by Kat Ransom
“I like this suspension setup better.”
I huff and stare at him, he knows I need more than that.
“This track is all cornering and precise braking. I need the car with me. Adding more negative camber makes it… tighter,” he speaks his words in chunks as he goes around the track on screen and the car rocks and shakes.
I just noticed he bites his lip when he goes around corners. You’d never see that under a helmet.
“Do you do that because you’re nervous in the corners?” I ask. That would make sense with the tire problems.
“Do what?”
“Bite your lip.”
He smiles and slowly runs his tongue over his bottom lip before answering me, “Just concentrating. You’re making it difficult.”
“How am I making it difficult?” I’m just standing here!
“Looking at my ass, looking at my lips, it’s distracting.”
I glare at him then look down at the controls before me. I fiddle with the brake controls, turn them way down.
Cole swings into the next corner on the screen. I hear him hit the brake pedal a few times, and then his virtual car sails off into the grass. The hydraulics of the platform jump around and rock the mock car violently back and forth.
I crack up laughing and think I even snort.
It feels so good to laugh with him again, like an eraser rubbing on those tarnished parts of my heart.
“Real nice. That’s real nice, Em.”
I continue snickering as I reset the computer, and Cole starts fake-driving again, but I’m hung up on him calling me Em. No one else ever has, except one short-lived boyfriend and I asked him to stop it.
We run through several programs and dozens of laps. Cole's doing well explaining how the car feels, and I have all kinds of notes. This next track is known to be very hard on tires, so it’s essential I understand as much as possible, and Dante was not as helpful in the Sim.
Dante is all one-word answers and has a hard time expressing how something feels versus facts. At one point, he tried mansplaining downforce, and we had to have a little chat.
At this point, I think I have everything I need from Cole in the simulator, but I’m enjoying watching him and talking to him, even if it is about the car. He thinks he’s clever, but he’s been sneaking plenty of innuendos into his descriptions.
The car feels tight, the brakes are so hot.
When he tells me how stiff and hard the suspension is getting, I tell him he sounds like Steel from my ridiculous book.
“Steel’s an asshole,” he replies.
“Oh, really?” I laugh.
“Yeah. He could have just paid for the kidney in chapter one, told Charlotte he was in love with her, and she wouldn’t have been forced to choose between him and her job.”
“Well, that wouldn’t be very dramatic then, would it?”
“I guess there had to be some plot to further all the sex scenes.”
“Wait,” I say as I move from behind the desk and stand right next to the elevated car, “how do you know Charlotte had to leave her job?”
“I read the book,” he says flatly, still going around and around the track on screen.
“You read. The book…”
“Mmm-hmm,” he says, biting his lip into a chicane.
“Why would you do that?”
“The suspense was killing me.”
“Cole…”
The car stops on screen, and he looks down at me from his elevated seat, “I read it because you read it. Just wanted to know more about the new you.”
I feel something shift in me, something dangerous. A small crack forming in my foundation.
I turn my head away from those lethal blue eyes looking down on me and stare at the Imperium logo on the wall, instead.
Cole pulls himself out of the seated car and stands up, then begins his descent down the stainless steel stairs attached to the platform. “Up you go,” he says when he reaches the bottom.
“What?”
“Up you go. You want to know how it feels, so, get in,” he points upward to the cockpit.
“I can’t, is, is that allowed?”
“Who gives a shit? Live a little, Em.”
I look at Cole, then look at the simulator, look at Cole, look at the Sim.
Oh, fuck it.
I climb up the steps apprehensively, but Cole’s right behind me and helps me get into the cockpit. He shows me all the controls I’ll need, tells me how to work the paddles and all the controls.
His hands run over mine as he puts them on the steering wheel, I can feel his breath on my neck as he bends over me to explain everything.
“There’s nothing you can break,” he reassures me. “Just have fun.”
Cole goes back down the ladder and restarts the computer program. The screen changes to starting position on the Hungarian grid. The lights go out, and I stretch my leg as far as it will go to mash the gas peddle down.
The car jerks forward, and I let out a squeal as the platform moves and shakes.
“Shift,” Cole laughs, my steering wheel showing me I’ve maxed the RPMs.
Oh hell, I was still in first gear. I shift into second, and as the first corner comes up, I hit the brakes, and the whole car rocks forward like it’s just hit a brick wall. The car sputters and dies.
“Shit!”
Cole is laughing hysterically now but restarts the program, and I try again.
I can make it through two or three corners and in gears one, two, or three before I manage to destroy the virtual car. I lose track of how many walls I run into. At one point, I somehow manage to overturn the car.
“Fuck, I’m gonna piss myself,” Cole cackles.
“I want to make it one full lap around,” I call down to him.
This is a hoot, even if I am starting to get motion sick from bouncing around in this circus ride.
“Is the real car this hard to drive?” I ask as I’m halfway through one full lap without death or destruction, even if I’m only going twenty-five miles per hour, and all of my engine warning lights are on.
“The real car is much harder, baby.”
Rounding the final corner, I find myself biting my lip, too.
