Page 56 of Redline Baby

He plates the eggs with a slice of toast and sets them in front of me without ceremony, the same way he bought me a milkshake at the carnival, the same way he pushed a basket of fries toward me at the bowling alley.

Like feeding me is just a fact of how things go between us.

"Eat," he says. "All of it. Not the granola-bar amount."

"Yes, Chef."

"Wrong title," he says mildly, and goes back to his own plate.

My face goes warm.

I laugh again.

We eat at the little counter, and the conversation drifts the way it always does with him.

Easy. No particular destination.

Somewhere in the middle of it, he asks me something that isn't about bikes or the weather.

"You grew up moving a lot?"

"Yeah."

"You mentioned it once, in passing at Redline. Never finished the thought. You tend to do that a lot there."

I turn my fork over in my hand, not really eating for a second.

"My dad was in construction. We'd follow the work. Six months here, eight months there. Never stayed anywhere long enough for a school to spell my name right on the first try."

I say it lightly, the way I say most things, but it costs a little more than usual.

"Kept a go-bag mentality my whole childhood. Never really unpacked anything all the way, you know? Just in case."

Soren doesn't rush to fill the space after that. He just nods, considering it seriously, the way he considers everything.

"Small town for me," he says eventually. "One stoplight, one gas station, family shop on Main Street. My grandfather started it. My father ran it. I inherited the keys at twenty-three, too young to really know what I was agreeing to." There's no nostalgia in it, but no bitterness either.

"Same building my whole life. Same four walls."

"Must be nice," I say. "Having something that's yours. Something that doesn't get packed into a U-Haul when the job dries up."

"Heavy, sometimes."

He eats another bite before continuing.

"I sold the old shop to build this one. And there's no version of me that doesn't feel personally guilty about letting my grandfather down by selling it, even though he's been dead for eleven years, so that's a genuinely irrational amount of pressure to carry around every day."

A small, dry smile.

"But yeah. It's mine."

He looks at me.

"And I'm sorry you moved so much. That sounds like it left a mark."

"It's fine." The words come automatically. I almost roll my own eyes. "I've got Redline now," I add. "Feels like the first place that's actually stuck."

"Good," he says simply.