My Brother's Girl

by Sienna Blake

  Her patience holding strong, Kayleigh tried again when I remained silent. “I’m not exactly sure what you want me to do.”

  Oh, what a dangerous question.

  I shrugged off my black leather jacket and slung it over the back of my beat-up office chair that was missing a wheel and leaned heavily to the right.

  “Maybe that’s because I don’t want you here,” I said to my ancient brick of a computer.

  Her loud scoff was enough to make me glance over my shoulder at her. She crossed her arms over her chest as she leaned against the door frame.

  “You could have refused to hire me,” she argued, clearly trying to keep her tone of voice civil.

  I mindlessly arranged a messy stack of papers to give the appearance I wasn’t hanging onto her every word.

  “And you could have offered to find a job elsewhere,” I countered.

  I looked over at her again and found her silently watching me. I wondered if she was thinking the same thing as me.

  “You could have closed the door…” “You could have closed your eyes…”

  “You could have covered up…” “You could have turned around…”

  “You could have done something…” “You could have done anything…”

  “But you didn’t…”

  Finally, Kayleigh shook her head.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she insisted. “When does everyone else get here?”

  I frowned. “You mean customers?”

  “No, I don’t mean customers,” she grumbled in frustration. “I mean everyone else who works here.”

  This brought a genuine smile to my lips as I spread my arms out wide. “Here I am, darling.”

  Kayleigh stared at me with wide eyes, which narrowed as my words sank in. “What about the other mechanics?”

  I sat on the edge of my already overburdened desk and counted out on my fingers. “Well, there’s me and then there’s...” I paused. She waited. “... and then there’s me and, um, yeah, me.”

  Her stern face was clearly not amused. “Alright, who’s the boss?”

  “Me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a boss, Darren. I meant who is your superior?”

  “No one.”

  She huffed, her hands balled at her sides. “Who signs your pay cheques?”

  “I sign my own cheques.”

  Kayleigh stomped her foot, seemingly one step away from tugging at her hair. “Who owns the place, assho—” Kayleigh stopped herself by biting at her lower lip as if needing to physically prevent herself from calling me what she was in her perfect right to call me: an asshole. She steadied herself by closing her eyes for a moment and then tugged a smile onto her face. “Darren,” she started again, her voice tender and quiet, “would you mind kindly telling me who owns Kelly’s Garage?”

  Instead of answering, I just stared at her.

  Realisation dawned on her pretty face slowly, then reluctantly, then unbelievingly. “You?”

  I remained silent as Kayleigh’s face remained suspicious.

  “Eoin didn’t say you owned the place.”

  Not surprising, I thought. I wasn’t sure Eoin even knew himself that I bought the place, despite it happening over a year ago. Kayleigh’s frown deepened as she pointed a finger at me.

  “You didn’t say that you owned it.”

  She was entering uncomfortable territory for me so I averted my eyes from hers and slipped past her. “I’ve got to get to work.”

  As I strode toward my toolbox, I again heard her behind me—my little, noisy, unwanted shadow. “Did you just buy the place then?” she asked.

  I opened a random drawer with no clue what I wanted to grab. I wasn’t sure which vehicle I was working on or what was wrong with it. Hell, I didn’t even know where it was. All I knew was that Kayleigh was behind me.

  That she smelled like peppermint.

  That her hair looked nice braided down her back like that.

  That her freckles reminded me of the powdered sugar dusted on the Christmas pastries in the golden window displays along Grafton Street.

  “I bought it a year ago,” I grumbled under my breath. “Now I have to get to work.”

  I grabbed a random wrench just so I could move away from her; there was only so long I could maintain the self-control required to not fall headlong into those green eyes, softer than a cashmere scarf, deeper than the midnight sky on the winter solstice.

  “Wait, you bought this place a year ago?” Kayleigh exclaimed, unbelieving. “A whole year?”

