Vindication: A Motorcycle Club Romance (6 page)

“Go to dinner with me,” said Ghost.

“No,” she said, with absolutely no
heart in it.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t date soldiers.”

“Who said I was a soldier?”

Bridget gave him a look. “You guys
are nothing but trouble. I know you up and down.”

“You can’t say that in front of a
school!” he teased, then leaned in and added in a lower voice. “Say it again.”

Bridget laughed and gave his shoulder
a little shove. “Seriously, I don’t meld well romantically with soldiers.”

“I’m not technically a soldier,” he
said. “You really think I’d take orders from someone?”

She hummed. “Good point. But don’t
you have a boss at your biker club?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess I do,” said Ghost,
rubbing his neck. “But that’s not the same. Any drill sergeant would crucify me
for saying the shit I say to Henry. In fact, Henry might crucify me one day for
it.”

“Sorry, was this part of you making
your case for why I
should
go out to dinner with you?” she said with a
disbelieving smile.

“Delete all that!” Ghost waved his arms
around and dirt from the flowers scattered across the walkway. “I’m serious,
though. Let me take you out. I promise, I’m not some military jagweed.”

Bridget didn’t reply. She was looking
up at him with those big, blue eyes, thinking. He could almost hear her
brilliant mind turning.

“I have to run out of town for the
next few days. Let’s have dinner when I get back. And if you don’t say yes,
I’ll come back here and make Toby give you love notes every day until you
surrender, or until I’m bankrupt. And then I guess I’ll just become a
panhandler outside the school.”

Bridget gave a cute little giggle.
“You know these kids are rich, right? He’s probably just going to use those
twenties to wallpaper his treehouse.”

“See what I’m already sacrificing
just to get near you? This is the total package, babe,” said Ghost, doing a
little twirl on his boot heels.

Bridget rolled her eyes, but she had
really never stopped smiling, not once during the entire visit. She looked off
into the distance for a moment, thinking, until a high-pitched artificial bell
sounded in the schoolyard. She gazed casually toward the kids as they began to
gather up to return to class.

For a moment, she just looked at
Ghost, watching him, like she was trying to translate something. Then she
glared, and snatched the flowers out of his hand. Dirt showered on the
cobblestone at their feet.

“Gimme your hand,” she said.

Ghost smiled and held his right hand
forward. Bridget took it in hers and he felt a jolt of fire race along his
nerves, through his chest. He watched her as she pulled the black sharpie from
the lanyard dangling around her neck and wrote her phone number on his hand. His
eyes traced the delicate line of her jaw and neck, and he imagined nibbling on
both of them.

Bridget said nothing, but only gave
him a sassy look as she recapped the marker on the lanyard. Ghost looked at the
number, and then back at her with a satisfied grin. She turned and sauntered
back into the school without looking back at him, and Ghost couldn’t remember
the last time he’d felt so lightheaded around a woman.

~
SIX ~

Bridget

Heels clacking on the burnt orange tile, Bridget
headed down the hallways of the Academy, smiling to herself and feeling a
million miles away. That feeling became a bit more literal when she looked up
and realized she’d taken wrong turns back to her classroom, and somehow wound
up outside the girl’s locker room, in the area of the academy that had been
added to the original structure. She whirled around, self-conscious, but the
hallway was devoid of witnesses. Bridget laughed at herself and shook her head
before righting her course.

The classroom was still empty when
she arrived. It usually took a mighty effort for the yard matrons to gather the
kids in orderly lines when recess was over, so what was supposed to be a fifteen-minute
break went closer to twenty, and Bridget was glad for it. She sat down in her
cozy, wood and leather chair and tried to gather her thoughts back to the tasks
at hand.

Ghost’s note sat on the desk, distracting.
She smirked as she picked it up and read it again:

Look, if you have a
problem with my love for Squirtle, I’m willing to challenge you to a Pokémon
match right now outside by the fountain. Bring your best cards. XOXO

Instead of writing his name, he had
hastily drawn a tiny little ghost with hearts for eyes. Bridget couldn’t help
but crack up at the note, even if it was completely ridiculous. It also
occurred to her that if some other, wimpier dude had tried this same thing on
her, she would have rejected it outright as mushy nonsense. Flowers and nice
dress-up dinners were one thing, but love notes? Bridget wasn’t sure she was
that type of romantic.

