Vee

You sigh, a fond, exasperated sound. Having a dog named Gretchen Wieners means accepting a certain level of high-maintenance sass. It was funny when you named her, a perfect joke for a tiny, cream-colored wiener dog who seemed to be full of secrets. It is slightly less funny when she’s actively ignoring you in favor of sniffing something that is, in all likelihood, the ghost of a croissant from someone’s picnic last Tuesday.

You lean back on the park bench, the wrought iron cool against your sundress, and close your eyes for a moment, just soaking it in. The gentle murmur of French and Italian, the distant hum of a supercar winding its way down Avenue Princesse Grace, the happy yapping of dogs. It’s a peaceful symphony.

The symphony is interrupted by a new sound. A frantic, happy scrabbling of claws on gravel, followed by a leash-jangle and a low, musical voice speaking in a mix of French and English.

“Doucement, doucement. Leo, calm down, please.”

Your eyes flutter open.

Standing by the gate is Charles Leclerc, looking somehow both exactly like he does on television and completely different. He’s not in a race suit, but in a simple white t-shirt and dark shorts, his hair artfully messy from the breeze. He’s wrestling with the clasp of a leash, and at the other end of it is a carbon copy of your dog. A small, cream-colored, long-bodied, short-legged dachshund, vibrating with the sheer, unadulterated joy of reaching a field of grass.

“Okay, okay, you win,” he laughs, finally unclipping the leash.

The dog is a missile. A low-to-the-ground, cream-colored torpedo of enthusiasm. And its target is Gretchen.

He barrels towards her. Gretchen, who had been engrossed in her clover investigation, looks up, her ears perking. She sees the approaching blur and, instead of her usual aloofness with strange dogs, she does something extraordinary. She wags her tail. Not just a polite little flick, but a full-body, a-stranger-is-a-friend-I-haven’t-sniffed-yet wag.

They meet in the middle of the lawn in a flurry of sniffing and tail-chasing. It’s an instant, profound connection. A dachshund love story for the ages.

Charles walks over, a sheepish, devastatingly charming smile on his face. He shoves his hands into his pockets. “Ah, sorry. He is … a lot.”

“Don’t be,” you say, your own smile blooming effortlessly. “Gretchen is usually the queen of social distancing. I’ve never seen her take to another dog so fast.”

“They are, euh, they look like twins.” He gestures towards the two dogs, who are now engaged in a chaotic game of chase that involves a lot of tumbling and playful nips.

“They really do,” you agree. “What’s his name?”

“Leo.”

“I love that. This is Gretchen.”

Charles’s eyebrows raise in amusement. “Gretchen? Like, from Germany?”

You can’t help but laugh, a real, genuine laugh that makes him smile wider. “No. Well, yes, technically. But her full name is Gretchen Wieners.”

He blinks. Once. Twice. Then his head tilts, a look of slow-dawning comprehension on his face. He lets out a sudden, surprised bark of laughter. It’s a wonderful sound, not performative or polite, but deep and real.

“Non. You did not.”

“I absolutely did,” you confirm, feeling a ridiculous surge of pride. “She’s a wiener dog. It felt like a moral obligation.”

“That is the best name for a dog I have ever heard,” he says, still chuckling. He runs a hand through his hair. “Now I feel bad. Leo is just Leo.”

“Leo is a great name! It’s classic. Strong. Lion-like.”

“He is not very lion-like,” Charles says, watching as Leo dramatically trips over his own feet while trying to catch Gretchen. “He is more like a small piece of bread with legs.”

You laugh again, covering your mouth with your hand. “A baguette?”

“Exactly! A tiny baguette.”

You both fall into a comfortable silence for a minute, just watching your identical dogs play. The golden light deepens, casting long shadows across the grass.

“You live around here?” He asks, his voice a little softer now.

“Just up the hill,” you say, gesturing vaguely. “Moved here about a year ago.”

“Ah, okay. Me too. Well, I have always lived here. But my apartment is new.”

“Right. Of course.” A silly thing to forget. “It must be strange. To have your hometown be this place.” You gesture around at the opulent, postcard-perfect scenery.

He considers this, his gaze distant for a second. “Sometimes. But most of the time, it is just home. Where my dog is, you know?”

“I know exactly,” you say, your eyes soft as you watch Gretchen roll onto her back, submitting to Leo’s playful attack. “It’s funny how they anchor you. Doesn’t matter where you are, as long as they’re waiting for you.”

“For sure,” he agrees. He turns his head to look at you, and his eyes, a warm, clear green, hold your gaze. There’s an intensity there you weren’t expecting, a flicker of something that makes the air feel suddenly warmer. “It is grounding.”

You feel a blush creep up your neck. You break the gaze, looking back at the dogs. “So, uh, does Leo have any other special skills? Besides the baguette impression?”

He grins, the moment broken but the warmth lingering. “He is very good at sleeping. A champion, really. He can sleep for twenty hours, I think. And he is very good at stealing my socks. And you? What about Gretchen Wieners?” He says her full name with a delighted reverence that makes you ridiculously happy.

“She’s an expert at judging people. She has this look … it can cut you to your very soul. She’s also a master manipulator. She’ll pretend she hasn’t been fed when she absolutely has. She has my parents completely wrapped around her little paw.”

“A clever girl.”

“The cleverest.”

You talk for what feels like five minutes but, when you glance at your phone, you see it’s been almost an hour. The sun is kissing the horizon now, painting the sky in shades of bruised purple and soft orange. The park is emptying out.

“Oh, wow,” you say. “I should probably get going. It’s her dinner time. And if the queen is not fed on time, there will be a rebellion.”

Charles nods, a hint of disappointment in his expression. “Yes, me too. Leo, he gets very dramatic.”

He whistles, a sharp, clear sound. “Leo, viens ici!”

You call out at the same time. “Gretchen! Time to go home, sweetie!”

The two cream-colored blurs, now thoroughly exhausted and panting happily, detach from each other and trot towards the sound of their respective owners’ voices. Or, at least, that’s the general idea. In their post-play haze, they seem to aim for the nearest tall human.

The little dog that arrives at your feet looks up at you with big, brown, adoring eyes, its tongue lolling out. You reach down and scratch behind its ears, the fur just as soft as you remember. “Good girl,” you murmur, clipping the leash onto its collar without really looking.

You stand up and smile at Charles, who is doing the same with the dog at his feet.

“It was really nice to meet you, Charles.”

“You too,” he says, and his smile is genuine. “And you, Gretchen Wieners.” He winks.

“Bye, Leo the Baguette,” you say with a little wave to the dog beside him.

As you walk away, a giddy, light feeling bubbles in your chest. It’s the kind of feeling you get from a perfect, unexpected moment. A little cinematic scene dropped into the middle of an ordinary day. You don’t ask for his number. He doesn’t ask for yours. It feels too transactional. This was just a nice moment at a dog park. Maybe you’ll see him again. The thought brings another smile to your face.

The walk home is pleasant. The dog trots happily by your side, only occasionally pulling to sniff at a particularly fragrant potted plant. When you get into the elevator of your apartment building, it licks your hand.

“You’re extra sweet today,” you coo, stroking its head. “Did you have fun with your new boyfriend?”

Inside your apartment, you unclip the leash. The dog immediately does a perimeter check, sniffing every corner of your living room with a seriousness that suggests it’s searching for contraband. This is normal. Gretchen always does this, reacquainting herself with her kingdom.

You go to the kitchen and pull out her food bowl — a ceramic one with ‘Her Majesty’ painted on the side. You fill it with her special, grain-free kibble and add a splash of water, just how she likes it.

“Dinner is served, my lady!” You call out.

The dog trots into the kitchen, gives the bowl a cursory sniff, and then looks up at you. And whines. A soft, confused little sound.

“What?” You ask. “It’s your favorite. Don’t be difficult.”

It ignores the bowl and nudges its head against your leg, looking for more pets.

This is the first red flag. Gretchen lives for her food. She would trample over a line of puppies for a single piece of kibble. She never, ever, turns down a meal.

“Are you feeling okay?” You ask, crouching down. You run your hands over the body, checking for any tenderness. It just wags its tail and tries to lick your face. Everything seems fine. Maybe it’s just tired from playing so hard.

You leave the food and go to the living room, flopping onto the sofa. The dog hops up next to you — another small, almost imperceptible oddity. Gretchen always waits for a formal invitation to come onto the couch. She sits, puts a single paw on the cushion, and stares at you until you pat the seat beside you. This one just launched itself up.

“You’re being very bold tonight,” you say, stroking its long back.

It snuggles into your side, letting out a contented sigh, and promptly falls asleep. Okay, this part is normal. The post-park crash. You turn on the television, keeping the volume low. After an hour, you realize the food in the kitchen is still untouched. That’s not right.

You gently nudge the sleeping form beside you. “Hey. You really need to eat something.”

The dog stirs, blinks its sleepy brown eyes, and then yawns, a wide, cavernous yawn. You smile and go to give it a belly rub, your fingers seeking out that perfect spot that makes its leg start thumping.

Your hand moves across its warm, soft belly. You rub and you rub. And then you stop.

Your brain, which has been happily coasting on the fumes of a charming encounter, suddenly slams on the brakes.

There is … anatomy here. Anatomy that Gretchen, a female dog, definitively does not possess.

You stare down at the dog. The dog stares back up at you, tail giving a lazy thump-thump-thump against the sofa cushion.

“Oh my god,” you whisper. The words hang in the quiet air of your apartment.

You gently lift the dog’s back leg. You confirm the evidence.

This is a male dog.

This is not Gretchen.

This is Leo.

“Oh my god.”

You have Charles Leclerc’s dog. Which means … Charles Leclerc has yours.

A wave of panic, so potent it’s almost nauseating, washes over you. You jump up from the couch. Leo — because this is definitely Leo — looks at you, confused by the sudden movement.

“Okay. Okay, okay, okay, think,” you say to yourself, pacing the length of your Persian rug. “How do you fix this? How do you fix this?”

You don’t have his number. You don’t know which apartment is his. Monaco is small, but it’s not that small. You can’t just go door-to-door. ‘Excuse me, are you a world-famous Formula 1 driver? And if so, have you accidentally stolen my dog?’

You snatch your phone, your hands trembling slightly. What do you even do? Post on Instagram? Tag him? That seems insane. Mortifyingly insane. Hi @charles_leclerc, sorry to bother you during what I’m sure is a busy schedule of being handsome and driving fast, but I appear to be in possession of your dachshund.

Leo hops off the couch and comes over to you, nudging his wet nose into your hand as if to say, ‘What’s all the fuss about? I’m comfy here.’

You look down at him, your heart sinking. “Your dad is going to think I’m a complete lunatic,” you tell the dog. “Or a dognapper. A very incompetent dognapper.”

You check the collar. It’s a beautiful, soft leather. There’s a small, silver tag attached. You flip it over, your heart pounding with a sliver of hope.

It’s engraved with one word: Leo.

Of course. Why would it have his phone number on it? He’s Charles Leclerc. That would be a security risk.

You sink onto the floor, pulling your knees to your chest. Across the principality, in another apartment that probably has a much better view than yours, is your sassy, judgmental, food-obsessed little girl. And she’s with a man you just met. A very famous, very handsome man who probably thinks you’re, at best, an idiot, and at worst, a kidnapper.

This is, without a doubt, the most bizarre and stressful thing that has ever happened to you.

Leo rests his head on your knee and lets out a tiny, sympathetic sigh.

***

Meanwhile, in an apartment overlooking the glittering expanse of Port Hercules, Charles is frowning at a ceramic bowl that says ‘LEO’ in bold, masculine letters.

The small, cream-colored dog sitting primly at his feet looks from the bowl, to him, and back to the bowl, her expression one of utter disdain.

“What is this?” Charles asks the dog, his voice laced with confusion. “It is your favorite. You love this.”

He had arrived home feeling lighter than he had in weeks. The encounter at the park had been … nice. Genuinely nice. The woman — he hadn’t even gotten her name, he realizes with a pang of regret — was funny and warm, with a laugh that made you want to do whatever it took to hear it again. And her dog’s name … Gretchen Wieners. He smiles to himself just thinking about it.

He’d walked in, unclipped Leo’s leash, and expected the usual routine: Leo would sprint to his water bowl, drink for a solid minute, then come demand his dinner with a series of impatient yaps.

But this dog hadn’t done that. It had walked calmly to the center of the room, sat down, and just watched him. Politely.

“Are you tired, mon bébé?” He’d asked, scratching behind its ears. The dog had leaned into his touch, but it felt different. Less frantic. More refined.

Now, it is refusing to eat.

“Leo, come on. Eat.”

The dog lets out a delicate little huff, turns its back on the bowl, and trots over to the sofa. It sits on the floor and looks up at the cushion, then back at Charles.

“What? You want up?”

The dog just stares.

“Okay …” Charles says, patting the seat next to him. “Come on, then.”

The dog, with an air of someone who feels they’ve finally been understood, hops gracefully onto the sofa and curls up in the corner, tucking its nose under its tail.

Charles stares at it. Leo is not a graceful hopper. Leo is a scrambler, a climber. Leo’s method of getting on the couch involves at least two failed attempts and a final, desperate lunge. This was … elegant.

A strange, unsettling feeling begins to prickle at the back of his neck.

He walks over to the sofa and sits down, observing the dog. It’s the same color. The same size. The same long body and short legs. But  is its face a little … narrower? Are its eyes a little more … almond-shaped?

“Am I going crazy?” He murmurs.

The dog opens one eye, regards him, and then closes it again, as if to say, ‘That is a question for your therapist, not for me.’

He leans back, trying to shake it off. He’s just tired. It’s been a long week. The dog is just tired, too. That’s all.

He scrolls through his phone for a while, replying to messages from his team, his family. The dog doesn’t move. Doesn’t snore. Leo snores. Not loudly, but a soft, whistling sound. This dog is perfectly, unnervingly silent.

Finally, he decides to go to bed.

“Okay, time for bed,” he says, standing up. “Come on, boy.”

The dog on the sofa doesn’t move.

“Leo?”

Nothing.

He walks over and gently picks the dog up. It’s warm and sleepy in his arms. He carries it towards his bedroom, talking to it in a low, soothing mix of French and Italian, the way he always does.

“… and tomorrow we can go for a long walk, eh? Maybe see your girlfriend again.”

He sets the dog down on its bed at the foot of his own. As he pulls back his hands, his fingers brush against its stomach.

His hand freezes.

He slowly, carefully, moves his hand again.

There is a distinct lack of something. Something that should be there. Something that has been there every single day of Leo’s life.

Charles’s blood runs cold.

He lets out a string of curses, a fluent, panicked mix of French, Italian, and English.

“Merde. Porca miseria. No, no, no.”

He turns on the main bedroom light, flooding the room in a harsh, bright glare. He kneels down and, with the gentleness of a bomb disposal expert, confirms his horrifying suspicion.

This is a female dog.

This is not Leo.

This is Gretchen Wieners.

He stands up so fast he feels a little dizzy. He runs a hand through his hair, his mind racing.

“Okay. Okay.”

He has her dog. The woman from the park. The funny, beautiful woman whose name he doesn’t even know. He has her dog. And she has his.

A hysterical laugh bubbles up in his throat. This is a disaster. But it’s also absurd. He pictures her, wherever she is, having the same moment of shocking discovery.

Unlike you, however, his panic is quickly replaced by a wry sense of determination. He can fix this. But how? He paces his bedroom, Gretchen watching him from her temporary bed with an expression of mild curiosity.

He pulls out his phone. He doesn’t have her number. He doesn’t know her name. But he knows where she was. And he has a very particular set of skills. None of which are useful in this situation.

He checks Gretchen’s collar. A simple leather one, with a gold, heart-shaped tag. He flips it over, hoping for a number, a name, anything.

The tag is engraved.

Gretchen Wieners

If I’m lost, my mom is probably ugly crying.

Charles reads it. Then he reads it again. And then he throws his head back and laughs. A loud, genuine, relieved laugh that echoes in the silent apartment.

“Oh, you are kidding me,” he says to the dog, a massive grin spreading across his face. “Your mother is a comedian.”

Gretchen thumps her tail once, as if to say, ‘The best.’

The tag is useless for contact information, but it’s a jolt of pure personality. It reminds him so clearly of her laugh in the park. The stress melts away, replaced by an overwhelming urge to see her again.

He has to find her.

He has a plan. It’s simple. It’s perhaps a little optimistic. But it’s all he’s got.

He will go back to the dog park first thing in the morning. And he will pray that she has the exact same idea.

***

You did not sleep.

You spent the night with a very cuddly, very sweet male dachshund who seemed thrilled to be having a sleepover. Leo, it turns out, is a world-class snuggler. He burrowed under the covers and pressed his warm little body against your back all night. It was nice. But it wasn’t Gretchen.

Every tiny sound from the hallway had you jumping, half-expecting a knock on the door from a frantic, or angry, Charles Leclerc. You imagined him with Gretchen, who you know for a fact is a bed-hog and will systematically push a person to the very edge of the mattress over the course of a night. You hope she hasn’t declared a coup and claimed his bed for herself.

At 6 AM, unable to lie there any longer, you get up. Leo follows you, stretching his long body with a groan.

“Okay, new friend,” you say, your voice rough with exhaustion. “Here’s the plan. We are going back to the scene of the crime.”

You get dressed with a sense of grim purpose, pulling on jeans and a simple sweater. You forgo makeup. This is a rescue mission, not a fashion show. You clip the leash onto Leo’s collar, your hands clammy.

“Please be there, please be there, please be there,” you chant under your breath as you walk out the door.

The morning air is cool and fresh, the sky a pale, promising blue. Monaco is still sleepy, the streets quiet save for the early-morning hum of street cleaners and the cry of gulls. The walk to the park feels ten times longer than it did yesterday. Leo trots beside you, sniffing the air, perfectly content. He has no idea of the international dog-swapping crisis currently unfolding.

As you approach the gates of the park, your heart is a frantic drum against your ribs. The park is mostly empty. An elderly man throwing a ball for a golden retriever. A woman jogging on the perimeter path.

And then you see him.

He’s standing near the same bench from yesterday, looking out over the grass. And at his feet is a very familiar, very regal cream-colored dachshund.

Relief washes over you so intensely your knees feel weak.

“Gretchen!” You cry out.

Charles turns at the sound of your voice. His face breaks into a wide, relieved smile. Gretchen’s head snaps up, her ears perked, and the moment she sees you, her tail starts whipping back and forth like a metronome on high speed.

At the same time, Leo spots Charles and lets out a series of excited yips, pulling on the leash.

You half-walk, half-run towards each other, meeting in the middle of the lawn like soldiers being reunited in a black-and-white movie.

“I am so sorry,” you both say at the exact same time.

You stop a few feet from each other, a little breathless, and then you both start to laugh. It’s a slightly hysterical, sleep-deprived, utterly relieved sound.

“I am so, so sorry,” you say again, crouching down to unleash Leo, who immediately bounds over to Charles, jumping up on his legs. “I didn’t even look. I just clipped the leash and walked away. I feel like the worst person on the planet.”

Charles is doing the same, unclipping Gretchen, who sprints the last few feet and practically leaps into your arms. You bury your face in her soft fur, inhaling her familiar dog-smell. “Oh, I missed you, you little monster.”

“Non, non, it is my fault,” Charles says, ruffling Leo’s ears. “I was … I think I was a bit distracted.” He looks up at you, and the meaning is clear in his warm eyes. “I am just happy you are here. I was not sure if you would come.”

“Where else would I go?” You say, stroking Gretchen’s back. “I had your dog hostage. I was about five minutes away from creating a city-wide amber alert.”

He chuckles. “I saw the tag on her collar.”

You groan, hiding your face in your hands. “Oh, god. You saw that.”

“The part about the ugly crying?” he says, his smile teasing. “It was very, uh, descriptive. I felt I had a responsibility to prevent this.”

“Mortifying. Absolutely mortifying.”

“I thought it was charming,” he says softly.

You look up, your cheeks flushing. “So, how was she? Was she a nightmare? Did she steal your side of the bed?”

He laughs. “She is a princess, for sure. She refused to eat from Leo’s bowl. She would not get on the sofa until I formally invited her. And yes, she sleeps horizontally. I think I had maybe ten centimeters of the bed last night.”

“That sounds about right,” you say, shaking your head. “Leo was an angel. He’s the world’s best cuddler. And he didn’t eat either. He just whined at Gretchen’s ‘Her Majesty’ bowl and looked at me like I was trying to poison him.”

“He is not used to such a fancy dish,” Charles says. “He is a simple man. A baguette.”

You both smile, the morning sun warming your faces. The dogs, happy to be with their rightful owners, are now sniffing each other again, their crisis averted, their world restored to its proper order.

An easy silence settles between you, filled with the relief of the situation being resolved. But underneath it, there’s a new tension. The excuse for seeing each other is gone. The dogs are back where they belong. This could be another goodbye.

You can’t let that happen.

He can’t let that happen.

“So,” he says, breaking the silence. He shoves his hands in his pockets, a gesture you’re starting to find incredibly endearing. “To prevent, you know, a future canine mix-up of this magnitude …”

“… we should probably be more careful,” you finish for him, your heart starting to beat a little faster.

“Yes. That. But also, maybe I should have your number,” he says, his gaze direct and hopeful. “Just in case. For emergencies.”

“Right,” you say, your voice a little shaky. “Emergencies. Like if I accidentally take your dog again.”

“Exactly,” he says, a playful glint in his eye. “Or if, for example, I wanted to ask if you were free for dinner sometime, to properly apologize for my part in the dognapping.”

A huge, brilliant smile spreads across your face. “I think I could be free for that particular emergency.”

“Good,” he says, his own smile mirroring yours. “That is very good.”

You pull out your phone, and he pulls out his. You trade numbers, your fingers brushing as you hand his phone back to him. A tiny spark zings up your arm.

“I’ll text you,” he says, his voice low.

“Okay,” you breathe out.

He lingers for a moment, as if he doesn’t want to leave. “I never got your name yesterday.”

You tell him. He repeats it, testing it out, the sound of it in his accent making your stomach do a little flip.

“It was very nice to meet you. Properly, this time,” he says.

“You too, Charles.”

He gives a final scratch to Gretchen’s head. “Be good for your mother, Princess.” Then he looks at Leo. “Come on, baguette. Let’s go home.”

You watch him walk away, Leo trotting happily by his side. Just before he exits the park, he turns and gives you one last smile and a wave.

You wave back, your hand feeling floaty and light.

You look down at Gretchen, who is looking up at you with an expression that is somehow both smug and loving.

“Well,” you say, clipping her leash back onto her collar. “I guess you’re a pretty good wingwoman after all.”

A location that blinked Melbourne like a dare, and five black-and-white photos that managed to say everything and nothing at once. Cropped close. A mouth, a hand, the outline of a shoulder. A pair of thighs in compression shorts that frankly should have been illegal. You’d stared too long at that one. There was no context or caption, only the unspoken promise of ruin.

You told yourself you were there for amusement. For attention you could throw away. You uploaded one photo. Jaw turned, mouth parted, collarbone exposed. Let them wonder. Your bio read: said i wouldn’t do it. look at me now. 

