“He couldn’t stand the thought of seeing you in there. It upset him,” she said, still making excuses for him.
She had been making excuses for him for twenty-five years. She didn’t know what else to do. She was right about one thing; I bet it did upset him since it was his fault I was there. He was probably scared to death every day that I would give up and rat him and the other guys out. I had known my dad was dealing drugs since I was fourteen. I hadn’t ever been a part of it. Circumstance had put me in the wrong place at the wrong time though and I had taken the fall…for all of them.
“I know,” I said.
I didn’t want to upset her. My dad gave her plenty to be upset about. She didn’t need any more headaches from me.
“I promise I just want to see them and have a beer. No confrontation, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “You’ll call me for a ride if you need one? I’ll be up late.”
I laughed. “If I need one, I’ll call. You’re supposed to sleep tonight though, remember? You’re going to run yourself crazy worrying so much.”
“I love you, Dax,” she said out of the blue.
“I love you too.”
It took us a couple of hours to get to the bar from the Pelican Bay. When we drove up in front, the first thing I noticed was that it hadn’t changed…at all. The sign that said “The Smoke Joint” was still hanging tilted to the right like it had been since I was a kid. The ugly light blue paint was almost completely peeled off in places and the rain gutters were hanging loose. You would think a bunch of guys without real jobs would have time to fix it up every now and then.
The big windows still had a mirrored tint so you could see out from the inside, but not in from the outside. They took care of those. I couldn’t see a single scratch. The club needed their privacy. The lot out front was filled with Harley Davidsons and the sum total of their worth would far outweigh that of the property they were parked on. I took a deep breath and looked at my mom.
“Be good,” she said with a nervous smile.
“Always,” I said as any good ex-convict son would.
I got out of the car and the gravel crunched underneath my prison-issued boots as I made my way through the sea of hogs to the front door. I hesitated for just a second. I didn’t let myself hesitate any longer than that. If I did, I might have turned around and got back in my mom’s car. She was still sitting, watching me. I could see her in the windows of the bar. I guess it was going to take a while for us to get back the relationship we had before I went to prison. The one where I was her grown up son and she trusted that I would get through the day without getting arrested.
The big heavy wooden door still groaned like it used to as I pulled it toward me, but the music coming from the jukebox was too loud for anyone inside to hear it. The old jukebox was older than my dad and I was surprised it still worked. The music was scratchy, but if you turned it up loud enough and drank enough beer, no one really noticed. No one even seemed to look at me when I walked in; everyone was busy bullshitting or making out. There was even an old, fat biker with a young, hot babe out on the tiny little dance floor looking like they might do it right there. That was enough to turn my stomach.
One thing about “The Smoke Joint” that attracted people besides of course the outdated décor and the Smokin’ Jokers meeting room in the back was that when you walked in, you felt like you had walked into something hidden and personal. It was off the beaten path and not a place that couples or tourists usually frequented. It was rare to not see the same five guys sitting on the same five worn, blue vinyl stools at the old Formica bar. It was like when surfers find a “secret surf spot.” They keep coming back and they don’t go spreading the word around for fear it would be taken over by “undesirables.”
In the case of The Smoke Joint, an “undesirable” would be a suit or a cop. Eighty percent of its clientele were bikers who still rode daily or old, tired bikers who were too arthritic to ride any longer but couldn’t give up the lifestyle. The other twenty percent were women with biker fetishes. Those women came in all shapes, sizes and ages and as I looked around I noticed that they seemed to be coming younger than they used to. Hopefully my dad was having the guys check IDs, but I doubted it. Even though I found much to complain about as my eyes scanned the place, it was still home and I still felt instantly comfortable there.
“Son of a bitch!” I heard a voice shout. It was a deep, gravelly voice and it belonged to an old coot named Buster Balls. No, that wasn’t what his mom named him, but I had never heard him called anything else. One of the guys told me once that Buster was like the whipping boy. He was always the one who got an ass chewing in the club whenever anything went wrong, even when it wasn’t his fault and that was how he had earned his nickname.
“It’s Dax, as I live and breathe. Boy, you put on some meat and some muscle since I saw you last.” He let out a low whistle. “And look at all them purdy CDC tattoos. They sure are making them nicer than they did in my day. All that hunger striking for the colored ink was well worth it.”
I smiled. He was right. The inmates in the SHUs (Security Housing Unit) across CDC had spent three summers in a row on an organized hunger strike in an effort to gain privileges. Colored ink was one of the things they had been given as a bargaining chip.
“How goes it, Buster?” I put out my hand and although he could barely curl his distorted one into a fist he tried and instead of shaking, he bumped mine.
“I ain’t dead yet, so I ain’t complaining. Why you hidin’ over here by the door? Don’t you want to say hello to your daddy and the other boys?”
“Yeah, where’s my dad?” I didn’t see him in his usual booth and he wasn’t behind the bar.
“He’s over there with that new little kitten, Samantha. Hey J.J.! Look who I found.”
