"You bet." He gives me a final squeeze around the waist—casual, friendly, the kind of touch that shouldn't make my heart stutter and skip but does—and then climbs off the bike. He takes off his helmet, his hair sticking up in every direction, and he's still grinning. "Okay, show me this shop of yours. I want to see where the magic happens."
I get off the bike and lead him to the back door, fishing my keys out of my pocket. My hands are steady, which feels like a minor miracle given how hard my heart is pounding. I unlock the door and push it open, flicking on the lights.
"It's not much," I say automatically, the words a reflex. "But it's—"
"Oh my gosh, Jay." Ivan is already walking into the main bay, looking around with wide eyes, taking everything in. "This is incredible."
The shop looks different through his eyes, and I try to see it the way he must—the rows of bikes in various states of repair, from complete wrecks to nearly finished. The tools hung neatly on pegboards, organized by type and size. The parts organized in labeled bins. The smell of oil and metal and gasoline that I've stopped noticing because it's as familiar as my own skin.
"This is where you work every day?" Ivan asks, running his hand along the workbench, touching the tools. "This whole place?"
"Yeah. My station's over in that corner." I lead him to my area of the shop, where the Triumph is waiting under a gray drop cloth. "This is the restoration I was telling you about. The one I've been working on for two months."
I pull off the cloth, and Ivan lets out a low whistle that makes me feel irrationally proud.
"Jay. Holy shit. This is—"
The Triumph gleams under the fluorescent lights, all chrome and classic lines and vintage beauty. I've spent two months on her, countless hours, and she's almost done. The engine is rebuilt and tuned perfectly. The wiring is new, routed exactly to original specifications. The chromeis polished to a mirror shine. She's not running yet—still need to do the final assembly, connect everything together—but she's beautiful.
"You did all this?" Ivan walks around the bike slowly, reverently, taking in every detail with the kind of attention that makes my chest feel warm. "By yourself?"
"Mostly. Mick helped with some of the engine work—timing the valves, balancing the crankshaft. But yeah, most of it was me."
"This is—" Ivan stops, shakes his head. "Jay, this isn't just fixing something. This is art. This is creating something special from nothing."
"It's just a bike. It's just mechanical work."
"It's not just a bike." Ivan looks at me. "You took something broken and you made it beautiful. That takes skill, yeah, but it also takes vision. You have to be able to see what something could be, not just what it is. You have to be able to imagine the finished product while you're looking at scrap metal."
I don't know what to say. No one has ever talked about my work like this. Mick grunts approval when I do something right, gives me a nod and a "good work" when I finish a difficult job. Customers are happy when their bikes run, when they can ride away. But no one has ever looked at what I do and called it art.
"Can you show me how it works?" Ivan asks, his eyes bright with genuine interest. "I mean, not all of it, but—I want to understand what you do. I want to see what you see when you look at this."
I walk him through the basics—the cylinder head, the piston that moves up and down creating compression, the spark plug that ignites the fuel at precisely the right moment. I show him the rewiring I did, the chrome gas tank I stripped and repainted three times until the finish looked like glass, the custom leather seat from California. Every detail I obsessed over.
Ivan listens to everything. He asks good questions—thoughtful ones that show he's actually paying attention. "Why did you choose this particular red?" "How do you know the timing is right?" He touches the bike carefully, reverently, like he understands how much of myself I put into this machine. And he keeps looking at me. Every time I explainsomething, his eyes come back to my face instead of staying on the bike. Like I'm the interesting thing here, not the Triumph.
"You love this," he says, when I finally run out of things to explain, when I've shown him every wire and bolt and piece of chrome. "I can see it in your face. When you talk about it, you light up. You come alive."
"It's just—" I shrug, suddenly self-conscious under his gaze. "It's the only thing I'm good at. The only thing I can do that matters."
"That's not true."
"Yeah, it is. I'm not good at much else. I can't—" I gesture vaguely, trying to encompass everything I'm not, everything I lack. "I can't do what you do. Build a career, have a family, be a normal person with a normal life. I just fix things. That's all I know how to do. Take broken things and try to make them work again."
Ivan steps close enough to me that I could count his eyelashes if I wanted to. If I could focus on anything except the fact that he's inches away.
My heart starts pounding hard enough that I'm sure he can hear it.
"You're good at more than you think," he says quietly. "You're good at seeing what people need and giving it to them, even when it costs you everything. You're good at making people feel safe."
"Ivan—"
"I'm serious. You saved my life. Not just back then at the Hendersons', but—you gave me something to hold onto. All those years, when things got bad, when I was in group homes or placements that sucked, when I thought I couldn't keep going, I'd think about you. I'd think about everything you taught me. I'd remember you telling me I could breathe, that I was going to be okay. And I'd keep going, because I knew you were out there somewhere, and I had to find you."
My throat is so tight I can barely breathe. His eyes are so blue. And he's looking at me like I'm special, and I don't know how to tell him that I'm none of those things. That he's wrong. That I'm just a broken person who got lucky enough to survive this long.
"I'm not who you think I am. I'm not that person anymore. I'm not the one who protected you."
