Chapter 8: The Grease-Stained Bargain
The socket wrench slipped again, and I caught my knuckles against the alternator bracket for the third time in as many minutes. A sharp hiss escaped through my teeth, and I pulled my hand back to examine the damage. A fresh scrape bloomed across the second knuckle, pink and raw, already threatening to bead blood.
I shook it off and reached for the rag tucked into my back pocket, wiping the grease from my fingers. The afternoon sun had angled itself through the barn's slats, painting long stripes of gold across the dusty floorboards. I'd been at this for two hours since I discovered the truck, and my back ached in ways I'd never felt before this body. Softer muscles, a lower center of gravity, and a spine that protested every bend and stretch. My tank top was stained with oil in three places, one smear tracking across my cheek where I'd scratched without thinking.
The engine was a 352 FE V8, and someone had kept it in decent shape despite the truck's sunbaked exterior. The carburetor was gummed up, the belts were cracked, and the battery was long dead, but the block itself was sound. I'd spent the last hour tracing the vacuum lines, checking the wiring harness, testing the distributor cap. My father would have known this engine blindfolded. I knew it because I'd watched him rebuild one just like it in the garage of our house in Akron, the summer I turned fourteen.
I was reaching for the carburetor again when a shadow cut across the stripes of light on the floor.
My hand froze. I straightened slowly, turning toward the barn's wide doorway.
Deputy Allan Cole stood there, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed. He'd traded the pressed uniform for a faded flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and a pair of worn jeans that had a small tear at the left knee. His boots were scuffed, the leather softened with age. A six-pack dangled from his fingers, the glass bottles clinking softly as he shifted his weight.
He wasn't in a hurry to say anything. He just watched me, a quiet smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, his flint-colored eyes taking in the scene. The cracked windshield. The missing tailgate. The grease on my cheek.
I became suddenly, acutely aware of how I must look. The cropped olive tank top I'd chosen this morning was now ruined, smeared with engine grime across the stomach and one strap had slipped down my shoulder. My hair had escaped its loose tie hours ago and clung to my neck in damp curls. I was standing in a barn, elbow-deep in a vintage Ford, covered in oil and sweat.
Sabrina Parker, the demure newcomer with the tragic backstory, probably should have been planting flowers or arranging curtains.
I pulled the rag from my back pocket and wiped my hands again, buying myself a moment. "Deputy Cole."
"Allan," he said, still smiling. "We covered this yesterday."
I tossed the rag onto a nearby crate. "Allan." The name felt strange on my tongue, too intimate, too familiar for a man I'd met once. But his eyes crinkled at the corners when I said it, and something warm twisted in my chest that I did not want to examine.
He pushed off the doorframe and walked toward me, his boots echoing on the floorboards. He set the six-pack on a dusty workbench and pulled out a bottle, offering it to me.
I hesitated, then took it. The glass was cold against my palm, condensation beading on my soiled fingers. I twisted off the cap and took a long sip. Cheap beer, the kind my father drank from a cooler during long afternoons in the garage.
My father. The thought hit me like a physical blow, and I swallowed the beer faster to wash it down.
Allan leaned against the front fender of the truck, close enough that I could smell the clean soap on his skin beneath the faint scent of the barn. He nodded at the engine bay. "My grandfather had one just like this. Want a hand, or am I just in the way?"
I blinked, surprised by the offer. And by the fact that he was here at all, on his day off presumably, in his civilian clothes, holding beer in one hand and the kind of easy confidence that men who grew up in small towns wore like a second skin.
This was dangerous. Every interaction with this man complicated things. He was observant, that was clear. A deputy with a badge and a nose for inconsistencies. If he spent too much time around me, he might start asking questions I couldn't answer without a folder of fabricated documents.
But I was also lonely. That was the word I had been avoiding all afternoon, the one that had chased me through the quiet farmhouse and out to this barn. Lonely in a way that had nothing to do with the absence of people and everything to do with the absence of myself.
"I could use a hand," I heard myself say. "The distributor cap is corroded, and I need someone with stronger fingers to hold the clamp while I seat it."
