The roof of an outlaw biker compound, it’s important to point out.
It was three in the morning.
The witching hour … when the veil between worlds was thin, when demons were more capable of sinking their talons into you, scoring your skin right to the bone… If you believed in such things.
I did, as it happened, believe in such things.
I was somewhat of a cliché for my generation. I liked crystals, astrology—I was a Scorpio rising,Sun in Sagittarius—and loved to read spicy fantasy novels with a strong female lead. I believed in magic, angels, demons, sprites and the Fae.
But my demons were not of the metaphysical variety. They didn’t come from the underworld or from mystical realms either. They were much too common, much more cliché. Uninteresting. Which made everything worse. If I was going to be battling demons, at least life could make them interesting, worthy of a chapter in my autobiography.
Violet Edwards, demon killer… It had a nice ring to it.
As opposed to Violet Edwards, just another fucked-up, rich kid with daddy issues.
I didn’t normally hang out in outlaw biker compounds. Nor did I drink Jack Daniels or any other dark kind of whisky. While in France, I had developed a taste for Pinot Noir, a crip rosé from the South when it was hot out.
But when in Rome and all that.
And my particular situation called for Jack… A crisp rosé wouldn’t do shit to dull the edges.
The night was unusually quiet. Even though I’d only been here a few days, I’d come to understand that silence, even in the middle of the night—especially in the middle of the night—was hard to come by at an outlaw biker compound. All of the married members, my mother’s good friends, lived in houses of their own. Which meant that it was only the single men who lived at the clubhouse. And they liked to party. Party freakinghard. They also liked to do a lot of other stuff that shocked even my not so naïve eyes.
No one seemed worried about sexual acts being performed in public after certain hours. To the contrary, it seemed some of them liked being watched. When that started, I took that as a sign that that was the time to be putting myself to bed—especially considering my current condition. But something had also awakened inside of me, a want to stay. A need. And every time, my eyes had always found blue ones, my body pulsating as we made eye contact, as it became clear he had been watching me too. The weight of that stare and my current condition had me scuttling back to my room, heart beating fast and shame covering me like sweat.
I found I liked the rhythm of the clubhouse, the men who lived there. I enjoyed the club life, learning about a different way of existing. I might’ve enjoyed it a lot more if my world hadn’t been rocked once again in the bathroom of my mother’s little house she shared with Swiss.
The one I had to get out of, for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which being what I found out in that bathroom.
I convinced my mom I did not need to be under the same roof as her and her new fiancé where even the thickest of walls couldn’t contain the evidence that my mother was happy. And satisfied.
It didn’t give me theickthat most might’ve had hearing their mother having great sex. Well, it gave me theick, but just a little. Mostly, it made me happy. Amongst some other very complicated feelings.
I had never heard my mother and father have sex. Then again, we’d lived in a large, sprawling house.
I’d never heard him beat her either.
But that had happened.
My entire fucking life, my father had beat my mother.
And she’d taken the opportunity of me going studying abroad as a window to escape. To drive across the country, find herself at a biker compound and fall for an outlaw biker. Then my father had also driven her across the country to try to beat her to death.
I’d learned all of this … less than two weeks ago.
And I was still processing the shattering of my entire childhood. Of everything I thought my mother was.
In addition to what I’d carried with me across an ocean. The weight of which was almost impossible to carry but a weight I could not transfer to my mother. Not now, not when she was finally happy for the first time in her life.
I had never seen my mother happy. Not truly free. Not once in my entire life. Until right then. So yeah, I would not be the reason that happiness was shattered.
Hence the Jack and the joint.
I wasn’t a habitual smoker. Sure, I’d tried it a bunch in high school along with the plethora of drugs available at all the rich kid parties our parents didn’t know we threw or attended.
I’d enjoyed drugs. Still did enjoy them. A little truth that my mother thankfully didn’t know, even though I told her almost everything.
But recently, I’d come to realize how much we’d been hiding from each other.