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Max had been awake for six minutes, mostly because Oscar had rolled on top of him at some point in the night and was currently using Max's chest as a mattress.
"Oscar."
Nothing. A small snore.
"Oscar, I have to get up."
Oscar's arms tightened. Somehow. Max hadn't thought that was physically possible given that Oscar had already been holding on with what Max would have described, generously, as the grip of a man who had been informed he would fall off the earth if he let go. Apparently there was still room to escalate.
"I have to pee."
"Mm." Oscar's face pressed further into Max's collarbone. A second snore, longer this time, almost contemplative.
"Oscar. I'm serious. Get off."
"You're warm," Oscar said, which wasn't a response to anything Max had said, but seemed to be the totality of Oscar's position on the matter. He shifted slightly, which Max briefly mistook for cooperation, and then realized was just Oscar getting more comfortable.
"I will pour water on you." Max gestured lazily at the water bottle they kept next to the bed, although Oscar's eyes weren't open to see it.
Accent thick with sleep, the Aussie mumbled back, "Nah you won't."
This was, unfortunately, true. Max lay there for another thirty seconds, staring at the ceiling, running through his options. He could physically lift Oscar off him, which he'd tried once before and which Oscar had responded to by making a noise like a distressed animal and grabbing hold of him with renewed conviction. He could wait until Oscar slipped back into deeper sleep and do the slow, careful extraction — this had a moderate success rate. Or he could deploy the pillow.
He deployed the pillow.
It required patience. He got his left arm free first, slow and careful, replacing his own body heat with the pillow in increments, watching Oscar's face for signs of waking. Oscar's brow furrowed once. Max froze. The furrow smoothed. Max continued. Two minutes of careful lateral movement and he had himself mostly free, the pillow now firmly in Oscar's arms, Oscar's cheek turned into it with a small, unconscious sigh of satisfaction that Max would never mention out loud because it was so unbearably soft that it made his chest do things he had no interest in examining at four in the morning.
He made it to the door.
He made it down the hall.
He was three steps into the bathroom, completely home free, when he heard the shuffle.
Max closed his eyes.
The shuffle got closer. Slower than a walking pace. More of a stumble, really — the particular gait of a man whose body had decided to move while his brain was still essentially offline. Max heard the soft thud of Oscar's shoulder finding the doorframe, the small exhale of someone who had navigated purely by instinct and dim muscle memory.
Oscar's arms came around his waist from behind. Oscar's chin dropped onto Max's shoulder, heavy and warm, and his eyes — Max could see them in the bathroom mirror — were completely closed.
Max stared at his own reflection.
"I'm trying to piss," Max said flatly.
"I know." A pause. A small snuffly sleep noise, right in Max's ear. "S'fine."
"Oscar." He aimed for chastising, but it came out irritatingly fond.
"Moral support," Oscar replied, which he'd said the first time this had happened, three months ago, when Max had laughed so hard he'd nearly had a problem of a different kind entirely. Now Max just stood there, held around the waist in his own bathroom at four in the morning, finishing what he'd come here to do with as much dignity as a man could retain under these specific circumstances.
He flushed. He washed his hands. Oscar remained attached through all of it, a large, warm, half-unconscious presence breathing slowly against Max's neck. When Max turned off the tap Oscar made a quiet sound of contentment, like this — this exact situation, a bathroom at 4am — was perfectly acceptable. More than acceptable. Preferred, even.
"This is stupid," Max told him. “And ridiculous.”
"Mm." Oscar turned his nose into the side of Max's neck. "Come back to bed."
"I was trying to come back to bed. You followed me."
"Come back faster next time."
Max looked at the ceiling. He thought several things that he didn't say. Finally, he shuffled them both back down the hallway, still attached, Oscar half-asleep and occasionally mumbling, and when they got back to the bed Oscar tossed the pillow aside — with no apparent regret, the pillow having served its temporary purpose — and reacquired Max with the practiced ease of someone who had done this many, many times.
Which he had.
"You're annoying," Max said, to the top of Oscar's head.
Oscar was already asleep.
There was a full couch. It could seat six people comfortably. It could seat eight people if they were friendly. It was a large, generous, well-cushioned couch that had absolutely no shortage of available space.
