Chapter 9. Soren #2
I hadn't noticed him come up next to me.
"Not often, but it's not a one-time thing. Kit'll burn his own tank of gas driving somebody's kid to urgent care at two in the morning and never mention it again. He gave a guy the shirt off his own back once. Actual shirt. Guy got hurt and was bleeding and needed one."
"He never mentioned any of that to me."
"He doesn't think it's worth talking about.
" Ni watches the empty road where the bike disappeared, something complicated moving behind his expression.
"That's the thing people miss about Kit.
Everybody sees the noise, the reckless riding, the way he talks himself into the center of every room.
Nobody clocks that underneath all that, he's the first person to give up his own ride for a total stranger and act like it costs him nothing. "
"It costs him something."
"Yeah."
Ni looks at me, and there's something knowing in it, something that says he's tracking exactly where my attention's been these last few weeks and isn't remotely surprised by it.
"It costs him plenty. He just never lets anybody watch him pay it."
Dex finishes securing the downed bike, straightens up, brushes gravel dust off his knees.
"Tow's twenty minutes out," he reports to the group at large. "We can head on to the diner."
The group remounts, engines firing back up in that same rolling wave, and we pull back onto the road, the formation a little looser now with Kit's absent slot in the middle of it, a gap that everyone rides around without comment.
I ride the rest of the way to the diner turning it over in my mind, and it isn't a complicated thought exactly.
I've watched Kit for weeks now—the performance at the bar, the frantic noise, the flinch toward the back corner, the way his whole body goes tight and defensive at anything resembling being seen.
I've watched him disappear into something I couldn't see at a bowling alley over nothing more than the pressure of a hand around his wrist.
I know, clinically, the shape of what Ni described to me that first night—a Little starving without a Caregiver, welding his own armor shut so no one has to hear him breaking.
But none of that told me who he actually is underneath all of it.
This does.
A man who burns an hour and a half and a full tank of gas on a total stranger without a second's hesitation. A man who softens his own reckless riding style purely because someone vulnerable is riding behind him. A man who shrugs off gratitude like it embarrasses him more than the sacrifice does.
That's not a broken person overcompensating for a wound. That's a genuinely good person, generous down to the bone. The wound is just what's currently sitting on top of that goodness, loud and messy and impossible to miss if you're only looking at the surface.
I want, very badly, to be the person who gets to see all of that without having to wait for a crisis to reveal it.
We're most of the way through breakfast—Dex arguing with Sol over the check, King recounting some story from an earlier ride that has half the table laughing—when the green Yamaha finally pulls into the diner's gravel lot, alone this time.
Kit parks, swings off, and immediately reaches for his helmet strap.
"You made it," Ni says, sliding a plate of cold fries toward the empty seat beside him.
"Barely."
Kit drops into the chair, steals a fry off Ni's plate without asking, the same casual theft he committed against my fries at the bowling alley.
"Guy's actually really nice. Works in insurance, if you can believe it.
Gave me his number. Kept trying to pay me for gas.
I told him to forget it. I invited him to Redline but gave him fair warning about...
you know. How different we are. He seems vanilla, so I don't think he'll take me up on the offer. "
"That's an hour and a half you didn't have to spend today," I say before I can decide whether it's the right thing to say out loud at a table full of people. "You didn't think twice."
Kit shrugs, already reaching for another fry, not meeting my eyes.
"Yeah, well."
He finally looks up, and there's something careful in his face, like he's bracing for me to make it into a bigger thing than he wants it to be, the same bracing I've clocked in him a dozen times now whenever anyone gets too close to the parts of himself he'd rather keep off-limits.
"Guy needed a ride. It's not that deep."
It is that deep.
I don't say so.
"You want the rest of my eggs?" I ask instead. "I'm not going to finish them."
"Obviously," he says, already reaching across the table, already grinning, already back to performing ease and nonchalance for the group at large.
Though I catch, just once, the small, private glance he sends my way before he digs in.
Grateful. Unguarded. Quick to hide again.
Like he knows I clocked exactly what happened back on that switchback, and he's relieved, more than anything, that I'm not going to make him talk about it.
We ride back together at the tail of the pack, the late-morning autumn sun pale and bright across the fields, and for the whole ride home I keep thinking about the particular gentleness in his hands on that green Yamaha's throttle with someone else's life balanced behind him.
And how badly I want, someday soon, to be the one he trusts enough to ride that carefully with.