Archive of Our Own

It starts like this: 

Valterri Bottas is not performing, and therefore Mercedes is not performing, and therefore, for the first time in almost a decade, they are looking for a new driver. 

“I want in,” you tell Syd, your manager. You’re scarfing down gritty protein waffles in McLaren’s hospitality room, prepared for another shit race in a shit car that your teammate is somehow God of. Syd drops his head in his hands and sighs, but you’re speaking again before he can get a word in, because you know that word would be no . “Don’t start! My contract is up this year anyway. And who else are they looking at? Russell? You know I can drive faster than him.”

Syd looks up from his hands. It’s the same look he gives you whenever you tweet something questionable, or get caught doing something in a club that you should probably not be doing, green eyes filled with annoyance begging to give way to mirth. “It doesn’t matter if you can drive faster than him,” he sighs, beleaguered. “Russell’s practically a shoe-in. He’s literally racing for them today.”

“So I’ll beat him,” you promise, easy. It won’t be easy, when he’s in a Mercedes and you’re in a McLaren. But you could do it. Russell’s probably never even driven the car before. And you’re only two positions behind him. Two positions is nothing. Two positions is one position and some change. Two positions is only a matter of late-breaking and being quick on the straights. You can do that, even in a McLaren.

Syd’s mouth is working itself tense, pressed into a line. You watch him consider, until he looks pointedly down at your gross waffles, and you begin to once more shovel them into your mouth. You have places to be. You weren’t even supposed to sit down. “I—” Syd starts, but lets out another weathered sigh, running his hands over his face like you’re asking for the world. You’re asking for Mercedes; in this life, that is the world. “It won’t be as easy as beating him today. You’re probably not even on Toto’s radar. There would have to be talks, a meeting, they’d probably want to get you in the simulator—”

“But you’ll do it?” you ask, feeling a grin spread across your face, like the break of day. You know Syd by now. You know what it sounds like when he says yes. “You’ll talk with Toto?”

The silence only lasts a moment. You watch Syd look up at the ceiling, looking like he’s silently begging with God. “Fuck, yes, fine,” he says, leaning back, exhaling. “I will talk with Toto Wolff. Jesus Christ.”

After that, you finish your shitty waffles happily, even if Syd warns you that he is not a miracle-worker, and he can’t make any promises, and he doesn't even know if Toto will want to meet with him. You don’t care about any of that. You can see Mercedes shining in the distance, growing closer and closer with every second that passes.

—

It is not easy to beat Russell. He puts up a fight; clearly, he wants to prove himself to Toto. But so do you. You scrape and fight and in the end, it’s not a battle of wits or a battle of strategy; it's pure skill. Russell locks up into turn eight, and you overtake, and the rest of the race—all ten remaining laps—he can’t catch up. Even when he’s in a Mercedes. And you’re in a car that feels more like driving a petrified tree than anything else. 

Third place has quite literally never felt so good. Your team cheers, and over the radio you hear whoops and hollers (you even beat Lando, which has notably never fucking happened) but you don’t care about any of that. The one thing you care about doesn’t come when you stand on your car and the crowd screams for you and Hamilton and Verstappen. It doesn’t come on the podium, when you’re getting sprayed with champagne and letting it replace the smell of burnt rubber. It comes after the fans have cleared the stands, after the only remaining media is sparse and inconsequential. It comes when you’re walking back to your driver’s room, ready to shower and change and leave. 

It comes when, in the middle of the paddock, you see Syd walking shoulder-to-shoulder with none other than Toto fucking Wolff. 

If you thought third place felt good, seeing that is like fucking heaven. 

—

You’re anxious the whole night. You turn your ringer on, which you never do. You pack up your things early and sit cross-legged on the bed, trying to think about anything other than Syd and Toto. It doesn’t work, so you turn on the TV, and have to scroll forever before you can find an Italian channel that is playing something in English. It’s some soap-opera that is clearly halfway through. You distract yourself by trying to reason out what’s going on with no context. You’ve just had a bombshell dropped that the two characters you thought were dating are actually siblings when the text-message alert sounds. 

The speed at which you grab your phone from the nightstand rivals that at which you overtook Russell. 

One new message from Syd Newell:

Lunch w/ Mercedes next qualifying. You better be able to charm your ass off.

There's a brief moment where any nerves give way to excitement. Syd did it, he got you an in , and you're sitting down with the Mercedes team in two weeks.

But then: oh god, you’re sitting down with the Mercedes team in two weeks. The anxiety starts all over again, but ten times worse. Still, you type out a reply with shaky fingers. You know me, you send, accompanied with a string of emojis you know Syd won't try to make sense of. 

A meeting with Mercedes in two weeks. 

The time between races has never felt so long.

—

In the two weeks between Monza and Bahrain, Russell continues his stupid Instagram posts. 

A picture of him on the Mercedes sim, captioned: Almost as good as the real thing. 

On his story, a video of him signing a fan’s Mercedes hat. “That’s next year, right?” the fan asks. Russell just smiles and autographs.

Worst of all, though, is the picture of him posed next to Toto. Boss man , the caption reads. You stop opening Instagram after that.

—

Syd somehow manages to stop Zak from questioning why the two of you aren't eating with the rest of the team, but you can still feel his eyes on you as you exit. It's not like he's talked about renewing your contract, though, so you have every right to shop your options. You have to, if you want a seat next season. It's hard not to envy the guys who don't have to worry about that. LeClerc with his five year contract. Lando with his undisclosed but probably even longer contract. 

But those guys don't get to have lunch with the Mercedes team. That’s all you. 

You walk down the paddock with bubbling, nervous energy growing within you. Stupid things that you haven’t thought about in ages suddenly bother you. What if they hate your accent? What if your hair is tangled? What if your breath smells? It should smell like toothpaste, cool mint. Maybe a little coffee. You run your tongue over your teeth, just to ensure nothing is there. You haven’t even eaten today. You’re stupid. And you’re nervous. 

And now you’re standing in front of the imposing white Mercedes room. 

“Alright,” says Syd, hands in pockets. “It’s all you.”

You blanche. “What do you mean, ‘it’s all me’?”

“I’m busy. I have a job.”

“ I’m your job.”

Syd does a dismissive, hand-wavy motion and rolls his eyes. “This is your thing,” he says, already walking away. “I did my part. You’re here, aren’t you?”

If you tried to get another word in, you would have to yell for Syd to hear. He’s practically running away. Literally. You settle for flipping him off, and then turn to the door and breathe slowly, setting your jaw. This is nothing. This is just lunch with Mercedes. No big deal. 

If you got here, you can get through. 

Except it turns out that this l unch with Mercedes you had been promised actually means lunch with Toto Wolff . He answers the door and your heart kickstarts in your chest at the sight of him. Brown eyes focused on you. Mercedes polo, rolled up in the arms. Face not impressed, but not necessarily unimpressed. It’s sort of like that feeling when you first get into an ice bath—a shock, not painful, but jarring. Seemingly unconquerable. That’s what it feels like to have Toto Wolff’s attention focused on you. 

“Ah,” he says, stepping to the side. “Come in.” You comply. It’s cool, clean. Everything looks sleeker here than it does at McLaren. You’ve always liked blue better than orange. “You're quite punctual,” Toto says as he closes the door.

It all suddenly seems very daunting. It's just you and him, the rest of the Mercedes team decidedly absent. You feel—

Underdressed, for one. You've had training periodically all day, as with all race weekends. You're in leggings and a compression shirt, your athleisure wear a stark contrast to Toto’s polo, his dress pants. You wonder if Russell would've known to dress nice. Probably, you think. And then you think maybe not to worry about Russell right now. 

You feel nervous, for two. Not necessarily nervous about the meeting, but nervous about the pure fact that you're nervous, an endless feedback loop of sweaty palms, and a jittering pulse. You’re especially stupid when you're nervous, and you'd rather not embarrass yourself in front of Toto. 

But so far, the only thing he can tell is that you're punctual. He doesn't see that you're underdressed; if he does, he’s polite enough not to comment on it. He can't tell that you're nervous; if he can, he doesn't care. 

You’re punctual . That seems like a pretty good foot to start out on. 

“Thanks for agreeing to see me,” you say, trying not to cross your arms or try to hide. You're confident, you’re polite, you’re a future Mercedes driver. No need for nerves, and no time to be self-conscious. “Half the drivers on the grid would kill just to be here.”

When you look away from the wall—adorned with posters of Lewis and Valterri, in the same poses as the walls of their garage—Toto is smiling, half of his mouth quirked up. You've seen him smile, of course, in interviews and photos and whenever Mercedes gets a double podium. But it's different to see it here, right in front of you. It's like seeing a celebrity in real life, like the first time you stood in the same room as Lewis. Only worse. Only heightened. Only simultaneously terrifying and thrilling. 

“Half the drivers on the grid did not beat George last race,” he says, raising his eyebrows in concession. “That was very impressive. I did not think the McLarens were competitive cars this year.”

When are they ever? you think, bitter. Still, you smile as he leads you to the table. There's takeout from a restaurant you don't recognize. Something Bahraini, then. You bet at McLaren they're having burgers. The thought alone is enough to inspire you to say, “The cars are not competitive. I am.”

“Is that so?” he asks, still smiling. There is something in his voice reminiscent of seeing the lights go out before a race, of hearing the roar of twenty synchronized engines. “Can you compete against Red Bull, then?” he continues. “Against Verstappen?”

There’s a moment where you think he's making fun of you. He's brought you here, agreed to meeting you, for the sole purpose of pointing out how stupid an idea this is. You driving for Mercedes, it’s laughable. You're not a seasoned driver, not like Hamilton or Bottas or Russell. And you've never even been inside a Mercedes simulator, much less one of their cars. He's brought you here to tell you that you aren't Mercedes material.

Except, he's still smiling. And he's sitting across from you, ready to share a meal with you. And his eyes, deep and brown, seem to be alight with something. And you realize with a start, he's not making fun of you. Not at all. No, you are sitting across from Toto Wolff, and he has issued you a challenge .

A challenge you will gladly take. “Yeah,” you say, mustering up more bravado than you truly feel. “I can compete with Verstappen.”

Toto raises his styrofoam cup to you. “We will see,” he says. 

You grin, promising, “You can count on it.” When you hit your own cup against his, the ice sloshes around, and your heart pounds in your chest, and Toto keeps smiling. 

Ten minutes ago, you didn't even know he did that when there weren't cameras watching.

—

You beat Verstappen.

It's close. He qualified ahead of you, of course, because his car is faster and he is faster and you’re not a miracle worker. But you're on a better strategy than him. Red Bull shits the bed in the pit lane, and he can't catch up before the checkered flag, and you beat Max Verstappen .

Everybody is screaming for you on the podium. But the person you are focused on is Toto, watching with his headset still on. When you catch his eye, he nods once. Like he's satisfied. Like he's impressed. Maybe even like he's proud. 

This is something you think you’ll have no problem getting used to.

—

It progresses like this: 

You are practically dating Toto.

Actually—no. It’s not even dating, it’s like you’re trying to court him, like you’re some greaser from the 50s taking the traditional route. Like maybe you're even going to fucking imprint on him. And if you’re not doing that , then you’re at least trying to endear yourself to him so he gives your permission to date/court/imprint on his perfect unattainable daughter, Mercedes.

Firstly, you have to always impress him. You’re not racing for McLaren anymore. You don’t listen when Zak tells you to let Lando pass. You ignore the orders to not fight. You fight tooth and nail for podiums. You look for Toto’s eyes in the crowd when you get them, waiting with bated breath for him to nod, satisfied, like he did in Bahrain. It feels better than the champagne, or the pictures, or even Zak admitting that you did good. The only affirmation you need that you raced well is Toto Wolff, arms crossed, face grim as ever, nodding your way. He doesn’t even have to say anything and you could practically jump up and down with glee. 

