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

Chapter 5

POV — LEXI

Incoming call. Number forty-eight.

The phone buzzes in my hands like a hornet in a jar, and Dylan's lake-photo grin looks up at me from the screen — that photo where he's laughing at something I said, back when I still thought making him laugh was a career.

Four people in this kitchen. Nobody moves. Even the coffee machine holds its gurgle.

My thumb hovers over the green button. Then over the red one. Then over nothing at all, because my hands have unionized and gone on strike.

"You don't have to answer that," Noah says.

"I know."

"You don't have to NOT answer it either," Kai adds. "You could also throw it in the pancake batter. Just saying. Options."

The buzzing stops. The screen goes dark. I look at my own reflection in the black glass — puffy-eyed girl in yesterday's shirt — and something in me settles, the way an engine settles when you finally find the right idle.

I press decline history. I press block.

"There." My voice comes out steadier than I feel. "Diagnostic complete. Faulty part removed from the system."

Kai starts a slow clap. Ryder, from the couch, nods once — a nod that weighs more than the clap.

And that should have been the end of it. Block the number, finish the eggs, go home, rebuild a life out of spare parts. I'm good at spare parts.

Except Dylan never in his life took a *no* he couldn't argue with.

* * *

* forty minutes and one very aggressive dish-washing session later *

I'm elbow-deep in soap suds — Noah tried to stop me, I threatened him with the spatula, we've reached an understanding — when I hear it.

An engine.

Not a bike. A car. Four-cylinder, front-wheel drive, that specific whine of a fan belt one payday away from snapping — I've told him about that belt six times, and hearing it now, still unfixed, still screaming, is somehow the most Dylan thing that has ever happened.

My hands go still in the water.

"Lexi?" Noah looks up from the stove.

"That's him." I don't even need to check the window. I'd know that belt in a hurricane. "That's his car."

Kai is at the window in one bounce. "Silver thing? Guy getting out with... is that a bouquet? Oh no. Oh, buddy, no. Gas station flowers. He brought GAS STATION flowers to a bike club."

"How do you know they're gas station—"

"They're still wearing the plastic sleeve with the price sticker. Lex. LEX. There's a price sticker."

My legs carry me to the window against every vote from my brain. And there he is, in the middle of the gravel yard, in the daylight, in his good jacket — the one he wears when he wants something.

Dylan. Fifty yards and one betrayal away.

"HOW did he even find—" I start, and answer myself before I finish. Chloe. He asked Chloe, and Chloe knew, because Chloe made it her business over the years to know everything about me worth ruining. Noah's number on my fridge with the club name on it. A year of me mentioning "the guys from the garage." It's not detective work. It's inventory.

"Lexi!" His voice comes through the glass, cracked around the edges. "Lexi, I know you're in there! Baby, please, just five minutes!"

*Baby.* The word lands in me like water in a fuel line. Everything sputters.

"I can make him leave," Noah says quietly. He's already taken the apron off. On Noah, taking the apron off is a change in weather conditions.

"No." It comes out of me before I decide it. "No, I— I need to do this. I need to look at it in daylight."

"Look at what?"

"The thing I loved for three years. I need to check if it was ever real or if I installed it wrong."

Kai opens his mouth — probably to make it a joke, that's his job — and closes it again. Ryder gets up off the couch without a word and simply moves to the door frame. Not blocking it. Just... existing near it. Like a fire extinguisher.

I dry my hands on my jeans, and I walk out.

* * *

The daylight is rude. Last night everything was headlights and shadows; now the yard is just gravel and honesty, and Dylan is standing in the middle of it looking smaller than my memory of him.

Weird. Three years I looked up at this guy. Turns out I was standing in a hole.

"Lexi." He exhales my name like he's been holding it since midnight. "God, look at you, you're— did you sleep HERE? With them?"

Ten seconds. He lasted ten seconds before making it about them.

"What do you want, Dylan."

"What do I— baby, I called you all night! Forty-seven times, I counted—"

"Forty-eight."

