Chapter Eight
SAGE
Four Weeks Later
Harry Reid International is doing what airports do best. People are pacing, kids are already bored.
Someone is holding a balloon that’s making a determined effort to escape into the ceiling.
And every time the arrivals doors slide open, half the people waiting instinctively lean forward before remembering they can’t make the passengers walk any faster.
I’ve been here twenty minutes already.
Too early.
Not early enough.
If you’d asked me this morning, I would have sworn I wasn’t the sort of person who showed up to the airport before they had to.
Turns out I was lying to myself.
Piper is coming home.
Of course, I was going to be here.
My hands stay in my pockets as another wave of people spills through the doors—none of them are her.
More people spill into the baggage claim area—business travelers, families, a couple arguing quietly over which carousel their luggage is on. I scan faces without really thinking, my pulse climbing another notch anyway.
Then I see her.
For one ridiculous second, my brain refuses to catch up.
It’s just… Piper.
Backpack hanging off one shoulder. Sunglasses shoved into her hair because she never remembers to put them away properly.
She’s talking to someone beside her as she walks, hands animated while she talks like they always are, completely unaware that my entire world has just narrowed to one person crossing an airport floor.
Something catches in my chest so hard it almost hurts.
God, I have missed her.
She looks exactly the same.
She looks older.
Both things somehow manage to be true at once.
Like life kept happening while I was busy missing it.
Her gaze sweeps across the waiting crowd, still talking, still smiling, then she sees me.
And everything else disappears.
Her smile breaks so wide it steals the breath right out of me. “Sage!” her muted tone calls out. Her face does the thing it’s done since she was five years old. The smile that starts at the edges, builds through the middle, and then takes over.
I step forward.
She drops her backpack and launches herself at me.
There’s absolutely no dignity involved.
One second, she’s on the other side of the barrier, and the next, she’s hit me with enough force to make me stumble backward. She is laughing into my shoulder while I hug her right back like I’m making up for every birthday, holiday, and random Tuesday we’ve spent in different states.
God, I have missed this.
She smells like citrus shampoo and Piper. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed something as stupidly ordinary as that until this exact second.
I laugh, the sound rougher than I expect after standing in my own head for most of the morning. “Hey, Pipes.”
Piper’s smile somehow gets even bigger. “Hi, Sage.”
She never hesitates.
Never asks me to repeat myself.
She never has.
I pull back first, because she needs to see my face to catch what I’m saying, and I sign at the same time I speak because that’s how we do it. With the two systems running together, neither of them are sufficient without the other.
‘You’re here.’
She gives me a look—obviously. Then she leans back just enough to get a proper look at me. I know that look. She’s checking for all the things I never tell her—whether I’m sleeping and eating, or whether work is chewing me up again.
She doesn’t miss much.
She never has.
“What?” I speak loudly this time.
She smiles but signs back. ‘You’ve been worrying.’
‘I’ve been working.’
“Sage,” she says in a monotone.
‘What? It’s basically the same thing.’
‘It really isn’t,’ she signs back to me with added emphasis.
Piper lifts her hands and signs, clearly, with the directness she brings to everything. ‘You’ve been spiraling. I can tell from the texts.’
I sign back without missing a beat. ‘I’m fine.’
She looks at me for another second. Long enough to tell me she’s seen whatever I was hoping she’d miss. Long enough to let me know we’ll be having this conversation later.
She doesn’t call me on it.
Not here.
Not while we’re standing in the middle of baggage claim with people dragging suitcases around us and families crying over reunions.
Piper is patient.
She always has been.
Which, unfortunately for me, usually means she’s just waiting until I can’t escape.
Instead, she grabs her backpack off the floor and her suitcase off the carousel, then knocks her shoulder into mine and grins.
‘So,’ she signs, adding her voice for the sheer delight of it.
‘Show me this city you’ve been hoarding all to yourself. ’
I laugh, the genuine one, the one I forget I haven’t been doing enough of lately. ‘You’ve seen Las Vegas before.’
‘I’ve flown over Las Vegas. That is completely different.’ She tips her head toward the exit, already walking. ‘Also, I’ve heard about this clubhouse, and I need to assess whether these people deserve you.’
‘They’re going to love you,’ I tell her.
She makes a production of thinking it over. ‘Of course, they are. That’s not the question.’
I shake my head and follow, and the ache in my chest from the past several weeks lifts enough that I can breathe around it.
