Kristen Ashley - Motorcycle Man

I bit my lip.

“Are you talking about Tack?” Lanie asked and Aunt Bette nodded to her and looked back to me.

“Let’s start with that. Who’s called ‘Tack’ and why?”

I slapped some hangers on the rack and replied, “Tack’s called Tack and I don’t know why.”

“His kids are in your kitchen and he sticks his tongue down your throat as a good-bye and you don’t know why he’s called Tack?” Aunt Bette asked, her eyebrows to her hairline.

“Uh…” I mumbled.

“He’s her boss,” Lanie shared at this juncture, Aunt Bette’s eyes got huge as her brows stayed glued to her hairline and her gaze stayed glued to me.

“Uh…” I repeated and Aunt Bette tipped her head to the side in a go on gesture. I knew I had her undivided attention because she was standing in front of a rack of clothes at Nordstrom’s and paying no attention to it but I had nothing more to give.

She looked back at the rack and started slapping hangers but I knew she wasn’t looking at the clothes.

“Your uncle and I understood your need to check out, Tyra. Sometimes in people’s lives, they need to check out. But I gotta tell you, your uncle isn’t fired up about how you’re checking back in.” She slapped a hanger across the rack. “The tattoos, he could handle.” Hanger cracking. “The needing a haircut, he could handle.” Another hanging cracking. “The grown kids, he could handle.” Another hanger went. “The grown kids cursing freely without him saying a word, he could handle.” There was another hanger crash. “The hot and heavy make out session as a good-bye in front of your uncle and Tack’s kids, he could handle.” And yet another hanger. “Even his ex shouting the house down, he could handle.” No hanger as her eyes cut to me. “All of that together?” She shook her head. “Um… no.”

“Things are confusing right now, Aunt Bette,” I said quietly and Aunt Bette’s gaze grew sharp.

“I see this,” she replied, hesitated then finished, “Clearly.”

“I like him,” Lanie announced, pulling out a top and holding it down her front as I stared at her in shock. “I think he’s lush.”

“I thought you wanted me to give notice,” I said to her.

She stopped looking down at the top and looked at me. “I did, until he made me pancakes. Now I think he’s lush.”

That feeling I had that morning swept through me as Aunt Bette muttered, “Gotta say, those pancakes are definitely in the plus category.”

I started slapping hangers, declaring, “I can’t talk about this.”

“Why?” Aunt Bette asked.

I stopped slapping hangers and looked at her. “Because I don’t know what to think about it. He’s a complicated man. There’s too much going on, with him and just with me, and all of it is happening fast. One day, I knew where my life was heading. The minute I woke up, I knew what I would be facing. Two and a half months ago, I changed that and now I don’t know what I’m doing, where I’m heading. All I know is, wherever it is, I have to get there. And as for Tack, he can be…” I stopped then started again, “a lot of things. Some of them are good, really good. Some of them are bad, really bad.”

“What’s bad?” Aunt Bette asked.

I shrugged and started moving hangers. “He’s unlike any man I’ve ever met. He takes bossy to an extreme. I’ve never experienced anything like it,” I answered. “And he has multiple personalities. He can be extremely gentle, thoughtful, warm. Then he can get angry and it’s scary. Then he can, I don’t know, disappear. He’s there, we work together for the most part, but he’s not.”

“Has he ever handled you the way he handled his ex?” Aunt Bette asked quietly and I took in a soft breath.

Then I admitted, “If he wants your attention, he finds a way to get it.” Aunt Bette’s eyes flashed and I hurriedly went on, “But it isn’t exactly the same. She’s a crazy woman and she makes his life a living hell and their kids. You heard it but what you saw is constant for him and they’ve been divorced for four years. And he said he’d never hurt me and he never has, not that way. He promised that. He said he’d rather cut off his own arm than ever hurt me.”

“He said that to you?” Lanie asked.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Wow,” she whispered then she looked at Aunt Bette. “He strikes me as a man of his word.”

Aunt Bette looked at Lanie then murmured, “Well, that’s two in the plus category, not exactly batting a thousand.”

Oh boy.

I heard chiming coming from Aunt Bette’s purse, she opened it, pulled out her phone and hit some buttons.

