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

Chapter 15

POV — LEXI

"Mine."

The word keeps me up half the night, and at eight sharp the next morning the bike itself is sitting on my lift like a dare.

Damon's machine. Up close and stationary, it's exactly what I expected and worse: hard-ridden, immaculately kept, not one sticker, not one chrome vanity, everything function, everything earned. The bike equivalent of its owner's face.

He doesn't hover. That's the strange part. He wheels it in, says "brakes feel long," and leaves — leaves, actually gone, no arms crossed in the doorway grading me. Which is how I know this is the real test. Any fool can perform under supervision. He wants to see what my hands do alone.

What my hands do alone: find the brakes are fine and the real trouble is two notches deeper — a wheel bearing starting to whisper, the kind of fault that hides for months and then one day, mid-curve, doesn't. He rode sixty night miles on that. My stomach does something unprofessional about it.

I replace the bearing. I leave the old one on a clean rag on his seat like a caught fish, with a note: "Your brakes were homesick, not broken. This was the liar. — Management."

He never mentions it. But at dinner that night my coffee arrives poured, and I didn't pour it, and nobody claims the crime.

* * *

* several days of glorious, boring routine later. yes, boring. I'd forgotten they made days like this *

Prospect life settles into a rhythm, and the rhythm goes like this: mornings are club work — Mule's brake drag, Kai's chain, which sounded exactly like the advertised bag of nails. Afternoons are outside jobs Noah wrangles from town, because a garage needs to eat. Evenings are Noah's cooking, Kai's commentary, a television nobody fully watches, and me falling asleep mid-sentence at a table where nobody minds.

I keep waiting for the other shoe. I want that on the record. Every night I do a lap of the day looking for the catch, the fine print, the toll — eighteen years of training doesn't unbolt in a week.

Every night: nothing. Just dishes, and lamplight, and somebody's boots by the door.

It's Thursday when the game begins.

* * *

I hear Ryder's bike come into the yard around four — that low, patient idle, unhurried as its owner — and I clock it the way I clock everything now, by ear, without looking up from the fuel line I'm bleeding.

The engine shuts off. Boots on gravel. The bay door frames him: Ryder, helmet under one arm, face set to its usual unread-book default.

"Problem?" I ask.

He looks at his bike. Looks at me. And delivers, with the gravity of a man reporting a death in the family:

"Runs wrong."

That's it. That's the whole work order.

"Wrong how? Idle? Pull? Noise?"

A shrug. Not a dismissive shrug — a precise one, somehow. A shrug that says: that's your department.

"Okay," I say. "Leave it with the doctor."

He wheels it in, parks it by my bench, and — this is the part I don't expect — doesn't leave. He takes the stool by the wall, settles onto it with his back against the pegboard, produces a paperback from inside his jacket like a magician who's above applause, and starts reading.

Alright then. Audience of one.

I go through his bike the way I go through everything: ears first, then hands, then instruments, in that order, because instruments confirm and ears discover. I start it. It settles into idle.

The idle is perfect.

Not good. Not fine. Perfect — even as a metronome, clean throttle pickup, no stumble, no flutter, compression like a textbook, chain tension right, valves quiet, brakes crisp. This bike doesn't run wrong. This bike runs the way the rest of us wish we ran. Somebody maintains this machine with a devotion that borders on liturgy, and that somebody is sitting on my stool, reading, twelve feet away.

I look at him over the tank.

He turns a page.

And the whole thing lands on me at once, soft, like a dust cover settling over a stored engine: there is nothing wrong with this bike. There never was. He built a reason to be here, rode it over, handed me two words of cover story, and took up a post — quiet, undemanding, present — in the corner of my afternoon.

The correct professional move is to say: she's healthy, take her home.

I pick up a wrench instead.

* * *

Here is the repair I perform on Ryder's flawless motorcycle, in full: I remove the air filter cover and look at a spotless filter for a while. I check the tension on a chain I have already checked. I drain a splash of fuel into a jar, hold it to the light like a sommelier, and pour it back. I loosen one bolt on the perfectly aligned handlebar clamp and retorque it to exactly where it was. I clean a battery terminal that has never in its life known corrosion.

It is the most fraudulent hour of labor in my career. It might also be the best one.

Because here's what happens inside that hour: nothing. Gloriously, medicinally nothing. He reads. I "work." The shop radio murmurs something with a slide guitar in it. Rain starts up outside, unserious, just enough to make the roof count it. At some point a mug of coffee appears at the edge of my bench — I never hear him move, the wing theory strengthens daily — and at some other point I catch myself narrating a fake diagnosis out loud, "yeah, see, this terminal, this is trouble waiting to happen," and he nods along, one collaborator to another, both of us lying, neither of us blinking.

No questions about my family. No status checks on my healing. No brave little conversations. Dylan used to fill every silence like silence was a leak — three years of radio chatter, of being asked if I was in a mood, of performing okay on demand. And this man built a fake appointment and burned an afternoon just to sit inside a silence with me and ask for nothing at all.

The quiet isn't empty, is the thing. It's load-bearing. It's the kind two people can lean a day against.

At six I wipe my hands, tear a page off the invoice pad, and write it up properly, because fraud deserves paperwork:

REPAIR ORDER — RYDER

Complaint: runs wrong.

Found: nothing. Bike healthier than any of us.

Work performed: silence, one hour. Coffee, received. Terminal, theatrically cleaned.

Parts: none.

Charge: none.

Diagnosis: come back whenever it "runs wrong" again.

I hand it over. He reads the whole thing at his usual speed, which is to say slowly, giving every line its weight. I watch his eyes stop on the last line.

He folds it with the care other people spend on documents that matter — creases it sharp, tucks it inside his jacket, inside pocket, the one over the chest.

"Same time next week," he says.

Four words. Tonnage: enormous.

He wheels the world's healthiest motorcycle out into the drizzle, fires it up, and idles off toward the gate without a trace of hurry, and I stand in the bay door watching his taillight and grinning like an i***t at a repair I didn't do.

"You're welcome," I tell the rain. "She's a very sick bike. Chronic. Weekly care, minimum."

* * *

I'm still smiling when the porch door bangs and Kai comes across the yard at a jog with his hood up against the wet, waving a torn scrap of paper like a war flag.

"Queen! Perfect, you're still greasy, don't wash — I need your professional eyes tomorrow." He slaps the scrap on my bench. It's a list, in his handwriting, which is to say in enthusiastic hieroglyphics: gaskets, plugs, a fork seal, something illegible that might say 'chrome???'. "Parts run. The county fair's got the big swap meet this weekend — vendors, old stock, guys selling barn finds out of trailers. Noa's list, my list, your list if you want parts for the bench."

"You need me to buy gaskets?"

"I need you to tell me which gaskets aren't garbage, there's a difference, YOU know the difference." He's already backing toward the porch, grin first, rain and all. "Nine a.m. You, me, the truck. It's gonna be great — food stands, questionable ferris wheel, a guy who sells bolts by the bucket. Bolts! By the BUCKET, Lexi!"

The porch door bangs shut behind him.

And I'm left in the bay with a scrap of hieroglyphics and one slow-arriving realization, filed carefully under vibration, source known this time:

that wasn't a parts run he just described.

That was a date wearing a parts run's clothes.