Open Wheel

by Shey Stahl

  I feared divorce, because it felt like I failed. Everyone warned me when Easton and I got married, we should take our time. This day and age, who married that young?

  Well, I did. I did because I thought it would work.

  Twisting to face me, his hand touched my leg sincerely. “Just hear me out…okay?”

  That wasn’t the way to start a conversation.

  “Okay…”

  Hear me out? Who says that?

  “I know you’re not happy,” he began, staring at his hands as he spoke, “and I don’t want this to be something where we blame each other and shit gets ugly.” With a deep sigh, he looked at me.

  I nodded, relief washing over me that he felt it too. It wasn’t me, and it certainly wasn’t him. We had grown apart, a life distanced by the very thing we’d sworn wouldn’t happen a year ago. The distance in our marriage. The need to choose everything else over our relationship. It was me working with JAR Racing and him choosing racing constantly.

  This life and everything we didn’t do and say had ruined us.

  My attachment to Rager made me wonder if there was someone else Easton was turning to.

  Would I have blamed him for turning to someone else at that point?

  “Are you seeing someone?”

  His stare caught mine, his answer just as quick. “No, I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  “Are you wanting someone else?”

  I supposed seeing someone, and wanting to, were entirely different.

  His stare dropped, his answer a little slower. “No…it’s not that.”

  “But you have feelings for Jessie?”

  I knew Jessie had feelings for Easton. That much was obvious. Her being his publicist, she spent a lot of time around him, more time than me. They were friends but I did wonder if there was more. She was a pretty girl.

  “No.” He shook his head slowly, but never returned his eyes to mine. Breathing in a deep breath, he let it out slowly. “But she kissed me about two months ago. I didn’t react, and I pushed her away. I don’t have any intention of pursing her, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  I was, and though she kissed him, that didn’t bother me like I thought it would.

  “So you wanting a divorce…this has nothing to do with Jessie?”

  “No.” He looked me in the eye, willing me to believe him. “It doesn’t.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “You’re not in love with me in the way you should be…and I want you to be happy. You’re happy with Rager. You look at Rager and I see it. I’m not going to be that guy who holds his wife in a marriage that she’s not happy with. He can make you smile.”

  “You always did too.”

  A crease formed between his brows. “Not for a long time.”

  Tears stung my eyes. He had seen it all along, but because I was trying, so was he. We tried to have a baby together, but it didn’t change the fact that I was married to the wrong man.

  Easton knew that.

  The thought of divorce scared me, especially after seeing what Axel was going through now and wondering what was going to happen with him and his wife, Lily. I tried to blink the tears away, but they fell instead.

  Raising his hand, Easton cupped my cheek. “Please don’t cry. I thought you would want this.”

  I nodded, his hand dropping. “I failed. I tried to fix us, but I failed.”

  “Honey, it wasn’t something we could fix.” I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, his expression unreadable, as I’d never seen him look that way. “We both know that. We tried…we gave it a better try than most do.”

  He was right, we did. Some thought we never saw each other, but we did. There were weekend and mid-week getaways and waking up at two in the morning to have sex. We did try, and there was still passion there, but we both saw what had become of us.

  “We don’t have to do this now, just think about it. I know deep down you want out of this. You don’t want to be married to me, and you know it.”

  I chewed on the question, unsure about how I wanted to ask it. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  Just ask him.

  “Do you want to be married?”

  “I will always love you, Arie, very much…but no, I don’t want to be married anymore.”

  That hurt. It hurt more than I thought it would. Stinging down deep, I felt the words in my gut, sharp stabbing pains that radiated through my bones like shock waves.

  Regardless if I was hung up on someone else and my husband knew it. Hearing him say he didn’t want to be married to me anymore was like a knife to my chest.

  “You want a divorce?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  For a moment, I contemplated how to answer him, what to say, but I didn’t say anything. Easton touched the side of my face, his thumb dragging over my lip, remembering, like he would never forget certain aspects of us being together, and then he kissed my forehead. “I’m going to head back to the hotel.”

  Nodding, I let him leave me on the beach, crying. And though the tears shouldn’t have been there, they were, and I couldn’t stop them.

  LATER THAT NIGHT in bed, knowing my marriage was over, I couldn’t stop crying. Easton gave me distance, said nothing as we laid there. As if words might have made it worse.

  When he felt the bed shaking, he turned over just as the air conditioner kicked on, his arms wrapping around me and pulling me against his chest. “Come on, don’t cry. I thought you wanted this.”

  I couldn’t say anything because that was what hurt the most. I wanted it and didn’t understand what it meant. What it would mean for everyone else around us. This was going to change our entire lives and our family at a time when I feared change wasn’t what we needed. Easton had won the championship this last season and the media was all over him.

  Now divorce? What would that mean?

  “What are we going to tell everyone?” I asked, staring at the wall, but letting him hold me.

  “We should wait,” he whispered, kissing my shoulder softly, his body trembling slightly. “I don’t think we should rush into anything. With the championship and Jack…I don’t want to bring any more attention to your family in a negative way.”

