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CHAPTER SEVEN
Ahand came out ofnowhere and slapped Jay up the back of the head.
“Hey! Fuck off!” he complained and spun around—and he wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to find Gunner standing there. He couldn’t count how many times Gun had hit him like that. He’d been elbows deep in an ugly, ancient Cutlass, and his hands were as grimy as his Sinclair uniform. So now Jay’s hair was probably full of grime, too.
He rubbed back there but didn’t feel anything actually dripping, so whatever.
“The bell’s ringing, asshole,” Gunner said. “You’re starin’ out the front window, don’t you see the car at the pumps?”
Jay had beenfacingthe front windows, but he hadn’t been looking at anything beyond them. All day, his head had been showing him the same pictures, over and over. Petra behind her bar, kissing him. Petra in her kitchen, her hands on him, her face smiling up at him. Petra walking toward her bedroom, inviting him to follow. Petra in her bedroom, taking her clothes off, watching him take his off. Petra naked, slim and sleek, with small, high, gorgeous tits and surprisingly contoured muscles, especially her legs and abs—the dancing, he figured. Petra drawing him into her bed, lying beneath him. Petra moaning as he touched her. Petra coming, with her arms and legs twisted around him. Petra smiling up at him after. Petra inviting him to stay. Petra sleeping in his arms while he lay there, his brain spinning. Petra still curled on her side, sleeping deeply, peacefully as he slipped from her bed, gathered his clothes, and left her room to dress near the front door.
His head had been full of nothing but Petra since he’d entered her bedroom. Since before that.
Now, standing in the convenience mart of the Bulls’ Sinclair station, Jay turned back to the window and looked. Yep. A bright red Mazda SUV, with a blonde PTA mom behind the wheel. She already looked irritated. Awesome.
Brian Delaney Auto Service was a full-service station, one of the last around anywhere, he thought. Most of the Bulls—everybody but Jay and Christian—were mechanics, and they worked the bays except in rare circumstances when there wasn’t some grunt to cover the shop and pumps. Prospects and patches who weren’t mechanics were the grunts.
When there was a prospect on the clock, Jay wouldn’t normally have to deal with the pumps, but Monty, the Bulls’ lone prospect, had broken his ankle and was riding one of those funky scooters for his leg. Thus, he was working the shop. Currently, he was stocking snack cakes. And Jay was at the pumps today.
There was no work he despised more than pump jockey. He’d rather dig graves. He’d rather shovel guts up off the dirt floor of the barn at the farm.
“I got it,” he said and pushed through the door, leaving Gunner to do whatever the fuck he wanted, so long as it wasn’t riding his ass.
Heat slammed down on his head as the sun fried his eyeballs. He hadn’t been especially drunk last night, but he felt hungover as fuck today. Maybe it was just that he’d slept only three hours, crashed in one of the beds upstairs in the clubhouse, and now was wearing a dirty uniform he’d shoved in his locker a while back and had never gotten around to taking home to wash.
If either Eight or Maverick were around this weekend, he’d hear about working in dirty, wrinkled greens, but Eight was off in the Osage, on some kind of father-son weekend with Ajax. He didn’t know where Mav was, but it wasn’t here.
The woman in the Mazda was on her phone, her window up. She didn’t notice Jay come up to the door, so he knocked on the window. She looked over and glared at him, then took the window down about an inch. The strong scent of probably expensive perfume wafted through the crack on a wave of cool air and punched his nose.
“Took you long enough,” she snapped. “Fill it up, check the oil. Wash the windows. You know, your job.”
No job he despised more.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said and held his hand up near the crack. They were full service but not stupid. Station policy was to get the credit card cleared first.
She shoved a Visa through the crack, then sealed her window up tight and went back to her phone.
Jay used his reader to run her card.Platinum Club, it said. Fancy.
When it was clear, he knocked on the window with it. She gave him another dirty look but put the window down just enough for him to feed the card through. That kind of shit happened a lot, always with women of about that ‘mom’ age. What did they think? That ‘pump jockey’ was a contagious disease? Or that he was going to reach through the window and molest them at three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon?
When he’d finished work on Thursday night, mopping the goddamn shop floors at midnight, he’d told himself it might be his last grunt shift. Even then, he’d known it wasn’t true; even if he’d passed his exams, Mav would have needed to refill his shifts and build him out a new schedule before he’d officially been in the bays. But on Thursday night, that thought had been a hope, an ease. A warm, soft spot in his chest.
The real thought, the one that had made the warm softness? That he’d finallyreallybe a Bull.
He’d been a patch for three years. He sat at the table in the chapel. He voted in church. But Bulls were mechanics. Every one of them, from the day Grampa D founded the club, had been a mechanic. Even Gunner, the last patch to go so long full-time on the pumps, had gotten his ASE years ago.
But Gunner had an excuse: he was dyslexic and hadn’t been able to deal with the exam until he’d gotten accommodations.
Jay didn’t have a learning disability. Apparently, he was just plain old stupid.
The Mazda’s horn blew while he was checking the oil. The explosion of sound under the hood made him jump, and he raked his knuckles on the radiator cap and took a big hunk out of the middle knuckle of his middle finger. It started to bleed at once, of course. Clenching his jaw, he grabbed the shop towel from his back pocket and wrapped it around this finger.
Then he went around to the driver’s door—she was glaring at him—and forced a smile onto his face. “Problem?” he asked through the closed window.
