CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Joe wasn’t at the Bird. In fact, he didn't come back that evening at all. She'd gotten up the nerve to take Kyle's bike and cruise along Main Street in Madelia from end of the tiny town to the other. Though she’d kept at least ten miles under the speed limit to be safe, it was as exhilarating nonetheless--even Zen, as Holly had described it. To sit where her brother once sat, to feel the way he must have felt in the saddle; the collective might of all bikers, the emptiness and freedom of the sky, of the road. But it couldn’t discount the pit in her stomach over the fact that Joe didn't come to dinner. Ruby was beginning to wonder whether she was going crazy. Whether he had ever existed at all or that he’d sat next to her bed, making love to her verbally, if not physically. She didn't dare ask, for fear of giving the impression that she cared about him.

 

She knew only that he'd said something about riding down to Modesto as an escort; apparently this was something he and the other Jockeys did regularly. But he hadn't asked her to wait for him; hadn't said when he'd see her again, or even if he'd see her again. He'd just...left. As if he didn't expect she would care.

 

Something told her she'd blown her last chance last night, and again this morning when she'd been so cold to him at the bar. Playing hard to get was one thing, but she was giving the impression that she didn't want him. And yes, it was probably for the best. But then why did it feel so awful?

 

Holly made a beef stew for dinner and served it with warm, crusty bread; it was delicious, and she tried to paste a smile on her face while she ate it, though she knew everyone in the room knew why she seemed so quiet. For her part, Morgan took three bites and asked to be excused. Holly and Colt invited Ruby to the living room to watch a Redbox movie Holly had rented, but all Ruby wanted was to not be seen. She made an excuse about being tired and slipped out.

 

As she climbed the stairs, she heard throat-clearing. Ruby stopped in her tracks and turned. "He'll be okay, you know," Regan said with a shrug. "Riding out to god knows where, never making it back until the wee hours. It's just what they do. You get used to it." She sounded like she spoke from experience.

 

"I'll never get used to it," said Ruby fiercely. "And anyway, if he doesn't care enough to tell me where he's going, then why should I care if he comes back?"

 

But she did care, she thought with chagrin up in the spare room, as she quietly stripped out of her clothes and into another pair of borrowed pajamas--Holly's, this time. She pulled the covers up to her chin, staring at another alien ceiling, in a darkness that felt strange, with silence that hid the strangeness. Why did she care? She was back here, helpless, in a place she'd vowed never to be again. And all she could think about was how Joseph Ryan had come to occupy that hollow space inside her, and how empty it would be without him.

 

In her dream, she rode with Kyle on the back of the Dyna Glide.

 

The bike looked the way it did when he'd last rode it--crooked mirror, road dust and all. But the landscape didn't look like home--it was vaster, greener, wilder, more like New Zealand, or at least what she'd seen of it in the movies.

 

Colorful birds of paradise, dozens of them, glided by as if to sing to them. Over the horizon, the ocean roared. The feeling of peace and well-being was more palpable than anything she'd ever felt before. It was so different from the wet, desolate street that had been present the last time she'd laid eyes on her brother in this life. He was strong and happy again, warm. She could even hear him breathe.

 

He was alive. And nothing could ever be wrong again--until he stopped and hopped off the bike.

 

A wind blew up, and the vastness looked menacing and strange now. She couldn’t go back to the emptiness of this world; to the desolation that her life was without him.

 

“Kyle, please. Stay. I need you to make things okay again.” She grabbed his jacket, and he spun around.

 

“I can’t,” he said. “I told Joe to take care of you, so let him.”

 

"I already have someone to take care of me," she informed him angrily.

 

“Who?”

 

“Fox Keene.”

 

The scene changed. She was graduating from somewhere, wearing a green cap and gown at the head of a vast auditorium. Kyle was nowhere to be seen; the faces in the crowd were dead-eyed, strange.

 

A hand held out her diploma. She reached for it, but instead, the hand grabbed her wrist. She pulled away, struggling, and bolted out of the auditorium. She recognized nothing about where she was, but a giant biker in leather pointed silently to a nearby garage.

 

Tentatively, she stepped into the murk, lit only by a small work lamp in the back corner. Standing there in the half-light of the garage was a man stripped to the waist, leaning over something as if he was searching the floor for a tool he had dropped. He reached up behind him and pulled his shirt off. She must have drew in a sharp breath, because he turned around and saw her.

 

"Oil spill," he said with a shrug.

 

But she barely heard him; his torso was something to behold, from his perfect ivory skin to his strong shoulders tapering down to those taut, narrow abs. His hips indented just below the low-slung waistband of the old jeans he was wearing. But she was drawn away from that toward the vortex of sadness and longing in his eyes. It couldn’t be just about something he had dropped.

 

She stepped over to him, hand shaking, reaching up to cradle the back of his head. He tilted his eyes down to regard her, put a brave smile on his face, and all of a sudden his youth and newness changed to fire, to pure intensity, and everything was okay for a second as he kissed her, without restraint, without hesitation. Suddenly, the sensation of happiness and comfort she had felt when she was with Kyle had returned.

 

But there was something else mingled with it: pure male desire. Like he had wanted it all along, like she did as well. It wasn’t possible, but in the kiss, she felt herself enveloped in him, wholly contained. In a second, he had her arched over the dark leather seat of the bike he was working on, his rough, oily hands sliding down into her panties. She submitted as he brushed his fingers over her clit, then his entire hand. Her body practically leaped into his touch, at the longing to feel everything, to feel every part of the man who had come to fascinate and enthrall her. It was at last time. She moaned, breathless, high on adrenaline, and wet, so wet--

 

He broke away. She reached out and touched nothing. The space where he had been was empty. Even his voice sounded leagues away.

 

"I'm sorry," he said, and hung his head. "It's too late.” The longing, sadness tempered with rage in his eyes was a physical hurt. "You should have come sooner."

 

The garage fell away and she was on her knees on the side of the road, a familiar cold wind battering at her, and a dark, lifeless form at her feet, black blood oozing.

 

"No." Her mouth tried to shape the words, but, like always, no sound came.

 

She looked down, and she saw it now--the mussed blond hair, the full lips, the fair young face still, lifeless, staring at nothing.

 

Only… it wasn’t Kyle this time.

 

It was Joe.