Chapter 1: Bad Girl’s Dictionary
Three months ago…
The night had been a sleepless one. Genevieve could feel the wind along her skin from her open window and somehow the zephyr gust was a portent. One that she couldn’t ignore. Absentmindedly, she caressed her clit with the small vibrating bullet that was her best friend these days. She had a lover, but he was just that and even the raunchy sex with Gio couldn’t exorcise the true needs her heart had. If nothing else all creatures wanted to fulfill the biological need for love.
With that thought her mind drifted to the one place she tried to avoid. Dante, the new kid. For some reason she couldn’t get him out of her head. He seemed to make the disquiet her soul felt even worse. Like he was the man that could give her what she had never known to be lacking before.
But even worse she knew that she couldn’t trust him. She wouldn’t. Something about him screamed Fed to her, even with his full cooperation in their illicit activities and there was no way that she could ignore the burn in her gut yelling “danger!” when her mind strolled in his direction.
But even with the alarm bells that sang with regard to the man that she barely knew, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about him anyway. From wanting him anyway. She used the tiny bullet to take her mind and body to a place that she sorely needed to go before she closed her eyes and allowed sleep to overcome her.
The next morning Genevieve spent entirely under the hood of her Thunderbird. Business was slow after the transition as most of the locals refused to trust her with their cars after the former owner retired. It didn’t help matters that she was a black female in a male profession, or that she wasn’t considered a local as she was raised in the county adjacent to Pender county. She was certain that she was going to need another cup of coffee just to make it through lunch due to sheer boredom.
The only car that she had to work on was the classic T-bird as she had finished the rehaul of her El Camino just a few weeks before.
The day had been a productive one and she had just finished building the engine. All that was left was to mount the mass of parts and metal within its custom-made home in the mouth of the car. The T-bird was the culmination of five years’ work. She had to hunt down spare engine parts and framework for the body over most of that time. All she needed at this point was a paint job and fifteen more bolts to complete this phase in the renovation.
But as her shop been slow for the last while, she found that she had more time on her hands than work. Now she had much less to do than she wanted to think about, hence her finished car. Or rather, almost finished car. The classic Thunderbird was her baby, but just months ago she couldn’t have imagined the day she would finally replace the speakers, affix the hood ornament, or fix the tiny scuff along the spoiler.
When the T-bird was finished she would be one hundred percent aimless. Gen sighed and tried to get her mind back in the here and now, before she did something stupid and the metal albatross crushed her. As she was in the process of tightening the assembly, she dimly heard the theme to a popular spy movie series ring out in the dim of her garage. The smartphone was in her pocket, but she didn’t need to answer it or check the message to know what she was supposed to do. This ringtone was special and there was only one reason that music would play.
It was time for a job. The job that paid the bills, like the balloon payments left on her mortgage, the lights, or paid for her to make a trip to purchase a front end for her T-Bird.
All of those things required money that she wasn’t making as a female auto mechanic in East Bum-Fuck, North Carolina. But she kept at it, the same way a tenacious bulldog held onto prey, for the simple reason that it fulfilled some part of her that liked fixing broken things. If only her abilities were sufficient to help herself.
But wasn’t that how the adage went? Doctor, heal thy self?
Dammit, she thought. And I was almost finished with the engine mountings. But at least I’ll have something to do tomorrow.
Genevieve stopped the monotonous cranking of her wrench then re-checked the chains that held the heavy engine precariously above her before she slid from beneath the car on her wheel-bottomed backboard. She had to get ready. And above all else Genevieve needed to have a shower and get dressed. There was no way that if her luck ran out today she wanted to go to jail with a funky ass to match her attitude. But she had a job to do, and after that she would make plans for the rest of the night.
That is, if night fell and she was still able to enjoy the darkest hours as a free woman.
The shower was a quick one, but she was able to scrub most of the grime from beneath her nails with the little time she had. The blue stuff in a bucket worked wonders on automotive filth, but even with the miraculous goo it would take time to truly work all of the grit away from her skin.