Chapter Seventeen
Ayda
The interior of my car felt like a safety zone when I finally climbed behind the wheel to go home.
My interaction with Drew had been interesting to say the least, and in all honesty, when it came to him, I wasn’t sure whether I was coming or going anymore.
Just when I thought I understood him, he would turn around and do something I would never expect him to.
His question about Tate had thrown me for a loop completely.
It was hard to have a conversation with him and not come away feeling more confused than I had when we started.
He never said what I expected him to, and that went in the positive and negative extremes.
The questions he asked weren’t the usual kind.
They were inquiries that no one else would dare to ask for fear of causing offense.
Whereas Drew just shot them off as though they were bullets from a six-shooter—all hard questions but compiled in a way that didn’t give you time to think about the answer, leaving only honest responses to fall free.
He was infuriating that way. The moment the words were past my lips, I wound up asking myself why I’d told him as much as I had.
Drew was a very complex guy, but the same couldn’t be said for some of the men that inhabited the space with him.
Maybe it was because they were drunk and in the sanctity of their home that they felt so inclined to get totally shit faced and cast any rules of modern convention aside.
When I thought about some of the things I did when I had a rare moment alone in my home, I quickly realized that I was wrong to judge what they were doing.
Sure, I’d seen more tits and ass in one night than when I’d gone to Mardi Gras in New Orleans in my senior year of high school, but it was their personal space. They could do what they wanted to.
I finished the communal bathroom at midnight, my body screaming in complaint as I stood up to look over my accomplishment with a hand on the small of my back.
The other wiped the sweat from my forehead, neck and cleavage, and I was pretty sure that the stink had managed to seep into my pores.
I felt disgusting, gritty, and pretty foul.
I’d only managed to get through half of the laundry, but I was going to be there in the morning to finish it, and if the boys wanted clean underwear, they should probably have learned to use the machines themselves.
There was only so much I could do in one night.
I managed to get together a small stack of towels before I left, and on my way out I took them to Drew’s office with a quiet tap.
He wasn’t there so, dropping my things, I grabbed what I could and cleaned quickly, leaving the towels in little rolls on the back of the toilet, which were in reach of the shower, before sneaking out and putting everything away.
It was the hardest I’d worked in years. I used elbow grease to spit and shine every surface.
I felt like the odd man out in the place for most of the night, barely acknowledged until I asked a question.
There were moments that I felt like a ghost in there, passing by people doing things normally reserved for a quiet room and locked door.
I had to remind myself several times that this place wasn’t held to the standards that the rest of the world was, because in most cases, this was a completely different world, and being a fly on the wall for an evening had been quite the enlightening experience.
The house was dark when I finally pulled up in my drive, and I sat in my car with the lights off, just staring at the porch lights.
I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about my new vocation.
I wasn’t too proud to clean toilets for a living, but if I was going to be doing that on a daily basis, I was going to have to teach them to aim better.
I even considered painting little targets on the urinals for them to aim at.
Mom had done that with Tate when he was a kid.
The memory made me smile, and my hand reached for the radio to turn up the song as I let my mind wander.
I thought about the questions Drew had asked, my arms encircling the steering wheel.
Was I happy? That was the one that resonated with me the most—the one I had the most trouble answering, because I honestly wasn’t sure of the response.
I meant what I said. As long as Tate was happy, I knew I could get by.
But what did that mean for me? I’d pushed most of my dreams and wishes aside to make his come true.
What happened after that? When his life was in his own hands and he was old enough to make his own decisions and mistakes, I was going to be lost. I wasn’t going to know how to live without climbing into bed at the end of the night with the sole purpose of waking up the next day and making sure everything was right in the world for one person.
How the hell did parents do this?
Glancing at the clock on the dash and back up at the house, I turned the engine over and backed out of the drive. Just for tonight, I was going to take back an hour and make the most of it, just before I started this shit over again in the morning.
“Ayda?”
My hands grabbed for my head to stop the pounding. I felt so dirty and gritty, and yet the voice and banging continued.
“Ayda!”
“Fuck. Off.”
The door was pushed aside as Tate fell into the room, his eyes wide at my state. I’d bought a bottle of bourbon and come home with it, and other than a shower, I honestly didn’t remember all that much. I was in physical pain.
“What the hell happened to you? And where are your pants? I don’t need to see my sister in her underwear.”
“Then you shouldn’t just barge in here,” I grumbled, pulling the blankets over my head and burying my face in my pillow. I was trying to remember why I thought partying with Jack (or was it Jim?) was a good idea.
