anya

You were, on the other hand, extremely good at honesty, which was how you'd ended up with three nicknames by the time you turned eighteen. The Paddock Princess. The Ice Queen of Formula 1. And, your personal favorite, coined by a tabloid that had clearly run out of better ideas: The Most Hated Woman in Motorsport.

It wasn't entirely fair. You didn't hate anyone, not really. You simply had no patience for people who wasted your time — reporters who asked the same five questions in different orders, influencers who treated team garages like content farms, drivers who thought a podium finish entitled them to be rude to catering staff. When those people did those things, you told them so. Usually in fewer words than they deserved.

Somewhere along the way, fewer words than they deserved had calcified into a personality. Into a headline. Into a face people recognized in airports and immediately associated with a Twitter thread titled 10 TIMES Y/N WAS UNHINGED.

You'd read that thread once, at two in the morning, during a particularly boring layover in Singapore. You'd laughed so hard a flight attendant asked if you were alright.

You told yourself you didn't care what the internet thought of you.

Mostly, that was true.

Melbourne in March smelled like eucalyptus and sunscreen and, underneath all of it, the faint metallic tang of brake dust that clung to Albert Park no matter how many times the support trucks hosed down the access roads. The season opener always felt like the first day of school — everyone freshly tanned from their off-season holidays, every team kit still stiff and unworn, every conversation beginning with how was your break and ending, inevitably, with someone glancing nervously toward whichever driver had switched teams over the winter.

This year, that driver was Kimi Antonelli.

You'd heard the name for months before you ever saw the face. Eighteen years old, fast-tracked out of junior categories with the kind of statistics that made veteran engineers go quiet and recalculate things. Italian, from somewhere outside Bologna, supposedly so shy in interviews that his management team had reportedly considered hiring an acting coach just to teach him how to make eye contact with a camera.

You hadn't met him yet. You also hadn't gone out of your way to.

What you had done, courtesy of three different group chats and at least one unsolicited voice memo from Priya, was hear approximately every rumor currently circulating about you that he'd apparently absorbed during his rookie orientation.

She made a journalist cry in 2022.

She told a sponsor's son his watch was fake. (It was fake. That part never made it into the story.)

She once made a grown man leave his own team's hospitality suite because he was "being insufferable near the espresso machine."

(That last one was true. You stood by it.)

"Y/n!"

You looked up from your phone to find one of the junior team assistants — Ben, you thought, though half the assistants this season were interchangeable twenty-two-year-olds in identical polos — bearing down on you with the focused urgency of someone who had just been handed an impossible task and intended to immediately hand it to someone else.

"Can you grab these for me?" he said, already pushing a cardboard tray into your arms before you'd agreed to anything.

You looked down. Six coffees. Six. Lids slightly too loose, the way they always were when the hospitality baristas were rushed.

"Where am I taking them?"

"Media center. They're setting up for the afternoon pressers and everyone's about to murder each other over caffeine."

You sighed, with great theatrical weight, the kind of sigh that had been honed over two decades of paddock life. "One day, Ben, people are going to write songs about my sacrifices."

"Nobody asked you to monologue, Y/n."

"Rude."

He was already walking away, weaving back toward the garage with the particular gait of someone whose day had not improved since 6 a.m. Typical.

You adjusted your grip on the tray and started toward the media center, which from where you stood looked deceptively close — maybe eighty meters, in a straight line, if straight lines existed anywhere in this paddock, which they did not.

The walkway between the garages and the media center was, on a good day, merely crowded. Today was not a good day. It was media day, which meant every team had simultaneously decided to funnel sponsors, broadcast crews, photographers, and at least four influencers who absolutely should not have had paddock passes through the exact same forty-meter stretch of tarmac.

You moved carefully. You'd done this a hundred times. You knew how to angle your shoulders, how to read the flow of a crowd, how to time your steps between the gaps left by camera operators swinging their rigs around.

What you did not know — what nobody could have known — was that eighteen years old and freshly arrived from his rookie media briefing, Kimi Antonelli was, at that exact moment, walking the opposite direction with his head down, reading something on his phone, having been told approximately forty times that morning to just keep your head down and you'll be fine.

Nobody had told him to also watch where he was walking.

You felt the collision before you understood it. A shoulder. A solid, unmoving wall of a person who had clearly not expected anyone to be standing where you were standing. The tray tipped. You grabbed for it — too late, too slow, your fingers closing around empty air where a coffee cup had been a half-second earlier.

Six coffees does not sound like a lot of liquid until all six are airborne at once.

"Jesus—"

The curse came from in front of you, low and startled and unmistakably masculine, followed immediately by the unmistakable sound of hot liquid making violent contact with cotton race-suit fabric.

For a moment, the entire walkway seemed to hold its breath.

You looked up.

Oh, no.

Oh, absolutely not.

Standing in front of you — close enough that you could see individual drops of coffee sliding down the fabric of his suit, close enough to see the exact moment his expression shifted from confusion to dawning horror — was Kimi Antonelli.

He was, you noted with a kind of detached, horrified clarity, taller than he looked in photos. Brown curls, damp slightly at the temples from the Melbourne heat. eyes, wide with the specific shock of a person who had just been ambushed by scalding liquid in front of several dozen photographers.

And he was  this felt like an enormous inconvenience at the time — extremely, almost unfairly attractive.

You had approximately one second to process all of this before he spoke.

"What the hell?"

His voice cracked slightly on the last word. He was eighteen. Of course it cracked.

You opened your mouth. What you meant to say — what you had fully intended to say, the words already forming, already halfway up your throat — was oh my god, I am so sorry, are you okay, let me get someone—

What came out instead, in a flat, clipped tone that didn't sound like an apology at all, was:

"Maybe look where you're walking."

The second the words left your mouth, you wanted to disappear. Not metaphorically. Actually, physically disappear, sink into the tarmac, cease to exist as a biological entity.

Because that wasn't what you'd meant. At all. It had come out wrong too sharp, too fast, the verbal equivalent of flinching and now it was just out there, hanging in the air between you, while Kimi Antonelli stared at you with an expression that suggested you had personally and deliberately ruined his entire life.

Somewhere to your left, a camera shutter clicked. Once. Then again, rapid-fire, the unmistakable sound of a photographer who had just realized they were sitting on something.

You didn't notice.

Kimi did.

You watched something close behind his eyes not anger, exactly, more like a door swinging shut. He looked down at his suit, now decorated with six separate coffee stains in various shades of brown, then back up at you.

"Right," he said.

Just that. One syllable, flat and final, in an accent that turned the word into something almost gentle even as the meaning behind it was anything but.

"Wait—" you started.

He was already walking away. Long strides, shoulders set, not looking back.

You stood there, in the middle of the walkway, holding an empty cardboard tray, while the last of the coffee dripped steadily off your knuckles onto the tarmac. Somewhere behind you, a sponsor's assistant was very obviously filming on her phone.

Fantastic.

Absolutely fantastic.

The first sign that something had gone catastrophically wrong arrived almost exactly three hours later, while you were sitting in the team hospitality suite trying to forget the entire incident had happened.

You were halfway through a plate of fruit you had no intention of eating when your phone, sitting face-down on the table, began to vibrate. And kept vibrating. In the specific, relentless way that meant something had happened, not to you, necessarily, but about you.

You flipped it over.

Forty-one notifications. Then forty-seven. Then, as you watched, the number simply stopped being readable, replaced by the small red dot that Twitter reserved for genuine emergencies.

"What happened now," you muttered, to nobody, and opened the app.

The video was eleven seconds long.

It started — you noticed this immediately, with the particular nausea of someone watching their own life get edited without their consent — after the collision. There was no Ben, no cardboard tray, no six coffees, no context whatsoever. Just you, standing very close to Kimi Antonelli, both of you frozen, coffee visibly soaking into his pristine mercedes race suit.

And then your voice. Cold. Flat. Crystal clear, because whoever had filmed this had apparently been standing close enough to capture perfect audio.

"Maybe look where you're walking."

The clip ended there. On his face. On the exact moment something in his expression closed off.

Eleven seconds. That was all it had taken.

You scrolled down, and your stomach dropped somewhere around your ankles.

#PaddockPrincess.

#JusticeForKimi

#FreeKimi.

All three, worldwide trends. Within three hours. On media day, the single most heavily covered, heavily quoted, heavily screenshotted day of the entire Grand Prix weekend.

The comments were not kind.

she's so rude omg

poor baby didn't even do anything

this is literally his FIRST media day and she's already terrorizing him

i've heard stories about her for years. guess they were all true

someone protect this man

You put your phone face-down on the table again, very gently, and pressed both hands over your eyes.

"Kill me," you said, to the fruit plate.

"Oh, we're not doing that," said a familiar voice, entirely too cheerful. "But we are going to enjoy this immensely."

You looked up. Three drivers — two from midfield teams, one from a team near the back of the grid who had clearly decided his Friday was free enough to dedicate entirely to your humiliation — had gathered around a phone two tables away, and at least one of them was now grinning directly at you with the unrestrained delight of a man who had found the best possible use of his afternoon.

"Oh, look," he said, to his companions, loudly enough for the whole suite to hear. "Public Enemy Number One has arrived."

"You people are insufferable," you said.

"Twitter hates you," said the second driver, not unkindly, scrolling his phone with one hand while eating a croissant with the other.

"Twitter hates everyone."

"Fair point," he conceded, through a mouthful of pastry.

You picked up the nearest object — a half-full water bottle — and threw it with the precision of someone who had spent twenty-three years perfecting exactly this gesture. It missed, sailing well wide and bouncing harmlessly off a sofa cushion, which only made the entire group dissolve into the kind of laughter that drew looks from across the room.

You put your head back down on the table and stayed there.

Across the paddock, in a media room that smelled faintly of new carpet and old coffee—ironic, you would think later, when you found out about this part, Kimi Antonelli sat very still in a folding chair while his manager, Marco Esposito, paced in front of him with the energy of a man trying not to say something he'd regret.

"Stop reading the comments," Marco said, for the third time.

"I'm not."

"You are. I can see your eyes moving."

Kimi didn't look up. On the screen, the eleven-second clip played again. And again. He'd lost count of how many times.

He had heard about you before he'd even signed his contract. Everyone had told him, in the careful, slightly amused tone people used when they were enjoying themselves at someone else's expense: Watch out for the team principal's daughter. She'll eat you alive if you give her the chance. He'd assumed it was paddock folklore — the kind of story that got more dramatic with every retelling, the way stories about brake failures and team radio meltdowns always did.

Then he'd walked face-first into six coffees, and the most famous woman in the paddock had looked him directly in the eyes and told him to watch where he was going, in a tone that suggested she'd been personally inconvenienced by his existence.

So. Maybe the rumors were accurate after all.

"She's exactly as bad as everyone said," he said quietly, mostly to himself.

Marco, for once, didn't argue.

What neither of them knew — what nobody in that media room could possibly have known — was that at that exact moment, in a different building entirely, you were scrolling through a separate, much smaller corner of the internet. Not the trending tags. Not the hashtags with your name in them.

You were looking at his pre-season interview. The one where he'd been so nervous his hands wouldn't stay still, where he'd laughed at his own mistake halfway through a sentence and then looked almost betrayed by his own laughter, like he hadn't expected to be capable of it on camera.

And you were thinking — with the specific, horrified clarity of someone realizing something deeply unhelpful at the worst possible time — that Kimi Antonelli had, without question, the prettiest smile you had ever seen on a person who currently, very justifiably, hated you.

The season had not even properly started yet.

This, you thought, putting your phone face-down for the second time that day, was going to be a problem.

The internet, you had learned over the years, did not have a memory problem. If anything, it remembered things with a kind of vindictive precision that made elephants look forgetful.

Two weeks after what certain journalists had, with admirable restraint, begun calling Coffee-Gate, the clip was still everywhere. It had been remixed with dramatic orchestral music. It had been slowed down so that the coffee appeared to fly through the air in elegant, glittering arcs while Kimi's face contorted in horror frame by frame. Someone had set it to a sad piano cover of a pop song, and that version alone had four million views.

You hated that the piano one made you laugh. You hated it every single time, and you watched it every single time anyway.

"You know," your father said, from the doorway of his office, in the particular tone he used when he was about to say something he already knew you wouldn't like, "if you apologized publicly, this would probably go away."

You didn't look up from your phone. "For something that was an accident?"

"You did tell him to watch where he was walking."

"Because he walked into me."

"You don't exactly sound innocent when you say it like that."

"I am innocent."

"You sound guilty."

"You sound annoying."

Toto Wolff — team principal, thirteen years in the paddock, a man who had survived eight championship battles, two engine supplier disputes, and one memorably disastrous sponsor dinner involving a llama — grinned at you with the specific delight of a father who knew exactly how to needle his only child.

You picked up the nearest pen and threw it at him.

He caught it without even looking, the same way he'd been catching things you threw at him since you were seven years old.

"You're lucky you're my favorite child," he said.

"I'm your only child."

"Exactly."

You rolled your eyes so hard it was practically audible. Before you could fire back, there was a knock on the doorframe — one of the PR team, tablet in hand, wearing the slightly harried expression that was standard issue for anyone in PR during a race weekend.

"Everyone's gathering for the welcome announcement," she said. "Five minutes."

Your father sighed, the long, theatrical sigh of a man about to spend forty-five minutes pretending he enjoyed small talk with sponsors. "Time to go pretend I like people."

You stood immediately. "Perfect. I'll stay here."

"No. You're coming."

"Why?"

"Because if I have to suffer, you have to suffer."

You hated it when he made valid points. You hated it more that it kept happening.

The paddock had a particular energy when something was about to happen — a kind of low electric hum, conversations trailing off mid-sentence, people glancing toward the media center every few seconds like they were waiting for a storm to arrive. You felt it the moment you stepped outside, and it took you about thirty seconds to figure out why.

A new presenter was joining the broadcast team. Rumors had been circulating for weeks — someone big, people kept saying, someone Netflix is apparently obsessed with — but nobody had a name, and nobody had a face, which in a paddock this size was practically unheard of. Information didn't survive that long without leaking. Whoever this was, someone had clearly worked very hard to keep her arrival a secret.

You found out why the moment she walked into the media center.

She was, in the most literal and clinical sense, breathtaking. Long dark hair that moved like it had been individually choreographed. A smile that looked effortless in the way that only came from years of very expensive practice. The kind of posture that made you instinctively check your own.

Within ninety seconds, every single person in the room had reorganized themselves around her like iron filings around a magnet. Drivers who normally treated press obligations like dental appointments were suddenly enthusiastically introducing themselves. Team principals — your father included, you noted with deep betrayal — were laughing at things she said before she'd finished saying them.

"That's a red flag," said a voice beside you.

You turned. One of the senior journalists — a woman who'd covered the sport longer than you'd been alive, and who you genuinely liked, mostly because she found almost everything exhausting in the exact same way you did — was watching the new presenter with the flat, assessing stare of someone pricing a used car.

"What is?" you asked.

"Anyone that immediately likeable."

"That's ridiculous."

"Name one person that charming who wasn't secretly a nightmare."

You opened your mouth. Then you thought about it for slightly longer than you'd intended to, and closed it again.

The journalist nodded, satisfied, and went back to her notes.

You were halfway through formulating an exit strategy — out the side door, past catering, gone before anyone noticed — when the new presenter appeared directly in front of you, as though she'd been waiting for exactly this moment.

"You're Y/n," she said. Not a question. A statement, delivered with the easy confidence of someone reading a name tag that wasn't there.

"The infamous one," you said, offering the kind of polite smile you reserved for people you hadn't yet decided whether to dislike.

Her eyes — dark, warm, entirely too sharp for the soft smile that accompanied them — lit up. "Oh, I know."

That was an interesting response. Most people, when meeting you for the first time, did one of two things: pretended they hadn't heard the rumors, or apologized for them on your behalf, as though you needed defending from your own reputation. Nobody usually just... agreed.

"Should I be worried?" you asked, folding your arms.

"Only if you're planning to spill coffee on me." Her smile widened, just slightly, just enough to show she'd done her research. "Sofia, by the way. Sofia Moretti."

"Good luck out there," you said, meaning please leave.

"Thanks." Sofia leaned in, just a fraction, lowering her voice to something that sounded almost confiding. "I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot of each other."

And then she was gone — already turning, already smiling at someone else, leaving you standing there with the distinct, prickling sensation of having just been sized up by something that smiled while it did it.

You weren't sure why that sentence felt like a threat.

You just knew that it did.

Within a month, Sofia Moretti was everywhere.

Not in the way most new hires were everywhere — gradually, awkwardly, learning the rhythms of the paddock one stumble at a time. She arrived fully formed, like she'd been broadcasting Formula 1 for a decade already. She knew which drivers liked being teased and which ones needed careful handling. She knew exactly which angle made every garage look most cinematic. She knew, somehow, within days, things about people that took most journalists years to learn.

The fans adored her instantly. The broadcasters adored her. The drivers — most of them, anyway — adored her, because she made interviews feel like conversations instead of interrogations.

And Kimi Antonelli, for reasons that became increasingly, infuriatingly clear over the following weeks, adored her most of all.

Or — that wasn't quite right. Adored wasn't the word. What was actually happening, as far as you could tell from a careful, definitely-not-obsessive distance, was that Sofia had simply decided Kimi was interesting content, and Kimi — eighteen, painfully shy, allergic to cameras — had apparently found in Sofia the one person in the entire paddock who didn't make him visibly nervous.

Which meant Sofia was around him. Constantly. Every interview, every garage walk-through, every casual hospitality shot that ended up on a broadcast highlight reel somehow featured both of them.

