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Arvid Lindblad is a person who can think and be silent at the same time. It’s a rare skill. Most people, when they’re silent, simply stop thinking. Arvid, however, is silent while producing such a noise inside his skull that it’s surprising the people around him can’t hear it. Right now, he’s sitting in the corner of the motorhome, holding a cup of coffee with both hands—not because it’s cold, but because he has to put his hands somewhere—and he’s looking at Liam Lawson.
Liam is explaining something about the mechanics. He’s gesticulating. He has this habit when he talks about something he finds interesting: he uses his whole body, as if words aren’t enough and he needs to show the shape of his thoughts with his hands. Arvid already knows this. He actually knows a lot of things about Liam, which in itself is a bit strange, because Arvid isn’t the type to collect other people’s habits.
Liam turns, catches his gaze, and Arvid immediately looks into his coffee. There’s nothing interesting in the coffee. But he looks at it for another five seconds to create the illusion that he was simply lost in thought.
This started, if it even “started” at all—because Arvid isn’t sure there’s a clear timestamp for a beginning—sometime between the second and third month. Gradually. Like mold. Or like dawn, if one wanted to be poetic, but Arvid doesn’t want to be poetic, because being poetic would be acknowledging something, and he’s not ready to acknowledge anything yet. It’s just that at some point, he caught himself searching for Liam with his eyes in the paddock crowd. That was an unpleasant discovery.
Arvid had an internal argument with himself, which would have looked idiotic if anyone could have seen it. He told himself: it’s just a habit, we just spend a lot of time together, it doesn’t mean anything. The brain remembers patterns. Liam is a pattern. That’s all. His brain responded with something inarticulate and continued searching for Liam in the crowd.
“Hey,” Liam says, walking over and plopping down next to him with such spontaneity as if it were his sofa, not just a crate of equipment that Arvid was trying to use to be alone. “What’s with the thoughtful face? Counting points?”
“Nothing to count,” Arvid replies.
“Well, that’s what I’m saying.” Liam reaches for his cup, looking a question.
“Take it,” Arvid says before he has time to think.
Liam drinks his coffee. Just like that. As if it’s the most natural thing. Then he makes a face.
“You drink this without sugar?”
“Yeah.”
“That explains a lot.”
“What exactly does it explain?”
“Well,” Liam hands the cup back, “why your face is like that.”
“Like what?”
“You know.” Liam makes a vague gesture toward Arvid’s face.
Arvid looks at him. Liam looks back, completely unruffled, with a faint smirk at the corner of his mouth, and Arvid thinks—not for the first time, it’s a thought that keeps returning with enviable persistence—that Liam Lawson is wired differently than most people. As if he doesn’t have that protective layer everyone else has. That default distance. He’s just open. He looks straight at you. He says what he thinks. He takes someone else’s coffee. It should be annoying. For some reason, it doesn’t annoy Arvid specifically.
Arvid thinks about it at night, which in itself is a symptom. At night, you think about problems. At night, you think about what won’t let go.
He’s lying in the darkness of a hotel room—all the hotel rooms have started merging into one long corridor with identical ceilings—and methodically breaks down the situation.
Fact one: Liam Lawson is likable. As a person. That’s normal; it happens with people.
Fact two: Arvid catches himself looking at him longer than necessary for an ordinary conversation. That’s less normal, but still explainable. Fatigue. Distraction.
Fact three: When Liam laughs—that slightly hoarse, slightly unexpected laugh—Arvid feels something in his chest. Something that doesn’t have a proper name. Warmth is too banal. Heaviness isn’t right. Something that makes him simultaneously want Liam to laugh again and to look away.
Arvid stares at the ceiling. The ceiling doesn’t answer.
