AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ChapterFive
DAMIEN
“Ifucked up. Oh, I fucked up,” I groaned to the only man I would call my friend, Fred. Fred was a good guy, 20 years older than me and full of sage advice. He was a man with a bald patch on top of his head, but that didn’t stop him from growing a ponytail with what was left.
He stared at me now over wire-rimmed glasses with lenses so thick they could be the bottoms of glass soda pop bottles. His gray eyes were magnified through the lenses, giving him a look of startled inquisitiveness constantly. The glasses only left his face when he went to bed. I only knew that because he’d told me that when I questioned him about the glasses one night. “What did you fuck up, my young friend?”
“With a woman,thewoman,” I groaned again, holding my head. I’d left Ginger’s club the night before, drove home, and got myself a little bit more than drunk when I got there. Fred had come over to my house, as he did most mornings, to make us both breakfast.
“The woman. Hmm. This would be that girl that left town over five years ago, am I right?” Fred asked, turning away from me, where I was still holding my head at the kitchen table, to put slices of bacon in a pan to fry it up. “How did you fuck up?”
“I went to her place. She has a place in Chicago.” I didn’t say anything more than that. Fred wouldn’t blab it all over town, he was too loyal to do that, but he didn’t need to know what kind of place I meant. “I went there. Made an idiot of myself. A complete and total ass, really.”
“Ah, I see.” He nodded, as if he really did. “Do you want pancakes or are you not eating this morning?”
“I’ll have pancakes,” I groused, even if my stomach thought that was a bad idea. I needed to eat, whether my stomach liked it or not.
“And what else? Did she kick you out? Humiliate you?” Fred prompted once he’d poured what looked like a dozen pancakes onto an electric griddle. He’d been in my life since I was a kid getting started. He’d taken me under his wing, guided an orphan into the right moves to make, and taught me all he knew about not getting killed and staying off the radar of law enforcement agencies. He’d been in a biker gang in his youth, one over in Florida, and he’d left when he broke a hip and couldn’t ride anymore. The gang had been taken over by some younger men that didn’t want the wisdom that age could bring them, they’d only wanted riders.
We’d been a match made in heaven, an orphan and a man in need of a family that didn’t have one. We’d hit it off and he was still a fixture in my life.
“She listened to me, let me have my say, then brushed me off. She wasn’t interested. And yeah, she laughed at me.”
“Now, that’s just cruel,” Fred waved a spatula over his shoulder to make his point. “A woman laughing at you can deeply hurt a man’s pride.”
“It hurt, yeah, I won’t deny that, but I deserved it.”
“Leave her to cool off for a bit, that’s my advice. If you outstayed your welcome, you may not get another chance. But, if you think there’s a chance that she could see things your way, you should go back in a week or two.” Fred flipped his pancakes, stabbed at the bacon with a fork to turn it over, but didn’t turn around. He didn’t need to look at me to hand over sage advice.
“A week or two?” I was certain my dick would fall off if I didn’t get it in her last night, two more weeks and it might shrivel up and blow away.
“Fuck somebody else if you have to, but yeah, wait. Give her time to stew over what you said. You can be eloquent when you want to be, I’m sure you said something to her that will stick in her mind.” Fred was a reader, he loved words and books. He often used words that most bikers wouldn’t know, much less dream of using. At least, not the bikers I knew.
“I don’t want to fuck anybody else, Fred.” That sounded so whiny, like something a teenager would say, that I just put my head down on the table and moaned in disgust at myself. “Is there coffee?”
“In front of you, Damien,” Fred said from the stove. I glanced over my arm to see that there was, indeed, coffee now in front of me.
I’d swear sometimes that Fred was magic. He was just quick and quiet. Stealthy even.
“You get that painting on its way here, kiddo?” Fred prompted, and I put the coffee down, half of the contents missing.
“Yes. I’d ask how a car dealer gets that kind of money, but I know better. Marvin’s been dealing in something for a very long time, and it’s not cars. I don’t know what, but you better tell him to keep his head down.” I finished the coffee and got up for more while Fred put two plates down on the table.
“I have before, and I’ll tell him again, just in case. You know Marvin, though, the man thinks he’s God’s gift to the planet. Men and women.” Fred drizzled maple syrup over his pancakes before he handed the bottle over to me.
I did the same after I put a cup of coffee in front of him and got down to the business of eating. I’d made me way through half the stack of 6 he’d put in front of me when he spoke again.
“You going to wait like I said, Damien?”
“I’ll try, yeah. She’s just…damn, I don’t know how to describe it. She’s unforgettable. Beautiful yes, but there’s something about her I can’t forget. I used to think it was how innocent she was, but that’s all gone now. She’s a grown woman now that knows her place in the world. It’s something else.” I couldn’t put my finger on it, but even this new woman that she was fascinated me.
I’d bumbled my way through that first, well second, meeting with her. I’d have to come up with a plan for our next meeting, because there was going to be one. I wasn’t about to take no for an answer, not when she wanted me as much as I wanted her. I’d been able to smell her desire on her, that sweet scent that my brain could not forget, even though I’d try to.
I’d dreamed about her, woken up with her smell in my nose and her taste on my tongue thousands of times since that night. Even now, I could taste her, smell her, a compliment to the sweet pancakes and salty bacon that were the only thing real in my senses at the moment.
“When will the painting arrive?” Fred asked, getting up to put his empty plate in the sink, taking a pink apron down from the peg on the wall and wrapping it around himself.
The bubblegum pink garment didn’t make me wince anymore, even if it made me question things about Fred. He’d bought the apron, not as a joke or for someone else, but for himself. I had a feeling there might have been more than one reason Fred left the biker gang, but I’d never ask him. If he wanted to tell me something, he would. If not, that was fine too. I wasn’t judging him.
