CHAPTER SIX
◆◆◆
Mia
If Melbourne had been a collision, the weeks that followed were erosion.
The season didn’t give them space to breathe.
They moved from Australia to Asia to the Middle East in a blur of airport lounges, trackside motorhomes, and identical hotel rooms where the curtains were too heavy and the air-conditioning too loud.
Mia learned to sleep sitting upright on flights, to answer emails in shuttle vans, to keep smiling even when her head felt packed with cotton wool.
Lucas was… complicated.
Not because he’d changed — he hadn’t. He remained cool, crisp, clipped around the edges, a walking ice sculpture in team kit.
But the longer the season went on without points, the harder that temperature was to work around.
His silences stretched. His replies sharpened.
His posture grew a fraction more rigid each time he checked the timing screens.
And on track, he was close. Agonisingly close.
He’d hook a strong sector, then lose time in the next.
P15, P11, P13 — always brushing the threshold but never cracking it.
Mia didn’t need to hear him say anything; she saw it in the way he stood beside the car afterward, helmet still in hand, jaw tight, attention drifting somewhere past the journalists waiting behind the barrier.
His interviews were polished, the media training sticking exactly as designed, but there was a remoteness in his tone that people picked up on. Fans called it icy. Sponsors called it concerning.
CLOSE, BUT NOT brEAKING THROUGH
POLITE ON CAMERA, INVISIBLE IN THE POINTS
Mia read every article, every comment, every whispering thread she wished she could scroll past. She passed Lucas only what he absolutely needed — the toned-down versions, the summaries without teeth — even though the sharper headlines stayed lodged in her own chest.
They worked side by side without ever quite syncing.
At the track, she hovered beside him in the garage while engineers debated run plans, jotting notes while he stood motionless, eyes fixed on a monitor like he could will the car into something more.
In the paddock, she walked half a step behind him through the crush of cameras and noise, headset on, redirecting anyone who moved too fast toward him.
In hotel corridors, they exchanged brief, functional nods before retreating to their rooms to prepare for another pre-dawn departure.
Their hands brushed once in Bahrain when she passed him a printed schedule she’d grabbed on the run — accidental, fleeting — and both paused for half a heartbeat, before moving on.
Neither acknowledged it.
* * *
Lucas
The influencer shoot in Dubai was supposed to be easy.
Bright lights, curated questions, carefully staged laughs. The rooftop studio overlooked the Burj Khalifa—white marble floors, gold accents, the city glittering below like spilled jewels. Everything polished, everything controlled. Lucas hated it on sight.
Jax lounged on a couch in the pre-shoot suite, feet up, lazily tossing a stress ball as though they were killing time before a barbecue. Mia stood in the centre of the room briefing them, voice calm and professional—the tone she used when she cared too much to let it show.
“Keep it light,” she said. “They want personality, not performance. Jax, you’re good at that—just be you. Lucas… try not to look like you’re mentally running practice laps.”
Jax flashed that grin of his, too many teeth, somehow endearing. “No worries, Mia. I’ll carry the charisma for both of us. Right, mate?” He nudged Lucas’s elbow.
Lucas didn’t look up from his phone. He scrolled without reading, using the screen as cover. If he met her eyes, she’d see the irritation he was barely keeping leashed. If he spoke, he’d say something sharp. Better to stay silent.
On camera, Jax was gold. He leaned into every question, cracking jokes about the heat melting his non-existent mullet, winking at the lens, roping Lucas in with playful jabs that should have felt annoying but mostly just felt… familiar. Safe, in a way Lucas didn’t want to examine.
“So Lucas here’s the silent assassin on track,” Jax said, slinging an arm around Lucas’s shoulders. Lucas stiffened but let it stay. “Me? I’m just happy to be here, trying to get our first points when he’s not looking.”
The influencer laughed. Lucas managed the ghost of a half-smile—more reflex than feeling.
When the question turned to motivation, he answered first, same as always.
“Winning,” he said. “Everything else is noise.”
It was the truth. Clean. Simple. The only answer that never felt like a lie.
Jax jumped in without missing a beat. “Yeah, nah, he says that, but deep down it’s the post-race kebabs. And maybe the team—don’t tell him I said it, he’ll deny it till he’s blue in the face.”
