Chapter 10
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— Austen —
The clubhouse was transformed. Indira had done this — the decorations had intention behind them, the kind of specific, considered effort you either have or you don’t. Fairy lights along the bar and the porch railings. A banner that read Happy Birthday in letters that looked hand-painted.
And flowers. On every table, wildflowers in small jars. Simple. Nothing fussy.
The room was full. Not just the officers and families I’d gotten to know at Sunday dinners — the wider club was here.
Brothers I’d seen in passing, prospects I recognized from the gate, women I hadn’t met, people from town.
The clubhouse at capacity was a different animal from the clubhouse at dinner. Louder. Denser. Nobody standing still.
Maya was on Dutch’s hip when we found them — eight months old now, dark-eyed, gripping the collar of Dutch’s shirt with the iron determination of a baby who had opinions about being put down. Dutch had Maya in one arm and a beer in the other and looked completely unbothered.
“Happy birthday,” I said, and touched his arm.
He nodded. “The first lady outdid herself.” He looked at the room with an expression that was part gratitude, part bewilderment — like he still hadn’t fully adjusted to the idea that someone would do this for him. “I told her not to make a fuss.”
“You told me you didn’t want a big party,” Indira said, appearing at his shoulder with a glass of something fizzy. “This is a medium party. You should see what big looks like.”
“I’m afraid to.”
“You should be.” She pressed the fizzy glass into Dutch’s free hand and lifted Maya off his hip and onto her own in the same motion. “Maybe I’ll get Colt involved next year.”
Dutch looked at her. Set his beer down.
Tyler bit back a laugh beside me. There were three brothers waiting behind us to get to Dutch, so we moved on.
His hand was on my back. Light, present, guiding me through the room without steering. He was good at this — the social version of himself, greeting brothers, shaking hands, grinning. The version I’d met first. The performance that made everyone in his radius feel like the only person in the room.
I’d learned to tell Handful from my Tyler.
I’d taken the night off for this — a Saturday, which was the night Velvet filled up and stayed that way until last call. He’d asked. I hadn’t hesitated.
What I couldn’t do was turn off the habit.
I’d been clocking the room since we walked in.
Who was on their third beer. Who was pacing themselves.
Every man in here was on beer — no one had ordered a cocktail, probably no one would.
Maybe the bar didn’t even do cocktails. Not my usual Saturday night in any sense.
Every couple in this club had their own gravity. I’d been watching it for months — the hands found in a crowd, the private looks, the small adjustments. It was the thing I wanted. Not the club, not the bikes. Just that.
Tyler had it when he was with me. The question was whether it held when the room was loud.
It was around ten when I started noticing.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing I could have pointed to and said there — not a single moment, not a line, not an act. Just a series of small things that added up the way small things do when you’ve spent your professional life reading rooms.
Tyler was looser. That was the first thing. He’d been at the party for three hours and he’d had three or four beers — not a lot by clubhouse standards — and the looseness wasn’t drunkenness. It was comfort. He was in the room where he’d spent years not having to think about anything.
I saw it first in the way he complimented my dress when I came back from the bathroom.
“Fuck, that dress,” he said, pulling me close, his hand on my waist. And his eyes were on me — mostly.
Mostly. But the mostly was the thing. There was a fraction of a second where they weren’t, where they tracked something past my shoulder, and by the time I’d turned to see what it was, he was looking at me again and the moment was gone.
It could have been nothing. A light. A sound. A person walking past in his peripheral vision.
But I’d spent years behind a bar watching men’s eyes, and I knew what nothing looked like and I knew what something looked like. This was in the space between the two where I couldn’t be sure but…
The second thing was Tanya.
She appeared the way she always appeared — from somewhere inside the party, drawn to Tyler. Old proximity. The magnetic memory of a body that used to be welcome. She was laughing at something someone else had said, drink in hand, and she crossed Tyler’s path near the bar and stopped.
“Hey, Handful.” She put her hand on his arm and ran it up toward his shoulder, slow, familiar. The gesture of a woman who’d done it a hundred times and expected to do it a hundred more.
Tyler didn’t step back.
He didn’t lean in either. He didn’t flirt — not the way he’d flirted at the wedding, not the way he’d flirted at the birthday party where he’d talked to my chest. He just stayed where he was.
Her hand on his arm, his beer in his hand, the two-second delay between her touch landing and his body responding to it that told me the step-back wasn’t automatic yet. He had to think about it.
“Tanya,” he said. Then he turned toward me, the way he’d done on the porch at Sunday dinner, introducing, redirecting. “You remember Austen.”
“Of course.” Tanya smiled at me. The recalibration smile — the one I’d seen at the dinner. “Still going strong, you two.”
