Adrenaline

When Dominic awoke he wasn’t surprised at all to find that Blair was conspicuously absent from his side. He figured that she wouldn’t be - just because of the fact that she was Blair Hundley and the fact that she had downed a quarter of the large bottle of Absolut that room service had brought her the evening before. Toretto had thought that she would have gone back to her own room, and therefore got to his feet and walked to the bathroom to take his customary morning piss… But Blair’s face was buried in the receptacle in which he had planned to pee. Groggily, Toretto touched her shoulder with a tentative paw - which triggered a spasm in her shoulders and uncontrollable heaving in her stomach.

Blair cursed the day she became a heavy drinker as she clutched the bottom of the toilet bowl, praying to the God who lived there to ease her hangover - fucking fast.

“Are you alright, Blair?” The burly man reached for a towel to wrap around his middle, then another to place over Blair’s naked shoulders. She looked so tiny retching into the toilet bowl he couldn’t help but feel bad, even though he had to pee like a racehorse and she had brought her situation upon herself.

“Do I lo -” She didn’t finish her muffled sentence as her stomach heaved once more. Dominic emptied the remains of the vodka in her glass tumbler into the bathroom sink and filled the glass with water.

“Drink this. Should I find some aspirin?” He asked, bracing himself for a tongue-lashing or The Exorcist-style projectile vomit. Toretto had no doubt in his mind which would have been worse. Again she murmured something unintelligible while reaching over to the bathtub to run a hot bath - while she was distracted with clambering into the tub and dipping her head under the scorching faucet, Dominic pounced on the opportunity to re-claim the toilet.

“Thanks for that,” Blair was understandable now, only her nose and mouth floated above the surface of the water. Dominic shrugged, not willing to apologize for necessities.

“Will you be alright to race later?” He asked, handing her the glass as she surfaced, her long hair clinging to her face and shoulders.

“What time is it?” The Brit was startled to learn it was nearly noon, and sighed. “I’ll have to, won’t I?” She drank the glass of water, asking for more of him by holding out the glass to him with a pitiful look on her face - one that told Toretto she was preparing to reject the liquid. He excused himself to her suite in order to shower and prepare himself for the day - when he returned half an hour later, Blair lay on his bed (still naked and dripping wet) smoking a cigarette.

“Speedy recovery,” Toretto murmured, slipping into a pair of jeans.

“I think it was more shock and grief than a hangover.” The redhead shrugged, taking a drag off her Marlboro. She was lying on her back, the tattoo on her abdomen was plainly visible to Dominic; yet he found himself averting his gaze from it out of respect for the tiny redhead. How the hell did she manage to command so much respect and yet never return it? She opened one eye to look at him, propping herself up on one elbow. Feeling uneasy at her mismatched gaze for once in his life, the muscular man committed himself to searching for a clean shirt in his dresser, but try as he might Dom couldn’t shake the feeling of her fiery eyes.

“What, Blair?” His tone was harsh as he spoke, forcing a clean shirt down over his head. When he turned back to her, he saw she had shifted, curled up into a little ball with a cigarette sticking out of it. Dominic cocked a brow - wondering what kind of drama Blair had in store for him this time - and crossed the room to run a calloused finger down the redhead’s prominent backbone, tracing the planets she had tattooed down her spine.

“I don’t know.” She opened her forest green eye to look at him through a mass of red hair. “I wonder weather it was the sex or the death of one of my drivers that has put me in a funk.” Oh. Ouch. He hadn’t planned on addressing the issue - hoped perhaps she had forgotten about her drunken advances; it wasn’t that Dominic minded the sex, it was the fact that he didn’t think Blair deserved to end up as Letty’s rebound girl. Blair’s eyes bored into him so knowingly that Dominic wondered if mind reading was something else with which she would surprise him. “Probably the grief.” She dismissed the though with a drag of her cigarette before she ducked her head back into her little ball.

