Chapter Two
ROAM
The hazard lights appear half a mile out.
Orange, patient… the kind of pulse that says the driver had the presence of mind to hit the switch before the car died, or the habit of doing so without thinking.
A car on the shoulder, the hood not quite flush, and the particular angle of a vehicle pulled over in a hurry by muscle memory rather than time to think.
My thumb doesn’t move on the throttle.
The road at this hour is full of other people’s problems. Long practice keeps me from collecting them. I ride for the club, fix what needs fixing, and come back when it’s done. The private disasters of strangers on dark highways are not in the brief.
The car slides into my peripheral vision. A woman is at the passenger door, her hair falling forward over her face, and she is not flagging anyone down. She’s not on her phone or doing anything a person does when they need help.
She’s standing there.
Nothing else.
Two hundred yards north, I ease off the throttle.
No logic to it. No calculation I can point to.
I tell myself it’s the mechanic in me. Twenty years of pulling bikes apart has made me incapable of riding past a dead engine without knowing the cause.
I tell myself it’s the hour. It’s three in the morning on a dead stretch of I-75, no other headlights in either direction, and nobody who would see her if something went wrong.
I turn the bike around.
The hazards are still going when I come back. She hasn’t moved from the passenger side door, keeping the car between herself and the road... and me.
Noted.
I pull in behind her and cut the engine. Silence comes down fast out here. There is nothing but the tick of hazards and the warm dark pressing in off the Everglades. I stay on the bike for a moment before swinging off, letting her get a clear look at me as I take in the scene.
Late-model sedan. It’s not her car. There’s something in the way she stands that tells me so.
She’s too careful with it, the way you’re careful with borrowed things.
The hood catch is slightly misaligned. She opened it, looked at whatever she could see in the dark, and closed it again without knowing what she was looking for.
Ten feet out, I stop.
She doesn’t move, hand on the door handle, weight slightly forward on her front foot. She’s reading me, full assessment running behind steady eyes. Whatever she’s been trained to read for is bigger than a stranger on a highway because she is not running.
She has learned that running makes it worse.
My hands are loose at my sides, with my body angled open, nothing squared up, nothing confrontational. She’s already processing my size. Nothing to be done about the size except be deliberate about everything else.
“Car trouble?”
“I’m fine.”
Reflex, not a decision—the words come out before the assessment is finished. She’s looked at the engine but hasn’t done anything except see a man on a motorcycle pull in behind her car. She says it the way someone says it when they’ve been saying it long enough that it stops meaning anything.
I’ve heard that particular ‘I’m fine’ before.
Don’t argue with it.
I look at the car instead, and study the hood angle and the position on the shoulder. The right rear tire is perfectly centered in the white line. She pulled over precisely, made herself visible, then reconsidered visibility the moment the headlight appeared behind her.
Two instincts, both correct and fighting each other.
Then I look at her.
The hazards throw light in a slow pulse. Each pass gives me a cleaner read. Late twenties, maybe early thirties, dark hair, and a jacket a size too big, worn like armor rather than warmth. The hair on the left side is down and forward. People don’t wear their hair forward on one side by accident.
The light comes again.
Along the left jaw, where the hair isn’t quite covering what it’s meant to cover, there are yellow-green colored bruises that usually go away when they’re about a week old. They are old enough to be fading but recent enough to still be reading.
Something goes quiet in me.
Not the good kind of quiet.
I’ve put my hands on men who leave marks like that. The feeling it gives me isn’t abstract or philosophical… it’s specific. I file it, putting it somewhere internally, and keep my face exactly where it is.
Her hands now. One is on the door handle, the other at her side, not fully fisted but close.
She has positioned herself the way someone positions themselves when they want to look like they’re not braced for impact, while being entirely braced for impact.
Her body is doing it without instruction, instinct taking over where thought leaves off.
This woman has been afraid for a long time.
Ten feet is the right distance. Ten feet says I’m not advancing, and I haven’t decided anything about this situation except to stand here and let it be what it is.
Keep the voice flat. Keep the distance.
“I can look at your engine,” I say.
She studies me. Whatever she’s looking for, she either finds it or decides she can’t afford to wait any longer, and she steps aside.
Then the rear door clicks open.
The kid hits the asphalt at a run. Thirty-one pounds, a stuffed rabbit dragging from one fist, hair sticking up every which way, and no shoes. She has identified the Softail in the dark, inside a sealed car, and is moving toward it with complete commitment. The woman reaches for her and misses.
The kid stops two feet in front of me and cranes her neck back to get the full picture. “Is that your bike?” Genuine reverence. “It’s big.”
I crouch down so I’m at her eye level.
“It is,” I say.
She looks at the Softail, then back at me, then at the Softail again, running her own assessment. Her version of it is significantly more enthusiastic than her mother’s.
“Can I touch it?”
“Rose.” Her mother’s voice carries a specific kind of tired, not anger, not impatience. It’s the tiredness of a woman who loves this child completely and is running on nothing.
Rose looks back at her mother, then looks back at me… waiting.
I glance up at the woman. She’s watching me, arms crossed, weight still forward, still reading, but she is three feet closer than she was a moment ago, but she doesn’t seem to know it.
I stand and take Rose the two steps to the Softail. She immediately puts both palms flat on the tank, running them along the steel as if she’s reading something written there. I crouch down again so I can see what she is, and watch her see it.
She has a lot of questions…
What does this button do?
Is it fast?
What’s the shiny part called?
Can the engine talk?
Why not?
I answer each one.
Out of my peripheral vision, the woman has moved back to the car door. She is watching, so I don’t look directly at her. Rose asks whether the exhaust pipe is hot right now.
“Yes, but you should never touch it,” I say.
“Because it could be hot?”
