Chapter 4
TILLY
Itried to put the crawl of shame behind me. The image of me on my knees, chasing a runaway vibrator across the pavement like it was a grenade with the pin pulled, I shoved it into the same mental box where I kept every other humiliating moment of my life. The box was getting full.
If Corban had seen it in my car this morning, there was nothing I could do about that now. Maybe he'd think I was some sad, lonely thing and try to cheer me up.
I doubted it. But a girl could dream.
I sat on the edge of my bed in my cozy little apartment, hands on my knees, and looked around at where dreaming had actually gotten me.
And you know what? It made me feel proud.
Some girls seemed to move through life more easily.
People opened doors and remembered their names.
They would trip over themselves to help.
Not so much when you were short and curvy with pink cheeks and a permanent case of looking like you just got lost on the way to somewhere better.
Everything I had, I'd clawed for. Including this.
I arranged my things into some kind of order. There weren't a lot of cupboards or drawers, but I didn't have much stuff anyway. A few clothes hung in the narrow closet. Toiletries lined up on the bathroom shelf like soldiers. Books stacked on the windowsill.
Then there was the matter of my troublemaker.
"You," I said, picking it up between two fingers like it might bite me. "You have been very naughty."
Alone in my apartment, holding a hot pink dildo, I giggled like an idiot. This was my life now.
But I knew exactly what I'd be doing later that night. Lying in this bed, lights off, thinking about Corban. The leather. The muscles. The tattoos. I didn’t even know I liked tattoos until I saw them on him.
I wondered where the Southside Skulls club was from here. Maybe I could take a drive on the weekend.
But tonight, my pink friend was going to get a starring role in what I had planned.
I placed it upright on the nightstand like a trophy and collected my car keys from the kitchen table.
A tour. That's what I needed. I'd drive around and see the sights. Whatever sights a town this size had to offer. And find somewhere that could fix my flat tire before the spare gave out on me too.
At least the back of the car would be safe viewing this time.
I changed into a clean summer dress, white with little yellow flowers, and tied my hair back with a matching bow. I checked myself in the bathroom mirror. Flushed cheeks, as always. Bright eyes. I looked like someone starting over.
I liked what I saw. That was new.
I skipped down the steps, keys jangling in my hand, and headed out into the afternoon sun. This time I turned right instead of left. The opposite direction from where I'd arrived, to see what I could see.
The town stretched out ahead of me, quiet and golden in the early afternoon light. Somewhere out there was a tire shop. Maybe a grocery store too. I needed chocolate or ice cream to celebrate.
I turned the key and started driving.
Corban
I rode like the wind because I was afraid she would leave before I got there.
The Harley screamed beneath me. Eighty. Ninety. The white line down the center of the road blurred into a single streak. Wind hammered my chest and tried to rip my hands off the grips. I tucked lower and twisted the throttle harder.
She was passing through and probably already gone.
That thought put another ten miles an hour under me.
A hatchback pulled out from a side road doing maybe thirty. I swerved left, crossed the center line, and blew past so close my handlebar almost kissed their side mirror. The horn blast behind me faded to nothing in half a second.
I flipped them off without looking back.
A truck ahead was fucking crawling. I swung wide around a blind bend to pass, and the oncoming pickup flashed its lights and leaned on the horn. I slid back into my lane with maybe a car length to spare.
But I couldn't slow down. The thought of Tilly pulling out of town while I sat in Dax's office talking about my feelings…
Fuck that.
I hit the straightaway into town and eased back to forty. The road was familiar here. I knew this stretch like I knew my own bike.
Which is why I should have known the intersection was coming.
But my head wasn't on the road. It was on her, and what I'd say this time. How I'd make my mouth work. How I'd?—
The car appeared from nowhere.
Something red came through the intersection. Right where I should have yielded.
Time didn't slow down. That's bullshit they put in movies. Time sped up. Everything happened in the same half second.
I grabbed both brakes. The back wheel locked and kicked sideways. The front tire screamed against the asphalt and the forks dove. I knew in my bones the way you know when a punch is already thrown, that I wasn't stopping in time.
So I dumped it.
I laid the bike down hard to the left. Eight hundred pounds of Harley hit the road on its side and the sound was ungodly. Metal shrieking against asphalt, and sparks spraying out behind it like a comet tail. Chrome grinding down to nothing.
