rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Chapter 5
Hudson
HUDSON COULD HEAR the car’s engine from blocks away. He stepped outside the garage and closed his eyes, listening, picking apart the sounds so that he would know exactly what he’d have to fix before he even popped the hood.
Standing there against the garage, listening to the still-far-off car, Hudson could forget about everything else. About school and girls and his future and whether his friends were actually jackasses or just acting like them. With his eyes closed, Hudson could reduce the world to a single engine and nothing more; a world where he could not only name every little part but knew what it was for, how it worked, how to fix it.
He opened his eyes when he heard the car’s brakes chirp as it slowed to turn into the garage. It was an old Plymouth Acclaim, the kind of car you either happily sent off to die or loved with your entire heart and refused to let go of. It had seen better days, its red paint job chipped and faded, its muffler not doing much muffling. He waved the driver forward to where he was standing. He was still identifying
the car’s problems when the girl killed the engine and climbed out.
He only allowed himself a quick glance at her, knowing as soon as he saw her that she was the kind of girl who could make you think your life was not complete unless she was in it. She was a jumble of contradictions: short but with long legs, fierce green eyes but a kind expression, baby-faced but wise. She was wearing a snug, plain red T-shirt that matched her car. Her hair was down, the black locks reaching just past her chin.
“Afternoon,” she said, offering a polite smile.
He replied in kind, trying to adopt the professional tone he used with most customers. He asked her to pop the hood and then walked to the front of the car to release the latch. He meant to bury himself in work right away, but against instinct he stole another glance. How long would the memory of her face haunt him? Days? Weeks? “You having trouble with anything specific?”
“Well, not really,” she said, slipping her hands into the back pockets of her shorts, which made her posture change in a way Hudson couldn’t help but notice. The quiet world outside the garage noticed the change in her posture, the damp Mississippi air noticed, even the various grease stains spread out on the garage floor noticed. “I just got started on a road trip, and it’s making a lot of noise, so I wanted to be sure it’s in shape.”
Hudson grabbed a clean rag off a nearby shelf and checked the oil and the transmission fluid. He liked working in relative silence, nothing but the subtle sound of the cooling engine, his hands and tools on the machine. Something about this girl, though, made him chatty. “Where you goin’?”
“North,” she said. “All the way north.”
“You from around here?” He suddenly felt self-conscious about his drawl, the hitch in his vowels, the overall lackluster quality of his presence.
“Nope. You?”
He chuckled as he ran his hands around the engine, checking for cracks in belts. “Born and raised.” He nodded to himself as he made a mental checklist of what he’d need to fix. “Mind if I ask where you’re from, then?”
“I don’t,” she said. He thought he heard her smile, but when he looked up, she was ambling around the garage, curiously examining the shelves and their bric-a-brac. “I was born in Texas. A little town not unlike this one.”
“So, if you’re from Texas, and you’re going north, what brings you to Vicksburg? Not exactly on your way.”
“I needed my car fixed, and I heard you were the best around,” she said. He looked up again, and she grinned. Weeks, he thought to himself. I’ll be thinking about that face for weeks. She walked around the car and joined him in front of the hood. “So, what do you think? Will she make the trip?”
“When I’m through with her, yeah. I’ll flush out all the fluids, make sure your spark plugs are in shape. This belt might need replacing, but I think we’ve got the parts. I’ll check your brakes, too, ’cause they didn’t sound great on the way in. But nothing to worry about.”
For a moment, Hudson forgot about the girl, thinking instead about getting his hands dirty, splotched by grease that he’d smear across his work pants, adding another battle scar to proudly display.
“You like this, don’t you?”
Hudson glanced up to find her standing so close that he could smell her scent fighting through the oil fumes in the garage. “Like what?”
“My face,” she said, then smacked him playfully on the arm. “This, silly. Fixing cars. I can tell.”
He shrugged, the kind of gesture one makes when there’s no choice but to love something. “If you want, you can come inside while I write up an estimate.”
“No need,” she said. “Do whatever needs to be done. I trust you.”
“Um, this could take a few hours,” he said. “We’ve got coffee and a TV inside. Some magazines, too. There’s also a pretty good burger joint down the road...” He trailed off, realizing that he didn’t want her to leave. Usually, no matter what distractions there were around, he could shut everything out and delve into his work. It was the same with studying at the library; friends could come by to tease him, cute girls from his class could take a seat and try to engage in conversation, but Hudson never let himself be swayed.
But there was something about this girl that made him want to hear her opinions on everything, hear about her day, tell her about his own.
“Or, you could stay here and keep me company,” Hudson said.
She stepped away from Hudson, but instead of leaving the garage, she grabbed a folding chair that was leaning against a wall and propped it open. “If you don’t mind,” she said.
Hudson breathed a sigh of relief. How quickly his luck had turned. He’d come home from school to a long, empty afternoon of worrying about tomorrow’s interview with the dean of admissions, with nothing but the occasional oil change to distract him. But now he had a full workload ahead of him and the company of a beautiful girl. He wiped his hands on the rag he’d grabbed earlier, and he got to work, racking his mind for something to say.
He could see her out of the corner of his eye, sitting quietly, moving just enough to look around the garage. Her gaze occasionally landed on Hudson, and his heart flitted in response. “Did you know that certain mechanic schools have operating rooms with viewing areas, like you’d have in med school? Just like surgeons in training, there’s only so much you can learn in a classroom. The only difference is that you don’t have to get sterilized.” Hudson peeked around the hood to catch her expression.
The girl turned to him, an eyebrow arched, containing a smile by biting her bottom lip.
“I hear some students even faint the first time they see a car getting worked on. They just can’t handle the gore,” he quipped.
“Well, sure. All that oil—who can blame them?” She smiled and shook her head at him. “Dork.”
He smiled back, then pulled her car up onto the lift so he could change the oil and the transmission fluid. What had driven him to make such a silly comment, he couldn’t say, nor could he explain why it had felt good when she called