Page 16 of Claimed By My Biker Daddies

I leave one on in the hall because people here like to wake to a small kindness.

In the pantry, I stop because the room stops me.

The memory is not a picture.

It’s a feeling, it’s accepting the truth that I saw her here first before she was trudging to the tents with all those desserts, looking like a deer caught in the rain.

Her bending here, head lowered, the string of her apron tickling the small of her back, the silver line of a knife as it slid under a candied orange slice to coax it into alignment with its brothers.

I had stood at the threshold and thought this is how a person prays when she does not believe anyone is listening, and I had turned away because my chest did not have room for that.

On the prep table a napkin waits, folded with corners so exact it translates into a language I understand.

The paper smells faintly of cinnamon.

Her name sits on the top line in the kind of handwriting that argues with its own neatness.

Beneath it a number.

No message, not even a lie about returning the pan.

A gift you give a man you do not trust, which is to say a gift you give a man you want to trust and know better than to.

I sit.

The chair creaks the way all honest chairs do.

I hold the napkin between two fingers and feel stupidly large.

I think about the saints on my ribs and the devils they wrestle.

I think about the rosary inked at my collarbone for all the men who did not make it back to hang the real one there.

I think about the way her hands did not shake when the generator coughed and the tent lights flickered.

I think about how she fed strangers and disappeared before the thank you could reach her.

I tell myself she wrote the number for Cruz and I tell myself she wrote the number for Deacon and then I tell myself the truth, which is that I do not care who she thought she wrote it for because I am sitting here with it in my palm like a sin I would commit again on a weak day.

I fold the napkin once because a man should not stare at something he cannot improve and then I tuck it into my wallet.

I close the leather over it and put the whole thing back where it belongs, close enough to hurt when I sit down too fast.

“Saint,” Deacon calls from the hall. “South is secure.”

“Good,” I answer. “Sleep.”

I sit with the scent of cinnamon and rain for long time before I finally go to bed.

When I do sleep I dream about coffee grounds and a twist of orange peel and the back of a woman’s neck.

When I wake, I unwrap the day the way a fighter unwraps his hands after a fight he did not lose and does not call a win.

The week rolls like a tire with a nail in it. It moves, it holds, it loses air at the edges.

We ride the ridge roads because snow hangs around in the shadows up there long after the valley forgets.

Cruz splits his time between the med kit and the kitchen because a man who is tender with wounds is also tender with soup.