11. Responding #3
Because he was. We both were. The wind tore past the helmets and turned the world into rush and thunder, and somewhere around the fourth overtake, sliding past a row of cars that sat in their lanes like they were parked, a laugh climbed out of me from somewhere under my gut, huge, helpless, four months old.
His answer came back through his spine before I heard it, a shake, a whoop buried inside his helmet, and then he opened the throttle on the straight and the desert smeared.
Scrub brush and heat shimmer. Guardrail posts strobing by.
The mountains crawling along the horizon.
The speed dragged at my arms and pressed me harder into his back, and my blood ran full of a clean rush.
The pit had pumped me full of the other version seventeen times, dread dressed up as adrenaline, and I'd hated every drop of it even while it kept me alive.
This was the real thing. This was the rush with nothing rotten in it, because for once in four months we were racing toward something good.
And somewhere in that thunder, arms full of him, carried, with nothing asked of me but to hold on, I quit arguing with what I'd been carrying since the gym.
There wasn't a moment it happened. It was all of it at once.
The spoon. The coroner's sheet. The towel on his head.
A man who said move instead of making me ask.
The truth settled in easy at eighty miles an hour, easier than it ever had standing still.
I was falling for him. Had fallen. Was still going, no ground in sight, and for the first time in my life I wasn't looking for the landing.
So I did something I had never once done in twenty-seven years. I let go of the man I was holding, sat up into the windblast with the speed ripping at my sleeves, threw both arms out wide, and screamed.
No words. Just lungs. Four months of hospital hallways and debt math and blood on canvas, out into the desert at the top of my voice, gone behind us at eighty, and I came back lighter by exactly that much.
That's when the bike twitched.
A flick. Left, then right, two inches of wiggle at speed, and my stomach fell through the seat, the horizon tipped, and "WOAH!" ripped out of me at full volume as my arms snapped shut around him hard enough to crack a rib.
The bike ran straight as a rail. It had never done anything else.
Under my arms his whole torso was shaking, and it had nothing to do with the engine. He was laughing. Howling, inside his helmet, shoulders heaving with it, and his gloved hand came down and patted my forearm twice. There, there.
"You did that on purpose!" I shouted it into the wind and got a happy, shameless shrug in reply, felt more than seen. "My arms were up because of you! I trusted you!"
More shaking. Another pat.
There was only one move left against a man like that.
I slid forward until no space was left, wrapped him up for real, chest to spine, arms locked across him, my helmet against his shoulder, and held on tighter than any ride required.
His laughing wound down. At seventy-five, his left hand left the bar for one second and pressed flat over my forearm, glove and all, and stayed until the next curve needed it back.
The first red light on the edge of the city caught us. The engine dropped to a rumble, and he flipped his visor up and turned his head halfway, one pale eye finding me over his shoulder.
"Still mad?"
"Furious." I flipped mine up too. Desert heat rolled over us the second the wind quit.
"You're smiling."
"The helmet's smiling. I'm furious."
"Uh-huh." Green. His visor snapped down, and I felt the laugh run through his back as the engine rose under us. "Hold on, furious."
The city climbed up out of the shimmer, and for the first time in four months I was headed toward a hospital with something in my chest besides lead.
We came into the UMC lot fast. The parking job was crooked. Neither of us looked back at it.
A Harley sat near the entrance, nose out. The brother leaning against it was one of the compound faces, Santos, broad through the shoulders, and he lifted two fingers off his crossed arms as we passed. Posted. Watching. The club's word, standing in the afternoon sun in a leather cut. I nodded back.
We hit the lobby at a jog with our helmets still in our hands, and the smell of the place did what it always did, floor cleaner and cold air and vending-machine coffee. Except today it didn't close around my neck. Today it was only a smell.
She was at the desk. Blue scrubs, glasses pushed up on her forehead, pen behind one ear. Our boots announced us, her head came up, and the professional blank held for one second before it cracked wide.
"Well." The glasses came down her nose. She looked at me over them, and the smile from the phone arrived in person. "That was fast. You must have flown."
"He drove." Still catching my breath, I tipped my head at Ghost. "Flying's close."
Her eyes shifted to Ghost and did something I couldn't read all the way, a narrowing with history in it that I didn't know. Ghost gave her a smile made of pure processed sugar. She gave him the look you give a dog that got into the trash and then brought back your slippers.