Who: Russ Campbell and Sam Alexander What: Bike-shopping When: Very recently Where: Used-bike lot outside of town
Sam was edgy. She was having one of those days when whatever the fuck lived beneath her skin itched, and she couldn't get to it in order to scratch it. Those days, the needles were hard to resist, especially with the money from the studio sale burning a hole in the pocket of her paint-stained cargo pants. Her knuckles were bruised up from the destruction to the canvases after her conversation with Chloe, but the long sleeves of her plaid shirt went past her fingertips, and the bruises on her temple were almost completely gone. She rocked on the thick heels of her Doc Martens, and she intentionally didn't turn around and look at the space she'd managed to own for only a few months.
There'd been something safe about owning something, about having somewhere to go, even if shit went bad. Without the studio, she had no idea where the fuck she would have gone when she got released. Yeah, so Neil had been busy with the real estate agent or whatever, but he would never be the guy that worried about shit for her. She'd just come to accept that about Neil. It was part of who he was, that reactiveness, and she was pretty sure he would never be a proactive fucker, no matter what. But she had to admit he'd been better lately, yeah? More assertive and shit, and that brought some of the smile back to her face.
She had sold the studio cheap (cheaper than she realized), cash, and almost everything inside was going with. One MIG and the non-destroyed canvases were being delivered to Neil's new place, along with some paints and metal, but most of the shit was staying. And she'd handed the thing over for 50k, which wouldn't even cover Iris' medical bills for the restitution or whatever, but it was the best she could fucking do on such short notice, and the lawyer said it showed good faith or something. But she needed a bike to get around, so there needed to be enough money for that. She'd been a little surprised that Neil hadn't offered to pay for it, but maybe he was getting tired of her mooching. The lawyer had to be expensive, yeah? So, she'd just do it herself.
She slipped red headphones over her ears, and she sat on the curb. Carmen sang in her ears, and she closed her eyes and let the opera sooth away that itch she couldn't scratch. Fuck Chloe. Just- fuck Chloe.
Russ didn’t know anything about needles and wanting them badly. He knew itches that gritted under the skin like spilt sugar on sticky surfaces, the beginnings of something molten that roiled over and over dangerously as it bubbled low in the belly. He tried to drown it, with cheap beer and when that didn’t work, cheap tequila and it was tequila that seeped oilily from his pores as he rolled out of the sheets to shower when Pepper’s phone chimed blue at him. Russ hadn’t visited the studio when it was a bolt-hole and he had next to no idea of what Sam’s art was truly like, only that she did it. He had a hazy idea of what art was at all, thinking of the cheap prints taped up in bedrooms all over, the kind of art that was hung in frames on painted walls and thought of oil paints, thick and crusted rather than anything requiring serious space. He did not need to look up where it was he was headed, Pepper’s phone had all kinds of patented tech within the sleek device, one of which was a highly annoying British voice that told him exactly when to turn and where and included a nasal reminder of how fast he was going at each corner.
The bike’s distinctive hum was a thick mechanical purr from a while away and the man on its back wore a black leather jacket against the rush of the wind. He almost missed her, as the bike slowed to almost a crawl. The kick-stand went down, and then the solidness of a work boot scuffed at the toes, and Russ yanked off the helmet. November was skidding quickly into December but the tan was still prevalent, the warm brown of working out under the sun that paled at his jaw-line. The goatee had been scraped clean away, the stippled-white of skin that had been hidden from the sun was reddish still from the razor, and his hair was still damp from the shower, sleeked the color of wet sand against his head.
“You gonna sit there all day?” Russ had no doubt that the thin cable snaking up to her ears was opera; he’d had opera stuck in his damn head for weeks after Sam had quit the garage and he’d not listened to a single CD of it since but occasionally the radio in the garage was flipped over to something where the announcer had the soft, regionless accent of education and the music between the ad breaks came from before the twentieth century. He liked it better than he liked the Cuban music and more than he liked the music Miguel hummed along to, and he left the bike running and warm as he swung the other leg off the bike and stood, broad hand extended with the spare helmet held out.
