Draco Malfoy has been your friend ever since you were kids and you’re always the one apologizing for him
Not your average Slytherpuff couple
A cute hogwarts au with Slytherin!Edmund and Hufflepuff!Reader
Lost time:
A kind of social media au about two friends realizing their love for the other and regretting the lost time they spent being just friends. —Finished series
arvid knows how to handle a racing car. surely, a pair of scissors and your fringe can't be that difficult. right?
genre: fluff, romance, slice of life, pre-relationship.
warnings: a fringe, a pair of scissors, and two idiots who refuse to name what’s happening between them. also... pure fluff.
word count: 857.
a/n: well, apparently i am capable of writing a really short little scene! guys, i honestly don’t even know how this one is. it hasn’t been proofread; it was more of a little confirmation that i’m still capable of writing (operation: oscar piastri is doing things to me). i hope you enjoy it. someone had asked me to write something with arvid, and i loved it. he’s such a sweetheart. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY RANDOM.
“Are you sure you know how to do this?” you ask, looking at Arvid from behind the fringe of hair he’s holding in his hand.
His eyes narrow, staring at that piece of hair as if it were a potential enemy, a high-powered car he needs to overtake with an inferior car, relying solely on the skill he’s acquired throughout all his years on four wheels. Except this doesn’t have four wheels.
It’s your hair.
A fringe.
One that’s going to define your appearance for the next few months.
No pressure.
“Of course I know how to do it,” he says, not a hint of a smile appearing as his concentration intensifies.
You want to laugh. Your lips press together. Even though, yes, this is something relatively serious, watching Arvid place so much importance on something is incredibly adorable. You watch the way his brow is furrowed, the closeness he always tries to maintain out of respect slowly disappearing as he moves closer to get the best cut possible.
The thing is… you two aren’t dating. Yet. You’re in that strange stage where you keep kissing each other, and only each other, with no interest in kissing anyone else.
“Arvid, I can go to a salon.”
“You can…”
“But do you want to do it?”
“Of course. I’ve done this before. On other people. On my mom.” Arvid says, taking a deep breath. “Do you think my mom is pretty?”
Your gaze lingers on him for a second longer than it should before you let out a little laugh.
“Love, I don’t know your mom,” you say, poking him in the stomach.
Arvid takes a step back with a grimace and nods.
“Not yet,” he says quietly, the certainty of it knocking the air out of his lungs. “And don’t poke me like that, I’m holding scissors!”
Your tongue glides over your lower lip and, finally, you close your eyes. Arvid moves in close again, raising the scissors and adjusting his grip on your fringe. You showed him how much you wanted to cut: short, but not too short, it didn’t need to be perfectly even, you wanted… Style. More than precision! Your words, of course, were met with a confused raise of his eyebrow that said, “You’ve got a hell of a lot of style.” That earned him a little kiss on the tip of his nose, making him blush involuntarily, and the scissors ended up in his hand before he could question it.
That was how you ended up there.
“Okay,” he says, and you feel him lift your hair a little higher. “Here goes.”
Now all you had to do was wait.
A second later… Snip. Then… Snip, snip, snip.
Arvid watches the strands of hair fall into your lap and onto the floor with apprehension. It was done.
“Is it done?” you ask, opening only one eye.
He looks at your face, at the hair he’s still gently holding back with his fingers so you can’t see the result, and bites the inside of his cheek.
“Wait,” he says.
Slowly, Arvid slides his fingers down, releasing the now-short strands of your fringe to settle against the skin of your forehead. The cut was accidentally… perfect. Just slightly above your eyebrows, covering enough to keep it from looking like an artificial cut.
With both eyes open now, you stare at his surprised expression.
“Does it look good?!” you ask, standing up.
Arvid doesn’t answer, and you don’t stick around to find out. You run to the nearest bathroom, turn on the light, and immediately look in the mirror.
The sight is instant. You. With the short fringe. The one Arvid cut. Exactly the way you had imagined it. Your eyes widen, and your hands reach for your fringe, touching it as if you don’t quite know how to process the fact that it turned out absolutely perfect.
“Look, I don’t know if… I don’t know if you like it, but… Look…” Arvid starts, nervous, his hands gesturing in front of him as he steps all the way in, stopping behind you. “I honestly think it looks really good. Not because of my work, or the way I hold scissors, but because you’re beautiful and it made you look even…”
He doesn’t even get to finish.
Your arms are wrapping around his neck, your mouth is on his, and suddenly Arvid only knows that this is very, very good, and that he would be more than happy to be silenced by you a million more times. He isn’t thinking straight, and he knows it because when you pull away, he instinctively leans forward, chasing after more.
“It’s perfect. You’re perfect,” you murmur, hiding your face in his neck. “I love it, I’m in love with this haircut and I—”
You don’t finish. You crush your lips against his in another kiss, and Arvid doesn’t argue. He doesn’t even ask what you were about to say.
Besides… he thinks he knows what you were going to say. And if he’s right… so does he.
it's summer when lando norris moves in opposite you. you remember because it'd been 35 degrees celcius that day, you'd already been pissed, and he'd knocked on your door and had the nerve to stare at your tits.
ever since then, you haven't been able to get rid of him. he teases you in the hallway, calls you pet names, brings girls home at two in the morning.
you don't like lando norris. but it doesn't erase the fact that he's right across the hall, and he likes you.
includes — fem!reader, cocky, arrogant, obsessed lando norris, neighbours, unrealistic/inaccurate f1 calender, bad first impressions, slowish burn, pining, tension, eventual smut, p in v, LOTS of flirting, nicknames (baby, gorgeous, etc.), max fewtrell + pietra pilao appearances, misunderstandings, lando's incredibly bad at expressing his feelings, mild angst, alcohol usage
radio check — first post in about a millenia but it's finally here!! i seriously had so much fun writing this one, thank you guys so much for waiting <3
word count — 15k
MONACO IS STUPIDLY HOT IN SUMMER.
It’s the one thing you’d quickly learnt after moving here years ago, after realising your French lessons from high school would not help you at all.
You’re in a halter neck, strings tied around the back of your neck, shorts stopping just before midthigh. You’d never wear it out in public of course, considering it’d probably make the nearest Monegasque auntie faint, but you were safe in your apartment, where the only other apartment opposite you was empty.
The TV in your living room is playing some soap opera, background noise as you try figure out how the new blender you bought works in the kitchen. The buttons are all in French, incredibly unhelpful considering the fact this was supposed to be one of your first steps to ‘self-improvement’.
“Eat healthy,” one of your friends had told you a couple days ago. “Or drink healthy. Helps with stress.”
She’d downed a shot of vodka a second later, so you weren’t sure why you’d taken her up on her advice.
Maybe it’s because you were getting desperate. Moving to Monaco was supposed to unlock new opportunities, especially considering the fact you’d scored a contract with one of top modeling agencies in Europe. Your family and friends thought you were doing well—if your Ferrari sitting downstairs in the underground car park wasn’t indication enough, and in financial terms, sure.
But you were stressed, loosing any kind of love you had for your career, and currently really wanted to figure out how to work this stupid, overpriced blender.
A fresh wave of mediterranean air breezes in through the open window. You frown, blindly reaching across the kitchen counter for the instructions again as if it’ll magically appear in english. It won’t. You know it won’t, but the same desperate delusion that’s taken over your life makes you reach for it anyway.
Your gaze is still on the blender, hand blindly searching through the mess on the marble countertop. The lid, perched dangerously close to the edge, makes contact with your arm, tumbling to the herringbone floor with a loud clatter.
“Fuck me,” you mutter, running your hands through your hair. The TV is still playing—you think the lead has just confessed her love to the love interest, her voice high and whiney and dramatic. Hastily, you switch it onto the next channel, a news outlet with monotone speech and dull colouring.
“I think the word for it is burnt out.”
That’s what your agent, Emilie, had told you over the phone a couple days ago. You wanted to scoff at it now—throw the stupid remote on the floor too as a petty release for your frustration.
Burnt out. You wouldn’t be burnt out if the entire universe seemed completely set on your demise.
Just as you’re about to snatch the lid back up from the ground, a sharp knock pierces through your apartment. You rise halfway, gaze snapping to the door, motionless like you’re trying to figure out if this is your mind playing tricks on you.
A minute later, there’s another knock, a little louder, one you do when you don’t think anyone is home.
Immediately, you drop everything else in your hands, ecstatic at the excuse to leave the blender behind and shove it away in the back of your cupboard.
You smooth out your shorts, trying to make them look a reasonable length, fiddling with the strap of your top. Probably another delivery guy, you think, delivering yet another impulsive purchase you’d made to make yourself feel better.
You swing the door open.
Fuck.
“Hey.”
There’s a man standing there, someone who isn’t in the typical delivery guy getup like you’re expecting. He looks your age, relaxed, familiar. Familiar in the way you knowyou’ve seen him somewhere, maybe passing by on the street, on an advertisement, maybe. He looked like he could model too.
You tilt your head, leaning against the doorframe.
Yeah, he could definitely fucking model.
“Need something?” you ask, and your voice comes out harsh, still not over the shitty day you’re having. It doesn’t click in your head that he’s a new face, standing on your apartment floor that only has one other, unoccupied, apartment on it.
“No—yeah,” he blinks, and you let your gaze stray, surveying his plain, white shirt, the grey joggers. “Was just saying hi.”
You look up at his face again. He’s got tan skin, brunette, curly hair, a small scar on the bridge of his nose.
He looks really fucking good, but you’re too annoyed to care.
“Why?” you ask, frowning. You see him give you a once over too, eyes dragging up from your thighs, all the way up to your face again. “Bit creepy, no?”
“I was just—” he moves aside, and that’s when it clicks. You see the luggage, the open apartment door with boxes strewn about inside. “We’re neighbours now. There’s only two apartments on every floor. Probably going to see a lot of each other.”
Some of the annoyance simmers, realisation taking its place.
“Oh,” you say, and he smiles. “Right.”
“Lando,” he says, offering his hand. “Norris. Lando Norris.”
“Have we met?” you ask, shaking his hand. “I know you from somewhere.”
“Probably work.”
“What do you do?”
“Cars,” he shrugs, and you shift on the spot, head tilting. “I work with cars.”
It's a vague answer. Everyone you asked in Monaco 'worked with cars'. It's how you managed to get your Ferrari in the first place.
You watch his gaze stray again. You watch it stray to your chest.
“I—”
“Are you staring at my fucking tits?”
He freezes, eyes snapping back up to your face.
“Well—”
“Seriously?”
“They’re right there.”
“What?!”
“How do you expect me not look? You’re hot, and you’re in shorts and a freakin’—”
“Have some decency!” you say, already moving to walk back inside your apartment. “Jesus.”
“No, wait,” he catches your wrist, pulling you back. “C’mon. I’m sorry. What’s your name?”
“I’m not telling you. Not after that.”
“Then what do you want me to call you?” you tug out of his hold, and he grins, like this is the funniest thing in the world. “Baby? Gorgeous? Prettiest girl I’ve ever—”
You slam the door shut.
He doesn't don’t retreat for a good few seconds, though you hear a low laugh before he does. It’s silent after that. Silent enough you could pretend that some ignorant, asshole hasn’t just moved in opposite you.
You glance at the TV, face flushed red, hands slack at your sides.
“On the topic of sport—Mclaren move up in the constructor standings with another win from their golden boy, Lando Norris.”
There’s a faint ringing in your ears, a mix of horror and disbelief.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding.
That’s where you know him from. Lando Norris. A fucking Formula 1 driver, who’s picture you’ve probably passed countless times on the street. You hear him now, in an interview, that same laugh filling your apartment.
“I mean, that’s life. Almost costed me a win but I guess I'm just that good.”
You look at the TV, the door behind you, at the blender lid that’s still on the ground, and decide your life really couldn’t get worse than this.
The next time you run into Lando is in the elevator, at 12 in the morning.
You’re in heels, a short minidress, head buzzing with alcohol from a post-shoot dinner. The strap around the back of your ankle digs into your skin, the minidress keeps falling and you’re so tired you’re half-inclined to let it.
The elevator doors open with a quiet ding.
Lando’s leaned against the wall, phone in hand when you walk in. You see him see you. You see his gaze drag over the hem of your dress, your sides, then back up to your face. He’s in jeans and a plain hoodie. You look like polar opposites.
Heat prickles at the back of your neck as you stop next to him, pointedly staring straight ahead.
“Hey,” he says, and you hear the smug grin in his voice. “How are you?”
“Good,” you answer, short, sinking further back against the wall. “You?”
“You’re not angry anymore?”
“At you? Yes. I am.”
“For what? Staring at your tits?” he crosses his arms, frowning. “I said I was sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“I don’t give a shit.”
He laughs again, the slight rasp in his voice sending something fluttering down your stomach.
“Where’d you go?” he asks, and you glance at the elevator panel. You and him lived on the 17th floor, one you’d specifically chosen because of the gorgeous view. You were regretting it now though, more every second as you feel his gaze burning into your skin. “You look good.”
“Just out,” you choose to ignore the compliment. “Why do you care?”
“I’m curious.”
“Why are you out this late? Don’t you have some kind of strict, training regime to stick to?”
His eyebrows raise in a way that makes you want to take back the words.
“So you know who I am.”
“Hard not to. Monaco loves cars.”
“And what do you think?”
“About what?”
“Living next to a Formula 1 driver. A good Formula 1 driver. A hot one.”
“Shut up,” you mutter, adjusting your purse on your shoulder. “You’re not that good.”
“Yeah? Who won the last race?”
“How would I know?”
“Don’t lie to me, babe,” he grins, hand tapping against the metal railing around the elevator. “You’re a bad liar.”
You hate the way the nickname makes your skin prickle, the way it makes heat crawl up your neck. Like he senses it, he moves closer.
“You never told me your name. What else am I supposed to call you?” he says, amused. “No, that’s a lie. I asked the girl down at reception.”
“You what?” you frown, turning to look up at him. “Surely that’s got to be illegal or something.”
“Not when you promise her an autograph,” he shrugs. “Easy work.”
“You’re a prick.”
“Am I?”
The doors open with a quiet ding, and you rush to walk out, heels clicking on the marble flooring beneath you.
“But seriously, where’d you go?”
“I said out,” you fumble for your keys. “Dinner.”
“You’ve been drinking,” he observes, leaning against the wall. “Are you drunk?”
“Get inside your apartment, Norris,” you say, sliding your key into the lock. “I’m sure you’ve got better things to do.”
“Mm,” he hums. “No.”
You look up at him again, just before you open your door.
He’s smiling. Of course he’s fucking smiling. He smells like cologne, probably that Ralph Lauren one—you passed his advertisement on the way home for it. You’ve been noticing him everywhere now. Advertisements, posters, his last win replaying on screens.
“Fine,” he says, pushing off of the wall, moving to his own door. “Night, gorgeous.”
You scoff out a laugh, turning the key and slipping into your apartment.
The door shuts, sending one last draft of cold air and cologne past. You don’t listen to him go this time. You drop your bag on the kitchen counter, kicking off your heels in the living room, before falling straight onto the couch in exhaustion.
The silence aches. You stare up at the ceiling, gaze tracing the ornate plaster moulded in the edges. The aperol from an hour ago is dull, barley buzzing anymore.
You hate silence. It’s one of those things you career had conditioned—the fast paced model environment since your teenage years. There was always the click of a camera, the shouting of a director, the house music that for some reason seemed mandatory for every shoot you went to.
Silence was uncomfortable.
You shift your head to look at the door again, barely visible above the back of the couch.
Maybe that was why coming home had always felt bittersweet. You’d finally get some rest at the cost of pure silence. Now though, Lando had moved in—loud, insufferable, Lando, and for some reason, it felt like something pivotal. Something incredibly major.
“Morning.”
You’ve dragged yourself through another night of endless doomscrolling, of fixed routine. Sun seeps into your apartment building’s hall, the silver numbers on your door glinting.
You pause for a beat at the door, still not quite released from the grasp of sleep, staring ahead of you.
Lando’s shirtless.
His tan skin is bare, toned, disappearing beneath the prominent lines peeking above his joggers. Like usual, he’s got a protein shake in one hand, looking completely refreshed like he’s been up for hours already.
“Sleep well?” he asks, watching you chuck something into the rubbish chute near both of your doors. “Looks like it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” you ask, dusting off your hands. You glance over at him, eyes narrowing. “Why are you even out here? Do you just listen and wait for me?”
“I’m not that obsessed,” he smiles, taking a sip of his drink. “Do you wish I was?”
“No.”
“Shame.”
You look past, at his open apartment door. It looks well furnished for the short amount of time he’d spent living there. You catch a glimpse of marble countertops like your own, a pictureframe off to one side of a Formula 1 car, clothes lazily thrown over the back of the couch. Cleaner than you expected for a cocky, millionaire-status athlete.
“Wanna come in?” he opens the door wider, voice teasing. “I see you staring.”
“I’d rather drink acid.”
“Liar,” he calls when you turn away again. “You know what we should do? Go out or something. Get to know each other."
“Why would I ever do that?”
“I’ll give you an autograph.”
“That doesn’t work on me,” you glare. “Go bribe the receptionist downstairs.”
“I’m not offering because you’re hot, sexy, and gorgeous,” he says, making you stop at the threshold of your door. “I’m asking because you’re my neighbour. I don’t plan to move anytime soon and I don’t think you do either.”
“Are you calling me hot, sexy, and gorgeous?”
“You are,” he says, then he smirks. “And I can say that without looking at your tits. I’m a changed man.”
The laugh that comes out of you is real. Slightly startled. Lando smiles wider at that, his hand mindlessly sliding up to rub at his shoulderblades.
“I can’t,” you say, and his smile falters slightly. “I’ve got work.”
“Work?” he frowns, like he’d forgotten it existed. “Right. What do you do?”
“That’s personal.”
“Oh c’mon,” he says, dragging out the syllables. “That’s unfair. You know what I do.”
“Everyone in the world knows what you do, Norris.”
“So?” he steps closer, hand falling back to his side. “I’ll guess. Surely it’s something big if you can afford an apartment like this.”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Finance? Daddy’s money?”
You scoff, leaning against your doorframe.
“Modeling.”
“Oh?” he says. “Go figure.”
He cocks his head, taking another sip of his protein shake and glancing over you like he’s observing, “You’re probably the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. Makes sense you model.”
You’ve gotten the compliment thousands of times before. It sounds no different coming from him, and yet you’re instinctively standing straighter, thank you on the tip of your tongue.
Lando shifts too, tongue poking at the side of his cheek, a slow grin taking over his features.
You’d found yourself watching his interviews last night. He’s got a tendency to smile when things he says anything remotely personal. To laugh, scoff, redirect the conversation into something comedic. It makes you think it isn’t just a one-liner. Maybe he really does think you’re the prettiest girl he’s ever seen.
But you know better than that.
He opens his mouth, about to say something you know will be incredibly idiotic.
“Are you being serious? Or do you just want to have sex with me?”
Lando blinks, mouth closing, words dying in his throat.
“Well—you can’t—” he lets out an exasperated noise. “Obviously I want to have sex with you. But I swear I’m—”
“Unbelievable.”
“Baby, c’mon.”
“I’m going to be late.”
You turn away, and he lets out a heavy, dramatic sigh.
“When will you admit you like me?” he calls, hand gripping your door to keep it open. You’ve got one hand on the door handle, giving it an experimental nudge. It doesn’t move an inch.
“Lando.”
He grins, slowly letting go. “Have a good day, gorgeous.”
You smile back, saccharine, before slamming the door shut in his face.
It’s been three days.
Three days of Lando accidentally showing up in the hallway whenever you do. Three days of his teasing, his faux pleading to make you like him. You hear him at four in the morning, that low voice of his followed by someone else. A girl.
You weren’t jealous. Why would you be? You were more so annoyed at the fact it’d been four in the morning, and they weren’t exactly being quiet. She was nowhere to be seen the morning after, but he’d been there. In his doorway, shirtless, with a protein bar in his hand and a half-assed apology about the noise.
The elevator opens and you sigh, making your way down the hallway. Your clothes feel like they’re sticking to your skin, the leftover photoshoot makeup on your face is uncomfortable.
Fucking Monaco heat.
Lando, thankfully, is nowhere to be seen for once.
You glance in your bag as you walk, sifting through for your keys. The bag—your first ever designer you’d bought with your own money, is full of items that have no business accompanying you to a photoshoot. There’s a sim card from France, an empty box of matches, a forgotten hotel room keycard from your last stay in Italy. More evidence that your life is currently a complete and utter mess.
Your fingers close around your keys just as you make it to your door. There’s no welcome mat outside, just plain, boring marble. You’d never bothered, considering the fact that it’d just been you coming home and you’d felt weird greeting occasional hookups with a fucking welcome sign at the door.
You slide your key into the lock, turning it, hand instinctively already heading in the direction of the light switch. You’re a creature of habit. Of routine. Of the belief that there’s not a mat outside the door, but you’re heel catches on something there anyway.
“What the fuck?” you mutter, glancing down at the marble floor. It’s not a doormat. It’s a thick, glossy magazine, a note on the top and a paperclip marking a specific page.
You snatch it up, the shiny cover smooth against your fingertips.
You snort, plucking the note off of the cover.
Lando Norris — Formula 1’s sweetheart?
He’s smiling in the picture, trophy clutched against him, champagne in his free hand. His race suit is half off, tugged down to show the black fireproofs below clinging to his skin. He looks smug, egotistical, like he’s saying I’m better than you even though the camera is looking over him.
You look at every inch of the cover, studying it, gaze greedy though your fingers are already sliding between the pages to the one he’d marked.
Finally, you flick it open. Another podium picture takes up the entire page. It’s softer. His head is tilted back in pure relief, the smile on his face relaxed, eyes shut.
You skim-read the article beside it. The words compassionate and caring making a few appearances, followed by ‘what’s not to like?’. It talks about his rookie year, his home race win, the generic career-oriented stuff, but there’s a specific section towards the end that catches your eye.
“How do you handle relationships when you’re living such a public life?”
“First off,” Lando laughs, looking away. “I have to admit I don’t think I’m too good at relationships in the first place. I’m much better at driving a car at 300 kilometres an hour than replying a text—a weakness of mine, actually.”
He looks flustered to admit it, a slip in the usual playful person we see out in the paddock.
I ask, “Then what’s your ideal type in a person? Someone equally as bad at replying to text messages?”
Again, he laughs, “Sure. I guess. Probably someone who can even put up with me in the first place. Someone who doesn’t just let me get away with everything all the time. Maybe bullies me a little. Also ideally someone who doesn’t know the first thing about racing—I wanna come home and not talk about freakin’ cars all the time, you know? ”
“I see. And, I apologise if this is intrusive, have you found that person?”
He smiles, leans back in his cushioned chair. It’s more of a smirk.
“No. Not yet. I—”
You stop there, at the end of the page, itching to flip over and finish the section. Instead, your gaze snags on the picture again. It’s perfect, really. His smile, the expression on his face. Probably would’ve fooled you if you didn’t know him.
“Asshole,” you mutter, shoving the magazine in your bag and hastily stepping into your apartment. You throw it onto the coffee table in the living room, tucked away like all your other problems. It doesn’t make a reappearance until a few hours later, when you’re in the kitchen, attempting to make one of those ‘nutritious, protein-filled’ meals off of social media that’s probably a sham.
Your phone buzzes on the countertop. Mindlessly, you swipe it off the surface, lazily throwing in more pepper into the pot on the stove. It wasn’t like you were too focused on cooking anyway. There was a 90% chance you’d give up and order takeout.
Unknown number —
like the gift?
You slam the pepper back onto the counter before you've even read the last word.
You —
why the fuck do you have my number?
Unknown number —
guess
jfc that girl at the reception is incredibly easy to convince
should really learn her name
The pot hisses, spitting boiling hot water against your arm, throwing a tantrum you’re not paying attention to it. You curse and turn it off all together.
You —
i need to file something against her
what’d you bargain this time?
Unknown number —
another autograph
and a picture this time
You —
you’re insane
strangely obsessed
Norris —
but did you like the gift?
thought it was a really good article if i’m being honest
i look fuckin mint
You —
sure
Norris —
don’t tell me i didn’t look hot
did you stare at it?
for how long?
You —
two seconds max
Norris —
haha
still a bad liar babe
are you home?
You —
might be
why do you care?
Norris —
just curious
fewtrell and his gf just landed in monaco
i’m waiting in the airport rn
You aren’t sure why he’s telling you that. It seemed too personal, like an update you’d tell your friend for no reason at all.
You —
right
are they staying with you?
Norris —
for a week
gonna stream
you should watch
You —
i’m busy
Norris —
boooo
fine
You chew the inside of your cheek, liking the message, before putting your phone face down on the counter.
He gets home an hour later. You hear another British accent, suitcases against marble, a feminine voice before it disappears into the apartment. Lando laughs, loud, making a joke with a very audible shut up in response.
It makes you glance up from the couch at the door. There are boxes of takeout scattered on the coffee table in front of you, half eaten and waiting to be packed into the fridge. A bottle of wine is leaned against your side. Your laptop is open with a new campaign proposal, something to do with a Euro Summer, all prestigious exclusivity.
Your gaze strays again to the hardwood coffee table, the magazine sitting there among the mess of takeout.
Lando Norris — Formula 1’s sweetheart?
His perfect face, that trophy in his hand, the glint of pure happiness in his eyes.
You blame that smile when you open up Twitch on your laptop, half an hour later. You blame the wine, the stress that isn’t making you rational. You blame Lando Norris’ frustrating likeability.
He’s already live when you search his name.
As soon as you click onto it, his voice fills your living room. You can see his apartment clearer now, his office by the looks of it. He’s got helmets lined up on one of the shelves, racing sim behind him, trophies scattered here and there like he doesn’t know whether to display them or not. ‘Fewtrell’ is sitting beside him, whispering something that makes Lando let out a loud laugh you think you can hear through the walls of your apartment.
It sinks in then.
You’re watching Lando Norris live, when he’s quite literally right next to you.
“Is this a new setup?” Lando reads from the chat, leaning back into his chair. He smiles, and it isn’t the smile from the magazine. It’s the one he uses in the interviews. “Yes. Yes it is. Moved recently.”
“That’s why it looks so much cleaner,” his friend cuts in. “Cause you haven’t even fully unpacked yet.”
“Fuck you,” Lando scoffs, nudging him in the side. “I’ve unpacked plenty. Everyone tell Max to shut up.”
You mindlessly click onto your phone, the live still playing on your laptop.
Norris —
gonna stream
you should watch
Your fingers ghost over the keyboard.
You —
its been a week since you moved in
should really unpack
He leans back in his chair, stretching his arms up, a silver of tan skin revealed beneath his hoodie before he snatches up his phone. You watch as he reads the message, eyes flickering to stare straight at the camera, before he starts typing.
Your phone buzzes again.
Norris —
knew you weren’t busy
how long have you been watching?
“What’re you smiling about?” Max asks, and Lando shrugs, muttering ‘mind your business’.
You —
barely a minute
don’t get cocky
Norris —
never
could come over yknow
i should introduce everyone to my gorgeously sexy stunning model neighbour
You glance at the live again. He’s smiling wider now, turned to the side like he’s hiding his phone.
“Lando, mate, can you focus?”
“I am focused.”
“No, you’re texting your freakin’ girlfriend or whatever.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Sure looks like it.”
Lando scoffs, quickly typing something else before sliding his phone into his pocket.
Norris —
girlfriend, huh?
Your fingers clench around your phone, heart slamming against your ribs.
“You’re washed,” Max says, and you slowly glance to the screen. “So fucking washed.”
“I haven’t played this in like, a year,” Lando answers, dragging his chair closer to the table. He glances at the camera, smiling. It’s triumphant, like he knows you’re sitting there, flushed pink, unable to come up with a reply.
You slam your laptop shut, his voice cutting off mid sentence. The wine bottle beside you tilts, almost falls, until the world decides you’ve been through too much today and lets it perch on the edge instead.
“Fuck,” you say, and it comes out breathy and dry, barely making a sound. There’s a muffled shout from his apartment, a bark of laughter. Clearly, he wasn’t affected as you were.
The thought makes the heat sink into your chest. It makes you snatch up the bottle of wine, turn on the TV to drown out the noise, and throw your phone somewhere else. Somewhere far out of reach.
Everything goes quiet two hours later. You hear his apartment door open, footsteps, the rubbish chute opening and closing, a pause just as he passes by your door.
His door slams shut. Yours doesn't open. Your agent texts you about another project, and you hate how you’re disappointed by the fact it isn’t him.
Lando likes you.
It’s obvious—probably clear as day to anyone who’s ever seen the two of you interact, which currently only happens to be the walls of your apartment hall.
“Have you met your neighbour yet?”
Max is sitting at the kitchen counter, a piece of toast in one hand. Lando’s blood goes rushing to his dick at the mere mention of you, and his hand tightens on his cup of protein.
“Yeah—she’s, um, yeah.”
“Yeah?” Max frowns, taking a bite of his toast. “She nice? Rude? Fangirl?”
“It’s complicated. We didn’t get off to the best start.”
He wants to say you’re everything he’s ever wanted in a girl. You’re gorgeous, to your eyes, your voice, your sharp, dry humor that no one else ever uses with him.
He’d been expecting some old couple—maybe a stuck up businessman, to open the door the day he’d moved in. Instead, he’d hit the fucking jackpot and found you. A girl his age, who was wearing the shortest shorts he’d ever seen in Monaco, and a face that looked straight from his dreams.
The only problem was that you didn’t exactly like him back.
Lando screws on the lid of the cup, eyebrows knit, a frown on his face.
The girl of his dreams, who couldn’t stand him. His luck had to run out somewhere.
“Who’s this?” Pietra asks, sitting down beside Max. “New girlfriend?”
“My neighbour.”
“The girl you sent that magazine of yourself to?” she snorts, taking a sip of Max’s drink. “No wonder she doesn’t like you.”
Lando turns around, focusing on mixing together his protein shake.
“I might’ve stared at her tits the first time we met.”
Max lets out a heavy sigh, the kind that he uses on stream when Lando makes a stupid, un-media-friendly joke.
“I’d slap you,” Pietra says, serious. “Then find a way to kick you out of the building.”
“I apologized!” Lando argues, turning around again. “And she’s a fucking model. She’s hot. She wears these tiny shorts around at home and fuck they’re—”
Max raises his eyebrows, spreading butter onto his toast, “So you’ve got a crush? That doesn’t excuse staring at her tits, by the way.”
“I think anyone who sees her would have a crush, honestly,” Lando says, leaning against the counter. The marble digs into his side, and he grimaces. “She still hates me though.”
“I wonder why.”
Max sets down the knife to take a bite of his food, and Lando rolls his eyes, sliding his phone out of his pocket, swiping onto the messages with you like it’s second nature. He’s done that a lot recently—reading through each text with you, trying to figure out what you mean by every word you say.
You haven’t replied to that last comment.
Lando —
girlfriend, huh?
He winces, fingers hovering over the keyboard, debating on whether you’re too flustered or too creeped out to answer.
Lando —
morning
“You could always apologize again,” Max muses, reaching for his mug of coffee. “Buy her something. Take her out for dinner for a proper start.”
“I offered breakfast once.”
“In a polite way? Or in a ‘I’m inviting you over because I find you attractive’ way?”
“Probably the second.”
Pietra shakes her head, muttering something under her breath before disappearing into the hallway. Lando watches her go with a frown.
“Try invite her out again,” Max says, and Lando’s phone buzzes in his hand. “Ask nicely. Explain why you want to take her out.”
hot, sexy, and gorgeous —
finally stopped stalking me?
“Mm,” Lando hums, attention already slipping. “I will.”
“Will you?”
“Yeah.”
Max scoffs, “Liar.”
Lando’s too focused on his phone to bother defending himself.
Lando —
what’s that supposed to mean?
hot, sexy, and gorgeous —
didn’t see you this morning
weren’t standing outside waiting for me like a dog like usual
Lando —
disappointed?
knew you’d miss me
hot, sexy, and gorgeous —
miss you?
you can’t stay away from me for more than a day
might as well have you on a leash
Lando —
buy me a collar and i’d wear it
hot, sexy, and gorgeous —
you wouldn’t
Lando —
i would
make sure it’s got your name in bold on the front
He smiles when you pause.
hot, sexy, and gorgeous —
are your friends still over?
Lando —
changing the topic?
and yeah they’re still here
did you wanna meet them?
hot, sexy, and gorgeous —
i’m good
Lando —
you could always come over y'know
You stop again. He watches the type bubble pop up, disappear, then start again.He probably sounds creepy. Like a weirdly obsessed neighbour that lived right opposite you.
He frowns at that.
“Lando.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you gonna eat anything?”
Lando —
what are you doing this morning?
hot, sexy, and gorgeous —
i’ve got a shoot at 11
and no you’re not coming over
Lando —
want breakfast?
seriously
fresh start or whatever
Max is still talking. Lando can hear the scrape of his knife against ceramic, his cup of coffee thudding onto the table every time he sets it down. His heart is beating faster every second those chat bubbles start up again.
hot, sexy, and gorgeous —
where?
“I’m making plans,” Lando finally answers, and Max stops mid bite. Lando raises his phone, waving it at him as if he can see the text on it. “Apology, right?”
“You made plans with her?”
“Yup.”
“She said yes?”
“Sure.”
Lando —
there’s a few nice cafes by the port
meet you outside in ten?
hot, sexy, and gorgeous —
if you’re late i’m calling this off
Lando —
couldn’t be late even if i tried
He shuts off his phone, sliding it into his pocket with a satisfied grin. Max frowns at him with mild disdain.
“You’re an idiot,” his best friend says, and Lando’s grin fades. “This is the worst way to pursue a girl.”
“I think this is perfect.”
“You stared at her tits the first time you meet her, you flirt and clearlydon’t do anything to back it up—you sent a magazine of yourself to her door—”
“She kept it.”
“Could’ve thrown it away.”
“I would’ve known if she’d thrown it away.”
“How?”
“Because she throws her rubbish out every morning, and I watch her do it,” Lando answers, like it’s the most normal thing in the world. “And she hasn’t thrown it out.”
Max stares at him in silence for a few beats.
“You’re insane.”
Lando shrugs, turning, “Got a breakfast date to get ready for.”
“It isn’t a date, it’s an apology. Remember that,” Max calls.
Lando lets the words go in one ear and right out the other.
It’s nine-thirty in the morning, you’ve got a campaign to shoot in an hour and a half, and you’re sitting at a table across from Lando Norris for fucking breakfast.
He’s in jeans, a loose, button up shirt, the top few undone to show perfect tan skin. There are sunglasses resting on the top of his head, colorful fan-made bracelets stacked on one wrist, pink Richard Mille on the other. He cocks his head as he flicks through the menu, tongue darting out every now and then to lick his lips.
He looks unbelievably good.
You shift on your chair, rustic iron scraping on the brick, outdoor flooring. Port Hercule sits right nearby—you see yachts pulling out of the dock already, a sign of Monte Carlo waking up. There’s french chatter, the occasional rumble of a sports car.
You’ve been pretending to look through the menu for the last five minutes. You know what you want already: the usual iced coffee and light meal you get before every shoot, but still pretend nonetheless.
“You’re staring.”
His voice still has the rasp of sleep at the end of it, and when you focus on his face again, he isn’t even looking at you.
“How would you know that?”
“I can sense it,” he says, letting the menu fall back onto the table with a quiet thud. He grins, cocky like he always is, “You know I look good.”
You snort, settling back into your chair.
Egotistical, arrogant, idiotic.
Those three words you’ve been repeating to yourself are fading by the minute.
“You look hot. What shoot do you have to be at today?”
“Some campaign,” you sigh, also setting aside the menu. “Clothing thing.”
“I could probably get you into some F1 promo.”
“And end up in the same magazine you were in? I think not.”
His smile widens, and he leans forward.
“Did you keep it?”
“Keep what?”
“The magazine. With my face on the cover.”
You bite the inside of your cheek to keep any blush from creeping onto your face. The magazine is still sitting where you left it on the coffee table, like an accusation, like something so pointed that you don’t want to address.
“You kept it.”
“Would be a waste of money if I threw it out,” you lie. “And it matches the colour scheme of my apartment anyway.”
“When am I ever going to see your apartment?”
“Never.”
“You’ve seen mine.”
“I’ve seen the door and the hallway.”
“And the office,” he adds, eyes glinting with amusement. “Remember?”
You clear your throat, glancing over at the port. He laughs, his chair scraping back as he settles into it again.
“I’m not trying to tease you. This is supposed to be a fresh start, remember?”
“Is it?”
“I’m trying,” his face turns serious when you look back at him. “I’m formally apologizing for staring at your tits the day we met. It’ll never happen again. Unless you let me.”
You suddenly understand why people let Lando get away with being him. You’ve seen his interviews online—the ones post-race where he’s cocky, high off a win, grinning with sweat glistening down his neck. You’ve seen how he says the most arrogant lines, makes inappropriate jokes, and no one ever seems to reprimand him for it.
He picks up the menu again, only to thumb at the corner of the card, still staring at you.
“Can we start over?” he asks. “Properly. Disregard everything you know about me—pretend I met you yesterday and asked you out.”
A small smile tugs at your lips, “Was this your plan? To lure me out under the ruse of an apology, then turn it into a date midway?”
He grins, and you laugh despite yourself, reaching for your glass again.
Maybe if you’d met him earlier—maybe if he’d knocked on your door a mere ten minutes before he did, things would play out different. Maybe he would’ve actually complimented you and asked you out normally. You weren’t sure if Lando Norris was capable of asking a girl out politely, but just for now, you were choosing to believe he could.
“So,” you set down your glass, looking at him. “Lando, was it?”
The look on his face is nothing short of delight, and he leans forward, forearms braced on the table.
“Right,” he answers. “Lando Norris.”
“And what do you do for work?”
“I drive cars.”
You smile, “What kind?”
“Formula 1 cars.”
The waiter comes back around with your food. Lando leans back, eyes still on you, relaxed like he’s just taking you in. You don’t snap at him this time. You let him stare like you’d let someone you were dating, you let him appreciate the fact that you’d even agreed to come out with him in the first place.
The rest of your ‘date’ goes by quickly. He’s likeable. You’d learnt that a while ago, but just refused to let yourself believe it. You find out he’s leading the championship, that Max is his best friend from childhood, that he thinks you’re the hottest person he’s ever laid eyes on.
“I could drop you off, if you wanted.”
You don’t even realise you’ve been scraping your fork at nothing for the past ten minutes, subconsciously dragging out the conversation. His own plate is empty too, and his arms are crossed, another smile on his face.
“To my shoot?”
“Yeah,” he answers, glancing further behind you at his car. It’s obnoxious. A McLaren P1, jet-black, the number plate a combination of LN and a bunch of fours. It screams ‘this car belongs to Lando Norris’, and the amount of stares it had gotten as he’d driven past only proved that further.
“It’s only a ten minute walk.”
“You’re in heels.”
“Barely.”
He frowns, like he’s genuinely offended, “I’m not letting you walk in heels. What kind of date would I be?”
“You’re saying you’re one of those guys who’d carry me if my feet got sore?”
“Of course,” he reaches for his glass of water, glancing over it at you. “You don’t believe I’d be a good boyfriend?”
You raise your eyebrows at him, “I never mentioned anything about boyfriends.”
“Still,” he sets the glass down again. “You don’t think I would?”
You’ve, reluctantly, been stalking his past relationships. You know the last two have been Portugese—both models, both the kind of gorgeous that seemed gifted by Aphrodite herself, and every single break-up addressment had said the same thing: praise and the stereotypical “we just want different things”. He seemed like a good boyfriend, but you weren’t sure if that was the PR talking or not.