The strangest thing isn’t what he feels. It’s how Liam exists in his head in the spaces between actual encounters. Arvid isn’t a romantic. That’s not self-deprecation, just a fact about himself he accepted long ago. He’s a technical person. He thinks about trajectories, data, concrete tasks. Abstract things are harder for him. So he doesn’t really understand what it means when, in the middle of a briefing, he’s not thinking about something important, but simply: Liam would say something stupid right now, and everyone would laugh. Or when he sees something funny—some absurd advertisement, some odd character in the paddock with a completely ridiculous hat—his first impulse is to tell Liam. Not anyone else. Specifically Liam. Because he’d appreciate it for sure. Because he has the right sense of humor, not pretentious, no attitude; he laughs at the same things Arvid laughs at. This isn’t falling in love, Arvid tells himself. It’s just someone you match frequencies with. It happens. It’s called a good friend.
He almost believes himself.
“Listen,” Liam says one day. “Do you even know how to relax?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, right now. You’re sitting, but you’re not relaxing. You have that face like you’re solving three problems at once.”
“Two,” Arvid says.
Liam looks at him for a second, then laughs. That laugh. Arvid looks at the track.
“Alright,” Liam says. “Two, then.”
They’re silent. It’s a good silence. Arvid can tell the difference, because there’s silence that needs to be filled, and there’s silence where you can just sit. With Liam, it’s the second. That probably means something, too.
“What are the problems?” Liam asks after a minute.
“Not telling.”
“Is one of them about me?”
Arvid turns to him. Liam looks back without a smile, just looking, calm and direct, the way he always looks, without that protective layer, simply looking at Arvid.
“Why would you think that?” Arvid says.
“I don’t know,” Liam says. “Just thinking.”
Arvid looks away. Stares at the track, the empty asphalt, the shadows from the grandstands.
“No,” he says.
Liam doesn’t respond. Arvid doesn’t know if he believes him. Arvid isn’t sure it’s the truth himself.
The problem with Liam Lawson—and Arvid formulates this clearly, because clarity helps—is that he doesn’t let you keep your distance. Not because he’s pushy. Not because he intrudes. But simply because that’s how he exists, without distance, and when you’re close to him, the distance just kind of disappears on its own, like mist under the sun, and you suddenly find yourself standing closer than you planned, and—here’s the crux—you don’t actually mind. Arvid thinks: this world didn’t ask if you wanted any of this. It just placed another person next to you and said, well, figure it out yourself.
Arvid is figuring it out. Slowly. Painfully. In the darkness of hotel rooms, in the gaps between briefings, in those seconds when Liam looks at him and Arvid looks into his coffee. Not rushing anywhere.
“Listen,” Liam says when they’re leaving the track and the paddock is emptying, starting to look like a film set after all the actors have gone. “Come to my room. They’ve got a decent TV. We can order some food.”
Arvid thinks for exactly one second.
“Alright.”
Why not. Seriously, why not. It’s just a room. It’s just food. It’s just Liam, who can’t sit in silence alone and so always drags someone along. Arvid knows this. It’s just a pattern of behavior, nothing more. He repeats this to himself in the elevator, looking at the mirrored door reflecting them both: Liam typing something on his phone, swaying slightly from heel to toe, the way people do when they’re comfortable in their own bodies, and Arvid thinks: just a room, just food. Everything’s fine.
Liam’s room looks the same as everyone else’s. Identical rooms, identical ceilings, identical smell of conditioned air that doesn’t smell like anything and so feels oddly oppressive. Liam tosses his bag onto the chair, flops onto the bed on top of the duvet, and stares at the ceiling.
“What’ll you have?” he says without moving. “There’s a menu on the table.”
Arvid picks up the menu. Looks at it. It’s a menu like any other—fifteen pages of things you can order at eleven at night, all of which will be either tasteless or overpriced.
“Burger, probably.”
“Me too. Order two. I’m not getting up.”
“You’re five meters from the phone.”
“I know. Order two.”
Arvid looks at him for a moment. Liam keeps lying there with an expression like he just ran a marathon and has every right not to react to anything. Arvid orders two burgers. Then he thinks for a second and orders fries.
“Got fries, too,” he says.
“You’re a good person, Arvid,” Liam replies to the ceiling.
They eat on the bed—not side by side, Arvid sitting near the headboard, Liam near the foot, with the food boxes and the remote control between them—and watch some documentary about sharks that Liam found and said, “Oh, look, sharks,” as if that were an exhaustive argument. Sharks, then.
