Chapter 5
Maniac
Pretty sure Wren could barbecue a flip-flop and it would taste amazing. I wasn’t sure what that woman did when she cooked, but it always turned out incredible.
While I was watching a rerun of Fresh Prince of Bel Air, she appeared at my side holding a plate in my face. “Here,” she grunted.
“Still stewing, I see.” I grabbed the plate from her hand and jack-knifed off the couch. “It’s good to know you stewing doesn’t affect your cooking.”
“If you say I’m stewing one more time, I’m going to dump the rest of the casserole right in your lap.” She stalked back in to the kitchen, but that’s as far as I watched her before the delicious aroma from my plate wafted up to my nose.
I shoveled a fork full into my mouth and moaned. “Holy Mother of God.” How she took a bag of tater tots and turned them into the most delicious thing I had ever tasted was fucking magical.
She started banging pots around, and I glanced over my shoulder. “You’re not gonna eat?”
“Not hungry,” she mumbled.
“Leave the dishes. You know I’ll do them once I’m done.”
She turned on the water. “I got it.”
Christ sake, this woman was going to drive me insane. I had told her fifty million times as long as she cooked, I would do the dishes. Now she suddenly thinks she needs to do them? “Turn off the fucking water and sit the hell down.”
“You say that a lot.”
I set my plate on the coffee table and wiped my hands on my pants. “Say what?”
“Fucking.”
I tilted my head to the side. Maybe I did. Who the hell cares? “That bother you?”
She grabbed the dish soap and squirted a shit ton into the sink filling with water. “No. I don’t know why I said anything.”
“Because it means something.”
“Just forget about it, Maniac.”
I shook my head. This woman was going to drive me fucking insane. “Nothing you say I can forget about.” I sat back down on the couch and rested my elbows on my knees.
She silently did the dishes, while I devoured my plate. “You got any more?” I called.
She was by my side in seconds holding the dish by my head. “Here.” She scraped four big spoonfuls onto my plate. “That enough?”
I looked down at the mountain of tater tots, corn, and hamburger meat. “I guess that’ll do,” I drawled. She had shoveled more onto my plate than she had given me the first time. I would have to say it was more than enough. She was going to make me fat with all of this home cooking.
“I’m gonna head to bed,” she called.
“It’s only six-thirty.”
“And?”
I looked over the back of the couch and watched her pad over to the bed. “Don’t you think it’s a little too early to sleep?”
“I can watch the TV from the bed.” She kicked off her shoes and face-planted onto the bed.
“Something wrong with sitting on the couch?”
“Yeah, you’re on it,” she mumbled into her pillow.
Why that sassy little shit. She was taking stewing over shit to another level. “You ever going to like me, darlin’?”
She rolled over onto her back. “I don’t know you, Maniac. I can’t say if I do or don’t like you.”
“Then come and get to know me.” I patted the couch next to me.
“Pass.”
No matter how I came at her, she threw up her hand and wouldn’t let me pass. “Then I guess I’ll just have to come to you, then.” My plate clattered onto the coffee table, and I catapulted over the couch. My feet hit the floor, and I dove onto the bed before Wren knew to try and run.
“What are you doing?” she screeched.
“Moving the party to you.”
“You and me in bed is not a party.” She scooted to the edge of the bed toward the wall.
I tsked and shook my head. “You’re hurting my feelings, darlin’.” I laid on my side and crept closer to her. I put my hand under my head and stared at Wren. She looked like she had just seen a ghost. I had told her before, I wasn’t going to push her past whatshe could take, but this was different.
She didn’t trust me. The only way for her to start trusting me, was for her to get to know me. I may be a bit rough around the edges, but I didn’t think I was that bad of a guy. “Ask me anything, and I’ll answer.”
“Why are you in bed with me?” Her back was plastered to the wall, and her arms were tucked to her body.
“If you won’t come to me, then I’ll come to you. Next question.” That was an easy one.
“You’re not going to get out of this bed until you’re good and ready, are you?”
I lifted my shoulder and shrugged. “No. Next.”
She rolled her eyes. “How many questions do I need to ask before you move?”
“At least twenty.” Also known as however many it took until she felt more comfortable around me.
“Twenty. Are you going to keep track, or am I?”
“You can, but the last three you asked don’t apply to that number. They need to be questions about me, and nothing else.”
She stared at me and shook her head. “You’re ridiculous. I don’t even understand why you are doing this.”
Not a question, so I didn’t reply.
“Dammit to hell,” she muttered. She sat up and grabbed a pillow. She sat Indian style and crossed her arms over her chest. “What is your favorite color?”
“Lime green.” So easy.
“What kind of name is Maniac?”
I shrugged. “It’s short for pyromaniac.”
“That mean you have a thing for fire, or is there some hidden meaning behind it?”
“Plain and simple, darlin’, I like fire.”
She paused and opened her mouth twice to talk, but nothing came out.
“Cat got your tongue?”
She slightly shook her head. “No, I was just wondering if I could ask you what your real name was.”
“Dalton.”
She tilted her head to the side. “Last name?”
“West.”
She bit her bottom lip.
“That good with you?”
“I guess it doesn’t really matter if I’m good with it. Not like you would change it or anything.”
I laughed and shook my head. “I didn’t like it, so I did change it, darlin’.”
“But you didn’t have a say with Maniac either.”
“It’s fitting, though.”
