Hearing You Read online

  Hearing You

  A Gay Motorcycle Club Romance

  by

  Parker Avrile

  ♥♥♥

  When a motorcycle club initiation goes terribly wrong, Damon wakes in the hospital with the power to read minds. Most of them aren't worth reading.

  And then he starts reading Steele...

  Turns out the heavily inked biker is keeping a secret― a steamy one.

  Copyright & Credits

  All Rights Reserved

  Text Copyright © 2016 Parker Avrile & Paris April Press

  Previously published as “Reading Steele”

  Except for brief passages quoted for reviews and/or recommendations in magazine, radio, or blog posts, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to anyone, any time, or any place is not intended and is merely coincidental. The cover model appears for illustration purposes only and has no relationship to any events in this story. Brief mentions of real persons, places, or products are used fictitiously and in accordance with fair use. All trademarks remain the properties of their owners.

  If you are offended by the strong language used by real-life Americans or by frank depictions of love and sex between men, this is not the right book for you. All characters are age 18+ and all readers should be too.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Disclaimer

  Other Short Stories by Parker Avrile

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Other Short Stories by Parker Avrile

  Blackmail Boy (gay rock star romance)

  Infinity in Blue (a sci-fi romance of love across the multi-verse)

  The First Dance (gay first love)

  Lost Diamond (gay mystery)

  Blackmail Boy, Infinity in Blue, and The First Dance are now available in audio at many retailers and some libraries. Visit my audio web page for a list of places to find them.

  Acknowledgments

  Much thanks to Kendra, Natalie, and the ever-popular Anonymous Coward for their kind assistance as my first readers.

  My undying gratitude to the Anonymous Hero who took me to the secret location to view the real-life gyrfalcon, a species under threat from global warming and collection by the illegal wildlife trade. The desert gyrfalcon appearing in this story is a fictional subspecies, and the nest site is at a fictional location.

  Any errors are my own.

  Chapter One

  Six motorcycles parked in a row in the empty lot. Six guys without steady jobs who somehow had the means to purchase flashy black leather jackets. The fence that caged the property from the street had been attacked by wire cutters again a week or so ago.

  I pedaled fast. The members of the Furio Scorpio Motorcycle Club were crouched around the sand pit they'd dug the other night, and I had a reasonably good chance of blowing past under their radar. My bike, a Santa Cruz Stigmata CC, might boast a precision-engineered carbon frame, but I doubt they knew it retailed for close to ten thousand dollars. To that crowd, a muscle-powered bike equaled a kid's toy.

  My cousin Chollie stood up. He was wearing tasteful new boots and a matching collar with shiny chrome studs sticking out all over. Evidently he was a pit bull in his own mind. By "tasteful" I mean "bad taste." You understood that. But Chollie wouldn't. He thought he was the hottest thing this side of Hollywood.

  I dropped my bike next door on Uncle Brick's front lawn, if lawn was the right word for his unorthodox brand of desert landscaping. I pretended not to look back at Chollie.

  When I arrived on my uncle's doorstep ten months ago, all I saw was a collection of angry-looking cactus set in whitey-beige round pebbles outlined in broken red bricks. That's before I knew the prickly specimens were temporary guests, there for a week or so before being transported again to some rich person's estate outside Scottsdale.

  Late May. Hell was hot, but the Sueno Perdido Valley was hotter. The forecast was a high of one hundred fourteen degrees. People here in this part of Arizona, without irony, called July and August the monsoon season because sometimes the afternoon highs only reached eighty-six. Fuck. I could hardly wait to experience the much-vaunted monsoon for myself.

  Yeah, that was sarcasm. My cousin hates my sarcasm. Says it makes me sound like I think I'm better than they are. But when you see six guys standing around a sand pit placing bets on a bug race, it's hard not to categorize them as rednecks. Especially since it was already close to ninety degrees, and the Motorcycle Club still thought they were too cool to take off their leather jackets.