Max was sitting on one end, laptop open, emails pulled up, working through something that actually required concentration. He had his can of Red Bull. He had his notes. He had a full couch and a quiet apartment and two hours before he had to be anywhere.
Oscar came out of the bedroom wearing a t-shirt and Max's socks, looked at the couch, looked at Max, and sat down directly on top of him. The full weight of Oscar Piastri, distributed across Max's lap and chest with the calm entitlement of a cat who had decided this was his spot and any previous usage of it was irrelevant.
"There's a whole couch," Max said.
"Mm." Oscar was already adjusting himself, doing that thing he did where he found the exact right configuration — his back against Max's chest, legs up over the armrest, head tilting back into the curve of Max's shoulder. He reached down and picked up the remote from somewhere in the cushions. "What do you want to watch?"
"I'm working."
"I know, I'm asking what I should watch."
"Oscar. You're sitting on me."
"I'm sitting adjacent to you."
Max looked at him. He looked at the three and a half feet of empty couch to his left. He looked at Oscar's face, which was completely unbothered, scrolling through whatever streaming service he'd landed on with the mild, browsing expression of someone making an entirely reasonable decision in a perfectly normal situation.
"You only speak English, you should know that is not what adjacent means."
Oscar shrugged, his mouth and eyebrows squishing into that familiar, wry oh well expression. "It's close enough." He settled back further, more deliberately, in a way that was clearly a message. His shoulder blades pressed warm and solid against Max's chest. "You're comfortable," he added, by way of explanation.
"I'm a person, not a couch."
"A comfortable person."
Max looked at his laptop. He looked at his list of emails, which had now been partially obscured by the back of Oscar's head. He could still technically reach the keyboard if he worked around Oscar's shoulder, which was not a dignified way to operate but was physically possible. He tried it. Typed three words. Oscar turned slightly to look at what he was doing, in a way that wasn't intrusive exactly, but was distracting nonetheless.
Max typed two more words.
Oscar turned back to the TV. He'd found something — a documentary about something, Max couldn't quite see the screen from this angle. The rain outside had picked up. Oscar's breathing was slow and even against him. Max got through maybe half a paragraph of actual work before he registered, without entirely meaning to, that he'd stopped looking at the screen and was instead looking at the middle distance, chin resting on top of Oscar's head, one hand that had stopped typing now just sitting on Oscar's arm. Doing nothing.
He didn't move it.
Oscar tilted his head slightly, like an acknowledgment, and went back to his documentary.
The emails didn't get answered until that evening. Max decided it hadn't been urgent anyway.
Max had a six o'clock meeting. He had his bag. He had his keys. He had his jacket on, properly, zipped and everything. He had said the words I have to go with his full voice, and said goodbye to the cats who had ignored him as they always did. He was standing at the door, at 5:39pm, with just enough time to make it to his meeting.
Oscar's hand was in his jacket pocket. Max's jacket pocket, to be more precise.
Oscar had reached into his pocket from behind, while Max was putting his shoes on, and captured his hand when Max tried to fish him out. His fingers folded around Max's, warm and loose, like he'd simply needed to make contact with some part of him and the pocket had been the most convenient geography.
"I'll be back around eight," Max said.
"I heard." Oscar's thumb moved, small and absent, across Max's knuckle. "Traffic might be bad."
"It won't be."
"It might be."
"Oscar." Max looked at the door. The door was right there. He had his keys. He had his bag. He had all the necessary components of leaving. "I'm going."
"Okay."
Neither of them moved.
Max became aware that his bag was no longer on his shoulder. At some point — he genuinely couldn't pinpoint when — he'd let it slide down to the floor. He looked at it. He looked at the door.
"You could stay," Oscar said, very casually.
"I have a meeting."
"Okay." A pause. "I'll be here."
"I know you'll be here, you live here."
"Just. Noting it."
Oscar's forehead came to rest against the back of Max's head. Lightly, the way he did a lot of things — like he wasn't entirely sure he was allowed, but also like he'd already done it too many times to pretend it was accidental. Max felt him breathe in, slow, once, and then exhale.
"You're the most clingy person I have ever met," Max said. "In my life. Ever."
"Second most. After you."