And me… I came off the seat and hit the road on my back. The leather took it. That's what it was for. I slid with my arms out, head tucked, the road chewing through my jacket like sandpaper through wood, and waited for the silence. The sky wheeled overhead. Blue, blue, blue.
The bike kept going, spinning slowly ahead of me, carving a silver scar across the blacktop until it hit the gravel shoulder and stopped with a crunch.
I stopped a few feet behind it, flat on my back, staring up at the sky.
My chest was heaving, and everything was quiet for one long second.
Then the pain arrived. Not sharp. Just a burning heat across my shoulders and down my left side. The leather had done its job, but I was going to be bruised as hell. Definitely.
I lifted my head.
The red car had stopped dead in the middle of the intersection. Brake lights blazing. I could see the driver through the windshield. Hands frozen on the wheel, and mouth open.
And even from here.
Even flat on my back in the middle of the road with my bike on its side and my heart trying to punch through my ribs…
I knew that face, and I fucking smiled.
Tilly.
Tilly
I found the ice cream before I found the tire shop. Priorities.
Strawberry swirl in a waffle cone. The good kind where the strawberry is real and the swirl is thick and the cone is still warm. I deserved this. It was a day of firsts. A new town, new apartment, and a new life. Celebration ice cream was mandatory.
I drove slow with one hand on the wheel and the other holding my cone out the window between licks, taking in the quiet streets and the storefronts and the way the afternoon sun hit everything in this town, painting it pretty.
This was the quaint kind of place where people probably said hello to strangers and left their doors unlocked and knew each other's dogs by name.
I loved it already.
There was a little church on the corner with a white steeple. A hardware store with rocking chairs out front. A diner with a chalkboard menu and checkered curtains. I turned my head to read the specials, and took a long, slow lick of my ice cream…
And rolled into the intersection without checking.
I didn't see anything until the sound hit me. A scream of metal so loud it went through my chest, and then something huge and dark came sliding across the road in front of me in a shower of sparks, and behind it…
A body sliding across the asphalt on their back.
I slammed the brakes.
The ice cream went everywhere. Up my nose, across my cheek, in my hair, on the steering wheel, and on the windshield. The cone crumpled against the dashboard and the waffle shattered into a hundred pieces across my lap.
But I didn't care because there was a person lying in the road and they weren't moving.
"Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God oh my God oh my God…”
My hands were frozen on the wheel. I couldn't feel my legs. My whole body had gone cold and electric.
I killed someone. My first day in my new town and I killed someone because I was licking a fucking ice cream and looking at a diner menu and not at the road.
The body moved. Lifted its head.
Oh thank God. Oh thank fucking God.
I threw open my door and half fell out of the car. My legs weren't working properly. Ice cream dripped off my chin and onto my clean white dress and I didn't care. I ran toward him on shaking legs, my sandals slapping the hot asphalt.
"Oh my God, are you okay? Are you… Oh God, please be okay, please be okay.”
He was on his back, in a leather jacket, jeans and boots. His bike was on its side about ten feet ahead of him, still ticking and hissing in the gravel.
And he was... smiling?
He was smiling at me.
I dropped to my knees beside him, my hands hovering, afraid to touch him in case something was broken.
"Don't move. You're not supposed to move.
I saw that on TV. You could have a spinal thing or…
or internal bleeding or…oh God, I'm so sorry, I didn't see you, I wasn't looking, I was eating ice cream and…”
"Tilly."
I froze.
He knew my name. The man I'd just nearly killed knew my name. How did he…
I looked at his face.
Dark eyes, strong jaw, tattoos crawling up his neck.
Oh no.
Oh no no no.
"Corban?"
His smile got wider. He was lying in the middle of the road, road rash probably shredding his back to pieces, his bike was damaged, and he was smiling at me like I'd just made his whole day.
"You've got ice cream on your face," he said.
"You… I…” I sat back on my heels. "I almost killed you!"
"Nah." He shifted, winced, then propped himself up on his elbows like it was nothing. Like he hadn't just slid across the road at God knows what speed. "Dumped it on purpose. Controlled slide."
"Controlled?" My voice came out as a squeak. "There was nothing controlled about that. There were sparks. You’re on the ground!"
He was still smiling. "Nice dress, by the way."
I looked down. Strawberry ice cream was everywhere. My white dress with yellow flowers was now white with pink smears and waffle crumbs and shame.
"I'm calling an ambulance." My phone was in the car. "Don't move."
"I don't need an ambulance."
"You slid across a road!"
"I've had worse."
"How have you had worse than this?"
