Overtime — The Project Car

A Mechanic’s Good Girl Bonus Chapter
by Isla Wilde

A scene too hot for Amazon. Set six months after the proposal.

She wasn’t supposed to find it.

Mason had been careful. For three months he’d worked on the car after hours, on the nights Lila had clinic shifts that ran late, on the Saturday mornings when she slept in and he told her he was doing inventory. He’d kept bay three tarped. He’d sworn Hector and Diego to secrecy under penalty of losing their lunch break permanently.

But Lila was a social worker with a forensic eye for detail and a boyfriend who’d been acting, in her words, “suspiciously cheerful.” She’d figured out something was happening in bay three two weeks ago. She just hadn’t said anything because she liked watching him try to be sneaky. Mason Cole attempting subtlety was like a pit bull attempting stealth — technically possible but deeply unconvincing.

Tonight, though. Tonight she’d come to the shop at nine PM because she’d left her laptop charger in the office, and the bay door was cracked open, and the amber work light was on, and she could hear him talking to the car.

She stood in the gap and listened.

“—almost done with the dash. You’re going to look so good, I swear. She’s going to lose her mind.”

He was under the dashboard, legs sticking out, his voice muffled by the interior. The tarp was pulled back. The car was —

Midnight blue. A ’67 Mustang. Restored from nothing, rebuilt from the frame, painted in a color that shifted to purple in the amber light like a bruise turning beautiful. Chrome gleaming. Leather interior, the scent of it mixing with motor oil and cedar soap. The most gorgeous machine she’d ever seen, and he was talking to it about her.

She pressed her hand over her mouth. Not to muffle a sound — there was no sound. Just the full, silent weight of being loved by a man who expressed it in engine blocks and paint jobs and three months of secret labor.

“Mason.”

A thud. A muffled curse. He rolled out from under the dash, creeper squeaking on the shop floor, and stared up at her from flat on his back with a wrench in one hand and guilt on his face.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I forgot my charger.”

“It’s not finished.”

“Mason.” She crouched beside the creeper. He was still on his back, grease on his jaw, wrench in hand, looking up at her with the expression of a man who’d been caught doing something devastatingly romantic and didn’t know how to handle the witness. “You built me a car.”

“I’m building you a car. It’s not done. The dash still needs—”

She kissed him. On the creeper, on the shop floor, bending down to press her mouth to his, upside-down and awkward and perfect.

“I love you,” she said against his lips. “I love you and you built me a car and I’m going to thank you in ways that are going to fog every window in this building.”

“Is the backseat done?”

“The leather was installed last week.”

“Then it’s done enough.”

“Get up,” she said. “We’re christening the backseat.”

“Lila, it’s a sixty-thousand-dollar restoration—”

“And I’m about to add significant emotional value. Get. Up.”

He took her hand. She pulled him to his feet. He towered over her the way he always did — a foot taller, twice as wide — and she could see the moment his brain caught up with the situation. The shift in his eyes from surprise to heat.

He opened the Mustang’s rear door. The backseat was wide and deep, black leather, the new-car smell mixed with the ghost of oil and the cedar from his hands.

She climbed in first. He followed. The door swung shut. The amber work light filtered through the tinted windows, painting them both in gold.

She pulled the flannel off. The tank top came next — over her head, gone — and she was bare from the waist up in the warm leather interior of a midnight-blue Mustang that the man she loved had built for her with his own hands.

“Come here,” he said. The voice. The voice. Low, rough, the register that lived in her bloodstream like a drug she’d never build a tolerance to.

She climbed into his lap. The leather creaked beneath their shifting weight. She straddled him, knees on either side of his hips, her hands on his chest.

“Because you were happy.” She cupped his face. “You’d come home on Saturdays smelling like paint and primer and you’d be humming. Humming, Mason. You don’t hum.”

“The humming wasn’t because of the car,” he said. “It was because of you. Everything’s because of you.”

She kissed him. Slow and deep. Then she pulled his shirt over his head and the slow became fast.

His hands were everywhere — her breasts, her waist, her hips. She rocked in his lap, the denim friction sending sparks up her spine.

“I want to thank you properly,” she said against his mouth.

She slid off his lap. The backseat was wide enough that she could kneel between his legs, and the look on his face when he realized what she was doing — surprise, hunger, something almost reverent — was worth every second she’d spent pretending not to know about the car.

She unbuckled his belt. The clink echoed in the enclosed space. She freed him from his jeans and boxers, wrapped her hand around him, and watched his head fall back against the headrest.

“Shh. You built me a car. I’m building you a memory.”

