Chapter Twenty-Three
Ihate everything about this.
The stupidity of it is that I’m not sure why. I’ve always had anxiety about Cade riding, that’s not new. But never like this. It always felt like an isolated fear that was largely irrational, and I knew that. Sure, it’s a sport where you can get injured. But my fears were always so outsized.
If Cade had done this race a few weeks ago, before things started to get weird between us, I would have been worried a normal amount, but also optimistic.
Now though, it feels so ominous. Like we’re fucking doomed, and this is just highlighting how much worse things have gotten ever since his dad showed up.
Kyle hasn’t even done anything. It’s so fucking nuts how much he can get under Cade’s skin and make him spiral just by existing, but at the same time, I know that if it were my dad, I’d be the same. Not spiraling in the same way, of course, but I’d still be spiraling.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to stop this terrible momentum that we seem to have gained, but the only thing worse than watching this stupidity would be sitting at home, waiting to get a call when Cade hurts himself or gets into a fight or does any of the things he does to misplace all that anger he won’t even acknowledge.
This whole situation is a shitshow. I’m standing here with the fifty or sixty other people who came to see the carnage.
Because this is all illegal and we’re trying not to attract the cops, only a couple sodium lights are on, and none of the really big overhead ones.
We’re surrounded by forest and one single dirt road leading away, and the small track already seems dwarfed by all this darkness.
I considered asking Tristan or anyone else I can trust to come with us, but then I realized I’d be putting them in danger if this whole thing gets busted up by the cops. It seemed too selfish.
So it’s just me here, waiting to see what happens and how bad it ends up being. I’m trying to brace myself, but it keeps shifting to numbness, instead.
“Wish me luck?” Cade asks.
He’s only standing a foot away from me, all of his gear on except the helmet and googles dangling from his long fingers. It feels like a bigger gap, though. It feels astronomical.
“Do you need luck?”
The flash of hurt on his face hurts me too, but it’s too late to take the words back. I realize I’ve got my arms crossed and my shoulders up around my ears, my body thrumming with tension, and force myself to relax. A little.
“I just mean… make good choices. You’re the best rider here. We both know that. But you have to ride smart and clean.”
Cade chews on his bottom lip for a minute, staring at me before he eventually nods.
“I don’t like how dark it is. It seems too risky,” I continue, as if I can still change his mind.
“It’s still light enough to see. I’ll be careful, I promise.”
He keeps staring at me, but doesn’t move any closer to me. I can hear by the shift in the noise around us that everyone’s getting ready to start.
Cade’s riding against four other guys—the three from the bar last night, plus a man I don’t recognize, who looks too old to have gone to high school with us. At least most of them are also hungover, I guess, and Cade’s on roughly even ground with them.
Or maybe the collective hangovers will just make it all more sloppy and dangerous. I’ve given up trying to predict what’s going to happen. I know, deep inside myself, that whatever it is will be bad. Now I just have to wait.
I catch Cade’s eye one final time, and notice the way he’s shifting his weight from one foot to the other, not turning around to go.
I feel like an idiot when I realize what he’s waiting for.
We normally try to keep PDA to a minimum when we’re in any kind of public space, but I also don’t want to leave things between us feeling like this.
It only takes one step to put myself in Cade’s space and wrap my hand around the back of his neck, holding him firm.
He sinks into me when I kiss him on the lips.
It’s chaste; mouths closed, but it feels like we’re saying everything that we haven’t said.
I lean my forehead against his when I break the kiss, taking a deep breath of the scent of him and closing my eyes for one more moment of peace.
Cade brings both his hands to hold my face and keep me close. When he speaks, it’s quiet, and his voice is a little choked.
“I love you. I don’t want to fight anymore, okay? I just need to do this. You have to let me take care of you and the girls.”
I can’t help but sigh, because this really is what it always comes back to, but there’s no point in getting into that conversation again right now. I’ve given up on trying to stop him.
“I love you, too. Please just be safe.”
