JACK & ADRIAN Chapter One

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 talking to the two customers who'd clearly been waiting on him.

Adrian doesn't hear a word of it.

Something in his chest just drops. One second he's a man idly browsing a shop he wandered into by accident. The next, every thought in his head has gone quiet, replaced by the plain fact of him — the breadth of him filling the doorway, dark hair silvering at the temples, a beard he clearly doesn't fuss over, forearms that look like they've earned every line in them. Nothing about him is trying. That's what does it.

Heat climbs up the back of Adrian's neck before Jack even looks his way. Before a single word passes between them. It's an old, half-forgotten kind of want, one Adrian thought he'd learned to keep at arm's length. His face goes warm, then warmer, completely without his permission.

Fifty-seven years old, he thinks, faintly appalled at himself, and still capable of blushing like a schoolboy over a man who hasn't even looked at me yet.

Adrian goes very still by the shelf of things he can't name, doing an extremely poor impression of a man who is casually browsing hardware.

Leave. Just leave. Walk out, keep walking, pretend this never happened, go back to the hotel and take a very long, very cold shower and never think about this street again.

He actually shifts his weight toward the door. Calculates the distance. Six, maybe seven steps to the exit, and Jack is still occupied — leaning over the counter, pointing something out to the two customers, laughing at something one of them says. Easy. Unbothered. Completely unaware that a Scandinavian flight attendant is currently having a minor crisis over a rag hanging out of his back pocket.

Go. Now. While you still can.

But his feet don't move. Instead he picks up some kind of hand-forged bottle opener from the shelf, turns it over like it's the most fascinating object he's encountered all week, and gives himself one more minute. Just to look. Just to breathe normally again before he does the sensible thing and disappears back into the sunlight.

The minute doesn't go as planned.

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

The voice is closer than expected — rougher than Adrian imagined, easy and unhurried. Adrian looks up too fast, bottle opener still in hand like evidence at a crime scene.

Jack has finished with the other two — they've wandered off toward a rack of leather belts — and he's leaning one forearm against the end of the counter, wiping grease off his knuckles with the rag, watching Adrian with the mildly amused patience of a man used to strangers wandering in and not quite knowing what to do with themselves.

"I — " Adrian's brain offers absolutely nothing useful. "Just looking. Sorry. The door was open and I—" He gestures vaguely behind him, as if the entire street is somehow responsible for his presence here.

Jack's mouth curves, just slightly. "Door's always open. That's kind of the point." He nods at the bottle opener still death-gripped in Adrian's hand. "That one's actually not bad, if you're into that sort of thing. Made it myself. Little heavy, but it'll outlive you."

Adrian finally sets the bottle opener down, a little too carefully, like it might go off. "Heavy is good," he manages. "Means it's built to last."

"Exactly." Jack tilts his head, studying him now with something a little more curious than customer-service politeness. "You're not from around here."

"That obvious?"

"Something about the way you said built to last like you were translating it in your head first." Jack's grin is easy, not unkind. "Where you from?"

"Denmark. Copenhagen." 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?"

"Cabin crew. Purser." Adrian feels the need to clarify, though he's not sure why it matters to a man in a stained apron whether he flies the plane or serves coffee at 38,000 feet. “Not much of a story. Sometimes, when I’m on a layover, I like to go for a walk and see where I end up. 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. "Come on, then. Watch where you step — floor's a mess."

He leads Adrian through the door he'd come out of, back into the workshop proper. It's louder here, warmer, smelling of hot metal and oil and coffee gone cold on a workbench somewhere. Two motorcycles sit half-disassembled on lifts, an old truck cab is propped up in the corner missing a door, and tools hang on the wall in an order that only makes sense to the man who put them there.

"Custom builds, mostly," Jack says, running a hand along the tank of the nearer bike without really thinking about it. "Bikes, some classic car work. The shop out front's my sister's idea — said I needed somewhere to put things that didn't have wheels or an engine. Turns out people like buying stuff a guy made with his hands instead of some factory in a warehouse."

"It shows," Adrian says, and means it. There's an honesty to the place he wasn't expecting. It reminds him, oddly, of his own job in reverse: Jack builds things that stay in one place, that people come back to. Adrian spends his life somewhere over the Atlantic, belonging to no single ground.

"You ride?" Jack asks, glancing over.

