Chapter 7
Nina
Fourteen motorcycles and a flatbed truck loaded with wrapped presents, and I can't get my arms around the man I'm riding with.
I've tried twice. The first attempt got me halfway, my fingers gripping the edge of his belt on each side, my cheek pressed between his shoulder blades where the leather of his cut creaks.
The second attempt, when he revved the engine and I lurched forward and grabbed on tighter, my hands overlapped by an inch at his navel and I called it a victory.
Garrett looks back over his shoulder. His hand drops from the handlebar and covers both of mine at his belt, checking that my grip holds, and the warmth of his palm soaks through my gloves.
His jacket swallows me. The sleeves hang past my wrists, the hem hits mid-thigh, and the collar smells like him: woodsmoke, cedar, the faint animal musk that I've stopped noticing at the cabin but catch fresh in the cold December air.
He put it on me this morning without a word, shrugging out of it in the parking lot and draping it across my shoulders while I held my travel mug and watched him settle for a denim vest over his shirt.
Jess, from Finn's bike two rows back, caught my eye and mouthed oh my gosh with the theatrical delight of a woman who lives for this.
The clubhouse lot idles around us. Exhaust plumes climb and dissolve in the cold.
Snow crunches under boots as the brothers strap down the last boxes on the flatbed, and Knox, baby Reeve buckled against his chest in a carrier that turns the president of the Feral Sons into something out of a parenting magazine nobody would ever print, runs his hand down the manifest on his phone with Sarah leaning over his shoulder.
"We're hitting the Ramsey place first," Knox calls. "North end. Then down through Pine Ridge and into town. Sarah's got the list."
Sarah holds up a clipboard. She organized half of this.
Jess told me yesterday, while we restocked the suture kits, that Sarah spent November cataloguing toy donations through the school.
She knows which family has the kid who reads two grades ahead and wants chapter books, which house has the teenager who'd rather have a gift card but won't ask.
She mapped the delivery route by hand, color-coded for age groups, and handed it to Knox a few days ago.
Knox didn't change a thing.
Garrett swings his leg over the bike and the whole frame dips under him.
I climb on behind him. My helmet brushes the base of his horns.
My boots barely reach the pegs. When he leans into the first turn out of the lot, the bike tilts at an angle my body cannot counterbalance because he has two hundred pounds on me and I'm hanging on like a backpack strapped to a grizzly bear.
The first stop is a trailer park on the north edge of town, tucked into a clearing where the Douglas firs thin out and the land flattens toward the coast. A single-wide with a wreath on the door and Christmas lights strung along the gutter, half of them burned out.
Garrett pulls two wrapped boxes from the flatbed and carries them to the porch. I follow. My boots crunch on the frozen gravel and the cold bites through my jeans, but his jacket keeps it out.
A woman opens the door. Late thirties, worn down to the studs.
I've seen that face in every ER waiting room I've ever worked—a woman running on caffeine and stubbornness because nothing else is available.
Three kids press against her legs. The oldest, maybe eight, stares at the bikes in the lot with wide eyes.
The middle one peeks around her mother's hip.
Garrett crouches to set the presents on the porch, bringing himself level with the kids. The youngest, maybe four, stares up at him with enormous eyes. Then his hand shoots out and grabs the tip of Garrett's horn.
Garrett freezes. His whole body locks, the same brace I saw at the hardware store last week, the same reflex that kicks in when a stranger gets too close. The mother's face tightens.
The child tugs the filed-down tip and grins. "You're like a bull."
Garrett's mouth twitches. He sets the wrapped box in the kid's arms. The boy hugs it to his chest and bolts inside, yelling something about Santa that rattles the screen door behind him.
"Thank you," the mother says. She's looking at me, then at Garrett, then at the stack of presents on the flatbed with an expression I've seen in triage rooms when a family gets good news they didn't expect. "He's been asking about Santa."
Garrett nods.
I catch the look on his face when he stands.
Unguarded, open in a way I haven't seen at the cabin where he controls every expression like a man rationing supplies.
The child's grip on his horn cracked him wide open for half a second.
The tenderness in his face when a four-year-old treated his horns like a jungle gym instead of a weapon.
I could watch this man with children every Christmas for the rest of my life.
The thought hits and I shove it under before it takes root. No. I'm not doing this. Eight weeks left on the contract and I'm fantasizing about holidays. Mami would have a field day. Mija, you moved in and started decorating.
I turn and walk back to the bike and pretend the cold is what's making my eyes sting.
The run takes us through downtown Nightfall Cove.
Knox at the head of the column, Sarah on the back, Reeve bundled between them.
Finn and Jess behind them, Jess's arms locked around Finn's waist, the claiming mark visible above her collar where her scarf has slipped.
She's barely showing, a slight curve under her jacket that I wouldn't notice if I didn't spend five days a week standing next to her at the clinic, but Finn's hand goes to her stomach every time they stop, possessive, a gesture he doesn't seem to know he's making.
She shoves him each time. He does it again.
The town turns out.
People line the sidewalks like a parade route nobody organized.
Shop owners step onto porches. A group of kids chases the bikes for half a block before a parent calls them back.
Betty stands in the doorway of the diner with a tray of something steaming, cinnamon rolls from the smell of it, and Gerald a half step behind her, hat tipped back, steadying the tray when she leans too far over the curb. She swats his hand. He does it again.
I feel the stares.
