you attend the canadian gp with kimi and fans catch more glimpses of you as a result.
kimi antonelli x doe-eyed!f!reader ୨୧ warnings : language, fan culture, hate comments, yn is mentioned to have bambi-like eyes, cherry!yn cameo ୨୧ note : if you enjoy don't forget to comment/reblog!
part of the blythe doll series.
📅 may 19, 2026
f1wagsgossip kimi includes two pictures of bambi in recent instagram update – fans wonder if the two are living together in his new home 👀 what do you think??
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user ummm... i don't think that's kimi's house 😭 i think that's HER house
user what??? is she like rich rich or something???
user i think she is – like old money type rich
user so maybe not her house but def her family's home then
user oh god not another rich girl 🙄
user isn't everyone in f1 rich though 😭
user does bambi have a little sister too??? WAIT IS THAT HOW KIMI AND BAMBI MET??? THROUGH THEIR SISTERS
user omg i think you're right!! no wonder maggie was so close to her during the miami gp
user okay but like why is she SO pretty 😳😳😳 this is totally unfair
user i don't think they're living together, it would be way too soon for them to move in together
user that's what i was thinking! if anything bambi probs hangs out with him at his house
♫ Olivia Rodrigo · lacy
🔒 blytheyn home 🤎
View all 49 comments
kimi.antonelli maggie said you and auggie need to come over that she misses you both
blytheyn just maggie misses us 🤨
kimi.antonelli okay maybe i miss you too
blytheyn lol we're about to spend a week together though 😂
kimi.antonelli still miss you though 😔💔
anyamarino my beautiful best friend
blytheyn MY beautiful best friend 🫵
blytheyn let's hangout once i get back okay 🥺
anyamarino ofc babe 💕 have fun!!
📅 may 20, 2026
♫ Olivia Rodrigo · drop dead
🔒 blytheyn 🌴 🐆 🦈 ☀️
View all 59 comments
kimi.antonelli pretty girl~ can i get your number 🤙
blytheyn i don't knowww my boyfriend is pretty protective 🤭
kimi.antonelli i'm sure he won't mind 😉
anyamarino so hottttttt 🔥 liked by author
anyamarino kimi better watch that hand 🤨
blytheyn 🤭🤭🤭
kimi.antonelli but she likes when i put my hand there 😔😔
carmenmmundt so glad we got to hangout today ❤️
clip #1 – bambi at the mercedes event with kimi 🥺
the clip is shaky and zoomed in, quality low as it tries hard to focus on your figure standing next to kimi. despite the poor quality of the clip, it could easily be seen how your hand was holding onto kimi's forearm as he guided the two of you through the small crowd.
the camera then catches kimi leaning over as he whispers something in your ear – you laughing and softly smiling up at him. the clip then immediately cuts afterwards.
💬 comments :
👤 : STOPPPPPPP HER SMILING AT KIMI ❤️🩹
👤 : low quality clip of a high quality couple
👤 : if she's private why is she attending events like this with kimi??
👤 : i think kimi is allowed to bring his girlfriend to work events if he wants too – ollie and gabi bring their gfs to things as well
👤 : talk about princess-like looks 😳 she's so insanely pretty esp with those eyes
👤 : oh she's in love with kimi just look at how she stares at him
📅 may 21, 2026
f1wagsgossip bambi – kimi's girlfriend – was reportedly spotted with him last night in la at the mercedes-amg launch event. fans spotted her walking around with kimi and also carmen.
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user how is she able to miss her classes for this??? seems pretty weird if you ask me
user probs just another fake student wag 😔 and i had my hopes up for this one
user umm... you do know that summer break is a thing for colleges right??? like that's probs why is she able to attend
user i WISH we could have gotten a picture of her and kimi together 🥹 the low quality fan ones just don't do her cuteness justice
user now why the hell is she so pretty 😩 who said that was allowed
user HER OUTFIT WAS SO CUTE THAT DRESS SHE WORE???
user that's what i thought!! the dress was just a simple black one yet it just matched the style we've seen from her so far!!
user kimi really picked a cute one
user why does she look familiar??? i feel like i've def seen her before
user maybe you've seen someone who looks similar to her?? bambi seems to be pretty private so i doubt you've seen her anywhere like tv or online before 🤔
📅 may 22, 2026
clip #2 – bambi entering the paddock with kimi 💕
the clip is steady (for once) as it focuses on kimi walking through the gate, him smiling and waving to people who are shouting his name. he then seems to slow down a little bit, turning to look over his shoulder. the camera then catches you coming in behind him – jogging a little bit to catch up with kimi who is waiting for you.
you are seen saying something as you adjust the lanyard around your neck before kimi is reaching down to link your hands together. the young driver says something in response as you both continue to walk side-by-side.
before the clip cuts, it does manage to catch kimi looking down at you with a fond look while you are still looking ahead.
💬 comments :
👤 : oh he's down bad just look at how he looks at her 🥹
👤 : AND THEN HE WAITED FOR HER
👤 : ah young love ❤️
👤 : omg why is it cute that she actually wears the lanyard like how its suppose to be worn 😆
♫ Solange · Losing You
🔒 blytheyn ₊𓇼 ೀ ‧₊˚
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kimi.antonelli where did you get that labubu??
blytheyn a fan gave it too me at the paddock ☺️
kimi.antonelli a fan???? they're giving you stuff????
blytheyn do you not want me to take things from them 🥺
kimi.antonelli you can! sorry sorry 😣 i just wasn't expecting it to happen so soon
carmenmmundt so pretty 🤎 glad we get to spend another weekend together!
blytheyn i am too!!
cherryn all my favorite things in one post: you and snoopy
blytheyn r-r-r-really 🥺👉👈 i'm honored
kimi.antonelli lando tell her not to flirt with my girlfriend 😠
lando sorry buddy your gf is her gf now too 👍
kimi.antonelli 👎👎👎
cherryn 🤗🤗🤗
📅 may 23, 2026
clip #3 – bambi walking around with y/n (lando's gf)
the clip is shaky as it films both you and y/n walking arm in arm together – your arm wrapped loosely around hers. y/n is happily chatting away while you are listening with a smile on your face. you then reply back which has the older woman nodding at you.
it shows you both weaving through the sudden crowd, stepping to the side when you both notice kimi coming through. at first kimi doesn't see you through the crowd, but when he turns his head he is seen smiling before waving and blow a quick kiss towards you.
you smile shyly, getting a little flustered when y/n teases you before you both are continuing down the paddock before the clip then cuts.
💬 comments :
👤 : yn² UNITTEEEEEEEEE – this is my new fav duo
👤 : if i had a nickel for every time two wags had the same name i would have two – which isn't a lot but weird that it happened twice
👤 : the current f1 first lady with the newly appointed paddock princess
👤 : yn taking care of bambi is so cute – i hope this friendship lasts 🥺
👤 : kimi blowing a kiss to bambi WAS SO STUPID CUTE
♫ The Birds and the Bee · Tonight You Belong to Me
🔒 blytheyn cozy corners in montreal 📚🧚♀️
View 78 comments
kimi.antonelli amore mio 💕
cherryn my cutie ☺️ can you come to all the races with me 🥺
blytheyn i wish 🥺🥺🥺 i can only do really the summer ones until classes start again for the fall
cherryn that's so unfair 😫😫
olliebearman you took kimi to a bookstore??? good job 👏
blytheyn why do you say that?? kimi loves to read 😊
olliebearman lol no he doesn't... he HATES to read
kimi.antonelli SHUT UP DUDE
olliebearman OMG YOU TOLD HER YOU LIKE TO READ TO IMPRESS HER DIDN'T YOU
blytheyn 😥😥😥
📅 may 24, 2026
clip #4 – kimi and bambi hugging after his win 😊
the clip is taken from the official f1 broadcast. it shows kimi getting out of the car and immediately running and jumping into his team's arms without a second thought.
however, before he goes to get weighed, kimi is seen quickly reaching out for you and pulling you into a tight embrace. you hugging him back just as tightly as you are seen saying something to him. kimi pulls away and nods before he's moving away.
the clip cuts to show him coming back over to barrier where he knows you're at. his helmet is off this time as he hugs you one last time. you then cup his face gently, doe eyes starring up at him brightly before you're kissing him.
the crowd around you both cheers loudly and the camera catches you both smiling into the kiss before he's pulling away. you then press one finally kiss to his cheek – the residue of your lipgloss leaving a mark on his cheek. kimi doesn't bother to wipe the kiss away before he's being ushered to the cooldown room and the clip cutting off there.
💬 comments :
👤 : THAT WASN'T JUST A HUG 😭😭
👤 : THE LIPGLOSS MARK ON HIS CHEEK STOPPPPPPP
👤 : they are literally the cutest couple on the grid right now
👤 : omg did she tell him to come back so she could kiss him 🥺 that's so sweet if she did
👤 : literally obsessed with them right now 😩
👤 : he went onto the podium with her kiss on his cheek 😭😭
blytheyn just updated their story !
caption : my winner 🩵🏆
replies :
kimi.antonelli your winner 🩵🩵🩵 thank you amore mio
blytheyn pictures were so good you used them for your own post huh 🤨
kimi.antonelli guilty 😅 you take good photos though 🩵
blytheyn suuuuuuure~
📅 may 25, 2026
f1atelier photos are just placeholders! yn doesn't have an actual faceclaim please imagine yourself or whoever you want in these pictures! thanks.
can I please request a reaction fic where reader goes to the club with their friends, and they are not really that good of a drinker and tries to avoid alcohol if they can but their friends tricks them into drinking a strong drink, therefore getting drunk, and reader lowkey panics and calls their bf to tell them what happened and pick them up. Just a fluffy yet kinda protective drivers kind of fic. Thank you !!
Not what I ordered
served with: all the drivers on the grid + retired x fem!gf!reader
chef's note: you aren’t a drinker. You’ve never liked the loss of control, the spinning rooms, or the way your head feels the next morning. Your friends know this—or they should. But one "mystery cocktail" later, the room is tilting, and your heart is racing in a way that has nothing to do with the music.
Alpine
Franco Colapinto
He picks up on the second ring. When he hears your voice sounding small and dizzy, his playful energy vanishes.
"Y/N? Hey, breathe for me. I’m coming, okay? Stay on the phone."
When he arrives, he doesn't care about the club's vibe—he walks straight to you, wraps his jacket around you, and gives your friends a look so cold they actually step back.
Pierre Gasly
He’s incredibly gentle. On the drive back, he holds your hand the entire time, kissing your knuckles.
"It’s okay, chérie. You’re safe now."
Once home, he’s got a routine: makeup removed, oversized hoodie on, and a glass of water with electrolytes. He’ll whisper sweet things in French until the spinning stops.
Aston Martin
Fernando Alonso
He doesn’t say much on the phone other than "Stay exactly where you are."
When he shows up, he has a presence that commands the room. He finds you, tucks you under his arm, and simply tells your friends, "This was a mistake," before walking out.
He spends the night watching movies with you, letting you fall asleep against his chest.
Lance Stroll
He gets worried quickly. He’ll send a car if he’s stuck at an event, but usually, he’s there himself in ten minutes.
He’s very quiet and sweet, humming softly to distract you from the nausea.
"Don't worry about them, Y/N. I've got you. Just close your eyes."
Audi
Gabriel Bortoleto
He’s the "Golden Retriever" boyfriend turned "Guard Dog." He feels so bad that you were tricked.
He’ll make sure you’re wrapped in the softest blanket he owns and will stay up all night just to make sure you don't feel sick, petting your hair and telling you stories about his day to keep you calm.
Nico Hülkenberg
Very mature and steady. He doesn't panic because he knows it makes you panic more.
He speaks in a low, grounding voice. "Take a sip of water for me, Y/N. Good girl."
He’s very efficient, getting you home and into bed, but the way he lingers to kiss your forehead shows how relieved he is that you're safe.
Cadillac
Sergio Pérez
Checo is the ultimate protector. He sounds fatherly and firm on the phone to keep you focused.
When he gets to the club, he ignores everyone else and goes straight for you. "Vente, mi amor."
He’ll be a bit stern with your friends, telling them they should know better, but with you, he’s all soft touches and reassurances.
Valtteri Bottas
He’s the king of "chill comfort." He brings a cold bottle of water and a warm hoodie in the car.
He doesn't make a big scene at the club; he just swoops you up.
On the way home, he’ll play low-fi music and crack a small joke to stop you from crying. "Hey, look at the bright side—I’ve got the best passenger in the world tonight."
Ferrari
Charles Leclerc
His heart breaks hearing you sound scared. He’ll talk to you the whole way there so you don't feel alone.
When he finds you, he pulls you into a hug that feels like home. "I’m here, mon ange. I’m here."
He’ll spend the rest of the night pampering you, making sure the room is dark and quiet.
Lewis Hamilton
He is so disappointed in your "friends" but focuses entirely on you.
He’ll lead you out of the club with a protective hand on your waist. In the car, he’s got a "hangover kit" ready just in case.
"You don't have to apologize for calling me, Y/N. I’m just glad you did."
Haas
Esteban Ocon
He gets very protective and a bit serious. He doesn't like that someone took advantage of your trust.
He’ll be very attentive, checking your temperature and making sure you’re hydrated.
He might give you a small lecture about your friends later, but for now, he just wants to hold you close.
Ollie Bearman
He’s a bit flustered but tries so hard to be the "man of the house."
He’ll stumble over his words on the phone because he's rushing to get his keys.
When he sees you, he looks like he wants to cry for you. "It’s okay, Y/N. I’ve got you. We’re going home now, I promise."
McLaren
Lando Norris
He’ll try to be funny at first to stop you from panicking, but the second he hears you're actually upset, his "pro driver" focus kicks in.
He’ll drive like he’s on a qualifying lap to get to you.
At home, he’s the best cuddler, letting you hide your face in his neck until the world stops shaking.
Oscar Piastri
Very calm, very logical.
He tells you exactly what to do: "Sit down, drink water, don't move. I'm five minutes away."
His calmness is contagious. He’ll help you through the "scary" part of being drunk with a steady hand and a dry wit that makes you feel silly for being scared.
Mercedes
George Russell
The "Perfect Gentleman." He arrives looking like he just stepped out of a magazine, but his eyes are full of worry.
He’ll speak to your friends with a polite but terrifying frostiness. "I’ll be taking Y/N home now. Goodnight."
He’ll tuck you into bed with hospital-level precision and stay by your side.
Kimi Antonelli
He’s so sweet and shy, but seeing you in distress makes him step up.
He’ll hold your hand in the car and look at you with such big, adoring eyes that you forget why you were panicking.
"Don't be sad, Y/N. You're with me now. Everything is fine."
Racing Bulls
Arvid Lindblad
He’s very youthful and earnest.
He might not know exactly what to do, so he calls his mom or a sister to ask how to help you.
He’ll end up bringing you a warm tea and your favorite stuffed animal, sitting on the edge of the bed until you fall asleep.
Liam Lawson
He’s the "tough love" guy who turns into mush for you.
He’ll grumble about your friends being "idiots" under his breath, but he’s incredibly careful as he helps you walk to the car.
He’ll hold you against his side, letting you drift off while he rubs circles on your arm.
Red Bull
Isack Hadjar
He’s fiery and fast. He’ll show up at the club looking ready to fight someone, but the second he sees you, he melts.
He’ll pick you up (literally) and carry you to the car.
"Forget them, baby. They don't deserve you. Let's go home."
Max Verstappen
Max is the king of efficiency. He doesn't waste time on the phone.
"I'm coming. Stay by the door." He arrives, gives your friends a look that would make a steward tremble, and gets you out.
At home, he’s quiet but deeply affectionate, staying in bed with you and letting you sleep on his chest.
Williams
Alex Albon
The king of fluff. He’ll bring a "care package" in the car—ginger ale, crackers, and your favorite hoodie.
He’ll listen to you ramble while you're drunk with a patient smile, nodding and kissing your temple.
"You’re okay, Y/N. I’ve got you."
Carlos Sainz
Very charismatic and protective.
He’ll walk into the club like he owns it, find you, and charm the tension right out of the room.
Once you’re in the car, he’s all about comfort. "Look at me, querida. You're safe. Just breathe."
Additional Drivers
Daniel Ricciardo
He’ll make you laugh through the panic.
"Hey, look at it this way—at least you didn't do it on a boat in Monaco!"
He’s very tactile, keeping his arm around you the whole night and making sure you feel like the most loved person in the world.
Jenson Button
Effortlessly classy. He’ll bring a soft cashmere blanket for the car ride.
He speaks in a soothing, melodic tone that puts you right to sleep.
He’ll leave a glass of water and a sweet note on your nightstand for when you wake up.
Sebastian Vettel
He’s the most "prepared" boyfriend. He has a full understanding of what to do for someone who’s had too much.
He’ll give your friends a very disappointed "dad" look before taking you home.
He’ll sit with you, holding your hand, and talking about bees or the environment to distract you until you're calm.
Yuki Tsunoda
He gets very angry at your friends.
"Who did this?! I will tell them!" But to you, he’s a softie.
He’ll share his favorite Japanese snacks with you once you feel better and make sure you have the best spot on the couch for a nap.
𖤓 Was listening to “Just a girl” when making this and the whole idea of this smau is kinda inspired by those “where’s wally” books 😭 so you get the vibes
𖤓 note: I don’t know if this has to be said, but the pictures do not represent the reader, it's literally just random ones I found onPinterest! But other than that, hope you guys like this!! Also, I love hearing feedback pls let me know if there is any way I can improve or just If you liked it gang. I love reading any comments 🫶
Pairing: Oscar Piastri x Felicity Leong-Piastri (Original Character)
Part of the The mysterious Mrs. Piastri Series.
Summary:
Oscar gets a species of wasps named after him. Bee has thoughts.
Warnings and Notes: ...Oscar gets roasted by a 5 year old. That's the story 😂
Big thanks to @llirawolf , who listens to me ramble 😂
Oscar found out about the wasp because Lando sent him seventeen messages in a row.
That was usually how disasters started.
Oscar was sitting in the kitchen at Lavender House, one hand wrapped around a mug of tea, the other bouncing Nell gently against his hip while she gnawed on the corner of his hoodie string with the fierce determination of an eight-month-old who had discovered textiles.
Felicity was at the island, slicing strawberries for Bee’s breakfast, hair piled on top of her head, wearing one of his old McLaren jumpers..
Oscar’s phone started vibrating next to his plate..
Once.
Twice.
Then it lit up like a Christmas tree.
Oscar frowned. “Lando,” he said.
Felicity didn’t even look up. “What did he break?”
“Emotionally or physically?”
“Both are possible.”
Oscar picked up the phone.
Lando: MATE
Lando: MATE
Lando: YOU’RE A BUG
Lando: OSCAR
Lando: ANSWER ME
Lando: YOU HAVE A WASP
Oscar blinked.
“What?”
Felicity looked up then. “Sorry?”
Oscar scrolled.
Lando had sent a link, three screenshots, and what appeared to be a badly cropped meme of Oscar’s face edited onto a wasp.
Oscar opened the article.
Then read the headline.
Then read it again.
Apparently, a newly described fossil wasp from Burmese amber had been named Gwesped piastrii after him. The amber was from the mid-Cretaceous period, around 98–100 million years old, and the name partly honored Oscar because the amber reminded the author of McLaren papaya.
Oscar stared at his phone.
Nell tugged harder on his hoodie string.
Felicity slowly set down the knife. “What is it?”
“I think…” Oscar said carefully, “I think somebody named a wasp after me.”
Silence.
The kitchen went very quiet.
Then Felicity’s face did something dangerous.
The corners of her mouth twitched. Once. Twice.
And then she absolutely lost it.
Not a polite laugh. Not a soft laugh. A full, bent-over-the-counter, one-hand-braced-beside-the-strawberries laugh.
Oscar stared at her.
“I’m glad this is funny to you.”
She tried to speak. Failed. Waved a hand at him.
Bee’s head snapped up from her porridge. “Papa got a wasp?”
Oscar looked down at the screenshot again, still feeling like this was somehow one of those fake headlines Lando sent when he was bored.
“Apparently.”
Bee scrambled up immediately and came to stand beside him, chin barely clearing the table but eyes sharp and interested.
“Can I see?”
Oscar handed her the phone without hesitation, because Bee was five now and could navigate scientific abstracts with more confidence than most adults Oscar knew.
Bee squinted.
Her lips moved silently over the scientific name.
“Gwes… ped… pias… tree-eye?”
“Piastrii,” Felicity supplied, still laughing under her breath.
Bee frowned. “That sounds like us.”
“It is us,” Oscar said. “Sort of.”
Bee squinted at the article. “It is extinct,” she announced.
Oscar frowned. “The wasp?”
“Yes, Papa. Obviously the wasp. It is from the Cretaceous period.”
Felicity’s shoulders were shaking.
Oscar looked between them. “Why does my daughter sound like David Attenborough?”
Bee ignored him, already scrolling.
“It is over one hundred million years old.” She paused, then looked up at Oscar with thoughtful seriousness. “That makes sense.”
Oscar frowned. “Why does that make sense?”
Bee patted his forearm kindly. “Because you are old.”
Felicity turned away from the counter.
Her shoulders shook.
Oscar stared at his eldest daughter. “I’m twenty-five.”
Bee nodded again. “Yes. Very old.”
Felicity lost it.
She laughed so hard she had to brace herself against the counter, and Nell, delighted by the noise, started giggling in Oscar’s arms — a gummy, breathless little sound that made the entire kitchen brighter.
Oscar looked down at the baby in his arms. “Not you too.”
Nell slapped his chest again. “Ba!”
“Betrayal,” Oscar muttered.
Nell made a happy squeaking sound and smacked Oscar’s chin with one damp fist.
“Thank you, Nell,” he muttered. “Very supportive.”
Bee had gone back to reading. Her brow furrowed.
“It went extinct sixty-six million years ago,” she said. “With the dinosaurs.”
Oscar leaned one hip against the counter. “That feels a bit harsh.”
“The asteroid was very bad for many species,” Bee said gravely.
Felicity, still laughing silently, managed, “She’s not wrong.”
Bee scrolled again, then stopped.
Her expression changed. Bee looked up slowly. “Papa.”
“Yes?”
“You got a wasp.”
“I didn’t ask for one.”
“I am Bee. You are my Papa.”
“Correct.”
“So you should have got a bee named after you because of me.”
Oscar leaned back in his chair.
Honestly, airtight logic.
Felicity kissed the top of Bee’s head. “Maybe someone will name a bee after you one day.”
Bee brightened. “Bees are better than wasps.”
Felicity covered her mouth.
Oscar shifted Nell higher on his hip. “I’m not sure I should comment.”
Bee crossed her arms, tiny and furious in dinosaur pyjamas. “Bees help flowers. Bees make honey. Bees are important for the environment. Wasps are—” She paused, searching for the harshest insult available to a five-year-old. “Mean.”
“Wasps are also pollinators,” Felicity offered, because apparently she had chosen violence.
Bee turned her betrayed gaze on her mother. “Some wasps are pollinators. Some are parasitoids. Bees are better.”
Oscar murmured, “Careful, Fliss. You’re about to get peer-reviewed.”
Bee pointed at the phone. “This wasp does not even help the environment anymore because it is dead.”
Oscar pressed his lips together. “That’s a strong point.”
“It is extinct,” Bee said, with the devastating finality of a judge delivering sentence. “And it is not even orange.”
Felicity wheezed.
Oscar looked down at Nell, who was now trying to eat his collarbone. “Do you have an opinion on this?”
Nell blew a raspberry.
“Thank you.”
Bee climbed back onto her chair, pulling Oscar’s phone closer. “I need to read the full paper.”
Oscar blinked. “The scientific paper?”
“Yes.”
“You’re five.”
“I can read.”
“I know you can read, but—”
Felicity, traitorously, handed Bee her tablet. “There’s probably a PDF.”
Oscar looked at his wife. “You’re encouraging this.”
“I married you at eighteen. My standards for sensible decision-making are historically inconsistent.”
“Does the paper have pictures?”
Felicity leaned over Bee’s shoulder. “It might have diagrams.”
Bee brightened. “Good. I like diagrams.”
Felicity, still smiling, pulled up the journal page on the tablet. “We can read it together.”
Bee leaned forward immediately, all outrage forgotten in the presence of new information.
Oscar watched his wife and daughter bend over the tablet together, Felicity explaining amber fossils and preserved insect morphology while Bee nodded like she was attending a conference panel.
Nell drooled down his hoodie.
Oscar sighed.
“I get a species named after me and somehow I’m still the least impressive person in this kitchen.”
Felicity looked up, eyes sparkling. “You did get an extinct wasp.”
Bee nodded without looking away from the article. “A very old dead wasp.”
Oscar stared at her.
Then at Felicity.
Then down at Nell.
“Right,” he said. “Thank you, family. Very proud moment for me.”
Bee finally looked up, expression softening slightly. “It is still cool, Papa.”
Oscar’s chest softened.
“Yeah?”
She nodded. “Because someone found something very old and special and thought about you.”
That hit him harder than he expected.
He looked down at the image of the tiny fossilised insect on his phone. Something trapped in amber for over a hundred million years.
Something that had existed before humans, before racing, before noise and engines and championship points.
And somehow, absurdly, it had his name.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “That is pretty cool.”
Bee leaned back, satisfied.
Then added, “But next time, ask for a bee.”
Felicity laughed softly, reaching across the table to squeeze his hand.
Oscar looked at his daughters — Bee, brilliant and indignant on behalf of pollinators; Nell, drooling on his hoodie like it was her life’s work — and thought that no extinct wasp, no trophy, no headline in the world was ever going to beat this.
Still.
He looked back at the phone.
“Over one hundred million years old,” he muttered.
Bee smiled brightly. “It’s okay, Papa. You look good for your age.”
Then she read the name again, very slowly.
“Gwesped piastrii.”
Oscar waited.
Bee looked up.
“Can I draw it?”
“Of course.”
She slid off the stool and ran for her insect notebook, the one covered in stickers of bees, butterflies, and beetles.
Felicity watched her go, still smiling.
Oscar looked at his wife. “You’re enjoying this far too much.”
“I’m married to an ancient wasp,” she said. “Let me have this.”
“It’s scientifically significant.”
“It is,” she agreed, leaning over to kiss Nell’s cheek, then Oscar’s. “My very significant fossil.”
He gave her a flat look.
She grinned.
A few seconds later, Bee returned with pencils, a magnifying glass, and the intensity of someone preparing a museum exhibit.
She sat at the table and began drawing.
The wasp had six legs, wings, a tiny helmet, and — for reasons Oscar couldn’t begin to unpack — his number on its back.
Underneath, in careful letters, she wrote:
PAPA WASP OLD EXTINCT IMPORTANT BUT NOT AS GOOD AS BEES
Oscar read it.
Then looked at Felicity.
Felicity was biting her lip so hard she looked like she might injure herself.
Bee added one final note at the bottom.
DIED WITH DINOSAURS. SAD.
Oscar sighed.
Nell slapped one tiny hand against his cheek.
Bee looked up proudly. “I’m going to show Lando.”
Oscar immediately reached for his phone.
“No—”
Too late.
Bee had already climbed off the chair, drawing in hand, heading for Felicity’s phone because she had learned exactly which adult was easier to manipulate.
Felicity handed it over without shame.
Oscar stared at her.
“Traitor.”
Felicity smiled, radiant and unrepentant.
“She’s peer reviewing your species.”
By lunch, Lando had sent back twelve crying-laughing emojis, Mark had replied with ‘finally, a Piastri with wings’, and Nicole had asked whether Bee wanted a book on fossil insects.
Bee did.
Obviously.
Oscar looked around the kitchen — Felicity laughing softly into her tea, Nell chewing on a silicone spoon, Bee lecturing Button the Frog about amber preservation and ecological value — and thought, not for the first time, that his life had become very strange.
He had a formula 1 seat. 2 daughters. A Genius wife. Nearly a dozen race wins… and a wasp species named after himself.
“Papa?” Bee said.
“Yeah?”
“If you are a wasp, does that mean you sting?”
Oscar glanced at Felicity.
Felicity’s eyes gleamed.
He sighed. “Only on track.”
Bee considered that.
Then nodded.
“Okay. That is acceptable.”
And just like that, apparently, he had been scientifically approved.
***
Meanwhile on Twitter:
@/OscarPiastri:
Apparently there is now an extinct wasp named after me. This is very cool.
Can it be a bee next time, maybe? My daughter had thoughts.
@/OscarPiastri:
(She also said it makes sense the wasp is extinct “because you’re old”, so I’m having a great morning, thank you for asking.)
@/f1paddocktea:
OSCAR TWEETING “can it be a bee next time, maybe? my daughter had thoughts” IS TAKING ME OUTTTT
@/papayascientist:
Bee Piastri said “congratulations on the taxonomic honour but I have notes”
@/fossilfuelledf1:
“my daughter had thoughts” = Bee wrote a full peer-reviewed rebuttal titled WHY BEES ARE BETTER THAN WASPS
@/piastriupdates:
Oscar has been a wife guy, a girl dad, a chicken dad, and now apparently an extinct wasp. The range.
@/AcademicF1Girl:
As someone who works in taxonomy I am begging the scientists to name an actual bee after Oscar next because Bee Piastri has clearly opened a formal complaint.
@/formulabee:
“Can it be a bee next time maybe” HE SOUNDS SO TIRED 😭 that child absolutely lectured him over breakfast.
@/beepiastrination:
Bee Piastri has standards. Bees pollinate. Wasps chase people at picnics. She’s RIGHT.
@/landoscarbrainrot:
He didn’t tweet “this is an honour.” He tweeted “my five-year-old has filed a complaint.” That’s fatherhood.
@/fossilwasposcar:
New username acquired. Thank you, science.
@/f1girlie44:
“my daughter had thoughts” is the most ominous thing oscar piastri has ever tweeted
@/papayaprints:
Bee Piastri heard her father got a WASP named after him and immediately convened an environmental ethics committee.
@/boxboxbee:
Oscar: very honoured
Bee: actually bees are better for the environment and this is taxonomically offensive
@/papayaenthusiast:
Oscar being immortalized in science and immediately using the moment to report that his daughter disapproved is peak Oscar.
@/academicwag:
The sentence “my daughter had thoughts” is so funny because you just know Bee had a full presentation ready.
@/norrisnation:
The funniest part is Oscar did not say “my daughter was excited.” He said “my daughter had thoughts.” That child had CRITICISMS.
@/piastrination:
Scientists: we named a new fossil species after you!
Oscar: thank you :)
Bee: why not a pollinator with stronger environmental credentials
@/graveltrapgirl:
Bee Piastri being personally offended that her name is Bee and Oscar got a wasp named after him is actually so valid.
@/beesbeforewasps:
NEW USERNAME UNLOCKED THANK YOU BEE PIASTRI
@/turnonechaos:
The way Bee is going to grow up and discover this thread and be like “yes, I was correct.”
@/papayafossil:
Oscar didn’t get a wasp named after him. Bee got a new research topic and Oscar happened to be involved.
@/f1archivegirl:
Oscar’s entire online presence is just:
dry race comment
dry race comment
daughter says I should have a bee named after myself, and also that I am old
dry race comment
@/F1:
Race winner. Dad. Now fossil wasp.
Oscar Piastri’s résumé keeps growing.
@/papayapiastri:
OSCAR GETTING A WASP NAMED AFTER HIM AND BEE PIASTRI BEING OFFENDED ON BEHALF OF ACTUAL BEES 😭😭😭
@/oldmanoscar:
“because you’re old ”
OSCAR IS 25 😭😭😭
@/piastriarchive:
Oscar really has the most insane soft launch-to-hard launch family lore ever:
2024: surprise wife and daughter
2025: surprise second baby
2026: surprise extinct wasp
@/sciencegirlf1:
Oscar: “I got a species named after me!”
Bee: “Incorrect pollinator. Revise and resubmit.”
@/fossilf1:
As a paleontology student and F1 fan, I need everyone to understand that Bee Piastri demanding a bee species instead is the greatest public engagement with taxonomy we have had in years.
@/carbonfiberbee:
Oscar Piastri accidentally making his five-year-old daughter care about extinct hymenoptera is exactly the content I needed.
@/landoscaragenda:
NOT OSCAR ASKING THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY TO NAME A BEE AFTER HIM NEXT BECAUSE HIS FIVE YEAR OLD WAS UNIMPRESSED
@/mclarenorange33:
some drivers celebrate species being named after them. oscar immediately gets bullied by his own child. perfect.
@/sciencegirlieF1:
Bee Piastri discovering her father’s namesake species went extinct with the dinosaurs and deciding that makes sense because “Papa is old” is genuinely the funniest thing I have ever heard.
Pairing: Max Verstappen x Dr. Anastasia "Ana" Wolff (Original Character)
Summary:
Max Verstappen to Mercedes? The paddock is buzzing. The media’s in meltdown.
Dr. Anastasia “Ana” Wolff, Mercedes’ notoriously brilliant, emotionally unavailable lead systems engineer and Toto Wolff’s eldest daughter, is not handling it well. Because Max isn’t just a potential signing, he’s the man she’s been sleeping with in secret for nearly a decade.
And if the rumours are true, and Max Verstappen really is joining Mercedes, then Ana’s carefully compartmentalised world is about to explode.
Warnings and Notes: Uh...Susie kinda verbally destroys Toto, mention of child abuse and neglect...
For Housekeeping Reasons, this is fiction. I don't know any of these people in real life. The world portrayed in this story is obviously not real life, and I am sure that none of the people mentioned are anything like I portray them in this piece of fiction. (Apparently, this needs to be said for some of the people in my inbox.)
Let me know if I missed something else, and I'll add it!
As always big thanks to @llirawolf , who listens to me ramble.
Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 10 October 2025
Max woke at 07:03 to an empty bed and the immediate, unpleasant certainty that Ana had done something deeply Ana with the morning.
For one stupid second, still halfway in sleep, he reached across the mattress expecting warmth and found only the cool sheet and the soft dent where she had been.
He opened one eye.
The bedroom was washed in that early Monaco light.
The house was quiet. Too quiet. Not the good quiet of two people still asleep and the world held briefly at bay.
Working quiet.
Max lay there for another few seconds, listening.
Nothing from the shower.
Nothing from the kitchen.
No clatter of mugs or the low murmur of the coffee machine or the sound of Ana moving through domestic space with that clipped, efficient softness of hers.
Then, faintly, from downstairs—
Her voice.
Not close.
Lower in the house.
Sharper than normal.
Max closed his eyes.
Of course.
He pushed himself upright more carefully than pride would have preferred, negotiated the leg, the crutches, the general insult of being a man in recovery, and made his way downstairs in sleep trousers and a T-shirt with his hair doing whatever the hell it wanted.
The kitchen was empty.
The cats were nowhere to be found.
From below, Ana’s voice rose again, clear enough now to be understood.
“No, Solomon, that is not what I said. That would be idiotic. I said if the second fault tree still assumes single-point validation under full load, then you are building optimism into a system that should be structurally incapable of optimism. Those are not the same sentence.”
There was a pause.
Then Ana again:
“No, I don’t care that it worked in simulation. It works until it doesn’t, and by the time it doesn’t, someone is in a wall at three hundred kilometres an hour. Try again.”
Max stood in the kitchen for a second, staring into the middle distance, and thought, with total clarity:
Well.
He forced himself down the basement staircase, (he had crutches now, damnit, he didn’t need the goddamn elevator) and found the door to Ana’s basement office open.
The office looked like the inside of Ana’s brain if it had been given square footage and no budget.
Screens everywhere. Notes. Systems diagrams.
A wall of organized brilliance that made him feel, not for the first time, that he had somehow gotten romantically involved with the concept of terrifying competence and it had turned out very well for him personally.
Sassy had curled herself together on the couch in Ana‘s office.
Ana was barefoot in her pyjamas. Meanwhile, Jimmy had decided that sitting on Ana‘s lap was the best place to be.
That, somehow, made it worse.
Or better.
Nastya was wearing striped pyjama trousers that were so old that the fabric was washed out and had an underminable colour and one of his shirts.
Her hair was tied up, glasses on, one leg folded underneath her in the desk chair as if she had simply descended here before dawn and become part of the systems architecture herself.