The clip dropped an hour later. Lucas watched it alone in the green room, volume low, jaw tight.
Comments rolled in fast—merciless on him, the usual frost and frustration: robot, boring, why does he even bother showing up?
Jax’s easy charm carried the video, making it almost watchable.
A few fans even started shipping the “ice and fire” dynamic between the drivers.
The familiar cold burn settled in his chest—not quite anger. Disappointment. In the footage. In himself. In the way it confirmed what everyone already believed: he was good at one thing, and these days he wasn’t even sure he was good at that anymore.
He found Mia in the hallway outside the media room. Phone gripped so tight the knuckles showed white. He didn’t raise his voice—the edge was there anyway, sharp as carbon fibre.
“This what you were after?” He held up the screen like evidence. “Me looking like a robot with a pulse?”
Mia kept her voice low, glancing down the empty corridor. “I wanted you to sound like you give a damn. About something. Anything.”
He let out a short, humourless breath. “I give a damn about the stopwatch. The rest?” He shrugged, the movement tight. “Noise.”
She looked at him then—not angry, not pitying. Just steady. “I told you winning’s not everything people want to hear about. They want to see the person behind the helmet.”
His eyes met hers—flat, unreadable on the surface. Underneath, something flickered. A crack. Small. Unwelcome. Because she wasn’t wrong. And that made it worse.
He’d spent years making sure there wasn’t much person left to see. The helmet, the suit, the stopwatch—they were clean. Predictable. No room for mess, no room for weakness. No room for the kid who’d once cared too much about what people thought and paid for it every time he let the mask slip.
“Maybe there isn’t much person to see,” he said. The words came out quieter than he meant. Not angry. Just… empty. Like admitting it out loud made the emptiness real.
Mia opened her mouth. “Lucas—”
He shook his head once, already turning. “Save it.”
He walked away, footsteps measured, back straight. The hallway felt colder behind him, but he didn’t look back.
Inside, though, something stayed unsettled. Not the comments. Not Jax carrying the clip. Her. The way she’d looked at him like she believed there was still something worth finding. Like she wasn’t ready to write him off as a lost cause.
He hated that she might be right.
He hated more that part of him—small, buried, almost forgotten—wanted her to keep looking.
* * *
Mia
Later that evening, Mia stood alone in the hotel’s small meeting room the team had booked for the day—a glass-walled space turned temporary media hub, whiteboard still up, monitors flickering with paused footage, long table littered with briefing sheets and half-empty coffee cups.
She wiped down the whiteboard with deliberate strokes, erasing bullet points about "personality vs.
performance" and "authentic engagement." The words blurred under the marker remover, but they lingered in her mind like echoes.
They hit closer than they should have. Not because of him—but because they scraped at something older, buried deep.
Control. She'd chosen communications because it let her shape the narrative, keep the story straight before it twisted out of her hands.
But days like today reminded her why she needed that armour in the first place.
The exhaustion settled in her chest, heavy and familiar, pulling her back to a memory she'd spent years trying to outrun.
* * *
Oxford, second year, late November. The air smelled of wet stone and mulled wine drifting from college bars.
Mia had been at the university for fourteen months and still felt like a guest who’d forgotten to leave.
The scholarship covered tuition and a narrow college room; it did not cover the way other students looked through her when she spoke, or the way they looked at her when she didn’t.
Emma had been the exception. Emma with her easy laugh, her old-money wardrobe, her instinctive way of making every room feel like it belonged to her.
They met in a first-year seminar on Victorian literature—Emma had leaned over during a dull lecture on Middlemarch and whispered, “If Dorothea Brooke had Instagram, she’d be insufferable.
” Mia had laughed louder than the tutor liked, and that was it. They were inseparable.
Emma’s birthday fell on a Friday in late semester.
The party was at her parents’ townhouse—three storeys of Georgian brick, high ceilings, and a garden lit with paper lanterns.
Everyone was there: the rowing boys with their broad shoulders and louder laughs, the English students who quoted Donne while drunk, the international crowd who pretended they weren’t homesick.
Mia wore the one nice dress she owned—black, simple, bought second-hand from a charity shop on Cowley Road.
She felt pretty in it. Emma told her she looked dangerous.