Chapter Text
For all intents and purposes, Oscar Piastri might as well be a virgin.
There would be nothing wrong with being a twenty-five-year-old virgin, of course. There would also be nothing wrong with having a sexuality crisis at twenty-five. Twenty-five was still young, no matter what people on the internet seemed to think. Every time Oscar opened social media, someone was calling him unc.
The point was, he’d done all of this before. Technically. He’d dated women. Three of them. Nice, smart, funny women who had seemed to like him for reasons Oscar had never fully understood. It had always felt a little like having a cool friend he was occasionally supposed to kiss. Which, in retrospect, was probably a fairly significant clue.
Not the first clue, though. The first clue had been Arthur Leclerc and Logan Sargeant, back in the junior categories, both of them objectively beautiful in a way that had made Oscar's life briefly and unnecessarily difficult. At the time, Oscar had a girlfriend named Alice. Alice had also, through no fault of her own, had a name that started with the same sound as Arthur's, which turned out to be surprisingly convenient in bed. He was still proud it had only happened twice.
That relationship had not lasted. None of them had. The thing with Logan got complicated too, for a while, because title fights were good at turning friendship into something sharper. By the time they both made it to Formula 1, they were barely friends, though Logan kept trying, and eventually they settled into something steadier.
Oscar liked steadier. Steadier made sense.
So Oscar decided he wouldn't think about men anymore, which was how he ended up staring at the fact that Lando Norris was asleep in his bed.
Oscar had been awake for forty-seven minutes. He knew this because he had looked at his phone three times, mostly to confirm that time was still moving normally.
It was Monday, the fifth of October. Baku had been eight days ago.
Max’s birthday party had been yesterday, technically, though it had mostly consisted of Oscar standing in a crowded room trying not to look at Lando too much while Lando stood across from him pretending not to look back.
And then they kissed, and after that, they couldn't seem to stop.
They had kissed in the hallway outside Oscar’s apartment for long enough that the automatic light had turned off twice. They had kissed in the doorway. They had kissed against the kitchen counter, which Lando had immediately broken away from to call “the ugliest kitchen in the world.”
Oscar had said, “It’s a normal kitchen.”
Lando had stared at the cabinets like they had personally wronged him.
“Osc, this is not a kitchen. This is a cry for help.”
“It’s white.”
“It’s several shades of white. None of them good.”
“There aren’t several whites.”
Lando had looked at him with genuine horror.
“Please don’t say things like that where I can hear you.”
Then they had kissed again, because Oscar had discovered, very suddenly, that the quickest way to stop Lando talking about interior design was to put a hand on his jaw and tilt his face up, which was probably information he would have to use responsibly.
He had not used it responsibly.
They had kissed on the couch. They had kissed in Oscar’s room after Lando complained that the walls were “the worst shade of grey imaginable” and Oscar said again that grey did not have shades, at which point Lando had made a small wounded noise and told him, very seriously, that he was worried about him.
Then they had slept in the same bed. Nothing else had happened. This was fine. This was good. This was, objectively, what Oscar wanted.
Probably.
Wanting more, Oscar could understand in theory. The practical version was less clear. The practical version was Lando beside him, warm and half-asleep, and Oscar suddenly unsure where his own hands were meant to go.
With women, there had always been a script. Not one Oscar had been especially good at following, but a script nonetheless. Dates. Kissing. Hands in expected places. A sequence of events he could perform with enough competence to avoid anybody asking if he was having a profound internal crisis about Arthur Leclerc’s forearms.
With Lando, there was no script. There was just Lando, asleep on his side with one arm folded under Oscar’s pillow, wearing one of Oscar’s old T-shirts because they had both forgotten to unpack properly the night before.
Oscar looked at him.
Lando’s hair had dried badly after his shower. One side was flattened against his head; the other was sticking up in a way Oscar found so unbearably endearing he briefly considered throwing himself off the balcony.
He wanted to touch it. That was not new. He had spent months wanting to touch Lando in small, stupid ways: fixing the collar of his shirt, brushing a stray eyelash off his cheek, pressing a thumb into the soft place just below his wrist. Things Oscar had spent months not doing because that would have been insane behaviour from a driver toward a strategy systems engineer with whom he was supposedly having a normal professional relationship.
Now he was apparently allowed, which was where the problem started.
Was he allowed to touch Lando’s hair while he was sleeping?
Probably not.
Could he touch his waist? Was that weird? Did men like it when you held them there? Or was it a girl thing?
Oscar did not think waists were gendered, generally speaking. He liked it when Lando held him there. But he had never spent much time thinking about another man’s waist before. Or, rather, he had, but not in a practical context.
Could he touch Lando’s ass?
This felt like an important question.
How soon was too soon?
Oscar stared at the ceiling.
He had a degree of sorts in driving very fast cars around other very fast cars without dying. He could explain tyre preparation windows and energy deployment and why lifting at the wrong point through Turn 8 in Istanbul made the car feel like it wanted to exit the track out of spite. His mother said that when he was little, he used to pretend to be a car.
Not pretend to be in a car. Pretend to be a car. He would run around the house making engine noises and insisting people call him Ferrari, which was embarrassing for several reasons, not least of which was that he now drove for McLaren.
He had spent twenty-five years thinking about cars. Lando liked cars too, obviously, but Lando also liked paintings and architecture and chairs and photography and forests and rivers and old buildings and weird lamps. Lando could walk into a room and immediately understand why it felt wrong. Oscar could walk into the same room and identify every possible exit and whether the coffee machine also dispensed hot chocolate.
Lando was smart in ways that made Oscar feel underdeveloped. He didn’t want to ask stupid questions. He didn’t want Lando to realize he had accidentally kissed someone who had no idea how to be kissed back properly.
He also wanted, with a force that made him feel ridiculous, to matter to Lando in humiliatingly particular ways. Not useful. Not convenient. Not the driver whose feedback made Lando's work better. The person Lando looked for when a room got loud. The person he texted first. The person whose opinion could pull him out of a bad mood or put him in one.
Oscar had never liked wanting that much from anyone.
Lando shifted beside him.
Oscar froze.
One eye opened. Then the other. For three seconds, neither of them said anything. Lando blinked slowly.
“Oh,” he said.
Oscar’s entire body went stupidly warm.
“Morning,” Oscar said.
Lando smiled.
It was unfair, how much softer he looked like this. Without his usual alertness. Without the quick movement of his hands or the focused line between his brows when he was thinking through a problem. Just warm and sleepy and in Oscar’s bed, smiling like finding Oscar beside him was a good thing.
“Morning,” Lando said.
Oscar swallowed. “You slept,” Oscar said.
“Typically what people do in beds.”
“Right,” Oscar said.
Lando’s smile widened. “You been awake long?”
“No,” Oscar said.
Lando squinted at him. Oscar held his gaze for exactly one second too long.
“How long?”
“Not that long,” Oscar said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Like, thirty minutes,” Oscar said.
Lando made a pleased little humming noise and rolled onto his back, stretching. Oscar tried very hard not to watch the way his shirt rode up over his stomach.
He failed.
Obviously.
Lando caught him.
Obviously.
Oscar looked at the ceiling again.
Lando laughed quietly.
“You’re being weird.”
“I’m always like this,” Oscar said.
“Yeah,” Lando said, smiling.
Oscar turned his head.
Lando was looking at him now. Really looking. Not like he did at the factory, quick and bright and analytical, like Oscar was one more thing he had to understand. This was slower. Warmer. Almost lazy.
Oscar did not know what to do with it.
“You can look at me,” Lando said.
Oscar’s stomach flipped.
“I know,” Oscar said.
“Do you?”
“Yes,” Oscar said.
“Because you keep looking at the ceiling like it’s doing something fascinating.”
“It might be,” Oscar said.
“It’s white.”
Oscar narrowed his eyes.
“Don’t,” Oscar said.
“There are bad whites, Osc.”
“There are not,” Oscar said.
“There are absolutely bad whites. This room has several of them.”
Oscar huffed a laugh before he could stop himself.
Lando looked pleased about it, which was worse.
Then he reached across the small space between them and put his hand on Oscar’s forearm, casual and easy, like the balcony had not been a separate thing sealed off behind glass and party noise, but the beginning of something Oscar still did not know how to do.
Lando’s thumb moved once, back and forth against his skin.
“You okay?” Lando asked.
Oscar’s first instinct was to say yes.
His second instinct, appearing from somewhere humiliating and inconvenient, was to tell the truth.
“Yeah,” Oscar said, because he was not ready for that kind of personal development before breakfast. “Just thinking.”
“Dangerous,” Lando said.
“It has happened before,” Oscar said.
“Recently?” Lando asked.
Oscar shoved him gently.
Lando laughed, catching his wrist before Oscar could pull away.
Lando’s hand wrapped around his wrist. Oscar’s fingers against Lando’s shoulder. Morning light leaking around the curtains. The apartment too quiet around them. The knowledge that there was no one waiting outside, no meeting room, no paddock, no garage, no radio in his ear.
Oscar leaned in before he could think too much about it.
The kiss was softer than the ones from the night before, and more dangerous for it. Last night had felt like momentum. Like a door opening and both of them falling through it at the same time. This was deliberate. Oscar chose to kiss him in the morning. Lando chose to kiss him back. There was no shock to hide behind now, no adrenaline, no balcony, no months of tension finally breaking apart under their hands.
There was just Lando making a quiet sound against his mouth and Oscar realizing he could do this again.
And again.
And again.
For several minutes, he did.
Eventually Lando pulled back just far enough to breathe.
“You know,” he said, “if this is your plan for the day, I’m not against it.”
Oscar felt his mouth curve into a smile.
“I had a bakery in mind,” Oscar said.
Lando’s eyes brightened.
“A bakery?”
“Yes,” Oscar said.
“You have plans?”
“One plan,” Oscar said.
“Very romantic.”
“I also need to do laundry,” Oscar said.
Lando closed his eyes.
“Never mind.”
“What?” Oscar asked.
“I just watched the romance leave the room.”
“I’ll need clean clothes for Singapore,” Oscar said.
“You can buy new clothes.”
“That’s a stupid use of money,” Oscar said.
“Oscar, you live in Monaco.”
“Still stupid,” Oscar said.
Lando opened one eye.
“Do you flirt like this with everyone?”
“No.”
Oscar realized too late what he’d said.
Lando’s expression changed.
“No?” he asked.
Oscar considered pretending he hadn’t meant it.
That would have been easier.
Probably.
“No,” he said again.
Lando’s fingers tightened gently around his wrist.
Oscar looked at him.
Then at Lando’s mouth.
Then back at his eyes.
Lando smiled, very slowly, like he had noticed every step of that.
“You can kiss me again,” he said.
Oscar did. Obviously.
By the time they made it out of bed, it was half past eight.
This was, by Oscar’s standards, a catastrophic start to the day.
He said as much while brushing his teeth.
Lando appeared in the bathroom doorway wearing Oscar’s T-shirt and his own boxer shorts, looking offensively comfortable.
“Catastrophic,” he repeated.
Oscar spat toothpaste into the sink.
“Yes.”
“We’re on holiday.”
“We have brunch at nine.”
“Brunch is not a binding legal appointment.”
“It is if I booked it.” Oscar looked at Lando through the mirror.
“You booked brunch?”
“I booked a bakery.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“It has seating.”
Lando leaned harder into the doorframe.
“God, you’re serious.”
“Also,” Oscar said, because if he did not say it now he would spend the whole day thinking about it, “you don’t even have a suitcase.”
Lando shrugged. “I have a backpack.”
Oscar stared at him through the mirror.
“Lando.”
“What?”
“We’re going to be in Singapore for a race weekend,” Oscar said.
“I know. I work for a Formula 1 team.”
“You cannot pack for Singapore in a backpack.”
“Watch me.”
Oscar rinsed his mouth. “Absolutely not.”
Lando grinned.
“Are you going to organize me?”
“No,” Oscar said.
“Sounds like you are.”
“I’m going to prevent a logistical failure,” Oscar said.
“That’s different?”
“Yes,” Oscar said.
Lando leaned against the doorframe, looking disgustingly amused.
“You know, you get very bossy when you’re worried.”
“I’m not worried,” Oscar said.
“You told me last night where you keep spare chargers.”
“That was practical,” Oscar said.
“You showed me two different drawers.”
“You lose things,” Oscar said.
“You made me download your building’s visitor app.”
“Security,” Oscar said.
“You told me which side of the bed has the better plug socket.”
Oscar paused.
“That was considerate,” Oscar said.
Lando’s face went strange. Soft, again.
Oscar hated how often it did that.
Or not hated. Something else.
“Yeah,” Lando said. “It was.”
Oscar looked back at the sink and pretended to rinse his toothbrush with more concentration than the task deserved.
When they finally made it to the kitchen, Lando stopped dead.
“I need to say it again.”
“Don't,” Oscar said.
“This kitchen is upsetting.”
“It’s functional,” Oscar said.
“So are hospital corridors.”
Oscar opened the fridge.
“I have eggs,” Oscar said.
“Congratulations.”
“And yogurt,” Oscar said.
“Do you have anything that wasn’t selected by a nutritionist with joy issues?”
Oscar looked over his shoulder.
“I have cereal,” Oscar said.
Lando peered into one of the cabinets and made a face.
“This is muesli.”
“It’s cereal,” Oscar said.
“This is punishment pretending to be cereal.”
Oscar shut the fridge.
“We’re going to the bakery anyway,” Oscar said.
“Thank God.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” Oscar said.
