HELLO BEAUTIFUL

Author: EvilGrin
Title: Last Chance Café
Rating: NC17 //violence, language, adult situations, het cons sex, references to domestic abuse
Fandom: TFATF/AU
Disclaimer: I don’t own Dom or any other characters from TFATF. Any others are my own creations, and any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental. The town of Desolation also does not exist. I make no profit from this. Lyrics are from Robert Plant’s ‘Big Log’, and I don’t make any money from those either.
Pairing: Dom Toretto/ Amber Lynn Johnston
Summary: This takes place well after the events of TFATF. A woman that moves next door has Dom rethinking a lot of things in his life, not that his life is ready to let him live in any peace. Hers either for that matter.
Archive: VX, FDB
Feedback: Please leave all feedback in this thread only, no shreds.
Author’s notes: This is a rewrite of an older story (orig. 31/1/2006) I had posted here, so if it looks familiar, that’s why.
Copyright © July 2007 xxxevilgrinxxx

My love is in league with the freeway
Its passion will ride, as the cities fly by
And the tail-lights dissolve, in the coming of night
And the questions in thousands take flight
My love is a-miles in the waiting
The eyes that just stare, and the glance at the clock
And the secret that burns, and the pain that grows dark
And it’s you once again
Leading me on - leading me down the road
Driving beyond - driving me down the road

Robert Plant - “Big Log”

1 “Mismatched”

Standing out in the scrabble of what was now her front yard, Amber took a deep breath, and wondered how the hell she had gotten here. There were so many reasons, and she let them run through her head and then discarded them. No, she wouldn’t let him take this from her too.

She refused to let him claim this from her, even if ‘this’ was a decrepit, run down, tin-roof shack on the outskirts of the town of Desolation. A flyspeck of an old silver mining town not too far from the Gulf of California, between southern California and Arizona, a stone’s throw from the Mexican border. A more aptly named place could not be found anywhere.

If anything, the house she now owned was as far removed from her husband, ex-husband, as she wished she was, and that suited her just fine. As she looked around, at the scrub brush and gravel, and further down the loneliest stretch of highway that she had ever seen, she wondered if that had been the idea. To get something so far removed from her husband and her former life; after all, she could have probably found something in the city, if she had really looked.

Which she hadn’t. She hadn’t really looked at all. Not that she had the time to search. She could have stayed within the city, close to work, and frittered away the settlement that she had; it wasn’t much. Instead, she had spent a total of one half of an hour over a lunch break with a realtor, and picked a place that was far from anything else, and cheap. Couldn’t complain about it now.

Amber slammed the car door behind her and leaned against it as she watched the moving van pull off the road and into her driveway, the sound of crunching gravel muffled in the heat of the late afternoon.

It was a small truck, little more than an oversized van, and yet it still managed to knock over her mailbox, which now lay in the yard like a dead dog.

She didn’t have much. It wasn’t something that she had thought too much about, until she had to move her things out, and found out just how little she really had.

How few things were really hers. How few friends she had. Most people would have rounded up a few buddies and promised them beer and the move would have consisted of a convoy of cars and trucks with all her belongings strapped to the roof. Her ex got the friends in the divorce too, it seemed. They were all busy, had other plans, didn’t want to have things be awkward. She said that she understood, but hadn’t really; it was a sore spot.

When she first fled her home, a harried run in the middle of the afternoon while her husband was still at work, she had little more than boxes of clothes and belongings. A few books and some dishes. A lamp. It was hideous, a battered metal swing arm lamp that flickered if she breathed on it wrong, but it had been hers from the moment that she had first left home as a teenager, and it felt right to bring it with her now.

She hadn’t taken anything that was his, or ‘theirs’. The rest of her battered, mismatched furniture came from friends and thrift shops, things she had picked up after her move into a tiny studio that she had paid a few months rent on until the divorce came through, until she had enough money to really get out for good.

The description made her laugh quietly, looking down at the ground, a hand over her mouth. It was a sign of how far she had come that she could laugh at it, at least. ‘Battered and mismatched’ summed up her marriage pretty well.
She wouldn’t have been able to laugh about it a month ago.

