Inspiration: Local Natives "When am I gonna lose you?"
Author's note: Had a real block – purely because I wanted to write something about love. Not the meet-cute. Not the breakup. Just that heart-wrecking, honest kind of love where you’re so happy, you almost can’t believe it’s real. And trust me, it was a struggle to find a song in my playlist that captured just that. But I found it – so here’s a little glimpse into my mind (and my playlist).
Pairing: Lando Norris x Reader
Warnings: some angst and one swear word.
Summary: A quiet evening on the coast turns into something deeper when two anxious hearts confront their shared fear. It's not a story about falling in love – it's about choosing it, keeping it, and learning to trust that it’s real.
Word count: 1.4k+
She felt it mid-movie – his hand suddenly tensing around her thigh, even though the scene on the screen wasn’t meant to stir anything dramatic. She turned to him, catching him stealing a glance her way before he quickly snapped his gaze back to the TV, a cheeky smile tugging at the corners of his lips.
“What?” she prodded, half-laughing. It wasn’t often she caught him staring. Whenever she did, it always set off a cascade of anxious thoughts. Maybe there was an eyelash on her cheek. Maybe her mascara had smudged, and she looked like a raccoon. Maybe–
He gave a tiny shake of his head, eyes still trained on the screen.
“Nevermind.”
“Nah, you’re not doing this to me,” she said, laughing as she reached for the remote and paused the film. These kinds of quiet, uninterrupted moments were rare. Even rarer was Lando choosing silence over commentary. He always had something to say – a thought, a theory, a stupid pun. So when he didn’t speak, it meant something. It meant everything.
With the screen frozen in mid-frame, he leaned back against the sofa and turned his head slightly toward her. And there it was again — the exact moment that had caught him off guard before. The sun was melting into the sea, casting golden slits of light through the blinds, painting lines across her face, her collarbone, her shoulder like some divine stencil.
He let out a quiet breath.
“Don’t you ever get that feeling… when everything’s perfect, and you just know something’s going to come along and fuck it up?”
The words hit her like lightning out of a clear sky – sudden, sharp, strangely poetic. But she didn’t flinch. She just nodded slowly, like some part of her had always been waiting for this exact question.
“I do, sometimes,” she said softly. “But… why now?”
“I don’t know. I just love this moment.”
His hand found hers, fingers gently fidgeting with hers — not restless, not anxious, just… soothing. Like the motion might slow his thoughts down enough to catch them.
He was used to his mind running laps. Constantly. Overthinking things that didn’t need thinking about. Race results. Snide comments online. Whether thirteen spring rolls were the magic number to feel full or just too much. The cute golden retriever he saw at the paddock last weekend, the one he’d probably never see again. He’d gotten used to that kind of mental noise – the static that never turned off.
So when there was stillness, when there was peace – real, earned, golden-hour kind of peace – his brain didn’t quite know what to do. It reached for the nearest thing to worry about. And it always landed on her.
What if he lost this? What if he lost her?
She was more like him than he ever expected. A year in, long-distance and late-night calls, airport reunions and sleepy goodbyes, and somehow they’d figured each other out pretty well. They both had restless minds – sharp, hungry, buzzing. They could spiral in sync. They could reassure each other just by existing. It made their bond easier in a way. But it also meant that peace felt like walking a tightrope, always half-waiting for the fall.
“But…?” she said, already sensing it. There was always a “but” with him.
He glanced sideways at her, cheeks slightly pink now in the fading light.
“But I was sitting there, just looking at you… thinking about how pretty you are. How lucky I am that you chose me – even with everything that comes with me. All the noise. And then I thought–”
His voice faltered for a second.
“–when am I gonna lose you?”
Her heart shuddered at the words he said. She hadn’t expected that kind of vulnerability from him tonight – not here, not now, with the ocean humming outside and the world finally leaving them alone. And yet, she knew exactly where it came from.
