just (peach)y

ONGOING SERIES:

White Mercedes | Oscar Piastri

Invisible String | Max Verstappen

The Long Way Home | Oscar Piastri

Figure It Out | Max Verstappen

COMPLETED SERIES:

Three Of Us | Lando Norris & Oscar Piastri

Radio Silence | Lando Norris

From Eden | Oscar Piastri

ONESHOTS:

Gentle Thing | Oscar Piastri, Lando Norris

Glass Girl | Max Verstappen, Oscar Piastri

SHORT ONESHOTS:

Mrs Norris

February 2023

Travel sickness was one hell of a beast.

Alina Hart had her head between her knees, breathing carefully in time with the meditation tutorial playing softly from her phone speakers.

“In for four… hold… and out for six…” the woman’s voice instructed.

Alina groaned. 

The private jet hummed steadily around her, smooth enough that most people probably wouldn’t have even noticed they were thirty thousand feet in the air. Unfortunately, Alina noticed every tiny movement. Every shift in altitude. Every patch of turbulence. 

Her stomach rolled. “Oh my God,” she muttered weakly into her knees. “I’m going to die.”

Indie exhaled softly from the seat beside her. Her hand was rubbing Alina’s back in gentle, repetitive circles. “Just breathe. Listen to Joan," she cooed. 

Joan was the meditation lady on YouTube who had a video especially for those suffering from extreme nausea, whatever the reason may be. 

Alina lifted one hand blindly in her best friend's direction. “I need another bag.” She choked out. 

Indie handed her another vomit bag. 

–

Flying private was awful for the environment, obscenely expensive, and every single time she stepped onto a jet, Alina felt like she was betraying at least three of her own moral principles at once.

The money spent could’ve gone somewhere useful.

To one of the many charities she worked closely with. To the overstretched food banks in New Mexico. To the animal rescue she funded outside Santa Fe. 

But there had been one too many incidents involving puke, teenagers with phones, and social media.

The first time it happened, she’d been eighteen and flying commercial back from London after three consecutive nights of performing at Wembley. Turbulence had turned her stomach inside out. A young girl in first class had filmed the entire thing, and by the time they landed in New York, shaky footage of Alina Hart crying with vomit on her sweatshirt had already hit Twitter.

People had mostly been kind about it.

But a few had been cruel.

Within twenty-four hours, there were opinion pieces and viral tweets and endless comment sections picking her apart. People called her inconsiderate for still flying commercial when she could afford not to. Others accused her of trying too hard to seem humble and relatable at everybody else’s expense.

That one had made her cry a little.

Not because strangers on the internet disliked her; that came with the territory, but because it made her feel like she’d failed at the one thing she’d promised her mama she never would.

“Fame is a beast, baby,” her mama had said back when Alina was sixteen and the record deal was still shiny and new and exciting enough to make them dizzy. “You gotta make sure you don’t let it chew you up. I don’t want to wake up one day and not recognise my baby girl anymore.”

Flying private had felt like crossing some invisible line she’d promised herself she never would.

But there hadn’t really been much of a choice. Because no matter how grounded or relatable the public wanted celebrities to be, humiliation was only charming in very specific doses. There was a point where vulnerability stopped making people empathise with you and started making them resent you instead.

So, on the cusp of her first world tour, she started flying privately.

Partly to avoid becoming internet fodder every time she travelled. Partly because she genuinely couldn’t stomach the idea of inconveniencing a plane full of innocent people just trying to get from point A to point B. 

She had eight Grammy Awards sitting in a glass trophy case in the recording studio at her Manhattan apartment, but she was still the same girl who used to spend hours teaching herself guitar chords from YouTube videos because her parents couldn’t afford lessons. The same girl who’d uploaded shaky covers and original songs to an audience of maybe five subscribers for years before one random video changed her life overnight.

Alina groaned quietly as another wave of nausea rolled through her stomach.

Jack closed his laptop with a sigh and stood from the seat opposite her. “Okay. Sit up.”

Alina looked up suspiciously through strands of messy, sweat-damp hair. Jack was Indie’s fiancé, which meant he’d unfortunately witnessed enough travel-related episodes over the years to become competent at handling them.

