Chapter 8
CLOVER
Ireally wanted to be wrong about Kingman being Cat Daddy.
I was already standing on the sidewalk in front of The Rhinehaus when he pulled up with a pink helmet in his hand. The fact that it was pink did something to my chest that I was not going to examine right now because I was busy being a woman with evidence and a plan.
The plan was to get on the bike, give him the whole ride to tell me the truth, and see what happened. I was only like... ninety percent sure it was Isak Kingman. That last ten percent was why I was getting on the bike and going for this ride. Yep. Uh-huh. That was why. It was.
The fact that he'd thought about me enough to pick a color was a little bit adorable. I hadn't expected that.
He held it out and I took it and turned it over in my hands. Solid, probably expensive. Good thing I’d twisted my hair into two strands so the helmet wouldn’t be uncomfortable
I put it on and he stepped closer. His hand came up and grabbed the chin of the helmet, tilting it, tilting me toward him. Whoo boy. That melted me at the knees a little bit.
Girl. Get a hold of yourself.
I had approximately one second to get my body in check, and then he was doing up the chin strap with both hands and I was looking up at his visor from very close range.
"I want to be sure you're nice and safe with me."
Oh. Oh my.
One of his hands was at my jaw and then briefly, steadily, at my throat while he adjusted the fit and I was not going to make a sound about that, I was absolutely not going to make a sound about that.
But oops, there went my knees again.
No, no. I was a professional woman with a plan and a theory and I was definitely not thinking about how warm his hands were through the leather or the fact that his hand at my throat had my girly bits doing their own cheer routine.
Whew, it's hot in here. There must be some Clovers in the… place where dumb girls learn not to take rides from hot strangers.
He checked the fit with his thumb along the edge of the helmet.
"Good?" His voice came through his visor, low and warm.
My voice came out only at a slightly higher octave than normal. "Good."
He stepped back.
I really, really wanted to be wrong.
He got on the bike and held out his hand to help me hop on behind him. I settled behind him, with my thighs essentially wrapped around his. Oh god. This was a mistake. The best kind of huge, huge, mistake.
We took off and left OTR behind us heading toward downtown Cincinnati. The Roebling Bridge at speed was something nobody had told me about.
The way the suspension cables flickered past like a metronome, the way the Ohio opened up on both sides all at once, the way Cincinnati sat on its hills behind us going gold in the early evening light while Kentucky rose to meet us and the whole world reorganized itself into something I hadn't seen before from any angle I'd had access to until right now.
I tightened my arms around him. Not from fear. From the opposite actually. From the feeling of something opening up that I hadn't known was closed.
"You good back there?" His voice came through the Bluetooth system in my helmet, close and clear, like he was right next to me instead of the only thing between me and the road.
"I'm extremely good back here," I said.
I felt him laugh. Not heard, felt, through the jacket, through the slight shift of his shoulders.
"Cincinnati looks different from here," I said.
"Always does." A pause. "It's really great going the other direction. When you come back over the bridge and the whole skyline is in front of you. That's the money shot."
"Is that why you're going this way first? So the good part is the return trip?"
"I'm a man of strategy."
"I thought you were a man of mystery."
"A man can be both."
He could, actually. I was finding that out.
The bike moved through Covington with the ease of someone who knew these streets, and I let myself have it.
The warm weight of him, the engine vibrating through everything, the city sliding past in the last of the golden hour.
The Bluetooth system meant I could hear him breathe when neither of us was talking.
It meant there was nowhere to hide from the quality of a pause.
I'd noticed that about him. The pauses. In texts there were the three dots appearing and disappearing, which told you someone was typing and reconsidering. In this, it was just — silence, and the sound of the road, and the city going by.
He had a lot to say tonight. I could feel it.
He just hadn't said it yet.
We found our rhythm somewhere on the way up the hill, the way we'd found it every night this week. Not looking for it, just falling into it, the conversation going wherever it wanted and neither of us trying to steer.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"You're going to anyway."
"Accurate." He chuckled and asked, "How'd you end up here? Cincinnati. Was this always the plan?"
I thought about how to answer that. How much of it was true and how much of it was mine to give right now, to a man on a motorcycle whose face I still hadn't seen.
"No," I said. "The plan was something more practical.
More...expected." I watched the streetlights come on one by one as the sky started to go.
"But I got an opportunity to do something that actually mattered.
Not just something that paid well. Something that could change things for people who needed the change. " I paused. "I know how that sounds."
"It doesn't sound like anything bad."
"It sounds naive sometimes. When it's hard."
"Is it hard?"
"Parts of it. The parts where you're trying to convince people that the change is worth it." I watched the city across the water starting to light up, building by building. "But the parts where it's working, those feel like the reason."
He was quiet for a moment. The good kind of quiet.
"I get that," he said.
"Yeah?"
""I've been doing the family business. Something they all live and breathe." The way he said it was careful, like he was picking his way across something.
"They've been doing it longer. Better, probably.
My oldest brother, he's the best at it, all of it.
He does this thing...he can just bring a whole.
...team together and get them to perform at peak levels.
