Page 114 of Red Flagged
“Oh my god,” I blurted. “I’ve always wanted to go.”
That earned me the smallest smile. “I know.”
I blinked. “Wait, how do you know?”
She looked at me like it was obvious. “You said so. That media day we did together in Miami? They asked about your dream destination. You said Scotland first—because ‘home is where the heart is’—but then you said Greece. Said you’d never been, but always wanted to.”
I sat there, completely floored.
“You remembered that?” I asked softly.
She tilted her head. “Of course I did.”
And fuck me, I think my heart actually short-circuited.
She remembered.
Not just some headline-worthy detail. Not something anyone would’ve picked up on from a press release or performance stat.She remembered something soft. Something quiet. Something I barely remembered saying in a press event months ago.
She listened to meeven then. Not because she had to or because it made her life easier. But because it wasme.
It confirmed that even when we weren’tus, she was still holding pieces of me.
I couldn’t breathe around the sudden swell in my chest.
The way her voice softened when she said it. The way she looked at me when she did—like it was the most natural thing in the world, as if remembering me wasn’t a task, but fated and probably charted in the freckles that mapped her shoulders.
God, I would’ve followed her anywhere. I’d been saying it for months. Sure, we’d lightheartedly tossed around marriage.
But this? This made me want tomarryher. Not as a fantasy or a ha-ha joke.Actuallymarry her.
I wanted to buy plane tickets and propose on the damn Acropolis. I wanted to wake up in Santorini with her tangled in white sheets and sunlight, hair a mess, mouth swollen from kissing for hours. I wanted to see her in white linen and sunglasses, a flower in her hair, sandals slapping cobblestones while she dragged me through ancient ruins like we belonged there. I wanted to swim in the Aegean with her on my back, buy her gelato on every corner, kiss her under every sun-washed archway.
I wanted her everywhere.
This wasn’t just love that survived the storm. This was love that rebuilt the house after.
And maybe—just maybe—I didn’t need to have it all figured out to start building a life with her.
Because it wasn’t a grand declaration. It wasn’t a kiss in the rain or some life-or-death moment on the track. It wasn’t sex or survival or screaming into the night. It was this.
A quiet room, a casual comment, a memory she kept just because it was mine.
And fuck, maybe that’s why it hit me so hard. Everything between us had always moved fast and furious. We crashed through every barrier the minute we met—sparks and tension and all the messy, magnetic shit that pulled us in.
We began to orbit each other in Bahrain.
We crashed, lips first, in Suzuka.
We blurred every line in Miami and never looked back.
We gave it “just one night” in Imola.
We failed to just be “friends with unconventional strings attached” in Monte Carlo.
We tried to hide it in Barcelona.
We almost lost each other in Montreal.
