As much as I’d enjoyed the time away, it was good to be back in Los Angeles again. Yes, our home reminded me of Angela in many ways, but it still felt more like home than the New York or London houses did. Plus, we had our friends to spend time with, which we simply didn’t have in either New York or London.

  Since we got home on Friday night, I took the opportunity to go driving with the boys on Saturday. Teddy Bear still had my Aston Martin, so that left me with the choice between the two Porsches or the two BMWs. My first instinct was to take the M6 coupe, but after a moment’s indecision I grabbed the key fob for the 918. Sure, the weather was a bit cool so I wouldn’t take the T Tops off, and more importantly, it did have a lot of memories of Angela associated with it, but I needed to get past that emotional hurdle.

  “Glad you could make it,” Stephen said when I joined him in the parking lot with a fresh cup of gas station coffee in my hand. “You brought the Spyder,” he said, gesturing in the direction of the Porsche with his own paper coffee cup. “Is it going to be one of those days?”

  “Nah, probably not,” I admitted. “I really haven’t been able to do much performance driving since I saw you last.”

  “You guys were in England, right?”

  “Yeah, London,” I confirmed. “I was hoping to get in a track day or two over there but I just couldn’t swing it.”

  “Track days? In winter in the UK?” Stephen asked, surprised.

  “Yeah, they run ‘em all year ‘round,” I confirmed. “It only mostly rains there, so unless there’s ice or the unlikely snow or really bad fog they run anyhow.”

  “Would you rent a car?” Stephen asked. “I mean, do they do that over there?”

  “No, I’d take my Lotus,” I said.

  “That’s right- you did mention you’d bought a Lotus… Evora, right? In British Racing Green?” Stephen said as I took out my phone to show him pictures.

  “Yeah, and I took a bunch of driving lessons to get used to driving on the wrong side of the road,” I told him.

  “Heck, your old 911 Safari should have taught you all you need to know about that!” Stephen teased. “That thing rarely stays inside the lines!”

  “Inside what lines?” Geoff asked as he joined us.

  “Leah was talking about taking driving lessons in England to get used to driving on the wrong side of the road, so I made the comment that she never bothered staying on the right side in the Safari,” Stephen explained.

  “You’re not wrong,” Geoff said, sipping from a bottle of Starbucks cold brew. “She gets all sorts of out of shape in that car. I don’t know how she’s stayed out of the ditch so far.”

  “I actually bought two cars in London,” I said. “The other is a Ford Focus.”

  “You said you were going to buy a Nissan Micra for your driving lessons over there,” Geoff nodded. “A Focus is a good choice.”

  “It’s a fun little car,” I said. “If a bit loud.”

  Looking at me, Stephen said, “You bought the sport model, right? Of course you did.”

  “The dealership I stopped in at had an RS that they’d had a speed shop upgrade like crazy. The dealership thought it would generate excitement or something, but it just sat on the showroom floor because after all the work they did it was just too expensive for what it was,” I explained.

  “But not for you,” Geoff nodded.

  “No, not too expensive for me,” I agreed.

  “It’s a shame those cars are stuck over there in England,” Stephen said. “It’d be hilarious to see you rip it up in a Ford Focus.”

  “That little thing dynoed at nearly four hundred horsepower,” I said. “It really rips.”

  “Insane,” Geoff said, shaking his head.

  Teddy Bear pulled up to the gas pumps at about that moment, waving to us as he got out to fill up.

  “I’m not sure you’re getting that car back,” Geoff said as we watched Teddy Bear.

  “That’s what Jimmy said last time,” I admitted. “I guess if TB likes it that much I can sell it to him.”

  “Hey, Leah!” Teddy Bear said as he pulled up next to where were we standing. “I didn’t know you were going to be joining us today!”

  “Hey, speaking of joining,” I said, looking around at the three guys. “We’ll be having a get-together at our house on Wednesday evening and you’re all invited. Bring Linda and the girls,” I said to Geoff. Turning to Stephen, I said, “You, you tell Stephanie. In fact, tell her to come even if you can’t make it. And you, feel free to bring whoever,” I said to Teddy Bear.

  “I might bring Solange,” Teddy Bear said, thinking about it. “She won’t shut up about Emmy and how she got invited to dinner at your place, and then the housewarming party."

  “Sure, bring her,” I said.

  Stein and Jimmy both rolled up about then, so we got to talking about routes and conditions. Apparently there were reports of ice up in the mountains, so we stuck to the Malibu Hills for the day, which was fine by me. Sure, it wasn’t really the right sort of road for the Spyder (it would have been perfect for the Focus RS) but that was fine. As I’d told Stephen, I was out of practice.

