Rev Match

"You're late."

The voice came from under a lifted sedan, all echoes and tire iron. Sabine stood in the bay doorway of Revline Performance with her bag strap digging into her shoulder and let the words sit there a second before answering.

"I'm here to race, not chat, Kenji," she said, and dropped the bag on the oil-stained concrete with a thud that made her feel better than it should have.

The creeper rolled out and there he was. Kenji Vargas, thirty-four years old and looking exactly like the last eleven years hadn't happened, greased up to the elbows, dark hair pushed back with the back of his wrist because he was too careless to use a rag. He grinned up at her from the floor, which she hated, because it had always been his best move, looking up while she looked down.

"There she is," he said. "Six months of divorce and you still can't walk past a flat-four without flinching at the sound."

"I didn't flinch."

"You flinched."

"I am here," Sabine said, enunciating like she was reading a legal filing, because old habits, "because Cain is putting up eight grand tonight and because you have spent four years telling everyone in this district you'd have beaten me if I'd ever shown up. I showed up."

Kenji rolled the creeper back under the car like he had nothing else in the world to do. "Give me ten minutes, this customer's brakes are more important than your feelings."

"Nothing is more important than my feelings, you know that."

From somewhere deeper in the shop, a laugh that wasn't Kenji's. Sabine turned and there was a guy leaning in the second bay door, tall, sandy, arms crossed, watching her with the kind of slow smile that meant he'd been listening to the whole exchange and enjoying every word of it.

"That's Nat," Kenji called from under the sedan. "My foreman. Nat, this is Sabine, the love of my life, we broke up in 2014."

"We dated for three months," Sabine corrected. "In senior year of college. He dumped me by text at a party. There is no love involved."

"Eleven years later and she still remembers the exact party," Nat said, pushing off the doorframe to shake her hand. His grip was warm and dry and he didn't let go quite as fast as polite. "I'm Nat, by the way. Thirty-one, the sane one here."

"Sabine. Thirty-three. Also apparently the sane one here, which is worrying."

"Two sane ones, that's a majority," Nat said. "We can outvote him."

"Don't encourage her," Kenji said. "She's been encouraged her whole life, that's her problem."

***

Sabine walked the track while Kenji finished the brakes. It wasn't much, honestly, the back lot of an industrial district with a course spray-painted between the loading docks and a line of cones somebody had already knocked over and not bothered to fix. She walked the racing line anyway, heel to toe, the way she used to before every race at twenty-two, before she'd quit and gotten a degree and a mortgage and a husband and then un-gotten the husband six months ago.

Right hand corner off the dock ramp, tight, second gear. Straight past the decal wall, which she could see over the fence, a whole side of the shop papered in sponsor logos, Cain's among them, three rows deep. Left kink, then the long oval around the retention pond where you either had the power or you didn't.

Her chest did the thing. The old tightening. Six months of spreadsheets and division reviews and sleeping in the middle of a bed that used to be the left side, and now here she was with her palms actually sweating.

"You walked that corner wrong," Nat said. He'd come out to the fence at some point without her hearing him, which was a skill she distrusted.

"I walked it fine."

"You went in too wide. You're giving up a car length at the exit and you know it."

"I was walking, not driving."

"Sure." He smiled again, that same unhurried smile. "You always argue this much, or is it a Kenji thing?"

"Kenji thing. Catch it like a cold."

"Well, for what it's worth," Nat said, "the pond oval favors your car. He's got more motor, you've got better brakes. He'll tell you the opposite. He's been building that coupe for a month and he talks about it like a new girlfriend."

"His coupe weighs four hundred pounds more than my car."

"See, you two deserve each other."

She looked at him for that, because it was a strange thing to say, and Nat just held the look, calm as still water, like he'd meant exactly what she thought he'd meant and wasn't going to take it back.

"Racetime, people!" Cain's voice rolled across the lot from a golf cart he absolutely did not need. Cain Sylvester was thirty-five, loud, and wearing sunglasses after dark, which told you most of what you needed to know about him. He'd been sponsoring these little exhibitions for four years and had the shirt collection to prove it.

***

By nine the lot had that crowd hum, forty or fifty people, some folding chairs, somebody selling tacos out of a cooler. Kenji rolled his coupe onto the line looking pleased with himself, and Sabine brought her little hatchback up beside him, and the two cars sat there nose to nose like they'd been arguing for a decade.

"Purse is eight thousand, winner take all, best of three runs," Cain announced through a megaphone for no reason, since he was ten feet from everyone. "One race in and we've got a tie, so it all comes down to the third run!"

It had, in fact, come down to that. Sabine had won the first by half a car length and lost the second by less, and her hands were shaking now in the way they never shook at work, and she was aware she was grinning, which was its own problem.

"Before the decider," Cain said, and here came the part where she should have paid closer attention, "a little spice for the crowd. Side wager. For every tenth of a second the loser falls behind, the loser strips an article of clothing. Right here, on the line. Agreed?"

"What?" Sabine said, head out of the window.

"Your call," Kenji said. "I'll do it if you will. If you say no, Cain eats his idea and we race for the purse like normal people." He had the nerve to look calm about it, elbow out the window, that same grin from the creeper. "It's simple math. You're good at math."

"It's an exhibition, it's Cain being Cain," Cain said, delighted. "Clothing stays on if you win. Or if you tie, I suppose, though nobody ties. And nobody has to agree to anything they don't want, I'm not a monster, I'm a sponsor."

"Somebody's about to tie," Nat said quietly, from the fence, and Sabine wasn't sure if he meant the race or something else, and his face gave away nothing either way.

She looked at Kenji. Kenji looked back, and for a half second under all the smug there was something else, something older, the actual question of why are you really here tonight, Sabine, and she decided, like she'd decided in her car on the drive over, that she wasn't going to answer that question out loud. She was going to answer it on the lot.

"Fine," she said. "I'm in. And fifteen hundred says you lose anyway."

"Deal. Get in your car."

She got in her car. Her heart was going and her palms were sweating and she realized, somewhere around buckling the harness, that she could not remember the last time she'd felt this awake, and that the answer was probably before her wedding, which was its own kind of indictment.

Third run. Pond oval, twice around. Her car versus his coupe.

They launched off the line together and the world went simple.

The oval was two long sweeps with a flat kink at the back straight, and Sabine drove it like she remembered it, which was deeper than she remembered anything. Her brakes went soft around the second lap and she carried anyway, because that was the game, that was always the game, hold it one breath longer than the other car can. The coupe hung on her quarter panel the whole last straight, four hundred pounds of motor and spite, and they crossed the line so close together that the crowd noise went weird, half a cheer and half a groan, like a stadium watching a replay.

She braked, coasted, sat there with the engine ticking and her hands shaking on the wheel. Not trembling. Shaking. Full grip to grip, both hands, and she watched them do it like they belonged to someone else.

Nat came out on the line with a laptop under one arm, because of course he had footage, of course he had timing, and he squinted at it for a long time while fifty people drifted in around him.

"Well?" Kenji called, out of his car now.

"Photo finish," Nat said. "Like, actual photo. I've got you two crossing inside the same frame. Dead heat."

"Bullshit, zoom in."

"I did zoom in. That's why I'm saying it. Dead heat." Nat looked up at both of them with the laptop half closed. "First tie in four years of these things, for what it's worth."

"Fifteen hundred," Sabine said, climbing out, legs unsteady in a way she hated. "The photo says neither of us loses. Fifteen hundred comes back to me."

"That's not how Cain's going to read it."

And here came Cain, golf cart at low speed, sunglasses pushed up into his hair like the night was an insult