“You’re gonna be late if you stay in bed,” he said, his hands squeezing my calves and pulling me to the edge of the bed. My hands flew out to catch myself before my head bounced off the hardwood.
“If I live through this, you’re gonna owe me for the rest of your natural life. I claim your first born, Tate. Don’t make plans for that sucker.”
“What the hell did they do? Feed you bourbon until you threw up?”
“No,” I said, covering my mouth and belching. “That was my bright idea after hours of cleaning some pretty fucking disgusting toilets.”
“So let me do it.”
It was probably the only thing he could have said that would have got me up off my hands and knees and into the bathroom. There was no way in hell I was letting him into that place, even if I was pretty sure they wouldn’t hurt him. I actually believed he would end up leaving corrupted and deranged.
“Ayda, come on. Like you don’t have enough to do,” he said through the bathroom door. By the sounds of it he was leaning against the wall.
“It isn’t so bad. I just had a long night and made a bad judgment call with the bourbon. Kinda like you did last week. Remember that?” I asked with a sarcastic laugh. “You tried to rip off the local MC?”
“Shut up.”
“Then don’t judge me.”
I heard his mumbled response begin, but the words were lost as I stepped under the spray of the shower. I just hoped it was going to chase away the sluggishness that was getting comfortable in my limbs from the work I’d done the night before.
As luck would have it, I was ten minutes early when I finally arrived at The Hut. I swear the sweat was my body pushing alcohol through my pores, and I could smell it on myself even worse after I slipped through the gate and reached up to knock on the door.
Or maybe the stench was from the bar on the other side of the door?
Either way, it stank. Badly. And my tender, thoroughly empty stomach turned the moment the door was thrown open.
I was really starting to regret my stupid decision the night before.
When I pulled out of the driveway, I’d been considering sex or alcohol as a way to get my mind off things.
But entering the bar and seeing Mr. Lupe’s eyes light up, I went with liquor.
A ninety-year-old man that refused to take off his dress uniform wasn’t all that appealing.
“You look as bad as I feel,” Kenny said, pushing the door closed behind me and shuffling farther into the glorious darkness that was the bar’s main room.
“Just say no toilets today and let me sweat it out in the laundry room.”
“I ain’t the boss, kid.”
I waved an arm in his direction and leaned against the pool table, until I remembered what I’d seen happening on the thing the night before and pushed off of it. Wonder what surface was actually safe to touch?
“Let’s hope there’s mercy to be had,” I whispered, almost biting off my tongue when I looked up to see Drew at the bar with a coffee and a smirk. I wanted to know his secret. He’d obviously polished off his bottle of whiskey and then some, yet looked…
“Umm, morning?”
Once again, I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. There was going to be no mercy for the day, no easy menial labor for this girl. He was going to have me jumping through hoops. I just hoped that he wasn’t a complete bastard and would, at the very least, supply me with the tar they were calling coffee.
He did, and although it tasted like raw beans boiled and strained, it actually helped the hangover quite a bit. For a while, things seemed to be going well. We were holding a half decent conversation, about caffeine of all things, and I actually managed to make Kenny snort once.
Of course, it was inevitable that I would end up sticking my foot in my mouth. That opportunity came when I saw a picture behind the bar of a younger version of Drew, his arm around a slightly older boy, but the reverence was there, shining through.
“Is that a younger you in that picture there?” I asked, my elbows planted as I leaned forward.
Drew's eyes followed mine to see what I was staring at, although something about the way his body tensed beside me told me that he already knew.
He didn't answer for a while, and the stony silence was so thick and so powerful, I felt like it was choking me, until he finally cleared his throat and mumbled, “Yeah.”
“You were a cute kid. Is that your brother with you?”
“No,” he answered sharply as he pushed his hands against the edge of the bar and rose to a slow stand. “No, it's not.”
The calm man I’d been speaking to had disappeared by the time I turned to see why he sounded so clipped.
In his place stood a man with the color and light drained from him, his jaw set in a hard line filled with anger and an emotion I couldn’t quite place.
With a growl that I should “get to work” he stalked away, gripping his mug with such fury, I feared it wasn’t going to last long, while I stood there in stunned silence.
“You want a survival tip, kid?” Kenny asked quietly, leaning into me. “You don’t ask Drew questions about anything or anyone unless you know the story behind it. Maybe not even then.”
Oh, and wasn’t that a lesson I could have learned ten minutes earlier?