  At lunch I mentioned that fact, and the guys clamored for another track day.

  Pulling out my phone to look at the local tracks’ schedules, I saw that Buttonwillow Raceway was going to have a two-session weekend in two weeks. Everybody checked their calendar and saw that they had it free, so it looked as if we were good to go.

  “Is it cool if I take the Aston?” Teddy Bear asked in a low voice.

  “The guys say you really like that car,” I replied, matching his tone. “I’d be happy to part with it if you want to buy it.”

  “How much?” Teddy Bear asked, a gleam in his eye.

  “I have no idea what market is, but let’s say a hundred? Does that sound fair?” I asked.

  “I’ll have the money for you on Wednesday,” Teddy Bear promised, looking as if Santa had come early.

  “What are you guys whispering about?” Jimmy demanded from the other side of the table.

  “Leah’s gonna sell me the Vantage,” Teddy Bear said, all grins.

  “Hell yeah, dude!” Jimmy said, holding his hand up across the table for a high five, which Teddy Bear promptly gave him.

  “It’s about time,” Geoff said, knuckle-bumping Teddy Bear. “About time.”

  “I’m selling the Aston Martin to Teddy Bear,” I told Emmy when I got home.

  “I will be sad to see that car go,” Emmy said, setting her guitar aside for a kiss. “I have fond memories.”

  “I do, too,” I admitted. “But he really loves the thing and I’ve barely been driving it, so…”

  “I understand,” Emmy said. “It is silly to assign too much sentimentality to inanimate objects, but I think it is natural to do so.”

  “It is,” I agreed. “That’s actually sort of why I took out the 918 today. I’d sort of been avoiding that car because it reminded me too much of Angela, but I need to get over that hangup.”

  “Take the rally car next time,” Emmy urged. “As you have pointed out to me, Angela would not want you to… to miss out on things simply because remembering her was painful.”

  “No, she wouldn’t, that’s true.”

  “So that is what you should do. Keep driving the cars that remind you of her, and enjoy them and enjoy the memories you have of her,” Emmy instructed. “I was thinking of her earlier, remembering her. I want to write a song celebrating her smile. I want to remember the very best of her.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “She did have a very beautiful smile,” I said. “And a truly spectacular ass.”

  “I have already written a song about that,” Emmy said with an impish grin, lightening the moment. “So fine, so fine, your amazing behind,” Emmy sang, strumming her guitar. “It’s the top of the class, your incredible ass.”

  “I think your song is going to need a little work,” I said with a chuckle, kissing the top of her head. “Hey, the guys all said they’d try to make it on Wednesday. Geoff said he’ll bring Linda and Ginnie and Eileen, and Teddy Bear is going to ask Solange. Stephen was gonna ask Stephanie.”

  “It will be good to have a full house,” Emmy said. “On the topic of friends, Jenna asked if we wanted to go to the Rams game on Monday night. She said that they have only had one loss this season and are in contention for the playoffs, so a group of players are paying for a suite at the stadium. She said that Andy would love it if we could attend.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I said, meaning it. I was fully on board with the idea re-engaging with our friends. It had been some months since we lost Angela and the babies and it was time to stop moping so much. Even if hanging out with the Rams WAGs might not be the most fun thing ever, at least it was social, right? We’d be out and doing things and not stuck at home feeling sorry for ourselves.

  “Em,” I said, sitting down on the sofa with her. “I’d already written it off, but since we’re talking about these kinds of things, tonight is the Porsche club’s monthly dinner…”

  “Do you want to go?”

  “Maybe… could you go with me?” I asked, hopeful. “The food’ll be O.K. and the company is alright for the most part.”

  “Faint praise,” Emmy laughed.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “But I would like to announce that I’m the new owner of Porsche Of Hollywood. And, well, I can’t keep avoiding those people because it reminds me of Angela.”

  Emmy’s face fell. “Leah,” she said, her voice tender. “I am sorry that I keep forgetting that you are suffering, too. I was not alone in losing a partner I thought would be with me for the rest of my life- you did, too. It is very self-centered of me to forget that your loss is as great as mine. Perhaps greater, even.”

  “I still have you, Em,” I said, resting a hand on her smooth thigh.

  “And I have you,” Emmy said, resting her hand on mine. “That means that neither of us is all alone. I will go with you to the club dinner tonight, and we can both remember what it is like to put ourselves out in the world.”

  “Well, put ourselves out in Santa Monica, at least,” I replied, earning me a smile. Emmy knew I was trying to break the somber mod, and she let it happen.

