Chapter 23
SMITH
After dinner, Riggs drove us back to his place. He parked around the corner, the same place I’d parked the first day I stumbled across his building. His headlights cast a glow over the sleek and shiny lines of his motorcycle, and he cut the engine.
“Did you really want to go for a ride?” he asked.
“Yes.”
His mouth made a quiet clicking sound and he shouldered open the driver’s side door. “You need a helmet. And a jacket.”
“I’m underprepared.”
“I know,” he said. “I’ll run up and get us sorted. Do you want to come or wait?”
Part of me wanted to come up with him, but the other part of me somehow knew both of us needed a few minutes apart, a chance to breathe.
“I’ll wait,” I said, following him out of the car.
Relief rippled through the air between us, and I rested against the hood of his car and pulled out my phone.
He hesitated before jogging toward the door of the shop, and I wondered if he wanted to kiss me.
I was still trying to figure out the boundaries of what Riggs’s asexuality meant for physical affection between us.
I didn’t want him to kiss me if it didn’t do anything for him, but I also didn’t want to lose out on the affection I saw between Lincoln and Hunter, between Silas and Marshall.
The bells on the shop door jingled softly, and I swiped my phone into the messages app and pulled up Asha’s name. I’d been a horrible friend to her since she introduced me to Rapture, and I owed her an apology.
I only have a few minutes, but I’m sorry for being a shit.
Asha
Who said you’re being a shit.
I haven’t been around.
I’ve been working so hard, I’ve hardly noticed.
That’s a lie, I have noticed.
But that’s life.
You’ve been good, though?
Very. You?
I met someone.
ofc you did. Do the other Covingtons approve?
I thought about dinner, about Marshall’s judgmental frown, the way the three of us had needed to talk him off a ledge he had no balance on any longer.
Not at all.
Should I be worried?
The bells jingled a second time, and I glanced down the street, appreciating the long lines of Riggs’s body, the shadows that wrapped around him as he balanced two helmets in one hand and the keys to his shop in another.
Not yet.
Lunch soon?
Monday.
It’s a date.
I slipped my phone back into my pocket as Riggs stalked toward me. He looked every inch the predator with a worn-down black leather jacket stretched across his shoulders. The silver zippers clinked together as he walked, and I could smell the leather overtop of the usual clean smell of him.
Riggs set one of the helmets down on the seat of his bike and beckoned me closer.
I shuffled toward him, tilting my head back to stare up at him once our toes got close.
He had a second jacket tucked under his arm, the same style but far less worn.
It was a little too big for me, but the shoulders sat well enough, and it must have passed the test because Riggs nodded at me to zip it up, which I did.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
The jacket was too big for me but too small for him, and the friend I’d met after our first morning together was close enough to Riggs’s size it wouldn’t have fit him either.
I didn’t need to ask who the jacket belonged to.
I knew it had been his husband’s. It didn’t bother me to wear a dead man’s clothes, but maybe it should have.
The thing about Riggs was it was so easy to look at him and forget anything else in the world existed.
His past was clearly a big part of his present, but all I knew was he was in with me enough to trust me with these things he’d held on to for so long.
“You tell me.”
There was the smallest pause, a hard swallow.
“I’m okay,” he said, lifting the helmet between us. “May I?”
I nodded, and Riggs fitted the helmet over my head.
The inside of the thing was thick with padding and soft, tight around my ears and against my forehead.
He slipped up the visor so I could see him and attached the straps underneath my chin.
His fingers dragged against my jaw, and he checked the tightness.
“Good?” he asked again.
“I’m good.”
Once I was suited up, Riggs slipped on his own helmet and shoved a key into the ignition of his bike.
“It’s hard to hear when we’re going, but if you need something, I’ll make sure to hear it.” He tugged up the zipper on my jacket an inch. “Hold on tight and when I lean, you lean. Alright?”
“I can do that,” I said, words caught by the helmet so I repeated them louder.
Riggs’s eyes wrinkled in the corner, and even though I couldn’t see his mouth I knew he’d smiled.
“We’ll take a ride up to Mulholland Drive if that’s good? There’s some nice pull outs up the mountain.”
“Sounds good.”
Riggs twisted the key and the bike roared to life.
He swung himself onto the seat and straightened his back, making room for me behind him.
Getting on wasn’t as awkward as I thought it would be, and pressing into him to wrap my arms around his stomach was far from a hardship.
Riggs was one of the sexiest men I’d ever seen and getting to touch him in any capacity was a win as far as I was concerned.
“Ready?” he shouted, head angled to the side.
“Ready!”
He reached behind him and pushed my visor closed.
It latched into place and he dropped his own, and then we were off.
The bike rolled away from the curb, and he took it slow for two blocks before leaning into the throttle and opening it up.
It was high speed only after that, with Riggs zipping his way into the valley and up the sharp hairpin turns of Mulholland Drive.
This place was much more Marshall’s territory than mine; the modern mansions tucked into graded hillsides reeked of new money and stucco.
I favored the buildings like Riggs’s shop.
The ones dripping with history and character.
There were more secrets and more stories, and just like his shop, Riggs was full of those too.
