Page 24 of Property of Thrasher (Kings of Anarchy MC: South Carolina #1)

MELODY

One Month Later

A month sounded like a long time until you live it. I once heard a saying about the days are long but the years go by fast. Life never felt that way back in Montana. But here, it definitely did.

The first days felt like I was learning a new language with all the verbs missing.

What are we doing?

What am I to him?

What is he to me?

Then the days started linking arms. Work, ride, sleep with him in my bed or in his occasionally, but mostly sleeping alone.

The rhythm didn’t make everything simple, but it made it steadier.

The sharpest edges in me weren’t knives anymore.

More like the corners of a table you learn to walk around without bruising.

Enzo was a big part of that. He was still himself—blunt as a hammer, quiet when he didn’t have something worth saying, a man who drew his lines like he trusted his own hand. Gentle but firm. I kept testing those words in my mouth.

Gentle, because he never made me guess about whether I could say no.

Firm, because when he meant yes he said it like a promise and kept it.

I learned the pressure of his palm on the back of my neck with a mild squeeze when he wanted my anxiety to drop two notches.

I learned the way he took a curve on the old county road so smooth it felt like the road leaned for us.

He didn’t want the world to make a fuss over us.

He never called me his old lady. He never did a big speech.

But his hand found mine under tables, and his mouth found the quiet part of my hairline when I was still half-asleep, and he’d mutter “text me” like the least romantic instruction and then answer in two minutes flat when I did.

If I asked for slow, he gave me slow. If I asked for quiet, he rode me out where there wasn’t any traffic and let the air do its work.

Elaina lived in my thoughts, too. The way he spoke about her.

She was a true treasure. Like a person he loved enough to be present for and drop anything if she needed him.

He rarely brought her up; when he did, it was practical and warm.

I tried to picture meeting her and landed on a thousand possible versions—none of which happened in the next month, which was a mercy. Some things need different timing.

What did happen, today, was Lyric. We were on break behind the hotel, sitting on the curb where the shade from the building threw a rectangle of usable air.

The sun had that white-hot look, and the cicadas sounded like electricity.

The kitchen had sent up sweet tea in paper cups, so icy it hurt my teeth, and Lyric kept spinning her ice with a straw like she could stir the nerves out of it.

“I’m just going to say it,” she said. Her eyes danced like light on water. “Tiny claimed me.”

I blinked. “Claimed you?”

She nodded, and even her nod had a smile in it. “At the clubhouse. In front of the bunnies and some of the brothers. He said it to me first—real quiet, just us—and then he said it out loud. The look on his face, Mel—like he was signing his name on something he wanted to take care of.”

A dozen images flashed through my head. I’d seen what claim looked like when it was a disguise for control.

But I’d also watched Tiny with Lyric these last weeks.

How he had a big man’s gentleness around her, how he stood between her and the loud rush of live without making it obvious, how he kept a palm at her spine like a security blanket, not a leash.

“How do you feel?” I asked wanting to make sure she was okay with all of this.

“Like I’m jumping off a dock into water I can’t see the bottom of.” She grinned wider. “And like I want to.”

Happy and terrified—she didn’t say the words, but I heard them anyway. They’d been riding shotgun in my chest all month. I didn’t need to map them out for her; she understood the shape on sight.

“I’m happy for you,” I shared, and I was. Happier than I expected, maybe because tiny immunities had been growing in me—against the old fear, against the idea that the only love available was the kind that shrank you.

She tipped her head, studying me. “And you?”

“I’m…good,” I said, then smirked because vague deserved itself. “Gentle but firm, that’s what I got.” I added.

Lyric’s laugh spilled out easy. “He is. You still sleeping in your own bed most nights?”

“Most,” I shrugged. “He respects his rules. Sometimes he breaks them.” I didn’t tell her which nights or how that looked. She wouldn’t ask. We had an unspoken code about not getting into details. I think it stemmed from our upbringing. No one really talked much about sex or relationships.

She bumped her shoulder against mine. “You look softer. In the good way.”

“You look like someone put sunshine in your pocket,” I shot back.