Then you swiped. And swiped. And swiped. Until you found him. 

You hovered on the profile longer than you meant to. He had athlete written all over him—but in the subtle way. The kind that didn’t need to shout. The kind that let the shape of a thigh do the heavy lifting.

You matched in under an hour.

He messaged first. 

O: You look like you'd break hearts for sport.

You: only on weekends.

O: Lucky it’s Friday, then.

The rhythm established itself fast. Snark edged with suggestion. A kind of conversational sparring that hummed beneath your skin. He was quick. Dry. Almost too confident, but not in the overcompensating way. In the way of someone who knew what they looked like when they made you come.

O: What are you wearing?

You: what makes you think I’m wearing anything?

O: God, you’re going to be a problem.

You: that’s the hope.

You asked once, joking, if he was some kind of model. He wrote:

O: Not professionally. But people look.

So, yes. He never lied.

It’s partly on you. You never asked for a face. The not-knowing made it worse. Better. More dangerous. Your imagination filled in the blanks with reckless confidence. His voice, when he finally sent a voice note, was low. Smooth. A little amused, a little deliberate.

“Say please,” he’d said in jest, and you replayed it a couple of times in the dead of the night.

You hadn’t swiped on anyone since. Not once. Not when you were bored. Not even when he took twelve hours to reply and you told yourself you didn’t care. The messages became a fixture. A heartbeat.

You’d catch yourself reading and rereading his replies like they were scripture. One hand between your legs. One word in your mouth. You never told him how far he’d gotten under your skin. He never asked.

You should have known.

Maybe not at first. Not in the beginning, when it was all thigh pictures and veiled threats and that smirking voice note that made your knees go warm. But later. Somewhere between the third and fourth night he sent you a recording at two in the morning, voice dipped low and rough with sleep—or maybe just want.

“Touch yourself,” he had murmured. A rasp. Something peeled open. “Slowly. I want you aching first.”

And you did it. God, you did it. Hand slipping under the waistband of your sleep shorts like muscle memory, breath catching as you recorded something back—a whispered thank you, half a whimper. A photo, too. Of the aftermath. Of what he could reduce you to. 

You’d never been this person before. Not with strangers. Not even with the ones who weren’t strangers. But something about O made it feel less transactional. 

It wasn’t just about the sex. He told you little things in the witching hours, when neither of you could sleep and your phones became lifelines.

O: Had a girl once. Didn’t work out.

You didn’t ask why. You didn’t have to. The way he wrote it told you enough. And more: 

O: Got a place in Melbourne. Not there much.

You: why not?

O: Work. Travel. Same old.

He never said what he did. You didn’t ask. 

There were nights he’d vanish. You’d tell yourself not to care. You’d go to the gym, go to sleep, try to fuck someone else and never follow through. And then he’d reappear with a two-minute audio clip that would leave you soaked and shaking.

You remember one in particular. The voice, deeper than usual. Accent thicker. Like he’d stopped pretending to be anonymous.

“Good girl,” he said after you sent him a recording of your own. Barely a whisper, just the sound of your breathing, your fingers, his name almost slipping out. “That’s it. Bet you’re so fucking wet right now. You always are for me.”

You should have known.

But you were sleep-deprived. Starved. Touch-drunk on someone you’d never seen, never held, and yet felt like you already knew.

Three days later, he asked if you wanted to meet.

O: You still up?

You: always for you.

O: Meet me. Tomorrow night. Your side of the city.

You: you sure you want to break the spell?

O: I want to see you fall apart in person.

You stared at the screen for a long time. Your mouth dry. Your legs already aching. You typed and deleted three different versions of yes before you landed on a simple thumbs up.

He sent a location pin as a reply. 

A restaurant. Not far. Not loud. Expensive enough to say this wasn’t just about sex, but discreet enough for you to wonder what you were getting into. 

You charged your phone. Shaved everything. Told yourself this was just another night. That you wouldn’t be disappointed, wouldn’t be shocked. That he could be some balding tech bro or a failed actor or worse, and you’d still survive it.

But deep down, you knew.

Maybe not the whole truth. You knew, instead, that this would ruin you one way or another. 

On the day of, you see him before he sees you. Or maybe he sees you first and just pretends he doesn’t. Either way, there’s a lag. A beat suspended between knowing and not-knowing. Then he walks over.

Baseball cap. Hoodie. Sunglasses, even though it’s dark inside and no one here gives a shit. Dressed like a man trying very hard not to be looked at, which, of course, makes everyone look twice.

He takes the seat across from you.

You stare.

Not at the mouth, which you’ve imagined. Not at the hands, which you’ve dreamt of. Not even at the jaw, sharp and familiar. No.

The eyes.

That’s what does it.

You exhale. Slow. Controlled. “You’re joking.”

He lifts the menu. “Hi to you too.”

“You’re fucking joking.”

“I’m really not.”

“Oscar Piastri?” you say it low, like a curse. He flinches anyway.

“Technically,” he says, adjusting his cap, “I never told you I wasn’t.”

You scoff. Sharp. Disbelieving. “Oh, fuck off with that.”

“Did I ever give you a fake name?”

“No,” you admit. “Just a letter. Like a Bond villain.”

His mouth twitches. Not quite a smile, but close. “Did I lie about where I live?”

“No.”

“Did I say I wasn’t Australian?”

You fold your arms. “So that’s the bar, then? You didn’t technically lie, so everything’s fair game?”

He sets the menu down. His hands are steady. “I didn’t lie,” he repeats, quieter now. More serious. “I just didn’t say everything.”

Your gaze narrows. “And what, exactly, were you omitting?”

He shrugs, like it's nothing. Like it's obvious. “That I’m me.”

“You are,” you agree flatly. “Which is exactly the problem.”

He tilts his head, a mockery of innocence. “How do you know who I am?”

“Don’t bullshit me like that,” you huff. 

“I’m not bullshitting anyone.”

“You drive for McLaren. You’re on billboards. You’re on TikTok. You're on the back of some guy's hoodie literally right now,” you say, jerking your chin toward a fan near the bar. “I live in this country. Everyone either wants to marry you or throw eggs at your car."

He smiles, crooked. “And you?”

You pick up your water glass. Raise it halfway to your mouth.

He watches. Waiting.

“Do you love me or hate me?” he rephrases. 

You sip. Let the silence stretch. Let it smolder.

He doesn’t know, you think. He doesn’t realize he’s already made you come four times with just his voice. Doesn’t realize you still keep one of the recordings saved under a boring filename, like MeetingNotes.mp3, so no one ever asks.

You swallow. Set the glass down gently. “Ask me again after dessert.”

His grin sharpens. He leans forward, arms braced on the table, voice low and amused. “If dessert’s anything like your last voice note,” he stage-whispers, “we’re both fucked."

You just smile in response. A little cruel. A little inviting.

Dinner is—annoyingly perfect.

The food is forgettable. The conversation, less so.

Oscar is better in person than you want him to be. Wry. Self-contained. Polite, but not boring. He orders sparkling water and something seared. You get pasta you won’t finish. He doesn’t talk about the car, or the team, or what it’s like to be twenty-something and publicly dissected. 

Instead, he tells you about the time he forgot his passport before a flight to Singapore, about a hotel in Japan where the toilet kept playing jazz, about how he once learned to cook for his ex and now only knows how to make three elaborate dishes he no longer eats.

Sometimes, when he hits the punchline, his voice dips. A cadence that slides lower, smooths out. The accent thickens. Familiar. Unmistakable.

It hits you like a bruise. He’s used that voice on you. You grip the stem of your glass a little tighter, and he notices. 

“You’re staring,” he says lightly, not looking up from his plate.

You arch a brow. “So are you.”

He shrugs, barely containing a smile. “Only fair.”

The rest of the meal passes in rhythm. You say something cutting. He volleys it back. There’s a pulse beneath every word. You can feel it in your knee bouncing under the table. In the way he keeps adjusting his sleeves, his watch, the angle of his posture.

Then, without ceremony, he calls for the bill.

It arrives like a closing chapter. No questions asked. No pretense. The decision already made.

He walks you to the curb with one hand in his pocket and the other brushing yours just enough to make your pulse trip. He doesn’t ask where you’re both heading. 

Neither of you speak on the cab ride. Tension coils in the silence, warm and anticipatory. Your thighs press together. His knee bumps yours once and neither of you moves away. He watches the city roll by. You watch the reflection of his jaw in the window.

By the time you get to your building, you’re drowning in it. Want. Nerves. That stupid, low ache he used to pull from you with nothing but a breath in your ear.

He follows you up without asking. You unlock your door with hands that only barely shake. Step aside.

He enters like he’s been here before, like he owns it. Maybe he does. A little.

You close the door behind you. Lean your back against it. Heart banging like it wants out. Oscar turns. Looks at you. Doesn’t move.

“You gonna kiss me,” you ask, voice too steady, “or just stand there like a fucking statue?”

His mouth curves. Slow. Measured. “Was waiting for the invitation.”

You walk toward him with something sharper than grace. Hunger dressed in confidence. He doesn't step back, but doesn't reach first.

You kiss him like it costs you.

Because it does.

Oscar kisses you like he’s starving.

Because he is.

Your hands find his jaw. His neck. The hair at the back of his head. His grip lands on your waist, then your hips, then your ass. He pulls you closer, and it’s like gravity itself rearranges.

You already know he’s going to be your favorite mistake.

The bedroom is darker than you left it.

Oscar doesn’t ask to be led. He walks in like he knows the way—flicks the light on low, toes off his shoes, rolls up his sleeves. You pause in the doorway. He glances back.

“Are you going to hover there all night, or…”

You arch a brow. “Or?”

Oscar grins. It’s lazy and confident, the way you’ve seen in those Instagram reels where he’s being sprayed with champagne. “Or you can come show me how grateful you are I didn’t bail.”

You scoff, but your feet move anyway.

He reaches for you halfway across the room, tugging you close by the waist. Hands hot and steady. When his mouth brushes yours again, it’s rougher. His tongue dips in like he owns the space. Like he’s checking if it’s still his.

You pull back just enough to speak. “You think you’re cocky enough for both of us?” you breathe. 

“Oh, sweetheart.” That damned accent. Uncut. All bite and heat now, slinking down your spine. “You haven’t seen cocky yet.”

He kisses you again. Deeper this time. His teeth scrape your bottom lip, and your knees nearly buckle. His hand slides between your legs, cupping through your clothes. You have to bite back a groan. 

He freezes. Pulls back just enough to murmur against your mouth. “Christ. You’re soaked.”

Your face heats. You go to swat his hand away, but he catches your wrist, fingers curling around it tight. Not painful. Commanding. “Don’t.”

The word lands like a struck match.

You glare up at him. “Don’t what?”

He steps back, dragging you with him until the backs of your knees hit the bed. Then he lets go. “Lie back,” he commands. 

You don’t move.

He tilts his head. Patient. Dangerous. “C’mon. You know how this goes,” he says. “I’ve heard you. Watched you.”

Your throat tightens. Heat curls, low and shaming. “You want me to—”

“Touch yourself, yeah.”

He says it like a challenge. Like a dare. Like he already knows you’re going to.

You hesitate. Try to find some footing in wit. Pride. Something. “Bit arrogant, aren’t you?”

Oscar raises one shoulder in a shrug, then steps back and lowers himself into your desk chair, spreading his thighs like he’s settling in for a show. That stupid fucking hoodie still on. That face calm, unreadable, but eyes already locked to your hands.

“Not arrogance if I’m right.”

You sit. Slowly. Let the silence drag.

His tone softens. Just a notch. “You want to stop, say it. I’ll go.”

You don’t.

You stretch out against the mattress, spine arching, one hand brushing up under your dress. Slowly. Testing.

His breath catches. Just barely. But it counts.

You pull your dress up. The air bites at the wet heat between your thighs. He sees it. Sees all of you now, bare and hesitant and trembling despite the attitude.

“There we go,” he murmurs. “Attagirl.”

You flush hard.

His voice, when it comes again, is the same one from the recordings.

Low. Measured. Laced with that accent that makes you ache in places you didn’t know could ache. The kind of voice that doesn’t ask. It tells. Demands. Wraps around your spine and pulls.

“Start slow,” he says. “Middle finger first. You know where.”

You hesitate. Maybe on principle. Maybe out of spite. His gaze doesn’t waver.

You part your thighs, breath trembling, and slip your hand between them. Skin already flushed, hypersensitive. One touch and you’re jolting like you’ve been struck. There’s too much heat. Too much memory. Too much of him already lodged inside your head.

The way he looks at you like you’re art and ammunition at once. Something precious. Something dangerous. His to admire. His to detonate.

He leans back in your chair—your chair—and makes it his. Arms crossed. Legs spread. Casual dominance wrapped in a stupid McLaren jacket. 

“Perfect,” he murmurs, just above a whisper, just enough to sting. “Now pull those pretty little panties to the side, yeah?” 

You slide your finger through the slick heat pooling between your thighs, pressing in just enough to tease. Not enough to satisfy. Not yet. You arch, a quiet curse slipping through clenched teeth. You can feel your heartbeat everywhere.

“God,” you hiss. “Please—”

He cuts you off with a look that’s amused, stern, and fucking devastating. “Don’t beg. Not yet,” he says. “You’re the one who got yourself off without me all this time. Show me how.”

You want to hit him. You want to kiss him. You glare instead, but your hand doesn’t stop moving. Faster now, the slick sound of it filling the room.

Shame and arousal knot together. Coiling.

Oscar’s next command slices through the air like a whip. “Two fingers.”

You obey. You hate that you do. You love that he knows you will. You slide in a second finger, walls clenching around the stretch, breath catching in your throat. You’re wetter than you thought possible—your body a traitor, your pride fraying at the seams.

The sounds you’re making now are shameless. Gasps. Moans. Pleas that you swallow back before they fall.

Oscar watches like a critic. Like he’s appraising a performance he commissioned.

“Fuck, look at you,” he drawls. “Dripping all over your sheets like a filthy little thing.”

Your eyes squeeze shut, shivering from the inside out.

“Open your eyes,” he snaps. “I want you watching me while you fall apart.”

You listen. And you’re close now—so close your legs twitch from the tension, the ache curling under your skin like fire. “Holy shit,” you breathe, and Oscar takes it as a sign to dole out his next order. 

“Faster. Come on,” he prompts. “Fuck yourself like you mean it.”

You don’t think. You just do. Obeying the voice that’s ruined you so many times before. Your wrist strains and your body trembles; everything else disappears.

He tilts his head, that cruel smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “What’s the matter? Need my cock already?”

You whimper. It escapes you before you can bite it back. Your wrist stutters. You wince.

His eyes flash, sharp. “Keep going. I didn’t say stop.”

“Oscar—”

“You’re so greedy, aren't you? Want me to do all the work,” he taunts. “Want to lie there, all needy and wet, and be ruined. But you can do this. You’ve done it before.”

You’re a breath away now. A single exhale from breaking. Everything inside you is wound tight and aching for release. A sob crawls out from the back of your throat as you go back to pumping your fingers into your sopping cunt, trying to chase pleasure for the man coaxing you towards it. 

Oscar softens, just slightly. Just enough to make it worse. 

“Good girl. Come for me,” he says. “Come just like you did the night I told you to come on your fingers and thank me after."

And you do.

It hits like a wave—sudden and brutal. Your whole body locks, jerks, shatters around your own hand. You sob his name. Mouth open, eyes wide. Locked on his.

You’re still twitching when he lunges.

Oscar’s mouth catches yours mid-breath, swallowing your shudder. It’s not gentle. It’s selfish. Desperate. The kind of kiss that tastes like claiming and salt and the bruised edge of your own name.

You gasp into it, and he’s already over you, under you, everywhere. All teeth and hands and heat. Fingers slick from your own body. Tongue pressing past your lips as if he owns the next breath you’ll take.

Clothes disappear in pieces. Dress shoved up, then off. His shirt peeled from his skin. Fingers catching in your straps, tugging them down your arms. He kisses the hollow of your throat, then bites the underside of your. Your hips squirm as he presses a thigh between them, pinning you down, rolling against you. It’s clumsy, chaotic, intimate in a way that feels dangerous.

“Fuck,” he hisses into your mouth. “I’ve thought about this. So many times. You like this part, don’t you? Being spread out. Slick. Shaking. Waiting for someone to make you come again.”

You try to speak, but he steals your answer with another kiss. Deep, consuming. He doesn’t let you come down. He only keeps pushing, talking, layering heat over heat until your mind goes foggy with it.

“You know what got me off the hardest? The idea of your fingers deep inside, while I talked you through it. And you were doing it. Weren’t you? Playing along like a good little whore. Sending me photos. Moaning my name like you knew it already.”

His hand slides down your side, grazing your breast, your ribs, the trembling dip of your waist. He palms your thigh, pushes it open wider.

“Oh my God,” you manage to choke out, just as he moves back to strip away his clothes. 

Shirt, pants, briefs. It’s almost clinical, the way he undresses. Efficient. No hesitation. No shame.

And then he’s there. Gloriously there. Pale cock standing at attention, with an angry red tip leaking like a faucet. 

You blink. You stammer.

It’s the first time you’ve seen him like this. Hard and flushed and heavy, thick veins along the shaft. And it’s—bigger than expected. Realer than you let yourself imagine.

Your breath catches. Your thighs tense.

He notices. Oscar’s voice drops, losing some of its edge. It’s not gone, but it’s muted. Softer. Measured.

“You alright?” he asks, cocking his head. There’s a gentleness to his eyes that makes your heart ache and your clit throb. “You can tap out. I mean it. I won’t be mad.”

Your mouth is dry. Your thighs are wet. You nod, then, realizing you need to say something out loud, you whisper, “I want this. Want you.” 

The moment stretches. A beat. A breath. His hand brushes your knee, the gesture grounding. Patient.

His smile returns. Slow. Wolfish. “Good,” he hums, “because I’m going to ruin you.”

He crawls back over you, dragging the head of his cock through your slick folds, teasing your entrance but not pushing in. Yet.

“Gonna fuck you slow first,” he murmurs, voice thick. “Make you feel every inch. Then I’ll fuck you the way I’ve been thinking about since the first time you sent me that little audio message. You remember? All breathless, whispering thank you like you were praying.”

His fingers dig into your hips, holding you steady as he shifts forward.

“Thought about you with your legs spread, touching yourself just like I told you to. Thought about bending you over this bed, and making you say please until you cried.”

You do. You remember too well.

“Say it again,” he murmurs, pressing against you. “Say thank you, Oscar.”

Somehow, you manage to choke it out. “Thank you, Oscar,” you whimper. 

Finally, finally, he begins to press his tip in. It’s a stretch that borders on unbearable. His jaw clenches. Your mouth falls open. Nails scrape along his shoulder blades, searching for purchase.

He groans into your neck. “That’s it. Let me in. Let me fuck you open.”

You can’t speak. Can’t think. Only feel the drag of him, the weight of it, the way he fills you up.

Oscar braces a hand beside your head, breath hot against your cheek. “You’re so fucking tight,” he grunts. “You were made for this. Made for me.”

You arch. He presses deeper, and deeper, until there’s nothing left between you but the slow, obscene drag of his cock inside your cunt. There’s the sound of your own breathing, ragged and real.

There’s the knowledge—shared and silent—that there’s no going back from this.

He finds a rhythm quickly. Like he’s been mapping it in his head for months. Maybe longer.

Each thrust is deliberate, brutal in its consistency. It’s as if he’s trying to etch himself into the softest part of you, and he is. You know he is. You feel it. Over and over. A litany in motion. Sharp hips, sharp tongue, sharp wit. The shape of him inside you becoming a kind of prayer.

“You look so good like this,” he rasps, breath hot against your throat. “Fucked open. Finally where you belong.”

It’s filthy. Cruel. Exactly what you thought you wanted. Your body flinches. Tighter around him. Unintended. A tell. The smallest betrayal.

His hips stutter mid-thrust. He watches you, eyes narrowing, brain ticking. Calculating. When he smiles knowingly, it’s the kind that feels like danger wearing a soft edge. Something mean with manners.

“Oh,” he says slowly. “Is that what does it for you? Not when I call you my little whore, but when I say you look good?”

You glare, trying to keep your dignity intact, your breath steady. “Fuck you.” 

“I am fucking you, pretty girl.” 

You clench down again. Oscar chuckles breathlessly, the sound low and mean.  “There it is again,” he murmurs, rolling his hips slowly, the grind unbearably deep. “Tight little squeeze. Your pussy’s telling on you, darling.” 

You hate him. You don’t. You want him. You want more. Want it mean, want it sweet, want it all at once. Contradictions melting in your gut.

He leans in, presses a kiss to your temple. Tender. Too tender. A cruel kind of affection. It makes your stomach turn in the best way. “You’re perfect, you know that?” he whispers in a tone that borders affection. 

Your body sings. It sings around him. Like a lock clicking open. Like truth breaking skin.

Oscar makes a low sound in his throat, equal parts reverence and smugness. The sound of discovery. “Fuck, sweetheart,” he groans, suddenly gentle in voice but not in pace. His hips are snapping hard. “You want to be worshipped? Want me to treat you like a princess?” 

You want to scoff. You can’t. Your pride’s still here, somewhere, buried under want. But your thighs are trembling.

You’re panting. Clutching. Tethering yourself to whatever's left. Oscar’s right there, relentless. Praising you like a prayer whispered between thrusts. As if every compliment earns him another inch.

“So tight. So fucking perfect.”

“You’re taking me so well. Never felt anything like this.” 

“You were made for me, baby. You’re—hng—sweetest pussy I’ve ever had.” 

Your orgasm builds again. Tangled. Tense. Threatening to snap.

He sees it. Feels it. The way your body contracts. The small, high-pitched sounds spilling from you. The way your hand grips his bicep like it’s the only thing keeping you tethered to earth.

“Not yet,” he says, a command. “Stay right there. Want to feel you fall apart. Want to watch it happen.” 

He slows, the bastard. His pace turns into deep, dragging thrusts that leave you gasping. He draws it out until it hurts—the pleasure of it all. Until you’re clawing at him, not to escape, but to survive.

“That’s it,” he breathes, brushing his mouth against your jaw. “My good girl. Always so good for me.”

You’re on the edge. Hanging by a thread. Every nerve ending tuned to him, to this.

You just look up at him—eyes wide, mouth parted, vulnerable in the worst way. The best way. “Can’t hold it back,” you whine. “Oscar, ‘m gonna come.” 

“Do it,” he relents, voice going impossibly soft as he hits that spot inside you. The one that has you seeing stars. “Good girls deserve to milk me dry.” 

He doesn’t stop when you start to fall apart.

If anything, he leans into it. Presses harder, deeper. Riding the tension as it breaks, then crests again, then splinters entirely. Your body spasms beneath him, dragged mercilessly through the folds of pleasure, like he’s determined to wring you out. Thorough, precise, and just a little cruel.

You’re gasping. Boneless. Trying to anchor yourself to anything real, anything solid, and finding only him. His hand on your hip, his chest against yours, his mouth, half-sharp, half-sweet, pressing whatever it wants into your skin.

“That’s it. That’s it,” he says, breath unsteady but voice still maddeningly in control. “Look at you. Look what I do to you.”

