The rest of the week went by in a steady rhythm of calls and texts, most of them from her, most of them entirely unnecessary in the practical sense and somehow completely essential anyway.
It started Wednesday night itself, with her calling to argue, at length and with real conviction, about whether a hot dog counted as a sandwich. She texted Thursday morning, a single photo of her coffee with the caption this is fine, everything is fine, I only slept four hours. Thursday night brought a phone call that started as a question about thermodynamics homework she absolutely did not need help writing and ended forty minutes later with neither of us having mentioned thermodynamics again. Friday, she sent nothing until almost midnight, then a simple ’goodnight, Nathan, see you at lunch tomorrow🥳’ that somehow felt like the loudest text of the entire week.
By Saturday morning, I was in a genuinely good mood. A rare, uncomplicated kind, the sort you don’t examine too closely in case it stops working. I’d picked out a shirt, showered, and was halfway through actually looking presentable when my phone rang.
Mr. Tanaka.
I frowned at the screen. I wasn’t on the schedule today. I’d covered a full shift yesterday specifically so today would be clear.
"Hey, boss."
"Nathan. Sorry to bother you on your day off." He sounded genuinely apologetic, which was very on-brand for him. The man ran a shop full of grown men covered in grease and somehow still managed to sound like he was inconveniencing you by asking for help. "Diego called in sick, and I’ve got three cars booked back to back. I wouldn’t ask if I had anyone else."
"How long do you need me?"
"Couple hours. Maybe three, if the transmission on the Civic is as bad as it sounds over the phone."
I glanced at myself in the mirror; dressed, ready, exactly on schedule for a lunch I’d been quietly looking forward to since Wednesday.
"Yeah. I can come in."
"You’re a lifesaver. I’ll make it up to you."
"You always say that."
"And I always mean it."
"True. See you in a bit."
The call cut. I looked at myself in the mirror one more time, sighed, and typed out a quick text before heading for the door.
Hey, so bad news. Got called into work. Emergency shift. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.
I watched the message go from delivered to read almost instantly.
No reply.
I stood there for a second longer than the situation probably called for, phone still in hand, running through the possibilities. Maybe she was upset. That tracked. She’d clearly been looking forward to today, given the whole week leading up to it.
Or maybe she’d just seen it and gotten pulled into something else immediately after. People did that. Normal people did that constantly.
Who was I kidding. She replied to texts before I’d even finished sending them, most days. This silence meant something.
I decided not to spiral about it further and grabbed my keys.
The drive to Tanaka Auto took fifteen minutes, most of which I spent glancing at my phone at every red light like that would somehow make her respond faster.
It didn’t.
By the time I got there, Marcus already had the hood up on the Civic, and a guy named Jude — newer, quiet, good with electrical work but slower on everything else — was elbow-deep in something on the other lift.
"Nathan!" Marcus called without looking up. "Tanaka said you were coming. Bless you."
"Don’t thank me yet. I haven’t looked at it."
"It’s the transmission. It’s always the transmission with this one."
I grabbed my overalls from the locker, pulled them on over my clothes, and checked my phone one last time before shoving it into my back pocket.
Still nothing.
I exhaled, rolled my shoulders once, and got to work.
Two hours in, Marcus and I had narrowed the problem down to something in the shift solenoid, but the car still wouldn’t turn over clean, and we were both starting to run out of theories that didn’t involve just replacing half the transmission out of spite.
"Try it again," I said, pointing him toward the driver’s seat while I leaned over the engine bay. "Give it a little gas this time."
"If this doesn’t work, I’m blaming you."
"Funny. Start it."
He turned the key. The engine coughed, caught, sputtered, and died again.
"Okay, so that’s not it either," I muttered, already reaching for the wrench again.
Marcus straightened up to say something back, and then went quiet, looking past me toward the entrance instead.
"...Nathan."
"What?"
I followed his gaze.
A Bentley Continental GTC — dark, gleaming, entirely too clean for the environment it had just driven into — was pulling smoothly through the open bay door, easing to a stop a few feet off, careful to stay clear of anything anyone was actually working on.