"If your ass didn't take so fucking long to wash," was Sam's retort, and she stood and slipped her arms into the jacket she'd been sitting on. It was a business jacket, but she didn't fucking care. It wasn't like she was making a fashion statement in her plaid and cargos, so who the hell cared if it was all covered up in 1,000 dollars worth of black. She took the helmet he offered, and she quickly braided her messy hair before slipping the helmet on. And yeah, ok, so maybe she stalled a little when it came to getting on the bike, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. One of her release conditions was that she go down to public mental health for meds every day, which meant she was pretty fucking sedated 24/7 lately. But it was better than panicking and losing her shit, yeah? She put her hands on Russ' shoulders, and she slid onto the bike. Her arms went around his waist, and she tapped his shoulder with his chin. "Take me somewhere cheap, yeah? I can't fucking afford a new bike right now. Something reliable, but cheap and not too fucking old." It wasn't too much to ask, was it? Bikes were cheaper than cars. She didn't have any kind of good idea of just how much the shit would cost, but it couldn't be too much.
She had considered asking Daniel for the money, when Neil didn't offer, but she felt shitty about that too. And she really didn't want to do any boat rocking where Lin was concerned. He seemed angry lately, and maybe insecure about shit, and she knew she'd gotten him into a world of fucking trouble with Chloe, though she expected Daniel to toss enough money around to fix that. She knew Christine didn't fucking help, and her telling Lou about Daniel had fucked with shit too. No, it was better to do this crap on her own. And it wasn't like she was going to be out for very long. She was sure she was going to get the minimum jail time. Ok, so not the full fifteen, but she wouldn't need to ride the bike forever. She didn't expect Neil to still be waiting when she got out, so maybe this was for the best. She nudged Russ' shoulder again. "Ready, baby."
Russ did not recognize a thousand dollars’ worth of suit from a cheap suit on rental, they looked much the same to him, ill-fitting and uncomfortable and real silly-looking on any man big in the shoulders. He did not need to recognize suits, having a notion one might be required for funerals (weddings being very very far from his mind) but uneasy about the idea. He did not question Sam’s wearing the jacket, however, assuming Neil was neither big in the shoulders and also the kind of man who needed suits for whatever reason in his wardrobe. It could have been Daniel’s; Sam had a lot of men ready to do her favors and lend her jackets. His fingers curled over the handlebars, the knuckles on both wind-reddened where the worn spread of black leather gloves ended.
The weight on the bike dipped and shifted as Sam slung herself across the back. The engine was warm and the seat was warm too, the bike was old and it was inefficient, heat leaching into the metal until you sat in the middle of the seat or you risked scorching your legs. Russ didn’t think of a somber announcer’s TV list of all the things Ian Russell had done to Sam as her arms anchored at his waist. The jacket was thick, it was heavy leather worn for protection rather than fashion and he could feel her the same way an animal might feel a fly. He nodded, rather than said anything at all about cheap, because Russ didn’t bother with expensive. You didn’t buy bikes when riding the thing off the lot lost you half the money you put down and he figured Neil would have been good enough company for buying that kind of bike. The kind with a good paint-job and nothing under the engine.
The engine rolled over as Russ kicked the bike into gear, a deep metallic throb that ran guttural up into the rib-cage of the rider. It was a familiar, comforting feeling that Russ no longer noticed and the highway opened up like petals peeling open, scarred gray ahead and the thin, smogged-up blue of the sky guarded around with the scrub of the land that ran alongside. He didn’t take her to the fancy kind of shop, everything on the lot shiny and clean and new. He drove way out to the outskirts of town where the prices were drawn on with stuff that rubbed off and the man who owned the place liked cash better than anything else. Russ figured Neil was funding this but the bikes on the lot ran from too expensive for what they were right the way through to cheap. They pulled in onto gritty tarmac alongside a bunch of bikes stood leaning against the center stands, clean and dirty both and prices written up in white on the corners of the farings.
Russ let the bike stutter to a stop and he kicked the stand down, waiting for Sam to slide free. There was just one other guy strolling the bikes on the lot and he was nearing the doors of the show-room itself, four walls all glass and a limp string of balloons floating near the door.
The 1,000 dollar jacket was huge in the shoulders, and said shoulders came to the middle of Sam's upper arm, which would have marked the jacket as Neil's and not Daniel's, but Russ didn't know either of the men, and Sam just cared that the jacket was warm, as evidenced by the splotches of paint at the ends of the sleeves. She held on tight, once the initial moment of panic passed, and she pressed her cheek to the back of Russ' warm jacket, the breadth comforting. There were a few men in the world who Sam knew wouldn't lay a fucking finger on her, and Russ was one of them. It was fucking hysterical, yeah? Since she'd met him by fucking him. But she was pretty sure he saw her as some kind of kid sister now, and it was probably a good thing the lights in the casino had been shit that night a few years earlier, because she thought he probably didn't hit it with chicks as young as she'd been then.