He sat all the way up and I made a noise. A squeak, a yelp, something undignified, and grabbed his shoulder like I could push him back down. Which was insane because his shoulder was the size of my head and solid as concrete under the leather.
"You need to lie down," I said. "You could be in shock."
"I'm not in shock."
"People in shock don't know they're in shock. That's the whole point of shock."
He looked at my hand on his shoulder, then up at me. His eyes crinkled at the corners.
"You came back," he said, quietly, almost to himself.
“I… What? I live here now. I moved here. That's my apartment." I pointed vaguely behind me. "But that's not… We need to call someone. Police. An ambulance. A tow truck. Something."
"Cops'll show up on their own," he said. "Someone will have heard it."
"Are you always this calm after nearly dying?"
“Are you always this cute covered in ice cream?"
My mouth opened and closed, then opened again. Nothing came out. My cheeks went hot.
He grinned, then he winced and shifted his weight off his left side.
"Okay," I said, pulling myself together. "Okay. You're hurt. You're clearly hurt. At least let me… Can you stand? Should I get… What do I do?"
"Sit with me."
"What?"
"Sit with me. Cops'll be here in a minute. Flatbed after that." He gestured at the road beside him. "Keep me company."
So I sat down on the road next to the man I'd almost killed. Who I'd also been planning to fantasize about later tonight with my vibrator.
Life was not going to plan. But also, maybe it was.
"I'm so sorry," I said again. "I was looking at a diner and eating ice cream and I just… I didn't see you."
"I was doing forty in a thirty,” he said. “But I was probably down to fifteen when I dumped the bike.”
"What? Why?"
He looked at me, holding my gaze, but didn't answer right away.
“I was looking for someone," he said finally.
"Who?"
The corner of his mouth twitched. “A pretty girl from California."
Oh.
Oh.
"You were looking for me?"
“I left like an idiot this morning because I couldn't talk. I couldn't think. I went back to the club and my boss told me to get my shit together and come find you before you left town."
I stared at him. "You couldn't talk to me?"
"Not a word."
"But you're talking now."
He looked down at himself. At the road, and the wreckage of his bike.
"Near-death experience loosened something up, I guess."
I laughed. I couldn't help it.
"I thought you hated me," I said. "This morning. You just stared and then walked off."
"Opposite problem."
"What does that mean?"
He rubbed the back of his neck. The same gesture from this morning. I realized now it wasn't dismissal. It was nerves.
“You're so fucking pretty I forgot how words work."
My heart flipped. I'd never felt anything like it before.
"You think I'm pretty?" I said, quietly, because no one had ever said that to me, and not with that look on their face.
He glanced at me sideways. "You've still got ice cream on your nose."
I swiped at it.
The sound of a siren started up in the distance.
"That'll be the cops," he said. "For the record, I ran the intersection. Not you."
"But I…”
"You had right of way. I should have stopped. I wasn't paying attention."
"Because you were looking for me."
"Yeah."
"So this is technically my fault."
"How is it your fault?"
"If I wasn't pretty, you'd have been paying attention to the road."
He laughed. It was the best sound I'd ever heard.
"That's not how fault works," he said.
"I'm just saying. My face is a traffic hazard."
He looked at me, full on. No smile now, just something serious underneath all of it.
"Yeah," he said. "It really fucking is."
The sirens got louder, and a patrol car appeared at the end of the road with its lights flashing.
"Tilly."
"Yeah?"
"What flavor was the ice cream?"
"Strawberry swirl."
He leaned in and licked the side of my cheek. “Yum. I’ll buy you another one, after…”
"After what?"
"After the cops, and the flatbed, and I figure out how to stand up without embarrassing myself." He shifted and winced again. "Might need a minute on that last one."
“I can help you.”
“You sure?”
“I’m stronger than I look.”
That almost-smile again. “All right. I'll take it.”
The patrol car pulled up, and an officer stepped out, taking a good look at the scene, clearly trying to figure out what the hell he was looking at.
"Afternoon, Dave,” Corban said casually, like he was sitting on a porch instead of in the middle of a road he'd just repaved with his spine.
The officer, Dave, shook his head slowly. "Jesus Christ, Corban.”
"Wasn't his fault," I blurted.
"She had right of way," Corban said, calm as anything. "I came in hot."
Officer Dave looked at me, covered in ice cream, and said:
"You new in town?"
"First day," I said weakly.
He shook his head. "Welcome to Harbor Point."