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It’s Max’s third DNF this season and in a part of himself that driving for RedBull has made easier and easier to recognize, George can only be glad it’s not him this time. This time or ever, really—but especially this time, with his home crowd, who has always loved Lewis more, dappled in neon yellow from the Lando grandstand, the spots of his sky blue few and far between—but still, his home crowd; his family came to visit, he got to look at them with pride instead of with apologies locked and loaded and corrosive in his throat-
And yet resentment starts rearing its ugly head around when he gets back to the garage to find Max already deep in conversation with Laurent, a conversation which does not look pleasant in the slightest.
It has been known to be like this.
Max is frowning; Laurent looks ready to get his hands on a shovel and start digging southward until he is further from civilisation than the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.
George gets suddenly reminded of this morning, some time before the anthem; it was discreet, Christian Horner came looking for him, to say hello, to wish him luck on his home race. He has a feeling it was not the same for Max.
He’d taken George aside, leaned in and said—almost conspirationally—shame Toto only deigned to let you go once I was gone. Bet he did it to spite me.
To spite him, George knows, it’s always about Max in the end, about getting Max, winning him. Because Toto wanted to make Max wait and Horner was ready to have him in a Toro Rosso at seventeen, with his pimply face and an attitude that would’ve taken too long to correct, younger than anyone had ever been, far from ready—but his nonetheless. Toto Wolff does not make the same mistake twice. He could not let anybody snatch Kimi up the way Horner did Max; fool me once, shame on you... Look at him now, with his forty points over Lewis, breaking all of his records and with all of Italy on his side, and the little sister of the W11 tame under his palm; at least George knows what the real deal was like, he knew once.
But he’s not worth dying for, not like that.
He didn’t know what to say to Christian, so he smiled politely. He—George, the person—didn’t want to be about Max, he’d thought stupidly, all wrapped up in navy blue.
You know, in 2021, Horner continued anyway, do you have any idea the amount of money he turned down?
George nodded then, yes, even though he didn’t.
He didn’t and still doesn’t want to know.
In 2021, in the car that won the world championship, in another car that should’ve won the championship, in either; he only remembers rolling around in the gravel, rife with pebbles of Williams white carbon fiber, skin boiling, thinking, I could’ve killed him.
Perhaps Horner knows that George was not told how much he offered for him back then, but he was kind enough not to give a number; he must have seen the face George made, straight through the lie.
He’d only clasped George’s shoulder and squeezed, said good luck, and left him with the pit at the bottom of his stomach.
It has been somehow remedied by finishing P2 in Silverstone, for the first time—odd that it is in a RedBull. If there are any, George does believe in signs.
Only somehow, because yesterday he outqualified Max for only the second time this season, and he wanted nothing more than to prove it wasn’t a fluke but within one lap Max was ahead like always and George was sinking back into his P5 like a kicked dog going back to his crate, whining in octaves inaudible to the human ear.
It’s only because of Max’s rear suspension and Ferrari’s strategists that George has anything to take back home today, and naturally he cannot let himself be happy with gifts, when he knows he must return them, later.
His father, steps into the garage; he’s not supposed to the way Jos Verstappen sometimes sits around like he is just another mechanic, with his arms crossed in disapproval at everything in the world but Max. Steve Russell does not fit in the way he does, and he brings nobody to help with that ungainliness that now George understands where he inherited from, and comes to squeeze George’s shoulder even though they already saw each other earlier. He does it the way Christian Horner did this morning, like he’s trying to say something else, glaring at Laurent, like he is daring him to pry this off his hands.
Back when he was caught up in the whole process of leaving Mercedes he’d reminded George—not with those exact words—that the only gift he ought to return was the ten years of Steve Russell’s life he had taken for his place in this world, and that the only way to return them was to make them worth the while.
Nothing else. Not Toto, not Laurent in his magnanimity, not Max’s rear suspension.
“That was brilliant,” his father says when the crowd starts dissipating in the garage; he does not seem to recognize that everybody has been staring at him strangely and George feels his throat knot up in kinship, sudden and unexpected. He has never been much like his father, despite getting everything that matters from him.
Only Max and a few mechanics linger; he catches Max looking their way, as if waiting for an explanation. What is he doing here, say his undead-blue eyes, wide open.
George turns back to his father. He searches in his eyes for something, noticing with a stranger yet feeling that they look a whole lot like Max’s do.
“I got lucky,” George says for what must be the millionth time today. “Really lucky.”
“Luck is earned,” his father says.
He has said this times before, George feels in his bones rather than remembers. But this time it does not feel like insult, the injury bandaged if not finally weaving back into a scar; it feels like losing a limb, to search for the sting of that open wound and find it nowhere.
They have a lot to talk about, but at Milton Keynes. There is no reason for George to stay at the motorhome tonight other than not getting in that car with his parents and he knows that, which is why he hopes to get to his room silently, without being made aware that he exists.
Max, as often is the case, enjoys making things difficult.
He’s standing in the corridor when George arrives, looking at something on his phone, probably telemetry or maybe the Norway – Brazil match , who knows. He has a habit of being in places where he makes himself more noticed than he should, and George does not rue that more than he should. Everyone has their idiosyncrasies.
