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Max traces the lines to George's door from memory, feet finding the path he had walked the previous night. He's always had a good memory for directions: maybe it's something to do with all the racing, all the twists and turns you need to have in your brain to drive right. Maybe he's seeing the way back here like another track to win on.
At least nobody can ask him another inane Grill the Grid question about this one. Maybe they should, actually: he'd be the only other one who'd get it, and it would give it away, and George would kill him, but it'd be worth it. The retirement questions are getting old anyway: give them something to talk about.
The lift dings and there is nobody else in it, because this is a F1 town for the week and anyone who gives a shit about F1 is celebrating with the newest race winner for Ferrari or speculating about what it means that he won live on television. Max isn't proper friends with Lewis and doesn't like either the press or publicly making a fool of himself, which is why he is doing so privately.
George--George doesn't need him, exactly, not like how Max needs him, but he's the only person Max can stomach talking to right now. And maybe, if George is here and not there, then he might need Max too. Or at least need someone and be too tired and sick of having lost to turn down Max's company.
Max tries the handle, and it comes open immediately under his hand. George might not be there, but at least Max can pay him back for Monaco. Lie in his bed and use his shower and leave the whole thing smelling like Max for when he comes back from his club excursion. Not let him think about Lewis uninterrupted for a second.
His footsteps make the floorboards creak. "Max, I'm not in the mood," says George, and Max jumps.
He wasn't visible from the door, at least not from the angle Max was looking in at. The blinds are down, the lights are off except the bedside lamp, George is sitting slumped on the other side of the bed in the darkness. He's just a silhouette. Max can feel the sadness coming off of him.
Max flips both the light switches and sees the room flood with light. George isn't dressed for the club: he's wearing grey joggers and a too-big white T-shirt. So either he didn't go or he came back a while ago. Max is slightly annoyed he didn't come sooner.
"You got P2," he tries. "That's still a podium. And you could pretend they were playing the national anthem for you and not Hamilton." Max is bad at this, bad at sympathy in general and worse at it when his own car is actively causing results which sting. He wants to yell at George that it could be worse, that it has been worse, that there are so many worse things to drive than a championship-winning car even if it's the other guy driving it better.
But it would come out hollow, because he's only ever been the other guy.
George snickers. "Is it bad if I say I did?"
"Yes," Max deadpans. "I want to win now just so you cannot do that. That is absolutely pathetic."
"Shut up," George replies easily, turning himself back around towards Max. His legs cross underneath him over the bleached white hotel sheets. "If you took any more points off of me I'd probably kill you."
"If you killed people for taking points off of you half the grid would be dead," Max says. "After Monaco."
"I'm already feeling bad and you think the correct response is talking about Monaco?"
"I don't get to talk about any race you did badly in while you're feeling bad? Those are the rules we're doing now?" Max says, keeping his tone as light as possible. "And you have such an absurdly high idea of what is doing badly now. You're considering a podium terrible. You would have killed for that five years ago."
"And I thank our Lord and Saviour Toto Wolff every morning that it's not five years ago anymore," George says wryly, swinging his legs around in front of him. He's ridiculously flexible--says it's to fit in the car, which Max doesn't believe but does enjoy profiting from. "Keeps myself in his good graces."
"I knew Mercedes was a cult."
"Always looking for new members. Join today, He in His infinite grace will give you a free T-shirt!" George does a grin so terrifyingly large it makes Max take a step back and follows it up with jazz hands.
"Don't do that. It makes you look deranged. And depressed."
"Look at what this season has done to me, Max." George leans back, gestures to himself up and down. Practically tosses his head back, letting his pretty brown hair he's let grow so long--damp from a shower Max suddenly begins imagining--fall backwards and forwards, sending tiny water droplets onto the duvet. And then looks up, with those perfect piercing blue eyes already almost filled with tears, and expects Max to say he looks awful?
Sometimes Max thinks George does it on purpose.
"Made you prettier," he says instead, and George goes very quiet and gets a small flush right on his perfect cheekbones. "If P2 is enough to ruin you then you're weak as hell."
"At least Kimi DNF'd," George says instead, bored with the ping-pong of compliments already. Completely skipping over his own--not a win, but his own points, his own success, his own achievement. It was a habit of George's which was infuriating, partly because Max saw George as beautiful and talented and partly because it was annoying to see a guy moaning over P2 when your car can't get past P4 at best and the start line at worst.
