Page 7 of Duke's Rescue
He’d started doing that. Showing up mid-morning with no particular reason, ordering coffee he nursed for an hour, sitting at the counter with his long legs angled sideways because the stools weren’t built for a man his size. He talked to the truckers, and talked to Rosie. He was easy with people in a way that fascinated me because I’d spent years studying how to be easy with people and he just was. No performance. No calculation. He was just present, and everyone seemed to know him.
I was glad he was there though. That was the part I kept circling back to, prodding at, turning over in my hands like something I’d found on the ground and couldn’t decide whether to keep.
“Saturday was nice,” I said, refilling his coffee. The words were out before I’d vetted them, which was unusual for me. I thought about everything before I said it. Every sentence got checked twice before it left my mouth, weighed for safety, tested for consequence. This one had slipped through.
He looked up. Those warm brown eyes, the easy focus of them, the way he gave you his full attention without making you feel pinned by it.
“Yeah?”
“Ruby talked about the workshop all Sunday. She wants to go back. She’s been calling the socket wrench a rock-a-wrench, which I think might be an improvement.”
He smiled. But it was in the most small and understated way, and somehow it made my stomach do something I hadn’t felt in so long I’d forgotten what to call it.
Rosie appeared from the kitchen. She’d been listening. Rosie was always listening, in the way of a woman who’d been running a diner for thirty years and had decided that feeding people included feeding them whatever else they needed.
“Ruby can stay with me tonight,” Rosie said. Casual. Like the thought had just occurred to her. “She’s been wanting to help me make pies. I’ll teach her how to make the crust and she’ll love helping me fill them.”
I opened my mouth to say she didn’t have to do that.
“It’s already decided,” Rosie said. And then she looked at Duke with an expression so transparent that if I hadn’t been watching I’d have heard it anyway. “Trixie’s had one night off in two weeks. Take the girl somewhere that isn’t this diner.”
Duke looked at me. I looked at him. Rosie went back to the kitchen, her work done.
“No, really. It’s fine. You’ve done more than enough…I…”
“You ever been on a bike?” he asked, cutting me off before I could finish.
“No.”
“You want to?”
The answer should have been no. The safe answer, the measured answer, the answer that kept the walls up and the distance intact. I’d spent six years giving the safe answer. Six years of yes when I meant no and fine when I meant I needed help and of course when I meant please stop. The safe answerwas a reflex by now, stamped into my nervous system so deep it fired before my brain caught up.
“Yes,” I said, and surprised myself.
His eyes changed. Just slightly, just a shift in the warmth, a deepening of something that had been building since the highway. He nodded once.
“Six o’clock,” he said. “Wear something warm.”
He pulled up at six. The sound of the engine reached me before he did, that low, deep vibration that I felt in the floorboards. I came downstairs and he was standing beside the bike, holding a jacket.
“It’ll be cold once we’re moving,” he said, and held it open for me.
It was his. Too big, the leather worn soft, the sleeves hanging past my fingertips. I put my arms through and the weight of it settled onto my shoulders, warm from his body, and the proximity of that warmth, the intimacy of wearing something that had been against his skin, made my breath catch in a way I couldn’t hide.
He showed me how to get on. Where to put my feet, how to lean, where to hold. His hands were on my waist, steadying me as I swung my leg over, and they were enormous. I’d noticed his hands before. You couldn’t miss them. But feeling them on my body, the span of his fingers, the warmth of his palms through my shirt, was different from noticing. His thumbs pressed into the curve above my hips, and something liquid moved through my abdomen and I had to concentrate very hard on where I was putting my feet.
“Hold on to me,” he said. “Lean when I lean. Trust the bike.”
I put my arms around his waist. My hands clasped against his stomach, the hard flat plane of it, and my chest pressed against his back, my breasts flattened against the leather of his cut, my thighs bracketing his hips. The position was obscene inits intimacy. Every part of my body was touching every part of his, fitted against him, wrapped around him, and we hadn’t even moved yet.
The engine came to life. The vibration went through me, through the seat, through every point of contact between my body and his, and I tightened my grip. He pulled out onto the road and the world opened up.
The bike was nothing like a car. The wind, and the road rushed under my feet. The mountains rose on both sides close enough to touch. The sky was enormous and turning gold at the edges, and the speed was terrifying and perfect, my body tight against Duke’s, my hands fisted in his shirt, every curve pressing me harder against him.
I felt everything. The shift of his muscles when he leaned into a turn. The flex of his stomach under my hands. The way his body moved with the bike in a rhythm so practiced, so fluid, it was like watching someone breathe. I was wrapped around a man who knew exactly what he was doing, and the combination of his competence and my vulnerability and the open road was doing things to me that I couldn’t blame on the engine vibration.
I wanted him. The thought arrived fully formed. I wanted this man, I wanted his hands on me again, I wanted the weight of his body, and I wanted to know what his mouth would feel like on mine. The wanting was clean, uncomplicated, so different from anything I’d felt in my marriage that it took me a moment to recognize it. Desire without negotiation and without the cost-benefit. Without the small, exhausting calculation of what I’d have to give up to get it.