But when George gets a hand on his doorknob, Max takes an earplug out and raises his chin, his eyes strangely fixated somewhere not George. “You are not going back with your family?” he says, lips pinched, brows furrowed. Possibly he thought he had the rooms all to himself tonight, maybe was planning to watch footy at a volume George would have complained about.
He feels generous today, he thinks, he might not complain—he might, god forbid, suggest they watch it together.
“They’re busy,” George says, pushing the handle down, “my old room’s a junkyard anyway,” he adds, the moment it leaves his lips he cringes, he sounds like a pity beggar.
Max blinks. “But anyway you should—”
“I won’t complain if you want to watch the football,” George cuts off, exasperated. “I want to watch it too, you know.”
Max’s eyes go a bit wider. He looks like a cat, when they knock a vase off a table and are suddenly surprised it broke. “I meant—okay. With—with me?”
George did not mean with him. He remembers Melbourne, sudden and violent. He forgets it just as fast, just as he forgets why he has been trying not to spend any alone time with his new teammate since then.
“I s’pose,” George shrugs, “we get more bandwidth,” he says stupidly; he’s pretty sure that’s not how it works.
They spend half an hour fumbling with the TV in George’s room with growing levels of frustration only to realize that it does not have cable, when the match between England and Mexico has already begun and they end up hunched over on George’s bed, with Max’s phone propped up on a pile of RedBull marketing pamphlets and a silence only broken when Bellingham scores, at which George cannot help but jump up and get a little embarrassing with the celebration, a little national pride on top of the healthy dose he already got today standing on the podium here, for once not thinking about all the times he already should’ve—2024, nestled somewhere far away, bandaged.
“It’s coming home, baby!” he cheers, punching the air, suddenly wanting nothing more than to call Alex and Lando and do this with them instead. Max rolls his eyes, and George, though he should be accustomed, feels his cheeks heat. “What,” he hisses defensively, “you’d be the same if it was the Netherlands.”
Max rolls his eyes even further. Drama queen. “Not today,” he mumbles.
“Why?” George’s stupid mouth asks before he gets the time to think for even a second. If looks could kill, Max’s would’ve gone back in time and atomized George in his mum’s womb before she even knew they’d had a little accident, her and Steve.
He wonders sometimes, if they were not so bullheaded (hah), if Alison Russell wasn’t the type of woman to insist she’s got a home remedy for things that should definitely be taken to a doctor; she would rub essential oils on cancerous tumours, if she could reach. By the time she knew it wasn’t a stomach bug—
“George,” Max scoffs.
“Oh,” he realizes, blushing, and before he can say sorry, Jude Bellingham scores another goal and the American crowd explodes along with George’s heart and his sense of propriety, he thinks he yells, probably, something other than sorry about your DNF. He must have blacked out for a second, because he finds himself hugging Max at the end of it, a giggle dying in his throat when he realizes his face is in Max fucking Verstappen’s neck.
He goes to pull away, but a force stops him dead in his tracks. Max’s arms, wrapped around him. As if—
Max Verstappen, needing a hug. The thought has never occurred to him; the premise seems ridiculous, Max is not the kind of person who needs hugs. Max is the kind of person who wins races, who turns round and round like a caged lion when he doesn’t, ready to bare his fangs and tear out throats.
There's these memes Lando sends him sometimes, they always start like: the lion does not concern himself with—
The lion does not concern himself with hugs, George’s inner monologue suggests stupidly, while Max clings, and the cheers on the phone turn into a low and steady tinnitus in both of George’s ears; he pointedly does not think, at all, about Melbourne.
“Oh,” he says again, clinging back. He feels Max’s breathing up its pace in real time, and he finds that shocking too. The idea that Max Verstappen’s lungs breathe in anything but the deepest, most optimal of cycles. The idea that beneath the suit of flesh there is anything but an engine, purring low, with a live feed to the engineers at MK hired 24/7 to make sure it doesn’t falter.
It’s an uncomfortable position; they’re sitting shoulder to shoulder and George’s torso is twisted at an uncomfortable angle to get his arms around Max’s shoulder; Max’s leg is doing something strange and the tips of their leg hairs are touching, giving an illusion of contact realer than skin to skin itself.
He shivers.
Max feels it, he must have captors, too sensitive, all over his chassis. And suddenly, his hand is on the small of George’s back and his leg hooks around to be on top of George’s; he can hear now his breathing in his ear, straggled.
He can’t not think of Melbourne.
Max had punched him and then kissed him, and then left him stranded on the street. They’d never brought that up again.
It felt like one of those things people do when they don’t know what else, like somebody laughing when they don’t quite understand what you’ve said and they don’t want to ask you to repeat yourself, like somebody flailing around in quicksand even though it’ll only sink them in at a faster rate.
Not tangentially related to desire of any sort, there had been the punch—deserved in retrospect—and then the kiss it better, George supposes, in a strange and twisted way, whichever way it is that Max Verstappen’s brain works, if he even has one of those in place of circuitry storing setups, telemetry data, navy blue motherboard with golden little chips, always infallible.
