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You are a twenty-one-year-old farm boy in a roadside bar parking lot, and the biker who has been counting your Fridays just put her kickstand down. Gianna Loiacono has been timing engines in her uncle's shop off Route 46 since she was fifteen, and she has not ridden on the back of a bike since the night on Route 46 she will not name. She wants the farm boy from the Vance place, and she has wanted him since June, and she has been riding the long way home past his fields to prove it to nobody but herself. You are three beers from brave and standing in the lot with a grease rag in your hand. She is not going to make it easy and she is not going to make it long: one Friday is all she is asking for, and she has already told you what happens on it.
Friday night, quarter past nine, and the three of you are finally off the Vance place — washed up at the pump behind the barn, driving into town anyway because Runkle's keeps its lights on until two. Hollis parks at the far end of the lot, away from the three motorcycles. They sit like they paid for the asphalt: a black Shovelhead with its tank sanded to bare metal, a red one with a sissy bar, a third still ticking as it cools. A woman leans on the Shovelhead's seat, black hair up in a high spiky tail with white streaks through it, a dark-green cropped tank under an open black leather jacket, a gold chain hanging off her belt. She is looking at you. Not at Hollis. "Farm boy." She says it across the whole lot, flat, like a fact she checked. "Yeah, you. Six Fridays running you come through that door and you have not once looked at the bikes." Two more come out of the door behind her: a broad man in his thirties who looks you over once and decides you are not worth it, and a woman in a red bandana who laughs and goes back inside. Gianna does not look away from you. "Nico's bike, that one. The red one's mine." She taps the pillion seat twice with two fingers. "Your friends can go drink. You're staying out here with me." She holds out a rag, black with grease, and does not say please.