The Line Between

I was twenty-three years old, I owned my own shop, and I was standing alone at a car show looking at a Camaro I had zero intention of buying. That was my whole Saturday. Don't get me wrong, the Camaro was gorgeous. '69, numbers matching according to the little placard, candy apple red with the stripes done right for once instead of slapped on with masking tape and hope. But I'd come here with a ticket, a warm soda, and no plan, which pretty much summed up my last two years.

Three years ago I was in the auto-tech program at the community college out on Route 9, and I was a different animal back then. I'd take a dare on a Tuesday. I'd climb on the roof of the shop just to see the sunset. I hooked up with my lab partner in the parking lot of a Zach's, for crying out loud, and I didn't lose a minute of sleep over it. That was the version of me that had ideas. The version of me now closed at six, went home, ate leftovers standing at the counter, and watched other people's build videos until my eyes gave out.

The dating didn't help. I'd been on six first dates in the last year. Six. Nice guys, mostly. One guy brought me flowers that he'd clearly grabbed at the grocery store, still with the price sticker on the cellophane, which honestly I respected more than hated. But every date felt like filling out the same form twice. What do you do, where are you from, do you have siblings. I'd answer, I'd laugh in the right spots, I'd go home and feel nothing. That's the part that bugged me. Not that the guys were bad. That I'd gone flat.

The shop taught me that when something's flat, it's usually a supply problem. No fuel, no spark. Somewhere in the last two years I'd stopped feeding myself anything interesting, and then I had the nerve to wonder why I idled rough.

So there I was, shoulder to shoulder with a few hundred strangers, staring at paint jobs, doing the thing where you check your phone even though nobody texts you on a Saturday. The hall smelled like fair food and tire shine. Some kid beside me was telling his dad the Camaro had a four-speed, and the dad said sure, buddy, in that tone parents use when they mean please stop talking. I almost smiled.

And then I heard my name.

"Trixie Grainger. No way!"

I turned around and there was Carlo Mendez, twenty-four now, in a team polo with a lanyard and a grin I'd know anywhere. Carlo. Lab partner Carlo. Zach's parking lot Carlo. He looked older in the shoulders and the same everywhere it counted, and my stomach did a thing I hadn't felt in a long time.

"Carlo? What are you doing here?" I said, and then felt dumb, because obviously, the polo had a racing team logo on it.

"Pit crew this season. We've got a display car in the back hall. What about you, I thought you'd be running your own shop by now."

"I do. I do run a shop." I said it too fast, the way I always do, like the achievement needs a stamp on it before anybody checks. "Little place over on Delancey. Two bays. Mostly insurance work, honestly."

"Mostly insurance work," he repeated, nodding slow, and I could tell he was doing the math on my life the same way I was doing the math on his. Three years since we'd shared a lift bay and a textbook. Three years since the parking lot. Neither of us said that part out loud. We didn't need to. It was just there, sitting between us like a torque wrench on a clean fender.

We talked for a while. He told me about the season, the crashes, the guy on his crew who set a tire on fire by accident and played it off for a week. I told him about the shop, the customer who tried to pay me in deer jerky. It was easy. That was the weird part. Talking to him was easy in a way the six first dates had not been easy, and I noticed that, and I tried not to notice that I noticed.

Then he looked around the hall, casual as anything, and came back to me with a different kind of look. A look I remembered.

"So here's a thing," he said. "You used to take dares."

"I used to be an idiot, is what I used to be."

"Same thing." He shrugged. "You still got it in you?"

"I don't know what that means."

"It means one button." He held up one finger. "Your jeans. The top one. I unbutton it, right here, standing in front of all these people, and then I walk away. That's it. That's the dare."

My first instinct was to say no, obviously. My second instinct was the one I listened to, because my second instinct had been right about the Camaro and right about the deer jerky guy, and it was right about this too, which is that I wanted to. God help me, I wanted to feel something happen to me that I hadn't scheduled.

"You're out of your mind," I said.

"Probably." He waited. He didn't push. That was always his trick, back in school. He'd throw the dare out and then just stand there while it did its own work on you, like he knew the wanting had to come from me or it didn't count.

People flowed around us. A guy with a stroller cut too close and apologized to nobody in particular. Somewhere a PA crackled about a raffle. Nobody on earth was looking at us, which meant everybody might be, which is how that kind of panic works.

"One button," I said. "And then you leave."

"And then I leave. Promise."

My heart was doing a number on me by then, I'll admit it. I nodded before my sensible half could file an objection. Carlo stepped in close, closer than strangers stand, and I felt the heat of him before I felt his hand. His fingers went to the button of my jeans, the little brass one, and here's the part I wasn't ready for. He took his time. Not long enough to be a problem, nobody watching would have clocked it as anything, but long enough that I felt every second of it. The crowd kept moving and my face stayed normal and his thumbnail rested right there against the denim, and every part of me was tuned to one square centimeter of brass.

