Chapter 13
The door to the bar swung open harder than necessary, and Charlie reacted first to the sound and then to the smell that accompanied the woman who stumbled inside.
Alcohol, stale and heavy, with something chemical underneath it.
She looked as though she had pulled on the first clothes she had found on the floor; her top hung crookedly, her skirt was too short to look intentional, and her eyes were glassy and unfocused.
The smile that spread across her face came too quickly and stretched far too wide.
Sissi.
Charlie barely had time to register her before the woman spotted Reeze, and then it was as though the rest of the room simply ceased to exist.
“There you are,” she slurred, laughing in a way that held no real amusement.
She headed straight for him without hesitation or even slowing down, and before Charlie had quite understood what was happening, Sissi had stepped right up to Reeze and put her hand directly on him, rough and blatant, as though he were something she owned and could take whenever she pleased.
Reeze went completely still, not out of fear but out of control, and Charlie saw his entire body change.
His jaw tightened, his eyes darkened, and something in the room seemed to shift with him.
He didn’t say anything at first, and apparently he didn’t need to.
A single short nod was enough for two of the men wearing member patches to move forward and take hold of one of Sissi’s arms each.
“What the fuck!” she laughed as she tried to wrench herself free. “Let go! I’m only having a bit of fun!”
Reeze stayed where he was and looked at her.
“No,” he said quietly. “You’re not.”
She protested all the way to the door, swearing, laughing and trying to twist herself out of the men’s grip, but no one seemed particularly impressed.
The door slammed shut behind them and, for a brief moment, the room fell silent.
Not tensely, and not even with any particular discomfort.
It was more as though what had just happened had simply been something that needed dealing with before order could be restored.
Charlie remained behind the bar with her heart somewhere in her throat.
What the hell had that been?
Mia put down a glass with a thud and turned towards her.
“Don’t worry about her.”
Charlie blinked.
“She’s…” Mia made a vague gesture with one hand. “A pass-around. She’s nobody’s, and none of the men take her seriously any more.”
Charlie swallowed and glanced towards the door.
“She… touched him.”
“Yeah, and that was stupid. She knows better. You don’t put your hands on a man when his old lady is right there.”
Mia shrugged, apparently completely unfazed by the whole thing.
“Sissi gives it up to anyone. She’s probably worked her way through the entire club at least twice when she’s been high enough, and today she apparently decided it would be a brilliant idea to go for Reeze without permission.”
The pub had already begun returning to normal around them.
Someone at the pool table laughed loudly enough to make several people turn around, a couple of prospects carried crates in through the side door, and Mia went straight back to pouring beers as though nothing particularly remarkable had happened.
Even Reeze seemed to have returned to whatever he had been doing before the interruption and was now standing with Billy and a few of the other men.
Charlie tried to follow the conversations around her, but concentrating on what anyone was actually saying proved difficult. The image of Sissi’s hand on Reeze refused to leave her alone, and she stood with one hand wrapped around her glass of Coke while her gaze kept finding its way back to him.
It was ridiculous and she knew it. She had known the man for a few days. Yes, she had kissed him and spent the night with him, but a few days didn’t change what they were. Even so, that little scene had managed to crawl beneath her skin in a way she didn’t like.
Mia noticed almost immediately.
“You’re still thinking about it.”
Charlie looked up. “Am I really that easy to read?”
“For me? Yeah.”
Mia wiped down the bar with a cloth while studying her with the same calm expression as before. Charlie hesitated for a few seconds before deciding she might as well ask.
“Have they been together?”
Mia looked surprised at first and then amused.
“Together? No.” She laughed and shook her head. “Sissi has never been with anyone in this club.”
Charlie tried to smile but couldn’t quite manage it, and Mia noticed that too.
“But that isn’t really what you’re asking.”
No. Maybe it wasn’t.
Maybe it had nothing to do with Sissi at all and everything to do with all those years with Dennis, all the times she had been told she wasn’t enough and all the times he had compared her to someone else.
All the women he had used as weapons against her until she no longer knew what she was supposed to see when she looked in the mirror.
Mia leaned her elbows on the bar.
“Yeah, Reeze has slept with her.”
The words didn’t hurt as much as Charlie had expected.
