Sure. Left yours at the altar once or twice. They must be easy to misplace.“I bet it’s hard to meet people who want to settle down, doing what you do.”
“Seriously. Call me traditional, but I just want a woman who wants to be a wife and mom. It’s impossible to find that these days.” He flashes me a toothy smile. “You know, if this goes well, our kids might get my red hair. Just saying.”
Out of nowhere, more of Faust’s words from yesterday ricochet through my head.
Your freckles look like Bernard’s.
“Oh. Yeah.” Shit, I sound uncomfortable. How can I make sure he doesn’t think it’s because of his casual family planning? “I like red hair.”
“Good,” he says, oblivious. “What about you? You want a family? Kids?”
Nope. “With the right guy? Sure.”
“Well, not with thewrongguy,” he jokes. I smile. He does, too.
When I make some comment about feeling a bit warm, Bernard vanishes to grab us drinks—“on him this time”—and I’m alone to shake off the residual Faustian weirdness. This is soannoying. Why can’t I get his stupid, deep voice out of my head? I don’t want to remember him noticing things about me that Bernard doesn’t. He’s not physically here, and I’m still getting frustrated by him.
Stubbornly, I stand, strip off my cover-up, and march to the pool. Glorious, heated water envelopes me as I sink into the shallow lounging area, made for drinkers and the occasional child. There. Bernard will return, bearing alcohol I won’t drink and a newfound appreciation for my swimsuit. We’ll banter some more, I’ll tiptoe around his tradwife fantasy long enough to really secure our dinner date, and then…
A man comes strolling out the entrance to the pool. It isn’t Bernard.
Every muscle in my stomach squeezes tightly as I register Faust’s long, angular silhouette, the sunlight only catching on his black Aviator sunglasses when he reaches the edge of the water. Though he isn’t looking at the pool. I can’t exactly tell where his eyes are but—judging by the severe frown he has on, coupled with the quilted Bode button-down thrown over his bare shoulders—I think I’m the target caught in his crosshairs.
Something scrapes against my lower back and I inhale in surprise, my head whipping to look behind me. Oh. Just the pool wall I’ve backed myself into.
Ironic.
The sound of flip-flops on concrete thwap to my left. “An Aperol Spritz for the lady,” Bernard says happily, plopping down on theedge of the pool with his own beer. Then he follows my mistake of a glance over to Faust. “Ah, merde,” he mumbles. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you here with him around. How did he even get in here?”
“Who, Faust?” Nice. Casual. “It’s fine. I’m starting to get used to his…”
“General hatred of mankind?”
“Yeah, that.” I laugh a bit too genuinely.
Bernard smiles, though it doesn’t reach his eyes. “He’s been like that since we were kids. A real rain cloud of a person.”
I rest my shoulder against the wall, purposefully angling away from Faust and his sunglasses and his frown. “You’ve known him that long?”
“That’s how it works in F1. You know everyone forever,” Bernard whispers back. “But me and him used to be best friends. Well, besides me and my brother. I think he was always jealous of that—that my brother’s in the sport, too. I’ve always had my family around, and Faust’s always been alone. That’s why we had our falling-out, I bet.”
Against my better judgment, my eyes stray to Faust again, a feeling close to melancholy unspooling beneath my rib cage. Always alone. All the way across the sparkling blue water, he’s seated beneath a breezy cabana, a paperback opened and perched on his thigh. My eyes skip there, too—his skin, his black swim trunks, as if he’d actually come to swim and not just sit there and pretend to read.
And… heisby himself.
I look away, trying to push away the faint heat below my skin. The sun is getting to me. I’m not made for hot climates.
“You’re better off without him,” I tell Bernard. “He is exactly the kind of person I can’t stand.”
“And what kind is that?”
“Critical.” I stir my spritz with a vengeance. “Always picking and judging and…staring. And he always thinks he knows best, doesn’t he? Ignoring what you say, watching for you to make a mistake?”
“Jesus.” Bernard laughs nervously. “What did he do to you?”
“Nothing. I just—get annoyed by people like that.”Rich people, I add silently. Wealthy, miserable, and taking it out on the world. Bernard does that with a smile. But Faust’s a walking red flag, too, even if his unhappiness doesn’t currently result in any stranded brides. Misery, in my experience, masks anger. And that anger among men in this stratosphere is pure entitlement: they think they deserve more, better, always, pretending to care about the poor or the political until it’s inconvenient for them, if they bother to pretend at all. And driving in Formula 1 doesn’t make these kajillionaires any less likely to furiously finger-snap someone’s life into pieces. If anything, competing in the luxury-sponsorship Thunderdome would aggravate a person’s worst, most narcissistic traits.
And it isn’t like Formula 1 helped my family when we needed it. Sports don’t love you back.
