“You might be up for a different reason tonight,” he says.
I stare at him.
“Hopefully you will be up thinking about this date. And me.”
Ooh!
“Well, that remains to be seen,” I say, flashing him a flirty smile. “Our coffee date has just started.”
“Don’t worry. I know I have to earn a place in your thoughts.”
I look at him. There’s nothing but an expression of sincerity on his handsome face.
God, I like this about him. Caleb is an F1 driver. Rich beyond belief, heir to a motor-car legacy, and one of the most handsome men I have ever seen. He could have anyone. At any time.
Without having to work for it.
But here he is in a conference room, having a cup of coffee, merely to spend time talking to me.
I pour myself a cup of decaf and put some milk into it. Caleb pops off the end of the conference table and moves next to me, reaching for a cup and selecting the fully caffeinated carafe.
“I can sleep no matter what,” he declares. Then he makes a face. “Unless I have a bad race. Then I’m too pissed off to sleep well.”
“Do you go over your mistakes in your head?” I ask, watching as he puts milk into his cup.
“I relive those moments on a loop. Then when I finally go to sleep, I wake up with a clear head. And ideas of how not to repeat those mistakes.” Caleb motions to the two club chairs in the room. “Let’s sit over here. We can pretend it’s more like a café than a boardroom.”
“We need music,” I say, walking over and setting my cup on a table between the chairs before I take a seat.
Caleb sets his coffee down. Then he reaches inside his pants pocket and retrieves his phone. “Spotify will have a playlist for that,” he says as he sits. I notice he stretches out his legs again, and how long he is.
I wonder how uncomfortable he is sitting in the cockpit. He’s definitely one of the tallest drivers in Formula 1.
But I’m not going to ask him that tonight. I don’t want to focus on his F1 career, unless he brings it up. I want to see if I have the same chemistry I’ve had with him before, but not as the subject of content creation or an interview. I want to see if that chemistry exists when I’m with him as Caleb Collings, the man.
“Christ, there are like a million variations of coffeehouse music,” he says, scrolling through his phone. “Coffeehouse jazz. Acoustic. Morning mix. This is complicated.”
I giggle at that. “Complicated?”
“Well, yeah, if I pick a shit playlist, it could ruin our date.”
“So we can overcome being in a sterile conference room with bad overhead lighting, but we can’t overcome selecting the wrong playlist? Show some faith, Caleb!”
He chuckles, and I love that I drew that out of him.
“Do you have a preference?” he asks, continuing his search for the optimal music for our conference room date.
“No. Just roll the dice.”
“Is that what you are doing tonight?” Caleb asks, lifting his eyes from the screen to meet mine. “Rolling the dice?
OOH!
“I don’t play games,” I say, reaching for my cup of coffee and taking a sip. “So I won’t start now. Yes, I’m rolling the dice. To find out who you are outside of the man who’s known for having ice in his veins on the track.”
His gaze stays on me as he taps a button on his phone, and light, jazzy, instrumental music fills the air. Just like that, he’s shown me he’s rolling the dice tonight, too.
“When I put down my visor,” he says slowly, parking his phone on the table between us, “I become a different person. I’m only thinking about one thing. How I’m going to attack the track I’m on. How I’m going to outrace Xavier and Mason. And that’s all I think about. It’s all about winning.”