She did not look around when he came in.
She just lifted one hand briefly in acknowledgment and kept talking into the headset.
“No. No, listen to me. You are still assuming the driver will have time to compensate if the arbitration layer hesitates.” She clicked something on the screen with sharp irritation. “That assumption is unacceptable. If I can see the delay in the model, the driver will definitely feel it.”
Max stopped about halfway into the room.
There it was.
The thing he had never really gotten to see properly before.
Not Ana working generally.
He’d seen that.
Everyone had. She was always working, or thinking, or rearranging some problem until the world behaved better. But this—this specific version of her, deep inside Mercedes, fully in command, furious about systems and safety and the scale of consequence—this was different.
It was fascinating.
It was also kind of hot.
Which felt like a poor character trait given that she was currently verbally disassembling one of the best systems engineers in Formula One before breakfast.
“Solomon,” she said, in a tone that made Max almost want to apologize on Solomon’s behalf despite having no idea what the technical argument actually was, “if I ask for redundancy, I do not mean decorative redundancy. I mean I want the kind that survives contact with reality. Please stop giving me the engineering equivalent of a false wall in a murder mystery.”
A beat.
Then, colder: “No. I’m not being dramatic. You’re just all being intellectually lazy.”
Max leaned on the crutches and watched.
This, he thought, was honestly incredible.
Also, somewhere under the admiration and the very real attraction, there was the more domestic and much more inconvenient fact that she should stop and come eat breakfast with him like a normal person instead of doing engineering warfare in pyjamas at seven in the morning while scratching his cat under his chin.
Ana clicked through another set of diagrams on the leftmost screen, eyes narrowed.
The whole thing had a pattern to it, he realized after a minute.
She was not actually angry with Solomon. Not in the personal sense. Irritated, yes. Ruthless, yes. But what sharpened her was something else.
Fear, maybe. Or not fear exactly. Urgency.
Because every time she came back to the point, it was the same axis.
Not elegance. Not performance. Not even only competitiveness.
Driver safety.
The car not lying. The system not hesitating. The architecture not expecting a human being to save it from itself at two hundred miles an hour.
And Max felt that knowledge settle into him with strange quiet force: nobody in that building, possibly nobody in the sport, was as insane about systems and driver safety as Ana was.
Nobody.
Because for most people it was engineering. For her it was personal.
Ana finally looked over and saw him properly.
Just for a second, something in her face softened.
Then she held up one finger—one minute—and went right back to destroying Solomon Becker’s self-esteem.
“No,” she said. “You don’t get to say ‘good enough’ to me about this. Not after Baku. Not ever again.”
That shut the room up.
Even through the phone, Max could tell.
Ana leaned back slightly, rubbing once at the bridge of her nose with the hand not holding the headset.
Then, quieter and somehow more dangerous:
“Fix it and send me the revised model before lunch. If Elliott signs off on the same compromised logic again, I’m coming to Brackley and becoming everyone’s problem in person.”
A longer pause.
Then: “Yes. Excellent. Thank you. Goodbye.”
She ended the call.
The room went still.
Ana stayed exactly where she was for one second longer, eyes on the screens, like she was still mentally three layers deep in the system and needed to climb back out manually.
Then she pushed the headset off and turned toward him.
“Good morning.”
Max stared at her.
“You’re insane.”
“Yes,” she said. “Good morning to you too.”
He came closer, slower because of the leg, and stopped beside the desk.
“You’ve been down here doing Mercedes work in pyjamas at seven in the morning.”
Ana took off her glasses and rubbed at one eye. “That is a fairly ordinary event.”
“It is not ordinary.”
“It is for me.”
“That’s the problem.”
That got the smallest flicker at one corner of her mouth.
Max looked at the screens, then back at her.
“You were calling Solomon an idiot.”
“I was calling a systems assumption idiotic,” she corrected. “Solomon merely happened to be nearby.”
“Interesting distinction.”
“It matters. Solomon isn’t an idiot. Solomon is very smart.”
He let that go because, probably, in Ana’s world, it actually did matter.
Instead he asked, “What was that about?”
Ana leaned back in the chair.
“The arbitration layer,” she said. “There’s still too much lag under compounded fault assumptions. It’s not catastrophic, but it’s not good enough.” Her jaw tightened briefly. “And Solomon keeps trying to solve for elegant compromise when I want structural paranoia.”
Max nodded once.
That made sense. Of course it did.
Because yes—there it was again, plain as anything. No one was going to be as unreasonable about this as she was, because no one else was carrying the same internal equation between systems failure and flesh.
“No one else is as insane about this as you are,” he said quietly.
Ana looked at him.
“No,” she agreed. “Probably not.”
No denial. No false modesty. Just fact.
Max rested his hand lightly on the back of her chair.
“And because of that,” he said, “you should stop before breakfast and come eat with me like a person.”
That made her actually look faintly offended.
“I am a person.”
“I know, but you are currently also a basement gremlin with a headset.”
She exhaled through her nose.
Not quite a laugh.
Close.
Then she looked back at the screens.
For a second he thought she might refuse.
Instead she said, a little too casually, “I may go with them to COTA.”
Max stilled.
Not because the sentence surprised him. Because he could hear everything under it that she was not saying.
Mercedes.
The car.
The need to be there if the architecture wasn’t settling into shape fast enough for her to trust it from another continent.
He looked at her profile.
“Okay.”
That made her glance back at him.
“Okay?”
“Yes.”
Ana studied his face as if she were checking for hidden hurt.
Max shrugged one shoulder.
“I’m going to miss you,” he said. “A lot.” Then, because that also deserved to be said cleanly: “But go, if you need to, Nastya.”
Something in her face changed then. Not relief exactly. Something quieter. More dangerous.
Because maybe she had expected resistance.
Or guilt.
Or one of those soft selfishnesses couples sometimes called love when what they really meant was choose me over the thing that steadies your mind.
Max reached out and tucked one loose strand of hair behind her ear.
“I understand,” he said.
And he did.
Because this was part of loving Ana: understanding that sometimes the thing she needed most was not comfort or rest or being persuaded to stay home and let other people fail.
Sometimes what she needed was to go directly toward the problem and force it into a safer shape with her own hands.
Ana looked down for a second.
Then said, quietly, “Thank you.”
Max bent and kissed her forehead.
“You can thank me by coming upstairs and eating breakfast before you start another war with Brackley.”
“That was not a war.”
“That was absolutely a war.”
“It was a disagreement.”
“You threatened to become everyone’s problem in person.”
Ana considered that.
“That was simply motivational.”
Max laughed then, because honestly, what else was there to do.
Then he held out a hand.
“Come on.”
She looked at it. Then at him. Then at the screens.
And finally, with the visible reluctance of a woman leaving behind several active lines of thought she would absolutely return to, she put her hand in his and let him pull her carefully to her feet.
The basement office glowed behind them with charts and systems and the future of Mercedes depending, apparently, on whether enough men in Brackley learned to fear her before lunch.
Max led her toward the stairs anyway.
Breakfast first.
Then global engineering domination.
***
Wolff Residence, Monaco - 10 October 2025
Toto knew Jack had noticed before his son said a word.
That was the problem with children, especially bright ones and especially their children: they missed great sweeping abstractions all the time and then clocked, with surgical accuracy, the one thing you had hoped might pass beneath notice.
A changed tone. A silence held half a second too long. The wrong kind of quiet between adults who usually knew how to move around one another without leaving sharp edges in the air.
Breakfast was soft-boiled eggs, toast, berries, and coffee that Toto did not particularly taste.
The kitchen was full of morning light.
Susie was standing at the island in a blouse and slim dark trousers, moving through the final stages of breakfast with her usual efficient calm. Jack sat at the table in his school uniform, building a precise wall out of strawberries at the edge of his plate before eating the fruit itself, because apparently that was the order things were happening in today.
Toto sat opposite him with the paper open and unread.
That, he suspected, was probably what gave him away.
Jack looked up from his strawberries.
Then at Susie. Then at Toto. Then back at his strawberries again.
Finally he said, with the unnerving directness of children who had not yet learned adults often preferred to be lied to gently: “Did you have a fight?”
The question sat in the morning light like a dropped spoon.
Toto looked up over the newspaper. Susie, by the coffee machine, did not move for one beat.
Then she turned and said, very evenly, “Why do you ask?”
Jack shrugged one shoulder in that particular way children did when they were trying to make instinct sound like nothing at all. “You’re being weird.”
Toto let out one breath through his nose that might have been a laugh under better circumstances. “That’s quite vague.”
Jack looked at him with deep eight-year-old skepticism. “No,” he said. “It’s not.”
That, Toto thought, was unfortunately fair.
Susie brought the coffee over and set one cup by Toto’s hand, then sat beside Jack and reached to straighten the collar he had already straightened twice himself.
“We’re all right,” she said. “We just had a difficult adult conversation.”
Jack considered that.
Then, with the graciousness of a child allowing adults one chance to recover their dignity, nodded once.
“Okay.”
He bit into a strawberry.
Toto looked at Susie over the rim of his coffee.
She did not quite look back, but the corner of her mouth moved by a fraction in a way that said: later.
Jack, having apparently decided not to interrogate his parents‘ marriage before school, moved on to the next logistical concern in his universe.
“We’re still going to Scotland this afternoon, right?”
That one Toto could answer without having to think.
“Yes.”
Jack brightened immediately. “With Ana and Max.”
“Yes.”
“And Mama.”
“Yes,” Susie said, smoothing butter over her toast. “I’m included in the trip to my home country, darling.”
Jack ignored the tone entirely, because sarcasm was one of the many linguistic arts he recognized without yet respecting.
“Good,” he said. “Because I already told Matteo I was going.”
Susie actually smiled at that.
Toto watched it happen with a kind of tired gratitude. Whatever had lived between them the night before had not vanished, exactly, but the shape of it had altered in daylight. Less incendiary. More precise. Still there. Still waiting.
Jack, blissfully unaware of the emotional architecture beneath the kitchen table, continued with the breathless importance of a child with plans.
“Will Ana and Max come straight after school?”
Toto looked at him, then at Susie, then back again. “That’s the plan.”
Jack nodded, satisfied. “And then we fly.”
“Yes.”
“And Jimmy and Sassy are staying here.”
“Yes.”
Jack speared another strawberry with exaggerated seriousness. “Good.”
Toto stared at him for a second. “What?”
Jack looked up. “I like when the plans stay the same.”
There it was.
Small. Simple. Load-bearing.
Toto glanced at Susie without meaning to.
She had heard it too, of course she had, and her face had gentled in that particular quiet way it did around Jack when he said something more revealing than he intended. “Yes,” she said softly. “I know.”
Breakfast finished without further emotional catastrophe.
Jack found his shoes. Then his schoolbag. Then the one notebook he was convinced had vanished forever and was, naturally, exactly where it always belonged.
Jack talked most of the way to school.
About a Lego structure that needed improving. About a teacher who didn’t understand the superiority of neat columns. About whether Scottish rain was “worse” than Monaco rain or just “more committed.”
Toto answered where required. Susie did better.
At the school gates, Jack stopped before getting out of the car and looked between them one last time.
“You’re okay, right?”
The question was quieter than the one at breakfast. More careful. Less interested in being correct than in being reassured.
And this time Toto answered before Susie could. “Yes,” he said.
Jack looked at him. Toto held his gaze. “Yes,” he repeated, more steadily. “We’re okay.”
Jack nodded once, accepted it, and climbed out with the swift resilience of a loved child already being pulled toward the next adventure.
They watched him run toward the entrance, turn once to wave, then disappear into school.
The car was quiet after that.
Toto started the engine and pulled back into Monaco traffic, the morning already sharpening around them, heading now not home but toward Ana’s house.
For a while Susie said nothing.
Neither did he.
The city slid past in bright fragments—stone, glass, sea, clipped greenery, expensive silence.
Then, when they were three lights away from the house and there was no longer enough road left to pretend the conversation could be indefinitely postponed, Susie said:
“Next time.”
Toto kept his eyes on the road. He knew that tone too.
Not anger now. Not the white-hot version of the night before.
Something steadier. Colder. Still absolute.
“Next time,” she repeated, “I want to hear it from you. Unprompted.”
Toto tightened his hands on the steering wheel.
“Yes.”
Susie turned slightly toward him.
“I mean it, Toto.”
“I know.”
“No,” she said, voice still quiet. “I want to be very clear. I do not ever again want to learn something so fundamental about what happened to our daughter because someone else happened to mention it.”
He swallowed once.
The word our in her mouth still had the power to undo him at strange angles. Not because it was new.
It really wasn’t. But it was becoming official, and because sometimes the legal shape of love arrived after the real one.
“You should have heard it from me earlier,” he said.
“Yes,” Susie replied. “I should have.”
The car moved through another turn, sunlight flashing hard off the windscreen.
Toto exhaled slowly. “I told myself,” he said, “that if it was old, and already over, and I could not change it, then dragging it up again would only make more pain.”
Susie was quiet for one beat. Then: “That’s a very convenient theory for the person who withheld the information.”
He shut his eyes briefly at the red light, then opened them again. “Yes.”
“I’m not asking for perfection.”
“I know.”
“I’m asking that you stop deciding, on your own, what I do and don’t need to know about Ana.”
That was fair. More than fair.
“Yes,” he said again.
Susie looked out the window for a moment, then back at him.
“You don’t get to protect me from the difficult things about her childhood,” she said. “Not if what you’re actually doing is protecting yourself from having to say them aloud.”
That one hurt because it was true.
Toto drove the next stretch in silence. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone lower.
“I am trying,” he said, “to stop doing that.”
Susie’s face softened. Not much. Enough.
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m still here having this conversation in the car instead of making you discover my absence by lunchtime.”
That got a short breath of laughter out of him, tired and real. “Comforting.”
“It was meant to be instructional.”
He nodded once. That, too, was fair.
They turned through the gates a minute later. The house stood bright and elegant against the garden, all glass and pale stone and deliberate calm, as if it had no idea that inside it lived one of the most formidable women he knew and several of the most emotionally complicated decisions of his life.
Toto parked and killed the engine.
For a second neither of them moved.
Then Susie reached for the door handle and said, without looking at him: “Today is about paperwork.”
“Yes.”
“And after that we fly to Scotland with the children.”
That word again. Children.
“Yes.”
She turned to him then, one hand still on the door.
“Try to remember,” she said, “that being ashamed of what happened to Ana is only useful if it makes you better now.”
Then she got out of the car.
Toto sat where he was for one second longer, looking at the front door of the house where his daughter was waiting, where Max would probably appear in the hall on crutches and try to look as though he had not been listening for the car.
Then he opened the door and followed his wife inside.
***
Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 10 October 2025
Susie saw Ana before Ana saw her.
The house was bright with late morning light, all pale stone and sea-glass calm, the kind of house that made beauty look inevitable.
Nikolai had let them in.
Toto had gone still beside her in the hall in that way he sometimes did now around Ana’s home. A kind of reverence sharpened by guilt.
Susie barely noticed him.
Ana was standing at the kitchen island in dark trousers and a soft blouse, hair pulled back badly enough that it had to have been done in a hurry, one hand curled around a coffee cup she had clearly forgotten to drink from. Max was opposite her, looking like a man trying to be upright and useful and mildly offended by the concept of physiotherapy before noon.
And yet there she was.
There she was.
Not as a story.
Not as a child reconstructed from other people’s failures.
Not as the little eight-year-old girl Susie had spent half the night imagining in rooms that had not loved her properly.
Just Ana.
Alive. Elegant. Tired around the eyes. Existing in a house that looked built for her rather than around her.
Susie felt the ache of it hit low and clean before she had time to brace against it.
Because this was the terrible thing about loving children who had not been handed to you young enough: you could see the ghost versions too.
The baby you never got to rock against your shoulder.
The little girl you never got to kneel in front of and zip into her coat and tell she was allowed to cry properly.
The thin, watchful child Susie had not known until it was far too late to protect from the earliest wounds.
Ana looked up then and saw them.
Her whole face changed.
Just enough to unmake Susie in one quick, private place under her ribs.
“Hi,” Ana said.
There was tiredness in it. And relief. And no idea at all, Susie realized instantly, that anything had changed between the adults since yesterday.
Good, Susie thought with a cold steadiness that surprised even her. Let it stay that way for now.
Let Ana have one morning in her own house without having to manage the fallout of truths she had not asked to become current problems
“Hello, darling,” Susie said, and crossed the room.
Ana set the cup down just in time to be kissed on the cheek, brief and warm and entirely normal. Susie made it entirely normal by force.
Up close, she could see it more sharply: the fatigue still sitting under Ana’s skin, the slight too-tightness around her mouth that meant the therapy session with Toto and Dr. Chirac had cost more than Ana would ever publicly invoice for, the faint flattening of affect that came when her resources were being rationed carefully.
And beneath all of that— Toto’s eyes.
Not in a sentimental sense. Not merely the dark color. The expression sometimes. The way watchfulness lived behind composure. The way intelligence and restraint could sit in a face together and make softness look almost accidental until it arrived full force and caught you entirely unprepared.
Susie had always seen it.
She saw it now and hated, all over again, the fact that there had been years in which no one had looked at that face and thought first child before problem, adjustment, too much, too difficult, too adult to need what other children needed.
Mine, a fierce and almost irrational part of her thought.
Mine now.
Not by blood. Not by chronology. Not by anything old enough to satisfy people who confused biology with devotion.
But by love. By years. By choice.
They didn’t want her, that furious private part of Susie went on, meaner now, sharper.
Irina with her abandonment dressed up as necessity. Stephanie with her contempt. Johanna too, in her own unforgivable way.
They didn’t want her. I do.
The thought arrived with such clarity Susie had to smooth one hand lightly down Ana’s sleeve just to ground herself in the present and not the violence of all the lost years.
She’s mine. And nobody gets to touch her like that again.
“Everything all right?” Max asked, because he knew Susie well enough to clock when she had gone very still in some internal place and did not altogether trust the direction of travel.
Susie turned her head toward him and found him watching both her and Ana with the expression of a man who was actually extremely good at detecting danger once it involved someone he loved.
“Yes,” she said. Then, because that answer needed help: “Just looking at her.”
Ana looked faintly suspicious. “That sounds ominous.”
“It’s affectionate,” Susie said.
Max, traitorously, nodded. “That means it isn’t ominous.”
Ana gave them both a look and returned to her coffee.
Toto had stayed nearer the doorway for longer than usual, which Susie noted. He entered the room now, more carefully than he would have twenty-four hours earlier, and Ana glanced toward him with an ease that hurt Susie almost as much as it relieved her.
There it was again, that miracle she kept tripping over now that the worst of the truth had been named:
Ana still came back. Still let them in. Still stood in rooms with the people who had failed her in childhood and offered them her adulthood anyway.
Instead she said, briskly enough to clear the air, “What is the timing?”
Ana blinked once, pulled fully back into the present. “Lawyers in forty minutes. I need to change my shoes.”
Max made a face. “I am going to get tortured by Alastor.”
Toto, perhaps grateful beyond words for the reprieve into logistics, said, “That sounds dramatic.”
“It’s physiotherapy,” Max replied. “So yes.”
Ana looked at him over the rim of her cup, dry as dust. “Ask him what you should do this weekend.”
Max stared at her.
The room held for one perfect second while Susie watched the sentence land in its full domestic absurdity.
A world champion, recovering from surgery, being clinically advised by his fiancée to use his physiotherapy appointment for homework allocation.
Max’s expression shifted into one of profound betrayal.
“Nastya, I love you so, so much,” he said, “but I also really hate you right now.”
Ana’s mouth moved at the corner. “That’s fair.”
Susie smiled despite herself.
Even Toto did, briefly.
Max looked at Ana with that peculiar blend of aggravation and devotion he seemed to reserve exclusively for her, then shook his head once as if resigning himself yet again to the fact that he had fallen in love with a woman whose primary instinct in moments of stress was to operationalize everyone.
“I’m serious,” he said.
“So am I,” Ana replied. “You need a weekend plan that isn’t self-directed idiocy.”
“That is a very rude summary of my instincts.”
“It is an accurate one.”
Daniel should have been there to witness it, Susie thought. He would have died of delight.
Instead it was only the four of them in the kitchen, and the moment was small and ordinary in the best way—Max being handled, Ana being exact, Toto trying and failing not to stare at the two of them with the strange, slightly dazed expression of a father still adjusting to the emotional geography of his daughter’s actual life.
And Susie, standing in the middle of it, felt the legal meeting waiting ahead of them like a second heartbeat.
The adoption. The papers. The signatures. The officious language that would try to reduce something living and enormous into acceptable legal form.
She had thought about it half the night after leaving Toto alone with his shame. Thought about the absurdity of law catching up to love so late. Thought about how many people had touched the early shape of Ana’s life carelessly, inadequately, selfishly.
Not this time.
Not now.
They didn’t want her. I do.
The sentence kept returning, each time steadier, less grief and more vow.
She’s mine.
Which was not possession. Not conquest. Not a replacement fantasy for everything that had gone wrong before Susie arrived.
It was simpler and fiercer than that.
Mine to claim. Mine to defend. Mine to love without asking her to become smaller first.
“Ana,” Susie said.
Ana looked up again.
“Shoes,” Susie said. “Go.”
That got a faint flash of humor.
“Yes, Susie.”
Ana set down the cup and moved toward the stairs, and Susie watched her go with that same painful doubling of vision: the woman she was, all precision and tired elegance, and the little girl she had never gotten to hold.
She imagined eight-year-old Ana in Vienna and could have screamed.
Tiny. Trying too hard. No stuffed animal in her arms. No mother.
No language yet for how the rooms kept teaching her that adults preferred her quiet.
Susie wanted to go backward in time and gather that child up bodily.
Wanted to sit her on a kitchen counter and put something soft in her hands and say, in a voice so certain it became law: You are not a guest. You are not too much. You are not temporary. You are not wrong for making sound.
Instead she stood in Monaco and waited for the adult version to come back downstairs in different shoes.
That was what loving older children required, she was learning. You did not get the beginning. You only got the now, and had to love fiercely enough that the now could hold some of what the beginning had dropped.
Max shifted his weight and looked at Susie.
“You all right?”
She turned to him. “Yes,” she said.
He watched her for a second as if deciding whether to believe that.
Then, because he was not stupid, he did something far more useful than probing.
“I’ll make sure her stuff is packed for Scotland after Alastor.” he said.
Susie looked at him properly then.
And understood, not for the first time, why Ana loved him.
Not because he said the perfect thing. Because he so rarely tried to say the perfect thing at all.
He just positioned himself, over and over, between her and avoidable strain and called that love.
“Thank you,” Susie said.
Max shrugged one shoulder, as though this were nothing, as though taking care of Ana in the aftermath of legal meetings and therapy and childhood ghosts and upcoming family flights were merely the obvious structure of the day.
Toto, at the edge of the room, heard it too.
And Susie felt a flash of renewed anger—not at Max, never at Max, but at the fact that this man on crutches was more intuitively protective of Ana’s nervous system than some of the adults who had once had full custody of her childhood.
Good, a vicious little part of her thought.
Let it shame them all.
Ana returned a minute later in other shoes and and a matching blazer, hair slightly improved but not enough to suggest she had wasted effort on it.
Susie smiled immediately.
“There you are.”
Ana glanced between them all. “I assume we’re leaving.”
“We are,” Toto said.
Max pushed off from the counter and reached for his crutches. Ana crossed to him first, adjusting the fall of his shirt automatically where it had caught wrong near the shoulder. The intimacy of it was so unstudied that Susie had to look away for half a second, not because it embarrassed her, but because the tenderness of competent people taking care of each other in tiny habitual ways was one of the few things still capable of making her cry at inopportune times.
“All right,” Ana said to Max quietly. “Don’t let Alastor win.”
Max looked at her with deep offense. “That’s not how this works.”
“That’s quitter talk.”
“I truly love you,” he said again, “and I truly hate you a little.”
This time Ana smiled properly.
“There’s the spirit.”
Then she turned back to Susie and Toto.
“I’m ready.”
Susie picked up her bag and moved toward the door with the rest of them, but as they stepped into the hall, she let herself look at Ana one more time—not only as she was, but as all the ages inside her at once.
The baby she never held. The little girl she never got to tuck in. The teenager she had first met, far too thin and far too self-contained, already trying to pretend she needed less than she did.
The woman standing here now, brilliant and tired and still somehow willing to let herself be loved.
Mine, Susie thought again, fiercely and without apology.
***
Baumgartner & Chevallier, Monaco - 10 October 2025
Clean pale stone.
Quiet glass.
A receptionist whose entire existence suggested confidentiality and expensive toner.
The sort of building where documents did not merely get signed: they were executed, filed, witnessed, and then put into very serious folders that cost too much money.
There was a weird kind of peace in law offices as far as Ana was concerned.
Ana sat beside Susie in one of the meeting chairs and watched Maitre Chevallier arrange papers into neat, inevitable piles.
Toto was on her other side, jacket on, expression controlled in that familiar way that meant he was treating the entire morning like something between a board matter and a surgical procedure.
Susie, by contrast, looked composed enough to frighten lawmakers in several jurisdictions. Her hand rested near Ana’s on the table, not touching, just there.
Maitre Chevallier turned a page and said, “As discussed, once these are signed, the petition proceeds formally. There will be a hearing, but given the circumstances, the residency, and the existing family structure, we do not foresee any issues.”
Any issues.
Ana almost smiled.
What an absurd phrase for the legal recognition of a relationship that had existed, in every way that mattered, for years already.
Any issues.
As if the difficulty had ever been paperwork.
She looked down at the first signature line.
The paper was cream. The pen heavy. The language exact in the way only legal language could be—clinical where ordinary life was not, flattening where feeling rose, but still useful because it made things legible to systems larger than any one family.
Susie signed first. Then Toto.
When the papers turned toward Ana, she took the pen and, for one brief second, just looked at her own hand.
Signing things had always felt stranger to her than it was for other people.
At Mercedes she signed AYW on contracts, NDAs, technical approvals, discreet internal documents that needed to move quickly between departments and lawyers and people who never quite looked directly at the amount of power hidden in neat handwriting.
AYW was efficient. Corporate. Contained. Easy to repeat. An acronym version of a self that functioned well in systems.
But here, with legal paper in front of her and family seated beside her and the shape of this moment too intimate for initials, she wrote it properly.
Anastasia Yelena Wolff.
The name moved across the page with the old familiarity of something she had chosen and kept and grown into so fully that sometimes she forgot it had once been otherwise.
But it had been otherwise.
She had been born Anastasia Mikhailovna Solovyova.
That name still existed somewhere, she supposed.
In old Russian documents maybe. Hospital records. The earliest legal traces of a child in Moscow with a grandmother who smelled faintly of tea and lavender and old books and whose piano had been the first place Ana had ever learned that repetition could become beauty.
Mikhailovna for a grandfather, because she hadn’t known her father then. Solovyova from a family line she had not kept.
Then Vienna.
Then lawyers.
Then the unraveling of that whole administrative catastrophe—custody arrangements, citizenship, names, permissions, signatures, translations, adults trying to sort a child’s existence into the boxes states required before they would agree she belonged anywhere at all.
She had not kept Solovyova. That had felt, even then, like a skin already shed.
She had taken Wolff.
Not because it erased Moscow or Irina or the whole wound of being dropped into Austria like an obligation with a passport. But because it had been her father‘s name. And a part of her had wanted to pretend that she was part of hi family, that she had the same right to carry that name as Benedict or Rosa had.
She had chosen Yelena as her middle name.
Not Irina. Never Irina.
Yelena.
Her grandmother.
The person who had taught her to play.
The person who had looked at repetition and seen devotion instead of defect.
The person whose name she had wanted somewhere inside hers because grief, even then, had seemed easier to survive if she could carry a part of her grandmother with her everywhere she went.
So she had become Anastasia Yelena Wolff.
Not by birth.
Not by clean inheritance.
By survival, the legal system, and choice.
The lawyer slid another document toward her and she signed again.
Anastasia Yelena Wolff.
This one felt different.
Not a change of name this time.
Not a salvage operation.
Not the paper trail of a child being rearranged to fit.
This was recognition.
Of something already true.
Ana looked at Susie’s signature on the page above hers.
Steady. Elegant. Completely itself.
A ridiculous amount of feeling moved through her chest, fast and sharp enough that she had to focus on the line spacing of the next document to stop it from showing on her face.
Irina had not been in her life since she was thirteen.
That fact had hardened into simplicity over the years.
There was no active ache left in it most days. Just a long-settled absence. An old, ridiculously deep cut that had scarred because it had had no choice.
But Susie—
Susie had always been there.
Not in the biological sense. Not in the legal one, until now.
In the practical, miraculous one that mattered more.
Susie had been there in Switzerland.
In kitchens.
In hallways. In school pick-ups and teenage silences and the slow, careful rebuilding of a nervous system that learned, around her, that not every adult required pre-emptive self-erasure.
Susie had never once made a distinction between Ana and Jack that suggested blood was the more meaningful category.
Not in comfort. Not in rules. Not in pride. Not in patience. Not in love.
Jack had never been made more legitimate by the fact of being Susie’s by birth. Ana had never been made less so by arriving as a teenager, stranger, already half-grown and carrying too much old damage.
To Susie, she had simply been… hers.
Which was a terrifyingly powerful thing to be, if the person in question meant it properly.
The lawyer was still speaking.
“…and then the court will simply want to confirm consent on all sides, the continuity of the parental relationship, and the established family unit.”
Established family unit.
Ana almost laughed again.
What an absurdly bloodless phrase for something that had held so much pain and luck and stubbornness to build.
She signed the last page and put the pen down carefully.
Across the table, Toto was watching her in that too-attentive way of his that had sharpened recently, as if he had finally understood how much could be hidden in a still face and now mistrusted every calm expression she wore.
Ana met his gaze briefly.
There was too much in it.
Pride. Guilt. Love. The strange, reverent fragility of a man being allowed to remain in a story he sometimes clearly thought he deserved to be cut from.
She looked away first, not out of rejection, but because she could not manage the weight of it while lawyers were still discussing hearing dates and procedural expectations.
Susie, meanwhile, had gone very quiet in the chair beside her.
The lawyer gathered the signed papers into their folder with the small formal finality of someone who understood that human lives often reached him in the flattened form of paper long after the difficult parts had already been lived.
“We will be in touch with the proposed date,” he said. “But truly, I don’t anticipate any complications.”
No complications.
Perhaps, for once, the law might actually be the easiest part.
They stood. Hands were shaken. The folder disappeared into professional custody.
And as they stepped back into the bright Monaco air, Ana paused for one brief second on the pavement outside the office.
The sea was visible at the far end of the street. A car moved quietly past. Somewhere nearby, an expensive café machine hissed steam into another polished morning.
Susie touched her arm lightly.
“You all right, darling?”
Ana looked at her.
At the woman who had never made her prove she belonged before offering love.
At the woman who had somehow turned maternal love into something both gentle and immovable.
At the woman the law was only now catching up to.
And because this morning had already contained enough honesty to make one more piece survivable, she said quietly: “Yes.” Then, after a beat: “I think so.”
Susie smiled.
Smiled with that warm, unstartled softness that had calmed Ana’s nervous system for years before she’d ever had language for why.
“Good,” she said.
Toto opened the car door for them.
The hearing still lay ahead. The formalities. The judge.
But the signatures existed now.
The names existed now.
And as Ana got into the car, she thought—not of Irina, not really, and not of Moscow either, though Yelena lived in the center of her name and always would.
She thought: They didn’t want me.
And then, just as clearly: She does.
And perhaps, in the end, that was what the papers was really for.
Pairing: Max Verstappen x Dr. Anastasia "Ana" Wolff (Original Character)
Summary:
Max Verstappen to Mercedes? The paddock is buzzing. The media’s in meltdown.
Dr. Anastasia “Ana” Wolff, Mercedes’ notoriously brilliant, emotionally unavailable lead systems engineer and Toto Wolff’s eldest daughter, is not handling it well. Because Max isn’t just a potential signing, he’s the man she’s been sleeping with in secret for nearly a decade.
And if the rumours are true, and Max Verstappen really is joining Mercedes, then Ana’s carefully compartmentalised world is about to explode.
Warnings and Notes: Uh...Susie kinda verbally destroys Toto, mentions of child abuse and neglect...
For Housekeeping Reasons, this is fiction. I don't know any of these people in real life. The world portrayed in this story is obviously not real life, and I am sure that none of the people mentioned are anything like I portray them in this piece of fiction. (Apparently, this needs to be said for some of the people in my inbox.)
Let me know if I missed something else, and I'll add it!
As always big thanks to @llirawolf , who listens to me ramble.
Wolff Residence, Monaco - 9 October 2025
Susie did not start the fight downstairs.
That was the only restraint she allowed herself.
She made it through the end of lunch. Through coffee and departures and the slow unwinding of plates and glasses and voices. She smiled when required.
She watched Ana carefully from across rooms and doorways and saw enough to know that her girl was holding together by force of habit and old discipline. Tired, yes. Frayed at the edges, yes. But upright. Functional. Still performing competence for everyone else’s comfort.
Fine.
Susie could wait.
But the anger sat in her all through the afternoon like a blade heated white.
They left, picked Jack up from school, got through homework and playtime and dinner.
She did every ordinary thing the evening required of her while fury moved through her in clean, cold lines.
By the time the house went quiet and Jack was asleep and she and Toto were finally alone in their bedroom with the door shut, Susie was no longer interested in being delicate about any of it.
She turned to her husband while he was taking off his watch.“You never told me.”
Toto froze.
Just for a second. But it was enough.
He looked up slowly.
He knew exactly what she meant.
Of course he did.
Susie folded her arms so tightly across her chest her shoulders hurt.
“The keyboard,” she said. Her voice was flat in a way it only became when fury had gone cold enough to sharpen. “The headphones.”
Toto sat down on the edge of the bed, the watch still in his hand. For a second he only looked at her.
She stood by the wardrobe with her arms folded so tightly across her chest it was the only thing stopping her from starting to pace.
“Yes,” he said.
Susie let out one short, incredulous laugh.
“Yes?”
That was all he had.
No explanation. No context. No I meant to tell you. No I didn’t know how. Just yes, like he was admitting he’d forgotten to buy milk and not withheld something grotesque and formative and unforgivable.
She took a step toward him.
“You never told me,” she repeated. “You let me sit there and hear about my daughter having a keyboard and headphones because she was inconvenient to the adults around her, and you said nothing.”
“I was ashamed of it.”
That checked her for about half a second.
Then the fury came back hotter.
“Good,” Susie snapped. “You should be.”
Toto looked at her then, and whatever he’d expected, it hadn’t been that. Not the speed of it. Not the lack of cushioning.
Susie took a step toward him.
“No, actually, let’s not pretend this is one of those things where you confess your shame and I’m meant to soften because at least you feel bad now. I am glad you’re ashamed. I honestly would be alarmed if you weren’t.”
Toto’s jaw tightened. “Susie—”
“No.”
The word cracked through the room hard enough that he stopped immediately.
“Do not Susie me. Not yet.”
She was pacing now, unable to hold still any longer, rage moving through her too fast for elegance.
“Ana was a child, Toto. A child. And you are telling me this now, after years, like it is one more sad historical detail in a very long list of sad historical details, when in fact it tells me something absolutely foundational about the atmosphere she was raised in.”
He looked down.
That made her angrier.
“Look at me.”
He did.
“What else,” she demanded.
A pause.
Then, carefully, “What?”
“What else didn’t she have? What else did you take from her to keep the peace?”
He frowned faintly.
Susie stared at him. “No. Don’t do that. Don’t pretend not to understand me.”
She took another step closer.
“What else was negotiable because she was so ‘mature’ and so ‘clever’ and so wonderfully self-contained that none of the adults around her felt obliged to remember she was still a little girl?” Her voice rose now, sharpened by disgust. “Did she have toys? Anything soft? Anything silly? Anything comforting? Or was she expected to arrive in Vienna at eight years old and behave like some tiny little self-managing adult with good posture and no needs?”
Toto flinched.
“She was always very mature,” he said.
Susie stared at him in open, furious disbelief.
Then she laughed.
