by Mara Jacobs
Stick stepped out of the car and held the door open for me. I slid in to the seat he’d just vacated, still warm from his body.
“You’ll want to…good,” he said as I found the seat adjuster myself and brought the seat forward. I was tall, but Stick was taller, both of us having long legs.
“Is that why you’re called Stick? Because you were as skinny as a stick when you were a kid?”
He rolled his eyes at me and closed the door, careful not to slam it. I knew my baby was in good hands with Stick, that he would treat her with kid gloves.
Oh, so now the Vette was my baby? And a she?
Stick got in the passenger seat and made a big show of snuggling into the seat. “I always said you had a smoking ass,” he said in reference to the seat being warmed for him.
“My old man couldn’t have splurged for seat warmers? In February?”
“Actually, she does have seat warmers. I was just pissed at you when we left Bribury so I thought I’d let you warm yourself up.” He rocked in the seat. “Which you did very well.”
Apparently Stick thought of my car as a “she” also. “Wait. What? Why were you pissed at me?”
He leaned over, stretching his arm to the back of my seat, just above my head. His face was very close to mine. “Because. Here you are given this amazing car…a gift. And all you can do is bitch about the type of car it is.”
“Just to be clear, this car is not a gift. It is a bribe, or more accurately, an opening offer.”
“To what?”
“More negotiations.”
“Again…to what? Or for what?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.” Not wanting to get into it with him, and still not fully understanding what role he was playing that he’d be at my sister’s wedding and delivering me my new car, I changed the subject to something I knew would absorb him.
“So, seven-speed. What exactly does that mean?”
It worked. He spent the next twenty minutes explaining it all to me. He could tell I was itching to drive her (“her” slowly becoming “Yvette” in my mind), and finally waved for me to start her up. I put it in neutral like he’d explained and then turned the ignition.
The roar of her coming to life was powerful, and I placed both hands on the wheel to feel her vibrations run through me.
Stick smiled at my movements. “She’s something, isn’t she?”
In an odd way, I didn’t trust my voice to answer him, so I just nodded.
“Okay. So we talked about the mechanics of it, but you can’t really pick up the rhythm of her until you drive her yourself. And every car is different with their…needs.”
I looked over at him, raising a brow. “Needs? Really?”
“Definitely. What this baby—”
“Yvette.”
“What?”
“Her name is Yvette.”
He studied me for a second, and then that grin, the one he’d had at the wedding just before he’d kissed me, came over his stern face. “God damn, but you might be a car person yet,” he said, clearly pleased.
“Hardly.”
But the grin stayed on. “Not very original,” he said.
I shrugged. “She’s my first car. What do I know about naming cars?”
“You’re right. You’ll learn.”
I smiled at that, at him. His eyes dropped to my mouth, and suddenly the car got very small. “Right,” he said, breaking eye contact and looking down at my feet. “So, yeah, finding the rhythm Yvette needs. Be gentle with her at first, but firm—she needs to know you’re the boss.”
“Oh Jesus, what are you, the Corvette Whisperer?”
“Why yes, yes I am.” He motioned for me to get moving, and I did as he’d instructed me, easing my foot off the clutch while applying the gas and also putting it into first gear.
And we lurched forward and then conked out.
“Again,” I said, before he could say a word. He just nodded as I went through the motions again, to the same result.
I expected him to jump in with some car-expert talk, or even just some guy-like tell-me-what-I’m-doing-wrong speak, but he stayed silent.
I almost liked Stick in that moment. Almost.
The third time, I got Yvette on the road in first, and drove at that speed for what felt like way too long.
“Listen to her,” Stick said softly. He was very close to me, and I could feel his breath on my cheek. “She’ll tell you when you need to shift. You’ll feel it.”
And I did. The movement wasn’t fluid, but it wasn’t as jerky as it had been, and I got her into second, increasing my speed.
“Yes, that’s it.” He moved his arm across the back of my seat and scooted a bit closer, leaning into the console. He rested a hand on top of mine, wrapped around the gearshift head.
“It’s like sex. Or good sex, anyway. Listening to her, feeling when she’s ready for more. Being gentle when you make your move, but also being sure.”
He squeezed my hand as I eased my foot onto the clutch and shifted to third. “Exactly,” he whispered.
The country road where we were driving was completely deserted and mostly straight, yet I didn’t dare take my eyes from the road. And not because I was scared to crash.
I was scared to see the look I knew Stick was giving me.
I could feel my pulse picking up, and my heart racing in time with Yvette’s. And I totally got what Stick was saying, totally felt her, felt Yvette.
The shift to fourth was seamless, and we sped down the country road, and I desperately wished that it was warm enough to put the top down. The next shifts also went well.
“Sixth? Seventh?” I asked Stick, not entirely sure what my baby needed. First-time mother, and all.
“Not yet. Let her get used to this first. It really is like sex. The early gears are foreplay. In fourth and fifth gear you’re trying to maintain, to make it last, make it build. Sixth and seventh, she…you know.”
