Ask Me First

Lainey had been married to a patched Coldwater King for eleven years, and she could count on her two hands the nights she had let his club see her. The neon over the Spoke's door still had its dead O, so the sign told the gravel lot BR KEN SPOKE in buzzing pink. Old snow sat in grey banks under the eaves. A dozen bikes were nosed in along the wall with their engines ticking in the cold, and Owen's made thirteen.

He killed it, put the stand down, and didn't get off.

"You all right back there?"

"My legs are frozen to your bike."

"I'll thaw them." He twisted on the seat and put one broad hand on her knee, over the black tights, and slid it up under the hem of her dress where the tights stopped being enough. His palm was warm from the grips. The grease in the creases of his knuckles never came out anymore; she had stopped minding that the first year they were married. "There. Starting on the left."

"People can see you."

"People can see me every Saturday." His thumb moved. "They can't usually see you."

That was true, and it was hers. She worked nights, seven to seven, and she had worked most Sundays of the marriage, and early on she had made a rule that the marriage lived down the pass in Ellery and the club lived up here, and Owen had kept the rule better than she had ever asked him to. So the Kings knew her as a name, and as a casserole that came up the grade in the back of his truck when somebody's mother died, and as a woman who had once stitched a split eyebrow at her own kitchen table on a brother whose name she never did catch, and not much else.

But it was a boiler night, and she had a Saturday off for the first time in five weeks, and Owen had rolled over in bed on Thursday afternoon, pushed her hair off her neck, and said he wanted her up there with him. So she'd come. And she had worn the black dress, because she was not stupid.

She climbed off the bike and her knees told her about the pass. She shrugged his spare leather jacket off her shoulders and handed it to him, and she watched him look.

The dress wasn't anything. Black, soft, a knit that held on at the waist and let go over her hips, cut low enough in front that the jacket had been necessary for sixty-one miles and wasn't anymore. It stopped a hand above the knee. She'd bought it for a wedding in Bozeman three years ago, and the first time she put it on Owen had sat down on the edge of the bed and not said anything for long enough that she'd asked if it was wrong.

He wasn't saying anything now either. He stood beside the bike in his cut over a worn grey thermal that fit him across the chest like it had been poured, his breath going up white under the neon, and he looked at her from her boots to her mouth and back down, slow.

"Owen."

"Give me a minute."

"It's twenty-eight degrees."

"Then give me a quick minute."

She laughed, and he caught her by the waist and walked her backward into the dark between his bike and the next one and kissed her with his beard cold and his mouth hot. She got a fist in the front of his cut. Somewhere behind them, a chair creaked.

"Evening, Lainey," Torch said from inside the door, where he sat on a chair turned backward with his arms folded on the rail, watching the lot. "I'm not looking. It's just that it's my whole job."

Inside was heat and noise and the smell of spilled beer soaked into old wood. The jukebox was playing something from before she was born. Two old men at the far end had a cribbage board between them and did not look up. Somebody had set a gallon pickle jar on the mahogany with BOILER written on masking tape, and it was already half full of fives and ones, because Loretta Hale had announced that every drink tonight cost a dollar more than it did and the dollar went in the jar, and nobody in the Kings had ever argued with Loretta about a dollar and lived to enjoy it.

Owen got her into the second booth along the back wall, the one by the fire door, and slid in next to her instead of across, and stayed there. Men came by. They said Anvil and gripped his hand, and they said ma'am to her, or Lainey, isn't it, and she smiled and said yes, it was. Ruthie, who worked the bar for Loretta, brought them two beers and a basket of fries and told her the fries were from Ma and not optional.

Under the table Owen's hand found her knee again and never really left.

He didn't do anything with it. That was the problem. He just kept it there, warm and heavy, his thumb moving a half inch at a time along the inside of her thigh while he talked to Ridge about a gate hinge and to somebody else about the price of rod. Twice the half inch went further than a half inch. Both times she put her beer down harder than she meant to, and both times he didn't look at her, and both times the corner of his mouth went up in his beard.

"You're a menace," she told him, low.

"I asked you to come up." He leaned in, and his voice dropped until only she had it. "I didn't say I'd behave. You've had that dress on under my jacket for sixty miles with your thighs around me. I've been hard since the second cattle guard."

Heat went straight down her. "Then take me home."

"Eleven."

"Ten-thirty."

"Eleven. Ma sees me walk out before eleven on a boiler night, I'll be buying the new boiler." He pressed his mouth to the place under her ear. "Drink your beer. I'm going to get you home and take my time about that dress."

She drank her beer. It didn't help.

At ten to eleven he got pulled across the room to settle something at the pool table, which was going to take four minutes, and she took the two empties and went up to the bar to put a five in the jar and get herself a water, because if she didn't cool off she was going to walk him out the fire door before Ma's deadline and let him buy the boiler.

There was a man at the bar the size of a door.