  I found myself opening the hood of the closest car. I stared down at the engine in the dim light as if I’d never seen any of these parts before, as if I hadn’t been working on them for the last ten years. With Kayleigh so close, leaning her head beneath the hood to stare incredulously at me, I couldn’t tell the spark plug from the windshield fluid valve even if you had a gun to my head.

  “Why haven’t you changed the name?” she asked, searching my eyes.

  My mind was a muddled mess. I shook my head, but even that failed to clear it. “The name?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest when I closed the hood and tried to escape from her by hurrying to the other car already up on the lift.

  “Are you a Kelly?” she pressed, close at my heels.

  “What?” I glanced back at her, feeling irritable. “No, but—”

  “But you had a year to change it.”

  I balled my hands into fists at my sides and let my head fall back to stare at the ceiling. “Kayleigh, let the name go,” I said through clenched teeth. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “But it’s your shop,” Kayleigh insisted. “It should have your name.”

  “It’s not my name!”

  I wasn’t able to keep my cool any longer. Like an overworked engine, the steam had to go somewhere at some point. When I saw the shock on Kayleigh’s face from my outburst, I sighed and dragged a hand over my face.

  “I just mean that it’s not mine to change.” I tried to recover as best as possible. “I bought it from a friend, a mentor, and it’s his name, alright?”

  I saw the debate raging behind Kayleigh’s eyes as she bit her lip and stared at me.

  “Just let it go, yeah?” I said.

  Without waiting for an answer, I lowered myself to my rolling creeper and wheeled myself under the car, still with my worthless wrench in hand. I sucked in a steadying breath as the dim light of the confined, tight space welcomed me like an old friend. From beneath the undercarriage, I craned my neck to see Kayleigh’s boots still standing next to the car. Silence sank again over the garage as I heard only my harsh breath against the cold, hard metal. I stared at her boots and waited, waited, waited.

  If this was the same girl who made my blood boil and my heart race at the grocery store, she would have bent down, grabbed the edge of my creeper, and dragged me back out from beneath the car. If this was the same woman who spoke the truth, the painful, painful truth I alone knew in my heart, she would have lowered her face to mine, jabbed a finger at my chest, and called me out on my bullshite excuse for not changing the shop’s name to mine. If she was the same fiery soul who had shaken mine without us even touching, she would have pissed me off, sent me past my limit, driven me crazy because she knew I needed that push.

  After waiting for what could have been a few seconds or minutes or bleedin’ days, Kayleigh’s voice echoed down to mine, sweet and calm and lacking any trace of anger. “Anything you want me to get started on first then?”

  I stared up at the undercarriage of the car for a moment before replying. “Just make yourself useful,” I grumbled.

  “Sounds good,” Kayleigh said without hesitation.

  Part of me was relieved. Part of me exhaled against the metal frame because we hadn’t clashed again like before. Part of me was thankful that I could be left alone to work, to not be bothered, to not fear slipping up and falling, falling, falling.

  Part of me wished I could see that
girl from the frozen food aisle of the grocery store again. Part of me wondered where she went…and why…why was she suddenly gone?

  Kayleigh’s boots moved away from the car with quiet, tentative steps. Even though I had the wrong tool for the wrong car, I remained there in my place in the dark.

  As it should be, I thought. As it should be.

  Kayleigh

  I smiled and he scowled and the week came and went.

  Earlier and earlier I dragged myself out of the loft to tiptoe past the drunk passed out at the front of the downstairs bar and drive toward the faint glow of dawn along the foggy horizon and beat Darren to the shop so I could greet him with a cheerful “Good morning” and a steaming cup of black coffee. Each morning he received it in his gloved hand with his motorcycle helmet tucked under his arm, dark hair a messy tangle atop his head as he brushed past me to stalk to the office without even a glance in my direction. I made sure to keep a skip in my step as I followed after him each morning.

  “Anything you need me to do today?” I’d ask, chipper as the birds whose song Darren would soon drown out with his welder.