You noticed this.

Not because you cared. Obviously. You had several hundred other things to think about, none of which were the scheduling overlap between a television presenter and a teenager who currently believed you were the worst person in the sport.

"You're staring," said Priya, sliding into the seat across from you with the smug, unhurried confidence of someone who had been planning this sentence for several minutes.

You nearly choked on your coffee — a different coffee, a much more carefully guarded coffee, one you were holding with both hands like it might escape. "I am not."

"You are."

"I was reading something."

"You were staring directly over your phone at Sofia and Kimi."

"They're standing right there. It's not staring if they're right there."

"Mm." Priya leaned back, folding her arms with the air of someone settling in for a show. "Convenient that they're always right there, isn't it."

You glared at her. She looked, if anything, more delighted.

Across the hospitality area, Sofia was mid-interview, leaning toward Kimi with the easy, practiced intimacy of someone who'd known him for years instead of weeks. Kimi who in his own driver-only interviews still occasionally forgot to look at the camera seemed, against all expectation, relaxed. He laughed at something she said. An actual laugh, not the nervous, too-quick laugh he gave journalists when he didn't understand the question.

It annoyed you. You weren't sure why. You filed the feeling away somewhere you wouldn't have to look at it again.

The internet, predictably, had Opinions.

It started small, a comment here, a slow-motion gif there. Then it became fan edits, stitched together with sweeping music, of every time Sofia and Kimi had stood within five feet of each other. Then it became theories. Then someone, you genuinely could not believe this had taken actual effort, produced a twelve-slide presentation titled WHY SOFIA & Kimi ARE ENDGAME (a thread), the evidence for which included: they stood near each other, they smiled at the same time, and, devastatingly, they were photographed in the same building on three separate occasions.

You watched the entire presentation. Twice. You told yourself it was for research purposes.

That night, lying in bed scrolling through your phone with the specific, self-destructive energy of someone who knew they should put the phone down and was choosing not to, a new video appeared in your feed. Sofia and Kimi, leaving the paddock together at the end of the day, walking side by side toward the parking area.

The comments were already in the thousands.

formula 1's new power couple !!

i'm sobbing they're so cute

sofia is literally perfect for him

You watched the video once. and you genuinely could not explain this part, even to yourself you watched it a second time. Then a third.

Then you put the phone face-down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling, which, as ceilings tended to do, offered absolutely no useful information.

What are you doing, you thought. Why do you care? Why are you even thinking about him.

The ceiling had no answers. Your brain, unfortunately, did  and the answer it kept circling back to, against every instinct you had, was his laugh. The real one. The one he'd given Sofia that afternoon, easy and unguarded, the kind of laugh you'd never once heard directed at you.

Which was, you reflected, an extraordinarily inconvenient thing to be thinking about, given that as far as Kimi Antonelli was concerned, you were still  and would likely remain, Public Enemy Number One.

And as far as you were concerned, lying awake at midnight for reasons you refused to examine too closely, Sofia Moretti was rapidly becoming a problem.

You just couldn't, yet, have explained why.

There were exactly three things Kimi Antonelli was afraid of.

Media interviews. Public speaking. And, somewhere just below those two, the specific and very modern horror of accidentally becoming a meme.

Formula 1, it seemed, had taken one look at this list and decided to expose him to all three on a rotating weekly basis.

This particular disaster began, with the kind of precision that would later feel almost cosmically unfair, at exactly 3:17 a.m.

He couldn't sleep. This wasn't unusual — the nights before a race weekend rarely were restful, his mind running through corner sequences and braking points on a loop that refused to switch off — but tonight felt different. Heavier. His brain kept circling back not to apexes or gear ratios, but to the Sofia situation, which had, somewhere in the last few weeks, stopped being merely strange and become genuinely exhausting.

Every interview with her generated headlines. Every photo generated theories. He didn't understand it — didn't understand where people found the energy — and the not-understanding kept him staring at the ceiling of his hotel room long after he should have been asleep.

Eventually, in the specific kind of boredom that only exists at three in the morning, he reached for his phone.

This was, in retrospect, a mistake.

Boredom led to scrolling. Scrolling led to Instagram. Instagram led, somehow — and he genuinely could not have explained the chain of logic that got him there — to your profile.

He told himself, as he scrolled, that he wasn't looking for anything in particular. He was simply curious. Because nothing about you added up. Everyone — everyone — had told him you were cold. Difficult. The kind of person who'd make a journalist cry for sport.

But every time he actually saw you in the paddock — not the version of you that ended up in clips, but the real, unscripted version — you were doing things that didn't fit the story at all. Helping mechanics carry equipment across the garage when your hands were clearly not needed for it. Sitting with exhausted junior engineers during a late debrief, handing out the last of the snacks from catering before anyone else could claim them. Once, memorably, you'd spent ten minutes crouched next to a sponsor's child who'd gotten separated from her parents, talking to her about her favorite cartoon in a voice so gentle he almost hadn't recognized it as yours.

None of it matched. And Kimi — who liked things to match — found that bothered him more than it probably should have.

So he scrolled.

One photo became two. Two became ten. Ten became twenty, and somewhere around photo number thirty-one — a photo from, he would later discover with a sinking feeling, exactly four years ago — his thumb slipped.

The screen flashed red.

For one full second, his brain simply refused to process what had happened.

Then it caught up.

"No," he whispered, to an empty hotel room, and unliked the photo so fast his thumb nearly went through the screen.

The damage, of course, was already done.

The first person to notice was a fan account with maybe four hundred followers.

The second person to notice was a fan account with four hundred thousand followers, who reposted the screenshot with the caption HE LIKED A PHOTO FROM FOUR YEARS AGO?? AT 3 AM??

By 3:26, there were screenshots. By 3:30, Formula 1 Twitter — which apparently never slept, a fact you found genuinely concerning — was on fire. By 4:00 a.m., there were no fewer than three competing conspiracy theories, one of which involved a timeline. By breakfast, the entire sport had collectively lost what remained of its mind.

You discovered all of this at 8:14 a.m., when your phone began vibrating against the bedside table with such aggression that it nearly walked itself off the edge.

You groaned, reached for it without opening your eyes, and immediately regretted every choice that had led to this moment.

Ninety-three notifications. Forty-seven messages. Two missed calls from Priya, which was never a good sign, because Priya did not call people — Priya sent voice memos that were somehow louder and more aggressive than an actual phone call.

"What happened now," you mumbled, and opened the group chat.

The first message read: OH MY GOD.

The second: WAKE UP RIGHT NOW.

The third was simply seventeen crying-laughing emojis in a row, followed by a screenshot.

You opened it.

And nearly dropped the phone directly onto your own face.

There it was. Clear as day, timestamped, unmistakable. A photo from your account — four years old, you in sunglasses at some long-forgotten test day, nothing remarkable about it at all — and beneath it, in the little row of recent likes:

liked by kimi.antonelli and others

3:17 AM

You stared at it. Blinked. Stared again. Then sat bolt upright in bed so fast the duvet went flying.

"No way."

You opened Instagram directly. The like was gone — unliked, presumably the moment he'd realized — but the internet did not believe in second chances, and screenshots, as you well knew, lived forever.

The comments beneath the repost were already feral.

HE WAS STALKING HER ACCOUNT???

FOUR YEARS AGO?? BRO WAS DEEP DIVING

someone check on this man immediately

THIS IS SO EMBARRASSING I CAN'T

You laughed.

A small laugh, at first — almost reflexive. Then another. Then, helplessly, you were laughing so hard you had to set the phone down on the duvet and press both hands over your face, because the image in your head — Kimi Antonelli, eighteen years old, alone in a hotel room at three in the morning, scrolling through four-year-old photos of you — was simply too much. The poor guy. The absolute, certified, undeniable poor guy.

You laughed until your eyes watered. You hadn't laughed like that in months.

The paddock that morning had the specific, electric energy of a place where everyone had heard the same piece of gossip and nobody could stop talking about it.

Drivers. Journalists. Team principals. Mechanics. Even the catering staff  you discovered, with no small amount of horrorf, one of whom gave you a knowing little smile as she handed you your usual breakfast that made it abundantly clear she, too, had seen the screenshot.

You walked into hospitality and were greeted, almost immediately, by a chorus of cheering from a table of drivers that included — inevitably — Oliver Bearman, who you'd long ago categorized as Kimi's friend, troublemaker division.

"Oh, she's here," Ollie announced, to the table, with the delight of a man who had clearly been waiting all morning for this exact moment.

"Don't," you said, already backing away.

"Oh, we're absolutely doing this."

"I hate every single one of you."

"We know," he said cheerfully, and held up his phone, displaying the screenshot, as the rest of the table dissolved into laughter. "Imagine accidentally liking a photo from four years ago."

"Couldn't be me," said the driver beside him, shaking his head with mock solemnity.

"Couldn't be anyone with dignity," Ollie agreed.

"Couldn't be anyone with survival instincts," added a third, and that was the one that finally broke the table entirely — even you, despite yourself, felt your mouth twitch.

You grabbed the nearest napkin dispenser and threw it, mostly out of principle. It missed by a wide margin and skittered harmlessly under a sofa, which only made things worse.

If your morning was bad, Kimi's was significantly worse.

He had never, in his entire eighteen years of existence, experienced true humiliation until that day. Everywhere he went, people smiled at him — not normal smiles, but the specific, knowing kind of smile people gave you when they were sitting on something embarrassing and waiting for the right moment to bring it up.

He walked into the morning drivers' briefing. Someone, somewhere near the back, coughed once, and said, with theatrical clarity:

"Three seventeen."

The entire room laughed. Even the stewards.

By the time he reached his media obligations that afternoon, he had developed the slightly hunted look of a man who had accepted his fate but was not yet ready to discuss it.

A journalist raised a hand. "Kimi — any comment on the recent social media activity?"

The room went very quiet. Marco, standing just off-camera, looked like a man calculating exactly how many years he had left before retirement.

"No," Kimi said.

Immediate. Flat. Final.

The journalist, delighted, opened her mouth to follow up. Kimi had already turned to the next question, jaw set, ears slowly turning the color of a brake disc at full temperature.

Fate, it seemed, had decided that wasn't quite enough.

Because that afternoon, walking between the garage and the paddock club — not paying attention, again, some things never changed — you rounded a corner and nearly collided with him.

Not as dramatically as the first time. No coffee, no cardboard tray, no eleven-second clip in the making. Just both of you, stopping short, a foot apart, in a quiet stretch of corridor where — for once — nobody else happened to be looking.

For a moment, neither of you said anything.

Then you noticed how tired he looked. The internet had spent twelve hours bullying him, after all — there were faint shadows under his eyes, and his shoulders had the particular set of someone who'd been holding himself very carefully all day, waiting for the next joke.

You bit down on your lip. Hard. Trying — and failing — not to smile.

His eyes narrowed the instant he saw it. "No."

That, somehow, made it worse. A laugh escaped before you could stop it. Then another.

"Oh my god."

"No."

"I actually feel bad for you."

"You don't."

"I really don't," you admitted, and laughed again, and his expression shifted from wounded to something that looked, almost, like it was fighting not to be amused.

"You liked a photo from four years ago," you said, delightedly.

"It was an accident."

"Sure."

"It was."

"Mm-hm."

"It was, Y/n."

You nodded, slow and exaggerated, the way you'd nod at a toddler insisting they hadn't drawn on the wall. "I totally believe you."

He groaned — an actual groan, dragging a hand down his face — and you laughed again, harder this time, and something about the sound of it seemed to catch him off guard. He looked at you properly then, like he was seeing something he hadn't expected to find.

Because you looked different when you laughed. Softer. Warmer. Nothing at all like the clipped, cold voice from that eleven-second clip that the entire internet had decided defined you.

The realization caught him off guard. He didn't say anything about it. But for the first time since the coffee disaster, the interaction ended with both of you — however reluctantly — smiling.

Neither of you noticed the photographer at the end of the corridor until it was too late.

By the time you reached your office, the photo was already online: the two of you, mid-laugh, close together, lit by the warm gold of the afternoon. The captions were instantaneous.

wait they're actually... friends??

the chemistry??

i need answers

Someone, inevitably, uploaded a thirty-two-minute video essay titled "The Hidden Truth Behind Kimi Antonelli's 3 AM Like." You watched ten minutes of it before you were laughing too hard to continue.

Somewhere else in the paddock, Kimi buried his face in a pillow and seriously considered a career change.

And somewhere else again — on a balcony overlooking the paddock, drink in hand, watching the whole thing unfold on her phone with the patient attention of someone reading a very interesting book — Sofia Moretti smiled.

A slow smile. Thoughtful.

Because she'd just noticed something. The internet, it turned out, wasn't actually all that interested in her and Kimi. Not really. The fan edits, the theories, the twelve-slide presentations — none of it had generated even a fraction of the reaction that eleven seconds of you laughing in a corridor had just produced.

The story the internet wanted wasn't Sofia and Kimi.

It was you. And him.

And Sofia Moretti had never, in her entire career, been the type of person to ignore a good story.

—--------------

Monaco was always chaos. Beautiful, expensive, completely unmanageable chaos — the kind of chaos that arrived every May with the reliability of a tide and left the entire paddock slightly dazed in its wake.

The streets were impossibly narrow and impossibly packed, lined with superyachts so enormous they made the harbor itself look like a bathtub. Celebrities appeared out of nowhere, trailing entourages the size of small security details. Influencers multiplied like an invasive species, all of them apparently under the impression that the paddock club was a backdrop rather than a workplace. The air smelled like sunscreen and champagne and, faintly, diesel from the support boats idling in the harbor.

You hated Monaco. Which was, you reflected every single year, exactly why you found yourself there, without fail, every May.

The paddock was already buzzing when you arrived Friday morning — not with the usual pre-session energy, but with something else. Something quieter, more conspiratorial. People were checking their phones with a frequency that suggested everyone already knew something you didn't.

You'd made it about ten steps inside the gate when Priya appeared at your elbow, practically vibrating.

"Have you seen it?"

You sighed. "No."

"You should."

That sentence, in your experience, had never once led anywhere good. You took the phone anyway.

The photo loaded slowly — blurry, grainy, clearly taken from a significant distance with a long lens. A yacht, anchored in the harbor among a hundred identical yachts. Two figures on the deck, standing close together. Very close together. Close enough, from this angle, in this light, that it looked — unmistakably — like they were kissing.

The caption left nothing to the imagination.

Kimi Antonelli and Sofia Moretti. Confirmed?

Something in your chest did something small and unpleasant and entirely uninvited.

"Oh," you said.

Priya, predictably, caught it instantly. "Oh?"

"Shut up."

"That sounded jealous."

"It wasn't."

"It absolutely was."

You handed the phone back — slightly too quickly, you realized a half-second too late — and Priya's expression went from delighted to radiant, which meant this conversation, unfortunately, was far from over.

The photo was everywhere within hours. Fan accounts celebrated. TikTok edits multiplied — slow zooms, dramatic music, the works. By that evening, two separate tabloids had run relationship timelines, complete with helpfully annotated screenshots dating back months. Somebody had even produced a graphic ranking the "evidence" on a scale from suspicious to confirmed, and the yacht photo sat firmly at the top, glowing red.

Nobody seemed remotely concerned about whether it was true. The story was simply too good. Reality, you'd learned long ago, was always optional when a better narrative was available.

You told yourself you didn't care.

You told yourself this, in fact, with increasing frequency and decreasing conviction, for most of the afternoon.

"You're staring again," Priya said, several hours later, sliding into the seat across from you on the terrace with the particular smugness of someone who had been counting.

You nearly dropped your phone. "I wasn't."

"You've looked at that photo six times in the last ten minutes."

"I was reading the comments."

"Liar."

You glared. Priya, entirely unbothered, leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, settling in with the relaxed confidence of someone who already knew exactly how this conversation was going to go.

"Do you like him?"

"No."

"That was fast."

"Because the answer is no."

"Interesting," Priya said, in the mild, conversational tone of someone discussing the weather.

"What's interesting?"

"People usually need at least a second to think about it."

You wanted, very badly, to throw your drink at her. Unfortunately, she'd made an irritatingly valid point — and the fact that it was valid made it so much worse.

The truth, if you were being honest with yourself — which you were determined not to be, for as long as humanly possible — was that something about the photo bothered you. Not because Kimi couldn't date whoever he wanted. Obviously he could. You had no claim on him. No reason to care. None at all.

And yet every time you looked at that blurry, distant image, something in your chest twisted, uncomfortably, in a way you didn't enjoy and didn't have a name for.

Except you did have a name for it. You just weren't ready to say it out loud.

Jealousy. Plain, embarrassing jealousy — and especially embarrassing given that the person in question barely tolerated being in the same room as you.

Kimi's day had not been any better.

He'd walked into the paddock that morning to a chorus of congratulations — from drivers, engineers, even a few sponsors he barely knew — and had absolutely no idea why, until someone finally showed him the photo. He'd nearly walked into a support pillar.

"What?" he said.

The driver beside him — grinning, delighted — pointed at the screen. "You and Sofia."

"What about us?"

"The yacht."

"What yacht?"

"The kiss, Kimi."

Kimi took the phone. Stared at it. Then stared harder, because the man in the photo — close up, in better lighting, on a different screen — very clearly was not him. The hair was wrong. The build was wrong. The entire person was wrong.

"This isn't me."

The driver was laughing too hard to respond.

Kimi felt the beginnings of a headache forming directly behind his eyes.

To make matters worse, Sofia — when a journalist had asked her about the photo during an interview that afternoon — had simply smiled, the same perfectly practiced smile she gave everything, and said: "People can believe whatever they want."

