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The thing about this summer was, and Max was sure no one would disagree with him on this, it was too damn hot.
Typically, Austria in the summer meant cool hills and the drifts of clouds across verdant landscapes. The Alps were a large, circular loom, and their cars were the shuttles that darted to and fro, carrying threads of red and turquoise and orange and blue to weave the tapestry that was their race. Of course, this kind of florid description could not have possibly come from his own brain—Max had merely overheard a conversation between Charles and George a few years back, and out of all of them on the grid, only Charles could have come up with this kind of romantic nonsense. But it was still memorable enough that the imagery stuck around, especially the way George’s eyes had lighted up with interest when he’d heard it and had reached over to pat Charles on the shoulder while Max looked on with a stone in his stomach.
They weren’t friends then. They probably still weren’t friends now.
But at least they were something—or so Max liked to tell himself.
He was sweating buckets in the paddock, but this wasn’t something Max wanted to concern himself with. The standard cooling vest aggravated him in ways he could not fully describe, and in any case, heat or not, rain or shine, he was still going to give that car his all. He was going to deliver, especially with the upgrades package they’d got. He was going to—
Go straight into the wall, apparently.
The one thing still on his mind, after the world settled from a roar to a high-pitched, low frequency hum between his ears, was that he should have taken up the offer of that damn cooling vest, after all, with the sun bearing down on him and the shutter of sunlight flashing across his eyes. For a moment, as his vision blurred from the impact, he swore he could see the thread stretching from his fingers across the gravel and onto the track, where George’s W17 whizzed past in a shock of turquoise.
It stretched and stretched, and did not sever.
He heard about it later, how qualifying had gone for George. George’s thread, it seemed, had gone round and round, neatly wefted into the silhouette of victory, whereas his own had snapped against a barrier. And despite the outrage everyone seemed consumed in, the truth was Max wasn’t angry about it. How could he be, when he would have done the exact same thing and did, and wasn’t that what they were all here for, in this loom, the shutters of their cars zipping for a reason, and that reason was the Grand Prix and the championship and the sweetness of victory so tantalizing he could taste it on the tip of his tongue.
“That would be blood in your mouth, mate,” Lando said sympathetically. “You bit your tongue?”
Charles and Lando had checked in on him shortly after qualifying ended. It was nice, Max thought, to know they cared, though he wasn’t quite sure what to make of the niggling feeling in the back of his mind that their presence made another absence much more obvious. They stayed for a while in the Red Bull motorhome while Max stared at the ceiling and complied with instructions from the team doctor to monitor for a concussion.
“Nicked it on my teeth,” he said, frowning at the display as he watched the replay of George’s pole lap. “It’s fine.”
Charles made a gesture toward the screen. “Hell of a lap, if only it wasn’t on your yellow flag.”
“It was a single yellow,” Max only said. Charles was sore, he understood, from losing out on pole. His own knees ached—the natural conclusion of being thrown against a barrier at 300 kilometers per hour. Absently, he squeezed one knee, teeth gritting as the pain jolted through him. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Oh, we’re defending George now?” Charles laughed. “Is the divorce off again? Sorry, I thought I saw you flip him off yesterday.”
Max didn’t bother responding, and was in any case saved by Lando’s big mouth. “Legally? No. Morally?” Lando had his arms crossed and his eyebrows raised. He didn’t even know why he allowed Lando in to begin with, the instigator. “Hm. Anyways, I guess it doesn’t matter now. The stewards agreed with him.”
“It’s in the rule book. You might want to read it sometime.” Max shrugged.
“But who does that, mate, when someone’s in the wall and it’s flashing yellow. Single or double, it takes just a split second to make a decision. And that—that was cold.”
“Me, mate,” Max deadpanned. Because he had no leg to stand on when Imola 2022 happened and he had coasted through Albon’s yellow flag to pole. Lando had the grace to look sheepish and scratch his head, while Charles simply lifted a corner of his mouth and crossed his arms. The two of them shared a glance. Max felt himself losing patience, and the possible concussion didn’t help. “Don’t you two have somewhere else to be?”
