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Charles will be the first to say that he and Max aren’t dating. And he certainly won’t be the last.
As far as any outsider knows, Charles and Max don’t like each other. They aren’t following each other’s social media, they don’t talk much where people can see them, and they’ve been rivals practically as long as they’ve been alive. Rolling their eyes at the mention of the other’s name is just as predictable as it is annoying, but that’s just the way they are. And in all honesty, Charles doesn’t want to be the one who breaks the status quo.
But Charles and Max aren’t dating. They have this weird thing, but they’re not boyfriends. They just let off a little steam with each other, sort out their differences in unlikely places. That’s it.
It started in Barcelona, when Charles retired from the race only to watch Max take victory. He was so painfully, stupidly frustrated by the whole ordeal that he coerced a member of the Red Bull team into telling him where Max was staying just to show up unannounced. A part of him still wonders, sometimes, if that unfortunate Red Bull team member worried Charles was going to properly fight Max—in the moment, Charles hadn’t been too sure what he was going to do.
All he knew was he had to do something. The way his skin simmered with unruly anger is still a feeling he can remember, red-hot and muddled with his sweat. The burn lingers, like a phantom, twisting with the reminder of how quick his heart was racing up the darkened streets of Spain. It’s almost as if it happened just yesterday; not months ago.
——
Charles knocked on the hotel room door, harsh and unwanted. It was late enough that Max should be back in his room, late enough for all his celebrations to have ended. Charles didn’t want to think about the shades of victory on Max’s pretty face, so he didn’t. He pummeled his fist into the door until he thought his knuckles might bruise, an ugly frown laid twisted across his face.
Max whipped the door open in a flurry. He was frowning, too, hair messy and stuck down to his forehead with a gaudily-branded Red Bull shirt stretching over his torso. The first thing Charles thought was that he shouldn’t still be dressed for the paddock at this hour, and the second thing was that he still smelled of stale champagne.
“What the fuck do you want?”
In all honesty, Charles still wasn’t sure. He was unsure, but he was fuming, and the victory-brought exhaustion on Max’s face certainly didn’t help. The space between them seemed to grow larger, and thicker, and heavy, and Charles knew he would have to say something eventually, if not to kill the awkwardness then to keep Max from closing the door.
But the Dutchman’s low, thick frustration was still wrapped up in his head. What the fuck did he want? Did he want to hit Max? Did he want to scream?
He barreled through the door without saying a word. Weighted, it slammed the second he pushed himself against Max, pushing both of them into the wall with a heavy sound. Max blinked up at him, and there was something about him from so close that made Charles feel dizzy.
He kissed Max before he knew what he was doing himself. And he tasted just as he smelled—sweat, old champagne, loose victories—kissing just as well as he raced: fiercely. Charles was almost more surprised to find his rival kissing him back than he was at himself for even starting this in the first place, but before either of them knew it, they were both falling down into a situation they could never know how to repair.
It was never going to end in the entryway. Charles fucked Max until he didn’t feel frustrated anymore, and when he left the hotel room as the sun had started to rise, leaving a tired, fucked-out Max behind, he knew he would be thinking about that look on Max’s face for as long as he knew how to breathe.
——
So really, this is all Charles’s fault. This whole thing. If it wasn’t for his bubbling frustration, or his fucked-up car, or his sorry excuses for keeping himself together, this never would’ve happened. But after that night in Barcelona, it kind of never stopped.
Secrecy keeps them off each other’s social media. But now, Charles has Max’s number in his phone, and they text each other a little more often than they should. They hook up all the time, because as it turns out, fucking the daylights out of your long-time racing rival is really good, even if their pent-up frustration isn’t always caused by the other.
Sometimes, though, meetings are for nothing but talking. Sometimes they just make out until their lips are numb. Sometimes Charles wonders what the hell he’s doing.
But he doesn’t want this to end. He’s keen on holding onto it for as long as he possibly can, keen on letting Max into his apartment when he knocks and answering the phone when he dares to call. The raspy accent on the Dutchman’s tongue is something he’s grown to like, and it’s almost sick, for it doesn’t start and end with the way he sounds murmuring filth into Charles’s red-tipped ears.
Charles sighs. He runs a clammy hand down the front of his face, as if that will somehow clear his head. There’s still a thunderstorm behind his eyes by the time he comes up for air, but he knows there’s not much he can do about it, leaving the lightning to simmer in the hollow of his skull.
Just as he’s thinking about how desperately he needs to clean his apartment, there’s a knock on the door. Charles rushes for it. In the midst of his misplaced thoughts, he finds himself hoping it’ll be Max, even when he already knows who’s waiting for him on the other side.
“Hello, Charles,” Pierre greets, signature grin matching inscrutable to the bottle of red wine he carries at his hip. “You did not answer my text.”
Stepping out of the way to let his friend inside, Charles frowns. “I did not see it,” he admits. “What did you say?”
