Chapter 6
Callum
The rally is one week out. Everything is ready.
The vendors are confirmed and the road closures are filed and the porta-potties are placed correctly relative to the wind, and the visiting clubs are all back on board, including the Stallions, and Noor has spent the last three days running through the master document for what she calls redundancy verification and what I call checking it for the fourteenth time when there is nothing left to check, and tonight is the final committee meeting at the Sunrise Grill.
Sienna has put out platters. The Chamber has shown up with a sheet cake from the Walmart bakery that says CONGRATULATIONS RALLY in green frosting, and which I will admit is hideous and which I will also admit I have eaten three slices of, because Sienna's coffee is excellent and free cake is free cake.
She is wearing dark green tonight. A simple wrap dress that ties at the waist and falls just above her knees.
Flats, because she has been on her feet all day.
Her hair is up, and there is a piece of it that has fallen loose at the nape of her neck and is curling there in a way I have been trying not to stare at for two hours.
Her wrist is touching the gold chain like she is missing somebody, or maybe like she is just thinking, and she is — even now, at the end of her own committee meeting, with the celebration still going on around her — sitting at a smaller booth in the back, looking at the master document on her laptop, scrolling slowly, frowning at a thing that does not actually need her attention but is a place for her hands to be.
I get up. I cross the room. The brothers see me cross. Havoc sees me cross. Havoc is at the bar, and Havoc lifts his beer at me as I pass, and he says, very quietly, " Votive candle, Brennan," and I say, without turning around, " Shut up, Havoc, " and he laughs and leaves me alone.
I slide into the booth across from her. She doesn't look up.
"I'm reviewing—"
"Noor."
"Yes."
"Put the tablet down."
"It's my laptop."
"Put the laptop down."
She looks up. Her face does the thing. The little tile-shift. She closes the laptop. She folds her hands on top of it. She waits.
"I need to tell you something," I say.
"All right."
"It's going to violate approximately all of your rules."
"Which rules?"
"All of them. Especially Three."
She goes still. I see the four-pen-tap of her brain even though there is no pen and no surface to tap. I see the still half-second that comes before the cutting thing, except this time the cutting thing does not arrive.
What arrives instead is, very quietly, this:
"I revised Rule Three."
I stop breathing for a second. I find my breath again.
"When?" I ask.
"Somewhere on the highway." She looks down at her folded hands. She looks back up. "When I was holding onto you. And pretending it was about aerodynamics."
"Noor."
"Yes."
"You are killing me."
"I know."
I reach across the table. I take her hand.
There is no audience in this booth. There is no club watching.
There is no credibility play. There is just my hand and hers, my fingers between hers, the gold chain at her wrist resting along the back of my thumb.
Her hand is, as always, cool and dry. Mine is warm and not, this time, sweaty, because I have apparently been preparing for this hand-hold for eleven weeks and my nervous system has finally caught up.
"This is a terrible idea," she says.
"My entire life is terrible ideas that worked out."
"Your road name is literally Jinx."
"And you got on the bike anyway."
She laughs. It is the laugh from the sprinkler. It is the laugh I have been trying to earn from her for three weeks, except now I do not have to try. The laugh is just hers. The laugh is mine if I want it.
I slide out of the booth. I stand up. I offer her my hand.
She takes it. She closes the laptop and tucks it under her arm.
She walks with me to the door. We pass Sienna at the counter, and Sienna looks at us and looks away, the way Sienna has always looked at the things in the Sunrise Grill that need a little privacy, and we pass Razor at the bar and Razor lifts his glass and does not say anything.
Havoc, behind him, does not lift his glass, but Havoc grins at me in a way that I will revisit later in the year and will not appreciate at the time.
Mateo is in the bathroom. He will hear about this from Havoc within the hour.
I will pay for it in the morning. I do not care.
I drive her home. She lives in a converted warehouse on the south side of town, third floor, walk-up, a brick building with industrial windows and a fire escape that spirals down the back.
I have been at her front door before, two weeks ago, when I dropped her off after the Stallions trip.
I have not been past her front door. I am about to be.
