“Well, then, don’t go off on your own when you know you have a whole club of brothers behind you,” she said as she led Voss into the bathroom with his bags full of supplies.
“And sisters,” I added, looking at her.
“Yeah, well, somehow I doubt I will be allowed to stay for much longer. You don’t tend to graduate past prospecting when you tell the president to kiss your ass,” she told me as she rifled through the bags, spreading out items across the counter.
“Nice shirt,” he said, smirking at me.
“I think you guys are going to need to cut it off of me,” I admitted, cringing at the idea of having them have to yank it up over my battered midsection.
“Well, luckily, Voss here covered all the bases,” Louana said, coming at me with a scissor.
“You really told Fallon to kiss your ass?” I asked as she stood in front of me, slicing the material up my front.
“He really needed to be told,” she said, cutting the collar, then moving down each arm until the shirt was just tatters of material on the ground.
“I’m sorry,” I said when she turned away.
“It’s fine. I didn’t really want to be a biker. I just wanted to fuck with you,” she said. “Okay. Cuts get cleaned. Then I am going to find something to pull those screws out with,” she said, looking a little green at the prospect.
“That’s what these are for,” Voss said, grabbing a fresh pair of pliers out of the bag, then soaking them in alcohol. “Might as well get this done before the cleaning,” he added, coming at me with the pliers and the kind of determination that meant he didn’t waste any time in plucking them out of my abdomen, no matter how much I cursed and slammed my fist down on the counter at my side.
“There,” he said, dropping the last screw with a pinging noise into the sink. “Done,” he added, moving away.
“I hope you’ve had a tetanus in the past decade,”Louana said, looking no less green even though she hadn’t been the one to do the extractions.
“A year back,” Voss said. “Rusty fence in Texas,” he added, recalling it as vividly as I did. Those wounds had gotten gnarly fast. Ended up needing a course of strong antibiotics to fight off the infection. He walked over toward me, untwisting a bottle of whiskey, and handing it to me.
“Thanks,” I said, getting another nod from him.
“Alright. Good. One less thing to worry about,” Louana said as she grabbed the alcohol and gave me a sad nod. “This is going to suck,” she warned as I took a long swig of the whiskey.
And then it did.
It sucked.
The alcohol, the scraping at wounds to get grit out, the slathering on of creams, then the wrapping up.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get any bones broken,” she said as she helped me get back up.
“That would have come,” I assured her. “I lucked out that everyone was tired from all the robbing.”
“It’s so exhausting being a complete and utter shithead,” she agreed as she lowered me down onto the corner of the bed, then pulled the bottle from my hand, and took a long fucking chug of it.
“Needed that, huh?” I asked, giving her a little smile.
“Your whole disappearance thing killed the little buzz I came back to the clubhouse with last night,” she told me.
“Went to the bar, huh?” I asked.
“And had a nice long heart-to-heart with Jase Mallick.”
“Jase?” I asked, hearing my tone get sharp.
“Oh, stop puffing up,” she said, making me realize that I had straightened, even though it hurt. “It was a friendly talk. He actually convinced me to go back to you and have the ‘hard talk’ as he put it. Then, you know, I had to run around and save your life, you stupid ass,” she said, getting a low chuckle out of both me and Voss as he moved back in from the bathroom.
“How pissed is Fallon?” I asked.
“Eh,” Voss said, shrugging. “Used to the shit,” he added.