I grin at her, at Noah.
“We’re going to ride in a smooth, straight line across the lot,” Bernadette says. “Ease the clutch out. Pick your feet up when you’ve got your balance. When you’re ready, roll that throttle.”
My engine hums. I put the bike in neutral, press the start button, and ease the clutch out, but my arms are shaking, not relaxed. I lift my feet and roll the throttle, but I roll it too fast, and the bike lunges like a mechanical bull.
My heart catches. Out of my mouth come curses I can’t decipher. I become aware that I’ve lost control, and in my panic, I grip at everything that can be gripped and slam on everything that can be slammed in hopes I’ll somehow find the brakes. I do—but too fast. My back wheel locks. The bike jerks to a stop and twists to the left. It slides out from under me and I hit the ground with the engine grinding into my left ankle. The pain is a fiery pop that spreads all the way up my leg.
A moment later, the bike lifts off me, and I see Noah’s face over mine.
“Are you all right?”
I’m so embarrassed, I’m in shock. “How do I know if I’m all right?”
He helps me up carefully, studies me from head to toe. “You shake it out, and see what hurts. Wounded pride or wounded hide.”
I’m worried about my ankle, but when I stretch it, there’s only a dull pain. My jeans are shredded and a scrape bleeds through. But he’s right, my real injury is a sprained ego.
Bernadette appears with a first aid kit. I roll up my jeans and clean the scrape.
“I panicked,” I say.
“Fear is enemy number one on a bike,” Bernadette says as Noah hands me a bottle of water. “Noah would say that’s a metaphor for something or other.” She playfully punches his arm. “You want to talk about panic, you should have seen him at sixteen.”
“No, B,” Noah says, “Lanie doesn’t need to hear about—”
“The boy didn’t know a throttle from a thyroid,” she goes on, turning her back to Noah so he can’t shut her up. “Matter of fact, he’s the reason I got my certification to teach.”
“You were that inspiring?” I say to Noah.
“Hell no!” Bernadette cackles. “I figured if I could teach him, I could teach a rock. Three days after I gave him a lesson, he took off on some used piece of crap for Colorado. His mama almost killed me, but he made it!”
I try to imagine Noah at sixteen, riding through the Rocky Mountains. Something twists inside me. “Why did you go to Colorado?”
“Why does anyone do crazy things?” Bernadette says. “For love.”
“Her name was Tanya,” Noah says, wincing at the memory. “She played volleyball and was in Colorado for a tournament. Let’s just say, neither she nor her coach was impressed when I rolled into town.”
Bernadette hoots. “He came back with his tail between his legs.” She sighs and rubs at a smudge on her windshield. “Ah, well. Loving a human is nowhere near as simple as loving a bike. That’s why Noah sticks to fiction now, and I stick to porkin’ torque.”
I bite back a laugh then turn to Noah, expecting him to do the same. But when he meets my eyes . . . is it two hours of riding in the sun, or is he blushing? I feel my own cheeks getting warm as Noah turns away and starts fidgeting with his motorcycle gloves like they really need his attention.
Bernadette glances at Noah, then at me. “Why don’t you two take the bikes for a spin around the neighborhood while I set up the course for your riding test? A little street practice wouldn’t hurt you.”
“Want to?” Noah says to me.
I’m already starting my engine.
We take it slow around the neighborhood, gliding through quiet streets and back alleys. Noah knows where to go to avoid the traffic, and soon I start to see Bernadette’s wisdom: This is much better practice for Italy than making circles in a parking lot.
I like looking at Noah on the bike. His olive skin glows against his white shirt. His hair is just long enough to peek below his helmet. As my eyes travel downward, I stop myself—
I’m still his editor, and we still need a book idea. So even if Noah looks distractingly good, and even if I am now single enough to notice, I need to try, for the sake of our careers, to rein it in.
The sky is gold with late-afternoon light by the time Bernadette gives us our tests.
“Remember,” she says over the rumble of the engines, “your eyes should always be where you want to be twenty seconds from now. Don’t look down at where you are, only out at where you’re going.”
“I think that’s a metaphor for something or other,” I say to Noah.
I keep my eyes ahead as I demonstrate how I’ve learned to turn, to weave, to smoothly shift gears, and to make a short stop. It’s glorious. It’s exhausting. It’s more fun and more challenging than anything I’ve done in a long time.
I roll to a stop before Bernadette. She jumps up and hugs me to let me know I passed. When she goes inside to print out the certificate I’ll take to the DMV, I stand before Noah, wondering, are we also going to hug . . . or?
“Nice weaves,” he says. “Very smooth.”
“Yours weren’t so bad, either.”
My eyes catch on his lips, and I notice that one of his bottom teeth is a little crooked. It’s charming. So charming I start to wonder things I shouldn’t wonder, like what it would be like to touch those lips, those teeth, with my own—
Bernadette comes out of the trailer, two certificates in her hands. “Who wants to get a celebratory beer at the Ice House—”
“I don’t know,” Noah says quickly, using the clipped tone I haven’t heard in weeks. “I’ve taken up enough of Lanie’s time.”
“Right,” I say—though if Noah hadn’t shut it down, I would have loved to grab a beer with Bernadette. She’s fun. And I enjoyed the insight into teenage Noah’s romantic lunges, maybe a little too much.
Did Noah see me staring at his lips a moment ago? Did I freak him out? Or maybe he has plans tonight?
“Yeah, I should get back,” I say.
“Next time then,” Bernadette says and hands me a card with her email address. “You’d better send me pictures from Italy.”
* * *
“I never said that!” I insist to Noah on the subway ride home.
“You absolutely said it!” Noah laughs, his smile big and open as he leans against a framed map of the MTA. “I remember it clearly—you were storming past the gates of the zoo. I was chasing after you. You spun on me. You had your hands on your hips, your cheeks were flushed”—he’s acting all of this out, badly—“you glared, and then—oh no!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Don’t you live on Forty-Ninth Street?” Noah points at the open subway doors, at the sign, which reads Lexington and Sixty-Third.
No way. Not possible. I missed my stop? I, Lanie Bloom, who has never, not once in my seven years of living in New York, not even before I knew the difference between Amsterdam and Park Avenue, ever missed my stop?
The next time these doors open, we’ll be on Roosevelt Island. After that we’ll be all the way in Queens. I look at Noah. A silent verdict passes between us. We bolt off the train just before the doors slam shut, and land in the station at Sixty-Third and Lex, where we double over, laughing.