5. Cassidy
CASSIDY
Four days into Saber's run, the bartender calls in sick twenty minutes before open, and Crash takes the news with his phone pressed to his ear and his eyes shut.
“It’s fine, Manny. Drink fluids.” He hangs up and stares at the ceiling like it’ll send down a replacement.
It’s not fine. There’s a baseball tournament in town. We’re about to get crushed. And Violet no longer bartends.
I put my pen down on the ledger. “I bartended for three years in California.”
“No.”
“Dive bar near campus,” I continue. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Cass, you’re here to fix the books, not pour—”
The front door opens, and the first six guys in matching jerseys walk in, and the decision makes itself.
“Apron is under the register,” he says.
By one o’clock, the rail is two deep, and the room is wall-to-wall red and yellow jerseys.
I remember exactly why I quit doing this and exactly why I loved it.
The problem isn’t the volume. The problem is the area behind the bar, which is a very tight space.
Crash calls a drink, and I’m already reaching for the bottle. I call for limes, and they appear at my elbow. Every turn puts us inches apart, his hand on my waist to move past me, my palm flat on his shoulder blade so he knows I’m behind him with a full tray.
An hour in, we stop saying excuse me. Two hours in, we stop needing words at all, and that’s worse, because now there’s nothing to listen to except his hand finding the same spot on my waist every time.
“Two margaritas, one IPA,” he says.
I’m shaking the salt tin when he reaches over my head for the tequila, his arm a warm line above me, and a guy in a red jersey leans across the rail.
“Sweetheart, can I get your number with that beer?”
“No,” Crash says, without turning around, in a register the whole rail goes quiet for.
The guy tips well and doesn’t speak to me again.
I bump Crash with my hip on my way to the register. “I can handle drunk baseball players.”
“Never said you couldn’t.”
“Then what was that?”
He racks clean glasses and doesn’t answer, and I take the next three orders with a stupid smile I can’t talk my face out of.
The evening bartender walks in at four, ties on an apron, and surveys the wreckage of the lunch rush.
I untie mine, and it’s the first chance I’ve had to take a deep breath. I go to the back office to get away from the crowd.
Crash comes in a second later. “Didn’t know you were in here. Forgot my phone.”
The space is even smaller than the bar area. “I just needed a moment to myself.”
“You were good out there,” he says. “Better than Manny.”
“Tell Manny.”
“I’m not telling Manny that.” He’s looking at me, and my shirt is sticking to my back, and his eyes drop to my mouth and stay a second too long to be an accident.
“Crash.”
His hand comes up, and his thumb takes a smudge of something off my cheek, and the touch lasts longer than the smudge does. He leans down, and we’re eye to eye.
I’d swear under oath the room runs out of air. If I lean forward three inches, this whole thing is over.
He steps back.
“I need to go for a ride.” He’s already moving, scooping his keys off the desk without breaking stride.
I duck out after him. “I’ll come with you.”
“Cass.” He stops with his hand on the doorframe. “You’re the reason I’m leaving.”
“Well, maybe I’ll leave first,” I tell him. “And you promised Saber that you’d babysit me if I left the clubhouse.”
He sighs. “Don’t do this.”
“Then take me with you.”
He turns around. “Fuck it,” he says. “Let’s go.”
We ride for miles until we reach a dirt road I haven’t been on since I was a kid. The bike climbs through mesquite and loose rock for twenty minutes, and I hold on to Crash with my palms flat against his stomach, half an inch lower than last time I was on his bike.
He doesn’t correct me.
The trail tops out on a ridge with the whole valley spread underneath it. Ash Valley looks small from up here. The highway is a gray thread, and the clubhouse is a speck you’d miss if you didn’t know what to look for.
I get off the bike and stand at the edge with my hands in my pockets while the sun starts its long slide toward the western range.
“I’ve been here before,” I say. “My dad used to ride up here.”
“I know.” He kicks the stand down and stays by the bike. “He’s the one who showed me. I was sixteen, first bike, riding it like an idiot. He made me follow him up this trail till I learned throttle control or died.” He looks out at the valley instead of me. “I didn’t die.”
“Thank god.”
He huffs out a laugh and comes to stand beside me. Not close. There’s a careful three feet between us.
The sun drops. The valley goes gold, then copper. Somewhere below us, a hawk circles, and neither of us has said a word in five minutes.
It’s the quietest I’ve ever known him to be.