Turned out they did. When Max was alone again, he flipped his phone over, expecting—something. But among all the notifications that popped up like a swarm of mosquitos in the summer heat, none of them seemed to deliver the message he wanted to see. As if he had tugged on his side of the thread and found it completely slack, the other end untethered.
And it seemed that that, more than anything, heralded a losing race Max didn’t even know had already started.
George arrived with no fanfare and no announcement, a far cry from how he liked to time his public entrances. It was a new development this year; with how known their usual accommodations in Spielberg had become, the team had decided to stay trackside in the motorhome rather than heading to the Steirerschösssl. It was probably the only reason George was able to get to his door almost completely undetected by the press, which, now that Max thought about it, was an unconscious decision on someone’s part, and he was simply going to ignore said person’s identity at the moment, post-crash confusion and all.
“Max,” he heard through the door. “Open up, come on.”
It was late evening; he had no idea if there were still others in the motorhome. Isack was probably out with the younger crowd. George had taken his sweet time getting here, Max thought with no particular feeling about it. The air conditioning was on full blast. He lay on the bed for a while longer, one arm resting on his forehead, and blinked as the turquoise thread made its desperate hurtle in his mind’s eye around Turn 9.
“Max!” George knocked again, louder this time. “Max, don’t leave me out here.”
“Or what?” He didn’t bother to put on trousers. Max dragged himself upright, still only in his underpants, and unlatched the door before George could make even more of a scene. It probably wasn’t that strange, people checking in on him post-crash, but there were certainly plenty of eyes on the dynamics around the paddock. Max understood the game more than most believed he did, and knew in no uncertain terms that the presence of George Russell in the residential Red Bull motorhome was catnip to the gossip columns.
And if he had to be very honest with himself, the moment he saw George’s face looking hopefully down at his, Max felt something unclench in his stomach, which was frankly absurd.
George had brought something with him. In a delirious moment, Max had imagined a bouquet of summer flowers, endless sprigs of blue forget-me-nots or white edelweiss, and immediately slapped himself awake mentally. They weren’t like that. They showed up on race weekends in each other’s room, gave what they could of their presence, and left behind no trace. This time was no exception; George sauntered over to the coffee table and plopped a questionable greenish glass container on top, then stood in the middle of the room like an overgrown gazelle with massive bug eyes and stared down at Max as if he was deciding whether or not to graze on Max’s hair.
“No,” Max found himself saying, then blinked. George’s brows knitted. “I mean, hey.”
George’s tone was soft, almost tentative. Max couldn’t tell if it was concern or guilt, which meant he couldn’t decide how to feel about it. “How are you? God, it’s freezing in here.”
“Good. Just resting.”
George rubbed his arms, bare beneath the short-sleeve team kit. He had looked ridiculous in his cooling jacket earlier today, Max remembered, and wondered where that jacket had gone. “About today—”
“Are you here to apologize?”
That immediately earned him an expression that Max had seen often on George’s face but was usually not directed at him, a kind of nose twitch and pout that suggested he considered the question egregiously stupid. He found that he didn’t enjoy seeing it turned on him now. “Apologize about what?”
Right. There was nothing to apologize for because George didn’t do anything wrong, as he himself had asserted. Which was why Max could not believe how angry he felt all of a sudden, how George had brushed it all off as if nothing had happened and everything was above board.
The truth was, in the last three weeks, they’d barely spoken at all. After Monaco, after the stars and the cormorants and the ocean waves, they’d returned to their lives, and Max didn’t know what was going on with George, but for his part, he’d turned to the sim and drowned out the noise of the world. George had not checked in again until Barcelona, and even that was just a quick handshake on media day for the cameras to feast on.
He hated it. He hated the silence and the absence. And he hated how good George looked in his room, the lightness of his expression, as if the pole position had lifted some weight off his shoulders, his spine pulled more taut as the shuttle weaved together the destiny of his Austrian Grand Prix.
God, but he probably did have a concussion, the way his mind was going.
“You’re mad at me,” George said. He sank into the couch, arms and legs crossed. Max found himself drawing closer, but unable to settle. It didn’t make sense, the way George brought out these feelings in him. Logically, rationally, Max understood that there was absolutely nothing George had done wrong. But.