He popped it. A tiny click I felt more than heard, and the waistband went loose by half an inch, and I stood there in a crowd of four hundred people with my jeans open like some kind of secret had been published. Heat crawled up my neck. I looked at a spot on the Camaro's fender and breathed.

"Still an idiot," Carlo said, low, pleased with himself.

"Get out of here," I said, and he grinned and melted into the crowd like he'd never been there, and I was left alone with a loose waistband and a pulse I could hear in my ears.

* * *

I walked the rest of the hall like that. Nobody knew. That was the entire kick of it, the entire rocket fuel of it, that four hundred people looked right at me and saw a woman browsing cars, and exactly one person in the world knew better. It shouldn't have felt like anything. It felt like everything. I caught myself grinning at a Chevelle like a lunatic and didn't care.

Somewhere around the truck display I made a decision about the rest of my afternoon, and it wasn't the decision the sensible half of me would have made. I went looking for the back halls, where the crews smoke and talk, and where a certain pit crew guy owed me a conversation.

The back hall smelled like coffee and tire shine and the particular warm rubber smell of a building full of engines. It took me two passes to find him. He was standing by a display car with his team's logo on the hood, a big orange coupe with the wheels off and brake discs laid out on a table like jewelry, and he was talking to an older guy in a folding chair when he saw me coming and just stopped mid-sentence.

The older guy looked at me, looked at Carlo, looked back at me, and got up and left without a word. Smart man.

"You found me," Carlo said.

"You made it easy. You're the only person in this building wearing a polo that matches the car."

"That's branding." He leaned against the table, arms crossed, and gave me the once-over, and I mean the full once-over, top to bottom, unhurried, like he had a right to. Three years ago that look would have made me slap him. Today it made my open jeans feel a half size looser. "You came looking for me. That's new."

"I came looking for a conversation."

"Sure."

"I did. And also I have a question, which is, what's the next dare?"

I watched it land on him. He tried to keep his face flat and failed, which was satisfying in a way I didn't have words for yet. "You're hooked," he said.

"I'm bored," I said. "There's a difference, and I'm not going to stand here and litigate it with you."

He laughed. That laugh hadn't changed either. We talked for another ten minutes, actually, real talk, about his season and my insurance work and a woman on Route 9 who runs the diner where the program kids used to go after labs, and she apparently still keeps the coffee at criminal temperatures. It would have been easy to just keep talking. That was the trap and I knew it, because talking with him was the comfortable part and comfortable was the thing I'd been drowning in for two years.

"So," I said. "Next dare. And don't do some boring half thing, because I'll know."

He rubbed his jaw and looked down the corridor toward the main hall, thinking, and I could see the idea arrive on his face before he said it. When he turned back his eyes had that shine.

"Your shirt."

"What about it."

"Take it off. Walk the main aisle. Bra only. Thirty seconds, top of the hall to the Corvair display, and then you put it back on."

I want to tell you I thought it over like a reasonable business owner with a lease and a liability policy. I did not think it over. There was maybe four seconds of white noise in my head and then the part of me that had been asleep since spring sat up and said yes, and I said yes out loud almost on top of it.

"Thirty seconds," I said. "I count."

"You count. And you don't have to, Trixie. That is the entire rule. Any dare, you can just say no, and we go back to talking about the diner, no harm."

"I know the rules. I invented half of them."

The shirt situation was actually kind of perfect for the dare, which I hadn't noticed until that moment. I was wearing a work polo, my own shop's logo on the chest, thin cotton, unbuttoned partway over a plain black bra because the hall had been warm. It looked like what it was, a mechanic's shirt. It did not look like lingerie or a stunt. That was somehow both better and worse. Better because nobody would stop me. Worse because nobody would stop me.

"I'll stand at the Corvair end," Carlo said. "You'll see me. If you change your mind halfway, you just stop and put it on and nobody can say a word."

"Stop stalling!"

"I'm not stalling, I'm being a gentleman."

"Since when."

"Since you walked down this corridor looking for me with your jeans unbuttoned, apparently."

I went behind a stack of tire racks, which was as much privacy as this building offered, and I took the shirt off over my head, folded it, and handed it to him. Handing it to him was a bigger deal than taking it off, I don't know why, some kind of custody transfer. He took it like it was made of glass.

"Thirty seconds on the clock," he said, checking his watch. "Go."

The main hall hit me like weather. Noise first, hundreds of conversations bouncing off the ceiling, then the light, those harsh white exhibit floods that don't flatter anything, then the crowd itself, a slow river of jackets and strollers and free tote bags. I walked into it in my bra.

The first three steps were the worst of my life. Not dangerous worst. Voltage worst. I felt naked in a way I have never felt naked in an actual bedroom, because in a bedroom there's one pair of eyes