Page 9

NINE

TRENT

How to Drive a Manual Transmission

I poked out the letters onto my TV remote, settling on a cheery looking video thumbnail with “Never driven a manual transmission? No Problem!” plastered over a happy grandpa-looking figure.

“Welcome back to Antique Rides! Don’t forget to like and subscribe. Today, we’re going to learn the easy way to drive a manual transmission.”

I settled into my couch, eyelids heavy as the clock on the wall hit one A.M. I only had four more hours until Kit would knock on my door, and even sleep deprived and exhausted, I didn’t want to look like a total ass.

I woke up four hours later to angry banging from the direction of the front door. Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I glanced at the TV to find that the manual transmission video had moved onto antique car auctions. Fuck.

“If you don’t answer this in one minute, I’m leaving without you!” Kit called through the oak panel.

I raced to the door, pulling it open to find her dressed in a threadbare flannel shirt over a baggy t-shirt and a pair of jean shorts, and a frown plastered on her face. Not a welcoming start to our joint adventure.

“What the hell, Trent? I said five A.M. It’s…” She pushed back the sleeve of her shirt. “Five fifteen. We’re not going to make the starting line on time if you don’t hurry.”

“Two seconds,” I said. A complete lie. I’d planned to watch the video and then pack. Falling asleep on the couch meant neither of those things got done. “Just wait here while I grab my things.”

I gestured to the entryway, but she shut the door behind her and followed me down the hallway, eyes surveying the apartment. “Where are your bags?”

“One second.” I held up a finger, stopping her before she barged into my room and saw a mess, for sure. No luggage, absolutely.

She crossed her arms and tapped her foot as I slipped into my bedroom, but thankfully didn’t follow. My heart raced as I scanned the room for an answer to my current problem. A fully-packed bag for a cross-country road trip? Not a chance. The best I could conjure up was my game weekend luggage. I pulled it from the bottom of the closet and tossed it onto my bed. Inside, I had a folded suit and dress pants. I spilled those onto the ground along with all the Norwalk Breakers branded gear. Which left…not much of anything besides a toiletry bag.

Well, it was a start.

I pulled open my dresser.

Empty. Fuck.

“Hey, what day is it?” I called to Kit.

“Wednesday? What does that have to do with anything?” Her annoyance traveled through the shut door clearer than her muffled voice.

“Nothing,” I lied, collecting the nearly empty suitcase and throwing open the door.

Kit’s glare burned at the back of my head as I avoided her eyes in a mad dash down the hallway to the walk-in closet by the front door. The housekeeper I hired my rookie year requested the room, staging her mops, brooms, and cleaning supplies inside. And then the room became a catch-all for packages and fan mail that the doorman and my assistant would drop off to be distributed later.

I scanned the room, spotting a stack of neatly folded clothes inside a translucent tote.

“One second,” I said, stuffing clothes into my bag and leaving what remained a mess.

“You aren’t even packed?” Kit’s voice teetered somewhere between incredulous and annoyed. The tone grated on me, feeding my anxiety.

“I was learning how to drive a stick shift,” I snapped, grabbing a jacket off the wall. Did I have everything? No, but I could buy whatever I’d forgotten on the road. Probably. If Kit didn’t throw me out of the car on the outskirts of Norwalk.

Her mouth dropped open in surprise. “You learned to drive a stick shift last night?”

“I’m in the process,” I lied. I’d made it through all of one minute of the video before falling asleep, but I got the basics: press the clutch, shift, let off the clutch. Easy as pie.

“I’ll drive us until we’re somewhere more rural.” Her lips pulled into a frown.

I wasn’t going to argue with that. “Great. And then I’ll show you my amazing driving abilities.”

She scoffed, brushing past me on her way out the door. I locked up behind her, tailing her into the elevator just before the doors closed.

“Well, that’s an eventful start, huh?” I ribbed her side. Kit shifted to the opposite side of the elevator, nearly hugging the wall.

