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Chapter Text

The morning had that soft, honeyed light that made everything look a little bit touched by magic, even the sweater pilling on Nico’s elbows and the half-crumpled receipt under the visor of Lewis’s car.

The marina was yawning awake. There’s the clink of rigging, a gull’s indelicate laugh, while Lewis waited by the curb in a long camel coat that looked like a hug you could wear. He tossed the keys in a small arc when he saw Nico coming down the steps.

“Driver’s choice,” Lewis said, still grinning at Nico like they were fifteen.

“Dangerous privilege,” Nico answered, but he caught the keys easily and slid into the seat, the leather settling beneath him like it already knew his weight.

Lewis draped the camel coat over Nico’s lap before remembering. “Oh, you can take that,” he added, casual, as if Nico hadn’t already done so a hundred times. “It’ll be cold near the water this early.”

Nico shrugged into it while the car purred to life. It fell past his hips like a promise and smelled faintly of bergamot and something warmer: engine heat, maybe, or the way hotel rooms keep a trace of whoever laughed there last. He checked the mirrors, tapped the steering wheel with his thumb in the old tempo. Lewis reclined, sunglasses sliding down his nose, trying and failing to look sleepy.

They’d always liked mornings in motion. Kart trailers and dawn, long roads and the way a day could crack open into anything. Nico drove smoothly through the tight streets, past the bakery where the owner would give them an extra pastry if Lewis tried a mangled bonjour. A cyclist lifted two fingers in greeting. The sea widened to their left, blue as a secret.

At a stoplight, Nico adjusted the collar of the coat around his throat. “It’s too big on me.”

“It’s perfect on you,” Lewis said, not even pretending to check the fit. “Makes you look very ‘television professional.’”

“Mm,” Nico hummed, unconvinced, but he didn’t take it off.

When they pulled into the paddock, the world shifted into its own bright language: high-vis vests and camera cranes, the thrum of generators, the hummingbird flicker of team radios. Nico eased into the space beside the Sky compound, killed the engine, and opened his door to a shout from a producer waving a clipboard like a baton.

“Rosberg! Your passenger has excellent taste in coats.”

Nico leaned over the top of the car, sunglasses in place, and called back, “He still hasn’t given me five stars on the app.”

“Surge pricing and terrible music,” Lewis complained, and they all laughed, because that was the other language the paddock spoke: convenience, rhythm, ease.

They walked in step, the way people do when they’re practiced at orbiting each other. Without looking, Lewis traded his sunglasses for the pair Nico had pushed atop his head, swapped them mid-stride like a sleight of hand.

Meanwhile, Nico slipped Lewis’ sunglasses into a pocket and didn’t need to ask where that pocket had come from.

A runner appeared with coffees, and Nico just reached for the right cup and pressed it into Lewis’s palm while the runner gaped like a magician had just pulled a rabbit from his sleeve.

“You boys married yet?” she blurted, then winced. “Oh God, ignore me—too many early call times.”

“Not yet,” Lewis said, cool as an ice bath, and Nico barked a laugh that felt like a grin taking its first lap. “We’ll let you wonder when’s the wedding though.”

They split at the seam where Sky’s glossy set met the pit lane. “I’ll steal you for lunch,” Lewis said, thumb skimming a friendly line over Nico’s shoulder as if to underline the plan.

“You’ll try,” Nico corrected, already hearing his name through his earpiece. “Win something nice so I look clever when I mention it.”

“I always make you look clever,” Lewis shot back, and then he was gone into the bright noise of engines like thunder held in a fist.

Nico slid into the Sky flow on autopilot: mic check, powder, a quick exchange of notes with the producer who preferred bullet points to oxygen. The coat stayed on because he liked its weight.

Between segments, he glanced toward the team hospitality where Lewis would be spreading a smile across a room like confetti, and every time a camera caught him looking, the director smirked and said, “Love story, page fifteen,” into Nico’s ear.

“Focus,” Nico murmured back, smiling into the lens because it cost him nothing and paid out in subscriptions.

On the other side of his smile, the past shuffled into neat frames. Heat shimmering above a kart track in Germany; his father’s hand on his shoulder, light and proud; a skinny kid with a brazen grin and a helmet too big for his head daring anybody to say no.

Lewis at twelve had this way of bouncing on the balls of his feet like the world might tilt into his future if he kept moving. Nico at twelve had examined every corner of the world like a puzzle he could solve faster than anyone else.

“Go on then,” he had said once, at some brick-dusted circuit where the air tasted of rubber and sugar. “Beat me.”

“I plan to,” Lewis had grinned. “But then we’ll get ice cream.”

And they had, more often than not, because kids know how to be easy in a way adults forget.

By the time the first free practice session ended, clouds had balled into loose cotton in the sky and the paddock smelled like hot brakes and sunscreen. Nico took his mic off and found Lewis exactly where he expected him: leaned up against a stack of tyres like a fashion editorial that accidentally wandered into a pit lane.

The sunglasses Lewis nicked earlier from Nico were perched on the blond man's own nose again before Lewis knew he wanted them back. Because it's their thing by now, swapping (well, swiping) each other's stuff just as easily as swapping car positions without repercussions.

“C’mon,” Lewis said, hooking a finger in the edge of the coat and tugging Nico a fraction closer. “I’m kidnapping you for thirty minutes. Media can fight me.”

“They will,” Nico said, but he let himself be tugged.

They walked to the little staff kitchen where the kettle never stopped muttering and the sandwiches came in plastic triangles. Lewis opened a fridge door, saw nothing he wanted, shut it like it had offended him, then reached for Nico’s lunch without asking because of course he knew Nico’s order. They ended up at a high table by the window, knees knocking once, then finding a balance.

“What do you think of the kerbs in turn nine?” Lewis asked around a bite, and Nico snorted.

“The kerbs? You took one look at those during the track walk and said, and I quote, ‘I’ll just fly, mate.’”

Lewis tried to pretend that didn’t sound exactly like him, because it did, and it was frighteningly accurate. “Pure slander.”

“Camera caught it,” Nico said, and there it was again, that quicksilver spark between them, the shorthand made over years. Nico had data in his head the way other people had song lyrics. Lewis had lines through corners like brushstrokes. Between them, the conversation drew a track map of its own.

“Interview?” a producer called from the doorway, apologetic like someone interrupting a good joke. “We’re live in three.”

Lewis glanced at Nico. “Go make sense of my nonsense, love.”

“I always do, babe!” Nico said, smirking as he lifted what was left of his sandwich in salute.

He watched Lewis go with that small ache he never named, not because it hurt but because it fit so snugly inside his ribcage it felt like part of the structure.

Nico turned back toward the camera and did his job: clipped, bright, generous with praise and stingy with clichés. He talked about balance and tire windows and the way a car could look like music when the driver trusted it. He didn’t say: the way I trust him like I trust my own hands.

Between takes, he thumbed his phone and found a photo taken that morning by a Sky intern who wasn’t yet used to seeing them side by side. In it, Nico’s wearing the camel coat and pulling a face at something off-camera; Lewis is half a step behind, mouth tilted toward a laugh he hasn’t let out yet. If you didn’t know them, you might misread the distance. If you did, you’d see the gravity.

The day unspooled. FP2 hummed into a debrief; the sun slid west and turned the garage doors into mirrors. They were professionals the way birds were aerodynamic— born that way, and then also rehearsed to a sheen.

When the last segment wrapped, Nico’s producer patted his shoulder. “Good stuff, Rosberg. Tell your boyfriend he owes us a win.”

Nico just raised an eyebrow. “We don’t nag the talent,” he said, then slipped the earpiece out and the world rushed back in.

They shared the walk out like a single thought. The paddock at dusk was softer, shedding its noise one layer at a time. Mechanics rolled toolboxes that glittered like treasure chests. Someone was laughing at something said in French. The air tasted of hot metal cooled too quickly.

As they approached the car, Lewis reached for Nico’s bag and Nico let him take it because they were well past the stage of arguing over point-scoring kindnesses.

“Airport?” Lewis asked, opening the passenger door for him like he was meant to do that ever since the stars breathed life into the two of them.

“Airport,” Nico confirmed, ducking into the warmth of the car and setting his phone in the cup holder without thinking. Inside the coat, the day sighed and let go.

The drive out of the circuit moved through pockets of silence and little fragments of chatter. “Your hair was doing the thing on camera,” Lewis said, gesturing vaguely around his own head.

“All my hairs are doing the things,” Nico said.

“Exactly,” Lewis said, like that solved something deep.

At the terminal, their routine was easy as a breath. Two bags, one carry-on each. Nico handed over both boarding passes without being asked. Security waved them through with the particular kind of brisk politeness reserved for people they recognized but refused to acknowledge as such.

At duty free, Lewis tried on three pairs of sunglasses and liked them all. Nico plucked the best one from his hands and put it on himself.

“Mine now,” he said.

“Thief,” Lewis said, but his eyes creased, pleased.

They boarded late, floating through a cabin of half-dozing travelers and blinking seat-belt signs. Lewis took the window; Nico took the aisle, then immediately leaned across to look at the view like a child. The coat pooled over both their laps.

When the plane hunched itself into the air and Monaco fell away clean as a peeled label, their shoulders found each other.

Lewis slipped his hand into the coat pocket and discovered a crumpled packet of mints and a note from a Sky runner with a scrawl that read, he really does make you look smart. He tucked the note back with a small shake of his head, a private joke he’d pretend he didn’t yet know the punchline to.

Sometime after takeoff, the cabin lights dimmed to a soft lullaby blue and the air settled into recycled hush. Nico’s head tipped toward Lewis’s shoulder, as if gravity had opinions. Perhaps it did; it wanted Nico right against Lewis, and asked him pretty nicely to watch over him. He didn’t fight it. His breath warmed the fabric.

Still awake, Lewis let himself angle a fraction, careful not to jostle. He opened his phone and thumbed through the day’s photos: the coat; the pit lane; Nico mid-gesture, explaining tire deg to a camera with the same intensity he once brought to qualifying. A picture someone else had taken: both of them walking past a stack of tyres, so close their arms brushed, neither of them noticing because that was the point.

He paused there, thumb stilled on the glass. The blue cabin light made Nico’s hair look almost silver at the edges. Outside, the wing cut through a smear of cloud like a page turned very carefully.

He didn’t think words like always or forever because he didn’t need to; the file folders of his life had a Nico tab on every page. The ache in his chest wasn’t pain. It was relief. A familiar weight. The shape of home.

By the time the seat-belt sign chimed on for landing, Nico stirred and made a small sound like it wasn’t yet time to wake him up. Lewis blinked, spotted his own sunglasses (Or Nico’s? at this point he didn’t really know whose belongings are whose) now living on Nico’s face instead of on his hair. Lewis can’t help but smile at him.

“Morning, Princess.”

“Did I drool?” he asked, voice sandpapered by sleep.

“Elegantly,” Lewis said.

Nico grunted and still tried to bury his face on Lewis’ shoulder. “I do everything elegantly.”

“Except pasta,” Lewis reminded him.

Nico pressed the heel of his hand under one eye and yawned. “We are not discussing your crimes with hot sauce.”

The wheels kissed the runway in a neat, decisive line. The cabin brightened. People fussed with bags and messages and sandals. Nico reached down and picked up Lewis’s backpack before Lewis could, slinging it over his shoulder in one smooth movement. The coat flared at the hem.

The gesture shouldn’t have made anything in Lewis’s chest go soft, but it did anyway.

They filed out with the rest of the passengers, two more people cradled by routine. In the tunnel, the air smelled like stale coffee and new plans. Lewis reached to steady Nico where the floor dipped, and Nico didn’t thank him because the thanks was in the reach itself.

At baggage claim, an older couple watched them point at the belt in perfect unison, then look at each other with the small, conspiratorial glance of people who shared brain cells.

The woman nudged the man’s elbow and whispered something that made him smile. Lewis caught a fragment, looks just right, and pretended to check the carousel for their suitcase while his mouth did that dangerous little tilt.

The bag arrived. Nico plucked it with a gymnast’s neat efficiency. Outside, night sat gently on the city and the taxi rank glowed like a necklace laid out on velvet. They didn’t discuss plans because they only had the one. Nico tipped his chin toward the car park where they’d left the spare. Lewis nodded once. It was their oldest choreography.

“Home,” Nico said, not specifying whose, because it didn’t matter.

“Home,” Lewis agreed, the word fitting cleanly in his mouth, familiar as a steering wheel under his palms when a lap was perfect and he could feel it, bone-deep and simple: the line, the throttle, the rush, the ease of being exactly where you were meant to be.

Chapter Text

On good days, the flat felt like a held breath released. The balcony doors were cracked wide to the sound of the marina, curtains lifting and falling with a lazy tide of air, sunlight slipping across the floorboards in slow strips like the day had decided to undress politely.

There were two mugs on the coffee table, one ring darker than the other; a jacket that wasn’t Nico’s hooked over the chair back like a loyal dog; a pair of trainers by the door exactly where Lewis had toed them off at midnight.

