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At some point, Max would have to think about exactly how he had ended up here, hurtling down the hairpins of Stelvio Pass at midnight with George Russell in the passenger seat doing everything in his power to kill them both.
The time was not now. For now, there were the turns he could barely see coming, illuminated in split-second flashes of reflective traffic signs before the 300 SL’s vintage headlights. There was the alpine wind barrelling through the open windows, ripping his hair upward and back without the protection of a halo or a helmet. There was George, head down, curls tantalizing in his peripheral vision, and Max would look, he would, but they would both plummet to certain death if he could not hold on.
Yes.
George made a sudden movement with his mouth. His tongue, wet and sinuous, edged a path around the column of Max’s cock like he was tracing a map of the pass on Max’s skin. It was too much, and it was not enough, and Max’s hips jerked involuntarily as his grip tightened on the steering wheel, letting off the accelerator just a hair as the wheels screeched around the tight turn.
“Fuck!” he exclaimed. “You really want to kill us?! Enough, George!”
No.
In lieu of responding, George hummed around his cock. They were on a long straight, at least for now. Max took the moment of reprieve for his heart rate to settle. Their eyes met, George’s pale blue reflecting back every tenuous fleck of light around them, and for a moment, Max thought of the undying, the supernatural, the extraterrestrial, anything at all but human, this face staring back at him from between his thighs, mouth agape like a maw from the depths about to swallow him whole.
“George,” Max tried again around the bulge in his throat. “Schat.”
But another turn was coming, and George grinned, baring white teeth that burned into Max’s retina as he forcibly yanked the wheel sharp left, sending the car spinning before Max could right them just as the barrier came into view.
“Just drive, Max.”
Yes.
There was something truly special about George’s backside, or at least Max had stared at it for so long that it had become the only standard for buttocks. The shape, obviously, was spectacular, like postcard-perfect mounds of Wiltshire chalkland rising under the fireproofs. But it was the feel, the texture of them, the pure muscular heft of the cheek resisting dimpling as Max groped at George’s left side in the five seconds they had between the cool down room and the walk toward the podium that stayed in his mind as the Italian anthem saturated the atmosphere around them.
George had been smiling into the crowd, his face not budging a millimeter as a chorus of boos greeted his arrival. But now—and Max had chanced a glance even knowing every camera was turned their way and that the live broadcast was making its way throughout the world—the edges of his lips could no longer maintain the same position.
There had been something in the cool down room earlier; the temperature had dipped noticeably the moment Kimi entered the room. From the start, he knew there was no way for him and George to have a proper conversation just yet, not in front of the cameras, and so Max had done the only thing he could and make sure that George had his water bottle before they settled into the debrief. George had answered him, terse but cordial, and Max had thought he could keep this going for a while, but there was no going back when Kimi arrived.
George was still saying the right things. He was, as a rule, as consistent as his driving, always capable of saying the right things. But his control over his expression was less precise, his body language even more unpredictable. In the room, Max had felt that offness as clearly as if George had been shouting from the rooftop how he was actually feeling about this day, and Max would be the first to admit that he usually did not understand what others usually so easily decoded.
That would probably have been the case here, if it wasn’t George.
When it was George, nothing would escape Max’s scrutiny.
Melancholy draped around George like a flimsy cloak, and the Italian sun had shone fiercely that day. Under the champagne spray, George’s face was lined from the balaclava’s imprint, but there was something more, too, settled under the shine of sweat and the natural glow of his skin. His eyes had seemed ever so slightly too bright, the feverish shine of illness or tears, and for the first time, Max’s ouvertures weren’t even met with a cursory glare. The ass cheek he’d grabbed earlier had felt so goddamn tight, the only indication George had noticed at all a slight uptick in his walking pace, and Max knew that if he did not follow George after the ceremony, he would not catch him any time before Madrid.
It wasn’t hard, slipping away afterwards. Mekies gave him a lot of breathing room these days, all too grateful for what Max could still do with the shitbox of a car they were running this season. And George—it was becoming a rather familiar tale, the coolness from his garage after a race no matter where he had placed. He had lost sight of George earlier after the official televised ceremony ended, and as Max strode with purpose between the motorhomes, occasionally nodding to someone who had waved at him, he heard the echo of his name.
If it was almost anyone else, Max would have inclined his head and walked away. But Max stopped when he realized it was Toto Wolff. The man crossed over quickly, reached out a warm hand to draw Max in close, and patted him familiarly on the shoulder. A strange feeling surged; Max blinked hard, then felt his face lift into a smile that felt more conditioned than genuine at the moment. “Hey, Toto, congrats.”
