Good Girl & The MC Sergeant
Chapter 2: Shotgun Seat
Wren stood in the gravel lot with her arms crossed against the cold and did the math on her situation, which was not complicated and did not improve no matter how many times she ran it. She had come to Ironwood Motors with Tyler. She had just ended things with Tyler in front of everyone he worked with. Her house was four miles away, on the far side of the ridge, past the last streetlight the county bothered to maintain, and it was almost ten at night.
You didn't think this through, she told herself, and for once she did not argue back.
Behind her, the party had found its rhythm again, laughter rising and falling near the fire pit, the radio someone had propped in the garage bay window climbing a notch louder now that the tension of a few minutes ago had broken. She could hear someone rattling the dare bowl for its next turn, plastic knocking against plastic, and underneath it the low murmur of people already turning her scene into a story they would tell on Monday. She was not going back in there to collect her jacket, which she had left draped over a folding chair near the fire. She would rather be cold.
She had made it as far as the mailbox at the end of the gravel drive, her sneakers crunching too loud in the quiet, when the bowl's next name got called out behind her, carried on the night air clear enough that she caught it without meaning to.
"Ronan," someone said, and a small cheer went up, the kind reserved for a member who almost never played and almost never lost.
She kept walking, but slower than she meant to, some old habit of curiosity refusing to let her tune it out completely. She told herself she was only listening because the mailbox was a decent spot to catch her breath before the long walk properly started.
"Invite someone to leave with you," a voice read off the slip of paper, and Wren heard it land the way announcements like that always did at Dare Night, half joke, half genuine social currency, the kind of dare that could make or unmake somebody's week depending on who got chosen.
She heard Sadie offer, quick and a little too eager, still trying to make up for the last twenty minutes with something that would put her back in everyone's good graces. She heard another girl's name too, a friend of Sadie's Wren only knew by sight, someone who worked at the feed store two towns over. Wren did not hear Ronan answer either of them. She heard, instead, the particular silence of a big man standing still while a crowd waited for him to choose.
What she heard next were boots on gravel, unhurried, coming up behind her, and she registered the sound with a small jolt before she placed it.
She turned before he reached her, because standing with her back to a stranger twice her size in an empty lot was not a habit she planned to start tonight, curse or no curse, humiliation or no humiliation.
"You don't have to say yes," Ronan said, stopping a few feet away, his hands loose at his sides, his jacket creaking faintly with the size of him. "But I'd rather ask you than anyone back there."
"Ask me what, exactly," Wren said, and was a little proud of how even her voice came out, given that her hands were still shaking faintly from everything that had happened in the last ten minutes.
"Whether you want a ride," he said. "That's the dare. Leave with somebody. Doesn't have to mean anything past that, unless you want it to."
She studied him in the dim light thrown from the shop's side door, the size of him, the ink winding up his forearms, the careful way he kept his distance instead of closing it the way Tyler's friends had earlier when they crowded close enough to laugh at her. He was not smiling in the way that was supposed to be reassuring. He was just waiting, arms loose, like the answer genuinely mattered to him either way, and like he had already decided he would walk back inside and let it go if she said no.
"Why me," she said. "There were at least two people back there volunteering, and from the sound of it, more than happy to take the bowl's word for it."
"I don't want to leave with somebody who volunteered because the bowl told them to," he said. "Figured you might actually want to get out of here before somebody decides they need to comment on what just happened one more time."
That was, infuriatingly, exactly true, and Wren found she did not have a clever answer ready for a man who had correctly diagnosed her situation in under ten seconds flat.
"I don't have a way home," she admitted, the words costing her more than she expected. "So this is either the easiest yes I've ever given, or the worst decision I'll make tonight, and I genuinely don't know which yet."
"Can be both," Ronan said, and something in his tone, dry and unbothered, pulled the smallest laugh out of her despite everything, a short, surprised sound she had not expected herself to make twice in one night, first out of anger, now out of something closer to relief.
She thought of Tyler's face when he'd realized she was serious, the way his jaw had gone tight, and some petty, wounded part of her wanted him to see this too, wanted the whole yard to watch her walk away on someone else's arm entirely, proof that she was not sitting home crying the way he'd probably already told himself she would. She told herself that was not the only reason she said yes. She was not entirely sure that was true, and for tonight, she decided she did not need to be.
"Fine," she said. "Yes."
They walked back toward the motorcycles parked along the fence, past the folding table with its empty plastic bowl, and she felt the yard's attention swing toward them the moment they came back into the light. Sadie's mouth opened slightly, some mix of surprise and calculation crossing her face. A couple of the older members exchanged a look that Wren did not have the energy to interpret, something between amusement and mild disbelief that Ronan, of all people, had made a choice at all. Tyler was near the fire pit, and when he saw who she was leaving with, his expression went through several stages fast, confusion, then something uglier settling in around his mouth.
