I go still.
It isn’t the gesture itself that lands. It’s what it means. The naturalness of it, the fact that he hadn’t even realized he’d done it until Quill was standing there with that knowing look on his face. I’ve seen Tate in enough situations to know the difference between something deliberate and something that comes from somewhere deeper than deliberate, and this came from somewhere I never reached.
‘She’s not mine.’
That’s what he told Torch, standing in the corridor outside the room, flat, certain, and without hesitation.
I was close enough to hear it.
I told myself it didn’t matter. I told myself I understood the arrangement, had always understood it, and had never once let myself believe it was anything more than what it was between us.
But watching Tate’s arm drop, watching him register the gesture and remove it, watching Sophia look down at the T-shirt in her hands with that careful expression of a woman trying very hard not to feel something she is absolutely feeling, I understand something I hadn’t wanted to understand.
I was never his because the arrangement was casual.
I was never his because there was someone else, someone who hadn’t existed yet in his life in this way, but who had apparently always been coming. And now she is here, standing in the middle of the Sinners’ yard in a pale-yellow dress with Ryan’s T-shirt pressed against her chest. Tate’s jaw is tight, Quill is smiling into his beer, and I understand all of it.
The thing is, it hurts. More than I expected, more than I’d allowed myself to admit was even possible, because admitting it would have meant admitting I’d wanted something I was never offered and had been foolish enough to wait for anyway.
I’m not a woman who does foolish.
Or so I’d thought.
Torch appears at my elbow. He doesn’t say anything immediately, just stands there with his beer, looking out at the yard the way he seems to look at everything, with that steady unhurried presence of a man who doesn’t feel the need to fill silence with noise.
Then, quietly. “You all right?”
I look at him, those calm eyes, and that steady presence.
I’m not all right. Not even slightly. What I am is smart enough to know that this yard is not the place and tonight is not the night, and so I do what I’ve always done with things that hurt.
I put it somewhere I can deal with it later.
“Yeah.” Taking the beer he offers, I turn back to the yard and we let the evening be what it is.
Chapter Eighteen
TATE
The Blood Brothers leave the following morning.
Five bikes in the same formation they’d arrived in, cuts on, the road-worn ease of men who know exactly how to cover distance. I stand outside the clubhouse with Luke and Flame and watch them mount up one by one, the Nevada morning already warm around us, the city going about its business in the background like nothing significant has happened in this lot over the past two days.
Something significant has happened.
Quill is last.
Shaking my hand at the door, he holds it for a moment, those blue eyes that never miss anything and never say more than they need to, looking at me steadily.
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks.”
He studies me for just a moment longer, the way he sometimes does, like he is checking something, making sure something is properly in place.
“Take care of her.”
Not like a reminder. Not like an instruction. Like something he already knows I am going to do and simply wants to say out loud.
