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sue me (i wanna be wanted) ⸻ isack hadjar x reader .

featuring isack hadjar, set post-zandvoort 2025, toxic relationship, exes to ??? word count 8.4k author’s note 18+ mdni !! hi everyone i’m back to writing again fr !! anyway i know i said spidey osc and casa lando were coming first but… too bad, you’re getting this instead because they’re both actually crazy long and still not finished so i want to tide you over until then. the setting should tell you i’ve been kicking the tires on this one for a while (ummmmmm a year………) and i have overthought it to the brink of driving me insane but i hope you all still like it anyway lol. fair warning that reader is a little (a lot) evil in this but we love her (at least i do) !! least healthy relationship i’ve ever written, sorry i put you through all that isack & you’re still my baby goat ! as always please come tell me what you think, i know this is a little different from what i normally do and it helps me so much to get feedback from you all about what you like and don’t like ! title is from sue me by audrey hobert.

You are definitely, completely, one-hundred-percent not supposed to be here.

Liam’s girlfriend had mentioned something in passing about celebrations after Zandvoort, probably forgetting you were in the Future Rookie WAGs!!! Instagram groupchat. You’d filed the information away like you still do with everything involving Isack — against your better judgment. Wishing you didn’t.

The sad thing is you’ve been doing better. That’s what you’ve been telling yourself, anyway, and everyone else who will listen: your mom, your friends, the therapist you stopped seeing after four sessions when she asked you to sit with your feelings about your ex and those feelings turned out to be a dumpster fire you had no interest in warming your hands over. You’ve been doing a lot of Pilates. You downloaded Raya and went on exactly three dates with a footballer who was perfectly nice and fucked you slow and made you want to claw your skin off every time he so much as touched your shoulder. You’re healing. You’re fine.

Then again, you’d always been excellent at ruining good things, and Isack Hadjar was the best thing you’d ever had.

So maybe you bought a Eurostar ticket to Amsterdam after the race. And maybe once you got there you took a cab you couldn’t afford from the city to a hotel room you definitely couldn’t afford by the sea. And maybe now you’re at the club the girls mentioned, wearing a dress you know Isack used to love on you — short, black, silky, with a neckline that dips low enough to be a problem. He’d fucked you in it more often than he ever took it off you, bunching it up around your waist with his fingers digging into your hips. You have a distinct memory of him pushing the straps off your shoulders in the back of an Uber in Paris, his mouth hot on your neck as his other hand slid up the fabric of your skirt, the driver trying very hard not to notice.

That fabric is sticking to your thighs for an entirely different reason now, damp with sweat from the heat of too many bodies in a room that wasn’t designed for this many people. You prop yourself next to the bar closest to the VIP section with a drink you don’t really want, scanning the crowd while you try to pretend you’re not looking for anyone in particular.

You don’t have to lie to yourself for long. You find him instinctively, your heart a compass tuned to the magnetic north that is your ex-boyfriend. He’s with the whole group of them behind the velvet rope, looking so unfairly, devastatingly hot that you have to take a long sip of your drink just to have something to do with your mouth that isn’t biting through your own lip. He’s got a drink in one hand — dark liquid, a Coke and Bacardi, probably, the same thing you know he’s been ordering since he was old enough to get into a club.

The other is around a girl.

She’s tall, tan, beachy waves falling artfully over bare shoulders, leaning in just a little too close to be casual, fingertips trailing along his forearm as she says something that makes him laugh. It’s your favorite laugh, you can tell even from here: low and easy and warm, the one that makes his eyes crinkle a little at the corners. The one that used to belong to you, and is currently being wasted on some girl in a cheap going-out top from Zara who probably thinks pole position is one of the tips to drive your man wild from the latest issue of Cosmo.

You hate her with a violence that surprises you; hate the perfectly done nails, the long wispy eyelashes, the extensions that you genuinely want to rip out of her fucking head. But the thing you hate the most is that Isack looks happy. He looks like someone who’s been doing just fine without you, actually, which is the one outcome you’d somehow failed to plan for, and your stomach twists so badly at the thought of him moving on that you consider running out as fast as your heels will carry you and flying home and blocking him on Instagram like you’ve been promising yourself for months that you would.

That’s when Liam’s girlfriend spots you. You see it immediately: the double-take, the dawning horror that she’s about to be solely responsible for ruining a podium sitter’s night. She grabs Ollie’s girlfriend’s wrist, tugging her into a frantic, whispered conversation. You lift your hand and flutter your fingers in a little wave — hi girls, remember me? — and watch the blood drain from their faces. Ollie’s girlfriend turns and hisses something to him, and then Ollie bumps Kimi and points (completely indiscreetly) right at you, and then Kimi punches Isack in the shoulder and says something urgently into his ear, and then Isack’s gaze drifts sideways until it lands on you and the smile drops off his face so fast it’s like it was never there at all.

The lights in the club keep flashing, painting everything they touch in vivid blue and purple. The bass is pounding so loud in your ears you can barely think. But it’s not the volume that makes the floor feel like it’s shaking, that makes your glass tremble in your hands. It’s the sight of your ex-boyfriend, standing across the room staring like he’s just seen the ghost of girlfriends past.

