Page 12 of Brash for It (Hellions Ride On #11)

Her house—his house—sits exactly where it did yesterday, glass and steel and white that hurts to look at in late August. The drive’s empty where the Porsche would be. There’s another car inside the garage that has the bay doors open. I don’t care what it is.

She fumbles the front door key from her bag. The lock turns. The alarm panel starts its little countdown. She freezes.

“Code?” she whispers.

“Try your birthday,” I say, because men like him think aesthetics is a synonym for love.

She taps. The panel chirps. The system disarms with a smug little beep-beep. She laughs once, a sound that’s half a sob. “Of course another reminder he has power over me.”

Inside is air-conditioned and odorless. The kind of clean that says a woman not named Kristen wipes the counters continually.

Kristen’s gaze skims the foyer and I can see her deciding how much sentimental value to assign to nothing.

She moves like we rehearsed it—closet for a duffel, dresser for underwear and jeans and soft things that don’t make her look like a parlor ornament.

I stay in the foyer because this isn’t a raid and I don’t need to see where she kept her mascara.

“Bathroom bag,” I call. “Don’t forget chargers.”

A light goes on down the hall. Footsteps that don’t belong to either of us. I angle my body and my hearing at the sound. A man in a polo and a haircut from a magazine steps to the edge of the living room, eyes widening when he sees me. “What the hell?”

“Afternoon,” I greet, pleasant as a warning. “We’ll be quick.”

“Who are you?” His hand spasms toward his pocket like a guy who never had to actually use the phone he’s reaching for.

“Her ride.”

Kristen steps back into view with a duffel in hand and a smaller bag clipped to the handle. She stops dead when she sees him. The color drains and returns in patches. “Brian.”

“Kristen,” he says, relief and annoyance mixing like oil and water. “I was going to call.”

“You disconnected my phone,” she says without heat. The sentence sits between them like a brick.

“Well, yes. Okay, I wasn’t going to call. I thought you’d take the hint.” He glances at me. “Who’s this?”

“Not your problem,” I answer before she has to borrow courage she shouldn’t spend on him. “We’re grabbing her personal effects.”

He laughs. The sound would be prettier if it had a soul. “She doesn’t own anything in this house.”

“She doesn’t need your shit, just came for her birth certificate and passport, odds and ends that have nothing to do with you,” I state, and even he’s not dumb enough to argue that, I challenge him to.

Kristen moves like she rehearsed for this too.

Down the hall. Bedroom. Closet. Another bag.

The bathroom. The dull thud of small bottles dropping into a kit.

The quiet, murderous efficiency of a woman who just realized that everything she didn’t pay for isn’t hers and everything that is hers fits in three zippers.

Brian stands with his hands in his pockets so we don’t see them shake.

He looks at me like the community watch public service announcement warned him about men like me.

He looks away like I don’t exist because if I do, then so does the part where he’s the guy who changed a gate code instead of facing a person. That’s a harder story to tell himself.

Kristen returns with the last bag. She sets it by the door and pauses in the foyer with the alarm panel. Her shoulders roll back. She turns to him. “You could have told me,” she states. No drama. Just a truth placed neatly where he can’t help but step on it. “Just given me time to sort myself.”

He shrugs like it’s charming. “I did. I said you were free to leave anytime.”

“You meant it like garbage day. You left and didn’t come back. Didn’t answer my calls or texts. You went ghost until you ripped everything away from me. Then you still couldn’t face me.”

He doesn’t answer. The silence is a confession. She nods once, as if accepting an apology he’s not capable of giving, then picks up her bags.

I take two without asking because they’re heavy and I don’t need her spine doing work it didn’t sign up for.

We step out. The door clicks behind us. She locks it like she’s putting a lid on a box never to open it again.

She stares at the house for one long breath and I let her because the leaving’s real when you see the shape you’re walking away from.

At the gate, we hit the call again. The woman buzzes us out with less attitude.

Maybe she caught the tone in the foyer through a speaker and decided she doesn’t get hazard pay.

I load the bags of stuff she doesn’t need immediately into a locker at the club’s garage because I’m not about to parade her luggage through my parking lot like a moving van.

It’s her family photos and gifts that were hers before Brian.

We keep her clothes and toiletries with us. Then we head back to my place.

She’s quiet on the ride. Not the brittle kind. The finished kind. When we click inside, she sets one bag by the chair and one by the dresser and sits on the edge of the bed like she’s not sure she’s allowed.

“You can… stay,” I explain, and realize she might need reassurance. Even though the truth is, I haven’t thought past today. “As long as you need.”

She looks up with something like panic and gratitude wrestling in her eyes. “Kellum, I can’t— I don’t want to— you don’t even?—”

“I know enough,” I cut her off before she can finish. I hook a thumb toward the kitchen. “There’s food enough to keep you upright. You want to pay rent, you can do dishes and call my mother and tell her I used the shampoo she bought. She’ll cry and send six more.”

