You have been hunting through it for the last 120 years, to be fair. Even so much time has left it relatively unchanged.

Another thing that remains unchanged is the pure stupidity of humans. Humans with beating hearts and barely pointed canines, who still cannot comprehend their own mortality.

You’d think, they’d stop coming here. Stop hiking with their heavy steps and oversized boots, after seeing the drained carcasses of people who look just like them, but with more freckles on their cheek, or maybe a different hair colour, or a birthmark which remained as the only colour on their body.

They never did. It was that morbid curiosity that keeps the myth of monsters alive- monsters like you.

You hadn’t always been like this. You’d grown up in the village that bordered the edge of the woods-long gone now-and one day, you’d strayed just a little too far. 

That was before the reports, though. The rumours. You were one of the first. You’re pretty sure that you wouldn’t have been so stupid if you’d heard of the man in the woods.

A bird whistles above you, low and harsh. You whistle back, pitch near perfect, but the only reply is a snap of a branch on the ground nearby. 

Gotcha.

The sound rings in your ears are you make your way towards it. There’s no need to run- humans are clumsy where you’re nimble (no fault of their own, just the way of the world) so it didn’t have to be like a chase. Higher blood pressure, stress, the high of that wears off. You’d decided many moons ago that the tracking was just as exhilarating- there was no need to be cruel.

You’ve been pushing forward for what feels like a while now, and you’d be bored, if you weren’t getting a little desperate. You figure they must be aware of you, aware of something, because they’re going quickly, but not carelessly.

It’s clear they don't know where they’re going, though. Because the only thing in this direction is the lake, so it’s a dead end.

You decide to start running.

You can kind of make out the shape of their body now- it’s a man, probably about your age (well, your human age), but he isn’t sprinting, like you’d assumed. He’s wandering, absent-minded, but he’s far too fast. And you can’t smell his blood either, but you can smell death.

You hiss, and he pauses. Turns. A sound that no one could’ve caught, unless they were like you.

“This is my land.” you declare, voice quiet but firm. You don’t step into the edge of the moonlight, but stay firmly hidden in the trees.

“Rather archaic, to still claim land. Most of us don’t do that, anymore.” he replies automatically, and you notice his accent is similar to yours, but fleshed out, like a thousand other tongues are fighting his own in his mouth. It’s almost familiar.

“Well, that’s nice to hear. But I don’t stray, and don’t accept strays. Feel free to pass through, but you cannot take any victims.”

You watch him scour the trees, trying to catch a glimpse of you behind the trunks.

“I wasn’t going to.” he assures, smoothening his tone. “I’m just passing by, as you said. Looking for an old friend.”

“I’m the only one here. Your friend must've moved on.”

“She did tell me she was going to, but something in me figured she wouldn’t. That’s why I'm checking.”

You’re too fascinated now, to stay back. You step forward, letting the light from the moon illuminate the side of your face.

He turns to face you, his own head caught by the light, and you inhale quietly.

“Ah, vieille branche. It’s been a long time, non?”

You nod, through half-gritted teeth.

“Yeah, it has been. Hello, Charlie.”

A careful grin stretches across his face, edge of his fangs glistening, and your palm flickers to the side of your neck instinctively. When he notices, he purses his lips.

“No one’s called me that in a long time.” he replies, taking a small step towards you. You don’t move. He frowns.

“You’re still here, eh? Thought you were going to go places. I thought you had things to see.” he asks, half-curious, half-mocking, and you straighten.

“Changed my mind. This is my home.”

“And your land, it seems.” he retorts, laughing to himself.

“Why are you back?” you ask bitterly, clenching your jaw, and he shrugs.

“Like I said. Wanted to check in.”

“Why now? It’s been so long. It’s been over a century, Leclerc.”

He winces. “That’s not my name anymore.”

That was always the difference between you and Charles. He shed his skin so quickly. Charles Leclerc died when he turned. You, however, were desperate to hold on to the person you’d been.

“Well, I’m fine. So you can go, now.”

He nearly pouts, and you almost slap him straight across the cheek.

“Look, I figured you would’ve got over it, by now. As you said, it’s been over-”

“You don’t get to assume that. You- you turned me into this, and then couldn’t deal with it when I clung to you. What did you expect me to do? I was scared, Charlie.”

“You would’ve died, like the rest of them. I didn’t know what to do.” he argues, brushing a hand through his long hair, and you shake your head.

“You should’ve let me.”

“I couldn’t.” he admits, voice breaking a little, and you scoff.

“You taught me how to kill them. You didn’t think twice. Don’t try and convince me-” you begin, anger seeping through your wiry veins, but then he’s there, a cold palm pressed to your colder cheek.

“You just have to believe me. Something was telling me that I couldn’t. And then, I felt disgusting. Selfish. But I couldn't leave you, just like that.”

“So you waited, until you knew I’d just suffer mildly, then?” you joke, but it’s harsh. It’s cruel.

“Until I knew you’d be fine. And you are fine- I mean, look at you. You nearly look like you might be alive.”

The compliment would’ve made you feel alive, if he’d said that during those early years you’d spent together. But you’d had longer than an entire human life to learn to resent him. It wasn’t even for changing you, although it should’ve been. It was for making you believe that maybe it wasn’t that lonely like this. That maybe you weren’t some undead, roaming thing. Maybe you could still feel, still love.

You’d spent hours, days, months (you still don’t know- time’s become abstract to you now), discussing where’d you go, when you felt comfortable enough to leave. What you’d see, other clans you’d meet, places you could settle. It had spurred you on, kept you grinning, kept you laughing as you’d tussle through bushes and branches. 

Then, one day, you’d woken up and he was gone. The imprint of his body was still pressed into the moss, but his scent was gone, and he'd left no tracks. His escape had been calculated. It had felt like a stake to the heart, which was ironic.

“Hey, come on. Don’t look at me like that.” he pleads, and you snap your eyes back into focus, glaring into his pupils.

“Like what?”

“Like you hate me.”

You shake your head, pulling away from him.

“Because I do, Charlie. And you know it’s totally fair for me to do so.”

He nods. “I know, and I'm sorry. I really am, and the second I left, I regretted it.”

Charles tries to reach for you again, but you bare your teeth, and he shrinks away.

“You didn’t come back, though.”

You realise that you’re seeing him nervous, for the first time. He’s fiddling with the wide collar of his shirt, letting his fingers brush the fabric carefully, rhythmically. It’s such a human thing to do. It makes your heart ache.

“That was a mistake. And that’s why I’m here now, okay?”

“Charlie-”

You wonder if he would be crying now, if he could be. You miss crying. It’s one of those things you’d never think you’d miss, but you do. 

“No, let me- let me explain.” he stutters, taking another step forward. You notice, now, that he seems a little off balance. 

“Are you hurt?” you ask, eyes narrowed, and he brushes it off.

“Scratched.” he corrects. “But, it’s already healing.” he assures you, and you figure you must be accidentally showing some concern.

“Well, I suppose I’ll add that into the explanation. I ended up somewhere I shouldn’t have been. I trusted the wrong people, at the wrong time. And they- well they tried to kill me.”

“Again.” you bemuse, and he chuckles. The sound is grounding, but it also makes you want to double over.

“Again.” he nods, before continuing. “And it almost worked. And I just remember thinking, what if you’d been there?”

His words are heavy. The silence that follows is heavier.

“It was then, that I decided I’d made the right choice. Because if you’d been there, and they’d got you- I could never have forgiven myself.”

You nod, straight-faced. “Alright.”

“But I was also thinking about you. I was on the other side of the world, a place I didn’t care for, just trying to outrun the guilt. So I came back.”

You don’t realise he’s been inching closer until he’s standing over you, blocking the slither of light between the trees. 

“Came back to do what? To say what?”

“Goodbye.” he says simply. “Properly, this time.” 

You push him away, hands square on his chest. 

“Well, you shouldn’t have bothered. I wish you hadn’t bothered.”

He tuts, giving you a skeptical glare. “Come on, we both know that’s not true. If it was, you wouldn’t still be here.”

He’s right, and you both know it. That was the first thing you’d ever decided on- if you got lost, stay put. He’d come find you.

You lunge at him, digging your claw-like nails into the side of his arm. He hisses, jumping backwards.

“C’mon, play nice.” he frowns, brushing his shoulder childishly, but the anger burns. It’s the most you’ve felt in years, considering you can’t really feel at all.

It’s a mindless attempt. You just want him to hurt. You’re thrashing, screaming, dragging him against the rough bark of the trunks with as much force as you can muster.

He just stands there, and takes it. It’s almost more infuriating.

“Fight back, goddamnit. Please.” you yell, the sound echoing, but he just shakes his head.

“I’m not going to do that.” he replies, the words broken and painful. You scream, the sound making him wince, as you sink to the floor lamely.

He drops down beside you, smoothing your hair back gently.

“I’m sorry. It’s okay.”

It’s not okay. It’s never going to be okay. You’ve just to live with it (ish) for the rest of time. Or until someone’s kind enough to burn you alive. You’re sure you’ll find someone when it gets that desperate.

He presses his lips to your forehead, dragging you closer to him.

You stay like that, hunched and aching, willing him to stay. You’re scared, the second you let go, he’ll disappear. So you grip his arms desperately, holding him in place weakly.

He doesn’t tell you he’s not going anywhere, because he’ll be lying. So he says nothing at all, and just stays, letting the time pass.

Because it always passes anyway, no matter how much of it you have. 

Oscar Piastri, a quiet semi-rookie when you first crossed the headquarters’ threshold, who gave you five words max per interview, had a sarcastic comment to every command the team social media manager threw his way, and disappeared at every media opportunity like a ghost, deadpanning instead of showing enthusiasm. Needless to say, there wasn’t much for you to manage.

It’s not like you didn’t try. You nudged him gently at first: helpful suggestions, friendly reminders to loosen up a little. Be more engaging. Play the game. But every time you did, he looked at you as if you'd sprouted a second head and proceeded to swiftly ignore you. The first time it happened, you were offended, and maybe a little concerned. You complained to Charlotte, Lando’s PR manager at the time, and she gave you the wisdom of a woman who had seen some things: “Assert yourself,” she’d said.

It was your first month on the job. You were fresh out of university. You didn’t even know where the best coffee machine was. How were you even supposed to do that?

Still, you decided to try again.

During a long and taxing car drive to the McLarens’ HQ, one you were sharing with Oscar after a last-minute driver swap and a logistical disaster, you figured it was now or never. Assert yourself, Charlotte had said. Be firm. Be confident.

You went for humor instead. A joke. 

Terrible idea, in hindsight.

“You know,” you said lightly, breaking the silence that had stretched across three roundabouts, “you’re kind of boring.”

Oscar simply glanced at you, expressionless, so you clarified. “I mean, you’re not even letting me do my job. Throw me a bone here.”

And it was supposed to be playful. Oscar was supposed to quietly snort, asking how he could finally help you, and boom, you’d finally get to apply all that polished knowledge you’d studied for years.

Instead, he tilted his head slightly, puzzled, as if you’d just spoken in Morse code aloud, and said, “Imagine being boring and still more interesting than your ex.”

“What?” You blinked. Saying you’d been taken aback would have been a euphemism.

He didn’t even look away from the road.

“You talk in your sleep. Don’t nap in the common room again.”

Silence fell again, but this time it wasn’t peaceful. It was personal.

That was the moment you decided, with startling clarity, that you very much disliked Oscar Piastri.

You didn’t know you talked in your sleep. You didn’t even know he’d stumbled upon you squeezing a thirty-minute nap in the common room of McLaren’s headquarters. And you certainly didn’t remember the dream you’d had─ or why exactly it had featured your ex out of all people. All you knew was that, no matter what he heard, it was a low blow.

Especially when it came to the one man who somehow slithered his way into your heart just to shatter it from the inside out.

Disliking the person you were assigned to manage wasn’t unheard of in the world of public relations. It was practically a rite of passage. Most of the time, it came with celebrities who were a walking headline: strippers, drugs, arrests, rumors of twins with three different people. That, you could’ve handled.

Oscar wasn’t like that at all. Oscar was just… rude.

Not loud rude, or messy rude. Just… quietly, unbotheredly rude. He was unreadable, dry, and too clever. Not a PR nightmare, just a PR black hole. Just to you.

And if there was one thing you happened to be very good at─besides the job you weren’t even getting the chance to do─it was holding a grudge.

After that episode, you kept your interactions with Oscar to the bare minimum, or as much as you could without being fired. The paycheck was just too good, especially as a fresh grad still recovering from student debt.

Any advice or directions you had for him came during team meetings, always surrounded by enough people that he couldn’t hit you with his usual blank stare. When he messed up during interviews, which was sometimes inevitable, and you followed up with a politely scathing email, bullet points and all. Face-to-face convos were reserved strictly for emergencies… or if you happened to be seated beside him, in which case you communicated via foot. Strategic, silent, and sharp. You’d step on his sneaker under the eyes of all, and he’d keep smiling at the camera like nothing happened. Except for the tiny, throbbing vein on his temple─ oh, you lived for it. 

It was a perfect arrangement. Passive-aggressive peace, mutually tolerated detachment. It worked for both of you.

Sometimes, you caught him glancing your way, wondering why you were still here. But you didn’t care. You had a system, and it was stable. It would’ve stayed that way for a long time, until your or his contract expired, whichever came first.

But then your ex decided to show up, and that messed everything up.

It was a very nice Thursday, dare you say. The kind of morning that made you think the season wouldn't be so bad.

You’d expected Bahrain to be hotter, considering the furnace it had been last year during the start of your first season with McLaren. But today, the air was warm without being unbearable, a soft breeze threading through the paddock and playing with the loose strands of your hair. Your cardigan slipped off one shoulder, but it didn’t cling or suffocate─ just draped like it was meant to be styled that way.

Oscar had just rolled out of the garage, off to log laps and data and whatever mysterious things drivers did during testing, which meant you were officially off-duty for the next three hours. You had time for yourself, maybe for a proper coffee and a chocolate croissant. Eventually, a little conversation with Lando, if you ran into him.

Yeah. This was a good morning.

You should have known it wouldn’t last.

It should have hit you when the coffee machine didn’t work, so you had to walk all the way to Lando’s side of the garage to fetch yourself a cup. It should have hit you when you didn’t even see Lando, and they were out of your favorite chocolate croissant. It should have hit you when you passed by grown men in their forties gossiping like schoolgirls about the new additions to Oscar’s car engineering team, you never heard anything about. It should have hit you when the feelings in your gut made you hesitate near the orange-colored walls.

But it really, really hit you when he grabbed your elbow.

“Y/N?”

Your body locked up like someone had flipped your off switch. The voice was familiar in the worst way─ like a nightmare you thought you’d finally grown out of. You didn’t even need to turn around. Your body already knew. Still, you did, as if asking the universe for confirmation.

And there he was. Theodore Silva, in full McLaren uniform, lanyard slung around his neck. Dark brown hair, messy, tied up in a bun, with his characteristic three o’clock shadow. Your ex-boyfriend. Your heartbreak origin story that, somehow, had the nerve to smile.

You would have backhanded him if the shock didn’t make your mind go blank.

“Wow,” he said, and you felt like a funny coincidence. “Didn’t expect to see you there. Always knew you were the ambitious one.”

Oh, you knew that tone. That patronizing little tone he used when he wanted to seem impressed while reminding you he could always do better. As if you hadn’t told him a million times about your fascination with motorsports and all of its scandals. You weren’t 19 and easily diminished anymore.

You slapped on a polite, seething smile. “I could say the same. I wouldn’t have guessed they hired people with so little… experience. Or the grades to back it up.”

Theodore Silva wasn’t the richest man alive. No, that title was reserved for his father, who owned a few businesses that took off in the early 2010s and left him with an outrageous amount of money and too much to do with it─ including sending his incompetent son to a prestigious business school even though he could barely manage to keep up half of the average required. Even his father’s money couldn’t get him to graduate the same year as you.

But after another year, it could apparently get him a job at McLaren.

Yet, Theodore still chuckled, brushing off your remark as if it were just another inside joke you two shared. “They just brought me on- engineering for Piastri’s car. Funny how life works out, huh?”

He was on Oscar’s team. You’d be obligated to see him, be near him, every day. You didn’t answer, just stared at him blankly, too busy cataloguing every sharp object in the vicinity, trying to ignore the twist of your heart.

“Small world,” he added to your silence.

You tried to smile again, but you knew it came out weird when the words that came out of your mouth sounded more like a screech than anything else. “Smaller than I’d like.”

Theodore tilted his head, studying you with calm eyes, as if he hadn’t watched you, arms dangling near his side, as you broke down in his apartment’s parking lot. “You look good,” he said softly. “I’m glad you’re doing well.”

You stared at him.

Hell no. He had that voice, wearing guilt like an optional accessory, looking at you like he was the one that got away. The nerves. You hated how your chest tightened, the smell of his cologne, and how he thought he could just waltz in, throw some compliments around, hoping to win you back.

Fuck him. “I’m doing very well, Theodore. Loving my job. How’s Anna?”

That landed. He physically winced, scratching his neck. “We, uh─ We broke up, actually.”

How surprising.

“So─”

You weren’t about to let him finish. You weren’t about to let him think he even had the sliver of a chance. He wasn’t about to wreck the life you built for yourself by simply being here, no. Instead, you did the sanest thing anyone would have done in your place.

You lied.

“I have a boyfriend, actually.” The words came out so fast you almost flinched, not registering them yourself.

Theodore paused, eyebrows lifting. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” you smiled, wildly too sharp for the context. “He’s great. Amazing, supportive. Emotionally available. You know─ faithful.”

He blinked, and his fake-casual mask slipped for a second. “What’s his name?” He asked, all lightness gone from his expression. 

That’s when it hit you. Unspoken panic rose in your throat because, believe it or not, you didn’t have a boyfriend. You barely even had a social life─ you spent most nights in bed with a sheet mask and Youtube videos. If you hesitated now, even for a second, Theodore would know. And he’d never let go, flashing you his smug little grin of his, strutting around the garage for a season, thinking he had a chance.

Not today, Satan.

The garage door behind you creaked open and footsteps echoed in your direction.

You didn’t look, didn’t think. You just grabbed the first arm that brushed against yours.

“This is him!” You said, an octave too high. “My boyfriend.”

And Oscar Piastri, your emotionally repressed, sarcasm-saturated PR headache of a driver, froze mid-step. As much as you wanted it, there wasn’t any way to back out now. His eyes dropped to your grip, white-knuckled, around his bicep. Then to you. Then to Theodore.

“... Sorry, what?” He said under his breath, just loud enough for you to hear.

“Babe,” you hissed between your teeth, eyes still set on Theodore and smiling like your life depended on it. “Go with it.”

Finally, your ex managed to speak up. He was frozen, mouth half-opened in shock. “This is your─ You’re dating─ Oscar Piastri is your boyfriend?”

Oscar opened his mouth, definitely to ask what was going on, but you beat him to it. “Yes! Yep. It’s, um─ it’s very new. A few months.”

You finally turned to face him fully.

His brown eyes, sharp and unreadable as ever, flicked across your face─ first your eyes, then your mouth, then down to where your fingers were still digging into his arm. There was confusion there, definitely, but also a kind of calculation unique to him.

“This is Theodore,” you added, swallowing thickly. “He’s one of your new engineers.” You hesitated. “... and my ex.”

That’s when something clicked.

You felt it. The subtle shift in Oscar’s expression─ the way his shoulders straightened or the brief flicker of understanding behind his eyes. He glanced at Theodore just once before looking back at you. You pleaded silently. With your eyes, with your fingers brushing lightly over the sleeve of his fireproof top, even with the part of your lips that whispered please without making a sound.

But the longer you stood there, the more the panic crept up your spine. Oscar didn’t owe you anything. The man barely liked you. He could’ve thrown you under the bus without blinking, called you out right there and made your life ten times harder.

Which is why you almost jumped when his hand, much larger, reached up and gently settled above yours.

“Ah, Theodore,” Oscar said, like the name physically bored him. “Nice to meet you. Sorry about my reaction,” he added, fingers tightening just slightly over yours. “I just didn’t expect… this.”

He turned to glance at you. An innocent smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth.

“Y/N’s told me a lot about you.”

Theodore snapped out of the shock that froze him into place, and his smile flickered. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” Oscar said casually. “All the highlights.”

You blinked up at him, heart in your throat, unsure whether to laugh or sob. Was Oscar Piastri helping you?

“The highlights?” Theodore asked, dumbfounded.

Oscar hummed, thumb absentmindedly brushing over your hand─ just once, like punctuation. You weren’t dreaming, he was playing along. And the look on Theodore’s face was worth every single of it.

“Funny, she never mentioned you, or the fact she was dating an… F1 driver, as a whole.” As if you even talked to him anymore!

Oscar shrugged, way too relaxed. “That’s all right. We’re keeping it on the down low for now, I’m sure you understand. And we don’t do much… talking, anyways.”

Your jaw nearly hit the tarmac. You stepped on Oscar’s foot, a habit by now, and he barely flinched. Apparently, that was enough for Theodore. “Well,” he said slowly, eyes narrowing. “Guess I’ll see you two around the garage.”

“Guess I’ll see you around my car,” Oscar answered, a little too quickly.

Theodore just glanced at him before muttering, “Small world.”

“So small,” you nodded stiffly.

The second he was out of sight, you yanked Oscar by the wrist like a woman possessed, dragging him to the nearest utility alleyway─ dim, slightly greasy smelling, and blessedly empty. For how long, though? You didn’t know. “Okay,” you hissed. “Wow, what the hell was that line?! We don’t do much talking?!”

Oscar raised a condescendent eyebrow, arms crossed on his chest. “I don’t know, you tell me, Mrs. This Is My Boyfriend. I just followed along. You’re welcome, by the way.”

You groaned so loud it echoed, looking up to the ceiling, hoping answers will fall off it and solve your life, simultaneously pacing a short line across the floor. “I know what I did, alright? I just─ I panicked! That guy─ he… he cheated on me. With my best friend. In my own bed. And I just─ he looked so smug and self-satisfied standing here like I’d run back to him. I needed to shove something in his face, show him I’m fine. Better. And I didn’t look and you were there and your arm was right there and now I’m going to have an aneurysm─”

Oscar blinked. “Wow. Okay. That’s… a lot of information, considering we barely know each other.”

“Thank you so much for the support, Oscar. I wonder whose fault that is, exactly!”

“I’m just saying. That was a whole soap opera act in thirty seconds,” he snapped back, rolling his eyes.

You exhaled harshly. “Whatever. I didn’t actually mean to drag you into this, okay? I’ll fix it. I’ll… tell him it was a misunderstanding or… I’ll figure it out. I’ll PR my way out of this, because whether you like it or not, it’s actually my job─”

“It’s fine,” he said, cutting you off, eyes closing briefly like he needed to reboot.

You paused. “Huh?”

“I said it’s fine.” His eyes opened again, locking onto yours. “Now that he thinks you’re dating someone, his delusional ego’s going to spiral and he’ll leave you alone. Especially if it’s someone… above in station, let’s say. Not to stroke my own ego.” He tilted his head, tone flat. “He looks like the insecure type.”

“He is,” you aggressively agreed, pointing at him like he’d just cracked the Da Vinci code, and you swore you saw his lips pull up. “So we just… leave it alone?”

“Let it die down,” Oscar continued with a casualness you could only hope to replicate. “Maybe have a conversation here and there for consistency, but that's about it. It’s not like he’s going to go around bragging that his ex-girlfriend is dating the guy he’s working for.”

You snorted. “I think he’d rather die.”

Oscar’s mouth twitched, trying not to smile. “Exactly.”

You sighed, finally letting your shoulders drop as the tension bled out of you. The adrenaline was still rushing through your veins, waterfall-like, but slowly softening, giving way to a quiet panic that you could make do with until the end of the day. It’s fine, you told yourself, it’ll be fine. “Okay,” you murmured, giving him a small nod. “Thank you. Seriously.”

“Don’t mention it,” Oscar replied, already turning away. “Literally.”

“Deal,” you said. “Never again.”

The plan was to return to your regularly scheduled programming─ distant and professional. With the way Theodore worked (or more accurately, didn’t), you were pretty sure he wouldn’t last long in the McLaren garage anyway. Life would go back to normal soon enough. You were sure of it.

Rule number one of PR management: never assume anything. Certainty was a myth. Because as long as there was even a sliver of doubt, it could all go wrong. Maybe you’d gotten complacent in your ways, Oscar never gave you anything to work with after all, but you really thought that this time, it would be fine. You slept like a rock that night, the kind of sleep where your mind recharged so hard it forgot you had responsibilities in the morning.