Now there’s none of that, it seems. Their bodies are slotted together in an awkward and silent embrace that reminds George of the first times he stayed over at Seychelle’s, when they were watching movies as an excuse to have holding hands escalate into other things, whatever film they had chosen often forgotten halfway through—she would get mad and curse at him in Dutch if he tried following the plot out the corner of his eyes.
Krijg toch de pest, he remembers her saying; he’d laughed for weeks about it when she’d told him what it meant. It seemed infantile. Her whole country did, a small peninsula of cold-headed but warm-hearted braggarts who could think of no fate worse than catching the bubonic plague.
He remembers the first time Seychelle had gotten close like this, and he’d found himself asking what was wrong, if she needed help with anything. She’d laughed very hard, had left him blushing in a corner of her bed, then she’d gotten her hands under his shirt and climbed on top of him, called him the biggest idiot she knew.
He doesn’t know why he’s thinking of all that. He knows the rumours about Max, still turns them around in his head from time to time, but still, that must not be what this is about—the same way it was not what it was about, nearly half a year ago now.
It must be the DNF, Max wanting to take something back, to get revenge for being illegitimately outscored. To make George feel improper; to touch him where carbon fiber cannot.
If wrestling for his life in the RB22 like a gladiator in the pits trying to subdue a beast thrice his size has taught him anything, it’s that the more you think you have a say, the more it ends up stinging when you realise you don’t. So he goes to give up the strange battle only to find that he already has, that his arms circle Max’s shoulder and his hands cling wantonly onto where their bones jut out slightly on his back, feeling the tension in his muscles.
Absurdly, he thinks Max might need a massage.
He feels him shift before he has the time to open his mouth to protest at the grip he gets on his waist, leveraging himself on top of George.
George moves, maybe to get himself somewhere not under Max, but his body does something different entirely—legs spreading to allow Max more room to sprawl himself on him, bucking up to seek friction—with no small amount of shame he realizes that it is likely the fault of the half chub he has apparently produced between his legs sometime between Bellingham’s second goal and now.
Maybe as a result of said goal, he’d like to think. Hard not to get a stiffy thinking of England winning the World Cup, he thinks hysterically—the other option is that he has only now found out that he is into men, which George thinks, has always thought, would be ridiculous.
For one, if he had the capacity to fall in love with Alexander Albon, he reckons would’ve, long ago. And yet he’s nothing but happy for his best mate, soon to be married to the love of his life.
And truly, he has had the time to wonder, with how liberally the word fag or some other thing with the same bitter flavour has been used to described him; he has had all the time in the world to second-guess his own attraction to women.
And yet he finds his hands gripping harder on Max’s shoulders, his own hips bucking up, trying desperately to find through Max’s jeans a problem of the same calibre, trying to stop himself from chasing crumbs of friction and failing miserably, head dizzy with the sound of Max’s breath muffling that of the excited commentators coming from Max’s phone, turned to nothing but white noise now.
But he thinks that maybe it is the fact that you would not really call Max a man—the same way you would not really call England some island in the Atlantic.
You could, if you were full of shit. (George would like to be, sometimes. A better liar, the way Max thinks he is.)
But Max is not a man, not really, not fully, in the way that Alex would be a man if he were to end up in George’s bed, the way he would be corporeal, within himself, the idea of him the same size and magnitude as he himself, painfully honest.
Having Max on top of him doesn’t feel that way. It’s an idea: the logical, Platonic conclusion of driving in Formula One.
George is a driver, he is Max’s teammate, he has had all the time in the world to get accustomed to feeling this way; to start, in some strange and twisted way, enjoying himself.
Max gets a hand under his shirt, breath stuttering, showcasing the racehorse-like strength of his legs in bracketing George in against the bed, against the wall. George gasps at the cold—he thought Max would be a warm engine kind of person, but it seems like at the hands he is more Dutch than he is machine; Seychelle’s hands were cold, too, all the time.
Krijg toch de pest, George thinks, gritting his teeth. He makes himself laugh at the absurdity of it, a low giggle in his throat, sort of hysterical. Max’s hand flinches at it, retrieving, then palm flat against his abdomen, then fingers curling, like it’s not quite sure, what to do. George feels hot all over, he wants, wants the friction, wants to know if Max wants, as bad, as terribly, like the bottomless pit in his stomach will grow to span his whole self if he does not let this happen.
He bites his lips just as Max makes a sound, a grunt, the breath tickling George’s ear, George pushing him down closer against him, wishing Max would get both hands in there, in, inside, reach past the skin and into the warmth of his intestines, untangle the knots they’ve been tied in all year long, destroy them fiber by fiber—fuck.
George prefers telling himself he did not just moan out loud, and that it takes a lot more than some bloke fingering his abs to get him going. Maybe he is that much of a self-obsessed prick.
And as Max’s hand wanders higher, grinding down against him proper, finally—his brain short-circuits a little at the feeling of Max’s dick stiff in his jeans and rubbing against his own similarly tented sweatpants, Max cupping his pec and, with shaky breath and a steady thumb, circling his nipple, flicking—too softly—the hardened nub of it, pressing just enough to make George close his eyes and involuntarily gasp, jerking his hips up, strangling the sounds trying to come out of his mouth.
