#queue it ma

[sadquickchristmassnowman]

“I can tell TV from real life, Jeff. TV has structure, logic, rules, and likeable leading men. In real life, we have this. We have you” is still one of the most METAL fucking lines in the entire series like??? abed just gagged him like that??? in front of EVERYONE??? insane. I’m still not over it. goddamn

[sofiaruelle]

Trying to escape bedrotting with some salad milk.

[lemonsourcrisis]

Hidden Love 偷偷藏不住 (2023) — 1.21 | "He's asleep."

[dragsource]

SIRENA ✶ la más draga : solo las más episode 02 'la más religiosa'

[venacoeurva]

[Holds newborn daughter like guinea pig]

-Please do not reupload/edit/use.-

[formulaforza]

miss americana & the heartbreak prince

—01. all american girl —word count: 6.4k —warnings: none :) —a/n: this is queued so I'm sound asleep right now but trust when I wake... I will be throwing up about having posted this

It’s nine in the morning on Friday, and the kindergarteners at Robinson Elementary are getting picked up from the gymnasium and taken to their classroom to start their day. It’s nine in the morning on Friday, and their teacher, Chris Elliott, is running four minutes late to the first day of the U.S Grand Prix. Her fingers flatten down stray flyaways, working in tandem with the extra strength hairspray she found in the back of the Walgreens beauty aisle last night. Her makeup is strewn about in chaos atop the stark white marble countertops, a single folded piece of toilet paper in the trash can, remnants of her lipstick kissed onto the fibers. 

She played it safe on the outfit today, still hasn’t been able to pinpoint exactly what the dress code for this race is supposed to be. Her Dad has been no help–he can get away with wearing jeans and a short-sleeve button-up just about anywhere he goes. More is expected from her, though. Three days, three outfits, always walking the line between casual streetwear and Kentucky Derby without a fascinator. She settled for something painfully classic and American, figured a European sport would be eating up the concept of everything being bigger in Texas. Levi’s, a white tank top, and a beat up pair of cowboy boots should do a good enough job at letting anyone curious know she’s authentically American, without screaming out for attention. That’s the goal for the weekend; blend in and keep Dad company. 

Dad, who is not-so patiently tapping his foot against the floor, watching pre-race coverage of the Dixie Vodka 400 on his iPhone 7,  is a guest of honor for Ferrari this weekend. It was a classic Bill Elliott commitment, one he makes and then forgets about until he’s getting sent an email a month ago to remind him. One he makes when he forgets his son is racing the same weekend. That’s how Chris ended up here with him, instead of her Mom or instead of Chase or Chandler. They’re all in Florida for the Cup Series. Well–Chandler isn’t. Chandler’s at her hot-shot job in the big city living her life blissfully away from racing. 

She can count on a single hand the amount of times her dad has missed a Cup Series race in the years since his retirement. Even if he’s moved on from driving the track, racing is in Elliott blood. It comes easier to them than breathing does. Chris won’t be the first to admit it, but she's the NASCAR nepotism equivalent of a Baldwin baby. She’s no Kennedy, the first-families of NASCAR are closer to the Petty’s and the Earnhardt’s, but, you ask a NASCAR fan about the Elliott Clan and you’re sure to get an earful. Champion, Hall-of-Fame inductee father, supergenius transmission and engine mechanic uncles, and a superstar fan-favorite older brother, the Elliott family racing history spans generations of fans.

Never the Danica Patrick-type, Chris has always preferred to watch the races rather than compete in them, but she still grew up at the track and was always up for a trip to visit her dad at the auto-shop. 

“Mums,” her dad says, peeking his head around the corner into the hotel bathroom. It’s a stupid nickname, Mums, Chrysanthemum. She’d roll her eyes if it was anyone but Bill still calling her by it. “We gotta go, darlin’.” Chris nods at him in the mirror, flattens her hands along her thigh and tucks one final strand of her bang behind her ear, and then they’re finally leaving the hotel for the track. 

It’s a strange kind of first for Chris, in that it’s not really a first at all. She’s been to COTA before, multiple times. Hell, she watched in the garage when Chase won the inaugural Cup Series race here in May last season. She’s even been to the U.S Grand Prix before, back when it was still in Indianapolis, when Chris was too young to remember if it was big or if she was just little. She’s used to the crowds, spends almost every weekend with upwards of fifty-thousand people, but this? This is the kind of crowd she can’t fathom being among, and it’s only Friday. If it takes them an hour and a half to get through traffic on a practice day, she can only imagine what the next two mornings have in store for her. 

“No antics today,” Bill tells her in the car. “They’re not like us. Trust me, I know.”

