Mickey claps me on the shoulder. "I'll be here Saturday. See you then."
"Wouldn't be the same without you."
I lock the door behind him and sit at the bar by myself. Stormy has already gone upstairs to take a shower and get ready for bed. I sit in the dark and think about a green tracker glowing inside a motorcycle frame for two months. Pinging. Broadcasting. Telling a man in Alabama exactly where to find the kid who ran.
I think about Ron Jackson sitting in his house watching a dot on a screen. He's being patient because that's how he operates. It's how he sat on the edge of a bed and smiled and waited for a young man to stop saying no.
The tracker is in Mickey's pocket now. Tomorrow it'll be hidden in an impound lot full of confiscated vehicles and bikes of every kind. I'll make a call tomorrow and the bike will be in pieces by the weekend. Ron Jackson will look at his app and see his property at a police station. He'll have to decide what that means and what to do about it.
It won't stop him.
Mickey's right about that. It buys time. But time is all I need right now. Time to figure out the next move. Time to build the wall piece by piece between Stormy and whatever's coming.
By the time I make it upstairs, Stormy is already asleep in bed. He's curled on his side, and when I climb in, he reaches for me without waking up, his arm sliding across my stomach, his face finding the crook of my neck. Automatic. Even in sleep. Finding me the way he always finds me now.
I tighten my arm around him and doze off to sleep.
Before daylight, my phone buzzes with a text. Dammit, I forgot to silence it before I went to sleep.
I'm awake instantly, heart hammering, because a phone buzzing at this time of day is never good news. My hand grabs it and I squint at the screen, already bracing for whatever's coming.
Two notifications. The patient portal. The Medical Walk-In Clinic.
I tap the first one. My text results. I scroll past the header, past the date and the reference numbers, to the results section.
Negative. All panels.
No surprise there. I've been celibate for a long time.
I tap the second one. Stormy's results. The ones attached to the account I set up at the front desk while Patty watched me type with my big fingers on a small screen.
Negative. All panels.
I set the phone down, bury my face in the pillow and breathe. The relief is overwhelming. Not because I was worried for myself but because he was so scared, so ashamed, so certain that the men who hurt him had left something behind that would follow him forever. And they didn't. They took years from him. They took his safety and his trust and his childhood. But they didn't leave this. This one thing, they didn't take.
He's negative. We're good.
I look over at him sleeping beside me. His face is peaceful. His breathing is slow and even with his hand curled on my chest.
I'm going to let him sleep. And when he wakes up, the first thing he's going to hear is good news. I set the phone down on the nightstand, close my eyes and wrap my arm around him.
Things are coming together.
We're negative. The tracker is gone. The bike will be gone by the weekend.
Chapter 25: Stormy
I wake up to the biggest smile I've ever seen.
Tex is propped on his elbow, facing me, and he's grinning. This grin is so wide and so bright it's almost stupid, the grin of a man who knows something wonderful and is barely containing himself.
"What's going on?" I say, my voice rough with sleep. "Why do you look so happy?"
He leans over me carefully. Propping his weight on his arm so his body hovers above mine without pressing down on me. He's always conscious of his size, always making sure I have room to move, room to breathe, room to leave if I need to. Even now, even in this bed that's ours, he holds himself above me, not caging me in.
"Oh, nothing," he says. "I'm just smiling because I'm waking up to the most gorgeous man in the world in my bed."
He kisses me slowly as if he's got nowhere to be and nothing to do except this, his lips soft against mine, his beard brushing my chin. When he pulls back, his eyes are twinkling.