You don’t go to him, though. You stay exactly where you are, hip cocked against the bar, and wait. Because if there’s one thing you know about Isack Hadjar, it’s that even when it’d be better for him, he has never, not once in his life, been able to leave you alone.

Sure enough, it takes about forty-five seconds before he’s stalking towards you, and you try not to be too satisfied by the annoyingly pretty pout on Beach Waves’ stupid face when he brushes her aside without a second glance. He cuts through the crowd like a knife, shoulders set and laser-focused, the way he gets on track, the way that used to make you weak at the knees.

Up close, his stare is ablaze, dark eyes trained on you. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Hello to you too, Isa,” you purr, letting your gaze flick up and down his body. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Don’t,” he snaps, cheeks flushing. His jaw is tight, hands shoved in his pockets like he doesn’t quite trust what they’ll do if he lets them free. “Don’t call me that. Don’t do this. Don’t act like —”

You blink innocently. “Like what?”

“Like — like you have any right to be here,” he splutters, cheeks flushed.

“It’s not a private club,” you say, shrugging and taking a long sip of your drink. The liquor burns horribly at the back of your throat. “I bought a drink. I’m a paying customer.”

He stares at you for a long moment and you can see the frustration radiating off of him. Let him be angry. Angry Isack is easier to deal with than the alternative — the soft woundedness he seemed to carry around by the end, the kind that made you feel like the worst person alive.

You are the worst person alive when it comes to him. But at least this way, you don’t have to let his face remind you of it.

“Did you at least watch?” he asks flatly.

“Watch what?”

“The race,” he says, a little too quickly for someone who’s trying very hard to pretend he doesn’t care. “Did you watch the race?”

You could tell him the truth. You could tell him you watched every single lap with a pit in your stomach and your heart in your throat. You could tell him you cried when Lando retired and you knew, you just knew he would cross the line in P3. You could tell him that when he lifted the trophy above his head on the podium, you had to press your hand over your mouth to keep from making a very undignified sound. A sob, if you’re being honest with yourself.

But that would be giving Isack Hadjar something you can’t afford to lose.

“No,” you lie airily instead, twirling a strand of hair around your finger. “Don’t really follow F1 these days. Why, did something exciting happen?”

Something flashes across his face — raw hurt, quickly buried under the heat of his anger — and you feel a sick little twist of satisfaction. If you came here to stand in front of him and feel like your chest is caving in, you might as well make him feel it too.

“Fuck you,” he says, voice unsteady.

You smile, slow and venomous. “Maybe later. If you’re lucky.”

He steps closer, close enough that you can catch the familiar scent of his cologne, the Tom Ford you bought him for his birthday two years ago that still makes your head turn every time you smell it on the street with some sort of ridiculous hope that it’ll be him. “Why are you here? Really?”

“Let’s say I missed you,” you say, letting your voice drop into something softer, more intimate, so he has to lean in to hear you. “Is that so hard to believe?”

“Yes,” he bites out, but his eyes flick traitorously down to the dark crimson of your mouth. “You broke up with me, remember? In November. The week before —”

“I know when I broke up with you,” you snap. The week before Abu Dhabi last year, is what he was going to say. You’d done it over the phone, too much of a coward to break up with him to his face and too selfish to do it earlier, when it might not have wrecked him right before the most important race of his life. He’d called you seventeen times in a row afterward; you cried on the cold tile of your bathroom floor and let them all go to voicemail, because you knew if you picked up even once you’d take it all back. Six days later, you sat in your hole-in-the-wall apartment in Paris and watched his car stall before it could start, watched the chance of a championship slip right through his fingers. When the cameras found him climbing out of the car afterwards — helmet off, jaw set tight enough to crack a tooth, eyes rimmed red — you’d thrown up in your kitchen sink.

So yes. You know when you broke up with him.

“Really?” he says, voice going harsh and jagged. “Because you’ve done a good fucking job of forgetting everything else for the past nine months.”

“I wish I could forget you,” you blurt, the words slipping out before you can stop them in a way that makes you actually, genuinely hate how pathetic they’ve made you sound. You cover it by taking another sip, longer this time, trying to wash the bitter taste of your own honesty out of your mouth. “I didn’t — that’s not what happened. Isack. You have to know that’s not what this is.”

“Then what? What is it?” he asks, accent thickening. “Because I haven’t heard a thing from you since that night, and —” he exhales shakily, casting his gaze to the ceiling. “I had the best day of my entire life today. I have been dreaming about this day since the first time I got in a kart. I should be celebrating. And instead I am standing here and letting you ruin everything all over again.”

“That’s not fair.”

A laugh punches out of him, but it’s not the one you heard earlier, the one you still know like your favorite song. It’s something darker, something hollowed-out. “Fair?” he echoes derisively. “You want to talk about fair? You dumped me over the phone. You didn’t even block my number, you just — you just stopped answering, like I was too insignificant to even bother cutting me out. Nine months, quiet, and then you show up here like it’s nothing. Like I am nothing to you. So don’t fucking ask me for fair when nothing is fair with you.”