“I don’t know,” you answer, truthful. “I’d give you about a six out of ten for offering to drop me off.”
He lets out a laugh, laced with surprise, “A six out of ten?”
“Point-five if you walk me in too.”
“Seriously?”
“No,” you scoff. “I’m kidding. You don’t need to drop me off.”
He sighs, heavily, and you hear the scrape of his chair before you register him moving to stand.
“What’s the address?”
“Lando,” you start, but he reaches out a hand, holding it in the space between you.
We’re still on a date, he seems to silently say, keep pretending you like me.
You haven’t been pretending. Not for the past hour. You feel like you should tell him—reassure him maybe, but then he’d tease you about it for the next month.
“Knew you’d cave,” he says when you let him help you stand. His hand trails to your waist, voice smooth in your ear. “You know, I think we’d be good together.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” you say as he guides you past the various tables, briefly stopping at the front counter to tap his card. “This is a one time thing.”
His grip tightens, thumb grazing the skin of your waist.
“Sure,” he says.
There’s a feeling in your gut that this’ll be far from a one time thing. You know that he knows it too.
Lando’s halfway through your Instagram feed when there’s a sharp bang on his door.
He pauses, thumb hovering over a picture from about two years ago, dragging his attention to hallway. He’s leaned against his kitchen counter shirtless, cereal half-eaten next to him. Max and Pietra had left for their early flight an hour or two ago. His own empty luggage he’s meant to be packing for the next few races lays strewn around his living room.
It’s silent. Slowly, he glances back at his phone.
There’s another bang, louder, someone knocking impatiently, then—
“Lando! Open the fucking door!”
Ah, fuck.
He drops his phone on the counter, stretching as he makes his way to the hallway.
“Morning,” he says when he swings open the door. He leans against the doorframe, smiling, trying to blink away the sleep from his eyes. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
You glare at him, phone in one hand, hair slightly messy like you’d just gotten up too.
“What the fuck is this?”
He glances at your phone, at the picture sitting there.
It’s the two of you, his hand around your waist, you glancing up with your eyes slightly wide. It looks strangely intimate, actually. Lando saw it about twenty minutes ago on his own Instagram feed.
“Was hoping you wouldn’t see that,” he admits, taking your phone and swiping through the rest of the pictures. There’s more of the two of you at the cafe, some in his car, photographed perfectly so the angle makes it look like you’re closer than you are. “If it makes you feel better, I had no clue.”
“No, that doesn’t make me feel better.”
He grins, handing it back and turning to walk inside his apartment. The door is left open like an invitation, and you follow him, glaring.
“Lando.”
“It’ll blow off within a couple of days,” he answers, returning to the kitchen counter. He picks up the spoon from his bowl of cereal. “I promise. Don’t stress your pretty little head about it.”
“I’m not stressed. I’m pissed. You—”
“Isn’t it your job to be photographed?”
“Not while I’m having breakfast with an athlete.”
“A hot athlete.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
He huffs out a laugh, muffled by the spoon in his mouth. Your anger wears off a little when you tear your attention off of him.
It’s the first time you’ve ever been in his apartment, you realise.
It looks the same as yours—the same layout, marble countertops, herringbone flooring. It’s messier though, more photographs on the walls, trinkets he’d presumably gotten from fans. His apartment looks more lived in than yours, though he’s only been here for a couple weeks. It smells like him too—cologne, linen, a hint burnt toast like he’d failed at cooking breakfast this morning.
“Where are you going?” you ask when you catch sight of the suitcases. “Moving again?”
“You wish,” he says, still eating his cereal. “Nah. Race this week.”
“You’re gone for a week?”
“Three. Triple-header and I’ll be in London for conveniency. Closer to MTC.”
You don’t understand a word he’s saying, apart from the fact he’s gone for three weeks. Three.
“Oh,” you manage, and he stops, spoon pausing in his bowl. “Right.”
“Gonna miss me?”
Probably.
The thought isn’t as startling as you thought it’d be. You’d gotten used to him recently—relied on him in fact, to fill the silence you’d dealt with every time you came home. You wouldn’t tell him that though, of course.
“No,” you say, and he smiles like he sees right through you. He pats the countertop, and you move without realising, pulling back the stool opposite him. “Might have some peace and quiet for a little.”
“You’re gonna miss me.”
You don’t agree or deny it this time. He finishes off his cereal, chucking his dishes in the sink before facing you again. You try ignore the fact that the sight of his back muscles moving sends a flush of pink crawling up your neck.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” you ask. “Yesterday. That you were leaving.“
“Didn’t think you’d care that much,” he shrugs, resting his forearms on the counter. “Plus it’s only three weeks. You’ve lived without me for, what? Few years?”
You don’t answer, and he stands up straighter, head tilting.
“I’m only gone for a little bit.”
“I know.”
“You seem—” he stops, eyebrows furrowing. “You seem like you actually care.”
“Do you think I hate you?”
“Sure looks like it.”
“I don’t,” you say. “Hate you. I don’t love you, that’s for sure, but I don’t hate you.”
His head is still tilted at you, fingers mindlessly tapping on the marble countertop.
“Will you watch?”
You blink up at him. He chews at the inside of his cheek, fingers still tapping, restless.
“Do you want me to watch?”
“Yes,” he answers immediately. “Yeah. Obviously.”
His voice is softer than usual—careful, like he’s holding something in. You want to answer him, make a sharp comment that’ll ease the tension. Instead, you stay quiet, leaning forward the slightest inch without even meaning to. His gaze flickers to your neck, the thin strap of your top, stopping at where the counter blocks off the rest of you.
“You look good.”
A smile tugs at the corners of your mouth.
“I just woke up.”
“I know.”
“You weren’t waiting in the hall this morning.”
“It isn’t eight-thirty yet.”
The time you’re usually out in the hallway. Even you didn’t know that about yourself.
“I should go.”
“Stay.”
“I’ve got work.”
You push back your chair, and he’s instantly moving, trailing after you.
“Not even for another few minutes?”
“I’m already off schedule.”
You pass by a framed picture of a car—his Formula 1 car. There’s a shelf next to it, one full of what looks like a bunch of magazines and decorative pieces. There are photos too, polaroids of his friends, a girl that you don’t recognize.
He catches your wrist just as you continue past it, almost at the threshold of the front door.
“Is there some kind of limit on how much you let yourself near me everyday?”
“An hour. Max.”
“It’s barely been ten minutes.”
“More time for later, then.”
His grip tightens, and you swear you feel his thumb graze over your skin.
“My flight is in two hours.”
He looks desperate now, his voice still soft, reasoning.
“More time for when you get back, then,” you say, glancing at his hand. “In three weeks.”
Again, his thumb traces over your wrist. You swallow, an attempt at regaining any sense of rationality. His cologne is intoxicating now, and when you look up at him, his hand trails to your waist instead.
“You’re in my apartment,” he says, more to himself. “Jesus.”
“I know that.”
“Do you always look this good?”
You’ve learnt to stop expecting him to stay on a single thought. It’s like he says whatever crosses his mind first, without a care in the world about an answer.
His other hand settles at the small of your back, tugging you close. You can feel the heat radiating off of him—the tension, the intensity of him standing there.
“Lando.”
He hums in response, somehow not focused yet entirely fixated on you.
You make the mistake of glancing away—glancing down, at his bare torso. At the defined lines disappearing beneath his joggers. When you look up again, a single thought runs through your head.
You want to kiss him.
You want to know how his skin feels, how he tastes, if his stupid, cocky exterior followed into his sex life. He lets his gaze roam too, and you know the same exact thoughts are circulating in his head.
Just at you move closer the slightest inch, he lets go.
“I think I’ll miss you,” he says, arrogance returning in full force. You’re still breathless, lips parted, heart pounding in your chest, but he’s already smirking, hands sliding into his pockets. “You and your gorgeous face.”
It’s silent for a few beats. He raises his eyebrows, standing there in all his infuriating glory, like he hasn’t just baited you into almost kissing him.
You can’t fucking believe him.
“Fuck you.”
“I’ll dedicate a win to you.”
You turn away, wrenching open his front door and storming out of his apartment. He follows, leisurely, stopping at the doorframe.
“Promise you’ll watch?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
You slam your door shut, letting it ring in the hallway. It’s the last time you see him in a month.
Dates before hook-ups had never really been your thing.
Some people liked it—the whole package, being wined and dined before ultimately back to a hotel just to fuck. You liked getting it over and done with as quick as possible.
It sounded sad, and only after your friend from home had told you so, you’d decided to trythe entire process for once instead.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re beautiful?”
You glance down at the man beneath you.
He’s got dark hair, dark features, the typical Monegasque, billionaire look. You think his name starts with an M.
“Sometimes,” you smile, hands trailing up his chest. You resist the urge to look at your bedroom door, at the wall like you can see the apartment right across your own. You’d sat through an entire, boring dinner for this moment. You refused to let yourself get distracted.
It’s been three weeks since Lando left for his races in Europe.
You’ve settled back into normalcy. Routine. No one bothers you every morning in the hall, no one nags you with questions in the elevator. Your phone remains silent—your entire apartment floor remains silent.
It’s weird.
Theoretically, it shouldn’t be weird. It should be the opposite of weird. You should be relieved, actually. Instead, you’ve been filling his absence with hookups, with the same impulsive purchases prior to him moving in, with races playing on your stupidly large TV.
He’d won in the Netherlands. You’d wanted to text him then—to tell him you’d watched, that you were so happy you’d spilt a glass of wine as he’d crossed the checkered flag. But you hadn’t, and your last messages were still from when you’d scheduled that breakfast together a month ago.
You don’t realise your gaze has already strayed away from the man in your bed. He’s been talking this entire time, more compliments, probably.
“Hello?”
You snap your head back to him, blinking. He’s got an irritated look on his face, and he sits up, making you fall onto the bed beside him.
“Am I too boring for you?”
“What?”
“Clearly, I am, considering the fact a fucking wall holds your attention better.”
He stands, snatching up his discarded clothing around your bedroom. You sigh, heavily, watching him from your bed. You’re still in lingerie, a pale blue lace set, dainty, and something you probably shouldn't be wasting on a random hookup.
“I knew you were entitled. An entitled, spoiled brat with an apartment she probably doesn’t even pay for herself.”
The man is still talking, and you roll your eyes, sliding off the bed when he walks out of your bedroom.
“You’re wasting an entire night, by the way,” you say, following him to the door. It wasn’t like you wanted to have sex with him anymore, but you did want an orgasm. You could probably shut your eyes and pretend it was someone else, and that was enough for you.
“I don’t care,” he says, and you stop at your front door, watching him tug on his shoes. “You’re a bitch.”
You don’t answer that, stepping aside to let him pass.
“Spoiled fucking—” he mutters something else in French, shaking his head as he continues down the hall. You watch him, resting your head against your doorframe, still in your lingerie.
“Night,” you call, and just before he can press the button for the elevator, the doors open.
You freeze, blood turning cold.
Fuck.
Lando steps out of the elevator as the man steps in, suitcase and bag dragged next to him, hood thrown over his head like he’d just gotten off a flight.
“Already called someone to replace me?” your hookup says, and you shut your eyes, sighing again. You want to die. You want to sink into the wall and disappear. “Real fucking classy.”
“Shut up and go home,” you answer, and the elevator doors close.
The hallway goes silent.
You open your eyes again, and Lando is by his own apartment door, barely a meter away from you.
“Hi,” he says, and his voice makes something inside of you flutter. One hand is around the handle of his suitcase, the other slack by his side. He looks exhausted. You think there might be circles beneath his eyes.
“Hi,” you answer, suddenly too aware that you’re still in fucking lingerie. “You’re back.”
“I’m back.”
“And, um—” you gesture in his general direction. “Yeah.”
“Who was that?”
You wince, looking away again.
“No one.”
“Didn’t seem to like you very much.”
“I know. I zoned out when we were about to have sex.”
Lando laughs, and it’s raspy, tired—hot.
“Do you wear that for every hookup you have?” he asks. “Or did you know I was coming home tonight?”
“I’m not wearing this for you,” you scoff, fixing the strap of your bra. “Do you wish I was?”
“Obviously.”
“Five minutes in and you’re already flirting.”
“Negative,” he says. “You’re in a fucking lace set.”
A cold draft of air flits past, and you mindlessly wrap your arms around you. He tracks the movement, jaw flexing.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Would you be jealous if I said yes?”
He releases his hold on his suitcase, stepping closer to you.
This is what you’re used to now—what you’ve been missing for the past three months.
You know what you probably look like. The flush from earlier hasn’t exactly worn off yet, your hair is probably messy from hands tangling themselves in them, you’re in lace that you know makes you look good.
Lando smiles. It’s one of his cocky, smug, smiles.
“Congratulations on your win,” you say, but it comes out breathier than you meant it to, softer. “And second place. Twice.”
His smile falters a little.
“You watched.”
“You asked me to watch.”
“I know—I just—” he stops, glances at the strap of your bra, then turns away back to his suitcase. “Fuck.”
“What’s wrong?”
When he turns back around, he’s got a shirt in his hands.
“Can’t focus when you’re dressed like that,” he admits, handing it to you. “Not that I don’t like it. Just wanna have a proper chat.”
It’s his Mclaren jersey, four clear on the back, black and orange. You thumb over the material for a second, before shrugging it on.
Lando jaw flexes when you look at him again.
“Suits you.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
He scoffs, head tilting towards his apartment.
“When did you land in Monaco?” you say, following him inside. “Couldn’t you have texted me?”
“We haven’t texted for a month, gorgeous.”
“I know, I just—” his door shuts behind you, leaving you still flushed, standing in the hall of his apartment. He throws his keys on the wooden console table by the door, lazily resting his suitcase against the wall. “Give me a heads up or something. So I don’t have a fucking hookup when you get back.”
He pauses, glancing back at you.
“You missed me,” he smiles. “Didn’t you?”
“I—”
“I missed you too.”
He moves closer, and it gives you a rush of familiarity. The blush on your neck must’ve spread to your face, because he lets out a soft laugh, hands settling on your waist.
“I thought about you a lot. On the plane home, on the podium,” one hand slides beneath his jersey, resting on your skin. “In my hotel at night.”
You try not to focus on his face too much. Ultimately, it doesn’t work, and you find yourself studying it instead. He looks exhausted, shoulders tense, his voice lower than usual.
“What’d you think about?” you ask, but the words sound distant in your own head. “Coming home and tormenting me again?”
“I thought about your pretty face,” he corrects. “The way you looked in my apartment before I left.”
“When you baited me?”
He smiles, palm warm on your waist, “I never baited you.”
“Sure felt like it.”
You’re still mad at him for it. Mad that he hadn’t finished what he’d started.
“Did you want me to kiss you then leave you for a month?” He says. “Would you have rather fucked and then lived through a month in silence?”
“We wouldn’t have fucked.”
He laughs at that. It’s short and incredulous, so insufferably sure in himself it makes you want to slap him.
“Don’t kid yourself, baby.”
“Fuck you.”
“Is that your natural response whenever I know you’re lying?”
“It’s my response when you’re being arrogant,” you answer. “You can’t just start something and not—”
“You think I don’t want to finish this?” he says, still amused. “I want to kiss you more than anything—I’ve wanted to kiss you the second you opened the door two months ago. I want to fuck you and have you wear that set for me. Not some shitty fucking hookup you don’t even know the name of.”
You throat is dry, heart stuttering in your chest at the words. Heat spreads through you, through your thighs, still bare but covered by his jersey.
“Then why don’t you?” you ask, and it comes out softer than you intended. “Instead of waiting when you know it’ll happen?”
“You deserve better than that,” he answers, and one of his hands move to your face instead, fixing your hair behind your ear. “You deserve to be obsessed over. Not to be taken out to dinner once just for the part that comes after.”
He pulls away, both hand sliding into his pockets. You take a step back, just to breathe, tearing your gaze away. His apartment looks untouched from a month ago,
When you finally have the courage to look at him again, he’s smirking.
“I missed you,” he repeats. “I missed you a lot.”
Your fingers curl at your sides.
“Congratulations on your win,” you end up on, reaching for the door. “Goodnight.”
He doesn’t stop you. He stands there, relaxed in his ownapartment, gaze flickering to your thighs knowingly.
“Goodnight, gorgeous.”
Lando hates being mature.
He hates making actual, rational decisions, ones that make him wait instead of giving things to him instantly. For example: not fucking kissing you when he’d had the chance. Twice.
He winces every time he thinks about it, sighs when he passes by the entry of his apartment. The image of you in his jersey, the pale blue set beneath it, continues to randomly flash in his head. Tormenting him. Except it feels less like torment and more like unshakable regret.
The stack of magazines in his living room seem to stare at him everytime he brushes past. Most are ones of himself, things he plans on planting outside your apartment with stupid notes attached.
The other half of the stack is magazines you’d sent him, back when everything had been fine. Magazines with you on the cover, so, incredibly gorgeous that he’d always stopped in his tracks when he’d picked them up. One of them is of Oscar. His teammate. Your own hand written note still attached: the better mclaren driver x, and he remembered immediately knocking on your door and playing hurt about it.
It was a joke. He knew it was a joke, but it didn’t stop the flare of jealousy that’d sparked inside of him anyway.
His gaze strays from the stack, to the white box on the table next to it.
It’s lingerie. Lacy, light pink, gorgeous, inside an equally as delicate box. It’d probably be even prettier on you—the whole reason he’d bought the damn thing anyway. It sits there like a shadow, like a guilty secret, waiting for the right moment he can give it to you and play it off like another fucking joke when you both knew it wasn’t.
He wants you. Badly. And yet he was holding himself back for some Godforsaken reason.
He hasn’t seen or spoken to you for the past two weeks. The rhythm the two of you had settled into feels tense, throwing every possible interaction out of sync.
It feels like you’re avoiding him—it probably feels like he’s avoiding you. He’s not. He, for once in his life, just doesn’t know what to do or say.
It doesn’t help that another week later, you’re not even in Monaco.
He hears you leave, the sound of suitcases on marble, unfamiliar voices and laughter. Another two hours and, like some deranged, obsessed admirer, he finds out through your friend’s Instagram stories that you’re on a private jet halfway to Mykonos, Greece.
When he drags himself through the rest of the day, through to the next morning, you’ve posted in a nightclub that he’s been to before. He studies the picture, the group you’re with, the men specifically. One of them is looking at you, but your eyes are closed, smiling, too caught up dancing with your friends to notice. Lando can’t tell if the man is staring at you in a casual, passing glance way, or a I wanna have sex with you way.
As soon as the thought crosses his mind, he tosses his phone out of reach, and decides he really needs to keep himself distracted for the rest of the time you aren’t here.
He does. Well, he tries.
He focuses on the upcoming triple header. He focuses on fulfilling every single one of Jon’s insane, training requests. He lets himself scroll on Instagram for a maximum of ten minutes everyday, as if he owes it to himself.
You post from clubs, from hotels, from yachts. Your skin glows, you look more carefree than he’s ever seen you. He’s never been so mesmerized in his life.
It’s five days into your absence when you post the picture he’d subconsciously been waiting for.
You’re leaned against a man.
Lando’s fingers hover over the picture, hood pulled over his head, sitting on one of the benches of his gym. There’s a drink in your hand—champagne, and you’re leaning back, the man’s arms draped over your shoulders. The coastline of Mykonos beautiful in the background, the kind of picture that unintentionally makes you feel inferior. The kind of picture he’d sometimes post, albeit without holding a girl against him.
He shuts his phone, shoving it into his bag, restarting his reps with a newfound sense of determination to get you out of his head.
You get back a week later There’s no laughter or conversation this time. Just your suitcase, your keys, the quiet shutting of your apartment door.
His heart is instantly slamming in his chest again, and yet for another excruciating seven days, he doesn’t see you.
“Fuck,” he mutters, tilting his head back against his couch.
He feels like shit.
For the entirety of this past month, he's felt like shit. He knows he should just knock—just talk to you, but he's gone so long without that he thinks he doesn't know how.
His apartment is awfully quiet for ten o’clock at night, silent apart from his nagging thoughts of regret.
He wants you to be the girl he’s spotted with in headlines. The girl people speculate about, instead of some random model he’d danced with at a club in Ibiza. He wants you with him on yachts, on planes, standing in parc ferme after a win. He’s wanted you since he’d stared at your fucking tits almost half a year ago.
It’s then that he realises he needs to do something. Something that doesn’t consist of sulking about you, thinking about you, or frankly, anything to do with you. Maybe an evening run, or a session on his sim. Maybe he could call up Max despite it probably being about two in the morning over in London.
Or, maybe, he could just knock on your door, kiss you, and see what happened from there.
He glances at the white box on the coffee table, the magazines beside it.
The media had always called him blessed. Mclaren’s golden boy. Incredibly, miraculously lucky. As he finally stands, slipping out of his apartment, he thinks it might be true.
Jimmy’z is as loud as it always is.
He’d called up Carlos, asking what he was doing and where he was, and it’d led him here. To the most exclusive club in Monte Carlo. It smelt like alcohol, like intoxicating perfume, the music pulsing so loud in his head he can’t think.
“What’s got you so worked up?” Carlos asks him at the bar, waiting for their drinks. “Surely can’t be the championship. You’re leading by a mile.”
“No—it’s not,” Lando answers, staring ahead of him. “Something else. Personal.”
“When’s the last time you had sex?”
He winces, glancing over, “Seriously?”
“Two months, then.”
“Fuck you.”
Carlos laughs, taking their shots from the bartender and sliding one across to Lando. He downs it instantly, savouring the burn in his throat and praying it’s enough to ease his tension.
“How about—” Carlos’s hands are on his shoulder, steering him to look in the direction of a girl. “Her. Blonde on your left.”
“I’m not doing this, Carlos.”
“No?” he surveys the crowd, before steering him again. “Her?”
Lando freezes. Carlos, too busy with his ongoing bit of listing random women, doesn’t notice.
You’re standing there, in a dress that glints beneath the strobing lights, drink in your hand, a carefree smile on your face as you talk to a group of your friends.
Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuck—
Lando’s heartbeat is so loud in his ears it drowns out the music.
You look beautiful.
It's the first time he's seen you in almost a month, but that's all that's running through his head.
He can see the way you’re talking, using your hands, more animated than he’s ever seen you before. Just as he can even choose to tear his gaze away, for both your sakes, someone’s approaching you.
He’s tall, blonde, frame nudging past people with the clear goal of getting to you. When he does, you blink, smiling and shaking his hand.
It’s nothing like the first time you and Lando met. It plays out perfect—the man makes you laugh, complimenting you by the looks of it, and you’re already pulling your phone out of your purse.
Something sparks deep inside of him. Jealousy. A pang of something possessive when he knows it isn't fair. Still, he’s moving, cutting Carlos off mid sentence.
“Where are y—”
“I’ll be back.”
He reaches you in under twenty seconds, managing to catch the ends of your conversation.
“Did you want another drink?”
“Yeah, that’d be—”
The man steps aside just as Lando stops in front of you. He watches your attention shift, watches the recognition flash across your features.
“Lando?”
The man blinks, head snapping towards him. You’re frozen on the spot, gaze darting between the two of them.
“Sorry, man,” he says, and Lando straightens. “Kinda busy h—”
“Leave.”
The command comes out short. Rude, but Lando can’t bring himself to care.
“I’m sorry?”
“Leave,” he repeats, and you’re silent, hands lowering to your sides. “Now.”
“Excuse m—”
“Get the fuck out,” he says, stepping closer. You tense, but stay quiet. “Do I have to make you?”
The man scoffs, muttering something and disappearing into the crowd.
It leaves you and Lando silent again.
“What the fuck are you—”
“Not here,” he says, grabbing your wrist to lead you out the back. “Fuck.”
You stumble outside, glass still in one hand, a glare on your face. The heavy door slams shut, and Lando releases his hold.
“What the fuck was that?”
“I dont—”
“What gives you the fucking right?” you say, voice raising. “You think you can dictate who I talk to just because we live opposite each other?!"
“No, fuck, baby—”
“You’re a fucking dick, Norris.”
“I know.”
“You’re arrogant, cocky, egotistical—” you shove him, and he doesn’t resist, staggering back. “You ignore me for a month and this is the first thing you fucking do?!”
He winces, rubbing his shoulder. You’re breathless, face flushed pink, looking at him with disdain.
“I wasn’t ignoring you.”
“Fuck you.”
“I wasn’t,” he repeats, moving closer. You step back, and he doesn't try again. “I was just—I didn’t know what to—”
“Is this a game to you? Am I a game? Are you testing to see how long you can keep me waiting for and how long I’ll keep letting it happen?”
He shakes his head, and you lean against the wall, exhaling.
“Were you…” he starts, and you look at him. “Planning on fucking him? And the guy in Greece—”
“You’re unbelievable."
“Were you?”
“Would it matter?”
“Yes. A lot.”
“Tell me why.”
Because I’m in love with you.
“Because you’re out of his league.”
“Lando,” you laugh, disbelieving. “Don’t fucking lie.”
“Were you hoping I’d say something else?” he grins, then immediately curses himself. What the fuck was he doing? “That I’d say because I want to fuck you?”
“Don’t you?”
His smile falters.
“What?”
“We’re unfinished, remember?” you say. “What happened to wanting to kiss me? To fuck me more than anything? No, I wasn’t planning on have sex with him, or anyone, but God I sh—”
He’s moving before you even finish the last word, hands fitting around your waist, lips crashing against yours with six months worth of want. Of need. One hand slides up from your waist to your jaw, the other sliding beneath your dress, warm on your skin.
You smell so good, like vanilla and lip gloss and champagne. Like everything he’s ever been searching for. It’s overwhelming. Filling his head until all he can think about is your lips, your tongue against his. He feels you chasing him back—nails digging into his shoulder, head tilting, lips parting so easily for him.
It’s better than any other kiss he’s had in his life.
“Fuck,” he gasps. “I’m sorry.”
You let out something between a whine and a moan, quiet, probably accidental. He feels your hands tangle in his hair, the warmth of your body as you arch against him. Impulsive, his hand trails down again, skimming beneath the waistband of your panties. You whimper then, hand catching his wrist to keep it still.
“Lan—” you start, eyes shutting as his lips trail down to your jaw, teeth grazing beneath your ear. You find his lips again, and there’s a sense of desperation, urgency. “I—fuck. Just—”
He abruptly pulls away, breathless, stumbling.
You stay still, face flushed pink, dress, creased from his roaming hands. He knows he probably looks the same, maybe worse. It’s silent, apart from the sound of ragged breathing and muffled bass from the club.
“Fuck. Sorry,” he says, running his hands through his hair. “I…”
Your eyes are wide and startled, watching as he presses his fingers to his mouth, lowers them, then covers his face.
“Lando—”
“I’ve got a triple header this week,” he bursts out. “U.S, Mexico, Brazil. I leave tomorrow morning.”
You’re still panting, motionless, processing the words.
His heart is racing, fingers clenching and unclenching by his sides. Before you get to even open your mouth, he reaches for you again. You’re not even surprised, kissing him back with the same exact intensity. It feels different from the first two. It feels like another promise, one that he knows he’ll keep, one that says when I get back, you and me are real.
“I'm not waiting for you any longer.”
“I know,” he mutters, thumb grazing against your cheek. “I know that. I promise.”
He steps back again, and you’re already moving to your apartment door, pausing just as you turn the door handle. You aren’t smiling at him. Your lips are parted, blush dusted across your skin. When he forces himself away, you stop him.
“Lando.”
“Yeah?”
You smile then—pefect, fucking angelic, and he almost reaches for you again.
“I missed you.”
Fuck.
You’re not sure when you realised you might be in love with Lando Norris.
As far as you remembered, he’d always been the same. He’d run into you in the hall every morning, in the elevator, on the way in and out of the building. He’d make the same shitty jokes, flirt in the most arrogant way possible, slide his hand around your waist when you’d sift through your mailbox.
It’s hard to tell, because Lando is so, undeniably, him.
You don’t know whether a shitty pick up line means something else. You don’t know if the small graze of his thumb on your skin is accidental or pointed. He calls you gorgeous, baby, a smile on his face that seems all too knowing, then you open your phone the next day to an article titled ‘Lando Norris spotted with model in Ibiza’.
You think you might’ve realised after that night in his apartment. It’d sat at the back of your mind like a shadow, a constant reminder that the two of you were ‘unfinished’. Whatever the hell that meant.
Or maybe it’d been the silence that came after, the month of tension, of absence that’d felt like torture. You’d hated it so much you’d left for Greece in hopes you’d return home to normalcy.
Mykono’s had been dreamlike. The coastline was gorgeous, you’d spent your days on yachts and nights in clubs. You’d met a guy called Elias—Greek perfection, and that had been it. You’d only met him. You hadn’t gotten his number, had sex, gone any deeper than knowing his name and age and the name of his dog.
All you could think about was home. Of your apartment and Lando, right across from it. You thought about his shitty pick up lines, his touch, the magazines always tossed outside your door. You thought about him, staring at the sea like you could see Monaco, and when you’d arrived home, he hadn’t been there waiting.
Naturally, you’d done the only thing you knew how whenever your life was thrown into disarray. You’d gone to Jimmy’z, with the sole purpose of getting wasted, but the universe, as you’d established almost six months ago when he’d moved in, absolutely hated you and you’d run into him anyway.
You remember being so, unbelievably frustrated. Frustrated at the sheer audacity of him, the shitty greeting after a month of pure silence.
But then he’d kissed you. You still couldn’t get the feeling out of your head—his hands on your waist, sliding up the planes of your stomach, your jaw, slipping down briefly to dip at the waistband of your panties.
Then he’d fucking left. Again. Without another word. Leaving only another promise and a white box outside your door.
It’s been five days since the kiss. Four since he'd left, leaving another promise in his wake. Four since you’d opened that perfectly wrapped box he'd left outside your door.
Lingerie. Light pink, dainty, lingerie.
You were sure you were reading into it too much. This was Lando, after all. Someone who jumped at the opportunity to make things amusing when they got too personal—but the thought of it. The thought of him seeing the set and thinking of you.
You tear your gaze away from the box, over to the screen instead, the Grand Prix in Austin on lap 55. Lando’s leading, like you’ve discovered he usually is. When he crosses the line in first, you’re not even looking. Your gaze has slid over to the box again.
It’s then you decide you’re going to something completely and utterly stupid.
You —
[ 1 image attached ]
congrats on the win
A wave of regret washes over you the moment you hit send.
The picture stares back at you on your phone: you, on your fucking knees on the plush, duvet of your bed, the pink lace flush against your skin. It’s a good picture. A really good picture, and yet you want to throw your phone off the balcony despite it.
He doesn’t answer for ten minutes. An hour. Two.
You swipe onto the messages again, debating whether to delete everything and block his contact, curled up in bed with the set still on, when—
Lando —
fuck
fuckfuckfuck what the fuck
baby
baby what the fuck
The torrent of messages makes you sit up, thighs pressing together, blush already making its way up your neck.
Lando —
no you can’t do this
not while i’m away for another two weeks
i’ll book a flight back to monaco right now i’m not even fucking joking
You —
be patient norris
Lando —
are you still wearing it??
You shift slightly, debating on whether to send him another picture.
You —
[ 1 image attached ]
Lando —
oh fuck
you’re gonna kill me
You —
what took you so long to answer earlier?
Lando —
post race celebration debrief whatever the hell
knew i should’ve checked my phone sooner
You —
where are you?
Lando —
hotel
im meant to go out with everyone in twenty minutes
fuck
You can imagine him in his room, his face tinted crimson. You can imagine his voice, picture his touch you so badly craved.
Your phone lights up again.
Lando —
if i win all three of my races
you wear that set for me when i get home
Your fingers clench around your phone.
You —
deal
Then you slide your phone onto your bedside table, silent, like it’ll soothe your racing heart.
The day of the Brazil Grand Prix, two weeks later, you’re curled up on the couch, anxiously biting the pad of your thumb as you watch. You’d found yourself watching the recent races with more attention than any other. Probably because of the looming shadow of the deal you’d made with him, growing closer with every lap he spent in P1. He’d won Mexico last week with a 25 second gap, Austin with 10, but this one was different. It held more weight.
The commentator raises his voice, saying words that have no meaning to you, until—
“Lando Norris wins the Brazilian Grand Prix!”
You can’t breathe. Your body rushes with adrenaline, with anticipation, heart thundering against your ribs.
An hour later, you get the text.
Lando —
i’ll be back on monday
The day Lando Norris had moved in across the hall, you knew your life would change.
Did you think it’d change this much? No. But you knew it’d change, and the revelation gave you a sense of unexplainable comfort.
He gets home on Monday, eight pm. You’d spent the entire day pacing, then attempting to be productive, then pacing again. The lingerie had stared at you from its spot on your chair, accusationally, waiting for the moment you reached for it again.
You hear him walk into his apartment. You count the minutes until he comes out again, until he knocks.
Lando’s already smiling when you open the door.
He’s in joggers, a cotton tee, backwards cap. He looks how he usually would on a regular day. One where he didn’t have a very blatant deal to have sex with you.
“Hi,” he says, and it comes out quiet. “Miss me?”
You drag your gaze up to his face, taking a step closer. It’s silent for a few seconds, weighted silence, before you give in.
“Yeah,” you breathe, and he’s already moving, hands on your hips to press you against him.
He kisses you soft.
You sink into him, lips against his, letting him guide you. His tongue licks into your mouth—not desperate like the first time, but slow. Savouring. The surface of your door is cold against your back, and you blindly reach for the handle, turning it and sending the two of you stumbling inside.
He doesn’t comment on the interior, the stack of magazines, the box still on the couch. He just keeps kissing you, hands roaming idly, beneath your shirt and brushing against the lace of your bra.
“Oh, fuck,” he breathes when he feels it, pulling away to catch his breath. “You wore it.”
“That was the deal, wasn’t it?”
He groans, muttering, “you’re killing me, baby”, hand sliding to your jaw.
Your hands reach up to his hair when he leans again, tossing his cap off to the side, tangling in the soft curls. A helpless moan escapes you when his hips move against yours. You can feel how hard he is, the pent up frustration and longing. You wonder if he’s been like this since Brazil, since his flight, and the thought sends heat pooling at your core.
“Bedroom,” you say between kisses, though you make no move to stop. “On the left.”
You don’t register the length between the door and your room. You don’t register him nudging you onto your bed either, only the warmth of him on top of you, his hand tugging your shirt off.
He pulls away again, just to take you in. His gaze surveys every inch of you, roaming freely, turning you inside out though he hasn’t said a word. He looks dishevelled—awestruck, his chest rising and falling in ragged breaths.
“You’re—” he blinks, like he can’t believe he’s even here. “Gorgeous. So fucking gorgeous—”
“Off,” you say, and your voice sounds so far away. You lean forward, pulling at his shirt. “Take it off.”
He immediately shrugs it off, and you scramble to tug your own shorts off too, about to reach for his joggers until he does it for you. You let yourself be greedy, taking in the sight of his tan skin, the curve of his muscles, the lines that disappear beneath his boxers.
“Please,” you say, quiet. You don’t know what you’re saying please for. It might be please kiss me, please fuck me, please don’t keep me waiting any longer. Probably a combination of all three. “Lando.”
His palm skims up your thighs, tugging you effortlessly closer. You can see how hard he is now—the prominent outline of him against his boxers. It makes you clench around nothing, fingers curling in your bedsheets.
“What do you want?” he asks, and you whine, his fingers toying with the waistband of your panties. “Tell me.”
“I want you.”
“Where?”
Everywhere, you want to say, thighs pressing together when he tugs the lace down. His hands push them apart again with a small murmur of stay still for me, and you think you might come right then and there.
“Lando,” you whine when he moves away, sliding up the planes of your back to the clasp of your bra. “Just touch me. Anywhere. Fuck me.”
He laughs then, low, his touch so gentle and only adding to your desperation.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, then he’s back to your thighs, tracing idly. His fingers—finally, graze over your clit, and you immediately arch into him. “So wet and I’ve barely touched you.”
He circles it, featherlight, making you gasp. His fingers move quicker at the noise, slipping down to your folds.
“Is this what you’ve been thinking about?” he asks, leaning down to trail kisses at your jaw. “These past three weeks—past few months?”
His finger slides inside of you, barely, but it makes you moan, hips jerking in an attempt to pull him in deeper.
“I know you have, baby,” he says, slowly pulling out, just to fuck in deeper. “Fuck.”
He moves swifter, thumb pressing against your clit, slipping in a second finger. It feels overwhelming already—too much, and yet you want even more. He curls his fingers perfectly, like he’s already learnt you. You already feel so full, his thick fingers quickening when he feels you tense.
“Lan,” you say, and he groans at the name. “Please—”
You come abruptly, hard, body trembling. He fucks you through it, murmuring praise in your ear, even as tears spring at your eyes in overstimulation.
You whimper when he slowly pulls his fingers out again. Wordlessly, he taps the side of your cheek, and you open your mouth instinctively.
“Jesus,” he rasps when you take his fingers into your mouth. You open your eyes to look up at him, eyelashes fluttering, and he looks devastated. Utterly ruined at the sight of you. “You’re perfect.”
You keep your eyes on him, still slightly shaking, licking over his fingers and tasting yourself on your tongue.
His next movements are a blur. You watch him tug his boxers down, cock hard and leaking. It’s big. So fucking big and all it does it make you impatient. He grins when you try move closer, stopping you halfway.
“Relax for me,” he says, and you’re falling back onto the mattress, head hitting the plush pillows. He reaches over, grabs a condom from God knows where, rolling it on and settling between your thighs. Your eyes are wide, lips parted, but you relax, letting him guide you exactly where he wants. “That’s it, baby.”
He nudges against you, gentle, and you both tense.
“Breathe,” he says, but it comes out strained, like he’s holding himself back. He pushes in, slow, stopping at just the tip. “Fuck. Oh, fuck.”
You whimper, hands fisting in the sheets, head tilting back when he eases in deeper.
“You okay?” he asks, stopping to brush your hair out of your face. “You look—insane. So fucking unreal.”
“I’m fine,” you gasp, one hand moving to tangle in his hair. He leans forward, kissing you, reassuring. “Move. Please move.”
His hands settle on your waist when he slides all the way in, and you both groan at the feeling. You turn your head to bury it in the pillows, but he immediately tilts it back towards him.
“Let me hear you,” he murmurs, starting to thrust in and out. “It’s just us. C’mon, gorgeous.”
You moan at that, and he pushes in harder, deeper, hitting all the right spots inside you.
You can hear his ragged breathing, your own name on his lips. He sets a rhythm, steady, the bed frame knocking against the wall with every moment. Your hands move to his shoulders, nails digging into his back, and he groans, thrusts turning rougher.
“You take me so well, baby,” he says, and he sounds breathless, hoarse. “So fucking well.”
“I can’t—” you clench around him, overstimulated. “Lan—I can’t—”
“You can,” he breathes, sinking impossible deeper, filling you perfectly. “Come for me. I know you can.”
It feels so good, like heaven, like the world really only consisted of the two of you. He moves your leg higher, and you let him, pliant, overwhelmed with pleasure. You’re sure your nails have left scratches, deep marks, but it only seems to encourage him more.
“Feels good, huh?” he says, and he’s grinning. You roll your hips against his in response, and the flash of confidence shatters, turning into something that sounds like a whine. “You’re so good—you’re so fucking good to me.”
He ghosts his lips over your neck, and you turn your head to kiss him. It’s messy, hungry, his tongue against yours and his cock relentless inside you.
The second time you come feels euphoric—dizzying, knocking all the air out of your lungs. All you can think about is Lando, his name, his touch, the months of craving of him all for this exact moment.
He shudders a second later, hips stuttering, grip bruising on your skin.
