#ptsftp

“I know.”

Marc puts his phone down, because it’s bad for his sleep, and because Valentino doesn’t sleep enough as it is.

“It really is none of their business,” Vale murmurs into his chest as they settle beneath the covers. “Tell them that. You are more in front of the cameras than me.”

“You fucking race in Le Mans,” Marc retorts.

Valentino rubs his arm, soothing the tense muscles there, running a thumb over the scars, before finally landing on his soulmark. “I will leave it up to you, yes?”

Marc knows he’s doing this to avoid a fight: catching the mark; putting the decision in Marc’s hands. It’s been nearly four years of this, and it still takes him off guard, catches him out of step. If he thought Vale meant it that way, he’d be a lot angrier, but it’s just—Valentino is trying. So he has to try as well.

He lets the shivering warmth spread from Vale’s thumb on his arm, smiles with it. It still aches, but Marc knows to separate it now, knows which is the injury and which is Vale. And it hasn’t been his mark for a very long time.

“They will not ask, not during a race weekend,” he decides. “It is not polite.”

Valentino’s snort is answer enough; media are not polite when they don’t want to be, and Marc thinks, with a vicious wrench, that he would know. He doesn’t say it, though, and closes his eyes as Vale traces his thumb in careful circles: scar, skin, soulmark.

Vale loves him. Vale wants him. He’s been proving it every day for four years, soothing over nearly a decade of hurt with sometimes-clumsy hands, but sometimes Marc will still ask himself what if?

He knows the answer, that if Vale hadn’t lost him for a fraction of a heartbeat, if he hadn’t had that cast-iron demonstration, they wouldn’t be here. No phone call. No whispered apologies in Marc’s motorhome. Nothing of the feather-soft way Vale had fucked him the first time Marc came to Tavullia again. Vale would not have decided to choose him.