Page 30

THIRTY

KIT

The radio hissed as the FM station we’d found only thirty minutes before faded away. Trent seemed unperturbed by the static, fixated on the back of the guidebook.

“Can you please not leave that there?” I asked, unpeeling the snake picture off the dashboard and sticking it to Trent’s chest. I didn’t need another reminder of that slimy, giant snake plopping on my lap.

He unpeeled the picture and stuck it on his side of the dashboard, out of my reach. “I like it there. It’s a great picture.”

“You think all our pictures are great,” I muttered, pressing the search button on the radio to find a new station. A preacher screamed about fire and brimstone, and I pressed it again. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Doesn’t look like nothing.”

He scribbled a number at the bottom of the page. The radio squawked, stopping on a station playing…bird sounds? Trent barely noticed.

“Do you want me to play a podcast?”

I let my hand fall from the radio. “Maybe just some music.”

“Sure.” He pulled out his phone, but a half mile down the road, still hadn’t switched the radio to Bluetooth.

“Are you finding us music or what?”

His head jerked up. “Oh, shit. Sorry.”

I caught a glimpse of his screen. He had navigated away from our team social media account to the rally account. “Are you tallying up points?”

He pressed the input button on the stereo, changing it to Bluetooth, and angled his screen toward the window. “Maybe.”

“You’re relentless,” I grumbled. But then curiosity piqued my interest. “How’s it looking?”

“Fine,” he lied through gritted teeth. “I’ll try to find another stop before we get to the finish line.”

Lo-Fi piped through the car, and Trent folded into the book, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

I inhaled, regulating my breathing and trying not to obsess over the million questions bouncing around my head. Hell, maybe I should have asked for a podcast.

I’d slept with guys before, no strings attached. I’d had the very occasional one-night stand where I’d enjoyed myself and said goodbye forever the next day. What I hadn’t done was spend the entire night in the guy’s arms. I hadn’t woken up the next morning to a kiss.

But Trent blurred the lines of “no strings attached.” There were strings. I liked Trent, as a friend, at least. And as much as I wished I didn’t, I had a little crush. How could I not after a night of mind-blowing sex? But in the early morning hours, well after he’d fallen asleep, I’d felt something else too. Something I couldn’t quite place and something that scared me.

The faint clunking noise from the hood suddenly intensified, jostling me out of my thoughts.

“What was that?” Trent sat up, surveying the road in front of us.

I shifted into a lower gear, and the car jerked with effort. The steady rattle gave way to a grind. “Not good is what that is.”

“Do you smell smoke?” Trent wrinkled his nose.

In the rearview, a thin line of liquid stained the pavement and confirmed my fears. I pulled the car onto the side of the road, cutting the engine and sucking in a steadying breath before hopping out of the car.

“What’s going on? What’d we break?” Trent followed me out, reaching under the hood to pop it open.

The burning smell smacked us in the face. I covered my nose, stepping back as he fitted the hood strut into place. A string of swears lodged in my throat. I raked a hand over my face.

Trent's panic gave way to concern and then…joy? His lips edged up in a smile. “This is great.”

I coughed on fumes. “Great? That’s the transmission making that noise. This is awful.”

“Right.” Trent turned to me with a shit-eating grin that temporarily made me forget how much I liked him the night before. “It’s a roadside repair. Points. We’re still in this thing.”

I blinked. “Roadside repair? Tell me, Trent, how do you unfuck a transmission on the side of the road?”

“Well…” He narrowed his eyes at the smoldering metal with a thoughtful look before turning back to me. “You can do it, right?”

Annoyance welled in my chest, which, coupled with the fumes, did nothing for my problem-solving skills. I took a step back, running my hand through my hair and blowing out a frustrated sigh. “No, I can’t. Changing out a transmission is a giant pain in the ass. One I haven’t had to do because I don’t wreck transmissions.”

