Chapter 1

“My mom is a bitch!”

I looked up from where I was working on my bike and grinned, chuckling a little. It was Saturday afternoon and my next door neighbor, Kelsey, was standing there, leaning against the fence between our backyards, her arms crossed and her chin resting on them. Kelsey was fifteen and she was insisting that her mother treat her more like an adult. I knew this because she usually demanded it in a scream. Open windows and close neighbors make for that kind of closeness.

“Your mom’s not a bitch. She’s just looking out for you. What happened this time?” I asked, straightening up and wiped my hands on a rag before grabbing a beer from the cooler I had near the porch. I’d become Kelsey’s favorite adult since I’d listen and didn’t set any rules.

“Yeah, Jake,” she rolled her eyes. “That’s what SHE always tells me. ‘It’s for your own good’, ‘you’ll thank me when you’re older’, ‘I’ve been where you are’. ALL. THE. TIME. Seriously, was there even Internet when she was my age?”

This was our ritual. She had a fight with her mom, she came over here and vented to me while I worked around the yard. I chuckled. “Your mom’s not that old. The Net’s been around since the 60s. It was available to the public in the 90s though. That’s 20 years ago. How old do you think your mom is?”

“Too old for you,” she countered, surprising me. I coughed up a mouthful of beer, laughing and sputtering at the same time. “You jealous that she might try to sweep me off my feet and take me away from you?”

“Well, you ARE the perfect guy,” she pointed out. “You have a motorcycle and you’re old enough to buy beer. You’re cool to talk to and you’re not a dead loss like the boys at school. I guess you’re okay to look at too,” she admitted, looking at me critically and holding up her hand, waggling it side to side to indicate that I was so-so.

“Comments like that will NOT get you invited in to scrub my back when I go for my shower,” I told her with a smirk. She flirted with me shamelessly. It was a harmless schoolgirl crush. She was joking, I was joking, we laughed about it.

“So you DO own a shower,” she said brightly as if it was a revelation. “I gotta tell ya, Jake, some days I wondered.” She gave me a look of pity as she waved her hand, trying to dissipate an imaginary bad smell from in front of her.

“Good thing your mom doesn’t have much of a sense of smell then, huh?” I teased back.

“She needs a good sense of fun,” she muttered sourly, remembering what today’s fight had been about.

“Wanna tell me about it?” I asked.

“Wanna gimme a beer?”

“Are you retarded? I heard what you got. I don’t want her mad at me.”

“Pussy!”

“You offering?”

“Get that shower and we’ll talk.”

I straightened up and looked in the direction of her house. “Hey, Lisa!” I called. “Your daughter’s out here trying to seduce me and drink all my beer!”

She came to the window. “Respect yourself, Jake,” she told me. “Make her buy you dinner first.” She looked at her daughter and then nodded at me, holding up one finger, giving her permission for a beer, but no more.

I gave her a little nod and then shrugged at Kelsey. “So where are you taking me?” I asked with a grin, crumpling the can in one hand and reaching into the cooler for a fresh one while I tossed the empty in the battered old trashcan beside the steps. I fished two out and handed her one with a wink and held a finger up to my lips that it was our secret.

She took it from me and opened the gate, coming into my yard so we could continue to chat. “Where do you think I’m taking you?” she asked.

“Your mom said you had to buy me dinner before I should let you sleep with me,” I prodded her in the side. “Don’t worry though, I’m a cheap date. You can take me to Wendy’s and I’ll be fine with that.”

“Is that why Jennifer hasn’t been around last weekend and today?” she teased and she hit a nerve this time.

I tried to keep the sour look off my face and failed. “Jennifer’s not going to be back,” I told her flatly.

Her eyes went wide and she realized she’d stuck her foot in it. “What?!!?” she said, upset. “I’m sorry, Jake. I didn’t know. What happened?”

I thought about what to tell her and shrugged, last Friday’s events still a little too fresh. “We wanted different things from our relationship,” I said carefully.

“Bullshit!” she spat in the dirt. “I’m fifteen, not six.”

I shrugged. “It’s true. It’s a little personal though. I don’t want to bore you with the details. It was pretty shitty last weekend when we broke up.”

“Tell me. All of it,” she wanted to know.

