2. Dead Weight
Chapter two
Dead Weight
Ash
Three days since the kitchen, and I still haven’t figured out how to stand in a doorway like a normal person.
I wasn’t looking for them. I want that on record somewhere, even if it’s only for myself.
I came out to the garage because I couldn’t sit in my own room another hour, and then I was standing here, and now I can’t make myself leave, which is its own kind of admission I don’t have the stomach to examine yet.
Rafe’s got some stripped-down bike up on the lift, half a frame, no tank, the kind of build he does when his hands need something to do more than his brain needs a plan.
He hasn’t said one word about whatever was behind that service-corridor door, and the bike is the closest thing to an answer I’m going to get.
Lorelei’s on the workbench beside him in a shirt that’s obviously his — too big, collar gone soft — legs swinging, the crescents her nails left in her palms still pink where she’s braced them against the edge.
She says something. He laughs, reaches over without looking, and tugs the hem down over her thigh where it’s ridden up, easy and unthinking, already done before either of them could’ve called it a decision.
I tell myself it’s not about the shirt. Repeating it doesn’t make it any truer.
She hasn’t said six words to me since the kitchen. I know because I counted, actual fingers, actual tally, like a man keeping stats on his own humiliation. I hate that I know it, and I hate more that some sick part of me needed to know the exact shape of how little room I take up right now.
Rafe clocks me before she does. Doesn’t stop what he’s doing.
“Vale. You gonna stand there or hand me a nine-sixteenths?”
She doesn’t look over. Keeps her eyes on the frame, on his hands, on anything that isn’t me.
The dismissal lands slow and ugly.
“I’m good.”
It comes out wrong, flat in a way that isn’t casual, and I watch Rafe hear the difference even if she doesn’t.
“Suit yourself.”
I should go find something to hit that isn’t a person and be the better version of myself for once.
Instead I stay and watch his hand settle at the small of her back when he shifts her out of the way of a dropped tool.
She leans into it before she’s even decided to, and the two of them take up the same six feet of space like it never had to be earned.
My hands curl at my sides.
Rafe never had to build a rule to survive wanting her. That’s the ugly center of it, simple enough now that I’ve finally stopped looking around it.
Lorelei leaves for class an hour later. She doesn’t look at me on her way out, just says something low to Rafe and presses her mouth to the corner of his jaw. The sound she makes when he answers, quiet and meant only for her, catches under my ribs and stays there while the garage door swings shut.
Rafe doesn’t turn around right away. He keeps working the bolt he’s been fighting since before she sat down, and I stand there another minute doing nothing useful with my hands, my mouth, any part of me.
“You gonna say it,” he asks without looking up, “or just stand there radiating?”
“Say what.”
“Whatever’s got your jaw locked up like that.”
My jaw locks harder just from him naming it, molars aching enough that I’ll probably still feel it tomorrow.
“You’re using it.”
The words come out before I decide to say them, which is exactly the problem with me lately.
He goes still. “Using what.”
“The claim. Don’t make me spell it out.”
“I think you’d better spell it out.” He sets the wrench down slowly, deliberately, the kind of careful movement a man makes when he’s genuinely trying not to throw something. “Because it sounds like you’re about to say something you can’t take back.”
“Before you kissed her at the circuit, you were still pretending none of this was happening.” My voice climbs, and I can’t pull it back down. “Now you’re tucking her shirt down like you’ve done it a hundred times.”
“Because I have.”
“That’s not—” I stop and start again. “That’s not what I mean.”
“Then say what you mean instead of circling it, because I’ve got about four more seconds of patience for whatever this is.”
The truth is sitting right at the base of my throat. I open my mouth expecting the rehearsed version and get the one I haven’t said even alone.
“You get to have it,” I say. “Out loud. In front of people. No permission required. And I built that rule. Hands off, mine to enforce, because I didn’t trust what I’d do to her if I let go of it for one second, and you just walked past it like it was never there.”
Rafe goes still. The anger doesn’t come clean.
“You think I don’t know what this costs you?” he says, low. “Standing there watching me get the easy version of a thing you decided you’re not allowed to want.”
“I don’t want the easy version.”
“Bullshit.”
“I want—”
Nothing comes out. My stomach drops slow and sour, and the rest of the sentence simply isn’t there.