“Fuck,” he groans when he comes, panting. He thrusts in again, rhythm faltering, his face pressed against your neck. “Fuck—I think I’m in love with you.”
Then he collapses, gasping, flushed a pretty shade of pink. You lay there, chest rising and falling, eyes half lidded, not yet processing his words.
You’re not sure how long you stay there, trying to regain your breath. You whine quietly at him pulling out, barely sensing him moving to toss out the condom.
“Everything okay?” he asks, quietly. You’re too spent to answer, so you move towards him, letting him press kisses on your forehead, your neck, down your shoulder.
He looks completely wrecked, hair tousled and messy. When he turns away again to presumably find tissues, you see the marks on his back, the indents of your nails. You’re sure you don’t look much better, but you know if you asked he’d say you were the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
I think I’m in love with you.
“Lando,” you say, softly. He blinks, glancing back at you, concern in his eyes. “Did you meant that?”
He cocks his head, like he’s trying to figure out what you mean. You see when it clicks, when the blush deepens into crimson.
“Yeah,” he says, and you sit up, flinching at the ache in your muscles. “I mean—I think so. You’re all I ever think about. Ever since I moved in.”
You study his face, the expression on it. He’s studying you back, looking for a reaction, a response in your eyes.
“I think I might be in love with you too,” you answer, and his shoulders physically relax. He falls back onto the bed, on top of you, face burying in your neck. “Even though you’re a cocky, arrogant, piece of shit.”
“Thanks,” he mutters. “I try.”
You laugh and feel him smile into your skin.
“Stay tonight,” you tell him, gently running your fingers through his hair. “If you want.”
“If I want,” he repeats, grinning. “Right.”
You scoff, settling back into the pillows. He kisses you, muttering something about finding a towel, and you let him go.
You wonder if all those months ago, if you’d opened the door to him in a better mood, if he hadn’t fucking stared at your tits, you would’ve had this sooner. Maybe you would’ve kissed him the first time you’d had the chance to, maybe you would’ve said yes to every single date he’d asked you on, and almost 10 months of wait would turn into one.
But it didn’t matter now. It didn’t matter because now, you finally had him.
It’s summer in Monaco, three months later, and there’s a magazine outside your apartment door.
The glossy cover is smooth on your fingertips, there’s a note stuck to the front, and a paperclip marks a specific page. You smile, leaning against the doorframe, plucking the note off and staring at the cover.
It’s you.
Well, not just you. It’s the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, it’s Lando in his race suit, it’s the two of you kissing after he’d just won the championship.
You’re crying—you remembered crying, but hadn’t realised how obvious it’d actually been. There are tears streaks trailing down your face, his hand is resting on your jaw to tilt your face towards him.
Lando Norris — An Interview with Formula 1’s newest World Champion
Though the championship has been the center of attention for Lando Norris, it isn’t the only thing people have been talking about. We sat the British F1 driver down almost a year ago with the question: How do you handle relationships when you’re living such a public life?
Back then, he’d responded with his usual, boyish charm—claiming he thinks he’s ‘much better at driving a car at 300 kilometres an hour than replying a text’. But now, after the events of his championship-winning Grand Prix, it seems as though that wasn’t entirely true.
“You said in a previous interview you wanted someone who can put up with you—who doesn’t let you get away with everything. You also said you hadn’t found them yet. What about now?”
We ask Lando, fresh off his championship win and the reveal of his girlfriend.
“Now? Yeah. I’ve found her.”
“And is she ticking all your boxes?”
“Every single one. She puts up with me—she has since we met a year ago, actually. She doesn’t know a thing about Formula 1. She’s hot, sexy, and gorgeous—ticks all my boxes.”
“And how did you meet?”
Lando smiles at the question, blushing.
“I mean—fuck, I wish I could say we met somewhere romantic, but no, it was quite the opposite,” his smile grows. “No further comment.”
“Alright. Final question: Any messages for her? For anyone?”
“No. She’ll get a message when she reads this interview anyway.”
You close the magazine, glancing at the note he’d attached on top.
Summary: You have always been open about your faith, but now it's being questioned and doubted by people because of your boyfriend's necklace.
Word count: 1k
Warning: openly talking about Christianity and faith, fan culture, hate comments, more character study than anything i guess
A/n: requested by @justareadero1 !! thank you so much for requesting! i'm sorry it took a while and it's so short, i had a bit of trouble on what angle i wanted to go with. hope you like it!
You have never been shy about your faith in God. Never been shy about talking about your experience and how He helped you through one of the worst times in your life. Whenever anyone asked, you told them the truth.
And as a reminder you've been wearing a rosary necklace for years now. It's a simple one, beautiful to you, even though you usually went to a reformed church where the rosary was a symbol that nobody really cared about. Really, even you weren't praying the rosary, finding the practice a bit too much.
But you liked the reminder. And your boyfriend of half a year, Kimi, liked it too. Many times he has complimented you on it, on the way it sat against your tops or your skin when you were wearing something with a different neckline.
"Look at you!" Kimi smiled when he picked you up for one of your dates. "You look beautiful!"
"Thank you," you blushed lightly at his words and instinctively brushed down your dress. "I picked this… for you."
"You look absolutely stunning," he repeated and stepped closer to kiss you gently on the lips. His hand held the back of your neck, his fingers reflexively tangling in your necklace. "Hi."
"Hi," you smiled back at him, a bit flustered.
And just a few days ago he sent you a selfie from his family holiday. On the picture you could see a new necklace amongst the others that you have gotten used to before. It was a rosary similar to yours just slightly different.
The first half of the summer break went by fast, faster than you thought it would. But you were busy and time flew while you worked and waited for Kimi to arrive back home.
And when he did, you were quick to go over to his flat and have a date night. It was exactly what the both of you needed with you cooking and Kimi helping with some parts of it. It was a nice evening and you wanted to share it on your Instagram with a Kimi-approved caption.
yourusername
liked by kimi.antonelli and 38,748 others
tagged: kimi.antonelli
yourusername: good things come to those who wait🏖️🩵
view all comments
kimi.antonelli: and everything has its own time☺️🏖️🩵
yourusername: !!🩵🩵
user1: aww my favourite couple is back🥺
user2: they're so sweet!
user3: hold on, are they wearing matching necklaces?
user4: omg wait, you're right! y/n is wearing the exact same one as kimi!
user5: oh ew… why is she copying him?
user6: exactly!! can't she have her own style?
user7: is that a rosary??
user8: omg nooo, not kimi wearing a rosary😭
user9: i mean… he's from italy, a country with a VERY CLEAR christian history
user10: i think it's great that he wears something like that🤷♀️
user11: okay but why is SHE wearing one?
user12: yeah, she's not really a christian…
user13: yeah she's not catholic
user14: i mean… people wear lots of different things these days. can we leave them alone??
user15: ewww, honestly, i know that she's wearing it for him. i'd be embarrassed if i was her😬😬
At first the comments upset you quite a lot. You never liked being in the spotlight, but with Kimi in the picture, it was hard not to be. And since you loved him truly, you weren't going to let him go.
But with that spotlight came the fans. His fans, fans of the sport and even haters. Those who hated for the sole reason of hating. For fun. For entertainment. And you didn't enjoy that.
And right now, you were just lost. There wasn't much you could do, you weren't going to reply to these people and you weren't going to give them the satisfaction of seeing you break.
But you did. To Kimi.
"I'm sorry," you muttered, eyes full of tears. He was hugging you to his chest, gently rocking you. "I don't even understand why it hurts so much."
"No, you shouldn't apologize," he murmured into your hair, kissing your forehead. "I should though. I'm sorry that I can't make this better for you. I can't even protect you the way I should."
"It would be worse," you shook your head, sniffling. "That's what they want. To get a reaction out of you."
You stayed quiet for a few moments, just resting against Kimi's chest. He was a good boyfriend. A great one. He always took care of you, he always listened to you, he always made you feel better.
But right now, nothing could really help. Nothing except time and prayer for those who are blinded by their own feelings.
So you rested and prayed. Prayed for them to find peace. For your feelings to settle. For the situation to take a turn for the better.
"I love you," Kimi muttered against your hair an hour later. "And I think your faith is beautiful. It doesn't matter what people online say."
"I know," you sighed, the tension finally bleeding out of you. "I love you too."
And it was true. No matter what people thought, no matter what they said, you knew the truth. It didn't matter what other people thought about you or about your faith. The only thing that mattered was your relationship with Christ and the only person who needed to know the truth about that was you.
yourusername
liked by kimi.antonelli and 19,374 others
yourusername: it's not for him, it's for HIM. forever grateful🙏
the comments are disabled on this post
More f1 stories: Formula1 masterlist
More stories: Main masterlist
Kimi is wearing a rosary necklace 🥹🥹 and I have the same one (or js slightly different) just in gold 🥹🥹 (its a sign from God that we were made for eachother 🙏)
Can you make a kimi x reader where they accidentally end up 'matching'? Like Kimi got this necklace from his dad or mom and they didnt know that reader had the same one and when people only noticed it most thought its cute and some where hating on reader for 'being a larper' or 'disrespecting Christianity and wearing religious things just because of kimi' even tho reader always wore the necklace (even before meeting kimi) and always openly talked about her beliefs, please?
Btw his eyes are soooooo gorgeous I cant 😭😭🥹
hey darling! thank you so much for the request!
i'll be honest, i didn't really know how to write this, since i myself don't wear a rosary, or use one for that matter. i grew up with the teachings of the reformed church and though i love my catholic brothers and sisters, i don't really hold their beliefs about these trivial things.
HOWEVER!! i tried my hardest to still kind of include what you wanted and i hope you'll like it! it's a little hard for me to talk about my faith as it's very personal and not really something us hungarians do. so i did my best!
thank you, once again and i hope you'll enjoy It's not for him (it's for HIM)!!
Pairing: Kimi Antonelli x You (Team Principle's Daughter)
Summary: Everyone in Formula 1 knows your name and most of them have something to say about it. But when rookie sensation Kimi Antonelli arrives in the paddock already convinced you're trouble, one awkward encounter is enough to set off a season full of rumors, rivalries, and unexpected complications. In a world where everyone is watching, the truth is never as simple as it seems.
Word Count: 16k+
Warnings: Misunderstandings, media manipulation, public scrutiny, online hate and cyberbullying, jealousy, rumor-spreading, emotional tension, slow-burn romance, invasion of privacy, social media drama, mild language, public humiliation, anxiety-inducing situations, brief character bashing, romantic conflict, paparazzi and press intrusion, references to toxic fan culture, happy ending.
By the time you were six years old, you had already learned the three unspoken rules of growing up inside a Formula 1 paddock.
The first was that everyone was always being watched, whether they realized it or not — by cameras, by rivals, by sponsors with clipboards and headsets, by fans pressed three-deep against the fences with their phones held aloft like offerings. The second was that nobody, from the newest tire technician to the most decorated seven-time champion, ever said exactly what they meant. And the third — the one that had caused you the most trouble over the years — was that the paddock rewarded charm far more generously than it rewarded honesty.
You had never been particularly good at charm.
You were, on the other hand, extremely good at honesty, which was how you'd ended up with three nicknames by the time you turned eighteen. The Paddock Princess. The Ice Queen of Formula 1. And, your personal favorite, coined by a tabloid that had clearly run out of better ideas: The Most Hated Woman in Motorsport.
It wasn't entirely fair. You didn't hate anyone, not really. You simply had no patience for people who wasted your time — reporters who asked the same five questions in different orders, influencers who treated team garages like content farms, drivers who thought a podium finish entitled them to be rude to catering staff. When those people did those things, you told them so. Usually in fewer words than they deserved.
Somewhere along the way, fewer words than they deserved had calcified into a personality. Into a headline. Into a face people recognized in airports and immediately associated with a Twitter thread titled 10 TIMES Y/N WAS UNHINGED.
You'd read that thread once, at two in the morning, during a particularly boring layover in Singapore. You'd laughed so hard a flight attendant asked if you were alright.
You told yourself you didn't care what the internet thought of you.
Mostly, that was true.
Melbourne in March smelled like eucalyptus and sunscreen and, underneath all of it, the faint metallic tang of brake dust that clung to Albert Park no matter how many times the support trucks hosed down the access roads. The season opener always felt like the first day of school — everyone freshly tanned from their off-season holidays, every team kit still stiff and unworn, every conversation beginning with how was your break and ending, inevitably, with someone glancing nervously toward whichever driver had switched teams over the winter.
This year, that driver was Kimi Antonelli.
You'd heard the name for months before you ever saw the face. Eighteen years old, fast-tracked out of junior categories with the kind of statistics that made veteran engineers go quiet and recalculate things. Italian, from somewhere outside Bologna, supposedly so shy in interviews that his management team had reportedly considered hiring an acting coach just to teach him how to make eye contact with a camera.
You hadn't met him yet. You also hadn't gone out of your way to.
What you had done, courtesy of three different group chats and at least one unsolicited voice memo from Priya, was hear approximately every rumor currently circulating about you that he'd apparently absorbed during his rookie orientation.
She made a journalist cry in 2022.
She told a sponsor's son his watch was fake. (It was fake. That part never made it into the story.)
She once made a grown man leave his own team's hospitality suite because he was "being insufferable near the espresso machine."
(That last one was true. You stood by it.)
"Y/n!"
You looked up from your phone to find one of the junior team assistants — Ben, you thought, though half the assistants this season were interchangeable twenty-two-year-olds in identical polos — bearing down on you with the focused urgency of someone who had just been handed an impossible task and intended to immediately hand it to someone else.
"Can you grab these for me?" he said, already pushing a cardboard tray into your arms before you'd agreed to anything.
You looked down. Six coffees. Six. Lids slightly too loose, the way they always were when the hospitality baristas were rushed.
"Where am I taking them?"
"Media center. They're setting up for the afternoon pressers and everyone's about to murder each other over caffeine."
You sighed, with great theatrical weight, the kind of sigh that had been honed over two decades of paddock life. "One day, Ben, people are going to write songs about my sacrifices."
"Nobody asked you to monologue, Y/n."
"Rude."
He was already walking away, weaving back toward the garage with the particular gait of someone whose day had not improved since 6 a.m. Typical.
You adjusted your grip on the tray and started toward the media center, which from where you stood looked deceptively close — maybe eighty meters, in a straight line, if straight lines existed anywhere in this paddock, which they did not.
The walkway between the garages and the media center was, on a good day, merely crowded. Today was not a good day. It was media day, which meant every team had simultaneously decided to funnel sponsors, broadcast crews, photographers, and at least four influencers who absolutely should not have had paddock passes through the exact same forty-meter stretch of tarmac.
You moved carefully. You'd done this a hundred times. You knew how to angle your shoulders, how to read the flow of a crowd, how to time your steps between the gaps left by camera operators swinging their rigs around.
What you did not know — what nobody could have known — was that eighteen years old and freshly arrived from his rookie media briefing, Kimi Antonelli was, at that exact moment, walking the opposite direction with his head down, reading something on his phone, having been told approximately forty times that morning to just keep your head down and you'll be fine.
Nobody had told him to also watch where he was walking.
You felt the collision before you understood it. A shoulder. A solid, unmoving wall of a person who had clearly not expected anyone to be standing where you were standing. The tray tipped. You grabbed for it — too late, too slow, your fingers closing around empty air where a coffee cup had been a half-second earlier.
Six coffees does not sound like a lot of liquid until all six are airborne at once.
"Jesus—"
The curse came from in front of you, low and startled and unmistakably masculine, followed immediately by the unmistakable sound of hot liquid making violent contact with cotton race-suit fabric.
For a moment, the entire walkway seemed to hold its breath.
You looked up.
Oh, no.
Oh, absolutely not.
Standing in front of you — close enough that you could see individual drops of coffee sliding down the fabric of his suit, close enough to see the exact moment his expression shifted from confusion to dawning horror — was Kimi Antonelli.
He was, you noted with a kind of detached, horrified clarity, taller than he looked in photos. Brown curls, damp slightly at the temples from the Melbourne heat. eyes, wide with the specific shock of a person who had just been ambushed by scalding liquid in front of several dozen photographers.
And he was this felt like an enormous inconvenience at the time — extremely, almost unfairly attractive.
You had approximately one second to process all of this before he spoke.
"What the hell?"
His voice cracked slightly on the last word. He was eighteen. Of course it cracked.
You opened your mouth. What you meant to say — what you had fully intended to say, the words already forming, already halfway up your throat — was oh my god, I am so sorry, are you okay, let me get someone—
What came out instead, in a flat, clipped tone that didn't sound like an apology at all, was:
"Maybe look where you're walking."
The second the words left your mouth, you wanted to disappear. Not metaphorically. Actually, physically disappear, sink into the tarmac, cease to exist as a biological entity.
Because that wasn't what you'd meant. At all. It had come out wrong too sharp, too fast, the verbal equivalent of flinching and now it was just out there, hanging in the air between you, while Kimi Antonelli stared at you with an expression that suggested you had personally and deliberately ruined his entire life.
Somewhere to your left, a camera shutter clicked. Once. Then again, rapid-fire, the unmistakable sound of a photographer who had just realized they were sitting on something.
You didn't notice.
Kimi did.
You watched something close behind his eyes not anger, exactly, more like a door swinging shut. He looked down at his suit, now decorated with six separate coffee stains in various shades of brown, then back up at you.
"Right," he said.
Just that. One syllable, flat and final, in an accent that turned the word into something almost gentle even as the meaning behind it was anything but.
"Wait—" you started.
He was already walking away. Long strides, shoulders set, not looking back.
You stood there, in the middle of the walkway, holding an empty cardboard tray, while the last of the coffee dripped steadily off your knuckles onto the tarmac. Somewhere behind you, a sponsor's assistant was very obviously filming on her phone.
Fantastic.
Absolutely fantastic.
The first sign that something had gone catastrophically wrong arrived almost exactly three hours later, while you were sitting in the team hospitality suite trying to forget the entire incident had happened.
You were halfway through a plate of fruit you had no intention of eating when your phone, sitting face-down on the table, began to vibrate. And kept vibrating. In the specific, relentless way that meant something had happened, not to you, necessarily, but about you.
You flipped it over.
Forty-one notifications. Then forty-seven. Then, as you watched, the number simply stopped being readable, replaced by the small red dot that Twitter reserved for genuine emergencies.
"What happened now," you muttered, to nobody, and opened the app.
The video was eleven seconds long.
It started — you noticed this immediately, with the particular nausea of someone watching their own life get edited without their consent — after the collision. There was no Ben, no cardboard tray, no six coffees, no context whatsoever. Just you, standing very close to Kimi Antonelli, both of you frozen, coffee visibly soaking into his pristine mercedes race suit.
And then your voice. Cold. Flat. Crystal clear, because whoever had filmed this had apparently been standing close enough to capture perfect audio.
"Maybe look where you're walking."
The clip ended there. On his face. On the exact moment something in his expression closed off.
Eleven seconds. That was all it had taken.
You scrolled down, and your stomach dropped somewhere around your ankles.
#PaddockPrincess.
#JusticeForKimi
#FreeKimi.
All three, worldwide trends. Within three hours. On media day, the single most heavily covered, heavily quoted, heavily screenshotted day of the entire Grand Prix weekend.
The comments were not kind.
she's so rude omg
poor baby didn't even do anything
this is literally his FIRST media day and she's already terrorizing him
i've heard stories about her for years. guess they were all true
someone protect this man
You put your phone face-down on the table again, very gently, and pressed both hands over your eyes.
"Kill me," you said, to the fruit plate.
"Oh, we're not doing that," said a familiar voice, entirely too cheerful. "But we are going to enjoy this immensely."
You looked up. Three drivers — two from midfield teams, one from a team near the back of the grid who had clearly decided his Friday was free enough to dedicate entirely to your humiliation — had gathered around a phone two tables away, and at least one of them was now grinning directly at you with the unrestrained delight of a man who had found the best possible use of his afternoon.
"Oh, look," he said, to his companions, loudly enough for the whole suite to hear. "Public Enemy Number One has arrived."
"You people are insufferable," you said.
"Twitter hates you," said the second driver, not unkindly, scrolling his phone with one hand while eating a croissant with the other.
"Twitter hates everyone."
"Fair point," he conceded, through a mouthful of pastry.
You picked up the nearest object — a half-full water bottle — and threw it with the precision of someone who had spent twenty-three years perfecting exactly this gesture. It missed, sailing well wide and bouncing harmlessly off a sofa cushion, which only made the entire group dissolve into the kind of laughter that drew looks from across the room.
You put your head back down on the table and stayed there.
Across the paddock, in a media room that smelled faintly of new carpet and old coffee—ironic, you would think later, when you found out about this part, Kimi Antonelli sat very still in a folding chair while his manager, Marco Esposito, paced in front of him with the energy of a man trying not to say something he'd regret.
"Stop reading the comments," Marco said, for the third time.
"I'm not."
"You are. I can see your eyes moving."
Kimi didn't look up. On the screen, the eleven-second clip played again. And again. He'd lost count of how many times.
He had heard about you before he'd even signed his contract. Everyone had told him, in the careful, slightly amused tone people used when they were enjoying themselves at someone else's expense: Watch out for the team principal's daughter. She'll eat you alive if you give her the chance. He'd assumed it was paddock folklore — the kind of story that got more dramatic with every retelling, the way stories about brake failures and team radio meltdowns always did.
Then he'd walked face-first into six coffees, and the most famous woman in the paddock had looked him directly in the eyes and told him to watch where he was going, in a tone that suggested she'd been personally inconvenienced by his existence.
So. Maybe the rumors were accurate after all.
"She's exactly as bad as everyone said," he said quietly, mostly to himself.
Marco, for once, didn't argue.
What neither of them knew — what nobody in that media room could possibly have known — was that at that exact moment, in a different building entirely, you were scrolling through a separate, much smaller corner of the internet. Not the trending tags. Not the hashtags with your name in them.
You were looking at his pre-season interview. The one where he'd been so nervous his hands wouldn't stay still, where he'd laughed at his own mistake halfway through a sentence and then looked almost betrayed by his own laughter, like he hadn't expected to be capable of it on camera.
And you were thinking — with the specific, horrified clarity of someone realizing something deeply unhelpful at the worst possible time — that Kimi Antonelli had, without question, the prettiest smile you had ever seen on a person who currently, very justifiably, hated you.
The season had not even properly started yet.
This, you thought, putting your phone face-down for the second time that day, was going to be a problem.
The internet, you had learned over the years, did not have a memory problem. If anything, it remembered things with a kind of vindictive precision that made elephants look forgetful.
Two weeks after what certain journalists had, with admirable restraint, begun calling Coffee-Gate, the clip was still everywhere. It had been remixed with dramatic orchestral music. It had been slowed down so that the coffee appeared to fly through the air in elegant, glittering arcs while Kimi's face contorted in horror frame by frame. Someone had set it to a sad piano cover of a pop song, and that version alone had four million views.
You hated that the piano one made you laugh. You hated it every single time, and you watched it every single time anyway.
"You know," your father said, from the doorway of his office, in the particular tone he used when he was about to say something he already knew you wouldn't like, "if you apologized publicly, this would probably go away."
You didn't look up from your phone. "For something that was an accident?"
"You did tell him to watch where he was walking."
"Because he walked into me."
"You don't exactly sound innocent when you say it like that."
"I am innocent."
"You sound guilty."
"You sound annoying."
Toto Wolff — team principal, thirteen years in the paddock, a man who had survived eight championship battles, two engine supplier disputes, and one memorably disastrous sponsor dinner involving a llama — grinned at you with the specific delight of a father who knew exactly how to needle his only child.
You picked up the nearest pen and threw it at him.
He caught it without even looking, the same way he'd been catching things you threw at him since you were seven years old.
"You're lucky you're my favorite child," he said.
"I'm your only child."
"Exactly."
You rolled your eyes so hard it was practically audible. Before you could fire back, there was a knock on the doorframe — one of the PR team, tablet in hand, wearing the slightly harried expression that was standard issue for anyone in PR during a race weekend.
"Everyone's gathering for the welcome announcement," she said. "Five minutes."
Your father sighed, the long, theatrical sigh of a man about to spend forty-five minutes pretending he enjoyed small talk with sponsors. "Time to go pretend I like people."
You stood immediately. "Perfect. I'll stay here."
"No. You're coming."
"Why?"
"Because if I have to suffer, you have to suffer."
You hated it when he made valid points. You hated it more that it kept happening.
The paddock had a particular energy when something was about to happen — a kind of low electric hum, conversations trailing off mid-sentence, people glancing toward the media center every few seconds like they were waiting for a storm to arrive. You felt it the moment you stepped outside, and it took you about thirty seconds to figure out why.
A new presenter was joining the broadcast team. Rumors had been circulating for weeks — someone big, people kept saying, someone Netflix is apparently obsessed with — but nobody had a name, and nobody had a face, which in a paddock this size was practically unheard of. Information didn't survive that long without leaking. Whoever this was, someone had clearly worked very hard to keep her arrival a secret.
You found out why the moment she walked into the media center.
She was, in the most literal and clinical sense, breathtaking. Long dark hair that moved like it had been individually choreographed. A smile that looked effortless in the way that only came from years of very expensive practice. The kind of posture that made you instinctively check your own.
Within ninety seconds, every single person in the room had reorganized themselves around her like iron filings around a magnet. Drivers who normally treated press obligations like dental appointments were suddenly enthusiastically introducing themselves. Team principals — your father included, you noted with deep betrayal — were laughing at things she said before she'd finished saying them.
"That's a red flag," said a voice beside you.
You turned. One of the senior journalists — a woman who'd covered the sport longer than you'd been alive, and who you genuinely liked, mostly because she found almost everything exhausting in the exact same way you did — was watching the new presenter with the flat, assessing stare of someone pricing a used car.
"What is?" you asked.
"Anyone that immediately likeable."
"That's ridiculous."
"Name one person that charming who wasn't secretly a nightmare."
You opened your mouth. Then you thought about it for slightly longer than you'd intended to, and closed it again.
The journalist nodded, satisfied, and went back to her notes.
You were halfway through formulating an exit strategy — out the side door, past catering, gone before anyone noticed — when the new presenter appeared directly in front of you, as though she'd been waiting for exactly this moment.
"You're Y/n," she said. Not a question. A statement, delivered with the easy confidence of someone reading a name tag that wasn't there.
"The infamous one," you said, offering the kind of polite smile you reserved for people you hadn't yet decided whether to dislike.
Her eyes — dark, warm, entirely too sharp for the soft smile that accompanied them — lit up. "Oh, I know."
That was an interesting response. Most people, when meeting you for the first time, did one of two things: pretended they hadn't heard the rumors, or apologized for them on your behalf, as though you needed defending from your own reputation. Nobody usually just... agreed.
"Should I be worried?" you asked, folding your arms.
"Only if you're planning to spill coffee on me." Her smile widened, just slightly, just enough to show she'd done her research. "Sofia, by the way. Sofia Moretti."
"Good luck out there," you said, meaning please leave.
"Thanks." Sofia leaned in, just a fraction, lowering her voice to something that sounded almost confiding. "I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot of each other."
And then she was gone — already turning, already smiling at someone else, leaving you standing there with the distinct, prickling sensation of having just been sized up by something that smiled while it did it.
You weren't sure why that sentence felt like a threat.
You just knew that it did.
Within a month, Sofia Moretti was everywhere.
Not in the way most new hires were everywhere — gradually, awkwardly, learning the rhythms of the paddock one stumble at a time. She arrived fully formed, like she'd been broadcasting Formula 1 for a decade already. She knew which drivers liked being teased and which ones needed careful handling. She knew exactly which angle made every garage look most cinematic. She knew, somehow, within days, things about people that took most journalists years to learn.
The fans adored her instantly. The broadcasters adored her. The drivers — most of them, anyway — adored her, because she made interviews feel like conversations instead of interrogations.
And Kimi Antonelli, for reasons that became increasingly, infuriatingly clear over the following weeks, adored her most of all.
Or — that wasn't quite right. Adored wasn't the word. What was actually happening, as far as you could tell from a careful, definitely-not-obsessive distance, was that Sofia had simply decided Kimi was interesting content, and Kimi — eighteen, painfully shy, allergic to cameras — had apparently found in Sofia the one person in the entire paddock who didn't make him visibly nervous.
Which meant Sofia was around him. Constantly. Every interview, every garage walk-through, every casual hospitality shot that ended up on a broadcast highlight reel somehow featured both of them.
You noticed this.
Not because you cared. Obviously. You had several hundred other things to think about, none of which were the scheduling overlap between a television presenter and a teenager who currently believed you were the worst person in the sport.
"You're staring," said Priya, sliding into the seat across from you with the smug, unhurried confidence of someone who had been planning this sentence for several minutes.
You nearly choked on your coffee — a different coffee, a much more carefully guarded coffee, one you were holding with both hands like it might escape. "I am not."
"You are."
"I was reading something."
"You were staring directly over your phone at Sofia and Kimi."
"They're standing right there. It's not staring if they're right there."
"Mm." Priya leaned back, folding her arms with the air of someone settling in for a show. "Convenient that they're always right there, isn't it."
You glared at her. She looked, if anything, more delighted.
Across the hospitality area, Sofia was mid-interview, leaning toward Kimi with the easy, practiced intimacy of someone who'd known him for years instead of weeks. Kimi who in his own driver-only interviews still occasionally forgot to look at the camera seemed, against all expectation, relaxed. He laughed at something she said. An actual laugh, not the nervous, too-quick laugh he gave journalists when he didn't understand the question.
It annoyed you. You weren't sure why. You filed the feeling away somewhere you wouldn't have to look at it again.
The internet, predictably, had Opinions.
It started small, a comment here, a slow-motion gif there. Then it became fan edits, stitched together with sweeping music, of every time Sofia and Kimi had stood within five feet of each other. Then it became theories. Then someone, you genuinely could not believe this had taken actual effort, produced a twelve-slide presentation titled WHY SOFIA & Kimi ARE ENDGAME (a thread), the evidence for which included: they stood near each other, they smiled at the same time, and, devastatingly, they were photographed in the same building on three separate occasions.
You watched the entire presentation. Twice. You told yourself it was for research purposes.
That night, lying in bed scrolling through your phone with the specific, self-destructive energy of someone who knew they should put the phone down and was choosing not to, a new video appeared in your feed. Sofia and Kimi, leaving the paddock together at the end of the day, walking side by side toward the parking area.
The comments were already in the thousands.
formula 1's new power couple !!
i'm sobbing they're so cute
sofia is literally perfect for him
You watched the video once. and you genuinely could not explain this part, even to yourself you watched it a second time. Then a third.
Then you put the phone face-down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling, which, as ceilings tended to do, offered absolutely no useful information.
What are you doing, you thought. Why do you care? Why are you even thinking about him.
The ceiling had no answers. Your brain, unfortunately, did and the answer it kept circling back to, against every instinct you had, was his laugh. The real one. The one he'd given Sofia that afternoon, easy and unguarded, the kind of laugh you'd never once heard directed at you.
Which was, you reflected, an extraordinarily inconvenient thing to be thinking about, given that as far as Kimi Antonelli was concerned, you were still and would likely remain, Public Enemy Number One.
And as far as you were concerned, lying awake at midnight for reasons you refused to examine too closely, Sofia Moretti was rapidly becoming a problem.
You just couldn't, yet, have explained why.
There were exactly three things Kimi Antonelli was afraid of.
Media interviews. Public speaking. And, somewhere just below those two, the specific and very modern horror of accidentally becoming a meme.
Formula 1, it seemed, had taken one look at this list and decided to expose him to all three on a rotating weekly basis.
This particular disaster began, with the kind of precision that would later feel almost cosmically unfair, at exactly 3:17 a.m.
He couldn't sleep. This wasn't unusual — the nights before a race weekend rarely were restful, his mind running through corner sequences and braking points on a loop that refused to switch off — but tonight felt different. Heavier. His brain kept circling back not to apexes or gear ratios, but to the Sofia situation, which had, somewhere in the last few weeks, stopped being merely strange and become genuinely exhausting.
Every interview with her generated headlines. Every photo generated theories. He didn't understand it — didn't understand where people found the energy — and the not-understanding kept him staring at the ceiling of his hotel room long after he should have been asleep.
Eventually, in the specific kind of boredom that only exists at three in the morning, he reached for his phone.
This was, in retrospect, a mistake.
Boredom led to scrolling. Scrolling led to Instagram. Instagram led, somehow — and he genuinely could not have explained the chain of logic that got him there — to your profile.
He told himself, as he scrolled, that he wasn't looking for anything in particular. He was simply curious. Because nothing about you added up. Everyone — everyone — had told him you were cold. Difficult. The kind of person who'd make a journalist cry for sport.
But every time he actually saw you in the paddock — not the version of you that ended up in clips, but the real, unscripted version — you were doing things that didn't fit the story at all. Helping mechanics carry equipment across the garage when your hands were clearly not needed for it. Sitting with exhausted junior engineers during a late debrief, handing out the last of the snacks from catering before anyone else could claim them. Once, memorably, you'd spent ten minutes crouched next to a sponsor's child who'd gotten separated from her parents, talking to her about her favorite cartoon in a voice so gentle he almost hadn't recognized it as yours.
None of it matched. And Kimi — who liked things to match — found that bothered him more than it probably should have.
So he scrolled.
One photo became two. Two became ten. Ten became twenty, and somewhere around photo number thirty-one — a photo from, he would later discover with a sinking feeling, exactly four years ago — his thumb slipped.
The screen flashed red.
For one full second, his brain simply refused to process what had happened.
Then it caught up.
"No," he whispered, to an empty hotel room, and unliked the photo so fast his thumb nearly went through the screen.
The damage, of course, was already done.
The first person to notice was a fan account with maybe four hundred followers.
The second person to notice was a fan account with four hundred thousand followers, who reposted the screenshot with the caption HE LIKED A PHOTO FROM FOUR YEARS AGO?? AT 3 AM??
By 3:26, there were screenshots. By 3:30, Formula 1 Twitter — which apparently never slept, a fact you found genuinely concerning — was on fire. By 4:00 a.m., there were no fewer than three competing conspiracy theories, one of which involved a timeline. By breakfast, the entire sport had collectively lost what remained of its mind.
You discovered all of this at 8:14 a.m., when your phone began vibrating against the bedside table with such aggression that it nearly walked itself off the edge.
You groaned, reached for it without opening your eyes, and immediately regretted every choice that had led to this moment.
Ninety-three notifications. Forty-seven messages. Two missed calls from Priya, which was never a good sign, because Priya did not call people — Priya sent voice memos that were somehow louder and more aggressive than an actual phone call.
"What happened now," you mumbled, and opened the group chat.
The first message read: OH MY GOD.
The second: WAKE UP RIGHT NOW.
The third was simply seventeen crying-laughing emojis in a row, followed by a screenshot.
You opened it.
And nearly dropped the phone directly onto your own face.
There it was. Clear as day, timestamped, unmistakable. A photo from your account — four years old, you in sunglasses at some long-forgotten test day, nothing remarkable about it at all — and beneath it, in the little row of recent likes:
liked by kimi.antonelli and others
3:17 AM
You stared at it. Blinked. Stared again. Then sat bolt upright in bed so fast the duvet went flying.
"No way."
You opened Instagram directly. The like was gone — unliked, presumably the moment he'd realized — but the internet did not believe in second chances, and screenshots, as you well knew, lived forever.
The comments beneath the repost were already feral.
HE WAS STALKING HER ACCOUNT???
FOUR YEARS AGO?? BRO WAS DEEP DIVING
someone check on this man immediately
THIS IS SO EMBARRASSING I CAN'T
You laughed.
A small laugh, at first — almost reflexive. Then another. Then, helplessly, you were laughing so hard you had to set the phone down on the duvet and press both hands over your face, because the image in your head — Kimi Antonelli, eighteen years old, alone in a hotel room at three in the morning, scrolling through four-year-old photos of you — was simply too much. The poor guy. The absolute, certified, undeniable poor guy.
You laughed until your eyes watered. You hadn't laughed like that in months.
The paddock that morning had the specific, electric energy of a place where everyone had heard the same piece of gossip and nobody could stop talking about it.
Drivers. Journalists. Team principals. Mechanics. Even the catering staff you discovered, with no small amount of horrorf, one of whom gave you a knowing little smile as she handed you your usual breakfast that made it abundantly clear she, too, had seen the screenshot.
You walked into hospitality and were greeted, almost immediately, by a chorus of cheering from a table of drivers that included — inevitably — Oliver Bearman, who you'd long ago categorized as Kimi's friend, troublemaker division.
"Oh, she's here," Ollie announced, to the table, with the delight of a man who had clearly been waiting all morning for this exact moment.
"Don't," you said, already backing away.
"Oh, we're absolutely doing this."
"I hate every single one of you."
"We know," he said cheerfully, and held up his phone, displaying the screenshot, as the rest of the table dissolved into laughter. "Imagine accidentally liking a photo from four years ago."
"Couldn't be me," said the driver beside him, shaking his head with mock solemnity.
"Couldn't be anyone with dignity," Ollie agreed.
"Couldn't be anyone with survival instincts," added a third, and that was the one that finally broke the table entirely — even you, despite yourself, felt your mouth twitch.
You grabbed the nearest napkin dispenser and threw it, mostly out of principle. It missed by a wide margin and skittered harmlessly under a sofa, which only made things worse.
If your morning was bad, Kimi's was significantly worse.
He had never, in his entire eighteen years of existence, experienced true humiliation until that day. Everywhere he went, people smiled at him — not normal smiles, but the specific, knowing kind of smile people gave you when they were sitting on something embarrassing and waiting for the right moment to bring it up.
He walked into the morning drivers' briefing. Someone, somewhere near the back, coughed once, and said, with theatrical clarity:
"Three seventeen."
The entire room laughed. Even the stewards.
By the time he reached his media obligations that afternoon, he had developed the slightly hunted look of a man who had accepted his fate but was not yet ready to discuss it.
A journalist raised a hand. "Kimi — any comment on the recent social media activity?"
The room went very quiet. Marco, standing just off-camera, looked like a man calculating exactly how many years he had left before retirement.
"No," Kimi said.
Immediate. Flat. Final.
The journalist, delighted, opened her mouth to follow up. Kimi had already turned to the next question, jaw set, ears slowly turning the color of a brake disc at full temperature.
Fate, it seemed, had decided that wasn't quite enough.
Because that afternoon, walking between the garage and the paddock club — not paying attention, again, some things never changed — you rounded a corner and nearly collided with him.
Not as dramatically as the first time. No coffee, no cardboard tray, no eleven-second clip in the making. Just both of you, stopping short, a foot apart, in a quiet stretch of corridor where — for once — nobody else happened to be looking.
For a moment, neither of you said anything.
Then you noticed how tired he looked. The internet had spent twelve hours bullying him, after all — there were faint shadows under his eyes, and his shoulders had the particular set of someone who'd been holding himself very carefully all day, waiting for the next joke.
You bit down on your lip. Hard. Trying — and failing — not to smile.
His eyes narrowed the instant he saw it. "No."
That, somehow, made it worse. A laugh escaped before you could stop it. Then another.
"Oh my god."
"No."
"I actually feel bad for you."
"You don't."
"I really don't," you admitted, and laughed again, and his expression shifted from wounded to something that looked, almost, like it was fighting not to be amused.
"You liked a photo from four years ago," you said, delightedly.
"It was an accident."
"Sure."
"It was."
"Mm-hm."
"It was, Y/n."
You nodded, slow and exaggerated, the way you'd nod at a toddler insisting they hadn't drawn on the wall. "I totally believe you."
He groaned — an actual groan, dragging a hand down his face — and you laughed again, harder this time, and something about the sound of it seemed to catch him off guard. He looked at you properly then, like he was seeing something he hadn't expected to find.
