CHAPTER 4
Open Door
°°°
By Thursday, Tank had invented four separate pieces of club business that could plausibly route him past Cedar Falls Urgent Care, used exactly none of them, and was starting to suspect the part of his brain responsible for tactical planning had developed an entirely separate, unauthorized division devoted solely to Lexie Holloway.
He told himself the fifth reason was legitimate.
It even mostly was — a prospect named Cutlass, the same one whose hand she'd stitched back together in April, had a minor infection setting up shop under one of the closed wounds, redness creeping past the edge of the scar in a way that worried Tank enough that he decided, reasonably, that a man in his position should probably confirm in person whether a patch needed a doctor or just needed to stop picking at things.
That the confirmation could have been handled by literally anyone else in the club, including Cutlass himself with a phone camera, was a detail Tank declined to examine with the same rigor he applied to most things.
The clinic was quieter at five than it had been at eight on Tuesday, the after-work lull before whatever passed for a dinner rush in a town the size of Cedar Falls.
Marisol was at the front desk, and something in her expression when Tank walked in — a quick flick of her eyes toward the back room, a smile she was trying and failing to keep off her face — told him word had already traveled through whatever channel carried gossip between a walk-in clinic and a motorcycle club with alarming efficiency.
"She's finishing up with a patient," Marisol said, entirely too pleased with herself. "You can wait."
He waited. He did not sit, because sitting felt like committing to something, and stood instead near the window with his hands in his pockets, doing the thing his body did automatically in any unfamiliar space — cataloging exits, sightlines, the general shape of who could get in and who could get out — a habit so old it barely registered as a habit anymore, just weather, just how a room looked to him.
Lexie came out eleven minutes later, in scrubs the color of a rained-on sky, hair escaping in loose pieces from whatever she'd done with it that morning, the exhausted alertness of someone eight hours into a shift that had asked more of her than the average day required.
She stopped short when she saw him, just for a half-second, something crossing her face too fast to name before she got it under control.
"Cutlass's hand," Tank said, before she could ask, before the moment could turn into something either of them would have to acknowledge out loud. "Redness past the scar line. Wanted a professional opinion before I decided if it's a problem."
"You drove over here for that?"
"Drove past here for that." A lie, technically, in the sense that he had not, in fact, been going anywhere that required passing the clinic, but close enough to true that he could say it without his voice doing anything that would give him away.
She studied him for a second — not suspicious, exactly, more like she was deciding whether to let the lie stand — and then apparently decided it wasn't worth the argument.
"Bring him by tomorrow morning. If it's spread past where I remember stitching, I want to look at it properly, not diagnose it off a description from a man who thinks a bruise and a fracture require the same level of concern. "
"Noted." He almost left it there. He'd gotten what he came for, or the excuse for what he came for, and the professional version of this conversation was over.
But she was still standing in the doorway, arms crossed loose over her chest, not moving to end it either, and something about the tiredness in her face — not fragile, just worn thin at the edges the way twelve-hour shifts wore people thin — made him say the thing he hadn't planned on saying. "You look wrecked."
"Excuse me?"
"Not an insult." He'd learned, apparently, in the space of one text exchange four days ago, that reliable's not an insult was a sentence that had done something to her, and some instinct he didn't fully understand was telling him this observation needed the same qualifier.
"You look like a woman who's been on her feet since six with maybe one break, and I know that because I've spent twenty years around people who look exactly like that after they've given everything they had to a day that didn't ask permission first."
Lexie's arms uncrossed, slow, like the observation had gotten past whatever defense she usually kept up for comments about her appearance. "Nine hours," she admitted. "Marisol called in sick, so it was just me and Doc most of the day."
"You eat?"
"I had a granola bar around noon that I'm fairly sure was mostly guilt calories from skipping breakfast."
"That's not eating." He said it flat, no judgment in it, the same tone he'd used to correct the just triage comment on Tuesday, a man setting a factual record straight because the wrong version was sitting in the room and bothering him. "Walk you to your car."
