Chapter 191 Callum #2
Aurélie tilted her head to the side, withdrawing her hand from mine to lift her mug with both hands. I missed her touch immediately.
“It’s… different this time,” I added, rubbing my hand over the back of my neck. “No mandatory media appearances. Less sponsor bullshit. Highest salary of my career. First-choice input on engineering and testing decisions. And a hard out clause after the second year if I want it.”
Her expression didn’t change. She just sipped her coffee and kept looking at me like she already knew where this was going.
But her silence made me ramble nervously.
“My benefits would get better. I’d get equity in the team. Flexible leave for mental health. Reduced race obligations if I asked for them. Paternity leave.” I raised my eyebrows at that, like maybe it’d prompt a reaction. A smile, a tease, anything.
But she didn’t say a word. She just tilted her head the other way and tapped her nails against the rim of her mug, the ceramic clinking softly against the edge as she stared at me over the top of it.
The little hairs around her face were still damp from her shower, her cheeks still flushed pink from the heat. Something in my stomach pulled tight, like my nerves were physically tethered to her silence.
I set my mug of earl grey tea down and exhaled slowly. “I’ve never had this much control before.”
Still no response. No smile. No frown. Just… that look. Steady and knowing.
“Aurélie.”
Still, no words. Her eyes stayed locked on mine, unreadable. The silence wasn’t cruel, but fuck, it was heavy.
Was she waiting for me to say more? Was she thinking through every possible version of the future? Or was she just giving me space to hear myself?
Because the longer she said nothing, the more I started wondering who I was trying to convince. Her… or me.
I rubbed a hand down my face and let it drop to the table, fingertips brushing the edge of her placemat.
“I’ve spent so long chasing the next win.
The next title. The next contract. And for what?
To be exhausted and replaceable and still stuck wondering if I’ve done enough?
” I paused and swallowed, my voice lowering.
“But when I look at you… at this…” I gestured vaguely to the table, the kitchen, the light streaming in from the patio.
“I don’t feel stuck. I feel like I’m home. ”
Her chin dipped and she looked up at me through her lashes, and God, she was so fucking pretty.
A beat passed. Then another. And then—Jesus help me—she smiled. It wasn’t sweet. It was knowing. Coy. Calculated. Absolutely diabolical.
She leaned forward slightly, voice deceptively casual. “Sounds like you’ve already made up your mind, baby.”
My jaw actually dropped. I gaped at her like she’d just cast a fucking spell and walked away whistling. “Excuse me?” I demand, blinking. “What kind of—witchcraft—was that?” I gestured wildly at her.
She sipped her coffee with zero remorse. “What? I’m just listening.”
“You’re not listening. You’re–you’re orchestrating some kind of emotional checkmate.”
“I’m just really good at puzzles,” she said with a shrug, eyes sparkling.
I dragged a hand down my face again, this time to hide the way I was spiraling into the center of the earth.
“You’re a menace,” I muttered.
“Mmm, must’ve been from the emotional exorcism.”
I burst into laughter, and she followed—head tipping back, eyes crinkling, the kind of unfiltered sound I hadn’t realized I’d missed until now.
That’s what we’d started calling it—the incident in the bathroom. The emotional exorcism.
“Are you going to use that against me for the rest of my life?” I asked, still catching my breath.
“I don’t know,” she said with a faux-innocent shrug. “Are you going to use the diaper strip tease against me for the rest of mine?”
“Touché,” I grumbled.
“Do you even know what that means?”
“I’m not completely uncultured, Aurélie. I can speak French when it’s used to insult me.”
She smirked, clearly pleased with herself, then went back to sipping her coffee, but the quiet that followed wasn’t uncomfortable. It was thoughtful.
My fingers tapped against the side of my mug.
“Made up mind or not,” I pressed, “I still needed to know what you thought. Because this doesn’t just affect my life anymore.” I looked up to meet her eyes. “It affects yours, too.”
Her expression didn’t change, and she didn’t interrupt. She asked me honest and difficult questions, absorbing every word I spoke as if she was cataloging them, putting together a puzzle no one else had ever cared enough to solve.
I hadn’t said a word about this to anyone else. Because the only person whose opinion mattered was sitting across from me now.