  Each morning, despite the office door slamming in my face harder and harder till it rattled on its hinges, I forced my lips into a smile and gave a big thumbs up to the white peeling paint inches from my nose. “Roger that, boss.”

  I was determined as hell to keep a positive attitude, maintain a pleasant demeanour, grin till my cheeks ached and I had to ice them with a bag of frozen peas after work on the couch while Candace shook her head and called me “Louca”. Crazy.

  Because I wasn’t the girl at the grocery store. I wasn’t the girl who stomped her foot by the instant mac and cheese, leaned her head back, and just shouted exactly what was on her mind to the long phosphorescent lights overhead. I wasn’t the girl who was brutally honest, who didn’t care what you thought about her. The girl who let herself lose her temper in the frozen foods section because a man managed to get under her skin.

  Because that girl would listen to her body when it told her that she liked it, that she wanted him under her skin, that she wanted him under her hands and under her covers. Because that girl wouldn’t try to convince herself that there was nothing between her and that man with the grey-blue eyes. Because that girl would break another man’s heart for the sake of being honest.

  And I wasn’t that girl. I couldn’t be that girl.

  So when Darren picked up his lunch and moved away from me when I tried to join him, I smiled and called after him, “Maybe next time then.”

  When he grumbled that he couldn’t find anything he needed with my new filing system, I smiled and redid it.

  And when he erased a new, friendlier voicemail message I recorded on the phone, I smiled and nodded, “Yeah, that’s better. It adds a bit of mystery when you have no idea where you’ve called. Fun.”

  Any and all of my efforts to update, reorganise, modernise, clean up, decorate, or just change the shop in the slightest were met with irritation and a gruff command to “put it back the way it was”. I’m fairly certain he even switched the toilet paper roll after I added a new one in the bathroom.

  But when a package arrived that dull Thursday morning, I knew, just knew, that he couldn’t possibly dislike this change. When the delivery truck arrived, Darren was on his back, flashlight held between his teeth as he frowned at the underside of a motorcycle a customer had dropped off earlier with the vague complaint that “it didn’t sound right”. The headlights swept across the garage as the truck pulled up the drive, and I leapt up from the now clean desk in the office, tugged on my beanie and mittens, and ran out to meet the delivery man. Darren didn’t even bother glancing up from his work, which didn’t surprise me.

  When he worked on a vehicle, he sort of disappeared. It was like he wasn’t even there in the shop anymore. I had to call his name several times before he’d mumble an aggravated, “What now?”

  I met the delivery man at the back of the truck where he was struggling with a large, narrow cardboard box. Drizzle caught in my eyelashes as I hurried to help him ease it down to the icy drive.

  “What have you got in this big ol’ thing?” the man asked, wiping at his brow with the back of his bright orange utility gloves.

  I patted the top of the box and grinned. “A smile,” I said.

  The delivery man eyed me as he handed over a pen atop a thick clipboard with a receipt for me to sign.

  “Yeah, sure. Whatever you say,” he said somewhat warily as I scribbled my name at the bottom. “Have a nice day then.”

  He disappeared around the side of the truck, exhaust swirling in the cold air as he started the ignition and backed away down the drive. Rubbing my hands in excitement, I lowered my shoulder and heaved against the box to slide it into the warmth of the garage. My boots slipped and I caught myself before my knees crashed to the slippery ground. Gritting my teeth in determination, I turned around and lowered my back to press against the edge of the box, heaving and ho-ing to shove it backwards.

  By the time I managed to get the massive box into the garage, the blast of hot air was oppressive on my sweaty face. I peeled off my beanie and tugged my mittens off with my teeth to fling them on the floor. Only after I had sagged against the damp side of the box did I see Darren leaning against the motorcycle with his arms crossed over his chest as he watched me with an amused grin, or at least the closest thing Darren was ever going to get to what us humans would call a “grin”.

