Page 6 of Open Road

I’m going to keep it that way.

“Okay,” I say.

Relief hits so hard that my knees nearly give out under me, and for the length of two breaths I let myself feel it, let it loosen something that has been clenched in my chest since we left. Then I remember who I’m running from, and the relief drains away as fast as it arrived, because Craig is not the kind of man who lets people leave, he is the kind who follows, who waits, who turns a closed door into something you pay for later.

Roam, oblivious to all of it, reaches for Rose’s overnight bag as though helping stranded women on the side of the road at three in the morning is simply a thing he does, one more ordinary errand in an ordinary night, and watching the easy competence of it, I catch myself thinking one ridiculous, treacherous thought, that for the first time since I pointed the car north and left Jacksonville behind, Rose and I are not alone.And that, I understand even as the warmth of it spreads through my chest, may be the most dangerous thing of all.

Chapter Two

ROAM

The hazard lights appear half a mile out.

Orange, patient… the kind of pulse that says the driver had the presence of mind to hit the switch before the car died, or the habit of doing so without thinking. A car on the shoulder, the hood not quite flush, and the particular angle of a vehicle pulled over in a hurry by muscle memory rather than time to think.

My thumb doesn’t move on the throttle.

The road at this hour is full of other people’s problems. Long practice keeps me from collecting them. I ride for the club, fix what needs fixing, and come back when it’s done. The private disasters of strangers on dark highways are not in the brief.

The car slides into my peripheral vision. A woman is at the passenger door, her hair falling forward over her face, and she is not flagging anyone down. She’s not on her phone or doing anything a person does when they need help.

She’s standing there.

Nothing else.

Two hundred yards north, I ease off the throttle.

No logic to it. No calculation I can point to. I tell myself it’s the mechanic in me. Twenty years of pulling bikes apart has made me incapable of riding past a dead engine without knowing the cause. I tell myself it’s the hour. It’s three in the morning on a dead stretch of I-75, no other headlights in either direction, and nobody who would see her if something went wrong.

I turn the bike around.

The hazards are still going when I come back. She hasn’t moved from the passenger side door, keeping the car between herself and the road... and me.

Noted.

I pull in behind her and cut the engine. Silence comes down fast out here. There is nothing but the tick of hazards and the warm dark pressing in off the Everglades. I stay on the bike for a moment before swinging off, letting her get a clear look at me as I take in the scene.

Late-model sedan.It’s not her car.There’s something in the way she stands that tells me so. She’s too careful with it, the way you’re careful with borrowed things. The hood catch is slightly misaligned. She opened it, looked at whatever she could see in the dark, and closed it again without knowing what she was looking for.

Ten feet out, I stop.

She doesn’t move, hand on the door handle, weight slightly forward on her front foot. She’s reading me, full assessment running behind steady eyes. Whatever she’s been trained to read for is bigger than a stranger on a highway because she is not running.

She has learned that running makes it worse.

My hands are loose at my sides, with my body angled open, nothing squared up, nothing confrontational. She’s already processing my size. Nothing to be done about the size except be deliberate about everything else.

“Car trouble?”

“I’m fine.”

Reflex, not a decision—the words come out before the assessment is finished. She’s looked at the engine but hasn’t done anything except see a man on a motorcycle pull in behind her car. She says it the way someone says it when they’ve been saying it long enough that it stops meaning anything.

I’ve heard that particular ‘I’m fine’before.

Don’t argue with it.

I look at the car instead, and study the hood angle and the position on the shoulder. The right rear tire is perfectly centered in the white line. She pulled over precisely, made herself visible, then reconsidered visibility the moment the headlight appeared behind her.