Vindication: A Motorcycle Club Romance (31 page)

~
TWELVE ~

Noah

After what happened in the club, all I could think
about was getting Laurel somewhere safe. Even though she’d been to shows a
million times and had no doubt dealt with way worse jerkoffs than the dude who
groped her tonight, it felt like I had personally failed her. All this rumbled
around my head silently as I wrapped an arm around her shoulder and pulled her
close to my side on the dark, winding drive.

Not too many miles from my house, in
the more isolated parts of Thornwood, a small river tributary ran through the
dark woods. The flat, soft beaches created by the slow-moving parts of the
river were popular places for peace and quiet, and one in particular had always
calmed me down. A makeshift parking lot of gravel carved on the side of the
unkempt highway road was the only indicator that anything was worth stopping
for. Tonight, we were the only ones here. I pulled my truck to a stop in the
dark.

“Is this the part when they find my
body wrapped in plastic on the beach, and you start having crazy dreams about
red curtains and giants?” said Laurel as she looked around through the windows.

“Why don’t you sound sadder about
that possibility?” I laughed.

“Hey, I like a good mystery as much
as the next girl.”

I kissed the top of her head. “I come
here sometimes when things get too loud. I’ve got some dry firewood in the tool
box in the back. What do you say we have a little bonfire?”

“That sounds lovely!” said Laurel
with a smile. “Isn’t it funny when you live your life around heavy music, but
still need so much quiet sometimes? People always gave me shit for that.”

With a smirk, I nodded. “They’re not
living their fullest lives without both.”

Laurel smiled up at me like we had a
secret together. She leaned up my body and kissed me sweetly, still with the
same sexual hunger she always seemed to possess, but with an added tenderness.
Was that there before? Or was I just now noticing it myself? The thoughts
melted away when I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her close, into
the kiss.

Before she could get me so hard I
couldn’t say no, I pulled away from the kiss and got out of the truck, helping
her out behind me. The firewood was wrapped in plastic and wedged in the
toolbox; by the time I got it out and turned around, Laurel was already
shivering in the unexpectedly cool night air. She had dressed for a night
indoors at the Graveyard Club, and I hadn’t thought to have her grab a jacket
before we left her car at the lot.

“Oh, fuck, sugar,” I said, dropping
the wood on the ground. Keys fumbling, I pulled the truck door open and dug
around until I felt the fabric of the spare sweatshirt I always kept in the
cab. After giving it a firm shake and a smell, it seemed clean and dry. I
turned it over to the front and realized it was my old Rising End sweatshirt.

“Here,” I said, helping it over her
head. “This is a warm coincidence.”

Laurel giggled a little as I
invariably made the getting on of the sweatshirt more complicated than it
needed to be. Her eyes were shining with laughter when she finally popped her
head out of the neck hole, hair alight and floating in a million different
directions.

“You’re the scariest thing in these
woods right now,” I said, smoothing her hair down with my hands.

She batted them away and made a
grumpy noise. “Doesn’t speak very highly of your woods, then, does it?”

“Is that a hidden insult about my
dick?”

She came toward me with a wicked grin
and ran a finger up and down my chest. “Now, what could there possibly be to
insult about
that
?”

“Nothing, I just like to hear it from
someone else every now and then,” I laughed.

Laurel rolled her eyes and gave me a
soft punch in the stomach. She turned and followed the clear-cut path through
the greenery that led down a slight hill toward the riverbed. I grabbed the
firewood and followed her down after making sure the truck was locked tight.

This beach was my favorite because of
one specific feature: the driftwood. Lots of it inevitably got picked up by
local artists or asshole tourists, but the piece that somehow wound up in this
tiny little gully was enormous, easily thirty feet long, rolled by the sand and
sea into a soft, rounded ghost of its former self. The trunk sat parallel with
the river, its most gnarled end planted in a curve in the river like ancient
roots. The opposite end, however, was firmly on dry land, and was just as
comfortable a bench as any I’d ever found. Laurel was drawn to it without
direction. She sat in the twilight, huddled in my sweatshirt, watching me set
up a little pit for the fire. It only took me ten minutes to get her roaring,
and the warmth scattered the gully with dancing light.

With my back to the driftwood, I sank
down into the sand, and beckoned Laurel to me. She sat down between my legs and
leaned on my back as my arms wrapped around her, swallowing her completely. She
wasn’t shivering anymore, not with the fire to her front and me at her back.

We didn’t talk for a while, and that
was fine. I could feel the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, and the
beat of her heart against me. My cheek resting on the top of her head, I smiled
when I realized her wearing my shirt was mingling our scents together in my
senses.

“This is perfect,” she said after a
while in a dreamy voice. “Feels like I never get moments like this anymore.”

I kissed her hair. “Why not?”

She was quiet, and then she shook her
head a little. “I’m not… I’m not the best at moments like this. It’s hard for
me to be close to people. I’m much better at work… at my job.” She sighed. “But
even the good days at work don’t feel like this.”

“You don’t have to sacrifice this for
your ambition, you know,” I said to her. “There are men out there who would be
glad as hell to have a woman who gives a shit about something. There’s almost
nothing sexier than watching a professional work.”

