Read REIGN: A Motorcycle Club Romance Novel Online
Authors: Meg Jackson
REIGN: A Motorcycle Club Romance Novel
Copyright 2015, Meg Jackson
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~
1
~
Oh great, a used condom.
Oh, wow, super, a bloodstain.
What is this even, yogurt?
Who does this to a pillow?
Was it very necessary, whoever you are, to
completely cover the walls with shit?
What is this…oh please…don’t even…no…yup, it’s
piss.
Jesus Christ, is it that hard to put your used
needles in the damn trash can?
Oh…a dollar tip, how nice, considering they left
an entire week’s worth of rotting fast food and half-empty beers all over the
floor.
How did they manage to get cum on the ceiling?!
That’s actually impressive, I can’t even be mad…
All in a day’s work for me. I pushed my cart from room to room, arms
sore from scrubbing at mysterious stains, clothes splotched with bleach, mind
numb to what wonders might await me behind the next door.
People are animals, I tell
ya
. No one knows
that as much as a cleaning lady at a hotel. And, no, before you start dreaming
up my identity for me, I’m not an “illegal alien”. I am half-Latina, but I’m a
full-blooded American citizen, born and raised, and I speak perfect English,
thank you very much.
What is it about staying at a hotel that can turn even a mild-mannered
person into an untamed beast with no problem pissing all over the floor or
dumping an ashtray onto their sheets before checking out? Is it because it’s
not their home, so they don’t care what happens to it? Is it because they don’t
realize someone like me has to come and clean it up? Or – and perhaps this is the
scariest possibility – is it possible that they’re actually like that at home,
too, and you just never see it?
Not everyone who came through the doors of the Gateway were like that,
of course, but way too many were. We had our fair share of families, businesspeople,
truckers. But for every guest who left the room in a decent state, there were
two prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, alcoholics, or other such devils who took
it upon themselves to make my job as hard as humanely possible.
And I never held anything against those people for what they
did
. If you’re a lady and you need money
and you don’t mind letting someone give you the old in-out to get some, go on
with your bad self. Got a drinking problem and can’t drive home? By all means,
keep everyone safe and stay at the hotel. Need to “figure stuff out” through a
drug-fueled weekend? Not my place to judge.
But, goddam, a little decorum would be nice to see once in a while.
“Gabriella, Rosa is taking her break now, can you make sure 215 is
ready? Early check-in,” my walkie-talkie crackled on my hip.
“Already checked it, boss, all good,” I said, pushing down the ‘talk’
button and hoping that my manager would actually hear me for once instead of
badgering me about why I “didn’t respond”. The woman was a sweetheart, but she
was deaf as hell and the flask of vodka she sipped on all day didn’t help her
comprehension skills.
As I heaved my cart down the hall, legs already aching from all the
bending over and crouching down my job demanded, I tried not to think about
what would happen at the end of my shift. To be honest, as much as I hated
playing nursemaid to the lost souls of the world, tidying up after them,
wondering whether that puddle was vomit or melted ice cream, there wasn’t a
whole lot to look forward to once I was done for the day, either.
It was late June, when it’s really only just beginning to warm up in
the high Rockies.
Maybe it’s a good night for a barbeque,
I thought idly, until I opened up the door to the
next room and my list and remembered that it was raining lightly. No use
stopping at the store on my way home for hamburgers and potato chips.
Maybe I’ll make lasagna,
I thought.
Lasagna
is good for a rainy day. Jeremy loves my lasagna.
Lasagna was a safe bet. Anything that I already knew Jeremy loved was
a safe bet. Anything I wasn’t sure about was a gamble. And if I made anything
that he’d told me once, even if he’d said it years ago in a conversation that I
had no reason to remember, I was treading on ice so thin it might as well be
paper.
Yeah, lasagna,
I thought, thankful that this room, at least, wasn’t as bad as some of
the others I’d seen that day. As I pulled up the covers, balling them up with
the sheets, ready to throw them in the hamper, I made a quick mental inventory
of the room. I was looking for chargers, cell phones, socks, shoes, a ski
goggle, anything that a rushed guest might have left behind on their way out
the door.
You’d be surprised what people leave behind in hotel rooms. Usually
it’s just crap, but sometimes you find interesting things: photographs,
mysterious pills, strange powders in baggies, gold jewelry. Some of the girls I
worked with, I knew, were prone to taking such finds home with them instead of
bringing them to the front desk, like we were supposed to. I didn’t hold it
against them, but I always brought anything I found straight to the clerks to
hold onto or dispose of as they saw fit.
It wasn’t worth the risk of getting caught, for me. And besides, I
didn’t do drugs, and I didn’t need jewelry. Jeremy, though he had many flaws,
was an excellent provider. Or, I should say, the police force he worked for was
an excellent provider. We didn’t want for money. The fact I had this job at all
was due to one of his whims.
After we’d married, three years before the shit hit the fan, he didn’t
like the idea of me “sitting around at home” all day. Unfortunately, he also
didn’t like the idea of me getting a job that would be “too mentally taxing” or
take up “too much time”. Really, he just wanted me to get a job where I’d come
home too dog-tired to do anything but put up with his shit, and working for
housekeeping at the hotel was the perfect mix of physical labor and
mind-numbing repetition.
“But what did I get a degree for, if I can’t do anything with it?” I’d
said, still so naïve.
“Well, I don’t know what you got a degree for, I sure as hell didn’t
tell you to get it. I mean, what can you even
do
with a degree in philosophy? You’d have to go to grad school if
you want to make anything of yourself, and we can’t afford that right now.
