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“Nervous energy. Different thing entirely.” He nods at the card still in my hand. “So am I gonna get a proper look at that, or are you just gonna wave it at me all day?”
I glance down at it myself first, at the photo they snapped only minutes earlier, my dark curls pulled back but already escaping around my face the way they always do, my brown skin still faintly sun-warmed from waiting outside beforehand. I look nothing like the photo on my old New York state ID, hair flat-ironed within an inch of its life, dressed in some stuffy blazer my mother picked out for the occasion like a photo ID appointment was a job interview. This one just looks like me, caught mid-laugh at something the clerk said—a real smile instead of a performed one.
I wait while Knox studies it.
“Not bad, Astra. Not bad at all.” He hands it back, something almost proud in his voice. “You should be smiling like that in every photo from now on.”
“That’s high praise coming from you.”
“Don’t get used to it.” He nods toward the truck. “Come on, we’ve got celebrating to do.”
“We?” I slide the license into my wallet, biting back a grin. “I’m the one who passed. You just sat in the waiting room.”
“I sat in the waiting room supportively.”
“Sure you did.” I brush past him toward the driver’s door, bumping his shoulder on the way. “Get out of my way. I have a license now. I outrank you.”
“You don’t outrank anybody.” He laughs, loud and real, and for a second I forget he’s supposed to be the composed one out of the two of us. “But, yeah, come here.”
He hugs me right there in the parking lot, quick and a little awkward, the kind of hug that clearly doesn’t come naturally to him, but that he gives anyway because the occasion seems to call for it.
“I knew you’d get it, kid,” he says, pulling back. “Told you weeks ago you were better at this than you thought.”
“You told me I checked my mirrors four seconds too late.”
“That was weeks ago,” he says, tossing me the keys. “Different lesson.”
We spend the drive back talking, actually talking, in a way we haven’t quite gotten to before. He tells me about the first bike he ever rebuilt from scratch, seventeen years old and half convinced he’d never get the timing right. How his father let him ruin two engines before he finally got the third one to turn over.
I tell him about the time I tried to bake a wedding cake replica for my Barbies when I was nine. It was three tiers, actual buttercream, and completely unsupervised. The whole thing collapsed the second I tried to move it. There was frosting and cake everywhere. Our chef found me sitting in the wreckage of it, looking personally betrayed by gravity. He laughs hard enough at that one that he has to wipe his eyes at a red light.
There’s something about hearing him laugh like that, unguarded, easy, that makes the whole conversation feel like something worth holding onto.
By the time we pull up outside the cottage, my cheeks hurt from laughing in a way they haven’t in longer than I can remember.
Then I see it.
The pink scooter, parked right there beside the porch steps, exactly where it would sit if it had always belonged there.
“How—”
“Pops,” Knox says. “He figured you’d pass today, and he wanted it here waiting when you got back.”
“He didn’t know for sure.”
“He did, actually. The man’s never been wrong about a single thing in his life, according to him." Knox shrugs. “Annoying, but so far, accurate.”
I don’t know what to do with the sudden tightness in my throat, so I just stare at the scooter longer than I need to. There’s something about the gesture landing harder than it probably should for two men I met barely two months ago.
“Come in,” I say. “I made something. You have to help me eat it before I do something embarrassing like cry over a bike.”
“Scooter.” He corrects me.
“Don’t start,” I say with a smile.
Knox follows me inside, and I busy myself in the kitchen pulling the lemon cake I made last night out from under its cover, cutting two slices.
He takes one bite and goes still, quiet enough that I brace myself for the criticism I imagine is coming.
