Tack was silent.
I was not.
“Call Tug. Tell him I’m getting a taxi. And as for you, you need to send someone else to get that envelope. I’m thinking I need a little time so I’d prefer to wake up alone tomorrow. When I’m ready to talk, I’ll call you. But you need to know, whenever I’m ready, it’ll be later.”
“Goddamn it, Tyra –” I heard him ground out but I flipped my phone closed.
This time we would talk my later.
I yanked open the door and stomped down the hall. I didn’t look into Hop’s room and I avoided it so studiously, I didn’t even know if the door was open.
I would discover Hop was done when I walked out of the Compound, my phone open in preparation to make a call to the taxi company, and I saw him on his bike.
When he saw me, he lifted his chin and called, “Cherry! Yo!”
I didn’t know if, when I saw him in his room, he was so in the throes of what was happening he didn’t see me. Or if he didn’t care. Or if he expected me to get the way of their world and not care because he didn’t look embarrassed or, indeed, anything except Hop.
I gave him a chin lift as his bike roared then he roared off with another flick of the wrist to me.
I glared after his bike, spared some time thinking about poor, cheated on Mitzi while I called a cab then I stood outside the Compound knowing exactly what that edgy meant.
Chaos, f**k, most MCs, women don’t factor.
What? Do you pass her around?
We don’t but she does.
Crap.
Truth be told, it hurt when I fell in love with Tack over tequila and he kicked me out of bed. But until that moment, I didn’t realize the hurt that burned deeper was seeing him with the brunette only a day later. He’d explained it. I hadn’t made an impression on him and clearly that had changed since.
But every girl, or at least the ones I knew, hoped like everything that when they met the one, they’d make an impression. And thus they wouldn’t ever be replaced and certainly not the very next night.
And as ridiculous as it was, as inflated an expectation, as admittedly unrealistic and even stupid, that didn’t mean it wasn’t downright true.
I didn’t know how Mitzi felt about Hopper. Maybe she understood this. Seeing the hard in her face, the tough in her manner, I suspected she did.
But I didn’t.
And I might not watch TV and I might have lived in black and white but I wasn’t literally unconscious all my life. I might not be savvy to the ways of the world like Tack but I wasn’t an idiot.
Bikers chose their lifestyles for a reason. And men became members of motorcycle clubs for deeper reasons. And it wasn’t a secret sect of society that lived quiet and kept clandestine.
Fire and Wind. Riding free. That was their motto.
Free.
Free.
Tack was avoiding all the “laters” because rivers of blood and the Russian mob freaked me out. But also because he knew this wasn’t my world and he wanted me mired in it before he lowered the boom.
Unfortunately, shit happened and he couldn’t control when the boom lowered.
And, damn it all to hell, that boom f**king hurt.
And unfortunately, that boom wasn’t near done with me.
“You got your place with the Club, I got mine.”