Emma realized late that night that Killian hadn't told her when to be there the next day, nor had she thought to ask, so she showed up at 8 the next morning hoping that the garage followed some semblance of normal hours. Though of course it was just her luck that when she got there the doors were already thrown open, lights on, with Killian half underneath a car where he had clearly been for a while. She stood there a moment, watching his knees move faintly as he worked, until his muffled voice said, "Were you planning on standing there long?"
"Sorry I'm late," She said instead. "I wasn't sure when you opened."
"Since it's just me, we open whenever I wake up." He chucked as he rolled out from under the car, smiling up at her a moment, as casual as if she had caught him lounging on a blanket on the grass. "Lucky for the business, I'm an early riser." He pushed himself up and wiped his hands on the sides of his jeans. "Ready for some work?"
"I said I would be."
"That you did, love." He led her to the back of the garage and handed her a worn pair of coveralls. She saw his name stitched over the left-hand pocket, and he gave her an apologetic look. "I don't have a new pair, and these were the best I could find."
"They're great. Thank you." She slung the coveralls over her shoulder as he continued along the back wall, gesturing vaguely to groups of tools and rhyming off their names as though there was any sort of organization to them. One look at the sprawling mess spread over the long workbenches told her otherwise, but she kept her comments to herself. It's not like she was any better and, after all, he hadseen the state of her back seat.
They stopped their short tour in front of a boxy sedan sitting expectantly on the jack, and Killian gestured grandly at it. "Your project for the morning." He said, grinning at her.
"What's wrong with it?" She asked sarcastically, tapping the edge of the wheel well that was more rust than anything. "Everything?"
"Venture a guess."
"Dry rot?" It was more than a guess - she could see the fibers of the tire wall showing through where rubber should have been, and she could only imagine how long the rubber had been flaking off these tires before the car's owner had finally brought it in.
"Ten points to the lady." He pointed approvingly at her. "New tires, new rims. You'll have to mount the tires on the rims first, but apart from that it's fairly straightforward." He bent over gracefully to scoop a torque drill off the floor and handed it to her ceremoniously. She accepted it, but watched him as he walked back towards the car he had been working on. He was walking backwards, a shit-eating grin on his face. "You may want to put on those coveralls, love." He said finally, laying back down and disappearing under the car. She could hear that grin plain in his voice. "The lug nuts are seized on."
It ended up taking her nearly half the day to get the job done. She learned within the first five minutes that he hadn't been joking about the nuts being seized on. She had gone at the first wheel with the torque drill, expecting a half-hour of work, but all she got for her trouble was a faint grinding, a lot of rust dust, and the corners rounded off the lug head. She was also rewarded with a thick streak of rust-red down the side of her pants when she wiped her hands on them absently, and she cursed herself for ignoring Killian's advice to put on the coveralls before she started. She took a break before staring on the second nut, slipping them on over her clothes. Even if she could hear his soft chuckle drift out from underneath the car across the garage as she swore under her breath, he had definitely been right about this.
She finally decided to forgo the power tool for a simple socket wrench, working the nuts loose one at a time, painstakingly slowly. It was maddeningly slow work, but it was straightforward and it was...cathartic, almost. Everything up to now had been a huge mess of frustration - her life in Boston, the person who had eventually pushed her to leave, her car breaking down, the parts being so damn expensive - but this was something she could do, and even if she wasn't necessarily working on her car to get herselfback on the road, every infinitesimal turn of each individual lug nut, even though there were twenty in total to get through, was another step forward, towards a future that could be happy and, for once, didn't seem quiteso distant.
The week wore on much the same, her arriving at the garage every morning and Killian already there, him giving her task after task that, though they were never hard, were always rewarding. Emma had learned everything she knew about mechanics ten long years earlier, but it all came back quickly as she worked, her hands remembering even when her mind didn't. He never said anything, but Emma saw Killian nod approvingly to himself once or twice as he inspected her work.
He never asked her where she learned her skills, how she could change fan belts and ignition coils without batting an eye and not have any sort of certification to her name. He just let her work in silence, took a glance over it at the end, but by and large she knew he trusted her, even in the short time she had been there.
They were both working in comfortable silence, her on the fan motor of a 1985 Saab 9000 that smelled faintly of cheese and had been making her hungry all morning, and him on a new exhaust pipe for a godawful panel van that was clearly causing him some trouble. Killian had been cursing heavily at the van, Emma trying to curb her smile and the laughter that kept trying to bubble up, but between one moment and the next he became very, eerily quiet.
