Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 75547 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75547 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
“How’s the address feel?” he asks, casually.
“1189,” I reply, like I’m giving him a password to something treasured.
“Good.” He nudges the notebook with a knuckle. “What’s next?”
“DMV,” I groan. “But not a rush. I have a license just with his address.”
He smirks. “Might be able to change that shit online. Look into it.”
He moves around the kitchen, because apparently in this house dinner is a real thing and not a mystical event. I take the jar of pickles out of the fridge and eat one over the sink like a teenager and he doesn’t comment except to say, “Leave me two.” While taking out a steak from the fridge and dropping it into a sizzling frying pan on the stove.
Dinner is quiet. Not a painful quiet that is a battlefield disguised as calm, but the kind where two people chew and exist and the room. A space that doesn’t demand performance. When the plates are in the sink, we go back to the table with the notebook and a pen and coffee I add all the extra creams and sugars to because he makes his coffee strong. He tips his chin at the page again.
“All right,” he begins, echoing last night. “What do you want?”
This time, the answer comes easier. “I want to be useful tomorrow. I want to feel productive. I want to go to sleep and not rehearse the worst conversation of my life over and over. I want to wake up and have the list make sense. I want…” I laugh, soft and a little breathless. “I want to build a life that can’t get towed away.”
He stares at me for a beat that stretches long enough to be scary and then softens into something that looks like pride—sharp and private. “That’s the line,” he smirks. “Write that down. That’s your motto.”
I do. I underline it. A LIFE THAT CAN’T GET TOWED. It looks cheesy, but tough and perfect. The page feels heavier with it there.
He closes the notebook with one finger, careful like the words might try to run. “Good day.”
“Good day,” I echo.
When we go to bed, I don’t wait. I roll into him before my doubt can start its chant, my cheek finding the place where his shoulder becomes his chest, his heartbeat steady just like the man. He doesn’t comment. He simply lifts his arm to make space and drops his hand into my hair and starts the slow, absentminded strokes that unwind the tightest knots in the world. Yes, I did sleep on my side before and that shows I am capable. But right now, the way I feel in his arms, I don’t want to give this up. Call me selfish, but his touch soothes me.
“You’re going to ruin me for sleeping alone,” I mumble into his skin.
“Not a bad way to get ruined,” he mutters into the dark.
“No,” I whisper, “Not bad at all.”
He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. The day stacks neat behind us, the next things line up ahead, and for the first time in a long time, I fall asleep not as a person being kept, but as a person making a plan—with a biker’s hand in my hair and a key to a box in town and a line in a notebook that makes my chest feel wide open to experience the world on my terms.
I sleep like the person I might become.
Nine
Pretty Boy
The shop’s quiet by the time I leave, but my head isn’t. Noise follows me home. Not the good kind, not the hum of an engine you just tuned or the laughter of brothers.
The bad kind. Static. It sits under my skin, crawls through my ribs, itches for a fight or a long ride or something I can’t name.
By the time I hit the door of the house, I know I’m carrying it with me. Boots heavy, shoulders tight, jaw locked.
She’s been here a month. We have had this unique way of falling in line together. I don’t mean to come home like this, but it’s just me and I’m wound tight.
Kristen’s on the couch, legs curled under her, the notebook balanced on her lap. She looks up when the door shuts and her eyes widen just a little. Not much. Enough. She sets the pen down like it’s fragile, like maybe I walked in with blood on my hands.
The static spikes. Not at her — at the idea of her flinching because of me.
“Hey,” she greets carefully.
“Hey.” I drop my cut on the chair, take my boots off. My hands fist and flex, looking for something to hold that isn’t her fear.
She watches me, cautious. The notebook slides closed on her lap. She’s waiting to see if I come in swinging. I don’t. I never would. But she doesn’t know that deep in her bones yet, not the way I need her to.