Chapter 4
In the years since she stepped into her role at CromTech, Eleanor has made facing her fears into an art form. She can handle boardrooms full of Armani-suited executives who shoot down every idea she presents. She can give interviews and press conferences. She’s given presentations in front of hundreds of people.
But when it comes to asking for a girl’s number, Eleanor Cromwell is a coward.
She’s seen Dani no less than three times this week. She caught her in a brief conversation at the gas station as Eleanor paid for a fill-up and Dani bought what amounted to forty dollars worth of packaged pastries, and, twice now, Eleanor has seen her at the café picking up the morning order for her whole staff.
Not that Eleanor has memorized when Dani usually gets to said café and has dragged herself out of bed to get there in time. Absolutely not.
Three times Eleanor has seen Dani around town, and all three times she’s lost her nerve at the last moment. Despite how passionately she argued the opposite to Kayla and Ash, Eleanor wants to see more of Dani, even if she has no intention of doing any flinging .
Dani is sweet. She’s funny. She’s interesting to talk to. She’s a bright spot in Eleanor’s day every time they run into each other. Eleanor could probably stand to have a third friend. Sure, it’s a potential friend who she’s devastatingly attracted to, but she’s fully capable of putting that on a shelf.
But Dani remains elusive.
Eleanor can only do so much without resorting to drastic measures. So, finally, frustrated and full of self-loathing, Eleanor pops her own tire with a corkscrew and calls for a tow from Cooper’s Tire and Auto.
When Dani rolls up in the tow truck twenty minutes later, looking as work stained and annoyingly attractive as ever, Eleanor finds she’s far less ashamed of her actions than she should be.
Dani rolls the window down, resting her elbow there and leaning out with a grin. “I hear you need my services again?”
The confident lilt in Dani’s voice sends a tingle down Eleanor’s spine. When Dani exits the truck and kneels down to look at the tire, though, anxiety starts to ebb in.
Dani frowns, tracing a finger over the tear in the rubber. “Huh. That’s weird.”
“What’s weird about it?”
“You said you didn’t notice it being flat yesterday, right?”
Eleanor vaguely remembers saying something of the sort over the phone, but she was distracted at the time by desperately hoping her gambit would pay off.
“Yes?” Eleanor says slowly.
“This is a pretty big hole. It’s a little strange,” Dani says, running her hand over the tire tread. “What do you think did it?”
“I could have run over something in my driveway. Right?”
“That’s true. These secluded driveways tend to build up all sorts of crud since the township doesn’t take care of them,” Dani says brightly. She taps a little rhythm on the rubber. “You should hire someone to clean it up every once in a while! There’s always kids in town looking for jobs.”
Eleanor, distracted by the movement of Dani’s hands, nods mutely. Thankfully, Dani hooks Eleanor’s car onto the truck with no further comments.
Eleanor has made Dani laugh exactly three times by the time they pull into the garage, and Eleanor’s sense of accomplishment rivals the time she managed to convince Renée that increasing Christmas bonuses for all staff, and not just executives, was a good idea.
Dani is out of the truck and sprinting around the hood to open the door for Eleanor as soon as she’s put the vehicle in park. She offers Eleanor a hand as she climbs down from the seat, a picture of grease-stained gallantry.
“Thank you,” Eleanor says once her feet have touched the ground again. She’s still caught up in trying to find something cleverer to say when Dani raises her other hand, waving suddenly at someone across the shop.
“Sarah! Come meet Nora!”
Sarah turns out to be the same auburn-haired woman with oil-stained hands that Eleanor saw at the grocery store not long ago. She’s near Eleanor’s height, and perhaps a few years older. Her stern expression melts at the sight of Dani, but she hardly spares Eleanor a glance as she walks through the shop at a quick clip, headed for the door.
“I’m late for my doctor’s appointment,” Sarah calls back, still moving. “Nice to meet you, Nora!”
She’s gone a few seconds later, the door swinging shut behind her and leaving them alone in the space. Owen is nowhere to be seen, and Eleanor’s car is the only one on the shop floor.
Dani shakes her head, smiling with some exasperation. “That’s my cousin. We co-own the shop. She’s started going for much more regular checkups since a hot doctor joined the practice.”
The slight worry that had been building in the back of Eleanor’s mind over the clear closeness between the two is eased, even as Eleanor knows it’s silly. She has no confirmation that Dani is anything but a card-carrying heterosexual. She’d like to think she’s been picking up an energy, but she’s been wrong before.
