I playfully—flirtatiously—shrugged at him.
“Depends on if I have enough content for the piece,” I said. “You actually had a wonderful answer about the club. Is it really like family for you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Especially since mine doesn’t exist anymore, aside from Sonny.”
“Off the record here. What happened?”
But Satan shook his head.
“Too fucking painful. Not telling you right now.”
But perhaps down the road…
“All you need to know with that is that what I said about the club is a hundred percent true. We have some hardass fuckers in here. People like to think that being a hardass fucker is awesome. Sure, somewhat. You get laid a lot and you don’t have to be PC and shit. But no one ever thinks about the darkness. You think we picked the names Satan and Spawn because it would make Aunt Ginny clutch her pearls and piss herself?”
Now I really wished this wasn’t off the record. But on the other hand, I was probably hearing more, on or off the record, than even some of his fellow club members.
“Every single person in that clubhouse, I would wager, has either been in a jail cell, had only one parent for the majority of their childhood, or got kicked out of at least one high school. Every fucking one.”
“And which one are you?”
“Oh, all three.”
“And how did you pull it together?”
Satan arched an eyebrow at me like I’d asked the dumbest question in the history of journalism.
“You’re the president of the club. You’re a small business owner. You’re not a total fuckup.”
“I…”
He sighed.
“I had a supportive wife who encouraged me to start my own shit. I was working in a shop and loved bikes but hated being under someone else’s heel. She suggested I start the damn thing, and so I did. I had no fucking idea that it would explode into this. So if you’re going to say I’m not a fuckup, I guess I appreciate it, but make damn sure you give the credit to her.”
“Is—”
“Dead. And I’ve already said far fucking more than I ever intended to.”
I bit my lip and nodded. I’d already heard far more than I ever thought I would.
“And so help you if any of that makes it into—”
“No, no, no, no,” I said, waving my hands quickly. “As soon as that camera turned off in there, we were just us hanging out. You’ll know if we’re on the record because I’ll say something like, ‘I’m Hailey Cook with WPTV.’ I won’t just snag something you say out of thin air and fuck you over with it.”
Satan nodded. That seemed good enough for him.
A long silence passed over us as I just sipped my drink and he looked down at his, deep in thought. It wasn’t said often, but one of the most underrated skills in journalism was knowing when to shut the hell up. Most of the time, it was because subjects couldn’t handle silence and would say what you really wanted them to.
But here, I just needed to be quiet to respect Satan’s space. I was beginning to suspect I wasn’t the only one he’d confessed and admitted those things to. He had probably just done so to himself for the first time in a while.
“Well, this has been a hell of a conversation,” Satan finally said after about…Lord knew how long, long enough that I checked my text messages while I waited for him to speak. “I say let’s go somewhere new. Someplace more…you know what, someplace more your scene.”
I looked around. This wasn’t the fanciest bar I’d ever been to, but the cowboy theme actually made it kind of fun. But Satan offering to take me somewhere upscale…
I could see what he was angling for. And frankly, after the way he was opening up, I was more inclined to say, “Why not?” It had been a while.
Plus, the alcohol was kicking in a bit.
