Chapter 39
thirty-nine
Evie
The engine hums through the seat, a low vibration that travels somewhere considerably lower than I'm prepared for.
I have never been on a motorcycle in my life.
Bright sun. The bay glittering at the end of the street.
The bridge visible from where we're parked, red towers against a sky that doesn't know it's supposed to be fall.
The Agusta sits on the curb like something alive, deep metallic red and gold accents holding the light, and Remy is circling me like I'm a patient.
He's already made me put on the jacket. Mine, not his — he got me my own, sized for me, the leather still stiff at the cuffs. When I'd asked why he'd ordered it in advance, he'd shrugged.
Either way, you'd be ridin' with me. Just hopin' it'd be more often.
It still smells like him from hanging next to his in the closet.
Gloves next. Then the helmet, chin strap buckled with his fingers warm against my jaw, adjusted once, adjusted again, his thumb brushing the skin below my ear like he's checking a pulse he doesn't need to check.
He taps the side of my helmet twice. The comms click open inside it, his voice suddenly close, like he's speaking against my ear.
"Test."
"I hear you."
"Good."
"I look ridiculous."
"You look safe." He tugs the strap one more time. "Ridiculous is a bonus."
I'm in leather that smells like him and gloves that almost fit and he's looking at me like this is the most fun he's had all week. The drawl is out, loose and natural, the version of his voice that doesn't perform for anyone.
"Where are we going?"
He glances back as he swings a leg over the bike.
"Does it matter?"
It doesn't. I don't tell him that.
Lean with him, not against him. Keep your feet on the pegs. The instructions loop through my brain in his voice, and they're already losing their order because now I'm on the bike behind him and his back is wide against my chest and my hands can't find a place that feels secure enough.
"Where am I supposed to hold on?"
Remy's hand drops from the handlebar long enough to catch my wrist and pull my arm tighter around his waist. His stomach is flat and hard under my forearm, and when he speaks the vibration of his voice moves through his ribs before the speaker catches it.
"Anywhere you want, chère. I'm not gonna complain."
I press my whole body forward until there's no air between us, and the engine's vibration meets the heat of him through my thighs and my breath catches in a way that has nothing to do with fear.
He pulls away from the curb.
The lurch tips my weight backward and I clamp onto him hard, my thighs locking against the bike like it's trying to throw me. A sound comes out of my mouth that's somewhere between a laugh and a scream, mostly swallowed by the helmet and the engine climbing through its gears beneath us.
"Remy. Remy. Oh my God, slow down."
He doesn't slow down. He might actually speed up, and his stomach shakes under my hands because the bastard is laughing.
I have never in my life felt less like the photograph my father framed.
The street straightens and the city opens up around us, buildings sliding past at an angle that makes my stomach flip, and the helmet hides my grin.
The first hill catches me with my weight wrong.
The bike tips forward and gravity rearranges everything I thought I understood about sitting on a moving vehicle, my body sliding into him with a pressure that starts at my chest and ends somewhere much lower, the full length of me pressed against the full length of his back while the street drops away beneath us.
I flatten my palms against him and hold on, and the descent pushes my hips forward against the seat until the vibration of the engine meets me exactly where I don't need it to, and I squeeze my eyes shut inside the helmet because the sound I almost make would be audible through the speaker.
The climb is worse. Or better. The incline pulls my weight backward and I have to grip him harder to keep from sliding, my thighs burning against the bike, and when we crest the top the city appears in a flash between buildings, the bay bright and enormous and then gone, swallowed by the next block before I can fix it in my memory.
Sherbet Victorians blur past on my left.
A cable car grinding up the opposite slope. Gone before I can name them.
There's no frame around any of it. No windshield, no tinted glass, no car door between me and the air. The city comes at me in pieces, unmediated.
But the city isn't what's making me breathless.
It's everything I'm leaving inside it. When the road bends Remy doesn't fight the angle, just tips into it like the bike is part of his body and the road is something he's having a conversation with, and my fingers curl tighter against him.
A steep downhill drops into a sharp left turn and he leans.
