He smiled down at me, eyes soft. “Thanks, love.”
“De rien,” I said sweetly. Then I turned my attention back to Lucy. “I’m scared of… how much the world thinks it owns us,” I said. “Of what they think they’re entitled to. Of what they’ll do to get it. The cameras, the leaks, the comments, the fucking… opinions.” My fingers found his where they rested over my stomach and threaded through them, curling tight in the spaces between his. “I’m scared of losing anything else.”
The word else hung between us like a second moon.
Kimi looked away. Ivy stared at the sand. Marco’s hand found the back of his neck, rubbing hard.
Lucy swallowed. “So why do it now?” she asked quietly. “Why not wait until it’s over? Until things calm down?”
Because they might not. Because the sport was a monster with a bottomless stomach. Because the world had already taken too much.
“There’s never going to be a clean later,” I said. “There’s always another race, another crisis, another fire to put out. Another excuse to say, ‘Not yet. Maybe when it slows down.’” I shook my head. “It doesn’t slow down. It just… changes shape.”
Callum’s hand slid from my arm to my stomach, splaying wide and firm, like he could hold me together from the outside. “We decided we’d rather build something in the middle of the chaos than keep waiting for permission from people who don’t have to live with the fallout,” he said. “It’s how we started, and it’s how we’ll continue.”
I nodded, throat thick with emotion. “If I learned anything this season, it’s that waiting for the perfect time would’ve just delayed everything I’ve ever wanted,” I said. “I don’t want to put my life on layaway anymore.”
“Also,” he added, “she looks very good with my ring on her finger, and I’m extremely impatient.”
That startled a laugh out of me. “C’est vrai,” I conceded. “He is very needy.”
“You love it,” he said.
“Unfortunately,” I said again.
Lucy listened like it was a sermon. “I’ve never been allowed to make a big choice without a boardroom approving it first,” she admitted. “My childhood stardom. My transition to music. My singles. My tours. My… everything.” She dug her heels deeper into the sand. “The idea that you two just decided, ‘This is our life, we’re doing it now, everyone else can keep up or get out of the way’, that’s… terrifying. And kind of incredible.”
“You’re allowed to do that too, you know,” Ivy said. Her voice was soft but firm. “Your life doesn’t belong to a label.”
Lucy huffed out a breath that sounded dangerously close to a sob. “Tell that to my contract.”
“We will,” Marco said. “Give us a copy.”
“Do not give them a copy,” Kimi said, then he cocked his head to the side. “On second thought, don’t giveMarcoa copy.”
“I’m just saying, I can read,” Marco protested. “And I love a good loophole.”
Ivy elbowed him. “You love pushing the envelope.”
“Same thing,” he said.
“Dubois here knows contract language better than anyone I know,” Kimi mentioned.
“Yeah, and her attorney is a fucking shark. They threatened a lawsuit against the goddamn FIA,” Ivy told Lucy.
The conversation spun off for a bit into Lucy’s management, the insane clauses in her image agreements, the time a brand tried to put a weight-check provision in her contract and her lawyer nearly set their office on fire. It was furious and funny and deeply unfair, and by the end of it I wanted to strangle at least three executives I’d never met.
But beneath the jokes, there was relief. Little by little, you could see the way her shoulders sank, the way her laugh cameeasier, the way she edged closer to Ivy’s side like she was plugging herself into a charger.
At some point, Marco flopped onto his back again and groaned loudly. “Okay,” he declared. “No more trauma dumping. My therapist would be very proud of me for recognizing my emotional bandwidth is full.”
“You don’t have a therapist,” Ivy said.
“I have you,” he said.
“That doesn’t count,” she and I said in unison.
He pointed at us with both hands. “Soulmates,” he said. “Disgustingly adorable.”