She nodded her head satisfied. “Sixteen.”
Of course she was counting how many questions she had left. “Eighteen. The name ones counted as one, and the color one was bullshit.”
“You don’t get to tell me if my questions are bullshit. All you said was I had to ask at least twenty questions.”
She may think she was calling the shots on this, but she fucking wasn’t. She wasn’t going to use some filler bullshit questions that didn’t matter. “Eighteen, and not one fucking less.”
She rolled her eyes again, but surprisingly, she didn’t argue. “Where were you born?”
“Here.”
“Here?” she questioned.
“Durham.”
“So people know you here? Know what you are?”
“Not sure what you mean by know what I am.”
She worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “MC?”
“You say MC like it’s a bad thing.”
Her silence told me she did think it was a bad thing.
“The Weston chapter of the Fallen Lords are some of the best guys you will ever meet in your life, Wren. What you saw and had to do with the Hell Captains would never, in a million years, happen with the Fallen Lords. Fuck, that shit wouldn’t fly with any of the MCs I know.”
“But it happens,” she whispered.
“Sure as shit does, darlin’, but it’s that one in one hundred MCs who pull that shit. You walk into some of these clubs and women aren’t allowed to speak unless spoken to, but they still respect women.”
“Not letting me speak doesn’t seem like respectful.”
I shrugged. But those were the rules to some of those clubs, and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about them. When I had decided riding and club life was something I wanted, I had to find the right place to be.
After bouncing from three different clubs, I finally found the Fallen Lords. When I had stepped into the clubhouse, something had just clicked. Brotherhood and loyalty. That was what the Fallen Lords were about. I knew that was what I wanted to be about.
“I can’t speak for or defend other clubs. Just like any profession or whatever, there are bad people, Wren. People who abuse the power they are given.”
She folded her hands in her lap. “Pretty sure that this is something we are going to have to agree to disagree on.”
She would get it through her head. Not now, but eventually, she would. “Next question.”
“You didn’t answer me whether or not people around here know if you are in an MC.”
“They know me, and they know I’m in an MC. You see me flying my colors. I’m not hiding from anyone I’m with the Lords.” Fuck that shit. I had worked hard to become part of something I loved, and I wasn’t afraid to tell anyone about it.
Her gaze fell on the TV behind me. “What about your family?”
“Mom and Dad are both dead. I’m an only child. The Fallen Lords are my family.”
Her eyes darted to mine. “How do you have no family?”
I shook my head. “I have a family, the Lords.”
She waved her hand at me. “No, you know what I mean. Family family.”
“My mom and dad were both only kids, that’s how I don’t have any real family. Or whatever you have in your mind that you think is real family, they’re gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not a damn thing to be sorry about. They were great parents while they were alive, but shit happens and they both died in their forties of heart attacks.”
“Still, has to be hard.”
“Don’t try to go all Freud or feel sorry for me, darlin’. Next fucking question.”
“Is there a reason why you say fucking all this time? No matter what you say, you always seem to sneak a fucking in there.”
A devilish grin spread across my lips. “Sneaking in a good fucking every now and then is never a bad thing.”
She rolled her eyes. “Not what I meant.”
I shrugged and turned back around to face the TV. “I’ve answered this before. It’s just a fucking word. Next damn question.” Since she appeared to not like that I said fucking, you can bet your damn ass I was going to use it all the fucking time now. Fuck, fucking, fuck. Ha.
“Do we really need to keep doing this?”
“Yes, unless you want me to start asking you questions.” The whole point of this was for Wren to get to know me better so she could trust me, but I was more than okay with learning more about her.
She sighed loudly, and then I heard her feet hit the hardwood floor. She shuffled across the floor and stood in front of me. “If I agree to watch TV with you for an hour, can we stop these damn questions?”
“Two hours,” I countered.
“One movie,” she replied.
I patted the bed next to me. “You pick the movie, darlin’. I’m game for whatever as long as it means you’ll not lay awake in the bed all night.”
“This really isn’t fair, because you only have a handful of movies.”
I shrugged. “There are at least ten below the TV. There has to be one you’ll watch.” I didn’t even know what movies were down there. I hadn’t been to the cabin in over ten years. Hell, I didn’t even know if they were going to be DVDs or video cassettes.
She stalked over to the cabinet below the TV and crouched in front of it. “Sweet Jesus, I can’t even remember the last time I saw any of these.” She held one up, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the layer of dust that was on the cover. “Weird Science? Breakfast Club? These are all from the eighties.”
She wasn’t wrong about that. “Don’t you chicks love movies like that?”
“I much prefer my movies to be from at least this decade or the last decade.” She grabbed one in the back and stood up. “This one is at least from the nineties.”
I couldn’t catch a glimpse of the case before she took out the video cassette and put it in the ancient VCR. “What’s your pick?”
She plopped down on the sofa next to me and crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re just going to have to wait and see.”
After I flipped the channel to Aux, I kicked my feet up on the coffee table and prepared myself for whatever chick flick she had just picked out.
The opening credits rolled, and I silently groaned. "Pretty Woman?"
She smirked. “You were the one who told me I could pick the movie.”
“A mistake I won’t make again.” I settled back into the couch at least thankful I had gotten Wren out of the damn bed and sitting next to me. It may not seem like a lot, but it was a pretty damn big deal to me.
One step at a time, I was going to break down the walls Wren had built around herself.
*