The glow of victory practically dripped from Toto, even as Max was the one still drenched in champagne. “P3, not bad, not bad, especially with that car. You always outperform your cars, Max. Incredible battle with George there.” Toto was patting him repeatedly. The deep lines on his face stretched. Max tried to remember the last time Toto had seemed so happy on the paddock and did not have to rummage in his memory for too long; Monaco, after all, wasn’t that long ago, even if Max didn’t stick around to witness it in person.
“Phenomenal drive from Kimi,” Max agreed. Toto did not seem capable of beaming; if the gossips were reliable, he physically could not, with just how much Botox went into that forehead. And yet, he was now, with his golden boy on Monza’s top step. “And of course, George always gives me a fight. A real prize of a driver for your team.”
At that, Toto’s grin drooped by just a fraction. He recovered quickly. “Yes, they did very well. It’s the best result we could have hoped for, a Mercedes 1-2.”
“In just the right order?” Max joked. The memory of George’s face as he received his P2 trophy welled up. “Hell of a headline, with Kimi clawing his way to a victory from the back.”
Toto shrugged. “We just create the opportunities. What the drivers do is up to them, and they both delivered today. Kimi seems to have beaten your start stats.” Toto raised an eyebrow in surprise, as if he had just recalled the fact. “From P17, was it?”
“Right.” They regarded each other for just a moment longer. Max held the eye contact very comfortably; it was other people who looked away first, compelled by some social norm Max cared not for. But Toto wasn’t other people. Their hands on each other were heavier now, weighed down with an undercurrent of tension that had been building for a while despite the public vacation they had recently shared. Max knew the taste of it, bitter like bile and just as green. Finally, Max cocked his head. “Why didn’t you pit George during the virtual safety car? Just curious. I was surprised to see us all pitting while he stayed out. Seemed an ambitious strategy is all.”
Toto’s grip on his upper arm tightened, then returned to his shoulder for another half-embrace. “Max! As expected of a team principal himself! Come to Mercedes and I’ll tell you all of our strategies,” he boomed, his Austrian accent thick. Then, slightly quieter, he added, “Kimi was on mediums, and already was at such a disadvantage with the start. Generational talents must be nurtured, I’m sure you understand.”
Max did. He had attended the Helmut Marko school of prodigies and graduated top of the class. Satisfied by Max’s nod, Toto quickly made his excuse, patted Max one more time, and disappeared into the paddock’s cacophony.
It took another fifteen minutes before he could escape the maze himself. By that time, after pulling many strings and calling in all the favors he could think of, he finally figured out where he needed to be, and at the last second to boot.
George was about to run him over with the silver Mercedes 300 SL before Max threw himself at the hood. The screech of brake scorched the asphalt of the parking lot, and then, a furious flap of wings as the car doors flew open. George descended on him like a harpy at once.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Stealing Toto’s car, are you? It’s a good heist.” Max shifted from one foot to the other, hands in his team jacket’s pocket. “Got room for a passenger?”
George did not step out of the car, merely yelled at him through the door. His curls seemed damp, freshly showered and cleaned of champagne. He wore a linen shirt, cream-on-beige, that would look much better crumpled on the floor of that car. “It’s a small car. Catch another ride, I’m not going to the airport.”
“What is it, schat, afraid I’d criticize your driving?”
“Ha. Last I checked, you were catching my dirty air.” George scoffed. “Aren’t you supposed to take off in an hour?”
“I take off whenever.” Max shrugged. “I can give you a ride later too, if you want, unless you’d rather see Toto.” Then, before George could protest, he hopped into the other side of the gullwing car, settling into the leather and wrinkling his nose at the faint scent of Toto’s perfume clinging to the interior of the car. “I’d thought this might be the last place you’d want to be. Bit on the nose, this.”
“Why would that be?” George asked flippantly. He was too sharp to not understand that he could not evict Max when Max had made up his mind. Instead, he huffed loudly, closed the gullwings, put the car in drive, and slammed on the accelerator pedal. They jerked forward, then came to a dead stop. “You know I’m going to crash this car, right? Still want to come along?”
An unapologetic grin tugged at Max’s lips even as the seatbelt cut into his neck. “Well, yeah. I always enjoy seeing a crumpled up Mercedes. Let’s go.”
