Page 10 of Sprog
"Yeah."
"How was it?"
I look at the road ahead of us, at the town coming up in the distance. I spot the familiar water tower and the church spire, note the particular flatness of the sky over this part of the county that I've looked at my whole life and never thought much about until right now.
"Good," I say. "It was good."
Seb nods. "Wait till you do a real one."
I don't ask what he means by that. I already know the answer is something I'll understand when I'm ready to understand it and not a second before.
The barat the clubhouse is busy on Friday nights. I'm still getting used to the way the main room transforms from a working space into something louder and looser once the week is done. The patched members bring their energy in differently on a Friday. They’re less focused, more expansive. The sweetbutts who hang around the club on weeknights triple in number by nine o'clock. The music goes up as the drinks go down while the room gets warm from constantly moving bodies.
I've been nursing the same beer for forty minutes.
It's not that I don't want a drink. I want several. But I've been on gate duty the last three nights and I'm operating on not enough sleep. I know from watching other men in this club that the ones who make mistakes make them when they're tired and drunk at the same time. I'm not going to be one of those men. Not this early. Not when there's still so much to prove.
So I nurse my beer and watch the room. I think about the Sportster in bay four that needs new brake lines, and I'm so absorbed in mentally mapping out the job that I almost don't notice the woman who slides onto the stool next to me.
She's one of the regulars; I've seen her around all week. Blonde, mid-twenties, wearing the kind of top that's designed to make certain things very difficult to ignore. She leans on the bar and smiles at me with the confidence of someone who has never once been turned down and doesn't expect tonight to be different.
"You're the new prospect," she says.
"That's me."
"I'm Jade."
"Austin."
She tilts her head. "You've been over here on your own all night. That doesn't seem like much of a Friday."
"I'm good, thanks." I say it without any heat in it, just a fact. I'm good. Thanks. I turn back to my beer and the mental map of the Sportster's brake lines.
She stays there for a second, and I can feel the small recalibration happening beside me, the slight surprise of a woman who expected a different outcome. Then she slides off the stool and moves on down the bar to find someone whose Friday is going differently, and that's the end of it.
A fresh bottle appears in front of me. I look up.
Cam is leaning on her side of the bar with her elbows on the wood, her chin in her hand. Her face is pinched in that way she gets when she's watching something she has thoughts about. She's Brick's woman, which I knew before I ever set foot in this club, and she's been running this bar since before most of the current prospects were born. She knows every name, every history, every preference in this room. She stores all of it behind eyes that are quieter than her mouth and sharper than most people give her credit for.
"You didn't have to do that," she says.
"Do what?"
"Turn Jade down like you're doing penance."
I look at my new beer. "I'm not doing penance."
"No?" She tilts her head. "Because you've sat here all night turning your bottle in circles and not talking to anyone and being so deliberately normal about it that it's practically screamingfuck off, I’m doing penance."
"I'm just tired."
"You're tired of being here instead of somewhere else." She straightens up and takes a cloth and wipes down the bar even though it doesn't need it. Cam always cleans things when she's talking through something. "I'm not judging you for it. She seemed like a good person from what I saw of her."
It took me a second to realize she wasn’t talking about Jade. When it hits me who she actually meant, I don't answer her.
"Ruby told me she came to the diner the morning before she left. Had a strawberry milkshake and pecan pie, same as always." Cam folds the cloth. "Paid her own bill. Didn't cry. Told Ruby she was going to be a doctor."
The bar is loud around us, and I hold my bottle and I look at the wood grain of the counter.