“Seems like you do, actually.” He plastered a goofy grin on his face that, in any other situation, would have made me smile in return. But faced with a blown transmission forty miles from the final check-in, I didn’t find it nearly as amusing.

“Is that helpful?”

The grin fell. “I guess not.”

“I can’t fix this,” I groaned, cupping my phone in my pocket. “We’re going to have to call a tow truck.”

Trent shook his head. “No, we aren’t. This is perfect.”

“Perfectly impossible. Even if I had a whole new transmission, I can’t fix it with the tool kit in the trunk. I need parts and instructions and time.”

“Do you really need to replace it?” He craned his neck into the car. “It doesn’t look that bad.”

“Based on what?” Frustration grew in my chest, threatening to explode while Trent pretended we’d simply run out of gas.

“I mean, it just needs some transmission fluid,” he answered with all the confidence of a guy who didn’t know what he was talking about. “We have some in the trunk.”

“So, we pour it in and it…what exactly? Leaks all over the road again?”

Trent followed my outstretched finger to the trail of transmission fluid in our wake. “We just make it not leak.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “And what does that look like? How do we make it not leak, Mr. Automotive?”

Trent opened and closed his mouth, gaping like a fish. “Damn, I really thought I’d come up with something on the fly. But, yeah, I’m gonna need your help.”

“Great. I’m gonna tell you how we fix this: we don’t.” I held up a hand as he opened his mouth. “And if you make any comment about potential points, I’m calling a tow truck and leaving you on the side of the road.”

He held up his hands, staying out of arm’s length as he walked toward the trunk. “Okay. Fair. I don’t know what I’m talking about, but just think about it for a minute. We’ve only got to limp along for a bit longer. It’s a back road, so we don’t even have to go that fast. Let’s just think it through. Maybe we can patch a hole or wrap it up.”

I took a deep breath and stepped away from the car as Trent fished the transmission fluid out of the trunk.

He gave me a wide berth, placing the plastic jug and a toolbox gently at my side before backing away, palms open.

Space was good. The tightness in my chest loosened and focused on the car. The stink of smoke evaporated, and Trent was right about one thing: we didn’t need to make it far. On further inspection, the transmission wasn’t completely destroyed. Not “gaping hole of nothingness” destroyed. That was a good sign.

I checked the transmission fluid. Completely empty.

I groaned. “Okay, it’s not that bad.”

Trent perked but didn’t approach. “So, we refill it?”

I shook my head. “It’ll just dump out again. It needs a steady supply to keep running.”

I ran my mind over the hundreds of hours I’d spent working on the car. The videos, the manuals, the parts. The overheated transmission was too hot to touch, but I craned my head inside the hood, spotting the hairline break running down the side. “It’s cracked.”

Trent sank down to the toolbox, pulling out supplies. “Duct tape? Could we duct tape it?”

I shook my head. “The transmission is a closed system, and with the temperature fluctuations, I don’t think duct tape would keep the fluid in. It might help, but we’d still need a way to feed it transmission fluid as we’re driving.”

“So, we’re screwed?” Trent asked softly. “Want me to call a tow truck?”

A “yes” lodged in my throat as my eyes locked onto the windshield fluid cap.

I’d meant to fill it before the start of the race but forgot. My fingers fumbled with the cap, opening it up and confirming it was empty. “Actually, I have an idea.”

Trent surged to my side.

“It might not work,” I said, the barest bones of a plan coming together in my head. “But I think I can move the windshield washer hose from the wipers to the transmission. We’ll wrap the crack as best we can and use the windshield wiper fluid pump to inject the transmission fluid while we drive.”

“And that will work?”

I shrugged, wiping my hands off on my jeans. “Maybe. It’s not like I’ve done this before, but it’s not like we’ll make it any worse.”

Trent nodded, the smile on his face euphoric, infusing me with confidence. “You’re a genius.”

“We haven’t actually done anything yet.”

He shook his head, placing his hands on my shoulders. “You’re amazing.”