From the brief glimpses Eleanor has gotten of Sarah, there isn’t much family resemblance—she’s much slighter in build, more lithe than muscular, with short choppy hair and a more serious demeanour, but Dani’s fondness for her is obvious.
“She has a crush on her doctor?” Eleanor says. “I feel like there are rules about that.”
Dani laughs, shaking her head while she works on getting Eleanor’s car detached from the truck. “No, there’s two doctors there. Sarah goes to the other one. But she’s had a thing for Naomi since high school. When Naomi moved back to town to join the practice and help Owen take care of their folks, Sarah was pretty excited.”
Eleanor’s eyebrows raise. She can’t say she’s surprised to hear that Sarah is into women, but Dani’s nonchalance about it is refreshing. Unexpected in a place like this. It’s a good sign. “So Naomi is Owen’s sister?”
The Porsche’s wheels hit the cement, and Dani dusts off her hands. “Older sister, yeah. Sarah likes to book appointments she doesn’t need so she can sit in the waiting room and hope her crush walks by.”
Painfully aware of how close to Sarah’s situation she is at this very moment, Eleanor says nothing.
“This is actually a pretty easy fix. We have a tire in stock that would work,” Dani says, flipping through a few pieces of paper on a nearby clipboard. “I could even show you how to fix it yourself next time?”
“I’m perfectly happy just calling you when I get a flat.”
“Everyone should know how to change a tire!” Dani protests. She slides into Eleanor’s passenger seat, opening up the dash and rooting around to grab a silver wrench that Eleanor had no idea existed. “I’m happy to teach you, if you want to learn.”
Eleanor agrees not because she’s at all interested in learning to change her own tire but because she’s hoping the lesson will prolong their conversation. Dani seems thrilled, prying the hubcap off and handing it to Eleanor, who tries to touch as little of the dirty metal as possible. It dangles from two of her fingers, but Dani doesn’t seem to notice—she’s too busy loosening the bolts and preparing to jack up the car.
“Shouldn’t you be putting the car on those hydraulic lifts?” Eleanor asks, setting the hubcap gingerly on the workbench beside her.
“Usually I would, but you won’t have one if you’re stuck on the side of the road,” Dani reasons. She nestles the jack under the car—which apparently was stored in Eleanor’s trunk all along—and starts to crank the handle while Eleanor tries not to ogle too obviously.
Dani’s jumpsuit is navy blue today but still unfastened and hanging tied around her waist. It dips lower when she bends, the tied arms brushing the ground, and Eleanor can see a hint of denim underneath. Light-blue Levi’s, by the looks of it, and peeking out just above the low waistline is what might be the thick band of a pair of boxer briefs.
“So you have to make sure the tire is off the ground,” Dani is saying. Eleanor blinks rapidly, raising her eyes to safer territory and trying to wipe the steam from the figurative windows of her mind. “And then you can unscrew the lug nuts.”
“I could google this if I ever have a problem, you know,” Eleanor says. It’s getting hotter and hotter in the shop, and Dani seems to not notice at all.
“You could! But what if you have no service?” Dani challenges, wiping her hands on her jumpsuit and grabbing the wrench. “Cell towers up here are patchy.”
Eleanor sighs. At the very least, she’s about to get a nice show. “Fine. Continue.”
Eleanor has experienced desire before. She’s felt her heartbeat speed up looking at a woman in a tight dress or a tailored suit, felt the longing to run her fingers through someone’s hair or her lips over their neck. But never in her life has she experienced the kind of unadulterated craving that she feels watching Dani Cooper singlehandedly wrench the bolts off a tire.
She’s known from the minute they met that Dani is strong, with the kind of build that means she could probably bench-press double Eleanor’s weight. But the way her muscles tighten and shift as she pulls the tire off and lifts the new one into place makes her feel genuinely, pathetically light-headed.
“Okay, your turn!”
That gets Eleanor’s attention.
Dani is looking at her expectantly, holding the wrench out as if Eleanor is supposed to know what to do with it. As if she hasn’t spent the last fifteen minutes thinking about what Dani’s sweat tastes like instead of paying attention.
She’s not even entirely sure what it’s her turn to do . Is Dani asking her to take off one of the other undamaged tires, for practice? Are there still more steps in the process for the one Dani has been working on? Eleanor doesn’t know because she’s instead been imagining what it might be like for Dani to pin her to the hood of her own Porsche.
