I’m jealous. He doesn’t have a plan in the world.
It might’ve been a little nice to have cousins growing up. Maybe it would’ve been fun if I’d spent my summers here, growing up in the sun and the banter and the dirt with him.
He makes me less nervous than Jake, too.
His eyes meet mine, and I look away, taking over and forcing his hands away as I finish tightening the strap.
“You ever been on a motorcycle?” he asks.
“No.” I climb on behind him, situating my purse to my side as it hangs across my body.
“I’m gentle,” he assures me. “Ask any girl.”
“I’m not any girl,” I say, sliding my arms around him and locking my hands in front. “You hurt me, and you still have to go home with me and deal with me.”
“Good point.”
He snaps the visor on his own helmet down and takes off, making my breath catch in my throat.
Jesus. I instinctively tighten my hold and clench my thighs around him as my stomach drops into my feet. The bike wobbles more than a truck, and I dart my eyes side to side, trying to keep my balance, but he’s not slowing down, and all I can really do is hold on. He might know what he’s doing, but this is new to me. I blink long and hard and then simply look down, keeping my eyes off the road.
These hills were a little steep coming up in the truck with Jake. I don’t think I need to see us going down on a dirt bike. Is this even street legal?
I hold him close, just staring at his T-shirt, so I won’t look at anything else, but after a moment, I try to loosen my grip on him a little. I’m plastered to his back. I’m probably making him uncomfortable.
But he takes one hand off a handle and pulls my arms tighter around him again, forcing my chest into his back.
He turns his head, raising his visor. “Hold on!” he shouts.
Fine. I refasten my hands around him.
We ride all the way down the gravel drive and come to the paved road, turning left and heading back the same way I came up two days ago, gravity forcing my body into Noah’s the entire time.
Once we’re on blacktop, and the terrain is a little more even, I raise my eyes and take in the trees on both sides, as well as the dense wooded areas surrounding us. Slopes, cliffs, and rockfalls, I’m seeing the land around us a lot more clearly than when I came up in the dark the day before yesterday.
Jake isn’t lying. Even with all the trees that will shed their leaves in the winter, there are lots of conifers which will block visibility in the heavy snows. The land changes, gullies suddenly rising into steep cliffs, and the sides of the road are decorated with sporadic piles of rocks that spilled from uncertain land. It’s dangerous enough to be up here in good weather. The city won’t pay for a truck to shovel snow and salt the roads for one family.
Which—I’m guessing—is exactly how my uncle wants it. Does Noah like it that way? His words from yesterday play back in my head. I would leave. I would leave in a heartbeat. You’re here, and you don’t have to be. I have to be here, but I don’t want to be.
So why does he stay? Jake can’t make him. He’s a legal adult.
We twist and turn, winding down the road as it turns into a highway, and it takes a good twenty minutes before we see the town come into view. A couple of steeples peek out from the tops of the trees, and brick buildings line streets shaded with abundant green maples that I know will be orange and red come October.
We come to our first stop sign, and he lifts up his visor now that we’re slowing down.
“Do you have others?” I ask. “Cousins, I mean?”
I don’t know why I care.
But he just shakes his head. “No.” And then thinks better of it. “Well, maybe. I don’t know.”
I’m it on his father’s side, so that just leaves his mom. Where is she? I haven’t known Jake long, but it’s hard picturing him domesticated. Were they married?
For a moment, it’s easy to think well of him, raising two boys on his own, but it’s also easy to understand how he could drive someone so far up the wall that she ran for the hills.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask Noah about her, but if he tells me something sad, like she’s dead or abandoned them at birth, I don’t know how to respond to things I can’t do anything about. My sympathy just comes off disingenuous.
He grips his handlebars, the veins in his forearms bulging out of his skin, and I tighten my hold as he takes off again, entering the main drag of town with all the shops lining the street.