Max made a silent, mental note to apologise to Lando.
"You're cruel," Max said instead. "They call me the teammate eater, but I never wanted them to lose."
"I'm not good enough to eat him, that's the problem. If I was winning I wouldn't want him to lose at all because it would just be happening." George made a gesture outwards with his hands that made it clear to Max that he was in the manic stage of post-race depression, which was good news for Max's own selfish reasons. "Anyway. All we ever talk about is races. We're very boring people, Max."
"What do you want to talk about? What do you have to talk about that isn't racing?"
George screws up his face. "It doesn't count because it's technically still racing, but Dori did the 24 Hours of Le Mans today. Her team was top of LMP2 for ages, it was brilliant."
"That's good," Max says. This feels like it's getting him further from his goal.
"And then twenty-one hours in their suspension failed and cooked a brake disc, which meant they lost everything." George looked pensively into the distance, stymied somewhat by the blinds. "Life can be so cruel to all the right people."
There it is. There's the link. The perpetual martyrdom to which George has sentenced himself, widened to include everyone tangentially related to Mercedes, in which every setback is an example of divine intervention not being on their side--his side.
For his mental health, it probably wasn't a great coping mechanism, but it wasn't Max's brain.
"Imagine losing an endurance race three hours from the end because your car broke," he says sarcastically, leaning his hand up against the doorway to the bathroom. "What a terrible fate to be sentenced to. How it reflects on everyone related to the F1 team you work for."
"Yes, actually," George says, tilting his head in that smug way he gets when he thinks he's being funny and isn't. "It's a terrible thing. Curses everyone with the same car manufacturer as you, in fact, so this is your fault."
"You're so insistent on being the victim it's kind of funny," Max says. "What did you tell Lewis? When you were leaving his celebration, what did you tell him? That you couldn't stand watching him win?"
"I didn't tell him anything, Max," George says, sighing through the words. "I didn't fucking see him after the race. He was swallowed in all the Ferrari red, he wouldn't even have noticed if I was there or not. What did you tell him?"
"Didn't go," Max admits, and sits down next to George. It's less confrontational then, works better. He doesn't reach out his hand to George's. "Nobody wanted me there, and I didn't want to be there, so."
"So," George echoes. There is a silence before George inhales again and says "I should have thought of that. Then I wouldn't have felt like such a twat, standing there watching this guy I care about so much--because I do care about him, we were teammates for years, right? And I'm standing there in this club, and he's having the time of his life high off the win, and I'm standing there doing mental maths in my head to figure out how far ahead of me he and Kimi are. It was his fucking celebration and all I could think about was how he was beating me."
"Been there," Max says. George shoots him a look. "Okay, maybe not exactly there," he concedes, "but I've definitely had to look happy for people I was not happy for before, and it didn't--maybe it made me an asshole, but I still did it." He doesn't know if any of this is helping.
"You were never counting championship points in your head, don't lie to me," George says. He tips his head back to the ceiling. "God, I was pathetic. And I'm shit at maths as well, and it was loud, so I was losing track of the numbers, and people kept trying to talk to me and I was pretending I couldn't hear them just so I could keep working it out."
"You know you could have googled them, right?" Max asks, because George's seeming lack of common sense is concerning him. "They put this stuff on the internet."
That was apparently the wrong thing to say. "Yeah, mate, I'm going to not just spend my friend's party thinking about how I've fucked my championship, I'm going to go on my phone in front of everyone like a loser to find out how badly. That's not embarrassing at all, mate, I'm sure you'd be doing that. Not like it'd lead to headlines."
"Don't call me mate," Max says. Mate is not insulting to their relationship or rankling under his skin or making him want to throw himself out of the hotel room window--well, it's not just any of those things. It's also something that would make sense to George Russell: it's plain wrong. "We're not mates."
"What would you rather I called you then, Verstappen? Last name? Darling? Sweetheart? Maxie?" George is being sarcastic, which Max knows because his mouth is practically expressionless and his voice is coming out sharp and angry for no reason. George does not actually want to call him any of those things, or at least he thinks Max does not want George to call him any of those things. For a smart man, sometimes George is extraordinarily dense. "If mate is so offensive to you."
He thinks he's hurting Max with the suggestions. Max almost wants to laugh in his face.
"It's not offensive, it's just wrong, alright? Do you usually kiss your mates?"
