Page 12 of Redline Baby

I wasn't drinking. I hadn't had a drop all night. I didn't need to be anywhere near triple digits on an empty county road. I didn't need my throat raw from talking. I was coloring a lion a shade of blue that didn't exist in nature, and I was completely, entirely at peace.

"Daddy, look," I said, holding the page up without looking away from it, because I wasn't finished and I wanted him to see the whole thing eventually, not yet, but I wanted him to know I was making something.

"I see it, bug," Charles said. His voice did that thing it always did—it dropped low, went slow, like he had all the time in the world and nowhere else he'd rather spend it. His hand found the back of my neck, heavy and warm, his thumb brushing once against the knob at the base of my neck. "That's a mighty strange color for a lion."

"He's a space lion," I told him, like it was obvious. "Space lions can be any color they want."

"Can't argue with that logic."

He didn't let go of my neck. He kept his hand right there, anchoring, the entire time I colored, only lifting it to take a sip of his own drink. Every few minutes, without any real reason, he'd press down, just slightly.

A check-in.

A here I am.

I didn't have to ask for it. I didn't have to perform being okay or perform being not-okay. I just had to exist, small and quiet and coloring a lion blue, and he kept his hand right there like it cost him nothing at all.

At some point, I got tired, the good kind of tired, heavy-limbed and soft-headed, and I put the markers down and crawled the two feet between us and put my head in his lap without asking. He didn't act surprised. He just shifted his beer to his other hand and let his fingers sink into my hair, scratching lightly at my scalp, and I remember closing my eyes and thinking, distinctly, clearly, the way you only think something when you're young enough or safe enough to think it without irony:

I never have to be fast here. I never have to outrun anything here. I can just be small, and someone bigger than me will hold the weight of it.

I fell asleep like that. Actually asleep, in the middle of a biker clubhouse, surrounded by noise and leather and motorcycle exhaust drifting in from the main room, and people screaming from the spanking benches, curled up on the floor with my head in my Daddy's lap, and nothing in me was screaming.

Nothing in me needed to be numbed.

I was just a boy, held.

He carried me out to his truck later. I don't remember that part. Allie told me about it afterward—said Charles scooped me up like I weighed nothing, tucked Pretty under my arm before I even asked for him, and didn't let anyone else touch me on the way out.

I sit up.

Pretty is still clutched in my hands, one flattened ear pressed beneath my thumb, exactly where Charles's finger used to rest when he tucked him in against my chest.

I don't have that anymore.

I don't have any of it.

I have an empty apartment, and a bear with a ruined ear, and a body that only knows how to go fast enough to stop feeling.

I press Pretty against my chest anyway, curling forward over him in the dark, and I let myself cry until there's nothing left to cry with.

Chapter 6. Kit

The joke isn't even that funny. King says something about a guy who tried to register a bike as a service animal, and I'm laughing, loud and wide, my beer bottle swinging up in a wild arc that nearly clips the pendant light over the bar. I can feel my tank running thin, the needle dropping into the red.

But I keep the smile bolted on. I keep the volume up.

Someone settles onto the stool beside me.

"Hey," the man says.

I turn, and it's him.

Soren.

The wall from the far end of the bar two weeks ago. He's been coming to Redline ever since, and staring at me ever since, too. He lifts two fingers to get the bartender's attention, points at the bottle in front of me, and the bartender nods and reaches for the cooler.

"Hey," I say back, and I hear my own voice land softer than I intend it to.