Jaxon
Moonlit nights were always my favorite.
There’s something about riding a motorcycle on a clear, cloudless night in early fall. Something about the crisp cut of the air across my face and filling my nose, the smell of pine and dying leaves, the ache of knowing very soon it’ll be too cold, too icy, too snowy to ride, and I’ll have to wait months to feel this feeling again.
When I met Natalie, she said she hated motorcycles. I’d thought then, in my fourteen-year-old head, that she was gorgeous, but she’d never be the girl for me. How could I be with a girl who hated the thing I loved more than anything else? I was determined at that moment to forget about her, even though when I’d first seen her walking across the campus of Blackmoor Academy, black hair shining in the sun like a raven’s wing, I’d felt the sort of instantaneous, desperate desire that seems unique to teenagers, the need for something I didn’t fully understand yet, but knew would matter more than anything in the world to me if only I could get my hands on it.
Onher.
I couldn’t forget about her, no matter how much I tried. I tried to avoid her, but she always seemed to be there, gray eyes glinting, casting glances at me from where she stood with her group of friends, and that’s when I knew she’d noticed me, too.
Our relationship grew in fits and starts. I was like a lot of boys my age, prone to picking on a girl I liked—something that didn’t change all that much over time—but Natalie could give it back as good as she got. There was a fire in her that I’d never seen in any other girl. It made me want her more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life, maybe even the motorcycle I was saving up for.
My father was solidly against me owning one. He said it was for a lower class of people, for the bikers that worked for us, and certainly not for me, the son of one of the founding families. “The others already look down on the Kings as the least of the families,” he’d told me over and over again. “The more you associate with those who aren’t of our class, the worse you make it.”
The less likely you’ll be to take the spot of the heiris what he’d meant. From the time I was old enough to understand that either I or one of my two friends—practically brothers—would run this town that I’d grown up in, it was impressed on me that I was supposed to be the hope of the King family, the one who would do what only one other King had ever done in the history of the town—take over.
I’d known all my life that there was no leaving this place—and I resented it deeply. It felt as if there were no point in having dreams or goals of my own when I could never choose where I lived, never choose my own path, never do anything other than what I’d been told I was born to do, whether I liked it or not.
That resentment, mixed with teenage rebellion, just pushed me to spend more time with the Devil’s Sons. I was determined to have my own bike when I turned sixteen. Since my father wasn’t inclined to buy me one, I started cleaning up at the underground fights, scrubbing changing rooms and bathrooms, and doing any odd jobs the organizers needed me to do. I knew as soon as I was old enough—they told me sixteen, the same age I could get my license and my motorcycle—I’d be down there fighting too. It pushed me to work out, train, and do the things that would eventually mold me into the adult I’d be.
And Natalie was there for all of it. By the time we were fifteen, she was spending more time with me than her group of friends, and yet we still hadn’t kissed. She filled my every dream, every aching moment I spent in my bed and in my shower with my hand on my cock, I thought of her, but I hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to back her against the wall of the gym or the lockers between classes and take the kiss I so desperately wanted.
But that all changed when I turned sixteen.
The morning of my birthday, I skipped school. I skipped the fancy breakfast the cook made for me too, dodging my parents in the dining room to snag a muffin out of the kitchen and make a break for the part of town where the Devil’s Sons’ clubhouse was located and where I’d be able to get the motorcycle I’d been saving up to buy for two years.
I rode it to school right after that, just in time to see Natalie in between classes. She took one look at me and the bike, and the most brilliant smile washed over her face as she strode towards me.
“Take me for a ride, birthday boy?”
I’d never forget those words. I took her out to my favorite spot, a little grassy meadow on the cliffs near the edge of town. There, under the brilliant early fall sunlight, I kissed Natalie Browning for the first time—my first kiss, and hers. We kissed for what felt like forever, slow and awkward, fast and clumsy, hands and mouths everywhere.
“I thought you hated motorcycles,” I said when we came up for air. “You told me that the first time we met, when I was hanging out with the bikers’ kids.”
“I’m pretty sure I still do,” she said with a laugh, tossing that shining hair over her shoulder. “But I loveyou, Jaxon King.”
And then we were kissing again, wild and desperate, until Natalie rolled me onto my back in the grass and straddled my hips, laughing with delight as she looked down at my flushed face and lust-filled eyes.
“Take me for a ride, birthday boy?”
That’s how, on my sixteenth birthday, I got a motorcycle, a first kiss, a girlfriend, and lost my virginity all on the same day.
But that’s just how Natalie was. When she decided she wanted something, she went after it. When she loved, she loved hard. And she wasn’t afraid of anything.
Even the things that she probably should have been.
Before Natalie, all my time had been spent with Cayde and Dean, my best friends, who were both a year younger than me. It didn’t matter, we’d been raised basically like brothers, and a year meant nothing, especially when, as a King, I was treated as the sidekick anyway. But with Natalie, I was an equal. I was her partner, lover, and best friend, and everything fell away except her and me. Our world narrowed down to that patch of grass on the cliff, where we’d go after dates to lose ourselves in each other, night after night. It was perfect. It was everything I wanted—shewas everything I wanted.
Until my family got wind of the two of us.
No one would tell mewhyshe wasn’t appropriate, only that I wasn’t allowed to date her. That she wasn’t the right kind of girl for a son of one of the families, for an heir, but no one would explain why. And predictably, neither Natalie nor I was having any of it.
And neither of us was prepared to keep our relationship a secret for long.
“I want to get the fuck out of this town,” she’d said one night as we lay breathless and panting in the grass, fingers entwined as we looked up at the stars. “I know you do too, Jaxon.”
“I do. But my family will never let me go. They don’t even want us to be together.”