All the Sky (6 page)

She was hot, no mistake. Tonight she was wearing another of those flowy tops, but this one left her arms and shoulders bare, just strings for straps. Those collarbones. Damn. She’d lifted her head high during one song, holding a plaintive note, and he’d had a sudden, powerful image of sucking on those sleek lines across her shoulders.

He’d shaken it off fast; he did
not
fuck chicks off the roster. But he’d been uncomfortable in his jeans for awhile afterwards.

She was looking at him like he was supposed to do something.

“What?”

“You owe me eighty bucks.”

Fuck. Right. And he’d already made out the fucking deposit. Awesome.

As he yanked open the zipper on the deposit bag, she said, “You really suck at tending bar, you know. You suck impressively.”

He peeled four twenties off the stack. “Like you could do better?”

“Actually, yeah. I’ve got a lot of experience behind the bar.”

He held out the money, and she walked to the front of the desk. She had a look he didn’t get at first. He was good at reading people, though, and he had it pretty fast, so he wasn’t surprised by what she said next.

“Looks like you need some help. I’m available, could start right away.” She took the bills he’d been holding out.

She was playing it cool, but Havoc could see a hunger in her eyes. He’d be a fucking fool to hire somebody without a full check first—not that a check had turned up anything on Larry Bellen. Still, after that fuckup, he knew he should be extra careful with new hires. And he’d be going on nothing but her word that she even knew the job like she said she did.

But the weekend loomed, and the thought of spending the whole of both Friday and Saturday nights away from the clubhouse and Tuck’s, missing out on the best parts of his life—he couldn’t deal. He’d go fucking nuclear.

“You bein’ straight you can do this job?”

She smiled—it was the first time he’d seen her smile like that, with her whole face. She really was hot. More than that—beautiful. “Sure. Better than you, that’s no lie. I make a mean dirty martini, and I know wine okay. I’d want to study up, but I can fake it in the meantime. Most people around here don’t know nearly as much about wine as they want you to think they do.”

That sounded convincing. Convincing enough. Havoc opened drawers, looking for the paperwork. One thing he was going to do right was get her info and have Dom do his thing.

He finally found the blank applications in a file drawer behind the desk. “Okay, what the hell. Here. Fill this out. You can start tomorrow—Bonnie’s on, and she can walk you through. You two are friends, right?”

The chick—he guessed he should learn her name now—nodded. “Yeah, a little. She’s cool.” As she took the blank form, she held out her right hand.

She wanted to shake. He hesitated, looking at the hand hovering over the desk—small, with a big silver ring on the index finger and a delicate flower tattoo inside the wrist. After a beat, he clasped her hand in his, and they shook.

Still beaming at him with that bright smile, she said, “Corinne Hawes. You can call me Cory. And thanks.”

“Welcome.” Havoc met her eyes—brilliantly blue. Yep, beautiful.

He did not fuck chicks off the roster, he reminded himself.

But there wasn’t any harm in looking.

CHAPTER FOUR

Cory and Nolan followed Bonnie around to her back yard. It wasn’t much of a yard, actually. More of a scrubby patch behind her double-wide mobile home. As far as Cory was concerned, though, it was the fucking Jardin des Tuileries.

Bonnie led them back to an aged Winnebago. As she unlocked the door, she said, “It’s not much, but I aired it out. The water and propane is full, and there’s power. No A/C, though. Sorry about that.”

She pulled out the steps and climbed up. Cory followed, then Nolan. It looked exactly like the old motor home it was—dark, faux wood paneling, velveteen settee and banquette, a small kitchenette, microscopic bathroom, and a bedroom at the back. There was a bunk over the cab, which would provide Nolan with a sliver of privacy.

“This is so great of you, Bonnie, really. I don’t know how to thank you.”

Bonnie waved the thanks away. “Please. It’s nothing. It’s just sittin’ back here, and it’s hardly cushy digs.”

Seeing as they were a day from sleeping in the Beast, these were the cushiest digs Cory had ever seen. She turned and looked at Nolan, who was sitting in the velveteen driver’s seat with his hands on the wheel. “Okay, kiddo?”

He turned to her with a grin. “So much better than okay.”

