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So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:
the ideal burns in you like a fever.
Or not like a fever, like a second heart.
— October, Louise Glück
Charles walks into the Williams garage just as George is leaving. In the white Mercedes racesuit for COTA Charles almost doesn’t register the incongruity of George’s presence, sees at first only the colour and the height and absently opens his mouth to greet Alex. Then he freezes, not quite a flinch, feeling weirdly caught out even though he has just as much of a right to be in the Williams garage as George, which is none.
George is looking at him, head slightly tilted. The cracked-earth pattern of his racesuit is obvious, now that Charles is paying attention; he must have come straight from filming something. “Charles,” George says. The unasked question circles overhead like a vulture.
“I was just going to say hello to Carlos,” Charles feels compelled to say, in a reasonable and not at all defensive tone.
“If you’re here to steal Williams trade secrets I’ve got no horse in that race, so by all means,” George says.
George doesn’t flinch either, but Charles can tell from the way his face stills into perfect neutrality that he wishes he hadn’t made the joke. In an effort to resuscitate the corpse of the atmosphere, Charles says, lightly, “Ah, I am caught. I will have to go back to Ferrari empty-handed. But this is not very fair. You have already done the spying for Mercedes and now you won’t share.”
“First in, best dressed,” George says. “No, I’ve got to defend Alex’s honour in his absence. And his setup too.”
“It’s good to see you are feeling better,” Charles says. “It’s very impressive, what you did in Baku and Singapore. I don’t know how you managed it.”
Only Charles does know. Illness, injury, he would race through it all, if he could. George knows it too.
“Yes, good as new, thank you,” George says. Clearly wanting to balance the scales, he offers, “Shame about Zandvoort.”
Charles bats the nicety away with an offhand wave. “It is in the past,” he says. Four races ago might as well be last season, and it’s hardly a topic he wants to discuss with George, anyway. “We are focusing on this race weekend, and the rest of the season.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” George says, “but d’you think you might be cursed.”
Reflexively Charles smiles, polite and closemouthed, the expression he uses to buy himself more time to conjure up an appropriately equivocal response to a pointed press question. “I’m sorry?”
George isn’t smiling. “I think you’re cursed,” he says, voice lowered. “I’ve been wanting to speak to you about it for a while, actually.”
“Like.” Charles could have all the time in the world and he still would not know what to say. “Literally… cursed? Not… the figure of speech?”
“Yeah,” George says. “Proper cursed. Like a classic bad luck curse.”
“What does that mean.”
“Look, I’m not an expert,” George says, in the kind of tone that makes it clear that he does consider himself one. “But I think either someone’s put a curse on you, or you were born unlucky. Ferrari’s got you all warded up?” Charles nods. “Then I’d say you were probably born with it. Wards won’t catch anything already inside them.”
The active use of magic is so strictly regulated at every level of motorsports its relevance to Charles’ life to date has been negligible, save for the yearly ward renewal at the pre-season medical check-up. Curses might as well be superstitions, for all they exist to him, though it seems that his lack of concern is unreciprocated. Briefly Charles wonders if this is some obscure attempt at pre-race psychological sabotage. But George’s expression betrays not a hint of insincerity. And Charles would like to believe that George would not resort to this kind of gamesmanship.
The image forms so easily. Some heavy, parasitic thing taking up residence in his chest. For a moment Charles forgets to breathe, another background process that he never thinks about but has been operating without conscious input the whole time.
“I’ve got a bit of a curse too,” George adds. “It’s not serious enough to bother trying to break, so I’m just living with it.”
Inhale, exhale. Charles at least knows his body well enough to quiet it. “What’s your curse?”
“Sometimes I can predict the future,” George says matter-of-factly. “The curse is, naturally, that nobody believes me when I tell them. Then it comes true, I say, I told you so, we move on, it happens again.”
“Okay. So then.” Carefully Charles excises any edge of hysteria from his voice. “Do you know how I can remove it? This… curse.”
“Well, there’s always…” George trails off. “Hmm. You may not like this solution.”
Charles lurches forward and seizes George by the shoulders. “No, no, tell me. Please.”
George’s mouth compresses into a line, and then he says, “It’s true love’s kiss.”
“What?”
“Mate, we can’t be having a conversation where I have to say everything twice.”
“You mean… like in the fairytale,” Charles says slowly. He releases George’s shoulders before he does any damage to the joints. “Like Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty. That true love’s kiss.”
“Yes, that’s the one,” George says. “The old faithful. Breaks any curse, or so I’ve heard.”
“But I don’t—I am not in love with anyone,” Charles says. “So I am just doomed, then?”
“Who said anything about being in love?” George says.
Charles frowns. “Would you not be in love with your true love?”
“Fairytales, what can I say.” George spreads his hands. “No, I don’t think that’s part of it.”
“Love is not a part of love,” Charles says doubtfully.
“It’s just what happens in stories,” George says. “It’s like how you’ve got the evil stepmother and the dragon and the prince and the talking animals. You’ve got the true love’s kiss. They’re always falling in love at first sight and whatnot, and it’s always true love right on the first try. But you only know it because it’s how the story goes, and because the kiss works and the curse breaks. The reasoning’s kind of circular, but again: fairytales.”
“So you are saying the kiss comes first, and then the true love,” Charles says.
“Maybe, maybe not. Like I said, I’m not an expert. Still got my curse, obviously.”
“More of an expert than me,” Charles says.
