The young woman looked over the bike. She put her hand on her chin, the way she remembered her father doing when she went with him to used car lots. He was a car guy; he loved buying old beat-up ones, working on them for months at a time, and then selling them for huge gains. She stroked her chin though she obviously didn’t have a beard the way her cuddly bear of a father had.
Her name was Vanessa Keller, and her father had been dead for ten years by the time she was staring at the Harley at age twenty-two. His name had been George Keller, and from the time her mother passed away when she was two, it had been just the two of them until he died. Mother dead as a toddler, father dead at twelve, and then she had gone to live with Aunt Kathy out in Utah.
She hated Utah. It was too hot, too dusty, too boring. Well, mostly boring. From a young age and through her teen years, Vanessa had found one thing she loved about Harrington, Utah, the small town her aunt lived in: A massive biker gang, one of the largest in Utah, was headquartered in Harrington. They were the Pythons, and the men in the biker gang all wore vests or jackets with an insignia stitched onto the back, a massive green snake coiled around a skeleton.
There were no women in the club proper, though each man always seemed to have one on the back of his bike, thick girls with massive breasts and fat asses, long blond hair, and as many tattoos as the men had.
Vanessa didn’t look like that, not as a teenager and not as a young woman. She was taller, thinner. She had rounded feminine hips and a taut ass, but it wasn’t big. Her breasts were perky, perfectly formed, but she didn’t bust through her bras the way the biker chicks all seemed too.
She was beautiful, though. Her face was angular, perfect, her lips plump, her eyes a soft blue. She’d had a long string of boyfriends throughout school, but she always went for the bad boys, and things ended badly.
Yet still she was missing something. Those boys, the bad boys of high school, they weren’t bad enough. She had a thing for the bikers she saw all over town. Not the old ones, of course, the fat guys with their big white beards—she liked the young ones, thin and tanned, with hard eyes and harder muscles. That was what she wanted.
When she graduated, Vanessa had planned on moving far away, but something had stopped her. Instead, she went to a local college and got a degree in creative writing. She had always loved writing. She lived with her aunt while she went to school, commuting to the small campus every day. And then she graduated, and she didn’t know what to do.
She wanted to write, to be a writer, but she didn’t know what. She felt as though she had stories within her, stories she wanted to tell, but how to get started?
She wrote short stories and sent them into magazines and websites. Most were rejected, but some were published. Still, it wasn’t enough to live on. Aunt Kathy had always loved her and taken care of her, but Vanessa could tell her aunt would be happier if, now after college, she found her own place. Aunt Kathy had been married once, but divorced since before Vanessa’s father passed away. She dated off and on but had grown to enjoy a solitary lifestyle. She had no kids of her own and liked it that way. Vanessa sat down with the older woman and told her she would be getting a job and moving out. They hugged, and Vanessa felt a bit sad. She could feel the relief flowing off her aunt.
She needed a job before she could find her own place. There were small apartments down on Mill Street, which was the main street that ran right through the centre of Harrington. She could afford one if only she could find a job.
She was drawn to a few places downtown. There was a small antique store owned by an old woman who was an antique herself. Another place was Nathan’s, a small diner. Vanessa was pretty sure she would make a good waitress. The last place she was considering applying to was the Devil Dog. That was a seedy bar at the far end of Mill Street, a place usually full of bikers, and Python’s more often than not. She could tend bar there, she was pretty sure, and she would be around the guys she had lusted after for so long.
Of course, Vanessa didn’t want to be at any of those jobs for long; they would just do until she wrote that great American novel she had in her. She ended up applying to all three places, and all three interviewed her.
In the end she was offered a job by the old woman at the antique store and Chet, the grizzled man who owned the Devil Dog. She took the job at the Devil Dog.
The hours were tough, but she had always been a night owl anyways. She worked five days a week, all nights, going in at seven and getting off at three in the morning on Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. She had back-to-back days off, which was nice, and it turned out to be sort of like the weekend.
Chet was a nice man, if a bit short with his employees. She didn’t get much guidance from him when she started beyond “show your tits off and you’ll get more tips.” Luckily Susan took Vanessa under her wing.