I wanted to knock that glass of wine into her so she’d go to the bathroom again to clean up.
“Mine isn’t because I like to eat.” Swayze paused. “Not exactly, anyway. It’s because…”
“Something better is always coming,” I finished, my eyes turning to Swayze. “It means save your fork, because dessert is on the way.”
“Exactly.” She nodded firmly once. “That’s exactly right. My mom used to say that all the time. Save your fork, Swayze. You start with a salad and move on to the main course. Then, from the main course, you move on to dessert. If you save your fork, there are better things to come.”
“Or,” Ignacia supplied, “you could just use the extra fork that restaurants give you.”
“Your stepfather told me that,” I ignored her. “That’s why I got the fork in the first place. Though mine was done a lot more… crudely. I got mine done in prison.”
“Oh,” Ignacia said. “That sounds like fun!”
I turned to look at my date. “It was not fun.”
Ignacia pouted, as if I’d just taken her kitten away. “Really?”
That’s when I realized something. Ignacia had a thing for a bad boy. She liked the whole ‘felon’ thing. Well, that made one of us.
Dinner continued in that same vein.
Swayze would say something, Ignacia would contradict her or say something degrading in some way, and we would all ignore it.
Eventually, though, not even the good food could make me enjoy it.
I ate so fast that by the time Bruno was ready to leave twenty minutes later like he said he was, so the hell was I.
Ignacia, however, was still eating and drinking.
My manners that my grandmother had ingrained upon me, however, forced me to stay even though I’d rather do anything but.
So when Bruno stood up and Swayze did, too, I felt my stomach pitch.
“Will you give me a ride home?” Swayze turned to look at Bruno. “I don’t think I can walk.”
“Sure,” Bruno said as he stood up, pulling his keys out of his pocket. “You ready now?”
She picked up her drink and downed it before placing it back on the table in front of her and snatching up her headphones. “Sure am.”
I gritted my teeth as I stood, too. “Ready to head back, Ignacia?”
Ignacia held up her half-full glass of wine. “I’m still drinking. And they’re finally gone. Let’s stay and enjoy for a while.”
I’d rather have my dick dipped into hot tar.
“Sure,” I grumbled, watching out the window as Bruno helped Swayze onto the back of his bike.
Swayze didn’t wrap her arms around Bruno or anything. In fact, she looked quite stiff on the seat behind him.
“Do you have something against Bruno?” Ignacia asked. “I sold him some property a couple of months ago. He’s a pretty nice guy.”
“Nothing against Bruno,” I admitted. “Are you ready yet?”
Maybe if I kept asking, she would say yes…
CHAPTER 11
The type of skin on your lips is called mucosa. The same skin you can find on your anus.
-Swayze’s random facts
SWAYZE
It was broken.
Son of a bitch!
“Can I still run?” I asked curiously.
The doctor looked at me like I was nuts. “No. You have to actually be off of it for six weeks. I think I will put you in the walking cast, though. I think that for you and the fracture it’ll be better in the long run. You have to wear the walking cast at all times unless you’re not putting any weight on the foot. Such as when you’re asleep.”
I grimaced.
“Shit,” I grumbled. “I was training for a marathon!”
“Well,” he said, “you’ll be sitting it out for six weeks while this heals. I’m sorry.”
I deflated.
“Dammit,” I moaned. “Can I do anything in the boot that I want to?”
“Do you mean run in the boot?” the doctor looked at me accusingly.
“No,” I lied. “I mean, can I do other exercises in it. Like riding a bike? Possibly rowing?”
Possibly anything that’ll make it to where I can work out and not go stir crazy while I waited for it to heal.
“Anything low impact you can do. Rowing, biking, swimming. What you can’t do is not take this seriously.” He patted my ankle. “I’ll have a nurse come in with a boot. You’ll be ready to go in about ten minutes. Now, don’t forget to do as I said, and seriously, ma’am. Take this seriously. If you don’t, you may never run that marathon.”
I sighed as he walked out the door.
He left it open, though, not leaving me totally alone in my thoughts.
Sadly, after my run two days before, my foot had started hurting worse and worse and worse until I realized that it wasn’t going to go away.
Which meant a trip to the town’s clinic.
Which also meant having to pay for medical bills out of freakin’ pocket because I still hadn’t gotten around to finding myself health insurance yet.
But, while I was here, I went ahead and had them refill my birth control, too.
I wasn’t saying that I would need it, but how sucky would it be to need it and not have it when the time rolled around?
There was a certain man that I couldn’t stop looking at across the street from me, and eventually something would have to give.
Either he would or I would.
I knew it.
He knew it.
And his date from two nights ago, Ignacia, knew it.
How did I know that Ignacia knew it?
Because this morning as I was leaving for the doctor, she’d stopped by to tell me to ‘stay away from her man.’
Luckily, I’d been in the car about to leave when she had rolled up in her fancy BMW.
Me in my twelve-year-old Volkswagen Jetta? I just slammed the door closed and motored away, not caring how close I came to running over her spiffy car.
While I waited for the nurse to come back with my stupid walking boot, I kept my eyes aimed outside. At least until I heard his deep voice.
