I know this because my parents were among the initial investors.
Parking the car, I lean my seat back a little.
“Have you ever thought about moving out of your parents’ house?” he asks.
“I wish it were that simple,” I tell him. “They’ve got me by the purse strings.”
“What’s to stop you from getting a job that’ll pay?”
I glance over at him. “Your job doesn’t pay you,” I observe.
“Yeah, that’s because the shop I work at is actually a way for me to launder my ill-gotten winnings,” he laughs. “You’re actually doing stuff aboveboard. You should be able to bring something home.”
“Does it bother you that I work as a volunteer at the hospital?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not at all. I just see how miserable you are having to deal with your parents, and I don’t see how that’s going to change all that much until you’re able to get your own job and find your own place, you know?”
I was a little worried this conversation would turn into an offer for me to move in with him, but fortunately, he doesn’t bring it up. It’s not that I don’t like him; it’s just way too early in our unofficial relationship to even start thinking along those lines.
“Yeah,” I answer. “The problem is that if I do that, they’ll stop paying for school, so I’ll either have to drop out or go into enormous debt just to finish out my education.”
“Do you really want to be a doctor?”
I don’t answer.
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s just weird for me to see you so timid.”
“Believe it or not,” I tell him, “that’s my default position.”
“Then why’s it so different when you’re around me?”
“Maybe it’s that I feel like I don’t have to pretend around you,” I tell him. “If I were to tell you I’m missing a class right now, what would you say?”
He shrugs. “I’d probably say that I’m glad you chose to spend your time with me.”
“That’s the difference,” I tell him. “You appreciate me for who I am, not for something you want me to be.”
Whoa, I think we just fell through a trap door and ended up right in the middle of “the conversation.”
Eli asks, “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” I answer, grabbing his hand and holding it.
“Then why does it seem like you think there is?”
“It’s not how I was raised,” I tell him. God, that sounds icky coming out of my mouth.
He’s shaking his head. “Maybe that’s what people have been telling you your whole life, you just haven’t noticed that you don’t have to live your life that way,” he says. “Make yourself who you want to be, otherwise you’re going to be miserable and saving lives won’t change that fact.”
I know he’s right. I’ve known everything he’s saying for quite a while now. Things just aren’t that simple.
“I’m working on it,” I tell him.
“I know you are,” he says. “Maybe it’s time to stop taking baby steps, though.”
“Yeah.”
The moon is lighting the dirt ground on the other side of the raised curb of the cul-de-sac, and as I gaze over it, I’m starting to get really tired.
I yawn.
“Getting tired?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I don’t want to go home, though.”
“You can stay over at my place,” he says. “It’s not much, but it’s somewhere you can lay your head.”
“I have to go home, though. Otherwise, the parents are liable to call the cops again, and I was really hoping to spend a night with you that doesn’t involve flashing lights,” I tell him.
“What do you want to do?” he asks. “Do you want to stay here a little while longer or do you want to head back?”
“Are we a thing?” I ask.
Eli looks over at me with raised eyebrows, saying, “What?”
Again, I’m already in it, so I may as well keep going. “You know,” I tell him, “are we boyfriend/girlfriend or are we just particularly physical friends, or what?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “We’ve never really talked about it.”
“That’s why I’m asking.”
Do I jump first, or do I wait for him to make sure I don’t break my neck at the bottom?
He answers before I can make a decision, saying, “I’d like it if we were a thing—in a boyfriend/girlfriend kind of relationship. Where are you on it?”
I’m beaming, the momentousness of the moment short-circuiting my tiredness, if only for a few minutes. “I’m with you,” I tell him.
“Hey, I see what you did there,” he says.
I snicker. “So, I guess that makes it official, huh?”
“I guess so,” he says.
Only a word or two have changed, but somehow this suddenly feels a lot bigger. Unfortunately, my eyelids are starting to droop.
“Can I ask you a favor as your brand new girlfriend?”
He smiles, answering, “What is it, dear?”
“Eww,” I say, shuddering.
He laughs. “What did you need?” he tries again.
“Would you mind just driving around for a while? I’ve got to go home before too long, but I just want to close my eyes a while before I have to get back there. Is that weird?”
“Not weird at all,” he answers. “Not a problem.”
I give him a kiss on the cheek and we get out of the car, passing each other around the front and get in each other’s doors.
After I get the seat moved forward, I buckle up, saying, “Thank you for understanding.”
“Everyone needs a night off every once in a while,” he says.
He pulls away from the curb, and as we drive over the next hour, we speak a little, but mostly I drift back and forth between sleep and wakefulness, safe and comfortable in Eli’s care.
Chapter Eight
The Old College Try
Eli
Here I am, finishing up a quick oil change before I clock out for the day, and Kate comes up behind me saying, “Enough messing around. I want to drive today.”
