Slipstream

Chapter Thirteen Monaco

Chapter Thirteen Monaco

Arthur doesn’t get angry when he collects his suitcase from the concierge and I just stand there, awkwardly apologetic. “Where are your things?” he asks with a puzzled frown.

“Well. I don’t know.”

Travel has wrinkled his shirt—definitely not the nap I took on him—and he plucks the fabric from his chest as he inspects my closed-book frown. “You don’t know?”

“It’s nothing.” I avert my eyes. “When are we meeting up with everyone else?”

My diversion tactic is unsuccessful. “Did someone take them?”

“No. Um, this… it happens. I sometimes lose things.” The prim man behind the concierge counter looks over. His eyes flick away when I meet them, judging. He heard that. I’m being weird. “It’s okay. I can get more clothes. It’s just stuff anyway.”

I shrink under the weight of Arthur’s worried eyes. His face is so much more serious when he’s upset and the false bravado he wears so well drops away. The emotion adds dimension to his blond-hair-tan-skin-hazel-eyes sameness, a rich splash of ink among the gold.

“How is this ‘okay’?” he asks, and there’s this crack inside my chest that sounds like ice breaking underfoot, but I’m the frozen thing threatening to swallow us both up.

It’s okay, because I lived out of a backpack as a kid, where homework and birthday cards went in then never came out. This is me doing great, because I’m literally a loser. I’ve lost everything I’ve ever had. “It just is.” I quickly wipe under my eyes, just in case. “This isn’t the first time I’ve left something somewhere without realizing it. I—I have ADHD. So I lose things.”

Careless, easily distracted, impulsive, disorganized. Look up ADHD online, and you’ll find a grocery list of traits I’ve either ground out of my personality or learned to accept. I’d trade it all again to be as creative as I am, to make movies. But I wish I didn’t have to.

Arthur steps toward me. “Lilah.”

My muscles tense. He rarely says my first name. “What?”

“You don’t need to put up this much of a fight when people want to help you.”

“Pretending you’re okay is what strong, functional adults do,” I reply. I’m going for dry humor, but it comes out as pitiful honesty. How is it that the moment I say something out loud that I’ve silently believed since I was a kid, I can hear how depressing it is?

Arthur’s frown deepens. I’m momentarily afraid this educational boyfriend act he’s doing will make him touch me again, and my spine stiffens, ready to act defensive for the rest of my weepy body. Truth is, I’d really like if he did. Hold me, like he did on the plane. But I’m not ready to process whatever that confusing development means, beyond how it’s been ages since someone touched me to make me happy instead of the other way around.

With a soft sigh, Arthur slips his hands into his pockets. Farewell, potential hug. “I have an hour until anyone notices I’m missing,” he says. “I was going to go walk around Port Hercules before the photo shoot. Come with me.”

“A port?”

“It’s cool.” Arthur sucks in one cheek, then shakes his head. “Ah, forget it.”

“No.” The word comes flying out. “I mean, yes. I’ll come.”

“Really?” He’s already brightening up, a smile starting to take root. “We can rent a car. You want to drive, or shall I?”

“Oh. You. I don’t—drive.”

His eyes brush down my face, then he nods. “Works for me.”

“What?” I’m talking before thinking. “That’s weird , Arthur. Sixteen-year-olds can drive.”

“Why would I think that? I like to drive. You don’t. We’ll get along better this way.”

“Hmm.” I side-eye him. No one is this nice when I say I don’t drive. “It’s not an ADHD thing. But it’s not not one.”

“Okay.”

“I can’t tell where the car is, spatially.”

“Well, that is difficult.”

“Don’t lie, you could drive anything.”

“I could print you a book of cars I’ve refused to drive.”

“I also run into doorknobs a lot. And tables. Cabinets.”

“I’ll stay on the lookout for any rogue kitchens.” He offers his arm. “Come on. There’s a garden nearby, too. We leave now, we’ll get in before they close.”

For a second, I’m confused about why he waits for my reaction after saying that. Then I remember telling him about my prize-winning tomatoes, and that same blue-ribbon rush kicks through my leftover sadness. What if Arthur is thinking about me as someone who’s won things, just like he has?