It was a geography of a life shared without ever needing to say mine or yours.

In the kitchen, a saucepan murmured on the hob and Nico stirred it with the specific intensity of a man who had, at least once, been personally insulted by a jar of pre-made sauce. He had flour on the heel of his hand and basil leaves bruised under his thumb, and every few minutes he nudged the flame lower like coaxing a temperamental engine into its sweet spot.

Lewis sat on the counter in a hoodie that Nico swore had been stolen from his wardrobe and not from any legitimate shop, bare ankles swinging. He had a cherry tomato between his fingers and the kind of grin people wore when they were about to misbehave in a way the culprit would definitely get away with.

“Don’t,” Nico warned without turning. He could feel it in his bones, the inevitable arc of a hand toward the spice basket.

“Just a splash,” Lewis said, innocent in the tone and nowhere else. “It’s not even the super hot one.”

“There is no such thing as ‘just a splash’ with you,” Nico said, reaching back blindly and slapping Lewis’s wrist with the spoon. A dot of red sauce landed on Lewis’s knuckle like a war wound. “Set the table.”

“I like watching you cook,” Lewis said, which was not a refusal so much as a delay tactic. He popped the tomato into his mouth and slid down off the counter. “Also, for the record, your no-hot-sauce rule is a human rights violation.”

“Report me to the UN,” Nico said, but his mouth tugged at the edge. “Plates are in the cabinet you always open first. Cutlery is in the drawer you always get wrong.”

Lewis opened the correct cabinet and the wrong drawer in one smooth movement, then corrected himself with theatrical contrition. “Imagine if you labeled things,” he said, carrying plates to the table by the balcony. “Imagine the harmony we could achieve.”

“I did label things,” Nico said. “With my soul.”

“Tragic,” Lewis said, but he was already pouring water into glasses, dropping lemon slices in because that was the current obsession. He put Nico’s glass to the left because he somehow remembered which hand Nico favoured even for things no one noticed.

Steam curled up from the pot like a satisfied cat. Nico added the pasta water to the sauce by instinct and flicked the pasta into the pan in a clean, professional sweep that made Lewis whistle under his breath.

“You’re just showing off,” Lewis said, leaning against the doorjamb with his arms folded, eyes content and hungry in that way that had nothing to do with food.

“Always,” Nico said. He tossed the pasta and the sauce came together glossy as a magazine spread. He tasted, adjusted salt, made a face of consideration that would’ve killed the ratings if he did it on Sky. “Get the cheese.”

“That’s my job?” Lewis said, offended by an imaginary hierarchy. He got the cheese anyway, grater in hand, and stationed himself at the table as if chairing the Parmesan committee.

They ate with the balcony breeze combing their hair in feathery passes and the city doing its quiet, expensive hum beneath them. Nico didn’t say anything about the hoodie because you didn’t interrogate a thing that felt like home; he just watched Lewis shovel pasta with the kind of reverence that made Nico feel like he had coaxed the weather into perfection.

“You put red pepper flakes in,” Lewis said, diffident, somewhere between accusation and delight.

“Small ones,” Nico said, gravely. “We had a diplomatic summit.”

“Historic,” Lewis said. “I’m proud of us.”

The bell rang while Nico was scolding Lewis’s heavy-handed cheese approach, two quick knocks and the sound of a key turning like it had never entirely given up on being useful in this lock. Jenson’s head appeared around the door.

“I brought… nothing,” Jenson declared, stepping inside like it was a foregone conclusion. He threw his bag at the sofa and the flat key on the counter. The bag landed with the soft thud of a man who’d learned to aim, while the key clanged on the counter. “But I will take whatever that is. Is this what retirement looks like, Rosberg? Cooking for your spouse?”

Nico pointed his fork. “You have to have a spouse for that.”

“Do you,” Jenson said, innocently looking between them. “Wild. News to me.”

Lewis was already up, hugging him, laughter mashing into Jenson’s shoulder. “You’re early.”

“I am a gift,” Jenson said, peering into the pan with far more curiosity than respect. “Also traffic’s a nightmare and I ran here because I couldn’t stand watching a man reverse a Bentley for fifteen minutes.”

“Sit down,” Nico said, resigned and fond in equal measure. “There’s enough.”

“There’s never enough when Seb is coming,” Jenson told him, tracking sauce with his finger along the rim of the serving bowl like a man who had lived enough to not fear Nico’s wrath. “He eats like he’s storing for winter.”

“Speak of the bee whisperer,” Lewis said as another knock came, this one accompanied by the soft chaos of someone juggling objects. Seb rolled in like a gust of countryside, hair wind-ruffled, cheeks pink with exertion, a bottle of wine tucked under one arm, a jar of something golden in his hand, and a bag that looked suspiciously like it contained baked goods.

“I come bearing peace,” Seb said, triumphantly lifting the jar. “My bees made this. They are in love with my orchard. We had a ceremony. Also, don’t look in the bag until after dinner.”

“You tell me and now I only want to look in the bag,” Jenson said, reaching.

Seb snatched it away and hid it behind his back. “Boundaries,” he said, sternly, then broke into a grin and hugged Lewis, then Nico, then somehow ended up hugging Jenson while still juggling wine and honey like a juggler who believed in diplomacy.

“Webber?” Lewis asked, glancing toward the door like he could conjure tall, sardonic energy by will alone.

“Parking,” Seb said, rolling his eyes. “He said something about Monaco being a ‘postage stamp with delusions of grandeur’ and I told him to write it down so he could be quoted accurately.”

“Ha!” came a voice from the corridor, deep and amused. Mark filled the doorway the way a mountain blocks a road. “Put that in the brochure. Hello, domestics.”

“You’re late,” Jenson said.

“I got stuck behind a man who reversed a Bentley for fifteen minutes,” Mark said, deadpan, and they all laughed like someone had set it up.

Dinner became a gravity all its own: wine opening with a cheerful pop, plates nudged closer like they were moving on rails. Seb tried to take a photo of the table and dropped his phone into a pot of red pepper flakes; Lewis fished it out, shaking with laughter while Seb lamented that his bees would be angry at the spice contamination. Jenson told a story about mistaking an ultra-marathon hydration pack for a fashion accessory and being offered condolences on his “back injury.” Mark, unhelpful, added, “You do look like a man who keeps spare calves in there.”

“Jealous,” Jenson said, flexing.

“Always,” Mark said, not missing a beat.

The food was simple and perfect, the sauce clinging like it had been taught commitment. Nico felt something loosen in his chest every time Lewis’s knee found his under the table and didn’t move away, every time Lewis nudged the water glass closer when Nico gestured for it without looking. They didn’t perform anything for this audience; they didn’t need to. The world flowed around them and they were a fixed point.

“So,” Seb said, leaning back with a sigh that suggested all future sighs were attempts at this one. “How are my favourite married couple?”

Lewis choked on a basil leaf. Nico made a futile hand gesture that was meant to be dismissive and ended up being fond. Jenson’s smile widened like sunrise on fast-forward.

“I mean,” Seb said, mouth twitching, “if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and switches coats and steals sunglasses and keeps tea in the cupboard for each other—”

“—is probably a duck,” Mark finished, dry as summer grass. He lifted his glass. “To ducks.”

“To ducks,” Jenson echoed gleefully, and Lewis, ridiculous, clinked solemnly like this was ancient ritual while Nico nodded with the pained dignity of a man who had lost control of the message years ago and decided to enjoy the ride.

Seb ended up telling them about his bees anyway, an epic saga involving a rogue swarm, a neighbor’s decorative fountain, and an intervention staged by Seb with the calm gravity of a man who could negotiate with insects. “I explained—very nicely—that the fountain was not sustainable,” he said, hands windmilling. “And then I gave them a better place to live. They were convinced.”

“Right,” Mark said. “Did you get them a mortgage?”

“They pay in pollination,” Seb said, wounded.

“It’s all any of us can do,” Jenson said, and the table went soft with laughter again.

After, they drifted by natural law to the living room. The sun had folded itself lower and the flat wore late-afternoon like a scarf: light thin as silk, shadows long enough to trip on. Nico started clearing plates without thinking and immediately got scolded by four men at once.

“Leave it,” Jenson ordered, already ferrying dishes like a waiter who hated it and did it well anyway.

“I’ll do glasses,” Seb said, gathering stems between his fingers with terrifying efficiency that made Nico suspect he used to do this in a past life.

Mark carried the heavy things because of course he did, and Lewis hovered behind Nico stealing bites of bread from a plate that was supposed to go to the sink.

“Out,” Nico told him, trying not to smile. “You’re in the way.”

“I’m the atmosphere,” Lewis said, kissing the air near Nico’s temple and dodging the incoming tea towel Mark lobbed in mock disgust.

When they came back with the living room tidied enough to pass inspection by a harsh judge, Mark had found the remote and had already located a replay of a race from the season before. He looked indecently comfortable in Nico’s armchair, like it had been waiting its whole life for a man with a wry eyebrow.

“Let’s critique the commentary,” Mark said, stretching out with the cool arrogance of a cat on a stolen pillow. “Oh look, it’s you, Rosberg. Let’s see if you say anything sensible or just fluff your mate’s pillows.”

Lewis flopped onto the sofa and dragged Nico with him like gravity was contagious. Seb took the floor with the exaggerated sigh of a man who worked all the time and wanted the earth to do the work now; Jenson curled into the armchair like he was auditioning for a nap.

On the screen, the paddock summer gleamed and the cars sang. Nico watched himself in a box in the corner, gesturing at tire degradation and explaining the calculus of a good undercut. It was always odd watching his television self. He looked taller and more certain, a man carved out of the idea of himself. Beside him, Lewis made a little noise every time the camera cut to an onboard and Nico’s voice said something he’d once said to Lewis in a different life with an engine and a target heart rate.

“Oh, you’re so in love,” Jenson mumbled, half-asleep, to no one and everyone.

“Please,” Mark said, “keep it down. I’m trying to enjoy the rare moment when Nico isn’t talking about small mistakes being very costly.”

“They are,” Nico said, automatically.

“See?” Mark said, triumphant. “Reckless.”

Seb propped his chin on the seat cushion and looked up at them like a child soaking in adult nonsense. “Aww,” he said quietly, at a shot of Lewis in parc fermé pulling Nico into a hug after a podium. “That’s cute.”

“It’s always cute until someone posts it on Instagram with a thirteen-paragraph caption,” Jenson said, eye still closed. “Spare me your literary ambitions.”

“You’re safe,” Lewis said solemnly. “I do all my sonnets on Twitter.”

“X,” Mark corrected, in a tone that suggested the letter offended him personally.

They let the race wash over them. Someone said something about turn six and the wind direction and it turned into a ten-minute dissection of wind socks that made even Seb’s bees look overqualified. When the ads came, the room deflated like a held breath let out in stages and Seb finally pounced on his bag.

“Okay,” he announced, producing a paper box like a magician. “Now you may look.”

He revealed a mess of pastries that looked like they’d been assembled by angels with sweet teeth—glazed fruit tarts glowing like stained glass, a knotty thing glossy with honey that made Seb’s eyes mist with paternal pride.

“My bees made that,” he said, jabbing a finger toward the nectar-slick pastry. “Well. In a roundabout way.”

“They’ve done good work,” Mark said, already slicing the pastry with the calculation of a man who intended to get both the crispy edge and the soft center.

Lewis fed Nico a bite with all the attendant intimacy of a seventeen-course tasting menu and zero of the self-consciousness. It stuck to Nico’s lip and Lewis laughed and thumbed it away. The entire room went deliberately, politely blind for a moment; the air filled with the sound of clinking plates and somebody humming. Nico pretended very hard to be annoyed and failed entirely.

They talked a little about the calendar — who was going where, who was biking too much, who was biking not at all (Lewis raised his hand, Jenson looked appalled) — and a little about silly things like the way the sea smelled different in May and whether Monaco needed any more millionaires (Mark said no; Seb said he was going to start a petition; Nico said he’d sign it if Seb’s bees were allowed to vote).

At some point, a neighbor’s dog barked and then barked again as if he’d discovered a profound new philosophy and was desperate to share it. The light dropped deeper. The race replay ended and the TV did that soft, blue belly-up glow that made everything look gentle, like the edges had been sanded. Nico noticed Lewis’s head getting heavier on his shoulder, not asleep, just closer, all the points of his body arranged with unconscious ease as if this was a configuration he’d returned to a thousand times in other rooms, other hotels, car rides, flights.

“I should go,” Jenson said, opening one eye, immediately lying. “But your sofa is delicious on my back. Feels like absolute heaven.”

“It is a good sofa,” Seb mused, stroking the cushion like a cat. “Not as good as mine. Mine is extremely good.”

“Everything on your farm is extremely good,” Mark said. “We get it. The carrots. The bees. The apples. Your soul.”

Seb beamed without shame. “It is.”

