Prologue Part 2

A deeply suspicious response.

“Who is it!”

He asked again through the door. Silence again.

The silence was strange enough to make his stomach drop with anxiety. That bastard, when Dan had apologized earlier he’d said he’d gone too far too, but Dan should have known when he showed up with those thugs in the evening. What was the point of booking an expensive room if they just let guys that size waltz right through. Complaints and grievances welled up inside him.

And what were they going to do when they found him?

The old Dan would have scowled and opened the door, would have been ready to clean up whoever was picking a fight the moment they started. No, he wouldn’t have given them the chance to acknowledge him in the first place.

‘My personality’s improved a lot, I’ll have you know.’

Dan grumbled and called the front desk. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] He asked whether they’d sent up any service he might not be aware of. When they said they hadn’t sent anything, he added that it seemed like an unknown visitor had come to his door, that he hadn’t called for anyone, and asked them to send someone up to check.

It was pathetic, but staying alive came first.

He didn’t even remember everything he’d done as his past self, so there was no way of knowing how deep the grudges ran. The front desk got back to him quickly. They said someone was on their way up, so when the door sounded again he could open it and check, and Dan felt himself relax.

The wait was both long and short. The door, which had been sunk in silence, sounded again. Dan smoothed his expression and opened it.

“…”

The infuriating man who’d started trouble with him. The large uninvited guests who’d looked like they were about as far down the chain as henchmen of henchmen of henchmen. He’d been bracing himself for something big and imposing and menacing, so when he saw the man standing alongside the hotel employee on the other side of the open door, his eyes went wide.

Christopher Paul.

Dan felt in his body what it meant for your face to freeze. He knew the man standing next to the hotel employee very well. It was the man who had been holding the champion’s trophy in this morning’s news photos.

The man had such a commanding presence that the hotel employee standing right beside him felt like a ghost. Dan consciously blinked, wondering if he was seeing things. He’d been staring with his eyes so wide in shock that they were starting to sting.

Without realizing it, he fumbled out the words.

“Who… are you?”

Which was to say, he knew perfectly well who the man in front of him was. The man with the deep set eyes and striking green gaze against his sweet dark chocolate skin had been born to an American father of mixed German, Irish, and Brazilian descent and a French mother of mixed French and Native American blood.

But he couldn’t help asking. The man opened his mouth.

“Um…”

Against that sweet dark chocolate skin, good quality dark brown hair with slightly curled ends swayed gently. His deep set eyes with their dark forest green irises made it impossible to look away. A small head that made his tall frame look even taller, long arms and legs, muscles, all of it registered in Dan’s mind. Both Dan and the hotel employee stood there staring at that lean body as if under a spell.

Christopher Paul.

The man was this year’s F1 champion, and not just this year but last year and the year before that too, he’d claimed the champion’s trophy three years running. He was the very guy who’d been proudly holding that trophy in the article that had put Dan in a foul mood this morning.

The starting point of today’s misfortune, in the flesh.

A young champion whose age suited the word “bastard” better than “man” or “fellow.” The bastard who had put Ferrari at ease by saying he respected teams with tradition, and then stabbed the great Ferrari in the back. The bastard who had come up through the Ferrari Driver Academy, stayed with the team as a Ferrari test driver, and then turned his back without a second glance and walked off to a new team.

The bastard who had snagged a seat when a storied team that had stepped back from motorsport built itself up and returned to the track, the bastard with not a shred of decency, whose racing style was ruthlessness itself.

That goddamn triple champion bastard.

The face of indeterminate nationality, a blend of so many, wore an expression of mild difficulty.

“I came for sex.”

In contrast to that look of difficulty, Chris Paul answered in a smooth and elegant voice, delivering the word that was probably the sole preoccupation of most men his age with the same calm he might use to say it was raining outside.

A long silence followed those words spoken in a low but not rough, gentle voice.

“What?”

Dan mumbled blankly.

And so it was.

Christopher Paul’s other name was sex. The man standing before him, who had become an F1 champion at twenty-one, was famous for claiming the champion’s trophy three years in a row, but he was famous in another direction too. That is to say, the name Christopher Paul, Chris Paul for short, brought the word “sex” to mind.

Just before claiming his first champion’s trophy, Chris Paul had drawn people’s attention for being young, aggressive, and good looking: twenty-one years old, an age that was genuinely young, driving with a ruthlessness that felt nothing like camaraderie, standing 186 centimeters tall against the F1 driver average of 172, a good ten centimeters above it, with a face to match.

Several of his sponsors had, as if it were only natural, shot advertisements with the good looking young driver who looked like he was about to become champion stripped half out of his clothes, muscles on full display.

The day after an article broke that Chris Paul had had a foursome with models he’d appeared in an advertisement with, he claimed his first champion’s trophy. Two people doing it was one thing, three people happened from time to time, but four people, and it was then that Dan saw the spelling of “foursome” for the first time.

