Page 46 of Retrograde

‘Don’t you think you two need to sit down and have a conversation about what’s going on here? At what point do you go back to your normal lives?’

Lucie just let them speak while she sat there feeling overwhelmed. That trip to Rome had done her so much good in the early stages of this whole debacle, but then Brett had that outburst in Monaco and she immediately dropped everything to be by his side.

Every waking minute was consumed by worry for his mental state, and she had allowed the lines to blur, which was making everything more confusing for her . He might be okay with keeping it casual, but Lucie wasn’t. She needed space.

Desperate to change the subject, she ignored her parents’ firing line. ‘Do Julien and Jasper have somewhere to sleep tonight?’ They were supposed to have got a hotel in town, but everything had been so rushed and chaotic in the end that she doubted they’d pulled it off.

‘Yes. Here. We figured Jasper could take your room, Julien could take the spare and you could just share a room with Brett, since you do that every night anyway.’ Mateo held her gaze before smirking.

‘You think we didn’t know? Lucie, sweetheart, you two couldn’t be more obvious if you tried.

There are fireworks any time you’re in the same room. ’

‘Dad!’ She went beet red.

‘Mateo, stop embarrassing her.’ Rosa bit her lip, trying not to smile too widely. ‘Are you two just, you know, enjoying yourselves? Or is it something more?’

‘Now who’s embarrassing her?’ Mateo retaliated.

‘I don’t really know what to say, to be honest. He’s just… it’s Brett.’ Lucie shrugged.

That wouldn’t provide much of an explanation to anyone, but to her parents, who knew them both like the backs of their hands, it was all she needed to say.

Lucie and Brett lay in bed that night to the soundtrack of Jasper’s snores.

They were violent, to say the least. At multiple points, she had debated going in there and suffocating him to get him to stop, but he was still her boss.

It wasn’t appropriate. In the end, they had decided to turn the TV on to drown him out.

‘I can’t believe you guys did all that for me,’ Brett murmured.

‘It wasn’t a big deal.’ She shrugged one shoulder, the other crushed up against his side.

‘Sunny, are you kidding?’ He breathed out a laugh. ‘My boss and my teammate just travelled from two separate countries to bring a very expensive piece of technology to an alcoholic ex-racing driver.’

She sat bolt upright. ‘Don’t ever call yourself an ex-racing driver.’

‘Well –’

She shushed him by shoving her hand over his mouth. ‘Nope! I don’t want to hear it. Not until you retire.’ She shuffled back down into her favourite spot in his arms, a position she was supposed to be avoiding amongst others, her head resting on his chest while he played with her hair.

‘If I was racing a different championship, I could be retiring in…’ he thought about it for a second, ‘ten years? Maybe a few more if I was really good.’

‘You are really good.’

‘Yeah, in our championship. They’re all different, Sunny,’ he laughed, although not in a self-deprecating way. It was true, each championship required different styles of driving and different skillsets. Some drivers were the best in one championship, moved across to another and failed miserably.

‘I suppose you’re right. But you ended up in the best one, because we’ve got drivers in their fifties and sixties. I’ll probably be booted out before you.’

‘You’re like Gabriel’s adopted child. He would never replace you.’

‘Gabriel won’t be CEO forever, though. He’ll leave one day, and whoever takes his position might want a bunch of teenagers running socials with the way content creation is going.’

Brett kissed the top of her head and she sighed with contentment. ‘Can’t imagine walking through that paddock without you. If your job’s ever at risk, I’ll hire you as my personal assistant. You can, like, I don’t know, hold my sunglasses and reply to my emails.’

Since the start of their careers, they’d had each other. At the end of every bad day, every good day and everything in between. The only time in ten whole years Lucie and Brett had considered a life where they weren’t attached at the hip was when Sienna was in the picture.

To her, a life without Brett was the most terrifying thing in the world.

It was the driving force behind her bringing him out here to Tuscany in the first place.

Having sex with him daily was never part of the plan, and she knew it couldn’t become routine.

Brett wasn’t going to settle, and it wasn’t fair to keep going the way they were going knowing this, and knowing she wanted more.

She would end up resenting him, regretting this summer they were spending tangled in bedsheets, and their friendship would never be the same again.

It had to stop. They needed firm boundaries in place, and they needed to learn to stop living in each other’s pockets. How was Lucie ever going to get the happy ever after she desired if she couldn’t let him go?