He stared back and he did it seriously pissed.
He dropped my hand but only to jab his finger toward The Trench and clip, “That was not gonna end well.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“Where were your friends?” he demanded to know.
“I-I don’t know,” I stammered, swallowed and finished stupidly, “Lonnie and Maria are hanging with Chaos. A local MC. I went in alone.”
I could feel the bite of his eyes at that admission before he growled, “All your signals contradicted each other, but guess my thought you were mostly clueless was the signal that held true. Not thinkin’ that you had it goin’ on, you just had shit friends.”
I flinched at that, but suddenly he straightened up and lifted a hand to drag it through his hair, looking away and taking in a visible breath.
When he dropped his hand and looked back to me, he muttered, “None of my fuckin’ business.”
“My car broke down,” I told him.
“Yeah?” he asked, like he didn’t much care.
“And I was evicted. They’re dozing my building. They’re making it a parking garage.”
His eyes narrowed on me.
“And?” he pushed.
“My parents want me to be a nail technician,” I shared idiotically.
“So fuckin’ what?” he bit. “You’re tellin’ me that’s a reason to wander alone into the fuckin’ Trench at fuckin’ Wild Bill’s Rally and nearly get yourself raped?”
That was what I was telling him but it was so lame it was humiliating, so I didn’t answer.
Tony got closer and tipped his chin down so he could hold my eyes in the dark, lifted only by moonlight and not-very-close campfires.
I was still mesmerized.
“Not my job to look after you but I’m not walkin’ away from you right now without tellin’ you, girl, you gotta clue the fuck in real fuckin’ fast. You gettin’ me?”
Oh, I was “getting him.”
About a variety of things.
And I felt them coming. I didn’t want them to come but this was too excruciatingly mortifying to bear at the same time hold them back.
So I didn’t and that was why the tears spilled over and my voice broke when I answered, “Yeah, To-tony. I’m g-g-gettin’ you.”
Then, to save face when they came full force, I turned, trying to fight back the sob but it burst forth anyway, and I started to run away.
But I got not a step before I was hooked around the belly and hauled back into a solid frame.
I shoved with both hands against his arm and demanded unevenly, “L-let go.”
“Shh, Cady. Just . . . I don’t know,” he said like he really didn’t know. “Let it out, I guess.”
“I-I-I can do that so-so-somewhere else,” I told him, still pushing at his arm.
“You can also do it here,” he said in my ear, his other arm coming around me.
“Let me go, Tony.”
“Just shut up and get it out, Cady.”
I decided to do that, but as useless as it was, I did it letting my hands flop to my sides and turning my head away from his mouth at my ear like that was any form of escape from him.
He gave it a minute before he pulled us back. I heard the almighty loud squeak as he yanked the tailgate down and then he sat on it, hefting me up to sit beside him.
I made a move instantly to jump down but with an arm across my front, fingers digging into the side of my hip, he held me there at the same time ordering, “No. Sit your ass here, stay there and pull your shit together.”
I supposed I owed it to him not to be more of a pain in the rear than I’d already been, so I kept my ass there but also kept my head turned away.
He let me go with his arm.
When the crying jag was just sniffles and deep abiding mortification, Tony murmured, “I don’t have any Kleenex.”
“That’s okay,” I murmured back, lifting the hem of my tee at the same time bending over to wipe my cheeks and my nose.
I straightened and kept my gaze to my knees.
“You all right now?” he asked.
No, I wasn’t all right.
I had no money. I soon would have no place to live. It would take another ten months to save up what I’d saved to give myself something better (eventually) and in all likelihood, that would be eaten up by some other life shit that would come along and hit me. A hot guy I was attracted to just saved me from being gang raped. And he was right.
I was clueless.
My best friend’s boyfriend was into me and had been since around the day we met.
I could work at the Sip and Save until I was forty and have stellar performance evaluations but still, Saks or Neimans or Nordstrom or Anthropologie were never going to hire me then set me on a career course to see me sitting beside Alexander McQueen’s fashion show in London (or however they found their clothes).
I couldn’t even hold my temper long enough to talk my parents into a loan.
I was probably going to end up hooked up with some dude who treated me like dirt, knocked me up, and I’d be working at Sip and Save for the rest of my life.
In truth, the world needed folks working at Sip and Save. If they didn’t, how would they grab a cup of joe or snatch up that bag of Corn Nuts for their road trip or pick up that set of wipers they needed?
I just . . . I just . . .
Didn’t want that person to be me (forever).
“Cady,” Tony called.
I looked right at him. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m being stupid. I have to be at work at seven and I don’t even know what time it is now but—”
“It’s past two thirty.”
Great.
“Cady—” he started.
I cut him off. “I’m sorry. I had a bad day, a bad couple of weeks and I didn’t handle it well and you had to . . . had to wade in and deal with it and I’m sorry. But I appreciate it. I really do. I’d make you cookies but I’m not going to have a kitchen for long and my car broke down and it took all my savings to fix it, and I don’t have flour, or brown sugar, or butter, definitely not chocolate chips or vanilla extract. So—”
I was edging off the tailgate, but I stopped when Tony interrupted me and did it with his voice trembling with laughter. “Don’t move.”
I stared at him wondering how he could sound so amused when his lips were only curled up a little bit.
Though, his eyes were absolutely shining.
Even in the dark.
“No flour?” he asked.
I looked away.
“Teasing you, Cady,” he said gently, still sounding amused, and both of those together were a double whammy of goodness.
Shit.
How could I forget how much I liked this guy?
“I’m kinda not really in the mood to be teased right now,” I told the VW van parked next to his truck.
“Sounds like it,” he muttered. Then not in a mutter, he demanded, “Talk to me.”
“I really appreciate what you did but—”
I stopped speaking that time when his fingers closed around my chin, he turned me to catch his eyes and he repeated, more firmly this time, “Cady, talk to me.”
I looked into eyes that were now very serious and it just happened.
It poured out of me.
Mom and Dad and how much they loved me, but how disappointed they were that I didn’t fit in with their overachiever family. Dad who made big bucks as a bigwig at a big computer company. Mom the head of the occupational therapy department at her hospital. My brother getting an academic scholarship to Berkeley and ending his college career with three job offers, all of them making more than five times the money I made at Sip and Save, even when I did overtime.
I shared about my car breaking down and my soon-to-be homeless situation.
I told him I was worried about Maria, not only because her boyfriend had a thing for me and if she ever cottoned on to that, it wouldn’t be Lonnie she told to take a hike. But that I worried about her because she seemed to have no direction, and I didn’t want to sound like my mother (who was certain I had no direction), but it was coming time to find a direction.
I did not tell him about how I wasn’t real sure about Lonnie continuing to burrow in with Lars and his crew, considering I might not have seen Tony since our first meeting a couple months before, but it seemed during our first meeting he was a part of Lars and his crew. I didn’t know how he would take that and he’d just saved me from being raped. I didn’t think it was cool to offend him.