And maybe she could have gone for a cheap car instead of the bike, but she loved the way the wind felt once he hit the highway. It was like flying, and she'd always been an adrenaline junkie. She didn't let go of his waist, but she wanted to, a daredevil, even with the sedatives swirling in her veins. And maybe she'd teach Neil to ride, like she'd threatened, and maybe she'd scare the fucking shit out of him at some point. She smiled against the worn jacket, and she thought about time. How much fucking time would she have to do the shit she wanted to do before they put her inside?. She normally didn't give a shit about the holidays, but she hoped it would wait until after Christmas. Lawyers and judges, they didn't want to work in December, did they?
When the bike stuttered to a stop, Sam slid free, even before he managed to get the kickstand all the way down. The place looked real. Like a real fucking bike lot, and she wondered if she could afford it. And, yeah, Neil had insisted on a Harley when he was helping with the cash, but he'd changed his mind, and she thought balloons looked fucking expensive. But a few steps over the gravel made her chill a little, because the prices written on the first few bikes weren't so fucking bad. She took the helmet off, and she held it back to Russ, and she stepped up to something shiny and orange. "I like the color," she said, despite the fact that she knew it totally marked her for a chick, caring more about the paint than the engine.
Russ didn’t think much about Neil or Daniel, having only a hazy idea of who the one was and no idea beyond a name of the second. If he thought of either at all, it was critically; Russ approved wholeheartedly of the rough-handed justice meted out by Joey Alexander who’d greeted the guy who’d fucked his sister by punching him hard before they could get on with getting past it. Joey, he could understand. Men who Sam was on the outs with as much as she was crowing over moving in with, not so much. He did not think much about where exactly Sam sat, only a private acknowledgment that she was both important and it was not because he thought about fucking her. He had, once - and had that vague memory of smeared eyeliner on white cotton and someone far too young when he was far too sober to justify thinking about doing it twice. Now he remembered white-bound wrists with the kind of discomfort associated with hospitals and Ford struggling with broken-glass words and the veneer of Sam as her give-no-fucks self scratched like paint.
She slid off the bike and the weight changed; Russ rocked onto the toes of his boots to steady the bike and hauled it up to the center stand. It looked like every other bike in the lot, a little scraped up and like most of the parts weren’t the ones the manufacturer had started it out with, except there was no price painted on it in white paint. The bikes on the lot were a mix, no single make or model lined up. There were Harleys amongst them but there were other kinds beyond American, Japanese was real popular and German. He took the helmet as it swung out toward him and he hung it over the handlebars and then Russ’s look of disgust was so vivid and quick that it looked as if his scowl would lift off his features.
“It’s a piece of shit,” he said witheringly, without bothering to lower his voice for the benefit of the salesman who was walking the lot, cheap suit and polyester tie and the kind of clean-under-the-nails hands that said he worked here for cash instead of parts or money off on the bikes. “You want an orange bike, we spray a good one.” He ran a hand over the paint-job, thick calloused fingertips skimming glossy paint. It was pretty, but it was cheap and it was a Japanese knock-off under good paint. “You want something you can pick parts up for easy.” She wanted cheap, and Russ looked at the prices under his eyelashes, concerned for a minute that cheap in the vocabulary of engines and parts did not add up to the Alexander definition. Maybe the Neil guy was out of money, didn’t he pay for Sam most of the time?
Sam looked at the orange bike with a lingering yearning. And, yeah, so she'd come from the kind of family where nothing was ever new, and nothing was ever the fucking color you wanted. You were lucky if you got shoes without holes, and you were really fucking lucky if those shoes weren't too small and prone to rubbing your toes raw. It was just how it was, and she'd never had anything from a box. She'd thought she might be able to get a bike that way - shiny and sweet and that hadn't been sat on by any ass but hers. But something had changed, and she didn't know what. She wasn't about to ask, either, because then it would look like she was after Neil for his money, and she wasn't. And she loved the fucking house, but she was finally starting to realize that the cars in the other driveways weren't fucking beemers or jaguars, yeah? So maybe he was embarrassed of her, or maybe he was just fucking tired of ponying up cash for her. Maybe he still owned Aria or whatever, and he didn't want to tell her. It made her wonder if the modest house was like mistress digs or whatever, and he could have told her if it was. She wouldn't have freaked or anything. She knew what she was, and she knew what he was, and she'd known since the fucking beginnning.
