Affliction: An Age Gap, Insta-Love Romance

Chapter 16

For the firsttime since she’d started working there four years ago, Cilla called in sick to work yesterday. And today, she was avoiding her own home like it was a haunted house. Today, she was avoiding pretty much anyone and anything that would remind her about how absolutely humiliating Friday night was. Which meant she’d been dodging Stephie’s calls, ignoring her texts, and generally just being an elusive, pity-party goer.

After a night of crying herself to sleep, she’d spent all day yesterday holed up in her house, watching reruns of Homicide Hunter on Discovery ID, eating her weight in Flaming Hot Cheetos, and waiting for the inevitable pounding on the door.

But the pounding never came.

Patriot never came.

And the longer she’d sat there, waiting for him, for him to come, apologize, and tell her that Friday night was all a misunderstanding, the more she realized that maybe that ugly voice in her head was right. She was just a distraction for him, a game, and that the thing he was supposedly doing with Jaime wasn’t club business at all, but rather personal business. The kind that lead to him claiming her as his ol’ lady, and leaving Cilla to wonder why mean bitches always won.

Just barely missing running into the back of a man hauling a crate of oranges, Cilla took a moment to breathe before she bumbled into someone else. She was surrounded by the Sunday morning crowd at the flea market that took place every weekend at the Circle Drive-In. During the week, the small, local drive-in theater showed blockbuster movies on the big outdoor screens on their massive lot. During the weekends, though, that lot was converted to aisles of booths boasting local produce, collectables like Funko Pops and knives, trashy treasures, Airsoft guns, handmade gifts items like quilts, and basically anything that could be sold without a liquor license.

After her last two days, Cilla just wanted to disappear, but she also wanted to get outside, get a little sun, and maybe pick through the booths for treasures she could use to make her small home a little more colorful. Having been raised in little more than a double wide, Cilla was acutely aware that she was a thrift market kind of girl, but she sort of loved digging for the proverbial gold at flea markets, thrift stores, and garage and yard sales. And let’s not forget the all-in-one neighborhood rummage sale. Today, she had energy to burn and a few twenties looking for a new home in the pocket of a flea market vendor. So, she meandered up and down the aisles, her mind on Patriot, his betrayal, the pain of what happened, and the frustration at not knowing where to go from there.

Without thinking about it, she pulled her cell from her jeans pocket and checked it, once again, for what seemed like the fortieth time that morning.

Nothing.

Not a single text or call from Patriot. In two days.

Stephie had texted yesterday, asking if she was okay after the smackdown from Jaime and the Slutketeers the night before, but Cilla only replied that she was fine. When Stephie ranted about Jaime, Sasha, Tasha, and Marci and how they were skank bitches that only an asshole like Tornado—Sasha’s boyfriend—could love, Cilla only replied that she wanted to keep out of it. When Stephie texted and threatened to come over and spend the night commiserating about their terrible Girl’s Night and wanting a do over, Cilla had put her foot down, telling her friend that she just wanted to veg out in her sweats, and be alone for the weekend. With the promise of chocolatey baked goods the following week, Stephie had backed down…and Cilla had grown increasingly disgusted with herself. She hated lying to her friend, but what could she really tell her? “I feel like the biggest fool because the man I loved treated me like shit….” Or…what about, “I can never show my face around the club because no one there actually wants me around….” Or, even better, “Patriot is a lying asshole, and I never want to see him again!” None of those things would get past her bestie without all the questions from an out-of-the-loop Stephie. Since Patriot had basically demanded her silence about their “relationship”, Cilla hadn’t told anyone, not even her best friend. So not only did she feel like the biggest bitch because she lied to her friend and kept things from her, but also because she was such a pathetic loser, she’d actually believed Patriot when he told her she meant something to him.

Maybe I’ll just tell Stephie.It wasn’t like Stephie would tell anyone—which was Patriot’s fear—that word would get back to someone at the club and his “club business” would be compromised. But Stephie wasn’t a blabber mouth…and it appeared that her man, Horde, was already in the know, if his not-so-subtle glares at Patriot that night at the bar were any indication. She really, really wanted to tell Stephie, to unload all the pain, the humiliation, the fear, and the confusion on her friend. But to what end? What good would it to do open up her chest and pull her heart out, especially when she was so freaking conflicted.

Patriot…that night at the bar…that wasn’t him, not the man she’d met and fallen in love with all those months ago. She’d never seen him so…outside of his own control. The man was a soldier, a warrior, and mother-effing MC VP, he didn’t do out of his own control. He owned his circumstances, his situations…but that night, it looked like he’d let things slip right through his fingers, because he couldn’t make a fist, because he couldn’t punch it or strangle it or silence it with a death stare. That night at the bar, Patriot looked lost. Unfettered.

And that was why she was even contemplating talking to him if he called, or replying if he texted. But he had to make the first move.

If he even wanted to….

Her blank cell screen mocked her.

Even after all he’d done—or rather failed to do that night—she’d still held out hope that he would follow her, demand she listen to him, and then lay it all out on the line to earn her forgiveness, like in the shows she watched on Netflix.

Well, what the hell did all those stupid K-Drama romances know about real life? Nothing. Because the truth was that Patriot had let her walk out of Cool Hands, and he hadn’t given her a second thought.

