“What about your grandparents?” Jacob asked, after a moment.
I shook my head. All four of them had died during my childhood, when I was too young to understand death, or be upset by it.
“I have an uncle,” I offered. “My father’s younger brother. He hung around for a few weeks after my dad died.” I grimaced at the memory. “He’s a prick.”
I left it at that, because Jacob was looking at me with pity and faint alarm, and I didn’t think he’d enjoy hearing about my uncle’s brief but contentious struggle to get more money out of my father’s will, or the restraining order I had to take out against him to put an end to it.
I cleared my throat. “What about you? Do you have a lot of family?”
He stared at me for another second before he nodded. “Yeah. Parents and grandparents and all that, and an older brother and sister.”
“That’s cool. Are you close with them?”
He shrugged. “Oh, you know.” He took a sip of beer and added, “They put me through racing.”
“Yeah, that’s what my dad did for me.”
Jacob hesitated. “What was he like?”
I blinked. I don’t think anyone had ever asked me that before. “I don’t know,” I said, stupidly. I thought for a moment. “He was a good dad. He loved cars. He raced a bit when he was younger.” I paused, then added, with a rueful smile, “I don’t think he was very good. He always said he started too late. He was too poor growing up to do karting and stuff. But the company he started got really big in the nineties, and he put, like, all his money into my racing.”
“He must’ve been really proud of you getting into F1.”
I smiled again. “Yeah, he freaked out.” I was quiet for a moment, remembering. I hadn’t thought about it in a while, that day when my F1 contract was officially announced. We’d known about it for weeks before the actual press release, but my dad was kind of a nervous guy, and he was convinced that something was going to go wrong at the last minute. He said we couldn’t celebrate until the official announcement, so we wouldn’t jinx it. “I wish he’d lived long enough to see a few races.”
“Was he sick for a while?”
“No, not at all. He just dropped dead at work. Massive heart attack.”
“Fuck,” Jacob said. “That really sucks.”
“Yeah.”
For a moment, I thought about the phone call, the one from my dad’s ER doctor. I was in my apartment when she called, just getting out of the shower. The first thing she said after she introduced herself was, “Are you driving right now?” I thought it was a weird question—did she know I was a race car driver, or something?—but then I realized she was asking because she was about to tell me something horrible, and she didn’t want me driving off of the road in shock.
I shook my head against the memory. There was no point reliving it. It wouldn’t change anything. I stared at the fire for a few moments, casting my mind around for something else to talk about.
“The friends that were here with you,” I said. “You know them from racing?”
“Mm.” Jacob was quiet for a moment. Then he took another swig of beer and said, “I’m really sorry about your dad. That’s really shit.”
I shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
“Still.”
I shifted in my chair, slightly uncomfortable under his steady, dark gray gaze. “Thanks,” I said finally. “It’s nice to talk about him.”
It was true, and slightly surprising. I hadn’t thought I wanted to talk about my dad. But I suppose no one had ever asked.
“You can talk as much as you want,” Jacob said.
The firelight flickered over his skin as he spoke, and I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to reach for him. I licked my lips and took a brave stab. “Yeah,” I said. “Or we could go inside.”
His lips curved into a smile, and a heat stirred low in my stomach. “Or we could do that,” he agreed, and rose to his feet.
If I’m honest, I think I fell in love with him that week. It sounds stupid, I know. But being with Jacob... it was like coming alive. I had never considered myself an unhappy person, but up until that weekend, my whole life had been consumed with racing. Even when my dad was alive, all we talked about was cars, and racing, and getting into F1. And honestly, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But that weekend in Scotland, it was like a door opened, and suddenly I could see there was this whole huge world outside of motorsport.
I’d never been a chatty person, but it was easy, somehow, to talk to Jacob. We talked while we went hiking, and while we drank coffee in the mornings, and while we lay on the empty, white-sand beach a few miles away.
