Page 28 of Bullet
“Fun?” Darrien asked. “Are you having fun?”
The thick judgment in his voice knocked any cheer straight out of me. Was I having fun? With the man who killed my father? What was I thinking? “No…”
Darrien wheeled his way over to the kitchen counter and picked up a box that already had emotions rising in my throat. He set it in his lap and opened it briefly to pull out an article and handed it over to me. I’d read it half a dozen times or more, but that never stopped it from hurting as I looked down at it. It was my father’s obituary, the one that had been published in the wake of the accident that had killed him.
“Road rage ended a good man’s life,”was written in bolded letters at the beginning of the obituary. The thing was, I’d been on Harry’s bike a lot in the past few days and he was an even more patient driver than I was. It almost would havehelpedto see Harry’s road rage act out while we were together, but he didn’t often put himself in road rage situations.
Of course, that could be because the last time he let his emotions get the best of him, my father died.
“Our car flipped over nine times,” Darrien said. “Your father was dead before they even pulled us out of the car. He was talking about you right before we got hit. How proud he was of you and how he knew you were going to do big things with your life. Poor guy didn’t even get to be here to see you succeed. He raised you alone after your mother left and this is how you’re repaying him? By sleeping with the enemy?”
“The point is to sleep with the enemy,” I said back, handing the article back to him.
Darrien returned the obituary to the box and instead pulled out a stack of white papers and waved them in my direction. “These are all of my medical bills that arestillunpaid. I can’t bring myself to pull from your father’s settlement and I used mine to send you to school. After all of our sacrifices, are you still going to turn your back on us?”
“No.” Tears slid down my face. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
He returned the papers to the box and set it off to the side, then he rolled his chair up to me and took my hands in his. “I don’t mean to make you cry, Celia, but I had to remind you of what’s at stake here. You aren’t just doing this for me, you’re doing it for our entire family that was ruined that day. We’re going to be broken forever. You have to remain focused.”
“You’re right,” I admitted. “I was losing myself. I’m sorry.”
“I want you to be happy. Of course I don’t want you to be miserable, but the sooner we destroy him, the sooner we can get on to bigger and better things,” Darrien said. “We’re so close.”
“I didn’t completely forget,” I said. “I convinced him to take a higher position at the club.”
Darrien’s head ticked uncomfortably to the side. “They offered him a higher position?”
“Vice President.”
“What happened to Tess?” he asked.
I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Who?”
There were a few minutes of silence between Darrien and me and then he shook his head and cleared his throat. “Nothing. So, they offered him that position? Things are going well for him.”
“The stakes are higher,” I replied. “Now when we ruin him, we can get him kicked out of the club for good. I just have to wait for a moment to strike. We’re getting closer. Eventually, he’ll trust me enough to let his guard down and then I’ll make my move. We just have to be patient.”
Darrien started nodding with a smile rising to his face. “There’s my smart girl. Now you’re thinking.”
“He wasn’t going to take the position, but I convinced him to take it.” I looked over at the picture of me and my dad that hung on the fridge. “The higher he is, the harder he’ll fall, right?”
“That’s right, Celia.” His hands clasped around mine and squeezed even harder. “I know that it feels terrible, but he deserves it for everything he cost us. Can you do this?”
“I can,” I said. “I will. For my dad. I’m going to make Harry pay for what he did. Guaranteed.”
Chapter Ten
Bullet
Waking up without Celia in my bed was much less enjoyable than waking up with her in it. She was a drug I could easily get addicted to if I wasn’t careful. For the fact that Istillfully expected her to ghost me again, we’d spoken on the phone or texted every single day since our first rekindled date, sometimes both. She did simple things like ask about the cats, and I made sure she didn’t get intoomuch trouble at work for calling in sick because of me. We met up for coffee before work a couple of times and it truly felt like we were actually dating.
It was nice.
It was only now that Celia and I were finally behaving as if we were actually trying to make something out of our relationship that I realized I’d never really been in one before. I’d been with women and I’d even dated someone for an extended period of time, but it was always just the baseline, first stage stuff. The light dates a few times a month, sex on occasion, but I’d never even dated someone that I cared to keep in regular contact with. I wasn’t inhuman, and there were times where I would sit on the couch alone and wonder what it might be like to have someone else there, but thanks to my trust issues, getting to that point with a woman always seemed like more trouble than it was worth. With Celia in my life, I was suddenly thinking about it more, dreaming about it even.
Avery sputtered out a laugh so loud in my ears that I nearly punched him in the face. “Look at our little Bullet. You’re glowing or something.”
Seneca was sitting next to him at the table we were all seated around at Hoppa’s Taphouse and laughed down into her glass of water at him. It was still early afternoon, and the members and prospects were just hanging out on Thursday before the bar crowd started showing up.
