Page 40 of To Belong Together
“I’m here now. We’re eating together.”
“This isn’t a date.” He downed more soup.
“Call me old fashioned, but conversation would still be nice.”
“Okay. How’d you become a technician?”
Of course he’d lead with a question, but fine. She needed to explain herself and why she’d turned away his business. “I had lots of friends in elementary school, but by middle school, I didn’t fit in. The girls, especially, were mean. So, I’d hang out in the garage with my dad, talking about all the nonsense at school. I talked so long, eventually he put me to work.”
“Sounds like a guy I could like.”
He might have liked her father in his prime. She suspected even now, John would treat him with kindness and respect.
The thought encouraged her to continue. “By high school, I was pretty good with cars. One of the football players bought a rundown sports car because he liked the look—and who cares about extras like, you know, power steering and brakes.”
A flicker of humor lit John’s eyes.
“Dad and I helped get it running, and the boy told his friends. When they needed repair work, they enlisted me. I learned to do more and more of it with less help from Dad. Working on the guys’ cars meant spending time with them, which meant the girls befriended me to get closer to the boys.”
John watched as if he were cataloging all the details, waiting for the moment when the pieces would fit and reveal the bigger picture.
“So, working on cars got me friends, which …” She shrugged. “Who wouldn’t like that? But I love fixing stuff. Taking something broken and giving it another chance.”
With that, she’d answered his question about how she’d become a technician, but she couldn’t stop there because she needed him to understand why she’d behaved the way she had since that first test drive.
She plunged onward. “At tech school, I was a novelty. The guys liked me because I didn’t use being a woman as an excuse. But once I joined the workforce, everything changed, even before I came here to work with family. Most the men I’ve worked with have been at this longer than I have, and some of them have spent that time learning how little they can get by with. They wouldn’t appreciate anyone as thorough as me no matter what, because I catch things they don’t, which makes them look bad. The fact that I’m a woman makes it worse. Add to that the fact that some customers don’t trust a woman to work on their cars.”
“So it’s you against all the men.”
“Feels that way. And you can imagine how it felt when a customer started asking me out, refusing to see me as a good technician.”
He sat back, hands retreating from the soup. “I never doubted your abilities.”
“But every time you asked me out, you were shoving my biggest weakness in my face.”
“That you’re a woman?”
“Exactly.” A weakness that haunted her in the form of fingers aching to touch the incredulous lines that had appeared across his forehead. She sat up straighter and clutched her spoon. “I’ve spent years trying to prove I can be one of the guys, that I deserve the same respect in my job.”
“Some of the best people I know are women. Take my mom. No one can take her place.” He smirked. “Even if Gannon tries sometimes.”
“Meaning what?”
“That was him on the phone before.”
“So why call him Mom? Was it supposed to be an insult?”
John frowned as if he hadn’t expected that interpretation.
“Only a woman can care about a person?” she asked. “Only a woman can cook and clean? That’s why you let me stay, isn’t it? I was cooking, and you wanted a woman to take care of you. A woman’s place is in the kitchen, and you finally found me there.”
John studied her, then the soup and the bread, before pushing his bowl toward the center of the table. “My mom is the director of fixed ops at an international company, and she’s one of the strongest people I know. She got us out when—”
He stopped short, stood as if to walk away, then squared his stance to her. “I took an interest, but was I less than respectful? I asked you out long before you set foot in a kitchen, but somehow you decided I’m so unworthy that I couldn’t pay you enough to make it worthwhile to do your job. You don’t want to be seen as a stereotypical woman? Then don’t accuse me of being a cardboard cutout of all the men who’ve wronged you. I’m not putting you in a box or locking you out of a garage. I’m trying to get to know you.”
She stared, heart going full-throttle like it never did when Sam or Roy berated her. She’d hit one of those icebergs Gannon had warned her about, and the impact left her speechless.
John had finally uttered more than three words in a row, and her feelings for him—and her regret over sending him away—surged. But of course, this had to be right after she’d lost it, read way too much into what he’d said.
