"I don't want you involved in my case at all."
"Too fucking bad."
"Fine. Then you're fired and so is Barrett."
"Porsche. Now," he growled, advancing toward me again and damn if I didn't retreat. Again. "I'll be in contact like it or fucking not." When I didn't immediately move, he took another, more threatening, step forward. "You don't get in the fucking car, I'll throw your ass in it."
Somehow, I believed him.
"Fine," I snapped and turned to storm across the street. I turned back suddenly to find he was still standing there, watching me. "I hope he's alright," I said and watched as his hard face softened.
"He'll be fine," he said in a voice that was almost... reassuring.
Before I could rethink my idea that he was just a heartless, arrogant, dickhead, I ran across the street, threw myself into my car, and got home like I was told to.
Then I iced my neck and took some ibuprofen, also like I was told to.
And then I decided that Sawyer was right; I needed to keep my head down. I needed to get my nails done and sip overpriced drinks and let people who knew what they were doing handle things for me from now on.
I might have been stubborn and determined, but two run-ins with very dangerous guys and an innocent guy getting caught in the cross hairs, yeah, I wasn't stupid. I needed to step back.
So that was what I was planning to do.SixElsieSo the next night, I did what was expected of me. I got home from work; I ate a light meal of yogurt and almonds (pretty much the only food I kept in the house in case of a late night snack craving); I showered; I got into a skintight deep purple dress with lots of leg and a fair amount of cleavage; I got my hair extra dolled up; I made my eyes smoky and my lips tinted; after I sprayed on some liquid bandage, I slipped into sky-high silver heels.
I tried my hand at covering up the bruises on my neck. After a night of sleep, I woke up to a room temperature icepack on my neck and really vivid purple and blue bands and fingerprints on my throat. Problem was, I didn't have the kind of makeup one needed to cover bruises like I had. I had a little greenish concealer for when I was hormonal and got a breakthrough pimple or something that I needed to mask the redness of. But I didn't have the yellow tones I would need to cover what I had going on. Besides, if my teen experiences with trying to cover up hickeys was anything to go by, I knew makeup was rather useless on bruises anyway. So for work, I tied a funky scarf on and called it a day. It looked appropriate with work attire.
The silver and purple scarf I tied around my throat that night, yeah, well... it didn't exactly look right. Who wore a scarf with a club dress? No one. No one did anything that stupid. But what choice did I have? I couldn't cover it with makeup and I couldn't leave the house with strangulation bruises on my throat either. I thanked my lucky stars that it was a long scarf, tied it tight at the throat, then left the ends to dangle, one down the front, one down the back.
It would just have to do.
On a sigh, I walked through a mist of perfume, grabbed my clutch and cell, and headed out the door.
Chaz's wasn't the kind of place you expected to see a bunch of silver-spoon men and women. In all honesty, it looked like and usually was, a biker bar. That being said, it was about all Navesink Bank boasted that had a genuine bar atmosphere. There were upscale restaurants we could head to that had a bar area, but it just wasn't the same. When we all turned twenty-one, we started going to Chaz's just because we knew it would piss off our parents that we were slumming it. But, in the end, it was somewhere we genuinely liked to go.
The outside was nothing to write home about, just a brick building with a simple sign. The inside had been redone, all the woods stained dark, the walls painted a deep color, the back bar boasting a whole plethora of unique looking bottles. They added a cocktail menu that, while not twenty dollars a round, was still overpriced. I guess that was the pink tax seeing as the beer was cheaper than you'd find almost anywhere else.
The clientele was a unique mix of bikers, middle class men and women, college kids, and well, me and my friends.
The music was always of the top-forty variety on the weekends and there was plenty of room to dance or scope guys.