Chapter 4 #2
"She absolutely did." I picked the trowel back up, something lighter in my hands than there'd been an hour before. "Alright. Tomatoes. Then feelings. In that order, from now on. Efficient like Doc would've wanted."
"Deal."
We finished the planting in comfortable quiet, and something had shifted between us by the time we packed up — not just in me, though I was different, lighter, like I'd set down a bag I'd been carrying since the blast without noticing how heavy it had gotten.
Something had shifted in the space between us too, some line that used to be clearly drawn now blurred at the edges in a way neither of us commented on directly.
I lost the cane for good that week. Not symbolically — actually, physically, left it leaning in the corner of my front closet and simply didn't reach for it one morning, and by the time I noticed, I was already three blocks into my walk to the diner.
The club noticed before I did, the way the club notices everything.
"You're walking different," Knox said, watching me cross the clubhouse lot without so much as a hitch in my stride. "Lighter. What'd Saoirse do to you?"
"Physical therapy. It's working."
"Uh huh. And is that also physical therapy talking, or is there something you want to tell your president?"
I didn't answer that one directly, but the grin I couldn't quite hold back probably answered it well enough.
Gemma caught it too, later that week, cornering me by the clubhouse fridge with the particular gleam in her eye that meant she'd already decided something about my life before I had.
"You've got a look," she said.
"I've got a face. It comes standard."
"No, a look. The specific look of a man who's thinking about a woman he shouldn't be thinking about during business hours.
" She crossed her arms, delighted with herself.
"I've seen that look on half this club at one point or another.
Boone had it for a solid year before he did anything useful with it. "
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You garden every Thursday with a woman who used to be your therapist and you've started smiling at your phone like it personally complimented you.
I know exactly what I'm talking about." She softened, dropping the teasing for a second.
"For what it's worth, Elias — I think it's good.
Whatever it is. You've earned something good. "
"It's complicated."
"Everything worth having is." She grabbed a soda from the fridge and bumped my shoulder on her way past. "Just don't overthink yourself out of it. You're excellent at overthinking. It's your whole personality, alongside brooding and an unhealthy relationship with expired yogurt."
"The yogurt thing was one time."
"It was several times. I have a list."
I laughed, and she disappeared toward the pool table where Sable was setting up a game, and I stood there by the fridge a while longer, turning her words over the way I turned over most things these days — slowly, carefully, checking every angle before I let myself believe any of it.
The first ride back happened two weeks later — Knox's idea, though he framed it like it was mine, the way he does when he wants you to think you chose something he'd already decided was necessary.
"Your bike's been sitting in that garage collecting dust for eight months," he said, dropping the words casually over breakfast at the diner, like he hadn't clearly been building up to this conversation for days. "Figured it was about time it remembered what it's for."
"I don't know if I'm ready."
"Nobody's ever ready. That's not how readiness works.
You get on, or you don't, and eventually not-getting-on starts costing you more than the fear of getting on ever would.
" He said it without judgment, just fact, the specific way Knox delivers hard truths like he's reading you a weather report.
"I'll ride beside you. Whole club will, if you want them there.
Or just me, if that's easier. Either way, Sunday.
Your bike, your choice how many witnesses. "
"The whole club," I said, surprising myself with how fast the answer came. "If they're offering."
"They're offering. They've been offering since the day you got home, brother. You're the one who hasn't been ready to take them up on it."
He wasn't wrong. I thought about that all week — about how much of my recovery had actually been about physical readiness, and how much of it had just been me, quietly, refusing every hand extended toward me because some part of me still believed I hadn't earned the right to reach back.
Sunday came clear and warm, the kind of spring morning that makes a man believe, at least for a few hours, that good things are still possible.
My bike started on the second try, engine turning over rough at first and then smooth, familiar, like it remembered me even if I wasn't sure I remembered myself.