Eleanor swallows hard. She reaches out to take the wrench, determined to make a try for it even if she ends up looking like an idiot—but before her fingers close around the tool Dani’s earnest expression breaks into a grin, and then a full-blown giggle.
Eleanor sighs in relief as Dani takes the wrench back.
“Don’t worry, I can tell you’re not really interested in changing tires,” Dani says, still chuckling to herself as she finishes up. “I just wanted to see the look on your face. Sorry I bored you; I get a little carried away sometimes.”
“You didn’t! I wasn’t bored.” Eleanor fights the natural urge to stammer out an explanation. Stumbling over her words was supposed to be trained out of her decades ago. “I was paying attention, I was just—”
She was just thinking about how the dimpled muscle of Dani’s lower back would feel shifting under her hands. Something she’d really rather Dani not know about.
“It’s cool! Honestly,” Dani says, saving Eleanor from needing to make up an excuse. “I’m just happy you didn’t fall asleep.”
Dani’s smile is as easy as ever. She moves behind the counter, punching a few keys on the decades-old cash register, but when the numbers come up on the tiny screen, Eleanor sighs in exasperation.
“You undercharged me again.”
“It’s the price of the tire. I took all that extra time teaching you, I’m not gonna charge you for labour,” Dani says. She tries to wave off Eleanor’s protests, but Eleanor stands firm this time.
“And I’m not going to let you fix my car for free.”
“It was barely ten minutes work!”
“I’m paying you even if I have to punch it into the terminal myself,” Eleanor says, her wallet held threateningly in her hand.
Dani seems to sense that she’s outgunned. She smiles, rubbing the back of her neck in a gesture that’s starting to feel familiar.
“How’s about you buy me a coffee?”
* * *
Riverwalk only has one coffee shop open past 6 p.m.—it’s attached to one of the two rival gas stations in town, which are positioned across the road from each other and are constantly fighting over prices.
Eleanor pulls into the small parking lot next to Dani’s truck, which in the light of day turns out to be some kind of classic model that she’s fixed up until the cherry-red paint shines like it’s new. The back window is plastered with stickers—most prominently, Eleanor can see a bumblebee, a variety of cartoon fruits, and a decal that reads don’t panic, I’m a mechanic .
Dani allows Eleanor to pay for the dark roast and five doughnuts she orders and leads her to a secluded table in the corner.
“There. Now we’re even,” Dani says.
“Because I paid for your seven-dollar order? That doesn’t seem fair,” Eleanor says, scooping the bag out of her herbal tea and setting it on a napkin.
“You’re also paying me with the pleasure of your company!”
It’s entirely too earnest to be flirty, but Eleanor blushes anyway. She takes a sip of her too-hot tea to cover, and scalds her tongue.
“What do you think of Riverwalk so far? Does it compare to the big city?” Dani asks, taking a bite of her first doughnut. It leaves a little bit of powdered sugar on her chin. Dani swipes it away without even looking, as if she does this every day. Which, Eleanor thinks, based on what she knows about Dani’s gas station purchasing habits, she probably does. How Dani keeps the muscle mass she has on such a diet, Eleanor has no idea.
“It’s different,” Eleanor says carefully.
Dani laughs around her mouthful of doughnut. “If you don’t like it, you can say so. I won’t be offended.”
“I don’t dis like it!” Eleanor hurries to correct, and Dani raises an eyebrow. “I’m still getting used to slowing down. I’ve been going so fast for so long that it feels like…”
“Hitting a wall?”
“Exactly.”
Dani nods. “Yeah, I get it. I actually grew up in the city for a while.”
“Really?”
The question comes out maybe a bit more incredulous than it should, but Dani doesn’t comment. She never seems to mind Eleanor’s unintentional rudeness. She only nods, a little more solemn this time.
“My dad’s family grew up here, but he moved down south to be with my mom. My Aunt Carol stayed. She was a single mom, and she wanted to raise Sarah in a smaller community. So when my parents died…”
Eleanor’s heart sinks. Not from dread or nerves this time, but empathy. Her grief over her father’s death is complicated, but having lost her own mother when she was barely out of kindergarten, Eleanor knows the slight ache that accompanies the trailing off of Dani’s story. The hollow place where someone is missing, no matter how much time passes.
“Car crash. So you don’t have to ask,” Dani says with a kind smile, sensing Eleanor’s hesitance. “Carol is my godmother as well as my aunt, so she adopted me.”
