Page 10 of Jagger
“Sinner is my grandpa, and no, he wasn’t there tonight.”
“Wait, you call your grandpa Sinner?” I asked, shocked at the thought. I settled down in my comfy chair and kicked my feet up on the matching ottoman, pulling a soft, plush throw over my bare legs to ward off the chill from the air-conditioning.
“I told you, Angel, none of us use our given names. Since I started prospecting myself when I turned eighteen, I’ve called them all by their road names, even my dad. He’s always King or Prez to me now.”
“Wow,” I mused. “I remember I went through a phase when I was about fifteen where I thought it would be cool to call my parents by their first names. My mom just ignored it, knowing it would pass soon enough. Not my dad, though. The first time I called him Dave, he grounded me for a week.”
“I’ll bet it was the last time you called him Dave, too, wasn’t it?” Jagger teased.
“You bet your butt it was,” I assured him, before drawing the subject back around to the club. “So, how long have you been a member? Did you have to prospect for a year, or did you get a break because of your dad being in charge?”
“Nope, no breaks, in fact, I’m pretty sure our time was rougher just because we were his kids,” he chuckled. “Rome and I prospected together, and King wanted to make sure nobody could say we hadn’t earned our patches.”
“It sounds like you have a lot of respect for him,” I said, loving the way he spoke about his family, even though it was so vastly different than my own.
“I respect the hell out of him, as a father and a president,” he told me firmly. “He and Sinner worked hard to build the club into something good for the community, and it hasn’t always been easy. MC’s have a bad rep, and there’s been a lot of resistance to the Guardians from citizens and the cops over the years, because they’ve assumed that we’re into all the shit that the one-percenters do.”
“I remember you said that earlier today…one-percenters. I’ve heard that phrase, but I don’t know exactly what that means,” I confessed, feeling a little foolish at everything I didn’t understand about his world. I picked up my mug and blew on the tea before taking a small sip. Mmmm, pure ambrosia.
“One-percenters are the hard-core outlaw clubs. They say that ninety-nine percent of society is law-abiding and follows the rules set by authority, but they are the one percent who operate outside of those rules. They tend to run drugs, women, guns, you name it. We don’t do that shit. I’m not saying we always follow all of the rules, but we don’t fuck around with shit that can get you sent up doing hard time,” he said gruffly.
“So, what does your club do exactly? I know you do the charity rides for the youth shelter. I think that’s great, by the way. What else do you do?” I hoped I wasn’t asking too many questions, but I really was fascinated. Listening to his deep, growly voice rumbling in my ear wasn’t exactly a hardship either.
“Well, Sinner formed the club back in 1978. Back then, he skirted the law a little more than we do now. They sold a lot of weed and raised a lot of hell when they first started. He told me that he started the club mainly to piss off his old man, who was a preacher. Sinner had been with another club before that, but they all got busted for stealing cars and running some kind of chop shop. The president and officers got sentenced to hard time, and the club disbanded. Sinner was only a prospect and wasn’t too heavily involved, so he only got six months in jail for possessing stolen property. He had a stereo system from one of the cars.Anyway, his dad disowned him for what he called his sinful ways, and a few years later my grandpa got together with some other buddies and formed the Guardians. His best friend started calling him Sinner as a joke, and that’s how he got his road name.”
“And the 5thCircle Guardians…is that a nod to Dante’s Inferno, and the 5thcircle of Hell?” I asked.
“See, that right there shows you’re different than most people I meet. Most of them have no fucking clue what the 5thCircle stands for. Yeah, again, Sinner was trying to piss off his old man. Plus, Sinner’s real name is Virgil, like the character in the story, so he thought that it was funny as hell.”
“Wait, so you can tell me your grandpa’s real name, but you won’t tell me yours? That makes no sense, unless yours is something really embarrassing. Your name isn’t Hobart or Ebenezer, is it?” I teased him, laughing as I tried to imagine calling out‘Oh God, Hobart, right there’in the throes of passion.
A bark of laughter came through the phone. “Hell no, I promise my name isn’t Hobart or Ebenezer. I’ll tell you what, if you’re a good girl, maybe I’ll tell you my real name after our date Monday night.”
I got goosebumps when he murmured ‘good girl’ in my ear like that. Who knew I had a praise kink? Not me, that’s for sure.
“OK, so I’ll tell you mine when you tell me yours, deal?” I asked playfully. I caught myself giggling and twirling a piece of my hair around my finger and dropped my hand down to my side in disgust. Good Lord, I hadn’t acted this twitterpated around a guy even back when I was a teenager. What on earth was wrong with me?
I heard voices in the background, and Jagger asked me to hang on for a second. I could tell he put his hand over his phone to muffle it a little, but it sounded like there was another problem by the aggravated tone he responded with.
“Yeah, I’ll be right there. Switch to the other register in the meantime, and I’ll try to get it back online,” he said to whoever was with him.
“I’m sorry Angel, but I’m going to have to cut this call short. One of our credit card readers went down, and that means cashing out the tabs at the end of the night is going to be a fucking nightmare if I can’t get it up and running again. I’ll try to call you tomorrow before we leave on our ride.”
“No problem. Good luck fixing it, and if I don’t get a chance to talk with you in the morning, have a safe ride.”
“Thanks, Angel. Goodnight and sweet dreams,” he said, his deep voice doing weird things to my insides again.
“Goodnight, Jagger,” I said softly.
I finished my tea while scrolling through my social media on my phone and then made the mistake of Googling motorcycle clubs and the Guardians in particular. I spent the next few hours engrossed in the strange new world of bikers and their clubs, learning more than I ever really wanted to know about the lifestyle they seemed to lead. The romance I’d read had mentioned women who hung around the clubhouse toservicethe bikers there and I had assumed it was strictly fiction, or at least an exaggeration on the author’s part. Turns out, it was not. Different clubs gave them different names from what I could tell, but club sluts, club whores, sweet butts, and club bunnies seemed to be the most popular. Sweet baby Jesus, what have I gotten myself into?
I went to bed, then tossed and turned the rest of the night, trying to reconcile everything I’d read with what I had learned about Jagger so far, and I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I finally drifted off to sleep sometime after four in the morning and was barely awake when Jagger called a little before eleven to let me know they had just finished with Church, and were heading out soon.
“We’re going to ride down through Brown County on into southern Indiana. It’s gonna be a beautiful day for it,” he told me, and I could tell he was glad to be going.
“Is the whole club going, or just a certain group of you?”
“It’s a club ride, so everyone who can make it will be there. There are seventeen bikes in the line-up today, and some of the guys are bringing their wives or Old Ladies.”