If anything, they merely confirmed something she already knew.
Reeze was thirty-one, attractive, popular and hardly shy.
Of course there had been women before her.
The problem was that her brain didn’t seem particularly interested in logic at the moment.
“I know it shouldn’t matter.”
“Who said that?”
Charlie looked up and Mia shrugged.
“Of course it matters to you. You like him.”
She said it so matter-of-factly that Charlie couldn’t even summon the energy to deny it.
“The difference is that that…” Mia nodded towards the door Sissi had disappeared through. “…had nothing to do with him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sissi is looking at a man she used to get attention from. The problem is, she isn’t getting it any more.”
Charlie glanced across at Reeze again. He hadn’t looked towards the door once since Sissi had disappeared, and now that she thought about it, he hadn’t really looked at the woman while she was there either.
Mostly he had looked irritated, as though someone had spilt coffee over important papers or parked in the wrong place.
The realisation eased some of the pressure in Charlie’s chest.
Mia went back to work and left her alone for a while, but when she returned after collecting a few empty glasses, Charlie was still standing there looking in the same direction across the room.
“You know,” Mia said as she put the glasses down, “I’ve seen that look before.”
“What look?”
“The one people get when they’re trying to convince themselves they don’t care.”
Charlie snorted.
“I don’t care.”
“Of course you don’t.”
The tone was so dry that Charlie nearly laughed.
Mia leaned against the bar and studied her for a few seconds.
“You don’t have to tell me anything. Not now. But people don’t react like that for no reason.”
Charlie didn’t really know what to say. The truth was that she probably knew exactly why it affected her so much; she simply didn’t want to look too closely at the reason.
Mia didn’t seem to expect an answer either and merely nodded towards Reeze.
“All I’m saying is that I’ve known that idiot for years, and when Reeze doesn’t give a shit about someone, you know about it.”
Charlie followed her gaze. Reeze was in the middle of a conversation with Billy, laughing at something he had said and gesturing with his hands the way he always did when he became involved in whatever they were discussing.
Even so, his eyes swept the room at regular intervals, and every single time they seemed to settle in the same place.
On her.
Mia saw it too.
“That isn’t how a man looks at someone he’s trying to get rid of.” She picked up another glass and began drying it. “The club isn’t kind, but it’s fair in its own way. And boundaries are sacred here, even if it doesn’t always look like it from the outside.”
Charlie nodded slowly. She had walked straight into a world she didn’t understand, and what frightened her most wasn’t really Sissi. It was how quickly everything had settled again afterwards, as though nothing had happened.
When Reeze returned to the bar a moment later, the surface had already smoothed over and his gaze was as clear as ever.
“You all right?” he asked, resting one hand lightly against Charlie’s back.
She had barely opened her mouth when a male voice sounded beside her.
“Yeah.”
Charlie flinched and turned. The man was standing too close, his face too red and his eyes too unfocused. The vest he wore was blank, without markings or patches to show any kind of affiliation.
“You,” he said with a crooked smile. “You look a bit lonely.”
“No,” Charlie replied immediately. “I’m not interested.”
She tried to turn away, but instead of taking the hint, he stepped closer.
“Aw, come on. You haven’t even had a chance to taste me yet.”
Reeze remained completely still beside her.
“She said no.”
His voice was calm, almost too calm, but the man merely snorted.
“Relax, mate. I’m only talking.”
“And now you’re done talking.”
The man put one hand on the bar and leaned towards Charlie again.
“I think the lady can answer for herself.”
It began almost imperceptibly around them. Conversations at the nearest tables faded, someone at the bar stopped laughing halfway through a sentence, and two club members sitting farther away rose from their chairs. Suddenly several people in the room seemed interested in exactly the same thing.
Only then did the man appear to realise that Reeze wasn’t simply some jealous boyfriend looking for trouble. His gaze dropped to the open cut and stopped on the Master at Arms patch across Reeze’s chest before moving quickly to the men who had stood up.
Some of his confidence disappeared.
“She said no,” Reeze repeated.
He didn’t raise his voice and didn’t need to. The words carried through the room anyway.
“I’m only talking,” the man said again, considerably less convincingly this time.
“Good. Then the conversation’s over.”