Page 84 of Handful

I’d named it The Wickham—part my surname, part the charming, faithless, ruinous villain of the only book my parents ever agreed was worth teaching. The kind of joke a family of literature professors raises you to make.

“Austen.”

I looked up when I heard Derek call my name. He’d come through the front of the bar fast—and Derek doesn’t go anywhere fast. Derek drifts, Derek glides; in all the years I’d known him I’d never once seen him hurry.

“You need to come to the door. Right now.” He pulled in a breath. “Your biker’s here. And he’s brought his friends.”

The place was ready. I was ready. I’d given myself this last hour on purpose—to walk it and breathe it and not have to manage a single thing—and I wasn’t eager to spend it on whatever had Derek running.

“Derek. We open in an hour. I don’t have time for whatever—”

“It’s not a-. It’s a—” He gave up on the sentence. “Just come. Trust me. You’re going to want to see this.”

I set down the cloth and went to the door.

I felt it before I heard it.

It came up through the floor first—through the soles of my feet and the old glass in the factory windows—before it ever reached my ears. A lot of engines, close and getting closer.

When I got to the door I looked left and there they were. Dozens of bikes, coming up the street toward The Wickham. Venom Riders MC, in formation—two by two, tight, no daylight between them—Dutch at the front, and Tyler, who’d been up my ladder forty minutes ago hanging a bulb and had slipped out the back swearing he was going for ice, riding at his right hand.

“Told you,” Derek said, beside me. “I have never in my life been so glad I happened to be facing a window.”

They didn’t stop in front of the bar. They rolled past it, slow, the whole long column, until Dutch and Tyler had drawn just beyond the bar.

“What are they doing?”

“I genuinely could not tell you,” Derek replied. “But it’s exciting.”

Dutch lifted one arm. Held his fist up in the air.

The bikes stopped. Engines down to a growl.

Then a small flick of that fist, upward—and every visor in the line went up at once. One motion.

“Oh,” Derek said softly. “Oh, that’s choreographed. That’s been rehearsed.”

Dutch turned his head toward me and dropped his fist.

“AUSTEN,” the bikers all shouted. Then again — “AUSTEN.” Then a third time, and on the third the engines came up underneath it, every throttle rolled at once.

“I’m going to need you to keep it together,” Derek murmured.

Dutch lifted two fingers off the grip. The visors came down—one motion, again—and he rolled his hand forward, and the whole column pulled off down the street and was gone.

“Holy shit,” Derek whispered.

Holy shit was right.

My pulse was going like I’d sprinted the block. Forty bikes had shut down my street, shouted my name.

And Tyler had organized it. Tyler. Dutch would have had to bless it—nothing like that rolls without Dutch—but the execution of it, that was Tyler. It was, hands down, the most exciting thing anyone had ever done for me. Wow didn’t cover it.

❧

We opened the doors at five. By six The Wickham was full—three deep at the bar, every table turned, the Edison bulbs throwing the whole room gold—and I stood in the middle of the thing I’d spent eight years building and ran the best service of my life.

Venom came out in force. They’d left the cuts at home—clean shirts—but you could still pick a Venom Rider out of any crowd by the way it parted to let him through. Dutch and Indira were at a table, Maya asleep against her mother’s shoulder the way only a clubhouse baby can sleep.