Axle
I’d gone into the grocery store needing to stock my pantry for the week. I had a feeling it was going to be a long week with the Hovas, and whatever else the Fallen Saints might have thrown our way, and I didn’t want to buy anything that could expire in case I suddenly wound up having to stay at the clubhouse for extended hours.
But there was something… off about being there.
I couldn’t quite describe it, but as I was looking at the various types of beans, I had a feeling that someone was watching me. When I looked at the rear of the aisle, there wasn’t anyone there, but I’d been in enough bad situations to know when I needed to trust my gut, and this was most certainly one of them.
I looked the other way. There was no one, but that didn’t shut up the concerned voice in my head.
I turned my back to the rear of the store and pulled out my phone, ostentatiously to text, in reality to turn on the camera to see if someone was following me. I saw someone walking by and looking down the aisle—a woman whom I swore… I swore it might have been… her, but it was too quick to tell—but it was too casual a thing to tell for real.
So I decided to turn the tables.
Instead of going one aisle down, where the girl—again, I had my strong suspicions as to who it was—would be waiting, I went to the front and looped around to two aisles, toward the frozen food section. I pressed myself right against the first fridge door and patiently waited.
And then Rose Wright turned the corner.
“Surprised?” I said as she jumped in surprise.
But in the moment between when I taunted her and when she responded, I got a glimpse of the woman that had utterly ravaged my life and made things a living hell for me nearly a decade ago.
And as much as I did not want to admit it, as much as everything in me told me not to acknowledge this as fact, there was no getting around the fact she looked stunningly beautiful now. In our youth, she had defined “hot.” She wore low-cut tops, jeans that conformed to her ass, and the kind of makeup that screamed, “wild, fun, and free.”
Now, though she was dressed in what looked like nurse’s scrubs, though she was clearly older than when I last saw her, there was something profoundly more beautiful about her. It wasn’t as easy as saying that she had great eyes or a great body, though both were still true. It was...
The best I could come up with was that I could see life had hit her in some ways, but she was still here, still walking, still with her body. That was a little silly of a description, but I couldn’t come up with anything better.
“I... hi, LeCharles,” she said gulping.
She tried to smile. As much as I was feeling good about how she looked, as much as I had to admire her beauty, I could also say that hearing her say my name brought back a lot of shitty memories, ones that I wasn’t particularly eager to relieve.
And it pissed me the fuck off.
“Why the hell are you stalking me?” I said. “First, you text me, which, okay, fine, but you should have gotten the hint I wasn’t interested by my lack of response. And now you’re following me around town? What the hell?”
“Please, LeCharles, seeing you here is just a coincidence, I swear,” she said.
Honestly, I knew she was telling the truth. She was speaking too desperately and pleadingly for it to be a lie. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t put a little heat on to make sure that she didn’t get any ideas.
“Sure it is,” I said. “In a town this small, where you know everyone, and you know where everyone is, it’s just a wild coincidence that you saw my bike out front and decided to come and find me.”
“I don’t even know what your bike looks like!” she said. “At least, compared to all the other motorcyclists out here.”
Like the Fallen Saints.
Does she know about them?
“Even still, as soon as you saw me in the canned food aisle, you decided to try and sneak some looks at me,” I said. “True stalker behavior. Impressive, really. Too bad for you, I’ve got a world of experience at knowing when people are following me and making sure that they don’t do anything to me.”
“LeCharles, please,” she said.
She was one step away from getting on her knees to beg. It was, truthfully, a shame to see her this way.
Actually, that was more true than I think I wanted to acknowledge. The Rose I had dated may have made my life a living hell before, but she was a ferocious kind of spirit, the kind that stood up to any and all threats and laughed at them in the face. There wasn’t much that could faze Rose Wright, and yet here she was, practically crying for my forgiveness.
I wasn’t about to ask her and give her the satisfaction of thinking I cared about her, but I had to wonder what the hell had happened to her in the last decade or so that had made her this way. No one went from that confident to this supplicant without some heavy shit happening along the way.
“Please, what?” I said.
