Tiffany…

“Oh my god, you’re kidding me, right? This is going to be an everyday thing?” I looked up at Delia and frowned.

“Why on earth would I joke about something like this?” I asked, handing her the pint of ice cream she’d picked out of the paper grocery sack sitting on my kitchen counter.

“Tiffany Amber Dempsey!” she cried, mouth agape. “I know Dragon is nice to all of us but he’s looking to get laid coming around Sugars, of course, he’s going to be nice to us. He’s still the president of the Sacred Hearts MC, though. They have a reputation around here for a reason. I heard, they once skinned one of their enemies alive and nailed his bloody skin to his family’s front door. They are not nice people and they’re going to want something from you eventually. Something that you’re probably not going to want to give them, and then what?”

“I know they’re not nice people, Lia. That’s totally why I went to them in the first place. In case you hadn’t noticed, Silas isn’t a nice person, either and when it comes right down to it, I happen to know for a fact that it is not ‘better the devil you know’ in this case.”

“So, like, this guy with the scary face tattoos is what? Just going to follow you everywhere you go, and you seriously thought that none of them were going to expect anything out of you in return?”

I shifted slightly and gave her a one-shouldered shrug as I tore the top off of my own ice cream pint. I hadn’t thought of that actually, but the more I thought about it, I had things to trade them. Sex, for starters, if I had to. I already traded sex for money. After going that low, sex for protection was a much better deal. I just hoped that whoever I had to fuck wasn’t into pain. I’d had enough of that for a lifetime, I’ll tell you what.

“It looks like it, so far,” I said.

“Yeah, so far, being the operative words. You didn’t deal with them in explicit terms from the get-go? Girl! Have you not listened to anything I’ve told you?”

“Desperate times called for desperate measures, Lia. Silas is out now and he’s going to come after me. I’m pretty sure he’s already looking.”

She handed me a spoon, her expression grim, the wheels turning behind her pretty green eyes.

She sighed, “This town isn’t that big, but it isn’t exactly small either. I mean, sure, you run into a lot of the same faces, but it’s not like everybody knows everybody else’s name.” She rolled her eyes. “I don’t think he’s going to find you that easy. He’s probably not even looking! I mean, he’s clean now and he’s spent a few years in prison cooling his jets, right?”

I rolled my eyes and took the spoon she held out, cramming it into the top of my ice cream and putting some into my mouth. Speaking around it, I said, “Do you have any idea how far you’re reaching with that shit?” I asked, swallowing the sweet, creamy goodness.

“Yeah, no, you’re right. Silas was a douche. He’s still probably a douche. You know what they say about guys who go to prison.” She sighed and her shoulders dropped. She turned lightly and went into the main area of my studio and dropped onto the edge of my bed like a giant sack of potatoes.

I went around the dividing island of my kitchen and dropped down next to her just as heavily.

“Actually, I don’t,” I said honestly.

She rolled her eyes at me and sucked on the spoonful of ice cream she put in her mouth. I waited for her to finish her mouthful and spill while I ate some more of my own deliciousness. I would need it to sit through the Hallmark channel movie Lia was about to make me suffer through.

“They come out the exact same way they went in, at least personality-wise. It’s like prison is some kind of time warp that holds them in stasis. I knew a guy that went in at seventeen for armed robbery, tried as an adult. Do not pass go, no stint in juvie, he went directly to the big boy's prison.”

“And?” I asked.

“Spent the entire five years of his sentence inside, came out at something like twenty-three and I swear to god, he didn’t mature at all in there. Like he looked older, and fantastic actually. Was ripped all to hell and had a set of abs to die for but he was still a seventeen-year-old kid. He learned nothing in there that he could use out here.”

“What happened to him?”

“Rare success story. He started working for a junkyard pulling apart cars, became a mechanic and stayed out of trouble.”

I gave her a look and she rolled her eyes at me again, “I didn’t say that was going to be Silas!” Her exasperation made me smile, which I hid behind my pint of ice cream as I took another bite.

It totally wouldn’t be. It’d be nice, but he was hell-bent on killing me when he got put away and I seriously couldn’t picture him doing anything but seething over it for the last three years. I wished they’d kept him for his full sentence. If they had, I would have been long gone, someplace he never would have been able to find me. Probably with a different name, too, though not by marriage. I couldn’t picture anybody wanting a washed-up whore.

“Hey, whatever you’re thinking, stop it,” Lia said gently and I looked over at her.

“What?”

“I hate it when you get that look,” she answered.

“What look?”

“Defeated. Like someone just kicked your favorite puppy to death in front of you and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”

I took a deep breath and let it out harshly, looking at my friend pointedly. She frowned at me and it was her turn to ask, “What?”

“I can do something about this,” I said evenly. “And I did.”

She scowled at me and said, “And I still think it’s a big mistake. You didn’t grow up around here, Tiff. You don’t know what kind of men they are.”

“Sometimes you just have to make a leap of faith,” I said with a shrug. “Trust your instincts.”

“Like you did when you got involved with Silas in the first place?” she asked me flatly.

Ouch. Low blow. Real low blow.

“I don’t want to fight about this,” I said and she sighed. She knew she’d fucked up. It was written all over her face.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized immediately. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, you shouldn’t have.” I picked up the remote and turned on my little TV, picked up the other and switched on the DVD player. “Just watch your movie,” I said and tried not to let my anger get the best of me.

It was a tense showing of The Christmas Wish, and I couldn’t say the mood improved much after.

“I’m really worried about you,” she said as her parting shot when she left that night.

“Me, too,” was all I could say to the scarred wood of my apartment door as I threw all the bolts and chains along its edge behind her.

We would be okay. Her heart was in the right place. I just needed to be mad for a while until I sorted out some more of the ugly inside my head.

So far neither Dragon nor Zeb had asked anything from me, but that didn’t mean I didn’t owe them. I was just hoping that when it came time to pay my dues, it wouldn’t hurt as much, if not more, than whatever Silas would do to me.

Rock, hi, I’m Tiff. Nice to meet you, too, Hard Place.