The first evening ends with careful distance.
After dinner, Nico walks me to the guest room like a host fulfilling an obligation, lingers at the doorway for half a second too long, then disappears with a quiet boa noite that carries the weight of everything we can't do here.
I listen to his footsteps fade, the creak of his bedroom door, the muffled Portuguese of his parents saying goodnight through walls too thin for anything but innocence.
I lie awake cataloguing the ways this house dismantles me. The photo in the hallway of twelve-year-old Nico with his arm slung around twelve-year-old me, both mid-laugh, gap-toothed and sunburnt.
Camila slipping extra pão de queijo onto my plate when she thought I wasn't looking. Tomás calling me Sorenzinho like I didn't spend eleven years earning the right to be forgotten.
The second day is worse.
Nico and I orbit each other through the narrow house with the hyper-awareness of two people pretending proximity means nothing. He reaches past me for a coffee mug and his forearm grazes mine; neither of us acknowledges it, and neither of us moves away.
In the hallway, we turn a corner at the same time and his hand catches my hip to steady the collision—two seconds of contact that leave a thumbprint of heat through my shirt.
By midday, the tension has its own pulse. Nico is showing me old photos in the living room—albums Camila insisted we look through—and he leans close to point at something, and our faces end up inches apart.
His eyes drop to my mouth. I can feel the heat off his skin, smell the cedar and clean sweat that is specifically him, and my body tilts forward before my brain authorises the motion. Neither of us closes the gap. The album sits open between us like a prop we've both forgotten.
On the second afternoon, Tomás and Camila leave for the market. The door closes, gravel crunches under tires, and the house goes quiet in a way that fills every room like a change in pressure.
Nico is in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, watching me. "They'll be an hour," he says. Neutral. Informational. His jaw is tight. “You need anything?” Trying to play it cool.
I cross the room in three steps and pull him inside the guest room by the shirt.
The kiss is different here—urgent but hushed, hyperaware of every creak. My back hits the guest room wall and Nico presses flush against me, one hand braced beside my head, the other gripping my hip hard enough to bruise.
I can feel him through his shorts—thick and hot and straining against fabric—and the contact jolts straight to my cock, makes my hips roll forward, grinding against him.
Tenderness keeps slipping through despite my best efforts. His thumb traces the hinge of my jaw. My fingers find the back of his neck and stay too long, cradling instead of gripping. I catch myself and fist his hair, yanking his head back, biting the tendon of his throat hard enough to pull a groan that vibrates against my teeth.
His response is to drop to his knees.
My spine locks against the wall. His hands hook into my waistband and drag my shorts down in one motion, freeing my cock—flushed, rigid, leaking at the tip. He looks up at me with dark steady eyes, wraps one hand around the base, and takes me into his mouth without preamble.
Wet heat engulfs the head first, tongue pressing flat against the underside as his lips stretch around the shaft, and the sensation is so immediate my skull cracks back against plaster. One hand fists in his hair. The other clamps over my own mouth because the sound building in my throat would carry through every wall.
He works me with devastating precision—slow, deep strokes to the back of his throat, cheeks hollowing on the pull-back, tongue swirling over the slit at the tip. The obscene wet sounds fill the quiet room.
My thighs tremble. The pressure coils low and urgent, and when he swallows around me—throat constricting, tight muscle working the head—my vision whites at the edges and a moan escapes my palm, guttural and wrecked.
"Fan—Nico—" His name comes out broken. His free hand pins my hip to the wall, keeping the pace his. Always his. I'm shaking, fingers twisted in his dark curls, watching his lips stretched around me—swollen, glistening—and the visual alone nearly finishes me.
Then the front door opens.
Keys in the lock first—the distinct metallic scrape that freezes us both mid-breath. Camila's voice fills the entryway:
“Boys!” she calls through the whole house. “Have you seen my wallet?” Her sandals slap against tile as she moves through the house. The guest room is twelve feet from the hallway. The door is open.
We scramble apart. Nico is on his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, eyes wide. I'm hauling my shorts up with fingers that refuse to cooperate, my cock still aching, my pulse so loud I'm certain she can hear it.
"Nico? Sorenzinho?" Closer now. Her voice carries the casual warmth of someone with no reason to suspect anything. "Onde vocês estão?"
"Living room, Mamãe!" Nico calls back, his voice impossibly steady, already moving—out the guest room, down the hallway, intercepting her before she rounds the corner. “We were, uh, looking at trophies, and, yeah… Isn’t that your wallet?”
I hear Camila laugh, hear her grab the wallet from the counter and kiss his cheek on the way out.
The door closes again. The car starts again.
I'm still leaning against the guest room wall with my shorts barely fastened and my hands shaking. The absurdity of it—two twenty-eight-year-old Formula 1 drivers panicking in his parents' house—breaks something open.
I laugh. Not the performed laugh I give cameras. A real one, helpless and startled, spilling out before I can catch it.
Nico reappears in the doorway and stares at me like he's witnessing something impossible. The look on his face does something dangerous to my chest—soft, unguarded, the same expression he wore when I made him laugh at twelve.
He crosses to me. His hand comes up and cups the side of my face—gentle, deliberate, nothing like the urgency from before. His thumb traces my cheekbone.
He leans in to kiss me. Not the desperate, hungry collision of ten minutes ago. Something quieter. Something that means.
I turn my head. His mouth grazes my jaw instead, and I feel the exact moment he goes still.
"Don't." My voice comes out rougher than I intend. I'm still looking at the wall, unable to meet his eyes because what's in them will undo me. "That's not—We can't do that."
"Do what." Flat. Careful. His hand hasn't left my face.
"Whatever that was about to be." I force myself to meet his gaze, and the steadiness costs me everything. "That's not what this is. It can't be."
His hand drops. The absence is immediate and violent.
"Right," he says. Something shutters behind his expression—quick and practised, the familiar architecture of someone who learned young how to survive a closed door. "The rules."
He walks out without looking back, and I stand there with the taste of him still on my lips and the knowledge—certain and corrosive—that what I just killed was the first real thing either of us has allowed in eleven years.
The rest of the evening passes in silence. Not hostile. Worse. Polite.
At dinner, Camila asks if everything is alright, and Nico smiles and says we're tired from the heat. His voice is perfect. His eyes are somewhere I can't reach. I sit at their table, surrounded by warmth I don't deserve, and understand with brutal clarity that I have just guaranteed the distance I'm terrified of.