“Do we have time to stop for coffee?” I asked. She glared. “I’ll take that as a no.”

The elevator doors swept open to the lobby. The newest doorman, Jacob or Jeff, I couldn’t remember, hurried out from behind the desk. “Good morning, Mr. Vogt.”

He couldn’t have been older than twenty, a reedy, nervous guy, but nice enough. Though, this morning, sweat dotted his forehead and his eyes shifted nervously between Kit and I.

“Good morning, Jay!” I smiled, hoping I’d at least remembered the first letter of his name right. “This is Kit. Don’t worry. I know her.”

The tension eased from his face, and he exhaled. “I told her I’d call up to your apartment first, but apparently you’re in a rush?”

“We are in a rush,” Kit said impatiently.

I ignored her. She could wait another minute. “Yeah, I’m gonna be out of town for the weekend. Keep an eye on the place, if you don’t mind.”

“Absolutely, Mr. Vogt.” J’s lips pulled into a smile. “And where are you going with your…sister?”

Kit glowered.

“We’re going on a little road trip,” I answered. “We’ll be back late Sunday. Or maybe Monday. I don’t know.”

Kit didn’t offer an answer to the question I pointedly didn’t ask. Oh well. Not like I had anything to do besides slow yoga, anyway.

His eyes ping-ponged between us, the smile fading from his lips. “Well, have fun?”

I raked a hand over my face, tipping my head back as Kit walked briskly out of the building.

What had I just signed myself up for?

Derek. This was because of Derek. Sure, it’d been my idea to play paintball, but in the minutes after his injury, as the staff rushed off to call an ambulance, Derek had only one thought on his mind: How badly he’d fucked over Kit.

And honestly, I could have cared less. Kit wasn’t my friend. But Derek was. Besides, Derek had a point. I didn’t want to hang out in a hospital for the next week, no matter how much I liked the guy. And if my options were to be useless in a hospital or to go on a trip across the country, I put on my traveling shoes. Or would have, had I had time to pack.

“Hey, Kit!” My voice echoed off the tall apartment buildings and down the empty street.

She stopped, shoulders heaving before she turned around. “We need to go, Texas.”

I tightened my grip on my bag. “Yeah, so you’ve said. We need to talk first.”

She slowed to a stop. “Talk?”

“Yeah,” I said. “This energy? I can’t do five days of this.”

Her jaw tightened, a small indent forming on her cheek. “Fine. Thanks for making me late. Have a great weekend.”

“That’s not what I meant.” My words stopped her mid-turn. “I meant, let’s start over. We’re about to spend five days together. I want to call a truce.”

She tipped her head back and inhaled. “What does that even mean?”

Annoyance coated her face, her stance, but I didn’t back down. “It means we’ll try to get along. You’ll cool it on the annoyance, and I’ll stop trying to wind you up.”

She snorted. “So, you’re admitting that you try to wind me up?”

“Don’t act like you’re not as much to blame as I am,” I laughed.

Her honey brown eyes flitted to the car and back to me before she sighed, taking my hand. “Fine. A truce.”

Just as quickly as her hand landed in mine, it was gone again, tucked into her pockets on the way to the car. Maybe we’d formed an uneasy truce, but hopefully it got us through the next five days without murdering each other.

“So, what’s the deal with this rally? What exactly are we doing?” I asked.

Kit opened the trunk to the rust-covered car parked at the entrance of the building. I placed my leather luggage in the trunk carefully, wincing at the sharp corners that could so easily cut into the fabric.

“So, each night, there’s a checkpoint. We need to be at the checkpoint by ten pm and can’t leave until six. Each morning, we’ll get a list of locations we can stop at for points. Whoever has the most points at the end of the rally wins.”

“That’s it?”

“There’s more.” She flicked on the turn signal, turning onto the highway. “We also get points for our car and theme.”

“What’s our theme?”

She shook her head. “Don’t have one.”

“And this car isn’t getting shit for points.”

“The worse the car, the more starting points, actually.”