  "Get some fucking beer," Chollie said.

  "Fuck you." But I was still a guest in my uncle's house, even after graduating from high school the week before. So I grabbed two six-packs of generic that were just as illegal to possess in Arizona as in New York. None of us was twenty-one. I was the youngest at eighteen, and Chollie was the oldest at twenty. But I'd figured out within two days of landing in the Phoenix airport that nobody in Arizona gives much of a fuck about the law, not even the sheriff. That's more than a TV show. It's a way of life.

  Chollie and four of the other guys each took two beers. That left me and the smallest club member, Hasp, with one. Not that Hasp was what anybody back in Williamsburg would have called scrawny. Like all the others, he looked like he'd just spent a year in a maximum security weight room developing his biceps. But he was an inch or two shorter than the rest, and I guess that was enough to knock him down in the pack's pecking order.

  How did I get here, standing around a pit of sand with a drunken MC drinking a convenience store generic instead of an Imperial IPA from my dad's dedicated beer cooler?

  Chollie knelt back down to nudge five or six highly unmotivated Arizona giant hairy desert scorpions. "Go, girl." He waved a cricket on a pair of tongs in front of a bug that looked to me exactly like all the others. Six inches long. Claws and a stinger. Sand-colored, if sand could be semi-transparent. I never cared to inspect the specimens closely enough to see if they actually did feature hair.

  "No fucking looky-loos," Hasp said. "Place your fucking bet."

  "I'm not betting on a fucking scorpion race," I said. "I'm from Brooklyn. You think I can't tell when the fix is in?"

  "The fuck you're not betting."

  "You could tell me anybody won, and I would have to believe it."

  "They're not running today anyway. They must be overfed." That was Steele. I was a little shy to look his way, because he would have been my type if not for the long tail of an intricately inked dragon that curled around and around his neck. It was hard for me to see past that damn dragon. A shame, really. Great body on the guy. Long powerful legs. Tight curved ass that puffed out to an eye-catching degree. Wide shoulders. Short brown hair and nearly trimmed beard to frame a sculpted face highlighted by large hazel eyes.

  But I didn't get the stupid neck tat. Chollie once claimed it was a protest against the New York banking system.

  "A very effective protest," I said. "He'll never have to worry about being lured away by dirty money to work for a hedge fund."

  Sure, we had tats in Williamsburg, but they were informed tattoos. Ironic. These guys had tats inked all over them like they really meant it.

  "C'mon, girl," Chollie repeated. The scorpion finally looked up like she was considering it.

  Steele squared those large shoulders. "More food ain't g
onna fix it. These fuckers aren't going to race. I have a better idea."

  Chollie's girl grabbed the cricket and ate. I looked away from the pit.

  "Let's initiate Damon," Steele said. "It's past time."

  "He's not one of us," Chollie said. "He'll never be one of us."

  "You never give him a fair chance. It isn't his fault about his father."

  "It's his fault about the French bike. It's fucking gay. Why would you drag that out here all the way from New York?"

  Don't ask me why he thought the bike was French. Maybe it was my spandex biking shorts. As for the rest, I was out back home, but I knew better than to fly the rainbow flag in rural Arizona. Still, there are limits to how far I'm willing to go along to get along. "Sorry, ladies, but I'm going to have to decline your kind invitation. I'm not interested in being initiated into Furio Scorpio. Besides the undeniable fact that I lack the right kind of bike, I'm afraid that being in a motorcycle club just isn't part of my aesthetic."

  "Don't fucking worry about your fucking aesthetic, Brooklyn boy," Chollie said. "You'll never be a member of this crew."