“I mean, I’m happy to give it a go with you,” George says, businesslike. “If you’re up for it.”
Charles looks at him consideringly. The prospect of his true love being George Russell seems a little remote, but what would Charles know about how a curse might function. Perhaps the unceremonious unsentimentality of it, kissing George behind the Williams garage during media day downtime, is exactly the backwards logic needed to outsmart a fairytale. “Maybe we will luck into breaking each other’s curses.”
“I don’t necessarily think it’s going to work—”
“Well, if it has nothing to do with love—”
“I didn’t say it has nothing to do with love,” George says. “But I think it’s worth a shot. Let’s see where we can…”
Most of the Williams personnel are at the front of the garage with the cars, muffled sound of chatter and drills and a low electric hum filtering out to the rear entrance where Charles and George hover on the threshold. George shepherds Charles into the shelter of one of the glossy white panels that serve as makeshift moveable walls. A brief reconnoitring glance around. Nobody in his field of vision, and they’re shielded enough from the view of passing technicians, though George camouflages a little better than Charles in his Ferrari team kit. But Charles doesn’t expect this to take very long.
It is an almost comically uncoordinated attempt. They miscalculate angles and velocities of approach; Charles’ nose hits George’s jaw and George’s hand slips off Charles’ elbow and when they manage to align their mouths their teeth click against each other. Some of the longest seconds of Charles’ life pass. George is tense and uncooperative until he makes an exasperated noise and moves a hand to the back of Charles’ head and tries to take over the direction of the kiss, by which point Charles does not at all feel inclined to comply.
Surely the farce has gone on long enough. Charles grimaces and ends the kiss by stepping back. The vaguely horrified expression is mirrored on George’s face, before it relaxes into the levity of mutual acknowledgement: so it was as bad for you as it was for me. It’s quite nice, being on the same side as George. Charles finds himself relaxing too.
“Yeah, I don’t think I liked that,” George says. “No offense, genuinely. But I probably wouldn’t do that again.”
“None taken,” Charles says faintly. “I don’t think I would do that again either.”
“Would be pretty funny if we actually did wind up being true loves after that,” George says.
“Is that a prediction? From your curse?”
“I don’t know,” George says. “I can’t tell what’s from the curse or what’s just me.” He smiles, wry. “And you wouldn’t believe me even if it was.”
“The true love’s kiss,” Charles says. “Have you tried for it before?”
George glances over his shoulder, where the half-assembled guts of Alex’s car must be gleaming under the downlights at the other end of the garage, offering up secrets neither of them are here to divine. “No, not really,” George says. “I quite like knowing. Even if no one believes me there’s still a fair bit I can do about it myself.”
“I think I would go insane,” Charles says. “If I knew, magically, that I was right, and nobody would listen.”
“Mate,” George says, not unkindly. “Have you looked at the team you’re driving for.”
Charles laughs. “It’s like this,” he says. My fate, he doesn’t say. My heart.
In a profound show of support, Pierre immediately bursts into laughter.
“Do not laugh at me, calamar,” Charles says sternly; Pierre shields his mouth with a hand, shoulders trembling. “It’s not a laughing matter. My true love could be literally anyone in the world. Where am I supposed to start?”
Finally Pierre composes himself enough to respond with comprehensible words. “You have already started, no?”
Irritated, Charles waves a hand. “I don’t think that can count,” he says. “The chances it is someone on the grid—”
“Probably quite high, since it’s you,” Pierre says.
“And what is that supposed to mean.”
“I find it hard to believe your soulmate would be too far from a car,” Pierre says. Then he grins. “Well, at least you know for sure it isn’t—”
“We’re not talking about that right now,” Charles interrupts. “See if I ever tell you anything again.”
“You are the one who just got in a van for twelve hours with him?”
“It was two hours, and I said we’re not talking about that right now,” Charles says, more loudly.
Emergency roadtrips with former teammates with whom he may or may not have had ill-advised late-season oneupmanship liaisons aside, Charles has not given himself much of a head start on his cursebreaking endeavours. A handful of ex-girlfriends and drunk hookups and Carlos Sainz, very helpful, thank you. At any rate it will have to be something to deal with in the breaks between races, like a sponsorship obligation, except he’s on both sides of the transaction; he’s hardly going to go around the paddock throwing himself mouth-first at unsuspecting coworkers. The racing comes first, always. He is a driver, not a magician. He won’t squander the concrete chance of a present win for some nebulous future possibility based on a curse that might not even exist.
Really it sounds like a shitty excuse, some poor attempt to evade accountability: it’s not me, it’s my supernaturally bad fortune! As if he cared so little. As if he wouldn't have done anything, if he’d known there was something he could do, to push a little closer to the title, the longest and most beloved dream. All this time he’s wasted not knowing and therefore not acting; the same old frustration rears its ugly head again and threatens to seal up his throat, this fucking car, these fucking tyres, it’s unbelievable, it’s just my luck. Now he knows its name. And what a relief, to have something in his power to overcome. He’d almost forgotten what it felt like.
Charles sighs. “Should we try? Just in case.”
A shrug. Pierre leans over and smacks their mouths together. “There,” he says.
“That was so unromantic,” Charles says, scowling.
“Did you want me to do it again?”
“No.”
“That's what I thought,” Pierre says. “Anyway, I think it is not such a bad start. You have known George since karting, it’s a good chance he is the right one.”
