Chapter One, Part I

Los Angeles. A stretch of hours between two flights.

The crew hotel sits close enough to the water that you can hear it if you leave the window cracked. Adrian has slept the mandatory hours, had the coffee, checked the roster twice out of habit. Now there’s that strange luxury: a few hours with nothing on the schedule. No briefing, no service, no responsibility for anyone but himself.

He decides to walk. No destination, no map — just the sun, the salt in the air, and legs that finally get to move on their own terms after hours folded into a metal tube at 38,000 feet.

The coastal road stretches on longer than he expects. Palm trees, pickup trucks nose-in at the curb, quiet residential blocks tucked away from the tourist strip. He passes a taco stand with a line out the door, a laundromat with fogged-up windows, a stretch of chain-link fence overgrown with bougainvillea.

Somewhere past the laundromat, music drifts out through the open doors of a garage. Something warm and slightly worn around the edges, somewhere between country and jazz.

Adrian catches a few bars as he passes. It’s good. Better than he would have expected from a place filled with tools, engines and bare concrete. His steps slow for a moment, but he keeps going. He’s found a comfortable rhythm, and a song playing from someone’s radio isn’t quite enough to break it.

Further down, the road thins out. There’s less to look at now, only sun-bleached fences and empty driveways. Ten minutes later, Adrian realises he has run out of road worth walking. Nothing ahead but more of the same, and the heat is sitting heavier on his shoulders than it did an hour ago.

He turns around.

By then, the music has already slipped from his mind. He is thinking about water, or whether the hotel bar can manage a decent lime and soda.

Then he hears it again.

A different song this time, but the same warm, easy sound. Adrian slows down. Maybe it’s an album. Or a playlist put together by someone who actually knows what they’re doing. Either way, whoever chose it has good taste.

As he gets closer, he hears something underneath the music. Tools against metal, not quite following the beat but somehow becoming part of it. The combination shouldn’t work, but it does.

Adrian looks toward the open garage properly this time. The sign above it has faded past reading, and from where he stands, he still can’t tell whether the place repairs cars, motorcycles or something else entirely.

His curiosity gets the better of him.

Instead of walking past again, he changes direction and heads toward the open doors.

He has no idea what the place sells, builds, or fixes. Doesn’t matter. It’s the unmarked door, the thing nobody put on the itinerary — the kind of places he’s always been drawn to.

Attached to the workshop is a small shopfront, the kind of place that exists more because someone needed somewhere to put the finished pieces than because anyone planned it as retail. Adrian drifts toward it rather than the workshop itself.

Inside, it’s cooler, dimmer. Shelves of things he doesn’t have names for — tools, parts, small handmade objects. Sawdust and machine oil in the air, and underneath it something faintly like cedar. Two other customers are already browsing, murmuring near a display of leather goods. Adrian wanders further in, running a thumb along the edge of a workbench turned counter, half-looking at things, half just enjoying being somewhere he has no reason to be.

A few minutes pass like that — quiet, unremarkable, the kind of pause that only exists on a layover.

Then a door at the back swings open, and a man steps through, wiping his hands on a rag tucked into his back pocket, already saying something to the two customers who have clearly been waiting for him.

Adrian looks up.

For a second, he genuinely forgets what he is doing. His hand stops halfway toward the shelf, whatever he’d been looking at disappearing completely from his mind.

The man is big. Not absurdly so, not gym-polished, just solid in a way that seems to belong to him. Broad shoulders under a faded T-shirt. Dark hair going silver at the temples. A beard that looks as though it gets trimmed when someone reminds him. Strong forearms. Grease on one hand. The rag hanging from his back pocket.

Something drops unexpectedly low in Adrian’s stomach.

The reaction is so immediate, so embarrassingly physical, that it takes him a moment to understand what is happening. Then heat begins climbing the back of his neck and into his face.

Oh, for God’s sake.

He looks away, suddenly far too interested in the shelf in front of him. A few seconds later his eyes drift back to the man without permission, and the instant he catches himself doing it, he looks away again.

That is when it gets worse.

Suddenly Adrian is aware of everything about himself. Where his hands are. How he’s standing. Whether his shirt is sitting properly. Whether his glasses have slipped down his nose. He even shifts his weight before realising he has no idea why, as though there might be a particular way a normal, attractive adult is supposed to stand when confronted with a man like that.

He is fifty-seven years old.

He has crossed oceans for a living. He has dealt with medical emergencies at thirty thousand feet, furious passengers, delayed crews, missed connections, people crying, people shouting. He can walk into a cabin full of strangers and take control of it without thinking.

And apparently one good-looking man with a dirty rag in his back pocket is enough to make him wonder what to do with his hands.

The man laughs at something one of the customers says.

Adrian looks again.

That does not help.

There is nothing polished about him. Nothing arranged for effect. He isn’t posing or trying to be attractive. He’s simply standing there, one hand on the counter, listening to someone talk, completely unaware of what his presence is doing to the stranger pretending to browse fifteen feet away.

