68 - Mount Up

The sun beat down on Lilah’s back, blistering the exposed tops of her shoulders as her hand came to shield against the ungodly glare of chrome.  Her skin crawled with discomfort, knowing that she didn’t belong here.  She was completely and totally out of her element.

All along the street in front of her and behind, there were hundreds of motorcycles in every size and shape parked in an oddly uniform line.  The only similarity among the bikes was the hordes of people woven in between, perched atop and leaning against them.  And the crowd was very much like the herd of sleek metal horses – all the same basic breed, yet with subtle differences.  Big, burly men clad in leather and tattoos were either glowering with intimidation, laughing at a bawdy joke or leering at the women. 

And the women…  They were as assorted as Forrest Gump’s famed box of chocolates.  However, unlike the mysterious candies that hid their secrets inside a chocolate coating, you knew EXACTLY what you were going to get with these women.  Most of them had no covering to speak of and their ‘secrets’ were laid out before God and everyone. 

What was she doing here?  Was this…?

The huge banner strung over the street finally caught her attention.  “Welcome to Sturgis”.

She definitely did NOT belong here.

With each step she took down the street, another laughing face turned in her direction.  The first man looked at her chest and laughed at her pitiful excuse for a Harley shirt and the breasts propping it up.  The woman with him took in Lilah’s coveted Athenian jeans with a sneer of disdain and shook her Daisy Duke clad ass to show her how it was done.  The next woman flat-out laughed at the rhinestone heels on Lilah’s precious boots and used her own well-worn leather shit-kickers to spray a helping of gravel.

Everyone mocked her with their eyes, gestures and words as she continued hesitantly on toward the end of the street.  After she passed, each one fell in step behind her as she continued her meager march toward the crowd gathered at the far end of the street.  Lilah had no idea what she was headed for, but it didn’t matter.  She just wanted to escape the contemptuous laughter that was getting gradually, deafeningly loud.

When she was within a dozen steps of the crowd, it magically and ever-so-slowly parted.  They were eager to show her what they were hiding and, like a human tide, hurriedly swept her inside the crowd.

In an instant, the center ring of this three-ring circus came into stark focus.

Tony.  On his motorcycle.  Completely naked and being ridden by a similarly naked raven-haired beauty.  Her D-cup breasts were full and firm and barely jiggled with each lift of her hips.  Her beautifully tinted mouth was parted in ecstasy as the tips of her burgundy nails burrowed through his chest hair.

He paused mid-moan to snap open his eyes and look directly at her.  “We never did this.”

Lilah curled herself into the fetal position and, for the first time, she didn’t fight the errant tear that wanted to slither free.  She let it go.  And then she let another follow behind it.  And then another until she was sobbing into the darkness like a heartbroken child. 

I was no more than that – another  nameless fuck in another nameless place.  The ONLY  thing different was that I had a name.

✧✧✧

Tony reared back on his Harley, arms folded across his chest, and smiled at yet another scantily-clad biker babe.  Sturgis, South Dakota was positively crawling with them and a fair share found him by default.  This particular bodacious brunette was straddled over the front wheel of his motorcycle.  The joke of a bikini top she was wearing barely covered her nipples as she strategically positioned her chest between the handle bars.

“Hello there, you Harley stud.  That’s a mighty fine piece of equipment you’ve got parked between your legs.”

“You gotta ride it to truly appreciate it.” He quirked an eyebrow up, the response rolling off of his tongue without conscious thought.   He had, after all, replied to some variation of that thinly veiled come-on at least a dozen times in the last week.  The midst of Sturgis Rally Week was definitely the time and place for a man to find a willing piece of ass.

Tony flicked his spent cigarette butt to the dusty roadside with a distracted smirk.  Today was the last day of the rally and, of all the years he’d been here, this was the first time he didn’t much mind that it was over.  The event was as rowdy as ever, full of booze, bikes and near-naked women, and there was enough of each to satisfy any man’s wildest dreams.  Tony knew it for a fact, because he had indulged in those dreams himself.   

Once upon a time, anyway. 

This time around, he wasn’t into it for some reason.  

