Page 43 of Property of Thrasher
I was already there when her shift ended—back lot, where the back doors spit steam into the night and the dumpsters smell like bleach and old socks. I’d parked in the sliver of shadow between a busted security light and the live oak. My bike ticked as it cooled. I leaned on the bars and watched the back door like I had business with the hinges.
She came out with a tote bag on her shoulder and her braid over one collarbone. Boots. Jeans. A soft T-shirt that had a tiny hole near the hem only I would notice because I noticed everything about her now. She did that quick scan people do when they don’t want to look like they’re looking for someone, then she found me and smiled like she’d been holding her breath all day and just let it go.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” I lifted the spare helmet. “Ride?”
She didn’t ask where. She never did. She just slid the tote strap to her bag across her body, took the helmet with both hands, and cinched the strap tight under her chin. First time I put her on a bike she’d fumbled with the buckle; now she snapped it like she’d been born to it. Progress looks small from the outside. This was far from small, she somehow fit in at every turn.
I swung my leg over, fired the engine, felt the familiar thud settle behind my ribs. She got on, knees snug against my hips, palms splayed at my sides. I kept the first quarter mile at a crawl to let her body calibrate to mine, then fed it throttle and took us out to cling the quiet roads.
Streetlights thinned as we pressed on. Pines drew up on either side like a moving hallway, dark and taller than they had any right to be. The air out here always smelled like damp bark and crushed green things. Night birds complained when we passed. A deer froze at a ditch line, eyes like coins, then flicked away.
She didn’t talk. There’s a language to a passenger, though, and she’d learned it—how to lean with me, not against me; how to keep her center soft; how to find the spot on my back where she could rest without sliding. Halfway down the county road she relaxed, all that new rider stiffness draining out through her boots into the pegs. The crown of her helmet came to rest between my shoulder blades. I let the road unwind under us and kept it steady.
Tonight wasn’t about speed.
I took the turn most people miss because it looks like a driveway to go to hunting land rather than a dirt road that became a real driveway. Mine. Gravel crackled. Trees closed in for a hundred yards then opened on my place: low, long, a wooden log cabin that needed oil, a deep porch that needed furniture, and a lot of dark space around it that didn’t need anything. I cut the engine, and the cicadas song came rushing back like a crowd.
She unlatched the helmet and shook her braid, pins catching moonlight before they fell. “It’s…quiet,” she said, voice soft from the ride.
“That’s the point.” I took both helmets and set them on the seat. “Come on.”
The porch steps creaked in the same places they always creaked as she followed me effortlessly.
Inside, the house gave up the cool it held all day—cedar, clean laundry, the faint metallic hint of machine oil that clings to a man even when he washes. I flipped on the kitchen light. It bled slow into the living room, the way I liked it. No lamps with dimmers, no art besides some photos, no clutter. I kept my life simple on purpose. The world had enough noise without me making more.
“You drink wine?” I asked, already reaching for the cabinet.
“I can,” she said, then smiled a little at herself. “I mean—yeah. Yes.”
“You want to?” I turned, glass held up.
“I do.” She nodded, like the admission required a little spine.
I poured red for her, water for me. She turned the glass a quarter turn and took a testing sip like someone taught her to pay attention to things. I liked that about her. I liked a lot of things I had no business cataloging in my head, yet, I did it anyway.
“You hungry?” I asked.
She touched the tote instinctively, like she’d packed a snack, then shook her head. “If you’re offering food, I won’t say no.”
That made my mouth tip. “I’m offering.”
The fridge gave me chicken breasts, half a yellow onion, a red pepper, and a carton of cherry tomatoes on their last good day. Drawer yielded garlic. Pantry had pasta, olive oil, salt that lived in a wide bowl because lids slow a man down, and cracked pepper. I set a pot of water on and reached for the knife I liked best. Its weight fit my palm the way a good wrench does—hand knows before head kind of like learning a woman’s body.
She leaned on the opposite side of the counter, glass cupped at the base, watching. The braid lay over the front of her shoulder now, an invitation and a problem.
“You cook a lot?” she asked.
“Often enough.” I trimmed the chicken and cut it into strips. “When I was a kid, food was either a fight or an afterthought. I made a decision somewhere around seventeen that I’d treat it like fuel and thanks, not punishment.” I tossed the meat with salt and pepper, smashed two cloves of garlic with the flat of the blade, and got the skillet hot before I added oil.
She smiled into her glass. “Fuel and thanks. I like that.”
“Works for me.” The chicken hit the metal and hissed under the heat. Garlic followed. Onion and pepper after the first turn. The house woke up around the smell. Water rolled to a boil before I dropped the pasta.
“Back home,” she said after a quiet stretch, “we didn’t have many restaurants. Not real ones. Just a grill at the gas station that did biscuits in the morning and burgers on Saturdays. Everything else you either grew or bought canned by the case. For eating out, that was a church thing on the occasions they had a community thing going and it went on at the church.”
I looked up at her through the steam. “Back home where?”
