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Maybe Lenny was dealing with some shit.
Or, more accurately, going through some shit without actually dealing with it.
Maybe the pain today had managed to break down the dam that was holding it all in.
I wondered what that might mean for the next couple of lessons.
Would she show?
Would her inability to disconnect the physical pain and her own emotional pain keep her from coming?
She wasn't the kind of woman, I was sure, who would be okay with allowing anyone else to witness her losing her battle with her own emotions. She was too tightly controlled for that.
Would this be a rare time when the need for self-preservation would win over her pride?
I guess I would know tomorrow.
"Dunno what to tell you," I offered, wanting to drop it, to let it go for now. It was no use discussing it since I didn't know what was going on, if anything was going to come of it, if it was going to matter in the grand scheme of things.
"Alright, if we're done with the heart-to-heart," Reign started, bringing our focus back to where he was standing beside the bar with a yellow lined notepad and pen, "We need shit for the party tomorrow."
Summer's birthday.
It was almost a year to the anniversary of her father's death, and she was still not really back to herself. The woman had been through so much in her life what with being kidnapped and tortured. Twice. Her father getting gunned down right in front of her was apparently the breaking point. She had been in bed for weeks, then a zombie walking for months. She was back to functioning now, was trying to keep it upbeat for her kids, but it was clear there was still a heaviness weighing on her.
Which was why Reign had seen her upcoming birthday as a chance to try to drive some life back into her, thinking maybe she needed time to just be a person instead of a wife and mother. He had arranged to have all the kids shipped up to Hailstorm to be watched by the women there, then secretly planned a big to-do at the compound for the next night.
"Sugar, Virgin, I think I can trust you to deal with the food. Roderick, Cy, Roan, and Reeve can handle getting this place to smell less like balls and old socks and more like a place we can have a party tomorrow. That leaves the booze. Edison?" he asked, jerking his chin toward the bar. "We need extra of everything."
He wasn't kidding. If the entire club, their women, the girls club, their men, and a few local friends were invited, we were going to need enough liquor to supply an entire army on leave.
"Here," he said, tossing the keys. "Only got about another hour and a half," he reminded me, making me search for my wallet before heading out.
An hour later, the trunk of the SUV was loaded down with enough whiskey, tequila, rum, vodka, and gin to keep the whole east coast supplied for a three-day bender.
But I wasn't on my way back to the compound because, apparently, it was too short of notice for the liquor store we usually used to get us the three kegs we wanted. They had been decent enough to send me across town to some hole called Meryl's with the warning that it looked like a shithole that catered to the worst scum around, and that it was both those things, but that the place was clean, and it was fine to order kegs from them. And since it was a weird liquor store/bar hybrid, people often didn't think to order from them, so they could likely pull it off.
So that was where I was heading.
And, well, it was a shithole.
There was no way around that.
The name was scrawled in golden paint on a simple green board in desperate need of repainting above the door. The front had old plate glass windows that had been hand-painted to, I figured, keep the sun from beating in. It was an old school saloon scene fresh out of the west, and therefore completely out of place in Jersey.
I got out, pulling open the glass door, being assaulted instantly with the strong scent of just about every kind of liquor known to man from the bar I knew was situated in the back.
You could hear it too, the unmistakable sounds of a watering hole. It was always the same from Romania to Russia to the good ole USA. There was the clinking of glasses, the raised guffaws of men too drunk to remember to keep it down, the music of bygone eras because you could hear that new soulless crap at a club.
The store part of the building had, for fuck-knew-what reason, hideous blue and gold faded carpeting, dirtier and more rundown in the center that led back toward the bar from overuse. It, and the corner of the bar I could see from my angle, was dark, half the lights overhead either not working or simply kept off for who-knew-what reason. It had the strange business choice to have all the liquor bottles lining the walls in the somewhat small space hard to see, let alone read, unless you were right on top of them.
