Chapter 6. Kit
The joke isn't even that funny. King says something about a guy who tried to register a bike as a service animal, and I'm laughing, loud and wide, my beer bottle swinging up in a wild arc that nearly clips the pendant light over the bar.
I can feel my tank running thin, the needle dropping into the red.
But I keep the smile bolted on. I keep the volume up.
Someone settles onto the stool beside me.
"Hey," the man says.
I turn, and it's him.
Soren.
The wall from the far end of the bar two weeks ago. He's been coming to Redline ever since, and staring at me ever since, too. He lifts two fingers to get the bartender's attention, points at the bottle in front of me, and the bartender nods and reaches for the cooler.
"Hey," I say back, and I hear my own voice land softer than I intend it to.
I feel nervous for some reason, which is stupid, so I turn to face him properly and ask the first thing that comes to mind, the way I usually do.
"How do you know Ni?"
"College." He smiles like the memory is a good one. "We were lab partners in organic chemistry. He talked me through more all-nighters than I can count."
"Ni. Studying." I let my mouth twist. "I genuinely cannot picture that."
"He kept a thermos of coffee the size of a fire extinguisher and swore constantly in three languages. I have never seen anyone hate a subject that much and still pull a B-plus."
I laugh, and it startles me a little, the realness of it, because I hadn't decided to.
The bartender sets a fresh bottle in front of me. I nod my thanks without looking away from Soren.
"So you two go way back," I say.
"Fifteen years." He takes a slow pull from his own bottle. He drinks like there's no possible reason to rush through the moment he's in. "He's the reason I still leave the shop before midnight most nights. Somebody has to remind me the whole world isn't made of carburetors."
I laugh.
He’s actually funny.
But I still notice the noise of the bar pressing in around us. King's booming laugh, the clink of bottles, the low thrum of the music.
Soren doesn't seem to notice any of it.
He's got one forearm resting on the bar, angled toward me, and he isn't performing being relaxed—he just is, and it's throwing me off my own rhythm.
I catch myself tapping my boot against the rung of the stool, fast, a frantic little pulse I don't remember starting, and I still it on purpose.
"You've been watching me," I say, because I can't keep quiet, because saying the loud true thing out loud is easier than sitting in the silence where he might say something first.
"I have," he says.
No hesitation. No deflection.
I'd been braced for him to laugh it off, wave a hand, just enjoying the show, kid—the way men usually do when I catch them at it. He doesn't do any of that.
He just lets it sit there, like it isn't a confession at all.
I take a drink to cover the fact that I don't know what to do with that.
"You know what this place is, right?" I ask. "Beyond the bikes."
Soren is quiet for a moment, considering it the way he considers everything, like there's a correct answer buried in there somewhere and he intends to find it.
"I've been to leather bars before. This is... more specific."
"More specific." I let out a breath that's almost a laugh. "That's one way to put it. So that's why you're here?"
"Partly." His eyes come back to my face, and they stay there.
It's an unnatural amount of attention.
I don't know what to do with the amount of attention.
"Ni thinks I'm too reserved. He says I need friends who aren't motorcycles."
"So you're into it. Kink."
"I am."
"That's why you've been watching me?" I ask, aiming for a smirk, mostly landing it.
"Partly that too." He turns the bottle a quarter turn against the bar, like the sentence isn't finished yet and he knows it. "You ride like Ni says you race. Committed to the corner, every time, no matter what's coming out the other side."
"That a compliment or a warning?"
"Depends on how much you'd like it to be one." A ghost of a smile. "You've got a good crowd around you tonight. Loud bunch. Good laugh."
"I'm a delight," I say. "Ask anyone."
"I have. Dex says you haven't slowed down in about three weeks."
He says it lightly, conversationally, in the same tone he used for Ni's thermos of coffee.
But it lands somewhere under my ribs anyway, a small, cold coin dropping straight to the bottom of my stomach.
"Dex talks too much," I say, and I hear the edge come into my own voice, thin and defensive, and I hate that he can probably hear it too.
"He does," Soren agrees easily, letting it go exactly like that.
No push.
No follow-up question waiting to trap me.
He just picks his bottle back up. "I like him. He's loyal."
I sit there for a second, off-balance, waiting for the rest of it, the part where he tells me what he thinks he sees, the diagnosis, the I know what you're doing, little one—because that's how this always goes, that's the script, that's how Charles used to do it: cut straight through the noise in four words and leave me standing there naked in front of him.
I brace for it.
It doesn't come.
Soren just watches the room, unbothered, entirely present beside me, and lets the silence stretch long enough that it should be uncomfortable and somehow isn't.
Not from him.
Not the way it is from everyone else.
