Chapter 3High schoolers have gone further than I have. #3
She laughs like I’m delusional, so I knock my elbow with hers.
“You probably know more than you think,” I say because she’s the humble type of woman who claims to be a novice and will turn around and rebuild an engine quicker than me.
Maybe not today, but one day, I know it.
Because I know how smart and determined she is.
“But yeah. Sign me up. I’ll teach you anything you want to know.
” I take another bite and swallow before adding, “you’ve got the hard job.
Teaching confidence to me.” I shake my head and let out a low whistle.
“You saw me talking to that woman yesterday, right?”
She snorts through a sip of iced tea, bringing her wrist to the underside of her nose to catch her raucous laughter. “That was painful.”
We laugh at my expense, but I’m okay with it because that was essentially a crime scene with the way she murderously rejected me.
I use the paper napkin she’s put out to wipe my mouth, and when I crumple it and drop it on the plate, I notice Delane watching me.
“Having doubts, eh?” I tease, but she straightens her posture and laces her hands together in her lap.
She looks like she’s on the cusp of dropping big news, like telling your parents you wrecked the car or something.
“Honestly, Laney, I’ll help you learn to work on cars without you trying to do the imposs–”
“I have a plan, but you need to trust the process, okay?”
Trust the process. That always sounds dangerously close to “I won’t know if this is all wrong until we’re at least halfway into it,” so I admit, I am skeptical.
But whatever she’s got planned equates to time with her. Helping her learn cars–that’s more time with her. It also means less time alone, even if we part ways in a few weeks, so I know I'm down for whatever scheme she’s cooked up.
“Okay,” I nod, watching how she smooths her thumb across the bed of each fingernail, fidgeting more than I’ve ever seen .
“First, the rules.”
I know I should ask “rules for what” before we even establish rules, but like I said, I’m saying yes to whatever it is she’s thinking, so instead, I say, “alright.”
She edges closer to the counter, moving the stool with her. The way she twists her core to somewhat face me while also shying away from my gaze is enticing. “We start now, and we end when I’ve completed all of the workshops in my book. I’ll pace your lessons with mine.”
I scratch the mid-day stubble along my jaw. “What book?”
From beneath the desk, the same place she often stashes her purse, Delane produces a thick, worn old manual.
The Mechanics Bible is visible on the cover.
“Each lesson has a workshop at the end, something you try in your own garage.” She taps the cover with one nail after dropping it onto the Plexiglass.
“There are fifteen workshops. If we spend a week on one, that’s about fifteen weeks. ”
Not long enough and yet still more than I’ve ever gotten or would get without this little arrangement.
“Okay,” I agree easily, still not sure how she plans on teaching me confidence.
“So we start now, huh?” I ask, my tone prodding her teasingly, knowing there isn’t anything either of us can do to benefit each other with just ten minutes remaining on our lunch break.
She swivels to face me, and our knees bump as she stares me down, lips in a grin. “Show me how you kiss.”
Show me how you kiss? No, Delane didn’t say that. Kiss. What rhymes with kiss? Miss? Tiss? Pi– “I’m sorry,” I say, shoving a finger into my ear and wiggling it around to see if my confusion breaks free. Wiggle, wiggle. Nope, still confused as ever. “Show you how I kiss ?”
She laughs, and it does nothing to stop the pulsing and growing going on south of the border. “I suspect most of your insecurity is in your abilities with women,” she says slowly as if saying the words too fast will make them hurt more. The fact that they’re true has them hurting plenty.
“Inabilities,” I admit, because what’s the point in denying it? She’s right. My lack of experience holds me by the throat, keeping me from getting a girlfriend. It may as well–if I got one that stuck around, I couldn’t seal the deal anyway.
“So I’m right in my assumption?” she asks, still talking low and slow, and I appreciate her sensitivity around my pathetic lack of experience. I refuse to let myself really focus on the fact that my inexperience is that freaking obvious in the first place.
I nod. “If you are assuming that I suck at hitting on and keeping women because I am inexperienced and nervous, like, Steve Urkel status, then yes. You are assuming correctly.”
“Steve, who?” her eyebrows pull together, and even her confusion is cute.
I sometimes forget that being starved of sitcoms and network television growing up has me in a weird spot in my mid-twenties. I fill a lot of my downtime with watching all the junk TV I never got to watch–including but not limited to Family Matters.
“Nothing,” I wave off the reference to the old TV show because most kids had normal childhoods where they were allowed to watch whatever they wanted.
Read whatever they wanted. I’m sure Delane’s seen reruns of Family Matters —and other laugh-track shows that defined the 1990s–in her peripheral and doesn’t even know it.
It’s when you go without something for so long that you become hyper-fixated on it.
That was me for my first few years on my own. Every time I felt overwhelmingly abandoned, unloved, and alone, I took my measly apprentice paycheck and purchased myself something that would previously be denied to me.
And now, years later, I’ve bought myself most experiences.
But not all.
“You think I’m a bad kisser?” I ask her as she scoots her stool closer to me. I like that.
She shrugs casually. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine you being a bad kisser–”
“If you can’t imagine it, that means you have imagined me kissing…
someone,” I say, feeling so much bravery I barely recognize myself.
I don’t usually flirt like this. Heck, I can’t normally flirt like this.
I know it’s flirting, though. I’m not that helpless.
Our voices are lower, we’re sitting closer, and both of us are wearing syrupy sweet smiles.
With Delane, it doesn’t feel like I’m trying to flirt or come onto her. Instead, it feels a lot like me being me, her being her, and that being the easiest and best combination ever.
She rolls her eyes, but she can’t shake the pink in her complexion. “Anyway,” she says, not addressing my comment but… I’m right. She has pictured it. That’s…interesting. “I think if you were able to enjoy instead of being nervous, then your entire dating game would change.”
I snort. “There isn’t much of a game going on. More like permanent half-time.”
“Either way,” she says. “Watching you ask that woman out was hard, Miller. You were so uncomfortable that even I wanted to slither away. I think if you weren’t dreading all the contact and sweating about who’s making what move when you’d do a lot better. Would you agree?”
I nod because that is what I worry about.
All the firsts hanging out on the line, just out of reach but inevitable on the horizon.
I never feel like I do the right thing the right way.
And I do feel a little bit like a forty-something going back to college; everyone knows I’m late to the game, and it’s even more embarrassing.
“I would agree,” I admit sheepishly, swiping my hands down my face.
I keep them there for a second because this lunch is so confusing and exciting and a little embarrassing.
She sees my weakness, but she’s offering to help.
And all I have to do is work on cars–which I love–and show her what to do–which gets us time together. Win-win.
“So kiss me right now. Kiss me like it’s the end of our first date. Show me how you kiss. That’s where we’ll start.”
Then she rests her hand on my knee. Splaying her fingers out, she leans forward, and I watch in what feels like a private dream as her eyes close slowly.
And then Delane waits for me to kiss her.