Chapter Six
Roulette
The wrench fit the bolt head on the third try.
I cranked it clockwise and felt the threads bite, the metal giving just enough to tell me it was seated.
The garage smelled like it always did -- motor oil and metal and the faint chemical note of parts cleaner.
My knuckles were already dark with grease, and I wiped them on the rag hanging from my back pocket while I worked.
Beside me, Hornet was elbow-deep in a carburetor, his fingers moving through the disassembled parts with the confidence of someone who’d done it a thousand times and still enjoyed the puzzle.
He hummed under his breath, some country song I didn’t recognize, and dropped a spring into a coffee can with a soft metallic ping.
Across the concrete, Gunner was working a chain through a solvent bath, the links clinking against the metal tub until the sound started to sync with Hornet’s humming without either of them noticing.
The garage was one of my favorite places in the compound.
Not because it was pretty -- it wasn’t. The concrete floor was stained with twenty years of oil spills and chemical drips, dark patches that no amount of degreaser would ever lift.
The tool wall ran the length of the back, every wrench and socket and pry bar mounted in its place, labeled with black marker on masking tape that had yellowed with age.
The mini-fridge in the corner hummed, a few crushed beer cans stacked on top of it like trophies.
Workbenches along the side wall held parts in various states of assembly -- a cylinder head here, a transmission there, a stack of gaskets waiting to be installed.
The air was warm and dense with the smell of work.
I reached for the torque wrench and was halfway through setting it when movement caught my eye through the open bay door.
Lark walked with her shoulders straight and her chin level, as if the ground beneath her feet had earned a temporary kind of trust. Her blonde hair was loose today, falling in waves past her shoulders.
She tucked a strand behind her ear with her free hand as she reached the picnic table outside my house.
She pulled out the bench to sit. Then she just sat there, one hand resting on the table, the other tracing the worn grain, looking out toward the tree line at the edge of the property.
My wrench went still in my hand. I didn’t mean for it to happen. One second I was tightening a bolt, and the next I was watching her sit at my picnic table, the morning light catching the gold in her hair, and the wrench just stopped turning.
Hornet caught it first. He followed my gaze through the bay door, then back to my face. The corner of his mouth lifted in a grin that spelled trouble. He elbowed Gunner hard enough to make him slosh solvent over the rim of the tub.
“Fuck, man --”
“Look,” Hornet said, jerking his chin toward the yard.
Gunner looked. His expression went from annoyed to delighted in about half a second.
“Well, shit.” He wiped his hands on a rag and leaned back against the workbench, crossing his arms. “This is the third morning in a row he’s been staring out that door like a dog waiting for the mailman.”
“Fourth,” Hornet said. “Monday doesn’t count because she was still inside. But Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and now today. That’s four.”
“I’m not counting days,” I said.
“Sure you’re not. You’ve just happened to be out here at dawn four mornings straight, coffee already made, like a man who has no idea what day it is.”
I picked up the wrench and wiped it on the rag. The metal was warm from my hand. “Shut it.”
They didn’t shut it. They never shut it. That was the point of brothers -- they saw the thing you didn’t want seen, and then they held it up to the light and made sure everyone else saw it too.
Gunner straightened up and put his hands on his hips, his face arranged in what he clearly thought was a perfect imitation of my resting expression.
Blank. Stoic. Eyes fixed on something in the middle distance with the focused intensity of a man solving a particularly difficult math problem in his head.
“Oh, Lark,” he said, in a voice pitched an octave higher than mine and about three times more dramatic. “Your hair is like sunshine. Your tomato-chopping skills are the envy of the clubhouse. Please sit at my picnic table forever and never leave.”
Hornet snorted into his coffee can. The third brother -- a Prospect whose name I hadn’t bothered to learn yet -- was trying not to laugh and failing completely, his shoulders shaking as he pretended to adjust something on the workbench.
“I don’t sound like that,” I said.
“You sound exactly like that,” Gunner said. “You just do it on the inside. We can hear it.”
I tightened the bolt. The wrench turned, the threads bit, and I kept my eyes on the work instead of the yard. But I could still feel her out there, sitting at the picnic table, the awareness settling in my chest like something solid I couldn’t shift.
Fox was standing at the edge of the garage, one shoulder against the doorframe, a mug of coffee in his hand.
He’d been there long enough to catch the whole exchange, but he hadn’t joined in.
That was Fox -- he watched. He listened.
He let the brothers run their mouths because that’s what brothers did, and he stepped in only when it crossed a line that mattered. This wasn’t that line.
I glanced over at him. His gaze met mine for a beat, steady and unreadable.
He gave me the smallest nod -- barely a movement, just a dip of his chin that said he saw it, he understood it, and he wasn’t going to make it worse by talking about it.
Then he turned and walked back toward the clubhouse, his boots muffled on the gravel, and left me to the noise.
I went back to the bike. The bolt refused to budge.
I moved to the next one, and then the next, working my way down the chain case with the methodical focus that usually kept my head clear.
My jaw ached from clenching, and I held the wrench harder than necessary.
Twice, my attention wandered through the bay door to the picnic table where she sat, morning light settling across her shoulders.
The third time, I made myself look down. The metal was warm under my hands. The garage smelled like work. The brothers were still laughing behind me, too caught up in their own bullshit to keep studying my face, and that was close enough to peace for now.
* * *
I heard the window before I saw her. Wood scraping wood, then the soft sound of someone exhaling through their nose, frustrated but determined not to admit it.
