Asphalt Demons MC My Boyfriend Cheated, Now Four Want Me At The Same Time

Chapter 2

POV — LEXI

I press call.

One ring. My thumb hovers over the red button, because who am I kidding, it's almost midnight and I'm the girl who said no a hundred and three times—

"Lexi?"

Noah's voice. Low, warm, a little rough around the edges, like an engine that just woke up. And that's it. That's the whole trigger. One word — my name in that voice — and the fuse that popped so cleanly back on that stairwell starts sparking again.

I open my mouth to say something normal. Something cool. *Hey, sorry to call so late, quick question about clutch cables.*

What comes out instead is a sound I've never made in my life. Half a word, half a leak in a pressure line.

"Lexi." Different now. Sharper. I hear something scrape on his end — a chair, a bench, him standing up. "What happened. Where are you."

"I—" Breathe. Breathe, Carter, you know how, you've been doing it eighteen years. "Noah, I don't— I don't know where to—"

"Are you hurt?"

"No." A laugh falls out of me, ugly and wet. "No, my body's fine. Great, actually. Best condition of my life. Just did a full diagnostic. Everything's broken except the parts you can touch."

Silence. Two seconds. In Noah-time that's a whole speech.

"Come here," he says. "Just come."

"Noah, it's midnight, I can't just—"

"Lexi." Steady. Solid. A wall you can lean a whole house against. "You know the address. Come. Just come."

The line stays open. He doesn't hang up. He waits — I can hear him breathing, I can hear the low murmur of a TV somewhere behind him, some other guy's voice asking something and Noah not answering. He's waiting for the sound of my engine.

I put the phone in my jacket. I put my helmet on over a face that's already soaked, which — pro tip from your local mechanic — is a terrible idea, because a visor fogs from the inside and tears have nowhere to go.

I hit the starter. Phoenix catches on the first try.

Good girl. At least one of us works.

* * *

* forty miles. don't ask about the speedometer. the speedometer and I agreed not to discuss it *

Here's what nobody tells you about riding while your life is on fire: the road doesn't care.

That's the best thing about it.

The road doesn't ask why I'm doing eighty on a two-lane at midnight. It doesn't tell me *he didn't mean it* or *maybe it's a misunderstanding* or *maybe you saw wrong.* I didn't see wrong. I've been reading machines since I was six — I know what a thing looks like when it's exactly what it looks like.

The wind hammers at my chest and I lean into it and scream inside my helmet, once, full-throttle, and the engine screams with me, and for about four hundred meters we're one animal with two lungs.

Three years.

Three years of *not those jeans, Lex.* Three years of *do you have to smell like gasoline.* Three years of shrinking, degree by degree, like metal cooling, and calling it love because he said that's what it was and what did I know, my first everything, my only everything—

The visor fogs. I flip it up and the night air slaps the tears sideways off my face. There. Free windshield wipers. Bike beats a car in all categories, don't let anyone tell you different.

And her.

I take the long curve past the water tower and I see it again, projected on the dark like a drive-in screen: blonde hair on his pillow. Her nails. My sister's nails, the ones she gets done every two weeks, the ones she flashed at me last Sunday over Mom's pot roast while asking, sweet as syrup, *so how's Dylan, still putting up with your little hobby?*

She knew. She sat across from me at our mother's table, passed me the potatoes, and she knew.

Something in my chest clanks like a rod about to throw. I roll the throttle harder because if I go fast enough maybe I outrun the picture, and news flash — you can't, it's mounted inside the helmet, it rides with you.

The turn-off appears out of the dark. Gravel road, no sign, just a bent reflector post and a rut I know from the one time Noah drew me a map on a napkin "in case you ever change your mind."

I change my mind at eighty miles an hour, apparently. Happy birthday to me.

Gravel rattles under the tires like applause from an audience that hates me. Ahead, up the slope, light. A long low building, windows glowing amber, three bikes parked out front like sleeping dogs, a chain-link fence, and a wide steel gate.

Open gate.

Almost open gate.

* * *

POV — DAMON

Midnight. I'm doing what I do at midnight: sitting in the yard with a socket wrench I don't need, next to a bike that doesn't need it either. Kai calls it brooding. I call it inventory.

Inside, Noah's been standing at the window for twenty minutes with his phone in his fist. Not talking. Waiting. Noah waits like a mountain waits — you don't notice until you realize nothing's moved him.

"Who," I said, first time he picked up the call and his whole face changed.

"Lexi."

Lexi. The garage girl. The one he's been recruiting for a year like the club's some church and she's his lost congregation. The one with the boyfriend. Some pretty boy with a car payment and opinions.

The one who says no.

"She's coming," Noah said, and went back to the window.

Coming. At midnight. Crying — I heard it through the phone from six feet away, that broken hitch in the breathing. You don't forget that sound. My mother made it through a wall for most of my childhood.

And here's the thing my brothers don't get, because my brothers still have soft spots where their sense should be: a girl crying at midnight is a grenade. Somebody pulled her pin, and now she's rolling toward MY yard, toward MY club, toward the three guys in this building who never learned that everything you let in the gate, you eventually bleed for.

I hear her before I see her. Single engine, coming in too hot, running clean — annoyingly clean, tuned by someone with actual hands — and the headlight swings up our road, drunk on speed, gravel snapping.

Noah's already moving for the door.

I'm faster.

I cross the yard, and I do the thing my hand's been itching to do since the phone rang.

I step into the gap of the gate and I fill it.

The headlight hits me square. The bike slides to a stop three meters out — good reflexes, I'll give her that — and the girl on it flips her visor all the way up, and even in the glare I can see her face is wrecked, eyes swollen, everything about her ten seconds from falling apart.

Grenade. Told you.

Behind me the clubhouse door bangs open. Footsteps — Noah's, heavy, fast. And I don't turn around, I keep my eyes on her and I say it loud enough for everyone on this property to hear:

"Who let you in?"