Summer Sons(44)
“You set the pairs?” Andrew asked.
“Consensus, I guess,” he said. “Luca called your dibs, though. That’s her car.”
He pointed to the fox-body Mustang Andrew had noted at the gas station. Andrew almost hadn’t expected her to mean it. Del hadn’t been much for their sport.
“She had a bone to pick with Eddie about his attitude toward girls, and I’m sure she’d love to pick it with you too,” Sam said.
“Shouldn’t be hard to beat that car, unless she’s packing something real impressive under the hood,” he said.
“Cocky little shit,” Sam said.
“What are you two gossiping about?” Riley shouted at them from the open window of his Mazda. “Hurry up, goddamn.”
“All he does is bitch,” Sam said with affection as he strode toward his WRX.
The roar of their motley crew careened off the hills. Andrew rode middle of the pack, the bulk of the Hellcat digging at the pavement. He pulled Eddie’s hat onto his head and kept a thumb on the brim, elbow on the edge of the open window. The dying light tinged the evening gold. He ran his tongue over his teeth. A dog bayed once, distant and eerie.
The passenger seat pricked at the corner of his right eye—the same straw paper and discarded shirt from the first afternoon remained, nothing remarkable on second and third glance—but there was a tug. Ethan’s taillights ahead guided him out of the hills alongside the rest of the pack, to an outlying suburb, then an unlit stretch of street leading into an industrial park. The grungy rumble of someone’s muffled electronic loops ahead of him bounced against his eardrums. The road through the boxy nondescript buildings was deserted and straight and nakedly public. Eddie would’ve said, kiss your plausible deniability goodbye. But he’d have been smiling when he said it.
Andrew had missed this too, no matter his other reasons for being in the pack tonight.
Practiced as choreography, Ben pulled onto the shoulder a stretch down the road while the rest idled in wait. Music throbbed through open windows, guitar and percussion and electronic fog clashing from all sides. Streetlights cast shadows behind Ben’s heels as he climbed out of his car with an actual orange cone in hand, like from high school gym class. He slapped it on the yellow line and bowed performatively at the group before hopping back in his Focus and reversing to meet them.
Sam hollered, “Let’s get this done before we have company!”
The Mazda rolled ahead of the rest and purred in the lamplight. Andrew was unsurprised to see Ethan match Riley, goosing the engine once their noses were even. It reminded him of his own habitual match with Eddie, first and last no matter what happened between—until now. Ben jogged to stand between the cars with a hand raised. Desire flamed in Andrew as both cars shot off the mark to Ben’s hand chopping the night air. The Supra’s whine shrieked over the Mazda’s lower register, plowing ahead first. Riley caught Ethan, though, at a too-abrupt shift. The Supra’s tail end went loose, a brief but unsalvageable slip that let the Mazda skate past the cone. Brake lights spilled bloody red over the road.
The Mustang rolled up next to Andrew, and Luca shouted to him, “Ben and Jacob have it next, then it’s us.”
“Clear,” he said.
The tattoo itched, a ring of tender prickling pain. Andrew rubbed his wrist on his jeans. Floater-specks danced at the edge of his vision while his nerves throbbed in asymmetrical tempo. The gunmetal WRX idled at the edge of the pack. Sam boosted himself to sit on the rim of his window, ass tucked into the notch of the door and one arm on the roof. Andrew was peripherally aware of the other pair squaring up with Ethan as their flagger.
The rest of him settled, attuned to the cigarette hanging from the corner of Sam’s mouth. His sunburned neck led to the swell of his paler, naked shoulders, where a hint of black ink slipped loose at the collar of his tank top. It was shapeless but bold in the gloaming light, too distant to guess at. Sam noticed his attention and flicked his cigarette onto the ground. Andrew’s hand lifted without his permission. He pointed a finger to his own chest and then at Sam. The bark of Sam’s laugh carried over the noise of the other cars bursting from their stop.
On the other side, Luca said, “Keep it in your pants, Jesus.”
Andrew twitched. She laughed when he turned from Sam, but it was good-natured, lighting her face. Her laugh gave him permission to look, but her seeing made him feel naked. High cheekbones, plump cheeks, the cloud of her hair wrangled free of her face with a toothed headband; the orange lipstick matched her short orange fingernails. He tried to imagine Del behind the wheel of her own car, doing her own work under the hood, and came up blank. Riley said Luca didn’t care for most of Sam’s friends, and neither did Ethan, but here they were: the core of the crew, the ones he should talk to more.
Thinking about that, he called back, “Next?”
“Yeah, I figure I’ve got a point to prove for our first head-to-head,” she said.
“What’s that?” Andrew asked.
“Got to demolish the new boy to keep him in his right place, like the rest of ’em,” she said with a wink as she worked her left arm to roll her window up between them. The tint concealed her one mechanical inch at a time, smirking at him all the while. That was a brand of showmanship Andrew appreciated.
His spark of pleasure was unexpected, momentarily unbalancing. The outing he’d intended as an investigation kept distracting him with something close to fun. He thumbed the button for his windows and coasted to the line. The Hellcat rumbled under him. The interior hush, tinted windows cutting him off from the light, sparked at his fingers on the gearshift. The digital display changed as he shifted to sport drive, the 0.00 timer mode active. All tech, Eddie’s car, compared to the classic machine Luca had chosen for her own, or his Supra, waiting at the house on Capitol for his next outing.