He gave her a few seconds to settle before he eased them down the driveway and through the gate, stopped to make sure it closed properly, and then rode the curves down his mountain gently.
A few miles later, Lee Highway opened up in front of them with morning light cutting low through the tree line and thankfully sparse traffic. He accelerated and decelerated easy, and didn’t lean it over too much in the curves.
Still, she fought the first curve he took with some speed behind it — the counter-lean, shoulders going rigid, arms locking tight around him, her weight pulling wrong.
He didn’t say anything. She’d figure it out.
On the third curve, her body softened behind him in a way he felt all the way through him, and her arms loosened from locked to settled.
He breathed out.There it was.The moment a new rider stopped fighting the momentum and just went with it.
“Oh,” she said through the helmet mic, her voice full of wonderment.
“Yeah,” he said.
He kept it easy, but let the bike lean a little more, gradually letting her get used to it, and felt her body behind him catalogingwhat the machine did, how it moved.
They rode in comfortable silence for a stretch, and he felt her head moving — turning to look at things, taking in the houses set back from the road, the old storefronts, the way the city showed itself differently from this angle. Not the windshield version of the old backroads, but the real one.
Everything changed when they hit the traffic and stoplights on Brainerd Road. Her arms tightened around him, and he felt her tense with every lane change, every car that came toward them. Not panic, but recalibration. City riding is a different animal, and she was smart enough to know it.
“Just a few miles in the city before we hit open roads again,” he told her.
Her grip loosened a little, and she snugged up to him.Good enough.
The tunnel under Missionary Ridge did something unexpected — he felt her give a long exhale as the city noise compressed and changed to the echo of tires in a tunnel, and she laughed when they came out the other side, like the tunnel had shaken something loose.
Once they were clear of the city, they took a jaunt around the base of Lookout Mountain, and thenfinallythey were out of traffic. Old 41 Highway opened up, and they drove through a thick forest. Eventually, glimpses of the Tennessee River came into view beside them, and he felt her go still behind him.
“I can see why you do this,” she said. “In a car you’re watching it go past. This is…” A pause. “You’re in it.”
“That’s it exactly.” He’d tried to explain it to people before and mostly given up. The words people reached for were always about freedom, wind, speed — the romantic version of riding. None of it was wrong, but it wasn’t the true difference. She’d nailed it though.You’re in it.
There were several long, sweeping turns, and he fully leaned into them now. And his heart soared when she was right there with him for every curve.
And then, finally, an extended, banked turn to the right, and they drove over the Tennessee River. No more glimpses through the trees.
She looked to their left at the interstate bridge running parallel — the wide slab of highway moving people from here to there faster than the law allowed.
“I’m enjoying the ride, but I have to ask why you chose the back roads.”
The pat answer was to tell her it was about the journey as the destination, and she’d have probably understood that just fine, but he wanted her to understandhim, not just his choices.
“Riding the interstate is like eating at a drive-through,” he said finally. “You get where you’re going. You get fed. It does the job.” He felt her listening. “This is a meal worth sitting down for. It’s a pig that’s cooked all night, a roast that’s been in the slow-cooker all day, the flavors of the meat melding into the vegetables. We might arrive at the same destination, but we have a completely different experience of getting there.”
Silence from the back, and then: “You just spoke to me in the only language I’m completely fluent in.”
He smiled behind his visor, glad she couldn’t see it.
By the time he made it to Monteagle Mountain, still on Old 41, he opened the throttle and leaned into the curves with abandon — and could feel his passenger’s glee, her loveof the speed and the wind, the freedom one simply can’t get in a car.
But eventually, all things must come to an end, and he pulled into the trailhead parking lot.
She waited for him to shut the engine down before she swung off, and he sat and watched her take her helmet off while realizing her hips needed to reconfigure themselves.
“I think my wolf enjoyed that as much as I did,” she told him, and he couldn’t help his smile.
“Ditto. Always.”