  “Need any help?” he asked, his voice husky as he raised a questioning dark eyebrow over at me.

  My heart rate leapt as a bolt of anger flashed through me like it had at the grocery store. I resisted the urge to ball my sweaty hands into fists, narrow my eyes till they squished against my rosy cheeks, and open my mouth to tell him exactly what I thought about him.

  “You’re an asshole, Darren.”

  “I’m not sure I’ve seen anything hotter than you up against that motorcycle with those low-slung jeans, that tight grey Henley, and that smudge of engine grease just below your eyes that are part frozen lake, part coal.”

  “I think you’re acting like this because you feel the same way that I do and just like me, you have no fucking clue what the hell to do about it.”

  Instead, I tugged up the corner of my frozen lips as mechanically as if I’d used a winch and said, “Good. I’m glad I’ve got your attention. There’s something I want you to see.”

  I pushed myself to my feet and glanced at the box. “I just need to go grab some scissors,” I said. “Wait just a second.”

  “I’m really busy,” Darren called after me as I hurried toward the office.

  I rolled my eyes as I grabbed them from the desk drawer. “It’ll be worth it,” I called out. “Trust me.”

  Maybe it was because I’d piqued his interest or maybe he felt just the teeniest bit bad about not helping me, but Darren remained where he was as I cut through the tape around the big box and stepped back to let the side fall to the shop’s concrete floor. I pulled back the shipping material and then looked over quickly to catch Darren’s reaction. I frowned in slight confusion when his expression remained unchanged, scowl still firmly in place.

  I double-checked that he could see everything alright. I scooted aside a few more packing peanuts from the bottom corner before again looking over at Darren. This time I found him already looking at me—he was not happy.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  Any trace of playfulness, as infinitesimal as it may have been before, was now without a doubt good and gone as he glared at me across the shop.

  I swallowed heavily and answered, “Umm, a sign.”

  “I can see it’s a sign,” Darren snapped. “A sign for what?”

  My eyes darted nervously from the box back to Darren. Well, this wasn’t going according to plan at all. In fact, I wasn’t sure it could be going any worse.

  “A sign for what, Kayleigh?” Darren growled.

  He was still leaning a
gainst the motorcycle, but I could see that his shoulders were tense. He seemed to be trying to keep his chest from heaving with ire, but it was plain as day from the way his fingers dug deep into the muscles along his arms.

  “A sign for what?” His voice shook.

  “A sign for the shop,” I answered, my voice small, hesitant, weak.

  Darren seemed to be restraining himself by the motorcycle. I could almost hear the rattle of the invisible chains wrapped around his broad, strong chest; they were held taut against the bike like the chain on a pit bull chomping at the bit in a junkyard.

  “A sign for what shop?” he shouted.

  My eyes moved again to the sign just beside me. I’d designed it myself on Darren’s ancient brick of a computer in his back office. As he disappeared into his work on this motorcycle or that car, I’d fumbled my way around a slow as treacle program, waiting for hours it seemed just for the stupid mouse to move, in order to make something I thought he’d like, something he’d be proud to put outside his shop instead of the old faded sign that didn’t even say his name.

  I made the background the colour of his ma’s kitchen, the place where they all gathered for Sunday lunches. I made the font the same as the street name carefully hand-painted on the mailbox outside their home. And I made sure to print “O’Sullivan’s Garage” as big and as loud as the O’Sullivans themselves.

  For me the answer to Darren’s question couldn’t have been more obvious: it was the sign for his shop. It couldn’t be a sign for anything or anyone else in the entire world.

  “Darren,” I said softly, looking back toward him, “it should have your name outside.”

  Either the invisible chains around him were released or he finally managed to burst through them, but regardless, Darren stepped forward and paced angrily back and forth in front of me and the sign.

  “Did you not hear me?” he asked, eyes more churning grey skies than calm blue waters when they darted over to me.