“Poet? That’s the name he uses?” I asked, rolling my eyes.
“Road name. Someone else picked it.”
“Right.” I nodded. “Yeah, where is he?”
“I’ll get him.” Charlie said quickly with a small smile.
“Slider,” Vera warned.
“Slider?” I snorted. “I don’t even wanna know where that came from. No worries, just show me where he is. I don’t give a rat’s ass what he’s doing. I just need to talk to him real quick.”
Char—Slider ran his hand over his slicked-back hair, and gave me a cautious nod before placing his hand between my shoulder blades to lead me through the room.
“You come see me before you leave!” Vera called out as we left her behind.
“Yup!”
He led me through a doorway and down a hallway that ran the length of the building, stopping a few rooms down, where I could hear someone giggling through the door.
“Poet, open up, brother!” Slider called out as I slid between him and the doorframe and pushed my way into the room before he could stop me.
Patrick must not have heard us, because he was on the bed, leaning back against the headboard with a small grin on his face as a woman in only a G-string told some kind of story complete with animated hand gestures. She was young, I could see that much, and she had a generic tribal tramp stamp on her lower back that he was tracing with the fingers of one hand.
Aw, how cute.
“‘I missed ye’ he said,” I commented loudly in a thick accent, walking into the room as his head snapped up. “How’d I live so long without ye? Come home with me. Yer beautiful.”
I sat down at the edge of the bed and sighed dramatically. “All lies.”
“Who the fuck are you?” she asked, eyes wide, while Slider laughed, making no move to leave the doorway.
“Jesus Christ!” Poet hissed, pushing the girl off his lap.
“I’ve never loved anyone the way I love ye, lass.” My voice dropped into his accent again, my tone growing more serious.
I shook my head slowly as I stood, finally raising my eyes to his and swallowing hard, letting him see exactly how I felt about the situation we were in. His jaw went tight and his eyes grew sad as he watched me, a thousand words unsaid between us.
When Slider realized the show was no longer a funny one and left the doorway, I allowed my gaze to travel over the woman eyeing me in annoyance, her long, red-tipped fingers barely covering her fake breasts. I wanted to stare right back and scoff at her gravity defying breasts and tiny hips, but I didn’t let my eyes stray from hers.
I’d shoved my way into the room, interrupting a private moment, and she had no reason to be embarrassed. I refused to make her even more uncomfortable. She seemed nice enough while she was making Patrick smile, and even though a part of me hated it, she hadn’t done anything to deserve disrespect from me.
Because of those things, I answered her as gently as I could.
“I’m his wife.”
Chapter 1
Amy
All my life I’d been ordinary. Ordinary body: medium sized hips, five-foot-six barefoot, size seven shoes, average breasts—a C-cup on my good days or after a few extra Big Macs. I was neither fat nor skinny, but somewhere in between. Ordinary features: boring brown eyes and a nose a little large for my face, fullish lips, but nothing to write home about, and one of my front teeth was a bit crooked which caused a slight overlap that I hated and, therefore, my smile in every photo from the time I was seven and got my adult teeth was closemouthed.
The only things that stood out about me—not that they were really all that interesting—were the two fingers missing from my left hand and my long black hair. I couldn’t remember ever actually having the fingers, so I never really missed them, and I’d inherited my hair from my dad. I loved it, and kept it really long. I’d never cut it much, just trims every six months to keep it healthy and so I didn’t look like some sort of cult member with hair hanging to my ass. It was shiny and thick and reached just below my bra strap, so I could do anything I wanted with it. French braids, coronets, fancy up-dos, a long, silky ponytail, I’d learned to do it all.
It was one of the only things that I had control over, and it gave me something to hide behind in every new school and new city that we moved to. I’d lived in fifteen different cities by the time I was seventeen, and the most recent was Ballyshannon, Ireland.
We’d moved to the town only a few months before at the beginning of summer, and it was safe to say it was the hardest town to acclimate myself to. I’d lived in America my entire life, but I had dual citizenship in Ireland and the US because my mother was an Irish citizen. She’d gone to school in the United States, met my dad there, and the rest was history.
I’d always known I had dual citizenship, but actually having to use it was beyond belief. I was an American, dammit. It was what I understood, where I was marginally comfortable, where I believed I’d live my entire life.
I’d started at a private, all-girls Catholic school a few weeks before and I still had no idea how I’d ever manage to pass my classes. My teachers’ accents were so thick that I could barely understand them, my peers looked at me like I was a freak any time I spoke, and the way they calculated my credits was completely different than the schools I’d attended back home. It felt like I was going to be stuck in Catholic school hell for the rest of my fucking life.
The only thing I didn’t hate were the uniforms, though the plaid skirt and white blouse uniform felt a little like I was dressing for a porn shoot. It gave everyone a sort of equality—we were all dressing for pornos—that I hadn’t had in my previous schools. It was insane the way fads changed between large schools in the inner cities and small schools in the backwoods. I don’t know how many times I’d gone to school on the first day and looking like a complete weirdo compared to everyone else. Of course, at my new school all I had to do was open my mouth and the freak flag started waving yet again.