Chapter 19 A Forced Move
Surprise doesn’t cover it.
This has happened before, once or twice.
A woman will regret hiring me, and because I go radio silent between payment reminders—to prevent situations like this—they panic.
One time, when I was first getting started and therefore less skilled at vetting clients, a congressman’s ex-wife had an existential crisis on a girls’ trip and rerouted her return flight to his house.
She hadn’t told him that I was an industry plant, but still. It had been a close, shitty call.
This?
Feels worse.
“Have you talked to her?” I whisper.
“She called when she landed, but no.”
“Did she say what she wants?”
“She said she wanted coffee. With the both of us.” Mei clicks her pen shut. “What’s going on?”
I feel that pen-click in my bones. “I have no clue. Here—I’ll go.”
Yes, kind and generous me. Definitely not staving off this disaster for another five seconds.
Mei nods curtly, and then I’m up, trying to get my stories straight in my head during the short walk to Imogen.
Imogen hired me. Mei doesn’t know that. Imogen referred me.
Mei does know this. I’m dating Bernard. Neither of them know that, technically, though Imogen would have a hunch.
“Imogen?”
Her long blonde ponytail swishes as she turns. “Cat. Hi!”
It’s Ariana Grande, circa 2018. I’m so fucked. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh.” Her nose scrunches. Clearly, she hadn’t expected me to be irritated with her. “I had… tickets.”
“To the race?”
She nods, sex-kitten ponytail bouncing. “Is that okay?”
“And you called Mei?”
“Well, we used to always get coffee before—”
“Imogen.” I school my frustration as best I can. “This is really, really bad.”
My honesty must take her by surprise, as well. Her blue eyes go glassy in a snap, her chin wobbling. “I know. I’m so sorry. He—he called me.”
He. Bernard. Without so much as a glance behind me, I gesture toward the door.
For a second, Imogen waffles, as if she actually flew from New York to Japan during ballet season to buy a cherry blossom latte.
Then she goes, and I follow her to the sidewalk, leading us to a more secluded alley between buildings.
When there isn’t any chance Mei might sneak up on us, I inhale for five calming seconds.
“First, this isn’t okay. This is not part of our arrangement, and this puts me and you at risk.
” I don’t add that I’ll need to reconsider staying on to finish the job.
She’s already almost crying, her nose going splotchy.
That can be a conversation for later. Also, that our agreement had been for her to pay me in full if she was the one to ruin the job.
That can be later, too. “Second, what did he say?”
“He asked for the ring back. And I didn’t know what to do, because I know he’s seeing you now.
I mean, I think he is, he hasn’t posted anything online, so I wasn’t sure.
But he said that he didn’t trust the mail and since I had tickets already, I could just come here and…
” She stops to catch her breath. “And give it back to him in person. I’m sorry.
I thought I should, and then on the plane I was just so—I don’t miss him. ”
“Okay.”
“But… I’m so angry.”
Her tears spill over. Instantly, I’m pulling a tissue packet out of my bag, on hand for moments just like this. “Yeah?” I say softly.
“I designed the ring,” she whispers. “I picked out the stone, and the look, everything. It isn’t even like it’s his grandmother’s diamond or something. It’s from Canada.”
This fucking guy. Like he needs to pawn it to afford rent. “Imogen, I’m so sorry. He did that to hurt you.”
“I know. I know! And I’m still here.”
Getting hurt. I wish she would’ve messaged me, though I don’t know what I would’ve said.
Normal Cat would’ve asked for her to ignore it and let me handle things.
So then she would’ve been in the city, with this ring, still feeling the pain Bernard knew just how to cause.
Because it is something to watch a man walk away and know that there are twenty spots on the Formula 1 grid and one of those athletes thinks about you.
Wants you. They can drive two hundred miles per hour, with the whole world watching, and you get them.
Their mind. Their body. This excitement, inaccessible to billions.
I’d been sad to miss three races and a man I’ve kissed three-ish times. Imogen was excommunicated from this world through no fault of her own.
I’m going to regret this. Sympathy for the rich. A new low. “You said you had tickets?” I sigh.
She gives me a teary mmhm.
“And they aren’t friends and family garage passes, or Paddock Club?”
A teary, negative mmhm.
“Okay. Do you want to watch the race together?”
Imogen blinks, a tear dripping from her long eyelashes. “Really?”
“No, Mei, and no talking to anyone else on the team. And—” I pull out another tissue. “We are dating, Bernard and I. So I’ll need to tell him that we know each other through industry stuff.”