Your voice goes small. “Isa, I didn’t come here to fight with you.”

“Then you shouldn’t have come,” he says, so cold that for a moment you’re right back there on the bathroom tiles listening to your phone ring and ring and ring.

“I came because I —” your voice splinters horribly around the words, and you watch Isack’s face soften. It’s small, barely perceptible unless you know him the way that you do, the twitch at the corners of his mouth, the warmth bleeding into his dark eyes. You hate it. You hate that even now, even after everything you’ve done, his first instinct when you break is to reach for the pieces. “I don’t know what I’m doing, okay? I don’t, I just —”

His hand flexes at his side like he’s physically stopping himself from touching you. “You just what?” he interrupts. He’s close now, too close, in your space enough that you can see his pulse beating high and insistent in his throat. “Finish the sentence.”

“I don’t know,” you whisper, throat tight, and for once in your miserable life you’re not lying to him. It’s worse than a lie, because it’s the most pitiful truth that you have to offer.

“Conneries.” He steps even closer, hips nearly brushing against yours, mouth curling into a sneer. “You always know what you are doing. That’s the worst part, no? You know exactly how cruel you are to me, and you do it anyway.”

“What, and you’re so innocent?” you snap, sickly grateful for the anger surging to fill the space where your honesty leaked out. “I saw you earlier. Letting a girl in a Shein haul with grown-out acrylics hang all over you. That’s who’s replacing me? Really?”

Isack blinks, caught off-guard, and you can see the surprise written all over his face. “Are you — is this what this is all about? This is why you show up here? You’re fucking jealous?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” you reply coolly, even as you feel your cheeks heat.

“Fuck,” he exhales. “You are — you’re fucking crazy, you know that? Je ne te comprends pas. If you still want me this much, why did you leave? Explain it to me. Make it make sense. Because I have spent nine months trying to understand how someone can look at me the way that you’re looking at me right now and walk away, and I —” he scrubs a hand over his face roughly. “I can’t do it, chérie. I can’t figure you out.”

Because you were going to leave me first, you think and think and think and do not say. Because you were about to be somebody, and I couldn’t stand the idea of becoming the girl you outgrew. Because I can’t let anyone love me without hurting them.

“Does it matter?” you reply instead, keeping your tone carefully level so you don’t do something completely embarrassing like burst into tears. “I left. It’s over. Done.”

He looks at you, really looks, and something flashes in his eyes again, desperation ebbing away and leaving something crueler in its place. “If this was really done,” he says, voice dropping dangerously, “you wouldn’t be standing here wearing this fucking dress.”

Your breath catches in your throat, and the corner of his mouth quirks up the second he hears it, like he knows exactly what it means. Gone is the boy from a minute ago, wounded and angry and unsure. In his place is an Isack you know well, the one who used to pin you against the wall of his driver’s room and tell you exactly what he was going to do to you before he did it, the one who could make you forget your own name with nothing but the sound of his voice in your ear and the heat of his gaze.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” you reply, but it comes out a second too late and embarrassingly thin.

“No?” he says, gaze dropping to your neckline, not even bothering to pretend he’s not ogling your tits. “You want a reminder of what happened last time you wore this dress?”

“Isack —”

“My birthday, last year,” he says, tone conversational. “You were fucking desperate. Couldn’t even make it to the bedroom, just begged me for it as soon as we got in the door. I remember the sound you made when I got on my knees for you in the hallway. You pulled my hair so hard I thought you were going to rip it out, told me nobody had ever made you come like that. Remember that?” He leans in, breath warm against your ear. “And you’re telling me you didn’t put this dress on thinking about me taking it off?”

“You’re delusional,” you lie, thighs pressing together involuntarily.

“And you’re wet,” he says, so matter-of-factly that it makes your cheeks burn, lips parting for a fraction of a second before you can regain your composure. He hooks a finger under the thin strap on your shoulder, tugging it a fraction of an inch out of place, knuckle dragging slow across your collarbone. “Dripping, probably, under this slutty little thing. I know you too well for you to think you can get away with a lie like that. So you can tell everyone else whatever you want, chérie, but you and I both know you didn’t come here for a fucking drink.”

“Why am I here, then?” you breathe, heart pounding. “Since you know me so well.”

“Because you still want me,” he says, and the smile curving his lips is so infuriatingly smug that you want to slap him and climb him in equal measure. “Go ahead. Say it.”

“Make me,” you whisper back.

He lets out a growl, low and frayed, pupils blowing so wide his eyes go black. You can see him try to fight it, muscles tensing, the visible effort of a man trying very hard to be rational about the woman who ruined his life. And then you watch him lose in real time, and it’s terrible and exhilarating all at once, knowing that no matter how smart Isack is, no matter how fast he drives, no matter how hard he tries to protect himself, you will always, always be the thing he crashes into.

“Outside,” he mutters finally, jaw ticking. “Now.”

