Chapter 17
I’ve been pacing the apartment for forty minutes.
Back and forth across the worn floorboards, from the window to the bed to the kitchen alcove, my body electric with a restlessness that has nowhere to go.
Sunday afternoon light slants through the south window, thick and yellow as syrup, and I can’t sit still in it.
Gunner's been at his desk since before I woke.
Hours now, laptop open, that focused stillness he gets when working security.
Files spread across the oak surface. His phone face-up beside them, occasionally lighting with messages he reads but doesn't answer.
The breakfast dishes still sit on the counter.
He made eggs this morning, toast, even peeled another orange in those perfect five strips.
We ate in silence, the weight of last night's public claim settling between us like something physical.
We'd fallen into his bed at five in the morning. He'd actually slept. Properly, not the wary surfacing-and-sinking he usually calls rest. I'd woken to find his arm heavy across my waist, possessive even unconscious.
My body remembers everything. The gold dress against my skin.
Three hundred pairs of eyes watching us dance.
His hand on my bare back, marking me as his in front of Miami's underworld.
The way we moved together, no performance, no pretense, just the raw truth of what we've become to each other.
The blood on his knuckles from the man who dared approach me.
Then the mirror. And the garden. The public claiming followed by the private.
I need to move. Need wind and speed and the engine between my thighs. The restlessness drives me to pace another circuit. Window to kitchen to bed and back again.
The helmet sits by the door where I left it after our last ride. Black and solid, waiting. I cross to it without thinking, pick it up, feel its familiar weight in my hands.
Behind me, I hear his chair push back. The soft scrape of wood on wood.
I know without looking that his shoulders have tensed, that his fingers have drummed once against the desk then stopped.
Tells I've learned to read over these weeks.
Then footsteps. Three measured steps to his desk.
The drawer slides open with a whisper of wood on wood.
I turn to watch him reach into the drawer, his hand disappearing into the dark interior. When it emerges, he's holding something small and metallic that catches the afternoon light. The bike key.
He walks to me, stopping an arm's length away. His gray eyes read my face. Not questioning, not forbidding. Just seeing what I need.
He extends the key toward me, his arm steady, palm up, offering without condition. The key is warm from his hand, and we both know this is a test wrapped in freedom.
"Go."
One word. That's all. No conditions, no timeline, no requirement to return. Classic Gunner. Minimal, understated, loaded with everything he won't say.
The key burns in my palm when I take it, our fingers brushing in the transfer. He leans down, kisses me once. Soft, brief, the kind of kiss that feels like punctuation rather than passion.
I turn to the door. Open it. Step through. Don't look back.
The service stairs echo under my boots. Through the loading dock with its perpetual chill, past the kitchen sounds already starting dinner prep. The Triumph waits for me, chrome catching fluorescent light.
I swing my leg over, settling into the seat. Key in the ignition, the engine roaring to life beneath me. The vibration travels up through my thighs, through my core, grounding me in the physical world.
I pull out onto the side street, not knowing where I'm going, only that I need to go.
The first intersection forces a choice. Left toward Coral Gables, right toward downtown. My hands turn the bars right before I've chosen a direction.
Through Little Havana's Sunday quiet, past the closed shops and open cafés, the smell of coffee and cigars drifting even through the helmet. The city is softer on Sunday evenings, like it's taking a breath before Monday's hustle begins again.
East briefly, then north onto US-1. The road opens up through Brickell, those towers of glass and money rising on my left, the bay glittering under the setting sun on my right.
The bike purrs beneath me, responsive to every shift of weight, every subtle adjustment.
A week of riding has made this machine an extension of my body.
The I-95 on-ramp appears ahead. South leads to Coconut Grove, to the familiar territory I've been exploring with Gunner. North leads somewhere else. Somewhere I'm already turning toward before I'll let myself name it.
I take the ramp north.
Miami falls away behind me. First the suburbs, then the endless strip malls, then finally just highway and Florida stretching flat in every direction. The sun is down, the April heat fading. I lean into the speed, letting the miles blur past.