Besides, if you went back to school, you’d have your nose in a book all the
time again, no time for me. I waited two years to have you all to myself, I
don’t want to wait another four,” he’d replied, appealing to that sappy part of
me that loved him beyond reason.
“I guess you’re right,” I’d resigned, not wanting to have the same
argument again for the third time that week. After our honeymoon, that had been
our first major issue. The first of many, I’d like to add.
So I’d started looking for a job. With almost no work experience, it
was tough. I could flip burgers, but that seemed beneath me, and with a degree
I was way overqualified, anyway. I wanted to take a position as a secretary at
a law firm, but Jeremy had thought that would be too stressful for me, with crazy
hours and demanding lawyers to cater to. He was the only man I should be
catering to, in his opinion.
So, I’d taken the gig as housekeeper at the Gateway. I’m pretty sure I
was only hired because I looked like I could speak Spanish. Which I can’t, by
the way. Well, I can, but only curse words. Plus, my name, Gabriella, is only
one “l” away from the traditional Hispanic spelling of the same name, blurring
the line even further. Being half Puerto Rican and half Italian, I’m what they
call “ethnically ambiguous”, which is a nice way of saying “no one knows what
the hell you are right from looking at you.”
With large, almond-shaped, dark chocolate eyes, a deep tan complexion,
and crazy, kinky, black hair that does whatever it wants at all times, I’ve
been mistaken for a Jew, a Mexican, a Filipino, and even, on one occasion, a
Hawaiian. My body, though, is pure Latina. I blessedly missed out on the dark
body hair and stick-thin frame of my Italian mother, and got my paternal
grandmother’s luscious hips, large, C-cup breasts, and wide, womanly thighs.
Not that I always appreciated that, mind you. In fact, when I was with
Jeremy all those years, I hated it. He was as Irish as they get, pale as the
moon and thin as a rail. He always made me feel like I was fat.
He’d buy clothes for me, intentionally buying sizes too large, because
he knew that it made me think I belonged in the “plus” size section. He’d make
little backhanded compliments about my roly-poly tummy, which never seemed to
shrink no matter how much I tried to diet or exercise.
Now, of course, when I look at myself in the mirror and see the slight
pudge
in my stomach, I know it’s just a necessary
evil of being what they call “voluptuous.” But back then? I did all I could to
hide my body, thinking that, since it didn’t look like a fashion model’s, it
wasn’t any good.
But that was just par for the course when it came to Jeremy. I was
never good enough, never pretty enough, never smart enough or funny enough. He
never ceased to remind me, in little ways, never outright, how he’d “settled”
for me because he loved my personality, not my mind or my body. And how much
could he have loved my personality, anyway, considering how much he thought I
screwed up on a daily basis?
As I went into the bathroom, gathering towels and making note of what
toiletries needed to be restocked, I instinctively paused to check myself in
the mirror.
I’ll need a touch-up soon,
I thought, brow furrowed, hand gently touching
the tender spot above my left eyebrow where my concealer was just starting to
look splotchy. You could just barely, if you looked hard enough, make out the dark
purple markings underneath my make-up. I flinched under my own touch, the spot
still tender although it’d been three days.
Here’s something you should know about humans, if you are one.
None of us are of one mind.
Or, maybe I shouldn’t be so broad. But I’ve met a lot of people, and
there’s always two sides to the coin. It’s not like some old, tired, trope,
like good and evil or black and white. It’s just…there’s the “you” that you’ve
always believed yourself to be, the one you want to be, and there’s the “you”
that you’d like to ignore, that you don’t want to take ownership of.
I don’t tell many people about that time in my life, because in that
time of my life the latter “you” was in charge of me. I thought of myself as
feisty and smart, with a spitfire wit and a take-no-prisoners attitude. The way
I’d been raised, in a household that was half
no
mames
,
guey
!
and half
fangul
!
But, of course, that wasn’t who I was. I was – and this pains me to
write – a “battered women”. Ugh. What a horrible phrase. It makes me think of
cake, or cookies. When, in reality, there was nothing sweet about my marriage.
Jeremy, love him though I did, was a gigantic asshole. A
disgraziat
.
A
so
pendejo
.
He didn’t always hit me. Maybe once, maybe twice a month. But I never
deserved it – does any wife deserve it, really? I can
maybe
see if you walk in on her banging three dudes at once, or
if she’s got a knife to your head. I
wouldn’t put someone in jail for smacking their woman if she was about to go
full-on
Misery
on the guy. But a
good, hard, close-fisted slug because you spilled coffee on his shirt in the
morning?
But, the thing is, he made me feel so low, emotionally, that I
thought
I deserved it. Even though, deep
down in the back of my mind, I knew that it was all a lot of macho bullshit and
that he was wrong about me, he was really, really good at making me feel like
I’d have nowhere to go, no one to turn to. He made me feel like being his wife
was really my only purpose on this earth. And lord, even if it was the most
fucked-up love in the world, I did love him.
How’s that for honesty? I can still admit – now, after everything –
that I loved that man with all my heart.
But some loves are just no damn good. Heroin addicts love heroin,
don’t they?
See, this is the thing I need you know about me before I go any
further. I’m not stupid. I’m not pathetic. I’m not a mindless bimbo. I was, and
am, smart as hell. I graduated top of my class from Baruch University, with a
degree in philosophy. I can think my way out of a steel trap.