Page 4 of Bound By Blood

“Oh, get me another rum and coke, will you?” Alex said, holding out her glass to Carly.

Carly cocked a hip. “What do I look like, a fucking waiter?”

Alex batted her lashes. “No, you look like one of my bestest friends in the whole wide world.”

Rolling her eyes, Carly snatched the empty glass, ice clinking inside, before heading back toward the busy bar. She made her way through the throng of people standing around a table where the seats were all full and slid up to the bar, squeezing between the people seated there.

Carly leaned over the bar and flagged down the bartender on the other side who was filling someone else’s order. He was a new guy, and she had yet to learn his name.

The short and bearded man motioned for her to give him a second, so she leaned her elbows on the counter and tapped her foot to the beat of one of her favorite songs.

As she was waiting, someone slid up next to her. The first thing Carly smelled was heavy cologne, and she recoiled a little. She peeked over at the person, finding him to be a short-haired stocky man with a pig nose. He might have been handsome at one point in his life, but he was balding at his hairline.

This man was grinning at her, and when he leaned in, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, the smell of his beer breath wafted in her direction. “How you doing, sweetheart?”

“Back off,” she ground out.

The guy pushed himself closer to her. “What do you say we head into the bathroom for some fun?” He was slurring his words, his eyes glossy from all the booze he probably consumed tonight. He reminded her of a college frat guy, a guy who was clearly still stuck in the past and the life of the good frat house party.

Carly was not interested. In fact, she was growing more and more pissed by the second. “Excuse me?”

He grinned sidelong at her. “Come on, what do you say?” He looked down at her chest, her breasts perked from the laced bra she had bought herself last week. Carly stiffened as his gaze traveled lower. “I usually don’t go for your type, but damn, you look good.”

Carly cocked an eyebrow and looked at him pointedly, turning so they were face-to-face. “My type?”

“Yeah, you bigger girls. I usually prefer my bitches to be all skinny and supermodel-type, but those tits would look great in my face.” He swayed a little closer to her breasts.

The bartender reached her. “What can I get you?”

She held up a finger to him, then promptly kneed the drunk in the crotch. He doubled over with a grunt. “You bitch,” he ground out.

Anger dripping from every pore of her body, she grabbed the man’s head and slammed it against the bar. No one called her a bitch.

The man crumpled to the ground, moaning in pain and holding both his crotch and his bleeding nose. Satisfied, she turned back to the bartender, whose eyebrow was lifted. “I’ll take a rum and coke and another beer.” She passed him her empty bottle and Alex’s glass.

With lips pressed tightly together, the bartender quickly refilled both orders in a timely fashion, probably so she’d take her anger away from the bar.

He passed them over to her. “Anything else?”

“That’ll do, Jack.” She didn’t actually know his name, but he looked like a Jack.

When he made no comment about his new name, she turned on her heel, stepped over the drunk, and strode back to the table.

Being called plus-sized used to bother her. She used to struggle with self-esteem about her weight issues because of her mother and all her snide remarks about her size. Carly had always been on the curvier side than most girls, and her mother always pointed it out. She even went so far as to try and starve Carly to ‘help’ her lose the weight. She had taken her to every doctor and tried various herbal remedies, but nothing worked, and she ended up disowning Carly because she was not the pretty daughter she had always wanted.

Because of her mother, Carly grew up hating herself. It wasn’t like Carly could have helped the weight. She even went so far as to try all the different diet and exercise programs, but none of them seemed to work either. Then, she nearly killed herself with Diet Pills. After that, she realized her obsession with her weight was going to kill her unless she changed her way of thinking. And it was also the reason Carly broke all ties with the woman who made her childhood hell.

She realized later, while she was in college and knew better, that her mother had been suffering from her own issues and had tried to mold Carly into the person she herself had wanted to be. Carly didn’t need her love or approval. She needed to live her life the way she wanted to, and to do that, she needed to love herself.

It had taken a while, while she lived on the streets and was fighting for somewhere to safely sleep, to fully embrace who she was, even though she had done many things that would haunt an innocent’s dream. No. She embraced all of who she was. She was determined not to let anyone take that away from her. Even her wrong-doings shaped her to be who she was. So, she used her attitude and snarky remarks as a defense mechanism. And when those didn’t work, she discovered that a swift kick to the balls usually did the trick.

Carly arrived back at the table. Her friends were staring at her then looking at the man peeling himself from the floor back at the bar.

“Everything okay?” Lily asked as Carly sat back down.

“Yeah,” Carly said, smirking a little. “Just another asshole. This is why toys are better. They don’t talk back.”

Carly handed Alex her drink, and Alex took it gratefully, sipping it. “God, that tastes good,” she muttered into the glass.