  We didn’t take Tiny that night, and it wasn’t just because we didn’t have any Porsches with more than two seats. No, I judged that it was a zero-risk situation, since we’d be surrounded by known quantities and in a situation that no hostiles could know to infiltrate.

  I felt pretty good about security in Los Angeles in general, too. Every known Night Child in the region had accepted our shadow, and their lives had been greatly improved as a result, so I was confident that our network was solid. We would know if any new Night Children were spotted before too long, even in a city as large as LA. Night Children tended to the same sorts of places, after all.

  Of course, there was also me. I don’t know what percentage of the population had actually seen the videos of me in Atlanta, but enough had for me to get more looks than usual when I was out and about in my blonde wig. So yeah, plenty of people would know not to screw with Emmy when I was standing right there.

  Emmy suggested that we take the 911 Carrera Safari to the club dinner and at first I was going to protest, but understanding what she was doing, I caved. Yes, it was loud inside and not as comfortable as the Spyder, but that was fine. It did make as much of a splash, if not more, than the 918 did among Porsche nerds.

  The parking lot was mostly full when we pulled in, but I trusted the valets to know where to park our old Carrera. Walking Emmy inside the seafood restaurant, we got a whole lot of stares. It felt really awkward at first until Targa Mike came over.

  “Hey, Leah, I’m really sorry about Angela,” he said, and it sounded as if he really meant it. “She was a really sweet girl. Everybody in the club loved her. I mean it- she really lit up the room.”

  “Thanks, Mike,” I said. “Mike, this is my wife Emmy. Emmy, this is Mike. He has a really sweet butterscotch-colored Targa.”

  “It’s a real pleasure to meet you,” Mike said, extending his hand, which Emmy took. “Again, I’m really sorry for your loss. Angela really was something special,” he said. Clearly he’d come to understand our unusual living arrangement and had no issues with it, to his credit.

  “Thank you, Mike. It was a terrible thing- we miss her very much,” Emmy said.

  By this time a few more people had gathered around and a number of them murmured their condolences. None really seemed scandalized by Emmy being there, but then again, this was Los Angeles, right?

  Emmy and I sat down at a table with Rick (the club’s events guy) and another guy whose name I couldn’t remember but should have.

  “Emmy,” the other guy said. “I saw your show at the Coliseum. That might have been the best arena concert I’ve ever seen.”

  “Thank you, Tom,” Emmy said, since of course she already knew the guy’s name. “It was good to perform for a home crowd, and wonderful to finish our tour here.”

  While Tom and Emmy talked about the show, Rick leaned in to whisper, “Leah- the video from Atlanta… Was that real?”

  “Yeah, it was,” I admitted quietly.

  “That was brutal,” he whispered. “I’ve never seen anything like that outside of the movies.”

  “Trust me- you don’t want to ever experience anything like that,” I told him, keeping my voice just as low.

  “No joke,” he said. “And you really, um…”

  “Yeah, I really did kill six people with my bare hands,” I told him. “Emmy’s bodyguards took out the other three.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Rick said. “When a co-worker of mine showed me the video, I couldn’t believe it.”

  “I’m going to regret that day for the rest of my life,” I told him.

  “At least you saved Emmy,” Rick said, glancing over at where she chatted with Tom.

  “That was mostly Emmy’s bodyguards,” I said. “They kept the attackers away.”

  “Long enough for you to finish them off,” Rick countered.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said, sitting up to indicate that I was done talking about it.

  After the dinner, when the club’s president asked if anybody had any announcements, I stood up to tell the club that I’d just completed the transaction and was now the owner of the Hollywood Porsche dealership.

  “Did you sell off those BMW dealerships of yours?” somebody called out.

  “Nope,” I said, smiling. “That means that in addition to getting club member discounts at Porsche Of Hollywood, I’ll extend the deal to my two BMW stores, too. Yes, that’s right, your Porsche club card will get you discounts on new or used BMWs, service, or accessories.” This got a laugh from the assembled group, which was what I was after. “By the way, we’ve cleared out the old management team at Hollywood Porsche too, so if you’ve had less than stellar dealings there, come give it another chance. I know the dealership has had a bit of a rocky reputation for a while, but with new ownership and management comes a new attitude. I hope to build it into the area’s most trusted shop, the way my other German car dealerships are in the Inland Empire.”

  “Thank you, Leah,” the club’s president said when I sat back down. “Thanks for the generous sponsorship of the club, too. Ladies and gentlemen, as of the new year Porsche Of Hollywood will be the club’s main sponsor. I’d like to thank Porsche Of Marina Del Rey for their past sponsorship and would like to remind you that they will continue to offer club discounts on service and accessories. That said, Porsche Of Hollywood is stepping up to the plate and deserves our patronage, so please stop on by.”

