Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 63842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Violet dropped a folded bill into the nearest donation box. I did the same with the twenty I’d brought for exactly this purpose and stood at the bar while she flagged down the bartender for my Coke. The man behind the bar was broad-shouldered, tattooed to the throat, with a thick beard. He set my drink down with a nod of acknowledgment and moved on.
I’d positioned myself with my back to the bar, so the room was in front of me, the way I’d noticed Rip and some of the other guys doing.
Speaking of, I heard Rip before I saw him as he spoke to a couple of the guys from the club. He appeared at my left side, putting himself between me and the section of the bar where two men were getting loud about something on the panel of television monitors along the back wall. He stood next to me at a comfortable distance with a bottle of beer in one hand and his gaze moving across the room in that steady, methodical sweep I found reassuring.
“You came,” he said.
“Violet is persuasive,” I said with a small smile.
“You doing OK?”
“Surviving.” I looked down at my soda. “I’ll get there.”
He didn’t push it. That was the thing about Rip, he never pushed. He didn’t need to fill every silence with reassurance or commentary. I think that steady way he had about him transferred to me when he was near. Maybe I trusted him more than I’d realized.
Rip turned and moved down the bar a few feet to talk to Tiny. I watched him out of the corner of my eye while I worked on my soda and watched everyone around me. To my surprise, I’d actually started to relax and enjoy the atmosphere.
The music had settled into something slower. The crowd hadn’t thinned but it had shifted, the energy changing from loud and aggressive to just loud.
I took a drink and the bartender set a fresh Coke on the counter, taking my empty can. Again, he didn’t speak but did nod at me politely.
A heavy, shuffling gait and the kind of laugh that had too much drink behind it came from my right. He stopped close enough that I could smell him, whiskey and cigarettes and the sour tang of liquor sweat underneath both. He was maybe forty-five, heavyset, with a reddened face and small pale eyes that had gone glassy. His cut was from a different club, the patches unfamiliar to me. He looked at me the way certain men look at women, when they’ve had enough to drink that their internal editor has shut down entirely.
“Com’ere, sweet thing,” he said, and grabbed my elbow.
My body did what my body had learned to do when someone grabbed me. I fucking froze. Every muscle seized up at once like a blown circuit. The drink in my hand didn’t move. My lungs pulled in one shallow breath and held it. My mind went very bright and very blank and stayed there, suspended between what was happening and any possible response to it.
Eric had grabbed my elbow like that. Exactly like that. In public, where he knew I couldn’t make a scene, where his grip looked casual to anyone watching but felt like a vise to me. The memory was a visceral, living thing, and I couldn’t have moved if I’d tried. Which, the humiliating truth is, I didn’t try. I never had.
Then Rip was there. I didn’t see him move. One second he was twenty feet away with his back half-turned, and the next, he was between me and the drunk and the drunk’s hand was no longer on my arm, and immediately I could breathe again. Rip had the man’s wrist in his own hand, making a movement that removed the guy’s touch and forced him, stumbling, backward a step. The drunk’s face changed immediately. He tried to hide his wince and couldn’t.
“Hands off,” Rip said. His voice was low. It didn’t carry past the three of us, which somehow made it worse.
The drunk pulled against his grip and cursed, a short ugly word. His face went red and then redder. “The hell you think you are, you --”
Rip tightened his grip. The drunk cut off mid-word, his breath hissing out between his teeth. Rip leaned in and said something directly into the man’s ear. His lips barely moved. I was close enough that I should have been able to hear it, but I couldn’t catch a single word.
Whatever it was, it worked. The drunk’s face went from red to pale in about four seconds. The fight drained out of him and his gaze dropped to the floor and stayed there, and when Rip released his wrist and stepped back, the man didn’t look up. He turned and moved away from the bar without a word, taking a wide route around us toward the far end of the room. He didn’t look back once.