Chapter 11. Kit
My manager calls me in at eleven that morning, which never means anything good, and it takes him about ninety seconds to confirm it.
Not enough hours to justify keeping me on past the season, he says. Nothing personal. Just numbers. Here's your last check, and good luck out there.
He says good luck out there like I'm setting off on some kind of adventure and not standing in a stockroom being told I no longer have a job.
I don't argue.
There's nothing to argue with.
He's not wrong, and he's not being cruel about it, and somehow that's worse. There's no target for the anger, nowhere to point it except at myself, at the last six months of thinning hours I'd been pretending not to notice, at a life that keeps quietly shrinking without asking my permission first.
I don't tell anyone.
I go home, and I sit on the edge of my bed for a while, not doing anything at all, and by the time evening rolls around, I've decided the only thing to do with the feeling is bury it under enough noise that I can't hear it anymore.
I don't know how I'm going to make rent.
My parents certainly won't help.
But I'll think about that later.
I'm still carrying it when I walk into Redline that night, and it takes about four minutes for my eyes to do the automatic sweep toward the back corner.
There they are.
Charles and John.
Except tonight, John's got a small, plain engagement ring on his left hand, holding it up for Anya and Dee to coo over, and Charles is sitting there with his arm around John's shoulders, looking like a man whose whole life is exactly where it's supposed to be.
I don't say anything. I just feel the floor tilt a little further than it already had all day.
I order a drink. And somewhere in the next hour, I've climbed all the way back up onto the loud, bright, performing version of myself I thought I'd mostly put down these last six weeks.
"—and I told him, if you're gonna low-side in front of God and everybody, at least do it with some style," I say, too loud, gesturing wide enough that my glass sloshes over Dex's knuckles. "Man went down like a sack of wet cement. Zero flair. I was embarrassed for him."
Dex laughs. Ni doesn't. Not really.
He's watching me.
I feel Soren settling in the air beside me, and he doesn't say anything at first. He just takes the stool next to mine and lets me keep talking.
Keep performing. Keep pouring my voice into every open space in the room like it's the only thing holding the walls up.
It's another ten minutes before he says anything at all.
"Kit."
Just my name, quiet, under the noise.
I don't stop talking right away. I'm mid-story, something about a track day, something that isn't even funny, but he waits, patient the way he always is, until I run out of momentum and have to actually look at him.
"What?"
I know I sound harsher than I intend.
"I know this isn't you," he says. "I've known the actual you for six weeks now. I know what it sounds like when you're not doing this. Your friends know it too."
His eyes stay on mine.
"Stop."
It should land soft. Any other night, it probably would. I've let him say harder things than this and felt something in me settle instead of spike.
But I've had four drinks and a stockroom conversation sitting behind my eyes, and a ring on John's finger twenty feet away, and instead of softening, something in me goes sharp and defensive. Fast. The old reflex kicking the door shut before I can stop it.
"This is me," I say, and I hear the edge in my own voice. "This is exactly me, actually. Maybe you've just been getting a curated version."
Something flickers across his face.
"Okay," he says. Just that. He doesn't push. He never pushes.
Some nights, I love that about him. Tonight, it makes me want to throw something.
"I'm gonna head out," I say, sliding off the stool, my balance a half-second slower to catch up than it should be.
"I'll drive you." He's already standing.
"I've got my bike."
"You've had four drinks, Kit."
"I've ridden after more than four drinks plenty of times." I say it like a joke, like the old bravado, except it isn't a joke. It's just true. And saying it out loud in front of him feels like handing him something ugly I usually keep hidden.
"That's the actual problem." His voice doesn't rise, but there's something underneath it tonight, something taut, close to the surface for the first time since I've known him.
"I'm not letting you ride like this. Let me drive you home, or call Ni, or—anything.
I'll figure out the bike tomorrow. Just don't get on it tonight. "
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're four drinks in, your hands aren't steady, and I watched you not hear a single word I just said to you."
He steps closer, solid, the way he always is.
Except tonight, it feels like a wall instead of an anchor.
"Please. Not tonight. Whatever happened today—I don't need to know what it was. I just need you to not get on that bike."
Something in me wants to listen. I can feel it.
The part of me that wants to hand him the keys and let him put me in the truck and drive me somewhere safe.
The part that wants to tell him about the job.
About good luck out there. But it's four drinks deep and buried under a ring on John's finger and a morning I haven't let myself feel yet, and the loud, reckless, self-destructive part of me is louder tonight than it's been in weeks.
And it wins.
"I'll be fine," I say. "I do this all the time."
"Kit—"
"I'm not asking permission."
It comes out harder than I mean it to.
