Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Tindra
Four days is a long time to pour coffee for strangers and pretend your whole body isn't listening for a motorcycle.
I run the shop on caffeine and stubbornness, because the shop doesn't care that my chest is tight from the moment I wake up.
The morning rush doesn't care.
The new espresso machine that fogs up on humid days and the milk order that comes in short and Kayla, who's finally stopped fearing the group head, none of it cares that the man I love rode off in a direction he wouldn't name with a face like he was going to war.
So I work. Work is what I reach for instead of falling apart.
Better than sitting with my own head, which has been a bad place to be all week.
It's the middle of the day when I notice the man by the window.
He's not doing anything. That's what snags on me.
He's got a black coffee he's not drinking and a phone he's not looking at, and he's taking up a two-top by the window like he's waiting for someone who's never going to show.
Mid-forties, maybe.
Windbreaker too heavy for June.
He doesn't read, doesn't scroll, doesn't do any of the small human things people do when they're alone in a coffee shop.
He watches the room.
I catch his eyes twice, and both times they slide off me easy, unbothered, a man with nowhere to be.
The second time I clock that there's a woman two tables over doing the same nothing, a to-go cup gone cold in front of her, and when the man finally leaves she stays another ten minutes and then she leaves too.
Neither of them buys anything else, and both of them are gone by the time I think to wonder why my skin's crawling.
Probably nothing. New shop, curious foot traffic, everybody's a first-timer in the first weeks.
I tell myself that, the way I've been telling myself things since Bodul left.
I wipe down their table and I move on, and I don't mention it to anyone because there's nothing to mention.
Sophie catches me staring at the door around close.
"He'll be back when he's back," she says, stacking chairs, not looking at me. "Whatever it is. He's a big boy on a big bike."
"I know." I keep wiping down a counter that's already clean.
"You don't know. You've been chewing the inside of your cheek raw for days now.
" She sets a chair down and finally turns, holding my eyes long enough that I know she's seen straight through me.
"You want to tell me who he actually is to you, or you would you rather keep pretending I'm blind as a bat? "
I love her for asking, and I love her more for the way she leaves the door open instead of pushing me through it.
"Not tonight," I tell her.
She nods and lets it go. If anyone gets keeping your mouth shut on something big, it's Sophie.
* * *
It's past midnight, and I'm not asleep because I haven't been able to sleep well since Bodul left.
So, I'm awake, staring at the ceiling, when the street finally gives me what I've been waiting for.
I hear the bike before I hear anything else.
Not the healthy growl of it. Something slower.
It idles in the lot too long, like the rider's sitting on it gathering himself.
I'm off the couch and at the window before the engine cuts, and my heart's already going because a man who's been riding for days doesn't sit in the parking lot unless getting off the bike is going to hurt.
I've got the door open before he knocks.
And the bottom drops out of me.
He's under the walkway light, and the light is doing him no favors.
For one horrible second, my brain refuses the picture in front of it.
His mouth is split and swollen, the lower lip fat and scabbed dark at the center.
One eye's gone purple-black and puffed to a slit.
There's road grime ground into him, days of it, and he's holding himself with one arm wrapped low across his ribs, careful, like his whole side is made of glass.
He's gray under the dirt, the type of gray a person has when they’re running on nothing but the need to get somewhere.
"Hey," he says, through the ruined mouth, and tries to smile with it, and can't.
My hands come up to him and stop an inch short because I don't know where I'm allowed to touch.
"Gods..." It comes out shaking. "Bodul. What—get in here, get inside, oh my?—"
I get an arm around him from the good side and he lets me take some of his weight, which scares me more than the face does, because Bodul doesn't lean on anyone.
He walks in bent and slow, breathing in the shallow, careful sips of a man whose ribs have quit on him.
I get him to the couch and he lowers himself down in stages, jaw clenched the whole way, a sound leaking out of him at the bottom that he tries to swallow.
I kneel in front of him, and I make myself look, really look, taking in every piece of the damage with my heart in my throat.
"Who did this?" My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Bodul. Look at me. Who did this to you?"
"Tindra." My name, wrecked.
