#day trips from melbourne
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Minibus 10-Passenger Day Trips
Private Day Trips in Melbourne Melbourne with its brilliant culture and stunning landscapes, offers a range of day trip opportunities perfect for groups. Hiring a 10-passenger minibus with a driver is an ideal way to explore comfortably and conveniently. From the breathtaking Great Ocean Road to the serene Yarra Valley, and scenic Mornington Peninsula there is something for everyone! Why Choose…
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victoriandaytours · 7 months ago
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Sip and Savour: Your Guide to Winery Tours of Victorian from Melbourne
For wine enthusiasts, Victoria's wine regions provide a brilliant sanctuary. These regions incorporate some of Australia's best wineries, and they are just a short drive from Melbourne.
To give a memorable and enjoyable tour, like Lake Mountain Day Snow Trips from Melbourne, this guide will help you find the best Victorian wineries in Melbourne. Whether you're a carefully prepared wine lover or a curious fledgling, these trips offer the ideal combination of relaxation and excitement.
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Best Wine Regions to Explore
Victoria flaunts a few truly good wine regions. Each gives unique flavours and experiences. These are the three best Victorian winery tours from Melbourne you shouldn't disregard:
Mornington Peninsula
The Mornington Peninsula is renowned for its lovely coastal scenery and cool climate. The visitors have
Diverse Wineries: From store family-owned vineyards to larger estates, there is a wide range of types to find.
Pinot Noir and Chardonnay: Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are two grape assortments that twist around here, producing probably the best wines in the nation.
Gourmet Dining: Numerous wineries have nearby cafés serving fine meals matched with their wines.
Yarra Valley
The Yarra Valley is popular for its panoramic scenery and fine wines and is one of Victoria's most prominent wine regions. Highlights include:
Sparkling Wines: Top-notch sparkling wines are something the Yarra Valley works to produce.
Tasting Experiences with Wine: Numerous basement entryways give exhaustive tasting meetings.
Proximity to Melbourne: It's ideal for a day trip since it's just an hour from Melbourne.
Macedon Ranges
The Macedon Ranges are a secret fortune in Victoria's wine region with its cool climate, wines, and breathtaking scenery. Here are a portion of the principal attractions:
Vineyards at High Altitude: These produce unique and refined wines.
Varietal Diversity: There is an immense selection of wines to attempt, from Riesling to Shiraz.
Charming Villages: Find local markets and artisan shops in Charming Villages.
You should consider these three best Victorian winery tours from Melbourne.
Benefits of Going with a Tour Guide to the Wineries
There are many benefits to choosing to partake in a guided tour for your winery visits. It's really smart on account of the accompanying:
Expert Knowledge: Tour guides offer insightful information on the region's experiences, wine-production processes, and distinctive characteristics of every winery. Accordingly, your experience will be more extravagant and enjoyable.
Travel Stress-Free: A tour guide will assist you with loosening up and concentrating on valuing the wine. By taking care of transportation, scheduling, and navigation logistics, a wonderful and stress-free excursion is ensured.
Exclusive Tour Access: Wine tours habitually have unique access to wineries that are checkpoints for the general public. Private Tastings, vineyard tours, and winemaker meetings could fall under this class.
Conclusion
Go on Victorian winery tours from Melbourne for a phenomenal chance to encounter the best wines from the area and take in the breathtaking scenery.
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Enjoy Yarra Valley Winery: Contact Well-known Wine Tour Operator!
If anyone is planning for a short trip, they can visit Yarra Vally Winery for an unforgettable wine-tasting experience. In the picturesque Yarra Valley, Simply, find a trusted and well-known wine tour operator with a reputation for excellence.
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Contact them and ask for a suggestion for a private or group trip for whole-day or half-day trips from Melbourne to experience the traditional wine making and tasting in the Yarra Valley and Mornington Peninsula wineries.
Benefits of Contacting Specialised Wine Tour Operators:
Well-established operators of wine-tasting tours usually have extensive knowledge of the region, including the wines, winemakers, and the history of the wineries visited. 
Whether anyone opts for a day tour from Melbourne or chooses to spend a few days exploring the Yarra Valley locally, these experienced service operators ensure a memorable tour experience for not only Australian citizens but also arrange the most pleasing tour for foreigners with experienced guides.
In addition to their scheduled day tours, they offer private group tours, allowing guests to customize their experience according to their preferences and needs.
Similarly, on their full-day Yarra Valley wine tour, guests can expect to visit three wineries or cellar doors, including a lunch in a specialised restaurant paired with a glass of wine at Rochford Wines, and complete the day with a visit to the Yarra Valley Chocolaterie. They also encourage those looking to expand their palate with an optional Gin tasting.
Their customer care executives and skilled staff take care of their guests with the highest level of comfort. They help to make a memorable day by exploring the scenic Yarra Valley just an hour's drive from Melbourne.
Find a Trusted Wine Tour Organiser Locally:
Find some well-known wine tour organisers locally and examine their trustworthiness and level of client satisfaction by reading reviews and testimonials from their clientele. 
Look for operators that employ trained staff who have experience and expertise in handling guests intelligently, manage tours smoothly, and have adequate knowledge about the wine regions they cover. 
To ensure a customised experience, confirm if they provide half-day or full-day trips for small groups as well as private parties.
Finally, select the right organiser, book a tour for your upcoming outing, and experience an unparalleled wine-tasting adventure in one of Australia's most renowned wine regions.
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no-144444 · 3 months ago
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guilt tripping- o.piastri
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summary: oscar asks something of you that you know you can't do. you do it anyway and it ends in you two almost breaking up. almost.
pairing: oscar piastri x fem! chronic illness! reader
a/n: hey yall, I just broke two ribs (lol) and got diagnosed with a chronic illness (lmao) so I might not be posting as frequently- just dealing with it physically and mentally so yah 😹
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“I don’t know if I can go,” you sighed, feeling even worse. 
“That’s alright,” he assured you, but you could hear the way his excitement depleted and his mood lowered. 
“M-maybe I can work something out, I don’t want to leave you alone,” your guilt grew everyday, this wasn’t healthy for either of you. 
“I don’t want you over-exerting yourself,” he spoke softly into the phone. “I’ll just ask mum if she has any friends that want to go or something. She always brings a million people with her.”
“I don’t want to leave you hanging Oscar. Melbourne is a big race. I’d be happy to come over like a week before, and then come to the race once I’ve had a few days to heal,” you bargained. A 22 hour connecting flight was not something you’d ever wanted to do. You couldn’t do it. You knew the pain would be too bad, yet you still stood there, offering it anyway. “And then I’d come for the race on Sunday, or just small bits on all the days.”
“Really?” his voice picked up, excited now. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure Osc, I love seeing you race,” your smile was more of a grimace than anything, but still, the guilt in your chest lessened as you listened to Oscar speak animatedly about the race weekend, while your anxiety ran through the roof. You couldn’t do all the things he wanted you to do, you never could. This had been a problem at the beginning of your relationship, every time he’d plan a date that wasn’t dinner or a movie, you’d have to break the news that a 15 kilometre hike wasn’t something you’d be able to do on a whim. Things like that took planning, physio, and preparation. Your chronic illness was no joke, and had limited you since you were a teenager. In the past few years he’d gotten much better at everything, from helping you with your physio exercises, attending pilates classes with you, knowing what to do on bad pain days, and always looking out for you in public. You knew he was just getting away with himself, and you didn't want to disappoint, so you agreed to it all, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t be a bad week of pain or flare-ups wise. 
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You got into Melbourne and sobbed when you got in the car. Thankfully, it was Hattie picking you up, so she just held your hand as you silently cried, the joint and too much to bear. You went straight to bed as Hattie explained to the rest of the house that you were exhausted, and Oscar took it at face value. You usually get extremely tired after long days, and you’d just had a 22-hour day of travel. 
“I’ll go check on her-” he started, desperate to see you but Hattie cut him off. 
“NO!” she squeaked, trying to not sound suspicious. Oscar raised an eyebrow. “She’s really tired and she’s already gone to sleep.”
“Yeah, well I’m tired so I’m going to bed,” he explained, stretching then yawning. 
“Osc,” Hattie sighed, knowing she had to tell him. “She’s not… alright. She can’t do 22 hour travel days like you or I can. She has Lupus and she’s still trying to figure out her medication, so it hurts all the time. She cried from the airport to here, all to support you because you asked her to, and she feels guilty every single time she can’t say yes. She’s done real damage to herself by coming here. I want you to understand that, do you understand that?” 
Oscar nodded, because the other option was breaking down into tears. Yes, he’d felt guilty that he couldn’t be there to take care of you while travelling, and he knew he was asking a lot of you when he asked. The guilt settled deep in his stomach and made him nauseous, but still he continued on to his bedroom where you were sleeping peacefully. He could see the puffy eyes, the red nose, the open bottles of medication on the nightstand. He wrapped an arm around your waist, another in your hair and pulled you as close as possible, whispering teary sorrys into your ear. 
When you woke up the next morning, you knew what you had to do. This wasn’t fair on either of you, and you needed to make a change. You quickly (but silently) got up, and started to leave the room, but Oscar grabbed ahold of your hand before you could leave. 
“Please don’t sneak out on me,” he begged, sitting up. He looked wrecked, puffy eyes, red rose- had he been crying? God, had you made him cry? 
“Osc, what’s wrong?” you asked, concern clear as day on your face as you cupped his face with your hands.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his voice breaking. “I knew I was asking too much when I asked you to come here, I’m so sorry.”
Your heart tightened in your chest. “Osc, I’m alright, I was just tired last night and-”
“Hattie told me,” his voice was deep, deeper than usual, and he pressed a gentle kiss to your hand. “And I’m so sorry.”
“Osc, I could’ve said no if I didn’t think I was able for it,” you tried to reassure him but he shook his head. 
“Y/n, you did say no and I didn’t take it as an answer,” he scoffed. 
You were stunned into silence. “I think we need to have a talk about us, Osc.”
He nodded, taking your hands in his. 
“This isn’t fair on you. I know I can't control my illness, and neither can you. It sucks, but it’s a fact. I wish I could be there for every single race and cheer you on with the other girls, but I can’t. It’s not in the cards for me right now, and I don’t know when it will be. Oscar, I love you so much, and you’ve been with me through everything and I know you deserve someone who can always be there for you, and I’m not that person right now. I love you but I know it’s not enough,” You finally looked at him and he was biting his lip as tears streamed down his cheeks. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head and stood up, dropping your hands as he paced his bedroom. “You know how much I love you, don’t you?” he asked and you nodded as you held back more tears. “So you know that I still feel your support even when we’re in different time zones or on different continents, right? You know that I value you being in as little pain as possible more than being at the barricade after a race, right? You know that I fucking love you more than I love racing, right? Y/n, I’ve been here the entire time, since we were 14 years old. You’re the reason I get in the car, you make me better, all the time it’s just you. I plan on being with you for my whole life, Y/n. I want to be there for everything. I plan to sit there through every appointment about medication until you find the one that actually helps you, I plan on being there for every day where you don’t feel up to it, I plan on being there for you, always. I never want to let go of you, and yeah, it is nice to be able to see you after a race, and I know that because fucking facetime exists. If you still want to break up because I fucked up by asking you to come here, go ahead, but don’t ever think that I’m without because I’m with you. I am so in love with you, Y/n. I mean it. I want to marry you one day, I want a family with you, I want to be old with you so we get to reminisce on the good ol’ days and make some more while we have time. ‘The good ol’ days’ will be the days I spend with you. More than any race win, more than any trophy, or than anything. My favourite part about a race weekend is coming home because I know no matter what my result was, you’ll be there with open arms, loving me anyways. You’re more than enough for me.”
You crossed the room and wrapped your arms around him, crying into his hoodie as he held you. “I love you too.”
After a few moments of both of you calming down, he finally spoke. “Can you forgive me for being such an asshole?” he asked, wiping his eyes. 
You nodded, a small smile on your face. “I can, can you forgive me for being such an idiot?”
He chuckled. “You’re no idiot,” he picked you up and gently placed you back on the bed lying beside you. “I love you.” 
“I love you too.”
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navigation for my blog :) (masterlist)
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magics-neptunes-things · 2 months ago
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Struck By Love
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Hi guys!
I received a lot of really nice comments about my first fic with Steph and some of you wanted a second part of this story, so here it is :)
Please enjoy ♥
And Happy New Year!
TW : Injury
Chapter Before
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You probably never have been so happy in your life until now. After Emily and Kat’s wedding, you came back to London to begin your life again. It was nice to see your family back in Australia, but you must admit that you were eager to come back home. Like this you will be able to see Steph again, because the girl went back to her family in Melbourne to finish her trip here.
You didn’t take your ticket the same day as Steph, you were on the plane with Caitlin, Katie and Kyra instead. Hayley is already back in London at this time. Steph is too, but you decided that she won’t come to greet you. As you said it will have her Arsenal teammates, so it was better that way.
In January, you took her to several dates in London, enjoying being able to have quality time with her. You went to restaurants, for some walks with Calvin and you even went ice skating together.
You love having time with her, getting to know her better. You have been very honest with her about the depth and the reality of your feelings for her since the beginning, and she doesn’t seem scared about it. Which is a real relief, even if you don’t expect anything from her at any time.
You are happy to just wait for her and you let her take the lead about what she’s ready to do. The dynamic works great like this and you are secretly very happy to see that you weren’t the only one eager to have moments together. When you don’t propose to see her for two days in a row, Steph asks you if you are free the same day.
You helped her to find a flat and she finally has found something with a garden for Calvin and not far from Arsenal’s training centre. It’s closer to your flat than where she was leaving before, too.
On the fifth date, you had this conversation about knowing what the other wants about your relationship and even if no one asked the other to be her girlfriend formally, you were both clear about the fact that you will be exclusive. It was obvious for you, but Steph needed reassurance, and you were happy to give it to her.
Like if you would be able to look at someone else anyway.
There are times where you can’t see each other for almost four days because of your schedule and the games, and it’s always a little hard when it is happening. It’s the case today.
You left for Manchester on Friday to play Saturday against United and Steph left with Arsenal on Saturday to play against Brighton & Hove Albion on Sunday. You had your day off on Sunday, so you were able to watch Steph’s game, but you haven’t seen her for real since Thursday and it’s way too long for your liking.
It seems that is the case for Steph too, the girl is literally rushing to get her things in her bag and be able to leave the training centre. She almost doesn’t take the time to answer Kyra’s teasing while putting on her shoes and her coat.
“Why are you in such a hurry?” Katie arches an eyebrow, looking at Steph running around from her bench.
“I have a thousand things to do at home”
Steph answers casually and her answer seems to catch Beth’s attention. It is too casual to be real in the blonde’s opinion. But she doesn’t have the time to say something because soon Steph isn’t here anymore.
“What is she up to?” Kyra frowns at Beth.
“Dunno. That was weird”
Both look at each other before grinning and saying at the same time.
“We need to find out what is happening.”
********
You were far from this, finally parking your car in Steph’s street. You stopped in a local pizzeria to grab some pizza for the night, in a place you know that Steph likes. You very quickly learned her favourite things to eat or her command at Starbucks for example.
You don’t have to wait very long for Steph to open the door after you knock on it, it was only thirty seconds wait.
“Hello-ooo” you say before being grabbed by the collar of your jacket and taken inside.
Right after you feel Steph’s lips against yours and you put the pizza somewhere to be able to kiss her back easier. Your smile kind of broke the kiss but Steph doesn’t seem to mind. You kiss her cheek and her neck before taking a discreet but big breath of her perfume.
“I missed you” she whispers, and you hug her harder against you.
“Missed you too”
You still can’t believe that this situation is really happening. You never thought that you will be able to have this kind of relationship with Steph one day. You are scared to lose it now to be honest, but you try to concentrate on the present.
Steph finally drags you to her living room, where you just cuddle while eating your pizzas and looking at a film. Steph already took Calvin for his walk today and he’s peacefully asleep on his dog bed in the corner of the living room.
You aren’t really looking at the movie to be honest. You asked her a lot of questions to know how her four days really went. You wrote her messages, and you had her on the phone twice, but with her teammates around, it’s never really easy.
You are still secret for now, wanting to have this secret only between you two. You like it that way, finding Steph at the end of the day and being in your little bubble of love.
“That plaid is the best purchase I have ever made” Steph comments at some point.
You laugh while looking at the big and fluffy plaid who is big enough to easily cover both of you. It’s comfy and hot too. And it has the advantage of having Steph’s smell.
“I like it too” you smile, snuggling against her.
The pizza boxes are abandoned on the table with some pizza crusts inside. Like every time you command at this place, it was a great pizza. You haven’t eaten everything though, so if you are hungry during the night you will have something to eat.
“How are your hands still so cold?”
You smirk when Steph wiggle to get away from you, passing now both of your hands under her shirt.
“Babe stop” she giggles.
But you don’t stop, amused by her reaction. When your hands are hot enough against her skin, you kiss her, happily taking advantage of your position. She kisses you back and you kind of lose any notion of anything when she passes her arms around your neck to take you against her.
You are still kissing several minutes after, when Steph’s door is opened by a non-really discreet Kyra. But between the noise of the TV and what you are doing, it would be almost impossible to hear anything. Thank god, no one decided to burgle Steph’s house tonight.
Steph is now lying on you, still under the plaid, but during your making out session your hands never left her body. You have now one of them on her bum, while the other is in her hair. Steph’s hands are softly scratching your abs, a gesture that makes you half-crazy.
“Oh my god what the hell is happening here?!”
Kyra’s scream makes both of you jump and Steph avoids falling off the couch only thanks to your excellent reflexes. Seeing your reactions, Calvin jumps from his bed to start to bark at Kyra.
“No one ever taught you the use of a door?” Steph asks after having calmed Calvin.
“You weren’t answering! And I used the key you gave me” Kyra answers, pointing an accusing finger at Steph.
Steph groans and you silently nod somewhere in your head to take this key away from Kyra as soon as possible.
“What is happening between you two? I thought you were straight!” Kyra asks Steph, frowning at you.
You look at each other, not really knowing what to answer. You are both standing now in front of the couch where you were very intimate several seconds ago.
“Being engaged to a man doesn’t make me straight. And it’s none of your business.” Steph rolls her eyes at her.
The big sister versus little sister energy makes you smile, but you don’t show it too much, letting cowardly Steph deal with her pest.  
“I just saw you with your tongue in her mouth, it’s totally my business now”
Little sister energy.
When you see that Steph is looking at you for some help, you don’t hesitate to stand at her high though, putting a hand on her back. You feel the nerves getting out of her body a little bit under your touch.
“Was it why you were in such a hurry earlier?” Kyra asks again, softer this time.
“Yes” Steph sighs “We have this… things going on since December and even if I haven’t talked about it to anyone it makes me really happy. I just wanted to keep it for us for now”
Steph throws a quick look at you when she uses the word “things”, and you answer her with a soft smile. Like you said before, you never put a real label on your relationship.
“Are you serious about it?”
It’s a little passive-aggressive now and the question is directed towards you. You arch an eyebrow, not really used to have to face an angry Kyra with arms crossed on her chest.
“I am” you answer calmly.
“Good. Because I let an asshole coming in her life once, I won’t let another one doing the same thing”
“God Kyra, shut up”
A pillow flows right in Kyra’s face. Steph seems to be really uncomfortable about Kyra’s statement, but you find it cute instead. And you are glad to see that Steph has friends like Kyra in her life.
“Will I have shared custody?” you joke to Steph, looking in Kyra’s direction.
“She’s Mini’s kid, not mine”
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Later that evening, after having kicked Kyra out and making her swear not to say anything to anyone, you find yourself with Steph in her bed. You are scrolling on your phone and texting some members of your family in Australia while Steph is lying on your chest.
You are playing with her hair too. You are very comfortable like this and you could stay here until the end of the world. Steph seems lost in her thoughts, unless she’s falling asleep. But you don’t interrupt her, knowing that she will talk to you if she needs to share anything.
It’s only when she turns her head to look at you that you put your phone on the bed, your other hand still in her hair.
“Is everything alright?” you ask softly.
She hums for only an answer, before going up on your body to put her head on your shoulder and not on your chest. You let her, passing your hand around her waist and kissing her head.
“I missed you”
Like this afternoon you feel your heart miss a beat and you love the warm feeling her words provide in you.
“I missed you too Stephy” you smile at her. “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing really, just that I hope Kyra will know how to shut her mouth”
“I’m sure she will”
You have a good feeling about it, Kyra might be a little pest when she wants it, but she’s very protective about the people she loves. And you know that even if you aren’t close to her like Steph or Mini, she loves Steph. And she will do what is needed for Steph’s good.
You kiss Steph’s hair again and when she looks up you put a tender kiss on her lips. You both are pretty tired after your weekend so you quickly both fall asleep after that.
********
In late February, you are back with the Matildas for the Shebelieves Cup. You made the journey with Steph of course, but also Kyra, Caitlin, Hayley and all the girls playing in England. You are a little sad to be seated next to Charli and not Steph, who is next to Mini.
You would probably have a better sleep if you were able to put your head on Steph’s shoulder, but the travel passed anyway. You are not with Steph either in your hotel rooms, this time sharing the room with Alanna. Steph is almost on the other side of the floor every time which practically prevents you from sneaking into her room at some point.
So you are a little bit moody this morning at breakfast, between the jet lag and the fact that you haven’t slept very well because Alanna is snoring like a damn combine harvester.
You are under your hood while eating your mountain of cereals alone, until Mini, Harper and Kyra come to sit with you.
“Hello sunshine. Mind if we sit here?” Kyra smirks.
You groan for any answer, making the girl giggle. You then put your eyes on Harper, who seems sulking too.
“Are you grumpy too because they don’t have any Froot Loops and only those disgusting Kellog’s?” Harper asks you, eyebrows frowned.
“Sure am Buddy” you answer. “And because no one told me that I will be sleeping with a tractor”
“Sorry, I thought that Lani’s snores were known by anyone” Caitlin says from the table next to yours.
