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

Chapter 4

POV — LEXI

Whose jacket is this?

The question follows me into the morning like a loyal dog.

I wake up to sunlight I didn't order and a ceiling I don't recognize. For exactly four seconds my brain runs on factory settings: warm bed, clean laundry smell, a coffee machine gurgling somewhere like a carburetor with opinions.

Second five, the memory drops in. Stairwell. Door. Blonde hair on his pillow.

I wait for it to crush me the way it did last night. It doesn't — not fully. It just sits on my chest like a toolbox someone left there. Heavy. Present. Survivable.

The jacket is still on the chair. In daylight the leather looks even more lived-in, elbows worn pale from miles I can't count. The demon patch watches me like it slept less than I did.

I splash water on my face, confront the mirror — mascara removed by natural disaster, hair auditioning as a bird's nest — and follow the coffee smell.

* * *

The hallway spits me out into the main room, and the first thing I see is the couch.

The second thing is that the couch is occupied.

Ryder. Folded onto furniture designed for people a foot shorter, one arm behind his head, boots on the floor lined up parallel like they parked themselves. A thin blanket covers forty percent of him.

And the math does itself, fast and ugly. Neat room. Books by height. Fresh pillowcase.

His room. He gave me his room, folded two meters of himself onto a couch, and did it so quietly I didn't even know whose bed I was crying into.

"He does that."

I flinch. Noah stands in the kitchen doorway with a spatula, wearing an apron that says KISS THE BLACKSMITH. On him it looks like protective gear for a small industrial operation.

"Does what?" I whisper.

"Decides things. Doesn't announce them. Arguing with Ryder is like arguing with weather." He tips his head. "Come eat."

"Thank you," I say to the couch. Quietly. Stupidly.

The couch doesn't answer. But one corner of Ryder's mouth moves about a millimeter, and I decide I imagined it, because the alternative is that he heard my four a.m. crying too, and I can't afford that information before coffee.

* * *

* the kitchen. smells like heaven took up welding *

Noah's breakfast: eggs in a pan the size of a manhole cover, bacon for a construction crew, toast stacked with architectural ambition.

What I do to it: crimes.

"Slow down," Noah says. "It's not going anywhere."

"You don't know that. Nothing in my life is guaranteed anymore. I eat what I can, when I can. Like a raccoon."

He huffs and slides two more eggs onto my plate without asking. You don't fight a wall that cooks. You thank the wall.

And here's the weird part I chew on with the bacon: it's quiet in my head. Nobody needs me to be okay. Nobody needs me to explain. Three years with Dylan, and I can't remember a single breakfast where somebody just — fed me. Without a comment about the food. Without a comment about me.

Don't. Do not compare. That road leads to crying into excellent eggs, and they deserve better.

"MORNING, INHABITANTS!"

Kai enters the kitchen the way other people enter swimming pools — cannonball first. He drops into the chair across from me and steals a strip of my bacon in the same motion.

"She lives! How was the room? Scale of one to ten."

"Ten. Minus a hundred points because I found out whose room it was five minutes ago."

"Ohh. Yeah, the Ghost does that. My first month here I mentioned a spring poking through my mattress. Woke up next day — mattress replaced. Never saw it happen. I checked him for wings. Inconclusive."

"You checked a sleeping man for wings."

"Quality control," Kai says solemnly. "This house runs on it."

From the couch, without opening his eyes, Ryder raises one hand and gives a slow thumbs down.

Kai gasps like he's been shot. "BETRAYED. In my own kitchen."

"Noah's kitchen," Noah says.

And I laugh. It's small. It's rusty. It comes out sideways, like an engine turning over after a winter in storage — one cough, then something actually catches. Eleven hours ago I watched my life un-exist, and now I'm laughing over stolen bacon.

*One night,* whispers the reasonable part of my brain. *Don't get comfortable.*

I know. Shut up and let me have the bacon.

* * *

The mood lasts until the yard door opens and Damon walks through it.

He crosses the kitchen without a word, pours coffee, and only then lets his eyes land on me. On my plate. On the general picture of me sitting at his table like furniture that installed itself.

"You're still here." Not a question. A status report, delivered with the warmth of a dipstick reading.

"I was leaving after breakfast. Unless you want the eggs back. That'll take time and you won't enjoy the process."

Something crosses his face — too fast to name. If I caught it on a diagnostic, I'd write down *misfire, cylinder unknown,* and schedule a longer look.

"After breakfast," he repeats, and takes his coffee toward the door. At the threshold, without turning: "The gate code changes at noon."

The door closes.

"He likes you," Kai says.

"He just told me the locks are changing."

"Exactly. He *announced* it. He warns people he likes. Us mortals just get locked out."

* * *

I'm carrying my plate to the sink when I remember the phone.

It's been in my jacket since the call to Noah. I fish it out, the screen lights up against my palm, and the whole kitchen goes very far away.

47 missed calls.

Dylan. Dylan. Dylan. A column of his name down the screen like a piston that won't stop firing. Nine voicemails. Texts I stop reading at the previews: *baby it's not, Lex answer me, ANSWER YOUR PH—*

Forty-seven. He found forty-seven separate moments in one night where he thought calling me would fix what I saw. And not one of them was before he took my sister to his bed.

"Lexi." Noah's voice, careful. "Your hands."

I look down. The phone is shaking. No — the phone's fine. The hands holding it are shaking, hard, like an engine bolted to a cracked mount.

Kai's not joking anymore. Ryder is sitting up on the couch. When did that happen?

And while all four of us watch, the screen changes. The column of missed calls disappears, replaced by a photo I set two years ago — Dylan at the lake, grinning — and the phone starts buzzing in my shaking hands.

Incoming call.

Number forty-eight.