Her throat tightens. “Okay.”
I release her slowly, fingers trailing down her arm until I have to let go. I pull my helmet on, strap it, then start the bike. The engine roars to life, a familiar vibration under me that has always felt like freedom.
Today it feels like leaving something important behind.
She stands there in the melt and slush, one hand wrapped around herself, the other lifted in a small wave.
I roll forward, then stop long enough to look back over my shoulder.
She’s still there. Watching. Waiting. Not asking me to stay. Not demanding anything I told her I can’t give.
Just trusting that this is not the last time.
I raise two fingers off the grip in a small salute.
“See you, Holley,” I say, even though she can’t hear me over the engine.
Then I ride.
The cold hits hard at first, knifing through my jeans, sneaking down my collar, turning my fingers numb even inside my gloves. The snowbanks blur past in dirty white streaks. The sky is bright, forcing me to squint. I lean into the road, into the familiar rhythm of the bike beneath me.
After a few miles, my mind quiets.
There’s still a knot in my chest, but it’s not panic. Not regret. Just… weight. The good kind, if that’s a thing. The kind you feel when you’ve picked up something you’re not putting down again, even if you’re not carrying it every day.
I think about the way she looked standing in the doorway that first night, half-frozen and half-defiant. The way she watched me in the shower like she didn’t mean to look but couldn’t stop. The way she admitted she wasn’t healed and didn’t try to pretend otherwise.
I think about her saying it makes her feel safer knowing I won’t ask her to be my everything.
I think about the way she said she wanted to keep me anyway.
A smile tugs at my mouth under the helmet.
“Any time,” I’d told her.
And I mean it.
She can walk into my world whenever she wants. And whether I’m ready for it or not, I already know— I’ll be waiting.
Fourteen
Tony
The first thing I smell when I open the garage door is old oil and rubber.
Home.
Not the cabin. Not the quiet mornings with the fire still glowing and Holley curled against me like she forgot how to sleep anywhere else.
No—this is Salemburg. My Salemburg.
Concrete floor, tools scattered like a language only I speak, bike parts, car parts laid out on the workbench in the exact pattern I left them in before the weekend. The old radio hums static before finding a classic rock station. The overhead lights flicker once before buzzing to life in that comforting way that says the world here hasn’t changed.
I wish I could say the same for me.
Two weeks.
Fourteen damn days.
