Page 21 of Property of Thrasher (Kings of Anarchy MC: South Carolina #1)

“She knows I wear a patch,” I said. “She knows I run with men she shouldn’t bring home unless she wants me to put them through a wall. That enough for you?”

“It’s enough.” She twirled pasta on the fork, then set it back down like she’d changed her mind mid-bite. “Does she like you?”

That earned a real grin out of me. “Depends on the day. On her thirteenth birthday I wouldn’t let her go to a party at a boy’s house when his parents weren’t home.

She told me she wished I wasn’t her dad.

Next morning she needed a science poster, and I was back in.

Love’s a revolving door at that age, and focus is more immediate than long term. ”

“And now?”

“She thinks I’m an antique and texts me memes to prove it.” I shrugged. “But when the world goes weird, I’m the one she calls. That’s what counts.”

“She’s lucky,” Melody said, quiet.

“She’s mine,” I said, because those words were the only ones that ever mattered where Elaina was concerned. “I take care of what I call mine.”

We let the forks scrape around our plates a bit and the sounds of the night tuck themselves around the house.

After, I wrapped the leftovers and did the dishes while she wiped the table like it was a task she needed or maybe it was simply to have a little space.

I gave her a towel. She dried, we stacked, it went easy.

“What about you?” I asked when we drifted to the shelf in the living room. She was looking at the picture of Elaina with the gap-toothed smile.

“What about me?” She glanced at me from the corner of her eye.

“What do you do when you’re not working? What do you like? What are you going to want six months from now that you don’t have today?”

She looked back at the photo like she could hide in it. “I read.”

“What?”

“Whatever I can get cheap.” A hint of a grin. “Romances, sometimes. The kind that promise it’ll all work out.”

“Those lie,” I shot back with a huff.

“Maybe,” she allowed. “But sometimes lying is the only way you get through the chapter you’re in.”

That hit harder than she knew. “What else?”

“I like the way the air smells before it rains.” She sounded surprised at herself. “And when you walk into the kitchen at five a.m. before anyone’s speaking and it’s just the coffee and the clock. And new things like riding. I like that now.”

I filed that one away, too. “I’ll teach you to drive one,” I said. “If you want.”

Her head whipped up. “To drive?”

“Not tonight. Not next week. But when you’re ready, yeah.” I pointed at my chest, then the bike outside like it was an oath. “You shouldn’t count on anyone else to take you where you need to go.”

The way she swallowed—like that sentence had weight—told me I’d said a thing she’d keep.

We sat on the couch after that, two feet of air between us like a line drawn in chalk. The TV wasn’t on. The house made the house noises: a tick in a vent, a soft settle of wood. “You ever think about leaving this place?” she asked. “Not the house. The state. The life.”

“Sometimes I used to. Not the club, this is my life. The state yes because I didn’t like feeling caged or tied down for a while.

” I stretched one arm across the back of the couch and kept it there instead of dropping it across her shoulders where it wanted to land.

“But this life is a choice I made with clear eyes. It doesn’t own me.

I could walk if I needed to. Wouldn’t be clean.

Wouldn’t be pretty. But I could. Except I don’t want to. This is where I’m supposed to be.”

“You like it,” she said, not a question.

“I like the brothers count on me. I like the order we make out of chaos. I like knowing whose problem is whose and solving it. The rest is noise.”

“And the noise?”

“Sometimes it’s loud.” I cut her a glance. “You don’t need that part. You got enough noise on your own.”

She stiffened a hair, like I’d brushed a bruise. I was careful with my next breath. “I’m not asking,” I said. “I’m observing. You don’t owe me your before.”

That eased her shoulders. “Thank you.”

We sat with it. The night pressed up against the windows, thick as velvet.

I wasn’t in a hurry. That surprised me a little.

My blood didn’t do patient by default. I looked at her hands where they rested on her knees.

She wasn’t shaking with me. Her nerves had gone away.

