Page 117 of Savage

Tank cooks up entirely too much food—bacon, eggs, sausage and beans—and we sit at the dining table to eat. We’re relaxed, comfortable, and sip our coffees as though we both want to be exactly where we are right now, as if we hadn’t been thrown together by circumstance or fate, or his Prez’s orders. Somehow—despite years of friendship, tantrums, drugs, sex and lots of illegal activity—we are meant to be exactly here.

I stare at him for a long time over the rim of my cup, and he stares back. It isn’t awkward; it’s enlightening. We’re reinventing, he and I, and I don’t think either of us knows how to stop it. Of course, I don’t think either of us wants to try.

When we’re done eating, I ask questions about his past: girlfriends—there were none, save for some girl in high school. Family—he tells me all about growing up with his mother but doesn’t say a word about his father, and he changes the subject when I prod further. Finally, I ask what he would have done with his life if he’d never found the club, to which he just shrugs and says, “What’s the point in thinking about the maybe? All we have is who we are today, and who we’re satisfied with being tomorrow.”

And he’s right. I’ve never really thought about what could have been if I hadn’t had a father who’d destroyed all the strength within me. I never gave those things any thought, because thinking like that was reckless and foolish. Thinking like that would get me killed. I couldn’t have had a life other than the one my father had created, and I’d followed, but sitting across from Tank, in his quiet mountain cabin, thoughts of another life don’t matter. I have this life, and despite what I’ve been through, despite the fact that I still fidget and shake and my body still craves the poison I’ve willingly fed it since the time I was seventeen years old, it isn’t so bad.

“What are you smiling at?” Tank says, as he stands and takes the plate from in front of me, sitting it on the bench behind us.

“I’m smiling because I’m really glad Prez ordered you to babysit me and not Country, or Grim, or … Kick.”

Tank comes up behind me and gathers my hair to the side. He gently kisses my neck, his hand coming around my front to squeeze my breast, as he whispers, “You’re here because I want you here.”

And I believe every word, because if there’s one thing I know about Tank, it’s that he doesn’t bullshit, and he doesn’t say anything he doesn’t mean.

“Why do you want me, Tank?”

He continues kissing a path down my neck and across my shoulder. Both hands knead at my breasts, and I don’t really expect an answer, but I get one anyway, “I’ve wanted you in one way or another since the first day I laid eyes on you, babe. You sucked my cock and stole my goddamn heart, and I don’t even want the fuckin’ thing back. Keep it, ’cause I ain’t got no use for it without you in my arms, and in my bed, and on the back of my bike.”

He trails more kisses over my neck, and then he lowers his voice to a whisper as he says, “If there’s a God up there, I ain’t ever fuckin’ seen him. If all these religious arseholes are right, and there is something more on the other side, I know I’m goin’ to hell for all the shit that I do, all the people I killed, but I’d take an eternity in hell over never havin’ you in my arms.”

I don’t say anything to that. What can I say? I just push away from the table and turn towards him. Grabbing his face in my hands, I pull him down to me. I kiss him as I never have before. I kiss him as if we’re in a damn movie, and I don’t care that it’s cheesy, or that I can’t possibly feel the way for him right now that he does for me. I haven’t given him my heart. Up until now, I’ve been too stupid to see what I had right in front of me, but the fact that this big, stoic, scary-as-fuck biker has given me his heart completely? Well, you can be damned sure I’m going to take care of it, because no one has ever trusted me with that before. No one has ever treated me like I’m the most important thing in their world, until now.

Until him.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

TANK

SIXTEEN YEARS AGO

Ididn’t expect to spend the night of my formal, my last farewell to high school and all the bullshit that that entails, with blood on my hands.Well, that’s not entirely true.

I’d been putting up with Tami Roger’s bullshit for the last three months, and so far she hadn’t yet put out, but after agonising over this fucking decision as if it were going to change her entire life, she’d finally decided tonight was the night.

And I’d thought I’d fucking earned it after the bullshit she’d put me through for weeks in the lead up to the dance. I’d been rimmed out by Tami’s dad for wearing my leather jacket instead of a fucking monkey suit, and her mum hadn’t wanted me in the pictures at all. Suited me just fine. I hated having my photo taken. I had confiscated a Polaroid of Tami though, and tucked it in the pocket of my leather jacket because she looked fucking hot in that dress, and I’d use it to spank my monkey to when she wasn’t around to blow me.

We’d danced at the formal, surrounded by all of her friends in their dresses with their dipshit dates in fucking tuxedos. If they’d played that fucking Kylie Minogue song one more time, I was going to outright execute some motherfucker. Tami had gone on and on about how this was “a night we’d remember for the rest of our lives”.

I’d remember it, alright, but it wouldn’t have anything to do with reaching a milestone to mark the passage of time.

In a way, I guess I’d expected to get my hands bloody tonight, and I had. Twice.

In a cheapo hotel room after the dance, I’d taken her virginity, and she’d bled like a bitch. She’d also freaked the fuck out when I’d tried to go down on her afterward. So instead, we’d lain there in silence, naked and wrapped in one another’s arms. Or I’d lain there in silence; as usual, Tami talked too fucking much about all the shit I didn’t give a fuck about, and then she’d bitched me out when I’d fallen asleep. It wasn’t that I hadn’t realised what this night had meant to her, or that I resented her fantasy for the perfect first time. Truth is, first times will always suck, no matter who you’re with. I tried to make it okay for her, but I know it wasn’t the experience she built it up to be. It wouldn’t have been, not with anyone.

She wanted romance and those three little words that she seemed to say almost every time she opened her mouth, but that I could never say back. I liked Tami a lot; I liked going down on her, I liked her going down on me, and I’d even enjoyed fucking her, but I didn’t love anyone. I never would.

To love was to hurt.

My mother had taught me that, and it had been a lesson she didn’t even know she was teaching, yet it was likely to be the most valuable one I’d ever learn.

I see that now, as she crouches down on the floor beside the body of her husband. All the shit he put her through, all the bruised and busted up eyes, all the rapes, the violence, and the mental beatdowns, and still she cries over his dead body.

“Jonah, what did you do?” she whispers.

“What I had to,” I say evenly, though the blood on my hands makes me feel like the whole world has tilted on its side. I’m the only man left standing, and I don’t feel a single ounce of relief because of it. I pull her away from his prone body. “You need to stop touching him. Fingerprints, Ma.”

Her panic-stricken gaze meets my serene one. “We need to call the police; we need to report it. We can say he attacked you. We’ll say that it was self-defence. There’s a history of violence there; they won’t question it.”

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