“If you stay folded in half any longer, your spine’s gonna permanently curve.” He said. 

With Indie’s help, she sat back against the seat properly. She breathed in and out deeply, her eyes watering with the effort to swallow down the urge to retch. Jack disappeared briefly into the tiny galley kitchen attached to the cabin. He returned a minute later carrying a glass of ice water and the packet of ginger chews. 

Alina looked at him miserably as he handed them over. “Thank you.” She sniffled. She took tiny cautious sips while the meditation woman continued talking softly from her phone. 

Outside the oval windows beside them, the sky stretched endlessly blue over the Atlantic.

–

The kitchen had been the centrepiece of Alina Hart’s childhood home. Her mama spent most of her days there, cleaning, cooking, and singing softly along to the oldies station crackling through the FM radio on the counter. It was where her cousins and aunties and uncles gathered every other Sunday, crowding around the table for food that somehow never ran out. Those Sundays had always been her favourite. The adults drank wine for hours while the kids ran wild through the garden, inventing imaginary worlds and drinking water straight from the hosepipe in the summer heat.

Even now, at twenty-two years old and living in a penthouse apartment in Manhattan worth more money than her parents had made in their entire lives combined, the kitchen still felt like the safest place in the world. Which was why she spent most of her time there.

The apartment itself was beautiful in that sleek, impossibly polished New York style. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. Cream marble countertops. Warm oak floors. Expensive furniture that had been chosen mostly by Indie, because Alina would’ve happily lived with beanbags and mismatched thrift-store chairs forever.

She’d filled the kitchen, though. Filled it carefully and stubbornly until it felt like a home instead of a showroom.

There were always flowers dying slowly in a vase beside the sink because she kept forgetting to throw them out once the petals started drooping. Half-finished mugs of coffee sat abandoned across the countertops at any given time, alongside random lyrics scribbled onto receipts, napkins, and the backs of grocery lists in her messy handwriting.

Somebody was always cooking something.

Cookies at midnight. Soup when somebody was sick. Pancakes on Sunday mornings, even though none of them were awake before noon often enough to justify making it a tradition. Jack, especially, had a habit of constructing enormous sandwiches at absurd hours of the night, the kind stacked so high and precariously they looked like something Shaggy and Scooby-Doo would demolish before running away from a haunted pirate.

One of the spare bedrooms had been converted into a recording studio less than a month after she moved in. That room became the other place she disappeared into when the world got too loud.

Some nights she’d stay in there until sunrise with the lights dimmed low, headphones half-on while she sat cross-legged on the floor rewriting the same verse over and over again until it finally sounded right. Other times she’d wander in barefoot at three in the morning just to play piano for a little while because sleep wouldn’t come. 

Indie called it her goblin cave. 

The other spare bedroom belonged to Indie and Jack. 

At some point over the last two years, their presence had become permanent without anybody really discussing it. There was a little ceramic tray full of Indie’s jewellery on the bathroom counter. Jack’s trainers are permanently abandoned by the front door. A framed Polaroid of the three of them was tucked onto one of the kitchen shelves beside the cookbooks Alina never used but had bought from a thrift store because they reminded her of home.

Home. It hurt to think about. Because even after two years of living there, sometimes the penthouse felt a million miles away from home.

Not because she disliked it. God, no. She loved her apartment. Loved the skyline glittering outside her windows at night. Loved walking to tiny cafés in Tribeca wearing sunglasses. Loved the custom studio and the kitchen and the life she’d managed to build entirely on her own.

But New York didn’t smell like sunscreen and cut grass in the summer. It didn’t sound like cicadas humming outside open windows or her mama singing Patsy Cline while making dinner. There were no horses grazing lazily in nearby fields. No cousins screaming through the backyard. No old FM radio crackling softly in the background while everybody argued over whose turn it was to wash dishes.

Some days, the distance between who she’d been in New Mexico and who she was now felt impossibly vast.

Like two completely different girls wearing the same face.

It would probably make a great album concept, Alina thought distantly as she sat in the studio with her fingers drifting absentmindedly across the piano keys. The girl from New Mexico versus the popstar from Manhattan.

