Then he pulls the steering wheel and climbs out.
I realise my hand is still pressed flat against my chest.
I find him in the paddock corridor twenty minutes later. Or he finds me — he comes around a corner and stops and there's six feet of corridor between us and it immediately feels like the wrong amount, too close to be coincidence and too far to be anything else.
"You scared me," I say.
This is not what I planned to say. I planned something with more distance in it, something that would let me maintain the version of myself that doesn't let him see the scoreboard.
He's still in the race suit, the zip pulled down to his waist and the arms tied off, his hair damp from the helmet. He looks like a man who just climbed out of something that tried to kill him and found the whole experience mildly inconvenient.
"I wasn't scared," he says.
"I know. That's the part that scared me."
Something shifts in his jaw. A fraction. He takes one step toward me, then stops, as if he's decided to let the distance work instead of his body.
"You shouldn't have been watching from the wall," he says.
"You put me there."
"I know." A pause that has weight in it. "That was a mistake."
The word lands somewhere it wasn't aimed.Mistake.As in: bringing me close was the error. As in: the variable he introduced into his own environment has become a complication he didn't plan for.
I should let it go. I should file it undernotedand move on. What I actually do:
"Then put me in the suite next time," I say, "with the journalists and the canapés. I'm sure I'll enjoy watching you almost die from a better angle and a sponsored champagne glass."
He moves before I finish speaking.
Not fast — he never moves fast when it matters, which is one of the things I've learned about him that I'm still calibrating, that speed and urgency are not the same thing in his vocabulary. Suddenly he's between me and the rest of the corridor, one hand braced against the wall beside my head, not touching me, just present. The paddock sounds filter through the wall behind him — engines, voices, the distant hydraulic hiss of a pit gun. In here it's muffled to near-silence.
"You don't get to do that," he says. Low. Controlled. Working harder than usual.
"Do what?"
"Look at me like that from the pit wall."
"Like what."
His jaw tightens. "Like it would matter. If the car went wrong."
The corridor is empty. The particular kind of empty that means no one is coming for a minute, and we're in this pocket of space that exists independently of the race weekend around it, and he's close enough that I can smell the heat still coming off him — fuel and carbon and something warmer underneath that is justhim, a smell I know now the way I know the layout of the Tower and the sequence of his morning routine and the face he makes when a calculation isn't resolving.
"It would matter," I say.
Because I'm an idiot. Because honesty in this situation is a liability and I'm deploying it anyway because the adrenaline ofthe near-miss is still in my system and the filter that would normally catch this is currently offline.
Something dangerous moves through his expression. Not the cold assessment — something with more charge in it.
"You distract me," he says. "Not when you're talking, not when you're fighting with me." His free hand lifts between us, and I watch it the way you watch something you don't know the intent of yet — moving slowly, deliberate, stopping an inch from my throat. Not touching. Just suspended. "When you exist. I can't stop noticing."
I don't breathe.
The hand drops.
He takes one measured step back and the controlled blankness comes down over his face like a visor, the version of him that is all function and no aperture.