They stayed long enough to justify leaving late. Eventually gravity loosened its grip and they rose in little flurries of motion: Seb packing his things with solemn ceremony and leaving the honey on the counter with instructions like he was entrusting them with an infant; Jenson locating his bag after a comedy of errors that involved mistaking the tea towel for his T-shirt; Mark patting Lewis’s shoulder in that way that meant affection disguised as insult.

At the door there were hugs, and then more hugs because the first ones didn’t seem to have stuck. They did the thing where everyone tried to leave at once and no one left, and then somehow they were in the corridor, Seb shouting something about watching a film next time “with subtitles so Mark can follow,” and Mark flipping him off in a way that felt like a lullaby.

When the door clicked shut, the flat inhaled the sound and settled. The streaks of pastry sugar on the coffee table caught a shard of dying sun and glittered like misplaced constellations. Nico leaned his forehead against the door for a second, just long enough to feel the wood cool against his skin and to file away the shape of the night into the drawer marked Evidence That This Is How It Should Be.

In the kitchen, Lewis was already at the sink, sleeves pushed to his elbows, rinsing plates with the lordly air of a man who had decided that washing up was his one true calling. He’d draped the tea towel over his shoulder like a sash of high office. Nico came up behind him and bumped his hip in a gentle, directional way.

“I can do that,” Nico said, reaching for a plate.

“I know,” Lewis said, not moving out of the way. Water hissed like a pleased cat. “It’s my turn.”

Nico leaned against the counter and watched, luxuriating in the idle luxury of not being needed and yet being wanted there anyway. The honey jar sat on the counter, light pooling in it like a sunset preserved. A note Seb had stuck to the lid said don’t feed to infants or Mark, and Nico laughed quietly, the sound catching in his chest and shaking something loose.

He hugged Lewis from behind in appreciation, because that's what you do when someone did the dishes for you on their own.

“Thank you for surviving our friends,” he murmured against Lewis' back, nuzzling his face against the warmth.

“They’re our friends,” Lewis corrected, resting his arm slightly against the arms around him. On his face was a fond smile that had not tired of itself in twenty years. “You were very brave when Jenson tried to do the dishes.”

“He was a menace,” Nico said, detaching himself from Lewis to help wipe the counter. “I saw him consider using the scouring pad on the nonstick.”

“We all make mistakes,” Lewis said, now stacking plates with the neatness of a man who understood the physics of space. “Some are more criminal.”

They finished clean-up to the soundtrack of the city outside disassembling itself for the night: boat engines winding down, the occasional laugh ricocheting off stone, a scooter stuttering up the hill like a tired bee. Lewis wiped down the counter with extravagant flourish and then snapped the tea towel at Nico’s knee.

“Rude,” Nico said, catching it easily. He folded it and hung it properly because some instincts could not be overwritten by love or disaster.

“You know,” Lewis said casually, leaning his hips against the counter and looking at Nico from beneath his lashes in a way that made the room tilt, “Jenson did call this a rom-com.”

“His remaining brain cells are poisoned by Instagram,” Nico said, too quickly.

Lewis’s mouth pulled at one side. “Seb called us inevitable.”

“He thinks bees can be reasoned with,” Nico said, and then, because it pushed through him like sunlight forced through blinds, he added, softer: “He’s not always wrong.”

Something in the air shifted, like a gear settling into the groove it had always been meant for. It wasn’t dramatic; it was precise. Lewis reached for the honey, lifted it, turned it in his hands like an artifact. The light moved in the jar and painted his knuckles amber. He set it back down like he was agreeing with a law of nature no court could repeal.

“It was nice,” Lewis said. “Them here. Like… this.”

“It was,” Nico said, because there was no angle on the truth that made it less true.

Lewis pushed off the counter, closing the small distance with the practiced ease of a man who understood lines and apexes. He reached for the hoodie he’d stolen and tugged it up over his ears like a boy playing at being small. Nico’s hands went to the hem without thinking and tugged it back down, smoothing it flat, fingers skimming the warmth of Lewis’s waist.

“You’re always going to steal that, aren’t you?” Nico asked.

“Until the heat death of the universe,” Lewis said solemnly, eyes smiling. “It smells good, just like you.”

Nico had a thousand reflexes for the old world—deflections, jokes, the way he could drive around something without losing time—but this wasn’t a corner you needed to brake for. He let the words sit between them like a shared plate. He let himself be looked at. He did not look away.

“Stay,” he said, and it wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last, but every time it felt like turning a key.

Lewis shrugged like he’d planned to all along, which he had, which they both had. “Okay.”

They brushed teeth side by side, bumping shoulders like kids at camp, and Nico had to spit the toothpaste out early because he was laughing at the way Lewis hummed a countdown song under his breath to make sure he hit the dentist-approve minutes. They argued briefly about who had stolen whose face cream (Lewis, obviously, and Nico, obviously), and then surrendered to the idea that their skin had already swapped custody.

In the bedroom, the sheets were crisp and the night had that clean, anticipatory quiet of a city that had decided not to bother them. Lewis dropped his phone face down and and turned off his notifications with the ceremonial gravitas of a man burying a sword. He climbed in and made a trespass of Nico’s half without apology. Nico turned the lamp down to a lake of honey at its lowest setting and slid in after.

“Did we feed Mark enough?” Lewis asked into the pillow.

“No one has ever fed Mark enough,” Nico said, settling his hand over Lewis’s chest where he could feel the thrum of a day well spent. The hoodie bunched under his wrist. He tucked his fingers beneath it and found warm skin. “We did our best.”

Lewis made a noise that was agreement and gratitude and the opposite of alone. The window was a rectangle of dark and the curtain moved in genteel, sleepy breaths. On the counter, the honey jar would be catching streetlight like a lighthouse for ants. Somewhere far below, the last scooter of the night made its valiant ascent.

“You know,” Lewis said, after the room had stretched comfortable and long around them, “they’re going to keep saying it.”

“Saying what?” Nico asked, though he knew.

“That we’re…” Lewis’s hand sketched a useless shape in the air. “You know.”

“We are,” Nico said, before he could stop himself. He didn’t know what shape he’d meant either, but whatever it was, they were.

Lewis’s breath punched out in a laugh that didn’t wake the neighbors. “Inevitable?”

“Duck-like,” Nico said.

“Domestic,” Lewis countered.

Nico thought of the tea lined up, and the shoes by the door, and the way Lewis’s hand had found his knee under the table without needing permission or a map. He thought of the pasta sauce and the friends who had walked into their flat and recognized the shape of it before he had put a name to anything.

He thought of the honey and the bees and Seb’s happy, deranged storytelling and Jenson’s dozing approval and Mark’s wry quality control. He thought of the balcony door and the curtains lifting like a breath that had finally decided to let go.

“Home,” he said, less a word than a diagnosis.

Lewis’s mouth curved against the pillow. “Yeah.”

They didn’t kiss, because there was a kind of courage in not needing to, a kind of faith in the inevitability of sunrise.

They lay there and let the city settle and the quiet unfold, and when sleep came it did what sleep does best. It made everything simpler by making nothing at all, and somewhere in the middle of it Nico’s hand stayed exactly where it was, curled under the hem of Lewis’s hoodie, palm warm against skin like a promise made without ceremony and kept without drama.

Chapter Text

The paddock hummed like a power line. Cameras rolled, radios chattered, and the air over the tarmac trembled in the heat. Once, that sound had lived under Nico’s skin and scratched. Today, it slid past him like wind over a visor. He could stand inside it and breathe.

Lewis swung their car into the spot with the kind of flourish that made strangers smile. The Mercedes came to a halt as neat as a handshake. They stepped out in one rhythm, two black bags over two shoulders, both bags heavy and familiar.

They walked side by side without talking, passing PRs with clipboards, junior staff jogging with coils of cable, and a little kid on a father’s shoulders wearing ear defenders the size of teacups. Their strides lined up. Their shoulders brushed once and then again.

Up ahead, the path divided. Sky to the left. Mercedes to the right.

Lewis angled his chin and the beginning of a smile tugged at his mouth.

“Lunch?” he asked, like the word was a natural extension of oxygen.

“Of course,” Nico said, dry as a notes page yet laced with anticipation like a love letter.

Lewis stepped close enough to fix his collar with one thumb. “You will thank me when the photos go up.” He bounced twice on the balls of his feet and jogged for the garage.

Nico watched him go for a beat longer than he needed. That old easy swagger. The undershirt clinging where the race suit had been peeled down. The little section of hair that refused to learn. Then Nico turned toward the Sky compound.

The glass front threw back the sun in shards. Inside, the crew moved in fast, tidy loops. Natalie waved a packet of run sheets. Karun lifted a coffee. Someone from production tucked a spare mic pack into his hand and dropped a tissue packet on top of it with a grin. He set his bag on his usual corner table where the light hit his left shoulder and the monitor on his right. He unzipped it.

Racing boots. Gloves. A helmet. A balaclava folded cleanly and faintly scented with the detergent Lewis liked.

Not his tablet. Not pressed shirts. Not the notes he had spent an hour refining.

“Unbelievable,” he told the bag, syllables falling out of his mouth like this hadn't happened before.

(...It had.)

Jenson’s head appeared over a partition, one tuft of hair swaying stubbornly with the sudden motion. “Forget something?”

Nico took the helmet off carefully from it. Karun looked like he's figuring out why the bag was an F1 car that had slicks in a rainy track. The blond man then deliberately tipped the bag so the contents spoke for themselves.

Natalie started laughing before Jenson did. Then Jenson snorted so loud three people turned around.

“We switched bags again,” Nico said, already resigning himself to retracing his steps.

“Again,” Jenson repeated, delighted. “Please hold for another installment of Bag Swap: Paddock Husbands edition.”

“Do not encourage yourself,” Nico said, but the corner of his mouth gave him away.

“Tell Toto I have twenty on this happening again before summer break.” Jenson smoothed a non-existent flyaway hair and shooed him with a hand. “Run along. Your husband is waiting.”

“I—” Nico opened his mouth and closed it with an exhale that could probably tame Jenson's stray tuft of hair. “Back in five,” he told Natalie instead.

The Mercedes garage smelled like hot carbon, brake dust, solvent, and cold air forced out of a machine. Engineers moved with only the energy they needed and not a drop more. Laptop lids, wheel guns, boards with tire sets, hands, eyes, the quiet.

Nico slid through it like he had never left. He did not touch anything and did not need to. His body remembered what to avoid and when to stop.

Toto stood by the monitors. He had that calm face on, the one that meant the top layer of this mangled Rubik's cube had been solved and the layer beneath it had his attention. When he saw Nico and the bag, his eyebrows lifted.

“Where is Lewis?” Nico asked, bag now slung over his shoulder.

“Why?” Toto asked back, which was how he asked for the performance of the obvious.

“We switched bags. Again.”

One corner of Toto’s mouth climbed. “Hopeless,” he said. “Like an old married couple who cannot agree on shoes.”

“We are not—”

“Not what?” Lewis asked from behind him, voice warm and amused. He came through a gap that was barely a person wide. Race suit to his waist, undershirt fitted, hair askew from the balaclava. He saw Nico, saw the bag, and lit up like a switch had been pressed. “There you are. I thought I lost my lucky boots.”

“Worse. You almost had me analyze tire wear with your helmet,” Nico said, handing the bag over.

They swapped with the smoothness of a good stop. Lewis’s fingers slid across the inside of Nico’s wrist. It did not need to happen. It happened anyway. Somewhere, someone whistled. Toto shook his head the way a coach does when he has already run the drill for the mistake he knew would happen.

“Try not to do it next time,” Toto said without hope for the switch, and with hope for the two idiots who looked one bad joke from a wedding proposal.

“Impossible,” Nico said. He smoothed his hair.

Lewis ruffled it anyway and was already walking away when he tossed the words over his shoulder. “Do not change. Twelve o’clock.”

Nico and Toto looked at each other. Toto’s expression settled into that of satisfaction of a man who knew too well that he was right. “Old married couple,” he said again.

“Goodbye, Toto,” Nico said, and left before his face gave the heat away.

Back outside, he signed a cap for a boy in a shirt that was two sizes too big and wrote a few words for a documentary crew who wanted “three thoughts on braking points.” He gave them four, because the fourth one felt like the true one. By the time the sun reached its highest, the air shimmered over the asphalt and the paddock moved like a mirage.

A runner clipped his earpiece in place. The live light came on. Nico gestured toward the slow-motion replay and put the lap into words. He liked that part. He could stack a race out of fragments and not pay with points for being wrong.

He was signing off when a shadow fell over his shoulder.

“Lunch,” Lewis said.

Nico did not turn right away. He let himself finish the last sentence, let himself hand the mic to the runner, then looked up. “Unbelievable.”

“Unbelievable that I remembered,” Lewis said. The eyebrow climbed. It always did.

“Unbelievable that you think I am on your clock.”

Before Lewis could answer, Crofty’s voice came down from above like a friendly thunderclap. “Hamilton has arrived to collect his husband for lunch.”

