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Charles doesn’t talk to Max all that much outside of racing.
They aren’t friends, but they aren’t really enemies, either. They’re rivals, and they’ve been rivals for a long time, and that kind of volatility in a relationship doesn’t leave much room for affections. Not even the kind of unassuming gestures that are turning up at each other’s doors when they share an apartment complex, or offering rides when they’re both going to the same place, or even following each other’s social media.
Charles will talk to Max after a race. He’ll talk to Max before a race, too. Somehow, when they’re trackside, all that hard-burdened rivalry becomes both stronger and weaker. Outside of their cars, they can share words like two people who have known each other for years—because that’s what they are—and in their cars, they can battle it out for a title both of them want more than anything in the world—because that’s true to them, too.
It’s a strange relationship. It’s unique to them. Charles is comfortable with it, comfortable with listening to Max talk animatedly about a qualifying session when they’re mere feet away from the press, comfortable with saying goodbye at the end of a race weekend and knowing they’ll both become obscure to each other come plane rides and Monegasque skies.
He’s used to it being like this. Nothing has to change. Maybe Charles doesn’t really want anything to change.
Max, however, seems like he’s trying to get something to change.
During race weekends, he seems to be actively seeking Charles out. Every spare moment Charles has, Max somehow manages to pop up for at least some of it, smiling his stupid smile and wearing his stupid hat like it’s glued down to his head. He sidles up to Charles’s side, talking about something vaguely race-related, or more recently, something completely unrelated to the sport at all.
Today, he’s fiddling with the brim of his cap, fingertips just barely grazing the edge of the red 1 embroidered along the brim. He’s standing arguably too close to Charles, gaudy Red Bull polo tight across his chest—not that Charles is looking.
“I heard it’s supposed to rain during quali tomorrow,” Max says, and Charles isn’t sure why he’s telling him that—as if he doesn’t already know. “Are you worried?”
Charles scoffs. He can’t help it. “Well, I assume you are not worried at all,” he answers, a little mumbly and a little uninterested, but he’s not sure what’s expected of him.
Max makes a similarly breathy noise, tch-ing through his teeth with a nervous shrug. “Maybe less than others. But bad weather is still bad weather, good performance or not, no?” He nudges Charles with his elbow, small and almost unnoticeable. Charles thinks he might’ve missed it, if he weren’t looking at Max. “Don’t want to see any bad retirements.”
Flippant, Charles shrugs. He doesn’t know how to carry on this conversation. Something about it will always feel stilted, the air between them thick and stifling even without the torrid heat of summer. His skin feels sticky beneath his polo, sweat seeming to gather right in the spot where Max had barely touched him, elbow still bent and newly tucked into his side. The distance between them appears to swell, and it’s a trick, but Charles is gullible to it, anyway.
Through the static, Charles doesn’t really answer. He hums, nodding slightly, and walks away like he has someplace to be.
He doesn’t. He really wishes he did.
——
After a race that has Max in the pits and Charles on the podium, the Dutchman comes up to congratulate him. It’s been so long since he retired that Max is back in his paddock clothes, gaudy polo and all, a stupid cap pulled down over his helmet hair and a strangely genuine smile on his face.
Charles reeks of champagne. It’s sticky on his skin, beading down the curves of his neck, and it’s cruel like sharp victory. But Max is still grinning, and he claps Charles on his damp shoulder, thick fingers digging into the harsh material of his race suit. Charles has never felt so strange coming down from the high of victory.
“Great race,” Max compliments, and he’s still holding Charles’s shoulder. “You deserved the win. Congratulations, mate.”
And it’s weird.
They’re rivals. If Charles were in Max’s shoes right now—the dry ones, the ones not soaked through with champagne, the ones that aren’t racing boots—he wouldn’t have even watched the podium. Maybe that makes him some kind of coward, or just a sore loser, but Charles would’ve locked himself in his driver’s room and bitten down into his hand when he found out the guy he’s in a title-battle with took 25 points when he took none.
Yet Max was here. Smiling up to his eyes, sweaty without purpose, telling Charles good job. Charles can only hope his face doesn’t show the suspicion he feels.
