Shifting Gears: The Complete Series (Sports Bad Boy Romance) (10 page)

He’s shaking his head.
“Maybe that’s what people have been telling you your whole life, you just
haven’t noticed that you don’t have to live your life that way,” he says. “Make
yourself who you want to be, otherwise you’re going to be miserable and saving
lives won’t change that fact.”

I know he’s right. I’ve
known everything he’s saying for quite a while now. Things just aren’t that simple.

“I’m working on it,” I
tell him.

“I know you are,” he
says. “Maybe it’s time to stop taking baby steps, though.”

“Yeah.”

The moon is lighting the
dirt ground on the other side of the raised curb of the cul-de-sac, and as I
gaze over it, I’m starting to get really tired.

I yawn.

“Getting tired?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “I
don’t want to go home, though.”

“You can stay over at my
place,” he says. “It’s not much, but it’s somewhere you can lay your head.”

“I
have
to go home, though. Otherwise, the parents are liable to call
the cops again, and I was really hoping to spend a night with you that doesn’t
involve flashing lights,” I tell him.

“What do you want to do?”
he asks. “Do you want to stay here a little while longer or do you want to head
back?”

“Are we a thing?” I ask.

Eli looks over at me with
raised eyebrows, saying, “What?”

Again, I’m already in it,
so I may as well keep going. “You know,” I tell him, “are we
boyfriend/girlfriend or are we just particularly physical friends, or what?”

“I don’t know,” he says.
“We’ve never really talked about it.”

“That’s why I’m asking.”

Do I jump first, or do I
wait for him to make sure I don’t break my neck at the bottom?

He answers before I can
make a decision, saying, “I’d like it if we were a thing—in a
boyfriend/girlfriend kind of relationship. Where are you on it?”

I’m beaming, the
momentousness of the moment short-circuiting my tiredness, if only for a few
minutes. “I’m with you,” I tell him.

“Hey, I see what you did there,”
he says.

I snicker. “So, I guess
that makes it official, huh?”

“I guess so,” he says.

Only a word or two have
changed, but somehow this suddenly feels a lot bigger. Unfortunately, my
eyelids are starting to droop.

“Can I ask you a favor as
your brand new girlfriend?”

He smiles, answering,
“What is it, dear?”

“Eww,” I say, shuddering.

He laughs. “What did you
need?” he tries again.

“Would you mind just
driving around for a while? I’ve got to go home before too long, but I just
want to close my eyes a while before I have to get back there. Is that weird?”

“Not weird at all,” he
answers. “Not a problem.”

I give him a kiss on the
cheek and we get out of the car, passing each other around the front and get in
each other’s doors.

After I get the seat
moved forward, I buckle up, saying, “Thank you for understanding.”

“Everyone needs a night
off every once in a while,” he says.

He pulls away from the
curb, and as we drive over the next hour, we speak a little, but mostly I drift
back and forth between sleep and wakefulness, safe and comfortable in Eli’s
care.

Chapter
Eight

The Old College Try

Eli

Here I am, finishing up a
quick oil change before I clock out for the day, and Kate comes up behind me
saying, “Enough messing around. I want to drive today.”

“Okay,” I tell her. “Did
you have anything in particular that you wanted to drive, or any specific
destination? Are you asking my permission? Because I think you’re old enough
now to make your own decisions.”

“Hilarious,” she mocks.
“If I’m not mistaken, you should be getting off work right about…” she’s
looking down at her watch, “now.”

“Got to finish this up
before I go,” I tell her. “Besides, you kind of dropped in on me there. How do
you know I don’t have plans?”

“Do you have plans?”

“Not sure yet,” I tell
her. “I was going to see what my girlfriend was up to.”

She rolls her eyes. “She
wants you to give her the keys to one of your cars, get in the passenger’s
seat—assuming there’s one in there—and give her advice so she doesn't die while
she is out there.”

“She’s not gonna get it,”
I tell her.

Her hands ball into
fists, and I think we’ve just crossed the line from playful banter into
shit-hitting-fan mode.

“Before you take a swing
at me,” I start, holding my palms up and toward her, “I’m just saying that because
I don’t want either of us to die.”

“Oh, so I’m a bad driver
now?”

“No,” I tell her. “It’s
because the Chevelle has twelve-hundred horsepower. That’s barely within what I
can handle, and I’ve been doing this for a long time. Last race, I almost crashed
more than once. Then there’s the Galaxie, but it’s unreliable as it is. I just
thought it might be best for a first on-the-road lesson to take something a
little more manageable, like your car. It’s not because you’re a woman or
anything; both of my cars scare
me
.
If you start grabbing power tools, I’m not above screaming to save myself.”

