Page 10

TEN

KIT

As we pulled into the starting point, I wondered if this might actually work. Or at least end up being a positive experience rather than a vacation I’d look back on with vague regret because I didn’t get to enjoy it with my best friend.

Trent had quietly read the rules for the rally before pairing his phone with the stereo to play a podcast I hadn’t listened to before. We shared a collegial silence on the long drive: Trent messing with his phone while I focused on the podcast. The only interruption was a quick bathroom break and a phone call from Derek that put me slightly more at ease. He’d pulled through surgery just fine, Gavin at his side.

A shortcut and lack of traffic brought us to the starting line thirty minutes before the rally would start.

“We’re a little early,” I said, pulling into the mostly empty gravel lot. A few signs poked out from the ground directing racers to the starting line, but the only two other cars in the parking lot looked abandoned. “Do you want to practice driving?”

Trent shifted down in his seat, focus on his phone. Clearly, he didn’t. And more to the point, I didn’t have the energy to force him to try.

“Fine,” I shrugged. “You’d probably suck at it, anyway. I’ll drive, you navigate.”

“I won’t suck at it.” Trent scowled as pocketed his phone. “I just didn’t finish watching the video.”

I choked on a laugh. “You don’t need a video to drive a stick shift. You need to just practice it. Practice . Maybe you’re not familiar with that concept.”

He reached for his pocket before dropping his hand. “You don’t think anyone’s going to show up, do you?”

I shrugged, glancing around the currently empty parking lot.

“Probably not. Maybe. Who cares?” Hell, maybe we’d get more points if the judges saw how shitty he was driving stick. “On second thought, why don’t we wait until there’s more people around to give you feedback.”

I didn’t want to drive the entire rally. Five days in a car for sixteen hours a day in a car with original fabric seats sounded like a nightmare, even with stops. And I didn’t exactly trust Trent’s navigation skills. Not until I had some proof that he wasn’t a disaster with a map.

As much as I wanted to humiliate the cocky football star, I also needed him to drive. I put the car in neutral, pulled the parking brake, and slid out of the seat.

“Come on, Texas. You got this,” I deadpanned.

“I don’t believe you when you say it in that tone.”

“What tone?” I lied. But my goading got him to move his ass out of the passenger seat. “So, did you watch enough of your video to get the idea, or do you need a primer?”

He scanned the parking lot. “I think I’ve got the idea.”

“Well, it’s a shitty old car. Worst thing you can do is blow the transmission.”

Derek had stalled the car a dozen times before getting onto the road, and then another half dozen on the street. I doubted Trent’s learning curve would be anywhere near as bad.

I held out the keys, and his face paled slightly. “I really can blow the transmission?”

“Don’t you have a slew of fancy cars? Why don’t you know anything about them?” I groaned. “Nice things are wasted on you.”

Talent. Money. Luxury goods.

He barked out a laugh, finally grabbing the keys from my hand. “That’s probably the truth. Good thing your car isn’t nice.”

At least he’d cheered up. I rounded the car and slid into the passenger seat, readying my first instruction. Instead, Trent cranked the engine and immediately stalled the car.

“Well, I love your confidence.” I metered out my words, poorly attempting to cover my disappointment. “But maybe start by pressing the clutch down.”

He fumbled with the seat, pushing it back as far as it would go to accommodate his height. Then, he messed with the mirrors and the keys.

“You probably should have done that before you tried to start the car.” The words only made him stall more. “People will start showing up any minute.”

He punched in the clutch and started the car.

“Great, now put it in gear.”

He squinted, leaning over the stick shift and studying the faded letters.

“You know about gears, right?” I asked with a grimace.

“First?” He pointed to the middle of the stick shift.

“That’d be a great place to start.”

With a bit of grinding, he pushed the car in first. “Why is this so hard?”

“The car is shit, and you knew that before you signed on for this adventure. Now, give it a little gas and let out the clutch. You should feel it catch.”

He punched the gas, lifting his foot and stalling the car again.

“Damn it.” He rubbed his forehead, shaking his head.

Trent wasn’t used to facing adversity, and it showed.

A small wave of pity rose in my chest. “You had the basic order of operations that time, at least.”

“You sure I can’t just navigate?” The cocky grin was back on his face, but with none of the bravado behind it.

I shook my head. “It’s easy once you’re driving. Now, try again.”

Trent raked a hand through his straw-colored hair. “Alright, I’ve got this.”

“Good pep talk, now go.”

He stalled it a few more times on his lap around the parking lot. After the lap, other cars filtered in, but he managed to park without a misfire.

He wiped his palm over his forehead. “Fuck. I’m sweating.”

“Doing something dumb sixteen-year-olds do every day,” I joked.

“Dumb sixteen-year-olds don’t have you in the passenger seat judging them.”

“I wasn’t judging. I was coaching. And being really nice about it. I called Derek a dummy at least four times, and he stalled twice on his first lap around a parking lot.”

“How many times did I stall?”

“I don’t want to answer that, Texas. Especially not after you started to feel good about yourself.”

He laughed. “Fair point, Kitten.”

I shook my head, grimacing at the nickname. But we’d called a truce, and I needed to coexist with Trent for the next five days. “But since you’ve brought it up, we might get some pity points if I told the judges you can’t drive manual worth shit.”

“You’re joking.”

I shrugged. “You said you wanted to win.”

“Yeah, I want to win, so I’d avoid the humiliation of signing up for a race and not being the best.”

“Do all the guys on your football team have such fragile egos, or is that a you thing?” I asked with an exasperated sigh.

“Just me. It’s part of my charm.” He handed over my keys with a wink.

