Chapter 5 French Defense #2
“I was born in the south of Portugal, in a coastal region called Algarve,” he answers slowly. “But I’ve been with Stark-Benzin since I was six, minus a few years.”
“That’s so cool.” Here we go. Push the conversation back his way. “Is that why you came back to the team? I bet you have so many good memories here.”
He frowns. It takes up most of his face. “Some.”
Championships aren’t up to his memory standards, I guess. “Is it nice to be back?”
He pauses. Nods.
“And what were you doing before this? Like, were you on another team?” I laugh. “Sorry. I really will figure out how F1 works, I promise!”
Faust meets my bubbly ingenue act with the flirtatiousness of a brick wall. Un-charmed. Very weird. “You don’t know now?”
“I mean…” I stretch the word out, smiling. “I know you race cars, obviously. And there are a lot of rules, right?”
His eyes narrow. “So, you were with a date.”
“A date?”
The barest hint of a smile curls one corner of his long, preternaturally unamused mouth. “At Bernard and Imogen’s wedding.”
I stop fidgeting with my bracelet. What the actual hell.
He shouldn’t—he can’t remember me. We barely met, and he literally meets one thousand people, traveling the world most weeks of the year.
And… wait a minute. Faust just watched me act like I was meeting Bernard for the very first time.
If he knows I was vaguely in Bernard’s orbit, orbiting, and now I’m suddenly on his team?
Shaking his hand? That’s unhinged behavior. Stalker-y, even.
That metal quote sign my dad used to have hanging above the garage’s cash register flashes in my head. Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.
My heartbeat quickens.
He could get me fired. Or… worse.
“Hm, I don’t remember meeting you,” I say with a syrupy smile. “You might have me mixed up with someone else.”
“I do?”
There’s another breeze, or Faust is looking at me again. Either way, the air’s cold.
“Seems that way. Sorry.”
I’m trafficking in half-truths—seems, might—so I don’t have to outright lie. Maybe, if I talk around this enough, I can gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss our first meeting from his memory over time. I mean, how many blondes in black dresses has he seen in the past month? One million?
Faust looks from me to the track. “Okay,” he finally says.
“Okay,” I repeat, my throat dry.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine!”
Across the fence, there’s a harsh roar, and I inhale sharply. Faust shifts. I think he might be noticing the way my hand’s clenched into a fist on my knee.
“You… have one of those faces,” he says, his voice quieter than before.
“Easy to mix up?”
He hums again. I guess that’s his default communication style.
He looks at me for one more beat, as if he’s trying for the last time to decide if I’m me or not, then he looks away and—okay.
I see the moment I lose his interest. His shoulders dip.
His frown goes detached again, bored. It’s a quick thing, a door slamming shut, whatever intensity he had for me and my backstory revoked.
Like I’d only been intriguing when he’d thought I was lying to him.
So that’s how we sit for the rest of Bernard’s promotional drive.
Silent. When it’s Faust’s turn to film, and the camera crew is getting close, and Mei’s asking how everything’s going, I say I need water.
As I head inside, a shiver brushes over the back of my neck.
The lightest touch of awareness. But when I look back, Faust’s walking the other way, his helmet on.
Good, I tell myself, going for the ibuprofen in my bag. The pills rattle. I fish three out. He bought that. I saw him buy it.
I don’t want him to remember me.
And that’s when I hear yelling.
“Enough.” I’m by the fence when Bernard throws his silver helmet down—it bonks dramatically against the grass. “I’m not going to stand by while you all fawn over him. You’d promised me a rookie, and now I have to drive with him? Where’s Christine? I wanted Christine.”
There are voices, hushed but loud, gray shirts flocking around him.
Bernard’s face is ruddy and slick with sweat, and I don’t think it’s all from the promo lap.
His angry eyes swing furiously around the crowd, then he straightens up, chest heaving, and announces in a perfectly clear voice, “I quit.”
The chain-link fence nips my shoulder blades as I slump backward.
More voices. Lots more politely panicked yelling. I barely hear it over the buzzing bumblebees that have taken up residence in my brain.
My future boyfriend just quit the team. And I’m… on the team.
I’m still holding the ibuprofen, frozen in shock, when the short-haired woman from the documentary team sidles up to me. She looks at my fistful of pills, then me, and pushes her glasses up her nose. “First time?”
“First day,” I mumble.
She makes a sympathetic noise and pats around her many pockets. After a moment, she hands me a ginger chew. “Helps with the nerves. Gets better with time, though.”
“Bernard just quit,” I say, blinking as I take the candy.
“Mmhm.”
“Can he do that?”
“Oh yeah. He’ll have to pay the team out or something. Probably nothing major if he’s walking. But—” she pops her own ginger chew, seemingly just for the taste, because goddamn is she chill—“Don’t worry. Faust’s a good driver. He’s a good guy to work for.”