"So what are you doing," she asked. "Sunday joyride?"
The waitress set our plates between us, and I waited until she left to answer. Meanwhile, Dani dug into her food like she hadn't had a meal in days, and I stifled a chuckle.
"Something like that," I said. "I'm headed back to L.A."
Dani looked up. "You're from L.A.?"
"Yeah, thereabouts. Headed back to my club. Why, are you going that way?"
"Farther south," she said. "San Diego."
"Why are you up here?"
"School. Stanford."
"Well la-de-dah." I whistled.
“I know, I know,” she said. “Privileged.”
“Pretty, rich, and smart, that's what I was going to say.”
“So is that your job-your motorcycle club? Or something you do for fun?”
“Both,” I said. “Something I do full-time.”
Dani's eyes lingered on my cut, and I could see her squinting at the patches, reading.
“Vice-President,” she said. "One percent." She took a huge mouthful of pancakes, and I couldn't help but think about her mouth around me instead of the fork. Goddamn it.
“Yeah, it means we’re not weekend warriors who-”
“I know what it means,” she said, interrupting.
“Sure you do,” I said. “I bet you've watched all the seasons of Sons of Anarchy."
She smiled, condescending. “You’re not the first biker I’ve ever met.”
I laughed. “Your boyfriends at Stanford don’t count, sweetheart.”
Dani shrugged, sipped her coffee. “The M patch there-you deal meth? Weed?” She watched me carefully for a reaction. “No,” she said. “That's not it. M is for murder, right?”
I watched her soak up her yolk with her toast casually, like it was every day she ate with an outlaw biker in a diner. She was right. Perceptive. But she probably watched a lot of television.
“So you watch a lot of Sons, then, huh? Got a biker fetish?" I asked.
“Never seen it,” Dani said, biting her toast.
“You hang around a club or something?” I knew that wasn’t the case. She wasn’t the type.
“Nope,” she said. “I've just known some bikers, that’s all.”
She was interesting, that was for sure. I couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d look like naked. I wanted her on my bike again, arms wrapped around me. Hand wrapped around my dick.
I cleared my throat. “It’s getting late,” I said. It was late afternoon, and it would start getting dark soon. I needed to hit the road. “You ready to roll?”
Rinsing my hands in the bathroom sink, I patted a few stray pieces of hair into place. I pulled the scarf down on my neck, examining the bruises starting to form on my skin, morbidly fascinated with the marks. Damn him, I thought. Fucking Billy. I was going to be stuck wearing scarves for a week now. I looked like a forty-year-old soccer mom.
Who cared what I looked like, anyhow? It wasn’t like I needed to impress the biker out there waiting for me. Blaze.
He was sexy though, the way he looked at me like I was a piece of steak and he was a hungry dog. Ravenously. He didn't think I saw, but I caught him staring at me. He'd jerked his gaze away, a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
But I'd felt a thrill catching him staring, there was no denying that. I bet he's great in the sack. Bad boys like him usually were. Like Billy. That's what I need. Another bad boy. No, not like Billy. Billy wasn't a bad boy. Over privileged asshole, yes. Not an alpha male in the same way this guy was. Blaze.
This guy was a different kind of bad boy. More dangerous, maybe; more calculated, for sure. But interesting. He didn't exactly sound like the outlaw bikers I had met growing up, the ones who provided protection for my dad. They weren't the sharpest knives in the drawer-nice guys, but not the brightest. Blaze, on the other hand, he was no dummy.
My dad had stopped using the bikers, traded them out for some other gang for a few years, and they'd faded out of my environment before I'd gone off to boarding school. But when I was a young kid, they'd come around, all leather and grease and tattoos. One of the old guys always brought me a little stuffed animal wearing a biker jacket or a helmet. They were nice to me, and I asked a lot of questions about their bikes. So I wasn't exactly intimated by Blaze.
I hadn't expected him to be heading to Los Angeles, though. That had caught me off guard, and I'd lied about where I was headed. It was a big town, though. There would be no overlap in our lives.