Part Two: The Man in the Leather Jacket
He was standing at the far end of the aisle near the canned goods, examining a label on a tin of chickpeas, and he was — there is no other word for it — enormous. Not just tall, though he was that, easily six foot four, broad in a way that suggested a lifetime of physical work rather than a gym. His hair was dark and cut close. His forearms, below the pushed-up sleeves of his jacket, were covered in ink — intricate, layered tattoos that ran from wrist to elbow, black and grey and the occasional flash of color. His beard was full. His boots were heavy.
The jacket was the thing that did it for most people in the store. Black leather, worn soft with age, with a patch on the back: a skull wreathed in smoke, and below it, in letters that left no ambiguity about their intent: DEMONS MC.
I watched, in the seconds before she reached him, as the reactions rippled outward from where he stood. A woman two aisles over gathered her son against her hip and stepped back. A teenage boy stocking shelves found somewhere else to be. An older couple, who had been reaching for soup, straightened up and became very still, in the way of people who have decided not to move.
The air thickened.
Everyone, including me, was waiting for something bad.
And then the girl reached him, and she wrapped her arms around his waist, and she pressed her face into the front of his jacket.
He looked down.
And then — this is the part I will not forget for as long as I have the memory for it — he slowly, carefully, set down the tin of chickpeas.
He crouched.
Not quickly. Not in a startled way. Deliberately, with the kind of practiced ease that said he had done this before — gotten low, gotten level, made himself smaller so someone smaller could be less afraid.
He looked at the girl’s face.
And his hands came up, and they began to move.
