It’s In My Head, Now It Has To Be In Yours. @oddlydescriptive - Tumblr Blog

oddlydescriptive

Mar 28

Reset, Chapter Twenty-Six

Max Verstappen x f1 driver! Reader

Enemies to friends to lovers slow burn

Teaser: Jesus Christ, you really need to stop falling asleep with Max.

Series Masterlist

Google: what do i need in my kitchen to cook

Google: what are staple ingredients

Google: monaco grocery delivery services asap

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This is stupid. This is so fucking stupid. You’re almost mad.

Not at him. That would be too easy. You’re mad at yourself- for saying yes, for letting it become a thing, for standing in front of your closet like an idiot when the idea is literally to cook dinner and leave. This should not be a big deal.

It’s just a kitchen. Just one meal. You do this all the time. You’ve fed whole pit crews with a Traeger and a bad attitude. You’ve cooked at Danny’s more times than you can count in the past month and a half.

And yet you’ve changed outfits twice.

Three times, if you count the first outfit you wore to the grocery store this morning, no problem, but ripped off the second it was time to go to Max’s, because it looked like you were trying.

Trying to look hot, or something. Embarrassing.

So you switch to something more neutral- black leggings, oversized sweater, sneakers- safe, anonymous, practical. But then you catch your reflection and it’s too… blah. Just because you don’t want to look like you’re trying doesn’t mean you want him to think you’re not hot, because that’s also embarrassing. You change again.

Jeans. A simple top. A jacket that looks like you threw it on without thinking, even though- well, you’re obviously thinking. You fix your hair. Then you un-fix it. You add mascara. A little gloss. Nothing you wouldn’t do for a regular day, but then wipe it off because gloss is for attention and you are not giving Max Verstappen the satisfaction of thinking you’re doing anything for him.

Except you are going to his apartment. To cook. For him.

You stare at yourself in the mirror and your stomach tightens with the stupidest, most infuriating truth: you’re nervous.

Not because you have a crush. You don’t. Not like that. This isn’t hearts and butterflies, it’s… rules. Your rules. His rules. The ones you’ve both followed without question since the day you met.

He’s mean. You’re mean back. You both pretend you don’t care. You both keep your distance. You both survive. Friendly by circumstance is one thing- dinner at Danny’s, sponsors, paddock obligations, Jos doing whatever the hell he does. But friendly by choice? Friendly by appointment?

That’s new.

You check your tote bag for the third time.

You’ve brought almost all of the ingredients. And your knife roll. And a bottle of olive oil you like because it’s not that you don’t believe Max has olive oil, per se, but you fear it may have been sitting on the counter for six months. You’re overpacked, and you know it, but you can’t stop grabbing just one more thing and shoving it into your poor tote bag because you have no idea what you’re walking into and you’re not going to let the discovery that Max Verstappen might not own a pair of tongs bring your meal to a halt. You know you’re overdoing it, even as you tuck a pair next to the olive oil.

You’ve overthought the menu too.

At Danny’s, you never think this hard. You just pick something from your mental cookbook- filling, clean, calorie-conscious- and get on with it. But Max is pickier. Not in an obnoxious way, not because he makes a thing of it, but you have noticed what gets quietly pushed around his plate. What he reliably finishes and what he does not. He is not really a seafood person, not especially adventurous, and seems to prefer food that is simpler, more familiar. Honestly, you get the impression that if a RedBull nutritionist were not standing over his shoulder with a gun, he would be perfectly content eating some variation of meat and potatoes every night.

And, if you’re honest, the idea of cooking for him feels weird in a way you do not enjoy thinking about. Which is ridiculous, really, because if you are in Max’s apartment making dinner and he is the only one there, who the fuck else would you be cooking for?

Oh my god. You need to get the hell out the door before you think yourself to death.

You grab the overstuffed tote, haul your bike downstairs, and head for his building with your brain still trying to chew its own leg off the entire way there. You only get briefly held in the lobby before Max comes down to let you up- a quick, quiet little interruption in the middle of your ongoing irritation with yourself. He says hi. Nothing weird about it, exactly, but there is a noticeable lack of the usual bite between you, different enough that you both seem aware of it.

Then you are just… there. In Max’s apartment. Holding your bag. With your own tongs packed inside like a lunatic.

Sorry, Danny, you’ve got a nice apartment, but Max wins. At first glance, the place is gorgeous.

Not just water view. Waterfront. Right over Cap d’Ail. Big glass, balcony, tan stone, clean lines, the whole thing bright without feeling like the soul has been sucked out of it by neutrals. It’s not ostentaoiusly large, but it’s bigger than anything you’ve seen in Monaco so far. There’s a hallway on each side of the living space with doors that assumedly go somewhere. There are a few odd gaps- places where it feels like something should be there and isn’t- but overall it is beautiful.

He must be working at the island- his laptop is open. There are a few printouts spread beside it. He drifts back toward them after the initial greeting, not brushing you off so much as giving you room to get settled, which is probably for the best.

You set your bag down, push your sleeves up, and go straight to the kitchen to see what kind of situation you are working with. You are expecting to have to work around things. At least something. Fill in gaps, improvise a bit.

Instead, you open the fridge and just stand there for a second. It is stocked. Like, really, genuinely stocked. Produce. Proteins. Condiments. Cheese. Actual options. Not random bachelor odds and ends, but a functional fridge. A useful fridge. A person could walk into this kitchen, right now, and make several real meals without having to first run to the store for a thing.

You glance over at your bag. Your knives. Your onion you surprisingly did not need to bring. You do not make a thing of it. Just turn back to the counter and start sorting what you are using and what can stay packed.

The kitchen is good. Not as familiar to you as Danny’s is, but you might like it more, on first impression. Scratch that, you definitely like it more, as is has American sized appliances. It’s well appointed, reasonably organized. Good knives. Good pans. Bowls that match, no sizes missing. Enough counter space to actually work. There are a few little gaps once you start opening drawers- odds and ends missing, a couple tools you want to reach for and don’t find- but nothing that matters. Nothing you can’t work around.

So, fine. You were wrong. You underestimated him.

You get the chicken out, start setting things on the counter, grab the olive oil- the seal is still on it. You pause, then peel it off with your thumbnail and move on. Garlic. Fine. Potatoes. Fine. You reach for the Dijon. Also… sealed.

That gives you a second longer pause, but you open it, set it down, keep going. Yogurt from his fridge for the sauce- untouched. Full seal under the lid. The fresh herbs still banded. Honey unopened. Even the pepper grinder does that thing where it feels like there’s no kernels in the grinder for the first few turns. You stop with the spoon in your hand and look, really look, at the sum of the parts.

Everything is new.

Not new in the sense of picked up a few things today or maybe grabbed some produce recently. New in the sense that none of it has been used. Not once. You had been giving him credit for a very competent kitchen, and maybe some of that credit still stands, but this- this is different.

This is a man who very clearly did major shopping today. For this specific meal.

You don’t turn around right away. Just finish opening the yogurt, set the lid aside, and let the thought settle into place without poking at it too hard.

