Make Me Your VIllain, page 2
She found something stupid to yell at me about, I took it, and then we’d depart to our separate rooms.
Only, now I wasn’t getting regular sex.
“I am always the one who unloads the dishwasher,” I pointed out. “So if it does dry onto the silverware, I’m the one who takes it out and rewashes it and puts it away. So, lay off me, okay? God.”
“This is the reason we broke up,” she pointed out. “You never could admit to your mistakes.”
I felt my pulse pounding in my temples, but instead of replying, I decided to be the bigger person and head to my room.
God, the day where I found an apartment couldn’t come fast enough.
Granted, I could stay with any of my brothers, and though they’d give me shit, they wouldn’t complain.
But the two that I would actually be willing to live with—Haggard and Bram—were both married. Both annoyingly so, meaning I wouldn’t want to be there when they decided to fuck on the kitchen table.
Which they would.
Crow men didn’t care when it came to their women. When they wanted, where they wanted.
At least when it came to Haggard and Bram.
“You need to pay rent this month, too! I don’t have it,” Lindy called at my back.
I paused in the doorway of my room and looked back at her over my shoulder.
“Why don’t you have it?” I asked carefully.
Lindy licked her lips and looked at me like she wanted to murder me for asking her that.
That was the first thing we agreed on when we’d split and decided to split the rent on the place we were in until one of us could find somewhere else to live.
She’d pay on odd months, I’d pay on even.
This was her month.
“I had a mishap at the store. Couple of declined credit cards. I have a few overdraft fees, too.” She paused. “Thanks for reminding me of my embarrassment.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You don’t get that many overdraft fees that you can’t pay your rent. Rent is eight hundred dollars. You’re telling me you got an overdraft fee eight times?”
Lindy shrugged her shoulder. “I’m telling you what I’m telling you. You believe what you want to believe.”
I clenched my fists. “You either come up with it by tomorrow afternoon, or you move out. That was the deal.”
Lindy’s eyes narrowed. “There’s nowhere to go, and you know it.”
I shrugged. “I do know it. I also know that you were the one to come up with the idea. Either pay it or move out. Not my problem.”
Her anger rose, and I saw her fist her hands at her sides. “I don’t have it, asshole.”
I looked her dead in the eye and said, “You made the deal. The deal is signed and stamped at our lawyer’s office for Christ’s sake. You made the deal. So, either pay it, or I go to the lawyer, which you chose to draft this ridiculous deal up, and have him show you a copy of the agreement before I go to the sheriff’s office and have you kicked out on your ass with nowhere to go. You choose.”
With that, I walked into my room and shut the door.
I locked it, then bolted it for good measure.
Because my roommate had a bad habit of coming into my room, borrowing my shit, and then not putting it back.
It was also why I had a fuckin’ refrigerator in my room, because the bitch ate all of my leftovers, and drank all my beer, out of spite.
That, or she poured it out/threw it away.
I wasn’t sure which.
Whatever her reasoning behind doing what she was doing, she was officially the worst roommate ever.
It might make me come off as heartless, kicking her out when she didn’t pay the rent.
But eight months ago, when this deal was struck, Lindy came up with the most ridiculous demands to allow me to ‘continue’ to be her roommate.
Early on, she knew the renter, and they’d switched the name on the lease—which had been in my name—into hers to try to kick me out. When I’d fought back and threatened to take the bitch to court, she’d allowed me to stay. But on a conditional basis.
At the time, I hadn’t much cared. Matters had hit the fan with other things in my life, and the last thing I really needed to worry about was Lindy and her demands.
Now, my life was a little more turned around, my business was booming, I had money in the bank to blow, and Lindy had shown me what a real bitch she could be.
Voices sounded from the other room, and I groaned.
All I wanted to do was go to bed.
All I would be able to do now was listen to Lindy have sex in the living room because she knew that it was ‘her’ room, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
God. Fucking. Dammit.
I hastily changed my clothes, took a shower as fast as I could, and then got dressed again.
This time in clothes that weren’t grass-stained and smelled of gasoline.
Gathering my dirty clothes, I walked out into the living room, finding Lindy there with her new ‘man’ on the couch.
If you could count a man in jeans tighter than my sister wore a ‘man.’
He looked at me and his eyes widened.
“Don’t mind me,” I said to them both, watching the man’s hands still on the back of Lindy’s shoulder where it’d been headed south. “Just gonna do some laundry before I head to bed.”
My lips tipped up in a grin as I started to do my laundry, tossing Lindy’s into a hamper that was for sure to wrinkle her favorite tops despite the fact that I knew she’d hate it.
See, I didn’t do anything to Lindy that she didn’t to me, first.
But Lindy always took it a step farther.
When I had clothes in the washer and she wanted to use it, sometimes she’d stop my clothes in the middle of a freakin’ cycle just to take them out, put hers in, and forget about mine.
She’d leave mine in a sopping heap in the middle of the laundry room, fuckin’ water pouring out of it and into the damn walls.