Suddenly, all heads turned toward me and even in the dim overhead lights I felt like a spotlight had been shined on my face. My dad looked up from the barely legal girl he had been…talking to and at first it looked like he wasn’t sure who he was looking at. I had changed a lot in two years and the lighting in the bar wasn’t all that great. I was surprised Buster recognized me. But recognition finally crossed his face and something akin to…discomfort, maybe. He knew I had just done two years’ time for the club and not through any fault of my own. I often wondered if he felt even a little bit guilty. I had to doubt it. His discomfort, fear or whatever it was always came from a place of self-preservation.
“I’ll be damned,” my dad said. “Dax!”
He came toward me and put his hand out. Grabbing mine, he pulled me against his massive chest and patted my back hard. Before I went in, that used to hurt…a lot. Thanks to my daily organized workouts, I barely felt it.
“How are you, kid? I didn’t even know you were getting out.”
“Mom didn’t tell you?”
“No, hell no. We would of had a party for you. Wouldn’t we, boys?”
I noticed that the rest of the club members had gathered around. Once they realized I didn’t have a weapon and I wasn’t there to exact my revenge, I spent the next ten minutes shaking hands, receiving high fives and pats on the back.
My dad grabbed two beers from behind the counter and led me over to his booth. For a second I forgot where I was and who I was with. I thought he was going to sit down with me and ask how I was and how the last two years had been. Instead, he called over two of the barely legal in daisy dukes and introduced them as Lila and Crystal. They were known as club girls. In other circles they would simply be known as sluts. They sat down and my father whom I hadn’t seen in two years went back to his own club girl in the corner.
“Did you just get out of prison?” the one named Lila asked.
“Yeah,” I said, taking a long pull off the beer. Damn, that was good. I forgot how much better beer was than pruno that had been brewed in someone’s cotton sock.
“What was it like?” she questioned.
I furrowed my brows. Her affec
t was completely incongruent to the question. She was smiling, flushed with excitement, talking to a muscular and tatted up stranger in a biker bar about just getting out of prison. She was getting turned on by it and making sure that I knew it.
The one named Crystal saw something she liked on the other side of the bar and excused herself by saying, “I’m gonna get me some of that.” You just can’t buy that kind of class. Lila was still looking at me adoringly and waiting for my answer. I went with the one that I thought might get rid of her the fastest.
“It wasn’t all that bad, I had me a cute little cellmate and I got to tap that ass as much as I wanted—” That was as far as I got before she was making a disgusted face. I guessed there were some things that didn’t turn her on.
“Um…I gotta go check on Crystal,” she said.
I chuckled as she hurried away. That was kind of fun; I would have to remember that line. For the next half hour I ate peanuts and sucked down one beer after the other as all of the guys came over one or two at a time to see how I was doing. A few of them had the decency to seem nervous, but most of them had a smug self-satisfied look of people who had just spent two years on the outside while I was doing their time.
I was sitting alone at last and just under pleasantly drunk when I saw the doors swing open and my best friend since I was a little kid walked in. I guessed since he never came to see me that I might need to amend the best friend thing later on, but at that moment I was ecstatic to see him. He had a girl on his arm, but in the dim light I couldn’t see her. If I knew Terrance though, she would be a looker. He liked the pretty girls. I was just about to holler at him when she stepped into the light.
“What the fuck?” I groaned.
I downed the rest of my beer and squinted to make sure I was really seeing what I thought I was. The girl on Terrance’s arm was most definitely a looker. I knew this because she used to be my girl. It was Olivia. Mother fucker…
Chapter Two
Olivia
Terrance and I were supposed to go to dinner, just dinner, but as usual, we ended up at The Smoke Joint. I didn’t know why he was so obsessed with the place. We had been right there in town, if he’d wanted to go to a bar we could have found a nice one. I really hated the place. I hated watching all the creepy old married bikers kissing and touching all over the young wannabe biker babes.
It was sickening.
Especially when I had to see Dax’s father. He was nice to me, but he didn’t even try to hide the fact that he messed around on his wife. He acted like he was above having to explain himself to anyone, even the mother of his child. Dax used to get pissed off about the way he treated her and he and his dad fought constantly. Dax used to get pissed off at the club and his dad for a lot of things before he started running drugs for them.
I followed Terrance over to the bar and sat down on one of the empty stools. He was still standing. The woman on the other side of me was a regular. I thought her name was Violet or something like that. She was an old biker babe who I thought used to do porn back in the day based on the rumors I had heard. She never made it to the coveted status of “old lady.”
I would never want to be called that, but to the women that hung around there, it was an honorable title. She shelled out quite a bit of cash in hopes of it. She had the biggest fake boobs I had ever seen and equally big, bleached blond hair. She smiled at me and I smiled back. Most of her bottom teeth were gone. I guess the cash ran out.
“I think I just want water. I’m a little too full from dinner for beer,” I said to Terrance.
He was still standing up and he was looking at something or someone over at Bull’s table. Bull was Dax’s dad and the president of the club that ran the bar. I glanced over in that direction but it was dark and all I could really make out was the shape of a man with a lot of beer bottles sitting in front of him on the table. It wasn’t Bull. This guy was too big, buff.