"—I was going out of my mind! You just disappeared! I didn't know if you were dead in a ditch somewhere, do you have any idea what that felt like?!"

I actually laugh. It scrapes on the way out, rust and all.

"Do I have any idea," I repeat. "What something felt like. That's the question you drove out here to ask ME."

"Lex—"

"Say her name."

He blinks. The flowers dip in his hand. "What?"

"You've said my name four times. Say hers. Say what I saw. Because you keep talking about phone calls and ditches, and you haven't once said the actual thing. So say it. Out loud. In the daylight."

And here — here is where the Dylan I know boots up. I watch it happen in real time, like watching an engine switch fuel maps: the shoulders drop, the eyes go wet, the voice finds that lower register that used to work on me every single time.

"It meant nothing."

There it is.

"It meant NOTHING, Lexi, I swear on my life. It was one time, it was a mistake, she came over about your birthday thing, we had some wine, and it just— it happened. It didn't mean anything. It was never her. It was NEVER her, it's you, it's always been you—"

"You told me she was exhausting." My voice stays level and I don't know how. Somewhere behind me, gravel shifts — one of the guys, on the porch now. I don't turn around. "You told me she was fake. Three years, Dylan. You built me a whole story where you could barely stand her."

"Because I could barely stand her!"

"You stood her fine last night. Horizontally."

His face does something ugly — a flash, there and gone, the thing under the paint job — and then the tears arrive. Actual tears. His hand with the flowers rises toward me and I step back like the bouquet is on fire.

"Baby, please." He's crying now, really crying, and the horrible thing, the thing I'll be ashamed of forever, is that some old, well-trained part of me twitches toward him. Three years of muscle memory. Comfort him. Fix it. That's your job, that's always been your job. "Please. It was one mistake in three years. THREE YEARS, Lexi. You're going to throw all of that away over one night? You're going to throw US away over — over HER?"

"You did that." My throat is closing but the words keep coming, one by one, like bolts off a stripped thread. "You threw us away. I just found the receipt."

"I'll fix it! I'll fix everything, I'll never see her again, I'll block her, I'll block your whole family if you want— Lexi, come home. Come HOME. What are you even doing here, look at this place—" his arm sweeps at the clubhouse, the bikes, the porch, the men on it, "—these people are STRANGERS, you've known them a year, you fix their bikes, that's it, that's all you are to them! You think they care about you? They're circling, Lex! You're a pretty girl who cried at their gate and you can't even see—"

"Careful," I say.

"—I'm the one who LOVES you! Me! Three years! I'm the only person who's ever put up with all of it — the grease, the attitude, the bike, your obsession with that stupid garage— I put up with ALL OF YOU, and this is what I get?!"

And there it is. The whole engine, cracked open on the gravel in front of witnesses.

*Put up with.*

Three years I ran on that fuel and called it premium. He put up with me. Like I was a knock in his engine he'd learned to drive around.

Something in my chest goes very quiet and very cold, the way a workshop goes quiet when you finally shut off the compressor and realize how loud it's been the whole time.

"You should go, Dylan."

"I'm not going anywhere without you." He drops the flowers. Actually drops them, right on the gravel, plastic sleeve and price sticker and all, and steps toward me — fast, hand out, reaching for my wrist the way he always reached for my wrist, like a man grabbing a handrail he owns. "You're being hysterical, you're not thinking straight, get in the car and we'll talk about this at home like normal—"

His fingers get within six inches of me.

They never arrive.

Because between one blink and the next, there is a wall where the daylight used to be. Black jacket. Storm-gray eyes. He moves so quietly for someone that solid — I didn't hear the porch, didn't hear the gravel, nothing — and now the whole shape of Dylan disappears behind a shoulder that smells like engine oil and cold morning.

Damon.

He doesn't touch him. He doesn't raise a hand. He just stands there, filling the space between me and three years of my life, the same way he filled that gate last night.

Except last night he was keeping me out.