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I made my rounds too, talking to Lo and Janie, meeting Alex, sharing a picnic table with a still too-silent Renny. As the night went on, things got rowdier and louder, making me feel like a buzzkill for not being in a partying mood. Seeing no one across the field, I made my way toward the back and found my tree. I climbed up, watching the party rage on as I enjoyed my solitude, feeling a calmness settle down on me for the first time in weeks.
At least that was until I heard rustling and looked down to see Repo move around the tree to stand under me.
"Fuck honey," he said, shaking his head, his eyes sad. "Don't look at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you fucking hate me," he said, jumping up and grabbing the limb I was sitting on and hauling himself up, moving to straddle it and lean back against the trunk as I swung my legs like a kid on a swing.
"I don't hate you," I said, looking off at the party, wondering if they could all see us or if we were lost in the night. Either option terrified me in their own unique ways. "That's the problem," I whispered.EightRepoTell you what, you keep your fucking hands off me and we won't have a problem.
That was what she said to me perched up in her tree like a sullen nine-year old.
And, well, I couldn't even be mad about it. She was right; I needed to keep my hands off of her. But to be perfectly honest, the only way to pull that off was to get her the fuck out of the MC once and for all. If she was hanging around, I was going to want to put my hands on her. So she needed to go. To make that happen, I had to stop trying to be fair, trying to keep the guys from riding her. I had to be on her all day and night. I needed to encourage her exclusion and hazing. So I did that, with a lump the size of a boulder in my gut the whole fucking time.
Fact of the matter was, I didn't have it in me to be a fucking asshole all the God damn time. That wasn't me. It especially went against pretty much everything I had learned and believed in life about treating women. And every time her face fell when I called her or lectured her or excluded her, I felt like the worst kind of scum.
That thing in the truck with Moose and Fox and Janie and Maze? That was seriously fucked. There was no way I should have been giving her a hard time, but I had my orders and Reign was standing right the fuck there. But her jerking away from me, hissing at me, then getting lectured by Janie as I watched Shoot and Cash try to cheer Maze up, yeah, none of that sat right with me.
Most especially because I wanted to be the one to make her throw her head back and laugh like she did at something Shooter said.
Don't ask me why, but that was where my mind went.
So when I walked underneath her and she looked down at me with a mix of anger, resentment, sadness, and hurt... I just couldn't fucking keep up the act anymore.
"I don't hate you," she said, avoiding looking at me. I didn't blame her. I made her not want to look at me if she didn't absolutely have to. "That's the problem," she added, her voice barely above a whisper.
"You should."
"Yeah," she agreed, not bothering to spare my feelings.
"Then why don't you?"
"You know why," she said, ducking her head, watching her feet swing.
"Honey..." I said and I watched her profile as her eyes closed for a second before she turned her head to look at me.
"What?"
"It's my job."
"What's your job?"
"Making your life miserable. It's my job. I don't want to do it."
"Then don't."
"That's not an option."
"Bullshit," she said, shaking her head at me. "There is always a choice."
"Not for me."
"Why not?"
Little did she know, that was a loaded fucking question...I grew up in a violent shithole.
Was there really any other way to describe Detroit? All there was was abandoned buildings, job scarcity, corrupted law enforcement, and crime. That was it. There was really no chance of turning out a good, upstanding citizen unless you got the fuck out of there before one of the gangs sucked you in.
I was not one of the lucky few who had parents always searching for a way to make their lives better for their kids. My dad was an irregular child-support check and my mother smoked crack. Had child protective services not been completely overwhelmed with actual physical and sexual abuse cases, my ass would have been hauled out of that roach-infested apartment in a heartbeat. But fact of the matter was, my mom was always too high to smack me around and I never got molested. So I was left where I was with empty cabinets and a mother who disappeared for days on end, sometimes coming home beat to shit, sometimes bringing men with her that I wasn't stupid enough to even try to pretend they were anything other than Johns.
