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I leaned over her and put my mouth on her breast, then her throat, then her mouth.
“I love you,” I told her. I said it against her lips, and again against her neck, and I kept on saying it. I’d held it in so long that it wouldn’t stop coming.
Her heels locked behind my back. She let go of the handlebar and took a fistful of my hair, and she used it to hold my face where she could see it. I got my thumb on her clit and rubbed her in time with my hips. I watched it rise in her. Her lips parted. Her eyes went wide and wet, and her whole body drew up under my hands. She came with her mouth open and no sound at all, and then a cry that carried clear across the desert.
“You’re mine too,” she said, when she could talk. “You hear me? You always were.”
That finished me. I drove up into her and came so hard my sight went, with my face in my own leather and her hand stroking the back of my neck.
Afterward I pulled her up against my chest on the seat of my bike, with my cut around both of us.
“I’m keeping this,” she said, stroking my cut.
“Nice try. You’ll get your own.”
“When?”
“Soon as I find somebody who can sew a property patch on it.”
She slapped me playfully for that.
I kept one promise for nine years, and I broke it in a night. I’m hers. That’s the one promise I’ll keep.
EPILOGUE
Ava-Rose
Three weeks later I had a new front window for my laundromat, twelve fully working washers and more business than I could handle.
Half of Main had started bringing me their wash on principle. Gus sent his tablecloths over every Monday and overpaid every Monday, and we both let that be his apology.
Out at Havoc’s place the club had a new shop framed and roofed. There was already a bare frame up on the lift.
It was the dead hour before lunch, and the shop was empty. I was at the Juki when the bell rang. I knew the boots.
Havoc dropped a patch on my cutting table. Black, with white lettering. I picked it up.
PROPERTY OF HAVOC.
I’d sewn that patch for five other women. I’d never once let myself picture sewing my own.
“Rush job,” he said.
“I charge double for rush.”
“It’s worth it.” He laid a leather vest on the table beside it. It was new and soft, and cut small. “I’ll wait.”
So I sewed it with a biker breathing down my neck. I’d done it a hundred times. My hands knew the work, which was lucky, because I couldn’t see it too well by the end.
“You crying, Bolton?”
“Shut up, Havoc.”
When I tied off, he held the vest open by its shoulders and I put my arms through. He turned me by my hips to see the back of it. He looked for a long time, and he ran his thumb over the lettering. When I turned around again that hard face of his had gone soft, the way it only ever does for me.
“There,” he said, rough. “That’s my girl.”
Somebody knocked on the wall behind us. Loudly. Three times.
