Claimed by the Biker Giant

Frank leans against the doorframe of the garage and crosses his arms, grinning at me like he knows something I don't.

"Go home, kid." He nods toward the parking lot. "Or don't go home. Go somewhere. Give that boyfriend of yours a real birthday present."

My cheeks burn. "Frank."

"I'm serious." He waves me off with a grease-stained hand, already turning back toward the office. "A young woman should not be spending a Friday evening elbow-deep in a carburetor. Not when she's got somewhere better to be."

I pull off my gloves and toss them onto the workbench. My heart does this stupid little flutter,the kind I've been suppressing all day because I didn't want to lose focus on Mrs. Patterson's touring bike. But now Frank's giving me permission and I let myself feel it: tonight's the night.

Kyle's birthday. And I've been planning this for weeks.

The new black lace underwear sits folded in my bag upstairs, tags still on. I bought it at that fancy boutique on Fifth that I'd never normally set foot in, spent forty minutes standing in the fitting room talking myself into it. It's not really me,I'm more a sports bra and cotton kind of girl,but it felt right for tonight. Like an occasion deserved dressing up.

More than the underwear, there's the other thing. The real gift.

I've been with Kyle for almost two years. I trust him. I love him. And tonight, I've decided, I'm finally ready. I spent twenty minutes in the bathroom this morning with a razor and a steady hand, shaping a neat little heart below my navel,a private joke, a declaration, something that would make him laugh before it made him groan.

'Tonight,' I think, kicking my locker open to grab my jacket. 'Tonight is going to be perfect.'

The evening air hits my face as I push through the garage door, and the September chill feels like a starting gun. My Kawasaki sits at the curb, black and low and gorgeous, and I swing my leg over her like she's an extension of my own body.

The engine catches on the first try.

Good omen.

Kyle's Mustang is in the driveway when I pull up to my parents' house, and I smile. He's early,which means he's eager. Which means tonight is absolutely going to be what I want it to be.

Then I see the other car.

Chloe's white Civic is parked at an angle behind the Mustang, like it was pulled in fast. My sister's in her second year at State, two hours north of here. She has no reason to be home on a random Friday.

My smile falters.

I sit on my bike for a moment, engine ticking as it cools, staring at those two cars together. Something tugs at the back of my neck,not a thought exactly, more like a draft from a window you didn't know was open.

'She probably drove back for the weekend,' I tell myself. 'She probably wants to see Kyle on his birthday too. It's fine.'

I kill the engine and head for the front door.

The house is quiet in a way that feels deliberate. No TV noise from the living room. No sounds from the kitchen. My mother always has the Food Network on when she's home; the absence of it lands wrong in my chest.

Voices drift from down the hall,from my father's study, the door half-closed. Low and overlapping, the way people talk when they think no one else is listening.

I take three steps toward it before I even decide to.

My hand rests on the wall beside the door. I hold my breath.

",just need to sort out the practical side of things before this gets any messier." My father's voice. The one he uses for quarterly reviews and difficult conversations,measured, immovable.

"David, I think we should be celebrating." My mother, with that warmth in her voice that she usually reserves for other people's children. "This is wonderful news. A baby,"

"It's not wonderful news, Susan, it's a complication,"

"It was an accident." Kyle's voice. I know that voice in my sleep. But right now it sounds different. Smaller. "We were drunk, at the Christmas party, and,it just happened. I never meant,"

The floor drops out from under me.

Christmas party.

We had a Christmas party. Here, at this house, three months ago. I had to work the late shift and missed the first two hours,I came home to find everyone already well into the wine.

"On Maxine's bed," Chloe says, and something about the way she says it,my childhood nickname, the one only my family uses,makes my stomach heave. "We didn't plan it. The room was the closest one and we'd both had so much to drink and,"

"That doesn't matter now," my father says. "What matters is,"

"I know it matters." Chloe's voice shifts. Lower. Almost satisfied. "I'm not upset about it. He gave me the best Christmas present I've ever gotten."

"Chloe." My mother's voice, soft and private, like they're sharing something.

"This is my first grandchild," my mother breathes, and the joy in it is unmistakable, and I want to crawl out of my own skin.

My back hits the wall.

Kyle slept with my sister. Kyle got my sister pregnant. On my bed. At Christmas. While I was stuck at work thinking about how I'd drive home through the snow and make him hot chocolate and curl up on the couch and,

"The two of them should be engaged before anyone starts talking." My father again, practical as a balance sheet. "Kyle, your family has standing in this community. A child born outside of marriage is,"

"I understand." Kyle's voice. So quick to agree. So eager to take the path of least resistance. "I understand completely. I'll do what needs to be done."

I press my palm flat against the wall so I don't slide down it.

"And Riley?" my mother asks, and for one insane second I think she's asking about me,that she's noticed I'm supposed to be here, that some maternal instinct has fired and she's wondering where her younger daughter is.

"She'll have to find somewhere else to stay," my father says. "Her room will need to be converted for the baby."

"She won't take that well," my mother says.