You tilt your head and try not to smile. “Why?”

He presses his lips together. “Because I am about to do something I will regret, and I’d rather not have an audience for it.”

You hum noncommittally, tracing a finger along the edge of your glass. “And if I don’t want to go outside with you?”

His hand closes firm around your wrist, tugging you off the barstool. His thumb presses into your pulse point and you think wildly that he must be able to feel how fast your heart is beating, to feel how much you still want him, laid bare under his fingertips. “I wasn’t asking,” he says, low enough that only you can hear, and the words zip hot up your spine.

“Careful, Isa,” you say, smirking as he pulls you through the crowd. “People are going to think you actually like me.”

“Ta gueule,” he snaps, fingers tightening around your wrist as he weaves you through the crush of bodies on the dance floor. “For once in your life, please, just shut up.”

You catch the faces turning as you pass the VIP section like a lowlights reel, varying degrees of horror and resignation written all over everyone’s expressions. Ollie’s at least had the decency to turn away. Kimi hasn’t, his arms crossed over his chest as he glowers at you like a sullen teenager. Liam’s girlfriend is practically hyperventilating in the corner. Beach Waves is the last to see what’s going on, standing stupid, glossy lips slowly parting as the understanding dawns. You catch her eye over your shoulder as Isack drags you past, letting your gaze travel pointedly down to the hand that was on his arm fifteen minutes ago then back up to her face, slow and deliberate. Then you press two fingers to your lips and blow her a kiss.

Isack doesn’t look back at her. Not even once.

Poor her, you think deliriously, triumphantly. She got the laugh, the charm, the arm around her shoulder, whatever mid conversation she'd been making about whatever mid thing she probably cares about. She got to touch him for one night. Big deal. She’ll never touch the rest of him.

The night air is cool on your flushed skin when Isack shoulders through the fire exit and yanks you into a side alley, a rush of briny salt and stale cigarette smoke filling your nose the second you get outside. You stumble over the threshold onto the uneven ground, door barely swinging shut behind you before he’s crowding you against the opposite wall and bracing a hand on either side of your head. When you get your first proper look at him, no chaos of the club left to distract you, you almost laugh out loud. He’s wearing a plain white shirt and dark jeans, the fucking Amazon Basics of outfits, nothing designer, nothing curated, and he still looks like that. You want to call every luxury brand you know and tell them to shut down the operation; nothing they could put together could ever come close to Isack Hadjar in a plain white shirt looking at you like you’re the only thing in the world worth being furious about.

“Tu me rends dingue,” he mutters, and then his mouth is on yours.

Isack kisses you how his worst critics say he drives — reckless, aggressive, all instinct and no patience. His hands find your waist, shoving you back against the wall, stucco pricking against your skin. His fingers push into the skin at your hips, hard enough to leave marks, and you’d be lying if the thought didn’t make heat pool dangerously low in your stomach. You kiss him back just as viciously, mouth hot and demanding, because if it’s a fight he’s looking for, you’re going to give it to him. Your teeth clash messily against his, nails raking down the back of his neck as he hisses against your lips. You feel his hand tighten in your hair in retaliation, tugging your head back so he can lick into your mouth at the exact angle he wants, and it’s not a nice kiss but god, it’s so good you feel dizzy with it, the sheer taste of him after nine months, the furious want radiating off both of you like a fever that won’t break.

“I hate you,” he gasps against your lips, every hard plane of his body pressed against yours.

“Apparently not enough to keep your tongue out of my mouth,” you mutter back, fingers reaching up and pulling hard at his close-cropped curls.

His hips grind helplessly into yours at the contact, lashes beating a frenzied rhythm against the top of your cheekbone. “Je te déteste.”

“Saying it in French doesn’t make it truer, Isa.”

He makes a frustrated, animal noise, borne somewhere in the back of his throat. “I said don’t call me that anymore.” He bites your lower lip, hard enough to sting, and swallows the gasp that erupts from your lips. His thigh slots between yours, pressing you harder against the wall, and your head falls back, eyes fluttering shut as he drags searing open-mouth kisses down your throat. He sucks a painful little mark there, into the juncture of your neck and shoulder, and you hate him for it and push into it at the same time, hand fisting at the front of his stupid fucking t-shirt like you want to claw right through it.

“Hotel,” you manage, breathless.

He pulls back, chest heaving, pupils blown so wide his eyes glitter black. There’s a smear of your lipstick, blood-red at the corner of his mouth. He looks wrecked, staring back at you without a word, and for a moment you think this is it. The end of the road, the moment he realizes he needs to take the last exit before he drives himself off the edge of the earth again.

When he speaks, he sounds like he hates himself for it. “Where?”

You walk the five blocks back to the hotel in silence. There’s nothing safe left to say, walking side by side with nothing but adrenaline crackling in the empty inches between you. You keep your eyes pinned on the sea, pretending he’s not close enough to touch, pretending you’re not desperate, aching, out of your mind with the need to feel his calloused fingertips against your skin. The elevator climbs five floors before the back of his hand brushes the back of yours, accidental and barely-there, and the contact sends an electric thrill straight to your throbbing core.

