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

Chapter 8

POV — LEXI

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

I stare at the preview line until the screen goes dark on its own, and my reflection stares back at me from the black glass. Oil-smudged. Wide-eyed. An i***t who thought, for one entire breakfast, that today couldn't get worse.

We need to talk about your sister.

Not: are you okay. Not: where are you, we've been worried sick. Not even: happy birthday, by the way, since everyone including me forgot that part.

About. Your. Sister.

The phone buzzes again in my hand. Not a text this time. A call. MOM, and the photo of her at last year's Easter, holding a pie, smiling at something just left of the camera. Probably Chloe.

I look at the workshop around me — Mule still ticking as it cools, my new bench sitting in its corner like a promise nobody made out loud — and I think: not here. Whatever this is, it doesn't get to happen here. This place is clean.

I walk out into the yard, past the porch, all the way to the fence line where the gravel gives up and becomes weeds. And I answer.

"Hi, Mom."

"Lexi." Her voice does the thing it does — climbs, like she's been rehearsing distress. "Finally. Do you have any idea what's going on over here?"

"I have a pretty exact idea, actually. I had front-row seats."

"Chloe hasn't stopped crying since last night."

I move the phone away from my ear and look at it. Just to confirm it's a real object and not something my brain built out of spite.

"Chloe," I repeat, putting it back. "Hasn't stopped. Crying."

"She's devastated, Lexi. She says you just stormed off, no explanation, wouldn't answer anyone's calls all night, your father was ready to call the hospitals—"

"Did she tell you WHY I stormed off?"

A pause. Small. But I've spent my whole life listening for the wrong sound inside a smooth run, and I hear it: she knows. She knows, and the pause is her choosing a gear.

"She told us everything," Mom says, quieter now, in the reasonable register. Dylan has one of those too. Maybe they sell them somewhere. "It was a horrible mistake, honey. A moment of weakness. There was wine, and you know how sensitive Chloe's been since Brett left her, and Dylan was comforting her, and things just—"

"Mom." My voice comes out flat as a feeler gauge. "I saw them. I opened the door and I saw them. There is no version of what I saw that has 'comforting' in it."

"Don't be crude."

"Crude." I laugh, and it comes out with edges. "I'm crude. She's in his bed on my birthday, and I'm the crude one."

"Nobody is saying it wasn't wrong. It WAS wrong, and she knows that, and she is torturing herself over it — but Lexi, sweetheart, listen to me. She's your sister. Boyfriends come and go. Sisters are forever. You have to forgive her. Family comes first. It always has."

Family comes first.

I stand at that fence and I run the phrase through the only diagnostic system I own, and here's what comes back: eighteen years of data. Family comes first — when Chloe wrecked my science project and I got yelled at for "leaving it where she could reach." Family comes first — when Chloe borrowed my savings for a festival and it evaporated, and asking about it made ME the greedy one. Family comes first, every single time, and every single time, "family" had one face, and it wasn't mine.

"Where was I in that sentence, Mom?" I ask.

"What?"

"Family comes first. Where am I in that family? Because from where I'm standing, you've had this phone for twelve hours and you've used it to tell me how MY sister is suffering because I caught her with MY boyfriend. You haven't asked where I slept. You haven't asked if I ate. You haven't asked one single question that has me in it."

Silence on the line. Behind me, far away, somebody in the clubhouse turns on a radio, and a guitar drifts across the yard like the world is trying to be gentle and doesn't know how.

"That's not fair," she says finally.

"No," I agree. "It's not."

"Lexi, come home. Come to dinner Sunday. Sit down with your sister like adults, hear her out, and we will get past this AS A FAMILY, the way we always—"

"Is Dylan invited?"

The pause is longer this time. Long enough to hear the whole answer inside it before she says a word.

"Your father thinks... he thinks if there's a chance you two can work it out, it would be better for everyone if—"

I hang up.

I don't decide to. My thumb just does it, the way a breaker trips — no drama, no ceremony, the circuit simply refuses to carry any more current.

I stand there holding a dead phone, and the guitar keeps playing, and a bird lands on the fence post two feet from me like nothing happened, and I think, very calmly, very clearly: they knew who she was. They always knew. They just decided a long time ago which daughter was worth the repairs.

* * *

* time unknown. the sky did a whole sunset without asking me *

There's a ladder on the back wall of the clubhouse, bolted steel rungs going up to the flat roof, and I climb it because down on the ground there are people, and people have eyes, and my face has stopped taking orders.

The roof is gravel and tar and one folding chair somebody left up here facing the highway. I don't take the chair. I sit down against the vent housing, knees up, and I watch the road lights come on one by one down in the valley, little amber beads on a string, and I hold out for a genuinely impressive amount of time.

Four minutes, maybe.

Then the thing in my chest that's been running rough all day finally throws its rod.

It's not pretty crying. It's not movie crying. It's the kind that comes up from under the floor, that folds you in half, that you do with a fist against your own mouth because some ancient instinct says don't let them hear, don't be a problem, problems get returned. Dylan I could bolt a door on. Dylan was three years. But this — this is the factory. This is original equipment. You can't unbolt the people who installed you.

Forgive your sister. Family comes first.

I cry until my ribs ache like over-torqued studs, and the highway blurs into one long smear of light, and I don't hear the ladder.

I swear I don't hear the ladder. Two hundred pounds of blacksmith on steel rungs, and I hear nothing, because apparently tonight even my ears have quit on me.

What I hear is a soft clink on the gravel beside me.

A mug. Steam coming off it. Cocoa — I can smell it through the wreckage of my own face.

And then the vent housing takes on weight as Noah lowers himself down onto the roof next to me, close enough that his shoulder is a wall at my back, far enough that I don't have to look at him. He doesn't ask what happened. He doesn't tell me it's okay. He doesn't do a single one of the things people do that make you have to perform your own pain for their comfort.

He just sits. Big and warm and quiet, looking at the same highway I'm looking at, like he's got nowhere else in the entire world to be.

I wipe my face with the heel of my hand, which accomplishes nothing, and my voice comes out in pieces.

"My family," I say, "picked her."

Noah is quiet for a long moment. The lights move on the highway. Somewhere below us the radio guitar keeps going, patient as an idle.

Then he reaches over, wraps my cold fingers around the warm mug, and says:

"Then let me tell you something about family, Lexi. I've got four little brothers and sisters. And a story I've never told anyone at this club."