Chapter Nineteen #2
I find her a few minutes later behind one of the transporters, where the noise drops from constant engine roar to something more manageable.
She’s leaning against the metal side with a water bottle trapped between both hands, peeling the label into thin strips with her thumbnail while she stares toward the road.
“Running away?”
Her head turns toward me.
“I’m hiding for five minutes before somebody asks me to touch another fucking fork.”
I laugh and lean back against the transporter beside her. “That bad?”
“I’ve heard preload, rebound and compression so many times today they’ve stopped sounding like real words.”
“Could start talking about tire pressure instead.”
She cuts me a look. “I will actually walk away from you.”
I grin. “Got it. No bike talk.”
For a while neither of us says anything.
Engines start somewhere across the paddock, followed by the rise and fall of voices.
An announcement crackles through a speaker farther away, too distorted for me to catch more than a few words.
The air smells like fuel, damp pavement and fried food drifting over from somewhere beyond the team area.
Echo keeps tearing pieces off the bottle label.
Eventually she says, “I hate when you guys go out.”
I look over at her and find her still staring ahead.
“At the normal circuits, even if I can’t physically see every part of the track, somebody can.
There are cameras, sectors, marshals, runoff, and you come back around again.
There’s a rhythm to it.” She gestures vaguely toward the road with the bottle.
“Here you all disappear for thirty-seven fucking miles and I’m supposed to stand there staring at a screen like that’s enough information. ”
“It is a little strange when you’re used to circuits.”
“A little?”
I smile.
“Okay. A lot.”
She looks down at the shredded label. “I keep thinking about everything I can’t see. Every section where I don’t know what the bike is doing, whether something feels wrong, whether one of you is pushing harder than you should.”
“You should be scared.”
Her head turns toward me so fast I laugh.
“That is possibly the least comforting thing you could have said.”
“I wasn’t trying to comfort you.”
“Yeah well no shit, I gathered that.”
I nudge her shoulder gently with mine.
“There are sections out there that scare me too.”
That makes her pause.
“You?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought your whole thing was being annoyingly calm about everything.”
“I’m calm. I’m not stupid.”
Her mouth twitches, and I look toward the road.
“There are places out there where I know exactly how small the margin is. I know what happens if I miss the braking point or get greedy with a line. Pretending that doesn’t scare me wouldn’t make me better at this. It’d make me careless.”
Echo’s expression changes, some of the sarcasm easing out of it.
“So you don’t ever take fear as a sign that maybe you shouldn’t be doing it?”
“Sometimes. Depends what the fear is telling me.”
She turns a little more toward me.
“If it’s panic, if I don’t trust the bike or myself, then yeah, I listen to that. But being aware that something can hurt you isn’t the same as being incapable of doing it.”
I reach over and pull the ruined strip of label out of her fingers before she tears the bottle completely bare.
“Fear doesn’t always mean stop, wa?yé?a. Sometimes it just means pay attention.”
She watches me for a second, then she exhales through her nose.
“I really hate it when you make sense.”
“I know.”
I laugh, and she bumps her shoulder against mine. The silence after that feels easier, so, I let it sit for a minute before asking, “What are you doing tonight?”
Her eyes narrow immediately.
“That question sounds suspicious.”
“I’m asking you out.”
That catches her enough that she stops peeling the label.
“Like an actual date?”
“Yeah.”
She studies my face. “You planning something horrifyingly romantic?”
“Depends how horrifying you find food and an ocean.”
“That’s manageable.”
I slide two fingers through the belt loop at her hip and tug her a little closer.
“I know I agreed to share.”
A smile starts.
“How generous of you.”
“I thought so. Very mature.”
“Basically a saint.”
“Still want you to myself sometimes.”
The joke fades from her expression, replaced by something warmer.
“You do?”
“Yeah. I like us when everybody else is around. I like the mess too.” My thumb brushes lightly against her side. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want time where I don’t have to compete with Thorne talking shit or Draygon staring holes through the room.”
She laughs softly.
“Jealous?”
“Not really. I know you want them. I also know you want me.”
Her mouth curves. “Very sure of yourself.”
“With you? Yeah.”
She studies me for a second, then smiles. “Dangerous.”
“Come out with me tonight.”
“Only if the food’s good. And I pick dessert.”
“Done.”
She starts to step away, but I catch her hand and pull her back long enough to kiss her temple.
