Chapter Twelve
THE CAR STARTED dying a mile past the bridge, and some part of me knew right then exactly how the evening was going to end, and started grieving it early.
It had been making a sound for a week, a little tick under the hood I kept turning the radio up over.
Not because I hadn’t heard it. I never miss the sound of something about to go wrong.
My body won’t let me. I just didn’t have the money to answer it, and until today the radio had been cheaper.
That afternoon the tick turned into a shudder, then a cough, then the dash lit up like a slot machine and the wheel went stiff in my hands, and I coasted the dying weight of it onto the shoulder with maybe the last thirty feet it had left, out where the pines came right up to the ditch and there was nothing in either direction but road, marsh and the sun going down.
I sat there a second in the tick and steam of it and did not look in the mirror, because I already knew what was in the mirror.
The bike had pulled onto the shoulder behind me before I even got my door open.
He’d been forty feet back all day, same as every day, and now he was off it and walking up the shoulder toward me with that unhurried way he had, big and easy, reading the situation before he got to it the way he read everything.
I got out and put the hood up mostly so I’d have something to do with my hands and something to hide my face behind, and I stared into the guts of my dead car like I had the first idea what I was looking at.
“Radiator,” he said, from a respectful distance. Not close. He never got close. “Or the head gasket, if you’ve been running it hot. You have?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I didn’t turn around. “Can you fix it?”
“Not here. Not tonight.” A pause. “It needs a shop.”
“Okay.” I straightened up and made my voice businesslike, the voice I use when I’m about to lose control of a situation and I’m trying to grab it back. “Then I’ll call a tow. You can go on. I’ll wait.”
“You’re not waiting out here.”
“I’ve waited plenty of places, I’m fine — ”
“Amy.”
He said my name and it stopped me, because he almost never said it, he’d spent months finding ways not to say it, and hearing it in his mouth after all that time did something low and stupid in my stomach that I absolutely did not have time for.
“It’s not about fine. You know it’s not. Nobody under this lockdown waits alone on a dark road right now. Not you, not anybody. That’s the reason I’m out here.”
And there it was. The lockdown. The thing I couldn’t argue with because it was true and because arguing with it meant admitting I knew why it was true, and I didn’t have the details but I had enough, I always had enough.
“Then I’ll call somebody to come get me.” I already had my phone out. “Brenda, or — ”
“Brenda’s not cleared to leave the compound alone and there’s nobody free to bring her. Everybody’s on the wall.” He said, no satisfaction in it, just the facts closing around me one by one like a hand. “There’s no car coming, Amy. Not tonight. Devil’s got every wheel on the property spoken for.”
I stood there on the shoulder with my dead car and my useless phone and the sun going down, and I felt the last door swing shut, and I knew, and he knew I knew, and to his credit he didn’t say it.
He just waited. He let me get there myself, which was somehow worse than if he’d said it, because it meant I had to be the one to turn around and look at the motorcycle.
“No,” I said.
“It’s twenty minutes to the gate.”
“I said no.”
“I know.” He didn’t move. Didn’t push. Just stood there being immovable in that quiet way, a man who’d clearly decided the outcome and was willing to wait as long as it took me to catch up to it.
“You don’t have to like it. You’ve got to do it anyway.
I’m not leaving you on this road and there’s one way off it. ”
I’d been trapped before. I knew what having my choices taken away was supposed to feel like, knew the cold that came with it and the awful feeling of everything closing in, and I waited for it standing there with Rune between me and the only way home.
It didn’t come.
That was almost worse.
I was furious and cornered and wanted to kick my own tire just to have something to kick, but underneath all of it I was still okay.
My body wasn’t screaming. Nothing in me was telling me to get away from him.
Apparently every alarm I owned had looked at the giant outlaw biker telling me I had no choice but to climb on the back of his motorcycle and decided this was fine.
Traitors. All of them.
“Fine,” I said, and it came out mean. “Fine.”
He went back to the bike and I followed, arms crossed so tight I could feel my own pulse, and he swung a leg over and got it upright off the kickstand, and then he did the thing that undid me before we’d even moved.
He took off his helmet and held it out to me.
“I don’t — ” I started.
“Put it on.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be alright.” Like it was nothing. Like a man handing a girl the only helmet and planning to ride bare-headed himself twenty minutes up a county road.
He didn’t make a moment of it. That was the worst part, he didn’t make it mean anything, he just held it out because I was the one who needed it more and that was the end of the discussion in his head.
And I took it, my hands shook a little buckling it, it smelled like him, woodsmoke, green things, something warm underneath that I remembered from being way too close to him in his cabin, and apparently smells could remember things your brain had spent months trying very hard to forget, because suddenly I remembered his mouth too.
His hand in my hair. The feel of his face against mine, the way that one kiss had started careful and stopped being careful at all.
I shoved the helmet onto my head before my brain could get any more helpful.
Super glad for the visor.
My face was doing things.
“Get on behind me. Feet on the pegs, there and there. And you’re going to have to hold on.
