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“Same answer as the last two times,” Edmund rolls his eyes and goes back to his computer screen to study the latest computer model the aerodynamic team sent up.
Edmund Lloyd’s been our chief engineer since I came to Imperium as a teenager. He’s an old-school kind of guy who cut his teeth in the Formula 1 of years past. He’s worked with legends of the sport and is a traditionalist who preferred the old ways of doing things. He’d rather have raw horsepower than hybrid engines. “There’s no replacement for displacement,” is his favorite mantra. We’ve all heard it ad nauseam over the years.
Every year that F1 introduces different technical rules that he has to adapt to, he loses more hair. This year, it’s a new tire manufacturer, Concordia, that has his hairline receding even further, and the shiny bald spot on the top of his head has grown exponentially. The whole team has been struggling to get the most performance out of Concordia rubber.
I don’t pretend to understand it all. I drive the car and can tell them what feels right, how the car reacts and responds to me. But why? I leave that to smarter people.
People like Edmund Lloyd and Emily Walker.
“I still don’t understand this,” Edmund raises one eyebrow at me suspiciously. “Just a friend from high school, but you’re going to wear a path through the floor with your pacing. Since when do you pace?”
I stand up straight and crack my neck.
Get a grip, asshole.
I don’t understand what the hell I’m doing either. I should have thought this through better. I should have gotten my ducks in a row first.
Ever since Emily moved to the UK ten months ago, I’ve been on edge, out of sorts. She’s throwing a wrench into my system, disrupting all the ways I’ve occupied my mind over the last six years.
Why did she move here?
I may have casually mentioned Emily to Edmund after one of the latest meetings discussing why the new tires suck and they talked about bringing an expert aboard. The tires are degrading, wearing down, quicker and more explosively than they should. We just can’t get them to work right. I may have left him a copy of the research paper Emily wrote at Cambridge. I didn’t understand half of it, but our factory engineers were salivating over it.
I wasn’t expecting Edmund to know the Professor Emily worked with on the paper and to line up an interview with her today. This was all abysmal planning on my part. What did I think would happen? What was I even hoping for?
I was bad for her then. I’ll be worse for her now.
But, like a selfish prick, like someone possessed by a cosmic pull, I can’t stay away from her.
Not when she’s an hour away from me in her little two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor just off the university campus. Not when she goes out with some asshole for dinner or drinks or coffee and lets him kiss her goodnight. Giggles at some bullshit line that he feeds her, smiles at him like she used to smile at me.
Oceans separated us before. Damn good reasons separated us.
But now?
My neck is stiff, and I crack it again.
It’s 9:01, and she isn’t here. She isn’t coming. Emily Walker is not a person who shows up late.
Hell with this. I need this shit like a hole in the head.
It is what it is, it’s not meant to be. I am who I am, God knows I can’t change it. And Emily shouldn’t be with me now any more than she should have been years ago. No matter how much I want her.
“I need to be in the simulator. Sorry about the no show,” I tell Edmund.
He shrugs, never looking up from his computer, and I leave his office to make my way downstairs to the Sim. I push the elevator button repeatedly before I give up and take the stairs to my left.
“Sim time, dickhead,” Dante, my teammate, pops out of an office and slugs me in the shoulder.
“Heading down now. Hurry up so I can kick your ass, as usual.”
Dante faux l
aughs and points at me like the concept is hilarious to him as we head into the stairwell. Dante and I came up through the Junior Driver Program together, and we get along better than most teammates, considering our job is to beat the other one every race.
On the track, we fight like hell, but off, we’ve become damn good friends. I had no one when I left Florida. Despite Dante being from Italy and having a huge Italian family who dotes on him like he’s the chosen one, we have a lot in common. We both grew up here, thrown into the ring as boys, and left to our own devices and coaches to become men.
“Ciao, Evelyn,” Dante croons and winks at one of the office staff who’s walking up the stairs as we walk down.