“Oh.” Imogen takes the tissue, folding it between her manicured fingers. “Do you think… the ring…?”
“Do I think he’s going to give your ring to me?” I finish for her, smiling. “No. You were with him for a long time. I’ll be gone in two months, if that. I think he’s just an asshole with worms in his brain, and the worms said he could hurt a woman if he did this.”
Imogen giggles. “I thought about selling it.”
“You should.”
“It seemed like a hassle.”
“Yeah, it would be.”
“Do you want to see it?”
I can picture it. Imogen is a chip off the Grace Kelly block. Probably a platinum band, with an ethically sourced, emerald-cut doorknocker of a diamond. “No thank you.”
Imogen’s tickets are in a grandstand near a particularly treacherous-looking bend in the Suzuka Circuit, and I debate asking her if she purchased them herself, now, or if being engaged to a driver got you random seat privileges for life.
Sort of like how retired flight attendants can fly on stand-by for free.
“I’ve never really—” Imogen grabs the metal stairway railing up the grandstand. “Um, sat out here before. So, my apologies if it isn’t—” She smiles at a couple she almost decapitated with her bag. “Nice.”
“This is wonderful.”
I’d used some of the truth to smooth things over with Mei.
“She’s grieving, and he’d texted her,” had been my explanation.
And Mei’s slim shoulders had bobbed in relief, her lips curving into a quick, grateful smile that’d tugged at my heart strings in a bad, jarring way.
“Thank God you’re here, Cat,” she’d said. “Seriously. Thank you.”
“Always here to help the team,” I’d said.
We have time to kill before the race starts, nothing interesting in front of us besides grass, an empty stretch of gray racetrack, and a barrier lined with yellow and red tire advertising, in that order.
Imogen’s sipping on a Coke I brought her, not unlike a very beautiful bobbleheaded doll in her Chanel, but she isn’t crying anymore, either. So, baby steps.
I’m going to have to talk to her. That’s part of attending a sporting event together, isn’t it? God. Small talk with a client. This is so not something I do.
“How is the season going?” I ask. “Ballet. You all are busy right now, because it’s spring, right?”
She lowers her Coke, smiling. “Oh yeah. Fall and winter are crazier, though.”
“Anything good coming up?”
“Besides The Nutcracker?”
“Besides that.”
She thinks for a minute, humming absently. “We’re doing Giselle this fall, but I don’t think I’m going to go for it.”
“Why’s that?”
“Oh, it’s kind of sad.”
“Ah.”
We go silent again. Around us, fans in every color of team T-shirt are chattering, taking pictures, filming videos, eating snacks, just really making me aware that we’re two women who don’t know each other, and I’m dating her ex-fiancé. That reminds me. “Hey, can I send a picture of us to Bernard?”
Imogen’s face goes pale. “Why?”
“I feel like it’d be what I’d do. If I ran into you, and we were friends, and I knew what had happened, you know? Like, hey, look who I bumped into, stop being mean to her. It gets ahead of him hearing it from someone else, I guess.” I roll my lip into my mouth. “But I don’t have to.”
She debates this, thoughts flashing in her bright eyes. “Okay, yeah. Could I post it?”
This is why I don’t hang out with clients. “That might be a bad idea.”
We take the picture anyway—on my phone—and I send it off with a note to Bernard about how Imogen and I used to be fashion week buds, and a lecture to Imogen about never replying to a single text from him again.
“Men go through, like, extinction bursts, after they realize they can’t control you anymore.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries to flirt with you, too.
Or lashes out. Really, any bad behavior. ”
“No texting, understood.” Imogen bends the tip of her straw back and forth until it’s a tiny right angle. “Do you hate all men?”
I bark out a laugh. Coincidentally, this is the exact moment a roar lifts into the air from far across the racetrack.
The cars have hit the proverbial pavement, zooming through the formation lap.
Before I know it, the first one is here—and the first one is gray.
And the gray one is Faust. His helmet is a deep scarlet today, an artist collab, and I follow the small red dot as he flickers around, here, gone. He takes my breath with him.
“Sorry,” Imogen says meekly. “That was rude.”
“No! No. I—usually, yeah.”
But I’m distracted, and it’s hard to cover up.
A massive screen is mounted on the grass near our grandstand, showing the starting line, and my heartbeat quickens at the sight of Faust’s car lined up at the first white line.
It’s different watching him here, with the real fans.