You barely get the keycard in the door before he’s on you.

His mouth attaches to your neck, kicking the door shut behind the both of you so hard that it knocks the generic art off the wall. Hands slide up your waist, cupping your tits, thumb flicking over your nipple. You gasp at the sensation, back arching, pushing your chest into Isack’s touch, and you hate how you can feel his infuriating, cruel little smile against your neck. He pushes you back against the wall with one hand braced to your hip, the other rolling your nipple between his fingers, friction of silk against the stiffened peak. It sends a sharp jolt straight to your cunt that makes your knees buckle. He shoves his thigh between yours immediately, holding you up, and the pressure of the ropy muscle beneath you drags a moan out of you that you’d genuinely kill to take back.

“Sound so fucking good for me,” he mumbles against your neck, teeth grazing your pulse point. He’s hard, absurdly so, pressed tight against you. You can feel his cock throbbing against your hip through his jeans, and when he shifts his weight back to tug his t-shirt over his head his hips push into your thigh so deliberately that it makes your head fall back against the wall.

He crowds into you again, one hand sliding up to plant on the wall next to your head, the other wrapping around your thigh and hitching it up around his hip. He grinds against you like that, slow and filthy, the muscles of his stomach tensing every time he rolls forward. He’s harder than he used to be, his shiny new F1 physique on display: broader across the shoulders, thicker through the arms. You can’t stop yourself from mapping the changes with your palms, your fingernails, your teeth against his collarbone, marking all the places that are new and hating every single girl who got to see him become this when you didn’t.

“I hate — putain,” his voice cracks into a whimper when you pull him forward by the belt loops, cock pressed hard against the crease of your thigh as he ruts into you. “I hate that I still want this so much.” “Then stop,” you gasp, rolling your hips to meet his. “I can’t.” He pulls back just enough to meet your gaze, and even in the darkness you can see his eyes are wild, desperate. “That is my problem. I’ve never been able to stop wanting you.”

“Go tell that girl that,” you snap brattily. “Sure she’d love to hear it.”

His expression shutters, and for a second you think you’ve actually, properly miscalculated; finally pushed him too far, hit the wrong nerve. And then he smiles coldly. It sends a strange thrill through you, knowing there’s something he can do now that you wouldn’t predict. “Get on your knees.”

The words land humiliating, heat flaring between your thighs so fast it makes you dizzy, clenching around nothing. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” he says, flat and almost bored, sliding his hand into the hair at the nape of your neck and tangling his fingers through it. “You want to run your mouth, no? I can think of something better to do with it.”

You should tell him to go fuck himself. You should walk out that door and never speak to him again and leave him here hard and wanting with the taste of you still on his lips.

Instead, you sink to the carpet.

His hand stays in your hair, loosening just enough to let you tilt your head back and look up at him. The sight of him from this angle — jaw set, chest heaving — makes your cunt throb. He’s already undoing his jeans with his other hand, overeager, zipper tugged down with a sharp metallic hiss. When he frees himself from his Calvins you have to swallow hard, mouth watering in a genuinely humiliating way. He’s bigger than you remembered, weeping at the tip.

His thumb strokes across your cheekbone, almost tenderly, before slipping over your bottom lip into your mouth. “Open,” he says, voice low.

You let your lips part, jaw dropping just slightly. He groans low and guttural, tugging you forward, and you let your tongue flick out to catch the bead of pre-come gathering at the slit. Isack hisses out a breath through his teeth, flush rising high in his cheeks. You take your time, making him wait, pressing slow, open-mouth kisses down his length, tongue tracing the thick vein on the underside, feeling him pulse against your lips.

“Don’t be a fucking tease,” he grits out.

You look up at him through your lashes, holding his gaze defiantly before you do exactly as he asked. Stop teasing, and take him in properly.

He whines, stomach muscles tensing and trembling under your fingertips, hips jerking forward involuntarily when you hollow your cheeks around his length. His head tips back, throat bobbing, lower lip caught prettily between his teeth as you pull back, swirling your tongue lightly around the tip before taking him deep again. His hand flies back to your hair, fisting into it, hips rocking into your mouth deep enough to hit the back of your throat and make you gag around his length.

“Come on, take it,” he says, voice rough, fingers crushing tightly into your tangled locks. “This is what your pretty little mouth should be for, no? You wanted it, you came all this way, so take it.”

You moan around him in response and his hips stutter at the vibration, fucking forward in short, brutal thrusts. He sets a rhythm that is nothing like the boy who used to pet your hair and tell you how good you were for him, how pretty you looked. This is mean, has your jaw aching and mascara streaming, spit pooling at the corners of your mouth and drooling down your chin. It sounds fucking obscene, the slick thrust of his cock against your tongue, your choked breathing around him, the low, frayed groans he keeps letting slip like he can’t stop himself. Your hand drifts between your thighs, barely a conscious movement, just needing the friction, but you barely make contact before his hand snaps around your wrist.

