I drop my napkins. They scatter over the floor. “No. I—never mind.”
“Graywood.”
“I said never mind.”
There’s a pressure between my shoulder blades. He’s touching my back. “Come on, out with it.”
“I’d really rather not.”
“Then I’m going to assume you’ve realized the error of your ways with Max and have fallen feet first in love with me,” Arthur says. “In which case, we should probably discuss graduating to a fake engagement. Fake wedding, even—”
“I thought you had a girlfriend. A real one,” I admit, my eyes fully shut and my face fully on fire. “Or something. I don’t know.”
I crack open one eye to gauge his reaction. He’s laughing before I can even get him into focus. “You… Me?Who?” Arthur says, elusive dimples on full display. “And you thought I’d still do this with you if I had a whole girlfriend stowed away somewhere?”
Well, shit. “I guess I wasn’t worried about like, a girlfriend, but maybe a someone? Someone not insignificant.”
“And why would you think that?” Arthur hums, leaning closer to me.
It’s hard to think. He’s so infinitely smug, and I don’t dislike it as much as I used to, when it’d reminded me of sore winners gloating over board games, Monopoly money stacked in their hands.
“I, well, during that first time you were in the car, you asked Cameron if ‘she’ was watching,” I explain. “So. That.”
He’s close enough that I see his pupils go from dimes to quarters, small then big then small again. Then his dimples vanish.
“Oh, that. Right.”
“It’s not really any of my business,” I continue. Shouldn’t have brought this up. Why am I still bringing it up?
“No, it is your business,” he retorts. “We’re a thing, and you don’t like cheaters. I get it.”
“I didn’t think you were—”
“There’s nobody else,” Arthur interrupts. His thumb presses against my back, finding and settling firmly against a notch in my spine. Like he wants to keep me still. “As long as we’re doing this, you have my full attention.”
“For the scheme?”
His cheek flexes. “For the scheme.”
“Then who was she?” I ask.
“She?”
“The person you want to watch you. Who is she?”
Blame the bloodhound in me, starved for scraps. But I still feel like I don’t know Arthur enough, and surprisingly, him implying his year of rest and relaxation was so messy that he now doesn’t date, but wait he doesn’t cheat, doesn’t completely gel. Something isn’t adding up. And if I’m curious about who’s managed to genuinely steal his attention, that’s just a documentarian’s innate nosiness.
And I know it wasn’t me. But… she had to have been someone new to watching his races, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked Cameron. Someone who Cameron could’ve seen in the garage that day. Someone Arthur might not have trusted yet to stick around for the whole thing, someone who didn’t like Formula 1 and had told him that—
“Merlin,” Arthur says. He swallows and leans away, and cold air rushes to fill up the empty space where he was, his hand, the possibility that he could’ve maybe wanted… never mind. Stupid.
I shouldn’t have asked.
“She’d gotten mad at me that day. Thought she was skipping out on it.” He plucks up a bottle cap and spins it, then slaps it down on the bar top. “Gotta keep her happy.”
I wish I was that bottle cap. Of course Arthur hadn’t meant me. He’d said that then, he’s saying it now. Arthur doesn’t want anything from me past the end of the summer. And that’s good. A relationship between us is scandalous enough to wreck a multimillion-dollar racing contract, and a documentary, and a new American circuit, and my professional image. I don’t want him to want me.
Then why do I ask him, “What happens after?”
