“That gonna work for you?” Shy asked.

Joker’s head filled with Heidi dead in an alley. She’d been pretty. Marred by a little man with a small dick who’d been shamed by bikers and used her to make them pay.

She’d had a thing for Joker. He had no idea how she’d hung her hopes on him, but he knew she’d had a thing for him.

She had never made him laugh. She annoyed him more than anything, and it had never been cute.

Mostly, when he was with her, he felt nothing.

But she was someone’s daughter. She was going to give someone a child. And there was no telling who she could have been if she’d been allowed to keep breathing.

Now she was dead.

No, it didn’t work for him.

But he had a woman, a kid, a brotherhood, family.

So it had to.

He jerked up his chin.

Hop nodded.

Shy clapped him on the shoulder.

Then they got on their bikes and rode.

* * *

That night after dinner, Carissa, sitting next to him on the couch, started poking hard at the laptop on her lap with her finger, grunting “Unh! Unh! Unh!” with each poke.

She then tossed it on the coffee table, where it skidded, taking the little basket she put the remotes in with it.

The basket went down.

The laptop was still up but half of it was hanging off the table.

“It’s broken!” she cried.

“I hope so, or you poundin’ on it and tossin’ it around wouldn’t be all that smart,” Joker muttered, his eyes still on the TV.

He felt her turn to him.

She ignored his comment and asked, “Do you have a laptop I can use to put the furniture in storage on Craigslist?”

“I don’t have a storage unit, and you cleaned my room. Did you find a laptop?” he asked back.

“No,” she bit out, damned cute.

“So… no,” he answered.

“Ugh!” she grunted, also cute, so he looked her way and saw her drop her head to the back of the couch, which was again cute.

He twisted to her, wrapping an arm around her and leaning up to get in her face.

“I’ll buy you a laptop for your birthday.”

She lifted her head off the couch an inch. “That’s not going to help me sell the furniture now. Dad’s paying for that unit. He has two boxes in there. We can put the boxes in the garage and he can save that money.”

“An early birthday present.”

She rolled her eyes and dropped her head back.

He knew that wouldn’t go over.

Still.

“Butterfly, you made a date with Elvira to return eight thousand dollars’ worth of clothes and shoes and two of the outfits in that mix would look spectacular on you and cost nowhere near eight thousand dollars. You got money in the bank but you won’t splurge. Thank Christ you didn’t feel the same about the panties and bras. But none of that costs as much as a laptop and you still didn’t keep it. So with that, I gotta ask, when’re you gonna lay out the cake to buy a laptop that in this day and age you need?”

She lifted her head up another inch. “After I put the bedroom furniture in the front yard, tape signs up around the neighborhood, and sit out there all day waiting for someone who’ll happen by and pay me what I’m asking, making it so I don’t have to take a hit to the savings I like having to buy a laptop.”

“That’s one way to go. But how much do you want outta that shit?”

“It all cost nearly six thousand dollars, it’s seen nearly no use, and is less than three years old, so I was hoping maybe five hundred dollars.”

He sat back, still turned to her and she came up.

“Six thousand dollars?” he asked.

“His mother picked it,” she mumbled. “It includes mattresses, which are expensive, and the furniture wasn’t exactly Ikea.” Her eyes slid away. “She might break into hives if she went to Ikea. Though the maze bit scares me, I love the bottom floor where all the gadgets are.”

“How ’bout this,” he ignored her rambling on Ikea and the fact she spent six times more on a guest bedroom set than he did on rent his first year away from his dad. “I take the laptop in and see if Cherry’s got a fix on someone who looks at computers. She’s got one in the office, it can’t work all the time, and the woman is a lot of things, but an IT geek isn’t one of them. We also pass it around you got that shit available. But you don’t take anything less than three K for it, Carrie. If it’s near-new and quality, you do not take that hit. You sell for as much as you can, get a laptop that’s dependable, and bank the rest.”

“That sounds like a plan,” she said.

That was easy.

Now for the last.

“You’re worried about your dad payin’ for that unit, we’ll shift crap around at the Compound or the stockroom at the store. We put it there.”

She grinned. “My manly man biker. He has an answer for everything.”

“My goofball Butterfly. She’s got a knack for makin’ me hard even when she’s bein’ a total goof,” he shot back.

Her eyes fired and her hand came up to hit his chest.

“Little high, baby,” he muttered.

Her gaze heated further, but as she slid her hand down, she asked, “Is this much sex natural?”

That said her ex not only didn’t have talent, but it would seem he also didn’t have stamina.

“Natural to what?” he asked back, going in, aiming for her jaw.

“Natural to a body’s health. I mean, I wouldn’t want you to have a heart attack in your twenties with all the effort you put in to pleasuring me.”

Pleasuring me.

And the woman didn’t think she was a goofball.

He grinned, finished running his lips down her jaw, lifted up, and pressed closer.

“I think my body can hack it,” he told her.

“Well that’s good,” she mumbled, eyes on his mouth, which he felt on his mouth and also in his dick.

“What you want, Carrie?” he whispered.

She lifted her gaze to his and whispered back, “You can start by kissing me, sweetie.”

He started there.

Some time later, he finished a fuckuva lot differently.

Tack

Tack stood on the deck of his house, his eyes to the silent dark of the woods on his mountain.

He had his phone to his ear and it was ringing.

“Tack,” Knight greeted.

“Yo, you hear?” Tack asked.

“Not yet,” Knight answered.