Something shifts in Adrian's face — not hesitation this time, but memory. "Not a motorcycle, no. But I had a Vespa once. Well — my father's, technically. A little P50, two-stroke, probably older than I was." He almost smiles at it. "I was thirteen, fourteen. We spent six weeks every summer in a village south of Naples, and I rode that thing from morning until dark. Every day. Every single day for six weeks."

"That's dedication."

"I loved it. Still do, the idea of it — those small coastal roads where you genuinely don't know where they lead, just going, no plan." Adrian shrugs, a little self-conscious now. "I've wanted a proper Vespa ever since. A big Piaggio, not a toy. Never got around to it."

"And a motorcycle?"

"Motorcycle, I think I'd want to be on the back of." Adrian says it lightly, almost daring Jack to make something of it. "Someone else driving. I'll hold on."

Something flickers across Jack's face — quick, unmistakable, gone almost as soon as it arrives. "Careful," he says, voice a shade lower than before. "I've got two bikes in this shop that run fine."

"Two bikes that run fine," Adrian repeats, deliberately unbothered, though his pulse says otherwise. "Noted."

"You say that like a warning."

"Maybe it is one." Adrian finally looks at him properly — actually meets his eyes instead of finding somewhere else to land — and for a second neither of them says anything at all.

Jack breaks it first, pushing off the workbench. "So — Naples, and now Denmark. How does that happen?"

"My parents divorced when I was ten. My mother's Danish, so we went with her — my sister and I." Adrian says it simply, worn smooth from repetition. "But every summer after that, until I was eighteen, nineteen — we went back. My sister and I, every year, to stay with my father. And my grandparents."

"Every summer."

"Every single one. Ten weeks, sometimes. My grandmother would already have a list of what was wrong with how thin I looked the moment we walked through the door." A small laugh. "My grandfather taught me to fish off a little rock past the harbor, badly, because he was worse at teaching than he was at fishing. And there was the Vespa, and the road up to the church nobody went to anymore, and figs falling off the tree in my grandmother's garden that nobody ever seemed to eat except me."

Jack has gone quiet in a different way now — not distracted, but listening, the rag finally still in his hands. "Sounds like it mattered. More than just a holiday."

"It was the only place that ever felt like it was mine without asking anything of me." Adrian hadn't meant to say that much. He glances down at the bike beside him, tracing a thumb along the edge of the seat. "Copenhagen was home. But Italy was — " He stops, searches for the word. "Weightless. Does that make sense?"

"More than you'd think." Jack's voice drops a register. "I had a place like that too. Different ocean. Same feeling, probably."

Neither of them moves for a moment. Somewhere behind them, the radio hums on, oblivious.

"You're good at this," Adrian says eventually, needing to say something.

"Good at what?"

"Making a stranger tell you more than he meant to."

Jack's mouth curves, slow. "You're good at telling it."

He nods toward a stool tucked near the workbench, half-covered in a folded tarp. "Sit, if you want. I've got about twenty more minutes before I owe those two out front an oil change, and I'd rather spend it not talking to myself for once."

Adrian hesitates — the sensible part of him doing the math on layover hours, on the fact that he came here to walk, not to sit in a stranger's workshop feeling something he hasn't felt in a long while.

He sits.

"So," Jack says, dragging a second stool over, close enough that their knees nearly touch, not quite. "Purser. Copenhagen. Tell me something that isn't in the file."

"The file?"

"The version you give people at parties. I want the other one."

Adrian studies him for a second — the grease still under his nails, the patience in the way he's waiting. "That's a dangerous thing to ask a stranger."

"I run a garage, not a confessional." Jack shrugs. "But I'm listening either way."

Before Adrian can answer, a voice cuts across the shop. "Jack! You said fifteen minutes twenty minutes ago!"

One of the two customers is leaning through the doorway, not annoyed exactly, more the tone of someone who's clearly said this sentence before.

Jack doesn't even turn around fully. "It's a process, Dennis. Can't rush the process."

"You're not doing anything, you're sitting on a stool."

"Strategic planning." Jack raises his voice just enough to be heard, deadpan. "Give me five."

Dennis mutters something that might be a laugh and disappears. Jack looks back at Adrian with the faint, unhurried apology of a man who isn't actually sorry at all.

"Sorry. Small shop, big mouths." He stands, stretching. "I should deal with that before Dennis starts telling my sister I'm slacking off."

