I shrug. “I don’t know. We were... together, I guess, last year.”
“?‘Together, I guess,’?” she repeats. “What does that mean?”
I shrug again. “I don’t know.”
“Okay.” She leans back in her chair. The silence stretches out, itchy and uncomfortable. “Tell me about him,” she says.
“Like what,” I say irritably.
“Well, what’s his name?”
“Travis.”
Travis Keeping. Champion of the world.
“What else?” I ask in a brittle voice, when Amanda just nods.
“Whatever you’d like,” she says. “As long as it’s the truth.”
I look at my hands. The truth. The truth, the truth, the truth.
Fuck. Why is this so hard?
“What’s he like?” Amanda prompts me.
“I don’t know.” I clear my throat. “Nice.”
She lets out a surprised snort of laughter, then covers her mouth with her hand. “Sorry.”
My mouth turns up a bit. I guess it was sort of a stupid answer. I swallow and try again. “He’s... kind of quiet, I guess.”
She nods. “Okay.”
I pick at my thumbnail again. “He’s, like, a recluse, practically. I mean, he’s supposed to be this huge F1 star, but he’d never even dated anyone before me. And he doesn’t have any family or friends or anything.”
“Sounds lonely.”
I frown. “I guess. I don’t know. I think he was fine with it.”
She tilts her head. “What made you decide to date him?”
I shrug one shoulder roughly. “I didn’tdecideto date him. We just started hooking up.”
She raises an eyebrow. “So it was just sex?”
I grind my jaw together. Fuck, but I want to stop talking about this. “I don’t know. At first, yeah.”
“And then what happened?”
I look at my hands. Memories I’ve been trying to ignore since the crash are slipping intrusively into my mind. Travis sitting next to me at the end of that hike in Scotland, taking off his jacket to put around my shoulders. Travis lying next to me in bed, tracing his fingertips over my skin. Travis kissing me in the hospital and asking me not to die.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“It seems like it’s hard for you to talk about him.”
I shrug. “What’s the point? We broke up.”
“When?”