One short, sharp, utterly disbelieving laugh.
“She was eight years old!”
Toto looked away.
She took another step toward him.
“Eight, Toto.”
He said nothing.
“The same age as Jack,” Susie said, and now the anger was in every word. “The same age as our little boy. Eight years old and dropped into a foreign country with a father she didn’t know and a woman who could not stand the sight of her, and your defense is that Ana was mature?”
His face tightened.
“Susie—”
“No. No, absolutely not.” She pointed at him. “Do not do that thing where you try to make it smaller by sounding sad. I am not interested in sad. I am interested in what happened to my child in your house.”
He looked at the floor.
Susie had spent too many years watching men mistake shame for accountability. Feeling bad was not the same as having done right.
She stepped toward him again.
“What else? Since we are apparently doing this properly now. Since today is the day I find out my little girl was treated like a domestic inconvenience and you thought I didn’t need the full version.”
She took another step.
“Did she have toys?”
He said nothing.
“Dolls?”
Nothing.
“Stuffed animals?”
His silence was answer enough, but she was angry enough now that she wanted the answer spoken aloud. She wanted him to hear the shape of it in his own voice.
“Toto.”
He looked away.
“No,” he said quietly.
Susie just stared at him.
“No stuffed animals,” she repeated.
He shook his head once.
“She had books,” he said weakly.
“Of course she had books.” Her voice was acid. “Of course she had books. Because God forbid the gifted little autistic girl be permitted something as frivolous as comfort. Wonderful. Marvellous. Splendid. So when she was frightened, she could cuddle Tolstoy.”
Something ugly and grief-stricken moved through her so fast she had to turn away from him or risk saying something so vicious it would scorch the room.
She crossed to the window and stood there with her back to him, arms wrapped around herself so tightly it hurt.
No stuffed animals.
No wolf until Jack gave her one as an adult because an eight-year-old child had managed to clock something that none of the grown-ups around Ana had thought worth noticing
And suddenly she could see it—horribly, vividly, unbearably clearly. Not just what had happened to Ana. What had been withheld. All the ordinary softness around childhood erased because no one had insisted hard enough that she was still entitled to it.
No rabbit dragged by one ear through a hard week.
No bear under one arm when the world became too loud.
No stupid comfort object to absorb fear privately so the adults could keep pretending she was “so mature.”
“She had books,” Toto repeated weakly. Then, after a beat, as though he hated himself for the explanation even while reaching for it, “And Benedict and Rosa had so much already. Benedict was four. Rosa was barely one, maybe two. The house was full of baby things, toddler things, noise, plastic, stuffed toys everywhere. And Anastasia…” He stopped.
Susie’s eyes narrowed. “Ana what.”
Toto rubbed a hand over his face.
“She never showed any interest in them,” he admitted. “Not in their toys. Not in the dolls, or the stuffed animals, or any of it. Benedict would be on the floor with cars and blocks and Rosa with whatever she was dragging around, and Ana would just… not go near them.”
Susie went very still.
“And you assumed,” she said.
Toto looked up.
Her voice had gone colder now, which was always the most dangerous version of her anger.
“You assumed she wasn’t interested.”
He said nothing.
She laughed again, but this time there was nothing sharp about it. Only disbelief. Pure, bitter disbelief.
“Of course you did.”
“Susie—”
“No, say it.”
He closed his eyes briefly.
“I assumed she wasn’t interested,” he said at last. “She never asked. She never reached for those things. She’d sit with a book instead, or line up pencils, or just… watch.” His jaw tightened. “ I told myself if she wanted something, she would say so.”
The silence after that felt poisonous.
Susie stared at him as though she no longer recognized the shape of his thinking.
“She was eight,” she said again, quieter now and somehow even more furious. “She was eight years old, newly arrived, grieving, autistic, outnumbered by a household that already belonged to other children, and you told yourself she would simply announce her needs if she wanted comfort?!”
Toto looked down.
Benedict at four with his cars and toy dinosaurs and little-boy chaos.
Rosa still a baby, surrounded by soft things and bright things and the shameless clutter that naturally collected around children everybody agreed were still children.
And Ana, already older, already strange, already trying to make herself legible and unobtrusive in a house that was not hers.
Of course she hadn’t picked up their toys.
Of course she hadn’t reached for Benedict’s things or Rosa’s things or inserted herself into their childish little ecosystem and said, I need one too.
She had been eight, yes—but she had also been the outsider. The older child. The foreign child. The child who already understood too much about being in the wrong place and making the wrong demands.
Behind her, Toto said helplessly, “She has the wolf now.”
Susie wheeled around.
“Now?”
Her voice rose on the word, sharp enough to cut.
“Now?” she repeated. “As an adult? Because our son—our child—saw something you should have seen 20 years ago? Because Jack had the emotional intelligence to recognize something the grown-ups in her life apparently did not!”
Toto looked away.
“I know.”
“No,” Susie said, voice rising again. “You know now. I am asking whether you knew then. Whether any of you looked at a child who had already lost so much and thought perhaps she might need something soft to hold.”
He didn’t answer.
And in that silence, Susie got her answer.
Her anger changed shape again.
It got worse.
Because now it wasn’t only about Stephanie, or old cruelty, or some abstract marital failure that could be narrated into sad inevitability.
It was about absence. Neglect dressed as pragmatism. A little girl shaped around what wasn’t provided until she became the sort of child who stopped asking.
“She was eight,” Susie said. “The same age as Jack. Jack, who still crawls into our bed when he has a nightmare. Jack, who still lines his stuffed animals up in specific order because that makes his brain feel better. Jack, who still needs one extra story and a ridiculous amount of reassurance over the correct positioning of a stuffed capybara to fall asleep properly. Eight, Toto. Eight is still a baby.”
He looked down again.
And now she was beyond patience with that too.
“Do not sit there and let me do all the emotional labour of saying this out loud while you stare at the floor like remorse is somehow a contribution.”
That made him look up immediately.
Good.
Susie took a deep breath, the anger still scorching her insides. “Did Stephanie ever hurt her?”
The question landed like a weapon.
Toto went still.
Utterly still.
And Susie knew.
Before he answered, she knew.
Because if the answer had been no, it would already have been out of his mouth.
She took a step back as though the room itself had become contaminated.
“Toto.”
He closed his eyes once.
When he opened them again, he looked like a man bracing for impact he had deserved for a very long time.
“Once,” he said.
Susie stared at him.
No.
No, that was not a survivable answer.
“What.”
His voice had gone flat, almost clinical now, as though he had to drain all the life out of the memory to make himself capable of saying it aloud.
“Anastasia was ten,” he said. “She was in the middle of a meltdown. Panic attack, really, but at that age the distinction was not always clear in practice. Stephanie thought she was being defiant. Or theatrical. I don’t know.” He swallowed. “She slapped her.”
Something in Susie’s body went white-hot.
For one second she couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Could barely breathe around the force of what she had just heard.
Then she was off.
Off the spot, across the room, then back again, pure violent motion because if she stood still she might actually scream.
“She what.”
He looked at her.
“She slapped her,” he repeated. “Across the face. In the middle of it.”
Susie put both hands over her face and then ripped them away again because she could not bear to muffle what came next.
“Oh, my God.” Her voice broke on the last word, not with softness but with fury so intense it had started to eat through language. “She was ten.”
“Yes.”
“She hit an autistic ten-year-old child in the face during a meltdown.”
“Yes.”
“And you are telling me this now?!”
He didn’t answer.
Susie laughed again, a furious, broken sound.
“Tell me you left her.”
Toto looked at her. “Not that day.”
Susie just stared at him in naked disbelief.
Not even anger for a second. Something cleaner and more devastating.
“Not that day.”
“I told myself it would never happen again—”
And there it was.
The excuse.
Not a justification, not exactly. Worse. The pathetic little scaffolding men built around moral failure once enough time had passed that they mistook explanation for absolution.
Susie cut him off so hard he stopped mid-breath.
“You told yourself.”
Each word came out like a slap of its own.
“You told yourself it would never happen again. How wonderful for you. How incredibly comforting that must have been to you.”
Toto’s face tightened.
“That was the first real fracture,” he said. “I screamed at her. I told her if she ever touched Anastasia again—”
“And yet you stayed.”
That landed.
He bowed his head.
And something in Susie went from fury to something even colder.
Because of course he had screamed. Of course he had finally found his line when violence became too visible to narrate into family stress or marital complexity. But then he had done what so many people did after children were hurt by someone inconveniently close to them: he had stayed, and therefore made the child stay inside the structure of that decision too.
“Ana was ten,” Susie said again, quieter now, which was somehow worse. “And the lesson she learned from that was what, exactly? That she could be hit when she was too overwhelmed to be convenient? That adults who loved her would set lines only after damage had already happened? That if she made herself small enough it might never happen again?”
Toto looked wrecked now.
Good.
She wanted him wrecked.
She wanted him to sit inside every ounce of it.
“You are telling me this now. Now.” Susie’s voice shook with sheer fury. “Years later. After I have loved her and watched her flinch from things she should never have had to flinch from and wondered how much of it was history and how much of it was temperament and all that time you knew someone had laid hands on her.”
“I didn’t know how to say it,” Toto said.
Susie laughed in disbelief.
“Oh, that is pathetic.”
He flinched.
“I mean that,” she said. “That is pathetic, Toto. You didn’t know how to say it? Ana was ten. She was ten, and an adult hit her, and your problem was that you didn’t know how to say it.”
He dragged a hand over his face again, shame written all over him now.
“That,” he said quietly, “was how Anastasia got diagnosed.”
Susie stopped moving.
“What.”
He looked up at her and kept going because at this point there was no dignity left in stopping halfway through horror.
“Afterwards she got worse. More frightened. More volatile in certain ways. She started bracing before ordinary changes. The panic got more frequent.” His mouth tightened. “I took her to a specialist because I thought the move had destabilized her more than I understood. Or that something neurological was becoming clearer. That was when they formally identified autism.”
Susie just looked at him.
It kept getting worse.
The violence. The aftermath. The fact that the adults had not even managed proper diagnostic clarity until trauma had forced their hand.
She crossed to the window because if she remained standing in front of him she genuinely did not trust what her mouth would do next.
Monaco glittered below, obscene in its beauty.
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No.”
Of course not.
“Did Ana?”
“I don’t think so.”
That made something in Susie snap.
“You don’t think so.”
Toto looked up, startled by the force in her voice.
“She was too far gone,” he said. “By the time I got there she was… not really present. Terrified. Dissociated, maybe. I don’t know the exact word. I’ve never believed she remembers the slap itself.”
And there it was.
The moment Susie was done.
Done with shame. Done with his sad face. Done with the careful, flattening language of male guilt trying to sound precise while still protecting itself from the full obscenity of what had happened.
She stepped toward him so fast he actually drew back.
“Did you ever think to ask her?”
Toto stared at her. And then, quietly: “No.”
Susie just looked at him.
No.
He had not asked.
Not once.
Not in all these years. Not after the diagnosis. Not after the divorce. Not after Switzerland. Ö Not after Ana had grown into the kind of woman who could discuss systems architecture, board governance, sensory overload, and Formula One political ecosystems with terrifying precision.
He had never asked her whether she remembered being hit.
Susie’s whole face changed. Not grief now. Fury.
Total. Clean. Absolute.
“You never asked her.”
That was it.
That was the moment Susie was done.
Not frustrated. Not upset. Done.
She let out one short, disbelieving breath.. “No,” she repeated.
Toto did not answer.
Because what was there to say.
Susie took one step toward him. “You never asked her.”
His face tightened. “Susie—”
“No.” Her voice cracked like a whip. “Do not ‘Susie’ me as if I am being unfair. You sat there and told me that you don’t think your daughter remembers being slapped across the face during a meltdown at ten years old, and when I ask whether you ever actually asked her if she remembers, the answer is no?”
He looked down.
That, somehow, made it worse.
Not because she wanted him defiant. Because he looked ashamed and passive and entirely too willing to accept the moral shape of what he had done only now that she had put language around it.
Susie folded her arms, but it did nothing to contain the force of her anger.
“So let me understand this properly,” she said. “You decided she didn’t remember. You built an entire comforting theory around that. And at no point did it occur to you to ask the only person in the world whose memory of it actually matters.”
Toto rubbed a hand over his face.
“I didn’t want to force—”
“Oh, don’t.”
The words came so fast and sharp they nearly cut him off the bed.
“Do not dress this up as delicacy. Do not. This is not you protecting her privacy. This is you protecting yourself from the answer.”
That landed.
She saw it land.
Good.
Because she was no longer interested in sparing him the clean edge of truth.
“You didn’t ask because if she said yes—if she said she remembered it, if she said she remembered your wife hitting her—you would have had to live with that in a way you clearly found inconvenient.”
“That isn’t fair,” Toto said quietly.
Susie stared at him. Then she laughed. Actually laughed.
A short, furious, unbelieving sound.
“Fair.”
She took another step toward him.
“You want to talk to me about fair?”
Her voice rose now—not theatrically, but because she was too angry to keep every syllable inside the neat civilized register she usually preferred.
“Was it fair that Ana was ten? Was it fair that Ana was autistic in a house with adults too lazy or too cruel to learn what that meant? Was it fair that she grew up being treated like an inconvenience, moved out of the living room and given a keyboard and headphones so nobody needed to hear her?! Was it fair that she didn’t even have a stuffed animal? Was it fair that she got hit and then nobody even bothered to ask her, years later, what she remembered of it?”
Toto flinched.
“Was it fair,” Susie went on, “that you decided for her what her own memory looked like because that version of events was easier for you to survive?”
The room was silent except for their breathing.
Toto looked wrecked.
Susie did not care.
Not enough.
He opened his mouth. “I thought—”
“Yes,” she snapped. “That is the problem, isn’t it. You thought. You inferred. You assumed. You built a theory. You did everything except ask the child who lived through it.”
“She was already so careful,” Toto said. “So guarded. I didn’t want to—”
“Didn’t want to what? Upset her?” Susie shot back. “She was already upset, Toto. She was a child who got hit for having a neurological response the adults around her found inconvenient. What exactly did you think one question from her father was going to do to worsen that?”
He had no answer.
Of course he had no answer.
Because there wasn’t one.
Susie’s voice dropped again, and somehow that was worse.
“You know what I think.”
Toto looked up.
“I think she remembered in exactly the way children often remember things they are not allowed to process properly,” Susie said. “In her body. In her reactions. In the way she learned to get small. To get quiet. To over-explain. To manage herself before anyone else decided her distress was intolerable.” She paused. “And you saw that. You saw all of it. And still you never asked.”
Toto shut his eyes.
For one second.
Then opened them again.
“No,” he said.
The admission was bare now. No defense left on it.
Susie nodded once.
“Yes. I know.”
She turned away from him then because she could not bear to look at him while she said the next part.
“Do you understand what that means?”
When he didn’t answer immediately, she did turn back.
“It means,” she said, “that for years you let yourself live beside a wound in your daughter and preferred your own theory of it to her voice.”
He looked like he’d been hit.
Good, some part of her thought viciously. Good.
“You keep talking about shame as though it is evidence of conscience,” she said. “It is not. Not by itself. Shame is easy. Shame sits there and suffers and still makes itself the center of the story.”
Toto’s whole face tightened.
She did not stop.
“Do you know what conscience would have been? Asking her. Sitting in front of your daughter and saying: I know something happened. I should have protected you better. What do you remember? What do you need from me now?”
His hands clasped tighter together.
“I know,” he said.
“No,” Susie said. “You are only beginning to know.”
That shut him up.
She crossed the room and stood directly in front of him now, forcing him to look up at her.
“You do not get to decide she doesn’t remember simply because you find the alternative unbearable.”
Toto said nothing.
“You ask.”
His voice, when it came, was almost inaudible. “Now?”
Susie stared at him in open disbelief.
“Not like an ambush,” she said. “Not like an interrogation. But yes, Toto. At some point, yes. You ask. If she lets you. If she wants to speak. If she doesn’t, then you respect that. But you do not carry on with this grotesque fiction that silence means absence.”
He looked down again.
“No,” he said.
“No,” Susie agreed. “It does not.”
For a moment the room was completely still.
Then she stepped back, folded her arms again, and said the thing that had been building inside her ever since he admitted the slap.
“She was ten. And every single adult around her failed the most basic test.”
Toto’s face changed.
Because he knew she meant him too.
Good.
She wanted him included in that sentence. Explicitly. Permanently.
“She needed one adult,” Susie said, quieter now but no less furious, “just one, to stop centering their own convenience long enough to really see what was happening to her.”
He looked like she had taken something out of him with her bare hands.
Again: good.
“And instead,” she said, “you all made her survive you.”
That broke whatever weak attempt at self-protection he still had left.
Not with tears. Not yet.
But with the complete collapse of posture, of defense, of any remaining illusion that his intentions had been enough to soften the actual damage.
Susie watched it happen and did not move to soothe him.
Not this time.
Not yet.
Because this was the part he had spent too many years outrunning: the point at which love, without courage, had simply not been sufficient.
After a long silence, Toto said, hoarsely, “I should have asked.”
“Yes,” Susie said. “You really should have.”
Another silence.
Then, because she was not done and he was going to hear all of it now, she added:
“And if she remembers nothing, then she still deserved to be asked.”
That made him look up.
Slowly.
Because yes.
That was the other indictment, wasn’t it.
The question itself had been owed, regardless of the answer.
Not because memory would solve anything.
Because dignity required it.
“She was entitled,” Susie said, “to one adult treating her experience as hers to describe. Not yours to infer.”
Toto nodded once.
“Did you stay because you thought one slap was survivable?”
His whole face changed.
“No.”
“Then why.”
He looked like he hated the answer before he gave it.
“Because I told myself it would never happen again. Because I was already trying to hold together a marriage, a house, three children’s lives, a job, everything. Because I wanted to believe that if I drew the line hard enough, the rest could still be saved.” He swallowed. “Because leaving means admitting that our marriage couldn’t be repaired.”
Susie stared at him.
“And meanwhile,” she said, every word sharpened to a point, “our daughter was the cost of your optimism.”
That hit exactly where it should.
He shut his eyes again. “Yes.”
She crossed back to him then—not because she had forgiven him, not because the anger had burned out, but because distance was no longer enough and she needed him to hear the next part from close range.
“She could have cut you off,” Susie said. “Do you understand that? She would have been entitled to. She would have been entirely justified. She could have built her entire adult life somewhere none of you were allowed near and I would have understood every second of it.”
Toto looked down.
“She could have built a life where you weren’t allowed near the centre of it. She could have decided, quite rationally, that she had given enough to people who failed her too early and too often.” Susie’s voice shook now, not from softness but from the scale of it. “She could have taken her intelligence and her fury and made herself unreachable.”
“Yes,” he said.
“And instead she built software for Jack.”
That undid him a little.
She saw it happen.
Not tears. Not yet.
But the structural collapse of a man who had finally run out of ways to narrate his failures as unfortunate choices made under pressure and was instead being forced to look directly at the child who had survived them.
“She built something kinder for our son,” Susie said, and now her voice was shaking, “instead of building walls so high none of you could ever reach her again.”
He looked like that might be the sentence that finally cut deepest.
Good.
It should.
“She is a goddamn miracle,” Susie said. “And she should never have had to be one.”
Ana was brilliant. Capable. Loving in ways most people did not even understand.
But none of that erased the fact that she had become extraordinary in part because ordinary care had failed her too often.
Susie looked at him for a long, merciless second.
“She should have been allowed to be ordinary,” Susie said. “Difficult sometimes, yes. Particular, yes. Brilliant, yes. But ordinary. Safe. Soft in places. Silly. Held. She should not have had to become extraordinary just to survive being under your roof.”
Toto bowed his head.
And when he finally spoke, his voice had gone raw.
“I know.”
Susie looked at him with furious, exhausted grief.
“You do not get to hide behind shame.”
He looked up.
“You were ashamed. Fine. Good. Be ashamed. But shame is only useful if it changes what happens next.” Her voice went low and lethal. “No more omissions. Not with me. Not about her. Not the big things, not the humiliations, not the ugly details you think make you look bad.”
He nodded once. “Yes.”
“And if she lets you in now,” Susie said, “don’t you dare waste it.”
Susie stood there for another moment, looking at him.
Not because she had anything left to say.
Because if she stayed much longer, she might say something she could not take back, and the thing about rage at this level was that it made honesty feel almost too easy.
Toto was still sitting on the edge of the bed, shoulders bowed now, hands clasped together hard enough that the knuckles had gone pale. He looked wrecked.
Good, some cold, furious part of her thought.
He should.
But beneath that, underneath all of it, there was still the much more inconvenient truth: Susie loved him.
That was what made this so unbearable.
If he had been only cruel, only careless, only monstrous, the emotion would have been simpler. Cleaner. She could have put him in a category and left him there.
But Toto was none of those things in any neat, permanent sense. He was a man who had loved badly in some of the most important places. A man who had failed a child he should have protected. A man who could now see it and be shattered by it — and somehow that did not repair the failure, it only made the whole thing sadder.
Susie pressed her lips together and exhaled slowly through her nose.
When she spoke, her voice had changed.
The anger was still there, absolutely. But it had burned down just enough to reveal the exhaustion beneath it.
“Okay,” she said.
Toto looked up.
That one word made him tense, as though he did not trust anything gentler than fury anymore.
Susie folded her arms across herself, less in anger now than in self-containment.
“Okay,” she repeated. “I love you.”
His whole face changed.
Not because the words surprised him.
Because they were still there.
Because after everything he had just admitted, after everything she had just said, she was still giving him that truth and neither of them had the luxury of pretending it didn’t matter.
But she did not let him speak.
She lifted one hand slightly, cutting him off before he could ruin it with apology.
“I love you,” she said again, more firmly, “but I really cannot deal with you tonight.”
That landed too.
Cleanly.
He stared at her.
Not defensive. Not offended. Just tired enough, ashamed enough, and honest enough to understand exactly what she meant.
Susie shook her head once, small and sharp.
“I can’t sit beside you and comfort you,” she said. “Not tonight. I can’t do the thing where I make this bearable for you. I can’t hold your hand through your guilt. You can have it. You should have it. I am not the person who is going to make it softer this evening.”
Toto swallowed.
“I know,” he said quietly.
She believed him.
That was the problem with him, in the end. He rarely lied when it mattered most. He simply arrived at the truth far too late and expected the timing not to count against him as much as it did.
Susie looked toward the door for a second, then back at him.
“So I’m going to sleep in the guest bedroom.”
He flinched.
Not dramatically. Not with protest.
Just a small, involuntary reaction that told her he had not expected that particular consequence, even if he understood it instantly.
“Susie—”
“No.”
Her voice wasn’t sharp this time. Just final.
“I’m not leaving because I don’t love you. I’m leaving because I do, and right now that makes this worse, not better.”
That one seemed to hit deeper than the anger had.
His eyes dropped to his hands.
“I don’t want to look at you tonight and have to manage two things at once,” she said. “My fury at what happened to Ana, and my grief for you that you let it happen and have had to live beside it ever since. I’m too angry for the second thing. And I’m not willing to betray the first.”
The room went very still.
Outside, Monaco glittered on in expensive indifference. Inside, the air felt stale with too much truth finally spoken aloud.
Toto nodded once.
Not because he liked it.
Because he understood.
“Okay,” he said.
And there was something almost unbearable in how quiet he sounded.
Not asking her to stay.
Not asking her to soothe him.
Just taking it.
Susie closed her eyes for a second.
Because this, too, was part of loving someone: knowing when staying in the room would only force you into a tenderness they had not earned from you that night.
When she opened them again, he was still sitting there exactly as he had been, a man hollowed out by his own admissions, too decent to argue, too ashamed to defend, too late in every way that mattered.
She hated that she could still see the man she loved inside that silhouette.
She hated that love did not evaporate just because disappointment became righteous enough to deserve it.
“I am not saying this to punish you,” she said, quieter now.
Toto looked up.
“I know.”
“I’m saying it because I need the space.”
Another nod.
“Yes.”
Susie studied him for one more second, then moved to the wardrobe and pulled out what she would need for the night with the brisk, efficient movements of a woman refusing to let herself hesitate now that the decision had been made.
A change of clothes. Her toothbrush. The small bottle of hand cream she always kept in the drawer. Practical things. Ordinary things. The domestic choreography of temporary distance.
Behind her, Toto did not move.
That made it worse somehow.
If he had argued, she could have fought him. If he had become defensive, she could have sharpened herself against it. But this — this quiet acceptance, this exhausted understanding — left only the actual ache of it.
She turned back toward him with her things in her hand.
He was still on the edge of the bed, still bent slightly forward.
For a second Susie almost went back to him.
Almost.
Then she thought of Ana at ten.
Of the slap.
Of the fact that he had never even asked.
And the impulse died where it should.
At the door, she stopped.
Toto looked up immediately.
There was too much in his face. Shame, obviously. Love, still. Grief. The deep, useless weariness of a man who had finally stopped narrating himself as well-intentioned and started seeing the scale of the harm.
Susie held his gaze.
“I do love you,” she said one last time, because she wanted that on the record, because she would not let distance be misread as absence. “But tonight I cannot be your wife first.”
His throat moved once.
“I understand.”
She believed him.
Then, after a beat, he added, very quietly, “I’m sorry.”
Susie’s expression tightened.
Not because she doubted it.
Because it was true and still not enough.
“I know,” she said.
And then she opened the door and left him there.
The guest bedroom was cool and impersonal in the way all well-prepared guest rooms were. Beautiful, comfortable, faintly anonymous. Susie set her things down on the bedside table and stood in the middle of the room for a moment, breathing.
The house was silent around her.
Jack asleep.
Toto alone with the full, unsoftened weight of himself.
Susie sat down on the edge of the bed and let the anger settle around the grief instead of the other way around.
She loved her husband.
She was still furious with him.
Both things were true.
Neither cancelled the other.
***
Text Messages: Lewis Hamilton & Nico Rosberg
Lewis:Quick question.
Lewis:Have you seen Ana’s engagement ring yet?
Nico:No?
Lewis:That’s such a shame.
Nico:Lewis.
Lewis:I have.
Nico:Of course you have.
Lewis:In person.
Nico:I dislike you already and I don’t even know what it looks like yet.
Lewis:Massive.
Star sapphire.
Deep blue.
Completely unreasonable in the best possible way.
Nico:A star sapphire?
Lewis:Yes.
Nico:Well.
That is annoyingly tasteful.
Lewis:I know.
I saw it first.
Nico:You are behaving like a twelve-year-old.
Lewis:And yet I still saw it first.
Nico:Why exactly were you in a position to see it first?
Lewis:Because, Nico, I was invited to the housewarming.
Nico:You are joking.
Lewis:No.
Nico:I was not invited?
Lewis:Apparently not.
Nico:This is deeply offensive.
Lewis:I agree.
To you.
Nico:Lewis.
Lewis:What?
Nico:Did you text me purely to tell me that you were invited to Max Verstappen’s house and I was not, and that you have seen Ana’s engagement ring before me?
Lewis:Not purely.
Nico:There’s more?
Lewis:Obviously.
Lewis:I’m helping her choose a wedding dress.
Nico:You are what.
Lewis:Helping her choose a wedding dress.
Nico:Why are you saying this so casually.
Lewis:Because I’m calm.
Nico:I am not.
Lewis:That sounds like a personal issue.
Nico:You’ve seen the ring.
You were invited to the housewarming.
And now you are helping pick the wedding dress.
Lewis:Yes.
Lewis:It’s really not my fault that I’m useful.
Nico:I hate everything about this conversation.
Lewis:No, you hate that I am currently more informed than you are.
Nico:Lewis.
Lewis:Nico.
Nico:Did Ana actually ask you?
Lewis:Yes.
Nico:That is… actually very logical.
Lewis:Thank you.
Nico:I resent how logical it is.
Lewis:Same.
Nico:You are not to put her in anything ridiculous.
Lewis:Do you take me for an amateur?
Nico:Sometimes.
Lewis:Hurtful.
Nico:Deserved.
Lewis:Relax.
We’re going to Paris on Monday.
I’m eliminating stupidity.
Nico:That is a deeply threatening sentence when applied to wedding fashion.
Lewis:That’s why it will work.
Nico:Send me a picture of the ring.
Lewis:No.
Nico:Lewis.
Lewis:I need to hold this over your head for at least another 24 hours.
Nico:I hope you have to wear a hideous beige suit for the wedding.
Lewis:I’ll fix that too.
***
Text Messages: Dr. Anastasia “Ana” Wolff & Nico Rosberg
Nico:I need to register a formal complaint.
Ana:against whom
Nico:Lewis.
Ana:that narrows it down very little
Nico:He texted me specifically to tell me that he has seen your engagement ring and I have not.
Ana:that does sound like him
Nico:He also informed me that he was invited to the housewarming and I was not.
Ana:Nico
Nico:And then, as if that were not enough, he told me he is helping you choose a wedding dress.
Ana:yes
Nico:“yes” is a cruel response when I am suffering
Ana:you are not suffering
you are being dramatic
Nico:Both can be true.
Ana:for what it’s worth
he is being annoying on purpose
Nico:That does not make it better.
That makes it more Lewis.
Nico:Also, I am lightly offended that you didn’t tell me you were engaged.
Ana:Nico
the grid knows
some of Brackley knows
but I haven’t even told Susie’s parents yet
Nico:Oh.
Nico:Well.
Nico:That is actually quite reassuring.
Ana:i thought it might be
Nico:So I am not uniquely under-briefed.
Ana:no
you are in a large and distinguished category
Nico:Excellent.
I feel much better now.
Ana:good
Nico:I still reserve the right to be mildly hurt.
Ana:that seems fair
Nico:Thank you.
Ana:while I have you
can you look over the photobook I made for Roscoe?
Nico:No.
Ana:no?
Nico:Lewis doesn’t deserve that.
He is mean to me.
Ana:Nico
Nico:I’m serious.
Why should I contribute to a sentimental gift for a man who weaponized your ring against me?
Ana:because you loved Roscoe more than you dislike Lewis?
Nico:That is manipulative.
Ana:also
that housewarming was literally for the current grid
Nico:You did not have to phrase it like that.
Ana:it is the truth
Nico:Yes, Anastasia, I know I am not currently on the grid.
You don’t need to hit me with my retirement.
Ana:you texted me to complain about a lunch invitation
I felt context was necessary
Nico:I texted you to complain about Lewis.
The lunch was secondary.
Ana:sure
Nico:I’m choosing to interpret that as affectionate skepticism.
Ana:that is your right
Nico:Fine.
Send me the photobook.
Ana:thank you
Nico:If it is bad, I will say so.
Ana:that is why I asked you
Nico:And for the record, I am happy for you.
Ana:thank you
Nico:Truly.
Ana:i know
Nico:Also, if Lewis puts you in something absurd, tell me immediately and I’ll stage an intervention.
Ana:he said his goal was to eliminate stupidity
Nico:That is both reassuring and ominous.
Ana:yes
Nico:Send the Roscoe draft.
Ana:doing it now
Nico:And Ana?
Ana:what
Nico:Tell Max I hope he knows how lucky he is.
***
Text Messages: Dr. Anastasia “Ana” Wolff & Susie Wolff
Ana:The lunch was less socially catastrophic than projected.
Susie:High praise.
Ana:I am trying to be generous.
Susie:How are you?
Ana:Tired. But home.
Susie:That helps.
Ana:Yes.
Ana:You are coming on Monday, right?
Susie:To Paris?
Ana:Yes. For the dress appointment.I want you there.
Susie: Of course, I’ll be there. Like I would ever miss my daughter picking out a wedding dress.
Susie:And for the record, I fully intend to prevent Lewis from putting you in anything ridiculous.
Pairing: Max Verstappen x Dr. Anastasia "Ana" Wolff (Original Character)
Summary:
Max Verstappen to Mercedes? The paddock is buzzing. The media’s in meltdown.
Dr. Anastasia “Ana” Wolff, Mercedes’ notoriously brilliant, emotionally unavailable lead systems engineer and Toto Wolff’s eldest daughter, is not handling it well. Because Max isn’t just a potential signing, he’s the man she’s been sleeping with in secret for nearly a decade.
And if the rumours are true, and Max Verstappen really is joining Mercedes, then Ana’s carefully compartmentalised world is about to explode.
Warnings and Notes: Double Update. You guys are welcome 😉
Let me know if I missed something else, and I'll add it!
As always big thanks to @llirawolf , who listens to me ramble.
Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025
Alexandra Saint Mleux knew enough about art to ruin her own peace. That was the actual problem.
Anyone else might have walked into Max Verstappen and Ana Wolff’s house and simply thought: beautiful.
Impeccable, even.
Light everywhere. Cream stone. Hardwood floors. Glass. Space. Money handled by someone with restraint instead of vulgarity.
The sort of place that made people instinctively stand up straighter and check whether their shoes were too loud for the floor.
Alexandra walked in, glanced down the hallway, and nearly had a cardiac event.
Because on the wall, paired with criminal casualness beneath two discreet brass lights, hung a Lee Krasner.
Not Lee Krasner-inspired. Not a print. Not a polite contemporary abstraction that vaguely nodded toward mid-century American modernism.
A Lee Krasner.
She actually stopped walking.
Charles, behind her, nearly crashed into her shoulder.
“What?” he asked.
Alexandra didn’t answer at first.
She was staring.
The hallway was quiet. Beautifully proportioned. The painting sat there in all its controlled ferocity—gesture, emotion, color —and beside it, another work arranged with enough confidence to suggest whoever had placed them knew exactly what they were doing and feared no one’s opinion.
Alexandra turned very slowly toward Charles. “Do not touch anything.”
Charles looked offended. “Alex.”
She looked back at the wall.
“I need you to understand,” she said, in the careful tone of a woman trying not to shout in somebody else’s entrance hall, “that if that is what I think it is, then I am unwell.”
Charles followed her gaze, looked at the paintings, then back at her. “They’re paintings.”
Alexandra closed her eyes briefly.
Of course he would say that. Of course the man raised in Monaco around money and objects and beautifully terrifying interiors would see a hallway full of world-class art and deliver the sentence they’re paintings with complete sincerity.
She turned to him again. “I hate you a little.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No,” she admitted. “But I need you to stop being illiterate about art history for one minute.”
That got the corner of his mouth.
He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Is it real?”
Alexandra looked back at the Krasner.
Then toward the living room beyond the hall, where she could already see another frame catching the light from the windows.
She swallowed. “I don’t know,” she lied.
She absolutely knew.
Or rather, she knew enough to be deeply unsettled by how real all of it felt.
The surface. The framing.
The absence of that terrible, overexplained performance wealthy people often draped around art when they wanted the room to know they had purchased prestige.
This wasn’t prestige.
This was taste.
Which, frankly, was more dangerous.
And then she made the mistake of looking into the living room.
The world stopped again.
Because there, in the soft Monaco light, hung something water-soft and luminous and unmistakable.
Alexandra took one involuntary step forward.
No. No, surely not.
She moved into the room like someone approaching a religious vision she did not trust not to evaporate under scrutiny.
Charles, now fully invested only because her level of alarm had clearly upgraded the matter beyond decorative interest, followed more quietly.
Alexandra stopped just inside the sitting room and stared.
It was a Monet.
Not Monet-adjacent. Not a print.
Not some pale decorative landscape chosen by a rich man who wanted his house to look expensive in a noncommittal French way.
A Monet.
Her heart actually kicked. “No,” she whispered.
“Is that bad?” Charles asked.
She turned and looked at him with the kind of pity one reserved for men who were good at many things and hopelessly under-equipped for the particular emergency currently unfolding.
“It is not bad,” she said. “It is, however, slightly insane. That’s a Monet.”
The living room around them was all light and polished restraint. A massive grand piano sat near the windows.
Flowers had been arranged with just enough asymmetry to suggest intelligence rather than Pinterest. The Monet held the wall with that impossible softness only geniuses were able to produce.
Alexandra moved closer.
Close enough now to see what mattered.
Not the name. The surface.
She stared at the paint handling, the atmosphere, the way the image dissolved and cohered at once depending on distance.
Not a print.
Dear God.
She actually put one hand lightly against her own sternum.
Charles noticed immediately. “You’re having a moment.”
