🔥 Sim Session 🔥
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Driver Veto by Tessa Valehart
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place in December, after the final race of The Driver Veto. It contains spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.
Nico’s side of a night in the simulator building while the factory is shut for Christmas: six belts, a wet Silverstone on the screen, Mara back on his radio for one lap, and a corner he can’t keep on the road. Explicit content — 18+.
Sim Session
The factory shuts for Christmas on the twelfth of December, and I’m in the simulator building on the thirteenth at ten past nine at night.
That isn’t a crime. I want that understood before anything else. The notice taped to the glass door says NO WORK TO BE CARRIED OUT ON SITE UNTIL 4 JANUARY, and under it, in green ink, somebody has initialled it C.A. My pass still opens the door, because nobody thought to stop it. The sim room is dark. The car sits in the middle of it on its six hydraulic legs, a real tub with no wheels and a wraparound screen in front of it like a cinema, and the only light is the standby glow on the engineer’s desk.
I’ve sent one message.
Will you run me one lap. Not work. The factory is shut. I have read the wording.
She answered in four minutes.
I’ll be the judge of the wording.
She comes in at a quarter past with rain on her coat. Hair up, stylus through it, the one with the tooth marks. She stops at the door and reads the notice twice, the way she reads everything twice, and then she looks at me.
“No work to be carried out on site,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Then we’d better not do any.”
She takes her coat off and hangs it on the back of the desk chair, square to the edge. Under it she’s wearing a grey jumper I’ve seen on her kitchen floor. She turns on the screens one at a time. Silverstone comes up, wet, grey, at the moment just before Copse: the hundred board, the dark patch where the tarmac changes, the grandstand with nobody in it.
I haven’t heard her voice in a car since Singapore. Tom has it now, and Tom is good. I’ve told him so in writing. But Tom is the number first and the reason after. She is the bone behind my ear.
“Fireproofs,” she says. “Only the fireproofs. Go and change.”
“Ingegnere. It is a simulator.”
“And I’m a stickler.” She doesn’t look up from the desk. “Go on.”
When I come back in the thin white cotton, top and bottoms, nothing a man can hide in, she’s standing beside the tub with the belts laid out over the sides.
She doesn’t let me climb in by myself. She holds my elbow while I step over, as if I’m somebody’s grandfather, and I let her, because her hand is warm and I’ve missed it all week. I slide down into the seat. It’s mine. It’s moulded to me, with the shell skimmed flat under my left hip where she found three millimetres in July.
“Breathe out,” says Mara.
Her palm is flat on my breastbone. The whole hand.
I breathe out. She pulls the shoulder belt down across me and the buckle bites. She does the other. Then the lap belts, hard, one and then the other, her knuckles dragging over the cotton at my hips. Then the two straps that come up between my legs, and she feeds them into the buckle low on my stomach and takes the slack out of those too, slowly, looking at nothing but her own hands.
By the second strap I’m hard. I was hard on the walk from the changing room. There’s nowhere to put it in a six-point harness. There never was.
Her hands stop on the buckle. One second. Two.
“Is that going to be an issue at three hundred kilometres an hour?”
The exact voice. I shut my eyes.
“It is a simulator,” I tell her. “Nothing is three hundred.”
“Then it’s distorting nothing.” She tightens the last strap another centimetre, and I feel that one everywhere. “Hands on the wheel. You don’t take them off it until I say.”
“And if I do?”
“Then I go home, and you can explain the logins to Celia in January.”
She goes back to the desk. She sits. She puts the headset on, and settles the boom mic at the corner of her mouth, and for a moment I can see her in the glass of the screen, lit green and white, with the stylus in her hair and her thumb resting beside a button worn pale in the middle.
“Radio check.”
It goes into the bone behind my ear, low and level, and something in my chest that has been standing up since Singapore sits down.
“I hear you.”
“Five laps. Out, three timed, in. Same as Silverstone.” A pause. “You know the rest.”
I know the rest.
Out lap. The platform tips me back under acceleration and leans me into Village, and the screen fills with wet grey England, and in my ear there is nothing at all. She said she’d leave me alone, once. She does it again. In the quiet I can hear my own breathing in the helmet I’m not wearing, and under it the small sounds she makes at the desk: the click of a key, her chair, a breath.
Lap one. Hundred board. I lift. I turn in on the dark patch. The rig pulls my head towards the outside and the belts take my weight. The car holds. The floor in this simulator is the new one, and it’s honest, and it does on lap one exactly what it will do on lap three.
“That’s one.”
Nothing else. I find, as I did in July, that I was waiting for it.
Then her chair moves. I hear her get up. I hear her footsteps on the rubber floor, coming round to the side of the tub, and the click as she unhooks the headset cable from the desk and lets it hang. It’s long enough. She has measured it, of course.
“Lap two,” she says, and her voice is in my ear and also next to it, a metre from my left shoulder, two ways at once. “Same again. Eyes on the screen.”
Her hand comes over the edge of the cockpit.
