Darkness had just first rolled in when he pulled up and began his watch of my place.
I stomp down my stairs and flung my door open. And I'm presented with a furious biker. His gaze scans over my body as my hand unsteadily holds onto the whiskey glass. The silence around us, around him – it hit me physically. The fury inside of that silence was enough to make me shrink back into myself. Almost.
I'm still very aware that his vein is throbbing on the side of his neck. I'm sitting in the dark drinking and there is a strange man that he will be wanting to question me about. Oh, and the fact that I was meant to meet him today but couldn’t find the courage. I didn't even open my shop.
Instead, I ran away for the day and day drank across town at a rundown dark bar filled with other bikers that were nothing like this angry biker standing before me. I jut my chin up, fold my arms with my glass resting over them, calling me to down the beautiful, hot, amber liquid
I meet his stare with one of my own. It would not have measured up to the menace in his, of course, but I also guess it might be an anomaly considering he probably didn’t get people staring back at him in such a way.
“Waited outside the diner like a tool for you today for a few hours,” he clips out. I watch the way his lips move around all the angry words. “You didn’t show. So, I headed here, and you weren’t at the shop nor in ya apartment,” he bites out again harsher.
“You know this how?” I question him.
“I checked.” He goes to push past me, and I move to stop him.
“How did you check?”
I ask, blocking him and he steps back, shocked.
“The normal way, little bird, through the window.” His eyebrow shoots up when I step into him to look over his shoulder.
“So, breaking and entering,” I spit back, happy thathewasn’t standing in the shadows listening to this exchange.
“I told ya before little bird it ain’t…” I cut him off holding my free finger to his lips.
“It ain’t breaking and entering if the window is open.” I drop my hand, my arm feels heavy, so heavy.
“Yeah, that’s the one, little bird. Oh, and you know there is a bloke down there watching your place, right?” His eyes blaze with a different kind of anger; this one was laced with a question mixed with pain.
“I know,” I say my eyes growing heavy from day drinking that lead into night drinking. How did he find me?
“So, this is what you’ve been doing… drinking and meeting randoms?”His voice sounds hurt. I laugh as he pushes passed me, kicking the door shut hard behind him. When I walk up the few small steps behind him, he turns to me.The room is dark now that the door is shut taking away the porch light. The only other light streaking the black room was the moon through the window and I can see his stormy blue-grey eyes burning into mine.
His entire being seems to twitch as his eyes darkened. “What’s your problem anyway?” I feel strong. It is so the whiskey talking. I am like a pussy on any other day.
“Don’t like to be kept waiting,” he growls
“Well, I don’t like being ordered around,” I snap. “Especially by a man who all but hurled himself into my space and took over all of the space between here and reality!” I'm a little surprised by the volume of my voice. It was addicting, that fury, and nearly impossible to control now that I’d let it out of me. Shocked, I stood there looking at him.
“Then that man, which is you, keeps on breaking into my home and space. He places his smell, smiling eyes and husky voice inside the walls of everything that keeps me safe making me feel, well, unsteady. You don’t show up for days, then you rock up, spend the night and order me around some more,” I continue my voice slightly shrill.
“You shake up the life I’ve been very happily hiding inside of up until now.” I narrow my eyes. “I know you’re in a club that doesn’t play by the rules, I’m not though. I am me. And that leather jacket with that badge on your back does not give you permission to break all of my rules and the walls I had built around my scared self.”
I suck in a rough breath at the end of my tirade. I’d never been attracted to a man like him before. All the men I’d been slightly interested in were all cookie-cutter versions of each other. The men my parents approved of the men that fit into my parent’s world and social calendar. The male version of vanilla ice cream. There was only one version of 81, and he was standing right in front of me. And he definitely was not vanilla in any sense of the word. So, my heart is slamming into my chest with fear, expectation, and excitement swirling through me, waiting for a reaction.
But he doesn't do anything. Doesn't yell. Doesn't growl. Doesn't curse at me. He doesn't raise his hands to me. His body has relaxed somehow during my little screeching session. That doesn't make sense at all, since when I'm silent, he’d been as taut as a wire. People were comfortable in silence. They were irate when they were being yelled at. But 81 isn't most people. He’s something extraordinary. A small grin tugs at the corner of his mouth.
“It’s called a patch, little bird. We do not play by the rules. We aren’t no eat, pray, love type of club,” he spoke, his voice light. Teasing almost. I hadn’t been expecting it, so it took me by surprise. I digest his words, blinking rapidly.
“I-I, um,” I stutter nothing else coming out. I've got no witty comeback, I have nothing. I stumble over my words like a fool.
“I suspected that. No decency, rule-breaking boys on bikes,” I mutter, scrambling for something, anything to say. The grin remains but darkens in a way that makes my body hum with something I haven't felt in a very long time.
“Oh, baby, I suspect you very much would like to find out just how good at breaking the rules I am,” he says, his voice a low rumble.
“I’m fucking certain that the rules you have, the rules I’ll fucking break, little bird, you’ll love it when I do. It will also have nothing to do with decency.”
He steps forward, stealing all the oxygen from my lungs. But when I think about it, I don't need oxygen when he's this close.
