“I hope you didn’t cancel whatever plans you had for the evening to teach me something so rudimentary.”
“If it’s so rudimentary, why can’t you do it?”
Cool metal dug into her palm as her grip tightened on the keys and she brushed past Dayton. She slammed the door behind her as she ducked into the car and he shot her a questioning look. A look he had no right to dish out, not when he was putting her in this impossible situation.
She shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d figured out her secret. He was more intuitive than most but then intuition wasn’t required when her range of transportation included a bicycle and ride-hailing.
Kenna siphoned a deep, soothing breath. The keys twinkled in her hand. Winking in the waning sunlight. Wishing her luck. She’d watched him remove them from the metal notch by the wheel moments before but with Dayton beside her in the confined space she wasn’t confident she could recreate what he had done.
The parenthetical lines framing his mouth deepened as a frown set in. “You’ve been behind a wheel, haven’t you?”
She stared at it, that circular fixture.
“No. Never.”
“Kenna, I’ve seen your driver’s license.”
“It’s fake. I expected an ounce of common sense from someone who made it through med school and residency.”
“I don’t understand. Your parents—”
Her head snapped in his direction. “They didn’t want us to drive, alright? So they didn’t teach us.”
“Why?”
His voice was hollow yet brimming with curiosity. Kenna understood how he thirsted for this kind of conversation and how thrilling a moment like this must have been for him. Closer and closer to unraveling the enigma of her existence. And she decided she’d spare him a few crumbs if for no other reason than he still held some kind of sway over her.
Some level of charm she could not ignore.
“They didn’t want to make it easy for us to leave.”
He slipped into a familiar expression.
It was a face he wore well. The clinical mask he relied upon at the practice. And now it had broken free and found use beyond those four walls. It had penetrated their personal lives, all that existed outside of work and who they were to each other five days a week. Dayton attempted a smile but it was forced and disingenuous and there was no easy transition from the heaviness of what had been said. But he would make it easy for her. He wouldn’t say anything further. Not yet.
“The key with the black cap?” He gestured to the set of keys cradled in her half-open hand. “Put it in the ignition.” He pointed to the spot to ensure her understanding and there it was again. The rekindling of affection that had been snuffed out months ago. “And twist it all the way to the right.”
Her pulse stuttered in her throat as she held the singular key. Hesitance attacked her on a physiological level until it crescendoed and, all at once, it was too much.
Being trapped in that cabin with Dayton, no one else around for who knew how many miles.
The stirring of buried feelings.
The fact that he was going out of his way to teach her something when showing her the ropes had stopped being his responsibility last semester.
Trembling laced her hand as she slid the key into the ignition but she swallowed the fear, the uncertainty. She twisted it and the decades-old engine sputtered to life. The action was so simplistic and yet Kenna couldn’t contain the manic grin that bloomed across her face.
She was a child who’d just taken her first steps and she needed praise, acknowledgment for having figured out something so essential to life.
An emotion she could not pin down swirled in the blackness of his eyes. Sadness? Perhaps, as a result of her overzealous glee, he had realized that she was telling the truth.
“Don’t get too excited, kid. We’re just getting started.”
The clinical mask was gone. The anguish.
All of it vanished. He was unmistakably Dayton. Honey flashed against his dark eyes and his subtle smile crept to life. It was as easygoing as he got and she liked how familiar it was, however unwise it may have been for her to feel that way.
“Alright. Foot on the brake. That’s the left pedal.” Kenna lined up both of her feet with the pedals but the arrangement was far from comfortable and she was sure she had done something wrong. “And you only want to use your right foot, switching between the pedals whenever necessary.”