Chapter 2 #2
“Yeah. We fix bikes and anything anyone brings in really,” I replied.
“That was where the tow truck came from though. I thought you said you were owed a favor? But it was from your club’s shop, wasn’t it?”
I kicked the gravel at my feet. “Didn’t think you’d let me help otherwise.”
Callie found Trixie on the lodge porch while I was showing Ruby.
I came back to find them sitting together in the late afternoon sun, Callie with baby Ryan on her hip, Trixie leaning forward in her chair with her elbows on her knees and her guard halfway down for the first time since I’d met her.
They’d been talking for an hour. Something about Callie did that to people.
She’d walked through the same gate Trixie had, running from something, scared, and she’d found the same thing on the other side.
She knew. You could see it in the way Trixie sat with her.
The relief of being near someone who didn’t need the whole story to understand the shape of it.
“I told her I’d watch Ruby tonight,” Callie said to me, later, while Trixie was getting the kid’s sweater from her car. “She really needs a night off, Duke. One night where she’s just a woman having a beer and letting her hair down.”
Callie had earned her opinions the hard way. When Angel’s old lady told you something, you listened.
Angel’s Rest on a Saturday night. The bar warm, Bree behind the counter, the jukebox playing something with too much bass.
I walked Trixie in through the front door and watched her take in the room.
The noise, the leather, the timber and low light, Men at the bar, the crack of pool balls from the back table.
Something in her loosened. It happened in real time.
The tension in her shoulders easing a fraction, her spine straightening, her eyes moving around the room with curiosity instead of caution.
This place was loud, rough and real, and she was breathing easier inside it than she had anywhere else I’d seen her.
I got her a beer. We sat in a booth, and we talked.
She was funny. I hadn’t expected that. Dry and quick.
It was the type of dry, quick humor that slid in under the conversation and waited for you to catch up.
She told me about Ruby’s attempt to befriend the stray cat behind the diner, a three-day campaign involving increasingly elaborate food offerings.
She did impressions. The cat’s face. Ruby’s outrage at being ignored.
The voice Ruby used when she was negotiating, which was apparently the same voice she used on Buck when she wanted something.
She said his name and then stopped. Just for a beat. I watched her decide whether to take it back, file it away, close the door she’d accidentally opened.
She left it open.
“Ruby gets what she wants from people,” she said. “She got that from me. I just forgot I could do it for myself.”
I wanted to ask. Wanted to know what had happened, who had taught her to forget, what kind of man made a woman this warm go this quiet.
I didn’t ask. I told her about the time I’d tried to teach Priest to play pool and he’d sunk the cue ball on every single shot for forty-five minutes straight before admitting he’d been doing it on purpose because he thought it was funnier that way and that he had known how to play pool the whole time anyway.
She laughed. Full, genuine, her head tipping back, and the sound of it was warm and startled, like she’d surprised herself with it.
The laugh changed her whole face. Brightened her eyes, flushed her cheeks, and the woman underneath the careful, measured version was right there for a second. Warm, wry, sharper than she let on.
I was staring. I knew I was staring and I couldn’t stop, because she was sitting across from me with a beer in her hand laughing at my story and the feeling that produced was so unfamiliar and so enormous that my usual toolkit of deflection and distance was completely useless.
She caught me looking. The laugh softened. Something else moved into her face, slower, heavier, a heat that built in the silence between us. Her eyes held mine for a beat too long, then dropped to her beer, her fingers tightening on the glass.
“I should get Ruby,” she said. “It’s late.”
“I’ll walk you out.”
The compound was quiet. The bar noise fell away behind us as we walked to the lodge.
The sky was clear, the stars thick above the valley, the mountains black against a blacker sky.
Our boots crunched on gravel. She was close enough that the space between our arms hummed with something neither of us was saying.
She collected Ruby from Callie, the kid half-asleep with her teddy crushed against her chest, and carried her to the car. Buckled her in. Closed the door, and then it was just us, standing in the dark beside her car with the porch light catching the edges of her face.
“Thank you,” she said. “For today. For all of it.”
“Anytime.”
“No, really…I can’t remember the last time I…” she shut it down quickly. “Just…thanks. It was nice.”
We stood there. A foot apart, maybe less, the night air cold between us, her breath visible in small clouds, and the kiss was right there. I could feel where it would land, could feel the exact distance my mouth would need to travel, could feel my whole body leaning toward it, wanting it.
Her lips parted. Just slightly, her tongue touching the inside of her lower lip, unconscious, a reflex, and the want that went through me was so sharp I felt it in my hands.
She held my gaze for one more second. Then she turned, got in the car, started the engine. The headlights came on. She pulled away down the gravel road and I watched the taillights shrink through the trees until the dark swallowed them.
I stood there with my hands in my pockets and a feeling in my chest that I recognized from exactly zero previous experiences of ever having felt quite like this.
I was in trouble. The deep kind, and the kind you don’t come back from.
I went inside and Hawk was leaning against the bar with a whiskey with Bree pressed against his side. He looked at me with the expression of a man who’d been exactly where I was standing and had the scars to prove it. The look that said yeah, brother. I know.
I ignored him. Got a beer and sat in the booth where she’d been sitting and finished it alone.
Her laugh was still in my ears, and I wanted more.