Distracted, she dragged her hand over a black Honda, and she really had no fucking idea how to pick a bike. A MIG? Sure. Oil paints? Fuck, yeah. Opera? Any time. But this shit wasn't in her league, even after all the time she'd spent at the garage. Which was why she'd invited Russ. He knew this shit.
She pulled a roll of bills out of her pockets. Hundreds, still with brown bank paper wrapped around each 1,000 dollar packet of ten. She separated five packets and held them out to him. "I can go up to ten, I guess, but I probably shouldn't," she admitted. She didn't want to the court to say it was excessive or some shit and come take the bike away, because then how the fuck would she get to work? The house was awesome, and she fucking loved it, but it made wheels such a fucking necessity.
"So," she went on, as if she hadn't just unrolled 50k in the middle of a parking lot. "How's your boy?"
The bike lot had variety. There was shit right up alongside the marvels and Russ rocked back on his heels and showed no inclination to touch the way Sam did, to slide his hands over gloss and paintwork and brushed steel and get lost in the way things looked. Russ had spent time in garages and with engines all over since he was ten and now he was narrowing in on thirty-seven. Whichever way you looked at it (Russ did not) it was a long time listening to the tick-tick-tick of broken engines and the way a bike would purr if you coaxed it right with oil and grease and a little patience. He was looking the other way from the Honda, at a Kawasaki that sat with its wheels wrong, and a BMW a little way along that was nicer, considerable hulk with scratched up white paint. A BMW would drive right, Russ was thinking over, perhaps better than a Harley but a Harley was good too, parts were easy, but pricey.
And then Sam unwrapped fifty thousand like it was nothing in the middle of a lot, and Russ moved quicker than he had any right to, all that muscle mass wound around bone and the brown bank paper disappeared as his hands cupped over hers. “You fucking insane?” Russ’s voice was Nevada and dust and the distinct lack of tonality that was all one register, but it bit up a little higher just then. “You don’t take that out in here. Put it away.” Five thousand was enough, ten would be buying a name.
“You want to sit up or you want to go over?” Russ looked at her blankly, the dull sand of his hair whipping in the wind that bobbed the limp balloons, his eyes squinting tight against the thin sunlight. He ignored the question, left a little boy all black silky curls and the stain from blue frosting alone until the sunlight could sweep him away, make him a ghost again. “You got a choice. Different style of riding.”
Sam was lost in how the bikes looked, and she didn't expect him to freak over the money. She looked at him with wide, scared blue eyes, because that shit always happened when someone moved fast when she wasn't expecting it. She froze, and fuck that; she really needed to look into some self-defense classes, if only to stop turning into a fucking deer in headlights when shit surprised her. This was Russ, she reminded herself, breath coming shallow-fast and messy. Russ wouldn't fucking touch her if she stripped naked and jumped him in the middle of the fucking parking lot. And yeah, ok, the breaking slowed down. She swallowed heavy, tasting bile that hadn't quite made it all the way up, and she pocketed the cash like nothing had ever happened. Her eyes lost their wideness, but it was a slow fucking thing, and the fear was replaced by don't fucking say a word. "It doesn't matter. I have to go take the rest to the fucking courthouse right after here. Restiltution," she said, and she knew the word from when Ian had paid it to her. Well, she mostly knew the word. "It'll make me look good if it's voluntary or whatever," she explained, money out of sight again, and like none of that shit ever happened.
"I don't want a ninja thing," she said, finally, after getting herself under control the rest of the way. She assumed that was what he meant by going over. "Something classic. Softail," she said, because aesthetic was her thing, and she knew what she liked. She might not be able to tell if the fucking thing was going to run, but she knew what she liked. "I wanted a new Bolt, which you're going to say is a new company and sucks, but whatever. I like how they look. But Neil had said a Harley." She didn't add anything to that. Shit had changed, and that was just that.
And then she rolled her eyes. "How's your boy?" she repeated.
Russ was not intuitive. He did not understand the nuances of other people and he did not learn; it took time to accrue enough knowledge to recognize wrong when he saw it, but Sam’s baby Bambi-in-the-middle-of-the-road act did not take nuance. He flinched and was still, the spread of his hands careful seriously-officer-no-gun wide as he lifted first his right and then his left from reaching distance. Russ did not know nuance nor rationale, but his caution was edged and sharp, the shuffle of boots on tarmac audible as he took a pace and then looked at her and took another, backwards. Daylight crept between them, the whipping wind that rode across the lot. Sam was meant to be brassy and noisy and annoying (mostly annoying) and she wasn’t meant to look like he’d gone half-way to hitting her. Russ knew the look, even if he didn’t know it on Sam. His face fell into the careful lines of a guarded expression, simultaneously bothered and bothered by being bothered and bothered by knowing enough now to reach for the answer as to why and understand.
