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

Chapter 11

POV — LEXI

"Well. Isn't this cozy."

My sister's voice comes out thin — a violin string wound one turn too far — and I watch her do the thing I've seen her do my whole life. The reset.

It takes her maybe four seconds. Shoulders back. Chin down, eyes up. The wounded-dove face folds itself away, and a new one comes out of the toolbox — and I know this one too. I've watched it empty wallets and rearrange rooms since we were kids.

The charm face.

Because Chloe has never once in her life left a room while she was losing. If plan A dies, there's always plan B, and plan B is always the same: find the most important man in the room and make him hers. Doesn't matter for what. A minute is enough. A look is enough. Just so the room remembers who the sun is.

And her eyes have already found him.

Damon. In the bay door. Half in shadow, arms crossed, watching all of this the way a man watches a gauge.

Oh no.

"You must be the one in charge," Chloe says, and her whole voice changes register — drops into something warm and slow, honey over a heated engine. She crosses the gravel toward him, heels and all, and holds out one manicured hand. "Chloe. Lexi's big sister. I'd say she's told me all about you, but honestly? She hides you boys away like a dragon with treasure."

I stop breathing somewhere around "dragon."

Kai makes a sound from the workbench like a man swallowing a bee. Noah's arms uncross slowly. Ryder doesn't move at all, which from Ryder is a whole opinion.

Damon looks at her hand.

He does not take it.

"I know who you are," he says.

"Oh, good things, I hope." She lets the hand drift down like it was never offered, smooth, no crash, and takes another half step in. Close. Closer than anyone here stands to Damon, and I realize I know that without ever having measured it. "Look, I'm sure this all seems very dramatic. Family stuff always does from the outside. But you seem like a man who makes his own reads." Her lashes do the slow blink. The one that got her out of two speeding tickets that I know of. "So maybe you and I could talk. Privately. I could give you the actual story — the whole picture — over a drink somewhere that isn't..." her eyes flick over the workshop, the tools, my bench, "...this."

The garage is so quiet I can hear Mule's engine tick as it cools.

And here is my confession, the one I'm not proud of: some hot little cylinder in my chest is already firing. Not fear. Not embarrassment. Something meaner. Because I've been the audience for this show my whole life. I know every act. Boys at school. Dad's work friends. My driving instructor, God help me. It always works. It has always, always worked, and I've always stood off to the side holding the metaphorical grease rag, watching the whole room tilt toward her like a bike into a curve.

Go on, I think, and I don't even know who I'm rooting for. Try it. Try it on him.

Damon uncrosses his arms.

"The whole picture," he repeats.

"Mm-hm." Chloe smiles up at him. "There are two sides to everything."

"There are." He nods, slow. "So let me show you mine. Night before last, a girl came through that gate at midnight doing sixty on gravel, crying so hard she couldn't get her helmet off. Yesterday morning, a boy stood in this yard and told her he 'put up with her' for three years, like she was a leak in his ceiling." His voice doesn't rise. It doesn't need to. It comes out level and cold, like a torque wrench clicking off exact numbers. "And today, the person who put both of those things in motion parked across two spaces, walked past her own sister without one word of sorry — and offered me a drink."

Chloe's smile holds. Barely. Like a tire holding at the wrong pressure.

"That's not—"

"That's the whole picture," Damon says. "You asked what I've heard about you. Nothing. She never talks about you. Two days here and she's talked about carburetors, torque specs, and my brother's bad fuel — not one word about you. You want to know why that stung just now? Because you came all this way to matter here, and you don't."

Somebody exhales. I think it's Kai. It might be me.

"So here's my read, since you asked for it." Damon steps past her — actually past her, unhurried, boots even on the gravel, and stops at my bench. At Mule's carb, laid out clean on the cloth in parallel rows. "This girl rebuilt a bike we couldn't fix in two years, on the worst morning of her life, without being asked. That's what she is. And you—" he turns, and gives Chloe one last look, brief and final, like a man closing a hood, "—you're a warning light. Loud, bright, and the whole dash turns you off when they find the actual problem. The gate's behind you. It works from both sides."

* * *

Nobody moves for three full seconds.

Chloe's face goes through something I have never seen it go through in eighteen years — a search. A real one. Hands patting empty pockets for a next move, and finding nothing, because there is no act for this. Nobody's ever skipped the show before. Nobody's ever told the sun it was a warning light.

She looks at me last.

And I wish I could tell you I looked back with grace and pity, the bigger person, the healed one. But that hot little cylinder in my chest is running wide open now, and what's on my face is probably closer to what's on a scoreboard.

"Enjoy it," she says to me, quiet, and the honey is gone — it's all string wire now. "Whatever this is. Places like this get bored of girls like you."

Heels on gravel. Two-space parking job. The little white coupe over-revs in reverse — she'll cook that clutch inside a year, and no, I will not be taking it in — and the trees eat the sound the way they ate Dylan's fan belt.

Gone.

Kai slides off the workbench with his hands on his head like he's witnessed a moon landing. "A warning light. The whole dash turns you off. I need to write this down. Noah, is there a pen, I need this ENGRAVED—"

"Kai," Noah says, but he's smiling into his beard, the traitor.

And me — I'm standing at my bench, wiping hands that are already clean, running the diagnostic I can't shut off.

Finding: wicked satisfaction, quantity: shameful. Eighteen years of watching her win, and a man with storm-gray eyes just closed the show in ninety seconds flat. My sister came to collect a minute of my face, and left with nothing, and I am not sorry, and I'll do penance for that never.

But there's a second reading on the gauge. Smaller. Buried under the first one, flickering.

Because somewhere in the middle of all that — somewhere around *she never talks about you, she talks about carburetors* — the meanness in my chest changed fuel. And when Chloe stood that close to him, lashes going, honey pouring, some i***t subsystem in me that I did not install and cannot locate had exactly one thought, on a loop, in bold:

*step away from him.*

Him. The man who called me temporary. The doorman. The wall.

I file it under vibration, source unknown, and slam the drawer.

"Hey." Damon's voice. I look up. He's still by my bench, and he nods once at the carb, at the clean rows of parts. "Finish that today?"

"That's the plan."

"Good." He heads for the bay door, and then stops, half-turned, eyes on the yard where her tire marks are still printed in the gravel. "Church tonight. Seven. All four of us."

Kai goes still. Noah's smile is gone. Even the workshop seems to lean in.

"Church?" I ask. "What's church?"

"Club vote," Damon says, and looks at me — one second, unreadable, the shutter already coming down. "About you."