I lean back in my chair. Let out a breath I've been holding for three hours.
The main room is empty, quiet, lit by the glow of my laptop screen and the overhead light above the bar.
My coffee is cold. My hands are steady. My heart is doing something that feels like the first normal beat in weeks.
One front down. One to go.
I call Leah from the clubhouse before I head home.
"It's done," I say. "Everyone's okay."
She exhales. I can hear it.
The breath she's been holding since the engines left the parking lot.
She was awake. Of course she was.
She knew what tonight was, even though I didn't tell her the details.
She knew the way she knows everything—by watching, by listening, by being too smart to miss what's happening around her and too stubborn to pretend she doesn't see it.
"Come home," she says. And the word—home—hits me like it always does.
Like something I don't deserve but can't stop reaching for.
"Twenty minutes."
"I'll be up."
I make it home in seventeen and she's on the couch when I walk through the door.
My t-shirt, her legs tucked underneath her, her hair down around her shoulders.
The TV is on but muted—just light, filling the room so she wasn't sitting in the dark.
A mug of tea on the coffee table, untouched.
She wasn't drinking it. She was holding it. Something to do with her hands while she waited.
She stands when she sees me.
I stop in the doorway. Just stop.
Because she's standing in my living room in my shirt waiting for me to come home from what has to be the most stressful part of being in a club, and the image of it.
This woman, in this house, looking at me like I'm the only thing she was waiting for—does something to my chest that I'll never be able to explain.
"You good?" she asks.
"Yeah." I drop my keys on the table by the door, shrug off my cut, and hang it on the hook. "Everyone's good. No one got hurt."
She crosses the room and puts her hands on my chest.
Flat, warm, her fingers spreading over my sternum.
Checking.
Not my words—my body.