  You want to wait? You want to lie to them?

  The reality slapped me in the face. It was over. My marriage, after six years, was over.

  Turning to face him, my eyes went to his in the moonlight coming through the windows. His eyes were staring at his hand he’d placed on my shoulder. “Why now?”

  “What?” His gaze moved to mine, the brown dull and muddled with thoughts he couldn’t comprehend.

  “Why did you decide now you want a divorce?”

  Easton’s brow scrunched as he spoke, his voice shaking around the words. “That last race of the season… in Homestead… you didn’t come.” I didn’t say anything to defend myself, because he knew that weekend was when my older brother, Axel, won the championship. I was with him, where I needed to be. But then it hit me. I was choosing my family over Easton. But right then, the look on his face said so much more. “And I didn’t miss that you weren’t there. I remember looking around victory lane and knowing you wouldn’t be there. I felt nothing.”

  Tears flowed endlessly, not because of his words, but because he knew it was over too. You couldn’t make yourself love someone in the ways you needed to. It happened, or it didn’t. And sometimes, the love faded to eventually nothing but a friendship, if you let it. He let it.

  “I’m not lying about the fact that I love you, and I want you to be happy. You and I both know that’s not with me.”

  When I didn’t reply, he continued, his voice still shaking, only this time, his eyes watered.

  “Can you really tell me I’m enough for you?” His hand rose, cupping my cheek in the hazy blue-lit night. “That if I said I never want you to see Rager again, would I be enough for you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “This isn�
�t just on you… it’s me too. I wasn’t there. I’m never there when you need me the most.” There was truth in that. He wasn’t. There was always something else, and when I only needed a minute of his time, it wasn’t a minute he spared. “I lost you.”

  Mounting the wing - Sprint car wings are mounted high above the drivers head to ensure that the flow of air under the wing is not disturbed by the car’s bodywork. The top wing is usually mounted centrally over the car (sideways). Care should be taken when mounting the wing to ensure that the brackets are as aerodynamically efficient as possible. Anything that disturbs the air under the wing will affect the performance of the wing. Most modern sprint car wings have internal slides which keep the brackets out of the airflow. The brackets that support the wing at the rear are known as wing trees and the front mounts are called wing posts.

  EASTON AND I FLEW back to Mooresville the next day, and so began the silly season as they called it in NASCAR. In early January, teams and drivers went straight to work after the holidays to prepare for the season.

  Easton, well, with him winning the championship, his mind was on that and what he needed to do. It seemed as soon as we were back, the divorce wasn’t talked about. I had so many questions for him, and they all went unanswered that morning.

  I came downstairs—after very little sleep—to find him at the kitchen table, coffee in hand and his cell phone in the other.

  Going about making my own coffee, I checked my emails on my phone, deleting the ones I didn’t need and peeking over at him a few times. Since we held one another two nights ago, he hadn’t said a word about the divorce. At some point, we had to work out the details, right?

  “When do you want to file for divorce?” I asked, staring at him as I took a seat across from him.

  My words, or rather my blunt question caught him off guard. He had to know I was going to ask.

  Taking a slow drink of his coffee, he then set the black mug on the table with a light thud and looked up at me. Pain was evident in his eyes, I saw that much. Licking his bottom lip, he hesitated, opening his mouth a few times to speak, but then didn’t. When his stare dropped from mine, he finally answered me, eyes on his phone. “I’ll file soon. Let’s wait to announce the divorce until the media calms down.”

  I nodded, unsure how long that would take. Not only did we have Jack’s death still being talked about, we now had my brother’s future in racing and my relationship with Easton snagging headlines. It wasn’t lost on anyone that out of the thirty-six races scheduled last year, I attended only fifteen. Everyone was speculating if we were done long before we realized even it.

  I had every intention of working it out with Easton. I did. But then again, maybe he didn’t.

  “North Carolina requires you to be separated a year before the divorce is final.”

  He’s done his research, hasn’t he?

  “A year?” I asked, never looking up. My heart raced a little, speeding up and then evening out as I tried to remember this was what we both wanted. “What do we tell our families?”

  Easton’s stare finally found mine, weariness displayed in the way he didn’t maintain eye contact and the hardness to his voice. “We don’t tell them anything. If they know, the media will find out. It’s better this way, right?”

  He had a point.

  If the media found out now, they’d have a good time with those headlines trying to sway the public’s image of our family, and my father. Attention for him wasn’t what I wanted. Not after what happened with Jack.

  Everyone wanted to blame him for what happened in Cottage Grove. A seven-year-old boy, his grandson, my nephew, was killed in the pits that night when a sprint car with a stuck throttle came off the track and into the pits. Jack was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the sprint car tumbled over him, killing him. There were moments, minutes I suppose, where my dad tried to save Jack only to have him bleed to death in his arms.

  For that reason, the media pointed the fingers at Dad saying he should have known better than to have a child in the pits.

  I grew up in the pits. So did my brothers, and those kind of things never happened. Hundreds of tracks around the world allowed children in the pits. To place the blame on my dad wasn’t fair in any way.

