The bike behind me finally started up, and I blew out a relieved breath that I was no longer penned in.
The bike rolled backwards, and I put it in reverse.
I waited for the bike to get out of the way completely, which really wasn’t all that much room since I had a feeling he was waiting to ride beside Bain and Diana.
After backing out just enough that I could pull forward, I pulled off to the side so they wouldn’t be following behind me.
They passed like bats out of hell, and I followed at a much more sedate pace.
Maybe I’d lose them completely, and wouldn’t know where to go…
CHAPTER 5
I don’t want to be involved with the drama. I just want to know 109% of what happens.
-Matilda to Etienne
ETIENNE
“Why does she act like you’re the devil incarnate?”
I looked over at Wake, who was staring at Matilda’s rigid back as she walked away, and shrugged.
“I have no clue,” I admitted. “When I first met her, it wasn’t that bad. But slowly over the last couple of months, she’s grown outright hostile anytime I walk into the room.”
“My bet is the leech that’s always attached to you at the hip.”
KD, otherwise known as Kyle Davis, the famous ex-MLB first baseman, tossed a baseball into the air, caught it, then threw it right back into the air.
“If you’re talking about Ellen,” I said, “she’s not a leech.”
“She’s a leech,” Cassius corrected.
“She’s somethin’,” KD grumbled. “Last week I tried to talk to you, and she was all ‘Etienne is in meetings. Etienne told me to hold his calls. Etienne has a golden cock that only I can think about.’”
I rolled my eyes. “She’s not that bad.”
“She’s that bad,” Dutch, Wake’s ol’ lady, said. “Last week, I saw her harassing the hell out of Mattie.”
“Mattie didn’t say anything,” I admitted.
“Mattie would rather chop off her own arm than talk to you at this point,” Dutch said. “I’ve seen it time and time again. People that feel like they’re outcasts tend to go out of their way to not bring attention to themselves. They’ve found that bringing attention to themselves causes more heartache and pain. Hence the reason she stays in the shadows, out of the way of… everything.”
We all looked Matilda’s way to find her practically shoved into a corner with the table blocking her from people getting too close, while the wall at her back meant nobody could sneak up behind her.
She had a healthy distance between her and any other people in the room.
And she was reading.
With a book light pinned to the top of her paperback book.
It was cute as fuck, was what it was.
“Diana know she’s over there reading?” I asked Bain.
“No,” he grunted. “Not even sure why she invited her, to be honest.”
“I invited her,” Diana fumed, pissed and standing with her hands on her hips at the end of our table. “Because she’s my best fucking friend. And when I thought I had absolutely nothing, she was there, showing me that I did have something.”
Something passed between Bain and her, and I realized that there was something going on there that I hadn’t realized had been going on.
“Sorry, baby.” Bain squeezed her hip. “That’s not what I meant. I meant, I don’t know why you forced her to come when you clearly can tell that she’s uncomfortable.”
“Because people want to be included,” Dutch said as she gathered her drink and phone off the table. “They want to feel like they’re wanted. Which, apparently, nobody in this group is able to do.”
Dutch and Diana left, leaving the rest of us to watch them go sit next to Mattie.
“Well, now I feel like a dick,” Bain muttered.
“You are a dick,” I pointed out.
He knew I had a point.
We’d made no bones about who I was as a person. I was who I was, and I didn’t apologize for it.
But that didn’t mean that I was mean to people—especially people that were like Matilda and generally made me utterly fascinated—when I could help it.
I picked up my beer and downed it, feeling the rushing burn coat my throat.
God, that’d been one of the things I missed most about being in prison. Access to beer.
You don’t realize how much you’ll miss something until you no longer have it, or can access it in any way.
“Where you going?” Bain asked as he watched me set my mug down.
“To apologize for being a dick,” I said.
Bain and the others watched me go, and I circled my way around the bar, and watched her as I moved closer and closer.
At first, she was calm and collected with me across the room. But the closer I got to the table—even though she wasn’t looking at me in any way—she was very much aware of where I was. She got stiffer and stiffer the closer I got, and then went absolutely rigid when I stopped at the table.