It could be practical. Probably is, in part. If someone is coming over to cook, it makes sense to make sure there is food in the house. It could also be Max being thorough, preemptive, not wanting there to be a problem once something is in motion. But there is also something a little… considered about it. A little ahead-of-time. Enough that you are not entirely sure what to do with it.

It is faintly vindicating, in a way. You had not been completely insane to pack like you did. The original assumption had not exactly been wrong. But that feeling gets tangled almost immediately with something humored and fond that you do not linger on for very long. You don’t call him on it. For one thing, there is no point. For another, it feels easier to let him have it- whatever it is.

You slice the potatoes, start the chicken, pull a bowl down from the cabinet for the sauce. Behind you, he is still at the island with his laptop and his papers, close enough that you can hear the occasional shift of a page, the soft tap of keys.

It occurs to you somewhere in the middle of chopping cucumber that Danny is not here, which means there is no third point in the room. No buffer. No easy drift in and out of someone else’s conversation. If there is going to be talking, you are actually going to have to do it. On purpose.

You keep your eyes on the cutting board.

“What are you working on?” you ask, like it is only a practical question, like you have not spent the last several minutes quietly aware of the sound of him shifting papers behind you.

“Redline stuff.” It’s not a clipped answer, exactly. Just… not expanded. A normal answer, left where it lands.

You scrape the chopped cucumber into the bowl with the side of your knife and reach for the tomatoes. You have heard some about Redline, obviously. Enough by proximity. You went to the same conventions as him last fall- the day you got your contract signed- the day you made Max get on his knees in a bar and beg you for the change in the bottom of your purse. Damn, that was a really good day. You had the same name tags, the same brand reps foaming at the mouth to get five minutes of your attention. You are not really a sim racing person in the way some people are. You use it because it is useful. Practice. Data. Reps. A way to prove your work ethic, a way to learn- but you have never really understood the appeal of doing it recreationally, much less for an audience.

Still, you ask, “Are y’all using any of that new equipment they were demoing in London?” There is a beat behind you. You glance over only briefly. Max is looking at you now, not suspicious exactly, but a little surprised. Like he was not expecting a follow-up that specific.

“Some of it,” he says. “We are going to use the Ascher wheels they showed us this year.” You make a small sound of recognition, and something shifts, just enough that the next sentence between you comes easier than the first one did. And the next one easier than that.

He starts explaining what they changed. The wheel company. The logic behind the swap. The difference in input feel. You ask one question, then another. Small ones. Real ones. Not fake-interest questions. The sort of thing you would ask anyone talking about equipment that matters in your line of work.

And Max- maybe because you actually know what he means, maybe because you are not making him translate himself into simpler language, maybe because this is a subject he does not often get to talk about with someone who can keep up- starts talking.

Properly talking.

He gets into the weeds fast. Steering weight. Where half the commercially popular stuff completely mucks it up. How regulating equipment in sim racing would legitimize some things and ruin others. What counts as meaningful performance and what is just expensive nonsense dressed up as innovation. He is not trying to sound smart. He just is. The words come more quickly, more easily, and with each minute he sounds less like someone answering a question and more like someone following a thought all the way out because, for once, nobody is interrupting him or glazing over.

You set the knife down after a while without really meaning to, wipe your hands on the towel by your hip, and turn fully around so you can look at him properly. He is still sitting at the island, one arm near the laptop, one hand moving now when he talks, papers forgotten. There is more expression in his face than usual.

The conversation keeps going. You start batting the subject back and forth in a way that feels oddly good almost immediately- quick and technical and just argumentative enough to be interesting. You disagree on a couple of things. Agree hard on others. He pushes back. You push back harder. He is smiling by the time he tells you your ideas about regulations would be a scrutineering nightmare.

The weirdness of arriving starts dissolving without either of you really noticing. The room changes shape around the conversation. Dinner is still happening in the background- oven heating, dressing waiting, chopped vegetables sitting half-finished on the counter- but the real momentum has moved somewhere else. Into this. Into the fact that talking to him like this is… easy, actually. That he can be kind of funny. Stimulating in a way you had not been braced for.

Because Max is smart. You knew that, obviously. You are not discovering his intelligence for the first time. He didn’t just stumble into two championships by being dumb. But this version of it is different from watching him be right in meetings or brutal in debriefs or dryly competent in some paddock conversation. This is him interested. This is him talking about something because he wants to, not because he has to. The difference is immediate.

You shake your head and turn just enough to scoop the last of the salad into the bowl, and toss a look over your shoulder when you tease him for being a grump everytime DTS is in the hospitality suite. And the look he gives you then is warm in a way that catches you a little off guard. Not soft. Not sweet. Just open, for a second. Engaged. Like he is enjoying this as much as you are.

Which, apparently, he is. So you stand guard next to your half-made salad and your hip against the counter and keep talking to him until dinner is nearly done and you definitely need to pee before you sit to eat. “Where’s your bathroom?” you ask.

Max points down the hall. “First door.” You head that way, only to find there are two doors across from each other that could both reasonably qualify as first. You pick the left one.

The room beyond is mostly empty.

You do not really process it beyond that- just a quick impression of pink on one wall, a little decal that you don’t stop long enough to make out, a few stray pieces of furniture that are clearly not random. Definitely not the bathroom. Not guest room, either. Something personal enough that you back right out.

“To the left, you said?” you call.

“No,” Max says. “The right.”

“Oh. Okay.” You shut the door and go into the bathroom opposite, do your thing, and it’s only while you’re sitting there bunching up your toilet paper that it hits you.

Kelly’s daughter.

You knew, vaguely, that they had all lived here. But that room- half emptied, still marked- makes it real in a way the abstract version never was. And before you can think too hard about what that means, or how much history sits inside something as simple as the wrong door, you know you need to say something the second you walk back out. Not because you want to talk about it. Quite the opposite. Because the last thing you need is for him to think you were wandering around his apartment opening doors for fun when the two of you are only just, barely, in a place where dinner together feels non-violent.

So when you come back into the kitchen, you say it immediately, because there’s not much else to do but that. “I, um… I opened the wrong door first,” you tell him. “I wasn’t snooping.”

Max glances up from the island. He does not look angry. Not even annoyed, really. Just still in a way he wasn’t a few minutes ago. “Oh,” he says. That is all.

And because you are not stupid, you know exactly what happened.

You clearly just stumbled into something tender by accident, and Max, being Max, does not make a scene of it. He just folds whatever part of himself that had been open and smiley back up and turns towards his printouts again.

You turn back to the counter before the silence can harden any further and start plating dinner.

Chicken first. Potatoes. Salad. Something to do with your hands. Something orderly. You are only a little annoyed with yourself, but enough that it sits there under your ribs- sharp and stupid. You had managed to get things feeling normal. Better than normal, actually. Easy. And then you go and open the wrong door like an idiot and fuck it all up. But… as you start setting things onto the plates, the rest of it begins to line up.

The girl’s room.

