Chapter 7
I should’ve known Zola coming would mean more than a quick detour at the Duchess drive-through. Twenty-five uninterrupted minutes dragging me for a dumb mistake is worth more to her than gold. This passenger princess is having the time of her life.
“You’re just lucky the tow guy got you off the road before someone smashed into you. This could have been so much worse.”
She pauses to lick BBQ sauce from a strip of bacon with so much enthusiasm, it’s near pornographic. I avert my eyes to give the pair a moment of privacy, but unfortunately, I can’t avert my ears as she continues.
“You could’ve charged at home for like ten minutes and avoided all this.”
I consider reminding Zo that if we’re going to coulda, woulda, shoulda my unfavorable charging consequences, we should keep the tow and wish away late-night dating app hookups. But she’s already continuing her lecture without me.
“And why not have him tow you to a charge station? Why choose the most expensive and inconvenient option possible?”
Hormones, just hormones, I tell myself, though this particular Zolaism isn’t the baby’s fault. Unsolicited opinions are the only kind Zo’s got.
Luckily, her judgments and her burger provide Zola all the company she needs.
She hardly seems to notice how quickly I leave her behind once we’re parked outside the shop.
But I hadn’t realized what I’d be walking into, and as I step through the lobby doors, I almost wish I wasn’t experiencing it alone.
The energy is different in here—pulsing cool and low with the bass line.
Street art renderings of Black icons line the walls from the cash register all the way to the vending machines in back.
Familiar figures taking on new life under soft studio lights.
Immortalized, reverently, by the detailed stroke of a brush.
I scan the portraits that seem to leap off the walls, but even the walls themselves tug at my gaze. Striking city scenes and intricate landscapes shouting the words to their own stories. Just as rich and alive as each subject within the frames and treated with as much care.
It’s like stepping inside the pages of a love letter to the culture.
I’m still studying the floor-to-ceiling murals, reveling in all the hidden treasures the artist left to be discovered, when a voice rumbles behind me.
“So how was it? Those bartenders still corrupting our youth?”
His words pull me from my trance. Deading my perusal so abruptly that I physically trip over myself as I spin toward him.
There’s not even time for me to put my own hands out to catch my fall, before his are on me—steadying me, with a firm but gentle certainty.
Once I’m no longer a fall risk, he releases me. “Shit, sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“No!” I say, too forcefully. “I mean, no—you didn’t. I just wasn’t paying attention. Or I was paying too much attention. To all this.” I raise my hands to our surroundings. As if perhaps he’s unaware that he’s in the presence of magic. “I wasn’t expecting this place to be so…”
But finding the words to convey stepping through that vortex of a front door is futile.
He brings both of his delicately veined hands up to adjust his Kith hat, and I blame my earlier perusal of the murals for the way I also study him now.
My brain, immersed in this world where everything is art.
Including each graceful movement his fingers make before he tucks them into his crossed arms.
“I wanted it to be a place you could lose a little time,” he tells me. “But most people who come through hardly notice. Probably woulda been better off putting those hours toward a commissioned piece, but once I see it—” He brings a graceful finger to his temple, with a shrug. “It’s over.”
My eyes bug out of my head. “You did this?”
“I did,” he says, assessing the walls with me, like he’s seeing them for the first time again.
“It’s—” I start, but words fail me again. “I feel like I should’ve paid an entry fee to get in.”
I hadn’t committed his laughter to memory, but the husky sound brings a familiar warmth to my belly. And that, I do remember. Luckily, staring at his work affords me a necessary distraction from whatever’s happening to my insides.
He stands beside me, turned toward a muraled wall in quiet contemplation. My eyes dart between the art and the artist in front of it.
His profile is all hard lines and chiseled edges—torched steel, right at home in this auto shop—but there’s a softness to his nose that I hadn’t noticed yesterday.
Rounded curves that offset the otherwise statuesque features I’d initially found intimidating.
Though his demeanor is proving to be anything but.
When his dimple pops in quiet pride, I’m incapable of keeping my own face passive. He’s the one controlling my smile now—like some sort of master puppeteer.
I’d planned to put the “one green eye, one blue eye,” thing I saw in a movie on Zola’s questionnaire to piss her off, but now when she asks my ideal physical type, I fear I must paste a picture of this man.
His expression shifts to thinly veiled amusement when he notices me watching him. Again. “Don’t let this fool you,” he says, keeping the air between us light. “Pops wouldn’t let me touch his garage. It’s still foul as ever back there.”