For two hours, Cilla moved up and down the flea market aisles, buying thing she didn’t need but realized she just couldn’t live without, including a desk lamp shaped like a seashell, a canvas bag that read “Nixie’s Bag of Tricks” on the side, and a plastic bag full of lemons she was going to use to make several lemon meringue pies. When K-Dramas, gorging on junk, or binging on book smut couldn’t make her feel better, baking sometimes could.

It took another hour in Sunday traffic on I-81 to get home, but once she was there and her finds were put away, she realized that…she had no other ambition for the day. Now that she wasn’t out and about with things to distract her troubled mind, she was left with oh so many thoughts, none of which were good.

She didn’t want to go into her room because the sheets on her bed still smelled like Patriot. She didn’t want to sit on her couch because she still remembered how he’d dined on her just a few days ago while she’d been trying to watch Dean and Sam stalk a demonic scarecrow. But, realistically, she couldn’t just stand in the middle of her house and do nothing.

Biting back tears of frustration, she nearly came out of her skin when her cell pinged a notification. Clutching at her chest, she felt the frantic pounding of her heart under her palm. Swallowing, she dug her cell out of her where she’d dropped it, and checked the screen.

Patriot: I know I have a lot to make up for and I will. Trust me, baby.

She stared at the words, blinking, then re-reading them.

Trust me.

What the hell did that mean? Trust him about what? His intentions? That he hadn’t lied to her for weeks, or that his behavior at Cool Hands was out of character? How much more trust did he expect from a woman he continued to let down? A woman who’d been repeatedly burned by his club—mostly the women—and him.

I have a lot to make up for….

And I will….

He certainly did…but how exactly was he going to make up for humiliating her in front of his MC friends and their bitches? How was he going to fix the cracks in her heart that she’d barely mended before she’d met him? She’d spent most of her life not belonging anywhere, then she’d met Stephie and realized she wasn’t the only one who felt like that. She’d pushed through, made a life for herself, but still felt like she was on the outside of everything. Then she met Patriot, and she’d been introduced to the Unchained. And while she was having the time of her life, living for the first time in her twenty-two years, the club was just tolerating her—if the Slutketeers were telling the truth. But even if they weren’t, the truth was that Patriot…had felt like home.

And now that home was crumbling around her, teetering on the edge of a cliff.

Suddenly furious, her body trembling with the urge to scream, to hit something, to throw her new desk lamp against a wall, she lifted her cell, dialed the number, then waited for him to answer.

One, two, three…four rings later, he answered.

“Baby, now’s not the time?—”

“No,” she snapped, ignoring the rush and butterfly flutters in her tummy she always got at the sound of his deep, sex and whiskey voice. “You listen here, jerk face.” She wanted to stop at the sound of his grunt, but she just kept right on, like she hadn’t just insulted a badass biker. “I am sick and freaking tired of being pushed aside with silence and lame ass excuses. If you aren’t man enough to come to me, face to face, and explain your bullshit from Cool Hands, then I don’t want to hear anything else you have to say.” She was on a roll—her heart racing, her chest heaving with her accelerated breathing, and her voice rising, she was having an out of body experience. “You have a lot to make up for? You’re going to make it up to me, Patriot? You want me to trust you?” With every word, her voice rose until she was shrieking into the phone. “You can’t make up for years of feeling like the ugly, fat, unworthy, unlovable neighborhood trash. You can’t make up for all those months of me feeling like you and I had something special, and then ripping that away from me when the truth about you and Jaime finally slapped me in the face, courtesy of your friendly club bitches,” she nearly sobbed, her heart aching, but she continued. “You cannot make up for the embarrassment and degradation I experienced in that bathroom the night the Slutketeers made it plain that I wasn’t welcome at the club. And you cannot make up for the betrayal and absolute furious agony I felt when you let those same women tear down, piece by piece, every bit of me that I’d spent years trying to rebuild. Because you were too busy protecting the ‘club’s business’ to protect me.”

To add to her frustration, tears slipped down her face, but she whipped them away.

“I don’t trust you, Patriot. I can’t,” she rasped, her words barely audible to her own ears.

Once she was done, it was like her bones gave up on her, and she collapsed onto the coffee table, her heart thundering in the silence of the room.

And it was silent because Patriot hadn’t spoken a word.

But he was there…she could hear movement and murmuring voices in the background. She wanted to care where he was and what he was doing, but she was fresh out of fucks.

Sighing, she opened her mouth to speak, to end the farce of whatever they were for good, but a man’s blood curdling screams made her blood run cold.

“Patriot? What?—”

“Got to go, baby,” he interrupted, irritation clear in his tone. “But we are not fucking done talking about this. I will make it all up to you, I will prove that you can trust me, or I will hand you my kutte and let you set it on fire. I promise you. I swear it on my life, Cilla. Be ready.” He hung up, and she gaped. Shocked.

His kutte?But…that was everything to a member of an MC, right up there with his bike and his balls. Why would he swear on something as important as his Unchained kutte if he were just using her, playing with her?

God…what the hell was she going to do? She didn’t know how long she stood there, staring at her silent cellphone, she only knew that, eventually, she needed to…get ready.

But for what?