I feel him nod against my forehead, and I don’t make any moves to pull away. Maybe if I keep my eyes closed and my face next to his, nothing has to change.
Cade is the one to pull away first. He leans back, still holding me in place, and presses a hard kiss to my forehead. By the time I open my eyes again, he’s walking away from me. He doesn’t look back, and I get it. I wouldn’t want to, either.
I don’t let myself look at the people scattered around me, because I don’t know whether they were looking at us with disgust or some kind of pity, and I don’t care. I’m just trying to breathe.
The riders all line up at the start, and a controlled cheer goes out from the crowd. A lot of people parked up tailgate style, and people are drinking, smoking weed out in the open, acting like it’s a big party. Adrenaline starts to blur my vision.
The track is a cross between a backyard set-up and something more professional.
It’s mostly berms and smaller jumps, but there’s enough space for them to get up some real speed in places, and the final jump of the track is big enough to qualify as a booter.
They can get some serious air time there, if they go for it.
Air time in the dark. Perfect.
I’m so consumed by my tension, I don’t really clock the start of the race.
I just hear the sudden roar of the engines, smell the octane in the air, and then see Cade—a pink blur—eating up the track.
I haven’t decided if I want to watch him closely or just close my eyes and hope for the best. I can’t believe I agreed to stand here for thirty fucking minutes of this.
Like always, a rhythm descends on the arena.
The engine noise pitches and ebbs as they move around the track, the conversation falls to a general kind of chatter, and everyone seems pretty content to just relax and watch the ride.
Once in a while a cheer goes up for one of the riders, and I think they’re mostly for Cade. He’s obviously the favorite to win.
Without making a conscious decision about it, I realize my eyes are trained on him and I’m not willing to look away.
To save myself some pain, I focus on studying his technique.
Where he’s holding his weight, when he accelerates and slows, how he gets past or falls behind the other riders.
It’s closer matched than I expected—all of them still huddled together more or less—but Cade is also slower than I’ve ever seen him.
Not just slow on the bike, but slow in his reactions.
I suspect he’s been pretending to feel a lot better than he did today.
The other guys might be hungover, but Cade is coming off a what? Nearly 24-hour bender with only a few hours of sleep here and there, plus a lot of stress about it?
All he ate today was fucking potato chips. God, this is a nightmare.
I wince as Cade lands hard from a jump and fishtails a little, but he gets it under control and keeps going.
This is out of my control.
This is out of my control.
This is out of my control.
I have a strong urge to talk to my therapist, which has never happened to me before. I guess if I had a parent I was close to, I might have an urge to talk to them instead, but that’s not something that’s ever going to be a part of my life.
I’m shocked out of that thought by a sudden series of noises. They’re harsh—metal on metal—and accompanied by a gasp from the crowd.
I’m calm. It’s like the waiting was worse than the event, and I always knew this was coming. The world is moving in slow-motion around me as I finally latch my eyes onto what everyone else is looking at.
Or course. Of course it’s Cade.
Someone must have been passing someone else and lost control, because Chris’s bike is on its side as well as Cade’s, and both riders are tangled together in a pile, several feet away. My lungs are frozen as I wait for them to move, to try to get up.
If this were a real race, the EMTs would already be out there, but of course it’s not, so instead we have some confusing yelling coming from different sources and the other riders, clearly oblivious, still moving around the track.
Cade still isn’t moving.
I think someone—probably Chris’s uncle—is moving closer to the track, yelling and waving his hands, but it’s too slow.
I wall off every emotion I have into somewhere very far away, and start to run.
There aren’t any real fences or barriers, it’s all just open, so it’s easy for me to get on the track and start waving off the other riders.
One stops, then the rest, getting their feet on the ground and looking around to see what’s going on.
I’m past them now, though. Just as I reach the crash, I can see Chris pushing himself to his feet on one hand, the other held protectively close to his chest. His helmet is still on until he pulls it off and throws it to the side, but Cade still isn’t moving.