FORCE: A Bad Boy Sports Romance (75 page)

Gabriela

I was almost done. Just one more row of goofy white monstrosities, and I could punch my time card and get the hell out of here for another night. My nerves were jangling. My head was buzzing. I was exhausted.

And then the bell over the door jingled. "Oh for fuck's sake," I said out loud.

My manager shot me a look and hurried to the front of the bridal salon. I felt like collapsing into the pile of wedding dresses in front of me. They would probably make a pretty nice bed. I could sleep here all night.

Instead I straightened up. I was $500 away from making my commission cut-off for this paycheck and of course I desperately needed the money. I pasted on a smile, wiped my hands on my slacks, and rounded the corner to go greet the starry eyed bride.

And then I stopped short when I saw Kathy Vollmer.

My stomach sank right down to my toes and I'm sure my practiced salesperson grin took on a bit of a snarl. Kathy looked at me and I saw several different emotions play across her face. The first was the frantic scrambling to place me. The second was the recognition that yes, indeed, Gabriela Ortiz was standing in front of her. And a third was the evil glee when she glanced down at my bare left hand.

"Gabi!" She trilled, and the three overly made-up girls with her whipped their heads around. Yep, they had all gone to Lenape, though I could only remember two of their names. Lauren, and Hannah and Miss-Blonde-Extensions, but they all looked interchangeable anyway.

"Hi Kathy!" I sang out, rushing over to her in simulated glee. "Oh my gosh, congratulations!"

This job really made me hate myself sometimes.

"Do you work here?" Kathy asked.

Of course I work here, you stupid bitch. Why the hell else would I be in a bridal salon? I just saw you look at my hand, you know damn well I'm not here shopping for myself.
"I do!" I said instead of punching her. Then I widened my eyes and used the line I must have used a thousand times before. "Hey, that's something you're going to be saying soon!"

Kathy and her interchangeable maids started giggling wildly as I shot a glance at the clock. Closing time was in fifteen minutes. How quickly could I hustle her in and out of here?

"So what if you been up to since graduation?" Kathy asked me as I settled her into her dressing room.

"Oh, you know," I hedged.
Spinning my wheels and dodging commitment
I didn't say. "Adult stuff."

Kathy's eyes widened for a second, and I realized I had made a grievous error. The image of Gabriela Ortiz doing adult stuff was never far from the mind of any of the graduates of Lenape High. And no matter how many times I tried to dispel the rumors about my overactive sex life, I kept doing things to prove that they were all right about me.

Like sleeping with half the town out of sheer boredom in a series of unfulfilling escapades that only left me feeling worse about myself. I knew it should bother me that I was helping a high school classmate pick out her wedding dress. I knew I should be concerned that someone my age had already found love and commitment.

But all it did was make me feel annoyed.

They didn't need to judge me, I was good enough at it for all of us.

The instincts that I had honed over the past few months at this crappy job proved to be correct. The third of the dresses I slid over Kathy's head had her weeping and taking multiple selfies. I wrote down her information, smiled at her plans, asked all the right questions and hustled her away, out of my hair. Of course she wasn't going to buy today, girls like her never do. She had to go try on dresses at as many salons as she could, fulfilling all of her princess fantasies at the expense of the overworked consultants.

By the time I got her out of there, it was in half an hour after closing time and I really needed to drink. But the idea of going back to my studio apartment was too depressing. One drink at Jokers. That's all I was going to do. One drink and then I would go home. Tomorrow was my day off, I'd sleep in,
maybe sign up for one of those dating websites?

Making empty promises to myself was a specialty of mine. I knew I wasn't going to do any of this, but it felt good to think that I would.

I shoved Kathy's discards back in to the rack, not really caring if they ended up where they didn't belong. They could deal with it in the morning with fresh, coffee-sharpened eyes. I was too damn tired.

I escaped into the chilly late February air, feeling the hollow pride at completing another day of selling the dream of love and commitment to others, when I didn't even believe in it myself.

Crash

Fuck it was cold.

Of course it was cold, it was the end of February and the whole Northeast was blanketed under six inches of crusty brown snow. It was cold, and yet I was riding a motorcycle.

That seemed about right.

I should be driving south
. Heading somewhere warm, somewhere dry. Somewhere else but north on I-287. But it was like my bike was driving itself, like a goddamned homing pigeon zeroing in on its roost. I was riding without thinking, tearing up the miles between Philadelphia, and me. Between me and the humiliation I was leaving behind.

