VIPER || Oscar Piastri

Chapter 70

[POV: Narrator]

There are three well-documented stages to handling an emotional emergency.

Stage One: Recognize the feeling.
Stage Two: Process the feeling.
Stage Three: Overcome the feeling like an actual functioning adult.

That's the general idea.

Logical, right?

Andreanna Saunterre has a slightly different system.

Her personal three stages look more like this:

Stage One: Over-rationalize, or in clearer terms, lie to yourself and refuse at all costs to recognize that just by saying 'everything is FINE', does not mean everything is actually fine.

Stage Two: When you inevitably spiral, avoid everything and anything to do with the reason you're spiralling until everyone involved forgets what happened.

Stage Three: Panic.

So, let's play a game.

Say — hypothetically (and, mind you, I'm coming up with this situation completely off the top of my head) — you kissed someone. Twice. In one day.

Say you did it to make your emotionally confusing ex-best-friend jealous.

Say the other person in this situation — your accomplice, your fake boyfriend, if you will — then kissed you again. For no good reason.

What would you do?

Would you:

A) Calmly acknowledge the moment, communicate like a rational human being, and clarify boundaries moving forward?
B) Repress everything until it calcifies inside your soul and quietly takes over your entire being?
C) Set something on fire?

If your answer was secret option D: ghost him, pretend to suddenly love reading Nietzsche, and start a one-woman psychological operation to determine if your fake boyfriend is on Xanax, then congratulations.

You might be Andreanna Saunterre.

*

Andi, who was absolutely fine, was peacefully packing her things away in her and Oscar's hotel bedroom. Humming along to her upbeat playlist with a totally regular heartbeat, she kept herself busy by folding her clothes into suspiciously perfect little rectangles. Tossing socks into her suitcase, she considered colour-coding her tops one more time, or re-alphabetizing her toiletries.

The kiss (or—kisses, plural) was now a memory stored gently away in the Vault of Denial.

She was experiencing an Olympic level of chill.

Until she went to fetch the jacket she'd left on the sofa, and found Oscar Piastri standing mid-knock on the opposite side of the door she'd just swung open.

"Andi—" he said, and she knew that tone. "We should probably talk about—"

Wide-eyed, she reacted quickly. "Later. Talk, uh— talk later."