“I woke up in a flat with six kinds of performance cereal and eight bad shades of white. I’m being exactly dramatic enough.”
Oscar wanted to kiss him again, mostly because he was standing barefoot in Oscar’s terrible kitchen wearing Oscar’s T-shirt and looking like he belonged there with more than half of Oscar’s actual belongings.
Oscar crossed the kitchen.
Lando stopped talking.
Oscar kissed him.
Lando made a small, pleased sound and put both hands on Oscar’s hips.
Oscar immediately forgot every thought he’d ever had about muesli.
The kiss backed Lando into the counter. Or maybe Oscar backed him into it. It was difficult to tell who was responsible. Oscar was still not entirely sure what he was allowed to do with his hands, but Lando apparently had fewer concerns because one of his hands slid under the hem of Oscar’s shirt and settled warm against his lower back.
Oscar’s brain made a noise like a laptop fan giving up.
Lando pulled away first.
“Bakery,” he said, breathless.
Oscar nodded.
“Bakery.”
Neither of them moved.
Lando’s eyes flicked down to Oscar’s mouth.
Oscar kissed him again.
They left the apartment forty minutes later.
The bakery was twelve minutes away on foot, if one walked normally.
It took them twenty-three.
Partly because Lando kept stopping to look at things.
A balcony.
A tiled entryway.
A small blue door Oscar had walked past approximately four hundred times without noticing.
“Look at that,” Lando said.
Oscar looked.
It was a door.
“It’s a door,” Oscar said.
“It’s a very good door.”
“What makes a door good?” Oscar asked.
Lando turned to him like Oscar had asked a deeply tragic question.
“Shape. Proportion. Colour. Wood. Context.”
“Right,” Oscar said.
”You don’t care.”
“I care that you care,” Oscar said.
"Hm." Lando tilted his head, considering the door like it had personally earned the moment. "People don't usually look twice. At doors, I mean. Or anything, really. You'd be amazed what you can tell about a place from the things nobody bothers to look at properly."
"Is that a strategy thing or a you thing?"
"Bit of both," Lando said. "Drives Pete mad. He says I'd notice a loose bolt on a Red Bull and not notice if our own car was on fire."
"Would you?"
"Notice the bolt? Obviously." Lando grinned. "The fire I'd probably get to eventually." He paused, glasses sliding slightly. "Unless it was you. I'd notice if it was you straight away."
Lando's mouth opened.
A beat too late, he realized what he'd just admitted out loud.
He looked away.
The street was suddenly very interesting.
A scooter went past. A woman carrying flowers glanced at them and then did not glance again, because Monaco was full of people who had learned not to ask questions.
Beside him, Lando was quiet.
Oscar risked a look.
Lando was smiling.
Oscar’s ears went hot.
“Bakery,” he said.
At nine-oh-six, which Oscar considered acceptably close to on time and Lando considered evidence that brunch was not a binding legal appointment, Oscar ordered four scones, two coffees, and a pot of yogurt with fruit because some part of him still believed in nutritional balance.
Lando watched him do this with increasing concern.
“Are we feeding other people?”
“No,” Oscar said.
“Okay.”
Oscar took the bag from the woman behind the counter and thanked her, then led Lando outside before Lando could develop an opinion about the chairs.
Outside, Lando peered into it.
“Four scones.”
“Yes,” Oscar said.
“Different scones?”
“Yes,” Oscar said.
“Right.”
Oscar handed him the first one.
Lando took it.
“What am I doing?”
“Taste testing,” Oscar said.
“Is this a date?”
Oscar nearly dropped the bag.
Lando bit into the scone like Oscar was not still trying to remember how to sit normally.
Oscar watched him chew.
Lando swallowed.
“Good.”
“You have to rank it,” Oscar said.
“Of course I do.”
“Out of ten,” Oscar said.
“Seven.”
Oscar frowned.
“Seven?” Oscar asked.
“It’s good.”
“It’s better than seven,” Oscar said.
“You asked for my ranking.”
“It’s my favourite one,” Oscar said.
“Then why ask me?”
“Yeah, well, I wanted to know if you had taste,” Oscar said.
Lando laughed so hard he had to cover his mouth with the back of his hand.
Oscar felt briefly, violently pleased.
“Fine,” Lando said. “Eight.”
“You can’t change it because I looked disappointed,” Oscar said.
“I can do anything I want. I’m a free man.”
Oscar handed him the second scone.
Lando took it.
Their fingers brushed. It was nothing, barely anything, and Oscar still noticed.
They ate all four scones sitting on a low wall near the harbour, legs almost touching, the sun bright enough on the water that Oscar had to squint even with his sunglasses on. The yogurt sat between them, mostly ignored, until Lando ate one strawberry from the top and declared himself healed.
Lando ranked them incorrectly.
Oscar told him so.
Lando accused him of rigging the competition.
Oscar said it was not a competition.
Lando said everything was a competition if one had vision.
Oscar said that explained a lot about his strategy models.
Lando looked offended for three seconds before remembering he was proud of his strategy models.
It was all too easy.
Oscar had expected it to feel like crossing some invisible line and finding everything rearranged on the other side. Instead, it felt like all the things they had already been doing had simply been given permission to be what they were.
Lando still talked too much. Oscar still listened. Oscar still said things too dryly. Lando still laughed like Oscar had given him something. The difference was that sometimes, when their hands brushed, neither of them moved away, and sometimes Lando looked at him with his whole face open.
“You’re staring,” Lando said.
Oscar looked at the water.
“No.”
“Mate.”
“Don’t call me mate.”
Lando went very still.
Oscar did too.
He had not meant to say it.
Or he had.
He didn’t know.
Lando turned his head slowly.
“No?”
Oscar stared at the boats.
“No.”
A beat.
Then Lando said, quieter, “Okay.”
Oscar had to grip the strap of his backpack with both hands.
“Not—” He stopped. Started again. “Let's not do this, not today.”
Lando’s shoulder pressed lightly against his.
“Okay,” he said again.
Oscar nodded.
And that was the entire conversation.
Oscar made the tactical error of suggesting a walk after that.
He meant Tête de Chien, the viewpoint above Monaco near La Turbie, which made the whole principality look small enough to fit under someone's thumb. Oscar had done it before when he needed to clear his head: not the version from sea level, but the reasonable one, where you took a taxi up to La Turbie first and walked the rest.
He explained this badly.
Lando, who had been smiling at him over the last piece of scone, stopped smiling.
"Sorry," he said. "When you said walk, did you mean walk, or did you mean a surprise vertical activity?"
"It's not vertical."
"That is not an answer."
"It's a viewpoint."
"Most things called viewpoints involve a point from which one views," Lando said. "That point is usually up."
Oscar looked at him for a second too long.
"We don't have to."
Lando looked offended. "I didn't say I wouldn't go."
"You looked like you might file a complaint."
"I can file a complaint and go."
So they went.
The taxi dropped them near the village, where the stone buildings were pale in the late morning sun and the old Roman monument rose behind the roofs like Monaco had briefly misplaced part of ancient history.
"This is very pretty," Lando said suspiciously.
"You sound annoyed."
"I am annoyed that I like it."
"That must be difficult for you."
"You have no idea."
For the first ten minutes, Lando was fine. Better than fine. He walked quickly, talking with his hands about how old towns made more sense than new developments, flushed from the sun but not tired. His calves looked very good, which Oscar noticed despite being a serious athlete and a person with discipline.
Then the path started climbing properly.
"This is a hike," Lando said, stopping with one hand on his hip and the other braced against a sun-warmed wall.
Oscar looked back. "It's a path."
"A path can be a hike. This one is extremely committed to becoming a mountain."
"You ran a half marathon."
"For running," Lando said. "On a route I chose. With normal ground. To a specific finish line. There was no surprise mountain involved."
Oscar laughed before he could stop himself.
Lando pointed at him. "Don't laugh. This is how people die in travel documentaries."
"Usually they ignore warnings."
"I am warning you."
"Noted."
Lando was flushed and sweaty now, wearing sunglasses he had stolen from Oscar's kitchen counter because his own were apparently in a bag, somewhere, maybe. His hair had started doing an alarming thing at the front. He looked miserable and dramatic and so painfully lovely that Oscar briefly forgot the view they were climbing toward.
Oscar studied him properly then. Lando was not out of shape. He was hot and annoyed and breathing harder than he wanted to be, but he had run through Rome with a race bib pinned to his chest and enough stubbornness to make strangers cheer. This was different. His eyes kept catching on the drop beyond the wall before snapping back to the path.
"Are you scared of heights?" Oscar asked.
Lando looked down at the path before answering.
"No."
Oscar waited.
"I am scared of falling from heights," Lando amended. "Which is completely different and much more rational."
"Right."
"Don't sound pleased about learning my weakness."
"I'm not pleased."
"You look pleased."
Oscar did not think pleased was the word. Fond, maybe. Terrified by how fond.
"We can turn around," Oscar said again.
Lando looked at the path, then at Oscar, then very deliberately not at the drop.
"No," he said. "You like it up here."
Oscar's chest went strangely tight.
"That doesn't matter."
"It does to me."
"Alright," Oscar said, quiet enough that it almost got lost in the wind. He wasn't sure, afterward, if he meant the view, or the climbing, or both at once.
For a moment, Oscar could not find anything to say.
Then Lando ruined it by adding, "Also, if I turn around now, the mountain wins."
"Still not a mountain."
"Tell that to my hamstrings."
They kept going.
At the top, Lando forgave the hike with very little dignity.
"Oh," he said.
Oscar stood beside him, close enough that their shoulders brushed. Below them, Monaco shone too brightly in the afternoon sun, all white walls and blue water and expensive boats moving smugly because they did not have to qualify in Singapore. The circuit was almost invisible unless you knew where to look. Oscar knew where to look. He always did.
Lando stayed half a step back from the edge.
"Wait," Lando said suddenly, already reaching for his phone. "I need pictures."
Oscar looked at the view again.
"Of Monaco?"
"No, Osc, of the emotional journey I had on the way up."
"That would be a video."
"Don't tempt me."
Lando took photos of the city first: the harbour, the cliffs, the ridiculous blue of the water, the pale stone of La Turbie behind them. He moved carefully, never close enough to the edge to make himself tense, and Oscar watched the concentration settle over his face. Lando with a phone camera was not so different from Lando with data. He looked for angles. Patterns. The thing that made a view become a feeling.
Then he turned back.
"Can I take one of you?"
Oscar blinked.
"Me?"
Lando's mouth twitched. "Please?"
Oscar looked away too late to hide how much the please did to him.
"Fine."
"Wow. Enthusiasm."
"I'm standing here, aren't I?"
Lando lifted the phone. "Move a little left."
Oscar moved.
"Other left."
Oscar moved the other way.
"Chin down."
"Are you directing me?"
"Badly, yes."
Oscar should have hated it. He usually hated having photos taken when they were not for work, hated not knowing where to put his hands, hated the split second of being looked at without a purpose he could understand. Lando looked at him through the phone and smiled like the photo was already something he wanted to keep.
"Good," Lando said softly.
Oscar's ears went hot.
An older couple came up the path behind them just as Lando lowered the phone. The woman smiled at them, already lifting her hand toward the camera.
"Would you like a picture together?" she asked.
Oscar opened his mouth.
Lando opened his mouth too.
"Oh, you don't have to," Oscar said at the same time Lando said, "That's really kind, but no worries."
The woman waved this away. "Come, come. Give me the phone."
Lando handed it over before either of them found a better argument.
"Stand together," the woman said.
They stood together.
"Closer."
Oscar went very still.
Lando looked at him, quick and careful.
Oscar moved closer first.
The woman's husband said something in French that Oscar did not catch, and the woman laughed, already taking photos. She crouched a little, then stood again, then told them to look at each other. Oscar did not. Then Lando laughed, helpless and embarrassed, and Oscar looked at him automatically.
The phone clicked again.
"Perfect," the woman said, handing it back.
Lando looked down at the screen and went quiet.
"Merci," Oscar said, because Lando seemed temporarily unavailable.
The couple moved on.
Lando kept looking at the photos.
"What?" Oscar asked.
"Nothing." Lando tilted the phone away too quickly. "You're just very annoying to photograph."
"Why?"
"Because you look good by accident."
Oscar looked back at Monaco before his face could do something career-ending.
"Like a good door?" Oscar asked.
Lando glanced at him over the top of Oscar's sunglasses. "Like a good city."
"High praise."
"Don't ruin it."
Oscar smiled and looked out again.
For a few minutes, neither of them said anything. Lando's shoulder stayed against his. Oscar could feel the heat of him through both their shirts, nervous and steadied by the same simple fact: Lando had come with him. Lando had complained the entire way and still come with him.
"You do this a lot?" Lando asked.
"Sometimes."
"When you're stressed?"
Oscar considered lying. "Yes."
Lando nodded and looked back out over the water.
"It's nice," he said.
"You hated it."
"I hated the climbing. I like being here."
Oscar looked at him.
Lando was looking at the city, not at Oscar, his face still pink from the climb and his mouth turned up at one corner. Oscar wanted to kiss him there, in the open air with Monaco beneath them and no one close enough to see. He did not. Instead, he let his hand brush Lando's.
Lando caught two of his fingers.
Only for a second.
Then he let go, because someone else was coming up the path behind them and Oscar's whole body had gone careful before he could stop it.
Lando did not say anything about that.
They walked down slower. Lando complained less, which Oscar suspected meant he was tired enough that even his commentary had developed tyre degradation. Back in La Turbie, they stopped at a café because Lando claimed he needed emergency sugar and Oscar had learned enough from the half marathon to take Lando seriously when he started using the phrase blood glucose in a dramatic voice.
