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The good guys never look like heroes, but the villains somehow always do. A lesson almost every woman I know learned the hard way.
“Let me make one thing clear,” I say, slinging a heavy arm over the kid’s shoulders. “Mine. Simple as that. You and me gotta sort out between us what’s yours and what’s mine, but this—” I nod toward Alice, who’s struggling to pull the booster chair from the back seat “—is mine. Unless you want your nutsac hanging from the tailpipe of my bike.”
“He’s not going to hurt you ever again,” I say quietly under my breath. “Morris,” she says, shaking her head. “You don’t know what he’s capable of.” “If you think that, darlin’, then you don’t know what I’m capable of.”
“Alice Sparrow,” he grits out, his voice husky with desire. “My beautiful little bird.”
Home. I want to take a minute to savor something I have not felt since my mom passed. What it feels like to be home.
“But you don’t just earn the patch by falling off the bike,” he continues. “You earn the patch by getting back on. Riding again. Overcoming your fear and flying—even if you have broken wings.”
You think we only fall once in life? We ride, we crash. We ride again, we crash again. Sometimes we’re lucky, and we don’t fall far enough or hard enough to do any permanent damage. But most of the time, a fall means bad news. Real bad. You’re fucked up so bad, you’re not sure you’re gonna make it. But if you wanna earn that patch and ride again, you get back up. You ride again, Alice Sparrow.”
And as I fall asleep in Morris’s arms, I have a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, I’ve earned my broken wings.
“It all just comes, Alice. We can’t prepare for it. We can’t stop most of it. Sometimes we can run from it, but we can’t outrun it. You always have a choice. How you want to live. Who you want to be. Who you want to let in. I think I decided I’d rather face it my way than spend my time looking at life in a rearview mirror.”
“Everything comes,” she says. “But our truth won’t find us until we’re ready to face it.”
“Say you’ll go for a ride with me, sweetheart. Say you’ll get back up with me, no matter how many times life knocks us down and tries to break us. Say you’ll fly with me as long as we both have wings.”
