Page 17 of Sully

“Just two years. Why?”

“I’m assuming that means you don’t know where you are.”

“What do you mean?”

“This clubhouse,” he said, gesturing around.

Clubhouse?

“What do you mean by clubhouse?”

“This is a biker clubhouse, honey. An outlaw biker clubhouse.” He paused for a beat. “Do you know what that means?”

Of course I knew what that meant.

I’d read that trope more than a few times before. It wasn’t my favorite genre. Those biker guys always ended up with kick-ass heroines who were bold and confident. I had a hard time putting myself in their shoes or relating to their stories.

“Yes,” I said, looking at him again with renewed interest. But nothing about him screamed ‘biker’ to me. If anything, he had a sort of beach bum and former frat boy vibe to him.

“You can say it.”

“Say what?”

“That I don’t look like a biker.”

“It might just be the shirt,” I said. “And slippers.”

“That’s fair,” he agreed. “But if you know what we are, you understand why going to the cops isn’t exactly our first instinct. But I’m not gonna tell you not to go to them.”

I would love to say that I came up with some great, logical reason to decide not to go to the police. But it really just boiled down to feeling like I was strangling at just the thought of having to go to the police station to tell someone at the front desk my crazy story, then watch as they didn’t believe me, only to have to repeat it to a detective, and maybe a DA one day.

It was all too much.

I’d heard once that there was more to human instinct thanfightorflight. There was alsofawn. And, of course, the one I related to most:freeze.

When faced with an anxiety trigger, I just shut down. Did nothing. Tried to pretend it didn’t exist.

Healthy? No.

But it was where I was at.

“Are you going to try to find him?”

“No ‘try’ about it. I’m gonna find him,” Sully said. And it was the first time I saw something darker beneath his light and friendly exterior.

I wasn’t an idiot.

This was the part in those biker books where the hero turned over every rock to find the man who hurt his woman, then dispatched him in a brutal way.

Except, of course, I wasn’t Sully’s girl.

“And I will keep you safe too. I know you gotta be thinking about that.”

I hadn’t been, not until that very second. I’d been too wrapped up in the past and present to be giving the future much thought.

“How?” I asked.

“However I need to that makes you the most comfortable. You could stay here. I can hang at your place. Both. I can meet you at work each night to make sure you’re safe walking out of there. You’re not gonna be alone in this.”

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