“Is that solely because of his lifestyle?”
“For the most part. He’s not a bad man but he does bad things. A lot of them. It’s hard for me to be okay with some of the things the club does. Especially how they treat women.”
“I thought they were respectful?”
“I guess it depends on your definition. Do they take care of the sex workers that work for them? Absolutely. But they do that because they take ten percent of whatever the girls make. Granted, that’s a hell of a lot less than a street pimp would take, but it’s still not cool. I don’t know the ins and outs anymore, butthey used to run guns with the Russian mob. They sold drugs for a while, although I’m pretty sure my mom pushed them away from that.”
“It’s not the lifestyle I would choose,” he says, “but I think clubs like your dad’s come together because they don’t fit in anywhere else.”
“They’re outlaws,” I say dryly. “And while they use that word with pride, I think it’s a copout. It’s an illusion they create to make breaking the law cool.”
“I guess I don’t know how it works,” he says.
“My father has only done two good things in his life,” I say with a shrug. “Marry my mom after he knocked her up and let me get out when I left for college.”
“You make it sound like you were a prisoner.”
“I was.”
Chapter Fifteen
Landon
She’s mad.
It’s not just the fact that she stayed in the bedroom all day, but her rigid posture and the somewhat stilted conversation tells me I fucked up. I just don’t know what I was supposed to do. I have a fair amount of experience with women, but never one who was raped a week ago. And I’m pretty sure there’s no guidebook for something like this.
I should say something, clear the air, but how do I do that without making it worse?
Yes, I’d really like to take you to bed but I’m afraid it might bring on more nightmares or bad memories?
The last thing I want to do is evoke some kind of flashback. That would be a different kind of nightmare.
At least we’re talking now, even if it’s not like the easygoing conversations we’ve had in the past. Where we opened up, talked about the past and the future, and connected on a level I rarely allow with the women I sleep with.
Maybe it’sbecauseyou’re not sleeping with her.
The devil on my shoulder is an asshole but Allora has just given me an opening into a more serious conversation with what she said.
“How were you a prisoner?” I ask curiously.
She laughs but it’s without mirth. “The club takes protection seriously, and on one hand they’re complete womanizing asshats, on the other—they protect what’s theirs fiercely. To the point of suffocation sometimes. It wasn’t too bad when I was little but once I hit puberty? My boobs popped. Guys in general started looking at me. Dad waswayyyyover the top. My mom had to intervene almost daily so I could have somewhat of a normal life.”
“Normal how?”
“Like, he didn’t want me to stay after school to run cross country. My mom talked him into it, but one of the guys from the club would park on the street when we ran our daily two miles.”
“But he let you run,” I say, trying to understand what part of this is bad. “I might be a little worried about my young teen running on city streets unsupervised.”
She rolls her eyes. “I was fourteen. We ran in a group of, like, ten. The high school is in a nice, suburban area. No major intersections, no danger beyond the normal freak accident or something like that. It was annoying as fuck.”
“I guess as a teenager it would be, but now that you’re an adult, you don’t see it differently?”
“No. Every other kid did it with no issue. It was only me who had to have a freakin’ babysitter.”
“Bad things happen, and I imagine you worry about all of them once you become a parent.”
She shrugs. “You have to let children grow up and find their own way. How else do we learn to be independent? I’m willing to bet no one babysat Courtney when she was fourteen.”
