She’d felt all the other people, but they’d been irrelevant. She’d been just with him.
And then there’d been another cock pushing at her. At the time, it had barely registered, and when it finally had, he was pushing into her ass, and all she could think about was the feel of it, and the way the guy with the beard had reacted to it, like he’d felt it, too. And liked it.
Strange to think of it now, with the E worn off, how simultaneously hyper-connected and disconnected her brain got. She was so busy cataloguing sensations that their causes got lost in the swirling lights and sparkling bliss.
She didn’t even know where the guy with the beard had gone. Somebody had come and pulled him away from her, and he’d set her down and whispered, See ya, sparkle fairy, into her ear, then disappeared into the throng. She’d been left standing there, confused.
Princess Charming without her Cinderfella.
And now she had blood in her panties. And a sick feeling in her belly to go with the knives in her brain and the fog in her heart.
Maybe Ashley was right.
Yeah, she needed to stop this.
Last night was definitely the last time. Definitely. It wasn’t the first time she’d had that thought, but this time, she really meant it.
She stripped and got into a hot shower. She needed to be wearing her normal self when she went to see how her father was doing.
~oOo~
Not well. That was how her father was doing.
He’d been so drunk last night when she’d put him to bed that she’d felt nearly certain he wouldn’t wake, but she found him passed out on the floor of his bathroom, wearing nothing but his underwear. The toilet bowl was full of puke he hadn’t flushed down, and he’d managed to wad up the bath mat for a pillow.
His flaccid dick had slid through the slit in his boxers; Leah averted her eyes and pulled a towel off the rod. She spread it over his midsection, then flushed the toilet. His wire-rimmed glasses were askew on his face and looked bent; she eased them off and tried to reshape them before she set them next to the sink.
“Daddy.” She leaned down and shook his bare shoulder. “Daddy, wake up.”
He groaned and turned his face into the bath mat. There were blotches of brown puke on the pale green plush.
She shook harder, and he batted at her with a limp hand.
“Daddy, it’s six-thirty. It’s Sunday. You have to wake up. It’s Sunday.”
His pathetic sounds and flails of complaint stopped, and, after another second or two, he opened his eyes. He simply lay there, staring at the base of the toilet, and Leah sighed.
“Daddy.”
“Okay.” His voice sounded normal, and Leah relaxed. He was already getting what he called his ‘game face’ on.
She stood up. “I’m going to put the coffee on. I can make sausage gravy, if you don’t mind Pillsbury biscuits with it. No time to make them from scratch.”
He gave a scant shake of his head and then levered himself slowly to a seated position. Leaning back against the tiled wall, he closed his eyes and sighed deeply. “Just sausage and eggs, I think. Scrambled. Make the coffee strong.”
“Okay. You need anything else?”
When he shook his head and wiped his hands over his face, Leah backed out of the room, relieved to have gained that escape.
~oOo~
In the kitchen, Leah pulled her wet hair back into a quick ponytail and got the coffee started, making it extra strong—she could use an extra boost this morning, too, and maybe the caffeine would push the gloom back from her mind as well. Before she went to the fridge for the sausage and eggs, she took down a tall iced-tea tumbler from the cupboard and filled it to the brim with water from the tap. Her tongue and throat felt like she’d swallowed wallpaper paste.
While she drank the icy well water, she stared out the window over the sink. It looked out onto the front porch, and her father had hung a couple of red hummingbird feeders from the eave of the porch roof. Two of the tiny birds had their long little beaks deep inside the yellow plastic flowers that made the feeding points.
Hummingbirds made her think of her mom.
The day after E, her brain always went searching for all the bad feelings it could find.
With a deep breath, she turned away from the window and finished her water. Then she got started on breakfast.
She was a pretty good cook, she thought. She could follow a recipe, at least, and things generally worked out okay. Sometimes she even experimented a little. Her dad was her only tester, for the most part, and he liked what she made. He wasn’t exactly impartial, but she hadn’t poisoned him yet.
Needing some light and happy this morning, Leah smoothed a flowered tablecloth over the round table and got out the good dishes—the set that had been her grandmother’s, with the chain of daisies around the rim. She arranged the sausages and eggs on the plates and added a couple of orange wedges to each one for garnish. She made a pitcher of orange juice to go with their grease and caffeine, and she set the glass pitcher on the table, in the middle of a sunbeam.
When her father came in, he looked like he always did. He was freshly showered, neatly groomed, and already fully dressed but for the suit coat he would put on before they left the house. The only sign of his hard night was the extra bit of shadow and sag beneath his already normally hangdog eyes. And the little shake in his hands as he struggled with his collar.
