Page 1 of My Broken Biker

Chapter 1 — Jace

The sidewalk outside Pelham's Hardware has a bad joint where a tree root's been pushing up for years, and I step over it without looking because I know every problem between the pharmacy and the truck.

Past Pelham's the block opens up, the afternoon past its busiest hour and the regular Bloomfield rhythm settling in: a man double-parked outside the diner with his hazards going, two teenagers spread across the bench outside the bookshop, the smell from the bakery working its way down from the far end of the block the way it always does past noon.

I've got the pharmacy bag in my left hand and the cane in my right, and I'm making my way toward the truck at the pace I make my way toward things now.

The gift shop a few doors up has its doors propped open and the cool air leaking out from inside is enough that a woman in a yellow sundress has slowed outside it, turning her face toward the gap.

That's when I see a man in the alley.

He's watching her the way someone watches something they've already decided on, his whole body oriented toward her before she's even looked up, and I read what that means before I've finished reading it.

I'm already moving.

He grabs her bag and yanks and she doesn't let go, which means she goes with it, dragged forward and off-balance, her shoulder wrenching back, and she makes a sound, short and startled, and then he pulls harder and I reach them.

His wrist. The lock. The leverage takes him to the pavement and he hits it hard.

I'm still on my feet.

Then the leg.

I go down, hands hitting concrete first and then my knee, and the pain through my right leg arrives all at once, not building to anything but just there, fully, and I stay where I am because there's no useful alternative while it works through.

The man is already pushing himself up off the ground and I watch him, not taking my eyes off him, because he's got weight on me and he's mobile and I'm on the pavement of Main Street, and if he decides to make something more of this right now my options are limited, which is a fact I'm aware of.

I watch him anyway.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, looks at the people on the sidewalk who've stopped to see what the noise was, and reads the situation for what it is. And then he goes back into the alley.

I watch the mouth of it until I'm sure.

The cane is somewhere to my left and the prescription bag went a few feet, and the street carries on normally.

After a while someone sits down beside me.

Not stands over, looking down from above with the expression people get when they want to help but also prefer to keep a little distance from the situation.

She sits right down on the pavement without any apparent concern about it, already with her bag in her hand, having gotten it back herself at some point while I was occupied with other things, and she looks at me without adjusting her expression around what she sees.

"What do you need?" she says.

"A minute," I say.

"Okay," she says, and gives me the minute without counting it, without checking in or filling the quiet with anything that needs a response, just sitting there on the pavement beside me while the pain works through its stages, and when it does I tell her.

She gets up first and puts her hand out, a good solid grip, and I use her weight to get upright while she picks up the cane and hands it over and then goes to where the prescription bag landed, bringing it back without any comment on any of it.

Up close, her hair is dark auburn and the afternoon has had its way with it, loose around her face and curling softly at the temples.

She's full through the hips and chest with a softness through the middle that she carries without any particular attention to it.

Her face shows what she's feeling while she's feeling it, and what it's showing right now is just plain, unhurried attention, without anything adjusted around the sight of a man getting himself back up off the ground.

It's been a long time since someone looked at me that way.

"Coffee place right there," she says, nodding up the block. "If you want."