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“Stella, yeah?” Chet asked, and Zaxx nodded. Chet drew it at once and set the glass, already fogging with condensation, before him.
“Thanks. I’ll take a bacon cheese, too,” Zaxx added, “with ...” He’d been about to order rings, but Gia did still owe him a beer, and the universe owed him one decent thing this weekend, so he opted for “with steak fries.” Just in case he got that beer, and just in case he got a chance for anything more, he didn’t want onion breath.
“You got it.” Chet grabbed his order pad out of his apron. Zaxx picked up his glass and turned to lean back against the bar.
Gia was no longer standing at the other end. Zaxx did a quick scan for flashy blue and/or red sequins and found the Jasper girls at a two-top near the dance floor, with Gia squeezed in between them. Hilary was telling some kind of story that required a lot of arm motions. Mindy was laughing loudly. Gia looked like she was trying very hard to be patient.
He didn’t understand that dynamic at all. Not only did she not seem compatible with them, she didn’t seem to enjoy their company.
Until tonight, despite the attraction he felt (like every other sane, straight man who’d ever laid eyes on her), Zaxx hadn’t ever considered making a move on Gia. He wasn’t really afraid of Isaac—the dude was huge and strong, but he was also in his sixties, while Zaxx was neither small nor weak, and he was only thirty. He could hold his own against the guy if he had to.
Anyway, Gia was a fully grown woman in her mid-twenties. Isaac might not like his daughter hooking up with a patch, but Zaxx was pretty sure she didn’t let him have a say anymore. Gia made her own choices.
Isaac had some control over the options she had to choose from, however. He’d made it clear in the club that his daughter was off-limits, and while the man was only a soldier now, he had once been its president. In fact, he was its most famous president, and he had an almost godlike rep. If you were a patch, you did not cross Isaac Lunden, especially where his family was concerned. There could be consequences beyond his desire for violence.
Despite all that, the real reason Zaxx hadn’t made a move was lack of opportunity. She hadn’t been around enough to be anything more than something pretty to look at. Also, she hadn’t ever seemed interested in Zaxx or anyone else in the club.
On that point, even now, Gia had demonstrated no interest in him beyond offering to buy him a drink as thanks for backing her up. Hell, maybe she was gay; he’d never seen her with anybody around town. Maybe she had a boyfriend at school. Maybe a girlfriend. Regardless, she’d moved back here, and now he was interested. If he moved on her and got rejected, no big.
He had no intention of going over there and invoking Mindy Jasper’s hellfire, but if at some point Gia was alone, or if she got around to buying him a beer, some sign that she remembered he existed, he’d throw out a line and see if he caught anything.
~oOo~
An hour later, Zaxx was finished with his dinner and nursing a glass of water before he ordered his third beer. No Place was at full capacity, the Wild Bunch was into their wall-shaking second set, and the dance floor was crowded. Darwin and Nolan flanked Zaxx now, and Thumper was boot-scootin’ Hilary around the dance floor. So far, this didn’t look like it was going to be a crowd-control night.
A Saturday night at No Place developed a personality, and if you spent enough Saturday nights here, you eventually got a sense of how any given one was likely to go. There were nights when the vibe was right to allow some light-hearted fisticuffs, nights when the vibe was too amiable for fighting, and nights when the place nearly vibrated with menace and allowing one to get started meant real harm to person and property.
Tonight vibed like an amiable night. Dodd and Mitch Cummings, two of the usual suspects for starting real trouble, hadn’t come in. Neither had Neal Draper. The Cummings and the Drapers had an old-fashioned feud going on, two generations long at this point, so nights when both families showed up, shit usually got broken before the lights went up.
Karlene Conroy wasn’t here tonight, either. Karlene was in her fifties but dressed like one of the Jasper girls. A club girl from way back, she had that Streetcar Named Desire, wilted-gardenia thing going on. She showed a couple times a month, and after several whiskey sours started dramatically seeking ‘the kindness of strangers.’ Half the time, the guy in her sights had a woman with him, and things always seemed to get nastier when women started going at each other and guys ended up fighting in defense or on account of them.
This crowd tonight seemed pretty calm, all in all. Loud and rowdy, but not in that way that was really a manic cover for aggression. Gia looked like she wasn’t having much fun, but she was part of a small minority.
Mindy and Gia sat at the same table, watching the dancers, not talking. It was too loud in here now for any conversation that wasn’t shouted directly into the ear, but even so, not once that he’d looked over had he seen Gia having the kind of good time most everybody else was having. He’d been expecting her to bail any second.
Nolan drained his beer, set the glass on the bar, and walked away without a word. His movement had been so sudden, and his stride was so purposeful, Zaxx sharpened his attention, seeking out the trouble Nolan must have seen.
“Who’s he after?” Zaxx shouted at Darwin. “You see anything?”
“I see what you see,” Darwin shouted back. “Oh ... I get it. Uncle Nolie to the rescue.”
Zaxx turned back and saw Nolan at Mindy and Gia’s table. He bent down between them and said something to Gia. She smiled and nodded, and Nolan stood back and offered his hand. She took it and stood, and Nolan led her to the dance floor. Mindy watched Gia abandon her, and her face arranged itself into a caricature of a Disney villain’s sneer.
If there was drama tonight, it was going to come from right there.
Zaxx had that thought and brushed it away. He was a lot more interested in the couple stepping into the fray on the dance floor. For the first time tonight, Gia’s smile was big and bright and fucking glorious. She could really dance, too; significantly better than Nolan. It was a simple two-step they were doing, but her body moved with lithe instinct. When Nolan did an awkward turn, she smoothed it out and added a little flourish. Then she let her head fall back and actually laughed.
Zaxx felt something hot and sour flare up in his chest. Jealousy.
Nolan was older, but not so much it would be creepy. In his mid-late thirties, so around ten years older than her. He was a good-looking guy, too. But he was extremely married, with three little kids, and he wasn’t the extracurricular type. He was also really close with Isaac.
So, then, logically, there was no reason for jealousy. Nolan was not making a move on Isaac’s daughter. He’d simply seen the same unhappy look on Gia’s face and had moved in to do something about it.
“That girl’s been sulking all night,” Darwin observed into Zaxx’s ear. “Mindy’s a handful, but I don’t think she’s holding her hostage. I don’t know why Gia doesn’t just go home. Is she waiting for something? Somebody?”
Should Zaxx have gone in first? Had Gia needed another rescue? Had she been waiting for him? With Mindy over there, the thought had not once occurred to him. He’d been standing here on the other side of the room, holding onto a vague and dwindling hope that Gia would come over on her own, or at least separate herself from her Jasper shackles.
For all he knew, she’d been hoping he’d show up to do exactly what Nolan had done.