Last time you went to one of these races, you were still a driver, she wants to tell him, but doesn’t. He doesn’t take well to the implication he’s an old man. Walking into the paddock with a yellow pass hung around her neck, FERRARI-GUEST-17 and a picture of the team logo popping up on the screens at the turnstiles, she’s beyond taken back by the pomp and circumstance of it all. She’s barely through the entrance and she’s already spotted half a dozen people who could buy her without it making a dent in their pockets. It’s nothing like walking around a NASCAR track. There isn’t a single Bud Light knight or backs sunburnt into American flags or t-shirts turned muscle tanks. It’s just… rich people. Lots and lots of rich people. 

In the Paddock Club tent, Bill manages to find a couple of his old buddies. Guys he raced with back in the day who’ve turned up for whatever with whoever this weekend. It’s unsurprising, stock car racing is nowhere near as exclusive a club as Formula One. They aren’t any of the guys Chris remembers being a part of her childhood, none of them pseudo-uncles in the way some other drivers were. You’re all grown up, they tell her, note her height and her features and one of them even asks if she’s in college yet. She plays along, pretends she remembers them fondly and that they haven’t been on the recipient list for the annual Elliott family Christmas newsletter for the past thirty or so years. His buddies are much more comfortable talking about Chase, anyways, about his racing and his fiancee and his little boy than they’ve ever been talking about Chris or Chandler. The concept of a quote-en-quote girl dad wasn’t such a thing in the nineties.

Chris makes small talk with one of the wives. They can’t be that far apart in age, she’s definitely of a different generation than her husband. Gross. Chris lets the woman lead the conversation; she talks about the polka dots on her skirt and Chris’ cowboy boots that are, apparently, perfectly authentic. 

They separate from the group of former NASCAR drivers and their child brides within the hour. Bill has to be in Ferrari hospitality by one o’clock for a special meeting. He’s still not sure what he did to get selected for this specific group of people who get to do a hot lap with one of the Ferrari drivers, but he isn’t about to ask any questions that might get him out of it. He sets off to hospitality and Chris sneaks out of the paddock and into the rest of the track. 

There’s only so much to see inside the paddock. Hospitality after hospitality after hospitality, just in different colors with different modern structures with pictures of different cars. She wants to experience the event, not just the rich people who can pay their way into the upper echelon of the pinnacle of motorsport. If she’s going to be on her own for an hour and a half, she might as well be fully and truly on her own. 

She ends up in the beer garden. More specifically, the bar tent. You can’t separate a NASCAR fan from the Natty Light. The pass around her neck gets her into the VIP area of the tent, which… feels like an antithesis of itself.  Her phone buzzes in her back pocket when she’s waiting on her bottle from the bartender. It’s her dad. 

Brad Pitt is here. Crazy. 

She makes quick acquaintances with a couple who looks about her age. She compliments the girl’s denim jacket and then she’s in. The DJ is playing country music with a techno backtrack at the other side of the tent and they all three spend a good fifteen minutes trying to decide if they love or hate the set. “It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” the guy says. 

“It’s definitely not the best, though,” Chris winces, spots a Ferrari pass hanging with the VIP one around the girlfriend’s neck. “Are you guys here with Ferrari?” She asks. 

“Oh, “ she says, looks down at the pass and fiddles with it for a moment. “Yeah, Will’s a golfer and they invited him for a tour and to do this golf event with ESPN.”

“Oh, that’s sick!” Chris nods. “Have you guys ever been here, or is this your first time?”

“We’ve come every year for…” Will starts, looks to his girlfriend for the rest of his sentence. 

“Four years,” she nods. “What about you?”

“This is my first time,” Chris explains, leaves out the technicalities because she barely cares about them, doesn’t expect a stranger to even half-care. “My dad’s here with Ferrari, and I’m here to babysit my dad.” She laughs. 

The woman nods, makes a quiet ah sound. Will asks for clarification. “You guys lose each other, or something?”

Chris nods. “Or something.”

Charles sees her before he hears her. She appears in his peripheral on the top floor of Ferrari Hospitality, moving swiftly through the groups of strangers with a confidence that makes you think she owns the place. He half-prepares to excuse himself from his current conversation–not that he’s understanding more than forty-percent of the words coming out of this guy’s mouth–to take a photo with the short brunette bee-lining it over to him. 

“Excu–”

“I think I saw Brad Pitt on my way here,” she says, and the man he’s been talking to for fifteen minutes laughs. Oh, he thinks, that’s mortifying. She’s not here to intrude on his conversation and ask for a picture. She’s here with this guy. 

“This is my Chris,” Bill says. 

“Hi,” Chris says. Chris. Chris. Chris is a woman. A woman extending her hand, thin and well manicured with a single ruby ring, for him to shake. “Chris.”

“Charles,” he says, hesitates. “You are not what I was expecting.” 

