Page 45 of Redline Baby

"I'm here."

His grip tightens.

Then he finishes climbing into the back seat.

Allie gets in beside him.

Dex takes the front passenger seat. King will drive. Sol follows on his motorcycle. Ni stays with me while I wait for the tow driver to finish securing Kit's Yamaha.

Chapter 13. Kit

The sign above the door is restrained: Halverson Moto, black lettering on brushed aluminum, no flourish.

The front windows are large, floor-to-ceiling panels of plate glass that run the width of the showroom, and through them I can see the display bikes lit by the ambient light of early morning. It's beautiful and fancy, but sober. Like Soren.

And there, through the gap between the showroom window and the service bay door, off to the left side of the main floor:

My bike.

My baby.

The left fairing panel is cracked clean through, a fracture running diagonally from the intake vent to the rear corner. The left bar end is scraped raw, the aluminum bare and pale where the anodizing got taken off by the asphalt. The whole front end cants slightly wrong. One fork leg sits out of line, and there's a thin streak of oil down the tube from a blown seal.

I stand there looking at it for about five seconds too long. Then I push through the door because I can't keep doing that.

It smells like motor oil, familiar by now, the same smell that clings to Soren's hands most nights we hang out. The concrete floor is polished to a dull, clean sheen. Every overhead fluorescent is on, running at full brightness. Along the far wall, the custom steel workbench I've leaned against a dozen times these last few weeks runs the full length of the bay, exactly where I remember it.

I keep my left arm close to my body as I come through the door. The bandage Dex wrapped last night is still in place under the rolled-back sleeve of my jacket, and the bruising that's come up above and below the wrap is doing what bruising does, turning ugly shades of red and purple.

It hurts about as much as it looks, so the color is accurate.

My left shoulder is wrong in a way I've been ignoring since last night. The joint is stiff and grinding, and I can raise the arm about thirty degrees before the pain stops being something I can pretend is theoretical. I have tested this several times already this morning to establish the exact parameters of the problem. Thirty degrees.

Which I have decided is not enough wrong to constitute a real problem.

Soren is at the workbench with a torque wrench. He's really handsome, as usual. He has his big back angled toward the door, facing the bike on the lift, both hands on the wrench handle, applying slow, even pressure to a bolt I can't see from this angle. He's wearing a gray work shirt and dark jeans, sleeves rolled to the forearms.

He hears me approaching and looks up. Something shifts fast across his face. The focus of the work drops away entirely the second he sees me, like nothing on that bench matters more than the fact that I'm standing in his doorway looking like I got dragged behind a truck. He sets the wrench down without finishing the bolt and crosses the shop toward me.

Fast. For a man who almost never moves fast.

I feel the familiar, embarrassing rush of being the only thing in the room he's looking at. He stops close.

Closer than most people stand. But it doesn't put me on edge the way it might have two months ago. I lean into it instead. Some part of me goes loose and relieved just from the proximity of him, even with the shame of last night still sitting heavy in my chest.

I'm embarrassed about how I behaved.

About what I said to him.

About the fact that he told me not to ride, and I rode anyway, and then he had to come find me bleeding beside a destroyed motorcycle.

I haven't figured out how to say any of that out loud yet.

"Did you go to the ER?" he asks.

"It's fine," I say casually. "I'm fine. Dex wanted to drag me to urgent care last night. I told him it'd cost me two hundred bucks to be told to ice it and take ibuprofen."

"We'll go now."