King of Hearts

For the first time in my life, I was in love. When I looked into his eyes, I saw all of the pain and all of the depression I'd always felt mirrored right back at me.

"Anyway," he said. "Sorry, I bumped into you. I'm outta here." He started walking towards the door. His long legs took huge steps and I stood there watching him. The next thing I knew I was running after him. When I got outside, I screamed at his back.

"Hey!" I yelled. He turned back to look at me. I smiled at him and threw three hundred dollars- worth of science textbooks into the air. My folders opened up in midair and papers flew all over everywhere. People in the area looked at me as if I was crazy.

"Can I come with?" I asked. He smiled and nodded. One of the campus police officers came running over to me. "Do you know that littering is a crime?" he asked. "Do you know that you can be suspended for it?"

"Do you know that I just quit?" I yelled. "Go home and listen to Alice Cooper's song, School's out. Make sure you study it thoroughly because there will be a test on it." He looked puzzled.

My new found ally and I quickly ran over to the parking lot. I looked around for his car and saw him sitting on a motorcycle. He held out the second helmet to me and I took it. He rocketed away from the school and we simply never looked back.

For the next few months, we bummed around town with some friends of his who rode bikes. I did call my mother to tell her that I'd met someone and I wouldn't be back for the foreseeable future. That summer saw changes in me that no amount of high school, college or life thus far had wrought.

I went from the living embodiment of individuality, the paragon of asexual virtue, to biker babe in the blink of an eye. I loved the freedom of the biker lifestyle. We just hung out all day long. We didn't have jobs. We didn't have a place to stay. We didn't have bullshit. But I had love. I had Raymond Heart.

I was willing to do anything I had to do to keep Ray. At first, we were just kind of buddies. We learned the whole biker lifestyle together. We kind of made it up as we went along. Ray was a handsome, charming, good old boy who was tough as nails when he had to be. But he didn't have to be. Everyone loves Raymond. But when there was a fight? One punch from a guy who bench presses three hundred and fifty pounds was usually enough to knock some sense into whoever was on the other side.

Over that summer, three small groups of individual bikers melded into one large club. And I had to change too. There were any number of girls who wanted Ray. To his credit, he never once asked me to change. But when I took all of the piercings out of my face and allowed the holes to seal up, he told me I was pretty. When I dyed my hair back to its natural chestnut brown, he told me he'd been wrong about me being pretty. My face fell until he lifted my chin up and told me I was beautiful.

He also started holding my hand when we went places. I was happier than I'd ever been in my entire life. There were two types of women who hung with us in those days. There were club women, who were the property of the club meaning that anyone in the club could have them. And there were "old ladies." If you were someone's old lady, it meant that no one could touch you without his permission. Once I'd done my makeover, a lot of the guys in the club took notice of me. And once, when I was drunk and too out of it to notice it, a guy tried to take advantage of me. Ray's hand in his chest put a stop to that. When he told the guy that I was his "old lady," even drunk as an English sailor on leave, I was so happy I could have died.

The women going after Ray were still trying to test me though. Ray was, after all, a man. So the shorts they wore got shorter and their tops got lower. And I had to compete with them, but Ray never laid a hand on me.

I had a couple of women in the club who were friends of mine, including Beth, who helped me keep tabs on things. Beth helped get me into a number of things that on further thought, would probably have been better left alone. Ray knew that I had feelings for him and he also knew that I was a virgin. At twenty-one years old, nothing had ever been inside of me. I wanted him badly but I had no idea of how to go about doing it. Beth got me drunk as a skunk and showed me how to take my own virginity with a big vibrator. After I got used to it, Ray was supposed to be my first. It didn't work out that way.

We had a big biker rally at the state fairgrounds and I got all ready. There were bikers and clubs from all over the state. We made a lot of money with that rally and the party afterwards is still legendary. Ray and I camped out and had our own tent. I'd been out smoking weed with Beth and I went back to our tent.