“You want to know why I picked a school in California?” I ask.
“Good weather. Ocean.”
“To get away from the desert,” I whisper.
He looks over at me. “You mean to get away from the club?”
“To get away from you.”
He turns his gaze back toward the valley and doesn’t respond.
“I loved you, Crash. Since before I understood what to call it. And you only saw me as a kid.” I stop myself. Breathe. “I felt invisible.”
“You weren’t invisible. But you’re right; I never saw you as more than a kid.” He says it low. “Because that’s what you were—a kid.”
He’s right. I was a kid. He’s nine years older than me.
“I know that now, but I didn’t feel like a kid back then.
” I rub at some dried lime juice on my forearm.
“It’s why I left. I figured I only wanted you because I couldn’t have you.
Like forbidden fruit. So I went to college in a place where nobody knew who I was.
And nobody was off-limits. I went, so I could stop thinking about you. ”
“Did you?”
“I had four years and a whole life out there.” I watch lights start to turn on below us. “And the whole drive back, the person I couldn’t wait to see wasn’t my brother.”
“If you’re about to say Trapper—”
The grin doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t joke about this. Please.”
The grin dies the rest of the way, and for a second, I’m looking at a man I don’t know. No charm.
He turns toward the valley.
“I’ve watched you charm every woman who’s ever walked into that bar. And they all want you. The number of women you’ve slept with is no secret,” I say. “Yet, you’ve never had an actual relationship. Have you ever felt anything for anybody?”
“No.” He says it without any hint of regret.
“I see.”
He walks back to the bike and leans against it and picks a flat piece of shale off the ground.
“My mom raised me alone. Mostly.” He turns the rock over.
“Mostly is the operative word. There were men. A whole revolving door of them, and every one of them promised her the world. House with a yard. Take the boy fishing. Marry her in the spring.” He shifts his position against his bike. “One of them, Ray, lasted two years.”
“Crash—”
“She had this routine.” He keeps going like I haven’t spoken, like the story will only come out if he doesn’t stop.
“When one of them didn’t show, or showed and said the wrong thing, she’d stand at the kitchen sink and run the water so I couldn’t hear her cry.
Then she’d shut the tap, fix her face in the side of the toaster, and come out asking what I wanted for dinner.
” He throws the rock over the ridge. “I was eight the first time I worked out what the water was for. I told myself that night, if I can’t keep a promise to a woman, I don’t make one. ”
“And you couldn’t keep one?”
“Never wanted to.” He brushes shale dust off his hands. “I’m a flirt. I like flirting. Being nice costs nothing. Everybody laughs, everybody leaves happy, and nobody cries when I leave. I never promise I’ll stay. I’m always very clear about that.”
“Do you think your mom would be proud of that?”
“She died when I was still a prospect. Never got the house with the yard.” He shrugs. “But yeah. I think she’d have been proud that I don’t promise women dreams I have no intention of fulfilling.”
The sun is gone. The sky over the range is burning down through orange into a deep bruised purple, and the first cold edge of desert night moves across the ridge.
“Do you ever want to fall in love?”
“Not with the type of women I’ve been with. They don’t want to get to know me. They love the idea of dating a patched member, being an Old Lady. They like the money and the lifestyle.”
He doesn’t want to fall in love. I asked the question, but I don’t like the answer. I really thought I felt something between us, but I was wrong, and I’ll accept that.
“But you’re not that type of woman.” He finally turns and looks at me again.
“You grew up in this world. The patch doesn’t impress you.
The money doesn’t impress you. You’ve watched what this life actually costs people; your whole family paid it.
” He shakes his head. “Which means if you wanted me, it’d be me.
And that’s never happened.” He exhales. “You know the real me, Cass. And I know the real you. I want—”
He stops. Right there, on the edge of the words I want to hear.
He doesn’t finish the sentence. “We better get back.”
He swings a leg over and settles into the seat, and he won’t look at me.
I walk over and stand beside the bike.
“Scoot back.”
His brow creases. “What?”
“Scoot. Back.”
And he does it. He slides back on the seat without knowing why he’s obeying, and I put one hand on his shoulder, swing my leg over, and sit down facing him, my thighs over his, boots hooked behind him.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Exactly what you’re too scared to do.”
I kiss him. For one second, he doesn’t react. Two.
Then his hand closes around the nape of my neck, and he kisses me back.