“Shit, Ryan,” she said, her eyes dropping to where my hand clasped my shaft.
I reached forward, dragging at her wrist, moving it towards my cock but not forcing her to touch me. She didn’t move back. But she didn’t relax her fingers from the fist they were clenched in. Like she was scared to move in case she touched one of the barbells slicing through the skin on the underside of my shaft.
“They don’t bite,” I mumbled, pulling her gaze to me. “But I might.”
Sophie didn’t smile, just looked at me with wide eyes. Fuck.
“You can touch me,” I urged.
She shook her head, and when she looked up at me again, she let go of her lip. I knew that look. I’d seen it so many times. Anxiety. Uncertainty. Although she wouldn’t show it in her eyes. She was too conditioned. But I knew her too well. Remembered her too much. Remembered how she used to touch me all those years ago. And now she was hesitant. Not pliant and eager like she’d been moments ago.
“I…err…” she started.
Behind me, a noise started. Shrill and loud, the vibrations travelling across the old floorboards under the thick carpet. I knew the ringtone.
Saved by my brothers. Even though they didn’t know it.
“Sorry, Soph. I need to get that.” But I wasn’t sorry. I was saved from having to stare into the eyes of the woman I loved and see her recoil at looking at me.
I stepped over my clothes and dug out the mobile from the leather jacket dumped on the floor, pushing the handset to my ear.
“Yeah, Indie. On my way.”
I scooped my hoodie off the floor, pulling it over me, my dick still hard, the Jacobs’ Ladder still on display. Sophie’s eyes tracked every movement from the sofa.
“I have to go, Soph.” My voice grumbled low in the charged silence around us.
She nodded silently.
I stepped into my jeans, feeling her eyes move with me as I pulled the material up my legs before tucking myself back into my trousers. My cock rubbed against the denim, the piercings pulling at the skin, and I tried to ignore the sensation and the woman sitting naked on the couch in front of me. Fucking club business. But that’s what it was, and I was needed elsewhere.
“Can I see you again?”
For a moment, she didn’t respond. Then, slowly, she nodded, and relief flooded through me. I clicked open the screen on my mobile and pushed it towards her.
“Stick your number in there, Grey,” I instructed, trying to keep the elation out of my voice and not look like a little boy getting excited over his first girlfriend, even if that’s all I still was.
Sophie didn’t move.
“It’s still the same, Ry,” she said quietly. “I never changed it. Just like you didn’t. Just in case you tried to find me again.”
Emotions hit me like a psychotic event. My chest swelling with happiness that she’d always thought about me. Then pressure as guilt kicked me in the ribs, that I should have fought harder than sending letters I knew she wasn’t getting. And now dread. Dread that I’d changed too much for her. That every new thing she learned about me took her too far away from the memories of what we had and stopped her making new. I saw the uncertainty in her eyes at the piercings in my cock. At theink that stained my skin. At the hole in my earlobe and the little silver ring in my lip.
“I remember it,” I said eventually, watching her reaction.
A faint smile. A little breath like she had been tense. I remembered, and now she knew. Now I only hoped she remembered how good we were together.
*****
The crumbling car park in the run-down industrial estate was as abandoned as half the buildings. Heavy industries that had slowly dwindled. Shipbuilding, iron, steel, and all the smaller trades that had clung on in their shadow. Fabrication shops. Marine engineers. Old print works with faded signage still clinging to brick like they hadn’t realised they were dead yet. Rollers pulled down and never lifted again, some hanging crooked where the tracks had given up. Rust had eaten through doors and fencing, creeping over everything like it had claimed the place for itself.
And here three of us sat on our bikes waiting right in the middle of an industrial graveyard. We spotted his headlights before we could see or hear him, pinpricks of light swelling as he got closer. Eventually, the engine whined, high and thin, and sharp like nails down a fucking blackboard. It was stark in the early hours, nothing like a proper engine. No weight to it. No presence. Just a frantic, overworked scream like it had something to prove.
I rolled my shoulders slightly, the deep, steady thrum of the Triumph Rocket sitting solid beneath me, and I almost felt sorry for the thing the Viking rode. Almost.
Then, without a nod or any other communication, the bikes all shut off simultaneously, and silence descended on us like an oppression.
The Viking pulled his helmet off, the visor on the full-face lid as black as night, hiding the man underneath who worked in the shadows. He shook his hair free from where he’d tucked it under the black leather bike jacket, pale blond catching under the dullest streetlight on the industrial estate. It gave off an almost orange glow. Stubborn and sedentary, the only survivor. But it lit the Viking up like he was made of gold.