“How about we start with your problem with your mom and then maybe afterwards I’ll feel like talking about it?” I offered, hoping she’d go into a lot of detail and it would take us the whole afternoon.

She looked at me and then shrugged. “It seems really stupid now, knowing that you and Jennifer broke up,” she sighed. “She said I still can’t date. There’s a guy at school who keeps asking me and I WANT to go with him, but Mom says no.”

I nodded. An age old story of parental cock-blocking. “Has she met him?”

She looked at me like I was stupid. “NOOOO!” she said, like it was obvious. “She asked me a bunch of questions about him and then said I was still too young to date.”

“Do I get to know what questions or would you rather I ask my own and try to develop my own opinion?”

“Go ahead,” she challenged. “Ask away.”

“What kind of shoes does he wear?” I asked, making her blink.

“Uh, boots,” she said, caught off-balance.

“He have an after-school job?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

“Is he an athlete?”

She shook her head. “Nope.”

“Is he in any of the school clubs?”

“He’s not like that,” she told me.

I nodded and returned to my bike while we talked and she sat on the picnic table to keep me company. I set my beer aside and the click of the socket wrench provided our background music. “How tall is he?”

“Taller than me, but not quite as tall as you,” she said.

“What color are his eyes?”

“Brown.”

“Where’d you meet him?”

“At school.”

“What made you notice him?”

“Okay!” she said, exasperated. “He rides a motorcycle. Mom won’t let me date him because of that.”

I nodded and kept on like it was only part of the puzzle. “What kind of helmet does he wear?”

“He doesn’t. He likes the wind in his hair, he says.”

“He’s an idiot. I’d be dead if I didn’t wear one,” I told her.

Her face darkened at first and then her eyes went wide when she heard that I’d taken a tumble. “You were in an accident?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was last summer before you and your mom moved in.” I stood up and motioned for her to follow me. “The helmet’s still in the garage.” I opened up the garage and led her inside, picking up the helmet from the bench and showing her. There were deep gouges down one side of the helmet and a dent in the back. I poked it to draw attention to it. “If I hadn’t had it on, that would have caved in the back of my skull. Riding without a helmet is just dumb.”

She nodded and touched the helmet. I gave it to her and told her to keep it. She looked up at me questioningly. “I can’t take your helmet,” she told me with a stubborn look on her face.

“It’s no good for riding any more, but it’s a good reminder not to ignore the safety gear,” I told her. “I want you to have it. I’m not your dad, so I can’t tell you not to get on a bike, but I hope you’ll keep it and you’ll never get on a bike without a helmet, at least.”

She bit her lip and nodded, hugging it to her chest like I’d given her a teddy-bear. “Okay. I’ll hang it in my room then,” she promised.

I was about to pat her on the shoulder, but I remembered my hand was still covered in grease from the bike, so I stopped short. Instead, I leaned in and kissed her on the top of the head. She blushed and looked up at me with the deepest blue eyes I’d ever seen. She really had grown up this past nine months since she’d first come to the fence to talk.

I led her back out into the yard and closed the garage so we could keep talking. “So he’s older than you are, rides a motorcycle and Lisa doesn’t like him. Are those the only reasons or did she ask things like where you’d go on this date and whether he’d be picking you up on his bike or if he had a car?”

She shook her head. “We were gonna go to a party they’re having up by the lake, but – What?”

She’d started to tell me about their plans and I knew what had caused Lisa to flip her shit. “Kids have been throwing parties up by the lake since before the Internet, Kelsey,” I told her. “There’ll be at least a keg of beer, probably some paralyzer punch made with enough liquor to stop a buffalo, there’ll be drugs everywhere from weed to E. I’d guess there’s at least four STDs attending and not a lot of condoms for the amount of sex that happens in those woods.”

She winced and shrugged. “Okay, so there was supposed to be a keg,” she admitted grudgingly. “So what?!!? I have a beer in my hand RIGHT NOW! Big deal.”

“There’s a difference between you having one beer in the afternoon while you’re hanging with a responsible,” she rolled her eyes when I said that, “adult and getting shit-faced at the lake where there’s no parents, no help and no hope if you get into trouble,” I pointed out. “What if you have one too many and start puking? You gonna ride back from the lake, screaming your dinner all over the back of his neck while you wobble on the back of the bike?” I asked, amused at the mental image.