She hadn't denied it.

That, apparently, was all the internet needed.

By the time evening fell, you'd retreated to one of the team's private balconies — a small, quiet stretch of stone overlooking the harbor, mostly used by exhausted engineers who needed five minutes away from the noise. The city glittered below, a thousand lights reflected and doubled in the black water, and somewhere down there, on one of those impossibly bright yachts, was the photograph that had ruined your evening.

You weren't thinking about it. You were definitely not thinking about it.

"You're hiding."

You very nearly fell off the railing.

You turned, and there he was — Kimi, hands in his pockets, looking, infuriatingly, even better than usual in the warm evening light. You were beginning to suspect he did that on purpose.

"I'm not hiding."

"You are."

"I'm sitting."

"Alone. On a balcony. Where nobody can see you."

"You found me."

"Unfortunately," he said, and the corner of his mouth twitched — and then, before he seemed to fully decide to let it, he was actually smiling. A real one. The kind that transformed his whole face, the kind you'd only seen directed at Sofia, until now.

For a moment, neither of you said anything. The city hummed below — music drifting up from somewhere, the low rumble of boat engines, distant laughter from a party on one of the yachts. It should have been awkward. It wasn't.

Then, against your better judgment, your eyes drifted toward the harbor. Toward the yachts. Toward the source of the entire disaster.

Kimi noticed immediately. Of course he did.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"You looked at the yachts."

"So?"

His eyes narrowed — and then widened, slightly, and then — to your absolute horror — he started to smile again. A different smile this time. Slower. More dangerous.

"No," you said, before he could say anything.

"Are you jealous?"

"What?"

"You're jealous."

"I am not."

"You are."

"I'm literally not—"

His grin widened. The absolute, unbearable idiot.

"There's nothing to be jealous about," you said, and the words came out sharper than you meant them to, faster than you meant them to — and the second they left your mouth, his grin vanished. Completely. Like a light switching off.

"...What?" he said, quieter.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Now it was his turn to look confused — and in the silence that followed, something clicked into place in your head, slowly, horribly, with the particular dawning dread of realizing you'd missed something obvious.

"Wait."

Kimi groaned, and put his face in his hands. "Oh, no."

"The guy in the photo — that's not even you."

Silence.

More silence.

And then you started laughing — properly laughing, the kind that bent you forward — because of course it wasn't him, of course the entire internet had spent an entire day insisting Kimi Antonelli was secretly dating Sofia Moretti based on a blurry photo of a man who wasn't even Kimi Antonelli, and somehow, in the chaos of it all, neither of you had bothered to check that detail until right now.

"You figured it out," he said, muffled, from behind his hands.

"It took me about two seconds."

"I hate this sport."

You laughed harder. The sound carried out over the water, and for the first time all weekend, Kimi found himself laughing too — quietly at first, then properly, shoulders shaking, leaning against the railing beside you like the tension of the entire day had simply drained out of him.

Because somehow — somehow — the fact that you'd noticed, that you'd cared enough to figure it out, made something in his chest go warm in a way he didn't have a word for either.

Across the harbor, on another balcony, Sofia Moretti stood with a glass of champagne she hadn't touched in twenty minutes, watching.

Not the conversation itself. She couldn't hear it from here. But she could see the shape of it — the way Kimi had turned toward you, the way you'd both doubled over laughing, the easy, unguarded warmth of two people who had, somewhere in the last few months, stopped performing for each other.

She'd seen a lot of things in her career. She recognized this one immediately.

For a long moment, she simply watched. Then, slowly, she smiled — a thoughtful smile, the kind that usually meant trouble for somebody.

Because if there was one thing Sofia Moretti understood better than almost anyone in this paddock, it was attention. And right now, watching the two of you across the water, she understood something else, too.

The story the internet thought it wanted — her and Kimi — had never really been the story at all.

The real story was standing right there, laughing on a balcony, with absolutely no idea it had just been discovered.

And Sofia was already wondering exactly how far that story could go.

If there was one thing Formula 1 loved more than racing, it was drama. And if there was one thing the streaming documentary crews following the season loved more than Formula 1, it was turning that drama into content.

Which was how, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday morning three weeks after Monaco, you found yourself staring at an email that would ruin your entire month.

You knew it was bad before you'd even opened it. You knew it was bad because your father was laughing. Actually laughing — not the polite, diplomatic chuckle he used in sponsor meetings, but a real, helpless laugh, the kind that meant something had gone catastrophically, hilariously wrong for someone who was not him.

"What," you said, flatly, before you'd even sat down.

He slid his tablet across the desk without a word, still grinning.

You read the email. Then you read it again, slower, in case the first reading had been some kind of fever dream brought on by jet lag. It hadn't been.

Subject: Exciting New Feature — Rising Stars of the Grid

The streaming team — the same one whose cameras had been quietly embedded throughout the paddock all season, capturing footage for the kind of glossy, slow-motion-heavy documentary series that turned mid-pack rivalries into Shakespearean tragedies — wanted to produce a special feature. A behind-the-scenes look at the personalities shaping the sport's future. Three days of filming. Exclusive access.

Co-starring, the email specified, with the kind of breezy confidence that suggested someone had already decided this was happening regardless of what either of you thought about it:

Kimi Antonelli and Y/n.

You contemplated, briefly and seriously, setting yourself on fire.

"No," you said.

Your father grinned wider. "Oh, yes."

"No."

"You don't have a choice."

"Watch me."

"You signed the media participation agreement at the start of the season, sweetheart. Page eleven. I believe you initialed it twice."

You hated contracts. Specifically, you hated the ones you'd signed without reading, three years running, because you'd been distracted by a sponsor argument happening in the next room at the time.

"This is a violation of my human rights," you said.

"It's a documentary."

"It's psychological warfare."

—---------------------------

Kimi's reaction, when Marco delivered the news, was — by all accounts, and you heard about this secondhand from at least four separate sources within the hour — even less measured than yours.

"Absolutely not," he said.

"You have to," Marco said, with the patient weariness of a man who had said this sentence approximately four hundred times this season alone.

"I don't."

"You literally do, Kimi. It's contractual."

"I can disappear."

"You're a Formula 1 driver. People will notice."

"I'll become a farmer."

"You grew up in Bologna."

"I'll learn," Kimi said, with the grim determination of a man already mentally relocating to a remote olive grove.

Marco closed his eyes and breathed in slowly through his nose, the way he did before every single conversation that involved your name and his driver's reaction to it in the same sentence.

Filming began in Barcelona, three days later, in a section of the paddock that had been transformed — almost unrecognizably — into a small production studio. Lighting rigs. Microphone stands. A small army of crew members in matching black t-shirts, all of them moving with the brisk, over-caffeinated energy of people who had been awake since 4 a.m. and intended to stay that way.

At the center of it all stood a man who introduced himself, with the enthusiasm of someone announcing the discovery of a new planet, as Jonas Berg — senior producer, executive in charge of, as far as you could tell, everything, and possessor of the single most relentlessly positive personality you had ever encountered in your life.

"Perfect," he said, the moment you and Kimi were both standing in front of him.

Neither of you had said a word.

"Oh, this is going to be fantastic," Jonas said, beaming, clapping his hands together once, and the sentence settled over both of you with the weight of a verdict.

The first interview was, by any reasonable definition, a disaster.

"Describe each other," Jonas said, leaning forward in his director's chair with the eagerness of a man who had clearly been waiting all morning for exactly this question, "in one word."

You groaned. Kimi closed his eyes.

"Come on," Jonas said. "Just one word each."

"No," you said.

"Please."

"No."

"Just one word!"

You folded your arms. Kimi looked very deliberately at a point on the wall slightly to the left of the camera, the way he did during press conferences when he was trying to disappear without technically leaving the room.

Jonas, to his credit, did not surrender. Jonas, you would learn over the following three days, never surrendered.

Finally — mostly because the silence had gone on so long it had become its own kind of torture — you sighed.

"Awkward," you said.

The crew burst out laughing. Somewhere behind a camera, someone actually applauded, quietly.

Kimi's eyes snapped open. "You can't say that."

"It's true."

"You spilled coffee on me."

"That was months ago."

"Trauma lasts forever," he said, with the kind of deadpan delivery that took you completely off guard — and the crew loved it, loved it so visibly that you could practically see dollar signs reflected in Jonas's eyes.

You glanced sideways at Kimi. He glanced back. For a half-second, something flickered between you — something that felt, almost, like the beginning of a private joke.

Then the camera operator said, "Got it, got it, that's great," and the moment dissolved into the general chaos of the set resetting for the next shot.

The three days that followed forced you together in a way nothing else ever had.

Garage walkthroughs, where you were instructed to "just talk naturally" while a camera crew trailed three feet behind you, capturing your every word. Joint interviews, in which Jonas asked increasingly absurd questions — if you were stranded on a desert island together, who would build the shelter — apparently in the hope that one of you would say something quotable. Promotional shoots for a sponsor neither of you had ever heard of, which involved both of you standing slightly too close together in front of a branded backdrop while a photographer shouted things like "more chemistry, please!" with absolutely no sense of irony.

At first, it was unbearable.

By the second day, it was merely annoying.

By the third day — and this was the part that genuinely alarmed you — it had become, somehow, almost comfortable.

It happened on the afternoon of the second day, during one of the long gaps between filming setups. The crew had vanished — gone to reset lights, or argue about angles, or whatever it was documentary crews did when they disappeared for forty-five minutes at a time — and for the first time in two days, nobody was watching either of you.

The silence wasn't awkward. It was just quiet. Comfortable, even, in the way silences sometimes were when neither person felt obligated to fill them.

You glanced over. Kimi was staring at his phone, frowning, with the specific intensity of a man fighting a losing battle against modern technology.

"What?" you asked.

He looked up. "What?"

"You're making that face."

"What face?"

"The one where you're losing an argument with your phone."

"I'm not."

"You absolutely are."

His expression — which had not changed at all — confirmed it. You leaned over, glanced at his screen, and immediately spotted the problem.

You burst out laughing.

"Oh my god."

"What?"

"Your brightness has been on zero for the last ten minutes."

The realization landed slowly. Then all at once. Kimi looked down at his screen — at the faint, barely visible outline of an app he'd apparently been trying to open in the dark for ten full minutes — and put his face in his hands.

"Don't tell anyone."

"I'm telling everyone."

"Please."

"No."

And then, somehow — you weren't entirely sure how, except that his muffled groan from behind his hands was so genuinely, helplessly embarrassed that it was simply funny — both of you were laughing. Properly laughing, the kind that made your stomach hurt, the kind that drew a few curious glances from crew members resetting equipment nearby.

It felt natural. Effortless. Not performed for a camera, not engineered by a producer hoping for a moment — just two people, laughing at something stupid, because it was stupid, and because somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, you'd stopped bracing yourself every time he was near.

That realization — quiet, sudden, and entirely unwelcome — was somehow more frightening than anything the internet had thrown at either of you so far.

Unfortunately, Netflix noticed everything.

Of course they did. That was, after all, the entire point of having forty cameras embedded in a paddock at all times. Every glance became a moment. Every silence became tension. One afternoon, you walked past Kimi without speaking — you were carrying coffee, he was on the phone with Marco, neither of you so much as made eye contact — and a producer standing nearby actually whispered, to a colleague, with genuine reverence:

"Did you see that? The tension."

There had been no tension. You had literally just walked past each other. The producers, it turned out, did not particularly care.

The trailer dropped two weeks later, and it was, in a word, horrifying.

Sweeping orchestral music. Slow-motion footage of you both — walking, laughing, glancing at each other across a garage. A shot of you looking at Kimi from across the paddock, captured with the kind of lingering, meaningful close-up usually reserved for romantic leads in films. You remembered that exact moment. You'd been trying to figure out whether he had ketchup on his face.

The internet did not see it that way.

THE CHEMISTRY IS INSANE.

THERE'S NO WAY THEY'RE NOT TOGETHER.

ENEMIES TO LOVERS, REAL LIFE EDITION??

YOU CANNOT FAKE THIS.

You wanted, very sincerely, to sue everyone involved in the production. You did not, mostly because your father pointed out — unhelpfully, but accurately — that you'd signed the contract twice.

Sofia watched the trailer's reception with quiet, careful interest.

Because she understood something neither you nor Kimi had quite registered yet: the conversation had moved on. The blurry yacht photo had stopped trending weeks ago. The rumors connecting her and Kimi had quietly faded into the background, replaced — entirely, completely — by a single, all-consuming story.

You. And him.

Every article. Every fan edit. Every theory thread.

Sofia watched it happen, in real time, from the comfort of her hotel room, scrolling through an endless feed of speculation about a relationship that — as far as either of its supposed participants knew — didn't exist.

And Sofia Moretti was bored.

Bored people, especially bored people who understood exactly how the media worked, were dangerous.

The final day of filming ran long. By the time the last shot wrapped, most of the paddock had already emptied for the evening — garages quiet, lights dimmed to half-power, the production crew packing equipment into cases with the brisk efficiency of people who'd been awake since dawn and had a flight to catch.

For once, there were no cameras pointed at either of you. No producers hovering nearby with clipboards. Just you and Kimi, sitting side by side on a stack of equipment cases, both of you too exhausted to move.

Neither of you spoke for a while. The silence stretched, easy, the way it had on the balcony in Monaco.

Then Kimi said, quietly: "You know."

You looked over. "What?"

He was staring at the empty garage floor, choosing his words with the careful deliberation he brought to everything — interviews, qualifying laps, apparently this too.

"I thought you hated me," he said.

The confession caught you off guard. For a moment, you just looked at him. Then you laughed — softly, this time.

"I thought you hated me."

"I did."

Your jaw dropped. "Wow."

"After the coffee thing," he said, and the corner of his mouth twitched.

"That's fair," you admitted.

"And then I realized..." He paused, and the twitch became something closer to an actual smile. "You're just weird."

"Weird?"

"Very weird."

"You're the one who accidentally stalked my Instagram," you pointed out.

His ears turned red instantly — so fast, so completely, that you started laughing all over again, and somehow, despite the three exhausting days, despite the trailer, despite everything, you couldn't quite stop.

It had become a habit, you realized. Laughing around him. Somewhere in the last few weeks, without either of you really noticing, it had become the most natural thing in the world.

Neither of you noticed the figure standing at the far end of the empty paddock — phone in hand, watching, perfectly still.

Sofia had seen enough.

If the world wanted a story, she'd decided, she was going to give them one.

And this time, the consequences wouldn't be quite so easy to laugh off.

It started, as these things so often did, with a single sentence. Seven words, delivered with a soft, knowing smile, under bright studio lights, during what should have been a perfectly ordinary live interview.

Those seven words very nearly burned the entire paddock to the ground.

Sofia sat beneath the lights with the easy poise of someone who had done this a thousand times — which, of course, she had. The audience adored her, as always. The questions were the usual mix of season recaps and lighthearted banter, nothing that should have caused even a ripple.

Then a reporter asked the question. The question. The one that had been hovering, unasked, for months.

"Kimi Antonelli," the reporter said, grinning. "Friends, or more?"

The audience laughed. Sofia laughed too — soft, practiced, exactly the kind of laugh that told you absolutely nothing while appearing to tell you everything.

"Oh, Kimi's sweet," she said.

"So nothing going on?" the reporter pressed, still smiling.

Sofia paused.

It was a small pause. Barely a breath. The kind of pause that, on camera, looked entirely natural — thoughtful, even a little wistful.

Then she smiled — a little sadly, a little knowingly — and said:

"Sometimes things get complicated when other people get involved."

Silence.

The reporter blinked. The audience blinked. And somewhere, in living rooms and phones and laptops scattered across the world, the internet drew in a single, collective breath — and then exploded.

You found out the next morning, the way you found out about most disasters: your phone, vibrating itself nearly off the nightstand, dragging you out of sleep into a wall of notifications you weren't remotely prepared for.

Your name was trending. Again. You stared at the screen, blinking, still half-asleep, and the longer you looked, the worse it got.

HOMEWRECKER.

SHE STOLE HIM.

WE ALWAYS KNEW SHE WAS FAKE.

SOFIA DESERVES BETTER THAN THIS.

You sat up so fast the room spun. "What?"

Your group chat was already a warzone. Messages arrived faster than you could read them — overlapping, urgent, half-finished.

this is insane

she KNEW exactly what she was doing when she said that

don't respond

for the love of god do NOT respond

And then, from one of the drivers, a single line that landed with the weight of a verdict:

Paddock Civil War has officially begun.

He wasn't wrong.

Within forty-eight hours, the entire online Formula 1 community had fractured into factions with the speed and intensity of a championship title fight.

Team You. Team Sofia. Team Kimi. And — by a significant margin — Team Chaos, which consisted almost entirely of people who found the entire situation, regardless of who was right, simply too entertaining to take a side.

The drivers' group chats became actual war zones. Memes leaked. Inside jokes that were never meant to leave a private chat ended up, somehow, on Twitter within hours — including one screenshot, mortifyingly, of an entire fake "championship standings" table ranking which driver supported which side, in which one of the rookies had somehow ended up in first place for reasons nobody could explain and everybody found hilarious.

The drivers, for the most part, treated it as entertainment.

The sponsors did not.

Your father stepped into your office holding a tablet, and you knew — the way you'd learned to know, over years of exactly this — that whatever was on it was bad.

"What now," you said, not even bothering to make it a question.

He set the tablet down on your desk without a word. An article filled the screen — a major sponsor, quoted, expressing concern about "ongoing online speculation" and its potential impact on brand partnerships.

Your stomach dropped.

"Oh," you said.

