CHAPTER FIVE
Alex
Then
We saw each other every day after that. Hiking, sightseeing, working our way through every dive with a menu worth trying. We kissed. We did more than kiss. By then there wasn’t much of him left for me to learn with my hands or my mouth.
We hadn’t had sex.
It wasn’t for lack of signal on my end. I made it plain, every time, what I wanted. He’d leave anyway, every night, without asking for more.
I was starting to wonder if something was wrong with me. When a room went quiet in Monterey, I assumed I had caused it.
The waiter set our plates down. “Anything else?”
“This is good,” Riley said, looking it over. He glanced at me. “Alex?”
My chili dog smelled like every summer I’d ever spent on the boardwalk with Martina, cheese and onions, the same order every time. “I’m set,” I said, and took a bite without bothering to be careful about it.
“This place is great.” Chili escaped the bun, but I didn’t care. “Diner food, root beer on tap, homemade malts. What else does a person need?”
He raised his burger like he was toasting a celebration. “Good find.” He said it around a mouthful of food.
“How’s Lackey’s wife?”
“Girlfriend,” he said.
“Girlfriend.”
“Just a mole. Nothing to worry about. Nice of you to ask, though.”
Lackey was Riley’s sponsor in the club, and something like his landlord besides. A few weeks back, someone had noticed an odd-looking mole on his girlfriend’s back while they were swimming. Even secondhand, the thought of it had stuck with me.
“I was worried,” I said. “You never know, especially out here. Nobody wears sunscreen.”
“She got checked head to toe. They took off a couple of moles, but nothing was cancerous.”
“That’s good, at least.”
I was working through my fries at a pace that wasn’t polite. Riley matched me bite for bite, a sip of chocolate malt between each one, and seemed to be enjoying the meal as much as I was.
I liked watching him eat. Three weeks in, I was still as caught up in him as I’d been the day we met.
Enough that even the way he picked up a fork felt like something worth noticing.
Everything he touched, he touched carefully.
Me included. Careful was not a word I put on boys. Gone, was more like it.
I picked at my fries and watched him finish his burger, until I couldn’t sit on the question any longer.
“Would you say you’re an open book?” I asked, licking salt off my fingers.
He didn’t look up from the fry remnants at the bottom of the tray. “Pretty much.”
“Nothing off-limits?”
“Not really.”
“So, I can ask you anything?”
“Sure.” He reached for his malt. “What’s on your mind?”
I wiped at nothing with my napkin. “Why haven’t we had sex?”
He answered like I’d asked him to add two and two. “I want to wait until you’re twenty-one.”
I stared at him like he’d said something disqualifying. “You’re not serious.”
“I am.”
He had to be joking. Some biker thing I hadn’t caught yet from watching the TV show. “No, you’re not.”
He took a drink of his malt, unbothered. “I really am.”
“We’ve seen each other every day for three weeks,” I said. “Why would you want to wait until I’m twenty-one?” I did the math in my head. “I’ll be halfway through my junior year.”
“December tenth, right?”
I was flattered he’d remembered my birthday and less than thrilled about everything else. I sighed and reached for my root beer. “Yeah.”
“You disappointed?”
I dropped my napkin on my half-eaten chili dog. “Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because I really, really like you.”
“Feeling’s mutual. That’s exactly why I want to wait. If we’re still together on your twenty-first, it’s probably the start of something that lasts. Think of it like an engagement.”
An engagement to two years of nothing, more like. And there was no version of this where he actually stayed celibate that long. I may have been young, but I wasn’t stupid. “So over two years, you’re telling me you won’t be sleeping with anyone else?”
He shook his head.
“Anyone?”
He laughed. “Told you the day we met. I’m a one-woman man.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“I won’t sleep with anyone.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table.
“For the next two years, I’ll hope every day that when your birthday comes, you still want me around.
If you do, and you’re ready, that’s it, the two years are over.
And if we don’t make it that far, we shouldn’t have slept together in the first place. ”
I wanted to argue with the logic. I couldn’t. If anything, it made me respect him more.
“So this is to protect me. Make sure I still want the same thing in two years that I want right now.”
“More or less. I want you to actually know me by the time we get there. That doesn’t happen in a few weeks. It happens over time.”
I felt grateful, frustrated, and a little afraid, all at once. Mostly afraid there was something underneath all of it I didn’t know yet.
“You don’t have any deep dark secrets?” I asked, half joking.
“I am who I am. I’m not going to lie to you, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I thought of the show. Drugs, beatdowns, the occasional body. “What about the club? Drugs, anything like that?”
“Club business isn’t mine to talk about. But no. We’re not that kind of club.”
“Criminal stuff?”
“What about it?”
“Do you do it?”
“Me?”
“You. Forget the club. Are you a criminal?”
“I’ve committed a crime or two. That doesn’t make me a criminal.”
“What does that mean?”
He laced his fingers together and looked at them for a while before he answered. “You ever draw anything? Paint?”
“Sure. Everyone has.”
“Would you call yourself an artist?”
“God, no. I’m terrible at it.”
“Everybody sins. Doesn’t make everybody a sinner, not really. Same idea. I break the law now and then. Doesn’t make me a criminal.”
Considering the company he kept, it tracked. “You guys mess with guns?”
He laughed. “This is Arizona, not California. Everybody has a gun.”
“Do you?”
“Four.”
“What for?”
“One’s an antique Winchester 30-30, more of an investment than anything. It’ll keep going up in value. A rifle for hunting. A shotgun at home. A pistol when I’m on the road.”
“You have it now?”
He stretched his leg out from under the booth and nodded at his boot.
“You’ve got a gun in your boot?” I said it loud enough that two booths over turned to look.
“Jesus,” he muttered, pulling his leg back in. “Want to tell the whole restaurant?”
“You’ve got a gun in your boot?” I whispered.
“I do. And I’ve got a permit for it, before you ask.”
“That’s insane.”
“You know what’s insane? This state’s full of guys carrying who shouldn’t be, and sooner or later they’ll get caught or get killed, but in between, they do a lot of damage to people who never did anything wrong.
I’d rather carry every day and never need it than have a time come that I don’t and it matters.
Right now, if someone tried something in this diner, they’d have to be a better shot than me.
” He said it without much weight to it. “I haven’t met many who are. ”
I wasn’t scared of him carrying a gun. I wasn’t at ease with it either. It was just new to me, and I didn’t have much besides theory to go on.
“Say some guy at the counter starts something,” I said. “Gets into it with the cook over how much sauce is on his Reuben. Cook won’t back down. Guy climbs over the counter and starts swinging. Do you pull it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Doesn’t call for it.”
“So what do you do? Anything?”
“Go pull him off the cook.”
“What if he turns on you?”
He laughed. “Then we fight.”
“You wouldn’t—”
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t pull it over a fistfight.”
“Then when?”
“When it’s the difference between me, or someone I love, living or dying.”
It was a clean enough answer. I ran the numbers on my own future, the way you’d total a receipt.
Gun-toting biker. Handsome. Drinks in moderation. Good kisser. Shows up when he says he will. Careful with money. Would put himself between me and something bad. Wants to wait until I’m twenty-one.
Or.
Some guy from campus in a popped collar, three drinks past charming, who’d forget my name by morning and wouldn’t notice if I walked out of a party alone at two a.m., let alone follow me to make sure I got home.
It wasn’t close.
“My twenty-first birthday, huh?” I asked.
He nodded. Once. “That’s the plan.”
I put my hand out across the table. “You’ve got a deal, Mister.”