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

Chapter 6

POV — LEXI

Except last night he was keeping me out.

Now his back is a wall between me and Dylan, and I'm standing in its shadow trying to remember how lungs work.

Dylan's hand is still hanging in the air where my wrist used to be. He looks at Damon the way a guy looks at a truck that appeared in a lane he was sure was empty.

"Who the hell are you?"

Damon doesn't answer. He looks at Dylan's outstretched hand until Dylan looks at it too — and lowers it himself. That's a trick I need to learn. Making people fold without a single word, just by billing them rent for the air.

"This is between me and my girlfriend," Dylan tries again. The voice is back to reasonable-guy register. The one he uses with waiters and traffic cops. "So step aside, buddy."

"Buddy," Damon repeats. Flat. Like he's reading an ingredient he doesn't recognize off a label. "She asked you to leave."

"She's confused—"

"She asked you to leave," Damon says again, same volume, same tone, and somehow the second time it weighs double. "I heard it from the porch. Four other people heard it. The gravel heard it."

"Look." Dylan pulls up a laugh, and it comes out crooked, like a wheel with a bent rim. "I don't know what she told you, but this is a couple thing. Three years. You've known her, what, since last night? I'm not leaving my girl at a — a compound with four grown men, are you insane? Lexi, seriously, listen to yourself, listen to where you ARE—"

"She fixes engines," Damon says.

Dylan blinks. "What?"

"You said 'that's all you are to them.' I was on the porch for that part too." Damon shifts his weight, gravel creaking under his boots, and now I can see half his profile — jaw set, eyes level, calm in a way that is somehow louder than shouting. "So let me correct the record. She's the reason my brother's bike runs. The reason Kai's brakes didn't quit on Route 9 in March. For a year she's done honest work for us with honest hands and never once asked for anything." A beat. "You had three years of her. What did you do with them?"

"That's none of your—"

"You taught her to apologize for smelling like gasoline."

The yard goes very quiet. Somewhere behind me, on the porch, nobody is even pretending not to listen.

Dylan's mouth opens. Closes. He looks past Damon at me, and for a second I see it — the recalculation, the search through his toolbox for the wrench that fits THIS bolt. Tears didn't work. Reasonable-guy didn't work. So out comes the last one.

"You know what?" He straightens his jacket. The good one. "Fine. Keep her. Take a good look at what you're getting — a grease monkey with an attitude who'll choose a carburetor over you every time. I gave her three years and a real future, and she blew it up over one mistake. One! You'll figure her out soon enough."

I feel that one land. I do. Right in the old wiring, the part of me he installed himself, screw by screw — the part that whispers *he's right, you're difficult, you're too much and not enough at the same time.*

I open my mouth to fire back.

Damon gets there first.

"You keep saying 'mistake,'" he says. Quiet. Conversational, almost. "Let me tell you how it works out here, since you drove all this way. On the road, everything can turn on you. Weather turns. Engines quit. Asphalt ices over in October when nobody's ready. You plan for all of it, because none of it is personal. The road doesn't lie to you. The road doesn't wait until your birthday." He takes one step forward — one — and Dylan takes one back, automatic, like they're gears meshed together. "The road doesn't betray. You did. That's not a mistake. A mistake is grabbing a ten instead of a twelve. What you did, you did with both eyes open, in a bed, for however long it took — and 'one time' is just the once you got caught."

Dylan's face has gone a color I've never seen on it. Not red. Grayish. Primer-colored.

"So here's what happens now," Damon continues. "You get in your car — the one with the fan belt about to snap, you should really get that looked at, though not by her — and you drive off my land. You don't call her. You don't come back. Not because I threatened you. I haven't touched you and I'm not going to. You're going to leave because you finally understand something." He tilts his head slightly. "She saw the real you last night. And a man can survive almost anything except being seen."

Silence.

A crow flaps off the fence like even it has somewhere better to be.

And Dylan — three years of my Dylan, the future I decorated in my head like a room I'd never get keys to — bends down, picks his gas station flowers up off the gravel, price sticker and all, and carries them back to his car.

He actually takes the flowers.

The door slams. The engine turns over, the fan belt shrieks its dying-animal shriek, and the silver car reverses out of the yard in a hurry that scatters gravel like the yard is spitting him out.

We listen to the belt scream all the way down the road until the trees eat the sound.

* * *

Nobody says anything for a while.

I'm staring at the gate, and my brain — helpful as always — starts a post-crash inspection. Heart: still running, rough idle. Hands: shaking, but decreasingly. Pride: dented, panel needs pulling. That thing in my chest that flinched when he cried: scheduled for removal.

"Well," Kai says from the porch, in a voice like a man reviewing a movie, "the flowers were a choice."

"Kai," Noah warns.

"I'm just saying, he TOOK them BACK. He's going to return them. There's a man out there right now getting store credit on breakup flowers—"

Ryder makes a sound. I turn, startled, because I've cataloged exactly zero Ryder sounds so far — and this one is a short exhale through the nose that, on him, might legally qualify as laughter.

And something in me unclenches, half a turn on a seized bolt, and I laugh too. Wet and stupid and too loud, and Kai grins like he just won a race, and Noah shakes his head, and for a second the yard feels less like a battlefield and more like a place.

Then I remember whose yard it is.

Damon is still standing where the wall was, watching the empty road. I walk over — my boots suddenly loud on the gravel — and stop beside him. Not too close. You don't crowd a running engine.

"Thank you," I say.

He doesn't look at me.

"I mean it. What you said — you didn't have to. Last night you didn't even want me past the gate, and today you—" I search for the words and, as usual, find tools instead. "You stood in front of me like a crash barrier. Why?"

He's quiet long enough that I think that's the answer. The wind pushes some grit across the yard. Behind us, Kai is loudly narrating something to Noah about flower refund policies.

"He was on my property," Damon says finally. "Making noise. I don't like noise."

"Right." I nod slowly. "So that whole speech — the road, the betrayal, the 'being seen' thing — that was you doing pest control."

"That was me being accurate."

"That was you being decent," I say, before my brain can veto it. "I saw it. You can log it as pest control if it helps you sleep, but I saw it, and I'm the best diagnostic in three counties, so."

And he turns his head and looks at me — really looks, the full storm-gray voltage of it, and this close I notice the thing I missed last night in the dark: he doesn't look at people like a bouncer. He looks at them like a man reading a gauge, checking a number he doesn't trust.

For two whole seconds neither of us moves.

Then he does the thing. I watch it happen — watch some shutter come down behind his eyes, smooth and practiced, like a garage door on a timer.

"Don't get used to it," he says. "You're temporary here."

And he walks past me toward the workshop, boots even, shoulders square, leaving me standing in the middle of his gravel with my mouth half open and my diagnostic scanner throwing a code I've never seen before.