Lando ordered a lemon soda and an espresso because he contained contradictions. Oscar ordered water and then watched Lando eat half a slice of orange cake as if the climb had been an expedition and he had personally survived it.
"Never invite me on a romantic mountain walk again," Lando said.
"It was your idea to continue."
"That does not absolve you."
"Do you want the rest of the cake?"
Lando looked at him.
Oscar pushed the plate closer.
"You're forgiven," Lando said.
By the time they reached the apartment again, Lando's hair was damp, Oscar's calves were starting to feel the stairs, and the whole flat smelled faintly stale in the way flats did when someone had left laundry in the machine and pretended future them would solve it.
By the time they started packing that afternoon, Oscar had solved precisely none of his problems.
He had put Lando's clothes in the laundry, which sounded less controlling than washed Lando's clothes, although only slightly. Lando had tried to help for three minutes, turned one of Oscar's white training shirts faintly pink with a red sock he swore had not been there before, and then been banished to the bedroom for everyone's safety.
After that, Oscar packed Lando a suitcase, although packed sounded too controlling too, even in his own head. What he actually did was place a medium-sized black suitcase in the middle of his bedroom, open it, and stand there while Lando made several incorrect decisions about linen shirts.
Oscar had been packing for race weekends since he was fourteen. He knew how many pairs of socks a person needed for humidity, rain, unexpected sponsor obligations, and the exact horror of putting on yesterday's clothes after a long-haul flight. Lando had spent years working corporate jobs without being swallowed by the same junior-category travel machine, which apparently meant he believed international packing was a vibes-based discipline.
"You own one pair of trousers," Oscar said.
"Incorrect. I own three."
"One of them has a paint stain on the knee."
"That gives it character."
"It gives it paint."
Lando looked up from where he was folding a shirt in a way that suggested he had never met fabric before. His glasses were pushed up into his hair. There was still a faint sleep crease on his cheek. Oscar wanted to kiss it.
Oscar did not kiss it, because they had kissed in the kitchen already. Twice. Also in the hallway. Also beside the suitcase, when Lando had accused him of packing like a man preparing for a hostage situation and Oscar had said, "You will thank me when you have socks."
Lando had said, "I am not thanking you for socks."
Then he had kissed Oscar anyway.
The kissing was excellent. Oscar had spent a not insignificant portion of the morning discovering that Lando made a particular sound when Oscar put a hand at the back of his neck, and that Lando pretending not to like being told where to stand was, in fact, a lie of historic proportions. The dangerous part came after, when Lando smiled at him over a half-packed suitcase and Oscar had to keep being a person with sentences and luggage opinions.
Was this a relationship? Was it becoming one? Oscar would have liked instructions. Ideally laminated. Possibly colour-coded. Something that began with what to do when a man you had kissed for the first time twenty-four hours ago started using your bathroom like he belonged there, and ended with what to say when the same man smiled at you and your entire chest exploded.
He would have liked to say, I have no idea what I am doing, and sometimes I look at you and feel like I am going to leave my own body. That sounded worse than it was, because Lando had never once made him feel wrong. Lando had kissed him in Oscar's terrible kitchen and slept beside him and looked at him in the morning like wanting him was the easiest thing in the world.
Oscar folded a pair of socks twice, badly, then unfolded them again. Lando watched his hands for a second, like he might ask, and Oscar immediately reached for the underwear instead.
Instead, he said, "You need more underwear."
Lando stared at him.
"That is the least romantic sentence anyone has ever said to me."
"It is practical."
"It is medically concerning."
Oscar put three more pairs into the suitcase.
"I really like it when you're bossy."
Oscar's hand paused on a folded T-shirt.
Lando's expression changed before Oscar could decide whether to panic. He looked amused, mostly, but then his mouth shifted and the bedroom suddenly seemed to have less air in it.
"Sorry," Lando said. "Too much?"
"No."
Oscar said it too fast.
Lando's eyebrows rose.
Oscar looked back into the suitcase. "I just think you should have enough underwear."
"Right," Lando said, very softly. "Of course."
Lando laughed, bright and unguarded, and Oscar forgot what he had been about to say.
Lando reached over to the nightstand and picked up Oscar's blue watch, turning it over in his hands like he was reading it.
"This is the Richard Mille, right? The one from Silverstone."
"Yeah. McLaren sent it over after." Oscar shrugged. "I don't really wear it much."
"You don't really wear it much," Lando repeated, faintly betrayed. He turned it over again, careful, like it might be worth more than his flat. "Oscar, this is, like, a house. This is a small house."
"It's just a watch."
"It is not just a watch. I looked these up once out of morbid curiosity and then had to close the tab and lie down." Lando held it up to the light, watching something move inside the case. "Imagine getting given one of these and going 'eh, don't really wear it much.' Some of us have to buy our own watches, Oscar. With money. That we earned."
"You could've had one too if you'd done a few more karting lessons as a kid."
Lando laughed. "I can barely ride a bike."
"I don't know, I think you'd be a good driver if you tried."
Lando set it back down on the nightstand, exactly where it had been, with a care that didn't quite match the grumbling.
It should have been easy to tell him then how he felt. Lando was happy. Oscar was happy. They were standing in Oscar's bedroom in Monaco, surrounded by clothes and bad whites and the ordinary wreckage of the morning after, and Lando was looking at him like Oscar was not a problem to solve.
Oscar reached for a green shirt without really thinking about it, the way he reached for most things, until he caught himself halfway through folding it and realized he had picked it because it was Lando's favorite color. He had known that for months. He had never once let himself notice that he knew it.
Oscar opened his mouth.
Lando said, "Do not pack the green shirt."
Oscar closed his mouth.
Then opened it again.
"Why?"
"Because last time you wore it, you crashed."
Oscar looked down at the shirt.
"That was not the shirt's fault."
"That is exactly what someone cursed by a shirt would say."
"I thought green was your favorite color," Oscar said, holding it up.
Lando looked personally offended. "That's not even the right green. It's pastel green. My favorite is more like, hex D2FF00."
Oscar stared at him. "Did you just give me a color as a number?"
Lando rolled his eyes like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "That's literally what colors are, Oscar."
Oscar kissed him before he could explain further, and packed the green shirt anyway.
Lando did not seem to mind. Oscar could avoid nearly any conversation if Lando kept letting him put his mouth over the truth.
"Actually," Oscar said, when Lando was sitting on the floor beside the suitcase trying to decide whether a hoodie counted as essential Singapore clothing.
Lando looked up.
"The pictures from earlier. Could you send them to me?"
For a second, Lando only looked at him.
Then his face did that soft thing again, the one Oscar was still pretending not to find devastating.
"Yeah," Lando said. "Obviously."
He sent them before Oscar could regret asking.
Oscar saved every single one.
ᯓ★
The next morning, they flew to England first because McLaren's travel plan involved a team charter out of Heathrow, a phrase Oscar had heard approximately seven hundred times in his life and still found faintly exhausting. Monaco to London was short enough that Lando spent most of it asleep with his head tipped back and his mouth slightly open. Oscar spent most of it pretending not to look.
He looked anyway, obviously. At the line of Lando's throat. At the way his hand had gone slack around his phone. At nothing in particular and everything at once, until Oscar caught himself and thought, with some force, fuck. Right. Not the time.
He picked up a safety card he had no intention of reading and held it in front of his face like it had personally requested his attention.
At Heathrow, everything became awkward by force.
There were team bags, engineers in hoodies, mechanics dragging cases. Sophie stood near the check-in desk, calmly telling a sponsor on the phone that no, Oscar could not film an airport TikTok on the way to Singapore, because Oscar was not a toy. Tom had two coffees and a face that said he had already answered three emails he should not have received. Rafa sat on a suitcase with one earbud in, scrolling through his phone and looking too young and a little scared.
Lando stepped half a metre away from Oscar as soon as they reached the group.
Oscar understood. They were at work, not boyfriends, less than forty-eight hours into whatever this was, and team gossip travelled faster than qualifying simulations when someone wanted it to. Still, his body missed the heat, and some ugly little part of him relaxed. Distance meant he did not have to find out what his own face did when Lando laughed at something someone else said.
It also made him stupidly aware of how quickly he had started overanalyzing where Lando stood. Lando by the passports. Lando by the analysts. Lando laughing at something Oscar had not heard. Every version of it pulled at his attention until he had to make himself look bored on purpose.
"You look awful," Rafa said.
Oscar looked at him.
"Good morning to you too."
"It's afternoon."
"Then you're even ruder."
Rafa grinned. "Andrea said you're leading the championship and therefore I have to be supportive of your process."
"My process?"
"Looking like you've been hit by a bus, apparently."
Oscar glanced at Lando, who was talking to one of the strategy analysts and pushing his glasses higher on his nose with his thumb. Twelve hours ago, Oscar had kissed him in a bedroom. Now Lando was discussing tyre allocation like a functioning member of society.
Oscar hated him a little.
Probably not actually.
He was, Oscar thought, objectively, the hottest man in the room. The way he stood. The way he talked with his hands. The size of his hands.
Shit. Okay. Moving on.
"Long night?" Rafa asked.
Oscar's head snapped back.
Rafa's eyebrows rose.
"Travel," Oscar said.
"You came from Monaco."
"Still travel."
"Right." Rafa looked back at his phone. "Very demanding, the hour and a half of existing in a seat."
Oscar decided not to speak to him again.
He lasted nine minutes.
Rafa had nothing to do with it. Lando appeared beside the row of seats with his laptop open, glasses low on his nose, and said, "Can I borrow your brain for two minutes?"
Oscar looked at him.
"That depends what for."
"Car."
"You are aware I drive it."
"That is the brain I want."
He liked that far too much.
Lando sat beside him, not quite touching. The half metre was gone. Or partly gone. His shoulder brushed Oscar's when he turned the laptop, and Oscar's entire body took attendance.
On the screen was a track map of Marina Bay, colour-coded in a way Oscar immediately did not understand.
"Do I need to understand the colours?" Oscar asked.
"No. I made them ugly for myself."
"Why?"
"So I would hate looking at the problem enough to solve it."
"That seems unhealthy."
"It works."
Oscar looked at the map. "What am I looking at?"
Lando tapped the section after Turn Five. "The update should help you here in theory. Lower drag, cleaner energy use, better exit through the faster part before Seven. But the tyre deg simulator keeps assuming you will trust the rear earlier than I think you actually will."
Oscar looked at him.
"You think I won't trust the car?"
"I think if the rear steps once in FP1, you will remember it for the next twelve laps and pretend you haven't."
That was rude.
Also accurate.
"I do not do that," Oscar said.
Lando glanced at him over the top of his glasses.
Oscar looked away first.
"So what do you suggest?"
"If it feels nervous on entry, do not let them only chase mechanical balance," Lando said, quick now, hands moving as his brain caught speed. "Tell Tom exactly where it starts. Braking phase, release, or first steering input. If it's release, I want to look at brake migration and harvest. If it's steering, fine, they can yell about setup and I will stand down like a mature professional."
"Will you?"
"No."
Oscar smiled before he could stop it.
Lando saw. His mouth softened, then he looked back at the laptop like work was safer.
"Also," he said, quieter, "if it is bad, say bad. Not 'a little strange' or 'interesting' or whatever polite nonsense you do when you think everyone is busy."
"Interesting is useful feedback."
"Interesting is what people say about art they hate."
"You say interesting about art you hate?"
"I say very brave."
Oscar huffed a laugh.
Lando closed the laptop halfway, then opened it again as if he had remembered they were in public and not in Oscar's kitchen.
"Anyway," he said. "Use your words."
Oscar wanted to say, you too.
Instead, he said, "I'll try."
"That is all I ask from my favourite world championship leader."
"Your only world championship leader."
"Still my favourite."
Oscar's ears went warm.
Rafa, from across the aisle, said, "Are you two always this weird?"
"Yes," Lando said, without looking up.
"No," Oscar said at the same time.
Rafa grinned.
"Good talk."
The flight to Singapore was long enough to stop feeling like travel and start feeling like a death sentence. The cabin lights dimmed after dinner. People unfolded themselves into expensive seats. Someone from comms watched three films back to back. Tom fell asleep with his laptop still open. Rafa played FIFA online with his jaw set, trying to intimidate a screen.
Lando slept.
He put on a hoodie, took off his glasses, folded them into the case Oscar had bought him in Belgium after watching him nearly crush them in a hotel gym bag, and fell asleep within eight minutes.
Oscar sat two rows behind him and lost his mind quietly.
At work, their normal had already been strange enough that nobody noticed when it became stranger. Oscar could stand close to Lando, bring him water, follow him out of meetings and into corridors and around paddocks, because everyone had accepted, at some point, that Oscar had selected Lando as a person he liked and then failed to develop subtlety. Now he could not look at Lando's sleeping hand on the armrest without remembering it at his waist.
If Oscar touched Lando's shoulder, would Lando know it meant I want you? If Oscar did not touch Lando's shoulder, would Lando think he was embarrassed? If Oscar looked at him too long, would Tom notice? If Oscar did not look, would Lando notice?
Oscar wanted a spreadsheet. It would not help, obviously, but it would give him somewhere to put the panic.
Some quiet, unreasonable part of him kept waiting for Lando to wake up and turn around. When the plane was boarding, Oscar gave him nothing. No look held too long. No hand left close enough to touch. No water bottle placed beside his laptop with a silent little demand attached to it.
Lando slept through Oscar's entire anxiety loop.
