Page 12 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies

The tents come down in slow triangles.

The deck gets swept again, this time with a little reverence for how it held under the weight of joy.

The chickens roost along the rail like officers on patrol.

Cleopatra settles with an offended shake.

The lodge quiets without going silent.

A different kind of music begins, the hum of a place that knows it will be lived in tomorrow.

I should go.

I tell myself I will grab my bag and slip out like a good professional who came to work and will leave with all of her boundaries intact.

I tell myself I have earned the right to flee any room that asks me to put my heart on a table I do not own.

I tell myself I do not stay.

I have practice with it.

I do not move.

The fire settles. The hearth glows. The chalkboard waits for tomorrow’s handwriting.

The air smells like citrus and pine sap and engine grease and the last hour of a party that did not regret itself.

I dry my hands on a towel and try to imagine who I am if I say yes to a question I have avoided answering since I learned to make myself small to fit the rooms given to me.

The doorway fills again.

I feel rather than see it.

The hair on my arms lifts like recognition. Roman stands with the fire behind him and the night at his back.

“Will you stay for a few more days?” he asks, and the words are not dressed as poetry.

They are not bait.

They are not a trick to see if the girl with the flour on her fingers will stumble.

They carry weight and a quiet code.

I do not hear a cage in them.

I hear a room with a door and a light he will keep on if I ask him to.

But my contract was only for tonight. I have a life I need to get back to—and a family that disapproves of exact situations like the one I’m in right now.

My mouth opens. Nothing comes.

I’m too full of night and rain and the shape of his question to speak quickly.

I am also full of a reckless happiness that scares me more than any storm.

It rises like the smell of bread just before it finishes baking.

It’s sweet and thick and complicated by the knowledge that once you pull it from the oven, you are committed to letting it cool and be eaten and then it’s gone, and the only way to have it again is to make more.