Because she had felt it too.
Their relationship, from the outside looking in, probably never should have worked. On paper, it was ridiculous. She was – for all intents and purposes – a nobody. Just a student who’d gotten separated from her university tour group while wandering through the endless corridors of MTC. He’d been on a break, taking a breather from a wall of sponsor commitments. She’d made some half-sarcastic remark about the building layout – something like “Hard to believe you’ve got all these engineers and no one thought of a better floor plan.”
He laughed. Not just a polite chuckle. A real, head-tilted-back, god-I-needed-that laugh.
He helped her find her coursemates. They walked maybe ten minutes, tops. But in those ten minutes, something clicked – fast, easy, effortless. By the time they reached the others, he was practically pleading for her number. Just in case, he said.
Now here they were, a year and a half later. Sitting in a cabin tucked between the trees and the sea, miles from anyone, basking in quiet. Days of decompressing behind them. Long talks about futures they both secretly hoped would intertwine. It was surreal.
She looked over at him. His hand was still playing with hers absentmindedly, his eyes on their fingers instead of her face – like he wasn’t sure he could handle eye contact after saying something that raw.
“You’re not gonna lose me,” she said gently.
He glanced up, cautious hope flickering across his features.
She exhaled. “But I get it. I do. Sometimes when you call me after a race and you’re so tired you don’t even sound like you – I get this ache. Like, what if this life of yours pulls you so far away I can’t reach you anymore?”
He opened his mouth to protest – to say no, never, that’s not how it’ll be – but stopped himself almost immediately. Because how could he argue against what he’d just admitted feeling himself? It would’ve been hypocritical. Even worse – unfair. Her fear was valid.
Their worlds had collided in the most unlikely way, and he was still keeping her tucked away from the spotlight – not because he was ashamed, but because he wanted something that was just theirs, untouched by the noise.
“But we keep showing up for each other, yeah?” she went on, voice steadier now. “In the little ways – the answered calls, the random surprises I hide in your luggage. The voice notes when the time zones don’t match up. The flowers that you order every time an older bouquet starts to waste away. Every person we let into our shared world.”
He looked at her then, how her face softened when she talked about them, how she said “shared world” like it was sacred.
“There’s this thing about people like us,” she continued. “We expect good things to vanish. We prepare ourselves for it. But maybe… maybe this is one of the rare things that’s actually built to stay.”
For a moment, all he could do was sit with it – the weight and the lightness of her words, the quiet miracle of being known so well. Then, he squeezed her hand, gently but with purpose.
“You know what I think?” he murmured.
She tilted her head toward him, a question in her eyes.
“I think we don’t give ourselves enough credit,” he said. “This? What we’ve made – it’s not just luck. It's an effort. Intention. It’s staying up at 3 a.m. just to hear your voice, even if I’ve only got five words in me. It’s you reading the same boring post-race summary just to tell me I sounded confident. It’s both of us choosing this. Every day.”
Her lips parted slightly, the corners lifting, and he could see the words landing – not as a grand gesture, but as truth. And the most amazing thing for her was how in reality he was talking himself out of the spiral.
“I’m not afraid of losing you because something out there takes you away,” he added. “I’m afraid of losing you by accident. Letting something slip. Not fighting hard enough.”
“But you are,” she whispered. “Fighting for it, I mean.”
She cuddled into him, light slowly slipping away.
“And if we keep doing just that, we will never lose each other. So let’s keep it that way. And whenever that curly little head of yours starts telling you these kinds of things, remember us here,” she murmured.
He couldn’t stop smiling, even as he gently kissed the top of her head.
“I will.”
Neither of them said anything else for a while. She unpaused the film, and they eased back into the cushions, limbs tangled, breaths in sync. The dialogue from the screen filled the silence between them, but something had shifted – something small, steady, and unshakeable.
They watched the rest of the movie just like that: closer, lighter, stronger. And this time, neither of them was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
