“Sleep okay?” he asks
“Yeah,” I say. “Great, actually.”
He hums, approving. “That’s the goal.” As he reaches for a tool, the inside of his wrist flashes, showing fresh ink, still raw.
“Is that new?” I ask, pointing at his wrist.
He glances down, then holds his arm out for me to see. “Yeah.”
The tattoo is small and cleanly done. A snail with a crooked baseball cap tipped sideways and a tiny arm with a wrench tucked under it. Ridiculous and adorable. Luis turns his wrist so I can see every angle, a faint, pleased smile on his mouth.
Luis is a tattoo artist as a side hustle. The same steady hands that make him a great mechanic make him a great artist, I guess. He’s talented, and I love seeing when he’s done a new piece on himself.
“It’s cute,” I tell him. “Terrifyingly cute.”
“Thank you,” he says solemnly. “I was going for ‘menacing.’”
Luis is the most unbothered, unshowy, laidback guy I know. The world can throw whatever it wants at him and he’s never anything less than affable about it.
Damian barrels in ten minutes later, bringing in a rush of cool autumn air with him.
“’Sup man,” he says to Luis, clapping him on the back.
“Voss,” I greet him with feigned officiousness, giving a serious nod of my head.
Just one corner of his mouth lifts, hazel eyes shining with mischief. “Finchy,” he replies.
I laugh and grab us each a coffee, and we fall into the rhythm of the day.
It’s a busy time of year, with cars getting serviced after the winter, but I like the meditativeness of hands-on labor. I work on a Subaru with a torn bumper, then a dented F-150 that needs body work, then a minivan with a dead engine. In the background all morning is the sound of the phone ringing, the compressor kicking on, the clang of metal, sounds I stop hearing after a while.
Damian is working at the lift beside mine, as he usually does, half under a sedan with a light clipped to his shirt, humming along with the radio. He scoots out from under the car and straightens.
“Hand me your ten-millimeter socket?” he asks, voice casual.
I freeze. Slowly, I look at him. “Damian,” I warn, arching an eyebrow.
His grin sharpens. “What? It’s a normal request. A basic human need.”
“You can’t just say the forbidden words out loud,” I tell him, deadpan. “We agreed we’re not summoning the Ten-Millimeter Demon anymore.”
It started with him repeatedly borrowing my ten-millimeter and returning everythingexceptthe ten-millimeter, as a kind of prank. Now we have a pretend superstition: you don’t say the words ten-millimeter unless you’re holding one, or “the demon” is summoned.
He props an elbow on the lift arm, all innocence. “I’m not summoning, I’m suffering.”
I toss him the socket. “That better come back to me. If you feed it to the demon, I’m making you do inventory.”
He catches it one-handed. “Copy that.” His grin lingers, and he watches me for a beat with warmth in his eyes. “Still coming over this weekend?”
“Yeah,” I say, grinning. “Of course.”
“Jake’s looking forward to it. Hasn’t seen you in a while.”
“I know.” Jake’s been back on contract jobs lately, working consulting gigs to keep eyes on the right channels—whatever that means. Jake doesn’t like feeling out of the loop, and says that working keeps his brain from chewing through the walls.
Damian’s voice drops just a fraction. “AndI’mlooking forward to it.”
I glance up at him and the look in his eyes makes my heart skip a little, the way it always does when he looks at me like that. He winks, and then plants his feet and glides back under the sedan on the stool.