"Yeah," your father said, and for once, there was nothing playful in his voice at all.

The room went quiet. For the first time since this entire ridiculous saga had started — coffee, hashtags, fake yacht photos, brightness settings — the consequences felt real. This wasn't fan accounts anymore. This was contracts. Reputations. Careers that belonged to people who'd worked their entire lives to get here.

And somehow, once again, you were the villain.

The worst part — the part that kept you awake that night, staring at the ceiling of your hotel room, the same useless ceiling that had offered no answers months ago and offered none now — was that you hadn't done anything.

You hadn't posted. Hadn't commented. Hadn't said a single public word about Sofia, about Kimi, about any of it.

It hadn't mattered.

People had already decided the story. They always did. And once a story had a villain, changing the casting was nearly impossible — no matter how little evidence there had ever been to support it.

By Saturday, you'd stopped opening social media entirely. Stopped reading the articles. Stopped checking the notifications that kept arriving anyway, relentless, regardless of whether you looked at them.

You told yourself it didn't matter. That you'd survived worse. That people would move on, the way they always eventually did.

But lying there, alone, in the dark, you found yourself wondering — not for the first time, and you suspected not for the last — why it was always you. Why people found it so easy to believe the worst. Why, in three years of being the most talked-about woman in the paddock, not one single person had ever thought to ask for your side of anything.

Across the paddock, in a hotel room two floors up, Kimi was furious.

This was, by any measure, unusual. Kimi didn't get angry. He got nervous. Embarrassed, constantly. Awkward, on a near-daily basis. But angry — actually, visibly angry — was something almost nobody in the paddock had ever seen.

Every time he opened his phone, there you were. Being blamed. Mocked. Attacked — for something that, as far as he could tell, you had never done, had never even implied, and had spent the entire weekend trying very hard not to think about.

The breaking point arrived during a press conference the next afternoon.

A journalist raised his hand. "Kimi — do you think the recent tension between Sofia and Y/n has affected the atmosphere in the—"

"No."

The interruption was immediate. Sharp. The room went quiet.

The journalist blinked, recalibrated, and tried again. "But Sofia implied that—"

"Then she shouldn't have."

Marco, standing just off-camera, looked like a man who had just watched a controlled detonation go slightly, terrifyingly, off-script.

Another reporter leaned forward. "So you're saying the rumors aren't true?"

Kimi looked at him. Directly. For a long moment — long enough that the silence itself became uncomfortable.

"I'm saying," he said, slowly, evenly, every word deliberate, "that people should stop blaming Y/n for things she hasn't done."

Silence. Complete silence. Even the photographers seemed to have forgotten how their cameras worked.

Because Kimi Antonelli — the shy rookie who flinched at direct questions, who'd once spent an entire press conference staring at a fixed point on the wall — had just, calmly, publicly, on camera, taken your side.

The clip went viral within the hour. Naturally.

Fan accounts reposted it within minutes. News outlets picked it up by the afternoon. TikTok edits multiplied — thousands of them, by evening, set to everything from somber piano to triumphant orchestral swells. Some people switched sides instantly. Others dug in harder. Nobody agreed on anything.

Except one thing, which everyone — everyone — seemed to notice at exactly the same time.

Kimi clearly cared.

A lot.

Possibly — and this was the part the internet seized on with the particular ferocity reserved for its favorite new theory — more than a lot.

You found out about the clip while sitting in hospitality, and your first thought was that it had to be fake. Edited. Some kind of deepfake, surely, because there was simply no version of reality in which Kimi Antonelli stood in front of a room full of cameras and said that. About you. On purpose.

Then you watched it.

Then you watched it again.

Then a third time, your chest tightening in a way that had nothing to do with the trending hashtags or the sponsor emails or any of the noise that had filled the last forty-eight hours.

Because nobody had ever done that for you before. Not publicly. Not when it actually mattered — not when staying quiet would have been so much easier, so much safer. And yet he had. Without hesitation. Without asking for anything in return.

You found him that evening, near the garages, in one of the quiet stretches of paddock that emptied out once the crowds thinned for the day. The light had gone soft and gold, the way it always did in the last hour before sunset, and the noise of the day had faded into something gentler — distant generators, the occasional clatter of equipment being packed away, somebody's radio playing low from inside a garage.

He looked up when he heard you approach. Immediately nervous — as always — shoulders tensing slightly, like he was bracing for something.

For a moment, neither of you said anything.

Then: "I saw the interview."

His ears went red instantly. Cute. Annoyingly, predictably cute.

"Oh," he said.

"Thank you," you said, and the words came out quieter than you'd intended — quieter than you'd meant them to, softer, more honest than you usually allowed yourself to be with anyone.

Something in his expression shifted. Softened.

"You shouldn't have to thank me," he said.

You swallowed. Because somehow, that single sentence — gentle, simple, entirely sincere — made everything feel more complicated and more clear at the same time. The line between better and worse had become, you realized, alarmingly difficult to find.

Neither of you noticed the photographer at the far end of the corridor. The shutter clicking, quiet and unhurried, capturing the way you looked at each other. The way Kimi smiled when you smiled back.

The image would be online before morning. The internet would spend weeks dissecting it.

And within days, none of it would matter at all.

Because somewhere else entirely — far from the paddock, far from the cameras and the hashtags and the endless, exhausting noise — a journalist named Tomas Reyes had just opened an email with an attachment he had not been expecting.

A folder. Screenshots. Voice notes. Messages.

Enough evidence to unravel an entire story.

And once it went public, nothing about this season would ever look quite the same again.

—--------------------

The truth arrived on a Wednesday, at 9:12 in the morning. By 9:13, the internet was on fire again — though this time, for once, not because of you.

You were halfway through your first coffee — a careful, paranoid sip, the kind you'd developed an instinct for since Coffee-Gate — when your phone lit up with the now-familiar wall of notifications. Calls. Messages. Tags. All at once, the way they always seemed to arrive.

You opened the group chat, bracing yourself.

The first message read: OH MY GOD.

The second: SHE'S FINISHED.

The third, in caps, with three exclamation points: TURN ON TWITTER RIGHT NOW.

You frowned. This felt different. Usually, by this point, you'd have already seen your own name somewhere in the first ten messages. This time, you hadn't.

You opened the app — and nearly choked on your coffee.

Every trending topic carried the same name.

Sofia Moretti.

—----------------------------------------

The article had gone live less than twenty minutes earlier, written by Tomas Reyes — a journalist whose name you recognized, mostly for his reputation as someone who didn't publish anything until he could prove every word of it three times over.

He'd been investigating something else entirely, the article explained. A completely unrelated story about sponsorship negotiations. And somewhere in the process, he'd stumbled onto something he hadn't expected.

Screenshots. Voice notes. Messages. Emails, going back months.

Not fabricated. Not edited. Real — painfully, undeniably real.

The picture they painted was meticulous, and worse than anything the rumor mill had ever produced about you, because it was true. For months, Sofia had been quietly feeding information to gossip accounts. Not lies, exactly — that was the unsettling part. Carefully selected truths. Small details, taken out of context. Convenient omissions. Just enough to nudge a narrative in a particular direction. Just enough to keep a story alive. Just enough, always, to keep Sofia Moretti at the center of the conversation.

And every single thread, it turned out, led back to you.

The internet turned on her instantly. Brutally. Without hesitation — the same people who had spent weeks calling you a homewrecker were now posting, with breathtaking confidence, that they'd never believed it for a second.

You sat with your coffee going cold, scrolling, reading the same paragraphs over and over, and felt something you hadn't expected to feel.

Not triumph. Not relief, exactly — though there was some of that, somewhere underneath everything else.

Mostly, you just felt empty.

Because the truth had arrived. Finally, after months. But it had arrived after. After the headlines. After the sponsor emails. After the nights you'd lain awake wondering why it was always you. The damage didn't undo itself just because the story had changed.

And then — somehow, impossibly — things got worse.

Or better. It depended entirely on who you asked.

It began with a single leaked screenshot. Then another. Then ten more. Within the hour, it had become abundantly, gloriously clear that the entire paddock had collectively decided Kimi Antonelli deserved absolutely no privacy whatsoever, ever again, for the rest of his career.

The culprit, as it turned out, was Ollie.

Accidentally, Ollie insisted, to anyone who would listen, which — given the timing, the volume, and the suspiciously specific selection of messages — absolutely nobody believed. Least of all Kimi.

The first screenshot appeared on Twitter without context — a cropped image from a group chat, easy to scroll past. Then someone zoomed in.

And suddenly, everyone was paying attention.

Because the message was from Kimi. And it read:

what time is Y/n's interview tomorrow?

The timestamp was six months old.

The internet paused — collectively, audibly, you imagined — and then, immediately, became feral.

More screenshots followed. Then more. Each one somehow worse — or funnier, depending on your perspective, and usually both — than the last.

One read: do you think she actually hates me?

Another: stop sending me edits i'm begging you

Another, mortifyingly: i accidentally liked her photo

And the reply, from Ollie, immortalized forever: I KNOW. STOP REMINDING ME.

The paddock — and you, eventually, despite every effort not to — was crying with laughter.

Then came the saved photos.

That one, by all accounts, nearly killed him. One of his friends — Ollie, again, you assumed, because at this point the pattern was undeniable — had revealed, with the casual cruelty only a close friend could manage, that Kimi had a small folder of saved screenshots from your Instagram on his phone.

Not many. Just enough.

Enough, as it turned out, to end his dignity permanently and irreversibly.

By lunchtime, there were compilations. By dinner, timelines. By midnight, someone had uploaded what could only be described as a documentary — twenty-two minutes, fully edited, complete with a dramatic title card — laying out, in exhaustive detail, the case that Kimi Antonelli had been hopelessly, helplessly in love with you for months.

The evidence, you had to admit, was embarrassingly convincing.

The funniest part, though — and you noticed this somewhere around your fourth replay of the Ollie screenshot — was that nobody was talking about Sofia anymore. Not even a little. The internet had simply, seamlessly, moved on to a new and far more entertaining target.

And his name was Kimi Antonelli.

You were still laughing when you found him that evening, tucked behind one of the garages in the narrow gap between two equipment trucks — clearly hoping, with the misplaced optimism of someone who had not yet fully grasped how the internet worked, that this might be a place where nobody could find him.

It wasn't working. Two mechanics had already taken photos with him on the way over. A pair of journalists had tried, unsuccessfully, to get a comment. And — you'd heard this part secondhand, but you believed it completely — a group of drivers had apparently followed him partway across the paddock, singing.

The moment he saw you, he groaned. An actual, full-bodied groan, head dropping back against the side of the truck.

"Oh, no."

You lost it immediately. A laugh, then another, then you were laughing so hard you had to lean against the truck beside him just to stay upright.

"This isn't funny," he said, with the deep, tragic conviction of a man whose entire life had ended.

"It absolutely is."

"My career is over."

"You won a race three weeks ago."

"I'll never recover from this."

You laughed harder. His expression grew, somehow, even more devastated — which, naturally, only made it worse.

Eventually, though, the laughter softened. Faded into something quieter. The silence that followed felt different from the others — not awkward, not the easy comfortable quiet of the documentary days, either. Something else. Something that made the air between you feel suddenly very small.

You looked at him. Properly looked — at the flushed ears, the embarrassed, helpless almost-smile, the way he couldn't quite meet your eyes anymore, not because he was avoiding you, but because he seemed to be working very hard not to give something away.

And something in you shifted.

Because for months, the internet had been insisting — loudly, constantly, with twelve-slide presentations and twenty-two-minute documentaries — that Kimi liked you. For months, you'd dismissed it. Laughed it off. Filed it away with all the other theories the internet had ever had about you, most of which had been wrong.

But standing here now, in the narrow gap between two equipment trucks, watching him try and fail to look anywhere but at you—

Maybe, you thought, they hadn't been wrong after all.

He must have seen it on your face. The realization. Because he froze — completely, suddenly, the way he did right before a red light at the start of a session, every muscle tensed, waiting.

For one long, terrifying second, neither of you said anything at all.

Then a voice rang out from somewhere across the paddock, loud enough to carry over the generators and the distant music and everything else.

"HE'S BLUSHING AGAIN!"

You both jumped. Within seconds, a small crowd of drivers materialized at the end of the row — like vultures, you thought, extremely loud vultures — already laughing before they'd even arrived.

Kimi closed his eyes. Slowly. With the air of a man accepting his fate.

"I hate every single one of them," he said.

You laughed — and this time, instead of looking away, instead of denying it, instead of doing any of the things he'd spent months doing every time the subject came anywhere near the truth—

Kimi smiled too.

Because the secret was out. Properly out. The whole world knew. The paddock knew. His friends — especially his friends — knew. And judging by the way he was looking at you now, openly, without flinching, there didn't seem to be much point in pretending otherwise anymore.

That night, the internet celebrated.

Not because of a scandal. Not because of a fight, or a rumor, or a carefully engineered piece of drama.

For once — for the first time in longer than you could remember — people were celebrating something real.

And for the first time in months, you weren't the villain.

You were simply the girl Kimi Antonelli couldn't stop looking at.

Which, you discovered, lying awake that night with your stomach in knots and a smile you couldn't quite get rid of, was somehow far more terrifying than anything the internet had thrown at you all season.

Because the final race weekend was only days away.

And after everything — the coffee, the hashtags, the yacht photo, the documentary, the civil war, the exposure, all of it — there was only one thing left that hadn't been said out loud.

For the first time all season, the paddock was quiet.

No scandals. No leaked screenshots. No relationship rumors trending before breakfast. No journalists hovering by the garage doors with the specific, hungry look of people hoping for a story. Just racing — actual racing, a concept the sport seemed to have collectively forgotten somewhere around Monaco.

You weren't complaining.

Sofia's departure from the broadcast team had been announced quietly, a brief statement buried in an afternoon press release that most people scrolled past without comment. Nobody asked you about it. Nobody asked Kimi, either. The story, it turned out, simply ended — not with a bang, but with the particular, anticlimactic silence reserved for people who had spent too long mistaking attention for power.

You found, to your mild surprise, that you didn't feel much of anything about it at all. Just a quiet, settled kind of relief — the feeling of a held breath finally released.

The final race weekend arrived faster than you'd expected. One week it had been summer — the air thick and humid, the kind of heat that made the tarmac shimmer — and the next, you were standing in the paddock looking at banners that read SEASON FINALE in enormous, triumphant letters, while everyone around you walked like they'd aged ten years in ten months.

It had been a long season. A dramatic one. A genuinely, almost impressively ridiculous one. You suspected — with the strange, fond exhaustion of someone looking back on a disaster they'd somehow survived — that you would be telling stories about this year for the rest of your life.

The funniest part was the comments.

Nobody called you the Ice Queen anymore. Nobody called you the villain, or the Paddock Princess, or anything else that had defined the last several years of your online existence. The internet — somehow, against all odds — had collectively decided to redirect its considerable energy toward a brand-new cause.

JUST DATE ALREADY.

WE ARE SO TIRED.

STOP BEING WEIRD ABOUT IT.

HOLD HANDS. THAT'S ALL WE ASK.

The entire world, apparently, had developed a deeply personal investment in your love life. It felt invasive. It also — and this was the part you found most difficult to argue with — felt completely, maddeningly understandable.

Because the truth was, you and Kimi had spent the last few weeks in a strange kind of limbo. Everyone knew. The paddock knew. The internet had known for so long it had practically filed paperwork. And yet, somehow, neither of you had said anything — not because you didn't know how you felt, but because neither of you seemed to know how to be the one to say it first.

Your friends were no help.

"You know he likes you," Priya said, for what had to be the fourth time that week, with the patience of someone explaining gravity to a toddler.

"Thank you, Sherlock."

"So?"

"So what?"

"So do something."

You groaned and put your head down on the table. Priya groaned louder, on principle, and the conversation — as it had every previous time — accomplished absolutely nothing.

Kimi's friends were, somehow, even less helpful.

The morning of the final race, Ollie appeared beside him in the garage, entirely uninvited, with the particular swagger of a man who knew exactly how unwelcome he was and had decided not to care.

"As your friend," Ollie said, leaning against the car like he owned it, "I think you should tell her."

Kimi didn't look up from his gloves. "No."

"As your friend, I think you're being an idiot."

"No."

"As your friend—"

"Go away, Ollie."

Ollie grinned, and held up both hands in mock surrender, already backing away. "That's not a no," he called over his shoulder, and then turned and bolted before Kimi could throw anything at him — which, given the way Kimi's hand had already closed around a spare wheel nut, had been a wise decision.

The race itself passed in something of a blur. Engines, screaming through the final laps of the season. The crowd, louder than you'd ever heard it. Champagne, eventually, sprayed across the podium in great golden arcs that caught the last of the afternoon light. Interviews. Photos. The slow, almost ceremonial handshakes between people who'd spent the entire year trying to beat each other and would now, for a few months at least, simply be people again.

The checkered flag waved.

And just like that — after everything — it was over.

The paddock emptied slowly, the way it always did at the end of a season — not all at once, but in stages, like a tide going out. Trucks were loaded. Equipment cases stacked and sealed. Garages, one by one, fell quiet, their lights switching off in sequence until the whole place felt strange and hollow, the kind of quiet that only existed in places built for noise.

You should have gone back to the hotel. Everyone else had.

Instead, you found yourself wandering — past empty garages, past darkened hospitality units, past corridors that had been filled with people only hours earlier and now held nothing but the faint, lingering smell of rubber and fuel and spilled coffee that never quite seemed to wash out of anything in this place.

There was something about the stillness that caught at you. Comforting and sad in the same breath. Beautiful, in a way you didn't quite have words for — like standing at the end of a long book, the kind you weren't ready to close.

