Reading Online Novel

Craving Molly(55)



She couldn’t have stunned me more if she’d reached across the table and punched me in the face. And the way her words came so easily, like she was talking about the weather, made it that much worse. She wasn’t trying to convince me. She didn’t need to. Because she was completely confident that Molly was done with me.

It was what I’d wanted, wasn’t it?

I sat there silently, seeing nothing as Mel asked Rock to take her home. I didn’t move when they got up from the table, and I didn’t acknowledge Rock when he cuffed my shoulder as they walked away. I’d wanted to be done with Molly. It was for the best. We weren’t working.

Except that we had been. We’d worked. Shit had been easy with us. No drama, no games.

As I sat there at the table, I realized that somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d convinced myself that if I could find a way to have the club and Molly, I’d get her back. She loved me. She hadn’t said it, but I knew she did. I hadn’t really let myself believe that what I was doing was final.

The chair across from me screeched across the floor and I glanced up to find Poet, the former vice-president of the club, sitting down across from me. The guy was grizzled as shit and had given up his seat when the old president, Slider, had died in the shooting at our barbeque. He’d said he just didn’t want the title without his best friend at the helm. We’d all understood it. He stuck around, though, still part of the club. Hell, his daughter was married to the current president, so it wasn’t as if he’d have gone far anyway.

“You okay, boyo?” he asked gruffly, leaning forward on his elbows.#p#分页标题#e#

“Probably not,” I said derisively.

“Woman troubles, eh?”

“I fucked up.”

“We all fuck up,” he said with a laugh. His face lost all humor when I didn’t crack a smile. “Well, it can’t be as bad as all that.”

I said nothing, just held his eyes across the table.

“I think we need a drink,” he said confidently, lifting up his arm and waving it from side to side to get the bartender’s attention. In just a few minutes, the brunette from the bar was setting two shot glasses on the table with a bottle of expensive whiskey that only Poet bothered with. “Thank you,” Poet said politely.

At any other time, I would have laughed at his good manners, but I didn’t then.

After he’d poured our first shots and we’d knocked them back, Poet began to speak. “You’ve probably heard my story, eh?” he said, pouring more whiskey into our glasses. “It’s a bit of a tale now, getting passed on like a game of telephone since you were a babe.”

“I’ve heard pieces,” I said quietly, taking another shot.

“Ah, well, then. You probably haven’t heard the best and worst parts.” He took his shot, immediately filling the glasses again, and began to tell his story. Halfway through telling me about his life in Ireland before he’d come to the US, his wife, Amy, came and wrapped her arm around his shoulders. She didn’t protest as he pulled her down onto his knee and continued speaking, and soon, both of them were telling me the story from their own points of view.

Because it wasn’t just Poet’s story. It was Amy’s, too. Even though they’d been apart for thirty years of their marriage, the story very much belonged to both of them. I tried not to cringe as they described their flight from Ireland and all the things that had gone wrong, but I took two shots as Amy quietly glossed over her time in Ireland after Patrick had left. That’s what she called Poet—Patrick. And the way she said it made her sound like the teenager she’d once been.

I didn’t make it to the end of the story, even though I wanted to know what happened. Unfortunately, the whiskey and exhaustion worked against me, and I found myself passing out with my face pressed against the sticky table. There was probably a lesson in that long tale somewhere. Poet didn’t tell stories without a reason, but I had no idea what wisdom he’d been trying to impart.

* * *

“Jesus,” I groaned at some point the next day, lifting my head from the bed in my room at the clubhouse. I shivered and pulled at the blanket I was laying on until I could wrap it around my shoulders.

I still had my cut on, but someone had pulled my boots off my feet when they’d helped me into the room. I closed my eyes and tried to remember who’d moved me, but the night was a blank slate after I’d laid my head down on the table while listening to Poet discuss his first years at the club. A couple of the boys must have carried me in, I decided. If a woman had helped me, she would have at least covered me with a blanket. It was cold as fuck in my room.