Chapter 14
Byrdie
“What ’cha doin’?”
I jump five feet in the air as hot breath kisses the back of my neck.
Turning, with my heart still pounding against my chest, I come face to face with an amused Makhi standing literal inches behind me after nearly giving me a heart attack.
“Nothing. Why?” I ask, trying to slow down my racing pulse.
“You’ve been hovering in the doorway, staring at that piano for fifteen minutes.”
Embarrassed, I consider lying, but he sounds too confident. He’s right. I have been hungrily eyeing Nash’s grand piano, wanting to play it. “How do you know that?”
His amusement grows. “Because I watched you.”
I raise an eyebrow. “For fifteen minutes?”
He scratches the back of his neck, avoiding my gaze. “Yup.”
“Don’t you have something better to do with your time?” I demand.
It comes out defensive as hell because he probably thinks I’m crazy. Maybe I am. First, he finds me standing on the edge of a roof, staring down at the ground. Now this. It’s not like me to be so prickly, but ever since they brought me back from New Mexico, I have not been behaving normally.
He opens his mouth to respond, but I switch from defensive to offensive. “You could have asked me what I was doing before waiting for fifteen minutes.”
He steps around me and walks into the music room. “But that would have meant I wasn’t watching you anymore.”
It almost sounds like something he enjoyed doing.
Don’t be silly, Byrdie.
When I see where he’s heading, I hurry after him. “What are you doing?”
He takes a seat at the piano. “What do you think? Playing the piano.”
Drawn by my curiosity as I am by boredom, I drift closer.
We’ve all been a bit lost, wandering the house, bored, waiting for news that Nash’s attorney has gotten him out of jail.
“You play the piano?” I ask.
He presses five keys in an order that makes me scrunch up my face.
He takes one look at me and chuckles. “Maybe you could teach me.”
Shrugging, I curl my bare toes on the glossy hardwood floors. “I don’t know how to teach. I just play.”
I taught myself through trial and error, with a burning need for music to run through me. I don’t know how to play because I don’t know why I play.
“Ask Nash when he’s back,” I suggest.
Nash offered to teach me how to read music, and I have yet to take him up on it. I want to, but something is still holding me back. Maybe not knowing how long those lessons will last.
No one has asked me whether I intend to stay here forever.
I can’t remember the last time I cleaned, so am I even a maid anymore?
And the tote bag with the money I earned is in my room.
So I could leave. Jeremiah will think I died in the desert, so I’m safer than I was when I ran away from him.
I have hundreds of dollars to get on a bus or a train and go wherever I want.
But nothing is compelling me to leave.
“Nah.” He pushes himself to his feet and snags my hand.
I pull my palm out of his, and he stops, his expression going blank.
“What are you doing?” I demand.
I haven’t forgiven him for slamming a door in my face. Not yet. And maybe not ever.
“We are going for a ride,” he says, shrugging off my rejection as if it never happened.
Nash has a bike that I used to clean until he threatened to fuck me on it, so I stopped. Back then, a tiny part of me was intrigued by the thought, and I spent more time than I should have imagining how he would do it. But I’m not the same girl I was before.
Being left to die in the middle of a desert would change anyone.
“Ten minutes,” Makhi says.
Blinking to refocus, I find he’s moved. He’s standing at the patio door leading into the backyard.
“Ten minutes to what?”
“Meet me in the garage so I can take you out for a ride.”
“And if I don’t want to.”
“Then don’t.” He slips outside, leaving the door open behind him.
I look at the open door, then at the piano I want to play, and walk away.
Nance is in the kitchen, busy cooking as usual.
I slump into a seat at the dining table, bored out of my mind.
Vonn is working out, or I’d have gone to speak to him.
I heard the clang of heavy iron, a sign he was lifting weights in the home gym, a room I rarely entered.
Nance or Lydia cleaned it, and I had no interest in going into the home gym until Nance told me that Vonn likes to work out there.
She glances at me. “What’s with the long face?”
