Rival Hearts - Chapter #6 - by itsvlada

[Nico’s POV]

Race weekend arrives like a declaration of war, and our garage splits down the middle—Soren's engineers on one side, mine on the other, an invisible DMZ that everyone respects and nobody acknowledges.

Perfect. Just fucking perfect.

"Nico, you're two-tenths off optimal through sector two." My engineer Rodrigo sounds like he's delivering a terminal diagnosis. "Your braking point has drifted fifteen meters. His sector three was faster, but your sector one is stronger. Drive your own lap, not his."

His. Like Soren's name is too dangerous to say over the radio.

"Copy." I know exactly why the braking point has drifted.

I've been watching Soren's sector times instead of trusting my own line through turn seven. We lock out fifth and sixth—positions that feel like failure when the car is capable of second row.

Henrik's debrief after the failure that is qualifying, is brief enough to be its own kind of violence.

"Fifth and sixth." He plants both hands flat on the conference table like he's bracing himself against the urge to strangle someone. "In a car that should be fighting for pole position."

Soren studies a fascinating spot on the far wall while I become deeply interested in my telemetry printouts.

"I don't care who started it," Henrik continues, voice so controlled it's actually terrifying. "I don't care about your history, your egos, or whatever psychological death match you're conducting in my garage. If you two can't extract your heads from your asses, I'll make personnel changes that neither of you will survive."

He gathers his notes with the deliberate calm of a man restraining himself.

"Two drivers with front-row pace delivering midfield mediocrity because they can't stop measuring their dicks long enough to measure themselves against the actual competition." He stands. "You're dismissed. Both of you. And figure your shit out before tomorrow, or I'll find drivers who can."

Even as he said so, the race the next day went even worse and this time Henrik didn’t even bother with a past-race debrief. Just looked at both of us, said nothing, and walked away.

I decide to blow off some steam as soon as I get back to the hotel. The hotel gym at midnight is supposed to be empty. Supposed to be my sanctuary from the day's humiliation.

Instead, I find Soren in the corner with free weights, shirt dark with sweat, sandy hair falling into his bright blue eyes as he works through what looks like a punishing routine.

Neither of us speaks. Neither of us leaves as well.

I climb onto a treadmill and start running—easy pace at first, then faster, like I can outrun the memory of Henrik's expression when he looked at our finishing positions.

Then Soren adds weight to his bar, and I increase the speed.

This is what we do now, apparently. Compete even when we're alone. Even when nobody's watching. Even when the only prize is the satisfaction of outlasting each other in a hotel gym that smells like industrial cleaning products and existential despair.

Thirty minutes in, my shirt is clinging to my skin like a second layer of shame. I catch him watching me in the mirror—one second, maybe two—before he jerks his attention back to his weights.

Interesting.

He switches to pull-ups, and I make the mistake of glancing over just as his shirt rides up with each rep, exposing the definition across his shoulders and the way his muscles move under sweat-slicked skin.

I nearly lose my footing on the treadmill belt, arms windmilling like an idiot to keep from face-planting in front of the man who already thinks I'm a professional disaster.

When I look up, he's staring directly at me. Not through the mirror. At me.

Our eyes lock for a heartbeat that stretches into infinity, and something passes between us that has absolutely nothing to do with racing and everything to do with the way his chest rises and falls.

The way his lips part slightly as he breathes, the way I can see his pulse jumping in his throat from fifteen feet away… Fuck.

I slow to a walk, then stop the treadmill entirely.

He drops from the pull-up bar, breathing hard, and suddenly we're both just standing there—drenched, exhausted, the gym silent except for the sound of two people who've been trying to outrun something that definitely isn't physical.

Soren speaks first, voice rough and stripped of its usual polish. "This isn't working."

"What do you suggest?" I step off the treadmill, reaching for my towel, trying to ignore the way his eyes track the movement.

"I don't know." He runs a hand through his hair, and I watch water droplets trail down his neck. "But we can't keep…"

He gestures between us, a movement that encompasses everything: the garage, the race, this moment.

"Henrik's going to bench one of us. We need to fix it."

"Fix what, exactly?" I fold the towel over my arm, movement precise, controlled, the opposite of how I feel. "Our qualifying? Our race craft? Or the fact that you can't be in the same garage as me without turning it into a war zone?"

His jaw tightens. "That's rich, coming from the man who put me into the wall on lap fifteen."

"You blocked me on lap three."

"Because you were driving up my gearbox like you had a personal vendetta!"

"I do have a personal vendetta." The words slip out quieter than I intended, more honest than I planned. The gym absorbs them like a confession. "That's the whole point, Soren. That's what this has always been about."

He goes completely still, something shifting behind his eyes—surprise, maybe, or the discomfort of hearing uncomfortable truth stated without diplomatic packaging.

"So what's the plan?" He tries for dismissive, doesn't quite manage it. "We pretend to be friends? Shake hands for the cameras and hope Henrik doesn't notice we're faking it?"

"Pretending is your specialty, not mine. I don't have the talent for it."

I take a step closer, close enough to see the flecks of gold in his eyes, close enough to smell his cologne mixed with sweat.

"But I also don't have the luxury of losing this seat because you can't handle sharing a garage without making it personal."

The hit lands exactly where I aimed it. I watch it register—a flicker across his expression, there and gone, the kind of micro-reaction he thinks he conceals.

He doesn't. Not from me. Never from me.

He takes a step closer, closing the distance between us until I can feel heat radiating off his skin.

"Then what do you want, Nico? Because I'm standing here actually trying for the first time in eleven years, and you're delivering verdicts like you've already solved the equation and you're waiting for me to catch up."

What do I want?

"I want you to drive like the version of yourself that isn't obsessed with beating me," I say quietly. "And I want you to figure out why you can't—because I think you haven't managed a single session without thinking about me since I arrived, and if you're honest with yourself for five seconds, you know that's true."

His breath catches. Almost imperceptibly, but I hear it.

The silence stretches taut between us as I watch his chest rise and fall rapidly, and I can't tell if it's from the workout or from standing this close to me in a dark, empty gym where nobody can see us, nobody can judge us, nobody can…

"Without wanting to kill each other," he says finally, voice dropping to almost a whisper. "That's what I was going to say. We need to figure out how to be in the same room without wanting to kill each other."

But the way he's looking at me—close enough to touch, radiating something far more complicated than hostility—makes the words sound rehearsed.

A line he's delivering to himself as much as to me.

"Is that what you want?" I ask quietly, taking one more step forward until there's barely four inches between us. "To kill me?"

Something fractures in his expression. Brief. Repaired almost instantly.

"I don't know what I want, Nico." His voice is barely audible now, rough with honesty that sounds like it's being torn out of him. "That's the whole fucking problem. That's what I'm trying to tell you—I don't know what this is, and I don't know how to make it stop, and I don't know why I came down here at midnight knowing you'd probably be here too."

The honesty of it catches me off guard. I expected deflection, charm, another wall built from borrowed confidence. Not this.

"That might be the first honest thing you've said all night." I hold his gaze. "Don't ruin it by pretending you didn't mean it tomorrow."

Neither of us moves. The gym contracts around us until it feels like the entire world has shrunk to this space between our bodies, this moment where eleven years of hatred and hurt and something else are balanced on a knife's edge.

Then Soren breaks eye contact, steps back like he's touched something that could burn him alive.

"Forget it." He grabs his towel with hands that aren't quite steady. "This was stupid. I was stupid."

He grabs his towel and walks out. The door swings shut, and I'm alone with my heartbeat and the recognition that whatever just passed between us had nothing to do with hatred.

Nada mesmo. Nothing at all.