3: END GAME

I watch as she drags her bag further up her arm and then holds her head down while she chuckles. Nova was always a beautiful girl. Now she’s an amazing woman. The thin girl with the long legs that went on forever and barely budding breasts have developed curves that are as sinful as the crimes my MC commits.

Her auburn hair still has those same thick ringlets that frame her oval-shaped face. Where it once used to hang to her waist, she’s cut it to just at her breasts. Those light-green eyes still sparkle with delight and intellect when something pleases or intrigues her, but they hold a pearl of deeper, profound wisdom than they once held when she was just an innocent and precocious but depressed girl.

Nova’s smile can brighten the darkest day, turning a monsoon into a brilliantly sunny day with rainbows in the sky. Her long limbs no longer give her a lanky look, but her body has filled out nicely from her high, pert, and full breasts to her curvy hips and round, tight ass.

“Thought you were caught up again,” she says as I take a step up to her.

“That was a one-off. It couldn’t be helped. Do I look like a man who would regularly miss our nightly coffee dates?” I ask as I spread my arms out wide.

She folds her arms over her chest and eyes me up and down. “Dates? Is that what we’re doing?”

“Not sure what you want to call it. All I know is that I look forward to them.”

“So do I. Funny...”

“What’s that?”

“Wouldn’t expect to hear a man that wears these things speaking the way that you do,” she says, touching one of the patches on my cut.

For the first time, I feel unclean and uncomfortable about what I do in the MC. I’ve always been proud of my role in the MC and my brotherhood, but Nova makes me rethink some things.

I stayed in trouble as a teen, and she was accustomed to it, but she always wanted better for me. In some respects, I feel as if I’ve failed her in that too.

“This has nothing to do with whether I show up for you or not.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I say, instantly feeling guilty as I think about missing last night because of the club run or the annual Dallas trip that’s coming up in a few days. “You still want to go inside and get that coffee?”

“No.”

Disappointment fills my insides, but I put on a smile anyway as I try to hide my feelings. “You’ve got another date so soon?”

She laughs.

“No. I don’t have another date. However, I am tired, and I do want to get home.”

I nod. “Okay...so see you tomorrow at the same time?”

“I was kind of hoping that I’d see you in a little while.”

Nova laughs at the confusion on my face and says, “Follow me home. I can whip up something to eat for us really quick, and we can have coffee out on my front porch and listen to the ocean. Wasn’t that always something we dreamt of?”

“Yeah. It was,” I say, thinking back to simpler times.

She looks sad, so I change the subject.

“Ahh, you’ve got a cottage on the ocean. Bookstore’s doing better than I thought,” I say, glancing at the building behind her.

“Not quite. Well, I hope to say that one day, but no. That’s all thanks to my divorce settlement.”

“Well, if he had to be a fool, he might as well pay for his foolishness, huh?”

“My thoughts exactly,” she says, winking and moving around me to her car.

Following her, I hop on my bike once again with a curious beating in my chest that doesn’t feel like my normal heartbeat.

***

She truly meant it when she said coffee and dinner. In no time at all, she’d made roast beef sandwiches, a Caesar salad, and coffee. We’re sitting on the back porch overlooking the beach on our second cup of coffee.

It was a simple meal, but with the right company, it was perfect.

“Smokey Ridge is a long way from Santa Fe and Santa Fe’s a long way from Georgia. How’d you get to Santa Fe?” I ask her.

“Nothing as exciting as marriage number one. But several dinner dates, romantic evenings, and a marriage proposal led me there. Will proposed to me, and then six months later, he mentioned that he’d been offered a position as chair of cardiology at a hospital in Santa Fe. We hadn’t married yet, so I could have said yes or no. I thought it was an exciting opportunity, and since I had nothing holding me back, I accepted and agreed to the move.”

“You get married there?”

“No. We married seven months after his proposal and held our wedding in Atlanta because he still had friends and family there. We moved to Santa Fe two weeks after our wedding.”

“No children?”

“Honestly, that’s the one thing we both agreed on throughout the marriage. Neither of us wanted children for various reasons. I learned that he was a selfish bastard who didn’t want kids because his ego was so big. Will wanted me to himself, my attention, and everything else. He didn’t want to share his money, his woman, or the attention from the world with anyone but himself. Eventually, I realized that was why he ‘handpicked’ me. He loved the idea that I didn’t have a family or many friends. Being solely dependent on him was exactly what he wanted.”

“Something’s wrong with that picture.”

“Damn right, it was. Moving to Sante Fe only underscored that fact. It allowed him to do all the dirt he wanted without any witnesses, his family’s judgment, or me being able to run home to family and friends. Or so he thought. For the first few years of our marriage, I didn’t work. I spent time focusing on my art, always trying to improve it. Will would encourage me to keep working at it until I got better, and I would listen but always discouraged that I was never getting better. Until a friend of his visited us, and his wife said that I should consider an art showing.”