“Ha! I did it! I am the world champion!” I throw my arms into the air as I cross the finish line. One lap in just seventeen minutes.
Total rockstar.
Cole climbs back up the ladder and helps extract me from the car. Even getting in and out of these things is difficult.
“Well, did it help you understand the car better?” He asks me at the bottom as I fix my hair that’s become disheveled with all the commotion.
I quirk my head to the side, “You know, I wasn’t thinking about it.”
He beams at me, the corners of his smile damn near reaching his eyes.
Our eyes flicker back and forth between each other in the darkened room.
Cole takes a big breath in, blinks, and then breaks our gaze. He turns behind the desk, “I’ll print out your data set for a souvenir.”
“More like a badge of shame,” I take the papers as they come out of the printer. It’s so bad it makes me laugh again. Good thing I went into engineering as I have no career potential as a Formula 1 driver.
We gather up my laptop and my printouts, and as soon as we leave the room, I realize it’s now dark outside. Hours have passed inside the simulator room.
“Walk you to your car?” Cole asks.
“Okay, just need to grab my stuff.” There’s more security around this building than Fort Knox, yet I tell myself the prudent thing to do is to let Cole walk me to my car.
“You excited for Budapest?” he asks as we step outside into the warm, muggy night air.
“I am. If there’s time, I want to buy some paprika, and there’s a restaurant I’ve always wanted to go to.” There probably won’t be any time, if the last race was any indication, but I want authentic paprika for my arsenal, and this restaurant has been on my bucket list fo
r a while now.
“What restaurant?”
“I can’t pronounce the name, but it was on Anthony Bourdain’s show.”
Cole nods, and we talk briefly about how much we both felt the loss of Anthony Bourdain. I don’t know why his death affected me so much, I think I admired the way he lived his life and enjoyed the small things, lived in the moment.
“I think he’s why I started cooking,” I tell Cole.
“You cook now?”
“When I can.” We’ve reached my car, and I unlock it and open the door.
“You’re amazing. Good night, Em.”
“Goodnight. Thanks for that,” I point back to the building.
“Any time.”
I get in my car, and he shuts the door. I give him a little wave as I pull away and notice in the mirror he’s still standing there watching me drive away.
I’m halfway home before I realize he called me ‘baby’ today.
Danger, Emily, danger.
Still, I find myself tapping the steering wheel to music and singing to terrible pop songs as I make my way back to Cambridge. Today was a good day, and that’s all I want to think about.
When I get home, I post my horrendous simulator data print-outs to the refrigerator with food-delivery magnets and laugh the entire time I explain to Klara what the hell they are.
“You’re happy,” she grabs my hand and smiles.
Twelve
Hungaroring—Budapest, Hungary
Cole
“You did what?” Edmund’s eyes go wide, and he sets his coffee cup down with a heavy clink.
“They were not very nice about it, either,” Emily says as she pulls her long chocolate hair behind her head, twists it up, then sticks a pen through it to hold it in place.
Fuck, that’s hot.
She looks like a sexy school teacher when she does that. Her long neck is exposed now, and I can almost see her pulse ticking beneath her skin.
“What do you mean they weren’t nice about it?” The caveman inside me perks up when Emily says the other teams weren’t exactly friendly with her.
All weekend, she’s been hell-bent on talking to the other teams to see if they’re having tire problems, too. They are, but Em has quickly discovered that everything is a secret in Formula 1. Teams don’t share data, strategies, or intel. Not when there are billions of dollars at play. It’s every team, man, or woman, for themselves.
“They didn’t do anything,” she clarifies and gives me a knowing look that tells me to calm down. “They just acted like I was a dumb girl, and a strategist from a certain Italian team suggested I’d be better at fetching them all coffees than worrying about tires.”
The fork in my hand falls to the table in outrage. Those pricks.
“Ahh, to be young again,” Edmund chuckles and looks around the hospitality area of our motorhome where I’m grabbing a pre-race snack, and Emily is taking advantage of any free time to talk shop.
It took Edmund about three minutes after Emily started to put the pieces together about us. He doesn’t mind that I schemed him and Emily into this job since he’s thrilled with her anyway, but he’s promised to keep my secret. Emily might think she only got the job because of me. It would hurt her pride and fuel bullshit ideas like this crap that women belong fetching coffee.
She’s dealt with it her whole life as a woman in STEM fields.
“Ignore them,” Edmund continues. “Their strategists can’t find their way out of a paper bag.”
Emily whips out a thick, spiral-bound notebook, pages and pages filled with her delicate, girly handwriting in blue gel ink. She’s very particular about her pens, and when one goes missing, she gets stabby.
“Do you know what these tires cost? It’s absurd,” she flips to a page in her notebook. “Twenty thousand dollars for a single race.”
I nod, sounds about right.
“Did Olivier get you the information?” Edmund says like he has a frog in his throat, then he starts coughing hoarsely. “Excuse me, coffee down the wrong pipe.”
“Yeah, he sent me commercial brochures. PDFs that anyone can download from the Concordia website,” Emily purses her lips and scowls. She even asked Edmund to get the info from Olivier, and this is what he sent in response.