The set laughed in a rush. A camera turned toward them, because of course it did gravitate to people who made it effortless to just being. Natalie pretended to be stern and failed.

Nico tipped his head back to the commentary box with the expression of a martyr who enjoys his fate. He rolled his eyes like a man who had practiced in mirrors and chose not to mind.

Lewis leaned close enough that only skin could hear him. “They are not wrong.”

Nico elbowed him twice. Lightly. On principle.

Their usual table waited at the edge of the lunch tent, a little island shaded from the brightest heat. The tent smelled like fries and onions and something grilled. Tongs clanged against steel. People talked in a hundred low currents. Lewis showed up still gloved, a water bottle running with condensation, and a tray piled too high.

Nico took the tray without being asked. “You would drop it all if I were not here.”

“And then you would tell me off,” Lewis said, reaching for Nico. He aimed for Nico’s hair. Nico ducked. Knuckles skimmed the edge of an ear, nothing to look at, and still something enough to send chills down his spine.

Fans lined the barrier with their phones. Nico’s phone buzzed with the first wave of photos. Lewis stealing a fry. Nico smacking his hand with no force at all. Lewis looking thirteen percent too pleased with himself.

Captions scrolled past:

Domestic Husbands Energy.

Crofty Called It.

If You Are Married, Just Say That.

Nico locked the screen. “Your PR will kill you.”

“My PR knows a win when it sees one.” Lewis took another fry like a thief in daylight. “You eat like a bird on weekends.”

“I am not your seasonal project.”

“You are my seasonal perennial,” he said.

“That is not a thing.”

“With that hair, it is now.” He waved the fry like a conductor and ate it.

Jenson appeared at the corner of the table with a coffee and a face made for commentary. “Put a ring on it,” he told Lewis. “Or colour-code your luggage. Nico, please stop arriving ten minutes early. It makes the rest of us look like amateurs.”

“Try minding your own business,” Nico said.

“Tried it,” Jenson said. “Hated it.” He leaned in. “We have a sweepstake running. Monaco or Silverstone for the next bag swap?”

“Monaco,” Lewis said.

“Silverstone,” Nico said at the same time, because saying each other's home race had been an inside joke in itself. Maybe it was both their home race.

Jenson grinned like a man adding a line to a spreadsheet and strolled away, spreading caffeine and mischief.

They ate and let the conversation unspool. Sauce or no sauce. Turn eight and the wind. Whether the new curb would chew the shoulder or tap it. It felt like the old days stripped of danger. Nico’s chest softened around the edges without asking permission.

On the way back to the compound, a girl in a bucket hat thrust a notebook at him. “Lewis! Nico! Please sign for my dad,” she said, breathless. “He loved watching you and… him. Together.”

Nico signed and wrote, Be kind to your future self,

Lewis took the pen and the notebook and scribbled, and the future will be kind to you. Because that was how they work. Together, finishing each other's sentences. He grinned and signed his name beside Nico's.

Her eyes went bright. They moved on.

The afternoon stretched and filled. He and Karun disagreed with a wink and made good television. He got stuck behind a forklift and waved at a cameraman reversing with his tongue between his teeth. He drew on a telestrator and felt like a teacher with happy students.

Then the race. The hive found a higher pitch. The grandstands turned into sound. Nico put on his headset and split the world into layers. He watched, read the timing tower, listened to the engine notes and lifted a story out of the screen. When the feed cut to Lewis, something tugged under his ribs. Nothing sharp. Just a pull he knew too well to misname. He talked about tire prep and brake release and windows opening.

He did not say still you.

He did not say I can see it the way you see it when it is yours to hold.

He thought it, and that was enough.

The pen after the race was a forest of microphones. Lewis spoke clean and bright, energy under the surface showing at the edges of his smile. “Car felt good. Stop was right. Thanks to the team. We will push for more.”

His eyes landed on Nico once, a flicker, and went on to the next camera. The moment folded itself away in Nico’s chest and stayed there.

By golden hour, the concrete had softened in the light and faces looked kinder. Nico finished his last hit and unclipped his earpiece. He already knew who stood behind him by the way the air shifted. He turned.

Lewis had a bottle of champagne under his arm like a loaf of bread at the Last Supper and a crooked smile that meant he had decided something. “Come on,” he said. “Celebrate with me.”

“Is there not a team thing?”

“There is always a team thing,” Lewis said. “I want an us thing.”

The words landed lower than they sounded. Nico felt them hit and he held onto Lewis' arm for support. He nodded. “Okay.”

They left the paddock, walked a corridor with ugly carpet, and waited for a stubborn elevator that insisted on stopping at every floor. In the lift, Lewis leaned back and shut his eyes for half a second. Tired moved across his face and was gone. Nico watched the change the way you watch a skyline you know. You count what is the same. You notice what moved.

Lewis’s phone buzzed. He looked at the screen, then set it face down. “They can wait.”

“Your PR?” Nico asked.

“Among others.”

The hotel was neat, quiet, and expensive in a way that did not draw attention to itself. Lewis set the champagne on the table and went to war with the room service menu. “No quinoa tonight,” he said from the other side of the couch.

“God forbid,” Nico said, toeing off his shoes. He placed his lanyard on the dresser because the ritual had always soothed him and still did. “If you drink before food, you will be asleep in ten minutes.”

“I have a plan,” Lewis said.

The plan in question was noodles and fried things and sauce that would stain if it met anything white. It arrived too hot in cardboard. Steam curled like thin fingers. It tasted like salt and ease. Nico ate faster than he meant to, and Lewis watched it with quiet satisfaction and said nothing for once.

They let Netflix decide for them. A stand-up special filled the room with clean timing and laughter that moved like a tide. Lewis sprawled in one corner of the sofa, bare feet tucked, ankle bone knocking the cushion.

Nico folded into the other corner. His plate slid. Lewis caught it without looking and set it on the table, a small, precise move that made Nico’s mouth tilt. Lewis tugged the blanket free and shook it out.

“Here,” he said. He draped it over Nico’s shoulders and tucked the edge neatly at his hip.

Nico made a sound that was almost a thanks and almost a sigh. Lewis’s voice dropped into that private register that never reached a microphone. “Sleep if you want. I have you.”

Nico did not mean to lean. He did. His head found the line of Lewis’s shoulder like water finds low ground. Lewis adjusted so it would be easier and did not make it a moment. The laughter from the TV moved in waves and went soft at the edges. A foot nudged against an ankle and stayed.

Lewis looked at his phone. The group chat had already turned lunch into a meme.

Jenson had posted a photo of the fry theft and captioned it LEAVE NO FRY BEHIND. Daniel was weeping in cascades of emoji. George typed domestic husbands, deleted it, typed it again, and deleted it again because he liked to pretend he did not gossip. Max sent an emoji that could be a thumb or something ruder if you didn't have glasses on, or if you were a millenial. Thumbs up were rude on a millenial's handbook, and that was law.

Lewis slid the phone face down.

He looked at Nico’s face instead. The tightness at the jaw had gone. The small lines at the eyes had smoothed. Nico’s mouth softened first and then his breathing followed. Lewis thought of the bag swap and the fry and the tiny smack to his wrist that had felt like a ritual. He let the warmth of it sit in his chest like a coal.

“You are staring,” Nico murmured, eyes still closed.

“Am I?”

“You always have.”

“Only when there is something worth looking at,” he said. He kept his voice soft. Nico’s mouth twitched once and settled again.

Time thinned. The comedian talked about airport gates. The audience laughed. Nico shifted and pressed closer. His hand slid into the space near Lewis’s hip and rested there, fingers loose. Lewis did not move.

“Champagne,” Nico said later, eyes still shut, tone full of mild disdain.

“Tomorrow,” Lewis said. “Breakfast. We will call it a mimosa and pretend to be civilized.”

“You will be late to debrief.”

“I will not,” Lewis said, sure in a way that felt like truth. “I am good with alarms.”

“Liar,” Nico said into his shoulder.

“Only about fun.”

Outside, below their window, the paddock exhaled in stages. Tire blankets folded. Flight cases latched. Catering packed its last tray. A generator dropped an octave and cut out. They would start again before dawn. For now, everything rested.

“Domestic husbands,” Nico said, almost asleep. “Ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous,” Lewis echoed into his hair. He lifted the blanket higher on Nico’s shoulder and let a curl of blond catch the light from the television. He could say a hundred things. He did not say any of them. He stayed.

When the credits rolled, the room slipped into that half-dark that hotels have even with the lights off. Lewis moved carefully, cleared the cartons, came back to the same place without disturbing anything that mattered. Nico slept without apology. The weight on Lewis’s arm felt small and enormous in the same breath.

He picked up his phone, typed You free for breakfast?, and deleted it. He did not need to ask, not when the man himself was dozing off beside him. The answer had been given in a dozen small, true ways.

He set the alarm anyway. Lewis can already picture it: Nico won't stir when it chimed to confirm in the next morning. That fact that Lewis knew told him more than any speech ever had.

He put the phone face down, let his eyes fall half shut, and let the ache of this sit where it wanted. For once, he did not plan the next move. He did not write the next joke in his head. He did not practice leaving. He chose to be the person who watched and did not move and would wake up in the same place.

A forklift beeped somewhere far away and fell quiet. Inside the room, nothing important moved.

For the first time in a long time, they did the simplest, most difficult thing.

In this instance out of the thousands of their timelines that could go wrong, they defied the inevitable.

They stayed.

Chapter Text

Sunday mornings between races carried their own hush, the kind that made you listen. Saturday’s heat had burned off, Sunday’s storm hadn’t formed yet, and the paddock, for once, wasn’t a mouth full of noise.

Monaco inhaled and held it. The marina swayed like it was keeping time for no one, gulls looping lazy figure-eights that didn’t lead anywhere important. It felt like a day that wouldn’t ask for anything you didn’t want to give.

At ten, Lewis texted: Drive?

Nico had already paced his apartment twice, drunk the kind of coffee that polished the edges of the morning, and lined his sunglasses along the counter like an audience.

He double-tapped Lewis’ message into a heart, let the phone clatter to the couch, and stood at the curb with his laces double-knotted like he might sprint at any second.

The building’s glass gave him back a clean outline. Old reflex, quick check, nothing stuck in his teeth, hair doing that thing again. He didn’t fix the hair. He knew someone else would, without asking, without even making a bit of it.

Lewis turned the corner and the car made a small scene of arriving. Chrome winked at sunlight, paint catching the sun in a sheet and throwing it back.

The music was low and felt like a good engine at idle: bass steady, no rattles, warmth under the surface. Nico tugged the door open and slid in, the seat giving that soft mechanical sigh that expensive things make.

“You’re punctual,” he said, half a tease, half the truth of how Lewis lived now.

“I’m always punctual.” Lewis’ grin cracked like light off water. “You’re the one who thinks three minutes late is fashion.”

“I'm retired, Lewis,” Nico said, shoving his sunglasses into his collar. “I’m retired from punctuality and embraced fashion.”

Lewis laughed and it felt like the morning had been waiting to do exactly that. He flicked the indicator with a fingertip, elegant even in throwaway moves, and pulled them into the loop of the city.

They didn’t speak for the first few turns. They didn’t need to. The car filled the quiet the way a hand fills the space between two fingers; naturally, like it had always been intended that way.

Lewis adjusted the seat back one click and Nico reached out, caught the edge of his collar, and pulled it smooth where it had folded. Absent, automatic. The kind of touch that never made it into photos because it happened before the camera could catch it.

The Riviera spread out ahead of them like a promise. The road carved along the cliff as if someone had drawn it there with a sure pen. The sea wasn’t just blue, it was a stack of blues: teal over deep slate, glitter hung on top like sugar.

The wind was salt and suncream and a whisper of pine where the trees crowded the edge. Monaco slid behind them; sky and water filled the windshield.

Nico leaned forward to poke at the touchscreen. Lewis batted his hand away without looking, a gentle backhand, the exact amount of force required to say no and I like when you try at the same time.

“Your playlists,” Nico said, already scrolling, “are a cry for help. This is a rescue mission.”

“Excuse me?” Lewis’ scandalized voice lived in the range he saved for fun. He put his elbow on the window and let the wind flip one curl and not the others. “My taste is flawless.”

“Flawless?” Nico snorted, reading the queue. “Half of this could dislodge dental work.”

“Necessary for focus.”

“Sure,” Nico said, “because what you need while parallel-parked on a cliff is subwoofer therapy.”

He tapped shuffle. A bright riff hit the cabin like soda bubbles, sharp and sweet, drums up on their toes. Nico blinked and then smiled with all his teeth.

“Is that—”

“Yep.” Lewis’ fingers landed on the wheel, a soft, exact beat. “Paramore. ‘Still Into You.’”

Nico’s laugh warmed the air a degree. “Paramore? Really?”

Lewis raised an eyebrow. “Don’t pretend you don’t know it.”

“Of course I know it,” Nico said, already forming the words with his mouth.