The move wouldn’t take very long at least, that was another upside to having next to nothing. She cringed as the movers fumbled a box of her dishes and dropped them on the ground. Her only box of dishes; she didn’t even have any paper plates. She wouldn’t yell; it wouldn’t do any good, and sometimes you had to pick your battles.

Amber didn’t really have the money to eat out, but at that moment she was glad that there was a diner next door.
She wasn’t really in any position to be picky either. No more five star dinners, no more garden parties, no more boring social dinners for the people from his work. All of that was a thing of the past, and she wasn’t quite sure how to take that; she hated it, but it had been something that she had gotten used to. It was a hard thing to change so drastically.

She could cook, but with what? Amber looked back in through her car window at the box of cookies and bottle of tequila that she had brought with her to warm up her house. That would have to do. The more she thought about it, the more that suited her just fine. A drastic change was exactly what was needed.

Dining cars had been the rage at one point in US history, and the beautiful restaurants made from railcars had popped up all over. When she had first looked at the property in the realtor’s office, there had been a description of the place. ‘Next to an authentic Route 66 style dining car.’ Amber had this image in her head of sleek art deco lines, a lot of chrome, bouffant hairdo’s and 50’s and 60’s era cars.

The reality was something a little different. The ‘Last Chance Café’ had probably been beautiful at one point; the road running through Desolation had been a major one, at one point in its history. Time had other ideas.

The dining car was more rust than chrome, and its roof had been patched over and over again with pieces of metal, leaving it looking like someone had thrown an old afghan with mismatched squares up there. Mismatched appeared to be a word that she was going to use an awful lot.

At some point, a wooden deck had been built on the outside, and like the patched roof, that too had been added to over the years. The word ‘mismatched’ again popped into her head. The two stairs leaned against the deck at different angles, propped up on cement blocks that had sunk to different depths in the yard, and the railing around the outside had seen better days. There were several tables and, while these all matched, none of the chairs, nor umbrellas flapping over them, did.

No one sat outside at the tables; maybe they would when it was cooler, provided anyone at all came out here.
Someone must, or there was no way that the place could even remain open long enough to get as bedraggled as it looked now. There was no way that anyone would sit outside; not in this heat. Maybe in a few hours when the sun went down, but not right now.

There was a garage just behind the diner and to the right. If anything, it looked to be in even worse condition than the diner was. There was no way to know what color the main building had been, but now it was a faded out beige grey, a weathered colour that blended into the surrounding scrub. As though it had given up trying to stand apart and was now part of the landscape.

The same color as her house, for that matter. She wondered fleetingly if the house she now owned had been part of a package deal with the diner and garage; someone would have had to live here to run them, at one point.

The garage had the same sort of style as the house, the same old-fashioned windows with the curved woodwork at the top, and a long sloping roof which covered a deep, shaded porch. From the way that they had both been weathered, Amber guessed that they had been built at the same time. Maybe the people that ran the garage and diner lived somewhere else and drove here, having sold the house.

It made her feel odd, as though she should feel guilty at having broken up the set.

‘Mismatched’ again. Amber snorted out loud, not really caring if the movers looked at her funny, as she stood there by herself and chuckled under her breath. That was part of the joy of being out here; if she wanted to laugh like a loon all by herself, she could, no matter how odd it looked.

The movers wrestled her bed across the dusty driveway, and up the three stairs to her deep front porch, disappearing inside with it. It was the one thing that she had bought brand new when her divorce went through; a new bed. There was no way that she would take the one that still occupied the apartment where she had lived with her husband. She wanted nothing of his.

She was starting to sweat out here in the heat. Dressed in a neat, black business suit, Amber supposed that was to be expected; it was doubtful that her new house would have air conditioning. She turned back to her car, taking off her jacket, opening the door and hanging it carefully over the seat. Her white blouse was a little better suited to the heat, but she was already slicked with sweat.

Amber made a face at her reflection when she slammed the door closed again. Great. She was a little cooler, but the perspiration had made her blouse nearly see-through. Probably not the smartest idea with a troop of troglodyte, mouth-breathing movermen.

