Trading Paint (Racing on the Edge) (25 page)

I giggled. “What kind of a friend would I be if I said no.”

“Clearly not a good one,”

“Fine
...
” I acted like this was no big deal but any time Jameson had kissed me these last few weeks, it was all I could do not rape him.

“Try to control your excitement just a little.” He derided.

“Oh, sorry,” I threw myself into a balls out kiss.

I knew anytime I put everything I had into our frequent boundary pushing, he panicked and pushed me away. I tested him.

I wrapped my arms around his neck and wiped that goddamn smirk off his face. His tongue was the first to brush across my lower lip. Within seconds of his tongue entering my mouth he let out a groan and pushed me against the side of his hauler, his strong hands moved from my hips to my thighs and pulled me up around his waist.

Instinctively, I wrapped my legs around him and felt what I was doing to him. I was counting down the seconds before he put the brakes on and wrenched
himself
away but it took more time than usual. This time he let it go on and I was the one to stop. He needed to focus and not be doing this. Jameson had enough distractions lately and making out with his best friend should not be one of them.

“Jameson
...
” I breathed in his ear but he didn’t stop, instead he pushed me back further, grunting as his hips met mine. “Stop,” I said softly and I’m not sure he heard me because he didn’t stop.

I pushed against his shoulders only to have him push back against mine and wrap his arms around me tighter. He strained closer and moved his hips again.

As much as I enjoyed it, we did need to stop or I knew where this would be heading.

“Jameson, you
...
I need you to stop.”

I moved my mouth from his gasping for air only to have his lips travel to my neck, kissing and sucking along my collarbone. Running on instinct, I wiggled against him because this felt so goddamn good I couldn’t stop myself, his hips twitched forward and the sensation caused us both to gasp, that brought him back to reality.

His face was pure mortification as he stumbled backward against a set of tires. “Shit
...
I am so sorry Sway. Fuck!” he cursed himself. “I can’t believe I did that
...
Jesus Christ what the fuck is wrong with me?” he punched the side of the hauler before storming out, cursing at himself.

Well then.

I slumped against the side of the hauler, confused.

I knew Jameson well enough to know that he was just horny. Being on a road trip with all of us didn’t provide much time to bleed his pressure valve as Jimi would call it. I knew he’d slept with someone a few weeks back but other than that, the poor boy was in a constant state of arousal. I couldn’t blame him. He was eighteen. It had nothing to do with me. I was just there and I was safe. He didn’t have to worry about me wanting more or expecting anything from just kissing. There was only one problem with that situation. I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. For so long I was all right with that but now, I didn’t know. I had begun to analyze everything.

Eventually when I heard the cars lining up for the feature event I made my way outside. Jameson’s car was lined up but he wasn’t. It was just Tommy and Spencer standing beside it.

“Where’s Jameson?” I asked looking around.

“Who knows,” Spencer grumbled kicking the rear tire and then gestured with a head nod to the pits. “Asshole told us to line his car up and then took off the other direction.”

Tommy looked perplexed. “We thought he was with you.”

“I was with him earlier but
...
he left
...
I haven’t seen him in probably thirty minutes.”

Right when we were starting to get nervous because the rest of the Outlaws were making their way onto the track, Jameson came running up zipping his driver’s suit as he slowed to a jog. Without looking my direction, he hoisted himself inside his car. I watched him lock in the steering wheel before sliding his gloves over his bloody knuckles. Before putting his helmet on his eyes met mine, he mouthed “sorry” and then winked.

I gave him a smile and winked back before mouthing good luck.

I had no idea where he disappeared to but I assumed he did some speed bleeding with either some pit lizard or himself. I hoped it was himself but doubted it. This just made me sick to my stomach to even think about and frankly, ready to vomit so I pushed those thoughts aside and focused on making fun of Tommy, always a good time.

“Looks like fire crotch got a little too much sun today.” I slapped the back of his red neck.

“That’s it!” he shouted chasing me toward the pit bleachers. “And you wonder why I shot you with a staple gun!”

Being distracted by Tommy was good because when Jameson won the race, I saw the girl I assumed he fucked somewhere in the pits sitting on his lap
...
He removed her but I knew, a girl always knows. I was observant enough to know that he was hanging on to his sanity by a thread and I wasn’t helping.

I didn’t believe in regretting anything in life but I was wise enough to master avoidance and denial, two of my best traits I thought.

12.
      
Take a Look – Jameson

Take a Look – A driver following closely behind another car may dart momentarily to the inside at the entry to a corner, pretending to attempt a pass in order to disrupt the concentration of the driver in the front and hopefully cause a small mistake, setting up a subsequent passing attempt.

It seemed in our rush to make it to a different track each night that this had us making silly mistakes here and there and then there were the mistakes we had no control over but were forced to fix.

There’s no worse feeling, as a driver or crew, than spending fifty hours a week preparing a car for the next weekend to have it break and have to start all over again the next week, praying it doesn’t break again.

And when it does, it’s crushing for everyone involved.

After the Triple Crown Nationals, still wanting seat time, we had the bright idea that I was going to run the Wild West Showdown, which was a six-night international driver challenge at six different tracks.

By the fourth night in Chico, I was beat and so was my engine. It blew up half way through the feature race that night.

