Chapter Text
Lewis Hamilton was the most infuriating man Max had ever met.
He wasn't sure when that had stopped being a problem.
The hotel room sat in that particular kind of quiet that came with early mornings in unfamiliar cities - the air conditioning humming low, the curtains doing an indifferent job of keeping the Bahrain sun out. Thin strips of light fell across the carpet anyway. Max sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, watching Lewis stand at the mirror going through a skincare routine that had no discernible end point.
He had somewhere to be. Lewis knew this.
Lewis uncapped something, examined the label with the focused attention of a man reading race telemetry, and set it down again.
"You're doing that on purpose," Max said.
"Mm." Lewis dipped two fingers into a small glass jar, working whatever it was across his jaw in slow, upward strokes. He caught Max's eye in the mirror for half a second and looked away again, the corner of his mouth doing something that wasn't quite a smile.
Max exhaled through his nose.
The thing nobody who hadn't been this close to Lewis would ever understand was how deliberate he was. Every single thing was a choice - the stillness of him, the unhurried way he moved through a room, the way he could make a rented hotel bathroom feel like he'd furnished it himself. Max had spent years reading him on track, cataloguing every twitch and feint, and he still couldn't always tell the difference between Lewis being genuinely unbothered and Lewis wanting him to think he was. The uncertainty had driven him insane for the better part of a decade. It still did. Some things didn't change just because you were sleeping with someone.
The Alpha in him - the part he kept on a short leash in Lewis' presence - noticed the way Lewis smelled in the morning. Warm and unhurried, something underneath it that was just Lewis, that Max had never been able to file away as unremarkable no matter how many mornings he'd woken up next to him. It wasn't something he'd ever say out loud. Lewis would look at him with those long-lashed eyes and find it either hilarious or insufferable, and Max wasn't prepared to find out which.
Lewis picked up another bottle, tilted it, peered at the amount left with mild displeasure.
"Lewis."
"Max." He said it in the same register, not unkind, not particularly interested either, tipping a few drops onto his palm and pressing both hands briefly to his face.
Max looked at the ceiling. Outside, Bahrain was already hot and getting hotter. In seventy-two hours they would be in their cars and the season would start properly - all the noise and cameras and the particular strain of being in the same paddock as Lewis without being able to touch him. They'd agreed on that without saying so, as they agreed on most things; a look across a room, a certain careful distance maintained in public. It worked, mostly. It required a level of daily performance that Max, who had never had much patience for performing, found quietly exhausting.
The harder part - the part that sat in his chest with a dull, persistent weight - was knowing that in seventy-two hours he would also want to beat Lewis more than he wanted almost anything. That instinct didn't go anywhere. It lived alongside everything else, unchanged and unapologetic, and Max had stopped being surprised by it. What surprised him, still, occasionally, was that Lewis was the same. That Lewis wanted to beat him just as badly and found nothing contradictory about that. It was possibly the thing Max respected most about him. It was also, frequently, the thing that made all of this so complicated.
An Alpha was supposed to want things to be simple. Max had clearly drawn the short straw.
Lewis pressed his lips together in the mirror, working something in, and Max watched the line of his throat move as he tilted his chin up.
He picked up his keycard from the nightstand and stood. "Don't wait up."
Lewis glanced at him properly then - a slow look, unhurried as everything else, head tilted a fraction like he was deciding something. Something moved behind his eyes that Max didn't have a name for.
"I never do," he said, easy, and turned back to the mirror.
Max let the door fall shut behind him and stood in the corridor for a moment longer than he needed to.