Page 4

FOUR

KIT

After a shift in the microbiology lab, I smelt like pseudomonas, a sickly grape smell reminiscent of children’s cough syrup. Thanks to the mice infestation in my dad’s car, I’d walked to work, and I hoped a late afternoon breeze would rid my scrubs from the smell. Instead, I walked into a wall of heat and humidity.

Walking was clearly a bad idea, but I’d spent the weekend stuffing my brain with so much information about parasitology and coagulation theory that I hadn’t checked the weather. Or accounted for the fact that spring in Virginia was summer in the rest of the country.

Hot, humid, and exhausting.

The promise of a cold drink and air conditioning fueled me up the two stories to our apartment, a tiny 2-bedroom Derek and I had rented when we’d left our hometown.

Rather than live in university housing, Derek tapped his private scholarships, putting down a deposit on the cheapest apartment in the least seedy part of town. And while he studied for his business degree, I drew blood as a phlebotomist before bootstrapping myself through an associate’s degree to work in the lab.

Now, in just a few short weeks, I’d have my bachelor’s degree, a bump in pay, and whenever Derek left me to move in with a boyfriend or a husband, I’d be fine. Comfortable even.

I caught my breath at the front door, sticky from the walk and flushed. I slotted my key into the lock when an unfamiliar voice from the opposite side of the door caught my attention.

No, not unfamiliar.

I winced as I pushed the door open to find Trent Vogt on my couch.

“Hey! You’re home!” Derek called jovially. He stood at the center of the room, pacing with a soccer ball under one arm and wearing his lucky jersey. “The game just started.”

My gaze swung back to Trent but snagged on the wild amount of food laid out on the coffee table. “What’s that?”

“I brought snacks.” Trent folded his ankles, bringing his palm to the back of his head.

The hem of his T-shirt rode up high enough to see his tanned abs. Golden roped muscle that on anyone else would be an instant turn-on. The thought replaced my exhaustion with irritation. “Are there more people coming?”

“No.” Derek shook his head, gripping his ball in both hands and giving it a squeeze when the opposing goalie scooped up the ball on-screen. “Why?”

“There’s enough food to feed a small army. I assumed there’d be more people coming.”

“Nope, just us,” Derek groaned as a ref pulled out a yellow card.

I briefly considered ignoring the food in favor of a shower, but my stomach betrayed me, rumbling loudly.

“Here,” Trent said, grabbing a plate from the corner of the table.

“Thanks.” I grabbed the plate with some reluctance.

Derek had asked me to ease up on Trent, which would have been easier if Trent didn’t plaster on that try-hard smile and use that smarmy self-assured voice, drawling out every word encapsulated in honey in a way he never did with Derek.

And I’d happily stepped aside in the past while Derek bro-ed it up with his high school baseball buddies. Of course, back then we didn’t share a house. The parties were held in the woods around a bonfire and not my living room, so I had the option of declining the invitations.

But the snack plate was amazing. I had to give Trent that. Even if he probably paid some bougie lunch spot way too much money for it, it was nice. Whole nuts, tiny sandwiches, a variety of cheeses cut into tiny cubes and meats shaped into flowers, each item painstakingly labeled with tiny chalkboard signs. My plate overflowed and when a green olive rolled onto the coffee table, I gave up on the pretense of sitting anywhere but directly beside the food and parked myself on the floor.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked, offering a small olive branch of conversation.

“Ruffage. It’s on Lincoln. Have you been?” Trent reached over the coffee table for a handful of Jordan almonds.

“No. I don’t hang out in that part of town.”

The bougie part of town. I hadn’t said it, but the pointed look by Derek told me I implied as much. “Other than the bar by the kickball field, Kit doesn’t leave the neighborhood.”

I certainly didn’t wander around the “historic” downtown district. The part of town where the old warehouses had been gutted and replaced with cobblestone roads and flickering streetlights. A nod to a colonial period that I doubted really existed anywhere except a greedy developer’s sense of nostalgia.

“With the hospital right down the street, I don’t really need to go anywhere else,” I said, chewing a slice of prosciutto.

Also, I didn’t get paid enough to afford the twenty-dollar cocktails and high-end shopping on Lincoln Street.

“She also can’t go anywhere else,” Derek sighed, eyes wandering to Trent. “Her car is a piece of a shit.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but Derek had a point. My previous car had been fine. Old, sure, but reliable. A 2000 Honda Accord that had its fair share of chipped paint and a dingy interior, but it could transport me across the state if necessary. Then, my mom had moved, and I’d taken my dad’s Mercury Cougar rather than watch it be sold.

