Chapter 4
Harper’s garage is right next to Crosswire’s, so it only takes a minute to get to Travis’s changing room.
I let myself in without knocking and find him sitting on the narrow couch with his phone in his hand and his feet thrown up on a chair.
He’s dressed in his race suit, but he has it unzipped to the waist, revealing the fireproof shirt underneath.
He looks up at me and smiles. “Hey, you.”
“Hey,” I say tersely. “What’s up? You said it was important.”
“Come look at this,” he says, beckoning for me to sit down beside him.
I perch on the very edge of the couch as he turns his phone toward me. He taps play on a video he has loaded up.
“What are you doing, silly girl?” our dogsitter, Molly, asks. The camera is pointed at Morocco’s tail, which is thumping on the edge of our bed. “What did you do with all your toys?” Molly says.
I groan. “Are you serious?”
“What?”
I get to my feet. “FP3 starts in, like, ten minutes. I have to go.”
“It starts in twenty minutes,” Travis says. “Sit down.”
“Travis—”
“Sit.”
His tone doesn’t leave room for argument. I sit down again. Reluctantly.
“Now watch the video,” he says. “Properly.”
I make an aggrieved noise, but he ignores me, turning my chin to point my face at the screen.
“What are you doing, silly girl?” Molly asks again. “What did you do with all your toys?”
She moves the camera up from Morocco’s tail to her head, which is buried in a pile of her toys. There’s her favorite stuffy, a bright red lobster that Travis and I bought for her in St. John’s, and a donut-shaped toy from Matty, and about thirty others.
“Did you bring all your toys up onto the bed?” Molly asks. Morocco’s tail thumps loudly. “Do you wish your daddies would stay away so you could sleep in their bed with all your toys every night?”
Morocco thumps her tail some more, then she rolls over for a belly rub, and the video ends.
“Isn’t that cute?” Travis says.
I’m seriously going to kill him. “Very cute. Not, however, what I would qualify as ‘important.’”
He feigns a gasp. “Blasphemy.”
“Travis—”
“I saw your interviews,” he says.
I flush bright red. “Oh.”
“Mm.” He looks like he’s fighting a smile. “You’re really good at them.”
“I know, right,” I mutter.
He pokes my cheek. “It helps that you’ve got such a great smile. Really puts people at ease.”
My mouth twists into a grudging smile. That’s exactly what I said to him the first time we met.
“You’re freaking out,” he says.
It isn’t a question. I heave a sigh and sink back into the couch. “Yeah.”
“Nervous?”
“I wasn’t. But then there were all these people shoving phones in my face, and reporters asking all these questions, and my fucking father promised tickets to his friends—”
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah. Isn’t that messed up? I know I shouldn’t care. I don’t care. It’s just—it’s so—”
“I know.” He threads his fingers into mine.
“I really have to get back,” I say, though I make no effort to reclaim my hand. “There’s probably stuff I should be doing.”
“What you have to be doing,” Travis says, “is sitting here with me and looking at pictures of Morocco. Did I show you the one from yesterday? She is the world’s most perfect dog.”
He swipes open his phone again and shows me a picture. Then he scrolls to another one, and another. It’s kind of ridiculous, how many pictures he has of her.
Ridiculous and adorable. I hook my chin over his shoulder as he scrolls, and with every picture, my breath comes a bit easier.
It’s not just that Morocco is, in fact, the world’s most perfect dog.
It’s all the little reminders of our life back in London.
A shot from the dog park where we take her to play.
A photo of the dog bed we always try to make her sleep on before caving and letting her sleep on our bed.
Take-out containers on the coffee table in the background from the Mexican place we tried a few weeks ago.
I let my weight sink into him a bit more. “We need to call someone to fix the dishwasher,” I say, as he swipes to a photo of Morocco in the kitchen.
“Yeah,” he says. “I can do it when we get back.”
He scrolls through a few more pictures. I take a few more deep breaths.
The world backs up a bit, like a camera zooming out, and my heart rate slows down as I regain perspective.
Fumbling an interview doesn’t matter. My father’s awful behavior doesn’t matter.
My life is bigger than that. It’s the broken dishwasher we need to get fixed, and the pile of Morocco’s toys on our bed.
It’s my coffee date with Kelsie next week, and Nate’s wedding next month.
It’s the scrapbook I have to finish by Christmas, and the trips we have planned after the season is done.
It’s London, and it’s Travis, and nothing that happens this weekend can change that one bit.
“Want to listen to my pre-race playlist?” Travis asks. “I’ve been told it sounds like the music they play at spas.”
I smile into his shoulder. That’s another thing I said to him the first time we met. “I love you a lot.”
He smiles. “I know.”
He taps on his phone and starts up some music, instrumental stuff that would absolutely get played at a spa. I wrap my arms around him and breathe in the smell of his skin, letting the warmth of his strong frame sink into mine.
“You,” he says eventually, “are about to drive a really fast car."
A slow smile stretches over my face. The good kind of nerves are rising up again. “Faster than yours,” I say.
He grins. “Tell that to the time sheets.”
“If you do beat me,” I say, stretching my shoes against the floor, “it’ll only be because my feet have gone so numb I can’t feel the pedals.”
Travis chuckles. “I can help with that.” He gets to his feet, retrieves a pair of race shoes from his closet, and tosses them to me. “Here. You and I wear the same size.”
“These are Harper shoes,” I point out.
“So?”
I laugh. “So they say ‘Harper’ on them. I don’t think Crosswire would appreciate that.”
“Right.” Travis frowns. “Hand them back to me a sec.”
