Hot Driver - S01 E02

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Hot Driver - S01 E02

Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 2

Ivory stood in the center of her perfect room, pressed both palms flat against her face for three full seconds, then dropped them and moved with sudden, explosive efficiency.

What followed was twenty-three minutes of the most dramatic getting-ready routine ever witnessed by bathroom tiles. Ivory Bennett did not simply take a shower. She descended upon her bathroom — a gleaming expanse of black marble, gold fixtures, a

rainfall shower the size of a small room — like a general preparing for battle. She was in and out in nine minutes flat, because she was late and she hated being late, and that hatred gave her a speed that she otherwise reserved exclusively for walking away from people who annoyed her.

She sat at her vanity and worked with focused, practised precision — moisturiser, primer, foundation, the kind of makeup that looked like no makeup but took fifteen minutes to perfect. Gold eyeshadow swept across her lids. A thin line of black.

Two coats of mascara on those already devastating lashes. A sweep of blush across those famous cheekbones. A coat of her signature dusty rose on those pink lips.

She pulled on the black Valentino suit that had appeared at her door — perfectly pressed, immaculate — a sleek double-breasted blazer and matching wide-leg trousers that sat on her curves like they had been designed for her body alone, because they essentially had been.

She buttoned it closed, smoothed it down, assessed herself in the full-length mirror with the critical eye of someone who would accept nothing short of excellence.

She fastened her gold earrings — long, geometric drops that caught the light when she moved. She stretched her dark hair into bouncy, deliberate curls that fell past her shoulders in glossy waves. A spritz of her perfume — Baccarat Rouge, applied to her wrists, her neck, her collarbone. Gold ring. Gold watch. Black heels that added four inches to an already impressive height.
She looked in the mirror.
The CEO of Ivy Fashion Empire looked back.

Ivory picked up her bag, gave the room one final sweeping look to confirm everything was in its correct place, and walked out the door.

Downstairs

The sound of her heels on the marble staircase announced her before she appeared — a crisp, decisive rhythm that made Hazel look up from her phone, Diana straighten slightly, and Arthur set down his newspaper.

Ivory descended the staircase with the kind of unconscious elegance that couldn’t be taught — straight spine, chin level, dark eyes already fixed on the front door like she was calculating the exact number of seconds between here and her car.

“Good morning,” she said, the words delivered cleanly, efficiently, like items being checked off a list. She pressed a kiss to her mother’s cheek as she passed the dining room entrance. “Morning, Mama. Hazel.”

“You look stunning,” Diana said warmly.

“Obviously,” Ivory replied, already moving toward the front door.
“Ivory.” Her father’s voice. Two syllables. The temperature dropped.
She paused. Turned with the slow, controlled patience of someone who did not have time for this.

“Sit down,” Arthur said. “Eat breakfast.”

“Dad, I’m late—”

“Sit. Down.”

A beat. Ivory looked at the door. Looked at her father. Looked at the door again.

“Please, baby,” Diana added, patting the empty chair beside her. “Five minutes.”

“Mama, I have a seven-thirty — well, I had a seven-thirty, which is now a seven-fifty-something because someone in this house cannot follow simple instructions—”

“Ivory.” Arthur’s voice had no volume but infinite weight.
She pulled out the chair. Sat. Placed her bag on the empty seat beside her with the careful deliberateness of someone handling an explosive. She reached for the fork and began eating with the precise, efficient energy of someone simultaneously calculating how many minutes they’d lost.

She had to admit — quietly, internally, in a place she would never say out loud — that the food was extraordinary. It always was. She speared a piece of smoked salmon, took a sip of orange juice.

“I need to visit Abigail,” she said, mostly to her mother. “It’s been three weeks.”

“She’d love that,” Diana said immediately, her face softening. “She was asking about you.”

“Is Tyler treating her well?”

“He adores her.”

Ivory made a small sound that wasn’t quite agreement, because she had never fully made her peace with the fact that Abigail — brilliant, warm, deserving Abigail — had ended up in an arranged marriage.

She had said her piece about that. Loudly. Several times. But Abigail always smiled and said she was happy, and Ivory had learned to look at the smile instead of the arrangement.

“Maybe this weekend,” she said, reaching for a croissant.

“Ivory.” Her father again. Different tone. Heavier.

She did not look up. “Hmm.”

“We need to talk about your personal life.”

The croissant paused halfway to her mouth. She set it back down. Here we go.

“I’m not sure what there is to discuss,” she said pleasantly. The pleasantness was a weapon.

“Don’t do that,” Arthur said, leaning forward, forearms on the table.

