Page 65 of Bend

“I had my reasons.”

“Yeah?” I step closer. “Then give me one.”

Her eyes flash. “Maybe I don’t owe you one. Maybe it wasn’t my place to tell you who I was, or why I was here.”

That almost does it.

I take another step and she stays where she is, which only makes the pressure between us sharper. She doesn’t back down. She never fucking backs down. I should respect that. I probably do, in some dark inconvenient place I don’t want to examine right now. But mostly it just makes me want to shake the truth out of her.

“You knew who I was,” I say, my voice low. “From the moment you saw me that night in the bar, you knew and you think I’m not owed an explanation on why you just kept it from me?”

Finally, she says, “I wanted to meet you without all the noise first.”

I blink at her. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“No, I heard the words. That doesn’t mean they make sense.”

Her jaw tightens. “I knew your name. I knew your reputation. I knew your team. I knew the kind of headlines attached to all of you.” She gestures vaguely toward the garage behind me, like that one motion covers the whole world I live in. “I didn’t want all of that to be the first thing between us.”

Us.

That word lands in my chest and sits there, heavy and irritating.

I ignore it.

“So instead,” I say, “you decided to keep it to yourself and let me be the idiot in the conversation?”

Her eyes narrow. “I didn’t make you an idiot.”

“No? Because that’s not how it feels.”

That slips out rougher than I mean it to, and I hate it the second it’s out there. Hate that I’ve let enough honesty through for her to hear it.

Something changes in her face. Not much. Just enough for me to notice.

“I wasn’t trying to make a fool of you,” she says, quieter now.

“Then what were you trying to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bullshit.”

“No.” Her voice sharpens again. “Not bullshit. I genuinely didn’t know. I just...”

She cuts herself off and looks away toward the road beyond the fence. Cars slide past in streaks of sound and fading light. The city keeps moving like this conversation isn’t threatening to crack something open between us.

I wait.

After a second, she looks back at me. “I wanted to know if you were actually like them.”

“Them?”

“The stories. The interviews. The rumors. The version people build when someone becomes a name instead of a person.”

That one gets under my skin because I know exactly what she means. I’ve seen people do it my whole life. Take a racer, a team, a public life, and flatten it into something easier to consume. Dangerous. Cocky. Untouchable. They make us into versions of ourselves they can understand and judge from a distance.