Page 42 of Viking

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Arie

Isigh and stare atthe woman behind the bar. She doesn’t look that much older than me, but her T-shirt cuts low across her breasts and ties in a knot at her ribcage, exposing her taut, tan stomach. When she bends to lift a carton of beer from the floor, her mini skirt shows off her lacy undergarments—her thong ... Calamity calls it a thong. She even tried to convince me to wear one yesterday, but I like the coverage of a brief.

Every biker not sitting in church right now has their eyes fixed on the woman at the bar, no doubt just hoping for another glimpse. She has a tiny gold chain draped around her waist and it glitters when the light catches it.

Mother, save me.

Is this how women my age dress? I had a hard enough time putting on the leather pants that form to my body like skin. Where I come from, only the brothers may wear pants. Women are to wear skirts or the ceremonial gown, with no exceptions. Unless, of course, it was our time of the moon. Then we were left to bleed freely in our cages, dirty and naked as the day we were born. That way, everyone would see our shame at failing to produce a sacred child from the ceremonial couplings.

Is this how Viking expects me to dress? Will he look at me differently, touch me the way I want him to if I expose my flesh, tempting him the way the loose women here do? I had barely any clothing on last night, and he pushed me away. Perhaps I am just repellant to him. Perhaps he does not like my hair, my face, the freckles dotting my nose, or my body, which has failed to produce children. The brothers berated us for such insult. Maybe these bikers choose an old lady based on whether they’re capable of producing offspring. Though that does not seem to be the case for Calamity and Blue.

“Whatcha thinking about, baby?” Calamity asks and takes a sip from her beer.

“Have you ever produced offspring for Blue?”

Calamity Jane coughs and sputters, spraying her drink across the scarred coffee table in front of us. “Sugar, you can’t just go around asking people if they’ve produced offspring.”

“I can’t?”

“No. You can’t.” She sets her drink down and pats her chin and chest dry with her palm. “It’s a little intrusive.”

I lower my gaze and stare at my lap. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay ... I don’t mind telling you about it, but for some, it can be a sensitive subject.”

“How so? Do the other Sist—women—have shame over it too?”

She laughs, but it’s not the joyful laughter I’m used to hearing from Calamity Jane. “Yeah, I guess we do, but not for the reasons you’re thinking. We don’t have no cult forcing us to produce kids as kids. You’re barely even legal to drive, baby.”

“I will celebrate my eighteenth lunar year in two days.”

“Yeah? What’s that, like ... your birthday?”

I nod.

“No shit? Viking will be pleased as hell to hear that, but do you mean to tell me they tried to marry you off knowing you were a seventeen-year-old girl?”

I nod. “I was to marry Brother Archimedes at ten, but they put him to death for insubordination. He wasn’t like the others. He never reveled in our pain or discomfort. In fact, he appeared sickened by it. He never spilled his seed inside any of us. He couldn’t even get hard long enough to—”

“Jesus. Baby, I’m sorry I asked.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever understand the brothers’ cruelty. I don’t think I’ll ever understand a mother who would let her children suffer so.”

“You know you’re not alone there. I’ve lost more babies than I could count on one hand, miscarried every single one of them. Doctors told me I had a hostile uterus. Can you believe that?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I spent a long time blaming God for my problems, blaming him for taking those little babies away from me, for cheatin’ me out of becoming a mother. And then I realized it wouldn’t have mattered if I prayed every day and sacrificed a goat. That just wasn’t my path to walk.”

“Do men not leave if you can’t produce offspring?”

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