The Dirty Thirty Read online

  The Dirty Thirty

  I travel The Dirty Thirty alone, searching for something, searching for myself. What I don’t expect to find is him.

  By Jessa Kaye

  Copyright © 2014 by Jessa Kaye

  Edited by Fran Walsh, Ali Maki and Rachel Lawrence

  Summary: Distraught over her impending thirtieth birthday and encouraged by a new, mysterious friend, Sydney Harper decides to strike out on an adventure, leaving her dismal life behind. With nothing but a suitcase in her hand and the wind on her back, she hitchhikes across The Dirty Thirty, checking off a list of hopes and dreams as she travels the highway, and discovering something she never expected.

  She finds herself. She finds him.

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Warning: This novella contains several explicit scenes of an erotic, sexual nature. This story is intended for adults over the age of eighteen. All characters portrayed are eighteen or older.

  Special thanks to L.C. Morgan, whose birthday and unwavering friendship was the inspiration behind this novella. Thanks to author Allyn Lesley for pre-reading The Dirty Thirty and for offering your abundant suggestions. Special thanks to Fran, who originally edited this work of fiction while it still lived in the Twilight world. Thanks to Ali Maki and Rachel Lawrence for your editing work during the transitional phase of this story.

  Thanks to my husband who gave me the room to breathe and type while not complaining … much. And to my lovely children who say, “All Mama does is peck-peck-peck on her laptop.” Hopefully all my “pecking” hasn’t been in vain.

  But most of all, I thank my readers and the fandom for rekindling the fire inside my heart. Thank you for reminding me that I was once a thirteen-year-old girl with a typewriter and a dream. I lost her somewhere along the way. She’s missed me, just as much as I’ve missed her.

  Cover Art © L.J. Anderson, Mayhem Cover Creations

  Chapter One

  There is nothing unpredictable or chaotic about my life. Each day is an endless routine of mundane bullshit that makes me want to slit my wrists.

  I wake up every morning alone in my bed. There’s no husband, no boyfriend, no significant other—unless you count my vibrator who I spend more time with than anyone I know. Although I’m quite fond of my phallus-shaped friend, I doubt he’d make for interesting dinner conversation the way a significant other would.

  After waking up I yawn and head to the bathroom to pee. Then I wash my hands and brush my teeth. While the coffee brews, I slink out to the end of the driveway in my pajamas to retrieve the newspaper. The kid who delivers it seems to always toss it in the motherfucking bushes. Half the time it's there hidden among the tiny, glossy, green leaves, and the other half the neighbor’s dog has chewed it up, scattering the black and white printed pages across my dewy lawn.

  I really hate that goddamn dog.

  Once inside, I pour myself a cup of coffee. I take it black.

  Then I spend the next few minutes frying bacon and eggs, inevitably burning each because my cooking is shit. It’s one skill I learned on my own. Growing up without a mother, I was raised by my father, a man who ordered takeout for us every night for the entire eighteen years I lived with him. I’ll probably be diabetic in a few years. It’s either that or die of heart disease from all the greasy meals I’ve consumed in my life.

  My thoughts have taken a rather morbid turn lately as I’m closing in on thirty. I feel the inevitable day creeping up. It’s almost as though I can see the years slowly dwindling by, and it’s killing me that I have accomplished nothing in my life.

  Nothing.

  I dreamed of going to college when I was younger, and managed to do so for a while, living off student loans and grants, but the money quickly ran out. The bills began to pile up and I found myself working not only one full time job in the evenings, but a part time job as well, just to make it in the world on my own. My grades began slipping, and the next thing I knew I was on academic probation until they deteriorated to the point where I lost my scholarship. Things only went downhill from there.

  Eventually I let it all go. The stress outweighed my drive to succeed. With each passing day, I hated myself a little more for the mistakes made in my youth. I’d suddenly become my mother, a woman who never finished anything she set out to do in life, a woman who accomplished no goals, and gave up on everything.

  Being a wife.

  Being a mother.

  Sometimes I find myself wondering about the woman who birthed me, a woman my father claims I could be the ghost of. Besides sharing the same DNA and the same lack of motivation, we also mirror each other in appearance. She’s still there, her image tucked in the back of my mind and on the scratched and faded photographs I sometimes remove from a bookshelf in my bedroom. The matted paper with her unsmiling face is damaged from time and the occasional tear. Long, dirty-blonde hair and lifeless blue eyes stoically stare back at me during the times I shuffle through the photos. How my father didn’t recognize her unhappiness, I’ll never know. At nearly the same age she was when she left us behind, I’m mature enough to notice the despondency in her face, the slump of her shoulders, the way she stood to the side of me in the photographs. In the handful of photos with her holding me, she still looked unhappy.

  Stiff.

  Cold.

  Uncaring.

  What made her so unhappy? Was it because of me? Is it my fault she left us? Am I the reason for her asphalt-coated heart?

  The smell of burning toast drags me from my internal reverie. I shuffle over to the oven because I’m too broke to afford a toaster since I blew up the last one. I pull the slightly burned toast from the rack, cringing at the blackened crust. The next five minutes are spent scraping the bottom of the bread. Each swipe of the butter knife against the bread grates on my nerves, and I take turns cringing and sighing in frustration.

