Chapter 7. Soren
I text him on a Tuesday, which is not a day anything happens at Redline, which is exactly why I pick it.
Ni gave me your number. Hope that's alright. Wondered if you'd want to get food sometime this week. No occasion. Just food.
I set the phone face-down on the workbench and go back to torque-checking a wheel hub I've already checked twice. Rue isn't here today. It's a school day, and Maren has her until four, so the shop is quiet. No small sneakers on the concrete, no bright noise filling the corners.
I've never minded that quiet before.
Today, I keep glancing at the phone.
It takes him forty minutes to answer, which I respect. I would have thought less of him if he'd answered in four.
sure. i know a place. fair warning i talk a lot when i eat
I smile at the bench, alone, which is a foolish thing to be doing.
I've noticed. Thursday work?
Yeah
Thursday, then.
He picks the restaurant—a small sushi place tucked into a strip mall between a laundromat and a shuttered video store, the kind of place that looks like nothing from the parking lot and turns out, when I step inside, to be doing something quietly excellent with the fish.
Kit is already at a table near the back when I arrive, ten minutes early by my watch, which I take to mean he was considerably early.
I don't say that out loud.
He's changed since Redline. No leather jacket tonight, just a gray henley, his hair pushed back off his forehead instead of falling into his eyes, the sides still shaved, his build still small.
He looks up when the door chimes, and there's a half-second where he looks almost nervous before he arranges his face into something easier.
It's a good look on him.
Not because I want him nervous.
Because it's real, and I've spent three weeks watching him wear things that aren't.
"You found it," he says, standing halfway out of the booth like he isn't sure if that's a normal thing to do and does it anyway.
"You gave good directions." I slide into the seat across from him. "Turn at the laundromat, can't miss it. You undersold the laundromat's importance to the directions."
"It's a real landmark around here. Regional pride." He's already reaching for the menu, flipping it open. "I usually get the same three rolls. I'm not gonna pretend I'm adventurous about it."
"Tell me the three rolls."
"Okay, so." He sets the menu down. He doesn't even open it, because he clearly doesn't need it.
"Spicy tuna. The classic. Non-negotiable.
I judge a place almost entirely on this roll.
If they skimp on the tuna or drown it in mayo, it's over.
We're done. I've made my assessment of their entire kitchen. "
"Harsh but fair."
"Then the dragon roll, because I'm shameless about eel sauce.
I will drink eel sauce out of a shot glass if they let me.
And this place does this thing where they actually torch the eel instead of just microwaving it like some places do, which—genuinely criminal, by the way.
Some of these places just nuke frozen eel and call it a day. "
"You have real opinions about this."
"I have opinions about everything. You're gonna learn that about me real fast." He says it easily, like a warning label he's proud of.
"And then the volcano roll, which is technically a mess.
It's just a pile of spicy crab and mayo baked on top of a California roll, but it's an emotional support roll.”
"An emotional support roll?" I ask, noticing how much fun I'm actually having.
"Exactly. Everyone needs one. It's self-care."
He's grinning by the end of it, pleased with his own case, and when the waitress comes over, he starts ordering on autopilot.
"We'll do the spicy tuna, the dragon roll, the volcano—"
He catches the we'll out of his own mouth and stalls, glancing at me sideways like he's just realized he's been narrating a meal for two without checking whether I wanted in on it.
"Sorry—I mean, unless you want your own thing, I just—"
"Add a yellowtail roll and a bowl of edamame," I tell the waitress. "And he's not wrong about any of it."
He exhales, some tension leaving his shoulders. There's something almost boyish in the relief of it, like he'd braced for me to find the whole performance excessive and instead found me enjoying it.
"Yellowtail," he repeats, testing it, filing it away. "Simple guy."
"I like knowing exactly what I'm eating. Yellowtail, a little scallion, a little ponzu. No mystery sauce required."
"That is such a Daddy order."
He says it lightly, teasing, and then goes very slightly red, like the word slipped out ahead of where he meant to take the conversation. He reaches for his water.
"I'll take that as a beautiful compliment," I say.
I let him have the exit.
He takes it gratefully, launching straight back into an argument for why the volcano roll is an underrated feat of engineering, no matter what "sushi purists on the internet" have to say about it.
We talk about nothing at first. The restaurant. The neighborhood. A pothole on the main road that's apparently been there since before either of us learned to drive, one the county keeps patching and the winter keeps reopening.
"It's basically load-bearing at this point," Kit says. "If they ever actually fix it, half the block's gonna structurally collapse."
I laugh because he's telling it exactly the way he told stories at the bar the first night I watched him, but there's no bar noise to fight through this time, no crowd to perform for. And it's just funnier.
Then the food comes, and he's talking again, easier this time, telling me about the shop where he works part-time, how the hours have been thin, how his manager keeps promising a schedule that never actually materializes.
