“Surprised you came out of that alive.”
Twitched laughed. “Yeah, but I came though. A lot.” There was a general titter of amusement between the club and the joke. Encouraged, Twitch went on to say, “But she got more.”
The girl sitting with Hulk and Cody laughed the loudest and bumped her shoulder against Twitch’s. He gave her a grin and waggled his eyes suggestively at her. Cody watched as she leaned over and whispered something in his ear. Twitch’s grin widened and he tossed back the rest of his drink.
“If you all will excuse us,” he said, slipping out of the booth and taking the woman’s hand. She giggled and followed.
Cody shook his head and rolled his eyes before taking the spot the pair of them had vacated. “Well, at least someone is happy.” He glanced around at the group of bikers. Most of them were wearing their kuttes. Some were done in leather, some in denim, but all of them sported the large white tiger with its head tilted back in a frozen roar. The White Tigers of Carson, Nevada, a small club when all things were said and done, but a good group of guys. Even Twitch.
There was Bubba, and yes, that was his given name. The man was nearly seven feet tall and weighed in at just under three hundred pounds, and nearly all of it was muscle. He volunteered at the youth club after school to make sure kids whose parents couldn’t afford daycare still had someplace to go.
There was Carl, a scrawny little dude who used to be an addict until Boss picked him up and helped him to quit the habit. He rode a hell of a bike and played a mean guitar now that his hands didn’t shake so much.
Donna was wrong. These men weren’t criminals; they were rebels. They stood for something. They wanted the freedom that America promised but buried with its rules and laws. Rules, he thought, that were enforced by the assholes in blue who didn’t practice what they preached.
“You gonna listen?” Hulk asked, interrupting Cody’s train of thought.
“Listen? To what?”
“To Donna. You gonna get lost or are you gonna keep going after her?”
Cody shook his head. “Neither. I’m here, and I’m going to be here. I’m going to help her with Kyle and… shit, man, I told her that I’d be available once she gets her head out of her ass.”
Hulk whistled. “Use those exact words?”
“Close enough.”
Hulk’s teeth shone white as pearls against the darkness of his lips. “I thought you were a ladies’ man, Lieutenant.”
“Ladies, sure. But Donna is something else altogether. She’s this… force. You know? You ever met a woman who just gets up in your life and by the very act of being there turns everything upside down?”
Hulk gave him a long look with those liquid dark eyes of his. He didn’t say anything at first; he just watched. Cody let him. Hulk was a quiet man, prone to long introspection. Cody brought his nearly half-gone beer up and took a long swallow.
“Hey, Cody,” a woman said. A soft hand with bright red nails settled itself on his shoulder. The grip was familiar. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Hey, Chastity.”
Chastity was a dark-haired Barbie brought to life. Her long legs were displayed beneath a short fringe of skirt, and she’d forgotten to button the top two buttons of her blouse. The edges of a lacy black bra were visible in the flare of open fabric. She had a nice rack, Cody knew from firsthand experience, but she didn’t have much else going for her.
She sidled up next to him, letting her fingers scratch the back of his neck ever so lightly. She was wearing a perfume that was strong on the vanilla. Not the good, warm kind that went with baked goods or expensive candles, but the cheap, overly sweet kind.
“I’m really glad you’re here.”
She brushed her magnificent rack against his shoulder, and he waited to feel the arousal he was sure should accompany that. He waited and waited as she leaned closer, her mint-gum breath blowing ever so lightly against his neck. Nothing happened, just a sick feeling in his stomach like he was doing something wrong. It took him a moment to realize he was feeling guilt. He, Cody Bannik, who never felt guilt at the touch of a woman, was getting sick at the thought of taking Chastity home and making an irony out of her name.
He gave her a friendly pat on the hip but shook his head. “Thanks, hon, but not tonight.”
She pouted but didn’t push. With a sigh, she slid herself back up onto her stilts and gave Hulk a questioning look. Hulk shook his head. Cody realized that he’d never seen Hulk take a woman home from the pool hall, or from anywhere now that he was thinking about it.
“You in love with someone?” Cody asked suddenly.
Hulk raised a dark brow. “What?”
“I was just thinking that I’ve never seen you pick up a woman, but I’ve seen plenty hit on you.” Cody eyed him. “Was wondering if you’re in love with someone.”
Hulk went very quiet. “Been in and out of love a few times, Lieutenant. None of them were fun.”
There was something about the way he said it that kept Cody from asking anything else. A thought niggled at the back of his mind. He didn’t say it, but he started to wonder if Hulk just didn’t like women for personal company. Cody wouldn’t have cared one way or the other, but he knew that not everyone in the club would feel the same.
“Fair enough,” Cody said. “What’s everyone gathered up for?”
“Boss is coming back.”
Cody blinked and plunked his drink on the table. “It’s about damn time. When?”
“Tomorrow, maybe the day after if they stop up north and gamble away some of their share. Got the call around midnight. Tried calling you but…” Hulk shrugged one massive shoulder.