When I turned to survey the front of the clinic where patients walked in and out, it was to find Trick standing there with a towel over his arm and blood running down his hand to drip onto the floor.
My face went white with worry.
Ignacia, who was behind him, apologized profusely. “I’m so, so sorry, Trick!” she cried. “I never meant to do that.”
“I said it’s fine,” Trick grumbled, his eyes on the woman at the front desk. “You can go now. Thanks for the ride. Hope that blood comes out of your leather seats.”
Then, without another word, he turned his back on her and walked into the main part of the clinic, leaving her behind.
I could see her narrowed eyes through the receptionist’s window and knew that Trick’s cavalier attitude toward her pissed her off.
I should’ve told him he was barking up the wrong tree when I’d seen them together.
Should have, but I knew that this way would be much more amusing… for me, not for him.
Ignacia was prime cut, grade-A crazy.
All the men in the town loved her… until they didn’t anymore.
In fact, I’d helped two men now get restraining orders against her.
She was that crazy.
She became obsessive and smothered the men that she tried to date, and in the process made it to where the men had to get tough with her.
Though, her cutting someone up was new to me.
“We don’t have any more rooms, sir. They’re all full,” the receptionist said as she pulled him back. “You can wait here until one opens…”
I was up and hopping toward the door.
“Put him in here, Pam!” I called out. “I’m almost done, and he won’t mind.”
Trick’s eyes snapped up to meet mine.
His eyes narrowed, and a worried look passed over his face, but then was wiped
completely clean as he looked over at Pam.
“I don’t mind,” he admitted.
I didn’t ‘mind’ either.
In fact, I wanted him there.
I’d wanted to talk to him for weeks now, but couldn’t quite work up the courage to force myself to talk to him.
I’d already said all the words that I could.
He’d heard my apologies. He’d said he accepted them.
But still…
The nurse moved him into the room with me, and I hopped backward out of the way while he came through, dripping blood.
I grimaced and went to the opposite side of the table and returned to my seat.
“What happened?” I asked when he sat down with a grimace.
“Fuckin’ Ignacia cut me with a broken beer bottle,” he grumbled, lifting what I now realized was Ignacia’s sweater up and showing me the wound.
I gasped at the raw looking cut on the top of his forearm. “How the hell?”
“I was walking over toward your place to see if you needed help with the big box that was delivered onto your front porch. When I came around the corner, she just popped out like a fuckin’ whack-a-mole and was there. I didn’t think anything of it until she was pulling her arm down at an arc and slicing me open.” He shook his head. “I’m not quite sure exactly how she didn’t see it was me, though. Or why she felt it necessary to arm herself with a beer bottle. But seriously, I was the one coming into the alley. She was the one hiding in the shadows. She should’ve been aware that I was there, not the other way around.”
“Ignacia got the drop on you?” I snickered, then sobered a bit. “I’m just going to tell you this now, Ignacia is a crazy bitch.”
His eyes shifted toward me as he tossed the sweater to the garbage can and reached for a wad of paper towels.
He pressed them down against his arm, and I grimaced again at the look of that cut.
“That’s gonna be a shit ton of stitches,” I admitted.
He grunted in derision. “I know.” His eyes turning to me. “Why do you say she’s crazy?”
“Other than the fact that she is?” I lifted my foot up to rest between us, and his eyes went to the purpling throb of a bruise. “I had her served with two restraining orders last year. Both from men.” I paused. “She seems to latch onto them and obsess over them. It’s only when the law gets involved that she backs off enough to allow them room to breathe.”
He sighed, long and loud. “I don’t understand how I always manage to do this.”
“Do what?” I asked curiously.
“Attract the ones that are trouble.” His eyes met mine.
My face heated. “I wasn’t trying to be trouble!”
His lips quirked. “I know you weren’t. Doesn’t change the facts, though.”
No, it sure didn’t.
“All right, dear.” The nurse came in with a walking boot in her hands and my paperwork in the other. “This needs to be worn at all times until your next appointment in three weeks. No running. The doctor made me reiterate that to you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Is it broken?” Trick asked as he looked at the nurse fitting me into the boot.
“Actually, yes,” the nurse replied. “Quite spectacularly, too. I’m not sure how she managed to walk around on it for three days. But she did. I would’ve been howling in pain.”
Trick’s eyes twinkled, and I flipped him off.
“Fuck you,” I mouthed.
He grinned wider.
“You’re all set,” the nurse said.
“I’m staying to take this one home,” I said, gesturing with my thumb toward the hulking man who was still bleeding beside me. “We’re neighbors.”
“Uh, huh,” the nurse said as she looked at Trick’s bleeding arm. “Let me go grab the doctor. That looks bad.”
She hadn’t even seen the worst of it yet.
The nurse disappeared, and I stood up, trying out my new walking boot.
“This blows,” I grumbled.
“Makes your ass look better,” he mused.
I rolled my eyes and continued walking around.
“You wear that to work today?” he asked curiously.
“What?” I asked. “The black shorts? Or the slipper?”
He nodded toward the ground. “Slipper.”
