Prologue #3
I just let it sit there, strange and specific, in the dark.
Hours later, I woke to the quiet of a room emptied of someone who’d been in it.
Didn’t have to open my eyes to know she was gone.
The air in the room had shifted back to its ordinary temperature, no warmth beside me, no sound of another person breathing.
I lay there for a moment longer, staring at the ceiling in the gray pre-dawn light, and then sat up.
Her jacket was gone. Her boots. The lamp on the dresser still threw its small circle of amber across the floor, and I had a dim memory of neither of us switching it off the night before.
Other than that, the room showed no evidence she’d been there at all.
She’d moved carefully, efficiently. She hadn’t wanted to wake me.
She hadn’t wanted to be there when I woke up.
I felt the irritation land clean and quick in my chest, the way it always did when something happened that I hadn’t accounted for.
I wasn’t a man who got managed out of situations.
I controlled them. I was the one who made calls, read a room before anyone else knew it needed reading, stayed two steps ahead of whatever came next.
Willa had slipped out before first light without a word, and the choice had been entirely hers, and that sat wrong.
I got up and pulled on my jeans. Found my shirt on the floor where she’d shoved it the night before.
The details of it came back without being invited -- her hands impatient, the sound of her sigh, the way she’d buried her face against my shoulder at the end.
I pulled the shirt over my head and pushed the memories back to somewhere they wouldn’t cause trouble, which was the mature, sensible approach.
I went for coffee.
The compound was mostly silent at this hour. I went into the kitchen, ran the coffee maker, and stood at the counter watching it brew with the kind of blank attention a man pays to something when his mind is somewhere else entirely.
The coffee took four minutes. I know because I counted.
I poured a mug and drank it standing at the window, looking out at the compound in the flat gray morning light.
The bikes were lined up in their usual row, chrome catching what little light there was.
Everything was exactly where it was supposed to be.
The morning held the quiet simplicity of a day that hadn’t gone wrong yet.
I should have been fine with it. I’d had plenty of nights that ended the same way -- woman gone by morning, no note, no expectation of anything further, and I’d woken up feeling nothing more complicated than well-rested. This wasn’t any different. There was no reason it should be.
Except I was standing in the kitchen of my own clubhouse at dawn, counting the minutes, and I was thinking about the inside of her wrist. The jump of her pulse under my thumb. I finished the first mug and poured a second one.
She hadn’t wanted anything from me. That was the part I kept coming back to.
Every interaction had been stripped of the usual maneuvering -- no angling for status, no hint she cared who I was beyond what I was in the immediate moment.
She’d followed me down that hallway because she’d wanted to.
She’d left before dawn because she hadn’t wanted whatever came with staying.
Most people wanted something from being connected to the Reckless Kings, even tangentially.
That was just the truth of it. Not everyone and not always, but enough that it had become a background assumption I didn’t have to think about much.
It was part of the calculation. It was part of how things worked.
Willa had taken the night and walked away from everything that came attached to it, and the clarity of that move was more unsettling than anything she could have asked for.
I set the mug down.
The irritation was still there, but it had settled into something lower, less sharp. Less like irritation, actually, and more like a problem I hadn’t solved. An equation still running somewhere in the back of my mind, patient and persistent.
I didn’t know her last name. Didn’t know who’d brought her to the party or why, didn’t know where she was going when she walked out the gate in the dark, didn’t know whether I’d ever be in a room with her again.
She’d handed me nothing to work with and taken nothing with her, and she’d done it deliberately.
I found I respected it even as it annoyed me.
Respect and irritation. An interesting combination.
The compound began to stir in small increments -- the Prospect at the gate trading off with his replacement, a light coming on in one of the houses down the row, the distant sound of a motorcycle somewhere further down the road.
The day was happening whether I participated in it or not.
There were things to see to, club business that didn’t wait on anyone’s inconvenient thoughts, responsibilities I’d had long before last night.
I picked up the mug and finished the second cup in two long swallows.
The empty space beside me in that room was going to keep mattering, I suspected, for longer than it had any right to. I didn’t like that. I also didn’t know what to do with it yet, which was an unusual position for a man who generally knew exactly what to do with everything.
I rinsed the mug, set it in the rack, and went to find something to do with my hands.
It didn’t help much.