Liam eats and comments. It’s a habit of his; he can’t watch something in silence. He has to talk. Not loud, not intrusively, just release a quiet stream of consciousness toward the screen.
“That one’s big,” he says.
“That’s a great white,” says Arvid.
“Ah, right. Are they smart?”
“Smart enough.”
“How smart?”
“Well,” Arvid thinks, “not dolphins, but they’ve got some brains.”
“Dolphins are smarter than sharks?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s unfair to sharks.”
“Sharks don’t mind. They don’t have a rich emotional life.”
Liam turns to him with an expression as if Arvid just said something deeply wrong.
“You don’t know what’s going on inside them.”
“I have a general idea.”
“Maybe they’re really upset that dolphins are smarter. Maybe they’ve got a whole complex about it.”
Arvid looks at him. Liam is as serious as Liam ever gets—which is to say with a slight spark in his eyes that betrays he’s laughing at himself. Arvid looks at that spark.
Then he looks back at the screen.
“Alright,” he says. “Maybe.”
Liam nods contentedly and returns to his burger.
They finish eating; Liam puts the boxes on the table, finally getting up, the lazy thing, and when he comes back, he sits a little closer. Not significantly closer. Just closer. Close enough that if Arvid shifted a little to the left, their shoulders would touch. Arvid doesn’t shift. He just notices.
On screen, a shark is eating something. Liam comments—well, that’s rough, buddy—and leans back against the pillow, stretches his legs out. Relaxed. Completely relaxed. Arvid thinks he envies that ability to just let go, to allow his body to simply exist without constant control.
Then Liam says:
“Hey, toss me the blanket. It’s on the chair.”
Arvid gets up, grabs the blanket from the chair, and comes back. And here—right here—is what Arvid will later dissect with the same meticulousness he applies to telemetry data after a complex stage. He comes back with the blanket. Liam looks up at him from the bed, leaned back against the pillow, a bit sleepy, with that calm gaze of his, and says quietly:
“Thanks.”
And smiles. Just like that. Warmly, a little lazily, the way you smile at people you’re comfortable with.
And Arvid—
Arvid stands there with the blanket in his hands and for a fraction of a second, a very short one, an almost non-existent fraction, he thinks about something he shouldn’t be thinking. Something like: I wish it were always like this. Something like: this is the right place. Something unformed and warm that rises from somewhere in his chest and reaches his throat before he can stop it.
He hands over the blanket. Sits back down. Watches the sharks. Liam says something—about how the documentary is boring, they should find something else—and picks up the remote, starts flipping through channels, and it’s all perfectly normal and doesn’t mean anything other than what it means.
Arvid knows this. Arvid knows that Liam simply asked for the blanket. That he smiled because that’s what people do when someone gives them something. That “thanks” is a word said automatically, without subtext, and the smile is just politeness or just a good mood, and there was no “I wish it were always like this” there, not intended. Arvid knows all this.
And yet he sits there and feels something inside slowly and awkwardly rearranging the furniture. As if someone entered the room and moved one chair, and now you keep stumbling over that spot because your muscle memory says it’s empty, but the chair is there.
I wish it were always like this.
Fuck.
“You asleep?” Liam says.
“No.”
“Look, found a good movie. A heist.”
“Okay.”
Liam wraps himself up in the blanket, almost completely, only his nose sticking out, and watches the screen with the look of a toddler given their favorite toy, and Arvid smiles involuntarily. He looks away so Liam won’t see. On the screen, the heist movie starts. Arvid watches it and doesn’t see anything. He thinks: this doesn’t mean anything. He thinks: he’s just tired. He thinks: this happens to people, you find someone you’re comfortable with, and your brain starts spinning all sorts of things around it, because the brain is an idiot and can’t just accept something good without immediately complicating it. He thinks: right now, I’m just sitting in a room with someone I feel comfortable with. It’s not a crime. It’s not a disaster. It’s just an evening. It’s just Liam, wrapped in a blanket, watching a movie, occasionally saying something quiet toward the screen. Just Liam.
Arvid looks at him one more time, briefly, three seconds, while Liam is watching the screen, and thinks: So what do I do now?
The sharks were done. The heist had begun.