“I run every morning.”
“Yeah? And you like it?”
He shifted to face me, so I did the same. “Not really.” When Daniel raised an eyebrow, I explained about Claire. “It’s just for the summer, then ideally she’ll have all the other people from the cross-country team to run with.”
He leaned forward. “And this is ASU?”
The smile that had been on my face at the thought of not having to run anymore stalled.
So yeah, I knew Daniel was older than me. Not a lot older; in ten years it wouldn’t be an issue, but while I was sixteen, even a couple years mattered. And I could tell, even if he couldn’t, that it was more than a couple of years.
“Ah, no. This would be Mountain View.” When that name didn’t register, I added, “High School.” I felt like I was admitting to having leprosy, and based on Daniel’s expression, so did he.
He pressed back flat against his window and squinted. “Wait a minute. How old are you?”
I’d ditched my coveralls before we left for Sonic, so I was wearing a pair of denim cutoffs and one of the shop T-shirts. I wasn’t feeling super sophisticated. “Almost seventeen.” My birthday was less than four months away.
Daniel’s squint turned into a wince.
“How old are you?”
I felt every single one of the thirty-six inches separating us when he said, “Not seventeen.”
CHAPTER 13
Can you be disappointed by the loss of something that had only begun to flicker with the promise of existence?
It had been only three days, closer to two since the first night we met barely counted, but already I’d discovered that I liked talking to Daniel. More than that, he was someone—maybe the only someone—that I actually could talk to. If my age meant that he wasn’t interested in being that someone, apart from anything else igniting between us, then, yeah. I could be disappointed.
Going back to that whole I’ve-only-known-him-a-few-days thing, I was having a hard time figuring out what he was thinking.
The drive back to the shop was not the most comfortable three minutes of my life. I didn’t say much and Daniel said even less. The only highlight was discovering that my earlier gamble had paid out: Dad wasn’t pacing the garage looking for me. If we’d been even a moment later though, he would have been.
I’d just gotten out of the Jeep and handed Daniel back his keys when the sound of “You Make My Dreams Come True” buffeted me from behind as Dad popped his head in from the main bay.
“Have I got a job for you—Oh, I didn’t realize you had a customer.”
I glanced at Daniel as Dad walked over, saw no obvious answer about where we stood in his expression, and made the easy decision to just go with it. “Dad, meet our new neighbor, Daniel. He and his mom moved into the Cohens’ old house.”
“Is that right?” Dad extended a hand to Daniel. “I’m Jim Whitaker. Welcome to the neighborhood, Daniel.”
There was a moment—more than a moment—when I thought Daniel wasn’t going to shake Dad’s hand. He’d gone very still when Dad approached, and seemed to be having a hard time keeping his gaze from darting around the room. It reminded me of the time we found a feral cat cornered in the garage last fall. I still had the threadlike scars on one arm from when I’d tried to catch it.
Those two little lines between Dad’s eyebrows appeared, the ones that always showed up when a customer would swear they checked their oil regularly and had no idea why their engine blew up. Somebody usually got yelled at when those lines appeared, but Dad just waited, hand outstretched.
Daniel’s gaze lingered on me—I wasn’t sure why—and then he silently shook Dad’s hand.
I didn’t know Daniel well enough to guess why he was being borderline rude to my dad, but I thought it was in everyone’s best interest to wrap up the introductions. I drew Dad’s attention to me.
“I just finished replacing Daniel’s brake pads. What was it you needed?”
Daniel made it easier for Dad to shift gears by fading back to the other side of his Jeep. The frown didn’t immediately leave Dad’s face, but it softened considerably as he answered.
“Thought you might want to change a battery for me.”
My brows rose in response. That seemed like a trivial request, one that hardly warranted a face-to-face conversation. Normally, Dad would just add it to the board.
My interest sufficiently piqued, I followed Dad to the main bay and forgot everything else the second I saw the Dodge Stratus parked inside.