“I’m having several.”
He came to stand beside her, hands very firmly to himself, which she appreciated.
“You think it’s real?”
Alexandra let out a breath that bordered on laughter and hysteria at once.
“I think,” she said, “that if this is fake, then whoever faked it deserves a state funeral and a building in their name.”
That made Charles laugh.
At the far end of the room, near the terrace doors, Max was standing.
Not in the wheelchair. Not seated. Not absent.
Standing.
Crutches under his arms, weight still managed carefully, body held with that very specific economy of movement people acquired when pain was still present and simply not being invited to dominate the room.
He looked thinner than before. Sharper somehow. A little worn at the edges.
But alive.
Here.
Alexandra felt Charles stop beside her before she even turned to look at him properly.
This, she thought at once, was the real shock.
Because this was the first time Charles had seen Max in person since Baku. Not statements, surgeries, updates, and the endless, ugly churn of media language.
Max.
In the flesh.
The boy he had known since they were children.
The man he had raced for nearly all of his life.
The constant presence against whom so many seasons had been measured.
Rival, nuisance, benchmark, history.
Familiar in the way only a handful of people ever really were.
Alexandra knew before Charles said a word that this was hitting somewhere deeper than he would ever say out loud.
She saw it in the stillness.
You could follow every update, every medical bulletin, every court development, every ugly piece of aftermath.
And still not be prepared for the first real sight of someone after survival had passed through them and left its evidence behind.
Max looked over then and saw them.
His expression shifted almost immediately into something dry and familiar, which Alexandra suspected was its own mercy.
“Alexandra, Charles,” he said.
His voice was steady. A little rougher than she remembered. Still unmistakably his.
“Max,” she said, before she could decide whether sounding normal was possible.
Beside her, Charles moved first.
There was no performance in it. No elaborate choreography. Just a very brief, very human hesitation as he took in the crutches, the altered balance of him, the fact that Max was here at all — and then Charles crossed the room.
“Hi,” he said, and his voice had gone quieter than usual.
Max looked at him for half a second.
Then Charles did the thing Alexandra knew he had not planned, the thing instinct overrode pride for: he leaned in and hugged Max. Careful, brief, real.
One arm around his shoulders. One hand landing lightly against his back, avoiding the obvious injuries without making a show of it.
Alexandra watched Max freeze for the smallest beat in surprise before he returned it awkwardly but without hesitation, one-armed and careful.
When they pulled apart, Charles looked at him properly.
“Good to see you,” he said.
Simple. True. Not enough for everything the sentence needed to carry, but maybe that was why it worked.
Max’s mouth moved slightly. “You too.”
Alexandra, still only half in the real world because the other half of her remained spiritually fused to the Monet, looked between them and felt the awkwardness begin to dissolve into something gentler.
Daniel Ricciardo appeared from somewhere near the kitchen with a drink in one hand. “Ah,” he said, seeing Alexandra’s face. “You found the art.”
Alexandra looked at him. “I found a Monet.”
Daniel nodded. “Yes. That seems to be affecting people.”
“That seems to be affecting people?” she repeated.
He grinned. “The gallery man almost died yesterday, apparently.”
Max looked faintly unrepentant. “I picked it because it was pretty.”
Alexandra turned toward him so fast Charles actually smiled. “You what.”
Max lifted one shoulder. “It was pretty. Ana likes it. That was enough.”
There was a beat.
Then Alexandra laughed, because what else was there to do.
Of course.
Of course Max Verstappen had accidentally bought a Monet with the same brutal simplicity he probably used to choose race gloves or kitchen knives or sunglasses.
Not because of provenance or history or mythology.
Because it was beautiful.
Which, infuriatingly, was not the worst reason she had ever heard.
She looked around the room again—the Monet, the piano, the air of money disciplined by actual taste—and then back at Max.
“Ana chose the rest, didn’t she?”
At that, something in his face softened by a fraction.
“Yes,” he said.
Alexandra nodded once, deeply vindicated. “Yes,” she said. “I thought so.”
***
Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025
By the time the first of them arrived, Max had already decided this was a terrible idea.
Not because he didn’t want them there.
That was the problem.
He did.
Which was precisely why the whole thing felt vaguely dangerous.
It had been nearly a month.
Nearly a month since Baku. Since the wall. Since the hospital.
Since the surreal, flattened unreality of being spoken about more often than spoken to. Since seeing people in fragments—on screens, in messages, in clipped little updates relayed through phones and lawyers and doctors and the endless administrative violence that followed disaster.
And now they were coming here.
To the house.
To him.
Not as names in a group chat. Not as grainy photos from the paddock. Not as his colleagues in race suits and media pens and controlled public environments.
As themselves.
Max stood in the entry hall and watched Ana move through the final ten minutes before arrival with the calm authority of someone who had already planned this down to weather contingencies and serving utensils.
The dining table had been extended. Flowers had appeared in strategic places. Something citrusy and expensive-smelling had happened to the kitchen. The cats had been bribed into temporary tolerance.
“You’re frowning,” Ana said, not looking up from where she was rearranging a bowl of peaches that, in Max’s opinion, had already been perfectly acceptable two minutes earlier.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
He shifted his weight slightly against the crutch and looked toward the front windows.
“I just think,” he said, “that inviting nineteen idiots into my house immediately after almost dying was maybe not my best decision.”
Ana glanced at him then. One quick, sharp look that saw far too much.
“You invited them.”
“Yes.”
“So clearly some part of you wanted them here.”
That was the problem too.
He did.
He wanted the noise. The normality. The ridiculousness of drivers occupying a room and immediately turning it into organised chaos. He wanted proof that life had continued enough to become annoying again.
He also, inconveniently, did not want to be looked at like someone who had survived something.
He wanted them to walk in and see him.
Not the crash.
Not the aftermath.
Just him.
The doorbell rang.
Max went still.
Ana did not comment on that. Another one of the many reasons he was marrying her.
Nikolai got there first, opening the front door with the same expression he wore for everything from mail deliveries to possible assassination attempts.
The next person through the door was Alex Albon.
Max had not realized until that second how much of him had been braced for some version of awkwardness—for the little pause, the shift in expression, the carefulness people sometimes got when they were trying too hard not to look shocked.
Alex took one look at him and immediately crossed the space between them like the intervening weeks had been an administrative inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.
“Mate.”
And then he hugged him.
Not delicately.
Not like he was going to break.
Just carefully enough not to be stupid about the injuries, one arm around his shoulders, solid and warm and familiar.
Max let out a breath he had not known he’d been holding and hugged him back one-armed.
“Hi,” Max said into his shoulder.
Alex pulled back just enough to look at him properly. His face did that strange thing people’s faces had been doing lately when relief arrived too quickly to hide. “You look like shit.”
Max snorted. “There he is.”
“That’s a compliment,” Alex said. “You’re upright.”
“Mostly.”
That made Alex grin, and the room became easier immediately.
Behind him came Carlos, who slowed for half a beat on entry—not enough that anyone who didn’t know him would have noticed, only enough that Max did.
Carlos looked at the crutch. At the thinner lines of him. At the fact of him being here at all.
Then he stepped forward and hugged him too.
Brief. Firm. No drama.
“Good to see you,” Carlos said.
“You too.”
Carlos drew back, one hand still on his shoulder for a second longer than necessary.
“You scared everyone.”
Max looked at him. “That sounds like a them problem.”
“That,” Carlos said dryly, “is very reassuringly you.”
Good, then.
That was what Max wanted. That tone. That normality. Not pity. Not reverence. Just his friends recalibrating in real time from hospital updates back into insults.
Pierre was next, and Pierre did not even pretend to be normal about it.
He walked in, looked at Max once, muttered something French and emotional under his breath, and then pulled him into a hug hard enough that Max had to brace with the crutch.
“Easy,” Max said into his shoulder.
“No,” Pierre said. “Absolutely not.”
That made Max laugh despite himself, which was unfortunate, because laughing still pulled at places he would have preferred not to feel.
When Pierre stepped back his eyes were suspiciously bright in the sunlight.
He solved that by immediately reaching up and messing up Max’s hair.
Max recoiled half a step in outrage.
“Don’t.”
Pierre grinned, unrepentant. “Had to make sure you were real.”
Max raised the crutch by a threatening inch. “I’ll hit you with this.”
“You won’t.”
“I literally will.”
Pierre looked delighted. “Excellent. Much better.”
By then the arrivals had started to stack.
Oscar came in quieter, but no less sincere, and his hug was one of those brief, heavy things that said more than the sentence after it.
“Good to see you.”
“Yeah.”
Lando, who had somehow managed to arrive carrying a palm tree as tall as he was, ruined every possibility of a dignified greeting on entry.
Not because he meant to.
Because he was Lando.
He came through the doorway already half hidden behind a ridiculous explosion of leaves, nearly clipped the frame, said “shit” with feeling, corrected the angle, and then reappeared behind the plant with the expression of a man convinced he was doing something both generous and hilarious.
“A housewarming gift,” he announced.
Everyone in the hall stared at him.
The palm was absurd. It looked like something that belonged in the lobby of a tropical hotel trying too hard.
Max stared at it.
Then at Lando.
Then back at the palm.
“What the fuck is that?”
“It’s a plant.”
“I can see that.”
“It’s festive.”
“It’s bigger than you.”
From somewhere behind Max, Ana said, in a tone of careful neutrality, “It is certainly alive.”
Max squinted at him. “How did you even get that here.”
“Commitment.”
“It’s horrible.”
“It’s majestic,” Lando corrected.
And then, because apparently the laws of the universe had decided this situation was not yet humiliating enough, Toto walked in from the terrace, took in the scene once, and without a word lifted the entire ridiculous palm and carried it out of the middle of the hallway like a man who had accepted that this was his life now.
Lando watched him go. “That’s not where I would put it.”
“No,” Toto said over his shoulder. “And yet here we are.”
That got the first full, helpless laugh out of Max all day.
And after that, it became easier.
Yuki came in at speed and stopped just short of launching himself bodily at Max, clearly remembering at the last possible second. He settled for gripping his shoulder hard and saying, with complete bluntness, “You look less dead.”
“Thank you,” Max said.
“That was a compliment.”
“I know.”
Liam and Isack followed, both pretending a level of casualness neither of them actually felt. Ollie hugged him with the peculiar earnestness of someone still young enough not to be embarrassed by relief.
Esteban clapped him on the shoulder and immediately apologized when Max nearly folded himself in half.
Gabriel looked vaguely like he had walked into an alternate reality and was trying not to show it.
Kimi came in with the strange, steady seriousness he had when something mattered to him more than he wanted it to show. He hugged Max too—brief, careful, real—and when he stepped back, Max reached out and ruffled his hair before he could stop himself.
Kimi looked mildly affronted.
Fernando arrived next and made the mistake of smiling too knowingly at him.
He hugged Max first—properly, briefly, firmly—and then, when he pulled back, reached up with all the confidence of a man who had won championships and therefore feared too little.
He touched Max’s hair once.
Max lifted the crutch immediately.
Fernando took one step backward.
“Do not.”
“You were going to.”
“I was not.”
“You absolutely were.”
Fernando looked deeply unconvincing. “There is no proof.”
Lando, from somewhere near the drinks table, said, “I’d like the record to show he absolutely was.”
Max pointed the crutch at Fernando like a weapon. “I will hit you.”
Fernando, instead of looking deterred, looked pleased. “Good. You’re fine.”
That sentence landed more cleanly than it should have.
The rest of them kept arriving in waves.
Nico, who had known too much of the ugly logistics from too close a distance not to look at Max for one extra second before pulling him into a clasp that was almost a hug and then becoming decisively German about the emotional implications.
Lance, awkward for exactly one second and then normal. Franco, still visibly delighted and slightly shocked that he had somehow ended up here among all these people and that Max was standing in front of him rather than trapped forever in headlines and hospital notes.
And through all of it Max stood there, leaned on the crutches, took the handshakes and the claps and the hugs and the terrible jokes and the worried looks quickly disguised as insults, and felt something in himself settling every time one of them got close enough to make it real.
Not because they treated him like he had never nearly died.
Because they didn’t.
They treated him like he had, and had come back, and was still himself enough to threaten them with mobility aids if they became irritating.
That, in its own ridiculous way, was love.
By the time everyone had arrived, the house was loud.
Not paddock loud. Not race-weekend loud.
Friend loud.
Driver loud.
Too many voices in too many corners, all slightly overlapping, all turning the polished restraint of Maison Étoiles into something messier and warmer and more alive.
The palm had been relocated to the terrace by Toto, where it stood in the sun looking no less absurd.
The cats had accepted that resistance was futile and melted strategically into the crowd.
And Max, standing in the middle of it all with his crutch under one arm and Charles saying something dry at his shoulder, thought that this — this exact noise, this physical proof of people showing up — was what he had wanted when he invited them.
Not sympathy.
Not spectacle.
Just this.
A room full of colleagues and competitors and idiots and friends, all of whom had come to see him with their own eyes and make sure he was still here.
He was.
And when Pierre came past him again on the way to the terrace and, with the deliberate self-destruction of a man who had learned nothing, reached out to mess up his hair a second time, Max swung the crutch up immediately and Pierre barely dodged in time.
“Jesus Christ,” Pierre laughed.
“I warned you.”
“You did.”
“You’re all so annoying.”
Oscar, from behind them, lifted a glass. “Good,” he said. “That means he’s definitely fine.”
***
Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025
Lily Zneimer had expected the lunch to be strange.
She had not expected it to be… this.
Not the house itself, although that was certainly part of it.
The house was beautiful in a way that felt less like wealth and more like someone had taken all the sharpest edges of good taste and made them look effortless. It was open and bright and somehow both enormous and intimate, with the sea flashing beyond the terrace and enough art on the walls to make Alexandra go slightly silent in the first ten minutes, which Lily had not previously believed possible.
No, what Lily had not expected was the feeling of the whole thing.
She’d expected Max Verstappen’s housewarming to feel … controlled. Cool. A little forbidding, maybe.
The sort of place where the chairs looked expensive and nobody quite relaxed because the owner himself looked as though he might bite if someone spilled something on the wrong surface.
Instead it felt lived in.
Not casual, exactly.
Nothing about the house was casual. The flowers were too perfectly placed for that. The piano in the sitting room looked like it should have its own diplomatic passport.
The food had appeared in calm, elegant waves that suggested at least three people more competent than any Formula One driver had been involved in the planning.
But it felt inhabited.
That was the strange part.
Like somebody had not only designed a beautiful life here, but had actually settled into it.
Lily stood near the terrace with a glass in her hand and watched the whole thing unfold in layers.
Drivers everywhere, of course. That was unavoidable.
Lando already laughing too loudly at something Daniel was saying. Oscar looking more relaxed than she’d seen him in weeks.
Lewis impossibly elegant even while standing in sunlight with a plate in one hand. Carlos in conversation with Alex and Pierre.
Kimi hovering close enough to Valtteri and Max to look accidental and not accidental at all.
And then there were the women.
Alexandra, somehow making understated look editorial.
Rebecca looking like she’d stepped out of a campaign for quietly expensive happiness.
Kika warm and easy and even prettier the longer one looked at her.
Flavy laughing with Alicia near the drinks table.
Isabella and Alex’s Lily deep in a conversation that had already become more intense than the lunch probably required.
Lily herself had spent an embarrassing amount of time that morning trying to work out what one wore to a lunch hosted by Max Verstappen and his girlfriend, who was also, apparently, an engineer, software founder, mystery person and possible genius.
Which brought her, unfortunately, to Ana.
Lily had told the group chat she was intimidated, which had been true. She had not mentioned that she was also, in a quiet and deeply unhelpful way, a little bit in awe.
Only slightly, she told herself now. Only a normal amount.
Ana stood near the kitchen island in a cream knit and a dark skirt. She wasn’t glittery or loud or socially effortless in the way some women at paddock events were. She didn’t fill the room by trying to own it.
And yet Lily kept noticing when she moved.
It wasn’t even beauty, though yes, fine, she was beautiful—cold at first glance and then increasingly not, once you watched the way her face changed around the people she trusted.
It was more that she seemed to occupy herself with total precision. Nothing wasted. Nothing added for effect. Like she had no instinct at all for decoration in her own behavior and therefore came across as even more striking because of it.
Also, Lily thought as she took another sip of champagne and tried not to stare, she ran software companies on the side.
For fun.
That still refused to settle into anything resembling normal.
Oscar appeared beside her, touching two fingers lightly to the small of her back in passing.
“You okay?”
Lily looked up at him.
“Yes,” she said. Then, lowering her voice just enough that nobody else would hear: “I am trying very hard not to fangirl at your friend’s girlfriend.”
Oscar actually laughed. “That’s so specific.”
Still, Lily watched.
And what she saw was not what she had expected at all.
She had expected Max and Ana to feel dramatic together, somehow. Tense. Hyper-private.
Something all intensity and steel and secrecy, maybe. The sort of pairing that looked powerful from a distance and exhausting up close.
Instead they kept drifting toward each other with the ease of people who had long ago stopped noticing they were doing it.
That was what startled her.
Not grand gestures. Not performative touching. Not the sort of possessiveness or theatrical chemistry people usually expected. It was smaller than that, and somehow much more intimate.
Max was sitting by the terrace doors talking to Alex and Carlos when Ana crossed behind him carrying a plate toward the kitchen. He didn’t even turn fully, just reached a hand back without looking, fingers brushing briefly against her hip as she passed.
She leaned slightly into the touch without breaking stride.
That was it.
That was all.
And Lily, watching it from across the room, felt something in her brain rearrange.
Oh, she thought. Oh, this is not what I expected at all.
Because that wasn’t drama. That was fluency.
The sort of physical shorthand people had when they belonged to each other so completely that contact no longer needed ceremony.
A few minutes later, Max said something dry to Daniel that made half the room laugh and Ana, from across the island, didn’t laugh at all—just looked up, met his eyes, and gave him one small, deeply entertained look that landed harder than anyone else’s reaction.
Max visibly softened.
Not much. Only enough for someone paying attention to notice.
Lily noticed.
And then, because apparently the lunch intended to keep surprising her, she noticed the same thing between Ana and Toto.
That relationship, too, was not what she’d expected.
From the outside, from the internet, from fragments and stories and the broad mythology of paddock power, Lily might have imagined distance. Formality. Something a little difficult and expensive and unsentimental.
Instead, what existed between them looked… gentle. But deliberate gentleness, as if both of them had learned that the other was made of more breakable things than either had wanted to admit.
Toto checked on her without hovering. Ana answered him without bristling. Once, when someone across the table dragged Toto into another conversation, his hand brushed briefly over Ana’s shoulder as he passed behind her, and she didn’t flinch or go rigid or perform indifference. She simply tipped her head a fraction toward the touch and kept speaking to Lewis.
Again: not big. Again: somehow enormous.
And Susie—
Lily had not expected that either.
If Max and Ana were fluent, and Ana and Toto were careful, then Ana and Susie were something else altogether.
Steady.
That was it.
Steady in a way that made Lily’s chest ache a little unexpectedly when she saw it.
Ana around most people remained self-contained, precise, a little watchful under the surface even when she was being polite.
Around Susie, something different happened. Not that she became more animated exactly. More that her whole body seemed to downgrade its alert level by several degrees.
She stood closer. Turned toward her more easily. Didn’t pre-edit every expression before it arrived.
At one point Susie said something low in her ear while they were both reaching for glasses, and Ana made a face—a real one, quick and unguarded and almost adolescent in its offense—that lasted less than a second before disappearing.
Susie only smiled.
Lily stared into her drink.
This, she thought, was actually kind of devastating.
Because whatever strange constellation of people and losses and repaired things had created the atmosphere of this lunch, it was clearly built on more tenderness than the outside world had any idea existed.
Oscar leaned in close enough to murmur, “You’re doing the observing thing again.”
Lily looked up. “What observing thing.”
“The one where you go quiet because you’re building a whole internal thesis.”
She let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
Then said, quietly, “I just didn’t think it would feel like this.”
Oscar’s expression shifted, because for all his own dryness, he was sometimes unnervingly good at hearing the real sentence underneath the easy one.
“Like what.”
Lily looked across the room again.
At Max, now listening the attention face he wore when someone else had the floor, except his attention kept pulling back to Ana whether he meant it to or not.
At Ana, who had just tipped her face up toward Susie’s with that rare, brief softness again.
At Toto speaking to Lewis near the windows, one eye still somehow on his daughter.
At the whole impossible house holding them all.
“Warm,” Lily said finally.
Oscar followed her gaze.
Then nodded once.
“Yeah,” he said.
Complicated. Elegant. Slightly terrifying. But warm.
Lily took another sip of champagne and told herself, sternly, that she was absolutely not going to become emotionally invested in Max Verstappen’s domestic life because that would be ridiculous.
Then Ana looked up at something Daniel said, and Max looked at Ana looking, and the whole stupid room seemed briefly strung together by invisible threads of affection and history and difficult people being loved properly anyway.
Lily sighed into her glass.
This, she thought, was a disaster.
Because she liked her.
Not in the “acceptable hostess” sense.
Not in the “Oscar’s friend’s girlfriend seems nice” sense.
No.
She liked her in the much more inconvenient sense of recognizing, with no usable defense against it, that Ana Wolff was not only intimidatingly competent and slightly fascinating, but also—deeply annoyingly—someone Lily might have liked even without any of the mythology around her.
Which meant, naturally, that she would now spend the rest of lunch trying not to seem too impressed.
This did not go especially well.
Especially not when Ana, passing close enough to the terrace table where Lily was standing with Rebecca and Kika, paused just long enough to ask, very evenly, “Is anyone allergic to hazelnut, or are we safe?”
Lily, caught completely off guard by being directly addressed by the woman she had been privately theorizing about for the past forty minutes, blinked and answered too quickly. “No. I mean— not me. We’re safe. I think.”
Ana nodded once. “Good.”
***
Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025
Ana had not intended to be cornered by six very beautiful women before she’d even finished a full glass of water.
In fairness, cornered was too dramatic a word.
Observed, perhaps.
No—that also sounded hostile, and it wasn’t. Not really.
The women gathered near the terrace table had the unmistakable air of people trying very hard to be normal while all collectively noticing the same thing at once and deciding, with admirable restraint, not to lunge verbally for it.
Ana had joined them because it had seemed less deranged than continuing to orbit the edges of her own lunch like a guest. Susie had made some subtle movement of the eyes that translated, in maternal language, to go on, darling, they won’t bite. Max had been trapped by Daniel and Charles. Toto was speaking to Lewis and Valtteri in the corner of the terrace with the posture of a man pretending he was not also monitoring the whole emotional ecosystem.
So Ana had done the reasonable thing.
She had walked toward the women.
And now, here she was, standing with a glass of sparkling water in one hand while Rebecca Donaldson, Alexandra Saint Mleux, Lily Zneimer, Kika Gomes, Lily Muni He, and Flavy Barla all looked, with varying levels of discipline, at her left hand.
Ana followed their gaze down.
The ring caught the Monaco light with the kind of flagrant confidence only a star sapphire of that size could manage. She had once again forgotten it was there.
That, apparently, had been a tactical error.
There was a brief silence.
Not awkward. Not exactly.
More the silence of several people realizing at once that they had not, in fact, been misreading the jewel and that the implications were now alive in the room with them.
It was Rebecca who spoke first, because of course it was.
Her tone was perfectly warm. Perfectly controlled. Only the slightest amount of delighted disbelief threaded through it.
“That,” she said, looking at Ana’s hand, “is not a subtle ring.”
Ana looked down at it again, as if perhaps it might have shrunk in the last four seconds out of courtesy.
“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
Lily Zneimer made a tiny sound that was almost a laugh and almost panic.
“Oh my God,” she said.
Alexandra, who had the sort of face that remained elegant even while clearly experiencing multiple revelations per minute, looked from the ring to Ana and back again. “You’re engaged`.”
It was not quite a question.
Ana looked at her. “Yes.”
Flavy’s hand actually flew to her chest.
Kika blinked.
Lily stared.
Rebecca smiled in that helplessly amused way people did when reality abruptly became much more interesting than expected.
And Lily Zneimer, apparently representing the collective emotional honesty of the group, said, “To Max?”
Ana turned her head slowly toward her.
Lily flushed immediately. “Sorry. That was an insane thing to say. Obviously to Max. I just meant—”
“No,” Ana said, and the corner of her mouth moved faintly. “It’s all right. Yes. To Max.”
That, somehow, made it worse.
Or better, perhaps, depending on one’s appetite for social shock.
Because there was something about hearing it plainly stated that made the whole thing rearrange itself into a more incredible shape. Not just big ring. Not just mystery relationship. Not just internet speculation sharpened into gossip.
For one brief second Ana considered the room from outside herself and understood what it must look like: Toto Wolff’s daughter, Max Verstappen’s fiancée, standing on a Monaco terrace as though none of this was remotely unusual and wearing a sapphire so large it looked less like jewelry and more like a diplomatic incident.
That was objectively a little funny.
“I’m sorry,” Rebecca said, smiling now in earnest, “but how long has this been going on?”
Ana took a sip of water first.
That bought her perhaps three seconds of delay. “A while.”
Lily Z made an offended noise. “A while is evil.”
Alexandra’s eyes narrowed with the calm focus of someone assembling a museum-level puzzle. “A while,” she repeated.
Ana looked at the sea instead of directly at six women who all wanted precision and absolutely deserved it and were not going to get it because she was still herself.
“Yes.”
Kika, who had been quiet longest, finally said, “Did everyone else know?”
That one, at least, made Ana glance across the terrace toward the drivers.
Max was laughing at something Daniel had said, head tipped back, one hand braced against the crutch, entirely too relaxed for a man whose private life had just detonated silently among the women five metres away. Half the drivers looked normal. The other half looked normal in the suspicious paddock sense that usually meant privately informed.
“Not everyone,” Ana said.
Lily Muni’s eyebrows went up. “Some of them don’t know?”
“Correct.”
Flavy looked delighted by this.
“Oh, that’s phenomenal.”
Ana was not sure phenomenal was the word she would have chosen, but she let it pass.
Rebecca tilted her head. “And they’re finding out… when, exactly?”
Ana looked at the ring again.
Then back at Rebecca.
“I imagine now.”
That got actual laughter.
Unfortunately, that was when Lily Zneimer looked at the ring with the frank attention of a woman who had reached the point where social restraint could no longer compete with reality.
“I need to say this,” Lily said. “That ring is enormous.”
Ana glanced down again. “Yes.”
“That’s not a judgment,” Lily said quickly. “That’s just observable fact. It’s like—”
“A minor celestial body?” Alexandra supplied.
Ana looked at her sharply. “That is almost word for word what one of my friends said.”
Rebecca laughed outright.
Kika leaned closer—not enough to invade, just enough to properly see the stone. “What is it?”
“It’s a star sapphire. A sapphire with an asterism.” Ana explained. “Max knows I like stars.”
There was a very brief silence in which all of them absorbed both the answer and the extremely Ana specificity of it.
Of course it was not a diamond. Of course it was a star sapphire.
Of course Max Verstappen had somehow managed to choose something dramatic, obscure, and impossibly personal enough to make sense only after you knew who Ana actually was.
Lily Muni said, softly, “It’s beautiful.”
Ana looked at her and nodded once. “Thank you.”
Flavy, still staring, said, “I’m sorry, but I genuinely don’t know how you’re just standing here acting like this is normal.”
Ana considered that. “It has been on my hand for some days now,” she said. “The shock has diminished.”
Rebecca smiled. “For you, perhaps.”
That was fair.
The funniest part, Ana thought, was that they were all clearly trying to behave correctly. Nobody had gone sharp or territorial or catty, as adolescent memory had always trained her to half expect in groups of women she did not know well.
They were just… astonished. And perhaps a little impressed. And looking at the ring in the way all humans, regardless of gender or upbringing or personal dignity, tended to look at very beautiful objects that clearly came attached to an absurd story.
Lily Z, who had apparently given up on subtlety as a workable strategy, asked, “Did he just casually produce that?”
Ana felt the ghost of that night move through her ribs—the candlelight, Max’s face, the impossible sincerity of him, the fact that he had somehow managed to make something extravagant feel devastatingly precise.
“No,” she said quietly. “Not casually. He spent a year designing it.”
Because that answer told them more than the words themselves. That whatever this was between her and Max, it was not spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Not just wealth. Not just surprise. It belonged to a real history.
And because Ana had no desire to let the conversation become too earnest before lunch had even properly begun, she added,
Across the terrace, Daniel had finally clocked the energy shift and was now looking between the women and Max with the specific expression of a man who knew something entertaining was happening and wanted in.
Ana saw him open his mouth.
Max, following his line of sight, turned.
He looked toward the group.
Toward Ana.
Toward the ring.
Toward the expressions on all the women’s faces.
And, in one quick beat, understood exactly what had happened.
His face changed at once.
Not panic. Something much more Max.
A kind of resigned amusement paired with the immediate instinct to move closer to Ana whether she needed rescuing or not.
***
Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025
The drivers figured it out in the worst possible way: all at once, in public, and with just enough delay between realization and reaction for the embarrassment to become communal.
It started with Daniel.
Of course it did.
He was leaning against the terrace railing with a drink in hand, halfway through telling a story that was already 40% exaggeration and improving with every retelling, when he noticed that half the women had gone visibly strange near the drinks table and that Max was moving toward them with the expression of a man who knew exactly why.
Daniel stopped mid-sentence.
Looked at the women. Looked at Max. Looked at Ana.
Then, with the delighted horror of a man watching a secret combust in real time, said, far too loudly,
“Oh no.”
That got everyone’s attention.
Lando turned first. “What.”
Daniel pointed.
Not helpfully. Just generally, as though the whole scene itself was the point.
Charles followed Daniel’s line of vision toward the women’s little cluster, where Alexandra was still looking at Ana’s hand with the sort of alarm normally reserved for museum fires.
Max reached Ana just as Lando squinted, leaned sideways around Carlos for a better view, and said: “Why is everyone looking at Ana like that.”
Then he saw the ring.
There was a pause.
Lando blinked once.
Then twice.
Then, with the clarity of a man receiving devastating information at top speed, said, “No.”
Pierre looked over. “What no.”
Lando pointed now too, equally unhelpfully. “That.”
Carlos frowned. “That what.”
“The ring.”
And then the contagion spread.
One by one, like some ridiculous synchronized social failure, the drivers turned toward Ana.
Saw her hand. Saw the sapphire.
Saw Max sitting there with exactly the wrong amount of resignation in his face.
And understood.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Alex said.
Oscar closed his eyes briefly. “Right.”
Yuki’s entire face lit up with violent interest. “WAIT.”
Esteban actually laughed. “No way.”
Franco, who had not been present for enough of the private ecosystem to have any defense against this, just stared. “What is happening.”
Valtteri, from beside Kimi, went very still in the way of a man who already knew more than most and was now watching the rest of the class catch up.
Kimi, meanwhile, looked personally delighted. Just delighted that the ring had now become general knowledge and the day could therefore improve.
Lewis, traitorously, did not help at all.
He lifted his glass, looked directly at the drivers, and said, with serene malice, “Yes. I saw it first.”
“Oh my God,” Oscar muttered.
Daniel was nearly crying with happiness now.
“I cannot believe,” Lando said, looking between Max and Ana and the ring and then back at Max again, “that you just had this sitting here. At lunch. Casually.”
“It’s not casual,” Max said.
“That is not helping your case!”
Charles stepped forward then, eyes fixed on the ring with a kind of offended awe.
“Mon dieu.”
Alexandra, beside him, murmured, “Yes, that was my reaction too.”
Charles looked from the sapphire to Max and then at Ana, who, to her credit, was standing in the middle of this with the sort of cool self-possession normally associated with diplomatic immunity.
“You’re engaged,” Charles said.
Ana nodded once. “Yes.”
The drivers collectively lost the ability to be normal.
Lando made a sound like a kettle beginning to fail.
Yuki said, “How long.”
Oscar said, at the exact same time, “Since when.”
Pierre added, “And nobody thought to mention this?”
“Some people knew,” Lewis said pleasantly.
This caused immediate new outrage.
“What do you mean some people?” Lando demanded.
Lewis looked entirely too satisfied with himself.
Kimi lifted one hand. “I knew.”
Valtteri, without visible shame, said, “So did I.” He gave the slightest shrug. “I assumed we weren’t doing public disclosure until told otherwise.”
“That is a crazy sentence,” Alex said.
Franco looked scandalized. “How many people knew?!”
Daniel pointed to himself. “I did.”
Lando rounded on him. “You said girlfriend on a public stream!”
“Yes,” Daniel said. “I wasn’t going to announce it for them, duh.”
Charles was still staring at the ring.
Then, finally, he looked at Max with the kind of weary offense only a man raised among dramatic gestures and expensive standards could produce. “You have made the rest of us look bad.”
That got real laughter.
Even Ana’s mouth twitched.
Max frowned at him. “That’s not my problem.”
“It is now,” Charles said. “Do you understand what this does to expectations?”
Carlos laughed into his drink.
Oscar, now fully invested in the practical consequences rather than the shock, pointed at the ring. “No, because actually he’s right. That’s a stupidly high standard.”
Alex nodded. “It’s a generational problem.”
Lando looked betrayed on behalf of all future men. “This is catastrophic.”
Yuki, still staring at the ring, said, “That thing has its own gravitational pull.”
“That,” Daniel said, “is true.”
Ana glanced down at the sapphire as though she might apologize to the room for the administrative inconvenience of its existence.
Instead she said, very evenly, “It is a star sapphire.”
That made half the men go quiet again, because of course it was not just large and beautiful and ruinous to comparison. It was also specific. Personal. Thoughtful. Which somehow made Max look even more annoyingly competent.
Charles put a hand to his chest. “See?”
Max looked unimpressed. “What.”
“It’s not even just big,” Charles said. “It’s thoughtful. That’s worse.”
Carlos laughed harder.
Lando looked at Oscar with deep dismay. “We’re cooked.”
By now the terrace had split neatly into two energies: the women, who were fascinated and amused and adapting far faster than the men; and the drivers, who had instantly turned Ana’s engagement ring into a referendum on masculine competence.
Pierre looked at Max. “You really just sat on this information.”
Max shrugged one shoulder. “Yes.”
Esteban laughed. “Insane behaviour.”
“Correct behaviour,” Lewis said.
“No,” Lando said, still deeply distressed, “because we all came to lunch and he was just here. Like this. Already engaged. With this ring. In this house. While the rest of us were eating olives.”
Daniel looked at him. “You are being very emotional about someone else’s jewelry.”
Charles had not moved on.
He was still looking at Max with narrowed, personally aggrieved eyes.
“I’m serious,” he said. “You’ve made the rest of us look bad.”
Max, who had already won four world championships and apparently now intended to win the engagement olympics too, said, “Again. Not my problem.”
“It is my problem when I have to exist in society after this!”
Carlos patted Charles once on the shoulder. “You’ll survive.”
Charles looked unconvinced.
Alex, beside them, said, “To be fair, though, mate, it is a very good ring.”
“Thank you,” Max said.
And then, because enough time had passed for congratulations to override collective grievance, the mood shifted.
Lewis stepped forward first, clasped Max on the shoulder, and said, with more warmth than mockery for once, “Seriously. Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Max said.
Lewis turned to Ana next, kissed her cheek, and added, “You too. It’s beautiful.”
Ana inclined her head. “Thank you.”
Oscar followed, quieter but no less sincere. “Congrats, both of you.”
Ana smiled faintly. “Thank you.”
Lando came next, still offended but now willing to be gracious about it. “I am happy for you,” he said, pointing at Max, “while also being furious about the ring.”
“That sounds like a you problem,” Max said.
“Yes,” Lando replied. “But also congratulations.”
Daniel hugged Max lightly, “About time, honestly.”
Yuki, still absolutely fascinated, grinned and said, “Congratulations. Also I want to look at the ring again later.”
Carlos offered Ana a warm smile, then shook Max’s hand with mock solemnity. “Congratulations. You did very well. Annoyingly well, but very well.”
Charles, still offended on behalf of every future fiancé on the grid, finally sighed and said, “Fine. Beautiful ring. Terrible for the rest of us. Congratulations anyway.”