“You still don’t shake it around for fun in a fucking bike lot,” he said after a short pause, the space gaping enough to be a comment without words on her behavior. Russ took the out gratefully, with the carelessness of being truly terrible at anything that required emotional response, and snorted at the mention of a company apparently not good enough. “You want a Triumph,” he said, thinking of parts and the way to fix stuff; Russ liked things easy. He liked a roadmap laid out for him and he liked knowing what was under his fingers. “Maybe a Harley but you’re buying the name. You want a Bolt, you pick something that looks like it. Something with time behind it. Parts,” he said, by way of explanation. She’d spent enough time in the garage to know what he was talking about, or she’d pissed away the time there.
Russ eyed her with all the mistrust of conversational trap-doors. “You want to talk about that,” his hand swept apart the distance, conveyed the jumpiness and the aftermath, “I’ll talk about the kid.” He stared her down with all the conviction of knowing she didn’t want to talk about the former, comfortable in his ability to avoid the latter.
"Yeah? Like you're going to let the salesman come steal it from me or something," Sam said knowingly of the money. Because, yeah, ok, so she'd had an instinctive knee-jerk type reaction, but she knew (logically) that Russ wouldn't let anyone so much as lay a hand on her in that bike lot. She knew, too, that he would hate the fact that she realized it. Like Daniel, he liked to pretend he was a fucking sonofabitch. And oh, yeah, she knew he could be. They could both be serious motherfuckers in different ways, but not when it came to this, and not when it came to her. So, hah. Take that, and she grinned with some smugness at the power the realization gave her. It was like shooting that cop fucker at that boat party, or like beating Iris bloody in the hallway at Aria. It made her feet feel like they were flat on the fucking ground again, instead of constantly being off-balance and effed up.
She listened to him talk about the bikes, and she walked over the gravel and between the lines of machines. "I like how that one looks," she said pointing two rows over at a Triumph Thruxton 900 in sweet, sweet shiny black. It looked a lot like the Bolt, and she'd never actually heard of the brand. But he'd mentioned it, yeah? So maybe it wasn't so fucking bad. "It can be older or whatever, but I like that classic thing it has going on. And it doesn't look too fucking heavy." Because some of the Harleys looked like they weighed a fucking ton, and there was no way she was getting one of those prissy plastic looking bikes.
And maybe there was a happy hop on the gravel when he agreed to talk about the kid. It was like fucking victory or something, and it chased the remaining shadows from her inky blue eyes. "What was his name again?" she asked, intentionally playing the idiot. It was a good start, yeah? Naming shit was important. Her shrinks always said that. And, ok, so they were talking about fears and shit, but she figured the premise was still a sound one. "Did Ford hang with him yet?" Ford, who she was sure was going to drag Nathan into Russ' life before Russ even fucking noticed it happening, yeah?
Russ watched her bounce and the gravel scudded, and the hooded look to his face was fleeting and then gone, leaving behind a heavily lined bemusement overlaid with cautious mirth. It was a small look, the kind of exasperation reserved for small children, animals and Ford was larger, but it lifted the flat look in his own blue eyes to something a little lighter with a little more animation. Russ didn’t think of Sam as a child exactly, he thought of her as a sister and that neatly coincided with the age his own sister would have been - approaching thirty. The little skip made him think of kids, and see the young in all that female, knowing crap. He looked at her grinning like she’d pried some secret loose, and he shoved both hands in his pockets, eyeing the salesman across the lot with visible dislike.
“He ain’t going to take it. But if he knows you got more, he’ll up your budget. Start talking shit about the bikes in your price range, persuade you higher.” Russ sounded like he knew, and like perhaps it was a technique employed by anyone who’d worked in that line of things rather than a judgment on the salesman walking the line of gravel who had made a good call in avoiding approaching directly just yet. His boots crunched on the gravel, his weight grinding over stones as he walked toward the bike she’d indicated, and he made that self-same look of disgust as she listed off why she was drawn to it. But Triumph was good and old and there’d be parts kicking around, shit that wasn’t Harley-expensive.
The next came over his shoulder, leather squeaking a little as he started to look at the bike in detail, “Nathan.” He didn’t say anything about Ford, mostly because Russ didn’t know. He’d drawn a line for his little brother, a line that would be backed up by fists - he didn’t want to know a damn thing, mostly because he could easily see Ford sliding in to the space Marina made for him, he was barely more than a kid himself. He looked up from the bike, very deliberately.