Needless to say, no, I didn’t feel guilty anymore because of everything that she did so vindictively to me.
It wasn’t my fuckin’ fault I couldn’t finish all my clothes in the time she ‘allotted’ me during the day.
After getting my clothes started, I walked past her basket, into the living room, and started doing the dishes. The dishes that she’d purposely left in the sink because my peanut butter had gotten all over them.
Rolling my eyes, I finished those up, snatched a beer, then walked back into the living room while whistling.
Of course, I happened to be whistling Jaws.
The man who’d been kissing her earlier was now sitting beside her with his arm around her shoulder. Lindy was pressing her lips to his jaw, but the man’s eyes were all for me as he stared at me with worry.
“Good night,” I called out, heading to the bedroom.
At least, out of it all, I got the master.
Because when I got the master, she got the rest of the house that she wanted.
Whatever.
It only meant that when I got to my bedroom, I had a bathroom, massive walk-in closet, and a pretty big window that overlooked the road beyond.
It also meant that, when I climbed out the window two minutes later dressed in jeans, a white t-shirt, biker boots, and my Battle Crows MC cut, it was fairly easy to slip out.
But I paused and turned up the mood music before I left, mostly because I knew it’d piss her off and there wasn’t a single fucking thing she could do about it.
When the first croon of the guitar started playing, I giggled like a goddamn girl, then slammed my window closed.
The next ten minutes were spent rolling my bike down the driveway so she didn’t know I was gone and heading to the bar that was in the middle of Intercourse, Texas. The one place that I probably should’ve avoided tonight with my sour disposition.
Not because it was a bad place or anything, but because I just didn’t feel like talking to anyone.
And I knew, the moment I walked through that door with my cut on, people would come over.
It was just the name of the game when you were a Crow in Intercourse, Texas.
People either loved you or hated you.
Either way, people didn’t stay away.
CHAPTER 2
It’s called gross pay because it’s disgusting to see how much you would’ve made before taxes.
-Iris to Shine
IRIS
“Your parents are dead?”
I overheard the women and the men at the next table talking, and I glanced surreptitiously over my shoulder to see if I could make out the face that belonged to that annoying as hell voice.
She sounded like a balloon that was losing air.
“Yep,” the guy said.
The guy’s voice, however, wasn’t nearly as annoying as the woman’s voice.
He sounded like a sexy beast of a man that gargled with gasoline and growled out obscenities at the top of his lungs for fun.
At least, the hoarseness in his voice spoke of that anyway.
Maybe he was a smoker.
I hoped not.
Smokers made me want to vomit.
Not because of the habit being bad for you—though it was—but because the smoke literally made me nauseous.
That, sadly, was a childhood memory that I couldn’t quite shake.
I looked again over my shoulder and finally pinpointed the man that was talking.
And, oh, holy shit.
Just staring at him made my freakin’ heart skip a beat.
He looked like Thor.
Like, no joke, that golden-blond hair and beard, paired with all those muscles, fit underneath a white skintight t-shirt? Yeah, he could easily pass for the God of Thunder.
The black motorcycle vest on his back made me even more curious.
I hadn’t lived in Intercourse—God, gag on that name—Texas for long.
In fact, it’d been a little over six and a half months since I’d moved into town, but in that time, there was one particular group of people that I’d been warned about, over and over again.
And that was the Battle Crows MC.
I’d heard good things and bad things, but out of all of those things, the bad far outweighed the good.
Take my coworker, for example.
A coworker that’d dated one of the members of the Battle Crows MC.
Granted, I didn’t know which one, but the way she spoke about him made me genuinely curious about why she’d stayed with him for so long.
But if the man behind me was an indication of what the rest of the men in the group would look like, good God, now I knew why she’d stayed.
With a body like that, he had to be packin’.
Then again, my coworker—whom I had never quite gotten around to liking—had really great taste in men. Each and every one I’d met over the last few years that we’d been working together had proven to me that it wasn’t the guy, it was the girl.
The one good thing I could say about her was that she was good at her job and never left me hanging when we needed to get to work.
Five years ago, when we’d met on the first day of orientation, and realized that we’d lived within a mile of each other, I’d been wary about carpooling with her.
But for the most part, she sat in the passenger seat and didn’t say a word while she listened to her phone with earbuds.
Which meant that I could listen to whatever I wanted on the car radio and not talk back.
“They’re dead,” the Thor look-alike behind me confirmed, making me strain to hear him over the excitement in the bar around me.
“How did they die?” a breathy voice asked.
I felt a headache start to take root behind my brow.
God, did she talk like that all the time?
She sounded like she was exhaling her words.
That had to be exhausting.
“Yep, dead as a doornail,” Thoralike confirmed.
“Are you even listening to me?” I heard Teller growl.
I looked over at Teller and winced.
For a few seconds in time, I’d forgotten he was there.