Leah went to him and lifted her hands, and he bent his knees and leaned down a little so that she could reach the back of his neck and fasten the tab. Then she came around and checked, making sure that the white rim was even under the black of his shirt. When it was, and there was a perfect square of white below his Adam’s apple, she smoothed her hands down the front of his shirt. “There. All sharp.”
Not all Baptist ministers wore the collar anymore, but the Reverend Edward Campbell believed that a minister should always look the part, should mark himself out as the shepherd he was, so people in need could find him.
In public, at least. In his home, alone with his demons, he was as lost as anyone.
He smiled. “Thank you, angel. I’m sorry about this morning.”
“I know. It’s okay. Breakfast is ready.”
“It smells wonderful—and look at the pretty table you made.” He pulled her close for a hug. “You are a good girl, Leah Grace. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
When they sat down to eat, Leah winced sharply. It was the first time, she realized, that she’d sat since she’d been in Ashley’s car, still feeling traces of the good of the Ecstasy. But that was all gone, and her rear end was not happy with the hard wood of their country chairs. How she was going to sit in a pew through service, and teach Sunday school, she didn’t know.
“Are you okay?” her father asked, frowning.
“Yeah, fine.” She smiled brightly. “My back hurts a little. I think I slept funny. But it’s no big deal. Promise.”
They both excelled at game faces. And they both had to take them off sometimes.
“Your cheeks are red. Do you have a fever?”
She touched her face and felt the warm sting of beard burn. “I tried some new face cleanser. I think it’s too harsh for my skin.”
Content with her answers, her father held out his hand. She took it, and they bowed their heads.
“For food in a world where many walk in hunger,” her father intoned, “For faith in a world where many walk in fear, for friends in a world where many walk alone, we give you thanks, O Lord. Amen.”
“Amen.”
~oOo~
Mr. Osgood stood on his lawn in a bathrobe and striped pajamas, collecting his Sunday edition of the Tulsa World. Her father waved. Leah waved, too.
Mr. Osgood waved back. “Morning, Reverend, Leah!”
Her father stopped on the sidewalk. “Morning, Lester! Your garden looks great!” His voice was clear and friendly. He sounded rested. No one would guess where and how he’d woken less than two hours
earlier.
“Thank you! Annie’s outdone herself this year.”
“She sure has. Will we see you both at service this morning?”
“You bet!”
Leah could tell from the slightly guilty smile on the man’s face that he hadn’t intended to make it to service this Sunday, and now he felt like he’d been caught playing hooky before he’d even gotten around to skipping.
This was a big reason her father liked to walk to work. It was harder to forget God when his agent strolled by your house a couple of times every day.
They didn’t live in the rectory of Heartland Baptist Church; that little house had been destroyed in a tornado the year Leah’s mother had been pregnant with her. The church itself had been untouched by the winds that had made toothpicks of the structure fifty feet away from it, and Leah’s parents had been at the obstetrician’s office at the time. The congregation still spoke of the day God had come down from Heaven and wrapped His hands around their little church and their young preacher.
Rather than rebuild the rectory, Reverend Campbell had bought a house about a mile away, saying that he wanted to walk through the neighborhood every day to work and know his people in their lives, not just on Sunday or when they were in need.
And walk he did, rain, shine, or snow, every day of the week but Saturday—and sometimes on Saturday, too. Leah had walked, too, her whole life, even after she’d had her license and her own car. Every Sunday and a few weekday evenings as well.
On this May Sunday, the weather was cheerful and warm, but the walk was hard for them both. Leah knew why her father’s shoulders slumped a little when they weren’t greeting neighbors, and why his brow was furrowed behind his sunglasses, but he didn’t know why her step was a bit more halting than usual. She didn’t think he’d noticed, anyway.
He didn’t know there was another Leah, the dark twin of the good girl his daughter was. He only knew his angel, who’d been left behind with him when her mother had run away, and who’d taken care of him and their home every day since.
She was better at keeping secrets than he was. She kept hers and his both.
CHAPTER THREE
The little old lady rooted around in her beaded coin purse. Gunner reached through her open car window and tapped her shoulder.
“I don’t need a tip, Mrs. Greeley. I just need you to sign the slip.”
“You’re a good boy, Gunner. You deserve a little somethin’ extra.” She handed him a neatly folded dollar bill and snapped her little purse closed, then finally signed the credit card slip for her gas.
“Well, thank you, ma’am.” He shoved the bill in his pocket—she always tipped him one dollar, and he always told her not to—and then jumped out of the way when Mrs. Greeley put her big old Lincoln Continental into gear and pulled off. He ran up and grabbed the easel sign, advertising an oil and lube sale, out of the way before she could clip it as she turned around the pumps. She got herself out onto the street without calamity and headed off at about fifteen miles per hour.
