CHAPTER 9
The Ride
°°°
Cole had a night off so rarely that Tucker teased him about it for a full week before it actually arrived, and when it did, Cole spent the first hour of it standing in his own kitchen trying to decide whether asking Mara to spend it with him was a reasonable idea or a mistake he'd be paying for later.
He asked anyway. She said yes fast enough that he suspected she'd been hoping he would, and arranged for Grace to keep Eli for a few hours with the easy bribery of a pizza and a movie neither of them would remember by morning.
Eli, predictably, had opinions about being left behind. “Why can't I come? I like the motorcycle.”
“Because it's grown-up time, and also because your mom would kill me if I put you on the back of a bike without four separate kinds of safety equipment we don't own,” Cole told him, crouched to his level in the doorway, and Eli accepted that with the same gravity he gave anything framed as a safety rule, which was the one category of adult reasoning he never argued with.
“Where are we going?” she asked, pulling the borrowed helmet on over hair she'd left loose for once, no ponytail, no clip, just down around her shoulders in a way that did something unhelpful to his concentration.
“Nowhere. Everywhere. Doesn't matter.”
“That's not an answer.”
“It's the only one that's true. Get on.”
She got on. She wrapped her arms around his waist with the wary hesitation of someone who hadn't done this in a long time, if ever, and by the second turn out of the lot her grip had gone from careful to certain, her whole weight settling against his back like she'd stopped negotiating with the idea of trusting him and just decided to.
They rode without a destination for the better part of an hour, out past the edge of Millbrook where the streetlights thinned and the road opened into dark fields on either side, engine noise swallowing anything that would have needed saying anyway.
Cole had ridden this same stretch alone more nights than he could count, usually because riding was the only thing that ever quieted the noise in his own head.
Tonight the noise was quiet before they'd even left the driveway.
He pulled off at the overlook above the reservoir, cut the engine, and let the sudden quiet settle around them — crickets, wind through dry grass, the distant hush of water nobody could see in the dark.
“This is where you bring people?”
“This is where I come alone. You're the first person I've brought.”
She looked at him a beat too long for that to have landed as a casual thing to say, and he let her look, because pretending it was casual would have been its own kind of lie.
They sat on the tailgate he'd never installed a bed liner in and never would, legs dangling, shoulders close enough to touch without quite touching, and the quiet stretched out long enough that Mara filled it the way people filled quiet when they'd finally found somebody worth filling it for.
“Dean left on a Tuesday,” she said, apropos of nothing, staring out at the black water instead of at him.
“I remember it was a Tuesday because I had a shift that night and he waited until I was already dressed for work to tell me, like he'd timed it so I wouldn't have room to fall apart before I had to go be useful to strangers for twelve hours.”
“That's a cruel way to leave somebody.”
“I don't think he meant it as cruel. I think he just didn't want to watch.
He said, ‘I didn't sign up for this much,’ like Eli was a subscription he could downgrade.” Her voice stayed even, the practiced evenness of a story she'd told herself so many times it had worn smooth at the edges.
“I went to work. I didn't cry until my lunch break, in a supply closet, for exactly the eleven minutes I had before I had to go back out and put a cast on somebody's kid.”
Cole didn't reach for her hand, didn't offer some version of he didn't deserve you, didn't do any of the things he suspected other men might have reached for to make the moment about their own reaction to her pain instead of about her.
He just sat there, steady, and let her finish it in her own time, which turned out to be exactly what she needed, because she kept going.
“The hardest part wasn't losing him. It was watching Eli learn, at two years old, that people leave. He shouldn't have had to learn that yet. Nobody should have to learn that at two.”
“No,” Cole agreed quietly. “They shouldn't.”
He knew that lesson himself, had learned a version of it younger than two, in rooms that kept changing before he'd learned the names of the people in them, and didn't offer that part of himself up tonight, because tonight belonged to her story, not his.
There'd be time for his, if there was going to be time for anything between them at all.
He was starting to think there might be.
“What's it like,” she asked eventually, “running a whole neighborhood's worth of trouble. The Kepler stuff. Is it always this bad, or is this a bad stretch?”
His jaw went tight before he could stop it, a small, involuntary thing that she clearly caught, because her eyes flicked to his face and stayed there. “It's been worse before. It'll probably get worse again before it gets better.”
“That's not really an answer either.”
“It's the only one I've got tonight.” He held her gaze, asking without asking her to let it go, and after a moment she did, filing the reaction away the same guarded way he'd noticed her file most things, and turned back to the water instead of pushing.
The quiet stretched out again, easier this time, and it was Cole who broke it, tipping his head back to look at a sky thick with more stars than the city ever let through. “You ever notice Eli narrates everything like he's reporting live from the scene?”
“Oh, constantly. Yesterday he gave me a full play-by-play of a squirrel crossing the parking lot. Blow-by-blow. I got emotionally invested.”
“Did the squirrel make it?”
“Barely. There was a near miss with a delivery truck that Eli is still talking about.” She laughed, a real one, surprised out of her, and Cole found he'd have driven considerably farther than a dark field outside Millbrook to hear that sound again.
“He's going to be exhausting as a teenager. I already know it.”
“Exhausting kids usually turn into interesting adults. Worked out fine for half the guys at the clubhouse.”
“That's either very reassuring or deeply alarming, and I can't tell which.”
“Probably both.”
She was still smiling when the quiet found them again, softer now, worn in at the edges the way good silences got after enough easy laughter had passed through them, and it stayed that way for a while before curiosity finally got the better of her.
~ ~ ~
She got home a little after midnight, Grace half-asleep on the couch with the TV still murmuring, Eli conked out sideways across his bed with Biscuit crushed under one arm. Mara eased him upright enough to get him properly under the blanket, and he stirred, eyes barely open, voice thick with sleep.
“Did you have fun?” he mumbled, not really awake enough to wait for the answer.
“I did, baby.”
“Mom. Is Cole coming tomorrow?”
It was the first time he'd used the name instead of some version of the question — not is he coming, not will I see him, just his name, dropped into a half-conscious sentence like it already belonged there, already assumed, already a fixed point in the shape of an ordinary week.
“I don't know yet, baby,” she said, which was true, and also the only answer she had left in her that wasn't a promise she wasn't ready to make out loud.