“Don’t give me that tone. You are twenty-seven years old.
Twenty-seven. Your younger sister—”
“Dad—”

“—your younger sister is married. Settled. Building a life.” His dark eyes, so like hers, fixed on her with the kind of focus that had won him boardrooms and lost him warmth. “I have arranged meetings with suitable men. Successful men. Men from good families. And you have cancelled every single one.”

“Because I don’t need a man arranged for me like a furniture delivery,” Ivory said. Still pleasant. The pleasantness was wearing thin.

“You need to stop hiding behind that company—”

“I built that company—”

“I know what you built,” Arthur said sharply. “I also know that building a company does not keep you warm at night. It does not build a family. You are twenty-seven, Ivory, and you have not been in a relationship since—” He paused, and something shifted — a brief, barely perceptible hesitation. “Since that boy broke your heart in university. You cannot let one man’s—”

The chair scraped back.

The sound cut across the dining room like a blade.

Ivory stood. Her face was composed. Her eyes were stone. She picked up her bag from the empty chair beside her with one smooth motion.

“I have a meeting,” she said quietly.

“Ivory—”

“Tell Abigail I’ll call her.” She looked at Hazel — a brief, soft glance, the only crack in the marble. “Have a good day at school, little one.”

“Ivory Bennett, sit back down—”
She was already walking.

“Ivory!” Diana’s voice, softer, concerned.

The front doors opened. Closed.

Outside, the morning air hit her like a reset — cool and clean and indifferent to the dining room she had just evacuated. She crossed the marble driveway with long, clipped strides, reached her car — a black Porsche Cayenne that gleamed like obsidian in the morning light — yanked the door open, and dropped into the driver’s seat.

She started the engine with more force than necessary.

Her hands gripped the steering wheel.

Since that boy broke your heart.

Her jaw tightened.

She pulled out of the driveway with a roughness that made the tyres protest, swung out onto the private road, and pressed her foot down.

The memories came anyway. They always did, uninvited, wearing the faces of people she had tried — and failed — to forget.

Flashback — Three Years Ago
Creston University. Junior Year.
There was a time — a version of Ivory that existed three years ago, before the armour, before the ice, before the company and the corner office and the deliberate, cultivated coldness — when she had been something close to soft.

Not weak. Never weak. But soft, in the way that people are when they believe they are loved.

His name was Ron Morales, and he was everything that a twenty-two-year-old Ivory had decided a boyfriend should be.
Tall, dark-haired, easy smile, charming in the way that certain men are charming — effortlessly, reflexively, dangerously. He had walked into her Business Ethics lecture on the first day of junior year, dropped into the seat beside hers, leaned over, and said, “You look like you’re already running a company in your head.”

And she had laughed. God help her, she had laughed.

They were the couple of Creston University. Everyone knew it, everyone acknowledged it, everyone had an opinion about it. Ron and Ivory. Ivory and Ron.

Their names had become a compound noun. They wore matching outfits to lectures — his black hoodie to her black jacket, his grey trainers to her grey heels, playing with the idea without being precious about it, and somehow making it look cooler than it had any right to.

They kissed in the hallways without apology, his hand finding hers in corridors, her head finding his shoulder in the library. They were the couple that other couples pointed to as evidence that love was real and worth having.

Ivory had loved him with the full, reckless, unguarded capacity of someone who had never been hurt before. She had told him things she had never said aloud. She had laughed with her whole body in his presence.

She had let him see the parts of her that existed beneath the Bennett name and the designer clothes and the inherited confidence — the parts that were uncertain, and tender, and real.

She had loved him more than she loved her family. More than she loved herself.

And so when, six months into their relationship, he asked her again — the way he always asked, with that particular combination of tenderness and pressure that made her feel both cherished and small at the same time — she had finally said yes.

It was a Friday night. His dorm room. Candles he’d lit that she would later understand were calculated. Music playing softly.

His hands gentle, his words gentle, I love you, Ivory, I love you—

She had hesitated. I’m not ready, Ron.

And his face had shifted — barely, just barely, but she had seen it — the impatience dressed as hurt. If you love me, you’ll trust me. If you keep doing this, I’ll start to wonder if you actually love me at all. I don’t know how much longer I can—
She had stopped him. Okay, she had said. Okay.

It had hurt. The kind of hurt that no one warns you about, that she had gritted her teeth against and breathed through while his face was buried in her neck. Afterward, she had pressed her face against his chest and listened to his heartbeat and thought: this is what love costs. This is what it means to trust someone.

He had waited until she was calm. Until she was soft and open and completely, entirely unguarded.

Then he had sat up.

“This was fun,” he had said, and something in his voice was different. “But I think we should end this.”

She had looked up at him. What?