“Thanks,” he answers, short, accented terribly. It makes his throat sticky, champagne still hasty down the back of his tongue. “Sorry about yours.”
“Eh, it happens,” Max says, shrugging, and it’s horribly out of character. Charles thinks of karting tracks, of a younger version of that grinning face bitching to a man with a microphone, of the glares he got after running Max into the gravel. Now, though, Max is digging his thumb into Charles’s arm, pulling away quickly, sharply, like he’s on fire. “I will do better next week. Can’t have you get too comfortable, eh?”
And he laughs, laughs like he means it, laughs the way he used to with Daniel when they were teammates. It makes the skin around his eyes crease in that distinctly-Max way, lips quirked and teeth on show with a garish display of joy. Charles can only manage a chuckle, some gross kind of tightness keeping him from anything more. He readjusts the champagne-soaked cap on his head, feeling unfair.
“You do always keep me checking the mirrors,” he says, and it’s supposed to be a joke, but the tightness in his throat makes it sound like he doesn’t mean it. Max laughs, anyway. “If everything was always under your control, I think you would win every race.”
It’s meant to be a joke. Charles breathes his own calm amusement, the smile on his face tight with dried champagne, but Max doesn’t return it. He seems to frown, eyebrows creasing, looking down at Charles as if he’s somehow concerned. It feels weird. Charles thinks he might miss the younger version of this face, the one that was angry, the one that didn’t make his skin tingle down to the fingertips. Maybe he shouldn’t, though.
“Don’t sell yourself short, mate,” Max says, despairingly comforting, sounding in the same vein as Pierre after Charles has crashed out of his lead. It’s not a tone Charles recognizes on Max, and it makes him tense. “We would not have a fight if you weren’t talented.”
And Max brushes Charles’s shoulder when he walks by, summoned back by his team, leaving Charles to stand on the hot pavement feeling lost. He still stinks of a well-earned victory, red and golden everywhere. Max’s words hang somewhere on the exposed bits of his skin—just above the throat and just beneath his wrists—hanging there like he’s covered in honey rather than soft champagne.
——
Now that Charles has noticed it, he can’t stop noticing it.
He swears Max is everywhere. And somehow, he always has something to say, smiling down at Charles while he waits for an answer. Charles almost feels bad for his inability to offer much outside of quiet words and half-hearted nods, but this whole thing is still so weird, and he’s not entirely sure what to do with it all.
It’s not like they hated each other before. It’s not like Max being any kind of nice to him is some kind of far-flung concept. But the sheer amount of niceties he’s been offering recently is strange, and the expressions he wears all feel slightly out of place, and Charles isn’t used to watching his skin crease into a smile from such a close proximity.
These kinds of smiles on Max are reserved for other people. Like Daniel, like Lando, like those Dutch guys that come around sometimes and he likes to yell with.
Not Charles.
And Charles finds himself expecting those hard-lined expressions Max always used to wear around him, voice fumbly and face tinted red with something simmering like rage. Back then, it had almost been like looking in a mirror, if his reflection were warped into something less Monegasque, something broader and with different angles. Charles has spent too many years getting used to frowns and furrowed eyebrows to know how to get used to this.
It’s probably the fourth time Max is acting noticeably strange around him that he notices the freckle on his lip.
——
At the end of a race weekend, Charles finds himself in Max’s hotel room.
There are other people there. They’re just hanging out, a few of the drivers, and it’s only in Max’s room because his was apparently the largest. But playing FIFA in Max’s hotel room means that as it’s getting late, and Charles is still sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back against the gross hotel couch, Max gets up and declares he needs to take a shower.
Lando—the only one left, the only remaining buffer between Max and Charles, the only thing to cut the static after everyone else turned in for the night—complains beneath the warm hum of the water that he’s tired. When Max emerges from the bathroom, he’s wearing nothing but basketball shorts, hair wet and dripping down his nose. He has a bleach-white towel bunched up in his hands, and mournfully, he seats himself directly next to Charles on the floor, snatching the controller out of his hands without saying a word.
Out of habit, Charles yelps an, “Oi!” Max snickers like some kind of child, and Charles frowns, but frowning at Max requires looking at Max, and he’s entirely too naked and entirely too close.