She moved on. Tyler’s hand came back to my waist. His attention was back on me again. But the two seconds had happened. The old Handful had hesitated before my Tyler caught up. And I’d seen it.
The third thing was the dance floor.
Somebody had pushed the pool tables back and the space in the center of the common room had become a dance floor. At some point Tyler pulled me in. His arms around me. My hands on his shoulders. We moved to something slow from the jukebox, his forehead against mine.
“You’re clocking the room,” he said. “I can feel you doing it.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. You’ve counted every exit and you know who’s drunk.” His hands settled lower on my back. “Stop working. You’re off tonight.”
“I don’t know how to be off.”
“I’ll teach you.” He said it into my hair, certain, like it was a thing he’d already decided to spend years doing.
For a while everything else fell away and it was just us. His arms around me like he couldn’t stand to let go, his eyes moving over me, taking me in, and when they weren’t he was pressing kisses along my neck.
I told him I needed a drink and slipped away.
The bar was busy. I waited, got a water, took my time. When I turned back toward the dance floor, Tyler was still there.
With someone else.
I didn’t know her name. His hands were on her hips.
Low. Easy. The same position, the same loose comfort, the hands of a man who wasn’t thinking about where they were because he’d never had to.
Then she pressed closer — her body flush against his, her chest against his — and his hands slid to her ass. No hesitation.
He wasn’t kissing her. He wasn’t leaning in. He was just dancing — on autopilot, the music doing the work, the beer doing the rest. Not pursuing. Just there, the way he’d always been there, in this room, with whatever woman was closest.
I stood at the bar with my water and watched.
Across the room, Holden was leaning against the wall near the kitchen door. He wasn’t watching the dance floor. He was watching me. Not obviously — glass in hand, half-turned toward Bea — but his eyes were on my face.
Our eyes met. A second, maybe. Not a word, not a judgment. Just I see it too.
Then he looked away. Back to Bea. Back to his own orbit.
I didn’t make a production of it. I found Indira, told her I had an early morning — a lie, but a gentle one — and hugged her.
Thanked her for the party. Told her to tell Dutch happy birthday again.
She looked at me with the careful attention of a woman who could hear the lie but wasn’t going to call it.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
“Okay.” She squeezed my arm. “Call me if you need to.”
I found my jacket. I walked through the crowd — past the pool tables where Target was running a game, past the bar where Betty was on her second glass of wine and still serene, past the porch where the smokers were gathered — and I went out the front door into the lot.
The air was cool. The bikes were lined up under the lot lights, chrome catching the glow. I stood there for a moment, breathing.
Tyler was inside. I could see him at the bar with Colt, laughing about something, beer in hand. He hadn’t seen me leave. Didn’t even know I was gone.
I wondered how long it would take him to notice I’d left.
I wasn’t angry. That was the strange part.
I’d expected to be angry — the righteous, clear-eyed anger I’d felt the night I’d kicked him out of Velvet.
But this was different. This was quieter, and worse.
Because the man I’d fallen for wasn’t the one I’d watched tonight.
Tyler was real — the one who asked before he kissed me, who paid attention, who showed up.
I’d seen him. I’d fucked him in his “virgin” bed. I’d ridden on the back of his bike.
But Handful was real too. The one whose hands moved without thinking. Whose eyes tracked before the brain caught up. Years of muscle memory in a room exactly like this one.
Both men were Tyler. That was the part I didn’t know what to do with.
I’d been so deliberate about this. Months of watching, measuring, staying behind the line. I hadn’t fallen for him — I’d walked in. Eyes open. One day at a time.
The problem with walking in deliberately was that you couldn’t pretend you hadn’t meant to.
Derek had called it months ago, watching Handful read at the end of the bar.
Three modes, he’d said. Charm, apology, charm again.
He’s on mode two. Mode three’s coming. I’d told him he was a pessimist. Heard him anyway.
Decided I was different — that seeing someone clearly meant you were in control of it.
Emma had warned me about Handful from the start. So had Jamie. I’d heard them. I’d decided anyway.
The counter-evidence was the thing I kept coming back to. A man running charm doesn’t sit in your bar with a paperback for two months without making a move. Doesn’t spend more than your rent on riding gear because he won’t put you on his bike in anything less. Doesn’t introduce you to his family.
A prospect stood by the side door, keys already in his hand, watching the lot the way I knew they did on party nights.
I caught his eye and tipped my head toward the road.
He pushed off the wall without a word, walked me to his truck, held the door.
Neither of us said anything the whole way out, and I watched the clubhouse lights shrink in the side mirror until the dark took them.