Page 1 of Fearless

One

“There are no facts, only interpretations.” Friedrich Nietzsche had said that. A professor who’d been too smart for the school, and too underappreciated by his students, had lectured her on Nietzsche. She’d been neck-deep in her English studies, but those words had resonated, sticking somewhere in the back cobwebs of her mind.

No facts. Only interpretations.

So much of life was all about perspective.

She’d held that sentiment as a child, had carried it with her to college, down deep in the soles of her boots, never expecting to run into it again, in the words of a long-dead philosopher. She’d expected her five years at a major university to change that perspective of hers, to lend new verses to her interpretation. She felt older, felt wiser in the ways that only a young woman of twenty-two can feel and express with the bald honesty of a girl. But she was unchanged.

Because her interpretation – it was tainted with the laugh lines framing Daddy’s eyes, the lipstick kisses Mama pressed to her forehead, Aidan’s rich laughter, the smell of hot asphalt and leather, and the cacophony of tailpipes. All those tailpipes. All those nostalgic, tradition-steeped moments in which she’d felt the earth shake and known she was a part of something that had begun before her, and would endure after.

Her perspective would always be that of Ghost and Maggie Teague’s daughter, Aidan Teague’s little sister. That of a girl raised by outlaws.

And her interpretation was no one’s but her own.

“Nobody’s going to tell me to squeal like a pig, are they?”

Ava rolled her eyes behind her sunglasses. "Only if you ask Troy to play the banjo." She stole a glance at Ronnie as she piloted the truck around the next turn, and watched his Adam's apple work in his throat. "They're bikers, Ron. Not inbred hill people."

His chuckle was nervous. "There's a difference?"

She snorted, but inwardly she wondered how he'd ever survive the first handshake with her dad. Ghost could take a joke, but there were some things you just didn't say to the VP of an outlaw motorcycle club.

“They’re just regular guys,” she said, and for the moment, believed it. She came to a halt at the next red light, behind a minivan with a stick figure family decal in the back window: a dad, a mom, a boy with a little stick figure baseball glove and a girl in a stick figure ballerina tutu. There was a dog, and a cat, too. “They’re my family,” she said, smiling to herself as she traced the decal with her eyes. She thought the things were more than a little ridiculous, but they held a certain charm; the people inside that minivan were proud to be related to one another.

She turned to glance at Ronnie, at his dark gleaming hair falling across his forehead where his gel had given up, his narrow aquiline nose, the sharp, cutting blue of his eyes. He had the most generous mouth for a man, his lips full and always upturned in the corners, touched with laughter. He was, quite honestly, a dreamboat.

That’s what her grandmother would have said. Grammie Lowe, Maggie’s mother, had been repulsed by Ghost, and all the MC boys, from the get go. “Trash,” she always said, even within Ava’s hearing, something which Maggie and her mother had fought about endlessly. “They’re Ava’s family,” Maggie had hissed. “Don’t you dare try to turn her against them, or make her feel ashamed of where she comes from.”

Maggie had never felt shame, not once. Not when she’d been barely legal and climbing onto the back of an outlaw’s black Harley. Not when that same outlaw had presented her with the son by his first wife, and asked if she would help him raise it. Not when she’d found herself pregnant. Ava had no illusions about the timing of her conception; her mother didn’t believe in lying within the family. Ava knew she’d come along, and then had come the diamond and the wedding bells.

But Grammie, she had never stopped grieving. “I raised you better than this,” Ava had heard her tell Maggie once. And because she couldn’t influence her daughter anymore, Grammie was going to try and guide her granddaughter’s romantic endeavors. Grammie would have loved Ronnie. She would have hugged him, bussed his cheek, and asked Ava when the wedding was.

Ronnie, sun-gilded in the passenger seat of her truck, filled out his Dockers and Izod polo with the lean musculature of the tennis player that he was. Even off the court, he possessed a lithe grace, an athletic way of moving that was natural and effortless as breathing. That was where she’d met him the first time: on the court. He’d played for UGA’s college team and Ava’s friend, Sierra, had dragged her to a match one afternoon with the intent of spying on one of Ronnie’s “super hot” teammates, a curly-headed senior who looked like one of the kids in One Direction. Ava hadn’t understood the attraction – she liked her men post-pubescent, thank you very much – but on her way to the concession stand, she’d bumped into Ronnie. Literally. He’d spilled her soda all down the front of her sweater when they collided, and he’d spent fifteen minutes apologizing and awkwardly trying to help her mop up the spill without touching her boobs – a feat that had proved impossible.

He’d blushed, those aristocratic cheekbones of his coloring, and he’d finally asked her if he could have her number. As a way to make this up to her, he’d assured. He had to be on the court in five minutes, but would she please stay and watch him play? And would she please let him take her out to dinner and buy her a new sweater to replace the one he’d ruined?

Her sweater had been cheap and machine washable, but something about the afternoon sun haloing his dark head – something about the unexpected flutter in her chest when his fingers grazed her breast – had her nodding and agreeing. She hadn’t been on a date in – ever. She hadn’t slept with anyone since – No. No, she couldn’t think about that. Those old wounds would rip open again and start bleeding if she dared to let her thoughts wander back to the last time. The very last time. How did the saying go: the best way to get over a guy was to get under another one?

Ronnie had proved to be ace on the court, charming at dinner, and competent in the bedroom. She hadn’t thought, at first, that she could force herself through the motions without bursting into tears, but then he’d caressed the back of her neck and told her how beautiful she was; he’d trailed his lips down her throat and sucked, so gently, at her collarbone. Slowly, slowly, he’d warmed her skin, every inch of it, with his mouth. And when he’d been inside her, she hadn’t been so sad – no, not really. Time was helping. Time would keep helping, of that she was sure. In Ronnie, she’d found a chance for normal, for healthy. She didn’t want to lose that chance, which was why, before she started grad school at UT in the fall, and before he made any decisions about his own master’s plans, she wanted him to come home and meet her family. She needed him to, really, if she was honest, with a sort of desperation that sent warning signals flashing in her head.

He watched her now, his nerves plain in the pale rigidity of his handsome face, and she offered him the warmest smile she could muster given her own nerves.

“They’re a part of me,” she said. “If you can love me, then the people who raised me can’t be so awful, can they?”

He tried to return her smile, but his mouth lacked its usual quick grace. He swallowed and she saw his throat work. “No, they can’t.” He glanced out through the windshield. “The light changed.”

“Oh.” She faced forward again and slid her foot off the brake. The minivan was accelerating ahead of her, its stick figure family shrinking down to white squiggles against the glass.

Bye, little family, she thought.My stick figure family would eat you guys for breakfast.She grinned, allowing herself that one little moment of outlaw-reveling, then she shoved it back where it belonged, well beneath this new college graduate version of herself. The Ava Teague who’d come home this time was a stronger, more stoic, better educated version. She would live up to that. Even if this city was electrifying her in the way that only home could.

Home.

Knoxville, Tennessee. Between Interstate 40 and the Tennessee River, it flourished beneath a veneer of Southern pride and university spirit, lying in the shadows of the blue humped backs of the Appalachians. It had the privilege of being both a bustling city, and a college town. There was orangeeverywhere. A bright Vols orange. The football games pulled in a certain amount of tourists, as did the vibrant bar scene, the shopping, the restaurants, and the gleaming black river that wound through the Tennessee hills like a heavy cottonmouth snake.

Ava cracked the windows and breathed deep. “Smell that,” she said.

“Fish and river water?” Ronnie asked.

---