Shifting Gears: The Complete Series (Sports Bad Boy Romance) Read online

  He eases off the throttle a touch and asks, “You all right?”

  “Not sure yet,” I tell him. “Why is the car still rocking?”

  “The suspension’s going on it. Don’t worry, though. I do this for a living, kind of.”

  The sun is already near the horizon. I’m still not sure whether I’m thrilled or petrified cruising along in this boat of his, but it’s a decent departure from my usual routine of never doing anything exciting ever.

  We pull off onto a dirt road that crawls past a tall, grassy hill. There’s a rocky face on the west side, and I’m wondering if this brash guy might actually have a touch of the romantic in him.

  When we arrive at a dirt parking lot, there’s a line of people walking toward the hill.

  “We’re here,” his lips say, although it very well may be “weird hair.” It’s difficult to tell.

  He opens his mouth wide, moving his jaw back and forth. I mimic the gesture and after a few seconds, my ears pop. I wouldn’t say I can hear very well right now, but it’s an improvement.

  “How was the ride?” he asks in a reasonably discernible voice.

  I just keep trying to pop my ears more, hoping I might be able to follow the conversation a bit better before it’s time to go and his car deafens me again.

  “That bad?” he asks. “Maybe we should have taken your car.”

  “No,” I tell him, giving up on wiggling my jaw. “It’s fine. It was actually kind of fun.”

  It was kind of fun. It was also kind of terrifying.

  “You said you wanted a ride,” he says. “If you want, I can drive more like a normal person on the way back.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” I tell him as we get out of the car.

  “If you wouldn’t mind getting the box from Soeur Torsadée,” he says, “I’ve got some camping chairs and some wine in the trunk I’m gonna grab.”

  “What is this place?” I ask, picking up the box from the floor of the passenger’s seat.

  “It’s just a hill,” Eli says, opening his trunk. “A while ago, I guess people got into the habit of coming here to watch the sunset.” He pulls out two folding canvas camping chairs and leans them up against the back bumper. “It started as a hippie thing, I think, but then a few more people heard about it and it got pretty big for a while.”

  “You’d think there would be a sign or something,” I say, looking at the hill in the distance. From where I’m standing, the hill looks like it grew out of the Earth with the sole purpose of adding to the build-up of the moment. The sky behind the hill is starting to turn, but the sun is blocked from view.

  “They tried that a few years ago,” Eli says as glasses clink. He pulls a picnic basket out of the trunk. It’s a strange, if endearing, sight. “Most of the people are just here to watch the sunset, but some of them get a little protective of this place. The sign was up for an hour and thirteen minutes before they hooked up a truck to it and tore it out of the ground.”

  “So is this an outlaw thing?”

  He laughs, holding the picnic basket in his left hand and carrying the chairs under his other arm. “No. It’s just people on a hill watching a sunset,” he says and we start walking up the hill. “Stoners show up every once in a while, but they usually stay off in their own little area. That’s actually how I first learned about the place.”

  “So you’re a pothead?”

  “No,” he laughs and shakes his head. “That was a long time ago. I think I was sixteen.”

  He kind of made it better by making it worse, but I don’t care too much. We were all teenagers.

  We’re walking up the hill and it looks like we’re the last ones arriving. There are about twenty people, each with their own folding chairs set up along the flat, long rock at the edge of the hill.

  We get to the top and sun is just kissing the edge of the world and the sky is burst open, paint dripping outward and upward in a silent pink inferno. Thin, high clouds in the distance act as a sharper canvas for the contrasting purple and orange.

  “Want to have a seat?” he asks when we reach a space big enough for both of us.

  He puts down the picnic basket and takes one of the chairs from under his other arm. Letting gravity unfold it, he sets it down.

  “There you go,” he says. “You can put the food down if you want.”

  While I’m sitting down and pretending to look for a better place than my lap for the box of sweets, Eli unfolds his own chair and sets it up next to mine.

  The wide, green valley in front of us catches the deepening hues of the setting sun, though it’s too lush a green to hold it for long.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he asks as he opens the picnic basket.

  “It really is,” I answer through a very dry throat.

  “You okay?” he asks, pulling a bottle of wine from the picnic basket and reaches back in for a corkscrew. “I hope you like pinot grigio.”

  “I love it,” I tell him. I’ve never actually had it, but it sounds like the kind of thing I could get behind.

  He hands me a glass, uncorks the wine, and pours me some.

  The brighter colors are already fading from the sky, and I take my first sip of pinot grigio. I’ve had wine a few times before, but Paz usually buys the stuff in a box.

  My expectations are a little too high, though: I honestly can’t tell the difference between this and the other stuff.

  I open the lid of the box in my lap and lift it, offering some to Eli. He takes a truffle, but gazes at the baklava.

  “Whatever this is,” he says, “it looks delicious, but we probably should have asked if they could hook us up with some forks or something.”

  I smile and tear off a piece of the baklava, putting it in my mouth.

  “Maybe not,” he chuckles and follows my lead.

  “So,” I start, “illegal racing: what got you into that?”

