“Did he get hurt?”
“Only mentally.” She shakes her Coke. “I don’t miss that.”
My fingers slip around either side of my stiff plastic seat. “The drama?”
“The feelings.”
I shouldn’t ask. Me and a client, on a Formula 1 date, should not discuss feelings. A client who flew to Japan because of her feelings, good or bad.
I ask.
“Is it hard to be with a driver?”
The breeze plays with a piece of Imogen’s hair she didn’t slick back enough. She catches it, tucking it behind her ear. There are four rings on her left hand—one for almost every finger. “Honestly?” She gives me a sad smile. “It’s so easy, you’ll think you’re dreaming.”
Deep inside my chest, whatever shifted tilts further to one side. “The hours are insane, they’re workaholics, and they’ve all got daddy issues they take out on their team principals, but say they don’t. And they get hurt, and they’re moody, and this—it isn’t a safe sport. It’s safer now, but notsafe. There are no sick days or weekends off because you don’t feel like it. This is an insane thing to want to do. To have wanted to do their whole lives, since they were four or five or six, and then to get here and stay here. They’re not normalpeople. They don’t have normal relationships, with women, or men, or their families, or anyone.”
As Imogen talks, I hear the cars approaching again. Lap two. The drivers and their Sisyphean laps. “And then”—she smiles—“one day you’re on a jet home from Monaco, and he’s sleeping on your shoulder.”
I see it. Brown hair, tan skin. How peaceful he must look when he’s asleep. “And it’s easy?”
“And it’s easy, because he loves you.”
That, I can’t picture.
A cloud drifts in front of the sun. I shift around my bracelet, an Alighieri cuff shaped like a golden handcuff. I’ve been forgetting one very important thing while calculating an outcome for Faust and me. Arguably the most important part of dating, though I’ve spent years not considering it for any of my relationship equations, where I mirror and reflect and evade and lie to give men the Cat they want.
Faust would have to want to be withme.
Chapter 20TRADING MATERIAL
NEW YORK CITY
I rent a short-term apartmentfrom a little old man who brings me day-old flowers and snacks from his downstairs bodega. He has three sons, and they’re all polite and funny and work around the clock at the shop, and after a week of trying and failing to connect with Mei’s designer collab list, the boys let me squeeze into a metal table in the back room. They have a small television set up, constantly playing the news and Arabic dramas, and endless Lebanese coffee. I explain to them that I’m working on the most intense project of my new and very short career, they explain to me what’s happening inAl Thaman, and by the second week, I have a pair of shoes lined up for Faust. And cuff links. From a vintage store I found on my own. That’s it.
Renata stops by with Rowan when she isn’t maniacally plotting to win the “preschool lottery,” something she has to explain to me twice. “But enough about me, how are you? How’s work?” she saysone afternoon as we watch Ahmed—the youngest son—sit through Rowan’s rendition ofSpecial Agent Beagle Goes to Washington. She’s sounding out some of the words on the board book pages, and for a four-year-old? Genius.
I stir my cardamom-dosed coffee. “He doesn’t have anything to wear.”
“What?”
“For the gala.”
“Oh.” Renata smiles, tickled by something she doesn’t explain. “Yeah?”
“I got inspo stuff, but how hard is it to get a designer to put a billionaire in a black suit?”
“I thought you said he wasn’t a billionaire.”
“Okay, multimillionaire.”
“There is a difference.”
“Ew.”
She laughs. “And how’s dating the dirtbag?”
“Fine. Boring.” I shrug. “We text.”
