Cade brings both his hands to hold my face and keep me close. When he speaks, it’s quiet, and his voice is a little choked.
“I love you. I don’t want to fight anymore, okay? I just need to do this. You have to let me take care of you and the girls.”
I can’t help but sigh, because this really is what it always comes back to, but there’s no point in getting into that conversation again right now. I’ve given up on trying to stop him.
“I love you, too. Please just be safe.”
I feel him nod against my forehead, and I don’t make any moves to pull away. Maybe if I keep my eyes closed and my face next to his, nothing has to change.
Cade is the one to pull away first. He leans back, still holding me in place, and presses a hard kiss to my forehead. By the time I open my eyes again, he’s walking away from me. He doesn’t look back, and I get it. I wouldn’t want to, either.
I don’t let myself look at the people scattered around me, because I don’t know whether they were looking at us with disgust or some kind of pity, and I don’t care. I’m just trying to breathe.
The riders all line up at the start, and a controlled cheer goes out from the crowd. A lot of people parked up tailgate style, and people are drinking, smoking weed out in the open, acting like it’s a big party. Adrenaline starts to blur my vision.
The track is a cross between a backyard set-up and something more professional. It’s mostly berms and smaller jumps, but there’s enough space for them to get up some real speed in places, and the final jump of the track is big enough to qualify as a booter. They can get some serious air time there, if they go for it.
Air time in the dark. Perfect.
I’m so consumed by my tension, I don’t really clock the start of the race. I just hear the sudden roar of the engines, smell the octane in the air, and then see Cade—a pink blur—eating up the track. I haven’t decided if I want to watch him closely or just close my eyes and hope for the best. I can’t believe I agreed to stand here for thirty fucking minutes of this.
Like always, a rhythm descends on the arena. The engine noise pitches and ebbs as they move around the track, the conversation falls to a general kind of chatter, and everyone seems pretty content to just relax and watch the ride. Once in a while a cheer goes up for one of the riders, and I think they’re mostly for Cade. He’s obviously the favorite to win.
Without making a conscious decision about it, I realize my eyes are trained on him and I’m not willing to look away. To save myself some pain, I focus on studying his technique. Where he’s holding his weight, when he accelerates and slows, how he gets past or falls behind the other riders. It’s closer matched than I expected—all of them still huddled together more or less—but Cade is also slower than I’ve ever seen him. Not just slow on the bike, but slow in his reactions. I suspect he’s been pretending to feel a lot better than he did today.
The other guys might be hungover, but Cade is coming off a what? Nearly 24-hour bender with only a few hours of sleep here and there, plus a lot of stress about it?
All he ate today was fucking potato chips. God, this is a nightmare.
I wince as Cade lands hard from a jump and fishtails a little, but he gets it under control and keeps going.
This is out of my control.
This is out of my control.
This is out of my control.
I have a strong urge to talk to my therapist, which has never happened to me before. I guess if I had a parent I was close to, I might have an urge to talk to them instead, but that’s not something that’s ever going to be a part of my life.
I’m shocked out of that thought by a sudden series of noises. They’re harsh—metal on metal—and accompanied by a gasp from the crowd.
I’m calm. It’s like the waiting was worse than the event, and I always knew this was coming. The world is moving in slow-motion around me as I finally latch my eyes onto what everyone else is looking at.
Or course. Of course it’s Cade.
Someone must have been passing someone else and lost control, because Chris’s bike is on its side as well as Cade’s, and both riders are tangled together in a pile, several feet away. My lungs are frozen as I wait for them to move, to try to get up.
If this were a real race, the EMTs would already be out there, but of course it’s not, so instead we have some confusing yelling coming from different sources and the other riders, clearly oblivious, still moving around the track.
Cade still isn’t moving.
I think someone—probably Chris’s uncle—is moving closer to the track, yelling and waving his hands, but it’s too slow. I wall off every emotion I have into somewhere very far away, and start to run. There aren’t any real fences or barriers, it’s all just open, so it’s easy for me to get on the track and start waving off the other riders.
One stops, then the rest, getting their feet on the ground and looking around to see what’s going on. I’m past them now, though. Just as I reach the crash, I can see Chris pushing himself to his feet on one hand, the other held protectively close to his chest. His helmet is still on until he pulls it off and throws it to the side, but Cade still isn’t moving.
Fuck. The panic and emotion I’ve contained is clawing at the door, but I manage to keep holding it back. I ignore Chris, because he seems okay and I hear other people running up beside me. My knees hit the dirt next to Cade and I lean down to look at him, remembering at the last possible second that I shouldn’t move him, in case he fucked up his spine.
The wordspine, crystallized in my own mind, hits something raw inside me and I make a wheezy, pained noise without meaning to. Not crying. Something more uncontained.