Because you looked different when you laughed. Softer. Warmer. Nothing at all like the clipped, cold voice from that eleven-second clip that the entire internet had decided defined you.
The realization caught him off guard. He didn't say anything about it. But for the first time since the coffee disaster, the interaction ended with both of you — however reluctantly — smiling.
Neither of you noticed the photographer at the end of the corridor until it was too late.
By the time you reached your office, the photo was already online: the two of you, mid-laugh, close together, lit by the warm gold of the afternoon. The captions were instantaneous.
wait they're actually... friends??
the chemistry??
i need answers
Someone, inevitably, uploaded a thirty-two-minute video essay titled "The Hidden Truth Behind Kimi Antonelli's 3 AM Like." You watched ten minutes of it before you were laughing too hard to continue.
Somewhere else in the paddock, Kimi buried his face in a pillow and seriously considered a career change.
And somewhere else again — on a balcony overlooking the paddock, drink in hand, watching the whole thing unfold on her phone with the patient attention of someone reading a very interesting book — Sofia Moretti smiled.
A slow smile. Thoughtful.
Because she'd just noticed something. The internet, it turned out, wasn't actually all that interested in her and Kimi. Not really. The fan edits, the theories, the twelve-slide presentations — none of it had generated even a fraction of the reaction that eleven seconds of you laughing in a corridor had just produced.
The story the internet wanted wasn't Sofia and Kimi.
It was you. And him.
And Sofia Moretti had never, in her entire career, been the type of person to ignore a good story.
—--------------
Monaco was always chaos. Beautiful, expensive, completely unmanageable chaos — the kind of chaos that arrived every May with the reliability of a tide and left the entire paddock slightly dazed in its wake.
The streets were impossibly narrow and impossibly packed, lined with superyachts so enormous they made the harbor itself look like a bathtub. Celebrities appeared out of nowhere, trailing entourages the size of small security details. Influencers multiplied like an invasive species, all of them apparently under the impression that the paddock club was a backdrop rather than a workplace. The air smelled like sunscreen and champagne and, faintly, diesel from the support boats idling in the harbor.
You hated Monaco. Which was, you reflected every single year, exactly why you found yourself there, without fail, every May.
The paddock was already buzzing when you arrived Friday morning — not with the usual pre-session energy, but with something else. Something quieter, more conspiratorial. People were checking their phones with a frequency that suggested everyone already knew something you didn't.
You'd made it about ten steps inside the gate when Priya appeared at your elbow, practically vibrating.
"Have you seen it?"
You sighed. "No."
"You should."
That sentence, in your experience, had never once led anywhere good. You took the phone anyway.
The photo loaded slowly — blurry, grainy, clearly taken from a significant distance with a long lens. A yacht, anchored in the harbor among a hundred identical yachts. Two figures on the deck, standing close together. Very close together. Close enough, from this angle, in this light, that it looked — unmistakably — like they were kissing.
The caption left nothing to the imagination.
Kimi Antonelli and Sofia Moretti. Confirmed?
Something in your chest did something small and unpleasant and entirely uninvited.
"Oh," you said.
Priya, predictably, caught it instantly. "Oh?"
"Shut up."
"That sounded jealous."
"It wasn't."
"It absolutely was."
You handed the phone back — slightly too quickly, you realized a half-second too late — and Priya's expression went from delighted to radiant, which meant this conversation, unfortunately, was far from over.
The photo was everywhere within hours. Fan accounts celebrated. TikTok edits multiplied — slow zooms, dramatic music, the works. By that evening, two separate tabloids had run relationship timelines, complete with helpfully annotated screenshots dating back months. Somebody had even produced a graphic ranking the "evidence" on a scale from suspicious to confirmed, and the yacht photo sat firmly at the top, glowing red.
Nobody seemed remotely concerned about whether it was true. The story was simply too good. Reality, you'd learned long ago, was always optional when a better narrative was available.
You told yourself you didn't care.
You told yourself this, in fact, with increasing frequency and decreasing conviction, for most of the afternoon.
"You're staring again," Priya said, several hours later, sliding into the seat across from you on the terrace with the particular smugness of someone who had been counting.
You nearly dropped your phone. "I wasn't."
"You've looked at that photo six times in the last ten minutes."
"I was reading the comments."
"Liar."
You glared. Priya, entirely unbothered, leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, settling in with the relaxed confidence of someone who already knew exactly how this conversation was going to go.
"Do you like him?"
"No."
"That was fast."
"Because the answer is no."
"Interesting," Priya said, in the mild, conversational tone of someone discussing the weather.
"What's interesting?"
"People usually need at least a second to think about it."
You wanted, very badly, to throw your drink at her. Unfortunately, she'd made an irritatingly valid point — and the fact that it was valid made it so much worse.
The truth, if you were being honest with yourself — which you were determined not to be, for as long as humanly possible — was that something about the photo bothered you. Not because Kimi couldn't date whoever he wanted. Obviously he could. You had no claim on him. No reason to care. None at all.
And yet every time you looked at that blurry, distant image, something in your chest twisted, uncomfortably, in a way you didn't enjoy and didn't have a name for.
Except you did have a name for it. You just weren't ready to say it out loud.
Jealousy. Plain, embarrassing jealousy — and especially embarrassing given that the person in question barely tolerated being in the same room as you.
Kimi's day had not been any better.
He'd walked into the paddock that morning to a chorus of congratulations — from drivers, engineers, even a few sponsors he barely knew — and had absolutely no idea why, until someone finally showed him the photo. He'd nearly walked into a support pillar.
"What?" he said.
The driver beside him — grinning, delighted — pointed at the screen. "You and Sofia."
"What about us?"
"The yacht."
"What yacht?"
"The kiss, Kimi."
Kimi took the phone. Stared at it. Then stared harder, because the man in the photo — close up, in better lighting, on a different screen — very clearly was not him. The hair was wrong. The build was wrong. The entire person was wrong.
"This isn't me."
The driver was laughing too hard to respond.
Kimi felt the beginnings of a headache forming directly behind his eyes.
To make matters worse, Sofia — when a journalist had asked her about the photo during an interview that afternoon — had simply smiled, the same perfectly practiced smile she gave everything, and said: "People can believe whatever they want."
She hadn't denied it.
That, apparently, was all the internet needed.
By the time evening fell, you'd retreated to one of the team's private balconies — a small, quiet stretch of stone overlooking the harbor, mostly used by exhausted engineers who needed five minutes away from the noise. The city glittered below, a thousand lights reflected and doubled in the black water, and somewhere down there, on one of those impossibly bright yachts, was the photograph that had ruined your evening.
You weren't thinking about it. You were definitely not thinking about it.
"You're hiding."
You very nearly fell off the railing.
You turned, and there he was — Kimi, hands in his pockets, looking, infuriatingly, even better than usual in the warm evening light. You were beginning to suspect he did that on purpose.
"I'm not hiding."
"You are."
"I'm sitting."
"Alone. On a balcony. Where nobody can see you."
"You found me."
"Unfortunately," he said, and the corner of his mouth twitched — and then, before he seemed to fully decide to let it, he was actually smiling. A real one. The kind that transformed his whole face, the kind you'd only seen directed at Sofia, until now.
For a moment, neither of you said anything. The city hummed below — music drifting up from somewhere, the low rumble of boat engines, distant laughter from a party on one of the yachts. It should have been awkward. It wasn't.
Then, against your better judgment, your eyes drifted toward the harbor. Toward the yachts. Toward the source of the entire disaster.
Kimi noticed immediately. Of course he did.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"You looked at the yachts."
"So?"
His eyes narrowed — and then widened, slightly, and then — to your absolute horror — he started to smile again. A different smile this time. Slower. More dangerous.
"No," you said, before he could say anything.
"Are you jealous?"
"What?"
"You're jealous."
"I am not."
"You are."
"I'm literally not—"
His grin widened. The absolute, unbearable idiot.
"There's nothing to be jealous about," you said, and the words came out sharper than you meant them to, faster than you meant them to — and the second they left your mouth, his grin vanished. Completely. Like a light switching off.
"...What?" he said, quieter.
"What?"
"Nothing."
Now it was his turn to look confused — and in the silence that followed, something clicked into place in your head, slowly, horribly, with the particular dawning dread of realizing you'd missed something obvious.
"Wait."
Kimi groaned, and put his face in his hands. "Oh, no."
"The guy in the photo — that's not even you."
Silence.
More silence.
And then you started laughing — properly laughing, the kind that bent you forward — because of course it wasn't him, of course the entire internet had spent an entire day insisting Kimi Antonelli was secretly dating Sofia Moretti based on a blurry photo of a man who wasn't even Kimi Antonelli, and somehow, in the chaos of it all, neither of you had bothered to check that detail until right now.
"You figured it out," he said, muffled, from behind his hands.
"It took me about two seconds."
"I hate this sport."
You laughed harder. The sound carried out over the water, and for the first time all weekend, Kimi found himself laughing too — quietly at first, then properly, shoulders shaking, leaning against the railing beside you like the tension of the entire day had simply drained out of him.
Because somehow — somehow — the fact that you'd noticed, that you'd cared enough to figure it out, made something in his chest go warm in a way he didn't have a word for either.
Across the harbor, on another balcony, Sofia Moretti stood with a glass of champagne she hadn't touched in twenty minutes, watching.
Not the conversation itself. She couldn't hear it from here. But she could see the shape of it — the way Kimi had turned toward you, the way you'd both doubled over laughing, the easy, unguarded warmth of two people who had, somewhere in the last few months, stopped performing for each other.
She'd seen a lot of things in her career. She recognized this one immediately.
For a long moment, she simply watched. Then, slowly, she smiled — a thoughtful smile, the kind that usually meant trouble for somebody.
Because if there was one thing Sofia Moretti understood better than almost anyone in this paddock, it was attention. And right now, watching the two of you across the water, she understood something else, too.
The story the internet thought it wanted — her and Kimi — had never really been the story at all.
The real story was standing right there, laughing on a balcony, with absolutely no idea it had just been discovered.
And Sofia was already wondering exactly how far that story could go.
If there was one thing Formula 1 loved more than racing, it was drama. And if there was one thing the streaming documentary crews following the season loved more than Formula 1, it was turning that drama into content.
Which was how, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday morning three weeks after Monaco, you found yourself staring at an email that would ruin your entire month.
You knew it was bad before you'd even opened it. You knew it was bad because your father was laughing. Actually laughing — not the polite, diplomatic chuckle he used in sponsor meetings, but a real, helpless laugh, the kind that meant something had gone catastrophically, hilariously wrong for someone who was not him.
"What," you said, flatly, before you'd even sat down.
He slid his tablet across the desk without a word, still grinning.
You read the email. Then you read it again, slower, in case the first reading had been some kind of fever dream brought on by jet lag. It hadn't been.
Subject: Exciting New Feature — Rising Stars of the Grid
The streaming team — the same one whose cameras had been quietly embedded throughout the paddock all season, capturing footage for the kind of glossy, slow-motion-heavy documentary series that turned mid-pack rivalries into Shakespearean tragedies — wanted to produce a special feature. A behind-the-scenes look at the personalities shaping the sport's future. Three days of filming. Exclusive access.
Co-starring, the email specified, with the kind of breezy confidence that suggested someone had already decided this was happening regardless of what either of you thought about it:
Kimi Antonelli and Y/n.
You contemplated, briefly and seriously, setting yourself on fire.
"No," you said.
Your father grinned wider. "Oh, yes."
"No."
"You don't have a choice."
"Watch me."
"You signed the media participation agreement at the start of the season, sweetheart. Page eleven. I believe you initialed it twice."
You hated contracts. Specifically, you hated the ones you'd signed without reading, three years running, because you'd been distracted by a sponsor argument happening in the next room at the time.
"This is a violation of my human rights," you said.
"It's a documentary."
"It's psychological warfare."
—---------------------------
Kimi's reaction, when Marco delivered the news, was — by all accounts, and you heard about this secondhand from at least four separate sources within the hour — even less measured than yours.
"Absolutely not," he said.
"You have to," Marco said, with the patient weariness of a man who had said this sentence approximately four hundred times this season alone.
"I don't."
"You literally do, Kimi. It's contractual."
"I can disappear."
"You're a Formula 1 driver. People will notice."
"I'll become a farmer."
"You grew up in Bologna."
"I'll learn," Kimi said, with the grim determination of a man already mentally relocating to a remote olive grove.
Marco closed his eyes and breathed in slowly through his nose, the way he did before every single conversation that involved your name and his driver's reaction to it in the same sentence.
Filming began in Barcelona, three days later, in a section of the paddock that had been transformed — almost unrecognizably — into a small production studio. Lighting rigs. Microphone stands. A small army of crew members in matching black t-shirts, all of them moving with the brisk, over-caffeinated energy of people who had been awake since 4 a.m. and intended to stay that way.
At the center of it all stood a man who introduced himself, with the enthusiasm of someone announcing the discovery of a new planet, as Jonas Berg — senior producer, executive in charge of, as far as you could tell, everything, and possessor of the single most relentlessly positive personality you had ever encountered in your life.
"Perfect," he said, the moment you and Kimi were both standing in front of him.
Neither of you had said a word.
"Oh, this is going to be fantastic," Jonas said, beaming, clapping his hands together once, and the sentence settled over both of you with the weight of a verdict.
The first interview was, by any reasonable definition, a disaster.
"Describe each other," Jonas said, leaning forward in his director's chair with the eagerness of a man who had clearly been waiting all morning for exactly this question, "in one word."
You groaned. Kimi closed his eyes.
"Come on," Jonas said. "Just one word each."
"No," you said.
"Please."
"No."
"Just one word!"
You folded your arms. Kimi looked very deliberately at a point on the wall slightly to the left of the camera, the way he did during press conferences when he was trying to disappear without technically leaving the room.
Jonas, to his credit, did not surrender. Jonas, you would learn over the following three days, never surrendered.
Finally — mostly because the silence had gone on so long it had become its own kind of torture — you sighed.
"Awkward," you said.
The crew burst out laughing. Somewhere behind a camera, someone actually applauded, quietly.
Kimi's eyes snapped open. "You can't say that."
"It's true."
"You spilled coffee on me."
"That was months ago."
"Trauma lasts forever," he said, with the kind of deadpan delivery that took you completely off guard — and the crew loved it, loved it so visibly that you could practically see dollar signs reflected in Jonas's eyes.
You glanced sideways at Kimi. He glanced back. For a half-second, something flickered between you — something that felt, almost, like the beginning of a private joke.
Then the camera operator said, "Got it, got it, that's great," and the moment dissolved into the general chaos of the set resetting for the next shot.
The three days that followed forced you together in a way nothing else ever had.
Garage walkthroughs, where you were instructed to "just talk naturally" while a camera crew trailed three feet behind you, capturing your every word. Joint interviews, in which Jonas asked increasingly absurd questions — if you were stranded on a desert island together, who would build the shelter — apparently in the hope that one of you would say something quotable. Promotional shoots for a sponsor neither of you had ever heard of, which involved both of you standing slightly too close together in front of a branded backdrop while a photographer shouted things like "more chemistry, please!" with absolutely no sense of irony.
At first, it was unbearable.
By the second day, it was merely annoying.
By the third day — and this was the part that genuinely alarmed you — it had become, somehow, almost comfortable.
It happened on the afternoon of the second day, during one of the long gaps between filming setups. The crew had vanished — gone to reset lights, or argue about angles, or whatever it was documentary crews did when they disappeared for forty-five minutes at a time — and for the first time in two days, nobody was watching either of you.
The silence wasn't awkward. It was just quiet. Comfortable, even, in the way silences sometimes were when neither person felt obligated to fill them.
You glanced over. Kimi was staring at his phone, frowning, with the specific intensity of a man fighting a losing battle against modern technology.
"What?" you asked.
He looked up. "What?"
"You're making that face."
"What face?"
"The one where you're losing an argument with your phone."
"I'm not."
"You absolutely are."
His expression — which had not changed at all — confirmed it. You leaned over, glanced at his screen, and immediately spotted the problem.
You burst out laughing.
"Oh my god."
"What?"
"Your brightness has been on zero for the last ten minutes."
The realization landed slowly. Then all at once. Kimi looked down at his screen — at the faint, barely visible outline of an app he'd apparently been trying to open in the dark for ten full minutes — and put his face in his hands.
"Don't tell anyone."
"I'm telling everyone."
"Please."
"No."
And then, somehow — you weren't entirely sure how, except that his muffled groan from behind his hands was so genuinely, helplessly embarrassed that it was simply funny — both of you were laughing. Properly laughing, the kind that made your stomach hurt, the kind that drew a few curious glances from crew members resetting equipment nearby.
It felt natural. Effortless. Not performed for a camera, not engineered by a producer hoping for a moment — just two people, laughing at something stupid, because it was stupid, and because somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, you'd stopped bracing yourself every time he was near.
That realization — quiet, sudden, and entirely unwelcome — was somehow more frightening than anything the internet had thrown at either of you so far.
Unfortunately, Netflix noticed everything.
Of course they did. That was, after all, the entire point of having forty cameras embedded in a paddock at all times. Every glance became a moment. Every silence became tension. One afternoon, you walked past Kimi without speaking — you were carrying coffee, he was on the phone with Marco, neither of you so much as made eye contact — and a producer standing nearby actually whispered, to a colleague, with genuine reverence:
"Did you see that? The tension."
There had been no tension. You had literally just walked past each other. The producers, it turned out, did not particularly care.
The trailer dropped two weeks later, and it was, in a word, horrifying.
Sweeping orchestral music. Slow-motion footage of you both — walking, laughing, glancing at each other across a garage. A shot of you looking at Kimi from across the paddock, captured with the kind of lingering, meaningful close-up usually reserved for romantic leads in films. You remembered that exact moment. You'd been trying to figure out whether he had ketchup on his face.
The internet did not see it that way.
THE CHEMISTRY IS INSANE.
THERE'S NO WAY THEY'RE NOT TOGETHER.
ENEMIES TO LOVERS, REAL LIFE EDITION??
YOU CANNOT FAKE THIS.
You wanted, very sincerely, to sue everyone involved in the production. You did not, mostly because your father pointed out — unhelpfully, but accurately — that you'd signed the contract twice.
Sofia watched the trailer's reception with quiet, careful interest.
Because she understood something neither you nor Kimi had quite registered yet: the conversation had moved on. The blurry yacht photo had stopped trending weeks ago. The rumors connecting her and Kimi had quietly faded into the background, replaced — entirely, completely — by a single, all-consuming story.
You. And him.
Every article. Every fan edit. Every theory thread.
Sofia watched it happen, in real time, from the comfort of her hotel room, scrolling through an endless feed of speculation about a relationship that — as far as either of its supposed participants knew — didn't exist.
And Sofia Moretti was bored.
Bored people, especially bored people who understood exactly how the media worked, were dangerous.
The final day of filming ran long. By the time the last shot wrapped, most of the paddock had already emptied for the evening — garages quiet, lights dimmed to half-power, the production crew packing equipment into cases with the brisk efficiency of people who'd been awake since dawn and had a flight to catch.
For once, there were no cameras pointed at either of you. No producers hovering nearby with clipboards. Just you and Kimi, sitting side by side on a stack of equipment cases, both of you too exhausted to move.
Neither of you spoke for a while. The silence stretched, easy, the way it had on the balcony in Monaco.
Then Kimi said, quietly: "You know."
You looked over. "What?"
He was staring at the empty garage floor, choosing his words with the careful deliberation he brought to everything — interviews, qualifying laps, apparently this too.
"I thought you hated me," he said.
The confession caught you off guard. For a moment, you just looked at him. Then you laughed — softly, this time.
"I thought you hated me."
"I did."
Your jaw dropped. "Wow."
"After the coffee thing," he said, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
"That's fair," you admitted.
"And then I realized..." He paused, and the twitch became something closer to an actual smile. "You're just weird."
"Weird?"
"Very weird."
"You're the one who accidentally stalked my Instagram," you pointed out.
His ears turned red instantly — so fast, so completely, that you started laughing all over again, and somehow, despite the three exhausting days, despite the trailer, despite everything, you couldn't quite stop.
It had become a habit, you realized. Laughing around him. Somewhere in the last few weeks, without either of you really noticing, it had become the most natural thing in the world.
Neither of you noticed the figure standing at the far end of the empty paddock — phone in hand, watching, perfectly still.
Sofia had seen enough.
If the world wanted a story, she'd decided, she was going to give them one.
And this time, the consequences wouldn't be quite so easy to laugh off.
It started, as these things so often did, with a single sentence. Seven words, delivered with a soft, knowing smile, under bright studio lights, during what should have been a perfectly ordinary live interview.
Those seven words very nearly burned the entire paddock to the ground.
Sofia sat beneath the lights with the easy poise of someone who had done this a thousand times — which, of course, she had. The audience adored her, as always. The questions were the usual mix of season recaps and lighthearted banter, nothing that should have caused even a ripple.
Then a reporter asked the question. The question. The one that had been hovering, unasked, for months.
"Kimi Antonelli," the reporter said, grinning. "Friends, or more?"
The audience laughed. Sofia laughed too — soft, practiced, exactly the kind of laugh that told you absolutely nothing while appearing to tell you everything.
"Oh, Kimi's sweet," she said.
"So nothing going on?" the reporter pressed, still smiling.
Sofia paused.
It was a small pause. Barely a breath. The kind of pause that, on camera, looked entirely natural — thoughtful, even a little wistful.
Then she smiled — a little sadly, a little knowingly — and said:
"Sometimes things get complicated when other people get involved."
Silence.
The reporter blinked. The audience blinked. And somewhere, in living rooms and phones and laptops scattered across the world, the internet drew in a single, collective breath — and then exploded.
You found out the next morning, the way you found out about most disasters: your phone, vibrating itself nearly off the nightstand, dragging you out of sleep into a wall of notifications you weren't remotely prepared for.
Your name was trending. Again. You stared at the screen, blinking, still half-asleep, and the longer you looked, the worse it got.
HOMEWRECKER.
SHE STOLE HIM.
WE ALWAYS KNEW SHE WAS FAKE.
SOFIA DESERVES BETTER THAN THIS.
You sat up so fast the room spun. "What?"
Your group chat was already a warzone. Messages arrived faster than you could read them — overlapping, urgent, half-finished.
this is insane
she KNEW exactly what she was doing when she said that
don't respond
for the love of god do NOT respond
And then, from one of the drivers, a single line that landed with the weight of a verdict:
Paddock Civil War has officially begun.
He wasn't wrong.
Within forty-eight hours, the entire online Formula 1 community had fractured into factions with the speed and intensity of a championship title fight.
Team You. Team Sofia. Team Kimi. And — by a significant margin — Team Chaos, which consisted almost entirely of people who found the entire situation, regardless of who was right, simply too entertaining to take a side.
The drivers' group chats became actual war zones. Memes leaked. Inside jokes that were never meant to leave a private chat ended up, somehow, on Twitter within hours — including one screenshot, mortifyingly, of an entire fake "championship standings" table ranking which driver supported which side, in which one of the rookies had somehow ended up in first place for reasons nobody could explain and everybody found hilarious.
The drivers, for the most part, treated it as entertainment.
The sponsors did not.
Your father stepped into your office holding a tablet, and you knew — the way you'd learned to know, over years of exactly this — that whatever was on it was bad.
"What now," you said, not even bothering to make it a question.
He set the tablet down on your desk without a word. An article filled the screen — a major sponsor, quoted, expressing concern about "ongoing online speculation" and its potential impact on brand partnerships.
Your stomach dropped.
"Oh," you said.
"Yeah," your father said, and for once, there was nothing playful in his voice at all.
The room went quiet. For the first time since this entire ridiculous saga had started — coffee, hashtags, fake yacht photos, brightness settings — the consequences felt real. This wasn't fan accounts anymore. This was contracts. Reputations. Careers that belonged to people who'd worked their entire lives to get here.
And somehow, once again, you were the villain.
The worst part — the part that kept you awake that night, staring at the ceiling of your hotel room, the same useless ceiling that had offered no answers months ago and offered none now — was that you hadn't done anything.
You hadn't posted. Hadn't commented. Hadn't said a single public word about Sofia, about Kimi, about any of it.
It hadn't mattered.
People had already decided the story. They always did. And once a story had a villain, changing the casting was nearly impossible — no matter how little evidence there had ever been to support it.
By Saturday, you'd stopped opening social media entirely. Stopped reading the articles. Stopped checking the notifications that kept arriving anyway, relentless, regardless of whether you looked at them.
You told yourself it didn't matter. That you'd survived worse. That people would move on, the way they always eventually did.
But lying there, alone, in the dark, you found yourself wondering — not for the first time, and you suspected not for the last — why it was always you. Why people found it so easy to believe the worst. Why, in three years of being the most talked-about woman in the paddock, not one single person had ever thought to ask for your side of anything.
Across the paddock, in a hotel room two floors up, Kimi was furious.
This was, by any measure, unusual. Kimi didn't get angry. He got nervous. Embarrassed, constantly. Awkward, on a near-daily basis. But angry — actually, visibly angry — was something almost nobody in the paddock had ever seen.
Every time he opened his phone, there you were. Being blamed. Mocked. Attacked — for something that, as far as he could tell, you had never done, had never even implied, and had spent the entire weekend trying very hard not to think about.
The breaking point arrived during a press conference the next afternoon.
A journalist raised his hand. "Kimi — do you think the recent tension between Sofia and Y/n has affected the atmosphere in the—"
"No."
The interruption was immediate. Sharp. The room went quiet.
The journalist blinked, recalibrated, and tried again. "But Sofia implied that—"
"Then she shouldn't have."
Marco, standing just off-camera, looked like a man who had just watched a controlled detonation go slightly, terrifyingly, off-script.
Another reporter leaned forward. "So you're saying the rumors aren't true?"
Kimi looked at him. Directly. For a long moment — long enough that the silence itself became uncomfortable.
"I'm saying," he said, slowly, evenly, every word deliberate, "that people should stop blaming Y/n for things she hasn't done."
Silence. Complete silence. Even the photographers seemed to have forgotten how their cameras worked.
Because Kimi Antonelli — the shy rookie who flinched at direct questions, who'd once spent an entire press conference staring at a fixed point on the wall — had just, calmly, publicly, on camera, taken your side.
The clip went viral within the hour. Naturally.
Fan accounts reposted it within minutes. News outlets picked it up by the afternoon. TikTok edits multiplied — thousands of them, by evening, set to everything from somber piano to triumphant orchestral swells. Some people switched sides instantly. Others dug in harder. Nobody agreed on anything.
Except one thing, which everyone — everyone — seemed to notice at exactly the same time.
Kimi clearly cared.
A lot.
Possibly — and this was the part the internet seized on with the particular ferocity reserved for its favorite new theory — more than a lot.
You found out about the clip while sitting in hospitality, and your first thought was that it had to be fake. Edited. Some kind of deepfake, surely, because there was simply no version of reality in which Kimi Antonelli stood in front of a room full of cameras and said that. About you. On purpose.
Then you watched it.
Then you watched it again.
Then a third time, your chest tightening in a way that had nothing to do with the trending hashtags or the sponsor emails or any of the noise that had filled the last forty-eight hours.
Because nobody had ever done that for you before. Not publicly. Not when it actually mattered — not when staying quiet would have been so much easier, so much safer. And yet he had. Without hesitation. Without asking for anything in return.
You found him that evening, near the garages, in one of the quiet stretches of paddock that emptied out once the crowds thinned for the day. The light had gone soft and gold, the way it always did in the last hour before sunset, and the noise of the day had faded into something gentler — distant generators, the occasional clatter of equipment being packed away, somebody's radio playing low from inside a garage.
He looked up when he heard you approach. Immediately nervous — as always — shoulders tensing slightly, like he was bracing for something.
For a moment, neither of you said anything.
Then: "I saw the interview."
His ears went red instantly. Cute. Annoyingly, predictably cute.
"Oh," he said.
"Thank you," you said, and the words came out quieter than you'd intended — quieter than you'd meant them to, softer, more honest than you usually allowed yourself to be with anyone.
Something in his expression shifted. Softened.
"You shouldn't have to thank me," he said.
You swallowed. Because somehow, that single sentence — gentle, simple, entirely sincere — made everything feel more complicated and more clear at the same time. The line between better and worse had become, you realized, alarmingly difficult to find.
Neither of you noticed the photographer at the far end of the corridor. The shutter clicking, quiet and unhurried, capturing the way you looked at each other. The way Kimi smiled when you smiled back.
The image would be online before morning. The internet would spend weeks dissecting it.
And within days, none of it would matter at all.
Because somewhere else entirely — far from the paddock, far from the cameras and the hashtags and the endless, exhausting noise — a journalist named Tomas Reyes had just opened an email with an attachment he had not been expecting.
A folder. Screenshots. Voice notes. Messages.
Enough evidence to unravel an entire story.
And once it went public, nothing about this season would ever look quite the same again.
—--------------------
The truth arrived on a Wednesday, at 9:12 in the morning. By 9:13, the internet was on fire again — though this time, for once, not because of you.
You were halfway through your first coffee — a careful, paranoid sip, the kind you'd developed an instinct for since Coffee-Gate — when your phone lit up with the now-familiar wall of notifications. Calls. Messages. Tags. All at once, the way they always seemed to arrive.
You opened the group chat, bracing yourself.
The first message read: OH MY GOD.
The second: SHE'S FINISHED.
The third, in caps, with three exclamation points: TURN ON TWITTER RIGHT NOW.
You frowned. This felt different. Usually, by this point, you'd have already seen your own name somewhere in the first ten messages. This time, you hadn't.
You opened the app — and nearly choked on your coffee.
Every trending topic carried the same name.
Sofia Moretti.
—----------------------------------------
The article had gone live less than twenty minutes earlier, written by Tomas Reyes — a journalist whose name you recognized, mostly for his reputation as someone who didn't publish anything until he could prove every word of it three times over.
He'd been investigating something else entirely, the article explained. A completely unrelated story about sponsorship negotiations. And somewhere in the process, he'd stumbled onto something he hadn't expected.
Screenshots. Voice notes. Messages. Emails, going back months.
Not fabricated. Not edited. Real — painfully, undeniably real.
The picture they painted was meticulous, and worse than anything the rumor mill had ever produced about you, because it was true. For months, Sofia had been quietly feeding information to gossip accounts. Not lies, exactly — that was the unsettling part. Carefully selected truths. Small details, taken out of context. Convenient omissions. Just enough to nudge a narrative in a particular direction. Just enough to keep a story alive. Just enough, always, to keep Sofia Moretti at the center of the conversation.
And every single thread, it turned out, led back to you.
The internet turned on her instantly. Brutally. Without hesitation — the same people who had spent weeks calling you a homewrecker were now posting, with breathtaking confidence, that they'd never believed it for a second.
You sat with your coffee going cold, scrolling, reading the same paragraphs over and over, and felt something you hadn't expected to feel.
Not triumph. Not relief, exactly — though there was some of that, somewhere underneath everything else.
Mostly, you just felt empty.
Because the truth had arrived. Finally, after months. But it had arrived after. After the headlines. After the sponsor emails. After the nights you'd lain awake wondering why it was always you. The damage didn't undo itself just because the story had changed.
And then — somehow, impossibly — things got worse.
Or better. It depended entirely on who you asked.
It began with a single leaked screenshot. Then another. Then ten more. Within the hour, it had become abundantly, gloriously clear that the entire paddock had collectively decided Kimi Antonelli deserved absolutely no privacy whatsoever, ever again, for the rest of his career.
The culprit, as it turned out, was Ollie.
Accidentally, Ollie insisted, to anyone who would listen, which — given the timing, the volume, and the suspiciously specific selection of messages — absolutely nobody believed. Least of all Kimi.
The first screenshot appeared on Twitter without context — a cropped image from a group chat, easy to scroll past. Then someone zoomed in.
And suddenly, everyone was paying attention.
Because the message was from Kimi. And it read:
what time is Y/n's interview tomorrow?
The timestamp was six months old.
The internet paused — collectively, audibly, you imagined — and then, immediately, became feral.
More screenshots followed. Then more. Each one somehow worse — or funnier, depending on your perspective, and usually both — than the last.
One read: do you think she actually hates me?
Another: stop sending me edits i'm begging you
Another, mortifyingly: i accidentally liked her photo
And the reply, from Ollie, immortalized forever: I KNOW. STOP REMINDING ME.
The paddock — and you, eventually, despite every effort not to — was crying with laughter.
Then came the saved photos.
That one, by all accounts, nearly killed him. One of his friends — Ollie, again, you assumed, because at this point the pattern was undeniable — had revealed, with the casual cruelty only a close friend could manage, that Kimi had a small folder of saved screenshots from your Instagram on his phone.
Not many. Just enough.
Enough, as it turned out, to end his dignity permanently and irreversibly.
By lunchtime, there were compilations. By dinner, timelines. By midnight, someone had uploaded what could only be described as a documentary — twenty-two minutes, fully edited, complete with a dramatic title card — laying out, in exhaustive detail, the case that Kimi Antonelli had been hopelessly, helplessly in love with you for months.
The evidence, you had to admit, was embarrassingly convincing.
The funniest part, though — and you noticed this somewhere around your fourth replay of the Ollie screenshot — was that nobody was talking about Sofia anymore. Not even a little. The internet had simply, seamlessly, moved on to a new and far more entertaining target.
And his name was Kimi Antonelli.
You were still laughing when you found him that evening, tucked behind one of the garages in the narrow gap between two equipment trucks — clearly hoping, with the misplaced optimism of someone who had not yet fully grasped how the internet worked, that this might be a place where nobody could find him.
It wasn't working. Two mechanics had already taken photos with him on the way over. A pair of journalists had tried, unsuccessfully, to get a comment. And — you'd heard this part secondhand, but you believed it completely — a group of drivers had apparently followed him partway across the paddock, singing.
The moment he saw you, he groaned. An actual, full-bodied groan, head dropping back against the side of the truck.
"Oh, no."
You lost it immediately. A laugh, then another, then you were laughing so hard you had to lean against the truck beside him just to stay upright.
"This isn't funny," he said, with the deep, tragic conviction of a man whose entire life had ended.
"It absolutely is."
"My career is over."
"You won a race three weeks ago."
"I'll never recover from this."
You laughed harder. His expression grew, somehow, even more devastated — which, naturally, only made it worse.
Eventually, though, the laughter softened. Faded into something quieter. The silence that followed felt different from the others — not awkward, not the easy comfortable quiet of the documentary days, either. Something else. Something that made the air between you feel suddenly very small.
You looked at him. Properly looked — at the flushed ears, the embarrassed, helpless almost-smile, the way he couldn't quite meet your eyes anymore, not because he was avoiding you, but because he seemed to be working very hard not to give something away.
And something in you shifted.
Because for months, the internet had been insisting — loudly, constantly, with twelve-slide presentations and twenty-two-minute documentaries — that Kimi liked you. For months, you'd dismissed it. Laughed it off. Filed it away with all the other theories the internet had ever had about you, most of which had been wrong.
But standing here now, in the narrow gap between two equipment trucks, watching him try and fail to look anywhere but at you—
Maybe, you thought, they hadn't been wrong after all.
He must have seen it on your face. The realization. Because he froze — completely, suddenly, the way he did right before a red light at the start of a session, every muscle tensed, waiting.
For one long, terrifying second, neither of you said anything at all.
Then a voice rang out from somewhere across the paddock, loud enough to carry over the generators and the distant music and everything else.
"HE'S BLUSHING AGAIN!"
You both jumped. Within seconds, a small crowd of drivers materialized at the end of the row — like vultures, you thought, extremely loud vultures — already laughing before they'd even arrived.
Kimi closed his eyes. Slowly. With the air of a man accepting his fate.
"I hate every single one of them," he said.
You laughed — and this time, instead of looking away, instead of denying it, instead of doing any of the things he'd spent months doing every time the subject came anywhere near the truth—
Kimi smiled too.
Because the secret was out. Properly out. The whole world knew. The paddock knew. His friends — especially his friends — knew. And judging by the way he was looking at you now, openly, without flinching, there didn't seem to be much point in pretending otherwise anymore.
That night, the internet celebrated.
Not because of a scandal. Not because of a fight, or a rumor, or a carefully engineered piece of drama.
For once — for the first time in longer than you could remember — people were celebrating something real.
And for the first time in months, you weren't the villain.
You were simply the girl Kimi Antonelli couldn't stop looking at.
Which, you discovered, lying awake that night with your stomach in knots and a smile you couldn't quite get rid of, was somehow far more terrifying than anything the internet had thrown at you all season.
Because the final race weekend was only days away.
And after everything — the coffee, the hashtags, the yacht photo, the documentary, the civil war, the exposure, all of it — there was only one thing left that hadn't been said out loud.
For the first time all season, the paddock was quiet.
No scandals. No leaked screenshots. No relationship rumors trending before breakfast. No journalists hovering by the garage doors with the specific, hungry look of people hoping for a story. Just racing — actual racing, a concept the sport seemed to have collectively forgotten somewhere around Monaco.
You weren't complaining.
Sofia's departure from the broadcast team had been announced quietly, a brief statement buried in an afternoon press release that most people scrolled past without comment. Nobody asked you about it. Nobody asked Kimi, either. The story, it turned out, simply ended — not with a bang, but with the particular, anticlimactic silence reserved for people who had spent too long mistaking attention for power.
You found, to your mild surprise, that you didn't feel much of anything about it at all. Just a quiet, settled kind of relief — the feeling of a held breath finally released.
The final race weekend arrived faster than you'd expected. One week it had been summer — the air thick and humid, the kind of heat that made the tarmac shimmer — and the next, you were standing in the paddock looking at banners that read SEASON FINALE in enormous, triumphant letters, while everyone around you walked like they'd aged ten years in ten months.
It had been a long season. A dramatic one. A genuinely, almost impressively ridiculous one. You suspected — with the strange, fond exhaustion of someone looking back on a disaster they'd somehow survived — that you would be telling stories about this year for the rest of your life.
The funniest part was the comments.
Nobody called you the Ice Queen anymore. Nobody called you the villain, or the Paddock Princess, or anything else that had defined the last several years of your online existence. The internet — somehow, against all odds — had collectively decided to redirect its considerable energy toward a brand-new cause.
JUST DATE ALREADY.
WE ARE SO TIRED.
STOP BEING WEIRD ABOUT IT.
HOLD HANDS. THAT'S ALL WE ASK.
The entire world, apparently, had developed a deeply personal investment in your love life. It felt invasive. It also — and this was the part you found most difficult to argue with — felt completely, maddeningly understandable.
Because the truth was, you and Kimi had spent the last few weeks in a strange kind of limbo. Everyone knew. The paddock knew. The internet had known for so long it had practically filed paperwork. And yet, somehow, neither of you had said anything — not because you didn't know how you felt, but because neither of you seemed to know how to be the one to say it first.
Your friends were no help.
"You know he likes you," Priya said, for what had to be the fourth time that week, with the patience of someone explaining gravity to a toddler.
"Thank you, Sherlock."
"So?"
"So what?"
"So do something."
You groaned and put your head down on the table. Priya groaned louder, on principle, and the conversation — as it had every previous time — accomplished absolutely nothing.
Kimi's friends were, somehow, even less helpful.
The morning of the final race, Ollie appeared beside him in the garage, entirely uninvited, with the particular swagger of a man who knew exactly how unwelcome he was and had decided not to care.
"As your friend," Ollie said, leaning against the car like he owned it, "I think you should tell her."
Kimi didn't look up from his gloves. "No."
"As your friend, I think you're being an idiot."
"No."
"As your friend—"
"Go away, Ollie."
Ollie grinned, and held up both hands in mock surrender, already backing away. "That's not a no," he called over his shoulder, and then turned and bolted before Kimi could throw anything at him — which, given the way Kimi's hand had already closed around a spare wheel nut, had been a wise decision.
