It hurt like a motherfucker. I'm not signing up to get that bitch ripped out of me anytime soon.

And maybe, being a bit of a hardass himself, he could appreciate my prickly personality, could take my sarcastic jabs without getting offended.

Occasionally, when he bought me some drinks when the front liquor store part of the establishment closed, he would usher me to the back where it was cleared out except for the bartender breaking down for the night, and I would soften up a bit, I would prove that there was, in fact, something squishy, soft, vulnerable under all my quills.

Decent guys like Meryl would see those glimpses and figure there must be a good reason for all the times I stabbed him. And everyone else.

"Are you guys going to start selling pot when they legalize it?" one of our regulars, Ben, asked as he waited in the store, waiting for the bar to officially open at five.

When. Not if.

The election wasn't even over yet, and he decided who won and how fast the previously Schedule 1 drug, pegged as bad as heroin because that shit made any sense, was going to get in stores.

"Hear it will cost twenty-grand for the license," Meryl offered, not surprising me. His liquor store slash bar might have been a bit of a shithole in a crappy area of town, but for all intents and purposes, Meryl had some decent business sense. Pot would sell. Of course he looked into it.

"It'd pay for itself in a year, I'd bet." Ben looked over at me, head tilted to the side. "You smoke?" he asked, clearly not meaning cigarettes given the line of conversation, and also the endless shit I gave him every time he bought a pack of them.

"Not anymore."

He wasn't the least bit surprised by that admission. If there was any surprise at all, it was over the fact that I no longer did.

You got that bad girl vibe.

That was what he told me my first night on the job.

To be fair, he wasn't wrong, even if he maybe meant it sexually.

I didn't take shit, and I wore that fact on the sleeve of my (faux leather) motorcycle jacket that I never took off. My expressions were firmly set in 'bitch face.' And everything about me was 24/7 broadcasting 'fuck off.'

I would tell you that it was just a mask, a work persona given that I was surrounded by drunk, grab-assing dickheads every night of the week. But that would just be a lie.

I was about as warm as the Abominable Snowman's cock.

"Switch to something harder?" he pressed.

Maybe I should have been insulted that he thought I was a drug addict. But this was Navesink Bank, the shitty side. Girls didn't tend to work - or live - in this area unless they had too many kids and too little income, or were shooting some poison or another into their veins.

I let my smile be about as charming as that of a snake. "Me? Cheating on Johnny, Jim, and Jose? You should know better."

The regulars had learned when Meryl insisted we close the store early to bring me in the bar on my birthday for shots, that I was a woman who could handle her liquor. And copious amounts of it too. When the mood struck, I could drink any one of them under the table. It wasn't a vice I allowed often, but it did happen.

"You gonna drink with us tonight, Lenny?" he asked, excited about the prospect maybe because I once got wasted enough to strip down to my bra when I accidentally spilled an entire twenty-ounce mug of scalding coffee down my shirt. When it came to risking third-degree burns or modesty, modesty would lose every time. Even in a bar full of guys just as drunk as I was.

Living in a shitty area as long as I had, you learn to do risk assessment in the blink of an eye. Is the guy following you doing it because he plans to grab you, drag you away, and rape you, or are you walking past his car? Is that shuffling sound outside your door just some jackass crawling home at four AM, or is it someone trying to break in to steal what little you have of worth? Are the guys at the bar going to go The Accused on you because you took off your shirt, or are they going to ogle because, well, tits, but keep their hands to themselves because they know you, you know them, and because they know that you know them, they know that you are fully capable and cold-blooded enough to light their pubic hair on fire if they ever so much as touched you.

"Not tonight," I told him as I grabbed a switchblade out of my boot - something we weren't allowed to have in the store for some kind of safety regulation, forcing me to bring my own - to cut open the Newports box Meryl dropped down on the counter with a pointed brow raise because he had to get it out of the stock room himself.

Tags: Jessica Gadziala Henchmen MC Erotic
Source: readsnovelonline.net