We exited the car, walking over to the check-in car set up at the center. Over the course of the next half-hour, our competitors drove into the empty field. Twenty cars total and while some love-struck fanboy kept Trent captive at our car yapping about football, I scoped out the competition.

Prior to my dad’s death, I didn’t know much about cars. He’d taught me to change the oil in the beat-up Kia gifted to me on my sixteenth birthday, how to change a tire, how to muddle my way through maintenance, but nothing more complex than that. In hindsight, I wasn’t sure he knew much more than those routine tasks. And then, his heart gave out, and I never had a chance to ask.

So, I’d taught myself. Even with Derek covering half the rent and most of the expenses, I didn’t have the disposable income for a mechanic fix up the car. Besides, my job involved fixing instruments, replacing parts, and tearing things down to get them to work again.

A car wasn’t much different. Easier since most people didn’t post videos on how to repair a hematology analyzer.

But the mechanical prowess on display at the rally was next level. I’d made the car limp along despite its age. These people had harnessed all the shitty details about their cars and put them on display. One guy had gone so far as to fuse the front half of a WWII-style Jeep to the back half of an old Jaguar. Getting my Mercury Cougar to the end of the rally without blowing an engine didn’t seem so impressive stacked up against the cars around me.

I tore away from a homemade electric car that seemed to run on too many batteries and twice as many hopes to find the judges at my car. A thread of panic pulsed under my skin as Trent greeted them. By the time I hurried across the field, he had them laughing. Probably talking their ear off about his football prowess. Or how he’d been dragged along on this rally.

“Apparently, the car was junk, and she did all the work herself. She spent over a year getting it running.”

Trent’s voice didn’t hold its usual haughtiness as he bragged about what I’d done with the car. Maybe I was the dick. Maybe Trent wasn’t such a bad guy. Not only had he given me credit, but he was gushing over all my hard work.

“But her real stroke of genius was asking me to tag along on this rally.”

I flinched. There was the Trent I knew.

“My partner broke his leg, and you were the last-minute replacement,” I corrected.

He jolted, shooting me a sly smile. “Kit, this is Ashley and Tom. Tom and Ashley, my partner, Kit. And like I said, inviting me was genius. She didn’t even think she’d win until I came along.”

“So, you’re aiming to win?” Tom lifted an eyebrow, sharing a look with Ashley. “Do you mind sitting down for a pre-race interview and tell us your story?”

Trent's lips expanded into a winning smile, oozing confidence. “We’d love to.”

Ashley extracted a clipboard from under her arm and flipped through. “So, you signed up under team?—”

“I just signed up under Kit. We hadn’t come up with a team name yet.”

It’d been on the list of things to do. One Derek and I had planned to cross off on the ride to the starting line. But, like the rest of this rally, things had fallen apart, and I’d forgotten that carefully planned list back home.

“Kit and Trent, then,” Ashley smiled. “And you two are…”

“Acquaintances,” I said as Trent said, “Friends.”

“We definitely need them for an interview,” Ashley said. Her counterpart looked less amused.

“Do I need to call my agent?” Trent asked. His voice was teasing, but she turned red just the same.

“I don’t think so, but you can call and check. It’s optional. We just like to highlight some teams at different points of the race for the channel. It’s monetized though, so…” She bit her bottom lip, eyes gliding up and down his body.

“It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it,” Trent reassured her. He leaned closer as he gave her a wink. Her bottom lip escaped into her mouth again, only this time, her eyelashes batted.

He made it look so easy. So seamless. So sincere. And it churned my stomach that was only flirting to get ahead.

“Let me go get my equipment set up,” she tittered. “Give me five.”

As she scurried away, I smacked Trent’s arm.

“What was that for?” He rubbed his arm, raising an eyebrow.

“Don’t do that,” I snapped.

“Do what?”

“Flirt with the judges. You’re shameless.”

“Jealous?”

Jealousy was the farthest emotion possible. Disgusted? Annoyed? Absolutely. He was talented and rich. He didn’t need to charm people, too.

I snorted. “Hardly. Listen, I know you suck at driving, and you probably aren’t great at navigation, but we don’t need to flirt to win.”

“Thank God for that,” he muttered under his breath.

“Excuse me?”

“Well, if that were the case, we’d really be screwed.”

“Just because I haven’t flirted with you?”

Or anyone in months, at least. Except for the maintenance guy for the coagulation instrument at my work, who was hot but definitely married, I barely talked to any single men. Less interested in women. And I certainly didn’t flirt with them.

“You know, I am a little hurt. You’ve never even tried to flirt with me.” He played the words like a joke, but his eyes narrowed. I’d hit something, though what was a mystery.

“I’m a great flirt. And you’ve given me absolutely no reason to flirt with you, which is really your loss, when you think about it. Wait,” I paused as his eyes flitted across the field to where Ashley retreated to her car. “Are you upset that I called you an acquaintance?”

He bobbled his head before nodding. “That stung a little.”

“Fine, if you’re going to be whiny about it, I’ll call you my friend.”

“Platonic friend.”

I snorted. “Right, like anyone’s making that mistake. I think your reputation is safe, even around a bunch of gearheads road tripping through the middle of nowhere. Now, stop being whiny and let’s get this interview over with. Unless you’re waiting for hair and makeup.”

“I do my own hair and makeup for most interviews, thank you.” He raked a hand through his blond hair, almost red in the sunlight, and then threw an arm over my shoulders. “You know I’m not worried about my reputation, right?”

“Well, I am,” I said, slipping out of his grasp. “So, let’s not pretend we’re super chummy.”

“Save that for day three. Good call.”