You do one time, but then remember he’s watching and school yourself. 

And then of course, you have to constantly find him in the paddock, or on the grid. Single him out. Say hi , when you mean don’t forget about me . Give a good luck out there when you want to say I could win for you. Russell does this, too, but his way is cheating. He has access to the Mercedes factory seemingly whenever he feels like visiting. He posts on Instagram every time he’s there, and you’ve seriously debated blocking him so you don't have to see it. 

But it doesn’t matter. You’re persistent. You’ll stay in this fight, and you’ll win it, even if you don’t have the same access to Mercedes faculties as Bottas and Russell. 

You have the same access to Toto, and you’re not ashamed to court him, if need be. 

And god, does need be. 

—

Even if the impressing him wasn’t enough, or if the constantly looking for him at every turn, trying to get a word in, trying to somehow remain polite and calm when you want nothing more than to beg on your knees wasn’t enough, there are the actual dates. 

And alright, they're not dates . That’s just the simplest descriptor. They’re dinners. Lunches. Phone calls. You don’t know how often Bottas and Russell get to sit and talk with Toto for the duration of an entire meal, but you make the most out of every opportunity you get to do so. It’s easier to not feel frantic when it’s just you and him, not an entire paddock ready to pull him away at any moment. When you’re alone,  it’s easier to present yourself as a Mercedes driver, not just someone who deeply, desperately wants to be one.

You know by now to dress nice. You've learned from the first time, feeling self-conscious about your workout clothes the entire hour you were with Toto. Tonight, you’re in your own set of dress pants and a white button up. But, because you’re young, and because you hate feeling stuffy, and because Charles and Carlos are taking you to a club later, it's unbuttoned enough that the top of your strapless bra can be seen, black sticking out against the white. Toto doesn't mind, though. At least not enough to comment on it. You caught him looking, just once, while you ordered entrees, but he isn't like that. He's one of the few men in F1 who don't seem to pay any mind to the fact that you're a girl at all. 

It’s nice, except for on nights like this, when you're out together and he's paying like it's a date and you're nervous like it's a date and all signs point to date except for the fact that he's not looking. Even if you sort of want him to look. Even if you sort of want it to be something other than strictly business. 

Even if maybe, in all of this practically dating but not actually, it's gotten a little hard to focus on the goal at hand, when all you really want to focus on is Toto.

He makes it clear, though, what this is about: racing. Business . McLaren and Mercedes. Those are the only things you ever talk about when you're out like this. “You passed Norris again yesterday,” Toto says. He ordered wine, but he hasn't touched it. The glass sits full on the table. “What did Zak say this time?”

Ugh. And Zak. Zak is something the two of you talk about a lot. You shrug. In the beginning, he would yell at you when you didn't follow orders. But he hasn't offered you a contract, so he's got no hold over you anymore. He's realized that by now. “He’s getting better about it. He knew he didn’t have a strategy, he just wanted Lando to win. Like always.”

Toto frowns. “At Mercedes, we do not play favorites,” he promises.

Not true , you want to say, but don’t. What does it matter if Mercedes plays favorites? You’d rather be second best to Lewis than to Lando. At least Lewis is actually better than you, not just perceived to be. “ You’re not the one who has to convince me ,” you say, instead of voicing any of these thoughts. 

Toto raises his eyebrows. For a second, he looks pleased. But then he just has the business face on again. “You’re not exploring your options?”

And, of course you are. It's part of the job. But Christian Horner doesn’t make as good of a dinner date. “Everybody is exploring their options,” you say. “Not everybody gets to explore Mercedes.”

You waggle your eyebrows, and finally, Toto smiles, flashing white teeth at you. “You just want me to tell you that you’re special,” he says.

Yeah, you’d like that very much. But you know it's a pipe dream. He never clues you in, never mentions Russell or Bottas or anybody else he's in talks with. He never lets you know where you stand. Still, you say, “Well, it wouldn't hurt to hear.”

But as expected, he does not indulge you. You watch as he raises his eyebrows and finally takes a sip of wine. It stains his mouth. You pretend you're not looking.

—

Carlos and Charles take you out to some club they promise is very exclusive and then promptly abandon you to do God knows what.

You don't really like clubs. They're loud, and crowded, and usually you're only there to celebrate somebody else's win. Tonight, though, there's not even anything to celebrate, and you've been left alone, and you debate just going back to your hotel.

Except.

There's this guy.

He's tall like somebody you know. Dark hair, dark eyes like somebody you know. An accent like somebody you know. And he wants to take you back to his place.

You probably shouldn't. It's late, and you're alone in an unfamiliar country. You could get kidnapped, or have your hair stolen to make a racing clone. But the guy, when he smiles, his teeth flash all white and perfect at you, and his hands are resting on your hips, and he tells you he can call a car for the two of you.

“That was nice,” he says, when it is all said and done. In the quiet of his apartment, the accent really isn't all that similar. He breezes through the consonants that somebody you know would linger on. Stretches out the vowels somebody you know skips over. “You can stay, if you want,” he offers.

But your shirt is already on. “I’ve gotta head out,” you say.

He furrows his brows like he doesn't understand the slang, and that at least is familiar. 

—

In Abu Dhabi, your engine fails not three laps in. 

Your frustration is so palpable you can taste it. It works its way down your throat and to your stomach, making you want to cough it out. Or worse, to yell. 

But you manage to bite your tongue as you climb out of the car. You keep quiet through the condolences, the pitying press. You say nothing as Zak sends you back to the hotel so no reporters try to find you and get a quote.

Once you're alone, though, in the perfect stillness of your empty hotel room, you scream. Muffled by your pillow, it sort of sounds like the roar of an engine. That makes you scream louder. 

You’ve been doing so good. You could've won today. The track was wet, and that always makes for miracles. You could’ve won, and Toto could’ve watched, and he could’ve complimented you over the dinner you were supposed to have in the paddock. You had to text him that you couldn't make it. He replied with the frowny face emoji, which he likes doing ever since you told him how weird it was to think of him using emojis at all. 

It's all McLaren’s fault. You know only self-praising assholes blame the car. But it was quite literally the car. Engine failure shouldn't be something you have to worry about in a million dollar F1 race car, but evidently McLaren can't even make an engine right. A fucking engine . You don't understand how this never happens to Lando. It’s always you, always your car. You're getting better at riding the limits, at not pushing too hard. But it seems like Lando can get the car to do whatever the hell he wants. If you so much as look at the car wrong, you’ll spin out and DNF.

Toto calls you, in the middle of your self-pitying, McLaren-hating bed-rotting rage session. “Engine failure,” he says, when you pick up.

He’s one of those people who manages to sound the same on the phone as in person. It's like he's right next to you. “I would’ve won,” you say. It's probably not true, but now neither of you will ever know, so you can say whatever you want.

Toto laughs, a chuckle really, not anything else. “Sure you would’ve,” he says. You can see the face he’s making. Half of a smile, just the edge of his mouth. Eyebrows raised in disbelief. “It is a shame. I picked out wine for dinner.”

Ugh. Wine would be nice. Drinking wine with Toto, watching him get flushed and relaxed and fun, would be nice . “Don’t tell me that,” you complain.

“What hotel are you staying at?” he asks, after a moment of silence. “I will bring it to you.”

And then, you're thinking about drinking wine with Toto alone in your hotel room, and you're not quite sure that's something you could handle. If it were in the paddock, that'd be one thing. There'd be people around. Here, the only people you can see are lights in offices. Lights in offices have no sway on you. Lights in offices can't give you reservations. “You don't have to,” you tell him, because you think maybe it’ll dissuade him

“I will,” he says, not dissuaded in the slightest. “Which hotel?”

You swallow. “The Hyatt. 4409.”

—

Toto’s wearing what he was wearing at the race when he arrives. You’re in your pajamas.

It makes you think of that first meeting, back in Bahrain. You’d been terrified and self-conscious and embarrassed about wearing your workout clothes to meet him. Now, the only reason you notice his clothes is because the way his shirt strains in the arms, muscles visible through the fabric, flexing when he lifts the bottle of wine to present it to you. “To ease your sorrows,” he says with a smile. 

You tear your eyes away from his arms and up to his face. “No glasses?” you ask.

“I figured you would be staying in a hotel nice enough to provide those.”

Ha . There’s barely room to fit takeout in the mini-fridge, much less a cabinet, and much less a cabinet containing wine glasses. But you’ll do anything to keep Toto from leaving now that he’s here. “Glasses are for chums, anyway,” you say, shrugging your shoulders. “We can drink from the bottle.”

At that, he looks impressed. The same way he looks when you win races. It sends a thrill up your spine, everytime. Sometimes it’s hard to accept the fact that, in the span of a few months, you’ve gone from a complete stranger—barely a blip on Toto’s radar—to somebody that can impress him. That can surprise him. You’re somebody that can be interesting to him, even if he’s not interested in you, not like that. You’re somebody who he buys wine for. Somebody he meets in a hotel room to drink said wine. 

“You are so American,” he complains, but he’s walking towards the polyester couch anyway. So American , you think. He got that from you. Before, he would’ve said quite American. Very American. Rather American. Such an American. But you’re so American, and it’s wearing off on him. 

You grin as you join him on the couch. It’s cramped; maybe it would have made more sense for you to sit on the scratchy chair across from it, or even on the bed. But if you’re going to be sharing a bottle of wine, you’re going to have to be close. So what if your knee touches his? The smooth feeling of his dress pants against your bare skin is nobody's business but your own. This is a consolation prize. This was Toto’s idea. 

“I’m not that bad,” you say, as Toto uncorks the wine. “I could be asking you for beer. I could’ve made you stop for Miller Lite .”

This time, he looks unimpressed. But you can tell it’s fake the same way you can tell he’s fighting a smile off his face. The same way you can tell that his eyes have gone all fond , even if it’s hard to see them in the dim yellow light. You can’t stand the fondness. The fondness always makes you want more. 

“I would not have stopped for Miller Lite,” he says. 

And you wouldn’t have asked. You don’t even know if you can buy that here. It’s all Dos Equis and Coors. Besides, you’ve become accustomed to the European way of living. Beer tastes like shit. Still, you wouldn’t be you if you didn’t grin and say, “I bet Christian would buy me Miller Lite.”

There’s something a little more sincere to the tight line of Toto’s mouth now. “You say this after I’ve come here—all the way from the circuit—and brought you very nice wine, free of charge—”

“Oh, give me the thing,” you say, reaching a hand out for the bottle. 

It’s dark and sleek. The wine you usually buy comes from the neighborhood grocery store and costs twenty dollars. You can tell just from having the bottle in your hand that this is not like that. Which, of course it wouldn’t be. It’s Toto. You’ve known he has expensive taste since when he first took you out to dinner, you’re pretty sure you saw actual royalty at the restaurant. The wine, when you take the first swig, hits you on the top of your mouth. It doesn’t so much have a flavor as it has a feeling. Sharp. Tangy. Your mouth tingles, and you try not to make a face, but Toto breaks out into a grin and you can tell you’ve failed. 

“Not like Miller Lite?” he asks. 

You hand him back the bottle and swallow. “I feel like I just got sucker-punched.”

Toto shakes his head and takes a sip himself. You watch, in a combination of awe and something that feels a little more heady. If anybody were going to make drinking wine straight from the bottle look elegant, it’d be Toto. He lifts the bottle like it is a Miller Lite, like it’s no heavier than just a beer bottle. His throat bobs as he swallows, and when he pulls the bottle down, he does not struggle to not make a face. He just smiles. 