Maybe it was because of the rampant case of insomnia that didn’t seem to be going anywhere.  He hadn’t been sleeping worth a damn lately, oftentimes closing his eyes no more than a couple hours a night.  The biggest part of those nights was spent prowling the internet with a cigarette in his mouth.  Most times it was work-related email and research for the pasta sauce business, but when his mind wandered away from that, he found himself trolling the social networking sites. 

He wasn’t looking for anything in particular on the Facebook and Twitter sites, he was just looking.  The fact that he had stumbled onto Lilah’s friends, Morgan and Angel, was merely a random coincidence.  They didn’t have anything posted about her, anyway.

Or…

Perhaps Sturgis felt weird this time around because his bike was oddly light without a certain Southern Belle on board. 

Any tour dates before or after July 2011 would have a hard time competing with that window in time.  He’d been pleasantly lured away from the mind-numbing monotony of work every couple of days for an impromptu European bike trip, never knowing where they were going.  It wasn’t until she directed “left here”, “right here” or “just a little further on down this way” that he would discover their destination. 

Castles, forests, oceans, beaches, wildflower meadows – Lilah had found them all.  More than that, she’d convinced him to fully share her enjoyment of those places before moving them on to a brewery, bike shop, movie locale or distillery.  Things she knew he would enjoy.   

Nobody had ever wanted to take care of him that way before.  He hadn’t been bullshitting when he told her that he hated to be coddled.  That mother-hen shit was nerve-wracking, but Lilah’s road trips had been different.  They were fun and kept him relaxed in the middle of the Jovi chaos, but she never fussed.  Not even when he was irritated as all hell that day in Barcelona.

One of the crew didn’t show up for work, having enjoyed his night off a little too much.  Nobody knew where the hell he was and he wasn’t answering his cell phone, pissing Tony off to no-end.  Lilah had stood quietly by and listened to him bitch and scream at Rew for a good twenty minutes, calling the guy everything but a working man. 

When he finally came up for air, she cocked her head to the side and asked very matter-of-factly, “So do you wanna ride before you kill him or would you prefer to stay here and work up a good head of pissed-off?”

Decision made.  The only thing pacing the venue would get him was high blood pressure and lung cancer from chain smoking. 

Lilah’s adventure that day took them to a mountaintop monastery in Montserrat.  It was so isolated and serene that, when he got back to the venue, Tony was able to rip the hung-over man a new ass without raising his voice or his heart rate. 

Of course, the side-trip off the road TO the isolated mountaintop had given him a whole other kind of stress-relief – as most of their side-trips did.  No matter what those dumbass husbands tried to tell her, the woman was made for sex and she wanted it with him.  Who was he to argue?

You wanted it with her, too, jackass.  That’s why you haven’t spread any legs that weren’t your own this week. 

It had been decades since he had such passionate, unrestrained, mutually-satisfying sex with anyone, much less a woman who could easily be his friend as well as his lover.  Hell yes, he had wanted.  He freely admitted it to himself and anybody else that wanted to know.

What he hadn’t wanted was that softly drawled, “I love you, Tony.”

She couldn’t love him.  Not possible.  He wouldn’t accept it or allow it.

“I’d loooove to give it a ride.”  The persistent beauty interrupted the repetitive denial he’d been reciting for the last week and a half.  “I’m a very experienced rider…”

He grinned smugly at the not-so subtle innuendo. 

There wasn’t a doubt in Tony’s mind that the woman curling her finger under his chin could ride better than a Hell’s Angel – and probably suck a golf ball through a garden hose.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t a hint of interest stirring below his belt.  Not even when the double-D dynamos threatened to break free from the skimpy, rhinestone-flecked confinement of her bikini top.

Sparkly shit…

Paper umbrellas, sparkles, sequins, motorcycles…  They all brought Lilah to mind, and that meant she’d been on his mind an awful damn lot this week.  It was time for a change of scenery in the form of East Hampton and his brother’s family.

“I’m sure you’re a helluva rider, baby, but I’ve got places to go and people to see.”  He threw out a flirtatious wink to soften his refusal.  “Maybe next year.”

Next year he wouldn’t be this sexually-sated when Rally Week rolled around.  Next year he wouldn’t have a Bluegrass girl on his mind.