Still Standing

by Kristen Ashley

One shot of tequila wasn’t going to incapacitate me enough where I couldn’t drive my car.

  And perhaps, if I took it, he’d let me say what I had to say, and I could get out of there. I needed to go back to Esposito, get my money and pay my rent before they kicked me out of my apartment.

  My apartment was a dump, but it was an apartment, and without it I’d have nowhere to sleep but my car.

  That was, if I managed to avoid my car getting repossessed.

  So I put the glass to my lips and took the shot.

  I liked tequila, if it was cut with margarita mix, but I wasn’t a shot kind of girl.

  Therefore, even though I wanted to be ballsy and put myself out there as a cool customer, I couldn’t help but flinch then make a face when I took the glass from my lips.

  I looked back at West Hardy and saw he was tipping his chin up at the young biker again. Then I turned my head and saw the young biker move forward quickly and refill both Hardy’s glass and mine.

  Oh no.

  “Mr. Hardy—” I started, and he turned his head to me.

  “Buck,” he declared.

  “Okay, Buck, um—”

  “You play pool?” he asked.

  My head jerked.

  I then looked over my shoulder at the pool tables and back at him.

  “Pool?”

  “Cues, balls, felt table, babe. Pool,” he stated. “You play?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “Shoot that.” He dipped his head to my glass then went on, “And I’ll teach you.”

  I was getting the distinct impression this wasn’t good.

  “Mr. Hardy—” I began, and something happened to his body. It tensed in a way that made me quickly say, “Buck, sorry, um…I have nothing against pool, but I really don’t have occasion to play it very often and—”

  “Toots, shoot the tequila and slide your ass off that stool. You’re gonna learn to play pool.”

  I stared at him.

  I then decided to try to bargain.

  “If I let you teach me how to play pool, will you let me deliver my message and go?”

  “Depends,” he answered.

  “On what?” I asked.

  “On how you do with twenty questions,” he replied, and my head jerked again.

  “Pardon?”

  “We’re gonna drink, you’re gonna learn how to play pool, and I’m gonna ask you twenty questions. Depending on your answers, I’ll let you deliver your message.” Once he’d stated this, he turned his head back to the young biker and ordered, “Give me the bottle and get Toots a Miller.”

  “Oh no,” I stated quickly. “Beer is highly caloric, and I shouldn’t mix alcoholic beverages. That isn’t smart while driving.”

  Or, say, ever.

  Buck shifted his focus again to me, and his eyes moved down my torso then back to the young biker who was placing the bottle of tequila on the bar. “Miller Lite,” he amended his order.

  “Buck,” I started again, and regained his attention.

  “Shoot it,” he replied.

  “But—”

  “Darlin’, not gonna say it again.”

  I stared at him.

  I did this before I started to get angry.

  “Maybe I should leave,” I said to him.

  “You leave, what do you tell Esposito?”

  I had to admit, he had a point there.

  Enrique Esposito wouldn’t like that I didn’t deliver his message.

  “Toots, listen to me,” Buck said softly, and my eyes focused on him to see he’d leaned toward me. “My guess is, you’re new to this so I’m gonna give you a free lesson. You entered this game, you gotta play it.”

  “I’m trying to,” I pointed out.

  “Right, so, right now, the game is tequila, beer, pool and twenty questions. Now be smart, drink that shot and slide your ass off that stool because we’re gonna play pool.”

  I studied him a moment.

  Right before I tried bargaining again.

  “Just so I have this straight, I drink with you, let you teach me how to play pool and answer your questions?”

  “Easy,” he replied.

  “Do I get twenty questions?” I returned, and his brows shot up.

  “You want ’em?”

  “You ask me something then I should get something in return, so I ask you something. You like my answers, I get to deliver my message and go. That’s the deal.”

  “Why do you want twenty questions?” he inquired.

  I didn’t know the answer to that, so I said, “I just do.”

  “All right, Toots,” he stated then lifted his shot glass toward me. “Let’s do this.”

  I nodded my head, lifted my own shot glass, and keeping my eyes on him while he downed his, I downed mine. I repeated my flinch and making a face, and when I focused on him, he was looking at me and again grinning.

  He twisted his neck and ordered over his shoulder, “Rack ’em up.”

  The young biker had put a bottle of Miller Lite in front of me and Buck got off his stool.

  I followed him, getting off mine.

  He grabbed the bottle of beer and handed it to me.

  I took it, he nabbed the tequila and shot glasses in one hand, his bottle of beer in the other, and he moved to the pool table.

  I moved behind him, sipping at my beer and trying to ignore the gazes I felt following me.

  I found this was easier than expected since I did this by watching Buck’s behind in his jeans, and the visual was so good, it automatically assumed control of all my concentration.

  This concentration was broken only when a man shifted away from the pool table and I saw the balls in their triangle at the end.

  Buck left the shot glasses, tequila and beer on the side of the table and went to the wall where he selected a cue.

  I stopped by the table and wished I was wearing something else. Jeans, maybe. Gym shoes. Not a tight, buff-colored pencil skirt, a fitted white blouse with cap sleeves and ballet-pink, stiletto-heeled pumps.

