I waved at a few of them while they worked on super fly cars as I made my way into the office.
“Mornin’, Queenie,” Nova greeted me as he leaned over the front desk talking to a gorgeous woman with big, curled black hair and a va-va-voom body that put my elfin form to shame.
“Ah, so you’re the famous teacher,” she drawled with an insincere smile. “Heard the Garro men are stickin’ their necks out for ya.”
Nova snorted. “Don’t think it’s any skin off the Prez’s back to pretend to be datin’ a woman as fine as Queenie.”
Her eyes studied me from head to toe but she remained unsatisfied. I had the feeling she wanted to stare at me under a microscope until she could identify every single strand of my flawed DNA. Of course, I didn’t think someone like her would know how to use a microscope even if she had one, so I didn’t worry about it too much.
“Just came to drop off some cookies for you hardworking biker boys.” I put the big Tupperware on the desk and evaded Nova’s arm as it lassoed out to catch me around the waist.
In the last week, he’d been caught being too familiar with me by both King and other brothers but even after King had threatened him with castration, Nova didn’t seemed to be fazed. So, I was careful around him even though I knew he was harmless.
“Names Paula,” the awful woman from behind the front desk told me with a saccharine smile. “I’m a real good friend of King’s.”
Violence ignited in my belly, great gusts of hatred billowing up my throat tasting like ash in my mouth.
“Name’s Cressida,” I mimicked her with an equally sweet smile. “I’m King’s old lady.”
Her lips thinned instantly and she turned to Nova as if he’d betrayed her. “She’s what?”
The biker shrugged, rolling an unlit cigarette between his pink, pink lips. “You heard ‘er.”
“The fuck?” she asked.
“We do,” I agreed, nodding somberly. “A lot.”
Nova burst out laughing but Paula turned beet red. I decided to cut out while I was ahead and waved at the biker as I turned to leave.
“Can’t wait to see you at the party this weekend, Queenie,” Paula sneered at my back. “We can really get to know each other then.”
I let the glass door shut with a slam behind me and made my way over to Bat, who was working alone on a bike out front. We spoke while I surreptitiously kept an eye on the side wrought iron fire escape that led up to Zeus’s loft-like office overlooking the garage bays from inside the massive warehouse.
Bat was a good guy. He was married to a ‘Grade A bitch’ (according to Harleigh Rose who was my biker life encyclopedia) but he loved his twin boys more than anything and he talked about them all the time. I was going to meet them at the BBQ and I couldn’t wait because they sounded like badass bikers in the making. He entertained me with stories about their antics on the weekend, how they’d stolen a poor neighbor’s bike, painted it with chrome paint they’d begged their dad to bring home from the shop, and tricked it out with a bell shaped like a skull, and then they’d anonymously put it back in the kid’s yard.
My heart melted into a puddle.
So, I was in a good mood when I heard King call my name from across the asphalt.
I wouldn’t be when I turned around to see him standing beside a little white Honda Civic with a black hood.
“Like it?” he shouted when my gaze landed on it.
“Um, sure?”
Bat chuckled as he stood up and wiped his hands on the rag he kept in his back pocket. “Queenie, it’s your car.”
“No,” I said slowly. “My car is a dirty white Honda Civic from 1989.”
“Get your sweet ass over here, babe,” King called again, his body halfway in the driver’s seat with his torso hanging over the opened door.
Reluctantly, I made my way across the lot as most of the men abandoned whatever work they were doing to step into the spring sunshine and watch the unfolding drama.
And I was fairly sure the situation that was unfolding would involve drama because I was not happy.
King didn’t seem to pick up on that as he jumped off the car and rounded the hood; already talking about what he’d done to the car, how he’d modified it so it could go from zero to sixty in under thirty seconds, that he’d added a sunroof but also updated the A/C so it would actually work and how he’d put seat warmers in so I wouldn’t be cold on the drive to school in the winters.
It was badass biker sweet again, which was too bad because I needed to say what I needed to say and he was most definitely not going to be happy about.