Heat: Dark Love (Dark Saints MC)

3. Valerie

ValerieValerie saw all of this. She also saw the way his eyes skimmed the room like a predator, looking for any potential exits and any potential fights, since the guy looked like he was in a really bad mood. Valerie knew who this guy was at first glance, of course, and she was less than impressed. Exactly how far did this jerk think that throwing things around would get him?

Pretty far, apparently. She looked at her watch again. Twenty minutes until closing.

“Beer!” Damon raised a hand in the typical fashion, like he just expected her to go over there and give the beer to him. He didn’t even specify what kind he wanted, much less acknowledge that she was a bartender, not a waitress.

“Come over here and get it then,” she said. Usually, she wouldn’t bother with saying anything. Never mind that her boss might be mad at her, she didn’t know what would happen if one of these man-children got mad at her. She sighed and grabbed the cheapest, worst beer she could find, and brought it over.

Damon’s eyes barely grazed over her before he turned back to his table. There were a few other people sitting there now, but she didn’t even bother looking at them. Valerie already knew the sort of people she would find there, anyway.

Then she went back to behind the bar, listening to the laughter and the shouting. There was mainly shouting. It seemed like there was only so many times one woman could check her watch in the same night, but she found herself doing it again; ten minutes until close. She didn’t want to have to stay up all night cleaning up after these f***s only to return again in the morning, though, so it’d be best to let them know now. Besides, even with a ten-minute head start, this lot didn’t seem like they’d be capable of acknowledging a time limit and getting the hell out.

Could she just leave without cleaning up all the trash these people left here? Sure, if she wanted to be fired. Valerie was working on overtime, without extra pay. It’s not like she agreed to anything like that. That was just the type of payment arrangement that came with working for seedy bars and a thrice-monthly paycheck. Who the hell paid out their employees once every week and a half anyway? The people at Lanterns did, apparently.

And…she glanced around the room again, like she had so much earlier, and like she had so many nights before. The mess was even worse than it had been earlier in the day, and there was nothing she could do to put a description to it. Any way she could describe the horror would’ve been too kind, and she needed to get to work on this crap stat.

“Alright, guys,” she said, sliding out from behind the bar. “Time to wrap it up. Bar’s closing.”

The group laughed. Most of the people who had been there had left the bar some time ago, and now just this group remained. Men. Of course. Valerie didn’t have much good experience with this demographic either, but a string of names couldn’t testify as strongly to her hate as the state of this bar did. The remaining men were Damon Saylor (who takes themselves seriously with a name like that?) and some friends. Of course.

One of the nameless dudes was the first to speak up, thinking that he was sassy or something. “What? You want us to leave?”

This did no good. Valerie was about to open her mouth to say something, but Damon got a few words in edge-wise first. He looked to his friend and around the table, raising a finger. It was implied that the finger was intended for her as well: “listen and be quiet,” it said without speaking. But she ignored it. Why would she listen to a guy like that?

After about a couple seconds of that, Damon turned to her. A smirk was on his face. His eyes paid more attention to her this time, resting on her body longer, leering like the typical dude that watched her as she leaned over the bar.

“Sweetie,” he said, his voice dripping. Someone else might have described his voice as a purr. To Valerie, it was just an irritating voice, but the person it belonged to made her dislike it all the more. This was clearly a man who was used to getting what he wanted without qualms, and he clearly thought that meant he’d earned it. “Sugar. What’s your name?”

She said nothing, only pointing to the name tag on her right breast. It said “Valerie,” written there in some black, blunt font. Originally, her manager Clarissa had wanted her to have her full name on there, but Valerie had refused. There were only two ways that could end: the first way, in perverted guys using it as an excuse to look at her chest longer with the “cleverer” ones using it to make puns about ports (cleverness was rare in this place, but nonetheless); and the second way, in which some creep went and stalked her, eventually finding out where she lived. Like the bar, she didn’t keep much social media either. That wouldn’t do much to deter an ill-intentioned creep armed with her full name, though, and those were usually the only people who would notice and remember her full name anyway.

“Valerie,” he said, drawing out the “ick.” She thought that was a good representation of the way he made her feel, but there was something about his body that otherwise sung to her. She ignored it as best she could. Hot as this dude was, he was still a complete tool, and he and his friends needed to get the hell out of her bar. Because crappy as this place was – and never mind the fact that she didn’t own it – this was still her bar, until she moved on to somewhere new. Somewhere better. “What do you think you’re doing, sugar?”

“Letting you know that closing time is coming up.” She scowled. “Finish up.”

She turned on her heel back to the bar. She would check on them later, making sure they’d left. But first, she would need to make sure she had everything taken care of behind the counter: expensive liquor locked up; refrigerated things put up in the refrigerator; everything else in the drawer it belonged to; everything locked up. Everything back here locked, and she was glad for it. The door leading into the bar locked, too, and she couldn’t wait to get these fools out of here so she could clock out, lock that, and go the hell home.

This was taking way too long, though, and she glared, feeling rage burning in her chest as she looked over at the group. They were too casual. She could tell by the way they slumped in their chairs that they had no intention of leaving soon, and Valerie Parker was a goddamned good reader of body language. She had to be, of course; growing up in the environment she did had ensured that. She preferred not to talk about it, but the gist someone special might get: abusive household, details withheld or not, depending on whom she was speaking to, and running away at 15 to this.

Yeah, these guys definitely weren’t intending on leaving. But regardless of their intentions, they sure as hell were getting out of here.

This might have been one of the things that brought out the manager and maybe her boss and maybe that old “hey, sorry, we’ve gotta let you go” spiel and the paper that came with it. Even if it didn’t, maybe this was the thing that would end up with someone actually putting a bullet in her head, instead of just threatening it. Sometimes she wondered if she should have been named Cat instead. She seemed to avoid death a lot. Maybe she had nine lives. Tonight probably wouldn’t lead to a brush with death, but, if that’s where yelling at these people took it, well, Valerie was still going to do it anyway.

She gave the bar top one last run-over with her rag – the third one she’d used tonight; the other two were filthy and she still hadn’t even gotten around to cleaning the other parts of the bar. As she cleaned, she was glaring the entire while at… She wasn’t sure how to think of them in her head. Damon and club? They who must not be named because, quite frankly, were they even worth the effort it took to come up with one? No, they weren’t.

She stood, throwing the rag down in a bin beneath the bar so hard that the bin fell partway off its shelf. Oh, well. She stormed out from behind the bar, unsure of what she was going to say but knowing exactly the message she was aiming to get across. She’d seen her watch when she was cleaning. It was 5 in the f*****g morning. 12 hours since she’d first picked up her rag to try to force her mind out of this shift, and an hour after close. This was unacceptable.

And that’s exactly how she started her rant.

“This,” she punctuated the word by walking heavily towards the table, “is unacceptable.”

She took a hand and grabbed a glass from one of them, picking it up and throwing it into a wall. That was a waste of a glass and she would have to clean it up later, but at least she was getting a message across this time instead of just cleaning up after some drunk losers.

“And you,” she looked from face to face, trying to remember them in case they came back again so she could chuck them right the hell back out. “And you. And you. And you. All of you! You need to get out of here right now. It’s an hour –” her voice cracked, going too high at the last note, and she cringed at how it sounded to her own ears “– after closing, and you all need to leave.”

Her voice kept getting progressively higher and higher, and she hated the way it did that. She was trying to come across as threatening and serious, but her own voice was betraying her. It wasn’t like it was something she could help, either. Where men’s voices tended to get low and dangerous when they were pissed – especially in here, the freaking capital of “trying too hard to be masculine” – hers just rose until it broke off shrilly.