Max touches him with a gentleness that is almost obscene in the same way that it was when Marie Antoinette said let them eat cake: well-meaning at least five astronomical units past the realm of mockery.
He touches Max back, he realizes, like he wants Max to punch him. Digging whatever remains of his short nails right above his spine, begging to find out what leaks from it—marrow or oil; Max makes a sound, almost only a vibration, his hand spasms under George’s shirt and drops to his sweats, shaking.
“George,” he whines, and suddenly layers of skin he didn’t know existed are peeled off him, he feels like an ant dug out of its burrow by a sudden flood, a kid with a hose—it used to be him, that.
He didn’t know he was killing them, he tells himself sometimes, when the memory happens to him. It’s stupid. He was cleverer than that.
“George,” Max whines again, insistent; George can feel the warmth of his lips, not quite touching his neck, and more intimate for it.
George doesn’t trust his own voice to say anything. Which isn’t really a new feeling, all things considered.
He grabs Max’s hair, yanks, to force him to look, to be honest with him for once. His round cheeks are flushed pink, his lips parted open; they’re dry and rife with cracks, like they always are. He’s found himself thinking often that somebody should introduce Max to the concept of lip balm, but being the one to always felt a little too strange, waltzing uninvited into a place he was already a stranger in.
Max bites them, his lips; there is something like a smile on his face. In the background, George thinks he hears yellow card and has to stifle the urge to check. This seems important. He lets his hand wander down to the back of Max’s neck. The hairs there are thinner, softer, there. Like a baby.
If Max were a woman, this would maybe be the part where they kiss; where gently, he pulls her down to his level, or tips himself forwards, and takes a lot of care in looking for the moment her eyes close so he can do the same. Out of curiosity, too. What is it that makes somebody cave, what makes them want, why is it that it’s not polite to look.
But now instead Max’s clumsy fingers are pawing at his sweatpants, eyes wide open, mouth too. George is pretty sure men don’t enjoy being kissed, not truly. It’s more of an act of service, a part of wooing, there is not as much feeling there, not as many nerve endings; he feels his hips rabbiting against Max’s palm every time he gives the slightest pressure, like a fucking animal.
“George, please,” Max keeps saying, as if it’ll make George understand what he means, “let me—”
He doesn’t wait to finish his own sentence, suddenly lifting the pressure from George. It feels cold, isolated. He thinks he hears Mexico score one. He shivers.
There is a tug at his calf; Max has slid himself off the bed and has landed on his knees, on the floor. “Come on. Come here, fuck,” he demands, and still wordlessly George can’t help but oblige.
The more you think you have grip, the more it stings when you slide off and lose it.
He forces George’s legs open and slots himself between them, waddling on his knees. He still looks George in the eyes, as if waiting, like the moment right before a kiss, when you’re trying to guess when it’ll happen. Deftly, his hands find the hem of his sweatpants and hook in. George doesn’t allow himself to think. If he does, he’s not sure what will happen. He doesn’t even want to know what this is about.
If for Max, perhaps it is about taking back control after the race, undressing, deciding, George at his mercy P2 by proxy. He grunts frustratedly, tugging harder at George’s sweats, and part of him wants to refuse to move, let Max pry them off all on his own, if he wants to claim what’s underneath so bad. But he can’t count on his treacherous wants to have his back—them least of all—lifting ever so slightly; Max is strong, George is pantless far sooner than he would like to be. Maybe he would not like that at all. But again, there is no space for thinking, when you must win or starve.
He doesn’t have the decorum, Max, to first take off the pants and leave George the option to gauge how this feels like just in his underwear. It all goes at once; he is confronted, horribly, with the magnitude of his arousal, with the sheen on his tip which can only be precum. He closes his eyes. He needs to fucking get laid.
It’s been ages. Since he signed this miserable contract. Maybe before then, already, he had stopped wanting anybody to see him naked, it was too much work, having to strip himself of all the fucking rot before getting into bed with someone.
Max is lucky he’s this touch-starved; a hand closes around his base but doesn’t stroke, and George whimpers, truly whimpers—a sound he would have to be paid an obscene amount of money to listen back to on any recording. But Max doesn’t go any further, there is no movement; George focuses on the football match, still playing, tries to picture it in his mind. All he can see is Max, and then Seychelle, and then a strange, amorphous blend of the two. He grits his teeth.
Max’s thumb strokes over a vein, he can feel how it’s calloused, from the steering wheel. He feels it too when he touches himself, and sometimes he presses the harder parts of it to the more sensitive parts of his dick, and just rubs himself off like that, somewhere between chafing himself raw and rutting against somebody else, that layer of dead skin between he and himself acting as the intermediary.
But Max doesn’t go back down. Instead his fingers climb up George’s thighs, to his hips, lifting his shirt a little, tracking the bones there. Maybe Max wants to fuck him?
Of course he would, George laughs to himself—or maybe it’s Max’s fingers that tickle, where they touch the space between his abdomen and hipbones like there is something there for him to find.