He slows, but not because he needs to. Because he likes watching you twitch. He lets you linger in that overstimulated afterglow, lets the echoes settle before pulling them forward again.

You think that’s it. That he’ll fold you against his chest, that his mouth will find the shell of your ear and whisper something soft, foolish, post-coital.

But no. Oscar lifts his head. Reaches to brush your hair from your eyes with the back of his fingers as if it’s some gentle courtesy, not a prelude.

“Still good for me to get what I want?”

His voice is not tentative. Instead, it lies in wait. The kind of question that’s already half-answered.

You nod.

“Use your words.”

You swallow. Find breath.

“Yes.”

A corner of his lip tugs upward. Something hungry flashes in it. Then he moves—rising off you with that lithe, economical grace, hands guiding your hips as he shifts the angle, presses your thighs apart again.

Rougher, now. Faster. His control returns in the shape of momentum. Your body, pliant and bruised with bliss, meets each thrust like instinct, like muscle memory. It’s overwhelming, but you don’t want him to stop. You want to be unmade properly. To see what he looks like when he breaks, too.

When he pulls out, you chase the loss. He catches your chin between his fingers, leans in with eyes that are just a little darker than earlier. “Mouth.” 

You blink, then nod, repositioning with something close to desperation. Knees beneath you. Lips parting.

He slides in with a groan that cracks somewhere at the edges, one hand cradling the back of your head, the other tightening in your hair. “Fuuuck. Just like that.” 

You hum, or try to. He shudders, thrusts just hard enough to hit his tip in the back of your throat a couple of times. Your eyes water at the feel of it, but he’s already gracefully at the end of his rope. 

When he finishes—hard and fast, hips twitching, voice fractured into a curse and your name—it feels less like an ending and more like something earned. Like gravity finally catching up to the fall.

He stays there a moment longer. Fingers softening. Breathing out your name like it tastes good in his mouth.

He pulls out after a moment too long. He’s still catching his breath when he sees it: his release, smeared at the corner of your mouth. Glossing your bottom lip. A thin, obscene line trailing down your chin like spilled sin. 

You’re blinking up at him, fucked-out and glassy-eyed, still breathing through parted lips. And it ruins him. Just absolutely levels him.

“Jesus Christ,” he groans hoarsely, reverently. “You look—”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. Doesn’t need to. You can see it in the way his hand runs over his face, like he’s trying to scrub the image from his mind and failing gloriously.

He kisses you, then, but not with hunger. It’s something slower instead. Grounded. His thumb catches the mess at your lip, and he hums when you let him wipe it away. He’s tasting himself, tasting you. Taking it all in.

There’s something almost delicate about it, which would be surprising if you didn’t already feel like the floor had dropped out from under you somewhere between his praise and the way he came undone in your mouth.

He pulls back with an exhale. Presses his forehead against yours. Murmurs, “Where do you keep your towels?”

You’re brain is still just a little too foggy to process. “What?” 

“Towels,” Oscar repeats, nudging your nose with his. “Or wet wipes. Or a cloth. Just—anything that won’t make me feel like I’m letting you marinate in me.”

You bark out a laugh. “Didn’t realize you were the aftercare type.”

“I’m not a monster,” he deadpans, dragging a hand through his hair as he sits up. The movement pulls every line of his body into view. Long, clean limbs. Defined stomach. The faint blush of exertion still clinging to his skin. You stare. You don’t mean to.

Your eyes follow the flex of his back as he stands. The easy confidence in the way he moves across your space like he’s lived in it. Like he belongs. He doesn’t. That’s the problem.

You rattle off a drawer, a shelf, the hallway linen closet. He listens, nods, and disappears from view.

And that’s when your mind begins to spiral.

Because you just fucked Oscar Piastri. 

Let him talk you through your orgasm. Let him ruin you, mouth and body and everything soft in between. Let him see you like this—open, loud, desperate.

What the fuck were you thinking?

He’s a goddamn risk. You know that. You’ve heard the warning signs. The drowning metaphors. The stories that end in fire. But you did it anyway. Jumped, swam, sank. Let him into your bed, your life. 

It doesn’t have to mean anything, you reason. It could be a one-off. 

But then—

Oscar comes back. Warm cloth in one hand, clean towel in the other. He settles beside you, nudging your legs open gently so he can clean you up without asking. It’s matter-of-fact. Unflinching. Weirdly intimate.

He says nothing at first; he only takes care of you like he means it. Then, as he pulls the blanket up around you both, he kisses your shoulder and murmurs, low and cocky: “Give me twenty minutes, and then we can go again.” 

You laugh. It bubbles out of you before you can stop it, warmth spreading across your chest like sunlight you weren’t expecting. Dangerous. Disarming.

You press your face into the pillow and mutter, “Asshole.”

He grins against your skin. Doesn’t deny it. Doesn’t promise anything else. But he wraps an arm around your waist like maybe he’s not done with you. Not even close.

Against your better judgment, you find yourself hoping he’s telling the truth.

Maybe it’s too soon to say it.

But God, you might just love—the risk. Not him. Surely not him.

Right? ⛐

and even after three constant years of traveling all over the world with lando – some things really do still amaze and impress you.

like the raspoutine club he's managed to drag you to. the entire club was bathed in a deep red lighting and immediately when you walked in, lando holding onto your hand tightly, you could feel the bass vibrating through your whole body. every step you took in your heels sent another vibrating shockwave through your bones.

lando was just a step ahead of you, guiding you through the crowd of people, the smell of alcohol, expensive perfumes, and faint scent of smoke filled the air. you seen your boyfriend look over his shoulder you – checking to make sure you were doing okay, his bright smile painting his grin when you make eye contact. he then manages to move to where he's right next to you, his hand resting on your hip. which is warm against your skin, his thumb slowly rubbing up and down on the sliver of skin that is peaking between your blue set you're wearing.

when you two get past the dancefloor and the crowd starts to dwindle a little, lando presses his mouth against your ear so you can hear him over the music. "did i tell you, you look absolutely gorgeous, princess?"

you don't even bite back the smile as you turn to look at him, "yes, about three times at the hotel and two more on the way here." you tease before pressing a kiss his cheek. his hand comes down to grab a handful of your ass before playfully smacking it.

"hey! there he is! lando, how are you!" someone calls out once you both near the back of the club where red velvet booths line the wall. lando steps away from you to quickly greet the icy blonde male before his hand is reaching blindly towards yours. you grab lando's hand and let him guide you back next to him. "you must be y/n! pleasure to meet you, i'm matt!" he says, doing the usual european cheek kiss greeting that you've grown so accustomed to over the last eight years.

when matt turns around, back to you, talking to lando and trying to get you both to sit down – that's when you notice the back of matt's shirt. well... more like what it says.

because in big colorful font reads: EAT PUSSY, IT'S VEGAN.

you can't help but laugh at the text, lando giving you a side glance as he has you sit down next to him on the booth seat. however, you can he noticed the seat too from the faint smirk on his lips. you and lando sit shoulder to shoulder, his arm resting behind you as the assortment of drinks being to appear on the table in front of you all.

between the drinks and shots, you and matt start to strike up a conversation. the two of you talking about fashion and the industry after learning that matt is a model. lando chimes in here and there, the two of you sharing a few drinks, and you can't help but bite back a smile whenever you feel his lips press against your bare shoulder.

"so, matt," you say leaning over the table, a wide grin on your face as your body flushes with warmth from the alcohol starting to run through you. "what is up with that shirt? i just have to know!" you finally ask, making the french model laugh and shake his head.

"just something fun that i threw on. you like it?"

you laugh, nodding your head, "i need to know where you got it! lando needs one for sure!"

you completely miss how your boyfriend almost chokes on his drink when he hears you. but matt catches it and laughs as he watches lando try to recover.

"is lando vegan?" matt asks, a smirk on his lips and the question makes you laugh again, hands clapping together as you lean back into lando.

"hm," you say, looking at your british lover with a fond look. the red lights casting him in a beautiful glow as your hand reaches up to brush his hair back – even though it definitely wasn't needed, but neither of you care. "yeah, something like that."

the icy blonde male shakes his head, grin on his face before he looks at lando. "i'll tell you what– let's trade shirts! you can have it for free since y/n likes it so much."

lando knows he should probably deny the offer, but he's too far into tonight – and you – to deny it. he can deal with repercussions from his pr team at a later date, he thinks. his eyes shift over to you for a moment, taking in how he's totally enamored with you under the lights.

and then he's standing up before you can even fully process what's happening as lando is taking his shirt off in the middle of the club. matt lets out a hollered laugh before he's doing the same. you don't pay any attention to anything but lando, your hand casually reaching out to touch him. he turns his head and looks down at you with a wide, confident grin on his face as he switches shirts with matt – the two grinning and hugging even.

you feel something shift inside you as you watch lando throw on the other shirt. a heat running through you and settling in your stomach, but this is different from the one you've been feeling all night. no, this is one you get before you usually let lando rock your shit. and he is now wearing the rather iconic, in your complete opinion, shirt.

and of course he puts it on backwards, the big bold "eat pussy, it's vegan" written straight across his chest. he looks down at you, wiggling his eyebrows which earns a laugh from you as he smooths the shirt down. when he sits back down, lando doesn't hesitate to pull you into him. your chest flush against his side, looking at you before he's giving you a chaste kiss.

"you like my new shirt, baby?" he asks, your hands gliding across his shoulders before you're leaning close to kiss him again.

"yeah... i think it really suits you," you tell him, his hand coming up to grip your thigh in a way that sends another wave of heat over you. literally, taking your breath away, letting out a stuttered gasp as he kisses you. not caring who is around or that the two of you could end up all over twitter by daylight. "lan~" you giggle out, cupping his face as you both look at each other.

"don't you think this shirt gives good advice?" he asks, his hand trailing up your thigh and playing with the hem of your skirt.

"i do," you tell him with a smile, leaning over to the table to grab another drink. but instead of drinking it yourself, you hold it to his lips and lando happily lets you pour the drink into his mouth – the liquid burning down his throat. "don't you think..." you start to saying, earning his fully attention – as if you didn't have it already, "take the advice? you know... since you're good at following rules and regs and stuff."

"and stuff?" he repeats with a smile, his hand squeezing the flesh of your thigh. his lips press against your neck and the feeling sends a rush of adrenaline to between your legs. "are you gonna punish me if i break the rules?"

"well, i mean– when have you ever been denied the opportunity to eat pussy, lan?"

he chuckles, shaking his head, "you've got a point, princess." he's then standing up, taking a hold of your hand to help you stand up. "we'll be back!" he calls out to matt and the few others at the table and without looking back he guides you away.

you let lando guide you through the crowd of people, completely trusting him even if you have no idea where he's taking you. the two of you head in the direction of restrooms before lando is leading you down a hallway – everything still bathed in that red light. you learn rather quickly that raspoutine is a labyrinth, but lando seems to know exactly where he's going. only because seconds later he's pulling you into one of the single-occupancy restrooms hidden away near the very back of the club.

your british lover slams the door, locking it with a sharp click before he's pressing you against it. inside the bathroom, you can only focus on lando who is pressing his body flush against yours – his hands gripping your hips tightly before he's kissing you. you immediately kiss back, a low moan escaping your throat as his lips move passionately against yours in a deep, bruising kiss. his tongue slipping inside your mouth easily, and tasting the premium, expensive vodka on your own tongue.

you felt lando's hand move to grab your thigh, bringing it up to rest around his waist – his cock hard and throbbing in his pants, rubs against your clothed core. soft, desperate moans sound against his mouth as your hands come up to tightly grab the back of his shirt to anchor him close to you.

"f-fuck, lan~" you moan out when lando suddenly hoists you up, your legs around his waist as he moves the short distance from the door to the marble counter. the counter is cold against your otherwise heated skin and the contrast as you try to anchor yourself closer to him.

lando looked down at you, chest heaving as he ran a hand through his messy curls. his hazel eyes scanning over your body, the sequin and hanging jewels on your two-piece set gleaming under the pinkish hue lights that starkly contrast against the deep, lustful red of the rest of the club.

"so..." he trails off, hands sneaking underneath your short skirt to grab at the hem of your lacy panties. he doesn't pull them down yet, but you wouldn't be surprised if he accidentally ripped them from how tightly he's gripping them. "you gonna let this vegan have his dinner?"

you can't help but let out a small lighthearted laugh, "i guess i can feed this poor vegan~"

lando kisses you again, pulling your panties down past your knees and over your heels. he pulls away to dangle them in between the both of you – a wicked smirk on his face before you're watching him pocket them.

"that's my princess," he says, spreading your legs wider, skirt bunching up to reveal your center to rather humid air of the bathroom. lando sinks down to his knees, not seeming to care that he's getting his pants dirty as he's level with your dripping pussy. "as the french say, bon appétit."

he then leans forward and buries his face directly between your thighs.

lando's tongue does a broad wet stroke from the bottom of your opening all the way up to your clit. one of your hands immediately grabs onto his hair as you throw your head back as a loud, unfiltered moan rips from your throat. your other hand holds onto the edge of the counter like a lifeline – like you're trying to keep yourself anchored to reality.

his large palms come up to cup your ass, lifting you slightly off the counter to get a better angle as you feel his tongue slip inside before he's licking up again to suck on your clit. you were dripping onto his lips as lando switched between flattening his tongue, swirling it tightly around clit, and flicking inside so it could gather your juices up. he could feel you running down his chin, but lando could care less about the mess he was making – drinking you up like a man dying of thirst.

or a hungry vegan.

you felt your hips twitch against his mouth, trying to buck up but lando's hands grip you tightly and stop you from doing so. the pleasure was overwhelming – the small restroom filled with the sounds of your moans and the wet sounds of his mouth against your pussy. it was completely and utterly driving you over the edge.

"lando, please– fuck, fuck, fuck! lando, lando, i-i'm gonna–" you choke out as you feel him insert two fingers into you. pumping them fast and hard before he's curling them and rubbing your sweet spot. his lips locked harshly onto your clit, and you can feel your eyes rolling into the back of your head from the pleasure.

you managed to look down, locking eyes with lando who is staring at you with those piercing hazel ones. he gives his fingers another few good pumps and his tongue drawing sloppy figure-eights until you're finally coming.

vision turning white as you feel your walls clenching violently around his fingers as your orgasm rips through you. you let out a loud moan mixed with his name as you feel your thighs shake from the force of the orgasm. especially when lando refused to pull away – drinking up all your juices. he stayed right there between your trembling thighs, tongue flattening against your folds, his hands holding you as steady as he could until you could finally feel yourself come down from your high.

slowly, lando finally lifted his head before standing to his full height. chest heaving and face flushed even under the pink lights. you could also see his lips and chin glistening with your wetness – the sight itself making you a little shy as the realization that he just ate you out in a club bathroom. with a shaky hand, you reached out towards lando to pull him closer to you.

your boyfriend leaned over you as you felt his hands wrapped around your waist. he gives you a firm kiss, the taste of yourself on his tongue, as he pulls you off the marble counter. holding your close as he trails his lips down your neck and fixes your skirt.

"guess i need to do this vegan diet more often," he whispers into your ear – breath hot and smug as his hand lazily strokes your back. "but i think i was already addicted to your pussy for a while."

That question followed you home. The next evening, Max came up behind you in the bedroom, pressing his chest to your back and kissing your neck slowly , his silent “I need you” signal. You were needy too, and the curiosity burned hotter than usual.

You turned into his arms. "Max... about that thing my friend asked. I want to test it but let's turn it into a challenge"

His competitive grin appeared instantly. “Yeah?”

“Whoever taps out first has to be the other’s personal servant for the next two months. Whatever they want, whenever they want. No excuses.”

“Deal,” he said, eyes gleaming. “But I’m not losing, schatje.”

You both loved sabotaging each other. You had secrets to make him lose his mind. He knew your weak spots too. Game on.

You started slow, saving energy. He peeled your shirt off, you did the same to his. Clothes dropped piece by piece until you were naked. He rolled a condom on carefully, then pulled you into soft, deep kisses, hands gentle on your waist as he laid you down.

It was sweet, slow rolls of his hips, lazy making out. Until Max pulled an ace from his sleeve.

While still moving inside you with that unhurried rhythm, his thumb found your clit and started rubbing tight, perfect circles. He knew how easily you got overstimulated there. The gentle session turned electric in seconds. Your breathing grew heavy, hips jerking.

“Max— fuck...” you gasped.

He didn’t stop. He kept the slow thrusts going and rubbed your clit relentlessly until the orgasm hit you like a wave. You cried out, clenching hard around him, thighs shaking. He didn’t let your poor clit rest, drawing out every aftershock until you were panting and dizzy.

It took you a moment to recover. Then you remembered: you had to fight back if you wanted to win.

You pushed him onto his back and straddled him, sinking down onto his cock in one smooth motion. You were in control now.

“No hands,” you ordered, grabbing his wrists and pinning them beside his head.

You rode him exactly how you knew he liked: deep rolls of your hips, then faster bounces, then slowing down cruelly when he got close. Max’s eyes started rolling back, fingers gripping the sheets tightly.

“Please… please let me come,” he murmured, voice strained.

You slowed even more, teasing. “What did you say? Say it louder if you want it.”

Max was too desperate to fight his pride. “Please, Y/N… just let me come, pleasee”

“Good boy,” you whispered, riding him hard and fast until he came with a deep groan, filling the condom.

It was obvious this was only the beginning. Normally you would have stopped here, but your friend was right: pushing limits was addictive. And neither of you liked losing.

Max reached for another condom. You stopped him.

He raised an eyebrow until you slid off the bed and knelt between his legs. His cock twitched at the sight. You rarely did this ,maybe twice in five years, and he knew you weren’t a big fan. That made it even more effective.

“Don’t put it on yet.”

Max needed a bit longer to get fully hard again. You used the time to tease him with your mouth.

He hardened instantly when you kissed the tip. You teased with soft kitten licks and kisses, drawing it out. Soon his hand rested on the back of your head. You let him guide you, relaxing as he pushed deeper.

You gagged and pulled back for air. “Sorry… I’m really inexperienced with this.”

He just stroked your hair gently, breathing hard. You went back in more determined. Your eyes watered, tears slipping down your cheeks as he grew frantic. The ache between your legs became unbearable, so you slipped a hand down and rubbed your clit while sucking him.

Max groaned at the sight. You looked up at him through wet lashes and cupped his balls and that broke him. His eyes rolled back and he spilled into your mouth with a broken moan.

“You don’t have to swallow if you don’t want to,” he rasped.

But you did. You pulled off, opened your mouth to show him, then swallowed.

“Fuck… such a good girl,” he murmured, voice wrecked. His cock twitched hard at the sight.

He noticed your hand still between your legs and grinned. “Is my pretty girl horny? Want me to help?”

“Yes please,” you whispered.

He pulled you back onto the bed, spread your legs wide, and settled between them. He spread your soaked folds, admiring how your pussy clenched around nothing. He toyed with you, circling your clit, sliding fingers along your labia, dipping one finger in only to pull it out.

“Please Max, do something,” you begged, hips humping his hand.

“Naughty girl. Be patient,” he said, then gave your pussy a light slap.

Your whole body jolted and a strangled moan escaped. Max looked surprised but pleased, he’d never done that before. He did it again, a little harder. Your hips jerked and another moan tore from you.

“I see… we’re learning new things about each other,” he said, voice low. He gave one more light slap, then dove between your legs with his mouth, making you see stars.

“How about a 69 if we’re experimenting?” Max suggested with a wicked grin, still catching his breath.

The night became a blur of exploration. You tried positions you’d never bothered with before. Max took you from behind while you gripped the headboard. You rode him reverse cowgirl, grinding back against him. He fucked you against the wall, your legs wrapped around his waist. You switched dominance constantly : sometimes you pinned him and edged him until he begged, sometimes he held you down and made you come over and over until your voice went hoarse.

You both lay there for a minute, catching your breath, sweaty and laughing softly.

“Still good?” he asked, competitive glint still in his eyes.

“Better than you,” you shot back.

“Oh my god, Max, you and your stupid 69 jokes,” you laughed.

“Please?” He gave you the softest, subby eyes and sweet talk until you gave in.

It wasn’t a joke. He was obsessed, eating you out like a man starved while you took him back into your mouth. The mutual pleasure was overwhelming. You both came hard again.

Round… you’d lost count.

You were both exhausted, bodies covered in sweat, legs trembling. But neither would quit. You wanted to break him.

“Don’t take a condom this time,” you said, voice hoarse. “I want you raw.”

Max’s eyes darkened with surprise and lust. You were both clean and you were on birth control. He was more than happy to agree, but you could see he was fighting exhaustion too.

He slid into you bare and you both moaned at the feeling. He found your g-spot almost immediately and hammered into it relentlessly, trying to make you tap out. The raw friction felt incredible, too good. You were sore, overstimulated, and felt like it had been hours, but the pleasure kept building.

You came once more, but this time the overstimulation was bordering on too much. Your muscles were tired. Max chased his own release, thrusting deep until he spilled inside you with a guttural groan. He pulled out slowly, watching his cum drip from your pussy for a moment before collapsing beside you.

You both stared at the ceiling, chests heaving.

You turned to look at each other, shocked, then started laughing weakly.

“I’m quitting,” you said at the exact same time as him.

“So… we both lose?” you asked.

“Technically yes,” Max grinned tiredly. “This time. Rematch in two days?”

You groaned but smiled. “Deal.”

He pulled you into his arms and kissed your temple. You stayed there for a while, enjoying the warmth.

“Okay, I need to go clean up,” you said eventually, trying to stand.

Max reached for you. “Sit back down, I’ll clean you up—”

Too late. Your legs gave out the second you stood. You started falling. Max tried to catch you but when he stood up, his own legs buckled too. Both of you ended up on the floor in a tangled, exhausted heap.

You burst out laughing. “I was just… searching for something on the ground.”

Leaving your job is the best thing that's ever happened to you. That's what you tell yourself, anyway. That's what you've been telling yourself for a year and a half now, and if you say it enough times, eventually it might feel true. The severance package Lando gave you was obscene. Guilt money, obviously, even though you're not calling it that out loud, but that's what it is—guilty money, hush money, please don't sue me for firing you thirty seconds after I came inside you money. Enough that you don't need to work. Enough that you're free.

Free. You're so fucking free that you've tried pottery three times and hated it every single time. You're so free that you've reorganized your closet by color, then by season, then by color again because the first way was better. You're so free that last Tuesday you stood in the shower and counted to three hundred just to see if you could.

The clay fights you. That's what they don't tell you about pottery. Your hands cramp and the instructor keeps saying feel the clay's energy like the clay has energy, like the clay is anything other than wet dirt that collapses the second you think you're getting somewhere. You even tried running. Running is just you and your thoughts for however many miles you can stand. Not ideal. Not even close to ideal. Guitar's gathering dust in the corner. Duolingo sends you passive-aggressive notifications about your streak. You've considered learning Portuguese but that feels pointed, feels like something you shouldn't examine too closely.

Two weeks ago, Lando Norris won the World Championship. You watched it from your apartment because you're a masochist, apparently. You sat on your couch in Monaco and watched him spray champagne and cry and lift the trophy, and you thought, good for him. You thought, I'm happy for him. You thought those things and none of them were true.