I don't wait for him to say anything else.
I turn, and I walk, and I don't look back at him, because if I look back, I'll see exactly how much I'm hurting him by walking out that door, and I can't carry that on top of everything else I'm already carrying tonight.
I get the bike out of the lot fast, but I don't make it loud yet.
I roll out clean, swing onto the main stretch, shift smoothly up through the gears.
The city thins out around me in about ten minutes.
The bright, dense grid of streetlights stretches and gaps.
The storefronts give way to fenced lots and dark warehouses and then to nothing, the lanes widening as the road shoulders out toward the county line.
The traffic bleeds away to nothing. There's just me and the cold black ribbon of asphalt unspooling under the single eye of my headlight, and the sodium lamps coming farther and farther apart until they stop coming at all.
That's when I open it up. I roll the throttle open and the engine pitches up into that high, screaming register. The bike surges under me. The speedometer climbs.
Past sixty.
Past eighty.
Past a hundred.
Past the point where there's a recovery window.
I know exactly where that line is.
I've known where it is my whole life.
I cross it on purpose.
And it works.
It always works.
The noise floods in and takes everything.
I am gloriously, mercifully empty.
The first curve comes up, and I know it.
I know this road.
A long left-hander I've carved a hundred times, sweeping out past a tree line, and I take it without lifting, leaning the bike farther and farther until the peg's a breath from the asphalt, the horizon tilting, my knee dropping toward the deck.
I push the lean past comfortable.
Past sensible.
The tires load up, the suspension compresses, the whole machine humming right at the edge of its grip—
And at the apex, the rear tire skips.
A patch of loose gravel.
A faint, gritty stutter under me.
The back end steps out half a foot in a quick lateral kick that would put most people in the hospital.
My body handles it before my brain even registers the slide. I ease the throttle a fraction, steer into the slide, let the bike walk and catch itself. The rubber bites again.
The line comes back.
Reflex.
I don't slow down. That's the part I'll think about later. If there is a later.
I felt the warning and rolled straight through it.
The next curve comes up faster than the last, and it's sharper, a tighter radius dropping right, and I'm carrying too much speed into it.
I tip the bike in. And there, spread wide across the inside of the lane where I need the rubber to be, is gravel.
Not a stray patch this time. Not a stutter. A full scatter of it.
The front wheel hits it at speed.
There's no warning.
No stutter, no chirp, no half-second of feel to work with.
The front just goes.
Washes out from under me in a single violent lurch, the bars wrenching sideways out of my hands, the front end tucking out from under me in an instant with nothing to catch and no window to catch it in.
One heartbeat, I'm leaned into a corner. The next, there is no corner. No bike. No up. Just the ground coming for me sideways.
Then it's loud. The fairing slams down and the world fills with the screech of plastic and metal tearing across asphalt, a long, ugly shriek, sparks chewing off the engine case in an orange spray I can see flaring past my visor.
I'm down with it. My shoulder takes the road first, a slamming impact that punches up through the leather and into the bone. Then my hip. The gear sliding and snagging and sliding again, the pavement raking under me at speed, my whole left side a single screaming line of friction and heat.
The bike cartwheels off to one side.
I skate out across the lane on my back and then my side, momentum doing what momentum does, until it finally, finally runs out.
I come to rest on the shoulder.
For a moment, nothing moves.
I'm on my back, twisted halfway onto my side, the dirty visor smeared with road dust so the world is a brown blur with the dark sky behind it.
I just breathe.
My breath roars inside the helmet, wet and ragged, fogging the shield, the only sound in the universe for one long, stretched second.
The bike is ten feet behind me, thrown on its flank in the road, one wheel still turning slowly, spinning down with a faint ticking whir, throwing back the last of the light.
Then my body reports in. My left shoulder screams, a grinding pain that flares white when I try to shift my weight off it.
I stop trying.
My hip is wet.
I can feel it through the torn gear, a warm, spreading dampness against my skin, and I can't tell yet if it's blood or sweat.
Can't tell.
Don't move to find out.
I just lie there feeling the dampness spread.
The road is empty.
In both directions, it runs out into the dark.
No headlights. No taillights. Nothing. Just the pale line of the lane and the tree line and the wide black nothing beyond it.
The engine has cut out.
The high, screaming noise I came out here to drown in is gone.
All of it.
And in its place is the thing I've spent the entire night and the entire year running from.
Quiet.
Just the wind moving low across the asphalt. And the slow, dying tick of cooling metal somewhere behind me, the bike letting go of its heat into the cold, one beat at a time, while I lie on the shoulder in the dark and breathe.
There is no one.
There is no one for miles.
There is no one in the world watching.