  “Car movies,” he says, “definitely. That’s basically what it’s like. People talk about Casablanca and that one with the Italian guy who walks around for a while and then the movie ends as being some of the best movies ever, but racing flicks are basically my life on tape.”

  “It’s really hard to tell when you’re joking,” I say, trying to spot any tells.

  “It’s really not,” he says with a crooked smile. “The movies are mostly nonsense. Ya gotta respect P-Dubs, though. That guy was awesome.”

  “Naturally,” I respond, having no idea what he’s talking about. “What’s it really like, though? Is it as big a rush as everyone says it is on YouTube?”

  “It’s a lot of waiting. There are always too many people with too many cars making too much noise. Most of the people there will never get into a race themselves, not for anything worth anything, anyway. Usually, you’re up against some jackass with a trust fund whose parents like to indulge his little ‘hobby’ before they ship him off to Yale.”

  “You know my parents are both doctors, right?” I may not have a trust fund, per se, but I’d imagine if I were to take up street racing without knowing Eli, he might just say the same about me.

  “That’s different,” he says. “You’re not out there trying to prove how ‘grassroots’ you are. It’s annoying. Besides, you’re not a racer.”

  I wonder how I’m going to tell him that a decent portion of why I gave him my number is that I was wondering about being behind the wheel.

  Of course, I’ll have to wait to start racing—assuming Eli doesn’t scare me away from it—until I’m out of college and start making some money. I doubt my stock Honda Accord is going to stand up too well against what these guys are racing and it’s not like I have a ton of money just lying around.

  I’m not my parents.

  “What if I wanted to learn?” I ask.

  He takes his eyes off of the darkening sky a moment to look at me.

  “That’s different, too,” he says.

  “How so?”

  “Because I would be the one teaching you, not some
stock car driver you had shipped in for a few months. You’d be surprised how not-underground the underground can be.”

  He looks back at the view, and I set my hands on the armrests of my camping chair.

  A few people are already starting to leave, but the rest seem committed to stay until every unique color is sucked from the sky.

  “There’s a bit of a problem, though,” I tell him.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t have a car that would go fast enough to come in last,” I tell him.

  I see him shrug out of the corner of my eye. “That doesn’t mean you can’t start learning,” he says.

  “You’d really teach me?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “It may take a while, and we’re probably going to want to start with your car so neither of us ends up killed by the massive fireball that would have been my Chevelle, but if you’re willing to learn, I’m willing to teach you.”

  I didn’t know what to expect when Eli called, and I wasn’t much more prescient when I got to the Twisted Sister restaurant, but I’m pretty happy with the way things are headed.

  “Okay,” I answer. “Mind if I think it over a little while? I’m getting visions of police lights and handcuffs and mandatory driving courses.”

  “It’s not without its risks,” he agrees. “If it helps at all, the first lesson is going to be what to do if you’ve got the cops on your ass.”

  “It sounds like you already have a curriculum in place,” I smirk.

  “It’s the one Mick used when he taught me,” Eli says, and suddenly everything makes a lot more sense.

  The way Eli talks to Mick, it almost seems like he doesn’t respect his easily-injured friend. Still, Eli has been to the hospital almost every day, and he’s the only one. A couple others came in to visit Mick, but Eli’s the only one that ever came back.

  “So he’s the master racer, huh?” I ask, feeling more nervous than I already was. After all, Mick’s in the hospital after crashing his car during a street race. If he taught Eli, the chances of me making it through alive can’t be very good.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Eli says. “He’s more on the mechanical end than the driving end. He knows everything you’d need to know to be a great racer, but he tends to let his emotions drive the car.”

  “Who’s to say I wouldn’t be the same way?”

  “I can’t teach him,” Eli says. “He’s been doing it the other way for too long. I’m not going to let that happen with you, though. If it’s something you’re really interested in doing, I’d be sure to teach you the right way from the start.”

  Eli’s a hard guy to pin down.

  When I first met him in the ER, he came off as brash, cocky—good sense of humor, but definitely a bit of a jerk. Ever since then, though, every time I see him or talk to him, there’s something else that seems to blow that assumption out of the water.

  The sun is gone and the sky is becoming more black than blue, now, but I’m not in any rush to get out of here.

  I reach over and take Eli’s hand as we watch the last bit of sunlight fade from the world.

  Chapter Four

  Snakes Can Walk and the Tale of Two Warehouses

  Eli

  So, the Galaxie’s back in the shop to get a new transmission, and I’m telling myself for the twenty-ninth time that it’s just time to let the thing die like it wants to. Even as that’s going through my head, though, I’m typing in the make and model on the computer and ordering a new tranny.

  Today, I’m getting off a little early. I’m taking Kate out for a ride in the Chevelle after I’m off, just to make sure she’s actually got the nerve to go anywhere with racing.

  To be honest, I’m not really expecting her to start rolling up against someone for a pink slip, but I like her. People that like each other should have things in common, right?

  There’s another reason Maye was willing to let me go early, though.

  Mick is finally coming back to work today.

  He finally made it out of the hospital, surprisingly still alive, and this is going to be his first day back. To mark the occasion, Maye and I have left him a bit of a “welcome back” present: I’m leaving early, Maye’s locking herself in her office after he shows up, and we’ve got seven cars on the docket and nobody else scheduled to work.

