below telling everyone to keep it down because "Harmon is working."
There was a strange skittering feeling in my chest listening to him.
Maybe because it was the first time I'd ever heard anyone else refer to my gaming and taping as "work." Everyone always brushed it off as a hobby or a pastime, something inconsequential, something I could start and stop on a dime.
HallowedHallie: Oh, I miss him already.
MissiontoMayberry: Bunch of thirsty-ass bitches in here tonight.
Okay.
I needed to get control back over this comment section.
And stop thinking about freaking Huck.
The former proved easy enough once the game got going.
The latter, though, seemed like a pipe dream. Because whereas my game usually allowed me to completely escape from the real world, I found myself drifting back into my own mind, to thoughts of Huck.
As I signed off and got up from my chair, I had a sobering realization.
I was going to be sleeping with Huck.
There was no way around it.
And that meant I was going to do something I'd never had to do in my life before.
Beg for it.
Chapter Eight
Huck
I couldn't stop thinking about those dickheads talking to her in that chat.
Sure, I played it down, focused on the supportive women she seemed to have around as well, but the assholes were on my mind as I went downstairs, as I caught myself trying to overhear her one-sided conversation with them, as I considered logging in to listen and watch myself along with all the others until, eventually, I realized what a fucking pussy I was being, and took my ass outside to dive into the pool, doing laps until my arms and lungs were burning .
It wasn't my fucking business how men talked to her online. She wasn't mine. I didn't want a woman to be mine.
At least that was what I had always believed. That they were good for a night or a weekend, and then it lost its appeal.
That said, Harmon had been in my life longer than that, and in my house longer than that, even.
Maybe the difference was, I hadn't fucked her yet.
I'd never bought into that idea that men liked to chase. I didn't know a single man who wasn't over-fucking-joyed when some good pussy just landed in his lap, no effort at all. I was a busy man. I didn't have time to convince a woman I was worth fucking. Besides, it seemed creepy as fuck to do shit like that. If a woman didn't want to fuck me, she didn't want to fuck me. She'd be missing out, but I wasn't going to try to change her mind about it.
I guess another difference here was, Harmon did want to fuck me. There was no mistaking that. She was just insisting she didn't because, why? Because we were neighbors? Because she didn't want to get any more involved with an outlaw biker club than she needed to?
I didn't know.
It shouldn't have mattered.
I should have been able to shrug it off, move onto the next.
Why, then, was every unoccupied thought all about her? Why did I want to know about what she got out of this online community of hers, this game that took up a good part of her life, what incident had made her afraid of cars, and if it was connected to the PTSD and the pot she used for it? I wanted to know why she moved out into the middle of nowhere, why she had no apparent real-life friends, why she didn't seem close to her family, except maybe her brother.
Basically, I wanted to know what made her tick.
And I don't remember ever thinking that about a woman before. About a person before, if I were being honest.
I mean, yeah, sure, over the years, I'd learned about Che and Remy and McCoy and Teddy's pasts. And I'd demanded Seeley tell me his in the interest of protecting the club from any skeletons in his closet. But I don't ever remember being genuinely curious about that shit before, about the parts that made up the whole.
Yet here I was, sitting on the steps of the fucking pool, thinking about that shit. Because of a blue-haired woman with a slight gaming addiction.
What the fuck was wrong with me?
"Just got off the phone with Arty," Che said, dropping down on a chaise that sat beside of the pool, his phone in his hand.