mom fuckin’ hated those trips for a lot of reasons. The coal candy was just one more thing to spread her dislike to. She would go to work on the weekends, and my dad would put both me and my sister on the back of his bike to come up here when we were small enough but old enough to hang on. She thought it was dangerous, and it was, but fuck it. It was a different time, you know?
“Um, Dump Truck? Table of four?” the hostess called and me and my brother grinned at each other at the note of confusion in her voice.
“Yeah, that’s us,” DT grated and limped her way; Little Bird trailing behind him. I put Aspen in front of me and brought up the rear as we threaded through tables towering above the craven citizens around us that shrank in their seats or in some cases, studiously avoided looking in our direction as though if they didn’t acknowledge us, we wouldn’t actually exist.
That shit put a smile on my face, not gonna lie. These idiots didn’t have the first clue about what it meant to really live. They never would, and that was no skin off my testicles.
We took our seats, DT and I both seeing to our women’s comfort before our own, making sure their jackets were hung on the backs of their chairs, their purses accounted for, and that ever-present annoying shoving their chairs into the backs of their knees because it was the right thing to do. I asked Aspen, “You want I should get your chair for you, or you in the future? I always feel bad knocking the shit out the backs of a lady’s knees.”
She laughed and smiled at me, her green eyes luminous. “I actually don’t mind. I even like it,” she said. “Call me old-fashioned that way.”
“Never,” I said with a grin. “It makes you feel good, I’ll keep doing it.”
She blushed at the double entendre which made my smile grow. Little Bird looked back and forth between us at the exchange, her smile infectious and causing DT to smile himself.
We took our time overlooking the menus, ordered our drinks and perused them some more, each of us folding them closed and setting them aside as we made our decisions.
Aspen was the first to break the silence asking, “So, what’s the plan for the rest of the day?”
“Gotta get you geared up, little lady,” Dump Truck declared, stretching out his bad leg. “Don’t ever want you to earn your broken wings, but if it should go down that you do? You need to be in all the gear all the time to give you the best chance of getting ‘em and not just getting dead in the process.”
“I’m sorry? Broken wings?” she asked, brow wrinkling in confusion.
He pulled up his cut and pointed at the patch on it with a pair of wings, feathers coming off ‘em, wrapped around a black and orange sign that read broken wings.
“Oh! So, the little patches all mean different things?” she asked, as if it had just occurred to her.
Little Bird laughed lightly and said, “I thought the same thing. It’s like a whole other language like the Egyptians and their cartouches.”
“Fascinating,” Aspen said, staring at our cuts with new eyes.
“So, what do the broken wings mean? That you’ve been in an accident?”
“Yup, and survived,” I answered.
“How I got my road name, too. I got hit by a fucking dump truck.”
“Holy shit, and you survived that?” Aspen’s mouth dropped open in shock.
“Barely,” DT answered, shifting in his seat. “Fucked my ass up but good. Permanent damage to my leg, some permanent hardware in a few places,” he sniffed and cleared his throat, “but I’m here.”
Little Bird reached for his hand that rested on the table and clutched it. He looked over at her like she was his world, and she was. He smiled at her.
“Good thing, too. Could have missed out on the best thing to ever happen to me.”
“Aww.” Aspen smiled. “You two are seriously like relationship goals,” she said.
I reached over beneath the table and massaged the top of her thigh through her jeans, intending, if she gave me the chance, to prove that we could meet and smash every goal she ever held in her heart for being one half of a mated pair.
“So, what do the other patches mean?” she asked.
“That’s a question for later, baby. We can’t be giving away all our secrets now,” I said,