Page 23 of Fire for Effect

I wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, I had been a good girl, obedient, and quiet. I never said a curse word.

Then I realized that being good and sweet would never be good enough for her. It would never make her consider my feelings and my needs above her own. Then my give a fuck meter went to zero.

“What do you want?” I finally asked, when the silence dragged on too long.

The world was flying by. Wheat fields, farms, and little grain silos dotted the distance. Craftsman and Federalist houses, with perfect American flags lined the side of the road, surrounded by manicured grass that would soon die for the winter.

“Don’t you dare use that tone with me!” I could hear the irritation in her voice. The same one that had scoffed when I got an A-, and not an A. “I’m your mother.”

“I know!” I yelled back. “But I’m apparently just like my father, right?”

That was her chief insult. If I got a A-, then I was a slacker like my father. If I didn’t come home on time, then I was unreliable like my father. When I joined the Army at 18 without consulting her, I was abandoning her… just like my father.

It wasn’t a compliment. Mama was a beauty queen, with high aspirations up until I ruined her body. Then she sacrificed, went to night school, got a business degree, and started a tech company that went public when I was in elementary school. Then she was working longer hours to provide for us – to get us a house, to put food on the table, and to send me to a decent school.

Every day, she told me how much she had sacrificed to have me. She sacrificed everything!

Including me. She sacrificed my need to have one functioning parent.

Getting out of her house was the best thing that ever happened to me. And still, my need to feel connected to someone kept me from blocking her number. I answered her, always hoping that things would be different between us. But it never would be.

When the static between us dragged on, I was ready to disconnect.

“I would really like to see you,” she interrupted my thoughts.

I cringed.

That was the last thing I needed.

But then she added a word that I didn’t think she knew. “Please.”

It was all too… weird. My skin crawled with discomfort, and I mumbled something non-committal, then tapped the control to cut the call.

I couldn’t handle this right now.

For months she had called, trying to get me to come home, or for me to tell her where I was so she could visit. She’d take one judgmental look at my trailer, and I’d be back in the hell I used to live in, where her words cut me down like a machete through tall grass.

I was better when I was away. I was better alone.

But I still wanted her to reach out.

Now that it was happening, it made my skin crawl. Maybe that foreboding dread in my stomach wasn’t from Griff. Maybe it was from my mother.

I had to work to push the feeling aside. Going with your gut was not something I believed in.

My gut wasn’t to be trusted. The gut was what made me think I was in love, all those years ago, wasted years of my life, and made me suffer several broken bones.

Not a single peer review study ever validated something like gut instincts or intuition. The CIA’s MK-Ultra studies on mind control and other nonsense came to the same conclusions - it was fiction.

The air whipped around my full-face helmet as I idly turned on the winding mountain roads. It should have cleared my mind and my soul – wind therapy. But I couldn’t shake the sensation that I was standing on the edge of a cliff, ready to lean forward for a base jump, not sure if I had a parachute on.

My stomach was somewhere high in my ribs. My fingers tingled with anticipation. Like they itched to pull a trigger.

All the while, my mind blared that something big was going to happen. Something that would change the world as I knew it.

Anytime I tried to explore that feeling, Griff’s slicked black hair, and deep chocolate eyes came front and center in my mind. Him, his chiseled jaw, and his ridiculously large forearms. The way he always had a half-smile as he threw out another hurtful barb, and blunted the pain with a touch, or look.

I wanted him here, beside me. I’d even ride bitch, if that made him happy.

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