Fast & Wet (The Fast 2)

I wasn’t. I may not have received too many Christmas presents over the years, but I don’t see how it could get any better than the strappy, freaky little lingerie thing she pranced out of the bedroom in once everyone left.

I glance at the three stockings hung up by the fireplace. I just want to give Emily the one little present while we’re still alone, before Dante returns home with my sister.

And he’d better return home with my sister, or he’s not going to live to see New Year’s Eve. If I weren’t so determined to finally have time alone with Emily, I would never have let him leave with her tonight. But I was desperate.

Come hell or high water, that ring is going on her finger tonight.

It’s been one thing after another preventing it since we got home from the US Grand Prix.

We had races left to attend, all of them on last season’s tires, which Emily had to catch up on. Concordia, officially, claimed they discovered a simple defect in their manufacturing process. Their statement was, more or less, a very unsatisfying “Whoops.”

Officially, Oliver and a few other executives resigned.

Officially, Emily and Professor Tillman never got credit. Both said they didn’t want to be involved in publicity or scandal, anyway. They are writing a new scientific paper about what they learned, though.

But unofficially, and where it matters most to her, Emily has respect from the teams, engineers, and crews. They know.

Then, Emily’s parents did not exactly go quietly into the night. There’s a Christmas card from them sitting in a kitchen drawer, in fact. It doesn’t get displayed with the others, but Emily hasn’t thrown it out, either.

Emily is still working through her feelings about them, and she probably will for a long time. She did set boundaries for her parents. Under threat of a total ban on contact, they’re adhering to her rules, for now.

Honestly, I don’t know if it will work out or not. It’s up to Emily.

I don’t know that people ever fundamentally change who they are at their cores. Emily is always going to be good, though she lets the bad-girl out frequently and with unapologetic passion these days. Her inner badass flies freer than it ever has.

Everyone has chains around their neck from someone, somewhere, something that weighs them down. Cutting that shit off is the best thing either of us has ever done.

Stan and Kristy, on the other hand, it’s been a clean break away from them. Instead of wondering if this is the year either of them would contact me on Christmas, I took control of the situation and made the decision for them. One more weight around my neck fell away.

I won’t feel guilty for it.

Then it was Thanksgiving.

It was around then Danica came into our lives. Apparently, I have a younger sister. Half-sister, technically, but that’s just semantics. Her mother was one of Stan’s hookups, and I never knew about it.

She’s only a few years younger than me and, my whole life, I never knew it. Never knew I had other family out there in the world.

She’s had a rough go of things and is staying with us for a bit since, like me, she isn’t interested in spendi

ng the holidays with her biological father.

While I’m glad to have Danica here, I intend to marry my girl before the year is up, and, right now, we finally have the apartment to ourselves.

“If this is really our Christmas and we’re doing things how we want, then I’m doing it my way,” I tell her.

“I kind of want to keep teasing you, but I also want my ring. Okay, go get it,” she smiles.

She beat me to proposing, so it isn’t like I could drop to my knee and surprise her with a grand gesture. I’m trying to make up for it in other ways and am nervous as hell about them.

Standing from the couch, I take her hand and pull her up. She’s still wrapped in only a blanket, and we move over to the stockings by the fireplace.

“I’m so excited, gimme, gimme, gimme,” she squeals.

God, I hope she likes it. I researched and read everything I could find online, but I was on my own for this.

She was so specific on the kind of ring she did not want, I may have gone too far. No diamonds because she has ethical concerns about their sourcing, plus she thinks lab-created diamonds are ‘cooler’ anyway. Nothing too showy because that isn’t her. Nothing that can get damaged at work.

The same girl who wanted to ride a beat up Vespa around Budapest was not going to be impressed with a giant rock from Tiffany’s.