Not a Role Model (Battle Crows MC 4)

Tide looked at where she just was, and where she’d been sitting in the booth, then looked at me.

“Ethel has issues.” I shrugged.

“What’s that mean?” he asked curiously as he took his seat across from me again.

I reached for Ethel’s uneaten food, then started eating what was left of her chicken fingers.

When I looked up, it was to find Tide’s gaze solely focused on me.

“It means that she has a crush on her neighbor.” I paused. “He won’t give her the time of day.”

Tide opened his mouth and then closed it.

“They dated.” I gestured toward where Ethel had just disappeared through the restaurant. “She tries everything that she can do to get his attention, and he does everything he can to avoid her. That’s about all that I know because I try not to get into it.”

“You’re not best friends?” he asked curiously.

“Ethel and I are roommates,” I corrected. “We talk, but we don’t ‘talk’ if you know what I mean.”

“I guess I do,” he grumbled. “You could’ve warned me that she was hung up with someone else.”

I dipped the last piece of chicken into the gravy on Tide’s plate before saying, “We’re not friends, Tide. Why would I bother?”

He had nothing to say to that.

And when the waitress came, he made me pay for my date and my meal.

As we were walking home, I shivered.

He didn’t offer me his long-sleeved jacket.

“The fact that you date men that are weaker than you, that you can control, says a lot about you,” Tide replied as he walked beside me, ignoring my shivers. “It’s something you’ve always done.”

It was not!

“Yes, it is,” he replied as if he could read my thoughts. “What about that kid in high school? The one that had that speech impediment. You only dated him because you knew that he wouldn’t make fun of you. Seeing as he had his own problems.” He waited for me to deny it, but I couldn’t. That had been the reason I’d dated the poor kid.

I’d needed a date for prom, and so had he. We’d been beneficial for each other.

“Then there was that guy in college that left you at that bar, and since I was the only person you knew that you trusted not to hurt you in any way, you caught a ride with me. And the whole way home, you defended the dumbass who cheated on you because he was too scared to break up with you,” he continued.

I kicked a rock, causing it to skid all the way across the road and into the ditch on the other side of where we were walking.

“No reason to get violent,” he teased.

I sighed.

I didn’t want to talk about this anymore.

He was right about Franklin. I’d give him that.

But I didn’t date weak men.

CHAPTER 4

Well aren’t you just a little ray of pitch black?

-Tide to Coreline

CORELINE

I heard the door open and close, and I knew that my roommate had finally gotten home.

Usually, I liked to give her shit about her and her ‘stepdad’ but today felt like a ‘see how I can make her squirm’ day. Especially after she just ditched me yesterday as if I was last week’s leftovers.

I looked up ‘gross things that drive the average person crazy’ and grimaced.

When I found something I knew would do the job, I walked to my bedroom door and pulled it open slightly with my eyes downcast.

Had I just looked up, I would’ve seen. Yet I hadn’t. I just kept my eyes downcast and looked at my phone as I yelled her name.

“Ethel!”

There was a long moment of silence and then, “What?”

“What do hemorrhoids look like?” I hollered.

There was an even longer moment of silence and then, “Why do you ask?”

I rolled my eyes. Why did I ever ask anything? Because it made her uncomfortable, and she was a shithead.

“Because I’m fairly sure I have one on my asshole from straining to get that poop out last night!” I called out. “It feels like I have an eraser on my butthole!”

There was a strangled sound and then, “Are you sure it’s not just poop?”

There was a longer pause as I tried to figure out why she would ask that.

“Ethel, I’ve been wiping my ass for what feels like a lifetime. Yes, I’m sure that it’s not poop on my butthole.”

I just loved giving her shit.

God, the fact that she was so easy…

I looked up the next question I would ask her to make her uncomfortable.

Tomorrow, I’d ask her if she knew what soaking was.

According to the Urban Dictionary, soaking was when a Mormon man stuck his penis inside of the woman and left it there. They decided that as long as they didn’t move—and how the hell does one do that, anyway?—that it wasn’t technically sex before marriage.

I walked out to the living room, again my eyes still on my phone, as I stared at ‘soaking’ and read examples in the dictionary.