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

Chapter 10

POV — LEXI

*Lex, it's me. Mom gave me your new— look, we're adults. I'm coming by tomorrow. We need to talk, just us girls.*

Just us girls.

I read it four times up on that roof, and Noah read it once over my shoulder, and all he said was: "You don't owe her a meeting."

"I know," I said. "But I owe me one."

Because here's the thing about a knock in an engine. You can turn the radio up. You can tell yourself it's nothing. But the knock doesn't care what you tell yourself — it just gets louder until the day it takes the whole motor with it. Chloe has been my knock for eighteen years. Tomorrow, I open the hood.

* * *

* morning. the workshop. I've cleaned the same wrench eleven times and it knows it *

She arrives at noon, because Chloe has never been early or late to anything in her life — she arrives when the light is best.

I hear the car first. Little white coupe, engine that's never been past third gear, and a parking job across two spaces like the world owes her the extra room. Then heels on gravel. Heels. To a bike garage. Of course.

I stay where I am, at my bench in the open bay door, Mule's carb laid out in front of me on a clean cloth. My hands keep working. My hands are the only part of me I trust today.

"Wow." Her voice comes in before she does. "So this is where you've been hiding. It's very... you, Lex. Very rustic."

I look up.

She's dressed for a jury. Soft sweater, soft hair, soft little wounded smile — the full presentation. My sister could sell sand to a beach. And her eyes do the sweep they always do: over my coveralls, my zip-tied hair, the grease in the creases of my knuckles. The little inventory that ends, every time, with the same conclusion: *found — one sister, condition: beneath me.*

"You wanted to talk," I say. "Talk."

"Okay. Straight to it. Fine." She pulls in a breath, and here it comes — I can hear the rehearsal in it, the mirror she practiced in front of. "Lexi, what happened was awful. The way you found out — awful. I never wanted you hurt like that, and I cried all night, ask Mom—"

"I heard. Whole family updates on your suffering. Very thorough coverage."

"Don't be like that." The wounded smile deepens exactly one degree. "I came here to be honest with you, because you deserve honesty. So here it is." A pause. She's timing it. She's actually timing it. "It wasn't a drunken thing, Lex. I'm not going to insult you with the wine story. The truth is... it's been coming for a while. The way he looked at me. Little things. I fought it — God, I fought it — but Dylan and I... there was always something there. And that night he finally stopped pretending."

My hands set down the jet needle. Slowly. Carefully. Because the alternative is throwing it.

"He chose me," Chloe says, gentle as a nurse delivering bad news. "Himself. Nobody tricked anybody. And I think — deep down — you already knew you two weren't right. You must have felt it. Him wanting... more. Someone who fits his life. So really, when you think about it, all I did was stop everyone from wasting more years. Including you." Her head tilts. "One day you'll actually thank me."

The workshop is very quiet. Somewhere behind me a socket wrench clicks once and goes still.

"There she is," I say.

Chloe blinks. "What?"

"Eighteen years I've been telling people about this model and nobody believed the spec sheet." I wipe my hands, slow, finger by finger. "You didn't come to apologize. You came to win. You drove forty minutes to stand in my garage and tell the girl whose life you wrecked that she should be grateful. That's not honesty, Chloe. That's a victory lap."

The soft face flickers — one frame, like a bad connection.

"I came because you're my sister and I love—"

"You came because I left before you could see my face." I step around the bench. "That was the whole prize, wasn't it? And I took it with me. Well. Here it is." I spread my arms — coveralls, grease, all of it. "Look hard. This is what not losing looks like. He didn't choose you, Chloe. He just proved to me what he was, and you volunteered to be the evidence."

Her chin comes up. The sweetness drains out of her voice like oil from a cracked pan.

"You arrogant little— you think you're better than me? Fixing bikes in a shed for a gang of—" her eyes flick past my shoulder, meaning to gesture at the clubhouse, at my sad little borrowed life.

And her face changes.

* * *

POV — CHLOE

Here is what my sister doesn't understand, has never understood: I didn't take Dylan because I wanted Dylan.

Dylan is a fan belt away from being nobody. Dylan is nice teeth and a lease. I took Dylan for the same reason I took her festival money and her science fair ribbon and every boy who ever looked at her twice in high school — because for one shining minute, the girl Dad calls *talented* at every single dinner, the girl with the gift, the girl who got the thing I never got, stands there with empty hands. And the scales come level. For a minute I can breathe.

She doesn't know what it costs, being the pretty one next to the real one.

So I came today to collect the minute I was owed. She left too fast that night. I needed to see it land — needed one look at her face while I explained, kindly, that he chose me. I had it, too. I had her right there, backed against her greasy little bench in her sad little coveralls, alone, always alone, my scrappy stray of a sister who never had anyone in her corner because I made sure of it—

And then I look past her shoulder to wave at her pathetic shed, and my mouth stops working.

They come out of the light at the back of the bay like they've been there the whole time. Because they have been. The whole time.

Four of them.

A giant in a leather apron, arms crossed, standing the way buildings stand. A lean one by the tool wall who I didn't see until he moved, and now can't stop seeing. A grinning one perched on a workbench — except he isn't grinning, and something about a face built for laughing gone that still is worse than all the rest of it. And in the bay door behind her, half in shadow, one more — dark jacket, gray eyes doing math on me, and whatever number he gets, his face says it's small.

Not one of them says a word. Not one of them moves toward me.

They just stand there. Behind her. Around her. Like a frame around a picture, like a wall around a house, like — like family, arranged in the one formation I have never once in my life seen arranged around Lexi.

Or around me.

She isn't alone in her corner.

I'm suddenly aware of my heels sinking into the gravel, of my parking job, of my rehearsed little speech lying on the floor of this garage where everyone can see it for what it is. Four strangers looked at me for five seconds and saw what Mom and Dad have refused to see for twenty years.

And my sister — my little sister, grease to the wrist, chin level — doesn't even glance back at them. She doesn't need to check. She *knows* they're there.

She knows what that feels like.

The minute I came to collect turns to ash in my hands, and underneath it, way down, under the sweater and the hair and the eighteen years of winning — something old and hungry looks at that wall of people standing behind the wrong sister and howls.

"Well," I say, and I hear my own voice come out wrong, thin, a violin string about to go. "Isn't this cozy."