The Mechanic

I couldn’t breathe for laughing so hard and Liam was laughing right next to me. We were dancing along the empty street, with another half an hour to kill before midnight. He was humming the tune to some song I’d sworn I heard before but couldn’t remember where from, and I was humming along.

The car was parked a few feet away, pulled into the empty parking lot of some laundry place boasting of the best dry cleaning in town, windows dark. We pressed our faces to the thick pane and pointed at the clothes hung on racks, waiting to be picked up.

“That one belongs to a crazy lady,” I said, pointing to a hideous pink dress suit, studded with rhinestones so large the collar drooped, “Whose husband divorced her twenty years ago and has no kids, and since then she’s been wearing fancy clothes every single night to the bar, waiting for some dashing young man to buy her a drink.”

“That one’s obviously a truck driver,” Liam pointed to a frayed old tux jacket, “And he’s getting it cleaned because his only daughter is getting married soon and he’s got to dress nice for the wedding.”

I watched turned my head to look at him, our bodies pressed close, hip to hip, elbow to elbow, “Where’s she getting married?”

“On the beach,” he answered, as if he’d been personally invited, “In Cancun, because she loves the water and her fiancé is a professional scuba diver.”

“How’d they meet?” We were leaning against the glass, neither of us looking at the clothes anymore.

“At a bookstore. They stood next to each other in line and she told him the book he was buying was one of her favorites.”

“That’s all it took?”

“It was love at first sight.”

“Do you believe in that?” I was only beginning to process how close we were. I could feel his hand resting against my hip, the other lacing with mine.

“Do you?” He asked, signature smirk lifting the edge of his lips.

“Maybe,” I breathed, and he was kissing me, pressing me flush against his chest with just one hand, so large and warm on the small of my back. And I was kissing back because I had no other choice, not when he was kissing me like that, holding me like he was breaking me down and building me back up just so I could fit into his arms as perfectly as I was now.

When we pulled apart, I could taste him as I licked my lips.

“Sorry,” he was slightly breathless, our noses millimeters apart, “I should’ve asked first but I couldn’t help myself.”

I wouldn’t have believed those words had they been said by anyone else.

I believed him.

“It’s okay,” I was as breathless as he was, an arm wrapped around his neck, fingers twisting in the hairs by the base of his skull, “We could always try again.”

He grinned, “You think we should?”

I nodded, our lips hovering a breath away from each other, like magnets of the same pole, an invisible force keeping them from touching.

“Yeah,” I breathed in as he breathed out.

“Okay,” his inhale.

“Okay,” my exhale.

“Can I—”

“Yeah.” And we kissed. Again, and then again, and again.

We held hands for the entire car ride back to my house. There were still 10 minutes left before midnight.

Liam parked the car by the side of the road so we could walk back, neither of us wanting to say goodbye yet. We could see the living room light on in my house; my dad was probably still painting away, singing some old folk song from ‘back in the day’ as he did, mumbling over the lyrics because he doesn’t remember most of them.

“Y’know,” I started, swinging our hands between us, fingers knitted, palm to palm so that I could feel the faint hint of his pulse beneath his skin, “I think… even if it had been ‘just dinner’ tonight, I would’ve been okay with it, cause it would’ve been fun and it would’ve been with you.”

I never thought I could say something so damn cheesy but for some reason, with Liam, it was simple honesty. It was the truth, so it wasn’t strange.

“Alexia,” he stopped, pulling me back so suddenly I stumbled. He caught me perfectly, like nothing he ever did cost him any energy at all.

“You shouldn’t settle for anything less than exactly what you want,” he sounded so serious, the weight of each word passing from him to me as he held me against him. I nodded, surprised by the sudden turn in tone, but this was Liam, and everything he said was exactly what he thought, so I took it as it is.

“Okay,” I said, reaching up to press my palm to his cheek. Grinning, I continued, “I’m not settling.”

“Good,” he seemed pleased with himself, spinning me out from under his arm as we continued to walk.

After another brief silence, we were closing in on my house and I felt my heart dropping into my stomach. I tried to keep my tone light as I said, “This isn’t a dream, is it? I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and realize that I’ve only just gotten here and that you don’t exist, right?”

It was Liam’s turn to look confused, “Whoa—what? Why would this be a dream?”

I stopped us, taking two tentative steps towards Liam so that our toes met, but nothing else touched.

“Because,” I searched for the words to describe the positive tumult of emotions crashing through my system, the vicious, vindictive, and greedy, the melancholy, reluctance, and elation, “Because stuff like this doesn’t happen… not really. Like,” I looked up at him, eyes desperately taking in his face, the stubble lining his chin, the round curve of his nose, afraid that I might wake up at any second and forget it all, “You’re hot and nice, and that’s just… not something that happens in real life. And then there’s me, and us, and this,” I squeezed his hand, the words now tumbling out as if the flood gates had been cracked in all the wrong places, “Guys like you don’t go for girls like me. It’s just not… real.”

“Hey, hey,” Liam was laughing as he caught my chin and brought my face to his, “I’m kind of offended you don’t think this is real,” he said, voice brushing over my lips, one stitch above a whisper, and he kissed me again. Whereas before it was all the eagerness of kissing and the newness of lips on lips, the rush of him and me and finally; now it was gentle and firm, intoxicating in that slow, seeping, pulling kind of way.

“Believe it’s real yet?” He asked, pulling away barely far enough to make out words against my lips. I shook my head, mind buzzing with the feel of him and the exotic realness of it all. He kissed me again.

“How ‘bout now?”

I shook my head again, a helpless grin hinging between my ears.

Liam heaved an exasperated sigh, “Then I guess we’ll have to keep trying.”

I nodded, “I’m okay with that.”

And so we did. We kissed so many times that night, standing there, twenty feet from my front door, feverish and calm, giggling and breathing and pressing and pulling until I was sure I wouldn’t be able to untangle myself from him even if I tried.

And we’d kiss so many more times that summer, one for every star in the sky, we’d say, and see who can keep track longer before both of us would lose count and lose ourselves and lose the world to the taste of each other, the smell of love-drunk nights, the sheer singularity and solidity of us.