She took him in her mouth.

Slow at first. Learning him the way she always did — the pressure that made his hips jerk, the rhythm that made his hand find her hair, the flat of her tongue against the underside that drew the groan she was addicted to. She worked him with her mouth and her hand together, finding the pace that unwound him.

She hummed around him. The vibration made him jolt, his hand tightening in her hair, and she smiled and thought: this is what a year of loving someone feels like. You know exactly how to take them apart.

She took him deeper. Let him feel the back of her throat. His hips bucked and he apologized and she grabbed his hip and pulled him forward, telling him without words: don’t hold back. I want all of it.

She didn’t stop. She doubled down — faster, tighter, her tongue working the head on every upstroke — and he came with a shattered sound that fogged the windows in a single breath, his hand in her hair, her name wrecked on his lips.

She sat back on her heels. Wiped her mouth. Smiled.

“Your thank-you for the car. Part one.”

“Part one?”

“You spent three months. I’m going to need at least an hour.”

Something fierce crossed his face. The predatory shift — the moment the receiving ended and the giving began.

“Get up here,” he said. Not a request.

She climbed back into his lap. His hands were on her sleep shorts, tugging them down. No underwear. She’d come here for a charger; she hadn’t planned for this.

“No underwear,” he observed. His hand slid between her thighs and she gasped. “Did you know?”

“I hoped.”

“Same thing.” His fingers found her — slick, swollen, aching. “Christ, Lila. You’re soaked.”

“You built me a car. That’s the ultimate competence kink.”

He laughed. The real one. Against her throat, his fingers working between her legs. The laugh that was hers and would always be hers.

“Tell me what my hands do to you.”

“They make me feel safe. And taken care of. And so turned on I can’t think.” She was gasping now, rocking against his hand. “Watching you work is foreplay. It has been since the first day.”

“Right now the only thing I’m fixing is you.” He curled his fingers inside her and she cried out. “And you’re not broken. You’re perfect. You’ve always been perfect.”

“Come for me. In our car. On our leather. Be my good girl and let go.”

She came so hard she saw white. Her whole body locked around his hand, her face pressed into his neck, the orgasm rolling through her in waves that felt endless. He talked her through it the way he always did — that’s it, there she is, I’ve got you, that’s my girl — the liturgy of their love spoken against her skin.

She was still shaking when he reached into the glovebox. Condom. Of course he had condoms in the glovebox of the car he was building her.

“You stocked the glovebox,” she said, laughing, wrecked.

“Call it knowing my fiancée.” He rolled the condom on and she rose on her knees and sank down onto him, and the sound they made together — matched, harmonized — fogged the last clear window.

She rode him in the backseat of the midnight-blue Mustang he’d built her with his own hands, and the leather creaked and the windows fogged and the amber work light turned everything gold. His hands on her hips, guiding but not controlling. His mouth on her breast, her throat, the space below her ear. His voice telling her she was beautiful, she was brave, she was his, she was the reason he hummed.

“I’m going to drive this car every day,” she gasped. “And every time I get in the backseat I’m going to think about this.”

“Every time you turn the key, you’ll think of me. Every time you hear the engine, you’ll feel this. I built this car so you’d carry me with you everywhere you go.”

“I already carry you with me everywhere.” She pressed her forehead to his. “You’re in my bloodstream. You have been since the dipstick lecture.”

He laughed. She laughed. They came together, laughing, the way they always did at the best moments — joy and pleasure fused into a single, blinding thing that shook the car on its suspension and rattled the tools on the pegboard.

After, they lay tangled in the backseat. She traced the gear tattoo on his forearm.

“I want to add something,” he said. “To the tattoo.” He turned his arm so she could see the inside of his forearm, below the gears, where the skin was bare. “Here. Your name. Or something that means you.”

“A pen,” she said. “A pen nib. For the good girl who organized your life.”

He smiled. The full one. The devastating one.

“A pen nib in the gears.”

“Same time Tuesday?”

He pressed his mouth to her forehead. The benediction. The constant.

“Every Tuesday,” he said. “Every day. Forever.”

She closed her eyes. The leather was warm beneath her. His heartbeat was steady under her ear. The car he’d built her hummed with the residual heat of everything they were, and outside the tinted windows, the shop was quiet, and Route 9 was dark, and the hand-painted sign with the off-center O caught the last of the streetlight.

Home. All of it. Every grease stain, every bolt, every “good girl” whispered in the dark.

Home.

Thank you for reading. If you loved Mason and Lila’s story, please leave a review — it means the world.

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