Page 28 of Property of the Bikers

I don’t catch myself doing it immediately. I’m looking at the door and thinking about my next checkup with Doc when I realize I’ve been sitting on the edge of the bed listening for footsteps in the hallway for the last four minutes.

Jax brings breakfast at half past eight. He has every morning this week. Not always the same thing, not always from the kitchen, twice he brought something from a place in town that does breakfast burritos that are better than they have any right to be, given that the place looks like it hasn’t been renovated since 1987.

He stays longer than the food requires. He asks questions that aren’t interrogations and listens to the answers in a way that makes me answer more than I planned to.

I’ve been waiting for him.

I examine that for exactly two seconds, and then I put it down and go look out the window.

The compound is running its Friday morning.

A prospect is moving between the main building and the workshop with a toolbox. Ghost is at the gate, arms crossed and head tilted, talking to one of the men on rotation, breath fogging in the cold. The mountains behind everything are lit up sharply in the early light, the peaks white now, the sky above them so blue it looks artificial.

I stood at Viktor’s windows for two years, looking at Seattle.

I never once stood there like this.

A few nights ago, I was in the main room of the main building, which I’d been cleared to use in the evenings, and I watched Cade walk the north fence line from one end to the other.

Two of the rotation men were on the circuit, but Cade walked it himself, hands in his jacket pockets, moving at the pace of a man covering ground he knows by heart. He stopped at the northeast corner for a long moment and looked out at the road beyond the fence, and then he turned and walked back.

He didn’t know I was watching.

Or he did and didn’t register it as worth acknowledging.

I thought about that for longer than I should have.

Last night I woke at two in the morning to the sound of voices in the hallway, low and brief, and I lay in the dark and tracked them.

Two voices. Cade and Reeve, from the sound of it, were running through something that couldn’t wait until morning. I heard Cade’s voice stop outside my door for a moment, not long, the natural pause of someone registering that the room behind the door is occupied, and then his footsteps moved on.

I lay there after they passed and looked at the ceiling for twenty minutes.

These are not the behaviors of a woman counting the days until it’s safe to leave.

I know what those behaviors look like. I ran through them every day for three weeks in Viktor’s apartment. Everything I did pointed somewhere outside the place I was in.

Nothing I’m doing now points outside.

* * *

It’s half past eight, and there’s a knock on my door.

“Yeah,” I say.

Jax opens the door with his elbow because both hands are full. A plate in one, a mug in the other, and a brown paper bag folded over at the top, hooked on two fingers. He looks at me on the edge of the bed and then at the window and raises his eyebrows.

“You’re up,” he says.

“I’ve been up for an hour.”

“Good.” He sets the plate and mug on the nightstand beside the vitamins and holds out the paper bag. “Burritos again. The guy who runs that place asked if the pregnant woman liked them. I told him you ate two last time.”

“I was hungry last time.”

“You’re always hungry. You’re growing a person.” He pulls the chair from the corner without being invited and sits down, and I take the bag and open it, and the smell of eggs and green chile and something that is aggressively not Seattle fills the room.

I eat standing at the window because my back is better when I’m not sitting, and Doc told me to move more. Jax sits in the chair with his coffee and looks at the same view I’m looking at, and we don’t talk for a few minutes, which is one of the things about him I’ve stopped trying to analyze.