Chapter Three
Chapter Three
There isn’t a coffee shop within walking distance, only a dimly lit dive bar somehow actually named The Affair. If I’d been wondering whether or not the universe was getting a kick out of my life today, that cosmic joke has been confirmed.
“Another coffee?” the bartender asks. She can’t be old enough to serve me anything else. I’m twenty-four. She’s a literal infant.
“Hit me,” I say, then frown. “Weird phrase.”
“At least you didn’t call me sweetheart,” she says with a small smile. “You’re the nicest person I’ll get all day.”
“What a shame.”
As I thumb between my bank account, a plane ticket website, and the online marketplace where I just listed my apartment for sublease, the baby bartender leans her elbows on the glossy wood top and peers at me. “You okay?” she asks after I’ve made meaningfully prolonged eye contact with the Lone Star flag in the corner. Ask me what I’m thinking! eye contact.
Also, I’d been crying off and on every ten minutes before sliding into the denial stage of grief, which had to have been disconcerting. “I moved here for my boyfriend yesterday. He cheated on me, broke up with me oh, thirty minutes ago, and fired me from what I thought was our company but, surprise, completely belongs to him.”
The bartender’s eyes widen. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. Well, no. I’m pretty sure I’m in shock. But kind of a fun shock where I want to move away so quickly that his head spins?” It feels good to name the emotion. Strong. See what a head can do without its heart!
“Would tequila help?”
“No thank you.” I wave my phone. “Lots of planning to do.”
“Word. Let me know if you change your mind.” She starts wiping down glasses, and the methodical rub-setdown, rub-setdown does a wonder on the my-life-is-over jitters. “What all do you have to do?”
“At the moment, just get someone to rent my apartment so I can afford a plane ticket back and a hotel for when I get there. He locked me out of the company email and server, where all our files are.” I pause, needing a moment after voicing that new truth. “So I have no clue what I’ll do once I’m back in D.C., but anything is better than staying here.” My jaw is spring-loaded tight. I rub at my cheek and let my shoulders fall. “Sorry. I’m sure this town is cute when your life isn’t in pieces.”
My new therapist gives me a sympathetic smile. “Don’t apologize. Men are dogs. If I could date women, I’d be out.”
“I have and they still got me.”
She laughs. “Dogs.”
She starts to ask another question, only for the bell above the door to jingle and her customer-service instincts to kick in. “Welcome to The Affair,” she chirps at the newcomer, and I’m reminded once again that The Affair is the worst name for a bar in the history of broken pool tables and buzzy neon lighting.
The newcomer sits three creaky stools down from me, and suddenly the bartender is all smiles, the glow on her cheeks her very own neon sign blinking permanently distracted. So much for being the nicest person here all day. “Hey!” she says. “Didn’t think you were coming in.”
“Don’t tell anyone.”
Swiveling with a very-subtle creak, I peek at the person. Guy. Blond. His face is in profile, but wow, what a treat. He’s all angles, nose and forehead and chin and oh my God, it’s Arthur Bianco.
I swiftly swivel away.
But we’re still the only two patrons in this bar. When he speaks, it’s to me. “Damn, Graywood. Didn’t think you’d be hitting the bottle this early. I’m impressed.”
I could ignore him. I have things to do. Ample reasons to not engage.
“It’s just coffee,” I mutter.
He snorts. “You’re at a bar at nine in the morning and you’re drinking coffee?”
“Exactly? Are you saying you’re not drinking coffee?”
I can feel his smarmy smile radiating through the air. “Oh, I was going to get blackout drunk.”
My nose wrinkles with disgust. “Charming. And then what?”
“Carmen here”—he nods to the bartender—“was going to be the absolute doll she is and give me a ride to work, where my drunkenness was going to horrify you into quitting the documentary. Great scheme for me, since I get to have breakfast beer. Or, hm, a morning Aperitivo?”
I bark out a laugh. I can’t help it; it’s a horrible plan from top to bottom, considering that he’s a professional athlete and can’t rock up to his cubicle buzzed, hoping Human Resources doesn’t notice. But then my attention snaps over to Arthur’s face, or more accurately, his eyes, and I search for the inappropriate-laughter anger that should be there. Will be there. I’m literally laughing at him.
Only it’s not there. “See? It would’ve worked,” he says, eyes gleaming at his own joke. “You hate me already.”