Halfway through the flight, Lando woke up and went to the bathroom.
Oscar watched him go.
Then watched the closed door.
Then looked away.
Then looked back.
This was not a good idea. This was an aircraft with his team on it. His race engineer was asleep two rows away. His rookie teammate was probably awake enough to become inconvenient. There were rules about this sort of thing, even if Oscar did not know what they were. There were definitely rules about kissing a coworker in an airplane bathroom because you had spent six hours thinking about their mouth.
Oscar stood up.
Rafa looked over the top of his seat.
"You all right?"
"Bathroom."
"Cool. Thanks for the update."
Oscar ignored him.
Lando opened the bathroom door just as Oscar reached it. For one second they stared at each other in the narrow strip of aisle light, Lando's hair sleep-mussed, his face soft with surprise.
"Oh," Lando said.
Oscar put a hand flat on his chest and stepped him backward into the bathroom.
"Okay," Lando said, considerably more awake.
The door clicked shut behind them.
The room was objectively too small. Lando's back hit the sink and Oscar's knee knocked into something hard and the mirror reflected a version of them Oscar could not look at directly without setting himself on fire.
"This is probably unsanitary," Oscar said.
Lando blinked.
Then his mouth twitched.
"Is that your opening line?"
"I panicked."
"I noticed."
"I wanted to kiss you."
Lando went very still, and then very soft.
"Yeah?"
Oscar nodded.
"A lot."
That was apparently enough.
Oscar had meant it as an explanation. It came out closer to a confession. He would have followed Lando down the aisle for a worse reason than this; that was the embarrassing part. Lando only had to be there, soft with sleep and looking surprised to see him, and Oscar's body had already decided the rest.
Lando caught the front of Oscar's shirt and pulled him down, and Oscar forgot the airplane, the team, the rules, the exact number of hours left until Singapore. Lando's mouth was warm and smiling for half a second before it stopped smiling, and his hand slid up Oscar's neck fast enough to make Oscar's knees feel briefly theoretical. There was no space to make any of it graceful. Oscar had one hand braced on the wall beside Lando's head and the other at Lando's waist, which was not gendered and was also, he had now confirmed, an excellent place to put his hand.
Heat rolled down through Oscar's stomach, low and sudden, and he had to break the kiss for a second just to breathe through it. Lando's chest was rising and falling against his, too fast, and the small space between them had stopped being a problem and started being unbearable. Every place they were touching felt like it had its own pulse. Oscar pressed closer without deciding to, chasing the warmth, and felt Lando's breath catch against his mouth in a way that went straight through him.
"Okay," Lando breathed, like he'd felt it too. "Okay, that's. Yeah."
"Yeah," Oscar agreed, and kissed him again, slower this time, deliberate, because slower turned out to be so much worse.
Lando broke away first, breathing hard and laughing silently.
"You are insane."
"Probably."
"This is very against several workplace policies."
"You don't know that."
"I've been working in corporate environments for six years. I can infer policy risk."
Oscar kissed him again before he started ranting about work again.
Lando let him.
Lando tipped his head back against the mirror and made a quiet, helpless sound when Oscar's hand tightened at his waist, like being held in place had briefly interrupted every clever thing he could say.
"Good," Oscar murmured, without meaning to sound like that.
Lando's eyes opened.
Oscar realized too late that there was a way to say it that sounded normal, and a way to say it that made Lando’s mouth part around a breath.
"Don't," Lando said.
Oscar froze.
Lando swallowed. "Stop. I mean. Do not stop."
Oscar stared at him.
"I forgot my words," Lando said.
"It was clear enough."
Lando laughed once, breathless and embarrassed, and Oscar kissed the laugh out of his mouth.
For a few minutes, the part of Oscar's brain devoted to catastrophising went quiet.
Someone knocked.
"Occupied," Lando said, far too calmly.
"Mate, you've been in there forever," Rafa's voice said through the door.
Oscar closed his eyes.
Lando buried his face in Oscar's shoulder and shook with silent laughter.
"One minute," Oscar said.
There was a pause.
"Oscar?"
"Yep."
Another pause.
"Are you ill?"
"No."
"Then why are you in Lando's bathroom?"
Lando laughed properly then, helpless and warm against Oscar's shirt.
Oscar stared at the ceiling.
"We are discussing strategy."
"Guys, come on," Rafa said, and walked off.
Lando was still laughing when they separated. His glasses were not on, but Oscar could picture them anyway: the way they would fog at the edge in Singapore heat, the way Lando would take them off when he got frustrated and hold them in one hand like removing them might make the answer clearer.
"We should go back," Lando said.
"Yes."
Neither of them moved.
Lando touched Oscar's cheek once, thumb light at the corner of his mouth.
"You okay?"
Oscar wanted to say no. He wanted to say, I am happy and it is terrifying. I do not know what this is. I do not know what I am allowed to want from you. I do not know how to be normal now that everything I want is standing in front of me.
He smiled instead.
"Yeah."
Lando smiled back like he believed him.
That should have been a relief.
Oscar carried the lack of relief all the way to Singapore.
ᯓ★
Singapore felt like being wrapped in a hot towel and asked to run.
The air met Oscar at the airport doors. By the time they reached the hotel, his shirt was sticking to his back.
The lobby was all polished stone, orchids, and air-conditioning set to a temperature that suggested money could defeat weather if it was committed enough. Sophie was already by the lifts, answering a call and pointing two mechanics toward the right check-in desk without looking up from her phone. Lando stood under a gold light fixture that looked like it cost more than Oscar's first kart and pushed his glasses up with one finger, squinting at a message from Tom.
Oscar's room was on the twenty-third floor. It had a view of the bay, a desk too narrow for a laptop and a dinner plate at the same time, and a decorative cushion so aggressively unnecessary that Oscar put it in the wardrobe immediately.
By the time media day started, Oscar already felt like Singapore had found the inside of his head and turned up the humidity. There were interviews, sponsor obligations, photographs in team kit, and Sophie appearing every forty minutes with a face that suggested Oscar's next task would be quick only in the same way race control decisions were quick.
"How enthusiastic do I need to look?" Oscar asked when Sophie handed him the Singapore special-edition Quad Lock phone case.
"Like you are personally delighted by phone safety," Sophie said. "But in a natural way."
The case was black and dark blue with a stylised Marina Bay layout on the back. Oscar was supposed to hold it near his face, say something mildly enthusiastic about keeping your phone secure, and let the social team film him swapping it onto his phone. This would have been fine, except Oscar had forgotten what was inside his current case.
The sticky note slid loose and landed against his palm.
this tastes like brake fluid. enjoy.
- Lando
It was only a note. A stupid sticky note from a coffee Lando had left him months ago, folded once and worn soft at the crease from living behind Oscar's phone. The ink had smudged slightly at one corner. Oscar had carried it through airports and garages and hotel rooms without thinking about it, which was not the same as forgetting.
"Oscar," Sophie said.
Oscar looked up.
Sophie was staring at him over her phone.
"Are you smiling at a receipt?"
"No."
"Is it incriminating?"
"No."
"Then why are you smiling like that?"
Oscar folded the note again, smaller this time, and tucked it carefully behind the new case before snapping it onto his phone.
"I'm not," he said.
Sophie looked at him for another second, then apparently decided she was not paid enough to interrogate championship leaders about stationery.
"Fine. Hold it up and pretend you have a normal relationship with sponsored content."
"I do."
"Great. Sound less like you learned that from a compliance email."
Sophie was already scrolling again, thumb moving fast. "Oh, also, some Italian outlet ran a piece about Lando this morning. Don't ask me why. Something about 'the brains behind the comeback.' He's not going to see it, he never reads that stuff, but if anyone asks you about it, deflect."
"Deflect how?"
"However you want. Just don't confirm he's a genius on the record, it'll go straight to his head."
"Too late," Oscar said.
Sophie didn't even look up. "Yeah, I know."
After one night of hotel air-conditioning and not nearly enough sleep, by the time they reached the circuit for the first serious meetings, everyone looked faintly punished, except for the hospitality plants, which seemed to be thriving in a way Oscar found personally rude.
Marina Bay always did this. At night, it was almost too beautiful: lights on glass, grandstands glowing, the city rising beyond the catch fencing like the whole place had been built to look dramatic on television. Underneath that, it was narrow and bumpy and hot enough to make every small mistake feel twice as expensive. Oscar usually liked tracks like this, where the wall was not theoretical and trust had to become a muscle.
Right now, he did not quite trust the car.
Everyone kept calling it a setup issue, because setup issue sounded like something with a beginning and an end. The update package had arrived with too many promises: better efficiency, more stable rear on entry, cleaner airflow in traffic. The language engineers used when the simulation said yes and the driver might say something unhelpful.
The meeting room behind the garage was too bright and too cold, with a whiteboard already crowded by tyre sets, run windows, and one corner where Sophie had written NO DRIVER CONTENT BEFORE FP1 in blue marker. Andrea stood near the screen. Tom sat beside Oscar with his notebook open. On the timing feed, Alex Albon's Williams rolled through pit lane, followed by Max Verstappen's Red Bull, both of them looking much calmer than anyone in orange felt.
Before the meeting started properly, Peter leaned over to Andrea with a printout, grinning. "Apparently Mattia Binotto was on the terrace yesterday with someone holding a very long lens, very interested in Lando's screens whenever he sets up outside the motorhome. Autosport ran a little item on it this morning. 'McLaren's secret weapon.'"
Andrea made a small, unimpressed noise. "Tell him to face the wall next time."
"I did. He said the wall was 'aesthetically punishing' and refused."
A couple of the engineers laughed.
In FP1, Oscar said something unhelpful.
"Rear is moving on entry," he told Tom. "Especially Turn Seven. I don't have the confidence there."
"Understood. Brake migration offset available, position four."
Oscar tried it.
The car improved for half a lap, then became strange through the middle sector, lazy in the places where he needed it sharp and twitchy when he tried to lean on it. Sweat ran down under his helmet. His hands felt too aware on the wheel.
"Still not right," he said.
There was a pause on the radio. Not long. Long enough.
"Okay. Box this lap."
When he climbed out, the garage felt like a body holding its breath. Fans moved beyond the barriers in a blur of papaya shirts and phone screens; inside, everything was clipped voices and towels and the strange smell of hot brakes cooling too close to people pretending not to panic.
Kimi Antonelli had gone fastest for Mercedes. Again. Hamilton was close. Charles had put a lap together that made the Ferrari garage sound briefly unhinged. Rafa was sixth and cheerful about it in a way Oscar found almost offensive.
On the screens above the pit wall, Max Verstappen was complaining about rear temperatures and clearly expected the universe to apologise. Alex Albon had gone purple in sector one for approximately twelve seconds, long enough for him to look up and for Sophie to mutter, "Absolutely not, I cannot handle a Williams narrative today."
"Verstappen's left side is sparking," Lando said, almost to himself, eyes still on his own screens. "Has been since lap two. Someone should probably tell them that."
"Not our problem," one of the strategists said, not looking up.
"No," Lando agreed, and went back to Oscar's data. "Just saying."
Oscar was ninth, which usually did not matter in FP1 until everyone remembered there was no FP2 waiting to forgive them.
On a normal weekend, there was time to be wrong. Three practice sessions, more data, more chances to find the exact place where the car stopped making sense and make it make sense again. On a sprint weekend, the sport gave everyone one hour and then expected them to call panic professionalism.
Lando was at the pit wall when Oscar came back from the debrief room, glasses low on his nose, shirt sticking damply to his chest. He had taken off his McLaren overshirt at some point and tied it around his waist. There was a small red mark where the glasses had pressed into the bridge of his nose, and a blue pen tucked behind his ear like he had briefly considered becoming the sort of person who knew where pens were and then immediately forgotten.
Oscar noticed all of this and hated himself for noticing it while the championship was attempting to collapse into a spreadsheet.
"We think it is mainly entry stability," Lando said.
Oscar nodded.
"Also energy." Lando pushed the glasses up. They immediately slid down again because Singapore was disgusting. "You're losing more than we expected after the second sector. Not massive, but enough that the PU model starts getting optimistic in a way I personally find insulting."
"Can you fix it?"
The question came out too sharp.
Lando looked up.
Oscar hated the small flinch before Lando hid it. The way his face rearranged itself into work.
"We can improve it," Lando said.
Tom appeared at Lando's shoulder with a tablet. "We have time for one useful answer, if either of you has one."
"I have several," Lando said.
"One useful one."
Lando ignored him and turned the tablet toward Oscar. His glasses had fogged again. He looked more determined for it.
"Here," he said. "Turn Seven. You are braking at almost the same point as Rafa, but you are coming off the pedal earlier because the rear starts moving when harvest ramps in. The car is asking you to trust it exactly when it has given you a reason not to."
Oscar looked at the trace. He understood enough to see the shape of the problem, not enough to know why Lando's voice made it feel solvable.
"So?"
"So we stop making it do that." Lando tapped another line. "Less aggressive harvest on release, shift a little of the work later, accept a tiny energy cost before the straight. You might lose a hundredth there, but you stop giving away two tenths because the rear has stopped behaving like it was assembled during a fire drill."
Tom made a noise.
Lando looked at him. "That was useful."
"It was three answers."
"All part of one answer with supporting materials."
"Cars do not have emotions."
Lando pointed at Oscar without looking away from Tom. "This one does."
Oscar should probably have objected.
He did not.
Tom looked between them, decided not to ask whatever he was thinking, and said, "We can test it before SQ if vehicle performance and systems stop arguing with each other long enough to breathe."
"Tell them it was Oscar's idea," Lando said.
