I open the door with my heart in my throat and find a hotel employee holding a bottle of Dom Pérignon and a professional smile.
"Complimentary champagne for suite 1207?" He checks his card. "Celebrating a birthday?"
"This is 1107." My voice comes out wrecked, hoarse. I clear my throat. "Wrong floor."
"My apologies, sir." He's already retreating, oblivious to the fact that he just aged me fifteen years in ninety seconds.
I take the bottle because my hands need something to hold, shut the door, and set it on the counter without looking at Nico.
The relief is so sharp it borders on nausea—the kind of adrenaline crash that comes after avoiding a collision at two hundred kilometers per hour.
You don't feel grateful. You feel sick.
Nico's door closes. Mine follows. The suite divides itself back into separate territories, and the silence that settles between our walls feels like the most honest conversation we've had all night.
I don't sleep. My body is sore in places I've never been sore before—deep, internal, impossible to overwrite with narrative.
Every time I close my eyes, it replays.
Not the sex itself, though that's there too. What replays is the moment he stopped. Sat back. Asked if I wanted out. The quiet in his voice when he gave me the exit, and the louder quiet of my body refusing to take it.
I stare at the ceiling for four hours, cataloguing sensations I don't want to name, and when dawn finally leaks through the curtains I'm already dressed and gone before Nico's door opens.
Separate breakfasts. I eat in the hotel restaurant; he must eat in the room.
Separate transport to the track—I take the early shuttle with the engineers, arrive when the garage is still half-empty, and throw myself into setup discussions with Karina like the data will save me.
"You look terrible," she says, studying me over her tablet. "Late night?"
"Champagne doesn't agree with me."
"Since when?" She raises an eyebrow but doesn't push, turning back to tire compound analysis.
Tack. Small mercies.
Nico arrives forty minutes later, and I'm reviewing telemetry when I hear his voice greet the mechanics on his side—calm, professional, giving away nothing.
I don't look up, and he doesn't come over. We orbit each other like binary stars locked in mutual avoidance, the gravitational pull undeniable but the distance precisely maintained.
The mechanics feel it and I catch two of them exchanging glances across the invisible line that bisects our workspace. Something has shifted between us. The hostile static that's been disrupting the garage for weeks has changed pitch.
Still charged, still electric, but the aggression has transmuted into something the team can sense without identifying. Hotter. More dangerous.
I avoid Nico's side of the garage like a contamination zone, and he extends the same courtesy. The closest we come to interaction is during the drivers' briefing, where we sit at opposite ends of the table and Henrik's sharp eyes track between us with visible suspicion.
Formation lap before the race. The car settles around me like a second skin, familiar and grounding. The steering wheel's grip, the harness pulling tight across my chest, the vibration of the engine through the seat—all of it tangible, quantifiable, safe.
No ambiguity in a racing car. No feelings to misread.
Just physics and instinct and the binary simplicity of fast or slow.
"Heart rate looking good," Karina says through the radio, surprise threading through her Finnish flatness. "Unusually steady for a formation lap. Whatever you did last night, keep doing it."
I grip the wheel tighter and say nothing.
The lights go out. And something extraordinary happens.
Every corner is precise. Every braking point lands exactly where it should, my foot finding the pedal with a confidence I haven't felt all season.
The usual mental noise—the overthinking, the second-guessing, the constant awareness of Nico's car in my mirrors—has gone quiet. My mind is clear, the car responding to inputs I'm making before I consciously decide them.
I overtake the Ferrari into turn six on lap twelve with a move so clean it surprises me. Two laps later I pick off a McLaren through the chicane, threading a gap that should have been too narrow.
The car feels like an extension of my body rather than a machine I'm wrestling into submission.
By lap thirty I'm running P2 and gaining on the leader. Behind me, Nico is carving through the midfield with the same unnatural precision, his radio traffic crackling with Karina's counterpart noting his exceptional consistency.
I finish P2. Nico finishes P3.
Our best combined result since becoming teammates, and the first time all season Apex has put both cars in the top three.
Henrik is grinning when we file into the debrief room—actually grinning, which on his face looks like a geological event. He claps the chief mechanic on the shoulder hard enough to stagger him.
"This!" he says, pointing at the results board. "This is the car we built! This is what it's capable of when the drivers deliver." He turns to the engineering team. "The downforce balance was excellent. Tire strategy was spot-on, setup changes from Friday clearly paid off."
He looks between me and Nico—who sits four chairs away, still not meeting my eyes—and nods with satisfaction.
"Whatever you two figured out, keep figuring it out!"
I smile and the smile is perfect. The smile is also a lie.
After the debrief, in the media pen, a Sky Sports journalist shoves a microphone toward me. "Soren, P2—your best result this season. What changed?"
"The team's been working incredibly hard on setup development," I say, hitting every rehearsed beat. "We found some rhythm with the car this weekend. Incremental gains compounding into results."
"And the dynamic with Nico? You two seemed almost synchronized out there today."
"Professional respect," I say. "We're both here to win for Apex."
The words taste like copper pennies—hollow, metallic.
I find a quiet corner of the motorhome afterward and sit with my elbows on my knees.
Correlation does not equal causation.
I was drunk. It was a one-time lapse fueled by proximity and alcohol and Julien's idiotic suggestion. The improved performance is a coincidence—better tire strategy, the track suiting our car, a dozen variables that have nothing to do with what happened in that bedroom.
Sluta. Stop spiraling. File it away.
I shove the night into the same vault where I keep the locker room memory, the letter, and every other thing about Nico I refuse to examine. The vault is getting crowded, the door harder to close, but I've had eleven years of practice at not looking too closely at what I've locked inside.
The hotel corridor is quiet when I return, most of the team still celebrating at the track. I swipe into the suite expecting empty rooms and darkness.
Nico is sitting in the living area arms crossed. Expression unreadable except for the deliberate patience in his posture—the body language of a man who's been waiting and has no intention of being avoided.
His eyes find mine the moment I step through the door, steady and unflinching, and I understand immediately that the vault won't hold.
Not this time. Not with him sitting there like a verdict I can't appeal.
"We need to talk," he says, and the calm in his voice is worse than any accusation. "Sit down."