I came around the side of the house and found her on the porch, both hands braced under the bottom sash, her weight on her back foot as if she could force it up through sheer stubbornness.
The afternoon had warmed up. The air was thick with the smell of cut grass from somewhere across the compound, and the porch boards were hot underfoot.
Lark had changed into shorts and a faded T-shirt, had her hair pulled back in a loose knot that was coming undone at the nape of her neck.
She hadn’t heard me approach -- her focus was entirely on the window, her jaw set, her fingers braced under the wood like it had personally offended her.
I came up behind her and reached past her shoulder without saying anything.
My arm brushed against hers, close enough I felt the warmth of her skin through my sleeve, and then my palms were flat against the top of the sash beside hers.
One firm push, and the wood gave with a groan that sounded louder than it should have in the still afternoon.
The window slid up, and a rush of air moved through the gap, carrying the smell of grass and distant charcoal from someone’s grill.
Lark stepped back. Her shoulder bumped my chest, and she moved sideways to put space between us, her arms crossing over her stomach in that defensive hitch I was starting to recognize.
“I had it,” she said.
“Sure.”
I didn’t move far. The porch was narrow, and standing behind her had put me close enough that I could smell the coffee on her breath and the faint soap scent of whatever she’d washed with that morning.
She looked at the open window, then at me, and something in her expression softened just enough to let me know the defensiveness was habit, not conviction.
She picked up the two mugs from the railing where she’d left them hours ago.
The coffee was long cold by now, the surface still and dark in the ceramic.
She handed one to me without asking if I wanted it, and I took it because that was easier than explaining why I didn’t need another cup of coffee today.
We sat on the porch steps. The wood was warm through my jeans, and the sun had moved far enough west that the steps were in shadow, the light catching the tops of the trees beyond the fence line.
Lark tucked her feet up on the second step and balanced her mug on her knee.
I stretched my legs out, boots on the gravel, and let the silence sit between us without trying to fill it.
“How long have you lived here?” she asked after a while.
“Eight years.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Feels shorter than it sounds.” I said it plain, not looking for a follow-up. “Been the only life I remember wanting, most days.”
She accepted that like it explained something, and maybe it did. She took a sip of her cold coffee and didn’t wince, which told me she’d drunk worse. I’d seen her at Patsy’s enough mornings to know she took her coffee black and didn’t complain when Dave burned it.
“Becca mentioned you helped patch her bathroom wall,” she said. “After the shelf incident.”
“Fox made me. Wasn’t optional.”
“She made it sound like a whole ordeal.”
“It was a shelf. I put a screw in wrong.” Something in my chest eased at the way she was fighting a smile over her mug. “Everybody’s still talking about it like I burned the place down.”
“Marcy called you ‘surprisingly bad at one specific thing’ this morning. Wouldn’t elaborate.”
“Marcy exaggerates.”
“Does she, though?”
I didn’t answer that, mostly because she wasn’t wrong, and she seemed to take my silence as confirmation, because she huffed a laugh into her mug and didn’t push it further.
She took that in. The conversation moved in short, easy bursts -- a question, an answer, a pause long enough to let the answer land before the next question came.
I found myself angled toward her on the step without remembering when I’d shifted.
My right hand was resting on the wood between us, close enough to hers that if either of us moved an inch, our knuckles would touch. I didn’t move. Neither did she.
She asked about the garden behind the clubhouse, the one Becca kept saying somebody should get out and weed.
I told her it had been Raven’s project a few years back, before life got busy enough that nobody had the time to keep up with it properly.
It existed in that in-between state -- not thriving, not dead, just holding on -- and everyone was okay with that.
Lark laughed at that. A dry, quiet sound that caught me off guard because I hadn’t said anything funny.
It was just a laugh -- recognition, maybe, of something true even when the truth wasn’t kind.
The sound of it moved through me like a current, and I went still for a beat, my mug halfway to my mouth, before I made myself look away toward the trees.
When I looked back, my attention caught on her forearm.
A bruise, faded to yellow at the edges but still visible -- a thumbprint shape, maybe two inches long, just below her elbow.
You got marks like that from catching yourself on the edge of a counter or a doorframe while moving too fast through a narrow space.
A diner bruise. I’d seen them on waitresses before.
You carried heavy plates, you turned corners tight, you learned to move through a crowded room without bumping into anyone, and sometimes you failed.
I lingered on it a second too long. She noticed -- of course she noticed -- and her free hand moved to cover it, not consciously, just a reflexive adjustment, like covering a stain on your shirt after someone sees it.
I looked back at my coffee. Drank what was left of it.
The cold bitterness sat on my tongue, and I didn’t say anything about the bruise because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t make her feel watched, and she’d had enough of that.
The light shifted. The shadow from the porch roof crept farther down the steps, and the first real edge of evening cool moved in under the day’s leftover heat. Lark finished her coffee and stood, brushing her palms against her shorts.
“I should start dinner,” she said, stating it plainly, with no assumption that I expected her to cook.
I answered with a small sound in my throat. She went inside, and the screen door sighed shut behind her. I stayed on the steps with the empty mug in my hands.
After a minute, I set it down on the wood beside hers. Both mugs, side by side, cold coffee staining the bottom of each. The ceramic made a soft click against the porch boards, and I left them there because moving them felt like admitting the moment was over, and I wasn’t ready for that yet.
Elbows on my knees, hands loose between them, facing the compound gate where it stood open at the end of the gravel drive. The daylight thinned across the lot, turning the parked bikes into dark shapes against the fence while the clubhouse carried on behind me, distant and ordinary.