Chapter 4
Jacob
“Wooooo!”
Tippi cheers for the home team like she’s personally won the league. She jumps as she claps, pure joy sparking off her in bright little arcs that land all over me. “They nailed it. Come on, let’s see if we can meet the riders.”
“Meet them?” I echo, startled.
She shrugs, easy. “Worst thing they can say is no. Come on.” She catches my wrist and gives it a quick, encouraging squeeze.
My stomach dips. All I can picture is a line of confident, heavily armoured men clocking her and swarming like bees to syrup. Of course they’ll find her as gorgeous and captivating as I do.
Unlike me, they’ll have the nerve to do something about it.
We thread through the dispersing crowd to a steward. It would never have occurred to me to ask for access, and I’m fully prepared for him to shut us down.
He does the opposite.
Within thirty seconds he’s radioed someone, waved us through a barrier, and is now walking us down a concrete tunnel, happily making small talk with Tippi and flicking me the occasional wary glance in case I object. She handles him like a pro: friendly, but entirely unbothered.
It hits me, properly this time: I am in the presence of someone who lives deliberately.
Not just existing, not just coasting, but constantly nudging life to see what it will give her back.
She wanted me there tonight: she asked. She wants to meet the riders: she asks.
Either she’s genuinely unafraid of “no,” or she just doesn’t hear it very often.
And, when she does, it doesn’t concern her, because more equally fun opportunities will turn up soon.
Either way, she’s squeezing the meaning out of every day in a way I’ve only ever read about.
I wonder again if there’s a version of me who could ever learn to do the same.
The tunnel opens into the riders’ area. Engines still growl here and there; the air smells of oil, hot metal, and exhaust fumes. The men are in various states of armour and undress, laughing, jeering, replaying moments from the track. The steward raises his voice.
“Alright, lads. This is Tippi, and she wanted to say hello. Behave.” The last word is wrapped in humour that makes my teeth itch, like he’s proud of throwing a pretty woman into the lion enclosure.
I’m glad I’m here. If she wants to leave, I can get us out fast. That, at least, I’m good at.
To their credit, they’re more polite than I feared.
Tippi moves through them like she was born for it, complimenting their individual runs, asking how the fallen riders are feeling, listening to the answers like they’re all fascinating.
Like a journalist, but asking the questions out of personal interest rather than for an article.
They flock to her, but not in a way that sets my hackles all the way up.
It’s just typical pack behaviour around bright light.
“So, what kind of name is ‘Tippi’?” one of them drawls eventually.
He’s lounging on his bike, giving her a look I suspect he’s practiced in the mirror. The one that says, I’m different from these other guys, pick me.
It puts my back up instinctively.
Tippi only smiles, polite but unimpressed. “An unusual one,” she says sweetly.
His mouth quirks. “You’re not wrong.”
“That’s usually the case.” She glances away from him and back at me. “Jacob, Ryan was just about to show me his scar from the grand prix.” She waves me over and, for the first time, the group seems to properly see me.
The general atmosphere drops a few degrees into basic friendliness, and Ryan adjusts his approach so he’s talking to both of us instead of performing at her, lifting his trouser leg to reveal a jagged pale line along his shin. “Took half the skin off coming off at turn two,” he says cheerfully.
“Wow.” Tippi winces sympathetically. “I bet your partners go wild for that.”
He shrugs. “I do OK.”
“So you like scars, huh?” the snarky one cuts in again.
She shrugs. “Sometimes. I like the stories behind them more.”
“Kinky,” he grins. “Tell you what,” he fishes a card from his back pocket and offers it to her, deliberately not looking at me, “if you ever want to see the massive scar on my back and hear that story, hit me up.”
There’s a tiny pause.
Old, all too familiar insignificance prickles under my skin. In certain male ecosystems, I’m furniture until proved otherwise. Always have been.
“Thanks,” Tippi says brightly, and slides her arm through mine. “But I’m here with my date, so I’d pass that card to a woman who’ll actually use it. If I were you.”
The word date fizzles through me like electricity, and the corners of my mouth skip upwards before I push them back down.
The rider doesn’t lift his hand to take the card back, so she lets it drop to the concrete by his boot with an unconcerned shrug.
Happiness tickles along my veins, light and shocking. She chose me. Out loud. In front of an audience that assumed she wouldn’t.
I have never, not once in my life, been the one chosen in a room like this.