  I’d wanted to look professional and feminine.

  Professional, so that the men I delivered the messages to would take me seriously.

  Feminine, so they would think twice before hurting me.

  Now, I was thinking this might have been a mistake.

  Buck moved back to me, handed me the cue and looked at me.

  “You wanna start or you want me to start?” he asked.

  “Start?”

  “Twenty questions.”

  I tried to decide which was the best strategy.

  “You start,” I told him because I wanted a sense of where this was going.

  He didn’t delay and he didn’t shield his hand.

  “You work since they fired your ass after your man went down?”

  As I stared up at him, I felt my lips part and my stomach clench, and it didn’t feel good.

  He knew me. He knew all about me.

  Oh God.

  “Pardon?” I whispered as my legs started to shake.

  He again didn’t delay. “Your man was found guilty and handed a ten-year sentence. One month later, you were fired from the Hunter Institute. You work since then?”

  Yes, he knew.

  He knew all about me.

  He knew more than just what he could read in the articles about all that Rogan did.

  He’d looked into me. He knew I was coming. He knew Esposito was going to send me, slap him in the face by not coming himself or sending one of his lieutenants. He knew Esposito was the kind of man who had no respect, not for anyone, not even for the charismatic, magnetic leader of a biker gang.

  He knew.

  He knew and he’d prepared.

  Oh God.

  “He wasn’t my man,” I said softly.

  “You were married to him, Toots,” he replied.

  I shook my head. “No, the divorce was final before then.”

  Something about him changed and it was almost like the very air around him ge
ntled before he spoke again quietly.

  “I know, darlin’, but you aren’t answering my question.”

  “No,” I answered just as quietly.

  He nodded, moved closer to me, and I was too out of it to step away.

  “Your turn,” he whispered.

  I stared up at him.

  “Have you investigated me?” I asked, and he shook his head.

  “I’ll let that one slide, babe, not smart,” he said softly.

  My heart skipped.

  “Pardon?”

  “Don’t ask a question you already know the answer to,” he advised.

  “But you are,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, but I have my reasons, you don’t,” he replied.

  “Okay,” I whispered.

  “Go again,” he prompted.

  I didn’t know what to ask.

  Something was happening here. Something that had nothing to do with Esposito.

  Or maybe it did. Maybe it was a power play and I was stuck in the middle.

  Or maybe it was all about me.

  Either way, I was on dangerous ground.

  Far more dangerous than the ground I’d walked on when I entered this building and that ground was already pretty darned shaky.

  My attention shifted, and for some reason, focused on one of the plethora of tattoos on his arm. Before I could stop myself, I lifted my gaze and asked my question.

  “What’s the snake mean?”

  He tilted his head to the side as his brows knit. “Come again?”

  I pointed at the snake slithering up his arm, starting low, curling around, the design opening larger at his biceps.

  The snake was not thin, it was beefy.

  It was also curled around a skull at the bulge of his biceps, head flared, eyes focused, mouth open, fangs exposed, ready to strike.

  “The snake tattoo, what’s it mean?”

  I dropped my hand as he dropped his head and looked at the tattoo. Then he looked at me.

  His expression was blank, but his eyes were alert, assessing, intense, drilling deep into mine, and if it could be believed I was even more uncomfortable than I was before.

  “Kristy,” he stated.

  “Pardon?” I asked.

  “Kristy, my ex-wife. She had occasion in our marriage to piss me off and do it a lot. She said, when I got pissed, I was not all bark and no bite. I wasn’t even just bite. I was a strike. Like a snake.”

  “Oh,” I whispered, my gaze slid away, and I took another sip of my beer thinking he didn’t seem the kind of man to get angry enough to strike. He seemed totally in control.

  Therefore, I found this fascinating.

  “Line it up,” he ordered.

  I looked back to him.

  “Sorry?”

  “We’re gonna break,” he told me, tipping his head toward the table. “Line up your cue.”

  I looked at the table then to him. I did as he asked, set my beer aside, bent over the table, acutely aware that he was close, we were being watched, and my skirt was very tight, and I lined my cue up to the ball.

  My body froze as his warmth curved around me, his hand on mine on the cue, his other arm stretching out so his hand could cover mine resting on the table with the cue over it. His back was pressed to mine, his hips pressed to my bottom.

  Oh God.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered.

  “Only way to learn,” his deep, rough voice said in my ear, but somehow I felt it on every inch of my skin, “is by feel.”

  Then he drew both our hands back on the cue and struck it forward. The cue hit the white ball and it accelerated, cracking soundly against the triangle at the other end, sending the balls scattering as his hand went flat to my midriff and he pulled us both up.

  I watched the balls.

  Two went into pockets, both solid colors, and Buck moved from me to the tequila.

  He poured our shots and handed me a glass.

  This time, I didn’t hesitate.

  I was not one for liquid courage, but at that moment, I was going to take anything I could get. Therefore, I threw it back and then watched as Buck threw his back.

  He took the glass from me, set both on the side of the table, grabbed my bottle of beer, handed it to me, caught my free hand and moved me down the table.

