Into the Sunset

One text. Eleven words. That’s all it took for me to find myself standing at the door of a bar belonging to a motorcycle club. I didn’t know what I was going to find when I walked through this door. Would my husband Adam be drunk, hurt, or worse, in the arms of another woman? Opening that door is going to mean that my life as I knew it is gone forever. I felt it in my bones.

Come on, Sadie, you can do this, I said as I clenched my fists over and over. If he’s with some woman would that be all that different? Adam has treated me like I was nothing for years, so would his being gone be a bad thing?

I wouldn’t know any of it until I stepped through that door. So I opened the door, noticing that it didn’t make a sound. No one paid any attention to me as I walked inside.

I looked around, squinting until my eyes adjusted to the darkness. And I found what I was looking for.

I was right—nothing would ever be the same.

“Can I get another beer?” I asked Macy.

“Sure thing, Wrench,” she replied with a flirtatious smile. She had been trying to get my attention since I moved here, but she wasn’t my type. None of the girls I met here were my type.

So many of the local girls were after the bad-boy biker image. But that wasn’t me.

Sure, I was a biker, but I wasn’t about charm and rough sex. And I didn’t want a woman who only saw me as those things.

I wanted a woman who wanted me, Seth, not Wrench, the VP of Sinner’s Pride.

But calling me by my given name was reserved for my old lady. And as of three thirty this afternoon, I hadn’t found her yet.

As Macy passed me a new bottle, the door to the bar opened, and I turned to look at who entered. No one else batted an eye.

It was a woman who looked to be in her thirties. She was heavier, but not huge. Her dirty-blonde hair was up in one of those messy bun things on top of her head, and black-rimmed glasses framed her light-blue eyes. She was wearing what looked like her work clothes—a dress and flats.

I swallowed unconsciously.

Without trying, the woman took my breath away. She had that innocent but knowledgeable look. I could tell she had been living her life and was learning to deal with all the shit it threw her way. I instantly wanted to talk to her but instead watched as she scanned the room.

I didn’t remember seeing her at the bar before, but I could have sat on the stool and watched her for the rest of my life.

She looked around the room before zeroing in on a table.

I followed her gaze to the guy who had been coming in a lot lately. He was currently making out with a woman the club knew all too well.

Vanessa. She had been sleeping her way through some of the club guys. Most of them said she was crazy and was looking for a biker to claim her.

I thought back on it and realized that Vanessa and the guy had been coming in a lot recently. Usually, Vanessa showed up in the early afternoon, and the guy followed shortly after.

My senses were tingling. The new woman twisted a couple of rings around her finger. Her engagement and wedding rings were my guess.

And based on the way she was staring at the couple, I thought those rings might mean that she was taken by that guy.

I watched her with curiosity as she continued to stand there for a few minutes, staring at the two idiots making out at the table. They were acting like a couple of horny teenagers who needed to get a room.

This woman was married to the jackass making out with Vanessa, and she was seeing it for the first time.

Her pale complexion gave her an otherworldly look, and I was transfixed by her.

I could tell she wasn’t one to wear makeup, but it wasn’t something she needed. She was beautiful without it. There were dark circles under her eyes, and from the way she carried herself, I knew she wasn’t overweight because she didn’t care. She had the body she did because she worked too hard and didn’t have enough time to take care of herself.

The woman looked like she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders.

With a nod, she turned and walked to the bar. She stood next to me and placed a twenty down.

“Double shot of tequila, please.”

The woman flinched as she drank the double, making it obvious that she wasn’t normally a drinker. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

When she opened them, she turned to me. She looked me in the eye and then moved her gaze down to my empty beer bottle.

“May I have that?” she asked, pointing to the bottle. Her voice was quiet and kind.

I sucked in a breath at the sound. It was like music to my soul, and I realized that I didn’t want the first time we spoke to be like this. It broke my heart to hear such a gentle soul having to ask for something.

I nodded and passed her the bottle.

She took it in her hand and slowly turned it in circles on top of the bar. Just when I was about to ask if she was okay, she firmly grabbed the bottle and walked to the couple sucking face in the corner.