I’ve always felt singular, like the strangest person to ever exist, an alien that crash-landed on Earth and was raised among the humans. I’ve never figured out the right mask to wear—my regular adult-woman facade slips when a conversation goes too fast and I can’t figure out how to reply, and then everyone is waiting, and then they’re not, and I’ve missed it again. The cue. The normal social interaction. But when Arthur looks at me like this, I realize maybe being unique isn’t a tragedy if it’s the reason he keeps smiling at me.

Somehow this feel like winning, too.

I start to ask if he’s positive he wants to spend his precious free hours with me, but then Arthur’s looking over my head, and his brow furrows. “Lilah, don’t talk to her about—”

“Hello, friends!” Delaney says. Her voice is caught between singsong and pissed-off personal manager who didn’t know her celebrity sports star was going to cuddle with a documentarian on a jet. “Question as someone who flew on the other, less exciting plane. What are you two doing after this?”

Arthur rents a car. It isn’t a Leone.

Though it is white and sleek and shaped not unlike a beluga whale. I insist that Delaney take the front seat, she does, and then we’re off, twisting through the packed dreamscape of Monte Carlo. The hill-nestled buildings begin to thin out, fading into the surprise that is the French Riviera. Before seeing the perfect blue marina for myself, I’d assumed the French Riviera was, well, a river… in France. I was wrong. Apparently, it’s this whole coastline, and Monte Carlo is basically Navy Pier for the uber-wealthy, teeming with high-end restaurants and five-star hotels. And Arthur’s first watch photo shoot is on his family yacht, docked in the port.

No garden today.

Arthur is carted off by photographers, and I, unsure of what to do with myself, pretend like it was my plan all along to film him getting his picture taken. Stylists flutter between photos to tweak his outfit like he’s a Ken doll, and the colossal silver-and-orange diving watch hanging from his wrist is his signature plastic accessory. Then, after an hour of that, the brand team waves in other F1 drivers they’ve accumulated: James Hawke and a slender redhead with a beard that turns out to be Jean Baudelaire, and then three more muscular, smiley men I’ve never seen in my life. There’s Yuzhe Lei and Clark Templeton from Static Racing, a gamer-slash-fashion-designer and “legendary rude man,” respectively. From Cavalli, I meet Rafael Ramirez, a baby-faced driver from Mexico who bolts once he learns I’m filming because, “Sorry, but—yeah—be right back!” But then he does come back, dubious beer in hand, to ask me exactly what us camerapeople think when they, the athletes, drop an f-bomb on a live broadcast. “Do you get mad?” he whispers. “Or is it okay?”

“Definitely okay. This isn’t live.”

“And you work with Arthur?”

I nod, and his face glows. He’s so shy and so young and so clearly smitten with Arthur, it’s adorable. “I got into driving because of him,” Rafael admits. “I hope that maybe one day we could drive together on the same team.”

“That would be nice.”

Rafael is scribbling his number on my hand when the infamous Jean Baudelaire wanders over. “I heard you’re making a movie about Bianco,” is the first thing out of the Frenchman’s mouth. After that, he’s busy drinking what looks to be a wineglass of flat Diet Pepsi.

“Arthur and the team. I’d love to feature other drivers, too. Would you be interested?”

Jean’s short, scruffy beard doesn’t conceal his grimace. “No.”

“Oh, okay.”

He takes another swig. “Fine. I’ll ask my people.”

The drivers take photos together, separately, on the top deck, leaned against the railing overlooking water so blue, so glistening, it looks fake. There are group photos, single headshots. It sort of reminds me of The Hunger Games before the game starts and the contestants do their best to rip each other apart.

I get my fill of behind-the-scenes footage, then stand by Delaney, who of course is also on the yacht. Why wouldn’t she be? This is Arthur’s personal life for the day, and she’s Arthur’s personal manager. “I didn’t realize Sarah scheduled you for this,” she says when she’s off the phone.

“Sorry. It was Arthur’s idea.”

“Sure.” Delaney smiles, all curiosity and no teeth. We’re alone, by a pair of closed doors. Nobody is paying any attention to us. “So,” she says, and my stomach cramps into an origami crane. “You and Arthur.”

