Lahat ng Kabanata ng Break up with me: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

The Civic smelled like old french fries and the pine air freshener Jess had hung from the mirror three owners ago, though by now the only thing it still smelled of was the pine air freshener trying and failing to cover the french fries. Dani drove with one hand on the wheel and the other out the window, fingers slicing the summer air, and the night was warm and the radio was loud and she was twenty years old and free.Bri rode shotgun with her feet on the dash, which Dani had stopped fighting her about by the third year of their friendship because Bri did what Bri wanted to do and the dashboard was no different from any other surface in the world as far as Bri was concerned. Jess sprawled across the back seat with her shoes off, singing the wrong words to a song she'd hated twenty minutes ago and now claimed as her favorite. They had no plans. They had a full tank of gas that Dani had paid for in quarters and lint, and they had the whole summer ahead of them with nothing to do but be

The shop smelled the way it always smelled: motor oil, hot metal, and the green bite of cutting fluid. Costa Auto sat on the corner of Mill and Second in Bramwell, a cinder-block building with three bays and a hand-painted sign that Marco Costa had never gotten around to replacing even though the C in Costa had faded to a ghost of itself. The lot was gravel, and the gravel had two ruts worn into it from thirty years of trucks pulling in and out, and there was a tire out front that Marco used as a planter and had never planted anything in, and a coffee can by the door for the honor-system coffee that had never once, in the history of the shop, been refilled by anyone other than Marco himself. Dani pulled the Civic into the gravel lot at half past eleven and killed the engine and sat there listening to it tick.Her phone buzzed. Jess.*did you find out who he was**no**are you going to**no**you're boring*Dani smiled and put the phone face-down on her thigh. She grabbed her Big Gulp

Sunday night at Pinetop drew the biggest crowd of the summer. The fence along the front straight was four deep by dusk, and somebody had set up a grill in the infield selling burgers for cash, and the announcer, a man named Curtis who'd called every drift night at Pinetop for a decade, worked the crowd through a bullhorn because the PA system had died in June and nobody had fixed it.The track at Pinetop sat on a flat ridge top above a former logging town, a two-mile road course that wound through old growth pine and granite outcroppings, the kind of place that had been carved out of a mountain one dynamite blast at a time in the seventies and had never quite stopped smelling like the sawmill it used to be. On a Sunday night in July the place smelled like cut pine and burnt rubber and the funnel cake truck that parked at the gate every weekend, and the noise of it, the engines and the crowd and the bullhorn, carried down the ridge into the town below like the whole mou

Costa Auto's front bays smelled like automatic transmission fluid on Tuesday afternoon, because a 2004 Civic had come in leaking ATF from the cooler line, and Marco had left the half-disassembled car on the lift to go pick up the one part he couldn't grab from inventory. Dani stood at the bench wiping her hands on a rag and listening to the ticking of the engine on the other lift cooling down after a compression test when the small bell above the front door rang.She glanced over expecting Marco back with his part bag.It wasn't Marco.Roman walked into Costa Auto at two-fifteen on a Tuesday afternoon wearing a fitted white t-shirt, dark jeans, and a pair of aviators pushed up into his hair, and he looked like he'd never set foot in a repair shop in his life and knew it. He took three steps in, glanced up at the lifts, took in the trophy case on the wall covered in Sal Costa's old racing photographs, and then turned to Dani with a grin that belonged o

Roman stood at the stove in the penthouse kitchen stirring a pot of ragu with a wooden spoon his grandmother had given him, and the sauce had been simmering for three hours and the whole apartment smelled like tomatoes and basil and garlic and red wine, and he wasn't thinking about any of it. He was thinking about a girl in a back bay in Bramwell porting a cylinder head by hand with a die grinder and a quarter-turn-too-loose set of bushings in her rear end.The penthouse sat on the forty-second floor of a tower in Ashford's financial district, floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides, and on a clear day you could see the river and the bridge and the whole grid of the city laid out below like a circuit board. On a Sunday evening in August you could see the sun going down over the western hills, and the light came in low and gold and turned the white marble counters the color of honey, and Roman stood in it stirring his sauce and not looking at the view, because the view wa