59

Marianna.

The front door to Marco's building requires a code that Marco gave me approximately forty-five minutes ago, which I have already forgotten, which means I'm standing in the hallway in his oversized sleep shirt—the one that says GEORGETOWN LAW: WHERE YOUR DREAMS GO TO GET OBJECTIONS SUSTAINED—jabbing buttons on the keypad with increasing desperation while a three-time Formula 1 World Champion stands on the other side of a glass door watching me fail at basic motor skills.

"It's five digits," I whisper through the glass. "Do you know how many five-digit combinations exist?"

"100,000," Duane says. Not whispering. Just... existing at his normal volume, which in the 2 AM quiet of a Wynwood corridor sounds approximately like a foghorn.

"Shh—"

"Your brother is on the third floor. He can't hear me."

"My brother has the hearing of a paranoid bat when he's suspicious of something. Last year he heard me eating chips through a FaceTime call."

Duane looks at me with the expression of a man who has crossed the Atlantic in business class and crashed Formula 1 cars at 300 kilometers per hour and is now being thwarted by a keypad.

"Move," he says.

I move.

He types something. Four digits. A beep. The door clicks open.

"How did you—"

"Your brother uses his Georgetown graduation year for everything. I've watched him unlock his phone sixty times."

The door swings open. I stare at him. He steps past me into the lobby without touching me, which is its own kind of violence.

"That's a terrible security practice," I manage.

"Yes," Duane agrees, already heading toward the stairs because apparently he doesn't believe in elevators when there are only three floors.

I follow him.

This is the thing about following Duane Richter: you do it before you decide to. Some part of your nervous system just... responds. Orients. Like a compass that's been demagnetized finding north again.

It's infuriating. I resent it deeply.

I follow him up three flights of stairs.

The apartment looks different with him in it.

Smaller, obviously—the man takes up space the way his cars do, not just physically but atmospherically. But also somehow more real. Like the Wynwood light and the collegiate furniture and the Florida-shaped stain and the one sprouting onion have all suddenly been rendered in higher resolution.

Duane stands in the middle of the living room and looks around with the expression of someone performing a structural assessment.

"It's fine," I say.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking something."

"I was thinking it has good bones."

I look at the collapsed couch. "It has couch."

"Same thing."

He's not looking at me. He's looking at Marco's bookshelf—law textbooks and sports biographies and, wedged between a copy of Moneyball and a Pelé autobiography, a paperback romance novel with a shirtless man on the cover that I am choosing not to investigate.

"You drove here," I say.

"Yes."

"From your apartment."

"Marianna." He says my name like he's correcting a mathematical error. "You know why I'm here."

I do know. That's the problem.

I sit on the arm of the collapsed couch because it's the only piece of furniture in this room that doesn't require negotiations. Duane stays standing. Because of course he does. Duane Richter doesn't sit when he can brood architecturally.

"Canada," I say.

"Three days."

"And then?"

A pause. The air conditioning unit in the window rattles—Marco's place runs it on the setting I've privately classified as "struggling"—and outside, the reggaeton has given way to something slow and warm that filters through the walls like a rumor.

"And then Monaco," Duane says. "Silverstone. Spa. The whole summer calendar."

"Right." I look at my hands. "And I'll be here. At Kinetic. Building my career." I say it deliberately. Anchoring myself to the version of this story where I make good decisions. "Treating athletes. Getting my life together. Not—" I wave my hand vaguely in the space between us. "Not complicating things."

"Mm."

"That's not an answer."

"It's an acknowledgment."

"It's a non-word."

He finally moves. Crosses the room and sits on the couch—which promptly tries to consume him, the center cushion collapsing under his weight with a kind of desperate enthusiasm—and he sits there in it, all long legs and dark jacket and the specific gravity of him, looking not entirely unlike a man who has also made a decision he's not going to announce.

"I'm not asking for anything," he says.

"I know."

"I'm not promising anything I can't deliver."

"I know that too." I look at him sideways.

He's quiet for a moment.

"I don't know how to do this," he says. The words come out flat. Matter-of-fact. Not vulnerable exactly—Duane doesn't do vulnerable, he does accurate. "Whatever this is. I don't have a framework for it."

"You and me both."

"I drive cars for a living. I know the rules of the system I'm in. I know where the walls are." He looks at his hands—those hands I've thought about embarrassingly often. "I don't know where the walls are with you."

My heart does something complicated that I diagnose as tachycardia and immediately recognize as something else entirely.

Outside, Marco's snoring continues its steady four-second rhythm. The bar music pulses. Miami exists in that particular 2 AM frequency where everything feels permissible and nothing feels permanent.

Duane looks at me.

I look at him.

"Stay," I say. And then, before either of us can process that: "Just—stay. Until you have to leave for the airport. We don't have to—it doesn't have to be—"

"Marianna."

"I'm just saying—"

"I know what you're saying."

He reaches out. His hand closes around mine. Warm. Certain. Not pulling me closer. Just... holding.

"I'll stay," he says.

We sit on Marco's catastrophically uneven couch in the 2 AM quiet of Wynwood, his hand around mine, not saying anything else.

It's enough.

For now, it's enough.

Marco wakes us up at 7:15 by walking into the living room in his underwear and immediately backing out again with the energy of a man who has received information he was not prepared for.

The door closes.

Beat.

"MARIANNA."

Duane and I are still on the couch. Still dressed. His jacket is folded over the armrest. My head is on his shoulder. We've apparently slept—actually slept, which my body has decided is acceptable now, in Wynwood, on a collapsing couch, with a man who sat on my floor at 3 AM making chamomile tea and also drove here with a paper airplane and the specific quiet of someone who's decided something and doesn't need to announce it.

I'm awake. I have been for about three minutes. I've been lying there cataloging the situation with the clinical precision of someone who knows this moment is finite and wants to remember every variable.

His shoulder is warm. His breathing is even. The city sounds are different in the morning—birds, traffic, someone downstairs doing something with a blender that sounds aggressively healthy.

I was going to get up before Marco woke up.

I was.

I just... didn't.

"MARIANNA," Marco says again, from the other side of the door.