Chapter 15. Kit
The next morning, I push through the glass door at Halverson Moto with my left arm secured in the sling the hospital gave me, the white bandage around my forearm bright against everything else.
It's the kind of space that makes you feel exactly as put-together as you are.
Which, in my case, is not very.
The front showroom display bikes catch my eye first, same as always—a restored vintage Triumph on a center stand, and beside it something matte black and custom-built with hand-stitched seat leather that looks expensive enough to make me nervous just standing near it.
A glass case runs along the front counter, filled with small parts arranged on black velvet like they're jewelry instead of hardware.
I take three steps into the main bay and stop. My bike is on the center lift in the far corner. My baby.
The exposed frame looks naked and vulnerable, the engine case gouged where it met the road. The left fairing is already off. One fork leg sits visibly out of line, a thin film of oil still streaking down the tube from the blown seal. Someone has already started the disassembly.
My jaw tightens. I feel tears prick at the backs of my eyes and blink them away before they can do anything embarrassing.
Soren is at the workbench along the far wall, his back to me, both hands on a torque wrench.
He either hasn't heard me come in or he's decided not to acknowledge me yet, and something about the second possibility makes my stomach do a small flip.
I cross the concrete floor.
"Hey," I say when I'm close enough that he can't reasonably pretend he hasn't heard me. "So, look. About the bike."
Soren sets the torque wrench down.
He turns to face me, and his eyes do that thing they do—the unhurried sweep from my face to the sling, to the bandage on my arm, then back to my face again.
My stomach turns slowly. Not unpleasantly.
"I can't afford to have it here," I say.
I've been running these words through my head since I woke up.
"I mean, this place is—it's nice. Really nice. More than nice, actually. But I need to take it somewhere else. Somewhere cheaper. I've got a guy who works out of his garage, does decent work for cash, doesn't charge shop rates. It's just—I'm sorry."
I'm shifting my weight from foot to foot.
I can feel myself doing it, and I can't make it stop.
My good hand flexes at my side, opening and closing, a small nervous leak of whatever's wired wrong in me that I usually bury under noise.
Soren looks at me for a long, quiet moment.
His expression doesn't change. There's no irritation in it. No impatience. No performative concern.
Just him, watching me try to talk myself out of accepting something good.
"You think I'd let you walk out of here over money," he says finally. "That's not what any of this was ever about."
It lands like a physical thing. I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. The deflection I had loaded dies somewhere behind my teeth. Soren picks the torque wrench back up, but he doesn't turn away yet.
"The bike stays. The work gets done. That's the end of it."
He says it easily, no extra weight thrown behind it, like he's telling me the shop closes at six.
"You can argue with me about it if you want. I'll just keep saying the same thing every time, though, so it's really just extra noise for both of us."
"That's... annoyingly reasonable."
"I contain multitudes," he says, his motto now. I huff out something that's almost a laugh in spite of everything. In spite of the guilt sitting in my chest like a stone.
I don't say thank you. The words are right there. I can't push them out. The truth is that I can't afford to have it fixed anywhere. The truth is that he's helping me, and I don't know how to cope with being helped without feeling like I owe someone my whole spine in exchange. So I say nothing.
I just stay. Because he doesn't tell me to leave.
"You eaten?" Soren asks, setting the wrench down for good this time.
"Define eaten."
"Define it however you want. I'm hearing a no."
"I had half a granola bar at like nine. Does that count?"
"It counts as an insult to the concept of breakfast."
He wipes his hands on a rag, methodical, working between each finger, and jerks his chin toward the back office.
"Come on."
The back room is smaller than I expect—a scuffed little kitchenette wedged behind the office, a microwave, a two-burner stove that looks like it's survived three decades of shop life, a window looking out over a gravel side lot.
Soren is cracking eggs one-handed into a bowl before I've even fully settled onto the single stool wedged into the corner.
"You cook!" I say, sounding more impressed than I meant to.
"I feed a six-year-old on Wednesdays. You learn fast or she tells you your eggs are sad."
He glances at me over his shoulder.
"Rue's word. Sad eggs. I've been chasing un-sad eggs for two years."
I laugh.
"High standards."
"Brutal critic. No filter whatsoever."
He cracks a third egg.
"She once told a customer his exhaust sounded like a dying lawnmower. To his face. While he was standing right there paying for it."
"I like her already."
"Everyone does. It's a real liability for me, actually, since she's undermining my professional credibility one honest sentence at a time."
I laugh again.
And I notice, not for the first time, how happy he always makes me.
He plates the eggs with a slice of toast and sets them in front of me without ceremony, the same way he bought me a milkshake at the carnival, the same way he pushed a basket of fries toward me at the bowling alley.
Like feeding me is just a fact of how things go between us.
"Eat," he says. "All of it. Not the granola-bar amount."
"Yes, Chef."
"Wrong title," he says mildly, and goes back to his own plate.
My face goes warm.
I laugh again.
We eat at the little counter, and the conversation drifts the way it always does with him.
Easy. No particular destination.
Somewhere in the middle of it, he asks me something that isn't about bikes or the weather.
"You grew up moving a lot?"
"Yeah."
"You mentioned it once, in passing at Redline. Never finished the thought. You tend to do that a lot there."
