Free Toward the Sound of Chaos by Carmen Jenner Page B

out.
    “What
are you doing?” I ask.
    “Let
me drive.”
    I
frown. “It’s my car.”
    “Yes
it is.” He leans closer. “But you drive like a crazy person.”
    “I
do not.”
    “Yes,
you do.” The corner of his mouth tips up in a grin, and it’s so hard to
reconcile this playful and—if I’m not mistaken—flirty Jake with the tortured
man who’d crawled through my door last night. I am glad to see him doin’ better
though. “I’ve been hearin’ this clunk, clunk every time you start it up at the
beach. I’d like to take a closer look at that, but first, I wanna get a feel
for how she drives.”
    “Jake,
I don’t need you to fix my car.”
    He
leans closer to my ear and whispers, “Angel, just do as you’re told for once.”
    God,
but he is good.
    I
swallow hard. His gaze glued to my throat as it bobs and then travels up to my
lips. Jake moves closer still, the toes of his boots meeting my ballet flats,
his right side flush with mine from thigh to hip. I draw in a shallow breath
and tilt my chin up as he leans in.
    “Eww,
gross. Are you two gonna kiss?”
    And
then my eight-year-old ruins it all.
    I
exhale too loudly and drop the keys in Jake’s palm, his face gone hard and
serious as he shifts back, giving me room to move away. I walk around to the
passenger side of the car and climb in as Jake folds his large frame into the
driver’s side and adjusts the seat.
    He
slides the key into the ignition and the engine chokes to life. Jake cants his
head, listening intently. He hits the gas pedal a few times and I hear it, the clunk,
clunk he’d mentioned a moment ago.
    “I
don’t know how I didn’t notice that before,” I say, amazed that he’s managed to
hear it in the past. He gives me a tight smile. His previous playfulness is
gone, and I’m beginning to wonder what I did wrong.
    “Can
you bring this baby by my house later today? I want to take a look under the
hood.” He peels out of the drive. He’s a very cautious driver, sticking to the
speed limit, stopping when the light is amber and triple checking his side
mirrors as he navigates the early morning traffic at the intersection.
    “I
can’t. I have clients all day.”
    “Then
I’ll come to you,” he says, as if that settles it.
    “Are
you a mechanic?”
    “I
helped Frankenstein our trucks in Afghanistan, and my granddaddy taught me how
to restore old vehicles.” He never takes his eyes from the road as he tells me
this. “We built a couple cars from the ground up. I know enough.”
    “Frankenstein?”
I ask.
    “Yeah,
we were pretty hard up for parts, so we’d pull them from Humvees that’d broken
down and stitch ’em back together, so to speak.” His eyes glint with excitement
as he talks, and I have to wonder if he hadn’t lived through the hell he did,
whether he’d still be serving time in the Corps. Some men just live for war,
even long after they’ve left it. I know that from Mr. Williams. “We had a
couple of broke-down trucks get stranded on a goat track up in the mountains
that our Sergeant Major had ordered us to go get. It’d been raining for days; the
ground was just mud and slush, and that was the scariest firefight I ever found
myself in. We couldn’t see a damn thing.”
    I
shiver and goose pimples break out all over my body. As Jake tells us this I
watch Spencer’s eyes grow wider and wider, and I can see he wants to hound him
with questions, but he’s likely cataloguing the information away in his mind so
he can order his thoughts properly and not get tongue-tied. I’ve seen him do
this a number of times when Mr. Williams has talked about his time in the
Marines.
    “It
sounds terrifying.”
    “At
the time it was.” He grins at me like a madman. “But nothin’ ever made me feel
more alive than bein’ shot at.”
    “I’ll
have to take your word for it,” I say.
    Jake’s
face falls, and he turns his attention back to the road as he turns the corner
onto Sea Cliff Drive.
    There
I go putting