4. Viper
VIPER
Trapper finds me in the garage with grease up to my elbows. Joker and Duke went to get my bike, where I left it, and brought it back here. I should have it fixed within a day or two.
“Got those details you asked for,” he says. “Joker pulled the information. I’m just the messenger.”
I don’t look up from the bike. “Go.”
“Her name is Eden Kincaid. Twenty-two. Lives with her folks off Terrace Road.” He reads it off his phone. “Her dad is a preacher. Half the town shows up to hear him at the congregation out past the highway.”
So she wasn’t lying about that.
“Nursing student, like she said,” he continues. “Community college. Tuesday and Thursday classes, mornings into the afternoon. Clinical hours at the county hospital.” He scrolls. “No boyfriend that anybody knows of. Doesn’t drink. Goes to class, goes to the hospital, goes home. That’s her routine.”
I wipe my hands and take the phone off him long enough to read a few additional notes. Then I hand it back.
“Thanks,” I tell him.
He nods, and then he’s gone before I can say anything else. Good guy.
I stand in the garage with the schedule already memorized and tell myself I’m not going to use it.
But by Tuesday morning, I’m leaning on my bike in the community college lot.
Her car is easy to spot when it pulls into the parking lot. The same little sedan I bled all over days ago. I park one row over and wait, and when she steps out of her car with a bag over her shoulder, she stops.
Then she smiles. “Are you following me?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyebrows shoot up, surprised by my answer. She figured I’d lie.
“Okay,” she says. “Honest. I like honesty.” She hikes the bag higher on her shoulder. “Why?”
Because I can’t stop thinking about her, but I don’t say that.
“To walk you to class,” I say.
She looks at me a beat too long. “All right.”
She talks the whole way across the lot. About a test that she’s nervous about. About a man at the hospital who calls every nurse by his dead wife’s name, and how it got to her a little. About her father reading the text messages on her phone at the table while her mother says nothing.
Her dad sounds like an asshole, and her mother sounds spineless.
I don’t say much. I don’t have to. She fills every silence, and I let her.
I could listen to her talk until the sun gave out.
“This is my class.” She stops at a door.
“I’ll be here when you’re done.”
“Why?”
She knows why, but she wants to hear it. I’m not ready to give her that. “I’ll see you when you’re done.”
“Okay.” She ducks her head and goes in.
Just like I promised, I’m there when she comes out.
I’m there on Thursday too, and every Tuesday and Thursday for the next month.
It turns into a thing I do—meet her in the parking lot, walk her to class, wait, walk her back to her car.
Some days, we sit on the curb in the heat, and she talks. She asks questions, too, but I don’t give her much. I only want to hear about her.
Her dreams are admirable. She wants to work with sick kids. Says somebody has to do it, and she figures she can take it without falling apart.
“What about you?” she asks, knees pulled up, squinting at me in the sun. “You ever want to do something else? Be something else?”
Nobody’s asked me that before. Most people take one look and figure they’ve got the whole story.
“Wasn’t a lot of choices where I came from,” I say.
“Where’s that?” She opens a granola bar and offers me one.
I take the bar, but I’m not hungry. “Grew up in the system. Foster homes. Group homes. Wherever there was a bed.”
She goes quiet. For once, she lets it sit.
“There were little ones in those places. Younger than me. People went after them.” I turn the granola bar in my hands. “I was bigger than most. Somebody had to defend them, and I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t shy away from violence when it was needed.”
“You protected the kids.”
“I did what needed doing. But a kid good at that doesn’t end up with options.” I take a drink. “Then I found the Hellborn Kings. They took me in. Let me be what I am. I show up, I do the thing. They’re my family now. We trust each other.”
That’s more than I’ve said out loud in a year. I don’t know why it’s this girl I’m saying it to. Saber thinks she knows too much, and I just keep giving her more.
She turns all the way toward me.
