Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
The door cracked open and somebody I didn’t know stuck their head in to ask where the mop was. I pointed—third closet, left side—and they thanked me and left. I stood for a second with my hands on the folded sheet and let a thought drop into the space of me like a coin into a deep well.
I could want things. That could be true. I could say yes. I could say no. I could say not yet. I could say ask me again in a different voice.
I could tell Thrasher I wasn’t a patch. I was a person. If he wanted to claim me, he could learn what it meant to be claimed back by a girl who didn’t belong to anybody but herself.
The sheet made a soft thud when I set it on the stack. I pulled another one over, the edge of it whispering against the metal. The room hummed. The late sun painted a stripe of light across the floor where the door didn’t quite meet the threshold. Dust danced in it. I watched it, and everything inside me felt a little less like a hooked fish and a little more like a girl with lungs that worked.
Later, when I finished the shift and the sky blended from black to deep purple, I would walk out back again. I didn’t know if Thrasher would be there. I didn’t know if I wanted him to be. Both answers were allowed.
What I did know was this: if he was there and he said that word again—claimed—I would tell him mine. I would say the words Lyric gave me and the ones I’d discovered tucked under my tongue. I would see what he did with them.
Maybe he’d ruin it. Maybe he’d surprise me. Maybe I’d surprise myself.
The dryer dinged. I moved through the motion of opening it, heat rolling into my face, the smell of clean cotton like a promise that even if nothing was ever new, it could still be fresh. I pulled a towel out and it was warm against my cheek, and I realized sometimes small things were enough to get you from one day to the next.
Sometimes advice that sounded simple—enjoy it—was the hardest task and also the right one.
I folded the towel. I kept going. I thought about Lyric’s grin, about Tiny remembering creamer cups, about how love and sex might sometimes share a collar and sometimes run in opposite directions, and how maybe I didn’t have to leash either to live.
When my break came, I texted Lyric a heart and a mountain emoji. She sent back a coffee cup and a tiny cow for no reason. I laughed at my phone like an idiot. The sound bounced off the metal and didn’t sound lonely at all.
I went back to the table. I smoothed another sheet. The white of it glowed in the last of the light. I wasn’t a patch. I wasn’t a secret. I wasn’t a thing to be handed over to any man under any name.
I was Melody Holton. And whatever I decided next—yes, no, not yet—I was going to make sure the voice saying it belonged to me.
12
THRASHER
I was already there when her shift ended—back lot, where the back doors spit steam into the night and the dumpsters smell like bleach and old socks. I’d parked in the sliver of shadow between a busted security light and the live oak. My bike ticked as it cooled. I leaned on the bars and watched the back door like I had business with the hinges.
She came out with a tote bag on her shoulder and her braid over one collarbone. Boots. Jeans. A soft T-shirt that had a tiny hole near the hem only I would notice because I noticed everything about her now. She did that quick scan people do when they don’t want to look like they’re looking for someone, then she found me and smiled like she’d been holding her breath all day and just let it go.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” I lifted the spare helmet. “Ride?”
She didn’t ask where. She never did. She just slid the tote strap to her bag across her body, took the helmet with both hands, and cinched the strap tight under her chin. First time I put her on a bike she’d fumbled with the buckle; now she snapped it like she’d been born to it. Progress looks small from the outside. This was far from small, she somehow fit in at every turn.
I swung my leg over, fired the engine, felt the familiar thud settle behind my ribs. She got on, knees snug against my hips, palms splayed at my sides. I kept the first quarter mile at a crawl to let her body calibrate to mine, then fed it throttle and took us out to cling the quiet roads.