  “Thank you, Kevin,” I said, standing up again. “During the month of January any member who shows a current club card will get a free Porsche club T shirt. We’ll also be handing them out at the club’s first track day of the season in March.”

  “You did not tell me that you bought the Porsche store!” Emmy said a bit indignantly when I sat down and the next person stood up to talk about next month’s club breakfast and dinner.

  “Uh oh! Busted!” Rick said with a chuckle.

  “She comes from a BMW family,” I said with a shrug.

  “That is not what I meant,” Emmy said with a little huff. “I meant that you have not been sharing any of your work with me.”

  “It just never came up,” I said, raising my hands in a ‘what can you do?’ gesture.

  “That’s just a different level than I’m used to,” Tom said to Rick.

  “I know, right?” Rick agreed. “I can’t imagine my wife’s reaction if she just randomly found out I bought a new Porsche, never mind the entire dealership.”

  “It is not that,” Emmy said, turning to Rick. “It is her money, and she knows best what to do with it. It is that she never felt it was anything I would be interested in knowing about.”

  “I try not to bring work home,” I said apologetically.

  “This is coming from a woman who was up until midnight every night answering work emails for the last month,” Emmy said.

  “Yeah, but my workday started at four in the afternoon!” I countered. “We were at our new place in London,” I explained to the two guys, who were watching in amusement. “Eight hour time difference, so midnight there is four in the afternoon here. It’s a pain working remotely from halfway across the globe.”

  “‘Our new place in London’,” Tom said to Rick. “I’m really feeling the sympathy.”

  “Seriously,” Rick agreed.

  Mixing after the dinner, I got to talking to a couple of guys about the dealership while Emmy and Geoff’s wife Linda talked with a couple of other women. The guys shared horror stories about Hollywood Porsche, but I assured them that those days were over.

  “There’s a very real reason that our two BMW dealerships have dramatically outpaced the others in the region in sales, and that’s customer satisfaction,” I said. “The new management at Hollywood is our top talent moved over from the BMW shops. Like I said, it’s a new dealership in all but name.”

  “I tried to order a Targa 4S back a couple of years ago,” one of the guys said. “They said they could get me one and kept stringing me along, but never actually produced the car.”

  “That was the limited edition one, right?” one of the other guys asked.

  “Yeah. If they’d just told me they couldn’t get it I’d have found another dealer that could,” the guy said bitterly. “As it was, I got completely shafted.”

  “My guys all come from a BMW background,” I told him. “BMW really doesn’t do the limited edition thing the way that Porsche or Ferrari do,” I said. “So we’ll be much more honest about that sort of thing. If we have an allocation, we won’t play games about name recognition or past history with the brand or any of that horse shit. It’ll be real, real honest. We’ve made it clear to Stuttgart that we want any and all limited-edition vehicles they can give us, and we’ll sell them to the first person that walks in with the money. I’ve heard so many horror stories just like yours,” I told the guy. “The truth is that Hollywood probably did get an allocation, but they waited until a Tom Cruise, Samuel Jackson or somebody like that came in to sell it to. Under our new management we aren’t going to play any of those games. As far as we’re concerned, a client is a client, famous or not.”

  “Damn, that will be a breath of fresh air,” one of the guys said. “After the second time I walked in there and was totally ignored I vowed to never come back.”

  “Time to break your vows,” I said. “At least come in for your club T shirt, and to see if you can feel a change in the vibe. Since you’re a club member and I’ll see you at these dinners- and the track day, I hope- please, please tell me how my management, sales and service guys are doing. I need feedback from guys like you- real, dyed-in-the-wool Porsche guys,” I said, buttering them up.

  On the way home, Emmy confessed that she had had a good time at the dinner. “I enjoyed it more than I expected I would,” she said.

  “I saw you chatting,” I told her, giving her knee a squeeze.

  “Quite a few women were curious about our relationship, the two of us and Angela.”

  “Are you O.K.? That must have been hard,” I said.

  “No, it was not hard to talk about how wonderful Angela was,” Emmy replied. “I believe that the questions were motivated by curiosity and not malice, so I did my best to convey how wonderful and loving our relationship had been.”

  “And still is with you and me,” I said, stroking her bare leg.

  “And still very much is,” Emmy agreed.

  Tinea And Leah (a cyberpunk novel here on Royal Road. It was originally a fanfic of Stray Cat Strut, also here on RR, but has since surpassed its source material and gone beyond), has graciously given Emmy And Me a little corner of their Discord channel.

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