Something about that fed the caveman inside me.

“Come here,” I commanded needing her closer.

She moved like she’d been waiting for the permission. I slid my hand along the back of her neck and tugged her in, mouth brushing hers once, then twice, testing. She rose onto her knees and ended the test. Heat climbed fast, the way a small flame finds dry kindling.

I kissed her slow on purpose. Not because I couldn’t go hard—God knew that switch was easy to flip—but because slow felt like telling the truth. She made a sound when I cupped her jaw that I could have listened to on a loop.

Her weight came into my lap, knees bracketing my thighs, and my body answered with a blunt honesty that didn’t care about careful plans.

I curled one hand over her hip, the other at the back of her head, and gave myself five seconds to memorize the way she fit.

I felt the tremor when it cut through her, the sharp inhale that says a body remembers, both kinds of memory, the good one underneath the bad.

I stilled, held rather than pushed. “Okay?” I asked against her mouth.

She nodded, but I waited for the words.

“Okay,” she said, and it was clear. Then she kissed me like a person choosing their life.

We could have gone as far as we wanted. I knew it.

She knew it. She moved and my hands answered, and the couch proved to have just enough room if I shifted under her.

But there was a line I’d drawn on my kitchen counter earlier when I put pasta water on.

I had reasons. Some honorable, some selfish.

The honorable: last time, I hadn’t known what I didn’t know.

Now that I did, I wanted the next time to be something we stepped into with both of us looking at it clearheaded.

The selfish: I liked that she trusted me enough to get soft and fall asleep on my chest if I let her.

Sex would have been easy. Patience felt like work. I like work.

So I slowed it. I kept it in the safe place where our mouths said plenty and my hands stayed north of polite.

I got her laughing once, a real spill of sound, just by changing angle and catching the corner of her smile with my teeth.

That laugh did more to me than any moan ever had.

A man should take inventory of the things that wreck him. That one went on my list.

After a while I eased us back down, stretched along the couch, put her head on my chest. She made a tiny, involuntary hum at the first pass of my fingers through the loose end of her braid. I did it again so I could hear it twice.

“You ever wish you were older?” she asked the ceiling.

“Every day from fifteen to thirty,” I said. “Then you get older and wish you’d kept your knees. Forty ain’t easy baby.”

She smiled into my shirt. “I mean me, I guess. If I was older right now. So the math didn’t look so weird. So your daughter and I wouldn’t have been in the same high school if we’d lived in the same town.”

I considered that. “You want the kind of man who gets his validation from strangers approving of his math, find another man.” I explained frankly. “I’m not looking for the world’s permission, just yours.”

“What are you looking for?” she asked, soft.

“Plain speech. A steady back. Someone who doesn’t flinch at the truth and doesn’t lie to make me easier to love.” I stroked her hair lazily. “You?”

She was quiet long enough I thought she might punt the question. “A door that opens from the inside,” she said finally. “A choice that stays a choice in the morning. Someone who lets me be me, the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

I put my hand over the center of her back and felt the way she breathed. “We can do that here.”

That settled something in her. I felt it—bones let go of a brace I hadn’t seen but had suspected. We laid there a while, the kind of quiet where you find the same rhythm if you listen. My chest rose. Hers followed. We matched without trying.

It got late because we let it. Eleven slid toward us with its different air. I checked the clock with a glance and knew if I kept her, I’d cross a line I don’t cross. Not because of superstition. Because of experience and rules I made for a reason.

I slipped out from under her carefully and sat up. “I’ll take you back.”

Surprise flickered across her face. It wasn’t disappointment; it wasn’t relief. It was that look people get when the script they expected goes off-book.

She masked it quick, but not before I saw it. She smoothed the front of her shirt and retied the end of her braid like those hands needed a job. “Okay.”

I grabbed my keys and helmets. We moved through the dark house without turning lights on. The porch gave us back to the night, and the night held its breath a second like it was nosy.

