Kristen Ashley - Own the Wind

That was when he lifted his head and looked at me. Two beats after his eyes hit my face, they moved over my hair before they went down then they went back up. They did this slowly with a certain look in them that made my belly flip again.

On the way back up, I saw a muscle jump in his jaw.

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t do this.

His eyes were on another downward run, caught around the area of my breasts when I forced out: “Racine’s?”

His eyes changed direction and came to mine. He pushed away from the counter, pulled the top paper off the pad and, shoving it in his back pocket, he said, “Yeah, Racine’s. Ready?”

It hit me then he said he was taking me to Racine’s on his bike.

I liked this.

First, Racine’s was awesome, especially for breakfast.

Second, he was taking me on his bike.

I had to admit, as much as it killed, that was something I had missed with Jason.

Bikes.

I loved riding on the back of a bike, always did. Loved the growl of Harley pipes. I loved even looking at them.

Jason didn’t do bikes, and as our wedding drew nearer, I’d begun to plot how I was going to talk him around to getting one.

I hadn’t held high hopes for my plotting.

This was because he’d once declared, though gently, “I know that was your life, sweetheart, how you grew up. It’s just not my thing and, no offense to your family, it also isn’t real safe.”

Well, he was in a car when he died, so apparently they weren’t real safe either.

“Tab, babe, you ready?” Shy asked, and I looked at him. He’d come closer during my minitrance, but he took one look at my face, dipped his close and asked quietly, “Hey, you okay?”

I sucked in breath, nodded, and answered, “I will be when I’m on the back of your bike.”

His eyes moved over my face, then his lips turned up, and, finally, he caught my hand and moved me to the door.

He held my hand as we moved to his bike. He climbed on. I climbed on. His Dyna Glide roared to life, and I found I was right.

I was okay now that I was on the back of his bike.

I was even better when the wind was rushing through my hair, my front tight to his back, my arms around him, feeling the same things I felt when he came and got me out of trouble six weeks before.

Free.

Right.

I didn’t let my mind go to how free and right I felt or why. I just let myself feel it, let the wind whip away my worries, let the pipes drown out anything in my head. I held on and enjoyed the ride.

We got to Racine’s all too soon. Shy parked, I swung a leg over, he swung a leg over, and he grabbed my hand. He held it as we walked to the restaurant, and he kept hold of it as we were shown to our table. He only let me go when we were seated.

We got our coffee and ordered before Shy spoke.

“So what was it?” he asked.

I put my coffee cup down on the table and asked back, “What was what?”

“You feelin’ shit,” he said. “Headache, flu, what?”

I looked him in the eye and decided on honesty.

“It was nothing. Tyra made excuses. I just didn’t feel up to a hog roast and I didn’t feel up to anyone poking and prodding about why I wasn’t up for a hog roast. So I stayed home.”

He held my eyes a beat before he said softly, “That’s cool.”

It was cool he thought that was cool.

He was just plain cool.

And sweet.

Him being so cool and sweet, I decided it was time so I went for it.

“Now that I’ve got you, I just wanted to say, belatedly, thank you for dropping everything and coming to get me that night. You… I… well, I needed that night to go a certain way, it was going the wrong way, and you were there for me. I… everyone… well, I needed to get drunk and play pool and sing songs from musicals and you made that safe for me. It was what I needed, and ever since you gave it to me, I’ve wanted to say thank you and now… well, now I can. So thank you.”

There.

Good.

I’d finally gotten the chance to say what I needed to say, and although I mostly stammered, I still said it and I was glad I did.

Shy took a sip of his coffee, put his mug down on the table, sat back, looked at me, and commenced with rocking my world.

“Pleased I could give that to you, Tabby. It’s what you need, it’s what I’m here to give you. Know that. Wish I had someone to give me somethin’ like that when my parents were murdered, so I’m glad I can give it to you.”

Luckily I wasn’t taking a sip of coffee or I would not only have spit it on him but I also would have choked on it.

“Pardon?” I whispered and his head jerked slightly but his eyes grew sharp on me.

“You didn’t know?” he asked.

Heck no, I didn’t know.

“No, I didn’t know,” I answered out loud.

He looked to the side and muttered, “The brothers didn’t share.”

The brothers certainly did not share.

I didn’t express this, I stayed silent.

Shy didn’t.

He told me his heart-wrenching story.

“New Year’s Eve, I was twelve. My brother and me were at the babysitter’s spending the night there ’cause my parents were goin’ out. Mom was home gettin’ ready. Dad was at the liquor store pickin’ up a bottle of champagne. Guy came in to rob the store, popped the clerk, popped my dad. Took the cash from the register, the clerk’s wallet, Dad’s wallet and keys, and he took off in Dad’s car. Don’t know for sure but I figure no one’s luck is that fucked up so I also figure that means some other random motherfucker didn’t do my mom. In other words, it stands to reason the same guy used Dad’s license to find our house, his key to get in. He got in, popped Mom, took everything he could shove into our car, and took off. Cops got a lock on the shit he pawned a few days later. Found our car three weeks later two states away. Never found him.”

My breathing was shallow when he was done but I forced through it, “God, Shy. God. I didn’t know. That sucks, huge, so huge it’s impossible to measure how huge that sucks, it’s that huge.”

He grinned.

Yes, I said grinned.

Through his grin, he noted, “That about covers it, sugar.”