Every nerve in my body fires at once. Everything in me locks, my arms go rigid, every instinct I have screaming at me to pull upright, to fight the angle that feels like falling.
The pavement rushes up on my left side close enough that I could touch it if I reached and my whole body is a fist clenched around the wrong impulse.
Oh.
That's what it feels like. Not falling. Trusting the angle. My weight settles into his weight and the bike stops fighting the turn and we're just moving, the two of us tilted together like a single thing the road has to go around instead of through.
We straighten out and the breath I've been holding exits my lungs in a rush that fogs the inside of my helmet.
A red light holds us at the bottom of the hill. Remy plants one boot on the pavement, the bike idling between his thighs.
"You screamed on that one."
"I did not scream."
"Chère, I felt it in my ribs."
The light turns green before I can defend myself, and the engine pulls us forward into the next block, and I'm laughing because he's right and because the city behind me looks different when you're not managing it.
The road widens ahead of us and the buildings fall away and the Golden Gate appears, red towers against open sky, and there is nothing between me and it but wind.
The bridge hits different.
Wind slams us sideways the moment we clear the last building, a wall of cold Pacific air that has nothing to do with the sheltered streets we left.
The cables overhead throw shadows in rhythmic bars across the pavement, light-dark-light-dark, and the towers rise on either side in a red so deep it's almost rust, close enough that the rivets show.
My jacket fills with wind and billows behind me and I flatten myself harder against Remy's back because the gusts are pulling at me like hands, testing my grip, and for three seconds I'm certain the wind is going to peel me off the bike and drop me into the bay glittering two hundred feet below.
Then he leans left, and I lean with him, not because I remember the instruction but because my body has learned the language of his body in the last twenty minutes.
His weight shifts a half-second before the bike follows, and my hips answer without consulting my brain.
The gust catches us mid-lean and the correction is his, a subtle press of his knee through my thigh against his, and we straighten together and the bridge is just a road again, a road with a view that would stop my heart if my heart weren't already occupied.
Traffic thickens near the far side and he downshifts, the engine dropping to a growl my sternum picks up before my ears do, and for a moment we're close enough to the car beside us that I could reach out and touch its mirror.
The wind drops to manageable and I tip my helmet forward until my visor almost touches his shoulder.
"I think the wind just tried to kidnap me!"
His laugh vibrates through his back into my chest. "She does that." He turns his head a fraction, his voice half-lost to the air between us. "You held, though."
The merge sweeps us onto Highway 1 and the throttle opens, and the city streets we just left start feeling like practice.
The acceleration is a hand pressing flat against my chest, pushing my weight backward, and my fingers splay wide across his stomach before curling into fists in his shirt because the road is a ribbon now, unwinding along the edge of the world, and the speedometer is climbing past anything I'd agree to if he asked permission first.
My breath comes shallow and fast and then deep and slow as my lungs figure out the new rhythm. The wind at highway speed isn't gusts anymore but a constant pressure, a second skin made of cold air and noise that wraps around us both.
The ocean appears on my left and it goes forever.
Gray-blue water stretching to a horizon that curves, waves breaking white against black rocks far below the road, and on the right the hills rise golden-brown and close, dry grass rippling in the same wind that's pressing my body into his.
My eyes go over his shoulder as the road bends between them, water and land, and the city behind us gets smaller with every mile until it's just a smudge of pale buildings against the bay and then it's nothing at all.
I don't know what I'm moving toward. But whatever is behind me, the spreadsheets, the donor lists, the smile I built for cameras, it fits inside the rearview mirror now, and it's shrinking.
My grip changes.
I don't notice it happening until it's already happened.
My fists uncurl from his shirt and my palms press flat against his chest, fingers spread wide over the place where his heart beats beneath cotton and leather and the engine's vibration.
His breathing moves under my hands, slow and even, and something tight that's been living in the center of my chest for weeks starts to loosen.
He signals right. The bike slows, the engine dropping through gears until the roar becomes a murmur, and he guides us off the highway onto a gravel turnout where the road meets the cliff.
The ground doesn't feel right.