Fast & Wet (The Fast 2)

“Shit!”

Cole is laughing hysterically now but restarts the program, and I try again.

I can make it through two or three corners and in gears one, two, or three before I manage to destroy the virtual car. I lose track of how many walls I run into. At one point, I somehow manage to overturn the car.

“Fuck, I’m gonna piss myself,” Cole cackles.

“I want to make it one full lap around,” I call down to him.

This is a hoot, even if I am starting to get motion sick from bouncing around in this circus ride.

“Is the real car this hard to drive?” I ask as I’m halfway through one full lap without death or destruction, even if I’m only going twenty-five miles per hour, and all of my engine warning lights are on.

“The real car is much harder, baby.”

Rounding the final corner, I find myself biting my lip, too.

“Ha! I did it! I am the world champion!” I throw my arms into the air as I cross the finish line. One lap in just seventeen minutes.

Total rockstar.

Cole climbs back up the ladder and helps extract me from the car. Even getting in and out of these things is difficult.

“Well, did it help you understand the car better?” He asks me at the bottom as I fix my hair that’s become disheveled with all the commotion.

I quirk my head to the side, “You know, I wasn’t thinking about it.”

He beams at me, the corners of his smile damn near reaching his eyes.

Our eyes flicker back and forth between each other in the darkened room.

Cole takes a big breath in, blinks, and then breaks our gaze. He turns behind the desk, “I’ll print out your data set for a souvenir.”

“More like a badge of shame,” I take the papers as they come out of the printer. It’s so bad it makes me laugh again. Good thing I went into engineering as I have no career potential as a Formula 1 driver.

We gather up my laptop and my printouts, and as soon as we leave the room, I realize it’s now dark outside. Hours have passed inside the simulator room.

“Walk you to your car?” Cole asks.

“Okay, just need to grab my stuff.” There’s more security around this building than Fort Knox, yet I tell myself the prudent thing to do is to let Cole walk me to my car.

“You excited for Budapest?” he asks as we step outside into the warm, muggy night air.

“I am. If there’s time, I want to buy some paprika, and there’s a restaurant I’ve always wanted to go to.” There probably won’t be any time, if the last race was any indication, but I want authentic paprika for my arsenal, and this restaurant has been on my bucket list fo

r a while now.

“What restaurant?”

“I can’t pronounce the name, but it was on Anthony Bourdain’s show.”

Cole nods, and we talk briefly about how much we both felt the loss of Anthony Bourdain. I don’t know why his death affected me so much, I think I admired the way he lived his life and enjoyed the small things, lived in the moment.

“I think he’s why I started cooking,” I tell Cole.

“You cook now?”

“When I can.” We’ve reached my car, and I unlock it and open the door.