Kristen Ashley - Motorcycle Man

“Then I’ll get a taxi.”

“Tyra –”

I lifted a hand, wrapped my fingers around his wrist tight and whispered, “I want to go home.”

His hand moved so his palm was against my jaw again and he whispered back, “You’re pissed.”

“No, I just want to go home.”

“Baby, this shit’s ever gonna work, we gotta be able to talk.”

“Tack, I’ve just decided I don’t want this shit to work.”

“Jesus, Tyra –”

“No!” I cried, shaking my head. “No one has ever talked to me that way. I don’t like it. It’s not nice.”

“It’s not nice, Red, but it’s real.”

“Well real hurts,” I returned then felt tears fill my eyes and I couldn’t see him very well and I didn’t know if he could see me but I didn’t want him to see me cry. So I let him go, pulled my face away and tried to slide out from under him but both his arms wrapped around me. He turned to his side, pulling me into him. I pressed my hands against his chest and exclaimed, “Stop it! If I want to go, I should be able to just go!”

Then my breath hitched and he had to have heard it. It was loud and I knew he knew I was crying.

Damn it!

I dipped my chin and shoved harder at his chest but his arms just got tighter and he threw a heavy thigh over my legs.

“Calm down, baby,” he whispered.

“Let me go,” I whispered back.

“Calm down a second.”

I bucked hard against his arms and shouted through my tears, “Let me go!”

“You need to settle and get it out,” he told me and I stilled then my tears stopped coming and my head snapped back to look into his face.

“I do?” I asked sarcastically. “Is that what I need to do, Tack? You know? Do you know what I need to do? Have you been hooded? Kidnapped? Bound? Have you ever lain in a dark room with your aunt, who you love like crazy, somewhere you don’t know where she is? Same with your best friend, who you love just as much? Have you lain there wondering what would become of you? Has that happened? Because if it has, then I’ll know you’ve got experience so I should listen to you and know how to behave.”

“Tyra –” he started but I kept going.

“I don’t know what to do with you. So if you think I’m hot and cold, that’s because you can be really nice and really not so nice so I’m just going with your flow. I’ve never known a man like you and I don’t know what to make of you. Because the nice seems worth it and then, like just now, you’re really, really not nice and I don’t know what to do.”

His hand slid up, fingers sifting into my hair, and he muttered, “Baby –”

I kept right on talking. “So if I’m taxing your patience, Tack, my apologies. I know what could help out with that. You could let me get out of your bed, get dressed, go home and quit my job so you won’t see me again. Right now, I have to say, that works for me because when you get angry and impatient, your words hurt and you don’t know me enough to know if I can withstand that so let me explain something to you. I can’t and I don’t want any part of it. And that is not me running cold on you and playing games, Tack. That’s me being real.”

After I finished speaking Tack was silent but, I will point out, he was silent while not letting me go.

Then he murmured a question to the room because he certainly wasn’t asking me, “What’d I get into when I got into this with you?”

But it was me who answered, “It doesn’t matter because, if you’d just let me go, we’re both out of it.”

His hand slid from the back of my head to my face, taking my hair with it and he whispered, “You think about our Saturdays, baby, and what we had just now and you tell me that me lettin’ you go is what you need, and you mean it, I’ll let you go.”

“I need you to let me go,” I stated instantly.

“Fuckin’ hell,” he was still whispering, “you didn’t even think about it.”

“You told me you’d rather cut off your own arm than hurt me, Tack, and you just hurt me. Hurt is more than physical pain. You dished it out not knowing if I could take it. And I can’t. That’s you and that’s me. You have to be you and you can’t be you around me without me getting chewed up in the process, so no. I don’t need to think about it because I know it’s going to happen again and I don’t want that in my life.”

“You’re right, Red, I can only be me but I’ll tell you this then I’ll let you go and you can leave or you can stay in this bed with me. I don’t know you and you don’t know me. But I know now I gotta handle you with more care and what you gotta trust is that I can do that. I let you loose and you roll outta my bed, that’s tellin’ me you don’t trust me. But I’ll say it straight. You can trust me to handle you with care. Now, baby,” his arms went loose and his voice dipped low, “you decide.”