She looked up from her work to find Killian toe to toe with a short, older man who made the air in the room feel markedly colder.
"My car is out front." He said without preamble. "I'm having trouble shifting past third and I'll need it fixed before the morning." He wasn't saying anything particularly out of the ordinary, but he sounded like a snake as he spoke, his words coiled and ready.
"I can't know what's wrong with it without taking a good look." Killian said. "And depending on the problem, I may need to order parts. I'll need at least a few days."
"That's unfortunate." The man's gaze sharpened as he leaned in a hairsbreadth closer to Killian, and he smiled a smile that was the farthest thing from pleasant. "We've discussed this in the past, Mr. Jones, but the proprietor from Johnson's garage - you know Johnson, one town over? He's looking to expand his business and he is very interested in the property I have vacant just off the highway. And a mechanic's shop added to my portfolio? It would be a very lucrative deal for me."
"I can't promise anything." Killian repeated. "I'll try my best, but-"
"It would truly be a shame if you couldn't have it ready in time." The man interrupted. He looked purposely casual, but there was a hard edge to his voice. "I remember a time when a man could get some real work done at this garage, but then again, your brother was always the businessman, wasn't he?"
If Emma hadn't been watching him, she would have missed the way the muscles jumped in Killian's jaw, and the awful shade of pale that swept over his face. The other man didn't miss it, either, and that self-satisfied, disgusting smile only grew wider. He pressed a key into Killian's hand and nodded his head slightly, a mockery of respect.
"I'll see you in the morning, Mr. Jones." He said, turning on his heel and walking out the door.
Killian stood there for a moment, his eyes following the faint shape of the man as he ambled down the driveway. He looked...hollow. Hollow and so, so small standing in the middle of the garage holding that key.
"What was that about?" She asked, abandoning the Saab and coming to stand just behind him. Yes, she barely knew him, but his teasing banter and calm silence in the garage as they both worked were becoming more and more familiar - enough so that she didn't want that taken away, especially by one short, demanding man.
"That's Mr. Gold." He ground out. "He owns most of the town, and aspires to own much more. He and I have never seen eye to eye."
"He does know what can do wrong with a transmission, right? How long they can take to fix?"
"I'm sure he does." Killian flipped the key over his knuckles once, then his gaze cut up to her face. There was a storm in his eyes when it did. "I'll start his repairs this afternoon. I just..." With a rough shake of his head, he turned sharply and strode to the back door, slamming the key hard down on the work bench on his way out. The sound of the impact echoed through the garage as he disappeared, and Emma stared after him. This was the same man who exchanged easy conversation with her across the garage day after day, who hadn't even raised his voice when he dropped a carburetor on his own foot three days earlier.
She looked out towards the road, in the direction Mr. Gold had taken towards town. Whatever the history was between these two, she wasn't sure she wanted to know.
Killian was gone nearly the rest of the afternoon. She had waited a half-hour for him to come back, but when he hadn't, she started surveying the old car in the front lot with more and more apprehension. If Gold truly was serious about threatening Killian's business, and came back tomorrow to find the repairs on his car not even underway...
Emma didn't need a history with the man to know how bad that would be.
Leaving the Saab for a moment, she retrieved the key from where Killian had unceremoniously deposited it, and gone out to stand in front of the car. It was an old Cadillac - of course a man like that would drive a Cadillac - and where other similar vehicles may have looked dated and dusty, this one looked almost sharklike, its sharp lines and corners purposeful in their menace. With a sigh - who attributed menace to a stationary vehicle? - she unlocked the car and popped the hood.
The sun was low in the sky, shining through the doors to paint the whole garage in shades of oranges and reds, when he returned.
"It's nearly eight, love. I would've though you'd have left hours ago." She had heard his steps on the concrete floor as he came up behind her, but even as he spoke she stayed under the hood of the Saab.
"I'm almost done."
"Fan motor giving you trouble?" She heard the slide of tools against one another as he messed about with the pile of wrenches she had on the floor beside her, and then he too was underneath the hood with her. He used the butt of an adjustable wrench to poke at the wires that snaked up and through into the dash, and she just raised an eyebrow as his expression turned from understanding to deeply, deeply confused. "This all looks fine, love. Where's the trouble?"