She looked down the highway again; there wasn’t a car for miles. None had passed in the whole time that she had stood here either. If she ran into trouble, she would be alone. That was another thing that she hadn’t thought of, while she was thinking of getting as far from her husband as possible. Just how far she had gone, how far away from ‘civilization’, how alone she really was. Unless she counted the town of Desolation itself, the next nearest inhabited area was Yuma, Arizona, with outflung towns in Southern California next.

Leaning in closer to her reflection, she tried to wipe some of the shine off her skin, pulling her hair back out of the way. Amber didn’t really think she was that attractive, at least not enough to garner that sort of attention. Medium height and build, her hair a medium honey-brown. The length was, well, medium.

She smirked at her reflection, looking at her eyes. A medium shade between green and brown. Also medium. She was medium; it worked for her. Especially right now when she was a million miles away from help; it was good to not draw too much attention.

Turning to look back at the garage, she shielded her eyes from the sun, and wondered if it was as empty as the diner appeared to be. There were a few cars scattered in the yard. Maybe that was unkind; they weren’t scattered. They were carefully parked underneath a sagging open carport, out of the sun. Some of them were covered with tarps, and she supposed that that was also to keep them out of the sun. Amber looked over at her own house, with its sagging carport. She had thought at first that she would rip the ugly thing down, but it looked to have a use now.

Perhaps metal faded too, out here in the sun. She wondered how long it would take for her blue car to become the same faded grey as the surrounding buildings. The cars that were uncovered looked well cared for, from what she could tell. Not that she could tell anyway. A car had four wheels, a steering wheel, and if it wasn’t an automatic, she couldn’t drive it.

There were two old-fashioned gas pumps out front. Maybe they still pumped gas, but from the way that one of them tilted to the side slightly, she doubted it. The garage beyond yawned open, its four big doors rolled up into the ceiling, an arcane array of car parts and tools that she had no name for inside.

She tore her eyes away as the chief troglodyte walked across her yard with his clipboard in hand. ‘Her yard’, the mere thought had her crack a grin again. A yard was something that you had to mow, or get the kid down the street to mow. If grass had ever grown in her yard, she could imagine that it would be so tough that it would break more lawn mowers than the other way around.

Still, it irked her that he walked right across her yard. He had, however, neatly pushed her box of busted dishes up against her porch. That was something. Amber put on a disarming smile and took a step towards him. And away from the side of her car where she could be pinned, a random thought that flitted gleefully through her head.

He pulled a chewed pen from the vee neck of his sweat-stained, filthy tee shirt, pushing the clipboard towards her. “Need you to sign here…” He growled out at her as he leaned in closer, and Amber fought not to cringe; she was through cringing, as he took up a place at her side. Where he could get a great look down her cleavage. “…And here.”

“You mean here where it states that all my belongings arrived safely, that spot?” Amber kept her voice sweet, even though she wanted to shout and yell. She knew that she never would, and if it wasn’t for the heat and the exhaustion, the bitterness she felt, she wouldn’t have said anything at all.

His eyes narrowed down to a piggish, beady gleam that scared her a little, and she regretted that she had even said what little that she had said. It was just dishes. And she was alone. A smart mouth; it had been one of those things that was a flash point, across her whole life. Quickly, she signed the first spot, not wanting to dwell on that terrifying thought, stating that she was satisfied with the move.

The second spot was closer to the bottom, just a standard spot where everyone signed for anything on a form. This one actually made her smile, as for just the second time in over a dozen years, she signed with her maiden name. Her own name. Amber Lynn Johnston. The first had been when she had bought the shack that all her possessions, minus one box of smashed dishes, could now be found.

Unable to hold back the grin, she signed with a flourish and handed back his gnawed upon pen. “Thank you!”

He didn’t understand that either, her good cheer, and he eyed her suspiciously, heavy eyebrows beetling downward. It made him look angry, but Amber continued to grin up at him, in defiance of her own fluttering nerves. “Okay then, have a nice day then, Miss Johnston.”

“Oh, I will!” She continued to smile widely, and the thought flew through her head that she might be near hysteria. It didn’t matter; she didn’t think the mover was going to smack her, and that was a change. Her odd behavior had also made him take a couple of steps back, which also suited her just fine.