“Terrance?”
He didn’t answer me and he looked nervous. Terrance was a big guy with massive shoulders and arms and long legs. He learned how to fight at a young age and nothing seemed to ever make him nervous. If something did, I knew to worry myself.
Terrance grew up in the club. His dad was Dax’s dad’s vice president and they had both been in the club since before either of the boys was born. Dax and Terrance grew up playing in the back room of the bar together. I heard stories from both of them about it. They were mostly nice stories, but they both had their issues that I’m sure were caused by the darker side of it all too.
I could tell by the look on Terrance’s face that something was wrong. “Terrance, what’s going on?”
I glanced over at the booth again but he said, “No, don’t look at him.”
“Don’t look at whom? Who is that?”
Terrance turned back toward the bar and I could see his face in the mirror behind it. His dark brown eyes were wide and he looked like he had just seen a ghost. He was starting to scare me and I wanted to know what was going on.
I started to turn around again and he said, “Don’t look over there; it’s Dax.”
I froze. I didn’t understand…Dax? He couldn’t be there. He was in prison.
“What? Who’s Dax? That muscular guy over there in Bull’s booth?”
“Yeah, emphasis on the muscular guy,” Terrance said. “Shit! Did you know he was getting out?”
“Me? No! How would I know? I haven’t seen him since…jeez! Has it been two years already?” I tried to turn around again but Terrance actually put his hand on the back of my stool to stop me. “I don’t think he should be out yet. Wouldn’t Gail have said something or Bull? That guy’s too big to be him anyways and he has tats all over his arms.”
“It’s him, Liv. You don’t come out of prison without tats and muscles unless it’s in a box. It’s Dax.”
“Shit, maybe we should go talk to him,” I suggested.
“You think?” he said. “What are we going to do? Should we walk up to him and say, “Hey, Dax. Sorry we never came to visit you in the joint the two years you were gone, but look, we’ve been taking care of each other.”
Terrance looked nauseated.
My insides were quivering. I had done my best at least for the past year to put Dax and our life together out of my head. I was trying to concentrate on moving forward, with Terrance. He was a great guy and he deserved a woman that could give him all of herself.
I wasn’t over Dax, I wasn’t even sure if I ever would be, but I did a good job of not letting Terrance see or feel that. I walked away from him because I couldn’t be with a guy who would sell drugs. I also couldn’t be with a guy who would lie to me about it the entire year we were together and say he wanted no part of his dad’s life. He made such a big deal about not wanting his kids to be raised like he was and around the kind of people he was.
We had talked about getting married and having kids after college. He never let on that he had changed his mind. I didn’t know a thing about it until he was arrested. I wasn’t going to bring a life into this world with a drug dealer for a father. I glanced over to the end of the bar where Bull was making out with some girl younger than me. Look what kind of life Dax had; I wasn’t going to do that to my kids.
I sought Dax out in the mirror behind the bar. It was still too dark and shadowy for me to really get a good look at his face, but I could see his form better now that my eyes adjusted to the poor lighting. He was dressed in a white, wife-beater style tank, blue jeans and black boots. Dax still had his blond hair. I sighed, remembering how I used to love touching it.
Terrance was right about the muscle. His arms were huge, as big around as my thighs and he was stretching his tank to its limit across his chest. But the tattoos were the weirdest part. Dax always said he would never stain his body, but this guy had tattoos that ran down both arms and were visible under the neck of his tank which meant they went across his chest too.
“Aren’t prison tattoos black?” I asked stupidly.
“No,” Terrance said simply. “Not anymore. That’s old school. It’s him, Liv. I need to go over there. He’s looking right at us.”
This time I didn’t let Terrance stop me. I turned all the way around and realized that he was looking right at us and it was most definitely Dax. His signature jade green eyes had always been his most captivating feature. They were huge and surrounded by long, blond eyelashes. The first time I saw him I had trouble looking away. However, this time I could see him looking at me, questioning. I felt my face burning and I found the courage to turn away.
“I’m going over there,” Terrance said. “I have to talk to him. I owe him that much.”
Before I had a chance to respond or protest, he headed across the crowded bar. I didn’t expect it to go well and I really didn’t want to watch. I couldn’t stop myself though. It was much too loud in there with the music, the talking, and the laughing to hear anything. I watched anyway.
Terrance casually strolled over to him. Dax was still looking at me until Terrance got right next to the booth and then he switched his attention to my new boyfriend. I couldn’t see well, but I didn’t see a smile on his face as he looked up at Terrance. I saw Terrance smile and watched as Dax said something with a look on his face that told me I was probably better off not being able to hear him.
Terrance was moving his hands as he talked. It was what he did when he was trying to make someone understand his point. I didn’t think Dax got it because he suddenly stood up. He pushed Terrance in the chest.
I read his lips as he said, “Fuck you, Terrance.” The bar got quiet, except for the music. The two men stared each other down, but no one intervened.
Dirty SEAL (A Navy SEAL Romance) (The Maxwell Family) Page 70