Every head in the shop turned. Marcus. Jude, halfway out from under his own car, wrench frozen mid-turn. Even Mr. Tanaka, poking his head out from the office at the sound of an engine that clearly didn’t belong to anything on his lot.
The door opened, and Nicole stepped out; dark sweatshirt, blue jeans, white platform heel boots, looking like she’d walked straight out of an off-duty photoshoot rather than out of a quarter-million-dollar car parked in the middle of an auto shop.
I just stared. Marcus and Jude were staring too, but it wasn’t just the car doing that to them, it was her, stepping out of it looking like that, in an outfit that had no business being this effective, paired with a face and a body that made the car feel almost like an afterthought.
Mine was something else entirely. It was the quiet, sinking realization that whatever scale I’d built in my head — after the house, her office, and whatever sorcery handled the bill that night — had just been broken again, casually, by a woman stepping out of a Bentley like it was a Honda Civic.
The shop and Nicole. Two completely separate parts of my life, now colliding in a parking bay I never expected them to be in, and somewhere underneath all of it, the math I still hadn’t finished doing getting harder by the second.
She spotted me, smiled, gave a small wave, and mouthed the word: Hi.
Every head in the shop turned to face me at once.
Marcus was the first to recover, mostly. "I’m sorry— is that a Bentley?"
He glanced at me, then back at the car, then back at me.
"I’ll, uh—" I gestured vaguely toward her, already moving. "I’ll go talk to her."
"Yeah, go. I’ll wait."
I crossed the shop floor, very aware of every eye still on me, and stopped in front of her.
"Hi," she said again, softer this time.
My eyes went from her to the car, then back.
"A GTC."
She glanced down at the car, then back at me, something almost sheepish in it. "...A GTC."
"You have a Bentley."
"I have a Bentley." Her voice dropped slightly on the second one, like she was hoping saying it quieter might make it land smaller.
I stared at the car for a while longer than the moment probably called for.
"How did you even—"
"Jackson." She said it without quite meeting my eyes. "Your best friend—"
"I know who Jackson is."
Silence, longer this time.
"I took his number from his file and asked him," she said, quieter now, all the earlier brightness gone out of it. "I wanted to surprise you."
I stared at the car for a second, something sharp sitting right on the edge of my tongue — ’some surprise’ — close enough to say that I could feel the shape of it before I caught it and put it down instead.
"You didn’t have to do all this," I said, gentler than I felt, but true anyway.
"I know."
She looked down at her boots, fingers fidgeting together in front of her, not offering anything else.
I stared at her for a moment before exhaling. "There’s not much to do here except stand around and watch me get grease everywhere. You’ll be bored in ten minutes."
She looked up at me. "I won’t be bored."
"You say that now—"
"I won’t."
I studied her for a second. "You want to watch."
She nodded — small, hesitant, the kind of nod that wasn’t really an answer so much as a plea dressed up as one, like she already knew I wasn’t fully there yet and didn’t have a better way to close the gap than just looking a little lost and hoping it worked.
I shook my head, exhaling again. "Fine. You can watch."
I turned to head back toward the Civic, and she caught the sleeve of my coveralls before I’d gotten more than a step away.
"You’re not... mad at me, right? For the car?"
I turned to face her properly.
She already knew exactly why this had thrown me. Of course she did. She’d been reading me accurately since the rain, back before I even realized anyone was paying that much attention.
"I’m not mad." A pause. "Just... recalibrating. Again. Can we talk about it properly later?"
Something in her shoulders loosened, just slightly. "Okay."
"Come on," I said, already turning to head back.
She fell into step beside me, and by the time we reached the car, Marcus had mostly recovered from whatever internal crisis the Bentley had caused him.
"Hey, Marcus. Brought an intern. She wants to watch."
Marcus looked her up and down — the sweatshirt, the jeans, the white platform boots that had absolutely never once touched an oil stain in their life — and nodded slowly.
"Yeah. She looks real qualified for that."
That got an actual laugh out of her; bright, a little surprised, like she hadn’t expected the joke and appreciated it more for that.
I glanced over at her laughing, and something in me eased slightly at the sight of it. Better than the fidgeting. Better than the boots-staring.
I turned back to the car and got to work.