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He made a low, growling noise at me, but took the phone and raised it to his ear. "Hey Candy," he said, closing his eyes. Even from three feet away, I could hear my mother's voice, her thick accent making mine sound almost nonexistent in comparison. "Yes, ma'am. No, ma'am, I'm not kissing your ass," he said, giving me a pained look that I had no sympathy for since my own ear was still ringing from listening to her. "Yes, ma'am. I will. I always got his back. Take care of yourself and Dante. I will. Yes, ma'am. No, ma'am. We aren't getting into any trouble," he said, rolling his eyes at me.
That was the wrong thing to say.
Because my mother had been a lot of things in her life. She'd been a shoplifter, a stripper, a check-forger, and a clubwhore before she turned her life around after passing me off. One thing she had never been was naive. She knew that Virgin was telling her what he thought she wanted to hear. And since he never had a mother of his own, he didn't understand that they knew when you were doing that shit, and it pissed them off.
So he was getting his ass handed to him as I ordered another slice of pizza, knowing tonight was going to involve a lot of fucking drinking, and wanting to put a layer of grease, fat, and carbs down to catch it all.
"I understand, Candy. Yes. No, ma'am. Never. I always wear a..." he trailed off, looking at me with a mortified lift to his brows, "raincoat."
She didn't mean raincoat.
She meant a condom.
That was how she signed off every phone call with me. She reminded me to wear a raincoat, so I didn't knock up someone when I wasn't ready to be a dad. Then she told me she loved me and hung up.
"I'll tell him," he said, hanging up, handing me back my phone, and exhaling a breath. "How many shots is it going to take to forget that I just got a safe sex lecture from your mother?"
"I'd say eight or ten," I told him, slapping a hand on his back with a smile as we headed back outside to grab a cab, then the ferry, then drove our asses back to Navesink Bank to try to do a night of 'forget this day happened' drinking.
That was the plan anyway.
And it started off that way.
But as fate would have it, the night went differently than I had been expecting.
It was the night everything changed.
Even though I didn't really know it at the time.FIVEPeytonThere weren't a lot of places to go drinking in Navesink Bank. When I'd asked Charlie why - since he was the only person I knew who owned a bar - he'd told me that the town had a set number of liquor licenses, and that all of them were used. Apparently, the ones like Charlie, the Grassis, and the guy who owned that dive bar over on the other side of town had would make millions off of selling theirs. But no one wanted to.
So it left us with those three options.
We could hit up Famiglia for some upscale drinking, but we had to toe the line there, keep it classy. We weren't always in the mood for that. Okay, full disclosure, I was very rarely in the mood for that.
The dive bar was simply somewhere I hadn't been a fan of because there was little appeal to cheap drinks, no mixers, and gross old men who would grab my ass.
So we usually ended up at Chaz's if we were staying in town.
On a Saturday night, the place was always hopping - a mix of the just turned twenty-one-year-olds, chicks out for a girls night, married guys avoiding going home, and the occasional groups of guys who pretended to be watching whatever sports game was on the TV when all they were really doing is looking for a halfway fuckable girl to take home.
"Uh-oh, here comes trouble," Brodie, the bartender, called as we walked up to the long dark wood bar that I knew, because I was in the know about such things, that Hunter had built for the place. Along with the tables and chairs that ran along the walls, leaving a wide space for people to mill around or dance if they wished.
Brodie was hot.
Six-three, dark-haired, tattooed, deep blue eyed, strong but not bulky, with a piercing through his tongue that I had had naughty thoughts about more than once. He also had a faint, just-barely-there Boston accent that made panties melt anywhere in earshot.
But Brodie was also off limits.
I had been lectured by Charlie himself when he was hired.
He is the first bartender since Old Ed died that knows what he's doing. If you two get involved, and he hurts you, I'd have to fire him.
