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It’s a mind-numbing march of days at the McLaren gym until the start of the season, reps upon reps until he counts to fifteen in his sleep and can feel the straps of the neck torture machine digging into his scalp at all hours. But hey, maybe there’s actually a point to it after all, because Carlos spots Lando in the locker room with just a towel around his waist, and, because he hasn’t yet acquired a British sense of boundaries, walks over and squeezes Lando’s bicep appraisingly.
“You were not always this strong. I will need to watch out,” he says, and it’s teasing, a backhanded compliment, sure, but that’s not the only reason Lando blushes. He’s used to thinking at a million thoughts per minute, but the comment kicks his mind into overdrive, trying to calculate just how long Carlos has been noticing his body.
He’s not sure he can say anything that won’t sound spectacularly lame, so he opts for the safe route, namely, faking out a tackle and slapping Carlos on the shoulder, then ducking around the corner to the showers before Carlos can retaliate. Unfortunately for Lando, Carlos has racecar drivers’ reflexes, and he still manages to catch Lando’s back with a flick of the end of his gym towel.
Lando yelps and laughs, just like he’s meant to, the way he always does when they play around, but in the end he still turns the shower to cold.
⁂
They’re not even in Barcelona for a day before Carlos finds an excuse to pick him up from standing, carry him across the room, and drop him on the physio bench. He bows to an invisible audience, the hammy bastard, leaving his back exposed. Lando goes to scramble off the table and make Carlos pay, but then someone’s calling Carlos’s name down the hall and he’s gone.
It’s probably for the best anyway. If Lando has to rest face-down on the table for a minute, who’s to say he’s not just resting?
⁂
It’s past midnight and Lando pulls up the video of Carlos tackling him in that Japanese bowling alley, purely for research purposes, of course. Carlos just makes it look so easy, and it’s threatening to bust the lid on Lando’s lockbox of no-good bad fantasies. But Lando’s stronger now than he was last season, Carlos said so himself.
He closes the YouTube tab and catches sight of himself in the full-length mirror on the wall, bathed in the cool glow of his computer. He tilts his chin down, flexes one arm. One moment of vanity won’t kill him. At least now he’s sure that if it were to happen again, he wouldn’t roll over. He would make Carlos work for it.
⁂
He was wrong. Dead wrong. Carlos pulls him along by the wrist as they duck into the bathroom of the pulsing nightclub, too eager to make it back to the hotel but too smart to kiss again on the dancefloor. Carlos pins him up against the door like it’s nothing, grabs his shoulders with capable hands and doesn’t budge. It’s not just muscle, Carlos has height on him as well and Lando comes to the sticky hot realization that maybe he’s never actually felt the limits of Carlos’s strength. Lando pushes back, tries to give as good as he’s getting, but Carlos won’t be moved. He laughs into the kiss as Lando squirms, grinds his thigh into Lando’s crotch in a way that has no right to be so graceful.
Lando lets Carlos manhandle him around in the small space, gasps a little when Carlos picks him up in one arm and bends him over the sink. The porcelain is cool against his skin, a contrast to Carlos’s warm fingers under Lando’s shirt. Part of him hopes that Carlos appreciates the newly honed muscles on his stomach and back. He won’t say it, but he wants Carlos to know that he’s not something small or weak, destined to be overpowered. If Carlos just happens to be built entirely out of lean muscle and barely breaks a sweat shutting down Lando’s attempts at a fair fight, well then, he’s the outlier between the two of them.
(Lando thinks he might be glad he managed to end up here, sandwiched between the filthy mirror and an outlier.)
“It is so good to finally have you,” Carlos says, and there’s a smile in his voice, the one that’s a little too wolfish to only be friendly. Lando’s heart beats in rabbit-time, quick and hot in his ears. He wants to want to protest: he isn’t anyone’s, he’s his own man, but Carlos is wrapping strong arms around his chest, kissing from his jaw down to his neck, and he realizes too late that he actually might just give himself up entirely if Carlos asked.