Page 25 of Dread

“Come here,” I said, and nodded toward the garage.

The bike had been sitting under its cover longer than I wanted to admit, a fact I hadn’t examined too closely until I pulled the tarp back and found the leather seat still supple, the tank still full from the last time I’d taken it out alone, months before a tire blew on a Missouri highway and changed the shape of everything I owned. I checked the oil out of habit. Swung a leg over. Held out my hand.

She looked at the bike same as she looked at most things I offered her -- assessing, running the numbers, checking for the angle before she let herself want it. Then she took my hand and climbed on behind me, her arms finding my ribs, her chin settling against my shoulder blade like she’d been doing it for years instead of never.

“Hold on,” I said, which she already was.

We took the county road instead of the highway, the bike leaning easily through curves I’d ridden a thousand times alone, the engine’s low thunder replacing every thought that wasn’t the road and the woman holding on behind me. She laughed once, somewhere past the second mile, a sound the wind tore away before I could turn my head to catch it, and I didn’t need to see her face to know it. I felt it, transmitted straight through her arms into my spine, and I opened the throttle another notch just to earn it again.

We rode until the sun started dropping into the tree line and turned back before Hornet’s fishing expedition could beat us home. She didn’t let go of me until we’d stopped moving, and even then it took her a second -- like her hands had learned a lesson on that road they weren’t in any hurry to unlearn.

Evenings layered, one after another, building something that resembled routine, the patient accumulation of sedimentary rock becoming a mountain -- slow and only visible in hindsight. Dishes done. Ellie bathed, hair wrapped in a towel, smelling of the plain soap I kept in my shower. Reading on the couch, her body rested unevenly between us, more toward Katy than me, a children’s book open across three laps while I read the text with the same measured cadence I used for instructions I intended to be followed exactly.

Then bed. Ellie first, Katy taking the larger room because there’d never been any question she would. By ten, the lights were out and both of them had gone to sleep. I sat in the living room for a while, getting used to the fact that I wasn’t the only person under my roof.

I lay awake most of those nights longer than I would have admitted to anyone who asked. Not from worry, exactly. From the specific, low-grade disorientation of a man cataloguing a life he hadn’t planned for and finding, when he ran the inventory, that he didn’t want to give any of it back.

I woke at two-seventeen and knew before I opened my eyes that sleep wasn’t coming back. Some nights worked that way. The body decides vigilance is the order of business regardless of what the brain’s been promised, and arguing with it never got me anywhere in thirty years of trying.

The house had settled for the night. Through the kitchen window, the maples moved in the breeze, their branches shifting against the dark.

I made coffee. Two mugs. I didn’t think about the second until I was already filling it, but I knew Katy was awake. After days under the same roof, I’d gotten used to her habits.

I left the kitchen with both mugs and headed through the living room. The couch cushions were still crooked from where the three of us had sat earlier, Ellie wedged between us, while she talked through most of a movie. I passed Katy’s closed bedroom door and pushed through the screen door onto the back porch.

The deck faced east, toward the tree line and the compound perimeter beyond it. No moon tonight. Stars showed through the branches, and the boundary lights blinked in the distance.

Three days ago, I’d shown Katy where the property ended. Lately, I’d been thinking less about boundaries.

I sat in one chair. Left the other empty. Waited, patient in the manner I’d learned for most things worth waiting for, and it wasn’t long before the screen door opened behind me and her footsteps found the porch. I didn’t turn. Didn’t need to. I knew the rhythm of her steps on my own floorboards the same way I knew everything else about her, filed without comment, filed anyway.

She sat. Took the mug I’d set on the arm of the empty chair. Wore one of my T-shirts -- found folded on the guest room dresser, I assumed, since it hung to mid-thigh and the sleeves fell past her elbows, and she’d put it on without asking, which told me more than the shirt itself did.

“You sleep?” I asked.

“No.”

I nodded and took another drink of coffee. There wasn’t anything useful I could add, so I didn’t try. Katy took a sip from her mug and grimaced.

“Too strong?”

“You could stand a spoon up in this.”

“That’s coffee.”

“That’s an opinion.”

I almost smiled. She stared out toward the trees for a while.

“I keep listening,” she said. “For car doors. Engines I don’t recognize. A doorknob turning when someone’s testing it from the outside.” Her fingers tightened around the mug. “Sometimes I stand at the window in the guest room because I can see the driveway from there. I know it’s not rational. The club has men at the gate. Fox told me. Hornet. The others. I know I’m safe here.”

“Knowing and believing aren’t always the same thing.”

She turned toward me.

“It doesn’t go away fast,” I said. “But it does go away.”

“How do you know?”