The Second Thing

*This one's for anyone who's ever kept a thing they should have returned, just because it felt too good to give up. Thanks for reading, I hope the heat finds you.*

The jacket sat on my bedroom floor for two months before I did anything about it. That sounds like an exaggeration but it isn't. Two months, same spot at the foot of my bed, where I could see it every morning when I woke up in my rented duplex in a coastal town where nobody needs a motorcycle jacket.

I'm Lyssa, I'm twenty-four, and I work from home doing freelance design for clients who mostly want things to look "clean but warm," which means I spend my days nudging fonts two pixels left. Two months ago I broke up with Mark. We'd been together three years. We met at the studio I used to work at when I was twenty-one and he was the art director who was very good at making everyone feel like their ideas were almost good enough. Somewhere in those three years I stopped being a person who did impulsive things and became a person who did spreadsheet things.

Which is why the jacket felt like evidence.

There was a leather shop two towns over, and I'd gone in to kill time, and there it was on a rack, black, heavy, with a diagonal zip and snap collar, and I tried it on and looked in the mirror and thought, Mark would look so good in this. I bought it that day. For a man I had just broken up with. I didn't even notice the mistake until I was in the parking lot holding the bag.

So there it sat. I kept meaning to return it. The receipt lived under a magnet on my fridge, going soft at the corners. Every Saturday I said, this is the day I drive out there and get my $340 back, and every Saturday I didn't.

Thursday night, I came home from the grocery store with one bag containing yogurt, coffee, and a box of the cheap crackers I like, ate dinner standing at the counter, and then sat down on the bedroom floor with the jacket in my lap. The leather was cold. It smelled like a new car, kind of, that rich manufactured smell that I guess I'll only mention once here. I turned it over in my hands. Nice stitching. Heavy zipper. It was a good jacket. It was a jacket bought for a man who, the last time I saw him in person, handed me back a box of my stuff in a paper bag and said "well, take care" like we were coworkers quitting the same job.

I thought about all the sensible choices I'd made in two months. I switched to the cheaper phone plan. I moved my savings into an account with a better interest rate. I made a color-coded chart of my monthly spending that I updated every Sunday. I was twenty-four years old and my most exciting recent achievement was a budget spreadsheet, and something about that, sitting on the floor with a $340 jacket in my lap, made my chest hurt in a way I couldn't name.

I put it on.

It was warm from nothing, still heavy, and it fit me. That was the surprise. I'd bought it in a men's large and it shouldn't have fit, but it did, sort of, sleeves a little long, shoulders wide in a way that made me look smaller and also kind of dangerous, which I have never once looked in my life. I stood up and looked at myself in the closet mirror. Huh, I said, out loud, to nobody.

The house was quiet. It was after eleven. My back door sticks and you have to lift the handle while you turn the knob, and I did that without thinking, and stepped out onto my back porch into the cool night air.

* * *

Okay, quick geography. I live in one half of a duplex. Behind me, across a narrow strip of alley that's mostly gravel and two dumpsters, is the other half's back porch. My neighbor over there is Nolan. He's forty-seven, divorced, works at a motorcycle shop across town, and for the eight months I've lived here we've exchanged hellos over the fence. That was the entire relationship. He told me once my tomatoes needed more sun. I told him I didn't care if they lived. We'd both laughed.

He was out there. Under one of those clamp work lights hooked to the porch rail, sitting on a folding chair next to a motorcycle, wiping his hands with a rag that had stopped being gray sometime in the previous decade.

I should have gone back inside. Instead I said, "It's midnight."

He looked up. The light caught him from below, which is not a flattering angle for anybody, and he still looked fine, which felt unfair. "It's Thursday," he said. "Midnight on Thursday is basically Friday. You're up too."

"I couldn't sleep."

"That bike's keeping me up too," he said, and patted the tank. "She's close. Carbs are being stubborn."

I came down the two steps and stood at the edge of his little porch area, hands in the jacket pockets because I didn't know what else to do with them. He noticed it right away. I could tell because his eyes did a quick trip from my face down to the collar and back up.

"Now that's a jacket," he said.

"Oh. Thanks. It's, um." I looked down at it like I'd forgotten what I was wearing. "It's actually a men's large."

"It suits you anyway." He went back to wiping his hands. "You ride?"

And here's where I could have lied, because it was right there, the easiest lie in the world. I could have said I'd just started, or my bike was in the shop, or something smooth. Instead my mouth did what my mouth does.

"No. I bought it for my ex-boyfriend. The week before we broke up, so, technically I bought it for a man I was still with and didn't know I was done yet."

Nolan laughed. Not a polite laugh, a real one, head back a little. "That's rough."

