My Biker Husband Spent the Night in the Other Woman's Bed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Porch Light
Hallie watches Rhett leave Delaney's house at dawn, then locks him out. His last words through the door: the whole club has known since April.
At 4:58 in the morning, the porch light came on at the little rental across the street.
I was parked three houses down with the engine off and my hands on the wheel.
My husband had texted me at eleven the night before.
He said he was stuck at the clubhouse and would sleep on the couch there.
At one o'clock I had driven past the clubhouse lot, and his bike was not in it.
I had not wanted to know where it was.
I had known anyway, and I had come to look.
The front door opened, and my husband walked out.
He was shrugging his leather vest on over bare skin.
There was no shirt under it.
He did not look up and down the street.
He did not duck.
He took his time on the steps.
Delaney Rooke, the club's bookkeeper, stood in the doorway behind him with the porch light on her curls.
She was wearing a black T-shirt that came to her knees.
It had a frayed left cuff.
I had bought that shirt off a folding table at a rally in Williams two summers ago.
I had paid twelve dollars for it, and Rhett had worn it until it was soft enough to tear.
I could see the frayed cuff from where I sat.
Three houses away, in bad light, and I could not tell myself I had misread it.
Rhett stopped at the bottom of the step and turned around.
He said something low.
Delaney laughed.
I knew that laugh.
It was the one she gave everybody at the clubhouse, warm and easy.
She had given it to me on the day I carried soup to this same door when she had the flu.
She had given it to me at the Labor Day cookout too, when I held out a beer and she waved it off.
"Doctor's orders," she'd said, and our club president, Dutch, had come over and carried her paper plate to the picnic table for her.
Everybody had laughed at how Dutch fussed over the bookkeeper.
Now it was aimed at one man, in the gray light, at five in the morning.
He did not kiss her goodbye.
He did not have to.
That was the part that went in deepest.
They were past kissing goodbye, and they were comfortable.
He swung a leg over the bike and the engine rumbled up.
It went north toward our house, and the porch light went out.
I put my hand on the gearshift and backed the truck out of the street without turning my headlights on.
I took a picture first.
It was a bad picture, gray and grainy, but you could read the shirt.
I got home a few minutes before he did.
I sat at the kitchen table and watched the clock on the stove.
I did not cry.
I made coffee and set two mugs down, and then I put one back in the cupboard.
His boots hit the porch at twenty past five.
The door opened and he came in with his vest still hanging open.
"Hey, you're up," Rhett said.
He crossed the kitchen and kissed the top of my head.
His skin smelled like her laundry soap.
"Couldn't sleep at the clubhouse. The couch is a plank."
"Where's your shirt?" I said.
He didn't miss a beat.
"Spilled coffee down the front of it. The clubhouse pot is basically tar."
He smiled and reached for the coffee pot.
That was the too-smooth part.
It would have worked on me a week ago.
I turned my phone around and set it on the table between us.
He looked at the screen for a long time.
"Hal," he said.
"Don't call me that."
"It isn't what it looks like."
"It looks like my shirt, and her wearing it, and you with no shirt on."
I stood up.
"It looks like you saying 'love you, go to bed' with your boots under her bed."
"Delaney's got a problem," Rhett said, and his voice dropped into the soft, reasonable register he used on cops and landlords. "It's club business. I can't say more than that. You have to trust me."
I had trusted him for six years.
I had sewn his name onto his vest with my own two hands.
I walked past him down the hall to the bedroom.
I took his duffel bag off the closet shelf and filled it.
Jeans, socks, his razor, the good boots.
He followed me and talked the whole time.
I carried the duffel to the front door and set it on the porch.
I set his helmet on top.
"Hallie. Come on. You're being dramatic."
"Take your keys off the ring," I said.
He didn't.
I took his hand off the doorframe myself and shut the door in his face.
I turned the deadbolt.
Then I went to the kitchen drawer and found the little brass key for the back door and locked that too.
Through the wood, I heard him laugh once, short and surprised.
Then he stopped laughing.
"You're really doing this?"
I put my forehead against the door.
"You'll want to be careful, Hal," Rhett said. His voice had gone flat, with none of the charm left. "You think I'm the only one who knew?"
I didn't answer.
"The whole club's known since April," he said. "Ask Birdie."
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