She doesn’t waste any time. I wouldn’t, either, if I were her and my client wasn’t quite off the rails, but getting close. I watch Arthur get rearranged by a photographer, while a hairstylist anoints him with a halo of aerosol hairspray. “Shouldn’t you be talking to him about this?” I try.

Delaney shrugs. Today she’s in a pale lavender pantsuit and shiny matching heels, one foot click-clacking as she taps it next to my silent sneakers. “We both know he’d probably deny it.”

“There’s nothing to deny,” I say, doubling down for us. There’s really nowhere else to go but down. “I’m afraid of planes. Arthur knew I was freaking out and offered to help.”

“By cuddling you. For two hours.”

“It was more like a hug. A platonic, friendly hug.”

“While you slept.”

Knew I shouldn’t have drifted off. “I might’ve taken a small nap. Very short.”

Delaney’s lips lift into an analytical smile. “I’m not trying to grill you, Lilah. I just need to know what’s going on. If there’s something I should know about, I’ve been trusting that you’d tell me.”

Delaney’s questioning confirms how perfect our scheme is: She’s suspicious of our tilt-a-whirl of a power imbalance, and all we had to do was use each other as pillows on a plane. However I proceed, it’ll seem like I’m squirreling away a secret romance I don’t want her to know about. Max Black’s reckless employee, endangering Ignition’s film and Arthur’s reputation.

But… I don’t like lying to Delaney. It’s been one thing to spin stories for Max and let my anger wipe my guilty conscience away. I can’t hide behind Max’s awfulness here. This is me, lying to a woman I think I could, maybe, one day be friends with, if we’d met under other circumstances.

“I don’t want to hurt him,” I say. “I can promise you that.”

With a hum, Delaney sticks her hand out. I look at it, confused, until she makes a grabbing motion, and I realize she wants the camera in my bag. Once she’s certain it’s off, she takes my phone, then my work phone, and then inhales a deep, long breath. “I know about you and Max.”

“You… do.”

She arches a brow. “I vetted your social media before you came here. Max’s accounts were public.”

Goddamn stupid Max. “I see.”

Delaney gathers herself, chin lifting, full lips pursing with an inscrutable stare. “I get rebounding. I really, really do. But you can’t fuck Arthur Bianco, as tempting as it may be.”

“Oh, no, I am not tempted,” I rush out, feeling my face turn to a bright red crisp. “All good there.”

Her mouth twitches—amused or angry, can’t tell. “I mean it.”

“I’m not. He isn’t… he’s so loud. And intense.”

“Remember what I told you at the team dinner?” she says, ignoring my perfectly good reasons to not sleep with Arthur. “Holmes Bianco would crucify you. Think about your career.”

“Right. Exactly. Not that I think about him like that. Clearly, I’ve dated where I worked before, and that didn’t work out.”

With a quiet sigh, Delaney crosses her arms, though her elbow-drumming fingers betray her authoritarian calm. I can see the way she’s turning her brain over, dumping out the contents, and searching the scattered mess for what to say. She’d make an incredible documentarian, I bet. How she’s able to think on her toes would set her apart from the Michael Moore wannabes with mostly broken camcorders and bad attitudes.

“You know how we’ve been able to exist in public without anyone running up to Arthur, ruining the day?” she asks, more softly.

I look around the yacht. Clearly, I’ve entered a bourgeoisie bubble where aerosol hairspray is beneficial for the ozone layer and yachts are practical backdrops for ad campaigns, but I can’t really imagine the chaos she’s describing; the fans in the airport hadn’t been that annoying.

“That’s how bad it was for him in the past, when every news story was about him and his family legacy,” she says. “It would be ten times worse if he was caught in a public relations nightmare with you. The media would eat both of you alive, and I think you know that. But I think you don’t care, because you didn’t grow up in Formula 1. You don’t understand that liking a driver is pointless if you end up standing between them and a car. You’ll only get hurt when they pick racing over you—and it happens every single time.”

Her words throw me off guard. I’d been prepared for the think-of-your-career speech. But Arthur had been adamant that Ignition would cover this up. I wouldn’t have agreed to take this risk otherwise.

