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Fic: Angelica, The Accident
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It was an accident, but try telling Angelica that.
It was a late fall weekend. Temperatures were going to be in the low fifties, with clear, sunny skies. Perfect biking weather, especially if you were a pair of pervs like Angie and me.
Which was why before hopping onto the back of her Harley, Angie made me dress for the weather. In my case that meant a one-piece black leather biker suit, heavy leather boots, leather gloves, and a full-face helmet. Standing still in it I’d sweat to death inside five minutes. Get up to speed on Angie’s bike with a sixty mile per hour breeze and it was more than comfortable. Angelica was dressed similarly, except she wore separate leather pants and jacket, and a t-shirt I’d gotten for her birthday with “If you can read this, my husband fell off” printed on the back.
Which she never wore again.
Angie was the daughter of Cuban exiles, and drove a Harley, a forty-year-old Electra Glide that she’d bought from her uncle, which she kept in mint condition. After myself, it was her most prized possession, which somehow made what happened all that much worse. I got into my usual position, snugged in tight behind her, arms around Angelica’s waist, as she revved the bike’s engine. The we peeled out of our driveway and onto the road, heading towards our favorite back roads that ran along the Appalachians near our home.
It was a beautiful day. The leaves were turning, bursting in reds, oranges, and browns, as we zoomed along the old state route, almost empty of traffic since the new highway was built. It was getting on to about noon, and I could tell Angie was getting hungry, because she was edging up past the speed limit as we neared the mom and pop restaurant we usually grabbed a bite from along this route.
So we were doing about fifty-five, ten miles above the posted speed limit, when I felt my thoughts begin to drift. That wasn’t so bad. Having the Harley humming between my legs as I held onto Angie’s waist was plenty to distract me.
It was when I felt my arms and legs begin to tremble that I realized, too late, that I was in trouble. I’d taken my medication this morning before we’d begun our ride, and I was due another dose at lunchtime, but that didn’t help now as the seizure started. As I tried to raise my arm to tap Angie’s helmet in a signal to pull over, I felt my grip slacken completely and I fell off the Harley onto the pavement.
My one saving grace was that I was pretty much boneless at that point. My shoulder hit the asphalt and I was suddenly tumbling across the road, my helmet’s faceplate bouncing once against the ground as I rolled, until I came to a rest face up. I heard the Harley’s tires squealing faintly through my ringing ears, and a moment later Angie’s face entered my field of view, distorted through the cracked plexiglass of my helmet. She pulled her own helmet off, her long curly black hair falling across her shoulders, her tanned face looking sick with fear.
“Oh, shit,” she breathed. “Baby, can you hear me?” She reached down, fingers touching my helmet briefly as if to remove it, before she thought better of it. Instead she flipped the faceplate up and asked, “Seizure?”
“Yah,” I managed to get out. She nodded and reached into the inner pocket of her jacket, pulling out my bottle of emergency solutabs. She slipped one between my teeth, then yanked out of her phone to dial 911, giving her name, badge number, and a quick description of our location and my physical description.
“Where’s it hurt worst?” she asked, hanging on the phone with the dispatcher.
“Right shoulder,” I said, the seizure easing. They rarely lasted more than two minutes, but Christ they hit hard when they did.
“Can you move your toes?” Angie demanded.
“Yeah,” I replied. “And my fingers.” I raised my left arm to demonstrate, but she pushed it back down.
“No moving!” she ordered. “Or I fucking cuff your good arm.”
“Think it’s a sprain, not broken,” I huffed. “Doesn’t hurt much worse than when we’re doing impact play.”
“You could have a concussion.”
“That’s what the helmet is for,” I pointed out.
“Don’t. Fucking. Argue with me,” Angie breathed, tears running down her face. She gritted her teeth and spat out, “That’s an order.”
I shut up then, my fingers intertwining with Angie’s as we waited for the ambulance. It got to us in 10 minutes, which wasn’t bad given how far off the beaten track we were, but Angie was cursing every minute it took.
