I turned back to the car and got to work, Marcus sliding back into the driver’s seat without needing to be told.
"Let’s try it one more time," I called, leaning over the engine bay again.
The engine turned over, caught, held for a second, then died again.
"Still not it."
"Still not it," Marcus agreed, sounding personally wounded by the fact.
I was halfway back under the hood when Mr. Tanaka’s voice came from a few feet off, easy and unhurried the way it always was, even when he was clearly curious about something.
"Nathan. Everything alright out here?"
I straightened up. "Yeah, still working through it. Solenoid’s looking more likely than the fluid at this point."
"Take your time." He glanced past me, toward Nicole, who was standing a respectful distance from the lift, hands tucked into the pocket of her sweatshirt, watching everything with genuine interest rather than boredom. "And who’s this?"
"Nicole. A friend."
"A friend." He said it lightly, no real weight behind it, just the natural politeness of a man greeting someone standing in his shop. He offered her a nod. "Hope Nathan’s not boring you too much."
"Not even a little," Nicole said, smiling. "This is actually fascinating."
Mr. Tanaka looked pleasantly surprised by that, the way most people did when someone claimed to find car repair fascinating and actually meant it.
"Well. Make yourself at home. Coffee’s in the back if you want it, though I can’t promise it’s good."
"I appreciate it."
He gave me a look on his way past — small, knowing, the kind that said he’d already drawn his own conclusions about "a friend" and had no intention of saying so out loud — then headed back toward the office.
Marcus wiped his hands on a rag and straightened up, glancing between me and the Civic with the specific expression of a man who’d hit his limit.
"You know what, let’s take a break. Lunch break. Because if I have to look at this transmission for one more minute without eating something, I’m gonna flip it. Or set it on fire."
I smirked. "Love the idea."
I called over to Jude, who was still elbow-deep in his own project. "Taking a break. You good?"
He gave a thumbs up without looking up, which was as close to actual communication as Jude generally offered.
I turned to Nicole, who was already watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite place.
"You hungry?" she asked.
"Starving."
"Good thing I brought lunch."
I just stared at her for a second, genuinely thrown. "You brought lunch."
She was already walking back toward the Bentley, tossing the answer over her shoulder like it wasn’t a big deal at all.
"Yep. Give me a minute."
She popped the trunk, and I followed, half expecting to see takeout bags. Instead there were several large containers, neatly stacked, still faintly warm through the plastic when she handed the first one over.
"There’s more than enough," she said, already pulling out a second container. "I didn’t know how many people worked here, so I made extra. And extra of the extra, just in case."
I stared at the containers, then at her, doing some quick, disbelieving math.
"You made this."
"I made this."
"Yourself."
"I do occasionally do things myself, yes."
I opened my mouth, then closed it, still catching up.
"This is why it took almost three hours to get here instead of one," she added, pulling out a third container.
She glanced over at me, smirking. "Did I break your brain again?"
"A little. Give me a moment to recalibrate."
"Again?"
"You’re a lot to keep up with. My processor’s not built for this workload."
She laughed, bright and immediate, nearly dropping the container she was holding.
Marcus, who had wandered over out of pure curiosity, peered into one of the open containers and made a small, reverent sound.
"Nathan. Your girl can cook?"
I glanced at Nicole, who was very deliberately not making eye contact with either of us, though the corner of her mouth was fighting a losing battle against a smile. I opened my mouth to say something.
She beat me to it, holding out a container toward Marcus instead.
"This one’s for you. Marcus, right?"
Marcus took it like she’d just handed him a trophy. "You are officially welcome here whenever you want. I don’t make the rules, but I’m making this one."
She handed over a second container. "And this one’s for your friend over there." A nod toward Jude, still elbow-deep in his car.
Marcus took that one too, shaking his head slowly.
"She’s a saint, man," he said, looking straight at me. "An actual saint."
"You just met her," I said. "You don’t even know her."
"She cooked. And drove it here herself. That’s all I need to know."