“Yes, him and half the grid,” Charles says impatiently. He thumps his heel against the stack of tyres he and Pierre have repurposed as seats; hopefully this does not qualify as tampering with Alpine resources. “And many more besides.”
“Charles. Do you really think your true love is some guy you karted against when you were ten?”
“Well, probably,” Charles says. “With my luck. And the tournament records must all be paper, it will be impossible to look anything up.”
“You are not serious.”
“Maybe it is the F1-75,” Charles mutters. “I will detour to Maranello before Mexico and give her a kiss and maybe she will turn into a princess.”
“You do that,” Pierre says, in tones of deep skepticism.
Blare of orange in the corner of Charles’ eye. He reaches out just as Oscar rounds the corner of the Alpine garage and snags him by the sleeve. “Oscar!” Charles announces. “Just the person I wanted.”
“Um,” Oscar says, looking at Charles, then at Pierre, then down at the fingers curled into his fireproofs where Charles has not yet let go. “Hey, Charles. Pierre.”
“Ah, look at that, my trainer is calling me,” Pierre declares, jumping to his feet. He does not bother with even a cursory glance towards his phone as he strides away.
Oscar blinks sedately. Charles exhales.
“Oscar,” Charles says. “I think I am under a curse. And I would like your help to break it, please.”
Oscar’s gaze pinballs a few more times between Charles’ hand at his elbow and Charles’ face. “Sure,” Oscar says.
“You aren’t going to ask what I need you to do before you agree?”
The blinking accelerates. “Should I be worried?”
Charles laughs. “I am teasing. Don’t worry, it’s nothing extreme. Just a kiss.”
Oscar takes in this information with admirable equanimity. “Thought you were gonna say human sacrifice or something,” he says. “I’m not really ready to die yet, but I reckon I can manage a kiss.”
“It’s a kiss in the sense of true love’s kiss,” Charles says. “To be clear.”
Again Oscar appears impressively unfazed. “So if we’re, um, true loves, your curse breaks?”
“That’s right.”
“And if we aren’t?”
“Then we will have kissed.”
Oscar smiles. “Can’t say I have any complaints.”
So Charles tugs him closer by the elbow until he can shift his hand to Oscar’s waist and Oscar leans down the rest of the way to kiss him. It starts off slow, almost hesitant, like Oscar isn’t sure what angle to take. But Oscar approaches kissing with the same quietly methodical exactitude that he approaches everything else. Intake, process, adjustment, output; he is a fast learner in this, too. Hand firmer on the back of Charles’ neck now, taking the lead because Charles allows it, steering him into the kiss, the way Charles likes it, though Oscar shouldn’t know that this quickly. That preternatural instinct for adaptation and synthesis coupled with the same kind of kinetic intuition Charles first recognised in Max; it’s always made Oscar a genuine competitor, even before he had the machinery to bring him to the door of the championship.
Maybe Charles would like Oscar more if Oscar beat him less, but as soon as the thought forms he dismisses it as untrue. There’s no point to racing without threat. Besides, the MCL39 outperforms the SF-25 by such frankly embarrassing margins that there is little utility in thinking about the dimensions of that gap. What does it matter who is at the top of the ladder if that person isn’t Charles? Every race abides by the same principles. Each car ahead of Charles on the track is only one more hurdle to overcome.
When the kiss breaks Oscar is wide-eyed, pink dusted along the tops of his cheeks. “Thanks,” he blurts out.
“What are you thanking me for?” Charles says. “I should be the one thanking you. Maybe you have broken my curse.”
“I just mean.” Oscar flushes darker. “It was nice.”
Warmth rises easily. He always finds himself charmed by sincerity and he likes its iteration in Oscar, the seriousness, the inexperience transforming to competence with alarming speed. Not something to be taken lightly. He would not mind it if his true love was Oscar, he decides. “Yes,” Charles says. “It was nice.” He squeezes Oscar's waist and stands up, just as Oscar is stepping back to give him space. “Then I’ll see you on the track. True love or no, let’s have a good race.”
“Yeah,” Oscar says, and flashes Charles another smile. “See you out there.”
As Charles makes his way back to the Ferrari garage he catches a glimpse of a black racesuit, heading out of the Sauber garage in the opposite direction. Smudges of red on the back like a trick of the light. Not so far away that he wouldn’t hear and turn around if Charles called out to him. This distance is not uncrossable yet.
The bishop Lewis is holding slips out of his fingers, ricochets off the edge of the board and clatters down the table towards Charles like a miniature bowling ball, which is about as much resemblance to the actual game of chess as they tend to manage anyway. “Uh,” Lewis says bloodlessly. “I don’t… really know what to say.”
“That’s okay,” Charles says. He plucks the piece off the narrow table where it’s rolled to a stop by his elbow and offers it back to Lewis, prone in the open heart of his palm. “It is a difficult situation for me as well. As you can imagine.”
“I mean, you can’t really think it’s me.” Lewis’ fingers close around the runaway bishop. It doesn’t escape Charles that Lewis is meticulous in avoiding so much as the brush of a fingertip against Charles. He resets the piece on his side of the board, the correct square, no sleight of hand, no laughing stab at deception, and doesn’t look at Charles.
“No,” Charles admits. “But we are both Ferrari, so then I thought it’s possible that… somehow, it could be true anyway. Because it is Ferrari. I don’t know.”
