Today & Tomorrow (4 page)

She knew he had to go. But she’d had the best day she’d had in a long time. Years, maybe. She’d barely thought of being sick or dying. Even though the day had been about doing something on her list.

Her dad never let her forget that she was sick. He didn’t mean it; he just couldn’t help it. Tris could set it aside, but part of that was living his own life, so he didn’t spend much time babysitting her.

And she didn’t have any friends, no real ones, at least. Being sick like she’d been since she was thirteen had a way of making a wall between the sick person and the people she might have things in common with. Because when you were that sick, the only thing people thought you had was sickness, and they didn’t want to be in common with that.

By the time she’d gone into remission, she’d gotten used to being on her own, and she hadn’t been much in the mood to audition new friends—good thing, as it turned out, since she’d gone and gotten sick again.

So Analisa was mostly alone. Just her, her brother, their father, and It. Until today. She hadn’t felt alone all day. She wasn’t in a huge rush for the day to end.

“Yeah, I know. Thanks for helping me with my list.”

“You’re welcome. I liked helping.” He took a step toward her. “What else you got on that thing?”

Happy to prolong his time on her beach, she pulled out her phone and opened her notes.

When she handed it to him, he took it, asking, “You wrote it down?”

“Well, yeah. It’s not a list if you don’t write it down.”

“You did the things that are lined out?”

She nodded.

“Damn, really?” He read aloud: “‘Have lunch with the President. New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Skydive. Graduate college. Visit all seven continents.’” He looked up. “‘Play the Hollywood Bowl’? No shit?”

Hearing her list read aloud was embarrassing—it was all such a cliché. That was how she wanted to mark her life? No, it wasn’t. But she answered his question. “Yeah. I’ve been playing piano since I was three. I’m not that good, but my dad pulled some strings. He pulled a lot of strings. It’s not that impressive a list. I was thirteen when I started it, right after I got sick. I think my dad sees it like a shopping list.”

“How’d you graduate college already? You’re nineteen, right?”

“I’ve been homeschooled since I first got sick. With a tutor. It was stupid easy. I finished the high school stuff when I was fifteen, and then I did an online degree. No big.”

“It’s big to me. I barely graduated high school.”

“Really? But you’re smart.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I am. Too smart for those douchebags.” With his head cocked to the side, he smirked. “I had some trouble doing what I was told.”

That she could believe, and she laughed. “Understood.”

Looking back at her phone, he read on. “You need to cross out ‘Ride a Harley.’ And then there’s only three things left: ‘invent something cool,’ ‘buy a house,’ and ‘make a movie.’ Inventing something cool seems like the toughest one. You’re already making the movie. And I don’t guess it would be hard for you to buy a house.” He handed her back her phone, and she took some footage before she put it in her pocket. “Why buy a house?”

She shrugged. “It’s something people do in their lives. I’m trying to get my life lived. And yeah, my dad could just buy me a house, but I want a reason more than my list to have one.” It didn’t even make sense to her, so she knew she wasn’t explaining it right. There was stuff on her secret list that was even more crazy than that.

But Nolan didn’t push the point. He just nodded at the pocket where she’d put her phone. “It’s a pretty short list. Ten things?”

“It’s gonna sound totally obnoxious, but it was hard to make a list. The way I grew up, I’ve been a lot of places, done a lot of things. Even before I got sick.” What she meant was that it was hard to make a list that she could share with her father. The things she most wanted were too much for him.

“Yeah, I guess it’s a real bitch to always have everything you want.”

He hadn’t said it with a nasty tone, but she flinched. She hardly knew him, but she was still surprised that he’d said something like that. “That was mean. I was trying to be honest.”

He had the decency to be abashed. “Sorry. You’re right. That was a shitty thing to say.” With a shake of his head and a sheepish chuckle, he added, “On that note, I guess I really should go.”

“Yeah.” She still didn’t want him to go, but she didn’t really want him to stay, now, either. What he’d said had hurt.

They walked back to the house and around to the front drive. As he picked his helmet up off the bike, Analisa had a moment that felt like panic. If he left, and she never saw him again—she felt like It would creep up a little closer.

“My list is longer than what I showed you. There’s a second half. It’s secret.”

With the helmet halfway to his head, he stopped. “Secret? Why?”

“It’s stuff my dad would lose his head to know about. I haven’t checked any of it off because it’s stuff I’m not sure how to do on my own.”

He cocked his head but didn’t say anything. She didn’t know whether he was intentionally going to make her ask it, or whether he honestly didn’t know what she wanted to ask. So she asked. “Would you help me?”

Setting the helmet back on the bike, he sat sideways on the seat, then reached out and pulled her close, between his legs. Officially the most intimate position she’d ever been in with a guy. “What’s on the list?”

