Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,99
with relief.
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if I’m going to need one yet. But when I do. I got one. A good one. Dylan got him for me.”
“Dylan? When did you talk to him?”
“After you tried to kick me to the curb.”
“Well, I can see how well that worked.”
Not at all. We grinned at each other like idiots.
“But what does that mean for you? Getting a lawyer?” She meant what was the cost. Oh, this girl, how well she knew me.
“It means I can’t ever go back,” I told her. “Not to the Skulls.”
“Do you want to? Really?”
“It’s all I know. All I’ve ever known. All I’ve ever been.”
She touched a finger to a tattoo on my hand. A smiling grim reaper. It wasn’t a Skull tattoo, I mean it wasn’t pretty. But it wasn’t club. So I wasn’t going to have to get it covered. That was part of the price of leaving the club, you had to get all the tattoos covered, blocked out.
The big one on my shoulder—like the one my pops had—that was going to be a bitch.
“I’m sorry that it makes you feel bad, but I’m glad,” she whispered. “I’m glad you can’t ever go back.”
I was, too. I just wasn’t quite ready to say it yet.
She tilted her head and took a sip of her wine. The sun hit it and turned it to gold. Her lip was a little swollen where I’d bit it. I ran my tongue over my own lip where it was cut from her slapping me.
My cock got hard. Fuck. She really did that. She hit me and then let me fuck her face so hard she could barely breathe. She was grinning at me like she was reading my mind. “What are you thinking about?” Her eyes dipped to my lap and my obvious erection.
“Your smart mouth.”
“Yeah?” She breathed, leaning in closer. “What are you going to do about my smart mouth?”
Screw the drinks. I nearly got to my feet and would have grabbed her hand and pulled her out of there. Into the nearest room with a door I could find, but a waitress came by and dropped our order of calamari in front of us and I could hear Joan’s stomach growl.
My girl needed to eat.
“Feed it,” I said. “I’m going to feed you and then I’m taking you home.”
“Then let’s eat fast.”
We dug into the food, which could have been the most amazing calamari in the history of the world, but I barely tasted it. I was too distracted with watching Joan lick her fingers and knock back her glass of wine. For some reason I couldn’t forget what Fern said about finding out about her father. About how that would tell me something about why Joan did the stuff she did. Why she hurt the way she did and spent so much time trying to cover it up.
“Tell me something.”
“Is this about my name again?”
I laughed and took a swig of beer, stalling for time, not quite ready to change this mood. “No, I learned that lesson. You’re not telling me your name.”
She dragged a calamari ring through the lemony sauce that came with it and put it in her mouth, her eyes twinkling at me. I wanted to warm my cold body by her bright and wild light for days.
“Tell me what happened to your dad.”
She practically fell off her barstool she jerked back in such surprise. She swallowed, wiped her mouth with a napkin.
“My dad? What the hell does he have to do with anything?”
Probably everything, I thought. Just like my mom and my dad were the root of all my compromises.
I took a sip of beer and shrugged.
“There’s not much to say.” She drained her glass and asked the bartender for some water.
She wasn’t going to tell me. I could see it in the set of her chin. All stubborn. All fuck you. And it was weird to feel sad about something like her keeping her life private. She didn’t owe me shit, as much as I might want it.
I ordered another beer and then Joan surprised me.
With all her attention focused on the little cardboard coaster she was bending and then tearing into shreds, she started to talk.
“Dad was…I don’t know…a simple guy. He didn’t graduate high school. He ran this junkyard and we lived there in a trailer—I told you that. He liked that job. He liked hunting and fishing. And us. Me and Jennifer. He loved us.