I’d spent twenty-four years being managed. Being adjusted for. And now I was living in a compound full of men who didn’t see anything in me worth adjusting for, and the freedom of it made me dizzy.
Doc was the one who cracked the world open.
“Come on,” he said. Standing in the kitchen doorway, keys in his hand, looking at me like the decision had already been made. “You need more clothes, toiletries. Stuff that isn’t whatever you’ve been cycling through for two weeks.”
“I can’t afford...”
“Club’s got a tab at the general store in town. Staff perk.”
I didn’t think for one moment that the club had a tab at the general store. I didn’t think “staff perk” was a real thing in a motorcycle club. But arguing with Doc was an exercise infutility I’d learned to recognize early, and he was already walking toward the lot.
He handed me a helmet.
“You ever been on a bike?”
“No.”
“Hold on to me. Lean when I lean. Don’t fight it.”
I climbed on behind him and my thighs pressed against the outside of his and the heat of him came through his shirt and into my hands where they rested on his waist and the physical intimacy wasn’t lost on me.
Then the engine kicked to life and thought became impossible.
The road from the compound wound through pines for three miles before it hit the highway. I’d driven it in my car a dozen times, but on the back of a bike it was a different road entirely. The wind, the speed, the way the world opened up around you with nothing between your body and the air. The curves pulled at me and I held on tighter, my arms locked around his waist, my chest against his back, and something in me that had been clenched for weeks, months, years, loosened its grip.
The mountains were enormous from here. Close, real, the kind of big that made your own problems feel like the appropriate size. The sky was wide and blue and the air was pine, cold water, freedom, and I pressed my face against Doc’s shoulder and laughed into the wind because I couldn’t help it. Because this was so far from Cherry Hills, so far from linen napkins and charity galas and a mother who scheduled my smile, that the distance felt like a country.
Forsaken’s main street was quiet in the morning. Doc parked outside the general store, a timber building with a creaking porch and a hand-painted sign. He held the door and I walked in and stopped.
It sold everything. Hardware, groceries, clothes, toiletries, all crammed into narrow aisles that smelled like sawdust, cardboard, and clean cotton. Nothing fancy. Nothing curated. Nothing that came with a personal shopper and a glass of prosecco.
“Get what you need,” Doc said. He leaned against the counter near the register, arms folded, settled in to wait.
I stood in the women’s section, which was half an aisle between the work boots and the canned goods, and looked at the rack of t-shirts, flannels, jeans. Simple clothes. Practical. Nothing my mother would have called appropriate.
I picked up a flannel. Red and black, something I’d never have been allowed to own in my old life. I held it against myself and looked down at it and felt something ridiculous happening behind my eyes.
“That one,” Doc said from the end of the aisle.
I turned. He was watching me with that steady attention that I’d stopped trying to pretend I didn’t notice. The way his eyes tracked me in a room, missing nothing, reading everything. Right now he was reading a woman holding a twenty-dollar flannel shirt like it was the most important decision she’d ever made, and the thing was, it almost felt like it was.
“Yeah?”
“Looks right on you.”
I bought the flannel. And jeans, and a couple of t-shirts, and proper boots because my ballet flats were starting to see better days. They were designer and weren’t exactly meant for bar work. A new toothbrush, shampoo, things I’d been rationing from travel-size bottles I’d got from a gas station. Doc carried the bags back to the bike and put them in the saddlebags and didn’t say a word about any of it. I stood on the porch of the general store in Forsaken, Montana, wearing new boots that Ihad picked out myself, and felt something settle inside me that I didn’t have a name for.
Choice. That was the name for it. Small, ordinary, something most people did without thinking. I’d picked a shirt. I’d chosen boots. Nobody had approved the selection, nobody had checked the label, nobody had weighed whether it reflected appropriately on the family.
I’d just chosen. And it counted.
We stopped at Rosie’s for coffee on the way back. The diner was warm, humming, Rosie herself behind the counter with a coffee pot that never seemed to empty. She knew my name already, and had the casual interest of someone who’d adopted me into the town’s ecosystem without asking permission.
Doc sat across from me in the booth, his mug between his hands. We talked. About the compound, the bar, the town. He told me about the shop, Forsaken Iron Works, where the brothers did legitimate work on bikes and cars. He told me about the road, the way the highway ran north through the mountains into wilderness so remote you could ride for hours without seeing another soul. He told me things about himself in small, careful pieces. Former combat medic. Years overseas. Came to the club because the world he’d trained for didn’t exist anymore and the world he’d come home to didn’t fit.
I told him things too. Tentative, testing. That I’d studied art history at CU Denver because my mother wanted me to and I’d actually loved it. That I could identify a Rothko from across a room but couldn’t make toast without setting off a smoke alarm. That before the dinners and the suitors and the lineup, there’d been a version of me who had opinions about things.
He listened the way he did everything. Fully, completely, like what I was saying was worth the space it took up. I wasn’t used to that. In my family, my words had been decorative. Pretty soundsto fill silences at dinner parties, nothing that required actual attention.
