Cable’s eleven minutes.
The north wall blind spot.
Rhyder’s face in that church room and the promise made in the heat of the parking lot.
The unknown figure moving through the hacienda courtyard, something familiar in the way he carries himself that still won’t resolve into anything certain.
And underneath all of it, Sophia.
The weight of what is being ridden toward sits alongside the weight of what is being ridden away from, and both of them are real, and neither of them cancels out the other, and that is just what it is.
When I come back, she is on the back deck in the last of the sun with a book she isn’t reading, her legs tucked beneath her in the chair, her eyes somewhere in the middle distance beyond the page. I sit beside her without saying anything. The desert goes slowly gold around us, the mountains catching the last of the light, Memphis dropping heavily between our chairs with a sigh of pure contentment.
Neither of us says anything about tomorrow.
We don’t need to. It is already in everything, in the quality of the light and the particular stillness between us, in the way she reaches over after a while and places her hand over mine on the arm of the chair without looking up from the book, and in the way my hand turns over beneath hers and holds on without making anything of it.
Just present, both of us, for as long as we have left of today.
***
In the morning, she is already up when I come out of the bedroom, dressed and ready, her bag sitting by the door with the quiet finality of something decided.
“I’m coming with you. To the clubhouse. To properly say goodbye.”
Looking at her, the bag, the set of her jaw, and the blue eyes that are steady and entirely decided, I pick up the helmet from the counter and hold it out without a word.
She takes it the same way.
We ride through the Vegas morning in the silence of two people who have said everything and have nothing left to add to it. Her arms are around me, and her cheek is against my back, the city moving past on either side, and the clubhouse getting closer with the weight of a goodbye that neither of us is ready for, sitting quietly between us in the warm desert air.
The Sinners are already there when we pull up. Luke, Flame, Cable, and Diesel are standing in the lot with their bikes ready and their cuts on, carrying the focused energy of men who have been waiting for this moment and are ready to move. They look up when I pull in, and then they see Sophia on the back of my bike. I feel the shift move through the lot, that quality of attention that changes when men register something significant. It’s not surprise exactly, but something closer to recognition, theacknowledgment of something that has been building for a long time and has finally been named.
Luke catches my eye across the lot and says nothing, but something moves in his expression that is quietly and completely approving.
We get to work with last-minute details and final checks. Cable goes through the timeline one more time with the focused calm of a man for whom thoroughness is its own kind of care. Sophia stands slightly to the side and watches without making it into anything more than what it is, a woman who understands the world she is standing in and knows her place in it without needing to be told. She has always understood this world. Always knew she would.
We say goodbye at the bike.
My men have moved inside with the discretion of people who understand that some moments aren’t for an audience, and it is just the two of us in the lot with the Vegas sun climbing, the desert stretching beyond the city, and the bikes lined up, ready to go.
She stands in front of me and looks up with those blue eyes that hold everything she feels without apology or concealment. It’s the fear, love, and the fierce determination of a woman who has already survived the unsurvivable and is being asked to face the possibility of it again.
Cupping her face in both hands, I tilt it up and kiss her, fully and without hurry, and she holds onto it with both hands in my cut, pulling me closer, holding on with everything she has. I feel her shake slightly, just once, the tremor of someone holding themselves together by sheer force of will.
When we pull back, her eyes are bright, she blinks once, and holds it together.
“Everything in your power,” she says.
“Everything in my power.”
She nods, releases my cut, and steps back. I make myself turn away from her, walk myself to the bike, throw my leg over it, and start the engine. When I look back one last time, she is standing in the lot with the sun in her hair, her arms wrapped around herself, and her eyes steady on mine.
I hold her gaze for just a moment longer than I should.
Then I ride.
Sophia
