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Charles is standing in a huddle with some of the other drivers – half the grid, approximately, rants flying off in multiple languages – when he feels a tap on his shoulder. Anna, Max’s PR agent, gives him a short, tight smile, before quietly saying, “He’s MIA again, let someone know if you… you know.”
Charles nods, and she’s gone before anyone can really pay attention to her. “Guys,” Charles raises voice over the ruckus, though only Pierre and Alex look at him. “I think I’m gonna head back.”
“Why? In a hurry to somewhere?” Pierre asks.
“Just… Tired and annoyed. Don’t feel like talking.”
Maybe Pierre had noticed Anna, after all, since he has that look in his eye that says he’s not buying Charles’s excuse. Before he can start grilling Charles, Charles hastily exits with a wave of his hand.
The look on Fred’s face tells Charles what he will find in his driver’s room. He dodges the team principal’s attempt at luring him into a conversation and dashes towards his room.
Max sits on the floor. He’s still in his race gear, the suit bunched around his waist. His hat lies abandoned on the bed and his recently shorn hair is sticking up. A lion without his mane. Charles still mourns the lost length, thick and luscious, perfect for pulling and gripping, to be played with and petted.
Max’s head shoots up when Charles closes the door; for some reason he hadn’t heard the door open and for a while Charles had stood unnoticed in the open doorway staring silently. His eyes are glassy and pink splotches cover his cheeks, traveling down his thick neck and disappearing under the white fireproofs. Max’s reactive, easy to blush skin is one of Charles’s favorite things about him, how he can trace the redness with his lips and turn it even redder.
“Hey,” Charles says nonchalantly, as if this were a typical occurrence, as if rivals wandered into each other’s rooms on the regular – though, Max’s surreptitious little trips to Charles’s room aren’t particularly new. Half of Ferrari’s personnel are aware, including Fred, who’s probably the sole reason nothing has leaked to the press. What a shitstorm that would be. Fred hasn’t intervened, because (Charles suspects) he’s holding out hope that they could get Max interested in Ferrari (besides Charles) once Lewis’s time is up. Although – despite the rough start – Lewis’s post seems stalwart enough, for now.
One timely photographer in the right place could get the rumor mill going and detonate it all. They are taking precarious risks.
Charles doesn’t have the heart to tell Fred that Max truly is loyal to the bone to Red Bull and there is little to change that. Fred probably knows this, anyway. Charles has been watching Red Bull’s fall from the grace of 2023 with puzzlement. But he gets Max. He knows what it feels like when a team becomes more than a team, despite that team letting you down, again and again. And at least Max had had those heights.
The sulky, forlorn man on the floor of Charles’s driver’s room doesn’t resemble the victorious, carefree Max of 2023. His lips have pulled into an even more prominent pout. He fiddles with an empty Red Bull can in an agitated manner, pressing dents into the aluminum.
Charles sits on the floor next to Max. Max in a bad mood is prickly, may even appear volatile. But Charles knows Max at this point, knows that he doesn’t shun touch in these moments – on the contrary. When Charles wraps his arm around Max, he melts against Charles, letting his head loll onto Charles’s shoulder.
“What a start to the season,” Charles mutters.
Max only shrugs. Charles has seen it before, the ‘I don’t care’ attitude. But if Max truly didn’t care, he’d leave Red Bull this second, contracts be damned, and walk into another category – any of them would welcome him with open arms. If he truly didn’t care, he wouldn’t open his mouth and give a heated speech about everything that’s wrong with the regs at the GPDA meeting. Only to be stabbed in the back – they both have the same hunch about who’s behind that little leak.
“Did they figure out already what’s wrong with your car? Are they fixing it?”
“Yeah. Some bullshit.”
“That’s good. I mean, that it’s fixed, no? Isack did well, so. Who knows what you could’ve done?”
“Yeah, who knows,” Max parrots sardonically. “Because I didn’t make it out of Q1 because of some bullshit I’ve never experienced in my life.”
Charles frowns in confusion. “A Q1 exit?”
“No! That bullshit with the car. Whatever…” Max crushes the Red Bull can, the little picture of Max on it crumpling, and tosses it into the trash can by the desk.
“But Isack did well,” Charles repeats.
“Yeah, Isack is Isack. He’s a good kid.” Max’s voice is a little softer when he says that. “Good for him, you know. We will see. Doesn’t change that these regs are fucking bullshit, of course. We all know that. And that fucking Mercedes.”
Charles silently agrees. Those 0.8 seconds will haunt his dreams. He leans his head against the bed behind him. “Not the start of the season I wanted.”
“What, were you surprised?” Max scoffs. “I have been saying. I’m always saying and nobody ever listens.”
“I’m not the FIA, Max.”
“Oh, really? And here I thought I was cuddling on the floor with Ben Sulayem. The FIA especially never listens. What’s the fucking point of this sport…”
They all live and breathe racing. That is evident; there is no one on the grid who wouldn’t race feverish, nauseated, in pain. Who doesn’t give racing his 110%. But Max takes the love for racing a step further. He’s a madman whose break from F1 entails racing online or in another category. He would sleep in the simulator if he could. F1 sucking out the fun and breaking his spirit like this feels criminal.
Charles takes Max’s hand into his, remembering someone in the driver huddle mentioning he may have hurt them. “You went to the med center?”
“Yes. My hands are fine.”
“Sure?” Charles is a racing driver. He knows when a racing driver says he’s ‘fine’ that’s probably not the whole truth.
“Sore,” Max admits. “Rupert said I should take it easy.”
“Ah. So I’m not getting a hand job?”
Finally, something that resembles a smile passes Max’s face. “Yeah, imagine me telling Laurent they need to put Yuki in the car because my hands are unusable because I gave a Ferrari guy a handy. He would hunt Fred for sport.”
“Both hands? That’s some hand job I’m missing. What do you think, could you complete a race one-handed?”
“Is that a challenge?”
“No,” Charles laughs. That would be stupid. And too many buttons for that. He plays with Max’s fingers before bringing them to his lips, kissing each knuckle tenderly.
He loves these hands. Max’s hands. He remembers a smaller version of them, red from gripping the wheel in the cold, reaching to pick up Charles’s glove he had dropped in the mud. That almost defiant kindness in Max had never left. It had irked Charles, back in the day, when he had wanted to ignore Max out of annoyance and Max kept doing things like that.
Charles leans his cheek into the hand and revels in the warm touch. Tiny Charles would balk at the thought of kissing those tiny hands; partly because they were attached to Max, partly because he thought he shouldn’t be having those kinds of thoughts. Current Charles has those beloved hands committed to memory: the broad palms and long, slender fingers. Strong and elegant, always bare, though they would look beautiful with rings. But Max is too practical, even the beautiful bracelets he used to wear bothered him too much, in the end.
His lips move down the fingers, over the palms, to his wrist. He kisses the delicate, protruding bones, searches for the pulse point, though he always finds it difficult to locate. He glances at Max’s face: Max has closed his eyes, though his face is still filled with tension, and flushed pink.
Charles goes back to the fingers, kissing each fingertip and around the perfectly manicured nails. Then, he entwines their fingers and swallows the ‘it’ll be alright’ that threatens to spill out of his mouth. He knows how much Max hates platitudes. He wishes he could restore the magic of this sport with the flick of his fingers. For Max, and for himself. For those two starry-eyed tiny boys, for the starry-eyed rookies of current and last season.
“Let’s get you back to your own team,” Charles says while rising to his feet, pulling Max along. “Anna was looking for you.”
A grim look returns to Max’s face. But he’s never been the one to let his team down. He nods. “Fine.”