There was something beautiful hidden inside all that contradiction. Something poetic and aching.

Alina could write endless songs about heartbreak and friendship. She could write about love and loneliness and growing up too fast. But she’d never quite figured out how to put this feeling into words. The strange hollow ache living permanently beneath her ribs.

Homesickness, she figured.

Not necessarily for a place. She wasn’t sure. 

The piano hummed softly beneath her fingertips as she played another unfinished progression, staring vaguely out through the studio glass toward the apartment beyond.

Sometimes she’d wake up after falling asleep on the couch and find Indie curled on one of the barstools in her signature pink silk pyjamas, drinking coffee while scrolling through runway collections on her iPad. Other mornings, Jack would already be awake before sunrise, finishing client work at the kitchen island with one of Alina’s old vinyl records spinning softly in the background.

The apartment wasn’t lonely.

Far from it.

It was warm and cluttered and full of people she loved.

She pressed another chord absentmindedly. 

–

“This is such a stupid idea,” Alina muttered a week later.

Indie tugged tighter on the fabric ties at the back of her dress before stepping away to assess her work. “I know,” she agreed. “But you need closure or you’re never going to move on, and frankly, I can’t keep watching you mope around. It’s exhausting.”

Alina glared at her through the mirror. “I have not been moping.” She said, a bit snappily. It had been six months. Still moping after six months would just be sad. "This is ridiculous,” she muttered. “I already got closure.” She faked a smile. 

Indie made a sceptical noise. “Well,” she said. 

“I did," Alina argued. 

“Lina.” Indie folded her arms across her chest. “Laymen’s terms: you walked in on your boyfriend fucking his assistant. In your hotel room. And you haven’t said a word to him since.” 

Alina groaned miserably and covered her face with both hands. “Can we just stop talking about it?” She asked. Her stomach felt heavy. 

“Mario wants you to see him and talk it out,” Indie continued. Mario was Alina’s manager. He was Italian, had very strong opinions about Hollywood not protecting young talent enough, and had a wife and five beautiful baby girls just a few years apart in age. “He wants you to just end things on decent terms to avoid a PR nightmare in the future if you’re both forced to be in the same place at the same time. You can’t avoid him forever.” Indie said. 

Alina sighed dreamily. “I would love that.” She said. It would be in her best interest to never ever have to lay eyes on Kian Jax ever again. Unfortunately, there was no getting rid of the image that already lived permanently behind her eyelids.

Her boyfriend of a year tangled in white hotel sheets. His assistant scrambling to find her clothes. The horrible split second where all three of them had just stared at each other in stunned silence before Alina’s entire body had gone cold.

She remembered the stupid details most vividly. The room smelling like expensive cologne and hotel air conditioning. The television still playing silently in the background. Kian saying her name again and again. 

God, she’d felt so stupid.

People had warned her about him from the beginning.

Kian Jax was beautiful, with his tattoos and his restless energy. Dating him had felt less like being in a relationship and more like willingly strapping herself to a live wire, and God, she’d loved it.

She’d ignored every warning because being wanted by him had felt intoxicating. The late-night flights to surprise her on tour. Pulling her onto stage during his concerts. Writing songs about her. 

Naming an entire album after her. 

Everything with Kian had burned hot and fast. 

Indie’s expression softened slightly. “Honey,” she said gently, “I know it hurt your feelings. You don’t have to pretend it didn’t.”

Alina’s jaw clenched instinctively.

It hadn’t just hurt her feelings. It had broken her heart.

Because for all Kian’s chaos and ego and self-destructive tendencies, she’d trusted him completely. And Alina didn’t trust people easily anymore. Her circle was small for a reason. Kian had somehow slipped through every wall she’d spent years constructing around herself and then shattered straight through them.

She dropped her hands from her face finally and stared at herself in the mirror instead.

The dress Indie had forced her into was black silk, soft against her skin, the neckline dipping low across her collarbones. Her hair fell in loose waves around her shoulders, makeup subtle and pretty. 

Indie stepped closer and fixed a strand of hair behind Alina’s ear with familiar tenderness. “Jack and I will be at the next table,” she promised softly. 

