Page 7 of King
Chapter 3
Ella
I was still shaking when I opened the back door and slipped into my kitchen. I was mortified that I’d pulled a knife on someone – let alone Pop’s son – but I’d never dreamed he had been talking aboutmelike that. I was mortified about that, too.
Once he got over his shock at finding himself on the business end of a filet knife, he’d probably been unpleasantly surprised to see me up close. I knew a man like him had his pick of hot, young things, and I doubted I was the kind of woman he would normally look twice at.
I recalled my conversation with Michelle, who was dating Pop’s widowed son-in-law, Cowboy. She and Cowboy had been visiting Pop, and she had expressed an interest in the jams and jellies I made and canned. Pop had sent her next door to talk to me about buying some.
Michelle and I had hit it off right away. She was a couple of years older than me and was the principal at the school that Jagger’s wife, Molly, worked at. We’d spent almost an hour chatting over coffee while she sampled the various flavors I had available. During that time, she’d given me the scoop on life at the clubhouse, including the women they referred to as “club bunnies and hangarounds”.I’d been mildly appalled, always assuming that the TV shows and books about bikers wereexaggerating about the lifestyle. It turns out they were not, at least not when it came to their sex lives.
While I knew I looked good for my age and was fairly comfortable in my own skin, I was not a twenty-something woman with a taut, toned body and flawless skin. From a distance I probably passed as younger – at least based on what I’d heard King saying about me - but face to face with me in Pop’s living room, there was no disguising the fact that I had a few more crow’s feet and laugh lines than I was sure King was used to seeing.
I doubted the women at the clubhouse had to have their roots touched up every eight weeks either, to keep the gray hair at bay. I also doubted they carried a pair of tweezers in their purses just in case they discovered a random chin hair while they were out and about.
Yeah, that had been a shocking realization shortly after my thirty-sixth birthday. I had just dropped Mia off at a friend’s house when I’d idly scratched an itch on my chin and made that startling discovery while waiting at a stoplight. I’d been staring with horrified disbelief into the tiny mirror on my car’s sun visor when the car behind me had honked to let me know the light had turned green. I had immediately stopped at the Walgreens on the next block to buy tweezers and spent the next five minutes sitting in the parking lot plucking my chin and cursing the universe.
I didn’t want to dwell on that memory, or on any of my other shortcomings – real or imagined – any longer. I grabbed my purse from the kitchen table and headed out the side door leading to the garage. I tried to focus on the list of things that I needed to pick up at the grocery, so that I didn’t have to think about chin hairs, wrinkles, or looking like a crazy woman in front of Pop and his family.
It didn’t take long to pick up bags of chips for my son and a couple of his football buddies, along with the makings for homemade pizzas. Those were always a hit with the guys from the team, most of whom acted like they’d never been fed whenever they came to my house. I added a tub of my favorite butter pecan ice cream to the shopping cart, just for the hell of it. I deserved it after the day I’d had.
Hunter and his friends pulled into the driveway just seconds after I parked my car in the garage, and to their credit, each of them grabbed a bag of groceries and carried it in without being prompted.
Thirty minutes later, I had pizza dough rising in a covered bowl, and three hungry seventeen-year-olds inhaling chips and homemade salsa as if they hadn’t eaten in days. While I waited for the dough to rise, I ran upstairs to my bedroom to call Camille, needing to share the afternoon’s drama and my embarrassment with my best friend.
Camille and I had met on our first day of college, when we’d been assigned as roommates in the freshman dorm and had been best friends ever since. She and Clayton had never really been close, but in the beginning at least, both had made an effort to get along. As time went on, that amicable façade had crumbled, especially on Clayton’s part. He’d started making disparaging comments about her, which had been the source of a number of arguments between us. Once I’d filed for divorce, the two had dropped all pretense, and didn’t even try to be civil to each other on the rare occasions they’d crossed paths.
I slipped my phone out of my back pocket then flopped down onto my bed, making myself comfortable on my pillow as I waited for the call to connect.
“Hey, hon, what’s up?”
I barely let her get her greeting out of the way before I launched into the story. “I made
a complete ass of myself with Pop’s son today.”
“The hunky silver fox?”
I groaned, deeply regretting telling her about the photos I’d seen of King. “Yep, that’s the one.
I pulled a knife on him,” I confessed quietly, and she screeched in my ear before I could say another word.
“You didwhat?Why? What did he do to you?”
I winced as I pulled the phone away from my ear. Jesus Christ, that woman could reach an octave that would shatter glass when she was upset. I groaned as I admitted, “He didn’t do anything to me. I heard him say something and totally misunderstood the situation, so I pulled a knife on him.”
“Where the hell did you get a knife, El?”
“Well, it wasn’t like a switchblade or anything, for God’s sake. It was a filet knife, and I sort of threatened to butterfly his dick with it.”
“Um,” Camille hesitated, then snickered. “OK, you’re going to have to start at the beginning.”
I told her what had happened, word for word, cringing as I relived the second most humiliating experience of my life. Since I’d actually walked in on my then-husband in our bed, balls-deep in a woman half our age, I figured that said a lot about how mortifying this afternoon had been for me.
“So, then I told him I’d split his cock down the middle, and he’d be pissing in two different directions for the rest of his life.”
Camille, being the exceptionally good friend she was, didn’t bother hiding her laughter. “As a nurse, I can tell you that the male anatomy doesn’t actually work that way if you slice the urethra, hon, but I suppose you got your point across, no pun intended,” she said between bouts of uncontrollable giggles.
I had to admit that my threat was pretty absurd, but King had seemed to take it seriously.
