“Nope. It slipped past, like, fifteen marshals and took off into the night. I think it might be a ghost dog, actually. It’s probably haunting the track.”
Heather catches my eye and pulls a face. I bite my lip, hiding a smile.
Matty goes on about ghost dogs for a while, and then Heather steers the conversation back to the realms of reality by asking Matty how his girlfriend, Erin, is doing. She’s a wildlife photographer, and she’s off somewhere in Botswana doing a photoshoot.
Matty doesn’t seem that keen to talk about her, though. I think the two of them are going through a bit of a rough patch, though I can’t say for sure. I’ve thought about asking him about it, but I’m not sure it’s my place. Just like I’m not sure it’s my place to ask how he’s feeling about his bad season, or about the media pumping out lists of drivers who might replace him.
Don’t get me wrong, he and I get along really well, and Heather and I do, too. We hang out all the time at races and when we’re all back home in London. But even after months of knowing them, I can’t quite relax with them the way I can with Kelsie and Nate. They’re Travis’s best friends, not mine. And sometimes—not often, but sometimes—I get the feeling they’re watching me, waiting for me to screw things up again.
I can’t really blame them. I didn’t handle things well after my crash last year. Or before it, for that matter. I was a shitty boyfriend to Travis the first year that we were going out, then I completely lost my mind after the crash and broke up with him in the hospital. We were apart for months, and I don’t think Heather and Matty were that impressed by how quickly Travis took me back.
Actually, I know that they weren’t.
I overheard them talking about it once. It was way back in April, at the start of the season. Travis and I had only just gotten back together, and I flew with him to Melbourne for the first race of the year.
It was early Thursday morning, and Heather and Matty were having breakfast with Travis on his hotel room balcony. I was down at the hotel gym, but my headphones died halfway through my run, so I popped back up to the room to steal Travis’s. As I walked toward the balcony door to tell Travis I was taking them, I heard Heather say, “So…how are things with Jacob?”
I stopped dead in my tracks. She didn’t ask it in a casual way. She said it carefully, like she was minding her tone.
Travis must have heard it, too. “Don’t say it like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
“You know like what.”
There was a soft clink of cutlery. “I told you, I like him.”
“And I told Sky Sports I respect Cole Milton as a driver,” Travis said. “Doesn’t make it true.”
Matty snorted, but Heather just sighed. I should have stopped eavesdropping on them then, but I was rooted to the spot.
“I do like him,” Heather said. “I just don’t trust him.”
Another sigh, this one from Travis. “I told you, it’s different than before. Things have been really good?—”
“For, like, two weeks,” Matty put in.
“Not you, too,” Travis said.
“Hey, I’m not saying I don’t like him.” I could picture Matty holding his hands up defensively. “I just think?—”
“What?”
“I don’t know. That you were a little quick to forgive him, that’s all.”
My face lit on fire, though his words weren’t a surprise. A couple of days earlier, when we were all having lunch with Matty’s parents in London, his mother asked how Travis and I had gotten back together, and after I told her the PG version, I saw Heather and Matty exchange a subtle, pointed sort of look. Like they thought it wasn’t a very good story, or something. I pretended not to notice, and they never said anything about it, but hearing them talk about it so bluntly with Travis…
I’m not going to lie. It fucking sucked.
I was about to flee back to the gym when Travis spoke again.
“Matty,” he said. “Remind me, what happened the last time you babysat Morocco?”
There was a brief pause. “Er?—”
“You let her eat a cooked chicken bone, and she was sick for a week. I had to take her to the vet, twice.”
“I didn’t know dogs couldn’t eat cooked bones!” Matty protested. “Dogs eat bones, that’s just, like, a thing. If anything, I blame the media, perpetuating this dog-and-bone myth?—”