I pulled back the flap and saw Ray with an older woman with long red hair and huge tits on top of him. She was working her ass like a porn star. It bounced up and down on his dick like it was made of rubber. "Oh shit," moaned Ray. "Get up, I'm gonna cum."

"Fill me up baby," she said. Ray pushed her off of him. He obviously didn't want to risk her getting pregnant. She grabbed onto his dick and started licking it like an ice cream cone. Ray shot blast after blast of sperm on her face and she just let it sit there.

When he was done, Ray noticed me staring at him and went into shock. Before that moment, I think that I was too shocked myself to even react. But the tears just came from nowhere. I ran out of the tent and as far away from it as I could. I could hear Ray calling me while he tried to get his clothes on and I could hear the old redhead laughing. I eventually found Beth and we got so high that I didn't know which way was up. It was the only way I could deal with the pain of what I'd seen.

I guess the combination of alcohol and drugs was so powerful that I really don't remember much. My next waking thought, was of some guy literally being ripped out of me in mid-stroke. He was just some greasy young biker and I was flat on my back with him between my legs. As I gained consciousness, all I felt was a sore pussy, mostly from him being snatched out of me. He was thrown to the ground so hard that the impact of him hitting the dirt next to me had to have knocked him out. But then Ray was straddling him and pounding the shit out of him. Then he turned and started on the guy who'd been waiting to go next.

I blacked out again but Beth later told me that the look Ray had on his face when he looked around, cleared the tent. There had been eight guys there taking turns fucking Beth and me. And these weren't average guys. They were tough bikers, but Ray cleared that tent so fast that people still talk about it. The only one still in the tent when he turned back around was the guy he'd slammed and he was only there because he was out cold.

Even the guys who were fucking Beth left. No one wanted any part of Ray's rage. She later told me that he'd picked me up as if I was a baby and carried me out of there. He'd taken his share of the money we'd raised and checked us into a nice hotel. When I woke up the next morning, he and I were alone and he looked miserable. Beth had told him about how I'd made myself ready for him to take my virginity and how things ended up.

It was a very bittersweet moment in my life. We had our first real talk. Not just about hiding from the real world, but about ourselves and how we saw things. The moment was very sweet to me because Ray told me that we had a problem. He'd started out telling people that I was his old lady to protect me. He knew that I was a virgin and didn't want anyone to force me into something I wasn't ready for. But his feelings for me had grown. He'd pretty much gone the whole time that we'd been together without having sex because he didn't want to push me into anything either. The previous night had just found him tired drunk and horny and he'd succumbed to that redhead.

When he'd seen the look on my face, he'd known in that instance that he loved me and that he'd probably made the biggest mistake of his life. My heart nearly burst hearing him say that he loved me. I told him that I'd felt the same and that I'd been hurt so badly by seeing him giving that fat old redhead something that he was supposed to only give me that I'd gone out and gotten way too drunk.

We forgave each other and swore to never do it again. The bitter part of the memory is that something that should have been a special gift for Ray was taken by some guy whose name and face I can't even remember.

Things got better for us after that. They'd been great all along but that day despite its ups and downs, established us as a real couple. Over the next few weeks, Ray blossomed as much as I did. He used part of the money from the rally to rent a large clubhouse for the club. He had a head for business from the very start and could see far enough into the future to make long range plans for all of us.

There was never any kind of election or anything like that. Ray was just the natural leader of the club. We did all kinds of fun things. We even had a big weekly poker night. Ray was a hell of a poker player. I never saw him lose. The funniest thing about him was that although he won all the time, whenever he won big, it always involved a hand that contained one particular card. Whether it was a flush, a straight or four of a kind, Ray's biggest hands always included the King of Hearts. After a couple of those victories, people just started calling him, "King."

Something I need to point out here is that during this time, Ray and I were almost never apart. We ate together, we slept together, we were always together. If he was working on his bike or helping someone else with theirs, I was there beside him handing him tools. He sometimes had to move me over just so he had the space to do something but neither of us cared. It was literally the happiest time of my life.

