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“Is this a trick question?” I narrow my eyes back at him. “Both. I love the whole of you. You needed both sides of yourself to survive. Without Blue you wouldn’t have made it. Without Ocean, you wouldn’t love me. Am I wrong?”
He mutters something that sounds like my name and like cursing, and then he’s crashing me to his chest before I can protest about his ribs and the pain, like he’s never going to let me go.
***
We don’t park outside the trailer park like last time. Ocean directs me to a place closer to town. We enter an empty plot where a couple of muscle cars are parked. A couple of guys in leather jackets and stylish clothes lounge around them.
My stomach is all twisted up, and the race hasn’t even begun.
We park, and a guy makes his way toward us. Ocean takes a deep breath and takes my face in his hands. “Love you, Kay.” He kisses me, pulling back before he deepens the kiss. “It will be fast.”
Not sure if that’s meant to be reassuring.
God, I wish I had my cards. I wish I could trust in them. I wish I had time to trace the lines on his palms, try to read them.
He exits the car, and I scramble out to follow him.
“Blue,” a lean middle-aged man with graying hair says, clasping Ocean’s hand. “I thought maybe you changed your mind. I might have raced this baby myself.”
He turns and runs a hand over a shiny silver Ford.
“As if you ever would.” The scorn in Ocean’s voice is light, faint, but the guy glares at him. “Hey, Duane.”
I don’t know much about cars, but what’s the fuss all about? Yes, the car’s shape is low and aerodynamic. But what’s the big deal?
“Remember I’m doing you a favor, Blue,” the middle-aged guy grumbles.
“Not the way I see it. You’ve been begging me to race your car for years now.”
“Don’t make me change my mind, dickhead. Just get in, run her around the block. Make sure she runs fine. Race’s about to start.”
The car doesn’t look like much, but this impression changes when Ocean shrugs off his jacket, folds his tall frame behind the wheel and starts the engine.
That roar. The rumble. I swear I feel it in my chest, just like I feel his voice when he’s speaking close to me, like when I have my hand pressed to his diaphragm.
So that’s what a muscle car sounds like from up close.
He’s still wearing the T-shirt I made him. I’m glad. It’s as if I’ll be in the car with him somehow.
Then Ocean peels out of the field and onto the road, and I’m caught between exhilaration and terror. God, that car is fast. He vanishes around a corner, and before I take two steps, he reappears around another, in a cloud of exhaust smoke.
Holy shit.
He wasn’t kidding when he said it would be fast. That he would be fast, a blue shadow inside that silver car.
“You with Blue?” Duane calls to me, and I walk toward him, my gaze glued to Ocean where he’s parking the car at the side of the road and climbing out. “You should come stand here. Safer. Those cars go real fast.”
Yeah, I noticed.
“But they are safe, right?” I know the moment the question leaves my mouth how stupid it sounds. It’s a drag race. How can it be safe? “I mean, is it a straight stretch, no obstacles? Nothing tricky?”
“Well, we can’t make it too easy, now, can we? There are a few twists and turns. These city boys think they can show up with their toy cars and win.” He tsks. “Ocean knows this area like the back of his hand. He can win this with his hands tied behind his back.”
That’s reassuring, at least. “And if he wins, he’s done, right? He won’t be racing again.”
He scowls. “The buy-in isn’t too high on this one. It’s his call. There’s a lot of dough in racing, and he knows it. He used to do it on a weekly basis, back then. The first time he dyed his hair blue. Said it was war paint. And he kept it.”
I think of a young Ocean getting into these powerful cars, these deathtraps, to race every week, and my heart stops in my chest. How many brushes with death did he have, nobody caring, nobody dragging him away, telling him there’s another way to survive?
