Page 23 of Property of Thrasher (Kings of Anarchy MC: South Carolina #1)

I didn’t talk. Wasn’t what being on a ride was about, I had learned and experienced taking this special timeout.

Riding with him was a freedom I couldn’t explain.

I watched the way his hands worked the bars, light and sure.

I felt the hum of the engine move from my thighs up into my ribs, then into that quiet part of my brain that only ever gets quiet when I’m moving.

It was as if all the static I carry—memories that sting, moments that catch, the old voices that crowd my mind—got smothered by wind.

On a bike, things that loom shrink back down to what they actually are.

A man on a couch. A rule said in a calm voice. A girl with a choice.

He took a left I didn’t expect, and suddenly we were on a rise that gave us a view like out of a magazine—a flat line of trees, a small glitter of water from the lake in the distance.

I leaned into his back, and he pressed his palm once over my knuckles where they met at his stomach, like saying, I feel you, without taking his eyes off the road.

By the time we circled back toward town, the sun had shifted into late afternoon.

The light went syrupy and soft. I could’ve stayed out there for another hour, two, five.

My body had gotten heavy in the good way, not the tired way—the way that says you’ll sleep without having to bargain with your own head for it.

He pulled into the back lot and cut the engine.

The quiet pressed down around us. I stayed where I was for one extra second, cheek against the leather at his shoulder, and inhaled this moment to my memory banks.

Then climbed off and unbuckled the helmet.

My hair came loose in little escaping strands. I pushed them behind my ears.

“You want to come up?” I asked, my voice coming out gentler than I’d planned.

He studied me a second, then nodded. “Yeah.”

In the hallway, neither of us rushed. I unlocked my door and stepped aside so he could come in first. My room looked exactly like a hotel room looks—beige, generic art trying too hard on the wall, the small dresser with a drawer that stuck halfway.

I’d made the bed that morning, habit welded into me.

The only thing that was mine was the stack of paperbacks on the chair I bought at the second hand store up the road.

“Water?” I asked, because offering felt like a way to steady my hands.

“Sure.”

I poured from the bottle on my dresser into the cheap plastic cups with the little paper lids and handed him one. He took it and looked at me over the rim while he drank. My throat did a weird little click in response.

“Thank you,” I muttered trying to let him know I appreciated time with him. I didn’t know why. Things felt awkward, but not uncomfortable. More like two people that were connected but still learning one another.

“For what?”

I rested my hip against the dresser. “The ride. The way it felt. I know this is going to sound dumb, but it was like the air around me told me to remember I was alive. Like there was room to think without the thoughts crowding me.” I caught his eyes and didn’t drop them. “Like freedom.”

His mouth barely moved, but his eyes did. Something in them went soft and certain. “That’s the whole point,” he said. “It’s not dumb.”

I set my cup down on the dresser with a plastic thud, crossed the little square of carpet between us, and pressed my fingers to the front of his shirt.

He didn’t move. He let me be the one to erase the last inch.

I rose onto my toes, and when my mouth met his, he let it be what it was—slow, unrushed.

The first pass was a hello, not a demand. The second was an answer.

He kissed me like reading, yes, but also like writing, each touch a word he didn’t waste.

My hands went from his chest to the sides of his neck, thumbs under his jaw, and his breath changed.

He was gentle with me the way a strong man remembers the weight of what he’s carrying.

Firm in all the places that made my nerves settle instead of jump.

I stepped back once, tugging him with me, and the backs of my knees met the bed. We sat without breaking apart.

I didn’t rush. I didn’t have to. His palms slid over my shoulder blades, down my sides.

He didn’t go anywhere he hadn’t already announced, not with words but with patient touch.

When I lifted my shirt over my head, it wasn’t because I felt like I ought to.

It was because the air felt better on my skin, because I wanted to see his eyes change. And thankfully, they did.

“Okay?” he asked, voice low, when his hands found the bare skin at my waist.

“Yes,” I whispered firmly to make sure he heard how much I meant it.

We took our time. We learned each other in the slow language bodies speak when nobody’s translating for them.

I felt it when he chose a pace that matched my breath, not the clock in his own blood.

I gave back what he gave me, trying to memorize the map of what made his breath catch, the way his hand flexed on my hip when I kissed the corner of his mouth, the sound he made when I traced my fingers along the line of his shoulder.

The room stayed quiet, but it wasn’t the kind of quiet that isolates.

It was the kind that wraps around two people and holds.

When we finally moved together, it wasn’t a rush or a scramble.

It wasn’t a thing that happened to me. It was something we did, both of us looking.

My body knew more this time—less flinch, more yes—and he kept reading it, checking in, adjusting without making me name every small thing.

He truly read my body, every inch. The world narrowed to warm skin and soft breath and a rhythm that had nothing in it that hurt.

I let myself be there, really there, not bracing for the next bad thing or waiting for the ceiling to crack.

After, he didn’t roll away. He didn’t get up and put his boots on and draw a line in the doorway with his body.

He gathered me in, my cheek on his chest where his heartbeat felt like a low drum, and tucked his chin into my hair.

His hand drew a slow line up and down my spine as if the act of touch was its own sentence, not a prelude to some other demand.

“Thank you,” I said, surprised to hear the words come out. They were small and big at the same time.

“For what?” he asked, and I smiled at the repetition.

“For all of it.” I tilted my head to catch his eye. “For the ride. For this. For…not rushing. For listening. Mostly for letting this be safe.”

