by Kat Ransom
“All right, fuel and tires look good, Cole. You can push now. Repeat, push now,” Edmund comes through the earpiece in my helmet, and I close the gap to the car in front, who happens to be Dante.
For the better part of several laps, Dante and I squabble back and forth, wheel to wheel. I’d pass him, then he’d pass me, but I’m finally in front of him and pulling a lead now.
“Tell him to stick that in his cannoli,” I laugh over the radio.
“Uh, copy cannoli message,” Edmund replies, trying to be serious.
With two more laps to go and no one close behind, this is a second-place podium for me if I can bring it home, and the car is rock solid. It’s never over before it’s over, but I can back off and relax just a little.
“GG,” I say over the radio and hope Emily registers the code since I’m not that big of a pussy to call her gorgeous girl over the radio so it can be broadcast in thirty-six countries. “The car is tight as hell, so smooth through the corners.”
There’s a long pause, and then I hear the crackling in my ear and her voice, quiet and nervous about her first time talking on the radio, “Yes, I see that from your data. Tight and smooth.”
I hear the garage laughing before Emily releases the button to speak to me. I love that they all love her, too. And they should, she’s the last one to leave the factory every night. She’s thrown herself into this circus, embraced it, and has been working with damn near every team at Imperium. Because she’s a total badass, even if she doesn’t always know it.
A meteor could not wipe the smile off my face as I cross the finish line in second. I do a little bob and swerve with the car to acknowledge the crew standing along the race wall, cheering and hooting as Dante and I bring both cars home.
We pull the cars into parc ferme, wave to the fans, and get mobbed by our teams behind metal crowd fencing. All the pit crew and engineers hug me and pat my helmet, but I’m looking for her. She’s a few people deep, but I grab her hand and pull her forward to the fencing. She takes my helmet, plants a kiss on my visor, and squeals.
I get about ten-seconds with my crew, and then the FIA is pulling me away to get weighed and hustle to the podium ceremony. It’s a massive win for Imperium to have two drivers on the podium, and the whole team is damn near rioting on the ground beneath our platform. There’s going to be one hell of a party in Brussels tonight, I’m sure.
I’ll be having my own party, after the private chocolate making class course Mila arranged for Em and I, of course. I don’t even care how much shit Dante is going to give me about it.
I’m wooing.
It seems like an hour passes before all the media and hoopla is over and Dante and I finally head back to the garage. He’s already making plans for drinking and fucking his way through all of Brussels tonight.
Emily’s not in the garage when we walk in, but the crew is looking at both of us like something is wrong. We look around in question, then we hear it, Stan yelling and carrying on from the back room.
“Goddamn it,” I toss my helmet down and storm into the back room, Dante in tow.
Stan is piss-drunk, yelling and swearing at Liam, and a couple mechanics who are trying to corral him out of the building before he makes more of a scene.
“I told you to get the fuck out,” I point at him.
“You don’t tell me shit, you little pissant,” he lunges at me but stumbles.
Liam is trying to reason with him, but you can’t reason with a career alcoholic.
“Second-place, that the best you got?”
“Someone call security,” I yell back to the crew behind us who is watching in horror.
I’d like nothing more than to knock Stan’s teeth out and curb-stomp him, but I’m more of a professional than he ever was, and he’s done jeopardizing my career. I’m not going to be on the news for brawling with my father in the team garage.
“You worthless little shit,” he gets in my face despite Liam trying to pull him back. “Too busy chasing pussy instead of winning.”
“Watch yourself,” I shove him back.
“Always were more concerned about that dirty whore…”
That’s the last thing I hear before I drive my fist into his face, and Stan flies back, hitting the concrete. I don’t feel it on my knuckles, I don’t hear the commotion of the guys circling around, I don’t feel Dante’s hand across my chest holding me back.
I don’t feel any of it for several beats until sound returns to my ears, and Stan rolls over gurgling, blood gushing out of his nose on the floor. Security rushes in behind us, and, unanimously, the whole crew tells them that Stan attacked me.