His hand left mine and moved to my knee. I could feel the heat of him through my jeans. His big hand covered my knee, his fingers dangling down between my legs. His other hand moved from the back of the seat to my neck, gently resting beneath my hair. He moved aside the collar of the great peacoat I’d found at a navy surplus store, and put his fingers around the back of my neck.
His thumb began to slowly stroke my sensitive skin.
And I couldn’t wait to go further.
Chapter Ten
I started to downshift as I climbed a hill. A familiar hill. Stick gently squeezed my thigh, noticing my tension. “You’re doing great. You’ve got her.” He mistook my stiffening for my first big hill in Yvette. He didn’t know what I knew.
Just over the hill, I saw it. The gates to a large estate, the last one on this road.
The Holy Grail if you were my mother, Pandora Winters.
Easing my way down the hill (I just wanted to put it in neutral and coast, but Stick said no), I decided to pull over. Just a bit before the gate, like we’d done so many times before.
“Um…want me to drive?” Stick asked. His hand had stilled on my thigh. Part of me desperately wanted that hand to keep climbing, to tease and tempt, to pull me out of the place that being in front of this estate took me.
“I just… Can we stop for a second?” I said.
“Sure,” he said. Not a speck of sarcasm or derision from him. Weird.
I thought about turning to him, reaching for him, tasting him. But it was Stick, and it would have just been avoidance, so I didn’t.
It was some sort of sick pull that had me reaching for the door. The air was cool and brisk, the wind whipped somewhat, and I raised my face to it, like I was daring it to give me its worst. And as if Mother Nature knew me well, the wind died suddenly, leaving my view of the house beyond the gates, just at the top of a tasteful rise, clear and unobstructed by gusting, bare tree branches.
In the spring and summer, you couldn’t even see the house, the foliage was so thick, the t
ree line acting as a larger secondary gate.
I knew this because our pilgrimages were at various times and seasons. Pandora’s whims were not on any kind of calendar that I could ever figure out.
And I’d tried. Relentlessly, desperately, until I’d gone to boarding school hours away. Though I wasn’t entirely out of her line of fire there, at least I wasn’t woken out of a deep sleep to go “for a ride…for ice cream,” which would inevitably end up here, with her standing in front of the car, as I was now.
I moved around the front, my bare hand feeling the warmth of Yvette through the hood. She felt good, comforting.
I came to the passenger side, which was in front of the gate. Stick exited from the car but didn’t say anything.
Until I started to lean against Yvette. “Hey, hey. Hold on,” he said, pulling me by the waist and spinning me around. He did some kind of odd frisking thing, lifting up my peacoat and checking out my ass.
“Hey,” I said, pulling away from him.
“Just checking for anything that will scratch the car,” he explained, a bit too much humorous glint in his eyes for me to totally believe him. I gave him an “oh, please” look, and he said, “Seriously. You know what all those sparkly things on girls’ jeans do to good cars?”
“I don’t have sparkly shit on my ass.”
“So I see, but I had to be sure.”
I shrugged. “Why? You delivered her in pristine condition. Anything that happens to her now is on me.”
A sickening look crossed his face. Seriously. Like he was literally going to be physically ill.
“You’ll take care of her, right? I mean, I know shit happens, especially in winter, but, like, you’re not going to just…” He waved his arms in an abstract way, apparently unable to articulate the possible atrocities I might perpetrate against my new car.
“Relax. I’ll take good care of her. Like I’ve told you—many times—I’m not a silver spoon. I know the value of stuff.” He looked at me skeptically. I reached out and put my hand on his upper arm, still warm from being in the car. “I’m serious. I won’t be a douche to Yvette.”
This eased him, and he nodded at me. We turned, standing side by side, both leaning against the side of the car.
I don’t know if it was Stick showing me how to drive Yvette, or his genuine caring about her welfare, or just a moment of weakness on my part, but as I looked up at the gates I said in almost a whisper, “This is Caroline Stratton’s house. My father’s ex-wife.”
“I know who she is,” he said.
That’s right. If he was working for Grayson Spaulding and had done enough digging to know about my background, he’d have heard about Caroline.
But he couldn’t have known… “My mom and I used to drive out here and park right in this same spot.”
“When?”
I shrugged, looking forward, not wanting to meet his eyes. I could feel him looking at me, and as if he knew I couldn’t answer while he did, he turned and looked toward the house.
“A few times a year. I don’t know how often she did it when I was a baby. Or if she even did, though I suspect so.”
“Did you live close by?”
I shook my head. “Not close enough that it was a quick drive over. We lived on the other side of Baltimore.”
“And you’d just stand here? Like this?”
I nodded, though he wasn’t looking at me. I think he felt it, though.
“Yeah. Sometimes she’d spew some bullshit about how it should be her and me living in that house. Most times she’d just look at it.”
“And what would you do?”
I shrugged. “Nothing. At first I didn’t understand why we couldn’t live there, if she said we were supposed to be.
“And don’t get me wrong, our house was no shithole. It was fine, perfect for just the two of us, really. My father supported me, just not…”
“In the style your mother thought you deserved.”
“She saw Betsy and Joey being raised in this house and she said I should be raised in something just as big.”
