Should I be worried?
The bells jingled a second time, and I glanced down the street, appreciating the long lines of Riggs’s body, the shadows that wrapped around him as he balanced two helmets in one hand and the keys to his shop in another.
Not yet.
Lunch soon?
Monday.
It’s a date.
I slipped my phone back into my pocket as Riggs stalked toward me. He looked every inch the predator with a worn-down black leather jacket stretched across his shoulders. The silver zippers clinked together as he walked, and I could smell the leather overtop of the usual clean smell of him.
Riggs set one of the helmets down on the seat of his bike and beckoned me closer. I shuffled toward him, tilting my head back to stare up at him once our toes got close. He had a second jacket tucked under his arm, the same style but far less worn. It was a little too big for me, but the shoulders sat well enough, and it must have passed the test because Riggs nodded at me to zip it up, which I did.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
The jacket was too big for me but too small for him, and the friend I’d met after our first morning together was close enough to Riggs’s size it wouldn’t have fit him either. I didn’t need to ask who the jacket belonged to. I knew it had been his husband’s. It didn’t bother me to wear a dead man’s clothes, but maybe itshould have. The thing about Riggs was it was so easy to look at him and forget anything else in the world existed. His past was clearly a big part of his present, but all I knew was he was in with me enough to trust me with these things he’d held on to for so long.
“You tell me.”
There was the smallest pause, a hard swallow.
“I’m okay,” he said, lifting the helmet between us. “May I?”
I nodded, and Riggs fitted the helmet over my head. The inside of the thing was thick with padding and soft, tight around my ears and against my forehead. He slipped up the visor so I could see him and attached the straps underneath my chin. His fingers dragged against my jaw, and he checked the tightness.
“Good?” he asked again.
“I’m good.”
Once I was suited up, Riggs slipped on his own helmet and shoved a key into the ignition of his bike.
“It’s hard to hear when we’re going, but if you need something, I’ll make sure to hear it.” He tugged up the zipper on my jacket an inch. “Hold on tight and when I lean, you lean. Alright?”
“I can do that,” I said, words caught by the helmet so I repeated them louder.
Riggs’s eyes wrinkled in the corner, and even though I couldn’t see his mouth I knew he’d smiled.
“We’ll take a ride up to Mulholland Drive if that’s good? There’s some nice pull outs up the mountain.”
“Sounds good.”
Riggs twisted the key and the bike roared to life. He swung himself onto the seat and straightened his back, making room for me behind him. Getting on wasn’t as awkward as I thought it would be, and pressing into him to wrap my arms around his stomach was far from a hardship. Riggs was one of the sexiestmen I’d ever seen and getting to touch him in any capacity was a win as far as I was concerned.
“Ready?” he shouted, head angled to the side.
“Ready!”
He reached behind him and pushed my visor closed. It latched into place and he dropped his own, and then we were off. The bike rolled away from the curb, and he took it slow for two blocks before leaning into the throttle and opening it up. It was high speed only after that, with Riggs zipping his way into the valley and up the sharp hairpin turns of Mulholland Drive.
This place was much more Marshall’s territory than mine; the modern mansions tucked into graded hillsides reeked of new money and stucco. I favored the buildings like Riggs’s shop. The ones dripping with history and character. There were more secrets and more stories, and just like his shop, Riggs was full of those too. Halfway up the road, Riggs downshifted and slowed down, pulling off the road into a fairly large patch of dirt that overlooked North Hollywood.
I opened my visor and climbed off the bike, stepping out of the way so Riggs could do the same. He undid the straps on his helmet, then mine, and we both pulled them off at the same time. He shook out his hair and set the helmet down on the seat of the bike, then reached over and ran his fingers through my much shorter strands. I let him pull me into his arms, something constricting in my chest when he wrapped his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head.
“This is something, isn’t it?” I asked.
“You’re not talking about the view?”