“Nance, can I—”
“No cleaning,” she cuts in firmly. “You need to rest and recover. Mostly rest.”
I groan in frustration. “But there’s nothing to do.”
That’s the biggest source of my problems.
Cleaning became a distraction I leaned into to avoid having to think about Jeremiah, the pain he had caused me, and losing my mom.
I didn’t have to think when I cleaned. I could focus on getting the next bit of floor or table or whatever sparkly, then move on to the next cleaning task to occupy my mind.
Without that distraction, all I have is time to think, and all I seem to want to think about is how close I came to dying alone in the desert if Makhi, Nash, and Vonn hadn’t found me.
Would the vulture have waited until I was dead before it ate me?
And the snake. How painful would it have been to die of venom?
I scramble to my feet and rush out of the kitchen.
“Where are you going?” Nance shouts after me.
“Ride with Makhi.”
I dart into the living room that Nance turned into my bedroom, riffling through the chest of drawers that Vonn carried down the stairs for me.
No sooner have I stuffed a hoodie over my head and stepped into white sneakers than I’m hurrying out through the entryway, hoping to catch Makhi before he leaves.
Nance sticks her head out of the kitchen, frowning. “Don’t you think—”
“I’ll see you later, Nance,” I call out, and fly past her before she can talk me out of doing something I already know isn’t a good idea.
The loud purr of an engine propels me to run faster.
I fly through the garage, and skid to a stop.
Nash is in a black leather jacket and sitting astride his bike, holding a helmet with another on his head.
My sneakers didn’t make a sound, and with the sound of his bike’s engine filling the room, he couldn’t have known I was there. Yet he holds the helmet to the side as if he knew the moment I entered the garage.
“Here.” His voice emerges slightly muffled, but I hear it clearly enough.
“How did you—”
“Just did.”
I don’t let myself think too long and too deeply about why this is not a good idea. I take the helmet he offers me, force it onto my head, and take his right hand for balance as I climb up onto the bike behind him.
There’s a natural tilt to the bike seat I hadn’t noticed until he shifts forward a bit, and when I clamber on behind him, I’m pressed up tight against his back.
I stop breathing when he grips both my hands and pulls them around his middle. Over the thick leather of his coat, I feel the muscle beneath.
He turns his head to the left, and I can barely see his eyes through the tinted screen of his helmet. “Wrap your arms around my waist. Hold on tight.”
I didn’t think about this ride for as long as I should have.
By the time I’m telling him that I changed my mind, it’s too late. The bike is moving forward. I can wrap my arms around him and hold on, or risk flying off his bike when he accelerates.
I hold on.
He smells shower-fresh and of leather, a combination I hadn’t known I would like.
I turn my face to the side to see better as he takes it slow and steady through the garage and down the graveled driveway toward the iron gates that wrap around the Gabriel Mansion. He must have a key fob that he presses for the front gate to slide open as we approach.
I thought he’d head toward town. He turns away from it and abandons his slow and steady pace.
Outside the mansion, he floors it.
I wrap my arms tighter around him, clinging more than holding on.
The world whips by so fast, the speed and the wind melding to create a wind tunnel effect as the whine and scream of the bike’s engine drives out every bit of sound.
We fly.
I make a sound of complaint when Nash slows the bike down and pulls off the road, tiny stones crunching under its wheels.
We’re up a little higher than the town, on an incline. Below us, Massey is a small cluster of buildings too far away to identify.
Makhi cuts the engine, gets off the bike, and peels off the helmet before he taps the side of mine.
I pull the helmet off, and he takes it from me and sets it down beside the bike. “How was your first ride?”
“Fast.” I’m probably grinning like an idiot.
He grins at me. “Come on.” He snags my hand and tugs.
“Where?”
He doesn’t answer, and I climb off his bike, stumbling from a sudden weightlessness that hits me the second I plant both feet on the ground. Nash is there, steadying me before I can fall. “Careful. The world is always a little strange when you feel like you’ve been flying.”
