Cade
"You're fucking killing me." She couldn't hear. I was shouting inside my own head.
She was built for this road. The bike was built for this road. Low, light, and vicious through the turns.
I wasn't.
Eight hundred pounds of American iron doesn't carve… it commits. Every lean was a negotiation. Every corner, a prayer. I heard metal scrape pavement on a tight left past the Niantic River and felt the peg shave itself a little shorter.
She was gone.
Sweeping past stone walls and flashes of ocean, I could see her ahead.
A dark shape dropping in and out of the curves like she was stitching the road together.
Route 1 opened wider and I closed the gap on the straights, the Road King doing what it does best when you point it forward and let it breathe.
But every time the road bent, she'd vanish again.
We hit the bridge over the Thames and the world opened up. Shipyards below, and nothing but silver water ahead. She was two bikes ahead, steady now, and I watched her helmet turn. Just enough to check.
She saw me, eased off, and rolled the throttle back to a cruise, sitting up in the saddle like she’d won.
I didn't ease off.
I blew past her like I'd been holding back the whole time, leaned low over the tank, and took the lead into Groton with everything the King had.
For about eight seconds, I was winning.
Then she was beside me, shaking her head. I could see the grin even through the visor.
I laughed. Couldn't help it.
We both turned down the volume, and let the engines settle into a low, matched rumble. Side by side, easy now, the war over and neither of us needing to say who won. We both knew.
The road narrowed as we turned toward Bluff Point. Trees closed overhead like a tunnel and the pavement gave way to gravel. A sign said no vehicles beyond the lot, but she didn't even slow down. Just threaded the Bonneville past the barrier and onto the fire road like she'd done it a hundred times.
I followed her, because that was what I did now.
The canopy thickened, and the world got quieter. Gravel crunched under our tires as the bikes idled through the shade until the trees thinned and the sky broke open and there it was… endless bluffs and nothing else. No cars. No people. No noise but the waves hitting rock.
She killed the engine first. Pulled off her helmet and hung it on the handlebar.
I pulled up beside her and did the same.
The wind came off the water and hit us both, and she was looking at me with that face… flushed, alive, and still half-wild from the ride.
"Told you," she said.
“Bitch.”