My face heated even before he bent down and kissed me.

I sucked in a breath, waiting for him to pull away. Instead, his fingers curled in my hair, hand cupping my cheek and pulling me closer. His lips skated over mine, warm and inviting and utterly irresistible.

The kiss shouldn’t be happening. By tomorrow, we’d be back in Norwalk, back to our lives, back to having no reason to see each other or be around each other.

I gave into the kiss, anyway. Just for now. For maybe the last time. Because Trent Vogt was a flirt and an opportunist and a surprisingly fun person to be around, and by this time tomorrow, my life would go back to normal.

“Alright.” I pressed my palms against his chest, breaking the kiss. “Let’s see if we can fix this.”

Trent recorded while I fumbled through my plan. At the end of the day, a car wasn’t much different from a lab instrument. They were both electronics and pumps and lines. The windshield washer line was surprisingly easy to dismantle, and thanks to the tiny toolbox I’d stashed in the back seat, I had the parts to secure the line to the transmission fluid cap.

I used the entire roll of duct tape to cover the crack, and then some electrical tape for good measure. As the last of the transmission fluid disappeared into the car, I crossed my fingers.

Trent pressed the button for windshield wiper fluid. The tiny motor kicked on and I watched the tubing release a slow trickle of transmission fluid.

“It’s working,” I said, feigning confidence and slapping a piece of duct tape over the line. “Now we just need to figure out how often we need to press that button.”

The answer was a lot. Despite the duct tape, the transmission fluid leak behind us was noticeable. We pumped in a near-constant flow, and by the time we spotted signs for the car show, my thumb ached from depressing the button while I drove.

The Cougar shuddered its way past the picturesque main street with a sign that welcomed us to Nowhere, Florida. Pristine antique cars flanked the shuddering, shimmying Cougar as it ground its way past the packed sidewalk of onlookers to the parking lot just behind a bookstore marked for the rally.

4:57.

We made it with three minutes to spare. Trent smiled, clapping his hand on my shoulder with a wide grin. “We did it.”

“Almost did it,” I amended. “We still need to find out if we won this thing.”

“If we won this thing, huh?” Trent’s smile was infectious, eyes alight.

“Which we didn’t,” I tamped down my excitement. “But maybe we placed in the top three.”

The end of the rally party was in full swing and stretched out of the parking lot and overflowed into the car show. Car hoods were open, and teams wore their costumes as they traded beers and sodas in the street. We navigated around the crowds, making our way toward Tom and Ashley, who sat under a tent emblazoned with “Road to Nowhere Rally.”

“You made it,” Ashley said as we approached, checking her watch. “You cut it close. Again.”

“We had a roadside repair,” Trent all but crowed. “Did you check it out yet?”

Ashley shared a look with Tom. He shook his head. “Apparently not.”

That was all the prompting Trent needed to pull out his phone. “It was amazing. Kit repaired a cracked transmission.”

“I didn’t repair it,” I corrected. “I just worked around it. And I probably destroyed the Cougar in the process.”

Trent aimed the video at them, and they watched the cut and edited two-minute video Trent had posted nearly an hour ago.

When they finished, Tom sat back in his seat and shot me an impressed smile. “You came up with that?”

“It was a two-part solution. Trent came up with the duct tape idea, I came up with the windshield wiper workaround. Or borrowed the idea from something else I read.”

He nodded. “You’ve got a real future as a shitty car mechanic.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” I blushed.

“And how many points does this shitty car mechanic earn?” Trent asked.

Tom sighed, rubbing his scruff-laden chin. “Five.”

“Which puts us…” Trent deflated. “Two points behind first.”

“Second place is pretty good for your first rally,” Ashley said. “You should be really proud of yourself.”

Trent nodded, but didn’t brighten up. I bit my bottom lip, my hand moving to my phone in my pocket. “Exactly how badly do you want to win, Texas?”