The odd gaps in the apartment you noticed when you came in- spaces that looked less like bad decorating and more like something used to be there. A chair. Art. A lamp. Whatever it was, gone now, leaving behind that faintly unfinished feeling you only really clock when something has been removed, not never added at all.

The missing odds and ends in the kitchen.

And the fridge.

You pause with the serving spoon in your hand. Now that you’ve seen it- you can’t unsee it.

Because of course. Of course all of it was bought today. Not some well-stocked domestic miracle you had been generously crediting him for, but a man realizing someone was coming over to cook and making sure the house could support that without exposing all the places where a life had recently been broken apart.

The thought lands heavier than you expect.

You have never really done that- never built a life with someone in the literal sense. Not like that. Not to the point where your things are their things and their home is your home and a child’s room sits down the hall because this is where she lives too. But the truth is, you do know a little bit about what it means to get folded into someone else’s life. Maybe not fully, not like this. Not in the adult, shared-home, shared-responsibilities, shared-everything way that seems to linger all over this apartment. But enough to feel the edge of it.

The closest thing you have ever had to domesticity is Florida.

Not even with Dom, exactly. With all of them.

After COTA, when the families collectively decided it would be better for you and Dom to race out of Florida for a while, you moved back with his family to their estate outside Miami. He got shifted out to the guest house- partly because he was getting older, partly because he was the only son and his parents were already starting to widen the perimeter around him, letting him feel a little more like his own person. You got his old room.

And just like that, you were in it.

You spoke their language. You ate at their table. You did homework with the girls. Helped brush little teeth and braid little heads and tug uniforms straight and clean up after dinner and carry groceries in from the car. You learned the rhythms of the house without trying. Which cabinet the glasses were in. Which sister needed the green cup and which one would cry if you packed fruit that touched the crackers in her lunch. Which nights Señora Reyes lit the little candle by the Virgin in the kitchen and why. Which nights Señor Reyes wanted quiet after work and which nights he wanted everybody at the table loud and laughing.

You were not their daughter, obviously. But you were part of the family.

Part of it enough that when Señor Reyes sat you and Dom down one night- serious, formal, both fathers already in agreement, the mothers having apparently talked it to death before any of you knew there was a conversation happening- it felt like family business.

You can still remember how careful he was with it. How adult he tried to make you both feel. That this was not a punishment. Not disapproval. Just practicality. Wisdom, in the way parents define wisdom when they are trying to save their children from futures they think they can already see going wrong.

It was time, he said, for focus.

On racing, for you. On the parts distribution business, for Dom.

Or… on marriage, on building a life the way both families would also support and understand.

But not both. Not all of it at once. Not if either of you wanted the best real shot at what was in front of you. They did not want split focus with the level of financial investment that was going to be required. Did not want fumbled opportunities. Did not want a drawn-out, ugly collapse between two young people who had grown up too close, too attached, too tangled up in each other to blow apart cleanly if it all went bad at the wrong time.

So the choice got laid out like something almost reasonable.

You and Dom could break up now, stay kind, stay clean, let each other chase the lives opening in front of you.

Or… you could stay. Not go to Japan. Let international racing go. Marry. Build something steadier, more local, more shared. Fold fully into the family in the way everyone could already see.

At the time it had felt impossible that adults could sit there so calmly and discuss the flavor of your heartbreak like a business merger.

And then you took Japan.

You took Puerta Performance and the tiny room and the international shot and the ache of it. You took the path the meant you had to leave behind the only boy you’d ever loved, who’d ever bought you flowers, who saw you with your braces and awkward limbs and undercooked race craft and decided you were special to him, long before you’d ever done anything particularly special at all. You took the version of your life that widened instead of narrowed.

You might have chose it, but it still hurt like hell.

Agony, really. Not dramatic teenage sadness. Agony. Weeks of crying yourself to sleep in that tiny dorm room with its hard mattress and paper-thin walls. Weeks of winning and stepping off podiums with nobody there who really belonged to you. No family table. No little sisters. No Dom. Just your mechanic and the team boss and whatever shape of pride or loneliness you could scrape together on your own.

If that felt that bad- if losing that not-even-fully-built version of domestic life had hollowed you out that completely- then this…

You glance, just once, toward the hall, toward the room you opened by mistake. Then at the clean, expensive apartment with its small missing pieces. The kitchen drawers with their little absences. The empty walls with nails still in the drywall. The shape of a life that was clearly once whole and is now very much not.

And you really cannot imagine it.

Cannot imagine loving someone enough that their child has a room in your home. Enough that your things and their things stop being separate categories. Enough that the apartment itself begins to reflect a shared life instead of a single one. And then having to cut that down the middle. Not just emotionally, but physically. Practically. Piece by piece. Missing furniture. Empty drawers.

You do not want to feel sorry for him. You know better than that. Max would hate it. He would hate being looked at like something wounded and tragic, but it’s just the quiet, unavoidable understanding that this must have hurt him in ways he probably never talks about. Prabably tries not to think about.

You glance around a little as you finish making each plate and realize you have no idea what the protocol is here. At Danny’s, you know the flow. Here, you have got nothing. So…you ask. “Do you usually eat at the island,” you say, “or the table, or the couch?”

Max looks up from where he is closing his laptop. “Normally, the couch, but-”

You pick up one of the plates and interrupt whatever he’s going to say next. “Couch is fine.” More than fine, honestly. The couch feels easier. Looser. Less like a dinner with implications. Less like being sat across from each other under across and actual table while you both pretend not to notice that this is the first time you have ever done this on purpose.

“Couch is great,” you add, a little too quickly, and nod toward the TV. “We can watch film while we eat, if you don’t mind.”

That, at least, feels normal. Practical. Useful. Dinner with a screen on and race footage running is familiar enough that your body loosens around it automatically. The whole reason you started making dinner at Danny’s in the first place was to watch film together. It had just… expanded from there. Or maybe derailed from there, depending on how you looked at it. Danny likes to talk too much for it to ever be efficient, which means you rarely get as much done as you would by yourself, but you have never really minded.

Max, on the other hand, just nods. “Yeah. Fine.”

He takes his plate, grabs the remote, and heads for the couch while you follow with yours and a notebook. By the time you sit down, he is already pulling up the most recent Saudi race. You settle in at one end of the couch while he takes the other, enough room between you to feel reasonable, and the opening frames wash the room in the bright artificial glow of Jeddah.

There. That is better. The whole thing feels less exposed with race footage on. Less like dinner for dinner’s sake. More like something with a structure you both understand. Something to look at besides each other. Something to build the silence around, if it comes.

By the second replay angle, trying to eat and write is pissing you off. Then you have your notebook open on the coffee table and you are sliding down off the cushion, folding onto your knees without really thinking about it. You sit back on your heels, plate beside the notebook, eating with your left hand and writing with your right so fast the pen is almost scratching.

You pause, jot something down. Rewind ten seconds. Pull a page out and set it next to the one you’re working on. Watch a line through Turn 22 again. Scribble harder. Take another bite. Your right hand never really stops moving. You ask for new angles or rewinds or skips enough that Max eventually surrenders the remote to you entirely.

