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The sun set in Monaco around nine these days, which was just about the perfect time in Max’s estimation. The long summer days stretched out relentlessly to make up for the time he had missed at home, and the cats enjoyed it, to be sure, the extra time climbing all over his lap as if to scent him lest he leave again. And with all the weeks he was away, Max did enjoy the stolen leisure between race weeks, if only in snatches of a few more golden hours at a time.
Today, he wasn’t at home, and the cats were likely wreaking havoc in the apartment without anyone to bother.
He’d gone directly here from the paddock, stripped his team kit off in favor of comfortable summerwear, and sent most everyone home as the rest of the race played out without him on the tablet screen. The sun was baking; he had had half a mind to slather on sunscreen, but one thing after another drew his attention, and by the end of it, Max had huddled under the large umbrella, eyes glued to the small screen, and felt the force of the Riviera’s summer sun blast at him with radiant heat.
“Jeetje,” he’d muttered at some point. It became his favorite expression over the next two hours, and by the end of it, Max decided that enough was enough.
He was gracious enough to send a congratulatory message under the Mercedes’s Instagram account, and that was about the end of his patience.
Overhead, the seabirds flew toward the setting sun. They had landed on his yacht earlier, bold as they ever were, but did not give him much trouble. They were mostly watching, their eyes keen in search of prey, their beaks ever ready to lift open, their strong wings outstretched to coast on air streams like the back of a well-built car. Which certainly wasn’t his car today, or a lot of people’s cars, for that matter—but that wasn’t the point.
The point was that Max didn’t feel much like going back in just yet.
The waves crashed against the bow of his boat. He wasn’t too far from the harbor; Monaco hummed in the distance, the excitement of the weekend having already reached its fever pitch and was now coming down slowly, blissfully. The drones of engines sometimes pierced through the sound of the waves, but Max paid them no mind and continued to nurse his beer.
And then the engine sound drew closer, and from his perch by the upper deck railing, Max spotted a very familiar motorboat drawing into focus, and a familiar face hidden behind sunglasses.
They looked at each other for a while, the length of a small pool between them. Finally, George broke the silence. “Permission to come aboard, captain?”
“Permission denied.”
“Max, really.” George maneuvered the motorboat skillfully and came up alongside the stern. “Help me up.”
Max glanced down, eyes half-lidded. He wasn’t too stable on his feet after the afternoon’s unplanned solo sports bar adventure, but he managed the stairs down, walking backwards until both of his feet were leveled. The planks were warm under his feet. He reached for George’s arm, offering his own for George’s hand, and pulled him across the rest of the distance.
“Hello, you,” George said.
George looked exhausted. Max wasn’t sure when was the last race he had seen George in any other mood. George pulled together well for media day, headed into qualifying with optimism, held onto his calm, cautious hope through the media circus before the race, and in whatever crumpled heap he’d found himself in at the end of a disastrous run, would still muster up the stiff upper lip and perform for the vultures in the post-race interviews. And he would look this way afterwards, when the curtains were down, when Max was there to see it.
In the setting sun, George seemed held together by thin threads. When Max tangled his hands in George’s hair, he thought he might snap them. And thought about himself, the strings that held him together, the way he had severed them without a thought so many times before, and how this time they held tenuously, the two of them once more a matched set.
“Thank you for offering me to move up positions.” Their legs dangled from the stern, trailing into the cold water. George inhaled deeply, ocean air whisking away locks of his hair. “Guess it didn’t matter so much.”
“That was fucked.”
“Yeah. Yours, too.” George eyed him, the harsh lines around his mouth softening. “Still don’t believe in luck?”
What could Max say to that? Because whatever it was, this long string of complete and utter fuck-ups for them both since the season started, could completely be explained away logically. Mistakes happen. Engines fail. Science had its limits. Human errors, as it were, were aplenty. But George’s run—George’s run had been, without exaggeration, monumentally fucked, as if everything that could possibly go wrong did, and Max understood statistics, to a point, but even he couldn't help giving it a second thought.
But he wasn’t going to tell George that. Max continued to track the seagulls and the cormorants and watched them in their formations, and George finally commented, breaking the silence, “You’re into augury now, too.”
“The what?”
“Telling omens by birds.” The ghost of a smile passed through George’s face. “What? I can watch documentaries too.”
"I don't know what it means," Max replied. He watched the cormorants trace a long, lazy arc over the water, black shapes against the bruising sky. "I never got that far in the documentary. Or maybe it wasn’t even the same documentary you watched.”
George laughed, low and tired. "Helpful."
“Don’t ask me to read entrails either.” Max turned his palm upward between them, and George's fingers found their way into the gaps without being asked, the way water finds the cracks in stone. Max looked at their hands for a moment and didn't say anything about it.
The sun had gone fully now, the last of the gold sinking below the headland. Monaco's lights began to come on in its absence, scattered like jewels hung on gold chains along the hillside. The water moved gently beneath the hull. Max could feel George's shoulder against his own, the familiar weight of him, and breathed.
He could smell George’s shampoo. George had stopped in his apartment, cleaned up, and driven the motorboat out here.
“How did you know where I was?”
"You had a shit day too," George said, not a question. “I drove around for a while. Figured I’d find you here.”
“To lick my wounds? Thoughtful, schat. You can start now, don’t be a stranger.”
George huffed with wounded innocence. “To check in, though I knew your mind would go a certain way—”
“You could have just texted.”
“Figured you wouldn’t be checking your phone either.” George bit his lower lip, then pinched Max’s wrist without untangling their hands. “You’re too calm. It makes me nervous.”