Oscar blinked. "It was not."
"They will take it better."
"Because I am the driver?"
"Because you look less annoying than I do when you are right."
"I am less annoying than you."
"Exactly."
Oscar nodded again.
He wanted to say, I did not mean it like that.
He wanted to say, I am frightened.
Instead, he said, "Okay."
Lando looked at him for another second.
Then someone called his name from the strategy room, and he turned away.
Oscar watched him go.
Oscar had wanted Lando to look back and smile. Instead, Lando glanced at the monitor, pushed his glasses up with one finger, and went back to the data Oscar had asked for.
The team kept saying championship in sentences that did not technically contain the word championship. We need to maximise the weekend. Every point matters here. Kimi looks strong. Mercedes have pace. We cannot afford to give anything away. Every sentence found the same place in Oscar's chest.
Last year had started like a miracle and ended like a very public autopsy. He had led for half the season. He had got used to people saying future world champion like it was already true. Then Daniel had found another gear, Max had stopped making mistakes, and Oscar had discovered that pressure did not always arrive as fear. Sometimes it arrived as calculation. Too much of it. Brake five metres earlier. Leave margin. Protect the points. Do not crash. Do not lose. Do not become the story people tell about almost.
Then he had become exactly that.
This year was different. He was leading. He had Baku. He had Monza. He had Lando. He also had the old fear under his ribs, patient as anything, waiting for a reason.
Lando had kissed Oscar like there was no second version of the kiss happening somewhere else, no imagined headline, no camera, no family group chat, no sponsor question waiting in the future. Oscar kept thinking of that in the garage, under the lights, while he watched Lando talk to Tom with his glasses in one hand. He kept wanting to touch him and then feeling sick with relief that he did not.
Across the garage, Lando stood with his glasses in one hand and a tablet in the other, talking quickly to Tom and two systems engineers, not looking at Oscar at all.
He was doing his job. Oscar knew that. He still felt abandoned in a way that made him angry at himself first and everyone else second.
Sprint Qualifying did not help.
Before SQ1, Lando found him beside the car with two printed run plans and a face that said he was personally offended by laminated paper.
"This one is bad," Lando said, handing Oscar the top sheet.
Oscar looked at it. "Why are you giving me the bad one?"
"So you appreciate the good one."
"Is this a teaching method?"
"It's a journey."
Oscar glanced at the second sheet. "This says delay push lap if sector one traffic."
"Because if we send you into dirty air before Seven, you will call the car terrible, the garage will panic, and I will have to have a spiritual crisis in front of Andrea."
"You have those anyway."
"Yes, but I prefer to schedule them."
"Don't let Binotto find out you're this good," Oscar said, mostly joking, mostly not.
Lando snorted, not even looking up from the laptop. "Yeah, because what they need over there is someone else telling Bortoleto his braking points are wrong."
"You'd be good at it, though."
"They'd hate me within a week."
Oscar studied him. Lando was tired, and too hot, and running on caffeine and spite by the look of him. He had highlighter on the side of his hand and a crease between his eyebrows from squinting at screens. He looked at the car like it was a language he could almost force into sense if everyone else would stop interrupting long enough.
Objectively: a man with highlighter on his hand, complaining about Bortoleto, in a garage that smelled like hot rubber. And yet.
Oscar realized he had been staring for what was, by any reasonable measure, far too long, and that at least one mechanic must have noticed. Oscar made himself check his own data instead.
"You really think it will help?" Oscar asked.
Lando's humour dropped for a second.
"I think if we give you a car that behaves the same way twice, you'll do the rest."
Oscar's hand closed around the edge of the desk.
He wanted, badly, to know how Lando kept saying things like that and then walking away as if Oscar was supposed to survive them. It was technical, technically. A professional assessment from a very clever systems engineer about expected driver performance. Oscar still felt it somewhere lower.
"Okay," Oscar said.
Lando smiled, quick and crooked. "Excellent. Please be fast. It makes me look clever."
SQ1 was fine in the way Oscar hated most, clean enough to keep him out of trouble and messy enough to make him feel like trouble was only waiting for him to stop paying attention. The car still snapped slightly through Turn Five, and he had to breathe out of a correction before the wall became interested.
"P8," Tom said.
"Yeah, feels worse than that."
"Understood. We see it."
Do you, Oscar thought, and immediately hated himself for it.
SQ2 was worse. Traffic. Heat. A rear that would not stay put. A Ferrari in the wrong place at the wrong moment. Hamilton had been released into the same bit of track Oscar needed, and Oscar crossed the line hearing Tom say P7.
By SQ3, Oscar had stopped feeling attached to his own body.
He went P4.
P4 was not a disaster.
P4 felt like one.
Kimi was on pole for the Sprint. George second. Charles third. Oscar fourth. Rafa sixth.
Oscar climbed out of the car and smiled for the cameras with what he thought was the calm grin people liked to call ice-cold because nobody could hear the noise inside his head.
Lando found him near the scales.
"We have a direction," he said immediately. "The rear entry issue is tied to the migration map and the harvesting phase. We can shift—"
Oscar glared at him.
Lando stopped.
His glasses had fogged at the edges. His hair was damp. There was a thin line of sweat at his temple, and he looked exhausted from caring too much and not eating enough.
"Have you had dinner?" Oscar asked.
Lando blinked.
"What?"
"Dinner. Food."
"I'll eat later."
"Lando."
"Osc, I need to—"
"Eat something."
For a second, Lando looked down at the protein bar before he smiled. Not happiness, exactly. Smaller than that.
"Yes, sir," Lando said, too quiet to be only a joke.
Oscar looked away so quickly his neck hurt.
"I'm serious."
"I know."
Lando reached for his water bottle and took a drink, still watching Oscar over the rim of it.
Oscar's brain chose that moment to remember the airplane bathroom.
This was unhelpful.
"Good," Oscar said, and walked away before he could do something clinically stupid in front of the FIA garage.
Lando worked all night.
Oscar knew because Lando texted at 03:17.
lando
found one ugly little assumption in the rear migration logic. not saying it’s THE thing because tom will kill me for optimism but it is definitely A thing.
Oscar stared at the message from his hotel bed.
His room was too cold. His skin still felt hot from the track. He had showered twice and still smelled faintly of sweat and carbon dust and Singapore.
For a while, he did not answer.
Instead, he opened his photos.
The Tête de Chien pictures were still near the top of his camera roll: Monaco sharp and bright under them, Lando's stolen sunglasses, Oscar standing too stiffly until the old woman had told them to look at each other. Oscar tapped that one.
In the still image, they looked almost normal. Two people on holiday. Lando laughing, one shoulder turned toward Oscar. Oscar looking at him instead of the view, which was unfortunate but historically accurate.
Oscar pressed his thumb to the screen and held it there.
The photo moved.
Lando looked at him and laughed again, tiny and silent in the blue light of Oscar's hotel room. Oscar watched his own mouth change in response, watched himself forget to be careful for half a second because Lando had been happy and there had been sun and an old woman in La Turbie telling them to stand closer.
Then the Live Photo snapped back to stillness, and Oscar played it again.
oscar
Are you still at the circuit?
lando
define still
oscar
Lando.
lando
yes
oscar
Go to sleep.
lando
bossy
oscar
Please.
The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
lando
soon. promise.
Oscar wanted to call him. Help him.
He did not.
He wanted to say, I need you here.
He did not.
He wanted to say, You are allowed to care about the car, but please care about me too.
That was a thought so embarrassing that he put his phone face down on the bed and stared at the ceiling until the air conditioning made his eyes sting.
ᯓ★
The Sprint lasted eight laps for Oscar.
He should have known. He arrived in the paddock in the ugly green shirt. The one Lando had told him not to pack because last time Oscar wore it, he crashed. Oscar had packed it anyway because he was an adult, a Formula 1 driver, and theoretically not controlled by knitwear.
He wanted to be funny, so he sent a selfie to Lando with a spooky face.
oscar
the cursed shirt says hi
lando
piastri i am begging you to respect the data
By the time he got to the garage and Sophie handed him a new McLaren polo, Lando was laughing.
Oscar was not a betting man, but he would have bet a thousand euros that Lando was not laughing now.
He got a clean start. Not perfect, but clean. He held fourth into Turn One, stayed out of the mess through Two and Three, and kept Charles close enough that Tom's voice stayed level on the radio.
"Gap ahead point nine. Russell two point four ahead of Charles. Kimi leading."
Oscar did not need the championship maths. His brain supplied them anyway.
If Kimi won the Sprint and Oscar finished fourth, the lead narrowed. If Russell finished ahead too, it narrowed in a way that would become a headline. If Oscar did something stupid, it would become a narrative before the car reached parc fermé.
He tried not to think about narratives.
He tried to feel the car.
Lando's ugly little assumption had helped. The rear was not perfect, but it was less treacherous on entry. Through Turn Seven, Oscar could brake harder without waiting for the car to change its mind. Through the old grandstand section, under the lights and the heat and the sound ricocheting off concrete, he started to believe there might be a race in it, and because he believed that, he was stupid enough to relax.
He overtook Charles and George with ease. It felt like he was flying.
He smiled under the helmet.
Then he got to Kimi.
Oscar knew immediately that it was not malicious, which made the anger harder to put anywhere useful. He drew alongside into Turn Fourteen and left the room he was supposed to leave. Kimi braked late, then committed because drivers in racing cars rarely became uncommitted in time. The Mercedes locked and slid into Oscar's right rear with a dull, brutal knock that Oscar felt before he heard.
The car snapped.
For one second the wall filled his visor.
Then the impact came side-on, hard enough to steal the air from his lungs.
"Fuck," Oscar said.
The engine coughed. The steering wheel lit up with warnings.
Tom's voice arrived too calm. "Oscar, are you okay?"
Oscar breathed.
Once.
Twice.
"Yeah. I'm okay."
Oscar looked at the angle of the wheel, the tyre warning, the car sitting wrong beneath him.
The safety car came out. Then the red flag.
Both him and Kimi were out.
Oscar climbed out while marshals moved around him and sweat cooled unpleasantly under his race suit. The crowd noise became shapeless. He raised a hand because he was supposed to raise a hand. He walked behind the barrier because he was supposed to walk behind the barrier. He answered the medical car questions because the questions were simple and had correct answers.
First DNF since Melbourne.
That was the thought, sharp and stupid and immediate. Before I'm okay, before Kimi hit me, before the car is broken.
He had scored in every race since. Every single one. He had built the championship out of consistency as much as speed, out of not letting bad weekends become empty weekends, out of dragging points home when the car was wrong and the strategy was worse and the world wanted something dramatic from him.
Now there was nothing.
By the time he reached the garage, everyone was already moving. Damage assessment. Sporting reports. Strategy for Rafa. People looked at Oscar, checked that he was intact, and then their eyes moved back to screens. It was nobody's fault. That was how garages worked. If the driver could stand up, the team had to keep moving.
Besides, if there was a weekend to lose points, it was a Sprint. That was what the reasonable part of him tried to say. He was still leading. The damage was limited.
The unreasonable part knew championships were not lost all at once. They leaked away in small, explainable disasters until someone else was holding the trophy and everyone had a clean story for why it had happened.
Lando was there.
He looked at Oscar once, quick and pale, like relief had hit him too hard to become visible properly. Then one of the strategy engineers said something about the red flag restart and Lando turned back to the monitor.
Oscar stood in the middle of the garage in a race suit that felt too heavy. His gloves were still on. His hands were steady.
Lando turned back to the monitor.
The hurt that followed was so irrational Oscar almost laughed.
He looked at the part of him that had walked into the garage and performed fine so well that even Lando had believed it.
He went upstairs to the showers instead.
He made it into a stall before he cried. Oscar was not a loud crier. He stood under water that was too hot because he could not be bothered to change it and pressed both hands flat against the tile, breathing through the tight, ugly thing in his chest.
He was crying because Kimi hit him and because of the points and because the city was too hot and because his body had held the line until the second there was no one looking. Underneath all of that was last year, sharp and stupid and alive again: the memory of losing something everyone had already started handing to him, of Daniel smiling with the trophy while Oscar stood beside him and tried to look like a good teammate, a good Australian, a good almost.
He had told himself he was better now.
Maybe better was just what people called you between mistakes.
Someone knocked once outside the showers.
"Oscar?" Tom's voice.
Oscar shut his eyes.
"Yep. Two minutes."
"You sure you're all right?"
"Yeah. Just sweaty."
The lie came easily, which frightened him more than the crying.
He made himself stop crying because there was still Grand Prix qualifying. There was still a race on Sunday. The championship would not pause because Oscar had run out of places to put himself.
When he came back down, Lando was at the workstation with his glasses off, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Oscar wanted him so badly it felt like anger.
"We need to talk through the qualifying plan," Lando said when he saw him.
Oscar nodded.
"Okay."
Lando looked at him for half a second longer than work required.
"You sure?"
There it was. Lando noticing, even now, even late.
Oscar could have said no. He could have said, I cried in the shower. He could have said, Please stop talking about the car for ten minutes and hug me.
Instead, he said, "Yeah. What are we doing for Q1?"
The door closed.
ᯓ★
Q1 began badly. That was the technical term.
The first run was messy from the out-lap. Track evolution was high, traffic was worse, and Oscar reached Turn Five with the tyres not quite where he wanted them. The front washed wider than expected. He corrected, lost the exit, and knew before Tom spoke that the lap was gone.
"Box, box," Tom said. "We'll reset."
Oscar came in P17.
Nobody sounded panicked.
That was how he knew they were panicked.