“You always did have an eye for art. I remember how you could sit on that porch for hours drawing everything you saw...the neighbor’s dog chasing the kids, the mailman talking too long with Mrs. Spencer, Mr. Calhoun coming home drunk and falling up the stairs.”

She laughs, and I swear it sounds like the most beautiful thing my ears have heard in a long damn time.

“You remembered that?”

“I remembered most things about those years.”

Her gaze turns down, and her smile slips. “Even...”

“Yeah. But we’re not there anymore, Nova, so don’t let those dark times infringe on the good ones. So, why’d you divorce the asshole other than him being just that?” I ask, lifting my ass from the chair a little to pull a cigarette pack from my back pocket.

I open the box and shake one out, lighting it up as she stares at me.

“Sorry. You mind if I smoke?”

“No, Kai. Not at all. I was just thinking, I remember the first time you learned to smoke. Almost killed yourself.”

“Yeah, still killing my damn self with these things,” I say, pulling it away from my lips and looking at the lit end before sticking it back in my mouth again.

“Will and I divorced because I realized that I deserved better. I didn’t have to keep putting up with his cheating and his gaslighting me. It didn’t matter if I lost everything, freedom and peace of mind was better than putting up with his shit.”

“How long was he cheating before you gave up?”

“We were married for nine years, and I swear, Kai, he had to have cheated for at least five of those years. I only found out about it in the last two years. By that time, I was fed up with his disparaging comments about my art, my hair, and anything else he could think of. He doted on me the first few and then grew tired of me like an old toy. The emotional abuse was more than I could take, and one day, I woke up and remembered that I have to love myself.”

“Did the bastard ever put his hands on you?”

“Hell no! I would’ve been out the door a lot quicker if he had.”

I narrow my eyes through the smoke.

“No, Kai. He never did,” she emphasizes.

I nod.

“What happened with marriage number one? You mentioned that getting to Santa Fe wasn’t as exciting as marriage number one.”

She laughs. “We were drinking with friends one night on an overnight camping trip. Someone dared us to do it, and the next morning, we all climbed in the friend’s truck and headed for the local city hall and made it happen. You should’ve seen the ragtag bunch of us in the truck with shorts, t-shirts, tanks and muddy boots. We were a motley crew, but we were so excited. After we left city hall, somebody went into the back of a store across the street and found a box, while someone else went inside and bought a marker, some string, and some cans of fruit. We tore the box and wrote “Just Married” on one of the pieces.

She starts laughing again, and though I’m jealous as hell of her marrying someone else, especially in the years I was still missing her, I’m glad this memory brings joy to her heart.

“We sat in the back of that damn truck under the hot sun eating that canned fruit until we had five empty cans and then strung them to the back of the truck.”

She starts giggling again, and this time, tears spring to her eyes. When she stops, she looks at me as her smile slowly dies from her lips but not her eyes. I almost don’t want to ask the next question.

“What happened?”

“We divorced over irreconcilable differences after three years. We had no business getting married so young and straight out of foster care. He needed someone to care for and protect to make him feel like a man, and I needed someone to love me and take care of me. It wasn’t enough,” she says simply with a shrug.

“Did you end on amicable terms?”

Laughing, she asks, “You always did pull a word out of your ass that no one expected you to use. To answer your question, yes, we did. It was best for both of us. He moved to Wyoming with his grandfather, and I stayed where I was until Will came along several years later.”

“Why hadn’t he lived with his grandfather instead of foster care?”

“Dylan said that his grandfather wasn’t well enough to care for him. So, when he was old enough, he went out and took care of his grandfather.”

“You stay in touch?”

“At first, for a few years. His grandfather eventually passed, but he stayed out there working on a ranch and eventually married again. I lost contact after that. What about you?”

“Told ya.”

“No. Kids?”

Laughing, I say, “You can pretty much guess my reason.”

“For the same reason, Dylan didn’t want any, I’m guessing. His parents were on drugs really bad, too, although he wasn’t in the system as long as you were.”

“Still doesn’t explain why you didn’t have any with Will.”

“Scared. Never wanted to love anyone as much as I loved my parents and then lose them. Scared that if anything ever happened to me, my kids might have to go through the same thing that I did.”

“Can’t live your life based on fear, Nova.”

“You did.”

“No. I lived it based on logic. I knew my mom was fucked up, never knew what fuckoff might be my dad, and with my twisted mind didn’t want to pass any of those genes off to anyone. It’s safer that way. ‘Sides, I’m a selfish bastard.”

“No, you’re not. You never were. You always put my needs before yours.”

“You were a puny kid that was scared and lost and easy prey. You needed someone to look out for you.”

Shrugging, she says, “Whatever the logic, you’d apply it to your kids, too.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” I say, getting up and jogging down the porch steps to crush my cigarette under my foot.

I walk out to the water’s edge and toss the cigarette out into the ocean.

I hear her footsteps behind me.

“Thank you,” she says softly, stepping up beside me.

“For?”

“Back then. I never told you how much it meant to me.”

I crook my arm over her shoulders and press a kiss to the top of her head. She was my saving grace, too. She taught me how to give a damn again.