Chapter 39 #2
My legs have forgotten how to be still, the vibration of the engine still humming through my thighs like a tuning fork someone struck twenty minutes ago and never dampened.
I swing off the bike and my legs buckle, gravel under my feet, not enough to fall but enough that I grab the guardrail with both hands and stand there blinking at the Pacific Ocean like it personally offended me.
Remy cuts the engine. The silence is enormous.
He pulls his helmet off and sets it on the tank, and his hair is a disaster, flattened in some places and wild in others, and he runs a hand through it and somehow it works.
He looks like he just rolled out of bed, which is unfair, because I look like I was dragged behind the bike, not sitting on it.
"My legs are vibrating."
"That'll stop in a minute." He leans against the Agusta with his arms crossed, watching me with the kind of quiet amusement that makes me want to throw my helmet at him. "Maybe two."
I pull my own helmet off and set it beside his, and the wind hits my face and my hair hits everything.
It's everywhere, tangled and knotted and whipping across my mouth and into my eyes, and I gather it in both fists and hold it at the back of my neck while the ocean breeze tries to steal it again. "I look insane."
"You look like someone who just rode a motorcycle for the first time." His mouth twitches. "Which you did. So."
"Was I doing it wrong? Because on that hill, the third one, I think I leaned the wrong way and you had to correct and I felt the whole bike shift under us and I'm pretty sure that was my fault."
"That was a pothole."
"It was not a pothole."
"Chère, I've been ridin' since I was nineteen.
I know what a pothole feels like." He uncrosses his arms and pushes off the bike, closing the distance between us until he's close enough to pull a strand of hair free from where the wind has plastered it across my lip.
His fingers are warm against my mouth and he takes his time with it, tucking it behind my ear. "You did good."
The praise lands clean. A flush spreads through my chest like the sun on the water below us.
When did that change?
He walks back to the bike and I follow, the gravel crunching under my sneakers, my legs still buzzing with phantom engine.
The Agusta is cooling in the afternoon light, ticking softly, and I look at it properly for the first time without the distortion of speed or terror or Remy's body between me and the machine.
There's a scratch along the left side. A thin line scored through the red, deep enough to catch the light. He hasn't fixed it.
"What happened here?"
He doesn't look at where I'm pointing. He already knows. "Dropped her. Kickstand would've cost me three seconds I didn't have."
The night he came for me.
It all comes back: gravel under my knees in the dark, his voice saying my name before I could see his face, his arms lifting me off the ground like I weighed nothing, one under my knees and one behind my back, and the sound his boots made in the dirt as he walked toward the helicopter lights, calm the whole way, even though his heart was slamming against my shoulder hard enough that I could count the beats.
My palms itch with the memory of the cuts I'd gotten crawling through that window, and the echo of his hands is there too, wrapping gauze around each one with fingers that didn't shake.
I run my fingertips along the bare scratch. The raw metal under the paint is cool, a thin line he chose not to cover.
He watches me do it. Doesn't say anything.
The silence holds for three beats, four, the ocean filling the space between us with the sound of water hitting rock far below, and then I turn toward the guardrail because the view deserves more than my peripheral vision and my chest needs a second to figure out what to do with the weight that just settled into it.
"It's wilder than the Gulf." I lean my forearms on the railing. "Bigger somehow."
He pushes off the Agusta and comes up behind me, the warmth of him close enough that I can feel the heat of his chest through the back of my jacket before his arms come around me, one at my waist, the other braced on the guardrail next to mine.
My back settles against him without deciding to.
"Colder everything." His accent stretches the word out, makes it sound like something worth arguing about. "Water, wind, people."
"Not all the people."
His chin brushes the top of my head and whatever I can't see makes a sound vibrate low through his chest. "No," he agrees. "Not all of 'em."
The sun has dropped low enough to turn the water into something I couldn't paint if I had a thousand years and every color ever made, gold bleeding into copper bleeding into a blue so deep it's almost purple at the horizon line.
