“Sure I will. No one fucking cares, Carnie! You’re the only one who has a problem with this. Why don’t you take your peroxide hooker down to Denny’s, okay? The food’s better there, anyway.”
“Hey!” I slam down my serving spoon. “If you don’t wanna eat the food I make, Shay, then drag your own ass into town and have done with it.” Shay and I have gone toe to toe a couple of times ourselves. I knew from day one that there was never going to be any love lost between us, and that if I wanted to become a member of this club I was going to have to stand up to her, irrespective of whether it mattered to me or not. Her head rocks back, eyes narrowing as she fixes me in her sights.
“Calm your shit, Sophia. Not everything’s about you. Your food will do just fine,” she snaps.
“What a compliment.” I roll my eyes. “Carnie, why don’t you and your friend eat outside in the sunshine? It’s too small in here for bickering right now. The walls are closing in.”
“Y’know…” Carnie shakes his head, his mouth pulling up into a bemused smile. “For a prospect, you sure do get away with telling us all what to do an awful lot. I wonder why that could be.” We all know why I get away with blue murder: I’m the president’s old lady. Carnie won’t ever air that fact out loud, though. Rebel will string him up from the rafters and use his torso as a punching bag if he does. I’m about to come back at him with a retort about children being easily led, but a loud, metallic scraping sound cuts through the humid, stifling air inside the clubhouse and everyone stops talking again. Cade towers over everyone, hands planted on the table in front of him on either side of his silverware—he casts a dark, weary look at Carnie.
“You’d better watch your mouth, man,” he says quietly. “It would be a pretty shitty start to my day if I had to kick your ass for being rude to Soph.”
“See! This is what I mean,” Carnie says, throwing his hands in the air. “She gets preferential treatment because she’s blowing the boss.”
“No one said this was an equal opportunities organization. If you don’t like it then you can always leave, Carnie. Just remember to leave your ink at the door.”
Leaving the Widow Makers is just like leaving any organized crime outfit. It’s never as easy as it might seem. Even if Carnie hadn’t had access to highly sensitive, high dangerous information that could really hurt the majority of the club’s members, which he has, then he’d still have to get the huge tattoo marked into his back removed. And that is a particularly unpleasant and painful procedure that involves whiskey, knives, blood, fire, burning and bleeding. Carnie begins to turn a sickly shade of green.
“I was just pointing out that—”
“People that point tend to lose their fingers,” Cade growls.
“Yeah. Well…”
“And I’m not sleeping with fucking Shay, you idiot. I don’t shit where I eat.”
Carnie looks at Shay, confusion all over his face. He looks so turned around that I almost feel sorry for him. I’ve got no idea what the hell lead to Shay telling this lie, but there’s no way I would have believed it for a second. I’m surprised that Carnie did either. Shay looks unapologetic as she swipes her plate up from the table and scrapes the remaining food from its surface into the trashcan at the end of the bar.
“Why did you tell me you’d fucked him?” Carnie demands.
“I have. Just not recently,” she says.
“Not in the last five years,” Cade corrects. Shay turns purple, but she nods her head.
“You wanted to know. You asked. You were being a little pissy bitch about guys I’d slept with before that you might know. When I told you about Cade, you didn’t stick around long enough to hear that it wasn’t a current thing. You made assumptions, because you’re a hard-headed jerk, and now here we are, with you sticking your dick into a walking Hepatitis factory.”
The blonde, who’s stood quiet for the most part up until now, sets down the food Carnie passed her. “I think I’ll just get going,” she fake whispers. She looks like her temper is rising but thankfully she’s managing to keep a hold of her tongue; Shay will rip it out her overly-botoxed mouth if she doesn’t.