Page 20 of Bedding the Biker Next Door

Still avoiding the collectibles in the hutch, he started in on his mom’s bedroom. His gaze immediately landed on the old trunk at the end of the bed. Whenever he’d brought home his artwork or his report cards from school, she would hang them on the refrigerator to show them off for a while, and then when she took them down to make room for something else, she would take them into her room and put them in the chest.

He trudged over and sat on the floor next to it, then pulled the lid open. The brown chest was packed with clear shoeboxes, spiral notebooks, file folders, and little bags filled with stuff—a lifetime of memories. Abruptly, not allowing himself to examine any one thing too closely, he began moving items into a packing box.

He paused when he spotted what looked like an announcement for his mom’s senior prom, and his hands shook a bit. The announcement, along with several other pieces of paper, fell from his hands and fluttered to the floor. “Damn it.” He scrambled to pick up the item closest to him, a newspaper clipping attached to a postcard. The clipping was from 1985, news coverage of a “Junior Republican Convention” in Long Beach.

He stiffened.

The last thing his mother told him before he informed her he didn’t want to know anything about his father was she’d met him at a political rally. Was this the one? He hadn’t wanted to know. But his mom was gone now. So…he could change his mind…if he wanted to…

“Shit!” No. The man had been a sperm donor, never a father. Cole wanted nothing to do with the asshole who’d abandoned the woman who’d given birth to his child…the man who’d abandoned his own child. He threw the clipping into the box, then charged into the living room to grab his keys. The familiar need to be outside and to feel the wind pelting his face, the desire to be truly free, ate at him. Heading out the door, he made his way to the rear garage, pausing a moment to glance at Jill’s house before grabbing his bike and getting on the road.

He just needed a diversion before he lost his damned mind. He drove south for some time before he took the exit for Liquid Cooled. As he pulled into the parking lot filled with Harleys, he blew a sigh of relief—at least some things never changed. The “Liquid Cooled” sign still had a burned-out “e” and “d.” The building’s ugly brown paint had been touched up recently, but the new paint had just been slathered on top of the old, so in some spots, it was lumpy or peeling right off.

He made his way through the sea of hogs to the front door. There, he heard the refrain from Witchy Woman floating from the jukebox out to the parking lot. Witchy woman indeed, he thought. The heavy wooden door groaned on its hinges when he pulled it open. He immediately spotted several familiar faces and the tightness eased from his chest.

The best thing about Liquid Cooled was how it was off the beaten path. Ninety-five percent of its clientele were true bikers—men and women alike. Most rode every day and would die with their hands on the bars or gravel in their back. Some had become too arthritic to ride, so instead they sat around and talked about the good ol’ days when they could, the places they visited, the accidents they’d been in and how they lived to tell about it. The last five percent were usually women who simply loved bikers.

In the dim lighting, worn, black vinyl stools lined the bar. Cole took the empty stool at the end and ordered a beer. The leather-faced man next to him was arguing with the guy on his other side about whether Harley changed their engines to 700cc in ’76 or ’77.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch!”

Cole grinned and slowly turned around to face a three-hundred pound, bald hunk of flesh sporting a salt-and-pepper beard down to his chest and a three-inch scar gracing his right cheek down to his neck, disappearing under his T-shirt.

“How the hell are you, Cole?”

“I’m doing all right, Smash.”

“Where have you been? We were just talking about you the other day, weren’t we, Stitch?” Smash called. An old guy sitting at a table across the room looked up, grinned, and joined them.

“Well, well, there’s that pretty little bastard!” Stitch was about five-foot-seven, but he was pushing eighty, so they all let him think he was seven feet tall if he wanted to.

“How the hell are you, Stitch?”

“I ain’t doin’ worth a shit,” he said, his standard reply.

“Hmm...” Cole took a long swallow of his beer. He stared at it even as he felt the other men’s gazes on him.

“What you been up to?” Smash gripped Cole’s shoulder in a death grip, then slapped him on the back so hard he almost spit out his beer.

“Up to no good,” Cole drawled out. “Would you have it any other way?”

“Nah, but maybe you can be up to no good with us some time. How about the Ride Home?”

Cole had no idea what he was talking about, and apparently his cluelessness showed on his face, because Smash pulled another guy in as he passed. “Viper, tell this pretty boy about the Ride Home.”

Viper realized the “pretty boy” was Cole and perked up. “Hey! What’s up, man?”

“Same old,” Cole muttered. “What’s this ride home Smash is babbling about?”

“It’s a cross country trek from Glendale to Milwaukee,” Viper said. “I did it back in ’08. It was a hell of a time.”

“Sounds like it,” Cole said. “When is this happening?”

“We leave in a couple of months. You have to go with us, man. We stop and see all the major attractions along the way, plus all the Harley dealerships, too. Party every night. But mostly we just ride. It’s indescribable,” Viper said, getting a glazed look in his eye.

“Why’s it called the Ride Home?”

“We end up in Milwaukee right where the first Harley was created. It’s a pilgrimage, my friend, started back in ’08 for their 105th birthday, but now we just do it every year, because we can.”

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