5. Diesel
DIESEL
The back lot doesn’t look like the back lot anymore.
Sharon’s crew spent weeks stringing lights through the trees, string after string looping between the oaks Jenson used to just mow around, and somebody dragged the good tables out from storage.
I stand near the bar setup with a beer sweating in my hand, half-listening to Ryder and Ace argue about whether Riot’s tie counts as formal wear or a strangulation hazard, and I let my eyes drift over the whole spectacle, keeping watch. Old habit. Might be the one that’s kept me alive this long.
“Man looks like he’s about to walk himself to the gallows,” Ryder says, nodding toward Riot, who’s tugging at his collar like it’s personally offended him.
“He looks fine.” Ace doesn’t even glance over. “You’re just jealous somebody ironed something today.”
“I ironed my shirt.”
“You slept in that shirt.”
Gunner wanders past with a beer in hand, grinning. “Anybody else notice Bone crying during the rehearsal? Man’s supposed to be the treasurer. Cold, heartless, doesn’t feel a thing. And there he was, snotting into Carol’s shoulder like a baby.”
“He’s sixty-two and his old friend’s daughter is marrying our president,” I say. “Cut him some slack.”
“I’m just saying. Ruined my whole image of the man.”
I let the noise wash past me. It doesn’t need much from me except a nod here, a grunt there.
Sasha’s somewhere near the arbor with Ruth and Carol fussing over her dress, and Jenson’s up front looking like a man who’s spent his whole life waiting for exactly this moment and finally got there.
I’ve never seen him like this. He’s been running this club for years, and I’ve watched him stare down rival presidents without so much as a blink, and tonight he can’t stop touching his own tie like he’s not sure it’s still there.
Love does that, I guess. Makes a man forget how to be still.
I take a pull from my beer and try not to think about a ring that isn’t in my cut anymore, a cord that snapped in the dark on County Road 9 two weeks back, gone into gravel, never found.
Some nights it doesn’t bother me. Tonight, surrounded by all this—flowers and lights and a man about to say vows he clearly means—it sits in my chest like a stone.
I turn when I hear tires on the gravel, slow and careful, coming up the drive past the row of parked bikes.
Morris’s truck.
I don’t think much of it at first. Old man’s practically family at this point, been coming around long enough that nobody blinks when he shows up somewhere he technically shouldn’t.
His wife climbs out first, wearing some floral dress that looks like it’s been saved for exactly one occasion a year, and Morris follows after her, slower, working his knees like they’ve got opinions about standing up straight.
Then the rear passenger door opens.
My hand goes to my chest before I even register why—two fingers pressed flat against my sternum, right where the ring used to be. I don’t decide to do it. I catch myself doing it and lower my hand.
Penny.
She’s got her hair down.
I haven’t seen her with her hair down in seventeen years. But it’s down tonight, pale gold catching the string lights, falling past her shoulders. I nearly set my beer down on empty air.
She’s wearing blue. A soft, simple thing because she never needed the effort, never needed anybody telling her she was beautiful. She just was, plain and unbothered by it. I’d counted on her looking different enough to make this easier.
It didn’t. If anything, she’s more beautiful than she used to be. Sharper in the jaw, steadier in how she stands, like every year since she left just carved away whatever softness used to make her easy to underestimate.
“You good?” Ace asks, following my line of sight, and then going quiet when he sees what I’m looking at.
I don’t answer him.
She hasn’t seen me yet—too busy saying something to Morris’s wife, laughing at whatever it is, easy and light in a way that makes my chest hurt worse than the silence would have—but then her gaze drifts, scanning the crowd the way a cop’s does even off duty, cataloguing exits and faces without meaning to.
And she finds me.
I feel the exact second her eyes land on mine across thirty feet of string lights and folding chairs and every single person standing between us.
Something happens to her face. She doesn’t gasp, doesn’t stumble, doesn’t do any of the dramatic shit I might’ve imagined if I’d let myself imagine this moment more than once or twice at three in the morning with a bottle for company.
She just goes pale. Color draining out from under whatever makeup she’s wearing, fast enough that even from here I can see it happen.
But she doesn’t look away.
Doesn’t duck behind Morris, doesn’t find something urgent to say to his wife, doesn’t do a single thing to break that line between us though I’m half expecting her to run.
Brave girl.
My girl, some stupid, seventeen-year-old part of me thinks, before the rest of me catches up and shuts that down hard.
She’s not mine. Hasn’t been since she packed that car and left. She’s a cop now. I’m still everything she couldn’t live with. I know all of that, and it doesn’t stop me wanting to walk straight across the lot to her.
Gunner says something beside me. I don’t hear a word of it.
Across the lot, Penny swallows, throat working, and finally—finally—looks away first, turning toward Morris as somebody steps between us.
I bring the beer to my mouth and realize my hand’s shaking bad enough that the bottle rattles against my teeth.
“Diesel.” Ace, quieter now, closer. “You want me to walk you somewhere else for a minute?”
“I’m fine.”
“You look like you just saw a ghost.”
I almost laugh at that, except there’s nothing funny about it. I’ve faced armed men with a steadier hand than this.
“Worse,” I say. “I saw exactly what I remember.”