“Show-off,” you complain. 

“It will get easier.”

And it does. The two of you take turns passing the bottle back and forth, each sip a little longer than the last, each tangy punch a little more bearable. In the lamplight, it’s harder to see the flush in Toto’s cheeks than you would’ve hoped. But the yellow glow makes his eyes turn to honey whenever he turns his head the right way, and the wine makes your stomach feel more like goo and less like bricks, like it had felt before Toto called. It’s nice to sit with him, and to laugh, and to talk about things that aren’t McLaren and Mercedes and stupid Zak a few halls down. And with the wine, the wanting isn’t so bad. At least, it isn’t so apparent. Any signs that you’re crushing on the man who may be your boss in the near future can be explained away with the fact that you’re halfway through a bottle of wine likely more expensive than a night’s stay in your hotel room. 

The night stretches on, and the bottle gets lighter and lighter til there’s nothing left, and it sits abandoned on the tiny wooden table in front of you. Maybe three months ago, you would’ve been savvy enough to try and take advantage of this moment, of the lack of inhibitions. Maybe you would’ve asked him where you stood, and where Russell stood, and whether Bottas was a concern at all. Maybe you would’ve asked to talk about a contract. Now, you just hiccup and say, “My sorrows have been eased,” and you know it’s stupid even before you say it, but you’re too buzzed to care. It’s too late, you’re too tired. There’s a myriad of excuses for anything dumb you say. You’re sure Toto understands this. 

“I think maybe you need to go to bed,” says Toto.

You frown, even though he sounds and looks very rational, and you have to be up early in the morning, and you’re already sort of half-asleep. If you go to bed, then Toto leaves, and then you’re back to being sort-of-coworkers-sort-of-friends-sort-of-nothing. Then you’re back to the courting. The begging. 

“We should do this every time I lose,” you say, a desperate attempt to not have to say goodbye to this so soon. The simpleness, the ease. The crossing of professional boundaries. 

Toto smiles. But he’s standing up. So your frown deepens. “We would not get to do it very often, then.”

Ah! A compliment! Your frown falls away. “Every time I win, then,” you correct. “You’ll have to sacrifice your car’s budget for wine.”

Toto helps you up off the couch and onto the bed, and even you have to admit you’re certainly not drunk enough to need help with a three step walk. You say nothing though, because his hands are warm against you and his laugh is real and deep when you pull a pillow over your head. 

“I am sorry about your race,” he says, as he’s leaving. It’s the first time he’s said anything about it since he got here. “You deserve to be in a better car.”

The door closes, and you can’t decide if you’re justified in feeling hopeful or not.

—

“Are you talking to Mercedes?” asks Lando, in the middle of the media day. 

And it’s not like it matters if people know. It’s not like there’s a contract, or anything. But it’s generally considered bad form to ask about that kind of thing, especially in front of reporters and managers and your current boss. “What makes you say that?” you ask, scanning the room for anybody who probably shouldn’t be hearing this conversation.

But there’s nobody that raises your alarms, so you let yourself relax a little, turning back to Lando and watching him squint at you. “Mark says Syd has been talking with people on the Mercedes team a lot lately,” he says, slowly.

And, ugh . You probably should’ve expected that. You and Lando’s managers are great at keeping secrets. Except from each other. “It’s—” you start, attempting to think of a way to bend the situation. A way to put it lightly. But there really isn’t one. “Yeah. We’re talking. But it’s just that. The competition is steep, y’know?”

Lando bites the inside of his cheek. He looks like he’s thinking very hard, so you give him time. “I thought it was going to Russell,” he says, after a moment. It’s clear that’s not all he wants to say, but he adds nothing more, even when you wait for him to.

Eventually, you just shrug. “Yeah, well, I drive faster.”

“It’s not because of me, is it?” he asks suddenly, so quickly and so intensely that it’s reminiscent of getting whiplash when you take a corner too fast. 

You splutter. “ What ?”

“You aren’t leaving because of me, are you?” he restates. “It’s not something I did?”

“No, it’s not something you did,” you say, staring at him with wide-eyes. You feel justified in looking at him like he’s grown a third head, because he has , and that head seems to be pretty paranoid. “Why would it be?”

“All my teammates leave ,” he groans, dropping his head in his hands. “It’s starting to seem like there’s a pattern.”

Which, there is. But that’s not Lando’s fault. It’s McLaren. It’s the team, the car, the boss. Lando’s perfect. He’s great. He doesn’t badmouth you when you pass him, because he does the same thing. He’s always nice in the press. He’s funny. He’s fun , period. Lando’s great. 

You tell him as such. But he just frowns. “Then it’s the car?” he asks. “It’ll be better next year, Zak says—”

“The car’s always going to be ‘better next year’,” you say, rolling your eyes. “This car just isn’t for me.”

His frown deepens. “Well, I can talk to Zak. We could make changes that help you, too, not just me. You get more podiums than me, I’m sure they’d be willing to make some changes. We could be a competitive team, the two of us, in a car that we both like.”

There is no world on which that could ever happen, least of all this one. Zak hasn’t even mentioned extending your contract. If he won’t even do that, then he certainly won’t change the car to make it better for you. Still, Lando’s nice, and Lando’s trying, and Lando’s the only reason this team is worth a damn, anyway. “Thanks,” you say, trying not to sound too dejected. “If things could work out like that, it’d be nice. But they won’t work out like that. It’s not you, it’s—everything else. You’re a good teammate.”

Lando smiles, but then he frowns, as the first part of what you said hits. “They could work out like that! You just have to fight for it.”

But you’re too busy fighting for something else, and you’re certainly not going to give up on it now.

—

The climax is like this:

An Alpha Tauri car fucking swerves and crashes into you at 200mph. 

The wreck is bad. You don’t actually remember much. You were overtaking, and then somebody was in your racing space, and then everything went black. 

You heard the telltale crunch of impact. 

You smelled the burnt rubber, and maybe smoke. 

You were pulled out and sent to medical, where you wait now as a doctor takes your vitals. No concussion , no damage , he had said. But we can’t send you back without BP, O2 levels. The like.

So you sit in the quiet room and think about how badly this is going to fuck up McLaren’s chance for the placement Zak so badly wants. Lando will still get points, unless something happens to him, too. But a team can’t be competitive with only one car. You can’t be competitive, stuck in medical. You hope the Alpha Tauri car is down for the count, too.  You hope the stewards don’t think this whole ordeal is your fault. You hope Toto doesn’t think this whole ordeal is your fault. 

As if somehow summoned by your thoughts, there is suddenly a woman in a blue Mercedes uniform opening the door and stepping into the room, without knocking. Which is fucking weird, you think, but you just got slammed into by a billion dollar car and don’t have the energy to protest the presence of one woman. She’s Mercedes, anyway. It’s probably not in your best interest to protest at all. 

“How much longer until she is released?” the woman asks. When she speaks, it’s no-nonsense, but she wrings her hands together, and it betrays something that seems like fear. You squint at her.

The doctor, for his part, looks just as bewildered as you are, which confirms your suspicions that this is fucking weird. “I just have to finish her vitals. There is no sign of injury,” he says, looking at the Mercedes woman while simultaneously sticking a thermometer under your tongue. You feel okay rolling your eyes, since he isn’t looking. A thermometer, really? You don’t think fever is usually a symptom of getting run over.

“Well then we need her to be released now ,” the woman says. You can’t see her mouth behind her mask, but her eyes are wide, trying to convey some sort of urgency that neither you or the doctor understand the need for. 

“Why?” you ask, because the doctor seems content to just stare in judgment. 

The woman looks at you, shifting on her feet. Briefly, you wonder if this is a kidnapping plot. If somewhere there is a woman who really does work for Mercedes, knocked unconscious and stripped of her uniform. But then this woman is leaning over to whisper in the doctor’s ear, and any judgment falls from his face. He’s left looking like he’s seen a ghost, eyes wide, mouth agape. 

“I see,” he says, folding the BP monitor back up. “Yes, she is cleared. You may take her.”

You frown, but swing your legs off the examination bed and stand up, anyway. You think being literally anywhere else would be better than being in medical, even if it means you risk a possible kidnapping. The Mercedes woman nods her head, and you follow as she walks you out of the hall, through the paddock, and unsurprisingly, to the Mercedes hub. 

Are they going to sign me? you wonder, heart jumping in your throat, blood pulsing in your veins. Is this it? Is it happening?

When the two of you get inside, you’re met with more Mercedes team members than you’ve ever seen before. Some of their faces are familiar, some you could maybe even call by name. But most of them are complete strangers. “Please,” says one of them, an old bald man with an English accent. “Have a seat.”

You comply, sitting in the sole empty chair in the room. The woman who walked you in stands in the corner, looking nervous. Syd is standing next to her, and he's staring at you like you're a ghost. He's staring through you like you're a ghost. “What’s going on?” you ask. You try to keep it light and casual, but it comes out a little strangled. You feel like you’re getting an intervention. The unfamiliar Mercedes team members all surround you, looking grim. And Toto is nowhere to be seen. 

The bald Englishman frowns. “Toto has imprinted,” he says. 

Oh. 

“On who?”

The bald Englishman frowns some more. 

Oh . 

“What?” you splutter, standing from your chair. But then everybody just looks at you, so you sit back down. You cross your arms. You uncross them. You look at the floor. Nobody answers you.

“You are familiar then, with imprinting?” the Englishman asks, after an unbearably long silence. Around the word imprinting, his accent seems to disappear. Like he’s said it so many times it’s lost its meaning. It’s not a word anymore. He says it the same way you say position or push or box . With an accent adopted by everybody around you, not American or English or Italian, but a mixture of all of them. A neutral third-party accent. He says imprinting like to say it is his job. 

And that’s probably not the part you should be focusing on. You should maybe think about the meaning of the word, not just the way he says it. You should maybe think about what he said before. Toto has imprinted. And Toto has imprinted on—

“Yeah, I’m familiar,” you say, rather than finish your thought. Everybody is familiar with imprinting. You learn it right alongside sex ed. Here is a penis. Here is a vagina. Here is a relic from the paleolithic era that science cannot explain. 

The Englishman nods. “Good,” he says, like you’ve passed a test. “So you are aware that certain measures will have to be taken?”

That part, you are not familiar with. In the sweaty middle school gym, when your biology teacher had explained to you and two hundred other sixth graders what imprinting was, she hadn’t gone into details. Only a very small percentage of the population has the gene , she had said. An even smaller percentage will ever express that gene. 

She told you about how the act of imprinting was different for everybody. For some, it’s painful. Others, euphoric. And some people don’t ever feel anything at all, and only find out they’ve imprinted because somewhere down the line, they test positive for antibodies. And then she had clicked to the next slide, and the entire gym erupted into prepubescent giggles as you stared at a diagram of an ovary. 

You don’t know anything about any measures that will need to be taken. The Englishman must read this on your face, because he clears his throat and says, “Perhaps we should discuss in private.”

—

He leads to another room, one that looks like it’s probably used for physical therapy or training of some sort. You sit on the cushy bench and stare up at the Englishman. (And at Syd, because of course he has to be here, because there is no such thing as truly private in F1). 

“My name is Dr. Fischer,” the Englishman says. “I wrote my thesis on imprinting. I lead the only diagnostic imprinting team in the United Kingdom, at Manchester King’s Cross. I am here to make things go smoothly for both you and Toto.”

At the mention of his name, it feels as if somebody has stuck their hand through your chest, taken your heart in their fist, and squeezed . A sound tears its way out of you, some sharp gasp you can’t control at the sudden pain, and you lift a hand to your chest.

