Falling into You (Falling #1)(40)

Cracked, stained concrete floor, hanging, flickering fluorescent lights in warped cages, stack after stack of red and silver tool chests along the walls, counters with more tools hanging from hooks, chains from the ceiling suspending engines, the metal frame of a ’66 Mustang Shelby GT, a couple huge gray plastic garbage cans and overflowing ashtrays and abandoned beer bottles and pizza boxes…

“It’s not much, but it’s mine.” I laugh. “It’s really, really not much. I can’t believe I brought you here. It’s so dirty and ugly.”

I’m seeing it for the first time, in a way. I’ve never brought a girl here before. I’ve girls to my place before, but they never want to see the shop; they’re only interested in the bed. I look around, seeing what she must see.

Then she surprises me. “I love it. It…feels like home. It’s a place that you obviously love.”

I stare at her. “It is home. I may sleep upstairs, but this garage is home. More than you know.”

I think of all the times I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor where the Mustang is now, before the apartment upstairs was renovated to be livable. I bought this place for pittance, because it was dump. Rejected, abandoned, unwanted. Like me. I fixed it up. Made it mine.

She lets go of my hand and wanders around the shop, pulling open drawers and examining tools, which look bulky and awkward and dirty in her clean, delicate hands. She always puts the tools back exactly where they were. I wonder if she realizes how anal I am about, or if she’s just polite. Probably just polite. We really don’t know each other at all. She couldn’t know about my OCD about the tools.

“Show me what you do,” She says.

I shrug. I point at the engine. “That engine there.” I walk over and run my finger around the opening of a piston. “I bought it at a junkyard a few weeks ago. It was rusted and dirty and ruined, basically. It was in an old car that had been in a wreck, rear-ended and totaled. A ’77 Barracuda. I took the engine, fixed the parts I could fix, replaced the ones I couldn’t. I took it apart completely, down to components.”

I pull the tarp off a long, wide table in a corner, showing a dissected motor, each part laid out in a very specific pattern. “Like this. Then I put it all back together, one piece at a time, until you see it there. It’s almost done. Just gotta install a few more parts and it’s done, ready to be put into a car.”

She looks from the table to the reassembled motor. “So you turned that—” she points at the pieces on the table, “into that?”

I shrug. “Yeah. Those are completely different engines, but yeah.”

“That’s amazing. How do you know where all the different parts go? How to fix them?”

I laugh. “Lots of experience. I know from having done it a million times. All engines are basically the same, just with little differences that make each kind of engine unique. I took my first motor apart when I was…thirteen? Of course, once I got it apart, I couldn’t get it back together again, but that was part of the learning process. I tinkered with that fucked-up engine for months, figuring out how the thing worked, which parts went where and what they did and how to get them back in. Eventually I did get it back together and running, but it took me like, I don’t know, more than a year of dicking around with it every day. I took it apart again, and put it back together after that. Over and over again, until I could do it without stopping to think about what came next.”

She tilts her head. “Where’d you get the engine?”

I stare up at the ceiling, trying to remember. “Hmm. I think I bought it off the shop teacher at the high school. I’d saved my allowance for months.” She still looks confused and I laugh. “I had a tutor at the high school after classes ended at the middle school. I happened to walk by the shop one day and saw the engine and something just clicked as I watched the shop instructor, Mr. Boyd, puttering with it. He ended up being one of my best friends until I moved out here.”

Nell is peering at me as if seeing me for the first time. “You had a tutor?”

I wince, wishing she’d have missed that part. “Yeah. I wasn’t very good at the whole school thing.”

I turn away and throw the tarp over the table and lead her to the private stairway leading to my apartment. It’s my way of politely indicating I don’t want to talk about it, and she seems to get the message.

Saying I wasn’t very good at the school thing was a huge understatement, but she doesn’t need to know that. I’m hoping to avoid the subject as long as I can.

My apartment isn’t much. A galley kitchen I can barely fit in—like, I can’t have the stove and the cabinets opposite open at the same time, not that I ever use the stove, but still—a living room in which I can just about touch all four walls standing in the center, and a bedroom that contains my queen bed and nothing else. All my clothes are in the dresser, which is in the living room, and the dresser also doubles as the TV stand. Not that I ever really watch TV.

I throw my arm out to gesture at the apartment. “It’s even less than the shop, but it’s home. I’d say I would give you the ten cent tour, but I’d need to give you nine and a half cents back.”

She laughs, the Tinkerbell giggle, and my heart lifts. But even with all the normalcy, the questions, the interest, I can see her fighting for calm. She hides it well, hides it like a pro. It’s buried deep, thrust down under the surface.