It feels very much like winning.
On the drive back, she presses the accelerator far more confidently than I ever would and keeps up a running commentary of the night: the scoring system, the crashes, the guy with the ‘gnarly’ scar, and even the Pulp Fiction ride-on music.
She doesn’t seem to expect me to contribute anything beyond the occasional “Mmm” or mild answering question.
Almost like she understands that I’m not rude, just overstimulated and done for the day.
The relief is indescribable. I don’t relax like this even with my own family; there’s always some version of a mask on, some effort to match their pace. With Tippi, I can let the conversation flow past, listening, not scrambling to find my place in it every second.
That doesn’t mean I’m at ease. Not by a long shot.
She’s far too captivating for that. Every time she laughs, something in my thorax does a painful little jump.
Every time I catch her scent, sweet like brown sugar and something floral, I have to resist the urge to lean closer and take greedy inhales through my nose.
By the time she pulls up outside my house and turns off the ignition, it’s gone ten PM. I have work in the morning, but I know I’ll lie awake far past a sensible hour, replaying her face, her voice, and the way she yelled for strangers on bikes like she cared about them.
Part of me wants her to drive away so I can crawl back into my routine and repair whatever’s been shaken loose until I feel like I’m on solid ground again.
Part of me wants this night to refuse to end.
“Can I come in?” Tippi asks.
It’s as though she read my thoughts. My throat closes around nothing. No pretext, no flimsy excuse. Just a question.
“Uhhm. Sure?” It sounds like I’m asking her instead of answering.
She smiles, slow and sultry, like this dance is the easiest thing in the world. For her, it probably is. For me, it feels like stepping off a cliff and hoping physics took the night off.
My hands are unsteady as I unlock the front door. The hallway feels smaller when we’re both in it.
“Oh, wow.” She toes off her boots and shrugs out of her jacket, heading straight for the framed 2001: A Space Odyssey poster at the foot of the stairs. “You’re a Kubrick nerd as well?”
As well.
How is everything about this woman straight from my wishlist?
“Er. Yes. I’m - yes. Huge fan.”
“Same.” Her grin is incandescent. “OK, I have to tell you this. I found the wildest theory about 2001 when I was doom scrolling the other morning. Are you ready?”
She waits for me to nod before continuing, and somehow that small courtesy is almost as intimate as anything else she’s done tonight.
She leans in like she’s sharing classified information.
“There’s this idea, right, that the monolith is basically the cinema screen.
So every time evolution jumps forward, it’s because someone’s watching it.
Which means the apes, the astronauts, Dave in the weird hotel…
They aren’t seeing alien tech. They’re watching a film.
The whole thing is about how images change us. ”
I blink. “…Oh.” That… That theory has legs.
Her eyes sparkle. “Right? So the apes see it and suddenly, tools. Humanity sees it floating around Jupiter and suddenly, we’re star children.
And Dave at the end? He’s in that seventies room, staring at this big black rectangle, and then we see the star baby.
Like we’re the next stage after him because we watched him watching the monolith screen watching itself -”
“Recursive observation,” I say, warming to the subject, the puzzle clicking into place in my head. “Like a visual feedback loop. The audience as the final evolutionary step. That would make HAL the only one not evolving because he literally can’t see it.”
“Yes!” She claps once and points at me. “Exactly. Oh my god, you’re brilliant.”
Blessedly, she doesn’t notice how that word lands like a small, happy bomb inside me.
“And the jump cuts,” I say, following the thread, “that’d mean they’re like… hard edits in consciousness. Bone to spaceship, ape to astronaut. We don’t see the steps, just the result. It’s the same inside a brain: memories, dreams, only the highlights we splice together.”
Her hand goes up for a high five. I give it, a little shyly. She looks pleased, like we’ve just completed a heist.
“And what if,” she says, eyes dancing, “that last shot, when the star child turning to look at us, is Kubrick basically saying, ‘Now you are the experiment.’ Like, he’s made it so that we’re the ones under observation.”
“That… really works,” I say, grinning. My mind is already spinning off into threads I want to tug later: HAL as failed audience, the monolith as editing bay, all of it.
My legs start trembling again when I realise how she’s looking at me now: eyes warm, pupils wide, head tilted just so. I usually find direct eye contact difficult, something to endure rather than enjoy. With her, though, I can’t look away.