Gage shakes his head, interjecting into the conversation. “That wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I was thinking you’d help with something other than distracting Ash from his work. That’s already easy enough to do.”
“Excuse me.” Ash gives him an offended look. “I do my work.”
“Sometimes.”
“Yeah, now you do,” Knox throws out. “Because the only ass you want is waiting for you at home, and you’re not trying to dick down all the dancers anymore.”
Ash pouts, although there’s still a grin playing around his lips at the same time.
He’s the most model-handsome of all the guys, and I know he had plenty of women before I came into his life, but it doesn’t really bother me anymore. Now that I know about his past, I have a better understanding of how he became the person he is today. And he’s so fucking possessive, hungry, and affectionate with me that it would be impossible for me to doubt his feelings for me at this point.
“Anyway,” Gage cuts back in, getting back to the matter at hand. “We’ll talk about it once this is all done. If there’s anything you’re particularly interested in, River, we can discuss it. But like I said, I have some ideas for things you’d be good at.”
“I mean, sure,” I say casually. “I could do that. I could probably do anything you guys do. How hard could it be to run a nightclub, right? I could do it with my eyes closed, I bet.”
“Bold words,” Priest drawls. “And you’d be surprised.”
He glances at Gage, who laughs a little under his breath and says, “It might look easy, but it’s definitely not. Remember the mix up with the vodka?”
Ash groans and scrubs a hand down his face. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you? I don’t know how many times I have to say that she didn’t tell me it was diluted.”
“And you didn’t read to make sure,” Gage points out. “Probably because you were too busy flirting with her to do your job right.”
I laugh at that. “Wait, what happened?”
“Ash, do you want to tell her or should I?” Gage asks.
“Fuck off, you always tell it wrong.”
“That’s because you always try to make yourself look better when you tell it.”
“I’ll tell it,” Priest cuts in, smiling. “You both take liberties, and the story’s good enough on its own. So,” he turns toward me. “It’s maybe the fifth weekend that the club has been open. Ash is in charge of making sure we’re stocked with liquor for the bar. It’s been going well so far, since we’re still new, there hasn’t been that much business. But it just so happens that the weekend coming up is Memorial Day weekend. People are going to want to get drunk, and to capitalize on business, we decide to do half price drinks.”
“Okay…” I say. “So what went wrong?”
“Our liquor vendor at the time was slammed with orders because every other club in the city also wanted to get a shit ton of booze too. So we went to a different one. One who, for some reason, also sold diluted liquor that’s half the strength of the real stuff. Ash thought he’d gotten an amazing deal and scored us five cases of vodka.”
“Diluted vodka.”
Priest nods. “Diluted vodka. The customers were pissed.”
“Until they had more drinks and then it was fine,” Ash points out.
“There was almost a riot.”
“We lowered the price on the diluted cocktails and people drank even more than they would have normally. We made the same amount of money as we would have otherwise.”
We all laugh at Ash’s indignation, and he huffs but doesn’t seem that upset about it.
“Okay,” he says. “But what about the time Knox fucked up with the smuggling?”
“Look,” Knox cuts in. “I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I did what I could, and it turned out okay.”
They launch into a story about how Knox was in charge of smuggling weapons through the club on behalf of another gang and ended up sending them to the wrong place.
“We got them back before it was too much of a shit show,” Gage says. “But it was a very close thing.”
“What would have happened if you didn’t get them back?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “We would have been in the territory of a gang with a hair trigger temper, with a bunch of weapons that didn’t belong to us. Maybe we could have talked our way out of it, but probably not without it coming to a fight.”
Knox cracks his knuckles and shrugs like getting into a fight with an angry gang is just another Tuesday or something. “The fight we could have handled,” he says. “It was everything after it that would have been a shit show.”
“Even if we walked away from the fight—” Priest begins.
“Which there was no guarantee we would have,” Gage adds.
Priest nods. “Right. It would have been with them knowing who we were and that would have ruined everything.”
“Good thing it didn’t break bad then, I guess.”
“Understatement,” Gage replies, but he doesn’t sound upset about it.
It’s interesting to hear these stories of how they were when they were just getting started. Obviously they’re better at it now, running both sides of their business, but it makes sense that there was a time when they were young and just learning the ropes of everything.
Judging from how much laughter there is about it, those mishaps have turned into funny stories that they look back on fondly, and that’s good to see.
Knox pours more booze, and we take the shots. The second round goes down even more smoothly than the first, and Gage moves into a story about how they almost blew a stakeout of a rival club because a dog wouldn’t stop barking at Priest.
“That wasn’t my fault,” Priest points out. “Animals just don’t like me.”
“Except for Harley,” I tell him. “Harley acts like you invented bacon just for him or something.”
“Yeah, this dog did not share that sentiment,” Ash says. “It was barking like it wanted to leap over the dumpster it was hiding behind and try to tear Priest’s throat out. The hilarious part is the dog was probably just a little bigger than a football.”
“It was not that small!” Priest insists, taking another shot when Knox pours it.
“It was!” Knox yells, sloshing whiskey around in the bottle. “It really was.”
I can feel the alcohol making me tipsy, making my face feel a little bit numb and my insides go a little tingly. It’s a nice feeling, drinking for the fun of it with people I like, instead of trying to drown my sorrows in a bottle or something.
I look around the kitchen, and something shifts inside my chest. I can’t really deny it anymore. I’m falling for these men. I’m falling in love with them, as terrifying as that is. Even knowing I had feelings for them and wanted to stay with them, I’ve been avoiding thinking the ‘L’ word. It’s just such a big thing. One of those things you can’t just say and then take back. Even thinking it feels like a commitment, and it’s not something I have any fucking experience with at all.