George flinches away from him. Max has crossed a line: you don't mention that. It breaks things when you start to talk about them, that's something he learned pretty early on; it was transferable to his not-a-relationship with George. "So what if I do?" George says.
"Then go talk to another one of your mates, not me," Max says, bends his knees, stands up, and it's only by the time he's halfway to the door and George is still watching him with those big blue eyes that Max considers George might have believed him, and he might have to back down from it.
George lets him get all the way to touching the door handle before he says "I don't kiss anyone else. Not now."
"You used to?" Max says it for fun, to rile him up, and it works.
"Jesus Christ, Max, yes, did I seem like a virgin to you a year ago?" George seems almost embarrassed of his own voice, but continues. "I've slept with other people. I don't anymore." It has the air of a confession.
"You don't sleep with other people... why?" Max decides he needs to get this right before he gets too invested or not invested enough. "Is it because of me?"
"You're too bloody convenient," George mutters, staring into the duvet, eyes down, looking like he wants to smother himself with it. "You've ruined me for casual sex. Someone I find attractive who finds me attractive, who I don't have to get to sign a NDA, who shares my schedule, who shows up at my door? I don't have to work for it anymore. You're too satisfying. Happy?"
Max is not happy. Max is too shocked to feel at this point.
"Did you just call me too satisfying?" Max says, dumbstruck and focusing on all the wrong details. "What does that even mean?"
"It means you make me feel ways that casual sex doesn't and it makes me not want to have it, and you're just always there, and so I have sex with you and not with other people. Which is why I haven't had sex with anyone else in ages." George explains it like it makes perfect sense, which must be a skill he's picked up from the decades of PowerPoint presentations, because it's fucking insane.
"Do you like having sex with me?" he asks, brain working overtime. George sighs.
"Yes," he says practically petulantly. "I like it too much. That's the problem."
"If you like having sex with me and I like having sex with you and then we have sex, how is that a problem?"
"Because you're going to ruin me for sex with other people."
"Why would you have sex with other people?" Why wouldn't you just be mine? "Because there's no need for us to have sex with other people, we could just have sex with each other instead and not bother with that." He neglects to mention that he's been doing that already, that George has been his only partner since they started whatever the hell this is, that his heart is in his mouth at the thought of an answer of 'no'.
"Are you asking me to be exclusive?" George teases, quirking the corner of his mouth up, leaning forward on his elbow. Max feels the heat rush into his face. "Want to go steady, Verstappen?"
"Forget it," Max mumbles, pushes down on the door handle with every intention of disappearing into the too-hot Spanish night. Or back to Monaco already, put a country's distance between him and George to help with putting the emotional distance between the two of them. "Stupid idea. See you in Austria."
"Max," George says in his schoolteacher voice. "Come back."
Max has never been able to deny George anything except on the racetrack, and despite his best efforts to memorise it like one the path to his room is still, stubbornly, carpeted. So he turns back.
George is standing up, straight behind him, and looking straight into his eyes like he's about to cry again. "You want that? You want--just us? I need you to say it."
George reaches for Max's hands in one solid motion and grabs his upper arms instead, like he's about to fling him into the wall. Max is trapped, transfixed, caught in George's gaze.
He nods, once, quickly, and then says "Yes, George, it's all I've wanted for fucking years--" and then George cuts him off with a kiss that makes him see stars through the blinds.
"Me too, Max," he says when they pull apart. "Me too. You're so... I don't even know. You infuriate me, but I hope you show up to infuriate me nonetheless. I like arguing with you and kissing you afterwards. I like the sex, but I'd like it more if it wasn't all we did, I think." George has a soft look on his face, and it sets something on fire in Max's chest, and the next thing he knows the floodgates are open and he's talking and talking and talking.
"I like it when you win and I like it even better when you lose, because then you're so needy and it makes me want to give you everything you deserve even more than usual. I like it when you're angry because you get this look in your eye like the world has wronged you and you're going to fix it. And you infuriate me too, George, all the time. And it only makes me lo--want you more." He holds back the word just in time.
George looks at him with an unreadable expression. "I love you too, Max," he says, and kisses him again before he can say the words back.
Later, George will try and claim credit for saying it first, and Max will say 'you said too, which shows even you know I said it first', and George will say 'I'm the one who had the balls to actually say it', and the argument will never be settled.
That's just the way they like it.