"Rex."
Knox puts the phone down. He's quiet for a minute, and I can see him putting it together—the time of night, the highway, the state of me.
"You were at Holly's again, weren't you?"
I don't move or say anything. My hand stays on the door frame. The wood grain presses into my palm.
"You ride to her most nights and ride away before morning. You think nobody notices?" The rain hits the clubhouse roof in a steady sheet above us. "I can smell it on you, brother. Been able to for months." Knox holds my gaze. "You can't run from the bond. Men before you have tried and failed."
I've got nothing. He's right and we both know it.
"I know," I say.
Knox nods and turns back to what he was doing before I walked in, giving me the out we both know I need.
I walk out and down the hallway and into the rain. My bike sits in the lot where I left it, rain pooling on the seat.
Mate.
The word surfaces. I push it down. I throw a leg over the seat, kick the starter, and ride.
Chapter 3
Holly
The eyeliner pencil slips and the wing on my left eye smudges into a comma. I curse under my breath and grab a tissue.
It's the second time I've ruined it tonight. My elbow braces against the cold edge of the sink and I start the wing over, slower this time, trying to remember whether my hand's shaking because I haven't eaten since lunch or because I'm about to walk downstairs and let a man buy me dinner who isn't the one I've been sleeping with for six months.
The bathroom light buzzes overhead, a low industrial hum that's been driving me insane since I moved in. The mirror is unkind and honest, every cheap rental bathroom mirror ever made. Short dark hair I cut myself in this same sink last spring with kitchen scissors and a bottle of wine for courage. The violet streak I touched up this morning, which is going to bleed onto my pillowcase tonight no matter what I do. Four piercings climbing the curve of my left ear, silver, silver, gold, silver, every one of them a small private rebellion against a woman three thousand miles away who used to lecture me about ladylike presentation.
The sleeve tattoo crawls down my right arm. Black ink and grey shading, sea creatures and storm clouds and the bones of an old ship. I started it at nineteen, the year I dropped out of Wellesley. I called my mother from the parlor with the cling film still on my forearm, just to hear her voice break. She didn't speak to me for a year after, and by the time she tried again I'd stopped answering.
I get the wing right on the third try.
The black halter dress fits the way it's supposed to. It clings where it should and skims where it shouldn't, and the boots make my legs look longer than they are. I look good. I look like a woman about to be taken out for dinner by a man who is, by every sensible measure, the better choice.
I look good but I feel like a fraud.
The clock above the cabinet says ten past seven. Tyler will be downstairs any minute, and I'm stalling because I know what I'm about to do is a bad idea, and I'm going to do it anyway.
My phone buzzes on the cabinet.Tyler: I'm out front. No rush.
I drop the eyeliner in the drawer, grab my coat off the hook, and head down before I can think any harder.
Tyler waits at the curb in front of the Anchor, hands in his pockets, breath visible in the cold. He's dressed up: dark jeans, a charcoal jacket I haven't seen before, a fresh haircut. He smiles when he sees me come down the side stairs, and the smile is so open and uncomplicated it makes my stomach turn over.
"Hi."
"Hi yourself."
"You look incredible."
"Don't make a thing of it."
He laughs and opens the passenger door of his car. I duck inside and try not to think about the last time a man I slept with opened a door for me, which has never happened, because Rex doesn't do doors. Rex does shoulders and walls and the curve of my hip pressed against my kitchen counter at one in the morning.
The car smells of new upholstery and Tyler's cologne, something he doesn't wear at the bar.
