Sneaking him in. The weight of him in my bed when we were too young to understand what it meant, or that what we had then wouldn’t last. The panic that came with it. Listening for my dad’s car on the drive. Shaking him awake before dawn, whispering harsh and urgent for him to go.
My eyes opened slowly. Darkness. But this wasn’t that. There was no quiet breathing beside me. No soft, steady rhythm. Ryan moved. Not gently. A twitch at first. Then a shift. His arm tightening around me, fingers flexing like he was holding onto something that wasn’t there. A low sound followed. Rough. Broken. My chest tightened.
“Ry?” I whispered, turning slightly, trying to see him in the dark.
He didn’t wake. His head moved against the pillow, jaw clenched, breath uneven.
“You reap what you sow…”
The words were low. Repeated. Over and over again. Not said. Dragged out of him. His grip tightened suddenly, fingers digging into my hip hard enough to hurt.
I sucked in a breath, my eyes struggling in the darkness. Behind me his chest rose and fell, uneven. Ragged. Too fast. Too sharp. As if he was running from something he couldn’t outrun.
“Ryan,” I said again, louder this time, my voice unsteady despite the effort to keep it calm.
He didn’t hear me. His head jerked again, his knees hitting me in the back of the thighs, the words still spilling from him, quieter now but constant.
“You reap what you sow… you reap what you sow…”
“Ryan, wake up.” I couldn’t ignore the panic I could hear in my own voice.
Wriggling free of the heavy arms that held me there, I turned, pushing into his chest, shaking him once, twice. His skin was hot under my fingers, damp. Whatever had hold of him wasn’t letting go easily.
For a second nothing happened.
Then his body jolted, sharp and sudden, something snapping. That hold breaking. His eyes opened. And for a moment he didn’t see me. The room descended into silence. The air charged with tension. Ryan breathed heavily, but with each breath, the tension in his body eased. Arms that had been rock a moment ago relaxed.
“I’m sorry, Soph.” His voice was hoarse and rough, like he’d been shouting. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“What was happening, Ry?”
“Nightmare.”
“That was more than a nightmare.”
I’d seen nightmares. That was bigger. Deeper. Something so rooted, I knew there was so much more. Thirteen years. So much had happened in that time. So much life had passed. And in that time, something had happened to him. The laugh-a-minute, happy-go-lucky boy I knew.
Ryan said nothing as he climbed out of bed, the space he left behind instantly inviting the cold air of the terraced cottage. He didn’t turn the light on, only scrambled around in the dark in the wardrobe beside the bed.
“What are you doing, Ryan?” I asked as he slid jeans over those thick tattooed legs.
“I need to clear my head.”
“Now? What time is it?”
“Early. Sun not up yet.” He turned then, gazing at me through the darkness. “You’d better come, Soph. Can’t leave you here. But I need to get on that bike right now.”
I didn’t understand. Not one bit. But I nodded anyway.
Night air clung to my legs, my thin jeans doing little to ward off the cold.. The bike roared beneath us. A different tone. Angry and urgent. But then it changed. Dropped. Deeper. Heavier. Not the sharp snap of before. Not the push to get somewhere. This was something else. It settled low and stayed there, rolling through the frame and up into my bones.
Ryan leaned forward, his body folding over the tank. He wasn’t riding anymore. He was driving it. Forcing it to answer him. The engine didn’t protest. It responded. A long, relentless pull. Like it was trying to drag something out of him. My arms tightened around his waist as the speed climbed, the road blurring beneath us, the world thinning out at the edges to nothing more than streaks of light in a marbled darkness. The sound filled everything. No space left for thought. No room for anything else to exist.
And that was it. That was what he needed. Not escape. Drowning in the roar of an engine and the rush of the wind.
As first light pulled in over the north east coast, Ryan slowed the huge motorbike underneath us. I don’t know how long we’d ridden into the night for, chasing the golden streaks of dawn as it filtered inland over the North Sea. But now I wasnumb, my finger ends tingling hot and sore and my toes feeling like the wind had worn them down to lifeless nubs. I shivered suddenly tightening my arms around Ry.
The deep roar uncoiled into something steadier, the vibration softening where it pressed into my legs. The road came back into focus, the world filling in around us again where it had blurred and stretched. Whatever was happening in Ryan’s head, I could feel it through the bike. The aggression. The speed. And then the breath. Like life had been reset. And now he could breathe again.
