The Biker's Regret: The Enemy I Became.

I could wait

(Noah)

I left the compound mid morning.

Dante had everything he needed from me and the men had their instructions. Watch the route, track the timing, report back before anything moved. Nobody acted without my word. That was the standing order and every man in that room knew what it meant when I said it.

I rode back through the city with my head clearer than it had been the night before. That was what the compound did for me when I needed it. It pulled my focus back to what was real and what required action and what could wait. By the time I crossed back into the part of the city where the apartment was I felt like myself again.

I parked and took the helmet off and went inside.

The lobby was quiet. The doorman nodded. I crossed to the elevator and pressed the button and stood back and waited.

The doors opened.

Reese was standing inside.

She had her bag on one arm and her phone in her other hand and she was already looking up before the doors had fully opened, the way you did when you heard the elevator arrive and were ready to move. When she saw me she went still for exactly one second. Just one. Then she moved to the side to make room and looked back at her phone like that one second had not happened.

I stepped in.

The doors closed behind me.

The elevator was not small but it was not large either and there were two of us in it and the space between us was not as much as either of us would have chosen. I could smell her from here. Something clean that my body recognized before the rest of me could catch up. It hit me the same way it had hit me in the hallway on moving day and in her apartment and every time she had been close enough that the distance stopped being a barrier. My body did not forget things the way my head sometimes tried to.

"Morning," I said.

"Morning." Her voice was even. Composed.

I leaned against the back wall and looked at her.

A moment passed.

"Just getting back?" she said. Voice easy, like it was a question about nothing.

"Yes," I said. "Been a busy night."

She nodded once. No follow up, no second question. She had asked the one thing she wanted to know and she was not going to let on that she had wanted to know it. But she had asked. That told me something. She had spent some part of last night aware that I was not there and she had not been able to fully let that go before morning.

I had not been able to let it go either.

The number above the door changed from two to three.

"You didn't sleep," I said.

She looked up. "Excuse me?"

"You look tired," I said. Not mean about it. Just true.

"I slept fine."

"Okay," I said.

She put her phone in her bag and looked at the doors instead. The silence between us was not the comfortable kind. It had weight to it, the kind that came from two people standing close together with too much between them and neither one willing to be the first to acknowledge it. I was aware of every inch of space between us. I was aware of the way she was holding herself, like staying still required more effort than it should have. Like the distance she was keeping was something she had to actively maintain and not something that came naturally.

It did not come naturally. Not for either of us.

"You can stop," she said.

"Stop what?"

"Whatever you're doing right now."

"I'm standing in an elevator," I said.

She turned and looked at me then and whatever she had been keeping behind her eyes came forward for just a second before she pulled it back. I saw it. She knew I saw it. Neither of us said anything about it.

"You make everything harder than it needs to be," she said.

"I'm not the one making it hard," I said.

She let out a short breath that was almost a laugh and looked back at the doors. "That is exactly what someone who makes everything hard would say."

"Maybe," I said.

The elevator reached four. The doors opened and she moved first, out into the hallway, her steps certain the way they always were. I came out after her and we walked toward our doors without speaking.

She reached hers first. Put the key in. Then stopped.

She turned around.

We were a few feet apart. The hallway was quiet around us.

She looked at me directly this time. No pretense of being somewhere else with her attention. Just her eyes on mine and something in them she had not quite managed to put away before I saw it. It was the same thing I had seen in her apartment. The same thing she had been carrying since moving day and working very hard to keep behind everything else. It was not anger and it was not indifference. It was something that had been sitting in her a long time and had not gone anywhere no matter how much she wanted it to.

I knew because I had been carrying the same thing.

"You are not going to make this easy are you," she said.

It was not really a question.

"No," I said.

She held my gaze for a moment. "You should."

"Probably," I said.

Something passed across her face. Not anger. Not the wall she usually put up. Something quieter than both of those and harder to look away from. Then she turned back to the door and pushed it open and went inside and it closed behind her without a sound.

I stood there for a moment.

Then I went into my own apartment and set my keys down and stood in the quiet.

She had stopped at that door and turned around when she did not have to. She could have walked straight in and let it close between us and that would have been the end of it. She had chosen not to. She had turned around and looked at me and said what she said and I had heard everything underneath it that she had not put into words.

She was not over this.

Neither was I.

And sooner or later she was going to stop pretending otherwise.

I could wait.