If there is anything that could displace fate itself surely it would be the trampling weight of red, the downwards crush of hooves coming down like a hammer. Sunrise in Maranello. Almost a hundred years of legacy. The tifosi calling his name, singing for him, thousands of voices in devoted chorus, the century-long hope, how could any love be truer. Enshrined in the ongoing dream. We will be with you always. Won’t you stay with us longer. All the faith, all the love in the world for you.
“LH,” Charles says. “You don’t have to say yes. Most likely, I will be fine. And it doesn’t have to mean anything. It is like… stretching before a workout. It’s just an action that is useful.”
“I’m not, like, trying to not help you, man, I’m just…” Lewis is now eyeing the wall beside them with the skittish desperation of a man three seconds away from hurling himself through plywood to escape. Not for the first time Charles thinks the driver’s rooms are claustrophobically small, more like a jar than a place to inhabit, some preserving enclosure. Their shadows jockey for space. “Like, it doesn’t… it wouldn’t mean that my… is also you?”
It occurs to Charles that there’s no guarantee the whole true love situation is reciprocal. This is such a startlingly miserable prospect he probably should have thought of it earlier. “I’m afraid it would be typical if my true love was you but your true love was not me,” Charles says grimly. “These things are always happening to me.”
The relief that cracks Lewis’ face open is so blatant it’s almost embarrassing to look at. It annoys Charles a little; would it really be so terrible, being Charles’ true love? Though, to be fair, Lewis has a history when it comes to teammates that Charles does not envy.
“And I think,” Charles continues, “that your true love should be someone you can look in the eye.”
Lewis winces and laughs and finally looks back at Charles. “Yeah,” he says, rueful. “That sounds right.”
Lewis is not the first world champion teammate Charles has had, but Sebastian was never quite so far away. The difference, Charles knows, is that he has come to partner Lewis too late. He is neither teammate nor rival in any sense other than literal. The part of Lewis that he can reach is only a peripheral flash of a person Charles will never entirely see, already half-apotheosised into something greater than the dream they share. A man calcifying into artwork. A cordoned-off room in a red museum.
“Alright,” Lewis says. “Let’s do it.”
They end up leaning in over the chessboard until their faces can meet in the middle. How stupid it probably looks, Charles with his hands braced against the tabletop for balance, both their eyes open, neither of them ceding or gaining territory. Still, despite the bad angle it is a sensorily pleasant experience. This is something Lewis has done many times before and is good at, much like the reason he is at Ferrari at all. Charles likes the weight of Lewis’ hand on his jaw, the practised and careful movement of Lewis’ mouth against his, the easy slide of their tongues. But he feels, inexplicably, a great sense of grief bearing down on him. A distance opening up, inverse to their physical proximity. In a glass case in the closed red room: Lewis’ heart, silver and remote as a star.
When Lewis pulls back his face is like a shroud. Whatever puzzle Lewis is keeping locked inside him is not something that Charles can or even really wants to solve. Still, they are bound together for as long as they both wear the red, and Charles does not want Lewis unhappy. If he is diminished, it should not be this slow and quiet death by suffocation in a shrinking series of airless rooms: the factory in Maranello, the Ferrari motorhome, the driver’s room, the cockpit. The part of Lewis’ story not yet transformed into myth should end on its own terms. Surely there is enough space in the red dream to afford him that dignity.
Charles says, “Have you spoken to Seb yet?”
Lewis looks surprised. “No,” he says, blinking rapidly. “Not—not yet. I’m going to, I just wanted to wait a bit longer before talking to him. About all of this.”
One or both of them must have jostled the chessboard at some point during the kiss. Half the pieces lie scattered across the squares. Impossible to recall what the gamestate had been before, the caging parameters of move and countermove narrowing towards a definitive end, the win or the loss or the stalemate. It doesn’t matter. They’ll have to start the game over. They are always starting the game over.
“I think,” Charles says, “maybe we will both need to give him a call.”
In Turin, Jannik wins the ATP Finals in straight sets. They are a hard-fought pair of sets, but numerically it is the shortest path to victory. When Jannik plays at his best there is a kind of inevitability to his game; even up in the stands Charles gets the sense of gaps being sealed off, one by one, until the court chokes on its airlessness. It reminds him a little of Max, that fatal certainty in wringing out pace from his machine on pain of death, either his own or everyone else’s. You had to be a bit insane to push back against it.
It’s a novelty, soaking in the celebratory atmosphere of someone else’s win not predicated on his own loss. Buoyant with that simple secondhand joy he could, if he wanted, imagine himself both unselfish and unindebted. Charles waits until Jannik has emerged from the gauntlet of post-match press and exchanged farewell embraces with the world’s happiest and probably least sane suffocation victim Carlos Alcaraz and his village-sized entourage before approaching.
“Charles! Good to see you,” Jannik says, grinning with his teeth visible, which is his equivalent of effusiveness. “I didn’t know you would be coming, I would have put you in my box.”
“No, no, my seat was already very good,” Charles says. A million camera flashes firework in the periphery of his vision. “It was an amazing match, I saw it well. Congratulations.”
They pose for the requisite slew of photos, Jannik shifting his trophy to the cradle of one arm and slinging the other around Charles’ shoulder, Charles looping his arm around Jannik’s waist to complete the circuit. Jannik is hot as an ember and glowing with exertion, effort well-spent. He carries his victory with the ease of repetition.
Charles leans in and Jannik, intuiting Charles’ intent, tilts his head down. “There’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about,” Charles says quietly, by Jannik’s ear, angled away from mechanical or human view. “Is there somewhere we could…”
“Now?”
