Fast & Wet (The Fast 2)

He drove that track once as an F1 reserve driver when the primary pilot was injured. He never lets anyone forget it.

“Does he know I’m here?” Emily asks and fidgets with a long strand of hair that’s fallen out of her bun.

“I haven’t told him, but probably.” I’m sure he’s seen her on TV, heard gossip through the rumor mill, and that’s what all my voicemails are about.

“Does the Major General know you’re here?” I ask about her own asshole father.

“I haven’t told him, but assuredly,” she clones my dysfunctional statement with a frown. “I told Mom,” she adds.

“How’d that go?”

She shrugs, “It’s not like we’re together.”

Knife to the heart.

Stab stab stab.

Her dad and mine should really run off together. They can make one another miserable and leave the rest of the world alone. Too bad they also hate each other.

You should be able to banish people to remote islands, like in the old days.

I want to continue this conversation, I want to tell her we aren’t together yet, but I need to head to the garage and get in the car in a few minutes.

Save it for tonight.

“My mom said they saw your mother,” Emily mumbles and looks at me with her big, brown eyes. There’s a mixture of apprehension, pity, and curiosity swirling around behind her long, dark lashes.

“Recently?”

“I guess.”

“What did she say?” I take my Imperium hat off and run my hand through my hair. The last thing I need is her showing up again, here, there, or anywhere.

Emily’s been given enough reasons to hate me without the piece de resistance.

Emily hunches her shoulders up, “They didn’t talk to her.”

I bet.

Mommy Dearest is probably out of money again if I had to guess. I sure as hell haven’t sent her any since I blocked her and cut her off years ago. Apparently, getting abused by Stan is worth whatever cash he tosses at her from time to time.

It’s not that I blame her for leaving Stan. That was the correct thing to do. But allowing me to be born, since she hates me so much, the product of what I am—then hating me for it my whole life—isn’t okay.

Leaving a child alone with Stan when she’d finally found a backbone was not the correct thing to do.

Her part in the last six years without Emily was most definitely not the correct fucking thing to do.

She thought old Stan was going to be a Formula 1 driver, but she hitched her wagon to an abusive prick who didn’t have the talent or dedication to make it. He ended up being successful in sub-prime mortgages where he could prey on people in other seedy ways, but she was gone by then.

Fuck the both of them.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned it before the race,” Emily sees my frustration and, in the blink of an eye, she puts her hand on mine on top of the table.

Like an autonomic body reflex, muscle memory, my fingers wrap around her's, and she gives me a little smile.

This is how it all started, isn’t it?

At first, I just thought she was this smart, gorgeous girl—she intrigued me, challenged me. She was the first girl who said no to me, wouldn’t go out with me, told me to ‘piss off,’ if I remember correctly.