You walked without really deciding to walk anywhere. And somehow — though you would later tell yourself it was a coincidence, and would later not quite believe yourself — you ended up at one of the garages near the end of the row.

The lights were dim. Most of the equipment had already been packed away, leaving the space feeling larger than it should, the concrete floor swept clean except for a few stray cable ties and a single forgotten glove.

And sitting alone on a stack of tires, elbows on his knees, staring at nothing in particular, was Kimi.

Of course it was.

For a moment, neither of you said anything. You simply walked over and sat down beside him — close enough that your shoulder nearly brushed his, close enough that neither of you moved away.

The silence stretched. It didn't feel like the silences from before — not the awkward early ones, not even the comfortable ones from Barcelona. This one felt different. Fuller. Like it was holding something.

No cameras. No reporters. No producers hiding behind equipment cases with their hearts set on a moment. No fans pressed against fences, phones raised. No internet, for once, watching either of you.

Just the two of you, in an empty garage, at the end of a very long year — exactly the way it probably should have been from the beginning, if either of you had had the slightest idea what you were doing back then.

"You know," Kimi said, eventually.

His voice was quieter than usual. You looked over.

"What?"

He didn't answer right away. He was staring out at the empty garage floor, turning something over in his head — choosing his words, the way he always did, careful and deliberate, like every sentence was a corner he didn't want to take too fast.

Then he laughed. Softly. A little nervously — the kind of laugh you'd learned, over the course of this absurd, exhausting season, to recognize as the sound he made right before saying something that actually mattered.

"When I joined Formula 1," he said, "everyone told me you'd be impossible."

Your smile appeared before you could stop it. "Did they?"

"Yeah."

"I hope you defended my honor."

"I absolutely did not."

You gasped — properly gasped, hand pressed to your chest in mock betrayal — and he laughed again, a real laugh this time, the sound of it echoing softly off the concrete and the empty steel shelving and the dim, half-powered lights overhead. For a moment, he looked younger. Lighter. Like something he'd been carrying all season had finally, quietly, set itself down.

"And?" you asked.

His smile faded — not completely. Just enough. Just enough that you felt the shift in the air between you, the sudden weight of and? settling over both of you like the silence had been waiting for exactly this question the whole time.

Kimi turned toward you. Properly turned, so that his knee brushed yours, so that there was nowhere left for either of you to look except at each other. His eyes — green, soft in the low light, achingly familiar after months of glancing at them sideways, in corridors, across garages, on balconies in Monaco — found yours, and for the first time all year, he didn't look away.

"Turns out," he said, quietly, "everyone was wrong."

Your breath caught. Just slightly. Just enough that you noticed it yourself.

Because there was something in his voice — something you'd been hearing, in pieces, for months. In the way he'd taken your side in front of a room full of cameras. In the way he'd laughed at himself, beside you, in a way he never laughed for anyone else. In the way he'd looked at you on a balcony in Monaco like the rest of the world had simply stopped existing.

Something you'd been pretending, very deliberately, not to understand.

The silence that followed felt enormous. And yet — somehow, impossibly — it didn't feel uncomfortable. It felt full. Heavy with everything neither of you had said all season. Every glance across a garage. Every argument that hadn't really been an argument. Every laugh that had snuck up on both of you when you weren't paying attention. Every single thing that had, somehow, brought you here — to this exact spot, on this exact night, at the end of this exact, ridiculous season.

Kimi took a breath. The kind people took before doing something they couldn't undo. Before jumping off something. Before saying something true out loud for the first time.

Which, you supposed, were more or less the same thing.

"I like you," he said.

No speech. No grand gesture. No cameras, no crowd, no carefully constructed moment. Just the truth — quiet, simple, spoken in an empty garage that smelled like rubber and old coffee, at the end of a season that had tried, in every possible way, to make this moment about anything except the two of you.

You looked at him. Not with surprise — not really. You'd known, hadn't you. For a while now. The paddock had known. The internet had known, loudly, for months, with twelve-slide presentations and twenty-two-minute documentaries and an entire group chat's worth of incriminating evidence.

But hearing it — hearing it from him, in his own quiet voice, with his ears already turning that familiar shade of red — felt different.

It felt real.

Kimi, predictably, looked immediately nervous — which, you thought, was deeply unfair, because it was adorable, and now you were smiling, and you couldn't seem to stop.

"You know," you said softly.

His expression turned cautious. "What?"

"I think the entire world figured that out months ago."

His face went red. Instantly, completely, the way it always did — and you laughed, and somehow that broke whatever tension had been left, all of it, at once. The nervousness. The fear. The months of pretending. All of it just — dissolved, into the quiet of the empty garage, into the sound of your laughter and, slowly, his.

A smile crept onto his face too. Small, at first. Then bigger. Warmer. The kind of smile you'd seen directed at Sofia, once, what felt like a lifetime ago, and had hated — and now, finally, it was pointed at you, and it felt like nothing you'd ever hated at all.

"You didn't answer," he said.

Your heart skipped. Once.

So you reached over, and took his hand, and laced your fingers through his.

Simple. Easy. Certain — in a way that surprised you, a little, with how little thought it took, after months of overthinking absolutely everything else.

Kimi looked down at your hands. Then up at you. And the smile that spread across his face then was unlike anything you'd seen from him all season — bright, and unguarded, and so openly happy that it made your chest ache in the best possible way. The kind of smile people earned. The kind that made every disaster — the coffee, the hashtags, the documentary, the civil war, all of it — feel, retroactively, completely worth it.

"I like you too," you said.

The words had barely left your mouth before he laughed — a relieved, helpless laugh, the sound of someone setting down something heavy they'd been carrying for far too long.

Outside, one by one, the last of the paddock lights clicked off. The season ending around you, quietly, the way seasons did.

Neither of you moved. Not yet.

There was nowhere else, in that moment, either of you would rather have been.

Months later, the new season began.

The paddock came back to life the way it always did — loud, crowded, chaotic, full of fresh kit and fresh gossip and the particular electric energy of a season that hadn't gone wrong yet. Exactly as it should be.

You walked through it hand in hand with Kimi.

No hiding. No careful angles, no quick release of hands the moment a camera came into view, no awkward, deliberate distance in interviews. Just the two of you, together, the way you'd been for months now — long enough that it had stopped feeling like a secret and started feeling like, simply, how things were.

People stared, of course. This was Formula 1. People always stared.

But this time felt different. No whispers behind hands. No accusations. No scandal, no trending hashtags with your name attached to something ugly. Just smiles — and, from somewhere behind you, the unmistakable sound of a driver making exaggerated kissing noises, which Kimi hated with his whole heart and everyone else found absolutely delightful.

As you passed a cluster of journalists, one of them — the same senior reporter who'd warned you, what felt like a lifetime ago, that anyone that charming was probably a nightmare — called out, grinning:

"So the conspiracy theories were true after all?"

You looked at Kimi. He looked at you. Then, with the long-suffering patience of a man who had given up fighting the inevitable months ago, he rolled his eyes — and you laughed, and squeezed his hand, and kept walking.

Past the garages. Past the cameras. Past all of it — the noise, the chaos, the entire ridiculous machine that had spent a year trying to turn the two of you into a headline, and had, in the end, simply turned out to be right.

Toward another season.

៸៸៸ nsfw tags for the whole fic, as in both chapters: masochism (jake), sadism (reader and jake), overstimulation, painful masturbation, praise, worship, dirty talk, blowjob, finger fucking, pussy eating, riding, missionary, mating press,  standing up sex yayyyyy, huge giant fat cock jake, deep penetration, unprotected sex, implied breeding, choking, hair pulling, suffocation, cock warming, crying, begging, hate sex, hitting (m receiving), squirting

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

The next morning, you were late waking up to log into your work account but Jake was still there, drowsy and smiling at you from the moment you opened your eyes. 

You briefly remember the early morning pouting he gave you, hard against you and lips all over you, and in turn you remember how you made a promise to yourself swiftly after rejecting his needs.

Your face heated up the second he said good morning to you, flustered over the fact that not only do you want him, but you want him to want you like that again, despite your rejection. After all, you let him sleep over, and he didn’t try to take advantage of you despite sporting an intense boner through the majority of it. 

He sees the way your eyes check him out upon waking up too, but you stay silent after he gives you his good morning greeting. 

“Are you hungry? I can step out and pick up some breakfast so you can work.” He offers, stretching his arms out wide and tapping you to stand up. “I’m staying again today.” 

Your eyes widen at him, but the smile on your face betrays that little red flag in your head that has forced you, up to this point, to struggle to give him what he needs. 

“I’d like that.” You nod to him, cheeks permanently warmed at the image of your shining boyfriend. “Sorry about last night.” You blurt now, standing up and stretching yourself. 

“It’s fine love, it's just hard to keep my hands to myself sometimes.” He says, intensely watching your reaction.

You lend a pause in your stretch at those words, having heard them before when your ex did things that made your body ache for weeks. There is a pull in your gut hearing him say that before you remind yourself that they’re just words. He just really likes you, and he did stop when you told him to.

He is not your ex. 

“I wouldn’t have hurt you though,” He continues, seeing you deep in thought in front of him. “If you’d have let me, I mean.”

“Jake I–” You stop yourself, feeling a flood of words on the tip of your tongue. “I know you wouldn’t hurt me.” You confirm, now moving forward to hug against him. “I would have–” 

“You would?” His eyes light up, smile brighter than you’ve ever seen before. 

“No, I mean,” You stutter in panic, hugging him tighter. “I would have touched you if you asked.”

His eyes go dark instantly, making his smile seem more eerie than anything as you look up at him. 

“I’m okay with doing the touching, we can work our way up to the other stuff…maybe? If that’s okay?” 

“Oh, baby, that’s more than okay.” He coos out, now losing his appetite for actual food and wanting nothing more than to show you just how good he could really be for you. His arms hug you tightly before releasing you, and he ushers you across the room. “We can talk about this later though, you’re already late, right?”

You nod, feeling a bit better about initially rejecting him and doing just that, moving to the small nook that holds your desk and PC and listening to him slip his shoes on. 

“I’m going to grab breakfast, and I’m gonna stop by my place to grab some clothes.” 

He leaves before you can answer, which is nice because part of you didn’t want to hear your own voice accepting that. 

Accepting that he’s leaving right now, accepting that he’s coming back to stay another night, accepting that you feel perfectly fine with all of this despite your inner demon advising you to run. 

You don’t know who you are in this moment, but what you do know is that you’re safe. That’s what’s driving you to act blatantly against what your own brain is telling you.

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

You’re clinging and Jake is fucking devoted to the feeling of it.

Devoted to the way your fingers, so much smaller than his own, grab him to kiss him. Devoted to the way you kiss the bruise above his brow, and the way you ask him to stay for another night, and another, and another, up until he finds himself doing his and your laundry together just so he doesn’t have to go back home to grab more clothes to rotate through. 

It’s been a week since he’s been in your apartment, rolling around on your bed with you in it, cleaning himself in your shower, washing himself with your soap. It’s like only the two of you exist in this space, where he is the only one to step out and see the sun, solely so you don’t have to.

Or, solely so you can’t. He doesn’t think he’d let you at this point, now that you’re his and you prove it with each kiss and hug. All you need to do is sit and look pretty, sit and love him. That’s what your purpose is in this relationship, he will do the rest. 

Given, he’s also fucked his fist each second he can get in your bathroom. But goddamn do you cling. You whine when he separates himself from you even for a moment, and day by day he can see you come closer and closer to fulfilling his need to be loved by you entirely. 

Your phone hasn’t received any unsavory messages you’ve noticed as well, they haven’t needed you to come into the office, and all you can manage to think is that…you’re in love with being in this apartment with him.

Only good things happen when Jake is with you and you’re growing so attached that you’ve thought more than once to just move him in with you. Your mother would scold you, your ex would kill you, and arguably, Jake would absolutely do it. 

He waits on you hand and foot. Cooking, cleaning, doing your laundry, holding you and giving you some of the best sleep you’ve had in years. You refrain from considering it seriously though, because this relationship is still so new. You don’t want to freak him out or cause an uproar in your already fucked up and unsteady life. You’re throwing yourself in like you always do, but…is it so bad when he’s doing the exact same thing?

Until he’s not, anyway. 

“Love,” Jake starts, tapping his chin with the tips of his fingers as he lounges on your bed. “I need to go home today.”

Your heart immediately sinks. 

“What? Why?” You ask in a voice that plainly shows your panic.

“Well,” He taps on his chin again before moving his hand through his hair. “I’m pretty sure my mailbox is probably full by now, I need to clean out my fridge, and I should probably check my course work.”

“You’re…in college?” 

Jake nods with a snicker, laughing at how he’s given up his entire life for you. 

“Yeah, probably won’t be soon though.” He laughs, shaking his hair out and then looking at you with big, rounded eyes. “Just for the day, I’ll be back before sunset.”

You look down in a disappointed way before nodding to him. 

“Aww, babe. Don’t be like that–” He mock pouts as he turns to you, grabbing both of your cheeks and squishing them up, forcing your lips to pucker before landing a harsh kiss against them. “I’m coming right back, I promise.” 

You nod again, unable to keep a smile from forming on your face. 

“You’re so cute, it’s going to kill me one of these days.” He smiles back at you, hopping up and preparing himself to head back to his apartment. 

What you don’t know is that, while Jake wasn’t lying and that he should at least clean out his fridge, he needed to go home. 

He needs to unload the footage onto his computer, he needs to watch it back, he needs to fuck something.

And so, he does just that. 

The second he gets back to his apartment, it’s almost uncomfortable. Unfamiliar scents, no warmth, rotting food in the fridge, neglected pillows and bed sheets. 

Even so, it’s like he acts on instinct when he walks past everything he needs to do and lands himself at the window. His mind takes over in an instant.

It felt like so long ago when he first saw you from here, knowing you were the most beautiful, the perfect girl for him. Knowing you would love him too, and that you’d never want to leave him. He smiles at his victory, knowing that you’re sitting in that apartment right now thinking about him too. If he knew where he would be now, he thinks his former self may have very well fucked himself to death. After all, he’s felt you, tasted you, and even seen parts of you based on the little image he sent to himself from your phone. Everything happened better than he knew it would.

If it weren’t for your ex, perhaps you wouldn’t have let him stay with you in your apartment. Perhaps you wouldn’t have clinged to him so immediately. 

In a way, he almost wants to thank the man before he eventually strangles the life out of him. 

He’s tasted almost all of you by this point, and each moment it happened is trapped within the files of that little camera there. All of it, for him to remember. Each kiss and makeout session he made sure happened in the view of this camera, and so badly does he want to watch over and over again the moments where you gave in to him. The moments where you needed him. 

He’s quick to push the camera to his pc, uploading a weeks worth of files before placing it back onto the window sill and immediately shoving his hand down his pants. 

Jake shivers at the first unrestricted graze of his hand against his cock, eyebrows falling into that of probably one of the most pathetic faces he could ever make in his life. The relief is so good, so painful.

He can’t fucking help it. After jerking off multiple times a day before finding himself in your apartment with you, it’s hard to only do it once a day within a short time span of a few minutes. He felt so restricted in terms of his release, and he has so much cum to give right now. He’s aching for it. He wants to bleed it dry. 

He wants you so bad at this point, seeing you dangle yourself in front of him and not yet give in to at least going down on him– he needs this. He needs it now. 

Even if it’s not you touching him, he needs to release before he takes it from you. Before he does something stupid and makes you hate him forever. Before he really does become your ex. It felt like he was going insane in your apartment, surrounded by you, only wanting to fuck you, and still not getting to. 

God, the footage is so grainy but it hits his cock so fucking fast. He memorized each moment as it happened, and now watching it in third person makes him feel as if he’s some sort of ghost. Like he’s having an out of body experience and can see and feel you in a completely different light.

In more ways than he already has, even.

He releases within thirty seconds, barely holding his cock when he doubles over at the footage of that very first, harsh kiss you gave him. Sensitive and twitching, his raging length spilled all in his pants, drenches them through even, as his body shakes with the need for more.

And as if it never happened, he takes a firmer hold of his cock now, fast forwarding the footage to each and every kiss, wondering how good those lips of yours would feel elsewhere on his body. How pretty your moans would sound for him, how cute your hand looked gripping your tit in that little nude of yours, how–

He comes again, forcing him to let out a choked sob and drop his head to his desk. God, it hurts. He’s so sensitive, and still, he wants you so bad. His dick is still raging, aching, and begging, especially when he thinks of how you’ve been clinging. How your hands have fucked yourself, and how badly he wants them to stay on him forever. 

God he wishes your fingers could slice him open, leaving painful and love-filled reminders of not who you belong to, but of who he belongs to. 

When he thinks of how he’s only doing this right now because you have your claws buried into him already, almost refusing to let him leave you, he knows he could come another four or five times within the next thirty minutes solely because you cling, and cling, and fucking cling. Fuck..

That’s so hot to him.

He’d let you cage him up in a heartbeat, he’d let you fuck his entire life up and then laugh at him for it. It’s what you deserve. To have a man willing to do anything for you, someone willing to give up everything just to hear you breathe, to have him be that person. 

Third release, forcing him to hold his breath to the point of feeling faint.

The veins on his neck protrude, sweat now dripping down his brow. 

It hurts, it hurts, it fucking hurts.

But it doesn’t hurt enough.

And all day he does this. Until the sun is telling him that he needs to go back to you, until his hair is drenched in sweat and his arm is sore. Until his body feels weak and his cock feels spent, raw, and still throbbing for more. 