“If possible. It won’t take long, I don’t want to keep you from cooldown.” Health is an athlete’s most precious resource. The myriad of unremarkable but necessary routines adjacent to the sport, optimisation and maintenance, stretch and refuel, Charles knows how exacting the process of guarding it can be. The body demands its price for spectacularity.
“Locker room,” Jannik suggests. “Carlos I think will be cooling down already.”
Jannik steps away for a brief word with his team and then he waves Charles over to the players’ entrance. The trophy comes with him. He’s earned it, after all. If it were Charles he wouldn’t let go either.
Away from the invisible corona of heat issued by thousands of cheering hotblooded bodies, the locker room is a shade cooler than the arena. Charles waits until the door shuts behind them before he says, “How much do you know about cursebreaking?”
A ghost of a smile touches Jannik’s mouth. “The true love’s kiss,” he says. “I have heard that’s how it’s done.”
“I am, ah,” Charles says. “In this kind of situation.”
Instantly Jannik’s gaze sharpens, the match focus snapping back on. He sets the trophy down on the bench. “You are cursed?”
Charles nods.
“Then… you are saying that your true love may be me?”
Charles nods again. “It is not that I am in love with you or anything,” he hurries to say. “I have been trying to think of what would make sense, if it’s meant to be something fated. You know. Like a fairytale, this kind of logic. And we are both…”
“Italy’s great hopes,” Jannik supplies, the corner of his mouth slanting sharper.
“Something like that,” Charles says. “So I thought maybe it’s you.”
It would make a sort of narrative sense, the two of them, although Jannik has fulfilled his end of the national bargain, and more besides. It is only Charles who is still an open-ended promise. All desire, nothing to show for it. What made him any different from all the other untitled hopefuls. Only the red. Only the long dream that began before him and will go on afterwards.
“It cannot be me,” Jannik says decisively.
The reactive flare of disappointment is snuffed out almost instantly by curiosity. Charles asks, “What makes you so sure?”
“Ah, it’s quite stupid.” Jannik shrugs. “I have also a similar, or opposite… it is like a prophecy or a curse. So your true love, it’s not me. But since we are here I am happy to try, in case. It cannot hurt.”
“It’s possible you are my true love but not the other way around,” Charles says. “In fact I am quite sure that if you are mine I will not be yours. Given my luck.”
“Then let’s try,” Jannik says. “You want to do it now?”
“No time like the present,” Charles says.
Jannik’s lips are horribly chapped but he knows how to use his height, crowds Charles back against the locker with the whipcord solidity of his body. You didn’t expect it from him at first sight, the strength those long, elastic limbs could generate, the almost bruising force of his mouth. It’s only surprising for a moment, before Charles responds. What a delight to have something to push back against.
Besides, Charles is not trying to break free from Jannik’s hold. The proximity to triumph intoxicates; if it can’t be his own it should be one that has nothing to do with him. The hand fitted to the back of Charles’ neck, the foreign array of calluses on his palm, the body keeping its small record of devotion. And the proof of it reciprocated: the trophy on the bench, glint of light on metal out of the corner of Charles’ eye, another for an ever-growing collection of victories. Reminder of what it meant to love something so fiercely it had no choice but to love you back.
Jannik pulls back but doesn’t step away. “It’s enough?”
“I’m sure,” Charles says. “Thanks for doing this—” he shuffles through his vocabulary, for, to, with, every preposition seems not quite right, but then perhaps the imprecision is the only reason they are speaking in English at all, “for me.”
“Of course,” Jannik says. He smiles. “I am tifoso, you know. Anything to bring the trophy home to Ferrari, it’s okay. Maybe it’s not by me, but the curse for sure will break. Let’s see.”
“You are more optimistic than I feel,” Charles says.
“I try to always be positive,” Jannik says.
The flush is starting to retreat from Jannik’s face, system regulating itself back to equilibrium with athlete’s rigour. The recovery, the reset. In the short term the body is a poor record-keeper; soon there will only be the trophy to show he had done anything at all. Charles thinks of how Jannik had looked, from his seat in the stands, abstracted into smudges of colour, white and navy so dark it was almost black sliding across the court. The red came as a shock, when the eye registered it, the hair escaping the cap, the arteries dilating just under the skin, though like the explosive power he put behind every ball that left his racquet it’d been there all along. Fox in the snow. Blood on white teeth. A pair of bulls about to lock horns.
“You know who it is?” Charles says. “Your true love. Since it’s not me.”
“Yes,” Jannik says, unconcerned, like they’re discussing nothing more significant than the weather. “It’s less important than you think.”
“I would like not to be cursed,” Charles says. “I think that’s quite important.”
“What I mean is,” Jannik says. He pauses, frowns, recalculates; it’s the same glacially reflective expression Charles had seen on him one break down in the second set, approaching the net again and again after a failed drop shot that had cost him a game, unrelenting, no matter the risk, until he got it right. And then he got it right, so beautifully right Alcaraz had beamed at him across the net, irrepressible, blinding in high-definition closeup on the big screen, pulling the small smile on Jannik’s face broader until it didn’t even look shocked at itself anymore. “It’s different for me. My true love is my curse, it’s a long story. So I cannot break it. I am stuck with it forever.” Strangely enough he sounds quite pleased at the prospect. “But for you, you will still have to decide which matters more. The curse, or the love?”
