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“But the parties are only—“
“Every single day for like twelve hours straight,” I cut him off, getting a chuckle out of him.
“Fair enough,” he agreed, reaching for the gun I had set up on the table, stabbing the magazine into it, then holding out his arm, and shooting like an amateur primetime television mobster. Gun cocked to the side. Posture casual. Barely even looking at his targets.
And still… the fuck was more accurate than he had any right to be.
“Happy?” he asked, giving me a raised brow look that said he knew this was a waste of his time.
“For now,” I agreed. “But Huck will be on my ass about you practicing like everyone else does.”
“Catch me earlier in the day then, man,” he said, placing the gun back down on the table before walking away.
“I feel that sigh,” another voice said a second later, making me turn to see Velle standing there. “Coast can be…”
“A pain in the ass?” I filled in.
“I was going to say… difficult,” Velle said.
“Same thing,” I said, shrugging.
Velle was about as opposite from Coast as you can get. Both in looks and personality.
Where Coast was more fair, Velle had black hair and a black beard, and dark eyes. He, like Coast, had a lot of ink. And he was also sporting gauged ears and a nose ring.
As for who he was as a person, Velle was quieter. He was someone who was more likely to be standing on the sidelines, paying attention to the goings-on or having some sort of deep conversation with someone.
Velle had been chosen for the club for his knack for getting people to spill all their secrets to him. And I guess if I were Huck, I would definitely see that as an asset.
As a fellow club member, one who was harboring some shit he didn’t want to talk about, though, I found his ability for reading people off-putting.
“You here to practice?” I asked, waving toward the table with the gun still sitting there.
“I’ve been told I can use it,” he admitted, making his way toward the gun.
“You overthink it,” I told him as he checked the magazine.
“Kind of a personality quirk, I guess,” he admitted, nodding.
Velle had grown up in a club. Albeit a casual, road warrior type club. Not one like ours. It wasn’t until he did a bid for grand theft auto that he seemed to pick up his current set of overthinking skills, thanks to bunking with a disgraced shrink for a few years. Apparently, he learned a lot of shit fromthe doctor that he found was applicable to conversations with people that allowed him to ask the right questions to get the information out of them that he was seeking.
It seemed it even happened accidentally these days. At parties, he could be seen trying to chat up one of the club girls. Likely looking for some good, casual fun. But in no time, the women were spilling their traumas, crying, then rushing out of the club like they’d just had some sort of massive therapeutic breakthrough. Or break. Who the hell knew?
All I knew was that afterward, Velle always seemed disappointed. Like maybe it had become a part of him. Like he couldn’t turn it on and off at will.
“Normally, I’d say to imagine someone you hate standing in front of the target,” I said. “But I got a feeling you’re too ‘healed’ for that shit.”
“Might be giving me too much credit there,” he said, shaking his head. “Think if you spend enough time around people who know a lot about the human condition,” he started, squeezing off a shot that landed too wide, “you learn that almost none of them can turn that lens on themselves,” he told me as he tried again, then again.
Getting further away rather than closer.
“Like that cellmate of yours?” I asked, moving closer to him, reaching for his arm, and shifting his aim slightly.
“Fucking genius. But he had a debilitating gambling problem that had him so in the red that he had to sell scripts,” he said, squeezing the trigger, this time actually hitting the target, but at the edge. “Not to mention a really twisted codependent relationship with his sick fuck of a mother.” This time, he almost hit a bullseye when he squeezed the trigger.
Just proving my point.
That when he stopped thinking about the actual task at hand, he was a fuckuva lot more accurate.