Their thighs are touching. Their thighs are touching. Max and Charles don’t do things like that.
And Charles is wearing a pair of stupidly loose shorts, too, forcing him to feel the dampness of Max’s skin against his. It’s warm with deep-infused steam, but the water beads cold, and Charles can smell the shampoo in Max’s hair—plain, over-produced, and definitely squeezed from one of those tiny, travel-sized bottles the hotel staff leaves on the sink. Charles frowns slightly at the thought of using that crap.
Distracted, he forgets to fight with Max for the controller. He’s not sure if he would’ve done that in a different circumstance, though, because usually, Max isn’t sitting right next to him or stealing things out of his hands. That kind of closeness is reserved for other people, and even if Charles is there, he’s usually at enough of a distance from the other that he doesn’t tighten his grip.
Yet, here they are. With Max sitting close enough to bump Charles’s side with his shoulder, laughing loudly and too close to his ear, pulling awkward, hasty smiles across Charles’s lips that he’s thankful are virtually impossible to see. The room is dark, and Max isn’t really looking at him, and Charles doesn’t want him to.
“You chose a shit team, mate,” Max complains, but he’s still winning, because of course he is: he wins at everything. Charles is supposed to hate that about him.
“Maybe if you were patient, I would have let you play after me,” Charles scolds, and he doesn’t realize how airy his voice has gone until he can no longer taste the words on his tongue. “Then you could have chosen your own team.”
Max scoffs. He bumps Charles’s shoulder with his own, entirely too much exposed skin, and Charles catches the scent of his stupid hotel shampoo again. He can’t even call it Max, because it’s so clearly not, but it still lingers with his essence and is just so infuriatingly him that it nearly makes Charles sick. He knocks Max back, a little lighter, a little timid, a little hasty under the still-there static in his ears.
“You’re only winning because I’m half asleep,” Lando whines from the couch, though everyone knows that’s not true. He makes a frustrated noise when Max gets another goal on him.
“You are still winning,” Charles parrots, inching slightly further away from Max when he reels in from his unnecessary nudge. He feels like he can breathe a little better, no longer plagued by the tired scent of hotel shampoo. No longer damp with the proximity of Max. “So maybe you should not insult my shit team.”
Max makes a dismissive noise, focus clearly set better on the TV than on Charles. Charles is grateful for it, less frozen, leaving him a better space to put more distance between himself and Max. He searches for his phone where he set it on the floor, surely not because it gives him an excuse to move a little more with the benefit of deniability.
“I think Lando is just bad.”
Lando makes an offended sound from behind them, and Charles snickers, picking up his phone from where it had slid under the couch. He swipes through Twitter boredly until the match finishes, but he’s so distracted he doesn’t notice Max turn off the TV or say goodbye to Lando until he’s collapsing back into the space beside him, a little less damp but still just as close.
He completely swallows all the distance Charles had worked so hard to put between them. It’s the warmth of his leg against Charles that finally drags his attention away from his phone, looking sharply at Max, who still has that stupid-going smile on his face; the one that has never belonged to Charles. His hair is still wet enough to be dripping, darkened by the water running down his face.
Charles misses Lando. He misses the noise from the game on the screen. He misses having a buffer, something other than Max’s stupid face and the meddle of their breathing with the hotel’s too-functional air conditioning. There are goosebumps spiking against his skin, and his eyes might look a little wild, and they are surely not related to anything but the cold.
Max’s grin goes sideways, side-cocked enough to swallow that one freckle into his teeth. “Are you still there, Charles?”
And his name rolls off Max’s tongue all weird, aided by the soft wave of his hand in the slim space between their faces. He doesn’t look concerned, though: he looks proud of himself. Like that name on his tongue doesn’t ring with the unfamiliarity of something that doesn’t belong, like his eyes aren’t too squinted or too creased, like he isn’t wearing his friends-only expression under the garish light of a borrowed room.
They’re too close. They’re too alone. Charles has never been so alone with Max. He doesn’t know what to do, so he swallows thickly. The way his saliva runs down his throat is comparable to being sick.