"You're not going to say it," I say finally, and I don't even know what it is, except that I can feel the shape of something withheld, sitting there patient and enormous, and it's making me itch worse than if he'd just come out with it.
"Say what?" he asks, and there's nothing coy in it. He seems genuinely willing to wait for me to tell him.
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes out.
I close it again.
"So..." I say instead, grabbing for the nearest exit ramp, the way I always do, the way I've done my whole life. "Ni said you own a shop too."
Soren lets me have the exit.
He doesn't drag me back to the thing I almost said. He just tips his head, easy, like the change of subject is a perfectly reasonable place to land.
"Halverson Moto," he says. "About twenty minutes from here. Mostly custom fab and vintage restorations."
"Restorations."
I latch onto the word like a life raft, grateful for something to talk about that isn't the eight inches of exposed nerve currently sitting between us.
"So you take the wrecked ones. The junkers nobody wants."
"Those are my favorite, actually." He says it simply, no metaphor loaded into it that I can see, and yet I feel it land somewhere anyway.
"Most people take one look at a frame that's been sitting in a barn for twenty years, rusted through, half the parts missing, and they see scrap metal.
I've never once looked at a bike like that and thought it was finished being useful. "
I stare at him.
He holds my gaze, steady, unbothered, and takes another slow pull of his beer, like he hasn't just said something that's currently knocking the air directly out of me.
"Careful," I say, my voice coming out rougher than I want it to. "A guy could start thinking you're talking about something else."
"Could be," Soren says.
He doesn't confirm it.
He doesn't deny it either.
He just lets me sit there, holding the full weight of the thing he isn't quite saying, and somehow that's so much worse—so much more—than if he'd just come out and said it plain.
Thankfully, we change the subject, and soon we're talking about bikes again.
My comfort zone.
And it's very strange.
I have a beer in my hand and a man beside me who talks like he wants to listen to me, and for once the noise of the room isn't something I have to survive. It's just background, the ordinary hum of a place I belong.
I'm loose. My foot is quiet. I am, against all odds, almost fine.
Then my eyes drift.
It's nothing. It's the smallest thing.
Soren says something about valve clearances and I glance away from him, just a natural break in eye contact, the kind of casual sweep your gaze makes across any room, and my attention skips across the worn tables and the leather cuts and the warm yellow pools of light—and lands in the back corner.
As always.
Charles has his hand in John's hair.
My beer bottle comes down on the bar.
Fuck.
I always ruin everything.
It's harder than I mean it to be. My jaw locks. The muscle below my ear jumps the way it always does, teeth grinding to powder, and I drag my eyes forward and I don't look at the corner again.
But it's too late.
I feel it happen.
I feel the armor slide back into place over the soft thing Soren had somehow coaxed halfway into the open.
"So they re-shim the buckets," I say. "Yeah. Pain in the ass. Cheaper bikes just use screw-and-locknut adjusters. Way easier, but everybody acts like it's some sacred..."
I'm talking too fast. I can hear myself talking too fast. The words come out the way they did before he sat down, and my knee starts moving. I pull my phone out. My thumb wakes the screen.
Nothing.
No notifications, no missed calls, just a lock screen with the time and nothing waiting for me.
I lock it, put it down.
Pick it up ten seconds later and do it again.
Nothing.
There's never anything.
There's no one who texts me at this hour and there's no reason to look and I look a third time anyway, just to have somewhere to put my eyes that isn't the back wall.
Soren doesn't say a word about any of it.
He doesn't comment on the bottle or the clipped sentences or the phone or the knee.
He doesn't ask if I'm alright, which would make me snap, and he doesn't glance over his shoulder to see what I saw, which would make me die.
He just sits there, steady, that bottle in his hand, and watches me.
And it's unbearable now.
A minute ago, it was the best thing in the room.
Now it's a spotlight.
Now I can feel the exact weight of being seen.
"I should do a lap," I say. "Haven't talked to Dex in a while. He'll give me hell."
"Sure," Soren says.
Just that.
He doesn't try to hold me. He tips his bottle a fraction in easy acknowledgment and lets me go.
I slide off the stool.
My boots hit the floorboards and I aim myself across the room toward the pool tables where Dex is leaning over a shot, and I make it maybe halfway before the whole plan dissolves in my hands.
Because going toward Dex means staying.
And staying means the back corner is still behind me, pulling, that black-hole gravity dragging at the base of my skull, and I cannot do another twenty minutes of holding my spine straight while Charles murmurs into someone else's hair twenty feet away.
I cannot.
It’s so motherfucking annoying. I hate myself for it.
So I change direction.
Mid-stride, clean, like I always meant to.
I veer off toward the heavy metal side door, the one the smokers use. I shoulder the door.
The cold hits me full in the face.
Then I'm moving toward the lot.