Max couldn’t fucking see. Even a race track at night was generously illuminated. The Mercedes 300 SL’s headlights were modest, not having been designed for a life-or-death situation in which one was flinging oneself, one’s car, and one’s complicated situationship at nearly 160 kilometers per hour through the forty-eight terrifying hairpins of one of the world’s most infamous roads. But it would probably have been safer if George was covering his eyes instead of whatever he was doing now.
Yes.
“Faster, Max,” George murmured, lips puckered around his cock, yet each syllable came out more crisply than a starched collar. “You can’t possibly lose to my time going down.” George chuckled quietly to himself. “Oh, that’s good.”
Max gritted his teeth, shifting the gearbox down as the road dipped suddenly beneath them. “And have you ever had someone sucking you off while you drive?”
George took a moment to consider. He gave a tentative, kitten-like lick on the very tip, sending a long, high-pitched whine of sensation all the way from the weeping slit to the tip of Max’s toes. The car jerked slightly, but George was completely unfazed. The top of his head brushed against Max’s navel, where his shirt had ridden up; George rested his chin on Max’s lap, his body draped entirely across the center console. “If I say yes, would you murder them?”
“Yes,” Max replied without hesitation. The section just below them lighted up with another car’s headlight, opposing traffic. Max lifted off the accelerator just enough, like he was responding to a yellow flag, and rolled his hips as George chuckled on the cockhead. The vibrations were cruel; Max could not hide from then, could not shy away from what was all-encompassing. “Just let me drive for a bit, stop distracting me.”
“Where’s the fun in that? Are you a driver or a taxi driver?” His balls were lifted, then dropped to hang pendulously when George had decided they were too heavy to hold, or whatever passed for logic in George’s head now. “You’d defended against me all day. Are you too tired to continue?”
“Hardly seems a fair fight now, and I can’t exactly attack you at the moment, can I. Get your own car, then we’ll talk.” Briefly, the road flooded with light, and then angry honking when the other driver realized just how quickly Max had been going, their cars perilously close to each other along the barely visible line dividing the road. In that moment, Max glanced down at George, his familiar features bathing in golden light, and was startled by the beautiful stranger staring back at him.
This was what George looked like broken, when an exquisite crystal vase shattered. The shards were gathered into weapons, sharp-edged and lethal. It could no longer hurt itself, having been ruined beyond recognition but for the beauty intrinsic in its fragility. And so it turned outward, its broken pieces clasped in bleeding palms and tucked between fingers, numb to sensation as it slashed forward.
If George was a fawn, that fawn had survived a nuclear apocalypse and came out the other side a stag, with shrapnel for antlers and unearthly, radioactive eyes like will-o-the-wisps rising above a bog.
“You should have forced a double DNF today,” Max said. George blinked. The light disappeared, the shadows rushing back in, the pristine darkness of the Alps once more sweeping away the broken pieces. Max reached for him, expecting a sharp sting of pain on his fingertips, and was instead met with George’s soft skin, warm in the cool night.
“I thought that was rather our thing,” George said after a long pause, neither leaning into his touch nor drawing away. Pressure grew along the base of Max’s cock, the wetness of saliva squelching as George worked him up again, thumb pressing on the vein running along the length. “Look at us on the run, but, well, it’s not too late either as far as double DNFs go. Are you Thelma or Louise in this scenario?”
“I meant with Kimi, George. We race clean now.”
“Do we? Have you become as boring as me then?” George mused, then squeezed his fingers tighter. “Thelma or Louise, Max?”
“Fuck, I didn’t watch that movie, I don’t know what—ah, fuck—what you’re talking about,” Max blurted out, then overcorrected as the car approached another hairpin. But he could not slow down now, driven by the madness that hummed in his veins and George’s both, the speed that had been carved into their very soul. “Fuck, George, schat, you really don’t want to die, do you?”
The silence stretched. The car made it through another hairpin, wheels screeching on the worn road surface. Their whole bodies jerked around, held in place by the seatbelts, and George released the tight grip on Max’s cock only to cover it with his whole mouth, taking Max so deep in that Max swore he had hit past the midpoint of George’s throat into his esophagus.
No.
“George!” Another turn, a breathless whip after the last.
Yes.