Nightfall Cove chose its monsters twenty years ago, during a wildfire that cracked the secret open, and from what Sarah told me over coffee last week, the majority never looked back.
The bikers rumble through the main drag, chrome, leather, horns and tusks, and the town watches with the comfort of people who've seen this ride every December.
But there are others. A woman on the corner pulling her child closer, her hand tight on the kid's shoulder.
A man in a truck who keeps his eyes on Garrett a beat too long and doesn't wave.
And on a telephone pole at the intersection of Main and Second, a flyer I catch in the corner of my eye as we roll past.
PROTECT OUR TOWN.
A clenched fist, printed in red. Humans First. I've seen the logo on flyers stapled to bulletin boards around town, stickers peeling off lamp posts, a banner someone hung across the bridge last week that Dawson tore down before noon.
The flyer flaps in the wind as we pass, and I press my face against the back of his vest and wrap my arms tighter.
Holly shows up at the fifth delivery with a camera slung around her neck. Her hair is purple. She's shooting for the Rusty Anchor's community board, she tells me, and she moves through the deliveries like a woman who knows how to disappear behind a lens.
She catches Rex.
He's on the porch of a house on Cedar Street, crouching in front of a little girl who's maybe six, handing her a present wrapped in paper covered with reindeer.
The kid tears into it. Rex grins at her, genuine and wide and nothing like the guarded expression he carries at the clubhouse. Holly's camera clicks.
Rex looks up, and his grin fades into an intensity that has no business on the face of a man handing out Christmas presents. Holly lowers the camera first. Her hand shakes when she adjusts the lens cap, a fine tremor in fingers covered in silver rings.
Later, at the clubhouse, the brothers unload the flatbed and Holly leans against the bar with her phone pressed to her ear. "Yeah, I'm free tonight. The new place on the waterfront? Sure."
Rex is six feet away, restocking bottles behind the bar. His grip on a whiskey bottle tightens until I can see the tendons shift in his forearm. He sets the bottle down with a care that says more than slamming it would, but his mouth stays shut. He reaches for the next bottle.
Sarah drops onto the couch beside me while the brothers unload the truck. Jess takes the chair across from us, glass of water in her hand, feet tucked under her. They settle in like women who've done this before—waited while the men work, talked while the noise carries through the walls.
"Garrett actually talks to you?" Sarah asks.
I nod.
Sarah and Jess exchange a glance that carries an entire conversation I'm not part of.
"In the time I've been here," Jess says, "I've heard Garrett say maybe ten words total."
Sarah pulls her legs up on the couch, tucking them beneath her the same way Jess did. "He spoke at our wedding. 'You look beautiful.' That's it."
I think about the cabin. His voice dragging out of him, gravel and rust, a machine that sat idle for so long the parts fused together. The effort each word costs him. In the dark, the soft broken sha'li that fell out of him like a confession he didn't mean to make.
"He makes me breakfast," I say, because I don't know how to explain the rest of it.
The purring. The carving he's been working on by the fire, the shape emerging from the wood that I think might be a hummingbird.
The way he stands at the window when Jess picks me up and watches the truck until we reach the road.
Sarah reaches over and squeezes my hand. The gesture is so casual, so certain, that my throat closes.
Three weeks in and they're already making room for you. You know how this ends, Nina. You pack a bag and drive to the next city and the group text goes quiet.
I squeeze her hand back. I let go first.
The bathroom down the hall is empty. I lock the door, sit on the edge of the tub, and pull out my phone.
The email from Swedish Medical Center in Seattle sits in my inbox where it's been sitting for four days.
I've opened it twice already. Travel nurse, Level 2 trauma, twelve-week contract starting March first. The pay is better than Nightfall Cove.
The city is bigger. The hospital is a name that would look good on the business plan.
I tap reply.
My thumbs hover over the screen. I type: Thank you for reaching out. I'd like to discuss the position further.
Professional. Clean. The sentence I've typed a dozen times for a dozen contracts in a dozen cities.
But I don't send it. I can't seem to make myself.
I close the app. The draft saves itself to the outbox, a half-finished escape route glowing in the dark of my phone screen. I press my forehead against my knees and breathe until the tightness in my chest loosens enough to walk back out there and smile.
The headlight cuts a tunnel through falling flakes. The forest closes around us, Douglas firs heavy with white. Garrett takes the curves slow, his body solid in front of mine, blocking the wind. I press my cheek against the warm plane of his back, and my arms hold what they can reach.
His hand drops from the handlebar and covers mine at his belt.
Through the layers of leather and flannel and denim, I feel the purr. Low and constant. The snow lands on my helmet and melts. The engine carries us through the dark.
I close my eyes.
I don't count the weeks left on the contract.
I don't think about Phoenix, about the exit strategy I've kept running in the background since the day I arrived.
I let myself have this ride. This man. This road through the trees with the snow falling and his hand over mine and the purr rolling through both of us like a current that doesn't care about contracts or timelines or the part of me that's already grieving the leaving.
The cabin appears through the firs, porch light glowing against the snow. He helps me off the bike, his hand spanning my waist, steadying me on the frozen ground. The air hits the places his body kept warm and I lean into him before I can stop myself.
He doesn't pull away. His arm comes around my shoulders, and we stand in the clearing with the snow falling and the bike ticking cool behind us.
I press my forehead against his chest.
The purr deepens.