Tom's voice stayed measured. Andrea stood with his arms folded. Mechanics moved around the car with controlled urgency. Lando was at the edge of the strategy station, glasses fogging at the lenses every time he stepped too close to the garage opening. He wiped them quickly on the hem of his shirt, put them back on, and looked immediately irritated that the world had the nerve to include humidity while he was trying to think.
Oscar watched him through the visor.
Lando did not look down.
"Oscar," Tom said. "We are going again. Mode push, then recharge. Give yourself margin to Verstappen ahead."
"Copy."
The second lap was better, which was almost more irritating, because better still put him P14.
He made it through Q1 in fourteenth, and the garage exhaled like they had not been holding him underwater for eighteen minutes.
Oscar climbed out during the break because the car was too hot and his own skin felt wrong. He drank water. Someone handed him a towel. Someone else told him track temp. Tom said something about Turn Three minimum speed and getting the car rotated earlier. Lando said something about deployment after Turn Five and Oscar only caught half of it because he was looking at the sweat caught at the edge of Lando's glasses.
"Oscar," Lando said.
Oscar blinked.
"Yeah."
"Did you hear me?"
"Deployment after Five."
"And?"
Oscar stared at him.
Lando's mouth tightened. Not angry. Hurt, maybe. Worried.
"And don't chase the delta into Seven," Lando said. "You're making the car do two things at once. Let it breathe."
Let it breathe.
Oscar almost laughed.
"Copy."
Q2 was worse because the new tyres felt good. So the car felt better.
A bad car gave Oscar somewhere to put the blame. A better car left him with the quieter, awful question of why he was still afraid.
Oscar went out with enough grip to trust and did not trust it. He braked a fraction early into Turn Seven and hated himself before the apex. He carried too much into Fourteen trying to make it back and nearly lost the rear. He crossed the line P11.
"We need another," Tom said.
"Yeah. I know."
"Plenty in it."
He looked at the headrest of the car.
Plenty in it meant plenty in him.
He knew.
The final Q2 run came down to the last lap. Very dramatic. Very unnecessary. Oscar had spent most of his career trying to avoid unnecessary drama and now seemed to have become a factory for it.
He started the lap knowing he had to make Q3 and knowing that knowing was the least useful thing in the world.
Turn One was fine. Turn Three was better. Turn Five was clean enough, and then Raffles Boulevard blurred past, the car twitching over the bumps, the wall close and bright and indifferent. Turn Seven arrived too fast. Oscar heard Lando in his head, which was both useful and incredibly annoying.
Let it breathe.
He let it.
The car stayed with him.
P8, by three hundredths. Oscar did not celebrate.
Leclerc crashed at pit entry. Red flag.
He came back into the garage and said, "I need a minute."
Tom looked at him.
"Q3 starts in twenty."
"I know."
He walked to his driver's room before anyone could stop him.
The room was small and cold and aggressively tidy. His spare cap sat on the table. His phone was face down beside it. Someone had left an electrolyte drink near the sink. The little fridge hummed under the counter, full of water bottles and protein bars he did not want. His fireproof top from the Sprint was folded in a plastic laundry bag on the chair, still faintly smelling of sweat and fire extinguishers.
Oscar stood in the middle of the room and tried to breathe through the tenths of a second deciding his life.
There was a knock.
He knew it was Lando before the door opened.
Oscar had wanted him to come.
Oscar had also wanted him not to.
"Osc?"
Oscar turned.
Lando stepped inside and closed the door behind him. His glasses were in his hand now. Without them, his face looked younger and more tired. There were red marks on both sides of his nose. His hair was damp at the temples.
"We need to talk," Lando said.
Oscar almost laughed.
Of course they did.
"Now?"
"Yes, now." Lando's voice was careful, but only just. "I have no idea what is happening with you today."
Oscar looked at the floor.
"Nothing is happening."
"That is very obviously not true."
"It's qualifying."
"It was also a Sprint this morning, and a crash, and you disappeared and every time I ask if you're okay you look at me like I've asked you to explain the Australian tax code."
"I'm fine," Oscar snapped. "The tyres keep overheating. It's shit."
Lando inhaled, sharp and frustrated.
"Do not do that."
Oscar looked up.
"Do what?"
"Talk like that. Talk about the car."
Something hot moved through Oscar's chest.
"You do it."
"What?"
"You talk about the car all the time."
Lando stared at him.
Oscar knew he should stop.
He did not stop.
"All day," Oscar said. "The car, the model, the map, the deployment, the migration. I get it. That's your job. But don't stand there and act like you're the only one who can make yourself useful."
Lando looked lost.
"I was trying to help you."
"I didn't ask you to fix me. I asked you to fix the car."
Oscar felt the room sour as soon as it left his mouth.
Lando flinched.
"Right," he said.
"That's not—"
"No, I understand."
"Lando."
"I worked all night because you said the car didn't feel safe."
"Yes," Oscar said, and hated the small ugly laugh that came with it. "You only care about the car."
Lando stared at him.
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing."
"Osc."
Oscar looked at the electrolyte bottle on the table. The spare cap. The stupid perfect order of the room. Anything except Lando's face.
"You were right there," he said.
Lando went very quiet.
For one second, Oscar thought he had finally said the thing he meant.
Lando looked genuinely confused. "So were you."
Oscar swallowed.
"I said I was fine."
"Yes," Lando said. His voice rose, then dropped immediately, like he had caught it with both hands. "You did."
Oscar's throat hurt.
"I don't know how."
There. Small. True.
Lando's face changed.
Oscar could not bear it.
"And you were busy," he said quickly, because Lando's face had gone too open and Oscar did not know what to do with mercy either. "You had the car, and the model, and everyone asking you things, and I know that matters."
"You don't think what you do matters?"
"That's not what I said."
"It's what it sounded like."
Oscar looked at him then, because the hurt in Lando's voice made not looking feel worse.
"I don't know how to do this," Oscar said.
Lando's hand tightened around his glasses.
"With us?"
Oscar's silence answered for him.
Lando's mouth opened, then closed again.
"Okay," he said, too carefully. "Then start there. Don't start with telling me I only care about the car. Not after you were the one who told me to fix it."
Oscar's mouth went dry.
"I know."
"Do you? Because from my angle it feels like you don't trust anything I do unless it turns into a lap time fast enough to make you feel better."
"That is not fair."
"No," Lando said. "It isn't."
Oscar went silent because it was true, and because it missed the worst part. Before, Lando had known what to ask because Oscar had stood there practically shaking with the need to be asked. Today Oscar stood still. He had answered questions. He had looked away first.
Oscar hated himself so sharply he could barely look at him.
"I didn't mean that," he said.
Lando laughed once, without humour.
"Which part?"
Oscar did not know.
He looked at the clock. Q3 was starting soon. There was a room full of people waiting for him to become useful again. Lando was standing in front of him hurt and angry and beautiful, and Oscar had no words that would not make it worse.
So he did the only thing he knew deep in his heart he wanted to do.
He crossed the room and kissed him.
For half a second Lando did not move.
Then he made a sound low in his throat and kissed Oscar back like he was angry about it.
It had none of the softness of the morning in Monaco. Oscar pushed him back against the wall and Lando went, one hand fisting in Oscar's race suit, the other still holding his glasses until Oscar took them carefully and put them on the table without breaking the kiss.
"Please," he said against Oscar's mouth, voice rough.
Oscar moaned before he could contain it.
Lando went still for half a breath, then made a sound Oscar was going to regret learning how to produce.
Lando's mouth opened under his, hot and desperate and familiar in a way it had no right to be after a week. Oscar pressed closer, chasing the only kind of silence he understood, the kind where wanting filled every gap words had ruined. He grabbed Lando's ass and pulled him firmly against him.
Lando pulled back just enough to breathe.
"This is not talking."
"I know."
"Oscar."
The way he said it hurt.
Oscar kissed him again because he could not survive the hurt yet.
The knock on the door was loud enough to make them both jolt.
"Oscar," Tom called. "Q3. We need to go."
Oscar stepped back.
Lando's mouth was red. His hair was a disaster. He looked wrecked in a way that made Oscar want to apologize and kiss him and run away.
"Osc," Lando said quietly.
Oscar picked up his helmet.
"Later."
Lando looked at him.
Then nodded once.
Oscar left.
Q3 felt insane. The garage, the lights, the radio, the pressure, all on the other side of something clear and thick. Oscar heard Tom. He answered. He drove out. He warmed the tyres. He watched the delta. He listened when Tom told him Ferrari had banked a strong lap, when Russell was improving, when Rafa had not found time in sector two and would likely stay seventh.
Then, everything narrowed.
Turn One: brake hard, trust the front, let the car rotate. Turn Three: breathe it in, keep the minimum speed, do not protect what is not gone yet. The steering was alive in his hands, every vibration coming up through the wheel and into his wrists, through his shoulders, into the cage of his ribs. For the first time all weekend, the car stopped arguing with him. It answered back.
Let it breathe, Lando had said.
Oscar did.
Turn Five mattered. It always did here. Get greedy on the exit and the whole straight punished you; baby it too much and Turn Seven arrived with the delta already bleeding red. Oscar let the car run to the wall, hands quiet while the rear loaded up underneath him. The bumps started almost immediately, the surface broken by seams and old public-road texture, each one coming through the wheel like a small argument. The rear moved exactly where it was supposed to move, and not a centimetre more.
Oscar felt it happen before he thought about it, the tiny shift under him, the car asking for trust and then giving him a reason to offer it. Somewhere behind that feeling was Lando at a monitor with his glasses low on his nose, talking too fast about brake migration and harvest maps while Tom tried to turn it into something they could actually run. Somewhere behind it were mechanics changing settings with tired hands, engineers arguing over traces, every small piece of work disappearing into the car until all Oscar could feel was the answer.
He carried speed toward Seven and the wall stayed close. The lights flattened the road into silver and black. The braking zone came at him hard, the fastest part of the lap snapping suddenly into one slow left-hander, and Oscar did not wait for the brake point to save him. He knew the car now. He knew what it would give him. Hard brake, rear stable, patient release, let the rotation come instead of dragging it there.
Through the middle sector, Singapore tried to make him untidy. Tight corners, short exits, kerbs waiting bright and dangerous at the edge of his vision. Oscar used only what the car could stand, and then, for one suspended second, everything went silent. The walls seemed to rise past him. The sky came down. The floor skimmed the bumps, the tyres trembled under him, and Oscar understood, suddenly and without wanting to, why people saw impossible things and built religions around them. The car was not a machine anymore but something alive enough to answer him, violent and precise and impossibly from another world.
Then the noise came back all at once, swallowed by grandstands and glass and thrown at him in pieces. Oscar used more kerb than he had all weekend. The car held. The track opened, bright and violent and immediate, and he felt suddenly, fiercely alive. Not calm. Never calm. Full of the car, full of the speed, full of every person who had touched the weekend and made it possible for him to reach this corner and not let go.
He did not think about Kimi or Zak or last year. He thought about Lando saying, let it breathe. He thought about the car breathing under him. He was the car and the car was enough and the lap was happening now, now, now.
He crossed the line.
There was a burst of noise on the radio, too loud to understand.
Then Tom, laughing despite himself.
"Pole. Pole by four tenths."
Oscar breathed out.
"Copy."
"That was unbelievable, mate."
Oscar closed his eyes for half a second.
When he climbed out, the garage erupted around him. Mechanics clapped him on the helmet. Andrea had one hand pressed to his forehead and the other in the air. Rafa shook his head, grinning, and said something Oscar did not hear. Sophie appeared with a phone already recording, took one look at Oscar's face, and lowered it by two inches like even the social media department had limits.
Lando was there.
At the back of the garage, half-hidden by two engineers, glasses back on, already looking at the screens again.
Oscar looked at him.
Lando looked back.
ᯓ★
Lando came to Oscar's hotel room at 01:58.
Oscar knew the exact time because he had been staring at his phone like it might explain how to be a person.
The knock was soft.
Oscar opened the door.
Lando stood in the hallway in a black T-shirt and loose trousers, hair damp from a shower, glasses on. He looked tired enough that Oscar immediately felt worse.
"Can I come in?" Lando asked.
Oscar stepped aside.
Lando came in, then turned back toward him before Oscar had even shut the door properly.
"You were incredible today," he said.
Oscar's hand stayed on the handle.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." Lando laughed once, but it came out thin and unsteady. "Oscar, you went purple, purple, purple. The last sector, I thought the timing feed was wrong. You were faster than anything any stupid simulation thought was there. Faster than anything any of us had predicted."
Oscar closed the door.
Lando looked almost embarrassed by how much he meant it. His hair was still damp from the shower, glasses slipping slightly down his nose, mouth soft. Oscar should have let himself take it.
"You are so good. It was crazy to watch," Lando said quietly.
Oscar looked at the carpet.
"Thanks."
After that, the silence came in hard.
The room was too neat. Hotel rooms always were. Nothing belonged to anyone. Oscar's suitcase was half-open near the wardrobe. His race suit hung on the back of a chair like evidence.
Lando stood by the small table and took his glasses off.
That, more than anything, made Oscar nervous.
"We need to talk," Lando said.
Oscar stepped closer.
"Okay."
"Actually talk."
"Okay."
Lando looked at him like he did not believe him.
He had no reason to.
"I watched you do something unbelievable," Lando said. "And I wanted to be happy about it with you, but you looked at me like I'd done something wrong. I still don't know what it was."
Oscar had to swallow twice before he answered.
"Nothing happened."
"You cried in the shower."
Oscar went still.
