took the towel off my hair and wrapped it around me right quick. I zipped out of the bathroom quicker than spit. “Who the hell are you and what are you doing here?” I shouted back, sounding as confused and frustrated as I felt.
I listened for his answer but only heard the water running. He was washing his hands—at least there was that, most men didn’t. I waited for an answer, for him to come out, anything. What the hell was he doing in there? I waited some more, tapping my foot. After what seemed like an eternity, the man finally stepped into the living room. Getting a good look at him, I saw he was tall and thin, but built strong. He had a handsome enough face, young but certainly not my type. His eyebrows were perfectly shaped and above them, well, his hair looked too good. He was a pretty boy, alright—the type of guy you’d see shirtless on a romance novel, holding a swooning woman in his arms. But none of this mattered—I’d never seen him here at the Roost before.
“I live here,” he told me like it was common knowledge.
“I thought this was a woman’s club.”
He could read the skepticism on my face. “Oh, honey. Didn’t Shirley tell you? I’m Sugar, and I’m your roomie.”
“Come again?”
“I’m gay,” he blurted out loudly.
I continued to stare at him like he had two heads. It’d taken me all of two seconds to figure out he was a confirmed bachelor from his name. The fact was supposed to make me more comfortable with him pissing in front of me and gawking at me in nothing but a towel. The man’s eyes still roamed my body.
“If you’re so gay put your tongue back in your mouth and look at my face.”
He crossed his arms, wobbling his head a bit. “I was told to get you dressed. I’m trying to see if that booty of yours can fit in my jeans or sweats, come on.”
I followed Sugar to his room, pigsty it was. He muttered as he searched his closet, “Like I know a goddamn thing about women’s clothes. I like it up the ass—doesn’t mean I’m a fashionista.”
Nevertheless, he slung a pair of purple women’s leggings at me. I huffed and put them on under the towel. They fit me pretty snugly. It’d been like pulling up hose. He threw a glittery orange tank next, warning me, “Don’t ask.”
I caught it and went back to the bathroom to look for my bra. Thank goodness, Shirley hadn’t tossed it with my clothes. I wasn’t the sort of woman who could go without one. I shut and locked the door this time. I hung up my towel neatly before I stretched my bra around me to buckle it in the front and then twisted it around and up right. Pulling on the tank, I straightened myself in the full-length mirror that hung on the back of the door. Hell, I looked like a black Richard Simmons.
Sugar was waiting for me on the other side, dressed like any other man around these parts, in worn jeans and a t-shirt but he had on a vest with pink flaming high heels on the back no doubt. “Well. Come on. You’re being sworn in.”
He told me on the way to the Roost, I was going to church, not to a house of God but to a sacred ritual nonetheless. That night I swore my life to the Hell on Heelz MC. The Banshee had me simply promise, “Ride with us, party with us and defend our lives with yours.” It’d gone unspoken, but I already knew there was much more to it. I’d learn it like they all did, in time. She wasn’t poetic. She didn’t call us sisters of the wind or nothing, but she did say the devil was a man but women were meaner. That there was a special place in Hell for women who didn’t support each other. Then we partied in spite of the murder that happened just hours earlier and maybe harder because of it, to forget it. We forgot it, hard.
Chapter 4
A typical Saturday night at the Roost meant our private club was busting at the seams with those who wanted to get drunk, get high and get laid. The Banshee and her girls had their favorites over. Some of the men were from other
Ronin Winters, Mating Season Collection
Emily Goodwin, Marata Eros