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I let her go, not unused to Lyric’s outbursts of anger. She’d been fiery as long as I’d known her. She would talk when she was ready.
Eventually, she sank down onto the couch, pulling the flattened pillow onto her lap and smoothing it out again.
“Wanna tell me what the cushion did to you?”
She sighed heavily. “Can I not? I don’t really want to get into it right now. Just know the cushion deserved it.”
I shrugged. “It was definitely asking for it, just sitting over there, minding its own business. How dare it?”
She grinned at me. “What’s the meeting about?”
The smile fell off my face. “I’ll tell you in a minute when the others get here. But hey, I ran into Lleyton when I was getting my haircut in Providence yesterday…”
Lyric groaned. “Was his perfect girlfriend with him?”
“Well, yes, actually. He was picking her up from her appointment. But that’s not the point. He said Amelia is doing really well in her new daycare.”
Lyric scrunched up her face, probably because she knew what I was going to say next. “You didn’t tell me you’d changed daycares. You were so happy with her last school. What happened?”
Lyric sighed heavily. “Lleyton happened. He didn’t pay her fees, and she lost her spot. She’s at the church daycare now.”
I squinted at her. “I thought you paid her fees? I didn’t think Lleyton was in the picture much at all?” Guilt swamped me. I’d been so caught up in my own business the last few weeks, I had barely even checked in with Lyric. That wasn’t how I rolled. I was the mother hen. The matriarch of this little family we’d created here. And I’d let the loss of one affect all the others.
Lyric shrugged. “He’s around when he feels like being a parent. He says he wants to discuss his custody arrangement, so I don’t know, maybe he wants to be more involved. But not paying Amelia’s fees didn’t exactly get that conversation off to a good start. Though maybe I don’t have a leg to stand on because I couldn’t afford them either.”
I slouched down in my chair. “Because the club has been so quiet lately.”
Lyric fiddled with a loose thread on the cushion, plucking at it with her red-polished fingernails. “That, and all the other things I have to pay for. Peggy’s wage to look after Gran and Amelia being the big one. But rent went up. Food costs more. It’s tough right now.”
I hated that. I just wanted to fix everything for everyone, and I didn’t know how. Not without Fawn. Ever since she’d been taken, I was lost at sea, floating in a storm with no lifejacket or way of getting back to shore.
Augie traipsed into my office and slumped down on the seat across from my desk, grunting a hello. Phoenix appeared a moment later, filling the doorway with his big, wall-of-a-man presence. He politely knocked, unlike Lyric and Augie, and I nodded at him to come in. He edged into the room, leaning on the back wall, quietly waiting.
I loved the three of them hard. Their pain and problems hurt me. “I need help coming up with ways of getting fresh traffic in here. My ideas suck. I just have nothing that would even make a dent. Promotions. Events. If I could afford a coordinator, I would. But I can’t. So it’s on us.”
“What about like, meat raffles?” Lyric offered, cracking a piece of gum between her teeth. She folded her arms across her chest.
“Meat raffles? Are we stripping at the old folks’ home? Who comes to a strip club for meat raffles?” Augie glanced over at her, his glossy blond hair flopping in his eye.
It was a different look for him, after shaving his head for as long as I’d known him. The stubble around his jaw was new too, and while it suited him, because he was runway-model-gorgeous no matter what he did, his new scruffier appearance made my heart hurt.
Because I knew it had more to do with Fawn’s disappearance than a conscious fashion choice. He’d been close with her, maybe even closer than I was, and the strain of not knowing was getting to him.
Lyric flipped him the bird. “You got any better ideas?”
“Let’s just do the politician dick party thing again. It worked last time.”
I shook my head. The Pin the Penis on the Politician party had been huge for us, especially with Fawn taking the reins to plan it all out. But I didn’t think it would work twice. Or maybe I just didn’t want to do it again without Fawn when it had been her brainchild. “It doesn’t make sense. The elections are over. We need something new.”
Phoenix cleared his throat, and I glanced up in surprise. He was a man of few words and quite the opposite of Lyric and Augie who always had something to say. None of us knew much about Phoenix, other than he was loyal to a fault and the type of guy you could call in the middle of the night if your car broke down. He’d drive across the country to get you if he had to. But words were not really his thing, and I hadn’t expected him to contribute to the discussion, even though I never would have left him out by not inviting him to the meeting. I might have owned the club, but we all got a say in how it ran.
“What about an Opposites Attract party? For both guys and girls. We give everyone a card on entry, and they have to find the person with the matching pair?”
I quirked my head in interest. “That’s different.”
He shrugged. “We need different. That’s what was good about Fawn’s party. It brought in a new crowd. We need to think further than just the lonely guys who show up and drown their sorrows in cheap beer. We can still put on a show, but maybe we class it up a bit. Less stripping, more show.” He stared down at his feet. “Or not. Probably a stupid idea.”
Lyric tossed her wadded-up gum wrapper at him. “Or it’s genius. It’ll get the crowd moving around, talking to each other. Making new friends…”
