Fast & Wet (The Fast 2)

Throwing his rain jacket over his clothes that I’m still wearing, his pants flopping around my ankles like bell bottoms, I make my way to the garage. I can hear the roar of the cars on the track.

My feet take me there, but my heart leads the way.

It’s driving.

I may not always be able to feel and not think so much, but all I have right now are feelings. Because there is no science to truly explain people.

All the psychologists in the world could not put this Humpty Dumpty family nightmare back together again.

And that’s okay.

Because when I walk into the garage and Mila gives me a big hug, when Liam ruffles the hair on my head, zips my jacket up knowing I’m cold and makes me eat another protein bar—I feel it. When I look on the television screen and see Dante and Cole racing around the track neck and neck again—I feel it. When Edmund, the engineers, and mechanics, wave, and welcome me back—I feel it.

I feel it, and I know that family is not your DNA.

When I look at my cell phone, and I see messages from Makenna and Klara and Professor Tillman, I know family is not genetics. It isn’t what makes up the cells in your body or the blood that flows through your veins.

Family is the people you choose to surround yourself with. It’s the people who are always there for you when no one else is. The ones who accept you, exactly as you are. In your perfectly imperfect form.

A bunch of little somethings that combine to make something greater, something stronger and more stable than any of the individuals.

My family is here, my real family, and it’s led by the man currently going entirely too fast on last season’s tires that I know absolutely nothing about.

C’est la vie, as Oliver the weasel might say.

Cole knows what he’s doing, he’ll always come back to me.

And I’m done running from him.

Mostly. Being chased is kinda fun in the right circumstances, like naked-time.

Imagining it, I grin as I grab a set of headphones off the charging rack. Before I forget and turn into the worst friend ever, I ask Mila if she can locate poor Makenna, who is god-knows-where wandering around the track, and she sets off to find her.

Then I throw my headphones on. I don’t want to sit at my regular engineer station today, though, and I’m hoping Edmund will humor me.

“Do you think I could pull up a stool?” I lift one side of his headphones off his head and ask him when I reach the pit wall.

“It would be my honor,” he winks.

He seems healthier since the last time I saw him thank God.

“Thank you for everything,” I tell him.

“We’re the ones who should be thanking you. Every driver out there today is safer because of you, because of what you did.”

“It wasn’t just me,” I blush. It was so many people. It was the same family who helped. The ones who believed in my crazy ideas and long-winded tangents about tires, materials, compounds, and chemicals.

“Celebrate the win when you get it, Emily,” he reminds me.

“I intend to.”

Edmund and I sit together with the other chief engineers and strategists, and we watch our boys on track continue to duke it out. I know they’re having the time of their lives doing it.

The track is nearly dry now, and the sun is starting to peek through the overcast sky. It’s time for both the drivers to make a pit stop to get off the wet tires and back onto slicks.

“Can I?” I ask Edmund.

“Yes, please. I had hoped for this, you know.”