Chapter 23 Discovered Attack
When I wake up, alone in bed, my stomach flops out of my body and drops to the floor.
I scramble, sitting up, looking around, panicked. My adrenaline only marginally resides once I remember where I am, and hear what sounds to be a large man trying to be quiet in a very small kitchen. Utensils clinking, a faucet running.
Trying to be quiet myself, I twist off the bed and slink toward the noise, peering around a corner at the alleyway of a kitchenette.
Faust is standing in front of a toaster oven, diligently watching tofu crisp and drinking what appears to be an entire jug of Pedialyte.
He’s in the black sweatpants and white T-shirt he fell asleep in, though there’s a kitchen towel hanging from his pocket, and his hair is more pushed-back than usual.
Like he’s been running his hand through it so many times, it’s now momentarily trained to defy gravity.
I only have a second to take in how he looks when he cooks—concentrated, absorbed, in control—before he notices me, eyes flicking over, then widening.
I talk first. “Hey.”
“Hi.”
“What are you doing?”
“Cooking.”
“Nice.” I take a step. Now I’m basically in the kitchenette; one giant leap for mankind. “Do you usually do protein and carbs before a race week?”
Momentarily, his expression is a bit caught, like he’s not going to let me question-ask my way into smoothing over how inherently strange this is. Me in his morning, us after last night.
Then he points at a plate I hadn’t noticed, with the metal spatula he’s holding. “I do. You don’t have to.”
On the plate, there’s glossy strawberries, the tops already cut off.
A banana, expertly divided into neat, even slices.
And three pieces of crispy brown toast; one with only butter, one with almond butter and salt, and another with emerald-green avocado triangles and a chef’s flick of vinaigrette.
I exhale, surprise making it a bit hard to think. “Did you make all of this?”
I catch Faust’s half smile before he turns back to the toaster oven. “The fruit?”
Smart-ass. “Okay, did you cut all of this?”
“Mm.”
He’s been awake, grocery shopping, and cooking without waking me up. I spent years not looking at screens or eating chocolate after ten p.m., counting sheep—and this is what works on my Greyhound brain. Faust’s patented sternness, a fuzzy weighted blanket draped over my shoulders.
Pressure. Structure.
I think back to last night and feel myself turning pink.
His smile widens when I go for a strawberry. “Is this a part of your thing? Feeding me?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Ha-ha.”
He grabs the towel from his back pocket, flips open the toaster oven. “It is, and isn’t.”
“Oh?”
“My parents own a restaurant. Or, my mom does, and Dad moved to Algarve to help her with it.” Turning away, his voice goes light. “It’s a difficult business, but always nice to feed people you care about.”
I’m stuck, that comment bouncing off me. “What… kind of restaurant?”
He looks at me, uneasy. I’m reacting weirdly to this reveal, and I know that, I get that, and it really isn’t that huge of a deal, there are a million people in the world whose families run restaurants, more than that I bet—but not here at a hotel with me.
Not in my orbit. Faust tilts his head, eyes narrowing.
“I’m not sure how to describe it, but it’s normal Portuguese.
Family style, home cooking—traditional. Why? ”
My jaw feels tight and wobbly-jelly soft at the same time. “I, uh. I just didn’t know. What are they like?”
Lucky me, his bland protein requires attention. Faust turns away. “Mom is a matriarch, Dad enables her. Married after a week. Dad was a student in Madrid, only visiting Lisboa for April twenty-fifth—” He pauses, like I already know what that means. “And then they met.”
“And here you are?”
He chuckles. “Vinte e cinco de Abril sempre. You’ll like them. What about you?”
You will like them. I’m sparkling, excited and nervous by that idea in equal measure.
“My dad owns a garage. He’s the one that got me into F1.
He’s never been to a race, but he likes cars so much—I didn’t get a bit of the skill from him.
” I laugh. “And I have three sisters. Maisie, Bailey, Samantha.”
I don’t elaborate. People always notice the obviously left-out mom, and Faust doesn’t miss it, either. “Got it,” he says. “We could visit, after Monaco. My family. Next up is Spain, so we’ll be right there.”
“Oh.” I twirl a strawberry top between my fingers. “I’m breaking up with Bernard in Monaco, though. So. I’ll be gone by then.”
His back is to me, shoulders stiff. “Right.”
My heart thuds. He sounds disappointed, though I can’t figure out why.