“Thank you,” Ana said.
Kimi, who looked absurdly pleased by the whole thing, said, “I’m just glad it’s finally public enough that I don’t have to pretend not to know.”
Valtteri lifted his glass. “Congratulations. And condolences to every jeweller now being asked to do better.”
That got another round of laughter.
Franco, who was still mentally catching up, shook his head. “I feel like I missed six seasons of a show and got thrown into the finale.”
“You did,” Daniel said.
Then Alex, because he was practical enough to move quickly from scandal to logistics, asked, “So. Wedding. Are we talking actual plans or just ring first, panic later?”
That got everybody’s attention again.
Several faces turned toward Max and Ana at once.
Max and Ana looked at each other.
There was a pause.
Then Max said, “We know when.”
Oscar narrowed his eyes. “That sounds like you know one thing.”
Ana, with total composure, said, “Correct.”
“When?” Pierre asked.
Max answered, “Sometime before next season.”
Silence.
Then Lando said, “That is not a plan. You know nothing else, do you?”
Ana folded her arms lightly. “We know that it will happen before next season.”
“That is literally the same sentence in a different coat,” Oscar said.
Lewis put a hand over his eyes. “You have no venue.”
“No,” Ana said.
“No guest list,” Alex guessed.
“No.”
“No schedule,” Pierre added.
“No.”
Charles blinked. “You are planning a wedding in… what, three months? Four?”
“Approximately,” Ana said.
“And you know nothing else.”
Max looked mildly defensive. “We know we want it private.”
“That,” Carlos said, “is at least two things.”
“Thank you,” Ana said.
Lando looked between them in disbelief. “You two are the most planning-obsessed people I know and somehow when it comes to marriage your strategy is just… before Melbourne, probably?”
“That is unfair,” Max said.
Ana considered it. “It is also accurate.”
Even Max laughed at that.
Daniel spread his hands. “This is my favourite possible development. The two most terrifyingly organized people on earth have become emotionally useless about their own wedding.”
“We are not emotionally useless,” Ana said.
Oscar raised an eyebrow. “You have a timeframe and no known location.”
“That is not ideal,” Ana admitted.
Lewis looked at her. “Monday. Paris. We begin with the dress. One piece at a time.”
That made half the drivers stare again.
“You already have dress infrastructure?” Alex asked.
“Of course she does,” Daniel said.
Max, still somehow losing control of his own event in stages, muttered, “Apparently.”
Ana glanced at him. “You asked if I was happy. I am.”
That softened him immediately, which did not go unnoticed by anyone.
Lando made a scandalized face. “Oh, disgusting. Right. Fine. I support this. But I want updates.”
“No,” Max said.
“Yes,” Yuki said.
“Definitely yes,” Pierre added.
Charles pointed at them both. “And when you choose the date, tell people with enough time to emotionally recover.”
Carlos nodded. “Especially if Charles now feels he has to outdo a star sapphire.”
“I do,” Charles said grimly.
Alexandra laughed. “You do not.”
“I absolutely do.”
By then the whole houxr had settled into the easier warmth that came after shock: congratulations properly given, teasing redistributed, the secret now fully public and somehow less fragile for having survived contact with the grid.
Max looked around once — at the drivers, at the women, at Ana standing beside him with the ring catching the light like it had always belonged there — and thought, with the weary acceptance of a man whose life would apparently never again be private in any normal sense, that this could have gone worse.
Then Daniel lifted his glass and said, “To the engaged idiots.”
Lando pointed. “Affectionately.”
“Debatable,” Charles said.
Lewis raised his own glass. “To Max and Ana.”
And this time, when the others echoed it, the congratulations came all at once.
Pairing: Max Verstappen x Dr. Anastasia "Ana" Wolff (Original Character)
Summary:
Max Verstappen to Mercedes? The paddock is buzzing. The media’s in meltdown.
Dr. Anastasia “Ana” Wolff, Mercedes’ notoriously brilliant, emotionally unavailable lead systems engineer and Toto Wolff’s eldest daughter, is not handling it well. Because Max isn’t just a potential signing, he’s the man she’s been sleeping with in secret for nearly a decade.
And if the rumours are true, and Max Verstappen really is joining Mercedes, then Ana’s carefully compartmentalised world is about to explode.
Warnings and Notes: Therapy time! We'll get into some more nitty gritty of Ana's time in Vienna.
Let me know if I missed something else, and I'll add it!
As always big thanks to @llirawolf , who listens to me ramble.
Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025
Dr. Chirac’s office had been cool, quiet, tastefully under-lit, and still Ana had somehow managed to sweat through a suit she ordinarily wore to make men in technical meetings regret underestimating her.
She hated therapy. Possibly would always hate it.
Not Dr. Chirac specifically. Dr. Chirac was, irritatingly, actually competent.
Calm. Unshowy. Entirely too good at letting silence exist without trying to aggressively improve it.
If Ana had been forced at gunpoint to rank therapists she’d endured, Dr. Chirac would probably have come out well above average.
(But that was not the point.)
The point was that therapy offices still made her nervous system behave as though it had been cornered by people with clipboards and insufficient pattern recognition.
Ana had spent so much of her childhood and adolescence being sent to adults who claimed to specialize in understanding children like her and then, within fifteen minutes, had proven they were mostly interested in understanding children who arrived in more legible packaging.
She had learned to mask in therapy before she had learned to do much else consistently.
Sit correctly. Answer carefully. Make eye contact on a schedule. Appear insightful but not evasive. Distressed but not inaccessible. Bright, but never in a way that made the therapist feel stupid.
By the end of any session, she usually felt less helped than observed.
Today had been better than most.
Which, unhelpfully, had made it even more exhausting.
Toto killed the engine and glanced toward her.
Ana had already unfastened her seatbelt.
“I need to get changed,” she said.
That made him blink once, clearly thrown by the immediacy of it. “What.”
“I sweated through half this suit in that office,” she said, hand already on the door handle. “If I have to greet twenty Formula One drivers and assorted women in wool-blend tailoring that now feels like punishment, I may commit an act of social violence.”
That got the faintest twitch at the corner of her father’s mouth.
Max was in the hall before she had properly crossed it, looking warm and thankfully alive.
Ana kissed him once because she needed to and because it reset certain internal systems more effectively than breathing exercises ever had, and then said, with all the grace she could still manufacture, “I need to get changed. Immediately.”
Max’s eyes flicked briefly over her face, then to the line of her jacket collar.
“Bad?”
“Therapy is a ridiculous activity,” she said flatly. “And my suit now feels like a personal insult.”
That also got the faintest twitch at the corner of Max’s mouth. “Fair.”
Susie, who was in the sitting room and apparently already entirely at home in the middle of the pre-lunch chaos, looked up from whatever she had been arranging and said, “Go. Before you start trying to peel your own skin off.”
Ana turned her head toward her. “That is not funny.”
“It wasn’t a joke.”
Which, infuriatingly, was true.
Ana made her way upstairs with the particular speed of someone maintaining the last of her self-control through sheer self discipline. She had made it into the bedroom and just started tugging open the wardrobe when she heard the soft, familiar sound of Susie following her in and closing the door behind them.
Of course.
Ana looked at her and immediately, instinctively, felt her shoulders drop by a fraction.
It was one of the more absurdly consistent facts of her life that Susie could calm her nervous system simply by being in the room.
Not by doing anything in particular. Just by existing there with her particular combination of steadiness, intelligence, and complete lack of interest in making Ana feel like an unsolved problem.
It had been that way for years.
Susie had never acted as though Ana was broken. Or difficult. Or a girl who needed to be translated into something more broadly acceptable before being allowed full personhood.
Susie had just... taken her as she was.
Which, Ana thought privately, had probably saved more of her than anyone ever properly acknowledged.
“I need five minutes,” Ana said.
Susie took one look at her face, the suit, the shoes, the particular tension in the line of her jaw, and said, “You need twenty.”
“Five is more realistic.”
“Fine. I’ll help.”
Ana did not bother objecting.
Instead, she peeled off the suit jacket first with a visible shudder of relief.
“I hate therapy,” she muttered.
Susie leaned against the dressing table, arms folded, watching her.
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
Ana glanced at her, one eyebrow lifting. “Do you?”
“Yes,” Susie said simply. “Every therapist you talked to when you were younger seemed to make you more exhausted, not less.”
That stopped her for a second.
Because yes. Exactly.
Ana dropped the jacket over a chair and reached for the fastening of her blouse.
“They never helped,” she said, more quietly now. “Not really.”
Susie said nothing.
Ana unbuttoned the blouse with quick, irritated fingers. “They all wanted some version of me that was easier to read. Softer. More spontaneous. Less…” She made a small, vague gesture. “Built. I spent more time in therapy offices masking than doing anything else.”
Ana stepped out of the blouse and reached immediately for the first soft thing available, pausing only when Susie said, with deceptive casualness, “I didn’t know about the keyboard.”
Ana’s hands stilled over the shelf.
For one second she considered pretending not to know what she meant. But Susie was not Toto and not Dr. Chirac and not a person before whom evasion felt especially useful.
So she only said, “Max told you.”
“Yes.”
Ana closed her eyes briefly.
Not because she minded Max telling Susie.
She didn’t.
“I didn’t know,” Susie said again, and there was something different in her voice now. Not pity. Never that. Anger, perhaps, though carefully controlled. “I knew about your grandmother. I knew about the piano in Switzerland. I knew about the Yamaha in Brackley. But not about the keyboard.”
Ana looked down at the shelf for a second longer before picking up a dressing gown, made out of a faded knit soft enough not to start a fight with her skin.
“I assumed.”
“That I knew?”
“That Toto must have mentioned it sometime.”
Susie stared at her for a second.“Toto never told me.”
There was something so nakedly offended in the sentence that Ana almost smiled.
Almost.
Instead she pulled the dressing gown on and said, with more tired honesty than she might have managed under better circumstances, “It was long before you came into our lifes. ”
“That is not the point.”
“No.”
“It is also not a defense.”
“No.”
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Then Susie said, “You know I would have done something.”
Ana glanced at her.
The immediate answer was yes. Of course she knew that. If Susie had known, there would have been a conversation. Possibly several. Possibly sharp enough to leave marks on the furniture. Susie was not a woman who responded well to children being made smaller for the convenience of adults who should have known better.
Still, Ana only said, “Yes.”
Susie watched her for another second. Then, gentler, “I never wanted you to feel wrong in our house.”
That landed somewhere deep and quiet.
“I know,” she said.
And she did know.
She had known it in Switzerland in a hundred tiny ways nobody else would have noticed.
In the fact that Susie did not flinch when she repeated things. In the way she asked before moving objects that Ana used often. In the way she learned quickly which fabrics made Ana go rigid and never mocked it. In the fact that she could sit in companionable silence for an hour and never once weaponize the silence against Ana.
Susie had never treated her quirks as moral failings.
Never looked at her with that exhausted adult expression that said Why must you be so much work?.
Susie had always just accepted that Ana was as she was and built around that with competence and kindness, which was perhaps the most radical form of love Ana had ever encountered as a teenager.
Ana belted the dressing gown and exhaled slowly as the fabric settled right against her skin.
Better.
Not good. Better.
She sat down on the edge of the bed to take off the trousers next, too tired to preserve dignity for its own sake.
Susie came and sat beside her, not too close, just near enough that Ana could feel the steadiness of her there without having to negotiate touch she had not asked for.
“That should never have happened,” Susie said.
Ana looked at her.
The fury in Susie was always most alarming when it arrived this quietly. Not theatrical. Just cold, clear, and already looking for where to go.
Ana’s mouth moved once.
“I know that more now,” she said.
Susie reached over and brushed one knuckle lightly against the back of Ana’s hand. “You were never wrong for taking up space.”
There it was.
The sentence that still had the power to catch somewhere under Ana’s ribs no matter how many times she tried to out-think it.
She looked down at their hands.
Then said, because truth felt marginally less dangerous with Susie than with almost anyone else in the world, “Being near you always made it easier.”
Susie turned her head slightly. “What did?”
“Everything.”
That made Susie still.
Ana stared at the carpet because looking directly at her would make the sentence harder to continue.
“You never made me feel broken,” she said. “Or wrong. Or too much.” Her fingers folded into the bedspread. “You just… accepted me. Even when I was odd in ways other people found alarming.”
Susie’s face softened all the way then, which was rare enough that Ana usually preferred not to provoke it accidentally.
“Oh, darling,” she said.
Ana made a face. “Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You are becoming emotional at me.”
Susie smiled faintly. “Only because you’ve just said something very lovely and deeply unfair to spring on me while you’re half-undressed and furious at your clothing.”
That got a reluctant breath of laughter out of her.
Which was dangerous too, because laughter loosened things.
Downstairs, Daniel laughed, the sound carrying up the stairwell like proof that lunch and social performance and the rest of the day were continuing whether or not she felt adequately reconstructed.
Susie looked toward the door, then back at her.
“Also,” she said, as if only just remembering, though the timing was too careful to be accidental, “tomorrow morning we’re having a meeting with the lawyers.”
Ana blinked.
“What?”
“About the adoption paperwork.”
The room seemed to go very still.
Not outwardly. Nothing moved. The light remained the same. Daniel was still laughing downstairs. The house had not altered.
But internally something shifted so abruptly that for a second Ana could do nothing except stand there and absorb the sentence.
“You’re serious,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“We already have a meeting?”
“Yes,” Susie said, and now her voice had gone gentler. “We do.”
Ana stared at her.
It was one thing to know, abstractly, that they were moving toward it. That the conversation in Monaco, the quiet yes in the kitchen, the changed shape of things between her and Susie had been leading somewhere real.
It was another to hear lawyers and tomorrow morning in the same sentence.
“It’s just the first meeting,” Susie said. “Paperwork. Structure. Next steps. No one is springing a courtroom on you at breakfast.”
That pulled the faintest shift at the corner of Ana’s mouth.
“The lawyers will walk us through the paperwork tomorrow,” Susie said. “What Monaco requires, what timing looks like, whether anything needs to be done in parallel.” She paused. “And then we do it properly.”
Ana swallowed once. “Okay.”
The word felt much too small for the thing it was attached to.
She could feel the emotional weight of it arriving in different places at once: relief first, then disbelief, then something deeper and harder to name. Something that made her chest feel too full in a way she distrusted instinctively.
Susie leaned in and kissed her forehead, quick and without ceremony.
A door opened. Something clinking on the terrace. The lunch beginning to assemble itself whether she was emotionally prepared for it or not.
“I am not looking forward to today,” Ana said weakly.
“The lunch?” Susie asked softly.
“The women,” Ana said.
Susie’s eyebrows lifted. “The women.”
“I don’t really think I have much in common with them.”
That, at least, made Susie smile.
“You all love racing drivers,” she said. “That seems a fairly solid starting point.”
Ana stared at her.
“That is not a personality trait.”
“No,” Susie agreed. “But it is a shared poor decision.”
Ana made another face, which only widened Susie’s smile.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” Susie stood then and walked over to the wardrobe, calmly beginning to move hangers aside. “You do not need to have identical hobbies to survive one lunch.”
Ana folded her arms. “That has historically not gone especially well for me.”
Susie paused and looked at her properly.
“Yes,” she said. “I know. But historically, a great many people have been idiots. That means the sample size may have been flawed.”
That was annoyingly sound reasoning.
Ana disliked that.
Susie pulled out one dress, looked at it, rejected it immediately, and moved on.
“You also do not have to perform femininity in whatever way you think they might prefer,” she added.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.”
“I was going to perform tolerable civility and then probably hide behind a serving dish.”
“That,” Susie said, “may still become necessary. But we can at least dress you appropriately beforehand.”
She held up a shirt.
Ana looked at it. “Too stiff.”
Susie nodded and put it back.
Another.
“Scratchy collar.”
Back again.
Another.
“Wrong seam.”
By the sixth rejection Susie had gone from amused to faintly appalled.
She stood in front of the wardrobe with two fingers hooked through a line of hangers and looked at the contents as if the entire concept of Ana’s closet had become a personal insult.
“Ana.”
“What?”
“We really need to go shopping one of these days.”
Ana looked blank. “Why?”
“Because,” Susie said with admirable restraint, “half of your wardrobe is threadbare.”
“It is not.”
“It absolutely is.”
Ana glanced toward the shelf in question.
There were, perhaps, signs of use.
That was maybe because Ana wore things until they became unwearable, then kept wearing them for another month if the fabric remained tolerable and the holes were not in socially inappropriate locations.
“It’s fine,” Ana said.
“This is threadbare.”
“It is soft.”
“This has a hole.”
“It is near the hem. That’s a structurally irrelevant location.”
“This cardigan is practically translucent.”
“It’s comfortable.”
Susie turned and looked at her.
Ana lifted one shoulder. “It takes a very long time to find things that don’t feel wrong.”
That, at least, made Susie’s face soften again.
“I know,” she said. “But some of these garments have given their lives in service. We must let them go.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
Susie gestured toward the wardrobe. “You wear things until they die.”
“It is fiscally responsible.”
Susie lifted another cardigan sleeve between two fingers with the expression of a woman examining battlefield remains. “This,” Susie said, “is not a garment. This is a survivor.”
Ana, to her irritation, laughed.
Susie looked back at her, one eyebrow raised. “We are going shopping.”
“I hate shopping.”
“I know.”
“There are lights.”
“Yes.”
“People.”
“Yes.”
“Music.”
“Yes.”
“Bad textures.”
Susie dropped the cardigan back into place. “And I will manage all of that. You will just point at what doesn’t make you want to commit violence.”
“That is not a persuasive pitch.”
“It doesn’t need to be persuasive. It’s already decided.” Susie said firmly. “And until I can drag you into a proper shopping expedition with fabric standards and time and patience, you are wearing this.”
She pulled out a soft ivory knit top and a navy skirt that skimmed rather than clung, both elegant enough for lunch and comfortable enough not to destroy the rest of Ana’s day..
Ana narrowed her eyes. “That is acceptable.”
“Glowing endorsement.”
“It means the outfit won’t make me want to peel my skin off before the starters arrive.”
“Excellent,” Susie said. “A ringing success.”
Ana took both pieces from her and disappeared into the bathroom to change.
When she came back out a minute later, Susie was waiting with the kind of expression that suggested she had not only selected correctly, but knew it.
The outfit was simple, clean, soft enough not to start a war, structured enough that Ana still looked like herself and not like someone’s frightened cousin at a corporate lunch. Susie handed her a pair of loafers without comment.
Ana accepted them.
Then stood there for a moment in the quiet, feeling the strange aftermath of therapy still buzzing low in her nervous system, the house full below them, the women she did not know waiting somewhere in the near future, and Susie in front of her—steady, lovely, infuriatingly right.
“You really never made me feel wrong,” Ana said again, more quietly this time.
Susie stepped closer and tucked a piece of her hair behind her ears. “Good,” she said. “Because you were never wrong. Only particular.”
Ana exhaled.
That word.
Particular.
So much kinder than broken. So much more accurate than difficult.
Downstairs, Daniel’s laugh once again carried up the stairwell like evidence that the day was continuing regardless of anyone’s psychological preferences.
Susie looked toward the door, then back at her. “Ready?”
Ana thought about saying no.
Thought about saying absolutely not. Thought about saying she would rather take apart a gearbox with her bare hands than make elegant conversation with the romantic attachments of Formula One drivers in her own living room.
Instead she said, with all the dignity available to her, “Manageably.”
Susie smiled.
“Close enough.”
And then, because she was Susie and therefore emotionally incapable of leaving the room without one final tactical correction, she reached out, smoothed Ana’s hair once behind her ear, and said:
“Also, if any of them are stupid, come and stand next to me. I’ll bite.”
That got a real laugh out of her.
***
Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025
Toto knew something was wrong the moment Max said, with far too much calm: “Susie is probably going to have words for you later.”
They were in the kitchen. Ana had gone upstairs with Susie to change, the house already carrying that pre-event hum of flowers and glass and a buffet for 30 people laid on in the living room.
Max, however, was leaning on crutches near the kitchen island with the expression of a man who had decided he was morally obligated to hand over a live grenade before someone else stepped on it by accident.
Toto paused. “That sounds ominous.”
Max looked at him. “It is.”
Toto waited.
Because if there was one thing he had learned about Max Verstappen, it was that when he bothered with conversational preamble, the content underneath was usually either very serious or very annoying. Often both.
“What did you do?” Toto asked.
That got him a flat look. “I didn’t do anything.”
Toto’s eyebrows lifted.
Max made a small, impatient gesture with his free hand. “Well. I asked questions.”
“That is usually when trouble begins.”
There was a beat. Then Max said, with the bluntness of a man who saw no point in cushioning obvious stupidity: “A keyboard, really?”
Toto stilled. Not visibly, perhaps. Not to most people.
“In Vienna,” Max said. “When she was living with you and Stephanie.” His mouth flattened slightly. “Her playing annoyed Stephanie, so you got her a keyboard with headphones for her room?”
The sentence landed with surgical precision.
No raised voice. No accusation in tone. Nothing theatrical.
Which made it worse.
Toto stood very still in the hallway and felt, with sickening clarity, the exact moment the consequences of an old practical decision returned wearing the face of his future son-in-law.
“I see,” he said at last.
Max looked almost offended by the understatement.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
Because he did.
Too well, now.
Max shifted his weight on the crutches.
“She told me about Moscow,” he said. “And her grandmother. Irina sold the first piano because the playing annoyed her.”
Toto shut his eyes briefly. Only briefly.
When he opened them, Max was still looking at him with that deeply unhelpful directness of his, the kind that made evasion feel stupid before it even formed.
“Yes,” Toto said quietly. “I know about Moscow.”
Max’s face did something sharp and fleeting.
“Did you know what the keyboard taught her? ”
There it was.
Not the object. Not the headphones. Not even Stephanie, though there was enough blame there for several lifetimes.
The feeling of it.
Toto exhaled slowly.
“No,” he said.
The honesty of it cost him.
Because no, he had not known. Not then. Not in the way that mattered.
He had known the apartment was tense. Had known Stephanie was unhappy. Had known Ana’s repetitions, her scales, her devotion to practice, had become one more source of domestic friction in a home already too brittle to absorb any strain gracefully.
And he had done what he had so often done in those years: solved the immediate problem.
A keyboard. Headphones. Privacy. Peace.
Practical. Efficient.
Catastrophically incomplete.
“She said,” Max went on, and now there was something colder under the words, not hostility exactly but protective anger sharpened into coherence, “that she was fine with less.”
That one hit hardest.
Not because it was unfair.
Because it wasn’t.
Toto looked away for a second, toward the staircase Ana had just climbed, as though the sight of it might somehow rearrange the past into something less ugly.
Instead he saw only the child she had been overlaid against the house he stood in now: small, watchful, newly arrived in a country not hers, trying to assess how much of herself could safely occupy a room that belonged to other people first.
And he had given her a keyboard and headphones.
Christ.
“I was trying to keep the peace,” Toto said.
Max gave a short, humorless breath through his nose. “Yeah.”
Not agreement. Recognition. And, worse, judgment that Toto had no particular grounds to contest.
Toto rubbed once at his mouth. “I know how that sounds.”
Max looked at him.
“No,” he said. “I think you know how it ended.”
That was fair. Devastatingly fair.
Toto looked back at Max.
“How bad? ”
Max’s jaw moved once. He did not pretend not to understand the question. “She cried,” he said simply.
Toto closed his eyes again.
Not for long. Long enough.
When he opened them, Max was still there, still solid and difficult and apparently constitutionally incapable of softening a truth that no longer deserved softening.
“And Susie knows now,” Max added. That, more than anything, explained the warning.
Toto almost smiled.
Not because anything was funny.
Of course Susie knew by now. And of course the reckoning had merely been deferred until a later, more private hour.
“She didn’t know,” he said quietly. He never told her. Had never dared to tell her.
Max watched him for a second longer, then said, with renewed offense on Ana’s behalf and perhaps a little on his own: “But also—really? A keyboard with headphones?”
Toto actually let out a short breath that might have become a laugh in another universe.
There was no humor in this one.
Because heard aloud now—stripped of circumstance, context, adult justification—it sounded exactly as bad as it was.
A child displaced from a shared room because her music annoyed someone. A keyboard with headphones offered in place of space. Containment instead of belonging.
Max’s grip adjusted on the crutch.
“She learned to make herself smaller around it,” he said. “That’s the part that’s…” He stopped. Started again, rougher now. “That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.”
Toto looked at him.
And because there was no use pretending with Max, not now, he said the only true thing available.
“Neither can I.”
That quieted something between them.
Not resolved. Not forgiven. Just acknowledged.
Max looked toward the stairs then, where Susie and Ana still hadn’t reappeared, and muttered, “Anyway. I thought you should know before she gets to you.”
That, Toto thought, was almost considerate in the most Verstappen way imaginable: no comfort, no padding, just clear threat assessment before impact.
“Thank you,” he said dryly.
Max glanced back at him. “I’m not being nice.”
“I know.”
“I’m being practical.”
“Yes,” Toto said. “I know.”
That got the faintest twitch at one corner of Max’s mouth.
Good.
Not because Toto particularly needed Max to find him bearable in this moment, but because the alternative—open hostility in the kitchen while Ana changed upstairs and Susie sharpened herself into marital consequence—would have improved nobody’s afternoon.
Toto looked once more toward the stairs.
Then back at Max.
“The Bösendorfer,” he said after a moment. “was that also a mistake?”
Max considered that.
“No.”
Toto waited.
Then Max said, more quietly than before, “It hit everything at once. That’s what broke her open. But no.” He shook his head once. “No. Not a mistake.”
Something in Toto’s chest eased and tightened at the same time.
The gift was right. The nerve it touched was old. Those were not contradictory facts.
“She played this morning,” Max added after a beat.
Toto looked up sharply.
“She did?”
“Rachmaninoff. At dawn. Very Russian. Very dramatic.” Max’s expression altered by a fraction, not enough to call it softness, enough to mean it. “She was incredible.”
And there it was.
The part Toto had not gotten to see.
He stood there for a second with that image in his mind and let himself be glad of it before guilt rushed back in to reassert its rights.
Then he looked at Max properly.
“You’re angry.”
Max gave him a look that suggested the sentence was insultingly unnecessary.
“Yes.” Max’s mouth flattened again. “Not just at you. At all of it.”
Toto nodded once. Then, because honesty had apparently become compulsory across multiple households today, said: “She should have had better.”
Max’s face did not change.
But something in his posture did.
A small easing. Not absolution. Not even close. Just the recognition that Toto was not going to stand here and defend the indefensible because time had passed and practical reasons had once existed.
“Yes,” Max said. “She should have.”
And just then Susie appeared at the top of the stairs.
One look at her face told Toto that yes, Max’s warning had been entirely warranted. She did not look explosive. Susie almost never did. She looked much worse than that: controlled, beautiful, and absolutely certain of the subject of their later conversation.
Ana was beside her in dark blue and cream, composed again, though more delicate around the edges than she would have liked anyone to notice.
Susie’s eyes flicked from Max to Toto.
And in that one elegant glance, Toto read the whole thing.
Later. Privately. No escape.
Max, traitor to the end, shifted slightly on the crutches and said under his breath, “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
Toto did not look at him.
Wise, probably.
Instead he straightened, looked up toward his daughter, and prepared to get through lunch before his wife dismantled him with the kind of marital precision that never raised its voice and somehow made that much, much worse.
***
Maison Étoiles, Monaco - 9 October 2025
Lewis Hamilton was the first person to arrive, which surprised nobody and pleased himself immensely.
Ana heard the front door open from the sitting room and already knew it would be him before Nikolai even said his name.
There was a particular quality to Lewis’s entrances—not loud, not clumsy, not even dramatic in the obvious sense.
Just precise. Intentional. Like he had already decided what kind of effect he was going to have on a room and saw no reason not to achieve it.
He stepped into their home in cream knitwear, dark trousers, sunglasses, and the expression of a man whose priorities were deeply ordered and entirely his own.
He saw Ana immediately.
Not Max. Not Susie. Not the piano. Not the flowers. Ana.
And more specifically—
Her left hand. “Oh, thank God,” he said, walking straight toward her. “You’re wearing it.”
Ana, who had once again forgotten she was wearing the ring at all, blinked once and looked down at her own hand as though surprised to find the sapphire still there.
“Yes,” she said. “That does tend to be how engagement rings work.”
Lewis ignored that. He took her hand in both of his and lifted it toward the light with a seriousness that might have been absurd if it hadn’t suited him so perfectly.
“I haven’t seen it properly yet,” he said. “And I need to see it first.”
Ana tilted her head. “Why?”
Lewis looked up at her over the ring, entirely sincere. “So I have something to hold over Nico’s head.”
That startled a real laugh out of her.
Across the room, Max made a sound of exhausted recognition, like a man who had already accepted that whatever social order he had hoped for today had already dissolved.
Susie, standing by the drinks table with the kind of elegant calm that suggested she had already survived three small disasters before noon, turned her head and smiled.
Lewis was still inspecting the ring.
“Well,” he said. “That is offensive.”
Ana frowned faintly. “Offensive.”
“It is enormous,” Lewis said. “And very beautiful. Which means I now need at least twelve minutes alone with Nico at the next possible opportunity so I can mention that I saw it before he did.”
Max, from somewhere behind her, muttered, “That is such a weird priority.”
Lewis finally let go of Ana’s hand and looked at him. “No. It is a very important priority.”
Ana folded her arms loosely, one shoulder settling against the edge of the piano as she watched them both.
“Right,” he said, turning back to Ana with the expression of a man resuming the actual business of the day. “Monday. Paris. Eleven o’clock.”
Ana stared at him.
Lewis stared back.
Around them, Susie’s eyebrows lifted. Daniel, already halfway through a drink he had almost certainly not been explicitly offered, looked delighted. Max narrowed his eyes.
“What’s Monday?” Max asked.
Lewis answered without looking away from Ana.
“For you? Nothing. We are going wedding dress shopping.”
Susie blinked. “You asked Lewis for help?”
Ana looked at her, faintly puzzled by the surprise in her tone. “Yes,” she said. “That was logical.”
Lewis smiled immediately, pleased by the evidence of good judgment. “Exactly.”
Susie repeated, “Logical.”
“Yes,” Ana said. “Lewis understands construction, silhouette, quality, and aesthetics. He has strong opinions, good taste, and no patience for anything ugly or pointless. That seemed efficient.”
Toto made a small choking sound into his glass.
Max put a hand over his mouth and looked suspiciously like he was trying not to laugh.
Susie recovered first.
“That,” she said, “is an extremely Ana reason to ask Lewis Hamilton to help choose a wedding dress.”
Ana still did not entirely understand what the alternative was meant to be.
“Would you have preferred I ask someone indecisive?”
Lewis placed one hand briefly over his chest, visibly moved.“Thank you,” he said. “That is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.”
Max looked between them.“You already made an appointment?”
Lewis turned to him. “Yes.”
“You did that without asking me.”
Lewis removed his sunglasses slowly and with enough elegance that the gesture felt faintly disciplinary.
“Max,” he said, “with affection, your involvement in this is not required. Quite frankly, I don’t trust your taste.”
Daniel doubled over laughing.
Susie looked away, shoulders moving once.
Ana, to her credit, limited herself to the smallest shift at the corner of her mouth.
Lewis turned back to her as if resuming the actual business of the afternoon.
“I called in a few favours,” he said. “Fabric first, shape after. You are not going to be put in anything that makes you look like a haunted napkin.”
Ana nodded once.
“That seems reasonable.”
“Good.”
Susie was still looking at the two of them with a kind of dazed warmth, as though watching a plan she had not anticipated assemble itself perfectly in front of her.
“You really did ask Lewis.”
Ana tilted her head. “Yes.”
Something in Susie’s face softened further.
“That was logical,” she said again.
Ana heard the change in her tone and, because she knew herself too well not to account for the emotional truth beneath the practical one, added, “I also did not want to spend six months looking at dresses I hated.”
Lewis looked triumphant.
“There,” he said. “You see. She understands the stakes.”
Max, leaning on his crutch by the terrace doors, shook his head once in the resigned way he had when life had become too strange to resist and therefore had to be accepted as-is.
Ana glanced at him.
He caught the look and, to his credit, only asked, “Are you happy with that?”
Not why Lewis. Not why didn’t you tell me. Just that.
Ana looked at Lewis, at Susie, at the room slowly filling around her, at the ring still catching the light on her hand.
Then she answered honestly.
“Yes,” she said. “I really am.”
Lewis, apparently satisfied that order had been restored and his authority in the matter properly acknowledged, gave one brisk nod.
“Excellent. Then I’m having champagne before the others get here and make this irritating.”
Daniel lifted his glass immediately. “That,” he said, “is a policy I support.”
***
Group Chat: Paddock Girlies
(Members: Alexandra Saint Mleux, Rebecca Donaldson, Lily Zneimer, Flavy Barla, Kika Gomes, Lily Muni He, Alicia Torriani, Isabella Bernadini)
Lily Zneimer: okay
before i lose my mind
what are we wearing
Alexandra Saint Mleux: For lunch?
Lily Zneimer: no for battle, yes for lunch
Rebecca Donaldson: I thought this was a housewarming, not a summit.
Kika Gomes: With Formula One drivers involved it is always a summit.
Flavy Barla: also this is not just any housewarming
this is Max Verstappen’s new house
which somehow already makes it feel like i need to pass an exam
Isabella Bernadinid: I’m still stuck on the fact that apparently we are invited
Lily Muni He:same
i would like everyone to know i have tried on four outfits already and now hate all clothes
Alexandra Saint Mleux: That sounds proportionate.
Lily Zneimer: I need theories
what is the apartment going to look like
Rebecca Donaldson: Cold. Minimal. One chair. Ten race helmets. No food.
Kika Gomes: That was old Max.
Flavy Barla: new theory:
still cold
but like… expensive in a more emotionally confusing way
Rebecca Donaldson: You’re all thinking too small.
Rebecca Donaldson: I think it’s going to look like: a Bond villain discovered linen OR an architect fell in love OR money acquired emotional literacy
Kika Gomes: money acquired emotional literacy 😭
Flavy Barla: wait no because that feels correct somehow
Lily Muni He: There will definitely be floor-to-ceiling windows
Alicia Torriani: And one giant room so beige nobody is allowed to put red wine near.
Lily Zneimer: No, listen.
what if it’s actually super warm and domestic and we all walk in and Max Verstappen just casually lives in an Architectural Digest spread
Alexandra Saint Mleux: That is disturbingly plausible.
Isabella Bernadini: someone ask their driver if there are cats
Lily Muni He: I already know there are cats
Rebecca Donaldson: There are absolutely cats
Kika Gomes: If there are cats I become less nervous.
Lily Zneimer: I become more nervous because then i will want the cats to like me more than the humans
Flavy Barla: honestly same
Alicia Torriani: Can we circle back to the more pressing matter
Alicia Torriani: Ana
Isabella Bernadini: yes
Rebecca Donaldson: yes
Lily Muni He: yes
Lily Zneimer: THANK YOU
because i am not the only one, right?
i am a little scared
Alexandra Saint Mleux: I don’t think scared is the word.
Kika Gomes: Intimidated?
Rebecca Donaldson: Extremely.
Flavy Barla: She’s beautiful in that way that makes you want to stand up straighter.
Isabella Bernadini: And smart in that way that makes me want to pretend I know what systems architecture is.
Lily Zneimer: she runs software companies
on the side
for fun
Alicia Torriani: Not even in a fake “girlboss” way either
like actual software
actual products
actual users
actual awards
Flavy Barla: Also the fact that she somehow made that look like a side quest while still working in Formula One
Isabella Bernadini: I’m sorry but that is genuinely insane
Lily Zneimer: and now we are going to her house
for lunch
like normal women
Alexandra Saint Mleux: We are not normal women. That is the first mistake in your reasoning.
Lily Zneimer: fair
Lily Muni He: Do we think she’ll be nice?
Rebecca Donaldson: I think she’ll be polite.
Kika Gomes: That is a terrifyingly different category.
Flavy Barla: No, but from what I’ve seen she doesn’t seem mean
just… very exact
Alicia Torriani: Yes
like if she disliked you I don’t think she’d be cruel
I think she’d simply become quieter and somehow you would know you had failed
Isabella Bernadini: That is so much worse
Lily Zneimer: this is not helping my blood pressure
Alexandra Saint Mleux:Lily.