“I was asking if you wanted me to bring wine,” Pierre says simply, placing the bottle on the counter with a well-timed thunk. Charles’s head starts to spin a bit. “When you said nothing, I just brought it. Can always take it home if you don’t want it, no?”
A smile cracks Charles’s face. “Thank you, Pear,” he murmurs, already going for the cabinet stocked with glasses. “I would’ve said yes.”
The clamor he makes with his own fragile wine glasses reminds Charles of too many things at once. It all clouds his brain, heady and unwanted, a laughably unnecessary distraction for all that’s going on right now. Pierre is pouring himself a glass of wine, offering the bottle to Charles, watching the Monegasque with all the patient fragility of someone who’s afraid. Perhaps Charles looks just as unruly as he feels, but really, he can’t be blamed. The low glimmer of Monaco’s stars is making him feel heavy everywhere it matters.
——
“I brought wine,” Max said once, standing in the doorway to Charles’s newly-cleaned apartment. “Unless you don’t want it.”
“No, the wine is great,” Charles said quickly, reaching to take the bottle from Max’s hand. He looked at it, listened for the click of the door. They were standing too close. “Thank you,” he murmured, hasty and awkward. “Uh, I’ll go get some glasses.”
They split the bottle of wine on Charles’s couch. There was music playing—left over from when Charles had been cleaning earlier, an activity he hates to do in silence—but nothing on the TV. As glasses drained to an empty, Charles started to feel as terse as the clingy drops of unreachable alcohol left sticky up the curved inside of his glass. He looked at it, at the shades of red he can’t untangle, and he felt Max shift closer to him.
Of course, there was a reason for this. Charles didn’t think about how much it felt like a date until Max was already gone, the aureate Monegasque sun seeping in through his bedroom windows. In the moment, it was just something he wanted—Max’s lips, Max’s hands, Max’s everything—and he hadn’t really wanted to dwell on anything that wasn’t the taste of wine off Max’s tongue.
They barely made it to the bedroom. Charles was a puddle of obscenity, blood hot and skin hotter, Max’s lips mashed down into the curve of his neck with hasty murmurs growing more and more lewd with every passing moment.
“Take my cock so well.”
“So good for me.”
“Such a slut, Charles, so desperate for it.”
By morning, the empty sheets smelled of someone else’s shampoo. Charles found two empty wine glasses sitting on his coffee table, and a slough of bruises curved along his chest.
——
“The wine is good,” Charles compliments, swirling it around in his glass like he knows more than he does. “Do you want to order dinner?”
Pierre makes an affirmative noise, already scrolling through his phone with one hand. He winds up next to Charles, showing him the menu to some place Charles has never heard of, asking what he should get. As he places the order, Pierre makes some joke about tripling his training for the next week to offset it, and Charles laughs. He drinks a little more wine so he stops thinking so much.
——
“You are ruining me, Charlie, I will need to do six workouts tomorrow just to be normal,” Max complained, sinking down into the crease of his own couch.
Charles giggled. He didn’t feel as bad about it as he should. “You are so dramatic,” he dismissed, reaching calmly for Max’s hand. “It is not that bad. It is only cake.” He looked at Max, took in his disapproving expression, the lines of silence rolling down his features. “Maybe,” Charles started, already wearing a wicked grin, “you could offset it some other way.”
Max raised an eyebrow, but he was smirking. “What kind of naughty thing do you have in mind?”
Neither of them got any sleep that night.
——
Pierre and Charles have dinner with light conversation. It’s nice because it’s familiar, and Charles wonders why they don’t do this more often. When he says that aloud though, Pierre counters, “You are always so busy. Do you have a secret girlfriend I should know about?”
Pierre laughs, but Charles goes pale. He denies the accusation immediately, and it doesn’t feel like lying, because there isn’t a secret girlfriend, but he still feels slightly sick. Max isn’t even his boyfriend, though—they just mess around. But perhaps the Dutchman has been keeping Charles a little busier than he initially thought.
As Charles cleans up from dinner, Pierre settles himself on the couch to turn on the TV. Charles washes his hands for a moment too long, and he thinks of Max on the same couch, and he thinks of being kissed senseless and getting on his knees between Max’s legs and sucking his dick until he chokes. There is a wrong time to be thinking about this, and it’s now, when Pierre is lingering in the space behind him.
Charles takes a deep breath. Pierre calls for him from the living room.
“What’s up?” Charles asks, entering the room to find Pierre crouched on the floor between the couch and the coffee table.
“Where the fuck is your remote?” Pierre complains, looking under the table briefly. “You really need to clean your apartment, Charles, this place is a mess.”
And Charles can’t exactly argue, because his place is a mess. He’s been telling himself he’ll clean up for days, but he keeps getting distracted, or just deciding not to. He shifts his weight between his feet, watching Pierre scramble around on the floor.
