“Your mother misses you.”
That was a low blow, but I swallowed hard and clenched my fingers through the chain-link, refusing to respond. It didn’t stop her face from popping up in my head, of course. Wavy brown hair covered her shoulders, and her bright smile made me feel loved and wanted.
Ultimately, she still took his side.
Michael stepped a few feet away from me and smoothed out his hair.
“Fuck her, too,” I muttered under my breath. I didn’t think Michael actually heard me, though. Even after all this time, I felt like shit for saying it and wanted to take it back.
“Ryan says hello.” It was a slightly better topic.
“Haven’t seen him in a while.” My cousin was a big-ass motherfucker. He would have made a great fighter, but he went into the family business with the rest of them. No room for that kind of shit in his life. Michael wasn’t actually his father. He had married a woman about fifteen years older than he was, and she came with a son. It was cool though, because up until then, I had been the only kid my age in the family.
Ryan and Michael were the only ones I still talked to at all.
“He’s been pretty busy,” Michael said. “Did he tell you he was going to marry Amanda?”
“I figured,” I said, feeling myself tense up a bit.
“Well, she’s planning the wedding to end all weddings, apparently.”
“There’s a shock,” I snorted.
Michael laughed, which quickly turned into a sigh.
“Not going to change your mind?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“Not this year,” I replied. “I don’t see ‘daddy dearest’ making the trek down here to talk to me. What makes him think I’m going to take the fucking subway all the way over to his office? He can park the fucking Porsche back here and come have a beer if he cares so much.”
“Liam…”
“You done?” I snapped.
“I guess so,” he said. He let out another long breath. “It was good to see you.”
“You, too.” I didn’t turn around and watch him walk back inside. His appearance brought up too many shitty memories, and though I did love my uncle, his presence left me feeling uneasy.
After a few more cigarettes, I tossed the last butt toward the street and headed back inside for a bit. It wasn’t long before I determined getting laid was not going to happen, given my mood and the general lack of teeth in the mouths of some of the patrons still left at Feet First come closing time. I untangled myself from one of the hornier ones by telling her I had to take a piss, went back to the locker room to grab my gym bag, and headed out the back door. Once outside, I dropped the bag, fished around for my pack of Marlboros, and lit one.
A lone car crawled by, momentarily obscuring my view of the drunk-fest that was still going on across the street. They were pretty fucking loud, which was disturbing my final smoke of the evening before walking home. Usually this was my peaceful time, the only real quiet of the night I would get before returning home and trying to sleep through the car alarms and gunshots. At least the idiots who used to fight at all hours of the night in the apartment below me finally moved out. Maybe they were evicted. Whatever it was, I didn’t have to listen to that shit anymore.
A chilly breeze blew down the street, bringing some of the more glorious scents up into the air and cooling my skin. I tossed the cigarette butt through the holes in the fence and into the gutter with the rest of the trash and then went back to the door to retrieve my shirt from my gym bag.
The trip-trapping sound of women’s shoes on pavement caused me to look up, and I watched a young woman come into view as she passed the dumpsters at the back of the bar. She walked quickly with her head down and a purse with a lengthy strap over her shoulder. Her long, brown hair was tied up in a ponytail at the top of her head, and she wore a pair of short-shorts, which showed off her long legs, and a tight T-shirt with the name across her chest of the bar and grill a few blocks down. I figured she was maybe five-foot-four and a hundred and fifteen pounds because I tended to size people up that way. Nice build, nice tits. She didn’t look over at me at all, just kept up her quick pace down the street with her eyes on her feet.
My first thought was fucking gorgeous.
My second thought was fucking stupid.
Who walked around this area of town in the middle of the night by themselves? I mean, yeah—I did—but I wasn’t a very easy target. She might as well have had a sign on her back that said “mug me”. I shook my head and went back to rummaging around in my bag. When I looked up again, the sound of her sho
es was beginning to fade, but that wasn’t what caught my attention.
The guys across the street who had been sitting and drinking had gone quiet and were now all standing up with their heads close to one another. The guy with greasy, shoulder length, black hair turned his head to look down the street in the direction the girl was walking and then nodded before he and a guy with a backwards baseball cap took off down the side alley that ran perpendicular to the street they were on.
I’d lived in that area a couple of years, and I knew that alley intersected with another alley, which then met up with a walkway between two of the abandoned warehouses, and dumped out onto this street a couple blocks down. The last two guys in the group were heavyset with unkempt dirty blond hair. They looked like they might have been brothers. They quickly abandoned the bottle-in-a-bag and started walking quietly but quickly in the same direction the girl was going, pulling the hoodies up over their heads as they walked.
Their intent was obvious.