“Now you. You get jumpy round everyone?”
"That's what you're here for, baby," she said smugly, when he explained that the salesman would up the price or whatever. And, admittedly, Sam hadn't ever bought anything that didn't come in a baggie or with a needle, and she didn't know shit about what life cost. 5k, 50k, it was all the same to her, because she didn't have the slightest fucking clue what the ballpark for a decent bike was. But she trusted him, and she knew he'd work this shit out, even if she swung the entire roll of cash around in the salesman's face. And if it didn't, he'd just find them another bike lot. She followed him the few rows over to the Triumph. "Is it ok?" she asked, because fuck if she could tell. She was youth and trust in her inky blue eyes, hands shoved deep in her pockets and her feet intentionally scuffing at the gravel, because she liked the sound it made.
She grinned when he admitted to knowing the little boy's name, because that was a start, yeah? "Nathan," she repeated, all Jersey Os. "It's a cute name." Which she would have said if it was absolutely fucking horrendous, because she just wanted to keep him talking. "He do good in school?"
But the question about being jumpy, that made her cool, and she just stared at him for a few minutes. "Yeah, no, just dicks that move too fast. That good enough for you?" And, ok, so that was kind of fucking defensive, but no one had actually mentioned it that blatantly, and she didn't like the fact that her damage was so completely fucking visible to anyone who looked.
Russ didn’t know if Nathan had started school or not. He knew the kid ate solids (which was perhaps, better than other men who had avoided children as if they were rabid) and he knew the kid was old enough not just to talk but to talk French (which Russ considered far more difficult than English). His shoulders hunched up, the discomfort of both talking about the kid and acknowledging that Sam would not - as Ford would not - desist both talking about the kid and trying to make him talk about the kid vivid and visual and he ran his hand over the engine of the bike, picking out the scratches covered up in paint with his fingertips.
Russ was not gentle particularly. He was not writer-soft hands and a crush and he wasn’t indolent the way the rich were always indolent and the man who wanted to muzzle Sam up in blankets and bubble wrap until the world couldn’t smash her anymore because of how he felt. (Both these were assumptions Russ made of Daniel and Neil without exceptional amounts of judgment beyond the neutrality of disgust any blue collar man felt about those who made a living without using their hands). For all that lack of gentility, his fingertips were cleverer than the rest of him, and he found the places where the bike betrayed why she’d been marked down a thousand or two when all that paint was glossy-new.
“It’s okay,” he said, finally, “Least, until I can start it, all I’m gonna know.” And he made a note, as the gravel skidded, pinged pieces off his boots, to get her to the garage more regular, because the only thing worse than riding a bike when you didn’t know how was not knowing what was in the engine.
The defensiveness paused him. He was moving slowly, the deliberateness of doing so very clear. She was staring at him like he’d spat in her coffee, and Russ figured that was okay, he didn’t much like being called on his shit either. He folded his arms, his hands tucked in his armpits, all the better for no sudden movements at all and he looked her back. There was warmth there, the kind dredged up from beneath, and the gravel-slide of his voice was warm too. “No.” Russ did not think of damage. He thought of one minute separate from the next, and he eyed her much the way he would have done Ford, all temper and piss layered over scared. He was not gentle but he was concerned. It showed. “It ain’t. You asked about the kid.” Tit for tat. Simple.
"They'll let you start it, yeah?" she asked, because she was pretty sure they let you test drive shit off graveled lots. There was a furrow between her brows, a worried thing that spoke to needing something that didn't break down, and she turned her attention to him with more seriousness, less lighthearted shit. "Listen, I'm going to be seriously fucking broke after today, so I need to get something that won't die on the side of the street. Maybe not long-term or whatever, because I don't care what happens when I'm locked up, but I need to be able to get to work and back now, yeah?" Because shit changed, and she had grown up broke as anything; this she could get used to again, because she'd always known Neil was borrowed time, at least as far as fronting her money for shit went. And it wasn't like she hadn't already taken him for more money in drugs than Aria did in fucking maintenance or whatever. And yeah, so maybe she was crunching any dreams of going to school beneath the gravel on that bike lot, but she wasn't used to dreams. When you grew up like she did, that shit didn't stick to your bones.
