I've tried twice. The first attempt got me halfway, my fingers gripping the edge of his belt on each side, my cheek pressed between his shoulder blades where the leather of his cut creaks. The second attempt, when he revved the engine and I lurched forward and grabbed on tighter, my hands overlapped by an inch at his navel and I called it a victory.
Garrett looks back over his shoulder. His hand drops from the handlebar and covers both of mine at his belt, checking that my grip holds, and the warmth of his palm soaks through my gloves.
His jacket swallows me. The sleeves hang past my wrists, the hem hits mid-thigh, and the collar smells like him: woodsmoke, cedar, the faint animal musk that I've stopped noticing at the cabin but catch fresh in the cold December air.
He put it on me this morning without a word, shrugging out of it in the parking lot and draping it across my shoulders while Iheld my travel mug and watched him settle for a denim vest over his shirt. Jess, from Finn's bike two rows back, caught my eye and mouthedoh my goshwith the theatrical delight of a woman who lives for this.
The clubhouse lot idles around us. Exhaust plumes climb and dissolve in the cold. Snow crunches under boots as the brothers strap down the last boxes on the flatbed, and Knox, baby Reeve buckled against his chest in a carrier that turns the president of the Feral Sons into something out of a parenting magazine nobody would ever print, runs his hand down the manifest on his phone with Sarah leaning over his shoulder.
"We're hitting the Ramsey place first," Knox calls. "North end. Then down through Pine Ridge and into town. Sarah's got the list."
Sarah holds up a clipboard. She organized half of this. Jess told me yesterday, while we restocked the suture kits, that Sarah spent November cataloguing toy donations through the school. She knows which family has the kid who reads two grades ahead and wants chapter books, which house has the teenager who'd rather have a gift card but won't ask. She mapped the delivery route by hand, color-coded for age groups, and handed it to Knox a few days ago.
Knox didn't change a thing.
Garrett swings his leg over the bike and the whole frame dips under him. I climb on behind him. My helmet brushes the base of his horns. My boots barely reach the pegs. When he leans into the first turn out of the lot, the bike tilts at an angle my body cannot counterbalance because he has two hundred pounds on me and I'm hanging on like a backpack strapped to a grizzly bear.
The first stop is a trailer park on the north edge of town, tucked into a clearing where the Douglas firs thin out and the land flattens toward the coast. A single-wide with a wreath on the door and Christmas lights strung along the gutter, half of them burned out.
Garrett pulls two wrapped boxes from the flatbed and carries them to the porch. I follow. My boots crunch on the frozen gravel and the cold bites through my jeans, but his jacket keeps it out.
A woman opens the door. Late thirties, worn down to the studs. I've seen that face in every ER waiting room I've ever worked—a woman running on caffeine and stubbornness because nothing else is available. Three kids press against her legs. The oldest, maybe eight, stares at the bikes in the lot with wide eyes. The middle one peeks around her mother's hip.
Garrett crouches to set the presents on the porch, bringing himself level with the kids. The youngest, maybe four, stares up at him with enormous eyes. Then his hand shoots out and grabs the tip of Garrett's horn.
Garrett freezes. His whole body locks, the same brace I saw at the hardware store last week, the same reflex that kicks in when a stranger gets too close. The mother's face tightens.
The child tugs the filed-down tip and grins. "You're like a bull."
Garrett's mouth twitches. He sets the wrapped box in the kid's arms. The boy hugs it to his chest and bolts inside, yelling something about Santa that rattles the screen door behind him.
"Thank you," the mother says. She's looking at me, then at Garrett, then at the stack of presents on the flatbed with an expression I've seen in triage rooms when a family gets good news they didn't expect. "He's been asking about Santa."
Garrett nods.
I catch the look on his face when he stands. Unguarded, open in a way I haven't seen at the cabin where he controls every expression like a man rationing supplies. The child's grip on his horn cracked him wide open for half a second. The tenderness in his face when a four-year-old treated his horns like a jungle gym instead of a weapon.
I could watch this man with children every Christmas for the rest of my life.
The thought hits and I shove it under before it takes root. No. I'm not doing this. Eight weeks left on the contract and I'm fantasizing about holidays. Mami would have a field day.Mija, you moved in and started decorating.
I turn and walk back to the bike and pretend the cold is what's making my eyes sting.
The run takes us through downtown Nightfall Cove. Knox at the head of the column, Sarah on the back, Reeve bundled between them. Finn and Jess behind them, Jess's arms locked around Finn's waist, the claiming mark visible above her collar where her scarf has slipped. She's barely showing, a slight curve under her jacket that I wouldn't notice if I didn't spend five days a week standing next to her at the clinic, but Finn's hand goes to her stomach every time they stop, possessive, a gesture hedoesn't seem to know he's making. She shoves him each time. He does it again.
The town turns out.
People line the sidewalks like a parade route nobody organized. Shop owners step onto porches. A group of kids chases the bikes for half a block before a parent calls them back. Betty stands in the doorway of the diner with a tray of something steaming, cinnamon rolls from the smell of it, and Gerald a half step behind her, hat tipped back, steadying the tray when she leans too far over the curb. She swats his hand. He does it again.
I feel the stares.
Nightfall Cove chose its monsters twenty years ago, during a wildfire that cracked the secret open, and from what Sarah told me over coffee last week, the majority never looked back. The bikers rumble through the main drag, chrome, leather, horns and tusks, and the town watches with the comfort of people who've seen this ride every December.
But there are others. A woman on the corner pulling her child closer, her hand tight on the kid's shoulder. A man in a truck who keeps his eyes on Garrett a beat too long and doesn't wave. And on a telephone pole at the intersection of Main and Second, a flyer I catch in the corner of my eye as we roll past.
PROTECT OUR TOWN.
A clenched fist, printed in red. Humans First. I've seen the logo on flyers stapled to bulletin boards around town, stickers peeling off lamp posts, a banner someone hung across the bridge last week that Dawson tore down before noon.