“What about?”
“You tell me, Max.” The cheerful, composed George who had charmed the post-qualifying interviews was nowhere to be seen. Around him, George let this face show—the clouds that came over his expression, the stifling heat before a storm, the unhappiness that always seemed pointed at Max, its favorite target, like lightning finding its rod. “Is this about the yellow flag?”
“No.” He wasn’t lying; it wasn’t really about the yellow flag. Except it was, in a way, but nothing Max could string into a coherent sentence. His head ached. Slowly, he made his way to the bed, wincing as his knees protested the change in position.
It didn’t escape George’s notice. “Where does it hurt?”
“My knees.” There was no point in denying it. Max looked away, feeling his throat completely drying up as the words were dredged out of him. “You didn’t text.”
“I came.” George still sounded clipped, but the anger seemed to be deflating slowly. “I never text, you know that.”
“Yeah, I do know that, actually, and why is that?” This wasn’t new, and in the end, it all came down to these little things. George didn’t text him, didn’t follow him on social media, pretended as if there was absolutely nothing going on between them to the press, and Max—what, Max just kept on looking at George and lighting up when George was in his vicinity and the cameras loved to capture those gazes and writing think pieces about them, not knowing just how close they came to the truth of it. And he suddenly found it so pathetic, this dynamic he tried to pretend wasn’t happening, but there was the crash and the wall and he had gone a whole afternoon waiting for a message that never came, and all anyone could talk to him about was George Russell.
And his knees hurt. He focused on the pain, letting it ground him as his head swam.
“Are we going to do this now?” George asked, looking wounded as if Max was the one who had forced him into the wall instead. “I had a team event, so I couldn’t check in right away. I’m sorry, Max. Is that what you wanted to hear? I really am sorry. I knew you weren’t hurt—I saw your interview. But I should have checked in sooner. That wasn’t done.”
“You know this isn’t about that, princess.” It came out less fond, more curt, and Max meant it that way. “But whatever. Thanks for checking in. I’m in one piece, so you can go back to your hotel now.”
In all the time they had known each other, it was always George who decided when to leave, when they were done, when enough was enough and too much was too much, and Max had fought him until he couldn’t anymore. But Max had never been the one to send George away. George’s eyes seemed to suck in all the dim light of the room, a snare. “Max, you know what the deal is.”
“I really don’t, schat.” He was exhausted, the accumulation of months and years of this, wanting something that had been held just above his head like bunching grapes, but out of reach no matter how high he jumped. George seemed to be communicating something with him through those bulbous eyes, his expression flat, but Max decided that if George wasn’t going to actually say it out loud, then he didn’t have to acknowledge it either. “You brought something.”
George glanced at the glass container, lips pressed into a thin line. “It’s your split pea soup. I thought you would want something easy to eat.”
Snert was not exactly something easy to eat, but it was comforting, the thick purée of peas and sausage that reminded him of rainy winters and coming in from the near-frozen tracks in his younger years. Except it was the furthest thing from the comfort George had wanted to offer with the gift. If anything, it made the hollow ache grow, the facsimile of domesticity Max could not stand because he understood that the real thing would never be fully his.
But he took the container anyway, inhaled the aroma, and accepted the spoon that George had procured from his pocket. He stood it into the soup and paused to admire the consistency. It looked awful, the color reminiscent of what he would bring up in a toilet bowl after a long night at the club, which meant it was exactly right. “You made snert?”
“I wish you wouldn’t call it that, what a sound that is.” George made a face.
“Erwtensoep sounds better to you?”
“Blimey, Max. And no, I requested it from my hotel.” Behind the tension, George sounded faintly embarrassed. “Where would I have made it? And beside, it wouldn’t be edible if I attempt. I can’t even make mushy peas. You don’t need food poisoning on top of banged up knees, do you.”
It tasted like an apology even if George had said it wasn’t. Max ate one spoon and then another, and washed down the unspoken pleas and smoked sausage chunks with water. George watched him, eyes like lanterns with his brows softened, the whole of his body oriented toward Max. Inch by inch, he sidled closer, the mattress dipping under their combined weight, George’s warmth nestling into Max’s side as Max finished the soup container and thought of cold rubber and colder tracks under a Dutch winter storm. George threaded their fingers together, holding tight, however belatedly.