In the end Charles winds up messaging instead of calling. He doesn’t explain himself; maybe that’s testing his luck. He almost asked out loud, back in the garage at Interlagos, scribbling swells of green on his sheet of paper and keenly aware of Sebastian inspecting his work over his shoulder, shadow blotting out half the paper, a lighter and decontextualised iteration of the inquisitive focus he’d once turned on Charles’ setups in parc ferme. Assessment without evaluation. But then Sebastian’s shadow retreated and his footsteps moved towards where Lewis was showing his scrapbooked creation to some engineers and the door of the moment shut behind him. Under Charles’ hand a trunk fractaled out in brown pencilstrokes into the shaded green miasma. He didn’t hear what Sebastian said next, only Lewis’ distinctive laugh in response.
But Sebastian agrees to meet before he flies out of Sao Paulo, so Charles texts him his hotel details. Again Charles is keenly aware of Sebastian behind his shoulder in the lobby, the elevator, the hallway leading to his hotel room, a dubiously clandestine energy to the optics he hadn’t really intended. He’d wanted privacy, not intimacy. It is not what he has always wanted.
In Charles’ room Sebastian spins the chair at the desk around and takes a seat, waiting for the story. And Charles does mean to get straight to business. But somehow the first thing that comes out of his mouth is, “Were you watching?”
“Of course,” Sebastian says. “It’s a pity about your race, that P3… But that isn’t why you wanted to meet, is it?”
“You must promise to listen the whole way,” Charles says. It feels less stupid to stay standing, so he does. “It is going to sound a bit strange.”
The creases by Sebastian’s eyes deepen. “Now I’m even more curious,” he says. “Alright. Tell me.”
“I am cursed,” Charles says. Then he tells Sebastian the rest of it, ungraceful, stilted, cringing. The telling has not become any easier with practice and it bothers him, the lack of progress. But Sebastian listens, like he’d promised.
When Charles finishes stumbling through his explanation, feeling painfully teenage, Sebastian leans back in his chair and tilts his head. “Do you think it’s me?” he says.
Charles puts a hand on the back of the couch beside him, though he doesn't need the steadying. He is sufficiently past the feeling enough to recognise it in hindsight. He remembers being twenty-one and wanting so much his teeth ached with the ferocity of it: red, victory, Sebastian, the synonymisation of all these things. Sebastian’s victory in red. His victory over Sebastian. His red, his victory. Sebastian.
Ferrari plans its line of succession but admits of only one heir. Charles took his inheritance early. Some part of Sebastian, Charles knows, has not forgiven him for being the faster driver during their shared years. Charles can’t really begrudge him any lingering resentment; victory is an unshareable thing and Sebastian had built up such an appetite for it. Sebastian like a red comet streaking across the sky, hurtling breathless and unstoppable towards impact, obliteration, earth.
“I don’t know,” Charles says. He’s glad he didn’t sit; it’s easier to meet Sebastian’s eyes from above. “It is—unlikely. But. I would like to be sure.”
“What makes you think you’re cursed at all?” Sebastian says. “Because you haven’t won a championship?”
“It’s more than that,” Charles says. “It is like…” He closes a compulsive fist over his heart, where the cavallino rampante would sit on his racesuit. Surely if there is anyone who would understand.
“I wanted it so, so badly,” Sebastian says, very calmly. “A championship with Ferrari. I would have given anything.” He is so still in his chair he could be a drawing himself. “Even my four, I think, for just the one. But it’s not a deal I was able to make.”
Sebastian’s gloved hand on Charles’ cheek. His eyes through the visor gap, terrible and burning and blue; Charles had had to let his own eyes slip shut against the awful intensity of Sebastian’s gaze. He had seemed for a moment not like the living rooted heart of Ferrari Charles drove with and against but the ravenous nightmare in black that Charles had grown up watching, the one that had snapped up four championships and seemed poised to swallow down countless more.
Charles has nothing to trade with. Everything he has, Sebastian had first. But he will ask it of Sebastian anyway: you will let me be selfish, just one more time. You will let me win.
“I would like to be sure,” he repeats.
Sebastian rises to his feet. He says, “Then let’s find out.”
Kissing Sebastian is better than any fantasy his younger mind ever conjured up, and also worse, delimited now by the concrete sensory input. No more dreaming, no more wonder, only the unalterable and precise knowledge of how it feels. Sebastian’s hair sieved through his fingers, Sebastian’s ungloved hand on his cheek. It’s hard to stay present and embodied; even as his mouth is moving against Sebastian’s it is already like a memory slipping out of reach. He’s reminded, bizarrely, of Lewis, that old and ossified heartbreak, some nameless long-ago grief inherited in shadow, only inverted: a grief for something not yet ended. As if there was any shortage of grief to be inherited, as if it was necessary to also borrow the grief of the future.
Charles pulls back first. Something twisting in his chest like a knife.
“I have wanted to do that for some time,” Charles admits.
A flash of steel in Sebastian’s eyes, before they go kind. “I know,” he says.
“Would you have? Before. If I’d asked.”
“Probably, yes,” Sebastian says. “Not my first time, you know, with a teammate. But it wouldn’t have fixed anything. It would have ended the same way.”
“Probably,” Charles echoes. “Yes.”