She did giggle at that and covered her mouth while she tried not to laugh. “No, but other people are going too.”

I shrugged. “That’s not much comfort,” I told her. “Guys use GHB these days. You could end up with a spiked drink and no one to know if they dragged you off into the trees and fucked you half to death. That far out, you probably wouldn’t get service on your phone to even call for help.”

“That sounds like what she said,” she admitted glumly. “It’s just a bunch of kids from school! I know almost all of them! It’s not like it’s gonna be strangers.”

He shrugged. “You’re probably right,” he admitted. “How would you feel if it was your mom that was going out and doing something like that though?”

She looked at me confused. “What do you mean?”

“If Lisa was going out to do something that you knew could end up with her hurt or not coming home again if it went really bad, how would you feel?”

She paused and worked that out in her mind. “She wouldn’t do that though.”

“You’re right,” I told her. “But people do some stupid, reckless things, especially when they’re in love. If she had a new boyfriend that talked her into something like skydiving. How would you feel about the chance that she could get hurt or killed.”

“I’d hate it,” she admitted, seeing where I was going.

“You’re all she has,” I reminded her. “Sometimes that means she’s scared out of her mind that she’s gonna lose you. Maybe that makes her over-protective and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I bet a lot of your friends have parents that can’t wait to get rid of them for the night so they can have the house to themselves on the weekend.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I guess. It’s just so frustrating sometimes. I hate being treated like a little kid.”

“I don’t think she’s treating you like a little kid,” I told her. “She might have over-reacted to the news that you were setting up a date to ride to the lake on the back of a bike, but that’s a far-cry from treating you like a kid. Your mom’s cool. She never gives you shit about the beer you drink with me, does she?”

“Not really, but that’s our secret.”

“She can smell the beer on your breath,” I told her gently. “She usually lets me know how many you’re allowed when she comes to the window to talk to me. She knows your safe here and I won’t take advantage of you and won’t let you get drunk, so she lets you have your afternoons over here.”

She nodded. “Okay. I’ll tell Chopper that I can’t go out to the lake with him.”

I laughed. “Chopper? He calls himself Chopper? What’s he ride? A rice-rocket?”

She frowned. “I don’t know what kind of bike it is,” she said. “It’s shaped differently than yours. He says it’s a race bike.”

“Oh, Little Girl,” I moaned. “If you need to date a biker, find a guy that has a hog. A Harley or something custom. You’re gonna send Uncle Jake to his grave if you don’t do it right.”

She frowned again. “What’s the big deal? He says his bike goes really fast.”

I nodded. “It probably does. There’s one thing that’s true about the bikes and the men you choose. Never pick one that goes too fast. Pick one made for distance.”

“Like yours?” she asked skeptically.

“Have you ever been on Peewee’s rice-burner?” I asked.

She nodded. “Why do you keep calling it a rice-rocket or rice burner?” she asked, hurt that I didn’t like her prospective boyfriend.

“Most of those bikes are made in Japan and Korea,” I told her. “Places where they eat a lot of rice. They’re made cheap and they have almost no style.” I glanced at her kitchen window, but didn’t see Lisa. “Anyway, you’ve been on it. We won’t tell your mom about that as a favor to you. You could feel the hum of the engine while you were riding, right? Felt good in a tingly way, yeah?” I asked knowingly.

She blushed furiously, her eyes bugging out and then nodded at me, embarrassed beyond words.

I nodded with her. “Nothing to be shy about,” I told her. “You’ve learned the secret of why a lot of girls are attracted to riding. Want to know why I told you to find one built for distance?”

She bit her lip and nodded. I motioned for her to come over to the bike I was working on. “Hop on,” I told her. I felt guilty for a split second, knowing I was eviscerating her budding relationship with her boy more completely than if I’d sent him to military school on the other side of the country. She settled herself in the seat and I started it up, letting her feel the thrum of the engine, much deeper and more powerful than what his bike could do for her.

She looked at me, her eyes wide in wonder and then I goosed the throttle, making the engine give a loud BRAPP! I watched her eyes roll up in her head and she reached out to grip my arm as she stiffened. I goosed it a couple more times and I could tell she was hooked. I grinned and shut it off as she trembled from the vibrations pummeling her body.

