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~oOo~
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Night riding had alwaysbeen a favorite, but night riding with Lyra behind him was an entirely new level of amazing. Southern Nevada days got into the eighties even in November, but the desert heat evaporated almost as fast as the sun set. The nights were cool and the air fresh. Not even ten minutes away from the neon bustle of Casino Drive they were in full desert, nothing but sky all around them, the stars multiplying and intensifying with every mile away from the city.
On his Fat Bob, Lyra rode almost level with him, with her arms snug around his waist. She wasn’t tall enough to set her chin on his shoulder, but she often rested her head against his back. He didn’t know why that felt so intimate, almost as close as if they were naked and under the covers. Maybe just because it was two of his most favorite things combined: riding and Lyra.
“Where are we going?” she asked when he pulled up to make a left at an intersection. A right would have taken them north, toward her special rock, but Zach meant to head south.
“It’s a surprise,” he said. The light turned green and he headed south, savoring the sensation of her body leaning with his around the turn.
She asked twice more on the twenty-minute drive: when they left the Strip behind, and when they crossed the state line into Arizona. He felt the usual urge to pull over at that state line and take his helmet off. He fucking hated the thing, and Arizona didn’t require he wear it. But stopping would give Lyra more time for questions, so he dealt with it for a few more minutes.
He took them down a road that was, in the strictest sense, paved, then to a gravel lane, and finally to something that was barely a path. Behind him, Lyra’s arms had grown tense. Not with fear, but definitely with confusion. But she didn’t ask again.
Zach stopped on that dirt ‘road,’ near a hand-painted sign that read:
FOR SALE BY OWNER
7.5 ACRES
MOTIVATED SELLER
WILL CONSIDER SUBDIVIDING
At the bottom of the sign was a phone number.
Lyra dismounted and looked at that sign. She turned to him with a grin. “What, are you gonna buy 7.5 acres of Arizona desert from a motivated seller who’ll consider subdividing?”
“If you like it, yeah.” He set the accursed brain bucket on his saddle and took Lyra’s to do the same.
Her grin had become a gape. “What? You’re serious?”
“Yeah. We’ve been talking about making this permanent between us, whether we decide to get married or not.” She was taking his flame, and he was already working on the design. To Zach, raised in an MC by unmarried parents, there was nothing more important than the ink. He could not care less about being married, and Lyra thought big weddings were a dumb waste of money. “Living together is the next step. We’ve been talking about that, too.”
“Yeah, but there’s no house here, and I’ve used half my dream house fund so far on the gall ... ery ...” Her sentence petered out as she walked away from him, off the path and into the desert. There was a nice, big, flat sandstone rock. Not her rock, but a good one. He’d looked into buying her rock, but it was on state land and it wasn’t possible for a regular guy, even a regular guy who was willing to think outside the box a little, to buy a parcel in the middle of state land.
They’d done a little online browsing of properties available in town, with houses on them already. Zach hated all of them. They were all so ... basic.
Then they’d bought those little houses for the compound, and he’d thought that could be really cool. To start.
She was headed to the rock, looking at the vast, sparkling sky as she walked. They were far enough from any unnatural light so all the stars could shine and the Milky Way fluffed out its cape and laid it out on display. Probably it wasn’t as vivid as it would be really far from civilization, but it was far more vivid than anything any part of Oklahoma sky could manage.
Catching up with her, he caught her hand. “I was thinking, we buy this place, out in the middle of nowhere but within an hour of every place that’s important to us. We put one of those tiny houses out here, andbam, we’ve got our own place for under a hundred grand.” He was already in talks with the motivated seller, and he could get the place for under fifty with a cash payment. There was already a well, and he’d looked into solar power. Buying a tiny house was a matter of ordering it. She’d liked one style in particular. He liked it, too.
He could pay cash for it all. It would put a real dent in his savings, but he’d make that up quickly, probably by the middle of next year. As SAA, his take would be substantially bigger.
“You said you want a bunch of kids someday,” Lyra said, still transfixed by the sky. “There’s not room foronekid in a tiny house.”
“Key word: someday. You said you want to wait for kids, and that’s cool with me. We’re young, we’ve got lots of time. I was thinking we start with a tiny house, we keep saving to build the house we really want, we have that one built when we’re ready to make a kid, and then we use the little house for when my folks come to visit.” He pulled her close and tucked her under his arm. “What do you think?”
“I love it.”
“Yeah?”
“I really love it! But I need to figure out how to break it to my dad—”