“Can't count the years on one hand that we've been together,” they chimed together.

The first verse came easy: nimble and quick. They cruised past a turnout where the cliff fell straight to water, sunlight laying a runway over the waves. The chorus broke open and they didn’t bother pretending.

“I should be over all the butterflies—” Lewis’ voice came out steady, low, like he carried pitch in his bones. Nico came in louder, a little off the beat, too much joy for the melody to contain, “but I’m into you! I’m into you!”

Sunglasses slipped; they didn’t care. Wind tore lines into their hair; they didn’t fix them.

Nico drummed the dashboard with flat hands. Lewis thumped the steering wheel with the heel of his palm on the downbeat, making a percussion section out of what they had.

Windows down, because they were brave singers like that. People on scooters turned their heads and smiled like they’d been let in on a joke.

“And baby, even on our worst nights, I’m into you!”

Each word hit Lewis like a little jump.

It was stupid and perfect and the kind of singing you only do when the person next to you already knows exactly how you sound and wants more of it anyway.

The bridge slid in.

“Some things just make sense, and one of those is you and I”, Nico sang it flawlessly (and punctuated the you and I with his fingers, pointing at Lewis at himself), but Lewis’ voice snagged in his throat for half a breath.

The lyric landed too squarely, like a truth disguised as bubblegum. He sang through it, but the ache stayed and took a chair in his chest.

By the time the chorus cut for the last time and the guitars poured out and away, they were both breathless and pink at the cheeks. Nico pushed his sunglasses up with a knuckle and aimed a look across the console that belonged on a poster for summer.

“You’re ridiculous.”

“Me?” Lewis tossed his hair back, parodying his own press shots. “You sounded like that one karaoke night in Berlin.”

There was a lot of those karaoke nights they were together. Lewis meant all of them.

“I carried us,” Nico said, scandalized.

“You dragged us across gravel,” Lewis returned, eyes soft and fond in a way that got into your ribs and stayed there, warm as sunwarmed metal.

Somewhere in the updraft of their laughter, Lewis’ hand found Nico’s knee in a tap that wasn’t quite a squeeze, a little offhand check-in that said still with me?

Nico left his palm over Lewis’ knuckles for one heartbeat longer than politeness required and then flicked his fingers away as if he’d brushed imaginary dust.

Their bodies knew the game and played it like pros: toe the line, erase it, draw it again, footstep over it together. Practice makes perfect.

They dropped into a cove you wouldn’t see if you weren’t looking for places to disappear. The last stretch of road gave up and turned to gravel.

Heat shimmered above the stones. A summer’s worth of shells had broken themselves into soft edges. The water breathed in long pulls like someone sleeping on your shoulder.

Shoes off on the first patch of sand. Nico hooked his fingers in the back of Lewis’ heel and tugged, lazy as a cat stealing a warm spot.

“Hey,” Lewis said, half laughing, half leaning on Nico’s shoulder so he didn’t tip. The laugh went warm through Nico’s shirt. Close made sense. It didn’t read as a move because it had never been one; it was simply the way their orbits worked.

They walked until the road noise seeped away and found a big bleached log that had once been a tree and now was a seat made by tide and time.

Lewis and Nico sat with a careful casualness: knees angled in, shoulders almost but not quite touching, their shadows making one dark shape with two heads and four feet.

Silence sat with them like a friend who didn’t need, nor demanded anything.

A sail far out scratched a straight line and then vanished. A gull cut the sun and left a shadow that slid over their feet and moved on.

Lewis leaned back on his hands, the veins in his wrists an easy map, the bracelets gathering the sun.

Nico tipped his head back until his throat showed, that pale triangle where the collarbone made its neat little shelf.

A stray thought crossed Lewis’ mind, unbidden. If the sea wanted to worship anything, it had a candidate.

Nico was the one who spoke. He didn’t bring weight forward to do it. He let the words rise like heat.

“I don’t regret it.”

Lewis turned his head. “Regret what?”

“Leaving.” No drama. No grand preface. Nico’s voice held steady as a straight. “Retiring. Everyone called me crazy. Maybe they were right on paper. But I’m glad I did it. I wanted the title. My father’s name next to mine, proof to myself, proof to the version of me who said I could. I did that.”

He dug his toes into the warm top layer of sand until the cool underneath met his skin and continued, “Walking away means I get to be here now. With you. Still in it, just… differently. I get to watch you, help when it helps, show up without what it took from me before. I wouldn’t trade that.”

The ocean did a thing with light that made the whole horizon look like it was breathing.

Lewis blinked, and the sunset went a little blurred. Not tears. Just the body rearranging itself to make space. The words did not bounce off anything; they stuck, grainy as salt, pleasant as sun.

He turned his face back to the water because some feelings were easier to hold if you pretended to be looking at something else.

Nico didn’t only sit beside his life. He threaded through it like a ribbon: songs in the car, laughter that came out of him unguarded and pulled your mouth up with it, the quiet way he reached first for the right cable when Lewis’ hands were full, the guest-scent of his detergent that turned up uninvited on Lewis’ hoodie, the text at 1 a.m. that didn’t ask for anything and somehow gave back part of the day.

Lewis’ right hand shifted against the log, an unconscious inching movement that stopped before it reached anything warm. The line was there and it wasn’t. They could balance on it like a curb, arms out, eyes forward, pretending it was ground.

Nico tilted his head and watched two gulls circle the same slice of air. “Feels right,” he said, not quite to Lewis, not quite to the sky.

“Yeah,” Lewis said, his voice coming out lower than it had any reason to be. “It does.”

They sat until the sun stepped down a rung and then another. A little wind climbed the beach and wrote goosebumps on their forearms.

He’d always gotten cold easily. Nico rubbed his hands once and Lewis, without thinking, caught a wrist in both hands and warmed it with his palms.

Nico’s mouth softened, not a smile exactly, more like the face the body makes when something it needs arrives without being asked for.

They didn’t say anything about it. They didn’t take their hands back for a while.

A kid with a stick drew a wobbly line from one rock to another and then turned back to measure it with his eyes, disappointed, then delighted. His mother called, he waved at them with the stick, and Lewis waved back, easy and bright, the kind of wave children remember for no reason at all.

When they finally stood, they left two clean tracks that the next tide would erase. The beach was full of that kind of thing: evidence that doesn’t insist on leaving nor staying. It just felt natural as it can be.

It didn’t make it less true.

Back at the car, the cabin smelled like salt on warm plastic. Another Paramore song queued up and tried to take over the moment. Nico swatted the screen with a laugh.

“Okay, Mrs Hayley Williams, that’s enough.”

“Jealous?” Lewis asked, but he dialed the volume down and let the sea keep most of the talking until the cliffs turned back into buildings.

Nico huffed. “Yes, what are you gonna do about it?”

“Switch back to being Mrs Hamilton-Rosberg, of course,” Lewis grinned, like it was the easiest thing in the world.

The blond man laughed and punched his arm lightly. “At least let me buy a ring first.”

Monaco had changed clothes while they were in their little bubble.

Dinner dresses and shirt sleeves. Lamps, gold around the edges. Someone laughed on a balcony with a sound like glass hitting glass. The world thought it was night, the heat emanating off the pavement disagreed.

The car idled in a triangle of headlight that turned the white facade into a stage. Nico rolled the sunglasses between his fingers and then clipped them back into his collar like a bit, like a dare.

“Have to go first, I got a meeting. Same time next week?” he asked, eyebrows up.

“You’ll steal my playlist again.”

“You’ll thank me,” Nico said, already gathering the unfoldings of next Sunday like thread he could follow.

Their shoulders bumped when they leaned in to see the same thing: a couple on a scooter taking a too-tight turn, laughing, living… and they didn’t lean back as fast as men who cared about lines.

Nico got out with a wave casual enough to pass as nothing. They were very good at nothing and everything when it came to each other.

Lewis watched the door swallow him and caught his own face in the glass for a second. He didn’t look away fast. He looked the way you look at a photo you didn’t pose for and like anyway.

He drove to the his next destination with the window cracked an inch to keep the salt inside a little longer.

Rooms are a lesson in how silence can feel wrong. The walls of his flat didn’t know him without Nico beside him. A bed that made a sigh that felt incomplete, like an interrupted yawn.

On the table were lamps that gave a glow and not a warmth. He kicked his shoes off and the carpet offered a softness that came free with the price of the room, not with his life. A thin band of sea showed between two buildings like a secret someone had already told.

He lay on his back and watched the ceiling, which didn’t have anything to say. Nico’s words replayed without his help: I’m glad I left, because it means I’m here. With you.

The sentence didn’t knock, didn’t demand. It sat. It asked him to notice that it had been true for longer than either of them had said it out loud.

He turned on his side and the pillow picked up cool from somewhere. The post-drive quiet settled into his bones and began to work. It found old places. It didn’t hurt. It hummed.

He thought of the road. The song. The way they had shouted that single word at the same beats like kids making a promise to the air.

He thought of Nico’s off-beat claps, of the hair the wind refused to obey, of the way a hand on a knee could mean I see you, and the way a hand on a wrist could cure a chill better than any sun.

He let the thought shape itself without pushing.

I should be over all the butterflies.

He had said that to himself for years, as if stability were proof of maturity. As if ease meant the body had learned to stop answering the door.

The butterflies had not taken the hint. They had merely learned better manners. They didn’t slam into his ribs anymore; they brushed past, an orderly, tender swarm, present and kind.

He had mistaken gentleness for absence. He had mistaken comfort for the end of want. He had been wrong.

He sat up to sip water and found his mouth smiling. He hadn’t meant to.

Lewis huffed a laugh into the room’s polite air and set the phone face-down again. The corner of his mouth didn’t drop after. In his chest, something turned over like a seal in shallow water: easy, certain, uninterested in the theatre of making a splash.

He laid back down.

He didn’t plan the next move. He didn’t rehearse the next deflection. He didn’t draft a joke to keep the day from getting ideas.

He let the realisation walk the room, touch the furniture, decide where it wanted to live.

It liked the space on the left side of his chest. It had always liked that. It stretched out there now like it had been waiting for the lease.

Earlier, at the cove, he’d watched Nico do a small, nothing thing: pull a gum stick from the paper with his teeth, clean and quick, and tear it in half without looking, handing Lewis the other half palm-up like an old currency they still accepted.

He’d watched the way the sun turned the fine hairs on Nico’s forearm into gold thread when his arm lay along the open window.

He’d watched Nico’s bare foot work the sand like a throttle until the cool found him and he relaxed into it as if the earth had just adjusted the seat to his settings.

He’d looked, and it had not felt like stealing from Fate. It had felt like standing on his own balcony and listening to a street he knew by sound. Still his street. Only the noise softer.

He thought of other lines they had toed so often they wore smooth.

The way Nico always stood on the left when they crossed a busy street, not because Lewis asked, but because it meant he could be the one to check the blind corner first.

The way Lewis tied one of Nico’s laces for him at an airport once; Nico had been holding two coffees and a passport, the lace had trailed like a tail, and they had both stared at the neat bow after like they had built something small and perfect and would put it on a shelf.

The way Nico never asked if he could take the wheel on winding roads; he just rested his hand at the ready and Lewis, without speaking, would let the car know that there were two of them driving.

It had always looked like friendship from a distance. Close up, it was a room with two doors and a habit of leaving both open.

He dreamed the road again and the song again and a version of the chorus that moved as wind moves, through and around and somehow also inside.

He woke once to the noise of a scooter below, and the room had that half-dark that isn’t night so much as the idea of it. He rolled to his other side and drew the sheet up and felt warm all the way in.

In the morning, he’d run. He always did.

He’d send Nico three versions of a playlist and Nico would choose the fourth option.

He’d drink coffee that tasted like the machine and then like what he’d put in it.

He’d step into the day that would eventually harden into schedule and strategy and speed.

But right now, he let the line blur until it stopped being a line. Not a risk, not a mistake, not a thing to define before someone else did. A comfort with weight. A warmth he didn’t have to hold alone to keep.

After all this time, the butterflies hadn’t gone. They’d evolved. They knew the route home.

He closed his eyes and let them circle where they wanted. He didn’t ask them to quiet down. He didn’t ask them for proof.

He simply noticed that they were gentle, and that they stayed.

Chapter Text

A day after, the champagne remained unopened. They both took it home to Lewis’ flat, spent the whole day just lounging, and then fell asleep together yet again, just like normal.

The feeling didn’t ebb. He knew they were both in too deep.

Lewis woke to the kettle’s soft complaint and the careful hush of a cupboard door: sounds an apartment makes when it’s trying to be kind. He floated there, spread thin over warm sheets, eyes closed, feeling light spool through his lids like fine silk. The cotton at his waist was twisted, proof he’d wrestled with sleep and lost pleasantly.

Monaco kept its voice down. Boats murmured in the harbor, a scooter coughed, a gull croaked commentary on a tourist’s crumbs. Then the smell found him, that of proper coffee, and reached into his chest with a sure hand, pushing the last pockets of sleep out.