“Hmm,” says Dr. Fischer. He lifts a notepad out of his jacket pocket and begins to write. Which is generally never something you want a doctor to do.

Syd’s eyebrows do the thing where they briefly merge into one as he stares at the doctor. “Wh—is she okay?” he asks, swinging his hands around. The pain is dissipating some. It feels more like heartburn now than something so visceral. 

Dr. Fischer finishes writing and drops the pad down to his side. “Yes. They are both fine. Humans evolved to imprint as a form of protection. It does not kill us,” he says. You nod—that’s always nice to hear—but then he continues, “Side effects such as physical withdrawal and heartburn are often present in the imprinter. The accepted theory is that this ensured imprints would last.”

He looks at you with the same frown you had seen back in the welcome room, and any heartburn is replaced with unease. “However,” he starts, and Syd squeezes his eyes shut. “These symptoms in the imprintee are far less common; it is called imprintee sickness. It indicates a more complex bond.”

Imprintee sickness. Complex bond . The words sound like a court judgment. A prison sentence. You think of how desperately you’ve wanted Toto to look at you. You think about the man from the club, and how he hadn’t even resembled Toto in the cold light of day. You think about sharing wine in your hotel room.

You think about how this might be your fault.

“What does that mean?” you ask, throat dry.

When Dr. Fischer says, “It means we will have to take a more delicate approach,” you get the feeling that the approach won’t be delicate at all.

—

You’re sent back to your hotel with a stack of papers that has to weigh at least three pounds. 

It’s informational brochures. Recommended therapists. An NDA–not exactly the contract you wanted to sign for Mercedes, but now it’s probably the only one you’ll ever get. There’s no way you can drive for Toto now. This is the biggest conflict of interest to ever conflict interests.

When you get back to the hotel, you fall face first down on the bed and try not to cry. The tears threaten to fall, but something holds them at bay. Maybe it’s the three pound stack of papers waiting for you to weed through it. Maybe it’s Toto. In another hotel on another street, or in a sterile doctor’s office, or back in the Mercedes hub now that you’re gone. Maybe it’s the complex bond . 

Whatever it is, rather than crying, you sit up in the bed and flick on the lamp and get to the reading.

—

In the morning, you wake up to somebody thwacking you on the forehead with a rolled up piece of paper. 

After a few seconds of moaning and groaning, you open your eyes enough to realize it’s Syd doing the thwacking, and the thwacking is being done by the first page of The Care and Keeping of Imprints , an entirely too long article about embracing the lasting effects of imprinting. You skimmed it. You have a feeling that one won’t end up being too much concern for you. 

Syd brushes more loose pieces of paper off the bed to sit down. You watch excerpts from The Theory of Imprints and Imprintee Sickness and Days 1-5 of an Imprint , all articles which you actually deemed useful, fall to the ground in spiral whirls.  “Wow,” Syd says, at the mess. “You were busy last night.”

“And I only got through half of it,” you complain.

It feels stilted. Syd, being here, talking to you. It feels like you should be doing something else. You should be racing. Or flying home. Or running into Toto’s arms. You can’t stop thinking about that last one. It’s taking over your thoughts, but Days 1-5 of an Imprint says that feeling goes away almost immediately for imprintees. Everything goes away almost immediately for imprintees. Even imprintees with complex bonds. 

Toto, though, will have a much rougher time for a much longer time.

You want to call him. You want to see him. But Dr. Fischer has not approved that yet. 

“Our flight’s been canceled,” Syd says, sounding put-upon. “Apparently, long-distance traveling so soon is dangerous, but if you both want to be at the next race—”

“We’ll both want it.”

“-–Then Dr. Fischer will allow it.”

Thank God for that. You can’t be away from the track for that long. Even your shitty McLaren car is better than nothing. Better than being stuck in this hotel room. And with the imprint, you’ll have to get used to the McLaren car anyway. That sort of makes you want to cry, but you’re sure Lando will be pleased. 

And, fuck. What are they telling Lando? And Zak? And the rest of the team? How did they explain the canceled flight and the missed press conference and the Mercedes meeting? How did they explain any of it? 

“Woah, there,” Syd says with a laugh. “Relax, or you’ll give Toto a heart attack. What’s got you making that face?”

You hadn’t realized you’d been making a face. You try to school your expression to something cool and neutral, but at the thought of Toto having a heart attack, it’s hard. You’ve sort of vaguely learned that across the imprint, Toto can feel your distress, times tenfold. You didn’t think there would be pain or health risks involved in that, but of course there are. Days 1-5 of an Imprint says when separated, almost everything hurts for the imprinter. It’s part of the reason you want to call so bad. He’s hurting and you can stop it. But neither of you have been medically cleared. 

Syd’s looking at you like you’re a ghost again when he asks, “Are you good?” and you realize you haven’t answered him. 

“I’m fine,” you promise. “Just—what did you tell McLaren is happening?”

“Nothing,” he says, mouth pressing into a line. “We can’t tell anybody anything. We signed the NDAs. They think you’re sick, from the crash. Mercedes management will meet with theirs to explain everything, and to work something out.”

“Will you be there?”

He waggles his eyebrows, and while it usually makes you laugh, you’re sort of failing to see the humor in this situation. “With a Mercedes contract out of the running, somebody’s got to get you back on Zak’s good side,” he says. “Now come on, we’ve gotta go get you medically cleared.”

—

You’re glad the crash happened at Silverstone, because it means you can meet Dr. Fischer in his own hospital, and you don’t have to wait in any lines or fill out any forms or talk to anybody.

A nurse leads you and Syd to the Imprinting Diagnostics wing, and you meet Dr. Fischer in a normal-looking examination room. It puts your mind at ease, a little. There’s no big, alien medical devices in the room that scream imprinting ! Or worse, that scream complex bond ! All you see is a heart monitor, a blood pressure sleeve, and one of those little white things they put on your finger to make sure your lungs are working. You’re sure there are more devices hiding where you can’t see them, but you still feel perfectly normal as you sit on the examination table. It’s just like a normal check-up. Except Syd’s in the chair next to you, looking worried and worse for wear. But that’s fine. You just won’t look at him, and this whole thing will be okay. 

“Goodmorning,” Dr. Fischer says, pleasantly, the way doctors do. “How are you feeling today?”

You shrug. It’s hard to feel perfectly fine with everything that’s happening. But all in all, you feel pretty okay. “Good,” you answer. And then, because this isn’t just a check-up, add, “No heartburn so far.”

Dr. Fischer nods, and types on the computer in front of him. The monitor is large, and its blue light is reflected in his glasses. You can’t see what he’s typing though, so you just have to hope. “Yes, that will probably be over for you now,” he says, confirming what you’d gathered from all your reading last night. “My hope today is to clear you medically so that we can begin initiating contact with Toto. Do you intend to nurture the imprint so it will last?”

The question takes you off guard. Nobody’s asked you that yet. You assumed it had been obvious that this whole thing was an accident both you and Toto needed to be rid of. “No,” you say, blinking. “Me and Toto aren’t—”

“Yes, I assumed,” he says, once more typing on the computer. “In that case, we will need to use physical contact to keep this imprint happy so that it will go away quickly and quietly. The worst thing either of you could do is neglect it. Do you understand that?”

You don’t know how either of you could neglect it when Dr. Fischer and the entire Mercedes staff seem to be working so hard to make it go smoothly. “I understand,” you say, anyway. No neglecting on this end of the imprint. Except for how you haven’t called him. But that wasn’t really your fault. 

“Good,” says Dr. Fischer. “I will begin the examination now.”

He does the usual things that all doctor’s do every time. He takes your blood pressure and looks in your ears, your nose. He sticks a popsicle stick on your tongue and makes you say ‘ah’ . He presses a hand on your stomach and tells you to breathe. He hits your knee with a hammer to watch you kick. You follow his instructions blindly, wondering what exactly he’s looking for. What would make him say it’s not safe for you to see Toto? What would stick out? What’s different ?

He listens to your heart, makes a face, and you think, oh . That’s what he’s looking for.

“Your pulse rate is extremely elevated,” he says, frowning. 

You wait for him to continue. But he doesn’t, so you shoot Syd an alarmed look, but all he does is return it with a helpless shrug. You wait for Dr. Fischer to remove the stethoscope before asking, “So…is that normal?”

He rolls his chair back to the computer and once more types away for a moment before looking at you. You can tell from the look on his face that no. That’s not normal. Of course. “It is not typical,” he says, choosing the word carefully. “My understanding is that you were in a wreck?” he asks. 

With all that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours, you’d practically forgotten about that part. You nod. 

“And Toto witnessed it?”

Another nod.

“Yes, that is a very difficult place for an imprint to come from,” says Dr. Fischer. When he begins to type again, it is at a much more rapid pace, like the realization has left him with too much to say. Each clack of the keys reminds you of your pounding heart. You couldn’t feel it before, but now that he’s brought your attention to it, your pulse kicks under your wrists, in your throat. You feel your heart everywhere. 

“This is a case where medical intervention would’ve been required no matter what,” Dr. Fischer explains. “When an imprint is born from a trauma occurrence, it takes on different characteristics than a regular imprint. It has to be sated in different ways. Moving forward, many of your symptoms will not be normal. But that does not mean you need to be scared.”

“Will it—” you start to ask, but then wonder: do you even want to know the answer? Yes. You have to know. You can’t be left in wonder. “Yesterday, you said this is a complex bond. Does that mean—”

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” he interrupts. Oddly, that’s somehow exactly what you wanted to hear. That maybe this situation is weird, and different, and not the kind of thing that happens to most people, where they can deal with it at home with no medical intervention whatsoever. Maybe it’s not that, but it can still be okay. It can still be fine. “Myself, my team, and everybody at Mercedes is working to help you. I do not want you to have anything to worry about.”

“That—okay. I’m not worried.”

Dr. Fischer smiles, and at the sight of it, you realize you’ve never seen him do it before. “I will write you a prescription that will help with your heart rate. Other than that, everything is in order. I clear you to see Toto. I will make sure everything is in order there, and send for a team member to pick you up.”

Alone with Syd in the waiting room, the pounding of your heart becomes almost unbearable.

—

It’s only a few minutes before a young woman with a bright smile comes to pick you and Syd up, but it feels like an eternity. The longer you wait, the crazier it seems that you haven’t seen Toto since the imprint. You think of him, alone and in pain. You imagine him hurting because you’re not there, and wow, the heartburn’s back. Great.

The woman leads you to a sterile looking room with a sterile looking couch and sterile looking personnel standing around. She instructs you to sit on the couch, so you do. She instructs you not to look at anybody but Toto when he walks in, so you shoot Syd one last wary glance and resolve not to look at anybody. She instructs you to talk to him as if things are normal. And that one will be hard, but you nod anyway. After all, she’s not exactly asking that you do these things. She’s telling you the things you have to do.

Eventually—after another long eternity—the door to the room opens, and finally, finally Toto is there.

Dr. Fischer enters first, Toto behind him. There’s a man on each side of him, somehow even taller than he is, and their mouths and eyebrows are set into a line. Why does he have bodyguards? you wonder. But then you remember you’re not supposed to be looking at them, so you snap your gaze to Toto. 

He looks normal . That’s the first thing you think. 

You’re not sure what you expected. Maybe you thought he would look more…rabid. That’s what they made it seem like he’d look like, meeting in a neutral location and not letting you look anybody in the eyes. But he looks just as in control as ever. Even now, he wears a nice shirt and dress pants. He smooths his fingers over the fabric of the slacks, hands flexing. 

“Hi,” you greet, when you remember you’re supposed to talk like nothing is wrong. 

Toto grits his teeth; you can see his jaw working. “Hi,” he says, like it causes him great pain. 

