7. Music and Mechanics #3
“The alternator’s this one.” Morgan pointed.
“It’s belt-driven off the engine. When it’s healthy, it keeps the battery charged while the car runs.
This one’s worn out.” She held out a socket wrench, handle first. “The mounting bolt’s here.
You’ll feel it seat when it’s lined up right. Don’t force it—let the tool find it.”
Nora took the wrench. It was heavier than she expected, cool in her palm. She reached into the engine bay and immediately had no idea what she was doing, the socket bumping uselessly against metal.
“Here.” Morgan’s hand closed over hers.
It wasn’t anything. It was a mechanic adjusting a customer’s grip. But Nora felt it everywhere—the calluses, the steadiness, the careful warmth of Morgan’s fingers guiding hers a few degrees to the left until the socket dropped suddenly, cleanly, onto the bolt head.
“There,” Morgan said. “Feel that? When it’s right, it just… fits.”
“Yeah.” Nora’s voice came out lower than she meant it to. “I feel it.”
Neither of them moved. Morgan’s hand was still over hers, both of them bent close over the engine, and the quiet in the shop had changed into something with weight to it.
Nora was acutely aware of how little space there was between them—of Morgan’s shoulder almost against hers, of the way Morgan had gone very still, of the fact that if she turned her head even slightly they would be close enough to—
Morgan turned her head.
For a heartbeat they just looked at each other, far too close, the wrench forgotten under both their hands. Morgan’s eyes flicked down—Nora was almost sure they did—and Nora felt herself start to lean, slow, helpless.
Rusty barked.
Just once, at a delivery truck pulling into the lot—but it cracked the moment clean in half. Morgan straightened fast, pulling her hand back, turning toward the sound. “Parts delivery,” she said, and her voice was perfectly level, and that somehow made it worse.
“Right.” Nora stepped back, set the wrench down on the bench with hands that weren’t quite steady. “Of course.”
Morgan went to deal with the delivery driver. Nora retreated to her stool and picked up her guitar and stared at it, and did not play anything, because her heart was going too fast and this time, it wasn’t from panic—it was from something she had no grounding exercise for at all.
This was a problem.
She’d come here because Morgan was safe—quiet, undemanding, a person who didn’t want anything from her. A place to just exist. And she’d been telling herself that was all it was, a calm room in a burning year.
But calm wasn’t what she was feeling right now. Right now she wanted to cross the shop and stand close to Morgan again and that scared her more than the blank page…
When Morgan came back in, she didn’t mention it. Just picked up where she’d left off, hands sure and ordinary, as if nothing had hung in the air between them at all.
Maybe for her, nothing had.
Nora made herself breathe and made herself look at her notebook. After a while, almost despite herself, a line came: I keep looking for home in places that were never mine.
“That sounded different,” Morgan said, not looking up.
Nora blinked. “What?”
“The last thing you played. Less… programmed.”
“You were listening?”
“I can hear.” Morgan tightened a bolt with precise force.
A soft sigh escaped Nora. “I don’t know how to mean it anymore. I don’t know how to write without thinking about what people will think.”
Morgan was quiet for a long moment, hands moving through the familiar motions of her work.
Then she said, “When I was a kid, I spent all my time at this shop. The man who ran it before me—Mr. Tom—he’d let me hand him tools, explain what he was doing.
I never thought about whether I was good at it.
I just… did it.” She moved to a different section of the engine, her movements sure and economical.
“Then I started handling customers. They expected things. I started second-guessing. Made everything harder.” She paused.
“Mr. Tom reminded me that the car doesn’t care what I’m thinking.
It only responds to what I actually do.”
“So I should stop thinking about the audience?”
Morgan shrugged. “I don’t know anything about music or audiences. But there was a difference in how you played that last bit.”
Nora stared at Morgan’s back. “Can I come back tomorrow?” The question slipped out before she could stop it. “To write here, I mean. If it’s not too weird.”
Morgan paused, considering. Her shoulders tensed slightly—the first sign of uncertainty Nora had seen from her since the delivery truck. “It’s weird.”
“Oh. Yeah, sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
“But it’s fine.”
Nora’s heart thrummed faster. “Really?”
“Rusty likes you. And you’re quiet when you’re actually writing.” Morgan glanced over her shoulder, expression carefully neutral. “Just don’t expect conversation.”
“I don’t.” Nora smiled, surprising herself. “I like the quiet.”
“Good.”
When Nora left an hour later, she had three lines of lyrics that felt real, a melody that didn’t sound forced, and the knowledge that she’d be back tomorrow.