Chapter 2: Take It Back

The 7-Eleven on Holloway had fluorescent lights that buzzed and a floor that stuck to your shoes and an attendant named Doug who'd been working the night shift for eleven years and had opinions about everyone who walked through his door. Dani pushed through the door with Jess and Bri behind her, still arguing about whether the motorcycle guy had been real or a shared hallucination, and she went straight for the drinks aisle because it was hot and she was thirsty and she'd spent her last five dollars on gas and she needed a Big Gulp if she was going to make it home.

The store sat on the corner of Route 9 and Mill, the kind of gas station that had a convenience store bolted to it in the eighties and never updated since, the awning over the pumps sagging in the middle where the snow load had bent it one winter and nobody had fixed it, the ice machine out front perpetually broken, the air pump charging fifty cents and stealing your quarters half the time. Doug had a coffee pot going that smelled like it had been on the burner since noon, and a hot dog roller turning four desiccated hot dogs that nobody was going to buy at eleven at night, and the whole place had the particular fluorescent glow of a business that was always open and never fully awake.

"He was real," Jess said, grabbing a bag of chips off the endcap. "He had mass. He had a bike. He had arms. That's three dimensions of real."

"Arms aren't a dimension," Bri said. "That was a guy on a bike. Probably lives in his mom's basement."

"Nobody who rides a bike like that lives in a basement, Bri. Look at the boots on him. Those boots were real leather."

"Leather doesn't mean money."

"It means not-overdrawn."

Dani filled the cup. She grabbed a bag of chips. Dani stood in line behind a man buying lottery tickets and a can of Slim Jims, and she counted the change in her palm and it wasn't enough, it was three dollars short, and she was trying to decide between the chips and the drink when a hand reached over her shoulder and set a black card down on the counter.

"I'll get hers," a voice said. Low. Male. Right at her ear.

Dani turned.

The rider stood behind her. The same blacked-out helmet, visor down, the same jacket with the sleeves shoved up. The tattoo on his forearm caught the fluorescent light, and now that she was close she could see what it was: a black line drawing of a bird in flight, wings spread, climbing from his wrist toward his elbow in a single clean stroke.

He was taller than she'd thought. He smelled like engine heat and leather and something clean underneath, like soap, and he stood with his weight easy, one hand in his pocket, the other on the counter next to his card.

Doug the attendant looked at the card, looked at the rider, looked at Dani, and said, "She's three dollars short."

"I can see that," the rider said.

"That card's going to decline," Doug said, the way a man who'd seen a thousand declined cards says it, flat and prophetic.

"It won't."

"Suit yourself." Doug swiped the card. The machine beeped. The card cleared. Doug looked at the receipt like it had personally betrayed him. "Huh."

The rider took the card back and put it away and he still hadn't moved, hadn't stepped back, hadn't given her room.

Dani stared at him. "You followed me."

"You drove slow."

"I drove the speed limit."

"Same thing." The visor tilted down toward her, and she felt that weight again, the full attention, the searchlight. "I need you to take it back."

Dani blinked. "Take what back."

"What you said. At the light." He leaned a fraction closer, and she could feel the warmth coming off his chest through his jacket. "We should break up. Take it back."

She almost laughed. "We're not together."

"I know." He waited a beat. "That's what makes it hurt."

Jess materialized at Dani's elbow, her eyes wide, her mouth open. Bri had gone completely still by the chips, holding a bag of Cheetos she hadn't paid for like she'd forgotten she was holding them.

Dani looked up at the visor. Dani couldn't see his face. Dani couldn't see his eyes. She could only see her own reflection staring back at her, small and warped in the black mirror of it, and she could feel him smiling. She couldn't see the smile but she could feel it, the way the air between them changed, the way he held himself a degree looser.

"Take it back," he said again, softer.

"Fine." She lifted her chin. "I take it back. We're not breaking up. We were never together. Happy?"

He didn't answer right away. He reached up slowly, and his gloved fingers found the edge of his visor, and he lifted it. Just enough. Just the eyes.