That’s probably the reason it took you so long to notice. First, it was the way people lingered as you passed. How engineers muttered behind their coffee cups and went dead silent when you got too close. You weren’t used to this level of attention─ as a whole, you were a pretty discreet presence in the paddock, so when the smiles came and the knowing smirks got thrown your way, you started becoming suspicious.

“Morningggg,” Lando sing-songed as you entered the McLaren hospitality tent.

“Good… morning?” You muttered, narrowing your eyes as you plopped down next to him. “What’s got you in such a good mood today?” You asked as you bite into the chocolate croissant you’d been craving since yesterday.

Lando studied you. Waiting.

“Do I have to guess, or…?”

The curly-haired man sighed dramatically, as if your question alone had aged him. “No, but I thought we were friends. Guess I was wrong, since I had to hear it from my race engineer. During briefing.”

You blinked. “Okay, what the hell are you on?” you admitted. “Have you been doing crack? Is that it?”

“Whatever, keep your secrets, Y/N,” Lando conceded, a smug little grin on his lips. “You’ll talk to me when you’re ready. Or I’ll just get the truth from Osc’. He seems… chatty, lately.” 

You couldn’t imagine Oscar Piastri being chatty to save your life. “What? What does Oscar have to do with anything?” But Lando was already up and walking off.

Alone with your chocolate croissant and your detonated sense of peace, you scanned the room, eyes darting in panic.

Across the tent, Oscar stood by the coffee station, talking to a staff member with his hands-in-pockets casual disinterest. His eyes met yours, and he paused mid-sentence, one eyebrow raised in that really? kind of way that made you want to slap him. There was a silent question in it. 

One you didn’t have an answer to.

The answer actually came knocking that night─ quite literally. Loud, incessant, unforgiving knocks at your hotel room door.

You were in the middle of taking off your makeup, cotton pad in one hand and dabbing at your under-eye concealer like it personally offended you. “Seriously?” You audibly commented, exhausted. It was nearly 10 PM. You’d done your job, answered more emails than anyone should in one day. The very least the universe could offer was twenty-four uninterrupted minutes of peace.

But the knocking didn’t stop, so you opened the door with a groan and a complaint on your tongue, only for the sound to die the moment you registered who was standing on the other side.

Oscar Piastri. In a hoodie, track pants, socks that did not match, and looking far too calm for someone who’d just banged on your door as if the apocalypse was tracking him down. You stared in confusion, words refusing to come out of your mouth no matter how hard you tried.

“Sooo… we might have a problem,” Oscar finally spoke in the silence stretching between you.

He walked in your room with no hesitation, without you even inviting him in─ the audacity! Sure, yeah, come on in, ruin my night, you thought. He glanced around, sizing your room and seemingly expecting paparazzis behind the mini-bar, before turning to face you with a flat look.

“What’s this problem that has you acting so dramatic for─”

“You’re trending on F1 Twitter. Well, we are,” he said simply, tone measured. “Someone took a photo. You holding my arm next to your ex. In the garage. And the caption is─”

He pulled out his phone. A screencap of big, red, capital letters: IS OSCAR PIASTRI SOFT-LAUNCHING HIS PR MANAGER?

It took a while for reality to set in. 

You stared at the screen blankly, eyes flicking from Oscar to the headline, erratic. Soft-launching. Soft-launching. You tasted blood in your mouth. Oh, no─ it was actually just your soul leaving your body. “This is not happening,” you mumbled, blinking rapidly. “It’s fake. This is fake. I’m hallucinating.”

Oscar hummed. “Want me to read you the quote tweets?”

You pointed a finger at him. “Don’t you dare.”

He shrugged and put his phone down. You sat down on your bed, hands flying to your temple. “Okay, okay. No big deal. I’ll just tell the team we were talking about… a car issue. A steering problem. Brake pedal feedback. That sounds fake, right? Like, real-enough fake.”

Oscar gave you a look. “You could try that,” he said slowly, “but your ex has apparently been sniffing around the garage asking people if we’re actually dating.”

“No way.”

“I overheard Lando’s race engineer telling him. He asked five different people.” A beat. “He’s not subtle.”

You could feel your eyes twitch. “Jesus Christ.”

Oscar crossed his arms, leaning back against the mini-bar, staring at you. “So I don’t think your little oh it was just a brake issue! excuse is going to cut it.”

“I’m going to end it all,” you said, dropping your face in your hands. “I’m going to crawl into my media kit and live there forever.”

He raised an eyebrow at you. “I’ll bring you snacks.”

“How are you not freaking out? Like, at all? It’s your face on every headline, and my job on the line!” You didn’t want to think about the repercussions this would have on any future jobs you might want, or your actual one. Future employers were going to Google you and find dating rumors about a fake relationship with a driver you were managing.

“Oh, I freaked out,” Oscar cut in smoothly, walking toward you. “Trust me, I had a whole mini-existential crisis in the elevator.”

“That’s good for you, Oscar. Why aren’t you still freaking out?”

“Because I figured this might be a job for my PR manager,” he said, toned laced with sarcasm. “Who also happens to be the cause of the PR disaster in the first place.”

You opened your mouth just to close it, and to open it again. “That’s fair.”

“And you said I was too boring.” Oscar gave you a dry smile, and weirdly, that was the moment it clicked.

You were his PR manager. This─whatever mess the universe had decided to dump in your lap─wasn’t just a disaster. It was an opportunity. A viral, narrative-controlling opportunity. The kind of chaos you could work with. You’d complained that Oscar gave you nothing: too quiet and acidic. Well, he certainly wasn’t that anymore, or almost.

You straightened up, the panic slowly morphing into focus. Your heart was still pounding, but now to the rhythm of the plan puzzling itself in your head. No one had trained you for what to do when you were the story but if anyone could improvise, it was. Your idea was wild, unhinged, even. But you knew better than anyone that the line between unhinged and brilliant was just the execution. And if you played this right, it could be exactly what the both of you needed.

You turned to Oscar slowly, the corner of your lips twitching into something almost insane. “Oscar,” you said carefully. “What if we didn’t let this go to waste?”

“Come again?”

“I mean, this,” you gestured vaguely toward his phone, screen down on the counter. “Oscar Piastri’s mystery romance unveiled, blah blah blah. It’s a mess, but it doesn’t have to be.”

Oscar’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “... You’re about to say something crazy.”

You got up from your spot on the bed to face him fully. “Fake dating.”

“There it is.”

“No, seriously, hear me out,” When he started taking a few steps back, you rushed toward him, hands animated. “People are already talking. We can’t undo the articles or stop the whispers, but we can own the story. It’s simple PR strategy: if the narrative’s out of our hands, we grab it back, shift the focus and make it work for us.”

“And what, exactly, would we be gaining from this?” Oscar looked deeply, deeply unconvinced.

You got closer to him and his eyes widened discreetly, quickly shifting from your eyes to your lips, and to the one finger you were holding up in front of his face. “One, you get press engagement. You’ve been called the human spreadsheet by more than one person─”

“Never heard of that.”

“Okay, maybe it’s only me, but my point still stands. This? It gives you dimension. Warmth. Personality. More people of all age groups rooting for you.”

Oscar raised an eyebrow. “Because I’m dating you?”

“Don’t flatter yourself too much. Two,” you continued without missing a beat, “I get a break from Theodore. He’s more likely to leave me alone if he thinks you’re in the picture long-term, or as close as we can get to it.”

“Isn’t that the reason you picked me in the first place?”

“I was desperate. You were here and tall.”

Oscar shrugged at your words, quietly agreeing with you, which egged you on for the last point of your argument. “Three, if this all goes up in flames, we just say we broke up. That wouldn’t be the ideal outcome until Theodore’s out of the picture, but if push comes to shove, we do this quietly. Classic ‘we ask for privacy during this time’, then ghost the media. End of story, and we go back to our ways.”

The silence stretching between the walls of your hotel room seemed to last a lifetime too long as the Australian studied you carefully, arms crossed on his chest. “You’ve really thought about this.”

“Actually, I just did. I’m that good.”

He exhaled loudly at your comment, dragging a hand down his face in exasperation, and you tried your best not to let a little quip past your lips. “And how long would this have to last?” Oscar asked, voice muffled by his palm.

“Until Theodore goes away, which shouldn’t be more than a few weeks knowing his talents. Enough to let the story peak and settle and it would include a couple public appearances, some social media crumbs─ low effort, maximum payoff for you.”

Hope swirled in your chest with the intensity of a storm when he dropped his hands, his dark eyes locked onto yours.

“And your ex leaving you alone would be the only thing you’d gain out of all this?”

You didn’t hesitate a single second when you answered. “That, and peace. Maybe a little petty revenge over him and honestly? A challenge.” Because this is what you’ve been dying to do ever since you stepped foot in the paddock a year ago.

And maybe Oscar saw the hellfire of determination in your eyes as he scanned you, either that or you sold your reckless idea with the confidence of a politician, because after long, skeptical minutes. He held out his hand, and the overwhelming weight pressing against your shoulders seemed to evaporate in the flight of a hundred butterflies.

“Fine, count me in,” he said, voice a little hoarse, “but if it all goes to shit, you’re taking the blame.”

You hastily took his hand, his rough palm fitting into yours, and you blamed the electricity rushing in your spine and the powdery pink of his cheeks on the ridiculous situation and the relief coursing through your body. “Deal, but it won’t go to shit if you keep up with me.”

The ghost of a smirk pulled at his lips, which made you smile. Your heartbeat was thundering in your chest and the heaviness of what you’d just agreed upon settled over you like a second skin.

Fake dating Oscar Piastri. How hard could it be?

First thing you did the next morning was to warn a handful of team members: there was no world in which running a fake dating scheme in secret wouldn’t come back to bite you and frankly, your job and reputation were already hanging by a thread due to yesterday’s PR earthquake. You and Oscar pulled Lando, Zak, and a few key staff members─social media, comms, and PR support─into the smallest available hospitality room you could find, locking the door behind you.

You explained the situation as fast as you could, hands raised in surrender under their gazes. How the rumors were technically true but not real, what conclusions you came to in such little time, and the thought process behind your idea, carefully excluding Theodore’s implication.

“Wouldn’t lying to the public make it worse?” Someone from comms piped up, deadpan.

You winced. “Damage control isn’t always about truth. It’s about optics, controlling the narrative before it controls us. We’ve assessed the risk, this buys us time to refocus headlines onto the cars, not the garage drama all while boosting Oscar’s popularity.”

Zak blinked at you as if you’d grown a second head. “You assessed the risk?”

“With me,” Oscar added from his chair, facing you. “I see the strategic upside. I’ll blow over in a few weeks, it’s fine. No harm done.” You sent him a silent thank you, holding his eyes just long enough for him to notice.

“Soo, when’s the wedding?” Lando piped up, leaning forward. “Or do we just have the break-up arc planned?”

You ignored him, preferring to explain the conditions of you and Oscar’s little agreement: no posts unless you greenlit them, no press comments and if anyone asked, yes, you were together. Happy. In love, but still casual. Social media staff were already scribbling notes or rapidly typing on their keyboards, and Zak looked like he might die of a heart attack.

So were you. Still, when you glanced at Oscar during one of McLaren’s CEO's silent breakdowns, you couldn’t help but share a silent laugh.

The following days were catastrophic, to say the least. Navigating the Bahrain paddock for the last of testing and media obligations for the first Grand Prix of the season the week after had turned into a minefield of knowing looks and suspicious stares. You and Oscar were learning how to walk the tightrope of fake affection with the grace of two toddlers. A few shared smiles, a shoulder brush, but every interaction felt rehearsed, taken off a badly written script. By some given miracle, it did work on some people but not all, and especially not Theodore. You could feel his eyes on you everytime you walked through the garage, narrowed as if waiting for a slip-up, but you’d rather die than prove him right.

By the end of the first few days, Oscar’s social media manager handed you a photo of the both of you to approve for Instagram─ one where Oscar had his arm slung around your shoulder awkwardly while you stood next to the car, all too aware of the massive lens pointed right at you. It was…

“It looks like we lost a bet,” you muttered, horrified.

Oscar leaned in over your shoulder to look at the picture. “Oh. Yeah, that’s bad.”

You threw your hands in the air, movements more powerful than words to transcribe the frustration elevating your blood pressure. Before a flurry of complaints and insults could slip past your lips, Oscar spoke.

“Okay, maybe it’s not very convincing, but it’s also because we haven’t figured out how to sell it correctly.”

“What a revolutionary thought.” He shrugged your comment off. 

“Well, I figured since we skipped the whole dating part and went straight to the whole madly-in-love thing, maybe it’s time we… backtrack?”

You felt the lightbulb switch on in your mind, eyes widening in realization. “Backtrack… like a backstory?”

Oscar nodded solemnly. “A timeline, yeah. How it started, how it’s going, first dates and everything. The whole fake fairytale.”

You couldn’t argue with that. You hated to admit he was currently beating you at your job, but Oscar was right. People were already speculating about the two of you a week in your fake relationship; everyone, including you, needed some foundations to be settled and fast. “Okay, alright. We can figure this out tonight, preferably in my hotel room since it apparently became the headquarters of this,” you made circle hand gesture between the two of you, “operation. Also because nobody will bust us in there.”

Oscar showed up at an ungodly hour of the evening─ the clock showcased numbers that hurt your sleep cycle, but nothing made the press talk more than going to your girlfriend’s room in the middle of the night, right? He knocked once before letting himself in, dressed in the same sweats and hoodie as a week ago, and holding a suspiciously large energy drink. “I come bearing poison,” Oscar announced, lifting the can.

You squinted at him from your spot on the bed-your hotel room lacking a desk-surrounded by a battlefield of notebooks and your wheezing laptop that was one short breath away from the grave. “Perfect, that’ll keep us up. We have work to do. Welcome to the Ted-talk-slash-lie-building meetup.”

Oscar kicked off his shoes, walking toward you. He eyed the chaos with a low whistle. “Oh wow, you weren’t kidding.”

You handed him a purple glitter pen without even glancing in his direction. “Sit your ass down and write with honor, Piastri.”

“Glitter? Really?”

“Don’t patronize me. I love glitter gel pens. Better memorize that if you want to be a good fake boyfriend.”

Oscar snorted but didn’t protest as he took the pen, sitting down next to an open notebook on the edge of your bed. He cracked the energy drink open with a hiss, and you took it from his hands before he had the time to bring it to his lips. “Jesus, you’re bossy.” You shot him a look. “Alright, alright. Where do we begin?”

You exhaled, eyes settling on your computer screen. A bright, pink page was showcasing Date Idea: Where To Take Your Beloved For A First Date? “With the basics. When we started dating, how we met, how many fake months we’ve been in fake love, which side of the bed you sleep in for continuity purposes.”

“Right side.”

“Wrong answer. It’s mine.”

You gradually settled in a surprisingly comfortable rhythm. Between the quiet clicking of the keyboard, the buzzing of Chinese nightlife outside your window, and the rhythmic scratch of the glittery ink on paper, you and Oscar brainstormed.

Ideas came slowly at first, awkward and stilted the way two kids forced together in a group project would work─ which it was, in a way. It didn’t take you long to realize you didn’t know Oscar at all, and he didn’t know you either, and the recognition of that fact put a certain strain on your interactions, as much as there already was. Yet, the tension softened as the minutes from midnight trickled away. You found yourself building a history out of thin air, questions after questions and jokes after jokes─ inside jokes that didn’t exist and justified why you laughed so hard at ‘soft tyres’, a first date that involved a tragically undercooked lasagna which Oscar and you had to fight over because neither of you wanted to look like a bad cook. You chose May 21st as the anniversary date because it sounded cute. Oscar protested, “How can a date even be cute? It doesn’t make sense.” He still settled on it.

Snorts, teasing looks as you drew a clumsy timeline in the middle of your designated ‘Relationship Basics’ notebook. “What about our first kiss?”

“Mmh, that’s a good one. People are going to ask.”

“Duh,” you fought the smile on your lips with little effort. “C’mon. You were wearing that hideous orange puffer, it was raining, and I was mad because you didn’t share your umbrella.”

“Oh right, and you were soaked and… okay, you said I owed you a kiss for compensation. Sounds like something you’d do,” Oscar replied, leaning forward in mock seriousness.

You made a sound, halfway between a gasp and a laugh. “You do remember!”

He laughed. A real one, warm and easy, going right through your chest. You quickly joined him, and his eyes lingered on you a second too long after the joke faded. “I made it up with hot chocolate later, though,” he added with a lazy smile that didn’t belong in any scenarios.

You scribbled that in your notebook. “Ew. We are sickeningly cute.”

And somewhere between a fabricated ski trip and the great debate of who said ‘I love you’ first, something shifted, just a little. Oscar had moved from the edge of the bed to sit beside you, arms behind his head against the headrest, legs stretched on the covers. His knees bumped yours every now and then, but you didn’t flinch away. The notebooks laid abandoned now, pens scattered across the duvet. Your laptop screen dimmed after an hour of neglect and your limbs were heavy with the sweet stickiness of fatigue that only came when you laughed too much and too hard.

You glanced over at Oscar and his hair was a little messy, eyes a little sleepy, softened by the light of the space. He was already watching you. “You know,” he spoke up. “For a so-called meeting, it suspiciously looks like a sleepover.”

You couldn’t help but giggle at that, tiredness winning over your resolve. “It’s almost four,” he continued,  voice lower in the hush of your hotel room. “We’ve officially survived our first week of fake dating. Well, we did four hours ago, but…”

“And we haven’t accidentally gotten married in Vegas like they do in movies. I’d call that a win.”

“Oh yeah, that’s definitely not because of our amazing chemistry.”

A huff escaped you again, and your head fell back against the pillows. Shanghai still hummed outside the window, quieter this time, and the city lights threaded through the thin curtains you pulled. The room was just as still, if warmer─ you could feel the tired blush on your cheeks and the heat of Oscar’s thigh against yours. “You know, you’re not as annoying as I thought,” you said, a lazy sigh curling into your words.

It came out like an offhand casual observation, but you didn’t meet his eyes. Truth be told, you were ashamed. The whole year you’d convinced yourself Oscar Piastri was a nuisance and a stain on your work life had been shattered in the shine of glitter pens and the drafting of a romance novel-worthy story. Because he was actually kind of funny, and even though he delivered his jokes like he was bored half the time which you used to interpret as condescance, they still made you laugh. He listened when you spoke. He had a dry, understated charm you were starting to recognize as very authentic.

And he hadn’t complained once tonight. Not when you made him pick an anniversary date for the third time, or reenact a fake first meeting with your best friend. He was just… there.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he replied, but his voice melted at his usual edges. “You’re alright too. Surprisingly.”

When you turned your head, you found he was already looking at you for the second time, and a moment passed. You gave him a smile, barely there, and he looked away. “Guess we do make a decent team,” Oscar mumbled.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” you mimicked him. He snorted.

You walked him to your door after an exchange of soft chuckles and breathy goodnights. Fake dating Oscar would be harder than you thought, but it definitely wouldn’t be as bad as you made it out to be.

You weren’t sure what it was between the sleep deprivation, the amateur acting, or the emotional whiplash of building an entire relationship with a guy you were only acquainted with, but something about it shifted the rhythm you’d gotten used to. Whatever happened during that night, being Oscar Piastri’s fake girlfriend became easier after it.

It started with texts. You couldn’t remember which one of you sent the first non-work related one, but it became a daily occurrence of linking the other pictures the press took of the both of you.Oscar would often comment something along the lines of Do I look like a man held hostage or a man in love? Be honest. You’d roll your eyes everytime, answering: All I can say is that I’m not flattered. At first, it was mostly logistical─ scheduling photo ops, making sure neither of you veered your scheme off the track. But somewhere between sarcastic captions and oddly flattering candids, the conversations grew longer. It became a way to kill time, a habit.

Oscar was easy to talk to, which was a thought that would’ve originally terrified you. Except the conversations carried off screen, and you found yourself enjoying them an awful lot.

Along the lines of your ruse, you started saving seats beside each other during lunch breaks or waiting up for the other to go back to the hotel together─ not for the cameras or Theodore’s heinous stare, but for a reason as simple as the enjoyment of the other’s company. Oscar was more than a colleague by that point, he became something else that you couldn’t quite call a friend the way you called Lando one. You stopped overthinking every step you took beside him, every glance and sentence. You had your script, sure. But more than that, you had a quiet kind of understanding. He knew when to press his hand to the small of your back when it was needed, and you knew when to lean in just enough to sell the look of something intimate. 

It wasn’t perfect, but it was practiced. Comfortable, even. Maybe, just maybe, a little fun. Which is why you couldn’t tell when the little things started to feel not as little anymore.

Rare were the times you arrived late to a team briefing, but a late-night spiral reviewing articles about your little charade had stolen more sleep than you’d expected, and for the first time since you started out at McLaren, your alarms lost the battle. You slipped in your seat next to Oscar, a movement you barely thought about anymore, breathless, cheeks warm from your run across the paddock and the drizzle misting your hair. Your pants were drenched, there was a pounding behind your eyes and you were thirty minutes away from biting someone’s head off if they even dared mention your tardiness.

Oscar didn’t say anything at first, just glanced your way as he often did, eyes flicking up and down once. You braced for a comment, a joke, preparing to hold yourself back from doing something you’ll regret doing to your fake boyfriend in public.

Instead, he leaned down, reaching for a paper bag next to him, from where he pulled out a steaming paper cup and a chocolate croissant that he slid toward you without a word. Your name was scribbled across the side of the wrapper along with your very specific order, down to the temperature.

You looked at Oscar. At your breakfast. Then at Oscar again. “How─”

“You weren’t answering my texts,” he said, still looking forward. “Figured you’d be late, so I got you this. You get cranky with no sleep or caffeine in your system.”

“I don’t get cranky,” you muttered, wrapping your cold hands around the hot beverage. “You get sassy when you don’t sleep.”

“Sure,” Oscar said casually, meeting your eyes for the first time since you sat down. “There’s extra vanilla, by the way.”

You didn’t answer, just rolled your eyes, but his gaze was still on you when Zak burst through the door. The fact he remembered that you took extra vanilla syrup in your extra hot latte and that your favorite pastry was a chocolate croissant should be nothing, because you’re sure you told him at some point during your many one-on-one briefings. Except it wasn't. Not really.

Then, there was the flight. There was nothing the fans and the media loved more, and Theodore despised just as much, than couple apparitions at airports, which led to Oscar’s social media manager to nudge you into the believable. That’s how you found yourself catching the same flight as Oscar, Lando and a few others on their jet. It had become recurrent in the past few weeks and you’d never admit it out loud, but there were non-neglectable perks: fewer crying babies, more space, and the occasional poker game where you absolutely obliterated Lando’s ego. You know I’m just that good at acting, you’d said, throwing a cheeky smile at Oscar that he gave you right back.

This time, though, none of you had the energy to talk, let alone play cards. It had been an exhausting and emotional race weekend─ back-to-back media obligations underneath the fire of reignited on-track rivalries, rain delays, and disputes amid the team you couldn’t legally disclose. The jet was unusually quiet as it took off into the night sky, everyone slipping into their respective silence.

You hadn’t meant to fall asleep. You usually didn’t in airplanes, they stressed you out too much─ you’d just leaned against the window for a little moment, eyes fluttering closed. The buzz of the engine and the soft cabin light blurred the world into static and you drifted away in a split second, as soon as the city was turned to insignificant holes in the black tapestry underneath you.

After a while, you felt a warmth, subtle at first. There was something solid against your shoulder, enough to make you crack one eye open.

Oscar’s head was resting against yours, and you were tucked comfortably against him. At some point, he’d dozed off too, and the both of you had slumped toward each other in your sleep. You could’ve moved, you know you would have a few weeks back, but you didn’t. You let your eyes close again and let yourself drift in and out of sleep along the quiet sync of your breath. His arms wrapped around your waist, your legs rested on his knees, and you weren’t quite sure how long you stayed like that─ten minutes, an hour─but when you finally woke up again, it was to the obnoxious flick of Lando’s phone camera and his barely contained laughter.

It was the accumulation of those little things, the seemingly insignificant moments that, piled together, made them bigger than they should have been. It was when Oscar took the habit of sleeping in your hotel room after qualifications to watch a movie under the pretense of simulating ‘passionate encounters’. It was when, one morning, bleary-eyed, you accidentally threw on his hoodie with his number printed on the back, and his hands lingered on the small of your back a little more possessively that day. It was when you were running low on your orange glitter gel pen and a full set was mysteriously delivered to your door, even if you didn’t need one. In the way his pupils dilated ever so slightly when you caught him staring, when he pointed right at you after his podiums, how your skin fizzed with heat for hours after he kissed your cheek in front of the cameras.