She watched for a moment as the two of them practically ate each other’s faces off. Neither of them noticed anyone was there.

With a look of determination on her face, she raised the hand holding the bottle and brought it down onto the edge of the table, breaking it in two.

The lovebirds jumped at the sound and broke apart. Vanessa looked at the woman, a smirk on her face, while her husband stared in shock.

Neither of them looked guilty.

The woman looked between the two of them before speaking. “You know, I’ve put up with a lot over the years. You’ve insulted me about my appearance, my cooking, my cleaning, and even the way I work at my job. And yet I always took it. I never fought back. I even held my tongue as you turned my son against me. But this? This is where I call it done.”

“Sadie—” Vanessa tried to say.

But the woman was not having it. She pointed the broken bottle at Vanessa, shutting her up.

I got up from my barstool, shooting Reaper a look. Words we could deal with. But violence could get us shut down, and we didn’t need that shit.

Vanessa and the guy were both standing now, but the woman, Sadie, was not backing down.

The man pushed Vanessa behind him. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing here? How dare you threaten her with that! Are you so fucking pathetic that you can’t let me go without chasing after me?”

By this time, the entire bar was watching the situation unfold. There were plenty of phones recording the scene, and some people were not-so-quietly trying to hide their laughter.

“Once again, I think you have done enough,” she said softly. “I never threatened her. I was merely pointing an object at her. I’m far enough away from her that there’s no way I could hit her.”

This man cheated on the strong, beautiful woman in front of me, and I wanted nothing more than to beat his face in with that bottle.

Reaper moved to stand next to me, and I knew he realized I was ready to pounce at any second.

The woman wasn’t done yet. “I’m here because someone texted me and told me to come and find you here. I don’t care anymore that you’re fucking someone else. She can have you.”

I wanted to cheer at those words, but I was also concerned that the bottle was getting a little too close to the cheating bastard.

The bar was one of the ways Sinner’s Pride was trying to stay legit as an MC. We had previously been in Texas, and our dealings there weren’t so much on the up and up. We all decided that we were done with the danger of our lives down there and decided to start fresh in North Carolina.

But no matter how legit we were, the authorities wouldn’t like it if there was a bar fight. We had a hard enough time getting the permits to convert the old motel into a bar and housing for the single members of the club; we didn’t need any negative attention on us in this uber-religious town.

She took another step closer to him. “Let me tell you what is going to happen. I’m going to go home and pack my things. I’m only taking my personal items. I’m going to leave the car that is in both our names and take my car that I purchased before we were married.”

The husband laughed like he had just heard the funniest thing in the world.

“I signed that over to Garrett. You have no car!”

Vanessa joined in the laughter.

“You are so worthless that no one is ever going to want you. You should give up any idea of making it on your own now.”

She shook her head. “You make yourself out to be this great Christian man who loves his family, but you can’t even treat me with enough respect to not cheat out in the open.”

He chuckled, and it sent a shiver of disgust down my spine. “I don’t know what I ever saw in you. You’re nothing but a fat cow and the only reason I stayed with you was so you would do everything around the house. You’ll never make it without me.” Adam seethed before taking a step closer to her, and I saw red. He looked like he wanted to lay his hands on his wife, and that wasn’t happening on my watch.

I walked up behind the woman, Reaper just a step behind me, and looked at the pathetic excuse of a man. He was so focused on his wife that he hadn’t noticed me.

Reaper cleared his throat. “She’ll be just fine. You will stay here while she gets her things. If you don’t, you’ll have to answer to my buddy, Wrench,” he growled out.

I folded my arms across my chest. “I’m here, and I’ll make sure she has everything she needs to get away from you.”

The woman lifted her chin, and a wave of pride rushed through me at the look of determination on her face.

“I don’t want the money in our joint accounts or any of the other things we had together. I will have a lawyer get in touch with you.” With that, she walked to the door and I followed behind her.

I heard footsteps and turned to see Adam moving to follow us. I put all of my anger into a look that said to back off and it worked. Adam stopped moving and only watched as I led Sadie out the door.