Off Limits

✦CHAPTER 3 — A Ride I Shouldn’t Take

*Nova POV*

Rain always makes the city look honest—smeared eyeliner on concrete, secrets running into gutters. I stare out the coffee shop window pretending to study. Really, I’m counting how many times my phone lights up without his name.

“Refill?” the barista asks.

“Please.” I don’t need more caffeine; I need a distraction.

Instead I get a message.

Unknown: Out front.

My heart hiccups. I glance up, and there he is through the fogged glass—Luca, leaning on a matte-black bike like a sin offering, rain threading down his jaw. A helmet hangs from two fingers. He doesn’t wave. He doesn’t have to.

I should text no. I should finish my homework and go home and practice being a good decision. Instead, my legs stand on their own.

When I push the door open, the smell of wet asphalt and him hits me. Close up, he looks like last night and every night before it that I pretended not to want.

“You shouldn’t text me,” I say.

“You answered.”

It’s not a smile, but it’s close. He holds out the helmet. “Bracelet delivery.”

“You could’ve just… given it to Mason,” I say, and the name tastes wrong in the rain.

“Could’ve,” he says, eyes on my mouth. “Didn’t.”

The helmet is heavier than it should be. “Where are we going?”

“Not far,” he says. “Clear your head.”

“Does yours need clearing?”

He studies me like a question he’s decided to get wrong on purpose. “Climb on, Nova.”

My pulse goes bright. “I’ve never been on a bike.”

“Good,” he says softly. “Firsts are easier to remember.”

I should say no. I slide the helmet on. The visor blurs him, but nothing blurs the way he watches me. When I swing a leg over, my knees bump his hips and a spark snaps straight through me. I don’t know what to do with my hands until he reaches back, finds them, and pulls them around his waist.

“Hold tight,” he says.

*Luca POV*

She fits like she was designed for this spot—arms cinched around me, chin tucked, heartbeat a drum against my spine. I tell myself it’s just a ride. I tell myself a lot of things that aren’t true.

We pull away from the curb, the engine’s growl covering what neither of us says. Rain slicks the road into a mirror and the city lights smear into veins. She’s tense at first. Then somewhere after the third turn, she relaxes and I feel it—the trust. It lands like a blessing I don’t deserve.

The streets thin out; warehouses replace bars and laughter. I follow muscle memory to the river road, a strip the cops ignore when the water’s high. We coast until the bridge rises ahead, bones of steel over dark. I kill the engine beneath it, and the sudden quiet rings loud.

She doesn’t let go right away. Neither do I.

“You bring all your bad ideas here?” she says through the helmet speaker.

“Just the pretty ones,” I say.

Her laugh is small, startled. I feel it more than hear it.

I swing off and help her down, fingers at her waist. She’s lighter than she looks, steadier than she feels. When she pulls the helmet off, her hair is caught in a halo of rain-spark, eyes too bright for the dark.

“You didn’t ask,” she says.

“For what?”

“Whether I wanted to come.”

I lean back against the rail. “You’re right. Tell me you don’t.”

She opens her mouth, closes it. The river moves like something alive behind her. “Why me?” she asks finally.

Because you looked at me like I was worth the ruin. Because you didn’t flinch when I did. Because my brother never learned how to hold a good thing without squeezing it to death.

The truth is a dangerous animal. I leave it caged. “Because you don’t lie to yourself very well,” I say.

Her gaze flickers. “Says the man who drove me to nowhere to pretend we’re not breaking rules.”

“Nowhere has a good view,” I answer, and I mean you.

*Nova POV*

He watches like he’s memorizing. I feel it in my bones, that slow burn attention that’s almost reverent, almost sinful. The rain softens to mist, beading on his lashes. I want to wipe it away with my thumb, and the wanting scares me.

“Your bracelet,” he says, pulling it from his pocket. The thin chain glints under the bridge light. My initials—cheap charms, old habit. He holds it out, and when I offer my wrist, his fingers turn the inside of my arm into a live wire. The clasp catches; so do we.

“You remembered which arm,” I whisper.

“I remember everything,” he says, and it sounds like a problem.

We stand too close. The city hums around us like we’re the secret it keeps. He’s not touching me anymore, except he is, because the space between us is a touch all its own.

“Luca,” I say, and it’s both a warning and a prayer.

He leans nearer, just enough for his breath to fog mine. “Tell me to stop.”

I should. I don’t. The not-saying becomes its own answer. My hands find the edges of his jacket; his knuckles brush my jaw. For one suspended heartbeat, our mouths hover—gravity held by a thread.

Headlights s***h the dark.

We jerk apart as a car crunches to a stop at the end of the gravel. Doors slam. Voices spill. Not cops—kids, loud and careless, the kind that film everything. One of them points, phone already up.

“Great,” I breathe.

Luca steps in front of me like a shield without thinking. “Back on,” he says, voice low.

I hesitate a second too long, because the boy with the phone zooms. “Yo, is that—?”

The rest of his sentence is drowned by the bike roaring back to life.

*Luca POV*

I hate running. But I hate giving the world a story more.

She clutches tighter this time; I take the river road fast, throw the city behind us. Every red light is a dare. I take none of them. When we hit neighborhood streets, I cut left, then right, slip into the alley behind my building. The engine ticks into quiet. Her hands don’t let go.

“We’re okay,” I say.

“Are we?” she asks, breath shaking. “Because that felt like the opposite.”

I turn. She’s flushed, rain-bright, alive. This is the part where I should send her home. Instead, I hear myself say, “Come upstairs. You can dry off.”

Her eyes flick to my window, then back to me. “That’s a terrible idea.”

“The worst,” I agree.

“And you want me to say yes.”

I don’t move closer, but it feels like I do. “I want you to say what you want.”

She looks at the sky like the answer might be written there. It’s not. It’s in the way she steps forward, slow but sure, like she’s been walking toward this longer than she’ll admit.

“Ten minutes,” she says. “No more.”

“Ten,” I lie.

We take the back stairs.