But what really blurred the line was the night in Spain.

It hadn’t been a particularly thrilling race─ tame from lights out to chequered flag. Oscar had finished P3, Lando snagged P2, both holding their qualifying positions with sharp determination. But the crowd had been wild, the champagne flowing and before you knew it, Lando dragged you and Oscar into Carlos’ plans for the night. All that happened after was a blur of neon lights and ear-shattering singing.

The walk back to the hotel was your idea- just a short stroll through warm cobblestone streets, the air sweet with late night chatter and the slow beginning of summer. You and Oscar snuck out the back entrance of the club, the latter clearly not fitting in the Spanish nightlife, your heels dangling from your fingers and his cap pulled low to hide the flush of his cheeks. Both of you were just tipsy enough to feel invincible, shoulders brushing as you exchanged anecdotes and very real inside jokes, something about not-much-talking, laughter echoing against the dead of the night.

It was quiet for a moment after that, the comfortable kind that sometimes settled between you. Oscar decided to break it.

“You know,” he started, softer than usual. “I’ve been meaning to ask─ why didn’t you like me at first?”

You turned your head up slowly, the reality of the question dawning on you. You raised an eyebrow. “What made you think I didn’t like you?”

“Come on.” Oscar gave you a look, and in the dark of his eyes you swore you saw the polite, Shakespearean insults you sneaked in your emails, the harsh tap on your foot on his, flashing in the quarter of a second. You couldn’t help but laugh.

“Okay, maybe I didn’t. At first.” 

He kept his eyes on you, waiting. You sighed, tipping your head back to look at the night sky─ no stars were visible, but it didn’t take away from the beauty of it. “You were just─” You paused, choosing your words carefully. “Honestly, you were rude, smug and condescending. I felt like you were trying to make my job harder than it should be by just- not doing anything. People were talking about you as this nice, quiet boy and I secretly wanted to bash your head against a wall.”

A beat. “Wow. That’s brutal,” he simply answered. “I don’t get how I gave that impression. I always thought you were the one being rude to me.”

Your head whipped in his direction and you could physically feel the disbelief splashed across your features. “Me? You started it!”

“How?”

“That one car ride in my third month,” you deadpanned. “You made a very snobbish comment about a dream I had about my ex. You said, and I quote─” you cleared your throat dramatically, dropping your voice to the flattest Oscar impression known to man, “‘Imagine being boring and still more interesting than your ex.’” Oscar was half-laughing by that point. “Oh, don’t you dare! You also said something about how I shouldn’t sleep in the HQ again, but for the record? It was my first triple-head─”

He held a hand up in mock surrender, mouth agape in stupor. “Is this what started this whole… passive-aggressiveness?”

“Uh… yeah? It was unnecessarily arrogant!”

Oscar made a face. “Unnecessary, sure. I get it. But you know what was also unnecessary? The intimidating, pretty new girl at McLaren─who also happened to be my new PR Manager─calling me boring to my face.”

The words hung in the air between the two of you. Your froze, caught off-guard by the ease with which the compliment slipped out. Oscar was continuing with his rant, either completely oblivious or choosing not to care. You cut him off. “... You thought I was pretty?”

That’s when he faltered, his lips parted in a half-word as if he hadn’t realized what he said before you pointed it out. Oscar’s gaze flicked to yours, then away, suddenly far more interested in the cracks of the sidewalk than anything else. “Well, yeah,” he took off his cap and brushed a hand through his hair like it might undo the sentence. “I mean, you still are. It’s not like that changed.”

It would be lying to say you had considered the possibility that you caused the tension between you and Oscar in the first place. While your sad attempt at humor might have been the catalyst, something must’ve already been simmering under the surface for things to go cold so quickly after it. Your heart gave the tiniest, traitorous jump, chest pulling in a reluctant way, at the thought he’d noticed you then. You despised how easy it was to smile, to fall into the warmth of the possibility.

“Oh,” you said softly, and it explained everything and nothing all at once.

“I’m just saying,” Oscar added quickly, flustered, “it didn’t feel great.”

You couldn’t tell if the red of his cheeks was from the heat, the alcohol, or the embarrassment, but what you could tell was how hopelessly cute you found him in this moment. You tried to play it cool, despite the fact your heartbeat had skipped a full chord. “Noted. And for the record, now I know you aren’t boring,” you added, teasing, playfully nudging your shoulder with his. “You’re just… private. Or mysterious. A sardonic brick wall, if you will.”

It successfully had him looking up, a light-hearted scoff slipping past his lips - you could see the relief in his facial traits. “I’ll take mysterious. It’s better than boring.”

When you got into your hotel room, Oscar slipped past your door as he normally would, and you collapsed onto the bed with your legs tangled together like always─ but something was different now. The air around the mattress was slower, stuck in time, warm in the way his breath ghosted over the nape of your neck when he settled beside you, eyes already fluttering shut.

For the first time since this whole agreement began, you had to consciously remind yourself that it wasn’t real. The comfort in your chest wasn’t made to stay. The steady rhythm of his breathing next to yours, the way your body naturally molded into the other─ it was all pretend. 

At least, that’s what it was supposed to be.

Like silk curtains flowing with the breeze, the change was discreet but there nonetheless, in the shared silences that felt less like pauses and more like instances captured with a polaroid. There was hesitation, once again, but unlike the one you chased away before─ in how you touched, how you laughed, how you glanced at each other and closed the gap under the bright flashes. You were both tiptoeing around something fragile and new.

Neither of you said anything, but it was something too heavy not to notice─ at least, you hoped Oscar did as well: the reluctant awareness of how hazy the lines had started to get and the stunned realization that maybe they’d never really been that straight to begin with after Oscar’s tipsy confession in Spain. You were still doing everything to showcase your relationship to the media, Theodore’s presence in the paddock still overwhelmingly present and Oscar’s popularity sky-rocketing. You were still holding hands and tucking yourself to his side in the garage between two meetings, carefully weaving the continuation of the story you made up together. Yet, when no one was watching, it didn’t feel as plastic. Not when Oscar whispered in the crevice of your ear in a crowded room, or when your heart jumped at the sound of his laugh. When it started to hurt, just a little, when he pulled away.

The day he called you at five in the morning from Canada was confirmation enough. The switch from the heat of Spain to the rainy weather of the United Kingdom for work had taken its toll on you, and you had to call in sick for the Montreal race weekend. Tucked in your covers with a cup of coffee and an inability to sleep due to your clogged nose, you watched your phone screen lit up with his name. You answered with a hoarse, “Why are you awake?”

Oscar chuckled, his voice slightly muffled by the hotel air conditioning in the background. “Why are you?”

“Respiratory betrayal,” you said, dragging your blanket further up your chin. “What’s your excuse? The race’s tomorrow.”

You talked about everything and nothing for a little while. Oscar told you how the track felt a little underwhelming, how the social media team messed up with their main Instagram account, and of Lando’s endless complaining about the lack of your presence─ apparently, the paddock was too quiet now. You nodded in your pillow with a smile like he could see you.

Eventually, the conversation drifted away, like it always did now. Oscar asked what you were listening to lately and you told him of a song that sounded like spring and reminded you of long drives at night, especially the instance when he drove you home after Monaco. He said it sounded like something you’d play to get out of your own head. You said it was. He told you about this stupid childhood habit he had of organizing cereal boxes in alphabetical order and you laughed so hard it triggered a coughing fit.

Oscar’s voice dropped. “I wish you were here.”

It wasn’t dramatic or purposeful in the slightest. He said it as if he was realizing it at the same time he pronounced the words. It was your case too when you answered, “Yeah, me too.”

Your chest ached, because there was no camera to capture the softness of the moment and you just found out you preferred it that way.

And then you came back for the Austrian Grand Prix. You didn’t see Oscar much that weekend. You’d barely touched the ground before you were swallowed whole by emails, debriefs, documents you missed during your sick leave and Theodore side-eyeing you every time you so much as coughed next to him. There was no time for soft moments, not even time to stop and just glance at Oscar even if you wanted to.

He crossed the line in P1 that day. You were mid-conversation with Zak, animated with excitement even during your lengthy talk about the following media duties, when arms pulled you in so strongly you lost track of what you were saying. You recognized him by touch alone: Oscar was wrapped around you, body sweaty and warm from his maddened laps. He held the helmet in his hand, still catching his breath when his head dropped on your shoulder. 

“You’re back,” he said, voiced laced with something a lot like relief.

“Of course I’m back,” you whispered back, fingers twitching on the back of his race suit. He sounded like you were gone for years and somehow, it really did feel like it. You could’ve stayed there for hours, you thought, until Zak obnoxiously cleared his throat next to you.

Oscar pulled back, eyes brighter than his usual post-race exhaustion, the glint of something you couldn’t name just yet dancing in his pupils. His hands came to rest on your wrist, barely brushing your hands. “Stay with me?” He asked, and your heart might have stopped just there. Realizing how it sounded, Oscar quickly corrected, “For the interviews. I’ve been dodging the media since you weren’t there.”

“I will,” you smiled. Your feet were already moving anyway.

He kept glancing sideways everytime the journalists asked about strategy and pace, and the little tug in your guts told your mind you were enjoying it, even though shamefully missing the feeling of the circle his thumb drew on the inside of your hand. When the interviewer asked about the less than discreet glances, making a comment on the obvious chemistry you two shared and how well you worked together─as colleagues and as a couple─Oscar didn’t laugh it off like you always practiced. He nodded, bashful and sure.

The sentence kept blinking in the back of your head like a warning sign: this was all fake. But even telling yourself that wasn’t enough anymore because your heart apparently didn’t get the memo. The touches and the sleepovers made your dreams spiral and your cheeks warm. You became his phone wallpaper for authenticity and his picture became yours as well without as much as a second thought, every little attention as natural as the cycle of seasons.

You were falling for your own fake dating ruse. Which meant you were quietly, miserably falling for Oscar Piastri in the process, in the realest and most literal way known to man. That was terrifying.

Never, in your short but hectic PR career, had you ever experienced that.

Not the newfound feelings you were harboring for your fake boyfriend, no. You tried your best to think about that as little as possible─ if you didn’t look at them, maybe they wouldn’t look back. Right now, you were talking about the diplomatic ambush you and the F1 grid and staff just walked into. The hotel hosting the drivers and half the sport’s staff for the Silverstone weekend had decided to organize a charity gala. Last minute. Mandatory, if you had any desire to keep your reputation intact.

It was a smart move─ brilliant, even: Host a fancy event for a cause, pick a night when the entire motorsport world is under your roof, and leak just enough information to the press so no one can afford to skip it. Declining? Not donating? Refusing to schmooze with the hotel owners? You’d be crucified online by breakfast. Genius, really. You respected the play. 

But damn, give a girl some warning. You didn’t have anything to wear.

Apparently it was the case of everyone else as well, which made you feel less self-conscious. When you walked out your hotel room the morning of FP3 and qualifying, the hallway wasn’t buzzing with race talk but with chaotic murmurs about last-minute outfits, shoes emergency and the drama of Max Verstappen only packing team merch─ which, much to his dismay, was absolutely excluded from the dress code.

You were promptly swept away by a group of female staff members from different teams, mostly working in comms or PR, determined to save you from showing up in jeans and a prayer after a heated conversation around the breakfast table. It turned into a surprisingly wholesome mission: shared complaints, budding friendships, and a chorus of tender laughter when you found the dress. “Your boyfriend’s going to be a happy man!” one of the older women teased, earning cackles from the others and a fiery blush from you.

You were, admittedly, very lucky─ as much as someone in a fake relationship could be.

Especially when Oscar knocked on your hotel door later that evening, fresh from his post-quali shower, hair a little messy, still buttoning up the blazer of his suit and eyes flickering with something unreadable when you opened the door, ready.

You’d be lying if you said you weren’t expecting a reaction. When you were tearing down your skin with your scented body scrub and carefully smoking out your eyeliner in the mirror, you told yourself it was for you only─ but faced with Oscar’s eyes roaming over you, you knew you were clearly lying to yourself.

For a moment, he didn’t say anything. He silently took you in, and you feared that maybe you didn’t achieve the effect you hoped for. Maybe a hair was out of place, or the dress looked awkward on you. But Oscar’s lips parted in a discreet intake of breath and the way his mind blanked out was painfully visible on his features. Quietly, “You look…” He trailed off, clearing his throat and rubbing the back of his neck as if he could try to scrub off the red climbing out of his collar. “You look really nice.”

Really nice. That wasn’t quite what you expected, but his reaction was telling enough for you and knowing Oscar, you knew you weren’t getting anything more unless he was under a copious amount of alcohol or sleep-deprivation. You rolled your eyes at him, biting back a satisfied smile. “You don’t look half bad either.”

And he did. Devastatingly so. His suit was tailored within an inch of its life, cinched right at the waist and the lapels hugging his chest, his frame striking in the color. It was all very James Bond of him, minus the reckless charm─ though tonight, he seemed to be toeing the line. Your gaze dropped to his tie, and your fingers twitched at your side when you realized the shade was an exact match to your dress. You hadn’t said anything about your outfit ahead of time so you didn’t believe it was on purpose, but when your eyes met his again, there was a flash of something knowing and boyish─ almost proud that you noticed.

“Come on,” Oscar finally broke the silence. “You’re setting the bar too high. Everyone’s going to think I’m the lucky one tonight.”

“That’s because you are.”

The hallway was quiet as you two walked down together. You could feel it again─ that invisible thread pulling tighter, a weightless tension lodging in your chest and the incessant smile pulling at your lips. This was fake. Totally fake, you repeated to yourself again as you stepped with Oscar in the elevator, arm slithering around his bicep, ready to make your entrance.

The hotel hall was drenched in gaudy decorations, shimmering chandeliers and overly sparkly dresses, the kind of excessive elegance that only made sense in photoshoots and unnecessarily overpriced galas. Everywhere you looked, sequins caught the light and laughter echoed over the clink of crystal glasses. You weren’t in your element at all, Oscar wasn’t either and clearly, none of the drivers or the team principals who showed up wanted to be there. But in the name of keeping up appearances, you spent the evening with Oscar and a glass of champagne, stepping on his foot from time to time for old time’s sake. You knew how to mingle, after all it was everything you studied for four years.

You drifted through conversations in tandem. His hand stayed on the small of your back, occasionally brushing lower in ways that felt more unconscious than performative, or maybe it was just wishful thinking. When you’d lean into him to talk, he always dipped his head to hear you better on instinct. When Lando started tagging along, he was quick to complain about third-wheeling.

The whole evening was spent like that: finding amusement where you could in the middle of obligations, which was often spent sending sharp comments Oscar’s way, which amused him greatly, or Lando’s with Oscar’s help, which definitely amused him less. But gossiping could only get you so far, and soon enough the height of the heels you chose and the weighty ambience was enough to uncomfortably tighten your ribcage. You were quick to excuse yourself to the empty entry of the hotel, where you collapsed on a chair with a sigh.

You took a slow sip of your almost empty glass, letting the fizz of the bubbles distract you from the uncomfortable twist in your chest. Oscar would have followed you if you didn’t ask for some alone time, and God knows you needed some away from him. You were trying to find a distraction, anything to make you stop thinking about the brush of his fingertips or how you could have sworn his gaze lingered a second too long on your lips when you laughed at one of his jokes.

You didn’t expect, and especially didn’t want, Theodore to be that distraction.

His voice cut through the fog. “Tired?”

The glass nearly slipped from your fingers. Your body tensed, and you jumped to your feet out of reflex, ready to leave at any given moment. “Oh wow, didn’t mean to scare you like that,” he raised his hand in mock surrender. You rolled your eyes.

Theodore had the same haircut, same smug face, same cologne that lingered like melted plastic. The longer you looked at him, the longer of an eyesore he became─ nothing about him stood out: not his suit, the false casual way he was holding his blazer in his hands, and certainly not his demeanor. You couldn’t help but draw a silent comparison to Oscar.

That’s when you realized: you hadn’t seen much of Theodore the past week around the paddock. You hadn’t paid a lot of attention to his presence in general, too caught up in Oscar and the torment of your own conflicting feelings to even grace him with acknowledgement. You voiced the first part of your thought, casually sipping your drink.

His expression tightened as he forced a smile. “Ah. Yeah, well, they… they let me go. Budget cuts, you see.”

It took all your will and decency not to explode in laughter. Budget cuts. Ah, yes. Incompetence must have had a change of definition in the Oxford Dictionary recently. “So… why are you here?”

“My dad knows the hotel owner. I got an invite last minute.”

“Oh,” you said with a mocking tilt of the head. “So nepotism and unemployment. Got it.” The fake niceness you sported on during your first interaction at the start of the season had vanished out of thin air─ you weren’t going to put up with this pathetic excuse of a man any longer than you had to, precisely now that you had no reason to anymore.

Theodore laughed. Your hand prickled with the need to punch him in the nose. “You know, it’s not even that important that I lost my job at McLaren.” Said no one ever, you thought. How far did his privileges go? “I─ well, I only took it up because I learned you were working there. I thought… maybe if I was around again, we could fix things.”

You must have hit your head, this had to be a fever dream. The words reaching your ears made no sense to you whatsoever. 

“Fix─?” You scoffed, eyes widening. “That job was supposed to be your redemption arc? Is that it? Oh my god, Theo. You slept with my best friend and you thought I’d fall back in your arms because you barged into my career?”

“I made a mistake─”

“You made a choice,” you spat.

“I didn’t think it would matter this much to you!”

“Did I not cry enough the first time or do you want me to reenact it? Were you really hoping I’ll welcome you with open arms, open legs and a memory loss?”

“Well─”

“Don’t answer that. Actually, stop talking.”

Theodore threw his arms in the air, taking a step forward as he hurled his jacket on the chair you sat on a few minutes ago. “I just thought maybe seeing me again would remind you of what we’ve had!”

Rage and indignation alike rose in your throat like vomit, and your hands shook imperceptibly as you answered. “It did. It reminded me that what we had was never good enough to keep me from building something better. So thanks for the little nostalgia trip, but I’ll pass.”

Something in Theodore’s gaze darkened, dangerous and petulant, and before you could step back, he leaned in. “Oh, I get it now,” he snarled at you, voice dropping into something bitter. “It’s because of Piastri, isn’t it?”

“Back off, Theodore.” Your back had straightened instinctively. Discomfort crept under your skin like cold water─ you didn’t like the way he hissed his name and how close he was getting.

He didn’t back away. Instead, he took another step. “Didn’t realize you’d fall for the first man who gave you attention after me. Guess I underestimated how lonely you─”

“Everything alright there?”

His voice, warm and familiar, sliced through the tension and your shoulders slumped in relief. Oscar.

He was standing just behind Theodore, who turned around comically slow. Oscar’s expression was unreadable. You never saw him angry, but you did know how to recognize the calm before a storm.

“Yeah,” Theodore answered, too fast. “Just… catching up.”

Oscar’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Well, I think you’ve done enough catching up for tonight.”

He walked toward you, and you subtly stepped to his side, his heat grounding in the absurdity of the situation. He didn’t look at you─ his eyes were locked on Theodore’s, cold and measured. “If you’ve said your piece,” he started, “I think you should head back to whatever table your father pulled strings to get you to.”

Theodore scoffed, his features twisting into something ugly, but he didn’t push his luck. He wouldn’t be winning this fight. After a beat of tense silence, he turned and stormed off the entry hall, muttering something beneath his breath you didn’t bother catching.

The moment he was out of sight, you could feel the rigidity in your body melt away. You hadn’t even realized how tightly you’d been wound until now, standing frozen in place. You reached out instinctively, gripping Oscar’s sleeve in order to keep you on your feet. “Shit,” you whispered. “I didn’t expect him.”

Oscar’s hand closed gently over yours and how thumb drew slow circles across your knuckles. You could feel his eyes on you attentively. “You okay?”

You sniffled, breathing fast as a breathy, nervous laugh slipped past your lips. “God.” You wiped your cheek, pausing when you saw the glint of moisture on your fingers, “I didn’t even realize I was crying.”

Oscar didn’t say anything right away─ he reached up with his other hand and brushed your tear track, cradling your cheek with the gentlest touch, like you’d break if he pressed too hard. “He’s a real dick,” he murmured, brows drawing together. “Trust me, he’s never coming near you again.”

That made you laugh─ quiet, and undeniably tired, but real. You looked up at him, something vulnerable sitting openly between you now. “Thanks for stepping in,” you breathed out. “You know, you’re awfully good at being a fake boyfriend. You nailed the attitude down.” You tried to make light of the situation, but the words stung when you got them out. You regretted uttering them as soon as you felt the frail openness in the air retract. Something in Oscar’s eyes dimmed a little, but they didn’t move from yours. 

“Always, that’s my job,” his tone dripped with a strange kind of acerbity. “Now, let’s get you to your room. I think we’re done for the night.”

You couldn’t agree more.

The way to your room was spent in silence, apart from the click of your heels on the carpet and the faint sound of breathing. The quiet was now oppressing, seeping with an anxiety that took you back to when he shook your hand in a similar hotel room a few months ago. When you released his arm as you reached your door, you half-expected him to mutter a polite goodnight and disappear at the end of the hallway.

Instead, Oscar leaned against the doorframe, hands shoved in his pockets. “Can I ask you something?”

You gave a small nod.

“What made you say yes to him?” He asked. Faced with your confused expression, he clarified, gaze flicking down. “Theodore. Why did you date him?”

There wasn’t a trace of judgment in his voice, just a searching sort of curiosity. The answer sat heavy on your tongue, unfamiliar and painful, but still, the question pulled something sharp through your chest─ you didn’t know why you were suddenly so self-conscious about it. 

“I’d like to say I don’t know but…,” you leaned back against the wall next to him, folding your arms to hold yourself together and eyes fixed on a point somewhere past his figure. “I think… I was tired. I used to put everything into school, so much that I skipped out on everything else. I didn’t even know who I was beside the pressure and achievements, and Theodore… just happened to be there during that confusing time of my life. My roommate’s, and ex-best friend’s, friend. I thought he was charming, in his own sort of way. He was persistent, used to leave flowers by my dorm room every morning.” You chuckled sadly. “They weren’t even my favorite - turns out they were hers.”

You heard Oscar exhale. “It still made me feel noticed, like I mattered to something outside of studies. Like someone actually saw me, you know? So I fell in love. And turns out he didn’t see me at all─ he sure as hell doesn’t now either, if he thought showering Zak with dollar bills and side-eyeing me across the paddock would be enough to win me back. That’s without mentioning the cheating.”

The silence of the hallway was deafening, your words echoing against the walls. It wasn’t uncomfortable, just dense. Until Oscar broke it.

“I don’t get it,” he murmured, “how anyone could cheat on you. It doesn’t make sense.”

It made you look at him. You’ve gotten used to turning around and finding his eyes already on you; it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, but your chest still tightened when you met the darkness of his irises. You waited for him to reply, lacking any explanation yourself of why it couldn’t meet the simple principles of logic in his head, why he couldn’t find the flaws in you that lead Theodore to another woman.

Oscar’s answer came under a different form. “For what it’s worth,” he said, gaze steady. “I like to think I see you.”

You blinked. “Do you?”

The question slipped out before you could stop it, and the moment it did, the answer came rushing in. He did. You knew it in the way his head tilted slightly to the side, like he was still trying to see more of you, even now.

Oscar knew your coffee order by heart, the temperature and how much milk to ask for when you were too tired to speak it aloud. He knew which bakery carried your favorite pastry and what time he had to sneak away from media duties to grab it for you─ especially when the paddock version tasted like cardboard. He noticed when your hands got cold before you did, kept spare hand warmers in his bag in colder countries because “you’re always freezing.” He sent you stupid memes during long flights because he knew take offs made it hard for you to sit still. He carried spare glitter gel pens in his bag, and never teased you about it─ just handed you another one when you absentmindedly noticed yours was running out.

He remembered that you always got motion sick if you sat in the backseat of a car for too long. That you needed silence when thinking. That you hummed when you were concentrating and tapped your pen when you weren’t.

And suddenly, you weren’t just asking if he saw you the way you’d always wanted to. You were asking if he’d always been seeing you, even when you weren’t looking.

“I do,” he answered, barely above a whisper.

You nodded. There couldn’t be anything more true than that.

