Page 29 of Redline Baby

"Once."

"Good. Use the passenger handholds, not my waist. Keep your feet on the pegs. Lean with me, don't fight it, and don't try to correct the bike yourself. You'll be fine."

"Okay. Okay, yeah."

The man climbs on behind him, still awkward in his unfamiliarity with a bike that isn't his own, and grips the passenger handholds.

Kit glances back at King.

"I'll catch up at the diner if the timing works. If not, don't wait on my account. I know the way back on my own."

"You sure?" King asks, though it's clear from his tone he already knows the answer, already knows there's no version of this where Kit doesn't do exactly this.

"I'm sure."

He starts the engine—that same aggressive, throaty growl I've come to recognize from two lanes over during every ride we've taken together—and pulls out of the gravel.

But he eases the throttle open with a gentleness I've genuinely never seen him use on that bike before.

Careful.

Controlled.

Nothing like the full-commitment riding I watched him do not twenty minutes ago on this exact stretch of road. He's riding like there's someone behind him who matters. There is.

I watch the green Yamaha disappear around the first curve of the switchback, handling another person's life with a care I've never once seen Kit extend to his own.

He knows how to be careful.

He just doesn't believe his own life deserves the same care.

The thought settles heavily in my chest.

"He does this," Ni says quietly beside me.

I hadn't noticed him come up next to me.

"Not often, but it's not a one-time thing. Kit'll burn his own tank of gas driving somebody's kid to urgent care at two in the morning and never mention it again. He gave a guy the shirt off his own back once. Actual shirt. Guy got hurt and was bleeding and needed one."

"He never mentioned any of that to me."

"He doesn't think it's worth talking about." Ni watches the empty road where the bike disappeared, something complicated moving behind his expression. "That's the thing people miss about Kit. Everybody sees the noise, the reckless riding, the way he talks himself into the center of every room. Nobody clocks that underneath all that, he's the first person to give up his own ride for a total stranger and act like it costs him nothing."

"It costs him something."

"Yeah."

Ni looks at me, and there's something knowing in it, something that says he's tracking exactly where my attention's been these last few weeks and isn't remotely surprised by it.

"It costs him plenty. He just never lets anybody watch him pay it."

Dex finishes securing the downed bike, straightens up, brushes gravel dust off his knees.

"Tow's twenty minutes out," he reports to the group at large. "We can head on to the diner."

The group remounts, engines firing back up in that same rolling wave, and we pull back onto the road, the formation a little looser now with Kit's absent slot in the middle of it, a gap that everyone rides around without comment.

I ride the rest of the way to the diner turning it over in my mind, and it isn't a complicated thought exactly. I've watched Kit for weeks now—the performance at the bar, the frantic noise, the flinch toward the back corner, the way his whole body goes tight and defensive at anything resembling being seen.