“I don’t want to tell you the whole thing all at once. But ‘get a tattoo’ is one of them.” She looked down; his legs framed hers, and he was still holding her hand. “Um, ‘pierce…something private’ is another.”

“Damn,” he murmured. “Damn.” He gave her hand a little squeeze. “But you need help with those?”

“I guess not—I just…I don’t want to do it alone. Feels too lonely.”

He eyed her curiously. “Are you asking me to go with you when you get something private pierced? Seriously?”

She blushed. This was the most awkward conversation she’d had in a long time, and she was still thinking about the way his legs held hers between them. “I’m not asking you to watch—gross! Just come along. Would you?”

He lifted her hand and brought it to his mouth, and she thought he was going to kiss it. But he stopped before he did and let their hands fall back to his lap. “Yeah, I will.”

~oOo~

Her father was standing near the door when she went in. Since the front of the house was almost as much glass as the rear, Analisa was sure he’d been watching her whole goodbye scene with Nolan. He’d probably been watching them on the beach, too.

Not that there had been much to see—an almost-kiss of her hand, and a hug before he got on the bike.

“Did you have a good day?” He stepped up and gave her a hug.

She hugged him back. He was smothering her a little lately, and he got on her nerves with it, but she loved him with everything she had. “Yeah. It was a great day.”

“Good.” He kissed her head and let her go. “So…since you’re not going to do more lessons, is that the last we’ve seen of Nolan?”

Rolling her eyes, she pushed away and walked into the house. “Subtle, Daddy.”

He followed her. “Sorry. But…well?”

She didn’t answer until she’d gotten to the kitchen and started taking her meds out of their cabinet. She had rejected the chemo and radiation bullshit this time, but she was taking a whole cocktail of drugs to make her parts keep working while her body was trying to break them.

Her father leaned on the island and watched her, his sad eyes lingering on each bottle. The house was dim; only the pendant lights over the island and the spots over the fireplace on the other side of the big space were on, making a deep, brassy glow.

“Analie, talk to me.”

She got a bottle of water out of the fridge. “No, this wasn’t the last we’ve seen of Nolan. I don’t know how much we’ll see him, but I like him, and I think he likes me. So I hope we’ll see lots of him.”

“Sweetheart—I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Don’t be a bigot, Daddy. He’s a good guy.”

“I agree. I like him, too. This isn’t about him being a biker. You know what it’s about.”

She took a handful of pills and swallowed them down with her water. “Liking Nolan has nothing to do with being sick.”

“But it should, Analie.” He came around the island and cupped her cheek with his hand. “I love you so much. I want you to have everything you want. More than anything else in this world, I wish you could have a future. I would give you mine if I could. But I don’t want you to find yourself in a place where you’re losing even more than you already are.”

And this was why it was hard to spend time alone with her father, as much as she did love him. Everything they talked about, everything they did, was filtered through the screen of It. Stage four lymphoma.

“I told you I want to live everything I can. I’ve never had a boyfriend. I don’t even know if Nolan could be that, if he even wants it—or if
I
even do. I just had a good time with him today. He’s nice, and he’s hot, and he wants to see me again. Let me have this, Daddy.”

“I don’t want your heart broken. It’s fragile enough as it is.”

That wouldn’t be so bad, she thought. People had heartbreak. It was part of life. She pulled his hand from her face and walked away. “Please.”

“I love you so much. So very much.”

“I know. I love you, too, Daddy. Let me live, okay?”

He stared at her, his sad eyes growing desolate. “I wish so much that you could, Analie.”

She had no answer for that. Nobody did.

Nolan pressed himself tightly against the decaying stucco wall and closed his eyes, taking a second to breathe and center. Then he opened his eyes and left cover, bringing the AK up to his shoulder and aiming as he moved. He fired a short burst just as the Rat realized he had someone coming up on him and began to turn. The Rat’s shoulder, neck, and half his face evaporated in an arc of blood and bone.

That was Nolan’s fourth kill since he’d come to SoCal, ten months ago. Knowing the Rat was dead, he didn’t even give him a second look. Instead, he did a check for his brothers and found new cover.

Gunfire and shouting fill the air, but Nolan’s survey of the scene told him that the Horde were wiping up the field with the Rats. They hadn’t stood a chance. He grinned. This ambush might finally shut this Rats charter down. And if the rest of them knew what was what, they’d take their lesson and sit down. Because the Horde had La Zorra and the Águilas cartel behind them.

They’d been coming back from a border run drop when Hoosier had pulled them off to take a call. Dora Vega, known as La Zorra, the leader of the Águilas, had had intel for them: a Dirty Rats meet with one of their suppliers. The cartel had taken care of the supplier, ensuring that the Rats would be alone at the location and expecting friendly company.

