“No, you don’t.”
“I’m strongly committed to the project.”
He pulled on his sunglasses. “Then commit with both hands.”
The bike rolled forward.
I tightened my arms around him and tried not to think about the fact that my fingers rested just above his belt, that his body was between my thighs, that the scent of Irish Spring and mintand leather filled the helmet every time I leaned close enough to breathe.
The women called goodbye from the porch. Regan yelled something about texting when we got there. Amber told Mason not to kill me. Savannah shouted that if I changed my mind about the lesbian commune, applications were still open. I managed to lift one hand long enough to flip her off, which made the whole porch erupt.
Then Mason turned us onto the dirt road.
The Airbnb slipped behind us.
The desert opened ahead.
At first, I hated everything.
The noise. The vibration. The lack of doors. The feeling that my body had been drafted into an intimacy experiment without consent from my executive function. The way Mason handled the bike with infuriating ease, his body shifting under mine in subtle movements that I felt everywhere. He didn’t jerk the machine around. Didn’t show off. Didn’t ride like a man trying to impress himself.
He was controlled.
Precise.
Almost elegant, if elegance could wear boots and smell like motor oil.
The dirt road gave way to pavement, and he accelerated.
My stomach dropped. My arms tightened. My cheek nearly hit his shoulder blade, and I felt his hand briefly cover mine again, not restraining, not mocking.
Steadying.
“You’re fighting it,” he called over the engine.
“I’m fighting many things.”
“Lean with me.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You’ll feel it.”
“I hate instructions that sound like trust exercises.”
He tilted the bike into the first curve.
My body panicked, then followed his because physics did not care about my trust issues. The movement was terrifying for half a second, then strange, then smooth. The road bent beneath us. His body guided the machine. Mine, despite my objections, learned the rhythm.
Oh.
I hated the oh.
The desert air rushed against my arms, warm now where morning had been cold. Sunlight spread over sand, rock, scrub, and distant mountains. The world widened until it felt like there was more sky than earth. I had spent days driving through the desert, but on the bike, it was different. There was no windshield turning the landscape into a scene. No cab. No dashboard. No illusion of separation.
The desert touched everything.
Wind pulled at my clothes. Heat moved over my skin. The scent of dust and sage threaded through the mint and soap clinging to Mason. The engine’s rhythm traveled up through my bones until my thoughts began losing their hard edges.
