My face warms. “He isn’t missing.”
She gives me a deadpan look. “Then where is he? He’s supposed to be here for that photoshoot.”
“Oh, sorry.” I pull out my Stark-Benzin calendar app. Qualifying was earlier, though I’d tried to tune it out. I’m Action Cat. Heartbreaker Cat. No time to worry about F1 results when I’m dining with Bernard tonight. Those results had included Faust getting his second pole position of the season, sure. But I don’t care. I can’t, so I don’t.
“I bet he’s sleeping,” I tell Mei. “Or eating. One or the other.”
“Well, he can’t.”
I know what she’s about to ask me, a lowly stylist, to do. “Mei, it’s Monaco, he’s—”
“Can you just go by his apartment and check?”
All the heat in my body drains away. Since the Miami-watch incident, I’ve been so good at keeping my don’t-have-soul-bearing-sex-with-that-man promise to myself. “Is that appropriate?”
Mei peeks over the rim of her glasses. “No. Please go.”
She gives me his home address, and I realize that it’ll look more suspicious if I refuse her, so I’m off. On foot, since Formula 1 has literally absorbed the streets here into its racetrack. Monte Carlo is a hilly town in my humble Illinois-native opinion, exceedingly European. The architecture is either pastel pink buildings or sleek,bite-sized skyscrapers, but skyscrapers from the ’90s, before architects went off the rails. The whole placefeelslike the ’90s, a bubble lost in time that no one wants to pop.
A dream.
And you wouldn’t know from the outside that a Formula 1 driver is renting an apartment in this plain beige building, though that’s the promise of Monte Carlo, too. They might be anywhere. I meet with the first-floor security, showing them my work badge and Mei’s emails and then, after they call Mei herself and her boss and her boss’s boss—I’m waved toward Faust’s private elevator.
That’s a nice reminder, I think on the way up. Faust can own his own elevator. I am not going to kiss him as soon as I see him. I’m not going to miss seeing Bernard tonight.
I guess—if he’s here, I can say goodbye.
The elevator opens into a dark entryway that really doesn’t look that different from the standard luxury Manhattan building. It’s laughably small for the cost, with plain white walls and mail stacked on a slim table, unopened. Men are men everywhere.
“Hey?” I call into the dark.
No answer.
Blinking at the blue-shadowed hall, I run the tip of my tongue along the inside of my teeth and debate the pros and cons of walking into a seemingly empty apartment. This is Faust’s space. I haven’t even second-guessed why it’s dark in here, because it’s so unsurprising.
Shit, what if the doormen made a mistake, and thisisn’tFaust’s apartment?
Fingering the pepper spray key chain in my pocket, I edge into the hall, the tips of my shoulder blades finding the wall. It’s quiet. The large window on the wall facing the door has its thin gray blindsdrawn, letting in only the ghost of sunlight. Then I turn and see a living room, a big gray sofa, a shape on it, him.
For a moment, I clutch my pepper spray as I register the mop of un-spun brown curls on top of his head, his arm thrown over his face. Feel a pit of chewing anxiety from nowhere, that I promptly shut. He looks like he’s asleep—fuck, heisasleep—
“Arcadia?”
He doesn’t sound asleep.
I abandon my pepper spray. “Hey!” I say, forcing my frozen legs to carry me over to the sofa, despite my instinct to double back to the door. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to barge in. If the team had known you were”—the wordstaking a napdie in my mouth, too intimate—“resting, they would’ve rescheduled.”
Not true, but, whatever. His mouth ticks at the very corner, like he also knows I’m lying. “And now?”
“And now,” I repeat with my own smile, “I can tell Mei you’d like to take this evening off, but they’ll probably make you reschedule the photoshoot. Sorry.”
With a groan, Faust pulls his elbow away from his face. “Stop apologizing.” He blinks his eyes open, first unfocused, then on me. “Monaco’s tomorrow.”
“I know. It’s fucked, in my opinion. Can’t imagine anyone genuinely cares if you model Dior this weekend or the next.”
There’s a smallwhoosh—like Faust’s laughing under his breath—then he pulls himself up, ever so slightly. By his arm. Which flexes, distractingly. “Monaco is tomorrow,” he says again, this time adding more of an emphasis on the name of the country, and briefly, I wonder if this is it. Our moment. He knows I’m dumping Bernard today. I’d told him that ages ago.
Then I remember that Faust has pole position, and it’s Monaco,and these past few years have been horrible for him, in Lilah’s words.