He nodded once, like yeah, obviously, and tightened his arm in a way that told me it wasn’t an accident, the way he was staying right here in the moment with me.

A thought flickered through me then, what he’d told me the night before last: I don’t let women I fuck sleep over .

No apology. Just the rule. Yet here we were, against all that.

I didn’t point it out. I didn’t want to turn it into a negotiation where I needed to win.

I just let the fact exist, a warm stone under the water, smooth and solid.

Maybe I’d keep it in my palm later and turn it over.

Maybe not. Right now, the only thing that mattered was the way my whole body had finally sagged into sleepiness without fear.

If I awoke tomorrow and he had gone, I would know why.

But if by some chance the dawn of a new day cascaded in with him still holding me, then I would treasure the gift that was as well.

I breathed him in and decided what was meant to be would be.

Morning didn’t come. Not all at once. The kind of sleep I fell into had no dreams that I remembered, only the sensation of falling and landing somewhere soft.

When I blinked awake, it was because a housekeeping cart squeaked somewhere down the hall and someone laughed too loud.

For a second I didn’t know where I was—hotel room, yes, my room, yes—but the weight under my cheek wasn’t the pillow. It was a chest. His.

I froze, not because I was scared but because I was surprised the moment hadn’t broken in the night when I wasn’t paying attention.

His arm was heavy around me, but not trapping.

His hand was warm where it cupped the back of my shoulder.

His breath moved my hair on the inhale. I lay very still and listened to the sound of our two bodies doing nothing together.

“Hey,” he greeted, voice roughened by sleep, without moving more than he had to.

“Hey,” I answered, my voice doing that morning-sandpaper thing it does.

“What time you gotta be up for work?”

“Later,” I said, because for once it was true. I had a late shift. “You?”

“Soon enough.” He didn’t move. “But not yet.”

We didn’t talk about what he’d said before, about sleepovers.

We didn’t talk about what it meant that he was still here.

That he’d broken his own line for me, or maybe just bent it.

If there was a word for the thing moving between us, we didn’t say it out loud.

It felt like taking a butterfly out of a jar when it just learned it could fly.

Better to let it land where it wanted. Better to keep the lid off and see if it stayed.

We lay there another minute, or five, or twenty. Time changed shape when my head was on his chest. I thought about Lyric and how she’d grin when I told her I liked the ride again.

I thought about Elaina and whether she liked the smell of oil on her dad’s clothes or hated it because it meant he was out with brothers instead of with her.

I thought about the road we took, the left I didn’t expect, the view with the water like a coin flashing in a field.

I thought about the way he’d asked, “Okay?” and then waited for the word.

I thought about if this would work. I thought about if it wouldn’t. I let both possibilities sit beside me like quiet guests and didn’t make them leave.

Eventually he pressed his mouth to the top of my head, a touch so light I might have imagined it, and said, “I should go.”

I nodded against him, not because I wanted him gone, but because we both understood the world outside the door was real and had its own clocks.

He eased out from under me the way you move a sleeping cat and stood, stretching his back until it popped.

I watched him pull on his shirt, watched him tuck in the hem just a smidge the way men who ride tuck things so they don’t flap.

He found his boots where he’d left them by the chair and sat to lace them, double-knot because he didn’t do loose.

I pulled the sheet higher, not for modesty, just because the room’s air had cooled and I suddenly felt the lift of the morning.

He looked over once, checking on me and his mouth did that almost smile again.

He crossed the room, put a palm on the side of my neck, and leaned down so his forehead touched mine.

“Text me when you’re off,” he ordered but paused with a smirk. “Well, if you want more of this.”

I nodded embarrassed about the way I absolutely wanted more of this.

He kissed me once, quick and sure, then straightened to move out of the space. At the door he looked back, the way people do when they’ve learned to take mental pictures. I took one too. Then he was gone, and the hallway swallowed him with the soft hiss of the hydraulic hinge.

I lay there, still, counting the places on my body that felt…

different. Not in the way people warn you about.

Not in the way I’d braced for. In the way that says somebody got in there, soul deep.

Maybe it was because I was a virgin and I was somehow romantizing what we had.

Who knew if any of this was real because my life was upended before landing here.

I got up eventually, pulled on my softest T-shirt, and made coffee with the cheap machine on the dresser because I didn’t want to go downstairs and run into anybody’s eyes with my hair like this and my face like this.

I sipped it by the window and watched a bird circle above the parking lot like it was waiting on the scraps to devour for a morning snack.

I texted Lyric a single line: I rode again.

She sent back three exclamation points, a coffee cup, and the word YAY in all caps, then followed with a heart and the words You deserve soft .

I set the phone down and put my palm over my own heart, like I could feel the truth of that through skin and bone.

Once the caffeine from the coffee awakened me, I got in the shower rinsing away the previous night.

While being clean was refreshing, there was something about washing him off of me that stung just a little bit too.

When I went to the mirror to braid my hair for work, my fingers were steadier. I looked like myself. Not a different person, not some transformed version with glowing skin and glittering eyes. Just me, with sleep lines on my cheek and a softness under them I was learning to trust.

Before I left the room, I glanced at the bed.

The sheet was a little wrinkled, only because sheets wrinkle when people are alive on top of them.

While he had made sure to shift us away from the wet spot, I knew they needed to be washed.

Quickly, I stripped the bed although a little sad to take his scent away since I somehow felt like he might not ever spend the night with me again.

Then I opened the door, stepped into the hallway noise, and let the day give me whatever came next.