She laughs again. It comes easier this time. “I can do dishes.”

“Good.” I reach into a drawer and pull out a key that opens exactly one door. I toss it to her. She fumbles and then catches it against her chest. “That’s yours.”

Her throat works. “You’re giving me a key.”

“Don’t make it a poem,” I state, because the feeling that runs under my skin when I see her set the key on the nightstand neat as a vow is new and I don’t want to name it. “It’s a lock. You need to get in at three in the morning and I’m not home, you don’t want to feel like a burglar.”

She nods too many times. Her eyes shine again. I pretend I don’t see it. She pretends she’s not saving the key from her own hands like it might run away.

Night lays itself over us by degrees. She showers again, quick this time.

I let her pick the channel on the television and she chooses silence instead, which works for me.

We eat the kind of dinner that doesn’t deserve the name—grilled cheese because it’s what I can make without burning something.

She says it’s perfect like she’s been on a desert island and it’s a steak.

I don’t argue with people when they complement my cooking.

When it’s time to sleep, round two is different.

Now she knows where the light switch is and how the sheet feels and what it’s like to be a weight on my chest and not a burden.

She still hesitates at the edge of the bed, hand on the top blanket like it’s the line between what she was and what she is.

“You’re sure?” she asks. She doesn’t define what I’m supposed to be sure of.

“Yeah.” I tip my head toward the mattress. “In.”

She slides in, careful, still wearing my shirt because it makes her smaller and bigger at once.

She fusses with the edge of the blanket.

She glances toward the chair like maybe I’ll take it this time because normal men are supposed to leave women alone in beds and be gallant and uncomfortable.

I strip down to my boxers again because I’m not a liar and the day’s sweat doesn’t belong in clean sheets.

I catch her looking the way people look at a cliff—afraid and a little curious what it feels like to fall.

“Um?” she says, replaying last night because repetition is a way to survive.

“We’re both adults,” I repeat, same tone, because consistency is also a way to survive. “I can sleep beside you without sex.” I climb in, mattress dipping. “Well… unless that’s what you want.”

She bursts out, “I—” and then clamps her lips.

I let the beat stretch and then put her out of her misery. “Joking. Chill, Kristen.”

She mutters, “You’re the worst,” but it’s soft and not real.

“Yeah.” I hook my arm and pull her the way I did before because she slept like death when I did it and I’m not an idiot—I do what works. She slides into the space like it’s the shape she was made in. Half on me, half beside me. We fit better than we should. I don’t dwell.

“Long day,” I say. “Sleep.” My hand finds her hair, goes to work with the same absent patience, slow strokes that teach the nervous system it can stand down.

Her breath catches and then sets to a steady count.

Her fingers find a resting place against my ribs, feather-light like she’s testing whether I’ll bolt. I don’t.

“You keep touching my hair like that,” she murmurs, already halfway gone, “I’m going to start expecting things from you.”

“Dangerous game to play, darlin’,” I warn.

“I know.” A yawn eats the last word. “Yet, I… don’t feel… scared.”

“That’s the point.”

She hums like she believes me, and then she drops.

I lay there with a woman asleep on half of me and a night that feels like it’s not out to get me for once, and I think about what comes next.

Not tomorrow.

But not far off because I don’t do five-year plans.

Just next.

Mentally, I prepare my task list. I need to call Trina because if I don’t check in, she’ll send a posse.

Tell Tripp I can’t run to Salemburg tomorrow early; he’ll pick up the slack because that’s what we do.

Figure out a burner for Kristen until she gets her name on something that rings when she calls.

What do I do to help her figure out what comes next for herself?

The ceiling doesn’t answer. It never does.

My hand keeps moving in her hair long after she’s done needing it because I do.

At some point, I sleep. And when I do, it’s clean.

No dreams with teeth. No falling without a floor.

Just the steady weight of a person who trusted me long enough to make it to morning and the simple fact that I didn’t screw it up.

When the sun starts to think about rising, I crack an eye to the pale light creeping under the blinds. Kristen’s still there, mouth open, that tiny snore like a secret I’ll keep. My arm is pins and needles. I don’t care. The AC clicks. The world does its usual tricks.

I breathe.

For once, the empty place in me isn’t a hole; it’s a room with someone in it.

Doesn’t mean I’m healed. Doesn’t mean I turned into a man with a porch light and a chore list and a calendar with anniversaries circled.

It just means last night, when someone said What am I supposed to do? I had an answer that wasn’t cruel.

I’ll take that.

I tilt my head and talk to the ceiling in a whisper so I don’t wake her.

“Long day,” I say again, like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence we both needed.

“Sleep,” I add, even though she already is.

Then I shut my eyes relaxing into the day and meet the morning halfway, not fighting it for once, with a woman half on my chest and a hand that doesn’t want to stop doing the thing that put her under.