Chapter 3
THREE
TRIXIE
Duke was in the diner when I came down for my shift.
He’d started doing that. Showing up mid-morning with no particular reason, ordering coffee he nursed for an hour, sitting at the counter with his long legs angled sideways because the stools weren’t built for a man his size.
He talked to the truckers, and talked to Rosie.
He was easy with people in a way that fascinated me because I’d spent years studying how to be easy with people and he just was.
No performance. No calculation. He was just present, and everyone seemed to know him.
I was glad he was there though. That was the part I kept circling back to, prodding at, turning over in my hands like something I’d found on the ground and couldn’t decide whether to keep.
“Saturday was nice,” I said, refilling his coffee. The words were out before I’d vetted them, which was unusual for me. I thought about everything before I said it. Every sentence got checked twice before it left my mouth, weighed for safety, tested for consequence. This one had slipped through.
He looked up. Those warm brown eyes, the easy focus of them, the way he gave you his full attention without making you feel pinned by it.
“Yeah?”
“Ruby talked about the workshop all Sunday. She wants to go back. She’s been calling the socket wrench a rock-a-wrench, which I think might be an improvement.”
He smiled. But it was in the most small and understated way, and somehow it made my stomach do something I hadn’t felt in so long I’d forgotten what to call it.
Rosie appeared from the kitchen. She’d been listening. Rosie was always listening, in the way of a woman who’d been running a diner for thirty years and had decided that feeding people included feeding them whatever else they needed.
“Ruby can stay with me tonight,” Rosie said. Casual. Like the thought had just occurred to her. “She’s been wanting to help me make pies. I’ll teach her how to make the crust and she’ll love helping me fill them.”
I opened my mouth to say she didn’t have to do that.
“It’s already decided,” Rosie said. And then she looked at Duke with an expression so transparent that if I hadn’t been watching I’d have heard it anyway. “Trixie’s had one night off in two weeks. Take the girl somewhere that isn’t this diner.”
Duke looked at me. I looked at him. Rosie went back to the kitchen, her work done.
“No, really. It’s fine. You’ve done more than enough…I…”
“You ever been on a bike?” he asked, cutting me off before I could finish.
“No.”
“You want to?”
The answer should have been no. The safe answer, the measured answer, the answer that kept the walls up and the distance intact.
I’d spent six years giving the safe answer.
Six years of yes when I meant no and fine when I meant I needed help and of course when I meant please stop.
The safe answer was a reflex by now, stamped into my nervous system so deep it fired before my brain caught up.
“Yes,” I said, and surprised myself.
His eyes changed. Just slightly, just a shift in the warmth, a deepening of something that had been building since the highway. He nodded once.
“Six o’clock,” he said. “Wear something warm.”
He pulled up at six. The sound of the engine reached me before he did, that low, deep vibration that I felt in the floorboards. I came downstairs and he was standing beside the bike, holding a jacket.
“It’ll be cold once we’re moving,” he said, and held it open for me.
It was his. Too big, the leather worn soft, the sleeves hanging past my fingertips.
I put my arms through and the weight of it settled onto my shoulders, warm from his body, and the proximity of that warmth, the intimacy of wearing something that had been against his skin, made my breath catch in a way I couldn’t hide.
He showed me how to get on. Where to put my feet, how to lean, where to hold.
His hands were on my waist, steadying me as I swung my leg over, and they were enormous.
I’d noticed his hands before. You couldn’t miss them.
But feeling them on my body, the span of his fingers, the warmth of his palms through my shirt, was different from noticing.
His thumbs pressed into the curve above my hips, and something liquid moved through my abdomen and I had to concentrate very hard on where I was putting my feet.
“Hold on to me,” he said. “Lean when I lean. Trust the bike.”
I put my arms around his waist. My hands clasped against his stomach, the hard flat plane of it, and my chest pressed against his back, my breasts flattened against the leather of his cut, my thighs bracketing his hips.
The position was obscene in its intimacy.
Every part of my body was touching every part of his, fitted against him, wrapped around him, and we hadn’t even moved yet.