“I’m so sorry,” Eleanor says simply. She herself has never liked the kind of cloying, uncomfortable pity that usually accompanies admitting that her parents are dead, and Dani seems grateful not to receive it from her.
“Thank you. It’s okay. I miss them, but I’m okay,” Dani says. There’s an old sadness there, but Dani doesn’t linger on it. “Turns out there was a shoddy repair in their car. I used to take cars apart all the time, trying to make them safer, maybe figure out how I could have—” Dani stops herself, sighing and laughing a little. “Well. I was eight. Two separate therapists and my grandparents’ super earnest rabbi all assured me that I couldn’t have done anything, but I can do something now. Fix stuff before it breaks. Try to make things better.”
The soft explanation reminds Eleanor with an uncomfortable jolt of her entire purpose here—the project she’s been pushing aside in favour of the woman sitting across the table. She’s looked at her in-progress feasibility study less than usual since she met Dani, but the comment about safety and making things better is a stark reminder.
Eleanor wants to make things better, too. For her eco-tech projects to ever see the light of day, she should really be doing her job instead of whatever she’s doing right now.
“That’s very noble of you,” Eleanor says, taking a more moderate sip of tea and pushing that thought back down. “Is that why you chronically undercharge people?”
Dani shrugs. She stuffs the rest of the doughnut into her mouth and moves on to the next. “Only the people I like.”
Eleanor directs her smile downward and into her tea.
“You’ve heard my tragic backstory now. What about you?” Dani asks. She carefully selects a sprinkled doughnut, rotating it to find the best place for a first bite, and Eleanor hopes that the shot of anxiety the question sends through her goes unnoticed. “I don’t know much about you.”
Eleanor straightens her posture. She folds her hands around her cup, arms braced on the table in preparation to avoid as many questions as possible. “What do you want to know?”
“Hey, no reason to be nervous,” Dani says. Her easy tone is helpful, but her first question is one Eleanor has been hoping to avoid. “Just curious. Like, what do you like to do? Hobbies, interests?”
Eleanor swallows. Her burnt tongue feels too big for her mouth.
“I work for a tech company. Corporate,” Eleanor says. Keeping it vague is probably for the best. Thankfully Dani takes another huge bite of her sprinkle doughnut and doesn’t seem to question it.
“Not exactly what I asked, but that explains the clothes,” Dani says, gesturing vaguely at Eleanor with sugary hands. Eleanor bristles.
“What’s wrong with my clothes?”
“Nothing! They’re really nice. But you definitely look like you’re ready for the boardroom, not the gas station coffee shop.”
Eleanor looks down at herself. She’s wearing what she would consider a completely average outfit—a pencil skirt and blouse with heels. Sure, the heels are Louboutin. And she might have put a bit of extra effort into her hair, brushing and straightening it incessantly, knowing there was a chance she’d see Dani at the shop. But she hasn’t changed her makeup routine from the one she usually does before work every day.
Oh.
“I take your point,” Eleanor admits, smoothing her skirt down with a wry smile. “So, if I buy some clothes here, do they come with motor oil already on them, or do I need to pay extra?”
Dani grins, dusting her hands together until rainbow sprinkles scatter from her fingers into her lap. “No oil required. Maybe just something a little more comfortable if you’re gonna be living here?”
Comfortable . It’s been a long time since Eleanor felt truly comfortable anywhere, regardless of what she’s wearing. Before this little break, she spent her days among executives, only to go home to an apartment so tidy and disused that it’s always felt like a realtor’s showroom. Her clothes are picked to match.
She hadn’t really considered how other people see her here, but now that Eleanor thinks about it, it’s true—this is a jeans-and-flannel kind of town, with few exceptions. Simple and practical. She must stick out like a sore thumb.
“I only came for the summer,” Eleanor says. “Not sure I need a full wardrobe overhaul for a short trip.”
Dani nods appraisingly. “So this is your vacation?”
Eleanor wrings her hands together under the table. The conversation is dancing very close to the truth, and as Dani removes the plastic lid from her coffee to take a careful sip, Eleanor wrestles with her options. She could outright lie to Dani about the reason behind her time in Riverwalk, or she could reveal it all and let the chips fall where they may.
Or perhaps she could take the coward’s route. She could say nothing at all, avoid all specifics in an effort not to actually lie, and continue her ridiculous quest to spend more time with Dani.
“My friends seem to think I work too much,” Eleanor says.
There. Simple and vague. As long as Dani doesn’t push, maybe their acquaintanceship can last a little longer.