Max is quiet for a while. Then he laughs. Not mean, or even dry, really. Just light enough to make you look up.

“What?” you ask.

He tips his head toward you and your entire little floor setup. “I used to think maybe you did all that at the factory to look busy or smarter than the rest of us or something.”

You blink once. “All what?”

“The…” He gestures vaguely. “This. The notes. The total table takeover, always writing stuff down.” You stare at him.

“It’s funny,” he says. “Seeing you actually just do it anyway.”

You lean back a little on your heels. “Do what, exactly?”

He shrugs, like the answer is obvious. “Be busy. Be smart.”

That lands in a way you do not entirely appreciate, mostly because it is nice and you are allergic to that in this particular context. So you point your pen at him. “Max, the day I start trying to impress a man on purpose, you need to shoot me.” His eyebrows go up. “Genuinely,” you add. “Put me down.”

He huffs a laugh. “Like a dog?”

“Yes, exactly like a dog. I’m telling you,” you say, going back to your notebook, “that if I ever start performing intelligence for male approval, it’s over for me. End it, I beg you. Mercy kill.” You make a little chopping motion over your own neck.

Max leans back into the couch, still faintly amused. “And I’m the one you trust with that?”

You glance up long enough to give him a flat look. “You have the guts for it. I believe in you.”

That makes him laugh again, quieter this time, and when you look back down at your notes your mouth is still threatening to smile about it. You keep going for another hour or so, maybe more, but the edge starts coming off eventually.

Not your focus, exactly. Just your speed.

The notes get less frantic. Your bites get farther apart. You yawn once, then again, trying to tuck it into your shoulder like that will make it less obvious. By the time the replay gets into the back half of the race, you are more curled over your notebook than actively attacking it.

You stretch without thinking about it- arms up, shoulders back, spine arching out the stiffness from hunching over the coffee table. Across the couch, Max’s eyes flick up. Just for a second. Quick and instinctive and almost immediately corrected, like he catches himself in the act and looks back to the screen before it can become a thing.

You do not seem to notice him. Or maybe you do and choose not to.

You let your arms drop and blow out a breath. “Okay,” you say. “I’ve got enough material for tonight.”

You close the notebook halfway and glance back at him. “What about you?”

Max looks at the screen, then at you, then down at the mess of notes spread across the coffee table. The truthful answer- the one he is not about to volunteer in so many words- is that he is not in a particular hurry to end this.

Having someone here changes the apartment. Simple as that. It stops feeling so hollow. Less like a place he is existing in and more like one he is actually living in, even if it is only because you are kneeling on the floor with a pen between your teeth and half a salad still sitting by your elbow. And when you are relaxed like this, really relaxed, there is something about your energy that is unexpectedly easy to be around. Focused. Warm. Busy without being frantic. Alive in a way that does not crowd the room or ask anything from him.

So instead of answering directly, he says, “Let me see.”

You narrow your eyes a little. “See what?”

“Your notes.” That gets immediate suspicion. It moves across your face fast and plain as weather. Guarded. A little ready for impact.

A few months ago, he absolutely would have taken the notebook just to find something wrong with it. Or to needle you. Or to say something that would make you feel half a step behind and him half a step above, which at the time had seemed easier than admitting you were very, very good at your job and it irritated him how often everyone else talked about it.

Back when you were doing his debrief packets for Red Bull, he had been a complete ass about it. He knows that now in a way he did not fully let himself know it then. Well, maybe he knew, but there was some part of him that refused to look at it through any sort of human eyes.

You hesitate, notebook still half under your hand. “For what?” you ask.

Max shrugs, aiming for casual and not entirely getting there. “I’ve driven there. And,” he adds, drier, “I know some things.” You stare at him another second. Clearly unconvinced. Clearly assuming, at least in part, that this is a trap. He cannot even blame you for that.

Still, after a beat, you hold the notebook out to him. Suspiciously. Like you are handing over key evidence to a dirty cop.

Max takes it without comment. And then, almost immediately, his whole expression changes- not much but enough. Jesus, is this- is this nostalgia?

Because the first thing that hits him is the cadence.

The precision.

The way everything is structured exactly the way he remembers.

Your brain, God, it’s… you are not just writing down what happened- you are sorting it while you go, grouping problems by type, marking where the driver is compromised by the car versus where the line choice is giving away time, flagging tire behavior separately from traffic effects. The language is efficient. The observations are sharp. Every note earns its place.

It is undeniably excellent.

For a second, all he can think is that he misses this.

Misses getting handed something this good after a session. Misses how easy it used to be to pull meaning from your work, even when he was being too much of an asshole to say so. Misses how it felt to pick up a debrief that wasn’t just from someone who knew how to do their job, but from someone who just…knew.

And right on the heels of that comes the other thing. Shame.

Because he had not just failed to appreciate it at the time. He had made it harder. Made you dread giving things to him. Made you brace for criticism when what he should have done was recognize that you were doing a job most people around him could not have done half as well.

He turns a page.

Still so good. Still so exact. Still so unmistakably you.

You are watching him closely from the floor, trying very hard to look casual about it and not succeeding at all. “Well?” you ask after a minute.

Max looks up. There is a pause- small, but real- while he chooses his words with more care than he used to choose any words with you. “These are good,” he says.

You snort softly, like you do not buy the simplicity of that.

But he means it. More than that, probably. Enough that he can feel the ugliest version of himself- the one who would have found something petty to jab at just to avoid the discomfort of saying something sincere- haunting the space like something everyone feels but refuses to see.

He looks back down at the page, thumb resting near the margin where your handwriting has gone slightly slanted with fatigue.

“They were always good,” he says, quieter now. And there it is. Not an apology. Not quite. But close enough. The admission that you were always competent. You were always good enough.

You finally get up off the floor and move back to the couch while he reads. Just the other end, your legs tucked up under you, one arm folded into the cushion while Max flips through the pages of your notebook with a level of attention that would have made you feel hunted a few months ago.

He goes through it properly, too. Not skimming. Not doing that thing people do where they glance at your notes and say ‘nicely done’. He actually reads. The flags. Your corner notes. The sector breakdown. The reminders you’ve written to yourself in the margins- things to watch for, things to feel for, places where the track punishes hesitation and places where it punishes greed.

It is a little intimate in the sense that this is how your brain works when you are trying to prepare. Sparse in some places, obsessive in others. All information, no decoration. And Max is sitting there moving through it like it makes perfect sense to him.

He taps one line with his finger. “This part’s right, but the issue isn’t really the exit. It’s where the car settles right before as you come from the backside.”

You lean further back into the couch, folding one knee up. “No, I know, but if it’s settling early there, that’s why I flagged the exit, since that’s where you’re losing the time, technically.”

He glances at you.

The reply is immediate, longer than he probably expects, and by the time you are done explaining exactly why you grouped it that way- what it changes downstream, how it affects setup through the next corner, why you are tracking the consequence instead of the original input- he is still looking at you with that same slightly sharpened attention he gets when something interests him for real.

He goes back to the notebook. A minute later, he says, “I think you’re underestimating how much you’ll get behind on the long straight if the car’s weak on power.”

