Page 12 of A Twist of Fate

“Well, I did. What’s going on? Why aren’t you at work today?”

I sighed in response to those questions. “I walked out.”

“You quit?”

“No, I just couldn’t deal with Kane being Kane. We had an argument, and I walked out instead of dealing with it. Not very mature of me, but my sanity will be safe for another day.”

Toby chuckled on the other end before getting serious again. “Was it about me?”

“Yes. No. Not really. It was about your sister more than anything.”

Toby grunted into the phone. “Poor sap’s in love with her, isn’t he?”

“He thinks he is,” I managed to get out. “He’s also smart enough to know she already belongs to someone else. That doesn’t stop him from making her feelings a priority over everyone else’s.”

“And he still thinks that keeping our relationship a secret will hurt my sister?”

“Yep,” I managed to get out as I slunk down into my too-hot car seat. Damn the leather seats in this sweltering, southern sun.

“Well, then he’s definitely not in love with the Ever I’ve always known, because I think he’s completely wrong. She will understand why we did it this way, I promise.”

“I think you’re right. That doesn’t stop him from attacking me with the way he thinks she’ll feel though.”

“Do I need to come over there and kick his ass?”

“Nah! He’d like that too much. It would mean that we’d have to admit why you were kicking his ass and it would get back to Ever.”

Once again, I had my man chuckling, and the butterflies in my belly fluttered as a result. “Come pick me up from the clubhouse. We can spend the day together and go see a movie or something.”

“That sounds amazing. I haven’t been to an actual theater in so long,” I admitted.

The clubhouse wasn’t some place I was used to going. Normally, Toby would meet me somewhere since our relationship was semi-secretive. I’ll admit, I felt a little jolt of excitement at the prospect of being invited to pick him up at the clubhouse. Maybe he was ready to take that next step, and didn’t mind his club brothers knowing about us. That feeling turned out to be fleeting as I pulled into the clubhouse. The parking lot looked like a ghost town. There were two motorcycles parked in the lot. An older, beat up, green Volkswagen Jetta sat near the edge of the lot by the road, but other than that, all was quiet. “No wonder,” I huffed to myself just as Toby came sauntering out of the building. His wide grin that reached excited eyes had my emotions tipping back toward excited from disappointed again.

He opened my car door, hopped in, and leaned over immediately. “Hey baby!” He leaned over and took my face in hand, turning me further toward him before his lips landed on mine and took their fill. When he pulled away, I was slightly breathless and just like that, the pressures of keeping what we had secret melted away into the background.

“It’s quiet here,” I commented as I threw the car into reverse.

“Yeah, just Crow’s always angry ass and one or two of the whores are here.”

My nose scrunched up in distaste inadvertently at the mention of the whores who hung around the place. I couldn’t say it didn’t bother me to know he had available pussy at his beck and call here, especially since he lived at the clubhouse.

“Hey now,” he called out while smoothing a finger down my nose to ease the tension he could see there. “You know that’s not my scene. Even if it ever was, I have you, and those women can’t hold a candle to what you have.”

“If it ever was?” I ask, noticing a woman standing near a tree over by the picknick tables, watching us with interest. “Was it?”

“Was what?”

“Were they ever your thing? The whores,” I clarified.

He sighed. “Is it going to ruin our day to tell you about my past?”

“No,” I told him honestly. “I have a past too.”

“I’ll tell you right now, hearing about your past will abso-fuckin-lutely ruin my day, so we aren’t going there.” He took in my stiff shoulders and sighed. “Used to be that was all J-Bird and I talked about. How we were going to nail all the whores all the time when we finally patched in.”

I laughed. “Imagine that. Two horny teenage boys consumed with the harem of free pussy at their fingertips.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what we thought too until we started getting older and were allowed to hang around the clubhouse more. The thing about that free pussy is that they are there for anyone to use at any time. J-Bird and I hadn’t thought about the fact that the men we knew as our uncles growing up would also be using those same women. Some of those men were married. We knew their women, they were our aunts. You know? Family. It’s a kick in the ass to see that shit go down and ruin the level of respect you might have once had for someone. It also tainted what we once thought of as something amazing to be had. The women who come here to service the men,” he paused and ran his hands through his hair for a minute. “They stick around of their own free will, they choose to be there. It’s fine. They serve a purpose and they get what they need out of it, I guess. I’ve seen and heard stories of the ugly side of shit though. My dad and mom were split up for a while because of those whores lying. He didn’t get to see her pregnant with me, to see me born, or even be there for the first couple years of my life. Not that all of them are bad, but…”

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