Page 17 of A Love So Hard

“Well, yeah, it was until I had to do all that running around today in order to get ready for a last minute date. You know, proper southern gentlemen give plenty of notice to a lady that they’re going to court them,” I explained to which he burst out in a raucous laughter that I couldn’t even be mad at, because it transformed his face into something far more beautiful than it normally was.

“I never said I was a southern gentleman, darlin’. I said I was biker with manners. That means I’ll wine and dine you in public, but…” He stopped himself short and shook his head. “Well, you’ll find out the rest soon enough.”

An anticipatory zing travelled through my body causing me to shiver. The cocky smirk on Double-D – CJ’s – face let me know he took notice. “Yeah,” he said as we finally made it into the restaurant’s door. “I think you’ll find you don’t want a gentleman after all.”

Our dinner date went better than expected, and I finally learned a few more things about CJ that I had been curious about for some time. “What exactly do you do for money? I know being in a motorcycle club isn’t exactly a job description.”

He laughed. “Well, it does feel like a job some days. You know the club has various businesses of its own, right?”

I just shrugged my shoulders because I honestly had no clue what the club was into.

“Okay, well, Aces Pawn in Summerville and North Charleston belong to the club. We have three strip clubs one in Charleston, one on the north side, and then another up in Santee.”

I sipped on my sweet tea trying not to think about whether or not I liked the idea of the club having those businesses, or more to the point, my man possibly frequenting strip clubs. I sighed inwardly, and covered it with another sip from my straw. I didn’t miss the look he gave me that said I wasn’t fooling anyone. “Why all the way up in Santee? Isn’t that branching out kind of far?”

“Nah, we have a couple guys that actually live up there with their families so they take on most of the duties of running the place.”

“So they drive all the way here for club stuff though?”

“Babe, it’s an hour and one more excuse to ride. Trust me they don’t mind at all.”

“I guess not.” I moved out of the way as our entrees were served and when our waiter walked away I asked what I really wanted to know. “You work at one of those places?”

CJ stopped with a piece of his steak half way to his mouth and set the fork down in order to give me his full attention. “I work for all of those places, Luce.” He blushed a little then and I wasn’t sure if the rest of what he was going to say would make me want to run out of the restaurant and call a cab to get home or not. “I do the books and the ordering for everyone.”

“You do the books? What does that mean exactly?”

“We had issues with management in a couple places last year skimming money or over ordering and costing the club. When it became a noticeable problem the club talked about hiring an accountant, but that was just one more outside person we’d have to trust with our club businesses, and that obviously wasn’t working out for us. I’m great with numbers, and have no problem sniffing out patterns like the ones the idiots were leaving behind when they thought they could skim money off the top of the club’s take each night.” He shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly. “I figured it out. Those people no longer work for us, and now I have a different job to do than when I first started with the club.”

“What did you do when you first started?”

“A little bit of everything. The prospects and even the younger club guys tend to float through the odd jobs that the club has to offer until they find their place in the world. Not everyone works for a club business on the regular. Everyone has to put in time, but we have guys who have day jobs that have nothing to do with the club.”

“So you’re like an accountant?”

He laughed then. “Yeah, without all the fancy degrees and bullshit,” he admitted.

“I think degrees can be overrated. Not everyone needs to go to school to understand how things work. School is for the people who don’t get it and need extra help to learn it.”

He grinned widely at me then. “I like that. Damn shame the rest of the country can’t see it like that, but it’s nice to know someone does.”

“My dad had a natural affinity for how things worked. He never went to school to be a mechanic. He just knew things and learned the rest through working on it. That’s how he taught me too. I’m not saying my degree isn’t necessary, because people should definitely have more knowledge than the average person has about the medical field and the human body when that is there chosen profession, but some things just aren’t like that.”

“So what do you plan on doing with your life, Lucy?”

“I’m looking for a nursing position, probably working with hospice for now, and then I’ll figure out what I really want to do once I have my own money and can move out of my parents’ house.”

“Why hospice?”

“Why not? Someone has to do it. I was there for my grandma, but I saw so many of her friends going through the end of their lives with no one around.” I smiled then , which may have seemed odd, but it was like sitting down to dinner with CJ had set my thoughts free on what I wanted to do. Strange as it was that this was the place I finally realized it, that’s how it happened. I’d been afraid of the people who were dying around me before, but it just now hit me that while it hurt to lose them, it felt so much better that I could give them comfort before they went.

“It’s difficult when you get to that point in your life and most of your friends have a hard time getting around, or won’t come see you because they’re afraid of saying goodbye. It was sad to watch. I’d go sit with some of them when my grandma asked me to. She knew which ones would be alone until the bitter end, and always told me no one should have to go alone.”

“That’s very admirable.”

“No, it’s just being a decent human, I think.”

We quietly ate our dinner after that, and I worried that the seriousness of what I planned to do as a job for a while had killed any good vibes we had going into the date. After CJ paid and we got back outside he grinned over at me.

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