That one makes you tilt your head. “Okay, but then how do you fight?” He looks up. “At a track like Jeddah,” you say, “if the car doesn’t really have the power?”

And that, apparently, is the right question. Because he starts explaining it immediately, and once he starts, he really starts.

There aren’t that many technical sections, he says. Not the kind where you can just manufacture time with neatness and patience and a perfectly rotated slow corner. So if you don’t have the power, a lot of it comes down to how much risk you are willing to carry. Who is going to keep it flat the longest. Who is willing to commit earlier, drop in harder, take the wall as seriously as it deserves without respecting it so much that you give the lap away. There is only so much you can compensate for with setup or cleverness if the top-end just is what it is. At some point it becomes a question of nerve.

You listen, chin tucked into the blanket bunched against the arm of the couch. Somewhere while he is talking, you shift deeper into it without really thinking. The fabric is soft and cool on one side, warmer on the other where it’s tucked under your arm, and you pull a little more of it under your cheek.

“This blanket is really nice,” you murmur, half to yourself. Max glances over at you, then back down at the notebook. And you say, softer now, “Brave. Hm.” He keeps reading.

There is another note farther down that catches his eye- something about your line through a faster sequence, the underlying idea mostly right but one piece of it not quite lined up the way he thinks it should be. Important enough to say out loud, because he can see where you are going with it and he thinks you are just a little off in what you think the car is going to do for you.

He opens his mouth. Then… stops. Because you have not answered his last comment. Max looks up over the top of the notebook and- you are definitely asleep. Curled into the corner of the couch, cheek pressed into the blanket at the arm, one hand loose against your stomach, the other still half tucked beneath you. The line between your brows is gone. Your mouth is soft. You must have gone under sometime between brave and whatever he said after.

He looks at you for a second longer than he means to. Then back down at the notebook. Then, almost absently, he reaches for the pen on the coffee table.

At first it is just one note. One thought in the margin where he thinks you are right about the balance shift, but maybe not quite right about what is causing it- it feels important that he tells you. Then another, shorter one, tucked beneath a flag in Sector Two. He flips a page. Writes again. Not correcting so much as answering. Building onto what is already there.

He really should stop. He knows that. Should close the notebook, wake you up properly, send you home, go to bed himself. That would be the sensible thing. The normal thing.

But your notebook stays open in one hand, his pen keeps moving in the other, and the longer he sits there the more the whole thing starts to feel less like staying up too late and more like slipping into some oddly peaceful current he does not want to disturb, the way the world feels when he slips out of bed and into the sim in the middle of the night to test a theory he thought of.

Just for a second, he thinks. He will put it down in a second. Instead, the second stretches.

The notebook slips lower by degrees. The pen stays loose in his fingers. His head tips back against the couch, and somewhere between one more page and no page at all, Max falls asleep too.

When he wakes, the apartment is dark apart from the faint city glow through the glass, the TV long gone black, the room quiet in that deep middle-of-the-night way that makes every small sound feel separate. His neck hurts. The notebook is half slid down his chest. One arm is numb. Wake happens slowly enough that, at first, he does not know what is wrong.

And then he hears it again. He blinks harder and turns his head.

You are twisted into the corner of the couch where he left you, but not sleeping peacefully anymore. Your face is tight. Your breathing is wrong. One hand is clenched hard in the blanket and your body keeps giving these small, jerking movements- not enough to wake yourself, apparently, but enough that the whole thing looks wrong immediately once he is awake enough to understand what he is seeing. Whimpering, too, so quietly. So quietly he almost misses it.

He pushes himself up a little, still thick with sleep, and watches for a second longer than he means to, trying to catch up to the scene in front of him. Bad dream. Obviously.

The question is whether he should wake you. He hesitates, but you twitch again, sharper this time, and make another small, pained sound, and that decides it for him.

He sits up properly and the notebook slides off his chest and onto the cushion beside him. He leans forward, rubbing one hand over his face once, trying to shake the last of the sleep out of his head, and then starts to reach toward you.

“Hey,” he says, low. “Hey.” He is only just barely leaning over you when your eyes fly open. For one split second- before he even thinks you fully know where you are, before your waking brain can catch up to the room or the couch or him- he sees it.

Terror. Not surprise, or confusion, or ‘why am I awake.’ Terror so immediate, so total it changes your whole face.

You scrabble backward with a sound he will think about later, wild and blind and panicked, and the blanket tangles around your legs at exactly the wrong moment. There is no time to catch you. No time to say anything useful. You go off the side of the couch hard and hit the coffee table on the way down with a sick, ugly thud.

The mistake lands in him all at once. Max jerks back instantly, and reaches not for you this time but for the lamp, and the light snaps on bright and sudden, washing the whole room clean at once- the couch, the table, you on the floor, him already pulling himself farther away so there is no chance of making it worse. Fast, instinctive, like the second he understands what happened he makes himself smaller again, farther away, one hand scrubbing tiredly over his face.

You are already flushing.

Heat floods straight up your chest and into your face so fast it almost makes you dizzy. Embarrassment, immediate and complete. For falling asleep here. For the nightmare. For making that sound, whatever sound came out of you. For waking him up. For flinging yourself off his couch like a complete psycho. For all of it.

“Fuck,” you mutter, still half on the floor.

The blanket is wrapped around one leg and twisted under your arm. You fight your way out of it and pat frantically for your phone, heart still beating too hard and too fast for the room you are actually in.

“I’m sorry,” you say automatically, because of course you do. “I’m sorry, I-”

“It’s fine,” Max says.

And the annoying thing is, he sounds like he means it. Not overly gentle, but tired and matter-of-fact, like the whole thing is inconvenient at worst and not some unspeakably mortifying social crime.

You find your phone wedged half under the coffee table, snatch it up, and the screen light makes you squint against it.

4:30.

For one second, you just stare at it. Then everything drops. “Oh, fuck,” you say again, much worse this time. “Fuck.” You push up onto your knees, then your feet, already moving before your body is fully with you. “I have to go.”

Max squints at you from the couch, not fully tracking yet. “What?”

“My flight.” You are grabbing for your bag, your notebook, whatever ended up where. “I have to get back to my apartment, finish packing, call a taxi-” You glance at the screen again like it might somehow improve. It does not. “My flight’s in two and a half hours.”

Jeddah. It’s forty minutes to the airport alone. You are halfway bent to grab your other shoe when Max, who has somehow already folded himself sleepily back into the arm of the couch like a cat reclaiming warm furniture, says, “Sit down.”

You stop and look at him.

He is watching you through that heavy, wrecked look of someone who is awake only under protest, hair a mess, T-shirt wrinkled, one arm tucked under his head again like he intends to return to unconsciousness as soon as possible.

“What?”

“Sit down,” he repeats, voice rough with sleep. “Go back to sleep.”

You just stare at him like he’s said the dumbest thing possible. “I have to get to Jeddah, Max,” you say.

“Yeah.” He shuts his eyes for half a second, opens them again. “So come with me.”

You blink. “What?”

