Page 70 of Flat Out
“Just admiring the show,” I shot back, though my concern for her was increasing by the minute. Leaning closer, I lowered my voice. “I need two minutes.”
She read something in my face and nodded toward her suite, brushing past me. I followed, relieved when the noise dropped a notch as the door shut. We turned to face each other. The distance between us felt both too intimate and too far apart.
Right now, we weren’t Cal and Auri, lovers pressed into the same skin, two names written into constellations that only made sense together. We were Callum Fraser and Aurélie Dubois—two elite Formula 1 drivers, rivals and champions in our own right, currently standing on opposite sides of a sport’s governing body that would rather see us silenced than heard.
And yet… the way she looked at me made it impossible to forget that I was hers first, and she was mine.
“How’s your neck?” I asked, scrutinizing her every movement, every microreaction.
Aurélie’s jaw ticked, her hand flying up to rub one side of it, almost subconsciously. “Manageable.”
“Uh-huh.” I tilted the tablet I brought with me so the rough trace I’d sketched caught the light. “Who set your brake migration today?”
Her lashes lifted. They were clumped together from sweat and remnants of mascara that had melted off her last night whenI kissed her tears away and swore I’d never let the world take her from me again, not even this sport. I intended to make good on that promise.
“Me, with Nico and Rhea.” She gestured toward the pit wall, where a tall redheaded woman in a headset—Rhea, I guessed—was conferring with a systems guy. “Why?”
I pulled up the lap overlay I’d saved. “Because your forward bias seems like it’s sitting three clicks farther forward than anyone sane would ever run on a chassis this twitchy. Especially not at a stop-start circuit like this. And your migration curve was flattened. You were loading the nose like a battering ram then catching a loose rear on exit. Pick one. You don’t pair both.”
Her mouth parted. Not in denial, but in calculation. “I asked for rear support on entry after the first run. They said the front was the safer compromise with temps.”
“Safer for numbers,” I said quietly. “Not for your body.” I zoomed the sector and tapped one of her problem areas. “Turn 5. Watch the rebound. Your heave is pogoing. That’s not ‘aero balance.’ That’s rebound too fast and packers too aggressive. Every hit goes straight up your spine.”
Her brows knitted together. “Pogoing?” she repeated, her accent turning the word into something almost melodical, like it belonged in her perfect French accent.
I blinked, then huffed out a quiet laugh despite myself. Christ. The garage could’ve been burning down and I still would’ve paused to watch her try to wrestle her tongue around an Englishism that made no sense. Something raw and visceral clawed at my heart, fucking wrecking me.
“Yeah, like a… a children’s toy. A stick with a spring,” I said, miming a ridiculous bounce with my hand. “Up, down, up, down. That’s what your chassis is doing.”
She smirked, shaking her head, a strand of hair slipping from her braid. I wanted to twine my fingers through it and haul herbody flush against mine. “Leave it to you to compare my car to a toy.”
I chuckled. “Well, it’sbuiltlike a fucking toy.” Then, softer, betraying myself: “And leave it to you to make me explain like an idiot.”
The joke lingered in the air, but so did the ache in my chest. Because even when I was supposed to be furious about sabotage, she could tilt her head and smile at me and I was just… gone. I loved her in that second so much, it stole my breath.
Her smirk faded into something smaller, more tender. “Then explain again. Because I like when you do.”
My chest tightened. Christ, she meant it. Her eyes tracked every movement of my hands on the tablet, wide and steady, like there was nothing in the world more important than hearing me talk about brake traces and rebound rates. And it completely fucking undid me. Because under all the noise, the politics, the goddamn sabotage, this was still us—her watching me, me watching her, tethered in ways that had nothing to do with lap times.
“I spoke to one of the engineers back in the bay at Vanguard,” I admitted, dragging my gaze from her mouth back to the screen between us. I was dangerously close to pressing her against these thin walls and fucking us both through the pain. “Even he frowned at this. Said no one would run your bias this far forwardandleave the rear that loose. Not unless they were clueless or careless. It’s begging for injuryandrisking their career.” I paused, catching the flicker of fire in her eyes, the way her lips parted like she was already forming a counterpoint. God, she was beautiful when she was about to argue.
I leaned in closer, lowering my voice even though we were already behind closed doors. “And then there’s you, staring at me like I’ve hung the stars, when all I’m doing is spelling out what you already know in your bones.”
She swallowed and stared at the line, then at me. “You think it’s incompetence.”
I swallowed the taste of copper. “I think no competent engineer marries that bias to that rear instability and sends you out. Not by accident.”
For a beat, the noise outside of this room carried everything we didn’t say.
She licked her lips, throat working. “I flagged it,” she said quietly. “They told me to drive around it.”
I felt something cold and precise slide into place where the panic had been. “That’s not setup preference, Aurélie,” I pressed, voice dropping lower, tight with a growing anger toward this team. “That’s either incompetence or sabotage. And don’t forget, it only takes one compromised setup, one missed safety measure, one negligent decision from racing control for a driver to pay in blood. We know that part all too well.”
I didn’t need to state the obvious that I was a byproduct of it.
Aurélie’s eyes watered, and I wanted nothing more than to reach out and fold her into me, but I needed to get through what I came here to say.
I also hated seeing her cry. I know what the accident had done to her–and I fucking hated it more than I hated the injuries, or the trauma, or the fact that I wasn’t racing this weekend.