Last Friday he went to the FIA Prize Giving ceremony in Rwanda with his beautiful girlfriend to collect his trophy. The photos were everywhere. Every sports website, every F1 account, probably on the fucking news in countries that don't even have racing. His girlfriend, Magui, wore a black dress that made her look like a goddess reincarnated. He wore a tuxedo. They looked like they were attending their own wedding. That's a thought you're not examining. That way lies madness.

You abandon your collapsing bowl. Scrub the clay off your hands—it gets under your fingernails, stays there for hours. The instructor asks if you're signing up for next week. "I'll think about it," you say.

You're not signing up. You already know you're not signing up. Outside, Monaco is cold for December. Your apartment is fifteen minutes away if you walk fast, twelve if you're really moving. You've timed it. You don't go home, and you tell yourself you're just walking. Just getting some air. Just clearing your head after an hour of fighting with clay that had no interest in becoming anything other than a lopsided mess. That's what you tell yourself, and maybe it's even true. Except you're walking toward the harbor instead of toward your apartment, which is the opposite direction, which means you're either lost in your own city or you're lying to yourself. Probably the second one.

And the wonderful thing about Monaco is that it's small. Stupidly small. You can walk from one end to the other in under an hour. Which means you can't really avoid anything, can't really escape anyone, can't really pretend you're not living in the same two square kilometers as—you stop that thought before it finishes.

There's a sports bar on the corner. The kind that has screens covering every available wall, the kind that shows every race, every match, every game that matters. You've walked past it a hundred times. You've never gone in.

Today, you're going in. Just for a drink, you tell yourself. Just for one drink because it's cold outside and your apartment is empty and you're allowed to get a drink at a sports bar without it meaning anything. The bartender is maybe twenty-five, definitely Australian, probably works here because Monaco is where F1 people end up when they're not important enough to actually work in F1. He looks up when you walk in.

"What can I get you?"

"Vodka tonic." He makes it. You don't drink it. Instead, you just hold it and look at the screens because that's what you do in sports bars, you look at the screens. There are eight screens total. Three of them are showing football. Two are showing tennis. One is showing some sport you don't recognize—maybe rugby, maybe something else entirely. And one is showing a replay of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The final lap. Lando crossing the line. The radio message. The celebration. You watch him climb out of the car. Watch him collapse into his team's arms. Watch the whole thing you already watched two weeks ago from your couch, except now you're watching it in a bar in Monaco while a drunk British guy three seats down yells "FUCKING LEGEND" at the screen.

The bartender notices you watching. "You follow F1?"

"Not really," you lie.

"Shame. That race was incredible. Norris finally did it, you know? After all these years."

"Yeah. I heard."

"Best season I've ever seen. Guy's a machine." He's polishing a glass, still talking. "And his girlfriend, mate. You seen her? Absolute smoke show."

You finish your vodka tonic in one go. It burns. "Another?" the bartender asks.

"No. Thanks." You pay and leave. Outside, the cold air hits you like a slap. You start walking. Not toward home. Just walking again. The thing about Lando firing you is that you still don't understand it. You've had a year and a half to make it make sense and it doesn't. It will never make sense.

He'd looked at you. Really looked at you, the way he used to in hotel rooms and empty conference rooms and all those in-between moments when it was just the two of you and nothing else in the world mattered. He'd touched your face. You'd touched his. For one perfect second, you'd thought maybe this is it, maybe this is where everything gets fixed. Then his expression changed and he'd pulled away and gotten dressed like he couldn't stand to be near you anymore.

I fucking love you, he'd said. In that hotel room in Qatar, buried inside your cunt, saying it like it was being torn out of him. Like he couldn't help it. Like he actually meant the fucking words. And then ten minutes later, boom, you're fired.

Just like that. You're fired. Two words that ended everything. You've spent eighteen months trying to figure out how someone tells you they love you and then removes you from their life entirely. How someone can look at you like you're the only person who matters and then just stop. Just move on. Just win a championship and fall in love with someone else and be happy, be so fucking happy that you can see it in every photo, every interview, every goddamn Instagram story.

He touches her differently than he touched you. He touches her casually. His hand on her waist, his fingers interlaced with hers, easy and comfortable and public. Like he's allowed to. Like it's simple. He never touched you like that. He touched you like he was desperate. Like he was trying to memorize the feeling. Like he was afraid—of what, you still don't know. Afraid you'd disappear, maybe? Afraid someone would see? Afraid it meant something.

It did mean something. It meant everything. At least it did to you. You miss him. That's the pathetic truth of it all. You miss him so much that sometimes you can't breathe. You miss his 3 AM phone calls. You miss fixing his disasters. You miss the way he'd look at you when he thought you weren't paying attention, like he was trying to figure out a puzzle he couldn't solve. You miss the feeling of him. His hands, his mouth, the weight of him, the way he'd say your name like it meant something.

You miss all of it and he's moved on and you're walking through Monaco at sunset thinking about someone who fired you eighteen months ago and probably hasn't thought about you since.

Your doorbell rings at 9:16 PM on December 19th. You're not expecting anyone. You consider ignoring it—consider pretending you're not home, consider going back to the book you're not reading. mBut, then, the doorbell rings again.

You should just pretend you're not home. Should pretend a lot of things that aren't walking to the door. You walk to the door anyway. Look through the peephole and your heart stops. Actually fucking stops in your chest. Lando Norris is standing in your hallway. He's wearing a cream Loewe sweatshirt and jeans, one hand shoved in his pocket while the other coddles his phone, and he's looking at it like he has all the time in the world. His hair is also shorter than it was in Qatar.

So, you do the only rational thing, the totally rational thing, and open the door. "Finally." He looks up from his phone. "I was about to use the spare key."

"You don't have a spare key."

"Don't I?" He walks past you into your apartment before you can stop him. "Nice place. Very clean and entirely very sad."

"Excuse me?"

"It looks like no one actually lives here." He's examining your bookshelf now, tilting his head to read the spines. "When did you become this person?"

"What are you doing here, Lando."

"Came to see you, obviously." He picks up a book, flips through it, puts it back in the wrong spot. "How've you been?"

"How have I been? Are you fucking kidding me?"

"Yeah. How are you? What've you been up to? Pottery, I heard. That's cute."

Your stomach drops. "How did you know about pottery."

"I know things." He sits on your couch. Your couch. Like he belongs there. "You quit that too, I assume. Seems to be your pattern lately."

"My pattern."

"Quitting things. Pottery, yoga, that book club." He gestures at your apartment. "Living like a goddamn ghost."

"Get out."

"In a second. I need to talk to you about something first." He leans back, arms spread across the back of your couch. "The new assistant isn't working out."

You stare at him. "Emma. She's trying, I'll give her that. But she's not you. Doesn't think like you. Doesn't anticipate things like you did." He says it so casually. Like he's commenting on the weather. "She's kind of useless, actually."

"And?"

"And I need you to train her."

The audacity. The fucking audacity of Lando Norris. "Are you insane?"

"No. Why would I be insane?"

"You fired me."

"I know. I was there."

"You fired me eighteen months ago and now you're asking me to train your replacement."

"She's not your replacement. That would imply she's anywhere near as competent as you were. Which she's not." He examines his nails. "I'm asking you to train her so she can be at least seventy percent as useful as you were. That's all."

"Get out of my apartment."

"Why are you being so difficult about this? It's a simple request. A few weeks of your time. I'll pay you whatever you want. You're not exactly busy." His eyes flick around your apartment. "Are you."

"That's not the point."

"Then what is the point?"

"The point is you fired me. The point is you told me I was done. The point is you haven't spoken to me in a year and a half and now you show up here like nothing happened."

"Something happened?"

You want to hit him. Want to actually punch the asshole in the face. "Qatar. Something happened in Qatar."

"Oh, that." He waves a hand. "Ancient history. We've both moved on."

"Have we."

"Haven't we? You have your pottery classes. I have my championship." He smiles. That smile. The one that used to make you feel like you were in on a joke and now just makes you want to scream. "We're both doing great."

"Lando."

"What?"

"Get the fuck out."

"I'm at the Fairmont. Room 412." He stands up, stretches. "Think about it. I need an answer by tomorrow morning."

"The answer is no."

"Sure it is." He's walking toward the door. Pauses with his hand on the doorknob. "You look good, by the way. Tired, but good."

He leaves before you can respond. You stand there in your apartment. Your very clean, very empty apartment. Your heart is doing something in your chest and your hands are shaking. Lando Norris showed up after eighteen months and asked you to train his assistant like it was the most reasonable request in the world. Made you feel crazy for being angry. Commented on your home and your pottery classes and the fact that you're living like a ghost. How does he know about the pottery classes. How does he know anything?

You walk to your couch. The cushion where he sat is still slightly compressed and you stare at it. He knows about pottery. About yoga. About the book club you got kicked out of. He's been watching. Or keeping track. Or something. For eighteen months you thought he'd forgotten about you entirely. That you'd been erased from his life as cleanly as you'd been erased from his Instagram captions. And now it turns out he's been aware of you this whole time. Aware enough to know about pottery classes in Monaco. Aware enough to know you quit.

The Fairmont is twelve minutes from here if you walk fast. You're not going to the Fairmont. You're not training Emma. You're not doing any of it. You lasted forty-seven minutes before you grabbed your keys.

When you enter Fairmont hotel, you walk past the front desk without making eye contact with anyone, past the bar where well-dressed people are having well-dressed conversations, past the elevator bank to the one marked for floors three through six.

You press the button. Wait. Watch the numbers descend. Four, three, two, one. The doors open and you step inside before you can change your mind. Fourth floor. Room 412. The elevator is playing jazz, soft and inoffensive, the kind of music designed to make you forget you're in a metal box suspended by cables. You watch the numbers climb. One, two, three, four. The doors open.

The hallway is long and carpeted in a pattern that's probably meant to be elegant but just makes you slightly dizzy if you look at it too long. Room 412 is at the end, past eleven other rooms, past the ice machine, past the window that overlooks the harbor. You stand there for a moment. The door is dark wood with a brass handle and a number plaque that's slightly crooked. You can hear voices from one of the other rooms, muffled by walls and distance. Someone's watching television. Someone else is laughing. You knock on Lando's door.

The door opens immediately, like he was standing right there, like he was waiting.

"Took you long enough," Lando says. He's changed. Different sweatshirt, this one grey, same jeans. His hair is still damp like he showered after leaving your apartment, and you can smell his soap from here—clean and you don't recognize it but that fits him anyway, fits this version of him that exists in hotel rooms and galas and Instagram posts with his girlfriend.

"Can I come in or are you going to make me stand in the hallway?"

He steps aside and you walk in. The room is bigger than you expected, bigger than it needs to be for one person. There's a king bed with white sheets, a sitting area with a couch and two chairs, a desk by the window with a view of the harbor that's probably spectacular in daylight but right now just shows darkness and distant lights. His suitcase is open on the floor, clothes spilling out in a way that's chaotic and familiar and makes your fingers itch to organize it. There's a bottle of champagne on the desk. Two glasses next to it.

"You knew I'd come," you say.

"Of course I knew." He closes the door behind you. "You always come." The certainty in his voice makes you want to scream.

"Don't flatter yourself."

"I'm not flattering myself. I'm stating facts." He walks past you to the desk, picks up the champagne bottle, examines the label like it matters. "You lasted, what, an hour?"

"Forty-seven minutes."

"Forty-seven minutes." He looks at you now, really looks at you, and there's something in his expression that you can't read, something that might be satisfaction or might be something else entirely. Either way, you don't entertain the thought. "You counted."

"I count everything now."

"I know you do." He says it so casually, like it's obvious, like of course he knows. And maybe he does know. Maybe he knows about the counting and the pottery and the book club and every other pathetic thing you've been doing for the past eighteen months while he's been winning championships and falling in love.

"How do you know about the pottery classes?" you ask.

"I told you. I know things."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer you're getting." He pours champagne into both glasses even though you haven't said you want any. "Emma will be there on Monday. I need you there by nine."

"I didn't say yes."

"You're here, aren't you?"

He hands you a glass and you take it. You're not sure as to why you take it but you do, and now you're standing in his hotel room holding champagne and trying to remember how you got here, trying to remember the exact sequence of decisions that led from your apartment to this moment. "This is insane," you say.

"Probably."

"You fired me."

"I remember."

"You told me you loved me and then you fired me."

Something flickers across his face. Fast, there and gone before you can identify it. "That was a while ago."

"So?"

"So we've both moved on." He takes a sip of his champagne, watching you over the rim of the glass. "Haven't we?"

"I don't know, have we?"

"You tell me." He sets his glass down on the desk, leans back against it. "You're the one who showed up at my hotel room at ten PM."

"You literally asked me to."

"I asked you to think about training Emma. I didn't ask you to come here." He tilts his head, studying you in that way he used to. "But here you are anyway."

You hate that he's right. Hate that he knew exactly what would happen when he showed up at your apartment. Hate that after eighteen months of nothing, he can still make you do exactly what he wants with barely any effort at all. "Why me?" you ask. "Why not hire someone else to train her? Someone who doesn't have a history with you?"

"Because no one else knows how I work."

"That's not a good enough reason."

"It's the only reason." He crosses his arms. "You know my schedule better than I do. You know what I need before I need it. You know how to fix problems before they become problems. No one else can do that."

"Emma could learn."

"Emma is twenty-three years old and terrified of me. Every time I ask her a question she looks like she's going to cry." He says it without sympathy, just a simple observation, a simple fact. "She's not you."

Your stomach lurches, "Good. She shouldn't be me."

"Why not?"

"Because being me got me fired."

"No." He pushes off from the desk, takes a step closer. "Being you got you promoted from assistant to whatever we were. Getting fired came after."

"After you decided you were done with me."

"I never said I was done with you."

"You fired me. That's pretty definitive."

"Is it?" He's close enough now that you can see the exact color of his eyes in the hotel room lighting—that blue-green that changes depending on what he's wearing, what the weather is, what mood he's in. Right now they're darker, more blue than green, and fixed on you with an intensity that makes your stomach twist. "Because here you are. In my hotel room. Eighteen months later. Doesn't seem very definitive to me."

You should leave. Should put down the champagne glass you're still holding, should walk out of this hotel room, should tell him to train Emma himself or hire someone else or figure it the fuck out on his own. You don't leave.

"Monday," he says. "Nine AM. MTC. I'll have everything ready for you—schedules, systems, all of it. Two weeks. That's all I need."

"And after two weeks?"

"After two weeks you go back to your life. Pottery classes or whatever else you're doing to pass the time." The dismissiveness in his tone makes you want to throw your champagne in his face.

"I want double your normal consulting rate," you say instead.

"Done."

"And I'm not working with you directly. Just Emma."

"Fine."

"And if she's actually incompetent, if she can't learn this, I'm out. I'm not babysitting someone who can't do the job."

"She can learn. She's not stupid, she's just not you." He picks up his champagne glass again. "Anything else?"

"Yeah. What does your girlfriend think about this?" The question comes out before you can stop it. You watch his expression carefully, looking for any sign that it bothers him, that the mention of Magui does something to him the way the thought of her does something to you.

Nothing. His expression doesn't change at all. "Magui doesn't care about my work arrangements," he says.

"You told her you're hiring your ex-assistant as a consultant?"

"I told her I'm getting help training the new hire. She said that's great." He takes another sip. "She's very supportive." Of course Magui is supportive and understanding and completely unthreatened by the fact that her boyfriend is hiring the woman he fired after sleeping with her. Of course she's goddamn utterly perfect.

"Monday," you say. "Nine AM. Two weeks. Then I'm done."

"Deal." He sets his glass down, extends his hand like this is a business transaction, like you're colleagues making an agreement and not two people who destroyed each other eighteen months ago.

You shake his hand. His palm is warm, rough with calluses from the steering wheel, and the touch of it against your skin makes something in your chest crack open. He doesn't let go immediately. Just holds your hand for a beat too long, his thumb brushing once against your knuckles in a gesture that might be accidental or might be completely intentional.

"It's good to see you," he says quietly.

You pull your hand back. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't do that. Don't make this into something it's not."

"What am I making it into?"

"You know what."

He smiles. That smile. The one that used to make you feel like you were the only person who mattered and now just makes you feel like you're losing a game you didn't know you were playing. "Monday," he says again.

You leave before you can do something stupid like stay. The hallway is the same length it was before—forty-three steps from his door to the elevator. You count them again anyway. Count them and try not to think about the way his hand felt against yours, the way his eyes looked in the hotel lighting, the way he said it's good to see you like he meant it.

The elevator arrives. You step inside and watch the numbers descend. Four, three, two, one. The doors open to the lobby and you walk out past the bar, past the front desk, past all the well-dressed people living their well-dressed lives. The night air hits you when you step outside and it's cold, colder than it was before, or maybe that's just you.

Monday. Nine AM. Two weeks. You just agreed to spend two weeks training Lando Norris's new assistant, in the same building as him, probably seeing him multiple times a day, pretending that Qatar never happened and that the past eighteen months of pottery classes and counting ceiling tiles were a completely normal and healthy way to process getting fired by someone who said they loved you.

This is fine. You're fine. Everything is completely fine. You walk the twelve minutes home and try to convince yourself that you haven't just made a catastrophic mistake.

Monday arrives with the kind of crystalline Monaco morning that makes you hate how beautiful everything surrounding you is. The sky is aggressively blue. You stand outside the MTC building at 8:47 AM because you're not going to be late, not going to give Lando the satisfaction of waiting for you.

The severance money means you don't technically need this. Could've said no. Should've said no. But here you are anyway, in black trousers and a cream cashmere sweater, your hair pulled back, looking professional and composed and like someone who definitely didn't spend three hours last night googling "how to train someone when you're emotionally compromised."

The building looks the same. Glass and steel and McLaren orange accents, you've been here a thousand times. Walked these halls, sat in these conference rooms, fixed Lando's disasters in every possible corner of this building. You take the elevator to the third floor. Lando's offices are on the fourth, but you're meeting Emma in the conference room, neutral territory. The elevator doors open and she's already there.

Emma is standing outside Conference Room B, clutching a tablet to her chest like it's a life preserver. She's twenty-three, with dark hair in a neat ponytail and wide brown eyes that get wider when she sees you. "Oh my god," she says, and her voice is high and nervous and sweet. "You're here. You're actually here. I'm Emma. Obviously. You know that. Lando said you'd be here at nine but I got here at eight-thirty because I didn't want to be late and I've been standing here for—sorry, I'm talking too much. I do that when I'm nervous. I'm Emma."

"You said that already," you say, but you're smiling despite yourself because she's like a puppy, earnest and eager and probably thirty seconds away from peeing on the floor from excitement.

"Right. Yes. Sorry." She clutches the tablet tighter. "Thank you for doing this. Lando said you were the best and he wasn't exaggerating, I've read all your notes, like all of them, the system you set up is incredible and I've been trying to follow it but I keep messing things up and last week I accidentally booked him on a flight to Barcelona instead of Budapest and he didn't even yell, he just looked at me like I'd kicked a puppy and that was somehow worse—"

"Emma."

She stops mid-sentence. "Yeah?"

"Breathe." She takes a breath. Then another one. "Sorry. I'm nervous. You're kind of a legend around here."

"I'm really not."

"You are, though. Everyone talks about how you could predict what Lando needed before he even asked, how you saved the Singapore weekend when his passport got stolen, how you once fixed a PR disaster with seventeen minutes' notice—"

"That was fifteen minutes."

"See?" Emma's face lights up. "That makes it even more impressive."

You can't help it. You laugh. It's been eighteen months since you laughed in this building, maybe longer. "Come on. Let's get started."

Conference Room B hasn't changed. Same long table, same uncomfortable chairs, same view of the parking lot where you can see Lando's cars if you crane your neck. You don't crane your neck. You spend the first hour going through systems. Calendar management, how Lando color-codes everything but never looks at the color-coding so you have to verbally remind him anyway. The specific way he likes his schedule printed—landscape, not portrait, because he's a psychopath. His coffee order, which changes based on what country he's in but follows a pattern if you pay attention.

Emma takes notes on everything. Actual notes, handwritten in a neat script, asking questions that are surprisingly intelligent. "What about when he's being difficult?" she asks around 10:15. "Like when he just doesn't want to do something?"

"Give me an example."

"Last month he had a sponsor call with Tag Heuer and he just didn't show up. Turned his phone off, then I found him at the gym."

You nod. "That's a Marcus problem."

"Marcus?"

"The Tag Heuer exec. Lando hates him. Too corporate, talks in buzzwords, makes Lando feel like he's in a business school presentation." You pull up the calendar on your tablet. "Did you reschedule?"

"I tried. Marcus was pissed."

"Marcus is always pissed. Did Lando at least send him something? Gift basket, signed merch, something to smooth it over?"

Emma's face falls. "I... uhhhhhh, no?"

"Rule one," you say, and you sound exactly like you used to, competent and certain and completely in control. "When Lando fucks up with a sponsor, you fix it before it becomes a problem. Send Marcus a bottle of something expensive with a handwritten note from Lando. I'll show you where we keep the stationary. Lando won't remember doing it but that's fine. That's the point."

"That feels like lying."

"It's not lying. It's managing expectations. Lando's job is to drive fast and look good in photos. Your job is to make sure he can do both without accidentally destroying his entire career." You look at her. "Can you do that?"

She straightens up. "Yes."

"Good." You're explaining the intricacies of Lando's travel preferences—aisle seat but only on long-haul flights, hates flying commercial but won't admit it's because he's claustrophobic, needs noise-canceling headphones or he gets migraines—when the door opens.

You don't have to look up to know it's him. You can feel it, the way the air in the room shifts, the way Emma's posture goes rigid. "Morning," Lando says, and his voice is casual, easy, like this is completely normal. Like he didn't show up at your apartment four days ago asking you to do exactly this.

You look up. He's in McLaren team gear, black joggers and a papaya polo, his hair still damp from a shower. He looks good. He always looks good. You hate that you still notice. "We're in the middle of something," you say.

"I know. Just wanted to check in. See how it's going." He leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, and his eyes are on you. Just on you. Not on Emma, not on the conference room, just you. "How's she doing?"

"She's sitting right here," Emma says, and there's a tiny bit of spine in it that makes you like her more.

"Right. Sorry." But he doesn't look at Emma. Still looking at you. "How's she doing?"

"Fine. We're going through travel protocols."

"Riveting." He pushes off the doorframe, walks into the room like he owns it. Which, technically, he does. He owns this whole building, or at least McLaren does and he's their golden boy so it's basically the same thing. He stops at the head of the table, one hand braced on the back of a chair. "Mind if I sit in?"

"Yes," you say, at the same time Emma says "No, of course not."

Lando smiles. That smile. "Majority rules." He sits down across from you. Emma looks between you like she's watching a tennis match and can't figure out who's winning.

"Continue," Lando says, gesturing at you like a professor encouraging a student. "Don't let me interrupt."

"You're already interrupting."

"Am I?" He leans back in his chair, arms behind his head. "I'm just sitting here. Very quietly. Being super helpful."

