Colt (Devil's Nightmare MC #10) - Lena Bourne Page 0,49
doesn’t mean the food’s not fresh.
The waitress walks to us slowly, holding a large, clear plastic pitcher of water. The sound of the tiny ice cubes inside it rattling inside it is the sweetest music I’ve ever heard.
She pours and I drink the first glass of ice-cold water without stopping for breath. I extend it for a refill and she eyes me like I’m not right in the head as she pours. She has short curly blonde hair, which is in dire need of a touch-up, both in style and coloring. The crow’s feet around her eyes are pronounced and deep, and her lips are so thin I barely see them. She’s not a happy woman, and it looks like it’s a permanent state of affairs for her.
Colt asks for a refill too, and she puts the pitcher down on the table none too gently.
“You two knock yourselves out,” she mutters and added, “What will it be? Besides water?”
Colt orders a burger with fries, and I opt for just fries and a salad, which gets me another weird look from the waitress.
“Make it a large salad,” I say pointedly and not even that meanly, but she looks away, a little embarrassed, meaning she got the point to get the hell out of my face just fine.
“You got a tongue on you, that’s for sure,” Colt says after we both had our fill of the ice water.
“You mean just now?” I ask. “Or with your boss?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call him my boss,” he muses, grinning at me. “But yeah, both.”
“I’ve been on my own for a long time. I know what’s what and I get things done,” I say. “Like I told you, I had to take care of my mom for years after she started losing it and I’ve learned not to take shit from nobody.”
“Except the Sinners,” he mutters, finishing off his second glass of water and pouring more for the both of us.
“I did my best not to,” I say, unsure where this conversation is going, but I don’t think it’s any place good and I don’t know why.
“You did good back there with Cross,” he says with a grin. “Your info was solid.”
Somehow I feel like the only part he thinks I did good at was the info part, not something else, something that’s nagging at him, making him distant, making us strangers after all we’ve already shared. But I could very well be imagining it. I don’t have the best grip on reality. So I won’t ask either.
“So how’s your mom now? Is she any better?” he asks.
I shake my head, glad for the change of subject and distraction. “I doubt it. I haven’t visited her for a while. She’s in this depressing, run-down asylum about an hour out of Vegas, and every time I go there, I come out feeling insane too. She just sits there and stares at the walls when I do come. She doesn’t even know I’m there, so I only go very rarely.”
“Sounds sad,” he says, kinda woodenly.
“It’s all in how you look at it,” I muse. “I’ve decided a long time ago to just have fun and do only what I want and what feels good. Life’s too short for anything else.”
The look he gives me is so sharp it cuts. But it’s gone the next second.
“So what’s your story?” I ask kinda sharply too, because that look threw me.” I told you mine, but I know next to nothing about you.”
“Except that I’m from Nebraska and don’t ever want to go back,” he says with a chuckle.
“Except that, yeah,” I say.
“It’s not a nice story. My dad’s a total meth head. He’s not even fifty and looked eighty the last time I saw him. He started out cooking and selling, but then he started using it. My mom left us when I was ten because of it, and I haven’t seen her since, and my father’s a mean son of a bitch. I try not to think of him too much. He might be dead, for all I know.”
He’s playing it cool, talking like all that is water under the bridge for him, but his eyes say different. They say he really, really wants to have a better and happier story to tell. I wish that for the both of us.
He’s shredding the napkin and I don’t think he even realizes he’s doing it. I reach over the table and take hold of his hands.