I didn’t want to know.
“Okay, Deke,” I replied but kept trying. Sooner rather than later. Don’t procrastinate. I’d done enough of that already. “Wanna come over tonight?” I shot him a forced grin. “Go into town, get takeout from the Italian place. I’ll drink wine out of a red Solo cup, doing it with guilt heavy at what that cup will mean to the environment. You can have beer. And we can toast to my addition of kitchen utensils, that being after I buy a wine opener.”
“Wiped, Jus. Thanks but work like today takes it out of you. But just so you know, talked to Bubba. He’s on for Saturdays as long as that lasts.”
He wasn’t being an ass and he wasn’t being closed off.
Yet he was for that last.
With no other choice, I nodded. “Sounds good.”
I said that but I did not like this. Bubba coming tomorrow through Saturday, I wouldn’t have alone time with Deke until Monday.
Maybe I could get Krystal or Jim-Billy to tell me where he lived and pop by on Sunday.
Though, if there was a woman, a woman who, say, packed bologna sandwiches for Deke’s lunches, I didn’t want to hit his place on Sunday (not a circumstance I’d considered after he’d picked up the chick at Bubba’s that day I’d closed on the house—then again, that chick might have had staying power, another reason he held us at friendly).
But what woman would let her guy go for hot dogs and s’mores with another woman, alone, even if they were friends, especially if her guy was Deke?
Maybe they were new and she didn’t pack his bologna sandwiches for lunch every day. Just the mornings after the nights she stayed after he fucked her.
Shit.
“Jus?”
It was me who gave a weird jerk when I focused on him.
“You good?” he asked.
I was not.
“Yep,” I told him.
“Good. See you tomorrow.”
“Okay, Deke. See you tomorrow.”
He did a farewell head tilt and off he went through my door, into my bedroom, sauntering through it like it was his bedroom, and he disappeared into the shadows of the house.
“Okay,” I whispered to the windows. “That was weird and it was a bad weird and it could be a very bad weird.”
It might have just been me, but it seemed the windows agreed.
*
“We don’t do this that often,” Lauren, Tate’s wife, shouted at me over the band playing at Bubba’s the next night. She was sitting on a stool in between Jim-Billy and me at the end of the bar. “Krys introduced it a while ago. Hit big.” She grinned. “As you can see.”
I looked from her gorgeous face to the bar, which was heaving.
An aside, to say she suited Tate was an understatement. They were like Barbie and Ken in their forties, with Barbie having a killer ass and Ken not being Ken but GI Joe except with longer hair, a beard and a lot more badass.
“Couple of bars in Gnaw Bone have live music,” Lauren kept shouting to me. “They rake it in. We’ve got some friends, Zara and Ham, live in GB. Ham runs one of the bars there. It’s the competition,” she said, still grinning, like it actually wasn’t, or if it was that competition was friendly. “It gave Krys the idea.”
I nodded, shouting back, “It was a good one!”
She returned my nod and twisted back to the band that was also good. Obviously, I’d heard better and this was in my dad’s living room, but they didn’t suck.
I’d done my best to slink in unseen because the peace of being just Jus might be done for me with Krys, Jim-Billy, Bubba, Tate, Lauren, Sunny, Shambles and soon Deke, but it was still there for everybody else.
And with musicians around, I knew better than to waltz in as Justice Lonesome.
I was no Johnny and I was no Lacey but I was a singer, songwriter, producer, guitar player and many in the biz, precisely those who’d play a biker bar, no matter how removed from the glitz (and perhaps precisely those) had no interest in Lacey Town, who didn’t write her own music or play an instrument.
But they’d know the likes of Jerry, Johnny, Jimmy, Tammy, the Blue Moon Gypsies…and me.
It seemed I’d pulled it off, doing it enjoying a few brews and getting to know Lauren better.
Now the band had begun playing, they were loud and there was no getting to know anyone better without shouting.
And I had a strict philosophy. If someone was on any stage and I was in the same room with them, my attention was on them. They deserved that respect. Lauren shouting a few words to me was one thing. But I was not one of those douchebags who sat while a band was playing their heart out or a singer was belting it out and held a full-blown conversation. If I needed to do that, I walked out of the room.
So I was trying to get into it.
But my mind was on other things.