Page 60 of Brand
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Brand
We spent the next day in bed. I let Blade and Sketch hold down the shop and prayed that they wouldn’t burn the place down.
Right here, with Cami in my arms, was the only place I wanted to be. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hit pause on life for too long, but for just one day, I wanted to focus on nothing but us.
And by focus, I meant learn every inch of her.
That was what I did, too, for hours, until we both were so spent we couldn’t even move.
“What happened here?” she asked, her voice soft as her fingers danced along my skin.
“I, uh, had an accident with my bike,” I answered not wanting to elaborate on said accident. The skin on the outside of my shoulder and across the top of my back was lightly scarred. It was more noticeable the more time I spent in the sun, the scar tissue not taking on any of the tan that the rest of my skin did.
“Bad?” she asked, her sad eyes looking into mine.
“I mean, it could have been worse. I was more pissed off that my bike got fucked up.”
“Oh? The one you have now? It looks fine to me.”
I let out a little chuckle.
“No. My baby’s tucked away in the garage out front of the compound. I’ve been trying to get her good as new, but I haven’t had a whole lot of time lately.”
Then, without her even having to ask, I started in on how much that bike meant to me and why.
“It had always been me and my dad since before I can remember. My mom took off before I was three, having a toddler was too much for her to handle. But it didn’t matter, because my dad was so awesome.”
Growing up, we weren’t rich by any means, but that didn’t mean that my childhood sucked in any way. My dad loved me and never let me forget it, not even for a second. He was great. He often had to travel for work and he would take me along with him when he could. When I was in school, I stayed with my grandparents while he was on location. I knew his job could be dangerous, some of the things the cars and such would have to do while he was in them were insane, but he always made me feel like he would come home to me. Not always as whole as he’d left though. There were times he’d come back sporting a cast or a few new burns, but he always made it home.
We spent weekends in my grandpop’s garage, working on whatever new project they’d found. It was awesome.
Then grandpop passed away. I was almost seventeen. Dad decided right then it was a good time for him to retire, and so he stopped being a stuntman and became a full-time mechanic and business owner, taking over grandpop’s garage. I’d work there afternoons after school, then full-time once I graduated.
“He sounds great,” she said, looking at me with intense eyes.
“He was,” I said as I blew out a harsh breath and rubbed my chest.
“Was?”
“Yeah.” I took in a deep breath before I continued. “When I was twenty, he came to me one night after we’d shut down the shop. He pulled off the tarp that had been covering something in the corner. I had noticed the tarp right when I got to work and had been curious, but I’d also been so busy I hadn’t had a chance to ask him about it. There sat a nineteen sixty-eight BMW R50 and a nineteen eighty Triumph Bonneville T140E.”
I smiled thinking about that night. The first time I laid eyes on my baby.
“So, I take it by the sappy look on your face that one of those bikes is the one that got messed up,” she said.
“Yep. I’m getting there,” I said with a laugh. “He told me that this was our new project and that when they were done, we were taking them on a cross-country tour of the states. We spent the next year trying to get those things into shape and planning our trip. We talked about all the stupid things that we had to stop and see. The world’s largest corncob. The Roadkill Cook-off in West Virginia. Yes, that is a real thing.”
“Oh, God. Please tell me you are joking. Wow.”
“Yes, but we never made it there. See, the whole time we were spending every free second fixing up those bikes, he was dying.” I tried to bite back the sadness that still to this day clenched my heart tightly. But it was no use, I felt the tears moisten my eyes and I didn’t wipe them away as a few escaped and trickled down the side of my face. “He didn’t even tell me. There I was, spending time with him, taking it for granted and not even realizing that they were the final moments I’d get to have.”
Her arm pulled me tighter into her body as her legs further tangled with mine. Just the simple thing like feeling her head against my chest made everything alright. No, it didn’t bring back my dad. And it didn’t change the past. But it made me feel like the future might not be so bad. Fuck that. With her, the future wouldn’t be anything short of amazing. I knew that for a fact.
“After that, I spent a couple of years fixing up the Triumph and saving money. A couple of nights a week, I worked at a tattoo shop that was owned by one of my friends’ brother. When I was ready, I sold my dad’s house, turned the shop over to my best friend at the time with the confidence that he wouldn’t run it into the ground, then took that trip my dad and I had mapped out. Well, that was the plan. I only got a few states away before…”
Shit! I didn’t think about this before I started to tell it. This part I was going to have to go about as gingerly as possible. I was sure Cami didn’t want to know about my past…entanglements…but there was no way to tell this without it.
