Rope and Regret (Paradise MC #2)

1. Tessa

TESSA

The coffee maker finishes its death rattle at six-thirty and the mug is already sitting there waiting for me.

The chipped one. He always grabs the chipped one, even though we own six mugs that aren’t chipped, because two years ago I said I liked the way the chip fits my thumb, and Cal Bramwell keeps stuff like that in whatever part of his brain doesn’t hold words.

I pour. Black, then sugar until it’s basically a dessert. He’s watched me do this six hundred times and still winces every time.

“That’s not coffee,” he says from the other side of the kitchen, digging through a stack of mail neither of us has opened since Tuesday. “That’s syrup with anxiety in it.”

“Don’t talk to my breakfast like that.”

“I’m just saying. A dentist would cry.”

“A dentist would charge us for crying. Drink your sad black water and leave me alone.”

He grins without looking up. His hair’s still wet from the shower, dripping a little at the collar of his t-shirt, and he’s hunting for his keys the way he does every single morning, like the keys are a brand-new problem the world invented overnight.

They’re under the mail. They’re always under the mail. I sip my syrup and watch him not find them, because this is my favorite show and it airs daily.

The kitchen’s too small for two people, technically. The whole house is—a rental on the edge of Paradise Valley with a porch that sags on the left side and his climbing gear heaped by the door in a pile that’s been there so long I’ve started dusting around it like it’s furniture.

There’s a rope in that pile I have never once seen him use. When I brought that up in March he said, “It’s a backup,” with the deep offense of a man defending a family member, and the rope stayed.

I’m wearing his t-shirt, the gray one with the shop logo cracked and peeling across the chest. PARADISE VALLEY CYCLE & SALVAGE, or what’s left of the letters. He pretends he doesn’t notice when I steal his shirts. He notices. He restocks my side of the dresser with the soft ones.

He lifts the junk drawer handle. Checks the windowsill. Pats his own jacket like the keys might’ve climbed in there overnight.

“You want a hint?” I ask.

“I don’t need a hint.”

“You need a hint.”

“Woman, I have found these keys every day of my adult life.”

“Because I tell you where they are.”

He stops. Looks at the mail. Lifts the stack, and there they are, and he holds them up like he caught them cheating. “They moved.”

“They didn’t move.”

“Something in this house moves things.” He shrugs into his jacket, and then—the ritual.

His cut comes off the hook by the door first, always first, before the jacket’s even settled on his shoulders.

It’s not even a real cut yet, not the way the patched guys wear theirs.

Prospect rocker on the back, bottom rocker, no center patch.

Six weeks out from the vote that gives him the rest of it, and he touches that thing like it’s already sworn to him.

Next to it on the second hook is my denim jacket, which is not a cut, which is just a jacket, but he hung a second hook the week I moved in and said, “Yours,” and that was the whole conversation.

Two hooks, side by side. He grabs his first every morning like the house would come down without the order of operations.

Two years and it still gets me a little, the hook thing. I’ve dated men who wrote me actual poems that got me less than the hook thing.

“Party planning today?” he asks, checking his pockets—phone, wallet, the ritual pat-down.

“Maybe.” It’s not maybe. I’m meeting Dot at the diner Thursday with a legal pad that’s got three pages of notes on it already, but the patch party is supposed to be at least forty percent surprise, so I keep my face boring. “Errands. Girl stuff. Extremely uninteresting.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“I’m an amazing liar. You’ve just known me too long.”

“Uh-huh.” He crosses the kitchen and there’s a second where I think it’s going to be the usual—a kiss on the temple, see you tonight, drive safe—and then his hand lands flat on the small of my back and pulls, and it is not the usual.

It’s a real kiss, slow, his mouth still a little coffee-warm, his thumb hooking into the hem of the shirt that’s mine now because possession is nine-tenths.

I grab the front of his jacket with my free hand. The counter edge presses into my back. Somebody’s mug is in danger and neither of us checks whose.

It goes on a beat too long. Two beats. We’re both late now, both smiling into it, and neither one of us pulls back first, which means it keeps going, which means we’re later.

“You have to be at the shop,” I say into his mouth, not letting go of his jacket.

“Wyatt can wait.”

“Wyatt cannot wait. Wyatt owns your whole life for six more weeks.”