He opens a drawer in his desk and takes out a black Sharpie. Then he scratches a line through the word “Harper” and writes “Crosswire” instead.
He hands them back to me. “Problem solved.”
I stare at his messy handwriting for a minute. Then I put the shoes down, cross the distance between us, and kiss him hard.
“You are the love of my fucking life,” I say.
He smiles widely, a deep dimple splitting each of his cheeks. “And you have to go get in your car.” He puts his shoes back in my arms and nudges me toward the door. “I’ll see you out there. I’ll be the one driving much, much faster than you.”
I grin over my shoulder. “We’ll see about that.”
Travis’s race shoes fit me perfectly, and I’m pretty sure only Sofia notices the Sharpie.
She snorts under her breath and says, “Really, Jacob?” but she doesn’t make me change out of them.
It’s not like anyone’s going to see them once I’m in the car, and she can probably tell I’m more relaxed with them on.
Part of it is just having shoes that fit properly, but it also feels like a bit of good luck, having something of Travis’s on me.
The new seat in Clayton’s car fits me perfectly, too, and the crash helmet the team got for me is really cool. It’s a super dark, shimmery green color, and when my image pops up on the TV screens around the garage, it looks really awesome under the lights.
I find the cameraman filming me and give him a thumbs up, and to my surprise, I hear a distant cheer from the grandstands.
I think a lot of people are rooting for me because of what happened last year.
I’m not sure being in a horrible crash makes me deserving of their applause, but honestly, right now, I’m going to take it.
I settle into the car, flexing my fingers around the steering wheel and feeling the shape of the pedals under my feet. Someone thumps the top of my helmet for good luck—Samuel, I think—and Cory’s voice comes to life in my ear. His tone is calm and reassuring, but I don’t need to be reassured.
I’m ready for this moment. I’ve been waiting for it for years.
As soon as the pit lane opens, the pit crew wave me out of the garage. FP3 lasts an hour, and some of the other drivers, like Travis and Mahoney, might only do a handful of laps. But I have to use every available second to get used to this beast of a car.
I’ve driven Crosswire’s old F1 car before, but that was on a private circuit on a cool English day.
This is a narrow, walled-in track at nighttime, and it’s one hundred and twenty degrees inside of the car.
By the end of my out lap, I’m soaked with sweat.
By the end of my first push lap, my neck muscles are on fire.
But I’m doing this, I’m actually doing it. I’m driving an F1 car, and I’m not doing a terrible job. Admittedly, I have a few harrowing brushes with the wall, and a snap of oversteer that almost ends in disaster, but by the end of the hour, my laps times are getting good.
Really good. Like, two tenths of a second off Mahoney.
“Well done, Jacob,” Cory says in my ear. “You’ve got time for one more, if you want it.”
I push the radio button. “Yes, please.”
I really want to beat Mahoney’s time. I know he’s probably not pushing as hard as he would in quali, and I know that lap times in practice don’t mean that much for the other drivers.
But Sofia is watching me right now, and Tom Kellen, and I don’t want to prove to them that I might be as good as Mahoney someday.
I want to prove that I’m as good as him now.
That if they put me in this car next season, I’ll come out of the gate fighting for wins.
I put my foot down and fly across the starting line.
I’m a tenth up on Mahoney by the end of sector one.
I’m two tenths up by the end of sector two.
Halfway through sector three, Cory warns me, “Traffic up ahead,” but I round a corner and see that it’s Travis on a cool-down lap, and I know he’ll stay off the racing line and out of my way.
Instead, at the very last second, he jerks his car to the left, and I nearly hit the wall swerving out of his way.
“The fuck,” I splutter.
But even as the words leave my mouth, I see a flash of white in the corner of my eye.
“You okay, Jacob?” Cory says in my ear.
An incredulous laugh bubbles out of me. “Yeah,” I say, a bit breathlessly. “There’s a dog on the track.”
“What?”
“A dog,” I repeat.
There’s a beat of confused silence. “Er—affirm. Box this lap.”
I laugh all the way down the pit lane, high on adrenaline and relief. The pit crew push the car back into the garage, and I sit in it for a few minutes, pretending to fiddle with my helmet while I get my giddy laughter under control.
“Nice work,” Cory says, after I’ve climbed out of the car. “Really well done, Jacob, seriously.”
I beam at him. “Thanks.”
“Do you want us to report Keeping for impeding on that last lap?”
I smother another laugh. “No, that’s okay.”
“Do you want us to report the dog for impeding?” Samuel chimes in.
I snort. “Oh, yeah, absolutely.”
“I’ll go talk to the stewards about it,” Cory says, frowning. “We can’t have a stray dog running around during qualifying.”
“But what if we pay the dog to impede all of our rivals?” Samuel asks. “Cory? Don’t just walk away—that’s a genius idea and you know it!”
Cory scowls at him over his shoulder.
Samuel grins and holds out his fist for me to bump. “Nice session.”
“Thanks.” I hesitate. “Um—Samuel?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you know what I’m supposed to do now?”
I thought Sofia and Cory would want to talk to me right away, but Cory’s gone to talk to the stewards and Sofia is sitting at her computer with a look on her face that forbids interruptions.
Samuel’s eyebrows lift a little in surprise, then he smiles. “Go grab some food and come back in, like, an hour. Sofia likes to sit with the data for a while before she and Cory talk to you about it.”
“Right. Thanks.”
“No problem.” He glances around and then adds, with a conspiratorial smile, “She’s really impressed. I heard her talking.”
A shiver of pure excitement runs through me. “Thanks, man.”