Chapter 13. Kit
The sign above the door is restrained: Halverson Moto, black lettering on brushed aluminum, no flourish.
The front windows are large, floor-to-ceiling panels of plate glass that run the width of the showroom, and through them I can see the display bikes lit by the ambient light of early morning. It's beautiful and fancy, but sober. Like Soren.
And there, through the gap between the showroom window and the service bay door, off to the left side of the main floor:
My bike.
My baby.
The left fairing panel is cracked clean through, a fracture running diagonally from the intake vent to the rear corner.
The left bar end is scraped raw, the aluminum bare and pale where the anodizing got taken off by the asphalt.
The whole front end cants slightly wrong.
One fork leg sits out of line, and there's a thin streak of oil down the tube from a blown seal.
I stand there looking at it for about five seconds too long. Then I push through the door because I can't keep doing that.
It smells like motor oil, familiar by now, the same smell that clings to Soren's hands most nights we hang out.
The concrete floor is polished to a dull, clean sheen.
Every overhead fluorescent is on, running at full brightness.
Along the far wall, the custom steel workbench I've leaned against a dozen times these last few weeks runs the full length of the bay, exactly where I remember it.
I keep my left arm close to my body as I come through the door. The bandage Dex wrapped last night is still in place under the rolled-back sleeve of my jacket, and the bruising that's come up above and below the wrap is doing what bruising does, turning ugly shades of red and purple.
It hurts about as much as it looks, so the color is accurate.
My left shoulder is wrong in a way I've been ignoring since last night.
The joint is stiff and grinding, and I can raise the arm about thirty degrees before the pain stops being something I can pretend is theoretical.
I have tested this several times already this morning to establish the exact parameters of the problem. Thirty degrees.
Which I have decided is not enough wrong to constitute a real problem.
Soren is at the workbench with a torque wrench.
He's really handsome, as usual. He has his big back angled toward the door, facing the bike on the lift, both hands on the wrench handle, applying slow, even pressure to a bolt I can't see from this angle.
He's wearing a gray work shirt and dark jeans, sleeves rolled to the forearms.
He hears me approaching and looks up. Something shifts fast across his face.
The focus of the work drops away entirely the second he sees me, like nothing on that bench matters more than the fact that I'm standing in his doorway looking like I got dragged behind a truck.
He sets the wrench down without finishing the bolt and crosses the shop toward me.
Fast. For a man who almost never moves fast.
I feel the familiar, embarrassing rush of being the only thing in the room he's looking at. He stops close.
Closer than most people stand. But it doesn't put me on edge the way it might have two months ago. I lean into it instead. Some part of me goes loose and relieved just from the proximity of him, even with the shame of last night still sitting heavy in my chest.
I'm embarrassed about how I behaved.
About what I said to him.
About the fact that he told me not to ride, and I rode anyway, and then he had to come find me bleeding beside a destroyed motorcycle.
I haven't figured out how to say any of that out loud yet.
"Did you go to the ER?" he asks.
"It's fine," I say casually. "I'm fine. Dex wanted to drag me to urgent care last night. I told him it'd cost me two hundred bucks to be told to ice it and take ibuprofen."
"We'll go now."
Absolute.
"No way. I can't afford it."
"I know."
That stops me for half a second. Of course he knows. I told him everything last night in the gravel while Dex held gauze against my arm and I tried not to look directly at the remains of my dignity.
Soren watches my face. Then, after a beat:
"Did I sound like I was asking you to pay for it?"
I open my mouth. I have a response loaded.
A variation on I don't need anybody paying for anything, pitched to sound like self-sufficiency rather than pride, which is what it actually is.
It's the same response I've been leaning on for weeks whenever he offers me something I don't think I've earned. But I don't say anything.
I've learned, these past weeks, that it doesn't work on him anymore. He just waits me out.
Soren is already moving.
He hooks a boot around the leg of a stool tucked beneath the workbench and drags it out across the concrete with a dull scrape. Then he points at it. Not a suggestion.
He knows exactly how submissive I am by now.
Knows it better than almost anyone ever has.
And he uses it without hesitation when it actually matters.
I sit down.
He pointed at a stool and I sat on it.
Same as I would have at any point in the last six weeks. The realization makes something warm and humiliating twist low in my stomach.
The shop is very quiet.
Through the front windows, I can see the avenue outside, a delivery truck making slow progress up the block, a dog walker moving through the thin morning light.
In here, the only sounds are the hum of the fluorescents and the occasional creak of the building settling. Soren crosses to the far wall, opens a cabinet with a key from his belt loop, and retrieves a hard-sided first-aid kit. He carries it back and sets it open on the bench beside me.