Lily Zneimer: what
Alexandra:You are dating Oscar Piastri.
You can survive one engineer.
Lily Zneimer: counterpoint: she is not one engineershe is Toto and Susie Wolff’s daughter, Max Verstappen’s girlfriend, and apparently the secret owner of half the educational future
Rebecca Donaldson: That is a good summary actually.
Kika Gomes: Do you think she even cares what we wear?
Alexandra Saint Mleux: Probably not.
Flavy Barla: No, but I care what I wear in front of a woman who can probably tell by looking at fabric if it was ethically sourced or not.
Alicia Torriani: I hate that this feels plausible
Lily Muni He: What are people actually wearing
please
I am losing the plot
Rebecca Donaldson: Simple dress. Gold jewelry. Hair down. Pretending I am not anxious.
Alexandra Saint Mleux: Black skirt, cream top, small bag, calm face.
Kika Gomes: Jeans and a nice blouse because if i aim too high i will look like i’m in costume
Flavy Barla: green dress
boots
confidence borrowed from nobody
Isabella Bernadini: White trousers and a navy top if I can get the trousers to stop being evil.
Lily Zneimer: I currently have three options and all of them look like i’m either trying too hard or gave up on life
Rebecca Donaldson: That is the eternal female condition.
Alexandra Saint Mleux: Send photos.
Lily Zneimer: absolutely not
I need emotional privacy during wartime
Kika Gomes: Do we think the boys are nervous?
Flavy Barla: No. They are all idiots.
Alicia Torriani: Lando will probably just say whatever enters his head and let God decide, I think.
Lily Zneimer:That is how Lando approaches most things.
Lily Muni He: Wait, is Daniel going too?
Lily Zneimer: Oscar said yes
Rebecca Donaldson: Oh good.
Then if anything gets too tense he’ll say something insane and reset the room.
Alexandra:Useful man, Daniel.
Flavy Barla: No because genuinely
he may save us all
Kika Gomes: I still cannot get over the fact that this is a housewarming.
Why does it feel like debuting at court.
Rebecca Donaldson: Because Formula One is basically court with worse tailoring and better PR training.
Lily Zneimer: Okay final question before I go re-evaluate my entire wardrobe
Lily Zneimer: what is the correct energy
Alexandra:Relaxed.
Pretty.
Normal.
Rebecca Donaldson: As though you go to sea-view Monaco lunches with reigning world champions every Thursday.
Kika Gomes: I have literally never done that in my life.
Flavy Barla: Fake it.
Lily Zneimer: okay
fine
I’m going to wear a blue dress
and if Ana turns out to be terrifyingly elegant and smarter than everyone, which she will, then i will simply cling to Oscar and let him handle it
Rebecca Donaldson: That is not the worst plan.
Alexandra Saint Mleux:See you all soon.
Flavy Barla: Good luck, women.
Kika Gomes: Godspeed.
Alicia Torriani: And may the apartment be beautiful.
Lily Zneimer: and may the engineer like us
Rebecca Donaldson: Aim lower.
May the engineer find us acceptable.
the canadian gp comes around again and you can only hope this weekend is different from last year's race.
lando norris x f!reader ୨୧ warnings : language, fan culture, hate comments, referenced / implied sex, bambi!yn cameo ୨୧ note : if you enjoy don't forget to comment/reblog!
part of the lando's heart series.
📅 may 18, 2026
cherryn just updated their story !
replies :
user STOP THEY WENT MINI GOLFING TOO
user omg lando really making you work girl 😆
user oh mini golfing is so cuteeeeee 💖 i'm glad you guys got to go out do it
user lol girl you LOVE mini golf more than actual golf don't you 😂
cherryn i dooooooo 🥺
user HOLY SHIT YOU RESPONDED ILY SO MUCH GIRL 🫶
user the TWO pink golf balls is so cute
user are you good at paddle?? i know you've been playing it for a good bit now 🤪
cherryn some might even say better than lando 🤫
📅 may 19, 2026
♫ LE SSERAFIM · Celebrate
cherryn montreal date 🌱🪵🪻🇨🇦👢 w/ alexabearrrr
View all 738,498 comments
lando can't wait for our date tomorrow 🧡
cherryn damn you're so CUTE 😫 fuck me
lando already do that but will happily go again 🫡
user AGAIN????? MY PARENTS ARE HORNDOGS
user wow 😮 let's act surprised the horniest couple on the grid FUCKS
alexabearrrr so glad we got to spend the day together ❤️
cherryn i knowwww i missed seeing you so much 🥺 but i'm glad i got to see you and bear!!
alexabearrrr omg bear was so excited when he knew you were coming 😆 thank you for bringing lando along as well!!
lando glad i could make his day 😆
user I LOVE YOU QUEEN ❤️
user LOVE FROM BRAZIL
user omg love the pic of you and lando 😂
user who is this alexa girl with yn??
user i think another content creator who lives in montreal – her and yn have done collabs before in the past! they usually hangout during the canadian gp
user alexa seems to posts about fashion as well along with like mom content – she has a five year old son named bear!
user ahhhhh i was wondering who bear when in their comments 😂
user beautiful 😍
user 🐷🐷🐷
📅 may 20, 2026
♫ Creepy Nuts · Otonoke
cherryn got dragged around montreal 🇨🇦 b4 going to check out lando's pop-up store! go check it out if you're able to this weekend 💚
View all 736,498 comments
lando pretty sure you dragged me around 🤨 not the other way around
cherryn hushhhhhhhhhhhh 🤫
lnfour glad you stopped by with lando 🙌 liked by author
blytheyn so stylish ✨
cherryn thank you pretty 😊
user NEW NAILS ARE SO PRETTY
user LANNNNNDOOOOOOOOOO 😍😍
user i'm going to the pop-up 💚💚💚 hope to get one of those skateboards 🤩
user you always eat with the matching sets 😍
user omg if she got new nails today that meant lando went with her 😂 that's such a boyfriend thing to do lol
user that means he also probs paid for them too 🤭
user didn't he mention before that he likes when she gets her nails done??
user he has!! i've always wondered why though 🤔
user i don't think it would take a mclaren engineer to figure that one out 🍆✊
user WAIT REALLY 😳
user i mean its not confirmed but knowing how obsessed lando is with her i wouldn't be surprised
📅 may 21, 2026
clip #1 – yn walking into the mclaren hospitality during media day!
the clip starts out already filming you as you are seen walking through the somewhat crowded paddock talking with a mclaren team member. your pink dress moving softly as you walked, one hand holding your pink lady dior bag while your other one rested against your stomach.
you and the mclaren team member were walking towards hospitality as you continue to talk and laugh. the team member lets you go first into hospitality before they are following close behind you.
before the clip cuts off, it manages to catch you rubbing your stomach slowly before you disappear inside.
💬 comments :
👤 : omg her and lando were matching today 🥺🥺🥺 the pink suits both of them sooooooo well
👤 : her media day looks NEVER fail 🤩 this is probs my second fave media day look of her's this season (the first is still miami obv)
👤 : umm... anyone think its weird she's holding her stomach like she is???
👤 : oh i wished she wore different shoes 😭 those damn speedcat pumas are ruining the look 😭
📅 may 22, 2026
♫ aespa · Licorice
cherryn does this make me a farmer now 🥕 🍆 🫚 🥦 🍅 🧅 🫛 gentlemonster
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lando you don't even eat half of those vegetables 🤨
cherryn SHUT UP AND STOP EXPOSING ME YOU MUPPET
user NOT YN CALLING LANDO A MUPPET 😂
gentlemonster love love love liked by author
alexandramalenaleclerc so cute ❤️ liked by author
ari.archive ❤️💚🤎💛 liked by author
withmia the cutest farmer 💚 liked by author
rebeccadonaldson ❤️❤️❤️❤️ liked by author
valentinexx the vegetables are giving like yokai watch vibes
cherryn omg bc i thought the same thing 😆
withmia WAIT NO–
blytheyn omg those are so cute
cherryn let me know what pair you like and i'll them to you tomorrow!
blytheyn omg no stop 🥺 i couldn't
cherryn wait why is that emoji literally you HKJKFHDS i'm HOLLERING
user oh i LOVE when gentlemonster sends you their glasses
user so iconic girl 💚 love youuuuuuuu
user SO PRETTY
📅 may 23, 2026
f1wagsgossip y/n – lando's girlfriend – has just updated her insta story with a picture of herself and kimi's new girlfriend – also y/n, but fans have dubbed as bambi – hanging out together. is this the start of a new iconic duo 👀
📸 credits to cherryn
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user UMMMM I FUCKING HOPE THIS THE START OF A NEW ICONIC DUO
user yn adopting bambi like how lando and the older drivers have adopted kimi is SO CUTE I LOVE IT
user bambi is gonna learn how to wag from the it-girl herself 🤩
user sorry but yn is NOT the it-girl you think she is 😂
user its crazy how fast some of these wags just latch onto each other lol kimi's gf has only been to two races and already hanging out with another wag 😮💨 seems like she's trying to hard
user that's what i was thinking... i expect her "private" insta to become public once kimi is wdc...
user ^^
user i give her till summer break to make it public
user think i would rather bambi be with yn than miss finance 💀
user STOP NOT MISS FINANCE 😭
clip #2 – lando carrying her purse is peak bf vibes 🤌
the clip is filmed only a few feet from where you and lando are spotted walking down the paddock together. fingers and shoulders caught brushing from how close you both are walking together. its after sprint with a few hours left before qualifying, and its obvious the two of you are on your way back to hospitality.
lando's hand is caught touching your back for a moment as you lean closer to say something to him. he smiles and nods, lips pressing close to your ear so you can hear him over the paddock noise. some fans come up with pens and hats and phones and lando does quick signatures and selfies before he's waving to others.
then– that's when the camera catches effortlessly taking your vivienne westwood purse from your wrist and holding it in his hands. you are seen shyly laughing and saying something to him, reaching for your purse but he's moving it out of reach with a smug look on his face.
you let out a huff as you let him carry your bag and the clip cutting after soon afterwards.
💬 comments :
👤 : isn't that the same one he got her for valentine's day??? i can only imagine the bag collection lando alone has gotten her over the years
👤 : landoooooo 😭😭😭 to have a boyfriend/husband like him would be the dream
👤 : him moving the bag away when yn reached for it FHJKSFHS that's SO CUTE
👤 : MY PARENTS 💕💕💕💕
clip #3 – THEY SHOWED YN ON THE BROADCAST 🤩 SHE'S SO STUNNING
the clip is taken from the official f1 live – its showing live feed of the qualifying race before it then suddenly cuts to show you sitting in lando's garage. the mclaren headphones over your ears as your eyes are focused intently on the screen.
as it shows you, that's when your name pops up on screen:
Y/N L/N
Stylist & Lando Norris' Partner
your eyes are caught flickering to the camera that is only about a foot away from you. your eyebrows quirking up before they move back to the screen as if to say 'go back to the race, please!' then it soon cuts from you to back to the race.
💬 comments :
👤 : she was FOCUSED on watching qualifying 😂 she's so like us lol
👤 : omg when she made eye contact with the camera 😂😂 she really wanted them to get out of her face
👤 : oh she looked STRESSED
👤 : i always laugh when they show yn on screen bc you KNOW she lowkey hates it
📅 may 24, 2026
clip #3 – yn arriving at the paddock with lando on race day 💕
the camera has a clear shot of you walking in with lando. both of you wearing jackets as there's a light drizzle – nothing too serious just a few drops here and there.
the british driver is then caught turning to you, "zip your jacket, baby. its cold," he's heard saying. you immediately pout at him, cheeks puffing before you're zipping up your pink selkie jacket and then adjusting your purse so it doesn't fall off your shoulder.
lando smiles at you before he's linking his hand with yours, "happy?" you teasingly say and he nods in response which makes you laugh.
the clip ends once the two of you walk past the person recording.
💬 comments :
👤 : omg why do i lowkey love her outfit – its a little more simple than what she does but like... still so her 😍
👤 : she's wearing a purple ribbon 🥺
👤 : omg she brought a jacket with her this time after learning from miami 😂😂😂 that's so funny of her
👤 : oh that bag is STUNNING i'm obsessed with it ✨✨
clip #4 – lando finding yn in the paddock after his dnf 🥺🥺
the clip was taken from a balcony of the paddock club – the person recording immediately zooming in on lando as he walks with his team through the paddock. some fans running up to him.
the camera jolts a little bit as it catches lando looking around as he's still walking – clearly looking for someone. as he gets closer to the mclaren hospitality that's when he seems to pick up his pace a little bit. and that's when you finally come into frame, speedwalking towards lando.
once you both are in arms reach of each other, lando is quick to wrap his arms around you. kissing the side of your head before you're pulling back slightly to look at him. your hand coming up to run through his sweat-drenched hair before you're hugging and kissing his cheek again.
lando's arm wraps around your waist as he guides you back towards hospitality and the clip cuts once you both go inside.
💬 comments :
👤 : guys i'm soft for them you don't understand 🤧
👤 : i just realized lando never fails to find yn after a race 🥺
👤 : at this point he just needs to propose to her
👤 : FUCK MCLAREN 🖕🖕🖕
👤 : if they ever break up i will fully lose all faith in love– and i'm so deadass guys 😭😭😭 IT IS THAT SERIOUS
landoyn4updates yn's instagram update after the race today includes pictures of lando after his dnf
📸 credits to cherryn [link one]
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user YN IS ON THE PEOPLE'S PRINCESS AGENDA WITH USSSS
user can we all just agree that this race didn't happen??
user literally what in the twilight zone was this race 😭 that was the longest yet shortest 2 hours of my fucking life
user kind of crazy she's laughing about his dnf 💀
user she's not laughing about his dnf though??? she's clearly just trying to lighten the mood by sharing that video and pic
user is the laughing in the room with us?
user oh 😳 so she's on stan twitter like the rest of us huh
user bestie i fear she's ALWAYS been on stan twitter with us
user she could be any of us when you think about it 😳
cherryn just updated their story !
replies :
user NOOOOOOO YOURE IN INDIANA NOW???
user how did you and lando teleport so fast???
user oh no 😭😭😭😭 girl we're so sorry
user you're going to see your favorite person now 🤣🤣🤣
user NOT THE "I'VE BEEN TRICKED" CAPTION 😭 GIRL STAND UP – THERE'S NO WAY THE DICK IS THAT GOOD
📅 may 25, 2026
clip #5 – lando and yn at the indy 500 afterparty last night 😳😳
the camera is immediately panning over to where you and lando are standing – lando talking to daniel and conor while you are leaning against him. your head on his shoulder, one arm draped lazily across his chest and resting on the opposite shoulder, while his own arm was resting possessively around your waist.
you seem to be uninterested in whatever it is that lando is talking about with the other two men. you're even closing your eyes for a moment as the hand on his shoulder traveled to rest on his neck. lando is caught looking at you with a smirk – saying something to you before kissing your forehead and then going back to his conversation. the clip immediately cutting there.
💬 comments :
👤 : i'm sorry did they fucking teleport there or something???
👤 : yn was attached to lando the whole time 😭 girl was literally a koala the way she was holding onto him
👤 : oh she did NOT want to be there but maybe she's just jetlagged and tired after canada
👤 : yn is either jetlagged/tired, drunk, or got the fuck of her life on the plane ride there – sorry but those are the only options 🥴🥴
👤 : IM SORRY?????? THE FOREHEAD KISS
landoyn4updates both lando and yn were spotted at the indy 500 afterparty in indianapolis last night!
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user omg them attending the indy afterparty after that disastrous race is 100% such a landoyn thing 😭😭😭
user i love lando don't get me wrong, but doesn't he realize that yn is probably tired of always traveling – esp recently???
user no cause i've been thinking the exact same thing 🥲 poor girl has been non-stop since the season started
user feel so bad for yn...
user omg i seen the clip of her leaning against lando at this party and the poor girl looks SO tired – lando pls take her home to rest 😭
user if i had a nickel for every time yn got dragged to a different motorsport event by lando in the span of a week i would have two nickels – which isn't a lot but weird that its happened twice
user first formula e and now indy 500 🤣🤣🤣 our girl is getting her motorsport bingo in
user don't forget she went to a motogp last year with lando and quadrant as well!
user oh shit i totally forgot about that lol
user lowkey feel so bad for yn when lando immediately shuttles her off to somewhere else right after a race
user its giving selfish boyfriend honestly 😬😬
user this is literally what she signed up for when she started dating lando... stop trying to baby her 🙄🙄 she's a grown woman
f1atelier photos are just placeholders! yn doesn't have an actual faceclaim please imagine yourself or whoever you want in these pictures! thanks.
how you communicate with your boyfriend using his own memes
note: just a little fun one in between the two longer fics i'm working on :) definitely feel like oscar would just be so used to you talking to him in memes that he's not even a little phased by it lol. hope you guys enjoy this one!
warnings : swearing, implied/referenced sex
after the canadian gp, you decide to take a break from social media and relax. hoping to enjoy just ten minutes with lando where you don't worry about social media and he doesn't have to think about racing.
lando norris x f!reader ୨୧ word count : 1.4k ୨୧ warnings : language, implied sex, mentions of being burnt out, nicknames (princess, baby) ୨୧ note : if you enjoy don't forget to comment/reblog!
part of the lando's heart series.
lando is convinced that after almost four years together, sometimes you just wake up and... decide on the most random things. which usually involves you dragging him on a "side quest" as you like to call it. but this time was different.
after the total disaster that was the canadian gp, and dragging you to indianapolis within the same day – lando could tell you were exhausted. especially with all the traveling the two of you have been doing in the past two months. he had truly never seen you this tired before.
he felt bad. especially when he realized just how upset you were about him tricking you into going to indiana with him. he knew you needed at least this week to relax. which is why when he woke up on tuesday morning after a 10+ hour flight, he wanted to make sure you could sleep in.
and sleep in you did, cause even by almost noon you were still asleep. buried under the covers with the curtains still drawn. when he went to check on you, that's when he noticed your phone wasn't plugged up. did you forget to do that in favor of sleep? probably.
when you did finally stir, you stumbled into the living room, hair mussed as you walked in wearing only one of his old karting shirts. your cheeky patterned underwear peeking out underneath and lando certainly isn't complaining on the view.
"hey, sleepy, you finally decided to join the world of the living, huh?" he asks as you climb into his lap. straddling him as you rest your head on his shoulder. lando's arms immediately circle around your waist, holding you close to him as he feels your lips just barely graze the column of his neck.
"didn't mean to sleep so long, 'm sorry," you mumble out and lando can't help but chuckle at how cute you sound.
"its okay, princess, i figured you were just tired." he replies, not able to bite back the smile that paints his lips when you tiredly nuzzle your nose against his jawline. his stubble rough against your own skin, but you don't seem to mind.
the two of you fall into a comfortable silence, and lando is almost convinced you had fallen back asleep in his lap. not that he cares – he quite enjoys having you in his lap. the british driver lets out a soft sigh as he adjusts the two of you, still holding you close to him as he props his feet up against the coffee table. his eyes trained on the tv that was replaying a golf match, his hand absentmindedly dragging up and down your spine.
"lan..." your breath hitches when you call his name, and lando bites his lip at the sound of your voice mixed with how he could feel the chill running down your spine. you move your head to look up at him, your hand running down his side overtop his hoodie before lazily trailing underneath.
"hands are cold, baby," he laughs out before pressing a kiss to your forehead. you let out a hum before you're adjusting your hips against his – your core sitting exactly where he wants it.
"can we..." you start softly, eyes somehow bright despite the heavy tiredness behind them as you look up at lando. "can we do this all day?"
"of course, princess, but didn't you want to go to that one restaurant today?" he asked, knowing that you had been talking nonstop the other day about this one restaurant that had been continuously recommended to you. "did you not want to go anymore? you were so excited about it."
"i'm just..." you pause to let out a sigh, "i'm tired, lan. i have so many emails and posts and pr to look through, but just the thought of doing any of that right now... just makes me exhausted."
"are you burnt out?"
"maybe? i don't know," you huff out and lando doesn't even need to look to know you have a pout on your lips. "i don't even think i plugged my phone up last night, so who knows if it's dead or not."
"i noticed that," he says with a small chuckle, "i figured you just forgot to do it before you went to bed."
"i did, kind of," you say with a breathy laugh, "i'm just not in the mood to look at anything my phone has to offer."
"well, if anyone tries to reach you then i guess they'll call me if its important," he says, tilting your chin up to peck your lips.
there's a beat of silence between the two of you – the only sounds in the apartment are your light breathes, the ac, and the golf match still playing on the tv behind you. it was nice and you realize that you don't want to ruin the silence.
"i like this," you whisper, moving your body up lando's as you wrap your arms around his neck, your face right in front of his. your lover smiles as his hands rest on your hips, fiddling with the elastic waistband of your panties. "the quiet, not having to worry about anything, you."
"i like this too," he agrees as the two of you share a soft kiss. "i like when my attention can be solely on the most important thing in my life." his words immediately send a flurry of butterflies through you.
"you're so cheesy," you say, hiding your face in his chest. you feel lando's chest rumble underneath your cheek as he laughs.
"it's true though and you know it," he says, squeezing your hips as he's pulling you down against him. "my spoiled princess."
"and whose fault is that," you laugh as you slowly roll your hips into lando's.
"mine," he answers, pulling you flush against him as you begin to kiss his jaw and down his neck. "fully, wholeheartedly my fault that i made you spoiled."
the two of you smile at each other as you cup his face and kiss him again. your mouth slowly opening and allowing his tongue to slip inside and tangle with yours. you let out a soft whimper at the feeling of his tongue tasting you as one of his hands comes up to tangle in your hair. loosely gripping it to hold you in place as your own fingers thread through his mop of curls.
his tongue was mapping your mouth like he didn't already know it – and the rest of your body – like the back of his head. completely making you breathless as every time you tried to catch your breath, lando would move his head to deepen the kiss. then, without breaking the kiss, lando flips the two of you – laying you against the couch as his hips press against yours like a heavy weight to keep you place. your legs wrapping around his waist to anchor him even closer.
when lando finally broke the kiss, you couldn't help the moan that left your lips as you noticed the line of spit that still connected the both of you. "fuck..." you whimper as lando trails his lips down your jaw and neck.
"you know," he starts, moving so he can hover over you, his arms caging your head between him and the couch. "i don't think anyone would be upset if you took this week off to relax."
"y-yeah? i think your fans would beg to differ," you tease lightly, hand still combing through his hair.
lando let out a small tsk sound in response, "fuck them, they'll get over it and survive."
"not very public figure of you to say that about your fans."
"i'm being serious, y/n, you're exhausted and burnt out. take a break from social media and stuff for this week. especially with the monaco race coming up i know you're going to need it, baby."
you think for a minute, eyes looking into lando's hazel ones that are swimming in color and devotion. "can we... still go to that restaurant tonight?"
you don't think lando's smile could get any brighter, but he never ceases to amaze you. "of course we can, princess. we'll do whatever you want this week."
"even this right here?"
"especially this right here," he assures you before his lips are crashing against yours again. your body melting into his as you both spent the rest of the day between each other's legs.
Warnings: angst, happy ending, kisses, tattoo, lando overthinking, yn being oblivious
Summary: Three years in, F1 driver Lando Norris can't stop overthinking his girlfriend's increasingly secretive behavior. With their anniversary days away, her late-night calls and sudden absences push his insecurities to a breaking point. Convinced their relationship is falling apart, Lando braces for the worst on their special day. But Y/N's hidden agenda isn't what he fears, and her final surprise will change everything.
Requested: No
Requests open
Word count: 3512
Author’s note: It just came to my mind and decided to write it. Wasn’t sure if i wanted to make it smutty or loving but eventually decided on the second one. I know I posted so much today but i got adhd and went in hyperfocus with writing what can i say.
Masterlist
For the first time in a long time, Lando Norris dreaded waking up. Not because of racing, media obligations, or travel, but because lately, waking up meant another day of pretending everything was fine. Another day of pretending he wasn't noticing things, pretending he wasn't paying attention, and pretending his stomach didn't twist every single time Y/N's phone lit up.
The worst part was that he knew how irrational he sounded. If any of his friends came to him with the same problem, he'd tell them they were overthinking. Y/N loved him. That wasn't a question; it had never been a question. Three years together had proven that, three years of building a life together, learning every tiny thing about each other, and becoming each other's home.
But somehow, over the last month, a tiny crack had formed in his confidence. And once it appeared, it only grew bigger.
At first it was small things: Y/N spending more time on her phone than usual, taking calls in another room, and smiling at messages she wouldn't explain. Then it became bigger things: late nights, secretive conversations, muttered excuses, and quickly locking her phone whenever he entered a room.
The first few times he'd ignored it. Then he'd noticed. Then he'd started thinking about it. And unfortunately for him, thinking was where all his problems began. Because once Lando started overthinking, there was no stopping it. His mind became his own worst enemy. He could take one tiny detail and turn it into an entire disaster: a delayed text became annoyance, a quiet evening became distance, and a distracted answer became evidence of something bigger.
It was exhausting, and he knew it. Yet somehow he couldn't stop. Not when the evidence seemed to keep piling up, not when Y/N kept acting strange, and especially not when their third anniversary was getting closer every day.
Because anniversaries mattered, at least they mattered to him. Not because of grand gestures or gifts, but because it was a day that belonged entirely to them, a day to celebrate everything they'd built together, and a day to remember where they'd started. And lately... lately it felt like Y/N had forgotten. Or maybe she simply didn't care as much anymore. Every time that thought appeared, he hated himself for it because it wasn't fair to her or to their relationship. But the thought always returned, and each time it stayed a little longer.
A week before their anniversary, Lando was sitting on the sofa while Y/N stood in the kitchen making dinner—or at least pretending to. Every thirty seconds she was checking her phone: typing, deleting, typing again, smiling, then typing more. Lando tried not to look, failed, tried again, and failed again. Eventually she caught him staring.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"You were staring."
"No I wasn't."
"You absolutely were."
He looked away. Y/N narrowed her eyes. "Lando."
"Hm?"
"What's going on in that head of yours?"
Too much. Way too much. But instead he shrugged. "Nothing."
She studied him for a moment, clearly unconvinced. Then her phone buzzed again, immediately grabbing her attention, and just like that the conversation was over. Lando watched her turn away, watched her smile at another message, watched her type a response, and something unpleasant settled in his chest. Jealousy. Not because he thought she was cheating, not really, just because whoever was on that phone seemed to be getting more of her attention than he was lately. And he hated how much it bothered him.
Three days before their anniversary he woke up at two in the morning. The bed beside him was empty. Instantly his eyes opened. The apartment was dark and silent, except for one thing: Y/N's voice, soft and distant, coming from the balcony.
Lando sat up. The curtains were slightly open, enough for him to see her silhouette outside, phone pressed to her ear, talking quietly at two in the morning. His stomach sank. He knew he shouldn't listen, knew he should simply go back to sleep. Instead he found himself frozen, waiting, watching, and overthinking.
A few minutes later she came back inside. The second she saw him awake she jumped. "Oh my god."
Lando forced a smile. "Who were you talking to?"
For the briefest moment she hesitated. And that tiny hesitation was enough to make his chest tighten.
"Just sorting something out."
Something. Always something. Never an explanation, never a name, never details. Just something. Y/N crawled back into bed, wrapped her arms around him, and pressed a kiss against his shoulder. Somehow that should have reassured him; instead it only made him wonder why she was hiding whatever it was.
The night before their anniversary, Lando lay awake long after Y/N fell asleep. Moonlight spilled across the room. Her breathing was slow and even, peaceful, meanwhile his brain refused to shut up. He stared at the ceiling, thinking, thinking, thinking, until eventually he rolled onto his side and looked at her.
She looked beautiful; she always did. Hair spread across her pillow, face relaxed, one hand curled beneath her cheek. The sight usually calmed him; tonight it only made him sad because lately it felt like there was a distance between them. Not physical—emotional. Like she was carrying around a secret, like she was somewhere else even when she was sitting beside him.
He hated that feeling more than anything because he loved her. God, he loved her. Sometimes he thought he loved her too much, to the point where even the idea of losing her made his chest hurt.
Eventually he reached over and brushed a strand of hair from her face. Y/N shifted slightly, half-asleep, and immediately reached for him instinctively, like she always did. Her fingers found his shirt, holding onto it. Even unconscious, even asleep, she still searched for him. And somehow that made everything worse because it reminded him that the woman he loved was right here, and he still couldn't stop doubting.
The next morning he woke up alone. At first he frowned, then he reached across the bed. Cold sheets. Empty space. His heart immediately sank.
Slowly he sat up. The room was silent—no sounds from the kitchen, no coffee brewing, no music, nothing. Then he noticed the folded note resting on her pillow, waiting. His stomach twisted. He picked it up.
Sorry, I got busy. I'll see you in the afternoon. ❤️
That was it. Just one sentence. No happy anniversary, no explanation, nothing. Lando stared at the words, reading them over and over, trying to convince himself he was overreacting, trying to convince himself it wasn't a big deal, trying and failing. Because today wasn't just any day; it was their anniversary. Three years. And she'd left before he woke up without even mentioning it.
The note crumpled slightly in his hand. He immediately smoothed it back out, feeling ridiculous, feeling hurt, and feeling angry at himself for being hurt.
By ten in the morning he'd checked his phone twelve times. No messages, no calls, nothing. By noon he was convincing himself she'd forgotten. By one o'clock he'd started replaying every strange interaction from the last month. By two he'd somehow convinced himself their relationship was falling apart. Which was absurd, completely absurd, but anxiety didn't care. Anxiety was a storyteller, and every story it told ended badly.
Meanwhile, Y/N was having the most stressful day of her life because everything was going wrong. Absolutely everything. The cake she'd ordered wasn't ready, the flowers were delayed, the tattoo appointment had run longer than expected, and the surprise dinner still needed finishing. And she hadn't been able to text Lando because she knew she'd ruin everything. The entire point was to make the evening special, to make him completely unsuspecting. What she didn't know was that she had succeeded a little too well.
When she finally unlocked the apartment door later that afternoon, she entered quietly. The place smelled empty; if loneliness had a scent, she was convinced this was it. She immediately spotted Lando on the sofa, and her heart sank because he looked miserable. Not angry, not annoyed—miserable. Like someone had stolen all the sunlight from him.
His eyes lifted, meeting hers, and suddenly she knew. She knew exactly what had happened. Weeks of secrecy, weeks of phone calls, weeks of strange behavior, combined with disappearing on their anniversary. Oh. Oh no.
"Lando."
"Hey."
That one word shattered her heart because it sounded so small, so uncertain, nothing like him. The excitement she'd been carrying all day immediately disappeared. The surprise could wait; first she needed to fix whatever damage she'd accidentally caused. So she crossed the room, sat beside him, and gently took his hand.
"Talk to me."
And finally he did. Everything: every insecurity, every fear, every worry, every terrible scenario he'd imagined. Y/N listened quietly, never interrupting, never laughing, never dismissing him because even though his fears weren't true, his feelings were. And they mattered.
By the time he finished, he looked exhausted, like he'd been carrying around a weight for weeks. Y/N immediately wrapped her arms around him, pulling him close, holding him tightly.
"I'm sorry."
He buried his face in her shoulder. "I know."
"No, seriously." She kissed his temple. "I didn't realize I was making you feel like that."
Lando closed his eyes. The relief alone nearly made him emotional because suddenly everything felt normal again. Like the distance had disappeared, like she was back, like they were back. And then she smiled—a mischievous smile, the kind he knew meant trouble.
"Now."
He groaned. "What?"
"Now you have to let me spoil you."
And for the first time all day, he laughed—a genuine laugh, the sound immediately brightening the room.
"There he is," she said.
"There who is?"
"My boyfriend."
The dinner took his breath away. Candles, flowers, his favorite foods, desserts, wine, everything. Every single detail had been planned perfectly. And with each passing minute, guilt settled heavier inside his chest because while he'd been imagining worst-case scenarios, Y/N had been doing all of this for him, for them, for their anniversary. Every dish, every candle, every decoration—weeks of effort, weeks of secrets, weeks of phone calls, weeks of planning.
And suddenly everything made sense. Every strange behavior, every mysterious message, every late-night call, every hidden smile. Not distance, not secrecy—love. Just love.
By the end of dinner he couldn't stop smiling. Neither could she. The dinner had lasted longer than either of them expected, partly because the food was incredible, mostly because neither of them seemed capable of stopping themselves from talking. Every conversation somehow led to another memory: their first date, their first argument, the first time she'd attended one of his races, the first apartment they'd shared, the first "I love you." Every story seemed brighter tonight.
Maybe because for the first time all day, Lando felt completely at peace. The knot that had lived in his chest for weeks had finally disappeared. Y/N was here, smiling, laughing, looking at him with the same warmth she'd always had. And now he felt ridiculous for ever doubting it.
As she collected the empty plates from the table, he leaned back in his chair and watched her move around the apartment. She looked nervous, which immediately caught his attention. Not stressed, not anxious—nervous. The kind of nervous that came with excitement, the kind of nervous she got when she was waiting for someone to open a gift she'd spent ages choosing.
Lando narrowed his eyes. "You've got that look."
Y/N froze halfway to the kitchen. "What look?"
"That look."
"Very descriptive."
"The one where you're trying not to smile."
She immediately looked away, which only confirmed his suspicion.
"Oh my god."
"What?"
"The surprise."
Her grin widened. "What about it?"
"You think I'm going to freak out."
"I don't know."
"You absolutely do."
"I might."
Lando laughed. "Should I be concerned?"
"No."
"Should I be scared?"
"No."
"Will I survive?"
She pretended to think about it. "Probably."
"That isn't reassuring."
Her laugh echoed through the apartment. God, he'd missed hearing that sound. A few minutes later she finally sat back down across from him. The nervous energy hadn't disappeared; if anything it seemed worse. She was practically bouncing in her seat.
Lando pointed immediately. "There."
"What?"
"That."
"What?"
"You're doing it again."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You absolutely are."
Y/N bit her lip, failed miserably at hiding a smile, then finally sighed. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"Ready?"
His eyebrows rose. "For what?"
"The surprise."
His heart jumped slightly. The excitement in her voice was impossible to miss. Whatever she'd planned clearly meant a lot to her, and suddenly he found himself getting nervous too.
"Wait."
She laughed. "What now?"
"I need information."
"No."
"Just a little."
"No."
"Hint?"
"No."
"One hint."
"No."
"Please?"
"No."
He groaned dramatically. Y/N looked entirely too pleased with herself. Then she stood, holding out her hand. "Come on."
Lando took it immediately, allowing her to pull him from the chair. The entire walk toward their bedroom felt suspiciously dramatic, mostly because Y/N kept smiling to herself. And every time he asked why, she refused to answer. By the time they reached the bedroom, his curiosity was driving him insane.
She closed the door behind them, then turned to face him. For the first time all evening, she actually looked nervous—not playful, not teasing, genuinely nervous. And that immediately caught his attention. The smile faded from his face.
"Hey."
She looked up. "Yeah?"
"You okay?"
Her shoulders lifted in a small shrug. "Yeah." A pause. Themn "I just really hope you like it."
Something in her voice made his chest squeeze—the vulnerability there, the uncertainty, like this surprise mattered more than she'd been letting on. Lando stepped closer immediately. "Love. I could never hate anything that comes from you."
The smile she gave him then was small, soft, affectionate, and somehow it made her seem even more nervous. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"Don't laugh."
Now he was concerned. "Why would I laugh?"
"Just don't."
His confusion only deepened. "I promise."
Y/N took a slow breath, then another, before finally reaching down toward the hem of her shorts. Lando blinked, immediately looking away, then looking back, then looking away again, which made her laugh.
"Oh my god."
"What?"
"Your face."
"I don't know what's happening."
"Relax."
"I'm trying."
"Clearly."
She rolled her eyes affectionately, then gently shifted the fabric of her shorts, just enough to reveal the curve of her hip. At first Lando didn't understand what he was looking at. His eyes landed there, his brain took a second to process it, then... everything stopped. His breath, his thoughts, the entire world.
