Chapter Two #3
The sounds from the bay continued. Metal on metal, something pneumatic hissing, the scrape of a tool against a surface.
Setting aside my coffee, I stood. The couch was comfortable, the Danish was excellent, but sitting here felt wasteful. I was burning daylight in a waiting room while something significantly more interesting was happening twenty feet away.
I headed back into the bay. Diesel was bent over the open hood, both arms deep in the engine. His shirt had ridden up slightly in the back, showing a strip of skin and the top edge of what looked like a tattoo.
“Hey.”
He glanced back then straightened. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I’m not really a TV person. Thought I’d see if I could watch you work. If that’s not breaking some kind of garage code.”
A glint of amusement flashed in his eyes. “No code. Just be careful and try not to touch anything.”
“Wasn’t planning on it. My mechanical knowledge tops out at the gas pump.”
“Good to know your limits.” He winked. The flirt. “Come here.”
I walked over to the front of the shuttle. Up close, the engine looked even more complicated than it had yesterday. Wires and hoses and metal thingies. I did recognize the container for the windshield washer fluid. Go me.
“Very bad. Alternator charges your battery while the engine runs. When it fails, you’re running on battery power alone. Eventually, the battery dies, and—”
“Errrrrrrr-clunk-nothing,” I finished.
His mouth twitched again. “Technical term.”
“I’m full of them.”
“I’m learning that.” He reached into the engine. “Hand me that ratchet. The one with the red handle.”
Glancing at the toolbox, I spotted several with red handles. “This one?”
“Other one. Smaller.”
I grabbed what I hoped was the right tool and handed it over. Our fingers brushed during the exchange. I pretended not to notice the way my skin tingled at the contact.
“So you work for Speed Escapades?” Diesel worked the ratchet with steady movements.
“Yeah. About six months now.”
“Like it?”
“More than I expected to. The seniors are...” I searched for the right word. “Memorable. Loud. Occasionally trying to set me up with their teenage relatives.”
He paused, glancing at me. “Teenage relatives?”
“Greta’s grandson. She’s very persistent. I’m very law-abiding.”
“Good priorities.” He returned his attention to the engine, but I caught the edge of a smile. “What’d you do before this?”
“Retail. Various stores, various positions, all equally soul-crushing.” I leaned against the workbench and watched him work. “This is better. At least I’m outside, and the seniors are entertaining even when they’re driving me crazy.”
“Fair trade-off.”
I thought so. “What about you? Always been a mechanic?”
“Since I was sixteen. Started working on motorcycles with my dad, moved to cars.” He pulled something free from the engine—the dead alternator, presumably—and set it on the workbench.
It looked even more spidery up close.
“That thing looks like it got pulled out of a junkyard,” I said.
“Alternators don’t usually fail this dramatically unless something else was already wrong.” He grabbed a new alternator from a shelf, all shiny and no gunk. “This should last you a good while. As long as you don’t ignore weird noises.”
“Does Walter count as weird noises?” I constantly checked my rearview mirror to make sure he wasn’t morphing into Venom. The guy needed more fiber in his diet.
“No.” Diesel smirked. If he kept doing that, I wasn’t going to survive the next few hours. I was barely surviving how good he smelled.
Lowering my gaze, I noticed his scarred knuckles. He wasn’t afraid of hard work. Or possibly bar fights.
“You always this quiet when you watch people work?” he asked without looking up.
“Usually I’m talking someone out of buying seventeen cans of tuna they don’t need. This is a nice change of pace.”
“Seventeen cans?”
“Minus twelve.”
“Edith.”
Diesel remembered my grey-haired rebels.
The Flatulent Five. Why did that touch me in all my soft spots?
Because they didn’t really have anyone. Greta had a grandson she was trying to get me arrested over, but I knew she put more into their relationship than he did.
Irene’s daughter stayed on top of her mom’s health because she didn’t want the burden of taking care of an aging parent.
They might be a handful, but in the six months that I’d known them, they’d started to feel like family.
He grabbed another tool from the box and reached back into the engine. “Your crew seems like a handful.”
“They’re the best kind of handful. The kind that keeps threatening to set me up but also brought me cookies when I had the flu last month.”
“Sounds like family.”
“Better than, in some cases.” In my case particularly since they were pretty much the only family I had. They were rough around the edges, but that was what happened when the family you raised and the life you’d lived left you with nothing but quiet.
“It’s what you make it.” Diesel wiped his hands on a rag, never breaking eye contact.
“I think so.”
We fell into comfortable silence after that. He worked, I watched, and the morning sun streamed through the open bay door. Best morning I’d had in a very long time.