The guardrail is warm under my forearms from hours of afternoon light, and his arm is warmer where it rests across my middle.
"I'm staying."
The words come out before I've finished deciding to say them, which is how I know they're true. This just falls out, plain and simple, the way Darcy says things.
Remy doesn't move. His arm stays across my middle, and the ocean keeps throwing itself against the rocks below us like it has somewhere to be.
"In San Francisco," I add, because the silence feels like it needs a shape. "Not just for now. I want to stay."
My father's city was New Orleans. Every street, every fundraiser, every room I walked into wearing the right dress and the right smile, his. This one could be mine. Not contingent on someone else's schedule or someone else's name. Mine.
"Okay." His voice is quiet and unhurried, the accent sitting wide open in the single word like it's been there all along and he just stopped holding the door shut. His mouth brushes my temple. "What about the house?"
"Your house?"
"Our house." He says it like he's correcting a medical chart, matter-of-fact, no emphasis on either word. "If you're stayin'."
What moves through me has nothing to do with the sun or the jacket or the guardrail.
"Darcy is going to lose her mind."
His laugh is low and immediate. "Darcy is gonna show up with a U-Haul and opinions about throw pillows."
"She's going to make a vision board. You know that, right?
She's going to make a vision board for our living room and a vision board for the wedding none of us asked for, and then probably one for the babies before we even sign the lease, and she's going to text me fabric swatches at two in the morning and show up with everything in a color neither of us agreed to. "
His laugh moves through his chest into my back. "She threw a pillow at my head when she was eleven because I moved her stuffed animals off the couch." His mouth is close to my ear now. "Left-handed. Dead aim."
"She's going to cry first, though." Darcy's face crumples in my mind's eye into that wide-open joy she can't contain, eyes filling before the sound catches up. "She's going to cry and then she's going to scream and then she's going to start planning a housewarming party we didn't ask for."
"By next Tuesday."
"By Thursday at the latest."
His hand drifts down from the guardrail and settles on my hip, fingers spreading wide with the easy weight of something that's found its place and stopped looking, and something in my chest releases, a brace against a blow that isn't coming.
"Margaret offered me a position." My eyes stay on the water. "With the Foundation. Strategic program development, the work she's been mentoring me toward since that first garden party."
The memory of Margaret's office surfaces.
She's looking at me across her desk, saying tell me what you see instead of here's what I need.
"She called after everything with my father.
Not to manage me, not to ask for a statement.
She called to ask what I needed and then she sent a list of resources before I could answer. "
His thumb moves once against my hipbone. "Winchester's good people."
"She's the reason I know what my skills are actually for.
" I turn one hand over on the guardrail, palm up, studying the fading pink lines where the cuts from the window have almost healed.
"Twenty-four years of reading rooms and tracing donor networks and spotting when someone's managing a narrative, and it took Margaret thirty minutes to show me that those skills could build something instead of just protecting someone else's brand. "
"You'd be good at it." His palm stays where it is.
The sun touches the water at the horizon and the whole Pacific catches fire, gold running liquid across the surface all the way to the rocks below us, and I breathe in salt air and engine oil and leather that smells like him and the last traces of whatever cologne he put on this morning before he asked me if I wanted to go for a ride.
"I don't know exactly who I'm going to be." I turn inside the circle of his arm and tip my face up to him, and his hand slides to the small of my back, adjusting without letting go. "But I know she's not going to ask permission first."
His eyes hold mine, green and warm, and he doesn't say anything because he doesn't need to. He just nods, once, and the nod carries every version of me he's watched emerge from underneath the performance.
I pick up my helmet.
His mouth curves as he swings onto the Agusta, and the engine turns over with a sound my sternum picks up before my ears do.
I climb on behind him and my body knows the language now.
Where my weight settles, the angle of my knees against the bike, the place where my arms wrap around his waist and find the heartbeat I've already mapped.
The gravel crunches as he pulls forward, and the highway opens ahead of us, and I lean into the first curve with him.