The wind whipped around our bodies as we cruised up the darkened ocean’s coast. I could feel Paige’s cheek pressed into my shoulder, her chest rising and falling with her steady breaths as she clung to me. The bike ride was silent. It had been since I picked her up. I could tell there was a great deal on her mind, and I wanted to find a way to alleviate it.
I felt close to her, like I’d found a kindred spirit in her somehow. I felt like she understood me. Understood the path I had walked and the heartaches I had gone through. When I looked into her eyes, it was as if I was looking into a crystal ball of my future.
A future that housed a woman and a bed, with the two of us tangled up in the sheets. A future that held a career and a child. A child I raised right despite how I myself was raised. I figured I was shown what not to do when it came to taking care of a kid, so as long as I did the opposite, I should be fine.
The water battered the ocean shore as Onyx vibrated underneath my legs. I felt powerful on the back of my bike, but having Paige here made me feel like a man. She clung to me with every tight turn we took, and at one point, I thought I felt her press her lips into the leather of my jacket.
I wondered what it was about Paige that drew me to her. I had known her for all of a week and had been on three dates with her. Yet I felt like I’d known her forever. I felt like she knew a part of me I hadn’t even divulged yet. I felt like I was looking into the eyes of an old friend who was just waiting for me to remember them.
It was all so perfect.
I didn’t want her to leave, but I knew eventually she would have to. She didn’t live here, but I still felt connected to her in a way I’d never experienced before. She was shrouded in mystery and wrapped up in more questions than answers, but I wanted to explore things with her and see where this went.
I pulled over onto the side of the road before I turned the bike around to look out over the ocean.
My helmet came off, and I hooked it underneath my arm. Paige picked her head up, working her helmet off her own head. She sat her chin on my shoulder before she kissed the nape of my neck, and I didn’t attempt to hold back the shiver that ricocheted down my spine.
“Chilly?” she asked.
“I hear that grin,” I said.
“I never thought I’d enjoy the ocean like this,” she said.
“I’ve always enjoyed it like this.”
“Just one of the many things that makes you different,” she said.
I turned my head toward her and found her smiling at me. The stars in the sky twinkled their reflections in her deep green eyes, and her hair reflected the vibrant light of the moon.
I put the kickstand down on my bike and hopped off, offering my hand to her in return. She looked at it for a second before she took it, allowing my extra bike helmet to settle onto her seat.
I walked her out into the sand before I pulled her into my body.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
“Dancing,” I said.
“But why?”
“Because.”
I slipped my hand around her waist and pulled her close to me. The top of her head came up to my chest, the perfect height for her lips to meet my heart.
She threaded her arms around me and placed her cheek against my skin as I draped my arms over her body. The rhythmic sound of the ocean waves crashing against the shore gave us the concert we needed to sway our bodies underneath the low-hanging moon.
“I feel like I know you,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I just feel like we’ve met before, even though I know we haven’t. It feels like I’ve known you for a lot longer than I have.”
Her silence rolled over me, but her grip on my body didn’t loosen.
“Why did you come back?” I asked.
“Zach…”
“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me what you wanted to tell me last night.”
Her eyes fluttered up toward mine, and I could see them swimming with apprehension. It was the same look I’d gotten from her when I knocked on her window with her purse in my hand. It was the look I’d gotten from her when I found her stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire.
I wondered if I’d overstepped my boundaries.
“I came back because I didn’t know where else to go,” she said.
It wasn’t the answer I was expecting, but it did push the conversation in a direction centered around her, and I wanted to know all I could before she left.
“Why not?” I asked.
“When I get stressed, my mind becomes one-tracked. I usually have my art to help me relieve it, but in that particular situation, I didn’t have it.”
“So you drove nine hours back to my house?” I asked.
“I guess, yeah.”
I felt her body shaking, and I pulled her closer into me. I stroked my fingers through her hair, trying to get her to relax. I was putting her on the spot, and I knew it, but her words warmed my entire body.
This woman drove nine hours in a fit of stress and anxiety because the one thing that was on her mind at that moment was me. This beautiful woman, with her luscious body and her intriguing mind and her wild ways, wanted to relieve her stress with me. She felt comfortable around me, and the thought made me smile.
