Itdidmake sense. If Tammy trusted Heather to babysit her son, Emory, then surely Dominic would be okay for a couple hours, right? I wasn’t sure why I was so reluctant.
Tammy placed a hand on my shoulder and leveled me with a serious stare. “You are not irresponsible if you go out tonight.”
I felt myself relax at her words. I could tell she was sincere, and somehow she hit the nail on the head. I was feeling like a reckless, irresponsible mom, but that wasn’t fair. Dominic was my entire world. I would do anything for him. All that didn’t get erased just because I wanted to have a girls night. I’d never gone to a bar with friends before. Jeff and I had married before I was even old enough to legally drink. By the time I turned twenty-one, he was completely running my life. I didn’t have any friends.
“Okay,” I nodded, “but only if Heather is okay with watching him too.”
Tammy called Heather to confirm, while I packed away my shower things. Nerves and anticipation battling for dominance in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t wait to see how this aspect of my life turned out.
* * *
“CanI bring my walking dinosaur toy? And my nerf guns? And my Gameboy?”
Dominic was practically bouncing with excitement as he loaded up his backpack with as many toys as he could fit. He was eager to meet a new friend, even if he was a couple of years younger than Dominic. I was starting to realize just how important interaction was for a child and how much of that Dominic had missed out on.
“Not the Gameboy. That’s really a one-person gaming system, and I don’t want you guys fighting over it.”
“Okay,” he complied easily, taking the Gameboy out of the bag. The thing was so old, and I only had one Mario game for it, that I thought, I should look into getting him a more recent gaming system. Maybe one with two players. I hadn’t done it in the past because I didn’t want him to spend all his time staring at a television screen, but he was getting older now, and I thought he could handle it now.
I left him in his bedroom, stuffing that backpack, and went into my room. It was sparsely furnished, with just a queen bed and a chest of drawers that I’d gotten cheap at a second-hand store because it was pretty badly scuffed up. Going to my closet, I looked through the clothing there, trying to find something that would be fitting to wear to a bar, since Tammy had told me that we were going to The Blue Dog. Apparently, all the bikers that were in the Outlaw Souls motorcycle club hung out there. That explained why I’d seen Swole and Trainer going over there just days ago.
Flicking through the hangers of clothing, I finally stopped when I came to dress that I’d never worn. It still had the tags on it, even though it was bought two years ago. I wasn’t sure why I even purchased the thing. It was a black dress that was short and hugged my curves. Jeff would never have let me go out in public dressed in that. He’d tell me that it would make him look bad if I dressed like a whore and that no one was allowed to see me except him.
Fuck. Him.
Grabbing the dress, and I pulled it out, looking it over. No frills or accents, just soft black fabric. I closed my bedroom door before stripping down and pulling it over my head. The hem of the dress came down to my mid-thigh, exposing much more leg than I was used to. I looked myself over in my full-length mirror with a critical eye, but then Dominic pushed open the bedroom door and walked in.
“Wow, mom, you look pretty.”
His blunt honestly melted my heart. “You think so?”
“Yeah, but I like your red hair more.”
So did I, but the dark brown was growing on me. I would have to keep the roots touched up so that no one knew it was dyed at all.
Tousling my hair so that it fell in waves around my head, I put on minimal makeup and slipped into some low-heeled shoes. No need to break my neck with a towering heel.
Grabbing my purse, I glanced inside at the envelope that held that cash I’d brought with me when I left Jeff. It was thinner than I would have thought possible after such a short period of time, but at least I had a job. I wouldn’t get my first paycheck until next week, so this cash had to last until then.
“Let’s go, Bud,” I called out to Dominic. He came hurrying into the room, his backpack full to bursting. “You know you’re only going to be there for a couple of hours, right?”
“Mom, you don’t understand.”
Well, he had me there.
Leaving the house, I paused to lock the front door. When I turned back around, Talia’s -boyfriend? baby-daddy? -whatever he was, he was walking up the steps on their half of the porch. He stared straight at my breasts, and I suppressed a shiver of disgust at the unmistakable lust in his expression. This guy was such a creep.
Looking away, I acted like he wasn’t there at all. Dominic was waiting for me at the car, so we climbed in and took off for the babysitter’s place. I didn’t look back at the duplex, but the hairs standing up on the back of my neck told me that he was watching me until we finally turned a corner and were out of sight.
When I dropped Dominic off at Heather’s home, which was a ground-floor apartment, he jumped right into playing with Swole’s little boy, just giving me a quick goodbye hug. He was growing up so fast.
I traveled the now familiar path toward work, but instead of parking in the lot of the fitness center, I continued further down the street and turned into The Blue Dog’s parking lot. It was packed. Motorcycles took up the spaces closest to the building, and there must have been twenty, maybe thirty of them. A sea of shiny chrome exhausts and black leather seats being watched over by a thin man with a bandana tied around his head. Much of the rest of the spaces in the lot were taken up by cars, and I added my own to their number.
I could hear loud music playing as I got closer to the building, and when I pulled the door open, my senses were overwhelmed by the mass of people and the volume of their conversations combined with the music. I slipped inside, scanned the crowd for Tammy or Swole. Finally, I caught sight of my muscular boss and relaxed. She was sitting at a square table halfway across the room, throwing back a shot of something amber-colored.
As I started to make my way to her, my eye drifted toward the bar, clashing with Trainer’s burning gaze. I watched as he deliberately looked over every inch of my body, his stare so intense that it almost felt like a physical caress. Every part of my body seemed to tingle, as his eyes passed over it, I was so aware of him.
This didn’t feel like the unwanted leering of my neighbor. No, this was raw and mutual. Trainer’s jacket was thrown over the back of his stool, and the black t-shirt he wore stretched over his wide chest, doing nothing to conceal the hard muscles beneath. I could see that he had a full sleeve tattoo on his left arm and had the urge to examine it closer, running my fingers over the ink. Although, if I were close enough to touch him, I couldn’t see myself stopping at his arm…
