Total pages in book: 42
Estimated words: 38856 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 194(@200wpm)___ 155(@250wpm)___ 130(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 38856 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 194(@200wpm)___ 155(@250wpm)___ 130(@300wpm)
"You held her hand for a summer," Eleanor says. "Then what?"
The scene before us shifts. Summer becomes fall, becomes winter, becomes spring. The silo remains, but we change. I grow taller, harder. Savannah grows more beautiful, more reserved.
Sixteen-year-old me parks a motorcycle outside the silo. Not my dirt bike—a real motorcycle. The Honda Shadow I saved another year to buy, working those same three jobs, pushing my body past exhaustion, sleepin’ four hours a night.
I bought it with hard-earned cash, counted out bills at the seller's kitchen table while he watched, suspicious of a kid with that much money. But it was mine. All mine. The first real bike I ever owned.
Sixteen-year-old me waits in the silo, pacing, runnin’ his hand through his hair. When Savannah arrives, I stop breathing. Because I know what happens next.
She steps inside, her hair longer now, her face thinner. No longer a child.
Sixteen-year-old me stops pacin’.
Looks at her.
Takes a step forward.
The memory of our first kiss burns through me like wildfire. I can't watch anymore. I turn away, my eyes finding the rusted walls of the silo instead.
That summer I turned sixteen changed everythin’. Not just because of Savannah, though she was part of it. It was the Shadow.
I bought it for three reasons. One. I had the money. Saved all year for it, even while I was paying Deacon to stay away.
Two. It was street legal. Which was better than a horse and a dirt bike. We’d ride that horse of Savannah's double sometimes. But two teenagers on a horse makes a scene. Two teenagers on a motorcycle with helmets on, do not.
I wanted to take her places. Places that were not a state park. I had big plans for dates. Most of which we never did because we were too busy kissing by that time. Doing bits and pieces of other things too.
But fourteen was too young. I wanted her pretty bad, just… not yet.
It was another year before we slept together. The summer I was sixteen was practice for that.
Third. A boy could not join a MC if he didn't have a fuckin' bike. Even if it was just a shitty Honda, it was better than a dirt bike.
I rode it into Terry, Montana almost every day that summer, got a job at their grain mill instead of Drybone’s.
There was no way to bump in to the Badlands crew in Drybone. They just didn’t go there. I'd been tracking them for months after that first encounter with Brick. Watching. Learning. The clubhouse was somewhere near Terry—I'd figured that much out from following their bikes at a distance, seeing which roads they took. I made myself a fixture in town, a local face, even though I still slept at home.
"You were hunting them," Eleanor says beside me, her voice almost admiring. "You wanted to be one of them."
I don't answer. I don't need to. She already knows.
After working at the Terry co-op for two months, I realized my mistake. Outlaw bikers don't frequent grain mills. They weren't gonna magically appear while I was sweeping floors and stacking bags. The men who worked there were decent enough—quiet, hardworking types who minded their business and expected the same from me. But they weren't bikers, that's for sure.
So I quit and got a job at a garage in Terry instead. Parts driver. It didn't pay as well as the co-op, but I didn't care about the money anymore. I cared about positioning. The garage was on the edge of town, the kind of place that didn't ask too many questions about who you were or where you came from.
Most of the mechanics were Northern Cheyenne from the reservation. They spoke their language to each other, switching to English only when they needed to talk to me. They treated me like a ghost—there but not there. I didn't mind. I watched. I listened. I picked up words here and there. Enough to understand when they were talking about bikes or customers.
The first time a Badlands member came into the shop, I almost missed him. No cut, no patches. Just a tall man with a long black braid and coveralls so stained with grease they might have been black originally.
Ratchet.
I didn’t know his name back then, obviously, but I recognized his face. He was there that day out at Makoshika. Not the one who held the gun to my head—that was Brick—but one of the others. Loading crates into the bunker.
He paused when he saw me, just for a second. A slight narrowing of the eyes, a tilt of the head.
I kept my face blank, but inside, my heart hammered against my ribs. This was it. The connection I'd been looking for. The way in.
Ratchet said something in Cheyenne to one of the other mechanics, who laughed. Then he walked past me like I didn't exist, heading straight for the manager's office.