"You only hit up my phone when you hate being alone " -Shaun Frank & DYSON, No Future

********************************

"I won't wait around forever," he said, looking at me with stormy slate eyes.

I chewed on my lower lip, not wanting to speak, but knowing I had to. "I don't expect you to."

His eyes were pensive, like he was trying to figure out what made me tick. As if he found the answer he was looking for, he lowered his head once more to my center, slowly licking his way up my slit.

***

I was fucκed.

"Cat," said Maya, "where's your tiara, at least? If I have to look this ridiculous, so do you."

The Ford house had been decorated entirely in a Frozen theme—fake snow everywhere, fake ice dangling from the ceilings like frozen daggers, and fake princesses and snowmen everywhere.

The princesses and snowmen just happened to be the adults.

Maya stood in front of me, hand on one hip, dressed from head to toe as Princess Some-Other-Shit. The pale blue shift dress she wore swept the floor, and she had to keep lifting it up as she ran about the house making sure little kids weren't doing what little kids liked doing—fucκing ѕhit up, then fucκing each other up. It was chaos. A nightmare. Toddlers scampering about our feet like little cake-stuffed mice. I'd almost crushed a little redhead girl rolling around the kitchen floor in a snowman's outfit. If she hadn't suddenly burst out into a squeaky rendition of Let It Go, I would've gone to jail for manslaughter, no doubt.

All in all, this wasn't a good start to my Saturday afternoon.

"Cat?" Maya was saying. "Tiara?"

She was wearing one herself, a huge one that announced to anyone who looked that she was the queen of this household. It was doing a pretty ѕhitty job of holding back her springy dark curls out of her face.

"Can't I just wear one of those fake carrot thingies Ripper got all the guys?" I pouted at her, batting my eyelashes super-fast like a little girl.

Maya let out an audible sigh. "Fine. Can you do me a favor and go find Ripper? He was supposed to go out and get ice."

"I can do that," I volunteered, maybe a little too eagerly.

Maya squinted at me. "This wouldn't have anything to do with you hating kids, would it?"

"Nah," I told her, turning away. "Honest."

I was out of the house before she could protest, my chest aching. There were so many kids in there, and it tore at my chest that I would never have that. Never have anyone call me mommy.

"Snap the fucκ out of it," I muttered to myself, filled with disgust.

I went out into the backyard, wrinkling my nose at the sight of even more kids out here than in the house. Michael was turning two, for fucκ's sake, and sure as hell didn't know all these kids from Adam, but hey, Ford parties were notoriously over the top.

I found Ripper with a beer in his hand grilling burger patties, looking like he wasn't bothered by these little roaches making a mess of his backyard and screaming like there was a fire on the mountain.

"Pusѕy," he greeted, raising his bottle, "what's good?"

"Came out here to see that you don't fucκ the meat up."

"Fucκ off," he said with a grin, flipping a patty. "I do this ѕhit in my sleep."

"Yeah? No wonder you're always feeding us charcoal." I dodged out of his way when he swatted at me with the steel spatula. "Maya says you're out of ice."

"Shit. Yeah. We are." He quit playing around and turned abruptly to call a giraffe-like kid over. "Kid, do me a favor and go buy some ice."

"Sure thing, Ripper," the boy eagerly replied, giving him a mock-salute.

"Prospects," Ripper muttered, returning his attention to the meat. "What the fucκ would we do without them?"

"I dunno. Get off your lazy ass and do it yourself?" I suggested with a laugh.

Ripper snorted. "Lazy? I fucκing wish."

That was true. Ripper was the most hardworking person I knew. He tended bar at The Wreck sometimes, had his own custom bike business that was booming, worked at Zen as an in-demand tattoo artist, and had recently become the landlord of two three-bedroom apartments in a good part of town—all while being a husband and juggling three little kids. He didn't have the time to be lazy.

We chatted about mindless ѕhit for a while—about work, about the Bloody Marys, about the Phantoms going legit, about Jake's kids—until I scanned the clusters of adults and kids around us.

"Ghost isn't here yet?"

"Nah," Rip said absently, flipping more patties. "Thought you were together. You know, since you're always together."

I chose to ignore that last part. "Haven't seen him today."

"Wasn't expecting him to come. Know how he gets around kids."

"It isn't his fault," I said, my voice serious. It's mine.

"Yeah." Ripper's hazel eyes locked with mine, and I could already read the question there. "Is someone ever gonna explain that to me?" At my resounding silence, he nodded. "Figured. Ghost wouldn't be Ghost without his damn secrets."

I felt a pang in my heart. "No, he wouldn't."

I wandered around for a little while, pretending that I felt at home here, when truthfully, I didn't. Maya and Ripper were probably my only friends with kids—I fucκing adored their kids—but being swarmed by so many other kids was proving too much for me.

The formidable Catalina "Pusѕy" Thomas was afraid of a bunch of dirty, toothless runts.

Before I knew what was happening, I was telling someone—Beast, when I looked closer—that I would be right back. He might've nodded, if I'd cared to look, and I marched through the house and came out front, getting on my bike and putting my helmet on.

