Ride Me Into Ruin: Iron Reapers MC

Rain

LEXIE

I went to bed at a reasonable hour for once. I just changed into comfortable clothes, turned off the lamp, and laid down.

I was half asleep when I first heard a soft sound against the window, easy enough to sleep through. I pulled the blanket up and closed my eyes again and for a few minutes it stayed that way, gentle and distant.

Then the wind came first, a sudden push of it that rattled the window in its frame and pulled me the rest of the way out of sleep. It was raining.

The rain had gone from soft to serious while I wasn't paying attention, loud against the roof, loud against everything, and underneath it the low roll of thunder somewhere close and getting closer.

Then lightning came through the gap in the curtains and one second later the thunder cracked hard enough that the walls felt it, the light under my door went out.

I reached for my phone on the side table and lay there for a second with the torch on, pointing at the ceiling.

My throat was dry. It happened when I slept with the window cracked, which I always did because I couldn't sleep properly without air moving. I lay there weighing it up for a minute and eventually got up.

I pulled my hoodie on over my sleep shirt, found my shoes in the dark, and opened the door.

The bar was full of storm sounds, rain on the roof, wind at the shutters, thunder moving through every few minutes and fading.

I kept one hand on the wall coming down the stairs and found the water jug behind the counter by feel. I drank half the glass standing there in the dark and listened to the rain.

The kitchen door was almost shut, a thin line of warm light came from the gap underneath it. I pushed it open.

Chaos was at the kitchen table with two thick candles burned in the centre of it and he had a glass of water in front of him and his hands loose on the table. He looked like he had been awake long before the storm arrived.

He looked up. "Hey."

"Hey." I nodded at the candles. "Good thinking."

"Drawer under the sink," he said. "Been using the same spot for years." He nodded at the chair across from him.

I sat down, the candlelight was warm and small, enough to see by, throwing soft shadows up the walls.

Outside the rain kept falling heavily and every few minutes lightning turned the windows white.

We sat without talking and I wrapped both hands around my glass and listened to the rain on the roof and felt my shoulders drop.

After a while Chaos looked at the candle flame, something had been sitting on his face since I walked in, quiet and private, the kind of thing that came out late at night when there was nothing left to distract from it.

"My dad used to love storms," he said, not to me exactly. Just out loud, the way people said things that had been sitting in them too long.

"He used to take me outside when I was small and we'd stand under the porch roof and just watch it come in." The corner of his mouth moved.

"My mother hated it. She'd be at the door telling us to come inside and he'd wave her off and she'd go back in muttering."

I didn't say anything. I just stayed still and let him talk. "He was the kind of man who didn't need much noise around him," he said.

"He walked into a room and people just settled. Didn't have to try for it." He looked at the flame. "He built this club, not just the name and the patch but the actual bones of it, the code underneath. What it stands for." He paused.

"He could fix anything mechanical. You could hand him something broken and he'd sit with it quietly until he understood it and then he'd fix it."

"Sounds like someone you take after," I said quietly.

His eyes came to mine across the table. "Maybe," he said. "I don't know if I ever got as quiet as him."

"You're pretty quiet," I said.

"That's different." The corner of his mouth moved again. "He was quiet because he was at peace with things. I'm quiet because I'm still working them out."

"How old were you?" I asked.

"Nineteen." He said. "He got sick fast. Didn't give us much time to adjust to the idea before he was gone." His thumb moved slowly against his glass. "I took the patch three months later. It felt like the only thing that made sense to do."

I looked at him across the small warm light. Nineteen years old and stepping into his father's place with a club full of men watching to see if he'd hold.

I thought about who I was at nineteen, worried about exam results and what to do with my hair, and felt the distance between those two lives like something physical.

"He would've been proud of you," I said. "For what you've built here."

Chaos looked at me, he didn't deflect it or brush it off. "What about you," he said after a while. "Before all of this. Who were you?"

I looked at my water glass. "I was going to be a doctor," I said. "That was the plan. I was very much a plan person back then. Lists, timelines, everything mapped out." I smiled at the memory of her, that girl with her colour coded notebooks.

"I got into nursing school instead and spent about three weeks being annoyed about it." I paused. "Then I did my first real shift and I never thought about the original plan again."

"What happened on the first shift?"

"There was a man, older, who came in alone, no family with him. He was scared but trying hard not to show it." I turned my glass on the table.

"I just stayed close to him, talked about nothing, kept him company while he waited. When his results came back clear he grabbed my hand and said thank you and something in me just." I stopped. "I knew that was it, that was what I was supposed to be doing."

Chaos was watching me. "I was good at it," I said. "I knew it and I wasn't shy about knowing it. I had a whole life that made sense." I looked at the flame. "And then I met my ex boyfriend and somewhere in those two years I stopped being that person."

"She's still there," Chaos said.

I looked at him. "The person you're talking about." His voice was even. "I've watched you work. I've watched you with people in this town." He held my gaze. "She didn't go anywhere."

I had nothing deflecting to say to that.

At some point I had stopped noticing how close we were sitting, both leaning forward slightly, elbows on the table, the distance across it smaller than when I sat down. I noticed it now but neither of us moved back.

The lights came on without warning, bright and sudden, the fridge humming back to life, and we both blinked but neither of us moved for a moment.

Then I sat back slowly and picked up my glass. "Well," I said.

"Yeah," he said.

I stood up and pushed my chair in. "Goodnight, Chaos."

He looked up at me, the candlelight was still catching his face even with the overhead light on. "Night."