Page 68 of Gonzo's Grudge
“And?”
“And that there’s a cliff just a few steps away and I’m not scared because you won’t let me walk off it.”
We climbed off the bike, took off our helmets and let the night envelop us in her beauty. I leaned my hip against the seat and watched her walk to the edge of the turnout, stop in the spill of headlight left in the dust, and throw her face to the stars like a dare. Wind lifted the hem of her sweater. Gooseflesh rose along the bare strip of skin. I stepped in behind her and set my palms at her hips, not pulling, just a place to lean if the world got woozy.
“What do you feel now?” I asked.
She tipped her head back onto my shoulder without asking permission like she didn’t need to anymore. “Big,” she said, a little laugh in it. “And… small. In a good way. Like I don’t have to hold everything up.”
“You don’t.”
She reached back and found my thigh, squeezed once like a thank you and a map. “I know.”
We stood there listening to the far-off hum of a semi on the state highway, the river whispering to rocks nobody will ever move. I could have parked my life in that minute and called it done.
After a while I felt her turn, soft against my chest, hands drawing lazy lines across the patch on my left side. President. Her fingers paused there, then slid up to my jaw. I didn’t need light to see her; I knew her face now like I knew this road.
“What do you feel?” she asked me, returning it like a gift.
“Everything,” I answered, and it didn’t even feel like any form of lie. “Wind. Your breath. The engine still in my bones. The part of me that used to go quiet when I got on the bike waking up because you’re here.”
Her mouth softened. “Alive,” she said, echoing me back, getting it exactly right.
“Alive,” I said into the curve of her cheek.
We didn’t kiss. Not then. The want was there, sharp as a blade fresh from the stone, but the night wasn’t about taking. It was about being. Existing together without the pressure of the past between us.
After a bit, I led her back to my bike. I strapped her lid again, double-checked the chin strap like I always do, like I always will. We climbed on. She settled and I felt her settle, like faith. The engine turned over with a bark, then smoothed. We dropped into the trees again, world going soft around us.
“Talk to me,” I coaxed as we rolled on.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Tell me what you feel.”
She was quiet for three breaths, and then it spilled out of her, easy and unpretty and perfect. “It feels like… like there’s a piece of me that was always missing and now it’s found.” A pause, then she continued, “Like I can hear myself think, but the thoughts aren’t screaming for once.” A beat. “And it feels like I’m accepted by you exactly as I am in this moment and the next.”
My hand left the bar long enough to cover her fingers at my chest again. “You are.”
At the fork, I took the long way, the one that swings past the old feed store and the little church that still rings a bell with a rope.
“Faster,” she requested once, into the wind, into me.
I gave her five more miles an hour and felt her answer with a squeeze at my ribs. When the straight opened up just before Mile Hill, I rolled it more, enough to let the bike breathe. The world tunneled; the headlight pulled the future toward us faster; I could feel her heart go wild and then settle, and it killed me in the best way that I could hear it at all.
“What do you feel?” I asked one last time as we crested the hill closer to town again.
“I feel brave,” she said. And then, so soft I might’ve imagined it if I didn’t feel the way her hands shook when she said it, “And treasured.”
The rest of the ride we let be ride. Nothing to fix, nothing to explain. Just miles. Just us.
When we finally turned back toward her road, the sky had pink threaded through it like somebody bled light into the east. I slowed to a creep before the gate, let the idle thrum us both quiet. She didn’t climb off right away. Neither did I cut the engine.
We sat there in the purpling hush, engine heat rolling up, night giving itself to morning inch by inch. I felt her hands open, then curl, then open again like she was making a decision with her fingers.
I looked at the stone pillars, at the black eye of the camera over the keypad. I looked at the house halfway down the slope with windows that had seen too much and still somehow held. Then I looked at the nothing in front of me, which was really everything.
“What do you feel?” I asked, softer than the idle, almost to myself.
