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“Yes, the vibe. You can’t tell me that they actually buy that you two are friends. You might have been smiling but you sounded like you wanted to kill him. And you,” I turned to Alejandro, “cannot alpha your way out of this. It won’t work anymore and people will just think you are afraid he’s going to replace you.”
“Because I am,” muttered Jason.
“Hey. None of that. We are not going to do that here.”
Alejandro glared at both of us. “What would you have me do? I cannot help that I am more mature and sophisticated than the classless American.”
“I may be classless but I can pull in more girls, more sponsors, and faster lap times than you old man,” retorted Jason.
“Nope!” I whisper-yelled. “Didn’t I just say we are not doing that here? Both of you cut it out.” I sighed and swiped a hand over my face before remembering where I was. I sincerely hoped I had not smeared my eyeliner. “You both need to get over this. So tonight instead of going out we are staying in, together, and working on a game plan. People have to actually believe you two are friends or we’re all getting fired.”
Alejandro might survive being fired, but I sure as hell wouldn’t. And Jason’s sister was counting on him. We had so much more at stake in this than being a premier driver.
Jason quirked an eyebrow at me suggestively “you sure that’s all you want to do tonight?” And there it was. He wasn’t going to let me off the hook for the moment earlier.
Heat pooled deep in my belly but I refused to let him sway me. “I’ll order food. Go change into something comfortable and bring your game face. We’ll stay up all night if we have to.” Then I turned and walked away, trying to figure out how I was actually going to make this happen.
***
AN HOUR LATER I WASseated on the couch in my leggings eating sushi off of chopsticks, trying not to throw them across the room. “I swear to God, Jason, you have to stop being so insufferable.”
“What?” the offending driver looked at me innocently and then continued to slurp his noodles at a decibel I had not thought possible for a human.
“She is right, man. You are so loud.” said Alejandro. His words weren’t helping smooth the situation, but I adored how he never used contractions in his heavily accented English.
“What do you want me to do? This is how I eat!”
“Really?” I raised my eyebrows. “Is thisreallyhow you eat? Were you raised in a barn?”
“Kinda. I mean I grew up on a ranch and we didn’t have fancy noodle dishes, just like the cup-o-noodle kind.”Slurp.“And this is how you eat them.”
“Wait,” I put my chopsticks down. “You’re serious? In all this time you’ve never learned how to eat noodles without making noise?”
He looked at me over the top of his bowl and took a delicate bite, completely silent, before bursting into laughter. “No, not really! I just wanted to see how long it took you to say something. This always drives my sister nuts too.” Another bite.Slurp.Unbelievable.
I sighed and resumed eating. This wasn’t the hill I was going to die on when we had a mountain of a problem to tackle. “Ok. So, back to the matter at hand. How are we going to convince the media that you two, who have been doing your best to appear as mortal enemies, now actually like each other?”
“Why must we do this again?” asked Alejandro. He couldn’t have made his tone any more indifferent if he’d tried. I stared him down. There was something about the stiffness in his shoulders I couldn’t decipher. Maybe. . . Maybe hewastrying to sound indifferent? But if that was the case, why?
“Because the public is invested in your lives now. Social media has come a long way and everyone wants to feel like they know you intimately.” They wanted to be able to look at the photos off the racetrack just as much as on to get a taste of the world of racing.
“Intimately, eh?” Alejandro gave me a thoughtful look which had me immediately blushing. Curse my pale ancestors, could these guys not?
I swallowed hard, determined not to let my mind slip into the gutter theirs so obviously lived in. “Yes. The other teams have been working together for longer and built a rapport that has the fans fully invested. Because we have been struggling in the points in the past, the big boss has decided that this is a way to make inroads with sponsors off the track. So, you need to be friendly.”
“And how do we do that?” asked Jason. I fought down the urge to ask if he wanted a PowerPoint presentation on how to be nice.
“Well,” I put my phone down and picked up my notepad. “I have some ideas. First, we definitely need to make some video content, so I thought we could do some silly games. Like last season one team carved pumpkins and another did Never Have I Ever. We can get the marketing team to come up with some non-competitive games for you, like maybe trying food from each other’s country or going shopping together where neither of you speak the language, stuff like that.”
“This will make us friends?” asked Alejandro, his nose wrinkled like he was smelling something awful.
“I don’t think it will make you friends, but if you have something to concentrate on outside one another that may help stop the bickering. I also looked up tips for faking a relationship, and you would be shocked by how much info is online. All those fake dating romance novels I guess.”
Jason gave a snort. “We are so not pretending to date.”
The two of them with their shirts off, eyes hungry with lust. Me in the middle.
“No, of course not.” I quickly shook off the mental image before my cheeks turned a permanent shade of scarlet. “But you do want to have the appearance of a bond. A bromance if you will. So things like ‘set some boundaries, get your backstory straight’ would probably help. I mean, people know you two don’t get along, so we need a reason you two suddenly hang out.”
