Chapter 2 #2
She looked at me for a long moment, recalibrating, the way I'd seen her recalibrate around the lone unexpected thing.
Then she said a date eleven days out, and held out her hand, and I wiped mine one more time on the rag before I took it, because I'd be damned if the first time I touched her was with oil on my fingers.
Her hand was small and cold and it gripped mine like a closing argument.
We shook on it in the open bay door with the spring light coming in and the smell of honeysuckle riding under the smell of motor oil, and that was how I got married — with a handshake, to a stranger, over an engine.
Knox approved it that night.
I'd thought he might not. I went to him before anyone, because the one rule of belonging I'd never break was that Knox heard everything that touched the club from me first, and I laid it out plain — the lawyer, the case, the marriage, the terms, all of it.
He listened the way he listens, the closed door of his face giving nothing back, and when I finished he was quiet long enough that I'd started rehearsing how I'd tell Ivy it was off.
Then he said, "The Castellano woman. The one fighting for the Delgados."
"Yeah."
"Good cases. The right kind." He turned his beer glass a slow quarter-turn on the bar, the way he does when he's already decided and is just letting you watch him arrive at it.
"A married brother with a wife who's an officer of the court is a brother nobody in this valley can call a thug to my face anymore.
That's good for you, and a thing that's good for you that's also good for a brother is good for the club.
" He looked at me. "It's also a kindness to a woman doing hard work alone, and to a family that didn't ask to be born somewhere worse.
The club does kindnesses where it can. We don't always get to.
This one's cheap." A beat. "You sure about you? "
"What do you mean."
"I mean a man who's been told no by everyone, including himself, for two years, gets handed a yes-shaped thing by a woman like that." Knox does not waste words, and the ones he spends land. "Make sure you know which part you're saying yes to. The license, or the life it's pretending to be."
I told him the license. I believed it when I said it.
"Then it's club-approved," he said, and that was Knox: a benediction and a warning in the same breath, and not one wasted word between them.
The brothers found out the next day, and the brothers, being the brothers, were no help to my dignity at all.
Hawk heard it first and didn't believe it, and then believed it and was outraged on principle.
"Viper's getting married," he said to the room at large, like he was reporting a structural failure.
"Viper. Before me. I've been working on Dani for two years and Viper walks in off the bench and gets a wife.
" He pointed at me with a wrench. "How. How does this happen. What is your secret."
"He has no personality and no past anyone wants to discuss," Diesel said helpfully, then squinted. "Wait. Married to who?"
"The lawyer," somebody said.
Diesel set down his beer. "The lawyer. The lawyer.
The one who looks at us like we kicked her dog.
The one who literally crosses the street.
" He turned to me with the wonder of a man watching a small miracle of stupidity.
"Viper. Brother. That woman hates bikers.
That woman has a documented, well-known, frankly-pretty-fair policy of hating bikers, and you're going to marry her? "
The room waited. I went back to the carburetor I was rebuilding, because my hands always knew what to do even when the rest of me didn't, and I said the thing I'd been turning over since the garage, the thing that had stuck in me like a splinter.
"She doesn't hate bikers." I seated the float and didn't look up. "She hates what bikers represent. That's not the same."
It got quiet in a different way. Diesel, who is not a stupid man under all the noise, tilted his head. "What's the difference."
"The difference is one's about us and one's about her.
" I wiped my hands. "You can't talk a person out of hating a thing that hurt them.
You can only be, over time, not that thing.
That's all." I shrugged like it didn't matter, like I hadn't lain awake building that exact distinction the night before, like it wasn't the closest thing to a strategy I'd let myself have.
"Anyway. It's paperwork. There's nothing to talk her out of.
She wants a signature and a roof for eleven weeks.
I want the town to stop checking its wallet when I walk by. It's a trade."
"Uh-huh," said Hawk, who had stopped being outraged and started being something worse, which was interested, leaning his hip against the bench and grinning at me like he'd seen a thing I hadn't.
"Paperwork. Sure. You're gonna live with a woman who's all sharp edges and bad opinions of you, in a two-room apartment, for eleven weeks, and it's gonna be paperwork. "
"It's going to be paperwork."
"Brother." Hawk shook his head, delighted, merciless, already certain. "It is never paperwork."
I didn't answer him. I went back to the carburetor and I told myself he was wrong, the way I'd told Knox he was wrong, the way I'd told myself in the garage when a stranger in a gray blazer shook my hand and something in my chest that I'd nailed shut two years ago shifted half an inch off its frame.
I didn't examine why.
That was the other old habit I hadn't put down — the one where I knew exactly what I was doing and refused, with everything in me, to look directly at it.
I was very good at not looking. I'd had years of practice.
I could stand at the fence in the dark and not look at the warmth behind me.
I could rebuild an engine and not think about the woman whose hand had gripped mine like a verdict.
I could marry a stranger in eleven days and call it a trade and mean it all the way down to the floor of myself where the lie was.
It's paperwork, I told the brothers.
It's a license, I told Knox.
It's a trade, I told myself, in the small mine room that night, lying in the dark a man about to have a wife.
And the honeysuckle came in through the cracked window, sweet and thick, and I lay there awake and ready, one ear open for the thing that comes in the dark, and for the first time in two years the thing coming had a name I wanted to say out loud, and I didn't, and I told myself that was the same as it not being there.
It was not the same.
Hawk, God help me, was right.