You want to throw your tablet at his head. "Emma, where were we?"

"Um." Emma's looking at her notes but you can see her hands are shaking slightly. "Travel preferences?"

"Right. So Lando needs—"

"I need a lot of things," Lando interrupts. "Very high maintenance. Must be exhausting to keep track of."

You ignore him. "Lando needs at least seven hours of sleep before a race. Which means you're coordinating with his trainer and his PR team to make sure he's not scheduled for anything after nine PM on Saturday nights."

"Unless it's important," Lando adds.

"Nothing is more important than you not crashing the car because you're tired."

"I would never crash because I'm tired. I'd crash because someone else did something stupid."

"Abu Dhabi 2023."

He sits up straighter. "That was different."

"You were exhausted. You'd done press until eleven the night before and you missed the apex on lap forty-three because you were too tired to focus."

"I missed the apex because Ocon was being a dick."

"Lando." You level him with a look. "Are you going to let me train Emma or are you going to argue with me about things that happened two years ago?" Something flickers across his face. Something that might be hurt or might be anger or might be something else entirely. "Fine. Continue."

You continue. Emma asks about race weekend protocols. You explain the specific way Lando likes his debriefs, bullet points, not paragraphs, because he won't read paragraphs. The way he gets quiet before qualifying, needs space, don't try to cheer him up or pump him up just let him be.

"He's a headphone person," you explain. "If he's wearing them, don't bother him unless the building is on fire."

"What if it's actually important?" Emma asks.

"Then text me first— sorry, text whoever his performance coach is and they'll handle it."

"You mean text you," Lando says quietly.

You don't look at him. "Text whoever is listed as his primary contact."

"That's you."

"I'm not his primary contact anymore."

"Yes, you are." He says it with complete certainty. "Never changed it. It's still you."

The room goes very quiet. Emma is looking at her tablet very intently, like she's trying to disappear into it. "We should take a break," you say, standing up. "Emma, fifteen minutes?"

"Yeah. Yes. Absolutely." She practically bolts from the room.

You start gathering your things. Lando stays seated. "You're still my primary contact," he says again.

"Change it."

"Why?"

"Because I don't work for you anymore."

"You're working for me right now."

"I'm consulting. It's temporary."

"Right." He stands up, walks around the table. He's too close now, close enough that you can smell his cologne and your head spins. "Two weeks."

"That's what we agreed."

"Then what?"

"Then I go back to my life and you figure out how to not destroy Emma's will to live."

"C'monnnn, I'm not that bad." You finally look at him. Really look at him. There's a small scar on his left eyebrow that wasn't there before—probably from a crash you didn't see, didn't hear about, weren't there for. He's broader in the shoulders. More defined. Like he's been training harder, pushing himself harder.

"You called her useless," you say quietly. "Emma. You told me she was useless."

"I said she wasn't you."

"Same thing."

"It's really not." He takes another step closer. "You were terrifying. Efficient and cold and you knew exactly what I needed before I needed it. Emma's trying but she's not—"

"She's twenty-three years old and you make her cry."

"I don't make her cry."

"You make her feel like she's failing even when she's doing everything right. That's worse than making her cry."

His jaw tightens. "That's not what I'm doing."

"Isn't it?" You cross your arms. "She accidentally booked you to Barcelona instead of Budapest and you looked at her like she'd killed your dog."

"It was a stupid mistake."

"It was an honest mistake. A mistake I made three times in my first six months working for you and you just laughed and fixed it."

"That was different."

"Why? Because you were fucking me?"

The words hang in the air between you. Lando's expression shutters closed, that thing he does when he doesn't want you to know what he's thinking. "That's not fair," he says finally.

"Nothing about this is fair." You grab your tablet. "I need air."

"Wait—" But you're already leaving, walking out of Conference Room B, past Emma who's hovering in the hallway pretending to look at her phone, toward the elevator. You hit the button. Wait. The doors open.

Lando catches them before they close.

"Move," you say.

"No."

"Lando, I swear to fucking god."

He steps into the elevator. The doors close behind him. It's just the two of you in this small space, and he's looking at you with an intensity that makes your stomach flip. "You're right," he says.

"About what?"

"About Emma. About me being too hard on her." The elevator starts moving down. "I don't mean to. I just—"

"You're comparing her to me."

"Yeah."

"Then stop."

"I can't." His voice is quiet now, raw. "You set an impossible standard and now everyone else just feels wrong."

"That's not my problem."

"Isn't it?" He moves closer. "You're here, aren't you? Training her. Which means some part of you still cares."

"I care about her. Not about you."

"Liar." The elevator dings. Ground floor. The doors open to the lobby and you walk out without looking back. You can feel him following you, his presence like a heat at your back. Outside, the Monaco sun is aggressive and bright. You walk toward the parking lot, no destination in mind, just moving because if you stop moving you might do something stupid like turn around.

"Where are you going?" Lando calls after you.

"Away from you."

"Your car's the other direction." You stop and turn around. He's standing there in the middle of the parking lot, hands in his pockets, looking at you like this is all some game and he's already won.

"What do you want from me?" you ask.

"I want," he stops. Runs a hand through his hair. "I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

"Fine. I want you to stop looking at me like I'm the villain in your story."

"Then stop acting like one."

"I fired you because," He stops again, and this time he looks genuinely frustrated, like the words won't come. "It was getting complicated."

"You said you loved me and then you fired me. That's not complicated. That's just fucking cruel, Lando."

"It wasn't— I wasn't trying to be cruel."

"Then what were you trying to be?" He doesn't answer. Just stands there in the parking lot while people walk past, employees and engineers and team members who definitely recognize both of you and are definitely going to talk about this later.

"Two weeks," you say finally. "I'm going to train Emma for two weeks and then I'm done. I don't want to have this conversation again. I don't want to analyze what happened in Qatar. I don't want closure or explanations or whatever it is you think you need to give me."

"What if I want those things?"

"Then you should've thought about that eighteen months ago." You walk back to the building, back to Conference Room B where Emma is probably still trying to make herself invisible. Lando doesn't follow you this time.

When you get back upstairs, Emma looks up nervously. "Everything okay?"

"Fine," you lie. "Let's talk about how to handle media obligations." You make it through the rest of the morning. Make it through lunch—salads in the cafeteria, Emma chattering nervously about her girlfriend and her apartment in Nice and how she got this job. Make it through the afternoon session on crisis management.

At 4:47 PM, your phone buzzes.

You stare at the messages. Emma is explaining something about how she organized his sponsor contacts but you're not listening anymore. "I need to take care of something," you tell her. "Can you review the crisis management protocols we just covered? I'll quiz you when I get back."

"Yeah, of course." She's already pulling up the documents, eager and focused.

You take the elevator to the fourth floor. Lando's office is at the end of the hall, corner office with windows overlooking the harbor. The door is half-open. You knock anyway.

"Come in," he says. His office is exactly how you remember it. Sleek brown desk, nice chair, shelves lined with trophies and helmets and racing memorabilia. There's a new addition—a photo from Abu Dhabi, him holding the championship trophy, surrounded by his team. You're not in it. Obviously.

Lando is standing by the window, back to you, still in his team gear. "Close the door," he says without turning around.

You close the door. Stay by it. Keep your hand on the handle. "What."

"I owe you an explanation." He turns around finally. His face is serious, none of that cocky confidence from this morning. "About Qatar."

"I don't want a fucking explanation."

"I know you don't want to hear it. I'm telling you anyway." He leans back against the window ledge. "I fired you because I was in love with you and I didn't know what the fuck to do about it."

You stare at him. At Lando Norris standing in his corner office with the nice windows and a championship trophy on his shelf, telling you he fired you because he loved you like that makes any fucking sense at all.

"No," you say.

"No?"

"No. You don't get to do this." You take a step forward, then another, until you're in the middle of his office and your hands are clenched into fists at your sides. "You don't get to rewrite this to make yourself feel better."

"I'm not rewriting anything. I'm telling you what happened."

"What happened is you fucked me and then you panicked and then you got rid of me. Don't dress it up as some grand romantic gesture."

"It wasn't—" He pushes off from the window, agitated now. "I wasn't trying to get rid of you. I was trying to protect you."

"From what?"

"From me. From this." He gestures around the office, at the trophies, at everything. "From being the person everyone whispers about. 'Oh, she's only here because she's sleeping with Lando Norris.' From having everything you accomplished reduced to who you were fucking."

You laugh. It comes out sharp and bitter. "How noble of you. Firing me to protect my reputation."

"It wasn't just about reputation."

"Then what was it about, Lando? Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you got scared. You said something you didn't mean in the heat of the moment and then you couldn't take it back so you just removed the problem entirely."

"I meant it." He takes a step closer. "I meant every fucking word."

"Then why—"

"Because I couldn't keep you and race at the same time!" His voice rises, echoing off the glass walls. "Because every time I got in the car I was thinking about you instead of the track. Because in Suzuka I nearly crashed in turn seven because I was wondering if you were watching. Because I was so gone for you that it was making me dangerous."

You open your mouth. Close it and try to find words that make sense. "You don't get to blame me for your driving," you say finally.

"I'm not blaming you. I'm explaining."

"You're making excuses."

"Jesus Christ." He runs both hands through his hair, messing it up completely. "Why are you being so difficult about this?"

"Difficult?" Your voice is rising now too. "You fired me, Lando. You looked me in the eye and told me I was done and then you disappeared from my life for months. You moved on for fucks sake! You found someone else. You won a fucking championship. And now you want me to what? Thank you for protecting me?"

"No, I want you to understand!"

"I understand perfectly. You wanted me gone so you could focus on your career. Mission accomplished. You got everything you wanted. Congratu-fucking-lations!"

"Everything except you."

The words hit you like a physical blow and you take a step back. Lando closes the distance. He's too close now, close enough that you can see the flecks of gold in his blue-green eyes, close enough that you're breathing the same air.

"You think I moved on?" His voice is lower now, dangerous. "You think I just forgot about you?"

"You're with Magui—"

"Magui is—" He stops. His jaw works. "Magui is uncomplicated. Easy. She doesn't make me feel like I'm losing my fucking mind."

"How nice for you both."

"You're not listening to what I'm saying."

"I'm listening. I just don't believe you."

"Why not?"

"Because if you actually loved me, you would've fought for it. You would've figured it out. You wouldn't have just thrown me away like I was—like I was disposable."

"You were never disposable." His hands come up like he's going to touch you, then drop. "You were the opposite. You were so important it fucking terrified me."

"Past tense."

"What?"

"Were. You keep saying were." You're shaking now, with anger or something else you refuse to name. "Past tense, Lando. Because whatever you felt, it's over now. You made sure of that."

"Is it?" He moves even closer, so close now that his chest is almost touching yours. "Because you came to my hotel room. You agreed to train Emma. You're standing in my office right now when you could've said no to all of it."

"I came because you manipulated me—"

"I asked. You chose."

"Fuck you."

"Yeah?" His voice drops even lower, rough and intimate and infuriating. "Is that what you want?"

Your breath catches. "Don't."

"Don't what? Don't point out that you're still here? That you haven't left even though you could? That you're looking at me right now like you want to hit me or kiss me and you can't decide which?"

"I want to hit you."

"Liar." He reaches up slowly, giving you time to move away. You don't. His fingers brush your jaw, the same way they did in that hotel room in Qatar, and your traitorous body remembers. Remembers everything. "You're still the worst liar I've ever met."

"And you're still an asshole."

"Yeah." His thumb traces along your bottom lip. "But you liked that about me."

"Past tense."

"Sure." He's smiling now, that devastating smile that means he thinks he's winning. "Keep telling yourself that."

You should leave. Should push him away, walk out of this office, text Emma that she's on her own, block Lando's number, and get on the first flight to literally anywhere else. You don't leave. "You're with someone else," you say, but your voice comes out breathy, unconvincing.

"Am I?"

"Magui—"

"Isn't here." His other hand comes up to cup your face, tilting it up toward him. "Hasn't been here. Not in any way that matters."

"That's not—you can't just—"

"I know." His forehead drops to yours. "I know it's fucked up. I know I have no right to any of this. I know I'm the villain in your story and I probably deserve it. But I can't," His voice cracks slightly. "I can't keep pretending I don't still feel it. Can't keep watching you in that conference room teaching Emma things you used to do for me and act like it doesn't make me want to flip the fucking table."

"Lando."

"Tell me you don't feel it too." His eyes search yours. "Tell me Qatar meant nothing. Tell me you don't think about it. Tell me you're over it and I'll back off. I'll let you train Emma and I'll stay away and I'll never bring this up again."

It would be so easy to lie. To say the words he's asking for and walk out and go back to your empty apartment and your pottery classes and your carefully constructed life without him. "I can't," you whisper.

"Can't what?"

"Can't tell you that."

His grip on your face tightens. "Why not?"

"Because it's not true." The admission feels like it's being torn out of you. "I think about it every day. I think about you every day. And I hate it. I hate that you still have this much power over me. I hate that you fired me and moved on and I'm still—I'm still stuck in that hotel room in Qatar waiting for you to explain why you ruined everything."

"I'm explaining now."

"It's too late."

"Is it?" He's so close now his lips are almost touching yours. "Tell me it's too late. Mean it. Make me believe it."

"Lando, don't."

"Don't what? Don't tell you I haven't stopped thinking about you? Don't admit that Magui was supposed to help me move on and it didn't work? Don't say that I've been keeping track of every pottery class and yoga session and book club meeting because I couldn't stop myself?"

"That's creepy."

"I know." He laughs, but it sounds broken. "I know it is. I know I'm fucked up about this. About you. But I can't."

You kiss him before you can talk yourself out of it. It's not soft. It's not sweet. It's eighteen months of anger and hurt and want colliding all at once. Your hands fist in his shirt, pulling him closer, and he makes a sound low in his throat that you remember, that you've heard in dreams and hated yourself for missing. His hands slide from your face to your hair, tilting your head to deepen the kiss, and it's exactly like Qatar and nothing like Qatar at all. In Qatar, it was desperate and finite, both of you knowing it was ending even as it was happening. This feels different. More dangerous.

This feels like a beginning. He walks you backward until your back hits his desk, and his hands are on your waist, lifting you onto it like you weigh nothing. Your legs wrap around him automatically, muscle memory from all those times before, and he's between your thighs and you're both breathing hard. "Fuck," he mutters against your mouth. "Fuck, I missed this."

"Shut up." You pull him back in, kissing him harder, meaner, putting all your anger into it. He takes it, gives it back, his teeth catching your bottom lip hard enough to sting.

His hands slide under your sweater, palms hot against your ribs, and you arch into the touch. You've been so cold for eighteen months and now you're burning up. "We can't," you gasp when he moves to your neck, biting down on that spot below your ear that makes you see stars. "Lando, we can't."

"Why not?" His voice is muffled against your skin, and his hands are still moving, thumbs brushing the underside of your breasts through your bra.

"Because—because Emma is downstairs, because this is your office, because you have a girlfriend."

"I'll break up with her." He says it so casually, like it's already decided. "I'll call her right now."

"Don't be stupid."

"I'm not being stupid. I'm being honest." He pulls back to look at you, and his eyes are dark, pupils blown wide. "I don't want her. I want you. I've always wanted you."

"You fired me."

"Worst decision I've ever made." His hands frame your face again, forcing you to look at him. "And I've made a lot of bad decisions, so that's saying something."

You want to laugh. Want to cry. Want to pull him back in and forget everything that happened between Qatar and now. "This is insane," you say.

"Probably."

"We'll ruin everything. Again."

"Maybe." His thumb brushes across your cheekbone. "Or maybe we'll figure it out this time."

"You don't know that."

"No." He leans in, presses a soft kiss to your forehead, then your nose, then the corner of your mouth. "But I'm willing to risk it if you are."

Your phone buzzes in your pocket. You both freeze. "Don't," Lando says.

"It might be Emma—"

"It can wait." But the spell is broken. Reality is seeping back in through the cracks—the fact that you're sitting on his desk with your sweater rucked up and your lipstick definitely smeared. The fact that Emma is downstairs waiting for you. The fact that Magui exists, whether Lando wants to acknowledge it or not. You slide off the desk, putting distance between you. Your hands are shaking as you pull your sweater back down, try to smooth your hair.

"This was a mistake," you say.

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Pretend it didn't mean anything. You're shit at it." He's watching you with an intensity that makes your skin prickle. "Always have been."

"It meant something in Qatar too. Look how that turned out."

"This is different."

"Is it?" You find your tablet where you dropped it on the floor, clutch it to your chest like Emma did this morning. "Or are you going to fire me again in two weeks when you remember why this is a bad idea?"

"That's not going to happen."

"You don't know that."

"I do, actually." He takes a step toward you. You take a step back. His jaw tightens. "Don't run."

"I'm not running. I'm leaving. There's a difference."

"Is there?" You open the door. Emma is definitely going to know something happened—your face is probably flushed, your lips probably swollen. But you can't stay here. Can't keep looking at him without wanting to touch him again. "Two weeks," you say without turning around. "I'm training Emma for two weeks. That's all this is."

"If that's what you need to tell yourself."

You walk out. Down the hallway, into the elevator, down to the third floor. Emma looks up when you walk in, takes one look at your face, and wisely says nothing. "Sorry," you manage. "That took longer than expected."

"It's fine." She's studying you though, those wide brown eyes taking in everything. "Everything okay?"

"Fine. Let's go over crisis management one more time." You make it through the rest of the day. Make it through Emma's questions and the review session and the walk to your car. Make it all the way home before you finally let yourself fall apart. Your apartment is exactly as empty as you left it. Clean and sad and full of the ghost of pottery classes and yoga sessions you quit.

Your phone buzzes and you brace yourself.

You throw your phone onto the couch. Pour yourself a glass of wine you don't drink. Stand in your living room and touch your lips where they're still tender from his teeth. This is going to end badly. You can see the car crash coming from a mile away and you're walking toward it anyway. Monday down. Thirteen days to go, and you are so undeniably fucked.

Tuesday passes in a blur of Emma and schedules and carefully avoiding the fourth floor. You arrive at 8:45 AM, earlier than necessary, because if you're early then you're in control. Emma is already there—of course she is, eager puppy that she is—with coffee for both of you and questions written neatly in her notebook.

"I was thinking about what you said yesterday," she starts, and you're grateful she doesn't mention the fact that you came back from Lando's office looking like you'd been thoroughly kissed. "About anticipating his needs before he asks?"

"Yeah?"

"How do you do that? Like, how do you know what he's going to want before he knows?" You think about all the times you just knew. Knew he needed silence before quali. Knew he needed distraction after a bad race. Knew he was spiraling before he even realized it himself. "You pay attention," you say finally. "To patterns. To mood shifts. To the things he doesn't say."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It is."

You spend the morning going through his sponsorship portfolio. Emma takes notes on everything—which sponsors require more hand-holding, which ones Lando actually likes, which ones are just obligatory. "Tag Heuer," she says, reading from her tablet. "You mentioned Marcus yesterday. What's the deal there?"

"Marcus is—" You stop, because Lando's walking past the conference room. You can see him through the glass wall, talking to someone from engineering. He doesn't look at you. Doesn't even glance in your direction.

Good. That's good. "Marcus is old-school corporate," you continue, dragging your attention back to Emma. "Thinks racing should be serious and professional. Doesn't understand that half of Lando's appeal is that he's not those things."

"So Lando hates him."

"Lando tolerates him because Tag Heuer pays extremely well."

Emma makes a note. "Got it. Tolerate with expensive gifts."

"Exactly."

Lando walks past again twenty minutes later. Still doesn't look. Wednesday is worse because Lando isn't there at all. "He had to fly to London," Emma explains when you arrive at 9 AM to an empty building. "McLaren board meeting. Won't be back until late."

"Oh." You hate the disappointment that floods through you. Hate that some part of you was expecting him to show up, to push, to do something. "Okay. Good. We can focus without distractions."

Emma gives you a look that suggests she's not as oblivious as you thought. You spend Wednesday going through worst-case scenarios. PR disasters, contract disputes, the time Lando accidentally liked a tweet criticizing the team principal and you had to do damage control for six hours straight.

"The key," you tell Emma, "is to fix it before it becomes a story. Lando's going to fuck up. That's not the question. The question is whether you can contain it before it explodes."

"That's kind of dark."

"Welcome to Formula 1." Your phone stays silent all day. No texts from Lando. No calls. Nothing. Which is fine. Which is what you wanted. You definitely don't check it seventeen times. Wednesday evening you're back in your apartment, staring at your laptop without seeing it, when Charlotte, your close friend finally calls.

"You're avoiding me," she says without preamble.

"I'm not avoiding you. I'm busy."

"Busy doing what? I thought you were living your best unemployed life."

"I'm consulting."

There's a pause. "Consulting for who?"

"It's temporary."

"Babe. Consulting for who?"

You close your eyes. "Lando."

Charlotte makes a noise that's somewhere between a laugh and a groan. "You're kidding."

"I'm training his new assistant. Two weeks. That's it."

"Two weeks of seeing your ex-boss who you were definitely in love with and who fired you after fucking you? That Lando?"

"I wasn't in love with him."

"You counted ceiling tiles for four months after he fired you."

"That's not—that's different."

"Babe." Charlotte's voice goes soft. "What are you doing?"

"I'm helping someone who needs help. Emma's sweet and she's trying and Lando's going to destroy her confidence if someone doesn't teach her how to handle him."

"Very altruistic."

"It is altruistic."

"So nothing's happened?" You think about Monday. About his office and his hands and the way he kissed you like he was drowning.

"Nothing's happened," you lie.

"You're such a bad liar." But Charlotte doesn't push. "Just be careful, okay? I don't want to watch you fall apart again."

"I'm not going to fall apart."

"Promise me."

"I promise." You hang up and immediately check your phone. Still nothing from Lando, which is good. Which is what you need. Right? Right? You make it to 11 PM before you break and text him.

You stare at that last message for longer than you should. Beautiful. He used to call you that, in hotel rooms and early mornings and moments when he thought you weren't paying attention. You plug your phone in across the room so you won't be tempted to respond. It doesn't help. You lie awake until 2 AM thinking about his hands and his mouth and the way he said I'll break up with her like it was simple.

Thursday morning Emma is vibrating with excitement when you arrive. "Okay so I have a question about the simulator sessions," she says before you've even sat down. "How often does he do them and do I need to coordinate with the engineers or does that happen automatically and—"

"Emma. Breathe."

"Right. Sorry. I'm just," She pauses. "He texted me last night."

Your stomach drops. "Lando texted you?"

"Yeah. Just to say I'm doing a good job and he appreciates me being patient while I learn." She's beaming. "That was nice, right? That he took the time to do that?"

"Very nice." Your voice sounds strange even to your own ears.

"He's not as scary as I thought he'd be. I mean, he's still intense, but you can tell he cares about getting things right."

You think about Monday, about the way he looked at you in his office, the way his voice cracked when he said I can't keep pretending. "Yeah," you manage. "He cares about getting things right."

You're midway through explaining the intricacies of coordinating with his performance coach when the door opens. Lando walks in with two coffees and that fucking smile. "Morning," he says, like this is casual, like he didn't disappear for two days. He sets one coffee in front of Emma. "Vanilla latte, right?"

