Chapter 10: Spin Out

I told myself I was prepared for Victoria.

I wasn’t prepared for the car.

Morning practice started under a hard blue sky, the kind that made the track surface look clean and fast. I took my usual position near the pit wall with the temporary badge still hanging around my neck and the camera already raised. Rex had been in the garage early. We hadn’t spoken beyond a brief glance when I arrived. The glance had been enough. It carried the weight of the hallway conversation from the day before and the knowledge that he was still watching for cracks.

Victoria was somewhere in the hospitality area. I refused to look for her.

The first few runs were clean. Rex’s car looked planted through the high-speed corners. I shot the usual sequences: entry, apex, exit, the heat shimmer off the brakes when he came in for adjustments. The routine should have settled me. It didn’t. Every time the black car flashed past, my focus locked harder than it needed to.

Then the radio chatter changed.

I couldn’t hear the exact words from where I stood, but the tone of the engineers shifted. One of them straightened too quickly. Another reached for the monitor with sharper movement. I lifted the camera toward the far sector of the track just as a burst of dust rose beyond the barrier.

The car was sideways.

For a split second the world narrowed to the black shape rotating across the runoff, rear tires locked, front wing angled wrong. My breath stopped. The camera hung useless in my hands. I couldn’t remember how to press the shutter. All I could see was the violent slide and the sudden, sickening possibility that the impact would be worse than a spin.

It wasn’t.

Rex caught it.

The car snapped back into a rough straight line, slowed, and limped toward the inside path that would bring him back to the pits. The dust settled. The radio noise rose again with clipped instructions. Around me the crew moved with controlled urgency, already preparing for a damaged car and a driver who needed to climb out and report.

I couldn’t move.

My pulse was a hard, uneven hammer in my throat. My fingers had gone cold around the camera body. The rational part of my brain knew it had been a minor incident. Drivers spun in practice. Most of the time they drove away. But the rational part had been shoved aside by something older and sharper, the same fear that had lived under my ribs for years whenever he was in the car and I pretended not to care.

Someone jostled past me. I forced air into my lungs and lifted the camera again, more for cover than for photos. Through the viewfinder I watched the car roll into the pit lane. The front wing was damaged. One side of the floor looked scraped. Rex climbed out with the same controlled motions he always used, helmet still on, body language tight with irritation rather than injury.

He was fine.

The knowledge should have loosened the knot in my chest. It didn’t. Not completely. My hands were still unsteady when I lowered the camera. I turned slightly away from the main activity, pretending to check settings, and tried to will my face into something neutral before anyone looked too closely.

I failed.

Marcus passed behind me and slowed.

“You good?” he asked.

“Fine.” The word came out too tight. “Just surprised. Looked worse from this angle.”

He made a noncommittal sound and kept moving. I didn’t know if he believed me. I didn’t care. All I cared about was getting my breathing under control before Rex finished the debrief with the engineers and inevitably found me.

It took longer than I wanted.

By the time the damaged parts were being swapped and the data was under review, I had retreated toward the back of the garage under the excuse of reviewing cards. My pulse had slowed, but the aftertaste of fear still sat under my tongue. I hated it. I hated how visible it had felt. Most of all I hated that the first person I had looked for when the dust rose was the same man I had spent years claiming I wanted nothing to do with.

“Aria.”

I turned.

Rex stood a few feet away. He had stripped out of the top half of the race suit. The undershirt clung to him, darkened in places with sweat. There was a faint smear of dust along one forearm. His eyes were sharper than usual, focused on my face with an intensity that made my stomach drop.

“You’re shaking,” he said quietly.

“I’m not.”

He glanced down at my hands. I forced them still against the camera.

“You went white,” he continued. “I saw it from the cockpit when I rolled in. You looked like you were about to be sick.”

“It was a spin. It happens.”

“Not to you.” His voice stayed low enough that the nearby crew wouldn’t catch it. “Not like that.”

I looked past his shoulder at the busy garage, searching for an exit that wouldn’t look like running. There wasn’t one.

“I was startled,” I said. “That’s all.”

Rex stepped closer. The movement cut off the easiest path back toward the main floor.

“Don’t.” The single word carried more weight than a full argument. “I’ve watched you pretend not to care for years. Today you stopped being able to hide it. Own it.”

Heat crawled up my neck. “You’re reading too much into a reaction.”

“Am I?” He studied me. “Because from where I was sitting, it looked like the idea of me hitting the wall scared the hell out of you.”

The truth of it sat between us, raw and undeniable. I could still feel the frozen second when the car had been sideways and my mind had supplied every worst-case image it had ever buried. I had cared. Violently. And he had seen it.

“What do you want me to say?” I asked, voice low and strained. “That I panicked? Fine. I panicked. It doesn’t change anything.”

“It changes everything.” His eyes held mine. “You can stand there and deny jealousy over Victoria. You can claim the deal is only about work. But you can’t look me in the eye and pretend you don’t care whether I walk away from a spin.”

I had no clean answer. The silence stretched. Somewhere behind us a pneumatic tool whined and cut off. The normal sounds of the garage felt distant.

Rex’s expression shifted into something harder to read. Not triumph. Not mockery. Something closer to recognition, edged with a intensity that made my pulse kick again for an entirely different reason.

“I’ve had people worry about me before,” he said. “Sponsors. Engineers. My father. It always comes with conditions. Today was different. You weren’t calculating risk or points or reputation. You were just scared.”

“Stop.”

“No.” He took one more step, close enough that I had to tip my head back. “I’m not going to stop. Not when you finally gave me something honest without me having to drag it out of you.”

My throat felt tight. “This doesn’t give you more power.”

“It already did.” The words were quiet. Certain. “You can go back to pretending tomorrow if you want. I’ll still know what I saw.”

I wanted to argue. The argument wouldn’t form. Because he was right. The spin had stripped away another layer of the performance, and there was no putting it back the same way.

Rex glanced toward the car, then back at me.

“I need to finish with the engineers,” he said. “Stay. Don’t disappear into the media room. We’re not done with this conversation.”

“I think we are.”

“We’re not.” His voice left no room for debate. “I’ll find you when I’m finished. And Aria…”

I waited, heart still too loud in my ears.

“Next time the car does something unexpected, don’t bother hiding your face. I already know what it looks like when you’re afraid for me. I’d rather see it than watch you try to erase it.”

He walked back toward the damaged car without waiting for a reply.

I stood there long after he left, the camera hanging heavy in my hands, the ghost of fear still humming under my skin. Around me the team continued their work like the world hadn’t tilted. For them it was a minor practice incident. For me it was another wall coming down in real time, with Rex standing on the other side of it taking careful note of every crack.

I didn’t go to the media room.

I stayed near the back of the garage, reviewing shots I wasn’t really seeing, waiting for the moment he would come find me again. The waiting felt inevitable. So did the conversation still hanging unfinished between us.

My phone remained silent in my pocket.

I didn’t need a message to know he was serious.

When he finished with the engineers, he would come looking.

And this time I had nothing left to hide behind.