Page 37 of The Girlfriend's Guide to Dating a Biker
I looked up at him and found the teasing gone from his eyes.
He placed the mug down and tugged my shirt, pulling me close. “I’m here because I want to be here. With you. However you come.”
I exhaled shakily, looking down at my hands that were still betraying my anxiety. “I’m . . . a lot. Spreadsheets, rambling, catastrophic decision-making. None of that screams effortless.”
What sat heavy in my chest, that I didn’t say, was that men before him had always wanted the edited version of me. The one who knew when to shut up about code, who didn’t clutter her life with colour-coded lists and spreadsheets, who wasn’t too much of anything. I’d been left enough times to know my quirks weren’t always worth the effort.
His eyes softened. “Effortless is boring as fuck. I like you exactly like this.”
I believed him. And that scared me as much as it soothed me.
Three weeks ago, I hadn’t known the first thing about bikers. Now I was wrapped up in one, utterly captivated, with no idea what rules applied here or what came next. But when Jake said things like that, all I could think was that maybe this wasn’t temporary. And that thought alone sent my anxiety into overdrive, because if there was one thing I didn’t do well with, it was uncertainty.
I had no road map. No instructions. No clear variables to plug into the formula. All I had was Jake, this MC life I didn’t understand, and me hoping like hell I could keep up.
We drank our coffee at my tiny kitchen table, and somehow the conversation circled around to the slogan on my favourite mug: “I Paused My Game to Be Here.” It was from last year’s Brisbane Geek Fair, which ranked in my list of the “things necessary for survival.”
I may have gone on a full tangent about tech panels, retro arcade tournaments, and the pure serotonin rush of a convention centre filled with fellow nerds. Jake didn’t say much, but the way he hung off every word I said made me feel like my geek fair enthusiasm was the most fascinating thing he’d ever heard. Then his phone buzzed with a text from his president, and just like that, he was gone.
He kissed me before he left, taking his time to ruin me all over again. I then spent approximately twenty-three and a half minutes longer than usual showering and dressing for the day because my brain was one long constant replay of that kiss.
Thankfully, I was working from home today, so none of my team got a front-row seat to my girlfriend-of-a-hot-biker glitch (wait, am I Jake’s girlfriend?). Slack may have gotten a few distracted messages, and GitHub definitely got some half-baked commits while I stared blankly at my screen and remembered Jake’s hands on me, but that’s just between me and GitHub. Every time I tried to focus on debugging, my brain rerouted to his mouth on mine, and suddenly Johnson’s broken code didn’t seem like the most pressing problem in the universe.
By lunchtime, I’d wrangled my brain into doing some actual work. In between Google sessions, that is.
Google search history from this morning (apparently I'm having some kind of existential crisis):
“how to look sexy while brushing teeth with morning hair”
“is it normal to octopus-cling to hot men in your sleep”
“how to operate basic appliances when being eye-fucked”
“how to tell if you’re falling too fast or just under-caffeinated”
“can you die from sexual frustration while making breakfast with a hot biker”
“signs a biker is ruining you for all other men: early warning system”
“dating timeline: when is it acceptable to steal all his shirts”
That last one was purely hypothetical. I definitely hadn’t already mentally claimed three of his T-shirts.
Me
Jake update: he slept over last night. No sex. Just sleeping.
Megan
And?
Me
I woke up on top of him. Like, literally. Arms and legs around him. Probably drooling.
Megan
You koala’d him.