Derek had offered to park on the street. Our lease only provided two parking spots. Norwalk wasn’t so cosmopolitan that street parking was impossible, but Derek had a brand-new Mazda, so I street parked the Honda for the better part of a year before finally admitting I didn’t need two cars, particularly one that wouldn’t start half the time.

“My car is an antique.” I defended it even as, internally, I acknowledged the sensible thing to do would have been to sell my dad’s car. Sure, it was in rough shape, but probably worth something.

My decision to keep the ancient, barely-driven Cougar led me to walking to work most days. Good for my health, not great for my ego. What self-respecting, supposedly gainfully employed twenty-four-year-old didn’t own a reliable car?

“Really? What kind of car is it?” Trent asked.

My cheeks burned, and I dipped my head, mumbling into my plate. “A Mercury Cougar.”

Trent’s blond eyebrows drew together. He tilted his head. “A Mercury? Do they even make those anymore?”

I didn’t know the answer to that. I shrugged. “Obviously, it’s not an Aston Martin or a Bugatti. I wouldn’t expect you to know anything about it.”

He swiped a piece of brie off the table. “Nope. I’m not really a car guy. I mean, I like fast cars, but old stuff? Not my thing.”

His tone stayed easy, which surprised me. Sure, I didn’t know shit about Trent, but I knew guys like him. Guys who’d rather die than admit to not knowing everything about everything. Guys who had never changed a car’s oil but talked about cars as if they were a seasoned mechanic.

Maybe the ludicrous amount of money Trent made from football inoculated him from that tendency.

“It wasn’t Kit’s either, but she’s determined to race the car. She’s been working on it for months.” Derek gave us an encouraging smile.

He had it bad for Trent. Not romantically. Even if I hadn’t read all the gossip columns about him, Trent gave off straight dude energy like no one else I’d ever met. But Derek loved a bromance, and Trent was his type. By the end of the night, they’d be drunk, discussing offensive formations and the best IPAs in the Southeast.

I needed to escape.

After I ate.

“You race?” Trent stood up. “Hold that thought. I’m gonna grab us a beer.”

He returned with two beers. Not the cheap stuff we kept in the back of the fridge, reserved for late nights working on the car when we needed just a kick of booze to wipe out the memory of completely screwing up an exhaust system or draining the wrong line. His beer was a sunshine-y yellow hazy liquid, poured into a glass with a head that looked like it came straight out of a tap.

I grabbed the offered glass and took a sip. Not even a little watery. “This is good.”

“Tell me about racing.”

“There’s really not much to tell. I’m not racing, like NASCAR and F1.” I glanced over at Derek whose rapt attention remained on the game. My mind picked through all the parts of the story that led to me signing up for the rally and how much I wanted to share with Trent. Sure, he was being nice, but he wasn’t my friend. “It’s a rally. The car isn’t fast, and I don’t really know how to make it fast. It was something my dad wanted to do, before…”

Even three years later, I struggled with saying the words aloud.

My dad is dead. He’s not alive. He passed.

Hell, I struggled to say them to myself.

I hadn’t lived at home for over three years when he died. We barely even talked, other than the occasional “hello” after I’d spent an hour on the phone with my mom or on my brief trips back home for a long weekend. I barely knew him, and at his wake, the only thing I remembered was the Cougar.

Also, I didn’t want to tell Trent he was dead because it’d change the conversation. Death made people uncomfortable. Rather than talking about my upcoming dumb, ill-advised rally, the conversation would pivot to my dad and funerals and grieving with a guy I didn’t even like.

“Anyway.” I shook my head as his mouth opened with some half-hearted apology for someone he didn’t even know. “I wanted to race his car, and I haven’t been on a vacation in ages.”

“I tried to convince her to just go to the beach. It was a no go,” Derek said with a laugh.

I would have loved a trip to the beach, but limited funds and vacation days meant I could only do one: rally across the country in some ill-advised way of putting my father’s memory to rest or go to the beach and spend another year avoiding the grief of losing a parent.

For once, I went with the “not avoiding my emotions” option.

Trent studied me, eyes narrowing and holding mine. Probably the first time he’d actually seen me. Well, seen me more than just a random person on his kickball team.

Derek yelled, and Trent’s attention shifted back to the game. The score flipped from zero-zero to one-zero. A ref pulled out a yellow card, and Trent stood, scooping up his beer to join Derek in front of the screen.

A frown pulled at my lips, confusion mixing with surprise.

For a moment, Trent seemed like an actual person.