They’ve got Stan handcuffed on the ground, and he’s spitting blood out, sweating and screaming—all the insults I’ve heard a million times before—but I don’t give a shit.
Finally, you’re in cuffs, dickhead.
“Banned.” I clench my teeth and tell security, “He’s never to step foot on any track ever again.” They nod and drag him to his feet and haul him out the back door.
Goodbye, prick.
Someone slaps my back hard, and I turn.
Shit, our team boss, Silas, is next to me, and I have no idea how long he’s been there.
“Good race today, boys,” he crosses his arms over his chest and grimaces at the blood on the floor. Then he takes a deep breath, shrugs, looks to Dante and me, and says, “Drinks on me tonight.”
Dante and I look at each other as Silas walks away then Dante busts up laughing. There’s absolutely nothing funny, other than our team boss shrugging off the blood on our floor, but something about the stress of it and the way Dante is struggling to breathe from laughing so hard, now I’m cackling like a hyena, too.
“I need to clean that up,” I laugh. I’m not asking a cleaning crew to deal with Stan’s mess.
“Ey, where’s a mop?” Dante yells as our crew disperses.
No one offers us a mop, but Dante and I find some towels, shop rags, and gasoline cleans up blood pretty well, we learn. In a few minutes, we’ve got it wiped up, and both of us have tears in our eyes from laughing so hard.
We’re washing our hands in the sink in the back when the exit door flies open again, and Emily sticks her head inside.
“I need help,” she looks at us and waves us over.
We both think Stan’s done something else and rush to fling the door open, but when we do, Emily is trying to lug a twenty-five pound used tire inside. She’s covered in brake dust and is black from the dirty rubber.
“What are you doing?”
“Hurry up, I need this tire,” she drags it another few feet, and I go grab it from her and haul it in through the door.
“Where did you get this?” Dante asks as the tire flops onto the floor where Stan’s blood just was.
“I stole it.” Emily’s out of breath and panting.
My eyes go wide, but she continues, “It was on a rack waiting to go into the Concordia truck.”
“Em, these are all numbered, they can’t go missing,” I run my hands through my hair.
“Shit,” Dante mutters. He knows as well as I do that this is fucked up. Silas isn’t going to laugh about this.
“I’m going to give it back, just help me,” she says as she jogs into the garage bay where the mechanics are working to break down and pack up the cars and gear.
Dante has the good sense to haul the tire into the bathroom to hide it while I chase Emily into the garage. She’s rifling through tool cabinets like a madwoman. “What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know, a plasma cutter or a saw or something.” Drawers are flying open left and right.
“Plasma cutter? What the fuck?”
She stops, puts her hands on her hips, “There are no rules about what conditions the tires must be given back in, Cole. I checked.”
“Jesus Christ.”
I think for a minute then find one of our wheel-gun guys who always has one of those oversized pocket hunting knives on him. He’s
some kind of survivalist or whatever those prepper types refer to themselves as. He’s outside sealing up a metal freight container.
“Hey, uhh, Jeff, can I borrow your knife for a second?”
“Sure,” Jeff pulls it out of the holster on his belt, because of course, it needs its own holster and hands it to me. “I’m telling you, everyone needs a good knife, Cole.”
“Uh-huh, thanks,” I run back into the garage and drag Emily into the back room.
The door to the bathroom is locked, and Emily bangs on the door.
“Who-eeees-eeeet?” Dante calls from inside.
“Open the fucking door,” I growl and look around to make sure no one sees this.
He cracks the door, grinning like a psychopath, and Emily and I rush inside and lock it behind us.
I open up the knife, “Okay, what are we doing?”
“I need a chunk of that tire, through the middle, like this big,” she holds up her hands for size.
“Right…”
Dante rotates the tire and kneels on it to hold it steady as we formulate our plan of attack.
