Chapter 5 #2
He does not say anything. He could not say anything if he wanted to; the wind would take it.
But I think he can feel my forehead. I think he can feel my forehead through the jacket through the shirt through his skin, and I think he is choosing, deliberately, not to react to the forehead, because reacting to the forehead would be acknowledging the forehead, and acknowledging the forehead would be, technically, in violation of Rule Six, which is the rule that does not exist on paper but which I am drafting in my head as we ride, and Rule Six says: do not name the thing that is happening.
Just let it happen. Just let it be a forehead and a shoulder and a road and a stretch of late summer that nobody will ever see again.
We reach the Iron Stallions clubhouse at twelve-fifteen.
Callum slows the bike a quarter-mile out and idles up to the gate at a speed that, he explains over the engine, is the speed at which an outside member arrives at another club's clubhouse without giving offense.
Slow enough to show respect. Fast enough to show you're not afraid.
He tells me this without taking his eyes off the road.
He tells me this the way a teacher tells a student before a test.
The gate opens. A man in a Stallions cut waves us through.
We park in the visitor row. Callum dismounts first. He turns.
He helps me off the bike. His hands are at my waist, and they linger no longer than necessary, and I am grateful and also disappointed, which is a combination I am beginning to recognize as something that occurs only around him.
"Noor."
"Yes."
"Take off the jacket. Carry it over your arm. They need to see you're not trying to look like one of theirs. Walk a half-step behind me until we're inside. Don't take a phone out unless I tell you it's all right."
"Understood."
"And —"
"Yes."
He looks at me. We are standing in the visitor row of a clubhouse parking lot two hours from home, and he has one hand still loosely at my elbow from helping me off the bike, and his face is — I will say this — entirely serious in a way I have not seen it before.
There is no grin. There is no self-deprecation.
There is just a young man who has been in the world long enough to know what kind of room we are about to walk into, and who is, very briefly, asking me to trust him with it.
"You've got this," he says.
I nod.
We walk inside.
The negotiation takes ninety minutes. I will spare you the details, because event-planning negotiation is not interesting on the page, but I will tell you the shape of it.
Booker is at the head of a long wooden table.
Two of his officers are flanking him. There is no offer of coffee.
There is no small talk. I sit down across from him with the laminated rally schedule and the projected economic impact for the Stallions specifically — I have done the math on what they earn from the rally, vendor sales and exposure included — and I make my case.
I make the case I would make to a corporate client.
I treat him exactly the way I would treat a Fortune 500 CFO who has informed me he is pulling out of a contract.
I am crisp. I am direct. I do not flatter and I do not bargain against myself, and I do not, at any point, pretend I do not understand the situation with the Vipers, because pretending not to understand is the kind of mistake that ends a meeting before it begins.
Callum sits one chair to my left and slightly back.
He says nothing for the first forty minutes.
He says nothing for the second forty minutes.
At the eighty-minute mark, when Booker raises a concern about security at the rally and asks whether the vendors will be physically separated by club affiliation, Callum says, without looking at me, "Mateo Reyes is running internal security.
He's a former MP. He's set up a separated vendor block that maps to club affiliation, but there's neutral ground in the food and merch zones.
I can have him email you the schematic before you leave today.
" Booker turns to look at him. Callum meets his eyes.
He does not smile. He does not look away.
He has just produced, at exactly the right moment, exactly the piece of information that resolves Booker's actual concern, and he has done it as though he and I had rehearsed it, except we did not rehearse it, because Callum Brennan has been listening to me work for three weeks and he knows the schematic of this rally as well as I do.
Booker grunts. He looks back at me.
"All right, Ms. Abbasi," he says. "We're in. But if the Vipers start anything, we walk."
"They won't," I say. "I'll personally guarantee it."
"You can't personally guarantee that."
"Watch me."
We shake hands. His hand is the size of a dinner plate. He almost smiles. He says, to Callum: "Brennan. You did good in here. Tell Diesel I said so."
Callum nods.
We walk out. I do not let myself breathe until we are past the gate and back out on the road and the clubhouse is shrinking in the rear-view of my mind. I am back on the bike. My arms are around him again. The jacket is back on. The helmet is back on. The road is unspooling under us in reverse.
We have been riding for forty minutes when something happens that I will, later, have to admit was not a thing I was planning.
I tighten my arms.
I tighten my arms more than physics requires.
I tighten them in a way that has nothing to do with leaning into a curve and nothing to do with the wind and nothing to do with any reasonable interpretation of the passenger's safety guidelines, and I tighten them because I want to be closer to him than I am, and I tighten them because the negotiation is over and the adrenaline is leaving my body and what is replacing the adrenaline is a feeling I have not had room for in the last eleven weeks and which has been waiting, very patiently, for the eleven weeks to end so it could finally come in.
He notices. I feel him notice. There is, again, the half-second of muscle tension in his stomach, and then the long breath out, and then he places his right hand — he has to, momentarily, in order to do this — over both of mine where they are clasped at his waist, and he holds them there for a count of three, and then he puts his hand back on the throttle, and we keep riding.
He has not said a word. He cannot say a word. The wind is too loud for words.
He doesn't have to.
We pull into Ember Falls at four-twenty in the afternoon.
He stops the bike in front of my building.
He cuts the engine. The silence after the engine is enormous.
I sit on the bike for a moment longer than I need to.
I sit with my arms still around him, because removing my arms is a transition I am not yet prepared to make.
"Noor."
"Yes."
"We're here."
"I know."
I take my arms off him. I get off the bike. I take off the helmet. I take off the jacket. I hand them both to him, and our hands brush during the handoff, and I do not look at him while it happens, because if I looked at him I would not be able to walk into my building.
"Thank you," I say.
"Anytime."
"Mr. Brennan."
"Yes."
"I mean that. Thank you. For — for all of it."
He looks at me. He is sitting on his bike with the helmet in his lap and his hair pressed flat from the ride and a pink line across his forehead where the helmet padding has been. He looks tired. He looks, to me, in this moment, like the most familiar face I have ever seen.
"Anytime," he says again. "And I mean that. Any time."
I nod. I cannot speak. I turn. I walk into my building. I climb the three flights to my apartment and I close the door behind me and I lean against it, and I close my eyes, and I let myself stand there for a count of forty.
Then I go to my desk. I open my laptop. I open the spreadsheet. EFR-2026. I find Rule Three. The arrangement terminates the day after the rally concludes.
I look at it.
I do not delete it. I am not, yet, ready to delete it.
But I add a comment in the margin. Just a small one. The comment reads: under review.
I save the file. I close the laptop.
I go to bed at eight o'clock at night, because I cannot stay vertical any longer. I lie in the dark, and I listen to the radiator click on, and I think, very clearly, I am going to have to tell him.
Then I fall asleep, and I dream of a road that goes on forever, with the back of a man's shoulder warm against my forehead, and I do not, in the dream, ever once want to stop.