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I’m half afraid to look at her, but as the room goes so quiet that you can hear not just a fart but someone’s intention of holding it in, a brief bubble in the gut, I sneak my eyes quickly to Ayana’s face. She’s not keeping a stony countenance like me. Her eyes are bright but swollen and red-rimmed. She’s obviously been crying, and that stabs me in the gut like a thousand knife blocks. Yeah, all the knives and the block too. Her lips wobble just a little, but she sighs deeply and keeps herself from showing too much emotion. I’m transfixed by her breezy beauty—the tangle of her thick, dark hair, her gorgeous eyes, her petal-soft mouth, her leather jacket and jeans, and her shit-kickers, which are so much like her dad’s that I want to smile, though I don’t.
Hobart crosses arms beefier than twin locomotives. It’s obvious he’s barely containing and restraining his fury when his eyes meet mine. I feel like a mouse waiting to be finished off in the mousetrap that’s just been set. No doubt he thinks I’m lower than a rodent.
It’s going to be a monumental task to convince these men that I come in peace and am not a lizard bastard like they think I am. Granny, it appears, is going to try.
“I’m sorry,” she mutters, and my god, it sounds like she’s holding back a laugh. Right now is really not a good time to break into uproarious mirth. If I didn’t think it would alert the goons in the room, I would shift my fingers and cross them behind my back. “I can’t operate when you’re wearing that.”
“Operate?” Hobart demands coldly. “Wearing what?”
Granny points. I track the direction of her finger straight to Hobart’s midsection. Oh. My. Holy. Juicy. Turnips. He can’t be. He just can’t be. But he is. This big, bad biker dude is totally wearing a black leather fanny pack. I didn’t even notice it at first. Now, if there’s anything Granny hates, it’s a fanny pack. I have no idea why, but they’re right up there with liver, pickled or tinned fish, and Brussels sprouts. Sorry to all who like these. We don’t. Not a single one of us.
“That fanny pack,” she hisses. “It needs to go. I can’t take a man seriously when he’s wearing a fanny pack.”
“What’s wrong with a fanny pack?” Hobart grinds. He seems more amused than angry, which is a minor miracle. Granny doesn’t care that she’s skating on thin ice. She’s giving the finger to said ice, and she’s not going through. Not today.
“They’re woefully hideous,” Granny informs him matter-of-factly.
A shiver of disbelief and a murmur of disapproval goes through the crowd. They’re surrounding us right now, and clearly, none of them have an issue with fanny packs.
Hobart puts a hand on the pack and caresses it lovingly. “Fanny packs are great. No one can steal from you because they’d have to reach right in front of you, at junk level, and there’s no way any guy would miss that.”
“Do you have a problem with that? People stealing from you? Because I would think that, in a crowd, you’d be the one person everyone would want to avoid bumping shoulders with.”
Thank god Granny didn’t say bumping uglies. She’s sometimes not that up on her lingo and says the wrong thing without even knowing it.
“Well, besides the obvious fashion benefits,” Hobart goes on, miffed now, and it’s obvious as his voice gets growly. “The fanny pack has excellent storage capabilities. You can put anything in there, including but not limited to—and sometimes in multiple quantities—a large knife, dental picks, bullets, a snack bag of raisins, a phone….” He unzips the fanny pack and pulls out his phone to demonstrate. His movement accidentally turns on the screen, and a photo of a cute kitten with extra big eyes lights up the screen.
No way. This scary guy has a kitten as his screen lock? I mean, that kitten is super adorable. Go figure. One of the guys somewhere behind me actually makes an awwww sound, but he quickly cuts it off with a gulp at the end.
I’m not sure how many insults Hobart can take about his choice of murse—does a fanny pack count as a man-purse?—so I’m glad Ayana changes the subject. She’s not afraid to get right to the heart of the matter.
“We all know that this club was targeted by another organization.” She sweeps her hand over Granny and me. “Their organization. They are, from what I understand, a kind of vigilante group that operates mostly online and rights a lot of the wrongs in the world—major wrongs that are done by bad people. I think it’s admirable, personally. I don’t understand everything they do or the why of it—”
“Because those mafia bastards killed my husband, and they’re going to pay. All drug lords, anyone who’s running a crime empire, even small potatoes, all of them. Every. Single. One.” There’s no winding down Granny when she’s furious, but Ayana is every bit as much of a fighter as Granny is, and she’s not bending under that sorrow or cowering from that anger.
