Chapter 5
Noor
The phone rings at six forty-two on a Wednesday morning, which is twenty minutes before my alarm is set to go off, and I know before I answer that it is bad news, because nobody calls me at six forty-two with anything else.
It is Diesel.
"Ms. Abbasi."
"Diesel."
"We have a problem."
The problem, he explains, in the spare and economical sentences of a man who has had this kind of conversation too many times to feel anything about it, is that the Iron Stallions have pulled out of the rally.
Booker — yes, the same Booker, the one who apologized to me for being late, the one who handed me his card — called Diesel last night to inform him that, after consultation with his officers, the Stallions will not be attending the Ember Falls Rally this year because of an unresolved territorial dispute with the Vipers.
The dispute, Diesel says, is not actually about territory.
The dispute is about a junior member of the Stallions who slept with a junior member of the Vipers and then said something on a public-facing social media account that he should not have said, and the Vipers responded with a public-facing post of their own, and the leadership of both clubs have spent the last six weeks trying and failing to put it down.
The Stallions have decided that attending an event where the Vipers will also be present is, in their assessment, a recipe for an incident, and they are not going to be the ones who turn the rally into an incident.
I lie in bed and listen to all of this. I do not interrupt.
I do not, in this moment, panic, because panic is a luxury I will permit myself later, alone, with tea.
The Iron Stallions account for approximately fourteen percent of the rally's projected attendance.
They occupy a vendor block I have already committed to, and pulling them now will leave me with three weeks to find a replacement for an empty section of the fairground, which is, by event-planning standards, the equivalent of being told three weeks before a wedding that the catering company has dissolved.
"What do you need?" Diesel asks.
"I need to talk to Booker. In person."
"His clubhouse is two hours north."
"I know."
"He won't take a meeting at a neutral site. He'll only do it on his ground. That's how he does it."
"I know."
"You're going to have to go up there."
"I know."
There is a pause. I can hear him breathing on the other end of the line. Diesel is the kind of man whose pauses are full sentences, and this pause is the kind of pause that contains the question he is too polite to ask out loud.
"You're going to take Jinx with you," he says. It is not a question.
"Yes."
"Ms. Abbasi."
"Yes."
"I want to be clear about something."
"Please."
"Walking into another club's house is not a thing you do casually.
Even with a Iron Vow prospect at your side.
There are protocols. There are things you do not say.
There are things you do not look at. There are doors you do not go through.
Jinx knows all of this because we drill it into our prospects from week one.
You will trust him on the protocols. If he tells you to do something, you do it.
If he tells you to stop doing something, you stop. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"And Ms. Abbasi."
"Yes."
"He's going to drive you up on his bike. That's going to read better than rolling in in a sedan. You okay with that?"
I think about it. I have ridden on the back of a motorcycle exactly once in my life, when I was nineteen and a friend in college talked me into a five-block joyride through downtown that I did not enjoy, and from which I emerged with a permanent bias against the activity.
I have not been on a motorcycle since. I have not, technically, ever been on a motorcycle with a man I know well enough to wrap my arms around.
"I'm okay with that," I say.
"All right." Another pause. "Ms. Abbasi."
"Yes."
"Take care of him."
I do not know what to say to that. He does not wait for me to find words. He hangs up.
Callum picks me up at ten o'clock. He is dressed for the road — heavier jacket, gloves, boots, a folded bandana that he tucks into a pocket — and he has brought, slung over his arm, a women's leather jacket that I have never seen before and a half-helmet that he hands to me with a small, almost ceremonial gravity.
"Whose jacket is this?"
"My sister Brigid's. She left it at my mother's last Christmas. I called Ma this morning and she overnighted it to me. Ma says hello, by the way. She says, and I quote, tell the event planner to send a Christmas card. "
"Your mother knows about me?"
"My mother has known about you for two weeks. My mother knows about everyone in my life within forty-eight hours of their arrival. I have given up trying to slow her down."
"You called your mother about me."
"Noor."
"Yes."
"I called my mother about the assignment. The assignment happens to involve you. The mother thing is just collateral."
I do not believe him. I do not say so. I take the jacket.
I put it on. It is a half-size too big across the shoulders and a half-size too small across the chest, which I think is true of every leather jacket I have ever tried on, and I do not, in this moment, care, because the jacket smells faintly of leather and faintly of something else that is, I think, just Callum, and the thing I do not care about is suddenly a thing I am very aware of.
He helps me with the helmet. His hands are gentle on the strap.
He does not stand too close. He stands exactly as close as he needs to and no closer.
When the helmet is fastened, he steps back and looks at me, and the look is brief, and I do not know what is in it, and I am glad I do not know, because if I knew I would have to do something about it, and we have a two-hour ride to get through.
"Ready?"
"As I'm going to be."
"Hold on tight."
"Define tight."
"Both arms. Around my waist. Lean when I lean. Don't fight the bike. Trust the bike. Trust me."
"Mr. Brennan."
"Yes."
"You realize that the last instruction is the difficult one."
"I do."
"All right."
I get on the bike. I have never gotten on a motorcycle that was not idling, and this one is idling, and the vibration travels up through the seat into my body in a way that is unfamiliar and not, I have to admit, unpleasant.
I put my arms around his waist. He is warm under the jacket.
He is, I notice with the part of my brain that notices everything, slimmer than I expected — not skinny, but lean, the kind of build that comes from long days of physical labor without the gym sculpting that men perform for the camera.
My hands meet at the front of his stomach.
I clasp my fingers. I lean my chest against his back.
I close my eyes for one second, just one, to absorb the fact that this is happening at all, and then I open them.
"Ready," I say.
He pulls out of my driveway.
The first ten minutes are terror. I will not pretend they are not.
The first ten minutes are my body trying to convince me that we are about to die, and my brain trying to convince my body that we are not, and a low background hum in my chest that is the sound of every contingency I have ever planned for failing to apply to this particular situation.
Then, somewhere around minute eleven, I make the choice to stop being afraid.
I make it deliberately. I think — and I will tell you exactly what I think, because it surprises me too — I think, I trust him.
I think it the way I would think it about a vendor whose track record I have audited, or a contractor whose references I have called.
I think it as a conclusion arrived at by evidence.
The evidence is three weeks of Callum Brennan showing up early, doing what he said he would do, paying attention, not breaking the things that matter even when he breaks the things that don't. The evidence is the man at the bar of the Antler last Friday night, eating his steak, not looking at me because looking at me would have given me away.
The evidence is, this morning, a leather jacket overnighted from his mother.
I trust him. I lean into the lean. I press my chest harder against his back.
I wrap my arms a fraction tighter around his waist, and I feel him register the tightening and not say anything about it, and I feel — and this is the part I will, later, write into the unbudgeted tab of my spreadsheet — the muscles of his stomach tense for just a second under my fingers, and then relax.
We ride.
The road north from Ember Falls climbs through hills that I have driven before and which look, at fifty-five miles an hour from the back of a motorcycle, like a different country.
The trees are starting to turn — not full color yet, but the early oranges, the first reds at the tips of the maples — and the sky is the kind of dense, late-summer blue that I have always associated with the end of something.
The wind takes my hair behind me and the engine runs underneath me and Callum's body is the only steady thing in a world that is, otherwise, moving past at speeds I am not piloting, and I rest my forehead, just barely, against the back of his shoulder, and I let it stay there.