I perked up at that. “Really? Shit. Then this car might win us the rally.”

“And the judges can also award points for any reason they want: funny social media posts, extra stops, anything really.”

“And what do we win?”

She rolled her eyes as she dipped into the driver’s seat and started the car. The engine ground out a clunking sound before roaring to life. “Bragging rights, mostly. A trophy, but we won’t win.”

I winced as followed her into the car, my hip smacking the center console. The passenger door squeaked as I shut it, metal grinding against metal.

“Of course we’re going to win.” The knee-jerk response stemmed from a lifetime of competitive sports. Football and track, hell, paintball the night before.

“That’s not how this works.”

“It’s how it works for me.”

She snorted, manhandling the shifter between us into reverse with a painful crunching sound. “Fine. I guess I can’t tell you anything.”

She leaned into the backseat and retrieved a book, handing it to me. “Here’s all the information I have about the event.”

The tattered stack of papers had been thumbed over quite a bit. Oily smudges covered the edges, and more than a few pages were ripped.

“You know you can just read this shit on the Internet, right?” I joked. “You don’t have to print it out.”

She rolled her eyes as I skimmed past the history of the event that took up the first five pages. I stopped on the first rule, reading it aloud. “Don’t be a dick. Really? That’s a rule?”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I should have thought about that before I agreed to this truly insane plan. I’m not sure you can handle not being a dick for more than a couple of minutes.”

“I thought we just called a truce?”

The hint of a smile pulled at her lips, but she kept her gaze on the road.

I shrugged. “Alright, maybe I’ve been a little bit of a dick. I’m sure you’ll keep me in line.”

“Like I won’t have enough to do. How good are you at navigating? Reading maps?”

I flipped through a few more pages. “I have GPS on my phone.”

She groaned as she grabbed the book from my hands, thumbing through pages with her eyes still glued to the road.

“Read this.” She pointed to a page before shoving the papers back at me. “We get a list of checkpoints, but we need to figure out where they are. There are no addresses.”

“This seems like a lot of work. You sure you don’t just want to rent out a track and race this bad boy?” I tapped the dashboard. Black plastic flaked in my hand.

“We just need to finish the race. That’s it.”

“Did your dad just want to finish the race or win it?” I asked.

She winced, and I regretted asking. The “don’t be a dick” rule might actually be a challenge.

Her lips flattened, jaw tightened. “I don’t know.”

“I think we could win.”

“You can’t navigate and can’t drive manual. We’ve never done this before, and some of the other teams have done it a dozen times without winning.” She sighed. “Did you just show up on the football field and start winning?”

I considered the question. She had an answer in mind, but I told the truth. “Yeah.”

Her head whipped toward me. “Yeah?”

I shrugged. “I was always really fast and a good catcher. Football just came natural to me.”

She shook her head, mouth agape. “Seriously?”

Rather than an awed breath that I normally received, Kit seemed almost offended. The reaction took me off guard, got under my skin. “Seriously. It’s not like I didn’t put in the work.”

Even with my inherent talent, making it to the NFL required work. Hard work. Sure, more for some other players than me, but she didn’t need to know that.

“Put in the work?” she barked out a laugh that made me bristle. “Didn’t you get reamed out for showing up to a game hungover?”

I raised an eyebrow.

“I thought you didn’t read the gossip columns and you hated football.” Her cheeks burned tomato red, and I laughed. “You’re such a liar.”

“Hey, better a liar than a guy who wastes his talent by partying all the time. If I got paid millions of dollars to catch a dumb ball, I wouldn’t leave the field.”

“Sure, that’s easy to say when you haven’t been doing it for a quarter of a century.”

Thanks to the loud clanking of the engine, the awkwardness that followed wasn’t silent.

“If you think you’re getting sympathy from me, Texas,” she said, voice barely louder than the engine, “you’re in the wrong car. If you want to prove that life is so easy for you that you can win a rally you’ve never even thought about before yesterday, have at it. I can’t wait to bring home that trophy.”