11. Diesel
DIESEL
Bone’s numbers don’t lie, but I still make him walk me through them twice.
“Buyer in Knoxville’s offering sixty on the dot for what we pulled off that van,” Bone says, tapping his pen against the ledger. “Kentucky boys want to lowball us at fifty-five, say the AR platforms need refinishing before they’ll move.”
“They don’t need shit.” Jenson leans over the table, one hand braced flat against the wood, reading the numbers upside down like he’s got nothing better to do with his eyes. “Tell Kentucky no. We wait a week, Knoxville pays full price or somebody else does.”
I nod along, but half my attention’s already drifting. Hell, it’s been drifting for two weeks straight, ever since a wedding and a woman in a blue dress left me unable to get Penny out of my head.
Jenson’s phone buzzes against the table. He glances at the screen, and something in his face softens the way it always does now, that stupid, lovesick tell he can’t shake no matter how many years he’s spent being unreadable to everybody else in this club.
He answers, listens a moment, then hangs up. “Sasha,” he says unnecessarily. “Needs a ride from lunch.”
“With who?”
“Penny.” He says it easily, not thinking twice about it, already reaching for his keys off the hook by the door. “They’re having lunch together. Didn’t I mention that?”
He hadn’t. Doesn’t matter. My mouth’s already moving before my brain finishes catching up.
“I’ll go.”
Jenson pauses with his keys half-lifted, one eyebrow climbing slowly. “You’ll go.”
“Yeah.”
“You. Volunteering to run an errand.” One corner of his lips twitches. “Since when do you do prospect work, Diesel?”
“Since right now.” I’m already holding out my hand for the keys. “Kade and Wyatt are on the range with Riot. Everybody else’s busy. I’m not doing anything.”
“You were doing numbers with Bone,” Havoc counters.
“Bone doesn’t need me. He needs a calculator.”
Bone, without looking up from the ledger, says, “He’s not wrong.”
Havoc studies me a beat longer, and I can feel him calculating my behavior since the wedding. Since Penny was there in that blue dress with her hair down and her badge out of sight. He doesn’t say anything out loud. Just shakes his head slowly.
“Take the truck,” he says. “Not the bike. You’re picking up my wife, not racing her.”
“Wasn’t planning on racing anybody.”
“Sure.” He tosses me the truck fob. “Go on, then. Don’t scare Penny off. Sasha likes her.”
I don’t answer that. I’m already walking.
The drive into town takes six minutes, and I spend every single one of them running through what I’m going to say when I get there, which is stupid, because I already know I’m going to forget every word of it the second I see her.
Main Street’s quiet this time of day, lunch crowd thinning out, and I spot the green awning before I even get the truck fully stopped along the curb.
Two heads at a table—one gold and loose around her shoulders, one pulled back tight and neat, and even from here, even through a windshield and a stretch of sidewalk, I feel my pulse pick up its pace.
I cut the engine and cross the street without checking traffic, because apparently I’ve survived the Kings just to get flattened by a fucking delivery truck. Sasha spots me first, waving like I might walk straight past them, but my eyes have already found what they came for.
Penny’s watching me walk up. Doesn’t look away, doesn’t do that cop thing where she pretends she wasn’t already tracking me the second I stepped off the curb. Color’s rising along her cheekbones, high and pink. It’s not the blush a woman gets from sunshine or iced tea.
I know that blush. I put that blush there plenty of times, back when we were kids who didn’t know any better. Back when I had no idea how many years I’d spend without her.
She’s not seventeen anymore. She’s a grown woman with a badge and a gun and thirty-five years behind her, and she’s blushing at me across a lunch table like she can’t help it any more than I can help watching her do it.
“Hey.” Sasha’s grinning like she already knows something I haven’t figured out yet. “Didn’t expect you.”
“Figured I’d save the prospects the trip.” I keep my eyes on Penny while I say it. “Penny.”
“Diesel.” She says my road name carefully, intentionally.
I let the silence sit there a second too long, long enough that Sasha’s grin widens into something closer to a smirk, and I finally drag my attention back to her before I do something stupid in the middle of Main Street with witnesses.
