Chapter 8
chapter eight
mia
Icross the room and he meets me halfway, which I notice even as it happens — that he doesn't simply wait for me to arrive, that the last two feet belong to both of us instead of just one.
His hand finds my jaw first. Not my mouth, not yet — my jaw, tilting my face up with a precision that should feel clinical and instead feels like the opposite, like he has been deciding for days exactly how he would do this and has finally run out of reasons to wait.
"Tell me if this is a mistake," he says, low, his mouth barely an inch from mine.
"It's almost certainly a mistake."
"That's not an answer."
"I'm aware."
He waits. He actually waits, his hand steady at my jaw, his whole body holding still despite what it's clearly costing him, and I understand that he is not going to move another inch until I give him something more than almost certainly.
"Kiss me," I say. "I'll tell you if I want you to stop."
That's enough. His mouth comes down on mine and the kiss is not careful — it has been careful since the hospital, every conversation, every restrained glance, every nineteen minutes rationed out like currency, and none of that carefulness survives contact.
His hand slides from my jaw into my hair, the other finds my waist and pulls me the rest of the way against him, and I feel, through the layers of clothes between us, exactly how much this has cost him to wait for.
There's a click at the door behind me — the lock, turned without breaking the kiss, his hand finding it blind, somewhere between the second and third breath we've shared. I notice it the way you notice a held door swing shut in a storm: distantly grateful, mostly somewhere else entirely.
I make a sound I don't intend to make. He answers it with his own, rougher, lower, and the kiss deepens into something with teeth in it, something urgent enough that I have to grip the front of his shirt just to stay upright.
"Seb." His name comes out of me like it's the only word I have left.
"I know," he says against my mouth, and kisses me harder.
His hand moves from my waist to the small of my back, pressing me closer, and I can feel the brace under his shirt, the careful architecture holding his neck still, and some distant rational part of my brain registers that he should not be doing this, that a man with a fractured vertebra should not be standing in a motorhome devouring a woman like the apocalypse is scheduled for morning. The rest of me does not care.
I get his shirt half-unbuttoned, my fingers clumsy on the third button, and he laughs against my mouth — a low, startled sound — before reaching down to finish it himself, faster than I managed despite everything, and then his shirt is open and my hands are flat against his chest and he makes a sound that goes straight through me.
"Wait," I say.
He stops instantly. Completely. His hands go still at my waist, his whole body arrested mid-motion, and the discipline of it — the immediate, total respect of that single word — undoes something in me more than anything he's done with his mouth.
My stomach drops in a way that has nothing to do with fear.
"I'm not stopping," I say. "I just need you to know I'm not stopping for any reason except that I want to keep going."
Something moves through his face. "Understood."
"Good." I pull him back down to me.
We move backward without either of us choosing to, until the table edge presses against the back of my thighs.
He guides me there — a hand at my hip, not lifting, just steering — and I sit because I want the height, because I want his mouth at a better angle, because some decisions stop being decisions and start being the only physically possible outcome of everything that came before them.
His mouth finds my throat. My hand finds the back of his neck, careful of the brace, careful in a way that feels like its own kind of intimacy — wanting him and not wanting to hurt him, both true at once.
His hand slides up under my shirt along my ribs and I arch into it without meaning to, my palm flattening against the table to keep myself upright, my fingers brushing the credential folder, knocking it half off the edge before I catch it without looking.
Outside, far too close, I hear footsteps and a voice — Renzo's voice, unmistakable — saying something about sector two to someone who isn't me.
We both go still.
"He's not coming in," Seb says, his mouth still against my throat, his voice rough enough that I feel it more than hear it.
"You don't know that."
"I locked it when you crossed the room."
"I didn't notice."
"You were occupied," he says, and there's something in his voice — not quite a smile, the particular satisfaction of a man cataloguing the exact moment he had the presence of mind to think of locks while losing every other kind of composure.
His mouth moves up to my jaw, unhurried now despite everything, like the interruption risk has only sharpened his focus rather than scattered it.