I’d forgotten that I’d come here with the intention of getting food, drink, and entertainment in the form of people watching, and what I’d gotten was my ex sitting at the table with me because he just couldn’t leave it fucking be.
Then I shook my head. “No. I don’t see how this conversation can ever go up from where you’ve taken it down. I’m sorry.”
Teller growled in frustration. “Can you please let me explain?”
He started talking, and again, my mind wandered to the table behind me.
“My papa drove a truck nearly his entire life. And it drove my mom crazy being a trucker’s wife,” the man said, making me once again home in on his words. “One night, he came home from being out of town. Had some roses and a bottle of wine and only found us kids.”
I smacked my hand against my forehead, then turned around with a fuckin’ smile on my face.
Which, after the night I had, was fucking impressive seeing as I’d had to deal with Dick.
Well, his name wasn’t actually Dick. It was Teller. I’d just started calling him Dick when he’d started acting like one more often than not.
“He called her name and disappeared down the hall. We heard a bottle break against the wall in the bedroom, then the diesel engine of the truck started up, and we heard it headed into town. The picture in the paper the next day was of my papa’s rig. It was buried in the motel where my mama was. Funny enough, the desk clerk said he saw it all. Papa never hit the brakes.”
That was it.
I couldn’t take it anymore.
I started laughing, my stomach tightening and contracting as the guffaws left me.
Teller, who’d been in the middle of whatever explanation he was giving, gave me the weirdest look, threw up his hands, and got up to go to the bar for a drink.
I wouldn’t say I was happy or anything, but I was fuckin’ happy.
I all but ran toward the jukebox in the corner of the room and paid the extortionate cost of five dollars to play the fuckin’ song.
But, when “Papa Loved Mama” by Garth Brooks started playing through the speakers, the Thor look-alike jerked his head up and stared right at me.
There were literal tears rolling down my cheeks as I grinned a stupid fuckin’ grin at him.
When it got to the part where the man buried his truck in the motel, I sang it out loud to him, our eyes connected.
Thoralike grinned secretly at me and sat back in his seat, lifted his beer, and saluted me with it.
I was grinning like the loser I was until Teller arrived to stand in front of me, blocking off my view.
I sighed, the grin slipping off of my face.
“Teller.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Please, for the love of all that’s holy, leave me the fuck alone.”
Teller stared at me for so long that I began to feel uncomfortable.
I’d never been scared of Teller before.
At least, I hadn’t been scared until he started to fucking stalk me.
This would be the fourth time he’d just ‘arrived’ where I happened to be and acted like it wasn’t a big deal.
Meanwhile, I was doing my damndest to ignore everything about him.
Then, there was the fact that it’d been a freakin’ week since I’d moved into my old place, and in that week, I’d seen more of him than I had on a regular week when we’d been together.
“Why are you looking at me like you want to get up and run away?” he asked. “I’d never hurt you.”
I gritted my teeth and clenched them hard before I released the tension.
“I’m sure you wouldn’t,” I lied.
I didn’t know him anymore.
I thought, at one point in time, I had. But the last couple of months had made it painfully obvious that I didn’t.
“If you want to talk…”
I sighed. “Teller, if I wanted to talk, I would’ve talked to you already. Give it a freakin’ rest. You’re seriously beginning to really get on my nerves. How hard is it to comprehend that I gave you a chance? And, you know, you know, that what we had was already going south. You were working so much. I was working extra shifts just to spend time away… a healthy relationship doesn’t have that.”
I was right and he knew it.
He just didn’t want to admit it.
Teller worked his jaw, and when I went to step around him, he caught my arm with his large palm.
My eyes went over Teller’s shoulder to see Thoralike looking at the two of us, his eyes narrowed.
I yanked my hand away from Teller, and he cursed. “Swear to God. Just let me tell my side!”
“Do you have a good reason for kissing her?” I asked.
Teller shook his head, his mouth a grim line. “No.”
“Do you have a reason that you were working so much?” I pushed.
He hissed in a breath. “No.”
“Did you have to continuously take shift after shift for people that needed you to?” I continued, my eyes once again wandering over his shoulder to see Thoralike leaving, a motorcycle helmet underneath his arm.
Teller crossed his arms over his chest, once again bringing my eyes to his. “It’s not that simple.”
“Teller.” I pressed the heel of my palm against my eye.
There was a freakin’ massive headache heading my way.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize how fucked up it was until I saw your face. I will never do it again.”
I nearly rolled my eyes.
Jesus, the man wasn’t getting a clue.
I jerked to the side and started to push around him, only to have him try to grab my elbow again to keep me in place.
This time, I used a move he’d taught me and twisted out of his hold, heading toward the back door.
I ran past a man that was bigger than any man I’d ever seen, and darted behind him, using the bulk of his body to hide me darting into the women’s bathroom.
Once there, I looked around, finding the small window that was just big enough for me to fit through.
I grinned and unlatched the window, using the sink to help get me up to height so I could slip out of it.