Fort Lauderdale comes and goes. Pompano Beach. Boca Raton. Names on green signs that mean nothing except distance from where I started.
Then the signs change. Treasure Coast destinations start appearing, flashing up in the glare of my headlight. Jupiter. Stuart. And there, smaller, almost like an afterthought: Pristine, 42 miles.
My hands tighten on the bars. Of course. Of course this is where the road was always taking me.
I keep riding.
The miles count down on the signs. Pristine, 28 miles. Pristine, 15 miles. Each one a small explosion in my chest, equal parts dread and inevitability.
The exit for the rest stop appears. The one Papa used to take me to when I was small, buying me ice cream even though Maman always said it would spoil my dinner. I don't slow.
Then the sign I've been waiting for without admitting it: Pristine, Next Right.
I take the exit.
The off-ramp curves down into the town that made me.
Even under the helmet, even at thirty miles per hour, I know every inch of this place.
The Sunrise Diner where Papa still gets his coffee every morning at six.
The library where I hid after school, reading Austen and dreaming of bigger stages.
The hardware store, closed on Sundays, thank god, where Jarrod has been planning our future without asking if I want it.
The town square appears ahead with its bandshell at the center, white paint peeling in the Florida humidity. How many Fourth of July concerts did I dance in there? How many times did the town watch me perform exactly what they expected?
I ride through without stopping, without slowing, anonymous under the helmet's protection. A few people are out. No one looks twice at a motorcyclist passing through. Pristine gets plenty of weekend riders heading to the coast.
The town ends as abruptly as it began. County Road 714 stretches ahead, narrow and straight, cutting through fields and occasional clusters of live oaks. The cottage is a mile and a half down this road.
Three quarters of a mile.
Half a mile.
Then I see it.
I pull over onto the shoulder hard, gravel spinning under the tires as I brake. The bike protests the sharp stop. I kill the engine. The silence that follows feels massive, like the whole world has stopped breathing.
From here, half a mile across the open field, the cottage sits on its slight rise.
Lights flicker from the living room windows.
The live oak in the front yard spreads its arms the way it has my whole life.
The garden sprawls around the house. Maman's roses on their arbors, Papa's vegetable beds, the chaos of Florida growth barely contained by human intention.
A shadow passes across the window then stops at the next one, looking out.
Even at this distance, I know that shape. The way he bends toward the windowsill. Nicolas. My father.
I sit on the bike, feet on the ground for balance, helmet still on. Just watching.
He's real. He's there. He's continuing.
The last time I saw him was nearly a month ago, before I left for Miss Macie's. Before the massive stranger filled my living room and walked me out with barely a protest.
Ten minutes pass. Maybe more. The night settles around me, growing to pure black. I should take the helmet off.
A car passes on the road behind me. It continues on without stopping, the sound fading into distance.
Nicolas moves along to the next window then pauses again to look out. Is he looking for me? Or imagining Maman running across the garden toward him?
This is my father. The man who raised me alone after Maman died.
Who taught me to mix pigments before I could write my name.
Who sent me to the conservatory believing I'd become everything Maman couldn't. Who welcomed me back when I failed, never asking why I really came home, just making space for me like I'd never left.
The cottage smells like roses and oil paint and safety. Everything soft and known.
I think about the apartment that smells like cedar soap and gun oil. Everything hard and dangerous.
Gunner is probably tracking me right now.
The thought lands with perfect clarity. Of course he is. The bike has GPS. He's sitting at that desk with his laptop open, watching a dot on a screen that hasn't moved for ten minutes. Watching it sit half a mile from the cottage where he took me.
The GPS tracking should feel like violation. Instead, it feels like being held.
I could be in Papa's arms in three minutes. Could tell him everything or nothing. Could wash the last month away like it was just a bad dream, slip back into teaching ballet to eight-year-olds, eventually marry Jarrod and give Pristine exactly the story it's been writing for me.
Could be safe.
The woman who left this cottage twenty-eight days ago would have gotten off the bike already. Would have run across this field. Would have chosen safety and called it love.