Things went quickly after that. The EMTs arrived and got a cervical collar around my neck before easing my helmet off and getting me onto a stretcher. Then Angie followed the ambulance on her bike as I was taken to the county hospital for x-rays. By the time we got out it was past seven in the evening. One of Angie’s biker buddies had answered her emergency call and arrived with his pickup truck, to carry her Harley with us as he drove us back to our house.
I sat in the back seat with Angie, my sprained arm in a sling, leaning up against her as we drive through the darkness. Her arm was wrapped around my waist, her face pressed against my cheek.
“Sorry,” she whispered into my ear.
“For what?” I asked, a bit loopy from the painkillers I’d been given.
“Should have pulled over earlier to make sure you could take your meds,” Angie said.
“It wasn’t time yet. I thought I was okay,” I replied. “I’ll have to talk to my doctor tomorrow about upping my dosage.”
Angie frowned, and she tightened her grip on me. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” she asked.
“It could have been a one-time thing,” I countered.
“You weren’t dosing as high as you are now when we graduated college,” Angie noted.
“No,” I admitted. “But anti-seizure meds are getting better all the time. I may just have to switch to a new prescription. Let’s not borrow trouble, huh?”
Angie frowned again as I tossed one of her favorite phrases back at her. Stronger and more confident than I ever could be, she rarely let things in life worry her. Today was one hell of an exception. “Fine,” she agreed. “But from now on, you don’t ride with me.”
“What?” I shifted in my seat so I could look her in the face. “No!”
“If you fell once, you could do it again,” Angie said firmly. “No more bike rides for you.”
“Angie, come on,” I said. “I love riding in the country with you.”
“And I love riding with you,” she replied. “But I like you being alive and in one piece a lot more. I’ll sell the Electra Glide and buy myself, I don’t know, a hatchback or something.”
“You, driving a hatchback?” I asked in disbelief. Tall and leggy, I doubted she’d even fit in one. “You’re not getting rid of your bike.”
“You don’t get to tell me what to do, esclavo,” she warned.
Now it was my turn to frown, as I spared a glance at the beefy biker dude sitting in the driver’s seat. Angelica normally only called me that when we were at home, conscious of not freaking out the neighbors. Yes, she was my mistress and I was her happy slave, but we didn’t flaunt that part of our relationship in public, and as she pointed numerous times, I wasn’t her doormat either.
“Look, there are alternatives,” I pointed out. “We can get helmets with wireless headsets so we can talk to each other more easily.”
“Not good enough,” Angie said.
“You could cuff my wrists around your waist, so I’d be sure not to fall off,” I said, half joking.
“That wouldn’t stop your feet from slipping off the pegs, and then you’d fall over the side and drag me with you. Then we’d both be taking an uncontrolled spill with maybe 800 pounds of motorbike falling on top of us,” she pointed out. “Don’t be an idiota.”
“I’m not an idiot,” I said, “and you can’t lock me in a box filled with pillows either.”
“I’m not, I’m not…” Angelica let go of me for a moment, clutching her frazzled, helmet sweaty hair. “I’m just scared.”
“I know,” I told her.
That was when the dam broke, and all the suppressed terror she’d held back released itself, and as she sobbed into my shoulder. Angelica was my dominant, but she was my wife too. Sometimes it was my turn to be strong.
I took hold of her hand, giving it a squeeze. Her hard grip in return was just short of breaking bones, but I didn’t flinch. “I’m not going anywhere,” I told her. “Maybe I’m not as healthy or as strong as you, but I’m not going anywhere.”
“Not after I leash you in the house,” she muttered, easing her clutch on my fingers to wipe her eyes.
“There’s a solution,” I teased.
Angie snorted a laugh. “You’d like that too much,” she accused. After a moment, she sighed and said, “I’m going to miss riding my bike.”
“You could ride by yourself,” I pointed out.
“Too lonely,” she objected.
“Or with your biker buddies.”
“They aren’t the ones I want to ride with,” Angie declared.
I thought for a moment. “Well, there’s one other thing we could do,” I told her.
It took two weeks to find a used sidecar that fit Angie’s bike. Harley Davidson stopped making them when trikes became popular. But that weekend we drove out again, me sitting safely in my seat beside Angie, close enough to reach up and squeeze her hand.
It was a compromise, but it worked.