“Long arms? I don’t have long arms.” I threaded my arms through the jacket while he held it up for me. As he zipped the jacket, I tugged on the cuffs of the sleeves.

Fisher smirked. Yes, the sleeves were a little short.

“It’s okay. Your legs are long too. And guys will overlook your octopus arms because you have legs for days.”

“I’m not a giraffe.”

“I didn’t say that.” He strutted to his bike, and I followed him … to his bike … off the side of the mountain.

He climbed onto his bike, and that feeling that stretched from the pit of my stomach to the center of my chest returned, only stronger as he helped me climb on behind him. When he reached around and grabbed my ass, pulling me closer to him, I almost died. It was the most forbidden feeling I had ever experienced. I realized how crazy that would seem to anyone else, but I was, in fact, the girl who spent the last three years of high school living with grandparents, attending a Christian academy.

“Rory can never know,” I said.

“Hold on,” Fisher replied.

I snaked my arms around his waist, trying not to actually press my hands to his stomach or my chest to his back.

“Hold on like your life depends on it … because it does.”

I tightened my grip, a lot. And two seconds later, he kicked the bike into gear, and we shot off down the street. It was unreal.

Me on the back of a motorcycle holding on to the sexiest man I had ever seen.

My heart in my throat.

The seeds of possibilities sprouting in my head.

It felt like an alternate universe where my mom hadn’t gone to prison. My dad hadn't died. And I never left Nebraska and the public school with all my friends. I was daring, and flirting with mischief was my only purpose. Church was a ritual, an afterthought. And the God I worshipped wasn’t anyone to fear. I was … normal.

Wild oats were mine to sow.

And my reality was whatever dream I dared to chase.

Fisher took me through town. I anticipated him heading back home, but he didn’t. He drove me up the winding roads into the mountains—the steep inclines and the rollercoaster trips down hills at insane speeds. We passed cars, weaving from one lane to the next. Rory would have died had she seen her only child on the back of Fisher’s motorcycle, flying through the increasingly steep terrain of the mountain highway.

“WOO HOO!” I let my lungs loose as we drove through the Eisenhower Tunnel.