"She doesn't have to take it any way at all," my father says. "She's twenty-three. It's long past time she was out on her own anyway."

Silence.

Then Chloe, almost gentle: "She'll be fine."

Something snaps.

The door swings open so hard it hits the bookshelf behind it.

Four faces swing toward me. My father at his desk, expression shifting from authority to something guarded. My mother in the armchair, her hand flying to her mouth. Kyle standing by the window,Kyle, who I drove across town to surprise, who I shaved for, who I bought forty-dollar underwear for,his face going ashen. And Chloe, perched on the arm of the sofa like she owns it, her hand resting on her barely-there stomach.

My voice comes out steadier than I feel.

"Let me see if I've got this right." I look at Kyle first. Can't stop myself. "You got drunk at my family's Christmas party and slept with my sister. In my bedroom. Without a condom."

Kyle opens his mouth. I don't let him.

"And now you're in here," I sweep my eyes across the room, ",with my parents and my sister, working out your little plan. And part of that plan is kicking me out of my own home so Chloe can have the nursery."

"Riley." My father's voice. Warning.

"I'm not asking you a question." I turn to Chloe. "I'm just making sure I heard correctly."

My sister meets my eyes. She doesn't flinch. There's something in her expression,not cruelty exactly, but a kind of settled certainty, like a player who's run the table and just has to wait for the other person to notice.

"That's pretty much it," she says. "I got your boyfriend and your bedroom." A small, tight smile. "You're going to need to move out, little sis."

The words land like a flat palm.

I feel them hit and I watch myself from some distant ceiling,this girl standing in her father's doorway with a broken expression and forty-dollar lace in her bag and a heart-shaped shave job that now just makes her want to laugh until she cries.

My mother says something soft and apologetic that means nothing.

My father says something firm about this being the practical choice, the mature choice.

Kyle stares at the floor.

"Okay," I say.

That's all.

Just: okay.

My room is exactly as I left it this morning,bed made, jacket on the chair, the small jade elephant my grandmother gave me on the nightstand.

I grab the canvas duffel from the closet and start filling it. Underwear. Two changes of clothes. Charger. Deodorant. The jade elephant. My grandmother's photo.

I don't cry. I don't know why I don't cry. Maybe there's too much pressure somewhere behind my sternum and crying would require releasing some of it, and if I release any of it right now I won't stop.

I zip the bag and throw it over my shoulder.

Downstairs, the study door is still open. I can hear the murmur of voices resuming,my father's practicalities, my mother's warmth all directed the wrong direction, Chloe's quiet satisfaction.

I stop at the bottom of the stairs.

"I'll come back for the rest of my stuff," I say, loud enough that they can hear me. "Don't throw anything away."

No one answers.

The front door closes behind me with a soft, final click.

My bike starts. I ride.

Sophia takes one look at me on her doorstep,duffel over my shoulder, face like a closed fist,and steps back to let me in without a single question.

We go through two bottles of wine and a quart of mint chocolate chip. I talk and she listens and somewhere around the second bottle she starts calling Kyle things I didn't know she knew how to say, and I laugh until it breaks into something else, and she hands me the ice cream and doesn't try to fix it, just sits with me in the wreckage of my evening and lets it be exactly as bad as it is.

I fall asleep on her couch somewhere around two a.m., still in my work clothes, the jade elephant clutched in my hand.

The next morning is bad.

Not hung-over-bad, though I am that too. It's the waking-up-and-remembering-bad, the two seconds of blankness before the night comes back to me in a wave.

'Kyle's face when I walked in. The floor of his expression dropping.'

'She'll be fine. Chloe's voice.'

'She doesn't have to take it any way at all.'

I shower, borrow clothes from Sophia, and ride to work.

Frank notices. Of course Frank notices. He's been running a motorcycle garage for thirty years, which means he's spent thirty years reading people the way he reads engines,by what sounds wrong, what's running rough, what's missing.

He doesn't say anything until the end of the day, when he finds me in the back office doing invoices I don't need to be doing.

"Sit down," he says. Not unkindly.

He pours two coffees and sets one in front of me, and he waits.

So I tell him. All of it. Kyle, Chloe, Christmas, my mother's joy about the grandchild, my father's practicalities, the way my sister looked at me when she said you're going to need to move out.

Frank is quiet for a long time when I finish.

"You got a place to stay?"

"Sophia's. For now."

He drums his fingers once on the desk. Thinks. Then: "I'm going to talk to Prez."

I look up. "What?"

"The club owns the building," Frank says. "There's an apartment upstairs. Been empty a while. I'm going to talk to Prez and see if we can get you in there."

I open my mouth to argue,about charity, about owing favors, about not wanting to be anyone's problem.

Frank reads all of it on my face and shakes his head.

"Let me talk to Prez," he says again, and his voice has that tone that means the conversation is over.

I wrap both hands around my coffee mug.

Outside, the garage is settling into its nighttime quiet.

"Okay," I say.

It comes out differently than it did last night. Less like surrender. More like a door opening.