“To Jeddah.” He shifts deeper into the couch, blanket half across his lap now, already sounding less interested in staying fully conscious than in solving the problem efficiently enough that he can stop thinking about it. “You can just come with me.”

It isn’t exactly kind, or some sweeping rescue. It is practical in the most Max way possible- blunt, sleepy, irritated on behalf of the situation more than either of you. A solution offered with the clear subtext that he does not want to watch you pinball around the apartment at four-thirty in the morning when there is an easier option and he would, personally, like to go back to sleep now.

You stand there with one shoe in your hand, blanket half hanging off the couch, your pulse only just starting to come down from the nightmare and the fall and the sight of the time, and look at him. He looks back.

Then, because you can see it on him now that the adrenaline has stopped blurring the edges- the heavy set of his body into the couch, the way his eyes are only half open, the absolute bare-minimum patience of someone offering a solution from inside genuine exhaustion- you pause.

Because he clearly still wants to sleep.

And suddenly the thought of scrambling around his apartment at this hour, pulling yourself together in a blind panic while he lies there half conscious and regrets ever inviting you over, feels more unbearable than sitting back down.

So you sit. You lower yourself back onto the far end of the couch with your phone in your hand and the blanket still half tangled around your legs, and say, “Okay.” Max makes a vague sound of acknowledgment and resettles almost immediately, like now that the problem is temporarily contained he intends to return to being unconscious on principle.

You, meanwhile, are wide fucking awake.

There is not a chance in hell you are going back to sleep. Not after the dream. Not after waking up in blind terror. Not after eating shit into his coffee table and realizing it is four-thirty in the morning and you are apparently now sleeping over at Max Verstappen’s house.

What the fuck.

What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.

You stare at your phone and try to get your breathing to even out while your body continues to act like it has not received the memo that the emergency is over. You open your messages and start doing the practical things because practical things are better than thinking too hard. A text to the flight contact. Another to the team coordinator. Short, efficient, apologetic enough to smooth the edges without inviting questions. You will not make the flight. You are hitching a ride.

You send it and then just… scroll.

Nothing meaningful. Headlines. Messages. Reddit. Some girl from karting posting blurry club photos in your merchandise. A recipe you immediately bookmark because even at 4:30 in the morning and half out of your mind, crab rangoons always look delicious.

A few minutes pass. Maybe more. The city outside is still dark-blue at the edges, that weird suspended hour before morning starts behaving like morning. You are very aware of Max on the other end of the couch, of the fact that this is his couch and his blanket and his apartment.

Max cracks one eye open. He looks at you, phone-light glowing faintly against your face, and asks, voice rough with sleep, “You’re not going to sleep?”

You glance over. “No. Probably not.”

He exhales through his nose and drags his own phone off the cushion beside him. For a while he scrolls too, shoulders sunk deep into the couch, one forearm over his stomach, both of you lit by separate little rectangles of light. He is not fully going back under either. The commotion woke him up too much for that. You can tell. Every so often he shifts, checks the time, glances at a message, drops the phone to his chest for a second before picking it back up.

You stare at your screen another minute, then lower it and sit there with the thought forming before you actually mean to say it. “Do you want breakfast?” Max looks over. You lift one shoulder. “I’m obviously not sleeping. And you’re kind of not sleeping.”

A beat. “So. Breakfast?”

_____________________________________________________________________

It is not that the race is going badly.

You have been on a heater from the start- four passes already, maybe not all pretty, but done. Done hard. Every overtake has fed the next one, and now you are deep enough into the race that the whole thing has gone a little feral under your helmet. The walls are flashing by, the car is alive in your hands, and you want more.

Not in any rational, well-planned way. Not in any way your engineer would approve of if he could climb through the radio and look directly into your soul. But rational left the building somewhere around lap twelve, when you carved past two cars in three laps, then bullied your way through another move that probably should not have worked but did because you wanted it more, and now the whole race has narrowed into one bright, ugly, compulsive fact: you are not done passing people.

The problem is that the Ferrari in front of you is Charles.

And Charles is a bastard to get by when he wants to be.

He plays fair- you can’t accuse him of being dirty about it. He’s clean and irritatingly exact, which is worse. He places the car beautifully. Gives you nothing for free. You show him the nose into one braking zone and he closes the door without panicking. You hint at a run on exit and he positions the car just enough that the dirty air punishes you for even thinking about it. Every lap you get close enough to imagine it, and every lap he makes sure imagining it is all you get. You do not quite have the raw power to get it done cleanly, and Charles is being just enough of a defender that you keep arriving and arriving and arriving with nowhere to go.

The team is happy. P8. You are safely in the points. The car should hold. The strategy is still sound. But Charles is in front of you, and you are getting more aggravated every lap.

“Tyre deg is building,” Gavin says. “Need a little less from the front. Stay smart.”

“I’m aware.”

You are. You can feel it already- the front starting to smear a touch, the car asking slightly more from the tyre than the tyre wants to give. But every time you close on the Ferrari through the corners, the frustration spikes again and your right foot gets a little less reasonable.

“I’m faster,” you snap.

“In parts,” Gavin says, and he is right. In the corners where you can be brave enough to make up for the power deficit. In the places where the car changes direction well enough and the wall is close enough and the lap still rewards nerve. But then the Ferrari stretches again where it matters, and you are back in the dirty air, angrier than before.

“We’re happy where we are,” Gavin says.

You don’t even bother hitting your radio button, because all you have for him a snarl. You throw the car harder into the next section than you should. The rear twitches. You catch it.

“Careful.”

“I’m fine.” You are not fine. You are overdriving and you know it and you are doing it anyway. Your tyres are cooking. The front is getting hotter. Every lap behind him is costing you, but backing off feels impossible now. You have too much blood in it. Too much frustration. Too much momentum built up from clawing your way through the field just to get stuck staring at a Ferrari gearbox.

“We need a reset,” Gavin says, calm, non-confrontational, trying again. He’s not giving up on you. “Two corners. Breathe. Build again.”

Charles gets a little loose over a curb and your whole body lights up- gogogo- and you get him. Not cleanly. Not beautifully. Not with some measured, patient setup that makes everyone on the pit wall nod and call it mature and excellent racecraft. You get him because you are mean enough, late enough, and committed enough to make it happen, and for two laps the whole thing feels worth it.

For two laps, you are vindicated.

Then the tyres die. They just go.

The fronts are finished. The rears are not much better. Every corner that had felt sharp before now feels like punishment. The car is moving underneath you in all the wrong ways- sliding, skittering, refusing to hold the line unless you baby it so much it barely feels like driving. The pit wall had told you exactly this would happen if you kept hunting. They had, in very calm engineer language, told you to chill the fuck out.

You had not.

So now the race changes shape completely. Hunting becomes maintaining. Maintaining becomes survival. Charles comes back through first, which is somehow worse than if you had never passed him at all. You fight it for half a lap, maybe less, but there is nothing to fight with. No traction. No confidence on entry. No ability to rotate the car without asking more of the tyres than they physically have left to give. He gets you and is gone.