“I’ll take the ascent. You’ll drive us down,” George announced. The division of labor worked in Max’s favor. The descent of a pass like this was always the more challenging one, and Max had no patience to drag this seventy-year-old relic up a mountain pass with so many hairpin turns. George was a much better driver in that regard, the precision Max cared not a whit for personally but found irresistible on the track as a rival. He had tried in all possible ways, in all these years, to buck George out of that mode, as if they were on horseback and he could spook George’s mare with the aggression of his own steed. But that was the thing; George never fell for it. George maintained his line, raced hard, drove as if it was all within his calculation, even as Max fell to pieces around him internally.
He wanted the contact. That was the main difference between them; George drove to win. Max drove to come as close to George as was possible, even if that meant sometimes the cars would kiss on-track.
He supposed George did not find that half as romantic as it came off in Max’s head.
“We’ll time it,” George said. “You’ll have the advantage. Going down should take much less time, shouldn’t it?”
“If you have a death wish,” Max replied unblinkingly. George merely scanned him for a quick second before returning his attention to the road. “How did you get the keys?”
“Susie gave them to me. Said I looked like I could use a drive, and to take Toto’s car. She smirked, that woman.”
“She’s perceptive.”
“She’s terrifying at times. Embarrassing, being called out by Susie, but what could I do, refuse the opportunity?”
“You did look like hell.”
He still did, in a way. His eyes were faintly red, a slight puffiness in the thin skin underneath that would have been unexpected given how dehydrated they all were after a race. The shower had done its job in stripping the remnants of champagne from George, and Max wondered if he had drank any of it or had just let the taste of someone else’s victory wash over him on that podium.
George was strong. George was resilient. But even the strongest branches turned brittle, the most willowy of vines eventually break after so many times it was forced to bend.
A small twitch flexed the muscle of George’s neck. His jawline seemed overly still, which was a tell in itself, his lips flattened rather than pursed in the familiar pout. Max knew George, every microexpression of him. There was something George wasn’t saying. Max had a feeling he knew what it was, but he was too much of a coward to have that conversation just yet.
“Shame that this isn’t the Autobahn. What’s the speed limit here?”
George shrugged, then pressed on the accelerator pedal. The traffic sign pointed the direction and distance toward Bormio; George confirmed with a glance at his phone, then forged on. The G-force was negligible compared to what they were used to, but the very fact of its being Toto’s prized child sent a jolt of thrill through Max anyway as he was pressed back against the leather seat. “Don’t know. Care to find out?”
At any other time, in any other car, Stelvio Pass was a good forty-five to sixty-minute drive going down. When George had made their way up earlier, throwing the car like a dart through each and every turn, he had finished the climb in just under thirty minutes. The car had barely managed the last incline, the engine revving with considerable effort as George narrowly avoided collision with the concrete barrier on the right hand side around a particularly treacherous turn.
“Fourteen minutes and counting,” George said now, taking a break from his Geneva convention-defying torture. He was leaning back against his seat, but his hand was still tight around Max’s cock, which had been standing at full attention in just about as long. The pressure strained his focus; too much blood was flowing downward, with very little left for rationality and thinking and whatever it was his brain was supposed to do in this situation. If driving wasn’t baked into his very bone, if it wasn’t the most instinctual thing he could do after breathing, they would have crashed a long time ago.
Yes.
“And how far until we reach the bottom?”
George turned on his phone; the background was blank, impersonal, not even a single glimpse of the identity of its owner in case it ever was lost or stolen. “Bit more than halfway now, but you’re losing time.” With that, he gave Max a squeeze that Max could not decide was encouraging or threatening. “Maxie, do you like stories?”
“What kind of stories?”
“Say I tell you one story,” George mused, “of adversity. Of a child raised in difficult circumstances, defying all odds to one day stand at the top of the podium of all podiums, of the greatest who ever was, of earth-shattering natural talent and grit and the resilience to overcome all obstacles thrown his way. The greatest, Max. Isn’t it a good story?”
“It is,” Max murmured. It didn’t take a genius to know what George was talking about.
“There’s another story, and I think it’s a good one too.” The car swerved around a turn, slightly more unpredictable than the last, coming up faster than expected, and Max remembered how these turns started changing shape the closer they got to the bottom.
No.
George ignored the whiplash and continued, “This one is about legacy. The weight of expectation, of the dreams of the past passed onto the future, of god-given skills and an intense upbringing that would forge another great, like tempering iron into steel.”
“I’m not sure I love that story,” Max said. “It kinda sucks.”
“It’s still very good, very compelling.” A thumb brushed over the tip of his cock, a mere graze, tender in its ministration. Max made a hitching sound deep in his throat, then swallowed hard and forced his eyes to stay on what little he could see of the road. “You want to hear of another one?”