"Let me see how bad this looks."
He doesn't wait for a joke. He takes my left forearm carefully, one hand supporting underneath while the other works at the edge of the dressing Dex put on last night.
His hands are large and calloused from years of work, the kind of hands that have been pressed against hot metal and greasy engines since before I learned to corner.
They are also, currently, warm. He's not aggressive, but not delicate either.
I stare at the far wall. My whole body is answering to it anyway. The closeness. The care. All of it landing somewhere lower than it probably should, considering the state I'm in.
There's a framed black-and-white photograph above the cash register.
A race bike, tail-out, rider pressed flat against the tank, the whole thing leaned hard into a corner.
The dressing peels away. Pain arrives bright and clarifying enough that my breath catches before I can stop it. Soren pauses. Only for a second. His eyes flick to my face.
"I'm fine," I say automatically.
His expression doesn’t change.
I sigh.
"Right. Sorry. Banned phrase." I murmur under my breath, "Authoritarian."
"Hold still."
I hold still.
He wets a pad with saline and cleans around the road rash without scrubbing at it, methodical, careful. I keep my eyes on the photograph. The wound looks worse in the clean fluorescent light than it did on the side of the road. Raw. Angry.
Soren doesn't comment on that either. He examines the skin around it, checks that the bleeding has stopped, then looks at my hand.
"Move your fingers."
I do.
"Any numbness?"
"No."
"Tingling?"
"No."
He lightly presses along the bones of my wrist and forearm, stopping well before he reaches the shoulder. My jaw locks anyway. He notices. Of course he notices. His hands stop.
"No."
I look at him. "No what?"
"I'm done."
"You barely checked anything."
"I checked enough, Kit," he says.
"You haven't even looked at the shoulder."
"Exactly." He folds a fresh sterile dressing over the road rash and secures it. "I'm not manipulating a shoulder you can barely move after a high-speed crash."
"I can move it."
"Thirty degrees doesn't count." Then he stands. "We're going to the ER."
"Soren."
"No. Enough." He says, definitive.
"You don't get to just—"
"I know," he says. The answer is immediate and calm. It cuts straight across the argument I was building. He steps back enough that I have space, but his attention never leaves me. "I know what I get to decide for you and what I don't."
My mouth closes. He continues.
"I am not your Daddy. We don't have a dynamic. You didn't give me authority over you."
Something strange happens in my chest hearing him say it that plainly.
"But," he says, "I am allowed to tell you when you're making a terrible decision.
You crashed at over a hundred miles an hour last night.
You can't raise your left arm. Your shoulder is grinding when you move it.
You have road rash deep enough that Dex had to keep pressure on it, and you spent the night refusing medical care because you don't have money.
You need imaging. You may need stitches.
And I'm not going to stand here pretending urgent care and an ice pack are adequate because you're scared of a bill. "
"I'm not scared."
"Fine. Angry at a bill."
"I’m being financially responsible!" I say.
"Kit."
There it is. Just my name again. Heavy. The same way he said it at Redline last night before everything went wrong.
I feel tired. Really, really tired. Soren sees that too. His expression changes. Softens without turning pitying.
"I know why you're saying no," he says. That almost makes it worse. "You lost your job yesterday. I know."
My throat tightens.
"I know you don't know how you're going to make rent yet."
I look away.
"And I know the idea of somebody paying for you feels like another thing you've lost control of."
I stare harder at the race-bike photograph. He doesn't move closer. Doesn't touch me.
"Let me solve one problem."
My eyes burn unexpectedly. I hate that. I blink hard.
"I don't want to owe you." The words come out before I can stop them. Soren is silent for a moment.
"You won't."
"That's not how money works."
"I'm not talking about money,” he says, serious. I look at him. "You don't owe me access to you because I help you. You don't owe me obedience. You don't owe me a dynamic. You don't owe me affection. You don't owe me anything."
My chest hurts in an entirely different place now.
"I want you to get medical care because I care whether you're hurt. And if I pay for it, I'm paying for it because I decided that's what I wanted to do with my money."
I swallow.
"You make everything sound annoyingly reasonable."
"I work very hard at it."
That gets the smallest laugh out of me. Soren's eyes warm.
At some point in the last several minutes, I don't know exactly when, my boot has stopped moving.
The toe that had been tapping the rung of the stool since I sat down has simply gone still.
My foot is flat against the metal. The tapping has stopped. I look down at it. Then at Soren.
He is watching me. Not my foot.
Me.