Laurel let out a bitter scoff and
turned her eyes down, away from the fire, and suddenly I worried I had struck a
nerve.

“What is it?” I asked, leaning my
head next to hers.

There was something I wanted her to
say. But I didn’t know if she felt it.

“I just…” She stopped when her voice
cracked, and I realized how close she was to tears. The smile on her
half-turned face was pressed, forced. “I’ve been hearing that for a long time
now, and it still hasn’t been true. I’m starting to think everyone just doesn’t
know what else to tell me.”

She wrapped her arms around herself,
and in turn, I wrapped my arms tighter around her. Lips against her hair, I
said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. And I don’t know about everyone
else… but I really mean it.”

“Really mean what?”

“What I said. Watching someone who is
good at what they do is the hottest thing. I’d consider myself a lucky man if
the woman I ended up with was so talented.”

Laurel inhaled sharply under my
touch, and something about it made my heart stop. But the moment fell silent
between us, filled by the sounds of the crackling fire and softly flowing
river.

I didn’t understand what I was
feeling for Laurel. When I wasn’t thinking about this disaster with the band,
or how badly I wanted to beat Duke to a pulp, I was thinking about her. When
she was next to me, I felt like I could handle whatever the world threw at me.
And being apart from her was starting to feel a lot like being apart from
something vital to my life.

In that moment by the beach, I wanted
to spill everything to her. I wanted to hand her my darkest secrets and see if
she could hold them, see if she would still want to kiss me when it was all
said and done. I craved to know if what was building in my heart had any
bearing on the real world, or on her. I wanted to cut open a vein and bleed
everything out.

Just like with the festival, even
though I knew I did the right thing back in the Graveyard Club by stopping that
guy from assaulting her, guilt still raged through my mind. Guilt that Laurel
had seen me, up close and personal, at my most violent. Duke’s bitter
accusations rang in my ears, and I realized I actually was scared that Laurel
saw me as an animal. I didn’t want her to think that of me. The thought was
unbearable.

“I want to tell you something,” I
said. “And I know we haven’t talked about this yet… and you’ve been… you’ve
been really amazing to just spend time with me and get my mind off what’s
happening without bothering me to bring it up.”

Laurel said nothing, waiting for me
to continue. Her body shifted under me, though, scooting closer, grasping the
cloth of my jeans.

“I’m not allowed to say much to
anybody, but not talking about it is fucking killing me. The festival… the
festival was an accident,” I said. “Not just an accident, but…a complicated
one.”

“What do you mean?” said Laurel. She
turned in my lap to look at me, sliding in the sand until her gaze met mine,
and I could tell by the worry in her eyes that I looked sadder than I realized.

“Look, I told my band, I told the
cops, and now I’m telling you, even if you don’t believe me like the rest…”
Anxiety spread through my veins.

“Believe what, Noah?” Laurel rubbed her
hands up and down my chest, and then grasped my hands with hers. “What
happened?”

I took a deep breath. Pulse rushing
in my ears, I spilled out the words before I could lose my cool. “The man who
fell… who I killed that day… he had a knife when he climbed up on-stage. I saw
it. I saw it with my own eyes. He had a knife, and he was going for Quinn.
That’s why I shoved him offstage.”

Laurel’s eyes widened, but she didn’t
lean away. She gripped my hands tighter.

“I didn’t mean to kill him,” I said.
“I just didn’t want him to hurt Quinn. We’d been attacked before, remember, and
people die from asshole fans all the time… I saw it about to unfold and I just…
acted.”

“Like you did earlier in the club,”
she said in a soft voice.

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly. Laurel, I
don’t want you to think I’m a fucking monster. I don’t want you to believe all
the shit the press says about me. It’s not the truth. I may be a fighter, but I
don’t fight over nothing.”

“Noah, I don’t think you’re a
monster,” she said, putting her hand on my cheek. “You’ve proven to me that you
aren’t. And I believe you about this.”

“You do?”

“Yes,” she said. “I believe you about
the festival. There’s been something off about this whole thing for me for a
while. Hearing this from you… it just confirms it.”

Relief crashed into me like a wave. I
took Laurel into my arms and hugged her tight, feeling her warmth against me.
“You have no idea how good it feels to hear you say that.”

“Are you telling me no one believes
your story?” Laurel said, pulling away to look at me. “Noah, seriously? I
figured you hadn’t said anything to the press for other reasons. I didn’t think
it was because… because they didn’t believe you.”

My expression fell. Sadness rose in
my mind, and I couldn’t find the words to say to her, lie or otherwise.

“Noah…” Laurel trailed off, distress
in her voice. “That’s what’s happening with the band? They don’t believe you
were protecting Quinn, and now they’re all jumping ship to save themselves?”

Hearing it said so starkly made the
reality of my cold situation all the more hurtful. My eyes closed and I dropped
my forehead onto Laurel’s with a sigh. Laurel nuzzled against me with concern,
her hand on the back of my head.

When she spoke again, her voice was
quivering. “You don’t deserve this to happen to you, Noah. You’re the last
person in the world who deserves this.”