Wicked Company

Chapter Thirty-Six

"What do you say?"

What do I say? What do I want? Do I want this? Okay, that was a stupid question, of course I do. But how do I even do this?

Tucker smirked down at me. "I can see you overthinking about this," he joked.

I huffed a half-assed smile, my body shivering under the uncertainty looming so heavily above. Did I like Tucker? A hell of a fucking lot. Did I want to be with him? Yes. See a future with him? Absolutely. But even knowing all of that, knowing that just an hour before, I was screaming at him to be honest with me, yet my body still fought to run. The absolute terror of the unknown was a splintering weight that was suffocating me too quickly to recover.

I took a step back, unable to meet his eyes. I kept my gaze locked on the ground and continued my retreat, flinching when my ass jabbed against the set of countertops against the wall. I fumbled blindly with the surrounding area until, eventually, I found the door.

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"You're a fucking idiot, D." Eli berated me with judgment in his eyes, uncapping the bottle of beer and sliding it forward on the bar's top.

I took a swig before responding, knowing full well I couldn't disagree with him. Anyone could see he was right.

"You asked him to be honest, and he was. And you took that brutal honesty, spit on it, then you turned and shoved it up his-"

"Alright, alright! I get it. I'm an idiot. I already know that. I got in my own head and it fucked me up one side and down the other. I know."

I reached for my drink, death gripping the neck of the bottle for a moment, then sighed, spinning it against the woodgrain. I watched the liquid through the dark glass, followed its swirling movements, waiting for the beer to settle back into place. Eli tapped his palm against the counter, disappearing for a moment to lock the club's doors before sliding onto the stool next to mine.

"Dani, why are you here?"

I lifted my brows in sarcasm, lifting my drink to remind him it was there.

"Okay, then I'm heading upstairs. You know where the cooler is. Help yourself." He slid from his seat, but I grabbed his arm before he could walk away.

"Wait, I'm fucking terrified, alright? My parents, they disowned me when I was fourteen. They kicked me out and haven't spoken to me since. Apparently being bi is the end of the road with them. And it's fine, you know? It's cool. The two people programmed to love me and I still wasn't worthy of it? But if you have parents like that, then who needs parents, right?" I forced a smile, ignoring my shaky hands and reaching for my beer, inhaling its scent before taking a sip to keep my head on straight.

"Zio - my uncle - I lived with him for a while, but he died about two years ago now, and I just... look, I don't know, okay? It fucking hurt. It's easy to sit here and say 'fuck my parents'. It's easy to say that in words. But then when Zio died, I was all alone. Like really, really alone. The one person who loved me for me and he left. Obviously not the way my parents did, but he still left. So I just got used to being alone, you know? It's so much easier that way. It took everything I had to keep going when I lost him, and it was so much easier to let my anger take over. So I did what I needed to do to make sure my uncle didn't die for nothing. I wanted to make sure it didn't happen to anyone else if I could help it."

I strummed my fingers along the near-empty bottle, Eli silently moving beside me to step back behind the bar and replace it. I watched the vapor rise from the top of the new bottle, focusing on its path before jumping back to my confession.