I turn my fork over in my hand, not really eating for a second.
"My dad was in construction. We'd follow the work. Six months here, eight months there. Never stayed anywhere long enough for a school to spell my name right on the first try."
I say it lightly, the way I say most things, but it costs a little more than usual.
"Kept a go-bag mentality my whole childhood. Never really unpacked anything all the way, you know? Just in case."
Soren doesn't rush to fill the space after that. He just nods, considering it seriously, the way he considers everything.
"Small town for me," he says eventually. "One stoplight, one gas station, family shop on Main Street. My grandfather started it. My father ran it. I inherited the keys at twenty-three, too young to really know what I was agreeing to." There's no nostalgia in it, but no bitterness either.
"Same building my whole life. Same four walls."
"Must be nice," I say. "Having something that's yours. Something that doesn't get packed into a U-Haul when the job dries up."
"Heavy, sometimes."
He eats another bite before continuing.
"I sold the old shop to build this one. And there's no version of me that doesn't feel personally guilty about letting my grandfather down by selling it, even though he's been dead for eleven years, so that's a genuinely irrational amount of pressure to carry around every day."
A small, dry smile.
"But yeah. It's mine."
He looks at me.
"And I'm sorry you moved so much. That sounds like it left a mark."
"It's fine." The words come automatically. I almost roll my own eyes. "I've got Redline now," I add. "Feels like the first place that's actually stuck."
"Good," he says simply.
Then he goes back to his eggs. The conversation keeps finding new channels after that.
What he watches when he can't sleep: documentaries, gravel-voiced narrators, sweeping footage of places he's never been.
What I fall asleep to: old MotoGP seasons, replayed so many times I can recite the commentary half a second before it happens.
Whether either of us actually finishes the books we start.
Neither of us does. He feels guilty about it.
I absolutely do not. He finds this hilarious.
It's crazy easy talking to him. It always has been.
At some point, I lean back against the counter, plate empty, and he takes it from me without asking, rinsing it in the little sink. While his back is turned, I work up the nerve to say the thing that's been sitting under my ribs since I walked in.
"Hey."
"Hm?"
"About that night... the one when I fell…"
He doesn't turn around right away.
"What about it?"
"I was an ass."
The water keeps running.
"About the bike. About—everything, actually. You told me not to ride, and I did it anyway, and I nearly wrapped myself around a guardrail, and you and the guys had to come get me off the side of the road, and I haven't actually said sorry for any of that yet."
He shuts off the water.
Dries his hands slowly.
Then turns to face me, leaning back against the counter and mirroring my posture, arms loosely crossed. He looks so good. As always. His beard is freshly groomed, and he looks even more put together than usual. Unlike me. I'm the same mess as always.
"You scared me," he says, no drama in it. Which somehow makes it land harder than if he'd raised his voice. "I told you not to get on that bike. I meant it. And you looked me dead in the eye and did it anyway."
"I know."
"If you were mine—" He stops. Something in my stomach drops. Soren considers the sentence before he finishes it, something in his face shifting. "If you were mine, properly mine, and you drank and rode after I told you not to, there'd be consequences. Very serious consequences."
My face starts getting hot before he even finishes.
"Real ones. Not a lecture. You'd be over my knee before you finished taking your boots off."
Oh.
"And that would only be part one."
Oh.
My whole face is hot now.
And not from embarrassment. Or not only from embarrassment. Something lower and warmer than that twists through me, catching my breath for half a second before I manage to answer.
"Yeah?"
My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.
"Yeah."
He watches me carefully, gauging my reaction. Whatever he sees seems to confirm something for him.
"You don't seem particularly deterred by that information."
"I mean." I clear my throat. "I... really like spankings.
" His eyebrows rise barely a fraction. "And being held accountable for my actions.
" I look down at my hands instead of at him, because it's easier to say the true thing that way.
"Yeah. I think I'd like that. More than I probably should admit out loud in your kitchen at noon. "
Soren doesn't say anything for a second. When I finally glance up, he's watching me with an expression I haven't seen on him before. Something that looks almost like relief.
"Noted," he says quietly. The same word he used before.
"We're not—I mean, that's not, like, a today thing," I say. Suddenly aware of how much ground I just covered without meaning to. My old instinct to retreat kicks in half a beat too late.
"No," he says, easy. No disappointment. No pressure.
He lets me have the room to back up without turning it into a thing.
"Not a today thing. There's no rush on my end.
" My shoulders loosen a little. "I just wanted you to know the truth of it, since it came up.
I think you'd rather have the truth than a version I dressed up to make it more comfortable. "
"I would." I breathe out. "I do." The remaining tension leaves my shoulders.
"Thank you. For—that." The first one comes awkwardly.
"And the eggs. And the bike. And, God, basically everything, apparently, since it turns out I've been keeping a running tab of things to thank you for and just never actually doing it. "
"You don't owe me a tab, Kit."
"I know." I look at him. "Doesn't stop me from keeping one."
He huffs something warm at that and shakes his head. Then he pushes away from the counter. "Go home. Rest that arm. I'll call you when the bike's further along."
"Bossy."
"You know it," he says and winks. I laugh.