Just like that, the air tilted. Toward him, engulfing you both in a fragile, sacred space. Everything narrowed down to Oscar and the small buzz between your two bodies─ dense and electric, full of every feeling that had been lurking beneath the surface. His eyes flickered to your lips for the briefest of seconds. Back to your eyes. 

He moved subtly, like he wasn’t sure you’d let him, the idea of losing the moment scarier than not having it at all. Your body was still, breath hitching and heart racing, as his hand reached up to cup the side of your face, thumb brushing softly over your cheekbone, memorizing the shape.

And when he finally leaned in, he hesitated just inches from your lips, close enough for you to feel the warmth of his breath and the tremble in yours. “Is this okay?” He whispered.

You closed the space.

The kiss was gentle at first─ careful and tentative. The gentle, kind sweep of two people trying to find their footing, but the electric shock of the feeling brought everything back to you: the months of tension, the stolen glances, the fumbled excuses to stay close. Your mouths crashed over each other, deepening in the split of a second, slow and aching in the pants you let out and the touch of roaming, curious hands. You breathed into his mouth, seeking his air to make it yours.

Oscar’s other hand slid to your waist, pulling you impossibly closer and your back flush against the wall as your fingers curled into the lapels of his jacket. You could feel his heart hammering under your palm, fast and desperate, mirroring yours. His tongue demandingly slipped past your lips, and he kissed you like he had wanted to for a long time, and there was no denying he had. Raw and needy, you felt stripped bare by the small whine he let out when you bit down on his bottom lip.

You thought, the world could fall apart tomorrow and this would have been everything you needed to go peacefully.

When you finally pulled apart, both breathless, he didn’t move far. You wouldn’t have let him anyways, the heat of his body too comfortable, the weight of his mouth branded on your own. His forehead rested against yours, eyes closed and lips swollen.

“You have no idea how long I wanted to do that,” he whispered, voice hoarse and rough with honesty.

You fingers tightened in his jacket, and you brushed a strand of hair off his forehead. “Trust me, I think I do.” He laughed against your lips and you kissed him again. Because after all of it─all the pretending, the teasing, the overthinking─you didn’t have to lie to yourself anymore, to convince yourself. You couldn’t make up the way he was kissing you back.

Yet, you still went to bed alone.

You hadn't planned on it─ well, not exactly. After the emotional whirlwind of the evening, the kiss, the honesty, the confession, you’d invited Oscar into your room without really thinking. It had been an instinct, comfort-driven by the nights already spent together, even if everything was entirely different─ including your intentions and his. But Lando had to barge in, clumsily looking for his room next to yours, doing a double-take at the sight of you tucked into Oscar’s side, your makeup smudged from tears and kisses like a hormonal teenager, Oscar looking all too rumpled and embarrassed next to you.

“Jesus,” Lando muttered. “I’m just─ you know what, we’ll unpack that later. Good night. Please don’t make too much noise.”

Oscar laughed, arms wrapping tighter around your waist when your friend disappeared, whispering, “I’ll come back tomorrow. After I take you out on a date. A real one, this time.”

You’d smiled. “You better.” He kissed you again, quick and soft and annoyingly perfect, more than your dreams made it out to be, and you went to bed glowing, with his name lighting your phone screen with sweet nothings and promises of conversations tomorrow.

But tomorrow never came, because the knocks that woke you up were giving you a sickening déjà-vu. They were urgent, a trumpet announcing the complete turning of your world just like they had done a few months back, in February, and loud enough to slice through the sleepiness in your bones along with the drowsy haze of your mind.

You got up with difficulty and barely had the time to wrap a blanket around yourself before answering the door. You half-expected to find the Grim Reaper himself waiting on the other side with how early it was for anyone else to be knocking. Instead, you were faced with Oscar. Your heart gave a small, automatic jolt when you saw him. After how last night ended, he should have been the best thing possible to wake up to.

The expression on his face stopped you cold.

Oscar, who rarely wore his emotions so plainly, looked visibly shaken. The sharp lines of his face were pulled tight with worry, brows furrowed and jaw clenched. And that─more than the hour, more than the knocks─was what stopped you from throwing yourself into his arms.

You opened the door wider to let him in, which he did with hurried steps. “What’s happening?”

“Can you close the door first?” You did without much of a question.

Oscar sat on the edge of your bed, phone cradled in hand. He looked up at you, and distressed wasn’t enough to describe it─ he looked wrecked. “Have you checked your phone this morning?” He asked.

Dread pooled in your stomach. “No, I─ I just woke up,” you answered. “Oscar, I─”

“Someone leaked it. Our agreement, the fake dating. It’s all out.”

The world tipped.

The air in your lungs vanished and, for a moment, all you could hear was the blood rushing in your ears. His words repeated like static, a taunting echo getting louder and louder the more you realized what it meant. “What?” You whispered, eyes locked on his. The truth could have looked different there, but didn’t.

You sat down next to him, every limb leaden, cinching the blanket tighter around your shoulders. “How─? Who even─? We were so careful and─”

“Nobody knows, they’re searching for it right now,” Oscar replied, but it came out strained. “Everyone's trying to trace it now, but it landed on DeuxMoi and basically everywhere after that. They’ve got… receipts. Pictures, testimonies, photos- and a very incriminating audio recording.”

His throat bobbed with a swallow. “Of you. Saying something like… how good of a fake boyfriend I am. From last night, before we went up.”

Your stomach flipped. “But─ we were alone.”

Different scenarios flashed in your mind, engulfing you both in a spiral of questions and worry. Someone could have been filming you, and the lights were too low to spot the silhouette. Maybe Theodore’s jacket, draped over the chair you’d sat on, had a recording device on it in an attempt to prove himself something, or to get revenge on you. But how would he have guessed? There were so many possibilities, and Oscar’s silence didn’t help you feel any better about any of them─ not knowing burned hotter than the betrayal itself.

He took your hand in his, your intertwined fingers resting between the two of you. The contact made you flinch.

Your breath came out in a shaky exhale. “I mean… it was going to end anyways, right?” Oscar’s frown deepened, so you pushed forward. “The whole relationship. Theodore left. That was the plan, wasn’t it? It wasn’t supposed to last past him. It’s a very shitty way to end, sure, but… you can work with it.” You were tearing up by the time the last word left your lips.

Oscar winced. His grip on your hand tightened. “Don’t say it like that.”

“But it’s true, isn’t it?” You let out a wet, pathetic laugh. “It’s over.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” he said, and it sounded a lot like a plea. “We can figure something out─ Zak, the rest of the PR team-someone will know what to do, there-”

You scoffed─ not at him, never, but at the cruel absurdity of it all. Your incapability of keeping something good for yourself. “You don’t get it, Oscar.” Your voice wavered. “Apparently, we’re everywhere. There’s an audio recording. People feel like they’ve been made fools of. They won’t forgive that so easily─ they’ll turn on you. They won’t believe in something that’s already been exposed as fake, even if─”

You couldn’t finish your sentence. Because that was the worst part, wasn't it? You weren’t faking it anymore. Neither of you were, and hadn’t been for a really long time. You could have stumbled around, trying to figure out what it meant, searching his mouth and holding on to the feeling long enough to put a name on it, but the headlines didn’t give you that chance. They took it from you, carved it out of your hands before you even got to claim it as yours.

A beat.

“It was real for me,” Oscar said. “It is.”

You looked at him, the details of his eyes that made promises you were sure he could have kept under different circumstances. You tried to smile, but your face cracked under the weight of it, tear tracks shining under the early morning light. “They don’t know that,” you whispered. “They won’t care.”

Oscar’s gaze fell on the floor, and you shook your head gently. “You still have a career to protect. Just say it was my idea, you were helping me out and I got you into all of this─ which is the truth, technically. You just got too caught up. They’ll forgive you eventually, they’re here for the racing.”

“And what about you?”

The silence spoke for itself, heavy with the undeflectable nature of the situation. Carefully, as to not startle him, you took back the hand he was holding and folded both of them on your lap. There would be no other outcome to this story. “I’ll figure it out. It’s my job.”

He didn’t believe you, you could see it in the lopsided curve of his mouth, the prominent vein near his temple you traced with your eyes before falling asleep. You realized you never had the opportunity to pass a night in his arms.

“You go get ready for your race, Oscar. Don’t worry about me.” Your chest ached as your mouth shaped the words, barely hearing them yourself. The only thing that mattered was the low lights in the Australians’ eyes, how his mouth opened and closed around something. He never said whatever was pending at the edge of his tongue, but he closed his eyes when you put your lips on the skin of his cheek.

Oscar just left quietly, in the imperceptible click of a hotel door. You couldn’t watch him go─ if you did, you might not have had the strength to let him.

You were let go by McLaren before the race even began.

The decision had been clear from the get-go. Still, it didn’t make sitting in that sterile room any easier knowing the lanyard around your neck would be up to grab for someone else in seconds. It wasn’t cruel or personal─ it was just business.

You spent over three hours with members of staff, going over the facts and projected damage. You nodded along and asked questions you could predict the answers to, but the conclusion was written into the walls: the scandal was too loud, and you weren’t quiet enough to survive it─ at least, not with a badge that read McLaren on your chest.

You gave it back, sliding it over the table to the chief of staff. They booked you a flight home as discreetly as they could manage and it wasn’t until you stepped in your apartment, suitcase dropped by the door and keys shaking in your hand, that the overwhelming silence caught up with you.

And with it, everything else.

Your face was headlining the front pages of multiple websites and you’d just lost the best job you’ll ever have─ if not the only one, because a simple search would now lead every possible employer to the failed scheme you tried to put up.

You collapsed onto your bed, entirely dressed and only one shoe off, still wrapped in the airport chill. They made you hand-over your team-issued phone, along with the contacts of everyone that mattered back at Silverstone. You didn’t even have a chance to explain yourself or to say goodbye.

Oscar would finish the race and find out you vanished, and you had no way of telling him 

You let the weight of it all crash down on you.

If you had to estimate, you’d say you let yourself rot in your own misery for about a week, give or take. You weren't counting the days, but you knew you hadn’t opened your curtains since you got home. Your eyes were red, rubbed raw every time another wave of emotion struck you, and you hadn’t so much as looked in a mirror. Instead, you moved through your apartment like a ghost, sidestepping your own reflection as if it might reach out and confirm what you already knew─ you’d lost something you didn’t realize mattered this much until it was gone.

The past year had been everything. You successfully worked your way into a world that worked too fast for second chances where you found a rhythm, built friendships and connections. As tiresome as the lifestyle could sometimes be, you fell in love with what you were doing and what you came to be. In the past months, your life had mirrored the tracks─ swift and brutal, with enough turns to break a few wheels. Now, you were left with nothing but the emptiness in your stomach and for someone who always strived for more, the bitter aftertaste in your mouth was enough to keep you from wanting.

Your wake-up call came in the form of your rent.

Turns out heartbreak didn’t pause rent or the cost of groceries rising due to inflation. McLaren paid well, but not well enough so that you could afford to disappear off the grid and wallow in self pity with your last check. So you did what you always did, reminiscent of your past college superhuman efforts: you opened your laptop and got to work.

You applied to everything you set your eyes on─ LinkedIn, obscure websites, Facebook Ads, no one was safe. You didn’t dare touch anything remotely F1 related, or even F2, F3 or F4, the wound was still fresh and your name was probably too much of a touchy subject for you to be accepted anywhere near. You stuck to motorsports-adjacent companies, agencies, development programs, even local circuits. Just… something, anything that would let you keep your toes in the world you loved.

Eventually, it came.

A small karting company in the Netherlands, of all places. Barely enough to fill a spreadsheet on a good day, but they had promising talents and were expanding, so in need of someone to help build their communications structure from the ground up. Preferably someone who knew how to handle press and build narratives, connect people to stories. They were desperate, which means they probably didn’t even look you up when they interviewed you. You took the opportunity with your first real smile in a minute.

It wasn’t as glamorous. The office had flickering lights, and you hadn’t come with the most adapted wardrobe. But it was something─ so you got to work.

You were surprised by how much you ended up loving it.

The people were awkward but nice, you went out with a few of your colleagues by the end of your first week, and the kids racing under your name were awfully sweet and their parents just as kind. The work wasn’t overbearing, but you put every ounce of your attention in building its perfect image with your team. Your new apartment was small and comfortable, and the city you settled in a neverending discovery of wonders. You felt fine─ which was a step away from the state you had been in not so long ago.

But even though you tried to build yourself another life, you still couldn’t shake the memory of Oscar. He was still there─ not in person, but in every memory you were not capable of erasing just yet. You caught yourself ordering his coffee order alongside yours as a force of habit, and accidentally took the notebooks with the overly precise details of your fallacious history with you to work. There was so much of him in you now, you had trouble picking apart the pieces. You scanned articles for his face but skipped race reports in case his name hurt more to see.

You tried to bury the ache in your schedule and the excitement of the company’s mediatic expansion, you wrote press releases, attended networking events with a tight smile and let small wins feel bigger than they were. Yet you knew your heart was sitting in his hands, thousands miles away- and you refused to wonder if, without knowing, you were still holding his. It was a hope you couldn’t entertain, all in the name of letting go. It was an act of healing of some sorts. Putting Oscar behind you was growth, not grief, and letting go of something that had no chance of being anymore was the most adult thing you’d ever do.

Except you have a history of your past catching up with you─ deep down, you should’ve known this time wouldn’t be any different.

It happened when you bumped into someone on your way out the café, hands full with the Communications team’s comically large coffee order. It was the end of August, and your mind was anywhere but on the street─ mostly focused on not spilling anything. Of course, that’s what made the crash even more cinematic.

Cold drinks flew in the air, splattering across the pavement and down your pants in dramatic, sticky rivulets. You were halfway into a curse when someone said your name in an all-too-familiar voice.

“Y/N?” You looked up from your drenched legs, and there he was.

Lando Norris in the flesh, unruly mullet and all. “Oh my god,” you muttered, halfway between disbelief and horror. “Hi?”

He stared at you like he was trying to convince himself he wasn’t hallucinating. You’d feel offended if you couldn’t understand where he was coming from- you did disappear suddenly, those two months ago. “You’re─ holy shit, what are you doing here?”

You awkwardly wiped your hands on the napkin that came with the order, glancing at the wasted money on the ground. “Clearly failing my duties. I work for a karting company just outside the city. Communications consultant.”

“No way, seriously? In the Netherlands?” Lando asked, eyebrows shooting up. “That’s… kind of awesome.”

You gave him an awkward smile. “Yeah. It’s not McLaren, sure, but I like it there.”

The mention of the team brought an icy breeze to the conversation and had Lando shuffling on his feet before you changed the subject. “And what are you doing here?” You asked, too enthusiastic for it to be spontaneous.

“Zandvoort race this weekend,” he answered with a slight grin.

“Oh, true.” With the drastic changes in your life and the newfound popularity the company had gained, you’d forgotten all about the fast-paced calendar you had become so accustomed with. The fact there was even a race taking place in the Netherlands, despite Max Verstappen being Dutch, had completely slipped your mind.

It should feel like a win, but your heart twisted to punish you.

Faced with another silence, Lando spoke up again. “You know, it’s not the same without you there, Oscar’s new PR manager is an old man.” That made you chuckle, although bittersweet. “We miss you. A lot.”

You didn’t miss the implication in his words. The air suddenly felt a bit thinner in your lungs than it did a few minutes ago. “He shouldn’t,” was all you could manage to reply in the tightening of your throat.

“Why not?”

You shrugged, forcing your voice to stay level. “It doesn’t matter anymore. It ended. He has to focus on his career.”

Lando opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of it, only giving you an hesitant smile in return. “Well… I’ll tell him I saw you. If you want.”

“No,” You shook your head with a soft laugh. “No. Just… good luck, alright? For the Grand Prix.”

It got Lando to smile wider, at least, something warm in the spreading of his lips. “Thanks. And Y/N?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m really glad I bumped into you. Let me make up for the spilled coffee.”

He did. Brought the entire order again and handed it over with a sheepish shrug, reminiscent of the friend you had two months ago, before disappearing down the cobblestone street. You stood there a bit too long, dazed by the improbability of it all. The universe decided to shake you a little, but somehow it had to be just when you made peace with the fact it had moved on without you.

You went back to the karting center where reality demanded your full attention. The rest of the day passed in a blur of last-minute adjustments─ tomorrow, you were hosting a little event in order to showcase the rising talents driving in your colors, which needed your immediate attention, no matter how divided by the episode this morning. You didn’t even notice everyone else leaving until the sun dipped below the horizon, painting gold across the windows and casting long shadows on the now-empty space.

You exhaled slowly, closing your computer and feeling the soreness in your back from being hunched over too long. The cons of being a workaholic, you guessed, but you’d done your part. You gathered your things, slid your jackets over your shoulders, and stepped out into the cooling evening.

You could have missed him if you hadn’t hesitated a second too long in the doorway, but you could also recognize Oscar anywhere, eyes closed or blindfolded.

He was leaning against a car, parked a few meters away from the entrance, hoodie loose around his shoulders and hair tousled by the breeze. His gaze was distant, unfocused as he was watching the distance. The second the door thudded shut behind you, the sound cutting through the quiet evening, his eyes snapped up, finding yours.

He looked lost, beautifully so. It froze you in your tracks. It didn’t seem to have the same effect on Oscar, as he pushed off the car and took careful steps forward.

“Hi,” was all he said, soft and steady.

You hadn't realized how much you missed the silken casualness of his voice before it reached your ears. It hit you harder than you’d expected. “How─?”

“Lando,” Oscar cut in gently. “He said you worked at a karting company near the city. I… looked it up. Thought maybe, with a little chance, you’d still be here.” He scratched the back of his neck and he looked away for a second, just one, before his eyes snapped back to yours.

Neither of you moved, unsure how to cross the canyon that had cracked open between you.

“I wasn’t expecting…” You trailed off.

“Yeah,” Oscar breathed out a humorless laugh, rubbing a hand over his mouth. “Me neither. It was, uh, pretty impulsive. But I couldn’t just…” He trailed off too, shaking his head.

You nodded, even though you didn’t understand. This whole conversation made no sense. “How’s it going? Life, I mean. At McLaren?” you asked, desperate to ignore your heart clawing at your ribs.

Oscar’s lips thinned. “Fine. Busy.”

“That’s good.”

He took a step closer, so very little you could have missed, and so slow it gave you the opportunity to step back. You didn’t take it. “And you? How’s─ all this?”

“It’s… something. I like it. I do.” You laughed, and it came out wrong.

“I’m glad.”

Silence fell, weighty on your shoulders. You didn’t know what to do, and you couldn’t guess how to act when Oscar looked so closed off, out of reach─ something he hadn’t been to you in a long while. You chose to let it stretch, unsure of what else.

Finally, it came down to Oscar. “You left.”

The words stung with the strength of a slap, and heartbreaking enough to put you back in front of your apartment door, two months back. You gripped the hem of your jacket, bringing it closer to your body in hope to substitute for the warmth his tone lacked. You inhaled sharply, fighting the sting behind your eyes.

“I didn’t have a choice. They made it very clear there was no place for me anymore, and it would be the better option for one of us to come out unscathed.” Your voice faltered despite your best efforts. “I didn’t want to leave that way, Oscar. Not without saying goodbye.”

You couldn’t help the comment that bordered on your lips. “But I figured you weren’t too concerned. You didn’t look too hard to reach me either.” Not an e-mail, no nothing. You were deprived of his contact information due to your work phone being taken away, but he wasn’t. 

Oscar’s hands curled into fists at his side. “I couldn’t. If I did, they assured me it could make everything worse if someone leaked it again, for the both of us.” A scoff escaped him. “Told me I had to wait until they found the person who took the audio recording in the first place before I could try anything.”

“And did they?”

“No,” he admitted. “But I don’t really care.”

Again, he took a step forward. Oscar was close, not overly, but close enough for you to see the wild and desperate edge etched in his delicate traits, regardless of how much he tried to hide it. “I wanted to reach out. Every day. I just─” He ran a hand through his hair. “I guess I thought that’s what you wanted. I kept thinking that maybe you hated me for how it ended, or─ maybe you regretted it.”

Your laugh broke out sharp and ugly, more hurt than anything else. “Hated you? Regretted it?” You shook your head in disbelief. “Oscar, how could you even think-?”

He didn’t interrupt you. You had to do it yourself, because Oscar just watched as if waiting for a confirmation between the lines. “You really think I’d regret you?”

He still didn’t move. “I mean…,” he finally rasped out, barely carrying over the wind, “it cost you your career in F1. I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

“I cost me my career, Oscar. Not you. The fake relationship was my idea. I told you from the beginning I’d take the fall if it came to it. You were just helping me.”

You watched his jaw contract with the need to argue back, but you wouldn’t let him. Oscar was wrong on all accounts in his reasoning, blinded by whatever had been clouding his mind during your disappearance, and you were making sure it stopped there.

“I couldn’t hate you even if I tried. Well, not now at least- you were pretty insufferable at first.” His shoulders shook in the semblance of a laugh. “And if there’s anything I regret, it’s not realizing that it stopped being fake a lot sooner.”

There it was, the hefty topic you had been dancing around─ the kiss, gentle in its unearthing, and the whispered promises of explanations in the morning. Something that had been stolen from you and was now coming back to the surface for a last gasp of air. You could either take it or let it drown.

Oscar’s eyes searched yours, and for a second you believed he’d apologize and leave.

But that’s not what he did.

“It was never fake for me,” he said. “When- When you walked in and introduced yourself as my PR manager, and you were all smiles and nerves and─” he huffed, breathless, shaking his head, “and I was gone. I didn’t know how to act around you or what to do with myself.”

He got so close, you had to tilt your head to look up at him. “I kept thinking it would pass,” he continued. “That it was just a stupid fixation. But you kept being you, and you got close to Lando, and you stuck around. It just kept getting worse. Or better, I guess, depending on how you looked at it.”

“Then there was your ex,” He said, breaking into a soft laugh. “You took my arm and called me your boyfriend and all I could think was, yeah. I’d like to hear that again.” His fingers grazed the inside of your wrists, a ponctuation in his confession. “I didn’t fake a single thing. Not once. It’s been real from the beginning.”

Almost delirious, you broke into a cackle that had your hand flying to your mouth─ a half-sob, half-choke ripped from your chest. “So you were a douchebag… because you liked me?”

Oscar’s mouth quipped, sheepish. “Yeah.”

“And you acted like an idiot because you didn’t know how to show it?”

“... Yeah.” Now he sounded embarrassed.

Another watery laugh bubbled out of you, and you wiped at your eyes with the sleeve of your jacket. “Oh my god, you’re such a man,” you said, voice wobbling between amusement and heartbreak, and Oscar’s smile cracked wider at the sound of it. You sniffled, rolling your eyes to try and hide the hopeful pain in your chest as you asked, intertwining your hand with his. 

“So… what do we do now?”

The pad of his fingers trailed up your arm, sending shivers down your spine. He cupped your elbows gently, steadying you like you were at risk of breaking at any minute. “Well,” Oscar murmured, the ghost of a demand parting his mouth. “Now that we got everything out of the way, I’m here for a reason. Only if you’ll have me.”

You didn’t need any more convincing, the days spent in his company during the tired mornings  and warm nights gave you ample amounts of reasons not to deny him.

As if you had the strength to even think about it.

You surged up, and your mouth caught up with his in the same way a puzzle piece would fit into another. It felt like homecoming, how the weight of his lips balanced against yours. Oscar hands went up your sides, painfully slow, wrapped around your waist and pulled your body flushed against him. You curled your fingers in the air at the nape of his nec, tugging slightly, and he sighed into your mouth─ broken and hopelessly in love.

The world shrank to just this: the press of his chest to yours, the warmth of his skin and how intensely Oscar Piastri kissed you back.

When you broke off contact for air, Oscar chased after your mouth. You tried to contain a giggle, unsuccessfully. “I can’t believe it took a whole fake relationship, messy break up and all, for you to do and say all that,” you teased.

He rolled his eyes and before you could react, the hands resting on your hips pinched your sides. You yelped, stepping on his foot. Old habits die hard, apparently, no matter what may have transpired in between.

“Well, I think you wouldn’t have liked me as much without that fake relationship.”

“I wonder whose fault it is, Oscar.”

“I’m just saying, I─”

You kissed him again. And again, and again, until the sun was well gone and stars were the only witnesses.

That night, you made sure to take Oscar back to your apartment. There was no awkwardness in the small talk made in the car, no hesitation in your movements. It was a slow series of quiet laughs against skin, not rushed or frantic in the slightest, whispered confessions tangled between languid kisses. You were curled up against him, a blanket thrown haphazardly on your legs and you talked. The way you wanted and needed to.