Now usually we would have time to change the engine prior to the next race but with the Showdown, they had racing in Chico on Wednesday night and then Skagit on Thursday, that’s a thirteen-hour drive. So ordinarily, we would have time to stop and change out engines in the sprint car we were running that night but as luck would have it, we had to haul ass to Skagit to make it there in time for the race. It was around two in the morning when we left Chico after sleeping three hours alongside the highway. This left one option. We changed out the engine on the back of the trailer, going down I-5 at 70 mph. Not something I would ever do again with Spencer driving.

Tommy, and our other buddy, Scott Pricket (Scooter), who we had met during the season and me were hanging off the side of the open trailer changing out engines while Emma and Sway handed us tools we needed through the back window of my truck.

We weren’t using my hauler this week but an eighteen-foot open trailer and it wasn’t safe to be hanging off the side of it.

“Hand me the 9/16 wrench.” I told Scooter reaching my hand over the roll bars and holding on with the other to the torsion bars. He didn’t answer so I
peeked
my head up making sure he hadn’t fallen off the side. “Where’s the wrench?”

“Uh
...
” he looked around beside him. “I think it’s in Woodburn. Do you still want it? We could turn around.” He suggested with a smirk.

We must have lost our entire set of wrenches that trip but we managed to finish changing out the engine as we barreled through the pit gates. Tommy’s hands were bleeding from bumping up against parts, I had a black eye from where Scooter dropped a crowbar on my face, and Scooter had a fat lip from where my hand slipped off a bolt and smacked him in the mouth,
after
he dropped the crowbar.

To this day, I hold my ground that was an accident.

We ended up setting fast time that night but didn’t do so well in the feature and finished seventh.

Later that night, another driver and friend of ours, Reece Wilcox, a tall southern driver out of Memphis, came walking up to our trailer holding up our wrenches. “Can you believe some asshole was throwing wrenches on the freeway?” Scooter and I exchanged a smile.
“His loss.
Got me and entire set by the time I reached Olympia.” Reece shrugged and walked off with my wrenches.

Aside from scrambling to another track each week, I also had to deal with other racers and their attraction toward my best friend and sister. It never failed, no matter what track we were at the men flocked to the girls. Alley was attractive—you could say that, with big tits, long legs and blonde hair, Spencer’s type. Not mine.

And Emma, well she’s my little sister but she had the cute thing down and men loved that shit, I guess. But what was harder than seeing men pick up on my little sister was seeing them flirt with Sway. Maybe I didn’t know how I felt about Sway or the reasons why I was attracted to her but I was and seeing other men and more specifically other racers swarming her in the pits was not something I enjoyed. Avoided actually and I did a lot of walking away during conversations just to avoid it.

Unfortunately, there were times when I couldn’t just walk away, like in Williams Grove in late October that year. It wasn’t long after Sway’s eighteenth birthday, I’d just placed third in the feature so I was slightly annoyed just by that and the fact that we needed to be in Lernerville later in the week had me thinking we should have left by now but no, everyone was standing around bullshitting and drinking. This happened after every race so I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Besides Spencer and Alley, none of us were twenty-one, but that never stopped us from throwing back the beers after a race.

Parker Dunn, one of the biggest trash talkers in USAC, was another Silver crown racer who’d I began to get to know just based on the fact we were competing on the same series and I’d grown to develop a racing relationship with him, the kind where we showed each other respect on the track. That ended later that night when he crossed the line. The “Sway line” I’d built around myself and others.

“Hey,” Parker sat down next to me on the back of my tailgate after brushing off the dirt. Still suited in his uniform I could smell the mixture of methanol and mud. “Is Sway like your girlfriend or something?”

I took a slow drink of my beer, contemplating how I might answer that. It took me a few minutes and when I answered, it seemed I was trying to tell myself that same thing. “No, she’s my best friend.”

“Oh, okay. So she’s available then?” he asked looking over at her. I craned my neck forward to look over at her. She was standing beside Spencer drinking a beer, giggling at Tommy. Her hair was blowing with the subtle wind, her cheeks flushed from the cool crisp fall air. Wearing a black Bowman Oil hooded sweatshirt, she hugged herself to keep warm.

“No, she’s not
available
.”

“You said you weren’t dating.” His expression bewildered by my sharp threatening tone.

“Yeah,” I jumped down from the tailgate and leaned against it resting my weight on my arms. “She’s not my girlfriend but that doesn’t mean she’s available. I’m sure as shit not okay with her seeing you.”

“Why?” he glared my direction but looked back over at Sway.

“Because you’re a racer—nothing means anything to you but the next race.” I stood straighter.

He let out a dark laugh while raising his beer to his lips and then laughed again shaking his head. “I never said I wanted to date her. I’m just looking for a little fun. You stick around her so I’m assuming she’s a good time.”

It’s no surprise to anyone that knows me that I had a short fuse. I knocked the beer from his hand and punched him square in the mouth before he finished the words “Good time”.

Like I said, our friendship ended that night.

Walking back to the hauler, Sway caught up with me and pulled me aside.

“What’s wrong with you? I heard you punched Dunn?”

“I did.” was my only answer. My eyes focused on her lips.

“Why?”

This was another time, I reacted without using my brain; leaning forward to kiss her forehead.

“Because,” I mumbled avoiding her questioning glance. I couldn’t even look her in the eyes. “You deserve better than him and all he wanted was a one night thing.” I told her placing another kiss against her forehead before walking back toward my car.

That night, lying in the hotel I watched Sway sleep again. We could only afford one room so Alley and Spencer were in one bed while Sway and Emma slept in the other—I slept on the couch next to the bed.