A Stranger in Familiar Land

Chapter 3

Ella got home to her apartment shivering, but in a good mood.

She entered her apartment and shrugged off her coat, locking the door behind her. Slipping off her work shoes, she sat down on the sagging couch to rub at her aching feet. She still needed to heat up the last of the potato soup she'd managed to take home from the diner on Tuesday before it went bad, but for now sitting down felt so nice.

She took a few minutes to rest her feet before standing up. She flicked on the radio on her way to the stove and an 80's rock song began playing. Her dad had always listened to 80's rock when he was cooking, so she kept the kitchen radio tuned to a classic rock station. Listening to it when she was cooking her feel like she was honoring his memory.

Ella thought about the day as she stirred the soup on the stove. The three motorcycle guys, Clay, Jax, and the ox man, who turned out to be named Opie, had been some of the better-behaving customers that whole day. At one point she's pretty sure she actually started liking their company.

She fingered the place on her arm where Maria's nails had left temporary marks as she poured the soup into a clean bowl. As kind as they'd been, they wouldn't be worth Maria's continued wrath. Ella was barely on good terms with the old bat under normal circumstances.

She sat down at the table with her bowl of soup and ate slowly. She'd heard rumors about the Sons of Anarchy from patrons of the diner before. A motorcycle club that ran 90% of the charities in the town while also being composed of entirely convicted criminals was the only information about them Ella had retained over the last four months.

As she began washing the dishes she'd used that day, as the apartment didn't come with a dishwasher, her father's favourite song came on the radio. She hummed along softly to it, thinking back to the times where he'd be cooking a Hispanic recipe from his mother that made the kitchen smell amazing while Ella sat at the table doodling either him or whatever celebrity she was most recently obsessed with.

God, she missed him.

After washing up the dishes, Ella leaned against the counter, the urge to draw pressing into her fingertips. She decided to take a walk to the center of Charming while the weather still permitted, to draw whatever took inspiration.

She threw on her dad's old leather jacket, the one he'd given her in high school, and pulled on her motorcycle boots. She pulled her small sketchbook from the back of her closet, grabbed her keys and prepaid phone, and left the apartment, locking the door behind her.

The night air was cool, which did shit for Ella's hands but the walk towards the center of Charming was nice. She barely ever took the time to really appreciate what Charming looked like. It was a picturesque town, filled with nice streets and pretty parks as long as you were on the right side of it.

Those pretty parks didn't exist for Ella's side. It took her walking to the center of town to even see a patch of grass. As she was walking, there was a roar of motorcycles in the distance. She smiled, remembering the customers at the diner. A far cry from the previous day, when every roar of a motorcycle made her think she'd be shot on her walk.

Maybe she did like them. Maybe.

Ella meandered her way to the gazebo at the center of town and sat down on a bench, facing the diner. She flipped open her sketchbook and took out the pencil she'd stuck in the spine and started sketching under the low streetlights. Inside the diner, the neon sign behind the counter was the only light source. Ella sketched what she could see in that neon light.

After an hour of sketching, her hands were tired. Her phone rang and she set aside the sketchbook to pull it out. It was her old friend Bradley, a guy she'd known in high school who she'd stayed close to over the years, doing his monthly check in.