Page 18 of Texting the Wrong Bikers

I pick up my glass of wine and take a sip. “Exactly.” I don’t normally drink alone, but just one felt appropriate tonight.

Dani sighs dramatically through the phone. “You’re no fun.”

“I know.”

There’s a pause. “So, gym boy,” she asks, making it a question.

Heat creeps into my face. “He’s weird.”

Dani gasps. “Bad weird? What did he do? Did he send you something gross? One time there was this guy who—”

I cut her off before she could launch into some gross story. “No.” I flop backward dramatically onto the pillows. “Confusing, weird.”

“Ooh. Elaborate.” Her voice is clearer now; she’s taken me off speakerphone.

I lie back on the couch and stare up at the ceiling while rain rolls softly outside. “I feel like…” I hesitate. “I feel like he’s different over text.”

“How?”

I sigh. “I don’t know.”

But I do know. Text Tyler feels funny, commanding, charming, observant, and dangerously good at making me blush. Gym Tyler mostly comes across as a very attractive man who owns too many compression shirts. The contradiction should bother me more than it does. Instead, somehow, it only makes me want to keep texting him.

Chapter 5

Trigger

It’s hot inside the clubhouse, and condensation fogs the windows. Too many people are crammed inside, with more trying to force their way through the crowd toward the bar. It’s busy, even for a Friday night. The windows are wide open to let air through, but it doesn’t help much. Heat still clings to the building from the long Southern day outside, clinging damply to my skin beneath my cut. Somewhere beyond the parking lot, cicadas scream so loudly they almost drown out the old rock music crackling through the speakers.

For the first time all week, there’s no rain, no thunder, just a strange, heavy stillness hanging over everything. It’s the kind of muggy heat that makes people restless. There’s the kind of charged energy in the room tonight that tells me things could go one of two ways. The smell of liquor, smoke, and sweat hangs in the air. Laughter and music fill the room, but there’s an undercurrent of danger, territorial dudes flexing their muscles, club bunnies teetering around in too-high heels, pitting them against each other, walking red flags to bulls. We ignore their advances because there’s only one woman who’s holding our attention these days.

I sit back on the leather couch, which crackles and sticks to my skin, near the pool table, a cold beer balanced against my knee. Chief leans against the bar, reading something on the phone with that calm, unreadable expression he wears whenever he’s trying not to react, which means he’s definitely hiding something.

Dash notices too. “Oh, look at that,” he drawls from the armchair beside me. “Chief’s pretending he’s not blushing like a lovestruck teenager again.”

“I’m not grinning. I do not blush.”

“Tell that to your face.”

Shadow snorts quietly from the other side of the table, where he’s cleaning one of his guns, piece by piece, with slow, careful movements.

“Thought you said this wasn’t serious,” Dash continues.

Chief doesn’t even look up. “Thought you said you’d shut the fuck up.” But he still throws the phone down on the table in front of us, as if to prove that he doesn’t care.

Dash shrugs, swigging his beer. “The night is young.”

The phone buzzes against the table. Every head turns instantly.

Dash points aggressively at each of us, even though he’s just as bad. “See? This is becoming a problem.”

I grab the phone before anybody else can touch it. Sadie’s name glows bright across the screen. Something possessive twists inside me. Mine. The thought hits so hard, and instinctively, it pisses me off. Because what the fuck is that? We don’t know this woman. We’ve never met her. Hell, technically, she still thinks she’s texting some other fucking dude. And yet, somehow, every night this week has ended with all four of us sitting around, waiting for her next message.

She texts us all differently now, without realizing it. Dash gets the playful teasing. Chief gets the softer conversations. Shadow gets the deeper shit late at night. Me? I get the dangerous messages. The dirty ones. The ones that make my pulse kick harder every damn time my phone lights up. Then, there are the funny, unguarded ones, the ones that are totally and uniquely her, like the one sitting on the screen now.

I forgot to tell you, Owen saw a motorcycle today and yelled THUNDER BIKE so loudly that an old woman almost crashed her shopping cart. I think I might have a wannabe biker on my hands. He used to be obsessed with garbage trucks.

A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. I love it that her kid is obsessed with motorcycles. I want to fess up, to tell her that we’re—that I’m—not the man she thinks I am. I want her to want me, not this gym prick she thinks she’s messaging. I can’t ask for his name outright without giving us away, but she’s said enough to make me think she believes we’re one of the gym rats who use the local fitness center. Some asshole with glamour muscles and no personality, someone she even seems to know isn’t right, if her messages hinting at how different he is are anything to go by. But every time I start to fess up, I stop myself. What if it stops her from messaging? I can’t stand the thought of not talking to her anymore. I just need a way to meet her, to confess face-to-face, to show her that I’m the man for her.