He murmured you might need to lay low for a while into your hair, eyes already closing with tiredness, in order to let everything die down and you agreed, brushing his knuckles with the featherlight touch of your lips. You could always come out with the truth later on, and you were content with your life in the Netherlands─ even more so if Oscar could share it with you in some hidden place in his heart. Your palm rested over his heart, feeling his heartbeat slowing down by sleep and lulling you into Morpheus’ arms just the same.

He kissed you one more time. The taste of home and future lingered in your mouth. Oscar will be there in the morning, when the sunlight will shine through the window. And then you could discuss it, about you, more in detail around a cup of coffee, when he’ll drive you to work before disappearing in his orange car, feelings less raw and more authentic.

Real didn’t have an expiration date. You had all the time in the world to figure it out.

The road stretched endless before you, the horizon punctuated by the skeletal silhouette of leafless trees, and the quiet between the two of you wasn’t awkward as it once had been in that similar situation. Music poured gently through the speakers, trading places with conversations that ebbed without effort with stories so inconsequential they existed only for the sake of being shared.

After two hours, Charles had asked if you needed him to drive, to rest.

Your fingers had tensed around the steering wheel and you refused without ceremony. It was your car. Your ground. You controlled it. It belonged in the same locked down bubble as your apartment, and the fact he was already sitting inside of a part of that bubble was already overwhelming. His music on the radio, his perfume mixing with the car heating, his concern…

Charles stared, with something else in his eyes than what usually inhabited them, but he didn’t push. One thing you learnt about him is that he rarely overstepped— doing so solely when pushed to his limits. So this time, he just changed the subject.

Three hours later, the hotel’s parking lot finally came into view, its wide expanse glittering faintly under the scattered streetlamps. Hunched against the cold in a red parka swallowing his entire frame stood Coach Vasseur, waiting for you.

This wasn’t the gritty, outdated hotel from Regionals. The building before you had a certain understated charm with modern lines, softened by vintage touches. Gravel-white paint caught the glow of the ending afternoon, and the windows shimmered with the golden warmth of lamps. 

“We had actual time to book it, so obviously I upgraded us,” Coach Vasseur remarked when you asked. “And look at that, you even have the luxury of separate rooms!”

Your room was directly next to Charles’. Inside, the space was modest but polished with a neatly single bed and a clean desk. You moved through the motions of your nightly routine mechanically: suitcase in the corner, toiletries lined up on the bathroom counter, the cold embrace of peppermint cream spread carefully on your face. Normally, these actions grounded you, because routine meant comfort.

But tonight, you couldn’t help but feel something was missing.

You sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the neatly pressed sheets that didn’t smell faintly of Charles’ cologne, and this mere realization hits you with a type of suddenness you could only find in a fall.

Somewhere along the line, Charles Leclerc had slipped into your personal rhythm. His presence was now necessary to your routine as was brushing your teeth or counting the knots of your shoelaces. He was a habit, your unspoken signal that the day was ending, that it was safe to sleep. Without him, every thought pressed too close, and the concept of tomorrow’s Sectionals threatened to crawl under your skin as it used to do long before him.

Your actions preceded all overthinking, your body reacting too fast for your mind to catch up: you bolted upright, feet hitting the carpet as you opened the door, intending on knocking to the one next to yours. But when you yanked your handle, Charles was already there.

He froze mid-gesture, hand raised as though he’d been about to knock on your door. “Oh,” he breathed.

“What are you doing here?” Your question came out as an insult. You couldn’t pinpoint why.

“Well… I was about to ask if you wanted to talk. You know, like before Regionals.”

Suddenly, the knot in your chest loosened. Your missing piece was standing right there.

You ended up in his room instead, side by side on his bed, the blankets pooled haphazardly around you both: you under them, Charles above them. Words spilled easily, as they often did, until one half-finished thought bled into the opening credits of the Murder, She Wrote episode you’d left hanging days ago in favor of more focus during training. In the middle of Jessica Fletcher’s latest discovery, sleep tugged at your eyelids, and you realized you hadn’t needed to overthink at all.

Charles was just part of your routine, now. 

Noise. Training. Lunch. Performance.

The first day of Sectionals unfurled like the first day of Regionals had, a treasured repetition you couldn’t help but appreciate. Rhythm Dance day carried no new terrors for the simple reason it didn’t change, and that One Day by Hans Zimmer had only received minor tweaks brainstormed in a late afternoon spent training over the regular hours, approved by both the committee and your trainer. 

You now knew every line of it like muscles and marrows, and Charles could merge with you without breaking any of them. Seamless, perfect… they weren’t even enough of words to describe it. No, according to some others, you were absolute.

The score thundered through the crowd. 76.92.

Absolute.

You didn’t quite know what to think about being put on such a pedestal, above the top step of the podium. It was a crown you’d once coveted: for every eye to be on you, to prove them wrong—every single one of them—almost hungry and rabid in your obsession. You could have bled yourself dry to be called imperious. Yet, hours later, basking in the quiet of your hotel room and carefully peeling the sequined fabric off your aching muscles, the words curdled.

They watched you, yes. But none of them saw the hours wearing your joints raw, or the tears of exhaustion and frustration slipping onto your cheeks. They only saw the glint of gold, and you quietly wondered if they thought you deserved it.

You shook your head.

The Free Dance was tomorrow. You couldn’t allow deprecating thoughts to hollow you out on the eve of the most important program of the championship. You needed the points. To focus. You needed… relief.

The dull throb in your ankle you had been familiar with for a year now reminded you why Coach Vasseur had begged you to balance your obsessive practice with recovery. So, after pacing your hotel room twice, you opened your suitcase and fished out the swimsuit you always carried just in case. A tiny ritual of preparedness.

The hotel pool Coach Vasseur had marveled about was buried on the lower floor of the hotel. You padded down quiet corridors, clutching your towel and swimwear, until the scent of chlorine cut through the warm air. You darted to the changing rooms and when you were done, the doors opened to a wash of soft humidity and pale golden light. Arched ceilings, clean tiles. A large bay window offered a view on the pine forest outside, painted saffron by the setting sun. The pool stretched before you, its steam languidly kissing your skin, glass-still under the amber rays mixing with the sapphire of the tiles below.

For a moment, you thought you were alone. Relief fluttered through your chest. Finally, a chance to let your body relax.

You really don’t know how you hadn’t noticed Charles.

He sat at the far edge of the pool with his feet dipped into the water, shoulders dropped low in relaxation. His hair stuck to his forehead, some strands clashing with others, and droplets of water fell freely down his cheek to his thighs. You couldn’t help but let your eyes drift to his chest, his arms, the subtle curve of his V line dipping under the blue swimsuit, the lean muscles of him coming from years and years of training. You were but a woman.

Embarrassment rushed to your cheeks at the same time as heat, and you tore your gaze away. However, his eyes, sharp and noticing as always, settled on you.

Of all places and time.

“Bonsoir,” Charles spoke. It was soft, teasing, and a grin tugged at his lips. 

“Whatever that means,” you mumbled back.

His laugh ricocheted in echoes across the small space, a ripple of warmth against your already-burning cheeks. You clutched your towel tighter against your chest. Terry cloth against your painfully exposed body. This— This was worse than any shattered ankles. This was worse than scoring dead last. The one time you decide to listen to Coach Vasseur’s advice—

“Did you come here to take your mind off tomorrow?” he asks.

A splash followed his words. When your eyes snapped back to him, he had slipped back into the pool, only his head and the slope of his shoulders now visible. He swam a few leisurely strokes in your direction.

“Maybe I just wanted to take a swim,” you answered with a huff.

“Mmh, non,” he countered. “I know you. You didn’t come here just to swim. Just swimming would never have convinced you to risk bumping into people.”

You wanted to protest that he didn’t know you, to deny him any scrap of correctness, and that it was a ridiculous notion. Still, he had hit the center of the target with his deduction and peeled the thought out of your own mind. You couldn’t bring yourself to lie. What a terrifying ordeal, you thought, being known.

“Well, clearly, there are people,” you vaguely gestured at him, and his eyebrows shot up, “so I’ll be just swimming later.”

His chuckle was infuriating. “Just get in the water, Y/N.”

“I told you. Later. I'm leaving.”

“You’re still here, though,”

You really, really hate yourself for not being able to turn away and stalk back to your room. Because you really, really want to get in the water with him, give your muscle some reprieve, indulge in him. But you’re really, really not sure if you should. And you couldn’t name why.

Faced with your silence, Charles rolled his eyes. “I hope you realize that I’ve lifted you above my head before. I can just pick you up and throw you in.”

You narrowed your eyes at him. The nerves of that man, sometimes.

That was enough to propel you forward. Slowly, you dropped your towel on a chair and lowered yourself down the pool’s steps. The water kissed your skin in comforting ripples, heat rising around you until at last you were submerged up to your shoulders.

“There you go,” he murmured, smug. “That wasn’t so hard.”

“Torturous, actually,” you deadpanned.

Charles only grinned wider.

You let yourself drift for a moment, muscles unwinding, the warmth soaking into the tender ache of your ankle. A sigh slipped from your lips before you could catch it. “It’s warm,” you admitted, for lack of other things to say.

“That’s what a heated pool is supposed to be.”

You splashed him, and only then did you realize just how close you both stood. The steam rising from the water blurred the edges of his frame, but not enough to hide the moles dotting his cheekbones  and the subtle twitch of his mouth. You floated closer to him without meaning to, surrendering to the way the water carried your body forward until there was no more distance to disguise behind.

“It’s weird,” Charles contemplates, breaking the silence. “If someone told me you’d be in a pool with me like this, I would have laughed.”

You stilled. It was the first time either of you dared to voice the obvious, that something had fundamentally shifted between the two of you. “I don’t think I really believe it myself,” you muttered.

“That’s because you were so obsessed with your hatred for me.” He sent another splash your way, meant to be playful. “Maybe we could have been there sooner.”

“Please,” you scoffed. “You’ve always hated me. You didn’t expect me to be all flowers and rainbows with you, did you?”

Charles shook his head, hair dripping in wet strands against his forehead, and you couldn’t help but count the rivulets. “Do you have to be dramatic about everything?”

The dismissal, probably meant to be careless, hurt more than you cared to admit. You pushed a hand through the water, creating ripples between you, and said flatly, “You don’t have to pretend you liked me, you know. I heard you talking to him, Coach Vasseur, the day he decided to train me. You said I was a ‘waste of time.’” Your voice was sharper than you intended. “That’s when I decided I’d start hating you too.”

And for the first time since you knew him, probably ever, Charles looked completely blindsided. His mouth parted in confusion.

“This—?” His voice cracked in disbelief, punctuated with a thicker accent. “This is why you’ve been like that to me all these years?”

“Yeah.” You forced a shrug. “What, does Wonder Boy think it’s not good enough of a reason? Should I have just pretended not to hear anything?”

Tension pressed heavy between you, now, chasing away the remnants of playfulness and only adding weight to the heat of the water. You were eleven again, standing in the rink hallway with your fists clenched, burning that sentence in your memory with white iron.

Charles blinked once, staring at you as if you had spoken a language neither of you were fluent in. His voice lowered. Desperate to be heard. “Non, no—you don’t understand,” he swam a little closer, like he was afraid you would slip away. His eyes locked on yours, so intense you wished you could. “I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about your partners.”

“My partners?” You frowned.

“They were a waste of time,” he said fiercely. “They were the ones not fit for it. Not you, never you— Mon dieu.” Charles shoved a wet hand through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes. “Fred wanted to put you with that kid, remember? When he first considered training you. But he wasn’t— he wasn’t good. Not like I was And you— you were raw, but you were already amazing. You didn’t deserve to be weighted down by him,” he spat the pronoun out. “So I told Fred he was a waste of time. He wasn’t fit for it. None of them were right, I was the only one who could do it.”

Your chest collapsed in on itself.

There was no other word for it, no other sensation comparable to the way your lungs seized in the thick, wet air, to the grotesque tightening in your ribs as your own heartstrings were strangling your ribs. The words didn’t fit in there. They didn’t make sense.

For the first time in your life, you were rendered speechless.

“You—”

“It didn’t stop there,” Charles cuts in. That was the thing about him: when he was anxious, passionate, angry, he couldn’t stop himself. He rambled. “He kept on trying to give you partners, and none of them were right, and you wouldn’t even look at me, and I—” He broke off, clamped his eyes shut to drag a breath, then met your gaze again. His own looked glassy in the steam of the pool. 

“When we were fourteen, you did a routine with that guy. You probably don’t remember him, but I do. I hated him. He was only skating professionally because his parents paid for it. He never had to work for it, and he still got to skate with you. With you.” His jaw clenched. “You were talented, and infuriating, and— he had his hands on your waist and he slipped. I remember it because you cussed at him so hard everyone was looking at you. I was looking at you. Do you remember? You insulted him so loud the entire rink stopped. I was watching. You called him incompetent, and he ran out crying because his ego was hurt.”

You did remember. 

“I thought if you slipped with him, something really bad could’ve happened. You could’ve been hurt, so you were right. But I—” he huffed out an uneasy laugh. “I also thought that if I was the one skating with you, I’d never let you go. I’d never let you fall, never, and I’d make every effort. I’d take the insults and push, and I’d work until I bled to give you whatever you wanted, even if you’ve always been horrible to me and I could only be horrible to you back. I still would have done it because it was you, it was always you.”

Charles was close now. So close you could count the droplets clinging to his lashes, and discern the boyish desperation in the child buried inside the man in front of you. Charles had never been able to fake indifference. He always felt everything so wholly,  ever since he was a child and you watched him practice before it was your turn on the ice. He had the same look about him now.

A pleading, relentless need. One you knew too well.

“Honestly,” he said, barely above a whisper, “I think I understood love better back then than I do now. Because then, I knew where we stood. You hated me. I tried to hate you back. And we were young, so at least that was simple. Because when you’re young everything you do and feel is a ‘phase’” His throat bobbed with bitterness. “Now… it’s all wrong. I know it was a huge fucking misunderstanding, and I can’t go back to fix it but— but figure skating is a part of me now. And you…” His eyes buried into yours, unflinching. “You are too. I don’t think either of those things are going away anytime soon.”

The whole pool had stilled.

Even the gentle ripples you’d been making just moments ago seemed to dissolve into nothing, muffled by the obscene closeness of Charles’ body against yours. His knee rested between your thighs. Rivulets trickled down his temple, slid along his jaw, and fell—one by one—onto your bottom lip.

The light was fading, burning itself out in pale yellow streaks across the water. The sun didn’t shine anymore so much as it caressed, painting his profile in tender strokes, the deep green of his irises made sharper by the shadow gathering around them. As if the universe itself was demanding that you listen to him.

Yet your mind wouldn’t catch up. The word swirled in you without shape or meaning, incoherent.

“What does that mean?” The whisper clawed its way out of your throat. Still, it seemed to ring out against the tiled walls as if you had screamed it. I don’t understand. Say it for me. Don’t make me.

It rested, silent, in the leftover space between you. The smile the Monegasque offered you was honey and lemon all at once.

“I don’t want to tell you,” he murmured back. “I’m tired of giving you everything and wait for you to give a scrap back, Y/N. I want you to want it enough to say it.”

Just like that, Charles pulled away.

The loss of his gravity was so sudden it knocked the air out of your lungs. You gasped, shallow, as though you’d been sharing the same breath and he had just taken it back. Water rushed in between you. He just swam backwards until the distance grew.

You think you called his name. If you did, he didn’t answer. He only climbed out of the pool, snatched his towel from the chair next to yours, his shoulders rigid beneath the fabric, and he walked out. 

Alone, you became aware of the wild hammering of your heart. The furious blush in your cheeks that burned higher than any fever. The fact that your ankle didn’t throb anymore. It was unbearable, unfamiliar. You tilted your head back toward the ceiling, eyes burning. Then, unable to bear the rawness digging at your skin, you sucked in a breath and plunged under the surface.

The day of the Free Dance passed in a blur, so shapeless that you barely noticed the hours dragging you forward until Charles had caught your wrist behind the divider curtain. It was a violent red, this time around. Not the quiet purple of Regionals.

His thumb pressed down over your pulse, just enough to anchor you in reality. Your heartbeat slammed against his touch. The hum of the crowd finally attained your ears, and your name rang over the speakers. The noise in your chest became unbearable.

“Are you alright?” Charles whispered above it all.

He’d spent the entire morning pretending last night never happened. His hold on you during training had been mechanical. Organized, but robotic, professional to the point of cruelty— as if whatever warmth that had ever seeped in the cracks of you had vanished. 

You hated it. You hated how he could detach so easily after shaking up everything inside of you. And you hated his fingers digging into your skin as though he couldn’t help himself. You hated that you didn’t understand. You hated that he didn’t help you with it.

“I’m fine.” The lie scalded on the way out. You kept your gaze straight.

Something broke in his expression. It was gone before you could chase it. The curtains pulled apart, and the blinding light of the rink swallowed you whole.

The show must go on.

The opening notes to Hardest of Hearts tore through the arena.

Charles’ palm met the small of your back. It was light as a feather, and his touch was disciplined. It lacked the weight of his that you’d come to crave. His movements matched yours with an accuracy that could only be attributed to machines, every beat accounted for, but none of the lines curved into you like he used you? It hollowed you out.

You chased him.

You didn’t mean to. Not at first. But your palms pressed hard into his chest during the first spin, demanding, breath trembling hot against his jaw and your fingers gripping tighter at his shoulders than what the choreography demanded. When he spun you out, you resisted against his touch to keep him close and snapped back into him like the harsh strike of a whip, hard, branding him red hot and brutal. Answer me, your body screamed. Do something. Don’t you dare disappear on me.

Charles felt it, because he always did. The hours he spent watching you and deciphering when you weren’t even aware he was there yet— he knew. And you knew too, by the faint hitch before his hand sank lower, deeper, anchoring you at the hip until it seared.

The glide of his palm against your ribs, his forehead brushing yours when it wasn’t supposed to. His precision burned, and the ghost of his breath against your temple as you reached the other side of the rink was close enough that the steam of it clung to your skin when you should have been centimeters away. He gave you answers you couldn’t decipher. You forced for more. What was unfolding on the ice was no longer a story, but a collision. You had shaped your own battlefield for all to come and watch.

Push, pull.

You shoved him back with sharp edges, and everything that was usually measured about you broke down in the feral drag of your nails along his exposed forearms. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me what it means. He dragged you back with equal force, not yielding an inch. You tell me. You figure it out. Nothing about it was polished anymore. You both spun out into something raw and jagged, dancing along the edge of a knife and forming a darker shade of intimacy. You were carrying each other, carving confessions after sins and demands in each line you spat on the glimmering sheet of cold beneath you. To the crowd, it must have looked like war— or worship. They were awfully similar.

And in the storm of it, his fingers intertwined with yours in a waltz hold, tender, and your eyes snapped to meet his.

Admiration, adoration, all of it finally spilt in waves from his irises and enveloped you whole.

Because when he had watched you from the bleachers, all those years ago, it was not disdain that tightened his jaw. It was fascination. His pointe coughs never marked your missteps, only the faltering of your partners he despised on your behalf. Not you. Never you. He had coveted their hands at your waist with a corrosive jealousy known to sinners. He pushed against your insults and comments with fire for seconds of your tongue lashing against his in any way he could grasp. He had endured hours and names at competitions he had no business at for the fleeting chance to see you. To have you, if only from afar. Because Charles Leclerc had never hated you, not really, no matter how hard he tried to because you simply did.

Because Charles Leclerc had loved you. Because Charles Leclerc still loves you. And you could see it now, blistering under his skin like a sickness, in the way he looked at you. You wondered, horrified, how you had never seen it sooner.

The terrifying answer to that realization pooled delicately on the fire burning in your belly: perhaps you did too.

You didn’t know when it began— it was the scariest notion of all, not to know. You couldn’t pinpoint the instant you had memorized the layout of his apartment, or when you began recognizing the cadence his heart picked up during a spin. You couldn’t recall when you came to know the exact number of moles on his face, or when his favorite warm-up song made its way in your playlist, or how he hated to drive in the snow but loved to in the rain. Those were details you hoarded without meaning to. You didn’t know when you had fallen in love with Charles Leclerc, but you had, and you couldn’t pinpoint the exact date and count the days you had not realized that you did, you couldn’t try to rationalize something that escaped the faultless routine you applied to your life.

But you did love him.

And you didn’t know what to do with it.

By the final note of Hardest of Hearts, neither of you let go first. The rest unfurled in an abstract blur.

You and Charles sat down in the Kiss & Cry with your breath still ragged and body still vibrating with what had occurred. Your ankle thrummed, the lights were too bright. The score flashed. 106.47. 

You were first place with a total of 183.39. A fucking record for a Sectional championship.

Your hands trembled where they still clung to Charles, your knuckles painted white. You couldn’t let go. Not when you were still quivering beneath the weight of it all. Coach Vasseur shook your shoulders with a triumphant laugh, his words rushing past you without meaning. You could barely hear him over the hammering of your pulse.

Reality hit you in the face when Charles’ hand slipped from yours. It was as if a cord had been abruptly severed inside of you, and before you could react, staff was ushering you both off the bench to make way for the next pair. From then on it was a cascade: faces, congratulations, cameras flashing, pleas for you to smile. Then the podium, the medals, the anthem filling your lungs and drowning you alive. Charles’ shoulder was near enough for you to brush against but in the constant swell of movement, he may as well have been oceans away.

When it ended, he seemed to have been swallowed by the crowd.

You searched for him through the currents of people. Somewhere in the crush of congratulatory hugs you despised and microphones shoved in front of your mouth, you had lost him. A fan thrust a bouquet into your arms, edelweiss tied in pale silk, but the flowers blurred in your vision with a clumsy “thank you” as your eyes finally caught him: Charles, slipping toward the exit with his puffer jacket zipped to his chin. He didn’t look back as he took a step toward the cold. Without thinking, you followed.

The door let out a sharp sigh as you pushed through it, trading the overwhelming heat of the rink for the cutting quiet of the night. The air was crisp, still, and the noise of the crowd was reduced to enough of a muffled echo behind you that you heard the distinct cry of an owl somewhere. The sky was dark and the stars looked like holes poked through fabric. Snow had begun to fall, fine and hesitant. The first of the year.

Charles was already several paces ahead, his figure dim beneath the streetlights.

Your voice left you before you could second-guess it. “Charles!”

He turned around. A few snowflakes dusted the sweaty mess of curls on top of his head. His eyebrows were raised and his mouth agape in apparent surprise. The cold strung your lungs, and you pressed your bouquet uselessly against your chest to keep warm. It’s only when his eyes found yours that you realized you had followed him out without the faintest idea of what to do next.

You opened and closed your mouth, searching for words. Anything to say. Charles faced you fully now, hands dug deep in his pocket, watching you expectantly.

“Yes?”

When he had spoken about his family, he had just done it with no preambles. When you had told him your nightmares, you hadn't rehearsed. Perhaps that was the truth of it, you figured, that there wasn’t logic to a confession, that feelings weren't really something you could shape or rationalize to coax into your comfortable order.

Surrendering wasn’t meant to be gentle, or to coddle you into inaction. Surrendering was an act of violence. It was about severing a little part of yourself and holding it out for another, praying they will not spit it back at you. It was cutting down the ivy that had shielded you for years now, knowing the wall would look bare, but aching to glimpse the window beneath. And oh, what a beautiful view it might be.

You figured it was time that you hurt yourself a little. So you pried the ivy loose. You severed the branch. You leapt from the cliff with no harness and no hand to push or catch you. 

You surrendered.

“My parents didn’t care,” you blurted out. “I don’t think it was ever in their plans to have a daughter, but they did and once I was there, they just… did what they had to do.”

Charles’ brows shot up and surprise rippled across his face. You couldn’t let it disarm you. Your eyes squeezed shut. “My mother made me dinner and my father signed my school trip slips but I never had a birthday dinner or a family movie night. I started skating because I liked how it felt to be noticed. I thought maybe if I did good enough, they’d look at me. Their daughter, not a child who had a room in their house.”

“They never did.” You took a deep breath. “I brought home gold, I stood on podiums, but they never came or called. Not once; Even though I pushed myself to the limit of what is humanly possible, they didn’t— they didn’t care.”

A thin laugh broke from you. How ridiculous must you look: eyes shut tight, bouquet clutched against you as if it might keep the cold off the flimsy, sequined costume you were still wearing. “I think that’s why I want to win so badly, until I take everyone else down with me.”

You opened your eyes.

There was something bitter in the way you zeroed on Charles as you threw his own words back at him, laced with a tired kind of anger. “Your words. At the rink.”