We park. We walk up the three flights. She is one step ahead of me on the stairs, and I am, I will admit, watching the way the wrap dress moves against the back of her thighs as she climbs, and at the second-floor landing she stops and turns and looks at me, and the green of the dress in the dim stairwell light has gone almost black, and her eyes have gone darker than I have ever seen them, and she says, very quietly, "Callum. "
"Yes."
"If we go inside, I am not going to want to stop."
"Noor."
"Yes."
"That's the plan."
She steps down to my step. She is now eye-level with me for the first time in eleven weeks, and she puts her hand flat on my chest, over my heart, and she leans in, and she kisses me there in the stairwell, before we have even reached her door.
The kiss is — I will tell you what the kiss is, because I have been thinking about this kiss for so long that I owe it the full description — the kiss is not small.
The kiss is not careful. The kiss is what eleven weeks builds into when you finally take the brake off, and she kisses me with the same precision she brings to everything else, like she has decided in advance exactly what she wants and has come to collect, and her hand slides up from my chest to the back of my neck, and her fingers find the hair at my nape, and she pulls me down to her with a small steady firmness that travels through every nerve in my body like a switch being thrown.
I get my hands on her waist. I get my hands on her waist and I press her gently back against the stairwell wall, and the laptop slides out from under her arm and lands on the carpeted landing with a soft thump that neither of us acknowledges, because acknowledging it would mean breaking the kiss.
The kiss does not break. The kiss gets deeper.
Her mouth opens under mine and I taste the tea she had at the Grill and something underneath it that is just her, just the woman I have been failing to stop wanting for eleven weeks, and a sound comes out of the back of her throat — small and low and gone — and that sound undoes me in a way I am going to have to apologize to the architecture of this stairwell for.
"Inside," I say, against her mouth.
"Inside."
She grabs the laptop off the floor. I do not let go of her hand.
We climb the last flight with my hand braced at the small of her back, and she unlocks her door, and she pushes it open, and I follow her over the threshold, and the door clicks shut behind us, and that small click is — I will say this — the sound my entire life has been pointed at for two years without my realizing.
The apartment is exactly her. It is exactly her, except more.
There are two long bookshelves with the spines color-arranged.
There is a kitchen that has been laid out the way an airplane galley is laid out.
There is a label inside the open tea cabinet that says tea.
I see it through the half-open door, and I almost laugh, except I do not laugh, because she is dropping the laptop on the entry table and turning around, and she steps out of her flats, and the flats land in a small lined-up arrangement of footwear by the door, and she is now barefoot in the green dress in the entryway of her own apartment, looking up at me.
"Callum."
"Yes."
"There is no contract anymore."
"I know."
"I need you to know that. I am not choosing this because of the rally. I am choosing it because I want to. Because I have wanted to since the parking lot at the Holiday Inn, and I have been managing the wanting like a project, and the project is over."
"Noor."
"Yes."
"Tell me what you want."
She tells me. She tells me in a low, direct voice I have not heard in any vendor meeting and will not hear in any vendor meeting, and what she tells me is exactly what she wants, and where she wants it, and how she wants me to start.
I have not, in my life, been spoken to by a woman in that voice before, and I will not, in my life, be spoken to that way by anyone else again, because that voice belongs to one person and one person only, and that person has just claimed me in her own entryway.
I kiss her. I kiss her properly this time, with both of my hands cradling her jaw and my thumbs at the hinges of it, and I kiss her until she is rising up onto the balls of her bare feet to get closer, and then I slide one hand down — slow, deliberate, no surprises — to the tie of the wrap dress at her waist. I do not pull it. I just rest my fingers on it.
"Yes?"
"Yes."
I pull. The dress opens.
Underneath she is wearing a simple set — pale, the color of cream — and she is — I will say this — exactly what I knew she would be.
She is small and she is soft and there is a small mole I had not seen before at the inside of her left collarbone, and the gold chain at her wrist is the only thing on her that catches the light, and her breath has gone shallow, and her chest is rising and falling in a way that makes me forget, for a second, every word I have ever learned in two languages.
"Bedroom," she says.