“Okay,” I tell her. “Did you have anything in particular that you wanted to drive, or any specific destination? Are you asking my permission? Because I think you’re old enough now to make your own decisions.”
“Hilarious,” she mocks. “If I’m not mistaken, you should be getting off work right about…” she’s looking down at her watch, “now.”
“Got to finish this up before I go,” I tell her. “Besides, you kind of dropped in on me there. How do you know I don’t have plans?”
“Do you have plans?”
“Not sure yet,” I tell her. “I was going to see what my girlfriend was up to.”
She rolls her eyes. “She wants you to give her the keys to one of your cars, get in the passenger’s seat—assuming there’s one in there—and give her advice so she doesn't die while she is out there.”
“She’s not gonna get it,” I tell her.
Her hands ball into fists, and I think we’ve just crossed the line from playful banter into shit-hitting-fan mode.
“Before you take a swing at me,” I start, holding my palms up and toward her, “I’m just saying that because I don’t want either of us to die.”
“Oh, so I’m a bad driver now?”
“No,” I tell her. “It’s because the Chevelle has twelve-hundred horsepower. That’s barely within what I can handle, and I’ve been doing this for a long time. Last race, I almost crashed more than once. Then there’s the Galaxie, but it’s unreliable as it is. I just thought it might be best for a first on-the-road lesson to take something a little more manageable, like your car. It’s not because you’re a woman or anything; both of my cars scare me. If you start grabbing power tools, I’m not above screaming to save myself.”
Her red face clenches together, and her fists are so tight her fingers are starting to go
white when she bursts into laughter.
Mission accomplished.
“Fine,” she says. “Just finish up so we can get out there while there’s still a bit of daylight left.”
“It’s four o’clock,” I tell her.
“Yeah,” she says. “Time’s a wasting.” She claps her hands together. “Get to it.”
I’ve created a monster.
Apparently, both Maye and the guy waiting in the shop for me to finish up his oil change are finding this whole situation hilarious, as I can hear them both cackling through the glass.
I finish up the lube job and ring the customer up. We settle up and, after washing my hands, I clock out.
Kate’s already waiting for me in her car and, as I approach, she honks the horn a few times in quick succession in an attempt to hurry me along. In protest, I walk a lot slower to the passenger door.
“Come on!” she’s calling from inside the car as I bend down to tie my shoe.
Finally, I get in.
She throws the car in reverse and tries to peel out of the parking lot. It’s a valiant effort.
We get going on the road, going the same direction we went when I took her for the run through Ghost Town. She gets the car going eighty before I motion for her to ease off.
“What?” she asks. “I’m just trying to get a feel for the higher speeds.”
“Speed is great,” I start, “but if you don’t know how to corner, you’re useless in anything but drag races. That’s all well and good if you take your car to the track for race day every month, but if you’re-”
“Okay, so cornering,” she interrupts. “Other than slowing down for the turn and rotating the wheel, is there that much more to know?”
“There’s a lot. I can go over some of that with you, but a lot of it is going to be you getting used to taking corners going a lot faster than you’re used to.”
“Okay,” she says, hitting the gas again as we approach the long curve. “Where should we go to practice that?”
“Ghost Town,” I tell her.
Her eyes widen a little. “But police are all over there, aren’t they?”
“Not necessarily,” I tell her. “They know people race through there all the time, but as long as you’re only doing the speed limit, and you’re not doing donuts or anything, we’ll be able to do a quick look through to see if there are going to be any problems.”
“Okay,” she says.
She slows down immediately, and I give her directions to the quickest route from where we are.
We drive Ghost Town end to end and then circle the perimeter. It’s not a big area, but with all those places to hide, it’s good to be sure the fuzz isn’t just stashing themselves behind something.
Finally, I tell Kate to pull over next to the curb.
“Okay,” I tell her. “The first part of the lesson was going to be double-clutching. It doesn’t have anything really to do with cornering, but it’s one of those things you’ll want to get used to doing.”
“What’s the next part?”
“You know the word ‘apex,’ right?” I ask. “You read books.”
“I do read books,” she chortles. “Yeah, the apex is the peak, the point at the top of an angle.”
“I have no idea what you just said,” I tease.
She playfully smacks me on the leg. “Come on, I want to learn to be a big bad racer, too.”
“The goal when you’re going around the corner is to get as close to the inside curb as you can without hitting it. You're trying to cut the corner as closely as you can so you don’t lose too much speed. You’ll want to go a little wide before the turn in so you’re not at too sharp an angle. Is that making sense?”
“I think so,” she says. “Get as close to the inside of the turn as possible without running over anything. To do that, I’ll need a wider angle of entry, so the inertia doesn’t throw the car off the road and into a building when I take a corner at speed.”