“That’s already a lot of stories, schat.”
A small pause, and then a chuckle. “You’re right. That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? There are already so, so many stories. And who’s there to remember all of them?”
Yes.
They didn’t crash the car, or at least George didn’t. The entire journey to the top of Stelvio Pass had been exhilarating. Max had never sat in a car as the passenger princess with George at the wheel, and as unusual as the circumstances were, he still found time to marvel at the strangeness of their situation. It was different, sharing the same chassis—or cabin—with George rather than racing him. The moves Max would have considered too cautious jostled through his whole body, every rocking of the car along the curve of the switchbacks a violent, controlled twist that sent his torso digging into the seatbelt strap. What Max was most surprised to find, and quietly delighted in when it finally occurred to him, was at this distance, from this vantage point, he could see exactly what George’s face looked like when he was engrossed in the driving, bare of the balaclava and the helmet and the obstruction of the halo.
The events of the day aside, there was still joy in George, the lightness that was so much a part of the George he knew, faintly quixotic, at times capricious. He breathed more easily in the car than outside of it, and Max understood the feeling, this deep bond they shared. He wondered if they had spent more of their lives behind a wheel, simulated or not, than on their own two feet. Then he remembered what George had said about running, about the need for movement, about the serenity of the ocean on free dives and the deafening sound of rushing blood in his ears on long jogs, and thought that it all came down to silence.
There was no intensity in George’s expression, not any of the total focus Max had once imagined, given just how anal George was about everything else in his life or how much chatter had come up on his radio through the years.
Now, George only looked at peace, taking the turns at increasingly alarming speed for a car that was more a museum piece than a performance beast.
Yes.
They drove in comparative silence for a while. Max spent the whole time alternating between the snowcapped peaks around them and the taut slope of George’s jawline, tracing the cheekbone with his eyes until he could make out each individual, microscopic pore on George’s ridiculously clear skin. He leaned forward a little until he could see just a peek of the other side of George’s face in profile, a small but noticeable scar on his eyebrow that he had never asked George about, and pillowed his head on one hand, elbow on the dashboard, simply watching.
Compared to the Alps on the other side, this was a much better view.
No.
The car hit a pebble, the velocity sending it flying upward. A dull thud sounded, and Max could not suppress an automatic sympathetic wince, but George’s lips spread out, barely able to conceal his amusement at the potential of Toto’s car ending up with a dent from this joyride.
When it was his turn, perhaps Max could afford to be a little less careful.
Yes.
“You didn’t ask.” They were almost at the bottom, Max could feel it. The incline grade had noticeably decreased; he had already shifted the gear to accommodate, and the car tore through the last few corners with considerably more help from the accelerator than from gravity’s work. George was playing with the curly hair on his groin, tugging several taut and releasing them, and then, out of nowhere, a sharp pinch as a single hair pulled free entirely. “Fuck! What was that for?”
“On the contrary,” George replied, laughing hollowly. “I’ve been asking the whole time, Maxie.”
“I didn’t care about racing Kimi,” Max blurted out, eyes watering from the pain. “Fuck, I thought you understood. This season is over for me, it doesn’t fucking matter anymore, nothing matters except racing you, schat, that’s all I’m doing right now, is that really so terrible?”
Pathetic as it was, and it had taken Max a long time to accept this without flinching to himself, this was the only reason he made it to the paddock this season anymore, with how the car had turned out.
Week in, week out, the highlights had ceased to be the win or the prospect of that fifth championship title. It had become catching George, being caught by George, the cat-and-mouse game they played together in front of the world, the only contact they were allowed to make in front of the camera. The cooldown room with George. The podium, also with George. The smile on George’s face, the way George would look at him in a tender moment and a heated bout, the sex soaking in their victory and the bitterness of defeat.
Yes.
He could no longer feel without George nearby. And no matter who else was on the track, Kimi or Oscar or whoever else, Max had simply ceased looking.
But George didn’t seem angry. George leaned over, grabbed his chin, and drew him for a kiss so fleeting that Max automatically chased after the bare warmth of George’s breath as soon as he pulled away. “Schat…”
“It’s a good story,” George said again, that familiar refrain. Max shifted his burning eyes from the road to George’s face, catching a flash of teeth and the wet shine of George’s lips. “People have always liked the chosen one narratives. Things are easy. Things should be easy, natural, intuitive. He’s natural and intuitive and so likeable, and so young, we can’t forget just how young he is, how he doesn’t have to learn because he was born with it.”
