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“Great,” I said.
As soon as I was out of view from the windows of the dress shop, I broke into an unathletic run–something like a baby deer trying to rush across a frozen pond, I imagined. Dean was in trouble, and I had to save him. Somehow.
I found Dean on the sidewalk outside the Ashford Inn. He was standing beside my dad’s old Subaru with his hands on his hips. I saw him walk over to the open hood, point at something, and nod his head. He looked like he hadn’t changed from fishing and still had on some crazy kind of rubber jumpsuit with a dirty white shirt underneath. His hair was wet and tousled, but he somehow still looked amazing.
Walter was scrambling around his feet, narrowly avoiding death by Dean’s heavy feet several times, but wagging his tail like it was a great game. Walter spotted me before anyone else. He came up, snorted, whined, and rolled over for a belly rub with his little tail thumping on the pavement. I scratched him and gave him a final pat, then rushed over to Dean and my parents.
“Hey!” I called out. “How’s it going?” I asked.
“Great,” my dad said. “Dean was just going to take a look under the hood and see if he can figure out what the knocking sound is.”
“Oh, is that right?”
“Yup,” Dean said. He planted both palms on the hood and leaned over the engine.
I watched, thinking that if mechanic work failed him, he could certainly play one in an erotic movie. My eyes fixated on the tightness of his ass and the rigid lines of muscle in his arms. Having an ass look good in a pair of rubber overalls like that was damn near superhuman, but Dean managed it. Of course he did.
“Knock in the engine?” Dean asked. “That could be a few things, but we should start with the spark plugs. It’ll be easier to check than the rods or the combustion chamber.”
If he was bullshitting, I thought Dean was doing a surprisingly good job at it for someone who claimed to not know shit about cars. Then again, I didn’t know anything about cars, either. He could be talking about flux capacitors and Jibbly-woo’s and I’d think it sounded pretty solid.
He reached into the car and fiddled around for a bit before coming out with what I recognized as a spark plug. “These look pretty rough,” he said. “You can pick some up from a hardware store pretty cheap and replace them. Might fix the problem. If not, we can look into it later and see what else it could be.”
“Wow,” my dad said. “Thank you.” He shot me an approving look and a double thumbs up.
I smiled back, a little confused. Had Dean been watching car repair videos in his spare time since I’d warned him about this? I supposed it wasn’t the craziest possibility. The man was clearly very smart. Maybe he taught himself just enough from the internet to pull it off.
“Now what about this?” My dad asked. “The front driver side tire has a little wobble to it. I mostly only notice it when I really get going, but it–”
Dean suddenly gave the wheel a hard kick with the heel of his rubber boot. There was a creak of metal and the whole car shook. I frowned, tilting my head and staring. The wheel had looked a little crooked before his kick, but it actually looked normal now.
“Hah! How about that!” My dad clapped with excitement. “The old kick it and fix it technique, huh? I like this guy, Pearl.”
Dean shot me a wink, followed by a bewildered look that said he hadn’t actually expected that to work.
I lingered for the next half hour while my dad walked Dean around the car, asking about so many problems that I wondered why he hadn’t brought the damn thing into a mechanic’s shop by now. Dean managed to look like he knew more than enough to make my story believable. There were a few things he admitted he wasn’t sure about, but he managed to peel off the door panel and fix a wiring issue that was stopping the driver side window from rolling up. He even fixed the seats that wouldn’t adjust.
“Now Pearl’s mom and I were hoping for one of those massages,” my dad said, “but–”
“Actually,” I said. “Dean and I need to get to dinner. If we’re going to make our reservation, I need him to go get cleaned up now.”
“Oh, sure,” Dad said. “Thanks, Son.” He clapped Dean on the shoulder and smiled.
Son? Was it that easy to win my dad over? Or was Dean just that damn likable?
I felt my heart melt a little when I saw how Dean reacted to my dad’s words, though. Dean was smiling, but looking at my dad in a way that made me think his words had meant a great deal. It made me think of what he’d told me about his strained family life and how our first assumptions about people were so often wildly wrong.