Alina let out a quiet breath through her nose. It would make it easier, probably, having them there. “Okay.”

“You’re doing this for Mario,” Indie reminded her. “For his peace of mind. You know he worries about you.”

“Right. For Mario,” Alina echoed weakly.

Mario had been beside her since she was sixteen years old. He’d protected her fiercely while simultaneously turning her into one of the biggest pop stars in the world. 

He worried about everything. Her anxiety. Her schedule. Whether she was eating enough fruits and vegetables and drinking enough water. 

If sitting through one uncomfortable dinner with Kian would finally convince Mario that she was okay, then… fine.

She could survive an hour sitting across from the devil incarnate.

Jack pushed himself up from the armchair, his armchair, as he constantly reminded everybody, because he had ADHD and needed to be involved in every conversation happening within a five-mile radius of him, and grabbed his phone from the dresser nearby.

“Worst-case scenario,” he started, “I throw a breadstick at his head, we all run away, and he gets stuck with the cheque.”

Despite herself, Alina let out a snort-laugh.

–

Kian sat across from her, candlelight flickering softly between them.

He had a new tattoo on the side of his neck. Alina tried not to stare at it for too long, but curiosity kept pulling her eyes back anyway. His tattoos had been part of what originally drew her to him in the first place. She’d met plenty of musicians and actors and industry people over the years, but Kian had been the first actual rockstar she’d ever crossed paths with.

And he’d looked exactly how a rock star was supposed to look.

“I fired her,” he said as they waited for their drinks to arrive.

Alina blinked. “What?” She asked. She’d been distracted watching condensation drip slowly down the glass jug of water. 

“Kate,” he clarified.

She frowned slightly, still trying to catch up. “Who’s Kate?”

Kian visibly winced. “I—” He scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “My assistant. She was my assistant.”

“Oh.” She said. She’d never realised until that exact moment that she hadn’t even known her name. The woman she’d found half-naked in her hotel bed, with her boyfriend, had only ever existed in her mind as his assistant. “That’s a shame,” Alina said, feigning nonchalance. “You worked together for a long time.”

“Right.” Kian’s face twisted slightly at that. He looked uncomfortable. “God, I just…” He exhaled heavily and rubbed at his jaw again with tattooed fingers. “I don’t even know what I was thinking. She was just there all the time, y’know? And she’d been throwing herself at me for months.”

Jesus Christ.

Alina wanted the floor to open beneath her and swallow her whole.

“Was it worth it?” she asked. 

Kian blinked hard and reached his hand slowly across the table toward hers. Alina just frowned at it. “No, baby,” he said softly. “No. It was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.” His voice roughened slightly. “I was drunk, alright? Still coming down from the show. Everything was crazy and loud, and—fuck, Lina, I don’t even have a good excuse. I just wish you hadn’t fucking run away,” he cursed. “I would’ve explained. I would’ve fixed it. I still wanna fix it,” he said, eyes locked on hers now. “Whatever it takes. I’ll earn your forgiveness. I swear to God.”

The waiter chose that exact moment to arrive with their drinks balanced carefully across a black tray.

Alina immediately straightened slightly in her seat. “Thank you so much,” she said warmly as the woman set her cocktail down carefully beside the candle.

The server smiled back at her automatically, clearly recognising her despite her attempts at relative anonymity. 

Kian, meanwhile, barely even looked up.

Alina kicked him sharply beneath the table.

His eyes widened slightly before he finally glanced toward the waitress. “Sorry. Thank you.”

The woman smiled politely and moved away toward another table.

Alina glared at him. 

Her mama had worked as a server for most of Alina’s childhood. Double shifts sometimes. Smiling through exhaustion because tips determined whether the electricity bill got paid that month.

Alina remembered sitting in booths after school colouring on paper placemats while waiting for her mama to finish work. Remembered the ache in her feet the summer she waitressed herself at fifteen. Remembered customers snapping their fingers at her and making her want to take the soda pipe and spray them with it.

Alina wrapped both hands around the stem of her drink, cold condensation dampening her fingertips as she stared down at the slice of passion fruit floating near the rim.

