Page 98 of Jingle Belle's Biker

I could teach her to ride a bike, to travel. But that isn’t fair, dragging a woman around with me.

Especially a woman who deserves the best her world can give her.

So, I put my helmet on and turn on the motor. Then I roar out of the city and the rest of my life.

Chapter Twenty-One

Belle

He’s gone. Saint’s gone.

I stare at his apartment. The door’s unlocked. I know because I tested it this morning after knocking. Pathetic little me, wanting to see him on Christmas Day.

He didn’t answer because he’s gone.

Just like he said.

Only . . . I thought—hoped—he’d wait a day.

I know a day makes zero difference in the scheme of things. Gone is gone. Ends are ends. Rip off the damn Band-Aid and all that.

But . . . it’s Christmas.

My eyes itch at the silence from the other side of the door. The emptiness that seems to drop the temperature.

I could open it, but I’m not going to. His bike is gone. Last night when I peeked late, no lights were on.

“Come on, Belle,” I whisper. “What did you expect? Him to miraculously appear? He told you he was out of here.”

A sad meow wafts up, and I look down, crouching and scratching Nomad’s silky fur between his soft, pointy ears.

“He left you too.”

Nomad mews and swishes his tail, stalking off and up the stairs.

“Yeah?” I say to the cat. “I don’t like it either. He left me too.”

There’s something so painful about this. I love Nomad. I’m glad he’s here.

But I thought, for all his talk, he’d take the cat.

Like everything else, I’m wrong, and that hurts.

There’s a celebration party for both Christmas and spillover from yesterday’s victory that’s going to start soon. So, I follow Nomad up to my apartment. I don’t want to go down there.

For all of Nomad’s weird sociability, he doesn’t seem drawn to it. Or maybe he knows I’m channeling sad loner for all it’s worth.

I should go, I know. I saw them setting up in the garden, the invitations rolling thick and fast because my friends and neighbors seem to pick up on the sad loner schtick too.

Saint . . .

It hurts, thinking now how Saint will never see it in its glory. He saw it cold and dead from winter, but the other three months it’s glorious, spring offering new growth. Summer, the blooms and colors fade into the rusts of fall, and then sleep.

Even now, I could have shown it all to him.

Told him in the winter, it can be glorious.

I wish it had snowed.

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