  I barely felt like I was part of Chollie's family as it was. Forget his fucking MC. I didn't understand Uncle Brick or his decision to spend his whole life in the same small town where my grandparents had been executed by a rival crime gang before Chollie and I were even born. You can say what you want about my father― and the fucking New York Post said plenty― but he got his happy ass to the big city, got steady work in a high-paying career, and dedicated his life to making a better future for his son. True, the steady work turned out to be enforcer for an organized drug cartel, and my time at the fancy private prep school came to an abrupt conclusion when he went down for life on multiple murder convictions. But at least I knew what fork to use for salad and why it was a bad idea to stand outside in direct sunlight racing bugs.

  "We've all done it," Hasp said. "It's his turn. Even if he isn't a full member, he hangs with us. He needs to be initiated."

  Steele nodded. "He's your blood, Chollie. Time to give him a chance to prove himself. He's ready. I know he is."

  The abortive race was forgotten without further discussion. Some of the scorpions were trying to dig into the sand, and they'd be lost if the boys didn't pick up fast. Marco and Steele were already collecting them bare-handed to put back into a hard plastic box. I looked at Steele's big hands, each knuckle marked with a tiny Japanese character. He had a deft touch that relaxed the bugs. Or maybe he just knew where to grip them to keep from triggering the stinger.

  "What have you all done?" I already suspected I wouldn't like the answer.

  Chollie's huge thighs flexed in his leather chaps as his knees spread open. He thrust a bare hand into the pit, inviting one of the remaining scorpions to take a chomp. I flinched, an automatic response. The boldest took the bait, thrusting hard with its stinger into the meat of Chollie's large left hand.

  "Fuck! FUCK!" But there was pride in Chollie's voice. Self-destructive shithead. He liked the pain.

  "Are you fucking crazy?" I stepped forward, then thought better of it and stumbled back.

  The scorpion was still latched on tight, its body arched taut as it emptied its venom sac deep into Chollie's palm.

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket. Steele slapped it down fast.

  "You don't call anybody."

  "He's poisoned, man. We need an ambulance here."

  "He's fine. We've all done it. Chollie's done it five or six times. It's just like getting an electric shock."

  The scorpion relaxed and pulled away. It seemed hesitant now. I don't suppose a bug can feel guilt, but it seemed to wonder what the consequences of its action would be.

  Chollie picked it up in his other hand and dropped it in the tank. It stood apart from the others. Yeah, I thought. That one knows it's shooting blanks now.

  "Fuck," he kept saying. "Fuck. I can see the stars."

  There was a large quarter-sized red welt already rising on his hand.

  "Very macho," I said. "I'm most impressed. But I'm still going to have to decline this test of manhood. I am not worthy."

  "You deserve to be one of us," Steele said. "I believe in you."

  "I'm sure it's a very great honor but no. Just no."

  Too late. Hasp had me on one side, and Steele had me on the other. I was falling to my knees almost before I knew it. No choice but to slam my hands out in front of me to break my fall. Fuck. My palms hit hard in the sand pit, sinking deep. The scorpions are gone, I told myself. They already picked them all up. It's safe. No scorps here. It's OK, it's OK. Breathe, breathe, breathe...

  Something boiled up out of the sand. It wasn't the same as the others. They were a translucent gold, but this... this... was it radium green? It seemed to glow when my shadow fell on it. Oh fucking hell. Maybe I'd already been bitten. Maybe I was already poisoned. Surely I was hallucinating. There was no such thing as radioactive green scorpions. Not here. Maybe in New Mexico, maybe in the places where they used to do the atomic bomb tests but not here, no, no, no, no....

  "The fuck, the fuck, the FUCK, you guys!" It was biting me for real. "The fuck. That green one, that's a wild one, it's got some kind of disease, guys. Please, call a fucking ambulance, I'm going to fucking die..."

  Even with my eyes closed, I could see a bomb going off inside of my head. A bright white light, as if I'd been struck by lightning on the top of my skull. I twitched and jerked like somebody being electrocuted. Was that smoke? Was that my nerve endings being shorted out?

  White light...

  White...

  Gone...

  Chapter Two

  I'm dead. That's it. I'm fucking dead.

