“How’s your tit?”
“Better than your girl’s, I bet. You still like manhandling underage tits?”
“Shut the fuck up, Phillips,” Ryan growls. “She’s legal.”
“Sure she is,” I say with a disbelieving nod.
Wyatt gives me the manly silent head nod he always does, but I barely notice him. I might be verbally sparring with Ryan, but it’s Diesel who has my attention. He hasn’t looked my way even once. He’s like this a lot—quiet and brooding. We used to be cool, but then something changed a few months ago and now shit’s just awkward. Not as awkward as it is with Grady, though. Maybe I’m just being awkward in general and has nothing to do with anyone else.
“Well, I got lunch with my mom,” I say and nod my head a few times. It’s my tell, and I fucking hate it. Grady’s kept his eyes downcast since before I walked up, only raising them once to greet me, but when I start with the head-nod business, he lifts his face to stare directly at me. His deep green eyes penetrate mine in a way they never have before. He’s looked at me with lust, with irritation, and with ambivalence. But this is brand new—this looks like guilt. It’s the same look he’s given his daughter, Cheyenne, when he can’t fulfill one of her many wishes. I don’t want him looking at me this way. It’s unsettling, and so instead of standing here and feeling like shit, I take a few steps back and excuse myself.
“Elle.”
It’s a single word. My name. People say it all the time. Grady’s said my name hundreds of times in the years we’ve known each other, but he’s never said it like this before. Six months ago I would have loved to hear the emotion in his voice. I would have almost begged for it. But not now.
I keep walking, picking up the pace in an effort to ditch him. Not that I’m going to be able to ditch him, but I’m going to try. I get around the corner to the front of the building when he grabs my arms and spins me around. It’s not this romantic, intimate thing. It’s cold and calculated. He isn’t Grady in this moment. He’s Forsaken’s sergeant-at-arms. I don’t fight him as he pushes me up against the wall and cages me in. This isn’t how I imagined it for so many years, where Grady would get a fucking clue, realize he’s in love with me, want me as much as I want him, and tell me how we’re going to be together.
But then he met Holly Mercer. He stopped calling me when his body needed me. No, not me—when his body needed somebody. He stopped engaging in bullshit conversations. He stopped being him. It was the final nail in the coffin, and I had to stop being me. And it hurt. It still hurts. And I’m not so much as angry at him as I am angry at myself. I spent a decade trying to be who I thought he wanted me to be. I toughened myself up. I shut down all those silly, girly fears and feelings I used to have. My father molded me into his perfect little tomboy, and Grady fine-tuned me into his perfect biker bitch. I should have learned with my dad because he left every woman he ever met—including me—and yet I still believed Grady would finally appreciate the woman I’ve become. He didn’t, and I’m the idiot who’s left standing here, hating herself for letting the men in her life determine who she is.
“We got a problem here?” Shit. He looks angry. His voice doesn’t vibrate and the muscles in his neck aren’t strained, so he can’t be too angry.
“I don’t know. Do we?”
“Quit being such a bitch and we won’t.” He snarls, getting right up in my face.
My body relaxes, and I let out a breath. The next thing I know I’m laughing. I can’t make sense of my reaction, and I don’t try. This is the first fucking fight we’ve ever had about my attitude, and of course it happens after there’s no longer a we—not that there ever really was a we so much as there was just two consenting adults hiding their physical relationship. We’ve fought plenty about his being a control freak—or, as he’d say it, we’ve fought plenty about me poking my nose into club business. God. The more I think about how he is, the more I want to stab him in the eyes with a pair of spoons. The brothers are all a bunch of assholes who expect anyone who’s not patched to see everything, report what’s important, not ask questions, and keep their fucking mouth shut. Well, fuck them and fuck their bullshit. That goddamn patch fucks all our shit up, and they have the nerve to expect us to just sit on the sidelines and wait to be rescued—something they’ve been doing a bang-up job of lately.
“Are you fucking laughing?” Now he’s incredulous. What an asshat.
“Why don’t you stomp off and pull your macho bullshit with that bitch you’ve got at home?”
I’ve never been good at the whole keeping-my-mouth-shut thing.