He grinned, and the expression transformed his face. The guarded professionalism of yesterday melted away, leaving something warmer, younger. He pushed off the fender and rounded to the passenger side of the engine bay. "Show me what we're working with."
We worked in companionable silence for a while. He held the clamp while I seated the distributor cap, his knuckles brushing against my wrist, sending a jolt up my arm that I tried to ignore. He fetched tools when I asked, handing them over without comment. He knew his way around an engine well enough to anticipate what I needed before I asked, and I found myself relaxing into the rhythm of the work.
"Where'd you learn this?" he asked eventually, wiping his hands on a rag he'd found hanging from a nail.
I kept my eyes on the carburetor. "My dad was a mechanic. Taught me everything he knew."
The lie came easily because it was almost true. Justin's father had been a mechanic. My father, whoever he was now, existed only in a fabricated file on a government database. But the muscle memory was real, the knowledge burned into my hands regardless of whose hands they were.
"You don't hear about a lot of women who can rebuild a 352," he said.
I glanced up at him, catching the hint of genuine interest in his gaze. Not skepticism, not challenge. Just curiosity, the same way he'd looked at my locket yesterday. Like I was a puzzle he wanted to solve.
"Guess I'm not a lot of women," I said.
He laughed, a low, warm sound that echoed off the barn's rafters. Then he picked up his beer from the workbench and took a long drink, watching me with those steady eyes. "Guess not."
We worked until the light began to shift, the golden stripes fading to amber and then to gray. I'd made real progress on the engine, enough that beneath the grease and the grime and the new aches in my back, I felt something I hadn't felt since before the transformation.
Purpose.
Or maybe just the closest thing to it I could find in this borrowed life.
Allan helped me lower the hood, and the latch clicked shut with a solid sound. He stood back, wiping his hands on his jeans, regarding the truck with a satisfied nod. "She's got a lot of potential."
"She's got a lot of rust," I said.
He smiled at me, and there it was again, that warmth that made me feel seen. Not as Sabrina Parker, the fabricated identity. Not as Justin Zygurski, the man who no longer existed. Just as a person, standing in a barn at dusk, covered in oil and breathing the same air.
"Rust can be fixed," he said. "Most things can."
He reached out, and for a moment I thought he was going to touch my face. My heart kicked against my ribs. But he only pulled a greasy smudge from my cheek with his thumb, wiping it away with a gentle stroke that left my skin tingling.
"There," he said softly. "Got it."
I couldn't look away from his eyes, and he didn't seem inclined to look away from mine. The moment hung between us, taut and humming with something I didn't have a name for.
Then he stepped back, settling into his boots, and the spell broke. "I should head out. Early shift tomorrow. But if you need any more help with her, I'm around."
"I might take you up on that," I said.
He nodded, and there was something in his expression that suggested he was glad to hear it. He picked up the empty six-pack, balanced it on his palm, and started toward the door.
I watched him go, the flannel stretched across his shoulders, the confident set of his walk. And I felt the pull of him, magnetic and alarming, pulling me toward something I had no business wanting.
The shadow of the man I used to be should have warned me away. But that man was gone. And in his place stood this woman, small and curved and hungry for connection in a way that frightened her half to death.
Allan paused at the door, turning back. "Sabrina?"
"Yeah?"
He smiled, and it was genuine, soft. "Good work today."
I opened my mouth before I could think better of it. "Allan?"
He stopped, one foot already out the door, and turned back. The fading light caught the line of his jaw, the quiet patience in his eyes. "Yeah?"
"Do you want to come back tomorrow? Help me with the engine again?"
The words tumbled out before I could catch them, and for a moment I regretted them. This was dangerous. Everything about this man was a risk I couldn't afford. But the loneliness was a physical ache in my chest, and he was the only person in this town who had looked at me like I mattered.
He smiled, and it reached his eyes, crinkling the corners in a way that made something in my stomach flip. "I'd love to. Actually, I've got the next two days off. I can help all day, both days, if you want."
Two days. The words landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples I couldn't name. Two days of him in this barn, working beside me, filling the silence with his steady presence.
