Chapter Two

Scandinavia, then Los Angeles again.

Chapter Two

The evening before his next stretch of duty starts the way most of his evenings at home do — something Italian simmering on the stove, a playlist he’s had for years, wine breathing on the counter. Adrian takes his wine seriously, has for as long as he can remember, ever since his grandfather let him taste — properly taste, not just sip — his first glass of something dark and Southern at far too young an age. It’s not really a hobby. It’s closer to a second language, one he speaks fluently and enjoys teaching to anyone patient enough to listen.

Tonight it’s a simple ragù, hours in the making, the kind his grandmother would have called merely adequate and he considers a genuine achievement. Three of his closest friends are coming over — the kind who don’t need an occasion, just an evening and a decent bottle. He’s set the table properly, cloth napkins and all, because he can’t help himself, and because tomorrow he’ll be back in a uniform for the better part of a week, and tonight is the last thing that’s entirely his own before that starts.

By eight, the candles are lit, the ragù is out, and the first bottle — a bright, unpretentious Sangiovese he’d talked his friends into — is already half gone. The conversation has wandered somewhere pleasantly ridiculous involving one friend’s disastrous attempt at online dating.

“Open the other one,” someone says, nodding at the second bottle on the counter — a Barolo he’s been saving for months, good enough that it deserves a proper introduction instead of being poured as an afterthought halfway through dessert. He’d chosen it weeks ago, specifically for tonight, the way he chooses everything to do with wine — carefully, a little reverently, more thought than the occasion technically needs.

Adrian reaches for the opener without thinking, the way you reach for anything you use every day. Except his hand finds a different one — the small, hand-forged one, sitting in the drawer where it’s landed weeks ago, next to the corkscrew that’s done the job for a decade without complaint. He picks up the new one instead. He isn’t sure why. Maybe because it’s a good bottle and it seems fitting. Maybe some small, unexamined part of him has been waiting for an excuse.

He sets the foil aside, twists the opener in, and pulls.

Nothing happens the way it should. There’s a soft, wrong little give under his hand, a click that has no business being there, and when he looks down the lever has come loose from the body entirely, hanging by nothing.

“Everything okay?” one of his friends asks, watching him frown at it.

“It’s — “ Adrian turns it over, mildly baffled. “It’s broken. It just broke.”

“That old thing?”

“No, it’s — “ He almost explains, then doesn’t, because explaining would mean admitting how new it actually is, and where it came from, and what it was doing in his kitchen drawer for weeks without ever being used. “New one. Barely used it twice.”

“Cheap,” his friend says with a shrug, already reaching for the old reliable corkscrew instead. “That’s what you get for buying from some tourist shop.”

Adrian doesn’t correct him. He sets the broken opener down on the counter and watches, a little more attention on it than the moment strictly needs, while his friend opens the Barolo properly with the boring, dependable one that’s never once let him down. He pours, swirls, breathes it in with the same automatic reverence he brings to every glass — and for a moment the wine has all his attention, the way it always does, until it doesn’t, and his eyes drift back to the small broken thing on the counter.

The dinner goes on the way dinners like this always do — too much food, too much wine, laughter that gets a little louder as the night goes, someone putting on music neither of them can quite agree on. Adrian is present for all of it, laughing in the right places, topping up glasses, thoroughly enjoying himself. But somewhere underneath the evening, in a part of his mind he doesn’t examine too closely, the broken opener sits on the counter like a small, stubborn splinter.

Not even one good bottle, he thinks, later, washing glasses after everyone’s gone, the apartment quiet again and smelling of candle smoke and simmered tomato. He picks it up one more time, turns it over in his hand under the kitchen light. Lifetime guarantee.

He almost laughs at himself.

He packs for LAX the next morning the way he always does — efficient, practised, nothing forgotten because nothing ever is after this many years. Somewhere between folding his uniform shirts and checking his roster one last time, the broken opener goes into his bag too, tucked into the outside pocket without much thought, the way you pack anything you’ve already half-decided you’re going to need.

The flight is long, the kind of long that used to bother him more than it does now. He lands in LA mid-afternoon local time, and by the time he’s through customs and at the hotel, the sun is still high enough that his body has no idea what time it actually is. Three days, this rotation — the longest layover he’s had in months — and the only sensible thing to do, for Adrian, is stay awake as long as possible in local time, force the body clock to catch up, or pay for it at three in the morning wide awake and staring at a hotel ceiling.

He showers, changes, and stands in his room for a moment weighing his options. A drink at the hotel bar. A walk on the beach, if he can be bothered with sand in his shoes. Or —

He looks at his bag. At the outside pocket.

Well, he thinks, with the deliberate innocence of a man who’s already made up his mind and is just waiting for a reasonable excuse to catch up. I do need it fixed. And it would be rude not to mention it broke.

Same excuse as before, worn a little smoother now, easier to say without wincing at himself.

He’s out the door within the hour, the broken opener in his jacket pocket, walking the same coast road in daylight this time instead of gold evening light, retracing a route his feet seem to remember better than his conscious mind does. The taco stand is busy. The laundromat windows are steamed up again.

As he gets closer, close enough now to hear the faint edge of music again, something happens in his stomach he isn’t fully prepared for — a small, fluttering drop, unmistakably nervous, the kind of feeling he associates with being nineteen and not fifty-seven. He almost laughs at himself for it.