“Five and a half,” he says, and kisses me again, and my toes actually curl against the cold floor, which is embarrassing at six-forty on a Tuesday.

He breaks it laughing, forehead dropped against mine, breath warm. “You’re gonna get me fired before I’m even patched in.”

“They can’t fire you. You’re free labor.”

“That’s the dream, yeah.” One more kiss, fast this time, to the corner of my mouth, and then one to my jaw for the road, like he’s leaving a trail. “Tonight.”

“Tonight.”

He straps the half-helmet on in the driveway while I stand on the porch with my dessert-coffee, both hands wrapped around the mug against the morning cold, and I watch him swing a leg over the bike the way I have every morning for two years, and it has not once gotten old.

Same bike he rebuilt our first year together—bought it as a frame and a promise, spread it across the garage floor in a hundred labeled pieces while I brought him beer and asked what things were just to hear him talk.

He talks maybe forty words an hour, my man, but ask him about a carburetor and he’s a podcast.

The engine catches loud enough to rattle the front windows. It goes straight through my sternum, same as always. Two years in, that sound lives in my chest like it pays rent.

He lifts two fingers off the grip—his whole entire wave—and rolls out, and I stand there grinning at an empty driveway like an idiot, which is my other favorite show.

The exhaust hangs in the cold air a second after he’s gone.

Down the road, the engine note drops through the gears and fades toward town.

Back inside, the kitchen’s quiet the way it always is after him.

A held-breath kind of quiet. I put his cereal bowl in the sink, run water into it.

Straighten the mail he wrecked. The furnace kicks on somewhere under the floor.

I’m reaching for my phone to text my sister about Thursday when something buzzes on the counter, and it’s not mine.

His phone. Sitting by the toaster where it must have slid out of his jacket pocket while we were busy being late. It buzzes again, rattling against the counter, screen up, screen lit.

Whitney D.

That’s all I get—a name and the first line of a text I don’t let myself read, because I’m not that person, I’ve never been that person—before the screen goes dark and takes it away.

Whitney D.

I stand there with my hand still halfway to the counter and my coffee going cold in the other one. Something small and stupid happens under my ribs. Not a drop. A skip. Like missing a stair you knew was there.

Two years. Two years of his people becoming my people—every guy at the shop, his climbing partners, the whole patched membership of the Paradise MC plus their old ladies and their kids’ birthday parties.

I know who Tucker’s mad at this week. I know Reyes takes his coffee like a punishment. I could name every contact in that phone worth naming, and there’s no Whitney.

There’s never been a Whitney. Not in a story. Not in a “before your time.” Not once, in two years, out loud.

The screen stays dark. The toaster reflects my own face back at me, warped and small.

Then the front door bangs open and he’s back, hair helmet-flat already, doing the pocket pat-down in the doorway. “Phone,” he says. “Left my?—”

“Toaster,” I say, and my voice comes out completely normal, which surprises the hell out of me.

He crosses the kitchen and grabs it, and I watch him do it—watch him pick it up and glance at the screen, one flick of the eyes, and something goes through his face fast, too fast to name, there and gone like a fish under ice.

His jaw does a small thing. Then it’s done.

Phone pocketed. He kisses my cheek, warm and quick.

“Love you. Tonight.”

“Tonight,” I say again, to the door, because he’s already through it.

The engine catches. Rattles the windows. Fades down the road toward town, and this time I don’t grin at the empty driveway. I stand at the window with a dish towel in my hand and no dish.

Whitney D.

I wipe down a counter that’s already clean. Wipe it again. My hands want a job and this is the job they picked, back and forth over the same dry laminate, while my brain runs it on a loop—the buzz, the name, the flick of his eyes, the fish under the ice.

It’s nothing, I tell myself, and I mean it, mostly.

It has to be nothing. An old friend, a cousin, some woman from a parts supplier with a first name and a last initial.

There are a hundred boring explanations and I’ll probably hear one of them tonight over dinner and feel like an ass for the dish towel routine.

Because here’s the thing, the thing I hold on to while the counter gets its third wipe for no reason: nothing about this morning felt like a man hiding something.

The mug was out before I was up. The kiss went two beats too long. He grabbed his cut off the hook like always and waved his little two-finger wave like always, and men who are hiding things don’t do all that.

Do they.