Beck
Ireorganize my socket set twice after she leaves.
Not because it needs it. Because my hands want something to do that isn’t thinking about the way Callie Wynn stood at my workbench and explained a blown MOSFET back to me like she was presenting a thesis.
I work on the Subaru. Change the oil on a snowmobile that doesn’t need it yet. Sweep the shop floor, which I never do on Thursdays. By five o’clock, I’ve run out of things to clean and have to admit I’m stalling, though I couldn’t say what I’m stalling for.
I lock up and walk to Lea’s.
I always go in the morning. Never the afternoon. Lea gives me a look when I walk in, the kind that says she’s noticed, and I ignore it and order my coffee and stand at the counter while she makes it.
“Twice in one day,” she says.
“Just coffee.”
“It’s always just coffee.” She sets the cup down. “And yet here you are at 5:15 looking like you forgot how to leave a building.”
I take the coffee and don’t answer, because Lea is exactly the kind of person who can read a room, and I don’t feel like being read.
The Trading Post courtyard is quiet at this hour. Most of the shops are closing up. The bookstore still has lights on. The candle place has its door propped open, and the whole courtyard smells like cedar and vanilla.
I should go home. My truck is in the other direction. My apartment is a ten-minute drive. There’s no reason to stand in a cobblestone courtyard drinking coffee I don’t need.
Callie comes out of the outfitter with a box of flyers under one arm and her keys in her teeth, trying to lock the front door one-handed. She’s losing the battle. The keys slip, she catches them against her chin, and the box starts to slide.
I’m across the courtyard before I decide to move.
“Here.” I take the box.
She looks up at me, keys dangling from her fingers, and there it is again. That smile. Wide open, no armor, like being happy to see someone is the easiest thing in the world and she can’t imagine why anyone would hide it.
“Beck. What are you doing here?”
“Coffee.”
“At five in the afternoon?”
“It’s 5:15.”
She laughs. I’m starting to understand that she laughs at things that aren’t funny, not because she’s being polite but because something in her sees humor everywhere, even in a mechanic standing in a courtyard holding her box and failing to explain why.
“Walk me to my car?” she says. “I’m around back.”
I should hand her the box and go home. That’s the correct move. The smart, uncomplicated, keep-your-life-simple move.
“Yeah,” I say.
We walk through the courtyard and around the back of the old stone buildings. The parking area is gravel, tucked between the Trading Post and the hillside. One car left—a sedan with a cracked windshield and a bumper sticker that reads I’d rather be skiing.
“That tracks,” I say.
“Don’t judge my car.”
“I’m a mechanic. I’m always judging cars.”
She pops the trunk and I set the box inside.
When I straighten up, she’s close. Closer than the courtyard, closer than the workbench.
The evening is warm and the light is going golden and soft around the edges.
Her eyes are brown. I hadn’t noticed that before.
Light brown, almost amber in this light.
I notice it now.
“Thank you,” she says. “For the bike. For the upgrade you didn’t have to do.”
“Already said it was practical.”
“And I already said it can be both.”
She’s looking at me the way she looked at me in the shop, when I told her ski instruction was a skill and not a vacation. Like I’ve given her something she’s been waiting for. The problem is that she’s giving me the same thing back, and I don’t know where to put it.
People call me when things break. That’s my role in this town. Beck, the guy you call. Beck, who can fix it. Nobody shows up at my shop to talk about transistors they researched on their lunch break. Nobody stands in a parking lot looking at me like I’m something other than a service they need.
“Callie.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Any of this. Carry boxes. Stand in parking lots. Talk.”
“You’re doing a pretty good job for someone who doesn’t do it.”
My jaw tightens. She sees it. I watch her eyes track the movement, watch them drop to my mouth for half a second before coming back up.
She doesn’t try to hide it. That’s the thing about her.
She doesn’t hide anything. Every thought, every feeling, every reaction plays across her face in real time, and it’s the most disarming thing I’ve ever encountered.
“I looked up ski certifications too,” I say.
Her eyebrows go up. “You did?”
“PSIA Level Two requires a minimum of a hundred hours of teaching. You’ll need to log hours at the resort this winter.” I don’t know why I’m telling her this. My mouth is doing things my brain hasn’t approved. “The Copper Peak ski school runs a mentorship program. Applications open in October.”
Her lips part. “How do you know that?”
“I know people at the resort. I maintain their grooming machines in the off-season.”
“Beck Meyer. Did you research my career path?”
“I looked up one thing.”
“You looked up multiple things. You just cited a hundred-hour minimum and an application deadline.”
I’m in trouble. I can feel it, the ground shifting under me, the careful structure of my quiet, uncomplicated life tilting sideways.
I fix things. That’s what I do. I don’t look up certification requirements for women I’ve known for three days.
I don’t carry their boxes to their cars.
I don’t stand in gravel parking lots watching the light turn their eyes to amber.
But here I am, and she’s looking at me like nobody has ever looked at me, like I’m something worth seeing and not just something useful, and I can’t make myself walk away.
“Thank you,” she says. Quieter now. The bright, bubbly exterior is still there, but underneath it is something steadier. Something real. “Nobody’s ever done that for me.”
“Done what?”
“Taken it seriously. Taken me seriously.”
The distance between us has gotten smaller. I don’t remember moving. She’s right there, close enough that I can see the faint sunburn across her nose. Close enough that when she tilts her chin up, her mouth is right there too.
“Callie?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to kiss you.”
“Okay.”
“I won’t be good at it.”
“I doubt that very much.”
I kiss her. My hands are still rough from the shop, still smell like solvent, and she doesn’t care. She puts her hands on my chest and I feel every single finger through my shirt. The sound she makes against my mouth is soft and surprised, like even she hadn’t expected it to feel like this.
I’ve been wrong. This isn’t trouble.
This is a hell of a lot worse.