I wanted my entire life to be that way. I was living among people who accepted me for who and what I was. When we pulled into places, no one gave us any shit. We didn't have jobs or any of that bullshit. We were a society to ourselves. We never caused any problems. We weren't outlaw bikers. We didn't run drugs or anything like that. Some of us may have used them, but we didn't sell or manufacture anything. That life fed my need for individuality. It was the perfect thing for me. It was the answer to my dreams. It was the way I always wanted things to be. Having Ray and that lifestyle completed my soul.

I guess I thought that it was the same for Ray, but it wasn't. Ray loved me and I loved him, but neither of us really knew the deep dark depths of each other's pain or the causes of that pain. We talked almost constantly but we somehow skirted the darker issues. We skirted mine because, as I said, I was living la vida loca. My life was crazy and wonderful.

What I didn't know, was that our life together, and by that I meant Ray and me as a couple, was healing Ray's issues as well. What I also didn't know, was that Ray, unlike me, had never had any social issues. Every one we ran into immediately fell in love with Ray. Women wanted to be with him and men wanted to be his friend. On that day that Ray and I met and just said, "Fuck it," there were things going on that I'd never imagined. Ray had missed most of our last year of high school. He'd had to quit the football team and missed most of his classes because his dad had suffered a nearly fatal heart attack. Both Ray and his mom had altered their lives significantly to care for him when he came home from the hospital.

Ray and his dad had always been close, so if there was a choice between football and his dad, football lost. After months that saw his grades plummet along with his chances for a football scholarship, Ray's dad started to improve. In fact, he got well enough that Ray was able to enroll at the last minute in the junior college that I attended.

After a few weeks there though, the improvements, turned out to be just the last dying gasp of Ray's father's heart. He'd passed away two weeks before I met Ray. His mom had insisted that Ray continue attending his classes.

Ray had come home one day, during the week before I met him, to find the police on his doorstep with a note from his mom. She'd taken her own life. She couldn't bear the thought of being without her husband. She'd left enough money for him to finish his classes, but it wasn't money he missed. Ray had been a part of a very small but very close family. It had always been just the three of them. Without his parents, Ray had tried to right the ship of his life, but there just seemed to be no point in it.

The biker lifestyle meant different things to us. For me, it was my dream. It was something I embraced with both arms. For Ray, on the other hand, it was just something to hold onto while he found what he needed to replace what was missing in his life. For me it was an end destination. For Ray, it was only a bus stop or a stop gap.

So, even by the end of the first year, Ray had started to come out of his pain. He put me back in contact with my parents. They really didn't like the life I was living or Ray for that matter, but they were glad that he'd made me call them.

The biker rallies that we'd had during the summers were so successful that we were able to house the club members who didn't have homes for the whole winter. At the same time, Ray and I had our own place. It wasn't huge or luxurious but it was cozy and warm and we had some degree of privacy.

During the winters, we held biker swap meets at the fairgrounds. We did bike repairs and customizations. We brought in experts from the factories to give classes in bike maintenance and we held our weekly poker games. Ray actually made a deal with the local authorities to give half of the profits from the poker games to local charities. He even arranged for a volunteer police officer to handle both the books and the till.

Ray gave serious consideration to returning to school then. What actually changed his mind was my father. My dad told Ray that he might want to consider being a plumber. He outlined all of the pluses and minuses, with Ray listening intently. He even told Ray about classes the plumber's union held. Ray politely listened to all of it, while I sat back and laughed.

When we left that evening, I was still smiling.

"You really had my dad going," I said. "He really thinks you're serious about going to school to become a plumber."

"I am," said Ray. And he wasn't smiling. But I was sure he'd never give up the biker lifestyle. Even when Ray enrolled and started going to the classes, I was sure that he was only doing it to impress my dad. Ray loved me and he wanted things to be okay between my parents and me. I was sure he was only doing it for that reason.

