Street Circuit

You don't answer him. You check the deadbolt twice, put a chair in front of the connecting door like a woman in a horror movie, and lie in the dark listening.

Nothing. No footsteps. No knock. Just the hum of the air conditioner and, very faintly, through the wall, the sound of a television turned low. Some cooking show. A man with an accent explaining how to fold dough.

He's watching a baking show. Forty feet of wall between you and the most dangerous man in the Apex Series, and he's watching a baking show.

You close your eyes, and Vegas comes back the way it always does at night. Not in order. In pieces.

The Bellamar lobby, all gold and black marble. Your heel going crack on the stairs and your whole body pitching sideways, and a hand catching your elbow before you hit the ground.

"Whoa. Got you." Hazel eyes. Curls. A smile like a blade with all the edges sanded off. "That's a fatal injury for a shoe. I'm so sorry for your loss."

"It was a good shoe," you said, wobbling.

"It was a great shoe." He crouched in front of you, right there in the lobby, in dark jeans and a white T-shirt that should have been illegal on him. "I can fix that or I can buy you a drink while you decide whether to cry about it. Or both. I'm very good at both."

He fixed it. A hair tie you pulled out of your bun, a folded cocktail napkin, a knot you've never seen before or since. It held all night.

At the bar he asked your name. You told him your first name.

"Ava," he repeated, like he was tasting it.

Then you held up a finger.

"Rule," you said. "I've been at a medical conference for four days talking about tendon loading. I don't want to talk about my job. I don't want last names. I don't want numbers. I want one night where nobody knows who I am."

He looked at you for a long moment over his drink. You thought he'd laugh. Instead he said, quietly, "Your rules," and touched his glass to yours. "I'm J."

"Just J?"

"Just J. I drive for a living."

You talked until two. About your mother's terrible boyfriends and his father's terrible jokes, about the best diner pie in the Midwest, about whether it's ever acceptable to clap when a plane lands. He was funny. He listened like listening was a sport. When you laughed, he looked at you like he'd won something.

At two he said, "There's a rooftop pool. It closes at midnight. I know a guy."

You'd each had one drink, hours earlier, and switched to water. You remember everything. The pool was dark and empty and lit from underneath, blue and rippling, the Strip blazing all around it like a city on fire. You sat on the edge with your feet in the warm water. He sat next to you, close but not touching.

"I want to kiss you," he said. Just like that. "Is that okay?"

You remember how your heart jumped. You remember saying, "Yes," and then, when his mouth was an inch from yours, "Yes," again, because the first one hadn't been enough.

He asked again in the elevator. Is this okay? And at the door of his room. And later, in the dark of his room with the city lights sliding over the ceiling, his voice low against your ear: Still okay? Tell me.

Every time. Every single step. Nobody had ever asked you that many times. Nobody had ever made yes feel like something you got to keep choosing.

That was the part you couldn't forget. Not the kisses. The asking.

Race day is a wall of sound.

You've worked football Sundays, a Big Ten basketball tournament, a marathon finish line in the rain. Nothing prepares you for twenty-six cars screaming off the line at once on a street circuit, the noise so huge it seems to come up through the concrete into your bones, the air shaking with it, the smell of fuel and hot rubber everywhere.

You're on the pit wall in a headset and team kit, beside Iggy. Through his radio you can hear Jace breathing.

He starts sixth. By lap twenty he's fourth. By lap forty he's third, and Iggy is muttering in French and slapping the desk.

"Shoulder?" Iggy asks over the radio, on the slow laps under a caution flag.

"Fine," Jace says.

It isn't. You can see it in the data on Iggy's screen: tiny inconsistencies in his steering through the slow right-handers, where the left arm does the heavy pulling. He's compensating. He's in pain, and he's driving through it at a hundred and seventy miles an hour.

He finishes third. The pit wall erupts. Iggy hugs you. You hug Iggy back, laughing, and over his shoulder you see the 44 car roll into the pit lane and Jace climb out, pull off his helmet, push his sweaty curls back with one hand, and look straight at the pit wall.

At you.

He doesn't smile. He just looks. Then the cameras swarm him.

The medical trailer is cool and quiet after the noise, all white cabinets and a narrow padded table. Jace comes in an hour later, after the podium and the champagne and the interviews, his fire suit unzipped and tied around his waist, a damp gray undershirt clinging to him.

He sits on the table without being told. When he tries to lift his left arm to pull the shirt over his head, he can't get past his shoulder.

"Let me," you say.

You ease the shirt up and off, slow, mindful of the joint. His skin is hot. There's a red pressure mark across his collarbone from the harness. The left shoulder is swollen, faintly, the muscles around it rigid as rope.

You put your hands on him and begin to work.

Neither of you says anything for a while. The generators hum outside. You find the knots and coax them loose, thumbs moving in slow circles, and you feel him let go of the breath he's been holding, inch by inch, until his head drops forward and he exhales, long and shaking.

"You drove three hours on this," you say quietly.

"Two hours and nine minutes."

"You're an idiot."

"I was third, though." His voice is low and rough. "Did you see?"

"I saw."

He turns his head. Your hands go still on his shoulder. His face is very close, and his eyes are hazel and gold and green in the harsh trailer light, and they drop to your mouth and stay there.

"Ava," he says. Not Doc. Not Vegas. Your name, like he's asking a question.

You should step back. You know where the door is. You know what clause seven says.

You don't step back. You lean in, just slightly, and his breath touches your lips, and his hand comes up to rest light as anything at your waist...

The trailer door bangs open.

You jump back so fast you hit the cabinet. Jace grabs for his shirt.

Sorin Vandewalle is leaning in the doorway in his race suit, blond hair perfectly messy, one eyebrow raised in an expression of polite and delighted interest.

"Oh," he says. "Sorry. Didn't know physio was a contact sport."