Page 6 of Brash for It (Hellions Ride On #11)

Then the flash burns out and leaves the afterimage, how it actually goes.

How soft turns into leverage. How love becomes a ledger.

How partnership becomes a set of unbalanced scales.

How trust turns into a choke chain someone wraps around your throat, gentle at first, then tighter when you step wrong.

The last time I tried it, I ended up at the bottom of a hole I dug with my own hands, throwing dirt on myself and calling it a garden.

Maybe I didn’t pick right. Maybe I don’t know how. Maybe I do know how and the knowing is the problem.

Wind skims the water. A shrimp boat moves like a slow prayer in the channel, deck lights sketching an orange ladder on the surface.

From somewhere down the dock, laughter spits out—a group of guys late to load a cooler into a little john boat, their work shirts still on, caps turned backward like the night is theirs to own.

They don’t look at me. Good. I don’t feel like being a story in someone else’s memories tonight.

I pull the Zippo and a smoke from my pocket. The flint sparks, flame tiny and sure. I cup it and drag. The first hit digs hooks in my lungs and I let it, because I’m not pretending to be better than I am. The ember glows, a little candle in my hand.

Do I want that?

The question won’t let go. It sits with me on the dock, legs swinging over the water like a kid.

Maybe the better one is: Could I keep it if I did?

I don’t know how to be half-anything. I tried once.

It went bad slowly to start with. Worse when it went fast. The patch demands the whole of me.

The road does, too. A woman who wants a man home by dinner every night will hate the way I leave.

One who says she doesn’t mind will, eventually, they always do.

The ones who swear they understand mean it until the first time the phone dies on a run and I don’t check in.

Suddenly understanding looks exactly like accusation.

The work’s not nine-to-five. The club’s not a hobby.

My life isn’t a house with empty rooms ready to rent out.

Headlights roll slow over the lot—a truck turning in, then choosing the far side and clicking off. Night fattens. Mosquitoes audition for dinner on my wrists until I flick them off and they get the message.

“Hell,” I mutter, smoke curling out right with the word.

Truth is, I’m not brave. People think not settling is bravery—some kind of lone-wolf bullshit, the man too wild to be tamed.

It’s easier, that’s it.

Not better. Not worse.

Just easier to keep your hands empty than to have something in them break and bleed all over you.

I take another long drag and crush the butt neat in the crack of a board. The old Kellum would have flicked it into the water and called it a lesson for the fish. The me now has lived long enough to hate assholes who treat the world like a trash can.

A woman’s voice carries across the ramp, not to me. “You lock it?” A man answers, “Yeah.” Car doors clunk closed. Tires bump over gravel. The taillights recede, then are gone. It’s just me and the water and a night so thick you could cut it and hand slices around.

I stay until my legs get ideas about stiffness, then push up and walk back to the bike.

The seat’s cool. The chrome sweats. I swing on, thumb the start button, and the engine answers like it never left.

The headlight throws a clean cone down the gravel, catching a flash of raccoon eyes in the reeds before they wink out.

I don’t take the straight shot home. I snake side roads that run parallel to the sound, black ribbons between dark pines and darker water. Houses pop up now and then—single lights in back windows, the blue wash of a TV in a den, porch swings creaking as the last of the heat lets go.

In one yard, a kid chases fireflies with a mason jar and a kind of glee I remember like it belongs to another man. His mother calls him in and his protest is music. He goes anyway, because the lure of cold sweet tea and a ceiling fan wins.

Good for him.

I ride until the thought of sleep stops feeling like punishment and starts feeling like a kind of surrender I can live with for a few hours.

The roads funnel me back toward town. The shop sits dark and square, secure lights throwing hard shadows.

I slow as I pass, eyeing the bay doors like they might decide to roll up and ask me where I’ve been.

My place isn’t far. A rental we keep for brothers or family friends who need a couch or a bed between lives.

Right now it’s just me and a fridge that hums loud enough to count as company.

I cut the engine and coast the last foot into my spot so I don’t wake the neighbors.

Keys jingle dull in my hand. The door sticks because the humidity warps it. I hip-check it and it gives.

Inside, it’s the opposite of the beach house a woman I don’t know sleeps in tonight. It’s not what my brothers have playing house and meaning it either.

No art.

No staged couch.

No fancy ass rug I’m supposed to be afraid to step on.

I’ve got a thrift-store table and two metal chairs that know how to take a beating. A dented pot. A stack of plates that all look the same. A bed built to hold a man who sleeps hard and doesn’t dream pretty.

I take off my boots at the mat because grit in the sheets is a sin according to my mother. She still cusses me out in my head for breaking the rules, so I like to take my shoes off to keep even the voice in my head mom quiet.

I toss my cut over the chair and stand there a second, the sudden quiet swallowing even the road out of my blood. The emptiness isn’t loud.

That’s the trouble. It’s soft. It drifts. It settles like quicksand until you don’t know you’re standing in it up to your shins.

Do I want that?

I shake my head like it’s a fly. I move because stillness isn’t a friend. To the kitchen. Sink on. Water runs. I scrub my hands until the oil surrenders, black spirals racing the drain. The scars on my knuckles hold grease like memory and that’s fine—some things are supposed to mark you.

In the mirror, a man looks back who other people call hard.

He is.

He earned it.

He keeps it because letting go would mean being someone else, and I don’t know that guy.

I flip the bathroom light off and the place goes gentle-dark. The bed takes me like it always does—no questions, no conditions. I stretch out and the sheet is cool, the pillow familiar. The other side is undisturbed.

It always is.

I stare at the ceiling long enough to map the hairline cracks. A dog barks two streets over. My phone buzzes once on the nightstand. I pick it up. Brothers’ chat. A picture of Tommy Boy’s paint colors, a joke about how he got bullied into teal by Jamison.

I type: Looks like a mermaid threw up.

Ten seconds later, the thread lights with laughter emojis. I put the phone face-down.

I tell myself I’m fine. I say it out loud so the room can hear. “I’m fine.”

The room doesn’t argue. It never does.

I close my eyes. The road I just rode unspools behind my lids—pines, marsh, water in strips of light. For about a minute, it’s enough. Then the question floats back up, stubborn, slow, refusing to drown: Do I want that?

I roll to my side, put my back to it. The empty space behind me answers with its own soft nothing. I fall asleep pretending I don’t feel it.