Jax's Little Obsession

Chapter 13

Maya’s Pov

Jax insisted on me visiting his garage. The garage is not really a garage. It is more like a museum that happens to have engine oil on the floor. Rows of motorcycles line the walls, some of them so old and rare I recognize them only from pictures in magazines my father used to keep stacked in his workshop. My mouth actually falls open before I catch myself and force it shut.

“You can stop pretending you are not impressed,” Jax says, watching me with obvious amusement as I walk slowly down the row, my fingers itching to touch every single bike I pass.

“I am not pretending anything,” I say, though my voice comes out breathless, betraying me completely. “This is just… a lot of very nice metal.”

“A lot of very nice metal,” he repeats, laughing. “You are standing in front of a bike that took two years to restore, and that is the best you can do?”

“Fine,” I admit, running my hand carefully along the frame of a vintage racer, its paint gleaming like it was finished yesterday instead of decades ago. “It is beautiful. Happy now?”

“Getting there,” he says, and something about the way he says it makes my cheeks warm.

He leads me to a workstation near the back where an unfinished bike sits, its engine partially exposed, wires and parts scattered across the table beside it. “This one needs work,” he says. “Consider it yours for the afternoon.”

“You are letting me touch your family’s equipment?” I ask, raising an eyebrow. “What happened to protecting everything with your name on it?”

“I am making an exception,” he says simply, rolling up his sleeves. “Besides, I want to see what you actually do when nobody is watching you fix things out of desperation.”

I roll my eyes, but I am already reaching for the tools, my fingers finding their familiar rhythm almost instantly. For the next several hours, we work side by side, arguing over almost every decision. He wants to keep the wiring exactly where the manual says it belongs. I want to reroute it for better weight balance. He insists the carburetor setting is fine. I insist it is choking the engine unnecessarily.

“You are going to break something important,” he warns, watching me adjust a bolt he clearly thinks should stay untouched.

“I am going to fix something you have been ignoring,” I correct, not looking up from my work.

“You have a lot of confidence for someone who learned everything in a garage the size of my bathroom.”

“And you have a lot of opinions for someone who has never actually had to make an engine run with parts held together by hope and duct tape,” I fire back, grinning despite myself.

He laughs, and the sound fills the garage warmly, chasing away whatever tension usually sits between us during arguments like this. Somewhere in the middle of passing tools back and forth, teasing each other about stubbornness and bad decisions, the atmosphere shifts into something easier, something that feels less like negotiation and more like actually enjoying each other’s company.

At some point, I reach up to wipe sweat from my forehead and accidentally smear grease across his cheek while handing him a wrench. He freezes, feeling the mark with his fingers, and stares at the black smudge now on his hand like I just committed a serious crime.

“Did you just—” he starts, looking genuinely offended.

I cannot help it. I burst out laughing, the sound echoing off the garage walls, doubling over slightly at the expression on his face, somewhere between disbelief and horror.

“You have grease on your face,” I manage between laughs. “The great Jax Worth, covered in engine grease like a normal person.”

“This is not funny,” he says, though the corner of his mouth twitches like he is fighting a smile of his own.

“It is a little funny,” I say, still grinning as I try to step back toward my side of the table.

Before I can move away, his hand catches my wrist, gentle but firm, stopping me completely. My breath catches in my throat as he tugs me slightly closer, reaching for a rag with his free hand only to abandon the idea halfway, instead dragging his grease-covered thumb deliberately across my cheek.

“There,” he says, his voice lower than before. “Now we match.”

“That is revenge,” I say, though my voice comes out quieter than I intend, my heart suddenly pounding hard against my ribs.

“Completely fair revenge,” he agrees, but he does not let go of my wrist right away.

We stand there for a moment, closer than we have been since the day in the car when he fixed my collar, close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off him, close enough to notice the way his eyes drop briefly to my mouth before returning to my eyes. My pulse pounds so loudly I am certain he can hear it in the quiet garage around us. Neither of us moves. Neither of us speaks. The air between us feels thick, charged with something neither of us seems ready to name out loud.

I am the one who finally pulls back first, my wrist slipping gently from his fingers as I take a small step away, needing distance before I do something I cannot take back.

“We should finish the bike,” I say, my voice not quite steady.

Something flickers across his face, disappointment maybe, or restraint, but he nods and lets me go without argument. “Right,” he says. “The bike.”

We finish the work mostly in silence after that, though it is not an uncomfortable silence, just quieter, charged with something unspoken sitting comfortably between the sound of tools clicking against metal. When the engine finally roars to life under our combined effort, we both grin at each other with matching pride, momentarily forgetting the tension from earlier.

“Not bad for someone raised in a garage the size of your bathroom,” he says, echoing his own earlier words with a teasing smile.

“Not bad for someone who almost let his carburetor choke his engine to death,” I reply, and he laughs again, warm and easy.

Later that night, lying in my dorm room with grease still faintly staining my fingers no matter how many times I wash them, I find myself smiling at the ceiling for no particular reason at all. I think about his laugh, about the way his hand felt wrapped gently around my wrist, about the look in his eyes right before I pulled away.

I am supposed to be furious with him. I am supposed to remember that this entire relationship started because of a contract, because of leverage, because of everything I never wanted. But somewhere over the last few weeks, something shifted without my permission, and now I catch myself thinking about him at random moments throughout the day, replaying conversations, looking forward to arguments I know I should not be looking forward to.

I am starting to enjoy being around him.

The realization should scare me more than it does.