“Don’t cut my dick off,” he jokes as I force Jeff’s ridiculous knife into the tire and start hacking at it. It is every bit as difficult as I expect it to be, and we’ve bent the shit out of Jeff’s beloved knife.
“Hurry up,” Emily whispers.
“Hurry up,” I look up at her, “you want to do this?”
“Give it to me,” Dante takes the knife and starts sawing.
We’ve got about half of it done when the doorknob wiggles and someone knocks. All of us go silent for a second before Emily calls out, “We’re in here!”
“Uhh, we?” A voice behind the door asks.
Shit. All three of us look at each other. Emily’s hand goes to her mouth, we don’t know if this is a regular crew person or Concordia.
“Oh, Cole, give it to me,” Emily blurts out in a panic and starts banging the wall and moaning.
“What the fuck?” I whisper, but she just shakes her head and shrugs.
Dante snorts, “Yeah, take this cock, Cole. Choke on it…”
I slug him in the shoulder, and he falls off the tire onto the floor laughing his ass off and moaning.
“Fuck the both of you,” I take the knife back and keep sawing.
“Uh, I’ll just come back later,” the voice from outside the door says.
“Okay yeah, much later,” Emily moans and keeps banging until she’s sure the mystery person leaves, then she abruptly cuts off and snatches the chunk of rubber as soon as we’ve got it free.
“We have to get this back on the rack,” Dante stands and opens the door, peeking out.
The coast is clear, and all three of us sneak out of the bathroom. We open the back door to the garage, wait until it’s clear, and then we start racing down the service road toward the Concordia truck.
“Tire bitch,” Emily grabs us and points.
We duck behind the eighteen-wheeler and see a short Concordia rep in her white, pressed shirt, carrying a clipboard, and headed toward the truck where the rack of tires is at the back waiting to be loaded.
“Her name is Tire Bitch?” Dante whispers.
Emily nods as we all watch the Concordia girl. She’s headed right for the truck, and it’s painfully obvious one of the tires is missing.
“You two owe me,” Dante mumbles, then stands upright, slicks his hair back, and strolls out from behind the truck. Emily and I watch, our hearts racing, as Dante swaggers up to Tire Bitch, takes her hand, and starts kissing it and cooing at her with his usual Italian bullshit.
She giggles at whatever nonsense he’s feeding her, then he takes her face in his hands and smashes his mouth against hers.
She drops her clipboard. Her arms wrap around Dante, and he spins her around, so her back is to us.
“Stay here,” I tell Emily, then I race the mutilated tire to the rack and hoist it up without making a sound.
Dante’s watching me out of the corner of his eye with Tire Bitch’s tongue down his throat, her eyes closed, her hands grabbing at him. I move to the far side of the semi-truck then round the hood to Emily, who’s watching the shit-show.
Once we’re clear, Dante pulls Tire Bitch off his face, says something to her, then turns and walks away. Her face is covered in black tire soot from his hands, and she looks lovestruck.
“Poor little Tire Bitch,” Emily whispers.
Fifteen
Emily
“Emily, this is… highly unusual,” Professor Tillman says as he looks into the brown paper bag I’ve brought into his office today.
I’m absolutely exhausted from jet lag and travel. I’m supposed to be off work for the next few days, but this can’t wait. I’m not making any progress on figuring out why everyone seems to be struggling with this season’s tires.
It just doesn’t make sense. Sometimes, some compounds seem okay. Other times they shit the bed. Olivier has been of no help. While he’s plenty underfoot, he’s entirely useless, which is even worse.
If someone is useless, the least they can do is make themselves scarce.
“I know, but I need your help. Imperium doesn’t have the kind of lab needed for this, and I can’t do it at work anyway, for obvious reasons,” I plead.
“Certainly not,” he agrees.
“Will you help me?”
He’s still for a long time, staring at the eight-inch chunk of tire Cole, Dante, and I stole. His eyebrows waggle from side to side every few seconds, he takes a few breaths, and I know this could go either way.
