Something shifted between us. Whatever we’d been before wasn’t enough to describe it anymore. Lying there with him, I felt the weight of that change settle in, equal parts comfort and fear.
“Stay,” I said quietly.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Jonathan replied, and in that moment, I believed him.
I was sound asleep early on a Saturday morning in late February when Jonathan tugged on my shoulder. “I want to show you something cool,” he whispered. “Get up.”
I groaned. “I’ve already seen your penis. Let me sleep.”
He laughed and kept shaking me, and a short time later I was in the passenger seat of his BMW at dawn, watching the Philadelphia suburbs give way to pine forests and farmland.
“You’re being very mysterious about this,” I said, balancing a cup of coffee and trying not to spill it every time he took a curve with more enthusiasm than the speed limit suggested.
“You know I race,” he said. “You don’t know what it looks like.”
New Jersey Motorsports Park had the feel of an industrial complex dropped into the middle of nowhere. Concrete buildings, chain-link fencing, and the kind of utilitarian architecture that prioritized function over aesthetics. The parking lot was already half-full despite the early hour, populated by pickup trucks pulling trailers and sports cars.
“Track day,” Jonathan explained as we walked toward the main building, carrying a duffel bag I hadn’t noticed him pack. “Basically organized practice sessions. You rent a car, or bring your own, and drive it the way it was meant to be driven.”
The way it was meant to be driven, apparently, was very fast. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the clubhouse, I saw cars circling the track at speeds that looked genuinely terrifying, open-wheel formula cars, sleek sports cars, even a few sedans that had been stripped down and caged for racing.
The sound was incredible, a symphony of engines being pushed to their limits. “You do this often?” I asked, watching a bright yellow car disappear around a corner with what looked like impossible precision.
“When I can. Keeps the reflexes sharp.” Jonathan was already pulling on a fire-resistant racing suit that looked like it had seen serious use. “Racing’s like any other skill, if you don’t practice, you get rusty.”
The car he’d rented was a Formula Ford, a basic open-wheel that looked like a Formula 1 car’s scrappy younger brother. No bodywork to speak of, just a chassis, wheels, and a small engine that sounded like it was permanently angry about something.
“That’s what you’re driving today?” I asked.
“Sixty horsepower, weighs about a thousand pounds. Power-to-weight ratio means it’s faster around corners than most supercars.” Jonathan grinned. “Want to walk the track with me?”
We spent twenty minutes circling the 2.25-mile circuit, Jonathan pointing out braking points and racing lines with the enthusiasm of an art student analyzing a masterpiece.
“See that slight rise before turn four?” Jonathan had to raise his voice over the scream of a Porsche approaching at full song, its engine note climbing through the gears before the driver lifted and the sound faded around the next corner. “You want to brake just before the crest, not after. If you brake hard when the car’s light, the wheels lock up.”
It made sense in a physics-class way. My father had always said you could feel a car lose traction when you took a hill too fast. The steering would go light in your hands. “You brake before the rise, when the car’s still planted?”
“Exactly. When you have maximum grip.”
The ground vibrated slightly as a pack of three cars thundered past, their slipstreams creating a brief wind that carried the acrid smell of hot oil and the sweet chemical perfume of racing gasoline. Safety marshals in bright orange vests watched from their posts, radios crackling with position reports and lap times.
“How do you know all this?”
“Practice. Mistakes. More practice.”
When his session started, I positioned myself at the fence near turn one, watching through chain link as twenty cars took to the track for their warm-up laps. Jonathan’s bright blue helmet was easy to spot in the Formula Ford, and even at parade speed, something about his driving looked different. Smoother, more purposeful.
Then the green flag dropped, and I understood why he’d dragged me to New Jersey at dawn.
Jonathan was fast, in a way that made the other drivers look like they were trying too hard. Where they fought their cars through corners, Jonathan seemed to dance with his. Wherethey braked early and accelerated late, he carried impossible speed through turns and found grip where others found only tire smoke.
It was beautiful in a way I hadn’t expected. Watching someone do something they were genuinely gifted at, something they loved enough to chase across the country on weekend mornings, was its own form of art. The precision was hypnotic, lap after lap, hitting the same marks within inches, finding speed that seemed to come from understanding the physics of motion in ways the rest of us never would.
After twenty minutes, the session ended and the cars returned to the paddock. Jonathan climbed out of the Formula Ford with the relaxed satisfaction of someone who’d just finished a meditation session instead of risking his life at 120 mph.
“Well?” he asked, pulling off his helmet and running a hand through sweat-dampened hair.
“You’re insane,” I said. “Also, you’re incredibly talented.” I slid into the passenger seat of his BMW, already contoured to my body. “Thank you.”