  I love a boss who’s willing to risk customer happiness in favor of a prank.

  “Hey, Faust!” Maye’s voice comes from somewhere behind me.

  I tighten the alternator I’m replacing and turn around. “He here already? I would have thought he’d do the fashionably late thing.”

  “No,” she says. “He just called, he’s going to be a few minutes late.”

  “Ah, so the world isn’t ending then?” I ask.

  “There’s a guy out front that wants to talk to you,” she says. “Tall guy, bald, goatee, really expensive-looking black suit. I wanted to give you a heads-up in case you got in over your head with a race and need to get out of here before that guy puts a couple in you.”

  “How thoughtful,” I respond, smiling. “I notice that you didn’t tell him I wasn’t here, though.”

  “Well,” she says, “I figure if he does kill you, I might be able to convince him to throw some money at the problem so I keep my mouth shut. I like you and everything, but you’re hardly a big payday.”

  “Nobody is here to kill or otherwise cause harm to anyone,” a man says, coming through the open bay door. “I am here to discuss cars.”

  “You want me to stick around?” Maye asks quietly.

  “Then there would be two bodies instead of one, wouldn’t there?” I ask. “I think I’ll be fine.”

  Maye pats me on the shoulder, really milking the whole killer bit, and she heads back into the office.

  “How can I help you?” I ask the man. “We’re a little backed up at the moment, but if you don’t mind waiting, I’m sure we can take a look at whatever you’ve got going on.”

  “I am here to talk about cars,” he says, “not repairs.”

  “Okay,” I tell him, wiping my hands on a sham cloth. “What can I do for you?”

  “I hear you have become quite the driver to beat around town.”

  “Yeah?” I ask. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “It does not matter. What matters is that I have a business proposition for you.” The look on his face is stern, his eyes unblinking.

  “I already have a job,” I tell him, “but thanks for the shady offer. It’s been a while since some jackass who wants to knock over a bank has come by asking me to be his fall guy.”

  “Who do you think I am?”

  I shrug. “I’m not sure who you are, but I know any racer would keep his or her mouth shut about any other. Talking is bad for business, and I think you should probably forget you ever heard my name.”

  I know I’m laying it on a bit thick, but this is the sort of thing that gets people imprisoned. Well, that and the illegal racing part.

  How Kate went about the topic—that’s the way a noob is supposed to do it. You don’t just walk up to someone at their work and talk about the circuit.

  A wide, toothy grin comes over the man’s face. “I am not just some nobody off the street,” he says.

  “Well,” I tell him. “You look like nobody and you just came off the street, so…”

  “Rans!” Mick calls from the direction of the shop. “Guess who’s back?”

  “Hey, look at you,” I say and leave the guy who’s trying to get us all arrested standing there with a stupid look on his face.

  He’s not responding to me, though, he’s looking at the man I was just talking to.

  I get up to Mick and give him a pat on the shoulder, saying, “You look like an ear of corn that’s been in the bottom of a dumpster for a while.”

  “What’s he doing here?” Mick asks in a whisper.

  I glance back. The man is staring at us.

  “Just some jerk-off who came in here asking about
racing,” I answer. “I was just about to kick his ass out of here.”

  “Don’t,” Mick says. “Eli, just speak when you’re spoken to and be respectful. I don’t know why he’s here, but it can’t be good.”

  Ding.

  “You mean-” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Mick interrupts. “That’s him.”

  He means Jax. The king of this city’s underworld, if there is one, is standing in my shop and I just called him a punk and told him to get out of my shop.

  “You’re full of crap, man,” I tell Mick. “Jax isn’t even a real person. He’s just a legend based off of some guy who won a few races back in the day. I know you like to talk all big, saying you went to school with him and everything, but-”

  The man Mick is calling Jax interrupts, saying, “Greenville Junior High.”

  “Dude, he’s real and he’s standing right behind you,” Mick says.

  “I get this is your first day back and you want to jump right back in with a prank, but this one’s pretty stupid…” I trail off as I notice all of the color has drained from Mick’s face and he’s taking long, slow breaths out of his nose. He’s trying not to let on that he’s on the verge of hyperventilating.

  Mick’s like me when it comes to pranks: he keeps his cool until everything’s played out.

  I turn around.

  “Jax?” I ask.

  The man nods.

  “Now,” he says and takes a few steps toward us, “if we are finished with introductions, I believe I was about to make you a proposal.”

  “Hold on,” I tell him.

  I walk past Jax and out the open bay door. One of the many legends I’ve heard regarding “Jax” over the years is that he drives a platinum-colored LFA when he’s not racing.

  Personally, I’ve never seen an LFA of any color even driving past this town.

  “Where is it?” I ask.

  “Where is what?” Jax returns.

  “You know,” I start.

  Jax is shrugging when I look back at him.

  “Without being more specific, I really do not know to what you are referring,” he says.

  He’s even talking the way Mick says he did. Of course, that’s a strike against this guy. Mick makes stuff up all the time, especially when it’s to mess with someone.