"That's either very reassuring or deeply alarming."
"Both," he says, echoing something he said to me once before, in a different room, under different stakes, and I laugh — actually laugh, breathless and surprised by it — right before his mouth finds mine again and the laugh disappears into something else entirely.
The footsteps fade. Renzo's voice goes with them, swallowed by the paddock's evening noise — distant engines, a radio somewhere, the ordinary mechanical hum of a world that has no idea what's happening fifteen feet away from it.
His hands are under my shirt now, spread across my back, and I am tugging at his shirt where it's hanging open, wanting more of him under my hands than I currently have.
He finds the clasp of my bra through my shirt and stops there — not moving further, a question without words — and I answer it by pressing closer, by sliding my hands down to his belt, by making the decision with my whole body instead of waiting for my mouth to catch up.
"Mia." My name, rough, almost a warning.
"Yes."
"I need you to be certain. Not in the moment. Certain."
I pull back far enough to look at him — his pupils blown wide, his mouth swollen from mine, the brace still holding him rigid even now, even like this, and something about the fact that he stopped, that he is asking again, despite everything his body clearly wants, settles something in me that days of careful conversation never managed to.
"I am certain," I say. "I am not certain about anything else in my life right now. I am certain about this."
He kisses me like that answer cost him something to hear.
I undo his belt properly this time, the leather giving way under my fingers, and his hand finds the inside of my thigh through the fabric of my trousers, and I make a sound I don't recognize as my own — something closer to his name than to any actual word.
His thumb traces a slow line that has nothing patient left in it, and my hips move toward his hand before I decide to let them, and for several long seconds neither of us is doing anything except finding out exactly how much further this could go.
It is his hand that stops first — closing gently over mine where it has found the open edge of his belt, not pulling it away, just stilling it, the same total respect he showed at wait, offered now without being asked.
I go still. Then I understand.
"Not tonight," he says, forehead dropping to mine, both of us breathing like we've been running. "Not all of it."
"No," I say, and the word costs me something, the want still loud in my body even as the rest of me agrees with him. "Not tonight."
We stay like that for a moment — foreheads together, his hand still over mine, the line between almost and everything close enough to touch and deliberately, mutually, left uncrossed.
"I don't want this to be the only time," he says.
"It isn't going to be."
"You sound certain about that too."
"I'm learning to be certain about things," I say. "It's new. Be patient with me."
He laughs — low, surprised, genuine — and presses his mouth to my temple instead of my mouth, which is somehow more devastating than anything that came before it.
We straighten our clothes in near silence, the urgency burning down into the dangerous quiet of two people who have just done something they cannot undo, standing four feet apart again, breathing returning to something like normal.
My pen — the one I always carry, clipped into my jacket pocket out of habit — has fallen out somewhere in the last few minutes, and I find it on the floor near the table leg when I bend to retrieve my coat.
I pick it up. I look at it.
I set it down on the table instead of pocketing it, and I don't examine too closely why.
Seb watches me do it. He doesn't say anything. He simply reaches over, after I've gathered my coat and turned toward the door, and closes his hand around the pen, and slides it into his own jacket pocket with the careful precision of a man filing away something he intends to keep.
I see him do it in the reflection of the dark window.
I don't say anything either.
"Tomorrow," he says, at the door. "The race."
"I know."
"I still haven't told you everything."
"I know that too." I look at him — his shirt still slightly askew, his hair a wreck from my hands, the brace holding him upright through sheer stubbornness, the truth of his father's death sitting between us, still unfinished, still owed. "Tomorrow, then. After the race."
"After the race," he agrees.
I open the door. The paddock noise rushes back in — engines, radios, the ordinary mechanical world that has no idea what almost happened in this room, what still hasn't been said in it.
I wanted him before I trusted him.
That was inconvenient.
It was also true.
I walk out into the Monaco evening with my coat over my arm and no pen in my pocket.
Behind me, in the motorhome, Seb Carras keeps it.