There is a moment where he just stands there and nothing happens. You want to look to Dr. Fischer for guidance, but you’re not supposed to. So you stare up at Toto and let him take his time. You don’t know what he’s feeling. All you know is your heart finally feels like it’s just pumping blood, not exploding with each breath you take. Maybe you don’t need those pills Dr. Fischer said he’d prescribe. Maybe all you need is Toto. 

“You can sit down,” says Dr. Fischer. 

It’s probably the gentlest that he could possibly say it, but still Toto closes his eyes, lets out a beleaguered sigh. He looks like he’s more hurt by the instruction than by whatever he’s feeling right now. You can’t help but smile. Everybody knows Toto doesn’t like being told what to do. Still, he obeys. He crosses the room and sits down all in one go, like jumping into a pool. His eyes are still closed. His knee touches yours, but that is it.

“You are well?” he asks. It sounds like every word is being punched out of him. All the articles you read said that close contact was supposed to feel nice. It should help him relax. He does not look relaxed in the slightest. 

“Yes,” you answer, simply. You don’t tell him about the heart pills or the trauma occurrence or the complex bond. You don’t think he needs to hear that, especially not now. Instead, you just smile, and add, “I’ll be better when I finally finish a race next week.”

All at once, Toto stands up. He is at the door before you can even ask what’s wrong. “This I don’t think is a good idea,” he says. His two bodyguards are at his side instantly, like they expect him to pounce or something. “We are too close.”

“That is what you need,” Dr. Fischer insists, but Toto shakes his head.

“I cannot—” he says. “This—”

And then he’s gone, bodyguards and all. 

—

“It is nothing that you did,” Dr. Fischer assures, but you have a feeling that’s not true. This is all because of something you did—all because you got into a wreck, all because you wanted to drive for Mercedes, all because you can’t leave well enough alone.

The imprint is your fault. You never did know when to stop pushing. 

—

You’ll try again at Toto’s hotel.

This is the solution Dr. Fischer provides. He says that both of you were too on edge because of the environment and the spectators. You will admit, the bodyguards freaked you out a little, as did the sterile room that made you feel like a psychiatric patient. It’ll be better without all the people, better in the hotel room.

You hold your breath as you walk to his hotel room. It makes your heart pound, but it was doing that anyway, so. It’s fine. Even if you didn’t have the room number sent in a discreet looking email from Mercedes, you’d be able to tell where he was from the way his two bodyguards are back, this time standing on either side of the door. Your stomach drops at the sight of them. They're standing there like they think Toto can’t be trusted on his own, like they expect him to lose control and take you, right then and there. 

You shiver, and resolve not to think about that any more. 

They nod at you as you knock on the door. You smile politely but then go back to not looking at them, as you were instructed. Toto looks miserable when he opens the door. His face is grim, like when something goes wrong with the Mercedes car, or when one of the Red Bulls hits Lewis. He steps away as you walk inside, like you’re repelling magnets. Like he physically cannot be near you. 

If that’s how he feels, this isn’t going to work out very well. 

Dr. Fischer had scared you straight, before you left the hospital. The bond will die on its own, he told you. For it to be quick and painless you will need physical contact. Without touch, it will die. But it will die slow. And you will feel it dying every day. It will hurt.

That had been enough to get you in a cab to Toto’s hotel. Is it enough to get Toto to touch you the way he needs?

“Is this better?” you ask him, trying to make conversation. It feels wrong to talk to him like everything is normal. Everything isn’t normal. Not even close. “I think it’s…less intimidating, without all the people.”

There are, of course, the men outside. But you try to employ an out of sight, out of mind mindset. “Yes, it is better,” he says, sounding like he would rather be anywhere else doing anything else. Not necessarily better . But you’ll take it.

“That’s good, then,” you say. Your fingers twitch at your sides. “So how do you want to…?”

He’s standing with his back to the door, not looking at you. It’s awkward, so awkward. More so than your first meeting, more so than back at the hospital. You want to cry. Everything is all messed up. It was so easy, before. It shouldn’t have been, that’s the problem, you know that, but still. You miss it. 

“I don’t want you to do anything you are not comfortable with,” says Toto. “I don’t want you to feel… compelled.”

Compelled to what? To help him? To make sure he’s not in pain? To stop your own heart from actually exploding? “I’ll do whatever it takes,” you tell him. “Whatever you need. I’m not compelled. I just want to help you.”

It takes a moment for him to relent. But when he does, sighing, shoulders falling as he says, “Okay,” a pit that had been forming in your stomach dissipates.

You take a step closer to him and he doesn’t back away. Another step and then another, and then you’re close enough to reach out a hand, and wind your fingers through his. “Oh,” he says, and it’s really nothing more than an exhalation of air, but that, in combination with the way every muscle in his body seems to relax, sagging forward, makes you grin. 

You take his other hand and step closer, so your chest presses against his abdomen. He looks down at you and then away, like it’s too much. But he doesn’t make any move to push you away, so you figure the touching part is fine. You want to ask him if he feels better, or if this is helping, but you’re scared of ruining the moment. Besides, he looks so relaxed now, compared to when you first walked in—especially compared to at the hospital—that you’re sure it is helping. There’s no need to ask.

Toto leans back against the wall, and you can’t tell if he wants you to follow or if he’s trying to create distance. In the time it takes you to decide, he lets go of one of your hands to pull you in by the small of your back. It’s hard to fight the flush off your cheeks, but you manage. It’s so romantic . You suppose maybe this whole thing is, but the doctors and the careful instructions break the illusion. The two of you in a hotel room is less medical. Toto’s hand on your back, just above your ass? That’s not sterile. 

“Is this okay?” Toto asks. He’s looking at you again, and his eyes are wide, pupils blown.

If Toto is referring to this glorified hug, then of course it’s okay. You thought he would need much more than this. You thought the bodyguards were out there for a reason. “This is nothing,”  you laugh. “The things I read—there were diagrams—”

Toto turns up his nose and cuts you off. “Of what ?”

So much. There are certain positions that are supposed to be better. The articles went into detail. You don’t divulge that. You just smile and say, sing-songy, “ Things . But I knew you wouldn’t be like that. I knew you wouldn’t need bodyguards.”

“I do need them,” he says, quickly. “It is to make sure I don’t—that you are—”

He doesn’t finish either of the sentence fragments, but you want him to. To make sure he doesn’t what? Jump you? The thought is not unappealing. But there is the part where Toto doesn’t actually want you, and he can’t actually control any of this, and that makes the notion of anything happening between you two practically appalling. 

“You’re doing a good job,” you assure, because it seems like now that you’ve mentioned the men outside, he’s anxious all over again. “It’s that Mercedes self-control.”

His breathing is slow and even. It always is. “It is hard to even look at you,” he says. His words contradict his demeanor—yes, he’s tense. But he’s still calm. Still managing.

“Close your eyes, then,” you tell him.

You can’t tell if he does, or not. You can’t see his face in this position. All you can do is feel him, his arm around you, the other entwined in your hand. His breaths press his chest against yours every time; you rise and fall with the pattern of his breathing. When he tells you, “I'm sorry,” it’s muffled by your hair. “If I could help it, I would make it go away.”

This whole thing is breaking your heart. Even with the pills, you’re not sure you’ll survive it. “It will go away,” you try to reassure. “It'll be fine. It is fine.”

Toto scoffs. “You have to miss your flight and come to my hotel room and hug me —”

“Who says I wouldn’t do that anyway?” you interrupt, not liking where that thought is going. You squeeze tighter to prove your next point: “I love hugs. I’m a hugger.” 

“Are you?” Toto asks, and he sounds amused; it feels like it’s been forever since you’ve heard him sound like that.

You want to make it last. “You’ve just never asked before. But now, you’ll never get rid of me.”

Toto sucks in a harsh breath, and you think, God, what now? What have I done this time? “You can’t say things like that,” he starts “It is—”

But then he doesn’t finish. He cuts himself off, leaving you in the dark. “What?” you ask. It comes out a little harsh. But you’re getting frustrated. “ It is what? You keep not telling me things.”

“It is—it makes me think that you want that,” he clarifies.

And he does not want you to want that. He wants to be rid of you. He wants you to be rid of him. “Oh,” you say. “Sorry.”

Silence falls over the two of you. You don’t want it to be awkward, but it is. And not the kind of awkward where it’s only you feeling out of place; the real kind of awkward, the kind that’s heavy and inescapable. You squeeze your eyes shut in some attempt to shield yourself from it, but it’s no use. Toto knows you want him in a way that he doesn’t want you—in a way he’s being forced to want you because of the imprint—and what you really want is for the ground to open up and swallow you whole. Imprintee sickness and all. You want it all gone. You want to never face him again. You want to run. Instead, you’re spooning him against the wall to his hotel room.

“I think this is enough,” Toto says, and you extricate yourself almost before he’s finished speaking. 

“Glad I could help,” you say, not looking him in the eyes. 

“Thank you,” he says, still pressing himself against the wall.

He looks like he wants to get away from you. You oblige, walking to the door. “You can just…text me, I guess. If you need anything. When you need this again.”

When you finally do look at Toto, he seems pained. His eyebrows are knitted together. “They have not told you?” he asks. 

Your heart drops. And then it once more begins to beat too hard and too fast, like even two feet is too many away from Toto. “Told me what?” you ask. 

“We must share a room,” he says, quickly. It takes you a second to decipher; you feel like you’re playing catch-up, like when you have to translate something to English in your head. “At the next race, we will…there will only be one room.”

One room. That’s just…that’s great.

—

“Where have you been?” asks Lando, when you finally show up for practice.

“Sick,” you say. With the NDAs you’ve signed, it’s practically all you can say. Not even Zak knows, you don’t think. Just a select few team leaders who have stock excuses to spout if you ever disappear, or if Toto shows up and takes you into his arms and you drive away into the sunset together. That last one won’t happen, you know this. But it doesn’t stop you from thinking about it. You would like to be able to blame the imprint, or even the imprintee sickness. But days 1-5 are over now. You have no real excuse. 

“Because of the crash,” Lando reasons. Which doesn’t make sense, but nobody has questioned you on it. “You’ll be able to race this weekend, right?”

“Yeah. I’m all clear, and they’ve fixed the car.”

Lando sighs, relieved. “Thank God. I’ve been lonely without you.”

You have, too. Lando’s presence is alway something you’ve taken for granted. You wouldn’t say you’ve ever really been friends with any of your other teammates. But you’re friends with Lando. He’s pinned in your messages app. He invites you to stream with him, even though the two of you have yet to find a game you aren’t absolutely, tragically terrible at it. “Aww, I missed you, too, pookie,” you say, mainly because he hates that word. 

He rolls his eyes and shoves your shoulder. “You’re terrible. And American ,” he complains. But then his face likes up. “Speaking of, did you hear we’re staying at some royal siesta this weekend? With all the top-dogs? I think Mercedes stays at the Royal Siesta.”

They do. And that’s not what it’s called. You close your eyes and groan.

“What’s wrong with you?” Lando asks.

But you can only shake your head.

—

You feel strange from the moment you touch down in Austin Friday Afternoon.

Usually, you love Austin. It’s your home race, and there’s no other feeling like racing at home. But you land in Austin, and you have to drop your things off at the hotel. The same hotel as Mercedes. In the room you’re sharing with Toto. 

It’s on a different floor than McLaren or Mercedes. Lando asked why, you shrugged and said they were probably booked full. Really, it’s so you’re not caught. So nobody sees. The sneaking around would be fun, you think, if you and Toto were in a real relationship. If it were anything other than what it is. Instead, you just feel dirty. You linger in the elevator longer than anybody else at McLaren, and try to avoid their questioning stares. It feels as if each of your footsteps is somehow louder than the last as you trek down the hall, alone. The sound of your key sliding against the lock is practically a gunshot. 