“I’m done,” Ron said. He had the audacity to look almost bored. “I was never actually — look, it was a bet, alright? Me and a couple of guys. First one to sleep with Ivory Bennett gets five million from the group.” He shrugged — actually shrugged. “I won.”

The world had stopped.
Not dramatically. Not with sound or sensation. It had simply — stopped. Like a clock running out of battery. Like a song cutting off mid-note.
A bet.

Five million.
I won.

“That’s not funny,” she had whispered.
“I know,” he said. “It’s not a joke.”
She remembered the floor. She remembered her clothes. She remembered leaving his dorm and walking back across campus in the dark, and she remembered not crying — not yet, not then, because her brain hadn’t fully caught up to what had just been done to her.

The next morning, she had told herself it was a misunderstanding. She had gone back to his dorm. Knocked on the door.

The door had opened.
And it wasn’t Ron who answered.

It was Maeve Morales. Her best friend. In Ron’s shirt. With Ron visible in the background, sitting on the same bed, on the same sheets, looking entirely unsurprised.

What had followed was the kind of public humiliation that Ivory could still feel on her skin three years later. The students who saw. The whispers that started within hours. The post on the university blog — someone, somewhere, had photographed the moment she stood at that door, and the caption had read, “Ivory Bennett: Richer than God, still couldn’t keep her man. Bet she’s shocked lol.”

She had gone home. Locked her bedroom door. And stayed there for four months.
Four months of silence. Of grief so heavy it had a physical weight. Of crying until her body ran out of water and then lying dry-eyed in the dark, staring at the ceiling. Of her mother knocking softly on the door every day, leaving trays of food outside. Of Hazel, thirteen at the time, sliding handmade cards under the door with crayon drawings and the words “I love you Ivory you are the most beautiful person in the world.”

Four months of loss.

And then she had gotten up.
Because Ivory Bennett did not stay down. She had never been built for it.

She had wiped her face. Opened her laptop. And started planning.

End of Flashback.

The car tyres screamed slightly as Ivory took a corner faster than she should have, and she loosened her grip on the steering wheel by deliberate degrees.
Breathe.

She breathed.

Maeve and Ron were running Morales Beauty Store now. Playing CEO. Playing power couple. Smiling in press photos and posting milestones online and thinking — genuinely, foolishly thinking — that they had gotten away with it.

They hadn’t.

They were just still waiting for their consequence to arrive.
It’s coming, she thought, and something cold and precise settled in her chest like a chess piece clicking into place. Every single thing they took from me — they’re going to return it in pain. I’ll make sure of it.

She pressed the accelerator.
Brooke Residence — Same Morning

On the other side of Creston City, in a neighborhood that had never once made it onto a list of places to visit or aspire to, sat a small house on Albern Street that was held together mostly by stubbornness and the sheer force of its occupants’ love for each other.

The Brooke residence was modest in the way that only people who’d never known anything different could find dignified — a narrow two-storey building with a paint job that had once been cream and was now the color of old paper, weathered by seasons and never quite budgeted for repainting. The front step had a crack that had been there since Duane was twelve.

The gate squeaked on its hinges in a specific pitch that the family had long since stopped hearing. The small front garden held two plastic chairs, a pot of stubborn marigolds that Celeste refused to let die, and a washing line on which clothes dried in the wind because the dryer had given out eight months ago and hadn’t been replaced.
Inside, the house was small and warm and entirely, fiercely alive.

The kitchen smelled of instant coffee and the remnants of whatever Celeste had cooked the night before — tonight’s lunch being tomorrow’s miracle, the way it always was. The walls were decorated with things that cost nothing and meant everything — a school photo of Duane at fifteen, school photo of Luis at ten, a small cross above the kitchen door, a calendar with certain dates circled in red, a drawing Luis had made at age seven that read MY FAMILY above three lollipop figures of varying heights.

Celeste Brooke was fifty-one years old and the kind of beautiful that work and worry and love had made — deep-set warm eyes, dark skin that had never seen a skincare product more expensive than a drugstore moisturiser, hands that were permanently capable, permanently moving.

She was dressed for her cleaning job this morning — dark trousers, a light blue polo, non-slip shoes that she’d had for four years and resoled twice. Her hair was wrapped in a neat headscarf. She moved around the small kitchen with the particular efficiency of a woman who had learned to do everything quickly and waste nothing, because time and resources were both finite and precious.

At the kitchen table, eating a breakfast of bread and eggs, sat Luis Brooke, sixteen, all limbs and easy laughter, in his school uniform with his collar already crooked, scrolling through his phone with the boneless ease of a teenager who had not yet fully registered that mornings were an imposition.