If he had kissed Sebastian back then, would it have worked? Even if he didn’t know he was cursed, only that he wanted something he did not have? Would it have been Charles in 2022, 2024, lifting the championship trophy overhead, the promise brought to fruition, finally a vessel for a lifetime, an inherited century, the century he took from Sebastian, of want?
The blade burrows deeper. He wants, quite badly, to repeat the action and see if it’s easier. Proof that cause can be linked to consequence, that he is capable of effecting change, of anything at all. It must show on his face. Sebastian maintains the separation between their bodies, another kindness. It is probably easier for him to be kind, now that they are apart. Charles likes Carlos more in Williams white and blue than he ever did on the other side of his garage and Sebastian has left it all entirely. How bearable everything becomes when seen in a rearview mirror.
“Charles,” Sebastian says. “Are you happy?”
Were you happy, Charles could say, though he of all people has no right to ask it of Sebastian. Was the dream worth its end. But he knows his own answer, which must also be Sebastian’s, because Sebastian had stayed as long as he could, until Charles took it from him. And Charles sees only one thing when he closes his eyes. The long dream, the victory, red as a heart.
Sebastian seems content now, in stillness, the old hunger laid down on the track. Max breaks his records like twigs and Sebastian is kind to him too. Maybe Sebastian will never get behind a wheel again. Maybe he doesn’t dream of it anymore, or if he does they are not dreams he wants to dwell on. But Charles does not remember how not to be hungry. Charles does not remember any dream except this one.
He hears, in Sebastian’s voice, Don’t waste it. As clearly as if Sebastian had said it aloud. But it is not worth it unless it is in red; isn’t that what you believed, too, with all your heart? So I will not fail. I will fulfil the promise, I will see my fate through. My heart, my victory, brought home the way you could not, because you showed me how.
“I am grateful,” Charles says. “For all of it.”
He sees Max in the paddock, which is the usual way in which he sees Max. He has seen Max in the paddock many times. This is because they race together. He sees Max about the same number of times that he sees anyone else on the grid. That he hasn’t spoken to Max about the curse yet is a matter of circumstance. With Max it is always about the race, and the curse isn’t relevant to the race, except in the hypothetical. They work in retrospect, it’s easier to be around Max with a reference to anchor them, Las Vegas, Jeddah, Silverstone, Austria, all the way back to Val d’Argenton and further beyond, the braid of intertwining histories going back past the vanishing point of memory and somehow it feels closer to reach for than the future.
For someone who has just lost the championship by two points Max looks remarkably sanguine. No fifth title for Max this year. No first title for Charles, though that’s a much older wound. The long dream and all its accumulated discontent, echoing down the lineage of red. For a moment the podium here, at least, had been in sight. He couldn’t help the hope, has never been able to resist wringing a little more out of a heart seemingly incapable of learning its lesson. Twenty-four races in the SF-25; Charles knew well enough by then what it could and could not do, and despite that he’d believed until the end.
Still, now that this hideous season is behind them and the sky has been lit up orange and a new world champion crowned and nothing Charles does can change the outcome, he wants to talk to Max. It’s always like this. When they are in the paddock it is the most natural thing in the world to fall into step. With the festivities concluded, most of the media and guests and personnel have filtered out already; there is a dangerous and deceptive sense of seclusion. The congratulations gives way to the post-mortem. Finally Charles says, “Maybe… maybe you have heard. I don’t know.”
“Heard what?” But Max is smiling, and Charles smacks him on the shoulder.
“You have heard! You are just being difficult.”
At this point it would be harder for Max to have not heard. After all, Charles has essentially been going around the paddock throwing himself mouth-first at unsuspecting coworkers for the latter half of the season, and the rumour mill outpaces the cars.
“Yeah, I heard about it,” Max says. “You thought that George was your true love? Really?”
“God, no,” Charles says, laughing. “I thought only, it is so ridiculous it may actually work. I am unlucky, I know this. It would make sense if my true love was someone I had never thought of like that.”
“So I’m the last, then,” Max says. “Good.”
“You don’t know that,” Charles says reflexively, and then, “What? Why is that good?”
“Well, we will break the curse, which means I will be the last,” Max says, as if this is a fact so self-evident it’s almost offensive to say out loud. “And then obviously you won’t be cursed. Why wouldn’t that be good?”
Charles stares. “You don’t know that,” he says again. Between his ribs a weird arrhythmia, some mechanical malfunction, yet another thing he has to outdrive. Around Max his body does not know the difference between an overtake dive and a routine conversation. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say it’s the other way around. The on-track battle like a dialogue: what will we say to each other today? “Probably my true love is someone I beat in karting when I was ten.”
“Sure,” Max says. “Someone who beat you in karting when you were… twelve, thirteen? Yes, 2010. We were twelve.”
“I beat you at Worlds when we—” Charles cuts himself off, shakes his head. “That’s not the point. And anyway, maybe it’s not so good. George does not want to break his curse. I’m not sure that I want to, either.”
It’s Max’s turn to stare. “Why?” Max says. “It’s a curse. It’s of course better if it’s gone.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” Charles says. “I don’t even know if it is a curse. It is not like I have never won a race. I think…”
I think I have been under this curse for so long that I cannot race without it. I think that if I cut it out of me I will untether myself from my fate; I will sever the ribboning path to the shining and silver thing I am reaching for every time I get in the car. I think I may never win again.
“I think it is just a part of me,” Charles finishes. Already, he knows, he is showing too much of a soft underside to the one person he should least want to see it; he should hate the idea of ceding anything to Max; but still he finds himself saying, “I don’t know what kind of driver I would be. If it was gone.”