“I don’t know there’s much more I can do, myself,” Edmund says to Emily. His eyes are watering from coughing, and he dabs at them with a napkin. “I can talk to the bosses, but they’ll probably tell me to deal with Olivier.”
“He won’t give me a straight answer.”
Emily’s met with Olivier a few times now, he’s been hanging around the garage being Mr. Smooth French Guy all over her. If I didn’t know Emily so well, I might be jealous.
But he treats her like arm-candy, dismisses anything she says with a laugh. He treats her like one of the attention-seeking celebrities or models who walk up and down the paddock.
Dumbass.
I’m standing back and letting Olivier dig his own grave. He’s doing a better job of it than I ever could, all on his own.
Edmund checks his watch and clears his throat, “Twenty minutes left. I’ll meet you both in the garage. I need to go find something for this cough.”
“See you there,” I tell Edmund and try to suck down another liter of water before the race. It’s especially hot today, and Liam has been on a tear making sure the whole team is adequately hydrated.
“Do you know what they do with the tires after the race?” Emily asks me, her face incredulous.
The sassy, determined tone of her voice turns me on more than she’ll ever know. She’s the most beautiful when she’s like this—confident, strong, assured. I could listen to her talk about tires, math, chemistry, or cheese—all day long.
It still has the same effect on me it did years ago. It drives out all the other bullshit from my mind. When I’d hear Stan’s voice in my head telling me what a piece of shit I was, what a moron I was to not hit every apex on the kart track, or how I was blowing the opportunities he’d given me, it was Emily who chased the thoughts away and replaced them with the excitement she felt over learning something new.
Dear old dad is supposed to grace me with his presence at the next race, too. I need to figure out how to manage that because I don’t want Stan anywhere near Emily. He probably already knows she’s here, given how many voicemails he’s left me.
Not that I’ve listened to a single one.
“They’re supposed to analyze them,” I answer Emily about the used tires.
“They burn them, Cole. They shred them, then burn them and use them as fuel at cement factories.”
“Is that normal?” It sounds bizarre, but what do I know.
“It’s not abnormal, but it’s rather convenient, isn’t it?”
“Can I do anything to help?”
Emily takes a deep breath and smiles at me across the table. “Just don’t get yourself killed out there.”
“No pressure,” I smile back.
She let it slip the other day that Dante’s crash scared her, but then she quickly reigned herself in. I don’t like that she’s upset, but a selfish part of me does feel good knowing she’s thinking about me enough to be worried.
That she doesn’t want me dead.
Everything has been going better than I thought it would with Emily. Sometimes, it’s like we’ve slipped right back into who we used to be with each other. Other times, I catch her pulling back. We haven’t talked about the past, though, and I know, eventually, we’re going to have to if I want her back.
And I want her back.
I need her back.
She’s been back in my life for a month, and it’s like giving a starving man one bite of steak. I want the whole goddamn t-bone, the entire cow. All of the cows, the herd, the ranch.
“Stan’s going to be in Belgium,” I blurt out in response to the persistent rogue thoughts in my mind about moving fate along. There’s not much I enjoy doing slowly.
“Oh,” her face
falls.
“Just wanted to warn you. I’ll do my best to keep him away from you.”
I wish the prick would just stay home in his Florida McMansion with whatever woman he’s terrorizing this week, but Belgium is his favorite race. He comes back every year to relive his glory days and act like he isn’t a washed-up has-been.
He drove that track once as an F1 reserve driver when the primary pilot was injured. He never lets anyone forget it.
“Does he know I’m here?” Emily asks and fidgets with a long strand of hair that’s fallen out of her bun.
“I haven’t told him, but probably.” I’m sure he’s seen her on TV, heard gossip through the rumor mill, and that’s what all my voicemails are about.
“Does the Major General know you’re here?” I ask about her own asshole father.
“I haven’t told him, but assuredly,” she clones my dysfunctional statement with a frown. “I told Mom,” she adds.
“How’d that go?”
She shrugs, “It’s not like we’re together.”
Knife to the heart.
Stab stab stab.
Her dad and mine should really run off together. They can make one another miserable and leave the rest of the world alone. Too bad they also hate each other.
You should be able to banish people to remote islands, like in the old days.
I want to continue this conversation, I want to tell her we aren’t together yet, but I need to head to the garage and get in the car in a few minutes.
Save it for tonight.
“My mom said they saw your mother,” Emily mumbles and looks at me with her big, brown eyes. There’s a mixture of apprehension, pity, and curiosity swirling around behind her long, dark lashes.
“Recently?”
“I guess.”
“What did she say?” I take my Imperium hat off and run my hand through my hair. The last thing I need is her showing up again, here, there, or anywhere.
Emily’s been given enough reasons to hate me without the piece de resistance.
Emily hunches her shoulders up, “They didn’t talk to her.”
I bet.
Mommy Dearest is probably out of money again if I had to guess. I sure as hell haven’t sent her any since I blocked her and cut her off years ago. Apparently, getting abused by Stan is worth whatever cash he tosses at her from time to time.