"That's a lot of hours to spend on a stranger's truck," I said, trying to sound casual, trying to sound like I didn't already want him to stay.
He shrugged, easy and unhurried. "You're not a stranger. You're my neighbor." He paused, and something softened in his expression. "Besides, I haven't had a project like this in a while. It'll be nice to work on something that isn't a broken-down county car or a report I should've filed three weeks ago."
I laughed, a small sound that surprised me. It felt foreign in this body, lighter than Justin's laugh had ever been. "Well, I'll try to keep you busy."
"I don't doubt it." He nodded at the truck. "She's going to need a new battery, fresh belts, probably a fuel pump if the carburetor's any indication. I know a guy in Burlington who might have the parts we need, if you want to make a run tomorrow morning."
The offer was practical, uncomplicated. But underneath it, I sensed something else. An excuse to spend more time together. A reason to come back.
"That sounds good," I said. "I'll have coffee ready."
He grinned, and for a moment he looked younger, less like the composed deputy and more like the kind of man who'd grown up in these hills, chasing fireflies and fixing tractors with his grandfather. "I'll take you up on that. I'm an early riser anyway."
He lingered at the door for a moment longer, and I felt the weight of his gaze on me. Then he raised a hand in a small wave and stepped out into the dusk, his boots crunching on the gravel as he walked toward his truck.
I watched him go through the gap in the barn door, watching his silhouette grow smaller against the purple sky. When his engine turned over and the headlights swept across the yard, I realized I'd been holding my breath.
I let it out slowly, leaning against the fender of the F-100. The metal was warm from the afternoon sun, and the smell of old oil and grease clung to my skin. I looked down at my hands, at the small scrapes and the dark smudges under my nails. This morning, those hands had trembled when I'd struggled with the clasp of a bra that didn't fit my frame. Now they felt steady, almost familiar.
Almost.
I walked back to the farmhouse as the last light bled out of the sky. The kitchen was dark and cool when I let myself in, and I stood there for a moment, listening to the quiet hum of the refrigerator, the settling creaks of an old house learning to hold a new occupant.
I washed my hands in the sink, watching the water run gray with grime, then wiped down the counter with a sponge that had been left in the drawer. Simple domestic gestures, performed in a body that still felt like a costume.
But for the first time since I'd woken up in this life, the costume felt a little less like a prison.
I climbed the stairs to the bedroom, stripping off the ruined tank top and the jeans that had grease smeared across the thigh. Underwear, rumpled and damp with sweat, joined the pile on the floor. I stood in front of the mirror, naked, and made myself look.
The same woman stared back. The honey-blonde curls, the soft round face, the eyes that were too blue to be real. The body that was simultaneously mine and never mine. I'd avoided this mirror this morning, dressing with my eyes averted, afraid of what I'd see. But now, with the evening light slanting through the window, I forced myself to look.
She was beautiful. There was no denying it. A stranger's beauty, designed by people I'd never know, in a laboratory I'd never see. But beautiful all the same.
I lifted one hand and touched the locket at my throat. The silver was warm against my skin. I didn't know what was inside it. I hadn't opened it. Some part of me was afraid of what I'd find, afraid it would be another lie, another piece of the fabricated life I was supposed to inhabit.
But Allan had touched it yesterday, and I'd felt something. A spark, a warmth. A reminder that even in this borrowed body, I was still capable of feeling.
I let my hand fall and turned away from the mirror. Tomorrow he would come back, and we would work on the truck, and I would pretend to be Sabrina Parker, the girl who moved to Vermont to plant flowers and heal.
But underneath the lies, underneath the unfamiliar curves and the locket that held a secret I didn't know, there was still something real. Something that had survived the transformation.
I just didn't know what it was yet.
I pulled on a loose t-shirt and crawled into bed, the sheets cool against my skin. The farmhouse settled around me, creaking and sighing like an old animal. And as I drifted toward sleep, I found myself thinking about the barn, the truck, the man with the steady eyes and the warm smile who had promised to come back.
Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I'll figure out what I'm doing.
But sleep came before I could decide.