Your other teammates are coming to have breakfast little by little around you now.
“What is known by anyone?” Steph asks casually, sitting in front of Caitlin.
Your apparition makes a funny thing in your stomach and you wonder quickly until when those butterflies will stay.
“That Y/N slept with Lani” Harper answers with all her innocence, making you choke on your cereal, Steph spilling her coffee and Kyra dying laughing. “But Lani did it like a tractor”
“Harper, you can’t phrase things like that” a laughing Mini intervenes.
“God” you mumble, holding your forehead.
You throw a tentative glance towards Steph, above Kyra’s head who is always laughing like crazy. She receives a slap behind her head by Caitlin, distracting everyone’s attention while you and Steph exchange a glance.
She doesn’t seem disturbed by what just happened, but on the other hand you never slept with Alanna. She even has an amused smile on her face.
That moment is quickly known by all the team of course, and it makes Alanna laugh too. You have to admit that it’s pretty funny and now that you know that Steph hasn’t taken anything badly, it’s easier to laugh about it.
You are more concentrated on not looking at Steph all day, though. Not for the same reasons as before. Before it was not to be caught by Steph herself. Now it’s to avoid being discovered by someone. You find it even harder now though, because you have the right to do it.
You don’t know if Steph’s smile will stay on her face all day, however, because all the team seems to take the joke really by heart. You received some comments about it all day, from your teammates but from people on the staff too. It even went viral on social media.
Alanna doesn’t seem to mind though, given the way she takes you by your shoulders to drag you back into your room before dinner.
“Come on Casanova, show me again some moves you got”
You roll your eyes but follow her anyway, taken away from any idea of sneaking out somewhere in the city with Steph. You haven’t been able to talk to her all day long and she doesn’t know you wanted to do that, but you still miss that plan.
Of course, when you are in the room you share with Alanna, she goes to her bed while you do the same. On yours. If it needs to be said, you never had any interest in the blonde, even if you like her very much. As a friend.
You always have a crossword book with you and that is with what you were occupying yourself when you feel your phone vibrating on your nightstand, where you put it to charge.
From Pudding 💞 Having fun?
You roll your eyes and disconnect your phone from the cable of your charging. You then sit cross-legged on your bed, your book forgotten.
From You No 🥺 I miss you What are you doing?
From Pudding 💞 Nothing much. Just watching Kyra and Charli misbehave with Harper
From You If I manage to escape my room, would you like to go for a walk? We have time to do it until dinner
From Pudding 💞 I’d love to 😌
You smile and you lurk towards Alanna to know what excuse you could use to get out of the room without being suspect.
“I’m going to take something to drink, do you want something?”
“Mh? No, thanks” Alanna mumbles back without looking at you.
From You I’m coming. Find me in front of the hotel?
You don’t wait for Steph’s answer before going up, putting your shoes and your hoodie back and going out of the room. You don’t see anyone when you reach the entrance of the hotel, or at least anyone from the Australian team.
Steph is already waiting for you, hidden in the corner of the building and you hurry your path to meet her.
Your first move is to go for a hug, but Steph stops you with a hand on your stomach.
“Someone still can see us here” she explains to you with a soft smile.
You nod and follow her steps, putting your hands in the pocket of your hoodie instead. Being next to her like this without being able to touch her is torturous for you. And you are together for only two months, you wonder how a couple can hide their relationship for years.
“How are you?” you ask her after several meters.
“Fine. It’s strange to be with you all day without being able to really be with you, you know?”
“Yeah. I feel the same”
You bite your lip softly, wondering how to approach the teasing you have to endure all day. You don’t know how she feels about it and you don’t want to assume anything. But it’s finally Steph who talks again first.
“But Kyra made me realise that not talking to you at all might be suspect for the others too. I mean we were friends before and we were quite close to each other, you know?”
You nod slowly at that. It was true, you went for example in the vineyard with her before your first kiss at Emily’s wedding.
“She’s right” you smile, relieved to realise that you are finally authorized to spend some time with her. “It’s weird that this advice comes from Kyra though”
Steph smirks and, now that you are away from the hotel, grabs your arm with hers. You let her do it, quickly kissing her temple.
“She might have teased me a little bit” Steph admits after some time.
“About us?”
“Yes, and that rumour about you and Alanna. And the fact that you seemed moody all morning too”
“I was, I really haven’t slept enough” you shrug before frowning. “But I’m sorry about the teasing”
“It’s okay” Steph smiles at you. “I know it’s not the truth”
You have to admit that Steph is way more chill than you are. Or maybe less jealous? Maybe both, because you totally remember about you being jealous when she was dancing and laughing with Mackenzie at Emily’s wedding for example.
You stay silent, a little bit ashamed about it. But your silence seems to tease Steph’s curiosity.
“It’s not true, right?”
“Oh, yes. Of course it isn’t” you hasten to confirm.
You free your arm to pass it around Steph’s waist, holding her against you. You were still walking, a little bit randomly to be honest. You haven’t really discovered the horizons; you had to travel a lot in the USA for the Cup, and you would rather be peacefully in your room than walking around.
“Do you want to grab a coffee?”
You turn your head towards the Café Steph is looking at and nod. You’re not a big fan of coffee to be honest, but you know that Steph is. You follow her inside, letting her pass her command first before asking for a tea yourself.
“How do you feel about tomorrow?” you ask the other Aussie when you are seated.
“Concentrated. We need to be if you want to win”
“I wasn’t asking my Captain” you smirk above your tea. “I was asking you”
Just like she does sometimes, she looks at you with a way softer look than usual, and a cute smile, and it makes you melt. So much that you have to be really concentrated to follow the next part of the conversation.
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The next day, you are playing against Colombia and when you enter the stadium, you feel pretty confident. Not because you are sure that you will win, but because you know that the team will do as much as possible to win the game. You are starting, positioned just behind Caitlin Foord in the middle of the pitch. It makes you stand in the middle of the players but you still manage to have a good view of your whatever Steph is.
You managed to go back to the hotel without no one asking you any questions yesterday, Alanna easily believing your story about being asked by Kyra for a random Uno game.
The first part of the game went great, to be honest. Colombia is a tough opponent, but you are winning 3-1, thanks to two goals from Caitlin and a really well managed free kick by Steph. You even managed to have an assist for one of the goals.
Around the seventy-minute Steph got subbed, just like Caitlin for Michelle Heyman. Your teammate from Tottenham, Hayley, is still on the pitch, just like Kyra.
In the 76 minutes, Colombia managed to score their second goal making 3-2 and you knew from that moment that they will push as much as possible to score a third one. Mackenzie is able to make some great stops and at the 82 Hayley almost scores, the ball hitting the corner of the post before going right in the stands.
At the 84, Mackenzie stops a ball from a corner and throws it quickly in the front, where you are waiting with Michelle. The blonde catches the ball and you follow her, facing two Colombians. You easily catch the pass Michelle offers you and run towards the goalkeeper, not expecting a single second a tackle coming from behind.
That is what happens though, your ankle painfully trapped between two legs, making you fall on the ground. It hurts and between the pain and how hard you fall on the ground, you have trouble breathing completely again.
You don’t hear the chaos above you, Ellie and Mini screaming at your opponent, the red card she takes or even the referee trying to calm everyone down. You just try to breathe, focusing your attention on your throbbing ankle and the design of Kyra’s boots, protectively crouch somewhere near your head.
“Hey it’s okay, you're okay” she says to you.
“She’s bleeding, we have to take her shoe and sock off”
You don’t recognize which one of the paramedics is talking, but you groan in protest when they grab your ankle. You hear the referee asking them to take you outside the pitch and some of your teammates protesting something, but you don’t really care. You didn’t have to deal with a lot of injuries in your life, but this one really hurts. It scares you, to be honest.
You hear the applause of the crowd when you are taken inside the stadium on the stretcher, but you don’t really react, hiding your face in both of your arms.
It’s way quieter when you are inside the infirmary, where a nurse gives you something for the pain. You thank her quietly, drinking the fresh water she gives you soon after with appreciation.
“We have to put some stitches on before going to hospital for a scan. Given how she takes you down, you might have something broken”
“Great” you sigh, looking at the ceiling.
Your mind goes to Steph. You would like to have her with you, but she’s the captain and has other duties. You are only friends for the others and if one of them should come with you, it would be more logical for Hayley to come with you.
But you are happily surprised to see that it’s in fact Steph who comes inside the room almost twenty minutes later, while you are still waiting for the stitches. She looks worried, but you feel your body relax as soon as she’s here.
“How are you feeling?” she asks, frowning.
“Better. The nurse gave me some morphine. But I have to go to the hospital to make a scan”
She sighs and strokes your cheek tenderly, before the door of the room opens again, making her retract her hand like if your cheek was on fire.
You look at the nurse when she comes inside, followed by a man you haven’t seen before.
“Y/N if you are ready, we are too”
She nods towards the needles and compresses in the trail she just put on a table next to you, and you can’t help but make a grimace. You are totally not ready for it. You hate needles.
“It’s going to be okay” she says, putting her hand on your arm in a comforting gesture. “Maybe it’s better if you leave?”
She turns towards Steph who is still standing in the room and you put your eyes on her too, just in time to see her frowning gaze looking at the nurse’s gesture.
“Oh. Uh, sure. I just wanted to give Y/N her things”
She puts the bag she was holding until now on a chair and turns her heels to leave, but you don’t want her to. So, you call her, almost shyly.
“Can you stay with me and maybe hold my hand? Please?”
“Of course”
She doesn’t hesitate a single second before coming back near you, sitting on a second chair and grabbing your hand.
“Thanks” you breathe. “I hate needles”
“I didn’t know”
She tilts her head curiously towards you, and you shrug. It’s not really something you talk about during your first dates usually, until you are dating a nurse maybe. You look at the doctor who is preparing his things, totally ignoring you three. You are nervous, so much that Steph can feel the tension in your body.
“Look at me. Just concentrate yourself on me”
You take a deep breath and oblige, your eyes easily falling on her. She hasn’t taken a shower after the game; she’s still wearing her kit under her jacket. She still has her bun, and she looks effortlessly pretty, even after a game like this. If you were alone, you would have said to her how beautiful she is.
It seems that she understands really easily what you are thinking about though, because you see her cheeks becoming a little more red. It makes you smile and want to kiss her. It’s frustrating, but at least like this you kind of forget what is happening near your ankle.
“Finish” the doctor says before standing up. “Ellen here will come with you to the hospital, so you have a real follow-up. And I think one of the members of the Australian team will come too”
You don’t see Steph frowning at that. You nod looking at the doctor leaving the room and the nurse following to get everything needed.
“I’ll go take a shower and I’ll come to the hospital as soon as possible, okay?” Steph says softly.
You nod again and sigh, letting your head go against the pillow of the bed. You watch Steph when she stands to kiss you, making you smile.
“Thank you for coming”
“Of course” she smiles and kisses you one more time.
She gets up just in time, the nurse coming back with all she needs. She makes sure that you have everything you need before taking you to the ambulance for the hospital. You are already on crutches, and you had hoped not to have to take the ambulance, but it seems like it’s how things are done here.
A little bit dramatic in your opinion.
Ellen and Kate, your team nurse, talked your ears off during the journey to the hospital and are still doing it when you arrive in your assigned room. The team asked for one for you to be able to take a shower and you are really grateful for it.
“Do you need help?” Ellen asks.
“Uh. No, thank you” you mumble, feeling your cheeks getting a little red.
“Look at you, Casanova” Kate giggles. “Alanna wasn’t enough, you need someone else already?”
“Oh god” you sigh.
“Is Alanna your girlfriend?”
“No” you roll your eyes.
You let Kate explain the story behind it, ignoring the different laughs coming from it while texting your parents and the Matildas’ WhatsApp group. Then you write to Steph too.
From You Are you soon here? The Nurse proposed her help for my shower
From Pudding 💞 That is not funny
You don’t have any other answer from her, and you sigh softly before putting your phone on your bed. Time to shower. You take the fresh underwear that Steph packs you with a fresh shirt and shorts too. You are glad to avoid the shirt from the hospital though.
“If Alanna isn’t your girlfriend, you still can take my help” Ellen adds, apparently more seriously.
You hesitate a little about what to answer at that. She seems serious about her help, but still teasing-flirting a little bit too.
“I still have a girlfriend” you finally answer.
You don’t know if Steph will be happy with that, like you said you never put a label on your relationship. But at least Ellen will understand that you are not interested.
“Do you?” Kate asks you with a big surprise.
“Yes” you smirk. “But it’s very fresh and you are under professional secrecy so you can’t say anything to anyone”
“You have a girlfriend, and you make jokes about sleeping with someone else?” Ellen asks, raising an eyebrow.
“No, I… I’m not the one who started it” you try to defend yourself.
“She’s right” Kate has your back “The situation has somewhat escaped her”
Ellen hums, apparently not totally convinced about your answers, but you decide not to give too much importance. First because you have to take this shower before they come to take you for the scan. And second because you will probably not see her again and that you don’t really care about what she might think.
After the shower, you went for your scan with Kate, who walks you happily around the hospital in a wheelchair.
And when you are back in your room, you are happy to see Kyra and Steph waiting for you, sitting next to Ellen. Their hair are still wet from their shower.
“How are you feeling?” Steph asks.
“I’m okay” you shrug, passing from the wheelchair to the bed. “How was the end of the game?”
You already asked this to Kate when you left for the hospital, but you want to have your teammates’ opinion. The good news is that Australia won, even if it was a close one.
“I have to go” Ellen says after Kyra’s explanation. “Will you be okay there?”
“Yeah thanks” you smile politely at her.
“It was nice meeting you” Ellen squeezes your arm affectionately.
Your eyes cross Steph’s when she leaves the room, before looking at Kyra who seems to have the time of her life.
“Do you think I can eat something?” you ask Kate.
“Sure, I’ll go to the cafeteria to grab you a sandwich or something. Do you want something else?”
You shake your head and she gets up, imitated by Kyra who claims to be hungry too. You don’t know if it’s true or if she wants to leave you alone with Steph, but you are happy to be alone with her a little bit.
What you said earlier when it was only you with Kate and Ellen comes back in your mind and you wriggle a little bit on your bed.
“Why are you acting weird?”
“I’m not weird” you mumble without looking at her.
“Don’t you dare tell me she came to help you under the shower” she says sternly.
You wince at her tone but shakes your head, searching for her gaze this time. If you are weird, she seems tense. Like very tense. You don’t want to upset her, but it seems more important for you to tell the truth.
Steph had crossed her arms on her chest, still seated in the chair in front of your bed.
“It’s not that” you say, nervously passing your hand in your hair. “But I might said that I have a girlfriend to her”
Steph looks at you blankly for several seconds, so much that you start to think that she’s waiting for you to add something.
“How is that a problem?” Steph asks.
“Kate was here too”
“And… That’s all? You seem so uneasy because you told a girl who was hitting on you that you already have someone?”
She doesn’t seem annoyed anymore; you almost have the impression that she’s repressing a smile. And you don’t really understand what the hell is happening.
“We agreed to keep it hidden for several times and we never discussed about being girlfriend” you frown.
Steph is totally smiling now, finally leaving her chair to come sit in front of you on your bed. She was upset and now she seems… softened?
“I am glad that you put a stop to her flirting with that information” Steph grabs your hand while talking “And I know none of us asked the other officially, but I would love to make it a little bit more official. Not by saying it to everyone, but at least by putting a real word on our relationship.”
“So… If I, hypothetically, ask you to be my girlfriend, would you say yes?”
“Hypothetically, yes” she smirks
And she laughs when she sees you rolling your eyes. You are not mad at her for her teasing though, how could you when her laugh is the most beautiful thing ever? You decide to try one more time, a little bit more seriously this time.
“Stephanie-Elise Catley, would you please be my girlfriend?”
“I’d love to”
You have time to see her smile before she leans in your direction, and you finish the gesture to kiss her.
Steph Catley is your girlfriend.
You don’t know what you did to be so lucky, but the happiness you feel right now makes you pass your arms around her waist, and you take her with you when you let yourself fall on the bed.
She lets out a high short scream when you make her fall on you, but her lips are soon very occupied again.
Both of you are able to hear when the door of the room is open though and you turn your head, waiting to be facing Kyra. But it’s actually Kate, holding your scan in one hand and your sandwich in the other.
“Oh… New girlfriend. I see”
417 notes · View notes
astonmartinii · 2 years ago
Text
you and me got a whole lotta history | charles leclerc social media au
pairing: charles leclerc x historian!reader
y/n is a historian and it’s not her fault her bf’s job takes him all around the world…
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yourusername
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liked by charles_leclerc, danielricciardo and 102,561 others
location: melbourne 📍
yourusername: so it’s the australian grand prix and i’ve spent the start of the week exploring this old city. one of my stops was the historic old melbourne gaol. this now museum was once a prison that housed some of the most feared criminals in australian history. constructed in 1839, the old melbourne gaol saw 133 hanged for their crimes between 1845 and 1924. it was briefly used during world war two but ceased operation as a prison in 1924 and was renovated to be part of the RMIT university and the museum it is today. a definite must if you’re visiting melbourne !!
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user1: my fave part of the race week is y/n’s museum recommendations tbf
user2: i can vision charles being dragged around this place hating his life
charles_leclerc: the things we do for love
yourusername: you said you enjoyed it :(
charles_leclerc: I DID
user2: oops
yourusername: i’ll leave you at the hotel next time
charles_leclerc: it was scary but i enjoyed it because i was with you
yourusername: okay that’s better
danielricciardo: so my farm isn’t good enough for you
yourusername: noooooo danny i thought we were going after the race?
danielricciardo: oof my bad
user3: petition for there to be a teds notebook but it’s y/n giving us a historical guide to the city the race is in
f1: we’re listening @skysportsf1
charles_leclerc
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liked by yourusername, scuderica ferrari and 788,341 others
tagged: yourusername
charles_leclerc: tough race in melbourne but a beautiful city regardless
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user4: HE served, we don’t talk about the race
yourusername: i don’t mean to say i told you so but i did say our day trip would be the best part
user5: girl you’re gonna get banned from the ferrari garage
yourusername: they deserve far worse than what i’m saying let’s be real
user5: true
user6: i love how charles didn’t reply ferrari has his ass ON LOCK
carlossainz55: we'll come back stronger
danielricciardo: we can all commiserate at my farm bro
charles_leclerc: your farm better be as good as you're saying now
danielricciardo: nervously awaiting the y/n review
yourusername
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liked by charles_leclerc, maxverstappen1 and 104,561 others
location: miami 📍
yourusername: though miami may be known for it's partying (it's all about the U), charles and i took our monday to take a stroll around st bernard de clairvaux church, one of miami's hidden gems. the church was originally built in spain all the way back in 1141 to the style of cistercian romanesque architecture for alfonso vii. the monastry's cloister was illegally purchased by american william randolph hearst in 1926 and in order for the church to be transported it was dismantled to 11,000 pieces and sent to the us where it was rebuilt and still stands to this day.
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user7: i'm never gonna be able to afford to go to miami so why did i read this whole thing like i'll visit some day?
yourusername: history is important and interesting, always good to read even if you never visit !!
user8: she's like the older sister i never had
user9: did charles enjoy this one more?
yourusername: "at least i'll get a tan here"
charles_leclerc: i feel like anyone who reads about me in your comments will think i'm an asshole, i have fun every time i just don't understand most of it
yourusername: i know you have fun baby (and i love you for driving us to all of these places)
user10: have you considered our super historic frat house this saturday night?
user11: imagine thinking you have a chance when her literal boyf is CHARLES LECLERC
user10: every goal has a goalkeeper doesn't mean you can't score
charles_leclerc: i will run you over
user12: omg ferrari's pr is quaking
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yourusername
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liked by charles_leclerc, lancestroll and 112,677 others
yourusername: it is my biggest honour to announce my position as a history lecturer here at oxford!! i always dreamed of studying here and to get to pass on my knowledge to those looking to follow in my footsteps is a huge pleasure and responsibility.
p.s. no worries, it is not full time so race week explorations will continue.
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user13: so it was true :(((((( wait i just read the whole post my bad
user14: so i guess i now need to turn my Cs into As if i wanna attend a y/n lecture
charles_leclerc: unbelievably proud of you my love - don't miss me too much
yourusername: you sure i can't persuade you to move to england with me :(
charles_leclerc: i'll be there as much as i can be but monaco is still our home
yourusername: always
landonorris: proud of you smarty pants
yourusername: thank you landito
landonorris: so you'll now root for the brits?
charles_leclerc: over my dead body
yourusername: what charlie said
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charles_leclerc
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liked by pierregasly, yourusername and 1,209,778 others
tagged: yourusername
charles_leclerc: super happy for another win for the season but we keep pushing for the real prize at the end of the season - thank you for your continued support tifosi and my love y/n who stayed up all the way in oxford ❤️
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user20: i don't wanna jinx it but like the season is going well
user21: too well....
yourusername: winning looks good on you
charles_leclerc: you look better on me
pierregasly: oh god you've been apart for a triple header and now you're being horny on main
yourusername: says mr. doggy emoji
pierregasly: touche
user22: so charles can mathematically win in either austin or brazil FUCK THEM KIDS I NEED Y/N AT THESE RACES
user23: if she's not there for charles wdc i am personally going to have a sleepover on the train tracks
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yourusername added to their story
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yourusername
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liked by charles_leclerc, lewishamilton and 503,786 others
tagged: charles_leclerc
yourusername: the autodromo jose carlos pace is the crown jewel of the interlagos neighbourhood. the circuit opened 83 years ago and has hosted the f1 since 1972. the circuit was originally meant to be a housing area but due to the 1929 stock market crash the owners decided to construct a racing track instead. interlagos is often a season decider with fernando alonso winning both his 2005 and 2006 titles here, kimi raikkonen winning the 2007 championship here, lewis hamilton won the 2008 championship here, jenson button clinched the 2009 title here and CHARLES LECLERC WON HIS FIRST TITLE HERE IN INTERLAGOS FOR THE 2023 SEASON
on a real note i am so proud of you charles, i have seen the sacrifices you have made and the unbelievable amount of effort you pour into every facet of your racing NO ONE deserves this more than you. i am so grateful to have shared this moment with you, here's to many more xxx
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user26: i am unwell this is so fucking cute
user27: bro this is so fucking crazy
charles_leclerc: couldn't have done it without you, so glad you could be there for me xx
yourusername: always charlie xx
yourstudent: miss y/n you can cancel all of our lectures if charles wins the championship again FORZA FERRARI
charles_leclerc: the people have spoken
user28: insane butterfly effect of the wall street crash to charles leclerc 2023 wdc
user29: they make me believe in love
note: this was super random but popped into my head while at work and i knew i had to write it !! hope you enjoyed xx
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natailiatulls07 · 1 year ago
Text
It's giving old money
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Oscar Piastri x British!Countess!reader
Summary - Oscar and his self conscious girlfriend, who is also a British countess, slowly soft launch their very private relationship however another certain Brit speeds up that process
Warning - swearing, Y/n is self conscious??