It hurts when he puts on a new pair of pants, hurts even more when he forces himself to squat in front of his fridge to clean it out, opting to toss everything into a bag rather than sifting through what’s good and what isn’t. 

Now more than ever does he want you against him, knowing that he’s fucked himself half to death solely to keep himself from scaring you, and still he isn’t satisfied.

At this point, nothing will satisfy him but you. He knows this now.

He’s quick to lock up, even quicker to toss his trash, and finds himself inside of your lobby at a loss.

Goddamn his libido. Goddamn this love for you. 

He can’t stop wanting you, and he can’t just fuck the need away himself at this point. He needs you to fuck his brain quiet, only you can satiate this horrifyingly deep hunger. 

Waiting, watching, waiting, waiting, waiting. 

He’s waited enough. He’s done waiting. 

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

Jake appears at your door right on time, and you were expecting to see his smiling face and big stretched out arms to greet you as you open the door for him.

You didn’t get that though. In fact, you found yourself frozen with the door half open as you stared at your boyfriend and the way his terrifyingly small pupils looked back at you before instantly growing twice the size. So different from this morning, heaving, lips shaking, eyes darker than they’ve ever been. 

Before you can even ask why he’s looking at you like that, you learn exactly why. 

“I’m going fucking insane.” Jake says shortly in a hot whisper, stepping forward and slamming the door behind him. You feel his hands on you instantly, slipping under your shirt and grabbing your waist tightly. “Can’t be away from you, can’t be with you, I can’t stand it.” 

You just listen, feeling him walk you into the living room, fluttering his lips all over your face and neck, only to press you up and against the window with his entire body pinning you there with a slam. 

You’re shocked, unable to do anything but listen to him and feel the way his hands grip and search your entire body for something to hold onto. 

“All fucking day,” Jake seethes out angrily, pulling back from you and grabbing your face to turn it. Almost pissed that you simply exist in front of him right now. “Right there.” He says, pointing directly to his apartment. “I sat right there trying to deal with this.” He presses his hips against you, letting you feel exactly what he’s talking about. “And still, I need more.”

Your brain goes numb. Or maybe it goes hot, you’re not sure. You’ve only recently realized that he turns you on beyond belief, it’s difficult to decipher the difference between horniness and fear right now. 

“Jake–” You turn back to him, now using your own hands to grab his face, forcing his eyes to steady and look at you, as if to bring him back to reality. “Do you need–”

He cuts you off with a harsh kiss, hands running up just to press you harder against the window, his hips chasing whatever he can get from you. Like he’s using you in this moment, as if you’re not real and simply a doll for him to release against and inside of. 

He’s fucking gone. Outside of himself, and you, and the universe as a whole. 

“What I need,” He says, pulling back and stating in an almost demanding tone. “Is for you to take care of me.”

You knew this would come sooner or later, and you’d been trying to work up the courage to do it. You’ve run his patience dry, and you guess it’s now or never at this point.

“Just tell me.” You whisper submissively, wanting to give him whatever he needs solely so that he won’t leave you.

You see his expression soften within a split second, his hips release their pressure against you, and he pulls his hands back.

“Fuck.” He lets out apologetically, demeaning himself for losing his control and being so blatant. Pointing out his fucking apartment to you. “Baby, I’m sorry, I–”

You’ve already made your decision, understanding exactly why your boyfriend broke his composure. This past week proved enough to you that he wasn’t in it to fuck you, and even though his needs weren’t being met, he still worked hard to meet yours, you feel…

Yeah, you’re happy he did this. Even the force didn’t scare you entirely. The only thing that scares you is him leaving you over this. And he watches as you do it, sinking to your knees and reaching out to hook your fingers into the loops on his pants. 

“Baby,” He warns you, feeling you pull him straight to you. “Wait, wait.”

You don’t, knowing that if you were to stop now you might end up talking yourself out of doing this again.

“No,” You shake your head, lifting on your knees just to rub your cheek against the length in his pants. “Let me take care of you, I’ve neglected you enough.”

God, he fucking buckles. Dropping right to his knees in front of you, pulling you in by the face, and kissing you as hard as he possibly can. His entire body quivers, bursting in a euphoric sense of arousal as the hairs rise on his body at the very image of you on your knees for him. 

“You’re so good to me,” He mumbles through kissing you. “So, so good to me.”

And you just let yourself feel it. Intensely, to the point that even your stomach flips at knowing what’s about to happen.

Strangely enough, it flips in a good way. You haven’t felt like this in years, and it brings so much glee to you knowing that Jake is right here, willing to let you make him feel good. Willing to let you feel these things again, willing to make you feel good if you work up the courage to ask for it. And most of all, he’s staying. 

“Stand up then.” You whisper in a smile. “I’ll take care of you, so don’t run back home to do it yourself anymore.”

Jake shakes his head with a smirk, happy to get what he not only wants at this moment, but what he so desperately needs. 

“I did that for you, and look where it got me.” He says, standing and staring down at you. “Nothing will ever satisfy me, only you can.” 

You chuckle shyly, reaching up to fumble with his button only to have him take over for you, dropping his pants and gripping himself. 

“Don’t be so sure though.” You swallow around a lump in your throat at the size of him, proving why you were always able to feel it and not quite ignore it. “I don’t have a lot of practice with this.”

Oh, could you be any more perfect? Any more fucking endearing? With those pretty eyes staring down what he wants to put in you so bad, not even knowing how he’s only ever gotten this hard for you and you alone. Fuck, he could give it to you so good, he could fill you until you can’t breathe, he could keep you forever.

You look so pretty like this, with your lips trembling as you wet them, with the way your smaller hands swat him away as if to ask him to let you try and hold it yourself. 

He could shoot his load right now if you asked him to, looking so fucking docile on the floor for him. He needs to look away, he needs to prepare for this.

“I don’t know if I can, um,” You start, gripping him and noting that he’s thick, there’s no way it will all fit in your mouth without absolutely suffocating you. “Jake, I genuinely don’t know if I can fit all of it.”

He lends you a short chuckle as he takes in a breath, his fingers going down to tip your chin up at him. You feel it pulse in your hand as he looks at you, almost feeling his quickened heartbeat through the vein that runs up the underside of it. 

“Love, I don’t need it to fit.” He smiles, pressing it harder into your palm. “Even this is enough right now.” He lies, pressing his hips forward as if to show you that he’s lying.

He needs it to fit so bad.

You eye him down, feeling the twitch release a little dribble of precum that rolls down and onto your circled fist. It’s been a long time since you’ve looked at another person this way, wanting to taste it, almost needing to. 

Rubbing your legs together, almost uncomfortably, you swallow again as you keep your eyes trained on his before glancing back down. You pull your hands back just to see the way it drops. God, it’s so heavy. You can imagine he’s full of resentment for how long it’s taken you to simply look at it. His cock rages at you, darkened in color and glistening in the light of the setting sun through the window. 

All you can do is stare.

And all Jake can do is stare too, watching you do math in your head of what you need to do with him. He’d take anything, fucking anything, from you right now.

“Mm,” Jake hums for a moment, grabbing your hand and squeezing it tighter. “Like this.” He instructs.

“I know how to give a hand job, you know.” You roll your eyes playfully, despite totally forgetting how to do it now that, you know, you want to. 

“Yeah, don’t tell me that.” He warns, annoyed that you’d even say that right now. “Just, grip me harder–” He closes his eyes, pretending that you’ve never touched a cock that wasn’t his own, noting how your hands have always been gentle with him, save for that day you dragged him around by the shirt in a kiss.

You listen, trying to grip the girth of it as tightly as you can while dragging your hand forward and back, forcing little grunts out of him.

“Yeah,baby–” he encourages you, “Just like that.” He continues to lose himself to the feeling in soft moans, blinking down and now moving his hips in your grasp, fucking forward a bit harder. “Use your other hand too..”

You listen intently, never having to use both hands on a man like this before. You try to squeeze him, offering as much pressure as you can as he swivels his hips forward and back, slicking your hands up nice and wet with his precum. Unbelievable how much he has, actually. 

 You look up when he lolls his head back in a drawn out moan, staring at the expanse of his neck and the way it tenses when he swallows around the same moan. And then, suddenly, in a split second he hangs his head back down and looks at you as if he can see everything you are, everything you ever have been, and everything you ever could be. You gasp at his expression, feeling totally lost and in awe when you see that gaze go dead as he stares back. 

His lips fall slack when his hips pick up pace, essentially fucking your fists rather than letting you do the work. And when you glance away from him, tuning in to the consistent pre-cum spilling out of him, he sees you lick your lips. 

He watches, he sees you want it. 

So, very gently, he places one of his hands on the back of your head, encouraging you to do it. And it’s like he can taste colors when you let him and instantly wrap your lips around the big, swollen head of his leaking length.

The half-moan-half-amazed-chuckle that falls out of him only comes from the fact that you instantly stretch your lips around it, lapping at his tip in an almost hungry way. 

“God, fuck–” He keeps his head hanging forward, watching intently as you take him further and further into your mouth, up until you release one hand and grasp his thigh to hold onto. “I’ve dreamed of this.” He admits, shocked that you’re really going to do this for him.

You blink up at him, trying to smile around the heavy length pressing your tongue down. If you’re going to do this, the least you can do is make sure he fucking loves it. Not to mention, the fact that you’re also enjoying it only drives you to do more. Like the wall inside of you has been shattered and nothing could ever stop you from wanting him in any and every way possible.

He smiles through a deep groan at the way your lips still curl around him.

Never in his fucking life did he imagine you smiling while sliding his cock down your throat. Really, you did that entirely on your own and somehow, he feels even more insane than he did walking into your apartment earlier. 

You’re making it fit, and all he can do is help you, now bracing that same hand on your head and pressing further into your mouth.. 

More, more. 

And when he feels your fingernails dig into his thigh and his cock hit the back of your gagging throat, he chokes out, eyes tearing up, and he sobs out your name in a desperate attempt to compliment you for it. 

That sound alone from him went straight through you, igniting a long awaited arousal within your belly. You feel the drip, relishing in the feeling of being wet for the first time in fucking years. He’s so big, and he’s so suffocating. You want to do this, you want to hear him cry out your name again.

Even when he tries to pull his hips back, you grab onto him and hold his hips in place, pushing your lips further down, depressing your tongue even more as the thickest part of him cuts off your airways. Your throat restricts around him, and you feel proud of it. Proud of choking on him, happy to keep doing it. 

He stutters in awe, gripping the windowsill with his free hand and using the other to feel your hollowed out cheeks. Shit, you’re going to taste him, he’s going to give you all of it, he’s going to–

Shocked, floored, entirely drunk for you, all he can do is watch as you choke. His body did not warn him at all when his cum shoots into your throat, warming your belly with that first swallow around him. 

Your reaction to it is immediate though, as he watches with half-crossed eyes the way you pull off of him and let his cum spurt out and drip all over your face. Down those beautiful cheeks, onto your plush lips, and down your neck.

It won't stop. He just keeps coming. His entire body trembles as he stares at you, and you stare back before closing one eye due to the fact that there is now cum in your eyelashes, and you fucking smile at him.

The image alone keeps him hard as his body finally stops twitching. You, there on your knees, smiling up at him drenched in him. 

“Baby,” He soothes out with a raspy tone. “Fuck, you didn’t have to do–”

“I’m wet. Jake.” You smile, as if you’re admitting this to him to gain some sort of congratulations for it. And in a way, you are. He has no idea how amazing it is to you right now that you can feel your panties go sticky. It feels amazing to admit to him, actually. 

It’s so relieving, it’s so warm, it’s something you never should have missed out on in the first place.

“What?” He asks with uneven breath, dropping to his knees in front of you again, rubbing the cum into your skin with his thumb as he caresses your face. “You are?”

You beam at him, smiling with a nod.

“Really?” He asks again, in disbelief because this was all it took? 

You nod again, leaning back on your arms and watching him follow, hovering over you and slotting himself between your legs with a hungry gaze. 

“Can I feel?” He asks abruptly, crawling over you to the point that your back hits the side table behind you, keeping you from lying all the way down. 

And you nod before you think about it. Wondering if this is how it’s always supposed to be. Always willing, always wanting, always needing. 

He stares at you when you nod, glancing down to your middle then back at you as if to gain another confirmation. 

You nod again, this time wanting to hide your face in your arms. You anticipate it, wondering what it’ll feel like to be touched there again by a hand that isn’t your own after all this time. And when you feel his shaking hand dip into your sweat pants, you don’t even shutter. You don’t shy away.

You’re surprising yourself even, letting out a gasp when he cups your core and looks down at you with a cautious smile. 

“You’re dripping, baby.” He smiles as he balances himself on one arm over you, rubbing his hand back and forth and memorizing the dips and folds he can feel through this flimsy fabric. Then, his more intrusive thoughts spill in an unintentional and needy groan. “Fuck, I bet you’re so tight.”

Words that would make you recoil are no longer scaring you. You can tell he wants to apologize for saying it too, but goddamn, you loved hearing it. In fact, your entire body pulses at the words, feeling his hand do nothing more than hold you there and gently rub. His eyes are pleading though, with his lips pouting as he relishes in thoughts of probably fucking his fingers into you just to see if he’s right. 

Or maybe it’s just you hoping that’s what he’s thinking about. You can’t help the way you clench, letting out a strained breath as you lurch forward and hug him around his neck, squeezing so tightly as you whisper against the shell of his ear. 

“You can touch me– if you want.” You whisper, physically feeling the goosebumps against his neck raise to your lips. “Just go slow.”

You still need to go slow, after all, you don’t know how your brain may react to this, despite loving it at the moment. Relishing in the fact that someone managed to make you feel horny again. You feared that you never could again. God, he’s amazing. 

“I’ll go so slow for you,” He whispers back, twisting his hand in your pants to hook his fingers around your panties to pull them to the side. “Oh, baby, you really do want this, don’t you?” He whispers again upon really feeling you drip, trying to slide his fingers through the slick mess before rubbing circles around your hole. He’s lost his train of thought now, only able to feel one sense at a time so that he can fucking memorize how you coat his fingers entirely.

He moans again from deep in his chest along with you, despite knowing you’re the only one feeling the pleasure of his fingers. You feel his moan vibrate through his throat when you kiss him there, anticipating what it’s going to feel like when he slides a finger in.

And it’s like you see stars when he does, slowly pressing one into you as he wraps his other arm around your waist to hold you in place, sitting back on his knees and forcing you to stand on your own infront of him. 

There he holds you as if he’s afraid you’ll start to fight, relishing the feeling of your wet walls hugging his finger all while you cling to him through it. He was right, you are tight despite how wet you’ve gotten. It’s almost like you’re a virgin despite knowing that you’re not. 

Your body is reacting this way for him, and you’re hugging him, and your pussy is clenching for him. He just knows that if he manages to fit his cock into you, he’d fucking lose it. You’d squeeze him so tight, and he’d fuck it so deep. Fill you up, deeper, deeper, until the only name you know is his. 

He’s losing it again, hearing your little whispered moans against his ear, hanging on him like a fucking pet, god, he wants you to squeeze the fucking blood out of him. You’re being so compliant, so submissive, so–

“Do you even know…” He starts babbling, trying to silence his thoughts by giving them straight to you as his finger slides out, eagerly shoving two back in at a much quicker, much harsher pace. “How much I’ve dreamed about this?” 

You shake your head noting how he’s already mentioned dreaming of you once. The thought has you spreading your legs out to feel how deep his fingers reach inside of you. There’s no pain involved in this, despite his pace not being nearly as slow as he said he would go. You’re not upset, you want him to go faster, you want him deeper, you want to hear him talk.

“So many times, baby, so many times.” He soothes himself more than you through these words, losing himself more and more each second to the feeling of your core clenching his fingers. “You’re even prettier to me right now,” He continues to babble, listening to you hum in his ear at the pleasure you feel. “I want you to take everything from me.” 

“I want you to wrap your legs around my neck, I want you to rub my nose in it, I want you to suffocate me, I want—”

“Shit, Jake.” You moan out his name for the first time at the dirty words. They’re a lot to take in only because you know it truly is a lot, or rather, it should be. But you fucking want that too. You want everything from him, you want everything he wants. Everything. “What else?” You urge him to keep talking.

“I want you to pull my hair,” He says, instantly feeling your fingers slide up his neck and into the thick of it, tugging immediately. “I want you to make it fit here too.” He continues, curling his fingers inside of you, thrusting his own hips against the dense air in your apartment. 

You moan again at his hot words. You’re overwhelmed by how much you want more, how much you’d let him, right here, right now. 

“Keep going,” You sing out, feeling it in your stomach and knowing that this familiar feeling is so much better than you’ve ever felt before. “Tell me, Jakey, fuck–” You continue, huffing at the way his fingers quicken even more. 

“Sound so pretty saying my name, fuck,” He groans now, more level than before as he feels your legs close around his arm, fingers relentlessly hitting the soft spot inside of you. “Tell me that I’d never hurt you, that only I can make you feel like this.”

You nod aggressively as your brain hits a wall, unable to fulfill his request. Every muscle in your body tenses in pleasure as you begin to shake, moving your own hips against his fingers and tugging his hair harder without intention. 

He moans out at how tight you hold him, wanting nothing more than to lay you out and bury himself into you, to feel your pussy jerk him off. 

“Feels so good, baby, right?” He continues to talk, feeling your tight walls try to push his fingers out with each threat of your build up, his mind is spinning. “Say it–” He stutters, feeling his own body react the same way yours is. “Fuck, please, say that you’re mine.”

