The Bare Bones (The Bare Bones MC) (4 page)

And you know what? Ford made me laugh. Here we were, one badass enforcer who pounded guys for a living, and a former teen troll who had grown up in a sandstone gorge.

I thought I was done with, ruined by age fifteen. I must’ve used up my allotted “fun” in life—whatever “fun” was—by the time I was eight. Suddenly I was giggling—
giggling, people!—
while riding two up on a chopper, back warmer to the most stunning bad boy in Arizona, absolutely alive in every sense of the word.

My mother could do nothing to stop me. I would not allow her to drag me down with her. My self-esteem began to soar for the first time in my life because I knew Ford liked me.

We suddenly had food, too. I was accustomed to eating a few small bags of Doritos and some Top Ramen every day, but thanks to Ford we were suddenly eating grilled steaks, potato salad, and yes, even vegetables. In fact, that’s what set off one of the only tiffs I had with Ingrid after Ford and Cropper moved in.

Ford had gone to the store to get some broccoli or something. He said a meal wasn’t complete without vegetables and you couldn’t just sit there eating carbs and protein. I was making the potato salad the way Ford had taught me to, chopping the red onions and sprinkling on the dill. Well, I knocked over my beer which spilled on the stupid fucking kitchen linoleum, and Ingrid went off.

“You fucking slob! You have no regard for anyone other than yourself! You come into
my
house and eat
my
food and you go and ruin
my
kitchen floor!”

I was appalled at first that she’d even go ballistic over something that simple. Beer was easily cleaned off linoleum. In fact, I was down there with paper towels sopping it up with her standing over me shrieking like a banshee, like she had a black belt in Nag Fu. See, this was her game. This was how she was wired. Something in her childhood had turned her as crazy as a monkey on a tricycle, and for the first year or so I actually felt sorry for Cropper for somehow having hooked up with her.

The poor dogs were cowering, and I slammed the sopping paper towels into the trash and yelled, “I hate you! Why the fuck would I purposefully ruin your kitchen floor? It’s called a
spill
, an
accident
!”

“Oh, yeah?” Ingrid raced to the open sliding glass door, as bug-eyed as a sprayed roach. She had one of my school books in her hand, and she ran to the gas grill and opened the lid. The grill had been warming up, and now she shoved my book over the flame and slammed the lid. “See how you like that, then! How does it feel having your property destroyed!”

“You insane bitch!” I ran for the grill, but Ingrid grabbed my shirt, tearing it. “What’s your fucking problem?” We were, like, strangling each other, furious beyond all reason. It had come out of the blue like it always did and quickly escalated.

I don’t know why, but my mother had always hated me.

I had my thumb against her windpipe, and now her eyes were as wild as those fish with two eyes on one side of their head. I seriously wanted to do harm to her. We hadn’t asked to be born. I saw people like June’s friends, normal, happy, average, everyday people. I knew they existed.

I saw her friend’s parents praise their kids. This helped kids grow up with confidence and serenity. They didn’t turn into twisted, warped individuals who had to fear shadows lurking behind every dumpster. No, they were positive, happy, and sunny. They didn’t thrash around with nightmares, or suck the cocks of strangers, or sleep in a dry gulley.

“
What the fuck is this?
”

Suddenly we were ripped apart by some powerful force. Ingrid stumbled backward and fell on her ass on the patio. Ford was fishing a flaming hardcover book on economics out of the grill, stomping on it with his steel toed boots.

I’d only seen him that irate during the bare-knuckle bouts he took part in, just pummeling some hapless dude into mush. But that was competition. That was for show. Right now, Ford was as fast and furious as a raging bull. The chain at his waist swayed as he stomped on the book, and for the first time I was honestly afraid he’d whip out that Sig Sauer he kept shoved in his waistband at the small of his back and shoot someone. And it might not be Ingrid.