She knew him before she knew why. Ash-blond going grey at one temple, scar tissue built up through both brows, a left hand around his glass that didn't close all the way — the fingers stopping short, the tendons standing up under the skin. Then he turned on his stool and looked at her with pale, careful eyes, and she had it. Not his face. His belly, opened and packed on a gurney under the trauma-bay lights at Ellery General, and his pressure falling, and his good hand clamped on her wrist hard enough to leave marks while she hung the second unit.

"Rivet," she said.

"You remember." He sounded pleased about it. He didn't smile, exactly; his face didn't seem built for it. "I remember you. You were the one running that room."

"I wasn't. Somebody else had charge that night."

"Didn't look like it from the table." He moved his glass a quarter turn on the mahogany with the hand that didn't close. "The doctor in charge was a boy. He kept looking at you before he did anything. I told Priya after. The nurse with her hair pinned up — she's the one the whole room was listening to."

Lainey felt her face get warm in a different way than it had in the booth. She'd been told that kind of thing for twelve years by patients who were high on morphine and grateful to be alive, and it had never stopped meaning something.

"That's nice of you," she said. "Thank you."

"Not nice. True." He nodded once. "Should've been you running that floor. Shame about Stoltz." He drank. "Anvil did right, raising his hand. Hard vote. He didn't like it. But he did right."

And then he stopped talking, because he was a man who said one true thing and put nothing after it, and he turned back to his glass like the conversation had been completed to his satisfaction.

The jukebox kept going. One of the old men at the cribbage board pegged out and said so. Somebody at the pool table groaned, and somebody else laughed, and the pickle jar sat on the bar in front of her with its fives and its ones.

Shame about Stoltz.

She knew the name. Everybody on nights at Ellery General knew some version of it — the pill people, the ones who'd leaned on the night charge two years back until the woman quit and moved to Missoula. Somebody's cousin had been let go from pharmacy over it. There'd been a meeting with a woman from the county. It had gone away.

It had gone away about the same month Gail Moretti called her into the office with the door shut and said the charge post she'd been offered was being pulled, that it had come from above her, that she was sorry, that she couldn't say more. And Lainey had nodded and said she understood, and gone back out to her floor, and decided the hospital had simply looked at her and decided she wasn't the one. She'd been deciding it every shift since.

Raising his hand.

A table. Men around a table, and a vote, and Owen's broad hand going up with the grease in the creases. About her job. About her floor. About her.

She did not drop the water glass. She was very good at not dropping things. She had held her face through the worst news a family could get, in the quiet room with the box of tissues, and had kept her voice level for a mother whose son was not coming out of bay two. She knew exactly where every muscle in her face was and what it was doing.

"He's a good man," she heard herself say.

"He is," Rivet agreed, to his glass.

When she looked up, Loretta Hale was watching her.

Ma stood behind the mahogany with a bar towel over one shoulder and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She was a handsome woman gone hard around the eyes, and she had heard every word — Lainey could see it, in the fact that she had stopped wiping anything. She looked at Lainey's face, and then at Lainey's hand on the water glass, and then at Lainey's face again, and she read all of it. Every line. Lainey watched her do it.

Loretta didn't say anything. She reached under the bar and came up with a clean glass, filled it with ice water, set it down on a mat in front of Lainey, and took the other one out of her hand, gently, the way you take something from a person who might not know they're holding it.

"On the house," Loretta said.

"Thank you."

"Mm." Loretta held her eyes a second longer. It wasn't pity. Lainey couldn't have stood pity. It was something flatter than that, and more patient, like a woman marking a page she intended to come back to. Then Loretta went down the bar to the cribbage men and asked if they were planning to buy anything or just take up furniture.

Lainey put her five in the jar.

At eleven Owen came to get her. He laid his palm low on her spine, over the dress, and bent to say goodnight to Ma, and Ma said goodnight to him like there was nothing in the world she knew that he didn't, and let them go.

In the lot the cold hit her bare legs through the tights and she was grateful for it. He held the leather jacket open and she put her arms into it. He zipped it up to her chin himself, the way he always did, knuckles grazing her throat, and pressed his mouth to her forehead.

"You were quiet in there."

"I'm always quiet up here."

"You were quiet at the bar." He tipped her chin up. Under the pink light his eyes were very pale. "Rivet bother you? He doesn't mean anything by it. He just talks like a wall falling over."

She looked at her husband. Forty-four years old, the beard going darker than his hair at the jaw, a nose broken twice and set straight enough that only he ever noticed. Eleven years. He had asked her to come tonight. He had kissed her against his bike in front of Torch. He had been hard for her since the second cattle guard, and he was going to get her home and take his time about the dress, and she wanted him to so badly it hurt.

"He said you were a good man," she said.

Owen's mouth went crooked. "He's easy."

He swung a leg over the bike. She climbed on behind him, fitted herself to his back, and put her arms around his waist and her cheek against the patch, where the leather was cold and smelled like smoke from inside and the road from before.

The engine caught. The Spoke's neon slid off her face.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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