Tentatively, he opens an eye, and the other follows—he is not very good at winking, even if he starts with his eyes closed. So with both eyes open, he watches what Max is watching.
He seems to have developed a sudden fascination with George's hipbones. That’s new, he thinks, trying not to laugh. Max’s thumb presses down along one very specific line, just left of his right hipbone. His breath catches.
He knows that line. That one’s not new, not to George. It’s where it’s more visible, looks somewhere between a stretch mark and a badly done colour tattoo, an old one, worn. He’s traced it himself sometimes, at night in the dark and in front of the mirror, torn between genuinely believing that stray, barely visible scar adds some sort of mystique and wondering whether it is off-putting to look at for too long, if you linger you can see her sisters, much shallower on the skin, maybe he did not exert himself hard enough in Lewis' car, maybe it should have hurt more. He thinks most people do not care, or have never pointed the scars out.
Maybe he thinks way too much about himself.
But Max isn’t touching there on coincidence. He’s keeping George’s leg spread open with a forearm, which seems wildly inappropriate, considering. He supposes that on a fundamental level, there must be nothing wrong, neither with scars nor with having his legs spread open. It’s how he was given birth to, after all.
“Max,” he hears himself say, pleading and quivery. Max’s hands still; he looks up, something like guilt on his features, which from here look astoundingly boyish. The round cheeks, the wide, innocent eyes.
He tries reaching out with his own arm, finding them glued to his sides, unwilling to respond. Max’s hands rescind from his hips. Gently, like he is trying to never have been there.
Like he somehow has the empathy to realize he has touched somewhere too far. But that's what his whole life is about, no? Pushing limits. Avoiding the punishments.
Part of George wishes he had asked, how’d that happen, is that a birthmark, does it hurt?
None of your business, no, no—only when I think about it.
Only when he thinks about how much smaller than him Lewis’ seat was and how much bigger the shoes were to fill, after all.
But thinking is thankfully disturbed by the wet sensation of Max’s mouth on his inner thigh, of his hands spreading them open, his lips, teeth barely scraping; a mouth is a mouth, it seems like. He could imagine just about anybody in the world, if he filters out the sting of stubble.
It only registers to him that Max intends to suck his dick when that mouth wanders further between his thighs and lands at his base, hot and needy, a greedy hand wrapping itself around him as the tongue licks a fat stripe up his whole cock. George shudders, afraid to open his eyes.
Max mutters something. It’s familiar, but Dutch. He’s heard that somewhere before. He doesn’t remember what it means. He braces himself.
It becomes too quickly apparent that women might be at an inherent disadvantage when it comes to sucking dick—which is unfair, George thinks stupidly as he feels his brains melting from the inside out when Max’s mouth envelops him whole. It might not be rocket science, he has thought for a long time. You put it in your mouth, and then you suck. You mind the teeth—or not, depending on the bloke. Some are into that.
But whatever Max is doing with his mouth, it is orders of magnitude beyond that. George can’t even really register what is happening, not only with the sensations on his cock, unable to distinguish where Max’s hand ends and his mouth begins, where the waves of pleasure are ebbing through him and where it’s Max’s tongue doing something particularly indecent to his dick. He has to open his eyes. To find out just what the fuck is going on.
Max looks completely wrecked. His usually steelcast eyes are clouded and watery, his cheeks pink and hollowed out—George thrusts upwards, involuntarily, and sees the outline of his cock jut out from one of them as he feels it inside, velvety and hot and wrapped around him, and Max makes a gagging sound that should indicate stop but that only prompts him to take George deeper, leaving just two fingers wrapped around him, the rest of him swallowed up, gone, taken.
“Oh fuck,” George moans; his fingers curl on the bedsheets and he loses motor control of his thrusts, if he hadn’t already. Max responds with another eager groan, still looking George in the eyes, still—
He has to wonder, if he can, if he can align any thoughts at all. What it is that—shit—that does it for him, that is making him look so fucked out of his mind. It cannot be the simple act of sucking George off. That’d be preposterous, even if Max is as into men as they say he is. It has to be—George’s entire body shudders, hot and cold—it has to be about the humiliation of it, of his teammate—forever an extension of him—of having George, only with his mouth, reduced to an animal, only instinct and urge and low moans pouring out directly from his throat, bypassing his brain.
How little it takes to take apart an entire man when your name is Max Verstappen.
How, George’s pleasure is entirely at his mercy while his own is tucked safely in his pants, completely out of reach. The power play of it.
He swallows around George, then slowly works his way up, sucking gently and working with his hand until it’s just his tip still stretching open his lips, and then swallows him back down in one go, as if trying to asphyxiate himself.
George almost cries. “H-how—how are you—doing that,” he pants, desperate, angry, dejected, more aroused than he’s been in his entire life.
That gives Max pause, and George immediately curses himself for opening his mouth. He still has not really learned when to shut up, only that it is generally a better idea than not.
George’s dick pops out of his mouth with a wet sound, and—the bastard—still stroking lightly at his base, asks, almost innocently: “what, has no one sucked your dick before?”
You fucking imbecile, George wants to say. Those are a whole lot of syllables to say with your dick down somebody’s throat, the complicated kind of syllables, very different-sounding, from one another. “N-not like this,” he whines, voice a wisp.