It goes flat on my stomach, over the buckle, where the six straps meet. It stays there through Maggotts and Becketts. Then her fingers find the waistband of the fireproofs above the lap belts and draw it down, slowly, under the straps, until I’m bare to the cold air of the sim room and standing up out of the harness like something it was built to hold.
“Mara—”
“Copse is coming. Hundred board.”
I lift. I turn in. Her hand closes round my cock.
I don’t know how I keep the car on the road. I keep it on the road. She strokes me once, slowly, root to tip, through the whole of the corner, and lets go at the exit, and in my ear she says, perfectly level, “That’s two.”
“You cannot—”
“Lap three. Hold the delta. If you lose a tenth to me anywhere on this lap, I stop, and I’ll know, because I’m watching it.” Her thumb drags over the head of me, where I’m already wet. “You put a car on the same patch of tarmac three laps running because I asked you to. I’d like you to do it again.”
“In July I did not have your hand on my—”
“No. You had six weeks of nobody believing you. This is easier.” Her fist starts to move. “Drive.”
I drive.
I don’t think anybody has ever driven a lap of Silverstone like it, and I hope nobody ever does. She strokes me in time with the circuit. Slow down the Hangar Straight, slower, her grip tightening into Stowe. Through Vale she stops altogether and holds me, hot and still, and I can feel my own pulse jumping in her palm. My hands are white on the wheel. The belts hold me exactly where she put me. I can’t lift my hips four centimetres. I can’t do one single thing but watch the screen and take what she gives me and keep the car on the line.
Out of Club. Abbey. She leans over the side of the tub.
I feel her breath first.
Then her mouth.
The noise I make goes into the microphone at my chin and comes back out of the desk speakers on the other side of the room, which is the most obscene thing I have ever heard. She takes me deep and slow, her tongue under me, one hand braced on the edge of the cockpit and the other round what her mouth can’t reach. The cable of her headset is lying across my thigh. Her hair is coming down. The stylus is going to fall out into my lap, and I don’t care.
“Copse,” I say. It comes out in pieces. “Copse, I cannot, Mara, the corner—”
She lifts her head.
“Hundred board,” she says into the mic, wet and hoarse, three centimetres from me. “Lift. Turn in on the dark patch. Same as the last two.”
I lift. I turn in. Her mouth goes back down on me.
The car holds. It holds through the whole of Copse at two hundred and ninety, my hands doing the same thing to the millimetre while every other part of me comes apart, and on the screen, the corner goes by clean.
“I saw it,” she says against me.
I go off at Maggotts.
Not the car’s fault. I put two wheels on the grass and spin it into the gravel on the inside, and the rig bucks and throws me sideways into the belts, and I come in her mouth with the screen full of sky and fence and sky, with a sound that the desk speakers play back to both of us at a volume I’ll never be able to forget. She doesn’t let go. She stays on me through every pulse of it, swallowing, one hand flat on my stomach, holding me down into the seat as if I might lift off without her.
The simulator plays a crunching noise and puts up a red message. It says the car has stopped.
For a long time nothing moves except my ribs.
She sits back on her heels on the step of the platform. She wipes her mouth with the inky side of her hand. Her face is pink to the hairline and her eyes are very bright, and the stylus has fallen out after all and is lying in my lap, on my thigh, next to my softening cock.
“Lap three,” she says. “Gravel at Maggotts.”
“You said Copse. Copse was clean.”
“Copse was clean. Copse was perfect.” She picks up the stylus and pushes it back into her hair. “I’m still writing down Maggotts.”
She unbuckles me herself. Six straps. She takes her time about that as well.
When the last one’s off I don’t get out. I sit in the seat, in the wreck of my own fireproofs, and look up at her, and wait. It has taken me thirty-six years and one season to learn to wait, and I’m not going to waste it.
“Well?” she says.
“You said I keep my hands on the wheel until you say.”
Something moves in her face. She looks at my hands, still on the wheel, still where she put them.
“Lap four’s yours,” she says, and her voice isn’t the radio one any more. “Your call. Until the in-lap.”
“Anything?”
“Standing yes. I’ll tell you if I don’t.”
I take my hands off the wheel.
I get out of the car. My legs aren’t what they were. I put one palm flat on her breastbone, the whole hand, in the same place, and I walk her backwards three steps until she bumps into the engineer’s desk, and the screens behind her are still showing my laps, overlaid, the lines on top of one another so close that you couldn’t get a pencil between them.
“Arms,” I say.
She puts them up. The grey jumper goes over her head and the stylus goes with it, and all that hair comes down at last. There’s nothing under the jumper. She drove here in the rain with nothing under it. I look at her for a long time.
“You planned this,” I tell her.
“I planned the lap. You planned the rest. I read your message.”
I undo her trousers. I take them down with everything else, and she steps out, and I lift her onto the desk among the keyboards. Something beeps in protest. The headset’s still round her neck, the cable trailing off the edge to the floor.
“Leave that on,” I say.
“It isn’t plugged in.”
“I do not care.”