He should move.

He didn’t.

He lay still and listened, cataloguing the room by sound. The cup’s quiet clink. The slide of a drawer. Bare feet whispering their way across tile. He could name the gait without seeing it. He could draw the path of those steps the way a driver can draw a circuit diagram from memory.

When he rolled at last, the sheets sighed and the world came into focus: Lewis’ flat in Monaco. His familiar, too-gentle palette, the expensive attempt at softness. And there at the polite little kitchen, there’s Nico.

His mop of blond hair was a mess, a delighted conspiracy of static that had found a head worth visiting. He wore Lewis’ gray hoodie, the one with the fraying seam at the cuff and a knot in one drawstring from some half-asleep morning months ago.

The hood hung between his shoulder blades like a flag planted after a gentle coup. The hem skimmed long, the way clothes do when they move to a better house and never come back.

Nico braced one hand on the counter, pouring with the other in a steady line. Steam rose and haloed his face. He squinted into it, unbothered, a man making the second cup on a day he already owned.

The sight hit Lewis with a clean, interior force: harder than an engine note through bone, harder than the snap of a last-lap pass. It didn’t knock him over. It rearranged him in all the wrong places and made it right.

All the small comfort-objects he’d labeled just Nico— the bag swaps, the hoodie thefts, the way a hand would find his collar and fix it, pasta portions cut without debate, snapped their elastic bands. The pile slid into its true shape.

Not just Nico.

Architecture. A frame. A home.

Love.

He was already moving before he knew he’d decided. The covers shrugged off his hips. Carpet warmed his feet where dawn had done its work. He crossed the room with the reverence of a man approaching an altar he’d walked past for years and only now recognized.

“Morning,” Nico said, not looking, because he didn’t have to. He tapped the French press with a wooden spoon, a little ritual to charm luck into doing what it was already doing. “Couldn’t find your ugly mugs. These toy cups will have to do.”

“My mugs are not ugly,” Lewis said, indignation softening his voice to something fond.

“Your mugs are crimes in ceramic,” Nico replied, finally glancing over his shoulder. The hoodie softened his angles and somehow made him smugger. “Also, good morning.”

Lewis stopped at the line where carpet yielded to tile. His blood had turned into weather. The room kept still as if it had agreed to hold him steady while he rerouted.

On the counter, the honey jar Seb had left glowed like a little sun. A teaspoon glinted beside it, smug about its use-value. The hoodie sleeves were shunted to Nico’s elbows, showing those small, familiar roads of vein that had never lied: karting, pit work, arguments, laughter… clear maps running just under skin. The machine muttered a last old-man sigh.

Something untied in Lewis’ chest.

“I think I’ve been in love with you this whole damn time,” he said before he could stop himself. He exhaled it in a half-laugh, half-impact, all true.

Steam kept rising. Nico’s hand paused mid-pour. A drop hopped loose, darkening the counter, a tiny perfect eclipse. The room inhaled. Nico set the kettle down gently, like easing a beloved secondhand car into neutral. He turned, mug half-lifted, mouth parted.

For a heartbeat he was Nico the planner, Nico with the chalk map sketched on the back of his knuckles. Then knowing slid over his face like sunrise: unhurried, inevitable, warm from within.

“Took you long enough,” he said, weapon and welcome in the same smile.

Lewis laughed because joy had his hand. It tugged him forward.

“I mean…” He stood a little straighter, because if he was going to do this he might as well do it clean. “It’s always been you. The bag mix-ups. The coats. You stealing my hoodie and improving it. You cutting my pasta in half and calling it love. The texts at stupid o’clock that don’t ask for anything but give back half the day. Even when you’re not there my life just… defaults to you. I didn’t notice because it was the only way I knew how to live.”

“Lewis,” Nico said, smoothing a wrinkle out of the sheet of their shared history with his name.

“And this morning,” Lewis pushed on, helpless and honest, gesturing at the counter, the cups, the hoodie fitting someone else’s ribs like it had been tailored to this exact chest. “You in my kitchen like you’ve always been here, and I can’t call it another word anymore. I don’t want to.”

The French press hissed and settled, tidy as a solved line. Nico depressed the plunger slowly, the private half-smile he saved for winning arguments without gloating appearing and then deciding to stay.

“Hand me the cups,” he said.

Lewis did, palms too warm, fingers less coordinated than they were at 300 kph. Nico poured with his usual precision, filling to an invisible line both of them believed in. He slid one cup across with the same small efficiency he used to pass a tool he knew Lewis would need three seconds from now. He didn’t break eye contact.

“Coffee first,” Nico said. “Then your big feelings.”

Lewis barked out a breath that had to call itself a laugh to exist. “You’re impossible.”

“And inevitable,” Nico said.

“Apparently.” Lewis reached, forgot temperature existed, yelped, shook his hand out like an amateur, grinning because he couldn’t not. He was lit from inside; the room noticed and leaned in.

Nico’s mouth tilted smugly. “Ridiculous. Come here.”

Lewis came. They met in the slim compromise where the kitchen couldn’t pretend it was separate from the room. Nico smelled like coffee and morning, a note of detergent that was his, some trace of last night’s champagne they hadn’t opened, and something that had always been Nico.

Up close, the hair was a ridiculous cosmos. The freckles on his nose made a constellation Lewis had mapped and refused to name. The jaw was the old hard line softened by not needing to prove anything right this second. The eyes, blue enough to make weather jealous, had the same look they wore in mirrors and press scrums and rearview glances: I’ve got you.

Nico tipped his head and read him like a trusted data set. “I knew,” he said, simple as torque.

“How long?” Lewis asked, both wanting and not wanting the answer.

Nico made a whole show of thinking. “Certain? The pasta. Or when you sang Paramore like you’re saying your vows to me at the altar,” His grin edged feral. “Probably before. Probably forever.”

“Forever’s a big word,” Lewis said, and found to his surprise that it fit like a jacket finally tailored.

“Some things just make sense,” Nico murmured, half-prayer, half-bridge, the song slipping onto their counter as if it were another appliance they’d always owned. “One of those is you and I.”

Lewis’ phone trilled, cheerful and obnoxious and very Jenson. It shivered across the counter and kissed the honey jar like it wanted to stick.

Lewis didn’t look. Nico quirked an eyebrow—theater honed since adolescence. “Your adoring public?”

“I’m busy,” Lewis said, eyes not leaving Nico’s face.

The phone insisted. Nico sighed the sigh of a man who had long ago agreed to love the world along with the person in front of him. He flipped the phone with two fingers like a spouse stealing a remote, accepted the call before Lewis could pivot, and put it on loudspeaker.

“Lewis! You with your husband?” Jenson boomed, refusing the idea of indoor voice. He skipped hello with the efficiency of a man who believes greetings are for people who don’t know each other. “Nico’s ignoring me. Charity ride. I need his route. Seb is sending bee emojis. Mark says he’s bringing a whistle. I am threatened.”

“Yes,” Lewis said smoothly, calmly, roots growing under the word before it left his mouth.

Nico chimed with the patience of a saint, “I’m here.”

There was a long enough beat to imagine Jenson’s face doing that slow oh. A machine hissed on Jenson’s end like it also had opinions. “Wait. Is that Nico? Put the ball-and-chain on. Tell him he can’t bail.”

“He’s not dodging you,” Lewis said, eyes on Nico, easing heat under his ribs just by existing. “He’s busy being confessed to.”

“Ah,” Jenson said, as if the weather made sense now. “Tell your husband to text me the meeting point.”

“I will.” Nico didn’t hurry the word. He met Lewis’ gaze and said, evenly, “We’ll call you back, you’re ruining the moment.”

“Good lad,” Jenson chirped. “Kiss the old ball-and-chain for me.”

“Not for you, but I’ll kiss him anyway.” Nico said, and ended the call like a man winning a hand.

Silence stepped back into the room, pleased with itself. Coffee breathed steam into their faces. Honey flaunted its light like a satisfied cat. The kettle thought about being useful again and chose rest.

“Ball-and-chain,” Lewis repeated, mock-appalled, genuinely glowing.

“He’s incorrigible,” Nico said. He set the phone facedown with the air of placing a winning chip. A little restless noise escaped him: the kind the body makes when the finish line is right there and you’re not supposed to sprint. He hooked two fingers in the front of Lewis’ T-shirt and tugged, a quiet, undeniable come here.

“And you,” he added, cataloguing reality before contact could rearrange it, “are not allowed to take your confession back.”

“I’m not taking it back.” Lewis stepped into the space and let his hands choose the truth; one at Nico’s jaw, one sliding into the ridiculous hair like a person finding home by touch. “I’m just… catching up.”

The kiss happened the way everything else between them had: easily, to tempo, already practiced without being rehearsed. No fireworks. No press release. Just a smoothing, a weight dropping into the right socket, a wrinkle you stop seeing because it’s always been there finally lying flat.

Nico tasted like coffee and relief and the kind of morning you make on purpose. Lewis chased the seam of the hoodie at the nape with his fingertips and it knocked a soft, involuntary sound out of him; a gratitude shaped like a groan.

Nico smiled into him, that insufferable little angle that meant I am winning and I am happy and, today, you are too. He tugged at the hem of Lewis’ T-shirt, not to escalate but to note position: here, here I am.

Lewis answered by angling closer: I know, stay with me. Now. Tomorrow. For the rest of our days and beyond this lifetime.

They broke when biology demanded signatures. Their foreheads touched with the soft thud of a cupboard closing well. Up close, Nico’s eyes were sky, storm, and the long road they’d already chosen. Lewis wanted to memorize and realized he had.

“Hi,” Nico said, breath kissing breath.

“Hi,” Lewis said, sixteen and ancient at once.

“Do you feel different?” Nico asked, curious and kind, a scientist watching a promised reaction bloom.

Lewis checked: heart, lungs, the scratch of carpet, the warm print of a hand at his waist, the coffee, the honey, the hoodie that looked truer here than in his own closet, the echo of husband open-palmed against his sternum. “No,” he said, then laughed at himself. “Yes. Not like… not like changed. Like I can finally say what it is without pretending it’s a code.”

“Good.” Nico rubbed their noses like punctuation. “Because I don’t want anything to change. Except the label on your mugs.”

“My mugs are fine,” Lewis said, outraged for form’s sake. “You’re the one who thinks a tea towel is decorative.”

“It can be both,” Nico said, and there it was: their thesis statement.

Later on, he finally drank. Winced at heat and strength in the same second he conceded both were perfect. He offered the cup and Lewis drank from the same lip. They shared that old, private smile; the one for we got away with something, the one that made future crimes inevitable.

“You’ll call Jenson?” Lewis asked.

“In an hour,” Nico said. “He can survive without me.”

“Cheeky,” Lewis said, stealing a quick, firm kiss like a tidy full stop.

Nico jerked his chin toward the couch. “Come on. Sit while I explain why keeping honey next to a heat source is a war crime.”

“It’s not…” Lewis started, then let the argument relax into forever. “Okay. Teach me.”

They took their coffee to the couch and fell into their groove without ceremony. Lewis’ feet under the table. Nico’s ankles tucked to the side. Hoodie pooled soft at his hips, sleeves pushed up as if wrists were truth-tellers.

The remote reclined between cushions like a benevolent referee. The phone glowed on the counter, face down and blessedly quiet under the honey’s warm approval. Outside, across a small wedge of air, an old man watered geraniums like liturgy.

They talked about nothing and everything: the charity ride route; whether Seb’s bees qualified as team members; whether Mark’s whistle could trigger international sanctions.

Nico scolded Lewis for balancing his cup on the sofa arm; Lewis performed a sigh and obeyed, then stole Nico’s cup with his other hand like a magician revealing the second coin.

“Unbelievable,” Nico said, but his mouth was too busy not smiling to convince anyone.

At some point, Lewis remembered the other night’s champagne, still chilling in the minibar, and didn’t say anything. The coffee was correct. The morning was more than correct. He reached, hooked a finger through the hoodie’s drawstring, tugged to feel the gentle give.

Nico glanced up through lashes, pleased to be read, and leaned so easily it didn’t count as leaning. They kissed again and the sound of it was small enough to be private even inside silence.

Coffee cooled, unimportant. The kettle would need filling again; good. The honey would continue its solar career of just reflecting light everywhere on their counter. Jenson would call back; they would ride, complain, laugh, and collect ridiculous Strava trophies.

Toto would shake his head and call them old married men in a tone that meant finally. Crofty would stir the pot with a spoon the size of Monaco.

Someone online would post a photo of two men walking shoulder to shoulder and call it by its name. Nothing needed rewriting. The label had always been there; they’d only now chosen to read it aloud.

They didn’t draw up terms. They didn’t etch rules. They didn’t make vows big enough to frighten the day.

They sat.

The morning chose their laps like a cat that had tested every room and picked this one as home. Outside, the harbor breathed. Inside, fingers found fingers on their way across the cushion and interlaced with a soft, audible click the room had been waiting years to hear.

