Page 45 of Faster

Chapter Thirty-Two

Cece had woken up with a bad feeling this morning. She put it down to the fact that she hated this track. Actually, she hated the whole country. They might have legal weed, but she was deeply skeptical of any country where blackface was an integral part of their holiday celebrations.

The racing fans were always universally awful. That was especially the case this year, when their national hero hadn’t won a single race this season and had announced his retirement on media day, reinitiating silly season during a year that had seen quite enough silliness.

Tension made the air feel heavier than South Beach in August. Ethan must have had a similarly bad feeling, though he would never call it that.

A feeling that Luca likely shared. During breakfast in their hotel suite, her two men had shared a terse conversation that didn’t require words.

At the end of it, they’d told her she needed to get ready fast enough to go to the track with Ethan.

Even with the extra security, they didn’t trust the fans here.

Cece had made noises of protest, but the fact that she had two people invested in her safety warmed her heart.

Walking into the paddock with Ethan, his hand on her lower back, made her feel like she did at the beginning of their relationship.

The fact that they’d come to the track with Luca in the same car added to that feeling.

People had noticed the relationship between the three of them had changed, but no one knew the extent to which they’d grown closer.

It was wild how people only saw what they wanted to.

They didn’t expect to see them in a romantic relationship, so Ethan and Luca’s dynamic morphed into a friendship in public—and Cece was just the really cool wife.

Her good feelings melted away when they got to the track and saw the puffs of orange smoke and garish wigs behind the barriers. She couldn’t speak Dutch, but she’d heard enough over the years to know a lot of words sounded kind of like “slut” without the same meaning.

But then she started hearing it a lot more, and people started throwing trash at them.

It all happened so fast that she couldn’t get her head around what was going on.

One moment, she was walking through a crowded paddock with fans behind barriers, flanked by Ethan and Luca.

The next, all three of them were being pelted with garbage, including an almost full beer.

And then, staff at the track were ushering them into a side building she had never been inside.

The heavy metal door closed behind them with a few words from the track marshals still echoing inside.

“What the hell just happened?” Ethan yelled.

Cece did what she always did when something went wrong and grabbed her phone.

Those things really were an addiction. It usually wasn’t lit up with notifications because she only accepted them from important contacts.

She’d been with two of her three important contacts the whole day.

But her phone was lit up with messages from everyone from her mother to her booking agent.

She clicked on one of the many from her mother first that said, “I can’t believe you!

” with a link. Shit. She clicked on the link, and it went to the @WAGsandSLAGs Instagram page, where there was a photo of her, Ethan, and Luca on vacation with the caption, “Are Things Way Too Cozy at Scuderia Lupo?”

The photo was not one of the summer break pictures each of them shared on social media. Luca had gone as far as spending a few days with his family in the South of France before joining them in the Maldives for what they thought was a week in a private cabana.

It was a lot less private than they’d thought. The cameras hadn’t caught anything naked or sexual, but the way Luca’s hand rested on the back of her neck and the way he looked at her made it obvious. Even worse than that, Ethan was bringing food out onto their deck at the same time.

In this dank storage room, Ethan and Luca were both pacing. Ethan tested the door. “We aren’t locked in.”

“We shouldn’t go out there,” Luca said.

Cece looked up from her phone, feeling like she’d been punched in the stomach. “I agree. We should stay in here.”

What would happen beyond the next few minutes was completely beyond comprehension.

Ethan and Luca both stopped pacing and walked toward her.

She wanted to pull back, so they could come up with a plan for how to handle this.

If they touched her, she wouldn’t be able to move forward with a clear head.

And she couldn’t allow her heart to make the decisions right now.

That’s what had gotten all three of them here.

But they wouldn’t let her pull away from them. They flanked her and cut off her avenues for escape.

“This is all going to be fine,” Ethan said.

Luca nodded. “We’re ahead in the championship as a team. This isn’t going to affect anything.”

Cece struggled to find her breath. Neither of them was thinking straight.

They couldn’t be. This would not be fine.

Their families would lose it—Ethan’s family would demand that he leave her.

She covered her face with her hands. Luca’s family would hate her for ruining his life with a scandal.

She’d ruined his career—the one they’d given up everything for.

And it’s not like they could all be together publicly.

Saying no one was cheating would only make things worse.

The team wouldn’t think twice before showing Ethan and Luca the door and making it so no one would accuse them of being homophobes.

No, they’d push that on the team’s sponsors, who were probably already on the phone with Lupo, trying to figure out how they could get their money back.

“This is a nightmare.” She took a deep breath, not able to bear the thought of looking at either of them in the eye when she said, “I have to get out of here.”

They both spoke at once.

“No.”

“You’re not going anywhere.”