“Yeah, I’m here,” he says, dumbly, and immediately cringes. The scrunch to his nose is surely visible, eyes falling quickly to the floor. “It is getting late.” And he turns on his phone, stares down at the time on his lockscreen like he really meant to check it—like the comment wasn’t a thinly-veiled excuse. Max chuckles like he knows, and the clock reads 03:27 and Charles is surprised he’s not actually as tired as he wants to pretend he’ll be.
“Are you tired?” Max asks, a calm whisper of something smug hidden beneath his tone. He sticks his elbow into Charles’s side again, making him tense down to his fingertips. “It is getting late,” he parrots, but he’s smirking, like there’s something Charles doesn’t know.
“You are so annoying,” he says, because it’s what he’s thinking, and his brain-to-mouth filter is waning thin.
Max laughs. It’s not the loud, breathy guffaws plaguing YouTube compilations that won’t leave Charles’s recommended—even if he never clicks on them—but it’s still so Max. His whole body leans with it, bare shoulder mashing unceremoniously into Charles; like he needs to rest his entire weight against another person. Like he has no perception of physical boundaries, of their physical boundaries, of the way they’re different with each other than they are with other people.
Maybe Charles would sit like this with Pierre. Close enough to smell soap off their skin, close enough to feel the last licks of steam from a shower still fogging up the bathroom mirrors, close enough to bite down on his tongue like this is something to be ashamed about—but not with Max. Never with Max.
He’s not meant to be alone in hotel rooms with Max like this, anyway. He should’ve just kept to himself.
“You must be very tired, if you are choosing to lie to me,” Max retorts, and he jabs Charles’s shoulder one last time before he draws away, and Charles frowns at the floor.
He wasn’t lying. Why is Max accusing him of lying? That only makes him more annoying.
But Max is standing up before Charles can reply, and he’s so relieved by their swelling distance that he doesn’t notice how quick he is to follow Max’s movements with his gaze. He stands slowly, straightening his back like he’s not the same age as Charles, stretching his arms above his head when he turns like he’s been seated any longer than five minutes. Now holding Charles’s gaze, he raises his eyebrows, and flexes almost as obviously as anything.
Every inch of Charles’s skin goes hot. He can’t blame it on the air conditioning, but surely, he’ll find a way to put this off his chest before Max opens his stupid, smirking mouth again.
“You alright?” Max asks, again, a little less smug than he was on the floor. His arms fall back to his sides with a swing, cutting the terse air between them frustratingly quick. “Earth to Charles,” he mumbles—even though it hasn’t been that long—kicking at Charles’s calf with his bare foot.
Charles jolts. “Yes, fine,” he dismisses, all but flying to his feet. He takes one last look at Max—Max and all his abysmal, shower-soft glory, Max and all the clothes he isn’t wearing, Max and the dumb, unbelonging smile that won’t go away—and he heads straight for the door. “I’m going now.”
He doesn’t say why. None of the words he wants to say can get past his throat, excuses lodged somewhere beneath the heat in his chest and the stippled feeling running pink down to his knuckles. They bend awkwardly, clicking, something sticky under his nails; it feels nothing like victory, or a haughty buzz, or the sweat he’s always scrubbing clean in the sink basin. It’s almost as unfamiliar as the way Max looks at him.
When Charles lets the weighted hotel door slam shut, he thinks of the neighboring rooms before he thinks of the words he drowned out of Max’s mouth.
——
It’s getting too strange. Every time Max comes around the corner, Charles thinks about running away, but he never quite gets there—he’ll grapple for excuses until he can finally run from the conversation, but it never comes quick enough. There’s still a part of him that’s thinking of hotel rooms and damp skin, and it’s a horrid part of him, and Charles doesn’t know how to breathe.
He goes to Pierre. He doesn’t know what else to do.
So he heads for the Frenchman’s driver’s room after Friday practice—which is not the most private place in the world, but Charles is antsy and he almost ran into Max on his way to the AlphaTauri garage, and his palms are shaking—knocking on the door quickly, sharply, like he’s in some kind of rush. Pierre should be in here—he’s not sure where he else he would be—and even if Charles got some strange looks for coming into the AlphaTauri garage blazing red in more ways than one, thumb between his teeth, he needs to talk to Pierre.