If Charles is honest with himself he knows that the curse has not lifted yet. He feels the weight nestled underneath his sternum like ballast. Grown into the shape of his heart, or it has been his heart all along. And his heart has never been a burden. Always a weight, yes, but one he bears gladly. So maybe he is like George, unwilling to break the curse because it gives him more than it takes. So maybe he is like Jannik, the curse and the love inextricable. What, then, is the difference between a curse and a blessing?
“That makes no sense,” Max says bluntly. “You are the driver you have always been. You will fight the same way, whether you are cursed or not. So you will race. Either you’ll win, or you won’t. But you will still race.” Max pauses. “It’s what I would do.”
“I can’t imagine you being cursed,” Charles says. Inexplicably his ears burn. “It seems like it would just not stick to you.”
“I don’t actually believe in that bullshit, you know,” Max says. “Magic or fate or whatever the fuck. But if there’s anything I am sure of, it’s you and me. You run, I’ll chase. Or I run, you’ll chase. It’s not complicated.”
“You would say that,” Charles says. “Nothing is complicated for you.”
“Why should it be complicated for you?” Max says.
My curse. My fate. My heart. Charles remembers well the start of 2022. How electrifyingly close it had all felt. The giddy heights, the glittering whole-body rush of standing on top of the world. Everything Charles wanted within reach, and then the gap widened and Max pulled ahead and took his second title, the one that might have been Charles’, if he’d done it right, kissed the right person at the right time, driven better, believed harder, made his own luck, stabbed through Max’s tyres, outpaced his fate. The closeness had only been the temporary proximity of formation after all, the moment before the lights went out and everything dispersed.
But Max is not moving away now. He looks at Charles. Intent and steady. Charles takes a step forward. The distance between their bodies halves. He can feel his pulse at his throat, his wrists, all the delicate thin-skinned parts of him where the blood rushes closest to the surface. Everything that he has told the others—that true love is allegorical, that it does not have to be reciprocated, that the mechanics of the kiss are as meaningful as a warm-up, a movement done solely for its function—dissolves like sugar on the tip of his tongue. A shocking sweetness lingering in its wake, almost too much to bear, but there’s a kind of pleasure in withstanding it too, welcoming the intensity. And Max only stands there. Waiting for Charles.
The decision is simple. Charles closes the gap. Grasps Max’s face in his hands and kisses him.
Max kisses back without hesitation. His hand slides firmly around the nape of Charles’ neck, reeling him in, only Charles is already there. The adrenaline spike drives everything other than the vivid immediacy of Max out of Charles’ mind; he is all instinct and hunger, so clearheaded it loops back to intoxication. His lips parting for Max’s tongue, his head tipping back into Max’s sure grip, their legs slotting together. With Max it’s impossible not to go all out. Restraint seems so pointless, everything falling away except the pure thrill of closeness, a precise match, a perfect counter, a dare to go faster, race harder, hold nothing back. He licks the lingering taste of rosewater out of Max’s mouth. Charles had been up on that podium too, a year ago, soaked in the sweet foam and spray, one more trophy to close out the season, though not the one that matters. Not yet.
Lightheaded and breathless he gasps into Max’s mouth. The air burnt clean out of his lungs like shorted wiring. Pushing closer, feeling Max push back. Every bright point of his body where it touches Max is strike paper, ready to light up, catch flame. This is the art, veering infinitely heartstoppingly close to collision without the crash, the wreck. The endless, beautiful moment at the limit. The inevitable escaped entirely.
His fingers tangle in Max’s hair as Max’s head dips lower, to his throat, mouthing wetly at his jugular. This is not, as far as Charles knows, any kind of cursebreaking technique, but Charles is hardly going to object. “Max,” he says, half-laughing, shivery with want, “Max, we will have to go soon, our friends are waiting—”
Max hums and lifts his head. His eyes are chemical-rush dark, his face as flushed as Charles feels. He says, “They can wait a bit longer. We waited long enough.”
Charles touches his mouth without meaning to. His heart bangs at his throat where Max had put his mouth; his skin prickles all over. He can’t tell if he feels any lighter or less cursed. He wants to get back out there on the track and race Max right now, the way he couldn’t for too much of this season, too much of every season they’ve shared, it’s never been enough. He wants with a terrible, consuming immensity that he thinks nobody except Max understands. Even when they hated each other, even when Max made Charles so angry he thought he would die or he would kill Max, whichever happened first. The undeniable recognition: you are like me, you know me, you feel what I feel. Always Max. Only Max.
Max shifts his hand, cradle for Charles’ face. His thumb catches the hot, tender swell of Charles’ bottom lip. He can take such care sometimes. The gentleness that comes from finely calibrated restraint. Almost all of his life he has been racing Max; he knows this dance, Max as opposition, adversary, counterpart. Unyielding and true. Here is the same trust in Max’s hands transposed into a different key. Charles’ heart is not yet done with hope.
“So since your curse is broken now—”
“If,” Charles corrects, but an uncontrollable smile keeps tugging stupidly at his mouth.
“Since your curse is broken,” Max repeats. “I will of course be seeing you on every front row and every podium next season.” No upwards lilt of a question. Only the plain statement, declaratory, no gap left for uncertainty to pass through. A challenge, a promise, a curse, a blessing.
“Let’s try it again,” Charles says. “Just to be sure.”