Page 46 of Rebels & Rejects

The waitress returns, setting our food down on the table, and another moment of silence falls over us when she’s disappeared.

“So, how long have you worked at Strip Tease?” he asks. It would seem, he’s all about the personal questions today.

“Five years.”

His eyebrows lift. “That’s a long time. Do you enjoy it?”

I snort, giving him a quizzical look. “Do I enjoy giving lap dances to overweight, middle-aged men and assholes with bigger guns than they have dicks?”

He simply shrugs, and I can tell his question was a genuine one. He wasn’t trying to take a dig at what I do for a living, he was genuinely curious to know if I enjoyed what I did.

“I enjoy when I’m dancing on stage,” I admit. “It’s impossible to make anyone out with the bright stage lights, so it feels like I’m in my own little world. It makes it easy to get lost in the music.”

“That sounds nice. I rarely get a moment to myself anymore. It’s quite an adjustment. In prison, I had hours every day where I wouldn’t see or talk to another person, and now I’m lucky if I can get two minutes to piss in private.”

My eyebrows climb up my forehead at his easy admission that he was in prison, and I have to bite my tongue to hold back the burning questions.I am not getting personally involved,I remind myself.

I force back the questions threatening to spill past my lips, biting off a considerable chunk of my panini and munching on it for as long as I can. I feel Oliver’s eyes on me, though; I can feel his puzzling stare as he tries to figure me out.

“You’re good at it,” he says after a long moment of silence. “Dancing.”

I make decent tips, and the hoots and hollers I receive when I’m on stage certainly imply the customers are enjoying the show I’m putting on for them. Still, no one has ever said it quite like that—as if it’s about the actual movements, and not just the shaking of my tits and circling of my hips. The strange compliment makes me blush, and I duck my head, mumbling a weak thanks as I lift my panini to my mouth, unsure how to respond to that sentiment.

Oliver doesn’t try to engage me in conversation again, and we end up eating the rest of our meal in silence. Surprisingly, it doesn’t feel awkward. It’s actually kinda nice. Something I can see myself doing on a regular basis. I refuse to let myself ruminate on that for too long, so I steer my focus instead on the mechanical process of chewing and swallowing until my plate is cleared.

When I look up, there’s a playful smirk on Oliver’s face. He’s holding one half of his panini in his hands, halfway to his mouth as though he was about to take a bite but got distracted. “Hungry?” he jokes with a chuckle.

I glimpse at his plate, which still has the other half of his panini to my own one, which looks like it’s been licked clean, and let out my own small laugh.

“Maybe a little,” I confess, unwilling to admit nerves and an uncanny urge to actually open up and talk to him had me practically wolfing down the food.

He finishes off the half of the panini in his hand before asking, “So did you grow up in Black Creek?”

“Yeah, I did,” I answer, starting to feel uncomfortable about all the one-way questions. “Did, uh, you?”

A small smile graces his lips like he knows what it cost me to ask that question. “Yeah, I did. Cain and I grew up on the same street.”

A pained expression crosses his features but it disappears so quickly, I have to wonder if I imagined it.

“So you’ve known him your whole life?”

“More or less.” He doesn’t expand further than that, and I don’t pry.

“And now you’re a member of the Rejects.”

I don’t mean for the words to sound disdainful, but they do all the same. It’s just difficult for me to view any of the Black Creek gangs in anything other than a negative light.

Oliver’s eyes jump back and forth between mine for a moment, as if he’s trying to discern my thoughts before he speaks up. “Is it just the Rejects you have an issue with or all gang members?”

“Don’t go thinking you're special. I truly hate all of you equally.”

My whole life, gangs have laid down the law and forced us to comply with their whims. My mom paid so much of her earnings to the gang that ran the territory we lived in, that she barely had enough left to clothe and feed us. They insisted she payrenton the street corner she stood on, plus a nominal fee for protection, and I’m sure there were other bullshit charges thrown in there. Not to mention the way they abused her and got her hooked on drugs so she’d be under their control. The final straw was when one of them—her fuckingboyfriend,if you can even call him that—beat the shit out of her and murdered her in front of Luc, leaving her body for me to find when I got home.

I saw the same shit day in and day out on the street. Gang members throwing their weight around, using their position, their size, their weapons to demand whatever the fuck they wanted. They’d hang around outside shelters and try to lure desperate people into gang life by offering them drugs and money. Flirting with women and promising them safety and security, but those same women would be right back in the shelter a month or two later, covered in bruises. So, yeah, it’s safe to say I have a fucking reason to hate gang members.

“What have they ever done for me or the people of Black Creek? All they are interested in is themselves. So long as they have drugs, alcohol, territory and can wave their big ass guns in people’s faces, none of them give a shit about the problems they cause for the rest of us.”

Oliver just sits and watches as I get myself riled up. I can feel the color in my cheeks as my anger takes over, and I have to take a deep, calming breath to rein myself in. I don’t need to be spilling my guts to Oliver. What the hell does he know or care about it, he’s one of those fucking gang members.

---