“You got any more intel on this shit, how much longer we’re out here?”
“I don’t know. I’m waiting to hear from Guillermo. Keep in touch. A week, a couple of weeks? I'm not sure."
I tossed and turned on the couch all night, thinking about the hit and Guillermo and the club. And Dani. Before I drifted off, I’d replayed the night at the hotel with her in my head. My hands on her breasts, her laying in the tub, head on my chest. I needed to get her out of my head. Hell, what I really needed was to get laid.
When she walked out of the bedroom the next morning with her hair all mussed from sleep, wearing a strappy little top and a pair of shorts that barely covered her ass, I groaned inwardly. Was she purposely trying to make things as difficult for me as possible? I sat up on the sofa, shifting uncomfortably, covering my lap with a blanket.
“Good morning.” She flopped into a chair, arms crossed over her chest. “I heard you leave last night.”
“I had to get in touch with the club."
“About what we talked about? Billy?”
“Yeah.”
“So they know it’s a bad idea."
“They know. I told the club president.”
“So they won’t kill Billy then.” I wondered if she was so stuck on this because she still wanted to be with this Billy guy.
Why did I feel so jealous? I shrugged. “They’ll look at the angles, figure it out. He's a college student like you, anyway. Doesn't he go home for the summer or something?"
"Home," she said, laughing. "I'm sure he's headed off to Ibiza or whatever other spot has the hottest girls."
"There you go," Blaze said. "So he's probably gone now anyhow. This Billy guy, was he your boyfriend or something?”
Dani laughed. “No way. I met him, like, six months ago. I was sitting in my history class, totally hung over, and he sat beside me, tried to chat me up. I think the only reason he kept talking to me was because I didn’t give him the time of day the first time. Anyway, he dates girls whose daddies are senators and whose moms are on the boards of charity foundations. Not girls whose daddies would put your feet in a bucket of concrete and throw you in the Hudson River if you crossed them.”
“But you wanted to, then.”
“No! He was just a bit of fun, casual. I mean, we traveled together a couple times. His parents have a private plane,” she said.
“So it was just casual,” I said. “Was he in the habit of smacking you around?” I was irritated with this conversation, angry at her for being with Billy, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking questions I didn’t want answered.
“He got weird before,” she said, looking down, fidgeting with her fingers. “We were in St. Barth’s once. He took something and got crazy, grabbed me too hard. It left marks. But it didn’t happen again, and I figured it was just a drug thing. It wasn’t like we were in a relationship, like he was an abusive boyfriend or anything.”
“Right,” I said. “Except when he choked you.”
“Yeah, well, I got the fuck out of there, didn’t I? It’s not like I’m going back to him.”
“You sure about that?” Where did that come from? I had no call even asking that.
“It’s not really any of your business, is it?” she asked. “But, no, for your information, I won’t be going back to Billy again. Like I said, it was just sex.”
Just sex. Like Dani and I. She was intentionally trying to hurt me.
“You do that a lot then, the whole 'just sex' thing?” I asked, immediately regretting my words. Why do I care? It's the same thing I did.
Dani shrugged. “I went to boarding school with bored rich kids,” she said, as if that explained everything. “You get a bunch of teenagers together, kids with lots of money and fucked up parents, and what do you think happens? They take Adderall, snort coke, and have threesomes. You don’t find boyfriends in boarding school. You have flings. Everyone sleeps with everyone else. It's kind of hard to go from orgies to a vanilla boyfriend-girlfriend relationship in college all of a sudden.”
“Geez.”
“What, are you shocked? You’re a biker. It’s not like you’re some kind of fucking saint.”
I laughed. “That's true. It’s not the sex part. I just can’t picture you at some boarding school with a bunch of rich kids.” That wasn’t entirely the truth. I hated the thought of her with Billy, and even though I knew she and I had been just a casual fling, I was surprised at how it made me feel to hear her talk about “just sex” with someone else.
“What do you mean?” Dani asked, affecting a British accent. “I’m fucking classy.”