“Because it could be.”
She thinks about this seriously. Nods. Then, “What’s your name?”
“Roam.”
She files it with great solemnity. “I’m Rose. This is Mr. Rabbit.” She holds him up. “He doesn’t talk.”
“That so.”
“He used to. He stopped…” A pause. “Mama says he’s resting his voice.”
Look at this kid. Three years old, managing a stuffed rabbit’s social calendar, bare feet on a dark highway, not afraid of a single thing.
She’s looking at me like I am simply part of the world, a big, interesting, motorcycle-owning part of the world, and there is nothing in her face that says she’s been taught to be afraid of it yet.
Her mother made sure of that.
Something in my chest shifts, but I don’t examine it.
Instead, I stand.
The woman is watching me across the hood. Her hair is still forward, arms still crossed. The quality of the read has changed, though, less threat assessment, more something harder to name.
“You got someone to call?”
Something moves across her face. Quick, then gone. “I’m working on it.”
Working on it means no.
The highway is empty in both directions. Three in the morning on I-75 with a kid, a dead car, and a woman who rehearsed the leaving so many times it became efficient.
I know before I open my mouth what I’m going to say. Knew it at the fuel pump and before that, at the fist she almost made, or maybe when she said ‘I’m fine,’ and I heard everything that it wasn’t.
“I’ve got a place,” I say. “If you need somewhere to be while you figure out next steps…” he pauses. “A club compound. Jacksonville, forty minutes back the way I came.” Another pause. “My president’s wife is there. Good woman. She’ll see you right.”
I put it down and don’t push it.
She studies me the way she’s been studying me since I pulled over, looking for the thing beneath the surface of the thing. I let her look. I don’t fill the silence, press the offer, or explain why she should trust me because this is her call. She knows it, and she needs to know I know it.
“I’m Roam,” I say. “Royal Bastards MC, Jacksonville.”
A beat. Then, with steel underneath it, “Janie.”
The kid tugs on her jacket. Demanding.
“This is Rose.”
“Hi, Roam.” Very serious. “Our car is broken.”
“Yeah, I heard.” I look at Janie. “How far are you going?”
“Valdosta.”
“Georgia. That’s a ways.”
“I know.”
Rose tugs on the jacket again. “Mama, can we see the clubhouse?”
Janie looks at the dead car, the empty highway, and me. This time it’s different from the first look, different from all the looks since. Something is underneath the assessment, making a decision that the assessment alone couldn’t make.
“How far did you say?” she asks.
“Forty minutes.”
She looks down at Rose, who looks up with the absolute confidence of a child who hasn’t yet been taught that the world doesn’t deserve it.
“Okay,” she says.
I pull out my phone. Creed answers on the second ring. “Yeah.” It’s nearly three-thirty in the morning, but he doesn’t sleep like other people.
“Bringing two in,” I say. “Woman and a kid. Need somewhere safe.”
A pause because he is running the numbers, reading the angle from forty miles away. Creed has known me twenty-two years. He’s hearing something in my voice I haven’t admitted to myself yet.
“Define safe,” he says.
“From a husband.”
Silence.
Then, “Gate’ll be open.”
Done. No conditions, no questions. That’s what years of trust and friendship bring.
I put my phone away.
Janie is watching me, and she doesn’t ask about the call. She is also smart enough to know what she needs to know and disciplined enough not to reach for the rest.
“The bike,” I say. “Rose rides on the tank, in front of me. You ride pillion, behind me, arms around my waist, feet on the pegs.” I meet her eyes. “She’ll be held. Both of you will.”
Janie looks at the Softail. She does the math—the width and height of the tank, the distance between her arms and the ground, working out exactly how much of herself this requires her to hand over.
Quite a lot.
She knows it.
“Okay,” she says.
She goes to the trunk and pulls out a bag, small, tight, packed by someone who knew they’d be carrying it fast. The leaving has been rehearsed enough times that it’s become efficient.
Rose gets lifted onto the tank. She grabs my forearms with both hands the second her weight settles and grins like we are absolutely about to do something excellent.
Warm and small between my arms, she smells like sleep and kid shampoo.
I reach into my saddlebag, pull out my sunglasses, and set them on her face.
“Mine now,” she announces and then giggles.
The sunglasses sit crooked, and she doesn’t fix them. Neither do I.
Janie gets on behind me. Careful about where her hands land and how much contact she makes, finding the pegs with her feet before letting her weight commit. Her hands come to rest at my sides. They’re barely there. A woman taking up as little space as possible.
Every careful inch of it, registered.
“Ready?” I ask.
“Yes,” Rose immediately says.
Janie says nothing. Her hands tighten slightly at my sides. Not gripping or letting go either.
The engine turns over. Rose laughs, short, pure, no calculation in it. The sound moves through the tank, up through my palms.
South on I-75. Jacksonville.
As the warm night comes in off the Everglades, Rose puts both arms out wide into the dark as if she owns it.
Behind me, Janie’s hands are barely touching my sides.
Forty minutes.
The miles peel away under the tires, and Rose laughs into the wind as if the whole night belongs to her.
While behind me I can feel exactly how little of herself Janie is willing to hand over, every point of contact rationed and deliberate, the careful posture of a woman who has already found her exits and is only borrowing this one for as long as she has to.
She’s temporary. She’s said as much without saying a word, riding back there as if she’s keeping count of the distance she means to put between us the moment the ground beneath her feels solid again.
And by every rule I have ever lived by, I should be thinking the same way, marking the days until she’s somebody else’s trouble and the gate shuts behind her for good.
Instead, I roll the throttle on toward Jacksonville and find myself trying to work out why the thought of her gone scrapes at something I didn’t know I still had, and why I can’t make myself want it the way I know I should.