“It’s important to me,” I break the silence. Doc looks up from the bag and rubs his chin. “People could be hurt. Someone I… someone I care very much about could be hurt.”
He drops the tire back into the brown paper bag and leans back in his chair.
Damn it, he’s going to tell me no.
I can’t blame him, I probably sound like a crazy person, as usual. This is stolen proprietary property, and I’m asking him to use the university laboratories to melt it down, tear it apart, run chemical tests on it, and find every secret hidden inside.
Secrets I’m starting to think Olivier and Concordia don’t want me to know.
“It’s okay, I understand,” I hang my head and start to stand. I’ll find another way.
“I didn’t say no,” he interrupts.
I sit back down.
“If this university can deal with the hellfire we caught in the 1970s when we created the first test-tube baby, we can certainly fiddle with some tires. Off the books, of course.”
“Of course,” I smile.
He reaches back in the bag and starts examining the hunk of hacked up rubber. “These are totally different from mass-produced tires, I’m sort of curious, myself.”
“We’ll have to separate all the components into their raw materials.”
“Change the predictive model software,” he adds.
“Anionic living polymerization.”
“We’ll have to bring in a chemist for that,” he starts tapping his fingers on his desk. “I know someone.”
“They’re meant to fall apart, deliberately, to make the races more interesting. But the way they’re breaking down, something is failing. I just don’t know what.”
“Well, let’s see what’s inside and start there. It could be nothing, you know.”
“I know.” Logically, I know this. But part of getting to an answer is eliminating other possible options, and I’m looking in every nook and cranny yet coming up empty-handed.
“It’ll take time. I’ll call when I learn anything. And I expect tickets to the Silverstone race,” he laughs.
“Complete with paddock passes,” I agree.
On my walk back home, I can barely keep my eyes, open but I want to tell Cole the good news.
If I’m honest with myself, I don’t like being home anymore. In Cambridge, he isn’t across the hotel hallway from me. He isn’t prowling around the paddock or motorhome where I
can ogle him, smell him, sneak into a corner office and taste him.
It’s gotten to be fun, exotic, whimsical, almost—seeing all these cities with Cole. I don’t know what this means for us, and I don’t know how I feel about it, but I’m doing my best to live in the moment. Be casual. Be smart.
Emily: The eagle has landed. I miss you.
Cole: Good job, baby. Get that sweet ass over here.
Emily: I’m exhausted. Zzzz. What are you doing today?
Cole: I ate all the chocolate we made and Liam’s making me run an extra 15 miles.
Emily: That’s what you get.
Cole: I’ve got something to give you.
Emily: More chocolate?
Cole: Even sweeter on my tongue.
I’m blushing when I get home and throw on pajamas, Cole still sending me more and more graphic messages. At some point, I succumb to my heavy eyelids and fall asleep on him.
“Emily?”
I wake, in a daze, to knocking on my bedroom door. It takes me a few minutes for my head to stop spinning and figure out where I am. Nope, not a hotel today, I’m home. It’s dark out.
“Emily,” Klara sing-songs at me from outside the door.
I crawl out of bed and stretch as I open the door, yawning. God, I needed that nap.
“There is a race car driver at the door,” Klara announces, wagging her eyebrows.
She knows of Cole, she knows I’m doing things with Cole. But I’ve never told her, or anyone besides Makenna, the whole story.
“Oh my god,” I peer down on myself in my blue flannel pajamas that featuring dancing pancakes. I run to the mirror, and it’s every bit as bad as I imagine, my hair is sticking up, and I have raccoon eyes.
I look like a deranged mental patient.
“You have to stall him,” I beg Klara and race to the bathroom to do whatever I can to fix this mess.
Brushing my teeth at the speed of light, I hear Klara walk back to the front door and let Cole in. I listen to them introduce one another and chit-chat for a second, and then there’s a knock on the bathroom door.