“Keep your hands to yourself.” What I wanted to say to him was that if he touched me again, I’d cut off his fucking fingers and shove them down his throat.
He looked at me and then at his friends, who were laughing at his clear misfortune. I’d embarrassed him. I could tell by how red his face became, how he narrowed his eyes at me and clenched his jaw. But fuck him. I didn’t care.
I walked back to the bar, but still I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I’d felt it as soon as I stepped out of the backroom, as if someone watched me intently. This wasn’t the same attention as a drunkard staring at me. No, this felt different. This felt more intense, more consuming.
I set my tray down and looked over my shoulder, scanning the interior of the bar. As bars went, it was pretty standard, with sticky, scuffed-up floors, a weird, stale smell in the air, and just an overall rundown appearance. The decor went as far as having old-ass license plates nailed up on the walls.
As I continued to scan the room, nothing stood out to me right away, and I couldn’t see anyone staring at me. But still, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was being watched. I always went with my instincts. They’d saved me more times than I could count. They’d been the reason I left the shitty riser I’d called home in the middle of the night, because my worthless and neglectful drug addict of a mom’s boyfriend—Henry—had been throwing up red flags in my direction.
The way he looked at me, brushed up against me, had my stomach clenching in disgust, had bile rising in my throat.
It would have only been a matter of time before he came into my room and took what he wanted.
At nineteen, it wasn’t like I had a whole lot of money, not with working part-time as a waitress at the diner in town—the one that made this bar look like the damn Ritz. And so that’s why I did what I had to do. That’s why I’d stolen from Henry to make sure I had the funds to escape.
I knew he kept a stack of cash in a coffee can in the freezer. He either thought we were too stupid to know or he watched too many action movies. Either way, I knew. So I’d left when they’d been passed out, needle in my mom’s arm, a mirror on the coffee table with coke residue smeared across it.
I’d wanted to have that relationship with my mother in which I could confide in her, but to be honest, I was surprised I’d survived as long as I had under her care.
I’d been nothing more than a means to an end, a broken condom, as she so eloquently put it. I’d been stuck in a shit life, and I’d been tired of it. Just a shame the circumstances had been the way they’d been.
So here I was, finding myself in some little rundown town hundreds of miles away from the only place I’d ever called home. I’d thought twice about staying. It was clearly run by criminals, an MC that had an iron fist where everything was concerned. But then I realized this was the best place for me to be, to hide… to be out in the open but camouflaged by the filthy scum of the world.
I closed my eyes and breathed out slowly. Maybe I wasn’t being watched. Maybe it was all in my head, a paranoid feeling, because I was on the run, expecting to be found at any moment.
And this job? This barmaid who got paid under the table despite having filled out an application for “paper trail” reasons, per the owner, was just trying to stay out of trouble and save some money to move to the next place.
But no matter how hard I tried, the feeling of being watched was heavy and thick, like honey over my skin, but not sweet. It was a bitter feeling, this cold sensation that wrapped its icy hands around my heart and squeezed that organ tight until I felt all the blood leave me.
My heart started racing, beads of sweat coating my palms and the length of my spine.
I knew Henry would eventually find me. Although he was a scumbag, I knew he had connections. I’d overheard him talking plenty of times. I was, after all, just the daughter of the junkie he was fucking. I didn’t know if he had ties with the mob, gangs, or maybe another MC. But whatever it was, he’d find me.
So this was a temporary home, a temporary solution. Maybe if I hadn’t stolen the money he would’ve left me alone. Maybe not. It didn’t matter now.