Monday afternoon, Kai pushed open the door to what he had come to think of as Cinders shop. As the chime sounded he noticed that this time the front desk was empty and the door to the back of the shop was left open.
"Back here!" Kai recognized Cinder's voice. He only hesitated for an instant before walking into the shop.
He had taken his car to a mechanic before, of course, but he had never been inside the actual garage. He felt dumb as he realized that he knew none of the tools scattered around or any of the small labels that precisely named each bin. His eyes widened as he took it all in; there were three cars parked in the shop and he recognized one of them as his own.
"Hello?"
"Kai?" her voice was muffled. "I'm under your car." He made his way over to her and this time he noticed the pair of feet sticking out from beneath the driver's door. "Would you mind passing my the three quarter inch wrench in the toolbox?" Kai peered down at the smattering of tools laying at her feet.
"Umm..." Cinder rolled out from the car with a smirk on her lips and a mischievous light in her eye.
"You have no clue which one is the three quarter inch wrench, do you?" Kai shook his head. She sat up on the rolling cart and pulled out a singular tool from the pile, giving him a little wave with it.
"Changing the topic away from my ineptitude, how is my car looking?" He knelt down and sat crisscrossed on the floor next to her.
"Well it's giving me a bit more trouble than I thought it would, but I think I know what to do now."
"And that is?" Cinder peered at him with a questioning look.
"If I told you would you actually understand?" Kai opened his mouth, then shut it again. Cinder gave him another one of those adorable smirks and then laid back down on the creeper and rolled beneath the car again.
"Hey there was another thing I wanted to ask you, too." Cinder's grunt was muffled by the large mass of metal on top of her. "Would you like to go to dinner next Saturday?"
"Wha-" Kai heard a sharp smack as, he assumed, she hit her head when she tried to sit up. She rolled back out from the car and he did not miss either the baffled expression or the large red mark on her forehead.
"Oh no! I mean, not like on a date or anything! My friends, Liam Kinney and Cress Darnel - I think you know her - we were talking and you came up and we got to wondering, all of us, if you would want to join us for one of our weekly Saturday dinners? Like this next Saturday." Kai was normally incredibly eloquent, of course his brain would choose this moment to shut off and make him sound stupid. She rubbed a gloved hand against the red mark on her forehead.
"Cress? The hacker?"
"I thought she did computer science."
"Yeah, that pretty much is computer science. The way to study computer security is by learning how hackers get in. And she kills at it." Kai shrugged.
"You would know more than me."
"And isn't Kinney that triathlete asshole?"
"Well yeah," he said.
"And you. Kai." He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Now that I'm listening to you say it like that my offer doesn't sound very appealing." Cinder waited for a breath of silence.
"I'd love to grab dinner with you." There was a moment while those words hung in the air when he felt like sighing. "Where should I meet you guys? Wait, here let me give you my number."
As she bent over to dig out an ancient Motorola razor, Kai couldn't stop the smile that split across his face.