“I don’t think about you enough to hate you,” I reply. “But dislike? Yes. You’re easy to dislike—”
“Aw, you do think about me.”
“And you don’t need to worry much longer about having me around, by the way, so don’t go getting drunk and blaming me.”
Arthur leans toward me with a barstool cre-ee-eeak that screams for attention. “You’re leaving? Why?”
He must be made out of muscle—typical—because my barstool barely wheezes out a pathetic squeak when I turn toward him. At least he’s dressed today. Green shirt. Black pants. Big frown. He has that air of surprised impatience that beautiful rich people develop in their early twenties, after they’ve graduated from whichever Ivy League their parents paid for and get red-carpet-rolled into a world built just for them. Life is predictable for this man, and when it’s not, he frowns.
“Yes. I’m leaving.”
I sound as annoyed as I feel. He isn’t asking because he actually wants to know what’s going on with me, or if I’m okay, or how hard it is to not slip back into being an angry foster kid, screaming internally about how unfair life is. Arthur Bianco doesn’t want to know how it took my adoptive family’s backwoods Buddhism and morning meditations for the troubled girl to grow into a mostly unflappable adult. No, he just wants to make any woman with a pulse pay attention to him. He’s like the obnoxious student a teacher sits you next to in an attempt to make the boy nicer, sacrificing your education for his.
A quiet, average woman like me not unraveling at Arthur’s attention must be a blow to his ego. It was much more endearing when the bartender was trying to get to know me.
Speaking of. My eyes flash to where she’d been seconds ago, seeking out solidarity, only to find that she’s vanished. Traitor.
Oh well. I take a deep breath. “You know Max Black?”
“Your business partner.”
“You called it. We were dating.”
Arthur’s eyes narrow. “ Were dating?”
“As of this morning, we’re not.” I wrap my hands around my coffee, seeking out the dull warmth. “And according to the LLC registration, I didn’t own one half of Black I’d hoped that if I ignored how close it was to me, it might go away. Now the emotions I’ve been running from punch me square in the stomach. Hearing the icy disappointment in Arthur’s voice is affirming, but painful. Someone else knows what happened to me today—sees the emotional whirlwind twisting inside me, waiting for everything to hit, how much I’ve lost, how my life will never, ever be the same, and it was completely out of my control—and they think it sucks. Sure, this sympathy is coming from someone who probably treats his girlfriends infinitely worse than this, but hey.
“She doesn’t know he was cheating. At least there’s that.”
I wait for Arthur to smile at my sparkling gallows humor, or to start drinking now that he’s confirmed that I’ll be out of his hair as soon as possible. But he does neither. He just looks at me.
“Max is going to keep making the documentary?” he asks.
“Sure seems that way.”
“Then you need to stay,” Arthur says. “Here. You have to stay.”
My eyebrows lift on their own accord. “Excuse me?”
“We could work together.”
“On?”
“Ruining the movie.” He slides from his barstool to the one next to me, and then he’s next to me , intense and determined and so much taller than me that I have to lean back to meet his wild eyes. He’s close, wide, animated as he talks. “Do you know what a reserve driver is?”
“Like a backup quarterback?”
“Right.” He grins. “But I have an offer for a seat on another team. Leone Racing. Italian. The dream. Best in the world.” There are a few more adjectives I miss as I try to remember where I just saw that name—Leone. That was the team he used to drive for, before his headline-making party days. The fancy one. “I have to get out of my contract with Ignition by the end of the season so I can drive for them next year, and I can’t be seen as loyal to Ignition or do any over-the-top media until then. Leone will want to tell my story, to relaunch my career. That’s why I’ve been trying to get out of this documentary.”
“But wouldn’t Leone like the attention a film gets you?” I ask, trying to keep up.
His grin curls higher, clearly satisfied by my question-asking. “F1 already associates me with Ignition, since my dear old uncle decided to become our team principal after I’d signed my contract. If some idiotic film comes out about me and his team, it’ll be all the media talks about for months. Years, if Holmes has his way. Ignition wants this to be the proper F1 blockbuster that finally breaks through the American market. Merchandise, sponsors, hospitality packages—the transition to Leone would be a mess.”
I hadn’t considered the timeline on his end; Max and I were supposed to film through September 1, and then it’d have taken us months to edit the project. If Arthur is trying to get out of his contract by the end of the season—in December, I think—then the documentary would’ve launched at the worst possible time. “Have you told Ignition that you want out of your contract?”