I rolled immediately to my back away from him then to my side. Pushing up to sitting, I threw my legs over the side of the bed. My feet hit the floor and I moved quickly to my panties. Snatching them up, I yanked them up my legs.

They were blue. Pale blue with delicate pale green lace. The color combination was striking. I thought that when I bought them. Now, even in the dark, their shades muted, I could still see the colors.

I settled them on my hips and stared at the wall opposite me, my hands lifting, my fingers sliding into the sides of my hair, nails scratching my scalp.

Colors, vibrant colors sifted through my brain. Tack’s sapphire blue eyes. Tabby’s matching ones. The bright, cherry red of the car he was working on. The purple of the flowers in the field that Celie and Nettie played in in The Color Purple. The embroidery at the back of Lanie’s robe.

Vibrant.

Tack had been in this room maybe half an hour, forty-five minutes tops and I’d had two orgasms, I’d made him laugh, I’d been angry, I’d been scared and I’d felt protected. Alive through every minute of it. Vibrantly alive.

I dropped my hands and wrapped my arms around my middle.

Oh God. Could I go back to black and white?

Then his words came back to me, not just the hurtful ones he just spoke, others. He lived in a different world and I had to fit into that world, he told me so himself. And, frankly, his world was more than a little scary. He asked me to trust him but he was who he was. He wasn’t seventeen and becoming a man. He was… I didn’t know how old but he sure as hell was not seventeen.

He was the man he was going to be. There was no more growing, no more learning. He was there.

I hadn’t known him long but I knew enough about him, about men, that I knew he would expect me to shift and change and be who he needed me to be. He’d expect it like all men expected it because women did that shit all the time. But he was who he was and I had to take him as he was, shift and change into his life and I had to make the decision now. Take him as he came and live in color but do it in his world, giving up my own. Or go back to black and white and hope my real dream man would come and color my world again.

I made my heartbreaking decision, dropped my hands from my hair, bent and grabbed my shorts, muttering, “I’ll call a taxi.”

I was pulling up my shorts while hearing movement in the bed. And I was just about to search for my shirt when two arms slid around me from behind, one at my ribs, one at my chest, both pulling my back into Tack’s hard, warm front.

I felt the tickle of Tack’s goatee on the skin of my neck where he murmured, “Baby, you aren’t makin’ the right decision.”

Feeling his arms around me, the tickle of his goatee, I had second thoughts.

But my mouth didn’t.

“I need to go.”

“Don’t fuck up, Tyra,” he warned and I pulled in breath.

Then I quietly told the shadowy wall, “You don’t know this because you didn’t ask but I jumped off a roller coaster, Tack, one that was out-of-control and jumping off that took me to Ride. I don’t need to get off one and jump right back onto another. I have to get off the roller coaster.”

His arms gave me a squeeze and his lips still at my neck moved. “Tell me about your roller coaster, darlin’.”

“Too late,” I whispered. “Too late to ask now, Tack.”

He was silent a moment then he whispered back, “Don’t do this, baby.”

“Let me go.” I was still whispering. “I need to go.”

He didn’t let me go. Not for long, breathtaking moments.

Then he did.

He let me go.

I felt tears clog my throat but I rushed through the dark room to tag my tee.

As I was pulling it over my head, I heard his gravelly voice say, “I’ll get one of the boys to take you home.”

There it was. It was done.

Done.

Oh God.

I yanked the tee down and, with difficulty, swallowed the tears that were threatening to choke me. Then I asked softly, “Can Lanie call me tomorrow?”

Tack’s voice was remote when he replied, “I’ll get her that word.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, watching him moving toward the door.

“One ‘a the boys will be in to get you,” he told me, striding out the door.

“Thank you,” I repeated quietly to the door.

But Tack was gone.

It was afternoon the next day and I was sitting on my deck, Uncle Marsh at my side and he was telling me stories of growing up with my Mom in Ohio. Aunt Bette was sitting at the bar in my kitchen, her fingers flying over the keyboard of her super-slim laptop, taking care of business even though it was Saturday. Mostly, she was giving me and Uncle Marsh alone time. But from my experience, Aunt Bette shut down approximately thirty minutes before she conked out for the night. All other times she was on the go, working, scrap booking, shopping, serial communicating with family and friends and generally making everyone around her tired just by watching her.