As time went on, he was still very active in everything we did with the club, but no one knew that while most of us lived an almost nocturnal existence, Ray was in school every day and doing really well. My dad was especially proud of him. Ray was soon invited to most of our family functions. He also started to tie his hair back and dress normally when we weren't doing things with the club.

I loved him so much that I didn't care if he wanted to put on what I considered a costume, for his daily life. Our sex life was great, he loved me and I loved him, so no matter what he wanted was fine. When we were with the club, I watched him like a hawk. Not because I didn't trust him, but because I didn't trust a lot of the women who hung out with the club. Ray was too tempting a prize for some of them.

Sex with Ray scared me. It wasn't that I was afraid that he'd hurt me or that things would get too wild, it was just the opposite. By then I'd sampled enough drugs to know that they weren't for me. But when Ray and I had sex it gave me the same kind of high. There were too many nights where we'd start out gently rubbing each other and end up slamming our bodies against each other with such ferocity that I was surprised we didn't hurt each other. Other times he was so gentle that we barely moved and all of the stimulation came from the fact that we were linked with the person we each loved most in the world.

There were times when it just felt like my insides just opened up to caress his dick because it was the missing part of my body. I just wanted it to go on and on and never end. Some of those nights it ended with the alarm sounding at six a.m. so Ray could go to school. I'd briefly open my eyes and realize that we had spent the entire night fucking but it seemed like only moments. Sometimes now, if I close my eyes I can still feel him thrusting against me while I suck on his tongue.

"Christina," he screams in the throes of passion. I can almost hear him calling my name now.

"Christina, what the fuck are you doing?"

My eyes snapped open and I saw Beth standing in front of me holding the phone. "It's for you," she said, staring at me. When a woman that is usually high stares at you, like you're doing something strange, it's an eye opener.

"Chis, we're leaving tomorrow," says Marcus. "The day after that it's going to snow here. We don't want to be riding bikes or even trying to, in slush and ice. I got something for you. I'll be by to pick you up at about eight in the morning. We need to get out of here as early as possible to make sure we're clear of the storm. Dress warm. I mounted a couple of side carriers to my bike for the trip. One of them is yours. You have about the same amount of storage space that you'd have in a suitcase. Motel accommodations are on me, but bring as much cash as you can spare."

After he hung up the phone, I saw Beth still staring at me. She had dried up sperm all over her but she was staring at me.

"That was Marcus," I told her.

"Uhm, I know that," she smiled.

"We're leaving tomorrow. Did you arrange a ride?" I asked.

"That was the point of me fucking those losers today," she smirked. "Give them a little pussy and they'll do whatever you want."

"Where'd you get a little pussy?" I smiled. "Yours is so stretched out that you could march a battalion in there."

"I'm not the one who was just lying in her bed, with her whole hand stuffed in her vagina and moaning her own name," she said. "Didn't that hurt? You were arched off of the bed with only your head and the soles of your feet touching it. Whatever the fuck you're on, you should stop being such a tightwad and give your best friend some of it."

As she started to turn away, I noticed the lines on her face. Beth was no longer the happy go fucky perennial party girl she'd been when we met. The years were beginning to have their way with her. The lifestyle is especially hard on women. Men can just buy a bike and join. No one cares how old they get or how fat. There are fat forty year old guys riding with twenty year olds behind them. I've seen and broken up fights between beautiful young girls who are trying to maim each other over beer bellied guys that they think will treat them better than the guy they're riding with.

Beth and I are the oldest women in the club now. Marcus protects me out of friendship and respect for the old days when King ran the club. Beth is pretty much the club pincushion. I'm still here because I love the life. Beth is only here for the drugs, the sex and because she doesn't know anything else.

I don't know why Beth and I are still friends. Maybe it's because both of us need to know that there is someone who will be sorry when we're gone. I don't know how it will end for us. Will we just walk away and go on welfare? Or will we end up road pizza after taking a ride from a guy who's too drunk to ride or just not good enough? Maybe we'll just be left on the road somewhere when the club rides away after we've lost a fight with some other stupid woman who wants to ride behind the guy we were with.