Jax flashed that grin of his, too many teeth, somehow endearing. “No worries, Mia. I’ll carry the charisma for both of us. Right, mate?” He nudged Lucas’s elbow.
Lucas didn’t look up from his phone. He scrolled without reading, using the screen as cover. If he met her eyes, she’d see the irritation he was barely keeping leashed. If he spoke, he’d say something sharp. Better to stay silent.
On camera, Jax was gold. He leaned into every question, cracking jokes about the heat melting his non-existent mullet, winking at the lens, roping Lucas in with playful jabs that should have felt annoying but mostly just felt… familiar. Safe, in a way Lucas didn’t want to examine.
“So Lucas here’s the silent assassin on track,” Jax said, slinging an arm around Lucas’s shoulders. Lucas stiffened but let it stay. “Me? I’m just happy to be here, trying to get our first points when he’s not looking.”
The influencer laughed. Lucas managed the ghost of a half-smile—more reflex than feeling.
When the question turned to motivation, he answered first, same as always.
“Winning,” he said. “Everything else is noise.”
It was the truth. Clean. Simple. The only answer that never felt like a lie.
Jax jumped in without missing a beat. “Yeah, nah, he says that, but deep down it’s the post-race kebabs. And maybe the team—don’t tell him I said it, he’ll deny it till he’s blue in the face.”
The clip dropped an hour later. Lucas watched it alone in thegreen room, volume low, jaw tight. Comments rolled in fast—merciless on him, the usual frost and frustration:robot,boring,why does he even bother showing up?Jax’s easy charm carried the video, making it almost watchable. A few fans even started shipping the “ice and fire” dynamic between the drivers.
The familiar cold burn settled in his chest—not quite anger. Disappointment. In the footage. In himself. In the way it confirmed what everyone already believed: he was good at one thing, and these days he wasn’t even sure he was good at that anymore.
He found Mia in the hallway outside the media room. Phone gripped so tight the knuckles showed white. He didn’t raise his voice—the edge was there anyway, sharp as carbon fibre.
“This what you were after?” He held up the screen like evidence. “Me looking like a robot with a pulse?”
Mia kept her voice low, glancing down the empty corridor. “I wanted you to sound like you give a damn. About something. Anything.”
He let out a short, humourless breath. “I give a damn about the stopwatch. The rest?” He shrugged, the movement tight. “Noise.”
She looked at him then—not angry, not pitying. Just steady. “I told you winning’s not everything people want to hear about. They want to see the person behind the helmet.”
His eyes met hers—flat, unreadable on the surface. Underneath, something flickered. A crack. Small. Unwelcome. Because she wasn’t wrong. And that made it worse.
He’d spent years making sure there wasn’t much person left to see. The helmet, the suit, the stopwatch—they were clean. Predictable. No room for mess, no room for weakness. No room for the kid who’d once cared too much about what people thought and paid for it every time he let the mask slip.
“Maybe there isn’t much person to see,” he said. The words came out quieter than he meant. Not angry. Just… empty. Like admitting it out loud made the emptiness real.
Mia opened her mouth. “Lucas—”
He shook his head once, already turning. “Save it.”
He walked away, footsteps measured, back straight. The hallway felt colder behind him, but he didn’t look back.
Inside, though, something stayed unsettled. Not the comments. Not Jax carrying the clip. Her. The way she’d looked at him like she believed there was still something worth finding. Like she wasn’t ready to write him off as a lost cause.
He hated that she might be right.
He hated more that part of him—small, buried, almost forgotten—wanted her to keep looking.
* * *
Mia
Later that evening, Mia stood alone in the hotel’s small meeting room the team had booked for the day—a glass-walled space turned temporary media hub, whiteboard still up, monitors flickering with paused footage, long table littered with briefing sheets and half-empty coffee cups. She wiped down the whiteboard with deliberate strokes, erasing bullet points about "personality vs. performance" and "authentic engagement." The words blurred under the marker remover, but they lingered in her mind like echoes.
They hit closer than they should have. Not because of him—but because they scraped at something older, buried deep. Control. She'd chosen communications because it let her shape the narrative, keep the story straight before it twisted out of her hands. But days like today reminded her why she needed that armour in the first place. The exhaustion settled in her chest, heavy and familiar, pulling her back to a memory she'd spent years trying to outrun.
* * *