The Monegasque flinched and, instinctively, too, a step forward.

“Y/N—”

Your bouquet sliced the air between the two of you, thrusting your flowers out like a shield, your grip white-knuckled around the stems. “No. I’m not done. You will stand there and you will listen to me.”

His hand, raised mid air as though to reach you, fell slack at his side. He obeyed. Charles simply stared at you, eyes filled with intent, and nodded. You continued. Your voice wobbled but the dam had already broken. Might as well let the rest out.

“I find comfort in repetitions,” you said, more like a fact than a confession. “Numbers. Nothing can go wrong when you have a solid rhythm and a routine established. There’s no surprise. It’s not scary. That’s why I trained so hard and strung Lando along with my spiral last year. I pushed us past our limits because we needed to win.” Your breath shuddered. “When I fell and my ankle snapped, all I could think about was how everything I built did too. And Lando… he didn’t look at me. He didn’t even look at me. So I blamed the shit out of him for not being enough.”

Charles took a step closer again but slower, as if to give you time to shove him back. You didn’t.

“It was selfish.” The admission splintered in your chest. “Pushing us that hard because I wanted it, losing Nationals and pointing the finger at him when it was my fault all along. It made him leave. It made all of them leave. That’s what they’re about, the nightmares: the fall. They’re about me being alone, bleeding out on the ice with nothing but my guilt… and no one comes.”

He was in front of you now. His tentative palm pressed against your forearm, somewhat burning hot even faced with the glacial temperature of the settling winter.

You were astonished by yourself, staring at the ruin you had just spat at his feet. You had pried your ribs open, and a part of you spitefully poked at your bruised marrow for exposing all these ugly and shameful parts of yourself. You had willingly shown Charles your Achilles heel and handed him the knife to slice it with no other afterthought than I hope you’ll be gentle with it— which you know he wouldn’t be if he were to do it. And he wouldn't do it. You knew him.

You knew the shape of his silences, the way his jaw clicked when he was holding too much back because he never learned how to not feel. You knew the rhythm of his stride of the ice, the downright feral edge of his ambitions and the wounds he never voiced.

And fuck, you wanted him to know you too. To know the smallest, most insignificant, most ordinary and shameful pieces of you— because maybe if you showed them to him willingly, if he held them, he wouldn’t run. You gave him every scrap, everything you could scrounge up.

“My… favorite color is green.” Your lips twitched with a fragile humor that didn’t quite land. “I only really like tea when you make it. Even then, barely. I… I really got into reality TV, but I don’t want anyone to know. I like Love Island the most.”

You laughed once, and barreled forward. “I can’t sleep unless the sheets are cold. I see Coach Vasseur as my dad even though I’d rather throw myself off a cliff than admit it to him. My favorite season is winter. And I—”

Your throat tightened around the final truth, as though even your body, out of reflex, wanted to hold it back. But you forced it out anyway.

“I think I want you.”

The truth hung between you, naked and vulnerable, in the narrow space between your bodies. For a heartbeat too long, Charles did nothing. He only stared, eyes widened, as if you had opened the sky itself. You thought that maybe you had gone too far. You couldn’t have misunderstood, no, but maybe you had reached too high. As usual.

Until slowly, like a man waking from a dream, he blinked the haze away and focused on you. His hand slid down your arms to warm you up, and you hadn’t realized you were shivering until his thumb started tracing patterns on the thin sleeves covering your arms. His brows arched, the corners of his mouth twitching with a question that was both incredulous and overflowing with hope.

“You think?”

You shook your head with a weak laugh. “I know.”

Something broke wide open. The hesitant line of his mouth stretched until it blossomed into a smile, accompanied with the huff of a disbelieving laugh, the type of one that could have felled kingdoms, you thought.

And that’s when Charles Leclerc kissed you.

It overcame you all at once. His lips grazed yours for the split of a second before crashing down, as if the air he needed to breathe resided in your lungs. The lingering smell of the perfume you used to indulge in as you twisted yourself in his sheets wrapped around you, and his tongue didn’t hesitate to pry your mouth further open. To let himself further in, with a hunger born out of denial and every unsaid word bleeding into touch. The rough pads of his fingers came to rest on the fragile space between your jaw and your neck, feeling your pulse and cradling your face, making sure you wouldn’t vanish in the way he pulled you flushed against him, the other hand grasping the soft fabric at the small of your back. There was no hesitation in the way you parted your lips for him.

You could only answer by tangling your hands in his hair, your bouquet of edelweiss forgotten on the whitening asphalt. Kissing back harder. Rougher. And with each gasp into the other’s mouth as you took more, more, more, you tasted the salt of old grudges mingling with the first fall of snow. There was something familiar about the violent need he gripped your waist, slid his lips against yours, molded himself to be so obnoxiously close, in a way that you couldn’t quite tell where he began and you ended. 

Charles kissed like he skated. Nauseatingly similar, you had thought when he first told you about his family. You and him were really one half of the other.

Which is why, beneath the blaze, was a softness, an unshakable knowing born out the burn of every near miss. His tongue sliding against yours, his mouth chasing your lips, and everything fell away. The championship, the years of fighting and poking at the wounds you inflicted on the other… there was nothing but Charles. Charles and you and the truth.

You were the first one to break apart. Heaving, your lungs refused to steady but not nearly as much as his did. You felt the frustration in the way his fist clung to the glittering fabric at your waist with whitening knuckles. His lips, swollen and flushed, chased the absence with a guttural groan that made your pulse leap.

You realized that you never had him this close. You don’t think you could have him any other way, now.

“So,” you breathed out. “Was that enough to finally tell me what you meant?”

Charles stared at you, and the corners of his mouth quirked with something between a huff and a laugh. “Putain,” he muttered. “Of all the times I imagined this, I never imagined you still being so high and mighty after it.”

“You imagined it?” You raised an eyebrow, a grin tugging at your lips.

The flush that leapt to his cheeks nearly outshone the red of the cold biting his skin. His gaze darted away, embarrassed for once.

“It means,” Charles started again, “that we have to talk. A lot. And then maybe… we could get pizzas again to celebrate, watch Murder, She Wrote.” His shoulders lifted into an awkward little shrug, boyish in a way you’d only ever glimpsed during late nights with a half-empty bottle of wine. “I’m happy to just be with you right now and, uh— eventually take you out. When we get home.”

The gentleness of him startled you, even more than the kiss had. It was the side you’d always dismissed as fleeting, a trick of dim light and exhaustion. The kind of Charles who only came out in the hush of midnight, when the world slept and only the two of you stayed awake. You hated yourself, just a little, for never noticing and never seeing him sooner.

It made you wonder, with a sting of heat in your chest, if you had been just as obvious without realizing, and if he had seen through you all this time. So you did what you always did when you didn’t have the answer: you teased.

“Well,” you said airily. “I don’t know. I am rather busy at the moment. I have this National championship to prepare for, you know.”

His head snapped up so quickly you nearly laughed, eyebrows raised to high heavens. “Oh, what a surprise,” he deadpanned, though the gleam in his eyes betrayed him. “I do too.” Then, cocking his head to the side, he let a grin stretch wide. “And we can plan all that… in my hotel room. Let’s get you somewhere warm, you’re freezing.”

Only then did you notice the tremors running through you and the way your nearly bare arms prickled beneath the night air. The kiss and the aftermath of winning Sectionals had flooded you with so much adrenaline you hadn’t felt it until now. Charles sighed, and shrugged out of his puffer jacket in one smooth movement. Without giving you the chance to argue, he draped it over your shoulders, the familiar scent and the warmth of him clinging to the fabric.

You slipped your arms through his in instinct, just like you would on ice. For the first time in years, the prospect of the unknown didn’t make you recoil. You didn’t count the steps he had taken toward you. Instead, it made you ache forward in curiosity. The snow spiraled gently around you both, blanketing the streets in soft white, as you walked together toward the hotel.

Behind you, the pale petals of your edelweiss bouquet sunk into the snow.

The gap between Sectionals and Nationals was eight weeks long, yet it had barely taken forty-eight hours for Coach Vasseur to sniff out what was going on between you and Charles.

Eight weeks should have been a generous expanse of time to settle on a song and sketch out a choreography. Technically, it allowed three or four days of full rest, a small indulgence for your second gold medal of the season, before even thinking about brainstorming.

Instead, you had barely let your duffel bag touch the floor before Charles was tugging you in his apartment. Before you’d realized it, your phones had connected to his speakers and your now shared playlist filled the room as you bickered about whether or not you should break the spaghetti before putting them in the water. The argument had ended with your back pressed to the kitchen counter, his mouth against yours, and the voice of Florence Welch singing Never Let Me Go washing over you.

The choice had seemed rather evident after that.

Which was why you now sat before Coach Vasseur, a whopping one day and a half after Sectionals, presenting him with a song proposition and a handful of choreographic sketches that had been born out of tired whispers with Charles’ head resting on your stomach.

“... Obviously, we’d have to practice that spin before even considering it,” you concluded, crossing your legs on the bench. “Especially with the lift restrictions coming with the theme. But it’s doable.”

Charles, dutifully at your side, nodded along. Coach Vasseur stood before you in front of the plexiglass boards with his arms folded, and his eyes darted from you to Charles with a gleam that held way more than consideration. Though he was a small man with kind features, you realized in that moment what made all of your competitors deem him scary.

After a minute of silence, he finally spoke up. “Are you two… a thing?”

You sputtered immediately while Charles’ eyes went comically wide. For one dizzying moment, neither of you seemed to remember the use of English. Maybe you could try in French.

“Euh— yeah,” Charles exhaled. “We are. A thing. If that’s what we’re calling this.”

You whipped your head toward your trainer, frowning at the sudden bluntness. “How did you even—?”

“I raised you,” Coach Vasseur cut you off with a sigh, “and him. I know. Also, not one of you has ever been, uh, subtile. Ever.”

You could almost be offended if he didn’t hit bullseye. Charles muffled a laugh beside you.

“Anyway,” he continued too casually, “I’m not about to give you a lecture on dating, or having sex, or both, with your skating partner. You’re adults. Just make it so it doesn’t ruin Nationals. That’s the only thing I care about.”

An audible groan left your lips and this time, Charles’ laughter broke in full. Somehow, it was in that specific moment you realized that maybe you were that obvious. And you didn’t mind much.

You left the rink still flustered from Coach Vasseur’s nonchalance, Charles grinning at your expense as he repeated ‘a thing’ under his breath just so you could glare at him. And yet, in the days and weeks that followed, what struck you most wasn’t all the unfamiliarity of a relationship implied, but the novelty of calling him yours. Your partner, outside of the ice.

As promised, Charles took you out— he didn’t go halfway about it, either. You went to the fanciest restaurant in town, the polished cutlery gleaming under the lights and a wine that came with a speech about its vineyard. You teased him about his upbringing. It was perfect, laughably so, and between the carefully plated entrées and the polite conversation, you realized you missed the bite of a cheaper bottle sweating between your thighs on his couch as you tried not to choke on your own laughter. 

You knew each other too much to bother with new first impressions. There was no need for performance when the real thing was already stitched into your days. What you found yourself craving was not the shine of chandeliers or the formality of elaborate dates but the comfort of routine, the one you had established with him, this time around. 

Which was why, a few evenings later, you found yourself pushing a shopping cart beside him at the grocery store, debating over which biscuits were better for late-night reruns of Murder, She Wrote. The sun was swiftly dwindling in the sky and snow was gently falling onto the ground, the fluorescent light above infinitely warmer than the restaurant’s. You both moved with a surprising ease: slipping a carton of juice past your hand before you could reach it, leading you to check the expiration date on the last offer of greek yogurt he loved. You called him bossy, he told you that you were being hypocritical, and you tried to keep quiet as ugly snorts overcame you both.

Without fanfare, he plucked one toothbrush from the shelf.

“What’s that for?” you asked.

Charles gave you an infuriatingly casual shrug, one that you knew he was doing on purpose when he tried to conceal just how plainly he took everything to heart.  “You know, with how much time you’re at my apartment, and next time you don’t have to panic when you forget yours.”

Heat spread across your cheeks before you could school your face, and in a bid to cover it you took the toothbrush from his hand and tossed it into the cart. Charles chuckled, but didn’t push. And you— well, you didn’t tell him about the guilt that struck your chest: you had a toothbrush and clothes at his apartment, a space in his bed that held your shape, but he had never once stepped foot in your home. That was simply… different. The rink was one thing, his couch another, and your threshold something else entirely. Letting him into your space, your real life, felt like opening a door you weren’t sure you could close again. And you always made sure you could close it. Just in case.

Charles didn’t comment, and linked his fingers with your free hand instead. You told yourself it was fine if he didn’t say anything.

However, you couldn’t deny the obvious: you did basically live at Charle’s apartment, now.

The toothbrush naturally found its place, nestled beside your peppermint face cream, the texture smudged with both your fingerprints and his. There was a space carved for your skates next to his in the wardrobe, training gear folded alongside his, and a couple of your clothes mingling with his hoodies and shirts. Even Leo had adjusted without so much as an ounce of hesitation, the little dachshund clambering onto your side at night. His warmth against your ribs became a welcomed third constant on the couch as the scenes on the TV blurred into one another, something about a certain Autumn and Louie. 

“That’s not fair,” Charles whined one night;

“What isn’t fair?” you asked absentmindedly, scratching the dog behind his ears.

“Leo prefers you to me. You prefer him to me. I’m being cheated on in my own house.”

You looked up and here sat Charles ‘Perceval’ Leclerc, fierce figure skater, arms petulantly crossed over his chest and staring you down as if the fact you were cuddling with his dog was a criminal offense. It should have been ridiculous, it was, but it didn’t stop a burning warmth to spread in your chest. You opened your free arm on the side Leo hadn’t claimed and Charles moved instantly, dropping a flurry of kisses on your cheeks, your throat, your lips, until a laugh escaped you. With a content sigh, he collapsed onto you.

And that’s just how your evenings looked now.

Obviously, what happened on ice was a different story.  Just because you were together didn’t rein in your competitiveness in the slightest. On the contrary, it honed your edges. Every brush of his palm against your back pushed you further, made you faster. You skated through each other, sense heightened until it sliced past every artifice, as though the two of you were one mirrored body. Nationals wouldn’t allow for mistake, not one like last year’s, so you would leave with gold or you would bleed yourself dry trying. Charles deserved nothing less. Neither did you.

Which is why, after one of your longest training sessions pulling into the late hours of the night, the glimmering sheet of ice a sweat-slicked body beneath your blades, you still weren't satisfied.

“Again,” you demanded.

Charles bent at the waist, palms braced on his knees, sweat dripping down the hollow of his throat and pooling dark against his collar. For a brief, unguarded moment, you found yourself distracted by the sight of it: the humanity in the boy who never seemed to stop.

He let out a disbelieving laugh. “Right now? Really? It’s almost midnight.”

Your jaw clenched. Nationals was looming, and the thought of anything less than perfection clawed at your throat. “Again.”

The silence hung heavy between the two of you as realization dawned on you. Lowering your voice to a plea you weren’t sure you’d ever made before, let alone show, you added, “Please.”

Something flickered in his eyes that couldn’t quite pin down. Weariness, yes, but something else that he swallowed before it could form into words. Without any more complaints, Charles straightened, skating back into position. Once again, he didn’t add anything, so it was fine.

When you were done with your obsessive spiral of repetition, still not satisfied but caught by the late hour, you bit your lower lip hard enough to draw blood so as to not let out a pained yelp when your bare feet found the ground. Your ankle, the one that had snapped a year ago, was painfully throbbing, as if the faint scar the surgery had left in its wake was splitting open a second time.

Truth be told, your ankle had been acting up for a while now. The flashes of pain after overexertion were to be expected, according to the many doctors who had warned you about coming back to ice dancing so soon into recovery, but this ache had nothing to do with the occasional pangs you felt after training or championships. This carried in everyday tasks, from going to the sink to showering to clambering to your bedroom, and seemed to intensify day by day.

It was there, in how you tried to stifle a groan as you nursed your foot back into your shoe.

You were so close to the goal you had been coveting last year. This was just a mere setback. You just needed to work around it. You could do it. You knew you could.

You glanced at Charles and, as usual, you found him already watching you. His sports bag laid zipped shut at his feet, but his eyes were still trained on you— well, not quite you, but the precise place where your ankle pressed against the hard fabric of your sneaker. The dots rapidly connected in your head.

The harsh shove you gave your foot to force it inside sent a white-hot shock lancing up your entire body. You swallowed hard against the hiss of pain clawing at your throat. Painful, yes, but you did it nonetheless. Force of habit.

“Are we still doing padel on Wednesday?” you asked abruptly, hoping to divert his attention.

You like to think it worked, but you were convinced he was just humoring in the way he raised his brows at you. “Are you going to be a sore loser about it?”

“Well, are you?”

Charles snorted and stood at the same time you did. The sting in your ankle reverberated through your whole body, a flash of white overtaking your vision, quick and merciless. Still, you kept steady. You knew how it went. You knew how to handle it.

You told yourself the arm Charles wrapped around your shoulders was nothing but his usual habit, his incurable need to exist within your space, to have a hand resting on you as though your presence alone anchored him that you’d normally welcome with overt enthusiasm. And yet, it didn’t make you daft either: you didn’t miss the subtle tightening of his grip when you leaned into him, nor the way he maneuvered you into the passenger seat under the guise of chivalry, careful to ease your weight away from your ankle.

You wished you could tell him to stop, but asking him out loud would be admitting something was wrong. And nothing was wrong. Everything was fine. You were fine.

One evening, you realized that fine had taken on another shape.

Charles’ bed had become your place as much as his, that much was clear way before you were offered the luxury of having him in your arms at the end of each training session. You had the left side, where the sheets smelled faintly of your face cream and Leo curled at your feet like a sentry. Except that now, Charles’ body had his arm slung possessively around your waist, your back to his chest, his warm breath caressing your neck lulling in and out of sleep.

Once upon a time, you would’ve rather slept with your spine pinned against the boards of the rink than let him see you this way: wholly unguarded, at the mercy of your own dreams. Yet there was something in his steady breathing and the solid weight of him that had quieted them. Nights beside him came with fewer nightmares, until eventually, there were none at all.

Which is why his bed was now your bed, and spending a night with him sleeping on the floor or on the couch was now unimaginable for you. You just needed him near.

You didn’t tell him this. You didn’t confess that, sometimes, in the middle of the night, you woke up and watched his lashes flutter faintly against his cheek and felt the terrifying weight of safety settle over you. No, this you kept to yourself— the quiet marvel of realizing that in Charles’ bed, with Charles pressed against you, you were no longer afraid to sleep.

That is, until that night.

You had forgotten how gutting nightmares could be. It had been so long since the last one that you had begun to believe Charles’ steady presence had cured them. However, you had not forgotten their settings: The carmine liquid seeping through the cracks you carved on the ice, slowly, from one body to the other. Injury to injury. Fractured veins crawling outwards. The blood red of the rafters. The faces in the crowd melting together. The muttering, whispering, mumbling as you fumbled upon yourself to try and sit upright.

Nobody is looking at you. You scream. You howl, raw-throated.

But nobody is looking at you. Nobody listens. And the gash widens, and the blood… There’s so much blood. It slicks your palm until they slip, until you slip, and until your head cracked against—!

You wake up in a gasp.

It happened to you so many times that you knew the steps by now. It was all familiar: the sweat dripping down your spine and collecting on your forehead, your lungs dragging raggedly, and the tremble of muscles that assured you this was real and you were no longer dreaming. Sheets tangled around your clammy legs, suffocating you further. You knew the rhythm of this aftermath: you could grip the normalcy of the situation, anchor yourself to the hurt until it faded. Catalog the symptoms and calm yourself back down.

If it weren’t for that goddamn throb in your ankle.

It jolted through the rhythm you needed. The hurt pulled your breath apart and made you gape like a drowned thing, and frustration spilt into panic. Your own body was betraying you. Mocking you.

Beside you, the sheets stirred. “Qu’est-ce que—” Charles’ voice, thick with sleep, spoke up. It quickly sharpened as he registered the violent quake of your shoulders.

He reached for you, tentative, not quite sure of his movement. That tiny moment of hesitation snapped something inside of you. You lurched toward him, burying yourself in his chest before you could even attempt to second-guess it. His arms wrapped around you instinctively, just like they would have on the rink, pulled you tight, his palm smoothing up your spine in slow, grounding circles.

Your body shook with impressive strength, but still you didn’t cry. You couldn’t. It was the last bit of secret you still held to your chest, heaving as though the sobs you swallowed down refused to give you the dignity of sound. Still, Charles held you as he had expected it to come out all along. His heartbeat was steady against your ear, anchoring you in a world in which red was solely the blush of dawn pressing against the curtains of his room.

Painfully, you calmed. And when you finally grew quiet enough, as the tremors eased, Charles risked words— lips brushing against the top of your head.

“You know you can tell me anything, right? I’m right here.”

It was tempting, so much you could taste the words on your tongue. He had you, after all. In his arms. As a whole.

But fear coiled tight in your stomach and bile burnt its way up your throat. If you broke, everything else broke with you: it would ruin the fragile safety you had built in this room, away from the world, swallow all the efforts you had made toward Nationals, everything you had worked for— gone. Once again.

You just needed to get through it. You just needed to win.

So you didn’t tell Charles. You pressed your face harder in his chest. “I know,” you whispered instead.

He didn’t answer, but you felt his shoulders sag. There was no relief in it. Somehow, more tension seemed to have gathered in his body.

You both fell back asleep in the silence of the forthcoming day. At least, you did.

And it all came crashing down on a Thursday.

That’s what made it ridiculous, in hindsight: the banality of a Thursday. Fridays were usually your rest days, but this time you’d shifted it forward to Thursday, only because Charles had asked you to come to the cinema that evening. The Monegasque had left during the late afternoon to take care of the kids’ classes, and you’d stay behind in his apartment until it was time for you to get ready. Nothing extravagant, just a little bit of light make-up to wash away the proof of your recent exhaustion and a nicer outfit, something that made you look like a girl going on a date instead of a competitor. You’d agreed you’d drive, pick him up, and then head to the theater. Afterwards, maybe some cheap takeout, Leo between you on the couch as you both fell asleep.

It was planned. It wasn’t in your nature to break routine. But you’d gotten comfortable with Charles, enough to think that arriving a few minutes earlier couldn’t hurt. You’d never witnessed him with his ‘students’ or softened into the teacher-version of himself, and you’d been curious about it ever since he told you— and the contrast it made with the outdated version of him that you had built in your head.

The rink was hushed at that hour, so silent your steps echoed down the cavernous hall. You passed the little table by the entryway, where you had once misplaced your key, the same night Charles had been locked in with you for a full night. Your hand brushed the surface without thinking, fingertips grazing the cold laminate, and the shadow of a smile bloomed on your lips.

What was it again, about the flap of a butterfly’s wings?

You made your way further down the hall. Then you heard it. Voices, muffled but aloud enough to resonate, cutting through the silence. Nobody should be here at this hour except for Charles and his students. Maybe Coach Vasseur lingering late, but that was all. Yet, as you drew closer to the sound, the tones grew harsher. Less like a conversation and more like an argument.

Your brows knitted as you approached the familiar stretch of hall leading toward Coach Vasseur’s office.  Light filtered through the opaque door, behind which two people seemed to be standing. The door itself, carelessly, was left ajar.

It was Charles. His voice, unmistakable even when taut with frustration. And Coach Vasseur, steadier, yet with a tinge of tiredness in his voice. Their words tangled together in the air, a mess of French and English. You froze at the aggressivity of their words. A tone that you only heard once before. Years and years and years back.

The comparison had you rooted in place. Listening.

“I can’t do it, Fred,” Charles’ voice, brimming with exasperation.

“You can, Charles,” Coach Vasseur. “You don’t have a choice. You knew this could happen the moment you let it get… personal.”

Your stomach sank to your feet.

Personal.

There was a sharp scrape of a chair leg against the floor, and then Charles again, louder this time but not quite screaming. “I get it, alright. She doesn’t make it easy! You don’t see her when she shuts me out, when she walls herself off—”

Blood roared in your ears. You. This was about you.

“ —but you’re still skating with her. And you will until the end of the season,” Coach Vasseur pressed. “I’ve already been approached, don’t worry. There’s another partner waiting for you right at the end. She’s a true gem, stable. Someone who won’t risk—”

“I don’t want—!” Charles’ voice cracked, and the conversation quickly switched back to rapid French that you couldn’t comprehend.

