“And you?”
His jaw shifts as he lifts his chin. I don’t notice that he’s mirroring me until I catch him looking at my neck, where my Elsa Peretti Bean necklace sits beneath my throat. Another good luck charm, and a reminder of home that now feels incredibly stupid to wear. Not that Faust knows anything about Elsa Peretti. Or Chicago, probably.
“I was born in the south of Portugal, in a coastal region calledAlgarve,” he answers slowly. “But I’ve been with Stark-Benzin since I was six, minus a few years.”
“That’s so cool.” Here we go. Push the conversation back his way. “Is that why you came back to the team? I bet you havesomany good memories here.”
He frowns. It takes up most of his face. “Some.”
Championships aren’t up to his memory standards, I guess. “Is it nice to be back?”
He pauses. Nods.
“And what were you doing before this? Like, were you on another team?” I laugh. “Sorry. I really will figure out how F1 works, I promise!”
Faust meets my bubbly ingenue act with the flirtatiousness of a brick wall. Un-charmed. Very weird. “You don’t know now?”
“I mean…” I stretch the word out, smiling. “I know you race cars, obviously. And there are a lot of rules, right?”
His eyes narrow. “So, you were with a date.”
“A date?”
The barest hint of a smile curls one corner of his long, preternaturally unamused mouth. “At Bernard and Imogen’s wedding.”
I stop fidgeting with my bracelet. What the actual hell. He shouldn’t—he can’t remember me. We barely met, and he literally meets one thousand people, traveling the world most weeks of the year. And… wait a minute. Faust just watched me act like I was meeting Bernard for the very first time. If he knows I was vaguely in Bernard’s orbit, orbiting, and now I’m suddenly on his team? Shaking his hand? That’s unhinged behavior. Stalker-y, even.
That metal quote sign my dad used to have hanging above the garage’s cash register flashes in my head.Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.
My heartbeat quickens.
He could get me fired. Or… worse.
“Hm, I don’t remember meeting you,” I say with a syrupy smile. “You might have me mixed up with someone else.”
“I do?”
There’s another breeze, or Faust is looking at me again. Either way, the air’s cold.
“Seems that way. Sorry.”
I’m trafficking in half-truths—seems, might—so I don’t have to outright lie. Maybe, if I talk around this enough, I can gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss our first meeting from his memory over time. I mean, how many blondes in black dresses has he seen in the past month? One million?
Faust looks from me to the track. “Okay,” he finally says.
“Okay,” I repeat, my throat dry.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine!”
Across the fence, there’s a harsh roar, and I inhale sharply. Faust shifts. I think he might be noticing the way my hand’s clenched into a fist on my knee.
“You… have one of those faces,” he says, his voice quieter than before.
“Easy to mix up?”
He hums again. I guess that’s his default communication style. He looks at me for one more beat, as if he’s trying for the last time to decide if I’m me or not, then he looks away and—okay. I see the moment I lose his interest. His shoulders dip. His frown goes detached again, bored. It’s a quick thing, a door slamming shut, whatever intensity he had for me and my backstory revoked. Like I’d only been intriguing when he’d thought I was lying to him.
