7. Diesel
DIESEL
The reception’s in full swing by the time I make it back to the bar for my third beer, and I’m doing math in my head the way I haven’t had to since high school—one more, maybe two, and then I switch to water, because tonight is not the night I do something stupid with my mouth.
Not with a bottle. Not with anything else.
Ryder and Ace are going at it near the dance floor Sharon’s crew built out of pallet wood and good intentions, both of them squared off like they’re about to settle this with fists instead of words, except the argument’s over who gets Sharon first.
“I called it,” Ryder says. “Soon as the band started.”
“You didn’t call shit. You just started walking toward her.”
“That’s called calling it.”
Sharon stands between them with her wire-rimmed glasses sliding down her nose, laughing so hard she’s got a hand pressed to her ribs, curls falling loose from whatever she did to them this morning. She’s not picking a side. She’s enjoying the show too much to end it early.
I almost smile. Almost.
Then a hand lands on my forearm, and I know the touch before I even turn my head, because I’ve felt it a hundred times over the years, more times than I could count if I tried.
Honey.
She’s got that same tumble of blonde hair, same wide mouth already curving into a smile she knows works on me, same easy way of pressing herself against my side like she’s got a standing reservation there.
And for one long, ugly second, I can’t look at her without seeing someone else standing in her place—not Honey, not really, but a memory of a girl I haven’t touched in seventeen years, softer than the woman she turned into, softer than anyone I’ve had since.
I know everyone’s noticed. Diesel’s got a type. Blonde. Something in the jaw. Something in the way she laughs. I never let myself look at it dead-on until right now, standing here with Honey’s hand sliding up my arm and realizing just how often I’ve gone looking for Penny in somebody else.
“You’ve been avoiding me all night,” Honey says, leaning in, breath warm against my jaw.
I don’t answer. My eyes have already found the one thing in this whole lot I shouldn’t be looking for.
Penny stands maybe thirty feet off, near the cake table, a flute of champagne loose in one hand while Ruth talks her ear off about something that’s got them both smiling.
Her hair’s still down. Still catching the string lights every time she moves her head.
And right as Honey’s fingers curl into the front of my shirt, Penny looks over.
I watch it happen. Watch her face go still, like when a person sees something they wish they hadn’t. It only lasts a second before she turns back to Ruth, nods at whatever’s being said, laughs at the right beat like nothing just happened.
But something happened.
I peel Honey off me, no charm to it, no easy smile to soften the exit the way I usually manage. First time in longer than I care to admit that I’ve been anything but smooth walking away from a woman, and Honey’s expression goes confused and a little hurt before I’ve even fully untangled myself.
“I’ll find you later,” I say, which sounds like a promise I have no business making, and then I’m moving, cutting through the crowd before she can ask me anything I don’t have an answer for.
I walk past Ryder and Ace, who’ve apparently settled their dispute by both dancing with Sharon at once, one hand each, spinning her between them while she laughs loud enough to carry over the band.
I walk past Tank in a folding chair with Ruth now perched sideways on his knee, feeding him a piece of cake off a fork like he’s a man who can’t be trusted to do it himself, and the sight of it—big, grizzled Tank letting his old lady baby him in front of half the club—loosens something in my chest even as I keep moving.
Past the tables. Past the lights. Past the point where Sharon’s crew stopped stringing bulbs because the party wasn’t supposed to reach this far, out where the grass goes ragged and the tree line starts eating the noise behind me one decibel at a time.
Bluebell nickers from her pen off to the left.
On the other side, the frames of the new houses rise up against what little light there still is.
Skeleton walls. Rafters with nothing on them yet.
Sharon’s blueprint come half to life—houses for brothers who’ve decided they want a yard instead of a dorm room down the hall from the bar, houses for old ladies tired of raising kids in a clubhouse.
I stop there, hands on my hips, and try to talk some sense into myself.
She’s not yours. Hasn’t been yours in seventeen years. She came for Sasha, not for you, and whatever happened back there with Honey isn’t anything Penny’s got a right to care about, because she gave up that right the day she drove off with the radio too loud.
It’s a good speech. Reasonable.
Doesn’t stop my pulse from doing something stupid when I hear grass shift behind me, when I smell her, that same perfume, something vanilla and floral, the scent I used to find on my letterman jacket.
She still wears the same damn perfume.
