Fast & Hard (The Fast 1)

Sandra Alix

Director of Marketing and

Communications

Celeritas Racing

I don’t have the strength to throw my phone so it slips from my hand to the floor.

Twenty Six

“See, honey, I saw love. You see it came to me, it put its face up to my face so I could see. Yeah, then I saw love disfigure me into something I am not recognizing.” - Phosphorescent - Song for Zula

Lennox

Release the car. Release the car. Release. The. Bloody. Car.

I grip the steering wheel tight. I have to get out of this garage. I can see her in my periphery vision no matter how much I lock my face straight ahead, out of the garage and onto the pit lane in Austria. Standing on his side of the garage in his #16 Celeritas apparel, her head is hung low.

I had to quit drinking days ago to drive this weekend. Conveniently, I was presented with a cup to piss in this morning. I’ve never had a drink within days of driving but that’s never stopped the ‘random’ tests after DuPont knows I’ve been out. I’m the only driver on the grid who’s been tested in years. Fucking douche.

Unfortunately, without the burn of liters of scotch in my gut, things aren’t numb anymore.

I focus on hating him, all the ways I want to hurt him, as I chase his car around and around the track today. I can picture it in my head, I can hear the sounds it would make, visualize the carbon fiber shattering if I just run right the hell into him at full speed.

The people watching, the factory workers in Aylesbury who would only have to rebuild everything and who depend on his farce of a team to pay their mortgages and send their kids to college are the only reasons I back off. It certainly isn’t the engineers in my ear telling me to back off.

“Fuck off, don’t talk to me,” I bark at them through the radio in my helmet. That’ll be a fine.

Good.

It’s easier to fixate on one thousand and one ways to murder Digby than think about her, anyway. Digby has always been a prick, always will be. But she was supposed to be different. I let myself believe she was. Even though she showed up as another media cretin, another nanny sent to stuff me into the perfect Celeritas mold, I tamped down my suspicions and fell for it, believing she was real.

She’s no more real than the rest of them. Even Matty and Jack I pay to be here, for christ’s sake. That’s all I have to offer anyone, money and fame. I thought that lesson has been ingrained in my brain real good the last time, but nope. Had to touch the hot stove one more time and now I’m surprised when my hands are burnt.

Wonder how long it’ll be before my face is plastered all over Infinity Magazine, photos of the inside of my home across the Cooper Media websites, stories Mum and Pop told her printed in thirty-five languages for global distribution. I stayed holed up alone in a London hotel until I flew to Austria, I don’t even want to go home and see the sanctuary she’s ruined.

I’ll stay in hotels, for now. Maybe I should get disposable apartments, at this point. I’m certainly not staying at Celeritas anymore so I can see her strolling out of Digby’s flat every morning.

Jack’s been running interference, assuring me she’s staying on the opposite end of the current hotel - his floor, of course. In a fog, Jack and Matty direct me through the motorhome and paddock in a strategic dance to avoid either one of them. We’re men, we don’t discuss it. It just happens.

In the post-quali press pen, there’s no avoiding her proximity, though. All the drivers, including Dickless, are there along with their PR people. Journalists surround us on the opposite side of the metal crowd fencing. At least I can go back to being my normal asshole self now though, there’s no incentive to give these senseless questions any dignity.

“Lennox, has the team determined the cause of the engine failure in France?”

“Beats me,” I shrug and down a bottle of water with as little regard as I can muster.

“I’m sorry, you don’t know happened?”

“Don’t know, don’t care. Next question.” I look behind me to toss my water bottle into a bin. Mallory’s next to Digby holding her voice recorder in front of him as he speaks to another journalist but I catch her eyes for the smallest measurement of time. They’re glassy and shaking.

Yeah, that doesn’t work anymore, love. Sell the lies somewhere else.

“Lennox, it looks like you had other things in your mind last week. Several photos surfaced of you clubbing in London. Do you have a comment?”

“Aye, there were other things on my mind but they’ve been worked out of my system, all better now,” I wink at the journalist and speak loudly enough for her to hear me. She thought I was an asshole before? Ha.

“Some online comments suggested supermodel Kate Allendale was spotted with you. Can you confirm if you’ve reunited?”