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

Chapter 13

POV — LEXI

I follow.

For the first two miles I'm chasing a ghost. The road out of the property runs dark and empty, my headlight carving a lonely white tunnel through nothing, and the only proof he exists is what my ears bring back off the hills — that hard rolling growl, somewhere ahead, opening and closing with the curves like a door in the wind.

Then the county road spits us both onto the old highway, long and flat and abandoned at this hour, and I crest the rise past the water tower and there he is.

One taillight. Quarter mile out. Moving like he's mad at the horizon.

Okay. Decision time, Carter. A smart girl hangs back, confirms the president isn't riding off a cliff, turns around, and files this under *not my circus.* A smart girl protects her three-vote majority and doesn't tailgate the abstain at two in the morning.

I drop two gears and open the throttle all the way.

Phoenix surges under me like she's been waiting all night for permission, and the cold goes from biting to skinning, and the white tunnel of my headlight stretches and blurs at the edges. The taillight grows. Quarter mile. Three hundred yards. Two.

He knows I'm here. He has to know — nobody rides like Damon and doesn't check his six — and the confirmation comes at the next straight: he doesn't slow down.

He speeds up.

And something in my chest that has been clenched since a stairwell three days ago — through the crying and the vote and the door click — unclenches all at once, because THIS language I speak. No wounded voices. No family math. No jury faces. Just two engines and a dotted line, and the oldest question on earth: can you keep up?

Watch me.

* * *

We don't race each other. That's the thing I understand somewhere around mile four, when I pull even with him on the long straight past the grain silos and he doesn't glance over, doesn't wave me off, just holds his line with maybe six feet of asphalt between our shoulders.

We race the wind.

He takes the sweeping left at the reservoir hard and low, and I follow his line — better than mine, tighter entry, later apex, filed for future use — and Phoenix and I lean into the dark until the pegs whisper against the road. Out of the curve he's half a length up. On the straight I claw it back. My eyes water past the edge of my visor and freeze there. The moon rides the reservoir beside us for half a mile like it wants in.

No words. Not one, the whole time. And here's my confession number two of the week: it's the best conversation I've ever had.

Because engines don't lie, remember? And right now his is telling me everything his mouth wouldn't at that table. It's in the way he rides — not smooth, not tonight. He's over-revving out of corners. Braking late and hard, like the road owes him money. This isn't a man out for air. This is a man trying to outrun something bolted to his own frame, and I know that ride, I invented that ride, I did forty miles of that ride three nights ago with tears freezing sideways off my face.

Whatever's chewing on him — I'm somewhere in it. You don't abstain on pizza-vote principles and then ride like this over nothing.

We hit the state route and swing north, and I stop thinking entirely. That's the gift of speed nobody tells you about: past a certain number, there's no room left in your skull for stairwells or sisters or empty chairs. The road takes the whole feed. Curve. Brake. Lean. Throttle. Breathe. Curve. My hands stop being cold. My chest stops doing arithmetic. For thirty unbroken miles I am nobody's daughter, nobody's ex, nobody's charity case — I'm just a heartbeat wired to a piston, running even, running clean.

And six feet away, all night long, so is he.

* * *

* mile sixty-something. the sky starts cheating *

The dark goes thin without asking anyone.

It happens the way it always happens on a long night ride — no announcement, just the black turning navy behind the hills on my right, then the navy going soft and bruised, and suddenly I can see his silhouette instead of his taillight. Shoulders down. Head steady. Like he was carved on that bike and the sculptor left no gaps.

He backs off the throttle.

I match him. We drop out of flight speed together, seventy, sixty, fifty, the engines coming down from a scream to a conversation, and he signals nothing but drifts right, onto the gravel pull-off at the top of the ridge — the one with the guardrail and the whole valley laid out underneath like a table set for someone important.

He kills his engine. I kill mine.

The silence afterward is enormous. It rings. Sixty miles of wind and cylinders, and now just ticking metal and some insanely brave bird tuning up in the weeds, and the two of us sitting on our bikes ten feet apart, facing a horizon that's going from bruise to ember.

I don't say anything. Small miracle, I know. But some engines you don't touch while they're cooling, and anyway, my whole body is humming with that after-ride vibration where your bones think they're still doing eighty.

The sun puts its first edge over the far hills. The valley catches fire the polite way — fields going gold one at a time, the river turning to poured copper, frost smoking off the fence posts.

Damon pulls his helmet off, sets it on the tank, and drags a hand through his hair. In this light he looks — not softer. Wrong word. He looks like his bike sounds at cold idle: uneven, honest, before the day warms him into something armored.

"You held the reservoir curve wrong," he says. First words in sixty miles. Voice sanded down by wind. "Entered too hot. You corrected mid-lean."

"I corrected beautifully."

"You corrected lucky."

"I corrected on a line I'd never ridden, in the dark, at speed, chasing a man who thinks turn signals are a government conspiracy." I pull my own helmet off and the cold grabs my ears. "Most instructors introduce the track before the exam."

Something moves at the corner of his mouth. Gone before I can log it.

The sun keeps coming. Neither of us leaves.

"You didn't vote," I say. Because apparently sixty miles of restraint was my lifetime supply.

"I know what I didn't do."

"Three yes carries it. Noah said. So the math works without you." I watch the copper river instead of him. Easier. "But I've rebuilt enough engines to know the difference between a machine that runs and a machine that's happy. Math is running. It's not—"

"Stay."

I stop. Turn my head. He's not looking at me — he's looking at the valley, jaw set, and the word is already out there in the cold air between us, ten times heavier than it has any right to be.

"The club needs a mechanic," he says. Level. Flat. Like he's reading it off a parts list. "Mule hasn't idled like that in two years. Kai's brakes would've quit by summer. Noah's bike runs rich and he babies it too much to admit it. There's work. You do the work better than anyone I've seen." A muscle ticks in his jaw. "So stay. That's my vote. For the club."

For the club.

Sure. Absolutely. That's why it needed sixty miles of empty highway and a sunrise to say out loud, and why it couldn't be said at a table with three witnesses and an empty chair. Purely logistics. A staffing decision. Men famously ride until dawn over staffing decisions.

"For the club," I repeat, deadpan as a compression gauge.

"That's what I said."

"Mm." I look back at the valley so he won't see my face doing whatever it's doing. That warm, dangerous, unauthorized thing is happening under my sternum again — third time this week, ought to get it looked at. "Well. Tell the club the mechanic accepts."

He nods once. Business concluded. And then — quietly, almost under the birdsong, so quietly I could plausibly have imagined it:

"You kept up."

"What?"

"Sixty miles. In the dark. On my roads." He puts his helmet back on, and the shutter's already coming down over the storm-gray, the day's armor bolting itself on piece by piece. "Nobody keeps up."

He fires his engine before I can answer — the V-twin snarling once, then settling into that hard uneven idle I'd know at the bottom of a lake — and pulls out of the gravel, back the way we came. Not fast this time. Riding easy. Riding like a man who left whatever he was outrunning somewhere back around mile forty.

I sit there another minute, alone on the ridge with a valley full of morning.

"For the club," I tell Phoenix, and pat her tank. "You believe that?"

She ticks as she cools. Very diplomatic. I fire her up and follow him home — and it's not until we're through the gate, until I'm pulling my helmet off in a yard gone soft with dawn, that I realize what word I just used.

Home.

Oh, I'm in trouble.