I took the off-ramp too fast, my back wheel skittering out of control and for a split second I thought it would happen all over again - I would wake up in a hospital bed with my mind wiped clean. I would be born again into a new life, with new mistakes to make, and new fuck-ups to regret, and I wouldn't have to deal with the aftermath of what I left behind.

It sounded so inviting. I almost wished it would happen.

But riding is one of those things I'm really good at. Like fighting and fucking and getting confused. I righted my bike on instinct, swinging my weight to my left side to yank myself out of the skid. I rumbled to an uneventful stop at the end of the ramp, and I turned right just like nothing had happened.

Lenape.

Why the hell had I come to Lenape?

I was just going to pass through, I told myself. Just look at the place, satisfy myself that there was still nothing here for me, then I would head out. Maybe fill up my tank with cheap Jersey gas, and turn tail and head down south.

Florida sounded especially nice.

Riding down the darkened main drag, I waited for the memories that I knew would never come. Being here was like purposefully giving myself the worst sense of déjà vu. Lenape was full of things I could never forget, because I could never remember them in the first place.

Forgetting everything still seemed like a really good idea, and there was only one thing for certain that would give me that pleasure.

A bar. It looked like a real piece of shit. But I stopped anyway.

The snow-threatening sky was tinged with orange, the whole sky blinking with busy aircraft zooming overhead. I heard the low groan of trucks downshifting on the highway and the noise of traffic in the distance, but here in the parking lot the silence was deafening. The heavy, staticky silence, the kind that can only come in winter. When everyone else is snug inside, and you have the world to yourself. 

Reminds you pretty bluntly that you have nowhere to go.

There were only a few cars in the parking lot, a big pickup that reminded me sharply of the one I had left in Philly, a small beat up looking hatchback that was either white or silver, I couldn't tell, and a handful of other ones. I wasn't really sure I wanted to deal with this many people at once, but the cold was really setting in.

I swung my stiff good leg over the seat.  My boot crunched in the freezing gravel, my whole leg pins and needles. The cold had seeped into my bones and I braced myself for what I knew was coming next.

My bad leg hit the ground as thick and dead as a log.

Fuck, it had locked up.

I massaged the muscle above the kneecap angrily.  Riding so long in the cold without moving or stretching had robbed it of any feeling. I knew this would happen. I knew better than to go so long without a break, but I had forgotten.

I forgot everything. Always.

My fucking knee refused to bend, no matter how long I rubbed it through my jeans. I sighed, my frozen breath wreathing around my face like I was a dragon.

I was going to have to walk into this shit place like a fucking cripple.

For some reason that struck me as funny. 
I'm in fucking Lenape for no fucking reason, and now that I want a drink, my fucking leg refuses to work.

"Fuck you then," I muttered. 

I limped stiffly to the door and yanked it open.

Gabriela

Kathleen Volmer. Why did it have to be her? The graffiti in the first floor bathroom had had her trademark loopy 'a'.

Gabby Ortiz is a whore
.

She hadn't even bothered to spell my name right. And tonight I had to pretend to be happy for her, prostituting myself for that five hundred dollars to reach my sales goal.

But in the end I had straightened my shoulders and gone to Jokers. Because if there's one thing Gabriela Ortiz won't do, it's let the sons of bitches get her down. "
No deja que los hijos de puta te agobien,"
as my mother put it, over and over again, spitting out the words as she hotcombed my mass of curls. "You show them,
hijita,
you hold your head high and show them that they can't break you that easily."

So that's what I did, though I was pretty sure my mother wouldn't approve of my methods. Getting drunk on a weeknight wasn't exactly the height of self-love. But I was here and I wasn't going to leave until I had alcohol in my system.

Jokers was a dump. There was no denying it, and tonight it seemed even worse than usual. Only a few seedy characters remained, the best of what Lenape had to offer. As I walked in, I spied Sergio, our small town's ancient tailor. The tiny little old Italian man was the only game in town when it came to prom alterations, and as such, every single kid who grew up in Lenape knew him by name., "Evening Mr. Marcozzi," I smiled and waggled my fingers in greeting. He raised his head at me and gave me a tired nod. He was looking more disheveled than his usual pin-neat dapperness.

Maybe Serge was as dispirited as I was.