Looking at the bodies on the ground now, with the fight over and the Horde beginning to mass in the center of what was nothing short of a battleground, Nolan thought they might well have wiped out the charter.

Hoosier scanned the bodies at their feet. “Head count.”

“We’re whole, Prez,” Bart answered. “All accounted for. Deme took a knock to the head, but he’s up.”

“I’m good,” Demon called out. Nolan turned and saw him and Muse coming from inside the building. One whole side of Demon’s head, to his shoulder, was red and wet with blood, but he was moving like he was okay.

Hoosier looked him over. “J.R.’ll need to sew you up when we get back. You good to ride?”

“Yeah. I’ll stick something in my helmet, soak up the blood.”

Hoosier nodded, but not like he was agreeing with Demon’s plan. More like he was distracted and barely acknowledging that words had been spoken. “What we just did could force a truce with the whole Rat organization. Or we just declared war on them all. Let’s hope for the first one, because the second one’s a fuckin’ mess.”

Again, he looked down at the reddening dirt. “Alright. Let’s get this here mess cleaned up. Muse, you head home with Deme—keep him close. Nolan, A, Jesse, Lakota—start digging. Shovels’re in the van. The rest of us, let’s prep the bodies.”

He kicked the arm of the body of a fat, older Rat with a long, chaotic, grey beard and longer, more chaotic grey hair. The charter president, Manson. “I want his kutte. Burn the rest of them with the bodies. Make it snappy.”

Nolan went to the back of the van, set his weapon down, shed his Kevlar vest, and got to work.

~oOo~

It looked like Hoosier was getting what he wanted. The Horde and the Rats were setting up a meet for a truce—one that included leadership from all players. There were a lot of moving parts. In the meantime, a cease-fire was in effect.

Nolan had never served in the military, but sometimes it seemed to him there wasn’t a lot of difference between military and one-percenter culture. Maybe that was why, or because, so many men in kuttes were vets.

While those negotiations were underway, things were quiet around the club. A couple of days after that last fight, Nolan was hanging out in the Hall, co-opping a shooter game with Sherlock. His phone buzzed in his pocket during a battle; he ignored it until they got through it and could pause. Sherlock went to the john. Nolan pulled his phone out.

Analisa. Usually she texted, but this had been a call. There was a voice mail. He stared at the notification, spinning his ring on his finger, trying to decide what to do. He hadn’t returned a text from her in two days.

He wasn’t avoiding her. Not exactly. He didn’t want to avoid her; he missed her. But the past month had been intense in a bunch of ways, and his head was fucking with him.

He’d seen her five times in the month since he’d met her. It felt like not enough and too much. He liked her. A lot. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that he was hot for her, too. And he felt fairly sure that made him an asshole. She was dying, and it was getting to the point that all he could think of was getting her naked.

He’d taken her to get her tattoo and piercing. The tattoo, he’d watched her get—more than watched. She’d given him her phone, and he’d recorded it for her movie. It wasn’t much of a tattoo: two stars, one inlaid in the other, with the words
We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands
circling the stars in script. Right between her shoulder blades. It had taken a couple of hours, mostly for the script. Nolan had spent those hours thinking about how pretty her back and shoulders were, her freckles heavy over her shoulders and then fading out by the time they got to the bottom of her ribs.

He loved those freckles. Far too much. Her pale, pale blue eyes, her sun-dusted skin, her blonde hair, her long neck—all of it. The more he got to know her, the more gorgeous she became.

She was thin; her ribs and the beads of her spine showed through her fair skin. But she hadn’t reacted at all to the tattoo machine, not even when it was right on her spine. When he’d asked if she was hurting, she’d laughed.

She’d gotten the piercing right after the tattoo, and for that, she’d taken her phone from him and shooed him away. He still had no idea what she’d gotten pierced; when he’d asked, she’d laughed again and called him a perv.

Which was clearly true. Seriously. Who went sniffing after a sick girl? A perv, that was who.

He spent some time at night, every night, imagining where her new piercing might be.

Since then, she hadn’t told him any more of her list, and as far as he knew, she hadn’t crossed anything else off. He’d taken her for a ride up the PCH. They’d spent a day with her playing tour guide for him around L.A. He’d had a couple of family dinners with the Winters.

It was so weird that he’d been hanging out with Donovan Winter. Donovan fucking Winter. He’d spent one evening talking at great length about motorcycles, Donovan asking question after question as if he were honestly interested in the things Nolan knew. Donovan fucking Winter. Who’d turned out to be a cool guy.