"I am not—" Max stopped. "I put my bag down involuntarily."
"You literally set it down. I watched."
"Involuntarily."
Oscar laughed, high-pitched and soft, still behind him, still holding his hand in his pocket, and Max felt it more than heard it — the vibration of it against his back, the way Oscar's shoulders moved. It was a good laugh. Oscar had a good laugh. Max had never told him that, and was not about to start now.
He made it out the door at 6:03.
The setup was good. Max had taken some time with it, getting everything into just the right position so he could play for hours without worrying about his neck or back. He had his headset on. He had a drink. He had the evening, a whole unscheduled evening, which happened rarely enough that he'd decided to spend it doing exactly what he wanted, which was gaming, alone, without interruption.
He'd been at it for forty minutes and he was in a good rhythm, the particular focused groove where his hands knew what to do and his brain was quiet in the specific way it could only get quiet when it had something precise to do, and he was not thinking about anything except what was on the screen.
He heard Oscar come in somewhere behind him. Keys on the counter, the particular sound of Oscar's bag hitting the floor, the opening and closing of the refrigerator. Normal sounds. Apartment sounds. Max didn't take his headset off, but he didn't bother engaging the noise-cancelling either.
He heard Oscar's footsteps move across the room. Toward him. He tracked them in his peripheral awareness the way he always tracked Oscar, automatically, practically, the way you'd track—
Oscar pulled the headset off one ear.
"How long have you been on?" he said, from right behind Max's shoulder.
"Not long," Max said, which was technically accurate depending on your definition.
"Mm." Oscar sounded unconvinced. He stood there for a moment, and Max could feel him looking at the screen, reading the situation, doing the quiet Oscar calculus of whatever he was deciding. Max put the headset ear back on and went back to the game.
Moments later, Oscar was crawling into his lap.
Max just barely managed to pause before his boyfriend's pale limbs were knocking his arms aside. Oscar settled himself across Max's thighs, straddling him and tucking his chin over Max's shoulder.
"Mate," Max said.
"Yeah?" Oscar shifted slightly, getting comfortable. He pressed his nose to Max's neck, inhaling and breathing out in a pleased sigh. It momentarily derailed Max, who had to pause and run his fingers down Oscar's spine in soft, affectionate lines before he remembered that he was saying something.
"This seat fits one person."
"Fits fine," Oscar said. His thighs were pressed between Max's legs and the sides of the chair, making the fat and muscle squish distractingly.
Max forced his eyes away. He looked at his screen, where things were happening that required his attention. He looked back at Oscar, who was nestled comfortably into his shoulder.
"I'm in the middle of a game," Max said.
"I know." Oscar tilted his head slightly, helping his voice escape past Max's collarbone. "Carry on."
Max looked at the screen. He put his headset back on properly. He carried on, in the sense that his hands went back to the keyboard and mouse and resumed the correct inputs, but it was a somewhat degraded version of the focused groove from before because Oscar was sitting in his lap, warm and solid and entirely comfortable, the weight of him distributed across Max's thighs with the easy permanence of someone who had absolutely no plans to move.
Max died twice in the next ten minutes, which was not his average.
"You're distracting me," he said.
"I haven't moved," Oscar said, which was true. He had, if anything, gotten more stationary — he'd angled his head and was now just sitting there, chin pressed into Max's shoulder, looking at the wall in the particular way Oscar sometimes did, like he was doing some private quiet thing inside his own head that didn't require any external input.
Max looked at him for a moment.
On screen, something exploded. Max looked back. He dealt with it.
After a while, Oscar let out a happy noise and melted even further into Max. He lounged there, in Max's chair, in Max's lap, with his head against Max's shoulder and his eyes either on the wall or closed — Max couldn't always tell without looking directly at him, and he was mostly looking at the screen. The apartment was quiet. The game noise came through the headset and stayed there, contained, and outside of it there was just the ambient sound of the apartment and Oscar breathing slowly and the weight of him not going anywhere.
Max's hands knew what to do. His brain went quiet.
He got back into the groove, eventually, and played well for a long stretch, and Oscar sat in his lap the whole time and said nothing else, and it turned out — though Max had no intention of reporting this to anyone — that it was one of the better evenings he'd had in a while.
