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)
He handed me the helmet and waited while I cinched it, thumb brushing the underside of my jaw once like a punctuation mark. I climbed on behind him and we rolled out easy, no hurry. He cut left where the traffic thinned and took the route that squiggles through the pines before finding open farm. Late summer had turned the fields that particular tired green, and the ditches were full of wild things I didn’t know the names for. The sun had softened just enough that I didn’t have to squint. Wind took the sweat from the back of my neck and returned it as cool.
I didn’t try to talk. There are a hundred ways to say “thank you” to a man who knows how to ride the way he rides. I said it by finding the place my hands liked on his middle and keeping them there. By not fighting the lean. By resting my cheek between his shoulder blades when we hit a stretch without potholes and letting the hum of the engine do the rest.
He took us to a roadside restaurant I’d seen a hundred times and never been inside—the kind with a hand-lettered sign out front that gets redone every year and a keg cooler someone’s uncle probably fixed. Inside smelled like grill and yeast rolls and lemon in a spray bottle. The tables were scarred wood, the floor old tile that had seen better mops. Two men at the bar argued cheerfully about baseball. A little girl at a corner table was coloring in a paper kids’ menu with the kind of full-body seriousness I recognized from trying to stay inside lines.
We took a booth in the corner. I slid in so I could see the whole room; he slid in so he could see the door. The waitress arrived with a pad and an accent and called me “sweetheart” without making it feel like a theft. Thrasher ordered sweet tea for me before I could speak and water for himself, then glanced across the table to see if I’d mind. I didn’t. He waited while I picked a chicken sandwich, then asked for a burger he specified down to the cheese.
“You always know exactly what you want?” I asked when we were alone again.
“Only about the important things,” he deadpanned, which made me smile because he’d count a burger as important in his day and he’d be right.
He stretched one arm along the back of the booth. I let my shoulder find his hand there like a plant finding a trellis. He didn’t make a show of touching me. He just did it and then didn’t stop. I felt the heat of his palm through the thin cotton of my shirt. I felt what it turned down in me when he held steady.
We talked about nothing in the way that means everything—the way the light hit the water on the way in, whether the birds we’d seen were hawks or vultures, how he’d once ridden with a guy who swore by duct tape as a fix for everything and why that friendship had lasted exactly two weeks. I liked hearing his stories—the ones not about the club, the ones about the human things.
The door jangled, and my attention went up without thinking. Tiny came in first, skin the color of wood polished by use, shoulders filling the doorway like a promise. Lyric was right behind him, free hair, soft dress I’d never seen her wear to work, eyes scanning the room and then lighting like a match when she saw me.
They spotted us at the same time we spotted them. Tiny’s grin broke across his face like he’d slipped it on out in the parking lot. Lyric pointed, her mouth already forming my name, then caught herself and made it a small wave.
They came over. Tiny hovered by the table with that respectful half-distance he’d learned around me and Lyric—men like him knew the difference between looming and existing. “Mind if we join?”
Thrasher looked at me instead of answering. I said “yes” with my face before I said it with my mouth. “Sit.”
The booth wasn’t made for such large men, so the guys took the outside. Lyric slid where she ended up across from me.
The waitress came back and didn’t blink at the patches, didn’t change the way she spoke. Tiny ordered a steak and beans and cornbread, Lyric a salad with a baked potato, then the waitress vanished into the kitchen and the table loosened the way groups do once logistics are done.
Tiny told a story about a prospect who’d tried to “repair” a cracked hose with Super Glue because he figured “glue’s glue.” Thrasher added only enough details to make it funnier: the prospect’s face when the glue hardened on his fingers, Tiny’s dead stare when the kid asked if a hairdryer would speed it up. Lyric giggled into her napkin and whispered, “Oh, bless,” the way Southern women do when they mean “Lord, have mercy.”