“Blair,” Toretto reached out to envelop her tiny frame in his massive arms, pulling her naked body into his lap. Stubborn as always, Blair remained tight in a bud. “Blair,” He spoke again as he touched his lips to her forehead.

“I get it Toretto, really. But she’s gone. Focus on the living as my dear old dad used to say.” Needless to say, her father was long gone, which made the Brit giggle lightly, snaking her hand to her mouth to take a hearty breath of smoke from her Marlboro. Toretto pinched the cherry of her half-finished cigarette between his first two fingers and disdainfully plucked it from her hands before he set it in the ashtray.

“Shouldn’t you be doing the same thing?” He ran an enormous paw through her soft hair.

“Yeah, well…” For once, Blair didn’t have a snippy reply or some sort of backhanded reasoning to make her superior to Dominic.

“So what are we going to do?” He asked tentatively, his paw stopping to cup her chin so their eyes could meet.

“We?” She asked, sitting up to reach for another cigarette, apparently unashamed of her nudity. “Well. If they want to, Kolya and Mikhail can race tonight. Or they can drink themselves home. But either way, I’m racing tonight, and I’ll need a pack mule.” Force-of-Nature Blair was back and balancing a cigarette in her lips as she spoke. Toretto laughed.

“I’ll be your pack mule any time.” He removed the cigarette so he could kiss the lips that had caressed it.

“But right now I really need a shower and to get dressed, Mr. Toretto.” She stood, reclaiming her cigarette with her usual sly look. Blair slipped into the robe she had worn the night before and blew out of the room like a whirlwind, leaving a near-empty bottle of vodka and a matching set of lingerie in her wake.

Hours later, Blair reemerged from her hotel room in a lacy, caramel-colored, three-quarter sleeved shift dress, a pair of black tights and her signature black heels. Her long hair hung in curls down her back; it bounced as she began to bang on the doors of her remaining drivers. Dominic stuck his head out of his door, wearing only his jeans.

“Good evening, Clarice,” He murmured, watching as Blair waited rather impatiently at the doors of the other two drivers.

“Get dressed!” She snapped; his eyes went immediately to the set of keys and box of cigarettes she held in her hand. The racing, it seemed, was going to be on her schedule. “Mikhail! Kolya! I swear to God!” She set off on a tirade of curses in languages Dominic couldn’t even identify as he returned to his dresser to retrieve a shirt, his thick wool coat and his keys. She was a mystery, the little firecracker - running to hide in his arms one moment and nearly snapping his neck the next. The burly man left his room yet again, obediently following the clicking of heels on the marble floor down into the lobby behind Kolya and Mikhail - who both looked quite disheveled.

Toretto was startled when Blair failed to pause at the doors of the lobby for him and the other two, as she normally would have; she was already in her car driving away when he reached the door of the Saleen. Kolya raced off into the darkness behind her, Mikhail in close second. With a sigh, Dominic turned the key in the ignition and took off with a roar of the 620 horses under the hood of the black Mustang.

Blair combed her bright curls back from her face as she exited her car, stretching her legs among the throngs of scantily clad girls- she wondered if the girl Vladimir had at the Hotel the day before was among the many faces in the crowd. Pushing thoughts of the dead from her mind, Blair approached the nearest man surrounded by girls - a tall, blond man named Jyrki - and began to negotiate the racing for the night. The Brit had already decided that Kolya was to be the mule, and that she and Dominic would have to race multiple heats in order to make up for the money lost on the Lexus that burned the night before.

After a short conversation with Jyrki in Finnish, Blair shouldered the black purse she always carried the money in and turned to see Dominic’s Saleen parked next to the M3 - the burly man leaned against the driver’s door of his car wearing the aviator shades Blair had gotten for him while blocking the advances of several small, drunken-looking girls. With a sigh, the redhead lit a cigarette as she walked over, noting where Kolya and Mikhail had parked as she did so.