The man in question pulls his door open, already mumbling something in English about how he’s busy, but it all comes to a screeching halt the moment he sees Charles. “Charles,” he says, sounding slightly dumb, but mostly observant—his tongue curves around the syllables in a way Charles knows, and he expects the sound of it before those lips even part in full.
Charles doesn’t say anything. The memory of that word—his word—in a different accent is hot behind his eyes, burning his ears to a bright-tipped red, and all he can do is shove into the room with a burdened force. He stumbles past Pierre, tripping in his own racing boots, taking a heaving breath where he knows the scent of collapsable walls and Pierre’s stupid, gaudy, overpriced room spray.
He hears the door click shut. Fingertips against the small of his back, warm even through his fireproofs, though feather-light. “Charles?” Pierre says again, more of a question than an observation; like he’s concerned. Charles thinks he misses the unfamiliar sound, the accent from a different place, farther than where he’s from.
“I feel weird,” Charles says, and it’s a garish understatement. Frowning, he speaks to the wall, Pierre still hovering silently in his blind spot. “Max is being weird.”
The hand against his back tenses. “Max?” Pierre echoes, and Charles nods. “Weird, how?”
With a labored breath, Charles turns to face his friend. The hand on him falls away, leaving a residual sense of tension worked into the depths of his muscles. Worry-lines paint the edges of Pierre’s face, hair mussed and sweaty and all over his face, and the dampness of it doesn’t make Charles think of anything out of character.
“He keeps talking to me.”
It sounds stupid when he says it out loud. He keeps talking to me. Like that’s illegal, somehow. Like Max can’t try and mend a relationship that’s been misplaced on the rocks for years, like he’s still that same overconfident boy from the karting track. In a way, he still is, but he’s not blaming a poor race result on Charles anymore. The water droplets Charles remembers on his skin aren’t from the rain, aren’t from being run off into a puddle.
Charles’s frown inches deeper without intent. Pierre says nothing. “Like, it’s— that sounds pathetic. Oh my god.” Pushing the air clean from his lungs, Charles presses his head into his hands. Fingertips reach for the pressure-points at his temples, and calmly, Pierre reaches to take his elbows. “He keeps— but it’s not about racing,” he admits, staring at the floor. “Not always. Sometimes, just— where he wants to go for dinner, in the city.”
He hears Pierre hum. Hears him consider it, like the weight of Charles’s tension between his palms. “And that is weird?”
Sharp, stagnant, dizzying—Charles looks up. He must look insane. Pierre is giving him a strange look.
“It’s Max.”
Pierre raises an eyebrow. “And?”
“And that is— it is not normal. I do not know what to say to him.” Charles pulls his arms away, and it makes Pierre’s hands drop. “I was in his room, once, and he kept touching me. He would sit very close, and— and smile like an idiot. He has a stupid freckle,” he points at his own upper lip, “it is ridiculous. He is ridiculous. He had no shirt on.”
A smile breaks across Pierre’s face. It’s disgustingly out of place; more so than everything Charles has been agonizing over for weeks.
“Oh my god,” Pierre says, soft, reverent, like he’s just had some kind of epiphany. Charles waits with bated breath. “You are an idiot.”
That wasn’t the answer Charles was expecting. He frowns. “You are not helpful. I should never have come to you.”
And he tries to push his way back towards the door, but Pierre catches him, blocking the path with his entire body. “Wait!” he says, sharp, eager, and still grinning like a nuisance. “You really don’t see it?”
Frustration bubbles up the back of Charles’s throat, and a little too loud, he cries, “See what?”
Pierre makes a shushing noise through his teeth, hasty when he glances over his shoulder. The walls are too thin for this. Charles feels hot all over, shaking through to his ribs.
“Charles,” Pierre starts, “he is flirting with you.”
Everything grinds to a disgusting, horrible halt. Juxtaposing, Charles goes cold. Ice in his veins, thin along his bones. His jaw is hanging open. Pierre is still staring at him, a glint of mischief behind his eyes, the amusement in his still-there smile almost as world-ending as the words he said from it.
“No,” Charles retorts, short, simple, and entirely unconvinced.
