“A dirty Chai latte and dark roast coffee, please,” I asked the barista at Loafe Café.
“Sure thing,” she replied with a bubbly smile.
I returned the expression, which wasn’t difficult because these days, all I did was smile. Accepting the dark roast coffee and my change, I went to the coffee station to add cream and an unhealthy amount of sugar, then picked up my dirty Chai latte from the counter and found a table outside even though it was a cold day in late October.
It was a gorgeous autumn afternoon in Vancouver, the grey sky the perfect backdrop to the riot of violent orange, red and yellow foliage clinging to treetops and littering the ground. The air was crisp and spiced with the sweet musk of decaying leaves that crunched underfoot. I took out my tattered copy of Paradise Lost and read while I waited.
It wasn’t long.
“Bone of my bone,” King murmured as his cold hands cupped my face to tilt it back for his kiss.
I accepted his mouth with a long hum of pleasure, loving the feel of his lips on mine, loving that no one cared if I kissed him or not. Now that we were free from the chains that bound us in Entrance, I found we erred on the side of too much PDA but I didn’t really care. I’d embraced my inner biker a lot over the last six months even though, technically, King and I were not a part of The Fallen. We were just two civilian students at UBC, him in the renowned Sauder Business program and me in my Master’s English program doing my dissertation on Paradise Lost, on Satan as an untraditional hero. I drew daily inspiration from my own untraditional hero, whom I tugged closed to me by his long hair so I could deepen our kiss.
When we broke apart, King grinned into my face. He’d grown a short beard in the time we’d been on campus and it made him look even sexier, like a lumberjack that had accidentally wandered onto campus. Women watched him wherever he went and I knew he got asked out a ton, both because he told me and because some women were ballsy enough to ask even when I was standing right next to him. If I wasn’t, King turned them down without blinking an eye. If I was, he let me sear them with my possessive wrath because my territorial behavior turned him on.
“Good day, babe?” he asked before gently nipping my chin with his teeth.
“Better now,” I said, shamelessly happy and unafraid to be cheesy about it.
Like Milton once wrote about good things coming from evil, the horror of King’s arrest and my abduction had grown mild over time and the light we created together had far overcome the dark. My hands still ached when it was damp, which in Vancouver was often, but the scars had been reduced to thin pink slashes that King kissed every morning when we woke up.
He’d obsessed over the scars until one morning that summer, he’d woken me up and dragged me to Street Ink Tattoo Parlor. Now, we had matching tattoos on the inside of our middle fingers, him a King of Hearts and me the Queen. They lined up perfectly when we linked out fingers together, which was often.
He may have kissed the scars every morning when we woke up but his middle finger I now kissed every time after, to remind him that we were alive, free and together.
“You ready to head out?”
I nodded, standing up and swinging my old messenger bag over my shoulder. It was still strange to me that it held my essays and not those of my students. King caught my hand as we walked towards the parking lot and I couldn’t help myself from looking around at all the students walking by us, feeling like a child holding her first trophy. I would never get used to displaying our relationship, to holding the hand of a man who was as beautiful and magnetic as a fallen angel.
“Did you tell Benny and Carson that we’d be back in time for their party on Sunday?” I asked when we reached his Harley.
King nodded, handed me my helmet (a wicked cool ‘brain bucket’ that had the words ‘Property of The King’ scrawled on the back in gold script) and swung over the bike. “They know, babe.”
“I just feel so bad that I won’t be there to help them set up,” I tried to explain as I settled behind him.
“Babe, it’s a fuckin’ Halloween party and you already spent the last three days helpin’ ‘em decorate the house. It’s for university students, they don’t need you to set out snacks and fuckin’ fruit punch.”
I blushed but planted my hands on my hips. “This is their first party as a couple, King. It’s important they know we support them.”
“We see ‘em every week, babe. Think they know it.”
Strangely, maybe, King and I had become really close with Benny and Carson, who had also moved to UBC in September to start their undergraduate degrees. They fought all the time because Carson still had a hard time being openly gay and Benny was an affectionate guy but it was clear to everyone who knew them that there was a lot of love there. They lived off campus like us, on the main level of a little bungalow with Carson’s mum living in the basement. She’d left her husband and didn’t want to be far from the son she’d neglected for the first eighteen years of his life. I was fairly close to her too, and we went to hot yoga every Sunday morning.
I settled behind King on the bike, pressed my cheek to his chest and dragged in a deep breath of his leather, fresh air and laundry scent. We did our laundry together now and I loved the smell of that clean scent on my own clothes, but nothing was the same as taking a hit directly from the source.
“You are such a dork,” King chuckled when he heard my deep inhale.
“You love it.”
“Yeup, makes me fuckin’ crazy. Don’t know what’s sexier, you in your geeky book tees or you in nothing.”
He felt my aroused shiver against his back and laughed.
“Dad needs us or he wouldn’ta called. Need you to be prepared for anything, yeah?” he asked after he’d sobered.
Zeus had called in the middle of the night requesting that King come home for the weekend. It wasn’t a usual request since Zeus wasn’t a helicopter parent and he’d been really good about giving King his space from The Fallen. Still, when Zeus called, you answered. So, here we were.
“Do you think it’s the Nightstalkers?” My scarred hands flexed involuntarily at the reminder.
The rival MC hadn’t taken off after Luis died. They’d only regrouped, and after lying low for the summer, I had to wonder if they were making their comeback.
“Don’t know, babe.”
“It could just be he met a woman and he wants us to meet her?” I asked, jokingly.
Zeus Garro did not date. Not ever.
King snorted.
“Maybe Harleigh Rose is dating someone and he wants us to meet him?” I hoped.
H.R. was more beautiful every day and a fifteen-year-old girl in high school, so it would be expected for her to have a boyfriend.
Zeus Garro did not let his little girl date. Not ever.
“You done talkin’ crazy now, babe? Wanna get home and assess the damage myself.”
“For now,” I muttered, but only so he would laugh again, which he did.
“Don’t be afraid to scratch or bite,” he said, reminding me of the first time I’d climbed onto his bike, and followed him onto the Sea To Sky Highway with no idea of where he’d take me. “I’m gonna ride hard so hold on tight, Queenie, yeah?
“Always,” I said under the roar of the engine as he pulled out of the lot.