Used to standing up for myself with all barrels wide open, I cringed in fear of Ford’s wrath. His eyes shined like bonfires as he stepped up to me, pointing a stiff finger at the ground.

“What the fuck’s the meaning of this?”

He didn’t give me a chance to answer. He immediately turned on Ingrid, who was too feeble or high to get off the patio. “Why did you throw Maddy’s book onto the fire? Never mind, I don’t want to hear your worthless excuse. I know her, Ingrid, and I know she could
never
have done anything that deserved such fucking treatment.”

Ingrid looked up at him towering over her, and she looked how I felt. Terrified. As Ford yelled, the terror oozed from me. It was replaced with confidence and serenity because for the first time in my life,
someone was protecting me.

“Listen to me good, you old witch. I never want to see you harm, hurt, or insult the tiniest hair on Maddy’s head
ever fucking again
. If I see or hear of anything like this ever again,
I will bury you
, old lady. Do you feel me?”

Ingrid just whimpered, so Ford stomped his boot, hard, against the cement.
“Do you feel me
, I said. Answer me.”

She nodded.

Quick as a whip, Ford took me by the arm and dragged me into the living room. Still holding me tight, he fell into the couch’s depths with me on his lap, my arms locked around his neck. The entire past two minutes had been a whirlwind, and I exhaled in a whoosh as we hit the couch.

He nuzzled his beautiful face in the crook of my neck. Delicious tiny shivers feathered my entire spine and erected my nipples, as though a thousand precious butterflies flapped their tiny wings against me.

I felt him part his lips, as though he was about to take a bite from my neck. I speared my fingers through his luxurious, thick mane of hair, practically purring with happiness.

Someone had stood up for me.

Ford had protected me against that evil bane of my existence, and now his bulging biceps were sheltering me from anything slightly hurtful.

My pussy clenched. I rotated my hips a little bit, just an automatic reaction of gratitude to a savior, but my cunt was clamped down over his swelling cockhead. His prick expanded and twitched against my innermost core.

“Maddy,” he whispered. “Don’t ever change for anyone. You’re perfect the way you are. Don’t listen to that twisted old bat.”

His words whispered along my neck where that bitch had been pressing, and I wanted to sob with thankfulness.

There was one serious down side to falling in love with Ford.

Now that I felt something for someone else, I knew I could be hurt.

“Thank you, Ford,” I whispered against his smooth forehead. “Thank you for being on my side.”

Then Cropper stomped inside the house or something like that. Something interrupted us, I don’t recall what, and I had to jump off Ford’s lap, leaving him with a big old tent in his lap. He had to slide his hand down the front of his pants to adjust his big old erection.

And I was smiling for the rest of the day.

Hey, you said this would be cathartic for me. It really is. Thanks. It’s good for my soul. It’s nice to remember these pleasant things from my past.

Maybe because they didn’t last too much longer.

FORD

“The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality.” ~ Henry Miller,
Tropic of Cancer

“O
kay, you go.”

“No, you go.”

“No,
you
go.”

Ford and Madison stood on the eaves of the Cottonwood house roof, urging each other to do a cannonball into the swimming pool below. They’d done it often, but the teasing was a ritual they liked to go through. It was babyish, Ford knew, but he liked the way he and Maddy played together. It was lighthearted, free and easy, unlike the way he played with the sweetbutts at the clubhouse.

His attitude toward the tattooed sweetbutts was earnest and dead serious—to get the job done. Fuck them and throw them out on their ass.

Maybe because his relationship to Maddy was sisterly, it ran a lot deeper than that. They played around and kidded each other. He even slapped her on the ass, quite often if the truth came out, but only when no one, especially not when that horndog Cropper, was looking.

Right now was no different. Maddy was clad in her underwire bra and clingy panties that were practically see-through when wet, and Ford slapped her on her round, jiggly ass.

