Chapter Fifteen
Victoria
Idon’t expect Asher to hold to his offer of a drink after work, but he does. What’s more, he’s in HQ all day when we get back, practicing in the sim suite and talking to Thomas about his car.
It’s a stark, sudden shift to his previous routine of avoiding HQ at all costs and ignoring everything about his car. Of choosing to ignore reason and strategy and instead doing whatever he felt like.
I tell myself that this is a one-off, to not get my hopes up in case he reverts to the absolute idiot he’s been conducting himself as up until now. But when I check his numbers from the sim suite, I’m somewhat encouraged.
It looks like he’s been practicing with X-mode for thirty laps in a row. By lap twenty-five, he started gaining time.
Huh.
He strolls into the analysts’ cave shortly before 6p.m. I’m at war with my computer, testing different formulas for emotions; he wears his usual grumpy expression, but it’s not quite as severe as it usually is.
“Intern.” He props a hip on my desk, blocking my view of my computer.
I look up at him. “Asshole.”
Is this becoming our customary greeting?
He flicks a glance over me. “Where’d the glasses go? You were rocking the hot-nerd look.”
Hold on, did he just insinuate I’m hot?
No, I must’ve misheard. Or he must’ve misspoken. If there’s one thing that Asher has made abundantly clear, it’s that my attraction to him is painfully one-sided.
“I only need them when I’m overtired and the blue light from computers gives me a headache.” I clear my throat. “I saw your stats from the simulator.”
His expression grows very serious. “And?”
I swivel my office chair to the side and click over to my algorithm. It’s nowhere near completion, but this model has already started spitting out forecasts based on hard data. “If you continue optimizing use of X-mode, you’re projected to gain one-twentieth of a second during races.”
Asher’s face sours. “That’s not going to get me any awards.”
“No, it won’t,” I agree. “But if you also optimize boost mode, keep an eye on battery power, and—”
“Get to the point,” he snaps.
Jerk. “If you optimize several other fields by an average of one twentieth of a second, you’ll hold solid rank in midfield.”
He scowls. “That’s not good enough.”
I laugh. “What are you expecting? A podium?”
When he scathes me with the force of his glare, my laugh abruptly cuts off. “Oh shit, you actually are.”
“You don’t have to say podium in the same tone you say Ebola.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just…” I shake my head.
“I’m confused. You’ve been placing last or close to last for years now.
What the hell changed in the span of one evening?
The results of your race yesterday were—” I pause when his glare nearly sets me on fire, “—underwhelming. I’m trying to understand what’s different. ”
“I’m a man of many mysteries. Pack up your shit, let’s go, and I’ll tell you about them.”
Since I Ubered to work, a bank account-draining habit I’ve developed because I’m usually too tired to drive safely, Asher begrudgingly offers me a ride in his limited edition McAllister.
I’ve had the pleasure of driving and being in extremely nice cars throughout my life—Hunter has an insane car collection he uses when he drives himself—but I still have to work to tamp down my excitement.
I want to get under the hood of the car and explore it desperately, but figure Asher would sooner shoot me than let me deconstruct his McAllister.
I don’t comment on the fact that he drives a car manufactured by a competing F1 team—a team that’s ranked #4—and he doesn’t offer any explanation.
The bar he takes us to isn’t what I expected from him. It’s a small, hole-in-the-wall dive bar that looks like it’s right out of a Western movie. Wooden countertops, crumbling beams holding up a questionable ceiling, and nuts on each table.
We take a table in the back. My chair creaks suspiciously beneath my weight, and I feel a touch out of place, but Asher looks right at home. He greets the bartender and waitress by first-names, and I think he almost smiles.
Weird.
He orders a Guinness for himself; I get a glass of white wine. We stare at each other as we wait for our drinks to arrive.
“So,” I say after a beat. “Assuming you haven’t brought me here to kill me, I’d love it if you explained your sudden change of heart. It’s giving me a serious case of whiplash.”
“If you make me bare my heart to you, I might end up burying you out back.”
His tone is just dry enough that I question whether or not he’s joking.
“Alright, no heart-to-hearts. But still. If you want my help, I’m entitled to know why.”
“You aren’t entitled to shit. You’re just an int—”
“If you finish that sentence, you can find someone else to help you,” I hiss.
He cuts off. His glare loses its sharp edge. Before we can answer, the waitress returns with our drinks. Asher picks up his Guinness and downs half of it in a matter of seconds. Lazy tendrils of heat curl through me as I watch his throat work.
I focus on my own drink, taking a sip. He needs to stop being so hot so I stop getting distracted.