“Do you really think he and I would be that much of a disaster?” I ask.

Delaney doesn’t respond. The pupils of her deep brown eyes are like two turned-off television screens, mirroring back my own incriminating question. Then her mouth dips into a delicate frown and oh, shit . She. The radio. I’d forgotten that there was a woman. Someone who Arthur is legitimately into. Someone who would probably despise our scheme, whether she knew it was fake or not.

“Delaney, are you—you and Arthur…?”

She blinks, once, twice, and then laughs into her hand. “Absolutely not.”

Then who is it? My heart flips with an unreadable emotion as I shift my attention to Arthur. It’s cloudless today, and the bright sunlight turns his already extreme features into sharp, high-contrast shadows. He’s in normal clothes, nothing special, though his hair has been sprayed way back, old-school, and that’s an interesting sight. Worth examining.

Then suddenly, he looks up. Right at me. And it’s sort of like—I don’t know, maybe—but that doesn’t really track for him—

Orpheus.

“Graywood, are you done over there?” Arthur yells, waving, everyone looking over, photographers and other drivers, and I’m covering my face with my hands. “James was just telling me about this shop that’s nearby. Come here!”

“Shit,” Delaney mumbles. “I need way more coffee to deal with this.”

Arthur has me film the far-off store from the yacht before we disembark, and when I nearly drop my camera in the water, distracted by how the light is hitting the windows, he’s grabbing my elbow and saving the day and leading me off the boat. “Where are we going?” I keep asking, but Arthur only laughs. “And what’s so funny?”

But he just keeps shaking his head, keeps chuckling, and normally I don’t like when it’s obvious I’ve missed some social cue, but with Arthur, it feels like a game. Everything does. That could be what I felt on the plane, really—we’re just both too competitive. I’m not attracted to him . I’m not another onlooker dazzled by his reckless persona and physics-defying body, and I didn’t lie to Delaney when I said I wouldn’t sleep with him. Not that he’d ever ask me to. He wouldn’t. And if he had walked into that Texas dive bar and offered me a rebound instead of revenge?

I would’ve said no.

After we pass Miu Miu and Hermès and Prada and stores too decadent for me to recognize—like, why would you name a clothing brand The Row? How does one pronounce Loewe?—Arthur says, “You’re overdue for your shopping montage, and I think I’m just the man to help with that.”

My excitement falters. Sure, I’d told him on the plane that I don’t want him to buy me clothes, but that’s probably code for please buy me expensive clothes in neurotypical. Having a mostly normal brain, whatever that means, makes it so Arthur can’t understand how one hour of buttoning up constrictive jeans under painfully bright lights feels like ancient medieval torture. “Thank you,” I say, sheepish. “But remember, I’m not spending your money. It’s not right, with the film and all.”

“Are you sure?” he asks, studying me. “This store might be worth breaking some rules for. You tell me.”

Already resigning myself—I only have one pair of pants left, so this is a good idea, regardless—I peek at the display behind Arthur, expecting piles of slouchy clothing that somehow look perfect, like the stuff he always wears. Because that’s what boyfriends do in my experience, real or fake. The second you get close, they paint you and remake you and half a decade later, you’re what they want you to be, until they don’t want you at all.

Instead, a vintage camera sits in the window. And another. There are rows of them, small and black and silver, stacked next to piles of lenses and film canisters.

Speechless, I gesture at my chest. “Where are the shirts?”

“You lost your other cameras today. With your suitcase?” Arthur rolls his lip between his teeth, looks at me, then looks at the store. “Least I can do.”

My hands press against the window like two moths skittering toward a lamp. I recognize the vintage video cameras the way you do old friends—oh my gosh, there’s her, and him, and how has it been so long? There’s a thick square Sony Mavica that I’m pretty sure uses floppy disks next to a stout Handycam, round like a soda can, and then I spot the same Panasonic camcorder that I used to own, and I’m tripped by the memory. The black plastic under my palm, the click of the viewfinder flicking around, my birth mom smiling as I recorded her. And earlier than that—my birthday dinner, one of the only good ones. Her glittery nail polish sparkling as she passed a pink-wrapped gift to me. “For my little storyteller,” she’d said. “Make happy movies for me.”