Emma lights up. "You remembered!"

"Course." Then he turns to you and sets the second coffee down. "Oat milk cappuccino. Extra shot."

You stare at the cup. It's from the specific café three blocks away that you used to make him stop at every morning when you worked for him. The one with the good oat milk, not the shit oat milk. "I didn't ask for this," you say.

"I know." He sits down at the table, directly across from you. "But it's 9:30 AM and you've been here since 8:45 and you haven't had your second coffee yet. You get mean after 9:15 if you don't have caffeine."

"I'm not mean," you say.

"You're terrifying." But he says it like it's a compliment. "So. What are we covering today?"

"We?"

"I'm sitting in again. Making sure Emma's getting the full picture." He leans back in his chair, arms crossed. He's in team gear again—black joggers, papaya polo. His hair is messy like he didn't bother styling it. "That okay?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"Not really."

You want to throw the coffee at him. You take a sip instead. It's perfect. Exactly how you like it. The bastard remembers everything. "Fine. We're covering travel coordination. Emma, pull up Lando's schedule for Japan."

The next hour is torture. Lando sits there asking questions, making comments, watching you explain things to Emma with an intensity that makes your skin prickle. Every time you look at him he's already looking at you. "So when we're coordinating flights," you say, pulling up a calendar, "you need to account for jet lag. Lando needs at least two days in-country before a race weekend if it's long-haul."

"What if there's not two days?" Emma asks.

"Then you make it work. But he'll be pissy about it."

"I don't get pissy," Lando interjects.

You level him with a look. "Singapore 2024. You had one day in-country and you snapped at everyone for three days straight."

"That was different."

"How?"

"I had food poisoning."

"You were jet-lagged."

"I was dyyyyying."

"You had a very mild stomachache." Emma is trying very hard not to laugh. Lando is glaring at you, but there's something else in his expression. Something that looks almost like fondness.

"Anyway," you continue, turning back to Emma. "Two days minimum. Schedule accordingly."

At 11 AM, Lando's phone rings. He glances at the screen and his expression shutters. You make it through another twenty minutes before Lando comes back. His expression is carefully neutral, but you can see the tension in his jaw.

"All good?" Emma asks brightly.

"Fine." He sits back down. "Where were we?"

"Simulator sessions," you say. "Emma needs to know how to coordinate."

"Actually," Lando interrupts, "I need to talk to you about something. Work thing. Won't take long."

Emma looks between you. "I can step out—"

"No need." Lando is already standing. "Conference room down the hall. Five minutes."

He walks out. You have no choice but to follow. The conference room is smaller than the one you've been using, no windows, just a table and six chairs and fluorescent lighting that makes everything look slightly sickly. Lando closes the door behind you.

"What's the work thing?" you ask.

"There is no work thing."

"Then why—"

"I needed to see you alone." He's standing too close again, crowding into your space. "Needed to know if Monday was real or if I imagined the whole thing."

"Lando—"

"Did you think about it?" His voice is low, urgent. "The past two days. Did you think about it?"

"That's not, we can't do this here."

"I texted Emma. Told her she's doing a good job. Did she tell you?"

"Yes."

"I did it so you wouldn't think I was only here for you. So you wouldn't accuse me of using this as an excuse." He takes another step closer. "But I am here for you. I'm always here for you."

"You were in London."

"McLaren board meeting. Had to present the championship review. Couldn't get out of it." His hand comes up to your face but doesn't quite touch. "Thought about you the entire time. Especially during the part where they asked about my personal life."

Your breath catches. "What did you say?"

"Said it was complicated." His thumb brushes your cheekbone, so light you might be imagining it. "Said I was working on fixing something I broke."

"Did they ask about Magui?"

Something flickers across his face. "Yeah."

"And?"

"And I told them we were taking a break."

The world tilts. "You what?"

"Called her last night. Told her I needed space to figure some things out." His eyes search yours. "She was surprisingly understanding about it."

"Lando, you can't just do this."

"Can't what? Can't be honest? Can't admit that I've been in a relationship with someone I don't love because I was too fucked up over you to be alone?"

"That's not fair to her."

"I know. Which is why I ended it." His hand is fully cupping your face now. "I'm not doing this halfway. I'm not sneaking around or lying. If we're doing this, I'm all in."

"We're not doing anything—"

"Liar." He's so close now you can count his eyelashes. "You're still the worst liar I've ever met."

"You're being crazy."

"Probably." His lips brush against yours, barely a kiss, more a promise. "But I'm done pretending I don't want this. Want you."

You should push him away. Should remind him that Emma is down the hall, that this is insane, that he broke your heart eighteen months ago and you're not giving him the chance to do it again. You kiss him instead. It's different from Monday. Slower, deeper, less angry and more inevitable. Like you're both finally admitting something you've been avoiding. His hands slide into your hair and you press closer, your back hitting the wall, and he makes that sound again, the one that's half-groan and half-surrender.

"We have to stop," you gasp against his mouth.

"Why?"

"Because Emma is waiting. Because we're in an office building. Because—"

"Because you're scared."

"I'm not scared."

"You're terrified." His forehead rests against yours. "But that's okay. So am I."

"Then why are you pushing this?"

"Because eighteen months without you was worse than being scared." His eyes meet yours. "Because I'd rather risk everything than spend another year and a half counting how long it's been since I touched you." You're saved from responding by your phone buzzing in your pocket. You pull it out, grateful for the interruption.

"Shit." You step back, putting distance between you. "We need to go back."

"In a second." He catches your hand. "Tonight. Come over."

"Lando."

"Not to my place. Neutral ground. There's that restaurant you like on Avenue Princess Grace. The one with the good risotto."

"I know the one."

"Seven PM. Just dinner. Just talking."

"And if I say no?"

"Then I'll respect it." His thumb traces circles on your palm. "But you won't say no."

"You're very sure of yourself."

"I'm sure of you." He lifts your hand to his lips, presses a kiss to your knuckles. "Seven PM."

He leaves before you can argue. You stand there in the conference room, heart racing, lips tingling, completely and utterly fucked. When you get back to the main conference room, Emma takes one look at your face and mercifully says nothing. You make it through the rest of the day. Make it through explaining simulator protocols and race weekend logistics and all the things Emma needs to know.

Lando doesn't come back. At 6 PM, Emma starts packing up. "Same time tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Tomorrow's our last day of basics, then we'll start shadowing some actual events."

"Sounds good." She hesitates. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"You and Lando. You have history, right?"

You should lie. Should definitely keep it professional. "Yeah," you say instead. "We have history."

"I figured." Emma adjusts her bag. "For what it's worth, I think he's different around you. Lighter. Like he can actually breathe."

She leaves before you can respond. You sit in the empty conference room staring at your phone. At the time. 6:03 PM. You could go home. Pour wine. Pretend tonight isn't happening. Instead, at 6:47 PM, you're standing outside La Maison du Caviar in a black dress you haven't worn in two years, watching Lando get out of his car.

He's in dark jeans and a white button-down, no tie, sleeves rolled up. He looks unfairly good. "You came," he says, and he sounds surprised.

"Don't gloat."

"Wouldn't dream of it." He offers his arm. "Shall we?" Day three. Tension officially at breaking point. This is going to end in flames.

"Wine?" Lando asks once you're seated.

"I can order my own wine."

"I know you can. I'm asking if you want wine."

You do. You desperately do. "Red."

He orders a bottle of something French and expensive without looking at the menu. The sommelier practically bows before walking away. "So," Lando says, leaning back in his chair. "How am I doing?"

"At what?"

"At this. Dinner. Normal human interaction."

"It's been five minutes."

"And?"

"And you're doing fine. Very restrained."

He smiles. That dangerous smile that means trouble. "Just wait."

The wine arrives. It's good. Too good. The kind of good that makes you forget you're supposed to be maintaining boundaries. "Emma's doing well," you say, because work is safe. Work is neutral territory.

"She is. Thanks to you."

"She's a fast learner. She actually listens."

"Unlike me?"

"You listen. You just choose to ignore half of what people tell you."

"Not true. I listened when you told me I needed to be nicer to Emma."

"You texted her once."

"And I brought her coffee this morning. And I'm letting her leave at reasonable hours instead of texting her at midnight about random shit." He takes a sip of wine. "See? Growth."

"Impressive. Want a gold star?"

"I want you to admit I'm trying."

"You're trying," you concede. "Doesn't mean it's working."

"Ouch." The waiter comes to take your order. You get the risotto because Lando was right, it is good here. He gets something with fish that you know he'll eat half of before getting distracted. Once the waiter leaves, Lando leans forward. "So. Eighteen months."

"We're not doing this."

"Doing what?"

"The post-mortem. The 'where did we go wrong' conversation."

"Why not?"

"Because I already know where we went wrong. You fired me."

"Before that. You're skipping the part where we were in love."

Your grip tightens on your wine glass. "We weren't in love."

"I was."

"Don't."

"Don't what? Don't tell you the truth?" He stops, frustrated. "Why are you being so difficult about this?"

"Difficult?" Your voice rises slightly. An older couple two tables over glances your way. You lower it. "You think I'm being difficult?"

"I think you're refusing to have an actual conversation because you're scared of what might happen if you do."

"I'm not scared of anything."

"Bullshit. You're terrified. You've been terrified since Monday when I kissed you and you kissed me back and realized that maybe you're not as over this as you want to be."

"You're so fucking arrogant."

"And you're deflecting."

"I'm being realistic. You broke my heart, Lando. You don't get to just decide we're doing this again because you're bored of your girlfriend."

His jaw tightens. "That's not what this is."

"Then what is it?"

"It's me finally having the balls to fix the worst mistake I ever made."

"By taking me to dinner? By kissing me in conference rooms? That's your plan?"

"My plan is to show you that I'm serious. That this isn't just—" He gestures vaguely. "—nostalgia or whatever you think it is."

"It's been two days."

"It's been eighteen months. Two days is just how long it took me to get you in the same room as me." He refills your wine glass even though you haven't asked. "And before you say it—yes, I know I'm the one who caused those eighteen months. I know I fucked up. I know I hurt you. But I'm here now and I'm trying and you won't even give me a chance to explain. I've had eighteen months to figure out exactly how miserable I am without you." His voice drops. "Because I've tried to move on and I can't. Because every time I get in that fucking car I still think about you in Qatar watching me in FP2 and smiling like you were proud of me."

Your chest aches. "Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't say things like that."

"Why not? It's true."

"Because it's not fair." You set your wine glass down too hard. "You don't get to fire me and disappear and show up eighteen months later with pretty words and expect me to just—"

"Just what?"

"Just forget. Just forgive. Just let you back in like you didn't completely destroy me."

The silence that follows is sharp enough to cut. "I know," Lando says finally, quietly. "I know I destroyed you. You think I don't know that? You think I didn't see what I did to you?"

"Clearly not, since you still did it."

"I did it because I was fucking terrified. Because I'd never felt that way about anyone and it was making me insane. Because every time I looked at you I wanted things I didn't know how to want." His hands are clenched on the table. "And I know that's not an excuse. I know it doesn't make it better. But I'm trying to explain—"

"I don't want an explanation. I want you to leave me alone."

"Liar."

"Stop calling me that."

"Then stop lying." He leans forward. "You want me to leave you alone? Fine. Tell me Monday meant nothing. Tell me you felt nothing when I kissed you. Tell me you're not sitting here right now wishing we were anywhere else so you could do it again."

"You're delusional."

"Am I? Because your pupils are dilated and your breathing is uneven and you've been staring at my mouth for the past thirty seconds." Fuck. He's right. You have been.

"That's—I'm not—"

"You're a terrible liar," he says again, and there's something almost gentle in it now. "Always have been. It's one of my favorite things about you."

"I need to use the bathroom." You stand up before he can respond. Navigate through the restaurant on unsteady legs—from the wine or from him, you're not sure. The bathroom is in the back, single-stall, the kind with a heavy wooden door and a lock that actually works.

You close yourself inside and immediately brace your hands on the sink. Your reflection looks back at you—flushed cheeks, bright eyes, lips slightly parted. You look like someone who's losing an argument. Worse, you look like someone who wants to lose. Deep breath. You can do this. You can go back out there, finish dinner like a professional, go home, and forget this ever—

The door opens and Lando steps inside and locks it behind him. "What are you doing?" Your voice comes out breathy, unconvincing.

"What do you think I'm doing?" He's crossing the space between you in two strides, and then his hands are on your waist and he's lifting you onto the sink.

"Someone could—"

"Let them." His mouth finds your neck, that spot below your ear that makes you gasp. "I'm done pretending. Done watching you try to convince yourself you don't want this."

"Lando."

"Tell me to stop." His hands slide up your thighs, pushing your dress higher. "Tell me you don't want this and I'll walk out right now. I'll finish dinner, take you home, never bring it up again."

You should. You should absolutely tell him to stop. "I hate you," you say instead.

"I know." His mouth moves to yours, kissing you hard enough to bruise. "Hate me louder."

Your hands fist in his shirt, pulling him closer even as you're trying to push him away. It's all contradiction—your mouth saying one thing while your body says another, and he can read every single signal.

"This is insane," you gasp when he bites down on your lower lip.

"Probably." His hands are everywhere now—in your hair, on your waist, sliding up your ribs. "Don't care."

"We're in a restaurant bathroom."

"I know." He pulls back just enough to look at you, and his eyes are dark, dangerous. "You want me to stop?"

"Yes."

"Liar." His hand slides higher, fingers tracing the edge of your underwear. "Try again."

"I—fuck—" Your head drops back against the mirror as his fingers slip beneath the fabric, teasing. "This doesn't change anything."

"Doesn't it?" He's watching your face, cataloging every reaction. "Because you're shaking. And your breathing's gone all uneven. And you're so wet I can feel it through your underwear."

"That's not—" You gasp as he presses exactly where you need him. "—not fair."

"Nothing about this is fair." His mouth is on your neck again, biting, sucking, definitely leaving marks. "Been thinking about this for eighteen months. Eighteen months of wondering if you tasted the same, if you'd make those same sounds, if you'd still fall apart the same way."

His fingers slide inside you and you bite your lip to keep from making noise. "Don't." He uses his free hand to pull your lip from between your teeth. "Want to hear you. Want everyone in this fucking restaurant to know what I'm doing to you."

"You're insane."

"And you love it." He adds another finger, curling them just right, and your hips buck against his hand. "There she is. There's my girl."

"Not your girl."

"No?" He slows his movements, teasing. "Then whose girl are you?"

"I'm not—I don't belong to—fuck, don't stop—"

"Say it." His thumb finds your clit and you actually whimper. "Say you're mine."

"Go to hell."

He laughs, and it's dark and possessive and makes you clench around his fingers. "We're already there, beautiful. Might as well enjoy it." He works you with devastating precision—eighteen months and he still remembers exactly what you need. The pressure, the angle, the rhythm that makes your thighs shake. You're gripping his shoulders, nails digging in through his shirt, and he's muttering against your neck in a voice gone rough and desperate.

"So fucking perfect. Missed this. Missed you. Missed making you fall apart on my fingers like you're mine, like you've always been mine—"

"Lando—" You're close, embarrassingly close, everything building sharp and inevitable.

"I know. I can feel it. Can feel you getting tighter." His mouth finds yours, kissing you through it. "Come on, beautiful. Show me. Show me you still want this as much as I do."

You come with his name on your lips and your hands fisted in his hair, and he works you through it, drawing it out until you're shaking and oversensitive and pushing his hand away. "Fuck," you breathe.

"Yeah." He's breathing hard too, forehead pressed against yours, and you can feel how hard he is against your thigh. "So that happened."

Reality comes crashing back. You're in a restaurant bathroom with your dress rucked up and Lando's fingers still inside you and at least twenty people on the other side of the door who definitely heard something. "Oh my god." You push at his chest. "Oh my god, we just—in a public bathroom—"

"Technically a private bathroom." But he's pulling back, giving you space. "No one's going to say anything."

"Everyone's going to say something." You slide off the sink on shaky legs, trying to pull your dress down with trembling hands. "They're going to see us walk out and they're going to know—"

"So what if they know?" He's watching you in the mirror, his reflection overlapping with yours. "I told you. I'm done pretending."

"That's easy for you to say. You're Lando Norris. You can do whatever you want."

"And what are you?"

"I'm the girl who got fired for sleeping with her boss and now everyone's going to think I'm pathetic for coming back."

"No." He steps behind you, hands on your hips, meeting your eyes in the mirror. "You're the girl I've been in love with for two years who I was too much of a coward to keep. And if anyone says anything about you being pathetic, I'll personally destroy them."

You want to argue. Want to list all the reasons this is a terrible idea. Want to protect yourself before he has the chance to hurt you again. Instead you turn around and kiss him. Slower this time, softer, and when you pull back his eyes are closed like he's savoring it.

"This doesn't mean I forgive you," you whisper.

"I know."

"And it doesn't mean we're back together."

"Okay."

"And I still think you're an asshole."

"Fair." He opens his eyes. "But you're here. You came to dinner. You let me—" He gestures vaguely at the sink. "—do that. So maybe we're not as hopeless as you think."

"We're absolutely hopeless."

"Probably." He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear. "But I'm willing to risk it if you are."

You should say no. Should walk out, go home, block his number, and never look back.

"One chance," you hear yourself say. "You get one chance, Lando. You fuck this up, I'm gone. For real this time."

"I won't fuck it up."

"You don't know that."

"Yes, I do." He kisses you again, quick and sure. "Because I'm not losing you twice."

You fix your makeup as best you can. Lando runs his fingers through his hair, trying to make it look less like you've had your hands in it. You both look thoroughly fucked and there's nothing to be done about it.

"Ready?" he asks.

"No."

"Me neither." He unlocks the door. "Let's go anyway."

The meal continues in a strange sort of limbo. Lando orders dessert—some chocolate thing that's probably obscenely expensive—and insists you try it even though you say you're not hungry. He feeds you a bite from his fork and you let him, and somewhere in the back of your mind you're aware that this is a turning point, that you're crossing a line you swore you wouldn't cross.

"Good?" he asks.

"It's fine."

"Just fine?" He takes another bite, considering. "I think it's better than fine."

"You think everything here is better than fine. You probably have stock in this place."

"I don't have stock in this place." He pauses. "I know the owner, though. Nice guy. Makes excellent risotto."

"Of course you do." By the time the check comes, it's nearly 10 PM. The restaurant has thinned out—just a few tables left, couples lingering over wine, the staff starting their closing routines. Lando pays without looking at the total, leaves a tip that's probably more than your entire meal cost.

"Ready?" he asks, standing and offering his hand. You look at it for a moment. At his palm, open and waiting. At the decision you're about to make. You take his hand. Outside, Monaco is cold and beautiful. The kind of night where the Mediterranean is dark glass reflecting city lights, where everything feels suspended and possible. Lando's car is waiting where the valet brought it around—matte black Porsche,

"I can walk," you say, even though you're not letting go of his hand.

"It's cold."

"It's twelve minutes."

"It's twelve minutes in heels." He opens the passenger door. "Let me drive you. Please." There's something in the please that gets you. Something vulnerable and honest that wasn't there before. You get in the car. Lando slides into the driver's seat and the engine purrs to life. He doesn't immediately drive. Just sits there with his hands on the steering wheel, staring out at the street.

"You okay?" you ask.

"Yeah." He glances at you. "Just thinking."

"About?"

"About how I'm going to convince you to let me come upstairs."

Your stomach flips. "Lando."

"I know, I know. You said one chance. I'm not fucking it up." He pulls out into traffic, smooth and controlled. "But I also know that if I drop you off and drive away, you're going to spend the entire night convincing yourself this was a mistake."

"It might be a mistake."

"Or it might not be." He takes the turn toward your apartment, like he's made this drive a thousand times. Maybe he has, in his head. "Either way, I'd rather find out tonight than spend another eighteen months wondering."

You don't respond. Just watch the city slide past through the window, trying to organize your thoughts into something coherent. Trying to figure out when exactly you decided to let this happen. Your apartment building appears too quickly. Lando pulls into a spot on the street—not in front, not obvious, but close enough. He kills the engine and the sudden silence is deafening.

"So," he says.

"So."

"This is the part where you invite me up for coffee that we both know we're not going to drink."

"Is it?"

"Or—" He shifts to face you properly. "—this is the part where you tell me to leave and I respect that and go home alone and hate myself for approximately six hours before texting you something stupid at 4 AM."

"Those are my only two options?"

"Probably not. But they're the most likely ones." His hand finds yours in the dark. "For what it's worth, I'm hoping for the coffee."

You should tell him to leave. Should protect yourself, keep the boundary you've barely managed to maintain. Should remember that this is Lando Norris, who broke your heart eighteen months ago and has given you no real proof that he won't do it again.

"Do you actually want coffee?" you ask instead.

His smile is slow and dangerous. "Not even a little bit."

"Then why did you offer?"

"Because you need the plausible deniability. Need to tell yourself we're just having coffee, just talking, just two adults having a completely professional and appropriate conversation at 10 PM in your apartment." He brings your hand to his lips, kisses your knuckles. "And I'll play along. I'll make coffee and sit on your couch and keep my hands to myself until you give me permission to do otherwise."

"You're very confident I'm going to give you permission."

"I'm not confident about anything right now except that I want you. Have wanted you for two years. Will probably want you for the rest of my life." His eyes meet yours in the dim light. "But I can wait. I'm good at waiting now. Eighteen months taught me patience."

Your heart is doing something complicated in your chest. "One coffee."

"One coffee," he agrees.

You get out of the car before you can change your mind. Lando follows, keeping a careful distance as you walk to your building's entrance. You're aware of his presence behind you—not crowding, not pushing, just there. Patient in a way he never was before. The elevator ride is silent. You're both watching the numbers climb—three, four, five, six, seven. Your floor. The doors open and you lead him down the hallway to your apartment.

Your hands shake slightly as you unlock the door. Lando notices but doesn't comment. Inside, your apartment looks exactly the same as it did when he was here four days ago. Clean and empty and sad. You see it through his eyes again—the bookshelf organized by color, the lack of personal photos, the overall sense that no one actually lives here.

"Coffee," you say, moving toward the kitchen. "How do you take it?"

"However you're making it." He's still standing by the door, hands in his pockets. Not moving. Not presuming. "Nice place."

"You said it was sad last time you were here."

"I said it looked like no one lives here. Different thing." He finally moves, but only to the living room, sitting on the edge of your couch like he's not sure he's allowed. "Do you actually live here or do you just exist in it?"

"That's a very philosophical question for 10 PM."

"I'm a very philosophical guy."

"Since when?"

"Since I spent eighteen months thinking about what I did wrong." He watches you move around the kitchen, getting mugs and grounds and trying to remember how your coffee maker works. "Lots of time to think when you're alone."

"You weren't alone. You had Magui."

"I told you. That was—"

"Uncomplicated. I remember." You measure out coffee with more precision than necessary. "How is she taking the break?"

"She said she saw it coming."

You turn to look at him. "She did?"

"Yeah." He runs a hand through his hair. "Apparently I talk about you. A lot. Even when I'm trying not to."

"That's—" You don't know how to finish that sentence. "—unfortunate for her."