A small tattoo sat against her skin, fresh enough to still look new, delicate, perfectly detailed, placed low on her hip, in exactly one specific spot. One spot. His spot. The place he kissed absentmindedly every single day. The place his lips always found whenever she walked past him, whenever they hugged, whenever he wrapped his arms around her from behind, whenever she stood in front of him while he rested his chin on her shoulder. A tiny habit neither of them had ever really talked about, yet somehow it had become theirs. And she'd remembered. Of course she'd remembered.
The tattoo itself was elegant, not oversized, not dramatic, just meaningful: his racing number, beautifully done, and beneath it, his initials—small, subtle, permanent.
For several seconds Lando simply stared, unable to process what he was seeing. Because surely he wasn't seeing what he thought he was seeing. Surely she hadn't actually— no, she had. The evidence was literally right there. His number, his initials, on her skin, forever.
"Oh." The word escaped before he could stop it.
Y/N immediately winced, the reaction clearly wasn't what she'd hoped for. "Oh?" she repeated nervously.
Lando blinked, still staring. "Oh."
Her face fell slightly, and suddenly she looked terrified. "Lando."
He swallowed hard, still staring, still trying to comprehend what was happening. Because over the last month he'd imagined a hundred different explanations for her strange behavior, a hundred different possibilities, a hundred different secrets. Not once—not once—had this crossed his mind. Not even remotely.
"Say something." Her voice was smaller now, more uncertain, and that finally snapped him out of his trance.
His eyes immediately lifted to hers. The nerves on her face nearly broke his heart because she genuinely looked worried—worried he wouldn't like it, worried he'd think it was too much, worried she'd made a mistake. And suddenly all he could think about was how long she'd probably spent planning this: the phone calls, the messages, the disappearing acts, the secrecy, the appointment, the weeks of preparation. All for this moment. All for him.
"You got a tattoo." Brilliant observation. Lando mentally kicked himself.
Y/N laughed nervously. "Yeah."
"Of my number."
"Yeah."
"My initials."
"Yeah." A pause. Then quietly— "Do you hate it?"
The question hit him like a truck. "Hate it?"
Her shoulders lifted slightly. "You've been staring at it for like two minutes."
"I have not."
"You absolutely have."
"I—" He stopped because she was right. He had. Because he couldn't stop looking at it, couldn't stop looking at the placement, couldn't stop thinking about why she'd chosen it. Why she'd chosen there. Not somewhere obvious, not somewhere visible—somewhere intimate, somewhere meaningful, somewhere that belonged to the two of them. The realization hit him so hard his chest physically hurt.
"You put it there."
Y/N's expression softened, immediately understanding what he meant. "Yeah."
His throat tightened. "Because I always kiss you there."
A small smile appeared, the softest smile he'd ever seen. "Yeah."
Lando stared at her, then looked back at the tattoo, then back at her. His vision suddenly felt suspiciously blurry. Oh no, not now, absolutely not now. His eyes widened. "Are you crying?"
Y/N immediately panicked. "What?!"
"I'm crying."
"What?!"
"I think I'm crying."
She stared, then burst into laughter. "Lando!"
"I'm serious!"
"You are not."
"I literally am."
His voice cracked, which only made her laugh harder until she finally noticed the actual tears gathering in his eyes. Then her laughter disappeared completely.
"Oh." Her own expression softened instantly. "Oh, baby."
Lando laughed helplessly, mortified. "I hate you."
"No you don't."
"No, I really don't."
She stepped closer, only inches away now, close enough for him to see every tiny emotion crossing her face: the nervousness, the hope, the love, all of it.
"I got it because of you." His heart squeezed. Y/N gently reached for his hand, holding it against her waist, against the tattoo, against the spot she'd chosen so carefully. "You always kiss me here." Her voice was quiet now, almost shy. "And every single time you do it, I feel loved."
Lando's breath caught.
"So..." She looked down briefly, then back up. "I wanted something that would remind me of you."
The tears came properly then, and he didn't even care because suddenly all he could think about was how much he loved her, how impossibly, ridiculously lucky he was, and how this incredible woman had spent weeks planning a surprise while he'd been busy convincing himself something was wrong. And somehow she still loved him anyway.
"Lando?"
He shook his head, still smiling, still crying, still completely overwhelmed. Then he pulled her into his arms hard, almost knocking the breath from both of them. Y/N laughed immediately. "Lando!"
"You're insane."
"I know."
"This is insane."
"I know."
He buried his face in her neck, holding her tighter. "You got a tattoo."
"You keep saying that."
"Because I can't believe it."
She smiled against his shoulder, then quietly whispered "I wanted a piece of you with me forever."
That did it, absolutely destroyed whatever composure he had left. And when he finally pulled back and kissed her, it wasn't rushed, wasn't desperate, wasn't teasing. It was slow, tender, filled with every emotion he couldn't put into words—a kiss that said thank you, a kiss that said I love you, a kiss that said I'm sorry for doubting, a kiss that said you're everything to me.
When they finally separated, both slightly breathless, Lando rested his forehead against hers. His eyes drifted down one last time to the tattoo—to his number, to his initials, to the place she'd chosen. And somehow he fell in love with her all over again.
Because anyone could get a tattoo. But this? This wasn't about ink, it wasn't about initials, it wasn't even about his racing number. It was about the meaning behind it, the fact that she'd paid attention, the fact that she'd remembered, and the fact that she'd taken one tiny little habit he'd never even thought twice about and turned it into something permanent, something that would stay with her forever.
And in that moment, standing in their bedroom with his arms around her, Lando realized that no gift he ever received would top this one. Not because of what it was, but because of what it meant. And because it came from her.
after the disastrous race that was the canadian gp, lando tells you that he doesn't want any comfort – just you.
lando norris x f!reader ୨୧ word count : 2.9k ୨୧ warnings : language, SMUT (oral, püssydrunk!lando, overstimulation (a little bit), cöckwarming, semi-public), nicknames (princess) ୨୧ note : if you enjoy don't forget to comment/reblog!
part of the lando's heart series.
the hotel door clicked shut with a small, trembling force as lando closed it behind him. the ride back to the hotel was tense and quiet. you could tell his team was sitting on the edge as lando refused to talk after his media duties had concluded.
you're honestly surprised he was able to have such a smile on his face after a disaster of race you all had just witnessed. but you knew lando just needed a moment. you figured a nice shower together and some time in bed would be enough to bring him back down from the hurricane that was currently rolling around in his head.
"hey," you say softly, shoes and purse discarded next to his own shoes and backpack on the floor. you come up behind him, hands coming to gently massage his shoulders and you just feel how tense he still is. "why don't we take a nice shower, lan. i think that might help – wash today away."
your hands traveled down the planes of his back before grabbing the hem of his hoodie and pulling it up. lando didn't protest as you took his hoodie off, tossing it to the side before he's finally turning to look at you. his face is full of exhaustion – beautiful eyes drooping slightly before he's sitting down on the edge of the bed.
you can't help but smile fondly at your lover, hand combing through his curls before cupping his face. lando lets out a sigh through his nose as he nuzzles his face into your palm, his hands coming to rest on your hips.
"i don't want a shower," he mumbles, looking up at you as he drags you closer between his legs.
you let out a small laugh, "but you would feel better. isn't that what you always tell me?" you reply, head tilting as he rests his head on your chest. you feel his hands trail from around your waist to your ass before he's giving you a firm squeeze.
"i want you though," he says, eyes shining against the hotel room lights as he glances up. his words send a chill through you and straight to your core.
"you can always have me lando," you tell him softly, his hands coming to the waistband of your jeans before he's unbuttoning them. he lifts his head, watching as he unzips your jeans before he's pulling them down your thighs to your knees, and letting you kick them off into the floor somewhere.
he angles his head just enough so he's kissing your pelvis over your underwear. "get on the bed for me, princess," he says, eyes glancing up to look at you.
you feel your breath hitch before you're getting on the bed and crawling behind lando. you feel the bed shift as he stands up, and you turn to see him lifting his mclaren team kit polo over his head and throwing it in the floor. his sweatpants go next as you settle in the center of the bed, getting rid of your own shirt and bra next.
"see?" he teases, getting back on the bed, his warm hands grabbing your ankles before he's pulling you down the bed a little, so you're only half laying down. "you don't want to shower either," he teases with a smug smirk that makes you roll your eyes at him.
"i was just trying to help," you pout as lando crawls over you. a small gasp leaving your lips when you feel his throbbing cock press against your core through your underwear. "f-fuck..." you whimper out as lando rolls his hips against yours.
"i know how you can help me feel better, princess."
"h-how?"
"by letting me taste this pretty pussy you've got. i just know she's been missing my tongue and i've been neglecting her of some kisses," he says before he's moving to settle between your thighs. his large hands gripping the fat of your thighs to spread them.
lando immediately presses his face into your underwear, nose nudging your clothed clit as he inhales your scent before kissing where a wet patch is starting to form on your panties. his hands move from your thighs, letting them rest against his shoulders, as they move to fiddle with the elastic waistband of your panties. he plays with it, letting it snap gently against your skin as he continues to kiss your clothed pussy. you watch as his eyes even fall shut for a moment.
when he reopens them, lando moves just an inch before he's pulling your underwear off and tossing them somewhere over his shoulder. he moves you once more, mainly spreading your thighs again and having your knees press against your chest. his fingers come to spread your folds, showing him just how glistening you are for him.
lando lets out a groan, bottom lip tugging between his teeth before he's diving straight in. tongue flattening against your folds as he licks from your opening to your clit.
"a-ah! l-lando~" you cry out as he repeats the action two, three more times before he's settling on focusing on your opening. you threaded your fingers through his dark curls, gripping tightly as he buried his tongue inside you. your british lover lets out a groan at the feeling of you tugging on his hair, his hazel eyes flickering up to look at you – taking in how your face is already painted in pleasure.
god, you looked so gorgeous like this, all spread out for him and letting him have his way with you without any complaint. his pretty girl. his princess. his pussy.
his y/n. you were his completely and the thought made his dick twitch against the mattress. he was def gonna come in his underwear before the end of this. not that he really cared as long as his face was buried between your thighs.
he pulled away slightly, tongue dragging upwards again before he's sucking on your clit. the action makes your hips twitch and arch slightly before his hands come up to hold you in place. the way his hands grip your thighs and his lips on your clit makes you moan loudly. you throw your head back as lando continues to eat you out like a starved man.
"so fucking good," he mumbles against your pussy before he's flattening his tongue between your folds and aggressively shaking his head.
"fuck! l-lan-do!" you cry out as the frantic stimulation that he was giving you. you could feel the tension in your core build you – heat spreading from your core to all over your body as he continues to lick, suck, and kiss your pussy. his fingers even finding their way inside of you as his mouth alternated between your entrance and clit.
"s-s-so good~ don-don't stop," you beg, feeling your climax start to build up more rapidly. especially as his fingers stretch you out and rub deliciously against your sweet spot, curling inside you to the point it makes your toe curls.
"pussy so good for me. she loves the attention," he breathes out with a drunk smile on his lips. you swear you almost saw his eyes roll back from the taste alone of you. "always weeping for me," he mumbles, voice getting a little slurred as he dives back in.
"l-lan, i'm... fuck– i'm close!" you tell him and he hums before he's suddenly speeding up his fingers and tongue lapping your pussy like he's completely desperate for you. which, spoiler alert: he is.
and it only takes a few more licks and one long, satisfied suck to your clit before you're tipping over the edge with a long, loud moan. the coil in your core snapping as you come. lando is quick to remove his fingers, mouth latching onto you as his tongue licks up all your cum. his hands digging into the flesh of your ass as he lifts you up just to keep you close to him.
your breath hitched, body twitching, and legs shaking as you slowly come down from your high. and then, like another wave crashing over you and dragging you down – you felt your pussy twitch just from the sheer overstimulation from lando's mouth. his mouth glued your pussy to the point that it had you worried about if he was breathing.
"oh, lan, lan, lan– s-top. t-too much~" you whimper out, hands attempting to push his head away. but that damn neck strength of his allows your attempts to be futile. you look down to make eye contact with lando, a pout on your lips as you meet those beautiful, lust-filled eyes that have you clenching around nothing. thanks lando.
you let out another cry, attempting again," lan, stop," you say, gripping his hair and pulling. you feel his tongue give your pussy one more lick before he's allowing you to move his head. finally.
"sorry, baby, you just taste so good," he says, like that's a good enough reason to overstimulate you.
"whatever, come up here so we can cuddle," you deadpan with an eye roll as lando crawls up your body. his arms wrapping around you and pulling you into his side before his lips are meeting yours in a soft kiss. the taste of you was almost overwhelming when lando's tongue slipped into your mouth.
when you broke the kiss, you let your hand rest against his cheek as you looked at him – eyes full of nothing but love for the man laying with you. "i love you, lan, so much."
he gives you a lopsided smile before he's kissing you one more time, "love you, y/n, sorry if i was too much earlier. i just... it fucking sucks because it was like nothing going right during that race, and i wanted to do well. i wanted to win."
"i know you do lando, but... it happens. remember, fate works in weird ways. but you're still my world champion, and i think that's pretty sexy."
"yeah? you think so?"
"i know so," you say with a laugh as he rolls the two of you over so he could kiss you again. "oh," you say, pulling away – not able to stop the smile as you watch lando try to follow your lips for a split second. "we're going back home right? what time is our plane?"
lando pauses for a moment, like he's letting the question settle in his brain before he's answering, "yeah... we have like two hours before we have to be at the airport."
"are we going back to monaco? or did you want to make a trip to the uk?"
"monaco," he says, lips pressing against your pulse in your neck. "stay for a few days before i have to go to mtc for a media, and then we can go back if you want."
you let out a hum, "okay, i'm fine with whatever as long as we get a break, all this traveling the last few months have made me exhausted."
"well, at least the next race is in monaco," he says softly before sitting up a little bit. "did you want to take that shower now?"
"ugh, yes please, i'm starting to feel gross down there," you say with a laugh which makes lando smile at you before he's moving to stand up. "plus, we can go another round in there if you want," you add, sitting up, hand reaching out to trail against his hard cock that is straining against his boxers.
"come on then, princess," he says, linking your hands together. your boyfriend is tugging your hand before he's leading you both into the hotel bathroom.
"monaco, baby!" you cheered, happy to know you would be able to go straight home.
"this is not monaco, lando," you told him with a deadpan expression, arms crossed as you sat next to him in the private jet.
"i'm sorry, baby, you just seemed so excited that i didn't have the heart to tell you," he tries to reason with you. his large hand resting heavily against your thigh and giving it a good squeeze.
"indiana? really? the fucking indy 500 already happened!"
"i know but zak is there and they want me to film some content with the american team for their socials," he explains.
"fucking zak," you grumble, still refusing to look at your british lover. lando leans forward into your view and you are quickly turning your head away – opting to look out the window instead. "this fucking sucks, lando, i wanted to go home."
"hey, look at me, please," he pleads, voice soft and you almost give in. however, you choose to stay strong and that's when you hear him let out a deep sigh, he's then moving next to you – pulling the armrest up and quickly hauling you into his lap.
"lando!" you squeak out in surprise as he settles you in his lap, arms wrapping around your waist to trap you against his chest.
"come onnnnnnnn," he whines, breath hot against your ear, "don't be mad at me, it makes me sad. don't make the world champ sad – i've had a rough weekend."
"shut up," you tell him with a huff as you feel him press his lips on your throat as he's slowly rolling his hips up into your ass. you can feel his half-hard cock through your thin shorts, knowing that he's gone commando underneath his sweats.
"and its just a day, princess, and then we can go home. we'll go to the uk and i'll make it up to you," he says, groaning as you pull your blanket over the two of you.
you then finally turn to look at him, his hazel eyes gleaming brightly once you do. "how you going to make it up, huh?"
"we can watch movies and i'll fuck you so good all over the house," he promises with a smirk.
"oh brother," you roll your eyes at him, "just fucking drop me off in monaco then or i'll book my own flight."
"you're such a damn brat," he huffs, bouncing you in his lap as his hands come to grope you underneath your, his, hoodie. "like hell i'll let you book your own flight."
"i'm a grown woman, lan, i'll do whatever i want."
"didn't say you weren't but i don't want you going back to monaco without me. come on, don't be pissed, i'm sorry i lied. let me start making it up now. there's no way you can stay pissed at me for three hours."
"watch me," you say before pausing for a moment. you're then turning slightly to look at him, "your dick is distracting me."
"yeah, cause my bratty princess is in my lap and not letting me put it inside her," he huffs out – the sudden turbulence jolting you a little bit and making you rock against lando's dick. he lets out a small groan in your ear, his arms squeezing you tightly against him. "let me put it in at least, i won't move, promise."
"you're a big, fat liar like your cock, lando."
he lets out a confident laugh at your words, "yeah, but you like my big, fat cock – your pussy especially likes it when i'm inside her. i bet she's weeping for me now."
fuck him, you think, because he's not wrong. you can feel how wet you are without even having to touch yourself. your wetness seeping into your underwear to the point that you almost–
"find whatever, put it in but i'm only cockwarming you. no funny business cause i'm still mad at you," damn, you hate how weak you are against him sometimes. truly your downfall.
lando lets out a small laugh before he’s adjusting the two of you, slipping his cock out before you're guiding his thick length into your pussy through the leg hole of your shorts. thankfully, your shorts were short enough to make this easier because you would rather not strip off your bottoms on the private jet where there was still lando's team in the other cabin.
"fuck, you're so damn tight, so warm," he groans out into your throat as you slip him inside you. you let out a breathy moan in response, head tilting back to rest against his shoulder. "my princess and her pussy just can't resist this fat cock inside her. you're so fucking wet, i can feel you dripping down your thighs."
"shut up, lando," you tell him again as you lie against him, your hands coming to rest over his own that are still underneath your hoodie. his hands rubbing light circles into your skin before you feel him kiss your cheek. "i'm still mad, don't think you're getting away with tricking me," you remind him.
lando smiles as one of his hands travels down to your lower stomach, letting his fingers splay over you. "of course, i would expect nothing less from my spoiled princess."
you turn to say something, but lando immediately crashes his lips to yours in a quick, fierce kiss that catches you completely off guard. when he breaks the kiss, you are pouting and letting your head rest against his shoulder. "go to sleep, baby, i know you're tired."
you don't say anything as you let your eyes fall closed with lando holding you close and his cock nestled warmly inside you for the next three hours. maybe when you land you'll forgive him, or maybe you'll make him fuck again – you'll decide when you land.
Summary: You rarely dress to stand out in the paddock, always keeping things modest and lowkey. So when you show up to a dinner with the drivers and wags in a dress that actually shows off your figure, the reaction is immediate, especially from the girls who have absolutely no filter, and Lando, who wishes the ground would swallow him whole.
The restaurant is loud in the comfortable, familiar way it always is when too many drivers and their partners are put in one place. Glasses clink, chairs scrape softly against the floor, and conversations overlap in a constant buzz of voices. It's warm, dimly lit, the kind of place that feels private even when it's not.
You're walking in just behind Lando, one hand lightly brushing his arm as he leads you toward the table. You don't think much of your outfit. It's just a dress. A little more fitted than what you usually wear, the fabric soft but structured enough to hug your waist and fall just right over your hips. The neckline dips slightly lower than you'd normally go, sleeves shorter, skin more visible.
Different. But not dramatic, not to you, anyway.
Lando, however, noticed immediately when you stepped out earlier. He didn't say anything at first. Just blinked. Then blinked again. "...oh."
You'd laughed. "What?"
"Nothing."
But it very much wasn't nothing.
The moment you reach the table, the reaction is instant. Alexandra is the first to stand up, pulling you into a quick hug. "Hi, gorgeous-" She pulls back, and freezes. Her eyes drop. Then snap back up. Then drop again. "Oh my god."
You laugh, slightly caught off guard. "What?"
She grabs your arm, pulling you a little closer, like she needs to inspect you properly. "No, wait-"
Before you can even respond, Carmen leans across the table. "Hold on."
And then Lily is turning in her seat. "Wait, wait, wait-"
Within seconds, you're surrounded. You blink, completely confused as Alexandra spins you slightly. "Since when-"
Carmen cuts in immediately. "Your body-"
Lily looks genuinely offended. "Why have you been hiding this?"
You let out a nervous laugh. "I haven't been hiding anything-"
"Yes you have," Alexandra says instantly. "Always in jumpers, always in long sleeves-"
"And now this?" Carmen gestures dramatically at you. "This is insane."
You glance toward Lando for help. He's not helping. He's standing slightly behind you, frozen, looking like he's just walked into a situation he cannot escape from. "Guys-" he starts weakly.
No one listens. Lily leans forward, eyes wide. "I'm sorry, but-" She gestures vaguely at your chest. "They sit so well."
You choke slightly on your own breath. "Lily-"
"I'm serious," she continues, completely unfiltered. "Like, actually unfair."
Carmen nods immediately. "I want that."
Alexandra tilts her head, still studying you like you're a puzzle she's trying to solve. "Are they natural?"
"Alex-"
"No, I mean it in the nicest way possible," she adds quickly. "They just look too good to be real."
You can feel your face heating up rapidly now. "Oh my god."
"Don't 'oh my god' us," Carmen says. "Answer the question."
Lando finally steps forward. "Okay-"
But George is already laughing into his drink. Charles is watching the scene unfold with open amusement, one arm draped casually over the back of Alexandra's chair. Max, of course, looks entertained. Very entertained. "Yeah," Max adds casually. "Answer the question."
Lando turns to him immediately. "Don't encourage this."
Max shrugs. "I'm just curious."
"You are not curious."
"I am a little curious."
"You're not."
Meanwhile, the girls are still fully focused on you. Lily reaches out slightly, then pauses. "Can I-"
"No," you say instantly, laughing despite yourself.
Carmen gasps. "Gatekeeping?"
"I'm not gatekeeping!"
Alexandra grins. "She's blushing."
You cover your face for a second. "I hate all of you."
Lily leans back in her chair, still staring. "I just think it's rude you never dress like this."
Carmen nods. "Yeah, we've been robbed."
Alexandra adds, completely unhelpfully, "Lando's been gatekeeping."
That's what finally breaks him. "I have not been gatekeeping!"
Every head turns to him. Wrong move.
Carmen raises an eyebrow. "Oh, so you agree then?"
Lando opens his mouth. Closes it. Then looks at you like you've somehow put him in this situation on purpose.
You grin at him.
He drags a hand down his face. "This is a nightmare."
George laughs. "You look stressed."
"I am stressed."
Charles smirks. "You should be proud."
"I was," Lando says. "Privately."
Max snorts. "Not anymore."
Lando sinks into his chair, muttering something under his breath as the girls continue to whisper to you, still very much not done with the topic. And as much as he wants to disappear... He also can't stop glancing at you either.
you're usually a pillow princess... but this time you whisper, "I want to ride you", and their reactions when it fully breaks them
Lando Norris: stares at you like you just threatened world peace.
"you want to what?"
sits up immediately, too eager.
"right now? this second? can I film it?"
holds his breath the entire time you climb on.
mutters "fuckfuckfuck" like a prayer when he realises how hot you look doing it.
Oscar Piastri: blink. blink.
"wait... you mean like actually?"
you nod.
he malfunctions.
"okay- um. okay. I need to emotionally prepare."
fully flushed, completely ruined, obsessed for weeks.
Charles Leclerc: gasps dramatically.
"mon amour, you want to do the work? for me?"
clutches his chest like you've proposed.
immediately lays down, hands behind his head.
"show me how good you look when you take what you want."
Lewis Hamilton: low groan. already hard.
"you saying that just made me lose ten years off my life."
leans back against the pillows.
"then ride me, baby. do it slow. make it messy."
holds your hips like a prayer. praises you the whole time.
Max Verstappen: jaw clenched.
"you want to ride me? after all that pillow princess talk?"
grabs your waist instantly.
"prove it. do it like you mean it."
watches every second with heavy-lidded eyes and zero control.
Arvid Lindblad: blushes instantly.
"you- what?"
voice cracks when you climb on top.
"oh fuck, I don't think I'm gonna survive this."
holds onto the sheets like they'll save him.
Carlos Sainz: grins.
"so you're not a princess tonight?"
lets you push him back and straddle him.
absolutely obsessed with how you move.
"look at you. riding me like you own me."
Alex Albon: fully chokes.
"I- okay. yeah. uh. yeah."
lays back, hands up.
"do your thing, love. I'll just be over here dying quietly."
has to close his eyes because watching you ruins him too fast.
George Russell: stunned silence.
"well this is unexpected."
immediately clears a space. fluffs a pillow for you to hold.
"go on, sweetheart. take me. I'm all yours."
low groans and praise the entire time.
Kimi Antonelli: eyes wide. blinking fast.
"...you want to ride me?"
gently cups your face.
"please."
absolutely wrecked the second you start.
Lance Stroll: smirks.
"you sure?"
leans back and watches you with his hands behind his head.
lets out one low moan when you sink onto him and loses his mind.
"yeah. this is new. this is staying."
Fernando Alonso: grins like the devil.
"ay, mi amor... finally taking charge?"
lays back.
"make me proud."
absolutely unravels watching you bounce, praises you in Spanish the whole time.
Liam Lawson: completely thrown.
"wait. what? now? here?"
nods rapidly. lays back.
"I'm not stopping you. I'm never stopping you."
moans the loudest.
Isack Hadjar: gasps.
"you? on top? willingly?"
has to breathe through it.
"ride me, baby. take what you want."
lets you do everything, loses control instantly.
Nico Hülkenberg: raises an eyebrow.
"oh? we're feeling bold tonight."
lets you straddle him, hands on your thighs.
"show me what you've been holding back."
Gabriel Bortoleto: stammers.
"I- okay- uh- yes. yes please."
fully submissive mode unlocked.
tries to grab your hips but his hands are shaking.
Ollie Bearman: chokes.
"you're serious?"
mouth open. watching you like it's divine punishment.
"you look... so good. I can't- fuck."
Esteban Ocon: grins. smug.
"so the pillow princess wants to play?"
sits back. lets you climb on.
moans into your mouth as you sink onto him.
"you better not stop until I'm begging."
Pierre Gasly: absolutely delighted.
"finally."
pulls you on top with a smirk.
"ride me until you can't take it anymore. then ride me again."
⋆✴︎˚。⋆ pairing: 𝗈𝗅𝗅𝗂𝖾 𝖻𝖾𝖺𝗋𝗆𝖺𝗇 𝗑 𝖺𝗇𝗍𝗈𝗇𝖾𝗅𝗅𝗂!𝗋𝖾𝖺𝖽𝖾𝗋, 𝖿𝗅𝗈𝗋𝗂𝗌𝗍!𝗋𝖾𝖺𝖽𝖾𝗋
⋆✴︎˚。⋆ theme: 𝖿𝗅𝗎𝖿𝖿, 𝖼𝗁𝗂𝗅𝖽𝗁𝗈𝗈𝖽 𝖿𝗋𝗂𝖾𝗇𝖽𝗌 𝖺𝗎
⋆✴︎˚。⋆ wc: 5.5𝗄
⋆✴︎˚。⋆ fc: 𝗉𝗂𝗇𝗍𝖾𝗋𝖾𝗌𝗍
⋆✴︎˚。⋆ a/n: sorry it took so long! i know this might be quite underwhelming for a chapter but the next few chapters will be chunky so i had to go easy! :') hope this is still ok :')
In the house of a racing driver, everything was built for speed. The air was often thick with the scent of motor oil and the tension of the next grand prix, but her room was a sanctuary of stillness. On her desk sat her worn notebook, its margins crowded with sketches of irises and cornflowers, each stroke of her pencil a testament to a dream that had nothing to do with a podium. If Kimi lived for the finish line, she lived for the beginning. She lived for the morning dew on a peony and the way a shop smelled at five in the morning, earthy, sweet, and full of potential. To most, a flower was a temporary decoration, something that withered and was forgotten. To her, it was a masterpiece of timing and grace.
The Italian sun was especially bright today, casting a golden glow over the narrow, winding streets. The air felt warm and smelled like sea salt and espresso. After her encounter with the kind concierge at the nearby hotel, and doing some research and realizing just how many beautiful flower shops were hidden around the area, she felt a surge of excitement. She wasn’t just looking for a way to pass the time; she was on a mission. She knew deep down that if she ever wanted to open a shop of her own, she needed to roll up her sleeves and learn the trade from the inside, from the way the stems were trimmed to the way the locals chose their Sunday bouquets. She set off with a light step, a saved map on her phone with several little circles. Every few minutes, she would stop, rotate her phone, and squint at the street signs, trying to figure out which cobblestone path led to the first shop on her list.
She was so focused on a particularly confusing intersection that she didn't notice the tall figure walking toward her until she nearly walked straight into his chest. "You look very lost," a familiar, playful voice teased. Like some weird pull of fate, she looked up to see Arthur Leclerc standing there, tilting his head with a mischievous grin. He was dressed casually, looking perfectly at home. "Arthur!" she greets, then quickly insists with a laugh, holding the map up like a shield. "No, I am not lost, I am on a very important mission, actually. I’m scouting." Arthur chuckled, looking at her map. "Scouting for what? The best gelato? Because I can save you a lot of walking."
"No, even better," she said, her eyes bright with determination. She explained her plan to visit the local florists and ask about an apprenticeship. Arthur’s expression softened, looking impressed. "That's awesome, I like that." He didn't even hesitate before stepping beside her. "Well, you clearly need a navigator who can actually read a map. I'm coming with you." They spend a great chunk of the morning coming in and out of the three flower shops she had listed. One of them was so beautiful, but the owner seemed to be too strict, and the other was quaint and perfect, but they weren’t looking for any other people. The last one was nice too, but she didn’t feel the pull in it.
After a long morning of visiting shops, Arthur led her to a small, quiet café tucked away in a corner of the piazza. The café was charming, with small round tables covered in white linen and the constant, rhythmic sound of the espresso machine humming in the background. They sat outside under an umbrella, the sound of the city fading into a comfortable murmur. Arthur leaned back in his chair, stirring his iced coffee slowly. He watched her as she tucked her notebook, now filled with scribbled notes about lilies and orchids, into her bag.
"I have to ask," he said, his voice dropping to a more curious, gentle tone. "How did you first fall in love with flowers? I mean, it’s a big dream. What was the spark?" She paused, a small smile playing on her lips before her whole face lit up. "I think it’s because they make people happy in a way that nothing else really does, my mom used to get flowers from my dad every occasion there was, but the best times are when there''s no occasion at all, her face just lights up instantly, and every time, I fell more and more in love with their magic," she said softly. "Think about it. Flowers are there for every big and small moment in a human life. You give them for birthdays to celebrate, for love on a first date, to say 'I’m sorry' after a fight, or even just because. They speak a language when people can't find the right words."
She traced the rim of her cup, her gaze momentarily drifting to a window box across the street overflowing with bright red geraniums. "I want to be a part of that. I want to be the person who helps someone pick out the perfect rose to make someone's day better. It feels... meaningful." Arthur didn't look away. He wasn't checking his phone or looking at the crowd passing by. He was completely focused on her, watching the way her eyes sparked when she talked about her future. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table.
"That’s beautiful," he said, his voice sincere and warm. "I can truly see you running your own place one day. You have the passion for it, and you're already doing the hard work. It fits you perfectly." He gave her a small, encouraging smile that made her heart flutter just a little. "When you finally open that shop, I’ll be your first customer. Though, you'll have to help me pick out the right 'thank you' bouquet for the person who helped you find the job."
She laughed, the sound bright and clear. "Oh, is that so? I think I can manage a friend discount for the best navigator in Italy." While they were waiting for their second round of drinks, Arthur pulled out his phone. The lighting was perfect, hitting the table in a way that made the colors of the café pop. "Hold on, stay right there," Arthur said, laughing as he adjusted his camera. She looks away, too nervous, too shy, but Arthur caught her just in time. The photo was candid and sweet.
Miles away, Ollie was taking a break, sitting on the edge of a bench, still wearing his racing gear. He swiped by the stories of his friends, expecting to see a meme or a racing update, but instead, he saw her. He froze, his thumb hovering over the screen to pause the story. A sharp, uncomfortable poke of jealousy flared in his chest, a feeling he wasn't quite prepared for. Ollie let out a long, frustrated breath and tossed his phone onto the bench beside him. He should have been the one there. He was the one who knew how much she loved those flower shops, and he was the one who wanted to hear her talk about her dreams for hours. The quiet of the track suddenly felt a lot lonelier, and he couldn't shake the image of her and Arthur laughing together in the sun. He picked his phone back up, staring at the picture, wishing he could just teleport to that café and take Arthur's seat.
The walk back to her apartment was slow and pleasant. The heat of the afternoon had softened into a gentle, golden evening breeze. As they reached her front steps, she turned to Arthur, her heart feeling fuller than it had when she left that morning. "Thank you for today, Arthur," she said, looking up at him. "I think I would have circled the same three blocks for hours if you hadn't shown up."
Arthur stepped closer, his hands tucked casually into his pockets. "I had a great time today. Truly. It’s nice to talk about something other than tire compounds for once." he replied, his voice soft and sincere. The air between them felt still for a moment, a quiet, comfortable beat that lingered just a second too long. Arthur opened his mouth to say something else, perhaps to suggest dinner or a walk the next day; he wanted to do everything, try anything to make her stay a while, but he never got the chance.
The heavy wooden front door swung wide with a sudden, dramatic thud. There stood Kimi, looking like a protective wall or the walnut from Plants Versus Zombies because he looked too cute to be deemed so strict. He didn't say a word to Arthur. He didn't even acknowledge him with a nod. Instead, he reached out, caught her by the arm, and gently but firmly began to reel her into the house like a prize catch. "Hey! Wait!" she stumbled back, laughing in shock as she was hauled over the threshold. "Bye, Arthur! I’ll see you soon!" she managed to yell, waving one hand frantically over her brother’s shoulder before the door was pulled shut with a final, echoing click.
The second the door was locked, she spun around, her annoyance vanishing instantly. "What are you doing home! I missed you!" she squealed, throwing herself at her brother and nearly knocking the wind out of him. Kimi’s serious mask broke immediately. He let out a loud, boisterous laugh, catching her in a bear hug and swinging her around. "I wanted to surprise you! Toto finally looked at the calendar and realized we needed a break. He gave us a full week off to come home and reset." He set her down but kept his hands on her shoulders, his eyes narrowing playfully as he looked toward the closed door. "But I think I was the one who got the surprise. Coming home to see my little sister being dropped off by a Leclerc? Since when do we have Ferrari escorts?" he teased, poking her side.
She groaned, rolling her eyes as she brushed past him toward the kitchen to hide the blush creeping up her neck. "Oh, gemello, don’t start. He’s a friend. He was just being nice and helping me with my flower shop search."
"Yes, 'nice,'" Kimi called out, following her into the kitchen with a skeptical grin. He leaned against the counter, watching her try to act busy with a kettle. "Very, very nice. I’ve seen that look before. That wasn't a 'just helping with flowers' look. That was a 'I hope your brother isn't home' look."
"Stop it!" she laughed, throwing a dish towel at his head. "It was just a nice day, Kimi. Nothing more."
"Whatever you say," Kimi replied, catching the towel.
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msantonelli replied to your story: thanks for being the best navigator!
↳ arthur_leclerc call me when you get lost ;)
── .✦
After the teasing in the kitchen died down, the two of them moved to the living room. Since their parents were out for the evening, the house felt quiet and still, leaving the space entirely to them. Without needing to say a word, they fell into their old, familiar routine. Kimi grabbed a thick wool blanket from the back of the chair, and she raided the pantry for a bowl of popcorn and some chocolate. They collapsed onto the oversized sofa, limbs tangled together just like when they were kids. It was their favorite way to spend a day, doing everything but also absolutely nothing. She loved everything about being his twin; they rarely fought, if anything, they only discussed matters even as little kids, then eventually giving up on it and making a fair deal for both. It was harmonious, something she would dare not tot find anywhere else.
She navigated through the menus until the familiar set of movies appeared in the selection, "Disney marathon?" she asked, already knowing the answer.