Faceclaim - Lila Moss
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yourusername
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Nights in Monte Carlo x
Liked by friendsusername and 124,674 others
Limited comments
friendsusername Hun we need to do this more often!
= yourusername Oh of course babe
username So jealous of her lifestyleee
username Imagine being her I wishhh
ilovey/nwithmyhearttt
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Y/n is at Wimbledon with her friend! I love the blue dress and the natural look <3
Liked by username and 58,739 others
username She's too gorgeousss omfggg
username Can we take a moment for the dress!
username Where is that dress frommm?? It's a fucking need!
= username I think it's Ralph Lauren
= username Thank yewww
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oscarpiastri
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A couple of days in London between gps
Liked by aussiegrit and 173,593 others
username Is this post sponsored by Ralph Lauren???
username Wait I recognize that dog, whats going on?!
username Oscar Pastry who is that?
landonorris Be safe bro emoji
= oscarpiastri Thanks mate lol
username It's giving old money
= username it's giving richhh
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yourusername posted a story
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username Y/n's new story of Archie, my heartttt
username Ikrr I want to kidnap it LMAO
username Wait Archie looks a lot like the dog in Oscar Piastri's recent instagram post, am I tripping??
username Gurl calm down, I doubt it. They are worlds away from eachother lol
username Yeah I agree, Y/n is too stuck up to make friends with anyone outside her countess/count social circle
yourusername
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Let's go racing x
Liked by mclaren and 166,289 others
Limited comments
username This is new...
username My multiverse of madness!
mclaren Your welcome anytime <3
= yourusername I had the best time, thank you
username Okayyy so anyone wanna say something to me?? :|
username Look okay I'm sorry, maybe you did have an inkling
username Now that I look at it, the dog does very similarrr
username IKRR I think her and Oscar would be cute together lol
username They'd be the perfect old money couple nglll
oscarpiastri posted a story
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yourusername
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Thank you Melbourne, you're the best x
Liked by oscarpiastri and 178,484 others
Limited comments
username Melbourne? thats random...
username Is this a soft launch????
username Oscar Piastri in the likes, Y/n in Melbourne...where Oscar also is, is Y/n and Oscar soft launching? :3
username Ummm Y/n??
oscarpiastri
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Days down in the water with my loved ones are my favourite
Liked by yourusername and 183,864 others
username Blonde hair + Melbourne + beach + Recent events + Y/n's like = Soft Lauch with Y/n L/n
= username Case closed! It has to be herrr
username I love summer break Oscar sm
logansargeant Always remember protectionnn
= oscarpiastri :|
username I need any more pleaseeee
username I mean they are making it very obviousss
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landonorris posted a story
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Text (White: Oscar Orange: Lando)
Dude what the fuck
What?!
What you've done?! You've just fucking outed mine and Y/n's relationship!!
Ohhh shit sorry man I didn't think you could see her face in the story I'll delete it now
No don't worry, we're trending on twitter anyways
Yeah sorry Osc, how's Y/n doing?
She's very anxious rn, you know how she is with the publics opinion of her
Oh no maybe distance her from social media
Yeah, I've taken her phone off of her
Ofc sorry again man
Nah dw it was bond to happen
oscarpiastri
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Yeah so me and this gorgeous women are dating. We want to keep it private and we hope you will respect our wishes <3
Tagged: yourusername
Liked by landonorris and 203,275 others
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1K notes · View notes
enwoso · 7 months ago
Note
Lovie having an even worse day than the grump story and hitting Vic pelova and having an all mighty meltdown
TINY TEMPER — alessia russo x child!reader
a long one🙃 got a little carried away when i was writing this, but ENJOY!
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grumpy masterlist
travelling was tiring for the average person. travelling to the other side of the world was exhausting. travelling to the other side of the world at the age of four was anything but tiring, until it hits you like a brick wall that is.
alessia knew this would happen. she's tried so hard for it not to happen but when your so little and you get to do exciting things there's no containing your energy.
but it was now officially day two of arsenals post season trip to melbourne and you were past the point of tired.
when the flight landed at seven am yesterday morning you were fast asleep, alessia not thinking anything of it. more thanking her lucky stars she was going to be able to get through customs a little quicker without having to have eyes in back of her head in case you decided to bolt. something you'd done on the layover finding it the funniest game ever.
however, alessia wished she could have gone back in time and told herself to wake you up instead of just trying to make things easier for herself as when it came to bed time last night you had more energy than a duracell battery meaning you didn't exactly have the longest night sleep.
but hey you were four and had no concept of time never mind time zones..
"oh did someone not have a good night sleep?" steph giggled slightly as you sat at the breakfast table with your arms on it as your head rested on them an almighty frown on your face.
"who you asking tiny or less?" kyra teased as alessia glared at the young australian a cup of coffee secured tightly in her hands. steph slapping kyra on the shoulder also giving the girl a warning glare. your mummy placing a bowl of cereal in front of you and a bowl of fruit next to it.
you would usually start digging into it but not today, instead you pushed it as far as you could away from you. not wanting it anywhere close to you. pushing it until it hit steph's plate as she was the one who was sat in front of you.
"lovie, don't do that please" alessia said firmly as she pulled your bowl back to be in front of you. you huffing as you turned your head away from the bowl.
"i never thought i would see the day tiny not eating her coco pops!" kyra tried as you gave her a cold stare. you didn't want to eat them, you wanted to sleep but every time you closed your eyes mummy was tapping you on the shoulder waking you up.
"you'll have to be quick, otherwise they'll go all soggy and yucky-" kyra tried again, usually you would listen to kyra as she helped you create some fun when everyone else was being all dull and serious.
"just leave her kyra, she's not gonna eat them" alessia sighed as she watched you turn so you were sat on the on edge of your chair, kicking your legs back and forth. your white crocs which were on your feet close to coming off.
you swinging your feet further and further until your crocs flew off you feet. them being very close to landing on the table next to you. where katie, cailtlin and teyah were sat talking and eating their breakfast.
"ay whose little croc is this" katie's thick irish accent coming out as she picked up your croc, sending you a pointed smile. you giving katie a frown in return as you went back to swinging your legs back and forth.
"do you want it back?" katie had got up and walked the few steps handing your croc back to you but you just ignoring her as katie looked up at alessia who was shaking her head telling the irish girl a no. katie giving a nod understanding you clearly weren't in the mood.
"i'll just give it to your ma" katie nodded to alessia handing your shoe over as alessia mumbled a small thank you as katie returned back to her seat.
alsssia was exhausted already and the day had nearly just begun and that wasn’t due to jet lag although it probably played a big factor but from the fact she knew she was in for a day from hell with you and your grumpy mood.
you come out your shell a little, playing around with vic in a soft play area that the hotel had, most of the girls had been told to chill before it was time for meetings.
alessia was a little more content knowing you were playing with vic, although she would have preferred it more if you’d had a nap but you were having none of that when the idea was suggested.
so alessia sat in the little cafe next to it doing some uni work. her eyes glancing over every so often to where you and vic were. vic admittedly looking like she was having way more fun in the small play area sitting in a ball pit filled with colourful plastic balls.
you were sat playing with building blocks, building them as high as you could before barrelling most definitely a little too aggressively your foot in the bottom of it watching it tumble before restarting.
“vic me wan that one!” you pointed to another little boy who was in the play area on the other side playing with what looked to be his younger brother, as he also was building a tower with other coloured blocks.
“no tiny, you can’t right now someone else is playing with it” vic smiled gently as she picked up another ball in the ball in the ball pit.
“me wan that one!” you demanded a little louder this time, looking over to the little boy as you glared at vic who was starting to get a little uncomfortable as she didn’t exactly know how to respond or handle the situation which in her eyes looked like it wasn’t going to end with your usual cheesy grin.
“tiny you’ll have to wait your turn.. why don’t you play in the ball pit with me” vic tried, hoping it would help for you to forget about the building blocks.
unfortunately for vic it couldn’t be that easy, you instead shaking your head totally uninterested in the ball pit that was filled with colourful plastic balls.
instead you got yourself up from where you’d been sat, vic seeing you were making a beeline for the little boy. in a blink of an eye vic was up out of the ball pit, colourful balls flying out the pit as she lifted you up just inches away from the little boy.
you letting out an angry scream you began to kick your legs into viv’s body as well as flaying your arms around. what vic hadn’t realised is that there was a building block still in your hand and with your arms flaying around, the block hit vic straight in the eye.
the scream alone was enough to catch alessia’s attention as she shot up leaving her uni work, seeing your temper tantrums finally happen. quickly getting to vic’s rescue you were taken out of vic’s arms as you carry on kicking your legs and screaming just this time on the floor.
alessia quickly asking is vic was okay, the dutch girl flashing a smile and nodding her head. her eyes watering a little bit in all she was in fact okay.
alessia’s attention moved to you, as you were still on the floor of the hotel. screaming and crying while you kicked you legs out in pure frustration. alessia could sense the other guests wondering the hotel where staring at the scene that was happening.
alessia trying to pick you up by your hand but you were having none of it, just letting your entire body go limp. to the point where alessia’s patience had worn and she had to pick you up.
"tiny temper strikes!" kyra says with a proud smile, as the others look at her with a pointed look, totally unimpressed.
"you've been waiting ages to say that haven't you-" steph asks as kyra nodded her head enthusiastically watching on as you pull a tantrum in the middle of the hotel lobby. your over tiredness really kicking in.
"that's a singer you tool!" katie laughs at the young australian as the others look on, kyra sat with a confused look.
"what, no it's not" kyra shakes her head not understanding what katie was saying as it breaks katie into another fit of laughter, caitlin hitting katie on the shoulder for her to quieten down.
“katie your thinking of tinie tempeh” steph corrected the irish girl as katie rolled her eyes playfully, “same thing”
alessia managed to get you back to the room, where your sobs had quietened down as you face was now stained with tears as the occasional sniffle came from you.
you had been sat on your own for the past minutes, your mummy giving you the space you clearly needed before trying to talk to you. alessia had tried to talk to you but you just kept moving your head away from her every time she spoke.
“lovie?” your mummy said calmly, as she stood a few inches away from you. alessia was upset with your behaviour but she also knew it wasn’t entirely your fault as you were only acting this way because you were overly tired and overwhelmed. but still it was so excuse.
you glanced over to your mummy as you came a little closer, sniffles still coming from you. your mummy bending down so that she matched your height as you sat on the end of the bed.
“now y/n you understand that what you did to vic wasn’t very kind?”your mummy spoke in a serious which told you she was disappointed in you, you bowing your head so you just looked at your feet, a little hiccup coming from you from spending twenty minutes sobbing.
“you could have really hurt her or yourself with how you were acting” your mummy continued as you still were looking down at you socks and the patterns that were on them.
“do you understand where mummy is coming from?” she asked as you nodded slightly, you understood that what you had done was wrong and you didn’t feel a little upset with yourself for the way you had acted.
"how uncle gio would think if he saw you acting like this?" your mummy asked as you shrugged your shoulder, slightly confused as to why she was bringing up gio he wasn't even here, you hadn't seen him in person since christmas just before he set off on his big adventure around the world.
you shrugged, "uncle gio not here though"
"well he was coming to see you but i don't think he'll want to now especially if you being not very kind" alessia told you as you lifted your head a little. uncle gio was here, how?
“m’sorry” you mumbled under your breath, still looking at your feet.
“i know you are lovie, but when we see vic next i would like you to apologise to her, can you do that for me?” your mummy asked as you looked up from you feet and nodded a small squeak of a yes coming from you as you nodded.
“good, now lovie i want you to promise if you ever get any big feelings that you don’t know what to do. i want you to tell me and mummy can help you” your mummy told you as you slides down from the bed and hugged your mum. alessia’s arms going around you tiny waist tightly as she stroked her hand up and down your back just like she always did.
“can i make a card for vic to say sorry?” you asked quietly, as you mummy flashed a small smile before nodding.
“i think that would be a lovely idea lovie! i’ll get your pens from the suitcases”
you had spent all your time in the afternoon while your mummy trained making vic a card, drawing yourself on it with vic and all of her favourite things — that you could remember that is.
you wanted it to be perfect, and after training you asked your mummy to help you write what you wanted in it.
your mummy writing it while you told her what to write. you making sure to add your own little personalisation into it.
vic was one of the last ones out of training, having went to make a trip to see the physio. just to get a ice pack for the small bruise you had given her on the side of her eye,
your mummy had told you to leave it on her bag, so you doing as you were told you did just that.
mummy was in a strange hurry to leave training you weren’t quite sure why, but you did as you were told. putting your shoes and jumper on when asked before holding tightly onto your mummy’s hand. saying bye to couple of arsenal girls that had managed to get back to the changing room.
your mummy lead you to the front of where you had been training, stopping in the front lobby. as you looked up and asked why.
“just waiting for a second lovie, then we can go on a walk” your mummy smiled as she looked around the lobby.
“can we go to the park?” you asked with hopeful smile, you had seen one on the coach on the way to the hotel and it looked pretty cool and had things you hadn’t seen in the park near your house in london.
“maybe, we’ll see” mummy said quickly as you frowned a little. you hated when people older than you would respond to you with that as it usually meant no, and that was no fun to you.
but the frown was quickly turned around into a smile as your mummy pointed to someone coming around the corner, you gasped as you realised just who it was.
"uncle gio!" you called out excitedly as he lifted you up in the air, throwing you slightly as giggles escaped you as he caught you. your mummy stood recording the whole interaction.
"hey kiddo, you've gotten so big since i last saw you!" gio smiled as you nodded proudly starting to babble how you'd grown and show him how much with your hands.
"i heard you've been causing some trouble!" gio whispered as you gave him a blank smile back, moving your head to face your mummy who's eyebrows were raised.
"i think we are still adjusting to the new time zone in australia, but still we've had a little chat and tomorrows a new day isn't it lovie!" alessia have you a small smile as you nodded your head before resting it on gio's shoulder.
your mummy and your uncle gio began to talk as gio carried you walked through the streets of melbourne. your mummy claiming she wanted to go shopping as you felt comfort in your uncles arms, pointing things out as he gave you a reassuring nod and smile.
but before you had even got to the first shop, you had fell into a trap of dreams. your eyes had felt heavy when walking past a cute little coffee shop but that's the last thing you remember before your eyes, which had felt heavy since the moment you woke up, closed.
"wait- what how on earth have you done that..." your mummy stopped before entering the first shop, noticing you had fallen asleep, something she had been trying all day to get you to have a short nap.
"done what?" gio looked at alessia with a confused look not quite sure what she meant. he hadn't done anything except walk along the streets with you in his arms.
"got her to sleep!"
"cause i'm an amazing uncle duh!" gio laughed once he realised, alessia shaking her head at her older brothers cockiness.
"well she's got half an hour for a nap, you can be in charge of waking her up" alessia smiled sarcastically before continuing.
"and with those amazing uncle skills i’m sure you'll have no problem with lovie's grumpiness when you have to wake her up" alessia continued, the same smile still plastered on her face as she tapped her brother on the back before leaving him to go and look in a shop.
alessia
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alessia eventful few days😅 tiny on tour continues🛫🧳🦘
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akawifeyy · 20 days ago
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lemonade | fic (DR3)
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description: as much as he would miss the high-stakes lifestyle of formula 1, daniel ricciardo is ready to start fresh. and the perfect start seems to be in his hometown, where a little girl is running a lemonade stand.
tropes: meet-cute, happy ending, lemonade stand au!, single mum!reader
face claim: none
trigger warnings: mature content (!!), swearing
| note: i love dr3 soooo much y'all, i hope i did him justice 🫶
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It all started with the lemonade stand.
A young girl, probably five or six years old, with curly brown braids tied up in pink ribbons, was standing by its side. She stood at attention like a miniature soldier, her eyes watching the street for potential customers.
The hand-painted sign swinging from the top read "Leia's Lemonade Stand" in blocky yellow writing, and a giant beaker of the refreshment was perched on the counter.
Daniel was intrigued. He patted his pockets, looking for any spare change, and found a wad of bills. "Hey," he greeted the little girl, who looked up at him with owlishly large eyes. "I'd like to buy some lemonade? One glass, please."
She beamed, dashing behind the counter to hand him a cool glass filled with sugary yellow liquid. "That'll be two dollars!"
"Here you go," Daniel said, counting out the money and leaving her some extra change, handing it to her. "Thank you for your service."
As Daniel was turning to leave, you walked up to the girl, who was your carbon copy, just a decade or two younger. You were her mother, Daniel assumed. "What do we say, Leia?" you asked, a proud smile evident on your face.
"Thank you and you're welcome!" Leia chirped.
Daniel took a sip of the cool refreshment, sighing in contentment. "This is delicious stuff. Did she make it herself?" he asked you.
"I helped out a bit, but most of this was done herself."
He outstretched his hand. "I'm Daniel."
"Y/N," you replied, taking it. "I haven't seen you around before. Did you just move here?"
Daniel shook his head, trying to formulate an answer. "I just moved back from, uh...out of the country."
"Oh?" you inquired. "I'm jealous, I've never lived outside of Perth. My parents were born here, I was born here, and now Leia was born here. It's tradition, I guess."
He laughed. "Perth is a nice place. The rest of the world is overrated."
"At least you've experienced it," you griped.
Daniel huffed out a breath, reminiscing on his years of fast-paced travel. City after city, country after country. He never stayed in one place for long. "Yeah, I suppose so. Have you really never been outside of Perth?"
You lowered your head, self-conscious. "I mean, I've visited Melbourne for a weekend girl's trip, but my life has been pretty busy ever since I had Leia. And her father...doesn't help out."
Daniel's attention sparked at the mention of Leia's father. "Is he around?"
You twisted your lips in consternation. "He's alive, but he skipped town shortly after Leia was born. Said he was destined for greater things, or some shitty statement like that. I don't remember, and frankly, I do not care. Leia and I get on just fine."
Daniel grinned. "I can tell." He set the glass back down on the counter, and Leia picked it up, putting it under the stand to be washed and cleaned later. "Thanks for the lemonade. Keep up the good work, hm?" he said to her, and she gave him two enthusiastic thumbs-up.
"I'll see you around?" you asked, hopefully in a casual tone.
Daniel nodded, giving you a cheesy wink. "Of course."
Two days later
The doorbell rung half past noon, and you checked the peephole to see who was there. Daniel. He was shifting nervously, wringing his hands out. "To what do I owe the pleasure?" you greeted him, stepping aside so he could enter the house.
"I was wondering if I could get another glass of the lemonade? Leia's done an amazing job with it."
You sighed sorrowfully. "We're all out, sorry. Leia has just started school again, so we haven't continued the business. Maybe we'll make some more during the weekend?"
Daniel pouted. "That blows. I've been looking for a way to talk to you again."
"Sorry." You shrugged one shoulder, and then you realized what Daniel had said. "Pardon me, what did you say?"
Daniel's eyes widened, his face reddening with embarrassment. "Uh, I was hoping to chat with you a bit? If that's alright? I don't want to intrude."
You shook your head, leading him into the living room. A variety of Leia's toys were scattered about, and you bent down to pick them up and move them out of the way. "It's OK, don't worry. My job's remote, so I don't have to leave or anything. Not until two, when Leia comes home from school."
"Great," Daniel said, sitting down on the couch beside you. "I've been bored out of my mind since I've come back to Perth."
You swallowed, not exactly sure of how to respond. "Yeah? Is your past haunting you or something?"
Daniel chuckled. "Not exactly. I'm just used to a lot of hustle-and-bustle, and Perth...isn't really delivering on that."
"Where did you work?" you asked.
He fidgeted with his hands. "Er...I used to be a Formula One driver. I know, wild, but yeah. DR3." He laughed again, but this time it was dry and full of resentment.
Your eyebrows shot up in surprise. "Formula One? My sister's obsessed with it. Wow, that's really cool."
"Yeah, it is. But they moved on to better talent, and now I'm back here." He slouched down, avoiding your gaze.
You gently nudged his shoulder. "Well, I'm glad you've returned and that we've met."
He gave you a wan half-smile.
For another hour, you two chatted away, talking about your past, about Leia, and about your hobbies. You told him about your Star Wars obsession (aka the reason why you'd chosen the name Leia for your daughter), showing him the vintage R2D2 toy you kept on your bookshelf. In return, he told you about how he used to go fishing with his parents in Lake Monger and about some of his F1 exploits.
Eventually, the alarm you set to keep track of when to pick Leia up went off, marking the end of your conversation. "I've got to go," you apologized.
"It's no problem." Daniel waved a hand, brushing you off. "Here's my number in case you want to keep in touch?" He wrote it down on a piece of paper and handed it to you.
"Thanks," you said, flustered.
"See you around, Y/N," he said as he stepped out the front door.