"Of course." Adrian stands too, grateful for the excuse to breathe normally again. "I should probably go anyway. I don't actually know how far I've walked."

"Probably further than you think." Jack nods toward the door. "That road doesn't really tell you."

"No," Adrian agrees. "It doesn't."

They stand there a second too long — not awkward exactly, just unfinished.

"Go deal with Dennis," Adrian says finally, half amused, half grateful for the reprieve. "I'll get out of your hair."

Jack studies him a moment longer. "You will, huh."

He says it almost to himself, like he's testing the shape of the doubt in it.

Before Adrian can answer, a figure appears in the doorway to the street. Mid-fifties, sun-worn, a battered ballcap pushed back on his head.

"Jack. You still owe me that drill bit set." The man's eyes catch on Adrian for half a second — not unkind, just cataloguing — before sliding back to Jack. "Heading into town, figured I'd ask before you forget again."

"I haven't forgotten, Mike, I've been strategically delaying." Jack straightens. "Actually. You driving anywhere near the water? Hotels along there?"

Mike shrugs. "Passing right by them, yeah. Why?"

Jack looks at Adrian, a little sheepish. "He walked here. From one of the crew hotels on the coast road. Longer walk than he thought, probably a worse one going back with the sun where it's headed."

"I can walk," Adrian says, mostly on principle.

"You can," Jack agrees easily. "Doesn't mean you should." He nods at Mike. "Take him as far as his hotel. It's not out of your way."

Mike looks between the two of them a beat too long, something amused settling into the corner of his mouth. "Sure. C'mon then." He tips his head toward the door. "I don't bite. Can't speak for the truck's AC, though."

Adrian hesitates, glancing back at Jack — a strange reluctance in leaving, disproportionate to the twenty-odd minutes they've actually spent together.

"Go," Jack says, quieter now. "Before Dennis starts telling my sister I ran off a paying customer by making him walk home in the heat."

"I wasn't paying for anything."

"You bought the bottle opener."

Adrian blinks. "I didn't—"

"You're buying the bottle opener," Jack says, already reaching for it off the counter and pressing it into Adrian's hand before he can protest, closing his fingers around it a beat longer than necessary. "On the house. Call it a souvenir. Lifetime guarantee, remember. Outlives you, outlives me, probably outlives this whole street."

Their hands are still touching, and for a second neither of them seems particularly interested in resolving that.

"Thank you," Adrian says, quieter than he means to.

"Don't thank me. Just don't lose it." Jack finally lets go, stepping back, tucking his hands into his pockets. "Go on. Mike doesn't have all day, even if he pretends he does."

Adrian follows Mike out through the shop, past the two customers still browsing, out into the flat gold light of late afternoon. The truck is parked at an angle at the curb, dust on the wheel wells, a St. Christopher medallion swinging gently from the mirror. Adrian climbs in, the bottle opener still warm in his palm.

Mike pulls out into the road, glancing sideways. "So how'd you end up in Jack's shop? Not exactly on the tourist maps."

"I was walking. The door was open." Adrian turns the bottle opener over. "I didn't plan any of it."

"Mm." Mike lets that sit a moment, eyes on the road, though there's clearly more behind it. "He make everyone the tour, or just you?"

Adrian doesn't have a good answer for that, so he doesn't offer one, and Mike, mercifully, doesn't push.

They drive in something close to comfortable silence, windows cracked, the ocean flickering between buildings on the right. Adrian watches the coast road unspool the way it did on foot, except now it takes minutes instead of the better part of an hour, and he can't decide if that feels like relief or loss.

The hotel comes into view sooner than he's ready for.

"Here you go." Mike pulls up at the entrance, throws the truck into park. "Tell Jack he still owes me that drill set."

"I will." Adrian opens the door, then pauses, one foot already on the curb. "Thank you. For the ride."

Mike just nods, something knowing still sitting easy in his expression. "No trouble. Small town, favors go around." A beat. "He doesn't usually give the tour, you know. Or the bottle openers."

Adrian doesn't quite know what to do with that, so he just says thank you again, and gets out, and stands on the curb watching the truck pull away until it turns the corner and is gone.

He looks down at the bottle opener in his hand.

Lifetime guarantee, he thinks, and doesn't examine too closely why the thought makes something in his chest pull tight.