Chapter 5 #2
“My brother’s the same,” I said. “Doesn’t say it straight. Says it in, I don’t know. Indirect stuff. Tells me the kids are good at riding dirt bikes because of me, but he says it like he’s reading a statistic.”
She looked at me for a moment. “Brother, or MC brother?”
“Blood brother. Mark. Two years older. Lives over in Glenwood with his wife and two boys. I ride over the third Sunday of every month to see them — have for years.” It came out before I’d decided to say it.
I reached for my glass. “He’s a good guy.
Works at a plant. Married. Steady. He’s the one who turned out right. ”
Austen looked at me. “And you didn’t?”
“I turned out different.” I drank. Set the glass down.
“Our dad left when I was young. Before I was old enough to understand what he’d done to my mom, but not before I’d picked up the way he talked.
About women. About everything.” I looked at her.
“Mark picked it up too. Same voice, same jokes, same chin angle on the punchline. The difference is he’s got a wife, kids, a proper 9 to 5 job.
Nobody’s pulling Mark aside because by every measure our dad ever handed us, he passed. ”
Austen was quiet. She didn’t flinch, didn’t soften, didn’t rush to fill the silence with reassurance. She just listened. Bartender’s attention.
“The club helped,” I continued. “In the wrong direction. Being a Venom Rider, the cut, the road name — it gave me a frame for all the stuff I should have outgrown. Made it feel normal. Made it feel earned.” I tugged at my rolled cuff.
“I’m not blaming the club. The club’s the best thing that’s happened to me.
Dutch, Colt, Holden — they’re better men than I’ve been.
I can see now they’ve been trying to pull me up to their level for years.
I just kept finding ways not to notice until recently. ”
“What changed?”
I thought about it. The honest answer was you, but I didn’t want to scare her off on the first date.
“A prospect died,” I said. “Just over two years ago now. Danny. He was nineteen.” I paused.
Didn’t look at the candle. Looked at her.
“After that, the club changed. Holden changed. Dutch and Colt - they’d already changed.
Everyone around me got serious about something.
And I didn’t. I stayed in the same gear.
Made the same jokes. Chased the same nothing.
” I set the glass down. “And then you kicked me out of your bar and I didn’t have anywhere left to hide. ”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. The restaurant moved around us — the waiter clearing a table nearby, a couple laughing by the kitchen, the quiet clatter of someone else’s evening happening at a distance.
“My sister thinks you’re a project,” she said. “She thinks I’m trying to fix you.”
That wasn’t new. I’d been a project before — women who showed up at the clubhouse certain they’d be the one who finally cracked it. Ring, baby, the full domestication arc with the bad boy biker. Austen didn’t seem like the type. “Are you?”
“No. I don’t fix people. That’s not my job and it doesn’t work.” She met my eyes. “What I’m doing is sitting in a restaurant eating good food with a man who used to talk to my chest, and deciding whether the version of him I’m seeing tonight is real or temporary.”
“That’s fair.”
“It’s not fair. It’s necessary.” She folded her napkin. “Tell me about Danny.”
So I told her about Danny. Not everything — not the details of the ambush, not the blood, not Holden’s face afterward.
But the prospect who’d shown up eager and stayed eager, who’d died trying to prove something to men who’d already decided he was one of them.
The name the club had given him after — Anchor.
The cut that hung in church. The way me and my brothers said see you out there when we passed it, like he was still riding somewhere.
“Every Saturday dinner,” I said. “Dutch opens with a toast. To Danny. The whole table. Every week. So he’s still there.”
Austen’s eyes were bright. “That’s beautiful,” she said.
I shrugged. “It’s what we do.” I looked out the window a moment. Thought about something I should have said at the start of the evening. “If we’re going to date — and I know you haven’t agreed to a second one yet — there’s something you should know. About how the club works.”
“Go ahead,” she said.
“Dutch has given me something to work toward. I can’t tell you what. What I can give you is notice. Every time I’m going to be gone, you’ll know the day before. A text, always. You won’t just find I’ve disappeared.”
“And if I ask what you’re doing?”
“I’ll tell you what I can. The rest is club business.” I held her eyes. “I’m not going to lie to you. But there are things that don’t leave the club.”
She looked at me for a moment. “I can work with that,” she said firmly. The way she said things when the decision was already made.
The check came. I reached for it.
“I can pay my own way,” she said.
“I know you can.” I put my card down without looking at it. “Doesn’t mean you’re going to tonight.”
She studied me a second, then let it go — not because she’d lost, because she’d decided the hill wasn’t worth it. “Next one’s mine.”
“Deal.”
Neither of us moved to leave. She told me about the bar she wanted to open someday — her own place, not someone else’s kingdom.
She had a name for it already, a Jane Austen reference she wouldn’t tell me yet.
I told her about Mark’s boys. Finn’s gap-toothed grin, Owen’s twelve-year-old handshake, and the dirt bikes I’d taught them to ride on my Sundays in Glenwood.
“You love those boys,” she said.
“They’re easy to love.”
“That’s not what I mean.” She looked at me. “You’re good with them. I can hear it in the way you talk about them.”
“Kids like me,” I said, and it came out easy because it was just true. Luca and Knox, and their baby brothers Graham and Danny. Even Maya.
We left together. The lot was quiet — Willowbrook at ten on a Sunday, the shops dark.
Austen stopped at her car and turned to face me. The streetlight was behind her — face half-lit, half-shadow.
“Can I kiss you?” I asked.
She studied me. I stood still. I didn’t lean in, didn’t move, didn’t do any of the things I would normally do — close the gap, make the decision for her, assume the answer was yes because the evening had gone well and that was how the math worked.
“Yes,” she said.
I leaned in and kissed her. Quick, careful, my hand on the side of her jaw and her mouth warm against mine for about three seconds before I pulled back. I wanted to stay.
She looked at me after. That careful, measuring look she had — the one that was doing math I couldn’t see.
“Good night, Handful,” she said, and reached for her door.
“Let me take you out on the bike next time.” It was out before I’d run it past the part of my brain that’s supposed to check these things first. “Get you on the back, let you ride—”
I heard it the same second she did.
“—the bike. Let you ride the bike.”
I’d been sweet talking women since I was fourteen and never once needed a do-over. Now here I was in a dark parking lot making things worse with every word. Whatever she’d done to me, it had taken something I’d never had to think about and turned me into a fumbling sixteen-year-old.
Austen laughed, her head tipped back, delighted with me.
“Ask me again when you can finish the sentence.” She got in her car. Pulled the door half shut, then leaned back out. “Good night, Handful.”
“Good night, Austen.”
I waited until she’d started the engine and pulled away from the curb before I walked to my bike.
The ride home was slow. I took the long way — not back through Willowbrook’s main street but out along the farm road that looped south before connecting to the highway. The long way added twenty minutes and I needed every single one.
The night air was warm, the sky was clear, and I didn’t turn anything over in my head.
I just rode. For the first time in eleven weeks, I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing or why I was doing it or whether it was working.
I was just on the bike, in the dark, with the taste of Austen, and the memory of the three seconds I’d kissed her.
I didn’t pick up speed until I saw the clubhouse lights.