"Fuck you," she said. "It's Brandi."
"Sorry, Brandi," I said. "See? That's how good the sex was. It made me forget your name."
"Nice try," she said, pouting. She reached for a cigarette on the table beside the small bed, lighting up as she pulled the dirty sheet around her waist. She blew smoke, the smell contributing to the cacophony of odors in the small room. The room was a crash pad in the clubhouse, a room for guests of the MC or a fuck pad for the brothers. If someone ran a black light over it, the whole place would turn white. It was filthy. I tossed the used condom in the trash and looked up at her.
"Sorry, Brandi. No offense."
She blew smoke at me. "None taken."
"I have to shower and jet. Need to get back to LA.”
She pointed toward the door.
I wound down the road, hugging the coastline, the bright blue ocean stretching for miles beyond the cliffs. Lucky for me, it was all clear skies and sunshine; I’d driven this before when I’d had to inch along the road at barely a crawl because the fog was so thick, worried I might miss a hairpin turn and plummet to my death. Sure, I could have driven the highway back to Los Angeles, but I needed the distraction of the scenery. The drive would buy me time, time to figure out what to tell my father, how to tell him. I wasn’t in the best frame of mind to be driving. I wasn’t in the best frame of mind to meet him, either-the man who would change everything.
I zipped down the stretch of road as it opened up, no longer on the winding cliffside death trap area of highway. I flicked on my turn signal, about to pass a minivan packed to the brim with kids and suitcases, a family probably headed on vacation, and pulled out around the car. I glanced at them as I passed. They didn’t know how lucky they were to have that. I would have given anything to be loaded into a minivan when I was a kid, driving to a vacation cabin to make s’mores with my normal parents, with the dad who was a boring accountant instead of the head of an organized crime ring. The kids in that car looked like they would be singing songs around a campfire, not refilling their criminal father’s bourbon glass while he gave cryptic orders to his thugs.
“Shit!” I yelled, flooring the gas pedal to pull ahead of the minivan. From my peripheral vision I saw the guy on the bike veer to the shoulder, and I looked in the rearview mirror, watching him make it back on the road. My heart was thumping wildly in my chest. I had nearly hit him.
I should pull over and make sure he’s okay, I thought. Then, yeah, that’s what I need to do. Pull over and make sure some biker is okay. That’s how you get killed. That thought was ironic, given what had just happened with Billy. Besides, I hadn’t actually hit the biker. But it was a reminder that I needed to get my head screwed on straight. Maybe I shouldn’t be driving home by myself after all.
My heart pounded in my chest. I breathed in deeply, big calming breaths, trying to get my heart rate to return to normal. It was just a scare, that’s all.
It took a half hour for my heart rate to come back down and for me to feel less on edge. I wasn’t usually the panicky type, but today was just not my day. I was exhausted already. I should look at finding a nice hotel and spend the night relaxing in a bubble bath with a glass of wine. Maybe at the bed and breakfast up the road, the place I'd stayed before. That might be exactly what the doctor ordered.
I drove on until I saw the red light on the dashboard. How had I not noticed the low gas light before? Five miles left until empty.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Now this day could not get any worse. There were no billboards, and I tried to remember if there were any towns along here, anything that might have a gas station. Was there a gas station before the hotel? I fumbled for my cell phone on the center console, sliding my thumb across the screen. No signal.
Of course I had no signal.
So, I was going to be stranded on the side of the road. Then my father would send one of his men up to school to find me gone. Maybe next my mother’s killer would come along and get rid of me too. After all that had happened with Billy last night-now this? My father would flip out. He’d insist that I have an escort everywhere, and who could blame him? The idea of being under house arrest on top of everything else struck me as hysterical. I felt a giggle build up in my chest, and I started to laugh, first just a little and then uncontrollably.