Two booths over from Mr. Marcozzi was a group of guys that made my heart sink to see. Fitch, Harlow and Tucker all insisted that they be called by their last names, as if it lent them some sort of respectability they couldn't find anywhere else. The three had graduated from Lenape High the year after me, with Fitch starting a rumor that I had gone down on him behind the bleachers in the goose-shit strewn football field. I'm still not sure how many people believed him.  After all, it was the word of a white football star versus the "exotic" known slut with her dick-sucking lips and Latin temper. People seemed willing to believe him, even after I had punched him in the nuts in the hallway and lost the right to walk with the rest of my graduating class.

Sometimes I wondered what the hell I was still doing in Lenape.

But if I left that would be letting the sons of bitches get me down. I lived here, I belonged here, my grandparents settling back when Lenape was mostly farms. They chose to raise their family away from the choking bustle of New York City, not realizing that New York would soon come to swallow us up out here, turning a town twenty-five miles west into a bedroom community of commuters. We had the weird distinction of being a small town where everyone knew everyone in the shadow of one of the biggest cities in the world.

I hated it, and I loved it, and I still needed that drink.

"Hey Sal," I smiled at the bartender.

"What's going on Gabi?" Salvatore Perroni lived down the block from my parents, moonlighting at Jokers to fund the various classic cars he had strewn across his lawn. Nothing made him happier than to work outside shirtless, gut blazing, as he tinkered with them, but my family had concluded that he actually didn't know a thing about car repair.

"Shit day," I sighed. "Can I get a shot of Jack, and uh, what do you have on draft tonight?"

"Girl after my own heart," he smiled.

"I don't fuck around when it comes to my alcohol," I grinned.

"Then let's make it two," Sal smiled as he lifted a shot glass. "To shit days," he called.

I grinned and knocked back the whiskey, feeling the burn spread through my throat and down to my stomach. I sighed as it unknotted something deep inside of me, then coughed into the back of my hand. "Shit, should've asked for Maker's, that stuff burns," I coughed.

Sal slid me a pint glass and I gulped the contents. "Pussy," he smiled.

I drained a third of the glass. "I'm not a pussy, I just have standards."

"Then why are you sucking down light beer?"

"Ew!" I pretended to be horrified. "How could you do this to me, Sal? I thought we were friends?" The shot was doing the trick, releasing some of the anxiety of the day. Fuck Kathy Vollmer. Fuck her maids.  We had never been friends in the first place, why should I pretend now?

I never got along well with girls anyway. Give me a guy friend that wouldn't be shocked when I swore and was vulgar. Girls were too damn touchy.

Sal grinned and rapped his knuckles on the bar, the heavy gold ring on his hairy knuckle nearly denting the wood. "It's on the house, Gabs," he grinned and his eyes briefly wandered down to my tits. 

I smiled and threw back my head, downing the rest of my beer and letting him have an eyeful. It was only polite. "Thanks Sal," I sighed. "Now can I buy a decent beer or are you going to make me drink ricewater again?"

Sal laughed and shook his head as he ran the tap from a local microbrewery. "That's more like it," I nodded, and swiveled in my stool to look out onto the bar.

Fitch darted his head up from his booth and shot me a lascivious grin, then ducked his head to his cronies, gesturing animatedly.  I saw his fingers point in my direction and I sighed, turning back to the bar again. After this beer I really should go home. I didn't want Fitch getting any ideas about getting me alone. 

I swiveled back to the bar and grabbed my beer, fishing around in my purse for my wallet. As I did, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror behind the bar again.

Fuck, I look exhausted
. I should be home getting my beauty sleep, not drinking alone in bars. I could almost hear my mother's voice in my head, raised in rapidfire indignation. "You drink too much, you spend too much time alone. Flitting from bed to bed. I didn't raise you to be a cheap
puta
Gabriela. When are you going to make me an
abuela?
"

The familiar self-loathing had almost reached its peak when I saw the reflection of the door opening. I sipped my beer more slowly now, watching the stranger who walked in. He walked with his shoulders thrown back, dragging his left leg in a slight limp that gave his hips a sexy rolling gait. It made me look a little closer.

Turning my mother's shrieking Spanish off in my head, I swiveled around so I could get a better look. My sister always said I had a guy's brain, direct and to the point and that went doubly true when it came to sex. I didn't play the shy game, waiting for a guy to come up and talk to me. No, when I saw something I liked, I made sure I was blatant about it.

I came by my reputation as a slut honestly.

The man sauntered up to the bar, slowly, like he was still deciding if he wanted to be here or not. I turned back to the bar and caught his reflection in the mirror as I lifted my beer. He raised his eyebrows in greeting, his lip curling into a smile that was half boyish mischief, half dripping in sex.