Max smiles smugly—which is a feat, considering his lips are swollen and red from the friction with George’s cock and there’s spit dribbling down his chin and there are tears at the corner of his eyes. Of course Max can pull a smug smile mid-blowjob. Why would he not. He’s Max, after all.
He’s now playing with George’s tip, teasing it lightly with his tongue, pretending he will swallow and then pulling out at the last moment just to watch George’s body jerk in frustration, teasing the underside of his balls with one finger just enough to be maddening but give no meaningful form of relief.
“Fuck—fuck you,” George hisses through grit teeth; he wants revenge, he wants Max inside him the way he is inside Max right now, helpless and vulnerable and unable to move.
Something catches his wrist, and George lets it go limp. It guides his hand somewhere tufty—Max’s hair, he realizes as he grips instinctively. “Fuck,” he groans, “you… you want it like that?” he asks stupidly, pushing a little, downwards, Max managing to roll his eyes at him with a cock down his throat.
Objectively impressive, George is forced to admit, shakily bringing his other hand to the back of Max’s neck, trying not to be so overeager. But it’s not like his own body is giving him a say. He can’t really comprehend what’s going on beyond the fact that it feels fucking heavenly and it’s out of his hands—really, even when he’s the one holding Max’s face steady as he fucks up into his mouth, George is still only in the passenger seat, a vehicle for Max, for anything he’s ever wanted.
It was like that back then, back when George first came into Formula One. He was in hindsight quite happy to play at admiring from as afar as possible, one lap down most of the time. Looking at Max’s disastrous 2020 season and feeling somewhat better about his own, though searching for a point of comparison always felt a tad too self-aggrandizing. He was always delighted when Max would come up to speak to him, as if George was somebody deserving of attention, he’d bask in it, strip every last piece of meaning from every little interaction and keep it too close to his chest, unable to look away.
And he can’t look away either—as he starts hitting the back of Max’s throat and drawing wet gagging sounds out of him—at how Max, having offloaded the task of using his hands back to George, is using his own to presumably palm himself though his jeans. Though George, vision blurry with pleasure, can’t exactly see.
It makes him, in a way, so terribly upset. That like always, it’s Max who has a grip on everything. He gets to decide when George comes, and then gets to eat the cake too—however that saying goes.
“Max,” he moans, delusionally hopeful that he will be able to say something more, “Max, oh my god, oh fuck—” Max groans in response, his eyelashes flutter—so he does blink, it turns out. George wants to cry. He doesn’t want to let Max get away with this; what is another win on his record? Does he even care? “God, fuck me, Max, please—”
He only realizes what has come out of his mouth when Max makes a choked out sound different to the gagging and brings his hands up to George’s thighs in an instant, gripping hard. He lets his own grip in Max’s hair loosen, enough for a breath, pretending it’s for Max’s sake. Anything but giving him the satisfaction of knowing he would have come, probably, given ten more seconds of that.
Gently, he lets Max take the dick out of his mouth, breathing hard, warm between his thighs, head lolling to the side. He’s pink all over, almost pretty. He wraps a hand around George’s base, with the other gathering the spit that’s dripped all over, between his thighs, and bringing it slowly to push at George’s taint.
He feels his own hips lift up involuntarily, allowing a better angle.
“Like this?” Max rasps out, breath ghosting over George’s shaft. He sounds as wrecked as he looks.
“Ngh-no,” George whines, spreading his legs wider. “You should—want you. In—fuck—” the sound his throat produces proceeds to immediately enter into his top five hall of shame moments that will keep him awake at night for decades to come.
It’s only the tip of Max’s index pushing—if it can be called that—very very gently against his rim. George has done this before. To himself, of course. He heard it was supposed to feel good, and so he’d postponed actually trying it for many years because he was afraid he’d actually like it. Thankfully, it was a whole lot of nothing. That bottle of anal lube still sits mostly unused, fossilizing in a drawer on his bedside.
But that’s not what this is about: feeling good, getting off. He can do that well enough on his own.
He’s grasping at straws, he feels like, but he would walk away from this with a terrible wound if he let Max finish both of them off all on his own. If no part of this was within his control. He wants to be the cause of something, for once.
“George, I—” Max breathes, thumb now pressing close to his taint. George might just come without warning; he shivers, trying to force it down. “I can’t, I—”
“Please—”
“M’gonna—I, George,” he whines; George feels it hot against his shaft, maybe he could come hearing Max do that stupid fucking voice for a minute or two more. “I can’t, I’ll just—I won’t last—”
“I don’t give a shit,” George hisses, baring his teeth.
And Max is climbing on top of him, hot and messy and clumsy, face in his neck, bracing himself with one elbow while the button of his jeans falls open with the help of the other. George’s sweatpants are stuck at an awkward angle between his ankles, not letting him spread out fully; Max’s phone is somehow on the ground, either of their minds nowhere really to be found.
George doesn’t even look. Well, he does, at the ceiling. Something hard and mildly uncomfortable slides in between his thighs, pushing at his rim; George wonders if this is hygienic, and whether it’s supposed to sting like that.