“George…”
No.
“I think I’d said it before. It has never been easy for me.” The words trailed off, less uncertain, more like George had run out of battery. Max reached out blindly for him, fingers tangling on the linen fabric of his shirt. “I make things look hard, Max, but not hard enough. There’s not enough adversity, just my own shortcomings. Nobody wants this story. Nobody wants to hear this story.”
“Tell me,” Max begged. “Tell me the story, I’m listening, schat.”
“You’d heard it before. It’s the same ending every week. What’s the point?”
Yes.
“Tell it to me anyways, make up an ending, tell me the ending you want—”
“It doesn’t end well,” George murmured. His lips brushed Max’s again, then trailed downward, open-mouthed presses against Max’s throat, the bulge at the bottom, the bare skin George could manage to find beneath the Red Bull team kit. Then he dropped all the way down to Max’s crotch, buried his nose into the hair and inhaled so deeply Max thought he could feel the pull.
George opened his lips around the tip, breathed onto it for several long moments until Max squirmed, then took it all the way in until he reached where his hands had formed two tight rings at the base of the length. He swallowed repeatedly, the motion sending seismic shakes throughout Max, and with all his power, Max held onto the steering wheel, but George took that moment to speed up.
The pressure grew unbearable. The cadence was furious, matching Max’s pounding heart. His vision was narrowing at the edges, the blood draining entirely from the upper half, and he dug into the wheel until he was sure his nails would leave crescents on Toto’s leather, and it still was not enough.
A turn was coming. He had to hold on—
For a moment, the world went completely blank. The darkness spread until that was all he could see, his mind floating above a body that no longer seemed real, and from above, he could see the tableau he and George made in this car, with George’s head on his lap. Both of them had been lost in their own stories, unable to merge but for the destination they would soon end up in at the bottom of the Italian Alps, bodies and machine finally merging into one inextricable mass.
“George,” he said, his last word, or what he thought it would become. The orgasm had robbed him of all sensations but the intensity of it, and he thought, a little death before the final one, that was a good one, George would approve. Eyes flickering open, he turned over to see George again one last time, the final sight before it all ended.
Max didn’t watch movies, but at least he understood the references.
But they weren’t falling. The car was still in one piece, four wheels firmly on terraferma, possible small dent notwithstanding. His hands were still claws clenched around the wheel, but George had taken it too, had steered them through the final corner, and the car had rolled down onto a long straight, the zigzags of the Stelvio Pass now behind them.
No.
“Drive,” George said finally, half-smiling. “Twenty-six minutes. You won.”
In the darkness, Max wondered if he had seen the brief shadows of long antlers, twisted and deformed, as sharp as knives and transparent as glass.
“Take me home, Max.”
Max had never driven faster than that night, or with more purpose, as they left the Alps behind.
“I was just thinking,” George commented, gaze intent on the road, grip loose and steady on the leather-wrapped steering wheel. The trip from Monza should have taken at least three hours; they had made it in two, with the traffic blessedly atypical for this time of the day and the year. Very likely they had all been concentrated in Monza for the Grand Prix. The Italian Alps loomed around them, white-capped, yet the hillside was still blanketed in verdant summer livery. George pulled over to the side of the road, both of them gazing up at the pass from below. The forty-eight hairpins spanned the whole side of the mountain, criss-crossed like corset strings. On the other side lay Switzerland. The sun was already starting its descent behind the mountain, but there was still enough daylight to make out George’s face set against the landscape.
A tingle ran down Max’s spine, the chill completely unrelated to the northern wind. George’s eyes were luminous, slightly too wide, the red rims from earlier already gave way to a stark bone-white. “I’d actually thought about it for a long time, since the mid-season promo video came out. What do you think, Max? Shall we consult the gods on this question?”
“What question?” Max asked, breathless, as George grinned at him, hollow-eyed beneath the brightness, and started the engine, shifting the gear up as they began the climb.
George aimed for the apex of the first hairpin without a word, full press on the accelerator. The engine groaned, roared its helplessness, and obeyed with significant reservation, but a car had no choice at all in where it was headed or how fast it must go. Laughter rang out in the cabin, joy or rage or some combination thereof; Max joined in, and let go of his own race and the season as it had been, and as it would become.
For this moment, there was nothing but the wind, the car, and them, two beating hearts within the same chassis, as the pendulum of Stelvio Pass swung.
No.
Yes.
No.
Is the story written?