Oh holy shit.

I sat there pondering as I watched him order. His voice was a low rumble, too low to make out what he was saying, but loud enough to ripple up my body from my toes. He was wearing a leather jacket, and I could smell the scent of it from here. It smelled like rain and sun, like he wore it every day, like it was molded perfectly to fit his muscular body.

Holy shit Gabi, you're really drunk, calm down girl.

He wasn't my type, I tried to tell myself. Shorn head, deep set blue eyes, that leather jacket...he looked like more trouble than he'd be worth. My tastes gravitated towards awkward nerdy white guys with an ethnic fixation. I'd taken a few virginities in my day, taught a few tricks here and there, but I mostly just used sex as a means to an end. A warm body, that feeling of connection, maybe a sad little orgasm or two, that's all I really looked for in a man. 

It helped that I was never actually attracted to them.

This guy...
holy shit, I was really attracted to him.
But there was something else there too. A flash of recognition, something familiar in the way his jaw tensed as he swallowed. I felt like I knew him, but I couldn't place him anywhere. I would have certainly remembered him; all leathery and looking like a badass biker.

He caught me staring again and shot me that lopsided smile once more, raising his pint glass in a silent toast. I lifted mine in response, and then knocked the rest back.
I really needed to go home. I really needed to get to bed.  I really needed to stop staring at this guy.

He shot me another smile as he lowered his glass and then turned to face me.  There was no recognition there, no familiarity. However I thought I knew him, he didn't share my feelings. I ducked my head, awkwardly grabbing for my purse. Fuck, I don't usually get all blushing-virgin with guys, but this one had me all off-kilter. I didn't like feeling this out of control.

"Have a good night," I smiled to him.

He nodded, not registering anything like surprise or disappointment. Just nodded and watched me go. I felt his eyes boring into the my back, the heat from his gaze so distracting that I didn't even notice Fitch until he was right in front of me.

"You could at least say hi," Fitch wavered drunkenly directly in my path. "I'm just trying to say hi to you, Gabi."

Tucker and Harlow moved to flank me, a move they must have perfected a while back. Harassing girls was like an instinct for them. They reminded me of a pack of wolves culling a herd.

I brushed my pocketbook up to my other hand and slid it in, closing my fist around the pepper spray I kept in there. Just in case. "Hi Fitch," I sighed, trying to sound as bored as I could. "Bye Fitch."

I tried to sidestep him, but Fitch lurched back into my path. "Come on Gabi," he leered, reaching for one of my curls. "Why you gotta be such a bitch all the time, huh?"

"I'm not a bitch
all the time,
Fitch," I clarified. "Just to you."

"You still mad at me? After all these years?" He moaned like I had cut him deeply and his minions snickered.

I rolled my eyes. "Honestly I don't spare a thought for you much one way or another," I told him flatly. "Now will you get the fuck out of my way? I'm tired and I want to go home."

"You still living down on Rofrits Ave.?" he asked and I felt a sinking sensation in my chest. He knew where my parents lived. He must have followed me home at some point.

"Nope, no idea what you're talking about," I gritted. "Get out of my way, Fitch."

"Little yellow house, all that Mary shit in the front yard?"

I seethed inwardly. The Virgin of Guadalupe was my mother's personal saint.
How dare he.
"No Fitch, I never lived on Rofrits, why don't you drop it?"

"I could have sworn..." he said, tugging on one of my curls and watching it spring back.  I felt a shudder of revulsion at how intimate the gesture was, "that I saw you there just the other day."

"I don't need this shit right now, Fitch, seriously. Get the
fuck
out of my way."

His genial drunkenness faded and his face darkened. "Gabi, you are a real bitch, you know that? You really need to be taught a lesson, shut your filthy little spic mouth." He leaned in so that his rank breath brushed against my ear. "You won't have much to say when I jam my cock down your throat..."

I felt my heart hammering so hard in my chest that I was afraid it would explode. I balled up my fists and raised to swing at him, when I heard a voice behind me.

"Baby, these guys giving you a hard time?"

The man from the bar had slipped his arm possessively over my shoulder. Fitch gaped open mouthed as the man in the leather jacket slid next to me with a sexy glower. He took in each one of us in turn, then looked me in the eye and flashed a megawatt smile. I inhaled sharply as he pulled me close to him.

Then he ducked my head backwards and planted a possessive kiss directly on my mouth.