No one is ordering champagne or whispering about steward-decision gossip they’d heard from friends of friends.
With hundreds of people packed in like sardines, the grandstands still go hushed as the race ticks closer and closer, everyone excited.
And I’m different since the last race, too.
A bit. I can’t pinpoint what it means or put the feeling into words, but it’s like something in me has shifted ever so slightly to the left, unnoticeable unless you’ve lived here, in this house, all your life. Like I have.
“Who do you want to win?” Imogen has leaned her elbows on her knees. Enthralled like I am, despite it all.
I think about the benefits of lying my way out of her question. There are hundreds. And there’s only one benefit to telling the truth; I’ve been superstitious most of my life, and it comes back when my heart races like this.
“Faust.” His name tingles in my mouth. “Always liked him.”
The first light goes red. Imogen laughs. “I did, too.”
Oh. The realization pops like fizzy candy. She knew him—would know him. “Really?”
The second light turns red. Three more left. “He never liked Bernard, but yeah.”
Third. “Even when they were friends?”
“No, but I liked that about him. He doesn’t cover stuff up.”
Fourth.
Fifth.
I think back to what he’d said when we’d played chess.
I want someone who wants to be seen with me. Known as mine. If anyone thought she wasn’t, that’s on them. But I’d want that … partnership. We’d know what we have.
And I can’t give that to him.
I won’t.
Unless—unless I did.
The lights go out, the crowd is loud, the wind tickles the back of my neck.
I could, I think as the cars burst off the starting line, Faust and then everyone else.
One day, I could give him that relationship.
And maybe this is how we start. He’d said he wanted a partnership.
Sworn that he wouldn’t mind seeing me flirt with other people.
I hadn’t believed it at the time, and wouldn’t believe any other man who said that.
But Faust? He’s different. Mentally, physically, clinically unique.
I could still do my thing, tricking the worst of the worst who’d think I’d cheat on Faust with them. That would be on them.
The wind picks up, the sound of cars building on the horizon.
Sitting in the grandstands makes the track feel so much bigger, too, and I feel it in my stomach when the cars speed by, the second lap of how many?
Fifty, maybe? Faust has held on to his starting position, and I can’t deny how exciting that is.
As if I’m proud, as if he’s something that’s mine.
“He’s crushing it,” Imogen says when they’re gone, temporarily, on the other side of the expansive circuit. And I know the “he” in question isn’t Bernard. “This track seems easy, but it isn’t. Last year, Bernard had his wheels ripped off after he slid into a barrier. It was a mess.”
“Did he get hurt?”
“Only mentally.” She shakes her Coke. “I don’t miss that.”
My fingers slip around either side of my stiff plastic seat. “The drama?”
“The feelings.”
I shouldn’t ask. Me and a client, on a Formula 1 date, should not discuss feelings. A client who flew to Japan because of her feelings, good or bad.
I ask.
“Is it hard to be with a driver?”
The breeze plays with a piece of Imogen’s hair she didn’t slick back enough. She catches it, tucking it behind her ear. There are four rings on her left hand—one for almost every finger. “Honestly?” She gives me a sad smile. “It’s so easy, you’ll think you’re dreaming.”
Deep inside my chest, whatever shifted tilts further to one side.
“The hours are insane, they’re workaholics, and they’ve all got daddy issues they take out on their team principals, but say they don’t.
And they get hurt, and they’re moody, and this—it isn’t a safe sport.
It’s safer now, but not safe. There are no sick days or weekends off because you don’t feel like it.
This is an insane thing to want to do. To have wanted to do their whole lives, since they were four or five or six, and then to get here and stay here.
They’re not normal people. They don’t have normal relationships, with women, or men, or their families, or anyone. ”
As Imogen talks, I hear the cars approaching again. Lap two. The drivers and their Sisyphean laps. “And then”—she smiles—“one day you’re on a jet home from Monaco, and he’s sleeping on your shoulder.”
I see it. Brown hair, tan skin. How peaceful he must look when he’s asleep. “And it’s easy?”
“And it’s easy, because he loves you.”
That, I can’t picture.
A cloud drifts in front of the sun. I shift around my bracelet, an Alighieri cuff shaped like a golden handcuff.
I’ve been forgetting one very important thing while calculating an outcome for Faust and me.
Arguably the most important part of dating, though I’ve spent years not considering it for any of my relationship equations, where I mirror and reflect and evade and lie to give men the Cat they want.
Faust would have to want to be with me.