The drive back takes the better part of forty minutes thanks to Vegas traffic. Piper has the window down before we’re even out of the airport, sunglasses shoved onto her face, one arm resting on the door while she soaks everything in.
I’d forgotten she does that.
Every new place gets her full attention. She watches the Strip roll past, the mountains sitting out in the distance, the sun baking everything the same dusty shade until even the casinos start looking like they belong here.
She keeps me talking the whole drive. Over the years, I have learned to drive and sign at the same time.
Difficult, but not impossible if you time it right.
We talk about the club, baby Marcus and whether he’s really as loud as I made him sound, Marley and Nitro’s wedding, then about Victoria and whether motherhood has changed her.
But she carefully avoids Ghost.
Which would almost be convincing if I hadn’t spent twenty-six years being related to her.
I know that look.
She’s loading the magazine before she pulls the goddamn trigger.
We pull up to the clubhouse mid-afternoon, the lot half full with bikes gleaming in the Vegas heat.
Piper gets out of the car, grabs her bags, and stands for a moment, just taking it in—the building, the lot, the bones of the place, and something in her expression goes quietly impressed, though she wouldn’t say it in those words.
‘It’s bigger than I thought,’ she says, and signs it simultaneously without thinking.
‘It’s always bigger than people think.’
She nods, satisfied, and follows me inside.
The clubhouse is exactly what you’d expect to find on a Sunday afternoon.
Koa is behind the bar arguing with Deek over whether reheated soup somehow tastes better the second day around.
Deek insists it does. Koa insists Deek’s taste buds are broken.
Bear is halfway through his beer, letting Deek and Koa argue over yesterday’s soup without offering an opinion. He knows better.
Marley is at the table with a coffee in one hand and a file open in front of her, looking like she’s been trying to read the same page for the last ten minutes without much success.
Ro calls something from the back that earns a muffled reply from Koa, and the whole place smells like whatever Koa put in that soup he’s been trying to convince everyone was award-winning since yesterday.
The conversation rolls on right up until Piper and I walk through the door.
Then every head turns.
Deek straightens immediately because Deek can’t help himself. Koa is already smiling. Marley pushes back from the table, opening her arms, and Piper, who has never met Marley in her life but has heard enough about her to have opinions, walks straight into the hug like she’s known her for years.
The room reorganizes itself around Piper almost immediately. It always does when someone new walks through the clubhouse doors.
Koa is the first one over, and Deek is only half a step behind him, already talking before he’s even close enough for Piper to read a word of it.
“H… e… l… l… o… o,” he says, slowing every syllable down to the point it barely resembles English anymore. “I… am… Deeeeeek!”
Piper blinks at him. Then looks at me. “Sage?”
“Yeah?”
“Is he okay?”
I sigh. “He’s always like this.”
“I caaan speeeak norrrmally?” Deek says, still somehow talking like he’s explaining advanced mathematics to a toddler.
“She can understand you, you idiot! As long as you are facing her when you talk.”
His eyes widen as if he is shocked by this revelation. “No, I know that… I know she can.”
“Then why the fuck are you talking like that?”
His hands run through the back of his hair with anxiety. “Fuck… I don’t know?” He thinks about it for a second. “I panicked!”
Piper laughs. “I like him.”
I groan. “Don’t encourage him.”
“Too late, I like his kind of weird.”
Deek grins at her salaciously. “I like your kinda weird.”
I snap my head around at him, narrowing my eyes on him. Hard! “Do not hit on my sister, Deek!”
Piper giggles as Deek clearly eyes her up and down. “Why? She’s hot.”
“Thanks, you’re not so bad yourself. You’re an idiot, but you’re a hot idiot,” Piper says.
“Jesus Christ,” I mumble under my breath as everyone laughs, and the introductions sort themselves out after that.
Nobody really knows the right way to do it, so they just do it.
Koa talks with his hands so much it barely matters whether Piper is watching his lips or not.
Bear offers a quiet hello and a handshake.
Nitro introduces himself twice because he gets halfway through the first attempt and decides he’d forgotten how names work.
Nobody gets it perfect.
Nobody seems particularly worried about getting it perfect either.
Within five minutes, Piper is laughing with them instead of at them. Deek is somehow convinced her Koa’s soup won an award that definitely doesn’t exist, and Koa is threatening to throw him out into the Nevada desert.