Grease and Guilt (Paradise MC #1)

1. Josie

JOSIE

The two lines don’t go anywhere no matter how long I stare at them.

I’ve been sitting on the closed toilet lid for—I don’t actually know how long.

Long enough that the light coming through the frosted window has gone gold and low, that end-of-day June light that makes even our dented old water heater look like something out of a magazine.

Long enough that the Hendersons’ heeler has started up barking three yards over, which means Rich Henderson is home from the mill, which means it’s after six, which means I’ve been in this bathroom for almost an hour holding a plastic stick in both hands like it’s going to change its mind if I look away.

Two lines. Pink. Clear as anything.

My heart’s going hard and fast and it won’t settle, and it’s not one clean feeling, it’s four or five of them stacked on top of each other and fighting for room.

Terror, because we’ve never once talked about this like it was a real thing that could happen to us.

Joy, this stupid bubbling-up joy I keep trying to sit on and can’t.

Disbelief. And under all of it, already, this fierce hot protective thing for something the size of a poppy seed.

That one scares me most, honestly. That one showed up in the first thirty seconds and it’s not going anywhere either.

A baby. Levi’s baby.

I press the back of my wrist against my mouth and laugh, once, this cracked little sound in the quiet of the bathroom, because what else are you supposed to do.

Okay. Okay okay okay. Think, Josie.

Here’s the thing about Levi Ford, and I knew it when I signed up for him three years ago, and I’d sign up again: he doesn’t say I love you easy.

In three years I could count the times on both hands and have fingers left over.

First time he ever said it, he didn’t even say it.

My old Civic died in the parking lot of the Stockman at two in the morning, dead battery, pouring rain—the kind of Montana spring rain that comes down sideways off the mountains and means it—and I called him half-expecting to get his voicemail, because we’d only been together four months and it was two in the morning.

He was there in fifteen minutes. Didn’t say much.

Jumped the battery in the rain, no jacket, water running off his nose, and when I tried to thank him he just looked at me like I’d said something in a foreign language and told me to get my alternator checked.

And I stood there under the Stockman’s awning watching this big soaked idiot pack up his cables and I understood, all at once, oh—this is how he does it.

With his hands. He loves people with his hands because his mouth doesn’t know how.

So no. I’m not blurting this out over dinner between the pot roast and the dishes.

He’d take it fine—he’d take it better than fine, I think, I hope, oh God I hope—but it would just be a Tuesday.

A thing that happened in the kitchen. And I want it to be a moment.

I want it to be something he remembers the way I remember the rain and the battery cables.

Is that selfish? Maybe it’s a little selfish. I’ve earned a little selfish.

And I know how I know, which is the embarrassing part.

I’ve suspected for nine days. Nine days of doing math on my phone in the break room, deleting the search history like a criminal, telling myself the smell of the coffee pot at work has always been that aggressive.

Nine days of driving past the pharmacy in Livingston twice before I finally went in—Livingston, forty minutes, because you cannot buy a pregnancy test at the Paradise Valley IGA, you might as well take out an ad.

The girl at the register didn’t even look up.

I looked at her like we were pulling a heist together and she scanned it like it was gum.

And then the box sat in my glove compartment for two days because taking the test makes it real, and I wasn’t ready for real until today, at five-fifteen on a Tuesday, for no reason at all except I couldn’t stand not-knowing for one more hour.

Now I know.

The party. The thought lands so clean and so obvious I actually sit up straighter on the toilet lid.

The club’s throwing us an anniversary party Saturday—three years, which apparently is the threshold where Dot decides it’s worth dragging the folding tables out for you.

The whole club’ll be there. Everybody we love crammed into one room.

And Levi—Levi, who has never once in three years been sure about forever, who flinches at the word wedding like it’s a wrench somebody dropped—Levi has never one single time wavered about the club.

The club is his family. That’s bedrock. He says it all the time, the only sentimental thing he says on a regular schedule: club’s family, Jo.

So I’ll use his own language. I’ve already got the line, it’s writing itself while I sit here: you always say the club’s your family, right? What if we started our own?

Our own charter. Him and me and a poppy seed. Two members and one prospect.

He’ll get it. He’ll blink at me for a second and then he’ll get it, and I’ll get to watch it land on his face in front of everybody, or maybe I’ll pull him somewhere quiet, I haven’t decided—but Saturday.

Saturday, at the party, with the string lights up and his family around him.

That’s the moment. That’s the one we tell the kid about someday.

I’m still turning it over—refining the line, testing whether charter is too cute, deciding it’s exactly cute enough—when I hear it.

The bike. His bike, coming up the county road, and I’d know that engine note anywhere, could pick it out of fifty bikes at a rally: the Dyna with the rebuilt top end he did himself two winters ago, that low rough burble that smooths out right when he downshifts for our drive.

Gravel popping under the tires now. Home.

I’m up off the toilet lid so fast I get a head rush.

Tissue—I grab a wad of it and fold the test into it, once, twice, like I’m wrapping something breakable, and my hands are not steady, my hands are absolutely not steady at all.

I zip it into the inside pocket of my jean jacket hanging on the door hook, and then I unzip the pocket and check it’s really there and zip it again, which is insane, it didn’t go anywhere in four seconds, I know that.

Out in the drive the engine cuts. Boots on gravel. The little grunt of the kickstand.

I check my face in the mirror. I look—God, I look like a woman who’s been crying in a bathroom for an hour, except I haven’t been crying, my eyes are just huge and glassy and my cheeks are blotched pink like I ran here.

I look like a person with a secret the size of a house.

I press my cold hands flat against my cheeks and breathe out slow through my mouth and watch myself come back down to something that could pass for normal. Normal-ish.

Four days. I just have to be normal-ish for four days.

His key’s in the front door. And here’s the thing they don’t tell you about loving somebody like this—three years in, and the sound of his key in our door still does something to me. Still, every time.

I grab the jacket off the hook on my way—it’s June, I don’t need a jacket, and I put it on anyway, because leaving it hanging in the bathroom with the test in the pocket feels like leaving a child unattended, and okay, yes, I’m aware that’s insane, four days of this is going to be a long four days.

I come down the hall as the door swings open, and I’m already smiling, I can feel it happening without my permission, the folded tissue sitting cold and secret against my ribs—and Levi fills up the whole doorway the way he always does, grease on his forearms, hair flat where the helmet sat, saddlebag in one hand and something wrapped in gas station cellophane in the other.

Flowers. Again. Third time this month, carnations dyed a blue that doesn’t occur anywhere in nature, and my heart does the dumb thing it does.

And his face when he sees me does the thing it does. Opens right up. Glad, all the way through, no guard on it at all.

“Hey, you,” he says.

“Hey yourself.” My voice comes out normal. Miracle. “Those for me, or did you finally get a girlfriend?”

“These old things?” He looks at the carnations like he’s never seen them before in his life. “Found ’em. Growing wild out by the pumps at the Gas-N-Go.”

“Naturally blue.”

“Montana’s beautiful this time of year.” He steps in and stoops down to me and kisses me hello, one hand still full of flowers, the other sliding around the back of my neck, warm and rough and easy, and he smells like the shop—grease, metal, sun-hot leather—and underneath it, him.

Three years and the smell of him still lands somewhere behind my knees.

“Good day?” he asks, against my hair.

You have no idea, I think. The best day. The scariest day. The whole world changed at five-fifteen and you’re standing in it holding gas station carnations.

And for one second—one long, sweet, dangerous second, his hand warm on my neck and his heartbeat right there under my palm and the truth pressing up against the back of my teeth like a live thing—I almost tell him right then.