Her red face clenches
together, and her fists are so tight her fingers are starting to go white when
she bursts into laughter.

Mission accomplished.

“Fine,” she says. “Just
finish up so we can get out there while there’s still a bit of daylight left.”

“It’s four o’clock,” I
tell her.

“Yeah,” she says. “Time’s
a wasting.” She claps her hands together. “Get to it.”

I’ve created a monster.

Apparently, both Maye and
the guy waiting in the shop for me to finish up his oil change are finding this
whole situation hilarious, as I can hear them both cackling through the glass.

I finish up the lube job
and ring the customer up. We settle up and, after washing my hands, I clock out.

Kate’s already waiting
for me in her car and, as I approach, she honks the horn a few times in quick
succession in an attempt to hurry me along. In protest, I walk a lot slower to
the passenger door.

“Come on!” she’s calling
from inside the car as I bend down to tie my shoe.

Finally, I get in.

She throws the car in
reverse and tries to peel out of the parking lot. It’s a valiant effort.

We get going on the road,
going the same direction we went when I took her for the run through Ghost
Town. She gets the car going eighty before I motion for her to ease off.

“What?” she asks. “I’m
just trying to get a feel for the higher speeds.”

“Speed is great,” I
start, “but if you don’t know how to corner, you’re useless in anything but
drag races. That’s all well and good if you take your car to the track for race
day every month, but if you’re-”

“Okay, so cornering,” she
interrupts. “Other than slowing down for the turn and rotating the wheel, is
there that much more to know?”

“There’s a lot. I can go
over some of that with you, but a lot of it is going to be you getting used to
taking corners going a lot faster than you’re used to.”

“Okay,” she says, hitting
the gas again as we approach the long curve. “Where should we go to practice
that?”

“Ghost Town,” I tell her.

Her eyes widen a little.
“But police are all over there, aren’t they?”

“Not necessarily,” I tell
her. “They know people race through there all the time, but as long as you’re
only doing the speed
limit,
and you’re
not doing donuts or anything, we’ll be able to do a quick look through to see
if there are going to be any problems.”

“Okay,” she says.

She slows down
immediately,
and I give her directions to the
quickest route from where we are.

We drive Ghost Town end
to end and then
circle
the perimeter.
It’s not a big area, but with all those places to hide, it’s good to be sure
the fuzz isn’t just stashing themselves behind something.

Finally, I tell Kate to
pull over next to the curb.

“Okay,” I tell her. “The
first part of the lesson was going to be double-clutching. It doesn’t have
anything really to do with cornering, but it’s one of those things you’ll want
to get used to doing.”

“What’s the next part?”

“You know the word
‘apex,’ right?” I ask. “You read books.”

“I do read books,” she
chortles. “Yeah, the apex is the peak, the point at the top of an angle.”

“I have no idea what you
just said,” I tease.

She playfully smacks me
on the leg. “Come on, I want to learn to be a big bad racer, too.”

“The goal when you’re
going around the corner is to get as close to the inside curb as you can
without hitting it.
You're
trying to cut
the corner as closely as you can so you don’t lose too much speed. You’ll want
to go a little wide before the turn in so you’re not at too sharp an angle. Is
that making sense?”

“I think so,” she says.
“Get as close to the inside of the turn as possible without running over
anything. To do that, I’ll need a wider angle of
entry,
so the inertia doesn’t throw the car off the road and into a
building when I take a corner at speed.”

“Still don’t know what
you’re talking about,” I tease. “Let’s do a four block square. Head up two
blocks, take a right, go two blocks, take another right… They’re industrial
blocks, so you’ll have more than enough space to play with the speed a bit. Not
too much, though.”

“All right,” she says.
“How fast should I be going when I make the turn?”

“As long as you’re all
the way in the left lane before you turn, I’d say we can start you off at
twenty-”

Her foot’s on the floor,
the gas pedal buried somewhere in the carpeting beneath it. It may not have the
raw power of the Chevelle, but it puts my head against the headrest for a few
seconds.

“Ready?” she asks.

“Tap the brakes and slow
down before you try to take a curve,” I tell her, looking at the speedometer as
it passes fifty.