The following off season, Chris Paul made the front page for something unsavory, a sexual assault article of the kind every famous athlete seemed to pass through at least once. What was alarming was that he was alleged to have assaulted two women who were friends with each other, at the same time.

What was even more alarming was the reason the charges couldn’t be made to stick. Chris Paul was cleared because at that exact time he had been having sex with three people simultaneously, himself, his manager friend, and another woman.

Dan had looked at a photo of Chris Paul back then and asked a question that couldn’t be heard: couldn’t he just do it with two people?

Chris Paul had delivered another big one near the end of this season too. [Read on RanaTranslations🌸] Three days after breaking up with a girlfriend who had basketball sized breasts and an equally large backside on an otherwise slender frame with thin arms and legs, there had been a tip that Chris Paul had done it seven times in one night with a housekeeper who had nothing in common with the girlfriend except being a woman.

Under the headline that the double champion had done it seven times in one night, the housekeeper’s detailed account of the situation followed. Then articles broke one after another claiming that Chris Paul had occasionally reached out to employees before, that the housekeeper had not been the first; that Chris had been involved in turn with former motor home housekeepers C, N, and T, that a Spanish secretary belonging to a fellow driver had passed through his hands as well, and that the reason his personal cook kept changing was that he had been involved in some way with the cooks’ sisters or family members. All the while, the man had breezily won the Grand Prix held that same week.

Chris Paul’s front page articles were split entirely between articles covering his astonishing achievements as champion and scandal pieces about how many people at once or how many times he’d had sex.

“Sex…?”

Dan swallowed the feeling of devastation and mumbled.

“Yes.”

Chris Paul smiled. When he smiled, it was as if the face speaking with that smile came into sharper focus than everything around it.

“With who?”

Dan said it reflexively. He stared at the man who had done plenty of living at a young age. The deep set eyes and dark green irises that made such a striking contrast against that sweet chocolate skin stared back at Dan without blinking.

Dan swallowed the urge to ask whether he couldn’t just do it with two people and let only his facial muscles twitch without a word.

‘He’s my anti-fan target, this lunatic. He’s out of his mind.’

Too absurd for words, an awkward laugh slipped across his face. The more he thought about it the more staggered he was, and Dan just let out a small scoff. Coming all the way from Abu Dhabi to New York for sex?

Chris stared at Dan.

He’s fine with men too, apparently.

Pushing away the question that had suddenly surfaced, Dan shifted his gaze to the hotel employee. The third party caught in an uncomfortable situation was doing their best to hold a polite business smile.

Dan looked from the hotel employee back to Chris Paul and fumbled out the words.

“…I think you’ve got the wrong room.”

His tongue moved smoothly enough to get the words out but his throat hitched several times and the words didn’t come out quite right. Chris Paul withdrew the gaze he’d been directing at Dan, checked the room number on the back of the door, then looked back and forth between Dan and the hotel employee and tilted his head.

“This is the right place.”

Chris said with a mild smile, as if something were strange.

“That can’t be right.”

Dan replied, his face a picture of alarm.

“This is the right place.”

At Chris’s rebuttal, Dan shook his head back and forth.

“You must have something wrong.”

“That’s strange.”

Dan held his breath watching the man murmur to himself.

There’s only him here, so what does he mean this is the right place. So he really is fine with men too. With that many women around, what’s so lacking that he’s sniffing after men as well.

He pushed down the curiosity that had risen to the tip of his tongue and said with a customer service smile:

“I hope you check again and sort this out nicely. Well then, if you’ll excuse me.”

Just as Dan moved to close the door.

“Wait.”

Chris yanked the closing door wide open. Dan pushed against it with everything he had but it was no use. The force he put into pushing the door dissolved into nothing.

“…”

He stared blankly at the door that had opened so easily.

A polite voice rang out over his dazed face.

“Won’t you have sex with me?”

Taking the full force of a smile that could reel in any man or woman, young or old, two or more at a time, Dan’s lips twitched awkwardly. It was a bright smile that he would have said yes to without hesitation if only it hadn’t been Chris Paul’s. Meeting that perfect smile, the kind where it would be strange for anyone, man or woman, not to fall for it the moment it was turned on them, he said:

“No.”

At the firm answer, Chris broke into a soft laugh.

Bang.

The door slammed shut loudly. Dan backed away the moment he closed it. Words spilled out of his mouth on their own.

“…Is he insane?”

At Chris Paul’s casual proposition, Dan suspected that most of his moves probably went like this, showing up without warning and suggesting it out of nowhere. What was frightening was that even going about it like this, the move had probably worked.

He thought of the man’s smile he’d glimpsed through the closing gap of the door and rubbed his forearm. Perhaps because he’d seen an absurdly good looking man’s smile up close, a chill ran through him out of nowhere. Dan stood frozen for a good while, blank and dazed, until the sound of Chris Paul’s laughter outside the door finally died away.

That was when Kim Dan’s true misfortune began.