"That's different," he said, loud enough to carry across the yard, stepping forward with his hands out like he was trying to physically stop the moment from happening. "That's Ronan. That's actually different, Wren."
"You lost the right to have an opinion about who I leave with about ten minutes ago," Wren said, without turning around, and kept walking, her chin level, refusing to give him the satisfaction of watching her hesitate.
Ronan didn't answer Tyler at all. He didn't even glance his way. He simply reached his bike, a dark, well-kept machine that looked older than either of them, its paint worn to a deep matte in places from years of use, and lifted a spare helmet down from where it hung looped over the handlebar.
"You ever been on one of these," he asked, not making it sound like a test, just a question he needed the answer to before he did anything else.
"No," Wren said.
He held the helmet out, waited for her to take it, then stepped close enough to help her settle it over her hair, careful, unhurried, adjusting the strap under her chin with two fingers until it sat right, checking the fit at her temple with the same patient attention she imagined he gave to a piece of engine work that had to be done correctly the first time. It was the first time he had touched her at all, and it was nothing more than that, a buckle checked twice, his hands dropping away the second he was satisfied it was secure.
"Tell me if that's too tight," he said.
"It's fine," she said, and meant it, surprised by how careful he was being over something so small, something Tyler had never once thought to ask about in four months of borrowing his cousin's truck to drive her places.
He swung onto the bike and waited until she had climbed on behind him before he said anything else. "Hold on to me or hold the bar behind you, whichever you're more comfortable with. Either one's fine."
She chose him, mostly because the night was cold and the idea of gripping a metal bar at speed sounded worse than gripping a stranger's jacket, and because some part of her, small and unexamined, did not entirely mind the excuse. The engine caught with a low, steady growl that she felt through her whole body before she heard it properly, and then they were moving, the gravel lot and the fire pit and Tyler's face all sliding away behind them into the dark, the whole ugly shape of the evening shrinking smaller with every foot of road.
They had been riding only a few minutes, the wind loud enough that talking took effort, the streetlights of Millbrook Ridge's main road giving way to the darker, quieter stretch that led out past the edge of town, when Wren remembered something Tyler had mentioned once in passing, a superstition the shop guys took half seriously even while pretending not to. If you dropped out of a dare partway through, before it was properly finished, you were supposed to be cursed with bad luck, financially, for the rest of the year. The Blown Wheel Curse, they called it, and normally she would have rolled her eyes at the whole idea and moved on without a second thought.
Tonight, with her coffee tin under her bed and every dollar in it earmarked for an application fee she could not afford to lose to something as stupid as bad luck, she found herself leaning forward slightly to be heard over the engine, feeling foolish even as she asked it.
"Does the dare only count if I stay out with you the rest of the night," she called, half joking, already regretting how it sounded the second it left her mouth. "I don't actually believe in the curse thing. I just would rather not test it this month, if it's all the same to you."
He glanced back at her for a second, not laughing at her, which she appreciated more than she expected to. "It counts however you want it to count," he said. "But if it makes you feel better, sure. You can stay out. No expectations attached. I mean that."
"I didn't mean anything else by it," she said quickly, feeling her face heat under the helmet, grateful for the visor that hid it.
"I know," he said, and something about the plainness of it, no teasing, no innuendo, settled the nerves in her stomach more than any reassurance Tyler had ever managed in four months of dating, or maybe more than any reassurance anyone had managed in longer than that.
They rode on past the edge of town, past the shuttered filling station with its faded sign and the dark fields beyond it, the road narrowing and the fences giving way to open pasture on either side, until a small cluster of lights appeared ahead, a narrow building with a hand-lettered sign swinging gently in the wind on a rusted bracket. THE RUSTY KETTLE, it read, and warm light spilled from its windows out onto the gravel turnaround in front, the only sign of life for a mile in either direction.
Ronan slowed the bike and eased it into a space near the door, cutting the engine so the sudden quiet rang in Wren's ears, replaced almost immediately by the soft murmur of a radio playing somewhere inside and the creak of a screen door somewhere down the building's side.
"Coffee's better than anything back at the shop," he said, swinging off first and offering a hand to help her down, which she did not strictly need but took anyway, her legs a little unsteady from the ride. "And nobody in there is going to ask you what happened tonight unless you want to tell them."
Wren looked at the glowing windows, at the shape of someone moving behind the counter inside, apron strings visible even from this distance, and then back at the man who had just spent the last fifteen minutes being more careful with her, in small, unremarkable ways, than her boyfriend of four months had ever managed to be in public.
"Okay," she said, and followed him toward the door, not at all sure yet what she was walking into, only sure that for the first time all night, standing in a gravel lot outside a stranger's coffee shop at the edge of a town she'd lived in her whole life, she did not feel like she was standing at the edge of somebody else's party.