Chapter 1 #2
I press my hands flat to my desk. I am breathing in the careful way I learned in high school to keep my face from turning red, which has never once worked. I can feel the heat starting at my collarbone and moving up.
I do not — I will say this honestly, because there is no point in not — I do not know the men of the Iron Thorn MC.
I know of them. I know that Briar married one.
I know that they show up at the spring festival and the harvest festival and they donate to the school fundraiser and they once chased a man with a knife out of Whitlock's Diner before the sheriff could get there.
I have nodded at Silas Creed across the post office.
I have once held a door for Hawk because his hands were full of paint cans.
I have a vague impression of the rest of them as a category — large, leathered, loud, kind enough to women in this town but not, as a general rule, the kind of people I share oxygen with.
I am cardigans. They are cuts. We are not in the same Venn circle.
The idea of walking through the gates of their clubhouse makes the heat at my collarbone climb to my ears.
But the shelf is leaning. And the reading hour is at four tomorrow. And Mrs. Halloran's twin grandsons sit underneath that shelf with their library cards and their juice boxes.
"All right," I say.
Briar lights up. "Yeah?"
"I will go ask."
"You want me to come?"
I do. I want her to come more than I have wanted anything all week.
But she has the shop, and her sister-in-law is bringing the baby by at two, and the flower deliveries for Mrs. Pruitt's anniversary go out at three, and I am twenty-six years old and a grown woman and I run a library, and I can walk three blocks to a clubhouse and ask a question without holding the hand of a friend.
"No," I say. "Thank you. I will go."
She squeezes my wrist. "They are good men, Nora. I promise. Silas is at the lumberyard till four but if you tell anyone you're my friend, they'll take care of you. Ask for Hawk. Or for Knox, if Hawk's not there."
"Hawk," I repeat. "Or Knox."
"Yeah."
"Right."
"You're going to be fine."
"I am going to be fine."
"Tell me one more time."
"I am going to be fine."
She picks up the peonies. She rearranges them. She hands me a single one, snapped off short, and tucks it behind my ear like she has done this for me on more than one bad Thursday. She says, "Go. Now. Before you talk yourself out of it."
She goes back out into the rain.
I stand at the desk for thirty more seconds. Then I take my coat off the hook behind the door. I tuck my keys into my dress pocket. I put a closed-back-in-thirty-minutes sign on the door. I lock the front. I step out into the rain.
—
The Iron Thorn clubhouse is on the east end of town, past the diner, past the railroad cut, past the long row of old peach orchards that the Allen family has farmed since before there was a Clover Ridge.
It is a low brick building set back from the road behind a chain-link fence, with a hand-painted sign over the gate — IRON THORN MC, CLOVER RIDGE CHAPTER — and a gravel yard out front where, even from a hundred yards away, I can count six motorcycles lined up in a neat angled row.
It is not raining anymore. The sky is that strange wet-shine that comes over Clover Ridge after a spring storm, where the dogwood petals on the wet pavement look almost glossy, like somebody varnished the road.
I can smell the orchards from the gate. I can smell wet leather from the bikes.
I can hear, very faintly, country music from inside the clubhouse and the metal clink of somebody working on an engine in the yard.
I stand outside the gate for a full thirty seconds.
I think about turning around.
I think about Tom, two weeks out, and the homeschool boys at four tomorrow.
I do not turn around.
I push the gate open. It does not creak. Somebody has oiled it recently. This small ordinary detail does something to me — the idea that someone in this place takes care of small ordinary things — and I cross the gravel yard before I can lose my nerve.
He is the first thing I see.
He is bent over the engine of a motorcycle near the side of the building, his back to me, and he is — and I will be honest about this, because the alternative is to lie to myself, and I am not in the habit — he is not wearing a shirt.
His shirt is hanging off the handlebars of the bike like a flag of surrender, and he is in jeans and boots and nothing else above the waist, and his back is a long brown plane of muscle and tattoo work that catches the wet shine of the after-rain light.
He has dark blond hair, almost brown, cut close on the sides and longer on top, damp at the nape of his neck.
He has a wrench in his right hand. He has a smear of grease on his left forearm.
He is the most physically present person I have ever stood within twenty feet of, and I have not even seen his face yet.
I am going to turn around. I am going to walk back through the gate. I am going to find a way to repair the shelf myself with a hammer and a prayer.
He hears the gravel under my flats.
He straightens.
He turns.
His eyes go to me and they go through me, and I forget — completely, entirely — what I have come for.
He has the kind of face you do not see in libraries.
Sharp at the jaw. Sharper at the cheekbones.
A nose that has been broken at least once and reset by someone who knew what they were doing.
Pale, pale eyes — blue, I think, but blue the way river ice is blue, blue with a coldness in the middle of it that I cannot read.
He looks at me the way a man looks at something he is trying to figure out, and I have time to feel my whole face go hot before he even speaks.
He says nothing for a beat.
Then he says, "You lost?"
His voice is low. Quiet. Not unkind. Just — careful. As if he is testing the air the same way I am.
I open my mouth. I shut it. I open it again.
"I am not lost," I say. "I am — I am looking for. I am looking for Hawk. Or for Knox."
His eyes do something. They flick over me — the cardigan, the dress, the rain in my hair, the peony tucked behind my ear that I had forgotten was there until just now, and which I now realize, with a fresh wave of heat, looks absolutely ridiculous on me, standing in a gravel yard in front of a man I have just looked at without breathing properly.
"They're inside," he says. He sets the wrench down on the engine. He wipes his hands on a rag that is so blackened I am not sure how it is helping. "I can get them."
He does not move yet. He is still looking at me. He is looking at me with the kind of attention I am not used to receiving, the kind of attention that goes into things and not just over them, and it is making the back of my neck prickle.
I clear my throat. I am about to start stuttering. I can feel it coming. Stop, I tell myself. Stop. Just say the words. Just say the four words.
"I need a shelf fixed," I say.
He blinks.
It is the first time his face has done anything, and it is small — just a single slow blink, like he is processing the sentence and finding it does not fit any of the categories he expected.
"A shelf," he says.
"At the library," I say. "It is — it has come away from the wall. The bolts pulled out. The hardware store cannot come for two weeks. I have a reading hour tomorrow at four. With children. Underneath it. So." I take a breath. "I need it fixed."
He looks at me for one more second. His eyes have not warmed up — they are still that river-ice blue — but something in his face has, very slightly, given way.
The corner of his mouth lifts about a quarter of an inch.
It is not a smile. But it is the place where, if there were going to be one, a smile would start.
He reaches up. He pulls his shirt off the handlebars. He puts it on. The fabric drags down over his shoulders and I have a brief moment of being grateful for cotton.
He picks up a leather jacket off the seat of the bike.
He looks at me. He says, "Lead the way."
I stand there a half-second longer than I should.
Then I turn, because if I do not turn I will say something I cannot take back, and I walk out through the gate ahead of him, with my heart going so loud in my chest that I am certain — certain — he can hear it across the gravel.
Behind me, his boots crunch in an even rhythm. He does not say anything else. He just walks, the right distance back, not crowding me, and when I glance over my shoulder he is looking somewhere down the road like he is giving me the privacy of my own walk.
I think, very clearly, with a kind of dread that is not quite dread:
Oh no.