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“You’re amazing. Good night, Em.”
“Goodnight. Thanks for that,” I point back to the building.
“Any time.”
I get in my car, and he shuts the door. I give him a little wave as I pull away and notice in the mirror he’s still standing there watching me drive away.
I’m halfway home before I realize he called me ‘baby’ today.
Danger, Emily, danger.
Still, I find myself tapping the steering wheel to music and singing to terrible pop songs as I make my way back to Cambridge. Today was a good day, and that’s all I want to think about.
When I get home, I post my horrendous simulator data print-outs to the refrigerator with food-delivery magnets and laugh the entire time I explain to Klara what the hell they are.
“You’re happy,” she grabs my hand and smiles.
Twelve
Hungaroring—Budapest, Hungary
Cole
“You did what?” Edmund’s eyes go wide, and he sets his coffee cup down with a heavy clink.
“They were not very nice about it, either,” Emily says as she pulls her long chocolate hair behind her head, twists it up, then sticks a pen through it to hold it in place.
Fuck, that’s hot.
She looks like a sexy school teacher when she does that. Her long neck is exposed now, and I can almost see her pulse ticking beneath her skin.
“What do you mean they weren’t nice about it?” The caveman inside me perks up when Emily says the other teams weren’t exactly friendly with her.
All weekend, she’s been hell-bent on talking to the other teams to see if they’re having tire problems, too. They are, but Em has quickly discovered that everything is a secret in Formula 1. Teams don’t share data, strategies, or intel. Not when there are billions of dollars at play. It’s every team, man, or woman, for themselves.
“They didn’t do anything,” she clarifies and gives me a knowing look that tells me to calm down. “They just acted like I was a dumb girl, and a strategist from a certain Italian team suggested I’d be better at fetching them all coffees than worrying about tires.”
The fork in my hand falls to the table in outrage. Those pricks.
“Ahh, to be young again,” Edmund chuckles and looks around the hospitality area of our motorhome where I’m grabbing a pre-race snack, and Emily is taking advantage of any free time to talk shop.
It took Edmund about three minutes after Emily started to put the pieces together about us. He doesn’t mind that I schemed him and Emily into this job since he’s thrilled with her anyway, but he’s promised to keep my secret. Emily might think she only got the job because of me. It would hurt her pride and fuel bullshit ideas like this crap that women belong fetching coffee.
She’s dealt with it her whole life as a woman in STEM fields.
“Ignore them,” Edmund continues. “Their strategists can’t find their way out of a paper bag.”
Emily whips out a thick, spiral-bound notebook, pages and pages filled with her delicate, girly handwriting in blue gel ink. She’s very particular about her pens, and when one goes missing, she gets stabby.
“Do you know what these tires cost? It’s absurd,” she flips to a page in her notebook. “Twenty thousand dollars for a single race.”
I nod, sounds about right.
“Did Olivier get you the information?” Edmund says like he has a frog in his throat, then he starts coughing hoarsely. “Excuse me, coffee down the wrong pipe.”
“Yeah, he sent me commercial brochures. PDFs that anyone can download from the Concordia website,” Emily purses her lips and scowls. She even asked Edmund to get the info from Olivier, and this is what he sent in response.
“I don’t know there’s much more I can do, myself,” Edmund says to Emily. His eyes are watering from coughing, and he dabs at them with a napkin. “I can talk to the bosses, but they’ll probably tell me to deal with Olivier.”