  I'm happy to report that there's no pain after death, not even for the son of a convicted mob hitman. The darkness behind my eyes was so beautiful that I kept them closed to focus on the sweet sensation of floating on a cloud.

  What a hottie. I'd hit it. Shame about the family. Bunch of fucking rednecks.

  The hell? That voice in my head wasn't my voice. I blinked my eyes open and sat up fast. There was a young nurse's aide putting a bit of ice against my lips. I sucked.

  Beautiful eyes. Jesus.

  I have blue eyes. To me, they're just eyes like anybody's eyes. But seeing them from her point of view... oh shit. She had a thing about blue eyes and dark hair. The rest of her thoughts were X-rated. Fuck me. I didn't want to know if girls really thought like that. Anyway, I must still be dreaming. You couldn't hear somebody's thoughts, no matter what drugs they gave you in the hospital.

  Because I was in a hospital. White sheets, beeping machines.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "You were handling scorpions. You must have had an unusual reaction." Once she stepped away to enter something into her tablet, I could no longer hear― could no longer imagine I heard― the disturbing thoughts inside her head. "The doctor will be in to speak with you shortly."

  He was close to sixty, a gruff-looking outdoors type with weather-beaten red skin and expensively styled silver hair. The kind of doctor who moved to Arizona because he liked golf. When he shook my hand, I heard another jolt of internal dialogue.

  Wish I was forty years younger.

  The fuck? What was more bizarre, that I was eavesdropping on his thoughts or that those thoughts involved some rather explicit activities with another guy? I'd been led to believe I was the only gay guy in the whole county. Hmm.

  "What happened to me?"

  "You'll be fine. We weren't able to identify the species that bit you, so we couldn't administer anti-venom, but most of the local scorpions around here are fairly harmless. Their venom is not usually considered medically significant but since you lost consciousness..."

  "It was green. Glow in the dark radioactive green."

  His somewhat bloodshot gray eyes studied me with... well... with what emotion I didn't know. Apparently I could only hear someone's thoughts if I was touching them. "There are no green scorpions in Nort
h America. Your memory of the event is probably affected. You must have had an allergic reaction. I do not advise you to ever allow a scorpion to sting you again. That was a very foolish game you boys were playing..."

  Yadda yadda yadda. He sent in a nurse to explain about the EpiPen I was supposed to carry. There are lots of scorpions in Arizona. I said I'd always keep it in my pocket but, honestly, the medical authorities clearly knew less about what was going on than I did. And it wasn't like I knew very much.

  They let me have visitors. Chollie came in looking nervous. "My dad is going to beat the crap out of me."

  "Why hasn't he already?"

  "He's in jail on a drunk and disorderly. Got in a bar fight."

  "Lucky for you."

  "Oh, you'll get a beating too when you get out." Chollie looked marginally more cheerful at the thought. "Playing with scorpions, what, are you crazy? He doesn't expect anything different from me, but you're the fucking high school graduate. You're supposed to have more sense than that."

  "Fuck me. He can't hit me. That's child abuse."

  "How can it be, man? You're eighteen now. Old enough to get the shit knocked out of you like anybody else."

  To Chollie, this was a perfectly reasonable argument.

  Redneck culture. Why couldn't my dad wait to take the fall on felony murder-for-hire until after I graduated college? I put my face in my hands, noticing as I did that my left hand was still a little red and puffy.

  "You want to see the guys?" he asked.

  "Sure. Send in the clowns."

  "Fuck you."

  The other five members of Furio Scorpio came crowding in, the nurse behind them yelling something about only two people at a time. They all ignored her. What was she going to do, drag them out by the scruff of their tatted necks?

  Steele came right up to the bed. He looked pale beneath his tan, and the beard had been shaved off to reveal the dragon's head spitting fire across his lower chin. The others hung back a little, but he took my hurt hand into both of his bigger hands and turned it over to inspect the bite.