“I’m not,” I promise. “I’m right here.”
The evening stretches long. He refuses dinner, then asks for it twenty minutes later. He’s agitated, tremors worse than usual, words tangling together in frustration. I clean him up when he spills water, change his bedding when an accident leaves him embarrassed and angry. Usually he is aware enough to let us know when he’s used his briefs, the adult diapers he has to wear since becoming bedridden. Tonight, he isn’t and used it more than once, filling and overspilling.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, eyes shiny with shame.
“Don’t be,” I say, swallowing my own exhaustion. “None of this is your fault.”
But later, when I finally step into the bathroom and lock the door behind me, I press my hands to the sink and let the tears come anyway. I don’t cry loudly. I don’t sob. I just let it out of me, quiet yet relentless, until there’s nothing left but ache.
Some nights are harder than others. Tonight is one of them.
When I return to the living room, he’s asleep at last, breathing even. I sit there for a while, watching the steady rise and fall of his chest, grounding myself in the rhythm.
This is my life, I remind myself. Not dramatic rescues or motorcycles cutting through the dark.
This.
Responsibility. Care. Staying.
Later, in my bedroom, I kick off my shoes and collapse onto the bed, too tired to change. My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
For half a second, my heart jumps.
It’s just Marcy, checking in.
You okay?
I type back, Long day. I’m fine.
I stare at the screen longer than necessary after hitting send.
Miles never gave me his name that night, his real name. I only have his road name. This motorcycle man life is different than anything I’ve ever experienced, but my cousin Josie, she’s got herself a biker in North Carolina. Raff is good to her and her son.
Miles.
It fits him. I roll onto my side and stare at the window, at the faint glow of the porch light seeping through the curtains.
Lucas’s words echo in my head. Guys like him don’t stick around.
Maybe he’s right.
But some part of me—the stubborn, hopeful part I keep buried under routines and obligations—wonders if sticking around is the only thing that ever really costs anything. Maybe the life of uncertainty suits someone like me better. If I can’t get attached, I can’t get hurt.
I fall asleep thinking about the road. And the man who chose it. And how sometimes, even when someone leaves, they leave something behind that doesn’t know how to follow.
Sleep takes me the way it always does, sudden and heavy, like my body’s been waiting for permission to shut down.
I dream of roads. Long ones. Empty ones. Wind and darkness and the steady thrum of something powerful moving beneath me. I’m not alone in the dream, but I don’t turn to look at who’s there. I don’t have to.
Half in a dream, half coming to, the mattress shifts.
Not the way it does when you roll over or when the house settles. This is deliberate. Careful. Weight added slowly, testing, like whoever it is knows exactly how light to be.
My eyes flutter open.
For a second, panic spikes—sharp and instinctive—but it dies just as quickly when I register the familiar smell beside me. The heat. The scent of leather and night air. The quiet certainty of his presence.
“Miles,” I breathe.