“I’m yours.” You whisper out of breath against his ear, the hot breath sending him overboard as he immediately pulls his fingers from you and grips his cock instead, ignoring your whimper of the lost build up.

“Yeah,” He cries out, thrusting his hips against his hand. “So let me– please, please let me.” 

His face looks so broken when you stare at him in shock, eyes pleading for you to give him all of it. To give him everything right now. How could you fucking say no to that expression? How could you ever say no to him? 

And still, with your orgasm half-fulfilled, you’re entirely enamored with the way you instantly want it too. As if you’re rushing head first into a brick wall with him, and you stop just to think for a moment.

Should you? 

Do you intend to keep this man forever? Do you want him to leave? Would you be able to picture a day without him? 

It confirms in your brain right then and there. You do intend to keep him. You don’t want him to leave. You could never picture a day without him at this point. 

If he wants to have sex with you right now? Why not? You’re sure that if he is truly wanting to stay, sooner or later you’ll feel him pumping inside of you. Why should it matter that it happens now rather than tomorrow? Or next week? Or even next month? 

Instantly upon your snap decision, you stand on shaking legs, watching him watch you. His hand gripping himself harshly to prevent a pathetic and untouched orgasm, cheeks flushed, eyes glassy. 

You smile, dropping your pants, panties, and then lifting your shirt right up and over your head. All he does in response is wince, grip the base of his cock harder, and try to focus on not spilling and wasting his cum on your floor. Brain only slightly trying to distract him with the idea of grabbing those sticky panties to suck them clean. 

“Really?” He chokes, out of breath and standing up, swiping your panties up quickly and crumpling them in his hand.

Then, you feel one hand on you after he drops his length, and the other rubbing those same wet panties against your skin, as if he has a death grip on them and you. Still, he walks you right back to the window and against it, speaking in that same, needy and shaking breath. “Baby, are you sure?” 

You look away, feeling vulnerable and shy but so willing, so ready when you nod and throw your leg around his waist as if to tell him that you’re more than sure. 

He gives you a breathy chuckle, pulling back just to lift his shirt off of him, hang your panties at the base of his cock, and then he grabs your leg and holds it in place. “Right here?”

He can’t tell if he’s even alive right now, with your pussy sitting spread open right up against him as you let him hold you here, your ass is probably looking great for the camera right now. Your panties feel so good in their rightful place, dangling just in front of his balls. You feel so good in your rightful place, right up against the wall with him trapping you here. 

You nod again, pressing your hips forward, proving to him how hungry you feel for him right now. Finally feeling dirty and not hating yourself for it.

“Right here.” You confirm, tuned into his lips and leaning forward to lick against them. “That’s what you want, right?”

He’s stunned by how you take control while still being somehow submissive to him about it. Almost like you’re shaming him for wanting it, almost like you don’t want to admit that you want it too. 

“Is that what you want?” He asks, trying hard not to think about how you’ve shifted entirely within the span of however long it’s been since the two of you started this. Is this how you act when you're horny? 

“How could I not?” You confirm again with a confident tone, watching your boyfriend break in front of you. “Look at you.”

Jake can’t bear to look at himself, he knows he looks just about as pathetic as he’s always wanted. Never quite able to feel pathetic enough to satisfy him, only now understanding why he chased and chased the feeling to have you like this. 

Controlling whether he can stick his dick in you, controlling whether he can fuck off and die. 

That’s how it’s supposed to be in a relationship, but somehow it’s something else between both of you. For him, it’s like you’ve intentionally edged him for an entire week and for you it’s like you finally have control over your own sexuality again. 

You feel powerful, and Jake wants to be entirely at your mercy. 

“No one has ever wanted me this bad and waited.” You finally say to his intense and loving stare. “I want to give you anything you want.”

If he had a tail, it would be wagging so fast right now. It’s like he’s being given a treat for being exactly who you needed him to be, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever stop doing it. 

“I could wait longer,” Jake mumbles, inching his lips to yours and letting his other hand cup one of your tits. “You could make me suffer,” He continues, whispering it right into your mouth. “Could lock me up and starve me of it.”

You lean your face back, a little shocked at his choice of words there. 

“So you meant those things you said earlier?” You ask, remembering how he babbled on about wanting you to suffocate him, about how he wanted you to take everything from him. 

“Do you want me to be honest?” He counters, now pressing his hips forward and letting his cock weep against your thigh. 

You nod to him. 

“I want you to take it all out on me.” He admits, gripping your tit in his hand tighter, hiking your leg up higher. “I want you to control every aspect of my life.”

Honestly, it shouldn’t be a thought that brightens your brain but it does. It sounds toxic, and you can’t even tell if he’s saying this just because he’s horny and is about two seconds from slamming you up and against this window with the force of his cock alone. Somehow, you love the thought of all of it. 

“Every aspect?” You ask with interest. “What do you mean?”

He chuckles as he hangs his head, watching his length pulse constantly against your thigh and the panties hanging off of it. Only then does he release your tit and use your panties as a way to position his cock up, lining up with the wet of your core that is only for him.

“It means–” He starts, sliding into you with a paused moan, hiccuping slightly as he furrows his brows. “I want you to make me cry for you.” He continues with a tilt to his head as he watches the way you wince at all of the strength he has to hold you up like this, to slide into you like this. “I want you to hurt me, and I want you to love doing it.”

He bottoms out after that, holding you in place and feeling your walls struggle to adjust to the tight fit. 

“It’s what you deserve.” He soothes out to you, kissing you once. “To take someone the same way you’ve been taken.”

You recoil instantly, pussy restricting in horror at the reminder of why you never do this with another person, but god the way he lifts on his toes just to plunge somehow deeper into you. The way his lips trap you even more, the way his force is nothing but fucking amazing to feel. All you can do is moan, bump your head against the window, and squeeze him. 

“You said you wanted to give me what I want–” He slides out of you just a little bit. “So, can you?” He pushes back in, listening to you get wetter at his words and feeling your answer when you can’t seem to speak for yourself. 

“I said I’d never hurt you, love,” He coos out this time, watching your body shift up against the window as he picks up some sort of rhythm, taking you the way he’s always wanted you. Right here, against the window. “But I never said that you couldn’t hurt me.”

Why the fuck is that so hot? God, why does a man like Jake offer you so much? Why is he doing this to you? Why is he doing it to himself? Why do you love it? 

You find yourself nodding as you moan out, still not quite adjusted to his size and the way he made it fit into you in such a…pleasurable way. It doesn’t hurt at all, it feels good. 

“Yeah, I knew you would.” He continues to talk as if he’s not internally losing it, but months worth of pretending, several orgasms today alone, and having your pussy hugging him just as tightly as he knew it would? That’s helpful. 

And now, as your fingers grip at him through his harsh and deep thrusts, all he can do is hold your leg against him, lean forward, and stare directly into his apartment window. As if he’s mocking his former self, as if everything in the world has fallen into place. You wouldn’t leave him now, never, you’d be just as stupid as everyone else if that were the case. 

He has faith in you, in himself, in this, and the way you drip all over him. 

He knew you’d be perfect for him. 

It doesn’t take long, really, for him to pull an orgasm out of you when he’s doing it this good. In fact, you don’t even have to reach a hand down to help pull it out of you by the time your body begins to stiffen up at it. 

His pace is slow, his cock is deep, and fuck his entire body is on you. You couldn’t squeeze your hand down if you tried, in fact, you don’t think he’d even consider letting you do any of this on your own. 

His grip is so strong, you can feel your sweat stick to the window as you slam your head down on his shoulder, sliding up and down the window with each of his powerful thrusts. 

It feels so good to do this again.

“Jake–” You hiccup against his neck, listening to his heaved and choked breaths through each thrust. “I wish I had done this sooner.” You manage to get out, body tensing and relaxing by the minute with the threat of an orgasm. “I’m sorry I made you wait so long.”

And honestly, you don’t know what’s gotten into you, nor do you fucking care. If you want to cry, you’ll fucking cry. It’s been too long since your tears hit you out of pleasure, or happiness, or fucking safety. At this rate, you’ll never let this man go. 

“I know baby, I know.” He soothes you, arms shaking as he holds you up and thrusting in as deep as he can go.

You feel him stutter in his pace, his hips stopping as you feel his heavy cock pulsate against your clenching walls. 

“Are you close?” He says, pulling back and looking at you. “Is that why you’re sorry?”

You look at him with glassy eyes, smiling dazed at him as you shake your head. 

“No,” You smile wider, running your hands up and into his hair, remembering what he asked for before. You tug, forcing his head to tilt back so that you can attach your lips to him. “I’m saying it because I want you to always make me feel this good.” You whisper against his pulse point, kissing it hard. 

You feel him lose composure at that, his hips immediately moving again, slamming up and into you so hard that you can’t even hold your head still enough to kiss him there again. 

“Ah, fuck,” He whimpers out, “why would you fucking say that to me right now?” He continues, relentlessly fucking himself against the soft and sensitive spot inside of you. “You still make me feel so insane, only you could do this to me.”

You smile, having learned that he appears to love the torture anyway. 

“You love it though, don’t you Jakey?” You say, loving the way he loses it for you, learning how badly he’s wanted this, seeing him intend to stay. 

And at those words, he can’t take it anymore. Fuck the camera, fuck anything else in the world that isn’t you. He ignores that wince on your face when he slips out of you, ignores the way the panties fall from his length, and focuses entirely on the way you hug him as he carries you straight to the couch. 

Right there, he drops you and watches the way your tits bounce at the motion. 

“I’m fucking obsessed with you.” He says, feeling the arousal run through his veins, knowing you’d love to hear him say that while never knowing just how true it is. “How are you real?”

You smile, hiding your face as you feel his hands hold your thighs open. You know what he’s looking at, and you can’t force yourself to see him do it. Solely because you know it’s going to swell your heart so big that you’d only fear the day he wants to leave it empty.

And you don’t respond either, because you can’t. His fingers are spreading you open and you can hear him drop to his knees yet again for you. You wan’t to look so bad, but still, you fear the love in his eyes.

You fear and want all of it. 

He hears the sharp inhale you give when he spreads you out, really inspecting the single spot on your body that no one on this earth should ever see aside from him. 

“This is where it hurt the most, isn’t it?” He asks, staring into the hole he’s already fucked, watching it beg him for more despite his words that probably stab your soul. 

You’ll never understand how he can take your pain and turn it into something you don’t mind hearing though. Yes, that’s where it hurt the most, and still, that’s where you want him the most. 

“Yeah, baby?” He asks again, reaching an arm up and forcing you to look at him. “This is what you were so afraid of?” He continues, dipping down and rubbing his face directly into the folds and inhaling a deep breath. 

“Y-yeah.” You choke out at the feeling, in awe of how you knew his eyes would make you terrified. He still stares up at you as he does it, pointing his glare straight through you and into your fucking spirit.

Only Jake can make you fear nothing else in this world aside from the thought of losing him. 

“I’ll make it better,” He says, boosting his ego at the way your legs wrap around his head. “You’ll always want me here,” He continues, cooing out with each taste and lick of your budding arousal. “You’ll never want me to stop–” 

No man has ever wanted you this bad while having you, even as you experienced the trauma of just that. Your ex wanted you physically, but something about the man drying to drown himself in your pussy right now makes you feel like he wants you on a level far deeper than what’s possible.

He’s eating you out like he wants to eat you whole. Like he could devour you, and never spit you out of his mouth. 

“Shit, shit–” You moan, hands shooting down to his hair yet again, finding yourself loving the way his grown-out roots feel softer than the harsher dyed section of his hair. You tug harder than you have before, feeling his tongue search and yearn for everything you have to offer him. 

“Mhm.” He mumbles with a mouth full of pussy, rolling his eyes back at how you do just as he suggested before. Rubbing his nose in it, letting him continue to lose himself in the point of all of his problems. 

And it’s as if you forgot that this only happens to reach a point of coming. The experience alone feels like one long and drawn out orgasm already, it doesn’t take anything at all for him to get you there. 

It’s like he already knows it too, because you go entirely silent with a held breath as he holds your hips and buries his tongue deep inside of you. He wants to feel it, he wants to taste it. And he suffers for it, really, neglecting his own cock and knowing he’s going to come through this alone anyway. 

As expected, he does. Upon the first gush of your slick hitting his tongue, his cock pulses, his balls squeeze up, and he can feel it shoot out of him each time your pussy shakes against his suffocated mouth.

And your hands, so perfect in his hair, pulling without even knowing. You’re everything he’s ever wanted, this is more than he could have ever asked for. 

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

By this point in your relationship, the two of you have moved so quickly that it doesn’t even scare you. In fact, if it slowed down at any point, you’d probably be preparing a suicide note simply because you don’t want to be in this world without Jake. 

Since the first time you got intimate with him, it’s like it hasn’t stopped. You’re shocked at his thirst for you and even more shocked that someone so fucking perfect would waste his breath on you even for this long. 

It hasn’t been that long, really, since the first time you touched him. A few days at most, but it’s like that moment solidified a lot for the two of you.

One, he’s not going to be sleeping in his own bed anytime soon or, ever, really. Two, you’ve learned through at least two more sessions of Jake’s mouth on you that he really does want you to live up to his requests. He makes it known how badly he wants you to make him suffer, how badly he needs you to give him everything he wants. Thankfully, he’s patient with your reluctance. And Three, your ex is no longer a threat. 

Each message you receive, you just hand your phone to Jake and he takes care of it. 

It doesn’t even translate in your head that you’ve been barred from answering your mother’s calls until the police show up at your door for a wellness check. Where, of course, Jake answers,

“Yeah, she’s here.” You hear his voice as you lay flat against your bed, heaving breaths as if he didn’t just have the tip of his dick in you. “Why?” You hear him question. 

A few more muffled words and you hear the door close and his footsteps making his way to your room. 

“Cops.” He dead-pans, “Your mom thinks you're dead.” he adds with an eye roll. 

Your internal panic, a feeling you had once been so accustomed to that now feels almost foreign, takes over your body.

“Fuck, my mom!” You say in a fast breath, rushing onto your feet and throwing on a pair of his soiled sweatpants. 

Jake hangs back but listens to your conversation from your hallway, listening intently to how you speak to other men, cops or not. 

“Yeah,” You say, scratching your temple with shame. “I guess I didn’t realize she was calling me so much.” 

Try five times a day. 

“I’ll call her now, sorry for wasting your time.” You continue with that nervous chuckle that you used to use on him during your dates. 

And then you’re back in the room, looking at him with a raised brow. 

“Why didn’t you tell me my mom has been calling?” You ask, a little annoyed that it’s gotten to the point of freaking your mother out. 

Jake shrugs, then looks at you apologetically. 

“I don’t like when she forces you to talk about it.” He finally says, sulking his shoulders and huffing out. “I don’t like that she tells you to be careful around me.”

You roll your eyes, relieved that he’s just being himself and wanting to keep you happy. 

“Still, you should have told me. She’s going to have a fucking heart attack thinking he showed up at my work place again.”

Jake’s entire brain stops working, his body going rigid as if the cold air outside is hitting him in full force. 

Your eyes immediately widen as you slam your hand over your mouth. Fuck, you forgot that you told her in a hushed tone, explaining that it’s okay. That Jake wouldn’t let anything happen to you. 

Fuck. 

“He what?” Jake says, dumbfounded at the slip of your words. 

“Jake, wait–” You try to get an explanation but he’s not having it. 

“You haven’t been at work, what do you mean he showed up?” He glares, chest heaving as his heart rate picks up. 

“It was from that day when you first stayed over,” You look at the floor apologetically. “I didn’t want to talk about it…” You trail off, feeling his energy hit you in the face at how he’s completely shifted from that loving, soft boyfriend you’re so used to. 

“You kept that from me!?” He seethes out in disbelief. This whole time he thought he fucked your ex up enough to prove what would happen if he even fucking tried it. By you explaining that it happened just after Jake found him, that’s a direct insult.

A threat.

A fucking death wish.

“I didn’t–” You stutter trying to explain yourself. “I didn’t think it would matter since you were here. You were keeping me safe.” 

“You lied to me?” He continues interrogating you, coming up to you and practically demanding an answer through his eyes.  

You look away, nodding. 

“You said you wanted me to keep you safe, what would have happened if you had to go to work again?” He drones on and on, seemingly stuck on the fact that you didn’t tell him. “What would happen if they called you to go in today?” 

Already you’re starting to cry, feeling stupid for not making a bigger deal out of it. To be fair, not talking about it helped and you did intend to tell him at some point. That just…never happened. 

“I would have asked you to stay with me at work.” You say, feeling numb as the fear of losing the man in front of you steals your every thought. “I’d have not gone. I’d have quit. I don’t know!” 

Jake backs down at your words, only able to soften his rage if you’re the one who causes it. 

“Baby,” His soft voice shocks you when you feel him come back to himself, as if to comfort the fear he just instilled in you. “I’m not mad.”

Yes he is, you know he is. 

“Now you’re the one lying.” You argue, pushing him away only to feel his grip on you tighten. 

“Am I?” He asks, urging you to keep talking. “Are you mad at me now?” He continues, intentionally pushing your buttons. 

“Mad that I should have already known?” 

“Mad that I didn’t let you talk to your mom?” 

“Mad that I’m keeping you safe, while you keep putting yourself in the position to be hurt by him again?” 

You stare at the floor. 

“Mad that this is your fault?” 

Yeah, you are mad. 

“Fuck you, Jake.” You break, feeling his strangling fingers on your skin scratch and leave welts when you force yourself away from him. “Fuck you for all of that.”

“What else?” He presses, hanging on specific words. “Fuck me for what else?” 

You just stare at him, and he can see the anger in your eyes. 

