Chapter Text
“I’m heading out,” Max calls into the apartment, wrestling with his left shoe.
Charles emerges from the guest room, still talking on the phone in rapid Italian. He says something to the other person on the line, then lowers the phone and covers the speaker with one hand. His gaze catches on the bag sitting by the door.
“Gonna spend the weekend at the track, then?”
Max finally manages to get the shoe on. “Yeah. Testing’s gonna take the whole Saturday for sure.” He stands, shouldering his backpack.
He turns towards Charles to say goodbye, but before he can get a word out, Charles cups a hand against the side of his jaw, leans in and presses a quick, heartfelt kiss to his lips, careful enough not to jostle the black cap off his head.
“Bye, champion. Text me at the airport, yeah?”
And then he’s gone again, already resuming the phone call as he disappears back down the hall.
Max stays rooted by the door, staring after him wide-eyed.
He blinks.
They’ve never kissed goodbye before. Or hello, for that matter. They’re not usually like that — not big on PDA or all that domestic shit.
Max’s fingers tighten around the strap of his backpack.
From somewhere deeper in the apartment, Charles laughs at something the person on the phone says — warm and distracted and completely normal, like he hadn’t just short-circuited Max’s entire nervous system on the way past.
Max touches his mouth.
What the fuck.
His brain scrambles uselessly for context. Maybe Charles hadn’t even realized he’d done it. Maybe all Monegasques were supposed to be clinically insane about affection and Max had somehow missed that memo.
Still.
Charles had held his face when he did it.
Not rushed. Not careless. Just easy and familiar.
Max’s chest feels weirdly tight.
He glances down the hallway again. Charles is pacing now, one hand shoved into the pocket of his sweats while he talks, voice fading in and out between Italian and English. Completely unfazed.
“Okay,” he mutters to himself. “Okay, cool. Whatever.”
He grabs his suitcase handle and heads for the door before he can embarrass himself by standing there another ten minutes.
The elevator ride down is agony.
By the time he reaches the lobby, he’s checked his phone three times without actually reading anything on it. His reflection in the mirrored walls looks vaguely like he’s been electrocuted. Wide-eyed and frazzled.
Because the thing is—
It wasn’t the kiss.
Well. It was the kiss.
But mostly it was that Charles had done it so naturally, like this was something they’d always done. Like Max belonged to him in those tiny, thoughtless ways people only did after years and years of living together. A hand on the jaw. A kiss goodbye. Text me when you get there.
Domestic.
Dangerously domestic.
Max drops his head back against the elevator wall with a groan.
He is so unbelievably fucked.
By the time Max flies back from the circuit , he’s managed to convince himself the kiss had meant absolutely nothing.
In the sense that— people kiss each other all the time.
Like, when they’re in a relationship. Obviously.
That’s completely normal. Hell, they’ve kissed each other a million times at home.
Usually under slightly…different circumstances, but that’s beside the point.
And, let’s not kid ourselves, they’d had their fair share of make-out sessions in public. Several times, actually. Hidden away from everyone else in quiet corners of paddocks and hotel hallways, fast and heated and stupidly reckless. The kind of kisses that left them both looking like a flushed mess afterwards, smirking, pretending they hadn’t nearly gotten caught.
But that had all felt different — unpredictable, charged, urgent.
The goodbye kiss hadn’t.
Charles had done it automatically. There was no buildup, just easy affection. Like it was already instinct to reach for Max on the way out the door. Like kissing him goodbye was as natural as grabbing his keys or checking his phone.
Max hates how much that affects him.
Especially because they haven’t actually talked about what being together means yet. There’d been no dramatic conversation, no list of expectations. They’d crossed some invisible line and just… kept moving afterward.
And maybe Charles is handling it normally.
Meanwhile Max spent three days at his own apartment staring at the ceiling like a fucking idiot because his boyfriend kissed him goodbye too sweetly.
So he does the mature thing and avoids thinking about it entirely. Which would be easier to believe if his brain didn’t insist on replaying the moment every six minutes…
They barely see each other before the next race. Max, for the most part, stays at his own apartment, and he’s not avoiding Charles because that would be ridiculous.
It just…makes more sense logistically.
None of that has anything to do with the fact that every time he thinks about Charles kissing him goodbye like they’ve been together for years, Max temporarily loses the ability to form a coherent thought.
Besides, they still text constantly.
Charles sends him silly pictures of Leo and accuses him of bribing his dog with treats because he won’t listen to anyone else anymore. Max replies with laughing emojis and tells him to stop being jealous. Charles calls him in traffic to complain about e-scooters on the road. Max sends him stupid Instagram reels at two in the morning. Everything is exactly the same as it’s always been.
Except now every interaction feels threaded through with something nerve-wrackingly new.
Thursday night Charles texted him:
CH: miss u❤️
Max had stared at the message for so long his screen turned off. He ended up too mortified to reply.
Because Charles has always been affectionate, in his own way. Physical. Warm. Constantly reaching for people he cares about. A hand on Max’s shoulder, fingers in his hair, leaning into his space without a second thought.
But it’s different now. Now Max knows what it means when Charles reaches out for him.
And worse — Charles seems completely unaffected by this revelation.
Like he’s settled into their relationship effortlessly while Max is still internally reacting to every small piece of intimacy like he’s been hit over the head with it.
For nearly a week, Max manages to strategically postpone the inevitable.
And then media day arrives.