Midnight. That was when he’d been arguing with Donna. Had he just not heard the call? Had he been that mad? Probably. He was still mad. It wasn’t as hot and bitter as it had been, but he could feel it like water on a low boil.
“That’s about the time that Donna was telling me to fuck off.”
Hulk took a deep breath and wrapped both hands around his drink, his fingers interlacing over the label. “You love this woman.” It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. Cody had been thinking something along the same lines, but he found himself wondering why Hulk, who Cody hadn’t been spending too much time with the past few days, had come to the same conclusion. “It’s easy to see. Not just because you sent Chastity off, or because you came in here looking like someone had run over your favorite pair of boots. It’s the way she makes you mad.”
“You lost me.”
“Do you ever get mad if the Anaheim Ducks lose the Stanley Cup?”
“No. Why would I?” Cody responded, his thumb beginning to scrape away the ring of paper on the neck of his beer.
“Exactly. I mean, it’s pretty obvious when you think about it. You haven’t much cared when other women turned you down. Or tell you that they aren’t interested. You just move on. Didn’t happen here, did it?”
The ring of paper fell on the table in small strips. “No, it didn’t.”
“Well, that’s because it matters. It matters a lot, doesn’t it? It matters what she thinks about you and why she thinks it. It matters not just because she turned you down to start off with. It matters because you legitimately care what she thinks. Her opinion is one that you value and respect. That’s love, man.”
Cody shook his head and started working on the label of his beer, letting those glue-caked strips join the first as he thought about what Hulk was saying. “What about all the fire? The passion?”
“Pretty sure y’all have that. But that’s not love, Lieutenant. That’s just interest. That big flare of look-at-that you get all messed-up with in the beginning. Right? Love is something else. It’s what happens when you think about the other person when they aren’t there, and not just about what’s in their pants. When you think about what they’re doing, how their day goes, and if they are doing all right. That… that’s love. That’s real caring.”
“Well, she doesn’t feel
that for me.” Cody shoved his bottle away. It wavered on its side but didn’t spill.
“I can’t say one way or the other on that. I don’t know her that well. But, well…” Hulk trailed off again. Cody found himself leaning in, wondering what the big man was going to finish that sentence with. “Well… here’s the thing. She told you that you two weren’t right for each other, right?”
Cody felt the dull boil of his anger go up a few degrees. “Yeah. She did.”
“Well, that means she’s been thinking about a future with you, right? She’s wondering how you fit into her world, and if it would make sense. Now, some women, they might try to make it fit. They’d cut away pieces of you or pieces of themselves in this struggle to finish the puzzle that is their lives. But Donna Mason? Naw, she’s played that game before. She tried to make herself fit here all of her young life, and it just didn’t happen. So instead of forcing it, she told you to get lost, because after evaluating her life, she said that it wasn’t right.”
“And that’s… a good thing?” Maybe it was the liquor, or maybe it was the fact that he couldn’t imagine Donna picturing them together, but Cody wasn’t sure he understood what Hulk was getting at.
“Shit, man, that’s the best thing when it comes to a woman like that.”
Cody frowned and dragged a hand through his dark hair. “I don’t think I’m following you, teacher.”
Hulk laughed, a great big barrel laugh that burst out of his lips and rumbled across the room. “You can be really dumb for a college graduate, you know that? She wants you to fit, and she respects you enough not to demand that you cut away parts of yourself.”
“Huh,” Cody said, laying his chin on the top of the beer bottle, feeling the lukewarm kiss of glass against his skin. “Guess I hadn’t thought about it like that.”
# # #
When Cody woke up the next morning he decided that he wanted to fit into Donna’s life too. He hadn’t understood everything that Hulk, the love guru, was saying, but it had all stuck in his head. Donna Mason wanted someone that she could count on, depend on. Fair enough since she hadn’t been able to count on anyone but her own damn self as far as Cody could see. If she needed that in a man, then he was going to be that man.
He was at the shop by eight, despite getting to bed at five in the morning. He started looking through money, going through some much-needed inventory. He threw himself into his work and began to understand why Donna found it comforting to turn to business when life was being too difficult to handle. With work, everything was laid out in a nice neat list. Life wasn’t half so easy to handle.
He hadn’t called her, though after a few more beers with Hulk he had begun to think that it might be a really good idea to do just that. It had been the larger, more level-headed man that interceded. It was for the best, though Cody hadn’t thought so at the time. He’d been too drunk to sit on his bike. He hadn’t wanted to go home anyway—the couch probably still smelled like her. Instead he had slept it off at the pool hall and walked into work this morning thinking the brisk morning air might clear his liquor-soaked brain. It had. Well, that and two bottles of Gatorade, some Pepto-Bismol, and aspirin.
It had been a very long night, and if the way the phone was already ringing at eight o’clock in the morning was any way to gauge it, it was going to be a very long day too. Good, Cody needed a long day. His uncle came in at nine thirty and helped out with the fixing, and Ricardo, a local kid, came in at eleven to take over phone duties.