The world goes quiet.

How could I have forgotten that? My birth mom had given me my first camera. I’d tried to save up myself, serious about cookie sales and lawn-mowing, but she’d been so thrilled that I wanted to make movies that she’d scoured every thrift store aisle for a working camera. It still smelled like lemon Pine-Sol from her deep clean; it’s a wonder that she didn’t accidentally soak the electronics and bust it.

“Those things are beasts,” I whisper, my voice threatening to crack.

Arthur’s standing next to me, watching me. “Those cameras?”

“That camcorder. You could probably run over it and it’d be fine.” I clear my throat. “I only have my one personal camera. And all the Ignition ones have a separate check-in process. Batteries and stuff.”

His smile fades at the edges. “Ah, hell. Should we—?”

“No,” I cut him off. “I want that one. The Panasonic.”

Before he can say anything else, or anyone can interrupt, or I lose this newfound need to be a person instead of a moral compass or a camera or a brain in a jar, I grab Arthur’s hand and pull him to the tall wooden door leading into the inexplicably placed camera store. And when the door opens with a wave of ancient leather and musty metal parts, the only smell worth maxing out a credit card for, I feel Arthur’s fingers tighten and loop with mine.

The rest of Monte Carlo slams by in a daze. Days turn into seconds—filming Arthur getting filmed by someone else, filming Arthur nodding his way through virtual meetings, buying myself the cheapest new clothes I can find, getting Delaney to help me refill my meds, avoiding Max, avoiding Sarah. Nobody else rushes to my hotel door, demanding to know what happened between Arthur and me on the plane. No one asks why Arthur was spotted buying me cameras, or why we go out to dinner, or why my interviews of him veer between his childhood and mine and his dreams and mine and the weather, what he’s been reading, his memories. And I start to worry that maybe it’s going to take something more extreme to get the team’s attention. On the outside, it looks like I’m making a documentary about him. But on the inside?

I can’t stop thinking about what Delaney said.

I’ve had time to sit with it. Process. And feel completely spooked and stupid. Probably an appropriate reaction to being told, out loud, by someone you respect, that you’re making a wildly inappropriate decision by “dating” a Formula 1 reserve driver who’s now unreserved and back in the spotlight. When I can’t sleep, I pop into the hotel hallways and walk the floors like a ’90s-era ghost—glasses on, striped pajama pants, freshly purchased Cranberries shirt—and think about Delaney’s warning.

It would be ten times worse if he was caught in a public relations nightmare with you. Multiples! Amazing.

The media would eat both of you alive, and I think you know that. Apparently, not enough.

I think you don’t care.

I care so much.

All my life, I’ve been someone who cares. Too sensitive, too deep of emotions, sentimental, nostalgic, reactive. You don’t become a person who hides behind a camera when your feelings make sense to other people. I care about Delaney’s sideways glance when I decline Arthur’s invite to the Monte Carlo casino, about the whispers her and Cameron exchange on the flight to Hungary, about her eyes on me when I grab a muffin from the morning snack table after I paced for too long the night before and look suspiciously bedraggled. I care about all of it.

Most of all, I care about that camera.

Make happy movies for me.

After my parents adopted me, my birth mom left town and changed her phone number. You know, mom stuff. I heard from a cousin that she moved closer to Ohio, following a boyfriend she met up north, though I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now. She hadn’t been able to stomach living in the same town as me, without me, and rather than occasionally bump into each other at a grocery store, she’d vanished. Again. A most spectacular finale.

All I have left is my silver locket and half of my genetic makeup. But having the camcorder around makes me think about her in ways I haven’t in a long time. Her, her happy endings, her hope. The scripts I used to write before I found documentaries, splayed out on the nubby beige carpet of the family room while she burned CDs for the car on her clunky computer. Lilah, Girl Detective was the longest-running series; I solved sixteen cold-case murders before she accidentally spilled orange juice on my scripts.

That’s how it always ended.

Promises to make her happy. Her changing her number.

Me here, her somewhere.

I turn these facts over in my mind until the fabric of them starts to thin.