He knows my expiration date in his life, and he hasn’t asked me to stay past then.
Maybe he’s sad to lose someone who’s willing to go to bed with him like I was.
Particularly if his rival is the reason he’s losing his friend-with-obedience-benefits.
Not a very fun end to our game at all.
I set my strawberry top down on the plate. “Do you know where my bag ended up?”
“Front door.”
More tense words. I slink away, squeezing and releasing my clammy fingers, already feeling guilty that our conversation is what reminded me to call Maisie before I leave New York.
We’ve been playing phone tag for days, and Faust and I are flying out to Miami this afternoon.
Starting this weekend, I’ll be Bernard’s soft-launched girlfriend, and I need to talk to her before whispers hit the internet.
Samantha and Bailey are too distracted by school to care, and Dad only uses the internet for eBay car model auctions. But Maisie? She’s online.
I unlock my phone screen and blink.
Maisie’s calling me. Right now.
With a big breath, I put on a smile and spin to look at the windows. “Hey, Maisie-Mouse!”
“Hi. Um, is it true?”
For someone like me, there can’t be a worse open-ended question to ask. My body tilts forward. “Is what?”
“Are you dating, uh—hold on.” A beat, Maisie’s soft hm. “Bernard Baudelaire?”
A breath knocks out of me so quickly, I get slightly lightheaded. “What? Where did you see that?”
“Online. He tagged you in a photo.”
“That’s so weird. Let me call you right back, okay?”
“Okay, but—”
I hate hanging up on her but I have to, and then I’m opening up every single social media app on my phone because, what the hell, what is happening, how. It’s Instagram, of course, though. My hands shake so badly that I almost can’t watch the story.
He reposted a black-and-white photo of me from the Day Gala. I’m on the steps in my black suit, watching Faust, smiling a bit, but mostly looking completely in the zone. Missing someone today, Bernard had written on the picture. Have a bagel for me.
And right below that, he’d tagged me.
Trembling, I click back into my main Instagram feed.
The new-followers icon pops up at the top of the homepage, and when I try to tap it, it doesn’t work.
Then the app crashes entirely. When I finally get it working again, I’m met with an alert that someone’s tried to log into my account, they’ve restricted it to protect me, and I have tens of thousands of new followers.
Comments stagger over my screen, glitching just as quickly.
HI CAT OMG HI, and lmao i thought bernard had meant faust at first?
??, and ARE YOU PARENT TRAPPING MY DIVORCED PARENTS #fernardmarriagecounciling, and—
I tap into the settings page, shake through my email and password, and deactivate my account.
There.
That’s… not enough.
That won’t stop it.
Fuck.
I go to a chair, banging my knee on the arm before I can sink down, my elbows on my knees, fingers pressing into my temples. A second later, I hear what has to be Faust flipping switches, and I’d probably ask him to give me space if I still had a mouth. I’m a cat. We like to die by ourselves.
“Hey, hey, easy.” He’s in front of me, dropping to his knees. “What happened?”
How do I tell one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met that my plan got derailed by his ex–best friend reposting a picture of me?
Humiliation makes my throat sticky, hard to work with.
So, I do the next best thing, pulling Bernard’s contact up on my phone.
The messaging app I use has a call feature, and before I know it, I’m putting him on speaker. I can’t explain it, but Bernard can.
“Cat? What a surprise.”
He sounds happy. And guilty. Good. “Bernard,” I say, unable to cover up how hoarse my voice is. “I thought we’d agreed on a soft launch.”
Faust’s fingers ghost over my knee. I can’t look at him.
“I’m sorry,” Bernard sighs. “You just looked so good in those photos. How was it, by the way?”
He’s lying. I look fine, like a nervous stylist watching her client. He’d cherry-picked the most glamorous picture, one that happened to feature Faust in the background, half-blurred but surely unmistakable to Bernard’s audience. An attention lover, through and through.
I must be quiet for too long. “I really thought you’d like it,” Bernard murmurs. “Faust did the public thing first, in Australia, right? When he said your name? It’s the same.”
Because he thought I was a spy from another team, sabotaging his final year in F1. Not to stake a claim on me to get people talking. “It’s different with us. We’re dating. And you know what I’d said about the team, about this job. You know why I didn’t want you to do it like this.”