"You know it," Kimi replied, leaning his head back against the cushion. As the movies played in the background, the initial excitement of the surprise visit settled into a warm, comfortable hum. They didn't even watch the screen half the time; they just talked, whispered, and laughed at memories they had from each of the movies.
"I really missed you this time, Kimi," she said softly during a quiet scene, pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders. "The house feels too big when you’re away at the races. I find myself looking at the door expecting you to walk in with a bag of laundry and a loud story about the paddock." Kimi stayed quiet for a moment, his gaze softening. "I miss you too. Sometimes, in the middle of a busy weekend, I just want to be back on this couch with you and our favorite movies playing, where no one is asking me for lap times or data." He turned to look at her, his expression turning more thoughtful. "But honestly? I'm so glad to see you finally doing your own thing. We’ve always been twins, you know? You were always glued to my side as my cheerleader, and don’t get me wrong, I love having you at my races, you make me feel loved regardless of my final standing, but seeing you chase after this flower shop dream you’ve always had since we were small, it makes me proud. I’m excited to see who you’re going to be. You’re going to be amazing at this."
She felt a lump in her throat and leaned her head on his shoulder. "Thanks, gemello. That means a lot."
"Of course," he nudged her gently. "Even if I have to scare off a few drivers along the way to keep you focused."
"Kimi!" she laughed, hitting him with a pillow. “I’m kidding, all I’m saying is no matter what, I will always be here to support you and cheer you on, like you always have with me.” They stayed like that for hours, lost in a world of animated heroes and childhood nostalgia. By the time the clock on the wall chimed 11:00 PM, the final credits were rolling, and their eyes were heavy with sleep. Kimi stood up first, stretching his arms high above his head and offering her a hand to pull her up. "Alright, time for bed."
"Goodnight, Kimi," she said, giving him one last quick hug. "I'm glad you're home."
"Goodnight," he said, smiling and ruffling her hair. "See you in the morning."
── .✦
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They headed to their separate rooms, the house finally falling into a peaceful silence, both of them happy to be under the same roof again.
The soft glow of her lamp made everything feel cozy, and she was just about to reach for her book when a dull thump echoed from her balcony. She froze. Her balcony was nestled right against the branches of the old oak tree that held their childhood treehouse, a path that had seen many questionable decisions over the years. It’s just a very heavy squirrel, she told herself. A squirrel that has been hitting the walnuts too hard, but then came a distinct, rhythmic knock-knock-knock on the glass. Adrenaline spiked. Panicked but trying to be brave, she scrambled for a weapon. Her hand landed on a stray, neon-orange Nerf gun left over from a heated battle with Kimi. She crept toward the door, squinting over the plastic sights, and slid the glass open just an inch.
"Identify yourself!" she hissed, aiming the foam dart right at the intruder’s forehead. "Whoa! Don't shoot! It's just me!"
"Ollie?" she gasped, lowering the toy. Ollie was crouched on her balcony, looking like a very tall, very confused gargoyle. He was precariously balancing a steaming pizza box in one hand and a lumpy tote bag in the other, trying his best not to fall into the rose bushes below. "What are you doing here? You scared the life out of me! I almost took you out with a foam dart!" she whispered-yelled, giggling as she pulled the door wide to let him in.
"I was in the mood for pizza, but I didn't want to be alone," he said, stumbling into the room and offering a sheepish grin. "Plus, the tree is a lot taller than it used to be. My knees are definitely questioning my life choices right now." Something about his clumsy entrance made her heart do a sudden, fluttering somersault. "Why didn't you just call Kimi? He’s literally twenty feet down the hall." Ollie made a face, looking genuinely offended. "Kimi is a pizza dictator. He’s strictly a Margherita man. If it doesn't have a single leaf of basil on it, he doesn't want to know. There’s no room for creativity with that guy."
"Well, he’s a wise man. Margherita is the gold standard," she retorted, crossing her arms. "Yes, well, but I also know that you are like me," Ollie countered, his eyes twinkling as he held the box out like a trophy. "A person who understands the glorious, greasy chaos of a four-cheese pizza."
He flipped the box open, and the scent of melted gorgonzola filled the air. She couldn't help it; she smiled. Ollie reached into his tote bag and pulled out a small blanket that had been folded, or rather, stuffed, haphazardly inside. He spread it out on her floor with a dramatic flourish, and they sat down, placing the pizza box between them like a delicious peace offering. "So," she said, squinting at him over a slice of crust. "Why are you really here?"
Ollie hesitated, his gaze dropping to the pizza. "Well... I’ve missed you." Her heart flutters, he misses her?
"We haven’t had much time lately," he continued, his voice dropping an octave. "Between Kimi and me racing in different time zones... sometimes I just need to ground myself. And honestly, your room is the only place that doesn't feel so…I don’t know, rehearsed? It’s just comforting.”
He looked around at her familiar posters, the ones he’d seen a thousand times. She nodded, her head falling back softly as she laid down on the edge of the blanket. "I feel that too," she admitted. "The house is awfully quiet without Kimi, and it’s even quieter when you’re not just a few houses away to cause trouble."
"It’s a good thing we're all home for a break, right?" she added. "Even if it’s just a week." Ollie stayed silent, feeling a tiny pang of guilt. Technically, he was supposed to be in London right now, nodding through a high-stakes meeting with Haas about technical data and future seats, but the second he’d seen those photos of her and Arthur on Instagram, the meeting had felt about as important as a flat tire. He had caught the earliest flight out, telling himself it was just protective older brotherly-like friend duties. He's never gonna hear the end of it from Ayao but truthfully, he really didn't care right now.
"So, what have you been up to today? Aside from almost assassinating me?" Ollie finally asked, pushing another slice toward her. "I’ve been visiting flower shops," she said, her eyes lighting up. "I figured I should work in one if I want to own one someday. I need to find out the nitty-gritty, the supply chains, the early mornings, how to not accidentally kill the expensive lilies."
Ollie nodded, listening intently. His mind was screaming: Is she going to mention Arthur? She didn't. She just talked about the shops and the blooms. "And? Have you found the one?" he asked. "Not yet," she sighed. "But I’m going to look for more tomorrow morning."
Ollie sat up a little straighter, his competitive side kicking in. "I can come with. If that’s alright. I'm excellent at carrying heavy things and looking busy." She looked at him in surprise. "Ollie, I’m sure you have much better things to do with your rest week than go on a floral tour with me. Don't you have... I don't know, car things to do?"
She sat up, looking down at the box to hide the bright crimson flush on her cheeks. "No, I insist," Ollie said firmly, his eyes locked on hers. "I actually need a professional's help. I want to buy a massive selection for my mom, she’s been complaining the house looks too masculine. You can be my consultant. It'll be a very serious business meeting."
She looked up at him, seeing the sheer determination in his eyes. "Okay," she smiled. "It’s a deal." She says, because saying she didn’t want him around would be a total lie.
The pizza was long gone, the cardboard box sitting between them like a forgotten relic of the evening. They remained on the makeshift picnic blanket, the quiet hum of the night making their voices drop to a soft, intimate whisper. They talked about everything, the tiny details of the flower shops she’d visited, memories of the treehouse they used to share, and finally, the weight of the helmet. She watched him as his expression shifted. Ollie loved racing; he loved it with every fiber of his being. He loved the scream of the engine and the way the world narrowed down, but sometimes, the sport demanded so much of him that it felt like it was swallowing him whole.
"You know, sometimes," Ollie said, his voice barely audible as he stared at his hands, "I get so lost in the data and the expectations that I forget how to be just... me. I look in the mirror and I don't see Ollie. I see Oliver Bearman, the driver. I see lap times and sector splits. It’s like I’m a part of the car instead of a person." Ollie looked at her, his eyes vulnerable. "I love the track more than anything, but it’s loud. It’s always so loud. When I’m here... it’s the only time it’s quiet enough to remember who I am without a racing suit on."
Without thinking, she reached out and took his hand, squeezing it firmly. "I won't let you disappear into the car. I'll always be the one to pull you back out. For you and Kimi." The air in the room grew thick with a comfortable, heavy stillness. They too were lost in it, in each other’s warmth, each other’s air, and in each other completely. Something about being in this room with Ollie felt like a sweet dream she wasn’t allowed to have, so when she turned her head, being able to finally glance at the clock on her bedside table over his shoulder, her eyes widened in genuine panic.
"Oh god, Ollie! It’s one in the morning," she whispered, her voice full of shock. "You have to go. If Kimi wakes up and finds you in here, he’ll actually lose his mind."
Ollie looked at the clock and then back at her, a clear look of hesitation crossing his face. He shifted on the blanket, his fingers tracing the hem of the fabric as he slowly reached for his tote bag. He didn't want to leave. The cool air of the room, the lingering softness of the dance, and the way she was looking at him felt a thousand times better than the quiet, empty house waiting for him down the street. "I know," he muttered, though he made no move toward the balcony. "I’m just... I’m not really tired yet."
"Ollie," she warned, though she was smiling. Her hand finds its way to his hair like a moth to a flame, brushing out the stray curls from his eyes. Ollie looked calm and unbothered when on the inside he just wanted to yell, and pull her into deep, long—nevermind.
"Fine, fine," he sighed, finally standing up and brushing the crumbs off his jeans. He grabbed his tote bag and tucked the folded blanket back inside, moving toward the open balcony door where the moonlight was spilling across the floorboards. He stopped at the threshold, the cool night breeze ruffling his hair. He turned back to her, his expression uncharacteristically soft. "See you tomorrow?" he asked, his voice hopeful. "I'll be ready for flower duty whenever you are." She nodded, leaning against the doorframe. "Tomorrow. I'll text you the address of the first shop." Ollie stepped closer, closing the small gap between them. Before she could say another word, he wrapped his arms around her in a soft, lingering hug. He smelled like laundry detergent and the faint trace of the outdoors. As he pulled away just an inch, he leaned down and pressed a gentle, lingering kiss on the top of her head.
"Goodnight," he whispered.
"Goodnight, Ollie," she replied, her voice barely a breath.
She watched him climb back onto the sturdy branch of the oak tree, moving with the practiced ease of someone who had done this a hundred times. Once he reached the ground, he turned and gave her a small wave before disappearing into the shadows of the garden. She stood there for a long time, the spot where he’d kissed her head feeling warm despite the midnight chill, a smile tugging at her lips as she finally locked the door.
The next morning, the air was crisp and smelled of rain-washed pavement. She hurried toward the small, ivy-covered shop at the edge of the piazza, but as she rounded the corner, she stopped in her tracks. There was Ollie, leaning against a lamp post right outside the entrance, checking his watch with a grin. "You beat me here?" she asked, breathless. She had to ride the tram about three times because she kept going off in the wrong area.
"I wanted to make sure we didn't miss the morning rush." Ollie joked, straightening up. They stepped inside, and the bell above the door gave a cheerful ting. The shop was a dream, buckets of overflowing blooms lined the walls, and the air was thick with the sweet, earthy scent of jasmine and fresh-cut stems. An elderly woman with kind eyes and hands stained green from florist tape looked up from a half-finished wreath.
"Buongiorno!" The lady greeted them warmly. For the next hour, she and the shop owner talked. They discussed the apprenticeship, the hours, and the delicate art of keeping hydrangeas from wilting in the heat. As they spoke, she felt a growing sense of belonging. The way the light hit the workbench and the soft, grandmotherly energy of the owner made her realize she didn't need to look any further. This was it.
While she talked, Ollie was the picture of patience. He wandered slowly through the aisles, hands tucked behind his back, stopping to inspect every bucket of flowers. He didn’t rush her once; he just looked at the petals as if he were trying to learn their secrets, occasionally nodding along to their conversation from across the room.
Finally, the deal was struck. She was officially an apprentice.
As they walked back toward the center of the shop, she turned to Ollie, her face glowing with pure joy. "Wow, I think you’re my lucky charm. I didn’t even have to go to any of the other shops on my list!" Ollie’s heart gave a sudden, powerful swell of happiness. Hearing her call him her lucky charm felt better than any podium finish. It was a small, simple thing, but it made him feel like he was exactly where he was meant to be. "Well, I do my best," he said, trying to keep his voice steady despite the flutter in his chest. "But okay, as a trial, to see if you've really got the skills, I want you to pick out some flowers for me. For my mom, and for the house. I'm sure you remember what she likes, right?"
She nodded excitedly, her eyes sparkling. "Of course I do!" She immediately went into work mode, moving through the shop with a new sense of purpose. Ollie stepped back, leaning against a wooden pillar to watch her. He stayed silent, completely mesmerized. She was in her zone, the way she tilted her head to check the height of a snapdragon, the gentle way she handled the rose stems, and the focus in her eyes as she built the arrangement. It was like he was seeing a part of her that had always been there, just waiting for the right moment to bloom. This was her thing, her passion, and Ollie realized in that moment that he could watch her do this forever. To him, she looked more at home among the flowers than she ever had in a grandstand, and he loved every second of it. She finished the arrangement with a flourish, tucking in a few final sprigs of green to balance the colors. She handed the heavy, fragrant bundle to Ollie, who took it with a slight stumble, surprised by the weight. He didn't know the names of half the flowers in his arms, some were ruffled and pale pink, others were tall and deep violet, but he didn't care.
They were beautiful because she had chosen them.
After Ollie paid and thanked the shop owner, he led her out into the bright afternoon. "Lunch is on me," he decided. "Celebrating the new job requires pasta." As they walked down the sun-drenched sidewalk, Ollie suddenly stopped. He shifted the massive bouquet to one arm and, with his free hand, carefully pulled a single Yellow Primrose from the edge of the wrap. He turned to her and held it out. She stopped, her eyes wide with shock as she stared at the small, bright bloom.
"A thank you for making this beautiful arrangement," Ollie said, his voice a little lower than usual. He looked at the flower, then back at her. "And... I’m not really sure, but I think I’ve seen you draw this one over a hundred times in the margins of your notebook."
She looked at the primrose, then up at him in total awe. The Yellow Primrose was her favorite, and she did draw it constantly whenever she was daydreaming. She hadn't realized he was ever paying that much attention. "You remembered?" she whispered, her voice thick with emotion.
"Of course I did," he admitted. Without thinking, she stepped closer and rested her head on his shoulder, her heart full of warmth.. Ollie froze for a split second, his breath hitching in his chest. He wasn't used to her being this close, but the shock quickly melted away into a quiet joy. He shifted the flowers slightly and moved his free arm, wrapping it securely around her shoulders and pulling her in tight. They stood there for a moment in the middle of the sidewalk, the smell of fresh flowers between them and the feeling that, for the first time, everything was exactly where it was supposed to be.
They stayed like that for a long moment, tucked away in the shade of a stone archway, while the rest of the world hurried past. The weight of the flowers between them felt less like a chore and more like a promise of things to come. "We should probably get these home," she murmured against his shoulder, her voice muffled by his shirt. "Before they wilt in the heat." Ollie let out a small, contented breath. "Right. The flowers. And the food. I promised food."
As they started walking again, his arm remained draped over her shoulder, and she kept her hand resting on his waist. The conversation shifted back to easy, lighthearted topics, Ollie complaining about his upcoming flight back to London and her teasing him about how he’d probably try to bring the pizza leftovers on the plane. When they finally reached her front door, the late afternoon sun was casting long, honey-colored shadows across the street. She looked at him, and for a split second, the world felt very small. She looked at his lips, then back to his eyes, and the thought of leaning in to kiss him flashed through her mind like lightning. Her heart raced at the idea, but her shyness quickly took over. She glanced nervously at the front door, picturing Kimi swinging it open at the worst possible second to ruin the moment. Instead, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Ollie’s neck in a tight, lingering hug. She squeezed him once, burying her face in the crook of his neck. "Thank you, Ollie."
She pulled back quickly, offering him one last shy smile before disappearing inside the house.
Ollie stayed standing on the sidewalk, completely frozen. His arms were still slightly raised where she had just been, and his brain felt like it had short-circuited. A dazed, lopsided grin slowly spread across his face. He didn't care about the meetings in London or the jealous sting of an Instagram story anymore. He finally turned and started the walk back to his house, his steps lighter than they had been in weeks.
Inside, she leaned her back against the closed door, clutching the flower to her chest and breathing in their scent. Her face was bright red, her heart still thumping from how close she had come to actually kissing him. The house was quiet, but her mind was loud with the memory of him holding her. She walked over to the kitchen table and began to carefully place the primrose in a small glass bud vase. As she set it on the windowsill, the yellow petals caught the final rays of the sun.
── .✦
🔒︎ msantonelli
♫ Olivia Dean - I Could Be A Florist
liked by kimi_antonelli, olliebearman, georgerussell63, arthur_leclerc and 40 others
kimi.antonelli proud of you, gemella! you'll do so many beautiful things! ♥︎ by the Author
↳ msantonelli ti amo!
── .✦
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The roar of the engines at the karting track was deafening, but at seven years old, she was louder. Perched on the edge of the metal bleachers, she was a whirlwind of frantic energy, her tiny fists clenched as she tracked the blur of a neon helmet circling the asphalt. Her parents were right beside her, their voices lost in the mechanical scream of the karts, but her focus never wavered from her brother. When Kimi finally streaked across the finish line, she didn’t wait for the official signal. She scrambled down the bleachers, her light-up sneakers hitting the pavement in a dead sprint, reaching him before their parents could even notice.
“Grande grande grande!” she squealed, her voice high and breathless as she threw her arms around Kimi’s neck, the hard plastic of his racing suit pressing into her chest.
Kimi was vibrating with an adrenaline high he didn’t yet have the words to describe. He hopped in place, his helmet still tucked under one arm, his face flushed and streaked with a bit of track grime. “Did you see me? I was so fast, wasn’t I? I felt like I was flying!” It was his first time in a competitive kart, and it was immediately clear to everyone watching that he was a natural, a prodigy in the making. She pulled back just enough to look him in the eye, nodding with the fierce conviction only a twin could possess. “I saw, Kimi! You were like a rocket ship!”
As the years passed and the stakes climbed, that bond only solidified. When Kimi made the leap into the brutal world of competitive karting, she was his shadow. She was never without him; through every race session, through every rain-soaked and sun-drenched podium, she was there. She had only ever missed a single race in over a decade, a weekend when a 102°C fever had left her delirious and weak, leaving their mother practically tying her to her bed and nailing her bedroom door shut just to stop her from crawling into the car with Kimi.
She had spent those three days in a state of inconsolable heartbreak, crying into her pillow because she couldn't be there to give him his pre-race twin fist bump. When Kimi finally returned home, trophy in hand, he walked straight into her room, sat on the edge of her bed, and draped his winner's medal around her neck. Kimi was the same way; he hated it when she wasn't on the pit wall. To him, the car felt unbalanced, the air felt thin, and the victory felt hollow if she wasn't the first person he saw when he climbed out of the car.
While Kimi lived for the thrill and loud engine roars, she lived for the peace and quiet chirps of the birds. She was the creative of the family, her hands usually stained with paint or glue rather than engine oil. Her lifelong dream was sketched out in a tattered notebook she carried everywhere: a floor plan for a boutique flower shop, complete with a sun-drenched coffee nook in the corner where the steam from the espresso would mingle with the scent of fresh blooms. Kimi would spend hours sitting on the floor beside her while she drew, never complaining about the boredom. He’d grab a colored pencil and carefully fill in the petals of her drawings, his tongue poking out in concentration, sure to color only within the lines and in one motion, or else he'll never hear the end of it. He loved picking flowers for her, raiding the neighbors' gardens whenever they played outside, just because he loved the way her entire world seemed to light up when he handed her a messy bunch of hydrangeas or wild roses.
Then, the duo became a trio. Kimi met Ollie Bearman in the competitive circuit, and the connection was instantaneous. They bonded over a shared obsession with the high-speed chases and late-night video game marathons. Not long after, Ollie became a permanent fixture in their home. He knew which floorboards creaked, where the hidden stash of the good cookies were kept, and he practically had a permanent roll-out bed in Kimi’s room, with a corner of the closet dedicated to his spare hoodies. He was the brother Kimi had never had, but for her, he was something entirely different.
They became an inseparable, chaotic trio. Where Kimi and Ollie went, she followed, acting as the bridge between their high-octane world and the quiet life she dreamed of. They spent their days at the track, the boys racing until their tires were gone, and her cheering until her throat was raw. Afterward, their parents would pile all three of them into the car and head to the local gelateria. They’d sit on the curb, melting gelato dripping down their hands, talking about nothing and everything. Ollie, much like Kimi, became glued to her side. He didn't just tolerate her presence; he sought it out. He would show up at their front door with a new box of video games for them boys, but perched right on top of the plastic cases would be a freshly picked flower he’d managed to source from a nearby garden. Even though Kimi’s room was right at the top of the stairs, Ollie would always walk to the very end of the long hallway to knock on her door first.
"Special delivery," he’d say with that effortlessly polite, lopsided grin, handing her the flowers. Every time his fingers brushed hers, her heart would kick into a gear it didn't know it had, leaving her giggling and blushing as he retreated to go play games with her brother. He was her first real crush, a deep-seated, soul-aching kind of love that only grew more intense as they transitioned from children into young adults.
It first became a problem when Kimi started noticing the way the air changed when Ollie and his sister were in the same room. Kimi was one of, if not the most, observant person in the world. He would notice how Ollie's eyes would always drift to her when she walked in the room, or the way his sister would laugh at his terrible jokes without missing a beat, and by the time they reached Formula 4, the childhood innocence had started to fray. Back when they were seven, the rules were simple:
Always share your snacks (unless it’s mom’s homemade brownies).
Don't crash into each other on the track.
If one of us goes down, we all go down.
But as the karts got faster and the engines grew louder, the stakes shifted from plastic trophies to professional reputations, and Kimi decided the silent understanding between them wasn't enough. So, during a practice session at Silverstone, Kimi added a fourth rule to their childhood pact. "Anyone but my sister, Ollie. Don't go there." And because Ollie was a sweetheart, a boy raised on manners and a deep, soul-level loyalty, he never did, but that wasn’t to say he didn't want to.
He loved Kimi like a brother, but she... she was never just a sister to him. He had always carried the quiet, heavy inkling that she was the one. Yet, the promise he had made to Kimi acted like a restrictor plate on his heart; it was too strong to break, so he settled for staying just within reach. He was the shadow at her side, the one who caught her eye across a crowded room, staying close enough to be there the second she needed him, but never close enough to ignite the bridge between them. She was his mirror in every way.
Kimi was relentless, acting as a human barricade between his twin and his best friend. He would nag her the moment Ollie walked through the front door with a fresh batch of freshly picked flowers, his eyes narrowing as he watched the telltale redness creep into her cheeks. “Not my best friend, gemella,” was Kimi’s go-to line, delivered with a protective edge that left no room for negotiation. She would only nod, her heart heavy but her resolve firm. She loved Kimi too much to ever jeopardize the sacred bond they shared; it had always been Kimi before anyone else, a pact made in the womb. So she forced herself to be content with the almost. She was okay with the stolen glances, the way her breath hitched when they were left alone for a few fleeting minutes without Kimi, and the lingering scent of his cologne after he’d hugged her goodbye. A single thought was the anchor that kept her grounded whenever her heart threatened to float away. To her, Ollie’s kindness wasn't a sign of hidden feelings; it was just... Ollie. He was the boy who had seen her lose her baby teeth and survive her awkward teenage years. In her mind, she was no more than a girl he cared for deeply but would never crave.
Eventually, the years of grit and grease paid off. The two men were recruited into the elite, dizzying world of Formula 1. It was the dream they had chased since they were seven, but for her, it meant they were gone for most of the year. The house felt too quiet without the sound of their arguing or the smell of track tires after a session, but a few thousand miles wouldn't stop her. She still attended every race she could, navigating the labyrinth of F1 logistics with a fierce determination. She found ways through those exclusive paddock gates, even if it meant a cheeky, well-timed email to Toto Wolff himself (which, to her delight and Kimi's confusion, had actually worked).
She became a regular in the paddock, a familiar face amidst the chaos. She’d find herself hanging out in the Mercedes garage first, watching Kimi with a twin's pride, before slipping away to loom around the Haas garage. She’d wait by the cooling fans, eyes searching for a familiar head of messy hair, her heart still doing that same somersault every time Ollie stepped out of the car and looked straight for her in the crowd with his gentle smile.
Then came the race in Emilia Romagna. The air was thick with the scent of espresso, expensive sunblock, and the distant, high-pitched whine of engines. It was a beautiful day for racing, but even better for drama. She strolled through the paddock, her VIP pass swinging proudly around her neck, stamped clearly with the Guest of Kimi Antonelli. Being the twin sister of a Mercedes prodigy had its perks, mainly that she got to attend the world's most exclusive sporting event. It was a long morning. For someone who has lived in Italy for all her life, she almost always lost her way. The long travel to the circuit induced hunger, which eventually led her toward the Paddock Club buffet, her mind focused entirely on finding carbs. Distracted by the menu board, she turned a corner and thump. She collided squarely with a very solid chest. "Oh, shoot! Sorry! I wasn’t looking at all," a soft voice apologized. "No, I’m sorry! I was definitely distracted," she countered, looking up.
Standing before her was a man who looked like he’d been synthesized in a lab specifically to be a heartthrob. He froze for a second, his eyes widening as he took her in. He looked genuinely stunned, she was so beautiful. "I’m, uh... I’m Arthur. Arthur Leclerc," he said, extending a hand. She giggled, the sound light and musical. "I know. You’re kind of hard to miss." She shook his hand, giving her name. "Are you here to give Charles moral support or just for the catering?"
"A bit of both," Arthur admitted, recovering his charm. "The food is usually the highlight if Ferrari has a bad pit stop."
"In that case, help a girl out," she said, gesturing to the buffet. "I’ve heard truffle pasta is to die for. Can you confirm the rumors?" Arthur made a face of mock contemplation. "The truffle is good, for sure. Very classic, but if you want the real deal, go for the Garlic Basil. It’s life-changing." She tilted her head, looking at him with an amused smirk, but she caught a glimpse of the clock behind him and decided that a single pain au chocolat would do for now. "Okay, Mr. Leclerc. I’ll hold you to that recommendation for next time, but I’ve got two drivers waiting for me who get very cranky if I’m late. I'll see you around."
She gave him a playful wave and headed off. She didn't see Arthur linger, his gaze following the sway of her hair until she disappeared into the crowd. By the time she reached the Mercedes garage, the two boys were already on high alert. Kimi was leaning against a stack of tires, talking to Ollie, who looked remarkably relaxed in his Haas kit, until he saw her. "Hey! What took you so long, amore?" Kimi asked, pushing off the tires to wrap her in a massive brotherly hug.
"Sorry! I got turned around," she says, burying her face in his shoulder. "I ended up by a hotel entrance talking to the concierge for way too long. I unfortunately forgot how to get to the paddock.” Ollie let out a soft snort, his eyes warm as he stepped forward. He reached out, pulling her into a hug that lasted just a beat longer than a friendly hug should. He leaned down, planting a soft, lingering kiss on the top of her head like he always does, but everytime, it made her stomach do a flip.
"You should have called me, darling," Ollie murmured, his hand resting casually on her shoulder. "I would have come and picked you up." She shook her head, smiling up at him. "No way. I know you guys are busy. Besides, the concierge was lovely! He even pointed out the best local flower shops for me to visit tomorrow." They stood there for a while, the three of them falling into their usual rhythm, cracking inside jokes about the absurd outfits the celebrities were wearing and debating whose car looked more like a glorified lawnmower that weekend.
“What are your thoughts on the fans having a giant head cutout of yours?” she asked, taking a messy bite out of her pastry. “It’s kind of funny, actually,” Ollie answered, sounding so matter-of-fact before leaning down to take a bite out of her bread, which made her laugh. “I mean, if they’re fine with staring at a gigantic version of my face for two hours, then why not, right?”
“It’s hilarious to see my head that big,” Kimi chimed in, gesturing vaguely in the air to demonstrate the size. “Like, imagine if you woke up tomorrow and your head was actually that big. You wouldn’t be able to get through the door. You’d just be stuck in your room forever, staring out the window like a giant balloon.” It was exactly the kind of absurd, ridiculous comment Kimi always made, the kind that kept them grounded even when their lives were moving at two hundred miles per hour. All of it was perfect. The sun was warm, the laughter was easy, and the company was even better. It was home.
Then, the vibe shifted. Kimi was the first to notice. His eyes narrowed, his protective twin sensors pinging. "Why is Arthur Leclerc looking at you like that?" he muttered, adjusting the brim of his cap. She followed his gaze. A few yards away, Arthur was leaning against the railing, looking effortlessly cool. When he caught her looking, he didn't look away. Instead, he offered a polite, lingering wave and a slow, charming smile. She felt a flush hit her cheeks. She started to lift her hand to wave back; it was only polite, after all, but she didn't finish the motion. Suddenly, Ollie was there. He moved into her personal space with the grace of a driver taking the apex, effectively stepping between her and Arthur’s line of sight. He reached out to her; his body acted as a human barricade.
His jaw was set in that terrifyingly tight line. His shoulders were squared, and he looked twice his usual size. "Shouldn't he be with Charles?" Ollie’s voice was suddenly clipped, almost cold. He didn't look back at Arthur. He kept his eyes fixed on her, though his focus felt more like he was guarding a treasure than having a conversation. "He’s going to get in the way of the mechanics standing there." She looked at Ollie in genuine shock. Ollie was the sweet one. He was the endlessly polite one. Hearing him sound so possessive and riled up was like seeing a golden retriever turn into a wolf.
She reached out, patting his arm gently with a smile that made Ollie melt even if he didn't want to admit it. "We just met in the Paddock Club. He was just being nice and giving me pasta recommendations."
"Yeah? The truffle is the only thing worth eating there," Ollie snapped, his eyes flashing. "Actually, Arthur said the Garlic Basil was the one to die for," she replied. She saw Ollie’s teeth clench. A muscle in his jaw leaped. For a split second, he looked ready to march over there and start a very public, very unsweet argument about pasta and boundaries, but then he caught himself. He saw her confused expression and immediately forced a breath out, softening his features.
"Right," he muttered, his voice dropping back into its usual sweet tone, though the edge was still there. "He’s just... trying to be charming. Don't listen to him." He gave her a one-armed side hug, squeezing her tight before Kimi pushed him away for their respective pre-race briefings, making sure to turn and give her sister their signature twin fist bump right after.
Left to her own devices, she wandered over to the cooling fans to escape the Italian heat. "I thought they’d never let you go," a voice joked. She turned to find Arthur approaching with an easy stride. "Your brother and Bearman are like a two-man security around you. I wasn't sure if I needed a background check just to say hello." She laughed, the tension Ollie had created finally starting to dissipate. "It’s a twin thing. Kimi is... well, Kimi. And Ollie? He just takes everything that happens during the race weekend very seriously."
Arthur leaned against the railing next to her, looking down at his phone for a second before looking back at her. "So, I saw those peonies you posted on your Instagram story yesterday. They were stunning." Her heart skipped a beat. "You... you follow my Instagram? I didn't even know you knew it existed."
"I did some light investigations after we bumped into each other," Arthur teased, his voice attentive and kind. He started asking her about all the things someone would do during the first time they met. Eventually, they talk about her dream shop, the coffee nook, and which flowers grow best in the Italian climate. For a moment, she forgot about the engines, but unbeknownst to her, deep in the shadows of the Haas garage, hidden from the world by the roar of the crowd, Ollie stood perfectly still. His engineer was trying to show him telemetry data on a tablet, pointing out where he could gain time in sector two.
Ollie wasn't looking at the screen. Through the open garage door, he had a perfect, unobstructed view of the cooling fans. He saw Arthur leaning in to hear her over the noise. He saw the way they were smiling. He saw Arthur laugh at something she said, something that was probably supposed to be his joke. Ollie didn't move. He didn't say a word, but the grip he had on his helmet was so intense that his knuckles turned a sharp, ghostly white. The sweet Ollie seemed to be lost at that moment.. In his place was a man who felt like he was watching someone try to steal the very air from his lungs.
"Ollie? You good, mate?" his engineer asked, stepping closer with a water bottle. Ollie snapped his gaze away, his face instantly smoothing into a mask of professional, cold indifference. "I’m fine," he bit out, his voice vibrating with a dark, restless energy. He snatched his balaclava and pulled it over his head, hiding his eyes. "Let’s just get on the grid. I’m ready to move some people out of my way."
After the chaos of the podium ceremony, the spray of sticky champagne, the deafening roar of the crowd, and the frantic energy of the post-race interviews, the world finally began to quiet down. The sun was dipping lower over the circuit, painting the paddock in long, golden hues that reminded her of the track from their childhood. She stood by the front of the Mercedes garage, her heart still thumping in rhythm with the engines. When she saw Kimi approaching, still glowing with the adrenaline of a podium finish, she couldn't contain herself. “Bravo, gemello! Complimenti!” she shouted, her voice cutting through the lingering mechanical hum of the pit lane.
Kimi didn't even slow down; he practically tackled her into a hug, his sweaty fireproof undershirt damp against her skin, but she didn't care. They clung to each other for a long moment, the silent twin language of I’m proud of you and I’m glad you’re safe passing between them, before Kimi was swept away by their parents’ tearful, ecstatic embraces. Ollie trailed behind him a moment later. He looked exhausted, his hair matted to his forehead and a faint smudge of grease on his cheek, but his eyes brightened the second they landed on her. She held her arms wide open, a silent invitation he never declined.
“Congratulations, Mr. Bearman,” she teased as he pulled her in. “P7, huh? Absolute magic out there. You moved through that field like you owned it.”
One of the million things Ollie loved about her, the thing that kept him up at night, was how she was so effortlessly good with words. Whether he was standing on the top step of the podium or nursing the sting of a DNF, she always knew exactly how to sway his mood. She was his North Star, the person who made the high-pressure vacuum of racing feel like a home. “I’m just glad you're here to see it all,” Ollie murmured into her hair. He tightened his grip. She giggled, the sound light and domestic, anchoring him back to earth. “I wouldn't miss it for the world,” she says, pulling back just enough to see both boys. “How about celebratory gelato? Like the old times? My treat.”
The word gelato acted like a command to Kimi. He snapped his head toward them, his eyes wide. “I want pistachio! And lemon! Let’s go right now!” Without waiting for a response, Kimi spun on his heel and started sprinting toward the parking lot, his trophy still clutched in one hand. They stood in stunned silence for a beat before bursting into simultaneous laughter. “He hasn't changed a bit,” Ollie chuckled, shaking his head. As they started to walk, following in Kimi’s frantic wake, Ollie reached out and threw his arm around her shoulder. It was a heavy, warm weight, a familiar tether. Without a second thought, she snuggled into his side, her head resting perfectly against his shoulder as they moved through the cool evening.
But as they walked, Ollie’s gaze drifted toward the Ferrari motorhome, reminded of what happened this morning. For years, Ollie had played the part of a loyal soldier, the perfect best friend, the man who respected Kimi’s fourth rule above all else. He had stayed on the sidelines because Kimi asked him to, and because he feared losing the only family he had ever truly known, but seeing that look in Arthur’s eyes changed something deep inside him. The almost was no longer enough. The what-if in his heart had become a when.
Ollie tightened his arm around her, his fingers grazing her arm in a way that felt less like a brother and more like a man marking his territory, and as he looked down at the girl tucked against his side, he realized he couldn't stay on the sidelines anymore. Not when someone else was finally starting to realize exactly what he had known since he was eleven years old.
He might just be done obeying and pretending.
── .✦
🔒︎ msantonelli
𝖤𝗆𝗂𝗅𝗂𝖺-𝖱𝗈𝗆𝖺𝗀𝗇𝖺
liked by kimi_antonelli, olliebearman, georgerussell63 and 40 others
msantonelli beyond proud of you, gemello! 🩵
kimi_antonelli grazie, amore! I couldn't have done it without your support!
↳ msantonelli 🩵🩵🩵
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olliebearman posted a story!
kimi_antonelli replied to your story: 😆🖕🏻🩵
msantonelli replied to your story: why am I always third wheeling you two i'm sick of it
↳ olliebearman would you rather have me kiss your cheek instead?
↳ msantonelli Oliver!!!!! 😳😣
↳ olliebearman i'm kidding!! 🤪