Page 37 of Diesel’s Desire

She blinks. “A ride.”

“On the bike. Get some air, clear your head for twenty minutes. You’ve probably been staring at the same case files so long you’re not gonna see anything new tonight anyway.”

“I have my truck⁠—”

“It’ll still be here when we get back,” I interrupt.

She hesitates, and I watch her run through every reason she should say no—her job, the case, the years of good sense that’s kept her upright and careful her whole life. I see all of it cross her face. Then she sets her glass down, empty, and something in her shoulders drops an inch.

“Twenty minutes,” she says.

“Twenty minutes,” I echo.

I settle her tab and mine both before she can argue about splitting it, and she doesn’t fight me on it this time, which tells me more about how tired she is than anything she’s said out loud.

Outside, the night’s gone cool and clear, stars scattered thick over the ridgeline behind Mac’s. I swing a leg over the bike, and she stands there a second, studying it like she’s never sat on the back of one, though I know for a fact she has. Two decades ago, plenty of times, her arms locked around my ribs and her chin hooked over my shoulder, laughing into the wind.

She climbs on behind me without a word.

Her hands find my waist, tentative at first, then settle in like they remember the shape of me even if she won’t admit it. It feels right in a way that scares me a little—familiar enough that I have to remind myself she only agreed to twenty minutes.

I pull out onto the county road, headed away from town, away from the station and the case files and every version of tonight where she says no.

She doesn’t ask where we’re going. Maybe she already knows.

The turnoff’s grown over more than it used to be, brush scraping the bike’s undercarriage as I ease us down the old logging trail. It opens up onto the bluff above Sutton Creek all at once, the trees falling back and the valley spreading out below us, moonlight laid flat and silver across the water a hundred feet down.

We used to come here at seventeen, sneak off after dark with a six-pack we weren’t old enough to buy and no plan past sitting on the hood of whatever car I’d borrowed, talking about a future neither of us got to have.

I cut the engine. The quiet rushes in loud after the ride.

“You remember this place,” she says. Not a question.

“Never forgot it.”

She slides off the bike first, walks to the edge where the rock drops away, arms wrapped around herself against the chill. I watch the wind catch pieces of her hair that have slipped loose from where she’d pinned it back for work, and something in my chest goes tight and hungry at the same time.

“We used to think we had it all figured out up here,” she says, not looking at me.

“We were kids. Kids think they’ve got everything figured out.”

She exhales slowly. “You proposed to me at eighteen.”

“I remember.”

“I said no.”

“I remember that too.”

She turns then, and the moonlight softens the tired lines around her eyes, and for a second she’s eighteen again, standing in a gravel lot telling me she can’t do this, she can’t be a club girl, she needs more than a patch and a promise.

“Evan,” she says, and my whole body responds to my own name in her mouth like it’s a command. “What are we doing?”

“Whatever we want.”

I close the distance before she can talk herself out of whatever’s building behind her eyes. She doesn’t step back. Her hands come up to my chest instead, not pushing me away, just resting there like she’s checking my heartbeat’s as wrecked as hers.

“This is a terrible idea,” she says.