“You can go now.”
She looks at me like I’ve offended her.
“Thanks for permission.”
“Anytime.”
“Dick.”
I watch her walk back toward the paddock smiling.
Yeah.
Good day.
****
I take her somewhere small that evening, mostly because anything too polished would make Echo suspicious.
The place is near the coast, tucked between a couple older buildings with a chalkboard menu behind the counter and mismatched tables out front. We grab food to go because the weather is holding, then walk until the houses thin out and find a quiet stretch of grass above the water.
Echo drops beside me and steals one of my fries before I’ve even opened the second container.
I look at her. “You do know you have your own, right?”
“Mhm.” She pops the fry into her mouth without an ounce of shame. “Yours looked better.”
“They came out of the same damn kitchen.”
“Still picked yours.”
I shake my head, already laughing.
“You’re a menace.”
“And yet you brought me on a date.”
“Starting to question my judgment.”
She reaches over and steals another fry.
“Bit late for that now.”
We eat while the water moves below us, gray-blue under the evening sky. The wind is cooler here but not bad enough to chase us indoors, and Echo eventually pulls her knees up, sleeves covering half her hands as she looks toward the horizon.
After a while she asks, “What do you actually miss about Canada?”
I think about it.
“The mountains, mostly. Florida’s nice, but everything feels flat after growing up around them.”
She smiles.
“I miss forests too. Proper ones. Places where you can ride for a couple hours and barely see anybody. Lakes that stay cold enough in summer.”
“That sounds miserable.”
“You’d love it.”
She looks over.
“What makes you so sure?”
“You complain about being outside right up until somebody tries getting you to go back inside. You’d spend the first week bitching about the cold, buy another six hoodies and then decide you’re never leaving.”
“I already own an unreasonable number of hoodies.”
“Exactly. See, you’re prepared.”
She looks back toward the water, smile lingering.
“Maybe.”
I don’t say anything to that.
I just let myself like the sound of it.
We finish eating, and for a while the conversation wanders without either of us trying to steer it anywhere important.
She asks about where I grew up, whether I miss riding roads back home, what winter actually feels like when you have to live in it instead of visiting for Christmas.
I tell her enough to make her complain preemptively about snow, which is entertaining considering she isn’t even going.
Eventually the conversation turns toward music.
I look at her. “You ever seriously think about doing something with it?”
She groans. “Here we go.”
“What?”
“Feelings.”
“You brought up Canada.”
“That was geography. Very safe subject.”
I laugh. “You can tell me to mind my business.”
“I normally do.”
“True.”
She picks at a loose thread near her knee.
“I thought about it when I was younger. I still write, obviously, but bikes always felt easier to take seriously.”
“Why?”
She thinks about it for a second, then gives a small shrug. “Probably because nobody ever made music feel like something I was allowed to build a life around. Bikes were different. There was always something practical about them. Something I could point at and say, I know how to do that.”
I nod, watching her profile against the water. “You ever regret it?”
“Not really.” She glances over. “I think I would’ve regretted forcing music into being a job more. I like that it’s still mine.”
That makes sense.
“Then keep it yours.”
Her expression softens a little. “Yeah. That’s kind of the plan.”
For a few seconds, neither of us says anything. The wind has picked up again, colder now that the sun’s almost gone, and Echo pulls her sleeves farther over her hands before looking toward the path we came down.
I get to my feet and hold a hand out to her. “We should probably head back before Thorne starts wondering where the hell we disappeared to.”
Echo slips her hand into mine and lets me pull her up. “And if Andre catches us rolling in too late, he’s going to give us that whole speech about sleep, hydration and not treating the TT like a fucking vacation.”
“He’ll say it to me like you had absolutely nothing to do with it.”
“Obviously. Cause you’re the bad influence.”
I laugh. “That’s rich coming from you.”
“What it’s true!”
“Come on, wa?yé?a. Let’s get back before we both get grounded.”
“God, that would make Thorne unbearably happy.”
“For sure. He would never let us live it down.”
She laughs, and we start back toward the road with our hands still linked.
By the time we get back to the house, it’s late enough that most of the downstairs lights are off. The place has finally gone quiet, which feels like a small miracle considering who we’re living with.
Echo glances toward the dark living room as we step inside. “Think we got away with it?”
“Depends how invested Thorne was in keeping tabs on us.”
She snorts softly. “So, no.”
“Probably not.”