  This is my life.

  My eyes drift to the open window over the sink while I continue scraping, peppering the shiny silver surface below with the charred mess. Kids ride their bikes down the tiny road. They laugh and sing, teasing each other. The girls speed away from the quickly pursuing boys, their faces aflame with embarrassment and their skirts flapping wildly in the wind. Their knobby-kneed legs pedal anxiously, and I wonder when I last felt that carefree.

  When was the last time I felt that exuberant over being pursued by a man?

  When was the last time I relished in the brilliancy of the wind slapping my reddened cheeks?

  I shake my head and throw my burned toast on a plate, slather some jelly on it and stuff my face until I’m miserable. The sadness lingers, but it is muffled now, partly snuffed out by a full belly and the reluctance of another day at work.

  ***

  I tried waiting tables. I applied for a job at Lloyd’s, a local truck stop just off The Dirty Thirty in the tiny, rainy town of Flint, Oregon. I started working at Lloyd’s when I was nineteen years old. I never could grasp waitressing.

  Literally.

  I could never grasp anything.

  The plates perched on my arms would tilt this way and that, spilling fries on customers’ laps. Cokes landed on the floor, splashing against the stained tile. The other waitresses, the more seasoned, established ones, would shake their heads in shame at my antics, their eyes rimmed in pity. Their sympathy only pissed me off. It pissed me off that I couldn’t do something as simple as delivering a few plates of food to a table without it being a complete and utter disaster.

  I was quickly demoted to dishwasher.

&
nbsp; Almost eleven years have passed since then. I’ve been scraping and scrubbing and spraying food from dirty dishes for nearly eleven years. I do it even now, and as I watch the suds disappear down the drain, I realize these suds are a metaphor for my motherfucking life.

  The panic builds inside my chest. Is this it? Is this all I deserve out of life? Is this the cruel hand God has dealt me? I’m to grow old alone, living in some shitty nowhere town for the rest of my days, too broke to afford a fucking toaster?

  I want more.

  There are things I’ve always wanted to do but have yet to do them. I’ve always been responsible Sydney, the girl in high school who studied on the weekends instead of partying with her friends. I was the girl who dated the good, sensible guys, the type of men my father approved of, yet bored me to tears. What’s come of it?

  Nothing.

  At the end of my shift I shuffle into the bathroom, glancing briefly in the mirror as I run my fingers through my deep, dirty-blonde hair. My fingers pause in the lackluster strands, caught in the frizzy mess caused by bending over steaming hot water in a greasy kitchen all day.

  My blue eyes are dead. They’re dead just like this town.

  Dead like my love life.

  Dead like my future.

  The tears don’t spill over until I’m in the back parking lot, bending, hands on knees near the back dumpster having a full-blown panic attack.

  That’s where I find her.

  Maybe that’s where she finds me.

  I hear her before I see her. Her strangled grunts and muffled curses sound out above the scuffle of feet and heckling of dirty old men. I’ll later wonder if this girl is an angel, although I’m sure she’s not. I’ll even question if she’s real. Maybe she’s the voice of reason buried somewhere in the back of my mind. Either way, she’s in the parking lot behind the shitty diner where I work getting attacked by three grown men as they try to pin her against the side of the neighboring brick building and accost her.

  The woman is around my age or maybe a bit younger, wearing black leather chaps, a wife beater and a leather vest. Her exposed arms are covered in tattoos, and her long, raven hair is in a wild, windswept disarray. I’m unable to focus on any other fine details.

  As two of the men pin her arms against the building, I’m shocked into stunned silence as the remaining man grasps her wife beater between his beefy fingers, ripping it halfway down the front of her chest. I find myself fumbling blindly inside my cheap, pleather purse, searching for the one thing my overprotective father always insisted I carry. I breathe a sigh of relief as I find my trusty Taser. Turns out, I don’t even have to use it.

  Before I can bat an eye, the guy standing in front of the woman is curled in the fetal position on the dirty ground, clutching his abdomen, or maybe his groin. The two men pinning her against the wall automatically let go as they watch their friend fall. Each one is assaulted with the spiked heel of the woman’s pointy, black boots.

  Blood flies from their faces, their heads snapping back with each strike of her boot. The woman never stops. She never pauses for a breath. She kicks and hits and punches and screams obscenities until all three men are joined together in a pile on the asphalt, moaning and groaning in pain, twisted in a bloody mess as she sneers at them.

  I blink.

  “You got anything to eat in there?” the woman asks, nodding her head toward the restaurant. “Been a long ride and I’m starving.”

  The voice that comes out of her mouth is low, raspy and sexy. As she removes a cigarette from a crumpled packet in the front pocket of her vest, I immediately know why. I nod numbly, my fingers fumbling once again in my purse. I drop the Taser inside and pull out a set of keys. The woman follows me, laughing as I quietly explain there is a new non-smoking policy inside the old building.

  She blows smoke in the air and raises an eyebrow. Her blatant disregard for the diner rules perturbs me, but instead of calling her on it, I drop my gaze to the keys in my hand.

