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So, I became the main girl of a dragon-shifting, biker-gang leader. Which I think was not what my parents had intended when I had started my aerophysics degree.
Nobody made me feel like CC did. When his eyes were on me, I was filled with a violent fire, unlike anything I’d ever felt before, and I needed him right then, wherever we were. We often got left behind by the gang, because we’d pulled off to canoodle in a roadside clearing or up in a massive tree.
I was sitting on his lap in a biker bar. We were on the outskirts of Montana, maybe a little closer to Idaho than I’d been before. My leather miniskirt was riding up a lot more than I wanted, but it felt weird to be wearing anything other than what passed as our uniform, I guess.
I was nursing a beer, which was flat and not particularly good, while CC chatted with a guy and girl I didn’t recognize. Some locals who were falling for his usual schtick. I didn’t pay much attention, because I’d heard the stories before.
My mind was somewhere else. I hated myself for it, because here I was on the adventure of the lifetime, literally having sex while flying on a nightly basis with a gorgeous boy, and my dumb brain couldn’t help drifting to the golden-haired dream I’d left at home.
The first time Blake and I had kissed was in middle school. It was a mess, because I had a retainer that made me store up too much saliva in my mouth, and he had floppy emo hair (still blond though, he never dyed it because his mom would’ve been too sad) that hung in his eyes and disrupted his vision.
We were ‘dating’ in that timid way that twelve year olds date. We were hanging outside a Target, waiting for my mom to come pick us up. All the other kids who we’d been loitering with had already gone home.
So we were alone. Which we had been a lot of times. But this time it felt different, because this was the first time we’d been alone since we had called ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend.
I didn’t know what to do. Then he asked me, “Do you think I’m a good boyfriend? Like, do you feel happy when we’re together?”
I nodded my head. “Of course!” I said, swallowing some spit. I felt a lot of things when we were together. Mostly tense during that brief dating period, but at the time I thought that was what being in love felt like.
I nodded resolutely. “You’re a great boyfriend,” I said, then quickly panicked, and asked, “Am I a good girlfriend?”
“Yep. You’re awesome,” he said, with a firm nod, “You’re really funny.”
I relaxed. He looked at me. I looked at him.
We had a horrible kiss where I literally drooled out of the side of my mouth. It wasn’t very magical.
What was magical was the ride back to his place, where he let his hand rest on mine, but barely, so that my mom wouldn’t see.
I think we broke up a few weeks later because we didn’t want to ‘ruin our friendship’, which was also exciting because it felt very mature and grown up to break up for such a smart reason, and so amicably.
Sitting on CC’s lap in the bar, I felt like crying. I got up, and he smacked my ass, so I turned around and nearly pushed him off the chair.
He held his hands up. “Sorry! Sorry, baby. What’s up?”
I said, “I need some air.” He tried to hand me cigarettes, as if they would calm me down, but I pushed them away and ran outside.
A golden head of hair was waiting for me there.
Blake was outside the bar, leaning against his pick-up truck.
He said, “I thought these were your bikes, but I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t work up the courage to go in.”
I didn’t know what to say. I suddenly hated my outfit. It was so very not-me.
Blake didn’t waste a second looking me over. He walked straight up to me and hugged me, and as I melted into his arms, I started to cry.
He whispered to me, “Your dad told me that ... You’re a shifter. That you have this gift. He has it, too. He says he should’ve told you, told all of us, and you never would have run away.”
Blake’s large body started shaking, and I realized he was crying with me as he held me tightly.
“My ... my dad?” I whispered.
He said, “Yes. It’s genetic. He told me all about it, and you know what? It’s pretty freaking weird, Kat. But somehow ... it makes sense for you? You’ve always been special. Not just to me, but to everybody. This is just another way you’re special. God damn it, I love you, Katherine. I’ve been trying to find you for months, now, so I could tell you. Whatever you are, whoever you want to be, I love you.”
I tipped my head back to look up at his face and saw how sincere he was. He bent down and kissed me softly, the lightest brush against my lips. Then he pulled back.
He said, “I know you might feel better with people more like you. Like this motorcycle club. But I wanted you to know ... You have a choice. You can come home and be you, and be loved, or you can stay here, and be you, and be with them. Whichever you want, it’s your choice.”
It was too much. It was all too crazy. I’d already chosen this life, and I didn’t want to think about it anymore.
I stepped away from him. Away from home.
I told him, “Thank you. So much. But I can’t.”
I went back inside and left him by his pickup truck.
I tried to find CC, so he could look me in the eye and remind me why I’d chosen this life of freedom over Blake and small town Montana.
I asked someone where he was, and they just laughed. I got an awful, sticky feeling in my throat.
I rushed to the bathroom. I threw open the door to the men’s room, which CC hadn’t even bothered to lock. He was getting blown by the dude he’d been talking to earlier, while the girl made out with him and squealed while he fingered her.
I shouted, “CC, what the hell?”
He stopped kissing the girl long enough to say, “Care to join?”
Then I realized what a biker gang meant by “main girl”. It meant I was his primary, but not his only. And I knew him well enough to know that he would never, ever change.
I’d made a huge mistake. The one true love of my life had just driven off in a pickup.
But it wasn’t that hard to catch up when you could fly.
I rushed out of the door, starting to feel the burn on my shoulders as I geared up to shift, only to find that Blake was still sitting in his car. He hadn’t pulled away yet.
He hadn’t even put the key in the ignition. He looked at me, waiting breathlessly.
I walked to the passenger door and slid inside. He stared at me, cautiously, not wanting to expect too much.
I said, “On a scale of one to one hundred, how pissed is my mom?”
He grimaced and shook his head. “One billion.”
I said, “Awesome.”
We held hands the whole drive home.
