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Besides, he was good at selling underage customers, also good at selling pussy in the back of the shop during and after business hours.
“Who’s the new girl? She barely looks old enough to buy a pack of cigarettes, let alone be serving alcohol.”
Richie looked over to where the young blonde was and then glanced back at me. “That’s Poppy. New girl. She’s been here about a week. Just turned nineteen, I think.” The look he gave me was a little bit hesitant. It was the look of a man who thought I said something shady. He knew me well, but fuck, I wasn’t some kind of a fucking maniac. “Should I have asked before hiring her?” he asked genuinely.
I shrugged. “I don’t give a fuck who you hire, Richie.” I looked back at Poppy. “You selling her ass in the back like the others?” He better fucking say he wasn’t or I’d break his kneecaps. That thought and certainty filled me so strongly it shocked the hell out of me.
“No.” He shook his head adamantly. “She’s not a whore. She just slings drinks and collects a paycheck every other week.”
I grunted in response. “Poppy,” I said under my breath, instantly liking how it rolled off my tongue.
I could still feel Richie looking at me, but I didn’t give a fuck. He wasn’t my concern. Now, Poppy… Poppy was definitely my concern.
Chapter Two
Poppy
“Damn, girl. You got a tight little ass on you.”
I ignored the drunken asshole who tried to grab me. I stepped back and gave him a fake, tight-lipped smile. The three men sitting around the table were all eyeing me as if I was a piece of meat. I was used to it, unfortunately, not because I thought I was pretty or anything special, but because I had a pussy and that’s all they cared about.
I knew these types of men. They were the ones I’d been around my entire life.
They were the type of asshole I’d run from.
Here I was, finding myself in the same situation as I’d escaped… being surrounded by a bunch of pricks who only saw me as a hole to fill.
I set the beer down in front of the asshole and turned to make my rounds and check on the other customers. The classic rock played overhead from the jukebox in the corner, an old-ass thing that looked like it was on its last legs. The interior lights of the thing flickered, and the makeshift dance floor was scuffed up and scarred. The few people who were in the center dancing looked more like they were trying to dry hump each other than anything else.
I made it one step before the guy reached out and smacked my ass hard enough that I felt the sting through my jeans. I turned around and narrowed my eyes. I might’ve been young, but I was tough, had lived my life around men who thought taking advantage of women was the norm. I didn’t come from a rich family. I wasn’t privileged. I had to fight for everything I got in life, and there was no fucking way I was going to let some drunk prick put his hands on me, thinking I was another girl who would just roll over and spread her legs.
“Keep your hands to yourself.” What I wanted to say to him was that if he touched me again, I’d cut off his fucking fingers and shove them down his throat.
He looked at me and then at his friends, who were laughing at his clear misfortune. I’d embarrassed him. I could tell by how red his face became, how he narrowed his eyes at me and clenched his jaw. But fuck him. I didn’t care.
I walked back to the bar, but still I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I’d felt it as soon as I stepped out of the backroom, as if someone watched me intently. This wasn’t the same attention as a drunkard staring at me. No, this felt different. This felt more intense, more consuming.
I set my tray down and looked over my shoulder, scanning the interior of the bar. As bars went, it was pretty standard, with sticky, scuffed-up floors, a weird, stale smell in the air, and just an overall rundown appearance. The decor went as far as having old-ass license plates nailed up on the walls.
As I continued to scan the room, nothing stood out to me right away, and I couldn’t see anyone staring at me. But still, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was being watched. I always went with my instincts. They’d saved me more times than I could count. They’d been the reason I left the shitty riser I’d called home in the middle of the night, because my worthless and neglectful drug addict of a mom’s boyfriend—Henry—had been throwing up red flags in my direction.
The way he looked at me, brushed up against me, had my stomach clenching in disgust, had bile rising in my throat.
It would have only been a matter of time before he came into my room and took what he wanted.
At nineteen, it wasn’t like I had a whole lot of money, not with working part-time as a waitress at the diner in town—the one that made this bar look like the damn Ritz. And so that’s why I did what I had to do. That’s why I’d stolen from Henry to make sure I had the funds to escape.
I knew he kept a stack of cash in a coffee can in the freezer. He either thought we were too stupid to know or he watched too many action movies. Either way, I knew. So I’d left when they’d been passed out, needle in my mom’s arm, a mirror on the coffee table with coke residue smeared across it.
I’d wanted to have that relationship with my mother in which I could confide in her, but to be honest, I was surprised I’d survived as long as I had under her care.
I’d been nothing more than a means to an end, a broken condom, as she so eloquently put it. I’d been stuck in a shit life, and I’d been tired of it. Just a shame the circumstances had been the way they’d been.
So here I was, finding myself in some little rundown town hundreds of miles away from the only place I’d ever called home. I’d thought twice about staying. It was clearly run by criminals, an MC that had an iron fist where everything was concerned. But then I realized this was the best place for me to be, to hide… to be out in the open but camouflaged by the filthy scum of the world.
I closed my eyes and breathed out slowly. Maybe I wasn’t being watched. Maybe it was all in my head, a paranoid feeling, because I was on the run, expecting to be found at any moment.
And this job? This barmaid who got paid under the table despite having filled out an application for “paper trail” reasons, per the owner, was just trying to stay out of trouble and save some money to move to the next place.
