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

Chapter 7

POV — LEXI

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

I've been chewing on that sentence for an hour, and it still tastes like a bolt somebody cross-threaded on purpose.

Temporary. Fine. Great. I'm temporary, the eggs were temporary, this whole detour in my life is temporary. But here's the thing about mechanics: even a temporary fix gets done properly, or you don't touch the machine at all. That's the code. So if I'm spending my last afternoon here, I'm not spending it sitting on a porch feeling sorry for myself.

Which is how I end up standing in the open door of their workshop like a kid at a candy store window.

Okay. Confession time.

I've seen a lot of garages. I grew up in one, I bled in several, I once slept in one during a fight with my parents that we all pretend didn't happen. But this one — this one has BONES. High ceiling with a chain hoist. A lift. A wall of tools that somebody loves but nobody organizes, hanging like a jazz band mid-song. And in the middle of the floor, up on a stand, sits a bike.

Not one of theirs. I know their bikes by sound already — Noah's deep grumble, Kai's eager snap, the low patient idle of the one I'm guessing is Ryder's. This one is older. A shop mutt: frame from one decade, tank from another, a seat that's been reupholstered by an optimist. And a rear cylinder that, judging by the fresh wrench marks around it, has been losing a war for weeks.

"That's Mule."

I jump. Ryder. Standing three feet away with two mugs of coffee, and I swear the man moves on rubber soles made of pure silence.

"Mule," I repeat.

"Club bike." He hands me one of the mugs. Doesn't explain why he brought two. Doesn't explain anything, ever, apparently. "Everyone's ridden it. Nobody's fixed it."

"What's wrong with it?"

Ryder looks at the bike. Looks at me. And says the four most romantic words anyone has said to me in three years:

"You tell us."

* * *

* twenty minutes later. sleeves rolled. hair tied with a zip tie because I have priorities *

Here's what a sick engine sounds like to me: a sentence with one word mispronounced. Everything else flows, and then — there. That syllable. Wrong.

I turn Mule over and listen with my whole body, palm flat on the tank, the vibration climbing up through my wrist bones like morse code. Rear cylinder's late to the party. Not dead — lazy. And under it, quieter, a papery little flutter that says the carb's been breathing dirt.

"Intake leak," I say to no one. "And your carb is filthy. Who's been jetting this thing, a raccoon?"

"Kai," says Noah's voice from the doorway.

"HEY," says Kai's voice from behind him.

I don't even turn around. I'm already pulling the carb, and my hands have gone into that mode where the rest of the world files itself under *later.* Somewhere in the last twenty minutes the doorway acquired an audience — I register it the way you register weather. Noah leaning on the frame with his arms crossed. Kai perched on a workbench, actually quiet, which should be reported to the authorities. Ryder just... near. Refilling my coffee at some point without me seeing him do it, which — okay, the wing theory is gaining evidence.

The carb comes apart under my fingers like it's relieved someone finally asked. Float bowl full of sediment. Pilot jet blocked so thoroughly I'm impressed, in a horrified way.

"There you are, you little criminal." I hold the jet up to the light. "See this? This is why Mule stumbles off idle. It's been trying to breathe through a coffee stirrer."

"How did you—" Kai starts. "You listened to it for like a minute."

"Ninety seconds. And it wasn't listening, it was a conversation." I fish the carb cleaner off the shelf without looking — my hand just knows where a shop like this keeps it, third shelf, left side, behind the rags, and it's THERE, and something in my chest does a small, dangerous, happy thing about that. "Engines talk. Most people just interrupt."

Nobody laughs. I glance up.

Three grown bikers are watching me clean a pilot jet the way people watch the last lap of a race. Noah has this slow, warm expression like bread rising. Kai's leaning so far forward off the bench he's a physics problem. Ryder is watching my hands specifically, and taking, I kid you not, mental notes — I can see him filing things.

"What," I say.

"Nothing," all three say, at three different speeds, in a way that means absolutely everything.

* * *

The intake leak is a perished O-ring, because it's always a perished O-ring, because the universe is lazy. I find a match in a drawer of assorted rubber that smells like every garage of my childhood, and while I'm in there I retorque the intake boots, sync the idle by ear, and — since I'm already elbow-deep and Mule has clearly never been loved correctly — adjust the clutch cable that's been stretched looser than my life plans.

"You didn't have to do the clutch," Noah says.

"It was crying. I don't leave things crying."

Kai makes a small sound like a kettle starting.

I put it all back together, wipe my hands, and swing a leg over the seat — and stop. Because that's a line, isn't it. Their bike. Their floor. Their air I'm borrowing.

"Go on," Ryder says. Two words. Tonnage: significant.

I thumb the starter.

Mule catches on the first crank and settles into an idle so even, so round, so HEALTHY, that for a second the whole workshop just listens. No stumble. No flutter. Just an old mutt of a bike purring like it remembered what it was built for.

Kai whoops. Actually whoops, fists in the air, nearly falls off the workbench. Noah laughs — a big, low, room-filling thing I haven't heard from him before. And Ryder... Ryder closes his eyes for one second, like he's tasting the sound.

"Two years," Noah says. "It hasn't idled like that in two years."

"It just needed someone to stop interrupting." I kill the engine and the silence afterward feels earned, like the quiet after applause. My hands are black to the wrist. My shirt's a casualty. I am, for the record, the happiest I've been since a stairwell ruined my life.

And that's when I notice him.

Damon. In the side doorway. No coffee, no comment, arms crossed. I don't know how long he's been there — long enough, judging by the way he's looking at Mule. Then at my hands. Then at the tools I've laid back on the bench in clean parallel lines, because I put things back right, because that's the code.

He doesn't say good job. Obviously. The man would sooner swallow a spark plug.

What he does is worse. He walks in, picks up the old O-ring I replaced, rolls it between two fingers, checks my work with his eyes like an inspector who came to fail me — and can't. Then he sets it down, looks at the workbench in the corner, the cluttered one, the orphan one buried under boxes and a dead battery charger.

"That bench," he says. "Nobody uses it."

That's it. That's the whole sentence. He walks out.

The three of them stare after him like he just recited poetry.

"Did he—" Kai whispers.

"He did," Noah says.

"He GAVE her—"

"Kai."

"That's a BENCH, Noah, that's basically a proposal in Damon—"

"It's a bench," I say. My voice comes out weird. Thick. Because I'm looking at that sad, buried corner of somebody else's workshop, and my ridiculous chest is doing the happy dangerous thing again, at full volume this time. A corner. Mine. In a place I'm leaving.

Temporary, remember. Temporary.

I'm still standing there, black-handed, arguing with my own ribcage, when my phone buzzes in my back pocket.

I wipe one thumb clean and pull it out, expecting Dylan from some new number, already composing the block.

It's not Dylan.

The screen says MOM.

And under it, the first line of a text, sitting there like a wrench dropped into a running engine:

*Lexi, honey, we need to talk about your sister—*