I looked down at my foot and wondered if the boot really did anything for my ass at all, or if Trick was just giving me shit.
The latter was likely the culprit.
The doctor came in just before I could reply about my slipper, in fact, being work attire.
“Sir,” the doctor said. “What do we have here?”
I rolled my eyes.
The doctor was looking at Trick warily.
Trick still had his leather cut on and the scowl on his face was adorably cute to me, but to other people? Not so much.
That, and word around town was that the ‘MC’ that Trick was a part of was ‘bad.’ A ‘bunch of felons’ in a motorcycle group doing ‘bad things.’
Or whatever.
I heard that at the grocery store yesterday morning as I limped my way through the aisles.
Trick and another man had apparently been in the supermarket before me—weren’t small towns lovely?—and they’d sparked up a long stream of conversations from everyone that I’d passed by.
Two older men saying how ‘youth these days’ weren’t the same as they used to be. Then there were the two mothers talking over their daughters’ strollers about how ‘hot’ they were but they were also ‘scary as hell.’
I agreed.
Trick was hot. But he could be very, very scary.
The funniest people talking about them, though, were the meat market guys.
“They just came in here and bought seven hundred bucks worth of Wagyu beef and didn’t even blink an eye. That was eight steaks!”
Yeah, eight steaks at nearly ninety dollars a pop? Those fuckin’ steaks better give me wings or something.
“What are you smiling at?” Trick asked as the doctor draped his arm over a tray and started to clean it.
“I’m smiling because I remembered a conversation between two men in the meat market at the supermarket yesterday,” I answered. “They were talking about you and whoever you’d come in with. How you spent ninety dollars on a steak.”
Trick’s lips twitched. “That was the best damn steak I’d ever had in my life. One of the men in the club started using a sous vide. I’ve never had a better cooked steak in my entire existence.”
“Those things are quite magical,” the doctor agreed. “Gets the meat to a perfect all the way through temp. Then you sear them and eat them? I’ve never found a better way to cook steaks.”
Seems I would have to look into this sous vide thing.
“I’ll look into it,” I said. “Can you do chicken in it?”
“I haven’t tried chicken yet,” the doctor admitted. “I’ve only done pork and beef in it. But I’m sure it can do chicken.”
I sat down beside Trick and practically leaned into him while I watched the doctor clean and stitch his wound.
“I’m betting you’re gonna have eighteen stitches,” I said.
“Twelve,” the doctor disagreed. “Maybe thirteen.”
I leaned an elbow into Trick’s thigh and practically laid on top of him as I watched.
“I wanted to be a doctor once,” I said to no one in particular.
Something underneath of me moved, and I looked down to see that Trick’s cock was getting hard.
Grinning, I stayed where I was.
“Why?” Trick asked. “You always said you wanted to be a lawyer.”
“I did,” I agreed. “After I met my stepfather. But before that, I wanted to be a doctor.”
“What made you choose one over the other?” the doctor asked.
I felt my heart get heavy. The memories assaulting me almost as fast as I could shut them down.
“My stepfather,
who was a lawyer, died. It was then that I knew what I was going to do,” I admitted. “It was always that or a doctor. But when he wasn’t here anymore, I felt that would be a great way to honor him.”
The doctor made a humming sound. “How did he pass?”
“He and my mother were in a car accident,” I said. “Someone ran them off the road. They died on impact.”
The doctor winced. “I’ve seen a lot of those before,” he admitted. “Not a good situation to be in at all. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks,” I murmured.
“You shouldn’t be breathing that close to an open wound,” someone said from the doorway.
Ignacia.
The hoe.
“I’m sure there were more germs on that beer bottle that you were holding. You should probably stay away from broken beer bottles if you have a tendency to swing them at people,” I disagreed. “You’re lucky that Trick has such good reflexes. And he was holding a seventy-pound chair. If he hadn’t been, you would’ve probably taken a fist to the face for your actions.”
“I didn’t know it was him,” she said petulantly.
“Well who the fuck else were you hoping that it’d be?” I asked. “Me?”
She was silent for a long moment.
“I don’t know who I expected,” she admitted. “Why are you on his lap like that?”
I rolled my eyes. “Trick and I are lovers. We’ve been lovers since before he went to prison for murder, you know? Then I became his prison wife and now we’re discussing our actual marriage. However, I’m sorry that he led you on. Also, and I can’t stress this enough, stay away from us. After you almost severed his carotid artery, I feel that maybe that’s for the best.”
“I was nowhere near his carotid,” Ignacia argued.
“Actually,” the doctor said as he held up his arm in a defensive position. “The way this looks is that you would’ve been really close to it. I’d say a couple of inches.”
He moved, making it to where his forearm was level with his neck as an example.
Ignacia snorted. “That’s ridiculous.”
“What’s ridiculous is that you thought that you needed a broken bottle in the first place,” I disagreed. “And I still can’t quite understand why you were in my back alley. Nor why you thought it was necessary to cut someone with said bottle when literally the only thing he was doing was walking down the alley. And I’m sure he wasn’t doing it quietly, either.”
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