Then she hit some more while saying, “That’s Marsh. He’s done communing with the golfing brotherhood and he’s hungry. I need to feed my husband. He says he’s at a place called Club and he already has a martini. If we don’t get there soon, he’s ordering.” She hit one last button and I sighed a relieved sigh that this particular conversation was over (for now). She dropped the phone in her purse and looked up at me. “Is this Club place close?”

“Yes, just outside the mall,” I answered.

“But we have to drive there seeing as I’m wearing heels and they have really cool cocktail glasses so it’s likely a taxi night anyway since you have one cocktail in a really cool glass, you have to have seven,” Lanie explained.

This was totally true and this also obviously worked perfectly fine for Aunt Bette for she nodded once then said, “Let’s roll,” as a reply.

With no other choice, since when Uncle Marsh was hungry, everyone ate, even I knew that, we left our rack and headed to the parking garage.

We motored through it toward my car since Uncle Marsh had their rental. I headed to the driver’s side. Lanie to the passenger side back because Aunt Bette’s legs were shorter than mine. And Aunt Bette to the passenger front.

I’d bleeped the locks, doors were opening all around when suddenly and with no warning I saw nothing but black. My body went solid in shocked surprise and I heard a scuffle right before I opened my mouth to scream.

But not that first sound came out because I stopped seeing black when everything went black.

As I lay on my side on a floor in the dark with my hands bound behind my back, my ankles also bound together, instead of freaking out and visualizing all the possibilities that would bring about what might be my imminent torture, violation and death, I took this time to reflect on why I had never married and why I fell in love with Tack over tequila and sex.

I did this because I wanted to think about Tack who was big and he was strong and he made me feel safe (when he wasn’t making me feel unsafe) but mostly he made me feel alive. If there was nothing else to be said about Kane “Tack” Allen, he made me feel alive. Every minute I spent with him from his initial, “Hey,” to when he kissed me hard and wet and long before he left me that morning, I felt tingling. I felt excitement. I felt fear. I felt pleasure. I felt warmth. And I felt anger. I laughed. I wanted to yell so badly it made me want to explode. I wanted to cry so badly it hurt not to do it.

And I’d been one hundred percent alive through all of it.

What I did not want to think about was where Lanie and Aunt Bette were because they were not with me. And also I did not want to think about where I was. And further I did not think of why I might be there. And lastly I did not think about what might become of me because I was worried that what might become of me was that I wouldn’t be alive anymore.

Instead, I forced my mind to Tack, a man who was not perfect.

But he’d seemed that way when I met him. He was everything my mind had made up in my daydreams of the man I wanted to be mine since I was fourteen and started having them.

He was handsome. He was strong. He had a beautiful voice and an even more beautiful laugh. And he laughed a lot. He had a light touch and he had a sweet touch and he had a sexy touch. He drank tequila like it was water and ate roasted hog sandwiches like they tasted as good as the finest fillet mignon. And when I had his attention, I had all of it. That night at the Chaos party, he made me feel like I was the only one there. He made me feel funny and interesting and beautiful. And when he took me to his bed, he made me feel a lot of other things that were even better.

It felt like, all my life, I’d been living in black and white and didn’t realize it and suddenly, across a rowdy biker party, I saw this man and the world filled with vibrant color. It didn’t leach in slowly. It slammed in with a kapow!

I didn’t know that was what I was looking for. I just knew I wasn’t going to settle for anything less, not anything less than perfect. I was going to find the man of my daydreams and nothing else would do. So I never got married because I never found him, no one ever brought that color into my life.

Until Tack.

And lying on my side in the dark, bound, I realized that color shot back through my life every time he was filling it. It muted and trickled away when he didn’t, but it would burst out bright and beautiful the minute he came into my space.

After all these years, I finally was alive and now I feared I was going to die.

Tears filled my eyes only moments before I heard the door open and then I heard a thud. I instinctively knew what that thud was. It was a body hitting the floor.

I tensed and the door slammed.

“Who’s there?” I called into the darkness.

“Tyra?” Aunt Bette replied.

Thank you God!

“Aunt Bette.” I started squirming toward her voice. “Are you okay?”