Page 198 of Bend

I’m awake before the alarm goes off, staring at the ceiling while early morning sunlight spills through the gap in the curtains and stretches warm and golden across the room.

It pisses me off immediately.

The sky outside is painfully clear, bright blue beginning to replace the softer colors of dawn, and apparently the island has decided today deserves to be fucking beautiful. After days of gray skies and unpredictable weather, the sun finally chooses this morning to show its face, warming the floorboards and catching on the edge of the blankets like there’s anything about today worth making pretty.

I stare at that strip of light longer than I should, anger tightening slowly through my chest.

Wolfe would’ve loved this.

He would’ve opened the curtains all the way, probably made some obnoxiously cheerful comment about finally getting decent weather before trying to drag the rest of us outside. He was always chasing shit like this, always noticing the sun, the ocean, the trees, every little beautiful thing the rest of us walked past without thinking twice.

And now the fucking sun has the audacity to come out when he isn’t here to feel its warmth.

It shouldn’t make me this angry.

It does anyway.

For a few minutes, I don’t move, because the second I get out of bed, today becomes real.

The race is still happening. The paddock is still waiting. Wolfe’s family is here, and that fucking course is still out there like it didn’t already take enough from us.

The only thing missing is him.

Thorne is asleep beside me with one hand curled loosely around my wrist beneath the blanket, and Draygon is on my other side, turned partly onto his stomach with his knee pressed against mine. Neither of them looks properly rested.

None of us have really slept since Wolfe died, but eventually exhaustion wins whether grief agrees with it or not, and sometime after midnight we must have all finally passed out.

I look at Thorne’s fingers around my wrist and have to swallow before carefully easing myself free.

There are three of us in the bed.

I still haven’t figured out how to look at that without immediately knowing who should make four.

Today isn’t practice. There are no easy outs, no bringing everyone back into the bay after twenty minutes so they can complain about setup changes and argue over tire pressure. Today is the actual TT, the race we came all this way for, and none of us wants anything to do with it anymore.

That would almost be easier if Wolfe’s family weren’t here.

They flew in from Canada yesterday after the organizers told them there would be a tribute before today’s racing, and even knowing they came because their son died here makes something about packing up and leaving feel impossible.

Nobody has said we owe them a race. Andre has made it painfully clear that nobody owes anyone anything, especially Wolfe, but there is still something about his parents standing on this island, watching the event acknowledge him, that makes all of us feel like disappearing would be wrong in a different way.

I climb over Draygon, and pull on the first clothes I can find and head downstairs careful not to wake either of the guys.

The kitchen light is already on.

My father is standing at the counter in an old sweatshirt and sweatpants, waiting for the coffee machine to finish.

He glances over. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Not really.”

“Same.”

He reaches for another mug without asking and sets it beneath the machine once his finishes. That tiny gesture lands harder than it should, mostly because he doesn’t try to make anything else out of it. He doesn’t ask how I’m feeling, doesn’t tell me today will be fine, and doesn’t give me some former-racer speech about courage or fear.

He just makes me coffee.

I lean my hip against the counter and watch him take a drink of his black enough that it looks like something I’d drain out of an engine.