An awkward silence settled heavily across the table. Around them, the restaurant buzzed softly with conversation and clinking glasses, but their little corner suddenly felt strangely isolated from the rest of the room.

Alina exhaled quietly through her nose. “I don’t want to get back together,” she said carefully. “And honestly, I don’t even really want to be friends.”

Kian’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, but he stayed quiet.

“I just…” She glanced up briefly before looking back at her drink. “I don’t want things to be weird forever if we run into each other somewhere.” She said it because they inevitably would. Award shows. Festivals. Industry parties. The strange rotating carousel of celebrity events. “I don’t want us to be defined by this,” she continued, attempting humour despite the ache still lodged stubbornly beneath her ribs. “I don’t wanna be the next Eminem and Christina Aguilera.”

Kian didn’t look remotely amused by the reference. Instead, he tapped his fingertips restlessly against the table before asking, a little too gruffly, “Have you met somebody else?”

Alina stared at him for a second.

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes only because she suddenly felt too tired for it. “You know what?” She pushed her chair back slowly and stood, smoothing her hands down the front of her dress. “I don’t think I’m hungry anymore.”

Kian looked up at her immediately. “Lina—”

She glanced over her shoulder automatically toward the next table, where Indie and Jack stood almost the exact second she did. 

She exhaled. That, right there, was her family. Not by blood, but in every way that actually mattered.

Warmth unfurled softly through her stomach when Indie immediately grabbed her purse and Jack tossed cash next to their untouched starters. 

Alina looked back at Kian, the man she’d once been so in love with she’d rearranged entire tour schedules just to spend an extra twelve hours in the same city as him.

“I can be civil with you,” she said quietly. “I can do that because I’ve never been very good at holding grudges. But please just… leave me in the past.”

Kian looked torn for a moment, but eventually, he nodded once, slow and stoic. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Just… let me walk you outside?”

Alina glanced at the windows. Outside, the street was lined with paparazzi. Cameras clustered together, lenses angled upward, waiting. 

“It’ll send the wrong message if we walk out together,” she said quietly.

Kian gave a short, humourless exhale, shaking his head with a faint, self-deprecating smile. “Not if we leave in separate cars.” He leaned forward slightly, elbows resting on the table now, voice softer. “Let me just do it, please.”

Alina hesitated. “I’ve got security,” she said. Three of them, in fact. It would be silly to go anywhere without them anymore, and Mario wouldn’t let her even if she tried. 

“I know.” He nodded once. “But security doesn’t intimidate the paps the same way I do.”

She hated that he was right.

Alina exhaled slowly, tension still pulled tight through her shoulders like a wire. “Just to the car,” she agreed at last, because arguing would only make everything harder, and she was already exhausted. 

Kian stood, reaching for his jacket.

Indie and Jack fell into step with them as they moved toward the exit, but it all unravelled the moment they hit the doors.

Security tried to carve a path through it, but the crowd surged anyway. 

Indie’s hand slipped briefly from Alina’s as they were forced apart by movement and pressure. Jack swore under his breath, trying to stay close to her, but the gap widened anyway.

Kian grabbed her hand without hesitation, firm and grounding, pulling her through the crush before she could think too much about it. His other arm lifted slightly, body angling to shield her from the cameras as they pushed forward.

For all his faults, he knew how to become armour when he needed to.

They reached the SUV in a few sharp, rushed seconds that felt longer than they should have. A security guard yanked the door open, and Kian helped her inside, steadying her as she slid onto the seat.

For a moment, he didn’t let go of her hand and instead just looked at her.

Alina met his gaze, something bittersweet tightening in her chest. “I hope you find someone who makes you happy, Kian,” she said softly. 

Indie and Jack climbed into the SUV, Jack ushering his fiance inside first. Kian stepped back and was instantly swallowed by security and flashing lights and noise. 

The door shut, and within seconds, the SUV had pulled away.

Indie turned to her instantly. “You okay? What happened?”

Alina stared out of the tinted window for a long moment, watching Kian disappear into the swarm behind them until he was just another flicker of movement swallowed by cameras and flashing lights.

Then she threw her head back against the seat with a laugh that came out a little too loud, a little too unsteady. “No more rockstars,” she announced. “Ever again.”