Max considered this. He thought about the race, that gutting feeling that came with a car that simply would not do what he asked of it, not with any amount of skill or will or anger. He thought about watching on the tablet as everything unraveled for George in the final laps and feeling it in his chest like a sympathetic bruise.
And when he hurt, he had often—what did George say—lashed out with unnecessary anger and borderline violence.
Except for today. Today, he was just numb, the way George had admitted he felt. He had seen his own disbelief mirrored on George’s face on the little screen. Ruefully, Max replied, “Expecting Mad Max?”
“It wouldn’t be unwarranted, I’d be the first to admit that.”
“It wouldn’t be unwarranted for you to crash out either.”
“Apparently that’s not something I’m allowed to do, ever,” George said tightly. “Or to underreact—then I’m complacent and a pushover. So damned if I do and damned if I don’t—I’m just done caring at this point.”
“You are kind of a pushover,” Max said, and pushed George flat on his back. “And an absolutely terrible liar.”
Their kiss was heated, violent, sure to leave their lips stinging. It tasted of George’s impotent rage, of his own helpless fury, and they were the native speakers of this shared tongue, and he heard all that George had not said and would not say.
He understood. He wished he didn’t.
But words between them had never been quite necessary.
They broke apart, their grips bruising on each other. The low-level sunburn throbbed on his shoulders and back. George’s face released its lines one by one, the fatigue chased out by their exertion. But that was about all the energy they had left; almost any other time, they would have torn the rest of the clothing from each other, and George’s little linen shorts would join the fish at the bottom of the shallow sea in short order. But George’s anger burned out quickly, the last burst of a log before it settled into its embers’ glow. Around them, the cormorants circled back, silent when not in their breeding season. Dark shapes, like ink blots against a charcoal backdrop, moving with absolute certainty in their ability to rely on their own wings to keep them aloft. He watched George track them, head tipping back slightly.
"What do the birds say, do you think?” George swallowed. “If you had to guess.”
Max looked up. The first stars were coming through, faint at the edges of the sky. He thought about it for a long, considered moment, running through the steps he would take if it were a race strategy—what do I have, what do I know, what do the numbers say—and arrived at the same answer he always arrived at when the numbers weren't enough.
“I don't know,” he said. “And who gives a fuck what they say.”
George was quiet.
“There's no other way through it,” Max said. “You already know this. You just get back in the car.”
“That's what you said in Montreal. I got back into the car, and then what. The same fucking shit. The same—the gods, or luck, or whatever else.” George’s breath came out shuddered. “I’m tired. I’m so angry, but I’m too tired to be angry. Max, aren’t you tired?”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m here and not there.” Max shifted, pressing his mouth briefly to the top of George's head, the soft brown hair warm from the day's sun. He felt George go still for just a moment, the held breath of it, the quick release George couldn’t quite suppress. “Take a break tonight. And then get angry again and race the next one. Then the next.”
“Last time you crashed into me in Spain.”
“It’s Barcelona next, not Madrid.”
“Right. You only barely tapped me in Barcelona. A little kiss on the track, wasn’t it.”
Max’s lips twitched. “If you want, princess, I’ll buy you a bird and teach it to sing 'God Save the King' to you. Your personal good luck charm.”
George exhaled, long and slow, the tension in his shoulders still set even supine. Max followed where George’s gaze had gone and was mildly surprised to find the sky had already deepened significantly, although the light of Monaco stained the darkness like a blur at the corner of his eyes.
He knew there were more stars there, constellations and the whole bright wash of the Milky Way, but they were hidden behind the light, which sounded particularly philosophical and somewhat embarrassing, and Max didn’t share the thought. He’d already said his fair share of ridiculous things to George, and each time, they inched closer to what their star had divined, then quickly looked away again.
It was never the right time.
And Max didn’t have much time to reflect on that, nor the energy, come to think of it.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked, more to dispel the thought from his mind than for anything else.
“Lando,” George replied, which got Max’s hackles raised immediately.
He was almost sorry he asked. “Why the fuck are you thinking about him now?” When you’re here with me, went the unspoken words. But George only inched toward him, their legs fully pressed alongside each other, and Max couldn’t help but to draw George closer still, his arm fully around George’s back, George’s head pillowed on his shoulder as if this were their default pose.
Max didn't mind it one bit. The knot in his stomach loosened little by little with each lungful of George's scent. It was borderline ridiculous how effective it was at this particular job.
“He snitched on me,” George sniffed and shifted into the embrace. “If he didn’t DNF, I would have blown up his phone. Literally.”
“There’s that anger and violence I so love.” A slip that he couldn’t retract. It sat between them, a seabird on the waves, still withstanding all that the ocean had to throw at it.
“You're very annoying,” George managed in a small voice, but squeezed his fingers. “I hate you.”
“No you don’t.”
“Deeply, profoundly annoying. I mean it.”
“George.”
“What.”
“Shut up and look at the stars.”
“I can’t see any,” George complained.
“Look harder, and be quiet.”
Their hands were still tangled between them on the warm deck. Above them, the last of the cormorants disappeared into the dark, their grand forms swallowed by the sky. He thought of the flight of the birds, their inevitable voyage into the unknown, then of the season, the losses—the distance still to run for them both.
The water rocked beneath them, the ocean's steady heartbeats. The seabird maintained its position, bobbing with the waves, its head above water.
“Oh, look!” George cried softly and tugged on Max’s hand. “I think that’s Venus right there.”