  “I’ll call the cops about those assholes,” I say.

  I unlock the back door, allow her pass me by then quickly lock the door behind us. The woman nods, pausing only to grab a clean glass from a drying rack and dump her ashes inside. She explores the back room, even opening the large refrigerator to disappear inside, emerging with a grin and a giant tub of chocolate chip cookie dough.

  I watch her with wide eyes and the phone pressed to my ear. She helps herself to a spoon and saunters into the dark dining area, switching on the lights as she enters the room.

  After ending the call, I join her. I find her sitting on top of a table, legs crossed beneath her, shoving spoonful after spoonful of cookie dough into her mouth. I approach the odd woman slowly and quietly, almost as though she’s a wild, wounded animal.

  She very well may be.

  “The police are on their way.”

  The woman nods thoughtfully at my statement. Her eyes are fixed on something, yet nothing, in the distance. Their warm, dark depths seem to be remembering something from long ago.

  As I slide onto a nearby chair staring at her, I find myself wanting to know more about this strange woman. I want to know why she was hanging out in the dark parking lot of a shitty truck stop in the middle of nowhere. I need to know how a small person such as herself learned to kick, hit and punch the way she did.

  “Where did you learn all those moves?” I take a deep breath. My chest feels tight. “Why were you in the back lot?”

  “You worked here a while?” Ignoring my question, she drops the container of cookie dough carelessly beside her, fixing her eyes on mine.

  “Since I was nineteen,” I respond, my eyes flitting across her vest and the various patches fixed therein. “Ten years. Almost eleven years.”

  She tilts her head to the side. “You like working here?”

  I contemplate her question for a moment before letting out a dry, bitter laugh.

  “No. No, I don’t like working here.”

  “So, why do you?” she asks seriously, studying me closely. “Work here, I mean.”

  My bottom lip is wedged between my teeth.

  The question is so simple, yet so complex.

  Why do I work somewhere that obviously makes me so unhappy? Why do I subject myself to this miserable life day after day?

  “What else would I do?” I ask, shrugging as the sound of police sirens suddenly wail in the distance.

  “Whatever makes you happy.”

  I mull over her words for a long moment, her gaze weighing heavily on mine.

  “Do you always do what makes you happy?”

  Smirking, she slides off the tabletop and gives me a wink. I follow her to the back door, my sneakers scuffling against the sticky linoleum.

  “Always,” she says before disappearing through the back door.

  Chapter Two

  Ellie Jackson, the girl I met in the dark parking lot of the truck stop, is a selfish little thing. She reveals so little about herself, yet becomes completely absorbed in my pathetic excuse of a life, drinking up everything I have to say like a woman dying of thirst. She knows all my hopes, my dreams, my fears. I share the pain of having a mother who brought me into the world yet found me so inconsequential that she never took the time to care anything for me. I tell her about growing up as the only child of an emotionally stunted man and of the loneliness I felt. She knows every failed relationship I’ve had over the years, and how not one man found me interesting enough to stick around for very long.

  Ellie becomes a fixture in my life, until one day, she isn’t.

  “You’re doing the right thing, Sydney.” She slings my suitcase in the backseat of my beat-up car.

  “This is the most dangerous decision I’ve ever made.”

  “It is.” She nods, her long, straight bangs falling into her eyes.

  “I could die.”

  “Possibly,” she says, “but were you ever really alive to begin with?”

  I say nothing. She continues.
br />   “To die at twenty-nine … to be in your twenties forever, it’s a romantic concept, no?”

  Um, no.

  “Ellie, you’re psychotic.”

  “Yet you listen to me.” She giggles, her slight Southern drawl endearing. “You’re taking my advice. Do you have the list?”

  I do.

  It’s the only thing in my possession besides the suitcase with a few changes of clothes, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a loaded twenty-two, my Taser, my cell and an assortment of feminine hygiene products. I wave the folded napkin in the air, blushing as I remember the things listed on the thin, wrinkled paper.

  “Don’t be embarrassed, Syd.” Ellie throws her leg over her motorcycle and guns the engine, yelling her last words over the rumbling machine quaking beneath her. “You still have time to cross one wish off your list.”

  Ellie pats the bike with a grin, and I hesitantly shake my head.

  “I’m not ready for that yet.” A knot of fear swells inside my chest, working itself up and lodging inside my throat.

  I’ve always been terrified, yet mesmerized by motorcycles. It is one of my many dreams, to ride a motorcycle on the open road. I want to feel what those kids felt on their bicycles the day I stared at them through my dirty kitchen window. I’d take it. I’d take the freedom and exhilaration; just not right now.

  I’m not ready and it somehow doesn’t feel right riding with Ellie.

  “Do you have the envelope?” she asks.

  The heel of her boot shoves the kickstand back as she heaves the huge bike up. I pat one of the front pockets of my shorts. The stiff paper of the envelope pokes the tender skin residing below.

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  She notices the worry I’m sure is reflecting on my face, and for a brief moment she looks hesitant. My new friend, my only friend, is leaving me. She’s leaving me standing next to my shitty car in my shitty driveway in this shitty, little town, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again.

  “When do I open it?” I ask. “When do I open the envelope?”