That it ain't of his made her want a smoke, and she patted at her pockets and pulled out a nearly-crushed pack of cloves, dark wrapped and smelling sweet when she lit one between her teeth. "Yeah? Well I'm done asking," she said, because the last thing she wanted was to fall apart here, when she'd been jonesing so hard for a needle less than an hour earlier. Yeah, no, she wanted fucking calm. And if fucking calm meant not asking about Nathan, well, yeah, she wouldn't ask about Nathan. She jerked her chin toward the bike. "Try it?"
Russ looked at her silently, and the blue of his eyes never blinked once as Sam slid from teasing little kid right on into adult with a world of worries. It sounded like maybe one of the safety nets Sam had, the men with the pocketbooks and the steady bank accounts (men who wouldn’t fly out to a poker table to make enough cash to pay off old debts) had come loose. Wallet was showing dust and cobwebs or maybe Sam was just doing it her own damn self. Russ nodded once, when she asked if the salesman across the lot would let him start the bike, but he let her explain the how and the why of not wanting shit that broke, rather than getting offended at the idea of letting her walk off the lot with something that wasn’t working right. He could have, but he figured all of that when I’m locked up meant it wasn’t him that was the problem right off.
“If it broke down,” he said, and now Nathan was scuffed beneath the gravel, some of the comfort slid right back, easy and Russ was affable calm, “I’d fix it. You’d fix it. You ain’t going to pick something that breaks often.” He didn’t ask about Neil, the man who lived where the hotels cost thousands a week, he didn’t ask about any of the others, either. He watched the production of the cigarettes with a lift of one blond eyebrow that furrowed into something like a frown, but he turned on his heel without a word and he walked over to the salesman who stopped pretending he couldn’t see them and moved quickly back toward the showroom doors.
When he reappeared, it was with a key. Russ’s long stride was unaffected, but the salesman was skip-hopping to keep up, Russ apparently unconcerned whether he did or not. Close to, the salesman was a white shirt, stained a little by the dust kicked up off the gravel and a thin, polyester tie. He made a move toward the bike and Russ stepped forward and without apparent effort or notice, nudged him to one side with one side of his leather-clad shoulder. The bike rolled off the center-stand, and the ignition whisked into gear, with a flick and a husky whirr.
“Go away,” Russ said, to the man hovering, and he looked instead at Sam, “They all got different sounds. You’ll learn yours.”
By the time he came back with the key, she had finished the smoke and calmed down enough so that she wasn't digging past the gravel and into the hard-packed dirt with the tip of her shoe. And yeah, even she knew that shit was visible, the difference, but it wasn't like she could make it fucking disappear. Even with the meds, stress was a bitch, and it made falling off wagons sound like the best fucking thing ever. But it was Christmas, yeah? And she'd made a deal with herself, just like she did all the time lately. She would make it through the end of the year without a hit. It wasn't that long, yeah? And then, if she made it that far, she'd extend it out again. She was better at baby steps lately. Thinking way off into the future was just too fucking intimidating, especially when her life tended to be this undefined thing without any real boundaries marking shit. Ok, so she was living with Neil now, and they were kind of a thing, but he'd still never said he felt anything, and she'd stopped saying that shit months ago. And so maybe the money being gone had something to do with that, or maybe it was something else. Whatever. Day by day, right? And it wasn't like she could do a lot of planning right now anyway.
She watched him nudge the salesman away, and she listened when he made the bike purr, and she grinned. And yeah, maybe she heard music in shit that wasn't music. And maybe she saw art in shit that people didn't see as art. But she loved that fucking sound, and the gap-tooth grin on her face said as much. "I never had something of my own like this," she finally said. Sure, she'd had the studio, but that had been the kind of fucking blink that didn't even have a chance to settle in and feel hers, yeah? And she'd never been the kind to think she was going to own anything of her own anyway. Money didn't really factor, yeah?
"That's the one," she said finally, with determination. "Go haggle. I'll learn it later. Can I paint it at your place?" she asked, meaning the garage. She was pretty sure Neil's place wouldn't let her paint a fucking bike in the driveway.
Russ eyed her, patience written in large, obvious letters all over squared shoulders. He was hunched over the bike, turning the engine over and listening to it patter, and he swung one leg over the bike and began flicking through the gears, feeling the way the engine kicked up to bite. He carried on doing exactly this because Sam didn’t know shit about shit, for all she’d sat in the office with opera playing under the door, and he moved through the motions as unhurriedly as paint drying. When he stood back up, oil was blackening the tips of his fingers and the bike sat, purring quietly like she’d been tamed.
