Chapter 4 #3
"You gonna be okay," Hawk asked, not unkindly, "carrying whatever she gave you? That's not nothing, holding somebody's real story. Especially somebody who doesn't hand it out easy."
"I know what it's worth," I said. "I'm not going to drop it."
"Didn't figure you would," Hawk said, and clapped me on the shoulder on his way past, and that was the end of the interrogation, the club's version of a blessing — not a lecture, not a warning, just brothers making sure the ground under me was steady before letting me keep walking on it.
Diesel, naturally, couldn't leave it entirely alone. "So are you two, like, a thing now, or—"
"We're not a thing. We're — I don't know what we are yet. Friends, maybe. More than friends, on my side, obviously, I've been more than friends with her since week one, but she's not there. Not yet."
"But she's getting there."
"She smiled at me today. A real one. Full face. It about took me out at the knees."
"Christ," Diesel said, grinning, shaking his head. "You've got it bad."
"I've got it exactly as bad as I want to have it," I said, and meant every word, and went to find something useful to do with my hands, because sitting still with the size of what I was feeling didn't seem like an option anymore, not after a smile like that.
I didn't say that part out loud, the staying part, not to Diesel and not to Hazel, not that day.
Some things you let sit a while before you say them, especially to a woman who'd need to believe it slow, believe it in accumulated proof rather than declarations, one Tuesday delivery and one dumb cat comparison at a time.
But I knew it. Sitting there in the gold morning hum of her bees, watching her smile like she'd forgotten, for one unguarded minute, that smiling was something she'd trained herself out of — I knew it the way you know weather coming, the way you know a bet's already won before the numbers confirm it.
Diesel caught up with me again that evening, out by my bike, arms crossed, wearing the specific expression he gets when he's about to say something serious under the cover of a joke.
"For what it's worth," he said, "I've watched a lot of us fall for people this club decided we couldn't live without.
Watched Silas do it. Watched myself do it.
Every single time, it looked exactly like what's happening to you right now — the ridiculous grin, the extra honey, the way you keep zoning out mid-sentence like your brain wandered off to go stand next to somebody who isn't in the room. "
"Is there a point coming, or are you just cataloguing my symptoms."
"Point is, it's always worked out. Not easy — none of it was easy, not for any of us — but it worked out, every time, because every one of us was stubborn enough and soft enough at the same time to actually see it through.
You've got more of both than any of us combined.
If anybody in this club was built for a woman like Hazel Dunmore, it's you. "
"Thanks, Diesel."
"Don't get used to the sincerity. Back to jokes tomorrow."
"Wouldn't have you any other way."
He clapped me on the shoulder and headed back inside, and I sat on my bike a minute longer, looking up at a sky just starting to go dark, thinking about a woman with a scowl and a mason jar of wildflowers she wouldn't admit she liked, and a smile I'd apparently spend the rest of my life trying to earn again and again, happily, for as long as she'd let me.
I was staying. However long it took her to believe that, I was staying.
I rode back out to my own bunk that night thinking about Rosco again, about the year it had taken, about how little I'd minded the wait once I understood what I was actually waiting for.
This felt different in scale but not in kind — the same patient math, the same certainty that the outcome was worth whatever the timeline demanded.
I fell asleep still smiling, still turning that smile of hers over in my mind like something precious I intended to keep safe.
Diesel's fifty-dollar bet was still sitting out there, unclaimed, waiting on an outcome I already felt certain of. I didn't need the money. I just liked knowing, deep down where it mattered, exactly how the story was going to end.
I thought, too, about what Silas had said — she reminds me of me — and about how right he'd been, in ways that went deeper than either of them probably realized yet.
Silas had needed twenty years and a woman patient enough to outlast his every defense before he'd let himself be loved the way Briar loved him now.
I didn't think Hazel would take twenty years.
I thought, watching her smile that afternoon, that she might not even take twenty weeks.
But I was prepared for either number. That was the whole point of choosing soft on purpose — you stopped needing the timeline to move fast, because the waiting itself stopped feeling like a cost and started feeling like part of the reward.
Some things are worth exactly as long as they take.
I fell asleep still smiling, that thought settled warm and certain in my chest, and slept better than I had in longer than I could remember.