“Still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tease. “Let’s do a four block square. Head up two blocks, take a right, go two blocks, take another right… They’re industrial blocks, so you’ll have more than enough space to play with the speed a bit. Not too much, though.”
“All right,” she says. “How fast should I be going when I make the turn?”
“As long as you’re all the way in the left lane before you turn, I’d say we can start you off at twenty-”
Her foot’s on the floor, the gas pedal buried somewhere in the carpeting beneath it. It may not have the raw power of the Chevelle, but it puts my head against the headrest for a few seconds.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Tap the brakes and slow down before you try to take a curve,” I tell her, looking at the speedometer as it passes fifty.
Her foot comes off the gas, and she does exactly what I told her to do, pumping the brakes, except she only slows down to thirty-five before jerking the wheel hard to the right. We’re going too fast, though, her turn too sharp and too late so the car understeers and Kate’s slamming on the brake pedal to keep “inertia from throwing us into a building.”
We come out of it, though we’re only doing about five before Kate’s ready to put her foot on the gas again.
“That’s called understeering,” I tell her. “You turn the front wheels, but the car just keeps going straight. It happens on front-wheel-drive vehicles.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’m assuming if there’s understeering, there’s oversteering. What’s that? Is that a rear-wheel-drive thing?”
“Yep. With oversteering, the back tires lose traction, so the tail swings out. There is an upper limit on how fast you can take a corner. It changes depending on what you’re driving and your skill level and all that, but too fast is going to be too fast in almost anything you drive.”
“Okay,” she says. “Let me try again, then.”
She starts going again, this time getting the car up to fifty-five.
I tell her, “You’re going too fast.”
“I’ve got to learn how to slow down for the turns, too,” she says.
I’m saying, “Yeah, but I was going to go over that after you’d gotten used to them at slower-” when she takes another turn.
It feels like it’s way too early, but her angle is good going into the corner. We come out a little wide on the other side, but all in all, it’s a pretty drastic improvement.
As soon as Kate’s got the car evened out, she cries, “Woo!” She says, “Yeah, I figured you were trying to take me through the lesson piece by piece, but you forget: I’m a quick study.”
“A little early,” I tell her. “It made you come in a bit too shallow, but it was a lot better.”
“Good,” she says, “now we can speed it up.” Without another word, her foot’s hard down on the gas and we’re passing sixty.
“Kate?” I’m asking, then I’m shouting, “Kate!” as her foot doesn’t even touch the brake when she takes the corner.
We go up the far curb, and she wrenches the wheel to the right, getting us back on the road, but causing the car to spin halfway around before coming to a shrieking halt.
“You’ve got to slow it-” I start, but she flips the car around and starts going again.
“I haven’t done the full lap yet,” she says. I’m just hanging onto anything I can, certain this isn’t going to end well.
She gets going about sixty-five, but she goes wide, braking early and turning almost right where she needs to. We’re entering the corner a little slower than the last one, but Kate is almost at the apex, and we come out the other side clean.
“Pull over a minute?” I ask.
“Sure,” she says. “You’re the boss, boss.”
I open my door half a second before the car has come to a complete stop, and I climb out onto the pavement, crawling my way toward the curb the way a shipwrecked sailor would crawl to shore.
Once my hand falls on the curb, I lift myself up enough to
turn and sit, my head between my knees as I breathe heavily.
Kate slowly gets out of the car and makes her way over to me, sitting down by my side.
“Was I that bad?”
“No, actually,” I tell her. “You’re a lot braver than I thought, though. And, I already knew you were brave.”
She’s looking at the ground. “I know I should have listened and slowed it down before that last corner, but I wanted to feel what it’s like when it’s going wrong, you know? That’s how I learn: I test things, push limits,” she mutters. “It’s never sounded like an exciting concept before because I’m usually pushing the limits of how much I can get done for other people in a given day. That’s what was going through my head, anyway.”
“Honestly,” I tell her. “You were pretty great. You scared the crap out of me on the first three turns, but that last one was perfect. If you can keep that up, you’re going to have it mastered in no time.”
She looks over at me. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “You’re a natural. One thing, though.”
“What’s that?” she asks, her voice much brighter now.
“Before I get back in that car, promise me you’ve found the limit and you’re ready to start doing it the way you did that last corner,” I answer.
She sighs.
“You’ve got to give me a buffer zone,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
She answers, “If you say go in at thirty, you’ve got to at least give me some leeway. I may not be able to get it right on. I’m thinking ten miles per hour. So if you’re telling me thirty, you’ve got to let me do forty.”
“What’s to stop me from telling you twenty so you’ll only do thirty?”
“Yeah, I’m going to have to be able to go at least forty,” she says. “I haven’t found the edge yet between too much and too little, I’ve just flown past it and come up a little short.”
People say this all the time, but this woman may quite literally be the death of me.
Shifting Gears: The Complete Series (Sports Bad Boy Romance) Page 10