Lando's face changed immediately.
"Tom told me you were in there a while. He didn't say you cried. I guessed."
Oscar looked away.
"I didn't want anyone to know."
"I am not anyone," Lando said softly.
Oscar knew that. It was why every word felt dangerous.
It was also the part he kept forgetting on purpose. Lando had never treated Oscar's attention like a problem. He had noticed everything, the standing too close, the way Oscar found him in places he had no good reason to be, and instead of stepping away he had said, very kindly, that he liked it.
Oscar turned back to him.
"I know."
"Do you?" Lando's voice cracked around the edge. "Because today it felt like you kept moving the line."
Oscar did not have an answer.
Lando pushed a hand through his hair.
"I was scared today. When Kimi hit you. I was scared, and then you came back, and you looked fine, and everyone needed things from me, and I thought if you needed me you would tell me."
Oscar laughed once, small and awful.
"I'm not good at that."
"I know."
"No, you don't."
Lando looked at him.
"I know some of it," Lando said, after a moment. "I know you bring me water when you are worried. I know you stand too still when you want me to ask the hard questions. I know you look at my mouth and then pretend the wall behind me has become fascinating when you want to kiss me."
Oscar's face went hot. He stepped away and sat on the bed.
"Lando."
"What I do not know," Lando said, softer now, "is what I am supposed to do when you stop doing all of it."
Oscar stopped holding himself back.
"You like it when it's easy," Oscar said.
"No," Lando said, very quietly. "I like you. All of you."
Oscar closed his eyes.
"I know."
"Do you?"
That hurt more than it should have.
Oscar opened his eyes.
Lando looked like he regretted it immediately, but he did not take it back.
"I mean," he said, quieter, "if you don't want this I'd rather learn sooner rather than later."
Oscar could not speak.
Oscar knew that should have made everything simpler for Lando.
Instead it made him feel cornered by his own wanting.
He crossed the room.
Lando's eyes flicked down to his mouth, and that was enough to ruin both of them.
"Oscar," Lando started, but Oscar was already kissing him.
This time Lando kissed back immediately. Maybe because he was tired. Maybe because they were both idiots. Maybe because talking required a kind of courage neither of them had left after Singapore had wrung them out under lights.
Oscar backed him toward the bed and they went down easily, almost smoothly, Lando landing first with a small sound against Oscar's mouth and Oscar half on top of him, one knee between Lando's thighs, one hand braced beside his head. For one second it was only heat and breath and Lando looking up at him with his mouth open.
Then the room seemed to close around him.
Oscar became aware of his own body all at once: his weight over Lando, the heat in his face, the fact that he was blushing so hard he could feel it in his ears. He wanted to keep going. He wanted it badly enough that wanting itself felt embarrassing, too much, like something Lando could see on him. Everything went too warm and too close. His hands started shaking.
Lando seemed to feel the stop.
He pulled back, breathing hard.
"We don't have to," he said.
Oscar's face went hot.
"I know."
"I mean it."
"I know."
Lando touched his cheek.
"You're not on a timer with me."
Oscar blinked.
"What?"
Lando's mouth moved, almost a smile and not quite. "When I told my family about my first boyfriend, my mum asked whether he was staying for dinner. That was it. Very anticlimactic. I was thirteen and had prepared a speech."
Oscar stared at him.
"I know that was lucky," Lando said. "I am not going to make you pretend it is boring for you just because it was boring for me."
"Okay."
Oscar wanted to tell him then. About being afraid of his own body. About how he had kissed women and felt nothing like this, and now every small thing with Lando felt like a room he had entered without knowing where the light switches were. About how he was not ashamed of Lando, never Lando, but sometimes he was ashamed of himself.
Instead, he leaned forward until his forehead rested against Lando's shoulder.
Lando's hand came up to the back of his neck.
They stood like that for a long time.
Eventually Lando said, "I can stay."
Oscar nodded against him before he understood what the nod meant. His body wanted that. Of course it did. It wanted Lando in the bed, Lando breathing beside him, Lando close enough that Oscar could pretend the silence was care instead of avoidance.
Then Lando stopped breathing for half a second.
It was small. Almost nothing. A sound Lando tried to swallow before it became a sound at all.
Oscar went still.
"Lando?"
"I'm fine."
Oscar pulled back.
Lando was looking down, one hand still at Oscar's neck, the other curled around the edge of Oscar's wrist. His eyes were bright. Too bright. He blinked once, hard, and a tear slipped anyway.
The room changed shape.
Oscar could handle anger. He could handle frustration, disappointment, even Lando looking at him like he had been hurt by something Oscar had said. Crying was different. Crying made it real in a way Oscar could not file under miscommunication or race stress or Singapore heat.
He had done that.
Lando wiped his face quickly, embarrassed. "Sorry. Sorry, that's stupid."
"It's not."
"It is. You're the one who got hit today."
"Lando."
"And I came here to talk and now I'm crying in your room like an idiot, which is really not the persuasive strategy I was aiming for."
Oscar's chest hurt so badly he almost could not see him.
He thought, very clearly, I am bad at this.
Then, worse: I am bad for him.
"You should go," Oscar said.
Lando blinked.
"What?"
Oscar stepped back. "You should go."
"Osc."
"Please."
Lando stared at him like he had misunderstood the language they were speaking.
"I don't want to leave."
"I know."
"Then why are you asking me to?"
Because if Lando stayed, Oscar would have to keep looking at what he had done. Because if Lando stayed, Oscar would have to be held by someone he had hurt. Because Lando had cried, and Oscar had no idea how to be loved by someone he could make cry.
"Because I can't do this right now," Oscar said.
"Do what?"
Oscar looked at him.
Lando wiped his face again, harder this time, like he was angry at the tear for existing. "No, tell me. Do what? Talk? Be upset?"
Oscar had to force the words out.
"That's not fair."
"I know," Lando said, and now there was heat under it, the first real flash of anger Oscar had heard from him all weekend. "I am trying very hard to be fair, and calm, and useful, and whatever else makes this easier for you, but I don't actually know what you want from me. You pull me in, then you tell me to go. You kiss me because you don't want to talk, then you look at me like I've done something wrong for what? Wanting to stay?"
Oscar flinched.
Lando saw it and looked briefly wrecked by himself. "I'm sorry."
That was the problem.
Lando would apologize. Lando would make himself smaller. Lando would stay and forgive him before Oscar had earned any of it, because Lando had spent months being kind in ways Oscar did not know how to survive.
Oscar needed him to leave.
Kindness would not do it.
"Maybe I just want you to do your job," Oscar said.
Lando went still.
"What?"
"Tomorrow," Oscar said, because stopping now would mean admitting he had done it on purpose. "Just make sure the everything works tomorrow. Make sure we don't fuck up the strategy again."
Lando's face dropped.
For one second, he looked so young that Oscar almost started crying.
"Right," Lando said.
"Lando."
"No. That's very clear." Lando nodded once, sharp and awful.
"I didn't mean—"
"Yes, you did." His voice cracked, but the anger held it upright. "You meant it enough to say it."
Oscar said nothing.
If he opened his mouth, he would beg. If he begged, Lando would stay.
Lando's face closed slowly, not all at once. That would have been easier. Instead Oscar had to watch every small piece of him go careful.
"Okay," Lando said.
"I'm sorry."
Lando let out a small, humourless laugh.
"No, you're not," he said. "Not like I am."
Oscar felt that like a hand around his ribs.
Lando picked up his glasses from the table and put them on, then seemed to forget what he meant to do next. His hand dropped uselessly to his side.
For one awful second, Oscar thought he might say something else.
He did not.
He left quietly, which was worse than slamming the door would have been.
The door clicked shut behind him.
Oscar stood in the middle of the hotel room until the air-conditioning raised goosebumps on his arms.
Then he sat on the edge of the bed and cried until he slept.
ᯓ★
They did not talk before the race.
Not properly.
Oscar saw Lando in the garage twice before the national anthem. Once at the strategy station, glasses on, face pale and composed while he spoke to Tom. Once near the back of the garage, where Sophie and the social media team were trying to get thirty seconds of usable content and Lando shook his head without looking up from his tablet. Oscar put his helmet on early so no one would ask why he kept looking over.
Tom noticed anyway, because Tom noticed everything and had the decency to say none of it.
Someone once told Oscar that driving while wearing headphones was illegal because it was distracting or something like that. He wondered if there was a law somewhere about driving while crying.
Even with his eyes burning, he kept pushing.
For thirty-seven laps, he did everything right. He got the launch. Covered Kimi into Turn One. Managed the tyres through the first stint. Kept enough pace in hand that Tom's voice stayed calm and the Mercedes pit wall had to make the first move.
The heat was worse than Saturday. It collected inside the cockpit, pressed against his ribs, soaked his fireproofs until every movement felt like dragging his own body through water. Singapore races were long even when they were simple, and this one was not simple.
Sometimes he made sure the radio button wasn't pressed and screamed at himself.
Antonelli stayed too close. Mercedes had better traction out of the slower corners, especially when the tyres started to go. Oscar could hold him through the middle sector, could pull a few tenths when the car was exactly where he wanted it, but he could not make the gap become comfortable.
"Gap behind one point four," Tom said. "Kimi reporting front limitation."
"Mine are not great either."
"Understood. Plan A still preferred."
Plan A meant control. Track position. No unnecessary risk. Oscar liked Plan A until Plan A became a religion.
There was another voice on the channel after Tom muted and unmuted. Lando, not speaking directly to Oscar but close enough that Oscar caught the edge of it.
"If Mercedes stops first, we cannot just mirror. He will come out in traffic."
Someone answered too low for Oscar to hear.
Lando again, sharper. "I know track position matters. I am saying you're being stupid about this."
Oscar smiled.
Tom came back. "Oscar, standby on stop window. We are checking Mercedes threat."
"Copy."
For half a lap, the car was simply a car again. Fronts going. Rear manageable. Kimi close enough that Oscar could see flashes of silver in the mirrors but not close enough to move. Lando's voice disappeared into the wall of people making decisions Oscar had to trust at two hundred kilometres an hour.
Then Tom said, "Lando thinks extend."
Oscar's hands tightened on the wheel.
The call itself might have been right. Hearing Lando's name in the middle of the race still hit the same bruise.
"Does the entire pit wall think extend?" Oscar asked.
A pause.
"We are split."
That was a terrible sentence.
"Give me the call," Oscar said.
Another pause.
"Plan A still preferred."
A VSC came on lap thirty-six after a Haas stopped near Turn Eighteen. The timing was ugly. Mercedes stayed out. McLaren debated for seven seconds that dragged out long enough for Oscar to count them.
"Box, box," Tom said.
Oscar obeyed.
The stop was terrible. A hesitation on the rear left, small enough to be human, large enough to become destiny.
"Four point nine," Tom said, as if Oscar could not feel every tenth already leaving him.
Then the stopped Haas became a red flag because the recovery vehicle needed room and the barrier needed checking.
Under the red flag, Kimi could change tyres without giving up the lead.
Oscar sat in the car at the end of the pit lane and understood the race had tilted away from him while he had done exactly what he was told.
The radio stayed quiet for a beat too long.
Then Tom said, "Oscar, just so you know, Lando was pushing to stay out."
Oscar stared at the Mercedes ahead.
That was not helpful information. It meant Lando had seen the thing that might have saved them, and the team had chosen the safer answer anyway, and Oscar had obeyed it. The championship had one more bruise, and Oscar had nowhere clean to put the blame, which somehow made him angrier. Worse, Tom mentioning Lando at all suggested he had noticed something. Maybe not the whole thing, but enough to connect Lando to conversations where he did not belong.
And if Tom had noticed, other people could too. The radio would end up online eventually. People would listen to it, dissect it, turn it into theories.
Oscar should not be having a crisis about who knew what at 258 km/h.
"We still have pace," Tom said.
Oscar looked at the Mercedes ahead.
"Copy."
He finished second.
He chased Kimi until the end. He made one move into Turn Seven that almost worked and would have been replayed forever if it had. Kimi defended cleanly. Oscar backed out because the championship was bigger than one corner and because walls did not care about romance or strategy or how badly someone needed to prove he was not collapsing.
Second was good, and still not enough.
Kimi won. Mercedes screamed. McLaren clapped too hard.
Oscar stood on the podium with champagne drying sticky on his neck and smiled because second place required smiling. He looked down at the McLaren group. Lando was there, glasses off, face tipped up toward him, expression closed.
Oscar could not tell whether Lando was proud or devastated.
The debrief room smelled like coffee, damp team kit, and the cheap marker pens someone kept buying despite everyone complaining about them. A stack of Singapore GP paperwork sat beside Andrea's laptop. Sophie hovered near the door for the first five minutes, waiting to hear whether Oscar was emotionally capable of more Martin Brundle, then looked at his face and quietly left again.
Everyone used the word unfortunate until it stopped meaning anything. Unfortunate VSC timing. Unfortunate red flag. Unfortunate rear-left delay. Unfortunate, as if bad luck became less brutal when everyone agreed to say it politely.
Lando sat two chairs away, silent except when asked a direct question about a model's safety car probability and the pit window logic. He answered clearly. Too clearly. Like he had taken all the mess of the weekend and compressed it into useful sentences because useful sentences were safer than feelings.
Zak hadn't been on the pit wall. He'd watched it from the garage like everyone outside the headsets had, which meant all he had was the result: second place, a botched stop, a red flag that had cost them the win.
"I want to understand the box call," Zak said, looking at the room rather than any one person in it. "We saw the VSC. We saw Mercedes stay out. Did we model that scenario at all, or did we just react?"