Impulsively, a month ago they’d run over to Knoxie’s in Pure and Easy and gotten inked together. She wanted a tramp stamp, and Ford’s prick was hard as a ramrod watching Knoxie tug her panties down until her ass crack showed as she lay on her stomach. Ford had never been as green with envy as when Knoxie rubbed her tailbone down with alcohol. She now had a tramp stamp that approximated the Bare Bones skull and ribs, only stylized and tribal. And Ford had more or less a permanent hard-on.

Her eyes shining, Maddy hugged herself and jerked away from Ford. He wondered if she knew that when she did this, her nearly-naked tits jutted out more prominently. “Stop slapping me! It hurts when my butt’s wet.”

“Oh yeah? I’ll give you more than a wet butt if you don’t go over the edge.” He slapped her again anyway. Ford had learned by embarrassing trial and error, and he now wore a tight jock under his boxers. It kept his horse-like erection under wraps.

She allowed him to yank her around so the globes of her luscious ass were pressed against his wet crotch. They’d already been swimming for half an hour, but major shrinkage was never a problem for Ford. God, how he wanted to just slide his palm down her flat belly and inside those damp panties. He’d just pinch her pussy lips together and rub until he brought her off in his hand. If he slipped his palm under her tight bra, her fat tittie would fill his hand.

Instead, Ford shoved her off the roof.

Instead of an elegant cannonball, Madison went in a flailing mass of limbs. She hit the water’s surface in what looked like a painful, giant slap. She frothed around awhile like a fish on a hook, and then Ford launched himself in a compact ball into the deep end of the pool.

They splashed and swam, and then Maddy hauled herself onto the edge where she leaned back on her palms, feet dangling in the pool. Ford executed what he knew was an impressive push-up, twisting his torso to exhibit its naked beauty to his best advantage. Ford was no moron. He knew what ladies wanted.

He wasn’t sure if Maddy wanted him in that way, and it would be wrong to make a move on her. She was practically his sister. But damn if every time she warmed his back on the way to her school, he didn’t wind up sporting a massive erection. He always wound up driving the twenty miles to Pure and Easy just to dip his wick into an uncomplaining sweetbutt.

“When you move to Flagstaff,” he said, “are you going to come down and visit?”

Madison shrugged. Doing so made her boobs undulate like plastic bags full of Jell-O. Chlorinated water dripped from the tips of her hair and into her cleavage. “I don’t know if I’ll have a vehicle. I’ll spend all my salary on tuition and books.”

Madison had been accepted into the nursing program at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. She only had to stick around this dump for another six months. Ford was bursting with pride for her. It hadn’t been easy raising herself with her mother’s fucking awful tutelage. The old witch Ingrid just breathed up perfectly good air and Ford failed to see what Cropper saw in her. He knew that Cropper wanted a “citizen wife” to maintain a good image in the community, someone who wasn’t a pass-around or a used-up sweetbutt. Someone unconnected with the MC world, not even an old lady.

Well, Ingrid certainly was that—unconnected to their lifestyle in Pure and Easy.

That was about it. Ford didn’t see what glowing citizen’s aura she cast over their dirty lives. She probably put out decently—Ford didn’t really want to ponder on that. The writing was on the wall and Ingrid’s time was limited, he knew. Cropper didn’t like the way she mistreated her children. Poor young Robert had taken to sleeping in the canyons of Coyote Buttes where Ford knew Madison used to sleep. Shit, being raised within the smoke- and booze-infused walls of the Bum Steer would’ve been better for the boy than that. Ford had even talked to Cropper about patching Robert in as a Prospect. Ford had an old white Dyna that Robert could go on a putt with.

No, Ford was fit to bust with pride at Madison’s achievements. She was getting out. He was only sad he wouldn’t see her much anymore, if at all. Flagstaff was only an hour north of Pure and Easy with some nice canyon carving in between, but what would Ford do, bring his thuggish element into her orderly nurse’s life? She’d be dating a bunch of guys named Brandon and Tyler, a bunch of doctoral candidates. How could he measure up to that?