But men run on two things. Food and f**king. I can’t help them with the f**king part, and they don’t need it from what I know of their personal lives. But food—hell yes. We get fabulous lunches. Fort Collins might be podunk to most people living on the outside, but it’s got a shitload of great restaurants that are more than willing to feed us for including their logo napkins in a shot on the show.
Ford chuckles as I walk up next to him. He’s leaning against the white cinder block wall, smiling like a dumbass down at his phone.
“What’s so funny?” I ask him as I walk up.
“Kate,” he says, flashing me the picture on his phone. “She’s eating apricots for lunch and she’s got them all over her chubby face.”
Jesus Christ. I have no idea who this Ford is. He’s got baby on the brain these days. “It’s two minutes away, why don’t you just go home for lunch and spare the rest of us your pu**y-whipped bullshit?”
“Because,” he says, looking up at me, totally serious, “it’s hard enough to leave Ash once in the morning. If I went home for lunch, I’d tackle her the minute I walked in the door and never want to leave.”
“Oh, for f**k’s sake.” I walk away and go help myself to the food, then take my plate and cop a squat next to Ryan at the table with the rest of the boys. Ford and his family. He’s only been back in town a week and I’m already starting to gag on his sickening happiness.
“You’ll understand one day, Spencer. When you’re tired of playing games with Ronnie, you’ll see.”
My fork stops midway to my mouth and I stare hard at him. “You better shut the f**k up, Ford.” He eyes me, then the camera crew, who are not on a lunch break, and winces.
Luckily he’s smart enough to drop it and not start spouting apologies.
“Hey.” Ryan jabs me in the ribs to take my attention off Ford. “I thought you were gonna show up at the Sundance last Thursday? I took my date there, hoping you’d bail me out, but you flaked on me.”
“Yeah.” I look over at him. Ryan is a few years older than me and he came from a bike family too, only his old man lost everything in a high-stakes poker game a few years back. Ryan and I were already friends—we met at the Elvis convention in Vegas the year before and we hit it off right away. We both have bikes, tats, and an insatiable drive to make money. “I had to cancel on Carla. In fact, I’m just too busy to do the Thursday night dates anymore. I might still hang at the Cat Call on Fridays since it’s close, but I’m not gonna do Saturday night dates either.”
“Totally understand, man. You’re hooked up big with commitments.”
Ryan’s tall and big, like me. But his tattoos tell a story I’m not sure I want to know about. His tats are nothing but violence. On a first look, they’re just a bunch of retro WWII shit. Old-school stuff. Diving swallows, anchors that say Mom, pinups. But if you ever have a chance to look closely, you see that’s not what they are at all. The swallow is dead and decaying. The anchor is attached to the foot of a drowning man. The pinup has a black eye.
He’s had a difficult life. Family had a lot of money when he was small, but they were new money. And sometimes new money has no idea what to do with all their money. So they do all the wrong things with it. Like gamble away the family business. Or get hooked on meth and try to sell their kids on the black market. Luckily Ryan was already thirteen by the time that shit started going down, so he got his little sisters out of it by turning in his mother the night before the ‘sale’. But that didn’t stop the downward spiral for long.
“Yeah, but we should go out this week. Just the guys, maybe,” Ryan says. “Celebrate a little, huh?”
“I’m in,” Griff says. “I’m a free man again, why the f**k not?” He gets up to throw his trash away and then heads back into the shop.
“I’ll go too,” Fletch offers. He’s the youngest. No steady girlfriend or nothing. He almost never hangs out with us since he heads down to Denver every weekend. “I’m sick of Denver.” He finishes his last bite of lunch and then gathers his trash and heads after Griff.
Ryan and I both look at each other and smile because Fletch only gets tired of Denver when he’s avoiding a girl. I’m shoveling some half-warm fettuccine in my mouth when the back door slams open and the cops come in.
“There he is!” that little f**k, Drake, calls out, pointing at me. “That’s him. I want Spencer Shrike arrested for breaking into my shop!”
Holy f**k.
I look over at Ford and he’s already dialing the phone. Ronin, I’m sure. Why the f**k do the cops have to show up when Ronin’s out of town?
I take a deep breath and come out swinging—so to speak. “Hey, Drake! What’s up, little dude?” I take my attention to the cops. It’s a short chick with blonde hair and a big guy with… “Scott? You a townie now?” This is the deputy who busted Rook last summer for speeding in my Shrike truck. It was a major scene because he’s the one who found out Jon had filed a missing person’s report on her. We’ve never been close friends or anything—in fact, he sorta hated my guts until that little Rook incident. But he lives down the road from me, so I see him driving through Bellvue a lot. And he always flashes me the country wave when he passes now.
That’s like the universal rural signal for what’s up? Which means we’re friends. Because if you’re not friends, you don’t country-wave people. It’s the law.