I don’t want. Your heart caught on the words, twisting around them until they curdled to form teeth, sinking into you.

“You don’t get to choose,” Coach Vasseur had turned to English again. Iron-clad, but quieter. “This is about the future of your career, hers too. Don’t be selfish. If the two of you implode, it won’t be just a breakup. It’ll be the end of everything. You’d be better off—”

“I said I can’t do it,” Charles asserted.

It. It was you. Skating with you.

The corridor blurred.

There was a silence after that, and you didn’t know if the two men had stopped talking or the white noise inside your head had intensified enough to render you deaf. All you knew is that you had to move before you were caught eavesdropping.

You stumbled back a step. Another. Heart hammering against your ribcage as if it wished to get out. All of a sudden, you were really small. Your hair was longer, and there were bruises on your knees from falling against the ice too often. You were eleven again, with a wet, pathetic kind of anger simmering inside of you but too little to know how to handle such an intimidating thing.

She shuts me out. I can’t do it. Someone else waiting.

By the time you turned away, swallowing against the burn in your throat, the truth hit you like a punch breaking cartilage, its taste metallic on your tongue: Charles didn’t want to skate with you anymore, not after colliding with the walls you built and finding the last, guarded pieces of yourself you’d been too afraid to give him.

He wanted out. And worse, he already had another option waiting at the exit sign.

Bile rose up your throat as you stumbled your way back to the parking lot. The snow blurred the edges of your vision, but the shaking of your hand only strengthened the haze further, trembling harder than your breath. Somehow, the key turned and the engine roared, and you drove down the fractured, icy roads that led not to Charles’ apartment, but to yours. The solitary box you’d never shared with him, and perhaps never would.

The lock clicked, and the weight of the world gave way.

You collapsed on the couch, doubled over, lungs sputtering out uneven gasps that scraped your throat raw. Your whole body shook as though wrung out by invisible hands, trembling the way one does sobbing, though no tears came. There was no release to the pain, just the unbearable, familiar ache.

How foolish you’d been. How naive to cut yourself open and to surrender the most fragile parts of yourself to someone else when the ending had always been written the same. People left. They always did. Lando had. You parents had, in their own cold way. Everyone you had ever wanted to hold onto had slipped through your fingers like snowmelt because you had always been too much to deal with.

You should have known better than to think Charles was any different, just because he had offered you what you wanted to hear on a silver plate. You only had yourself to blame.

The silence of your apartment pressed in. Except it wasn’t truly silent. Your phone kept breaking in, buzzing, glowing its white light on the coffee table. Again. Again. Again. Each vibration was another fissure in your ribcage, so much you started to count them to steady yourself. Old habits. Charles’ name lit up the screen, only to fade into the darkness when you didn’t move. You couldn’t move. If you touched it, the fragile threads that had been holding you together ever since Sectionals ended would unravel for good.

So you went through the motions instead. A parody of your nightly routine, performed with the leftover products abandoned here months ago. The wrong moisturizer, the wrong toothbrush, the wrong soap. All the right ones were at his apartment. Not home.

You didn’t change the outfit you picked out earlier, or touch the bed you hadn’t truly slept in for weeks. You crumpled onto the couch instead, hair unpinned, the fabric of your dress pulling uncomfortably at your ribs. When sleep finally came, it felt like drowning.

The steps you took to the rink the morning after was the sole work of your discipline. Your ethics carried you forward when your heart desired nothing but to stay crumpled on the couch, but the fire building in your stomach and its putrid spite was no stranger to that discipline. Not with how much you roiled and twisted during the night, so much that the abrupt movements had turned all grief had turned to venom, the rancid liquid sloshing in your veins as you walked. 

There was hate in that rage, obviously there was, but you were determined to hone it into precision. You were not going to redirect it at Charles. Not yet. You would not let him derail the one thing you refused to let go of: your spot atop that top National step. Instead, you would lace the poison in your steps and hope to slice it by accident until the very end.

It seemed simple in principle. You had woken up, put up your hair in a tight bun tugging at your temples with no hair astray and thrown on the cleanest gear from the scraps left in your wardrobe, all that to steady you.

However, no one could have prepared for what awaited when you walked in.

Charles was already there. He stood a few paces away, locked in deep, animated conversation with Coach Vasseur. The latter’s back was turned, but Charles you could see. His face was scrunched into disfiguring worry, a crease between his brows and his mouth moving fast with words you couldn’t hear. His arms crossed and uncrossed to punctuate whatever argument he had thrown himself in. He looked disheveled, the way he usually did after long training sessions, his hair sticking out in every cardinal direction— yet there was no wonder or satisfaction in his eyes. Instead, exhaustion sagged his shoulders.

Damn him, damn you, you thought, because you still managed to find him so beautiful it hurt. You hated yourself for it, that he was still beautiful in your eyes after all the ugliness he spilt.

The door slammed shut behind you and, as if commanding their attention, Coach Vassseur and Charles snapped around. That was when Charles visibly melted.

All the worry in his face thawed into a relief so warm it could have burnt if he had put his hands on you. His arms fell limb at this side, dropping from his defensive stance, and a breath fell from the small part of his lips. It fogged the air on its way out. So much everything swirled in the deep green of his eyes you had trouble picking out a single thought, one little emotion. It was overwhelming, the way Charles never quite knew how to feel anything halfway.

You almost allowed it to break you, to let yourself sag and delay reality for a few weeks more. And yet the fury caught up with you, the sheer hatred burnt you first, because how dare your heart still clutch at the sight of him, as though nothing had changed?

She shuts me out. I can’t do it. Someone else is waiting.

“Je t’avais dit qu’elle allait venir,” grumbled Coach Vasseur under his breath. “She would never miss practice.”

Charles took hurried steps forward, words loudly spilling from his lips as if he had trouble keeping them in.

“Putain de merde, t’étais où?” His voice cracked on the edge of both anger and fear. “Je— I searched for you everywhere! You didn’t come to pick me up, so I thought something was wrong. You weren’t at the apartment, you weren’t answering your phone and, and I don’t even know where you… where you live, so…” His voice faltered at the last admission, as though it tasted bitter, and his gaze flickered to the side.

Indignation prickled at your skin like a thousand needles. How dare he look at you like that, with worry still wet and shining in his eyes, when you had heard him bargaining your absence away only hours before? How dare he act as though your safety mattered when he was already planning to replace you?

You swallowed back against the need to scream. The next words scraped your throat bloody. “I’m sorry.”

Charles froze. His tone wavered, disbelief lining every syllable. “... Sorry? That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

He reeled, desperation flashing across his face. “Can you… can you at least tell me where you were?”

Pleading. He was pleading. And the patheticness of the whole situation burned behind your eyes until they stung, because here you were, standing in front of him, not saying anything about it and here he was, standing in front of you, not doing anything about it.

“I was feeling sick,” you muttered. You weren’t sure if he actually heard what you said. You straightened up, then added, louder. “Are we skating or not?”

You brushed past him, your shoulder grazing him as you moved, and dropped your bag onto the bleacher with a thud. You didn’t spare him a glance. He didn’t do anything about that either.

What transpired right after on the ice couldn’t be translated into words.

Never Let Me Go unfurled through the rafters, its soaring swell swallowed by the plexiglass walls, but the melody was wasted here. There was none of the warmth that usually tethered you, Charles, and the ice into a seamless body. The choreography, meant to be passionate and delicate, had soured into something indigestible for the eyes.

Your movements cut sharper than the blades were ever meant to. Each extension and step bled in the cracks with a sickening kind of anger, all wet and pathetic. You skated like a child begging to be seen, wanted, eleven and ten and nine all over again, and the humiliation of that truth seared you bone deep. When you met Charles, it was with the force of a breaking tide. You wanted to break the ice with each stab of your skates and drown him in the frozen water with the collision. At other turns, you recoiled as though his touch repulsed you, your body snapping away from the very palm that had cradled your face on many sleepless nights.

And Charles didn’t understand. You didn’t know how he couldn’t understand. You saw it in every stagger of his timing and in every falter in his reach for you. He skated with bewilderment in his limbs, a desperate scramble to catch your rhythm, to match your rage, to decipher the rules of the twisted game of pretending you had cruelly started playing too. Every failed attempt at harmony only made the performance uglier: two bodies clashing where they once caressed, dragging each other down, struggling, tripping, stumbling.

By the time the last note died, silence and heavy breathing followed.

“Again, from the top,” barked Coach Vasseur, unrelenting.

So you went again.

And again.

And again.

Each attempt frayed thinner the rope between you and Charles. Where your frustration sharpened, his confusion thickened. You grew more aggressive, and he grew more restrained, as though he feared the ice might fracture between you both— and that is exactly what you were seeking. You threw yourself against him no longer as a mean to grasp but as punishment. You wanted to bruise. The burn in your ankle only fueled it, your fury coiling tighter, tighter, until even your breathing became ragged with rage.

Still, Charles tried to follow, and you hated, hated, hated him so much for him.

However, everyone has a breaking point. Charles reached his by the eighth repetition.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

His hands were braced against his knees and his voice was low, his chest falling and rising in quick bursts. Sweat clung to his temple, dripping down the curve of his jaw, his lashes dark and heavy as he stared up at you. You stood there, knuckles white as they clung the rink’s boards, as if they alone could keep you upright. Your foot throbbed, every pulse echoing up your leg, but you forced your face into stillness. 

It was almost laughable, how quickly the reflex took over. “Nothing’s wrong. We should try again.”

You pushed yourself upright, swallowing the ache to skate back into position. That’s when Charles’ hand shot out. His fingers, usually soft but roughened by practice, closed firmly around your wrist and halting you mid-step.

“Don’t,” he rasped. His eyes burned into you, the way they used to in the early days before you knew him enough to stop fighting every second. Somehow, that fire had come back. “There is something wrong. You’re not skating with me out there, and I need you to tell me what it is.”

The contact seared. You wanted to scream, throw his hand off and shout the truth— he was a coward, like all the others before him. That he’d already chosen someone else, like the one before him. And you were a fool for not seeing it sooner.

You yanked your wrist free, voice venomous. “Maybe you’re the one not up to par, ever thought about that? Maybe that’s why you can’t keep up.”

The words sliced sharper than what you’d intended, and the effect was immediate. His expression crumpled. Hurt bloomed across his every feature, hollowing his mouth, hardening his face in a way you’d only seen once months ago. Anger flared, bright and undeniable.

“There you go again,” he sighed. His arms flew up, exasperation breaking him open.

You whipped around. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means you’re shutting me out! Again!” Charles’ voice cracked as he spat it out. He dragged a hand through his damp hair, breath jagged, words tumbling fast now. “That’s all you’ve been doing. You just— you just don’t fucking talk to me. You haven’t for months. I know something’s wrong: I sleep next to you, I’ve felt it every time we skate. But instead of letting me in, you’d rather drown and die in it. So maybe—” his jaw clenched, and his voice dropped something next to a whisper. “I think I might just let you.”

There was no heat to the last sentence, not really. Just exhaustion. Not even coming from practice, but from this. From you. It only stoked your fury higher.

“I don’t have to do anything,” you spoke through gritted teeth. “I don’t have to tell you anything, and you’re not letting me do anything. You are not essential to my existence, Charles! I’m doing perfectly fine on my own.”

Charles reeled back as if you struck him. His chest rose and fell, erratic. “You call this fine? You disappeared the entire night, you come back mean and angry and you refuse to tell me why. Something has been bothering you for weeks and you never told me. You’re spiraling, like you did last year—”

He had no rights to use last year against you. None.

“You don’t get to decide that!” you snapped. “You don’t know if I’m spiraling. You don’t know if I’m breaking, if I’m whole, stop trying to dictate my goddamn emotions! I—”

“I’m your partner!” his voice fractured on the word, coming from the deepest, most bruised parts of himself. It echoed all around you like a distant song of what used to be. “On and off the ice. I’m not trying to dictate anything, I’m trying to help you. That’s what this means, doesn’t it? Or does it only count when it’s convenient to you, with a gold medal?”

Everything around you blurred into a bright red, coiling deep within you. “Apparently you have no problem tossing me aside when things don’t go your way.” The words tore out of you before you could stop them, trembling the way the hands of a child would. “So I don’t think we are anything, Charles.”

The rink went very still. Your voice and its meaning frozen in a place and time.

Charles’ face was a blank mask for a heartbeat before it twisted into disbelief. “...What the fuck are you talking about?”

You opened your mouth, ready to brush him off and to shove the conversation into the same abyss you had shoved all the others you never had—

He cut you off before you had the time to.

“No. Don’t do that.” Charles slid closer. “What are you talking about, Y/N?”

The demand, with your name on his tongue like a plea, hung between you, glinting like the blade of a guillotine. And just as you were about to answer—what, you didn’t know yet, but words were forming on your tongue—the door to Coach Vasseur’s office slammed open.

“Enough,” Coach Vasseur’s voice boomed through the space. He wasn’t yelling, rare were the times he did, but it carried enough force for you and Charles to retreat a little like you used to when you were fourteen. He strode forward, phone still clutched in one hand after the call he slipped into his office to answer. “If you want to play out your lovers’ quarrel, you do it outside the rink. Nationals are in weeks. You either skate, or leave. You know how it is.”

You and Charles didn’t speak, nor did you fight back. There was no need to— you both knew what you were going to do anyway. That was what this entire agreement had been about from the beginning: skating. So you simply got back into position.

Florence Welch’s voice unfurled all around you, piano notes like a ghost clawing back from a sleepless night spent on a worn-down bench, when knuckles brushed as though contact might bruise. You lurched toward Charles with the force of an executioner swinging his axe.

If all the other times had been laborious, this one was hideous. Not just in the fractured turns and aborted twists, but in the rancid resentment that clung to your skin like sun-melted plastic, with the foul scent and disgusting touch. Charles’ hands gripped you too tightly, hard enough to leave marks, in hopes of wringing the truth out of you and you clawed at his wrists in answer, nails biting down enough to draw blood, but not enough to make him release you. Just enough to brand. That was the horror of it: how badly you actually didn’t want him to go.

You hated it. You hated it. You hated it.

The taste of your own want on your tongue was so horribly repulsive, both sour and shameful, that you couldn’t help but keep stabbing that revulsion into Charles further, slicing closer and closer to his steps. Each near miss was a gamble with disaster as he caught himself by centimeters only but somehow, he already seemed to be bleeding in the way his hands still seeked you, recklessly, snatching at your arms, your waist, your ribs, and dug deeper into them. Or maybe he recoiled from you. There was no way to know, not anymore.

Which is why you should’ve seen it coming.

It was the exact same sequence. For someone so desperately attached to routine, you should have recognized the pattern. There was no music in your ears, only the nauseating rush of blood and the serrated edge of your own breathing. Coach Vasseur’s voice came and went, tone harsh but words muffled. And there was Charles. Everywhere and nowhere at the same time. His hands on you. She shuts me out. I can’t do it. His breath on the nape of your neck. Someone else is waiting. The rink spun though you weren’t turning and your lungs collapsed inwards, your chest contracted. And your ankle, fucking hell, your ankle. That fragile hinge screaming louder than the music.

The chorus came in, or so you imagined—the cacophony of sensations was too overwhelming to single out one sound among all the others—and your feet were lifted off the ground. Second lift, mid-choreography.

You should’ve seen it coming, but you didn’t, because you were a breath too shallow.

Your body pitched forward before Charles could anchor you. Pain detonated in your ankle, giving up as you failed to throw yourself hard enough. Charles’ fingers slipped from your waist, his futile grip scrambling. He couldn’t hold the weight of you. Not this time. You tilted in the air. Your entire world did, in the grotesque way history repeated itself.

Until it blackened with a sickening crack of crimson against the ice. Injury to injury.

A concussion and a broken ankle.

Putting it like that, it sounded benign. People got concussions, people broke bones, they recovered, life went on. You know this. The doctors had assured you of it at sixteen, after your first nasty fall during training: ten days was the minimum it took for a concussion to ebb, and a broken ankle was a matter of twelve to sixteen weeks for full healing. You’d scoffed at the time and huffed at the boredom that bedrest implied and the uncomfortable feeling of the blades, now an extension of your feet, missing from their soles. Still, you healed.

It wasn’t so simple now. Back then, you hadn’t been skating on an already fractured ankle, nursing the ghost of an old injury that you had preferred to poke at than let it be. You hadn’t shoved your foot in stiff boots until the ache bent you in half—literally.

You had always hated hospital rooms. This one wasn’t much different, with its sterile white walls and horrid apple green accents. Coach Vasseur stood by your bedside table, arms crossed as he stared intently at the doctor hovering uncomfortably in the vacant space between you and the door. Charles was half-sat on the low windowsill at the end of the room. He did not meet your gaze once ever since you opened your eyes. You couldn’t do anything but lie there. Helpless.

“Given the neglect and stress on your ankle,” the doctor started, “without mentioning the complications in healing due to your continued training, the minimum recovery time will be longer than usual. Weeks longer, actually. If everything goes well, you could be cleared just a few days before Nationals.”

The world blinked back at you in fragments. His words didn’t quite make sense, and you much preferred to blame it on your concussion.

“A few days?” The question came out broken, a result of your pulse pounding at your temples.

The doctor nodded carefully, as if appraising a wild animal. “And even then, your ankle will still be fragile. With a concussion this recent, pushing yourself at full force could carry serious, lasting consequences. I cannot, in good conscience, recommend competition so soon.”

A sharp stream of air escaped from your nostrils. It felt like glass splintering under pressure. A few days. Days—it wasn’t enough. You couldn’t train in days. You couldn’t get back on your feet in days. It was nothing.

Coach Vasseur’s calloused hand closed around yours. “Your health comes first,” he said almost like a preemptive measure against the reaction he could feel inevitably boiling under your skin. “I know you don’t want to hear it, but you have to rest. There’s always next year, you—”

You wrenched your head back before he could finish, cutting his sentence short.

The silence that followed and spread around the room was worse than the deadliest of frostbite. You didn’t dare to look at Coach Vasseur, fearing what you might find in his eyes, or even at the doctor and the pitying turn of his mouth. Across the room, by the window where the dwindling day painted him in cold hues, Charles stood motionless. His hands were buried in the pockets of the coat he hadn’t bothered taking off, his shoulders hunched as if he was trying to fold into himself. His eyes found yours, finally, but he said nothing.

Nobody did.

Coach Vasseur drove you to your apartment. He’d offered to help you up, but you had violently insisted on getting upstairs alone. He’d hesitated at the curb, his fingers flexing in the ghost of a movement on the steering wheel but didn’t move. It was the last you heard of him for weeks because as soon as you shut the door and dropped onto your couch,  clothes from that fateful Thursday still pitifully hanging from its edge, you were left in your own silence. And you waited.

In the days that followed, the first stage of recovery dragged heavy, you waited for something, anything, to swallow you whole. You needed intensity, a thunderclap to wave off the uncomfortable cold settling into your bones as you struggled to hobble from your bedroom to your kitchen, or a surge of pain sharp enough, a clarity so blistering it could cut the lingering fuzziness from the concussion. The way the doctor had addressed you, or how Coach Vasseur carefully took your hand—they’d waited for anger. A hatred so deep it could sear through bones with words. That’s what you did, after all: you lashed out. You were angry, always. At something, someone, some nameless thing from the past. You’d expected that anger to arrive anytime.

Yet, all you had was emptiness. A painful emptiness, downright cavernous, punctuated by fragments of frustration when you tried to stand up and your ankle reminded you what you’d done to it. You couldn’t muster the strength to hate anything else anymore, not when you spent so much of your time hating yourself.

When your apartment is empty, and there are no blades to carve clean arcs through your thoughts, you’re left with an awful lot of time to think. It had been something you’d put off for years, thinking. There had always been something more important, whether it be a bruise to ice or a championship to win. You’d simply tuck it away: the pain from your ankle, the jaggedness of Charles’ betrayal, Lando’s Irish goodbye. Now, you had nothing else to do anymore. You had no hope of recovering fast enough to win Nationals, not even to score a podium, and you had screamed about the loss you had clung with the hope of a madman to until your throat bled quiet and your voice died to a dry sob. You had counted the days, the hours, but no arithmetic could bring you back your chance at gold. 

After that revelation came the anger.

The same anger that had burnt bright that Thursday night, scorched you the morning after, the fateful day Coach Vasseur told you Lando had given up on you, the same molten brand you’d carried since you were eleven, pressing your small palms to the cold glass of the door while a boy and a man argued on the other side. It wasn’t directed at any of those people, not any of those circumstances. It was only directed at yourself.

You were the one pushing people away. You were the one too centered on herself to see how the spikes you’d carefully cemented to your fortress pierced the people who tried to stay. There was no grand cosmic vendetta to keep you under frozen waters with the hope that, one day, you’d give up your last breath—the only one sabotaging your chances was the one staring back in the mirror. You’d lost Nationals twice by refusing to get out of your own mind and blaming yourself, again and again and again. You’d lost Charles by pushing him away, again and again and again.

You had lost yourself in the misplacement of your own hatred, again and again and again, all because you couldn’t surrender such a small bit of yourself without unraveling completely. And here is where it had led you: two weeks in your freezing apartment, recovery a bloody scab around your heart, alone in your own silence—the one you had carefully built and heavily regretted.

It was not much more different than your nightmares, now that you thought about it.

Sometimes, Coach Vasseur would stop by to drive you to your medical check-ups. He’d text you first then wait outside your building, engine idling, as you took long punishing minutes to go down the flight of stairs on your own. You didn’t talk much during those rides. Mostly, he asked if you were okay, and you’d answer with a clipped “Fine.” It wasn’t even a lie, you could be worse, but it did sound hollow. And when he drove you back, he’d watch you clamber up to your door. Alone.

You realized something had to change by the third doctor's appointment.

Sitting down in your coach's car, nothing had seemed out of the ordinary: the faint smell of coffee and the worn leather seats sighing under your weight, the forest of air fresheners dangling from the rearview mirror. The glimpse of a routine was a welcomed almost-comfort in your recent spiral. Coach Vasseur looked at you, eyebrows scrunched in that permanent expression of worry he only reserved for you.

“You alright?” he asked, the car roaring to life.

Curtly, you nodded. “I’m fine.”

The words barely left your mouth before your foot hit the floorboard too hard as you rearranged your position. A white-hot sting shot up your leg and you hissed in pain, the sound only betraying half of the pain spreading through you.

Coach Vasseur reacted instantly, a hand lifting from the steering wheel to help. “Bordel, fais attention—”

You flinched away before he could touch you. The reaction was instinctive and borderline violent in its speed, leaving a sour smell in the air.

The older man froze, hand retreating slowly, only to let out a tired sigh. You knew the look in his eyes as he took the car out of the driveway, you’d seen it many times before, the look of someone wanting to help but had long learned it was wasted breath.

“You know,” he started, edged with hurt reproach, “you could let me help you down that apartment of yours. You’ll only make that ankle worse.”

You stared at him for a long moment but found nothing but exhaustion. Charles had that same look in his eyes, the day you fell. Maybe Lando did too before he left. You turned your gaze toward the window and the blur of trees, watching the frost gather on the glass. “I’m fine,” you assured again

And that was it.

Except it was not. Not really, anyway. The rest of the drive was spent in silence. You didn’t bother filling it, and neither did he. It wasn’t exactly uncomfortable. You found yourself watching him from the corner of your eye. The morning light caught on the streaks of grey nearing his ears and the deep lines of his face, stemming from the long hours of holding together what fell apart. You wondered when he’d started looking like that. You wondered if it was your fault.

It was the exhaustion in his eyes that got to you the most. You’d seen it in Charles, when he tried to reach you one too many times and hit a wall, in Lando when he realized no amount of care could pull you out of yourself. That was it: the quiet fatigue before someone simply… stopped trying.

It hit you just like that, how you were doing it again. You were driving him away with the same techniques you drove everyone else away. The realization sat heavy and dull in your chest. Silence wasn’t protecting you. You were sharpening your own fear into a blade and stabbing the people who made the mistake to care. You were isolating yourself so completely because of your own fear of fucking up that soon enough, there would be no one left to isolate from. Even Coach Vasseur would stop showing up eventually.

You glanced at the windows again when the car made its way from your doctor’s office to your apartment after your appointment. The buildings slid by, and something inside of you cracked open. A slow shift, painful in its opening.

Maybe it was time to stop. To try something different.

By the time he parked in front of your apartment again, cold noon sunlight was pooling through the windshield, bright enough against the snow to sting your eyes. He turned to you expectantly.

“Well?” he said after a pause. “Aren’t you going to go in?”