Regardless, his body rewards him with an involuntary jerk, the sudden feeling of his balls tightening and pressure building inside him like a fizzy drink shaken too hard, fisting a hand into Max’s hair while he moans his name like it has answers—it might, it just might.
He realizes that was an orgasm when he fades back into reality and hears Max’s voice
“George, I’m gonna—” Max whines; George tightens his grip on his neck, hair, anything he can find purchase on, sweaty shirt; he’d like to bite Max’s face, find out if he bleeds rust.
He feels the tip of Max—what he’s managed to get in—throbbing a little between his legs. He waits a little, breathing hard, but nothing really happens except Max losing strength and collapsing on top of him, face lodged in the crook of his neck.
It’s a little disappointing, in all honesty. George thought he would feel it, or something, Max’s load, hot inside him. He wonders if the girls he’s fucked bare were lying when they said they could, or if it’s just another area men are not so sensitive in, like kissing, like the nipples.
He feels Max start to shift away and whines in frustration, hand slipping down on instinct, to where he’d grab if it were a girl, squeezing Max’s arse and keeping him close. He feels all of Max shudder on top of him.
“Mhhh, stay here,” George complains, feeling all whiny. He gets clingy after sex, sue him. Though he doesn’t really know if this qualifies as sex. Does it? It must, in one way or another. He hadn’t really factored that in. Maybe he should’ve.
It gets sticky between them, slowly, as the minutes or maybe seconds pass and the football match goes on in the background, only interrupted by breath. They should probably clean that off. He still doesn’t feel anything inside of himself.
That's not new, he thinks sardonically, almost laughing at his own joke, or expense.
“I thought, y’know,” George breaks the silence, “you were supposed to, like, feel it. The semen. Up the bum. I mean, seems like it—”
Max makes a strangled noise; his fingers dig into George’s sides—has he been hugging him? “What, is it your first time getting it raw?”
It’s his first time getting it at all. On a scale of one to career-endingly catastrophic, how bad would it be to admit to that out loud now?
“Well, that’s—a relief, I guess,” Max says, voice spent and raspy. He was being quite noisy, George notices, only in hindsight. “We should’ve probably—”
“Used protection?”
“Yeah.”
George sighs. It’s a pleased sigh, sleepy. “Well, with women I always do. ‘Less we’ve been dating for a while. Wouldn’t wanna…”
“Accidents?”
“Yeah,” George shrugs. It moves Max a little. “And I’ve never—with men. You know. So, if you’re clean I’m clean.”
Max makes another one of those noises, a little like an engine giving out but still trying to do its last miles until its destination. “Are you kidding?”
It’s George’s chance to say haha yes gotcha, but instead his mouth opens and says “no, of course not.”
“So I just—” Max shifts, and George squeezes his butt, keeping him close, the tip of him, still half-hard, locked inside him. It feels rather nice, weirdly enough. Better than George’s finger, at least. “Did I just take your butthole virginity?”
George scoffs. “Mate don’t—don’t say it like that—”
Max stifles a chuckle. If it didn’t force them to move, George would kick him. But Max leans in, closer yet, until his breath is ghosting over George’s earlobe and he forgets all about being angry because it sends tingle down his entire body.
“Butthole virginity,” Max whispers in the tone of somebody getting up to some very serious dirty talk, the kind that happens in amateur porn and one night stands.
George hates that he laughs. But once he starts, it spreads from his chest in waves to his entire body, and the challenge becomes keeping Max from falling off him—he seems content to let George attempt this maneuver alone, flopping limply on top of him, holding on just vaguely to George’s shirt.
“Krijg toch de pest,” George remembers in a fit of laughter-induced hysteria; he remembers how Seychelle used to say it, jokingly, like wishing a miserable and painful death was a lot kinder on the heart than actually saying I love you.
“Mate, are you having a stroke?” Max questions, all high and mighty and all-knowing in that annoying way of his. “Or were you trying to speak Dutch?”
“Wasn’t,” George mumbles; he’s glad Max has kept his face in his neck, or he’d see him blush very hard. It doesn’t look pretty when George blushes, he’s seen it in the mirror, in his front camera, in interviews. He gets teary eyed too, always, like embarrassment and crying always go hand in hand. He’s not a pretty crier.
Max doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t tease him more. George wishes he would. He goes quiet when George starts stroking his back, digging in what little nails he has when he traces over the spine.
It’s sticky. The heatwave that’s been ravaging Europe, the come, the closeness of hearts. All compounding into overheat. Max pushes a little further inside him. He’s not really fully hard, or soft, or anything. Just a little further inside George. He hears himself gasp.
“Fuck you,” Max grunts, suddenly inconvenienced by his own desire. Or maybe, pun intended, without snark.
Who knows. Who wants to know, is maybe the better question.
“I talked to Christian this morning,” George says suddenly. Max’s entire body tenses, which results in his dick being more inside George’s ass than it was before. Apparently.
“Mate,” Max hisses, “I’m inside you. Can we not—?”