"It's fine," he says. "I don't need much. Rent's not bad. I just need enough to keep the bike running and gas in the tank, and everything else is negotiable."
"What'd you do before the shop?"
He picks up his water glass, looking a little uncomfortable.
I almost regret the question.
"Racing," he says. "Not—like, real racing. Amateur circuit, regional stuff. But I was good. I was actually good."
I don't react immediately. Ni told me Kit had been on track for MotoGP. Had the times. Had the talent. Kit is describing it like a weekend hobby. I don't think Ni exaggerated. I think Kit is making the thing smaller because the smaller it was, the less it should have hurt to lose.
"Had a sponsor lined up," Kit continues. "Small one, but real. Enough for a proper season. Entry fees, a mechanic who wasn't just me at two in the morning with a headlamp."
"What happened?"
"Funding fell through." He says it lightly, the way he says most things, but there's a flatness underneath. "Sponsor's company got bought out. New owners didn't care about a bunch of regional amateurs. Cut the whole program in one email. Real professional. Real efficient."
He picks up a piece of the roll, examining it like it's suddenly interesting.
"Two weeks before the season opener."
"That's a hell of a thing to lose two weeks out."
"Yeah, well."
He eats the piece instead of finishing the sentence.
I let him.
I know the shape of this now. Pushing gets me nothing.
He comes back to it about a minute later, unprompted.
"I know I still ride like I'm racing," he says. "Ni gives me shit for it constantly. Dex too. Like I never got the memo that the season's over."
A small, real smile.
"Habit's a hard thing to retire."
"I don't think it's really about the habit."
He looks at me.
It's the first time all dinner he's held my eyes for more than a second without an exit ramp ready.
"No," he says. "Probably not."
I don't push past that either.
Instead, I ask him what bike he'd build if money were no object, and he lights up in a completely different register, hands moving through the air as he describes frame geometry I could have drawn myself.
For the next fifteen minutes, I get an entire unbroken monologue about weight distribution and center of mass and why everyone gets rake angle wrong.
I don't understand half of what makes it exciting to him and every bit of why it's exciting to hear him say it.
"You're not even a little bored," he says at some point, catching himself, catching me watching him instead of glazing over.
"I restore bikes for a living. This is basically foreplay for me."
He laughs, loud enough that the couple at the next table glances over.
He claps a hand over his own mouth for a second like he's surprised by the volume of his own joy, and something in my chest goes warm and a little unsteady at having caused it.
"Tell me about the shop," he says when he's got his breath back. "Actual question. Not just—I want to know what you actually do all day."
So I tell him.
I tell him about the customer who's been eyeing the same bobber for three weeks and hasn't worked up the nerve to buy it yet, and Kit has an immediate, strong opinion about exactly what's stopping the guy:
"He's scared he's gonna kill himself on it. That's not a bike thing, that's a confidence thing."
Which is, unfairly, probably correct.
I tell him about Rue.
I don't plan to.
It comes out because he asks, lightly, if I have kids, and I say no, not mine, but there's a six-year-old who runs my shop better than I do most Wednesdays.
Then I'm telling him about the tire gauge and the valve stem caps and the way she holds a wrench like a weapon and refuses to be told otherwise.
Kit is grinning the whole time, asking follow-up questions like he actually wants the answers and isn't just filling space with noise the way he does at the bar.
"She sounds like a menace," he says, delighted. "I love menaces!"
"She's a menace with excellent tire-pressure instincts."
"That's the best kind of menace."
The check comes, and neither of us reaches for it with any real urgency, which I take as a good sign.
Neither of us is trying to end this.
I win the small, wordless negotiation over the bill mostly by being faster, and Kit protests exactly as much as manners require and not one word more.
Outside, in the parking lot, under a sodium light that turns everything a little orange, he stands with his hands in his pockets, rocking slightly on his heels.
For a second, neither of us says anything.
It isn't the itchy, must-fill-it silence from the bar.
It's just quiet. Comfortable.
New, and already easy.
"This was good," Kit says, like he's a little surprised to be saying it. "I mean—you're good to talk to. That's not—I talk to people all the time, obviously, that's kind of my whole thing, but this was—"
He stops, laughs at himself, shakes his head.
"I don't know what I'm saying. This was good."
"It was good," I agree. "We should do it again."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He nods, mostly to himself, and there's a small second where I watch him actually consider that—not deflect it, not turn it into a joke, just let it be true.
And I think, watching him stand there in the orange light with his hands shoved in his pockets and something like real ease sitting on his shoulders for once, that I would very much like to be the reason that keeps happening.
"Night, Soren," he says.
"Ride safe, Kit."
He laughs at that—a short, surprised huff—like it's funny that I'd say it to him of all people, the fastest thing on two wheels Ni's ever seen.
Then he gets on his bike and goes.
I sit in my truck for a minute before I start the engine.