Her foot comes off the
gas,
and she does
exactly
what I told her to do, pumping the brakes, except she only
slows down to thirty-five before jerking the wheel hard to the right. We’re
going too fast, though, her turn too sharp and too late so the car understeers
and Kate’s slamming on the brake pedal to keep “inertia from throwing us into a
building.”

We come out of
it
, though we’re only doing about five before
Kate’s ready to put her foot on the gas again.

“That’s called
understeering,” I tell her. “You turn the front wheels, but the car just keeps
going straight. It happens on front-wheel-drive
vehicles
.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’m
assuming if there’s understeering, there’s oversteering. What’s that? Is that a
rear-wheel-drive thing?”

“Yep. With oversteering,
the back tires lose traction, so the tail swings out. There is an upper limit
on how fast you can take a corner. It changes depending on what you’re driving
and your skill level and all that, but too fast is going to be too
fast
in almost anything you drive.”

“Okay,” she says. “Let me
try again, then.”

She starts going again,
this time getting the car up to fifty-five.

I tell her, “You’re going
too fast.”

“I’ve got to learn how to
slow down for the turns, too,” she says.

I’m saying, “Yeah, but I
was going to go over that after you’d gotten used to them at slower-” when she
takes another turn.

It feels like it’s way
too early, but her angle is good going into the corner. We come out a little
wide
on the other side, but all in all, it’s a
pretty drastic improvement.

As soon as Kate’s got the
car evened out, she cries, “Woo!” She says, “Yeah, I figured you were trying to
take me through the lesson piece by piece, but you forget: I’m a quick study.”

“A little early,” I tell
her. “It made you come in a bit too shallow, but it was a lot better.”

“Good,” she says, “now we
can speed it up.” Without another word, her foot’s hard down on the gas and
we’re passing sixty.

“Kate?” I’m asking, then
I’m shouting, “Kate!” as her foot doesn’t even touch the brake when she takes
the corner.

We go up the far
curb,
and she wrenches the wheel to the right,
getting us back on the road, but causing the car to spin halfway a
round
before coming to a shrieking halt.

“You’ve got to slow it-”
I start, but she flips the car around and starts going again.

“I haven’t done the full
lap yet,” she
says.
I’m just hanging onto
anything I can, certain this isn’t going to end well.

She gets going about
sixty-five, but she goes wide, braking early and turning almost right where she
needs to. We’re entering the corner a little slower than the last one, but Kate
is almost at the
apex,
and we come out
the other side clean.

“Pull over a minute?” I
ask.

“Sure,” she says. “You’re
the boss, boss.”

I open my door half a
second before the car has come to a complete
stop,
and I climb out onto the pavement, crawling my way toward the curb the way a
shipwrecked sailor would crawl to shore.

Once my hand falls on the
curb, I lift myself up enough to turn and sit, my head between my knees as I
breathe heavily.

Kate slowly gets out of
the
car
and makes her way over to me,
sitting down by my side.

“Was I that bad?”

“No, actually,” I tell
her. “You’re a lot braver than I thought, though. And, I already knew you were
brave.”

She’s looking at the
ground. “I know I should have listened and slowed it down before that last
corner, but I wanted to feel what it’s like when it’s going wrong, you know?
That’s how I learn: I test things, push limits,” she mutters. “It’s never
sounded like an exciting concept
before
because I’m usually pushing the limits of how much I can get done for other
people in a given day. That’s what was going through my head,
anyway
.”

“Honestly,” I tell her.
“You were pretty
great
. You scared the
crap out of me on the first three turns, but that last one was perfect. If you
can keep that up, you’re going to have it mastered in no time.”

She looks over at me.
“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I tell her.
“You’re a natural. One thing, though.”

“What’s that?” she asks,
her voice much brighter now.

“Before I get back in
that car, promise me you’ve found the limit and you’re ready to start doing it
the way you did that last corner,” I answer.

She sighs.

“You’ve got to give me a
buffer zone,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

She answers, “If you say
go in at thirty, you’ve got to at least give me some leeway. I may not be able
to get it right on. I’m thinking ten miles per hour. So if you’re telling me
thirty, you’ve got to let me do forty.”

“What’s to stop me from
telling you twenty so you’ll only do thirty?”

“Yeah, I’m going to have
to be able to go at least forty,” she says. “I haven’t found the edge yet
between too much and too little, I’ve just flown past it and come up a little
short.”

People say this all the
time, but this woman may quite literally be the death of me.

For whatever reason, that
only makes me want her more.