“What makes you think it felt like that to me?”
He shrugs. “It did for me.”
Holding my hand, he leads me to the edge of the road until we truly are looking down over Massey.
There’s not much to look at. Just a main road with side roads leading toward residential parts of town. The bus station is the heart of Massey, but we’re too far for me to make out the other shops and stores along Main Street.
Nash points to the left, outside of town. “See that?”
Squinting, I follow his finger to where he’s pointing. White RVs or trailer homes—I can’t tell which—are barely visible if I squint hard.
“That’s where I was born. Trailer-park born and raised.
It’s why people have always looked at me as if I’m worth nothing.
My brother ended up in jail just like my dad, and his girlfriend finally had enough of waiting for him to get out.
She’s leaving town and starting over somewhere else.
I don’t know if my brother will see his kid again once she’s gone.
I’m not sure he even cares. He’ll get out, then do something that lands him right back inside again. Just like our dad.”
I look at him. “Why do I need to know that?”
He shrugs. “Just wanted you to see where I came from, is all.” He pulls on my hand, leading me back to his bike. “Come on. The ride’s not over yet.”
I twist back around to see the trailer park, narrowing my eyes to make it out. It’s on the edge of town, and it looks… rough. I’m not sure how Makhi went from living in a trailer park to living in a mansion with Nash and Vonn.
Makhi holds my helmet as I climb back onto the bike. He stands there, still holding it, even when I reach for it.
“Makhi?”
His usual taunting smile is missing, and he looks strangely hesitant.
“What is it?” I prompt.
“I shouldn’t have done it.” He takes a breath and releases it in a sigh of frustration. “Firing you. Slamming the door in your face. I knew you were running from something, but I thought you were trouble I had to get rid of.”
So that’s why he brought me here. To apologize.
His eyes dip to his black boots, and he waits for my response.
If we were anywhere but here, I’d have walked away. Maybe that’s why he brought me miles away from the mansion. He knew I’d have walked away too.
When I say nothing, he lifts his head.
Light-gray eyes dart to me, then away again.
“If it weren’t for Vonn and Nash, I’d still be back there.
” He peers over his shoulder. “Or I’d be dead in some back bar fight where I used to fight to earn my way.
It’s how I could afford to buy my bike. That’s why I thought I needed to protect them from you. ”
“Does your bike go faster?” I ask.
“Yeah, why?”
I take the helmet from him and stuff it onto my head. “I want you to go faster this time.”
The smile that stretches across his face is so beautiful I have to look away. “Yes, ma’am.” He follows it up with a salute that nearly makes me laugh.
We ride for an hour.
We fly down roads with twisting bends, whipping up and then down them. That feeling of weightlessness lifts me from myself, and I could easily become addicted to it.
Back at the mansion, he pulls the bike to a stop inside the garage, and I get off and hand the helmet back to him.
When I turn to leave, he snags my wrist, stopping me.
“Does that mean I’m forgiven?” Hesitancy softens his voice.
“I nearly died because of you,” I tell him, looking him in the eye.
“I know.” He swallows hard and holds my gaze when I know he wants to look away. “You want to talk about what happened?”
I take a step back, and his hand on my wrist falls away. “No.”
“Fair enough.” He cocks his head at me. “Anything I can do to change your mind?”
I shake my head and walk away.
“You looked good on my bike,” he calls after me, and I turn around. “Come back, and we’ll go again, K?”
I nod and walk away, but I’m not sure I will or if I should.
In my room, my lamp is on the wrong side of my bed.
It makes me uneasy. Seeing it reminds me of the necklace someone stole and put in my bag. When I dig through my bag, my money is still inside, and there’s no sign of a necklace, stolen or otherwise.
“Nance?” I call out, wanting to be sure this isn’t a sign of more trouble to come. “Were you in my room?”
“Yes,” she calls back. “I just tidied up a bit. Is something wrong?”
My shoulders relax. “No, nothing.”