“It makes me happy to know you felt you could come to me like that,” I said.
“I really hope I didn’t wake you up,” she said.
“Even if you had, it wouldn’t have mattered. You were going through something, and I was more than willing to help you through it. I know what it’s like to feel like that. To feel like things are spinning out of control. I need you to know that I’ve got you if you need me.”
She looked up at me with her big, bold eyes, and my heart skipped a beat as I hooked my gaze with hers.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“What?”
“You said you understood what it was like to feel things spinning out of control. How so?”
I drew in a deep breath before I pulled her head back against my chest. I didn’t want her looking up at me for this conversation. Just in case her opinion of me warped, I didn’t want to see it rush over her face. I wasn’t sure if I could handle something like that.
“My mother and I moved here to get away from my abusive father,” I said.
Paige didn’t say anything, but her arms held me tighter in their comfortable grasp.
“He was manipulative, at best. But at his worst, when he was drinking and cheating on my mother, he lashed out with his fists. He felt that the best way to assert himself was physically.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said breathlessly.
“One day, my mother woke up with a migraine and saw that I had a bruise around my neck. She couldn’t remember much from the night before, but I did. My father had come home from one of his fun little company parties, trashed, and went straight for my mother. He wanted her, but she refused, and when he continued to try and get what he wanted from her, I stepped in.”
I took a deep breath, gathering strength to finish the story I wasn’t used to talking about.
“He grabbed me around my neck, and it gave my mother a chance to get away. I’m still not sure what prompted the migraine, but my guess is my father got what he wanted in the end from her that night.”
Paige sniffled against me and it broke my heart.
“My mother was a strong woman, but she had her demons. She took advantage of my father’s absence, packed up all our shit, and just drove. We stopped for gas, then stopped again in Brookings for food. She fell in love with this town. How it sat on the ocean. How the mountains towered majestically over the water. We would go for nighttime rides up and down the coast whenever neither of us could sleep.”
“That’s why you like riding out here,” she said.
“It is. But my mother wasn’t perfect. She tried her best to have the kind of life she wanted me to have, but eventually, her demons swallowed her whole. I could never be angry with her for doing what she did. People told me it was okay to be mad, but I wasn’t. I was angry at my father for turning into the man he became, for ripping our family apart, for putting my mother through such hell that she never recovered.”
I held Paige close as she trembled into my body.
“I know how hard it can be to deal with things on your own,” I said. “Something tells me that’s what you’re doing. I just want you to know that I get it. I get trying to do it alone, and I get needing someone. And if you need someone, I’m here.”
Paige lifted her head again and gazed into my eyes. I could see the tears lining the rims of her eyes, threatening to spill over as she rose up onto her toes. Her lips hovered just below mine, and her eyes hooked onto mine before her hand cupped my cheek.
“Take me back to my hotel,” she said breathlessly.
I scooped her up off her feet and carried her back to my bike. I could feel her trembling still, her body shivering against me as she curled up into my chest. I set her down onto my bike and helped her with her helmet. Then we rode in silence as I took her home.
I figured I had overwhelmed her with what I told her, so I enjoyed her touch while I had it. I relished the way she gripped my waist, and I paid attention to the heat pouring from between her legs.
If I could somehow convince her to give me one last night with my body against hers, I’d do anything to make it happen. Her fingertips were drawing mindless circles on my abdomen, and it pulled a grin across my face as we made our way back into town.
I parked my bike and offered to walk her up to her room.
I packed up her helmet before I tucked mine underneath my arm. I escorted her to the front door of her hotel room and figured that was it. She dug around in her pocket for her room key and opened the door with ease, but as she turned back around to look at me, her eyes filled with a desire I’d seen the night before.
A desire that overtook her the moment we stepped into her room.
Her hands came up and fisted my jacket, pulling me into her lips. Our bodies crashed into each other like comets colliding above the earth, and I dropped my helmet into her room. She pulled me through the threshold, the door slamming shut behind me, and my hands flew to her hips as I pulled her close.
If this was going to be our last night together, I was going to make sure she would never forget it.