He arches a brow.“News to the boys who saw you carry her down the hall like you paid for that pussy.”
“Go polish your piece,” I tell him.“I’m busy.”
“Young thing like that, you probably still pickin’ baked beans out of your teeth.”
“What the hell are you talkin’ about, man?”
“Bushes.Baked beans.Young tail don’t shave anymore.Girl down at the candy shop has hairy pits and all.”
“I didn’t notice.It was dark,” I lie.Don’t tell him Carol’s bush is shaved into a damn Christmas tree.“You hittin’ that?”I ask about Holly Sugar.Her sister Ivy works with Carol at Sno-Globes.
They call her Sugar Plum.Sugar’s no stranger to the Executioner’s clubhouse.Holly, on the other hand, ain’t the kind to mix with outlaws.
Frost doesn’t say a word.Tellin’.
“You know that girl wants to be mayor.”
He laughs and leaves.
They’ll keep talking.Brothers always do.We survive by curiosity and cruelty in equal parts.The “robbery girl” is already a story, sugar-glazed or ugly depending on who’s telling it.I shut off the heater and listen to the motor’s slow heart.Carol’s name moves through my head like a prayer I don’t deserve to say.
Heavy steps in the hall.Not Frost.This weight is familiar in the way a reoccurring nightmare is, predictable, stale, mean.
Trina appears in the doorway wrapped in a black parka with a fur collar, lipstick too red for morning, rage already lit behind her eyes.
“We’re closed.”I don’t ask how she got past the gate.She still knows where the bone’s buried in the fence.
“You didn’t come home,” she says, like the words can make me.
I go back to the bike.“Storm closed the roads.”
“Storm didn’t close your phone.”
“Didn’t have anything to say.”
“That’s new.”She steps in, snow crackling off her boots, shakes her head slow.“What’s her name?”
I tighten a bolt that doesn’t need it.“Don’t start.”
Trina’s laugh is a blade.“I can smell it, Jack.Pussy.Did you even shower?”
I did.
“You were with someone.”
“You mean one of the whores called you, gossipin’.What I was with was trouble,” I say, which is the closest thing to truth I can live with.“Bar got hit.I stepped in.”
Her mouth flattens.She knows the shape of my lies.We built them together once.“Sure.You stepped in.At Sno-Globes?Titty bar.And then you stepped into some chick.With your dick.”
I set the wrench down before it jumps.“You wanna fight or you wanna leave?”
“Both,” she says, and peels off her gloves.Gold rings wink under the fluorescents, the gifts I bought her back when we mistook shiny for sorry.“You think I don’t keep count?All the little ways you’re gone even when you’re home?”
“I’ve been gone a long time,” I say.“You left first.”
That lands.I see it hit, then she shakes it off, mean and light.“I went where I was wanted.You don’t want me.”
“So, you admit you’re a whore.I’ll live where my brothers are.”