She held out her phone to them. “You don’t see this? Even the headlines make me look like some slut.”

Ethan pulled her to him, and Luca approached her from behind. She closed her eyes against the sight of them up close, comforting her. They were the ones who would lose everything. She could disappear into relative obscurity. They would be followed by this for the rest of their lives.

How could she be so stupid? But when had she been smart?

A smart woman would have known this was a scandal waiting to happen when she walked into Luca’s apartment on New Year’s Eve.

A smart woman would have flirted with Ethan for a night and given him the wrong phone number five years ago.

There had been something in her gut telling her that this could be disastrous the night they’d met, and she’d ignored it.

She was a dumb woman, but not foolish enough to believe them when they told her things would be okay.

She tried to wiggle her way out so she could get some air, but they just held her and did that thing where they talked without talking again. “I can’t breathe, and you have to let me go.”

They let her out of their arms, but they stood between her and the door. Ethan spoke first. “You don’t get it. We’re not letting you go.”

“What he means is that if you don’t want to be with either or both of us, you don’t have to. But you’re not walking out of here in a panic. Good decisions never come from that.”

She could see their point, but they were wrong. The best thing they could all be doing right now is panicking. That was appropriate for the situation.

Cece rubbed her arms, even though the room they’d been stuck in was hot, and the air was stale.

She could see both of them fighting their own battle against grabbing her so she couldn’t leave.

“I don’t see how either or both of you are so calm.

And it doesn’t matter whether I want to be with you.

I won’t have your careers—the ones you spent your whole lives fighting for—on my conscience.

You may not view it as a big deal right now.

Hell, I didn’t see it as a big deal when I first met you.

I thought it was just rich guys driving in circles.

Maybe it is.” She threw up her hands and turned away from them.

When she couldn’t feel either of them approaching her, she knew she was getting through to them.

“I won’t let you sacrifice your lifelong dreams for me.

” For a second, her mind went a few years forward in the future, when Ethan and Luca were off the grid, and their lives could be more anonymous.

They could be together, like they were in the Maldives, all the time.

In most places in the world, she could hold both of their hands. And no one would care.

But that was years away, and this was always going to be temporary.

It didn’t matter if they were both written in her soul, indelibly.

She wanted to promise them she would wait for them to be done, and then they could be together.

But life and timing didn’t work that way.

She wouldn’t fool herself into thinking they had a chance if she walked out of this room.

“You love us.” Ethan said the word she’d been avoiding using with both of them.

They’d been so busy living in the uncertainty of the present moment—the feelings that fueled their affair—that the words hadn’t seemed necessary.

And when it came to her husband, she hadn’t said them because she wasn’t sure their affair with Luca wasn’t the only thing holding their marriage together.

“It doesn’t matter.” She wiped away the tears that had fallen.

She probably looked like a swamp creature at the moment, but she didn’t care.

“Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to get out of here, and your agents and managers and press people are going to put out a statement saying that what the cameras captured was entirely innocent.

That Ethan and I are happily married and monogamous, and that we’re happy to have renewed our friendship with Luca. ”

“I don’t want to do that. It’s not true.” Luca and his penchant for the truth.

Cece shook her head. “It is true. Except for the monogamous part, which I feel like we should really lie about in this situation.” She turned to face them, though they were both blurry given that she couldn’t stop crying.

“Ethan is right. I care about you both. Please don’t make me watch you throw your lives away for me. ”

She’d always known they were living in this fantasy world on borrowed time.

She’d always known she was living in this glamorous, fake cloud of wealth on borrowed time.

It had never felt like her home, and it had never felt real.

Well, the only times it had felt real were when she was with Ethan or Luca.

They’d all been so young when they’d met.

“If you need to divorce me—for your family—I won’t fight it.” Ethan wiped his face, which surprised her. If he was crying, it meant he was done fighting.

“You’re making a mistake, Cecelia.” Luca used her full name, and when she looked at him, she understood it was because he was pissed at her. His anger shimmered in between the dust motes floating about in the slivers of sun that made it into the room.

She wanted to deny that she was making a mistake.

If she wanted to make her exit believable, she’d tell him every decision she’d made since she met the two of them at that Miami nightclub had been a mistake.

But she couldn’t do that. Those miscalculations and errors had made the sum of her life.

If she’d done anything differently, she wouldn’t have experienced the highlights of her life with either of them.

But it was over now, and she had to make them see this was the only right choice. She opened her mouth to say something, but the door to the storage shed opened, and their security walked in.

“We think we can get you all off the premises without cameras seeing.”

She tried to infuse steel into her spine, but she failed. At best, there was aluminum keeping her upright.

“I’m going to go.” Both Ethan and Luca had set jaws and clenched fists when she said that. “They have qualifying, and I have a plane to catch.”