The soup was really quite delicious.
“Is there more?”
“Not for now.” It was about the soup. It wasn’t about the soup. Thumb rubbing over his hand, George laid his tan over Max’s nonexistent one. “But maybe later. Promise.”
One way or another, they were always going to end up here. And here, Max found, was him propped up against a mountain of pillows, his legs spread, and George’s face gazing up at him earnestly, framed by his bruised knees.
“Here?” George asked between kisses. He didn’t tell George that each press of those pouty lips to his tender flesh hurt, no matter how light the touch. He swallowed the pain, let it sink in, let the kisses absorb like medicine through patches of burst blood vessels blooming under pale skin. George was careful, moving from one dark bruise to the next, his lashes lowered like fallen pine needles on alpine hills. “I didn’t know it was you, when it happened.”
“It doesn’t matter, George.”
“Of course it matters. Don’t play the stoic with me now; stiff upper lip is an English thing.” George traced over a particularly colorful bruise with the tip of his nose. Max made a tiny, halting sound, quickly shushed by George’s palm landing on his soft cock. “I was going fast, and you were barely visible in the corner.”
“You wouldn’t have aborted anyway even if you knew it was me.” The soup settling in his stomach, the painkiller the team doctor had forced onto him earlier finally kicking in, Max groaned as George worked him through his underwear.
“Well, yes. You wouldn’t respect me if I aborted because of you. What do you think this is, a Miss Congeniality contest? I lifted.”
“Barely.”
“Enough to count,” George retorted. “So you are mad about this.”
“Shouldn’t I be? You got pole on my crash.” He was mad, Max could acknowledge that now, but it wasn’t about this, but this was also the only thing he was allowed to be mad about, apparently, so he latched onto it. “Bold to assume I respect you.”
“You’re the bold one when I have your bollocks in hand.” To demonstrate, George gave them a less than gentle squeeze. Max didn’t know just how well-advised it is, doing this so soon after hitting the wall at such speed, but the team doctor was reasonably sure he wasn’t actually concussed, was well and coherent right after the impact, and so there had been almost no restriction on his activities to mind. So Max didn’t protest when George slipped a thumb into the elastic waistband and pulled it down, slow and teasing, to cup his warm hand around Max’s scrotum, the cockhead still soft and hiding within folds of foreskin.
“Schat…”
“Hello there,” George murmured, addressing his cock. “Missed me, have you?”
“My eyes are up here.”
“And your cock is down here,” George sweetly replied. “Jealous, Maxie? You haven’t even congratulated me once on pole.”
“Let’s see how it goes tomorrow or if you’ll fumble your start.” But each word was more effortful than the last, with George’s lips closing around the velvet tip. Max grunted, then sighed, then grabbed a fistful of George’s hair and yanked until George eked out a long whine. “You’re in a hurry to get out of here?”
“Just demonstrating my pole lap. On the actual pole and all.” By god, George knew what to do with that mouth even if it was responsible for such terrible, mood-killing lines. Cocksucking lips, lush and pouty-full and contorted into such obscene shapes for the camera’s gaze, now wrapped around his cock. George knew what pressure to keep, where to place his hands, how to press his thumb on the underside of Max’s cock, palm spit-slicked and shining as he licked long stripes up and down the shaft, then the head, tonguing the slit. Max pulled on his hair until George’s eyes shone with tears, and the viciousness almost took him aback. He wasn’t this way with his other partners—what distant memory those were now, even if George had never asked this of him.
It was only George, only ever George, who had brought out this violence, this need to claim, to possess.
Because George bit him, a quick, sudden flash of teeth that sent his whole body jerking.
“Fuck!” George’s hands were on him, soothing, pacifying. His mouth closed around one ball, forming a loose seal, the warmth and wet of tongue and lips suckling the sensitive ball until Max’s eyes rolled back. His fingers found George’s mouth, burrowing in, competing with his own body for space inside George, and George had no gag reflex, none, as silver threads of spit dripped from his chin onto Max’s groin.