He reaches out with a hand that's got split knuckles and cups the side of my face, and even now, even like this, his thumb finds my cheekbone like it belongs there. "I'm okay. I promise I'm?—"
"You are not okay." I catch his wrist. "You're the opposite of okay. Your eye is swollen shut, and you're holding your ribs like they're broken, and you rode a motorcycle in this condition for days, so don't you dare tell me you're okay. Who did this?"
He closes his one good eye.
And I watch him decide something, watch it move across the part of his face that still works, and when he opens his eye again there's a tiredness in it that goes down further than the beating.
"My father called me," he says.
The words come slow, like each one has to be pulled up from somewhere deep.
"That's where I went. Home. Back to where I'm from.
" He wets the split lip and winces. "I've got family up there.
Family I cut off a long time ago, for good reasons, and my father, he—there was a situation, and I had to go back and deal with it, and it went bad.
" His hand drops from my face to his own thigh.
"My family aren't good people, Tindra. That's the truth. That's everything I’m going to tell you. It’s why I never talk about them. Because there's nothing good to say."
I sit back on my heels.
Of everything I braced for, this wasn't it.
Over the last few months he's told me plenty about who he is now and nothing about who he was before, and I leave it alone.
Everyone in my world has a past they don't want to remember, and you learn not to pick at other people's locked doors.
But I never once pictured a father. A home. A whole life he rode away from.
"You have a family," I say, and it comes out stupid, small.
"I have a sister." Something in his face cracks when he says it, a hairline fracture in all that flat control, there and gone. "Marit. She's sixteen. And things with our father are—complicated doesn't cover it. She's the reason I went back. She's the only reason I'd ever go back."
A sixteen-year-old girl.
A little sister, up north somewhere, in a house with people Bodul calls not good and won't describe.
The way his voice bent around her name tells me more than the name did.
"Is she okay?" I ask. "Your sister. Is she?—"
"I don't want to talk about it anymore." It's not sharp, but it's final, a door easing shut. "Please. I've been on that bike for days building up to walking through your door, and I—I can't go back into it right now. Any of it. I just needed to get here."
I open my mouth to push.
It's right there, all of it, the questions stacking up behind my teeth, who hit you, how bad is she, and what does a bad family do to a man to make him grip his ribs like that.
And I look at him, gray and broken and here, and I close my damn mouth.
Because I know locked doors. I grew up in a house full of them.
I know the difference between a man hiding something from you and a man who simply can't walk back into a room that hurts him.
Everything in Bodul's ruined face is the second one.
He didn't lie to me. He handed me the truth in pieces and stopped at the wall he can't climb.
Pushing him over that wall tonight, while he's bleeding on my couch, would make me someone I don't want to be.
"Okay," I say softly. "Okay. We don't talk about it."
The breath he lets out is so relieved it nearly undoes me.
"But you're going to let me take care of you," I tell him, standing, already moving toward the bathroom and the first aid kit. "That part's not up for negotiation."
I clean him up on the bathroom floor.
He sits on the closed lid of the toilet and I stand between his knees with a bowl of warm water going pink.
I work slowly, wiping days of road and blood off his face with a washcloth while he watches me with his one good eye like I'm something he can't quite believe is real.
The split lip I clean last, gentlest, tilting his chin up with two fingers. He hisses when the cloth finds the raw center of it.
"Sorry." I go softer. "Sorry. Almost done."
"You're good at this," he says, muffled, careful of the lip.
"I've patched up half of this club at one time or another. Drunk idiots, mostly. Road rash. My father came home once with a—" I stop, because his eye has gone somewhere far away, and I set the cloth down. "Hey. Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere." His hand finds my hip, the same word he gave me the morning he left, and I don't think he knows he's doing it. "Nobody's ever done this for me. That's all."
It lands in my chest like a stone dropped down a well.
Nobody's ever cleaned the blood off him.
A grown man, and I'm the first.
It tells me more about where he came from than anything he said tonight, and I turn to rinse the cloth so he doesn't catch my face.
The cut comes off first.
I slide it down his arms slowly, mindful of the ribs, and set it aside with more care than I'd give my own jacket, because a biker's cut isn't something you drop on the floor.
Then the shirt underneath, easing it over the good arm and off the ruined side, and the sight of his ribs nearly puts me on the floor.