I've been trying to get out from under his shadow since I was old enough to understand it existed. "
"That's a long time to be trying." I could say the same thing about dance and cheer for me.
"Yeah." He let that pause sit even longer than normal, and I didn't try to fill it in for him. "The thing is I know I'm good at it. I know that. But knowing it and feeling it are different things when you're the youngest and everyone around you has been doing it longer."
"Do they make you feel that way? Your family?"
"No." He said it fast, which meant it was true. "They're — no. It's just the math of it. You can love something and be great at it even and still be aware of where you fall in the ranking of people who do it."
I thought about my dad. About standing just to the left of the frame of fame.
"I know that math," I said.
"I figured you might."
Something passed between us that didn't need words. I pressed my helmeted cheek against his back for just a moment and watched the world go by in a golden glow.
He didn't say anything, but he breathed beneath my cheek, wrapped in my arms, and for that one moment, I let everything just be. No judgements, no worries, no secrets. Just for a moment.
He steered us into a park with some beautiful open spaces and eventually parked in a lot at one end. The sign said that this area, Devou Park was only open until dusk, and we were pushing the edges of that time. But it was worth it.
We parked, got off the bike, and he took my hand, leading me. I let him.
We stopped at an overlook with a low stone wall along the edge and a view that went on forever. We both just stood there, holding hands, looking at the river, the skyline, the bridges, Cincinnati lit up and reflected in the water in a way that made the whole thing look like it was happening twice.
"Okay," I said. "I'm sure the bridge going back into the city is cool, but you're wrong."
"About what?"
"This is the money shot."
He made a sound that was satisfaction and amusement in equal measure, and we went to sit on the wall with the city in front of us and the sky doing its full performance overhead, going from gold to deep blue to the first hints of dark.
We talked. Easier here, sitting still, the road noise gone.
He pointed out places in the city and the river and the things he'd found when he first moved here that had made it feel like somewhere he could stay.
He knew OTR the way you only knew a neighborhood when you'd walked it at every hour.
The coffee place on Vine that opened at five-thirty, the bar that had the best jukebox, the park where Vito had his ongoing situation with a certain pigeon.
The city lit up completely across the water. Somewhere behind us two people walked past talking quietly and didn't look at us, two helmeted people on a wall, which was maybe a little strange from the outside and felt from the inside like the most natural thing I'd done in weeks.
I took my helmet off.
The air was perfect and smelled like the river and the city and the end of summer, and I held the helmet in my lap and looked at Cincinnati and let the world settle around me.
He didn't take his off.
I'd known he wouldn't. Not yet. But the not-yet had a different quality now that we were sitting still and the ride was over and it was just us and the city and the question I'd been carrying since I scrolled back through our texts on Friday morning and found the word that didn't add up.
"You know how you've been calling me cheerleader since the first night you texted me back?"
"Yeah," he said. Careful. Like he'd been waiting for it.
"I never told you I was a cheerleader."
Silence. The kind that had a different texture now. Not the comfortable kind. Maybe this was it. Maybe he was finally going to reveal his real identity to me. Let me in.
"You had a shirt," he said finally. "When I caught you jumping out of the tree. Chadwick University Cheer. I saw it when you landed."
It was a reasonable answer. It was probably even true. But reasonable wasn't the same as the whole truth and we both knew it.
"Okay," I said. "So you saw my shirt."
"Yeah."
"And that's why you've been calling me cheerleader." The tone of my voice was not quite as easy now. Suspicion was rightfully creeping in.
"Yeah."
I looked at the city for a moment. Enough was enough.
"I'm gonna ask you something else and I don't want you to deflect this time."
"Clover—"
"Why aren't you taking the helmet off?"
He was quiet long enough that I heard a boat on the river somewhere below us.
"It's not — it's not about you," he said, and I heard him trying to find the words for something he hadn't said out loud before.
"When I have it on, nobody knows who I am.
They just see a guy on a bike. And with you.
.. you met me as just that guy. You didn't know anything about me.
You just...you chose this anyway." A pause.
"The second I take it off that changes. You'll know who I am and you'll have a whole set of.
.. things. Expectations. History. And I don't want that to change what this is. "
I listened to all of it.
I heard what he meant to say.
And then I heard what it meant, sitting in my body, in my specific history with doors that didn't open wide enough and rooms that recalibrated and fantasies that were clearly visible and clearly not quite mine.
"You don't want to be seen with me," I said.
"What? No—"
"You don't want anyone to know." My voice came out level. I was proud of how level it came out. "A hot athlete who doesn't want to be seen with a fat girl." I set my helmet down on the wall. "I will not be somebody’s dirty little secret. That is a you problem, not a me problem, Tiger."
"That is not what I'm saying—"
"Then take off the helmet."
He didn't.
The city glittered across the water and a boat moved slowly down the river and somewhere behind us that couple was laughing at something and I sat with the silence and the stone wall and the weight of being right about something you desperately wanted to be wrong about.
I picked up my helmet. "I gave you the whole ride to tell me yourself."
I stood up.
"Just take off the helmet, Kingman."