"She's already seeing someone else. Some photographer. They've been friends for a while." He says it casually, like it doesn't bother him at all. "She's happy."

"And you're here."

"I'm here," he confirms.

The coffee maker gurgles to life. You lean against the counter, arms crossed, watching him watch you.

"Why did you really come to Monaco?" you ask. "Not the story about Emma being useless. The real reason."

He's quiet for a moment. "You want the truth?"

"That would be nice."

"I came because I couldn't stay away anymore. Because I won the championship and the first person I wanted to tell was you and you weren't there. Because I went to the Prize Giving with Magui and spent the entire night wishing it was you in that dress." He stands up, finally, moving toward the kitchen. Not quite entering it, just leaning in the doorway. "Because I've been tracking your pottery classes and your yoga sessions and every other thing you've tried to distract yourself with, and I realized I was being a creepy stalker instead of just coming here and saying what I should've said eighteen months ago."

"Which is?"

"That I love you. That firing you was the worst decision I've ever made. That I'm sorry." His voice cracks slightly on the sorry. "That I don't expect you to forgive me but I'm asking anyway."

The coffee maker beeps. You don't move.

"How were you tracking my pottery classes?"

"Really? That's your question?"

"It's a relevant question."

He sighs. "Charlotte."

"Charlotte?" Your voice rises. "Charlotte's been spying on me for you?"

"Not spying. Updating. She thought I should know you were okay."

"I'm going to kill her."

"She was trying to help."

"By reporting my activities to my ex-boss like I'm under surveillance?"

"When you put it that way it sounds bad—"

"It is bad, Lando!" You're fully yelling now, and some part of you knows you're not actually angry about Charlotte, you're angry about everything else—the eighteen months and the pottery classes and the fact that he's standing in your kitchen looking unfairly good and you want him so badly you can barely breathe. "You can't just—you can't track me and show up and expect me to just—"

"To just what?" He moves into the kitchen properly now, crowding into your space. "To just admit you still feel it too? To just let yourself want something instead of punishing yourself for wanting it?"

"I'm not punishing myself—"

"You're living like a ghost. Like you're waiting for permission to actually be alive again." His hands find your waist, not pulling, just holding. "Let me give you permission."

"I don't need your permission."

"Then take it anyway." His forehead drops to yours. "Take what you want. For once, just take it."

You're gripping his shirt. You don't remember reaching for him but you're holding on like he's the only solid thing in the room.

"This is going to end badly," you whisper.

"Probably."

"You're going to break my heart again."

"I'm going to try really hard not to."

"That's not good enough."

"I know." His lips brush yours, barely a kiss. "But it's all I've got."

You kiss him properly this time. Slower than in the restaurant bathroom, less desperate, more like you're both admitting something you've been avoiding. His hands slide up your back and you press closer, and the coffee sits forgotten on the counter, getting cold.

"Bedroom," you breathe against his mouth.

"You sure?"

"If you ask me one more time if I'm sure, I'm changing my mind."

He lifts you like you weigh nothing, your legs wrapping around his waist automatically. He carries you down the hallway, kissing you the whole way, only fumbling slightly when he has to navigate your bedroom door. Your bed is exactly where beds go, and he sets you down on it with a gentleness that makes your chest ache.

"Hi," he says, hovering over you.

"Hi yourself."

"Just so we're clear—this isn't just sex."

"Lando."

"I need you to know that. This isn't me trying to get laid. This is me trying to—" He stops, searching for words. "—to show you I'm serious. That I'm all in."

"You're going to show me you're serious by sleeping with me?"

"I'm going to show you I'm serious by staying." His hand cups your face. "By waking up here tomorrow. By making you actual coffee in the morning. By not running away when it gets complicated."

"It's already complicated."

"Then I guess I'm not going anywhere." He kisses you again, and this time there's a promise in it. A commitment you're not sure either of you are ready for but are making anyway. Your hands find the buttons of his shirt. Start working them open one by one. He watches your face the whole time, like he's memorizing this, like he's afraid if he blinks you'll disappear.

"Still with me?" you ask when his shirt is open, hands spread on his chest.

"Always." His hand slides into your hair. "Even when you don't want me to be."

"Annoyingly persistent."

"One of my best qualities." He pulls your dress over your head in one smooth motion, and then you're both just staring at each other in the dim light from the hallway. "Fuck. I forgot how beautiful you are."

"You saw me three days ago."

"Wasn't close enough." His hands map your body like he's relearning it—ribs, waist, hips, thighs. "Wasn't touching you like this."

You pull him down, tired of talking, tired of thinking, tired of all the reasons this is a terrible idea. His weight settles over you and everything else falls away—the eighteen months, the fear, the certainty that this will end in disaster. Right now, there's just this. Just him. Just the feeling of finally, finally being exactly where you want to be.

Even if it's temporary. Even if it's going to hurt later. Right now, though, it's enough.

Days four through fourteen pass in a blur of Emma and schedules and Lando showing up at your apartment every single night like he lives there. He doesn't live there. You've been very clear about that.

"I'm just here a lot," he says on day seven, making coffee in your kitchen at 6 AM like he belongs there. Like it's normal, like this is normal. "That's different from living here."

"You have a toothbrush in my bathroom."

"Emergency toothbrush."

"You have clothes in my closet."

"Just in case."

"Lando."

"What?" He's grinning now, that insufferable grin that makes you want to hit him and kiss him in equal measure. "I'm respecting boundaries. You said I couldn't move in. I'm not moving in. I'm just visiting. A lot."

"You stayed here six nights in a row."

"And I went home on the seventh. See? Not living here."

You throw a dish towel at his head. He catches it, still grinning. The thing is—it's good. Terrifyingly good. He makes you coffee in the morning and you pretend to be annoyed about it. He stays up too late watching old race footage and you fall asleep on his chest listening to his heartbeat. He fucks you against your kitchen counter on day nine and you return the favor in your shower on day eleven and somewhere in between all of that, you stop counting days.

Emma is thriving. That's the word everyone keeps using—thriving. She's confident now, anticipating Lando's needs before he asks, managing his schedule like she's been doing it for years instead of two weeks. "You're amazing," she tells you on day twelve, over coffee in the MTC cafeteria. "Seriously. I don't know how you did this job for so long."

"Practice. Lots of practice."

"And patience. God, so much patience." She stirs her latte. "He's different lately though, have you noticed?"

Your stomach flips. "Different how?"

"Happier? Less stressed? I don't know, he just seems lighter." She smiles. "Whatever you said to him about being nicer to me, it worked. He actually asked about my Christmas plans yesterday. Like, genuine interest. It was weird."

"Good weird?"

"The best weird." She leans forward. "Can I ask you something personal?"

"That depends on the question."

"You and Lando. Are you... I mean, it seems like—" She stops, cheeks flushing. "Sorry. That's none of my business."

"It's complicated."

"That's what everyone says when they're together but don't want to admit it." She's still smiling, not judging, just observing.

Day fourteen arrives with the weight of finality. Your last day training Emma. Your last day having an excuse to be at MTC every morning. Your last day before everything becomes real or falls apart or some combination of both. Emma brings you flowers. Actual flowers—a bouquet of peonies tied with a ribbon.

"Thank you," she says, and her eyes are suspiciously shiny. "For everything. For being patient with me. For not making me feel stupid when I messed up. For teaching me how to do this job without losing my mind."

"You're going to be great," you tell her, and you mean it. "Better than great. You're going to be exactly what he needs."

"I hope so." She hugs you, quick and tight. "Will you still answer if I text you with questions?"

"Of course."

"Even stupid questions?"

"Especially stupid questions."

Lando doesn't show up all day. You tell yourself it's fine, that he's busy, that he's giving you and Emma space to wrap things up properly. You tell yourself a lot of things that aren't quite true. At 5 PM, Emma leaves. You pack up your things—tablet, the notes you've accumulated, the coffee mug you've been using that technically belongs to McLaren. You're stalling. You know you're stalling when your phone buzzes.

You take the elevator to the fourth floor for what might be the last time. Lando's office door is open. He's standing by the window, still in team gear, and he turns when you walk in. "Hey," he says.

"Hey."

"So. Two weeks."

"Two weeks," you confirm.

"Emma's going to be fine."

"She is."

"Thanks to you." He moves toward you, hands in his pockets. "I, uh. I got you something. To say thank you. For the training."

"Lando, you don't have to—"

"I wanted to." He pulls an envelope from his desk drawer. "It's not much. Just a little something." You open it. It's a check. A very large check. More than double what you agreed on.

"This is too much."

"It's not enough." His voice is quiet. "You came back when I asked. You trained Emma. You gave me two weeks when you could've told me to fuck off."

"I did tell you to fuck off."

"And then you came anyway." He's smiling now, that soft smile that's just for you. "Thank you."

"You're welcome." You fold the check, tuck it into your bag. "So I guess this is it."

"Is it?"

"The two weeks are up. I'm done. You and Emma are set."

"What about us?"

There it is. The question you've been avoiding for fourteen days.

"I don't know," you admit. "What about us?"

"I don't want this to end." He says it simply, honestly. "The two weeks are up but I'm not ready to stop seeing you every day. Coming to your apartment. Waking up next to you. All of it."

"Lando."

"I know it's fast. I know we're still figuring things out. But I'm all in. I told you that. I meant it." He takes your hands. "Move in with me."

You stare at him. "What?"

"Move in with me. My place. I have space. A lot of space. You could—"

"No."

"No?"

"We've been doing this for two weeks. That's not enough time to—"

"It's been two years," he interrupts. "Two weeks is just how long it took us to stop being idiots about it."

"That's not how this works."

"Then how does it work?" He's frustrated now, you can see it in the set of his jaw. "Tell me. Tell me what I need to do to prove I'm serious."

"I don't know! I don't have a checklist of requirements. I just," You pull your hands back. "I need time. I need to know this isn't going to fall apart the second things get hard."

"Things are already hard. We're still here."

"Two weeks isn't hard, Lando. Two weeks is the easy part. The hard part is six months from now when you're traveling and I'm here and we haven't seen each other in weeks. The hard part is when I do something that pisses you off and you remember why you fired me in the first place."

"That's not going to happen."

"You don't know that."

He opens his mouth. Closes it. "You're right. I don't know that. But I know I want to try. I know that two weeks with you has been better than eighteen months without you. I know that I'm in love with you and I don't want to waste any more time pretending I'm not."

Your chest aches. "I need to go."

"Where?"

"Home. My home. I need space to think."

"Okay." He doesn't try to stop you. "Will I see you tonight?"

"I don't know."

"Tomorrow?"

"Lando."

"I'm just asking. I'm not pushing." But you can see it in his eyes—the fear that this is it, that you're walking out and not coming back.

"I'll text you," you say finally.

"Promise?"

"Promise."

You leave before you can change your mind. Drive home in a daze, your apartment appearing too quickly. Inside, it's exactly as you left it this morning—coffee mugs in the sink from breakfast with Lando, his shirt draped over your chair, evidence of him everywhere. You sink onto your couch and try to figure out what the fuck you're doing.

Christmas comes three days later and you spend it alone. Lando's in the UK—family obligations, his mum's house in Somerset, the kind of traditional British Christmas that involves too much food and badly wrapped presents and everyone arguing about charades. He invited you. Asked you three times, actually, each time more hopeful than the last.

You said no.

"I don't want to meet your family," you'd told him. "Not yet. It's too much."

"They'd love you."

"That's not the point."

"Then what is the point?"

"The point is I need space. I need to figure out if this is real or if it's just us getting caught up in each other again."

He'd looked like you'd slapped him. "Right. Space. Okay."

He texted you on Christmas morning, then a hour later, and the hour after that. Charlotte called twice asking if you're spending Christmas alone, you lied, she definitely didn't believe you.

The day after Christmas, you're sitting in your apartment in pajamas and the same book you've been pretending to read for three days when your doorbell rings at 2:47 PM. Lando is standing in your hallway in a Christmas sweater—an actual, honest-to-god Christmas sweater with reindeer on it. He's holding a small gift bag, silver with white tissue paper, and he looks nervous.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi."

"Can I come in?"

You step aside. He walks in, setting the gift bag on your coffee table like it might explode. "You didn't have to get me anything," you say.

"I know. I wanted to." He shoves his hands in his pockets. "How was your Christmas?"

"Fine. Quiet."

"Mine was loud. Too loud. Kept thinking about how you'd hate it—all the noise and the people and my mum asking a million questions."

"She asked about me?"

"Yeah. She wanted to know why I invited someone and then showed up alone. Gave me a whole lecture about not screwing things up." He smiles, but it's strained. "She's very wise."

You gesture to the couch. He sits. You sit on the opposite end, keeping distance between you. "The training finished well," he says, like this is a business meeting. "Emma's doing great."

"I know. She texted me."

"Right. Of course." He's fidgeting now, picking at a loose thread on the couch. "I, uh. I missed you. At Christmas. Kept looking around like you might show up even though I knew you wouldn't."

"Lando."

"I know you need space. I'm trying to give you space. But it's been three days and I'm going insane." He looks at you finally. "I don't know how to do this. Don't know how to prove I'm serious without being overwhelming. Don't know how to give you time without feeling like I'm losing you."

"You're not losing me."

"Aren't I?" His voice cracks slightly. "You spent Christmas alone. You won't move in with me. You barely text me back. What am I supposed to think?"

"That I'm scared." The admission comes out quiet. "That I'm terrified this is going to fall apart and I don't know if I'll survive it a second time."

"So don't let it fall apart." He moves closer. "Stay. Fight for this. Give us an actual chance."

"I am giving us a chance."

"Are you? Because from where I'm sitting, it looks like you're preparing for the end before we've even really started." His hand finds yours. "I'm not going anywhere. I don't know how many times I need to say it. I'm not firing you. I'm not leaving. I'm not changing my mind."

"You can't promise that."

"Yes, I can." He reaches for the gift bag, holds it out to you. "Open it."

"Lando."

"Please. Just open it."

You take the bag. Pull out the tissue paper. Inside is a small box, velvet, the kind that makes your heart stop. "It's not what you think," he says quickly. "I mean—just open it."

You open it and it's a key. A single key on a keyring, simple and silver.

You stare at it. "It's to my place," Lando says, words tumbling out fast now. "I know you said you won't move in. I heard you. But I want you to have it anyway. So you can come over whenever. So you know you're always welcome. So you can—" He stops. Takes a breath. "So you can stop thinking of my place as mine and start thinking of it as ours."

Your vision blurs. "Lando."

"I know it's not a grand gesture. I know it's just a key. But I don't know how else to show you I mean it. That I want you in my space, in my life, in everything." His thumb brushes your knuckles. "You said I needed to prove I'm serious. This is me proving it. Take the key. Use it or don't use it. But know it's there. Know you have a place with me whenever you're ready."

You're crying now. Properly crying. And Lando looks panicked.

"Shit. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you cry. If it's too much—"

You kiss him. Hard and desperate and with your hands fisted in his ridiculous Christmas sweater. "It's perfect," you whisper against his mouth. "You're perfect."

"I'm really not."

"Shut up and let me have this."

He laughs, and it sounds like relief. "Okay."

You pull back, wiping your eyes. The key sits in the box, catching the light.

"I'm still scared," you admit.

"Me too."

"But I want this. I want us."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." You pick up the key, test its weight in your palm. "I'm not ready to move in yet. But maybe—maybe I could stay over more? Start keeping more things there?"

"Yes. Absolutely. Whatever you want." He's grinning now, that full devastating smile. "You can reorganize my entire closet if you want. Color-code my kitchen. Do that thing you do where you arrange everything by frequency of use."

"You make me sound like a psychopath."

"You are a psychopath. It's one of my favorite things about you." He pulls you into his lap, arms wrapping around you. "Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas." You press your face into his neck, breathing him in. "For the record, I missed you too."

"Yeah?"

"So much I almost got on a plane to Somerset."

"You should've."

"Your mum would've hated me. Strange woman showing up on Christmas."

"My mum would've loved you. She already does, actually. Based entirely on my descriptions." He pulls back to look at you. "Fair warning—she's going to want to meet you. Properly. Probably at Easter or something equally family-oriented and terrifying."

"Easter's months away."

"So we have time to prepare." His hand cups your face. "You'll be ready by then. I know you will."

"How are you so sure?"

"Because you're here. Because you're crying over a key. Because you're scared but you're doing it anyway." He kisses your forehead. "That's the bravest thing I know."

You stay like that for a long time—curled up on your couch with Lando, the key in your hand, the future stretching out uncertain and terrifying and full of possibility. It's not perfect. You're still scared. He's still Lando Norris with all the complications that entails. But it's real. And maybe that's enough. Maybe that's everything.

Eight Months Later

The private jet levels off somewhere over Europe. You're curled up in the leather seat across from Lando, watching him pretend to read the same page of his book for the fifth time. You've been living together for six months now—his place became your place became our place somewhere around month three when you finally stopped keeping a drawer at your apartment "just in case." You sold that apartment four months ago. Haven't regretted it once.

"Nervous?" you ask.

"About what?" He sets the book down, reaches for your hand. The promise ring sits on your right hand, exactly where it's been for eight months. You've gotten used to the weight of it. Used to the way Lando looks at it sometimes, like he's planning something.

"You've read the same page five times."

He laughs, caught. "Fine. Maybe a little nervous." He stands up, walks to his bag. "Actually, I have something for you."

"Lando—"

"Close your eyes. Trust me."

You close your eyes. Feel silk brush against your face—a blindfold. He ties it carefully at the back of your head. "What are you doing?"

"Surprising you." He takes your hand. "Just trust me. We'll land soon."

"We're supposed to be going to Belgium."

"We are. Eventually." You can hear the smile in his voice. "But first—a detour." Twenty minutes of torture. You can hear everything but see nothing—the engine, the change in air pressure as you descend, Lando's thumb tracing circles on your palm like he's the one who needs reassurance. The plane touches down. Smooth landing. Lando helps you stand, guides you down the stairs carefully, his hand firm on your waist. The air is different here—warmer than Monaco, with a breeze that smells like salt and something floral you can't quite place.

"Are we at the beach?"

"Maybe. Keep walking." He guides you across tarmac, then pavement, then sand. Definitely sand. You can hear waves now, the rhythmic crash of water against shore. The sand gives way to wood—a deck, maybe a dock. The sound of the waves is louder here. Then he stops. His hands on your shoulders.

"Okay," he says, and his voice is different now. Nervous. "You can take it off."

You untie the blindfold, let it fall.

You're standing on a dock. The sun is setting over crystal-clear water that stretches to the horizon. There's a villa behind you, white stone and huge windows, the kind of place that's definitely not in Belgium. Palm trees. Bougainvillea climbing the walls. The most beautiful sunset you've ever seen painting everything gold and pink.

"Where are we?" you breathe.

"Greece." Lando's voice comes from behind you. "Santorini, specifically."

You turn around and Lando Norris is on one knee. Your heart stops. Actually fucking stops because he's holding a box—a different box than the one from eight months ago. This one is smaller, more delicate, and when he opens it there's a ring inside that catches the sunset and throws light everywhere.

"I know this is fast," he starts, and his voice is shaking. "I know eight months isn't very long in the grand scheme of things. But I've been in love with you for two years. I wasted eighteen months of that being an idiot. And the last eight months have been everything. Coming home to you. Waking up next to you. Fighting about whose turn it is to do dishes and making terrible pasta at midnight and watching you reorganize my closet for the third time." He takes a shaky breath. "I don't want to waste any more time. I don't want to wait until it's been a year or two years or whatever arbitrary timeline is supposed to make this acceptable. I know what I want. I've known since Qatar. I've known since before Qatar."

You're crying already. God, what is happening?

"You make me better. You make everything better. You call me on my shit and you're there at 3 AM when I can't sleep and you make Emma text you updates because you're worried about her even though you don't work for me anymore. I love you. I love you so much it's stupid. And I want to marry you. I want to marry you and fight about coffee orders and have you reorganize our entire life and grow old and—"

"Yes," you interrupt.

He blinks. "What?"

"Yes. I'll marry you. Obviously I'll marry you, you idiot."

"I had a whole speech prepared—"

"I don't care about the speech." You're pulling him up off his knees, laughing and crying at the same time. "Ask me. Properly."

He laughs, stands up, takes the ring out of the box with shaking hands. "Will you marry me?"

"Yes. A thousand times yes."

He slides the ring onto your left hand—your actual left hand, the important one. It sits there catching the light, real and perfect and terrifying. "I can't believe you did this," you say, and you're in his arms now, held tight against his chest. "Greece. A sunset. What about Spa? The race?"

"Fuck Spa." He's grinning against your hair. "We'll get there Sunday. I told Zak I needed a couple days. Told him it was important. Everyone knows—McLaren, Emma, Charlotte. They're all in on it. I've been planning this for three months." He pulls back to look at you, and his eyes are shiny. "I'm yours. For as long as you'll have me."

"Forever, then."

"Forever." He kisses you as the sun sets over Santorini, soft and deep and perfect. When he pulls back, he's still grinning. "No take backs."

Lando pushes the door open to the bedroom and you see champagne on ice, rose petals scattered across the bed, the whole romantic setup that he definitely planned down to the last detail. "You're very sure of yourself," you say, even as he's walking you backward toward the bed. "What if I'd said no?"

"You didn't." His hands find your waist, slide under your shirt. "And even if you had, I would've asked again tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that until you said yes."

"That's insane."

"That's commitment." He pulls your shirt over your head, tosses it somewhere behind him. "Now stop talking and let me worship my fiancée." The word makes you clench. Fiancée. You're his fiancée now. The ring on your finger catches the candlelight as you reach for him, pulling him closer.

"I love you," you whisper against his mouth.

"I love you too." His hands are everywhere now—in your hair, on your skin, working open the button of your jeans. "And I'm going to spend the rest of the night proving it." He pushes you down onto the bed and follows you, covering your body with his. His mouth finds your neck, biting down just hard enough to make you gasp, and you arch into him. "Shh." He's working his way down, kissing and biting and marking you as he goes. "Let me take care of you. Let me show you what it means to be mine." He makes quick work of the rest of your clothes, and then his mouth is between your thighs and you're fisting your hands in the expensive sheets, gasping his name. He takes his time, licking and sucking and bringing you right to the edge before pulling back.

"Not yet," he says, grinning up at you with his mouth wet and obscene. "Want you desperate for it. Want you begging."

"I hate you."

"No, you don't." He slides two fingers inside you, curling them just right. "You love me. You're going to marry me. And right now, you're going to come for me." He lowers his mouth again and you shatter, coming hard with his name on your lips and your hands in his hair. He works you through it, drawing it out until you're shaking and pushing him away.

"Too much," you gasp.

"Not nearly enough." He's pulling off his own clothes now, and when he's finally naked he settles between your thighs, the head of his cock brushing against you. "Ready?"

"God, yes." He slides in slowly, so slowly, and you can feel every inch. When he's fully seated he stops, just breathing hard against your neck.

"Fuck," he groans. "Feel so good. Always feel so good. My perfect girl. My fiancée. Mine."

"Yours," you agree, wrapping your legs around his waist. "Always yours."