Yet the butterflies in her stomach
made her feel like a school girl, reading a note from a boy she had a crush on who
passed it to her in class. Whatever it was about him, she liked this treatment
from Ghost. It was a very foreign feeling.

But this was probably all a setup,
she told herself. Biker guys, men like Ghost, why else would they cultivate
such knock-‘em-out charm except to bed as many women as fast as possible? After
so many years of it, they probably got bored having willing pussy handed to
them and started chasing after the more difficult game—the married housewives,
the preacher’s daughters, the upper-middle class elementary school teachers. It
wasn’t hard to imagine them making an actual, club-wide competition out of shit
like that. Soldiers did it all the time.

The competing thoughts and feelings
wouldn’t settle in her gut. They just sloshed around, refusing to blend, a
grumpy mixture of oil and water that left her with more questions than answers.

Tiny, excited voices echoed down the
hallway, and soon after the kids started filing into the room, trying and
mostly failing to come down from their exercise high and settle at their desks.
Bridget smiled at them as they passed, tucking the note from Ghost into the
thin top drawer of her desk. Near the end of the procession, Toby Cary came in,
glowing and grinning and swooping his Batman doll around in dizzy circles.

Toby. Bridget was shocked when he
brought her the note. All morning she had been a wreck, trying to teach the
class and simultaneously watch him for signs to confirm that he was the one who
had called her the other night. Hours of internet searching and phone calls had
yielded nothing about the number, except that it was local. She couldn’t see
any signs of trauma on the boy, but he’d always been pale, quiet, and tired.
She felt like she was starting to understand why.

She had tried to catch Toby’s eye throughout
the morning and somehow signal to him that she knew, and that it was safe to
talk. It was hard not to let the thoughts become obsessive; she felt like she
was tied up and watching a lion stalk up to eat him. The recess bell had been a
respite, and as she sat at her desk trying to compose herself, Toby had come
running in with the note, looking happy as a clam, like he did now. Before
Bridget could use the alone time to talk to him about the phone call, he had
shot back outside to the playground.

Toby was not an outgoing child, but
for some reason, he had walked right up to Ghost and spoken to him. The
revelation was mind-blowing for Bridget. What had Toby seen in Ghost to trust
him so quickly? Why couldn’t she replicate it and get Toby to open up to her so
she could help him?

She almost hadn’t answered the note.
But it occurred to her that if Toby had taken so quickly to Ghost, it probably
meant something. Maybe Bridget could use that to help him somehow. She wasn’t
sure how, but she couldn’t ignore it, not when she was so certain Toby was in
danger. So she took a chance on Ghost.

As she stood up to quiet the class
down and launch into the day’s history section, Bridget heard a little voice in
the back of her head argue:
That’s not the
only
reason.

It was seven thirty, and Bridget sat at the shiny,
mahogany bar of the Red Door, working on her third draft beer. Her hopes to get
home and in bed by eight had been shattered when Muriel Green, the third grade
instructor, came rushing into her quiet classroom not an hour after the
students had been dismissed for the day. She’d misplaced a pile of tests and
mistakenly thought she handed them back, but found them ungraded in the
backseat of her SUV when she went looking for her pair of spare sneakers.
Together, they huddled around clustered desks in Muriel’s classroom and quickly
graded the science tests before throwing them into each student’s cubby box.

Muriel offered drinks to thank her,
and Bridget decided it had just about been that kind of day and accepted. Her
fellow teacher was one of Bridget’s small social circle, and it had been a
while since they had spoken outside the Academy. They didn’t spend a lot of
time together, but she valued the woman’s insight and willingness to always
help Bridget out of a jam. They were different in a lot of ways—Muriel had
grown up in and around the richer parts of LeBeau and was genuine upper
class—but the profession seemed to have a way of smoothing out a lot of those
differences. Having someone to share the pressures of teaching made the days
much easier.

Next to her, Muriel was flagging down
the bartender to order her third martini, and Bridget shrugged and put in for
her fourth beer early.

“You know that kid, Tommy Cavanatti?”
said Muriel, leaning into Bridget’s shoulder.

