Chapter 1

Aaron was a bit of a loner. He didn’t really have friends. There was not anything not to like about him, just that he moved to town, to a job that monopolized his time. Each day, when he was done with work, he’d go home, make dinner, watch television and go to bed alone, just looking forward to sleep. That was his life. It was really all he knew, so that’s what he did.

One day, he discovered quite by accident that he enjoyed working with his hands. His car broke down on the highway. It just turned off on him and he had to coast to the side of the interstate. Aaron sat there and turned the key off and on again, thinking he would just crank it up again and be on his way. Unfortunately there wasn’t even a click when he turned the key. On top of that, he found he had no cell service to call AAA. Instead of getting angry at his run of bad luck, he simply found and popped the hood latch and got out to look at the engine compartment. To Aaron, he may as well have been looking inside a nuclear reactor for all he knew about what was laid out before him. He couldn’t even identify anything other than the battery. He probably stared at the engine, not really seeing it while deep in thought about what he’d do, for a good few minutes before an old truck pulled up behind his car.

A good samaritan driving slowly down the highway had seen him looking confused and unsure of himself and decided to stop. After greeting Aaron and finding out the young man was completely ignorant of how an internal combustion engine even worked, short of knowing where the gas cap was located, he took a look himself and saw the problem immediately.

“Ya run over anything recently?” He asked in a slow, Texas drawl.

“I don’t think so, sir,” Aaron answered politely.

“Well that there chunk of metal din come from yer engine. Looks like ya picked something up an’ it severed yer main to the fuse. Hard to imagine ya din notice! Har har. But I got me a few tools in the bed box o’ my truck and I kin get ya runnin’ again in a jiffy if ya want.”

“Really? That would be awesome! I’ll pay you of course,” Aaron assured the man.

The man got a few tools and some insulation tape and set to work. Aaron, interested in what the guy was doing, watched intently. Some people don’t like being watched while they work, but the guy doing the work didn’t mind and decided to explain what he was doing to jury rig a repair. He was surprised at first that a grown man could know so little about life under the hood of a vehicle when he was obviously not the kind of man that had never done manual labor, but explaining how things worked was a passion of his and Aaron quickly became spellbound with the old man’s explanations. Within a few minutes, his car was once again running, although the pair probably spent closer to a half hour on the side of the road, Aaron being politely schooled.

The man refused payment for helping and instead, asked that Aaron pay it forward. He also suggested that it wouldn’t kill Aaron to learn a little more about the machine he used daily. Aaron took the suggestion to heart and the moment he got home, he logged into YouTube and began learning. A month later, he successfully changed his own oil for the first time.

A year later, he purchased a basketcase old car and set about restoring it instead of vegging in front of the TV every night. He didn’t do a classic restoration, but rather a restoration that included making all the buttons, switches and levers do their intended jobs, the engine running the way it was designed to run and the car driving the way the manufacturer had designed it to. It still needed paint and Aaron had no interest in learning how to do bodywork, but he was generally very proud of himself. He gave the car to a women’s shelter, secure in the knowledge that it’d be put to good use and be reliable transportation for quite some time to come.

Aaron found that as well as fixing things, not just engines, he liked to be able to gift his fixed items to people in need. He would pick up something, like for instance, a fan off the side of the road, take it home and see if he could make it run. Then he’d give it away. If Aaron hadn’t been so shy, he’d have realized how many friends he’d made in his efforts with his new hobby. Unfortunately, no one knew Aaron did not have a ton of friends already and Aaron never wanted to intrude into a stranger’s life, so as a result, he managed to go through life known as ‘Mr Fixit’ by the neighborhood without really getting to know anyone - or being able to call anyone, male or female, friend. It was a lonely life for the good natured but very plain and shy young man.

One day, he was delivering a window air conditioner he’d restored to a homeless shelter and a woman berated him for, ‘walking funny’, and nearly walking into her even though it was because his arms were loaded down with the air conditioner and he couldn’t see well around his load.

“I’m sorry for nearly walking into you and for offending you ma’am. Neither was my intention,” he said as he altered his path to walk around her.

Her response was to spit on the ground in front of him and suggest he grow a pair. Of course her response was heavy on the profanity as well.

Aaron was tired from staying up late the night before working on the air conditioner and hot from lugging it from his trunk to here. He realized that she could easily be one of the homeless people who’d be benefiting from his gift and that made him angry. He lived to help people and this ... woman ... was as ungrateful and nasty as anyone he’d ever had the misfortune to meet.

“It’s because I’ve got a pair that I don’t put this down and haul you over my knee. Teach you some manners. You ... cunt,” he said, taking another pace and thinking she wouldn’t hear him.

Aaron usually avoided trouble and he also never swore. He felt that resorting to cussing meant that a person didn’t have an adequate grasp of the english language to be able to express themself but in his overheated, exhausted mind, that word was the only one that fit this ... person.

“You’d better bring a fucking army if you think you’d have a shit show in hell of touching me, dickbreath!” the woman screamed at him, embarrassing him. He stopped walking and turned around to face the woman.

“I’m carrying a 90 pound air conditioner. I’ve carried it from a block away and it’s really getting heavy now. You weigh what, one twenty? You seriously think that if I was inclined to act like a caveman, I couldn’t take you? One of us is full of it and it isn’t me, laaaaady,” he sneered, his anger growing stronger.

“Oh boy. I’d like to see you try, zit dick. You ain’t no man. Just an overgrown choirboy. You couldn’t even take my daughter in a fair fight, not that we fight fair.”

Amber didn’t even know why she was talking to this stranger. Usually it was enough, seeing her expression of disgust, to scare men away. Something about him annoyed her for no reason and it was just fun to set morons like him straight about life. That he’d suggest he could or would give her a spanking was something that she just couldn’t let go. Secretly, she wanted to be spanked. She knew she needed it. She’d spent untold hours writing about fictional characters based on herself who needed discipline imposed on them to make them better people. Not in a very long time had someone been immune to her simple presence, much less call her on her attitude.