"If you'd bothered to look..." She held a greasy rag in his face, and waited until he put two and two together. "The fan motor's fine - I was wiping down the engine."
"Apologies, love." He withdrew from under the hook, and she felt the car shift as he leaned against the bumped instead. She ran the rag a few more times over the curves and dips of the engine, then ducked out from under the hood to face him.
"Should I be concerned that you disappeared all afternoon?"
"If you're worried about your car, don't be." He looked slightly ragged as he ran a hand through his hair. "Your parts are on order, and even if Gold does shut me down when I don't have that boat of a car ready in the morning, you'll be well on your way by the time this place goes under."
"It's-" She cut herself short as her inexplicable anger eclipsed anything else she could have said. He was sitting here talking about losing his livelihood, and he didn't look so much as irritated. "Howare you not pissed about this?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that he came in here with completely unreasonable demands, threatened your business, and you just...you leave and then you come back and you're not even angry?"
"Some things just aren't worth fighting about, love."
"This isn't? Your whole life isn't?" She threw her hands up in the air, and she didn't know why she was so worked up about something that would stop having any bearing on her life the moment she crossed the town line, but she felt consumed by this irritation that he wasn't even doing anything about it. "Maybe you should get that supposed business genius of a brother in here, because someone should be angry about this, and it sure as hell shouldn't be me!"
She stopped, letting her arms fall to her side in exasperation, and turned back towards him. She hadn't noticed in the midst of her tirade, but he had gone unnaturally still, and his gaze was very carefully neutral. Inside it, though, there was a vortex of something that she felt like she could get lost in.
Her fingers felt numb and she could feel her heart beat in her ears, realizing instantly and horribly why a man who would threaten another man's business might bring up the topic of that other man's brother.
It wasn't because the brother in question was still around.
"Killian, I..."
"It's my fault for not mentioning it earlier." He said dismissively, but she knew why he hadn't told her - she had seen it in that deep pit of his eyes. "My brother...he wasthe brains of the company after our father left and our mother passed - that much is true. When he died..." He stopped for a moment, his mouth open as though he had words ready that didn't want to come out. "When he...I didn't handle it well. I did a great many things after, but running this business was not one of them. And now with only me doing repairs, turnaround times aren't what they used to be, and Gold knows that. So trust me, Swan. If I had the option of having my brother here, I would very happily take it." He pushed himself off the bumper with a sigh. It looked like he was staring into a place she would never be able to see, but she saw his gaze catch on the corner of the sign outdoors, lingering on Jones Bros.She should have figured out sooner, why there was Brothers on the sign but only one brother in the garage. "You can go now, Swan. I'll close up."
"Killian, I'm sorry."
"It's been years, Swan." He waited for her to shed her coveralls, following her to the large garage doors, ready to close them behind her. A part of her didn't want to leave him alone when he looked so defeated, but she didn't know him, and it was clear from the way he was subtly but surely ushering her out that he didn't want her to stick around to get to know him, either.
She lingered in the yawning frame of the door a moment, waiting until he came up beside her, his eyebrow arched in a silent question. He looked remarkably lonely, one man with the whole sunset-painted garage spread out behind him. She knew lonely, and she knew a thousand words she would have wanted to hear in the same situation. Instead, she took his hand gently, her fingers soft against the back of his hand as she dropped the key for the Cadillac in his palm.
"The TV cable was frayed almost clean through." She said. "You had another one in the back. It's reinstalled, connected to the throttle arm, and adjusted. Saab's done too. And that creepy van. I took them all out on the road, and they're ready to go." She glanced up at his slightly startled expression, and shrugged a shoulder. "Someone had to."
"Swan, you didn't..."
"Let's just say I wanted to." She didn't want to get into the way chest tightened as she watched him storm off after his conversation with Gold - at how the look on his face was only too familiar, and how she knew that when you had to take a several-hour long break to pull yourself together you deserved for something to go your way. She just shrugged again, and started off down the driveway. "See you in the morning, Killian."
"Night, Swan." He said vaguely, his head still spinning with the amount of work she had fit into the afternoon just so he wouldn't have to.
He started rolling down the doors, but watched her make her way across the dusty grass and along the road back into town. Silhouetted like that against the setting sun, her words still echoing in his mind, in that moment he thought that she was perhaps the most brilliant thing he had ever seen.