Mrs. Greeley likely would not pass a driving test if anybody made her take one now, but at least she drove so slowly that she’d probably just bounce off anything she hit, even in that road barge.
Delaney’s Sinclair was one of the last full-service stations in Tulsa. They didn’t even have a single self-serve pump. A fairly steady traffic of full-service customers, mostly old folks from the neighborhood like Mrs. Greeley, kept the pumps, and the pump jockeys, busy enough, but being full-service wasn’t much of a money-maker. Delaney’s made its real money in service and repairs.
Gunner was one of the few Brazen Bulls patches who didn’t work the busy bays at their president’s Sinclair station. He was good with engines. Really good. But he wasn’t a certified mechanic and wasn’t ever going to be. If he could just show the certification suits what he could do and get the piece of paper that way, he’d be fine, but there were required classes and textbooks, and written tests, and he sucked at all that stuff.
Reading wasn’t really his thing. He could read, he wasn’t a drooling moron, but he was slow at it. The letters shifted around on the page, and he had trouble keeping what he read in his mind for very long.
Put something real in his hand, and he’d understand it completely in minutes. He’d take it apart and know all its workings and then put it back together with his eyes fucking shut. Ask him to read a set of instructions on the exact same thing he’d just taken apart and put back together, however, and he’d be lost. Ask him to take a written test on it, and he’d forget everything he’d ever known, including his own fucking name.
So no certification, and Delaney wanted only certified mechanics in his bays. Which made Gunner a pump jockey. Well, hell, at least he had a job on the books, keeping the Feds off his scent.
His real job was next door, at the Brazen Bulls clubhouse. He was their munitions expert, keeping their weapons and ammunition in shape, managing the inventory, and, with Apollo’s help, researching any new weapons coming on their scene, including whatever shipments they were running for the Volkov bratva. He was certified on just about every kind of small arms, both military and consumer grade, and a wide assortment of large artillery as well—because all he’d had to do for that was show his Army instructors he could handle the motherfuckers.
And he could handle the motherfuckers.
That was where he made the money he lived on: in his cut of the club business. Going ten goddamn months without that cut—while he’d paid for the repairs to the pool hall, and restitution to Terry, the owner, and the huge damn fine Delaney had levied on him for starting a brawl on Dyson turf while he’d been wearing colors—had turned his financial landscape into something out of a Mad Max movie. He’d seriously considered putting his Chevelle up for sale, and he’d had that car since he was fifteen years old. He’d restored it from a husk.
If not for getting fed at the clubhouse, and Mo and Delaney’s house, and occasionally at his dad’s place outside of Grant, Gunner would have been living on ramen and tap water by the time Delaney had declared him square a couple months back.
If not for the kutte on his back, his landlord would probably have kicked him by then, too. But now he was square with club, his crib, and his chow again, and he still had his Chevy and his Harley. He just didn’t have room for much else yet.
Since that rave a couple weekends ago, he’d been really thinking about talking to his old man about renting out their barn. If they went in fifty-fifty, Gunner could get healthy. His father would fucking hate it all—the kids and cars and drugs and music—but if the money was decent, he might think about it, at least.
That rave had been fucking awesome. He’d been jacking off to his hazy memory of that little sparkle fairy ever since—way more than he’d been thinking about Willa, which was a nice, safe change. He wished he’d taken the time to really see her, but all he remembered was blonde and glowing. Like Tinker Bell. And slick and tight. Holy hell, she’d been a hot little number. She’d felt just perfect in his arms. He’d felt…he didn’t know. Like he’d found where he fit, maybe. But that was stupid.
Anyway, she’d made an impression, despite his hazy recollection of her looks.
Behind him, the roar of hard wheels on pavement rose up, and he turned to see a group of neighborhood boys rolling their skateboards onto the station lot.
“Hey! No! You know better!” Gunner barked, flicking his hand, and the boys rolled back to the sidewalk. The kids liked to swing through, do turns around the pumps, and then roll on out. One of these times, Delaney was going to meet them with his shotgun. He insisted that it was a safety concern, but whatever the reason, his attitude about kids on the station lot could best be described as ‘crotchety.’
Gunner liked the kids. They were harmless, and he liked the hero worship. They lurked around the edges of the clubhouse and the station, trying to get a contact high of biker cool. Wally, in fact, one of their current prospects, had once been one of the skater boys.
“You tell ‘em Gun,” Mr. Jones hacked in his three-packs-unfiltered rasp. “Buncha baby thugs.”
Twist (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 2) Page 3