I couldn’t stop looking at her.
The other brothers looked too, appreciative glances they thought they were hiding. She was beautiful. Long blonde hair she wore pulled back for shifts, brown eyes that went wide when she laughed, a body that was soft in all the places a body should be soft and that I wasn’t going to think about because I was a grown man sitting at a bar losing his mind over a woman who was clearly in trouble and the last thing she needed was someone making her life complicated.
I was thirty-eight. She was, what, mid-twenties. Young enough that the gap mattered. Young enough that the way she looked at me sometimes, curious, a little uncertain, made me feel like I should be standing further away from her than I was.
And still. I sat in the same seat every night. Drank slowly. Watched her navigate a room full of bikers with the grace of a newborn deer on a frozen lake, and felt something I didn’t have the good sense to ignore.
Friday night. Last call had been twenty minutes ago. The bar was emptying out, brothers heading through to the lodge or peeling off toward town. Bree finished up, pulled her jacket on, said something to Evie near the door that I couldn’t hear. Evie smiled. Bree left.
I should have gone through to the lodge. My room was fifty feet through the back corridor, and I had the club’s quarterly accounts to reconcile in the morning. There was no reason to still be sitting here with an empty glass in front of me and the lights going up.
She finished closing up. Turned off the lights, locked the front door. I’d moved outside before she finished, leaned against the wall in the far corner of the lot where the shadows from the building ran long.
She came around the back of the building. Walked to her car, the sedan parked against the wall. She looked around once, quick, the instinctive scan of someone who’d been checking over her shoulder long enough that it was habit. Then she got in.
I waited for the engine to start. For the headlights to swing across the lot, for the car to pull out, for her to drive to wherever she was staying.
Nothing happened.
The engine didn’t start. The headlights didn’t come on. She was just sitting in the car, in the dark, in a parking lot behind a bar at midnight.
I stood there long enough to be sure. Long enough to see a dim light go on inside the car, probably a flashlight or a book light, then go off again. Long enough to see no movement at all, and to understand, gut-deep, exactly what I was looking at.
She was sleeping in her car.
The new girl. The one who smiled at everyone, who laughed when she dropped things, who tipped herself out on every spilled drink because she didn’t know that wasn’t how it worked. She had no phone, no money she wasn’t earning by the shift, no place to go when the lights went off.
She’d been sleeping in this parking lot all week.
I pushed off the wall.
The gravel was loud under my boots in the quiet. I walked to her car and stopped at the driver’s side window. She was reclined as far as the seat would go, which wasn’t far, a blanket pulled up to her chin, her bag wedged into the footwell. Her eyes were closed. She looked small, folded into that seat, smaller than she looked behind the bar where she filled every room she walked into just by being in it.
I knocked on the window. Two knocks, even, not hard.
She jolted awake. The kind of full-body startle that came from sleeping somewhere you didn’t feel safe, adrenaline to sixty in a heartbeat, her eyes snapping open, her hand grabbing for the door lock before she was fully conscious.
She saw me and the fear drained out of her face. Replaced by something worse. Shame.
She opened the door. Slowly, like she was hoping the ground would swallow her before she had to look at me.
“Doc.” Her voice was rough with sleep. “I was just... I’m...”
“How long?”
She didn’t pretend not to understand. I watched her weigh the options, the lie and the truth, and the truth won because she was too tired to build anything else.
“Since I got here. Five days.”
Five days. Five nights in this car, in this lot, in Montana where the temperature dropped below forty after midnight even in summer.
“Get your stuff,” I said.
She blinked. “What?”
“Your bag, whatever’s in the car that you need. Get it.”
“I’m fine. It’s not... I’ve been managing.”