Text messages between Daniel and Y/N (Takes place a week to two months after their first meeting)
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Sydney, Australia (Two months later)
"Come on, Leia," you urged your daughter as you led her through a thick crowd of people in the airport. "Don't let go of my hand."
Daniel was in front, leading you towards the exit, where a glossy crimson Ferrari was parked. "Here we go." He opened the door for you, sliding beside you and helping to buckle Leia in.
You smiled at him. "Thanks so much for inviting us."
"No problem, darling."
The pet name sent a curl of heat through your core, and you looked out the window so you wouldn't have to respond. The view was stunning: metallic skyscrapers, a bustling city center. You couldn't believe that this was what you were missing out on your whole life.
About twenty minutes later, the car stopped in front of a sleek modern hotel. You saw Daniel's mum wave at you, and swallowed roughly. You prayed that she would like you.
"Leia, be nice," you chastised her before you disembarked from the car. "Use your manners."
Leia bobbed her head up and down. "I know, Mum."
When you walked over, Daniel's mum immediately struck up a conversation with you, pulling you into a tight embrace. "I'm Grace!" she introduced herself. "And this must be little Leia." She bent down to shake Leia's hand. "You look just like her."
"Thanks," you replied. "It's nice to meet you."
Grace put her hand on her heart. "Danny's told me all about you. I'm happy to see that you're exactly as I hoped."
Your gaze whipped to Daniel, who turned even redder. One more shade, and he could pass for a bearded tomato. "Really?"
"Yep!" Grace clapped Daniel on the back. "He loves you."
You blinked, but didn't blurt anything out. "We should probably head inside."
Daniel nodded fervently. "I agree."
That night
"You want to explain to me what your mum told me?" you probed Daniel, crossing your arms over your chest.
Daniel covered his face with his hands. "Fuck, Y/N, I'm sorry. She's not a good secret keeper."
"Are you saying that she was lying?"
His eyes peeked out from behind his palms. "Do you want me to say no?"
"Tell me the truth," you scolded.
Daniel sighed and took a step closer to you. "She wasn't. Ever since I saw you at that lemonade stand, I thought you were the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. You're funny, and strong, and independent. I want to prove to you that I won't be like the other one. I'm here to stay."
Without a second's worth of hesitation, you tugged on his shirt collar, pulling him down to your height, and kissed him. He moaned softly, his arms snaking around your waist and caging you against the wall. "Fuck, Y/N."
The kiss became more passionate as you tangled your fingers in Daniel's brown curls, and his own found the swell of your breasts underneath your shirt. "You're so perfect," he murmured softly. "Can I?"
You nodded, at a loss for words. Daniel lifted your shirt over your head, revealing the lacy pink bra you were wearing. "Fuck, I'm going to come in my pants like a schoolboy right now. My God, you're a fucking work of art."
You unbuttoned his shirt and loosened the waistband of his pants, letting them fall to the floor. Daniel picked you up, placing you on the bed. "The door's locked," he assured you when you opened your mouth. "If we're quiet, Leia won't know anything."
"Good," you whispered. "I don't want to traumatize her."
He laughed, and kissed you again on the collarbone. Carefully, he placed your hands above your head and said, "I want to have sex with you. Is that OK?"
"You don't have to ask, Daniel," you rasped.
Daniel shook his head. "Yes, I do. Consent is not a laughing matter, darling."
You expelled a breath in faux-annoyance, and he continued his mission. One slow thrust, and he was in you, filling your pussy and making you groan with pleasure. "Daniel..."
"Does it hurt?" he asked worriedly. "I'll go slower."
You twisted your head to look at him. "No, it's fine. Just...not used to this. It's been a while."
He pecked you on the forehead, his arms caressing the curves of your skin. "I won't hurt you, I promise."
He drove into you, the movements firm and sure. Soon, you felt the tidal wave of pleasure build up in you like an insistent hum. "Daniel, I'm going to..." you trailed off, the sentence ending with another moan.
Daniel kissed you on the temple, the touch exactly what you needed to tumble over the edge. "Let go for me, darling."
And so you did, the orgasm rippling over you and making you shudder with satisfaction.
He pulled out a moment later, his own orgasm succeeding yours, and he flopped down beside you, one arm wresting you closer to him. "You're stunning."
"When I'm all fucked out?" you teased.
Daniel played with a loose strand of your hair, his eyes bright with happiness. "Yep."
"You're so silly, Daniel," you poked fun at him, tapping his nose twice.
He flicked your nose, and stated the very obvious fact, "But you adore me."
Three weeks later
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Daniel clutched the bouquet of tulips in his hand, suddenly nervous. It wasn't the first time he had taken you out on a date. Hell, it wasn't even the second time. Yet each and every time, he was terrified.
You were perfect.
And he was...he was Daniel, the former F1 driver for four teams.
"Thanks for picking me up," you told him as he ushered you to his car. "I really appreciate it."
He gave you a quick kiss on the forehead. "No problem, darling."
You sat down, and then readjusted your position, feeling something poking your back. It was a box.
"Not a ring," he promised when he saw your expression. "I wouldn't have you accidentally sit on your engagement ring, darling."
You scowled at him, but popped open the top. A beautiful ruby necklace gleamed up at you, and you let out a gasp.
"It's my mother's. She wanted you to have it," Daniel told you.
"Wow, Daniel. This is...breath-taking." You hugged him.
"Just like you," he flirted, and you rolled your eyes. "It's the truth."
You extricated the necklace from the box and clipped it around your neck. "How does it look?"
"Perfect." He kissed you on the lips, one hand nestled on the crook of your jaw. "And all mine."
─── ୨୧ ─── THE END ─── ୨୧ ───
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zzeraphilm · 9 months ago
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Fight For Me (II)
Part one Kuroo Tetsurou x Reader (GN) word count: 3,803 Summary: When industries collide, Kuroo is reunited with the one that got away. But nobody is pleased to see each other.
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“Oh Y/N!” Alisa Haiba screeched, bringing her old friend into a hug. “I’m so glad you took the role! Ah I can finally have a friend amongst my team.” 
With a laugh, Y/N only rubbed their friend’s back lightly, not to crease her outfit that will soon be shot in the new YSL photoshoot. It had been back in Melbourne did Y/N L/N and Alisa Haiba became acquaintances. At first it took Y/N a while to realise how they recognised Alisa, thinking it was just because they saw her face plastered on every major billboard on their way to campus. But the illusive fantasy of a celebrity was shattered when she spoke in her accented English and their high school memories came flashing before their eyes. From that day forward, their worlds collided. 
After a gruelling last ditch push to complete their masters, Y/N was lucky to have Alisa as one of their few friends in Tokyo. Since coming back to Japan, Y/N had forgotten how lonely the city could be. How they would blend into the crowd of faces, becoming another statistic on a long list of residents. They hated the city, they hated how the streets they used to walk down during high school remain untouched, how the faces of the shop owners only grow older, their frowns sagging to the floor. Getting out of Japan felt liberating, to come back to it all Y/N found themselves wallowing in the same self-pity that they found themselves suffering with during their teen years. Alisa was a reminder of the world outside of the city, she allowed Y/N to follow her on trips and try new exciting things to brighten their full life. When Alisa became the face of YSL Japan and her modelling career expanded beyond Asia, Y/N was thrilled to join their friend at the request to be her assistant public relations secretary. 
If I could get Alisa to be the most known face across the globe, I can finally start my life again, out of Tokyo. 
The desire to finally leave Japan behind, leave their past behind and explore the world beyond. Maybe, that could get rid of the sour taste in Y/N’s mouth every time they thought of Tokyo. 
Despite their extensive years in academia, books could not compare to reality. Piles and piles of paperwork, emails and meetings meant Y/N lived and breathed the Haiba siblings. Being a part of Alisa’s PR team meant being a part of Lev’s, it was a given to see the fellow Nekoma alumni at work. At first, Y/N was resentful. Nekoma was supposed to be long past them, just a floating memory of guilt and regret. Lev was advised by his sister to not pester Y/N about high school, about anything related to Nekoma especially anything about Kuroo. The first few months with the Haiba siblings were stressful. Lev was growing increasingly popular amongst younger fans, booking him on daytime television to speak about his latest projects was a breeze. More fans meant more fan meets and thus more work for Y/N. 
More work means bigger reach, and getting even closer to leaving.
With winter around the corner, Y/N knew there would be an exponential growth in events that would need to be covered. Press conferences, online campaigns, brand collaborations. Whenever Y/N closed their eyes, all they could see was the Haiba siblings plastered on the inside of their eyelids. Amidst the pile of work, Y/N noticed a oddly hand written note; 
‘Please please pleaseeee consider this one! I wanna work with Kenma and Chibi-chan T^T’ 
Lifting up the sticky note, the title page screamed out to Y/N. 
“Bouncing Ball Corp ft. Hinata Shoyo and Lev Haiba.” 
“Helloo~”
“Where’d you get this plan from? Who gave it to you? Is this some kind of joke? You’re a high end luxury brand model with limited television guest appearances, what makes you think I’d let you represent sports now?” Y/N’s voice boomed into the phone, causing Lev’s eardrums to burst and bleed from the noise shattering scolding on the other end of the call. 
“Kenma gave it me! He said his team told him it would be good to reach out to other famous people who knew!” He whined.
It was partially the prospect of being with Kenma and Hinata again, but more so, he craved the feeling of slamming a volleyball with his bare hands again. After years of maintaining his pristine image, his calloused hands had smoothened out, as soft as a baby’s bum. He was yearning for the thrill of the game again. 
“No. This proposal makes no sense anyways. Who even wrote this?” 
“Well it was someone on Kenma’s side! Anyways, he’s got a hugeee following on Youtube and Twitch! All people talk about on Twitter is his stuff! Y/N you’ve always wanted a big international gig, and I’ve found us one! Please, please, please, pleaseeee!” If Lev wasn’t in public he would’ve been on his knees begging, kissing Y/N’s feet till they said yes.
Indeed, all Y/N needed now was a major international break for the siblings, if they could book either a global brand ambassador position or an American modelling debut, then Y/N could finally relocate to anywhere but Japan. The Tokyo smog blocked their lungs each daily commute to work, the buildings never changed and the familiar scents of old stores and parks they used to frequent as a student became sickening. 
“Give me Kodzuken’s contacts and we’ll see.”
It was a wild goose chase to get the right person to contact. Email, after email. More and more useless contacts that lead Y/N to no helpful responses. Different representatives of Kodzuken and Hinata Shoyo till finally the Japanese Volleyball Association. After two weeks of this ordeal, Y/N was finally sent through to the person in charge of organising the project. But of all people, it just so happened to be Kuroo Tetsurou. Shit. 
Despite getting to chase around his old volleyball rivals across the world for scouting, interviews and just regular catch ups. Kuroo hated the mundane parts of his job, emails and project meetings. Managers up his arse about deadlines. His fingers were beginning to cramp into a contorted version of itself with all the typing he had to endure. He swore his email page was burned into the scleras of his eyes. 
Ping. 
Another one to the read later pile. It was fifteen minutes till the end of his shift, he wasn’t going to stay for overtime this week, he had made plans with Kenma tonight. After weeks of rejection, the self-made entrepreneur finally was willing to leave his room to grab a drink with his long time friend. Before he could shut off his monitor, he read the Sender’s name.
L/N Y/N. 
Holy fuck. 
He thought he had buried the last sparks of affection he had for Y/N the morning they blocked them. But no, like a phoenix, the embers within him burst into an inferno. Nothing could quench the burning desire he held inside. Kuroo had forgotten where he was, he was no longer stuck in a mechanical cubicle with the robotic tapping of keyboards echoing throughout the room. He was back in his Nekoma uniform, back with Y/N by his side. He could smell them, touch them and most of all kiss them. Their laugh was ringing in his head, he was high on their perfume. Kuroo begs to any mighty power above him or anyone who could hear his heart, for his yearning to cease. He thought he could leave it all behind but his body, no his soul calls for Y/N. 
A few clicks was all it took and he plummeted to the pitiful man he once was without Y/N. His eyes darted at the few sentences, he could hear Y/N’s echoing in his head reading to him.
I hope this email finds you well…Lev Haiba…with Bouncing Ball Corp…please contact me…best regards L/N Y/N. 
By some wicked power that festered inside him, Kuroo saw this as a sign from the universe. Finally letting Y/N back into his life. He could once again feel true happiness, the love that had left his heart with a gaping void for the last few years. 
Within a few weeks, each team was able to schedule the first table reading for the promotional video. The main plan to have it filmed over a course of two weeks, just in time before the Olympics in Tokyo. Time was of the essence and the only reason why Y/N was pushing themselves to succeed in this collar was the promise of a better life for themselves. The table reading was in a spacious meeting room curtesy of the Japanese Volleyball Association, the room stretched far beyond any hall Y/N had seen before. A titanic monitor casts its shadow over the table, a long aisle of varied refreshments framed the corners of the room. The chairs were individually cushioned, the carpet was soft with the richest woven fibres from the farthest corners of the world.
Y/N had arrived with Lev and multiple representatives from his team, Kuroo was stood under the frame of the entrance door, his jaw ajar. To Kuroo Tetsurou the mere sight of Y/N took his breath away, all he wished to do was run as fast as his legs could take him and embrace them with the strength of a thousand suns. Claiming them to be his all over again. He didn’t notice that Y/N’s face was getting closer and closer towards him, till they were stood shoulder to shoulder, face to face. 
“Mr. Kuroo, a pleasure to be working with you.” Y/N held out their rigid hand.
“…Y/N,” he whispered, as if saying their name aloud was punishable by death. 
“My name is L/N. I expect you to refer to me as such. We will see you inside.” Five seconds. Their reunion lasted five seconds, Kuroo couldn’t help but watch Y/N’s figure walk away, the closest he’s ever been to them, and all he can have in return is the sight of their back. 
“My god, they’re as beautiful as the day I lost them.” Kuroo uttered. 
The meeting went as smoothly as planned. Any issues were discussed thoroughly and everyone was confident in the project. But Kuroo paid no attention to any of it. His eyes could not keep off of Y/N. The way they’d speak so eloquently, unlike how childish they were in high school. He admired Y/N’s new found maturity, this chic version of his love, he was still entranced by their allure years after their split. However, his eyes would dart to the presence of Lev Haiba next to Y/N. A deeply rooted feeling of jealousy to the boy he once considered his underling. The Haiba siblings could see and be around Y/N every waking hour, yet the only time he had with them within his reach, lasted only five seconds. It wasn’t fair. He had assumed that Y/N had no more ties to Nekoma, so the thought of Y/N never cross his mind, till now. Seeing them beside Lev Haiba, sparked a new fire within his chest. Distant memories would flash in Kuroo's mind, younger versions of themselves, a first year Lev begging to meet and be around Y/N, his partner of three years. Jokes that he would push aside, confirming how Y/N was separate to volleyball and he had no intentions of merging these two sides of him. Yet there they were, in union with each other. Y/N and volleyball. He felt sick. 
“I understand that the sport is the focus of this project, but we mustn’t ignore the everyday audience who aren’t fans of the sport.” Y/N spoke with a tinge of spite, they never mentioned the sport by name. In case the moment they uttered its name, they would be shackled down to its legacy for all of eternity. 
“Lev is the public’s rising heartthrob, for both his looks and his humour, use it.” 
“Aw! Thank you Y/N!” The half-russian man tried to coddle Y/N only to be pushed back into his seat by them.
Kuroo Tetsurou was torn. He wished to be the one to coddle Y/N. He hated how formal this all was, never had he thought of Y/N as this pragmatic android that spouted the same endless bullshit his co-workers would repeat. He wanted to see them laugh again, he wanted to bring them crying on their knees from tears of laughter. Maybe if he did that stupid impression of their father that always made them laugh, maybe then Y/N would go back to how they were in school. 
The meeting came to a close and the rounds of production was set in stone. Kuroo’s work continued to pile, he couldn’t stay on set with the boys anymore than a day and any moment he did have on set, Y/N was never there. Filming ceased and everyone returned to their original teams, muttering away on their desktops and laptops to meet the deadline their bosses’ had set. Lev Haiba went back to modelling for big brands, Kenma increased the number of live-streams in the weeks forward after having a week off for filming. Whilst Hinata was preparing the announcement of him joining the Japanese National team.
Kuroo was stuck in his monotone cubicle again. The sight of his friends succeed in things beyond the mundane 9 to 5, that he was a  slave to, was not an idea that came to mind at first. Originally, he loved the thrill of working behind sports promotion. But now, as a settled employee, he felt his life drain by the second. Only the thought of Y/N pushed him, once the project is uploaded and succeeds, he could see them at the celebratory party. If everything goes to plan. Then he could finally speak to them. Apologise. Tie everything up in a pretty bow so he could feel, complete. 
The promotional video saw millions of views and trending hashtags across multiple social medias. They had, of course, prepared for this case. Releasing behind the scenes content, exclusive photographs and interacting with online fans.
It was as Y/N had planned, down to the T. It was like a weight was lifted off their shoulders, they knew within a few days the money would come rolling in through sponsors and new deals for their company. The Japanese Volleyball Association along with Bouncing Ball Corp allowed the teams to work in a private office space for the collaboration to increase cross communication. Y/N had spent night after night working endlessly on multiple PR plans that would cover all of Lev’s possible mishaps. The moment everything succeeded, they crashed. Their face plummeted to the keyboard and drifted into a deep slumber.
Y/N was at the entrance of Nekoma High, their uniform was slightly creased because they forgot to iron their shirt the night before. First day of high school and they already felt nauseous. They hated how their uniform sat on their frame, they hated how they had they ended up in a school where most of their old middle school classmates joined them. They felt stuck in an endless cycle of the same boring, mundane life they always lived. 
“Ya gonna go in?” 
The light spring breeze blew the tall boy’s black hair to fly upwards, revealing his other eye. He quickly flattened it to hide his forehead. He looked ridiculous, his jumper was slightly too big for him, his parents probably went a few sizes up awaiting for his eventual growth spurt. 
“L/N c’mon, let me copy your English homework! Just this once!” Kuroo pleaded, training behind Y/N like a cub to its mother. 
“Kuroo this is the fourth time! Remember last time, the teacher called your mom in for a meeting about you cheating!”
The boy had grown to tower over Y/N now, he was freakishly taller than the day they first met. His long limbs made him be twice as fast as well. “I’d much rather get told off for copying than get told off for bringing nothing at all.” 
With a huff, Y/N couldn’t help but chuckle. Their dynamic was a breath of fresh air for Y/N, who previously was so used to an isolated world. But by Kuroo’s side, Y/N felt like they belonged. Somewhere within Kuroo’s circle, Y/N had a place fit just for them. 
Kuroo would always tell people that he asked Y/N out first, that he prepared a romantic dinner at his place and popped the question as if it was their last night on earth. In truth, Y/N caught him amidst his plans and cut him to the chase. But Kuroo Tetsurou, the ever-so secret romantic, wanted everyone to believe that he swept them off their feet. 
“If we’re going to be together we’ve got to do good morning and good night texts,” he huffed whilst Y/N’s arms cradled him into a tight embrace. They laughed in response for his childish acts, as a way to get back on ruining his plans on asking them out, Kuroo insisted on being as romantic as he could be with them. Holding hands, spooning, kisses in public. He didn’t care for the stares, he didn’t care for the whispers. He was happy. Y/N was happy. 
“Y/N,” Kuroo’s face was so close yet each time Y/N reached out their hand, it faded into nothingness. 
“Y/N! Y/N!” He kept calling their name yet Y/N couldn’t reach him. 
“Tetsu?”
A sudden jolt caused Y/N to shoot back up, their shoulders were covered with a distinct black jacket. Beside them was of course, the man who emerged straight from their dreams. Kuroo Tetsurou.
“Sorry but, they’re shutting the building soon. You shouldn’t sleep here, it’ll hurt your back. I know that very well,” he chuckled beneath his breath. 
Y/N hadn’t realised this before, but Kuroo’s eye bags had sunken deeper into his face. He had more noticeable crows feet and the wrinkles between his eyebrows had settled in already, quite concerning for a man still as young as him. He had changed his cologne again. He went back to the faint powdery scent, with hints of elderflower. The cologne Y/N bought him for their second anniversary. They didn’t know they still made that scent. His hands were still as calloused as they were years ago, bulging veins decorated his wrists and forearms. He maintained his built form, Y/N could see it through his button up shirt. He hadn’t changed much but was still an entirely different person.
“I was just tired Kuroo.” Y/N shimmied out of the man’s coat to return it, but Kuroo remained still. 
“It’s weird to hear you call me that.” He chuckled, “I was always Tetsu to you.”
“Yeah well that was when we were kids.” 
Kuroo smiled, a sad empty smile that held the years of regret that he harboured. Kids in love, he thought. 
“I’m going home now, thanks for waking me.” Before Y/N could step out of the office door, Kuroo grabbed their wrist. He knew this was the last time he would ever see them, he sensed it. The moment they walk out that door it’ll be over. He had to fight, it was now or never.
“I’m sorry Y/N. I’m sorry for how I treated you all those years ago. I’m sorry I didn’t pay attention to you. I’m sorry I was never there for you.” 
Disgusted. Pained. Relieved. Scared. Y/N’s stomach felt like a pit of snakes colliding into each other, trying to consume one another but failing miserably. Kuroo Tetsurou was a shell of a man now, the pain of heartbreak that lasted an eternity was killing his body slowly. He hadn’t mourned Y/N properly. He hadn’t mourned their relationship properly. 
“Why?”
“Huh- What?” Kuroo asked, dropping his grip on Y/N.
“After all these years. Why are you apologising to me now.” You could hear a pin drop from the deafening silence between the two.
“Because I love you. I’ve always loved you Y/N, I won’t ever stop loving yo-“
“Shut up.” This was straight out of teenage Y/N’s dreams, the Kuroo Tetsurou who was begging them to stay. The Kuroo Tetsurou that they used to cling to in hopes of a final embrace. He was finally right in front of Y/N. With glassy eyes, proclaiming his undying love to them, his body craving Y/N’s own. He was right there, and he was pathetic. 
