A Head to Go With It
Short Fiction
He always had a second helmet on the back of his motorcycle, and, at last call, he always seemed to have a head to go with it.
But he wasn’t a room worker, a drink buyer, a schmoozer, a show-off. She didn’t know what he was, but she wanted it.
An idea had built in Courtney Rizzo’s head from a seed to a garden, and, like a decent garden, it had taken a couple seasons.
Being honest with herself, she was probably always going to be drawn to danger, but her attraction to Ricky Seefeldt wasn’t necessarily a proclivity for dangerous men. Those proclivities usually ended up with cracked skulls and PPO’s, kids in foster homes, and a lifetime dependence on pharmaceuticals.
The garden of her desire for Ricky “Smoke” Seefeldt began to bud when he broke up a brawl between some Disciples and some fraternity morons when Courtney’s finger, for the first time in her two years at Dooley’s, was about to press the panic button.
How one guy breaks up a fight between six coked-up Phi Delts who were slumming and three Disciples in their home tavern was something she really wanted to know.
She asked, a few nights later, what Smoke had said to three guys, in a club he wasn’t a member of, to successfully rescue a Mercedes full of trust fund dickheads that probably deserved whatever was coming.
“At some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you keep it does not.”
She smiled, nodded, and Ricky walked away with his beer. It wasn’t until twenty minutes later when she was dropping a shot in a Car Bomb, that she realized he had quoted Water for Elephants.
The garden was in full bloom, and she was watering a pair of the three-for-ten buck underwear she got at Kohls.
When he came back for another round, Courtney mentioned the quotation to him. “Did you quote…” she asked.
He smiled, a soft, genuine smile, the kind of smile that had probably lifted most of those women onto the back of his motorcycle, and said “We can keep that a secret too.”
She had come to Dooley’s, in the worst neighborhood in the city, to escape her trust fund comfort, her mother and her mother’s workaholism, her father’s speeches about fly-fishing. She had come to seek adventure, to tickle her proclivity for danger, some nights to teeter on the edge of reason.
And now with no danger to her self-esteem whatsoever, she wanted to be the first woman in two years to get a second ride on Smoke’s motorcycle.
Photo by Sung Jin Cho on Unsplash
Thank you to JL Matthews for the prompt of “proclivity".
I’ve had this feeling before. 💙