He waited for me to go on. “But at some point I realized it had nothing to do with me. It never did. For either of them. I was a tool my mother used, and a burden my father reluctantly bore.”
Jesus, here I was giving my hard-luck story to a townie who was forced to steal cars for a living. Well, maybe forced, maybe gleefully willing. Either way…
“Sorry. I usually don’t throw pity parties,” I said, embarrassed. I sneaked a peek at him out of the corner of my eye. He shrugged, still looking up at the house.
“I don’t know you real well, Jane, but you’re right, you don’t play the pity card. And you could. Definitely.”
I lifted a hand and dropped it. “Well, everybody’s got their shit, right?”
“Yeah, to a degree. But yours is knee deep and very public.”
“Not anymore. I put my foot down. Changed my name, went to boarding school. Tried to distance myself from the crazy.”
He was nodding. “That’s good. It seems to have worked for you. And that’s the one thing I noticed about you right from the start—or at least after I learned who you were.”
“What?”
“That you never played the pity card, and you never ever played the ‘do you know who I am’ card.”
“Why would I play that card? I didn’t want anyone to know who I was.”
“Exactly. Not everybody in your position would want that. They’d play it to the hilt. Want to be on a fucking reality show or something.”
“God,” I said, the thought literally sending a shiver through me.
Stick lifted an arm, like he was going to put it around me, but then dropped it. Must have remembered that he intensely disliked me.
And then I remembered why I’d received Yvette—for services soon to be rendered.
“But it’s about to become that—a reality show.”
“Yeah, I guess it is. But you have something they want—your public opinion of your father.”
“I know, that’s why the car.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“Do you think I’m an asshole for taking it?”
He did turn to me then. Put his hands on my crossed arms and gave me a tiny shake.
“Are you kidding? They’ll chew you up and spit you out and not think twice about doing it. The press, the political party, the campaign—Christ, even your own parents. I say take what you can when you can. Hold out for what you want and try to navigate the waters so that you’re calling as many shots as you can.”
“There won’t be many I can call.”
His hands softened on me, but he still hung on. And damn, but I was grateful that he did.
“I know. But play it like a chess game—look three moves ahead, know what pieces are the most valuable to them and protect your assets.”
“You play chess?” I asked, with maybe too much incredulity in my voice.
His hands dropped away, and I was sorry I’d said it. “Nah, more of a checkers man, myself.”
He grinned, but I knew I’d hurt him. Man, when I try it doesn’t work, and when I don’t want to…bullseye.
We sat in silence, just looking ahead, both lost in our own thoughts. Or maybe he was lost in mine, because when he finally spoke, he said, “So, like, would your mom ring the gate bell or anything? Leave a flaming bag of dog shit and run?”
I smiled, imagining Pandora running back to the car in her spiky heels after depositing a bag of poo.
“No, she’d just stare at the house. Sometimes mumbling, sometimes not.”
“And your sister and brother were raised here?”
I nodded. “Yeah, it was the house they lived in when Joe and Caroline split up, so she stayed with the kids. I think she was looking for stability in Joey’s and Betsy’s lives. Even though she had lots of other choices.”
“Yeah?”
“She came from money. Old, political money. That’s why she and my father made such a gr
eat team—were considered the perfect match.” I let out a small snort that perfectly conveyed my opinion of that vision. “The house on the cape where she and the kids summered was a family home. And there are more. When her parents died, she inherited a boatload of money and properties, but she always stayed in this home. The one that she lived in with my father.”
“I’ll bet that pissed your mother off even more.”
I looked at him. “You catch on quick, son,” I said. He gave me a tip of an imaginary cap. The wind kicked up just then and his hair blew against his face. Without thinking, I reached over and pushed it away, back, even as the wind blew mine across my eyes, temporarily blinding me.
Which was just as well. I didn’t want to see what expression Stick had on his face with my fingers in his wavy hair.
“So, how long since you were last here?” he asked. His head moved into my touch, and I kept my hand there for a moment before removing it, ostensibly to brush the hair from my own face.
“Oh, let’s see. I was maybe eleven or twelve. It took me a second today to remember this was the way to her house.”
“And yet you kept driving this way,” he said, pointing out that which I would have left untouched.
“Yeah. Playing the masochist card?”
He laughed, and God it sounded good amongst all these ghosts.
“Careful—that will lead to the pity card, and before you know it you’ll have a whole damn deck.”
I smiled. “You’re right. Let’s go. Enough of this maudlin bullshit. I love Bribury, I’ve got great friends and now I have Yvette. Yes, there will be a bunch of bullshit coming up with the campaign, but right now, right here, life is good.”
He moved to face me, his back to the Stratton estate, blocking it from my vision. He stepped into me, his jeans brushing mine, his hoodie touching my coat. Lifting a hand, he brushed a finger across my cheek, then tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
“Yeah, about that. I’m sorry, but I think I’m about to fuck with your ‘all is right, right now’ vibe.”
“What do you mean?” Was it because he was going to kiss me? And would that mess with my vibe? Or make it better?