Then Ocon.

Then Gasly.

Each pass feels uglier than the last because you know exactly what you are feeling. You know what the car is trying to tell you. You know this is self-inflicted. There is no mystery here, no bad luck, no strategic betrayal, no one else to blame for the fact that you spent the middle of the race like a starving dog on a chain and now there is nothing left for the end except damage control.

“Just bring it home,” Gavin says.

You want to throw up. ‘Bring it home’, like you are not already doing everything short of physically dragging the thing by its collar. The last five laps are awful. Not racing, really. Just hanging on. The walls feel closer now. The car feels loose in a way that stops being frustrating and starts edging toward dangerous. You are catching little snaps you should not have to catch. Every braking zone feels too long. Every traction zone feels fake. By the final lap, you are no longer trying to attack anyone- you are trying not to lose the last point.

P10.

You cross the line absolutely spitting mad. Your whole body hot with it. Jaw clenched so hard it hurts. Sweat cooling under your suit while your hands still feel full of the wheel and all the mistakes you made with it. The worst part is that they were right, and you knew they were right while you were doing it, and you did it anyway.

You do not even want the cooldown lap. You do not want the result. You do not want the point. You do not want the bonus. You want your tyres back and six laps of your own stupidity erased.

Instead, all you get is the flag and Gavin in your ear, careful now, like he knows you’re two heartbeats from rage. “P10. Good points.”

Point, you correct mentally. Singular. Now you are even further behind the private ledger in your own head, and it’s currently ruining your life, and this time it’s undeniably your own goddamn fault. Not Charles’, or Ocon’s, or Gasly’s, or the tyres fault for finally doing exactly what tyres do when you torture them past the point of reason. You are furious at yourself, which is always worse, because you are the one person you have no inclination to ever forgive.

That is what keeps feeding the fire. There is no bad luck to hide in. No strategic misread big enough to take refuge behind. No one else’s mistake to sink your teeth into. You knew what was happening while it was happening. You knew you were cooking the tyres. You knew you were overdriving. You knew the race was turning from controlled aggression into something greedy and stupid and emotional, and you did it anyway.

You should have ten points by now. Ten or more. You know where they were meant to come from. You can see the shape of the season you were supposed to be building, race by race, little handholds of progress and competence and proof.

Instead you have three.

So by the time you get out of the car, every part of you already feels too hot. Your face under the balaclava. Your scalp. Your chest. Your arms. The rage sits right under your skin like heatstroke. You’re perfect for the press, because you always are, but people on the team -your people- speak to you and you answer, but badly. Too short. Too clipped. Not enough eye contact. Your physio tries to guide you through the normal sequence- drink, cool down, move, breathe- and you are cooperating in the technical sense only. Stomping more than walking. Ripping your gloves off like they personally betrayed you. Not throwing a fit exactly, but handling it badly enough that you know you are handling it badly while you are doing it and still cannot seem to stop. That makes you angrier too, because now it is not just the race. It is you visibly losing your grip around the edges.

The ice bath is awful, like always, but you deserve to be uncomfortable. You lower yourself in and every muscle in your body recoils at once, but instead of shocking you into calm it just makes the fury sharper. You sit there with your jaw locked and your fists flexing against your thighs under the water while your physio says something measured and sensible about recovery and your heartrate and tomorrow, and all you can think is that tomorrow would be easier to face if you had not just pissed away another 3 easy points for no reason except your own inability to back off.

You know this is not just about today. That is maybe the only thing you are honest with yourself about right now.

Because this is what happens when everything starts stacking.

No sleep. Or not real sleep. Just scraps of it between nightmares and adrenaline and whatever broken, jangling thing your nervous system has been trying to call rest lately. No real reset between weekends. No clean emotional baseline. Just stress layered on stress layered on the constant physical demand of trying to drag your body and your mind through a season when neither one is giving you much margin. You have not been performing the way you want to. You know that. You have been carrying it. Feeling it. Letting every slightly-off session and every compromised run sink its little hooks in.

And now it is in the racing. That is the part you cannot forgive.

You can survive being unhappy. You have been unhappy.

You can survive being tired. You have been tired.

You can survive the private mess of your own head if you have to.

But the second it starts showing up in the car, in the choices, in the quality of your work- the second it stops being your problem and starts becoming visible in the only arena where you still demand perfection from yourself- you feel things uglier than frustration rise up.

Fear, maybe. Disgust, definitely. You are disgusted with yourself.

The people around you are happy, because a point is a point. Because a rookie bringing home points in every race is a fair point of pride for a previously bottom-feeder team. Because of what points mean. Justification. A return on investment. Bonus money, for some of them. Something to take back to the garage and the factory and say, look- this is working. This matters. She matters. Every place counts for them in ways that go way beyond your own private standards, and instead of giving them the result that was there to be had, you got greedy and emotional and burned the thing down in your own hands.

And you are stomping around like a brat in front of the exact people you are actively failing.

You know you are being difficult. You know the team felt it. You know your physio can feel it, right now. You even know, somewhere under all the white-hot self-recrimination, that they are probably giving you more grace than you deserve for it.

They are still being kind to you. That is almost unbearable. Because they are still treating you like someone worth protecting from her own bad mood. Still talking to you carefully. Still trying to recover you like this is just a rough rookie race and not a flashing warning sign that maybe this is who you are under pressure.

Being realistic, you would not be the first.

You would not be the first rookie to show a little promise early- enough to get people talking, enough to get the flattering writeups, enough to make the team feel clever for taking the risk- and then never really do it again. You would not be the first one to arrive with a bit of heat around your name and then get flattened by the actual weight of Formula One. Pressure. Nerves. Sleep deprivation. The constant exposure. The reality that everybody here was special somewhere else and half of them still are not special enough for this.

Maybe you are just not that fucking good.

That thought has been circling you for three weeks now, just waiting for an excuse to fully bloom, and you just handed it one on a silver platter.

Maybe you are one of the ones who can make points, can scrape and scrap and look exciting for a minute, but not build. Not sustain. Not carry the pressure with any dignity. Maybe you are one of the ones who start to fray the second the expectation shifts from isn’t she interesting to okay, now do it again.

You have scored points in every F1 race you’ve entered. That is the objective truth. But objectivity has very little power when your body is this fried and your mind is this vicious. You do not feel safe. You do not feel secure. You do not feel like a driver building a season. You feel like someone hanging by her fingernails while the adults around her smile too kindly and say all the right things and quietly begin preparing for the possibility that she might not hold.

By the time you get through debrief, recovery, media, and the endless procession of hands on your shoulders and voices telling you it is still a point, still valuable, still something to build on, the feeling has not eased. It has only settled deeper. Gone from hot to hard. From fury to something meaner and steadier. The kind of mood that sits under your skin and waits for somebody to touch it wrong.

So by the time you reach the hangar, you are already carrying too much.