Halfway up the road, Riggs downshifted and slowed down, pulling off the road into a fairly large patch of dirt that overlooked North Hollywood.
I opened my visor and climbed off the bike, stepping out of the way so Riggs could do the same.
He undid the straps on his helmet, then mine, and we both pulled them off at the same time.
He shook out his hair and set the helmet down on the seat of the bike, then reached over and ran his fingers through my much shorter strands.
I let him pull me into his arms, something constricting in my chest when he wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head.
“This is something, isn’t it?” I asked.
“You’re not talking about the view?”
“No.”
Riggs was quiet for a moment, arms tightening around me.
“It’s something,” he agreed.
“Something serious?”
“I don’t know,” he said, but as the leather of my jacket groaned around my arms, those three words sounded like a lie. “Do you want it to be?”
“Do you?” I countered.
So much of what had happened between us had been for me, and I wanted to make sure that wasn’t true for all of it. I needed to know Riggs didn’t put himself last.
“I’m nervous about what that means,” he said softly. “For me.”
It wasn’t something he needed to clarify.
I understood entirely what he meant. Riggs had been with his husband, then he’d been alone, and now there was me.
I had no illusions about being a rebound or a replacement, but I wasn’t foolish enough to think there was never going to be any comparison there.
“I’m not in a rush.”
Riggs exhaled a long breath into my hair, then pulled me closer to the edge of the cliff.
It was clearly designed to be a viewing point, with a row of railroad ties in place to stop cars from going over the edge.
We sat down side by side on one, and Riggs stretched his legs out in front of us, crossing them at the ankle.
“I like what we’ve done so far,” I said.
“So do I.”
“I want to…I want to know how you see this working.”
Riggs clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and stared up at the sky like the answer would be written somewhere in the stars.
“I don’t want you to compromise,” I told him. “If I’m not what you want, then I don’t want to take up space.”
“I want you,” he said sharply, glancing at me from the corner of his eye. “Please don’t ever doubt that.”
“I haven’t yet,” I assured. “But I mean…”
I let the question die in my throat because I wasn’t even sure what I meant. There was no polite way to have the conversation that had started to bubble beneath the surface of whatever our relationship was turning out to be.
“I went to Rapture on Friday with Damon,” Riggs said. “I wasn’t sure if I should be there because that was a limit you and I hadn’t discussed yet. I should have talked to you first about it.”
“Did you…”
Riggs snorted, rolling his eyes at me. “Did I hook up with anyone? No, Smith. I didn’t.”
“I didn’t know.”
His smirk fell away and he sat up straighter, turning and taking my face into the cradle of his palms. “That was unfairly harsh. I shouldn’t have said that. Or… I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t touch anyone. I didn’t watch anyone,” he said. “I went because Damon was meeting somebody there and he didn’t want to go alone. I had a drink on the patio and caught up with some friends, and then I went home.”
“You don’t have to explain,” I said. “And even if you had done those things, it’s okay.”
Riggs arched a brow. “Really?”
“Well…” I thought about it for a second longer than I had the first time. “No.”
“Good boy.” He stroked his thumbs across my cheeks and then let his hands fall away.
My lashes fluttered and a shudder tripped through my entire body.
“Did you like that, baby? You like a little praise?”
“Apparently.”
“There’s nobody I care about making come besides you,” he promised, leaning close and dragging his nose across the tip of mine.
I sucked in a breath, mouth parting and tasting the cheese and tomato that still lingered on his breath. “Nobody I want to watch. Nobody I want to kiss.”
“Do you rea—”
He cut off my question with the press of his lips against mine, an insistent tongue demanding entry which I freely offered.
I slid my hands up over his chest, around his shoulders and kept him close, angling my head to the side so he could reach whatever parts of my mouth he wanted.
My cock immediately hardened, and without my asking, Riggs rested his hand against the top of my thigh.
His fingers stretched toward the burning and needy heat between my legs, but he didn’t go further.
“Do I strike you as the kind of man who does a single thing he doesn’t want to do?” he whispered against the corner of my mouth.
He did, in fact.
Riggs struck me as the kind of man who would put the wants of everyone in his life before his own because, to him, there was no other option.
He forged ahead to build a life he hadn’t wanted after his husband died.
He opened a shop he’d never dreamed of because he needed something to do with his time.
He hired new artists to fill empty booths because his best friend had told him to.
In fact, I wasn’t aware of a single thing Riggs had done for himself, and with an unusual fit of bravery I told him as much.
When I stopped talking, he leaned back enough to see my face. I’d worried there would be resentment in his eyes or accusation, but what I found instead was an amused smile and a smattering of constellations reflected back at me when he blinked.
“You are for me,” he said softly, coming back for another kiss. “Do you believe that?”
He held my face in his hand, breathed into my mouth, shared his air with me.
He let me sleep on a side of the bed that hadn’t been used, wear a jacket that never should have been mine, know a pleasure and promise that in any other life would have been miles out of my reach.
It felt selfish, but if—in any way—I’d been able to offer him something for himself, I could be happy with that.
“I believe you,” I told him.
He exhaled a shaky breath against my chin, and then together we watched the clouds drift across the sky, stars dancing in the dark.