” He glanced back, and for just a second the smooth cracked and there was something careful in it, something that knew exactly what he was asking of me and hated to ask it.
“I’ll take it slow. I’ve got you. You just hold on. ”
I’ve got you. Brenda’s exact words to me in the trees. The words you say to somebody who’s about to fall.
I got on behind him.
And for the first minute I kept the inch.
That was what I’d promised Brenda where Rune was concerned—not one inch more—and I took it literally, sitting stiff behind him with my hands barely touching his sides and that little strip of space between us like I could somehow hold it there for twenty miles.
I could do this. I could keep the inch, get off the bike at the other end, and never admit how much work it had taken not to close it myself.
Then he pulled out onto the road, and physics ended the argument.
The bike surged, the world tilted and my inch disappeared, because apparently motorcycles didn’t care about promises made to Brenda.
I grabbed him, both arms going around his middle, hands fisting in the front of his cut, my chest hitting his back and my thighs tight along his, every part of me I’d spent months keeping away from him suddenly pressed against the man I’d sworn I was done with.
Rune went completely still.
Only for a second, but I felt it. Felt his body lock under mine before he let out one slow breath and settled the bike beneath us.
Then my brain caught up with the rest of me.
Oh.
This was worse than I’d thought.
He was warm. That was the first stupid thing I noticed.
Warm and solid everywhere I touched him, his stomach hard beneath my arms, his back broad enough that I couldn’t see much past his shoulders, and I could feel every breath he took.
Every small shift of muscle when he changed gears.
The movement of his body under mine when he leaned us into a curve and brought us back out again.
My body remembered him. Not the heartbreak, apparently, because that would’ve been useful.
The kiss.
I waited for the panic.
Because this should’ve done it. A man between my knees, m body against his, his size everywhere, no real way to move away without throwing myself off a motorcycle doing fifty down a county road. There were about six different things happening that should’ve had every alarm I owned screaming.
Nothing.
My shoulders came down. My jaw loosened. Somewhere along that first stretch of road I stopped holding my body stiff against his and shifted closer without even meaning to.
That scared me enough that I almost pulled back. Because the awful truth was that being against Rune felt good. Not just safe. Good. Those were two very different problems.
I pressed my forehead against the back of his shoulder before I realized I’d done it and stayed there for one stupid second, helmet resting against him, his body moving underneath me with every breath.
There was something so nice about it that it hurt, just letting all that solid Rune hold the world steady for a minute instead of doing it myself.
Then I caught myself and lifted my head.
My arms stayed exactly where they were.
He rode like he’d promised. Slow, for a biker, smooth through the curves and easy on the throttle, no sudden anything, and when a truck came the other way and shoved a wall of wind at us, Rune moved the bike over without so much as a twitch.
I felt all of it because there was no way not to feel him now: the heat coming through his shirt and cut, the muscles in his stomach tightening when the road curved, the way his thighs shifted against mine when he changed position.
I should not have been noticing his thighs.
That seemed important.
I noticed them anyway.
At the next stop sign his hand left the bar. It came down over mine where they were fisted in the front of his cut and just covered them, one big warm hand over both of mine.
My breath caught.
Rune didn’t turn around. Didn’t say anything. His thumb moved once across my knuckles, so small I could’ve convinced myself it hadn’t happened if every nerve in my hand hadn’t immediately reported it to the rest of me.
Then he pulled away and his hand went back to the bar.
I could’ve moved mine. I didn’t. Worse, I spent the next five minutes hoping he’d do it again. He didn’t. Which was probably good, but it didn’t feel good.
Twenty minutes. By the time we crossed the marsh, the sun was gone and the wind had turned cool, and I was still wrapped around the man who’d broken my heart in front of the entire club, holding him like none of that had happened.
Like I hadn’t spent weeks trying to get over him.
Like my body had already figured out something the rest of me was still too angry to admit.
Right then, Rune was where I felt safest.
The gate came up too soon and not soon enough.
He slowed us through it, brought us around by the clubhouse, set his boots down and idled and I had to make myself let go, had to peel my own arms off him one at a time like they’d forgotten they belonged to me, and I got off on legs that didn’t feel like mine and pulled off the helmet and could not, would not, look at him.
“Amy,” he said softly.
“Thank you for the ride.” Businesslike. Or trying to be. I shoved the helmet at him without meeting his eyes. “Somebody can get my car tomorrow.”
“Amy — ”
But I was already walking, fast, toward the clubhouse door, to Brenda, anywhere that wasn’t six inches from him, and behind me he didn’t call again, he let me go, he always let me go, it was the one thing he was bent on doing.
I got inside and stood in the hall with my back against the wall, Rune’s helmet smell somehow still stuck in my hair and the heat of him still on the front of me, and my heart was beating hard enough that I pressed my palm against it like that might settle anything.
The safest I’d felt in months, maybe ever, was those twenty minutes with my arms around Gavin Boone on the back of his motorcycle, which was deeply inconvenient considering I was still furious with him and had every intention of staying that way.