“You don’t get to talk to me like that. If you did love me, you would’ve done this the night we ended it. But no, you barely said anything to me. In fact what you did, hurt me more than our actual split. You left me. You left me alone. Not just in our time together. I was never included in any part of your life beyond me. Despite being together for three years, I was completely, utterly alone." Warm tears that Y/N had suppressed for years began to arise from the dead. 
“I thought you wanted me by your side, that you needed me because I had a place in your life. But you proved me wrong time and time again! I came second to everything in your life! Not once did I feel like a person to you. You took me for granted.” 
It was like a slap in the face for Kuroo Tetsurou, he hadn’t realised it till now. In his eyes, Y/N was someone he once wanted to possess, to have and hold forever. He saw them just like his old pair of glasses he lost down the coach pillows. It took a few blinks to realise in front of him, was a person who had seen love and loss, found liberation and had it taken away. A person who had worked their life away to see the riches of their hard work. When they were in Nekoma, Y/N would always cheer him on from the sidelines, he thought it was fine. He thought they were okay with just watching them afar, he knew they didn’t really like volleyball but he didn’t care to talk about it anymore. He didn’t care. He didn’t care for having Y/N meet his teammates and hang around them, he wanted to keep them to himself. He didn’t care. His indifference was his demise. After over five years, he realised this. 
“I have lived a thousand lifetimes since I left you. I think it’s time for you to do the same Tetsurou. Stop clinging to the past.”
Kuroo Tetsurou, the man who yearned the joys of his youth, could see clearly now. Y/N didn’t look back at the man. They picked up their bag and stepped out the door. Phone in hand, ready to dial up their friends, to celebrate a life well lived. 
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rynbutt · 11 months ago
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mansplaining. | spencer reid.
request: @a-second-hand-sorrow "hey queen, just wanted to say i absolutely love your spencer stuff, you write him so well!! as a fellow aussie I was wondering if maybe you could write something with spencer and an australian reader? just something cute and silly, maybe with him infodumping everything he knows about australia ahaha, love your work!"
you can find my other fics on my masterlist.
requests are open!
cw: fem!aus!reader, none really, fluffy, silly fr
a/n: short and sweet hehe
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Henry held your hand tight as you guided him to the elevator.
JJ had just gotten back from a trip to Michigan for a case. She ended up sleeping for a couple hours before she had to go back into work again, all before little Henry woke up for the day. Since she hadn’t seen her son in almost three weeks, you thought it would be nice to bring Henry to her with some lunch as a surprise.
You had been JJ and Will’s nanny for almost 8 months now. Since Will had returned to work and JJ’s job was still incredibly demanding, they started looking for a nanny for their 3-year-old son. You just so happened to be looking for a job and to finally put your experience as a nursery assistant back home to good use. 
“You excited to see mummy?” You asked Henry as you stood in the elevator, his little FBI visitor badge far too big on his little body.
“Yeah!” He replied excitedly, jumping up and down while still holding your hand. You had taken Henry to pick up some lunch at JJ’s favourite place then let Henry pick out a pastry for each of you to have for dessert.
“Alright, remember, you have to hold on tight to my hand, okay? There are lots of people around,” you reminded the young boy, crouching down to his level.
“Uh huh,” Henry nodded, his tiny hand squeezing yours.
The elevator dinged and you gently guided Henry toward the bullpen, silently searching for JJ’s office. Henry stayed close to you as you swerved through the busy agents. You decided to ask someone who you thought looked vaguely familiar.
“Uh, Emily, right?” You gestured toward the dark haired woman sitting at her desk.
She glanced up at you, seeming to recognise you and little Henry almost instantly, “Oh hey! You’re Y/N, right?”
“Yeah, I was just wondering if you could point me in the direction of JJ’s office-”
“Did you know the Australian mainland extends from west to east for nearly 2,500 miles?” someone behind you said, obviously hearing your Australian accent.
Emily rolled her eyes and looked at you, “don’t mind, Reid.”
You turned around to look at ‘Reid’, he was cute, probably the young doctor JJ told you about. You pointed at him, “Dr. Spencer Reid, right?”
He ignored you, “And most of the rocks forming the foundation of Australia are from the Precambrian and Paleozoic time… about 4.6 billion and 252 million years ago respectively,” he looked up at you, “yes, I’m Dr. Reid.”
“Mm,” you hummed.
“I’ll go get JJ for you,” Emily sighed, frowning disapprovingly at Reid. You sat down next to Emily’s desk, picking up Henry to sit him in your lap.
“Where are you from?” Another man asked, “I’m Derek Morgan, you must be Henry’s nanny?”
“Yeah, I am… I’m from Melbourne,” you smiled.
Spencer interjected, “Melbourne isn’t said like that. The spelling negates that.”
“Kid… she’s from there, I think she knows how it’s said,” Morgan retorted. 
You just chuckled softly, “I’d love to hear you mansplain my country to me, Dr. Reid.”
“I’m not mansplaining,” Spencer replied, seeming offended.
“You kind of are,” Morgan added, leaning back in his chair.
“Mansplaining!” Henry exclaimed, making both you and Morgan laugh. Henry bolted from your lap the moment he saw his mum. You stood up to greet JJ as little Henry tackled her in a hug.
“What are you guys doing here?” JJ asked, cuddling Henry close to her.
“We thought we would surprise you for lunch,” you smiled, “Henry picked some pastries out for us too, for dessert… I hope it’s okay?”
“No, it’s perfect,” JJ replied, “it’s just what I needed honestly,” she sighed, giving you a side hug as she guided you to her office.
Henry sat on the floor playing with a few toys you brought along for him while you and JJ talked, “so, that Dr. Reid? He’s a character.”
“You met him, huh?” she leans back in her chair with a laugh.
“Oh yeah,” you replied, “he seems…” you trailed off.
JJ nodded knowingly, “Yeah, he’s like that.”
“He’s cute though,” you shrugged with a small laugh.
“Mm, I’ll make sure to tell him that,” JJ teased.
“Don’t you dare,” you retorted quickly. 
You spent the last half an hour of JJ’s break sitting with her and Henry on the floor helping him do a puzzle he had left from the last time he was here. It was nice for JJ to see her son, she missed him terribly but she knew he was in good hands with you.
JJ had to get back to work shortly after and she squeezed Henry in a tight hug, reminding you she might be late again tonight, which you didn’t mind. 
“Say ‘bye-bye’, mummy!” You held Henry’s hand, waving at JJ. 
“Bye-bye, mommy!” Henry called, waving his little hand around. 
You spun around, guiding Henry through the bullpen again before an idea popped into your head. You turned on your heel at the side of Spencer’s desk.
“Hey, Dr. Reid?” You asked softly.
“Yes?” He peered up at you.
“Ever heard of drop bears?”
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a/n: i hope you liked it! i know it was a short one but i think it's funny. another chapter of pierced coming soon >:)
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melbournechauffeurservice · 2 years ago
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Luxury Minibus Charter in Melbourne
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mecachrome · 1 year ago
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pre-mclaren oscar piastri primer (ft. maxf, landoscar)
0. introduction
for a few months now i've been wanting to make both an oscar primer and a timeline of pre-mclaren landoscar moments, but i couldn't figure out which one to prioritize… then after some deliberation i finally realized i could just combine the two things together! so. here is an oscar-centric timeline that is mainly about his racing background, moving to the uk, and how he became acquainted with other members of the rfm pack—aka lando, maxf, and logan. i don't know whether any of this information is useful or even vaguely interesting, but i mostly just wrote it for myself and thought i'd share what i had in case anyone else wanted to check it out. please feel free to comment or shoot me an ask if anything here is egregiously incorrect; i've checked and linked as many sources as i could but it's of course possible that some errors remain :)
1. background, rc racing, early karting days (2007-2015)
oscar piastri was born on april 6, 2001 in brighton east, a suburb of melbourne not far from albert park circuit, as the son of chris and nicole and to-be oldest brother to 3 younger sisters. a love for all things automotive ran deep in the piastri family: both of his grandfathers were mechanics and his father had also co-founded his own vehicle diagnostics software company, hp tuners, aka oscar's sponsor throughout his racing career. thanks to his father's business, oscar's family was objectively well-off and managed to contribute a fairly substantial amount of support toward his junior career, but they also weren't swimming in cash by multi-millionaire motorsport standards either.
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(L-R) edie, mae, hattie, and oscar, from nicole's twitter — each sibling is ~2 years apart (source)
while most drivers on the current grid were introduced to motorsport through go-karting, usually at or before the age of 7, oscar's path to single-seaters differed slightly. he first developed an interest in racing via remote-controlled cars at the age of 6, when his father brought him a monster truck as a souvenir back from a business trip in america. oscar began racing them that same year, eventually moving to safer electric track vehicles and even winning the second class of the national titles in 2010, at the age of 9. he was so small then that he often needed to stand on a milk crate to see the cars on track, and the next-youngest competitor at the time was twice his age. (source)
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oscar on the podium at age 8 (nov 16, 2009)
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oscar with his father chris, who often competed alongside him in a separate class (dec 21, 2010)
by 2011, oscar and his father were seriously considering his potential of pursuing rc racing as a viable career path, but things changed when he was introduced to karting via a friend's daughter in the rc community and his aspirations slowly shifted toward racing from inside a car. oscar was an unsurprisingly sporty and competitive child growing up; he'd played some cricket and aussie rules football and knew that all he wanted to do was race professionally, full-stop, at the time thinking along the lines of australian racing categories like v8 supercars. he was still competing in remote car racing as late as 2013, but he began karting seriously within australia in 2014, placing respectably in the junior categories of several regional karting series against relatively senior and more-experienced racers, and even going to france for a one-off event where he finished on the podium of the iame international junior x30 final. this outing affirmed his potential to his father and motivated the two of them to split time between australia and europe in 2015 as they juggled his karting future; plans for two more european events that year fell through, including the cik-fia world championship at the kfj level (which logan sargeant would go on to win), but at this point they were officially looking to take his career to the next level and commit fully to european karting in 2016.
this is when ricky flynn (and the hypothetical idea of lando norris!!!) comes in. before we get into rfm and karting professionally in europe, it's important to note that the defining aspect of landoscar's junior careers is that their pathways never once intersected. in fact, they don't even seem to have met properly before oscar entered the f1 grid as alpine reserve, although they'd spoken over social media and oscar was familiar with several people around lando's life—for example, maxf, logan, guanyu, and even lando's older brother oliver, who had also raced for rfm.
in short, you could say that landoscar's biggest hindrance was their parallel excellence. oscar was good enough to catch up and even surpass everyone else at lando's level, but lando remained untouchable throughout the years. oscar is only 1.5 years younger than him, but their f1 careers are offset by 4 years (2019 vs. 2023 debut) because of exactly two things: oscar's 2022 gap year in alpine and his two attempts at formula renault eurocup. on the other hand, lando sped through all of his junior categories in blistering fashion, falling short of the championship only once: the year he placed 2nd in f2 behind george russell. this is significant because many talk about the clinical nature of oscar's rapid single-seater ascension and three b2b2b victories (still very impressive, especially given his limited karting career!), but all of that speaks equally to the illustrious nature of lando's junior success and the sheer magnitude of faith placed in him as mclaren's "golden boy" coming up the ranks. to put things into further perspective, lando was teammates with maxf and jehan daruvala at rfm until 2014, jehan competing in the same class and max one below, yet by the time oscar was racing max and jehan—in f3 in 2020 and f2 in 2021, respectively—lando was already into his 2nd and 3rd years of f1. here's a chart that hopefully makes a bit more sense:
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majorly simplified timeline showing lando, guanyu, maxf, logan, and oscar's junior careers + the karting classes they primarily competed in each calendar year. maxf did not complete his 2nd f3 season and many of them contested multiple/different formula renault series, but this is just a rough overview of their feeder series experience. 
2. moving to europe, rfm, regional formulae (2016-2019)
back in australia, oscar was a member of the oakleigh go-kart racing club and being actively mentored by james sera, a multi-time australian karting champion and fa kart dealer who worked with young karting talents alongside his cousin david. in late-2015, he presumably helped oscar and his father reach out to ricky flynn, who ran ricky flynn motorsport (rfm) and whose team was at the time enjoying exorbitant success in the karting scene; lando had won the world championship at the kf level the year prior, and logan would soon clinch the kfj title in 2015, results which further drew oscar's interest toward the team. ricky flynn agreed to take oscar on and have him and his dad move out to europe, and by november 2015 oscar announced on social media that he would be joining rfm the next year. in january of 2016, he and his father moved to hertford, uk, so that oscar could begin a 100-day karting program and travel extensively around europe to attend races. this is where he met logan sargeant, who was in his final year on the team but competing a class above, now at the ok (previously kf) level. oscar himself was only competing in the okj class.
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not oscar-related, but as you can see guanyu, logan, and maxf were already acquainted before oscar and logan met, since the three of them and lando had been in rfm together as of 2014 — (may 11, 2014) & (feb 6, 2015)
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oscar and logan in 2016
in an interview published on june 7, 2023, oscar reflected on leaving australia and committing to his racing dream, saying:
"i think if there was a turning point, it was probably when i started finishing towards the front in australia, and i started winning a couple of races here and there and finishing in the top three of championships and stuff, and then went to europe and fully committed to going down that route. [...] there's obviously a very big commitment at that point when you move halfway across the world without family and stuff. so i knew at that point that i really wanted to become a professional because, firstly, that's what i want to do anyway, but, secondly, now i'm sacrificing seeing my family, and stuff like that to be able to do this — which was a sacrifice i was more than willing to make."
like the majority of oscar's karting career, his time with ricky flynn can primarily be summarized as decent. none of his performances were particularly stellar, and in november 2016 he placed 6th in the fia world championship final behind the likes of victor martins and théo pourchaire (he mainly competed against guys like them, dennis hauger, caio collet, etc… once again logan was a class above and lando/maxf had already graduated to single-seaters), but he showed promising racing foundations and a great capacity for improvement, especially given that he'd moved to europe the same year and was still adjusting to life and racing on the opposite hemisphere. about 6 months into his new karting venture, oscar had settled in reasonably well and his father decided he would return to australia to continue on with his life, so they made the joint decision that oscar was to begin boarding at haileybury's uk campus and continue racing in europe entirely on his own. uk and australian school years are misaligned, so my personal understanding is he moved to europe after finishing year 9 in australia, attempted online school/took a few months off (he says he did online coursework here, but mentioned here that he was out of school, so it sounds like it must have been a very half-hearted effort…), came back to australia over the uk summer to do some more karting, then began boarding in september 2016 as a year 10 student. he spent ~4 years there and eventually received his a-levels in 2020, except his final year was disrupted by covid and he never sat his exams. (blog post mentioning his a-levels + btg transcript excerpt about his exams; his website says he attended haileybury from 2016-19, but i think this mainly encapsulates his boarding period, as he was still doing remote work in april 2020.)
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oscar in f4 with his gcse revision guide, 📸 sebastiaan rozendaal (may 20, 2018)
2016 is also when oscar began his well-documented super-liking of several of lando's social media profiles. i think understanding oscar's time in rfm and his extremely british single-seater origins helps better paint his history with lando and maxf; my personal understanding of pre-mclaren landoscar is that while oscar never formally met lando or maxf during his karting days, he knew of them quite well through rfm and thus followed them on instagram/twitter after moving to the uk. of course, oscar has a fairly active social media presence in general, so young oscar quietly liked instagram posts and tweets from many different people, but i do feel compelled to note that in the early days he liked lando, maxf, and logan's posts with seriously impressive frequency compared to anyone else on the grid (or anyone in general, really); after creating his twitter account in may 2016, some of the very first tweets oscar liked were from maxf, and he also liked a multitude of mundane lando tweets from 2016 until… today, while on the other hand he didn't start liking george's tweets—another similarly-aged young british talent—until late 2017. (he does have some fun george-admiring moments though, but that can wait for another time!) outside of rfm, other people oscar was familiar with during his early racing years were british f4 teammate ayrton simmons, to-be series champion jamie caroline, and old australian karting friend christian pancione, who appears to still be one of his best mates (if not his best) as of today. fun fact is that christian raced for the carrera cup as a support event to the australian gp in 2023; here's oscar allegedly checking the quali live timing at lunch during his own media day. 
so, to conclude, oscar's early lando focus basically traces back to the motorsport path he took at the behest and guidance of his early rfm connections in the uk. the thing is that despite growing up in australia and vaguely admiring several aussie drivers in f1 as a child (read: mark webber and eventually daniel ricciardo), oscar has never had a specific driver he consistently mentions when pressed for his racing "idol," likely since his personality inherently resists idolatry and he instead views successful people more as actionable benchmarks or reference points for self-improvement rather than as unattainable paragons of accomplishment. as a kid forced to grow up almost entirely on his own, the majority of his racing aspirations were molded independently in the uk—he completed his karting career in the uk, boarded at haileybury for 4 years (fun fact: other drivers to attend include jehan, callum ilott, and clément novalak; callum was a few years above oscar and finished school in 2017, but the two would later become quite talkative over social media anyway), raced in british f4, became a brdc member, contested eurocup under a british license and therefore had the british flag raised and british national anthem played during his wins, stayed in the uk even at alpine since the factory is based in enstone, etc. oscar basically moved to the uk from australia without having really met anyone significant in the racing scene (other than jack doohan, or more importantly jack's father mick, but jack is younger and did an extra year of karting) and pretty much didn't have anyone specific to "look up to" at the time. oscar's first acknowledgement of lando's online existence was in december 2015, when he liked one of lando's instagram posts prior to moving to england, so it can be assumed that lando basically functioned as his most accessible reference point in the junior ladder as a 14 year old dipping his toes into the european racing scene for the first time. that is my highly subjective analysis of the situation!
select quotes re: oscar's inconsistent responses to his motorsport "hero" (or his favorite driver / a driver he looks up to in general):
(f1fs; mar 9, 2022) "i started watching f1 in… 2009 was the first season i properly watched. so when brawn came in, obviously mark was the only aussie on the grid at that point, so i was kind of naturally going for him. then joined by daniel, so obviously going to support the aussies, but i think watching lewis has been nothing short of spectacular, and a very good role model. [...] i think when i was first watching, i supported mark, but, you know, and i hope he takes no offense to this—vettel was winning everything at that point. so i was supporting mark, but vettel was doing most of the winning. i think now that i understand more about racing though, i would say [the driver i look up to the most is] lewis, mainly. the way he goes about things on and off the track is quite exceptional."
(mcl youtube; mar 29, 2023) sporting idols mentioned: ayrton senna, alain prost, michael jordan (see also ultimate athletes list)
(p1; aug 10, 2023) "i would say i never had like one specific idol. when i was growing up watching mark webber was at red bull, and obviously being australian, red bull being very quick at the time, i kind of naturally followed him. i mean—even like some of the guys in the junior ranks above me. like lando was always kind of two, three years above me, winning… most things on his way up. so i guess kind of him in some ways?"
(eff won; dec 4, 2023) "i don’t really have like one specific [idol]. i think what lewis has been able to do in terms of getting to seven world championships was incredibly impressive. i think what max is doing now is also very impressive…" 
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the first lando post oscar liked on instagram (dec 21, 2015)
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the first maxf posts oscar liked; instagram (feb 26, 2016) & twitter (may 9, 2016)
anyway, back to british f4! despite his initially unconventional foray into motorsport, oscar's journey progressed in a much more orderly fashion once he stepped up to single-seaters. his actual debut was in f4 uae, which he ran 3 rounds of between 2016 and 2017 (another fun fact: this is where he briefly acquainted himself with mclaren indycar driver david malukas, who would later recall him being very intelligent and whom zak brown allegedly spoke to oscar about before appointing to their indy team). after cutting his teeth on actual car-racing for the first time, oscar decided against moving up to the ok class as he felt confident in his ability to be competitive in single-seaters. his first full season was therefore the 2017 british f4 championship, during which oscar signed with arden while logan went to reigning champions carlin (lando had won with them in 2015, then maxf in 2016). oscar made his way to the top step 6 times in the season and placed just barely above logan for 2nd in the championship, finishing behind the considerably more experienced jamie caroline. arden was also founded and is currently owned by red bull team principal christian horner, so it was during oscar's time there that christian took note of and interest in his talent; oscar reportedly did a few runs in the red bull simulator but was passed over for joining the academy, which christian later voiced regret on. (source)
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maxf, logan (center), and oscar (to max's right) on a day maxf was visiting the 2017 british f4 grid (april 11, 2017)
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linus lundqvist, oscar, and logan on the podium at snetterton (jul 30, 2017)
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jamie and oscar, who were… er, mathematically in the main championship fight. for some reason they made them take these photos (sep 30, 2017)
after a successful f4 outing with arden, oscar returned to the team for his first season of formula renault eurocup in 2018, a renault series that ran in its specific configuration until 2020 before merging with the parallel regional series frec to become what is today known as freca. this season proved to be less competitive for oscar, as arden was relatively inexperienced in this series and oscar's three teammates were afflicted with what can colloquially be referred to as a "skill issue," making it difficult to collectively develop the car throughout the season. (blog interview) the series was thus returning driver maxf's to lose, who at the time was racing for reigning champs r-ace with teammates that included oscar's fellow rookies logan and victor martins.
despite the unideal environment, oscar managed to prove his worth by placing a respectable 8th in the series, scoring 110 points as a rookie driver and capping the season off with 3 podiums and a top-finish of 2nd place—a jarring contrast to his teammates' joint total of 12 points. this result attracted the attention of r-ace and granted him a seat with them for the 2019 season, at which point maxf and logan both graduated to f3. thankfully that wasn't too much of a concern for oscar since he'd always intended to do two seasons of eurocup, and now he finally had a chance to win the first serious championship of his racing career with an established racing outfit.