The realization comes with such blunt clarity that his breath catches.

Not merely attractive. Not someone he would notice across a bar.

Adrian wants him.

Which is absurd.

And inconvenient.

And, judging by the heat still sitting in his face, apparently not something his body intends to let him hide particularly well.

For one ridiculous moment he considers leaving. The door is only six or seven steps away. He could walk back into the sunlight, return to the hotel and pretend none of this ever happened.

He even turns slightly toward it.

Then another thought arrives.

What if the man looks over just as he’s leaving?

Adrian stops.

And, almost immediately:

What if he doesn’t?

Christ.

Apparently fifty-seven years have brought him all the way back to sixteen.

Instead of leaving, he picks up the first object within reach, some kind of heavy, hand-forged bottle opener, and turns it over in his hand with an attention it absolutely does not deserve.

He gives himself another minute. Enough time to breathe normally, recover whatever remains of his dignity, and then leave.

The minute doesn’t go as planned.

“You need a hand with anything, or you just enjoying the AC?”

The voice is closer than Adrian expected — rougher than he’d imagined, easy and unhurried.

He turns around too quickly.

The man is right there.

Not right there, obviously. A perfectly normal conversational distance away.

It feels much too close.

Up close is worse.

Adrian’s mind empties so completely that for one horrible second he can think of nothing except the man’s eyes.

The man waits.

Adrian continues holding the bottle opener.

“I —”

Nothing.

“Just looking. Sorry. I was just...”

He glances at the bottle opener as though it might provide the rest of the sentence.

It does not.

“Looking.”

A pause.

“Obviously.”

Why did you say obviously?

The man’s mouth twitches.

“Sorry. I mean, the door was open, and I saw...”

Adrian gestures vaguely toward the street, then immediately realises he has no idea what exactly he’s gesturing at.

“...this place.”

Brilliant.

The man is definitely smiling now. Not laughing at him, which somehow would almost be easier.

“Door’s always open,” he says. “That’s kind of the point.”

“Right.”

Adrian nods.

“Of course.”

The man glances down.

Adrian follows his eyes and realises he is still clutching the bottle opener.

He puts it down a little too quickly. It lands against the shelf with a small metallic knock.

The man looks at it, then back at him.

“That one’s actually not bad.”

Adrian swallows.

“No?”

“Made it myself. Little heavy, but it’ll outlive you.”

Adrian picks it up again before considering why.

“Heavy is good.”

The words are out before he can inspect them.

The man’s eyes come back to his.

For one awful second Adrian hears the sentence again.

Heavy is good.

His face warms another degree.

The man, mercifully, only says, “Means it’s built to last.”

“Yes.”

Adrian clears his throat.

“Exactly.”

The man studies him for another moment, and there is something different in his expression now. Not quite amusement anymore. Curiosity, perhaps.

“You’re not from around here.”

“That obvious?”

Finally. Something resembling a normal sentence.

The man smiles.

“Something about the way you said built to last like you were translating it in your head first.”

“Where you from?”

“Scandinavia.” Adrian gestures vaguely at himself, as if that explains the accent, the slightly too-neat way he’s standing in a workshop that clearly doesn’t require neatness.

“I fly. Crew. We’re on a layover.”

“A pilot?”

“No. Cabin crew.”

Adrian clears his throat again, grateful to hear something closer to his normal voice.

“When I’m on a layover, I sometimes like to go for a walk and see where I end up.”

He glances around the workshop.

“This time, I ended up here.”

“I’m Jack, by the way.” He wipes his hand on the rag one more time and holds it out.

Adrian shakes it.

“Adriano.”

Jack raises an eyebrow.

“Adriano?”

“Only my family calls me that.”

“Adrian, then.”

“For now.”

“Lucky for you the door was open.” Jack straightens up off the counter, tosses the rag back over his shoulder.

“Most guys who wander in off that road are lost, looking for the beach, or trying to sell me something. You’re the first one who just stood there admiring a bottle opener like it insulted his family.”

Adrian laughs before he can stop himself.

“I wasn’t admiring it. I was hiding behind it.”

The words are out before he’s fully registered saying them. He wants to reel them back in. But Jack just looks at him a beat longer, something shifting behind his eyes — amusement, yes, but something quieter underneath it too.

“Hiding from what?”

Adrian opens his mouth. Closes it again. The honest answer is currently standing three feet away from him with grease on his knuckles and forearms Adrian has no business noticing this much.

“Nothing,” Adrian says instead.

“Bad habit. Ignore me.”

“Mm.” Jack doesn’t look convinced, but he lets it go, nodding toward the workshop instead.

“You want the actual tour, or are you gonna keep pretending you’re just here for hardware?”

Adrian should say no. Should make some polite excuse about needing to get back, about crew rest and early departures and all the boring, true things that would get him out the door with his dignity mostly intact.

“The tour,” he hears himself say instead.

Jack’s grin widens, like he’d expected that answer all along.