I go down on my knees on the rubber floor of the sim room, between her feet, the way I did in a hotel in Budapest, and I put her heels on the edge of the desk, one and then the other, and spread her open with my thumbs.
She’s soaked. She’s been soaked since the second strap; I can see it on her thighs. I put my mouth on her and lick her slowly, the long way, all of her, and she says my name to the ceiling.
“Dimmi,” I say against her.
“I don’t—”
“You speak it now. You have had since August. Tell me.”
“Slower. Your tongue, flat—yes. Higher. There. Stay there.”
I stay there. I give her the same stroke again and again in the same place, like three laps, and I watch her face over the curve of her stomach. Behind her on the big screen the simulator has reset itself. It’s showing the hundred board at Copse again, wet and grey, waiting.
She looks over her shoulder at it. Then she looks down at me and laughs, a wrecked sound.
“I’ll never be able to run that corner again.”
“Good,” I say, and put two fingers inside her.
She grabs the back of my head. Her other hand comes down flat on the desk and hits a key, and on the side monitor my lap three trace jumps to Maggotts and the gravel. She doesn’t notice. I curl my fingers and find the place I found in Budapest, and her heels slip on the edge of the desk, and I hold her open with my other hand and suck her clit, gently, the way she taught me, and she comes against my mouth with her head back against the screen and my name breaking into three pieces.
I don’t stop. She didn’t. I keep her there with my mouth soft and my fingers still until she’s shaking and pushing at my forehead, and then I stand up.
I’m hard again. She looks at it, and at me, with her mouth open.
“Thirty-six,” she says faintly.
“I am told I like three. I am counting this as the second.”
“That’s not how—”
I kiss her. She tastes of me, and I taste of her, and she wraps her legs round my waist and pulls me in by them. I fit myself to her. I look at her face.
“May I?”
“Yes. God. Nico. Yes.”
I push into her in one long slide. She’s so wet that there’s no sound at all, only her breath going out of her. I hold still inside her, all the way in, with her heels locked behind my back and her hands in my hair and the headset cable caught between us, and for a moment neither of us can do anything.
Then I fuck her on the engineer’s desk.
It isn’t slow. I’ve been waiting a week, and before that a season. I put one hand flat on the desk beside her hip and the other under her, holding her onto me, and I drive into her hard and deep and the whole desk rocks. A screen goes over. Neither of us looks. She’s holding on to the edge of the desk with one hand and to me with the other, and she’s talking, the way she does now. Not the radio voice. Her own voice, broken up, yes, there, don’t you dare stop.
I lean down to her ear.
“Lap four,” I tell her. “Same again.”
She makes a sound that is not a word in any language.
I give it to her the same again. The same angle, the same depth, the same pace, every stroke landing on the place that makes her eyes roll shut. I can feel her start to tighten around me, a long way down. Her nails are in my back through the cotton.
“I missed you,” I say into her neck. I don’t mean the week. “On every lap. Since Singapore. Tom is very good, Mara, Tom is so good, and every lap I am listening for you.”
Her eyes open. They’re wet.
“I’m not on your radio,” she whispers.
“No.”
“I’m never going to be on your radio again. That was the term.”
“I know. I agreed.”
“But this isn’t a radio.” She takes my face in both inky hands. “It’s a simulator. Nothing’s real. It says so on the screen.”
And she pulls the dead headset up, and puts the boom mic to her mouth, and looks me in the eye, and says into it, level, low, in the voice that lives in the bone behind my ear:
“Push now. Everything you’ve got.”
I push.
I don’t last. I don’t try. She comes first, round me, clenching hard enough to stop my breath, with the mic still at her mouth and my name going into it, and it takes me with her. I come buried in her to the hilt, shaking, with my forehead pressed to hers and my hand flat on the desk among the keys, and somewhere behind her head the simulator plays its little crash noise again because I’ve leant on something, and neither of us cares in the least.
In-lap.
That’s what she calls it, after. We’re on the floor of the sim room with our backs against the platform, under her coat, which she has taken off the chair and put over both of us. Her head is on my shoulder. Her hair is everywhere. On the big screen the simulator has gone back to its standby picture, the hundred board at Copse, grey and wet and empty.
“You put it in the gravel,” she says.
“It is a simulator.”
“I’m still writing it down.”
She reaches up onto the desk without looking and finds the run sheet and the stylus, and she writes on her knee, in pencil, in the small square hand. I read it upside down.
Sim session, 13 Dec. Laps 1–3 consistent to the hundredth. Lap 3, Maggotts, off. Driver input variance.
Under it, after a moment:
Engineer compromised.
And under that, because she’s thorough, the date, and M.V.
“That is going in the file?” I ask.
“That’s going on the fridge.”
I laugh. She feels it in her ribs and laughs too, quietly, against my neck.
“Will you run me again?” I ask. “Next week. While it is shut.”
She’s quiet for long enough that I start to count.
“I’ve read the wording,” she says at last. “It says no work. It doesn’t say anything about practice.”
“So.”
“So same again,” says Mara Voss. “Thursday. Bring your own olive oil.”
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