52

Marianna.

Here's a secret about the human body that they teach you in school but never explain properly:

There are 650 skeletal muscles. Over 900 ligaments. 360 joints. Approximately 100,000 miles of blood vessels threaded through the whole system like wiring through a house that God built on a budget and a prayer.

I know every one of them.

I can name the insertion points of the supraspinatus in my sleep. Can palpate a torn anterior talofibular ligament blindfolded. Can tell you exactly which cervical vertebrae are compressed just by watching someone turn their head.

This knowledge is supposed to make the body legible. Predictable. Just a machine made of meat and electrical impulses, following rules that I've spent four years memorizing.

So someone please explain to me why every single neuron in my extensively educated brain is currently offline because Duane Richter just pulled his t-shirt off by the collar—the way men do, that one-handed thing where they reach behind their neck and just pull, the motion that shouldn't be erotic but is somehow more devastating than a full striptease—and I'm standing here cataloging his anatomy like it's a final exam I'm failing in real time.

Sternocleidomastoid. External obliques. Serratus anterior—the boxer's muscle, visible along the lateral ribcage in individuals with low body fat percentage, which he has, obviously, because he's a Formula 1 driver who maintains single-digit body fat for cockpit weight compliance—

My brain is doing this on purpose. Throwing medical terminology at me like sandbags against a flood, because the alternative is acknowledging that I am in a bedroom with a shirtless Duane Richter and the door is closed and my brother is unconscious forty feet away and I am feeling things in parts of my body that have been dormant for approximately twenty-three years.

The t-shirt lands on the floor. Black fabric on grey carpet. Very on-brand.

The city light catches the fading bruise on his shoulder—the one I treated, and the scar near his lower ribs I noticed during that first session. It's old. Thin. The kind that comes from impact, not surgery. Probably from Silverstone two seasons ago, the crash everyone thought ended his career before he climbed out of the wreckage and walked back to the pits like he was returning from a coffee run.

F1 drivers carry their history in their bodies. Every crash, every impact, every 5G lateral load through Copse or Maggotts or the Rascasse hairpin—it's all written there, in the scar tissue and the slightly asymmetric muscle development and the way his left trapezius is still marginally tighter than the right from compensating for that Monaco shoulder injury.

I'm doing it again. The clinical thing. The hiding-behind-big-words thing.

"Your posterior deltoid looks better."

That's what comes out of my mouth.

In this moment, this absurd, terrifying, impossibly charged moment.

I want to die.

I want the floor to open up and swallow me directly into the earth's core.

Duane stops. He smiles.

It lasts maybe two seconds. Three at most. A supernova that appears and burns itself out before you can fully comprehend what you've witnessed.

And when it fades—when his face returns to that familiar topography of sharp angles and dark eyes—my heart doesn't just skip a beat.

It stops.

Fully. Completely. The kind of cardiac arrest that no amount of CPR can fix because the cause isn't medical, it's him, and there's no defibrillator in the world designed for this specific emergency.

He moves toward me.

Not fast.

I have to look up. That's the thing about Duane—you always have to look up. He's six-one and I'm five-four in bare feet, which means the geometry of us requires me to tilt my head back, to expose my throat, to make myself small and open in a way that should trigger every alarm system in my body.

The alarms are silent.

For the first time in my entire life, the alarms are silent.

He stops. Close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off his skin. Close enough that I can count the individual strands of dark hair falling across his forehead, still slightly messed from when I grabbed it in the hallway.

His hand rises. Slowly. The same hand that controls a car at 340 kilometers per hour through Baku's castle section without blinking—and it hovers near my face like he's approaching something fragile.

"May I?"

Two words.

And he's asking.

I nod.

It's all I can manage. But he takes it. Wraps one hand around the back of my neck—gently, so gently, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw—and kisses me.

Soft. Slow. Nothing like the hallway. Nothing like the desperate, crashing collision of mouths from ten minutes ago. This is something else entirely. This is intentional. Methodical. The way he must approach every corner on a race track—entry speed, apex, exit—except the track is my mouth and he's taking every turn at a pace that makes my knees dissolve.

His other hand finds the hem of the hoodie. His hoodie. The $340 one I've been wearing like a security blanket, the one that smells like him, the one that's become so much a part of me that I forget where it ends and I begin.

He lifts it. Slowly. Giving me time. Giving me the space to say stop, to pull away, to freeze.

I raise my arms.

The hoodie comes off over my head. My hair goes everywhere—staticky, chaotic, probably achieving heights of disaster that would make my mother cry. I'm standing in a bra and his sweatpants and the cold air hits my skin and—

I don't freeze.

I'm waiting for it. Bracing for it. That familiar sensation of my soul evacuating my body, of watching from the ceiling while my physical form goes limp and unresponsive. The shutdown. The disconnect. The thing that made Josh call me a wooden board and Tyler tell his friends I was broken and Marcus ask if I'd been—

It doesn't happen.

I'm here. Fully, completely, terrifyingly here. Present in my own skin in a way I've never been during anything even remotely sexual. Aware of every point of contact: his hand on my neck, his mouth on mine, the brush of his bare chest against my collarbones.

The realization is so shocking that I actually pull back.

Duane's eyes find mine. Dark. Searching. Looking for the freeze, the shutdown, the exit.

"I'm okay," I whisper. And then, because I'm me and I can't leave well enough alone: "I think."

"You think."

"I'm... assessing."

He watches me. Patient. That famous Duane Richter patience that once saw him nurse a damaged car for thirty-seven laps at Spa to finish third when his engineer was begging him to retire—except now the patience isn't for carbon fiber and degraded tires.

It's for me.

My throat tightens.

"Come here," I say.

I don't know where the words come from. Not from the same Marianna who squeaked through the airport. Not from the creature who hid behind the kitchen island or cried into his pillow or couldn't say the word stop when a man's fingers went under her waistband.

From somewhere deeper. Somewhere underneath the damage.

He comes.

His mouth finds my neck first. Deliberate. Just below my ear, where the skin is thin and sensitive and—oh. A sound escapes me. Small. Involuntary. The kind of sound I've never made in real life, only in those dreams where my body works the way it's supposed to—

And it is working. Right now. Without my permission. Without my instruction. My hands are moving of their own accord, finding the ridges of muscle along his spine—erector spinae, my brain supplies helpfully, before being drowned out by a wave of something much less clinical.

He's mapping me. That's the only word for it. The same way he studies telemetry data—every corner, every braking point, every millimeter of track surface—he's studying me. What makes me inhale. What makes my fingers tighten. Where to press and where to ease off.

His mouth moves along my collarbone. Down. Stops at the edge of my bra. Waits.

I reach behind my back and undo the clasp myself.

Myself. Because I want to. Because for once in my miserable, frozen, allegedly-broken life, my body is cooperating with my brain and both of them are saying yes.

The bra falls. I have a brief, hysterical impulse to cover myself—to cross my arms, to make some self-deprecating comment about how I'm not Alina Lindqvist, about how these aren't the breasts of a Swedish supermodel, about how I'm sorry they're not—

Duane's mouth is on me before the thought can finish forming.

I stop thinking.