There’s more that I want to say—my anger trembling into focus—but I’ve already pushed this too far. A phone breakup isn’t the Cat Cromwell promise. “I’m sorry. I… Let’s talk later,” I add, then hang up.
The silence is startlingly loud once the call is over.
Faust’s palm presses against my knee. “Hey. Let me take care of this.”
He’s blurry when I peek up at him. Still, he gives me this look that makes me think that I’m not that different from the men whose hearts I’ve broken. Soft and open. Earnest and kind.
If I was an idiot, I’d think he loved me.
His hand tightens. “I can make this go away. Okay?”
“I… but…”
“Green?”
My resolve crumbles. I nod, too grateful to give him control of this situation to speak.
Faust hums, something of a thank you, then stands, presses a kiss to my forehead, and goes to the kitchenette.
Within three minutes, I hear him on the phone with someone—not Bernard.
“It was just a post,” he says quietly. “He’s an idiot.
She’s here with me. Crashed after the gala on the sofa. Yeah… Of course. No, I don’t think so.”
He has to be talking to Mei, or Christine. Two people I hadn’t thought of yet, and that makes me go for the tissues on the coffee table. I’d thought, at most, that having Faust as my partner in crime could help keep Bernard’s potential entitled-man anger away down the line. I hadn’t expected this.
I can’t listen to how kind he’s being, but I can’t stop, either.
That call ends. But he’s on the phone again, seconds later. “Hello. Yeah, thanks for calling.”
His tone is rigidly detached, endlessly stern. That’s Bernard, no doubt about it.
“Mm. Right.” He pauses, maybe listening to Bernard explain himself. It’s a long pause. “This is risking her job. Yes—no, I know she told you that. She’s here. We’re going to Miami this afternoon.”
A longer pause.
“That was your decision.”
There are footsteps, and Faust rounds the corner of the kitchenette, looking at me. He’s still on the phone, listening, but he nods at me. Clearly checking in.
I hold up the saddest thumbs-up.
He nods again, looking relieved. “Right, we both agree there,” Faust tells Bernard.
“Mm. No—stop. I’m not asking, Bernard. Scale it back, or I’m going to tell the other drivers that you’re taking advantage of a female employee.
No, see, it doesn’t matter if you’re seeing her.
You are in a position of power, and you overstepped her boundary.
” He falls quiet, gaze shifting to the ground. Bernard must be asking him a question.
Faust’s eyes widen.
Then he says, “No.”
They don’t talk much longer than that. When Faust hangs up, he lets out a long, frustrated sigh, his cheek bouncing as he looks at his phone again. “He says he’ll post that he’d tagged you by mistake. Should work well enough.”
“Faust. Thank you.”
I start to get up, but he walks over to me before I can, his serious expression softening. He kneels in front of my chair again, gathering my hands in his like he can protect them and me and us and this.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“Nothing, really. We all have that group chat—”
“The drivers?”
“Mm. And I told him on there to call me. They can guess the rest.” He glances at me. “Do you want to see it?”
“That’s okay.” While the concept of Faust throwing down a gauntlet on my behalf in the Formula 1 group chat does make my heart do embarrassing things, I’m distracted by the phone call. “What did he ask you, though?”
His brow furrows.
“He asked you something that made you look kind of, um, upset.”
His brow lifts. Then it really doesn’t. Trying to look unbothered doesn’t work on him. “He asked if I was interested in you.” Faust taps my knuckles with his fingers, looking away. “It’s nothing, I’m sure. Only reason he could think of that I’d try to protect you.”
Right. So, there are other reasons.
And he’d looked so shocked that Bernard had assumed that.
And he said no.
Faust doesn’t like to lie.
He clears his throat. “Why? Would you have wanted me to say something else?”
“No. That was good. He’d—he’d probably do something even more ridiculous if he thought you were going to ask me out. So, thank you.” I squeeze his fingers, and his eyes shift back to me. “Thank you.”
A small smile curves his lips.
And that’s when I decide that maybe this is okay, giving in.
Setting myself up for inevitable heartbreak, and knowing it doesn’t mean anything more to Faust. If I’m going to break my rules for anyone, I can break them for a man that feels like a safe harbor after decades lost at sea.
Because that’s the catch with a lighthouse and solid ground—the fog doesn’t go anywhere, the oceans don’t calm.
But you can rest for a little while, knowing that he’s firm beneath your feet.