  It truly was a freak accident.

  Unfortunately, every other week a story was being printed on the safety measures taken that night, or what my dad or Axel did wrong. Any way you looked at it, publicity wasn’t good for my family.

  Part of me felt guilty too. I’d be keeping something from them, but then again, this was my life, and I didn’t need to answer to anyone on what they thought I should or shouldn’t do.

  For that reason, I was going to keep this to myself.

  IN THE WEEKS following our return from Jacksonville, I threw myself into the designs for JAR Racing and merchandise orders for the start of the season. Not only was I in charge of all our designs, I was now involved with the designs of the World of Outlaws apparel this year. And my newest adventure, managing their merchandise trailer and media outlets. Which included their Twitter and Facebook feeds. I was already doing it last year, but now I finally had the job and was getting paid for it. That meant I would be traveling full-time with the World of Outlaws on their eighty-six race schedule.

  The second week in February, just a week prior to the haulers heading to Florida, I saw Rager for the first time since the JAR Racing party weeks before Christmas. Standing outside the showroom, I looked down at what I was wearing. JAR Racing hoodie, jeans, and flip-flops in the middle of winter. At least my toes were painted a nice bright yellow.

  Frowning, it dawned on me that I was wearing black and yellow. Not only was I the color of a honeybee, I was sporting the same colors as Rager’s new paint scheme this year. I could have stood beside the car and blended in.

  While the boys were inside the showroom signing autographs, my younger brother, Casten, approached me as soon as I stepped foot inside, smiling with that childlike way he had about him.

  “Where’s E?” He gestured to his left where Rager, Brody, and my dad sat with about ten fans surrounding them. “I thought he’d be at this?”

  Handing Casten a stack of rack cards, I shrugged, attempting to appear casual. “He’s in LA filming a commercial for Atry Sunglasses.” I could see Rager signing autographs out of the corner of my eye. While his head remained bent low, focused, his eyes deceived him, raising toward us every few seconds. My next set of words told me he could hear what Casten and I were talking about. “I haven’t actually seen him in a few weeks.”

  The scratch of the Sharpie against shiny paper stopped.

  “How the hell are you gonna make a baby if you never see each other?” Casten teased, his words expelling in a huff as he raised his arms over his head, flexing.

  Casten had recently begun working out rigorously. In return, he had a defined body. Problem was, it made him think flexing in front of everyone was the cool thing to do.

  Shaking my head, I shoved the box of cards at him and strode across the showroom to fill the table on the other side with cards and brochures on JAR Racing and CST Engines, the engine company my dad owned that shared a building with JAR Racing. Casually moving around the room, I tried to keep my attention on what I was doing and not on Rager. It wasn’t easy, but I didn’t look his way again.

  The autograph session lasted another twenty minutes before we closed the doors at two that afternoon. The guys filed out, but Rager stayed at the table, his eyes fastened on me as I picked up the remaining souvenirs that weren’t given out to the fans.

  Standing, his palms were flat on the table, his body leaning forward slightly, waiting and watching me with the same stare that made me flush. Only he wasn’t saying anything. The anticipation of hearing his voice and having his eyes on me had my hands shaking. Thankfully, he couldn’t see that when I reached for the box on the table.

  “What?” I finally asked, my smile giving me away when I felt him staring at me.
<
br />   “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Like what? I’m not looking at you.” I was trying to defend myself, but I understood quickly around guys like Rager, you don’t have much defense.

  He stood up straight, tossing the Sharpie on the table. “I don’t know what else to tell you then, but you are.”

  “How am I looking at you?”

  “Like you want me.” He paused, his tongue darting out to wet his bottom lip. “You keep looking at me like that,” I knew exactly where this was going now and my entire body felt the flood of emotions, “and I can’t be sure I won’t bend you over that front wing.” He came closer, his breath on my neck, giving a nod to the sprint car in the show room. My stomach clenched with the spike of adrenaline he always provided me. “And I won’t stop until you’re screaming my name loud enough for your husband to hear.”

  That would be difficult, wouldn’t it?

  Watching my reaction to the words, there was an inhale from deep within his chest, expanding his lungs at the same time I breathed in. He didn’t even blink. He was serious.

  He was bolder this year, wasn’t he?

  I took a moment to get a closer look at him. His hair was the same, close-cut on the sides and long enough to thread my fingers through on top. There wasn’t any reason to the mess, just thick black hair that begged to be yanked. His eyes caught my attention, as they always did. Rager’s eyes could be seen in the darkest of nights, I was sure of that. Bright blue with thick black lashes encasing them. He had lashes that curled up on the ends and, quite frankly, made me jealous that mine weren’t that long.

  And then the lips and the smile that rarely graced them. I knew the smile, just didn’t see it all that often. Even now, there was a set scowl to his features as he watched me, trying to decide if this would once again be a year where he felt tortured when I was around.

  I couldn’t help but think the moment I saw him, I wanted to blurt out that I was getting a divorce.

  “And don’t look at me like that, either,” he teased, letting the words out with a breathy laugh.