“No,” he pants, wrenching your head back by your hair with his other hand until you’re fully off him, a mess of spit and pre-come strung between your swollen lips and the head of his cock. “Did I say you could fucking touch yourself?”

You stare up at him, wordless, overwhelmed, a frisson of want running through you as he tugs both your hands up, placing them on his thighs. “You want to come tonight?” he asks mockingly, eyes dark. “Then you come when I let you.”

You barely have time to breathe before he’s feeding himself back in, faster this time, hips snapping forward until your nose presses against the coarse hair at the base of his length and your nails are digging perfect half-moons into his thighs and you can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t do anything but relax your throat and take all of it. He keeps you there, holds your head until your knees burn against the carpet and your throat aches with it. You can feel him getting close, though, his muscles tensing under your fingers, grip going white-knuckled in your hair, dick throbbing on your tongue, breath coming in quick, desperate bursts until he pulls you off him again.

You make an indignant noise at the loss, jaw still slack while Isack hauls you up by your upper arms hard enough that your stomach flips. He steadies you against his chest before pushing you back through the dim room until you stumble against the mattress, pitching backwards unexpectedly.

The feeling of falling is brief before his hand flies up behind your head, instinctive and tender, palm cradling your skull a half-second before it hits the headboard.

You freeze, blinking up at him, and watch the realization hit — his hand stiffening against your hair when he catches what he’s done, the hot flush of humiliation crawling up his neck. He snatches his hand away too fast, jaw flexing, something furious and mortified in his eyes like you’ve caught him doing something unforgivable.

“Don’t,” he snaps, compensating immediately for it. Overcompensating, really, grabbing the neckline of your dress with both hands and pulling it down your body so roughly the silk catches. You hear something rip, a stitch giving way around your hips. You’d care if you could think straight, but his hands are on your bare skin now, running feverish down your body like he’s trying to burn the gentleness out of his own fingers.

The dress catches around your thighs and he drags it the rest of the way off, tossing it blindly behind him as his face goes blissfully, thrillingly slack. “No panties?” he asks, breath shallow.

You smirk, propping yourself up on your elbows, letting him see exactly how wet you are, pretty and swollen, slick coating the inside of your thighs. “Huh. Must have forgotten to pack them.”

He exhales long and slow through his nose, and you watch his cock twitch, flushed dark and shining with your spit. Then he climbs over you, hand sliding up your legs, tracing delicately around your entrance.

“Fucking soaked,” he groans, more to himself than to you as he drags the pad of his index finger through the dripping mess. “Pathetic. Knew you would be.”

He pushes two fingers inside without warning, and the stretch of it is insane, pulling a high-pitched moan from your lips as your back arches off the mattress. “Fuck,” you whine, hands fisting into the sheets as you let your legs fall open, wider, hips jerking against his hand.

He moves slowly at first, methodically, thumb zeroing in on your clit and pressing down in heavy, deliberate circles until your breathing is coming out in shaky little gasps. He slips a third finger in, your cunt so embarrassingly wet that there’s barely any resistance. The sound of it is filthy, echoing through the room, squelching in and out of your wetness, his breathing going rough and uneven above you like fingering you is doing something to him too. The familiarity of it all, the exact right pressure in the exact right place like the past nine months never happened, makes your nerve endings sing.

Then he twists his wrist, scissors his fingers on the next stroke, hitting a spot that makes your entire body jolt off the bed. You know every move Isack Hadjar has ever made on you by heart, recognize them like your own name, and this one is infuriatingly, stomach-turningly different.

“Stop.” Your hand clamps around his wrist, holding him perfectly still inside you. “What the fuck was that?”

He doesn’t move, just watches you squirm underneath him like you can’t decide whether to pull away or get closer. “What was what?”

“What you just did,” you swallow hard, voice coming out thin. “That — that’s new.”

It’s silent, for a moment, Isack’s face shifting from confusion to guilt to a satisfaction so cruel you can barely look at him. “Yeah,” he agrees finally, crooking his fingers and doing the same move again. “It is.”

The jealousy comes white-hot, visceral and choking as soon as you let yourself think about it: someone else’s thighs around his hand, some other girl’s sounds in his ear, some bitch smart enough to pick up the thing you tossed away. And the absolute worst part is your body doesn’t care, hips still canting against his palm, riding his fingers desperately. You’re writhing, furious, soaking his fucking hand, and you can feel the orgasm coiling in the pit of your stomach, building fast and sharp, thighs shaking, right there on the precipice, so close your vision is starting to white out at the edges, and then he pulls his fingers out.

The noise you make is barely human. “No — fuck, Isa, don’t you dare —”

“Not yet,” he says, and holds up his hand, fingers glistening in the low light down to the knuckle. He grins down at you, cocky, bringing them to his mouth tantalizingly slow. He sucks them clean just like that, tongue flicking around his fingers, eyes locked on yours the entire time, and the sight of it makes you moan high and needy. “Not until I say.”

“You’re a fucking asshole,” you snap, watching him, cunt fluttering around nothing.

