Page 235 of Bend

“Not remotely.” His grin turns filthy. “But apparently you’ve got a race.”

Draygon reaches over and catches the back of Thorne’s leathers, tugging him away from me. “Put her down before Andre kills all three of us.”

Thorne reluctantly lowers me back to the floor, still looking far too pleased with himself. “Fucking possessive, this one. Man gets one hand on our girl and suddenly he thinks he owns the schedule.”

I smooth my leathers and glance between them. “You two realize I’m standing right here?”

“Yeah,” Thorne says, eyes dropping over me again. “That’s sort of the problem, innit?”

There are parts of Thorne that changed after Wolfe.

Parts of all of us did. He still has mornings where I find him outside the cabin before sunrise with untouched coffee beside him, staring at nothing.

He still goes quiet sometimes when somebody says something Wolfe would’ve laughed at, and I can almost see the memory hit before he smooths his face over.

But he doesn’t disappear anymore.

He doesn’t run when something gets too close or too real. He stays with me, with Draygon, with the team, and maybe most importantly, with himself.

Draygon stayed too, though he never really had a problem with that. His issue was learning that being there for everyone didn’t mean carrying the entire fucking building on his shoulders. He still checks on us, still notices everything and still somehow knows when I’ve eaten nothing but coffee until noon, but now sometimes he lets me take care of him back.

We’re figuring it out, together.

Across the garage, Revel suddenly announces, loud enough for everyone to hear, that somebody has committed sabotage, and when I look over, Cece is standing beside his bike holding his energy drink behind her back.

“You’ve had three,” she tells him.

“I’m an athlete.”

“You’re a medical emergency.”

Reign laughs from his bay while Lena shakes her head beside him, and Bex already has her phone out because apparently none of us have been allowed private humiliation since the day she met this team. Andre rubs both hands over his face, muttering something about retirement while Revel tries to convince Cece that caffeine is part of his training plan.

And there it is.

Normal.

Our version of it anyway.

Loud, messy, ridiculous and occasionally requiring intervention.

Mine.

A whistle cuts through the garage a few minutes later, and the mood shifts the way it always does before a race. The jokes thin out, helmets come up, gloves tighten and Andre starts moving between us with that focused expression he gets every time he has to send a group of people he cares about onto a track and pretend it doesn’t scare the shit out of him.

I reach for my helmet, then realize my other glove is sitting on the equipment bench a few feet away.

Dad is standing near it.

I still catch myself doing that sometimes.

Thinking the word before remembering how new it is.

Four months hasn’t magically fixed twenty-two years of missing each other. There are still weird silences, questions neither of us knows how to ask and entire parts of my childhood he’s trying to learn after the fact. Sometimes he talks about Evelyn before she left and I get to meet a version of my mother I never knew.

Sometimes I tell him about growing up and watch guilt flash across his face for things that were never his fault, but he calls me now, and I answer.

Sometimes I even call him first.