He starts moving then—slow at first, then harder, faster, until the bed is slamming against the wall and you're both gasping. His hand slides between your bodies to find your clit and you're coming again, clenching around him as he fucks you through it. "That's it," he growls. "That's my girl. Come on my cock. Let me feel it, baby."

You're barely down from the second orgasm when you feel the third building. Lando shifts the angle and hits something inside you that makes you sob.

"Right there?" he asks, doing it again. "That the spot?"

"Yes—fuck—yes, don't stop—"

"Never stopping. Never letting you go. You're mine now. Forever." His rhythm is getting erratic, his grip on your hips tightening. "Gonna come inside you. Fill you up. You want that?"

"Yes—please—Lando—"

"Mine," he says fiercely, and then he's kissing you as you both come, him spilling inside you as you clench around him, both of you shaking and completely wrecked. He collapses on top of you, breathing hard. You can feel his heart racing against your chest, matching your own.

"Holy shit," you manage eventually.

"Yeah." He lifts his head to look at you, and he's grinning. "So. Still want to marry me?"

"After that? Absolutely." You trace his jaw with your finger. "Though I'm going to need you to do that again. You know, to make sure."

"Fiancée has demands." He's already hardening inside you again. "I think I can work with that." He does it again. And then again. By the time you finally collapse in a tangle of sweaty limbs and expensive sheets, the moon is high and you can barely move. "Can't believe you're mine," Lando murmurs against your hair, his hand finding yours to trace the ring there.

"Can't believe you proposed on a dock."

"Romantic as fuck."

"Insane as fuck."

"Same thing." He kisses your temple. "Get some sleep. We have Spa on Sunday and I need you well-rested."

"Why?"

"Because I'm going to win that race for you. For my fiancée." He says the word like he's testing it out, like he can't quite believe it's real. "And then I'm going to take you back to Monaco and fuck you in our bed as a race winner and your future husband."

"Very confident."

TWITTER

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ynupdates

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ynupdates Y/n has created a new, private twitter account, which was made public briefly yesterday. We wonder what she's been posting 👀.

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user1 i just missed it 😭😭😭 i wanna see what shes been posting

-> user3 ikk im so annoyed

user2 i saw someone on tiktok saying she was talking about an f1 driver

-> user3 omg no i have to know???

-> user5 wait i saw that too, i wonder which one tho 🫠

-> user6 you are actually feeding my delusions rn omg @/ynupdates pls confirm

-> ynupdates @/user6 While our account has not been accepted by Y/n yet, we do accept submissions from fans so if anyone is on the account, they can send us screenshots.

user4 so all of us are just sitting in her requests fr

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oscarpiastri Another race down. Thank you everyone! 🧡

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user1 Amazing as always

user3 smashing it!!!

user4 the racing gods blessed you fr this time 🥹

-> user3 finallyyy he deserves it

yn.ln congrats!! 😚 | liked by oscarpiastri

-> user6 ariana what are you doing here????

-> user7 HUH

-> user5 giggling to myself because im on her priv so this makes perfect sense

-> user2 this NEEDS to happen.

-> user3 oscar likeddddd 🤭🤭

ynupdates

liked by user1 and 472,973 others

ynupdates It seems Y/n has a little crush on Formula 1 driver Oscar Piastri 👀. She has made numerous tweets about him on her private account and even commented on his recent post! (Thank you to those who sent in screenshots).

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user3 THIS IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN MISSING???

user6 nooo whoever sent these is lowkey a snitch

-> user2 girl please y/n made that comment publicly 😐

user1 oscar liked her comment too ... new ship?? 🤭

-> user2 this is actually my dream couple i can't even lie

user6 i don't know if i want to be him or be with him

yn.ln .... 😀

-> user4 GIRL 💀💀💀

-> user5 i love u but u are literally a public figure 😭 it was going to be exposed eventually

-> user2 brb making edits of you and oscar...

-> ynupdates Sorry! I promise we love you!!!

user6 do not let any f1 fanpages hear this im scared

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yn.ln you ain't got no mrs, but you got a sports car.

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user3 THE CAPTION pls

-> user4 in the words of ms tate mcrae herself 😛

-> user1 her acting so nonchalant on the main is sending me lmfao

oscarpiastri I do have a sports car actually | liked by yn.ln

-> user8 WJEBJDUXKDWHSHDJS

-> user5 oh my god. im floored

-> user3 HELPPO WTFFF

-> user7 this is what the people wanna see!!!!!!! holy shit

ynupdates 👀👀👀

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yn.ln perfect day <3

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user1 omg no way

user2 is that who i think it is?????? PAUSE

user6 SHE MANIFESTED THIS.

-> user4 literally so jealous

-> user2 this is actually everything to me

user7 ur so gorgeous im

user9 someone tell ynupdates immediately

user5 what was your exact prayer word for word???

"Like bowls," you confirmed, not looking up from the press notes you were pretending to edit.

"You have never once mentioned wanting to make a bowl."

"People contain multitudes, Kimi."

He'd huffed a laugh through his nose, unconvinced but unwilling to push, and gone back to scrolling through telemetry on his phone with the particular scowl he wore when a sector time displeased him. You'd felt the lie sit in your chest like a swallowed stone, sharp-edged and faintly thrilling, and told yourself it would be worth it. It was supposed to be temporary. Six weeks, maybe eight. Enough time to get the basics down, enough time to string together one perfect, devastating sentence, and then you'd never have to lie to him again.

That had been four months ago.

You were not, it turned out, a natural at Italian. You'd assumed arrogantly, in retrospect  that spending two years listening to Kimi speak it would somehow make the language seep into your brain by osmosis. It hadn't. The occasional phrase muttered under his breath after a bad session or the rapid-fire conversations he had with his mother on the phone were enough to make you fall a little more in love with the sound of it, but not enough to actually teach it to you. Grammar was an entirely different beast, full of rules that seemed invented solely to make you suffer. Still, night after night, you sat in your car outside team hotels with a language app glowing in your lap, stubbornly working through exercises and repeating phrases under your breath. Because you weren't trying to impress a garage full of people. You were trying to impress one stubborn Italian racing driver. 

Ti penso più di quanto dovrei.

I think about you more than I should.

You'd practice it in supermarkets, in airport security lines, in the shower with the water running so the sound wouldn't carry. You practiced it so many times the words stopped meaning anything and became pure muscle memory, the way a swimmer's stroke becomes thoughtless after ten thousand laps until you'd catch yourself mid-sentence and the meaning would come crashing back in, and you'd have to sit very still for a moment and remember how to breathe.

You worked in press and media for Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, one of the most recognizable names in the paddock, a team built on championship-winning engineering, relentless standards, and an expectation that every detail mattered. You had been there before Kimi arrived as a wide-eyed rookie with a mop of dark curls and a habit of apologizing to the car after a difficult session, as though it could hear him and might forgive him for asking too much of it. You'd watched him grow into the seat over the course of the season, you’ve watched the apologies turn into thoughtful, technical debriefs with his engineers, watched the nervous excitement of a teenager stepping into Formula One settle into something calmer, sharper, and far more dangerous on track. You wrote his quotes. You stood beside him in front of walls of cameras and microphones, feeding him English phrasing under your breath when questions came too quickly or when he searched for the right word, your shoulder a careful two inches from his, close enough that only he could hear you. 

Say "we're optimizing the long-run pace," not "we are still figuring out the tires," it sounds more in control.

He always did exactly what you told him. He trusted you with his image the way he trusted his race engineer with his car, completely, without question, which was its own kind of devastating because you knew with total certainty that if you told him right now, in this parking lot, in passable Italian, that you'd been in love with him since the Hungary weekend eighteen months ago when he'd given his media training translator the day off and asked you, badly, hopefully, if you wanted to get dinner he would believe you. He would believe anything you told him. That was the whole problem.

You had said no to that dinner. You'd told yourself it was unprofessional, a media liaison dating a driver, a mess waiting to happen, and you'd believed it for about four months before you stopped believing it and just felt stupid instead.

So: Italian. A plan. A grand, faintly ridiculous, entirely earnest plan, because if you were going to do this if you were finally, after a year and a half of aggressive denial, going to tell him the truth, you wanted to give him something. You wanted the words to cost you something, the way his trust in you had never seemed to cost him anything at all. You wanted to hand him your feelings in the language his mother sang to him, the language he dreamed in, according to his trainer, who'd heard him talking in his sleep on the team plane once and never let him live it down.

You were going to tell Kimi Antonelli you loved him in Italian, on a night you had not yet chosen, in words you had rehearsed roughly four thousand times, and it was going to be perfect.

You should have known better than to plan anything around a man who never did what you expected.

The accident happened on a Thursday, three days before the Monaco round, in the hospitality unit kitchen, over a stupid argument about coffee.

"It is not coffee," Kimi was saying, with the wounded dignity of a man defending something sacred, to Pieter, the team's Dutch chief mechanic, who had just handed him a paper cup from the catering machine. "This is brown water. You have insulted brown water by comparing it to coffee."

"It's free and it's caffeinated, Antonelli, drink it or don't."

"I don't. I refuse. On principle." Kimi set the cup down with the exaggerated care of a man setting down a small bomb, and you, sitting at the counter with your laptop open to a half-finished press release, didn't look up because you'd learned over two years that Kimi's coffee opinions were a bottomless well and engaging with them only deepened it.

Then he turned to his trainer, Sandro, who'd just walked in, and said something fast and low in Italian, clearly assuming you and Pieter were both out of range of comprehension. Something about Pieter's coffee, something uncharitable, something that ended with a word you knew — insopportabile (unbearable) and a short, sharp laugh.

And you laughed too. Before you could stop yourself. A short, involuntary huff of amusement at exactly the right beat, exactly where a person who'd understood the joke would laugh, and not a half-second later, the way someone catching a delayed translation might.

The kitchen went very quiet.

You felt it before you looked up felt the air change, felt Pieter's attention swing toward you with the slow, delighted dawning of a man who has just witnessed something he intends to never let go of, felt Sandro go still by the doorway. And when you finally made yourself look at Kimi, he was staring at you with an expression you had genuinely never seen on his face before, in two years, through podiums and DNFs and the worst sunburn of his life in Abu Dhabi. His mouth was slightly open. His eyebrows were somewhere up near his hairline.

"You understood that," he said. In English. Flatly. As though testing the words for weight.

"I— " Your mind, usually so reliable under pressure, the same mind that could spin a four-car pileup into a measured, professional statement in under ninety seconds, produced absolutely nothing. A vast, ringing silence. "No."

"You laughed."

"I have a— delayed sense of humor. Yeah. I was laughing at something else. Internally."

"At what."

"A meme," you said, with the specific, doomed confidence of someone who has just realized they are going to keep digging this hole until it swallows them. "I thought of a meme."

Pieter made a sound that was very close to a wheeze and had to turn around and pretend to be extremely interested in the coffee machine.

Kimi did not laugh. Kimi was looking at you the way he looked at telemetry data that didn't match what his hands had felt in the car like there was a discrepancy here, a gap between what he'd been told and what had actually happened, and he was not going to rest until he understood why. "Say something in Italian," he said.

"What? No."

"Say— " He cast around, then said, simply, plainly, watching your face with an intensity that made your skin feel two sizes too small, " —come stai oggi."

How are you today. The easiest sentence in the world. A sentence a phrasebook gives you on page one. And you knew, you knew, with the specific dread of someone watching a car slide toward a wall in slow motion, fully aware of the outcome and entirely unable to stop it that the safest thing to do was to look blank. To shrug. To say I have no idea what that means, Kimi, you're being so weird right now.

You did not do the safest thing.

"Bene," you said, before you could catch it. "Un po' stanca, ma bene." Fine. A little tired, but fine.

The kitchen, somehow, got even quieter.

Kimi set his unbearable, unloved coffee down on the counter with great precision, and the look that spread across his face was not triumph, exactly, though there was some of that in it there was also something more complicated, something that made your chest go tight and your face go hot in a way that had nothing to do with embarrassment, or not only to do with embarrassment.

"How long," he said.

"Kimi— "

"How long have you been learning Italian."

You looked at Pieter, who had given up all pretense of coffee-machine interest and was now leaning against the counter with the rapt attention of a man watching the best television of his life. You looked at Sandro, who had quietly produced his phone and appeared to be filming, the absolute traitor. You looked anywhere except at Kimi, because you had a horrible suspicion that if you looked at him directly right now, with his hair still damp from the sim and his eyebrows still climbing and that unbearable, searching look on his face, you were simply going to tell him everything, right here, in the hospitality kitchen, with Pieter's ruined coffee going cold on the counter and Sandro's phone recording the whole humiliating spectacle for posterity.

"Four months," you admitted, to the floor.

Another silence. A different kind. You risked a glance up and found Kimi had gone very still, the teasing edge gone out of his expression entirely, replaced by something quieter and more careful.

"Four months," he repeated.

"It's not— it's nothing, it's just a hobby, lots of people learn languages, it's a very normal— "

"Why."

The question landed like a dropped tool, a single clean clattering syllable, and you felt the whole architecture of your careful four-month plan the rehearsed sentence, the chosen-but-not-yet-arrived night, the version of this where you controlled every single variable come apart in your hands like wet paper.

"I have to finish this press release," you said, and closed your laptop, and left the kitchen at a speed that was not quite a run but was making active use of the word quite.

Behind you, you heard Pieter lose it completely, and Sandro say something in rapid Italian that you were fairly sure, despite four months of careful study, you did not want translated.

You did not see Kimi again until media day.

This was, in itself, a small miracle of scheduling and cowardice .you'd buried yourself in logistics work for two days, coordinated three sponsor interviews and a livery reveal and a charity appearance you absolutely did not need to personally oversee, and managed, through sheer force of will, to never once be in a room alone with him. You knew this couldn't last. Media day was your job. You stood beside drivers at media day the way race engineers stood beside pit walls; it was simply where you existed.

He found you at the equipment tent twenty minutes before his first interview slot, while you were untangling a lanyard for the broadcast crew with far more focus than the task required.

"You're avoiding me," he said. Not a question.

"I'm working."

"You're avoiding me while working. It's an impressive skill, actually, I want you to know I'm impressed." He leaned against the equipment table, arms crossed, and you made the mistake of looking up, and found him not laughing at you, not teasing, just watching you with that same quiet, careful attention from the kitchen, like he was trying to read a sector time he didn't trust yet.

"I have your interview schedule," you said, holding up the clipboard like a shield. "Sky Sport at three, then the sponsor— "

"I don't care about the schedule."

"You should, you have four interviews in ninety minutes and the Sky one specifically asked about the gearbox issue from Spa, so I need you to use the line we discussed, the one about the long-term reliability gains, not the— "

"Why didn't you tell me?"

You stopped. The lanyard sat tangled and forgotten in your hands.

"It's not a big deal," you said, which was, you understood even as you said it, the single most transparent lie you had told in a month full of transparent lies.

"You learned my language in secret for four months and it is not a big deal." He wasn't angry. That was the strange part you'd braced for something like hurt or affront, the offense of a man who'd been kept out of a joke at his own expense, and instead what was on his face looked almost careful. Hopeful, in a way he seemed to be actively trying to suppress, the way he suppressed his disappointment after a bad qualifying lap, schooling his features into something neutral before the cameras found him. "People don't do that for fun, cara. People do that for a reason."

The endearment landed somewhere under your ribs and stayed there, glowing faintly, radioactive. He'd called you that before, occasionally, carelessly, the way Italians scattered tenderness into ordinary sentences without seeming to notice they'd done it — but it felt different now, deliberate, aimed.

"I had a reason," you said, before you could stop yourself.

"Tell me."

"I have your interview in eighteen minutes."

"Tell me after."

"Kimi — "

"After," he said again, gently, like it wasn't a request, like it was simply a fact about the shape the rest of the day was going to take, and then Pieter was shouting something about a tire pressure check and Kimi was being pulled away toward the garage, and you stood there with the ruined lanyard in your hands and your heart going much too fast for a Thursday afternoon.

You got through the interviews. You fed him the line about long-term reliability gains, and he delivered it word for word, the way he always did, except twice he glanced over at you between questions with a look that had nothing to do with gearboxes, and you had to physically school your own face into something professional, something that did not say I have known I loved you since Hungary and I have spent four months learning your language so I could tell you properly and I have absolutely no idea what I am supposed to do now that you know I've been lying to you about pottery class.

By the time the sun started dropping orange and low over the paddock, you'd run out of interviews to hide behind.

He found you on the terrace behind the hospitality unit, where the team sometimes ate dinner when the weather cooperated, looking out over the darkening circuit toward the grandstands, empty now except for the cleanup crews moving like slow ghosts under the floodlights. You'd come out here to be alone and think of an explanation that wasn't the truth, and had so far produced nothing.

"There you are," Kimi said, like you'd been the one running from something all day, which, fair, you had.

He sat down next to you on the low concrete wall, close enough that his shoulder nearly touched yours, and for a moment neither of you said anything. Somewhere in the garage behind you, an impact wrench whined and stopped. The smell of rubber and hot tarmac and the particular metallic tang of race weekend hung in the cooling air, the smell you associated, more than any other, with the two years you'd spent standing next to this man and not telling him the truth.

"Sandro deleted the video," Kimi offered, after a while. "I made him. I thought  you looked like you wanted to disappear."

"I did want to disappear."

"I know. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have in front of everyone, it was not fair, I got excited and I didn't think." He turned to look at you properly then, and the playful armor from earlier in the day had dropped away entirely, leaving something younger and more uncertain underneath, an expression you recognized from the very first season, before he learned to wear confidence like a second skin. "Why Italian?"

You looked out at the empty grandstands instead of at him. It was easier.

"Because," you started, and stopped, and started again. "Because you trust me with everything. My English, my line readings, what to say to the cameras and what not to. You never once question it. And I just I wanted to give you something that wasn't about work. Something that was just  mine to give. Not professional advice. Not a press strategy." Your hands were doing something complicated and nervous in your lap; you made them stop. "I wanted to tell you something important in the language that actually means something to you. Not the language we use for sponsor calls."

"Tell me what."

The wind moved across the terrace, carrying the smell of someone's cigarette from the far end of the paddock, and you thought about four months of late nights with a phone app glowing blue in the dark, four months of online lessons with a tutor every tuesday, four months of rehearsing a sentence so many times it had stopped sounding like words and become something closer to a held breath, finally, now, about to be let out.

You looked at him. Damp curls, dark eyes, the small scar above his eyebrow from a karting crash at fourteen that he'd told you about on a long flight to Singapore, the steady, open way he was watching you now like nothing in the world mattered more than whatever you said next. Eighteen months since Hungary. Four months of Tuesday nights that weren't pottery class. One ruined surprise, and a man waiting, patiently, for the truth he'd already half-guessed.

"Ti penso più di quanto dovrei," you said.

I think about you more than I should.

The words came out steadier than you expected, four months of repetition finally earning their keep, landing clean and whole in the space between you instead of crumbling apart the way you'd feared they might. Kimi went very still. You watched the sentence travel across his face in real time comprehension, then something brighter and more startled underneath it, like watching the lights come up on a grandstand all at once.

"Say it again," he said. Quietly. In Italian this time. "Dimmelo ancora."

"I think about you more than I should," you said again, in English now, because you needed him to have it both ways, needed there to be no possible margin for translation error in a moment this large. "I have for a long time. Since Hungary, honestly, since you asked me to dinner and I said no because I was scared and stupid about the job thing, and I have regretted saying no probably every single day since, and I started learning Italian because I wanted to tell you properly, I wanted to give you something that took real effort, something that proved I meant it, and then you went and ruined the whole plan by being unbearable about coffee in front of Pieter— "

"I ruined it," Kimi said, and there was real laughter in his voice now, breaking through, bright and disbelieving. "I ruined it."

"You laughed at the coffee and I laughed at the joke and everything fell apart."

"Everything did not fall apart." He reached over, slow, like he was giving you every chance to pull away, and took your hand off your lap, turning it over in his like something he wanted to look at properly. His thumb moved once across your knuckles, light, almost disbelieving. "Everything came together. Badly. With Pieter watching. But together."

"This is not how I planned it."

"No?" His mouth was doing something complicated, fighting a smile and losing. "How did you plan it?"

"Candles," you admitted. "Probably candles. A view. Something with actual atmosphere, instead of— " You gestured vaguely at the terrace, the floodlights, the distant whine of someone's impact wrench starting up again. " —this."

"I like this," Kimi said. "I like that it's true. I would rather have you, badly planned, on a wall behind a garage, than candles and a script." He was still holding your hand, and now he laced his fingers properly through yours, deliberate, an answer offered without being asked for. "I have been waiting eighteen months for you to change your mind about Hungary. I was starting to think I had imagined the whole dinner. That maybe I asked wrong."

"You didn't ask wrong. I was wrong. I was so sure it would be a disaster, mixing the job with this. With wanting you the way I wanted you."

"And now?"

"Now I've spent four months memorizing Italian verb conjugations for you, so I think the disaster has already started and I might as well see it through."

He laughed properly, that bright, surprised sound you'd heard maybe a dozen times in two years, usually reserved for podiums and good qualifying laps, and it did something to your chest, hearing it directed at you instead of a stopwatch. "Ti penso più di quanto dovrei," he said again, testing the words now from his own mouth, watching your face as he said them, "is correct, by the way. Your grammar. Very good. A little formal, but good."

"Four months, Kimi."

"I noticed." He brought your hand up, pressed his mouth briefly to your knuckles, an old-fashioned gesture that should have felt theatrical and instead felt exactly, devastatingly right, here on this wall, with the circuit lights coming up gold against the darkening sky behind him. "Anche io," he said, quiet now, no performance left in it at all. Me too.

"Show-off," you said, though your voice had gone thick. "I worked very hard on that sentence."

"I know. I could tell. It was a good sentence." He was closer now, close enough that you could feel the warmth coming off him in the cooling evening air, close enough that the next thing either of you said wasn't going to be words at all. "Next time," he murmured, "warn me before you confess something. I almost fell off my chair."

"There's not going to be a next time. I only had the one."

"Good," Kimi said. "I only need the one." And then he kissed you careful at first, like he was still checking the data matched what his hands could feel, and then not careful at all, four months and eighteen months and one ruined, perfect surprise collapsing down into the simple, unhurried space between one breath and the next and somewhere behind you, faint and getting fainter, you were fairly sure you heard Pieter, from an open garage door, shout something about finally that you were extremely glad you couldn't quite translate.

Three weeks later, you stood in the same equipment tent, untangling the same kind of lanyard, while Kimi leaned against the table exactly the way he had that first impossible Thursday, except now his hand found the small of your back without either of you remarking on it, an easy, unremarkable fact of how things were.

"Sky Sport at three," you told him, not looking up from the clipboard. "Use the line about long-term reliability."

"Sì, cara," he said, and you felt it land warm under your ribs the way it always did now, no longer radioactive, just true. "Anything else?"

"Don't insult anyone's coffee where Pieter can hear you. We've had enough incidents this season."

"No promises," Kimi said, grinning, and pressed a quick kiss to your temple before Sandro called him toward the garage, and you stood there with the lanyard finally untangled in your hands, watching him go, thinking not for the first time, and not, you suspected, for the lasthat some plans were worth ruining.