"It's $340 of rough. The receipt is still on my fridge. Every Saturday I tell myself I'm driving out to return it and every Saturday I find a reason not to."

"Why don't you?"

I had been asking myself that for eight weeks and I still didn't have an answer that made sense. "I think I bought it for myself," I said, slowly, like I was hearing it as I said it. "I just didn't know that yet either."

He set the rag down. "Can I tell you something about jackets like that?"

"Sure."

"They're not really about looking cool. That's the marketing. They're about the moment you come off the bike going forty and slide five feet on asphalt and get up and discover you have skin. That's what the leather's for. It's the most honest piece of clothing there is. It doesn't care how you look. It cares if you live."

I stood there in a jacket I'd never once worn out of the house and felt weirdly called out by a garment. "I don't even have a bike."

"Nah." He stood up, knees cracking audibly, and gestured at the one next to him. It was old, maroon, some model I couldn't have named. "But she doesn't care either. She'd take you down the block and back at ten miles an hour if you wanted. Anytime. That's all a first ride needs to be."

"That's very generous for a Thursday midnight."

"I'm a night guy. Divorced guys with stubborn carbs don't keep regular hours." He smiled when he said it, so I knew the divorce was one he could joke about, which put him ahead of most people I knew. "You want to sit? I've got a spare chair and about forty minutes of waiting for these things to drain."

There was a second folding chair leaning against the wall and I opened it and sat, and the gravel crunched under my boots, and the work light buzzed faintly, and I realized I was outside at midnight in a leather jacket talking to a forty-seven-year-old mechanic and it was the best Thursday I'd had in two months.

"So why'd you come out here tonight?" he asked. "Really. Nobody wears a jacket like that to take out the trash."

I looked at the jacket sleeve. Long, on me. "I wanted to feel like somebody who does things," I said. "That's the entire answer. That's embarrassingly the whole answer."

"It's not embarrassing," Nolan said, and picked his rag back up. "That's the only reason anybody starts anything."

We sat there a while, him working, me watching. He explained the carbs to me in a way that made me feel like I almost understood, and I nodded along like a person on TV nodding. At some point he got up, checked a little tube sticking out of the bowl of one carb, said "Still dribbling," and sat back down.

"That's bad?" I asked.

"That's impatient, is what it is. Another twenty minutes minimum." He looked over at me. "Or we do something else with the twenty minutes."

"Like what?"

"You want to try the bike?"

I laughed, because it sounded like a joke. He didn't laugh.

"I'm serious. Around the block. Ten miles an hour, like I said. You wear the jacket, so you're already dressed for it better than most people who ask."

"Ask? I haven't asked anything."

"You're wearing $340 of motorcycle leather and sitting in my gravel at midnight. That's asking." He stood, that same knee crack, and pulled a half helmet off a hook on the wall I hadn't even noticed. It was scuffed and dull pink, which seemed like a strange thing for a divorced man to own, and I must have made a face because he said, "It was my wife's. She left it. Fits most heads."

Six years divorced and he still had her helmet on the wall. I decided not to say anything about that, because it wasn't my business, and because something in my chest did a small squeeze that I chose to ignore.

"Okay," I said. "Yes. Before I think about it."

"That's the right way to decide," he said. "Quick, before the sensible part of you wakes up."

"Sensible is the only part of me that's awake. It's midnight."

"Then move fast."

He gave me the helmet and I put it on and immediately felt like someone in a costume, all my hearing muffled, my chin shoved. He adjusted the strap for me, fingers quick and impersonal, and then he wheeled the bike around so it faced the alley and held it steady.

"There's a routine," he said. "You get on last, you get off first. Hands on my waist or my shoulders at first, whatever feels stable. Feet on those pegs when I say. Lean with me, not against me. That's the entire course."

"Lean with you, not against you," I repeated, like it was a password.

He swung on and the bike dipped with his weight and then steadied, and it suddenly looked a lot bigger with a person on it. I got on the way you get into a cold pool, one bad decision at a time. The seat was warm from the work light being near it, or maybe from him, and I put my hands on his shoulders like he'd said, which felt ridiculous, and then he said "okay, she's running, relax" and the engine came up under us and every ridiculous thought got folded up and put away.

Even at idle it was loud. My teeth buzzed. He walked it forward, turned us into the alley, and then we were rolling, and I gripped his shoulders harder, and then we were past the dumpsters and onto the actual street, and he said "comfortable?" over his shoulder and I said "yes" into the helmet where nobody could check if I meant it.

Then he opened it up a little. Not much. Probably not even fast. But the wind hit the leather on my arms and the world started moving like the world was supposed to move, and I slid my hands from his shoulders down