Page 18 of Retrograde
‘I know.’
‘No, you don’t know. You’ll never understand how awful I feel about what I said. For drinking too much and scaring you. You’re my best friend, Sunny. My right-hand woman. There is nothing on this earth I wouldn’t do for you. You know that, right? You’re my number one, always.’
‘I shouldn’t be your number one, Brett.Youshould be. You have to deal with whatever this is for yourself, not just for me.’ She shook her cup, the ice cubes rattling. Anything to distract from just how serious this conversation was getting.
‘I think you might be right, there’s more to it.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’ He looked out of the window. ‘I’ll reel it in.’
‘I love you to pieces, Brett. Please, don’t let this get any worse. Andneverspeak to me that way again, or trust me, Brett, I will consider walking out of your life.’
‘I’m scared,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t feel like myself any more.’
‘The Brett I know doesn’t let fear win.’
‘The Brett you know has been slowly disappearing for a while.’ He couldn’t even hide the sadness in his voice, and it broke her heart.
‘Hey.’ She reached for his hand. ‘He’s still in there.’
‘I want to go home, Sunny. I need to go back to Sydney. I think it’s about time I started facing my demons.’
‘I wish you’d told me you had demons in the first place.’
‘Yeah, well. I’m Brett Anderson, world-class racing driver. I can’t show weakness.’ He gave her a shaky smile, and the look of pain on his face made her want to wrap him up in her arms and never let go.
‘You can show weakness with me, Brett. You know you can. Nothing has changed from the beginning of our friendship.’
Lucie remembered the first time they met at Monza. It was her first week on the job, and she’d been so nervous to meet him. She could still recall the tremble of her voice. Brett had been a pretty big name in motorsport for two years, ever since he was sixteen and racing in a junior championship, and Lucie had celebrated her eighteenth birthday a mere two weeks before she started on the catering team. She had a baby face, and she was dinky to match.
She’d bumped into him outside his trailer before a race and he’d been flustered, and blurted out to her, a complete stranger, that he was nervous about the race, verging on a panic attack. His usual pre-race ritual wasn’t working for him. She’d offered him her headphonesand played her favourite song and they had sat on the step of his trailer listening to it for three minutes and twenty-nine seconds. It was in those three minutes and twenty-nine seconds that they had formed an unbreakable bond.
Brett confessed to her a year later that he had never admitted to being nervous about a race before, ever, but there was something about Lucie that made him feel instantly at home. He had been listening to that song before every race for the whole season, and now, ten years later, it was still part of his ritual. She justgothim.
‘I think… and please don’t take this the wrong way, but I think I need to go back to Sydney alone. Take a few weeks to figure myself out and get my head back in the game.’
‘Are you sure, Brett? What about the next race of the season?’
‘I think part of my problem is that I’ve finally allowed myself to get caught up in the whirlwind lifestyle of the rich and famous. You and Faith have done too good a job at making us so well-known and in demand, I’ve let myself get carried away with it. If I said that sentence to anyone else, they’d laugh at me. They’d tell me to stop being ridiculous, to enjoy the life I’ve got and stop worrying, that it’s just a phase. And maybe it is, but what if it isn’t? I’m sure Jasper can find a replacement for me. Just for one race.’
‘Okay. I’ll help you pack, and I’ll be there when you call Jasper. If you want, that is.’
‘Lucie?’ He took her hand in his.
‘Yeah?’ She turned to look at him and for a split second, he felt like that same vulnerable, eighteen-year-old Brett she’d met outside the trailer.
‘Thank you.’
‘You can thank me by just being your old self again.’
8
‘You did not seriously bringVersaceslippers.’ Lucie removed them from Brett’s suitcase and held them up with a frown.
They were packing for Brett’s flight home to Sydney and her flight to London to visit the Girls Off Track HQ. She was scared to be away from him at a time like this, but he was a fully grown adult. She had to let him go. Even if she did want to install a tracker on his phone to be sure he was behaving.
‘They’re my babies, Luce.’