The race itself passed in something of a blur. Engines, screaming through the final laps of the season. The crowd, louder than you'd ever heard it. Champagne, eventually, sprayed across the podium in great golden arcs that caught the last of the afternoon light. Interviews. Photos. The slow, almost ceremonial handshakes between people who'd spent the entire year trying to beat each other and would now, for a few months at least, simply be people again.
The checkered flag waved.
And just like that — after everything — it was over.
The paddock emptied slowly, the way it always did at the end of a season — not all at once, but in stages, like a tide going out. Trucks were loaded. Equipment cases stacked and sealed. Garages, one by one, fell quiet, their lights switching off in sequence until the whole place felt strange and hollow, the kind of quiet that only existed in places built for noise.
You should have gone back to the hotel. Everyone else had.
Instead, you found yourself wandering — past empty garages, past darkened hospitality units, past corridors that had been filled with people only hours earlier and now held nothing but the faint, lingering smell of rubber and fuel and spilled coffee that never quite seemed to wash out of anything in this place.
There was something about the stillness that caught at you. Comforting and sad in the same breath. Beautiful, in a way you didn't quite have words for — like standing at the end of a long book, the kind you weren't ready to close.
You walked without really deciding to walk anywhere. And somehow — though you would later tell yourself it was a coincidence, and would later not quite believe yourself — you ended up at one of the garages near the end of the row.
The lights were dim. Most of the equipment had already been packed away, leaving the space feeling larger than it should, the concrete floor swept clean except for a few stray cable ties and a single forgotten glove.
And sitting alone on a stack of tires, elbows on his knees, staring at nothing in particular, was Kimi.
Of course it was.
For a moment, neither of you said anything. You simply walked over and sat down beside him — close enough that your shoulder nearly brushed his, close enough that neither of you moved away.
The silence stretched. It didn't feel like the silences from before — not the awkward early ones, not even the comfortable ones from Barcelona. This one felt different. Fuller. Like it was holding something.
No cameras. No reporters. No producers hiding behind equipment cases with their hearts set on a moment. No fans pressed against fences, phones raised. No internet, for once, watching either of you.
Just the two of you, in an empty garage, at the end of a very long year — exactly the way it probably should have been from the beginning, if either of you had had the slightest idea what you were doing back then.
"You know," Kimi said, eventually.
His voice was quieter than usual. You looked over.
"What?"
He didn't answer right away. He was staring out at the empty garage floor, turning something over in his head — choosing his words, the way he always did, careful and deliberate, like every sentence was a corner he didn't want to take too fast.
Then he laughed. Softly. A little nervously — the kind of laugh you'd learned, over the course of this absurd, exhausting season, to recognize as the sound he made right before saying something that actually mattered.
"When I joined Formula 1," he said, "everyone told me you'd be impossible."
Your smile appeared before you could stop it. "Did they?"
"Yeah."
"I hope you defended my honor."
"I absolutely did not."
You gasped — properly gasped, hand pressed to your chest in mock betrayal — and he laughed again, a real laugh this time, the sound of it echoing softly off the concrete and the empty steel shelving and the dim, half-powered lights overhead. For a moment, he looked younger. Lighter. Like something he'd been carrying all season had finally, quietly, set itself down.
"And?" you asked.
His smile faded — not completely. Just enough. Just enough that you felt the shift in the air between you, the sudden weight of and? settling over both of you like the silence had been waiting for exactly this question the whole time.
Kimi turned toward you. Properly turned, so that his knee brushed yours, so that there was nowhere left for either of you to look except at each other. His eyes — green, soft in the low light, achingly familiar after months of glancing at them sideways, in corridors, across garages, on balconies in Monaco — found yours, and for the first time all year, he didn't look away.
"Turns out," he said, quietly, "everyone was wrong."
Your breath caught. Just slightly. Just enough that you noticed it yourself.
Because there was something in his voice — something you'd been hearing, in pieces, for months. In the way he'd taken your side in front of a room full of cameras. In the way he'd laughed at himself, beside you, in a way he never laughed for anyone else. In the way he'd looked at you on a balcony in Monaco like the rest of the world had simply stopped existing.
Something you'd been pretending, very deliberately, not to understand.
The silence that followed felt enormous. And yet — somehow, impossibly — it didn't feel uncomfortable. It felt full. Heavy with everything neither of you had said all season. Every glance across a garage. Every argument that hadn't really been an argument. Every laugh that had snuck up on both of you when you weren't paying attention. Every single thing that had, somehow, brought you here — to this exact spot, on this exact night, at the end of this exact, ridiculous season.
Kimi took a breath. The kind people took before doing something they couldn't undo. Before jumping off something. Before saying something true out loud for the first time.
Which, you supposed, were more or less the same thing.
"I like you," he said.
No speech. No grand gesture. No cameras, no crowd, no carefully constructed moment. Just the truth — quiet, simple, spoken in an empty garage that smelled like rubber and old coffee, at the end of a season that had tried, in every possible way, to make this moment about anything except the two of you.
You looked at him. Not with surprise — not really. You'd known, hadn't you. For a while now. The paddock had known. The internet had known, loudly, for months, with twelve-slide presentations and twenty-two-minute documentaries and an entire group chat's worth of incriminating evidence.
But hearing it — hearing it from him, in his own quiet voice, with his ears already turning that familiar shade of red — felt different.
It felt real.
Kimi, predictably, looked immediately nervous — which, you thought, was deeply unfair, because it was adorable, and now you were smiling, and you couldn't seem to stop.
"You know," you said softly.
His expression turned cautious. "What?"
"I think the entire world figured that out months ago."
His face went red. Instantly, completely, the way it always did — and you laughed, and somehow that broke whatever tension had been left, all of it, at once. The nervousness. The fear. The months of pretending. All of it just — dissolved, into the quiet of the empty garage, into the sound of your laughter and, slowly, his.
A smile crept onto his face too. Small, at first. Then bigger. Warmer. The kind of smile you'd seen directed at Sofia, once, what felt like a lifetime ago, and had hated — and now, finally, it was pointed at you, and it felt like nothing you'd ever hated at all.
"You didn't answer," he said.
Your heart skipped. Once.
So you reached over, and took his hand, and laced your fingers through his.
Simple. Easy. Certain — in a way that surprised you, a little, with how little thought it took, after months of overthinking absolutely everything else.
Kimi looked down at your hands. Then up at you. And the smile that spread across his face then was unlike anything you'd seen from him all season — bright, and unguarded, and so openly happy that it made your chest ache in the best possible way. The kind of smile people earned. The kind that made every disaster — the coffee, the hashtags, the documentary, the civil war, all of it — feel, retroactively, completely worth it.
"I like you too," you said.
The words had barely left your mouth before he laughed — a relieved, helpless laugh, the sound of someone setting down something heavy they'd been carrying for far too long.
Outside, one by one, the last of the paddock lights clicked off. The season ending around you, quietly, the way seasons did.
Neither of you moved. Not yet.
There was nowhere else, in that moment, either of you would rather have been.
Months later, the new season began.
The paddock came back to life the way it always did — loud, crowded, chaotic, full of fresh kit and fresh gossip and the particular electric energy of a season that hadn't gone wrong yet. Exactly as it should be.
You walked through it hand in hand with Kimi.
No hiding. No careful angles, no quick release of hands the moment a camera came into view, no awkward, deliberate distance in interviews. Just the two of you, together, the way you'd been for months now — long enough that it had stopped feeling like a secret and started feeling like, simply, how things were.
People stared, of course. This was Formula 1. People always stared.
But this time felt different. No whispers behind hands. No accusations. No scandal, no trending hashtags with your name attached to something ugly. Just smiles — and, from somewhere behind you, the unmistakable sound of a driver making exaggerated kissing noises, which Kimi hated with his whole heart and everyone else found absolutely delightful.
As you passed a cluster of journalists, one of them — the same senior reporter who'd warned you, what felt like a lifetime ago, that anyone that charming was probably a nightmare — called out, grinning:
"So the conspiracy theories were true after all?"
You looked at Kimi. He looked at you. Then, with the long-suffering patience of a man who had given up fighting the inevitable months ago, he rolled his eyes — and you laughed, and squeezed his hand, and kept walking.
Past the garages. Past the cameras. Past all of it — the noise, the chaos, the entire ridiculous machine that had spent a year trying to turn the two of you into a headline, and had, in the end, simply turned out to be right.
george has been paying attention for months: to the things you linger on in shop windows, the things you mention in passing, the things you want and never ask for. he decides to do something about it.
genre: romance, fluff, domestic, established relationship, hurt/comfort if you squint but make it presents.
warnings: gift giving, crying over presents, george russell being dangerously attentive, excessive fluff, reader gets spoiled rotten and is loved very loudly.
word count: 3k
a/n: okay, everyone, i'm not entirely sure about this one, but i wanted to post it anyway! it was inspired by a video youtuber michael dicostanzo made for his girlfriend, mackenzie, and i really wanted to turn it into something for you all over here. the video is absolutely adorable, and he's so incredibly sweet to her. despite my doubts, i hope this can warm your hearts a little while i'm away 🧡
“Is this actually working?” George asks, his face far too close to the phone camera, brow furrowed. “Right. It is.”
At that, he breaks into a grin, keeping the camera at a high angle so it catches his face and part of the front door of the house he shares with you in Monaco.
“Morning, everyone. Or afternoon. Or even evening, depending on where you’re watching this from.” He gives a small nod, resting one hand on his hip before glancing away from the camera towards something in front of him. “This is a bit different from the sort of content you’re used to seeing me do with the team and… if I’m honest, I’ve no idea whether I’ll actually post this. But there’s one person who’s going to see it, and I think that matters more than anything else. Anyway. I’m rambling now, so let’s just get on with it.”
George then starts walking forward, that smile still fixed on his face before stopping again a little further ahead. The television in the background and the enormous navy bookcase against the white textured wall come into view, though only for a moment. The Brit still takes up most of the frame with his cheerful expression.
“So. Since… hmm, April? Yeah, April. Since April last year, I’ve been keeping this…” He pulls a small black leather notebook from his pocket and holds it up to the camera; it’s about the size of a passport. “I’ve written down every single thing my girlfriend says she wants. Whether that’s on our trips, in the paddock, on our little days out… anyway. You’ll see.”
He then turns the camera towards the sofa. All that comes into view are a few boxes, some colourful objects scattered across it, and his free hand gesturing towards whatever he’s trying to show.
“Over here, we have this particular species of rabbit known as a Jellycat. It does puzzle me a bit, this one. She absolutely loves them, and yet it’s neither made of jelly nor is it a cat. Curious,” he says, pointing at the pink plushie with the floral lining inside its ears. “This one was spotted online a few weeks ago whilst we were getting ready for bed. Every night before she goes to sleep, she ends up scrolling through things she likes, and when she saw this little thing, the very first thing she said was, ‘I want this so badly,’ so… here it is, love.”
Moving on, he points to the box beside the rabbit.
“Over here, we’ve got a little teapot and teacup set they sell in a rather lovely shop in the centre of Monte Carlo. One day we were walking about there, trying to find a birthday present for a friend of hers, and she dragged me into the shop.” He brings the camera closer, crouching down. Beneath the glass lid, you can see the pink teapot with a heart on it. “I’m a tea fan myself, if you ask me. Yes, all right, terribly British stereotype. We do have afternoon tea here at home, it’s lovely, thank you very much. She said she wanted it the moment she laid eyes on the set. Very sweet.”
Still crouched down with the camera pointed at the presents, George lets out a little laugh and goes, “Oh, God,” before carrying on.
“This one’s quite interesting, actually,” he announces, pulling the box closer. “It’s a ceramic carousel for her bookshelf. I bought it from a little shop in London when we were there visiting some of my relatives. At the time, she was reading a book with this slightly macabre amusement park sort of theme and said it would make perfect sense to decorate her shelves with something like this. In the end, despite saying she wanted it, she came away with something else. Love, I’ve got you.” He pauses for a moment, almost as if he’s inspecting it again. “It is rather lovely, to be fair, and all the hand-painted details are genuinely charming. The people at that shop are very dedicated to their craft, she absolutely loves the place.”
He stops for a second, scratching at his jaw even though it isn’t visible on camera, before standing up. The goal, apparently, is to show two presents at once.
“These two aren’t particularly complicated. Have a look.” George stretches the phone out until both gifts come into focus. “A Lego flower bouquet. She loves flowers, and she saw a couple building this on TikTok. It took a little while to come back into stock, so this is actually one of the oldest things on the list because I had to wait for it to reappear in the shop. I even rang customer service, but they told me there wasn’t much they could do. Anyway, got there in the end.”
There’s a smile in his voice by the time he gets to the next one, his hand sliding over the waist of the dress beneath the translucent garment bag. A second later, he does it again, absent-mindedly, almost fondly, before carrying on.
“This one’s the last one. It’s for her, because she saw an actress wearing something like it in a film we were watching at the end of May and said she’d love to turn up to the paddock in it. She didn’t mean it seriously, but I know she liked it because it is her favourite colour, after all. I did have to ask a few people with far better taste than me for help with this one, but in the end, it found its way here.” He gives the dress another glance and nods to himself. “This one’s a present for me as well, really. I can’t quite picture how stunning she’s going to look walking about with me in that. I might not even... Anyway.”
George clears his throat and finally taps the screen to switch the camera back to front-facing. His hand disappears into the middle of his quiff, as though he’s using the camera to tidy himself up, and then there it is again, that huge, familiar smile, bright and happy.
“Well, that’s that. It’s not all that much, I’ll be buying her more presents, because she absolutely deserves every good thing and… well, I do hope she likes them.” He gives a small nod, his attention shifting from the gifts back to the camera. “I’m going to film her reaction as well because I really want to keep that forever. Bye, bye.”
And with one final tap, he switches the camera off.
A few hours later, you arrive home to a quiet house. You hardly think anything of it, with only you and George living there, the place can feel strangely uninhabited now and then whenever one of you is on your own.
The first thing you do is shrug off your coat and hang it by the door, slip off your shoes and socks, and switch on the underfloor heating, which George always forgets to do. The thought earns a little laugh through your nose.
“George?” you call, gathering your hair up into a bun as you cross the hall towards the living room.
His footsteps, unmistakable, come from the staircase with a certain urgency to them. Never rushed, never frantic, but definitely quicker than usual. You stop and wait, and the moment he sees you, a very particular smile settles on his lips.
“Hi, loveliest darling of all the darlings,” he says, as though it’s the most normal thing in the world to come out of his mouth.
Nothing suspicious about that at all, George Russell. You narrow your eyes.
“Hi, George,” you say, your voice carrying a note of wary amusement.
His pace slows as he reaches you, his gaze dropping to the floor before he lightly taps a foot against it.
“You turned the underfloor heating on,” he points out with a smile, leaning in to press a kiss to your cheek.
You close your eyes at the feel of his lips against your skin, a small smile tugging at your mouth. It does nothing to stop the click of your tongue in mock reprimand.
“Someone forgot again,” you reply.
George chuckles, already reaching for your hand to lace your fingers together.
“I wonder who that heartless monster might be,” there’s no real finality to the way he says it. In fact, the expression on his face slowly softens, shifting into something more thoughtful, more deliberate, as though he’s weighing something up. His fingers brush briefly at the side of his neck before his eyes find yours again.
“Love, I want to show you something.”
You don’t voice the question, but the tilt of your head says enough. Your attention stays fixed entirely on him, waiting, your slow blink asking the question for you. What is it? George’s only answer is a deep breath and a glance towards the kitchen, followed by a gentle tug on your hand to get you to follow him there.
Your steps behind him are automatic, but your suspicion only deepens. George, who is usually so calm about most things, gives himself away in a trail of little tells, each one making it more obvious just how nervous he is about whatever it is he’s about to show you. Of course you’re wondering what it is. Not with fear, but with genuine curiosity. Anticipation.
By the time you reach the doorway, he stops and turns to face you, blocking your view of the room beyond.
“You need to close your eyes,” he says, like he’s laying down the rules of a game.
One of your brows lifts. What?
George lifts a hand to your chin.
“Do you trust me?” he asks.
An unfair question. You catch your bottom lip between your teeth and then… simply close your eyes. What else could you possibly do?
You would trust him with your life.
“I’m curious,” is all you say, and it earns a quiet laugh from him.
In the next second, you realise he’s stepped out of your way and moved behind you. The feeling only intensifies when you sense his hands settle around your shoulders, giving them a gentle squeeze before nudging you forward to guide you along.
“I need you to come over to…” he starts, then stops, leaving you standing there as you hear the scrape of a chair being pulled across the floor. A moment later he’s in front of you again, taking your hand and tugging lightly. “Here. Now sit.”
Exactly as he asks, you do it. It’s not that you feel ridiculous, exactly, but there’s something about all of this that makes an involuntary laugh slip out as you sit down, hands tucking beneath the chair. You know George is incapable of anything sinister, but he’s acting so suspiciously that you can barely help yourself.
“What are you laughing at?” he asks, amusement lacing his voice as he nudges your chair a little closer to the table.
Your smile only widens.
“You. Being all weird and dramatic,” you reply, your eyes squeezing shut a little tighter. “When do I get to open them?”
George spares you a quick glance before stepping back to a safe distance.
“When I say so,” he informs you, pulling his phone from his pocket.
George clicks the camera on and starts recording. He catches sight of you through the lens, and his expression softens almost instantly. There’s something about the way you look like this, curious and fidgety and quietly waiting, that makes fondness settle in his chest before he can stop it.
“Right,” he says, a small smile tugging at his mouth. “You can open your eyes now.”
Slowly, you do.
You look at the large box at the back, then at the smaller things arranged in front of it, and let go of the seat beneath you with hands that have started to tremble ever so slightly.
Your reaction comes a second late.
“George…” you ask, your voice soft and thin. “What is this?”
“They’re presents, love. Things you said you wanted over the last few months and never bought,” he says, trying to sound steady, but still quiet, watching you carefully to make sure everything is all right.
You reach out for the Jellycat rabbit, and that’s when he sees it: your mouth trembling, your face beginning to flush.
“My God…” you whisper, reaching for the box with the ceramic carousel inside.
The first tear slips free, real and inevitable, but silent. George doesn’t notice it at first, not until the second one comes, and then the third, and suddenly you’re sniffling and your whole body is starting to shake.
George blinks. For one brief moment, he panics.
“Love, are you crying? Hey. Love,” he says, switching the camera off automatically so he can get to you. The phone is shoved into his pocket as he comes over, crouching down to your height, every movement happening almost at once.
Despite the blur in your eyes, you manage a little pout when you look at him.
“You bought all of this for me?” The question comes out thick and uneven, the words tangling together.
He moves a little closer, one hand settling on your thigh.
“Love, of course I did. It’s all yours.”
“My God,” you say again, burying your face in the Jellycat before sniffling.
“You… you liked it?” he asks, tilting his head ever so slightly as he tries to catch your eye.
You sniff in deeply, lifting your head to look at him, holding his gaze for a little longer from behind the plushie you insist on clutching tighter.
“You said that… you said these are things I asked for over the last few months?”
George shakes his head at once, almost vehemently.
“No, love. No. They’re not things you asked for. I just… I’ve been paying attention. In the shops we go to, the things we do, the moments when you really want something and don’t buy it. Or don’t ask for it.”
That might not have been George’s intention, but you… cry. More. With your whole body, leaning forward until your forehead rests against his as you hold his face between your hands.
“This is… this is… so lovely…” you manage between tears.
George lets out a laugh that sounds almost desperate and leans into your touch.
“I’m going to cry as well,” he says, sniffling.
“No. No, absolutely… absolutely no crying as well,” you insist, closing your eyes and taking a deep breath as you try to pull yourself back together. Your lip still trembles, but slowly, slowly, a smile begins to form.
Because you’re already so close, all you do is lean in a little further. You don’t ask permission to kiss him, you simply do — and George? George melts. It’s salty with tears, full of love and happiness and so, so much tenderness. So much gratitude.
George feels it low in his stomach.
“I loved it. I adored it. I love you. I wish you lived beneath my skin. I don’t know what to do with how much love I feel,” you whisper, pulling back only just enough to speak.
His eyes stay closed, as though he’s still savouring the ghost of your mouth on his. You stroke your thumbs over his cheeks.
“So you liked it, then,” he says, in that way of his that makes him seem utterly impossible.
You let out a little laugh and lift one hand to wipe at your face.
“George, be quiet,” you say, only to contradict yourself in the very next breath. “No! Actually, I want you to explain everything. Tell me. I want to know about the presents, how you got them, what they are, why—”
And now he’s just looking at you, because you’ve stood up and started talking with your hands. Despite having asked him to speak, it’s you who keeps going. Incessantly. And he only listens. Only watches.
For a brief second, a soft memory flickers through his mind.
The two of you spending a weekend at your family’s house. A photograph resting on the mantel above the fireplace: you, six years old, grinning widely with a glittering crown on your head as you posed for the camera. He remembers saying, “You’ve always been this cute, haven’t you?” and you rolling your eyes before wrapping your arms around him and replying with, “Thank you for taking care of both of us.”
That would never leave him.
He likes knowing that he’s someone that little version of you would be proud of. Is proud of, in the present tense, because he knows she’s still right there somewhere, and that she loves being spoiled by him, even when she doesn’t ask for it.
“We’re building the flowers,” you announce, your voice snapping him neatly out of his daze.
By the time George fully registers what’s happening, the Lego instructions are already in your hands and the little bags are scattered all over the table. You haven’t waited, haven’t put any of the other presents away. Your Jellycat is perched beside you like an eager participant, and the whole scene is so unmistakably you that it makes something warm settle in his chest.
George smiles, nods, and moves closer, pulling out a chair to sit down. You drag the other one right beside him and immediately start showing him the first steps.
“I’ll do the flower from bag number one, and you do the one from bag number two, all right?” you instruct.
“Perfect,” George says easily.
You’re already talking again, and then talking some more, reaching for one little bag and then another. Halfway through it all, you suddenly stop, abandon the table entirely to go and inspect the rest of the presents again, announce that you’ll try the dress on later, and then come right back as if you hadn’t disappeared in the first place.
He watches the small chaos your excitement has created in the kitchen and realises, yes, this was the best idea he’s ever had. Lucky bastard.
The presents may be yours, but he’s the luckiest man in the world.
living together was supposed to be temporary. four years later, filled with inside jokes and care that never had to be asked for, that line has long since faded into the background. between race weekends, late dinners, and accidental intimacy, friendship begins to blur into something impossible to ignore.
genre: roommates to lovers, friends to lovers, slow burn, domestic fluff, soft angst with happy ending, and they were roommates.
warnings: non-graphic sexual content, slow burn so slow it needed FIA approval.
word count: 10k
a/n: if you ever doubted the narrative power of a headband and a serum bottle… i hope this changed your mind. even if you’re not a george girl, stay here with me. seriously… i wasn’t either 🫦
You get home two hours later than planned because:
That bitch you call your boss wouldn’t stop rambling about cutting costs on a product that absolutely could not be discontinued.
A coworker needed you to handle something that wasn’t even in your client portfolio.
You got yelled at by said coworker’s client.
And when you finally managed to leave, you were met with what might have been the worst traffic day in recorded history.
To say it had been a difficult evening would be flirting with understatement. But the moment you open the flat door, the smell hits you and your shoulders drop before you even realize they were tense. A tired groan slips from your throat.
The weight of the day loosens, just a little.
In the kitchen, separated from you only by the counter that keeps the space open to the living room, George has his back to you, instantly recognizable. Mostly because of his signature state of undress. Anyone who didn’t know him might assume he simply doesn’t own shirts, the only coverage being an apron tied neatly around his waist.
Soft jazz drifts from the Alexa resting on the counter, and he sways lightly where he stands, distracted, entirely surrendered to the moment.
You smile, setting your bag down.
On your way into the kitchen, you nearly trip over the rug and let out an irritated, “Fuck,” which finally makes George lift his eyes from whatever he’s doing.
“You alright there?” he asks, a small smile tugging at his mouth.
You let out a quiet laugh, nudging the rug back into place with your foot before walking over to him. When you finally reach him, George takes two steps to the side, making room for you. With a small hop, you settle yourself on the clear stretch of counter beside the sink.
“Hi,” you say, letting your head fall forward as though your body can barely hold itself up.
George tips the chopped onion from the board into the pan, and this time it’s his turn to let out a soft laugh.
“Hello, you,” he says, reaching into the drawer for a spoon. “Rough day?”
You sigh, lips forming a small pout.
“Very, very rough. They’re awful,” you mumble.
In less than a second, he’s beside you, spoon dipped into the pasta sauce he’s making. He holds it out toward you without a word. You open your mouth automatically.
“Jesus,” you say around a mouthful, covering it quickly with your hand out of habit.
It’s so good the reaction slips out before you can stop it. George’s smile slowly spreads.
“Oh? That good?” he asks, nodding slightly, as if encouraging the verdict.
“That’s obscene,” you say, already opening your mouth for more like an impatient child.
With a fresh spoonful, he indulges you. The rich mix of cheese and spices fills your senses.
“Mmm. Wow. You’re actually outdoing yourself.”
He turns to lower the heat before facing you again. His hands come up behind you, and his gaze drops briefly to the back of your neck. Without comment, he unclasps your necklace and slips it into your hands.
“Right,” he says lightly. “Out of my kitchen.”
“Hey!” you protest as he takes your free hand and helps you down from the counter.
“Off you go. Have a shower, put something comfortable on.” He gives your shoulder a light push, steering you out of the kitchen before reaching back for the spoon. “I’ll stay here and set the table for Her Majesty. And later you can tell me all about those horrible people from your work.”
For a second longer than necessary, you just stand there, looking at him, at the kitchen, at the soft jazz drifting through the air, and something in you doesn’t quite want to move yet.
George tilts his head toward the hallway in silent instruction. You roll your eyes, he makes a little shooing motion with both hands. You exaggerate a wounded pout, dropping your head in mock defeat before finally turning to go.
You don’t even see him slip off toward the laundry room behind the kitchen. The next thing you register is a clean towel landing over your head. You catch it with a laugh, tugging it down into place before continuing down the hall.
The next morning, George steps out of his bedroom a little after you, adjusting his Mercedes shirt over his frame and hooking his sunglasses into the collar. You’re standing in front of the hallway mirror, finishing off your lip gloss before turning toward him with narrowed eyes, the cap still halfway to closing.
He glances down at himself, suddenly self-conscious.
“What?” he asks, tugging lightly at the fabric of his shirt as if checking for a stain.
You walk over, tipping your chin up and motioning him closer with your hand — a silent come here, because the height difference is absurd.
George leans down without question.
You lift your fingers to his hair, adjusting a few strands back into place.
“Okay. Good,” you declare, giving him an approving thumbs-up.
He shifts in front of the mirror you were standing in front of moments ago and tilts his head from side to side, checking his hair.
“Had breakfast?” he asks.
You nod.
“And you didn’t wait for me? That’s betrayal, that is,” he complains lightly.
“You were sleeping like a rock.” You fold your arms loosely. “I tried waking you. Didn’t work. Nudged you like five times.”
You walk over to the counter and pick up the lunch bag.
“Buuuuut… I packed yours. You can eat at work.”
You hand him his breakfast.
He huffs, but there’s a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“You’re far too clever for your own good,” he says.
You shrug lightly, the kind of gesture that makes it very clear you’re already aware of that fact. George rolls his eyes.
“Come on. I’ll drive you to work,” he says, pulling his keys from his pocket with one hand while holding the lunch bag with the other.
It isn’t exactly a daily occurrence, but it’s something you take advantage of whenever George happens to be around. He catches your bright smile and chuckles quietly to himself as he watches you go grab your things.
When you come back, the door is already open, and the two of you head down to the car together.
“As you know, I’m packing today,” George says, one hand resting loosely on the steering wheel while the other shifts gears as the car slows at a light.
“Yeah.”
“I’m off to race. Just four days. I’ll fly back the night after.”
He glances at you briefly before looking back at the road, fingers tapping once against the wheel in that absent rhythm he falls into when thinking ahead.
“You’re not going to rest before coming back?” you ask, turning slightly in your seat to face him.
The indicator clicks softly as he changes lanes.
“I’d much rather rest at home, honestly,” he says, shoulders lifting in a small shrug. “But I’ll let you know.”
He reaches blindly toward the center console, offering you the water bottle without looking — muscle memory more than intention.
“Alright,” you reply, taking the bottle automatically and twisting the cap open.
“You should come as well. They keep asking about you,” he adds, eyes still on the road. “We could stay a few extra days.”
“Everyone at Mercedes is lovely. I’d love to go, you know I would.” You take a sip from the water bottle, eyes still on him for a second before lowering them. “But I can’t pause the project right now.” You twist the cap back on and slide the bottle carefully into the cup holder. “My vacation actually lines up with your triple header, though. So I’ll be at three races in a row.”
His hand stills on the steering wheel. It’s subtle, just a slight tightening of his fingers before he glances at you properly this time, no half-look. A full one.
“You will?”
The light ahead turns red and he slows, the car coming to a smooth stop.
“And you’re only telling me this now?” he says, a laugh slipping into his voice despite himself. “Casually — as though this isn’t absolutely brilliant news?”
You grin.
“I knew you’d like it.”
His mouth curves before he can stop it, the smile breaking through fully now.
“Yeah,” he admits, shaking his head once in quiet disbelief. “I really do.”
The light turns green and the car moves again, the engine humming as George drives the last few blocks in thoughtful silence.
Your workplace comes into view sooner than either of you expects.
He pulls into a spot and parks smoothly, the engine cutting off.
For a second, neither of you moves.
Then George unbuckles his seatbelt first, the click sharp in the quiet car. Instead of reaching for the door, he turns toward you fully, waiting.
“You probably won’t be here anymore by the time I get home, so…” you say, unfastening your own seatbelt, the strap sliding back into place with a soft whir.
Your hand lingers on the buckle for half a second before you look at him.
You smile to yourself, amused, knowing he’s still a little affected by the news. It’s been a long while since you last went to the paddock — and he isn’t the only one who’s missed it.
When he smiles back, you pull him into a tight hug, and he returns it instantly. After a moment, you lean away just enough to cradle his face gently between your hands.
“Be careful out there with those cars. The halo protects you from a lot of things, but not everything. Don’t be silly,” you say, your voice carrying a mock severity, like a mother sending her child off to karting practice.
He nods, eyes fixed on yours as if absorbing every word completely. You continue in the same tone:
“And eat properly. There won’t be a little lunchbox waiting for you on the other side of Europe, so you actually have to take care of yourself.”
He nods again, his hand coming to rest lightly at your elbow.
“If there’s any gossip, I expect a full report.” You wink, and he smiles a little sheepishly. “And… well, I guess that’s it.”
He looks at you as if expecting something more, then purses his lips the way he always does when he’s about to deliver a very well-thought-out piece of information.
“You’re not going to remind me to buy the local spices?” George asks, one eyebrow lifting.
Your eyes widen slightly before you release his face, letting your hands rest on his shoulders instead.
“Oh! Right! The local spices,” you say, lifting your index finger as if continuing a checklist. “And a plushie. You haven’t brought one back in ages.”
He laughs.
“Alright,” he says, leaning in to press a careful kiss to your forehead. “Have a good day at work. Take care of yourself as well.”
Your hand moves to the car door handle, lingering there for a moment before you finally push it open.
“Come back soon, George,” you murmur as you step out.
“Always do,” he replies quietly.
You don’t answer, just smile before closing the door.
You walk toward work, and behind you, his car waits a second longer than necessary before slipping back into the flow of the street.
Already on the other side of the continent, inside the Mercedes facilities, George goes about his work with the precision of someone who has been doing this for years. He studies telemetry data, revisits old races where he made serious mistakes and others where everything went remarkably right, analyzing his own movements as though they might reveal what comes next.
Someone approaches from behind — a familiar face from the team. George slips one earphone out and greets them. The conversation flows easily, familiar laughter and easy smiles, and they ask about you the way someone asks after a relative. George answers just as naturally, as if speaking about his own life.
You’re doing well. You couldn’t come because work has been keeping you busy, but you said you wished you were there. And then he adds:
“She’ll be at the triple header. That’ll be nice.”
There’s an obvious smile on his face.
The day goes on, and the next one comes just the same. He does everything — speaks to everyone, takes part in interviews, moves through the intensity of race weekends like someone born for it, because in many ways, he was. It’s the realization of a dream. George loves what he does, loves everything he has worked for and achieved.
You’re at home. A friend came over for the weekend because you always find race weekends unbearably empty. She’s stretched out on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn in her hands, while you pace behind it, visibly tense.
Your special-edition Mercedes shirt, signed, like all of them are, hangs loosely over your pajama shorts. Every now and then, you pull the cap down over your eyes, as if that might protect you from what’s about to happen.
The commentator’s voice rises, running through the key details as the final four minutes tick away. Your eyes lock onto the number 63 on the screen. You’ve already chewed every nail you have left.
His car moves to the side and—
He overtakes.
The race ends. George finishes P2.
As promised, George comes home that night. You’re not asleep, of course.
The moment he opens the door, he’s met with a bear hug that nearly knocks him off balance. You practically jump into his arms, legs wrapping around his hips while his arms tighten around you instinctively.
“P2! P2! P2!” you chant, swaying slightly in his hold.
He laughs, burying his face deeper into your neck for a second before carefully setting you back down on your feet.
His eyes lift toward the dining table and take in what you’ve laid out: champagne, proper champagne, not that podium rubbish, two glasses, crisps, and pan-fried courgette.
He loves courgette.
“Would you look at this. Special treatment, is it?” he asks, one eyebrow lifting.
You shrug, like it’s nothing at all.
“It’s what my champion deserves.”
“I’m not a champion. I’m P2,” he says, but he’s visibly pleased.
“Oh, hush. Come on. Let’s eat.”
You tug him by the arm toward the table, stepping away only long enough to grab the champagne and pour into both glasses while he takes a seat. You move to your usual spot, the chair along the side, close to him as he sits at the head.
With exaggerated elegance, George lifts his glass and waits for you before making a move. You pick up yours and extend it toward him.
“Alexa, play Soft Instrumental Jazz For All Your Activities, please,” he says, looking straight at you, which makes a complicit smile spread across your face.
The device glows blue.
“Playing Melody on 5th Street by Oli Venn from Soft Instrumental Jazz For All Your Activities on Spotify.”
“Thank you, Alexa. You’re brilliant,” he adds gravely, before finally tapping his glass gently against yours — a soft clink.
“To your P2 today. And to all the poles still to come,” you say, taking a sip.
“To your project,” he replies smoothly, “and to the dog we’re going to adopt.”
You blink. “Oh?”
“Yes. I’m not sure when yet, but it’s happening.”
The conversation carries on the way it always does: easy, gentle, slipping naturally from one subject to the next. He fills you in on things he had already mentioned over text, paddock updates, small stories, the people who asked about you. You talk about your work too, about the friend who stayed over, about what you’ll need from the supermarket and the best time to go.
Eventually, you both decide that, with the triple header coming up, it’s better to leave the monthly grocery run until after you’re back. Neither of you wants food going bad in the fridge again — the lingering smell from past mistakes is a lesson painfully learned.
When dinner ends, George helps you clear the table. He carries the plates to the sink, and there’s a silent agreement between you that the dishes can wait until tomorrow. You put the champagne away and store the leftovers in the fridge.
Jazz continues to drift softly through the air, and as you walk past George, he catches your hand smoothly. You barely notice it at first, not until your arm stretches behind you and you turn back, confused. He raises an eyebrow and gently pulls you toward him.
“I think this moment calls for a dance. A P2 dance, don’t you?” he says, invitingly.
You laugh and nod, your hands settling on his shoulders. George’s hands find your waist, and with an ease that feels almost rehearsed, the two of you glide through the space between the dining area and the living room, moving together to whatever song Alexa has decided to play next.
“Thank you for dinner,” he says sincerely, his voice soft.
“Of course, George,” you reply. He smiles.
When the song ends and another begins, you both come to a stop. Your hands slide down from his shoulders before you step closer, pulling him into one last hug.
“You need to rest. Tomorrow we’re doing absolutely nothing,” you tell him.
“Can’t wait,” he answers, a smile evident in his voice.
At last, the contact breaks, and he leans down to press a courteous kiss to your hand like a proper lord.
“Good night, fair madam.”
You let out a laugh.
“Good night, George.”
With a wink in your direction, he finally heads off toward his room, and you do the same, retreating to yours.
The first day of the triple header arrives with an excitement George wasn’t expecting.
When he wakes up, you’re already a whirlwind moving through the flat. Clothes are scattered everywhere, waiting to be sorted; toiletries are lined up on the sofa; a tied-up trash bag sits by the door, ready to be taken out before you leave for the airport. Nearly everything is prepared.
“Good morning?” he greets, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands.
“Morning, handsome! We’re on holiday!” you announce, stepping out from behind the counter with both arms raised. “Well, I am. You’re not, ha-ha.”
He huffs a laugh through his nose and walks over to the sofa, picking up the neatly stacked Mercedes shirts resting on the armrest.
George shakes one of the shirts out with a small snap, inspecting it like it requires professional evaluation.
“Do I need all of these?” he asks, holding up two nearly identical team polos.
“Yes,” you answer immediately, not even looking at him. “You spill things.”
He narrows his eyes slightly. “I do not.”
“You absolutely do. Sauce. Coffee. That weird oil you use when you’re hovering around the mechanics pretending you know what you’re doing.”
That makes him laugh properly this time.
He folds one of the polos with surprising precision before setting it into the open suitcase. You move past him again, brushing his shoulder without thinking, reaching for your passport on the counter.
“Did you pack chargers?” you ask.
“Yes.”
“Both?”
“Yes.”
“The one that only works if you bend it at a specific angle?”
He pauses.
“…I will pack that one now.”
You grin triumphantly and step closer, slipping past him to grab it from the drawer.
“Excited?” you ask suddenly, softer this time.
He considers it.
“For the racing?” he replies.
“For all of it.”
He looks around. The half-packed suitcase, the scattered clothes, you standing there with his faulty charger in hand like you’ve just won a battle.
“Yes,” he says simply.
When you arrive at the airport, Charles and Alexandra are already there. They greet you from afar, and you immediately run toward the girl, who runs toward you as well, the two of you colliding into a tight hug. You’d been so happy when George told you they would be traveling with you.
George comes up right behind, carrying both suitcases. Charles leans casually against Alexandra’s luggage, and the two share a knowing look, the kind that silently says, “these girls…”. When you finally pull apart after nearly fainting at the sight of Alexandra’s engagement ring for the first time, George steps forward to congratulate her. You pull Charles into a hug.
You’re halfway to boarding the jet when Charles glances at George with an expression that spells trouble.
“So,” he begins lightly, “when is George finally going to propose as well?”
Alexandra elbows him immediately.
“Stop it,” she mutters.
He only laughs.
“Well, I don’t know…” George says, his gaze dropping to you conspiratorially, which says everything. “Would you say yes if I asked you to marry me?”
“Absolutely not,” you reply without missing a beat, a quiet smile tugging at the corner of your mouth.
He looks at Charles and gives a small shrug.
“Well. There you have it.”
The only thing you catch is Charles muttering, “My God, will they ever sort that out?” before everyone settles into their seats.
Pretending to be George’s social media manager, you hold your phone right up to his face while the two of you walk through the paddock, competing dramatically with the real media team trailing behind.
It’s easily the most entertaining part of the day.
“Since you’re here…” the actual social media guy says, turning the camera toward you.
You immediately lift a hand to cover your face, laughing.
George lets out a quiet snort.
“We’d like to know… does George give you trouble at home?”