Pierre huffs out a laugh. “Yes,” he declares, a stickler for correctness. “Oh my god. Charles.” He speaks the way he used to, when they were kids, when Charles would hurt himself doing something he always knew was a bad idea. “Charles, you are so dumb. I cannot believe you.”
Lost, Charles can only repeat, “No.” He’s still short. Pierre is still looking at him like he should’ve known, and it makes him slightly nauseous.
“He is flirting with you,” Pierre says, slightly breathless, like he can’t believe it despite the insistence. “He is flirting with you,” he repeats, “Max Verstappen is flirting with you.”
“Shut up!” Charles shouts, shoving at Pierre’s chest harshly. He stumbles, but he’s laughing, all high and too amused for the situation. Charles has gone as red as the race suit tied loose around his waist. “He is not. He is not.”
It’s more to convince himself than it is Pierre. Pierre is too confident, he’s beyond convincing.
“Max is flirting with you,” Pierre says, again, and he makes a horribly high-pitched sound that they’re both entirely too old for. “And you like him!”
Charles flares up beneath his fireproofs. “I don’t!”
“You do!” Pierre counters immediately, grin now wide enough to cut his cheeks clean down their center. “You are so nervous, and red,” he pokes Charles’s cheek, “talking about the freckle on his mouth, like you are looking at it.”
Pierre snickers, flicking the corner of Charles’s mouth. Charles stammers, disastrous.
“I—” he doesn’t know what to say. Pierre won’t stop laughing at him; coming to him was a terrible idea.
Sing-song-y, Pierre declares, “You have a crush on Max Verstappen!”
It’s childish. It’s fucking juvenile. Charles can’t find a way to counter it.
——
Nothing Pierre told him in his driver’s room was helpful. If anything, now Charles is worse off.
Because he thought about it. About Max, about liking Max, about Max liking him. It made him feel too strange to fall asleep in the silence of that hotel room, a movie still playing on the TV when he woke up to his alarm. It made him feel strange when he got to the track for qualifying, when he locked eyes with Max before they had to be in their garages, when the Dutchman flashed him a smile that stretched his lips and made him glow with that awkward-glory, the same exact expression Charles had been all but running from for the past few weeks.
He smiled back. For once, not the half-hearted, stilted smiles he felt were reserved for a childhood rival he couldn’t wrap his head around, but a real one. Like this meant something, somewhere.
All of his thoughts had to dwindle to silence for the rest of the day, though. The second Charles was zipping up his race suit, he was no longer thinking of Max as anything but his competitor, someone he had to be faster than. He could still do that, because Max was his competitor, his rival—even if he was also someone who sat too close to Charles on the floor, who wore a smile that was hard to stomach.
——
They’re on the podium together on Sunday.
It’s almost surreal. Charles crosses the line first, and he screams into his radio, and he pulls into Parc Fermé with Max on his heels. They grin at each other in the cooldown room, and Max practically chases him down with a bottle of champagne up on the podium, spraying it all across his back. By the time Charles is trying to get him back, he’s almost out of champagne.
He doesn’t get to talk to Max properly until a while after the podium, though they both still smell of champagne. Victory is hot beneath Charles’s skin, and he doesn’t think he’s ever seen Max so happy to be in second place, grinning ear to ear like he was the one up on the top step. His soaked-through Pirelli cap has vanished in favor of a Red Bull one—though Charles just ditched the idea of a cap altogether, hair messy with sweat and alcohol—and the first thing Max does when they get into each other’s proximity is grab Charles’s shoulder.
He shakes him slightly. Charles still tenses under his touch, but it’s a different kind of tension.
“Great race, Charlie,” he compliments, and Charles is almost surprised with himself when he doesn’t jump at the nickname. If anything, he turns a bit pink, cheeks warming with the kind of ruddiness he could blame on stale champagne. “You deserved the win,” he says, still out of character, pressing his thumb into Charles’s arm, “even if I really wanted it.”
They both laugh. It’s easy, almost. Charles likes seeing Max like this, giddy and dripping with champagne. His stupid Red Bull cap casts a shadow on his face, overtaking the blue of his eyes. Mindless, Charles reaches for the brim.