Aurélie licked her lips, considering me. I watched the movement, resisting the urge to pull her into my lap and kiss her. Sounded a lot more fun than trying to figure out my career all over again.
“You’ve been doing this for so long, Callum. You built your entire life around it, so I can understand why this is nerve-wracking for you.”
“I thought making this decision would be easy,” I admitted. “I thought I’d know.”
“That’s the thing. You do know. It’s just hard for a control-freak to accept change.”
I flipped her off, and she blew me a kiss.
“So how the fuck do I just… stop?”
Her brows drew together. “Do you want to?”
The question hit me harder than I expected, because that I didn’t know. Racing had been my identity since I was a kid. My purpose. My reason for waking up in the morning.
But now, seeing something outside of the sport…
it made the idea of three more years of giving my all to something that no longer fulfilled me the way it once did feel like slow suffocation.
Especially when this job was so much fucking more than just racing.
It was a business, it was playing by the bullshit rules put in place to portray this sport a certain way.
It was politics, danger, frustration on and off the track.
I looked at Aurélie, at the way her hazel eyes studied me, unbiased, unfiltered, unafraid.
She wasn’t Dom. She wasn’t Beckett. She wasn’t Marco. She wasn’t a team principal or a brand rep or a PR executive with a fucking agenda.
She was just her, and that meant she was the only person I could trust to give it to me straight.
I was so fucking relieved she was back to herself again.
Those few days she spent mostly asleep felt like a fucking eternity.
I kept my voice low. Stayed close. Made sure she always had water and something soft to wear.
Left her the lavender bunny heating pad when I had to step out.
Watched the rise and fall of her chest like it was the only thing keeping me grounded.
Now she was here, and I didn’t want to waste a second.
“Maybe it’s not about choosing racing or retiring, mon amour,” she murmured.
I frowned. “Then what is it about?”
She held my gaze, unwavering. "Maybe it’s about figuring out what kind of life you actually want—and then making a choice that fits that.”
The air in the room shifted.
“So I’ll ask you again. Do you want to keep racing? Do you still love it? Is this what makes you happy?”
I had been looking at this like a black-and-white decision. Like I had to choose between staying in F1 until I burned out completely or walking away forever.
But maybe… maybe there was something in between.
The idea hadn’t even occurred to me.
For the first time, it felt like I wasn’t stuck between two impossible choices: I was staring at a new possibility. One that didn’t just involve me. One that involved her.
I had to ask myself: did I want to keep hiding behind the decision that was comfortable? Or did I want to take a blind leap of faith, give up control, and trust that she’d be there when I fell?
Do I go with safe—or do I go with sacred?
Do I keep doing what I’ve always done, or do I bet everything on a future that protects us long after we both retire?
I looked back at her, at the woman who took every part of me—grief, fear, failure—and never once flinched. Who held me through my worst, believed in my best, and still managed to make me laugh when the world felt too heavy.
“I don’t know what the fuck comes next,” I admitted, voice low and cracked. “But I need to hear you say it.”
Her fingers flexed against her coffee mug, but then she let it go and rose to her feet. She rounded the table and stopped in front of me, gaze steady, soft.
“I think you need to be the one to say it out loud,” she murmured, reaching for my hand. Her grip was warm. Sure. “But if you need a minute… just be here. With me.”
She tugged gently, and I followed her to the living room.
For the next hour, we talked.
About everything and nothing. About whether we wanted to decorate for Christmas even if we wouldn’t be here.
About whether we’d do a vacation during winter break or just hibernate under blankets and binge-watch movies.
About how her neighbor’s dog barked like a gremlin every time I parked my car—which made no goddamn sense, because there was at least sixty fucking feet and a wall of cypress trees between the driveways, but apparently, I gave off terrifying intruder energy.
At one point, I asked if she wanted to come with me to visit my parents for my birthday. I was nervous as hell even bringing it up. It’s a big step—introducing someone to your family. It felt bigger with her.
But she didn’t bat an eye, just beamed and said, “I’d love that,” like it was the easiest thing in the world.
Aurélie stretched and glanced toward the windows as dark clouds gathered in the distance. “You know,” she said casually, “Greece might be nice over the break.”
My head snapped up. “Greece?”
She hummed, nonchalant. “Mmm. Good food, sunshine, history. We could swim. Wander around. Not be recognized.”