You push open the door with your foot, and find Toto is already there. The room is huge. If he’d been sitting anywhere else, you probably wouldn’t have seen him. But there’s a glass dining table near the front of the suite, and Toto sits there on his computer. He stands when he sees you; at first, you think it’s some odd way of being gentleman-ly, but then he says, “Let me help,” and takes your coat from where you’d been holding it folded against your chest. Which is a pretty normal way of being gentleman-ly. 

You follow him to the closet so you can shove your suitcase in and hopefully get out before another painfully awkward interaction ensues. “Thanks,” you say, as he hangs your coat, and then lifts your suitcase up to a shelf in the closet, so it sits next to his. It’s high enough that you’ll have to pull up a chair to get it down when you need. You don’t say anything. Neither does Toto, so you add, “This is nice.”

“Better than what they usually give you, definitely,” he says. He’s smiling. He’s acting like things are normal. That’s something you can do. 

“Zak won’t know what to do with himself,” you say. “If there’s no free continental breakfast, he won’t eat.”

The conversation stays light. Fake is another word you could use for it. But it’s better than silence. And it’s better than talking about something that makes Toto uncomfortable. You're just glad that, after last time, you don’t make him uncomfortable. 

At the very least, you’re glad he’s willing to pretend. 

—

Eventually, Toto leaves for a conference, and you have to meet the trainers at the gym. It feels nice to get out of your head. Plus, by being at the gym, you’re fighting the jetlag. Even if you’re yawning at 4PM. At least you’re not asleep at 4PM. You’re being productive . You train until your brain is fuzzy and your muscles ache, and then it’s Lando’s turn. He gives you a fistbump as you cross paths, but wrinkles his nose up at the sweat, so you flip him off. You can hear his witch cackle even as you walk down the hall. It’s gone, though, once you get in the elevator.

Toto’s once more in the room when you get back. He’s wearing his glasses, so you can’t really look at him, or you’ll go crazy. You can hear him make a strangled sort of sound, though, so you do look, concerned, but he’s already standing up and walking out the door.

“I have to—” he starts, but doesn’t bother to finish. 

The door clicks shut behind him, and you’re left standing alone in the middle of a suite in the Royal Siesta or whatever the hell it’s called, confused out of your mind. 

Eventually, when you lift the bottom of your tank top to wipe the sweat off your face, you remember something Dr. Fischer had warned you of, when he called you towards the beginning of your flight. Dress professional , he had said. Like you normally do. Nothing too revealing. 

You had done your best to push that instruction out of your mind. You didn’t want to think of the implications. Or rather, you did want to think of the implications. Very badly you wanted to think of them. Too badly. Plus, you figured you wouldn't end up in anything revealing, anyway. But now, you look down at your gym clothes and wonder if they are too revealing. It’s what you had been wearing when you walked in, minus the sweatshirt. But maybe the tank top does show a lot of skin. It dips down low in the chest and hangs loose in the sides. You wouldn’t have thought anything of it before. But it’s evidently enough to drive Toto out of his own hotel room. 

Oh well. It’s too late now. You just take advantage of the empty room to take a long, hot shower. It’s maybe the nicest shower you’ve ever used. You wonder how long you’ll be in the same hotels as Toto, because this is something you could get used to. There are towels folded nicely in the bathroom, plus a tempting-looking robe, but you figure you should maybe leave that one for Toto. It is his name on file, anyway. You just wrap the towel around yourself and venture back into the main room. You try to keep some dignity and reach your suitcase without assistance, but it’s no use. You drag a chair up and climb it. Even then you have to stretch to get to the shelf, and that just seems impractical.

Of course Toto has to choose that exact moment to return from his freak out. You close your eyes and accept defeat as you hear the sound of the door opening. 

“What are you doing?” Toto asks. You think you can hear a smile in his voice. You’re glad your predicament can at least be funny. 

“Not all of us can be 6’5,” you complain.

What Toto does next, you couldn’t have even attempted to predict even if somebody paid you a million bucks to give it your best shot. He closes the door behind him, walks up to the chair you’re precariously balanced on, and pulls you into his arms, one hand sweeping underneath your knees, pressing the towel into your skin, and the other coming around your shoulders. He lifts you off the chair, holds you for a moment like you weigh nothing, and then sets you down gently. 

You wouldn’t say you have butterflies in your stomach so much as you have an entire aviary of small and large birds alike. You watch with a dry mouth as Toto reaches up himself to grab your suitcase and place it by your feet. 

“You don’t need to be 6’5,” he tells you, smiling. 

It’s hard to come up with a reply. It’s hard to think about anything but being in Toto’s arms. “Not when I’ve got you,” you say eventually, feeling dazed. Sometimes it’s like your body forgets that you’re not the one who imprinted on Toto. You shouldn’t be feeling anything at all. Especially now that you’re on the heart pills. You have literally no excuse. 

Toto laughs and pulls his own suitcase down. He grabs clothes and heads into the bathroom himself; that would’ve been smart, you think, to bring your pajamas with you when you showered. But then you wouldn’t have gotten to experience that, so. Maybe you just have to never learn your lesson. 

You change quickly, not wanting to risk Toto seeing anything, and then crawl into bed. At 5 P.M.

—

There is only one bed. Of course. Because this is supposed to encourage physical contact, that’s the whole point. You try to fall asleep before Toto joins you in the bed. Somehow, any drowsiness and jetlag you had been feeling is shunned out by the anxiety. You close your eyes and just wait, half-expecting him to set up a pillow wall in between the two of you when he finally comes to bed. 

He doesn’t. He lays down above the covers and doesn’t move the entire time it takes you to fall asleep. 

—

Saturday morning, Toto’s alarm clock goes off at 4:45 A.M.

“What the fuck,” you mutter, between blares.

“Oh,” he says. “Sorry.”

The alarm cuts off, and once the feeling of the mattress shifting subsides, you’re just barely able to fall back asleep. But then a light turns on, and you’re awake again. “Oh my god,” you groan, lifting Toto’s abandoned pillow to cover your face and shield your eyes. 

Even with the pillow shield, you can hear when Toto laughs at you. “I cannot very well get ready in the dark,” he says. And god, the morning voice is not something you can handle now, or ever. 

You press the pillow harder into your face, hoping it can knock some sense into you. It doesn’t, but it does help wake you up. “Really? I would’ve thought you did that every day.”

Another laugh, low and quiet. You’re going to go crazy. You don’t know how you’ll make it through the next three days. “You are not nice in the mornings,” Toto says. He sounds far away. You think maybe he’s in the bathroom, getting ready. But that means he’s left the door open to talk to you, and that’s too domestic to bear thinking about.

“This does not count as morning,” you say, glancing at the clock. 4:47. What the fuck. “Do you always wake up this early for races?”

You hear the buzz of a toothbrush start up. “Everybody at Mercedes does,” Toto says, the words misshapen around the toothbrush

“Maybe this imprint is a good thing, then,” you say, without thinking. You freeze when the words process, and stare up at the ceiling with bated breath. 

Toto is quiet long enough that you think he’s just going to ignore you. But then you hear him spit, and he asks, “What?”

“It means I'll never work at Mercedes,” you begin to explain, hoping that even if the joke didn’t land, it will still make sense out loud and not just in your sleep-addled mind. “And have to wake up to that.”

“I did not realize you still wanted that,” Toto says, slowly. He steps out of the bathroom, but you don’t look at him. You can see him in the way his silhouette blocks the light. 

“Duh,” you scoff. “Everybody wants to drive for you.” 

“For the team, you mean.”

And god . You shouldn’t be allowed to talk before six o’clock; clearly, you can’t be trusted with rational thought this early in the morning. “I guess I don't really care about the team,” you say, because again: no rational thoughts. “That’s not—I mean, I guess that’s not really what it was about, towards the end there.”

Toto’s voice is quiet in the dimly lit room. “Then what was it about?” he asks.

The realization hits you all at once. You didn’t care about driving for Toto. You cared about impressing him. You didn’t care about getting a contract. You cared about getting on his good side. You didn’t care about being a good driver. You cared about being good. “I just wanted you to like me,” you choke. You’re glad the only light on is in the bathroom. Maybe it means Toto cannot see how mortified you are. You bite down on your tongue, hoping it will prevent you from saying any more. 

“Well, you can check that off the list,” Toto says, wry. Guilt rises up in your throat to mingle with the embarrassment, until you feel like you’re going to puke. “I like you quite a lot.”

You think, maybe, in another context, it would be sweet. Instead, you want to cry. You tried too hard, Pushed too far. Wanted too much. And now Toto is paying for it, now he’s imprinted on you and has to deal with you and your stupid complex bond. Maybe that’s the reason you suddenly feel like you’re going to explode. Maybe it’s because that’s what Toto feels like. 

“I have to leave soon,” Toto says. He’s standing next to the bed now, backlit, the yellow light like a halo. “Do you mind if we—before–”

It is not difficult to reason out what he is trying to say. He was very straightforward with his words, before the imprint. But he’s still straightforward now, in different ways. He lifts a hand, and you know he means he wants to touch. You nod, still not trusting yourself for words, and he brushes his hand over your forehead, swiping your hair away. His fingers trail down your cheek, featherlight, until he eventually rests his hand on the side of your face, like he’s holding it. You have to close your eyes. He looks fond again. You miss when it was real. 

You fall asleep again, with his thumb tracing back and forth over your cheekbone. You think you hear him mutter something at some point, but you’re too far gone to hear it. 

—

Before you leave, you have to get on a call with Dr. Fischer. 

“Everything is going alright?” he asks, with a pen and a notepad on hand, like he’s your psychiatrist. You think a psychiatrist might be more helpful at this point, in all honesty. But you digress. 

“Yes,” you answer. It sounds stilted, even though technically speaking, it’s true. With the imprint, everything is fine. “The pills are working. The…contact is helping.”

He nods and jots down a few notes. You imagine him writing, groundbreaking: touching eases imprintee sickness, and wince. “You might find that, with added stress this weekend, you’ll need more of that contact. Both of you. So don’t try and fight it.”

You can’t make any promises that Toto won’t literally run away if you ever try to initiate anything. Still, you smile and say, “Got it.”

He looks at his notes, but doesn’t write anything down. 

—

The day progresses pretty normally, all things considered. 

Early on, you meet with Syd to discuss renewing your McLaren contract. It stings, but no more than it did when you thought you weren’t getting a contract at all. And Zak talks with you about making changes to the car, so like. At least he’s trying. 

You fool around with Lando in an interview for some streaming service or another. It’s not Netflix, because they’re busy with Alpha Tauri (something you refuse to be bitter about) but the interviewers are still respectful yet funny—well suited for you and Lando. 

In the garage, before qualifying, you notice a new face. You ask one of the engineers, and he tells you that your head mechanic got imprinted on Wednesday night, hence her boyfriend’s presence.

“Is she okay to be working today?” you ask, remembering how dazed and distracted you’d been after Toto.

The engineer makes a face at you. “She’s fine,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “She can’t feel a thing.”

Right , you think. At that, you can’t stop yourself from being bitter. For most people, imprints aren’t even that big of a deal. They don’t require a doctor, and they don’t make you sick and lonely. Your mechanic is fine. Of course. Across the pit lane, your eyes automatically try to find Toto. He’s already watching you, mouth and eyebrows pressed into lines. When your eyes meet, he pulls down the mic of his headset and turns around.

You wonder if he’s okay. You wonder if he’s jealous. You distance yourself from the engineer, just in case. 