Dominic watched her storm up out of the corner of his eye - the little girl could turn heads with ease, that was certain - catching the flick of two fingers in Kolya’s direction, enough to send him jogging from his car towards her. She could command damn attention, too. Toretto dismissed the girls who swarmed him with a wave, turning openly toward Blair now.

“Well?” He asked as Blair held the purse out to Kolya, who looked relieved to be stripped of his driving duties for the evening.

“I’m going to race.” As she perched on the hood of the Saleen, Blair scanned the crowd for the racers she was pitted against. It seemed to Toretto as if she knew every name, every racer at every race they attended. She didn’t scope out the cars as most racers would - no, Blair believed knowing what was under an opponent’s hood as an unfair advantage - instead, Blair observed the behaviors of the drivers.

“How many runs?” Toretto noted the drivers she was eyeing, watching as she breathed in the smoke from her cigarette.

“Three.” Dominic’s eyes widened as that telltale wry grin spread over Blair’s face. “Oh, don’t worry honey; you’re in three heats as well. Just not against me.”

“When?” The muscled man had noticed Kolya and Mikhail getting into their cars and proceeding to the finish line as Blair had taught them to, and turned to the Brit as she slid off the hood of his car, crushing her cigarette with a thin stiletto heel.

“Now.” She handed him a piece of paper with three numbers written on it before she crawled into her car.

The first two heats Blair had entered Dominic in were easy enough, as were her own. They easily won both - Blair clutched the pink slip and keys to a dark blue Escalade.

“What are you going to do with that?” Toretto asked as Blair pointed out the drivers for his last race.

“Sell it.” She shrugged, and lit another cigarette. She had taken to smoking a lot more in the past day or so, she had sent Kolya to a nearby corner store for a carton of Marlboro Reds. Blair smacked Toretto’s stomach with her right hand while breathing from one of the new cigarettes. “Now go, you’re up next.”

Dominic’s blunt fingers reached to caress her cheek, but Blair deftly ducked out of the way to discuss her last race in Finnish with one of the disgruntled-looking loser - probably the one who lost his car, Toretto thought as he climbed into his car and sped off.

The race was always the best ten seconds of Toretto’s life - the more he could do in one night, the better. The money was good, no doubt, but Dominic Toretto hadn’t started racing for the money; it was the rush that got him, the feeling he got as he idled up to the crudely-spray painted starting line of a quarter-mile track, the flash of buildings and other people’s cars as he blew past them in the inside corner of the ninety-seven degree turn in the Fin’s track, the laugh that tore itself from his throat when he won.

For Blair, however, racing had been born of necessity and formed an addiction. Instead of turning tricks as many of her peers had, she had turned to street racing to make her money. She had slowly been sucked into the street-racing life, all of the things for which Toretto had started racing. The money she earned now was an exorbitant perk, one that came from many years of hard work and many failed attempts to figure out the scene. Blair not only knew the scene, she mused as she taxied up to the starting line immediately after Dominic’s heat for the last high-grossing race of the night, and she controlled it like putty in her hands.

The redhead’s bare foot tickled the gas pedal as she waited for the flag girls to assemble themselves, her hand rested lightly on the soft leather of the gearshift. A cigarette dangled from her lips - she didn’t deem it necessary to refrain from smoking in her racing car, it helped calm her nerves - and her fast-paced racing playlist blared through the superior speaker system of the BMW. The flag girls paced back and forth before the line of five cars and for a single second before they brought the starting flag down, Blair wondered how much damage it would do to her car and her reputation if she were to hit one of them.

But once the flag came down, all of those thoughts were gone. Actually, all thoughts were gone - Blair was one with her machine, feeling when the perfect time to shift and pass was. She never breathed for the ten seconds of a race - just let the music and her car take her to the starting line, where she skidded to a halt before taking a deep breath and locating the losers pf the race for payment and her boys for congratulations.

After Blair’s race, they returned to the hotel for one more night’s rest. The next morning, the convicts returned to the Compound with their spoils.