Chapter 7

Jake released a deep sigh as he hit the motor’s kill switch. They had made it. He looked at his old Timex, and it was eleven fifteen. House lights were flicking on in half the houses on the street.

Jake peeled his lid off. His head was itchy. He set the helmet on the gas tank in front of his crotch and reached up to give his hair a good scrub. He was exhausted. It had been a hell of a ride.

He looked up and saw Kate in a high collard, neck-to-toe, fuzzy pink bathrobe. Jake couldn’t help but smile. She was gorgeous in the shimmering lights of her stoop light. Her thick red hair was all a tangle. There was lots of it piled on her head and flowing down her shoulders.

Her eyes were on fire. Jake remembered that look. He didn’t understand why he was seeing it now. A couple of busybodies were opening their doors to listen to what was happening on their street. Stomp growled at the them. One guy closed his door.

Jake swung his leg over the bike. He had ridden up in his leather jacket and gauntlets, having put his slicker back in his saddle bag where he hoped it would stay for a while. He pulled his gauntlets off and set them on his seat.

Jake started up the walkway towards Kate, and the President and Stomp fell in behind him. Halfway up the walkway, Kate let them have it in her best Maureen Ohara, Irish wench, imitation, hands on her hips, as fierce as any man, “What the hell are you idiots doing here at this time of night? Drunk, are you? Too drunk to ride any further and need a place to crash or what?”

Jake was within eight feet of her now. He’d come to a stop, and when she took a breath, he held up his cell phone in front of her saying, “Your text, ‘I NEED YOU!’, all in capitals.” Jake waited for an answer. Kate looked stunned.

Kate was taken aback. She was thinking. Her memory was a touch blurry. She had had some fun with some girlfriends at the bar the night before. There had been a handsome biker at the bar. Jake came roaring back to mind. The ache of his loss. The love of her life.

It killed her even today to think of him. He had spoiled her, and no suitor had measured up since. They couldn’t measure up. The memories of her time with Jake were the best memories of her life. Oh, if things had been different. She had often longed for him these last five years.

Here he was in front of her. That dumb look on his face when he needs an answer to a question for life to make sense to him. He was black and white, fuck the grey. She smiled at that look.

She’d had a few beers with her father a year after Jake had left. She had taken up beer drinking after he left. It reminded her of her Jake and made her father happy. There has to be something good about it.

She was still searching for what good they found in beer when she was honest. But she drank her beer while he replied to her depiction of Jake’s black-and-white attitude.

Her father had said it was probably the biggest reason he hadn’t become a one percenter. Jake couldn’t handle the grey, he told her, and he said there was a lot of grey in club life. “The man lives by a code, a code that gives him purpose and a code that he couldn’t break at this point in his life if he wanted to. It would kill him to do so.”

Following that wisdom with the question, “Didn’t you watch that biker series, Sons of Anarchy?” he was laughing at his joke as he finished the question.

Jake took another step forward, and Kate took half a step to him. Jake asked again, still holding his phone face towards her, “The text?”