Lewis felt it: not a reveal so much as a recognition. Not the start of something, but the moment it admits its own name. He looked at Nico — hoodie, hair, ridiculous, right — and the same thought rose with the surety of a tide finding shore:

After all this time, I’m still into you.

He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to.

Nico squeezed once, a small language they’d never had to translate, and settled against him until their shoulders made one, long, comfortable line.

The coffee went cold.

Nothing really changed.

They had already been living as if they belonged to each other.

Now they did it on purpose.

Chapter Text

The paddock had been theirs long before anyone thought to argue about it. Before hashtags, before think pieces, before a thousand slow-motion edits of a single grin, it had been two teenagers stealing space with laughter and nerve. It had been fence gaps and golf carts, the language of nods and wrist-flicks, the generosity of a door held open with a shoulder. Now, older and softer around the edges where it mattered, they walked into that old inheritance like men unlocking a front door.

Lewis parked smooth, the nose of the car kissing the line in their usual spot. Engine low, then off. The cabin breathed its last cool breath. Two doors, two soft thunks, two bodies unfolding into sunlight.

The choreography didn’t belong to cameras; it belonged to muscle memory. Bags slung, black and navy to avoid exchanging this time, and the usual exchange of nothing-words that meant the day had started: Keys? Yep. Pass? Got it. You good? With you, always.

Nico tugged the coat tighter. Lewis’ coat, obviously; too long in the sleeves and too loose, swallowing the line of his shoulders in a way that made mechanics smirk and PRs sigh about continuity. He hooked a thumb toward Lewis, who was still bent over his phone, mouth shaped around a half-smile he didn’t owe anyone.

“Come on, your husband’s late,” he called, a voice pitched for one person and a strategically positioned sound guy.

Lewis slid the phone into his pocket and looked up. Sun hit the curve of his cheek and turned sweat into glitter. “Tell your husband he owes you lunch if you’re late.”

A nearby mechanic barked a laugh without turning. “When’s the wedding, then?”

Nico didn’t even look over. “Already happened.”

“Sorry mate, eloped before the invitation got printed,” Lewis echoed their long-term joke that, should he wished enough, will eventually become a reality.

The mechanic shook his head, grinning into his clipboard. Someone else muttered finally like a prayer you say at the end of a long season. Nico veered left toward Sky. Lewis peeled right toward Mercedes. Between them, the old path opened like it had been painted that way for this exact moment. Neither denied a thing.

The paddock did what it always did good; it made a storm out of sound. Radios, tire warmers, generators clearing their throats. PRs moving like purposeful birds. The smell of brake dust and sweet rubber. A child in ear defenders balanced on a father’s shoulders, marker poised, hope electric.

Nico signed the kid’s hat (Reach for your dreams one step at a time) and handed it back with a wink the camera didn’t catch.

The Sky compound took him in on muscle memory. Natalie shoved a run sheet into his hand, Karun passed him a coffee, someone clipped a mic pack to his waistband.

On his way through the gallery he met his own face on three monitors at once: one ten seconds ago, one live, one on a loop from a race they both pretend not to rewatch. The building hummed with life: aircon, laughter, and noncommittal bloody gamblers betting on outcomes no one would admit to.

“We’re leaning hard on the undercut today,” Natalie said, not looking up from her notes. “And try not to say ‘husband’ unless you mean to break Twitter twice.”

“Understood,” Nico said, taking a sip. “Which camera do I tell first?”

Karun choked and pretended not to.

On the garage, Lewis climbed into his seat like a man who knew exactly where his body belonged at every second of the day. Engineers leaned in like plants toward light. Hands danced between laptop keys and sensor readouts. Toto stood as if his height were a piece of equipment the team could borrow, his calm face and his calculating eyes doing otherworldly computations while the mouth made polite sentences.

“You look suspiciously relaxed,” Toto murmured when Lewis dropped onto the stool.

“I had coffee,” Lewis said.

“With?”

Lewis gave him a look that contained both you know this already, man and thank you for asking like a parent who respects boundaries.

Toto’s mouth twitched. “Try not to beat the rumor mill to death. We have tires for that.”

“No promises,” Lewis said, and the radio clicked live.

The lights went out. The world contracted and expanded in the same instant, the way it always did: track, hands, radio, corners, everything something you could hold and then something that held you back. Strategy unfolded like a good novel. The pit wall made its small gambles and won more than it lost.

Nico stood with the Sky mic and built a picture out of telemetry and tone, the muscle memory of racecraft doing its quiet, precise work under the surface.

“Look at Hamilton’s prep into Turn 8,” he told the camera, fingers drawing a neat curve in the air. “He’s opening the steering earlier now. That releases the front and saves the shoulder. That’ll pay back lap thirty onward.”

He didn’t have to look to know the car number when it crossed his line of sight. He felt it, a towline under the ribs he had stopped pretending wasn’t there. Still, his gaze went when it wanted. White helmet under harsh light, the slight tilt of the head he could read like a mood board. A piece of him turned its face toward that car the way plants rotate toward sun.

Strategy called; the pit responded. The stop hit its marks: the car up, down, and gone. Above all of it the paddock roared, a living thing pleased with its own noise.

Post-race, heat settled over everything like a blanket. The air over the tarmac shivered. The interview pen collected drivers the way tide collects what it likes: line by line, microphone by microphone. Cameras blinked red and green like a city street.

Lewis came in with helmet under his arm and sweat making constellations at his temples. Microphones rose. The red light found him; he found the right smile.

“Strategy was on point,” he said, professional and bright. “Brilliant stop. Thank you to everyone back at the factory, to the engineers, and our mechanics. The team did a great job today.” He answered, pivoted, answered again. It took skill to make it look like breathing.

But between questions, between talk us through the last stint and how much did the wind change the balance, his gaze slid a degree left, away from the camera line.

Towards Sky. Towards a man in a headset who knew exactly how many degrees that slide had been and what it meant.

Crofty dropped his hand. The red light went dark.

Lewis turned on a hinge. Crossed the small gap. Nico lifted his chin, already aligning for a brief debrief. Lewis didn’t speak. He placed a feather-light touch on Nico’s waist and leaned in, pressing a gentle kiss to Nico’s cheek.

Quick. Casual. Not hidden. Not performed.

It felt natural, like they were doing that all of their lives and for the rest of it.

Sky detonated with wolf whistles and whoops. Someone clapped. Karun said ‘well then’ into a dead mic, still somehow making it to air. Crofty’s laugh went straight to broadcast even though it had no business there. “I think we can safely say the rumors are confirmed!”

Nico’s face heated from the apple of his cheek to the top of his ear. His hand flexed on the mic; it was his old, pointless attempt at dignity. His mouth betrayed him though, curving before he could call it back. He didn’t look at the camera. He looked at the man walking away grinning like he’d done something brave and easy at once.

By the time Lewis reached the team’s hospitality, the photos had left the ground. They were already slicing through the world in bright arcs.

The ripple moved fast, the way gossip always does when it is more relief than surprise.

Toto, cornered by three microphones and a man with a podcast, smirked like someone seeing a problem solve itself. “I told them years ago they should just admit it,” he said, and refused to explain further.

Seb flooded Nico’s notifications with bees: 🐝❤️🐝❤️🐝❤️🐝❤️🐝❤️🐝. Nico muted him and sent a single Stop which Seb screen-shotted and posted with twelve hearts.

Crofty, on air, poured fuel with glee. “Honestly, the way they arrive with matching bags before? You’d think it was obvious.”

Jenson texted about time and then, in another chat, added an aggressively edited Renaissance painting of Lewis kissing a cheek labeled The Revelation of Spouses, 2025 (colourised).

Natalie, cutting to an ad, leaned her mic away and whispered, “You’re trending on a site that doesn’t even cover sport.”

“And knitting Twitter loves your shared cardigans,” Karun added. “Big overlap with the beanie demographic.”

Nico’s phone buzzed across the Sky desk like it wanted to jump. He sighed and answered without checking the screen.

“Rosberg,” Mark rasped through the loudspeaker, dry as gravel in a summer carpark. “Where’s your husband? He’s not picking up.”

Lewis, already sneakily leaning on the desk like he’d been born attached to it, plucked the phone mid-sentence and pressed it to his ear. He didn’t move his hand from where it had slid under the table to find Nico’s and lace their fingers together—automatic, under the sightline, not secret.

“There’s a reason I’m not picking up, Mark,” Lewis said, that particular smile in his voice.

On the other end, a sound halfway between a laugh and a groan. “About bloody time. Don’t make me sentimental. Just... Just text me before Seb organizes another bee parade.”

Lewis squeezed Nico’s hand, already grinning. “Will do.”

He returned the phone. Nico didn’t let his hand go.

“Bee parade?” Nico asked, dry.

“Seb’s in his imperial phase,” Lewis said.

“Bzz,” Nico said, expression pious, and Karun nearly choked trying not to laugh on camera.

Night softened the edges of the city. Lights laid themselves over water. Scooters altered their pitch into something friendlier. The room smelled like noodles, fried rice, and sauce destined to stain if it met anything white. They sat on the couch the way bodies taught each other to sit over years: Lewis deep in the corner, bare feet nudging the table, and Nico folded with ankles tucked, hoodie still on because it had decided this was its new address.

Their phones didn’t shut up. Heart storms. Fan edits with Paramore choruses plastered over clips spanning decades. A supercut of shoulder bumps that could have doubled as a documentary. Toto’s wink face already a response meme. An entire thread dedicated to the coat with forensic analysis of stitching.

“Look at this,” Lewis said, showing Nico an edit that turned the cheek kiss into a silent film, complete with title cards: THE HUSBAND REVEAL. The music had been replaced with a jaunty piano and somehow it worked.

Nico rolled his eyes on principle, but his mouth betrayed him again. “We’ve broken the internet.”

“Good,” Lewis said, tossing his phone aside and letting it thud into a cushion. “Let’s tell them ourselves.”

Nico turned his head, the smile tucked in one corner. “Make it Instagram official?”

“Exactly that.” Lewis pulled the coffee table closer with a foot and dragged his phone back like a fisherman netting a catch.

They went fishing in the camera roll. It felt like opening a shoebox under a bed. Years fell into their laps, unposed and then somehow perfect. Every time Lewis chose chaos — a blurry mid-laugh, a photo where only a shoulder made sense, Nico vetoed without mercy. Every time Nico went for a clean, controlled shot that could have been an advert for something they didn’t sell, Lewis nudged the mess back in.

“This,” Lewis said, pinching to zoom on a heat-of-summer karting photo: both of them in suits two sizes too big, grins trying to escape helmets. “We were ridiculous.”

“We were children,” Nico said, and then, softer, “Keep it.”

“This,” Nico countered, a podium shot where an arm had slung around a neck like it had never learned to be cautious. “You look like you’re in pain.”

“I was. You hosed champagne in my ear.”

A blurry phone video surfaced: car windows down, wind writing chaos in their hair, the Paramore chorus carried and mangled and loved. Nico watched it once and didn’t veto. He just let the quiet smile sit there and settle.

They built the carousel like engineers stubborn about an elegant solution. They argued and compromised and stacked and stepped back and then agreed without saying the word.

Lewis posted first.

• Them in oversized karting suits, grins too big for their helmets.
• Arms slung around each other on a podium, kids pretending at men.
• Nico dousing Lewis in champagne in 2015, Lewis blinking through fizz and joy.
• Nico caught in Lewis’ coat and sunglasses, laughing mid-protest, the coat claiming him.
• Today’s photo: Lewis kissing Nico’s cheek, Nico smiling despite himself, the future stepping into frame.

lewishamilton After all this time @nicorosberg 💖

Nico hit share second, deliberately, as if to say we are in step; we always have been.

• Two kids at a breakfast table, Frosties everywhere, milk moustaches like badges.
• Another podium, joy unguarded and feral.
• 2016: Lewis spraying Nico, Nico triumphant and golden.
• The blurry car-shot, Monaco a smear of bright behind them, mouths open on still.
• A private one: Nico’s arms around Lewis’ neck, foreheads pressed, eyes closed, the line concurring with itself.

nicorosberg i’m still into you @lewishamilton 💗

The comments came like summer rain; too many to count and still lovely to feel. Hearts flooded. Bees swarmed. Side-by-sides bloomed with lyrics scrawled across them in careful script. They really said soft-launch for more than 25 years and then BOOM, husband reveal, someone wrote, and it became a refrain.

Seb: 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝

Jenson: about bloody time.

Crofty: I told you so.

Toto: Happy for you both 😉

George typed domestic husb three times and deleted it three times and then sent a heart and pretended it had been his plan.

Nico set his phone face-down, the huff escaping him not annoyance but relief. The room felt like it had grown bigger to fit something that had been pressing at the walls.

“Feels like nothing’s changed,” he said, surprised by how true it sounded.

Lewis tightened their laced fingers, thumb brushing the familiar ridge of a knuckle he could identify with his eyes closed. “That’s because we were already living it.”