“Well, I appreciate the warning,” I tell him. “I’ll try not to be too disappointed.”
He holds a hand out to direct me toward the register, and we make our way across the lobby. “So, how’d your night turn out? Worth the trouble?”
The look on my face gives me away.
He smiles. “That bad?”
But before either of us can say more, Zola bursts through the front door waving my forgotten tow paperwork in the air like she’s trying to land a 747. I rush to intercept her, but her sight line is already locked on something more interesting behind me. Or someone.
“Hey,” she says, marching past me with a fake-ass smile plastered on her face. “I’m Kaia’s sister, Zola.”
“Nice to meet you,” he says, glancing toward me in a way that says, Watch how easy this is. And enunciates, “I’m Ro,” like R and O are the Sesame Street letters of the day.
“No way.” Zola giggles. Yes, giggles. “Everyone calls me Zo. How funny: Zo and Ro.”
I know my pregnant sister is not flirting with this man in broad daylight.
“The only people who call you Zo are me and Mom,” I say, openly hating.
She’s undeterred. “I just wanted to pop in to give this to my forgetful baby sis. But it looks like you two are doing just fine without me.”
She finally directs her attention back to me, with her eyebrows raised and nostrils flared in that way that silently screams: Girl!
“Okay, Zola,” I say, hitting the last syllable of her name extra-hard. “You’ve been a huge help. I’ll see you back at home.”
“So, you work here, Ro?” Zola asks, as if I haven’t spoken a word.
“Right now, yeah,” he tells her. “It’s my dad’s shop. I’ve been in town a couple months helping out.”
Zola pretends to survey the space before setting her sights right back on Ro. “It’s so nice. Does your girlfriend help out too?”
I’m dead.
Ro bites his lip to keep from laughing and shakes his head. “Nah. Ya know, it’s funny, I’ve never dated a girl who was real into cars.”
Having completed the transition from twenty-six-year-old woman to meddling auntie, Zola sucks her teeth. “Imagine that.”
I’m firing off all types of sisterly telepathy and universal girl-code death stares, but Zola’s on a mission.
“So, if your girlfriend isn’t into cars, how does she spend her time?”
Goodbye forever.
Ro’s eyes volley between us like he’s sorting out a riddle. “I don’t have one,” he says, giving Zola exactly what she wants. “I’m single.”
“You don’t say,” Zola says, elbowing me.
Welp. I tried to get the car back, but it lives here now. Ro can keep it. He can sell it. He can set it on fire for all I care. I’m leaving and so is Zola.
“Zola, don’t you have somewhere to be?” I say, trying (and failing) to sound intimidating. Unfortunately, as far as Zola’s concerned, I no longer exist.
“So, do you work every weekend, Ro?”
“Not every weekend,” he says, playing along. “If I’m not picking girls up on the side of the road and delivering them to neighborhood sports bars, I’m usually off Fridays.”
“Wait!” Zola yells. “You’re the guy who saved Kaia yesterday?”
I sneer. “Okay, I wouldn’t exactly say saved.”
Ro laughs. “Nah. Kaia doesn’t strike me as someone who needs saving. Just a ride every now and then. And a charge wouldn’t hurt. But yeah, that was me.”
Zola’s wild eyes land on me, and I’m terrified.
“Oh my god, Kai, I just had the best idea! Maybe Ro’s available for our little project.”
“Zola,” I say, desperate to stop her. Just once I’d like to leave this guy’s presence with my dignity somewhat intact.
“He could be my first pick for—”
“Stop,” I yell. “He doesn’t need to hear all this, he’s just the tow truck guy.”
The carelessness of my words stuns us all into a silence that goes on a beat too long. As if not speaking might give someone a chance to re-pin the live grenade I’ve just hurled.
“Okay,” Zo says too calmly. Blinking away her dreams of future family dinners with the guy beside me. The one who currently looks like he’s been punched in the gut while his guard was down.
“I’ll go, and just see you back at home,” she continues. “Ro, it was really nice to meet you. And your place is great, by the way. I need to get the name of the artist you used.”
Ro nods once, crossing his arms tightly over his chest when he says, “That would be me.”
It’s such a departure from how he’d looked and sounded talking about his work before. And it’s my fault.
Zola’s eyebrows lift at the news, but she leaves it alone. “Well, thanks again for all your help.”
“It’s all good,” he tells her, without a hint of his earlier levity. “That’s my job.” And when he continues, he’s still speaking to Zola, but his gaze and his words are directed at me—daggers hurling toward their target. “I’m just the tow truck guy.”
Shit.
—