I Ran Home With My Baby to My Brother's Biker Friends, and the Three Who Tormented Me Said I Was Theirs to Guard novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Unasked

Plow lights swept the yard at eleven that night, orange across the snow, and I went down the iron stairs in my coat with no plan at all.

Zuri was asleep in the locked back room with the heater going.

Mason sat on the couch outside her door with the monitor on his knee and a paperback he wasn't reading.

I had told him I needed air.

He had looked at me, and at the stairs, and said, "He's in the yard."

I hadn't asked who.

Dirk Ziegler stood at the far end of the lot beside the big flatbed, with a chain in his hands and his breath smoking.

He was checking the binders, one at a time, in the dark.

He didn't turn around when my boots crunched on the gravel.

"Go inside," he said.

"No," I said.

"It's nine degrees."

"I know what it is," I said.

I stopped ten feet from him.

The plow came around the corner of the lot again and lit him up orange, the scar through his eyebrow, the line of his jaw, his bare hands red from the cold.

Then it was dark again.

"The day of my mother's funeral," I said.

His hands stopped on the chain.

"You remember it."

He said nothing.

"The reception was in your bar hall because Cyrus was a patch, and my mother had cleaned that building's windows for ten years.

"I came out for air in the black coat.

"You took me by the back of the collar in front of everyone, and you walked me to the sidewalk.

"I was fifteen.

"I had been to a grave two hours before."

"Zo," he said.

"Don't call me that.

"You don't get that.

"You said it was club business.

"You said it was none of mine.

"You said, 'Out, mouse,' and Nik laughed, and I stood on the curb in the snow and watched them all go back in and eat my mother's casseroles."

My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated it.

I had said it flat all the way across Wisconsin, practicing, and here it came apart in my mouth.

Dirk set the chain down on the flatbed very carefully.

He did not apologize.

He did not explain.

He turned around, and his eyes in the dark were so tired that I forgot the next thing I'd planned to say.

"Yes," he said.

"I did that."

"That's all?" I said.

"That's all I can say."

"You can't say, or you won't?"

"Yes," he said again.

He stayed where he was, with the flatbed at his back and a good eight feet of gravel between us.

He kept that distance as if it were a rule he'd carved into the ground.

I thought about the diaper bag, and the key on the dresser, and the iron stairs where he had said not one word to my shoulder.

I thought: he has never touched me.

Not to steady me, not to hurt me.

I walked across the eight feet.

I didn't know I was going to until I was already doing it.

Gravel crunched under my boots, and the cold went through my coat.

I stopped so close that I could feel the heat of him through his vest, and I put my open hand flat against his chest.

He went rigid.

His heart slammed under my palm, hard and fast, like something that wanted out.

"Unasked," he said, very low.

It was my own rule, thrown back at me in his dry voice.

"No man in this club touches me unless I ask.

"I said that at the table.

"You're the one touching."

"I know," I said.

"That's against your terms," he said.

"I'm asking," I said.

He looked down at me.

Plow lights swung across his face and away.

"Say it again."

"I'm asking you, Dirk.

"I'm asking you to put your hands on me."

His breath went out of him in a ragged cloud.

He did not move.

"You don't know what you're asking," he said.

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