The line they had toed for years felt like a chalk mark under the couch. It hadn’t vanished. It had been absorbed, gentled by time and use until it was part of the floor.

Nico tipped his head against Lewis’ shoulder. His eyes slid closed with the kind of trust you don’t dramatize because it is too ordinary to perform. Outside, Monaco kept talking, music and engines and voices braided into a single sound. Inside, the air hung with noodles and laughter and the afterglow of saying a quiet thing loudly.

Lewis bent and kissed the place where Nico’s hair grew out, slow and sure. Nico didn’t move. He didn’t need to.

When Lewis’ phone buzzed again, he let it. When it stilled, he didn’t reach. When the champagne in the minibar remembered itself and sweated alone, it didn’t matter. The night was already open and named.

They talked about the charity ride until the conversation turned into jokes about bee sponsorships and EU laws on whistles. They let the TV run without volume, catching a flash of their own faces on a panel as if seeing two strangers doing something brave. At some point Nico stole a noodle from Lewis’ box and Lewis retaliated by stealing the box clean, and both of them felt fourteen in the exact right way.

“Tomorrow,” Lewis said, when the night had fallen into that soft place that held them up. “Breakfast?”

“Always,” Nico said.

“And a run,” Lewis added, daring.

Nico made a face. “We’ll see.”

“You’ll come.”

“I’ll complain. Massively.”

“You’ll still come.”

“Still,” Nico said, the word finding its chorus again in the quiet, “into you.”

Lewis didn’t answer with words. He squeezed their hands and felt the click the room had recognized two chapters ago.

Outside, a scooter tried a wheelie and failed gracefully.

Inside, nothing changed, except now the whole world finally knew what the paddock had known first.

Chapter Text

They took the coast road without discussing it. The car slipped out of Monaco like it was following muscle memory, not a map. The sea held its bright blade to their right. The sky wore Sunday like clean linen. Windows were down. Salt and eucalyptus braided in the air.

Nico fiddled with the playlist, incorrigible as ever. Lewis batted his hand away without looking from the road.

“You’re a menace,” Lewis said fondly.

“I… am improving your life,” Nico answered, perfectly serious. He hummed when the speakers tipped into a drumbeat he liked. “Better.”

They passed Cap d’Ail, then the tunnel where the world briefly became wind and echo. France opened her arms the way she always did. The border here was a line painted on habit. They crossed it like they were stepping over a threshold they had crossed a thousand times, and somehow never like this.

The pull-off appeared between pines. Lewis’ hands were already slowing. The indicator blinked. Gravel crunched under the tires as the car angled toward Plage Mala, the cove where the air remembered the three constants of their lives: salt, sun, and the past. Shoes came off at the path. They walked down to the thin strip of sand, trousers rolled, the sea doing its long inhale and exhale around their ankles.

Light turned showy. Sun scattered into coins across the water. Gulls wrote their florid essays overhead. The cliffs held them like cupped palms. Lewis felt his chest loosen. It always happened here, but today the loosening felt like a room inside him finding the correct temperature.

Nico bumped his shoulder. “You look like you’re about to give a TED Talk.”

Lewis snorted. He stalled. The ring in his pocket had been there for three nights. He had carried it through training, through debrief, through sleep, waiting for a moment that felt true. The moment arrived without fanfare. It was here. It was right in the simple way that made everything else quiet.

He drew breath. Old courage came when called. He turned to face him. “You have been my life since we were children,” he said, and the words lined up because they had been waiting for years.

His hand went to his pocket, ready to finish the thought with the proof.

He stopped.

Nico’s hands were already in his own pockets. The expression he used for pretending he was casual looked terrible on him. He also fumbled and produced a box from his pocket, eyes bright and wet at the edges.

“I was going to ask you,” Nico blurted, color high in his cheeks, breath catching. “Today. Here. I thought, if the world can be brave enough, then so can I.”

They stood ankle-deep, both ridiculous, both holding out small circles of metal that seemed suddenly as serious as vows. Laughing toppled through them at the same time. Foreheads almost bumped. The kind of laughter you can only share with the person who has always known why you laugh like that. The absurdity of it cracked them open. Of course it would be like this. Two halves of the same soul, reaching for the same future in the same breath.

“You first,” Lewis said, trying for solemn and failing.

“Together,” Nico said, because there was never going to be any other answer.

“Will you marry me?” They said together after a breath that felt like it had been held for decades.

They moved as if they had rehearsed it. Left hands offered, palms up, rings ready. The bands were simple, matte, beautiful in the way that does not need narration. The metal met skin. Each of them made a small involuntary sound at the same time, a soft yes their bodies gave on their own.

“Yes,” Nico said, eyes wet and unblinking. “Obviously.”

“Yes,” Lewis said, and felt every old fear scuff its shoes and leave. “Yes to the surest thing I’ve ever had my entire life.”

They kissed in their easy language. No fireworks. No performance. It felt like coming home and finding the lights already on. Above them on the cliff path, a couple paused and clapped. Lewis broke the kiss to bow, because he was still Lewis. Nico shook his head and laughed, victory lap smile and all.

They walked back barefoot. Sand stuck to their ankles. Sun winked off two new bands every time they moved.

Dinner was takeout on the couch. Champagne, two glasses, one bottle found at the back of a cupboard, popped without ceremony. At some point Nico held his hand out and squinted at the ring like he was trying to decide if it was a trick of the light.

Lewis took that hand and kissed the knuckle where the band sat. The ring felt less like metal and more like a word finally spoken.

They did not try soft anything. An hour later two photos went up side by side. Their hands together, rings catching whatever light the room could offer. Their grins, shameless and young.

lewishamilton forever. @nicorosberg
nicorosberg always. @lewishamilton

Replies flooded within a minute.

sebastianvettel 💍🐝🐝🐝.
mercedesamgf1 Toto said no seating-chart arguments on camera. Congratulations to our champions! ❤️
jensonbutton Knew it.

The next day on air, Crofty had his moment. The one he’d been waiting for more than a decade. “Breaking news. Our favorite paddock husbands are making it official.”

Mark sent a DM to the two of them.

aussiegrit don’t make me cry you idiots 💀

…he added a skull to pretend he hadn’t.

They laughed, then turned their phones face down and went on being themselves.

They wanted small. They wanted legal. France had said yes for years, so they decided to let her hold them.

The civil ceremony took place at the Hôtel de Ville in Nice, sunlight pouring through high windows that had watched more beginnings than anyone could count. Family. A few drivers. Crew who had known them before GPS could find their names. City roses outside. Old stone inside. The room smelled faintly of paper and polished wood, then gardenia and champagne as people brought the day in on their clothes.

Nico chose navy that fit like truth. Lewis chose black with velvet that caught light as he moved, like midnight carrying a secret. The bands rested on a small dish between them, patient and sure.

Seb brought honey in a jar wrapped with a ribbon he insisted was festive but looked like a bee had chosen it.

Jenson had a folded speech and the wicked gleam of a man fully prepared to both heckle and cry.

Toto grumbled about logistics in public, then hugged them hard enough to make Nico complain for effect.

Mark hovered like quality control at a heart factory. His eyes were sharp. His hands were very gentle.

The officiant spoke with the steadiness of a person who has helped strangers make a family and never grown tired of it. The law here called it marriage without footnote. The quiet power of that soaked into the floor and blessed everyone.

Nico did not need notes. He found Lewis’ hands and spoke to the room as if it were only one person.

“It is not always easy to love well,” he said, voice steady. “We are not easy people. We have had our worst nights and our best. We fought the same battles and each other and then ourselves. But when our fingers interlock, something in me that has always been restless settles. Some things make sense because they are written that way in you, and in me, and in the road between. After all this time, I am still into you.”

Lewis laughed under his breath and blinked hard. The scaffolding inside him, all the bracing, all the old work, finally came down. The structure underneath stood on its own. He lifted Nico’s hands and spoke where the words had been waiting the whole time.

“I should be over all the butterflies by now,” he said, and his voice dropped a little on butterflies, like he was making room for the truth of it. “I am not. I do not want to be. You have been my heart’s home since karting, since everything, since the first time you rolled your eyes at me and I decided to be better. I am still into you. I will be tomorrow, and in whatever we call forever.”

Second row. Chaos lived there. Jenson elbowed Mark with delight. “They put Paramore in the vows.”

“At least it wasn’t Nickelback,” Mark said, dry enough to crack the room open. Laughter loosened throats. The officiant smiled with her eyes and kept her place.

“Rings?” she asked.

They slid them on with the reverence of men who knew exactly what a good tool could do and what a symbol deserves. The bands clicked into a history they had already filled.

They kissed, not dramatically. Correctly. Applause rose like a tide and engulfed them. Confetti went everywhere. A piece landed in Lewis’ braids. Nico plucked it free and tucked it in his pocket for later.

Photos were quick and kind. Crofty got them for two and somehow winked in the second one. Toto pretended not to film, then clearly did. Seb dabbed honey on their fingers because bees are blessings, he said, and nothing could stop him. Jenson tried a joke, then cried, then finished the joke in a higher register. Mark clapped him on the back and told him to breathe.

They walked out into Nice like they had been handed the keys to a city and told to be careful. Horns honked. A kid on a scooter pointed and yelled that he had just seen a prince get married. Somewhere a café radio found Elvis Presley and turned it up like the day had requested it. Maybe it did.

The celebration tucked itself down the peninsula to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Villa Ephrussi opened like a dream that had done the admin. Gardens in quiet terraces. Windows that preferred light to wall. Tables long enough to collect everyone important without separating anyone. The food remembered they were human. No place cards. Even Toto was not that brave. People drifted. Old truths found old lies and decided both were funny.

Nico leaned into Lewis’ shoulder when he laughed. Lewis’ hand found Nico’s knee whenever the room lifted. The playlist wandered. Rick Astley told them that they were no strangers to love. A guilty 2000s classic made Jenson do a body roll that should have been cited. Something French made Seb sway like a tree with feelings. Someone, who later denied it, slipped “Still Into You” into the queue. The opening riff popped like a toast. Groans and cheers rose in equal measure.

Lewis stood and held out his hand. “Come on.”

Nico tried a theatrical who, me, then took it like he always had. The room made an aisle without being asked. They did not perform. They sang a little, because their blood needed it and the song had been their running joke and their benediction. Nico mouthed I’m into you against Lewis’ ear. Lewis forgot there were other people alive for a second and never apologized.

At the edge of the floor, Mark did something nobody had written down. He stuck out his hand at Jenson and tilted his chin in a dare. “Dance?”

Jenson looked like he had been proposed to. Maybe he had. “Fuck, yes.”

He immediately dragged Seb into their orbit, because Seb seemed to always be the perfect third wheel to everything.

The three of them formed a planet of limbs and enthusiasm that wobbled, corrected, and laughed at itself. Seb clapped off-beat without shame.

Jenson tried to spin Mark, who allowed it with deadly dignity. It was chaos at its kindest, and it made the room brighter.

Toto filmed them and has no intention of admitting it.

From the café radio, Elvis Presley followed them into the night. They took each other’s hand, took each other’s whole life too, because they can’t help falling in love.

Lewis and Nico swayed in their own weather. Head to shoulder. Cheek to temple. The rings drew tiny constellations across each other when their hands moved. Frosting streaked Lewis’ cuff. Honey marked Nico’s lapel. No one cared. They were married. They were unbelievable. They were themselves.

Later, when the glasses had given up their bubbles and laughter had settled into sediment, they walked home along the water. Jackets over shoulders. Confetti still hiding in unlikely places. Nice minded its own glitter and gave them privacy like a gift.

At the flat, shoes went where shoes go. Jackets found the back of chairs they had always claimed. Rings glinted even with the lights off.

In the kitchen, the honey Seb had relabeled “wedding edition” sat on the counter, stubbornly golden. Nico looked at it and huffed, restless with joy. Lewis came up behind him and folded his arms around his waist. His chin found the old home on Nico’s shoulder. Their rings clicked again, private and sure.

“Feels like nothing changed,” Nico said, because saying it had become part of the spell.

“That is because we were already living forever,” Lewis said, and he meant it without grandstanding.

They brushed teeth. They argued gently about flowers and water and whether the stems should be cut again tonight. Nico said yes. Lewis agreed like a very good husband.

They did the bad slow dance you do when you are too happy to sit and too tired to invent steps. Lamps went out one by one until the small kitchen light stayed, gilding the counter and the ridiculous perfect honey like a benediction.

They were ridiculous about the duvet. Then not ridiculous at all. They fell asleep with hands interlocked, rings warm where skin remembered them, weight exactly right.

If there was a soundtrack, it could have been crowd noise from a distant straight, or the sea turning the same page it always turns, or a pop song with a riff that makes a spine feel like a tuning fork. It did not matter. The room knew their tune. So did they.

After all this time, they were still into each other. Now the law, the coast, and the people who loved them had simply caught up to what their mornings had known forever.