“Oh, for God’s sake. I can still back out of this, can’t I?” George says, feigning irritation.
You lower your hand and pretend to think.
“Well… no. But he does autograph the groceries.”
The media guy laughs.
George nods seriously.
“Obviously. Imagine how great it is to eat sweetcorn straight from a tin signed Russell 63.’”
He gestures vaguely.
“You could even resell it at a premium, frankly.”
The social media guy takes another step closer, clearly enjoying himself.
“And does she give you trouble, George?”
George hums thoughtfully. “Oh, absolutely. Makes a slave out of me. Forces me to drive her everywhere.”
You glance at him from beneath your lashes, utterly unimpressed.
“You are such a liar. Honestly. And not even a little ashamed.”
“Look straight into that camera and say it’s a lie,” he says, pointing at the phone. “I dare you.”
You look directly at the camera, planting your hands on your hips.
“George Russell lies.”
He rolls his eyes and makes a dismissive gesture toward the social media guy.
“That’s enough. She’s grounded now. No public appearances until the end of the month.”
You gasp dramatically.
“Unbelievable. This is censorship.”
The social media guy laughs behind the camera. “We’re keeping that in.”
George points at him. “You absolutely are not.”
You lean toward the phone one last time. “See you next month, everyone.”
The social media guy finally turns off the camera and waves goodbye as you both approach the Mercedes motorhome. Toto Wolff is standing nearby with Susie, who lights up the moment she sees the two of you arriving together.
“You came! I thought George wasn’t serious,” Susie says warmly.
George looks personally offended. “What is this? Why does everyone suddenly think I’m a liar?”
Toto laughs, stepping forward. He places a hand on your shoulder in that almost paternal way of his before giving your hand a firm squeeze.
“How are you, young lady? Everything alright?”
“All good, Toto. I’m happy to be here,” you reply with an easy smile. “How about you two?”
“We’re very well,” Susie says. “We’re just off to speak with the Academy girls, but we’ll be back shortly.”
“Make yourself at home,” Toto adds. “They’re waiting for George inside, but you already know your way around.”
The farewell is easy, casual. And then they head off, leaving the two of you standing just outside the motorhome.
“Alex said the girls are getting together in the hospitality. I think I’ll spend some time with them while you’re working,” you say.
“Alright. I’ll find you later,” George replies.
You lean in to kiss his cheek, and his arm wraps around you in a quick, familiar hug before you both turn in opposite directions.
“Have fun!” he calls out just before breaking into a jog the rest of the way inside.
The conversation around the table revolved around Alex’s engagement ring. She was glowing, and everyone was genuinely happy for her. There was a softness to the group — an unspoken familiarity shaped by race weekends, waiting rooms, and the quiet understanding that came from loving people whose lives rarely stood still.
Eventually, after one last lingering look at the diamond sparkling on Alex’s finger and a wide smile, Isabella finally turned to you. She rested her chin on her folded hands, curiosity written all over her face.
“And you and George? How long have you been together?” she asked.
You took a sip of your juice, and the answer came as quickly as it always did.
“Oh, we’ve been living together for… four years? Yeah, I think that’s right.”
She looked impressed and leaned back in her chair.
“Wow. That’s a long relationship.”
Alexandra cut in, slightly uncomfortable after a brief glance shared with Lily — the kind that said more than she meant it to.
“Ah, she and George aren’t… actually a couple,” Alexandra said with a tight smile.
You looked from one to the other, eyes widening.
“Oh! Is that what you meant?” You smile, shaking your head as you trace a finger along the rim of your glass. “No, no. I needed somewhere to stay when I first moved to Monaco for work. A mutual friend introduced us because George had a spare room.”
You pause briefly, almost amused. “I was only supposed to stay there until I found my own place.”
You don’t notice the weight of the silence that lingers at the table for a beat too long until Alicia gently breaks it.
“That’s… really nice,” she says, always careful with her words. “If you ever need to, I’m moving to Monaco to be closer to Ollie. A roommate is always welcome.” She pauses, then adds playfully, “That goes for all of you. Except Alex.”
She delivers the last part in a teasing tone, and just like that, the table slips back into laughter — wedding plans, venues, guest lists, the kind of bright joy that fills the air easily.
It’s only you who doesn’t fully join in.
You smile when expected, nod at the right moments, but your thoughts stay somewhere else — circling what you said, and what Alicia offered. Every now and then, your fingers drift to the bracelet around your wrist, absentmindedly twisting it as the conversation carries on without you.
The weekend unfolds exactly as it should: media duties, dinners with good company, and George walking you to your bedroom door like a proper gentleman before heading to his own. You waking up far too early just to wake him, the two of you strolling through the paddock together, you lingering behind the scenes, chatting easily, completely integrated into it all.
The practice sessions come, the close calls, the tense moments, then race day arrives. And when George finishes P2 again, you celebrate in parc fermé, because this time, you’re there. You can breathe in the sweet, unmistakable scent of champagne soaking into the damp race suit.
The smile on his face is priceless, and it reverberates through your body as if it belongs to you.
And then, just like that, the weekend folds itself away. Flights. Suitcases. A blur of goodbyes and quiet hotel corridors.
You move on to the next week — the penultimate race of the season, but your mind isn’t where it should be. In fact, it hasn’t been for days now. You keep thinking. And thinking. And thinking.
You’re in his room, having just arrived and settled in. George sits at the edge of the bed, elbows resting loosely on his thighs, phone forgotten in one hand, while you lie sprawled across the mattress, staring up at the ceiling.
He watches you for a moment before speaking.
“Your thoughts are rather loud tonight,” his voice is light, though softened at the edges. He rubs a thumb absently along the side of his phone. “Care to share what’s going on in that head of yours, or shall I wait for you to turn the volume down?”
You let out a small breath of a laugh through your nose, eyes still fixed on the ceiling.
“Alicia said that if I ever needed to, she has a spare room.”
His fingers still.
George shifts slightly, setting his phone beside him on the bed before turning his head toward you.
“Did she?” he asks, tone neutral, almost polite.
You nod faintly, one arm sliding behind your head.
“We were just talking. The girls. They asked when we… well, when we… met.” The word comes out a fraction too late. “I told them the story. About the flat. After university.” Your fingers trace an absent pattern over the duvet. “That we agreed it would be temporary.”
A quiet beat passes.
George exhales softly through his nose, gaze dropping to his hands as he rubs his palms together once, thoughtfully.
“Right,” he murmurs.
You shift slightly on the bed but don’t look at him. Your eyes remain fixed on the ceiling because you… don’t quite know where else to look.
“And then?” you ask quietly.
He furrows his brow and turns slightly, giving you his profile. There’s a flicker of surprise in his expression, almost indignation. As if the question itself isn’t entirely fair.
“And then what?” he asks, quieter now. “I don’t really know what you expect me to say.” He looks away briefly. “Are you saying you don’t want to live with me anymore?”
A pause.
“It’s been four years.”
Four years.
You close your eyes.
“It has been four years,” you admit softly.
He notices the question you avoided — but he doesn’t bring it up. Instead, George stands and walks over to his suitcase, unzipping it with more focus than necessary as he pulls out his pyjamas.
You understand.
Of course you do.
Even if the weight of it feels new — and strangely unfamiliar.
You slide off the bed, the mattress dipping back into place as if you’d never been there at all. You slip your phone into your pocket and head toward the door, slower than usual.
Halfway there, you pause.
You turn back.
He’s still by the suitcase, shoulders slightly tense, taking things out of the bag he doesn’t really need to unpack, only to put them back again.
“Good night, George,” you say softly, a quiet hesitation threading through the words, bracing for silence.
He stills for a fraction of a second before looking up, giving you only his profile again — because he knows you’re capable of seeing everything. A small smile appears, not automatic, but offered.
“Good night,” he replies.
You hold his gaze a moment longer than you mean to. Then you leave, closing the door gently behind you.
The consistency begins to falter. George doesn’t finish on the podium in any of the final races, but you don’t see any sharp shift in him. He’s still George.
He hasn’t been talking to you much, that’s true — but there are reasons for that. Loose ends to tie up. Debriefs that stretch longer than they should. There’s always something left unfinished before you can properly go home. It’s never really the end of a season. You know that.
He just seems more tired. A little less steely. Quieter. Less like the man who signs your shirts and pickle jars with exaggerated ceremony, and more like a driver at the tail end of something long and demanding.
You can’t blame him so you stay.
You board the flight after a particularly difficult meeting for him. They wanted to understand what, beyond the car’s performance, had shifted — why he hadn’t quite managed to reach the same level he’d been operating at before. But George couldn’t offer them anything concrete. Just the promise that preparations for next season would be sharper, heavier, more relentless. That he would be ready to give everything he gave this year — and more.
George sleeps through the entire flight and still, when you reach the front door of your flat, he looks utterly exhausted.
You both leave the suitcases by the door, leaning against the small cabinet in the entryway. There’s an unspoken agreement that you’ll unpack tomorrow. Or the day after… or eventually.
George slips off his jacket and hangs it up, then reaches a hand out for yours. You give it to him, and he hangs it beside his with the same quiet care as always.
“I think I’ll try to sleep a bit more,” he says, already unbuttoning his shirt.
You watch him for a moment, his face, the faint crease between his brows carved by a worry you wish you could smooth away with your thumb until it vanished completely, leaving only that easy, familiar joy behind.
Instead, you nod.
“Okay,” you say softly. “I’ll make some tea. Do you want a cup?”
He shakes his head. That never happens.
And then he leaves you there, with no desire for tea at all.
You can’t sleep, so you stay in the living room with the lights low, trying to read a book only to realize you’ve read the same page five times without absorbing a single word.
Your eyes drift to George’s bedroom door more often than you’d like, then pull away again, as you tug the blanket up to your chin as if it could shield you from whatever it is that still hasn’t been named.
It’s only half an hour later that his door opens.
“You still haven’t gone to bed?” he asks quietly.
The sight almost makes you cry: George wearing only a pair of sleep shorts, his hair a complete mess, eyes faintly swollen with a kind of sleep that never quite came.
You shake your head.
“I’m not sleepy,” you say, biting the inside of your cheek.
He opens his mouth to say something, then closes it again. His tongue brushes over his lips as he looks down at the floor, rocking slightly on his feet. You tilt your head to the side.
“I can’t sleep,” he admits, like it’s a secret. “Would you… well, would you mind lying down with me? Just until I fall asleep, maybe. I don’t know. I suppose that sounds a bit odd.”
You don’t answer right away. Your brows lift because… because this is new. And of course, he takes your silence the wrong way.
“Right. Yes. It is odd. That’s alright, I—”
“George,” you say, cutting him off. He looks up at you. “I’ll sleep with you. Of course I will.”
He stops. Just for a moment. A moment so quiet it doesn’t even stretch. He looks at you as if searching for something, some sign that you only said it to be polite, that it wasn’t real. But you’re already getting up, setting the book down on the sofa.
And then… you’re walking toward him. You take his hand. And lead him to his room.
You lie down first because George doesn’t seem to have fully understood yet that this is actually happening. You know why: this is forbidden territory. You’ve never slept together before. Not on trips, not at home, not even when he was ill or when you were. This is the line that was never crossed. This isn’t normal.
And yet, when he lifts his eyes, you’re already there — lying back against the pillows, pulling the blanket up slightly in a quiet invitation he accepts with hesitation.
He approaches the bed carefully, watching you as though you might vanish if he moves too quickly, and then lies down beside you. You don’t hesitate. Your arms slip around him, guiding him closer until he’s resting against you, using you as a pillow. Your fingers find his hair, stroking slowly.
“You can sleep now,” you murmur, pressing a soft kiss to the top of his head.
George melts. He doesn’t even hug you back, just stays there, resting against you as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
You hum softly, some melody he recognizes from the instrumental jazz playlists you share, and at last his eyes drift closed. With your fingers absentmindedly playing with his hair, and the quiet song carried gently by your voice, he finally falls asleep.
George wakes the next morning to the soft sound of your breathing above his head. His eyes take a moment to adjust, the room still dark — blinds drawn shut, the only light coming from the humidifier glowing faintly atop the dresser.
In the next moment, he realizes he can’t move — your arms have caged him in, and your legs are nearly tied around his in a knot. But he doesn’t want to move, so it’s alright. He’s content to stay there, holding you for a few more minutes, or hours, or however long it takes for you to rest completely.
He stays like that a while longer, eyes closed though sleep doesn’t come, thinking about… well, he can’t lie. He’s thinking about the conversation. The same way he had the night before when he couldn’t sleep, and on the plane when it slipped into his dreams, and in the car, during practice sessions and races.
George, who had always known how to separate his personal life, his professional world, and his emotions, now found himself unable to tell where one ended and the other began.
When you wake, it’s so quiet he almost doesn’t notice.
You glance down at the tangled mess of limbs the two of you have become, and your first instinct is to pull away because this… this isn’t how things are. It looks too much like something you don’t do, something you’ve never been.
But then George’s eyes meet yours.
You blink once, sleep slowly fading, and realize he looks like he’s about to cry.
“What is it?” you ask, your voice rough with sleep, still soft enough to sound gentle.
His gaze slips away as he lets his forehead rest against your collarbone.
“Don’t go,” he murmurs, barely above a whisper.
Your hand moves to the hair at the nape of his neck, stroking lightly — comfort, but also a quiet request for him to look at you.
“Hmm? George…”
He lifts his face again, and now you can see it clearly.
Exhaustion.
“I asked you not to go,” he repeats.
You’re a little startled, a little worried, your mind still hazy from having just woken up. Your fingers move gently through his hair, brushing a few strands back behind his ear.
“Love, go where?” you ask, the familiar nickname slipping out naturally between you, your brow furrowing as your forehead comes to rest against his.
“Go. To Alicia’s. To the flat next door. To nowhere,” he says, eyes still closed.
Oh.
That’s it.
It was always that.
You let out a slow breath through your nose, and he opens his eyes, unable to understand why you’re laughing now.
“George,” you say softly, “I’m not going anywhere.”
He looks at you, a little confused. He doesn’t say anything, but you can see the question forming plainly on his face.
“I’m not going anywhere,” you repeat in a whisper. “And I definitely won’t manage to if you keep squashing me like this. How am I supposed to make us breakfast when you’re holding me hostage here?”
For a moment, you think George truly isn’t going to let you go. He looks at you as if you’re some sort of Christmas miracle, his post-sleep face still marked with the faint imprint of having rested against something textured, the creases soft but visible along his cheek.
Then he nudges his nose lightly against yours, stealing a quiet laugh from you. And finally, finally, he lets you go, dramatically collapsing back onto the bed.
You swing your legs over the side of the bed and, before standing up, add casually,
“You’ve got morning breath. Go brush your teeth before you dare show up in my kitchen.”
On your way to the door, you feel a pillow hit you square in the back. You burst into laughter, not even turning around as you head toward the kitchen.
Something has changed. You’re not sure what it is, but it has.
You’re at the supermarket. The shopping list is in your hands, and you point to the crisps on the very top shelf. George — perfectly suited for retrieving things far, far out of reach — stretches his arm and grabs them for you as if it’s nothing.
Natural. Fine.
Except his other hand rests lightly against the small of your back while he does it.
You don’t quite understand the behaviour, but you don’t question it either. You just stand there, a little stiff, and when he lowers himself again to place the packet into the trolley, his hand doesn’t move away. In fact, he uses both hands to gently guide you aside, clearing the way to the cart.
You blink. And the shopping continues.
In the car, you put on a song. It’s loud, full of twists, with an incredible beat that makes you dance like a child. George knows it too, so he sings along with you — shouting the lyrics and drumming against the steering wheel when the chorus hits. He even does the classic little pout and head-bobbing motion like a turtle.
When the car stops at the light, he looks at you. It’s nothing, really. Just a second too long — and you… you register it.
Then the car moves again.
At night, you both get ready for dinner. Alex and Lily invited you, so of course you’re going. When has George ever said no to Alex in his life?
You rest after the supermarket, watching a film — each of you on your side of the sofa, a large, heavily buttered bowl of popcorn between you to share. When it’s time to get ready, George nudges your leg with his big toe and gestures toward the bedroom with a tilt of his head.
“I’ll go get ready. Otherwise we’ll be late,” he says.
You nod. He stands. You stand too. He turns off the TV; you take the popcorn bowl to the kitchen. Together, you brush away the small crumbs left on the sofa, and then each of you heads off to your rooms.
From the bathroom, he calls out for you to bring his shaving cream. Wandering through the flat in your robe, you grab it from his dresser and take it to him. He thanks you, and you continue on to the laundry room to pick up the bra you want to wear.
An hour later, George is ready, sitting on the living room sofa with his suit perfectly adjusted, scrolling through his phone with his legs crossed, his foot bouncing absentmindedly.
You step out of your bedroom.
“George, can you help me zip this up?” you ask, one hand reaching behind your back to hold the fastening of your dress in place.
He nods, still looking at his phone as he locks the screen, then stands, slipping it distractedly into his pocket. His eyes lift to you.
You don’t notice it — but George blinks once more than necessary before stepping closer, moving with careful, almost measured caution. His hand moves to the zipper, and your perfume reaches him before he even begins to pull it up with ease. He exhales. His finger brushes lightly against the skin of your back, and you have a small, completely involuntary spasm — your ribs tightening for a second, your body swaying without meaning to. He steadies you with one hand at your waist, then finishes pulling the zipper closed.
Done.
“Thank you,” you say, brushing your hair off your shoulder and letting it fall down your back.
He hasn’t quite stepped away yet. He busies himself with his cufflinks, though they don’t seem to need fixing.
“Of course,” he says.
It’s only outside the restaurant, while you’re waiting for Alex and Lily, that he looks at you again — the easy conversation between you thinning for a second. He seems unsure of himself, hands slipping into his pockets before he finally says,
“You look beautiful.”
He’s said it so many times before that you don’t immediately understand why it feels different now. Maybe it’s the pause beforehand. Maybe it’s the hesitation that wasn’t there before. Still, you answer.
“You don’t look too bad yourself.”
He looks at you. You look at him. There’s the faintest smile at the corner of his mouth, and one mirrors it on yours. For a moment, it feels like you’re standing in something quiet and shared — something that belongs only to the two of you.
And then… Voices
You both step apart a little too quickly, like teenagers who think they’ve been caught doing something they weren’t supposed to, and turn to greet your friends.
Two nights later, it’s you who calls for him.
You’re in the living room — he’s on the simulator, you’re on the sofa reading your book. Eventually, he finishes his session, saying something through his headset to whoever he’d been playing with, then stretches, arms lifting as he lets out a quiet groan.
“Done?” you ask, glancing up at him.
“Mm-hm,” he replies, tipping his head back.
You set your book aside and trace absent patterns along the fabric of the throw, thinking for a moment. He stretches, rolling his shoulders, eyes drifting around the room until they settle on you — still curled into the sofa with your book.
Something soft crosses his expression.
“George,” you say quietly, even though he’s already looking at you.
“Hm?”
“Do you remember when I slept in your room the other night?” A pause. “I… haven’t been sleeping much.” You glance at him. “Would that be alright?”
“Oh,” he says, concern slipping into his voice. He’s already climbing out of the simulator before the word is fully out. “I… yeah, sure. I just need to grab a few things from my room, alright? Then we’ll go to yours.”
You nod.
He’s gone almost immediately, disappearing down the hallway toward his bedroom.
You sit there for a second longer than necessary. And then — a small smile curves at the corner of your mouth.
Tonight, the walk to the bedroom isn’t dramatic. It isn’t wrapped in hesitation or that fragile tension from the other night. This time, it feels simple. Intentional.
You go ahead of George, slipping off your earrings and setting them carefully on the dresser. You straighten the bed out of habit, smooth the sheets with your palms, then lower the lights until only the soft glow of the bedside lamp remains.
A quiet calm settles over the room.
Then you hear his footsteps in the hallway.
He pauses at the doorway.
You turn toward him.
“You took your shirt off,” you say — and instantly wish you hadn’t.
George glances down at himself, blinking.
“Yeah, I— well… you know I sleep like this. I can… put it back on, if you’d rather.”
You blink, then shake your head quickly.
“No… no, oh my God. Of course you sleep like this. I know that,” you mumble, words tangling together as they leave you.
He watches you for another moment before a quiet laugh escapes him. Your hand comes up to your forehead.
He steps closer, finally entering the room properly and coming to stand in front of you. Your eyes stay on his face, but it’s impossible not to let them drop for a second. He notices, of course.
“See something you like?” he teases, his voice low and amused.
You roll your eyes and give him a light push, suddenly very aware of how warm his skin feels beneath your fingers.
“Come on. Let’s sleep.”
You both climb into bed — him first, you right after. George lifts the covers over the two of you, and you stretch slightly to switch off the bedside lamp before settling properly against the mattress.
In the complete darkness, George slips an arm around your waist and gently pulls you closer. You don’t protest. In fact, you don’t say anything at all — you press one lip against the other, hiding a small smile, and nestle into his body.
And just like that, the two of you fall asleep.
This whole sleeping-together arrangement — always wrapped in slightly awkward requests — goes on for another week before it begins to feel almost normal.
You don’t even ask anymore.
His bedroom, once minimalist, slowly starts to merge with your things: a bottle of perfume appearing on the dresser, a folded pair of pyjamas in the first drawer, then two, then three. Your skincare products follow soon after, lined up carefully beside his things — objects that clearly don’t belong to him, yet somehow already do.
One night, you notice him poking at them with quiet curiosity.
“Find something interesting there?” you ask, stepping into the room, drying your hair with a towel.
He lifts a serum in one hand and a moisturiser in the other, studying them like unfamiliar machinery.
“You have far too many things,” he says, turning the bottles slightly as if the labels might explain themselves. “How does any of this work? I only use three things.”
And then you get an idea.
“Come here,” you say, taking his hand and tugging him gently toward the bathroom.
Still looking slightly bewildered, and somehow still holding the moisturiser, he lets himself be led. You gesture toward the closed toilet lid. He arches an eyebrow.
“Just sit down,” you say, rolling your eyes at him.
He does, slowly, like he suspects this might be a trap. Before he can say anything, though, you hurry back to the bedroom to grab what you’ll need — the little pouch and the things still resting on the dresser.
When you return, you’re already in your pyjamas, a towel wrapped loosely around your hair, strands escaping near your neck where they’ve begun to dry. You step closer without hesitation, as if dragging him into your nighttime routine is the most obvious thing in the world.
“What exactly is happening?” he asks.
“Skincare.”
“I do skincare.”
“I know,” you say, already tying a soft headband around his hair, pushing his fringe back until it sticks up in every direction. The sight makes you laugh under your breath. “But now you’re doing my skincare.”
“You’re laughing at me, but this feels rather serious,” he says, suspicious.
“Oh, it is serious,” you reply, holding up a bottle. “Cleanser first. And absolutely no cheap, ridiculous soap. Close your eyes.”
He closes his eyes. You step closer, and one of them opens again, just a quick check. You’re standing there with the cleanser in hand, mere inches from his face. You shrug. A smile spreads across George’s lips, and he obediently shuts his eyes again.
The moment the first drops of cleanser touch his skin and you bring the little sponge to his face, he pulls a dramatic grimace.
“This thing is freezing,” he complains. “Feels like that gel they use for pregnancy ultrasounds.”
Good Lord, this man’s brain. You frown, a laugh escaping anyway.
“How many ultrasounds have you even been to in your life?”
You keep working the cleanser gently across his skin.
“You’d be surprised,” he says.
You pause just long enough to glance at him suspiciously.
“You’re secretly a father and never told me? Because I feel like that’s something I should know.”
You dampen the towel slightly and bring it back to his face, carefully wiping away the cleanser. George keeps his mouth firmly shut so he doesn’t end up tasting soap.
When you need to reach for something higher on the counter, you use him for balance without thinking, a hand braced lightly on his shoulder. You grab the bottle, then settle back down on his lap, the product now in your hand.
His palm comes to rest on your thigh automatically.
You don’t notice at first. You’re too focused on twisting the cap open. It’s only when you tilt the bottle to pour some into his face that you notice the stillness. His hand hasn’t moved. And he’s… tense.
“You’re breathing weird,” you say softly, before you can stop yourself.
A flicker of embarrassment crosses his features, but he doesn’t pull away.
“You’re sitting on me,” he replies, equally quiet.
That makes your lips part slightly. The joke is right there. You could take it. You usually would. But you don’t.
You let a few drops of serum fall onto his cheeks, closing the bottle before setting it carefully on the sink. Then you begin to spread it gently across his skin.
George watches your eyes for a moment and just before you fully notice, he closes his own.
Your fingers keep moving, slow and careful, smoothing the product along his face. And then your thumb brushes once, accidentally, maybe, along the corner of his mouth.
His hand tightens, just a little.
When you’re done, you reach out to grab the towel to wipe your hands because… well, you’re not going to say it out loud. But you really don’t want to get up.
“George… now we move on to the—”
You stop yourself mid-sentence.
His eyes are open.
His other hand comes to rest against your back, almost absentmindedly, as though steadying you without quite realizing it. You don’t finish what you were going to say. You don’t say anything at all. Your gaze stays caught on his, your lips parting slightly just to let the air pass.
All at once, the bathroom feels smaller.
Closer.
George’s eyes drift slowly across your face, unhurried, searching, until they settle on your mouth. His head tilts upward, almost without intention, like his body moves before he has the chance to think better of it.
Your hand rises to his face again, your thumb brushing slowly over his lower lip.
George looks dangerously close to begging. His lips tremble beneath your touch.
And then you finally shatter whatever restraint still exists between you.
Your hand lifts first, fingers sliding into his hair, pushing the headband up and off without breaking eye contact. It falls somewhere behind him, forgotten. You lean in, your mouth finding his with intention. It isn’t hesitant the way it should be. It isn’t gentle. Maybe it shouldn’t have happened at all, but now… it’s ravenous.
A possessive sound slips from George’s throat as he leans into you, deepening the kiss instinctively. One hand tightens at your waist, fingers pressing just enough to pull you closer, while the other slides slowly up your thigh.
A soft sound escapes you, something that could very easily be called a moan.
That undoes him completely. George is ruined.
He rises to his feet with you still in his lap, your legs wrapping around his waist on instinct. The towel that had been wrapped around your hair slips loose and falls to the floor.
He presses you back against the wall, the kiss never breaking, fierce, hungry, his mouth moving against yours as though he truly intends to consume you. Years and years of nothing and everything at once spilling over into a desperate fusion of something neither of you even knew existed.
George breaks the kiss for a fraction of a second, only for his mouth to move to your neck instead. He kisses, bites, sucks at your skin, and you simply tilt your head back, granting him access, your lips parted as you try to catch your breath. Your hands cling to his back, searching for something steady to hold onto.
He bites a little harder at the curve where your shoulder meets your neck, and when a surprised little cry escapes you, he laughs low and pleased before lifting you away from the wall and carrying you toward the bedroom, still kissing you the entire way.
You wake in the middle of the night and, for a brief moment, it feels like nothing has changed.
Then you glance over your shoulder.
George is right there — his lips resting against your shoulder, his hand intertwined with yours in the loose embrace that keeps you tucked against his body.
Completely naked.
Oh my God.
A quiet laugh slips out of you, half-muffled into the pillow — but of course he hears it.
“What’s so funny?” George asks, his voice so sleepy it’s almost ridiculous.
“We’re naked,” you whisper.
He shifts slightly, and you know he’s looking now. A second later, you hear that unmistakable laugh of his, low and warm, and you feel the mattress dip as he lifts himself just enough to brush his nose against your earlobe.
“We are indeed,” he murmurs.
Your head tips back against his chest, and his hand slides up, gently cupping the side of your jaw. Your smile is small, sleepy, and painfully real.
“You alright?” George asks softly, his thumb brushing under your chin.
You nod and purse your lips, waiting for a kiss. He smiles and leans down, pressing a slow, warm kiss to your mouth, his hand finally sliding over your skin until it reaches a particularly sensitive spot.
“Alright,” you murmur, still with your eyes closed, lips lingering just inches from his. “But, hey, careful with that wandering hand. I might want to do everything all over again.”
“Oh, imagine that. What a terrible fate for this poor George.”
You laugh. He laughs. Then you turn fully toward him.
“You’re ridiculous,” you say, and he nods as if it’s the highest compliment.
Now you’re facing each other, eyes smiling more than your mouths.
“Why doesn’t this feel weird?” you ask quietly.
His lip twists in a thoughtful shrug, and his fingers begin tracing absent patterns along your hip.
“I think it was meant to happen a long time ago.”
You nod.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe,” he echoes. Then, softer, “But it’s good.”
“Yeah. It’s good.”
“Very good.”
“Very good.”
He’s laughing quietly now, and so are you. Then George leans in and presses a gentle kiss to your forehead.
“Do you want tea?” he asks.
“Mmm. I do,” you reply.
He shifts as if to get up and gestures toward the door with his head.
“Shall we?”
You glance down at yourself.
“Naked?”
He shrugs lightly.
“It’s our house.”
Your smile grows even wider.
Yeah. It is our house.
You take his hand, and without a single worry in the world, the two of you walk out to the kitchen exactly as you are.
You’re getting ready to travel for Christmas, but before that, there’s one more plan: Alex and Lily invited you both to the cinema to watch a film before everyone heads off in different directions and you won’t see each other again until pre-season.
Now you and George are sitting in the car, you finishing off your ponytail while checking your reflection in the mirror.
“Are we telling them?” you ask, lifting an eyebrow.
“Hmmm… no,” George replies thoughtfully. “I think we should wait until the start of the year. Keep it a secret.”
“Okay. Yeah, I like that,” you say.
You both lean in instinctively, laughing under your breath, your lips brushing in a quick, conspiratorial kiss.
And then—
Tap. Tap.
A knock against the window.
When you open your eyes, Alex’s enormous grin on the other side of the glass makes you let out a small, startled squeak.
“What is that?!” George says, turning sharply.
He spots him, laughs, throws his head back and covers his eyes with one hand.
“Well,” he sighs dramatically, “there goes the mystery.”
You shake your head, but there’s still a smile lingering on your lips as you finally step out of the car.
after five races in a row, kimi antonelli feels like he’s on top of the world. at the end of the day, though, he might just be on top of you — and, if we're being honest, absolutely determined to stay there.
genre: smut.
warnings: explicit sexual content, fluff, emotional intimacy, established relationship, praise kink, breast play, hair pulling, face sitting, fingering, p in v sex, multiple orgasms, light crying, teasing, competitive behavior, and strong language.
word count: 5.7k
a/n: 😃😃😃😃😃😃😃😃 honestly, i have no words. and this isn't proofread, so there are probably mistakes and other nonsense lurking around in here. anyway. ANYWAY. enjoy.
Kimi makes things especially difficult for you because throughout the entire day of celebrations, he only ever gets close enough to brush against you before being whisked away somewhere else. You don't mind, of course. This is an important moment — not just for him, but for the entire team. Everyone is celebrating. Everyone is happy.
That doesn't stop you from shivering every time he gets close enough to touch you. Or from feeling like your knees might completely give out whenever he throws one of those looks your way, eyebrow arched and grin already forming.
Damn him. That damned boy. He's doing this on purpose.
Everything gets infinitely worse when, because he's an idiot, he throws himself into the Monaco harbor to honor the winners' tradition and comes back looking like Mr. Darcy emerging from the lake. Well. A slightly sillier Mr. Darcy. And a much hotter one.
His Mercedes shirt is absolutely soaked, clinging to him in a way that should probably be illegal. Every line of his stomach is suddenly visible beneath the fabric, and your brain immediately starts thinking about—
No. Absolutely not. You are trying to be supportive. You are trying to be normal. You are trying very hard not to stare.
"Oh, come on," you mutter to yourself as he runs a hand through his dripping hair.
Because honestly? There should be regulations against looking like that. Especially when he keeps catching you staring and smiling about it.
“I'd give all my money to know what's going on inside this head,” he says, tapping your forehead with his index finger while biting his lower lip.
Your cheeks immediately burst into flames. Your hand drops to his shoulders, to the soaked fabric of his shirt, and you shake your head.
“I'm not thinking about anything. Nothing at all,” you insist, pointedly avoiding his gaze.
Kimi narrows his eyes.
“Thinking about those five times I'm going to make you come later?” he asks.
Evil. Absolutely evil. Your eyes go wide, and you immediately slap a hand over his mouth.
“Kimi! We're in public! Shut up!” you hiss.
He only laughs against your palm.
Slowly, you pull your hand away. Somewhere nearby, someone from the team notices the two of you and snaps a picture. A second later, Kimi wraps an arm around your waist and pulls you against him.
Completely soaked.
Which means you're completely soaked too.
You want to complain. You're wearing a brand-new outfit, after all. But then his mouth is on yours and suddenly, there isn't a single coherent thought left inside your head.
The moment you get home, everything goes to hell.
Kimi doesn't even give you a chance to think before sliding his hands beneath your shirt and steering you toward the couch. He kisses you with so much enthusiasm that all you can do is wrap your arms around his neck and kiss him back. It's one of those kisses. The kind that make your toes curl and leave you feeling like you might actually float away. The kind that fill your stomach with butterflies while awakening something warm and restless deep inside you.
Unfortunately, somebody has to be the rational one here, and you know for a fact it won't be the man who's still floating on a cloud of post-victory euphoria. So, reluctantly, you pull back. Just a little. Kimi doesn't understand. He immediately tries to follow you, but you stop him by pressing a finger against his lips.
A deeply offended sound escapes him.
“Baby. Baby. I—” He moves your hand away and kisses you. You try again. “The door.” Another kiss. “Baby.” Kiss. You grab his face between both hands and wrinkle your nose. “Baby!”
He tips his head back with an exasperated huff, rolling his eyes. Then he lets go of you, turns on his heel, and literally runs to the front door. He slams it shut and locks it like a man with a personal vendetta against doors before turning back around. You're already waiting for him, arms open. The sight makes him stop for half a second.
“Well, now we can finally…— Hey!” You were about to kiss him, for God's sake.
But now one of his arms is hooked beneath your legs, and somehow you're suddenly in his arms without having the slightest idea when that happened.
Apparently, Kimi has given up on the couch. He's also given up on conversation.
As you cling to his neck, eyes slightly wide — because, fuck... that's hot — he marches straight toward the bedroom with the kind of determination usually reserved for race strategy meetings. Not a single word. Not a single ounce of hesitation. Just a very clear objective.
“So... what's going on?” you ask, peering over his shoulder.
Kimi shrugs.
“That door cost me about ten seconds,” he replies without missing a beat. “I can no longer afford to give you the quick make-out session I originally had planned.”
“Oh? There were plans?”
“Well, obviously.” He gives you a look. “You see, I've been half-hard ever since I kissed you at the harbor.”
Oh, fucking fuck.
He tosses you onto the bed, earning a surprised squeak from you. Kimi doesn't even bother taking off his shirt. His mouth is on yours before you can ask another question, stealing a heated kiss from you as his hand slips beneath your shirt once again without an ounce of shame. None!
You let your fingers tangle in his hair, and Kimi lets out something dangerously close to a groan against your lips because he likes feeling your nails scrape against his scalp.
Likes it so much it's almost ridiculous.
You remember the first time you discovered it by accident — the way you'd instinctively grabbed at his hair after he'd done something particularly unfair with his hands and mouth, only to feel him freeze beneath you for a split second.
That had been all the confirmation you needed.
Unfortunately, discovering Kimi's weakness also means learning about retaliation. And right now, his hand drifts beneath the fabric just below your bra without ever quite touching your skin. Close enough to make your breath hitch. Not close enough to satisfy. So fucking unfair.
You let him. You let all of it happen because today is his day.
“What happened to my little complainer?” he asks between kisses, his mouth moving from yours to your cheek and then down to your jaw.
A soft laugh escapes you, and you drag your nails a little deeper through his hair. Kimi nearly melts.
“Don't do that...” he purrs, though there's absolutely no conviction behind the words.
You smile.
“I don't have a single complaint today, Grand Slam.” The smile tugging at your lips is impossible to hide. “Besides, don't you have a promise to keep?”
His kisses trail down to the exposed skin near your collarbone, where the neckline of your shirt dips lower. Small nips against your skin send a shiver through you, anticipation curling low in your stomach.
He nods.
“I do,” he murmurs, sending a shiver down your spine.
His mouth brushes over the curve of your covered chest before trailing lower, over your shirt, down and down until he reaches your stomach. Then Kimi lifts his head slightly… And stops. You can see his breathing deepen, his chest rising and falling as though he's bracing himself for something significant.
His hands find the hem of your shirt, and his first instinct is simply to pull it upward.
The movement is slightly unsteady. Kimi doesn't quite know what to do with the sheer amount of want coursing through him. Still, he lifts the fabric slowly, exposing your skin inch by inch.
Your breathing turns uneven.
Another wave of shivers follows, sparked by the friction of the fabric against your skin. Kimi lowers himself again, settling comfortably between your legs before pressing a soft kiss to the curve of your waist. Your eyes flutter shut. He keeps going… A kiss to your stomach. Then another. Slowly, unhurriedly, he traces a path from one side to the other, following the line of your waist as though he has all the time in the world.
He lifts your shirt a little higher, and you have to shift to help him, but Kimi never stops pressing kisses to your skin. Every inch of it. And when your hand finds the back of his neck, it feels almost like a plea. Please don't stop. He isn't going to. Not yet.
Kimi lifts himself up again only to help you pull the shirt over your head, carefully guiding it past your hair. The sight alone seems to steal the air from his lungs. He doesn't toss the shirt aside. He sets it down. A little wrinkled, maybe, but set down all the same.
Then he looks back at you.
That's what destroys you. The way he looks at you. The way his gaze lingers on your partially bare torso as though he's staring at the trophy waiting at the top step of the podium.
You bite your lower lip. Kimi swallows hard.
The choice is yours.
You push yourself upright, sitting on the bed as you hold his gaze. Your hands move behind your back and undo the clasp. The straps slide slowly from your shoulders until you can take the garment in your hands.
You're about to say something. Kimi doesn't let you. Again.
He kisses you like a starving man, one hand finding your waist once again with the apparent goal of pulling you even closer. As if that were possible. How could you possibly get any closer than this?
Oh, Kimi has an idea.
Without breaking the kiss, he grabs your bra and tosses it in the general direction of the rest of your clothes. Whether it actually lands anywhere near them is anyone's guess. Kimi isn't looking. He's far too distracted for that.
Instead, he shifts your positions. Suddenly, you're sitting in his lap, your legs wrapped around his waist while he pulls back just long enough to drag his own shirt over his head.
You don't get the chance to properly admire the strong line of his arms or the abs you've always been far too fond of. Your lips are already together again. Your tongues are a mess, the kiss so sloppy it feels almost impossible to keep up with, but you don't care. Your hand finds its way to his back, your nails dragging lightly across the expanse as though searching for yet another way to get even closer.
Then he stops kissing you.
His mouth travels lower.
Back to your neck. He leaves a bite there, as though he's trying to carve himself into your soul, and a soft sound escapes you. He's not satisfied. Kimi bites a little harder. This time, the sound he draws from you is louder, and your arms tighten instinctively around him.
His hand moves upward. He doesn't linger. He doesn't hesitate.
He simply cups your breast in his palm, your nipple slipping between his fingers before he gives it a gentle tug, pulling a sharp gasp from your lips. The sensation alone is almost too much. He squeezes a little harder, and somehow that still isn't enough for him.
Kimi pushes you back just enough to create some space, then immediately closes the distance again, his mouth taking the place his hand had occupied only moments before. Your head falls back helplessly, your eyes squeezing shut so tightly that you can't remember how you'd ever managed to keep them open in the first place.
The thing about Kimi is that he's never in just one place.