Dark. Almost black in the fluorescent light. And they were looking right at her with an amusement so warm it felt like a hand on the back of her neck. She couldn't see the rest of his face, just the eyes above the seam of the visor, and that was enough, that was more than enough, because the eyes were smiling at her and she could feel it in her chest.

"There," he said. His voice was different without the helmet between them, lower, rougher. "Now you can see me."

"Great," Dani said. "Now I can see you're a weirdo who follows girls to 7-Eleven."

He laughed. A real one, short, surprised out of him, and the sound of it did something to the inside of her chest that she did not appreciate.

"You owe me a kiss," he said.

Dani's mouth opened. "I owe you nothing."

"To make it official. The not-breakup. You kissed the helmet goodbye at the light, you should kiss the helmet hello now that we're back together." He tapped the visor with one gloved finger. "Right here."

"You're insane."

"I'm fun." He tilted his head. That same tilt from the light. "Come on. One kiss. On the helmet. Then I'll leave you alone."

"You'll leave me alone?"

"I'll leave you alone."

Dani looked at Jess. Jess gave her a tiny, frantic nod. Her gaze found Bri. Bri was still frozen holding the Cheetos. She turned back at him.

He stood perfectly still, waiting, the visor lifted, his eyes on hers, and there was something in them underneath the amusement, something she couldn't name, something that watched her very carefully.

She stepped forward. She rose on her toes. She put one hand on his jacket, on his chest, and she felt the warmth of him through the leather, felt his breathing go still under her palm. She leaned in and pressed her lips to the edge of his visor, just above the seam, cool plastic against her mouth, and she held it for one second, two, and she felt him not breathe.

She pulled back. She dropped her hand. She stepped away.

"Goodbye," she said, and she grabbed her Big Gulp and her chips and she walked out, and she did not look back, and her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat.

Behind her, through the glass door, she watched him stand there in the fluorescent light, one gloved hand lifted in a small wave, and she could feel the smile she still couldn't see, the warmth of it in the eyes above the visor, watching her go.

Jess caught up to her at the Civic, breathless. "Who was that."

"I don't know," Dani said. She fumbled the keys into the ignition. "I don't know and I don't care."

"You kissed his helmet."

"I kissed his helmet."

"Dani." Jess grabbed her arm. "That man was in love with you. That was a meet-cute. That was the start of a love story. You just drove away from your soulmate."

Dani started the car. The engine caught, the rear end knocked, and she pulled out of the lot without looking at the 7-Eleven again. "He was a stranger."

"He paid for your stuff."

"He's a weirdo."

"He's hot."

"He's gone."

And he was. By the time she reached the corner of Holloway and Main, the black bike was nowhere, the street empty, the night folding back over the space where he'd been.

But her lips were still cool from the visor, and her chest still felt the shape of that single held breath, and three blocks from home she pressed her fingers to her mouth without meaning to, and she smiled.

The cashier, alone now in the 7-Eleven, watched the rider lower his visor and walk back out into the dark. He stopped at the door and pulled his phone from his jacket and opened the camera roll to the photo he'd taken thirty seconds earlier, the one of the girl in the Civic, laughing, mid-sentence, her hair blown back from the window.

He studied it. He turned to it for a long time.

Then he opened a different app, a contacts list under a name that wasn't his, and he scrolled to the bottom where a single entry sat labeled with nothing but a question mark.

"Found her," he said to no one.

He got on his bike. He started it. He rode south toward the city, and the lights of Bramwell slid past him in long yellow streaks, and in his pocket the phone held the only photo of the only girl who had ever told him they should break up.

He thought about his uncle's voice on the phone that morning, flat and final. Two months, Roman. A wife or the company. He thought about the girl's laugh through the car window, unscripted, aimed at nobody, and how it had cut through that ultimatum like it belonged to a different life entirely.

He pulled up the contacts list under a name that wasn't his and typed one line into the entry marked only with a question mark: *Costa Auto, Bramwell. Red Civic, bad rear bushings, laughs with her whole face.*

Then he put the phone away and rode home to a house that felt smaller every time he walked into it.