We talked about work because you can’t live on the big talks alone—how the housekeeping cart’s squeak could be heard in three counties, how Mrs. Dockery in 212 kept stealing all the extra soaps and then complaining she was out, and how she wasn’t moving out anytime soon.

Then our ten minutes were up, and we stood, rolled our shoulders, and walked back into the hum like two women who knew how to hold their own joy and still clock in.

The rest of my shift went fast. I folded.

I smoothed. I listened to the rinse cycle pound and thought about the ways my life had grown bigger even inside the same walls.

By the time the clock hit late afternoon, the heat had turned the parking lot into a griddle and my braid stuck to the back of my neck.

Back in my room, I kicked off my shoes and lay back for six seconds before my phone buzzed. One word on the screen: Outside.

Thrasher didn’t send paragraphs. Although, I didn’t need them. I sat up, retied my braid, pulled on my boots, and pressed the heel of my hand to my sternum just because it felt good to steady that spot. Then I went.

The engine’s low rumble reached me before he did, like a pulse coming up the alley.

He was leaned against the bike when I pushed through the back door, sunglasses on, forearms tan, his expression the particular blank that meant he was in a good mood but wouldn’t scare it off by saying so.

When his eyes tracked up to me, the blank shifted to something I felt low in my stomach.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“Yes.” Real hunger had woken up lately—food hunger, touch hunger, air hunger. I liked feeding all three.

He handed me the helmet and waited while I cinched it, thumb brushing the underside of my jaw once like a punctuation mark.

I climbed on behind him and we rolled out easy, no hurry.

He cut left where the traffic thinned and took the route that squiggles through the pines before finding open farm.

Late summer had turned the fields that particular tired green, and the ditches were full of wild things I didn’t know the names for.

The sun had softened just enough that I didn’t have to squint.

Wind took the sweat from the back of my neck and returned it as cool.

I didn’t try to talk. There are a hundred ways to say “thank you” to a man who knows how to ride the way he rides.

I said it by finding the place my hands liked on his middle and keeping them there.

By not fighting the lean. By resting my cheek between his shoulder blades when we hit a stretch without potholes and letting the hum of the engine do the rest.

He took us to a roadside restaurant I’d seen a hundred times and never been inside—the kind with a hand-lettered sign out front that gets redone every year and a keg cooler someone’s uncle probably fixed.

Inside smelled like grill and yeast rolls and lemon in a spray bottle.

The tables were scarred wood, the floor old tile that had seen better mops.

Two men at the bar argued cheerfully about baseball.

A little girl at a corner table was coloring in a paper kids’ menu with the kind of full-body seriousness I recognized from trying to stay inside lines.

We took a booth in the corner. I slid in so I could see the whole room; he slid in so he could see the door.

The waitress arrived with a pad and an accent and called me “sweetheart” without making it feel like a theft.

Thrasher ordered sweet tea for me before I could speak and water for himself, then glanced across the table to see if I’d mind.

I didn’t. He waited while I picked a chicken sandwich, then asked for a burger he specified down to the cheese.

“You always know exactly what you want?” I asked when we were alone again.

“Only about the important things,” he deadpanned, which made me smile because he’d count a burger as important in his day and he’d be right.

He stretched one arm along the back of the booth.

I let my shoulder find his hand there like a plant finding a trellis.

He didn’t make a show of touching me. He just did it and then didn’t stop.

I felt the heat of his palm through the thin cotton of my shirt.

I felt what it turned down in me when he held steady.

We talked about nothing in the way that means everything—the way the light hit the water on the way in, whether the birds we’d seen were hawks or vultures, how he’d once ridden with a guy who swore by duct tape as a fix for everything and why that friendship had lasted exactly two weeks.

I liked hearing his stories—the ones not about the club, the ones about the human things.

The door jangled, and my attention went up without thinking.

Tiny came in first, skin the color of wood polished by use, shoulders filling the doorway like a promise.

Lyric was right behind him, free hair, soft dress I’d never seen her wear to work, eyes scanning the room and then lighting like a match when she saw me.