Butterflies, he thinks, mildly appalled. You’re a grown man. You’ve flown into hurricanes. This is a workshop.

The feeling doesn’t care about the argument. It stays exactly where it is, low in his stomach, all the way up to the open garage door.

Jack is outside this time, leaning against the doorframe with a coffee in hand, looking out at the street like a man taking five minutes for himself before the evening rush. He spots Adrian while he’s still some distance off, and whatever he’d been about to do with the rest of his coffee break is clearly forgotten. He straightens up off the frame, and for just a second — before the easy grin settles back into place — there’s something unguarded on his face, something that looks a lot like he hadn’t quite let himself hope for this and is now trying not to show how much he had.

“Well, well.” Jack’s mouth curves, slow and clearly pleased, not even bothering to hide it this time. “Look who came back.”

Adrian reaches into his pocket and holds up the broken opener, wordlessly, by way of answer.

Jack looks at it, then at him, then back at the opener, something working behind his eyes before it lands. “You’re joking.”

“I’m really not.” Adrian can’t quite keep the smile out of his voice. “One bottle of Barolo. That’s all it survived.”

“One bottle.” Jack pushes off the doorframe, closing the distance between them to actually take it from Adrian’s hand, turning it over, inspecting the break with the focused disappointment of a craftsman confronted with his own failure. “Christ. I’d like to say that’s never happened before, but I’d be lying, and you’d know it.”

“I wasn’t going to let it slide.” Adrian tips his head slightly, the corner of his mouth lifting. “I don’t have unlimited years left to be patient with broken promises.”

Jack looks up at that, something flickering across his face — amused, and something else underneath it, softer. “Fair point.” He turns the opener over once more, then pockets it himself. “Come on in. Least I can do is fix it properly this time. And you look like a man who could use somewhere to sit that isn’t a hotel bar.”

Inside, the workshop is quieter than Adrian remembers it — no Dennis, no second customer, just the two motorcycles up on their lifts and the radio playing low, something slow this time. Jack sets the broken opener down on the workbench, next to a small tray of tools that look too delicate for the rest of the room.

“Sit,” Jack says, nodding at the same stool as before. “This won’t take long, but I’d rather do it right than fast.”

Adrian sits, watching Jack pull a small pair of pliers from a drawer, along with something that looks almost like a jeweler’s tool — oddly precise for hands that spend most of the day on things far heavier.

“You do a lot of this? Fixing things you already sold?”

“More than I’d like to admit.” Jack doesn’t look up, focused now, turning the opener over under the light. “Comes with making things by hand instead of buying a mold. Every one’s a little different. Some hold up better than others.” A pause, a faint smile. “This one clearly had a design flaw.”

“Or it was tested very thoroughly by an excellent bottle of wine.”

That gets a real laugh out of him. “Sure. Let’s go with that.” He glances up, just briefly, something warm passing between them before he looks back down. “Three days, you said. That’s a long one for you.”

“Longest I’ve had in months.” Adrian watches his hands move — steady, unhurried, the same quality of attention he’d noticed on the bikes the first time. “Usually it’s one night, sometimes two. Enough time to sleep and turn around. This is—“ He searches for the word. “Luxurious, by comparison.”

“There.” Jack holds the opener up to the light, the lever fitted back into place, solid now. He tests it once, twice, the small click of the mechanism working exactly as it should. “Try to keep this one away from anything over thirteen percent alcohol. Might survive longer.”

“No promises.” Adrian takes it back when Jack offers it, their fingers brushing again, neither of them rushing to end it. “I have a lot of good bottles at home.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Jack leans back against the bench, arms crossing loosely.

Adrian means to say something back. Something easy, something quick. But his brain has picked this exact moment to notice how much of Jack’s legs those shorts leave visible, and the sentence he was building just evaporates.

“Sorry — what?” he says, realizing too late that Jack had actually asked him something.

Jack’s mouth twitches. “I said, that’s a lot of downtime for you. Three days.”

“Right. Yes.” Adrian clears his throat, mildly annoyed at himself. This isn’t a version of himself he recognizes — a grown man losing his train of thought because he can suddenly see most of Jack’s legs. He blames the flight. Eleven hours, a time change, and apparently what’s left of his composure. “I don’t usually know what to do with myself when I have this much time somewhere.”

“No plans, then.”

“No.” Adrian knows, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he should probably be more careful right now. Under normal circumstances, wide-awake circumstances, this is exactly the moment he’d make some polite excuse and head back to the hotel. He’s a careful man. He doesn’t do this. “Not really, no,” he hears himself say instead.

Jack nods slowly, like he’s weighing whether to say the next part. When he does, there’s less certainty in it than usual — a small crack in the easy confidence. “I usually grab something to eat around this time. Nothing fancy. If you wanted to — “ He stops, reconsiders, then finishes it anyway, more plainly this time. “If you’re not too tired. We could get dinner.”

He says it carefully, almost like he isn’t sure how it’ll land. Adrian just looks at him for a second, faintly disbelieving that this is actually happening — that this man, built like something Adrian would never have admitted to imagining, is standing here looking almost nervous about asking him to dinner.

Say no, some quiet, sensible part of him offers. You don’t know him. This is a lot, this soon, and you know better.

The thought doesn’t stand much of a chance. Not tonight, not with his body clock somewhere over the Atlantic and his usual good judgment apparently checked in at the hotel with his suitcase.

“I’d like that,” Adrian says, before the sensible part of him can find its footing again.