“Say it.” He’s closer now. I didn’t see him move. “For once, say the actual thing. Not the version you rehearsed until it sounded like it was about the house, or the rule, or protecting her. Just the thing.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what.”
“Make it sound like I’m giving a sermon because I’m trying to be careful how I say something that matters to me.”
“You’re not being careful. You’re scared, and you’ve gotten good enough at dressing scared up nice that nobody can tell it isn’t something else.
” He shakes his head, the anger in his face giving way to something worn-out.
“Six years, man. Six years of you deciding what we are based on what you think you’re allowed to survive wanting.
I’m tired of doing the math for both of us. ”
“That’s not fair.”
“No.” His voice cracks just enough that I hear it before he does. “It’s not.”
We’re close enough now that I can hear the hitch in his breathing no matter how hard he tries to hide it. Something inside me pulls taut, wanting to shove him backward into the workbench and wanting, worse, to close the last of the distance instead.
“I’m not jealous of her,” I say.
“Liar.”
“I’m jealous of you. Of how easy you make it look.”
His face shifts, hurt first, then something like relief with grief underneath it.
“You think this has been easy for me? You think I don’t lie awake some nights wondering if she’d have picked me at all if you’d just let yourself want her out loud instead of building a rule so somebody else had to be dumb enough to break it?”
That’s the part I wasn’t braced for. He’s been carrying his own weight this whole time and never once made me watch him do it.
“Rafe.”
“Don’t.”
It’s closer to a plea than a warning, and that undoes me faster than the anger did.
Neither of us decides out loud who closes the distance. One second we’re staring at each other and the next his fist is in the front of my shirt, rough enough to drag me forward, all those years of not saying it finally too heavy to hide behind.
He kisses me with hunger and anger and everything we never said, hard enough to nearly knock me off balance. I walk him backward until he hits the wall, our tools rattling in the box beside us, and neither of us breaks for air until we have to.
It isn’t fair that he gets to live out loud with her and still somehow manages to be more honest about whatever this is between us than I’ve ever been. I’m jealous of him for it.
But right now isn’t about her.
It’s us.
I break the kiss first and catch his face between my hands, taking in lines I’ve spent years pretending I don’t already know before lifting the hem of his shirt.
After that, clothes disappear faster than either of us can pretend we’re making careful decisions.
Shirts first. Shoes somewhere near the workbench.
I look at him properly, which feels more dangerous than anything we’ve done so far.
I know this body already in all the ways a man is allowed to know his best friend’s body without admitting anything inconvenient about it: locker rooms, bruises, grease, blood. Years of looking everywhere except directly at the problem.
Apparently I’m done being subtle.
My fingers drag over the grease still marking his forearm before catching at his waistband. Of course that’s what my brain notices. Not the fact that he’s half naked in front of me.
The grease.
Very normal. Excellent priorities.
“Do it,” he says. “Strip me bare like you’ve been wanting to.”
That shuts me up, which is probably why he said it. His eyes are dark, steady, and way too sure of me.
I do as I’m told.
I lower myself to my knees before I can think long enough to turn obedience into another moral crisis, undo him slowly, then look up. He’s watching me with the expression of a man who has waited a long time to find out whether I’d actually follow through.
I hate how badly I want to prove him right.
I pull his pants and briefs down. He steps out of them and kicks them aside, and there it is, the thing I’ve been refusing to look directly at all this time.
“Come on,” he says. “Don’t let me be the only one naked here. Show me the goods, Ash.”
I bark out a laugh despite myself.
“Alright, alright. Calm down. I’m going.”
I strip.
Rafe lifts a brow when he notices what I don’t have on.
“Commando. Sexy.”
“Shut up.”
He comes toward me, one hand closing around my throat firmly enough to get my attention while the other settles hard at my hip.
We both pause.
For once, neither of us looks away.
Then he does something disgusting and deeply Rafe — drags his tongue up the side of my face just to make me swear before kissing me again.
I kiss him back hard enough to make up for several years of bad decisions.
I need him now.
My hand catches his hip, and when I pull back, I don’t even get the question out before he reads it on my face. That should irritate me. Mostly it does.
The rest of me is too relieved I don’t have to say everything.
“On the floor, the mechanic creeper, or the workbench?”
“The creeper.”
He lowers himself onto it.