Jos has not helped.m His little post-race word with you had been polite. Controlled. Not outwardly cruel, but it was glaringly obvious he had only been polite by choice. You could feel the pressure of what he was not saying the entire time- every pause, every measured phrase, every tightly managed piece of feedback carrying that unmistakable undercurrent of restraint. He had chosen not to cut you open with the true lashing you felt he thought you deserved. That was all. The real version had still been there, hovering just under the surface, and it had left you feeling more rattled than if he had just gone for your throat properly and gotten it over with.

Jos Verstappen’s margin for driver error is somewhere around negative one. You know that. You know he thinks you drove like an idiot. You did.

So you are standing by the hangar door with your arms folded, rubbing at your face once like you can physically push the whole day out of your mind, when Danny drifts up beside you with that careful, easy tone people use when they know you are in a mood. “You up for dinner tomorrow?” he asks. “You cooking at mine again, or…” He lifts one shoulder. “If you’re not feeling it, we can just grab something.”

It is gentle. Casual on purpose. But you are not stupid. There is a little bid in it. A little softness. A little maybe-this-could-be-more-than-routine if you let it.

Normally, maybe, you would handle that better. You know he’s got something of a soft spot for you. But right now, you do not want to be having this conversation at all, much less with the guy who’s name is on the bid below yours, and maybe that makes you a shit person, a shit friend- because Danny’s never held it against you, but- You scrub a hand over your face. “Whatever, sure.” Your brain is already half elsewhere. “I might need to run by Max’s anyway. I left some stuff there Wednesday-”

Danny stops. “Max’s?”

You keep going, because if you stop too you will have to deal with the tone in that single word and you already know you are not in the mood. You glance over toward Max, who is a few feet away, half listening in that way he always is, looking occupied without ever actually being uninvolved. “Is it okay if I stop by?” you ask him. “Or you can bring it, or-” you make a small, irritated gesture with your hand, because now that you are thinking about it, the logistics are multiplying, “you still have all that stuff in your fridge, don’t you? If you’re just going to let it rot, maybe I just cook over there again.”

Danny makes a noise, quiet but immediate. “You cooked at Max’s?” he says.

There is a little too much in it. He does not mean for it to come out that way. You know Danny well enough to know that. But it still does- a little thrown, a little upset, a little too aware all at once that the last time he properly checked, you and Max could barely make it through a conversation without drawing blood, and now apparently you are leaving belongings at his apartment and using his kitchen.

And because you are already in a bad mood, already rubbed thin, already feeling overhandled by men today in ways that have left you raw and hostile, the tone lands badly. Really badly.

You turn your head and look at Danny, clipped before you even open your mouth. “Wednesday is dinner night,” you say. “Nobody ever said it has to be at your place.”

The second it is out, the air changes. Danny flinches a little- he tries to recover, but he is already flailing slightly, trying to figure out what part of this is information, what part is your mood, and what part is him having just stepped on something he did not realize was loaded.

“Okay,” he says quickly. “That’s fine. Nobody said that.” He gives a small, defensive shrug. “Maybe we switch it up. What about your place?”

Max, who has mostly kept out of it until now, lets out a short laugh. “No way.”

You look at him. He lifts his brows faintly, still half smiling. “Absolutely not. Way too small.” It is not judgment. He was just there. He has seen your apartment. The tiny kitchen. The cramped little table. The way two people already make it feel full. The idea of three of you trying to have dinner in there is objectively ridiculous.

But Danny freezes- really, properly freezes this time. His head turns toward Max in a way that is almost mechanical. “You’ve been to her apartment?”

That lands. Because it is true, and because it matters in a way you had not fully thought through until it is suddenly hanging there in public.

You have never, ever had Danny over. Never. Not once. Never even really told him where you live. He knows it’s over the border, obviously. Knows the general area. But not the actual apartment. Not the specifics. Not enough to picture your space.

And… he’s just found out that Max does. You don’t have the time, or honestly, the fucks to give to explain the the only reason Max saw your apartment at all was because he stood in your kitchen while you finished packing your luggage on the way to the airport on Thursday.

You can feel Danny trying not to make a thing of it. You can also feel him failing. Daniel is upset. More upset than he has any right to be, frankly, and doing a kind of terrible job pretending otherwise.

It is all there in the half-second delay before he closes his mouth. In the way his face goes still, then overly neutral. In the fact that he looks at Max instead of you, like the answer might somehow make more sense coming from another man than from the woman whose apartment it actually is.

And because you are already fried raw from the race, from Jos, from yourself, from the entire miserable accumulation of the last four days, you have absolutely no patience for it. “Why are you acting weird?” you ask flatly.

Danny blinks, thrown by the direct hit. “I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I just didn’t know you two were-” He cuts himself off, visibly trying to backpedal. “I don’t know. Going to each other’s places.” The wording saves him none of the feeling behind it.

You stare at him.

Because there it is. That subtle, ugly little shift men do sometimes when they start speaking like access to you is something they deserve admin rights to. Like they are not saying claim, exactly, but they are definitely circling the perimeter of it. And under normal circumstances you might have more finesse about cutting that off.

He exhales hard through his nose, already losing the clean line of whatever defense he was trying to mount. “You’ve never had me over, that’s all.”

Your head turns. The look you give him is sharp enough that he knows immediately he has stepped on it, but by then it is too late.

“Leave it, Daniel.” The tone lands low and clean and dangerous- the kind you would use on a dog about to put its teeth on something it absolutely should not.

Danny freezes for half a second.

“I’m not-”

“Leave. It.” you say again, and this time there is no mistaking it. A snarl with the edges sanded just enough to keep it socially acceptable. You know he is upset. You know he is trying not to be obvious about it and failing. And under almost any other circumstances, you might have found a way to step around that without kicking him in the throat. But you are too raw, too tired, too furious with yourself, and far too intolerant of any hint of a man trying to handle you right now.

Someone says it is time to board, and thank Christ for that, because movement is easier than standing there with all that unsaid shit pressing at your skin.

When the plane boards, Max takes his usual seat without discussion. First row, left side, window. You start to walk past him. Then stop. You look at the seat beside him and motion to it. “Taken?”

Max looks up at you. “Are you going to talk?” he asks.

You stare back at him for a beat. “Are you going to talk?” He gives you a look that is so plainly, so dryly means ‘obviously not’ that it nearly fixes your mood on the spot.

“Thank God,” you mutter. You slide your tote bag into the front closet, tuck your purse away, and drop into the seat beside him before anyone can make a thing of it.

Because Max, for all his faults, is reliable.

Predictable.

Black and white in a way that feels almost luxurious after a day like this. He is not going to try to cheer you up. He is not going to make you narrate your feelings. He is not going to say something well-meaning and stupid and then expect you to manage the emotional fallout of reacting badly to it. He is not going to get offended if you don’t present yourself in a specific way that would make others feel more comfortable. He is not going to need anything from you.

He is just going to sit there and be Max. Which, tonight, is exactly what you want.

You buckle in and lean back while the crew prepares the cabin. Max is already half turned toward the window, one arm folded, expression blank in that familiar way that does not ask questions and does not offer them either.

Steady. Simple. You had not realized how badly you needed that until now.

________________________________________ Here she is!! The winds of change are blowing!!

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