“She couldn’t be trusted.”
“Yes, damn right she couldn’t fucking be trusted!” I roared.
I walked over to him. I glared around at everyone else, who got the hint and hurried to clean up the mess I’d left.
“You were right about her,” I said.
Sonny understood.
“She could never be Mom.”
“No, she could not,” I said, both of us speaking in hushed tones now. “And don’t ever mention your mother’s name in the same breath as that fucking bitch ever again. Understood?”
Sonny nodded. I stewed. I almost wished there was a King’s Men member here so I could have a punching bag to take my anger out on. Instead, I grabbed Sonny’s beer from him and threw it against the wall. It felt a little cathartic, but I was still fucking furious.
“Last one,” I grumbled. “Get it cleaned up. I’ll be in church if anyone fucking needs me.”
Which they damn well had better fucking not.
I violated one of our club rules and took my phone into church, but fucking forgive me if the God of that church wasn’t allowed to violate his own rules. I slammed the door shut, placed my phone angrily on the counter, and fucking stewed.
I mean, how fucking stupid could I be? To believe a fuckingjournalistwould tell the truth?
And yet, when I thought about those moments out with her, those moments sneaking over to her place or vice versa…it had felt so real, so genuine. There had to be something there, right?
I mean, fuck me if I was dumber than I thought I was, but surely, there was something else, right?
No, you’re just a fucking fool. You miss Tamara, so you tried to replace her with Hailey. You want a woman in your life, but you go for the ones that can play you the most. You fucking fool. You fucking idiot.
I raised my fist to punch the wall in front of me but ended up simply “acting out” the punch. I made a promise to the rest of the club that while we could fuck around in the clubhouse and do all sorts of shit, church was the one place we treated with some goddamn respect. It was where we made the hardest, most consequential, and most important decisions as a club. People could drink and smoke in here, but only in the social sense, not in the get blitzed sense.
So I prevented myself from destroying my credibility.
Unlike fucking Hailey Cook.
God, what a fucking good thing it had been that I hadn’t told her my real name. That could have been a fucking disaster in the making.
I sat down at the table in the president’s chair and grabbed my phone. Part of me wanted to pull up her name, call her, and rip into her like no one ever had. Part of me knew that the instant I heard her voice, I’d lose my fucking mind and the effect would be gone, so I just needed to text her. Part of me just wanted to forget she ever existed and move forward; although this one was particularly aggravating, for the most part, bad press was like someone trying to flick paint at us.
Annoying as fuck, but hardly consequential to our well-being and standing.
I shook my head. I unlocked my phone to at least give myself the option to do something, only then seeing that, huh, the bitch had had the nerve to text me. I swore, if she said she was giving me the chance to respond to the piece…
I opened her text. It caught me by surprise.
“Not how I shot it. Station edited it to do this. I’m so sorry.”
I wanted so badly to believe her. I really did. If there was anyone I would have believed would have gotten fucked by an overzealous station, it was Hailey. I’d never fucked a reporter, after all; hell, I’d never gotten as close to anyone since Tamara had died.
But…
No. I wasn’t going to get fucking duped again. I’d need something a lot more than the word of a journalist right now—which carried as much weight as a fucking pebble of sand. I’d need to see some hard fucking evidence that the station had changed what Hailey had done.
And I just didn’t know how the fuck that existed.
“You fucking lied to me, you bitch,” I wrote. I hit send. I was going to be sending a lot of these. “You fucking bitch. Said you were going to give a balanced piece. Now you’re hiding behind some dude? Figures.”
I shook my head. These texts weren’t serving as cathartic release as much as they were just pissing me off even more. What a fucking crock of shit.
