[Nico’s POV]
Everything is different and I cannot pinpoint the exact mechanism of failure.
The circuit should feel like restoration—the familiar geometry of tarmac and tire walls, the controlled violence of downforce.
After São Paulo, I expected racing to recalibrate me, but the cockpit feels borrowed. Data screens pulse with numbers I can't absorb, and I keep drifting during debriefs—to a living room, Soren’s hearty, real laugh, His voice telling me ‘don’t’.
I swore I'd never give him this again—not after the locker room, not after the wolves. One night dismantled years of architecture. And when I followed the feeling—a tender kiss in the guest room, the kind that means something—he turned his head. Don't. That's not what this is.
The man who had my dick in him couldn't let me kiss him in the light. Ironic.
The drivers' event fills a rooftop bar overlooking the harbour—sponsor logos on glass, ambient music calibrated to encourage spending. I'm nursing a gin and tonic near the railing when Julien appears with two fresh glasses and that open, unhurried smile.
"You're hiding again," he says, replacing my drink without asking. "I'm starting to think it's a habit."
"Still a different skill set, remember?" I remind him.
"And I still find it charming." He leans against the railing, shoulder pressing mine. "How was the break? You went home to São Paulo?"
"Family time. My mother's cooking."
"You don't look rested, Nico. You look like a man thinking too hard about something he can't solve."
The accuracy stings. His hand finds my lower back—warm, steady. "Come back to my hotel," he says quietly. "No expectations. Whatever you want it to be."
The offer lands in the wound open since São Paulo. I am falling for a man who will always choose self-preservation—at seventeen, in the public eye, in the guest room. If I don't sever the circuit, I hand him the same power he had when we were boys. Julien is uncomplicated. If my body can respond to someone else, the damage is containable.
"Let's go," I say.
His hotel room is white sheets and harbour light. Julien kisses me against the door, and the kiss is good, I give him that. Skilled, his mouth moving against mine with confident patience, one hand cradling my jaw while the other works my shirt buttons.
His hands are softer than Soren's. I notice immediately—no calluses from gripping a wheel with desperate force. His palms smooth over my chest, thumbs circling my nipples until they harden.
He's lean, defined—narrower through the shoulders, the muscle distributed with a runner's economy rather than compact power. I run my hands down his sides and find smooth skin where I expect familiar hard ridges, the planes of a body built for confrontation.
When we reach the bed, Julien tracks his mouth down my stomach, tongue tracing muscle as teeth catching skin above my hip. He strips me and takes my cock in his hand—firm and knowing—thumb sweeping the head, spreading the slick already gathered.
When his mouth replaces his hand, lips stretching around the shaft, tongue working the underside in slow strokes, my head drops back.
He's attentive, reads every shift of my hips, hollows his cheeks at the perfect angle, takes me deeper with genuine enthusiasm. But his rhythm is patient where I've learned to expect relentless.
His mouth offers instead of fighting for control.
The suction is steady instead of devastating.
My fingers thread through his hair and the strands are wrong—too fine, too straight—and the absence hits like a physical thing.
I pull him up, flip him onto his back, reach for the condom, and he watches with open desire, legs falling apart with easy willingness.
No resistance. No challenge.
No moment where surrender is fought for and won.
I press inside him and he arches, a throaty moan escaping, hands gripping my shoulders. The heat is tight, responsive, and when I set a rhythm he moves with me—fluid, practised, hips rolling to meet each thrust.
His cock bounces between us, precome streaking his stomach, moans real and unperformed. He wraps his legs around my waist, and his breath stutters when I hit the angle that curves his spine.
It's good. Physiologically good.
When I wrap my fist around his cock and stroke in time, he comes hard—spilling over my knuckles, clenching around me, voice cracking on something French I don't catch.
I follow minutes later, the orgasm arriving like a scheduled event—building, cresting, emptying. Satisfying the way a meal satisfies when you're not hungry. Hollow in every way that matters.
"I'd like to do this again," Julien says afterward, tracing patterns on my chest. Honest. No games.
"I'll think about it."
The answer is no. I know it before the words leave my mouth—proof that somewhere between São Paulo and this anonymous room, I lost the ability to want something uncomplicated.
I dress in the pre-dawn dark and walk back to the team hotel alone, trying to survive the night without thinking at all.
The track next morning smells like rubber and brake dust. I round the corner of the Apex garage and Soren is already there—leaning against the timing stand, arms crossed, jaw set like concrete.
His eyes are winter, cold in the way I haven't seen since the early weeks. Before the arrangement. Before his hands learned the map of my body and how my name tastes on his lips.
"Morning," I say.
"Heard you had a good night."
Shit.
His voice is tight, consonants bitten off. But he looks through me the way he used to when looking at me was an admission he couldn't afford.
"Someone in the paddock mentioned seeing you leave with Marchand. And I noticed your side of the suite was empty all night, so…"
The jealousy bleeds through every crack in his composure and I watch it fracture him in real time—the rigid shoulders, the fingers digging into his own biceps hard enough to whiten the knuckles.
"Did Julien live up to expectations?" Sarcasm dressed so carefully it almost passes for indifference. "Are the French really better lovers? I've always wondered. Did you enjoy yourself, Nico? Was he…"
His voice splinters, but he recovers with vicious speed.
"Was he worth it?"
Each question is a wound wearing a costume. I hold my ground because the alternative is admitting I slept with Julien to feel less for the man in front of me. And that it failed.
"Our rules don't include exclusivity," I say, steady despite the collapse behind my ribs. "You have no claim on me, Soren. You made sure of that. This is exactly the arrangement you agreed to—no feelings, no obligations. Those were your conditions, as much as they were mine—you were relieved to hear them. I'm just honouring them."
The words land like blows. His expression shatters and rearranges into cold fury—like a window breaking and reforming into something harder, every edge designed to cut.
He turns and walks away without a single word, and the controlled violence in his stride tells me everything his mouth refused. Each step too precise, the gait of a man containing something explosive.
The garage swallows him, and the absence is louder than any argument.
I overhear the engineer's conversation just a couple hours later. Soren's withdrawn from tonight's team dinner. No explanation. His phone's going straight to voicemail—no one can reach him.
The information settles in my chest like a stone in still water. Concentric circles, expanding outward, touching everything.
I don't say anything. Don't make myself a part of the conversation.
I walk to the simulator room, close the door, and sit in the dark with the knowledge that I broke something today that neither of us knows how to fix.