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“Jesus Christ, Billie!” another woman said, reaching down to grab the woman’s hand and yanking her off the couch. “Sorry. She has no boundaries,” the other woman said as she pulled Billie away.
Just as Dezi was making his way over with two drinks. A whiskey for himself, filled almost to the rim. And a bottle of beer for me, cap still on. Because, apparently, he thought of shit like that.
Reaching down toward my belt, I pulled the bottle opener attached to a retractable cord upward, popping off the top, and letting it snap back into place.
“Handy,” he said, dropping his ass down on the arm of my seat, comfortable as could be as he invaded my space. “So, what was his name?”
“What?” I asked. “Whose name?”
“The biker you dated,” he said, making me choke a bit on the beer I’d just taken a sip of. “Don’t worry. I’m not the jealous sort. He’s in the past, where he belongs. So who was he?”
“Evan,” I answered honestly.
“Yeah? Who he roll with?”
“Think of an MC a lot more famous than yours,” I said, watching as his brow raised.
“Really? That’s who you got involved with?”
“Red is my favorite flag color,” I told him, shrugging. “But I’m in recovery for that,” I added, even though being in his clubhouse with him was a clear sign that I was falling off that wagon pretty quickly.
“Recovery, huh?” he asked, smirking down at me. “I didn’t have you pegged for a quitter.”
“I’m not rising to that bait,” I told him, though a part of me wanted to. The part of me I was trying hard to change, to turn into a better person. Or, at least, a slightly more stable one.
The past few months had been… weird, to say the least. They’d dragged me out of my old life and forced me into a new one.
And, I’d been finding, some parts of my old self just… no longer fit.
It was weird, at times, to realize you were changing. And it was hard to let go of old behaviors or feelings since they’d been a part of you for a reason, they’d protected you or helped you cope.
But if you no longer needed that, it was time to loosen your grip and let them go.
The problem was, I was a stubborn ass with a bit of a scarcity mindset, so it was hard to lose anything, even toxic parts of myself.
“So, is this a typical party at the clubhouse? Not a clubwhore to be seen?”
“Shh. Some of the princesses don’t like when we call them CWs,” Dezi said, nodding his head over toward Billie.
“Really? She gives off all the sexually liberated vibes.”
“Hence her not liking them being called whores. And sometimes there are girls here, but this has never been a CW-heavy clubhouse.”
“Weird,” I said, shaking my head.
“You’d prefer they’d be here?” he asked.
Did I prefer the presence of women who knew men were taken but still sucked them off in the common area? No. But the thing was… in those worlds, in the typical club atmosphere, no one gave a fuck what the women wanted.
“This is a more progressive sort of club,” Dezi said. “Partly because every woman here could probably kick the asses of every man here.”
My gaze slid to Billie, to the pretty blonde who wanted the drink umbrellas, and even the other woman in her sleek all-white business attire.
“You’re shitting me.”
“Hard to believe it, but no. Their aunts teach everything from Krav Maga to LINE. They’ve been doing self-defense from the cradle. Not even peace-and-love Billie could escape it.”
“This is an interesting town,” I said, still having a hard time wrapping my head around it.
“You get used to it,” Dezi said. “A little mafia here, a little cartel there, some loansharks for good measure…”
“You’re leaving out the two bike clubs, the ‘fixer’ people…”
“The underground fight club, the underground gambling club…”
“What? No way,” I said, more intrigued than I should have been. What can I say, underground stuff had always been like catnip to me. And I might have been looking to shake the habit, but I clearly had a long way to go.
“I’d take you to the gambling place, but I’m on a temporary ban. The fight club, though, I could swing that. If the club didn’t have its panties in a bunch about it, I could even get in the ring and have some fun.”
“Why does it have its panties in a bunch about it?”
“Oh, some shit with our president and Danny’s old club and the guy currently running the fight club. It was a whole thing a few years back. We are allowed to go again now, but Fallon doesn’t want us fighting anymore.”
“Anymore,” I repeated as my gaze moved around the room. “Let me guess. The young Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver lookalike used to fight back in the day,” I said when my gaze landed on him as he hopped himself behind the bar to grab a drink.