“For not being there when it happened?” He asks gently. “For not killing him when I had the chance?”

When he had the chance. 

“What do you–” You try to ask, but he just continues, closing back in on you. 

Somehow, you need it, despite wanting to pull away every time. 

“Fuck me for wanting this from you, right?” He says, much closer to you and dipping down to kiss you. “Fuck me for wanting you to be this mad, hmm?” 

You break again, something deep within you spiraling into a different type of insanity you’ve never felt. You don’t feel trauma, you don’t feel scared, you feel…enraged.

“Fuck me for thinking you look perfect,” He whispers against your lips. “Fuck me to fuck me, fuck me to fight me, fuck me.” 

The repeated words fit into your brain like they belong there. Like this anger is supposed to be filling you with pleasure rather than dread. Like you’re supposed to feel just as in love as you are mad. 

“Just fuck me, baby.”

And god fucking dammit. How does he crawl into the depths of your brain, like a fucking roach, and kiss all of the areas you don’t know exist? How the fuck does he wake shit up inside of you that you never dreamed of having, or feeling, or wanting.

“I hate you.” You say, and meaning it too. 

Because you don’t think you’ve ever loved someone more than you do now. 

“Yeah, I bet you do.” He smiles, dipping his hand down into the sweats you put on and sliding into the same slick he had spilling out of you just before the pigs showed up. “I love it.” He chuckles against your lips when you refuse to moan at his touch. 

You’re pushing against every good feeling inside of you right now, thinking only of how this rage spills out of you and against his fingers. 

“So wet to hate me–” He says, pressing and pressing and pressing for you to just fucking– “Hit me.” 

He sees your eyes shine at the very thought of how badly you must want to do that, unknowing of how much he wants it too. Needing it almost. 

And oh, the moan he lets out when your weak hands raise to shove him back. He plays off of it, stumbling back to your bed just to fall on it. Waiting, knowing you’ll come take him for all he’s worth.

“Come on, love.” He encourages you. “Make me sorry.” 

You hate him, and you hate that you love it. Love that he loves it, fucking adore that he wants this, he wants to let you do whatever you want to him. 

To kick, cry, scream, release everything that’s been trapped in your head for years.

You don’t even falter, feeling it bubble up and overtake every thought. Dripping down your legs as if this is the only way you could ever fulfill your own pleasure again. Only now to you slide the pants back off of you, so horny out of your mind that all you can manage is to feel these emotions drip for him. 

He watches you straddle him bare from the waist down, sees your breath shaking, and your lips quivering.

Jake knew you had it in you. 

“Take them off.” You demand, rolling your eyes at the way he looks up at you with pure bliss.

“Hit me first.” He offers, feeling his cock strained against his own pants that he haphazardly threw on when he heard the knock at your door. “Hit me, and I’ll fuck the hate out of you.” He lies.

“Take them off.” You repeat, cold hands reaching down as you do it yourself, lifting just enough to shove them down far enough.

And god, the breath is knocked clean out of him with the way you just take him. You slide down perfectly, bottoming him out in one motion. He can see now that you need this perhaps even more than he does. 

“God, come on baby.” He moans, feeling you just sit still on him. 

“Jake,” You warn, running your cold hands up to his neck on instinct. “Shut up.” You squeeze. 

The smile that forms on his face is pornographic at best, and drunk at worst. You see him love every instant of it, and you don’t want to admit that you do too.

You didn’t know it would feel so good to have a man’s neck in your hands, squeezing it just to shut him up. Releasing it just to hear him gasp out a praise. 

“So good,” He praises, eyebrows knitted together as he loses himself to the way your pussy chokes his length. You’re not even fucking him, you’re just– “So perfect.” He continues, nearly wailing out at the immense love he feels inside. 

And then, you do. You hit him. Power hungry and entirely at a loss for your own pleasure, you land a harsh and loud slap right against his face, only for him to moan louder. 

Only for him to fuck up. 

Only for him to grip your sheets so tight that you hear a rip. 

Again. You slap him, feeling your anger slowly fizzle with each frantic moan he gives back. 

Again, and again.

“Shit, you love that, don’t you?” He manages to say, feeling his cheeks sting with red-hot passion, only to be hit again, and again. “God, make it hurt.” 

At this point, you know that you could never give him enough as the rage leaves your body entirely and it’s replaced with nothing but the need to just….fuck him. Never in your life have you ever been blinded by a need so badly, save for safety.

And you have that now, don’t you? You have Jake now, right where you want him, right he wants to be. He wants you to feel this, he made you feel this. 

The first bounce felt like pure agony, slamming his cock into you by your own force, feeling him stretch you open, hearing it slap and echo against the walls. 

“Make it hurt?” You finally say, pinching his cheeks together and forcing him to look at you. “I don’t think I could hurt you enough if I tried.” You admit, quite truthfully, mind you.

Jake gives you a crooked smirk. 

“Try it anyway.” He coos, feeling the way you repeatedly arch your back just to ride him faster. “Could fill you up, right here, right now, flip you over and make you take it if you’re so worried that you can’t.” 

It runs through you like a cold shiver. You don’t want to give up this power, you want to try. 

“That’s big talk for someone asking to be choked right now.” You dead-pan at him, voice even and calm. You continue to move your hips, listening to his repeated moans with each breath. “So loud and needy for it too.”

Jake nods proudly and drunkenly, reaching his hands out to yours and forcing them back on his neck. 

“I could be needier.” He says, pressing your hands against his airways. 

You take over for him, choking his remaining words out of him and forcing him to moan. 

“You said you’d make me take it?” You seethe out through your own pained moan, riding him so hard that you feel sensitive. “Like you think it would hurt me?” 

He shakes his head rapidly, implying that you’re wrong to think that. Wanting to tell you that if he made you take it, you’d love every second of it. You wouldn’t tell him no. 

“After promising you never would, Jake?” You question still, knowing he can’t answer. You squeeze harder as you watch his face darken, the blood rushing to burst in the whites of his eyes. “Is that it? You want to hurt me so that I hurt you back?”

He nods in a daze, wanting nothing more than to die like this now, or some other day. To hear your voice, feel your hands, and know that you’re fucking him through it. 

“You don’t scare me.” You finally say, releasing the grasp and listening to the sharp inhale he takes in. “As much as I wish you did, you don’t.” 

That’s all it takes really, knowing that he could work you like a puppet and you’d still love him. Why else would you say that? You wouldn’t fuck him like this if you didn’t mean it. Your mother long forgotten, the anger gone, it’s just a raw form of you and him right now. 

Everything you’re saying is more truthful than he ever thinks you’ve been with him. 

“Want me to?” He finally asks with a wet gasp as he continues to catch his breath. “I bet I could.”

“You can’t.” You say, now slowing your hips as your legs tire out, bracing yourself on his shoulders to take a breath. 

“I can.” He says, immediately overpowering you. He sits up quick, flipping you right over and onto your back. “I can make you feel anything I want.” He whispers darkly to you. He grabs your legs and pushes them to your chest, lost entirely from this reality. “Anything you want.” 

You just stare up at him, willing to accept his words even more when he slams his length into you, so deep that you feel nothing but the pain of it. 

For the first time, he’s hurting you through pleasure alone. 

“Could make you love it too,” He continues to dote on himself as he watches the sparkle in your eye dim. “You love it already, don’t you?”

“I’m not afraid.” You manage to mutter out through a guttural groan, wincing at the way he drives himself into you at such a speed that all you feel is pain. 

“I can’t take you seriously when you talk like that.” He chuckles, feeling entirely in control of whatever entity is running his body right now. “I see you baby, you’re terrified to lose me.” 

Your eyes die in that moment, because out of anything in this world, he’s pinpointed your biggest fear. 

“So pretty when you’re scared too,” He hums out, not relenting at all with the force of his hips when he lets your legs fall around him, and he finds himself burying his face between your tits. “Maybe I should threaten to leave you.”

Instantly, you cry. 

“Just so I can eat up these little tears you have for me.” 

You wish he would shut up. 

“So I can taste the way you come on me, and feel your pussy try and lock me here.” He smooths over your nipple at the words, slowing his hips and pulling out just to the tip. “Your body tells me more than you know, love.”

Your eyes roll up when his pointed thrust shoves your body across your sheets, your hands reach for his shoulders, clawing for any sense of normality to this moment. 

“So quiet.” He lightens his own voice now, letting it fall against your collarbone in a tone just above a whisper. “So stubborn.” 

Your mind awakens at the insult, hoping he’s right. 

“To think I’d ever leave you.” He smiles, lifting up to meet your lips. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He tastes your tears and it’s just enough for him to forgive you. 

To forgive you for not hitting him enough, for not choking him until he died. To forgive you for even thinking you’d need to talk to your mother, and for fucking lying to him. 

And only now does he go quiet, fucking you will full intent now that he’s already in your head at every turn and corner. He can tell with the way you don’t even realize your previous orgasm. 

With the way it bubbled out and down his balls, hugging his cock so tightly that all he could do was keep fucking with your mind, toying with threats only to silence them. 

And then, you inhale a sob, and breathe out his name, so pretty to your ears, even more beautiful to his own. 

“Don’t leave me.” You chime out, body numb and emotions threatening you into a panic attack.

“I’m right here, love.” He chuckles. “You’re shaking.” 

You are. More than you can even comprehend, your body is shaking from feeling everything and nothing at once, all the way up until you do feel something. 

“Ah, shit.” You cry out, hugging his body so tightly against you. “Right there–”

And Jake does it, angling his hips to repeatedly hit the spot inside of you. Knowing you’re sensitive, knowing you can take it, knowing that he can’t when he feels every drop in your body push him out of you. 

Instantly he plunges back in, listening to the wet sounds of all that love you must have for him. He can barely move in this suffocating hug as your body shakes and quivers more than it ever has, even through your past traumas, even through the cold nights this city offers. 

He has spent you and fucked you dry. 

“There she is,” He echoes into your ear. “The girl of my dreams.” 

The only energy left in you is enough to give him a smile before your tunnel vision fades into nothingness. 

It feels calm in the darkness he gives you, and even calmer when you wake up feeling as if all of this was a dream. 

It wasn’t though, because you can feel the way you’re still leaking all over your bed. Your own slick mixed with his, and you don’t even remember when or how he orgasmed because he certainly was taking his time before you initially fainted, but you’re glad he did. You think he is too, with the way he clings to you like a puppy, as if he didn’t just fuck reality straight out of you. 

Lending you the gift of floating, and of pain you find yourself to love. 

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

Waking up the next morning felt like you were a new person and you couldn’t be happier to see the saddest version of you die. The only fear you need to have is that Jake may some day choose to leave, and he said himself that he never would. 

You trust him more than anyone, more than yourself even, considering he’s managed to force you into facing so many versions of yourself that you didn’t even know you had. 

This is the first morning you’ve woken up without your skin crawling and you can’t help but shake him awake, destroying that blushed and sleeping face of his. 

“Jake,” You shake him, feeling him stir instantly and lend you a crooked smile. “Wake up.”

You listen to his morning stretch as his body vibrates in a yawn, and then he’s nuzzling his face even further into your naked chest. 

For what feels like hours, you find yourself engaging in pillow talk. Logging into work? Long forgotten. Calling your mother? Forgotten. The pain in your body? Ignored.

You tell him everything. Every detail of your life, your first memory, your first laugh and cry. All of the times your heart has been shattered, your least favorite colors and favorite words in the world. And he just…listens.

He nods, he smiles, he coos and kisses you throughout all of it. 

And then–

“You know, a while back before we met, I came home and noticed some of my things were missing and messed with. I can’t help but feel like he’s known where I’ve been this whole time.” 

Jake stiffens in your grasp before relaxing. It happened so fast that you don’t think anyone but you would have noticed it.

“Some of my panties were gone, and the batteries in my toys went missing weeks ago–not that it matters now or anything.” You continue, watching his face intently. “ At first I thought that maybe I was just forgetful but– now i know that it really was him.” You pause, smiling at him. “I’m just kind of waiting now, wondering if he’s ever going to try and do it again.”

“Do you want me to kill him?” Jake chuckles out as if to offer a funny little solution, one that he has genuinely considered more times than he can count. And he should have already, honestly.

You feel warmer at the way he makes jokes, but you know better than anyone that Jake jumps into action driven only by rage at times.

“He won’t come near you again, love, haven’t I proved that to you already?” He continues, imagining the blood of his man on his fists again. Imagining the way his bones would crack so beautifully. 

You nod in an almost shy way to him.

“You’re safe with me.” He says, wrapping his arms around himself as you cradle him. “You’re safe with me.” He continues, repeating it more to himself because he feels as though he can’t fail you again, “You’ve always been safe.” 

You haven’t believed words so deeply until you met him. 

“He already fucking knows–” He whispers shortly, cutting himself off. “I’ll kill him.” He whispers a bit louder, uncaring if you heard that first slip of his words.

Something in your brain floods at those words. A confirmation that you’ve seen him break before, and it wasn’t your imagination. Your protective, loving, and sweet boyfriend has a side to him that you’ve yet to truly see. Those words were more believable than any of the sweet things he’s ever said to you. 

And still, you almost want to encourage it, reminding yourself of the image of your ex the day he showed up, all bruised up. And then to the image of Jake with his own little battle scar.

Deep down you think you knew what happened.

And you still wonder how such a perfect man fell into your lap? Your bruised up, pain-loving boyfriend, breaking his soft persona and showing you a glimpse of something that feels….unnervingly beautiful to you.

Unsure, almost, you feel. As happy as you are that he lied to you, you try to not think of how Jake found your ex with nothing more than an out-of-context description of your abuse. You try not to think of the way he looked away from you when you mentioned the items in your apartment that went missing. 

You try not to think about how close he lives to you, and how he always managed to show up when you couldn’t hang out. 

How all of his interests matched your own, up until he never spoke about them again when he started staying with you. 

How he only looks at you, how he only talks to you, and about you.

How he always knew what to say to you.

You try not to think about how you saw him toss his own laundry into your washer many nights ago, seeing a glimpse of what you thought could have been a pair of your own missing panties. Or how he always accidentally picked up your toothbrush rather than his own in the mornings.

You push those thoughts far into the back of your mind, knowing that you were just being paranoid, grasping to not trust a single person in this world as you fall into this life with him. Even if all of those instances were with purpose on his end, you know you’d simply accept them as normal. You’d accept him, you wouldn’t think twice. 

Jake is your only safety. He would never do anything to harm you, he’s proved that. 

You hold his head tighter against your chest, breathing out a sigh and accepting everything at face value, pushing back the slight doubt in your head that everything he has done for you, to you, and with you, isn’t normal. 

“Did you tell him already?” You sigh out in a calmer tone, soothing him with your fingers in his hair. “That you’d kill him? Is that really why you had that bruise?”

Jake stiffens under your grasp briefly. 

“What do you m–” He starts. 

“I won’t ask how,” You cut him off. “But thank you.”

He relaxes, thumbs now rubbing hearts into your skin, stomach bubbling in butterflies. 

“I did.” He now admits reluctantly, feeling dangerously close to a truth you don’t need to see or know about. “I couldn’t just let another person think that you still belong to them.”

You pause, then nuzzle closer to him. 

“I knew from the first time I saw you that I wouldn’t let anyone else touch you.” He continues, spilling and spilling. “I knew that you’d be mine.”

You try not to think too hard about it, asking out gently and instead choosing to just love him harder.

“When was the first time you saw me?”

Jake goes silent and tries to read the air in the room, sensing how relaxed you are against him. 

“Eighteenth of October at the supermarket. We both made spaghetti for dinner that night.” He lies, never intending to admit that the first time he saw you was through your window. Never admitting that he actually already knew you by that eighteenth of October. That he followed you to the market.

He says it so confidently, and the fact that he’s right about what you cooked should scare you. The fact that you must have seen him that day too should make you feel unnerved.

You choose to ignore that too. 

“Was your spaghetti good?” You ask, allowing yourself to spiral into the safety that he offers you. The image of your bruised ex boyfriend bringing joy to you, the idea of Jake keeping his promises making your stomach tingle with even brighter joy.

“No.” He admits with a chuckle. “Yours was probably better.”

“You really would kill him, wouldn’t you?” 

Jake nods.

You trust him. 

He’s not lying. 

He would never lie to you. 

Him knowing what you cooked that night is a coincidence. Him remembering the date and month is just him being mindful. Your lost panties must have gotten tangled in his laundry, surely. He found your ex because you probably let sensitive information slip without realizing it. 

He met your mother and uncle by coincidence. 

He’s the perfect man by chance, and you’re lucky to have him. 

“I love you, you know.” You say, feeling him immediately shift away from your chest to look at you.

The look in his eye when he’s immediately getting on top of you, it’s still as if he’s about to wisp away with you in his arms to another realm. You’ve already been there before, and your body warms at the thought. 

“What did you say?” He asks, voice shaking and somewhat far away from your own dissociated reality. 

“I love you.” You say again, watching his lips quiver, and feeling his hands squeeze you. 

He did it. He’s won. 

And at the end of the day, you don’t think Jake could ever lose. After all, you’ve never felt so safe in a grasp as tight as this one, as painful as this one. You’ve never wanted a man to leave his fingerprints on you so bad. 

As you look at him, seeing him lose himself from reality, you follow suit. Losing yourself with him, feeling that painful grasp on you turn into begging hands. Swelling him under your palms, soothing his stinging skin with your lips, listening to him encourage you, knowing that if your ex ever tried to step into this room, he wouldn’t make it out alive. 

・・・・・・・・・・・・・・

oh, the horrors, amirite?

this is the last of the fic. there is not a part three.