—

Qualifying is fine. P7. Not great, but not bad. There’s a chance for you and Lando to snag a podium on Sunday, if everything goes to plan. When you climb out of the car, you suddenly feel drowsy. Hot and cold and sweaty. Somebody hands you a water bottle, and you take it, gratefully. Syd leads you through the swarm of reporters, and you answer their questions on autopilot, thinking about getting back to the hotel and passing out. Thinking about Toto touching you again.

You’re starting to hate every time Dr. Fischer is right about something.

When you get back to the hotel room, there’s food in your hands. Some kind of bowl from some restaurant or another. You don’t remember who gave it to you, but you scarf it down like you haven’t eaten all day, and then fall into bed still in your clothes. 

You want to sleep but you can’t. There’s this feeling in your chest like something is missing. Three guesses as to what.

—

It’s dark when Toto gets in. 

You’ve been laying face-down on the bed for what feels like hours. Too tired to do anything but too anxious to sleep. You don’t say anything as Toto’s footsteps cross the room. You expect him not to, either. You need to stop expecting things.

Toto clears his throat, like he thinks you’re asleep. “You should not leave those on,” he says, referring to your shoes, which you hadn’t even realized were still on. 

You go to pull yourself up with a start when Toto begins to untie your sneakers himself. “You don’t have to do that—”

“I do,” he says, pulling off your left shoe. It hits the floor with a thunk. “I want—I have to take care of you.”

You fall back onto the bed, face smushed into the pillow. He has to. Because of the imprint. Now you feel tired, anxious, and guilty. “Sorry,” you say, as Toto removes your other shoe.

He makes a funny sound that can’t decide if it wants to be a laugh or a hum. “It’s not your fault,” he says, and you groan into your pillow. He doesn’t even know. You practically told him this morning that you want him so bad you’ve messed up something as ancient and instinctual as an imprint. And he doesn’t even know. 

“Congrats on pole,” you tell him, instead of apologizing again, or running your mouth, or asking him to take off all his clothes and touch you. 

The mattress dips beside you, so you turn your head to face him, and to breathe better. He’s sitting up, leaning against the headboard. He’s wearing a stupid button up and stupid slacks and you try not to roll your eyes. You don’t even know why you care. You just always feel so out of place. You think maybe you want to look like you belong with him. You want it to seem like, if somebody were to walk into this hotel room, that the two of you were together. You’re sharing a bed, and it still looks like you’re barely even coworkers.

“Seventh is not so bad,” he says, reading into the resentful tone you hadn’t even intended to have. “You’ve gotten higher from worse positions.”

You shrug, but being on your stomach in bed probably just makes it look like a spasm. You don’t know why you mentioned it in the first place; it’s the last thing you want to talk about right now. You want to ask him if he feels off. You want to tell him you wouldn’t mind if he, again, took off all his clothes and touched you. You’re not sure why that vision can’t seem to leave your mind. 

Toto is looking at you, and biting the inside of his cheek, and you want to shake him and scream, just say it, say whatever it is . But you don’t need to take such drastic measures. You just frown, and that is enough to have him saying, “I think we shouldn’t go all of tomorrow without seeing each other.”

He puts a hand on top of your own. Finally , you think. Thank God , you think. More , you think. 

Outwardly, you just nod. Toto takes it as permission to wind your fingers together, even though it’s permission to do much, much more. 

—

That’s how you fall asleep, in your street clothes, above the covers, holding Toto’s hand. 

But at 4:45AM when Toto’s alarm goes off, you find that your jeans are gone, the blankets are completely thrown off the bed, and worst/best/most life-changing of all, your leg is thrown over Toto’s hips, your hand is resting on his bare (bare!!!!!!) chest, and your head is tucked into the crook of his neck.

If you try, you can remember, hazily, waking up to help Toto get your jeans down past your hips. You remember seeing him in his boxers and having to squeeze your eyes shut and roll over. You remember him turning the lights off and climbing back into bed, and yes, vaguely, you do remember deciding that hand-holding wasn’t going to cut it. 

You really need to stop making decisions when you’re tired. 

Toto turns off the alarm. In the light of his phone, you can see him look down at you, sleepy and maybe a little confused. But he doesn’t push you away. And you’re not ready to give this up yet. You let your head fall back down and close your eyes. Your breathing has synced with Toto’s in your sleep. You wonder if your hearts are beating to the same rhythm as well.

“You’re going to make me fall back asleep,” Toto says. Morning voice. Ugh. 

“Where could you possibly need to be before the sun is up?” you ask, mouth moving against his skin. It’s very intimate, suddenly. You never want it to end. 

Toto lets out an amused exhale, and says nothing, relenting. His hand comes to rest on the small of your back, like it did that first day, standing against the wall in his hotel room. You will it to move lower, but it doesn’t. You suppose you can’t be upset that he’s so respectful. But you also can’t help yourself from wanting. 

Toto indulges you for about five minutes, but then his hand disappears, the lamp flicks on, and he says, “I really do have to get up.”

“Okay,” you say, and then, because it’s not yet 5AM, and because your bare skin is touching Toto’s, and because you’re crazy, actually psychotic, that’s the only explanation, you lift your head and kiss him.

You pull back with a gasp the instant you realize what you’ve done, and your heart begins to jackhammer in your chest, pills be damned. A million words try to escape through your mouth, but you slap a hand over your face before you can say anything. Nothing you could say would explain it, or make it better. You want to close your eyes so you don’t have to look at Toto, but you’re too terrified, too frozen to do anything but stare. 

Toto’s eyes are wide and fixed on you. He lifts his own hand to cover the one already on your mouth, like he, too, doesn’t want you to say anything. “That,” he says, breathing heavily. “You—” He closes his eyes, appearing to brace himself. When he opens them again, he asks, point-blank, “Did you do that because of the imprint?”

You realize in that moment, that you could nod, and the whole thing would be forgotten. You could nod and the two of you would go about your day like nothing happened. You would never speak of it again. The imprint would fade. You’d never share a hotel room again, and you’d never drive for Mercedes, and nothing would ever be the same. 

Toto stares.

You shake your head.

Something passes through his face. Hope, like the break of day. “Then why?” he asks, all raspy.

You pull his hand away from your mouth, and drop your own hand down. Instead of answering, though, because you know by now you can’t be trusted with words around him, you just kiss him again. And again. And again, and then he’s laughing, and he takes your face in his hands, and it’s everything you’ve wanted since that first meeting, since he smiled at you and challenged you to beat Red Bull over Bahraini fast food. 

You wish you had the mind to do this back then, before you let the wanting get so far. Before Toto imprinted on you when you still thought you just wanted to drive for him. You want to do many things for him. Drive is near the bottom of the list. You dig a palm into the mattress on either side of his hips so you can lift yourself up to straddle him—he groans and bites your bottom lip, and this is something you won't be able to forget, ever. You’ll be eighty years old thinking about Toto groaning beneath you. 

“ Scheiß ,” he says against you. You don’t know what it means, but you think you can reason it out. He pulls away and you try to chase him, but he stops you with his hands on your jaw. “It is race day,” he says, wide-eyed. “I have to—we have to—”

“I know,” you complain, throwing your head back. He has to leave, because he works for Mercedes and they’re all crazy. You have to go back to sleep, or else you’ll probably crash your car and yell at Zak and be generally unpleasant. But it’s hard to see reason when Toto is warm and firm underneath you, and you know what it feels like to kiss him. 

Toto kisses you again. It’s softer now, and you think maybe he is trying to de-escalate. But as long as you’re in bed with him, you’re never going to want to leave. So you sigh, put-upon, and swing your leg up and over him, standing up and stretching. You even walk to the window, just so you’re not tempted to go back. 

“After the race,” Toto says, sounding determined. “I will come back here, if you—”

“Yes,” you say, emphatically, partly because you don’t want him to have any doubt, but also partly because your willpower is not that strong, and if he keeps talking to you in nothing but his boxers, you won’t ever make your way to the track today. “Now go eat your raw eggs, or whatever it is you guys do.”

Toto laughs, and then he’s standing up, and then he’s kissing you again, and it’s so sweet that the fucking aviary is back in your stomach, and you feel weak in the knees. “You are perfect,” he says.

It’s not true, but it doesn’t hurt to hear it.

—

Your skin buzzes with excitement as you walk down the paddock. 

You feel lighter than you have in weeks. You woke up in bed with Toto. You kissed him goodbye. You get to race tonight, and then you get to go back to Toto. You resolve to fight tooth and nail for a podium tonight, because then you’ll have something to celebrate, and while you can’t predict exactly what that may entail, you sure can dream.

There’s croissants and orange juice in the McLaren hub. They’re not for you, but Lando sneaks one for each of you anyway, and the two of you eat them hidden in a corner together. You tell Lando that you and Zak have been talking about next year’s car, and he squeals and bounces up and down. That gets the two of you caught, and then you have to have a meeting with the nutritionist team, and it’s a whole thing. 

But whatever. The croissant is worth it, and by the time you and Lando manage to wriggle your way out of the meeting, you get to go meet Toto for five whole minutes of Mercedes and Dr. Fischer-sanctioned physical contact. 

“Funny seeing you here,” you say, when you get to the room Toto’s waiting for you in.

You wince as the words come out of your mouth. But Toto has always made you stupid, so he doesn’t even react to the cheesy line. “It is like I am grounded,” Toto says, as you close the door behind you. “It is 11:45, and they all say, Toto , you cannot keep working now. ”

He pitches his voice to make it sound like he’s talking to a kid. The imagery is funny, the big bad Toto Wolff getting sent to time out so you can come up here and hug him for five minutes. “Well, why would you want to work, when you could be here with me?” you ask, hands on your hips. 

It’s a joke, but Toto tilts his head, like he concedes. “For only five minutes is not enough,” he complains. 

He takes your hand, and then your other hand, and pulls you towards him so every part of you that could be touching him is touching him. Five minutes isn't enough, but you’ll have to make it work.

—

It’s a 1-2 win for McLaren, for the first time for you or Lando. 

Everything seems to pass by in a blur: the podium, the hug with Zak, his emphatic thank you , the press meetings as you leave the paddock. They ask if you’ve signed for McLaren. You smile and say, you’ll see soon enough , and in the car ride back to the hotel, you see that Zak’s confirmed it in an interview and the McLaren twitter has made an official announcement. 

This isn’t where you wanted to be a year ago, a month ago, a week ago. But you can’t see yourself anywhere else. Lando’s your teammate for another two seasons at least. You and Toto are both ditching any parties you’ve been invited to so you can get back to the hotel room, get back to each other, and do God knows what. 

It’s a pretty good place to be, all things considered. 

—

Toto’s already there when you finally get back to the hotel. He probably had less reporters begging him for a quote, less fans tripping over themselves for autographs, and less mechanics tackling him every five feet. Still plenty, of course. But less. 

He grins at you as you walk up to him. He doesn’t step back, or get tense anymore. The whole time you thought he’d been uncomfortable because of you. You thought your feelings were too obvious and he’d wanted to keep his distance. You’ve never been too good at thinking. 

“I didn’t have time to get wine,” Toto says, and you remember what he’d said before, about sharing a bottle every time you won. That night seems like a lifetime ago. In reality, it’s hardly even been a month. 

“We don’t need wine,” you tell him. 

There are no sorrows to drown this time. For once in your life, everything is going right, and Toto’s in front of you, looking exhilarated and happy, and the only thing there is to do is kiss him. So you do. It’s harder, when you’re both standing up, because he’s a foot taller than you, but you manage. He lifts one hand to cup your face, and the other snakes down to rest on the small of your back again, except this time, he actually does inch lower, and then he’s squeezing your ass, and Jesus Christ . This is not something you want to do standing up. 