“Thank you, Max,” he says, completely in earnest, fingertips brushing the curved brim of Max’s cap. “There were a few times when I thought you would get me,” he takes the hat clean off Max’s head, who makes a disapproving noise in his throat, “but I held you off.”
The grin he wears is smug. It comes with the victory, with the stick to his skin, with the embroidery along the side of a Pirelli cap he left somewhere in his motorhome. It comes with the feeling of Max’s gaudy, dry, self-branded Red Bull cap held deftly in his hands.
Max reaches for it with shaky hands. “Give that back,” he huffs, but Charles snatches it away from him.
“No,” he says, short, teasing. “You look better without it, anyway.”
Max’s entire face softens, somehow. His grappling hands seem to slow, and he just stares, too open and too close. The space between their faces is small enough for Charles to count the blemishes on Max’s nose, to see where his stubble grows patchy and uneven, to scrutinize the freckle burned into his lip with a tad too much reverence. There’s something shiny along his forehead, hair messy and ruffled, a severe case of what’s either helmet hair or hat hair—or both—plaguing his usually-covered locks.
Charles thinks it’s a good look on him. All messy, and close, and slightly pink beneath his eyes. He grins at Max, prideful, still holding his cap down by his side.
Max’s face twitches slightly. Cautious, he reaches for his cap again, and when Charles still reels his hand back to keep him away, he asks, “Are you flirting with me?”
The question, heavy and accented, sits in the space between them. If Max had asked that even just a few days ago, Charles would’ve frozen completely. He might’ve run away. He might’ve punched him.
Because Max was looking at him funny. He was wearing another one of those faces, the ones that weren’t supposed to be for Charles, the ones that were too kind and too special. He was soft around the edges, completely lacking all the fury he used to drag through the rain at karting tracks all across Europe. Back then, he was Max Verstappen, up-and-coming prodigy: everything Charles wanted to be.
Now, though, he’s just Max. Too honest, too open, too close. But in the same way that he was re-molding himself into something Charles never could’ve known, Charles was an entirely different man than even who he was a few months ago, and he was stippled with an ego that led him to stealing Max’s cap clean off his head like he hadn’t just been tense sitting next to him last week.
So today, still coming down from the high of a victory, he says, “Are you flirting with me?”
It should almost be in the past tense. Were you flirting with me? Yesterday? Today? Last week in your hotel room? But Charles begs the question with relevance to the shades of red blotching beneath Max’s skin, wearing a lopsided grin he used to reserve for people who weren’t Max.
Max just grins. It’s not quite so cocky, but it’s prideful. It looks good on him. “You have finally figured it out.”
Charles laughs. He doesn’t want to admit that it took Pierre and a bit of denial to figure it out, so he doesn’t. He puts Max’s cap on his head like that wouldn’t completely enrage his entire team—adorning himself with Red Bull merch so shamelessly, especially something so egregiously branded with a big number 1—and he smiles all easy and seductive.
“Maybe I have,” he says, smooth, too much like butter on his tongue. “What are you going to do about it?”
——
Max shows him exactly what he’s going to do about it.
He drags Charles all the way to his driver’s room. Maybe the Red Bull cap on Charles’s head gets them less looks, or maybe it draws more attention, contrasting the horribly bright red of Charles’s half-unzipped race suit. He’s not sure. He’s not really paying attention, if he’s being honest. The hand Max has wrapped around his wrist is already distracting enough, as is his haste to get anywhere they can’t be seen.
So they end up in his driver’s room. The door shuts harshly, and Max pins Charles up against it, holding him there by the waist like he might try and run away. Both panting, both too close, the world seems to grow smaller and smaller around them—in the end, even when it’s Max’s hands bunched up in Charles’s race suit, it’s Charles who finally closes the gap between them.
Max kisses harshly, fiercely, and with a dizzying amount of passion. Charles feels like he’s on fire. He could only hang onto an attempt to lead for a moment, immediately consumed by Max’s mouth and everything he wanted to do to him. He licks into Charles with frustrating ease, still tasting of the spike of champagne and sweet victory.
Charles wants to chase it more than anything else. He tries to press up into the line of Max’s body, choking on a whimper at the center of his sticky throat. Max just crowds him further back against the door.
