Ricciardo is racing

You have earned this. Candles on the ledge, the good salts, the water at the exact temperature you had to keep adjusting to get. You have a book you have been trying to read since April. This is the plan.

The door opens. No knock, no announcement, just Daniel with a record sleeve in his hands like he’s been carrying it around the house waiting for someone to show it to, and he sits down on the closed lid of the toilet.

“So this guy in Freo,” he says.

You put the book face-down on the tile.

The guy in Freo had opinions. He does the guy’s voice — reedy, a little superior — and explains that this is a 1974 Australian folk record nobody’s heard of and that’s the whole point, and did you know they pressed less than two thousand of them. He tilts the sleeve so you can see the cover. You cannot see the cover from your position in the bathtub. He shows you anyway, because he wants you in on it, whether you can see it or not.

The record turns into the bakery on Stirling, the sausage roll place; the woman there asked after his mum. Which turns into his mum, who rang Sunday and wants to know what he’s doing about the shed, and he said he’d get to it, which turns into Michelle’s dog, who apparently ate a thong.

And somewhere in the middle of the shed and the dog, without changing his voice at all, he says Sky rang about commentary for Melbourne, and he told them no.

Then he’s back on the dog.

You sit up. Water goes over the side and takes out the closest candle.

“You told them no?”

“Yeah.” He turns the sleeve over and looks at the back of it like there’s something there. “It’s a good gig. Good money. I’d be in the paddock four days out of seven.”

“Danny.”

“What.” He shrugs one shoulder. “I just don’t want to be standing there.”

Then he reaches over and drags his hand through the water near your knee, testing it, and pulls a face like it’s lava. “How are you in that? That’s not a bath, that’s a kettle.”

“Okay, but — “

He leans in and kisses you, one hand on the wet edge of the tub, and he’s already standing up when he pulls back.

“Right. Going to go put this on. Love you. Byeeeeee.”

And the door shuts, and you’re alone with the salts and the one dead candle and the thing he said in the middle.

—

Daniel is the kind of boyfriend with the kindest eyes you’ve ever seen on a person.

It was the first thing you noticed, which is remarkable, because he was talking at the time.

Brown, dark, and doing something most people’s don’t. He asked you a question and then waited for the answer with his whole face, and you spent the first thirty seconds waiting for his eyes to go where men’s eyes go. They didn’t. They stayed on yours the entire time, and then he asked a follow-up.

But it wasn’t the attention. Plenty of men can do attention. He looked at you like it hadn’t occurred to him to want anything.

You were, at the time, wildly unimpressed by him and completely aware of this.

He does it to everyone, which took you a while to understand and then made you like him more. The kid at the servo in Wanneroo who worked out who he was halfway through the transaction and went red about it — Daniel leaned on the counter and asked him what he was doing after school like they had all night, and the thing he was doing wasn’t being gracious about it. He wanted to know. Michelle’s mother-in-law repeats herself because she’s deaf in one ear, and he lets her, and he laughs at the end of the story the second time the same as the first. He is not being nice. Nice is a decision. This is just how his face is pointed.

Which is also why he can’t lie. Not even about the good cheese.

“I didn’t.”

You look at him.

“I didn’t.”

You keep looking at him.

“Okay,” he says. “So what happened was.”

And the other thing, the one you didn’t have language for at the start: they go first before the smile. The enormous one, the one on the posters, arrives second — it’s already happened up here. Which means when he’s about to be soft with you, you get half a second of warning, and you never learn to be ready for it.

Your dad was in hospital in March. You told him on the phone from the car park in a voice you were very proud of. He didn’t say anything reassuring. He was on a flight that night, and he found you in the corridor on level four, and he didn’t ask how you were doing; he just came around the corner and stopped, and you saw his face do it, and that was when you cried.

Then he took your bag off your shoulder and asked what the food situation was, because there is only so much of that he can hold before he has to go and do something about the food situation.

—

Daniel is the kind of boyfriend who cooks like it’s a performance and eats like it’s a family.

Sunday, and he’s been in there since two.

The rule is that you’re allowed in the kitchen but you’re not allowed to help, which he has never said out loud and has enforced without exception for a year. You bring him a beer, and he takes it without looking, puts it down somewhere, and forgets it. There’s music on. He’s talking to you and to the pot and, at one point, briefly, to his mum on speaker in a mix of English and something else, and when he hangs up he says she says the sauce needs another twenty minutes in a tone that suggests this is a ruling from a higher court.

He tastes it off the wooden spoon. Makes a face. Adds something. Tastes it again.

“Come here.”

You come. He holds the spoon up and puts his other hand flat under it, cupped, so it doesn’t drip on the floor, and watches your face the entire time you’re eating off it.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” He turns back to the stove, pleased with himself, and you can tell because his shoulders come down.

His nonna’s recipe, except it isn’t, because nobody wrote it down and what he’s actually got is his mum’s version of what she remembers, and he’s changed things, and he’ll defend every change. Too much of it, always. Enough for nine people. There are two of you.

“Danny, who’s eating this?”

“We are.”

“There’s like ten pounds of sauce in that pot.”

“So we’ll have it Tuesday.” He’s already getting a container down. “And Michelle’s coming Wednesday, and I’ll take some to Mum. It’s fine. It freezes.”

It always freezes. The chest freezer in the garage is almost entirely lasagna, with the rest of it pasta and sauce in containers he’s labeled by hand, and you have made your peace with it.

Later he’ll eat standing up at the bench even though the table’s right there, and he’ll put his plate in the sink and then come back and stand behind you with his chin on the top of your head while you finish yours, arms crossed over your collarbone, saying nothing, in no hurry at all. That’s the part. Not the cooking. The forty seconds afterward where the whole loud engine of him just idles.

Then: “Right. What’s for dessert?”

“You’ve just eaten.”

“Yeah, nah, that’s a separate issue.”

—

Daniel is the kind of boyfriend who wants you in the photo.

Not near it. In it.

The first time you met anyone in his life was at a barbecue at Michelle’s, and you’d planned to arrive at your own pace, meet people gradually, work the edges of the yard the way you normally do. He took your hand at the gate and did not let go of it for forty minutes. Walked you to everyone. This is her. Not this is my girlfriend — he’d already told them all that, apparently at length, apparently for weeks — just this is her, like the definite article was the whole announcement.

He does not have a public version and a private version of this. There’s a photo of you on the beach at Trigg, where you are mid-sentence and squinting, and it is genuinely not a good photo of you. It's been on his phone’s lock screen since March, and he's shown it to a Ford executive.

At dinner he’ll put his arm along the back of your chair and leave it there. In a crowded room his hand finds the small of your back and stays, not steering, just there, the whole time he’s talking to someone else. When you say something funny to a group, he laughs a half-second late because he’s watching everyone else get it first.

“You have to stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“That.” You gesture at his entire face. “The pointing at me.”

“I’m not pointing.” He is. “Okay. Yeah. I’ll ease up.”

Ten minutes later he’s got a hand on your shoulder telling somebody’s uncle what you do for a living, in detail, incorrectly.

Somebody’s cousin asked, once, at a wedding, whether the two of you had met through racing. You said no. Daniel said no, she’s got a real job with a delight so total that the cousin laughed and you did not, because it landed somewhere you weren’t expecting. He noticed. He always notices. On the drive home he said I didn’t mean it like that and then, twenty minutes later, on the freeway, out of nowhere, unprompted: “I like that you’re not from it. You’ve got no idea who anyone is, and it’s one of the best things about you.”

Then the indicator, and the exit, and a full explanation of what he thinks is wrong with the coffee at the place near his mum’s.