While his tongue flicks over your nipple, effectively obliterating the last surviving fragment of your sanity, the hand that had been resting on your waist tightens enough for you to know there'll be finger-shaped marks there tomorrow.
“I thought you were planning on doing other things...” you manage between a breathless laugh and a gasp, mostly because you enjoy distracting him.
Critical error.
Kimi sucks harder, the sharp sting making your nails rake across his skin. He lets out a low laugh before lifting his head and brushing his lips against your chin.
“Could you be quiet for a second?” he says, his voice muffled against your skin. “I'm having a very serious discussion down here. Quiet.”
“With that strategy,” you say, the words requiring considerably more effort than they should have, “you're not getting anywhere close to those five times.”
His hand closes around your throat, and a second later your back hits the mattress. There goes your ability to breathe.
“You want those five times? Fine.” he says, dark curls falling into his eyes as he hovers over you. “You're going to get your five times.”
A nearly wicked smile spreads across your face because you know exactly what you've just set into motion. Your entire body burns with anticipation, and your legs instinctively try to draw together in search of some kind of relief.
Kimi notices immediately.
“Open.”
His hand moves to the button of your jeans, undoing it without taking his eyes off yours. You actually obey, parting your legs a little wider, only to watch his jaw tighten, his self-control hanging by a thread.
He hooks his fingers into the waistband of your jeans, exposing a glimpse of the fabric beneath. For a moment, it almost looks like he's trying to be patient. Almost. Then he abandons the effort entirely. He drags both garments down in one motion, letting them slide along your legs. And damn it, he'd like to treat them with the same care he'd shown the clothes he'd taken off before. He really would. But Kimi can't take it anymore.
He lets everything fall to the floor.
With his hands wrapped around your ankles, he lifts your legs slightly and leans forward at the same time. The movement is simple. His hands glide up your calves until they reach the backs of your knees. His lips find the top of your left knee, leaving a gentle kiss against your skin.
Finally, his eyes land exactly where they've wanted to be ever since he stepped down from that podium.
“Fuck,” he murmurs.
“See something you like?” you ask, tilting your head slightly, that smile still hiding behind your bitten lower lip.
Kimi looks up at you. Flat. One eyebrow rises. You raise yours right back. Then, completely catching you off guard, he slides two fingers inside you and curls them just right, forcing your eyes shut as your back arches off the mattress.
Your lips part around a soundless gasp. One hand tangles in the bedsheets.
“Asshole...” you breathe.
Now it's his smile hiding behind a bitten lip. He leans over you, his hand remaining exactly where it is.
“What were you saying?” he murmurs, bringing his mouth closer to yours.
“I was saying tha—” You don't get to finish.
He curls his fingers the same way again.
A helpless sound escapes you, and you wrap one arm around him for support while the other remains trembling against the bed.
The bastard laughs. Actually laughs.
Fuck.
“You're so sensitive,” he says, stealing a quick kiss. Down below, he pulls his fingers back just halfway before sliding them inside you again. The sound that leaves you is positively obscene. “And you're so wet it's almost ridiculous…”
“Kimi... love...” you moan, involuntarily rolling your hips against his hand in search of more.
That's when his thumb finds your clit, and your legs threaten to close because, fuck. He moves slowly. Painfully slowly. So slowly that it makes you shiver.
“I know, love. I know...” he murmurs, sounding almost apologetic.
The kiss he gives you is just as slow as the movement of his fingers. In and out. At the same time, his teeth graze your lower lip in a gentle bite that draws a whimper from you.
“You want it faster?” he whispers against your mouth.
All you can manage is a breathless nod. Once again, he laughs. And then he gives in.
His fingers speed up, driving deeper, curling in that maddening way that has you grabbing him by the back of the neck and pulling him closer. Because when you come, you want to be kissing him.
He knows that.
“Come on, love. You can come for me,” he murmurs, his thumb moving with a practiced confidence.
He knows exactly what works.
You come apart from the combination of everything — his fingers, his voice, the permission… Fuck. Your vision goes white. Your breath vanishes. It feels like being struck by lightning. Your legs tighten around his hand as the world slowly begins to make sense again, your body struggling to remember how to function.
Kimi keeps you suspended in that feeling for a little longer, until you're far too sensitive to let him continue. Then, slowly — earning a soft sound from you in the process — he withdraws his fingers. He brings them to his mouth and runs his tongue between them.
“That’s one,” he says, leaning down to press a kiss to your cheek.
“Hm?” you ask, still breathless.
“The first one.” Another kiss lands on your cheek. “I still have four more to get out of you.”
Kimi drops onto the bed beside you, his head sinking into the pillow. All you can do is follow the movement with your eyes, seemingly incapable of moving much yourself. Your legs feel like jelly, and for a moment, you genuinely think you might not have the strength to continue with the rest of your day. And he says there are still four left...
You're so boneless you can barely process the thought.
“Are you just going to lie there?” he asks, poking your shoulder with his index finger.
“What exactly do you expect me to do?” you reply, covering your eyes with your forearm. “I'm dead.”
He pokes you again.
“So dramatic. We haven't even started yet. Come on. Come here. You've got this.”
You lower your arm and meet his gaze.
Kimi wiggles his eyebrows at you.
You immediately shake your head, finally attempting to push yourself up onto your elbows.
“There she is. Hi,” he says, the idiot, holding his arms out toward you.
With considerable effort, you drag yourself toward him and let your body collapse on top of his. Kimi immediately reaches up, tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear.
“You okay? Yeah?” he asks. When you nod, he presses a kiss to your forehead. “Good. Very good.” Another kiss. “Now sit on my face.”
You blink.
“What?”
“You heard me. Come on. We don't have time to waste.”
And now he's nudging you gently, as though encouraging you to do exactly what he just suggested. Your mouth falls open in disbelief because… What an absolute menace. Sure, it wouldn't be the first time. But the context of the conversation somehow makes it worse. You let out a slow breath and finally pull back enough to look at him properly.
“I am not taking responsibility if you suffocate,” you warn, pointing a finger at his chest.
The smile he gives you could probably power the entire universe.
“I'd die a very happy man if I were suffocated by your thighs.”
And somehow, after everything that is what makes you blush. You roll your eyes and look away.
“I'd argue with you,” you say, swallowing hard as you adjust your legs around him, settling onto his stomach, “but I think it's probably better if you stay quiet.”
From where he's lying, Kimi licks his lips, his gaze traveling slowly over your bare body with a devotion that sends another shiver through you, as though he were touching you already.
Naturally, that familiar feeling returns immediately. That restless ache. That impossible desire to pull him closer still, until he becomes an inseparable part of you.
“Better for who?” he asks, his hands finding your hips.
“For my sanity,” you answer softly, already beginning to lift yourself.
Kimi helps guide you, his hands pressing gently against your hips until you're positioned exactly where he wants you, your legs on either side of his head. He bites his lower lip and lets out a slow breath. The warm air brushes against your skin, drawing a quiet sigh from you.
With a little more pressure, his hands tighten around your hips before sliding farther back. That way, he can lower you slowly until… Until his mouth is there.
It's only a touch. Just the first contact. And Kimi knows he made the right decision saving this for number two, because your legs are already weak enough that supporting your own weight feels like an impossible task. In fact, the moment his tongue slips out and traces along you, so close that there's nowhere left to escape the sensation, all you can do is let out a helpless sound and pitch forward, forcing yourself to brace against the headboard for support.
Oh, and Kimi is in heaven. Kimi is absolutely in heaven.
If you knew how good you tasted, you'd never leave his mouth again. Never be selfish enough to let him wander off and live a life anywhere else when he could remain permanently attached to this particular part of you.
Because, fuck.
His tongue finds a rhythm. The way he manages it, he lets it slip inside you once, twice, three times before dragging it back up again. You're trembling above him. And Kimi is so hard it hurts. It takes an almost inhuman amount of self-control not to completely lose himself over how good you are.
He circles that sensitive bundle of nerves with his tongue, slowly at first. That's when one of your hands finds its way into his hair. Kimi lets out a low sound that vibrates through you, and somehow that only encourages him further.
His pace quickens.
The room fills with the evidence of his enthusiasm, and you— God. You don't stand a chance. Drawn forward by the sensation, you roll your hips against him without thinking.
Kimi groans again. Your fingers tighten in his hair. Something in his expression changes. He suddenly stills, one hand gripping your thigh a little tighter.
“O-Okay?” you ask, glancing down.
His hands tighten around your thighs. One second passes. Then another. No answer.
The answer comes in the form of renewed determination. You look toward the ceiling, your breath catching as he resumes, and before long that relentless rhythm is threatening to steal every coherent thought you have left. Kimi only needs a few more seconds before you completely fall apart.
This one hits harder than the last.
The force of it leaves you shaking, collapsing fully against the headboard as you struggle to catch your breath, sensitive and overwhelmed.
For a moment, you think Kimi is finally going to stop. He doesn't. He stays exactly where he is. Both arms wrap around your waist, holding you firmly in place while he continues at the same relentless pace, even as you try to remember how to function.
“Love... love...” you complain, a tear threatening to spill over. “It's too much...”
He doesn't stop. Your fingers tighten around the wood of the headboard, and a cry escapes you when he doubles down.
You're so sensitive. So unbearably sensitive.
By the time another wave crashes through you, all you can do is press your forehead against the wood and let it carry you away.
Finally. Finally, he stops.
You hear the sound of his head dropping back against the bed and the heavy breathing of someone who's just run two marathons.
“Two and three...” he murmurs, his lips glistening.
What is he even talking about?
Your brain is little more than a faint buzz at this point. You're so out of it that you barely notice when he gently lifts you off him and settles you back onto the bed. Kimi runs a hand through his hair and rolls closer until he's practically pressed against you, burying his face in your neck.
“I'm listening to your heartbeat. Alive,” he whispers.
And somehow, incredibly, you manage a tired little laugh.
“These trophies are really getting to your head, babe...” you murmur.
He wrinkles his nose, a small smile tugging at his lips, and lifts his head just enough to look at you from up close. A groan escapes you. You squeeze your eyes shut and let out a long sigh.
“What?” he asks, brushing his nose against your cheek.
“You look so pretty...” you admit without opening your eyes.
“And that's why you closed your eyes?”
You nod.
“I can't stand looking at you.”
He laughs.
“And what's so pretty?”
“Everything.”
His smile grows. A kiss lands on your cheek. Then another on the tip of your nose. Slowly, you open your eyes, and a soft sigh escapes you because he's right there.
So close.
Your hand drifts up to his face, resting briefly against his chin before your fingers brush over his cheekbones.
“Your cheeks are red,” you murmur. “And your mouth... really, really red...”
Your gaze drifts upward lazily toward his curls, and you laugh again.
“Your hair...” You shake your head fondly. “Beautiful. An absolute mess.”
Kimi settles into your hand, leaning into the touch while never taking his eyes off you. His tongue drags slowly across his lower lip.
“I saw you looking at me earlier. Up on the podium.”
“Did you?”
He nods.
“What were you thinking?”
“Hm...” You purse your lips, pretending to consider the question. “That you're the best driver on the grid. And that if anyone was going to break records at your age, it should be you.”
Kimi blinks. Then bites his lower lip.
“I thought I'd never been so proud of someone in my entire life.” Your thumb brushes lightly across his cheek. “And that you deserve every second of this.”
Now it's his hand that rises to your face. His palm cups your jaw, and with gentle pressure, he draws you closer once again. He presses a soft kiss to your lips and brushes his nose against yours.
“I love you,” he murmurs.
You smile, your hand finding the back of his neck as you lean in for another kiss. The contact is firmer this time. Kimi isn't teasing anymore. But neither is there any trace of his usual provocation.
No.
He's simply kissing you. Careful. Gentle. Like someone who knows exactly what he's doing. A love letter in the form of a kiss. You remember what it was like in the beginning, when you shared that first kiss. He'd always been careful. Always been a very good kisser. But somewhere along the way, something changed. It stopped being about technique and became... this.
Became this warm, safe feeling that wakes up inside you every single time.
His hand is warm against your back as it slides down to the base of your spine. You know he's been holding himself back until now. You know he's been savoring the moment. You also know it probably hasn't been particularly comfortable for him. So, even as you're kissing him, your hand drifts down to the fastening of his jeans, still far too tight, growing less forgiving with every passing minute.
Kimi doesn't question it. He doesn't make a joke. He simply lets you undo the button and zipper, helping with his own hands as he pushes the fabric lower. With his feet, he finishes pulling everything off, dragging the fabric down his legs until it ends up somewhere on the floor, leaving him completely bare.
You hook a leg around his hip, pulling him closer, and feel him brush against you — warm, hard, and almost feverish with anticipation. Kimi hisses. Your hand slips between the two of you, and when you touch him, a shaky groan spills against your mouth.
You swallow the sound.
Like you've done this a thousand times before, you guide him where he needs to be, and Kimi takes care of the rest. He rolls his hips forward, and the familiar feeling has you tightening your arms around him, holding him close. You stop kissing him only to hide your face in the curve of his neck.
Then he starts to move.
“Ah, fuck...” he murmurs, breathless.
“What?” you ask, brushing your nose against the skin of his neck before a helpless sound escapes you.
Kimi's arms tighten around you, drawing you even closer.
“You,” he says, still short of breath. “Us. Today. Fuck, it's the best day of my life.”
A rough laugh slips from your throat. You kiss him, brushing the damp hair away from his forehead. Then you press a kiss to his forehead too, but the sweet moment is quickly interrupted by his movements, and you're forced to cling to him again.
This time, it's Kimi who laughs softly. But you tighten around him, and he immediately grits his teeth, going completely still.
“Hey!” you complain.
“Don't do that. You're going to kill me.”
A smile spreads across your face as you rest your forehead against his.
“Start moving again, Grand Slam.”
And he does. The motion draws a quiet sigh from you.
“That nickname is so ridiculous.”
“You love it.”
“Yeah,” he says, a grin tugging at his lips. “I'm a champion.”
A laugh bursts out of you, and a second later your lips are on his again. And you're so happy. And he's so happy. And everything feels so warm and wonderful that you can hardly believe this is your life. That you get to hold this boy in your arms while he—
While he—
The thought never quite finishes forming.
His hand slips between the two of you once more, and the sudden sensation has you clutching at him instinctively, your vision threatening to blur.
“Love... fuck. That feels so good...” you mumble, the words running together.
He speeds up just a little. Just enough. The combination of everything, the warmth, the closeness, the way he's holding you, sends another wave crashing through you.
Your breath catches. The room tilts. You have to hold on to him tighter.
“Four,” he declares, arching an eyebrow as his head drops onto your shoulder, one hand spread wide across your back.
Gentle once again, he rolls you back onto the bed, easing you down onto the mattress before adjusting the pillow beneath your head to make sure you're completely comfortable.
Even though your body feels almost numb, he still takes care of you, making sure you're alright.
His eyes meet yours, and you nod.
He settles himself between your legs, and when he lowers his head to rest his forehead against yours, you know you don't have to do anything else. Kimi will take care of everything.
The boy who won five races in a row. The boy who has won your heart more times than you could ever count. The boy you love so much that sometimes it feels like your chest might burst from it. You know he'll take care of everything.
Even though you're still incredibly sensitive, your eyes drift shut the moment you feel him again. This time, Kimi doesn't make any effort to hold himself back. The moment is quiet, almost as though he's searching for something. He moves slowly at first, and your eyes squeeze shut.
His pace isn't frantic.
If anything, for the first time all day, it feels like this is just a little bit about him, and he's trying to reach something specific. Your lips purse, and you feel the first tear slip down your cheek.
Kimi brushes it away with his thumb and presses a kiss to your forehead.
“My love, I'm sorry... I need... I...” he says, the words falling apart before he can make sense of them.
Then the rhythm breaks. His movements lose their careful order. A little faster now. Gradually.
“It’s okay, love. It’s okay,” you say, your hand finding its way into his hair, right to the spot he can never resist.
Right there. His favorite place. Kimi knows he’s not going to last. Kimi knows he can’t keep holding on much longer. But there’s one last thing...
He can only do what he did before. His mind, drained of coherent thought by the overwhelming haze of pleasure, leaves him running on instinct alone.
His hand trembles.
A groan escapes him when he hears one slip from you. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. He’s trying. And the sight of his face drawn tight because of you, the way his thumb moves with determined precision, the sweat trailing down his neck toward his chest...
God. You lose yourself all over again. A soft cry escapes you. Another tear slips from the corner of your eye. And while you cling to him, Kimi manages only a couple more movements before he groans too.
Desperate.
Finally reaching the peak he’d saved for the very end.
And then— He falls apart on top of you.
“Holy fuck...” he murmurs, completely wrecked. “Five.”
Your eyes are closed, your arms spread out, your hair fanned across the pillow when your leg suddenly twitches in a rather embarrassing spasm.
He smiles and wrinkles his nose.
“Still feeling it?”
“Shut up,” you mumble, completely without strength.
“I’m going to get some water in a second...” he says, swallowing hard as he pulls you into a hug.
“Love, you don’t have to...”
“Shhhh,” he complains.
You fall silent. Kimi hugs you a little tighter, and with a sigh, he does his best to lift his upper body, a task that seems to require every last bit of strength he has left.
You don't complain. You don't stop him. Not because you want him doing all these things for you, but because… Because...
Uh.
Why, exactly?
Your head lolls to the side, your eyes already closed, and you vaguely get the feeling that maybe, just maybe, you're falling asleep. The sound of a glass being set down on the nightstand doesn't register at all.
But you do hear Kimi's quiet little laugh. The cool sensation of a damp towel against your skin doesn't wake you either. Nothing does. But you remember hearing the air conditioner click on. And you remember the moment you instinctively cling to Kimi when he lies back down beside you. You remember the soft blanket he pulls over both of you. And you remember mumbling something along the lines of:
after five races in a row, kimi antonelli feels like he’s on top of the world. at the end of the day, though, he might just be on top of you.
genre: short-short-shooort fic. romance.
warnings: suggestive. kimi antonelli is so hot omg. waist grab and… yeah.
word count: 646.
a/n: I KNOW I KNOW, KIMI AGAIN. i'm not normal about him, sorry. guys, to be totally honest, this doesn’t even count as a fic. i did to write something for kimi’s fifth victory because, seriously… it’s just delicious.
Down below the podium, you watch Kimi Antonelli take his fifth consecutive victory.
You're clapping, but honestly, the motion is completely absent-minded, because your attention is fixed on the boy who, just hours earlier, had tilted your chin up in the middle of a heated make-out session in the drivers' room and murmured against your lips, "I'm getting that win for you today.” Then he'd left you stranded on the couch, breathless and flushed, desperately in need of the coldest shower of your life.
Kimi was never someone who broke promises to you. Never.
At that moment, he's covered in a mix of sweat and champagne. His hands, your favorite hands, are around the base of the trophy while he looks completely in disbelief that it belongs to him. Yeah, pretty boy, you did it again. And amid all the chaos, his gaze finds yours.
You stop clapping.
He shoots you a wink before dragging his tongue across his lower lip... that damned tongue he seems utterly incapable of keeping inside his mouth.
The crowd around you keeps roaring, and the noise only swells when he raises the trophy high above his head. Deafening — and every second of it is for him.
Your Kimi Antonelli.
From the huge grin stretching from ear to ear across his face, you can tell he loves it. Loves the attention. Loves the feeling. Loves the power that comes with a crowd of people screaming his name because, yeah, he is just that good.
Slowly, people begin to disperse as the podium ceremony comes to an end. The cameras are already turning elsewhere around the paddock, and you make your way toward the podium steps, where Kimi is the last one to climb down after everyone else has left. You don't even have to try to get him to see you. In less than a second, Kimi is right in front of you, so close it should be a crime.
"There you are." He greets you, one hand finding your waist before you can even respond.
“You smell like cheap cocktail” you complain, wrinkling your nose.
He just laughs and slides his free hand to the other side of your waist, pulling you even closer.
“Is that any way to talk to Kimi Antonelli, Grand Slam winner and victor of five consecutive Grands Prix?”
You roll your eyes and rest your arms on his shoulders, lifting a finger to brush a damp strand of hair away from his cheek.
“All this winning is making you arrogant.”
He lets out a soft laugh, his hands tightening slightly around you.
“Oh, you have no idea just how arrogant I can be.”
“Yeah?” you ask, your eyes fluttering shut.
Kimi brushes his lips against your cheek, leaving a soft kiss there before moving higher, his mouth grazing your skin until it reaches your ear.
“I bet I can make you come five times as easily as I can win five races in a row,” he whispers. Your breath catches instantly. A shiver races down your spine, and your knees nearly give out beneath you. “What do you think?”
“I... I...” you stammer, swallowing hard as your gaze drops to the ground.
His grin only grows.
Another kiss lands on your cheek, quick and affectionate, because someone from the team is already calling for him from the other side of the paddock. He lifts his head, arches an eyebrow, and just like that, he transforms back into the victorious driver everyone expects him to be, jogging toward the engineers waiting to celebrate with him. Not before stealing one last kiss, though.
A quick peck that leaves your head spinning — not because of the contact itself, but because of the promise he'd just made. And because you know by the way your thighs press together, it's going to completely ruin the rest of your day…
they went to school together. they spent years competing over absolutely everything. then they meet again in the formula 1 paddock: she's mercedes' new marketing director, he's mercedes' newest driver, and they're forced to confront one very inconvenient fact: they've liked each other for far longer than either of them is willing to admit.
genre: romance, something to lovers, mutual pining, slow burn, childhood rivals, idiots in love.
warnings: kimi antonelli is bad at feelings, reader is somehow worse, shared birthday shenanigans, catastrophic lack of communication, croissant-induced near death experience, brief periods of sadness and soooooooooooo much fluff.
word count: 12.1k
a/n: answering yet another request that completely got out of hand. the original idea was just two people who liked each other reconnecting in the paddock years later, but unfortunately i like words far too much. a couple of notes before you start: frida is an original character created for this story and does not exist in real life, and the story takes place in 2025 because that's the year kimi joined formula 1 and i wanted to build from there. anyway, that's all! i adore this reader, truly. there are pieces of me all over her, and she means a lot to me. i hope you have fun following these two idiots through all the yearning, fluff, and emotional nonsense 🧡
Iconic rivalries had always existed. Everybody knew that almost as if they were destined to happen, as though the world wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining without them. After all, who doesn’t love a good piece of gossip?
Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, Marvel and DC, Pepsi and Coca-Cola — so many rivalries that became the foundation of global entertainment itself. Some ended in nothing, others in absolute melancholy, some still exist to this day, but every single one of them is remembered.
But there was one nobody talked about.
It all began on August twenty-fifth, two thousand and five, in a maternity ward. Same hallway. Two babies and a story your mother would never grow tired of telling.
You were an absurdly loud baby. Even the doctors were surprised by the strength of your lungs when you let out your first scream in protest against the great injustice that was leaving the comfort of the womb for this cruel world. But you weren’t the only reason that entire hallway wasn’t going to sleep that night. Two minutes later, in the room next door, a scream just as loud as yours echoed through every corner, almost as if it were trying to overpower the sound of your own. And since you had never been the type to take a challenge quietly, you screamed right back.
Okay, maybe it hadn’t actually started that night, with your tiny brains still far too underdeveloped to understand anything resembling rivalry. Many people liked to say it began when you were four years old, during your shared fourth birthday party held in the backyard of his house, when Kimi stole your knitted unicorn because he hadn’t gotten one himself.
But no — you knew the truth.
And the truth was actually much simpler: there had never been a proper beginning.
You were never best friends. Never archenemies. But somehow, you had always been inseparable. You and Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who had never existed without knowing of each other’s existence. You and Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who didn’t know a version of life where the other wasn’t somehow part of it. You and Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who were always trying to outdo one another.
For every achievement Kimi had, you came back with one of your own.
He joined karting; you entered the most prestigious writing and computer institution in the city. He won his first kart race; you had your work published in the local newspaper alongside a note of amazement from the town itself. He won his second race; you won the regional public speaking tournament.
It had always been like that, one achievement after another, an endless competition that fueled every kind of comment from every possible direction, even if you weren’t in the same field, even if the two of you weren’t trying to reach the same destination. It was always about trying to be the best. Always about seeing who would get there first.
Kimi, unfortunately, had always found this dynamic far too entertaining.
You remember that afternoon perfectly.
You had arrived at his house after your extracurricular activities at school and immediately ran up the stairs to his bedroom, barging in without even warning him first. He was sitting on the floor with headphones far too big for his head, a game controller in his hands, and he didn’t even look surprised to see you.
You tossed your backpack onto his bed, unzipped it, pulled out the newspaper and shoved it proudly in front of him.
Kimi blinked slowly once, then again, before setting the controller down on the desk and pulling off his headphones to properly take the paper from your hands.
“They published my article in the Child Geniuses section,” you announced proudly, arms crossed and a triumphant little smile sitting on your lips.
Kimi didn’t look impressed at all.
In fact, he simply lifted the newspaper a little higher and pointed toward the corner of the page.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli, age eight, wins his first kart race, promising to become a future motorsport star.
Now you were the unimpressed one.
“That’s not the Child Geniuses section,” you said with a shrug.
“I don’t care about that Child Geniuses thing,” he shot back, getting up from the floor.
You looked at him slightly from above.
“And I’m taller than you,” you declared, your final move.
Kimi always fell for that one.
He narrowed his eyes immediately.
“Not for long,” he promised, fists tightening dramatically at his sides.
But before either of you could continue, a voice called from downstairs.
“Kids! Lunch!”
And instantly, both of your faces lit up.
Kimi started poking at your back the second you both turned toward the bedroom door, bothering you all the way to the staircase until your laughter echoed through the entire house.
At school, the two of you were no better than that.
You were the best at everything, every single subject. Your portfolio was enviable, your grades impeccable, your applications impressive. But there was one thing you were completely incapable of being good at: physical education.
And although Kimi wasn’t the best student in the school, and even though all his grades were just enough to pass, he had something you didn’t have, and neither did the other students, for that matter: he was effortlessly exceptional at every sport they were given.
That was why, every Monday morning, you put on your gym uniform, tied your hair back tightly enough to hurt, and walked toward the court already irritated.
Kimi was always there before you.
And the second his eyes found yours, all it took was that stupid smile appearing on his face and that damn eyebrow raising slightly for you to feel instant hatred flooding your entire body.
Needless to say, it always ended in disaster.
You truly were terrible at physical activities. Balls either flew far away from you, far too close to you, or, whenever one came directly in your direction, you dodged it as though you were escaping a missile strike. Everyone on your team grew increasingly irritated every single class. At some point, you probably should have accepted your complete lack of athletic ability. But admitting defeat had never really been your thing.
Between wars and truces, you and Kimi grew up.
It wasn’t only the competitions. There were ice cream runs, afternoons spent in each other’s bedrooms doing homework, the times you managed to show up at Kimi’s races without warning him beforehand and, in the heat of the moment after a victory, he would run straight toward you to pull you into a tight hug only to realize what he had done a second later and immediately run off in the opposite direction.
There was also the apparently important detail that Kimi was becoming attractive and somehow you were the only person incapable of noticing it.
“So… do you think I should ask Kimi to come with me to the school festival?” Marcella asked, resting her face against her hand while watching him jog across the courtyard with the other boys.
Stupid boys. Ridiculous boys.
You simply wrinkled your nose and tucked a strand of hair behind your ear, pretending to be deeply focused on the book spread open in front of you. You had planned on studying for the exam, thank you very much, and you would really appreciate not being interrupted. It was important. Were you the only person in this school who cared about grades?
“Honestly, I think you should,” Viviana chimed in. “I thought about asking him too, but apparently he told Luca he already had someone in mind…” That caught your attention. “I think he was looking at you when he said it.”
And then the two of them burst into loud giggles. You just wanted to go back to studying and stop talking about—
“Someone at this table could probably confirm that for us, no?” Marcella added suddenly, and just like that, both pairs of eyes landed directly on you.
You slowly lifted your head to stare back at them.
“I’m not asking Kimi anything like that. Finals are coming up and he needs to focus or they’re going to pull him out of racing to make him focus on his grades,” you replied annoyed. “And we have exams too. Study.”
The girls pouted dramatically and flipped through their notebooks with loud, disappointed sighs.
“Oh, come on… You’re always with him. Just promise you’ll tell me if Kimi says anything,” Marcella insisted.
You looked at her again, then down at your notebook, thinking quietly for a moment. You thought about Kimi. About him showing up to the festival with Marcella. About the two of them dancing together and all the things that came with it. Your throat tightened unexpectedly. Still… maybe a distraction would be good for him. You gave a small nod.
“Fine,” you said at last, and that answer alone seemed enough to leave them satisfied, happily returning to their studying with bright smiles on their faces.
Later that afternoon, for the first time in a long while, you couldn’t focus on your homework.
You sat at your desk with your notebook open in front of you and your pen loosely held between your fingers. Kimi was supposed to arrive soon; the two of you had plans to study together. And if you kept performing this terribly on your assignments, he could absolutely overtake your grades at this point and honestly, you wouldn’t even be surprised.
Your mind refused to think.
Actually, no. That was the problem.
It was thinking far too much.
About the festival. About not going to the festival. Because you would need a partner and apparently every boy in school was terrified of you. Although, from what you had heard, Vittorio might ask you eventually once he gathered enough courage.
And you didn’t even understand why any of this mattered.
Things like that had never been important to your ambitions or your plans for professional success. You were already taking your sixth course in marketing and photography, with the doors to a junior program that could place you inside major companies practically wide open in front of you. Not having a date for some stupid teenage festival should not have bothered you nearly this much. But Kimi had someone in mind. And he had probably already asked her to go with him by now. And Marcella was a really nice girl, so Kimi would probably have a lot of fun with her. And Kimi… Well, Kimi was nice too. In his own way. And apparently girls liked him and—
The door to your bedroom suddenly flew open.
Kimi appeared as though he had been summoned directly from your thoughts and, honestly, what exactly had happened to him? He was smiling brightly, looking far too pleased with life, wearing that white tank top that immediately told you he had just come back from the gym. His bag hit the floor the second he stepped inside and your eyes instinctively followed the movement of his arm— Kimi was strong. Had he always been this strong?
“Hi,” he said simply before throwing himself onto your bed.
You blinked once before frowning.
“You’re sweaty and lying on my bed?”
He looked at you with that impossibly flat expression of his.
“I showered before coming here. I wasn’t going to make you deal with my post-gym smell.”
“Why not? I already know what you smell like after the gym. It wouldn’t exactly be new information.”
“A-Ah, well… I…” he started awkwardly, scratching the back of his neck as the skin there slowly turned pink.
A small laugh escaped you before you turned back toward the book on your desk.
“It’s fine if you want to shower, Kimi. I actually prefer it when you smell nice.”
“You do?” he asked, his attention shifting more fully toward you in that way that was supposed to feel casual but never really was, as though he were genuinely interested in the answer.
Your entire body froze for a moment. Your eyes widened slightly before you quickly reached for your pencil case and started shuffling through your supplies as though any of them might somehow save you.
“Well, yes, obviously. Nobody wants to be near someone who smells bad, especially not inside their own room. And I know you like lying on my bed, so it’s fine if you shower and wear the clothes you like and actuallythatwhitetanktopisreallynicewow… Haha…” And suddenly the words completely abandoned you. Your throat felt strange, your palms cold with panic, and in a moment of absolute desperation, you did something terrible. “Oh! Are you going to ask Marcella to the festival?!”
Kimi’s shoulders immediately dropped, his body even leaning back slightly.
“What?” he asked, blinking in confusion.
With one hand gripping the other, you started cracking your fingers one by one, a small forced smile appearing on your lips.
“Oh. Right. Well, Marcella said you had someone in mind for the festival and Viviana said that when you mentioned it, you were looking at Marcella, so now they’re both convinced you’re going to ask her to go with you. And then Marcella asked me to confirm it with you because she doesn’t want to look stupid.”
At that point, you got up and walked toward your wardrobe, turning your back to him. Kimi, still visibly confused, pushed himself off the bed and followed after you. Your panic immediately worsened because no, he really should not have been getting closer. Absolutely not.
“But I—”
He barely got the words out before you interrupted him with the endless stream of nervous talking you always fell into when things became too overwhelming.
“And they said Vittorio was thinking about asking me, so I might end up going too if he actually does it, and then we’ll probably see each other there and—”
“Vittorio is going to ask you?” Kimi interrupted this time, stopping halfway across the room with both hands hanging stiffly at his sides.
The easy expression he had walked into your bedroom with disappeared almost instantly.
You turned toward him, leaning back against the wardrobe door. Your eyes dropped briefly to the floor as you shrugged slightly, suddenly unable to hold his gaze for too long.
You wanted to say something else. Something smarter. Less disappointing.
“Maybe.”
Kimi stared at you for a second too long.
“And you’d say yes?”
His voice sounded strange now. Quieter. Tighter.
You frowned slightly.
“Well, I don’t think anyone else is going to ask me to the festival, are they?”
Kimi’s eyebrows pulled together immediately.
“Why would you even say that?!” he suddenly snapped, his voice rising enough to force your head back up.
You blinked at him, startled.
“Well, because apparently every guy in school is terrified of me and Vittorio isn’t even bad-looking, and he’s nice and—”
“So that’s it? You’re going with him?”
Okay, what kind of reaction even was that?
The irritation in his voice made something defensive immediately flare inside your chest.
You clenched your fists at your sides and raised your voice right back at him.
“I think I am, Kimi! What’s the problem? You can go with Marcella, you can go with whoever you want and I can’t?!”
Kimi opened his mouth immediately, like he already had an answer prepared, but nothing actually came out.
Which only irritated you more.
“Do you think somehow this is me trying to win?” you continued. “Because I thought we stopped doing that ridiculous thing where we compete over everything! I thought we were older than that by now.”
Kimi stared at you for a moment. His hands slowly moved behind his back and he just… dropped his shoulders. You noticed the way the tension between his eyebrows softened.
“I think…” he started quietly. “I think we are.”
But you didn’t want him to say that. No… no! Everything was wrong. You wanted him to get angry again, to raise his voice, you wanted… wanted anything. And when you almost stepped toward him, Kimi took a step back.
And, God. If he had slapped you, it probably would’ve hurt less.
“My dad's doing something today and I need to help him before… before traveling,” Kimi said, lifting his face toward you with a small, forced smile. He tugged lightly at his ear, cleared his throat, and made his way back toward the door, where his bag was waiting.
He slung the backpack over his shoulders and you really, really wanted to say something. But you only stood there staring at Kimi, your hands twisting behind your back with growing anxiety.
“Have… have a good trip,” you said uncertainly, stammering slightly.
Kimi looked at you and let a smaller smile appear on his lips. Then he nodded once and said:
“Bye.” Before finally leaving.
Kimi never asked Marcella to the festival. In fact, he never even went to the event because the Mercedes Academy — where he had just begun the explosive rise of his career — had announced an important meeting. You suspected it probably wasn’t even on the same day as the festival, but chose not to say anything when his mother mentioned it to you.
He disappeared for four entire weeks. And suddenly, Kimi no longer had time for anything.
He was competing now. Really competing. Traveling more often than he stayed home. And whenever he was home, the two of you fought.
It felt like going all the way back to first grade.
Your mother and his mother had planned a family dinner. It would be the first time Kimi had been back home after a considerably long time away, and you only listened to their excited phone conversations while pretending not to care in the slightest. Because, well, why would you care about any of that nonsense? They were going to throw Kimi a welcome-home dinner, blah, blah, blah. Right. You would go. It might even be nice. Veronica cooked really well. Your mother cooked really well. Whatever.
But when he arrived, you suddenly had no idea what to do with your own body anymore.
Your words got stuck somewhere in your throat in the middle of explaining that you had been accepted into the Junior Program for future leaders in audiovisual marketing, and you were only saved by his mother interrupting the conversation as she rushed forward to pull her son into a tight hug after missing him so, so much.
You stayed there, staring down at your own lap with breathing far too heavy to be considered normal, only lifting your head long enough to give him a brief little wave.
Everything was fine.
Kimi sat at the table, laughed with your parents, laughed with his parents, ruffled Maggie’s hair. Everything was fine. Your shoulders slowly relaxed.
“Your birthday is coming up!” your mother said, looking from you to Kimi. “Have you two thought about how you’re going to celebrate this year?”
Oh, right. Because the two of you had been born on the exact same day. And because you had never once celebrated a birthday apart before, even when Kimi had needed to travel from wherever he was and—
“It’s during FRECA race week. I won’t be here,” he said casually, scooping himself some mashed potatoes.
What?!
“You’re not going to be here for our birthday?!” you blurted out, stopping halfway through taking a bite.
Everyone lifted their heads because that was the first time you had spoken the entire night. And it was the first time Kimi looked directly at you, and you were looking right back at him.
His jaw tightened. He blinked once. Then shook his head before looking back down at his plate.
“I won’t,” he answered simply.
Traitor. Traitor. Traitor.
Fucking traitor.
“You won’t.” You repeated it slowly, staring at him with eyes blinking far too carefully.
Everyone noticed the shift immediately.
Your parents exchanged quick glances. Your mother looked ready to change the subject at any second, even clearing her throat softly, but you weren’t finished yet.
“It’s not on the actual race day, Kimi,” you said, your voice sharper now. “You could be here if you wanted to.”
Kimi’s head lifted immediately.
“How do you even know when the race is?” he shot back.
“Because this is what you do now!” you snapped before he could look away again. “You hide behind your schedule and your responsibilities instead of actually talking—”
“Oh, I’m hiding?” Kimi interrupted sharply, pushing his chair back hard enough for it to scrape loudly against the floor as he stood up.
Immediately, his father stood too.
“Hey, maybe this isn’t the moment—”
But Kimi was already looking directly at you now, jaw tight, chest rising too quickly.
“You’ve been hiding behind your own stuff since the day you were born,” he fired back. “You—”
“Guys, now really isn’t the time for this,” your mother tried again, getting to her feet as well.
You didn’t care.
You shoved your chair back and stormed toward where Kimi was standing.
“I really hope you’re happy, Kimi,” you said, your voice trembling now despite how hard you were trying to keep it steady. “I really do. Go celebrate your birthday with your new little friends. Be happy. Really, really happy.”
Then you turned your back on him and started walking toward the door.
“New friends?” Kimi repeated suddenly.
Your hand froze against the doorframe.
“And we’re friends now?”
That stopped you completely. The entire room fell silent. You didn’t turn around. You couldn’t. Your shoulders lifted in the smallest shrug before you finally walked away. Because you genuinely didn’t know the answer.
And you, who had never really been the type to cry, had the worst crying fit of your entire life that night. You curled up in bed, hugged the stuffed bear that had slept beside you since you were four years old, and cried in complete silence until your body grew too exhausted to produce tears anymore.
You fell asleep like that. Dreamed of messy curls, stupid laughter, and jokes that made absolutely no sense. Your parents checked on you twice that night and you never even noticed.
When you woke up, you felt empty. Like someone had reached inside your chest and simply ripped your heart out.
Things were never the same again. And you had never felt so alone.
After the awful fight at Kimi’s house, he texted you. Apologized. Genuinely. He even called you. You answered, he said he was sorry and made a few jokes, and you laughed. But he was already on the other side of the world when that happened.
You kept talking after that. Kimi kept texting. He still showed up at school every now and then and kept winning championships, while you kept growing in your career, no longer just a note in the “child geniuses” section but someone genuinely promising, with published ideas. A lot of published ideas. Because now you had far too much space in your mind to read, write, read, write, repeat.
Vittorio asked you out. You went.
You didn’t really like it that much.
He was funny, but not your kind of funny. Handsome, but not your kind of handsome. Interesting, certainly, but you weren’t interested. It wasn’t that nice.
You never went out with him again.
Someone told you Kimi had met a very beautiful girl in England and that there was apparently something going on between them — though nobody really seemed to know what it was. Whatever it was, though, it sounded intense.
