24. Honoria #2
“Not with Wombat. He’s been a straight arrow for years. Then you come along and he’s just… well, I won’t say a word. You’re drinking that because you’re driving, got it?”
Strange how the nicest people were sometimes the roughest looking. “Thank you.”
“It’s my job.” He tipped his head and went down the line to fill drinks and spread the word that “the club’s lawyer was present, play nice.”
A few of them introduced themselves, asked how to hire the firm. More avoided me, thinning the crowd by the bar which was quickly replaced by others.
The party got wilder. Yet through it all, there was a bubble of invisible protection around me.
Fly introduced me to each prospect, there were three.
The one who had been bartending had bloody knuckles.
I ignored those as well. Discreetly, I slipped him the firm’s business card.
He stuffed it in a pocket inside his vest. “Thanks, what are you drinking?”
“Seltzer, I’m driving.”
“You got it.”
No questions, no hassle, no pressure at all. Refreshing.
Mary joined me later. “I hear they kicked someone out over you.”
“He touched my ass.”
She laughed. Her eyes were a little glassy from drinking.
“When I used to strip, they’d take someone like that out by the collar.
There was this hole about five feet wide in the parking lot.
Water always collected there. Those guys made sure they dropped the body right in it. Whoopsie. Must have slipped.”
“Bodies?”
“Still breathing, doesn’t count.”
I laughed along with her. When it died I asked, “They are all kind of old fashioned, aren’t they?”
She sent me a speculative glance. “To a fault. But, I wouldn’t have it any other way.” She gazed out on the crowd. “I got stabbed. It almost killed Walt, not me.”
Her throat worked and her eyes watered. “That’s how you know.” Her smile faltered, then rallied. “Wombat, huh?”
“I’m with a man named Wombat.”
A snort leaked out of her.
“His real name is worse,” I confessed.
“I know. I see the club’s records. Random? What were his parents thinking?”
I shook my head. “They probably weren’t.”
She laughed. “I named my oldest Connery… Connery Fallon. Brave Leader, or War Lord if you care to know. She’s living up to it.”
“You have two children, don’t you?”
“Four. My brother’s two are ours even if we have to share.” She smiled. “Devon, Linnea, Connery, and Sam.”
Four. A twinge of—hopefully not jealousy—whatever it was, I shoved it aside to let her show off photos of all of them.
Sierra joined us. She pulled out pictures of her twins.
Twins. I brushed my hand across my abdomen and down one leg as if I weren’t contemplating how risky that pregnancy would have been.
Then Olivia joined us.
“It’s photo session time?”
They tucked the pictures away.
Very bluntly, she turned to me and said, “Boots and I decided we weren’t going to try. We’re both on the spectrum and life is kind of shit right now.” Her eyes went a little distant. “Plus I’m on a new medicine, so…”
Mary wrapped around her despite her initial stiffness. Her quickly whispered, “We’ve got you,” made those prior pangs of jealousy look amateurish.
Sierra stared at me. “You and Wombat, huh?”
I laughed. “Mary already nailed me with that.”
“Do you know his real name?” Mary stage whispered to Sierra.
Olivia piped in before Sierra could answer.
“I know this one, it’s Random. Random Blessing because his parents already named his older sister Sonnet Calvert, and his mom’s father didn’t like the strange names and complained that they couldn’t call their child by some random name, and they both decided they’d do just that.
But they also thought he was a blessing, hence the last name. And… I info-dumped again, didn’t I?”
Both Mary and Sierra held their laughter in.
I saved Olivia from embarrassment. “That’s the story he gave me, so…it’s got to be the truth.”
“Random, huh?” Sierra returned to staring at me. “What you going to call that one?” Her eyes dipped southward.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Mary muttered, “Oh shit.” Then she turned to Sierra and cuffed her ear. “Turn it off.”
“What are you talking about? Oh.” Sierra averted her gaze to the floor. “My apologies. Sometimes the moonshine goes right to my tongue and bypasses my brain. And the Good Lord didn’t see fit to put a filter between them. I ain’t going to say nothing else.”
Olivia’s eyes danced around the group. “Is this one of those moments when my husband would blurt out something stupid to save the day? Like, did you know the average penis girth is four and a half to four and three-quarters in diameter?”
My face turned red.
Both Sierra and Mary cracked up. Sierra recovered first. “Good one, ‘Liv.”
“Perfectly timed,” Mary added.
Both of them had conspiracy written on their expressions.
I cut them off. “At least six, if not more.”
Olivia chimed in, “I was there when Wombat told Walt it was six and a quarter inches.” She even held her hand out in a perfect circle of finger and thumb.
And I’ll be damned, but she nailed it.
Sierra broke first. And her laughter was contagious. Even Olivia had a glint of evil humor in her eyes as her shoulders tried to suppress her amusement.
It was time to confess. “I should be embarrassed, shouldn’t I?”
Sierra was the first to say, “Hell no. You should be damn thankful.”
Mary echoed her sentiments and tacked on, “You are riding Destroyers dick. That alone makes you special. Remember that.”
Oddly, I knew she believed that.