“And then?”
“And then I moved in. For a couple weeks.” A couple of all-consuming, overwhelming, almost terrifying in its intensity weeks.
“And then?” Voss asked again, tone rough, wanting me to get to the point.
“And then I packed up my shit one morning and peeled out of town.”
I turned to face him then, trying to gauge his reaction. I should have known better. Voss had a killer fucking poker face. The only time you could really read him was when he was pissed.
“Without saying shit,” Voss concluded.
I exhaled hard at that. “Yeah. Without saying shit.”
“Kinda cool with her bleeding you dry,” Voss said, shocking the shit out of me.
I mean, the man liked women. As a sort of hobby. A good time. But I’d never known him to have any sort of actual attachment to them.
So him siding with a woman he didn’t know was surprising to say the least.
“I’m not the most civil of men,” he said, sensing my shock. “But I figure that shit isn’t how it works when you give a shit about someone. Unless you didn’t give a shit about her.”
“I did,” I told him. “And you’re right. It was a fucked thing to do.”
“So, let me ask again,” he said, pinning me with a hard look. “She what you’ve been running from all these years?”
“To an extent, I guess,” I admitted for the first time aloud. Or even to myself.
“And running away from the shithead version of you who’d do that kind of thing?” he asked.
Voss was not known for having a filter. He didn’t weigh his words or bite his tongue. It rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, and I could see why.
I’d always found him kind of refreshing.
“Yeah, think that might be part of it too,” I agreed, thinking of the careless, selfish, and scared asshole I’d been back then.
“Got a chance to prove you’re not him anymore,” he said, shrugging.
“Yeah, if she’ll let me,” I agreed. “Lulu isn’t exactly… reasonable. Or level-headed,” I added, thinking of her quick temper. I used to marvel at the way it would burn bright, consuming everything in its path, and how I somehow never ended up burnt in the process, even when I was who got in the way of her anger and her target at times.
“Got weeks. Months. Years. Figure it out,” Voss said, turning away from the ocean he liked so much. “Saw a sign for an ice cream place.”
With that, he made his way toward town, leaving me to follow behind, biting my tongue because I’d end up with a fist in my face if I said what I was thinking right then.
That it seemed like Dezi’s ridiculous eating habits were rubbing off on Voss.
It was no secret that the two of them were oil and water. Dezi was too light and easy, with a devil hidden underneath. Voss wore the devil on his sleeve.
And their devils? Yeah, they didn’t get along.
The two were going to really get into it one day, and I hated to think how many of us it was going to take to get between them. Or how it would be possible for them to come back from that and become brothers in a club that would demand it of them.
Dezi was patched.
He’d proven himself valuable quite a bit already.
Which meant that if it came to choosing sides, Fallon would be forced to choose Dezi. And send Voss packing.
It was why I’d been working my ass off to run interference between the two. Not only because I owed Voss my life. But because he’d been a good friend to me during some rough times on the road. I didn’t want to see him leave, to go off to who-knew what fate.
So I didn’t say shit about the ice cream.
“You done being a pussy?” Voss asked suddenly a few hours later, making my head snap over to face him, a smirk toying with my lips.
“What?”
“Being a pussy. Hiding out here when you know you need to deal with your shit.”
“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. Eloquent, he was not. But he sure as shit got his point across. “I guess I’m done being a pussy,” I agreed.
Though a part of me maybe only agreed because it was late already, and I figured that by the time we got back to the clubhouse, Louana would be asleep, giving me the whole night to wrap my head around this new development.
“The fuck are you doing?” I asked Dezi as I went into the kitchen to grab a bottle of water before heading to bed, finding him standing in front of the stove in a goddamn frilly apron that one of the wives or girls must have left around, dropping a giant glob of butter into a pan that he had lined with bacon.
“Making bacon.”
“With butter,” I said, tossing Voss a bottle of water while I was at it, just barely resisting the urge to grab another one for Louana.
Old habits.
“Don’t want it to stick to the pan, right?” Dezi asked, genuinely looking confused, reminding me again that I had no fucking idea what kind of past he’d come from, but clearly it had left him without basic life skills.
“No, man,” I said, shaking my head. “Bacon makes its own grease in like ten seconds of being on the heat.”
“Huh. The more you know,” Dezi said, but didn’t actually remove the butter.
“He’s gonna have a heart attack before forty,” Voss said to me as we made our way out of the kitchen.
“Zaddy won’t let that happen,” Dezi called back. “Got me on salads and shit,” he added.
Voss and I both knew there was no way to balance out bacon fried in butter, but we kept walking toward the prospect room.
I found myself almost holding my breath as we moved inside, some part of me not sure that she wouldn’t have wrecked all my shit, or that she wasn’t lying in wait to take me out.
You never knew with Lulu.
That was what was so interesting about her.
You could never anticipate her next move.
But potentially being on the receiving end of her wrath made me a lot less appreciative of that aspect of her personality than I used to be.
Luckily, we didn’t walk into any sort of ambush. And it looked like all my shit was exactly as I had left it.
Louana’s middle top bunk was now covered with a black blanket with a gold celestial print. I knew that blanket. Because it had been on her bed when she’d been a kid.
I didn’t know a whole hell of a lot about Louana’s life after I skipped town. But I did hear that she’d been away. Traveling, Vi had said with a sort of disappointed huff because it sounded like whatever kind of traveling Louana had been doing meant she was hard to get in touch with.
That was another part of my selfishness that I hadn’t given too much thought to over the years. Louana had started out as one of Violet’s best friends. It was only through Vi that I got to know Louana well enough to want to start something with her.
With me leaving, it sounded like it put a somewhat permanent strain on their friendship.
But if she’d been away a lot, not putting down any roots, it made sense that she didn’t have a lot of her own grown-up shit, and needing to bring some stuff from her parents’ place to her new home at the clubhouse.
Underneath the blanket, she was still save for the steady rise and fall of her breathing.
I tried not to notice the way her long, silky hair was draped over the pillowcase. And how that hair used to feel drifting through my fingertips, or teasing over my chest… or my thighs.