Black Diaries

32. Ordeal by Motor Oil

"Look out, everyone! Incoming!" called a buoyant voice from under the car. "Or rather, outcoming. Please step back."

Instinctively, I took another step backwards, and so did Elliot. We heard the scraping sound of cotton on smooth concrete, and a moment later, the dirt-smeared face of a young man appeared. I gave him a cautious onceover. He was probably a rather handsome young man, probably blonde and probably had white skin. But I would reserve final judgement on any of these points until he removed the thick film of dirt and oil stains that clung to every inch of him.

"Hello there!" His face split into a wide grin, and I revised my opinion of his looks. If the rest of him looked anything like that smile, he wouldn't be handsome. He would be beautiful. "Elliot! Hi! Hi, Mr. and Mrs. W.! Nice to see you again." He gave me a wink. "And very nice to see you for the first time, mysterious nameless beauty."

I felt my face turning red.

"I'd shake hands, but..." With an apologetic grin, the young man held up his oil-smeared fingers.

"Zack!" exclaimed Mrs. Winslow, rushing towards him and giving him a squeeze nearly as hard as the one I had gotten when I had arrived. If she noticed the fact that she got oil all over her dress, she didn't seem to care. "We didn't know you were here! What are you doing down here?"

"Oh, just fixing up the Range Rover. I promised Mr. W., remember?"

"Yes, of course I do!" Smiling, Mrs. Winslow turned to me. "This is Zack. He's Elliot's best friend."

My eyebrows shot up. I leaned over to Elliot. "You have a best friend?" I asked out of the corner of my mouth.

"Yes."

"And you didn't mention this why...?"

"It never came up."

Men! I rolled my eyes.

"He's been a friend of the family for ages," Mrs. Winslow was saying. "My husband and Zack's great-uncle Rutherford started their first company together."

"And it went bankrupt about five minutes later," Zack added cheerily, which earned him a disapproving glance from Mr. Winslow. He didn't seem to mind at all, and after only a moment, the disapproving look vanished. From the way Mr. and Mrs. Winslow looked at Zack, I'd have ventured he got a lot of disapproving looks, and they were rarely, if ever, meant seriously.

"Zack." Elliot stepped forward, a rare full-blown smile on his lips. "Nice to see you. This is Cassidy. Cassidy, this is my best friend Zack."

"Elliot! That's no way to introduce the love of your life!"

Elliot's mouth dropped open. I felt my face heat with another rush of red.

"I should have mentioned," Elliot murmured, "that besides being my best friend, he's also a very enervating friend."

"This is how you do an introduction," proclaimed Zack, ignoring his friend completely. Wiping one of his dirty paws on his pants, he took hold of my left hand and, before I could do anything, had lifted it to his lips, leaving a black lipstick mark à la motor oil on the back of it. "Greetings, oh gracious lady. Zacharias Mahone, at your service. If you ever have need of a valiant screwdriver, do not hesitate to call upon me."

"Um... does he always talk like this?" I whispered at Elliot out of the corner of my mouth.

Apparently, though, Zack had better ears than I had reckoned with.

"No, he doesn't," he assured me. "Only on special occasions. Normally, I make much less sense."

He grinned and I felt an answering grin creep on my face. There was something about this guy that just made it impossible not to grin around him—even if he had just disfigured the back of your hand with a stain that would take hours to scrub off.