He didn't examine why.
Oscar fell asleep on him before he finished, which was almost impressive given the chair situation, and Max had to retire earlier than planned because extracting himself was not a realistic option and his perfect, back-and-neck-pain sparing setup had been disrupted by the 68-kilogram man in his lap. Oscar's breathing was very even and Max had stopped pretending he cared about the game awhile ago.
He turned the monitors off. The room went dark.
"Comfortable?" Max said, to Oscar's sleeping face.
Oscar, asleep, somehow managed to communicate that yes, he was. Max couldn't have explained how. He just could.
The paddock in March had a specific quality of light — too bright and totally flat at the same time, the kind of light that made everything look like a photograph of itself and made it very easy to see everything and everyone from a long way away.
Max was aware of this because he'd been aware of where Oscar was from a long way away since approximately the moment they'd both arrived, which was inconvenient, because Oscar was in papaya and Max was in blue and there was a significant amount of physical paddock between those two facts.
This was the correct situation. This was how it was supposed to work. They drove for different teams. In the paddock, in the public-facing hours of a race weekend, they were competitors first and whatever-they-were second, and Max had always been fine with this delineation because he was good at compartmentalizing and because Oscar, to his credit, was equally good at it.
What Oscar was not good at, it turned out, was walking past Max in a paddock corridor without his face doing something.
Luckily, that something wasn't enough to generate a new wave of social media posts about it, but there was a noticeable shift in the region of Oscar's eyes when they found Max's across a stretch of busy walkway — a fraction of a second of something private, gone before it had fully arrived, replaced immediately by the easy professional nod that Oscar gave everyone.
Max gave the nod back. He was also professional.
He thought about it for the next twenty minutes while he talked to the Red Bull media team about his schedule.
The Media Day structure kept them moving in separate orbits — Red Bull had their setup in one section of the paddock, McLaren had theirs further along, and the day was essentially a coordinated rotation of interviews and content and manufacturer obligations that would keep both of them busy and apart for most of it. Max knew this. He had the schedule. It was a perfectly reasonable structure. He'd been doing variations of it since he was seventeen.
He crossed paths with Oscar four times before lunch.
The first time was at the entrance. Max got there first; Oscar came around the corner moments later, already talking to someone from the McLaren marketing team, and then he saw Max and his mouth did a very brief thing that Max clocked from six feet away before Oscar smoothed it back out and gave him the normal paddock greeting: relaxed, friendly, the one that said we're colleagues who get along and absolutely nothing else.
"Morning," Oscar said.
"Hello," Max said back.
They both scanned their passes. The McLaren marketing person was talking. Oscar's arm was approximately four inches from Max's. In any other place, in any room without cameras and paddock staff and the entire infrastructure of Formula One around them, Oscar's arm would have been around Max's shoulders or his waist or in his pocket. Max knew this with the particular certainty of someone who had substantial empirical evidence.
He looked away and went back to his schedule.
The second time was a corridor, both of them moving in opposite directions, both of them with people. They nodded. Oscar's people and Max's people did the thing where they acknowledged each other professionally. Max and Oscar looked at each other for approximately one and a half seconds, which was the correct amount of time for a professional acknowledgement between rival drivers who were on good terms.
Max noticed, as they passed, that Oscar had slowed down by almost half a step. Just enough that the gap closed a fraction before the McLaren staff carried him forward around the corner and out of sight.
Max kept walking. He kept his face on correctly.
The third time was at the back of the media centre, a service corridor, which was technically off the main thoroughfare and therefore had slightly fewer cameras and substantially fewer people. Max had come through here to avoid a backlog near the main entrance. Oscar was apparently doing the same thing from the other direction, and they both turned the corner and found each other, alone, for the first time all day.
They stopped.
It was a narrow corridor. They were perhaps three feet apart.
Oscar looked at him. The professional nod was not deployed. Neither was anything else, exactly — Oscar just looked at him, for a moment, in the way he looked at Max when they were alone in the apartment and he didn't have to be anything in particular. It lasted maybe four seconds.
Then someone came around the far end of the corridor, a photographer from some outlet, and both of them moved aside and Oscar's face recalibrated and the moment was gone. Oscar said something briefly to the cameraman as he passed — friendly, easy, completely fluent in public Oscar — and then they were moving again in opposite directions and the corridor was busy and that was that.