“Told my uncle?” Arthur cocks a brow at me. “No. And you’re not going to, either. Do you know how many seats are available in Formula 1?”
“No?”
“Twenty,” he replies. “This is my one-in-twenty shot in getting to race again for the team I need to race for. One of their driver’s contracts is up. It’s now or never.”
“Seriously?” I squint at him, not totally buying his sob story. “I would think your fancy uncle would give you a seat at Ignition.”
Something passes over Arthur’s face, a cloud over the sun. Then the emotion is gone, filed away, and trapped beneath his bouncy smile. “You’d think that.”
He’s hiding something. That, or Ignition is. I swallow as the thought comes to me, direct, determined, forever surprised by my own instincts. Max always had to hold me back from being a bloodhound, as he called it. When I catch wind that a subject is squirming in front of my camera, hiding the truth from me, I want to distract them from the cut and press the wound when they’re not watching, circle like a vulture they don’t even spot. Learning things nobody wants you to know is addictive.
And Max isn’t here anymore.
“But Ignition stalling my career won’t matter if I have you,” Arthur continues. “If we ruin this documentary, I’ll get to drive with Leone, and you’ll get your revenge.”
Revenge.
The word makes me scrunch my nose. My glasses slip down a bit, so I scoot them up, and Arthur’s excitement suspends as he watches my fingers. Then that moment ends, and his determined expression is back like there was never a distraction.
“I don’t know…” I lean farther away from him and sneak a sip of coffee. “Feels like a bad idea.”
“Why? Don’t you want to keep Max from getting away with this?”
“Yes. But first, I don’t like to be around you. I feel like I can say that now that I’m, you know, fired.”
“And you covered it up so well yesterday,” he jokes. “Don’t worry. The feeling is mutual.”
“Because I don’t like Formula 1?”
“Because you’re a documentarian.” Arthur’s tone is surprisingly even. “And if it wasn’t for this little ex of yours pissing you off, you wouldn’t have spoken to me here. You’d have turned your nose up, remained superior, and walked into work all fake smiles or iron fist, as if you’re the first person who’s thought to make money off me by forcing me to play the same role I’ve been playing my entire life.”
Oh. “But our dislike for each other works to our advantage,” he continues. “Ignition knows I hate the media, and they think you love your career. Nobody will think we’re working together.”
“Fair,” I say, thrown off by everything he just said. But—no time to unpack it. Shock and denial are kind of nice, actually. They keep you moving right along. “I don’t really want revenge, though. I only want to make sure Max can’t keep operating as Black I do need to take out Max if I want to stop him from stealing the company and my last name. Max doesn’t let go of a plan once he’s decided on it. Making a better documentary than him, harder hitting, better researched, more exciting—alongside a real Formula 1 celebrity? That’s my kind of revenge.
And the idea of using this summer to make another film stops the panic rising from my toes to my ankles, up my legs, up my chest. There isn’t another safety net waiting to catch me, no luxury car manufacturers like Leone jumping to help. Nobody just becomes a documentarian when you’re born in a dime-sized Appalachian town where “good jobs” are an hour away, minimum. You have to want it more. Than anyone. You have to be hungrier and stronger and maybe a little too mean. Plus, my parents had adopted me when I was sixteen, and already used money they didn’t have to send me to film school just two years later. I can’t go back to them for more help.
If Arthur says no, it’ll take me years to fully rebuild my life without Max, prove that I’m a filmmaker in my own right, and figure out a way to fund a project… if I could even afford to stay in the city and keep working in politics.
Arthur said this was a one-in-twenty shot for him. For me, this opportunity might be one in a million.
“Please,” I whisper to him. “You help me. I help you. We tolerate each other long enough to ruin a bad movie and make a good one. Then you get to race for Leone, and I get to go back to D.C. with a great new film.”
Somehow, Arthur might be as desperate to salvage his career as I am, because he only stares at me for a few more tense moments. Then he holds out his hand, his expression unreadable. “Italy.”
“What?”
“You’ll go back to D.C., and I’ll move to Italy. That’s where Leone is based.”
I take his hand before he can change his mind, the warmth from his long tan fingers shocking my anxiety-chilled skin. “Deal. Thank you. I mean—fuck you, and thank you, and it’s going to be good. Really good.”
Arthur’s eyes glow with what might be a suppressed windchime laugh. It’s hard to tell. “If I’m doing this with you, it’s going to be the best movie anyone’s ever seen.”