About half an hour after Nick let her out, he happened to be passing through the living room on his way to the extra refrigerator in his garage, and he saw Sumire's blue Honda still sitting in his driveway. The hood was up, and there was a towel spread over part of the engine.

What the hell?

He opened his front door and nearly tripped over Sumire herself. She was sitting on the top step, in the shade cast by the deep roof of the porch, reading a book. The sound of the door made her jump and she looked up at Nick in surprise, closing her book.

"What are you doing here?" he asked bluntly, standing in his doorway.

Sumire gestured toward her car. "Louie--that's my car," she gestured toward the Honda, "can be kind of temperamental, and I can't get under the hood quite yet because it's too hot. Don't worry, I'll be out of here in a few minutes." She rose.

"Unless I'm in the way here on the porch? You need me to wait somewhere else? I mean, I can't move Louie, but I can go wait under the trees or whatever if you're expecting people--"

"No, no, nothing like that, but you could've waited in the house, for crying out loud," Nick said, opening the door wider. "Why didn't you ring the bell?"

"I didn't want to bother you," she responded. "I had my book, I was fine."

"Well, come in now," he insisted. "Please, I'm not doing a thing, I can't leave you out here, it's too hot."

She relented and followed him back in.

"Look, you don't have to keep me company or entertain me or anything," she said when he sat with her in the spacious and comfortable family room. "Please, do whatever you were doing."

"I was going to get some cold water from my garage," he told her. "In fact, hold on--" He quickly ran to the fridge, grabbed a few bottles and and came back, handing her two of the bottles. He once again sat down with her.

"There, that's all I was doing," he assured her.

"Well, thank you very much," she said. She cracked open a bottle and nearly drained it before setting it aside and giving him a small, measured smile of gratitude to go with her words.

"So how does a half-Japanese daughter of a botanist end up a linguistics student in LA?" Nick asked, sitting back on the sofa.

"Really? You're interested in that? In me?"

Nick shrugged. "Yeah, why wouldn't I be?"

"Well, okay. Uh, my mother was the daughter of a diplomat who was posted in Japan, and she met my father, who was a student at Tokyo University. They fell in love and got married, and had me. He got a job working for the prefectural government, maintaining the parks and grounds in Tokyo, and I think they were very happy." Sumire smiled, and Nick noticed that, for the first time since they'd met, it was a big smile, a normal smile, a smile that transformed her face to a thing of beauty, made it exotic, sloe-eyed, lovely. It was gone all too soon. "I used to go with him sometimes, help him, you know, though I don't know how much help I was," she laughed.

She gave herself a shake. "So then, well, he died, very suddenly, and it was terrible, and we left Japan and moved back to Boston, to where my mother's people lived. And she met her second husband, who was a professor at Harvard. She married him two years later."

She was silent for so long that Nick prodded her, asking, "Was that bad? Did you not get along with him or something?"

She looked up Nick.

"No, he's fine," she answered with a shrug. "I mean, he makes my mother happy, I guess, so that's nice. She was awfully young to have to spend the rest of her life alone, you know? So it's nice that she found someone."

"I guess so," Nick answered. "My parents divorced when I was little, and both of them remarried to horrible people. I hate my stepmom and my stepdad. I mean, all they want is to mooch off my fame and my money, you know?"

"I guess that would be a huge issue for someone like you," Sumire answered with a nod. "I don't have to worry about anything like that. "Marcus Dawson, my stepfather, has more money than I'll ever have. He's a pretty famous psychologist, like as a writer and in academic circles and all that, so yeah, my parents are way more loaded than me."

Nick laughed. "You wouldn't believe the people who came crawling out of the woodwork when I got rich and famous, wanting to claim a piece of me." He shook his head. "I have two brothers and two sisters, and I paid for them to go to college, and I already have college funds set up for their kids and stuff, I totally don't mind doing that. I mean, I want to do that, you know? But when Carla's--that's my stepmom--when Carla's no-good younger brother wants to start a dog breeding business and comes to me for start up money? I don't feel obligated to give him a fucking penny, you know? And then he has the balls to go whining to his sister, like I did something wrong!"

"Wow, that would suck," Sumire agreed. She opened the second bottle of water. "How do you ever know who really likes you for you, and who's just working you over?"

"Yeah, it can kinda blow," Nick agreed. "Sometimes I think it's just easier if I'm only around people who have as much money as I do."

"But aren't those people--I mean, can't those people be--" Sumire stopped.

"Boring? Stupid beyond belief?" Nick supplied with a grin.

"I didn't say either of those things," Sumire replied.

"But you were thinking them awfully loud," Nick answered.

Sumire looked around, unsure what to say.

"You know, I bet the car's cooled off by now," was what she finally came up with, rising abruptly. She headed for the front door.

Nick rose and followed her.

"So, Louie?" he asked as they headed outside. "Where'd that come from? Old boyfriend or something?"

"No, nothing like that," she responded. "I don't really know, I think it's from the color? I was driving some friends somewhere, and one of them started singing 'Louie Louie,' only she changed the words to 'Louie Bluie,' I believe."

She moved the towel and laid her hand on the part underneath. She found it cool enough and started pulling connections, wiping them and reconnecting. She worked in competent silence, leaving it to Nick to finally ask, "Do you know that will work?"

She shrugged. "Well, if it's not this, it's the fuse. I have a bag of fuses in the glove box, and I'll swap it out, and that should do it."

"And you can't just take the car in and have it repaired?" Nick asked.

"I can't afford it," Sumire responded without a hint of embarrassment.

Nick didn't know what to say. Such a thing had honestly never occurred to him. "And where did you learn how to, um, do whatever it is you're doing?" he asked.

"Well, necessity is the mother of invention, they say, right?" Sumire replied as she remained bent over the engine. "I went online, googled the problem, and asked around."

Nick nodded and found himself checking out her ass as she bent even farther into the front of her car. It was actually very nice, he decided, though he knew he'd never, ever tell her so. No one who wore her hair in such a tight bun and had such a "fuck you" attitude wanted to be told she had a cute rear end.

She quickly bent back up and possibly caught him looking, though he quickly averted his eyes to the deep blue skyline.

Yikes.

She narrowed her eyes a little bit as she poured water over her hands and wiped them on the towel. She slid behind the wheel and turned the key, but nothing happened.

"I guess it's the fuse," she said, continuing to stare at Nick, making him feel guilty over where he'd been looking as she leaned over to her glove box.

She grabbed a bag of fuses and took one out, then had to get under the steering wheel to get the old one out and pop the new one in.

This time his gaze wandered to her front as she lay on the floor of the driver's side, and he decided that she had a very nice rack also, though, again, this wasn't a compliment he could ever pay her. A guy could tell, just from the clothes a girl wore, whether or not she wanted stuff like this noticed, and this one definitely did not. When they met, she'd been wearing a dark blouse under her black sweater, and today she was wearing a loose shirt under her cardie. Basically, everything she wore screamed "don't look at me, don't notice me."

She quickly sat up, looking at him again as if to see where his eyes were. She pursed her lips together and yanked at her top, straightening everything out where it had ridden up and bunched together.

Nick sighed and bit his lip, turning away slightly, hands on his hips.

She again got behind the wheel and turned the key, and this time the engine started right away.

"Wow, I'm impressed," Nick said with a smile over the sound of the engine. "Well done."

Sumire gave a small smile of thanks, and gestured for him to lower the hood.

He did so, and stepped back as she put the car in gear.

She gave a little wave out the window and drove away into the warm evening.