He laughs, a real one, surprised out of him, and the sound of it after so long hits you somewhere unbearably soft. “Yeah,” he breathes, staring down at you. “Well. Takes one to know one.”

You look back at him. For one terrible second, you can see it — the boy underneath all of this, the one who laughed like that when you stole his chips at three in the morning, the one who used to fall asleep with his face tucked in your neck — and the tenderness of it is so awful that you have to look away. He doesn’t let you, though, hand finding your jaw, tilting your face back to his. Then he kisses you again, deeper this time, tongue sliding slow against yours and making your chest ache worse than the roughness ever could.

He breaks away and shifts over you, settling his weight between your thighs, one hand planted firmly beside your head. You can feel him against your core, hard and heavy, but he doesn’t push in, just holds himself there, jaw tight, watching your face with dark, patient eyes.

“Isack,” you breathe, frustrated. “Please.”

“Please what?” he asks, voice low and almost amused. He rolls his hips forward gently, the head of his cock catching at your entrance, and you bite back a whimper. “Come on. You were so good at using your words earlier.”

“I’m not going to fucking beg you,” you breathe, but your hips are already tilting up, trying to take him in, to take what he won’t give you.

He pins your hip flat to the mattress, thumb caressing against the jut of bone. “Really?” he murmurs, lips brushing the hinge of your jaw. He drags himself through your folds again, grinding the thick line of his dick against your clit, close enough that you can feel exactly how full he’d make you and not nearly close enough to give you what you need. “You sure?”

You last approximately five more seconds before whatever’s left of your pride rolls over and dies. “Fuck. Fine, you win, please,” you choke out. “Please, Isa, I need you to fuck me. Need you inside —”

He pushes into you before you finish the sentence, one long devastating thrust burying himself to the hilt, and it whites out your brain so completely that you forget your own name, forget every reason you ever had for leaving him, forget everything except the feeling of being full after nine months of emptiness that nothing else could touch.

“Jesus,” he rasps, voice wrecked and ragged, heartbeat hammering against your chest. “I forgot — you feel so fucking good, chérie. Still so fucking tight for me, fuck —”

You wrap your legs around his waist, heels digging into the small of his back. “Fucking move,” you hiss.

His eyes go black, pulling almost all the way out and fucking back in hard enough to crack the headboard against the wall. He doesn’t give you time to adjust, hips snapping against yours with a force that shoves you up the mattress, hitching your leg higher and opening you up so he can fuck into you at an angle that has you keening, the wet slap of skin on skin filling the room.

“Perfect fucking pussy,” he pants against your neck, driving deep into you. “Taking me so well, like it was made for me.” He pulls back to look at you, hair damp against his forehead. “Better than anyone else. Better than — putain, none of them even came close, you know?”

“Shut up,” you snarl, and sink your teeth into his neck so hard he yelps, hips slamming forward gracelessly, on reflex, making you see stars. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare tell me about them.”

“Fuck,” he gasps, hands shaking next to your head. You think for a second he’s going to push you off, but instead he presses you closer, and the sound he makes when you suck hard against the bite mark, tongue laving over his skin, is something you’ll replay behind your eyelids for another nine months. “I didn’t —”

“I don’t care,” you mewl, voice cracking around the lie. “I don’t care how many girls you fucked, Isa, because none of them are here right now, and none of them are ever going to be here. I’ll never let you get over me,” you breathe, and it’s insane but you can feel his cock throb inside you at the words, feel how he starts fucking you harder, deeper. “Not ever.”

Isack smashes his lips back to yours, furious and bruising, fucking you into the mattress like he’s trying to crawl inside you, like if he just gets deep enough he can reach the part of you that keeps running away.

“Dis-moi que tu es à moi,” he whimpers against your mouth. Begs, really — raw and desperate, still fucking into you ruthlessly — and you hate it, hate him for even asking it of you. As if you could ever belong to anyone else. As if there is a single version of your sorry, fucked-up life where you don’t end up right here, wrapped around him, ruining him all over, loving him so hard and so much that it feels like getting torn completely apart and put back together with your most important piece missing.

“À toi,” you sob, high and keening, hot tears pricking at the corners of your eyes, humiliating if you weren’t too far gone to care about anything but the heavy, thick stretch of his cock inside you and his gaze on yours. “Yours, Isa, fuck, you know I’m yours.”

His hips lose their rhythm for a moment, jerking frantically before he buries himself to the hilt again, grinding in tight, shuddering little circles against you as his thumb works your clit. You’re so close you can feel it everywhere, your walls clenching around him, eyes rolling back, every desperate thrust of his cockhead dragging against your sweet spot, drawing you closer and closer to the edge.

“Look at me,” he grunts, forehead pressed to yours. His eyes are glazed over, fucked-out. “Look at me while you come for me.”

Your eyes focus on his face, and that’s it, really. Your orgasm tears through you, almost violent in its pure sensation — your back arching off the bed, toes curling, body locking up and spasming around him. Isack doesn’t stop for even a second, just keeps fucking you through it, drilling into you with deep unsteady strokes that draw out every aftershock until you’re gasping, feebly clawing at his back and babbling his name like a prayer.