“Yeah. You planning on making it orange?’ Russ’s voice did not betray what he thought of orange on bikes, but he pointed toward his own bike, “Get your helmet, try out your own bike a little.” Maybe Sam didn’t know anything about them but she’d learn. Russ figured pulling a bike apart, to paint the pieces and then to put it back together, that would take the kind of time learning her from the bones up that you needed to. And maybe he’d teach her a little. He did not think much of having things to teach; a bike could be learned from YouTube videos and websites, and there were enough goddamn tinkerers in garages across the country he’d been that there weren’t no more needed. But maybe he could teach a little and Russ found that he didn’t hate the idea entirely.
He was boots on gravel again, and at a distance, he was a small, dust-colored figure against blue sky. The salesman came forward too eagerly, like a mouse darting toward cheese and if she had been watching, she would have seen it played like a silent movie. The remonstrations of the salesman and the stoic lines of Russ, boots in the dirt, hands in his back pockets and a look under his eyebrows that was close enough to being under the line of a hat to look cowboy. When the shoulders of the salesman sagged, and he held out an office-indoors white hand to shake that Russ looked at a half-beat too long for his own handshake to look anything but reluctant, the gravel kicked up again as Russ trudged back, this time with the salesman in tow.
“Pay him,” he said to Sam, bluntly, “He’s giving it to you for two and a half,” and he didn’t say how the salesman had been negotiated down.
"Maybe blue," she said. She'd had a thing for blue since the boat party. Blue with red splashed in like blood on water. Her paintings, the ones she'd mostly destroyed after talking to Chloe, had all been like that. Endless deathly blues with bright splashes of surfacing red and, yeah, so who the fuck said the bike couldn't be another canvas? She did like the classic shine of black though. This black didn't shine, dull and scratched, but that shit would be easy enough to fix. Russ could worry all he wanted about the engine; she could worried about how it looked. And she did what he said, heading back for the helmet and slipping it on when he went off to haggle. Hands on the cracked leather seat, she dragged calloused fingers and wondered if she could weld up the tarnished silver, use something mixed in. There had to be molds for that shit, yeah? And she might not know how the engine worked, but she could weld anything out of metal, so long as Russ gave her the old part to use as a model.
She straddled the bike, and she upped the kickstand and let it roll. She didn't do anything more than that. She trusted Russ to know if the shit was steady enough for whatever the guy was asking, and she really just wanted to get it out on the open road. Her old bike - the piece of shit Russ had gotten her for a few hundreds last Christmas - was dead, but she had the plate in her pocket, and bikes didn't need insurance, so she should be able to drive it off the lot if she paid cash. With any luck, she'd be able to run by the lawyers office and give up her money for Iris before she went home. It was still early enough, and traffic shouldn't be too shit out that way.
She was still thinking shit through when Russ came back, and she grinned at the price. Yeah, ok, maybe she could slip Neil some money for the rent or whatever, so he didn't think he had to pay for her. And if he wanted to keep her there without paying, like rich guys did when they slummed, then he could tell her, yeah? She might be able to get some new supplies or something, since she'd fucked most of her shit up. And it would leave her a thou for her meds, which should get her through months with the fucking generics. She grinned, and she pulled the money out of her pocket and handed it over, keeping her fingers outstretched for the deed. Fuck, she didn't even bother cutting the engine. "I can swing by the garage tomorrow, yeah?" she asked Russ. "I'll even bring you a bottle or something." Because she owed him for this shit. She had a vague notion of bringing Nathan by as thanks, which would seriously piss Russ off, but whatever. But that would take some fucking work; it would take some time.
The salesman didn’t walk away, he scuttled, with two and a half grand folded up in his pocket and the ballpoint ink dry on the deed and the change of ownership form filled out and signed. The old bike had been something knocked together from parts and elastic bands that barely went before he’d handed it over, but the bike Sam was on now, Russ calculated it had decades left in it, enough time to run it down. He didn’t think about paintwork and metal, he looked at the smile on Sam’s face as if it were an undertow to be pulled in by and the gravel skirted up again, Russ uncomfortable with evident happiness as much as he was tears.
He listened to the throb of the bike, and the way the sound layered under the engine of his own as he flipped the ignition. The horsepower was throatier, darker but Sam’s bike was only a note or three shy, almost but not quite there. It had power, and power could be learned. “You drop it within an hour, I’ll tan your fucking hide,” he said, as he disappeared beneath his helmet, and he shook his head no to bottles of anything.
“Come by to paint it,” Russ said over his shoulder and over the buzz of the engines, before he kicked the gears, and the gravel swirled in his wake.