Dani starts on her third doughnut, a chocolate glazed which she takes to with great enthusiasm. “What are you doing to unwind, then? When you’re not calling me to fix your car.”
“Honestly, not much. I’ve been working,” Eleanor admits.
Dani’s brow raises.
“What else am I supposed to do?” Eleanor says, maybe a bit defensively.
She isn’t sure why she feels the need to defend herself to Dani. Eleanor has been ignoring her actual project, sure, but the work she has been doing is enjoyable. She’s been filling her time with creating schematics, small prototypes, future project outlines—the part of her job that she used to actually like.
“I like my work, but I don’t do it on vacation,” Dani says, her mouth full of doughnut yet again.
Eleanor should find Dani talking with her mouth full repulsive, but somehow on Dani it’s cute. There’s a chocolate crumb at the corner of her mouth that Eleanor wants to brush away with her finger.
“This town isn’t exactly rife with activities,” Eleanor says. Immediately she regrets it because Dani has a list of activities so ready that it almost feels rehearsed.
“There’s lots to do here! There’s a bowling alley, and a drive-in movie theatre twenty minutes down the highway.”
“A drive-in?” Eleanor interrupts, skeptical. “Did I go back in time when I arrived?”
“And we have all sorts of festivals in the summer!” Dani continues determinedly. “Plus, there’s hiking in the woods, fishing, swimming—you just need to get a little creative.”
“Do I look like I hike?”
“You look like you need to learn how to downshift. Have some fun for once.”
Eleanor sighs. It’s not an untrue statement. Having fun has never been her strong suit. “I’m not sure I know how.”
“More of a pedal-to-the-metal person?”
Eleanor lets out a short laugh. “If we’re using car metaphors, probably closer to ‘burning rubber.’”
“No wonder your transmission was shot.”
Eleanor’s laugh is louder this time. Dani is grinning over the rim of her coffee in a way that makes her eyes sparkle, even under the gas station’s fluorescent lights.
Their chat extends far beyond their empty cups. Dani eats more pastries than Eleanor thought humanly possible, and Eleanor occasionally misses parts of the conversation while she considers what Dani’s sugary lips might taste like until the exasperated cashier finally asks them to leave.
When they step outside and the poor woman finally flips the Closed sign over in the window and shuts out the lights, Eleanor notices the posted hours; they’ve overstayed their welcome by close to half an hour.
Dani laughs abashedly. “I think I’m gonna have to give Katie a free oil change to make up for that.”
Eleanor does feel a bit guilty for stretching out the woman’s shift, but the warm knowledge that Dani lost track of time as much as she did is enough to quell it. She’ll have to leave a big tip the next time she stops by for coffee.
“This was fun,” Eleanor says, hyperaware of how awkwardly the words are probably coming across. “Really fun. Thank you.”
Dani opens her mouth to respond, but she’s drowned out by the sudden cacophony of two very loud trucks racing down the road toward them.
They’re unreasonably enormous vehicles. One has a lightning decal splashed across the side, and the other has tires which are clearly too big for the frame, sticking out like shoulder pads on an unfashionable jacket. Both sport unnecessarily powerful engines, if their speed and volume are any indication.
Loud music is blaring from the open windows. The man driving the truck with the huge wheels waves at Dani, who doesn’t wave back. The person in the lightning truck is Jenny, the bartender from the River Run, which Eleanor can only tell by the bright shock of blue in her hair. Jenny gives Dani the finger.
The two trucks roar past the gas station, ignoring the nearby stop sign and screeching around the corner until their noise finally fades.
“Sorry about them,” Dani mutters, unlocking her own truck and seemingly dropping what she was about to say before the interruption. “They rip through here all the time. I keep telling them they’re gonna kill someone if they aren’t more careful, but they don’t listen.”
“Jenny doesn’t seem like the type to take advice,” Eleanor says.
“She really isn’t. Never has been. And Shaun’s a little shit-disturber.” Dani hops into her truck and turns the ignition. “I gotta go, though. Sarah needs me to open the shop up early tomorrow.” Dani pauses before she throws the truck into drive. Maybe Eleanor is projecting, but her smile seems to soften a little. “Thanks for a really great night.”
Dani pulls away when Eleanor waves good night. For the second time Eleanor watches her drive away, wishing it wasn’t the end of their time together. And yet Eleanor realizes as the truck revs its way through the town’s only traffic light, she still didn’t ask Dani for her number.
Damn.