Max put his sunglasses on when he got back outside.
He was in a good mood, technically. He couldn't account for the particular quality of it.
Lando found him twenty minutes later, which was, on balance, not what Max would have chosen.
"You've walked past the McLaren hospitality, like, three times, mate," Lando said, appearing at Max's elbow from a direction Max hadn't anticipated.
"I've been moving around the paddock," Max said. "That's what we all do on media day."
"The McLaren hospitality," Lando repeated, with the specific emphasis of someone who found this very interesting and was not going to let it go. He was wearing his team kit with the top unbuttoned and an expression that was entirely too perceptive for this time of the morning. "Which is, you know. Where we are."
"It's busy. You know everyone is everywhere."
"Max." Lando tilted his head. He said nothing else. He just tilted his head and looked at Max with his arms crossed and the particular smile he used when he thought he already knew something.
"Your press conference is at two," Max said.
"Oscar's out there filming some social media shit right now," Lando said. "Just so you know."
Max looked at him for a moment. Lando smiled wider. Max had known Lando Norris for most of his adult life and there were still moments where he seriously considered whether Lando's whole personality was designed specifically to be structurally difficult to deal with.
"Goodbye, Lando," Max said.
"Friendly advice," Lando called after him, in the specific tone of someone who knew he had landed something and was now graciously stepping back to let it sit.
Max walked away at a normal pace.
He did not walk past the McLaren media wall.
He was aware of it from two hundred feet, which was not the same thing.
The fourth time he crossed paths with Oscar was at the end of the main paddock stretch, late afternoon, the light going golden and flat and the day winding down into the quieter pre-evening rhythm. The formal media obligation was mostly done. People were moving more loosely. Max was heading back towards Red Bull; Oscar was coming from the direction of the McLaren hospitality with a small group of people, and their paths crossed at the junction near the timing screens.
The group with Oscar peeled off in another direction. Oscar and Max ended up stopped at roughly the same point at roughly the same time, which the paddock cameras might have caught and might not have— it didn't particularly matter because they were standing at a normal conversational distance and Oscar's hands were in his own pockets, which was where they were supposed to be, and Max's hands were doing nothing unusual either.
"Good day?" Oscar asked.
"Fine," Max said. "As good as media day ever gets."
"Same." Oscar glanced past Max's shoulder, apparently distracted by the various marketing people walking by. His jaw was in profile and the golden late afternoon light was doing something to it that Max noted and discarded. "Interview with British reporters go okay?"
"Always the same questions."
"Yeah." Oscar looked back at him. Something in his expression was composed and easy and completely normal and also somehow, underneath all of that, faintly amused, like he was aware of the exact distance between them and found the precision of it funny. "See you tomorrow."
"Yeah," Max said.
Oscar nodded once — the professional nod — and started moving.
He went about four steps, and then, without turning around, he said: "Traffic's bad on the way back, by the way. Should leave soon."
Max stopped.
Oscar was already walking away, back in profile, hands in his pockets, disappearing into the paddock foot traffic. He did not look back. There was no reason for him to have said that. There was no practical reason, no logistical reason, no reason that existed in the public architecture of two competitor drivers with separate teams and separate schedules and a professional relationship.
It was a tiny private thing, folded into four words and left on the floor of the paddock between them, and then Oscar was gone and Max was standing by the timing screens alone.
He thought about his hotel room, and the selfie Oscar had sent from a very similar-looking hotel room last night. Although the teams typically tried to book into different accommodations to avoid too many fans accumulating, there was only one hotel near the track.
He got back to his team and did his debrief and did everything correctly and professionally and without incident, and later, much later, when he was back at the hotel in the room that was just his and nothing else, he texted Oscar.
You were right. Traffic was bad.
Three minutes later, his phone lit up.
You left too late, Oscar had sent back. There's no time for me to come over now, we have to sleep.
Max looked at his phone for a while.
Sleep here, he sent eventually.
Oscar typed, and then stopped, and then typed some more. Someone will notice.
We'll set an early alarm.
He sent the text, and it didn't take long before there was a knock at the door.