“Oh my god,” I blurted. “I’ve always wanted to go.”
That earned me the smallest smile. “I know.”
I blinked. “Wait, how do you know?”
She looked at me like it was obvious. “You said so. That media day we did together in Miami? They asked about your dream destination. You said Scotland first—because ‘home is where the heart is’—but then you said Greece. Said you’d never been, but always wanted to.”
I sat there, completely floored.
“You remembered that?” I asked softly.
She tilted her head. “Of course I did.”
And fuck me, I think my heart actually short-circuited.
She remembered.
Not just some headline-worthy detail. Not something anyone would’ve picked up on from a press release or performance stat. She remembered something soft. Something quiet. Something I barely remembered saying in a press event months ago.
She listened to me even then. Not because she had to or because it made her life easier. But because it was me.
It confirmed that even when we weren’t us, she was still holding pieces of me.
I couldn’t breathe around the sudden swell in my chest.
The way her voice softened when she said it. The way she looked at me when she did—like it was the most natural thing in the world, as if remembering me wasn’t a task, but fated and probably charted in the freckles that mapped her shoulders.
God, I would’ve followed her anywhere. I’d been saying it for months. Sure, we’d lightheartedly tossed around marriage.
But this? This made me want to marry her. Not as a fantasy or a ha-ha joke. Actually marry her.
I wanted to buy plane tickets and propose on the damn Acropolis.
I wanted to wake up in Santorini with her tangled in white sheets and sunlight, hair a mess, mouth swollen from kissing for hours.
I wanted to see her in white linen and sunglasses, a flower in her hair, sandals slapping cobblestones while she dragged me through ancient ruins like we belonged there.
I wanted to swim in the Aegean with her on my back, buy her gelato on every corner, kiss her under every sun-washed archway.
I wanted her everywhere.
This wasn’t just love that survived the storm. This was love that rebuilt the house after.
And maybe—just maybe—I didn’t need to have it all figured out to start building a life with her.
Because it wasn’t a grand declaration. It wasn’t a kiss in the rain or some life-or-death moment on the track. It wasn’t sex or survival or screaming into the night. It was this.
A quiet room, a casual comment, a memory she kept just because it was mine.
And fuck, maybe that’s why it hit me so hard. Everything between us had always moved fast and furious. We crashed through every barrier the minute we met—sparks and tension and all the messy, magnetic shit that pulled us in.
We began to orbit each other in Bahrain.
We crashed, lips first, in Suzuka.
We blurred every line in Miami and never looked back.
We gave it “just one night” in Imola.
We failed to just be “friends with unconventional strings attached” in Monte Carlo.
We tried to hide it in Barcelona.
We almost lost each other in Montreal.
We stepped into the light in Spielberg.
And in Silverstone—we shattered, but we put the pieces back together. Not perfectly. Not easily. But we chose to try, and maybe that’s the point. We weathered the storm, and now we were building the home.
We’d made a life once. Not metaphorically.
Not symbolically. A real, breathing possibility.
One that passed before we even knew about it.
It wasn’t just her loss. It was ours. And even if we never spoke the word aloud, even if we never saw it written on a chart or confirmed in bloodwork—I knew what we lost. I felt it, too.
Maybe that was the moment everything changed.
Maybe that was the moment I stopped wondering whether she was my future, and started grieving the one we almost had.
We survived things together that should’ve wrecked us.
And sitting here now, in the quiet, in the aftermath, it was glaringly obvious.
I didn’t want just race weeks and red carpets.
I didn’t want weekends where we stole moments between press calls and sprint races, only to go days or weeks without touching.
I didn’t want adrenaline in place of intimacy.
I wanted the in between in the French countryside. The Monday mornings. The grocery runs. The long walks with nowhere to be. I wanted her hand in mine, not because we were headed to the paddock, but because we were headed home. Together. Always.
I wanted all of it.
This wasn’t a sacrifice. It was a decision to stay, just in a different kind of race. The kind where love sets the pace. One we’d run side by side, no matter the track. Ours.
And that’s when I said it out loud. Not to convince her, or myself, but because I was ready to choose. Reverently, deliberately, with open hands and steady hearts.
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t chasing the next big thing. I was standing still. With her.
Right there, in her living room, in her presence—I fucking chose.