If George wasn’t going to talk about the topic they had been dancing around for months, if not years now, then at least he was putting his mouth to good use. Eventually, Max couldn’t take it anymore; he fisted George’s white kit in the front and pulled him upward, crashing their mouths together. His cock felt near bursting, overheated and oversensitive. He unbuttoned George’s pants and undid the fly, took George in hand, and brought their cocks into alignment, stroking George dry with only remnants of spit still on his own cock.
“I’m going to chase you tomorrow,” he whispered into George’s mouth, then nipped George’s lip until he yelped. “You better run, schat.”
“Talking big now with that upgrades package, chasing me from P5,” George gasped. He fought Max for control of their pace, forcibly loosening Max’s grip on his cock, but Max slapped his hand aside. “You seem to like these packages too. Shall I dangle one in front of your car, a little carrot stick for motivation?”
George had no sense of self-preservation, and Max knew he liked to goad this way, liked the way Max flipped him over and took his pleasure as he cried coquettishly under Max’s heft. The room was cool, the sheets rippling under them like lake water, but Max still felt an oppressive heat ripping through him as he found that George’s hole was already loose, the rim slick with lubricant.
“Slut,” he said approvingly. This was madness, how George got under his skin and refused to budge, like a splinter that had embedded itself too deeply. George laughed breathlessly, nails scratching blindly behind him on Max’s chest, finding purchase on his broad shoulders, as Max pumped into him over and over, heedless of his own bruises. Max grazed his teeth on George’s back, drawing red lines that he hoped would not fade, not yet, not until the weekend was over and done and the Grand Prix culminating in a victory for both of them. “Won’t give me you, but this, you give.”
“It’s what I can give,” George managed. “Max, Maxie, you know I try, I’ve been trying, I have—so take what you can, okay, take what I can give you, please, I’m sorry—I, ah—”
It hurt too much, an agony so profound Max couldn’t locate it in his body, so he covered George’s mouth and let George bite hard enough between his thumb and index finger that he wouldn’t be surprised if a permanent mark remained. His hips screamed in protest, his knees on fire, but he rutted into George with the ferocity of their usual lovemaking, and George arched his back and begged for more with the way his ass slammed against Max’s cock, as if Max owed him something.
When he flew into the wall, it had felt something like this, meeting an immovable shield and he the unstoppable force. George twisted his marked-up neck to kiss him, their mouths tasting of split pea soup and blood from the tiny cut on Max’s tongue, and the salt of George’s tears that had run in unending rivulets down his cheeks and onto his lips.
They came together, Max’s hand around George’s spent cock, milking him onto the sheet. George took him in, hole clenching, possessive of each and every drop of Max’s cum, and would not let Max pull out even as his cock softened.
They lay together in the aftermath on spoiled sheets. George’s hair had stuck to his temples in wet curls, his face flushed with exertion from where Max could see it, and could only guess that George was still crying from the dampness under his fingers where George had decided to lay his head.
“Maxie,” he said quietly, still turned away. “Don’t hate me, okay? Not too much. Not for too long.”
“I don’t hate you.” And wasn’t that the truth. “Not for too long. A day, maybe two at most.”
A quiet sniffle; George was so prone to tears, the most endearing and the most enraging thing about him. Max let him cry and held him from behind, internally huffing at how even when he was the one injured, George still demanded all the attention like the princess he was. But George also stroked the top of his hand tenderly, was pressing his cheek against it and kissing the tips of his fingers, and murmured, “Are you still in pain?”
“It’s not unbearable. Nothing that will stop me from taking P1 from you tomorrow.”
George scoffed wetly, but they fell silent, their bodies cooling together as the air conditioning droned on in their oasis of two. When Max closed his eyes, he could see the large loom again and wondered where they stood in it now and what shape their threads had formed, all entwined around each other this way, so that it was difficult to tell which one was which, and what the fates had foretold through their weaving of this story.
It seemed to matter less and less. George’s little finger had found his, the tiniest of promise hooked around each other, the other end of the thread finally pulled taut.
Max had a feeling that whatever it was that he actually wanted, he would still follow where George led, even if it was toward the podium tomorrow with George still just out of reach.