Her brother was cool, too, and almost exactly Nolan’s age. Nolan’s geek side had gotten buried since Havoc’s death, but standing in Tris’s room, seeing hand-painted D&D and Warhammer figurines, shelves of fantasy novels and comics, and an impressive game and film collection, his inner geek had risen from the dead. Analisa had walked by the open door and rolled her eyes at them.

So, no. Nolan didn’t want to avoid her or any of her family.

Not until that ambush on the Rats a couple of days before. They’d killed seven men—all that had remained of the most-local Rats charter. Then they’d burned and buried them, standing around a deep grave and watching until the fire had consumed everything it could. The smell of cooking flesh had been so strong that Nolan had wondered if they’d attract man or beast to the scent.

Nolan had killed one man himself. That in itself didn’t fuck with him; he was getting used to killing. None of what they’d done had caused him much concern.

And that was what was fucking with him. On the ride back to the clubhouse, his mind had been loose in his head, teasing at whatever thought it wanted, and the thought it wanted was this: he was a killer. Even more, he didn’t care.

He still didn’t care. But he cared that he didn’t care.

And,
God
, he wanted to talk to Havoc about it. He knew Havoc had killed, too, of course he had. Multiple times. Nolan needed his father. He needed to know how to be a good man and also be a man who could blow half a man’s head off and not give a shit.

There were other people he could talk to; he knew that. Badger. Show. Even Bart, who’d spent the past ten months trying to stand in for Havoc. But Nolan hadn’t known much of Bart at all until he’d come to SoCal, so he’d never be more than a brother. And Show and Badger still saw him as a boy. He knew what they would say. Come home. Get away from the question completely. Come back home.

He couldn’t. Not until he had an answer.

Staring at his phone, he wondered whether a man who couldn’t answer that question was the kind of man who should be accompanying a dying girl through the end of her life.

Or maybe, because she was dying, it didn’t matter. He could pretend to be what he wanted to be. Who he was didn’t need to touch her in the short time she had. She needed a friend. He needed to be a good man. Their needs seemed to mesh.

So he listened to her voice mail. And then he called her back.

~oOo~

“Your father is going to kill me. He’ll pull out his Dix Turner moves, and they’ll be finding my pieces all up and down the coast. Or he’ll just send that tank he calls a bodyguard after me.”

Analisa laughed and handed Nolan her helmet. “Dix Turner is pretend, and those were dumb movies. You’re a big bad biker. This is a big bad biker bar. It’s your element, right?”

“Sure. And also the very place he told me never to take you.”

They were standing outside an unassuming building across the Pacific Coast Highway from Malibu Beach. The front of the building and the sides of the road for some distance were full of parked motorcycles. This bar was well known and popular. Several movies had been shot here, in fact. The exterior, anyway.

They were here because Analisa wanted to cross something off her list. She wouldn’t tell him what, only that she needed to do it here. He hoped it was ‘sit quietly, have a drink, and cause no trouble,’ but somehow he didn’t think so. Her secret list was still mainly a mystery to him, but it seemed to be her ‘rebel’ list. At this point, he was just along for the ride.

“Okay. Let’s go in and get you a drink. Then maybe you’ll tell me what it is you want here.”

It was still fairly early; the sun hadn’t sunk into the ocean yet, though it was big and pink and ready to go under. He had some hope that the crowd here would still be mostly tourists and wannabes, who’d be behaving themselves, drinking their beers and taking their selfies.

Speaking of selfies, Analisa was carefully documenting their evening at the biker bar. When he noticed some unfriendly looks, he put his hand over the lens and pulled the phone down.

“Careful, Ani. A lot of these guys aren’t into having their picture taken. You’re better off doing it like you did your piercing—just some before and after shots. Okay?”

He still hadn’t seen her piercing, he still didn’t even know where it was, but he’d asked whether she’d filmed the whole thing. No, she hadn’t.

“You are a buzzkill. Just so you know.”

“I prefer to think I’m a lifeguard. What is it you want from this? I can’t help if I don’t know.”

Her only answer was a coy grin. Then she leaned on the bar, and the bartender, a round, older guy covered in ink, leaned on the other side. “Getcha somethin’, sweetness?”

“We want shots. Lots of shots. What’s good here?”

The bartender looked at Nolan, his eyebrows high on his wrinkled head.

Nolan ordered, since Analisa obviously had no clue what she was doing. “Couple shots of tequila—top shelf.”

She wasn’t drinking age, but this bar wasn’t going to card a girl who’d come in with a guy wearing a patch on his back.

They got their shots, and Analisa lifted hers up high. “To a long and healthy life!” She tossed it right back—but then didn’t swallow. Her cheeks puffed out with expensive tequila, she made a bizarre face, and then finally forced it down.