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oscar, max, and yifei ye on the hockenheim r2 podium (sep 23, 2018) [full gifset]
oscar's second season of eurocup is when he truly started proving himself as a driver, or at least to the people whose names, money, and opinions mattered around the paddock. his main competition in 2019 was again victor, who was now racing for mp and had been made a member of the renault sport academy back in 2018 after a strong performance in french f4. despite a close title fight, oscar managed to hold him off for the championship in the final race of the season, kicking off what would soon become an impressive string of consecutive single-seater series titles. even sweeter was the fact that all eurocup champions were awarded a renault sport academy spot that could be left or taken as they pleased, and of course—while the finances weren't nearly as impressive as alpine would later proclaim in their baseless smear campaign—oscar's connections in the racing world were limited as an australian driver almost exclusively managed by his father, so he gladly accepted the offer for the many venues of support renault presented to him.
see also: bby oscar briefly mentioning lando after winning eurocup in 2019 (@ 1:10)
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oscar being lifted by his team (r-ace) after placing 4th in the abu dhabi finale and winning the title by 7.5 points
3. renault sport academy, lockdown, f3 (2020)
many things happened in 2020. one: oscar became an official member of the renault sport academy, joining the likes of max (who'd been picked up on merit after winning british f4 in 2017), guanyu, christian lundgaard, caio collett, and fellow new recruit hadrien david (victor had been strategically demoted after oscar's win because renault is a notoriously unserious organization, but again this is not the post). two: by the time oscar was ready for f3, moving up the ladder proved to be exorbitantly expensive, and he realized he needed better funds and managerial support to sort his career out. he'd been offered a spot in prema's f3 team by team-owner rené rosin at the end of his eurocup season, who'd named him for the post-season test before the championship was over and stressed that the spot was his no matter where he finished. (source) prema is unquestionably one of the top—if not frequently the top—teams one can drive for in most junior series (though there is also somewhat of a self-selection bias; if you ask oscar he is not a significant beneficiary of prematax!), having absolutely demolished the f3 competition that same year and achieved a clean sweep of the drivers' standings with rob shwartzman, marcus armstrong, and jehan at 1-2-3 consecutively. oscar completed post-season testing with them in spain alongside to-be teammates logan and fred vesti in october (source), before confirming on jan 26, 2020 that he would be joining them for the f3 season as a renault junior.
so, where does mark webber come in here? apparently mark's trainer from red bull and wec had also been oscar's trainer since 2016 (i'm pretty sure this is australian physiologist simon sostaric), and it was through their joint connection that oscar was introduced to mark. according to mclaren's 2023 season preview, "the pair hit it off, and webber took his countryman under his wing," signing oscar to jam sports management, aka the management agency he runs with his wife ann. mark's support would become a major factor in helping oscar progress through the feeder ranks and establish himself in f1, mainly because he had actual connections and could help oscar network with sponsors and negotiate his way during future signings. of course, more on this later.
as an aside, here are a few things mark has said about oscar:
"he’s got that white line fever when he puts his helmet on and turns into a different character, which is sensational." (mar 1, 2020)
"one of oscar’s biggest strengths by a mile, compared to everyone he is competing against — and this will be a huge string to his bow when he makes it to f1 — is his composure. he has immense levels of composure. [...] if you are weak mentally you won’t make it. he was on his own from an early age. he did brilliantly with his studies. but the racing disease would not go away, he wants it very much." (sydney morning herald; dec 11, 2021)
"he’s a prost, mate. he’s such a thinker and so calm. at first i thought i needed to inject a bit of urgency in him, but actually no, he’s got his own frequency. that’s just where he is." (the race; oct 7, 2023)
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estimates provided by chris piastri on the cost of oscar's junior career, stressing the million-dollar commitments of running a single season of f3 or f2 (source)
anyway, back to the chaotic events of 2020. i think something that's good to keep in mind when discussing oscar's time in the renault sport academy is that he was actually a relatively new recruit, as in he only participated in a single training camp with the other juniors in 2020 and most of them (max, christian, guanyu, the temporary ghost of victor) already knew each other before. oscar essentially met with renault's factory team in early 2020, filmed promotional material with other juniors in january before attending the season opener together in february and then heading to winter training camp later that month, after which he and max left early for f3 pre-season testing in bahrain on march 1—a blessing in disguise, seeing as caio, hadrien, and christian remained behind and would soon be stuck quaranting in a hotel in tenerife—then briefly spent a week at school before returning home for what was meant to be a quick pit stop at the australian gp, which at the time had yet to be canceled.
then, of course, lockdown happened.
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simplified breakdown of renault junior stints, notably showcasing the academy's struggles to meaningfully promote any of its juniors
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oscar at the 2020 renault season opener alongside then-academy director mia sharizman, then-tp cyril abiteboul, alain prost, f1 drivers esteban ocon and daniel ricciardo, and the other academy juniors: fewtrell, lundgaard, zhou, david (feb 12, 2020)
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oscar and maxf behind the scenes of the same event (feb 12, 2020)
stuck in australia for three months, oscar would end up participating in two fia virtual races, one for f2 and another for f1 (jun 7, 2020). a fun landoscar tidbit is that he finished 5th in the virtual gp right behind lando, so they technically had raced each other before 2023, depending on... well, whether you count a 2020 sim race wherein george russell and alex albon lead the pack as a real race. nevertheless, this was a time when drivers were becoming much more active online, seeing as streaming was the best way to keep their images relevant and connect with fans, and despite oscar expressing little interest in streaming on twitch he would still experience a considerable uptick in his online activity and twitter reach that year.
racing resumed on july 4 at the red bull ring in austria; oscar had been granted an exemption to travel to the uk and complete a 2-week quarantine back on may 27, a reassuring indicator to the motorsport world that the f3 season would run after all. now that he no longer had to attend school, having received 2 b's and 1 c for his maths, physics, and computer science a-levels, oscar relocated from hertford to oxford in june to be near the renault facilities, which he visited nearly every day to train at, and began living independently (as in in a flat) for the first time since 2016, rooming with fellow renault junior caio collet.
as i said before, this season is when oscar's online presence and "memeability" began to really conceptualize, enabled primarily by the fact that he was a) finally living outside of a school dormitory, and b) now, of course, signed at prema, a team notorious for its social media visibility, literal family atmosphere, and frequent youtube pandering. according to this f3 article, his twitter followers jumped from 795 at the start of the season to 11.6k by the time he won the championship, an audience built significantly off the self-deprecating string of jokes he used to tweet regarding drs and general reliability issues faced throughout the season.
what i guess i want to touch on here is how oscar's online presence has always been concentrated around the bare fundamentals of his personality: dry humor, candid words, sparing emojis, a few humorous photos detailing the mundane reality of his everyday routines, and at most the occasional inopportune meme or reaction gif (#thepiastri 🤷‍♂️, f2 in baku, jetpack guy, so on). he's bantered frequently with callum on twitter and near-obsessively liked memes, videos, and other updates lando shares with his audience, but he also has seemingly little interest in building up his own "brand" the way lando so smartly has with ln4 and quadrant, and quite frankly seems viscerally incapable of wanting to engage one-to-one with fans or otherwise leveraging the popularity of his material image. basically what i like to say is that oscar enjoys being adjacent to "lad humor" and will happily enable it, but he really has no interest in being the one to initiate it himself!
"there's some things you want to share, some things you don’t. in today's age and sort of having the profile that us drivers do, we kind of just have everything shared,” piastri said. “but (social media) can be used for good, certainly within the profiles that we have. but in some ways, it can be negative, and there's always going to be people out there that don't like you for being you.” piastri tries to write as many of his posts as possible, and he checks those written by his team to be sure they sound authentically him. (the athletic; jun 29, 2023)
along these lines, oscar does enjoy the spotlight, only he seems to prefer it concentrated in a specific lens toward a specific productive end. he's endlessly capable of seeing the objective upside of a situation, joking after he was made a meme in baku following his f2 sr1 collision that he was all for it if it got him popularity. after his eurocup championship he also said: "i think everyone loves a bit of spotlight on them. i think that's just human nature, so a bit of attention's always nice." which is interesting to me!
but back to racing. this season would unexpectedly become two things: maxf's last competitive season in motorsport—especially disappointing considering that he'd gone into the championship expecting to put on a second-season title charge, instead failing to gel with the hitech team to the point that each increasingly poor weekend made him spiral mentally—as well as oscar and logan's last season racing against each other before f1, since logan would later encounter financial difficulties that left him stranded in f3 as oscar catapulted himself to f2 victory. 2020 was obviously a weird season in general because of covid and the gap from pre-season testing, so it also meant that oscar had gone into the season fairly rusty; he managed to win the first race of the season, but on top of his drs rollercoaster he did struggle with middling results in qualifying and was met step-by-step throughout the championship by logan.
maxf's last race in f3 was the barcelona sprint race on august 16, with three rounds left to the end of the season. he dnfed in an unfortunate first-lap incident mere moments after oscar charged his way up from 5th on the grid to the front of the pack, where he would eventually breeze his way to victory and pull himself near-level with logan for the championship lead. i recognize that this is an oscar post and not a maxf post, but i think their time in f3 during an extremely isolated and covid-affected period speaks to both an interesting dynamic between them (the little kid who always lagged a series behind you suddenly beating you on merit) and their respective temperaments toward racing. while at renault, max reportedly lived with jack aitken during the week but would return to his family home on weekends, so it makes sense that he struggled to adapt when covid hit and drivers were collectively forced into very regimented sporting bubbles. mark webber, who worked for channel 4 as a commentator and had access to the f1 paddock, basically couldn't see oscar in person and instead spoke to him over the phone every day on race weekends. maxf said of his decision to quit:
"normally [...] i’m able to stay calm under pressure and i don’t let many things get to me but when you have a bad qualifying result and you see guys up there that you know you’re capable of beating, it definitely takes a dig at you inside and it’s been a lot to process throughout the year." (source)
while then-academy director mia sharizman, who worked closely with the renault juniors, spoke of oscar's inherent propensity for independence and how he adapted well to the pressures of living on his own:
"if you look at oscar piastri, he has been living on his own, [away] from his family who are in melbourne for the past five to six years. because he has been living on his own in boarding school, he learns how to live on his own, and he thrives in that. we have to force him... 'have you spoken to your father?!' it's just things like that, but he thrives in that. that's why he thrived in those weekends racing. he loves being on his own without anybody. on the other hand, we had max fewtrell, for example, who can't – he couldn't survive the 11 weekends racing, because he always needed his family to be around him. so those are the things that suddenly you see and, i think that that we see now, after a few years a driver who is quick, a driver who has the talent, and then the driver who is stable." (source)
2020 is also when lando and oscar spoke to each other on twitter for the first time. yay! after lando went semi-viral for having a meltdown over a hornet on three separate social media platforms, oscar first joked with him about it on august 24 (this was incidentally also the day maxf announced his functional retirement, which oscar liked as well 😭), before referencing the incident again a few weeks later in september.
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(aug 24, 2020) / (sep 10, 2020)
outside of drs tweets and trying desperately to banter with lando norris, oscar's popular tweets at the time included several food-related mishaps and home appliance tragedies. while this isn't actually a lando moment, he was also slandered by the LN4 twitter account a month later on october 17 for reasons that remain a mystery, resulting in this set of interactions:
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(oct 17, 2020) / (oct 19, 2020)
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bonus: maxf's tweets @ oscar (when you aren't close enough to just text him.......)
but back to f3. similarly to his second season of eurocup, oscar would go on to clinch the title in only the final race of the year, this time even more stressfully—he never got pole that season and won arguably off of consistency, benefiting from errors and unfortunate collisions involving his primary competitors. after a hectic qualifying and string of contentious grid penalties set for the before-last round in monza, he began the feature race 15th on the grid but put on an impressive performance to finish on the podium, buffing his points lead after logan was tapped by clément and put out of the points. he, logan, and fred all dnfed in race 2 (read: the novalak pendulum swung away from oscar's favor to maintain stringent cosmic equilibrium, while logan and fred threw away a points opportunity with a teammate4teammate love tap), and oscar went into mugello with only an 8-point lead over logan and a 24-point lead over pourchaire. this weekend proved equally hectic, as is frequently the case with f3 racing standards, but in short oscar and logan entered the final sprint race level on points, with théo approaching terrifyingly near in their rearview mirrors. logan was unceremoniously taken out of contention on the first lap after contact with zendeli, and oscar managed to squeak his way to 164 points in the championship by placing 7th in the race; théo finished 3rd, with 161 points, two positions away from claiming both the race and the championship title.
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a succinct summary of an eventful season! (posted jun 30, 2021)
despite winning the f3 championship in far-from-dominant fashion, oscar's career was now steadily on an upward trend. on october 30 he was rewarded with a private test in the r.s.18 at bahrain alongside christian and guanyu, and a month later confirmed that he would be racing for prema again in f2 (december 1, 2020). as a rookie f3 champion there was a moderate amount of interest in him, but no one really expected him to carry home the f2 title on his first try and so one of the main favorites going into the next season was his second-year teammate and 2019 f3 champion rob shwartzman.
4. f2, alpine reserve duties, #piastrigate (2021-2022)
at the start of 2021, fernando officially took daniel's place at renault and the team rebranded itself as alpine, parting ways with team principal cyril abiteboul and functionally replacing him with new ceo laurent rossi—part of a no-tp management structure, frankly a self-evident infrastructural faux-pas from a million miles away. the renault sport academy was then also renamed to alpine academy; again i know that this is an oscar post so i won't get too into the details of Alpine Being Alpine, but understanding how the academy functioned does help better contextualize the inevitable unfurling of piastrigate.
the main issue, really, would always be laurent rossi, or at least the values laurent rossi had been hired to represent and which he willingly peddled during his controversial tenure at alpine. after rossi's appointment it was reported that "the renamed alpine academy was now being tugged in two directions between director mia sharizman's ideal as a creator of future f1 drivers and alpine's chief executive officer laurent rossi's commercially-led preferences." (source) mia directed the academy from january 2016 until may 2022, and had been the one to restructure its recruitment process by demanding better funding and robust testing programs to cyril:
"when we first restarted the team in 2016, it was, we didn't even have a two-year-old car program at that time. we had to use a 2012 program using the [lotus] e20. [...] then in 2018, i went through it, and i said to cyril abiteboul, "look, let's try and do this." we needed financial resources. i needed a head start with financial resources to kick start the program whereby you entice drivers, and you offer [a place] to the academy drivers. it was more to see how they are... it was more of an evaluation process... that was what the first idea was. then we developed the program to develop the drivers to suit their formual 2 program." (source)
(note: mia also believed that 2020 was a disappointing year for all of his juniors save for oscar's performance in f3, which is a whole other thing. but rossi's greatest shortcoming was that he had singular, insulated vision, and he resisted any external input to the detriment of reactionary business decisions, a fact that alienated alain prost and soon led to his exit from the outfit in 2022. not a good look!!! prost would later call rossi "the best example of the dunning-kruger effect, that of an incapable leader who thinks himself able to overcome his incompetence with his arrogance and lack of humanity toward his troops." 🤌)
so basically, the cracks of mind-boggling incompetence within the team's leadership structure were long evident. on a brighter note, oscar's 2021 f2 season would quickly become his strongest single-seater contest ever (f1 youtube has a good summarizing video of his season, if interested); because of covid, f2 was experimenting with a three-race format this year in which quali set the reverse grid for sr1 and sr1 results then set the reverse grid for sr2, which essentially meant high qualifiers were rewarded for simply maintaining composure in the first sprint and running cleanly in the top 10 in order to secure a favorable grid spot in sr2. oscar adapted well to this format, building off his reputation of smooth, consistent driving on top of slowly improving his qualifying results over the course of the season, finally breaking through with his first feature-race win in monza. 
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oscar with mia sharizman
this is also around the time when lando mentioned oscar in official f1 media for the first time, reading off a question about him to daniel in an interview posted in october:
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"this one's not even about formula one. it's about oscar piastri. oscar pias-tree! [...] he's been on it this year." — (full video) (oct 1, 2021)
of his own f2 campaign, oscar said:
"i thought that i could challenge for race wins, but i probably wasn't expecting to be so consistently at the front. consistency is something that i’ve had as a trait throughout my career, and i was expecting to be consistent in my results this year — but maybe a bit lower down!" (source)
not only did he end up being consistently at the front, he became virtually unstoppable in the second half of the season. on december 11, oscar clinched the title in abu dhabi with two races to spare, ending the season with 5 consecutive poles and 4 consecutive feature wins, 60.5 points above his previously-favored teammate in the standings. #notbadforashitqualifier!
by now oscar was a hot commodity in the paddock; the only problem was that alpine didn't really care, mainly because rossi had enthusiastically re-signed ocon to a three-year deal in 2021 and held zero intention of actually promoting any of its juniors to one of the race seats, plus the one open spot at alfa romeo had instead gone to guanyu and his considerable financial package (though oscar has always been vocally defensive of guanyu's appointment to his detractors). instead of moving to another series, such as indycar or super formula, oscar recognized that he'd proven everything he needed to prove within the feeder system and opted to remain on the grid as alpine's reserve driver, mainly so that he could embed himself in an f1 team environment and—most crucially—avoid being left "out of sight, out of mind," because once you go to america you usually don't come back.
i'll keep the rest of this post brief since i feel like everyone already knows What Went Down, but a quick highlight for fellow landoscar enjoyers was the 2022 australian gp on april 10, during which oscar accompanied rosanna tennant for the post-race show and awkwardly participated in a chaotic lando & alex interview. as far as i know, this was landoscar's first time interacting on-camera!
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o: "i haven't raced either of them, no." l: "not yet!" o: "not yet. hopefully soon." — (full video) (apr 10, 2022)
then silly season started, and everything was thrown into disarray when sebastian vettel announced his imminent retirement and fernando subsequently took his place at aston martin; alpine scrambled to recover from this blindsided move and prematurely promoted oscar to an f1 seat, to which oscar eventually posted The Tweet—claiming he'd never signed a contract with alpine and would not be racing for them in 2023, thus kicking off #piastrigate. or the piasco, or whatever you prefer to call it.
here's a good article that properly summarizes the crb ruling, but tl;dr: mclaren and alpine had come to an agreement back in march to loan oscar to mclaren's stable of reserve drivers after daniel contracted covid; mark webber, who was close to andreas seidl from their time at porsche in wec, quietly negotiated a contract with mclaren for 2023 that oscar would then sign on july 4, which was reportedly initially a reserve deal with an upgrade clause to a full-time drive given a dr buyout; alpine's legal team turned out to be essentially one overworked legal director who mishandled the situation thanks to a lack of organizational support, while a concrete williams deal never actually existed no matter what people continuously allege, and any proprietary right to oscar's services that alpine purported to have for the 2023 season would soon be voided by crb rule on september 2. in other words, they dun goofed.
because tumblr dies when i try to include it in this post, here's a link to a condensed chronological timeline version of this post.
that's it for now. i'm sure you know how the rest goes!!!
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f1tales · 5 months ago
Text
is it that sweet? i guess so - mv1
that's that me espresso || part two
previous part || next part
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pairing: max verstappen x ofc!piastri
summary: oscar’s older sister is a singer, who’s taylor swift’s opening act for the eras tour. she goes to a few races on her break. she meets max; who thinks about her every night now. much to oscar’s annoyance.
face claim: sabrina carpenter
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"You know people are on to us right?"
Ivy curled herself up to Max's side. She drew shapes on his chest. She looked up to meet Max's eyes. She bit her lip as she thought back to when Lando messaged her on Instagram just after the Australian Grand Prix.
She had been extrememly giddy when she entered the club for the Australian GP after party that Lando had invited her to. He had messaged her earlier about how Max wanted her number.
They had met briefly, but oh my god, Ivy was mesmerized by his deep blue eyes and adorable smile. Her hands were trembling as she made her way through the club to join Lando and his friends.
Max had been there.
And he had bought her drink, as Ivy had suggested he'd do before he went off to scold Lando for sliding in Ivy's DM's for him.
Ivy and Max ended up talking the entire night in the far corner of the VIP section of the fancy club. She decided she liked to hear him talk; she liked his accent. He had escorted her out of the club with a firm hand on the small of her back at two in the morning. He ordered a taxi for them to share and held her hand as they drove through the streets of Melbourne.
Max told the taxi driver to wait outside her building so he could walk her to the door. And okay, Ivy admits, the bar was set pretty low by her shitty exes, but it was one of the nicest things someone had done for her.
They had stood in silence for a while.
"I-," they laughed when they both spoke at the same time.
"Will you let me take you out tomorrow?" Max had asked as he held her hand.
Ivy had smiled at him, "I would. But I'm off to Perth to work on my next album." She squeezed his hand. She dropped his hand to fish a piece of paper out of her purse. She had shivered slightly; her sheer dress did nothing to keep her warm.
She had slipped the piece of paper in the pocket of his jacket. She then went to stand on her tiptoes and pressed her lips against his cheek.
"Good night, Max."
Max had then shown up in Perth just a couple of days after Ivy had arrived. Supposedly to go visit Daniel on his farm, but in reality he just couldn't stop thinking about the blonde singer.
And well, the rest is pretty much history.
Max had taken her to Daniel's farm for a couple of days before having to go to Japan to meet his friends. They had a ski trip planned, Max had wanted to cancel his plans. Ivy told him to go, that he was being ridiculous.
He went, but on the condition she would join him in Japan to watch the race in Suzuka.
And here they were. In Max's hotel room. The morning light was softly filtering through the room as Ivy continued to draw shapes on his chest.
"I didn't think we were being that obvious."
Ivy looked up at him with an eyebrow raised. Max had been anything but subtle about the whole thing. Liking her Instagram posts, commenting underneath them. And then talking about how much he liked her songs on his streams.
Max pulled her on top of him. "They're gonna be even more suspiscous when you watch the race from the Red Bull garage." He pulled her down so his lips could meet hers in a kiss. "I can't wait to see Oscar having an aneurysm when he sees you in the paddock."
The singer gasped, "Max!" She playfully hit him on the shoulder. "That's my brother." She sternly looked at him.