You didn’t answer immediately. Your fingers twitched against your thigh in nervousness, then rose to trace the shape of your other hand. One, two, three, four, five— you counted your fingers quietly to ground yourself in the motion, again. You could do something different. You could get out of the pattern.

“Actually,” you started. The sound of your voice was so unusual that it startled you, maybe due to the heartbeat pulsing in your throat. “Could you… help me up?”

The silence that followed could have looked comical. His eyes went wide and he stilled, until he blinked hard enough to snap out of his haze and scrambled to unbuckle his seatbelt.

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he tripped over the words. “Wait a second—”

The cold air hit you both when the doors opened. As he hobbled to your side, you let him loop a careful arm around your shoulder—you didn’t flinch away, at least you tried not to—and quietly walked toward the door of your complex.

Coach Vasseur carried you up the stairs. Not without awkwardness, his balance wavered more than once, but he made up for it with bull-headed determination. At the top of the stairs, he shifted your weight slightly, but your fingers held onto his sleeve. The keys glinted between your trembling fingers. One, two, three, four, five— you handed him the cold metal.

His expression of surprise turned into shell shock as his own hand took the cold metal in slow motion. You never let anyone inside. Until now. He fit one into the lock and the door creaked open.

Coach Vasseur stepped inside first, carrying you over the threshold like a careful trespasser, before setting you down gently on your coach. You sank into the cushions, clutching at your sleeve to stop your hands from shaking. One, two, three, four, five— The air in the apartment was cold and faintly dusty, and Coach Vasseur’s gaze swept across the main room. There were unwashed mugs by the sink, a blanket hung on a kitchen chair in a heap, and a pile of clean bandages piled onto the coffee table. Every second seemed endless, and you waited for judgement to come. He exhaled loudly, looking at you with a wry twist of his mouth. 

“It’s dirty as hell in here.”

You froze at the grumbled statement until a broken, surprised laugh slipped past you. “The broken ankle makes it hard to clean some corners,” you muttered. “Sorry.”

Coach Vasseur rolled his eyes but didn’t answer. He glanced around once more, found the broom tucked between the fridge and the wall further away, and reached for it. “Don’t worry about that, I’ll do it. Just rest.”

You wanted to argue and tell him you were fine, just like you had the past days, but the truth was you weren’t. The words wove together in your throat so you watched him instead, as the faint scrape of bristles on the floor echoed to fill in the previously daunting silence.

“Thanks, Fred,” you finally said, nearing a whisper.

He didn’t look up, but you still saw the smile pulling at his lips. “Anytime.”

And it was as simple as that. Fred cleaned your apartment and doted on you like your father should have in his position, and it didn’t weigh on you. It didn’t cling to your skin. If anything, it was freeing.

Surrendering didn’t just come with pretty words, like you may have believed a few months ago. It came with actions, the first one being making amends. After Fred left, when noon had barely passed, you picked up your phone and, in the space of a second, sent your address to Charles. This, and nothing else. 

Because you needed to talk. No matter what the outcome of the season might be.

Hours went by, enough for the afternoon to sink in lazily through your windowpanes, muted gold fading into the blue-grey lull of the evening. The coffee machine rumbled in the background, its steady purr the only sign of life in your newly tidied apartment. Still, the small, grey-text on your phone blinked at you tauntingly. Read.

Charles had seen the text, but he hadn’t answered.

You stared at the screen until your reflection blurred against it, but you couldn’t force yourself to be surprised. The world went on, unbothered by your regrets or realizations. It had always been a possibility that Charles simply couldn’t be bothered with you anymore, which he certainly made clear in his conversation with Fred. Still, the reality of it had wrenched and thrown your heart around in the cavity of your chest. You had lost him, truly and completely. And the sun still rose, the city still moved.

The machine clicked off, leaving a hollow quiet in its wake. Pulled out of your thoughts, you pushed yourself off the counter with a wince, hobbling toward the counter, when three knocks reverberated around the apartment.

You frowned. No one ever knocked on your door. You didn’t know your neighbors, and no one even knew where you lived—apart from Fred, now.

“Who is it?” you called loudly enough so your voice could be heard through the thin wood of your door.

There was a short silence. Until— “It’s me.”

Your grip on the counter faltered and your balance tilted just a second before you managed to catch yourself. A single exhale stuttered out of your lips. You hadn’t heard Charles’ voice since a clipped “Goodbye” after your short-lived hospital stay—occasionally, you’d hear it in your lingering nightmares, which had taken a whole other form—but now? It filled your apartment.

You couldn’t manage to move for a moment. Your mind screamed at you to sit still and quiet, and maybe he'll go away and you’ll be safe again. But it wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Not anymore.

“Come in,” you managed. “The door’s open.”

Pulse pounding at the base of your throat, each step that followed echoed like a countdown. The creak of the hinges, the shuffle of his shoes against the floor… Until Charles Leclerc awkwardly stood in the middle of the living room, facing the open kitchen, not quite sure what to do with his eyes.

He had flowers in his arms.

It was a muted bouquet of lily of the valleys, white orchids and purple hyacinths, gently wrapped in ivory foil that crinkled whenever he shifted from one foot to the other. A few petals drifted loose, falling on the floor from the barely noticeable movements, creating a puddle of spring in the middle of winter right in front of your coffee table. The thought of cleaning didn’t even cross your mind. The thought that Charles was in your living room, the late afternoon light haloing him, looking somehow even more devastatingly beautiful now that he wasn’t yours anymore, was enough to make you crumble a little on the inside. He looked slightly different, though you couldn’t have said how.

After standing around in silence for a while, it was becoming clear that he wouldn’t be the one starting a conversation. You cleared your throat to get rid of any hints of a sob.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” you spoke, eyes darting to the side. “You didn’t answer.”

He jumped a little, as if your voice had startled him. “I, uh— I was surprised,” he admitted. “I rushed to get ready and forgot to answer, I guess. I also got a bit sidetracked with… well, this.” He lifted the bouquet for emphasis. Another flurry of petals fell to the ground.

“You didn’t have to.” Your heart twisted into something ugly. He was still playing pretend, as if he wasn’t banging on the exit door of your relationship merely two weeks ago.

Charles shrugged. “I thought I could…” he started, then trailed off. His gaze flickered past you, taking in your space, and you suddenly felt very vulnerable. The books on figure skating left open on the counter, the trickling coffee machine. “ I mean, I’ve never been… It’s—” he hesitated. “It’s very you.”

The gentleness in his tone made you forget all about the workings of your lungs. You had to turn away to catch your breath.

“I was… making some coffee.” You forced the words through the tightness of your throat. “Do you want some?”

You heard the small exhale before you felt him move, the subtle sound of disappointment uncoiling in the air. The bouquet landed softly on the kitchen counter. His eyes burnt into your back, unwavering, and it made you want to fold into yourself until there was nothing left for him to stare at. “Did you really invite me over for coffee?” he asked.

He sounded exhausted, and your stomach twisted with guilt. You started fidgeting with your fingers once again. One, two, three, four, five— You swallowed, turned back to him. “No,” you admitted. “No, I didn’t.”

Charles didn’t move and everything stilled for painful seconds, so much you could feel a dull throb in your ankle from standing too long, the faint ticking of the clock above you, and the relentless count in your head. One, two, three, four, five—

His eyes caught on the gesture, and the rest was almost like a reflex. He took a few careful steps forward that you barely registered until his knuckles came to rest against your hands, fingertips red from counting, and a wave of memories hit you at once. You looked at him the same way you had done in that hotel room after Regionals, but everything else was different.

“Then tell me.”

You frowned. “What?”

“I’m just— I’m done chasing you around,” he breathed out. There wasn’t an ounce of malice in it, only tiredness, but it hit you like a slap in the face would. “I think I’ve chased after more than enough people in my life, and I don’t want to start doing it again. Looking for things that aren’t there, searching for approval… So we can sit there in silence if you want, but you’ll be the one who will have to speak first.”

And you know he didn’t mean anything by it, but old habits died hard. The audacity of it made something hot flare in your chest because how dare he say that, after all of this. When he’d been the one to walk away first and you had half a mind to beg for him to stay when the season would have come to an end. Chasing you around. Right.

Your pulse spiked, quick and angry, because it’s what you did: when you were hurt, you got angry. You could taste the salt of it in your mouth, and all of it came from that same gaping hole inside of you, in the shape of a lonely child.

“Oh, so you’re done chasing me?” you bit out. “That’s convenient. You didn’t seem to have a problem running away a few weeks earlier.”

Charles retracted his hand in one swift move. “What do you mean by that?”

“I was getting ready to apologize.” Your tone didn’t pick up like it usually would.  Instead, your voice got smaller, and the words more raw. You hated it. “I was getting ready to own up to my actions. I really, really wanted to talk, but you have some fucking nerves. Coming into my apartment, with flowers, talking about chasing after me when the only thing you can think about is leaving.” You tried to inject venom into it, but it didn’t land right.

Charles’ brows knitted together, his face draining of color. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Right.” You almost laughed. “Of course you don’t. You probably wouldn’t even know if I quoted you directly, huh? She shuts me out. I can’t do it. Someone else is waiting. Does that finally ring a bell to you?”

“Y/N—”

“You were leaving me,” you spat through gritted teeth. “You were leaving us, our partnership, everything we worked for. You already had someone waiting for you when the season ended, and you didn’t even think about telling me. You were going to pretend, like a coward.”

The words hit him hard. He froze, lips parting to respond but nothing came out of them. You awaited something, guilt or anger, maybe, but the only thing you could perceive was confusion.

“Wait— What? What are you even—”

“Don’t,” you hissed, taking a step back. You couldn’t look at him anymore. If you did, your chest would cave under the weight of humiliation. You couldn’t lose the last shreds of dignity you had. “On Thursday. I caught you talking with Fred, don’t even try to pretend it didn’t happen. I was supposed to pick you up for the movie, and I—” your breath hitched. “I just wanted to see your classes. I wasn’t even spying, and—”

Charles’ face changed slowly, the confusion deepening the longer you talked before something seemed to click behind his eyes. “Oh.”

He stepped closer and you couldn’t help but flinch at the proximity, the feeling of his warm breath against your skin that you couldn’t help but gravitate toward. His fingers now hovered just above your forearm. He didn’t touch you. He wouldn’t unless you let him.

“You misunderstood,” he said softly. “You misunderstood the situation completely.”

A hollow laugh slipped past you. “Don’t do that. If you tell me I made it up, I—”

“No, no at all. God, Y/N. What you heard— I wasn’t trying to leave.” His palm finally found your arm, and its heat, his touch, the pleading, his eyes almost made you crumble right here and then. “Fred wanted me to skate with someone else next season because— because he thought we were too close, and he was afraid of what would happen if we ever…” He hesitated, but decided against voicing what was heavy in the air. “I wasn’t leaving you. I was trying to get him to let me stay. I can’t imagine skating with anyone else but you.”

You wanted to argue back and tell him that what he was saying didn’t make sense, but you couldn’t. Because it did make sense. The fragmented words you overheard and the rapid French, you shaped all of it to fit your own fears and now that they finally aligned with the light of his explanation, you realized how painfully wrong you had been. You chose to run off.

You had fucked it up all by yourself. Again.

Lips parted in a silent gasp, you finally looked up at Charles, who was already watching your slow realization with a dim sadness in the exhaustion of his eyes. There was no anger there, although you wished there was. Anger, knew how to deal with. You never knew how to deal with this. You opened your mouth. Closed it again. You wished an apology could fix this, but a sorry couldn’t erase the dark circles carved under his eyes or the ghost of what you said that day.

“Charles—” you finally breathed out.

“I said you were shutting me out because you were,” he cut you off, and barely contained frustration hung on every word. “And you did it again. You went and drew conclusions all by yourself, and look where it got you. Look where it got me. Us.”

You couldn’t do anything but nod. “You spiraled all alone,” he continued, “and you didn’t even think to talk to me. You didn’t trust me enough to talk to me, Y/N. I could’ve clarified it, I could’ve helped you feel better if you just—” his voice cracked slightly. “If you just talked to me.”

Charles exhaled through his nose, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s like when you told the doctor your ankle was hurting. You knew something was wrong way before that. I knew something was wrong too, but I didn’t push. I didn’t want to scare you and for you to just… retreat again. I waited for you to tell me. And I’ve never been in your apartment until today!”

His voice didn’t rise, but he threw his arms in the air and looked around. You could only follow his gaze. The room felt smaller now, suffocating under the weight of everything you built to keep him out. He let out a laugh but it wasn’t amused. It sounded empty. “I’ve been waiting this whole time. I figured you’d invite me when you wanted to, because it’s— it’s yours. It’s personal, your boundaries, and that’s important for you. I waited for you to open up but you… you never did.”

The silence stretched thin between you. Charles didn’t speak again. He just stood there, every intake of air calculated as if not to shatter you. Maybe they would have, because again, he was right. Of course he was. You felt all of his words like a mirror held too close to your face.

You’d been shutting him out, again and again, because it was easier to manage your solitude than to risk it being taken away, and he hadn’t yelled at you for it, he hadn’t pushed you for it. He’d only watched with hope, heart wide open and hurting in the gentlest way. You had no reasons to be angry, you never had. Charles wasn’t angry—he was frustrated, and people only got frustrated when they care, when they want to be let in. When they love.

Charles loved you and you loved him, terribly, helplessly, in a way that terrified you down to your marrow. You thought you were preserving each other in your own selfish way of loving, by not pushing the other, but what it did was only push you further down in your own bad habits. Standing still. Not opening up.

But the Monegasque was standing in front of you now, pushing you. Maybe that’s what love was really supposed to be.

He opened his mouth then, as if to speak. His eyes were soft, and you could see the apology already forming on his lips. You wouldn’t have it. It wasn’t how it was supposed to be. He’d apologize, you wouldn’t, and you’d go back to the unhealthy cycle of guessing what the other wanted instead of knowing what they needed.

You found yourself whispering, “I just didn’t want you to leave.”

And there it was. Charles stopped any movements he had gotten ready to make. Your voice trembled as you went on. “Everyone always leaves, Charles. Lando did. My parents did. Every partner I ever had eventually got tired of who I was, and how my head gets when it’s too much. And I…” You pressed your knuckles against your mouth to keep a sob from spilling. “I didn’t want that to happen with you too.”

Tears blurred your vision, pearled at your lashes, but they wouldn’t fall.

“So I thought that if I could keep it all to myself,” you continued,” if I could just handle everything alone, you wouldn’t see how bad it can get. You wouldn’t have to deal with me, and we’d go on to win Nationals together like it was planned. You wouldn’t get overwhelmed and— and you wouldn’t leave.”

Oh, how bare you felt. The confession almost seemed like a living thing, trembling alongside you in the small space separating you from Charles. You lifted your gaze then, a bit higher, and expected the pity that always came with this type of confession. There was none of that in Charles’ eyes.

Only an understanding, a quiet thanks. His desire to try and try and try. He looked at you for a long time, as if memorizing you at this very moment. The worst part of you wanted to turn away, but the part that loved him didn’t. 

“I wouldn’t leave,” Charles finally answered, his voice a little hoarse. “I would never leave, I just… I just need you to start relying on me a little.” He was close enough so you could feel the slight tremor in his hands. “I’m here because I want you. I always wanted you, and that means everything that comes with you too.”

“I need you to talk to me and to trust me enough to tell me things, because I can’t help if you won’t let me. I can’t carry any of it if you don’t let me, because I want to carry it, Y/N. I’m not going to run away because I want to carry it with you.”

Your heart lurched against your ribcage. “I need to feel like you want me there,” he finished softly. “Because I do. I want all of it. I want you, not just one half.”

The sentence hit you like a punch to the guts, stealing the air from your lungs. You did want Charles just as badly, in a way that helped you finally find soundless sleep at night, but you had never paused once to realize that your actions might have translated something else entirely. You’d been so deathly afraid of making people leave that you never once considered that someone could choose to willingly stay.

“I’m sorry,” you breathed. Again, louder, “I’m sorry. I’m so—”

The rest was swallowed by an ugly sob, breaking free from your chest. The rest collapsed with it: the tension in your shoulders, the salt resting against your lower lashes. Years of grief for people who barely knew you, disguised as magnified anger, burst out all at once, and you cried.

Charles was across the small distance in a heartbeat. He pulled you in and you didn’t resist. You didn’t even think. You simply fell against his chest, hands locking around his waist and fingers curling desperately into the fabric of his sweater. Pressing his cheek to your hair, he held you tighter at each jolt your body gave under the strength of your tears. No matter how long you thought about it in the meddled murk of your mind, you couldn’t remember the last time you cried this hard. You couldn’t remember the last time you cried at all.

“You’re going to be all right,” Charles whispered in your hair, his hand tracing slow, gentle circles against the back of your head. “We’re going to be alright. I promise.”

You fell apart, and he caught you. Just like skating.

You don’t know how long you stayed like that—wrapped in his arms, your tears soaking the cotton of his sweater with his breath warm against your temple. Eventually, the sobs slowed into hiccups and your breathing evened out, the tremors in your shoulders fading one by one.

When you finally pushed back a little, his hands dropped to your sides as if to make sure you wouldn’t find a way to slip away. Your eyes met his, and you were struck still. Charles’ lashes were wet, his own eyes glassy and rimmed red, though a hesitant smile tugged at his lips. There had never been a single moment during which he had been this unguarded. You’d never been this unguarded.

And before you could think, the words fell out of your lips in a clumsy tumble. “I love you.”

Small but seismic, the words settled gradually over him. For a second, Charles just stared at you with wide eyes, and you thought that maybe it was too soon, but you couldn’t bring yourself to regret it. Then, that fragile smile of his softened, bloomed into something that broke and warmed your heart alike. His eyes shimmered with fresh tears, one finally spilling over.

“I love you too.”

This time, you were the one to kiss him.

It wasn’t the type of kiss that demanded something out of the other. His lips parted in a silent gasp for you, steadily, slowing the world down until you were the only ones left along with the pulse on your wrists. His thumbs brushed tenderly over your damp cheek and you sank further into him, his hands coming to cradle your face as something breakable, but not inherently broken. It was safe. It calmed your heart.

You pulled away, foreheads resting together, and both of you exhaled the same, shaky laugh.

“Do you… want to watch Murder, She Wrote?” you asked after a beat, unsure of what else to say. “I can really make coffee this time.”

Charles barked out a broken laugh, and you couldn’t help the comfort that spread through your body. You wanted to lie tucked in his side on your couch in front of your show, you wanted to sleep next to him in your bed, you wanted to skate with him once your ankle healed. You wanted this and so much more.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that.”

The clearance to skate had been given to you a week before Nationals.

On paper, it was the same case as the beginning of the season: technically, you were fit to skate, but the doctors didn’t recommend it. However, they couldn’t forbid you to do anything, they could only advise. In the end, it was your call. You had your own agency, and that agency led you in that damn office at six in the morning on a Thursday, of all day.

“I want to do it,” you said.

Charles had dragged his chair close, so much that his thigh brushed against yours. A small, anchoring gesture. Across from you, Fred sat with his hands clasped, elbows braced against the cold of the desk. His expression was one of both understanding and disbelief, the faintest sigh ghosting through his nose.

“Y/N,” he began carefully. “You know full well—”

“I know,” you cut him off. You took a deep breath. “I know. We won’t win. I mean, it’s statistical, right? We didn’t have enough time to train correctly, and I won’t risk putting too much strain on my ankle. I don’t think we could even reach third all things considered, I just—" your voice wavered. “I want to do it. I want to skate Nationals.”

The truth hovered in every single syllable, so loud you didn’t need to say it. This was your chance to begin again by finishing what had been started a year ago with a new perspective, even if you were not going to win. You just wanted to sleep again.

Fred gave the ghost of a sympathetic smile. It was more of a thinning of the lips, really, filled with that ever present paternal concern for you. You knew he understood. He turned to Charles.

“What do you think? You guys are the pair. I’m only overseeing stuff.”

Charles' hand slowly squeezed your thigh, the pressure almost imperceptible but there nonetheless. “I think we should do it.”

Next thing you knew, the cold lights of the rink were blooming across your favorite battle arena, catching on sequins and blades. Rows upon rows of spectators shimmered in the white glare, their cheers swelling and crashing in uneven waves. Around you, experienced pairs that you could recognize were finishing the last run-through of their programs. The routine of competition mornings felt warmly familiar, but strangely unknown at the same time, as if you were walking those same steps as an entirely new person.

Maybe you were. You welcomed the change with hesitant but determined steps throughout the day. Each movement was deliberate. You were nervous, of course, but it was a softer kind of nervousness.

Charles had been by your side since dawn, a steady presence who knew better than to hover. He’d offered a hand when you needed one, slept by your side when you asked him to yesterday. There was no tension left between you, only a current of comfort.

By the time you slipped in your Free Dance costume in the late afternoon—a beautiful deep slate blue with pale ice-blue highlights and pearls—your ankle was already sore from the fast-paced weekend, but it didn’t really matter. You promised yourself not to push too far. This time, it wasn't about perfection.

Waiting at the edge of the rink with Charles right beside you, you scanned the ice. The crowd, your competitors in front and next to you, waiting impatiently for their turns and to see who will get to score goals. Preys who thought themselves lions. You froze for a fraction of a second when your gaze landed on a familiar mop of messy brown hair.

“I still can’t believe Lando made it to Nationals,” you murmured, a surprised laugh escaping you. “And I didn’t even know.”

He was standing near the opposing boards on the opposite side of the rink, helping his partner stretch out. The girl looked vaguely familiar, although you couldn’t quite pinpoint how.

The first time you’d seen him was in the hotel lobby, the day before the Rhythm Dance. So many different emotions swirled inside of you that you nearly started crying: anger, frustration, regret… One of the first things you’d wanted to do was to march up to him and apologize.

You quickly realized, when he turned around and met your eyes, how futile that would’ve been. Lando looked older, now. More mature. As if the one year you spent apart had changed something chemical inside of him, for the better. After all, that’s what happened for you. 

The wisest decision was to let go of one another, you concluded.

Charles glanced at you, then back at the ice. “You had other things on your mind,” he said. “Winning. Your injury. Me…”

You turned to look at him, arching an eyebrow in his direction. “Are you jealous?”

He huffed, that telltale sign of his that was half amusement, before his lips quirked up into a fond smile, the corner of his eyes crinkling.

“I was,” he admitted, shrugging slightly. “When I was younger. But now I know there’s nothing to worry about.”

Charles closed the small space between you as he was saying this, his arm finding its way around your waist as it belonged there—maybe it always did. You tilted your head toward him as he dipped to press a kiss to your temple. The warmth of it melted into your skin and you leaned into him instinctively, smiling softly.

You met Lando’s eyes then, and you could see his eyebrows shooting up in both amusement and pleasant surprise from where he stood. You offered him a smile back, which he mimicked almost immediately.

This would probably be the last interaction you ever have, and you knew it was for the best.

Soon enough, you and Charles stood behind the velvet curtain separating you from the rest of the rink. The couple before you were finishing their routine, as you could hear from the crowd’s applause cresting and falling with the music. You caught a glimpse of them in the gap of the curtain, arms entwined in their final pause. All you could register was the hollow buzzing that filled your body, a low thrum of adrenaline with no set destination. There was a knot in your stomach and a second beat of your heart.

Without a word, Charles slipped his pinky around yours. The faint brush of his skin steadied your breath before he even spoke. 

“What’s going on?” he whispered. “You’re quiet.”

You turned your head toward him, the sharp lights from behind the curtain casting a halo on his profile. “I think…,” you hesitated, swallowing down the obstacle in your throat. “I think I’m scared.”

He didn’t speak immediately. He simply let his pinky uncurl so he could take your whole hand into his, fingers fitting in between yours perfectly like they had a thousand times before.

“That’s normal,” he said finally. “Me too. But once we’re out there…” He trailed off, giving your hand a squeeze. “It’s going to be fine. We’ll do what we do best.”

“We’ll skate.” You felt the corner of your lips curve as you said it. The smallest exhale of a laugh slipped through your nerves.

“Exactly,” he murmured.

The world beyond the curtain audibly shifted. The music had stopped, and the crowd erupted into impatient cheers, drowning out anything Charles might have wanted to say next. The familiar voice of the presenter rose above it all.

“Next on the ice… Y/N Y/L/N and Charles Leclerc!”

Your name echoed through the arena like the ring of a bell.

Charles turned to you one last time. He brought your joined hands up, pressed a quick kiss to your knuckles. Then, with the same sure steadiness you’d come to rely on, he parted the curtains for you, you did what you now knew how to do.

You took the first step forward.