“I had a girlfriend in college that told me that a motorcycle is just a $20,000 vibrator. Your little friend, Chopper? He’s got a dinky little one that runs off watch batteries. This one is a beast by comparison. That’s why you go for a traveling bike. Did his bike even do HALF of that for you?”

She shook her head and blushed again. “Will you take me riding sometime?” she asked coyly. Yeah. She was hooked.

I thought about it. I knew that we weren’t going to keep her out of the gene-pool for much longer, but a ride or two on the bike might be enough of a sedative to give Lisa some peace and quiet now and again and I did what I could for the single mother next door. I nodded. “We’ll have to get you a helmet and some road leathers,” I told her.

“Leathers?” she asked, surprised.

“Yep,” I confirmed. “They’ll help protect you if we take a tumble off the bike. When you hit the road at that speed, it’ll chew up skin like a cheese-grater. It’s called road-rash and you’re way too pretty to have to worry about that.”

She beamed at the compliment and got up off the bike. I noticed that there was a little wet spot and smiled to myself, leading her back to the picnic table and reminding myself to clean it up later. She crumpled up her can and tossed it in the trash with mine before she reached into the cooler. She pulled out a soda this time. It was our rule that she could only have a beer if I handed it to her and she never broke that rule. She was a good kid. If she wanted me to take her out riding so she could go cross-eyed, well ... I liked to get in the wind. She was fun to have around, good to talk to and easy on the eyes. If she was a few years older, I’d be tempted to ask her to go to the lake with me some time. If I was a few years younger, I wouldn’t ask. We’d just end up there.

“We have to talk to your mom to make sure she’s okay with it and go shopping for a new helmet for both of us.” I tapped my old helmet to demonstrate why I needed one.

I went to the cooler to get myself a refill and got a Coke myself, tapping her can with mine before opening it and taking a slug of it.

“So what happened with Jennifer?” she asked when I sat down.

“Shit,” I muttered. “I was hoping you’d let that go, Kelsey,” I told her.

“I tell you my problems all the time,” she said pleadingly. “I’ve got a chance to let you talk out one of yours. Please?”

I nodded. “How much do you know about sex, honey?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I know enough,” she said defiantly. That meant she knew next to nothing, but didn’t want to say so.

“Okay, then you know that there’s a lot of different types of sex. What I like in sex isn’t necessarily what you might like. Sort of like how you like beer, but your mom prefers a glass of wine when she wants a drink.”

She nodded, understanding the theory. “Okay, so you guys wanted different things in sex?”

I nodded. “That’s the short version.”

“That’s stupid. You guys love each other. There has to be more to it than that.”

I nodded. “Instead of telling me what she was missing from sex, she went looking for it somewhere else. A few friends of mine sent me pictures of her cheating on me around town.”

She looked mad. “She cheated on you?!!?” she gaped, incensed.

I nodded. “Sometimes with more than one guy. It’s not a big deal. I didn’t meet her until just before you guys moved in next door. As a matter of fact, as of next weekend, I’ve known you and Lisa longer than her, since she’s gone.”

She nodded. “I’m sorry that happened to you. Did she finally tell you what it was that she wanted from sex that you weren’t doing with her?”

I nodded. “I guess she likes to be treated rougher than I was willing to be with her,” I told Kelsey and shrugged. “Mom and Pop always taught me to treat a woman like a lady in public and a slut in private. I guess Jennifer had her fill of being a lady and wanted to be shown off as a slut.”

“How old are you, Jake?” she asked.

“Twenty-one, same as you, right?” I kidded her with a grin. We somehow never really talked about me much.

“So how come you live here all alone? I figured you and Jennifer were going to get married and then she’d move in and you’d start a family. Now, it sounds like you’ve been going it alone for a while. What gives?”

I nodded. “I have a sister in Topeka,” I told her. “When I was seventeen, my mom and pop were killed in a car accident. There was a big recall on the car after that, so me and my sister, Angela, were left with a huge insurance payout, another big payout from the car’s manufacturer and no other living relatives. She came down here until I hit 18, but she’s almost ten years older than me and she had her husband, Lorne, and my niece, Sarah, waiting for her to get home. I got a car for getting around, held onto the house and we split the money. I went to college and she helped me invest the rest of it.”