“The one with the lisp?”

“Right. Last week, during first
recess, I was passing out the materials for the art project and I accidentally
kicked over his messenger bag, and a freakin’ porno magazine fell out.”

Bridget almost lost a little bit of
her beer. “Are you kidding me? In
your
class? They’re so young!”

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Muriel,
shaking her head. She was much smaller than Bridget, with soft shoulders and
brassy brown hair cut clean mid-neck and in choppy bangs. Her glasses were
those wide, round owl-style from the seventies that only made her feminine
features look smaller and more delicate. “I know every generation has
complained about the younger ones being more horrible, but things really
are
changing.”

“What did you do?” asked Bridget.

“I took it out of his bag and put it
in my desk. He hasn’t said anything about missing it yet,” said Muriel with a
shrug. “Frankly, he’s such a good kid otherwise that I don’t feel like
embarrassing him to his parents if I don’t have to. I figured I’d wait and see
if he does it again before I call. Is that awful?”

Bridget took a drink of beer and
shook her head. “No. Anyway, if he hasn’t asked for it back, maybe he’s not the
one that put it there. Maybe his old man needed a quick hiding place.”

Muriel rolled her eyes. “Wouldn’t be
the first time. Some of these guys are complete pigs.” She had a sour look on
her face as she sipped her martini.

Sharing the horror stories of
parent-teacher conferences was a yearly ritual for the Academy’s faculty; they
had a dark corner booth reserved at this bar just for the occasion. Miss Moses,
the beautiful, multiethnic dance teacher, currently held the record of worst
interaction, when a visiting father propositioned her for sex in her ballet
studio with his wife and daughter ten feet away.

“I think I’m mostly shocked they
still make porno mags,” she said. “Who’s paying for those with the internet
around? This is the fifth or sixth porno mag I’ve seen in the last week, for
hell’s sake.”

Muriel gave her a funny look. “You
don’t say?”

Instantly, Ghost returned to
Bridget’s thoughts, and she sighed with a heavy smile. She put her beer down
and rolled her eyes at herself just a little. She was a little annoyed to
discover she didn’t have the balls to actually look at her friend as she spoke
about him. “I went to visit Gramps after class Friday and drop off a
prescription the idiot pharmacist fucked up, and there was this guy there
hanging out with the vets. He was bringing them rum and porno mags.”

Muriel’s eyebrows went up and she
laughed, red-faced. “To the old folks home? He didn’t get in trouble?”

“Staff there will never confiscate
something unless it’s a danger to the residents, but they also won’t get them
certain things. Apparently, this guy’s been… taking care of their more
debauched needs.”

“That is hilarious,” said Muriel. “An
angel of sin.”

“Oh, he’d love it if he heard you
call him that,” said Bridget, laughing.

“What’s this guy’s name?”

“Ghost McBride.”

“
Ghost
McBride, you say?”

Bridget nodded. “You heard me
correctly.”

“Is he a magician?”

“Dang, that’s what I should have
said…” Bridget stared at the ceiling wistfully.

The bartender interrupted to drop off
their fresh drinks. Muriel bit one of the olives off the toothpicks in her
martini before she continued. “You’ve got that little sparkle in your voice
when you talk about him.”

Bridget took a drink and rolled her
eyes heavily—too heavily, she realized, when Muriel’s smirk only grew. “He’s
pretty hot, but he’s also in a biker gang.”

“Jesus, seriously?”

“He’s got the leather vest and
everything,” said Bridget.
Shit, now I can’t stop thinking about everything
underneath that leather vest…

Muriel seemed to suddenly get less
jovial about it all. She looked at her martini, and even though she was still
smiling, her words were not. “So, what, are you gonna like… date this guy?”

“Ugh, do I still date?” Bridget said,
leaning on the bar. “I can’t even remember the last date I went on.”

“I think it was that dark-haired
lawyer who wouldn’t shut up about his visit to Nepal.”

Bridget crinkled her nose at the
memory. “Oh, right,
him
. God, he was so boring. He tried to call me for
like two weeks after that, and then he just left me a text he actually signed ‘
namaste
.’ ”

“I guess a biker would be the next
natural step from that,” said Muriel with a half-laugh.