Dirt Track Desire

The track is mostly empty by the time I wander back to the pits. Friday night practice, and the light has gone that orange color that makes everything look tired. I'm twenty-eight years old, I sell half-million-dollar houses during the week, and I spend my Fridays and Saturdays at a dirt track watching men turn left. My mother thinks I need a hobby that comes with air conditioning.

I stop at the back garage. Lou is under the wheel of the car on the lift, a torque wrench in both hands, working a lug nut. His forearms are tight, the tendons standing out, and he doesn't grunt or show off about it. He just leans in and lets the wrench click.

The air in the garage is thick with gasoline and heat. The engine block is still warm and it smells like fuel and hot metal, and I stand there breathing it like it's nothing, like I came in here for a reason.

Sarah, I tell myself, you have a showing at nine tomorrow morning. Go home.

I don't go home.

"Sarah. Practice is over. Everybody's gone." Jasper comes through the roll-up door with a clipboard under his arm. He's forty-five, crew chief, been running this team since before I started coming around. He squints at me. "You waiting on somebody?"

"No. Well, kind of. I've got a listing coming up out past the track, on County Road. I was going to swing by the property anyway." It's not even a full lie. There is a listing. It's just six miles away and I have no appointment there.

Jasper shrugs. "Long as you're not stealing my driver. Lou, you locking up?"

"In a minute," Lou says. He doesn't look up. He sets the wrench down and drops off the creeper, stands, wipes his hands on a rag that stopped being useful around noon. He's thirty-one, and when he finally looks over at me, he holds it a beat too long.

"You've been standing there ten minutes," he says.

"I have not."

"Close enough. You watching me or watching the car?"

There it is. Most guys would say it as a joke and give me the exit. He says it flat, like a question on an invoice. My pulse picks up, and I make myself stand still.

"Watching you," I say. "I like watching you work."

He wipes his hands again, slower. "That right."

"You torque a lug nut like it owes you money. It's kind of great."

That almost gets a smile. Almost. He tosses the rag on the toolbox. "My boss thinks I'm locking up. You staying or going?"

"Staying."

Jasper is already halfway out the door. "Kill the overheads when you're done, we're paying the electric bill on this place." The door rattles down behind him.

So now it's just Lou and me and the stripped-down car on the lift, and I've just told a man I barely know that I like watching him work, which sounds different out loud than it did in my head, where it sounded fine.

"You come around every week," he says. "Three, four Fridays now. You never talk to anybody except to ask what's wrong with the seventeen car."

"Nothing's wrong with the seventeen car. It's the most interesting thing here."

"That's my car."

"I know."

He crosses the garage and flips a breaker and the overhead fluorescents die in a clatter. What's left is one trouble lamp hanging off a hook, throwing a yellow cone of light on the oil-stained concrete between us. The dark eats the corners of the room. There's a cot back there somewhere. I know because I've seen it and because I've thought about it, which is worse.

The air changes. I can't describe it better than that. It goes from garage to something else, like the difference between a house showing and a house where somebody actually lives.

"You're the realtor," he says. "Good shoes every week, standing in the dust in good shoes."

"They clean."

"You're not here for houses."

"No." My mouth is dry. "I'm here because my life is very polite. I close deals and I say please and thank you and every man I've dated has been... careful with me. I'm twenty-eight and I'm done with careful."

Lou comes into the trouble light. In the yellow glow his face is half shadow and his hands are still greasy and he looks at me like he's reading a spec sheet.

"You know what you're asking for?"

"Not exactly. I know what I'm not asking for."

"Tell me."

"I want something rough and precise and hidden. That's what I told myself in the car on the way over, which is embarrassing to say out loud."

"It's not embarrassing." He sets the rag down on the toolbox. "It's a straight answer. I don't get many of those."

"Do you want it? Because I'd rather be turned down clean than played with."

"Yeah," he says. "I want it."

"Then ask me for the rest. I'm not doing careful, and I'm not doing grabbed."

He nods slowly. "Can I kiss you, Sarah?"

"Yes."

He crosses the last of the space and takes my jaw in one greasy hand and kisses me, and it is nothing like careful. His mouth is firm and slow and he tilts my head back like he's setting an angle on something, and I make a noise against his lips that surprises both of us. My hands find his shirt and hold on.

When he pulls back my knees are doing something unreliable.

"Still done with careful?" he says.

"Completely done."

"Then say what you want next. Out loud. I'm not guessing with you."

I look at the trouble lamp and the cot in the dark corner and the car above us on the lift, and I say it.

"I want you to take me to that cot and not be polite to me."

"Anything off the table?"

"Not yet. We'll find out."

He takes my hand and leads me back, past the toolboxes, past the tire rack, into the dark where the cot is. The springs groan when he sits me down on it. He kneels over me in the lamplight and pulls my blouse out of my skirt one-handed, and when the buttons start to strain he stops, unhurried, and works them one at a time like he's torquing something to spec.

"Last chance to be a good girl," he says.

"That ship sailed," I tell him. "Years ago, actually. Ask anybody."

He pushes the blouse off my shoulders and looks at me in my bra, and his breathing has gone heavy, and mine has too, and somewhere outside a truck door slams and neither of us even flinches.

"You said rough and precise," Lou says. "Rough I can do. Precise is the part most people can't take."

"Try me."

He reaches into the duffel at the foot of the cot and pulls out a towel, an actual clean towel, and lays it over the cot like he's done this before, like he keeps supplies for it. Then a plastic bottle, small, opaque. "Silicone. Doesn't dry out."

"You just carry that around?"

"Race weekends are long."

I kick off my good shoes and he watches me do it, and there's something about a man watching me take off expensive shoes in a dirt-track garage that makes my whole face go hot. "Skirt stays," he says. "Panties off. Blouse open like it is."

I push the skirt up and slide the panties down and step out of them, and standing there half-dressed in a dark corner of a garage is the most myself I've felt in a year. "Sit."

I sit on the towel. He kneels on the concrete in front of the cot, which puts his face level with my hips, and he pours some lube into his palm and rubs his hands together to warm it. "I'm going to take my time," he says. "Tell me the second anything's wrong. I mean the second."

"Understood."

"Say it back to me."

"The second anything's wrong, I tell you."

"Good."

He rests one slick finger against my ass, just resting, and looks up at me. "Here? You said nothing's off the table yet. I'm asking anyway."

"Here. That's the part I couldn't say out loud in the car."

His first touch slides slow around the tight ring of muscle, and the lube makes everything slick and quiet. I flinch anyway, just from the expectation of more, and