She paused at the bike, palm on the seat like it was a living thing she was greeting. I handed her the helmet. “Cold?” I asked.

“A little.”

I pulled a hoodie out of the saddlebag and held it. She slid into it like it surprised her the way it smelled like me. I swung on, and she climbed up. When her arms went around me this time, they were a fraction tighter. I didn’t overthink why.

The ride back took the same roads. Gravel first, then blacktop, then the last stretch into town where the lights start up and the speed limit lies to you.

She put her cheek between my shoulders again.

I kept the pace unhurried like I wasn’t trying to outrun anything.

The wind had that clean edge it gets before real fall shows its face. I liked it. I wanted to keep it.

I pulled into the back lot instead of the front because I didn’t need a lobby audience for the way this ended. I killed the engine. The sudden quiet came down like a lid.

She slid off and handed me the helmet, chin ducked under the edge of the hoodie. The braid lay over it like a rope. She looked at the door, then at me. The surprise was back, faint, like the echo of a bell. I didn’t make her say it. I didn’t make her ask.

“I don’t let women I fuck sleep over,” I stated the plain warning, no apology.

Her mouth parted. A thousand things moved behind her eyes—pride, hurt, relief again, a stubbornness I liked too much. She nodded once. “Okay.”

I didn’t fill it. I didn’t patch it with pretty.

I didn’t do pretty unless it’s earned. I swung my leg off, set both helmets on the seat, and stepped in close enough to put my hand at the end of her braid.

I didn’t tug. I didn’t pull her in. I just held the last inch of it between my fingers so she’d feel what I meant.

“Text me when you’re off again,” I said. “If you want more of tonight.”

She swallowed. “More talking? More pasta?”

“Yes,” I said, because that was the truth available. “And kissing that doesn’t always have to be more but can be when you want that too.”

That startled a smile out of her, small but unhidden. “Okay.”

She turned for the door, then looked back like the thought pulled her spine. “Your daughter,” she said. “Does she know you cook?”

“She knows everything she needs to which does mean she knows I cook,” I explained vaguely. “Goodnight, Melody.”

“Goodnight, Enzo.”

The metal push bar took her in. The rectangle of light from the back hall cut across the concrete for a second and then was gone.

I stood there long enough for a mosquito to find the inside of my elbow and then long enough again to slap it and smear it off on my jeans.

Then I got on the bike and started it up, the rumble loud in the quiet, and I let the night take me back the way I came.

On the road, I thought about the way her body softened under my hands once she believed me. I thought about the rules I keep and the way they keep me.

I didn’t apologize to the dark or to the pines or to myself for the line I drew. I didn’t feel sorry when the house took me back in its normal comfort as the keys hit the bowl with a sound that tells you that you made it home.

I didn’t feel clean, either. I felt like a man who’d handled a fragile thing with hands that were used to rough work and managed not to break it, this time. But I would, wouldn’t I? In time.

Inside, I set her glass in the sink and rinsed it so the wine wouldn’t sour in the cup.

Sure, she wasn’t exactly twenty-one, although I thought she was a little older until I looked up her employee file.

She had a maturity to her, life experience aged her.

She wanted wine, I wouldn’t hold her back.

I put the leftover pasta in the fridge even though I’d probably eat it cold at midnight.

I stood at the window and watched nothing.

The trees made the slow, old sound trees make when they remember wind.

If she texted, I’d answer. If she didn’t, I’d let it be.

I pulled my cut off the chair back and hung it where it belonged. Then I sat on the couch where we’d been and laid my head back and closed my eyes. Her weight wasn’t there anymore, but the impression of it was. I didn’t hold onto much. This, though, I’ll keep that for a minute.

Sleep came the way it always does when you don’t force it—after you stop looking at the clock and after you stop naming the thoughts. I drifted into a calm slumber that I hadn’t experienced in quite a while, maybe not ever.