Page 27 of Stupid Dirty

Ididn’t mean to derail our bike maintenance time with the spontaneous shopping trip. But Silas needed his own wheels. It was non-negotiable. Oil changes could wait.

Not forever, though. Which is why it’s only a few days later that I’m back at Ford’s after hours, sitting on my ass on the concrete, pretending to know what I’m doing.

When I hooked Silas up with the job, I swear I wasn’t thinking about any potential perks for myself. But I have to admit, it’s pretty cool that Ford lets us both use the space. Beats the hell out of working behind the trailer, patching my bike up with duct tape and optimism.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. I’ll shell out to get it tuned up properly when I have to, because that bike is my secondary source of income and I’m a shitty fucking mechanic. But only when I have to.

It’ll be a lot easier to keep up with the maintenance myself if I can do it indoors, with actual tools and paddock stands, under Silas’ watchful eye.

He may hate talking to people, but Silas speaks fluent machine. All of my robot boy jokes have clearly been on point. What he lacks in formal training he makes up for in instinct, and watching him run his gaze over an engine with absolute focus, calculating and sharp, is a thing of beauty. Everything about him that’s so often uncertain becomes calm and sure. His hands are steady, working over every piece of metal like it’s instinctual.

Watching him work is only a fraction of it. The past couple of weeks, he’s fucking blossomed. I’ve never used the word ‘blossomed’ in my life, but it’s the only way I can describe it. All this time away from his dad is showing how much of his old behavior wasn’t the real him. It’s like he was a shadow-version of himself.

The real Silas—my Silas,my brain prompts me, which is a weird way of looking at it but not technically untrue—is so much brighter than the old version. He smiles more: still small, shy smiles that are mostly for me, but they’re so genuine. He laughs and talks more easily with me and the open, unguarded way he gives affection to Maddi and Sky makes me want to beam at him and never stop.

He even looks different. Before, he had this way of holding himself, like he was trying to take up as little space as possible. Now, he’s more relaxed. And with his dad too busy drinking himself into a stupor in the wake of the AML suspension, he hasn’t had time to police Silas’ calorie consumption like a drill sergeant, and I can already see the difference.

Silas is thick-set. He’s built. He’s stacked. There’s a solidity to him that meant he never seemed lean, let alone too lean. He just had great muscle definition. The eight percent body fat kind that most people would kill for, with individually defined obliques that popped and that sexy V that girls are obsessed with. I’m not un-ripped myself, but I was pretty jealous until I realized he hadn’t eaten a carbohydrate since the eighth grade.

As soon as I got him to break out of his dad’s ridiculous ‘high-performance’ diet, he started to fill in, and he looks so fucking healthy. Yeah, his muscle is a little less defined, but it looks better that way. Dips and curves of muscle that look firm but warm, not the cold, hard definition of a statue. He’s bright and full of life. And even though it’s winter, his normally pale skin has picked up a hint of tan, because he’s going outside for things that don’t require him to wear full moto gear.

Right now, he’s bent over a bike, wearing grease-stained coveralls and a look of intense concentration on his face. The sleeves are rolled up, revealing forearms that are thick from all that riding, but are now also covered in a surprising amount of freckles from the extra sunshine and a dusting of hair that’s been sun-bleached. He’s covered in a thin sheen of sweat despite the cold. I watch his throat work as he swallows, still concentrating, and his skin seems to gleam in the light as his muscles flex and move.

He looks like some kind of Magic Mike mechanic pin-up shit. I’m not typically the kind of person who gets jealous over other guys’ looks, so I don’t know why I’m fixated on this. I just can’t get over what a difference a few weeks of real food and distance from his dad has made in him.

He’s fucking glowing. If I took a picture of him right now and he threw up a Tinder profile, his phone would blow the fuck up. Which makes my stomach twist with envy a little, which is also unlike me. I don’t know what’s going on in my head right now.

“Do I have oil on my face or something?” Silas’ voice breaks me out of my stupor. I realize I have no idea how long I’ve been staring at him, drifting on my own intrusive thoughts and not doing a damn thing to my bike.

“No, sorry. I mean, yeah. You do. But that’s not why I was staring.”

Way to sound composed, Waters.

Silas squints at me and paws at his cheek with one large, equally dirty hand, but he only makes it worse.

“Better?”

“Not even close.”

Forcing a smile, I try to shove the weird, flitting jealousy out of my brain. I hardly ever hook up with the chicks around here. He’s welcome to them. Hell, a little physical affection would be good for him. I’d be a shitty friend not to encourage him to get out there, if that’s what he wants?

“You look like you just walked out of a sexy mechanic calendar photoshoot. You must’ve been beating off pit bunnies with a stick the last few years, I swear.”

Silas blushes. It makes all the freckles on his face even darker, crimson spreading across his cheeks before he turns his attention back to his bike. It’s so fucking pure I want to wrap him up in bubble wrap and keep him away from the rest of the world forever.

Despite that, the tone of this conversation is taking a turn towards offensive locker room stereotypes. That’s not my jam. It feels gross as hell, but I can’t seem to stop my mouth from spewing shit even as my stomach continues to churn with uncertainty.

“How come I never saw you on Instagram or something with a girlfriend? Too busy to settle down?”

Silas clears his throat, still not looking at me. I’ve made him uncomfortable, and now I feel like a dick, because I am a dick. But I didn’t mean to be on this particular occasion.

Silence hangs between us for a while, punctuated by the scrape of metal on metal as he continues to unscrew the drain bolt on his radiator. I hate silence. It makes my brain feel like it’s going to eat itself. But I’ve already said enough stupid shit for one afternoon, so I do my best to exercise self-control.

Eventually, Silas speaks. He still doesn’t look at me.

“There’s an old military joke that goes ‘If the army wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one’. I kinda feel that way about my dad. If a girlfriend had been important for my career, he would have arranged for me to have one. But he never did, and he kept me too busy to find one on my own, so it didn’t seem like something worth fighting about.”

But what about what you wanted?

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