The rest of the movers filed across her yard and piled into the moving van, and just like that, they were gone. She watched and waited until the van was a tiny white blip on the horizon, and then it was gone for good, and she was alone.

She had hardly ever been alone; there had always been someone around. Noise, talking. Yelling, screaming, hitting. Something. Leaning back against the side of her car again, she closed her eyes and tilted her chin to the sky.

Nothing.

Except that wasn’t exactly true. With her eyes closed, and without the racket from the movers, she could pick out other sounds as the day fell swiftly towards evening. A clink of metal against metal. An odd, high pitched whirring sound that she had heard somewhere before but couldn’t place. A muttered curse.

That had her eyes snap open. There were people here, after all, even if she couldn’t see them. She wondered fleetingly if the sounds had come from the diner, and her belly grumbled at her; she hadn’t eaten since early in the morning. No, it had come from the garage. She wasn’t familiar with garage noises, but the metallic sounds and the curses said garage more than diner.

A hand still up over her eyes, she scanned the area of the garage again, and her breath caught when she spied someone looking back at her in the same fashion.

Amber dropped her hand and backed up against the side of her car again, startled. Frightened. Her heart thundered in her chest and her breath caught, before her eyes closed.

He clearly worked in the garage, and if she was going to live here, she couldn’t be terrified by the people who were going to be there all the time. The big mechanic hadn’t dropped his hand, but kept it over his eyes, shielding them from the glare. His eyes squinted as he watched her, making his features look cruel and severe.

Keeping one hand on the door of her car, she looked at him again, trying to smile politely. There was no way to tell what it looked like to him though; she was still pretty rattled.

He was huge, bigger than the movers, easily larger than her husband had been. She had never really been around large men in her life. Fat, yes, but that was different, and she didn’t have anything in her life to use as a reference.

Amber wondered if she had been afraid of the wrong people when she had feared the movers.

His hand dropped, and he looked at her with a hard glare. There was no way to know if it was an expression he intended, or if it was just the sun. Her throat felt dry and she wasn’t entirely sure what she should do, but she knew that she couldn’t stand out here in the sun all day. She couldn’t leave either. He knew where she lived; her inner voice capered in her head, happily adding in two cents worth.

She got back into her car. No, she couldn’t leave; she had bought this house, and she wasn’t going to live in terror, not here, not anymore. Backing up, she just missed the dead mailbox, and pulled the car up the driveway until it was completely under the carport. It was a little cooler underneath, not by much, but a little.

“Hi…” There was a fence that ran between the garage and her driveway. It wasn’t much of a fence; it wouldn’t keep anything out or in. It was more of an idea of a fence than anything else. Amber stayed on her side and called across the very quiet yard in front of the garage. Her voice shook just a little.

The big mechanic turned back to face her; he had been walking back towards the garage when she called out to him. He looked even bigger now, if that were possible. Clean shaven head, massive arms in a sleeveless tank, and mechanics coveralls with the top part pushed down around his waist. No answer, just that look. The glare that might or might not have been a glare.

She swallowed and tried to keep the smile on her face; to not look afraid. “I’m Amber, I just bought the place next door…” Her sentences tilted up at the end in a question, as though she wasn’t quite sure of either her name or her recent home purchase. She sounded like an airhead, and if she was at ‘home’, if her ex-husband had been here, he would have told her to shut up already, before she said anything else stupid.

Holding onto the fence with one hand, she held out the other, still feeling a little foolish. She half expected him to turn away from her and walk back to the garage, leaving her handshake out there like a dead fish.

He didn’t. A moment of hesitation and then he crossed the distance to the fence and swallowed up her hand in his. Warm, calloused, and slightly slick with some sort of grease for cars. Amber made a point to not wipe her hand off on anything.

“Amber..” He repeated her name back at her in a voice that sounded like gravel would sound, if it ever had the notion to say anything. “Dom….” He let go of her hand and pointed to a discrete sign that hung from the back of the diner, a sign that couldn’t be seen from the road but which hung within sight of the garage, and her house, which she thought was sort of odd. “…Toretto.”

Copyright © July 2007 xxxevilgrinxxx