It wasn't a question, not quite, but it also wasn't the flat command it might have been from someone else — there was room in it, she realized, an actual door left open rather than a decision made for her, and something about that shape of the offer was what made her nod instead of deflecting the way she usually would have.
The lot behind the clinic was half-empty at this hour, evening coming down soft and gold over the row of cars, and Tank fell into step beside her without commentary, without hovering, matching her pace in a way that felt less like an escort and more like two people simply walking in the same direction, which she suspected was a distinction he'd made deliberately.
"You don't have to do this every time one of your guys gets stitched up," she said, when they were halfway across the lot, mostly to fill the quiet, which had a texture to it she wasn't used to — not awkward, exactly, but full in a way silence with most people wasn't.
"Don't do it for every guy." He said it simply, the same unadorned directness she was starting to recognize as just how he operated, no performance in it, no calculation she could detect. "Just this one."
"Cutlass?"
"You know that's not who I meant."
She did know. She'd known before she asked, had asked mostly to see if he'd actually say it plainly instead of letting it sit unspoken the way most men would have, testing the water with implication instead of committing to the thing itself.
He'd said it plainly. That, more than the words themselves, was what made her chest do the thing again, the small unfamiliar architecture shift she'd felt reading his text three nights ago.
They reached her car, an aging sedan with a dent in the rear bumper she'd never bothered fixing because fixing it had never made the list above rent and savings and the slow, patient accumulation toward the clinic she wanted to open someday.
Tank's eyes moved over it — not judging, cataloging, she realized, the same way he'd cataloged the room when he first walked in, an assessment running behind his eyes that had nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with some deeper habit of checking whether a space was safe.
"You always park back here?" he asked, and something in his voice had shifted, gone a half-degree more alert, though she couldn't have said what triggered it.
"It's closer to the back entrance. Why?"
He didn't answer right away. His gaze had moved past her, to the far corner of the lot, where a car she didn't recognize — dark, nondescript, the kind of vehicle that existed to not be noticed — sat with its engine running, no one visibly inside that she could see from this distance, parked at an angle that put it in clear view of the clinic's back door.
"No reason," he said, after a beat too long, and something about the careful neutrality of it told her he was filing the observation away rather than dismissing it, a distinction she wouldn't fully understand the weight of for another three days. "Get in. Lock the doors."
"You're being weird."
"I'm being careful." A small, deliberate correction, the same instinct that had made him correct just triage now applied to himself. "There's a difference."
She got in. She locked the doors, mostly because refusing felt like it would take more energy than she had left after nine hours on her feet, and watched through the windshield as Tank stood in the lot a moment longer, not moving toward his own bike yet, his attention still angled toward the far corner where the unfamiliar car sat.
By the time she'd started her engine, it had pulled away, in no particular hurry, turning out of the lot in a direction that meant nothing to her and, she suspected, meant something specific to him.
He knocked once on her window before she pulled out, and she rolled it down.
"Number's still good?" he asked, nodding at nothing in particular, a question that had nothing to do with the number itself and everything to do with something else he wasn't saying yet.
"Still good."
"Lock your apartment door when you get home. Both locks, not just the knob."
"I always lock my door."
"Do it anyway." It wasn't quite an order, but it wasn't far off one either, and she found herself nodding before she'd decided to, some old instinct in her recognizing that this directness came from a place she didn't fully understand yet but trusted more than the request probably warranted. "I'll text you."
He did, twenty minutes later, while she was three bites into a dinner that was actually food and not a granola bar. Locked in?
Both locks, she typed back. Happy?
Working on it, he wrote, which she read four times trying to decide whether he meant the locks or something else entirely, and fell asleep that night without an answer, but with the warm unease of a woman who suspected, for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, that someone was actually paying attention to whether she was safe — and that the reasons for it might run deeper than a stitched-up prospect's hand.