Max simply looked at her with raised eyebrows. He placed his arms behind his head as Ivy's face cracked and a smile crept on her face.
"God, it'll be so fun to see him lose his mind."
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"We don't have to walk in together," Max looked at Ivy. She was chewing on her lip, something Max noticed she did when she was nervous or stressed. He grabbed her shaking hand and intertwined their fingers.
Ivy let out a relieved sigh, "I really do want to go public at some point. I just, my last relationship was so public and I,"
"Hey, hey, you don't have to justify it or apologise for it. I would also like to keep things between us for now."
He squeezed her hand three times just before the car came to a halt. Ivy leaned up to kiss his cheek, "I'll come see you before quali."
"Counting on it!"
Max winked before he got out of the car with his backpack strapped around his shoulders. Ivy waited a respectable five minutes before entering the paddock herself; a shiny Red Bull paddock pass hanging from her neck.
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part 3 coming soon.
taglist: @mastermindbaby @charlesgirl16
196 notes · View notes
no-144444 · 5 months ago
Text
brother's teammate- j.doohan
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Day 3 of fic-tober! fic-tober masterlist
summary: it's not your fault your brothers' new teammate is hot.
pairing: jack doohan x gasly! reader
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y/ngasly
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2,734,156 likes, liked by charlesleclerc, pierregasly, jackdoohan and others
y/ngasly: Paris is cool ig, onto Melbourne for the start of the season!
comments
user73: 2 mill likes in 3 minutes is crazy
user92: It's so funny that she's more famous than her brother all because of her youtube channel where she talks about her brother (and the races but like yk what i mean)
user82: She's literally the prettiest girl ever
liked by carmenmundt
carmenmundt: Can't wait to see you!
lilymhe: Please visit the Williams garage!!! (it's so boring there)
rebeccadonaldson: Please stop by the Ferrari garage! -> alexandriastmleux: I second this!
lilyzneimer: Please stop by the McLaren garage! (lando is driving me crazy) -> Oscarpiastri: She not lying, you're the only one who knows how to shut him up -> y/ngasly: Give him a treat and a ball and he'll shut up for like 3 hours, simple as that. -> user72: LMAO IS HE A DOG???
pierregasly: Didn't invite me to Paris? -> y/ngasly: It was a mother-daughter trip dipshit. You were too busy with your boyfriend anyways 🤷🤷🤷 -> charlesleclerc: Not my boyfriend** -> y/ngasly: oh sure, we all believe you -> arthurleclerc: exactly, lying to yourself is always a healthy way to cope!
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jackdoohan
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848,938 likes liked by pierregasly, y/ngasly, landonorris and others
jackdoohan: First day on the job! FP1 and 2 went pretty well today, p6, and p4, car is feeling good, ready for quali tomorrow!
comments y/ngasly: that was such a slay though -> jackdoohan: oh good! my internet history is already coming back to haunt me! yay! -> y/ngasly: don't worry babe, i'll only bring it up in your instagram comments -> user23: BABE????? -> pierregasly: 🤨 -> charlesleclerc: 🤨 -> arthurleclerc: 🤨 -> oscarpiastri: 🤨 -> carlossainz: 🤨 -> landonorris: 🤨 ->yukitsunoda: 🤨
user83: OMG I NEED HIM HE'S SO BABYGIRL
user82: bro is bringing that lump of shit (the alpine car) to the top 4? did i hear GOAT?
use80: Y/N CALLED HIM BABE I HAVE NO CHANCE NOW (i never did)
user28: Jack and Y/n???? -> pierregasly: I vote a big no on that one -> kikagomez: Awww! I vote yes!
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pierregasly
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983,473 likes liked by jackdoohan, y/ngasly, charlesleclerc and others
pierregasly: New year, new teammate! Love you mate (stay away from my sister or I will genuinely cut your eyes out of your head) @/jackdoohan congrats on P5 in Melbourne, onto China!
comments
y/ngasly: I see we're being very normal about everything right now
jackdoohan: Oh!
kikagomez: Pierre! stop this madness.
user70: Y/NJACK SHIPPER FOR LIFE blocked by pierregasly
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y/ngasly:
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8,938,837 likes liked by pierregasly, jackdoohan, charles leclerc and others
y/ngasly: out and about with the pookies this week in Japan
comments
pierregasly: would've been a nicer photo dump if you didn't include HIM -> y/ngasly: who? ur boyfriend and how he chose to spend time with me? -> yukistunonda: no babe, i promise it meant nothing! -> pierregasly: did Y/n steal your phone? ->yukitsunonda: yeah...
arthurleclerc: I stay looking mildly confused 👍
kimiantonelli: great pictures 👍 love u Y/n -> user81: OMG KIMI AND Y?N??? ->y/ngasly: nah polly not.
jackdoohan: wonder who that is? 🧐 -> y/ngasly: not telling -> jackdoohan: not telling the bestie?🥺 ->y/ngasly: NO.
landonorris: Slay picture of me
lewishamilton: aww me and the kiddos!
pierregasly: where's the unlike button? -> y/ngasly: haters you can kys -nicki minaj
charlesleclerc: they grow up so fast! ୨ৎ⋅୨ৎ⋅୨ৎ⋅୨ৎ⋅୨ৎ⋅୨ৎ⋅୨ৎ
pierregasly:
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973,826 likes lied by jackdoohan, y/ngasly, and others
pierregasly: Over and out Japan, P6 for me and P4 for Jackie!
comments
y/ngasly: Jackie slayed!!! -> jackdoohan: thanks Y/n! -> pierregasly: you don't deserve happiness.
user89: PIERRE GOES FOR THE NECK
user92: we are one race in and the girls are already fighting
user29: we are so back guys (i'm delusional)
user02: JACKY/N is SO real guys!!! (i'm delusional)
user58: p4 for Jack? SLAYYY
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jackdoohan
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684,938 likes, liked by y/ngasly, pierregasly, kikagomez
jackdoohan: P4 sounds pretty damn good to me 😁
comments
kikagomez: congratulations Jack!
y/ngasly: eating my brother up as per usual (slay)
landonorris: YAY! (stay behind me please)
oscarpiastri: WOOHOO!
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y/ngasly:
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1,839,029 likes liked by pierregasly, jackdoohan, and others
y/ngasly: when ur dumbass brother dnfs 😹 PODIUM FOR JACKIE WOOOOOHOOOOO!
comments
charlesleclerc: y/njack is so real rn ->user73: CONFIRMATION???? ->user46: HUH -> pierregasly: BLOCKED.
jackdoohan: thanks y/n :) -> y/ngasly: no problemo!
oscarpiastri: Jack Doohan world domination would've bored some... -> landonorris: EWW HE'S USING GEN Z TERMS! -> y/ngasly: the exclaimation point at the end gave me the biggest ick known to mankind -> landonorris: I will expose ur relationship right fucking now mate -> y/ngasly: at least I'm in a relationship lol -> user73: Y/NJACK ARE SO REALLLLL
user83: WHO IS HE Y/N PLZ TELL ME!!!!!!! ->user64: It HAS to be Jack, right? It makes sense! -> user46: delusion.
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f1gossip:
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837,474 likes liked by pierregasly, landonorris, and others
f1gossip: Y/n Gasly, sister of F1 driver Pierre Gasly has been stirring up rumours with one of this years most successful rookies! Jack Doohan, fellow Alpine driver has been seen in her comment section and likes, and they are pretty close in person too! What do we all think of this? Will they be debuting at Miami?
comments
user56: Not Lando and Pierre in the likes rn
pierregasly: I think you're delusional.
user47: They're so cute together thooooo
user42: did y'all see the way he looked at her after the race in Bahrain? That is a man in looovvvveeeee
user57: they're so cute together
user38: no cuz I ship it so hard
user22: Imma need an alchemy edit right NOW
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y/ngasly:
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7,892,374 likes liked by jackdoohan, oscarpiastri, danielriccardo and others
y/ngasly: WIN FOR MY SEXY BOYFRIEND!!! THANK U MIAMI
comments
user83: Ik pierre is RAGING
kikagomez: my heart❤️❤️❤️
pierregasly: delete this rn. ->y/ngasly: prolly not...
jackdoohan: i love you ❤️ -> y/ngasly: simping on the main? cringe. -> jackdoohan: great job at humbling me, thanks 👍 -> y/ngasly: can't let you get too big for your boots :)
landonorris: I KNEW FROM THE BEGINNING!
danielriccardo: Glad the advice paid off :) -> jackdoohan: sure did 👍
user74: THEY'RE SO CUTE!!!!
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pierregasly
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837,479 likes liked by charles leclerc, y/ngasly, jackdoohan and others
pierregasly: A) Yes, they're dating. B) yes I'm upset about it. C) Well done on the win Jackie (I WANT TO CLAW MY EYES OUT AT THE PICTURE OF YOU TWO GET AWAY FROM MY SISTER YOU FREAKY AUSTRALIAN!)
comments
y/ngasly: please take this down I'll call mom.
jackdoohan: Thanks Pierre! (choosing to ignore the caption!)
user72: NO WAY HE CONFIRMED WHAT????
user64: They're so cutie!!!!!!!!
kikagomez: Stop threatening Jack, Pierre. He's a kid. -> jackdoohan: ??? ->Y/ngasly: mate she's defending you I would not push it. ->jackdoohan: thanks Kika!
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navigation for my blog :) (masterlist)
fic-tober masterlist
taglist: @anotherapollokid @theseerbetweenus @simbaaas-stuff @5sospenguinqueen
468 notes · View notes
dilemmaontwolegs · 2 years ago
Note
Hi, hope you're alright. I came up with a story idea: the reader is married to Gasly's/Daniel's close friend but their marriage is hanging by a thread. The driver invites her to a few races so she can change the environment, they spend some time together and unexpectedly become lovers. And maybe later her husband is trying to fix their marriage but she and the driver can't stop thinking about each other
His Best Man || DR3
A/N: I took some creative liberties with the plot but I think it does this request justice 💕 ps: never condone cheating, it's horrible and this is purely fictional
Warnings: 18+ only, nsfw, alcohol, cheating, smut WC: 7.6k F1 Masterlist || One || Two || Daniel’s Reaction
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Dinner with James was a quiet affair, though it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Why would your anniversary be any different when his indifference was the only constant at this point?
You watched as he smiled at his phone, something you hadn’t been able to elicit from him in months, before he locked the device and placed it facedown on the table. The sigh that wanted to exhale from your flared nostrils barely remained silent as you focused on shifting the food around your plate, your appetite gone like the connection to your husband. 
“Daniel sent us some passes to the race in Melbourne next month. I thought we could go, make a little holiday out of it?” 
There was no excitement in your tone, it was more a question borne out of politeness because he would have seen the paddock passes sitting on the kitchen side if he ever looked away from his phone. The blasted device vibrated again and his fork clattered on his plate in his rush to read the incoming message. 
“Well?” you asked as his thumbs flew across his screen. 
“Can’t. Work project is going to keep me busy until the deadline,” he answered without looking up. “Take one of your friends, have a girls trip.”
Friends…those people you never saw anymore because James hadn’t liked them, though he never outright said it, those friends who had warned you that you were marrying a narcissist. 
“It’s our anniversary,” you reminded him. “You know, falls on the same day each year.”
“Mhmm, yeah,” he nodded, clearly not listening. “Sounds good.”
You propped your elbow onto the glass tabletop and dropped your chin onto your palm as a familiar burn of resentment simmered in your soul. “The mailman gave me a pearl necklace.”
“That’s nice. Put it on my credit card.” He reached into his back pocket and tossed his wallet across the table, narrowly missing the glass of rosé. 
You opened it and saw the polaroid from your wedding day no longer sat in the clear card slot but was stuffed behind his drivers licence. You shouldn’t have felt hurt after months of being ignored but the pain still surprised you, almost as much as the condom that you found with his cash. He hadn’t bought a box of condoms in at least three years, not since the wedding when you started trying for a baby - something that was probably best that it didn't happen.
“He must eat a lot of pineapples because it tasted delicious,” you murmured as you took his cash and the platinum credit card too.
James nodded and pushed his empty plate away. “Yeah, tasted good, thanks. Need to finish this project.” He rose from the table with his phone and started to make his way down the hall to his office. “Don’t wait up.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.” You had a trip to plan. 
You weren’t going to have a girls weekend but you were going to Melbourne. He may have been James’ friend first, but no one had the ability to turn a bad day (or year) around like Daniel could. 
When you arrived in Perth you hadn’t expected Danny to be the one personally waiting at the airport. It was impossible to miss him with the amount of people that surrounded him, asking for pictures and autographs before he spotted you stepping out of customs. 
You didn’t need to read lips to see him apologising to everyone as he made his way towards you, holding up a large welcome sign for ‘Roo’. You rolled your eyes at the nickname he had given you after one drunken night that ended with you tangled in a hammock, your head poking out of the material like a joey in a kangaroo pouch. You were only grateful he hadn’t nicknamed you Joey since the name had stuck over the years.
Your greeting turned to a peal of laughter as he dropped the sign and swept you into a hug that lifted your feet off the ground to spin you around. 
“I’ve missed you, you beaut!” Danny’s smile was contagious and even when your feet were securely back on the ground he still kept his arms around you. “A shame James can’t come, but we can totally make his jealous as fuck for ditching us. One week, you, me, road trip to Melbourne.”
Day One - Perth to Kalgoorlie “I hope you know where we are going.”
Daniel laughed and just winked from the driver's seat of his Ford Ranger. It had been three hours of driving on the highway and you had not passed one town in the dusty landscape. 
“It’s not far, just down the road a little more,” Danny said for the third time. “We still have half a tank of gas and a crate of Vitamin B, we’ll be fine if we need to camp.”
You quirked an eyebrow up as you looked in the backseat and saw the green box of Victoria Bitter beer strapped with a seatbelt.
“You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to camp anywhere,” you scoffed, tucking your knee up as the song changed to another country song from his endless playlist. “Spiders, snakes, dingoes, and your snoring. I think not.”
Daniel laughed and indicated to pull off the road despite there not being another soul within what felt like hundreds of kilometres. 
“I’m sorry I said you snore, please don’t leave me here.”
His laugh only intensified as he turned the engine off and turned to face you. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Roo.”
“Then why have you stopped?” You tested the window but it had powered off with the engine. “It’s a freaking sauna in here.”
“Because you haven’t been yourself all day and there’s no cell reception out here so there’s nothing to distract you.” He took the useless device from your hand and tossed it in the glove compartment. “What’s going on with you and James?”
“Nothing,” you muttered as his brown eyes narrowed. “Seriously, there’s nothing going on with him. We hardly speak anymore and he sleeps in his office when he’s not out of town on another ‘business trip’. It’s just…nothing.”
Daniel’s brows pinched together in confusion as he sucked a lungful of air through his teeth. “But…what the hell happened?”
“I don’t know,” you exclaimed as you threw your hands in the air, just as clueless. “What do you want me to say? That he’s having an affair, or that one day he just stopped caring, or both?”
You turned away as it wasn’t a bead of sweat that rolled down your cheek when you sighed in defeat. Unable to withstand the heat without the air conditioner, you tugged the door handle and checked the dirt for any unwanted animals before jumping down from the running boards. 
Daniel was already getting out his side and circling the bullbars before you could wipe the tears away but the sob you had tried to suppress clawed its way out when he pulled you against his chest. “I’m sorry,” he murmured softly as he rubbed your back and let your tears soak into his shirt. “He can be a bit of a cunt, but I never thought he could do that to you.”
“He did and it’s done,” you admitted with a raspy voice that was still strained from the emotion choking each word. “I moved my stuff out last week, not that he even noticed. I thought I could have a break to get away from it all and deal with a divorce when I get back.”
“That fucking idiot,” Daniel said as he pulled his shirt up to wipe your tears away. “He just lost the best thing in the world and he doesn’t even know it.”
Day Two - Kalgoorlie to Caiguna It was another long day of driving but after the broken sleep spent tossing and turning you weren’t much of a companion. You had eventually drifted off to sleep to the country music that Daniel loved so much and dreamt of crawling through fields of watermelons but the paddock soon turned to mud and you sank under the suffocating weight with it filling your lungs. 
“Hey, it’s alright, you’re alright,” Danny soothed as you startled awake, his quick reflexes throwing his arm out to catch you from hitting the window. You could still feel the filthy fluid on your skin and shivered as you changed the song over and took a shuddering breath. “Bad dream?”
You rolled your shoulders and twisted your stiff neck, groaning at the crick that had come from using the seatbelt as a pillow. “Just weird.”
His eyes darted away from the endless road ahead and saw you trying to massage your neck before he brushed your hand aside. There certainly were perks to his strength training because his fingers were a godsend as they erased the knots that had formed.
“Hmmm, thank you,” you sighed deeply and his lips tipped up at the sound.
“Anytime. Hope you got the rest you needed, there’s a stop ahead and these guys know how to throw down.”
You narrowed your eyes at the horizon that was blurred by heatwaves and tried to see what lay beyond but gave up after a few seconds. “Throw down what?”
“Huh?”
“What are they throwing down?”
“Throw down,” he said slowly as if it would somehow make you understand but you were still confused. “Party, drink, dance. Throw down.”
“Oh, throw down, why didn’t you just say that?”
He laughed at your sarcasm and squeezed your knee. “You could definitely do with a drink or two and loosen up. Then I can get my old Roo back.”
“As long as I’m not expected to sleep in a hammock again.”
The motel was a little rough and run down but it had four walls and the bathroom was clean enough to last one night. Daniel had barely given you enough time to get changed into fresh clothes before he was knocking on your door ready to escort you next door to the bar. Coincidentally, the bar was also the restaurant, service station and grocery store all rolled into one.
You and Danny were by far the youngest people in the place but it didn’t stop the warm welcome from everyone. If any of the patrons knew who he was they hid it well because they treated him just like any other stranger passing through.
“Where ya from?”
“Where ya headed?”
“Watch out for ol’ Deloris, she’ll try take a bite out of ya.”
The questions came in quick succession and you looked around the room trying to figure out which of the ladies was Deloris only to find the name on a plaque beneath a huge crocodile head suspended from the rafters.
“Fuck me,” you gasped as you took a step back, bumping into Danny as he laughed along with the bartender.
“Gets ‘em every time,” he chuckled as he placed two large bottles of beer onto the well worn bartop. “Looks like ya sheila could use something a little stronger.”
Daniel’s large hands landed on your shoulders and started to massage the tense muscles. “There’s no crocs ‘round here, isn’t enough water,” he whispered to calm your nerves. “Deloris was probably a pet.”
“Who in their right mind would keep that as a pet?”
“Probably someone not in their right mind.” His warm laugh tickled your ear before he turned you back to the bartender to grab your drink. “Cheers.”
Daniel found a small table in the surprisingly busy restaurant space and it appeared as if most of the locals were keeping the economy running in the place. It was strange to think that the faded walls decorated with old photographs of the glory days gone by felt more homely than the one you had built with James.
You could easily see yourself placing a coin on the pool table to save your place in the queue or ordering the fresh market fish off the menu without questioning how it was fresh so far from the sea. You could see yourself walking in to see the same faces at the end of a long week and the barman would listen to your complaints as he poured your usual without needing to be asked.
You took a generous gulp of beer that Daniel swore was ‘the good stuff’ and hummed at the hoppy flavour as it quenched the thirst that hadn’t stopped since you stepped foot in the country. It was no wonder why they liked their beers so much, they needed whatever they could to cool their bodies down.
“I like this place,” you said with a smile that Danny returned with pride.
“Thought you might, and tomorrow’ll be even better.”
“Where are we going tomorrow?”
Daniel shook his head and occupied his lips with the bottle so he could keep you in the dark a little longer. You didn’t mind this type of surprise, knowing he wanted to make you smile and was planning everything could to make that happen on the road trip.
The doldrum tune that was playing from the corner of the bar was interrupted as a coin was slotted into the jukebox and Josh Turner’s Your Man came on the machine. Couples around the bar and restaurant left their belongings and made their way to the dance floor. Where you came from no one would do that, and if they did their belongings wouldn’t be there when they returned.
Beneath the table you could feel Daniel’s foot tapping in time to the beat and his fingers drummed on the long neck he lifted to his lips. He caught the longing in your eyes as you watched a grey haired man holding his wife, slowly swaying together like you had imagined you would with James in 40 years.
“Come on, Roo,” he invited as he pushed his chair back and held out his hand. His palm was cold and damp from the beer bottle but it was refreshing on your skin with the heat that still lingered with the setting sun. Leading you to the edge of the dance floor he pulled you close and curled an arm around your waist as he started to sing along. “I've been thinking 'bout this all day long, never felt a feeling quite this strong, I can't believe how much it turns me on, just to be your man. I know you know the words, don’t be shy.”
It was impossible to feel embarrassed with him, even if you butchered the song he would still smile like he was listening to his favourite artist live. So, you placed your hand in his and the other rested on his shoulder as you started to sway and sing along.
“There's no hurry, don't you worry, we can take our time. Come a little closer, let's go over, what I had in mind.”
Daniel let go of you and your head fell back with a laugh as he spun you away and pulled you back. You could only giggle as you returned out of step and ended with your back to his chest instead of face to face but he adapted quickly and held your waist instead.
“Baby lock the door and turn the lights down low,” his voice was deep and rich in your ear, intimate and full of promise that hit you unexpectedly. “And put some music on that's soft and slow. Baby we ain't got no place to go, I hope you understand.”
You were glad you weren’t facing him as his words affected you in a way you couldn’t remember feeling for over a year. The very air seemed to thicken in your lungs as you felt every inch of his body fitting against yours. You could feel the veins on his hands as you laced your fingers with his and guided them down to your hips.
This was the first time the lines had blurred throughout the years of friendship and you allowed yourself to feel wanted, if only for a song.
Day Three - Caiguna to Yalata The pounding in your head turned out to be banging on your door and you somehow found the strength to answer it. Bright sunlight flooded in through the crack and you groaned as you covered your eyes.
