“Got weeks. Months. Years. Figure it out,” Voss said, turning away from the ocean he liked so much. “Saw a sign for an ice cream place.”
With that, he made his way toward town, leaving me to follow behind, biting my tongue because I’d end up with a fist in my face if I said what I was thinking right then.
That it seemed like Dezi’s ridiculous eating habits were rubbing off on Voss.
It was no secret that the two of them were oil and water. Dezi was too light and easy, with a devil hidden underneath. Voss wore the devil on his sleeve.
And their devils? Yeah, they didn’t get along.
The two were going to really get into it one day, and I hated to think how many of us it was going to take to get between them. Or how it would be possible for them to come back from that and become brothers in a club that would demand it of them.
Dezi was patched.
He’d proven himself valuable quite a bit already.
Which meant that if it came to choosing sides, Fallon would be forced to choose Dezi. And send Voss packing.
It was why I’d been working my ass off to run interference between the two. Not only because I owed Voss my life. But because he’d been a good friend to me during some rough times on the road. I didn’t want to see him leave, to go off to who-knew what fate.
So I didn’t say shit about the ice cream.
“You done being a pussy?” Voss asked suddenly a few hours later, making my head snap over to face him, a smirk toying with my lips.
“What?”
“Being a pussy. Hiding out here when you know you need to deal with your shit.”
“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. Eloquent, he was not. But he sure as shit got his point across. “I guess I’m done being a pussy,” I agreed.
Though a part of me maybe only agreed because it was late already, and I figured that by the time we got back to the clubhouse, Louana would be asleep, giving me the whole night to wrap my head around this new development.
“The fuck are you doing?” I asked Dezi as I went into the kitchen to grab a bottle of water before heading to bed, finding him standing in front of the stove in a goddamn frilly apron that one of the wives or girls must have left around, dropping a giant glob of butter into a pan that he had lined with bacon.
“Making bacon.”
“With butter,” I said, tossing Voss a bottle of water while I was at it, just barely resisting the urge to grab another one for Louana.
Old habits.
“Don’t want it to stick to the pan, right?” Dezi asked, genuinely looking confused, reminding me again that I had no fucking idea what kind of past he’d come from, but clearly it had left him without basic life skills.
“No, man,” I said, shaking my head. “Bacon makes its own grease in like ten seconds of being on the heat.”
“Huh. The more you know,” Dezi said, but didn’t actually remove the butter.
“He’s gonna have a heart attack before forty,” Voss said to me as we made our way out of the kitchen.
“Zaddy won’t let that happen,” Dezi called back. “Got me on salads and shit,” he added.
Voss and I both knew there was no way to balance out bacon fried in butter, but we kept walking toward the prospect room.
I found myself almost holding my breath as we moved inside, some part of me not sure that she wouldn’t have wrecked all my shit, or that she wasn’t lying in wait to take me out.
You never knew with Lulu.
That was what was so interesting about her.
You could never anticipate her next move.