“Give me a minute,” I tell Sasha. “Wanna ask Penny something.”
Sasha’s eyebrows go up, delighted, entirely too pleased with herself, a woman who just got handed information she absolutely intends to use later. “Sure.” She’s already gathering her purse, sliding her chair back. “I’ll wait in the truck.”
“Truck’s unlocked.”
“Obviously.” She stands, brushes past me with a look I choose to ignore, and calls back over her shoulder, “Bye, Penny. Lunch again soon, okay?”
“Okay,” Penny says, still watching me.
Sasha’s footsteps fade toward the curb. The waitress clears a plate two tables over.
Somewhere down the block, somebody’s dog barks twice and goes quiet, and none of it matters, because it’s just me and Penny now, a café table between us instead of a gravel parking lot, except this time I’m not holding out a ring I already know she’ll say no to.
“You didn’t have to come pick her up yourself,” Penny says. “You’ve got prospects for that.”
“I know.”
“So why’d you come?”
I pull out the chair Sasha left empty and sit down across from her without asking, because if I stand here much longer I’m going to do something with my hands I haven’t earned the right to do yet.
“You know why,” I say.
Her jaw tightens. That cop stillness she wears so easily now settles over her. “Evan.”
“Diesel,” I correct automatically, even though I miss hearing her say my real name something fierce.
“Fine. Diesel.” She says it sharper this time, frustration cracking through the careful control. “Why’d you come?”
I lean forward, elbows on the table, close enough now that I can smell her perfume again.
“Have dinner with me,” I say.
She blinks. Doesn’t answer right away, and I watch a dozen different arguments cross her face—her job, the years apart, whatever version of me she’s built in her head out of small-town rumor, the guns she probably suspects we still run through the state and beyond.
“That’s not a question,” she says finally.
“Have dinner with me.” I say it slower this time, quieter. “That better?”
“Evan—”
“You called me that at the wedding too.” My hand finds the front of my shirt without meaning to, two fingers pressed flat over the empty spot where a ring used to sit, and I make myself drop it before she notices what I’m doing.
“You keep using a name I haven’t answered to in longer than you’ve been gone. ”
“Maybe I’m not asking for Diesel.”
That lands somewhere low in my chest, and for a second neither of us says anything, just sit there in the noon heat with a green awning throwing shade across half the table and the other half catching sun straight on her face, catching the gray in her blue eyes.
“I’m not the same guy who stood in that parking lot,” I say. “Seventeen years does that to a man.”
“I know.” Her voice goes quieter too. “I’m not the same girl who left.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Good,” I say again. “Because I don’t want to pick up where we left off. I want the woman sitting in front of me right now. Cop and all.”
Her throat works as she swallows something she doesn’t want to say out loud, and across the street Sasha watches us through the truck window, entirely too pleased with how this is playing out.
“Dinner,” Penny says slowly, like she’s turning the word over, looking for the catch. “As what, exactly?”
“As whatever you want it to be.” I hold her gaze steady, refuse to blink first, because I’m done letting her walk away without at least making her work for it. “Two people. One table. See what happens.”
She doesn’t answer right away. Doesn’t say yes, doesn’t say no, just sits there with her arms crossed over her chest. I’ve got no idea which way this falls until she finally exhales slowly, like she’s been holding her breath since I sat down.
“I finish my shift at six,” she says.
Not a yes. Not exactly. But it’s not a no either, and after years of nothing but silence and stolen glances at red lights, I’ll take whatever crack in the door I can get.
“I’ll pick you up at seven,” I say, standing before she can change her mind, before either of us can talk ourselves back into whatever safe distance we’ve been keeping for almost two decades.
“I didn’t say yes.”
“You didn’t say no.” I’m already backing toward the curb, toward the truck, toward Sasha’s expectant face watching us both through the windshield with entirely too much interest. “Seven o’clock, Penny.”
She doesn’t call after me. Doesn’t tell me not to bother showing up.
That’s good enough for tonight.