Page 48 of Ghost’s Awakening

"The best I've had in four months." It scraped on the way out, and the grin that came with it arrived crooked and wouldn't come off.

Irish's whole face split open. He spun me toward the doors by the shoulder and shoved me with both hands. "Then what are you still doing in my kitchen?! GO!"

The desert opened up at eighty miles an hour, and I finally understood what motorcycles were for.

I'd ridden behind Ghost twice. The first time I was shirtless, bleeding, and so deep in shock the cold couldn't reach me, holding on to a stranger because the other option was asphalt. The second time we rolled away from a hospital with a two-week clock hanging over my head, and I spent thirteen miles staring at the back of his helmet doing math that had no good answers in it.

Third time. Different road. Different sport entirely.

The afternoon sun laid a white glare down the whole highway, and Ghost ran the Harley through it like he'd built the road. He rode the way he fought. No wasted motion, reading traffic three moves out, and it took me ten minutes to understand that what looked like madness was pure skill. He saw gaps before they opened. A sedan drifted a foot and he was already somewhere else, the lean rising up through the frame into my hips, smooth, decided, the engine dropping low and then opening up with a roar I felt in my back teeth. We took a truck on a curve with room to spare. I only knew there was room because he did.

My arms were around him, my chest flat against his back, one T-shirt and one cut between us, and every move he made reached me half a second before the bike made it. His shoulders gathering before a lean. His elbow dipping before the throttle. I'd held this same body twice before and felt nothing but survival. This time I could feel him laughing.

Because he was. We both were. The wind tore past the helmets and turned the world into rush and thunder, and somewhere around the fourth overtake, sliding past a row of cars that sat in their lanes like they were parked, a laugh climbed out of me from somewhere under my gut, huge, helpless, four months old. His answer came back through his spine before I heard it, a shake, a whoop buried inside his helmet, and then he opened the throttle on the straight and the desert smeared.

Scrub brush and heat shimmer. Guardrail posts strobing by. The mountains crawling along the horizon. The speed dragged at my arms and pressed me harder into his back, and my blood ran full of a clean rush. The pit had pumped me full of the other version seventeen times, dread dressed up as adrenaline, and I'd hated every drop of it even while it kept me alive. This was the real thing. This was the rush with nothing rotten in it, because for once in four months we were racing toward something good.

And somewhere in that thunder, arms full of him, carried, with nothing asked of me but to hold on, I quit arguing with what I'd been carrying since the gym. There wasn't a moment it happened. It was all of it at once. The spoon. The coroner's sheet. The towel on his head. A man who said move instead of making me ask. The truth settled in easy at eighty miles an hour, easier than it ever had standing still.

I was falling for him. Had fallen. Was still going, no ground in sight, and for the first time in my life I wasn't looking for the landing.

So I did something I had never once done in twenty-seven years. I let go of the man I was holding, sat up into the windblast with the speed ripping at my sleeves, threw both arms out wide, and screamed.

No words. Just lungs. Four months of hospital hallways and debt math and blood on canvas, out into the desert at the top of my voice, gone behind us at eighty, and I came back lighter by exactly that much.

That's when the bike twitched.

A flick. Left, then right, two inches of wiggle at speed, and my stomach fell through the seat, the horizon tipped, and "WOAH!" ripped out of me at full volume as my arms snapped shut around him hard enough to crack a rib.

The bike ran straight as a rail. It had never done anything else.

Under my arms his whole torso was shaking, and it had nothing to do with the engine. He was laughing. Howling, inside his helmet, shoulders heaving with it, and his gloved hand came down and patted my forearm twice. There, there.

"You did that on purpose!" I shouted it into the wind and got a happy, shameless shrug in reply, felt more than seen. "My arms were up because of you! I trusted you!"

More shaking. Another pat.

There was only one move left against a man like that. I slid forward until no space was left, wrapped him up for real, chest to spine, arms locked across him, my helmet against his shoulder, and held on tighter than any ride required. His laughing wound down. At seventy-five, his left hand left the bar for one second and pressed flat over my forearm, glove and all, and stayed until the next curve needed it back.

The first red light on the edge of the city caught us. The engine dropped to a rumble, and he flipped his visor up and turned his head halfway, one pale eye finding me over his shoulder.

"Still mad?"

"Furious." I flipped mine up too. Desert heat rolled over us the second the wind quit.

"You're smiling."

"The helmet's smiling. I'm furious."

"Uh-huh." Green. His visor snapped down, and I felt the laugh run through his back as the engine rose under us. "Hold on, furious."

The city climbed up out of the shimmer, and for the first time in four months I was headed toward a hospital with something in my chest besides lead.

We came into the UMC lot fast. The parking job was crooked. Neither of us looked back at it.

A Harley sat near the entrance, nose out. The brother leaning against it was one of the compound faces, Santos, broad through the shoulders, and he lifted two fingers off his crossed arms as we passed. Posted. Watching. The club's word, standing in the afternoon sun in a leather cut. I nodded back.

We hit the lobby at a jog with our helmets still in our hands, and the smell of the place did what it always did, floor cleaner and cold air and vending-machine coffee. Except today it didn't close around my neck. Today it was only a smell.