“It sounds like you’ve spent your whole life being the one everybody leans on,” she says. “The kids. Now the club.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
She picks at the corner of her granola wrapper, taking her time, which she almost never does.
“You’ve got people who care about you. I can tell.” She lifts her face to mine. “But that’s not the same as having someone who cares for you. You know that, right? There’s a difference.”
Fuck.
I open the granola bar and take a bite, so I don’t have to hold her eyes.
It doesn’t help, and the tension grows in my chest until my brain names it.
She’s mine.
The thought comes down plain and final, no argument anywhere in it. I don’t decide it. It’s already true, and it’s been true since I opened my eyes in her car.
This nursing student. This preacher’s daughter. She’s mine.
A woman like this doesn’t deserve a day of unhappiness.
Nothing in this world will hurt her. Not while I’m breathing. I’ll make sure of it personally.
She wants to sit with frightened kids, so they’re not alone when they’re sick. I kept frightened kids from getting hurt by turning into the kind of man you call when somebody needs hurting.
That’s who’s sitting next to her in the sun, and she’s smiling at me like I’m safe.
There’s no version of this where I’m good for her.
But I don’t give a fuck.
I need her.
On Sunday, I do something with no good reason behind it.
I leave the bike and drive my truck to the chapel where her father preaches.
The lot is packed with sedans and minivans baking in the Arizona sun. I want to see her in the world where her father raised her.
So, I go inside and take the last row, and sit in a clean shirt with my sleeves pulled down over the ink.
Her father is a short man behind the podium, gray coming in at the temples. He preaches about obedience. About a woman’s place under a man’s roof. About daughters who wander off the path their fathers set for them.
He’s looking at Eden in the front pew when he says that last part.
Eden’s up there in a dress buttoned to her throat, hands folded, eyes down. She doesn’t talk. She doesn’t smile. The woman sitting in the pew is nothing like the one who stitched up my stab wound in the middle of the road.
She’s smaller here. Made quiet on purpose.
I sit in the last row and watch a man teach a whole room that the best person I’ve ever met ought to keep her mouth shut.
That doesn’t sit well with me.
The rest of the sermon is much of the same. When it’s over, I wait by the truck while everyone files out.
People line up to shake the preacher’s hand on the steps. I stay where the cars hide me, figuring I’ll watch her get in her parents’ car and go, and that’ll be that.
She finds me anyway.
She comes around the side of my truck still in that buttoned-up dress, and her whole face changes the second she sees me. She’s happy to see me. The folded-up girl from the front pew is gone.
“You came,” she says, quiet, glancing at the crowd. “To my dad’s service.”
“Wanted to see it.”
“And?”
I shrug. “Now I’ve seen it.”
She huffs a laugh, but her eyes don’t hold it. “That bad?”
“He holds you back.”
Her smile drops. “Yeah. He does.”
We’re standing close. Closer than a second ago. I don’t remember moving. Her face is tipped up to mine, and the heat’s coming off the asphalt. A piece of red hair sticks to her cheek.
I lift my hand to her cheek to brush the hair back. She doesn’t pull away. She leans into it, and her lips part, and I start to lean down—
“Eden!”
Her father, calling across the lot.
She steps back so fast she stumbles. I catch her elbow and let go just as quickly. The happiness in her face shuts off. The closed-off girl is in front of me again before she even turns around.
“I have to go, Viper.”
“Tanner,” I tell her.
“What?”
I want her to know me. The real me. “My real name is Tanner. I want you to know.”
“Tanner,” she says my name, dragging out the syllables.
A tightness in my chest evaporates to something warm that spreads to every limb.
“Go,” I tell her.
“Tanner—”
“Go, Eden.”
She turns and walks toward her father with her head down and her shoulders curled in.
I don’t wait for her to look back. She won’t.
I’m not a good man. But I’d be good to her.
He’s caged her. I’d let her loose.
A dangerous life at my side beats a safe one cowering under a man like that.