Bonnie laughed and handed over the key. “Well, that’s excellent. I’ll let you get settled, and then come on into the house. I got a big plate of leftover fried chicken and a 12-pack of beer”—she looked over at Nolan—“and some soda, too.”

She scooted past Cory and went back outside.

When they were alone, Cory sat on the little settee, behind Nolan in the driver’s seat. “This is just until I can save up enough for rent and deposit on a place. I’m going to keep this job.” Nolan smiled a little, looking down at the floor, and Cory knew he didn’t believe her. No reason he should. “I am, Nolan. This is as far as we fall.”

She had some money saved. Living rent-free with Lindsay and Alex had allowed her some room—not much, what with not having a steady job that whole year, but some room. If not for the credit card debt she and Matt had accrued from those frequent months when they’d had to pay the Visa with the Visa, and which she alone was still climbing out from under, she might have been able to have built a nest egg and get them into their own place.

There still would have been the problem of the job, though.

But she finally had steady work again. And she was going to keep this one. She was. Valhalla Vin did a good business, and people knew her there. She could do her shifts behind the bar, and still gig there on Thursday nights, and she’d been able to keep two of her other gigs around the region. It was going to leave Nolan on his own a lot in a new place, but he’d be okay. He wasn’t a kid who needed to be around other people much. The biggest challenge would be the lack of internet back here. Nolan found his happiness online, and Cory made some pennies posting performance vids, but internet was apparently not so easy to get in Signal Bend. Valhalla had wifi, though, so she was hoping she’d be able to find a way to use that. As long as it didn’t get her in trouble. Because she was going to keep this job.

She’d worked the bar five days so far, and it had gone okay. Havoc, the manager, was a sexist jerk with a short fuse, but so far he’d only been a jerk and not an outright asshole. That flare-up they’d had a few weeks ago, when he’d flipped her off, had been the worst, and that had happened before she’d gotten the job. Bonnie had told her that, while, yes, he was a total Neanderthal, there was an okay guy under the leering snark. Cory hadn’t seen anything but leering snark yet, but she’d be patient, and she’d hold her tongue. Because it was a good job, and it gave her and her boy a little hope.

By some crazy streak of sudden good fortune they also had a place to stay, because Bonnie had overheard her on the phone with Nolan, talking about their looming move to the Beast. Before Cory had her phone back in her pocket, Bonnie had offered them the Winnebago.

Cory had wept. Behind the bar, leaning against the door to the office, Cory had broken down and cried. She rarely cried, but that had been worth a few tears.

She stood up in their new home, walked over and tousled her boy’s dark, shaggy curls. “Okay. Let’s unpack the Beast. There’s fried chicken waiting for us.”

Nolan looked up, his brow furrowed. “Do we have to go in? Can’t we just hang out back here on our own?”

“No, kiddo.” She sat in the passenger seat. It was almost a recliner. “Bonnie has done something really great for us. We can’t hide back here like hermits. We’ll help around the place, we’ll accept her invitations, and maybe we’ll be able to do something nice for her soon, too. Small footprint, remember? We need to try to leave a small footprint, try to be gracious and not make her life harder because we’re here. Better we make it easier. That includes being company, if she’d like it.”

He nodded, but he didn’t look up. “I just…I feel like everybody’s always watching us, all the time. Waiting to see what we’re going to fuck up next. I want some time alone.”

She knew how he felt. She’d been judged by other people as long as she’d been able to know it was happening. Living under that kind of scrutiny had dug into Cory’s brain, so that even when she was alone, there was a voice in her head that provided the commentary. Like her lack of concern about Nolan’s language. He’d been swearing in front of her since he was eleven, and she truly didn’t care. She cared much more about name-calling than simple expletives. She wouldn’t tolerate hearing him call somebody ‘stupid’ or anything like, but she didn’t get heartburn over ‘fuck.’ Still, she’d tried to teach him to choose his audience carefully, to recognize that, while she didn’t mind the occasional frustrated, therapeutic ‘fuck,’ most of the rest of the world was offended.

And every time he swore around her, the church lady in her head puckered her lips in judgment.