Nobody answered immediately.
"Because from where I was sitting," Zak went on, "it looked like we should have seen that coming."
Rafa glanced at Oscar from the other end of the table. Tom did too, quick and careful, both of them clearly waiting for him to say the obvious thing: that the call on track had been to extend, that Lando had pushed for it, that the team had overruled him and gotten it wrong. Oscar felt his throat close around it.
He didn't say it.
The silence went on a beat too long.
It was Andrea who filled it, leaning forward with his hands folded on the table. He hadn't been on the radio either, not really, not in the room where the argument had happened, but he'd clearly heard enough of it secondhand to know which direction to point the room without pointing it at anyone.
"For what it's worth," Andrea said, "I think the strategy side did an excellent job all weekend. Lando especially." He didn't elaborate, didn't say extend or overruled or any of the words that would have turned the room's attention somewhere uncomfortable. "I've had people from two other garages mention him to me this weekend, separately. Whatever he's doing, it's being noticed. So. Good job, all of you. We take the result and we move on."
A few people nodded, relieved someone said something. Lando went very still, then looked down at his laptop like it had suddenly become the most interesting thing in the room.
Oscar should have said something then too. Should have said, yes, exactly that, and it wasn't his fault. We didn't listen to him. That part was on me.
He didn't.
Lando did not look at him again after that.
ᯓ★
By the time Oscar got back to the hotel, he had eighteen messages he had not answered.
His room looked exactly as it had before the race, which felt insulting. The decorative cushion was still banished to the wardrobe. The curtains were half-open over the bay. Someone from housekeeping had lined his trainers up neatly by the wall and replaced the towels he had left on the bathroom floor after the Sprint, as if a room could be reset just because the bed had been made.
caio
Proud of you anyway.
ollie b.
for what it's worth, im really srry bout red flag! :(
hattie’s new phone
mum said ur not answering anyone. also can i please come to austin TXT are playing in texas and i already checked ur calendar.
mum
Are you okay? We watched. Call when you can, honey.
Oscar stared at his mother's message until the words blurred and his eyes burned.
Singapore was three hours behind Melbourne. It was late for him, later for her, but not impossible. That made it worse. There was no practical reason not to call.
Lando had not reached out.
Oscar deserved that.
He put the phone down on the bed and tried to sit with the quiet.
It should have been easier by now, and Oscar could not stop circling that. A week ago, he had Lando. He had Monaco, the fancy bakery, the plane bathroom, and Lando asleep beside him with one hand tucked under Oscar's pillow.
He had Lando looking at him as if wanting him was just another ordinary fact of the world.
Oscar had thought being loved like that might make him different. Cleaner. Braver. Less likely to be lonely and anxious and afraid of becoming a driver who could not manage tyres when it mattered.
He had thought maybe if Lando wanted him enough, the rest of it would shut up. If Lando looked at him like that, if Lando laughed into his shoulder, if Lando chose him in all those tiny, thoughtful ways, then Oscar might stop feeling like he was standing outside his own life.
Instead he was alone in a hotel room after finishing second from pole, still afraid of the same things, still thinking of headlines that did not exist yet, still ashamed of needing what he needed. Lando had tried so hard. Oscar could see it now: every careful question, every joke pulled back at the edge, every moment Lando had stepped away before Oscar knew how to ask him to.
And it still had not been enough to stop Oscar from hurting him. He sat on the edge of the bed still wearing his sweaty McLaren polo and called his mum before he could convince himself not to.
She answered on the fourth ring.
"Oscar?"
Her voice was sleep-rough and immediately alert.
Oscar closed his eyes.
"Hi."
"Are you all right?"
His face crumpled before he could stop it.
"Mum," he said, and then nothing else came out properly.
"Oscar, sweetheart, what happened? Are you hurt?"
"No. No, I'm not hurt. I'm sorry."
"Why are you sorry?"
Oscar pressed the heel of his hand to his eye.
"I'm so sorry."
"Oscar."
He had heard her say his name in a thousand ways. Proud. Tired. Amused. Warning. This one was the voice from childhood, from fevers and bad dreams and the horrible elastic snapping feeling of needing your mother before you were old enough to be embarrassed about it.
It broke him completely.
"I'm gay," he said.
There was a silence.
Not long. Long enough for Oscar to hear her sit up, the small rustle of sheets, the click of a lamp.
"It's okay," Nicole said.
Oscar let out a sound that was almost a laugh and almost not.
"I'm sorry."
"Oscar, what on earth are you apologising for?"
"I don't know." He wiped his face with the back of his hand. "I just. I should have told you. Or known earlier. Or been normal about it. I don't know."
"You are being very normal about it, considering you have called me crying from Singapore."
That made him laugh for half a second.
Then it hurt again.
"It's going to be a problem," he said. "For the family. For everything. The media. Sponsors. The team. I don't know. Maybe it won't, but I keep thinking it will, and I can't make myself stop thinking it. I keep thinking someone will ask a question and I won't answer right, or someone will find something, or I'll look at him wrong on camera and everyone will know before I've even worked out how to say it."
Nicole did not interrupt.
That was how Oscar knew he was crying harder than he thought.
"And I'm meant to be winning," he said. "I'm meant to be doing this properly. Last year I had it. For half the season, I had it, and then Daniel kept getting better and Max kept taking points and I kept telling everyone I was fine because that was easier than saying I could feel it going wrong. And then it did go wrong. It went wrong slowly enough that everyone could explain it afterwards and fast enough that I couldn't fix it."
He wiped his face with his sleeve like he was twelve years old again and had crashed a kart and tried not to cry until he saw her.
"And now it's happening again. Kimi fucking hit me yesterday and I cried in the shower, and I didn't tell anyone, but Tom knew anyway because Tom always knows too much. Then I got pole, and that should have made it better, but it didn't. I still felt like I was one bad lap away from everyone finding out I was never as calm as they thought. Never as good."
He stopped breathing for a second.
"And Lando came to my room," he said. "He came to talk to me because I had been horrible all day, and he was so tired, Mum. He worked all night because I said the car didn't feel safe. He kept trying to understand what I needed and I kept not saying it, and then when he cried I panicked."
Nicole made a small sound.
"I told him to leave," Oscar said. "He didn't want to. He kept being kind, and I couldn't make him go, so I said something awful. I told him maybe I just wanted him to do his job. I told him to make sure we didn't fuck up the strategy again."
The words sounded worse out loud.
Oscar pressed his hand over his mouth.
"Oscar," Nicole said softly.
"No, I did," he said, because if he stopped now he would never say the rest. "I said it because I knew it would hurt him. I wanted him to leave before I could ask him to stay. And then today he was right about the strategy, and they didn't listen, and I should have defended him in the debrief but I didn't. Zak asked about the model and I just sat there. I let him sit there alone with it because I was angry and embarrassed and scared Tom had noticed too much."
He could hear himself breathing now, ugly and uneven.
"And he still hasn't texted me," Oscar said. "I get it. I don't deserve for him to message. But I keep checking anyway."
He laughed once, broken and embarrassed.
"I thought having him would fix it," he said. "That's not how it works, I know. I thought if someone loved me like that, if he looked at me like I was easy to want, then maybe I would stop being like this. Maybe I would stop feeling wrong all the time. But he does love me, I think, or he could, and I'm still scared. I'm still thinking about cameras and headlines and points and whether I'm going to ruin his life by asking him to be with someone who can't even say the word out loud without calling his mum."
Oscar pressed his fingers harder against his eye until he saw sparks behind the lid.
"I'm so bad at this," he said. "All of it. Being a driver. Being a boyfriend. I fucking chose a career that will fall apart the second people know something true about me."
"Oscar."
"And Lando," he said, because once he had started, the words seemed to have found the worst possible exit. "I don't know how to do that either. I don't know how to be with someone. I thought I did, maybe, because I've dated people, but I didn't. Not like this. I don't know what I'm supposed to give him. I don't know what I'm allowed to ask for. I don't know if I can make anyone happy when I keep wanting to run away every time it starts to matter."
The silence after that was different.
"Lando," she said.
Oscar covered his face. He did not mean to get into this.
"Yes."
"The engineer Lando?"
"Mum."
"The Lando from the Half Marathon?"
"Please."
"The Lando whose texts made you smile at your phone every morning when you were home?" She was deliberately teasing him now.
Oscar made a noise into his hand.
"Hattie says she is coming to Austin," Nicole added, like this was a normal continuation of the conversation and not Oscar's life dismantling itself in a hotel room. "Something about a K-pop show and needing you to help her."
"She texted me."
"Good. She's been talking about this for days, it's so annoying."
"I know."
Nicole exhaled, soft and shaky.
"Oh, my love."
That was worse than anything else.
"I'm sorry," he whispered again.
"Stop that. Stop apologising to me for being my son."
Oscar went very still.
"There is nothing wrong with you," she said. "Do you hear me? Nothing. Not because of this. Not because of a race. Not because you are tired and apparently trying to carry the whole world by yourself."
Oscar could not breathe properly.
"I wanted to be good," he said.
"You are good."
"No, at this."
"At what?"
"Everything."
Nicole was quiet for a moment.
When she spoke again, her voice was gentler.
"Oscar," she said, and it was very soft now. "You are my baby."
He made a sound he could not stop.
"You are my baby," she said again, firmer this time, like it was the most obvious thing in the world and she was annoyed anyone had made him forget it. "You do not have to earn that. You do not have to win a championship for that. You do not have to be easy or calm or brave on television. You can quit this tomorrow and come home, and I will still love you exactly the same. I would be very surprised, obviously, and your dad would be mad, but we would love you the same."
Oscar laughed, or tried to.
"You can win every race left this year and I will love you the same," she said. "You can lose all of them and I will love you the same. You can date Lando or not date Lando. You can take ten years to tell anyone else or tell the whole world next week. None of that changes who you are to me."
Oscar looked down at his hand.
"Mum."
"You are my son," Nicole said. "My beautiful boy. That is it."
He cried then. Properly. Silently, but properly, shoulders shaking in the cold hotel room while his mother stayed on the phone half a world away. He had won races in front of thousands of people and stood on podiums with fireworks going off behind him. He had been called calm, ruthless, mature, inevitable. None of it had prepared him for the unbearable relief of being loved without performing anything first.
"And if Lando loves you," she said, after a while, when Oscar had gone quiet enough to hear her breathing, "he does not only love the version of you that wins. He is not waiting for the version who always knows the right thing to say. If he loves you, and I think he does from the way you sound when you try not to talk about him, then he will want the truth. Even if the truth is messy. Even if you tell him tomorrow that you are frightened, or that you do not know how to do this, or that you are never racing again and moving back into your childhood bedroom."
"I am not doing that."
"Good," she said. "I have plans for that room."
It broke a laugh out of him, small and wet and real.
"But he would still love you," she said. "If he is worth this much of your heart, he will want to know where it hurts."
Oscar pressed the phone harder to his ear.
"Mum," he said, but it came out broken.
"I know," she said. "But you are good, Oscar, you're great."
Oscar laughed wetly.
"He keeps telling me that."
"Then maybe listen to him."
"That's annoying advice."
"I am your mother. I am allowed."
For the first time all weekend, Oscar stopped clenching his jaw. Nothing fixed itself. It was one strand out of the knot.
He talked to her for another forty minutes. Not about everything. Enough. She asked practical questions because she was his mother and because he was very clearly her son: had he eaten, had he showered, was he alone, did he want her to call again in the morning. He said yes to the second, no to the third, and maybe to the fourth, which was as close as he got to admitting he did not want the call to end.
When they hung up, the room was still cold.
The championship was still damaged.
Lando was still somewhere else, maybe angry, maybe hurt, maybe waiting for Oscar to finally do one brave thing without being forced into it by a qualifying session.
Oscar looked at his phone.
His face was blotchy in the black reflection. His eyes were red. He looked exhausted and very young and not at all like a world championship leader.
He opened Lando's contact.
Then closed it.
Then opened it again.
oscar
can we talk?
He watched the message sit there, delivered and unanswered, which was its own kind of answer if he let himself look at it too long.
oscar
i'm sorry
Still nothing.
Oscar told himself Lando might be asleep. Or angry. Or awake and looking at the message and deciding, very reasonably, that Oscar could wait.
Then Oscar opened the team calendar.
He wanted something ordinary. A room number. A meeting slot. One small, practical excuse to stand in front of Lando before he lost his nerve again.
Instead, the logistics page had already updated. Race engineering and strategy travel: Singapore to London, early departure. Factory debrief: MTC, Woking. Remote Austin prep. Simulation review.
It was all normal. Oscar had seen pages like it all year.
Lando's name was there, and Oscar sat very still.
He checked the transfer time. By now, Lando was probably already in a car with two engineers and a suitcase full of ruined sleep, heading toward the airport while Oscar sat barefoot on a hotel carpet with his mother's voice still warm in his ear.
Oscar's own calendar had not moved. Partner breakfast. Sponsor filming. A McLaren event with Zak, Andrea, and Rafa. Two more days in Singapore smiling politely beside people who would ask him about resilience and momentum and how it felt to still be in the championship fight, as if momentum had not become something he kept dropping with both hands.
He looked at the message again.
oscar
i'm sorry
It looked smaller the second time.
Nothing was fixed. The points were gone, Lando was hurt, and Oscar still had a throat full of words he had never learned how to say.
Outside the window, Singapore kept glowing. The bay, the glass, the impossible clean lines of a city that would still be there in the morning. Oscar sat in the cold hotel room with his phone in his hand, waiting for an answer that did not come.