I ignored the grin that I knew, from experience, hid his pain and blathered, “What… I mean, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, uh… you don’t have to tell me but what happened after? To you and your brother.”

He leaned further back in his chair, shifting his hips so his legs were out to the side. He stretched them, crossed them at the ankles, casual, cool, like this could be any conversation.

“Mom and Dad, Lan, my brother, and me were tight. Dad was cool, there but not in your face, Mom was awesome. You’re right, fuckin’ sucked huge they were gone and, after, Dad’s brother took us in. He was cool, a lot like Dad. My brother and I liked him. We didn’t understand until later there were a lot of things about him not like Dad.”

This, I thought, wasn’t a good beginning.

Shy kept talking and I found I was right.

“My aunt was not cool. Dad hated her. Mom detested her. Said straight out in front of Lan and me she was a bitch. My aunt hated us bein’ there, and she didn’t have a problem lettin’ us know. Doted on her two pieces-of-shit brats, acted like Lan and I stole the last slice of bread the family’d ever have and pissed on it.” He tipped his head to me. “Your mom, seen her around, Tab, before Tack stopped takin’ her shit. She’s a total bitch. My aunt makes your mom look like mother of the year. She was relentless. She had enough venom for a thousand snakes and she was not afraid to strike.”

“That sucks too,” I noted then finished, “Also huge.”

He grinned again and that grin, as well as the first one, in the face of our subject matter made me all kinds of uneasy. “You’re right about that too, babe.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I told him, and I didn’t. I mean, I really wanted to say something, I just didn’t know what that was.

He sat up in his chair, put his legs under the table, and leaned into me, all the while his eyes locked on mine.

“Nothin’ to say, Tabby. Life was shit. Lost my family, years later, found a new family. Then life wasn’t shit anymore.”

He was talking about his life but his point was clear.

My life was shit. I lost Jason. But someday, life wouldn’t be shit anymore.

He was right, and so was Tyra.

Losing Jason at all, much less at his age and three weeks before our wedding, sucked huge. So huge it was impossible to measure.

But time would pass and, if I was lucky, life wouldn’t suck anymore.

To express the epiphany he’d led me to, I whispered, “Right.”

“Right,” he whispered back.

Our food arrived.

It was time to eat and get out of the heavy, and I knew Shy agreed, because he tucked right in, so I did too.

I was forking into my eggs when it hit me.

I should never have had second thoughts about coming out with Shy because Shy was Chaos. I was Chaos. And Chaos was family.

So being out with Shy was right, because he was family.

“Thanks for draggin’ my ass out to breakfast, Shy Cage,” I muttered to my eggs then shoved some into my mouth.

“Pleased you hauled your ass out to come with me, Tabitha Allen,” Shy muttered back. I lifted my gaze to his and I saw his unbelievable green eyes warm and smiling at me.

I chewed, swallowed, and informed him, “Just that, I hope you know, you’re getting the check.”

Shy burst out laughing.

It sounded beautiful.

Good.

Right.

And again, I was right, this was right, this was good.

It was family.

Let’s Ride

Two months later…

I stomped through the parking lot of the hospital and stabbed at my phone.

I put it to my ear, it rang once, then he said what he always said when he got me.

“Sugar.”

“Where are you?” I snapped.

Silence a beat then, with humor in his tone that I wisely decided to ignore, Shy asked, “Where do you want me to be?”

“My house for dinner. Twenty minutes. And I don’t care what it tastes like, Shy, you’re gonna eat it and you’re not gonna bellyache about it.”

“Your place. Twenty,” he agreed, still with humor in his tone, which I continued wisely to ignore.

Then he hung up.

I shoved my key into the door of my car and unlocked it.

I only felt better when I turned the key in the ignition and she purred to life.

My dad gave me my car, he restored it for me, and he still kept it purring for me. He did this with love, straight through from before I was sixteen to now, and he’d do it until he couldn’t lift a wrench anymore.

Every time she purred to life, I remembered that and it made me feel better.

I coasted on that feeling all the way home, even as my mind filled with the last two months.

In that time, I’d grown tight with Shy.

This was partly because he didn’t treat me as fragile like everyone else did. Shy treated me like me, and as the days wore on with Shy in my life, I felt more me than I’d felt in a long time.

This was also partly because there were times when I needed to be treated like I was fragile and with an acute sense that was a little uncanny (and something I was burying in my pit of denial, a place I created after breakfast with Shy that was seeing a lot of action these days), Shy knew when those times were and treated me accordingly.

Twice, I’d fallen sleep in his arms crying about Jason.

Twice, I’d woken up when he’d picked me up, cradling me and carrying me to bed.

I felt it when he laid me down. I felt it when he pulled the sheets over me. Last, I felt it (but was burying it in my pit of denial), when his lips brushed my temple and he moved away.

Incidentally, I was also burying in my pit of denial how it felt to be carried and essentially tucked into bed by a hot guy.

Since we’d gotten tight, it went without saying we spent a lot of time together. He came over and I ruined dinner, we talked, then we watched TV. I went to the Compound and we played pool or sat on a couch, gabbed and sometimes laughed, or we’d sit at the bar with some of the guys and shoot the breeze.

We didn’t see each other every day, just four, five times a week, but we talked every day on the phone, sometimes more than once, just checking in, chatting, Shy keeping his finger on my pulse (something I also was burying in my pit of denial).