“Bonnie’s not judging us, Nolan. She’s helping us out. You know she’s cool. And we’ll have some time on our own tonight after she goes to the bar. We’ll get this RV set up like a proper little home. And then I’ll kick your ass in Pente. Okay?”

He finally nodded again and stood, and they went out to unload the Beast.

~oOo~

Cory heard him get up late in the night—or down, more like, sliding open the privacy curtain on the loft and climbing out. She’d left the door to the little bedroom open a little, to maximize what cross breeze could be found on a warm, still, muggy Missouri night at the end of June.

It was a night too hot to sleep, so she’d been lying on top of the bedspread, her eyes closed, letting her mind roam. She felt pretty good—better than she had in awhile. A solution for her problems, a balm for her cares, seemed to be on the horizon, so she could set them aside. What she’d been doing, then, instead of worrying, was writing a song in her head.

She never wrote a song down until it was finished. Her head worked better like this, left to move how it wanted, without being forced into lines on a page. She hadn’t been writing much lately at all, really. Online and in the bars and coffeehouses where she gigged, people mostly wanted covers of songs they knew. Whenever she posted an original online, it got maybe a third the hits of a cover, if that. And people tended to start to chat again when she played an original at a gig. A couple of the managers had very pointedly told her to stop, if she wanted to keep the gig.

She tried not to take it personally. She knew her stuff was good, and the feedback she got from those who would listen confirmed what she knew. But for the most part, people liked what they already liked.

The music thing wasn’t going to happen, not in any real way. Cory knew that. She knew she should give it up, focus on finding some kind of steady work that would provide some security for Nolan.

She simply couldn’t. Her head was quiet and calm only when she was creating something. She’d lose her marbles if she gave it up. Sometimes, she felt right on the edge of marble-lessness as it was.

So on this heavy, still night, Cory was gathering her marbles, writing a song in her head, seeing the chords emerge as the lyrics did, when she heard Nolan climb down, dress, and leave the RV. Except that they were in a new, unfamiliar place, she wasn’t worried much. This was a thing he did, his way of gathering his marbles. She wrote songs in her head; Nolan walked. She wished he’d taken a flashlight, at least, because this was deep country, and it wouldn’t take much to walk beyond the reach of the dusk-to-dawn lights in each front yard on Bonnie’s little one-street neighborhood of mobile homes and end up in blackness.

But he was a smart boy, so he’d be okay.

~oOo~

He was gone about two hours. By then, Cory was up, still not exactly worried, but certainly curious. She’d pulled a beer from the little fridge and gone outside to sit in a plastic Adirondack chair, under a nearby tree. The mosquitoes were in fine fiddle on this early morning, but as much as she could, she ignored their feasting on her bare arms and legs.

Finally, he came trudging up from the back, having apparently crossed a weedy field from the woods beyond it. He didn’t see her until he was almost at the tree; when he did, he jumped back a little, surprised.

“You okay, Mom?”

She patted the plastic arm of the empty Adirondack next to her. “Yeah. Couldn’t sleep, either. Wasn’t it dark in the woods?”

“Not bad. Moon’s bright.”

“You have a good walk, get things straight?”

Nolan sat down, dropping all at once into the chair, the way all teens seemed to do. “Do you think he just stopped caring at all?”

Her heart constricted. Matt hadn’t been in any kind of contact at all for almost three months. It was baseball season, but until these past few months, he’d always been sure to call, at least once a month. He hadn’t seen his kid in person in four years, but at least he’d call, and sometimes Skype. Never before had there been this total silence, not even returning Cory’s calls and texts. She was pretty sure he’d found somebody and was distracted from his past by the prospect of a future.

But he had a child in his past. She was finding it harder and harder to wish him well.

“No, kiddo. Your dad loves you. You know he loves you. It’s the season, you know how busy he gets. Since he started coaching, even busier. That’s probably all it is.”

“But he’s been busy before, and he’d still call. Last thing I got from him was a reply to a text I sent. Three weeks ago. A smiley. Only a smiley.”

She hadn’t known about that. She took a breath to say something encouraging—she wasn’t sure what—but he waved her away. “You don’t have to stick up for him, Mom. I know the deal. I’m okay, really. I just want to be mad at him. It makes me feel guilty being mad when you make excuses for him.”