“We do not have much time,” Max breathes, voice hot and heavy against Charles’s swollen lips. “But I need— Charles, can I touch you?”
It’s the best thing Charles has ever heard. Voice raspy, and hot, and close enough to feel against his mouth—his head is spinning. For a moment, all he can do is nod, quick and breathless; his voice doesn’t come for another painstaking second.
“Please,” he says finally, fingers digging into the harsh fabric of Max’s race suit. “Max— hurry.”
Max was already going to hurry. He still swears under his breath when Charles whines.
Hasty, he tugs Charles’s race suit and fireproofs down to his waist. Pressing flush against his body, he latches his mouth against the side of Charles’s neck, hand slipping down the front of his pants where he gave up trying to wrangle the fabric out of the way. Without much warning, his hand wraps around Charles’s hard cock, drawing a low moan from the Monegasque.
“Max,” Charles breathes, and he tries to rub at Max’s erection through his still-zipped race suit, feeling his arousal where it stands too-prominent beneath all that fabric.
Sweat gathers along his hairline, sweltering beneath the edges of Max’s cap. His breathing is rough, ragged, panting—it sticks to Max’s skin where he’s close, lips moving languid against the bare skin of his neck. They both know they can’t leave any marks, but that doesn’t mean Max won’t mouth at Charles’s skin like he could, in some alternate reality where emerging from another driver’s driver’s room with an ugly purple bruise on your neck isn’t completely damning.
Max still moans into Charles’s neck when he cups his cock just right through his pants. Close, he ruts against Charles’s hand, chests pressed together until the space between their bodies and the door is narrow enough to thump. Biting his tongue, Charles tips his head back, cap shifting where it’s still perched atop his head.
This is strange. Objectively, this is far stranger than Max’s kind smiles or out-of-place expressions, than his nice words or casual conversation. Charles never thought he would end up like this: pressed into the door, melting into the curve of Max’s looming form, gasping out a string of syllables that could be equated to some version of the Dutchman’s name. It’s horribly mangled, but the essence is there, thick with desperation and hot, all-consuming need.
“Merde,” he swears, eyes slipping shut, “Max, mon chéri— I am close, I’m so close.”
The hand on his cock speeds up. Charles makes a high-pitched sound, biting his lip in the interest of thin walls. Max flicks his thumb over the head of Charles’s cock, and he lets his teeth graze over spit-slick skin, and Charles tips his head down into Max’s shoulder before he comes with a whine, body twitching harshly between Max’s body and the flat of the door.
He’s panting. His mouth is cotton-fuzzy, and his head is still spinning. The palm he has flattened across Max’s erection has gone lax, body spent and boneless where his skin is slightly sticky. Max just takes a deep breath, pulls a little farther from his raw neck, and presses impossibly closer to Charles’s body.
“Fuck, Charlie.”
And he ruts himself against Charles until he makes an impossibly hot noise, coming in his race suit like he doesn’t care for the consequences. Their breath mixes in the overcrowded air of the driver’s room, mouths sticky and swollen and still, somewhere and in some language, asking, what the hell did we just do?
It feels right, though. Being this close to Max, being like this with Max. Maybe the heavy breathing and the sticky skin is easier to stomach than Max’s soft smiles ever were, and maybe that scares something buried deep inside of Charles. He thinks he’s getting better, though: better at moving on from younger versions of themselves, versions of people who knew nothing about what they would become. Predictions were merely dreams, then, and Charles was grasping at smaller straws than he ever thought Max was.
But now they’re here. Close, sticky, breathing loud and overburdened. Charles has his arms up around Max’s shoulders, and he’s grabbing at him like he’s going to fall, fingertips searching for familiarity in the harsh fabric of his race suit. It lingers in every thread.
Weak-kneed and pinned back against the door, Charles is the first to speak. “Please tell me this isn’t the only time we will do this.”
Max laughs, breathless and easy. Pulling away from Charles slightly, he grins across a ruddy face, flicking at the brim of his cap where it sits crooked on Charles’s head. “You are crazy to think as much,” he scolds, litled, and kisses Charles softly on the lips. “I am going to keep you like this for as long as you will let me.”