  He stopped, upended the cue he was carrying so its nub was to the floor and got in my space.

  Again, I didn’t retreat. The tequila was hitting me, I could feel it. I didn’t remember the last time I’d had a drink and now I’d had three shots of tequila and sipped at a beer.

  Drunk was going to come fast.

  He knew this too.

  I was definitely on dangerous ground.

  “He leave you with anything?” Buck asked.

  I blinked up at him.

  “Who?”

  “Your ex,” he answered, my heart skipped again then he went on, “They didn’t find all the money. They seized your house, the contents, your cars, your accounts. Did he leave you with anything? Cover your ass at all?”

  “No,” I told him and took another sip of beer. And it was at that moment I decided to fight fire with fire. “Why did you and Kristy get divorced?”

  He looked down at me and answered without hesitation, “She didn’t share my vision of what our lives would be. That being copasetic most off the time, not up in each other’s shit nearly all the time. She married me with expectations of where our lives would lead, but she didn’t share those expectations with me. If she did, I’d never have married the bitch in the first place.”

  “What were her expectations?” I asked.

  “My turn, Toots,” he didn’t answer.

  “Sorry,” I whispered and took another sip of my beer because I had nothing better to do.

  “You didn’t know?” he asked

  I studied at him, off balance again.

  He asked questions I kind of understood, but they were questions that forced me to clarify in a way that I suspected he was trying to make me off balance.

  “I didn’t know what?” I asked back to clarify.

  “About the whores,” he clarified.

  My middle moved back like he punched me, and I twisted my neck, looking away to hide the pain his words caused.

  In doing this, I had no idea I missed the gentling of the air around him again, but even if I was looking at him, I wouldn’t have caught it.

  I wasn’t numb to this.

  Even after eighteen months.

  Even after having my husband arrested in a middle-of-the-night raid of our house.

  Even after having my photo, his photo, all those women’s photos (okay, there were only three, but three was a lot) on the covers of newspapers, and even some magazines, for months on end.

  Even after the hideous questions the journalists would shout at me whenever they had their chance.

  Even after having everything I owned taken from me.

  Even after losing my job.

  Even after walking into multitudes of stores and restaurants and seeing people’s faces change when they recognized me.

  And even after hearing some of the things they said, either straight to my face or under their breath.

  Truthfully, it wasn’t that big of a story. We were just another in a never-ending cycle of greed, ugliness and negativity the public at large consumed with wild abandon like the news was a daily Bacchanal.

  But Rogan was young, handsome, a fallen golden boy, and some of the details were salacious, and those kinds of descents from grace lived a life much longer than anyone’s fifteen minutes.

  As for me, I was forced into the role of the chump. The putz. I was so stupid I didn’t know that my husband was living large from stealing people’s pensions. Sleeping with high-class call girls in New York City, Chicago, Las Vegas. Squiring them around, drinking champagne, eating at the finest restaurants, giving them presents as well as paying them for sex.

  I didn’t know, but some people believed I couldn�
�t be that stupid. Some people thought I put up with it for my fancy house and my fancy car and my fancy clothes (and I did have all that, but it wasn’t that fancy). Some people thought I enjoyed my beautiful life living off other people’s misfortune as handed to them by my thieving, cheating husband, and I’d turned a blind eye so I could keep that life.

  Either way, everyone—and that was pretty much everyone nationwide, but definitely in Phoenix—felt I got what I deserved.

  I got what I deserved for being stupid enough to fall in love.

  I squared my shoulders and buried the pain before I looked back at Buck, locked eyes and replied, “No. I didn’t know about the whores.”

  “Toots—” he whispered.

  I cut him off. “What did she expect?”

  “Darlin’—”

  I turned away and walked back to the tequila.

  It was me who poured two new shots, grabbed both in one hand and walked back to him. I lifted the shots and watched his hand take one, but I didn’t watch him shoot it. I just shot mine, flinched, belted back a gulp of beer and put the shot glass on the side of the table.

  I looked at him again.

  “What did she expect?” I repeated.

  Buck studied my face a moment before answering, “She expected me to keep our lives as they were and not make any waves.”

  “And those waves you apparently were making?” I prompted.

  “Sorry, Toots,” he said gently. “That’s another question.”

  “Right,” I stated. “Fine, then ask one of me.”

  “I’m thinkin’ we should focus on pool for a while,” he told me.

  I nodded instantly and turned to the table.

  “Great. Perfect,” I declared, examining the table. “What do I do now?”

  “You’re solids, babe. You see your shot?” he asked.

  I stared at the table, focusing on what would possibly be my shot. I found it, set my beer aside and pointed.

  “Good girl,” he murmured, and I felt his body move into me. Forcing mine down, he situated the cue on the table. “Hands on mine,” he instructed.

  I did as I was told.

  He moved my hands to where he wanted them and said in my ear, “See how this is lined up?”

  I didn’t. I wasn’t paying attention to much except his heat at my back, his power surrounding me, the fact that I was careening toward drunk and the hollow feeling of despair that had a permanent hold of my stomach but was now sharpened to the point I wondered why I was still standing.