business,” I said with a smirk. “Quit being nosy.”
Shooting the shit was easy with Dawson, always had been, but I was still a little iffy on talking to him about Joker. Especially when I knew how he’d treated Joker at the bar.
“Come on,” Dawson said, his grin widening. “Was it a date? Or was someone just dropping you off from a one-night stand?”
“You didn’t tell me the score,” I deflected, motioning at the television even though the score was prominently displayed.
“Which one of those guys hooked you?” Dawson teased. “Was it Coop? Seems like he and Rebel could be talked into a three-way if you tried hard enough.”
“Dawson, seriously,” I said, and scrubbed my hand over my hair. “It wasn’t a one-night stand.”
Dawson peered at me curiously—and then that was quickly wiped away, replaced with a wide-eyed look of disbelief. “Oh, no way. It wasn’t Joker, was it?”
“So what if it was?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest and focusing on the game. Looked like we were having this conversation, even if I wasn’t quite ready for it.
“Aw, come on,” Dawson said, leaning heavily back on the couch before taking a long swig of his beer. “He’s such a dickhead. And he’s treated you like shit, too. You’re just setting yourself up for a world of hurt, again.”
“Well, you haven’t acted so great either, recently,” I said. “You really got on his ass at Ballast.”
Dawson cringed. “Yeah, I may have taken things a little too far, I admit that. But I was doing it for you, Bren.”
“You were not,” I said. “You were just looking for a fight, and he happened to be there. Flip back to the movie, I don’t want to watch commercials.”
Dawson flipped to the movie as instructed. That was the comfortable thing about our friendship, despite the rocky parts—we could talk like this to each other, honestly, even a little angrily, without actually feeling like the friendship was on the line. Because at the end of the day, I knew that Dawson had my best interests at heart, even if he went around defending my honor in the most irritating, fucked-up way.
Dawson fixed his attention on the television, but it was clear from his grimace that he wasn’t really watching it. “So, if it wasn’t a one-night stand, what were you doing with Joker?”
“A date,” I said.
“Ugh,” Dawson said. “Sleeping with him I could understand, he’s seriously fine, but a date? Like a real date? Why?”
There was a note of disgust in Dawson’s voice, like he couldn’t imagine going on a real date with someone like Joker. It irritated me to hear it, and at the same time, a little flare of possessiveness rose in my chest, too. Because I understood why Dawson was so disbelieving. Joker had acted like a dickhead around him.
There was this other side to Joker, though, a different, sweeter, softer, vulnerable side, and I kind of liked that Joker had chosen to show that to me. That he didn’t show it to just anyone. It made me feel… special. Different. Like he saw something in me, the same way I saw something in him. There was something connecting us, even if neither of us really knew what it was. And I wasn’t about to give that up.
But Joker clearly didn’t have friends like Dawson—friends who knew him as closely as Dawson knew me. Joker’d been so hurt, and so isolated by his family, that he didn’t know how to open up to make those kinds of friendships, even within the structure of his club. And I wanted him to have that support network.
So even though part of me wanted to keep the real Joker to myself, as something private, I also wanted my friends to like him.
“He’s a good guy,” I said, but it sounded like a canned response even to my own ears.
“You always say that,” Dawson said with his eyebrows raised.
“I know,” I said. “But with Joker…” He wasn’t like the other guys I’d dated—guys who had problems but didn’t want to change. Joker could be defensive, cagey, but he was still… reaching out to me. I didn’t have to prod or poke or beg him to be vulnerable with me. All I had to do was be patient and listen when he was ready. “He gives off a bad first impression, I’ll give you that.”
“You’re tellin’ me,” Dawson muttered.
“But it’s just a defense mechanism,” I said. “Beneath that, he’s different. He’s different with me.”
Dawson narrowed his