Flight K109 (#1 ¬ Aiello Racing Series )

Elliot Ilves

 Mia spends the rest of the week sleeping on our couch. I take her to her mother's house whilst she's at work the next day so Mia can pick up her stuff and she's been staying in my apartment ever since. I offer her to use my bed and let me sleep on the couch instead but she's adamant about staying on the couch after the night in Vienna.

I shamelessly beg our manager, Luisa, to give Mia the job for the event. I may or may not have exaggerated Mia's situation a bit, but hey, she got the job.

I actually don't see Mia much, even though she's literally been living in my apartment. The team has been working me and Sandro to the bone. It's as if they can't decide if they wat us to do physical, sim testing, or strategy and thechnics so they've just decided we should do all of them. They've got us going in early and getting in late. And both of us are so exhausted we barely have energy to eat dinner, so, despite my every urge I force myself to sleep and get some rest instead of hanging out with Mia. The only time I see Mia outside of Dinner time is when I accidentally walk in on her in the bathroom, but that is a whole other story that I am too ashamed to share.

There's still a whole tension going on between us. I thought it would go away after Vienna, that it was just because of the situation we were in that night, but it hasn't. The night in Austria might have actually made it worse, because if I'm being blatantly honest, sleeping with Mia, waking up with her in the morning, having her all to myself for an entire day with no distractions, it's been all I've been able to think about all week. The only time she hasn't been on my mind is when the team PT has been making Sandro and I do workouts so hard that all we can focus on is not dying.

Thankfully we fly back to Estonia on Monday. Where I have Sascha and my Family to distract me. Jon has taken a week away from his big shot job in St. Petersburg to come visit home in Tallinn. Which is a bit annoying because it means I have to share a room with him whilst he's here, even though he's a grown ass man who would survive fine in a hotel for a week. In previous years he's just take Claudia's old room, but last winter my parents decided to turn it into a study / office. Thanks to 4/5 of my family being academics with desk jobs I was the only one against the decision. 

We have a big family dinner when Jon arrives on Tuesday. Being the youngest I get sat at the baby end of the table with my kid niece, it suits me fine anyways, considering the fact that all my family can seem to talk about is their big corporate jobs and social politics going on around the world. Spoiler alert; those two things are the furthest away from being my forte. 

I never did have the best grades in school, or much of an interest in academia in general, and I honest don't give two fucks about what the Croatian prime minister did at the royal wedding.

And my parents and siblings just don't get my life, they're not really sports people, definitely not motorsports people. They just try their best to support me the way they know how, which is through pep talks and weird legal analogies I definitely don't understand but pretend to for their sakes.

My father has just finished talking about some russian scandal when Jon turns to me.

"So baby brother," he starts, "how is it going in Italy?"

I still my face, I'm pretty sure I know where this is going and there's no way I'm going to let Jon rile me up about this. "It's going good, it's a great team and I'm doing well with them."

"What about your big decision? Any closer?"

There we go.

I take a drink of water before answering, I know exactly my brother's standpoint on the question of my career in motorsport. Which is that I shouldn't have one. He's been saying for years how motorsports as a sport is a waste of time and resources. How it isn't a real sport and it's just a way for rich people to waste some time and get famous through it. He's been telling me ever since I got serious about karting that I should just give it up and follow something useful, like chess, or Latin. He says that I shouldn't waste my time trying to further myself and just go to university and get a real job, like him and Claudia did.