When he follows, spilling into you seconds later, he breathes your name back like a curse.

Isack falls asleep the same way he always used to, a switch flipped quick and absolute, one arm slung heavy around your bare waist like even unconscious he knows you’re liable to bolt at any time. You used to tease him about it: you sleep like someone who’s never done a single bad thing in their life, you’d said once, fingers carding through his hair in the dark. He’d laughed dreamily and pulled you closer, mumbled maybe I haven’t against your skin. In sleep, the hard edges of him soften, furrow between his brow smoothing out, lips parting slightly, breath going slow and even. He looks younger that way, unguarded. More like the boy you once loved.

You trace the sharp line of his jaw with a softness you’d never allow yourself in the light of day. There’s a mark on his neck where you bit him, pink scratches from your nails already raising over his shoulders and the muscles of his back. Bruises on you, blooming purplish-blue over the sharp jut of your hip where his fingers found a hold. You catalogue it all like evidence: proof that you were here, that for a few hours you let yourself have the one thing you want most and are least equipped to keep.

Isack shifts closer to you, face pressed against your hair. “Reste, chérie,” he mumbles, barely conscious. Even in sleep his hand gravitates to yours, fingers intertwining. “S’il te plaît.”

You don’t answer. Can’t answer, really. You don’t trust yourself to speak, not when you can already feel your throat closing dangerously with emotion. So you close your eyes and don’t sleep. You just lay in his arms and let him hold you, let yourself pretend you’re the kind of person who knows how to stay.

When the sun rises, pale morning light flooding through the curtains, you know you can’t lie to yourself much longer. You slip out from under Isack’s arm inch by inch; he stirs, making a confused, half-asleep sound that feels like a knife shoved directly into your stomach, but he doesn’t wake up. You pull yourself back together quietly, slowly, like completing the steps of a checklist you don’t really want to reach the end of. Dress: crumpled on the carpet, slipped over your head and smoothed into semi-presentability. Heels: kicked off somewhere between the door and the bed, buckled back on despite half-formed blisters because you deserve the pain, at least a little bit. Dignity: lost too long ago to even bother looking for it.

You order the Uber from the lobby, put the pick-up point a block away from the hotel because you don’t want the engine sound to wake him. You’re already halfway back to Amsterdam Centraal by the time your phone buzzes in your lap.

isack [ 4:47 AM ] : Of course isack [ 4:47 AM ] : Of course you left

You stare down at the messages, chest going tight. Thumbs hover hesitantly over the keyboard, typing and deleting and rewriting until you settle on the only honest thing you can say.

you [ 4:51 AM ] : you knew i would

isack [ 4:52 AM ] : I guess I did isack [ 4:52 AM ] : Doesn’t make me feel any better though

you [ 4:53 AM ] : i’m sorry

isack [ 4:54 AM ] : No you’re not isack [ 4:54 AM ] : Don’t lie isack [ 4:55 AM ] : You would do it again tomorrow

you [ 4:56 AM ] : and you would let me you [ 4:56 AM ] : so what does that say about both of us

isack [ 4:56 AM ] : I don’t know isack [ 4:56 AM ] : That we are both stupid? That we have never learned? isack [ 4:57 AM ] : You are the worst thing that has ever happened to me

you [ 4:59 AM ] : i know

isack [ 5:00 AM ] : And I still love you anyway isack [ 5:00 AM ] : That’s the stupidest thing

Some sick, horrible part of you lights up when you see the messages. He still loves you. After all of it, after nine months of hurt, after you walked out on him again. You want to press your phone to your chest like a girl in a silly rom-com. You want to screenshot the message and frame it so you can look at it forever and remember what it felt like to know that even though you’d done your worst, he still wanted you.

you [ 5:01 AM ] : please don’t say it if you don’t mean it [ unsent! ] you [ 5:01 AM ] : i still love you too [ unsent! ] you [ 5:02 AM ] : it’s not stupid, isa you [ 5:02 AM ] : it’s just not enough

The early-morning light catches on the water as you speed past, coloring the sea golden as you stare down at the three dots, disappearing and reappearing over and over again. You hold your breath and count the seconds, wondering if this is it, if this is the time he finally wises up and stops replying to you for good. You wonder, too, if it’s not all you deserve from him.

isack [ 5:05 AM ] : Maybe someday it will be isack [ 5:05 AM ] : À bientôt chérie

You stare at your screen until the words blur together, until all that’s left is the smudges of blue and grey through the tears you steadfastly refuse to let fall.

Not goodbye. Because it never will be, with you, and you both know it. You’ll stay away for weeks, maybe even months if you’re feeling particularly strong, and then something will happen — another podium, maybe a win someday when he makes it to Red Bull like you know he will, some other sick excuse you’ll manufacture when the real reason is that you just want to be wanted again — and you’ll show up in another city, in another dress, and he’ll let you in because he can’t help himself.

And then you’ll leave again, because you can’t help yourself either.

à bientôt, isa, you type back, smile curling the edge of your mouth.

See you soon.