When the numbers on the screen matched up to the numbers on paper, Cody decided to get some of the real work done. He started with a minivan that belonged to a soccer mom who needed an oil change and new spark plugs, then moved on to a Toyota with shit suspension. Minutes ticked by and his hands got greasy, and Cody’s thoughts started to focus onto a single undeniable truth. He’d be whatever Donna Mason needed him to be. He worked right through lunch and might have gone through dinner too if Uncle Gary hadn’t waved a six-piece of fried chicken and an order of mashed potatoes under his nose.
“Eat,” he’d been instructed. “And then go work your magic on the computers. I can’t make the order make sense.”
Cody had used the time in between number verifications to check his phone. His heart stopped when he saw a text from Donna. It was a few hours old but said, in that straightforward, no-nonsense way that she had, that Kyle was doing fine and she thought he’d want to know. That was nice, but it wasn’t all that Cody wanted to know. He went through three attempts at a text before her sent, Good to know, thanks for keeping me updated. You okay?
Then, before he could send her five more texts about nothing in the hopes that she would respond, he turned back to his dinner and the spreadsheet for the body shop. It was going on ten o’clock when everything was finally squared away. Ricardo and Uncle Gary were long since gone. Cody realized that he had put in a fourteen-hour day. Maybe he should head home, take a shower, eat something else because that chicken had done nothing but remind him that he was starving. That was the smart thing to do, but he wasn’t going to do it. Cody Bannik did not end his day with spreadsheets and ordering layouts.
Oh, management was all fine and dandy, but it did not compare to the glory of getting greasy under the hood of a real classic, and the sapphire blue ’78 Dodge Challenger currently sitting in bay three was definitely that.
“All right, beautiful. Let’s see what’s going on here.”
According to the diagnostics and the tinkering that his uncle had done near closing, the Dodge was overheating for no reason at all. Not a good thing. A pretty car like this needed good, honest tending. He wondered who owned it, and if they’d be willing to sell. He had a decent amount of money tucked away.
Would Donna like it, Cody wondered. She loved fast cars, things that were sleek and shiny. Did they have to be new? Would she appreciate the soft lines and detail work that went into a classic beauty like this? He thought she would. He could already see her, sitting back in the driver’s seat with her hand on the stick shift, that mane of autumn colored hair flying around her face as she flew down the interstate.
“What the hell has put that stupid look on your face?”
Cody nearly thwacked his head on the hood of the car when the boss’s voice reverberated a few inches from his ear. For all the man was big as life he moved like a cat. Cody cursed and nearly threw a tool at the other man.
“Can’t you see I’m doing very precious work?”
Slade “The Boss” McGee had a wide grin and a nose that had been broken at least twice. There was a small scar that ran through his left brow that made him look dangerous. In Cody’s opinion that scar was a warning, and lo to any and all who ignored it. His leather jacket was fringed down the sleeves and marked with a simple black square across the right breast with white capital letters that read “PRESIDENT.”
“Yeah, I can see that, but we got business.”
Cody raised his brow. “We do?”
“Yeah, we do.” The tone was so cold and sure of itself that Cody couldn’t help but think of Donna. Still, getting bitched at by a pretty redhead in a business suit was a little better than getting the voice of the ice king from the boss.
“All right.” Cody took a moment to close the hood of the Dodge. He wondered what had put that angry look into McGee’s eyes, and why it was focused on him. Was it the fact that he hadn’t been at the pool hall as much lately? It wasn’t unusual for Cody to spend more time at his shop or at home than with the club. He was just a lieutenant, an enforcer, not second-in-command and not even third. Yeah, things had been left in his hands while the other guys had been gone, but that had been a cakewalk. He tossed his cleaning rag over one shoulder and leaned against one of the pillars that separated one work bay from the next. “What’s up?”
Slade crossed his arms over his chest. It made the tattoos on his bare forearms dance with the shift in hard wrought muscle. Cody had wondered once whether or not the boss had ever been one of those lifting
champion guys. Not the pretty body on the front of muscle magazines, but the kind that you might mistake for husky until they started swinging. The boss cleared his throat. “Did you or did you not use the club funds to get out that little scrap of nothing?”
Cody shoved his thumbs in the large pockets of his coveralls. Is that what this was about? The money? Seemed like a piss-poor reason for McGee to come down here and be mildly threatening. “No, I didn’t.” When the president of the White Tigers continued to give Cody a thousand-yard glare, Cody held up his hands in surrender. “I thought about it. Even got the money out of the safe. But at the end of the day I didn’t do it.”
The boss dragged his tongue over his teeth and shook his head. “Goddammit! Don’t play this smartass college boy crap with me, Librarian. You took the money out with the intent of handing it over to the goddamned police to help your little friend. What did you have to go and do a stupid thing like that for? Kyle Mason is a teenager who doesn’t have his head screwed on straight. He isn’t a prospect, and he sure as hell isn’t a member of the club.”
BARE SKIN: A Dark Bad Boy Romance Page 46