You hated hearing that.
So when Kimi texted you asking how school was going, you didn’t answer. You just went back to writing your articles. Studying. Writing. Studying. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Eventually, you graduated before everyone else. Your grades were good enough to make that possible. You earned a scholarship in England. The Junior Program became the Senior Program, and you were their first choice to be sent to some of the biggest universities in Europe.
There was enormous expectation surrounding your future.
Far away from school, you were now an apprentice behind the scenes at Mercedes. Formula 1. You almost laughed at the thought alone.
When the email appeared in your notifications bar and you opened it with wide eyes — not only because of the opportunity itself, but because of the salary attached to it despite you being nothing more than an intern taking her very first steps — the first person you thought about calling was… him.
Because, in a deeply ironic way, you had made it to Formula 1 first.
September, 2024.
You were at the office. The rest of the team was there too, conversations overlapping into a constant buzz across the massive computer-filled room because Toto had said there would be a major announcement that day — and your department would be responsible for publishing it.
Which meant the visuals needed to look perfect.
As if all of you didn’t already have dozens of pre-approved layouts ready to be edited depending on whatever announcement he decided to make.
Frida, the marketing director, walked into the room and everyone immediately fell silent. The sound of her heels echoed against the floor and, the second she flashed a provoking little smile, nervous laughter spread across the room.
It was going to be a big day.
“Alright, everyone. We’ve got a lot of announcements to deal with today,” she began, taking a deep breath. “First of all… as you already know, Lewis Hamilton will be leaving the team for Ferrari.”
The murmuring immediately returned, softer this time. Sad. Everyone already knew. Still, hearing it out loud made it real.
Frida sighed dramatically.
“I know, I know. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do except wish him a great future and a successful new chapter.” Then she pointed toward you without hesitation, already knowing you were writing notes before she had even finished speaking. “We’ll need a full legacy campaign. Victory panels, career highlights, emotional pieces. What do you think we should do?”
She always did that. At this point, you were used to it.
“We should alternate the posts over the course of the next few months,” you answered almost immediately, already thinking three steps ahead. “The design team can start preparing layouts for every major announcement, including Lewis’ departure — statistics, legacy, achievements, farewell messaging, future wishes. But we shouldn’t dump everything online at once.”
A few people around the room nodded.
You kept going.
“Until Lewis officially joins Ferrari during pre-season, we rotate the content strategically. Nostalgia-based posts, career appreciation, transition messaging. We control the emotional pacing instead of exhausting it in a single week.”
Frida’s smile widened.
“And I’m assuming the replacement driver has already been chosen?” you asked at last.
That smile on her face suddenly became almost dangerous.
“Yes,” she replied. “And very well.”
The room instantly grew louder again.
Before anyone could start guessing, Frida lifted a hand.
“Before I announce Lewis’ replacement, there’s another announcement I need to make.”
Silence again.
“Starting next year, the marketing department will have new leadership.”
Immediate shock spread across the room. People turned toward each other, confused whispers breaking out everywhere.
Frida laughed softly.
“Oh, relax. I’ll still be here assisting during the transition period. My official departure has been scheduled for the following year so I can stay on as a mentor.”
Then her eyes lowered directly to you.
And suddenly, the entire room looked at you too.
“You,” she said simply.
Your pen stopped moving.
“You were the choice unanimously approved by the Senior Program board and the Mercedes executive team.” Frida crossed her arms lightly, looking almost proud. “There isn’t a better person for the role. You have every qualification we were looking for.”
And for a second, you forgot how to breathe.
“So…” Frida said, extending the envelope toward you with a grin. “Would our future official Marketing Director like to open the announcement letter for the new driver?”
Everyone was looking at you.
Not with irritation. Not with discomfort. Not with the quiet distance you had grown used to your entire life whenever people realized you were smarter than them.
With admiration.
It still felt weird.
Back then, being the smartest person in the room had only pushed people away from you. Now, it was the reason they respected you. Your abilities mattered here. They were recognized here.
Your eyes burned slightly.
Still, you stood up.
“Okay…” you said softly, taking a deep breath as you reached for the envelope.
You glanced once at Frida and she winked at you encouragingly. Your cheeks felt warm. Your heart was beating much too fast. Slowly, you pulled the paper out.
And your smile disappeared.
“Andrea… Kimi Antonelli,” you read quietly, still staring down at the paper.
A few confused murmurs immediately spread across the room.
“Him?” someone whispered. “Replacing Lewis Hamilton?”
Frida frowned slightly and leaned closer, reaching for the letter as though checking whether you had read the right name yourself.
“Hm,” she hummed. “Isn’t he a little… young?”
“He’s good,” you replied simply.
The answer came out far too quickly. Frida looked at you again, this time with visible curiosity.
“You know him?”
Your fingers tightened slightly around the edge of the paper before you gave the smallest shrug.
“Something like that.”
During pre-season, you worked remotely. Not because you wanted to, but because it was standard procedure for your position. Frida had asked you to focus on getting organized for the travels ahead. After all, you wouldn’t be staying in Brackley anymore.
It was time to see the world.
So you stayed.
The team sent over videos to be approved, Frida gave you enough autonomy to approve certain emails and respond to forms sent in by sponsors, and every now and then the two of you would jump on video calls to clear up questions and get certain things organized.
That night, she was teaching you how to manage the team’s Slack channels — the internal communication app used by everyone at Mercedes. Quick messages. Approvals. Complete chaos during race weekends. Specific channels for every department and every possible emergency.
She needed you attentive. Focused.
It was the most important app of all.
You listened carefully between spoonfuls of cereal, asking questions every now and then. But something felt off.
Frida noticed immediately.
“What’s going on, cupcake?” she asked.
Your eyebrows pulled together slightly as you looked back toward the screen.
“Hm? Nothing. I just couldn’t figure out the channel creation button for a second, but I got it now.”
“I’ve never seen that expression on your face before.”
“What expression?”
“I don’t really know how to explain it.” Frida leaned back slightly in her chair, studying you through the screen. “You look melancholic. Uncomfortable.”
You frowned a little.
“And how exactly can you tell?”
She shrugged, though a soft smile still appeared on her lips. You lowered your gaze toward your cereal bowl.
“I think I’m just a little tired.”
“Are you?”
You nodded once.
“Alright. We can stop here and let you rest,” she decided, already lowering her pen onto the desk. Then, after a brief pause, she added, “But I think it’s something else.”
When you didn’t answer, she continued anyway.
“You still haven’t opened the videos waiting for approval. Only the photo folders.” Her head tilted slightly to the side. “And ever since the announcement, you’ve been… distant. Quiet.” She narrowed her eyes just a little. “You don’t like the new driver? You said you know him. Did he do something to you?”
“What? No— no, it’s not that.”
Frida stayed silent, waiting.
You swallowed.
“He… Kimi…” Your fingers tightened slightly around the spoon. “We kind of grew up together. And it’s complicated. We got along even though we were constantly fighting over everything.” A humorless little laugh escaped you. “But eventually it just became… unbearable.”
For a moment, Frida simply looked at you.
“I didn’t realize you two were that close,” she admitted softly. “What a coincidence.”
“Yeah,” you muttered. “Crazy.”
Frida’s expression softened almost immediately.
“Listen,” she said carefully, “if this job feels too heavy because of that, tell me. I’ll understand. I can talk to Toto.”
Your head lifted immediately.
“No. No, this is my dream. I can do it. It’s fine.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” You hesitated for half a second before adding more quietly, “I don’t… hate Kimi. Or anything like that. It’s fine.”
For a second that lasted a little too long, Frida simply looked at you.
Your gaze dropped almost immediately. You couldn’t maintain eye contact with her right now, so instead you occupied your hands with the edge of a wrapper sitting beside your computer.
The silence stretched gently between the two of you until, very softly, Frida finally spoke.
“I trust you, sweetheart. I know you’ll do the best job possible.” Her voice remained calm, certain. “I believed in your dedication and your knowledge from the moment they sent me your résumé. I know I made the right decision choosing you to replace me, even this young.”
Your cheeks burned instantly.
If possible, your eyes lowered even further.
Frida smiled a little.
“That’s why I know you won’t let anything interfere with the quality of this team.” She tilted her head slightly. “But you’re still allowed to be sad. And if you need someone to talk to, you can call me. Alright?”
You nodded once.
You didn’t really know what to say.
Frida was just so… good.
Your throat tightened slightly.
“Alright. Goodnight. Think about it, okay?” she said gently, her tone still soft and welcoming.
“Okay. Goodnight, Frida…” you replied quietly.
The screen went dark. You let out a long breath and stretched your back slightly against the chair.
Wow. Okay. Frida believed in you. In your potential. In your abilities. You had responsibilities now. Real responsibilities. You needed to act like it.
Videos couldn’t scare you.
Your eyes still slightly watery, you finally opened the email and clicked on the folder. There they were. The videos. How were you supposed to approve this?
You inhaled deeply. Your finger hovered over the mouse for a moment before, finally, you clicked.
Laughter filled the speakers immediately. People talking over one another. Someone behind the camera laughing too. Toto appeared briefly before opening a door.
And then—
Kimi.
Mercedes cap. Mercedes shirt. That exact expression of a child who had just received the coolest Christmas present in the world. Someone said something off-camera and he laughed. Easy. Bright. Boyish.
A quiet breath escaped through your nose — so close to a laugh it barely counted. You didn’t want to approve this video. You… You wanted to keep it. But keep it for what?
Slowly, you clicked approve.
At least this way, whenever you wanted to watch it again, it would already be there on the official page. And you would never have to explain to anyone why you kept opening the same video over and over and over again.
When you finally arrived at the paddock, it was early January.
Car testing was already in full swing, and for the first time, you were officially being treated as the Marketing Director — even if Frida still remained constantly by your side during the transition period.
Your senses felt slightly on edge, making you glance around far more often than necessary to check whether a certain driver was heading in your direction, even though you knew perfectly well he was out on track doing his job. Maybe you wouldn't even run into him that day. Which was good. You had a plan. An order.
You knew you would eventually see him during a meeting, and he would probably be around the motorhome hospitality area at some point. You were also supposed to be present for a few of his video shoots. But you could always send a representative instead and take care of George's content sessions yourself. Easy. Everything was under control.
You were sitting in the dining area during an informal meeting, laughing at someone's joke. Your laptop sat open in front of you while members of the marketing and media teams chatted around the table about nothing in particular as you worked your way through a handful of emails. Those were your favorite moments of working there.
Still smiling, you reached for your croissant. You took a crispy bite and immediately grimaced when a few flakes of buttery pastry tumbled onto your lap. Worth it. Croissants had always been one of your favorites.
But then your eyes lifted. And there was Toto walking into the dining area. Not alone. Andrea Kimi Antonelli.
You didn't even have time to react.
Your throat did something incredibly traitorous. Your body simply gave up on following logic, and within seconds, the piece of croissant lodged itself somewhere it absolutely should not have. It hurt. And worse, it blocked your breathing.
It was the most desperate moment of your life.
A humiliating, completely involuntary sound escaped you as you tried to force air back into your lungs. Both of your hands flew to your throat instinctively. Help. Help. Help.
Someone beside you noticed immediately and shouted for assistance. Suddenly there were hands around you. You wanted to pull away from them. Every instinct told you to. But that would be unbelievably stupid, so instead you let them help you to your feet.
You couldn't think. Not really. Only that you couldn't speak. Couldn't breathe. And very soon, you probably wouldn't even be able to think for good.
The walk was a blur.
All you could do was produce those awful, embarrassing sounds of someone whose throat had completely betrayed them.
So much for having a plan.
There you were a few minutes later, dressed in a hospital gown, sitting partially upright on the examination bed with your arms crossed and a completely blank expression fixed on the wall. You hadn't died because of a piece of croissant.
Thank God.
What a pathetic way that would have been to go.
A knock sounded at the door. You looked up. The nurse.
"Hey," he said gently. "There's someone who wants to see you. He asked me to check if you're okay with him coming in.”
Your jaw tightened slightly because you were pretty sure you knew exactly who the nurse was talking about. I mean, really. Who else would ask someone else to ask permission before entering the room? Oh, for God's sake. You nodded.
The nurse nodded back and stepped out.
A second later, his silhouette was replaced by a much more cautious one. Only half a body at first. A head. One arm. One leg. You immediately shook your head and let out a long breath.
"I already gave you permission to come in," you said, without looking up at him.
Even then, he hesitated before slowly stepping the rest of the way into the room.
"Are you feeling better?"
"I am," you replied, nodding slowly as you fiddled with a loose thread on the blanket.
His head tilted slightly to the side.
"I was..."
"No." You shook your head.
"...worried—"
"No." This time, you shook it more emphatically.
"...about you."
“No!” The second the word left your mouth, you immediately lay back down on the examination bed and turned your back to him.
Kimi let out a quiet breath and rubbed the back of his neck.
“Do you want me to leave?”
...
“...No,” you answered quietly.
Slowly, he walked over to the armchair and sat down. You were still turned away from him, so Kimi simply stared at your back. You knew he was staring because wherever Kimi chose to look always seemed to burn a little.
“You shouldn't have seen that,” you said, your voice just as quiet as when you'd told him not to leave.
Kimi clasped his hands together and raised an eyebrow.
“I don't think anyone planned for what happened out there,” he replied.
You shook your head.
“No. I had planned something else.”
“You did?”
“Yes, I...” You cleared your throat and curled in on yourself slightly. “I thought we'd only see each other tonight. At the meeting.” A pause. “I was prepared for that.”
Kimi stayed silent. You stared at the wall.
“I'd already... thought about it.” Your fingers tightened slightly around the edge of the blanket. “If it went well, okay. If it went badly, okay too.”
A few milliseconds later, Kimi spoke.
"I'm sorry.”
A confused expression crossed your face.
"What are you apologizing for?"
You thought he was talking about the dining area. About everything that had happened that day. You never would have expected him to say what came next.
"For not coming back for our birthday."
Your breath caught. Your head lowered even further.
"It's been two years, Kimi. It doesn't matter. You apologized in your texts." you murmured.
In the armchair beside you, he shifted slightly. You heard the soft friction of fabric.
"Yeah. I'm sorry anyway," Kimi repeated.
Slowly, you turned toward him. Your eyes lifted just as slowly… Until they finally found his. You wanted to cry. Your bottom lip trembled slightly.
"It's okay," you said, your voice breaking.
"I wanted to apologize in person for that a long time ago, but..." He hesitated. "I could never find you."
Your shoulders curled inward slightly.
"Things got weird," you said.
"They did."
"It was a long time ago."
He nodded.
"I don't even remember when it started anymore." He lowered his gaze to the open palm resting in his lap. His voice was low. "Feels like a century."
He didn't remember. But you did. You knew. Without hesitation, without even thinking about it, you said:
"Marcella."
Kimi frowned. His eyes returned to you.
"Marcella?"
You lowered your head and stared down at the fabric of the hospital gown.
"Yeah." A pause. "Because you were going to ask her to the festival."
The boy blinked. His shoulders dropped. His lips parted slightly, as though the answer was struggling to find its way out. Then—
"But... I wasn't going to ask her to the festival."
Your head lifted immediately. Once again, your eyes found his. You didn't say anything. You didn't have to. Kimi could see the question written all over your face.
"No," he said. His voice was soft and desperate all at once, like he was trying to close his hand around something that kept slipping away. "I went to your house that day to ask you."
"No... You said you had someone in mind and—"
But he cut you off. Kimi didn't even give you the chance to finish.
"I showered at the gym before I came to your house."
You blinked. Right...
"I wore that white tank top because I'd already noticed the way you looked at me when I wore it."
Wait. What was he talking about?
"I was sure it was going to work." He swallowed hard, still gesturing with his hands as he spoke. “And then you started talking about Marcella and Vittorio, and I couldn't get you to stop because when you get stuck in those thought spirals, there's nothing in the world that can pull you out of them and—”
A knock sounded at the door.
"Hey, it's time to go. She's been discharged."
The nurse's voice cut through the room.
"We'll be right there. I'll take her back to the paddock. Thanks," Kimi replied, still slightly breathless.
Your chest was rising and falling so hard beneath the weight of everything you'd just learned that you barely noticed Kimi stepping closer to help you off the examination bed. A little disoriented, you grabbed his arm and slowly swung your legs over the side of the bed.
Kimi didn't bring the subject up again while you gathered your clothes from the corner of the room and disappeared into the bathroom.
Not when you came back, either.
He was still there.
Waiting.
Because he'd said he would walk you back.
Standing there in front of him — after nearly choking to death because you'd spotted him from a hundred meters away, and after the most awkward conversation either of you had ever had — something felt weird.
Not bad weird. Just... weird.
Your eyes drifted over his hair. Then his face. Then his neck.
"Your neck is bigger."
One of Kimi's eyebrows lifted. He glanced down, as though he might somehow be able to see his own neck. And when he looked back up at you with the hint of a smile tugging at his lips, you suddenly wanted very badly to look away.
You didn't.
"I think it is," he admitted. "I train a lot. The helmet is pretty heavy, you know."
You shook your head.
"No. I didn't know that."
His hand moved to his own neck, and your eyes followed the motion automatically.
"One day I'll let you hold it. You'll see what I mean," he said.
And it wasn't an offer.
Your stomach tightened. Because that meant you were going to see each other again and… And you nodded. A small smile appeared on your lips too.
Kimi seemed to relax at the sight of it.
"Okay," you said.
Maybe you stared at each other for a full minute. Nobody would've been able to tell. But you decided someone had to leave first, and it certainly wasn't going to be him, so you looked away and took a step toward the exit.
Kimi followed immediately. He didn't even question it.
The walk back to the paddock passed in a strangely comfortable silence. Whatever needed to be said had already been said. It was okay. By the time you got back, your team was still there.
So was Toto. Waiting for him.
You hadn't even thought about it, that he'd probably stepped away from his responsibilities just to come see you in the medical unit. That was so… Wow.
"Kimi?" You called his name, stopping and turning back toward him.
"What?" he asked, both hands tucked into his pockets.
You crossed your arms over your chest. One eyebrow lifted, and a small, familiar smile slowly spread across your face — the kind he knew all too well.
"I made it to Formula 1 before you."
Kimi's expression stayed completely flat. Then he rolled his eyes. From where he stood, he looked down at you, not that far down, really. Maybe there were five centimeters between you at most. Still, he said:
"I'm taller than you."
Your smile widened. A quiet laugh escaped him as he nudged a small pebble across the ground with the tip of his shoe.
Toto called his name. Kimi shot you a wink. Then, finally, he turned and headed back toward the work waiting for him.
The day went well enough. You went back to work, handled everything you needed to handle, attended meetings, approved content, answered emails. But the team noticed you were a little more absent-minded than usual. Not less competent. Just... pausing more often than you normally did.
I wore that white tank top because I'd already noticed the way you looked at me when I wore it. What was that supposed to mean? What exactly had you been doing? What had you let slip without even realizing it?
And… I went to your house that day to ask you. Your cheeks turned red just remembering it. Red. Red. One of your coworkers walked past your desk and, instinctively, you covered part of your face with both hands.
"Hey? I, uh..." he started, scrolling through something on his tablet. Then he looked up. His eyes flicked briefly to either side before settling on you. "Hey. Are you okay?" His eyebrows pulled together slightly. "Bad time?"
Instantly, you cleared your throat. Straightened your posture. Reached out and took the tablet from his hands.
"No, no. It's fine." And went right back to work.
That evening, back at the hotel, you thought about it some more. You could always ask him. Right? Asking questions gets you answers. That's what you'd always said. So...
You picked up your phone.
Your thumb slid across the screen, moved to your contacts list, and hovered over Kimi's name.
You took a deep breath. Tapped it. And called.
It rang once. Twice.
You hung up immediately, shoved the phone under your pillow, and buried your face in the pillow right after, as though hiding from your own terrible decisions.
One minute passed. Your phone vibrated. You blindly shoved a hand under the pillow to grab it. Without even looking at the screen, you answered.
"Hello."
"Hi. You called me?”
"No..." you replied immediately. "You're the one calling me."
Silence. Then Kimi laughed.
"Oh, right. There was a missed call here." A pause. "From a girl. She has your name."
Your hand moved up to cover your eyes.
"That's weird..."
"Very weird." You could hear the smile in his voice now. "Especially because that name hasn't shown up here in a while."
"Yeah..." You swallowed. "I think... she wasn't doing very well."
"She wasn't?" Despite the lightness of the conversation, there was still a faint note of concern in his voice. "What happened?”
Silence. Silence. More silence.
"It's okay if you don't want to talk about it."
You swallowed hard and stared up at the ceiling.
"When you said today that..." Your voice came out smaller than you intended. "That you'd noticed the way I looked at you when... when you were wearing that shirt." A beat. "What did you mean by that?"
Something clattered on the other end of the call.
"Ow, shit."
The startled curse pulled the smallest smile from you. A moment later, he was back.
"Uh— well. I..." he started, immediately stumbling over his own words. "I don't think... talking about this over the phone is the best idea."
A brief pause.
"Could we meet instead?”
"Oh, no..." You sat up straighter against the headboard. "But, Kimi... I wanted to know..."
A beat passed. Then Kimi let out a quiet breath.
"I know. If we meet now, I mean."
You blinked. Wait. You glanced at the clock and raised both eyebrows, immediately sitting up in bed and pressing the phone tighter against your ear.
"Now?!"
On the other end of the line, you could practically picture Kimi getting out of bed and crossing to the other side of the room. His footsteps were audible, just as they always had been.
"Well... is now a bad time?" he asked, sounding slightly distracted.
Your free hand came to rest on top of your head as you thought about it for a moment.
"It's late. Isn't it?" you said, curling in on yourself slightly.
"A little." A pause. "But we're not sleeping. Were you going to sleep?"
"It's my bedtime and… And you spent the entire day running around in circles wearing that ridiculously hot racing gear, Kimi..."
He finally gave up.
"I want to see you before I go to sleep."
A pause.
"Can I come see you?"
His voice softened slightly.
"The answer to your question is important. And it's not something I can explain over text or over the phone."
…
He could hear your breathing through the phone. You glanced at the clock again, then down at your feet, covered by your socks.
"You can come," you replied, slightly breathless.
...
"Okay. Cool."
A small laugh.
"What are you laughing at?" you asked, pulling the blanket up over your legs.
"This conversation."
You rolled your eyes.
"I'll come there." He says
"... Okay."
And then he hung up.
It takes Kimi exactly fifteen minutes to show up at your door. And throughout every second of that time, your foot bounces restlessly as you think about what is about to happen. You stay sprawled across the bed. Every now and then, you absentmindedly run a hand through your hair. A few times, you pick up your phone to check something, only to put it back down a second later and let your head fall against the pillow again.
By the time the doorbell rings, however, you're not thinking about anything anymore. It takes you ten seconds to open the door.
He doesn't even seem surprised.
"Hi," Kimi says, a small smile appearing on his lips.
"Hello," you replied, stepping aside to let him in.
You hadn't been joking when you'd said it was bedtime. You were wearing a pajama set covered in pandas eating bamboo, along with matching non-slip socks. Kimi laughed. Again.
"You're awfully smiley lately," you pointed out.
He shrugged.
"I'm happy," he said. Just like that. Then he pointed at you with his index finger. "I like your pajamas."
Your eyes immediately dropped to your shirt. You blinked and raised an eyebrow.
"It's old, but... thank you," you replied. Then you looked back at him. "Why are you happy, anyway?”
A beat passed. Then his smile softened into something almost helpless.
"You're asking a lot of questions," he said.
Before you could respond, he stepped past you, walked into the room, and simply threw himself onto the bed, his feet still hanging off the edge.
Oh.
You stopped mid-step.
Your head tilted ever so slightly to the side and—
Oh.
"What?" he asked, eyes already closed. "Are you just going to stand there?"
With some hesitation, you shifted your weight slightly, thinking. In the end, the decision came easily enough. Slowly, you walked over. Unlike Kimi, you didn't throw yourself onto the bed. Instead, you laid down carefully, adjusting yourself until you were at the same height as him, your legs hanging off the edge too.
He shifted a little to get comfortable, and while he did, you simply said:
"The white tank top.”
A quiet laugh escaped through Kimi's nose, little more than a breath. He opened his eyes slowly, and you were already looking at him::wide-eyed, curious, full of questions about absolutely everything.
"Straight to the point, huh?" he said. "Yeah. The white tank top."
You waited. A smile immediately spread across Kimi's face.
"Ah, well..." he began. "It's a little difficult to explain... I think it started around seventh grade. Before the white tank top."
Your eyebrows lifted in surprise.
Kimi nodded.
"Yeah, it did. I..." He let out another small laugh. "I noticed that every time we had a little argument and I ended up touching you somehow, you'd go completely red and stop talking."
His smile widened slightly.
"Which was kind of weird, because you used to stop talking around everyone. But with me, you always talked a lot."
Your breathing had gone a little uneven now.
"That was your clue?" you asked quietly, biting the inside of your cheek.
Kimi rocked his hand from side to side.
"Eeeeh..."
A crooked smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"Kind of… But not exactly. It was a start."
A grin appeared on Kimi's face.
"You wrote a piano piece called Kimi Has the Most Beautiful Hair in the World." He pointed at you. "I think that was probably the biggest clue.”
Your eyes widened instantly. Your hand flew to your mouth.
"Oh my God..."
Kimi laughed. And then—
"Kimi's hair is pretty. It's long and silky. I wonder if it'd turn curly if he cut it. Kimi's hair. Kimi has the most beautiful hair in the world!"
He sang every line dramatically.
With each verse, your eyes grew wider. And wider. And your face turned a deeper shade of red until you finally turned your head away and buried it in the crook of your own arm.
"No, no... Oh my God..." you groaned into your own skin. "Don't ever do that again. Promise me you'll never sing that again."
His smile only grew.
"Okay..." he said. "I promise."
His head tilted slightly as he tried to catch a glimpse of your face.
"You can come out of your shell now, little turtle."
A beat passed.
"But by then..." he continued, a laugh still lingering in his voice. "The field was kind of clear." Slowly, you lowered your arm. "So I showed up wearing the white tank top, and you got a little startled."
His eyebrows pulled together slightly as though he were remembering the moment.
"I didn't really understand what happened. And then you said, 'Nice shirt,' stared at me for a few more seconds..." He pointed at you. "...and immediately turned around and walked away."
Your hands immediately flew back to your face. Again. Jesus Christ. How embarrassing. How much nonsense. You... You'd actually done all that. And the worst part was that you couldn't even deny it because you remembered every second of it.
But Kimi just laughed again. Amused. Giving you all the time in the world to emerge from your embarrassment while patiently waiting for you to do it.
"I think you had a crush on me," he said. A grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. "What do you think?”
Your hands slowly dropped away from your face, but your eyes still refused to meet his.
Your cheeks were burning.
"I think you need to be quiet."
It was the closest thing to a response you could manage. Kimi tilted his head slightly, searching for your eyes again.
"Is that a yes?" he asked.
"No." You narrowed your eyes at him, finally looking his way. "That's an I think you need to be quiet."
A small pout immediately appeared on Kimi's face.
"But I like talking."
This time, a laugh escaped you. Of course he did.
"Oh, I know you do."
And somehow, that only made him smile wider. A laugh escaped him. And another one escaped you. Kimi's smile softened. Then, little by little, he grew more serious. The shift was subtle, but you noticed it immediately.
"I think… there's one more thing we need to talk about."
You waited. Kimi held your gaze for a moment.
"The fight.”
You blinked. Kimi kept talking, and this time, he was the one who looked away.
"I canceled our birthdays."
Your feet swayed slightly where they hung off the edge of the bed. You rested both hands over your stomach.
"Yeah. I..." You swallowed. "I remember.”
The mattress shifted slightly on Kimi's side of the bed. The sheets rustled softly as he lifted an arm and rested it behind his head, running a hand through his hair while he tried to figure out where to begin.
"I..." He hesitated. "I thought maybe you didn't want anything to do with me anymore." For a moment, he stared up at the ceiling. "And I thought you were going to get a boyfriend. Or maybe you already had one."
A pause.
"There was that..." He cleared his throat and gave up on the thought entirely. "Ah, anyway."
He waved a hand vaguely through the air, as though trying to shoo the thought away and continued:
"The point is, I wasn't going to be able to spend the rest of my life pretending I was happy watching you with someone else every year on our birthday.”
The room fell quiet. You absorbed the information. So… So that was it… You blinked, lowered your gaze to your hands resting over your stomach, and swallowed hard.
"But it hurt me," you murmured, your voice so small. Because you understood what he was trying to say.
But that didn't make certain things hurt any less. Kimi visibly shrank. His eyes squeezed shut for a moment.
"I know," he whispered.
Your thumb and index finger began tapping lightly against each other as you thought about what to say next, trying to sort through years' worth of feelings all at once.
"I cried a lot that night."
The words slipped out before you could stop them. Kimi's head turned toward you immediately. The expression on his face was surprised. Almost frightened.
"You cried?" he asked.
"Yes." You nodded once. "Hugging Mr. Peanuts... until I fell asleep."
The look that crossed Kimi's face was immediate. Devastation.
"Oh my God..."
His voice came out barely above a whisper.
"I'm so sorry… I'm so, so, so sorry…”
And then he turned fully onto his side. His expression was almost unbearable to look at. Like the thought of it physically hurt him.
You turned toward him too, because you wanted to see him better. Slowly, one of his hands lifted. It hovered beside your face. Not Touching.
Waiting.
"Can I touch you?" he asked, his voice fragile.
You looked at his hand. Then back at him. And nodded. His palm settled gently against your cheek, and your eyes closed. This wasn't the touch of a stranger. It was Kimi's.
Your own hand lifted and wrapped around his wrist, keeping him there. For a moment, neither of you spoke.
"I'm sorry for hurting you while thinking I was doing the right thing," he murmured.
"It's okay." Your thumb brushed lightly against his skin. "It's over now."
A small silence settled between you.
"And Kimi?"
"What?"
Your eyes opened. You looked at him for a second. Then another.
"I think you have a crush on me."
A quiet laugh escaped him. Broken around the edges. Almost a sob.
"You think?"
You nodded. Then your eyes slowly closed. A small smile tugged at the corners of your mouth.
"I think I have a crush on you too," you admitted softly.
Kimi swallowed hard.
"Yeah?" he asked, his voice trembling.
For the first time all evening, there was no uncertainty in your voice when you answered.
"Yeah.”
Now, the uncertainty seemed to belong to him. Kimi's thumb slowly traced across your cheek.
"And..." Kimi swallowed. "Do you want to do something about that?"
"I..." Your voice came out softer than before. "I do."
Kimi's heart was beating fast. Far too fast. You opened your eyes and looked at him. He was staring back at you with that disbelieving expression that did something very weird to your stomach.
Your gaze wandered across every feature of his face.
Kimi was so beautiful.
Slowly, you pushed yourself up onto one elbow. Then a little higher. Hovering over him. Your heart was racing now too.
You closed your eyes and your lips met his.
It was uncertain. Hesitant. Inexperienced. Nothing more than a quick kiss. A peck.
You pulled away almost immediately.
Your eyes remained closed, sparing you from seeing Kimi's expression. You missed the wonder on his face. Missed the slight tremble of his bottom lip. What you didn't miss was the feeling of his hand finding the back of your neck. His fingers slipping gently into your hair. And the way he guided you back toward him, careful but unwavering.
When his lips met yours again, you nearly melted.
Kimi knew what he was doing, so you let him guide you. You allowed yourself to learn from the way he moved because you wanted to do it the way he did. Then, almost instinctively, you parted your lips slightly.
From that moment on, your brain was reduced to a puddle. Your body became entirely useless.
A small sound escaped against his mouth, and Kimi, who had begun letting his tongue brush against yours, shifted your positions effortlessly, as though you weighed nothing at all. Without ever pulling away. Your toes curled.
You liked this. You liked this a lot.
Kimi caught your bottom lip gently between his teeth, and your hands immediately tightened in the fabric stretched across his back. Then his lips began tracing a path away from yours. To your jaw. Then lower. Your neck. Your shoulder. Your throat. So many kisses. So, so many kisses.
You missed him so much. God. Your heart tightened painfully inside your chest as Kimi pressed another kiss against your skin, this one landing on your cheek and drawing a small smile from you. But in the middle of it all, he felt your body shake. And then a tear slipped down your face.
Kimi stopped immediately. Not frozen. Not startled. Just stopped.
Both of his arms were braced on either side of your head against the mattress as he looked down at you from up close.
"Hey, what's wrong?" he asked softly.
One of his hands rose to your cheek, catching the tear before it could fall any further.
"Did I do something wrong?"
You shook your head.
"It's just..." Your voice broke slightly. "It's a lot. Everything is a lot." Another shaky breath escaped you. "I missed you so much. I really like this. I really like you."
For a second, Kimi simply looked at you. Then he let out a quiet breath, sounding almost relieved. He rolled onto his side and pulled you against his chest. You closed your eyes again.
You clung to him, your hands fisting in the fabric of his shirt as you buried your face against his chest. Breathing him in. And it was the same scent it had always been.
The scent of Kimi.
"I like you too. A lot," he said, brushing his nose gently against the top of your head.
Your lips curled into the smallest smile, and you snuggled closer, searching for him instinctively.
Kimi. Kimi. Kimi. More Kimi.
"It's way past your bedtime now," he said quietly. "Sorry for keeping you awake like this and messing up your schedule for tomorrow."
"It was worth it. I wanted to talk to you," you replied, your eyes still closed.
"And do you want to sleep now?" he asked.
You took a little too long to answer. Kimi understood immediately. A quiet laugh escaped him, and he pressed a kiss to the top of your head.
"We'll see each other again tomorrow. I'm not going anywhere," he said. "You can get some rest. After all..." His smile softened. "You're the Marketing Director. Wow."
Your smile widened at the mention of your new position, and you lifted your head to look at him.
"That's true! I'm a Marketing Director in the same year you're a Formula 1 driver. Isn't that cool?"
Kimi looked at you. And the small smile on his lips made your stomach flip. That was what used to happen. Back then. At the very beginning. When he wore certain clothes. Or listened to you talk. Or did pretty much anything at all...
"Yeah..." he replied softly. "Yeah, it's really cool.”
The laugh you were about to let out was interrupted by a yawn, and Kimi ended up laughing for you. He sat up on the bed, gently leaving you where you were and pulling the blanket up to your shoulder.
"I'm going to let you sleep now," he said, brushing the hair away from your forehead. "And one day we'll sleep together, and you'll wake up next to me. It can be soon. Whenever you want. But I'll need my clothes." The corner of his mouth twitched. "And my toothbrush."
Finally, the little laugh that had been trapped inside you escaped. Your head nodded in agreement. Then your hand lifted, fingers wiggling in a silent come here.
Kimi went immediately. Slowly. Lowering himself until his lips met yours in a chaste kiss. Careful. Gentle. And very sleepy on your end.
"Goodnight," he said quietly.
"Goodnight..." you murmured back.
And not long after, you were already asleep.
When morning came, you were one of the first people to arrive at the administrative area. But Frida was already there, sitting at the desk in the office you would soon be sharing, waiting for her computer to finish booting up.
"Morning!" you greeted, slipping the strap of your bag off your shoulder and setting it down on the desk.
"Morning, cupcake," she replied distractedly, her eyes drifting from her phone to you. Slowly. "I heard you choked yester—"
She cut herself off. Her eyebrows lifted. Then lifted a little higher. You were wearing a light touch of makeup, a silver star-shaped hair clip holding part of your loose hair back, and a black sweater over your team uniform.
"Oh." A knowing smile tugged at the corners of Frida's mouth. "Well, don't you look pretty today.”
You cleared your throat, pulled your laptop out of your bag, and set it down on the desk. At the same time, you tucked a strand of your bangs behind your ear.
"Thank you very much," you said. "I like this sweater."
And immediately after — before Frida even had the chance to respond — a certain cheerful boy appeared, hanging from the doorframe.
"Good morning, ladies!" Kimi announced, complete with a grin.
"Oh, Kimi! I was just telling her about the sweater." Frida pointed at you. "Don't you think she looks cute today?”
His gaze immediately dropped to you the second the invitation was offered. Not that he needed an excuse. He would've looked at you anyway. But there was no way he was going to pass up an opportunity when one was handed to him.
His smile widened.
"I do," he said. "I like the little star in her hair."
"Could you both please stop paying attention to me?" you asked, already red in the face as you tried to get your laptop to turn on.
Kimi glanced at Frida, raised an eyebrow, and flashed that familiar crooked smile before pushing himself away from the doorframe and heading off with the same spring in his step he'd arrived with.
"He likes you," Frida said, turning her attention back to her computer.
A small smile immediately appeared on your face, hidden behind your hand as you moved the mouse with the other. Because, yes. He really did like you. She had absolutely no idea.
August 25th, 2025. Bologna. Kimi Antonelli's childhood bedroom.
Standing in front of the mirror, you adjusted the front of your dress while trying to decide whether it looked nice enough for the party. You had bought it the month before, during a race week, and at the time you had been completely sure it was perfect. Now, looking at it more closely, you weren't so sure anymore.
Your hands smoothed over your waist as you studied your reflection. Your eyes narrowed slightly and a thoughtful hum escaped you.
"Hmmm."
"I think I can read minds." Kimi's voice came from behind you, approaching through the half-open door.
"Oh, yeah?" you asked, meeting his gaze through the mirror.
"Yeah." He nodded once. "I think you're standing here thinking and thinking and thinking about whether that dress looks good enough. Or whether your hair looks nice." A grin appeared on his face. "And I, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, have arrived to save you from all this nonsense.”
You turned toward him, and he stepped a little closer. Kimi didn't touch you. He simply moved near enough that your faces were only a short distance apart. But your hands lifted on their own, settling on his shoulders. He was wearing one of those light-colored t-shirts you loved. Soft. Comfortable. Nice to lean against.
"Okay." You blinked up at him. "And how exactly are you planning to save me from all this nonsense?”
Encouraged by your hands resting on his shoulders, his own found your waist.
Then he pulled you a little closer.
"First of all," he began, "I'm going to tell you happy birthday..."
A smile immediately spread across your face.
"Happy birthday to you too," you replied, tilting your head slightly.
He nodded.
"And secondly..." His hands tightened just a little at your waist. “I'm going to tell you how beautiful you look.”
That familiar blush immediately spread across your cheeks.
"Okay..." you said.
"You're the prettiest girl in the world. And that's the prettiest dress there is."
"You're exaggerating..."
"No." He shook his head once. "I'm right."
"But—"
His index finger immediately found your lips, gently cutting you off.
"No arguments."
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"Prettiest girl in the world.”
Looking directly into his eyes, you clicked your tongue. What a stubborn boy.
"Oh, alright," you said at last, surrendering. "Because it's your birthday. I'm not arguing."
"Yeah. That's right." He nodded, pretending to be completely convinced.
His hand found yours, weaving your fingers together.
"Come on." He gave your hand a gentle tug toward the door. "They're waiting for us."
A grin appeared on his face.
"It's the grand reopening of our shared birthday, remember?"
Yes. You hadn't forgotten. Not for a second.
A quiet laugh escaped you.
"Let's go," you said.
Kimi's smile widened immediately. Still holding your hand, he led you toward the door. The hallway looked exactly the same as it always had. The stairs too. The framed family photos. The familiar sounds coming from downstairs. Laughter. Voices. Life.
For a moment, you found yourself looking at the back of Kimi's head. At the hand holding yours. At the boy who had somehow been there for almost every important chapter of your life.
Kimi glanced back at you.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
A small smile appeared on your face.
"No reason."
He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. You laughed. And together, you headed downstairs to celebrate your birthday.