“Sorry,” George says on reflex, “should I wait for you to pull out, or should I just—”
“George,” he cries out, but it’s laughter-sounding, his teeth scraping at his jawline. He sounds happy about something. His hands have been under George’s shirt for god knows how long. Probably that. “Did you know that in 2021—”
“Yeah,” he interrupts; he regrets starting this conversation; he regrets probably being dropped on his head as a child. “I do.”
“It’s crazy,” Max says in that tone that means the subject has piqued his interest and he is about to start talking a lot, “I think he tells me, it’s going to be Checo Pérez, maybe, five or six months before the new season? I was so convinced it would be you. I think Christian was too.”
Shame, said Christian this morning. George did not know that. It wasn’t him having the contract conversations after all. He wasn’t allowed to.
Something in his throat tightens. “Is that why you were nice to me? The years before.”
Under the rain, in Spa. Max smiling at him. George's entire world spinning on its axis. Thrice over, then again. I hope to be up there fighting with these guys, some day, he'd said, the first ever podium of his measly career in that measly Williams both saved and damned by that heavy rain which was keeping them both tucked under that umbrella.
He thinks of it now, and wonders if when Max said you will, it was in the way that he started being nice to Kimi last year in the off chance that they ended up sharing a team—or rather, that he had to tame him into accepting scraps, into being happy about them.
Was George being tamed?
Max laughs, humorless. He thrusts a little, just a couple millimetres if George’s inner sensors are right, but it still stings. Even if involuntary. They never really mean it, do they not?
He grips Max’s hair, forcing him to pull his face out of hiding. Max scrunches his face, annoyed that he is no longer afforded the safety net of being unreadable. “No. I actually really hoped it wasn’t you.”
It shouldn’t feel like getting punched in the diaphragm. It does. He wants Max to fuck him so stupid he forgets who he is. “You hoped for Checo, then?” Would you rather have him now? You know I can’t leave. You know that. Where would I—? “Or did you want Alex to stay?”
“I don’t have a say,” Max lies, through his teeth, like a liar. He is scanning George’s face, maybe to see if he can tell that he is full of shit.
“And if you did?” he asks anyway.
“I liked working with Checo,” Max says, his eyes clear and wide and focused, that way that makes people think he is telling the truth.
What he means is I liked it that he was not good enough to justify not rolling over, I liked it that he didn’t hate losing badly enough to leave.
“And look at you guys now, he hates your fucking guts,” George says, he’s saying it affably, like it’s a compliment. Maybe it is.
There is something on Max’s face, maybe like hurt, were he capable of such things. Do androids dream of electric sheep? Does Max Verstappen’s cardiogram read in telemetry?
“I still won, didn’t I?” Max smiles; that weird feeling is gone, replaced by all of the smugness and self-satisfaction. It goes straight to George’s dick, unfortunately. He bites his lips, so as not to moan. “You are deranged,” Max notes, very helpfully.
George opens his mouth to reply. No sound comes out as Max brushes his surprisingly soft thumb over his lower lip. “What is this look?” he mutters, almost as if to himself, “what, you want me to feel sorry? For—what was that you said—eating them alive?” There’s a hardness to his tone that is usually reserved for Laurent, these days. George really wants something to rub himself off against, but Max’s thigh is too far out of reach. “You want me to—?”
“No,” George cuts off, reaching to try and bite Max’s thumb. He slides it out of biting range, somewhere on George’s cheek. Gross, it’s wet. “I know you won’t.”
The future tense slips out and he does not try to reel it back in. There’s no use. He still doesn’t have a say.
Max’s eyes are wide, like he’s trying to see far past him. His thumb reaches the corner of George’s mouth again. “Will you hate me?”
Do you give a shit?, George tries to say, but Max’s finger cuts him off, this time his index pushing into his mouth while his thumb keeps the lips pried open. Almost as if he doesn’t, in fact, care what the answer is.
He slips a second one in, the middle, insult on the injury—they say the worse it stings the more it’s healing. It has to be true. It must. George sucks, a heady feeling taking over him, the simple urge to let go and let it happen. He moans, bucking up against nothing and being sharply reminded that he still has a dick inside of him, and that no part of his anatomy was made to be fucked, that it stings, that he’s fighting a losing battle against nature the same way he’s fighting a losing battle against the godforsaken car every day, neither made for him.
He opens his eyes, and Max stops. George wants to spit in his face. He rests his forehead against George’s, his lips too, brushing but not quite, connected by the few stray electrons which refuse to be part of their bodies.
From under the bed, he hears the commentators loudly announce a penalty shot for Mexico, the crowd roaring to life through the shitty speakers.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” George groans, frustrated, practically shoving Max off of him. “I swear to god, Pickford, if you fail us now—”
“Us?” Max laughs sardonically, tucking himself back in his pants in record time as George does the same and then reaches under the bed to fish the phone out from its misery, “mate, you’re not on the team.”
Of course Max has never heard of being invested in other people’s success. Why would he? Pride by proxy is nothing but a crutch for losers. “The lion does not concern himself with trivialities such as football, I know,” George rolls his eyes, “can we finish watching?”
“What?" Max blinks. He looks like he has never heard a joke before.
“Nothing," he shrugs. In the grand scheme of things, it really is. Nothing, nothing at all.