He wandered off toward Jude, container in hand, calling out well before he’d even reached him. "Yo, Jude! Nathan’s girl cooked!"
I turned back to Nicole, who was watching the whole thing with an expression of pure, uncomplicated delight.
"You did that on purpose, didn’t you?"
"Did what?"
"That."
"I genuinely don’t know what you mean."
I opened my mouth to push back on that, and she cut me off by handing me another container.
"For your boss." She tilted her head toward the office. "I’ll wait for you so we can eat together."
I narrowed my eyes at her.
She just stood there, hands clasped behind her back, smiling like she had no idea what I wanted to say.
I finally exhaled and took the container toward Mr. Tanaka’s office.
The food was, without exaggeration, one of the best I’d ever had. I did my best not to let it show on my face, mostly because I didn’t particularly want to give her any more encouragement in whatever campaign she seemed to be quietly running, but I clearly failed, because at one point she just watched me chew with an expression of absolute satisfaction, like she already knew exactly how this was going to go.
Marcus thanked her twice, once for the food and once specifically for the seasoning on whatever he’d been eating, going so far as to ask if she’d consider giving him the recipe. Even Jude wandered over long enough to say an actual, audible "thank you," which was, by a wide margin, the most words he’d spoken all day.
By the time we’d finished and she’d repacked the empty containers back into the Bentley’s trunk, we made our way back toward the Civic, still up on the lift, transmission problem entirely unresolved.
She studied it for a moment, hands on her hips.
"It looks like this car’s been giving you guys a headache."
"Yeah, the solenoi—" I stopped mid-sentence, mostly because saying "solenoid" out loud to a woman who looked like that felt vaguely ridiculous.
"The solenoid," she finished for me, unbothered. "In the shift assembly. That’s usually the first thing I’d check too."
I blinked.
"I heard Marcus saying the issue is with the transmission," she added.
I stared at her for a second. "...Right."
"You’re forgetting," she said, not unkindly, "that before I was your professor, I was an actual automotive engineer."
"I don’t forget that."
"Sure you don’t." But she was smiling.
She wasn’t wrong. It was easy to forget, honestly; given the face doing the talking and all. It was easy to file her under ’brilliant, but theoretical,’ some polished, boardroom version of engineering rather than someone who’d actually gotten her hands dirty on a car exactly like this one.
Marcus wandered back over, clapping his hands together once. "Alright, break’s over, love birds. Back to the grind."
I shot him a look he ignored completely.
Nicole moved closer, clearly intending to actually watch this time, and I glanced at her outfit; the white boots, the clothes that’s definitely expensive, none of it built for standing around an auto shop.
"You should probably give it a little distance. You’ll get stained."
She pouted; small, immediate, the same one she did back at her office. "But I wanna watch."
I paused. The pout got me again, same as last time, and I hated how effective it still was.
"You’ll ruin the boots."
"I don’t care about the boots."
Marcus, wiping his hands on a rag nearby, didn’t even look up. "Hey, the lady said she’s fine getting her expensive shoes dirty. Let the lady watch, man."
She turned to me, saying nothing, just giving me a look; somewhere between a pout and a plea and something else I couldn’t quite name.
"Fine," I said. "But don’t touch anything without asking first."
"Yes, sir."
She was already moving closer to the car by the time it landed, entirely unaware of what those two words had just done, casually tossed off like they meant nothing at all.
I stood there for a second, quietly recalculating everything I thought I knew about how this was supposed to go. She was twenty-eight. A professor. A PhD, an actual engineer, more accomplished at this point than most people twice her age, and she’d just said ’yes, sir’ like it cost her nothing, like it was just a normal thing you said to someone, completely oblivious to the fact that it had just short-circuited something in my brain I hadn’t given her permission to touch.
"Nathan." Marcus, somewhere behind me, clearly not for the first time. "You good?"
"Yeah." I shook myself out of it, grabbing the wrench again. "Yeah, I’m good."
I was not, in fact, good. But I got back to work anyway.