AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Not at all. I made about three hundred in tips. I had only one person grab me. And the guys from Atra showed up to hassle me." I left out any mention of Finn and him dragging me back to the VIP room.
"And Jimmy?"
"He was kind of in a bad mood. He stomped around, huffed and puffed like the bad wolf he likes to think he is, and then left us alone."
"Did he leave by himself?" She tried to sound like she didn't care, but it was obvious she did.
"I wasn't paying attention," I admitted. I had been too discombobulated by Finn. "I thought he had that no sleeping with the help rule." I wiped my hands dry and returned to the bedroom. Ivy scooted over and I climbed into bed with her.
She snorted. "He has a lot of rules that he likes to apply to the staff that don't apply to him. He's Jimmy Risk, you know. Rules are for peons."
Yeah, there was something there, but if she didn't want to tell me then I wasn't going to press I had my own crush and my own secrets I didn't want to talk about. Besides, Jimmy was bad news in my book and the last guy I'd want for Ivy—not just because he was a strip club owner, but because that was all he owned: nightclubs and strip clubs. For a recovering alcoholic like Ivy, it didn't make good sense for her to be shackled to a guy who had access to thousands of gallons of liquor. It wasn’t ideal that she worked there either, but she needed a job and Jimmy provided the only one since she got out of prison.
"I never saw him hit on any of the girls. He was in a really growly mood." I’d have to tell her about the VIP room thing. Jimmy or someone else was bound to bring it up. Hey your sister went in the back and gave a private dance to a customer! I didn’t want her to hear it from anyone else. Taking a deep breath to calm my suddenly racing heart, I said, "You know who else was there?"
"Everyone? I mean, at some point it seems like every male in this city ends up there."
I ran my tongue over my lower lip, remembering the taste of him. "Finn O'Malley."
She barked out a surprised laugh. "You're shitting me? What the hell was he doing there? His latest girlfriend not putting out enough?"
"He was there with some guys I didn't know and Adam Rees."
"Nice. How'd he look?"
"Good." I paused, and the silence lengthened between us as I discarded several adjectives that would give away how much I felt for him. How could I describe him without talking about how piercing his blue eyes looked even in the dark light and how hard his body felt when it pressed against me? Or how soft his hair looked, and how I wanted to drag my fingers through it and then pull his lush mouth to mine and kiss him until there was no air left in either of us.
"I saw him right after his dad died, did I tell you that?"
I shook my head and tried not to pay attention to the way my heart was squeezing. “Right after or later?”
A sick feeling roiled in my stomach. Had they hooked up? Talked about getting back together? Was this before or after Finn and I had sex at the trailer?
“Right after.”
Relief rushed through me so fast I felt dizzy. I wished he’d said at least one word about this the other night. But then, would it have really made a difference? I hadn’t thought about Ivy before that night and sure as hell not during. I squirmed beside her, but she didn’t notice.
She was lost in her own memory. "I ran into him at the Walgreens on 48th and University. I'd run out of tampons and peanut M&Ms. He was buying bottles of Everclear. I asked him what he was doing and he said ‘getting shitfaced.’ Anyway, he looked good then. Of course, he'd always looked good. That wasn't the problem with us,” she finished with a slight curl of her lip. Was that disgust or dismay?
It was an opening, a tiny one, but I dove through it and kicked the door open. "What ever happened between the two of you?"
As if there was something she could say that would make my own actions okay. Yes, they'd been broken up since she was twenty and that was five years ago, but Finn was still her ex. And it felt wrong. Even when it was so good.
"Oh, God." She flung an arm over her eyes. "That was a shit time in my life, Winter, and I did a lot of things I'm ashamed of."
"Sorry, you don't have to tell me."
Losing a parent was like receiving blunt force trauma to the side of the head. You never really fully recover, but you could move on. When our parents died in a car wreck on New Year's Eve when I was sixteen and Ivy was nineteen, there was a time there I thought we'd died too.
Ivy’d already had a bad drinking problem. She'd flunked out of her first semester at college and had come home defiant and unapologetic. They'd argued, and then the accident happened. After that, Ivy couldn't pull herself out of the tailspin. She was sober just enough to fight for my guardianship so I wouldn't have to stay in foster care for two years. But after the petition was granted, she let go, as if the court battle had sucked out every atom of her self-control.
We'd had the life insurance policies, so it seemed we'd make it financially. Ivy paid off the house and set aside money for my college. Or so I thought.
But Ivy's drinking turned into drugs, and the money from the insurance ran through her fingers like water through a sieve. I didn't learn the full extent of the damage until I tried to pay for my
first semester at Central. The check bounced, my admission got denied, and I had a long screaming match with Ivy that ended with bitter tears on both sides.
I mortgaged the house to pay for her first stay at rehab and sold the house to pay for the second. But once an addiction had a hold, its grip was so tight you couldn't pry that person loose with a bulldozer. She had to crawl out on her own. That was the lesson I had to learn. Margo, Ivy's sponsor, said I still hadn't learned it. Margo thought I should move out, but until Ivy could stand for herself, I wasn’t leaving.
