Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 137310 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 687(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 458(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137310 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 687(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 458(@300wpm)
When Diana had no reply, he turned to her to find her looking at him.
“Sunday,” she said.
Okay.
Yeah.
But she had to know what she was working with on Sunday.
“Babe, the brothers share profits equal across the board, and we got a slew of auto supply stores, and the builds from the garage bring in a shit ton. I’m not hurtin’. But I don’t live like you do.”
“So, if you wanted to live like I do, you could, because you have the money to do it. You just aren’t really bothered, so you don’t.”
“Honestly?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” she answered.
“I never had good like you got, so I didn’t really think about it, even though a lot of the brothers, especially the ones with old ladies, got it pimp.”
“Do you like it pimp?” she asked quietly.
Her pad?
The scent of her hair and her perfume on her soft sheets?
A home-cooked meal every night?
Fuck yeah.
“Definitely gonna look at some rolls of wallpaper when I get home,” he joked.
She gave him another smile and went back to the painting, asking, “What did you want to be when you grew up?”
Hugger returned his attention to the window.
He wanted his mom safe and out from under the thumb of some asshole pimp.
Enter Chaos for the second time in her life, they got her free of the last asshole pimp she had, set her up so she could manage her own clients, and she went freelance.
After that, he just hoped he didn’t grow up to be like his father.
“Harlan?” Di prompted.
“Never really thought about it,” he said to the window.
He felt the air get heavy and he let it be.
Because, yeah.
On Sunday, she had to know what she was dealing with.
They were in the zone they hadn’t had much time in, so when they talked on Sunday, if this wasn’t going anywhere, she wouldn’t feel like she wasted time on him.
In the meantime, he got to have her for the next four days. Have her time. Her smiles. Have her back when she sat down with her dad.
And he decided in that moment that was good for him.
Hugger hadn’t had a lot on his life, and it was no joke that what he had with Di the last six days was the best he’d ever had, bar none, and he hadn’t even banged her yet.
So he’d take what he could get of Diana Armitage, then he’d take off out of her life when she realized he was a hassle who wasn’t worth it.
On a thought that was unhappy, but not unusual for Hugger, he pulled out his phone to play solitaire while she spit-washed an ugly-as-fuck painting.
At lunch, they went downtown to a place that made excellent tacos using freshly rolled and grilled tortillas, and Hugger noted, in a city that seemed to be nothing but a never-ending succession of strip malls, they had damn good food.
On their way back to her work, they stopped at a Total Wine so she could buy her dad a bottle of gin.
She returned to the painting.
And he went back to something familiar.
Solitaire.
15
SOMETHING BIG
Diana
“You don’t have to change!” I shouted down the hall. “I’m not changing.”
We needed to leave imminently for dinner.
I was in the kitchen, trying to fashion a bow around Dad’s bottle of gin.
Maybe the bow was overkill, but I was nervous.
I didn’t want Dad to be a dick to Hugger, for one. That would end the night real soon, because I wouldn’t put up with it.
I didn’t want Dad to be a dick to me, either.
Of course, that would suck for me, but I wasn’t sure how Hugger would respond to it. Though, I did know neither Dad nor I wanted to find out, but Dad might want it less than me.
I was also nervous about Hugger.
There’d been a change in him since Madison left.
There was something almost fatalistic about him.
Sure, I could see how we’d started was weird. We hadn’t had a date. We’d had one kiss. Police and the FBI were a part of our lives. And we were living together and sleeping together without the fun sex parts that came with those.
And onward from all of this, our road was pretty rocky.
Hugger would have to go back home.
I would have to stay here.
I could say the emotion I felt was hate at the knowledge that, eventually, he was going to leave.
Just that. Him leaving.
This was how used to having him around I’d become.
And how much I liked it.
It got worse thinking we’d have to try to get to know each other over phone calls and texts, and figuring out times for visits, and then there was the expense of that.
I didn’t know a thing about motorcycle clubs outside what I learned when watching that documentary about Chaos, but I suspected, if you were in one, they wanted you to be in it, not living with some chick in another state. And what I learned in that documentary pretty much confirmed that suspicion.