Page 1 of Look What You Made Me Do

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MIDDLE OF NOWHERE KANSAS – POPULATION 5,238

It had been two years, eight months and twenty-three days since Ella Lucas had last done the horizontal rumba. And even then, it hadn’t been very good.

With the powerful Harley throbbing between her legs, she was acutely aware of every asexual minute. The machine pulsed against her, taunting barren places, reminding Ella of her depressingly sexless existence. Was it possible to orgasm on the seat of a Harley?

Alone?

She revved the engine. Lock up your husbands, Trently, Rachel’s daughter is back in town.

Her red lips twisted in a bitter smile. Seventeen years she’d spent in this speck on the map trying to do the right thing, trying to be her mother’s opposite, playing the good girl. Until she’d cracked under the pressure of it all and just walked away.

Almost two decades later it had taken them all of forty-eight hours to make her feel like that powerless and frustrated teenager again. So today she was determined to give them what they’d always wanted.

Proof. Actual proof.

Something real to gossip about once she’d hightailed it out of this one-horse town. Something to truly damn her. Something for them all to nod sagely over and say, See, we were right, the apple never falls too far from the tree.

And she intended having a damn fine time doing so too.

The sun beat down on her shoulders as she thundered into Trently’s main street, rising off the pock-marked road in a shimmering haze. It could have been any of a hundred main streets in rural Kansas – wide, bordered by barren cracked pavements and brick store fronts that hadn’t changed in decades.

The bank, the pharmacy, the beige austerity of S. J. Levy’s law practice, the realtor, the meat market and the Trently diner – with the same blue-and-white striped awning from her childhood – stood exactly as they always had. It was like entering a time warp. Not even the advent of two-dollar shops had infected the Trently streetscape.

People stopped abruptly on the sidewalk as she passed, their heads turning to track the noisy motorcycle. Business owners stared askance through their shop windows, craning their necks to see if a marauding bikie gang had moved into town.

Ella ignored them all. She was a successful career woman who had long ago cast off the shackles of Trently.

And she was on a mission.

Blood thrummed through her veins as she parked the bike outside The Rusty Nail. Cutting the engine, she kicked down the stand, her reckless mood ratcheting a notch as she dismounted.

The townsfolk still hadn’t moved as Ella took off her helmet and hung the sleek black dome on the handlebars. She shook out her untethered hair and it fell in careless disorder around her shoulders, just like in a shampoo commercial.

She’d always wanted to do that.

Sadly, biker bitch was as far removed from her ponytailed high-school-math-teacher existence as was possible. She was as nerdy today as she’d always been.

But Trently didn’t know that.

Squaring her shoulders, Ella stepped resolutely toward her target. The rasp of her denim-clad thighs brushing together was almost gunshot loud in the preternaturally silent town.

Good. She had their attention.

Scandalized whispers to her right permeated Ella’s focus. Two old ladies she recognized instantly were sitting on a bench that had been located outside the town’s favorite dive bar for as long as anyone could remember.

“Afternoon, Miss Simmons, Miss Aberfoyle,” she said, not bothering to wait for an acknowledgment.

Crossing the sidewalk, she yanked open the bar door, wishing for a second it was one of those old-fashioned swinging doors from the days of the Wild West. She had, after all, ridden into town for a showdown, of sorts.

It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust from the bright, summer day to the cool, dim interior of Trently’s oldest liquor establishment. The patrons inside stopped mid-conversation to stare at Ella. Only Johnny Cash crooning about not taking your guns to town broke the charged silence.

Ironic.

Ella didn’t bother to look around. She knew he was in town – she’d seen him at the funeral yesterday, standing in the distance under the canopy of the giant old cottonwood – and she knew exactly where he’d be. Like his father before him, Jake Prince was behind the bar.

She didn’t know why the famed tight end – known to football fans as The Prince – with two Super Bowl rings to his name was back home in far eastern buttfuck Kansas pulling beers. Ella vaguely recalled seeing or hearing something about an injury a few months back but still, Trently seemed like an odd place to recuperate.

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