Page 51 of Property of Thrasher
“I’m…good,” I said, then smirked because vague deserved itself. “Gentle but firm, that’s what I got.” I added.
Lyric’s laugh spilled out easy. “He is. You still sleeping in your own bed most nights?”
“Most,” I shrugged. “He respects his rules. Sometimes he breaks them.” I didn’t tell her which nights or how that looked. She wouldn’t ask. We had an unspoken code about not getting into details. I think it stemmed from our upbringing. No one really talked much about sex or relationships.
She bumped her shoulder against mine. “You look softer. In the good way.”
“You look like someone put sunshine in your pocket,” I shot back.
We talked about work because you can’t live on the big talks alone—how the housekeeping cart’s squeak could be heard in three counties, how Mrs. Dockery in 212 kept stealing all the extra soaps and then complaining she was out, and how she wasn’t moving out anytime soon. Then our ten minutes were up, and we stood, rolled our shoulders, and walked back into the hum like two women who knew how to hold their own joy and still clock in.
The rest of my shift went fast. I folded. I smoothed. I listened to the rinse cycle pound and thought about the ways my life had grown bigger even inside the same walls. By the time the clock hit late afternoon, the heat had turned the parking lot into a griddle and my braid stuck to the back of my neck.
Back in my room, I kicked off my shoes and lay back for six seconds before my phone buzzed. One word on the screen: Outside.
Thrasher didn’t send paragraphs. Although, I didn’t need them. I sat up, retied my braid, pulled on my boots, and pressed the heel of my hand to my sternum just because it felt good to steady that spot. Then I went.
The engine’s low rumble reached me before he did, like a pulse coming up the alley. He was leaned against the bike when I pushed through the back door, sunglasses on, forearms tan, his expression the particular blank that meant he was in a good mood but wouldn’t scare it off by saying so. When his eyes tracked up to me, the blank shifted to something I felt low in my stomach.
“You hungry?” he asked.
“Yes.” Real hunger had woken up lately—food hunger, touch hunger, air hunger. I liked feeding all three.
He handed me the helmet and waited while I cinched it, thumb brushing the underside of my jaw once like a punctuation mark. I climbed on behind him and we rolled out easy, no hurry. He cut left where the traffic thinned and took the route that squiggles through the pines before finding open farm. Late summer had turned the fields that particular tired green, and the ditches were full of wild things I didn’t know the names for. The sun had softened just enough that I didn’t have to squint. Wind took the sweat from the back of my neck and returned it as cool.
I didn’t try to talk. There are a hundred ways to say “thank you” to a man who knows how to ride the way he rides. I said it by finding the place my hands liked on his middle and keeping them there. By not fighting the lean. By resting my cheek between his shoulder blades when we hit a stretch without potholes and letting the hum of the engine do the rest.
He took us to a roadside restaurant I’d seen a hundred times and never been inside—the kind with a hand-lettered sign out front that gets redone every year and a keg cooler someone’s uncle probably fixed. Inside smelled like grill and yeast rolls and lemon in a spray bottle. The tables were scarred wood, the floor old tile that had seen better mops. Two men at the bar argued cheerfully about baseball. A little girl at a corner table was coloring in a paper kids’ menu with the kind of full-body seriousness I recognized from trying to stay inside lines.
We took a booth in the corner. I slid in so I could see the whole room; he slid in so he could see the door. The waitress arrived with a pad and an accent and called me “sweetheart” without making it feel like a theft. Thrasher ordered sweet tea for me before I could speak and water for himself, then glanced across the table to see if I’d mind. I didn’t. He waited while I picked a chicken sandwich, then asked for a burger he specified down to the cheese.
“You always know exactly what you want?” I asked when we were alone again.
“Only about the important things,” he deadpanned, which made me smile because he’d count a burger as important in his day and he’d be right.
He stretched one arm along the back of the booth. I let my shoulder find his hand there like a plant finding a trellis. He didn’t make a show of touching me. He just did it and then didn’t stop. I felt the heat of his palm through the thin cotton of my shirt. I felt what it turned down in me when he held steady.
We talked about nothing in the way that means everything—the way the light hit the water on the way in, whether the birds we’d seen were hawks or vultures, how he’d once ridden with a guy who swore by duct tape as a fix for everything and why that friendship had lasted exactly two weeks. I liked hearing his stories—the ones not about the club, the ones about the human things.
The door jangled, and my attention went up without thinking. Tiny came in first, skin the color of wood polished by use, shoulders filling the doorway like a promise. Lyric was right behind him, free hair, soft dress I’d never seen her wear to work, eyes scanning the room and then lighting like a match when she saw me.
They spotted us at the same time we spotted them. Tiny’s grin broke across his face like he’d slipped it on out in the parking lot. Lyric pointed, her mouth already forming my name, then caught herself and made it a small wave.
They came over. Tiny hovered by the table with that respectful half-distance he’d learned around me and Lyric—men like him knew the difference between looming and existing. “Mind if we join?”
Thrasher looked at me instead of answering. I said “yes” with my face before I said it with my mouth. “Sit.”
The booth wasn’t made for such large men, so the guys took the outside. Lyric slid where she ended up across from me.
The waitress came back and didn’t blink at the patches, didn’t change the way she spoke. Tiny ordered a steak and beans and cornbread, Lyric a salad with a baked potato, then the waitress vanished into the kitchen and the table loosened the way groups do once logistics are done.
Tiny told a story about a prospect who’d tried to “repair” a cracked hose with Super Glue because he figured “glue’s glue.” Thrasher added only enough details to make it funnier: the prospect’s face when the glue hardened on his fingers, Tiny’s dead stare when the kid asked if a hairdryer would speed it up. Lyric giggled into her napkin and whispered, “Oh, bless,” the way Southern women do when they mean “Lord, have mercy.”
Under the table, Thrasher’s hand found mine. He didn’t even look down. Fingers threaded through mine, palm to palm. He held—not tight, not possessive. Present. When he talked, his thumb rubbed one line across my knuckles like he was marking time. Every so often he’d give that tiny squeeze that says, you still with me? Every time, I answered the squeeze back.
The food came hot and sizzling—the steak whispering to the plate, my chicken sandwich dripping just enough to be worth a napkin. Conversation didn’t stop. It turned into the kind where you pass things you think the other person will like. Tiny cut off a corner of his steak and set it on Lyric’s plate without asking. She did the same with her potato when he admitted he never remembers to order one. Thrasher pushed his fry boat toward me after my eyes lingered one beat too long. I took two. He smirked and pushed it closer like he knew I’d reach again.
“Club needs?” Tiny asked Thrasher at one point, tone neutral like he didn’t want to bring business to the table if business didn’t want to be there.
