“I’ll get to it.”
Elizabeth walked inside. And I was faced with the mirror image of myself on the concrete, jagged, shattered, and broken.
* * *
Elizabeth only came out once more during the workday for lunch, and she left with three of her colleagues, which gave me the benefit of not having to talk to her again.
Except that’s not a huge benefit. It was oddly fun shit-talking with her today. It’s fun pushing her buttons, seeing how far I can push her.
Tara and Elizabeth differed in that regard. I could trash-talk Tara and she’d play the same game. I had trash-talked Elizabeth, and she’d doubled down on her personality.
One had become boring and taken for granted by the end of everything. The other seemed refreshing to face off on someone willing to stand up to me, even while acting like a Catholic high school teacher.
When the day finally ended—and my God, I needed to bring something to entertain me the next time I did this, because working security sucked fucking balls—Elizabeth came out almost on the dot at five p.m. I had thrown one leg over the bike when she came up to me.
“You cleaned up the glass,” she said.
I shrugged.
“I make a mess, I clean it up,” I said. “I’m not your fucking chef, but I am your security guard. Gotta make sure the place is clear of danger.”
She smiled.She fucking smiled?
“Sorry about the yelling this morning. I wasn’t expecting you, and it caught me off-guard.”
“Don’t,” I said. “I have a job. I did my job. There’s nothing to apologize for.”
“I know,” she said. “I just felt bad about whatever was said about your father—”
I turned the engine to life. Elizabeth staggered back, her hands covering her ears. I backed out, squeezed the handlebars, and peeled out of the lot, heading back into Santa Maria.
Back to where my brothers were. Back to normalcy. Back to the real family I had.
I thought about heading home, but I remembered that Brock had asked me to come by SMAR more often, even if just to say hello. He wanted to turn the repair shop—and eventually, clubhouse—into the place the boys came to hang, not the house. Though I liked the simplicity of hanging out at home, I couldn’t have agreed more.
I had too many associations at the old house of my ex secretly angling for my best friend and her sister bitching about the sticky beer floor to ever see it as a place I could sleep easily at.
I pulled up to see Brock starting to lower the garage door, but he stopped just long enough to let me in. Mason and Garrett sat inside by an empty bay, sharing a drink. Brock had a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
“Business is good, huh?” I said.
“Business is always good with the Black Reapers,” Garrett said. “Now that we’re less Backstreet Boys and more NSync, we—”
“Never fucking compare us to NSync,” Brock said. “I will fucking cut your ass if you ever compare us to a boy band.”
“I was making a joke!”
“A shitty one at that,” Mason said. “If we’re anything now, we’re Five Finger Death Punch.”
“I…OK, I can see it,” Brock said. “Much better than fucking NSync. Jesus Christ, Garrett.”
“What! We’ll probably play some shitty music from them at club parties—”
“No, we won’t,” I said. “We’ll play some country, some heavy rock, and whatever the fuck the mood strikes us as.”
Garrett, recognizing defeat, went back to sipping his drink.
“You can still get your thirtieth STD of the month, even if your least favorite music is playing,” Brock said. “Steele, how was security?”