“Good morning sunshine,” Daniel greeted brightly as he stepped inside. “It’s 7am on another stunning day here in Straya.” 
You playfully shoved Danny and he rolled with it to splay across your bed, the blankets still tucked in from collapsing atop them last night. 
“7am is too early,” you complained as you climbed into the small space he left on the twin sized bed, curling onto your side and throwing your arm over your face to block out the light. “Let me sleep.”
“You can sleep in the car.” His fingers danced teasingly over your ribs and you jutted your elbow back into his hard abs before he could properly tickle you. “Ouch, you’re not very nice in the morning.”
“This isn’t morning, this is still night,” you grumbled as his arm draped over your waist instead.
“The sun is up.”
“Tell that to the people of Norway. It can be sunny at midnight there.”
You could feel him silently laughing at you as it shook the bed. “But we aren’t in Norway.”
“Shh,” you murmured as you snuggled closer to him. “Let me go back to sleep.”
“Fine,” he conceded, making some adjustments to the pillow before shoving his arm under your head, “but just because I’m comfortable now.”
The hangover was gone by the time you woke naturally and you felt refreshed as you stretched lazily. Rolling over in Daniel’s arms you found his eyes closed and his lips parted slightly with soft snores. You raised your head a little to see the alarm clock that was probably considered vintage in the 80’s and saw it was well past check out time. Luckily it didn't appear that the No Vacancy sign was ever used, so there was no rush to leave.
The small movement was enough to wake him and your stomach clenched at the smile that brightened your day more than the blistering sun outside when his honey brown eyes opened. 
“I can’t believe this,” you tutted as you let him pull you closer against his chest. “I was ready to go at 7 and you just went back to sleep…so lazy.”
“How rude of me,” he chuckled. “I’m sure I can find a way to make it up to you.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
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“Woah,” you whispered breathlessly as the truck bounced to a stop on the hard sand of the tidal line. “It’s beautiful.”
“Isn’t it just,” Daniel grinned as he opened his door and looked across at you. “Coming in?”
You bit your lip as your eyes feasted on the picturesque scene. Big barrel waves crashing out in the bay and white sand welcoming bare feet on the shore, it was a sight pretty enough to make angels cry. Hopping out, you rounded the four wheel drive ute and sat on the metal bar running across the front, distracted by the breathtaking view. “What about sharks?”
Daniel’s door shut and you turned to the sound in time to see him pulling his singlet over his head and tossing it through the backseat window before unbuckling his belt and shoving his jeans off too. It was impossible not to stare at the hard planes of his chest or the definition of his abs, and then the thick thighs that were barely covered by his boxers. 
“The chances of a shark attack are less than…” His words trailed off as he looked up and caught you blatantly staring, his teeth sparkling as a big smile grew on his face. “The view is spectacular, am I right or am I right?”
“You or the beach?”
“Spectacular is pretty high in the standards of compliments,” he said as he started to flex his arms, “but if you think I’m spectacular then I would accept that.”
You closed your eyes from the harsh sunlight and tipped your head back to feel the rays on your cheeks as you laughed. “You’ve never had to worry about your ego, have you?”
He sent you a playful pout as he walked towards you, his thongs flicking up golden sand behind him with each step. “It would take a hit if you didn’t come swim with me.”
You hadn’t realised quite how many types of heat there was until that moment. There was the heat of the bonnet from hours of driving beneath you, the heat of the sun in the sky above and the heat of his hands that landed on your knees. It was the heat of his hands that seeped into your blood and spread throughout your body, increasing to boiling point as they slowly ran up your thighs.
Your knees unconsciously parted for him and he stepped into the space so you were eye to eye and his tongue rolled across his bottom lip. “There’s nets out past the reef, you’ll be safe with me.”
You took a sharp intake of air as his fingers caught the hem of your shirt and his knuckles grazed your skin. “Well?” he asked quietly. “Trust me?”
You swallowed deeply as you nodded and he rewarded you with another of those smiles you had come to love before he lifted your shirt up and left it on the hood of the truck so he could grab you around the waist and haul you over his shoulder.
“Daniel!” you yelped as the world was suddenly upside down and he kicked his thongs off before jogging towards the water. “Don’t you dare dunk me.”
You expected the next sudden shift when the water reached his knees but as quick as he tossed you up off his shoulder he caught you again with a booming laugh. His arms were bound around your thighs and your hands planted on his shoulders as you looked down at his amused face. 
“I wouldn’t dare,” he promised as he eased his grip, your body sliding down his until you were once more eye to eye. “I just want to make you smile.”
Day Four - Yalata to Port Lincoln  As much as you had found yourself enjoying the historical rich motels in the outback, you were just as happy to find the accommodation in Port Lincoln was a five star resort on the waterfront. The sun was just starting to set when you arrived at the hotel and checked into the two bedroom suite with a gorgeous view of the harbour. 
“I never knew driving could be so exhausting,” you said as you dropped into the swing chair on the large balcony. 
“Don’t worry, tomorrow’s a rest day so you can recover from all that driving you didn’t even do,” Daniel pointed out with a smirk, taking the spot beside you and taking over the leg exercise of swinging it back and forth. “We can do whatever you want, just can’t miss the boat to Adelaide tomorrow night.”
It was nice spending so much time alone with Daniel on the road, comfortable conversations rolling like the tires on the highway, but a change of pace would be welcomed. “What is there to do?”
“Hmm,” he frowned and stood up. “Let me go see.”
Daniel disappeared out of the room and returned a few minutes later with a stack of brochures that he had taken from the tourist stands in reception and you met him on the couch inside where the pleasant offshore wind couldn’t whip them away. Together you flicked through them, separating them into three piles of yes, no and maybe. 
“Sure you don’t wanna cage dive?” he teased as you threw that particular brochure across the room. “You could get up close and personal with a Great White. Once in a lifetime opportunity right there.”
You snorted and shook your head. “Once in a lifetime because it would kill me. Not happening.”
“Here, that’s a yes for you.” 
You took the advert for a farm park where you could hand feed the animals and added it to the yes pile. “Maybe next year we can go to your farm…unless James gets you in the divorce.” Your lips turned down at the idea and you realised you had hardly thought of your husband, but now that you had he had disturbed your peace even though he was thousands of miles away.
Daniel reached over the coffee table to the stationary set, grabbing a hotel engraved pen before pulling his shoe off. “It’s just like Toy Story,” he said as he waved the pen in your face. “Put your name on me first.”
You managed a small laugh as you took the pen and clicked the nib out. “Should tattoo it so it doesn’t wash off.”
Daniel squirmed on the couch as the pen tickled his foot and you grabbed his ankle so he couldn’t move too much but he started to giggle uncontrollably as the nib ran over his instep. “How long does it take to write Roo?”
You laughed and kept going before he wretched his foot free and crossed his leg over his knee to see your full first and last name on it - maiden name, not married.
“For legal purposes,” you said as you clicked the pen nib away and tossed it on the table.
“Fair enough.” He grinned at the writing everytime he looked at his crossed leg and draped his arm over the back of the cushion as you returned to the seat. “You can come by the farm anytime, don’t have to wait for next year.”
“Except for shearing season,” you smirked as you remembered that mistake where you were roped into helping the jackaroos round the sheep up and shave them. “I have no interest in losing all feeling in my arms again.”
“Earned that beer though,” he said with a chuckle as he started to massage your neck. “I was so proud, you weren’t afraid to get stuck in and help. I kinda thought you were a bit of a princess ‘til then.”
Your nose crinkled at the endearment James used to call you. “Well I’m glad I got rid of that image. But, out of curiosity, what do you think I am now?”
The smile could only be described as devilish as his hand spread across your nape and guided you closer to him. His eyes held you captivated and his lips parted with his answer but it was silenced by the sound of ringtone breaking the tension and like a puppet whose strings were cut he fell back into his seat. The emotion in his eyes was erased with a blink and you reached blindly for your phone, answering the call without needing to see who it was from.
“Hey, isn’t it like midnight?” you asked as you lifted the device to your ear but there was no answer at the other end. “Hello? James?”
“Fuck, yeah, just like that baby. God, Laura, you’re so perfect.” The phone slipped from your grasp as you heard the muted but unmistakable sound of James’ voice.
Daniel frowned as he picked the phone up from your lap and lifted it to his ear, shock registering before it transformed into anger and he hung up the phone without breaking the screen with the force of it. He discarded the phone and pulled you into his lap in the same instance but you didn’t hear what he said as you buried your face in his neck and grappled onto him for dear life.
Day Five - Port Lincoln to Adelaide You didn’t feel like doing anything other than staying in bed and sleeping the day away but Daniel wouldn’t let you waste another minute of your time because of James. In a way you could understand the logic and as a big ‘fuck you’ to him you were going to get your shit together and go and have fun.
Daniel worked even harder to get a smile or a laugh out of you and kept his camera on hand to capture the moments he succeeded. The animal farm did make you feel a little better and holding a joey as you bottle fed it was finally enough to break through the invasive cloud that had hung over you. 
“Roo and Roo Two,” Danny commented as he moved around taking a million shots of you.
“Need a hand?” a passing couple offered after watching Daniel try and extend his arm enough to get in the shot too.
“That’d be a dream,” Daniel nodded and he handed his camera over before sitting down beside you and curling his arm around your waist. The joey was almost asleep from drinking all of the milk and Daniel grinned at you as he stroked its neck. “Looks like you when you sleep.”
You grinned back, forgetting about the camera. “Cute, right?”
“Yup, that’s, uh, exactly what I was thinking.” He cleared his throat and scratched his neck awkwardly before laughing when your elbow connected with his ribs. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. You’re a cutie-tootie when you sleep…it’s another story when you’re awake.”
His laugh was loud enough to wake the joey when you nudged him again with an offended look. “What? You’re beautiful when you’re awake.”
“That’s totally what you meant,” you said sarcastically before rolling your eyes. “Just look at the camera and smile like a normal person.”
He tipped his head to yours and smiled brightly for the camera, but he couldn’t resist whispering, “Bold of you to assume I know how to be normal.”
Day Six - Adelaide to Portland It took a moment to recollect the events from the night before and it wasn’t because of the many wine tastings you had gone to around the Port Lincoln area. Perhaps that had a little bit to do with it, but mostly it was because you had fallen asleep in the truck to the gentle rocking motion of the ferry but now you were tucked into an unfamiliar bed. 
“Danny?” you called out as you tossed the covers back and found you were still in yesterday's clothes. You could hear some sounds outside of the room but Daniel hadn't answered your call so you picked up the coat rack from the corner and quickly opened the door.
“Jesus Christ.” Daniel jumped back as you waved the long pole his way. “What the fuck?”
You sagged in the doorway and dropped the makeshift weapon to clutch your chest. “You gave me a fright.”
“I gave you a fright?” he asked incredulously. “You gave me a fucking heart attack. What were you going to do with this?” He swiped the coat rack off the floor and couldn’t stop himself from laughing at it. “Please don’t give me a concussion before the race.”
“But any other time is good?” you quipped as your lips tipped up now that your heart rate was returning to normal. “How did I get to bed?”
He flexed his arms with a cocky grin. “I tried to wake you up but you were dead to the world. And now that sleeping beauty is awake, how about we go out for breakfast? There’s meant to be a huge market that sells a bit of everything that we could check out after.”
You held a finger up as you looked down at your clothes and heard your stomach rumble, answering the question of whether to shower or not first. “Just give me one minute to change.”
Daniel had obviously been awake for a while being an early bird so he was ready and waiting at the door when you reappeared, his hand held out and waiting for yours. The lines between friendship and more were getting blurrier each day but it no longer felt wrong as you laced your fingers with his and stepped outside.
“Are you limping?” you asked with a frown as he kept his weight on one side the entire walk to the market.
“No, just got pins and needles in my foot.”
An hour later he was still favouring his right foot so you steered him back towards the hotel so he didn’t make it worse before you got to Melbourne. “You should probably see a doctor.”
Daniel dropped onto the couch and stole the remote to choose a movie, patting the space beside him so he could kiss your temple after joining him. “You worry too much, I’ll be fine.”
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“You’re quiet,” Daniel commented as he turned off the tv. “What’s got you thinking so loud?”
You chewed your bottom lip as he called you out. He was too observant, or you were too easy to read. “It’s our last night together.”
“You’re still going to stay with me for the weekend, right?” He shifted in his seat to face you and stroked your cheek with the back of his hand as he waited for an answer.
You nodded and he relaxed a little only to freeze as you spoke, “But you’ll be busy, we don’t have time to hang out.”
“I’ll always make time for you,” he promised as he pulled you into his lap. “This week with you has been…spectacular.”
“Spectacular is pretty high in the standards of compliments,” you reminded him, much to his amusement.
His smile softened as his fingers trailed along your jaw and down your neck to trace your collarbone. “Which is why it’s reserved for very, very good things.” 
You were almost certain he could hear your heart racing like thunderous hoof beats in a quiet desert. The blood was pumping around your body carrying the oxygen you needed to replace but couldn’t seem to draw the air into your lungs as he leaned forward.
“You were his best man,” you whispered with the last of your breath as you felt the heat of his lips so close to yours.
“But I’ve always been the best man for you.”
The first kiss was softer than the wind, tentative and testing as you learned how your body responded to the caress before hunger yearned for something deeper. A deep moan rumbled from Daniel’s chest as your tongue rolled across his lips that parted for you and his arms encircled you to hold you tight, as if he were clinging to the spell so it couldn’t be broken.
“Please, Danny,” you sighed longingly as his hands slipped under the summer dress you wore and his thumbs teased you with painfully slow circles on your thighs. “You have never been a patient man, don’t start now.”
His quiet laugh heated the skin of your neck that he kissed with such tenderness you wanted to cry. It had been so long since you had been touched in such a way that you couldn’t wait any longer.
“Please,” you begged as you rolled your hips over his cock that was straining against his shorts. You moaned as the hard length brushed over your panties and a reciprocal sound came from Daniel before he stood up abruptly. 
“Fuck, I wanted to take my time with you,” he murmured against your lips as he blindly walked to the closest bedroom. 
“Later,” you promised. “Right now I need you to get me out of this goddamn dress and fuck me.”
Day Seven - Portland to Melbourne “Oh, fuck off,” you growled as your phone rang on the bedside drawers. You rolled back into Daniel’s embrace and wrapped your arms around his waist as he saw at the voicemail notification before it started to ring again. 
“He’s just going to keep calling,” Daniel said with a sigh that turned to a yawn after the late night spent getting to know each other's bodies intimately. “You’ll have to talk to him at some point.”
“I know, I just want to savour this moment before the drama starts. I can’t remember the last time I woke up like this, happy and content. I’m not ready for that to end.”
“What makes you think I’ll let this end?” he teased as he rolled you onto your back and trailed wet kisses down your neck. “I might just write my name on your foot too and call you mine.”
The warmth of the blankets disappeared as Daniel made his way down your body, kissing the entire length of you before settling between your legs as the phone rang again.
“Answer it,” Daniel ordered as his fingertips delicately traced the stretch marks across your hips, committing every inch of your body to his memory. “Or he won’t go away.”
You tried to find any hint of resentment in his face as you reached for the phone but there was only an air of smugness as he made himself comfortable, resting his head on your thigh.
“I think we have been robbed,” James said without even a hello as you answered the call on speakerphone. “Everything in the guest room is gone.”
A huff of amusement bubbled at the image of him standing in the empty room, his face crumpled in confusion as he scratched his head. “It’s at my apartment.”
“What apartment? What are you on about?”
“The apartment I rented before I moved out two weeks ago. The one I will be living in when I get back.” Daniel’s fingers traced the waistband of your panties and your breath hitched as they slipped beneath the lace.
“Bullshit,” he laughed but there was a hint of uncertainty in the sound. “Just come home and talk about this before you make any rash decisions. I know I have been busy with work lately-"
“More like busy with Laura.” The air that hissed between your teeth could have been mistaken for anger but it was entirely from the devilish look in Daniel’s eyes as he bit the soft skin along your inner thigh.
“Laura’s my assistant.”
The laugh turned to a gasp as Daniel pushed the lace aside and ran his tongue through your folds, his eyes rolling up to watch your reaction, the phone falling from your hand as you reached for his hair.  You tugged the strands as his tongue circled your clit and you couldn’t stop the moan from escaping as you arched your back at the growing pleasure.
“Fuck, yeah, just like that baby,” you begged shamelessly and he chuckled as he felt your walls flutter around the fingers he curled into your cunt. “God, Daniel, you’re so perfect.”
A round of expletives filled the air as James heard a real orgasm take over your body but they fell silent as he realised why the words seemed so familiar. You weren’t just accusing him of fucking Laura, you knew. And you were using his best friend to show him.
“Some friend you are, sack of shit,” James growled as you whimpered with the aftershocks of the orgasm.
“Some husband you were,” Daniel snickered as he tore your panties off and climbed up your body to kiss you, sharing the taste of your pleasure on his tongue before he picked up the phone. “You lost the best thing you had, mate. I won’t make the same mistake you did.”
Daniel ended the call stared down at you in wonder as a slow smile started to spread across his face. “I don’t think he will be calling back.”
It may have been the high of the orgasm, or it could have been the knowledge that after a year of enduring the decaying marriage, but you were free - either way, you were giddy with joy as you wrapped your legs around Daniel’s hips and pulled him closer. 
“I can’t believe you did that,” you giggled as you hooked your fingers into his boxers and pushed them over his hips. 
“He had to know who you belong to now, he had his chance.” His voice was pure decadence in your ear as he ran the tip of his cock through your folds before stretching you wide as he thrust forward and stilled. He gave you a moment to adjust to his size and brushed a gentle kiss across your lips before captivating you with his golden brown eyes. “Still want to know what I think you are?”
Your fingers ran softly down his back, feeling each bump on his spine right down to the twin dimples at the base. “Tell me,” you whispered as your hands grasped the firm muscles of his ass, your nails digging in to spur him into moving.
“Mine.”
Melbourne Grand Prix - Race Day The screams of Daniel’s home crowd were intoxicating and you couldn’t help cupping your hands around your mouth and joining in as he parked front and centre of the pitlane having won his home race. Climbing out of the car, stood atop the halo and threw his fists in the air before tearing his helmet off and holding it up too, tapping his finger on the large number 3.
You couldn’t help but notice how he still favoured his right foot after he jumped off the car and rushed towards his team, grappling them into strong hugs that probably crushed the air out of their lungs - not that they cared as they ran on adrenaline after the race.
“Wow, Daniel, what a race! You were absolutely flying!” the interviewer praised after he took his microphone and joined her in front of the Sky Sports camera. “Looking at some of those high speed corners, it looked like you were fighting to keep the race line.”
“I couldn’t brake hard if I tried,” he laughed and combed his sweaty hair back through his fingers. “Got a fresh tattoo and it’s still a little tender.”
“On your foot?” Naomi asked as she pointed to his Red Bull boot. 
“Yeah, glad it wasn’t on my throttle one or I don’t think I’d be up here,” he joked.
“I’m certain I am asking on behalf of everyone when I say, can we see it?” A cheer from the crowd confirmed her statement and your fingers gripped the metal barrier as goosebumps broke over your skin.
“No way,” you mumbled under your breath as you shook your head to get rid of the ridiculous thought you had.
“Sure, I’ll need this off for my shoey anyway,” he said as he pulled the boot off along with his sock. Turning around, he bent his knee so the sole of his foot could be seen and looked over his shoulder, grinning as he found you at the barrier with his team. 
“Aww, look at that, it’s adorable,” Naomi gushed as she saw the basic outline of a kangaroo on the sole of his foot. “What a way to pay homage to your nation!”
You bit your lip from smiling too hard when he started to laugh as she completely misunderstood what the picture meant. “Of course!” 
He excused himself quickly and hopped towards you, not wanting to get the days old tattoo dirty on the ground. 
“You’re actually insane,” you gasped as you slapped his chest playfully, still in disbelief that he had the word Roo tattooed on his foot beneath the picture. 
He leaned in closer so he could talk without fear of being overheard and you inhaled the purely masculine scent of him enveloping you as his lips brushed the shell of your ear. “It was your idea, and if you didn’t sleep so much you would have been awake to come and get it done with me.”
You rolled your eyes but you couldn’t keep the smile off your face as his hot hands came to rest on top of yours. “I must admit, I’m a little disappointed that it isn’t my full name.”
“Do you know how ticklish that was? I would have wet myself trying to get your whole name.”
You smirked at him, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes deepening with his growing smile. “That sounds like a you problem.”
“Does anyone have a marker pen?” Daniel asked loudly and about half a dozen were thrust his way in an instant. 
“What are you doing?” you asked as you took a step back but the crowd was so tightly packed there was nowhere to go.
“Foot,” he said as he tapped the barrier, “up. It’s not a tattoo…yet.”
“You’re insane,” you laughed as you shook your head but instead he dropped to his knees and caught your ankle under the barrier.
“And you’re mine, I just need to…stop wriggling,” he complained as he pulled your shoe off and bit the cap off the marker before inking your sole. Twisting your foot about you saw his driver number covering the skin and bit your lip at the self-satisfied smirk on his face as he flipped the pen in his hand. “There, that’s better.”
“Is it?” you joked as you slipped your shoe back on. “I would have said spectacular.”
You were always surprised that his smile could somehow brighten, even when it seemed like it couldn’t possibly grow any more. But his smile grew as stepped closer and his hand reached for the back of your neck, pulling you to meet him as much as the barrier allowed.
“Spectacular?” he echoed before crushing his lips to yours until you were breathless and forgot where you were. “Yeah, that’s more like it.”
Daniel's Road Trip Playlist: Cruise - Florida Georgia Line Watermelon Crawl - Tracy Byrd Your Man - Josh Turner You Make It Easy - Jason Aldean Right Now the Best - Zach Bryan Over For You - Morgan Evans Live Like You Were Dying - Tim McGraw Die A Happy Man - Thomas Rhett Butterflies - Kacey Musgraves
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