Wearing scuffed boots, jeans, black leather vest, Cole climbs the steps from his basement apartment. He enters the midnight alley shivering, embracing the cold. He unlocks the chains that secure the Harley and clips them around his neck. In one easy motion he mounts the bike. His foot leaves the ground, arms push up from curving bars. For an instant his long, heavy body poised in stillness gives the illusion of motion captured.
The kick down is violent. The engine coughs and comes alive. The steady ping of its breathing fills his ears and sends vibrations to his teeth.
Cole cruises out of the alleyway and onto the deserted city streets, timing his movement from one light to the next. With finger pressure on the throttle, the pistoned throat beneath his belly rumbles. The windows of dead shops rattle. Sleepers turn in their dreams. Cole does not sleep, but dreams as he rides. He dreams of a woman who comes to him only in dreams.
As always, they are in a white room. White walls, white floor and ceiling, clean white sheets upon the bed. Her flesh is as spotless as the sheets. Her nipples are pale amber, budding to rose. Her hair is blond, sometimes uncombed and rising wildly about her face as he forces her down onto the bed; at other times it swings in tightly knotted braids. Each time they fuck she curses him, she invents new obscenities to whisper wetly in his ear. He has to tie her wrists to the bed or her nails will cover his body with scratches. And afterward, the bones of his hips are sore from the force of their coupling.
She comes to him only in dreams, only in the savage cycles of his imagination. Always she retreats to the next instant of awareness, the next block, around the next corner at the joint of flesh and hair and comprehension.
With throttle pull the engine roars between his legs and the city falls behind. He takes a rise accelerating, and sailing over the crest the bike leaves the ground for seconds ... touches down. There is a world complete, Cole thinks, in senses riding. The leather, the cold, the weight of chains in wind, the blood of bugs tattooed upon his cheeks. He leans against the backrest and the vest flaps open, beats upon his bare arms and chest. In the distance, beyond the city lights, the falling moon is orange and mottled as an open furnace door.
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