I turn slowly. Give myself the extra second to arrange my face into something that isn’t as wrecked as I feel.
Penny’s standing maybe ten feet back, champagne flute gone, arms crossed loosely over her middle like she’s cold, though the night’s warm enough that can’t be the reason. The string lights don’t reach out here, so she’s mostly shadow and moonlight, but I’d know her anywhere.
“Didn’t peg you for the type to wander off from a party,” she says.
Her voice hasn’t changed either. Seventeen years of academy training and policing and whatever else built the woman standing in front of me, and her voice still sounds exactly like it did the last time she said my name in a parking lot.
“Needed air,” I say. “Lot of people back there.”
“Lot of blondes, too.”
I don’t have a good answer for that, so I don’t try. Penny doesn’t fill the silence either. We just stand there, ten feet and seventeen years between us, while somewhere behind her the band starts up something slower, softer.
“You look good, Evan,” Penny finally says, and my chest goes tight at the sound of my actual name in her mouth. Nobody calls me that anymore. Nobody’s really called me that in years except her, right now, out here where nobody else can hear it.
“Diesel,” I say, not because I want to correct her, but because I don’t know what else to do with my hands or my voice or the ten feet of grass between us.
“That’s not your name,” she counters.
I breathe out slowly. “It’s the name everyone here knows.”
Penny tilts her head, studying me like she used to when we were kids and she could tell I was lying about something, some small thing, homework I hadn’t done or a fight I’d gotten into that I didn’t want my mother hearing about. “Not to me.”
I take a step. Just one, testing the ground, waiting to see whether she’ll back away.
She doesn’t bolt.
“You following me out here for a reason,” I ask, “or you just enjoy watching men fall apart at weddings?”
She blinks. “Wasn’t following you. Needed air too.”
“Funny. Lot of air back there by the cake table.”
“Wasn’t the air I had a problem with.”
So she did see Honey. I don’t ask her to say it.
I’m enjoying the possibility that she’s jealous far too much.
So instead I just look at her—hair down, dress soft and blue in the moonlight, standing close enough now that I could reach out and touch her if either one of us was stupid enough to let that happen.
“Seventeen years,” I say, quiet. “You still smell the same.”
Her arms tighten around herself. “You still notice things you shouldn’t.”
“Never claimed to be smart.”
That gets something out of her—not quite a laugh, but close, a breath of air through her nose that might’ve been one in a different life, a life where she didn’t leave and I didn’t turn into somebody who needed a devil mask and a stolen van to feel something close to alive.
“Sasha’s happy,” Penny says, changing the subject so fast I almost stumble trying to follow it. “That’s good. She deserves that.”
“She does.”
“Jenson too, I guess.” She glances toward the lights, the noise, the party neither of us is currently part of. “Didn’t expect to like him. Kept waiting for a reason not to.”
I snort. “Find one?”
“Not yet.” Her eyes come back to me, steady now, her expression turning assessing. “Working on it, though. Habit of mine.”
“I remember.”
We stand there a while longer, close enough now that I can see her blue-gray eyes. They wrecked me at seventeen and still do at thirty-five. Neither of us moves. Neither of us says the thing that’s actually sitting in the air between us, while crickets call down by the creek.
Somewhere back at the party, somebody laughs loud enough to carry, and it breaks whatever spell’s been holding us both still out here in the dark.
Penny takes a step back first. Just one, but it’s enough to put air between us again, enough to remind me exactly where all the years and a badge and a criminal record I don’t officially have but everyone knows about anyway leave us standing.
“I should get back,” she says. “Morris is probably looking for me.”
“Probably.”
She doesn’t move yet, though. Not for a second longer than she needs to, like some part of her’s waiting to see if I’ll say something to stop her.
I don’t. I’ve got nothing to offer her that isn’t seventeen years too late and missing a ring I lost in a ditch two weeks ago, and I can’t offer her a damn thing I couldn’t offer before.
“Diesel,” she says, testing the name in her mouth like she’s trying it on for size, and it doesn’t sound right coming from her, doesn’t sound like it fits, and something in my chest cracks a little wider at hearing my club name in the voice that used to whisper my real one against my collarbone in the dark.
Then she turns back toward the lights. Bluebell watches from her pen as I stand there letting Penny go. Even the fucking horse looks disappointed in me.