Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
What's mine gets claimed.
What gets claimed gets marked.
Simple as that.
And if she hadn't posted what she posted—if she hadn't stood up in front of four million people and torched everything Marcus White Jr. thought he owned, hadn't said there is no time, no distance, no consequence—if she'd kept quiet and played it safe like she’s been trained her whole life to do, I'd have waited.
I'd have held my tongue.
Let it come in its own time, let her find her own way to the thing that was already true. The day would've come when she looked around and realized her position in the club hadn't been acknowledged yet, and I'd have fixed it then.
But she didn't keep quiet.
So I felt like the claim needed to be made public on my end too.
The sun is just dropping over the horizon when we reach the driveway to the new trailer. Before tonight, I hadn't been out here in months. Not since Colt and I rescued Savannah from the cabin and I took her home with me.
I roll the bike up to the porch and kill the engine. Things go silent the way they always do after the rumble dies and I take off my helmet as Savannah gets off and starts takin' off hers.
I put our helmets on the seat and take her hand, smiling like some normal guy who doesn't have a pit of dead bodies haunting his every moment.
Because right now, they're not.
All I care about is her.
"I hope you’re hungry."
"Are you gonna cook for me?" she sasses. "Because that would be beautiful."
I just laugh and open the door, wavin' her in with my hand.
No, I'm not cookin' for her. That would not be beautiful, it would be a disaster. But I dropped food off here earlier. Because Savannah Ashby and I are gonna have ourselves a fuckin' date.
For the first time in our lives we are not gonna make love in an old silo or in a dirty, smelly room above an outlaw biker clubhouse, or in a dilapidated hunting blind, or on the floor of a sandstone canyon.
Not that I would take back any of those experiences, but we gotta get past that stage.
And this is how I'm gonna do it.
This trailer is now ours and even if we don't live here, I want her to feel at home.
Savannah steps inside and I watch her take it in—the way her eyes move slow and deliberate across the room, the way she does that thing where she doesn't react right away, just catalogs everything.
Her gaze lands on the counter and stays there.
Seven bags of Chinese food, lined up like they're waitin' for inspection. I don't know what she likes so I got one of everything.
On the coffee table is a movie. I set it out deliberate, leanin' against the edge so she can't miss it. Big Trouble in Little China. It felt like it went with the food—felt like the kinda thing you pair together without overthinking it.
Chinese food and Kurt Russell bein' confidently wrong about everything for two hours. Man spends the whole film thinkin' he's the hero when he's actually the sidekick, and the thing is, he never figures it out. Just keeps on goin', loud and certain, like certainty is the same thing as bein' right.
I respect that in a fictional man.
Real life version of that guy gets somebody killed, but on screen? Fuckin' perfect.
Then there's the tub of popcorn sittin' on the counter next to the bags, and that one was a mission all its own. Had to pick it up from the dollar theater in Terry before I ever got to the food, which means I was haulin' that thing back on the bike inside a garbage bag, and I'm not gonna pretend that looked anything other than what it was—a man on a motorcycle with a trash bag full of popcorn flappin' in the wind at sixty miles an hour, butter smell soakin' into the plastic, which is now soakin' into the popcorn, which is now smellin' like somethin' you'd find at the bottom of a gas station dumpster.
Not ideal. It's the thought that counts, I tell myself, which is somethin' people say when the execution went sideways but the intention held.
It counts. It's gotta count.
I also got Milk Duds. M&M's. Mike and Ike's—the whole box, not one of those sad little movie packs. I got 'em at the checkout because I didn't know which one she'd want, and I still don't know, and that's fine. She can have all of 'em. She can have whatever the hell she wants tonight.
There are not one, not two, but three candles lit on the coffee table, all of 'em smellin' like lavender, which is somethin' I had to ask the woman at the dollar store about because I didn't know what I was lookin' for, just knew it was supposed to smell soft and not like me.