The whole club flanked me out of the lot, Boone on one side, Titan on the other, engines a rolling wall of noise and belonging, and for the length of that ride, mountain wind in my face, brothers all around me, I didn't think about the blast once.
I thought about Saoirse instead — steady, warm, dirt under her nails and truth in her mouth, the woman who'd handed me back a version of hope I hadn't believed in since a plane ride home with a duffel bag and a cane I no longer needed.
I wanted her. God, I wanted her, in a way that had nothing to do with gratitude and everything to do with who she actually was — her humor, her steel, the way she carried her own grief without ever letting it calcify into bitterness, the way she'd looked at me across a garden bed and told me the truest thing anyone had said to me in eight months.
I feared it too. She was my therapist — had been my therapist, still felt like my therapist in the particular way that lingers past any official ending.
There was a line there, drawn for good reasons, and I didn't know how a man who'd only just started believing he deserved anything good could possibly justify asking a woman who'd already given him so much to give him this too.
A drowning man doesn't get to want the person who threw the rope. That's what I kept telling myself, riding home that evening with the wind in my face and her voice still echoing in my chest — a life worth the one they lost.
I just didn't know yet whether that life was allowed to include her, or whether wanting it made me exactly the kind of man I was afraid I'd become: someone who took and took from the people who'd already given him everything, and called it healing instead of what it actually might be.
Hope, maybe. Terrifying, complicated hope.
I decided, somewhere on that ride home, that I wasn't going to keep pretending I didn't feel it. I just didn't know yet what I was going to do about it, or whether she felt anything close to the same thing standing on her side of the line she'd drawn so carefully around us both.
That night, back on my porch, Knox pulled in unannounced, killing his engine and settling into the chair beside mine without waiting for an invitation, which by now was just how our porch evenings worked.
"Good ride," he said.
"Good ride."
"You seemed different out there. Lighter." He studied me sideways, the way he does when he's decided to ask the real question instead of the easy one. "That the garden talking, or something else?"
"Something else, maybe."
"Saoirse."
It wasn't a question, so I didn't bother answering it like one.
"She's good for you," Knox said, after a while, watching the tree line the same way he always does when he's about to say something that matters.
"I've watched you these last couple months, Elias.
You walked back into this town carrying something none of us could see the shape of, and she's the first person who's managed to get you talking about it without you shutting the whole conversation down. That's not nothing. That's not small."
"I know."
"So what's stopping you?"
I turned the beer bottle in my hands, working through an answer that felt true instead of just convenient.
"She threw me a rope, Knox. Pulled me out of something I wasn't sure I was getting out of on my own.
Feels wrong, somehow, to turn around and ask the person who saved you for anything more than what she's already given. "
"That's a nice sentiment. It's also wrong."
Knox said it plainly, no heat in it, just the flat certainty of a man who'd clearly thought this through before he showed up on my porch.
"You didn't get saved, Elias. You did the work. She just built you a room safe enough to do it in. Don't shrink what you accomplished by pretending you were just cargo she hauled out of a river."
He took a long pull of his beer.
"And for what it's worth — a woman who spends her whole life pouring herself into other people's healing generally isn't looking for someone to save. She's looking for someone who sees her as more than the person who does the saving. Maybe you're exactly what she needs too. Ever consider that?"
I hadn't. Not in those terms, not with that particular shape to it, and something about hearing it out loud from Knox — steady, unshakeable Knox, who'd kept my chair for two years without once doubting I'd come back to sit in it — loosened something further in my chest.
"Maybe," I said.
"Maybe's a start." He clinked his bottle against mine, standing to leave. "Don't wait too long to find out, brother. Life's shown you exactly how short it can be. Don't waste what's left of it being careful about the wrong things."
He left, and I sat there a long while after, mountain dark settling in around the porch, thinking about ropes and rivers and a woman who'd never once treated me like cargo, only ever like a person worth the trouble of actually knowing.
Maybe's a start, Knox had said.
I decided, watching the last light fade behind the tree line, that I was done being careful about the wrong things.