“Sorry, mate,” he mumbles, but it feels slightly disingenuous. “I mean, the remote can not be too far, can it? I don’t take it around my house.”
Charles laughs. Pierre does, too, though the sound is muffled by his position. “I am going to hire you a maid.”
Charles gets down on the floor to help him look.
——
The last time Charles was on his hands and knees on the floor, it was for much more unsavory reasons.
Max was behind him. Max had his hands on his hips. Max was fucking him, hard and fast, because they were both so hot for each other they couldn’t be bothered to get back into Charles’s room. It was almost better that way, because like this, Charles could feel everything at once—it was too much, but in the good way: even if he wound up with rug burns on his knees the next day.
Max fucked him so hard he cried. Charles turned into a puddle against the carpet, and he forgot how to say anything aside from Max’s name, so beyond everything by the end of it that Max had to carry him to bed. In the morning, Charles got to fuck Max, and he was slow with the exhaustion still trapped beneath his skin, slow with the sunlight bleeding gold into his veins.
——
“Charles,” Pierre says, and it’s sudden, and he sounds offended.
Charles turns sharply at the address. He hasn’t moved much since beginning his attempts to help Pierre look for the lost remote, and he knows he’s lost in his head. But Pierre is standing now, and he’s holding something far away from himself like it’s hurt him, and Charles can’t see what it is.
The silence starts stretching too thin to manage. “What is it?”
Pierre turns, and with him, the object of his distasteful frown. “Why do you have a Red Bull cap in your apartment?”
Charles tenses. He looks between Pierre and the cap, still held tepid between two fingers, dark blue and flat-brimmed and garishly branded with a sick sense of obvious. It feels wrong, just looking at it. There’s a big red 1 emblazoned on the front.
“Uh—”
“Is this Max’s?” Pierre interrupts, looking down at the cap with more scrutiny. “It is,” he answers for himself, “you have one of Max’s caps in your apartment.”
“No, it’s just—” and Charles stops, and he tries to remember when they were so stupid.
——
Maybe it was when Max came over the last time, a few days ago, and Charles bent him over the counter. Or maybe it’s been there since the beginning of all of this, and Max just has so many caps he never realized one was missing.
Probably, though, it was after the race in Canada. Tired of travel and without a race until early July, Charles had come back to Monaco with Max on the phone, complaining about his flight. They met, and they talked, and Charles faintly remembered congratulating the Dutchman on his win. As a competitor, it was slightly out of place, but Charles made a bunch of lewd promises to reward him properly.
It was after all of that. After Charles sucked him off until Max was pushing, pushing at his head to make him stop, saying he didn’t want to come just yet, saying “if you’re going to give me a reward, let it be your come inside me,” and Charles got so dizzy he couldn’t make good on a promise like that just yet.
It was when Max got on his knees and returned the favor—which certainly did not help in terms of clearing Charles’s head—and Charles had knocked his cap off and kicked it across the floor. By the time they were done, it was late, and they were tired, and Charles had already forgotten about it. By the time Max was leaving, it was so buried underneath the rest of Charles’s mess that he didn’t see it; and Max never asked where it had gone.
——
And now, it’s in Pierre’s hand. Now, Charles looks so pale and flustered that his silence is more incriminating than any flimsy excuse he could possibly come up with.
“It’s not Max’s,” he tries, but it’s pathetic. “Or, well, it is, but— it’s a joke! Um,” he clears his throat, and somehow that’s more pathetic, “Lando thought it would be funny to send me one of Max’s hats. Because, uh, yeah.”
Pierre narrows his eyes at him. Clearly, he’s not buying it for a second; Charles probably wouldn’t buy it, either.
“I was going to say it is nice to see you two getting along so well that he comes over,” Pierre starts, slow and calculated, “but based on your reaction, it must not end there.”
He throws the cap at Charles. It hits him in the forehead, brim-first.
“It’s not what you think,” Charles says quickly. In all honesty, he doesn’t even know what Pierre thinks.
“You are sleeping together,” Pierre says, stale, like it’s obvious. Charles swallows. “Charles.”
Flying to his feet, Charles counters, “How does his hat being in my living room mean we’re sleeping together?”
“It doesn’t,” Pierre says, gaze falling down to the cap now held firmly in Charles’s hand. “It is your red face that tells me.”
Charles huffs. He looks down at the cap, dark blue and unbelonging. “I cannot believe we were so stupid.” Burying his face in his hands, Charles whines. He’s not sure what else to do.
“He has been keeping you busy, then?” Pierre asks, and it feels rhetorical. When Charles comes to look at him again, he appears smug. “Your secret girlfriend is Max Verstappen.”
Charles wants to fall through the floor and never be seen again. Instead, he mumbles, “I am going to call Max.”
The whole time he’s on the phone, Pierre won’t stop looking at him like he’s mad. He must sound just as lovesick as he feared.