Toto, evidently, is thinking the same thing. He pulls back to ask you, “What do you want?” and you don’t have the mental capacity to answer anything other than the truth:

“Everything,” you tell him. “Whatever you want.” He kisses you again, so you add, “Maybe something having to do with the bed.”

You can feel him smile against your mouth. “Yes,” he says. “The bed.”

So you walk him backwards towards the bed, until eventually the both of you are falling together, landing with an oof . You want so much. Having Toto beneath you is like having the world at your fingertips. You aren’t sure what to do first. After a moment’s contemplation, you decide to start with unbuttoning his shirt, pulling it out from where it’s tucked into his belt with gusto. When he laughs, you feel it in the bottom of your stomach. When he leans back to give you space to work, you’re filled with a deep-seated want.

It only increases tenfold when you can finally push his shirt off his shoulders. At that point, he has to help you, but he looks you dead in the eyes as he pulls the shirt off and discards it. It’s terrible. You want more. “This does not feel fair,” Toto says, after he’s let you stare at him for an indulgent amount of time. 

You know what he’s asking. So you pull your own shirt off above your head before you have the time to feel insecure about it, and you let him look at you the same way he let you, resisting the urge to cross your arms, or to cover yourself. “Beautiful,” he says, sliding a hand over your stomach to rest on your hip. 

“Are you kidding me?” you ask, the words pulled out of you by a force beyond your control. “Look at you. You’re the hottest guy I’ve ever seen.”

The lighting in the hotel isn’t as good as you would expect for The Ritz. But it’s bright enough that you can see a flush rise in Toto’s cheeks. “Better than the engineer you were with Saturday?” he asks, quiet. 

It takes you a second to even remember what he’s referring to. When you do, though, you feel validated. You knew he was jealous. You tell him as much. 

“Of course I was jealous,” he says. “I have imprinted on you. I am jealous when you talk to Zak .”

And that’d be pretty amusing, even if his face didn’t go all grim and serious. You kiss him so he’ll stop thinking about it. “Sure, blame it all on the imprint,” you giggle. “I promise you’ve got nothing to be jealous of.”

He’s understandably distracted by the kiss, though, and leans in to kiss you again. Very one track mind. You can’t complain though, not when he lets himself fall flat on the bed, pulling you down with him. He reaches behind you to unclasp your bra, something he does with too much skill, in your opinion. But it means he can move his mouth to your jaw, trail down your neck, and have a destination in mind. When he presses a kiss to the top of your breast, your mind short-circuits. His lips against your skin feel white hot, and after a moment of him laving kisses to your tits, you have to pull him away by his hair. If you don’t get to the main event soon, you’re going to go crazy. You’ve wanted this for so long, and you can’t be made to wait any longer. 

“Toto,” you say, in your best attempt to be somber— sober —and not desperate. “Do you have a condom?”

He inhales sharply. “Yes,” he answers, and digs around for his procket for a moment before presenting one. Then he says, sounding mortified, “I had to ask Lewis .”

“Jesus Christ,” you mutter, because the thought of Toto Wolff, Mercedes team principal, being so desperate that he had to ask Lewis Hamilton for a condom is going to literally kill you. Imprintee sickness be damned, trying to have sex with Toto is what's going to finally do you in. “You want it bad.”

He makes a face. “And you do not?”

“No, no, I do,” you assure, nodding your head a bit frantically. “Trust me, I want . I’ve wanted this for—Jesus, I’ve wanted it for a while.”

Toto doesn’t ask you to elaborate, for which you're grateful, because you’re not sure you’d be able to put an exact number to how long your desire has lasted. Looking back now, it seems as though you’ve always wanted him. But you know there was a time when that wasn’t true. You just can’t remember it. Can’t imagine it. The idea of not wanting Toto is preposterous. 

“Good,” says Toto, using one hand to unfasten his belt. You have to look him in the eyes, because that is not something you can handle right now. “Then we can be done waiting.”

It takes some maneuvering before you can both be rid of your clothes—and a lot of mental pep talks, on your end, but you refuse to be insecure in front of him when he clearly wants you so bad. Eventually, though, you’re both laid out in front of each other, bare. 

He is—he’s perfect. Of course. Just as you would’ve imagined him, if you ever let yourself think about it. And he’s looking at you with pupils blown big and black, and it’s almost too much. Almost. 

“Can I touch you?” he asks, his hands curling into loose fists at his sides, like he expects you to say no. 

God. You could never say no to him. “Yeah,” you say, and you mean it to be a little cocky, mean to imply of course you can touch me . Instead, it comes out desperate. And that’s true, too. 

Toto pulls you closer to him. You let yourself be moved the way he wishes, go willingly as he lays you flat, torso supported by the pillows. He looks at you slowly, like he wants to memorize each nook and cranny. You want to tell him he doesn’t have to. Any time he wants to see, you’ll let him. But you just like the fact that he’s looking at you. 

“Toto,” you say, when the looking stretches out a little too long. 

He smiles, and hushes you with a kiss. An effective method, you’ll admit. But it's what comes with the kiss that really has you going quiet. He moves on from looking and finally touches. He drags his fingers up your stomach, leaving goosebumps in his wake, to take one of your breasts in his hand. When he squeezes, it’s not hard enough to hurt, but it’s certainly hard enough to feel. You feel your cheeks heat, and know the flush must spread to where Toto’s hand is, too. It’s hard to comprehend that he’s actually touching you like this. He actually wants you like this. Who would’ve thought?

“You need to tell me if you don’t like something,” Toto says, and you’re going to ask what he means, but then his hand moves from your breast all the way down down down so he can run his fingers through your folds. You’re embarrassingly wet. The glide is easy. 

“Oh my god,” you say, throwing your head back.

Toto smiles. His teeth are so white. It’s unfair. “Or if you do like something,” he concedes. 

You think you’d like anything he did right now. But all he does is rub light circles over your clit with his thumb, and bite a mark into your neck. That’s easy to like. That, you may like too much. His hand on you is nearly hypnotic. You push your hips up, looking for more, but he uses his other hand to press them back down into the mattress. He doesn’t say, you’ll take what I give , but he might as well. The effect is the same: you, groaning, throwing an arm over your face and feeling like you’re losing your mind. 

“I want to see you,” Toto says, effectively driving you even crazier. 

You comply and throw your hand away from your face, instead squeezing the sheets in your hands. “I want more ,” you counter. You recognize that it sounds whiney, so you bite your lip to stop yourself from saying anything else.

“Oh, do you?” Toto asks. It’s taunting, but before you can say anything—retort or beg or cry—he has a finger inside of you , rubbing slowly back and forth on your walls, placating. 

You know you must make a sound, but your brain does you the favor of removing that from your consciousness. 

Toto hears it, though, and he kisses the spot on your neck he was biting, and says, by your ear, “You’re doing so well.”

You groan and squeeze your eyes shut. “You have to—” you start, but then Toto adds another finger and begins to work them slowly in and out of you, and your ability to form rational thoughts dwindles by quite a large margin. 

“I have to what?” Toto asks, smug. He’s pretending he can’t see the effect he’s having on you, which in turn only makes you more desperate. 

“You have to go faster,” you tell him. “I’ll cum if you—I don’t want—I want to with you in me .” And then, because you can predict him saying, I am in you , you clarify: “With your dick. I want to cum with your dick in me.”

Toto makes a sound, low and long, and then you have to watch as he tears open the condom wrapper with his teeth. You have to watch that, and not cum on the spot. It’s not his fault, though, because his other hand is busy fingering you open, picking up speed, getting impatient. Lights out and away we go , you think. 

“Is it—” Toto starts. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” you groan, throwing your head back. “ Been ready, just–just get on with it, please—”

“Okay, okay,” Toto interrupts, laughing. He leans down to kiss you, and maybe to distract you from how he has to pull his fingers out of you, leaving you cold and empty. He shifts above you, putting the condom on, you assume. And then. Well. And then, you don’t feel so empty anymore.

It is—a lot. You knew it would be, when you first saw him naked. His dick is, objectively-speaking, big. Like the rest of him, like his hands and his shoulders, and he’s 6’5, so really, it’s a proportional dick. But it’s still big, and as he presses into you, you feel like you’re being split open, feel like every part of you is being moved to make room, to accommodate. You feel full .

“Are you alright?” Toto asks, pushing your hair out of your face. 

It’s sort of hard to breathe. You take measured breaths, in and out, and say, strained, “Yes. Just— ah —just slowly. Maybe.”

Toto kisses your forehead. It’s sweet. “Of course,” he says.

He gives you a moment to adjust, and it’s—it’s a lot but it’s good, really good. He pulls out minutely and you squirm. He pushes back in and you gasp. Your hands are cramping from how hard they're digging into the sheets. But you don’t even mind.

It’s not like you’re some blushing virgin. Not even close. But Toto inside you is like—for lack of better word—a revelation. It might as well be the first time. It’s ruined you, that’s for sure. You’ll never be able to have anybody else. You’ll always be thinking about this: Toto, on top of you, inside of you, covering you completely. Every inch of skin. You bet the imprint is singing right now. This has to sate it far better than hand-holding and awkward, prolonged hugging. It better never ask for anything from the two of you ever again. This should be the cure-all to imprintee sickness. 

“You can go—faster,” you say, straining to get it all out in one go. 

It’s like a dam breaks. Like Toto had been waiting for you to say those words. He props himself up with a hand by your head. It toys with pulling at your hair, but doesn’t actually. You’re not sure you’d mind if it did, especially not when he begins to fuck you in earnest. 

“ Scheiß,” he says, after a few hot, heavy moments and again, you don’t know the meaning, but you can gather the sentiment. “You feel so good, mein kleine , I cannot believe it.”

You make a sound and it’s embarrassing. Purely humiliating. But it makes Toto close his eyes and groan and do this rolling thing with his hips that has you gasping, throwing your head back, an inch away from the edge. “Oh my god,” you say, high and reedy. “Again, please, I’m gonna—”

Toto presses his face against yours, foreheads knocking together. “Fuck,” he says, and hey, that’s one you know! “Yes, go on,” he encourages, and rolls his hips again, and again, and you were gone from the second you woke up that morning and saw him in nothing but his boxers. You were gone when you kissed him, and when he kissed you. And you were probably gone long, long before that. 

Toto kisses your neck, and then your jaw, and then he takes your mouth in something that feels more like bite than kiss . You think that’s what does it for you. His mouth on your own, something you’ve wanted for so long. Something you’ve dreamed about him wanting. And here he is, doing that and so much more. He thrusts in again, and you cum, every muscle in your body tensing, every thought in your brain whiting out, til all you can think of is Toto; the two of you, connected completely.

The condom means you can’t feel it when Toto cums, but he makes a noise kind of like a wounded animal, and drops his head down, and you know. He pulls out, looking spent, and there’s a moment where you feel empty and alone, but then Toto falls on top of you, all his weight pressing you into the mattress, and it’s perfect. You could die like this, and you’d be happy. Died doing what she loved , your gravestone would say. 

“We will clean later,” Toto says, deciding for the both of you. 

You wholeheartedly agree.

—

Before summer break starts, you have to shoot promotional videos that can be sporadically posted on Instagram to keep fans hype.

You sit across from Lando in the media room, both decked out in McLaren orange—or papaya , as Zak would insist—when he asks you, “Can you finally tell me what happened with Mercedes now?”

And, well. Your future is secure, both in terms of a contract and in terms of Toto. So yeah. You think you can.

“Do you remember the Alpha Tauri crash?” you ask.

Lando nods.

“Actually, scratch that. Do you remember Bahrain?”