“I want to stay in F1,” he says, slamming his glass back on the table. Drops of beer slosh over the side of it, spraying the already-sticky wooden surface.
“Okay,” I intone slowly. “That’s… a new revelation?”
“Kind of.”
I stare at him. “Explain, please.”
“You’re like a dog with a bone,” he mutters.
“I’m not good with change. Like… at all.
And this sport?” he picks up his glass and takes another swig.
This time, I have the foresight to avert my gaze, but I still catch him licking droplets from his lips, and the heat inside me intensifies. “It’s nothing but change.”
Why do I have to be attracted to the biggest asshole I’ve ever met? Is this the universe punishing me for my years-long dry streak?
“The changes are pretty incremental in the grand scheme of things,” I say, meeting his eyes. “Yes, they’re constant, but if you keep up with them, they’re small.”
“I haven’t been keeping up with them,” he growls.
“My first few years in F1 were excellent. Then, the cars and regulations started seriously changing—I didn’t like that, so I didn’t adhere to it.
And the new hybrid changes in recent years were especially offensive.
I hadn’t decided for sure that I was leaving… but I didn’t apply myself to staying.”
His logic is fucked, but at least I now understand him a bit better. That’ll enable me to help him. I shouldn’t help him after how he’s treated me… but if my forecasting system can take him from P22 to P10 in a single season, it’ll have proved its efficiency and value.
It’ll also help me make a name for myself and my work.
“So, you’re allergic to change, but you underwent a massive one that ended up with you knocking on my door at 3am. What brought that about?”
He works his jaw. Fuck, even that’s hot.
“I spoke with someone very important to me. She reminded me that I’m either all in or all out, and that doing shit by half-measures doesn’t run in my blood.”
Speaking of blood, mine starts to boil as soon as he says she. There’s very little in the press about Asher’s personal life, and nothing about a girlfriend. Could it be his mother?
No, Thomas recently mentioned that Asher has a notoriously bad relationship with his parents. So this She is another woman.
No wonder my attraction is one-sided. It’s entirely possible he’s in a committed relationship, and this woman is important enough to have instigated what sounds like a serious change of heart.
Why an image of me eviscerating this faceless woman flashes through my mind, I’m sure I don’t know.
“I see.” I try to keep the testiness from my tone.
God, why do I care? “Well… the good news is, the 2026 regulation changes have sort of caused an overhaul. So, you won’t necessarily need to memorize manuals from previous years—though reading them wouldn’t hurt.
For this year, you do need to memorize the car manual, read the technical directives, the stewards’ decisions so far this season, and every debrief summary from our race engineers.
They all have essential information that you have to know as well as the back of your hand. ”
“Are you giving me homework, Miss Linden?” His tone is only a touch mocking; mostly, it’s resigned.
“Yes,” I say shortly. “Do that as soon as possible. Then, I’m going to need you in the simulator every other day, with each day focusing on a new element.
Today you did decent work with X-mode, but it wasn’t targeted enough.
It gave me good data, but I’ll need more.
Tomorrow, I want to see you run active aero drills—switching between straight mode and corner mode under pressure, and then defending without it—each for at least twenty laps.
I’ll also need you cycling through the power modes; deploy, harvest, overtake, recharge, with one focus per session or two in the simulator.
” I bite my bottom lip, and I think I catch a flash of heat in Asher’s eyes.
No, that’s just inappropriate wishful thinking.
“I need to see how you drive in dirty air. Clean air. What combination of modes and energy management helps you most on straights versus through corners. And, if you want the fantasy of a podium this season to be even remotely achievable—” which it probably isn’t “—I need you to give it your all. I’ve seen your early tapes; I want to work with that driver. ”
“He wasn’t any less of an asshole than I am,” Asher comments glibly.
“He was good enough to make up for the permanent stick up his ass. You aren’t.” I give him a pointed stare. “Can you do that?”
He considers this for several beats. Nods. “I’ll try.”
“Great.”
The pieces of my model that are complete should be enough to successfully run forecasts on Asher specifically, especially if he’s giving it his all.
The mechanical and strategic variables are solid—it’s the human side that’s still unfinished.
His emotional volatility is exactly the kind of thing I don’t yet know how to quantify, and it’d skew the models predictions, but that’s a problem for a later date.
For tonight, I need to run through the working sections of the algorithm, clean up the inputs, test the outputs, and pray to god that my soft-launch works. If it doesn’t, I have no doubt Asher will scream my incompetence from the rooftops, ruining my prospects in F1… and I’ll be devastated to boot.