[Nico’s POV]
The overcorrection begins three days before the race.
I notice it first in Monday's engineering debrief—his injuries are almost healed, but Soren's angling his body away when I lean over the shared data screen, his shoulder pulling back with a precision that looks involuntary but isn't.
The vulnerability of that morning in my hotel room—the confession, the tears, his hand reaching for mine on the sheets—has shaken something loose in his architecture, and now every wall is going back up reinforced.
By Wednesday he's colder than he's been in weeks. Sharp banter, calculated antagonism during simulator sessions, the charm deployed like a weapon whenever I try to hold eye contact.
I catch his gaze during a tire strategy meeting—hold it deliberately—and he retreats behind a grin so manufactured it could be injection-molded. "Focus on your own data, Almeida. Some of us are actually here to race."
Vintage Soren it is. Polished, impersonal, designed to remind us both that whatever happened in that hotel room was an aberration.
I let it land without reaction because I've studied him long enough to read the panic underneath—the fingers tapping his thigh after he says it, and the specific tightness around his mouth that betrays the cost of performing indifference.
I corner him after the session in the corridor behind the simulator bay—narrow, industrial, fluorescent strips making everyone look half-dead. He tries to pass me and I step into his path.
"We should talk about what's happening."
"Nothing's happening. That's the point." He doesn't meet my eyes, jaw set, tendons drawn tight. "What I said that morning—I meant it. All of it. But meaning something doesn't mean I'm ready to build a life around it.”
“I can't go from eleven years of silence to whatever this is becoming. I told you about the locker room. About my father. That doesn't make me someone who can just—" He stops. Swallows. "I need the rules. What we had before works. This doesn't."
"So you show up at my door bleeding and broken, hold my hand, tell me things you've never told anyone—and then pretend it was a malfunction?"
His eyes flash. "Maybe it was."
The words are designed to wound and they do, but his voice cracks on the last syllable. I reach for his arm and his reaction is immediate—he wrenches back, spine hitting the wall, fury flooding his face.
"Don't." Low, dangerous, almost trembling. "Don't push me somewhere with your hands when I'm telling you with my mouth that I'm not ready."
I raise both palms. Step back.
He's right. The fact that he can articulate it—not just retreating but explaining the retreat—is its own kind of progress I need to respect, even as it carves a hollow behind my sternum.
So I drop it, so I prepare to the race, and pretend like all of that didn’t happen.
São Paulo during race week is electric—minha cidade, my city, the humidity thick enough to taste, the crowd noise carrying from Interlagos even during Thursday practice.
That evening, I stood too close to him in the garage doorway—old habit, old test. His breath catches and he steps sideways, crosses his arms. "Rules exist for a reason, Almeida." Quiet enough that the mechanics don't hear.
"Which rule am I breaking?"
"Proximity. Keep your distance in the garage." We discussed nothing of the sort. But the corridor echoes—don't push me—and I hold the line.
And the night before the race, the knock comes at eleven. Two sharp raps—our cadence, our code.
Soren stands in the corridor in a black T-shirt and training shorts, hair damp from the shower, expression arranged into something so aggressively casual it borders on hostile. "Pre-race 'lucky charm,'" he says. Flat. Clinical. "We need the result tomorrow."
He enters and doesn't touch me. Moves to the window, staring at the São Paulo skyline with his arms crossed and his back to me. "Strategic necessity. Nothing more."
"You keep telling me what this isn't." I close the distance until I can feel the heat coming off his skin. "When do you start telling me what it is?"
He turns and his bright blue eyes are defensive and hungry and furious at both. "It's whatever gets us through qualifying. That's all."
I kiss him. His mouth opens immediately—a contradiction his body delivers before his mind can overrule it—and then his hands are on my chest, shoving me back into the wall hard enough that my shoulder blades crack against plaster.
I grab his shirt, hauling him in, and the kiss turns vicious—teeth catching his lower lip, his fingers fisting my collar so tight the fabric strains.
"You're a fucking liar," I say against his mouth, and instead of denying it he bites down on my jaw with a sound that's half growl, half confession. I yank his shirt up and he rips it over his own head, then shoves me harder into the wall, pinning me there with his hips, his cock already rigid against my thigh.
Everything is fast and furious and graceless. I get his shorts down while he works mine, both of us kicking free of fabric. He lifts my thigh, hooks it over his hip, and the raw contact—his cock grinding against mine, slick skin and desperate friction—drags a groan from us both.
"This what strategic necessity feels like?" My voice comes out wrecked. His teeth find the tendon in my neck.
"Shut up, Nico."
He reaches between us—wraps his fist around both of us, shafts pressed together, and strokes with a rough, punishing rhythm. My head drops back against the wall, vision blurring. The plaster is cold against my spine. His hand is burning.
I wrap my hand around his, tightening the grip, and he shudders—forehead dropping to my shoulder, breath in ragged bursts against my collarbone. His mouth finds that spot below my ear, lips and teeth working the skin with an attention that exceeds any strategic necessity. He's not marking territory. He's memorizing texture.
Then his free hand comes up to my jaw—thumb tracing the line of bone from ear to chin, slow and reverent, completely disconnected from the brutal pace of our hands. The dissonance is staggering. His body is all aggression and his fingertips are writing something tender across my face that his mouth will never say.
He catches himself. The hand recoils like he's touched a burner, jaw clenching.
I come first—the orgasm hitting like a wave breaking, spilling hot between us. He follows within seconds, his grip tightening, a guttural sound bitten off against my shoulder as he shudders and empties.
Afterward, silence. He peels himself off the wall and reaches for his shorts. The usual choreography—retreat, safe distance.
"Stay."
Quiet. No demand, no challenge. Just the word, offered like an open hand.
His back goes rigid as the hesitation stretches—too long for dismissal, too short for acceptance. He lies down on the far side of the bed, a deliberate gap between us wide enough to be its own statement. Arms crossed over his chest, body angled away. I turn off the lamp and the skyline paints the ceiling in amber.
As minutes pass, his breathing hasn't evened out—too controlled, too deliberate, the careful rhythm of someone performing sleep. "This isn't just pre-race anymore, is it?"
The words land in the dark like a match struck near gasoline, but Soren doesn't answer. I listen to the performance of his breathing—measured, precise, an impersonation of unconsciousness that confirms everything the silence tries to deny. He's awake and we both know that.
I don't push. Paciência—the Brazilian kind that understands some things ripen only in their own season.
I close my eyes and let my breathing slow genuinely, and somewhere between consciousness and surrender I hear him shift. Not closer, but toward. A fraction. A degree. The smallest concession from a man whose body keeps writing confessions his mouth refuses to sign.