The engine came to life. The vibration went through me, through the seat, through every point of contact between my body and his, and I tightened my grip. He pulled out onto the road and the world opened up.
The bike was nothing like a car. The wind, and the road rushed under my feet.
The mountains rose on both sides close enough to touch.
The sky was enormous and turning gold at the edges, and the speed was terrifying and perfect, my body tight against Duke’s, my hands fisted in his shirt, every curve pressing me harder against him.
I felt everything. The shift of his muscles when he leaned into a turn.
The flex of his stomach under my hands. The way his body moved with the bike in a rhythm so practiced, so fluid, it was like watching someone breathe.
I was wrapped around a man who knew exactly what he was doing, and the combination of his competence and my vulnerability and the open road was doing things to me that I couldn’t blame on the engine vibration.
I wanted him. The thought arrived fully formed.
I wanted this man, I wanted his hands on me again, I wanted the weight of his body, and I wanted to know what his mouth would feel like on mine.
The wanting was clean, uncomplicated, so different from anything I’d felt in my marriage that it took me a moment to recognize it.
Desire without negotiation and without the cost-benefit.
Without the small, exhausting calculation of what I’d have to give up to get it.
He took the backroads up into the mountains, the air getting cooler, the pines thicker, until the road ended at a lookout point above the valley. He stopped and shut the engine off.
Silence. Below us, the valley was spread out in the last of the daylight, green and gold, Forsaken a handful of lights in the distance. The mountains ringed everything, the snow on the peaks catching the last light.
I got off the bike. My legs were shaking, adrenaline and something else, and I stood at the edge of the lookout and breathed with my eyes closed.
“You okay?” he asked, behind me.
“Yeah.” My voice sounded different up here. Lighter. Like the altitude had stripped something away. “That was... I’ve never felt anything like that.”
He came to stand beside me. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of him in the cooling air, the size of him next to me, a presence that should have felt threatening given everything I’d been through and didn’t.
It just felt solid. Real. A man doing what he said he’d do, taking me to a view I’d never seen and letting me breathe and live a little.
“Buck didn’t like me doing new things,” I said.
It came out the way things do when you’ve been holding them for years and they find their own way to the surface. Quiet. Flat. The voice you use when you’ve said something to yourself so many times the edges have worn smooth.
Duke didn’t move. Didn’t turn to look at me. He stood beside me, his eyes on the valley, and he waited.
“He liked things predictable. He liked knowing where I was, what I was doing, who I was talking to. He liked routines. If I wanted to try something, go somewhere, see someone, it went through him first. He’d say yes sometimes.
Usually with conditions. Usually with a conversation afterwards about whether it had been worth it, whether I’d enjoyed it as much as I thought I would, whether I really needed to do it again. ”
I was talking to the mountains. To the sky. To the open air that had no walls and no doors and no one in it who was keeping score.
“It didn’t feel controlling at first. It felt like he cared.
Like he was looking out for me, like he knew better.
And then one day I realized I hadn’t made a decision without checking with him in two years, and I couldn’t remember when that had started.
It was like boiling water. You don’t feel the temperature change until you’re already cooked. ”
I stopped. Swallowed. The air was cold against my face and the truth was cold against my chest, and I’d said more to this man in thirty seconds than I’d said to anyone in six years.
“You don’t have to tell me anything else,” he said. His voice was low, steady, the voice of a man who was being very careful. “You don’t owe me the whole story. You don’t owe me any of it.”
“I know.”
“But I’m here. And I’m listening. Whenever you want.”
The simplicity of it undid me. No questions. No advice. No fixing. Just a man standing beside me in the cold, telling me he’d listen when I was ready and meaning it all the way down.
I kissed him.
I didn’t plan it. There was no decision, no calculation, no weighing up of costs. I turned toward him, put my hands on his jaw, pulled his mouth down to mine, and kissed him.
For one second he was still. Every muscle in his body held, rigid, a man caught between what he wanted and what he thought he should do. I felt the tension in his jaw under my palms, the held breath, the restraint.
Then his hands found my waist.