***

He was at the clubhouse, when everyone else was at the Ford residence.

Leaning in the doorway of his office and casting a contemplative look at him, I said, "Don't feel like partying with a bunch of toddlers?"

"Got ѕhit to do," he grunted, not looking up from his computer screen.

"Oh, yeah? What kinda ѕhit? Maybe I can help."

"Look, P," he said, finally meeting my eye. "I just wanna be alone for five fucκing seconds today. Just five. That cool with you?"

My chest burned. "Yeah. Sure."

"You of all people should fucκing get that."

He wasn't looking at me when he said the words, but he might as well have been. I could feel the weight of his words like a physical current. His voice was heavy with accusation, with a painful memory.

It happened every time children came up in conversation, and I always tried to do my best to make sure that we never spoke about kids to each other. But what with it being little Michael's birthday today, that was a pretty damn inevitable topic.

"I don't ask you to wait for me, Ghost," I said softly because I didn't. I would never be that selfish. Once upon a time, I'd let him go, after all. It had hurt like hell, but I'd done it. I'd done it for him.

Ghost let out a bitter laugh. "And yet, I do. I'm either a masochist, or the biggest idiot alive. You decide."

"You're neither. I am."

His eyes flicked up, a stormy grey. "You are what you are. I can't change you."

"If this"—I motioned between us—"isn't working for you, just let me know, okay?"

Ghost was glaring as he stood up. With his dark hair unkempt and longish, and his piercings glinting in the light, he made an imposing picture. "You want me to end this because you're too much of a pussy to end it yourself?"

I felt anger stirring. "Hardly. We're unhealthy. We're not going anywhere. You've said it yourself, so many times before."

"I'm in love with you, Catalina. Just you. But what-fucκin'-ever. That doesn't mean a ѕhit to you, so maybe it's time it doesn't mean a ѕhit to me, either."

"I love you, Mar. You know I do. I just...don't want to marry you."

His eyes refused to let me go, and then they did, and he sat back down.

"I'm just... I'm just gonna leave," I murmured, feeling awkward and ѕhitty. "I'll catch you later."

"Yeah," he said back to me. "You do that."

***

"Hey, sweetheart. What time do your legs open for business?"

"Right about now, 'cause my foot's about to make its way up your ass," I retorted with a glare at the bleary-eyed, crass idiot standing before me. "You buying, or what?"

Bartending wasn't as easy as people made it out to be, especially when you had to deal with drunk, horny assholes when you weren't in the mood for their bullѕhit. Like right now.

Fortunately, this drunk asshole ordered a Bud, paid, and moved on without any further drunk assholery.

Bree Mason, the other girl behind the bar with me, let out a loud wolf-whistle. "Tell me why that just got me hot."

I rolled my eyes at her. "Bree, sweetie, everything gets you hot."

She stuck her tongue out at me, winking a blue eye at me. "I have needs, Pusѕy, baby. And I don't discriminate."

Bree was a cute chick—a little rough, a lot thirsty—but she was good people. Her hair was a flaming orange—natural, she always insisted, although everyone knew that that was a lie—cropped short to her skull. She worked full-time at Ghost's tattoo parlor, but since we were short-staffed tonight and she had experience tending bar, she was helping me out.

Ghost didn't think I could handle a busy Saturday night, and he was right. My mind was elsewhere. My mind was on him.

After snapping at a dozen customers, Bree finally came over to my side of the bar.

"Damn," she said, eyeing me with expectant clear blue eyes. She folded her arms across her ample chest. "What's eating you tonight?"

Bree wasn't anyone I hung out with, wasn't what I'd call a friend, or even an acquaintance. The joke around town was that she would sleep with a tree if it had branches thick enough to satisfy her. She was what they called club pussy. Always there, always ready, and always available. For a few seconds, she'd dated Baron Ford, Ripper's younger brother. He'd come to his senses, though, and whatever they'd had had fizzled out into nothing.

So yeah, we had very little in common. But she was here. That was what counted.

So while some System of a Down song was playing loudly for whoever was drunk enough to dance to it, I told Bree what was probably the one real thing I'd never shared with anyone but the one other person it involved.

"A couple months after Ghost came back from Afghanistan, we fucκed around without anything, and bam! I got pregnant. Me, the chick who was always so fucκing careful." I paused, trying to remember what that felt like a couple of years ago. Trying and failing.
"Ghost and I... We don't talk about it, or cry together, or some such ѕhit, but I know he still thinks about that baby. I know he does, but he won't say so."

Being with Ghost while at the same time not being with him was complicated. I didn't need his ѕhit. But I needed him. And when he asked me to step up, to have some balls and own the fact that we were both getting too old for casual not-so-casual sex, I sometimes felt that I'd cave. That I'd be selfish and say yes.

"I'm sorry you lost it," Bree offered, her voice solemn for the first time since I'd met her. "The baby. I'm sorry you lost it."

"I didn't lose it," I said quietly, using a once-white rag to wipe away a beer spill on the bar top. "I had an abortion."