There wasn’t much he understood from Bill Elliott during their hot lap, not that Bill didn’t talk. Charles just didn’t have the focusing capabilities to drive the car in an entertaining way while also deciphering the thick southern drawl of the man sat in the passenger seat. It was thick, heavy, and sounded like maybe he’d smoked a pack a day for a few years. That, or he was straight-up making up words in a bit that only he was in on. One thing he did understand, though, was the kids’ names. I have three, he’d said, Chandler, Chase, and Chris. He’d assumed all boys. Chandler, Chase, and Christopher. Christian. Cristiano. The last thing he was expecting was a beautiful girl with a firm handshake. 

“You were expecting me?” She asks, and her voice is a million times easier to understand than her father’s. 

“No, no. He just,” He gestures absently to Bill. Chris doesn’t break eye contact. She has wonderful eyes. “I thought Chandler, Chase, and Chris are three brothers.”

“Oh,” She laughs like it’s not even close to the first time she’s had to follow behind her dad and correct the miscommunication, and a piece of her bangs falls loose from its tucked position behind her ear. She fixes it without thought. “Well, you’re one for three.” 

She asks Bill about the hot lap, asks if he had fun and he laughs. They’re very laugh-oriented people, he’s noticed. Laughy and almost intimidatingly good at holding eye contact. He’d always heard Americans had an issue with eye contact, and if that really is the case, these two practice their active-listening skills enough for the rest of the country. Their kindness is in their expressions, soft eyes and small smiles that keep you from feeling like an intrusion on the conversation. He notes all of his findings internally, categorizes them together as if he’s spent the last ten minutes looking at anyone but her. 

She’s horrendously his type. It’s painfully apparent with every passing moment. The hair and the face and the build and the smile. Just, God.

“Why didn’t you do one?” He asks, “A lap?”

“The need-for-speed bug skipped the women in my family, unfortunately.” She tucks her hair again. He wonders if she’s growing it out or if she always keeps it at such a length that it’s just too short to stay where she wants it to. 

“We could go slow,” he offers and she chuckles, closing her eyes long enough to roll them without him actually seeing them roll. 

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’ll be fun, I promise.” He’s never been good at flirting, always found it off-putting in the beginning, trying to walk the line between what one person finds fun and another person finds horribly uncomfortable. Once the dust settles, he can manage, but making those first few moves? He might as well be a deer in headlights. Semi-truck headlights. 

“I don’t know,” she says, drags out the vowel sounds and he’s oblivious to whether or not she can tell he’s only making this offer as a chance to spend more time with her. He’ll get an earful for it, no doubt, but if she agrees it’ll be worth it. Bill chimes in, eggs her on with a guilt trip. You should do it, don’t be a party-pooper. Charles wonders if Bill can tell he’s flirting with his daughter. Probably not, he’d bet. “Okay,” she says, and his stomach does a celebratory flip. Before he can say anything more, Mia is pulling him off somewhere. He hadn’t even seen her coming, but he fills her in on the walk.

“Domani c'è un'aggiunta al programma dei giri veloci.” There’s an addition to the hot laps schedule tomorrow, he says. Mia glares at him and he pretends not to notice, flashes her a toothy-grin as an unapologetic apology. 

When she’d agreed to do a hot lap with the gorgeous racing driver standing a foot away from her, she assumed it would be forgotten the moment he stepped away from the conversation. She never would have agreed to it if she actually thought it was going to happen. Chris was sorely mistaken though, when later that afternoon, a man dressed head-to-toe in Ferrari red finds her to gather her information. 1:10, he tells her through a thick Italian accent, be in hospitality at 1:10. 

It was wonderful, really. Perfect, fantastic, great, legendary. This is an amazing opportunity. She isn’t going to regret agreeing to this, no chance. Even for the queen of optimism, this one is hard to put a positive spin on. 

There is no underestimating just how much Chris hates going fast. She’s never liked it, spent the majority of her childhood getting carsick in a vehicle maxing out at forty miles an hour. Her sister and brother used to think she was faking it just so she could always ride shotgun. She’s not even allowed to drive the car if she’s with her dad or her brother because they can’t bear it. To her, a speed limit is just that, a limit. To everyone else, it’s a minimum. 

Her only hope is that she doesn’t vomit all over an expensive supercar at 1:10 tomorrow afternoon, or worse–the cute guy driving the car. 

In the meantime, she can distract herself with the Green Day performance and remind herself that only so much can happen in five minutes. Anyone can survive five minutes. 

– – –

They eat the continental breakfast at the hotel the next morning. Bill has pancakes and Chris has cereal because, as she’ll tell anyone, there’s just something about cereal from a plastic container. She’s also three coffees ahead of where she was this time the day before, all of her nerves personifying themselves as desperation for caffeine. She’s responding to a work email on her phone while Bill has a call with Chase. 

Somewhere on a race track in Florida, Chase is calling between practice and qualifying sessions. They talk every day during a race weekend–Bill and Chase–and it’s almost never about racing. Her dad might drop an occasional that’s not what I would’ve done or a well, that looked like fun, but that’s usually the end of race-talk. They used to fight like cats and dogs about driving when Chase was younger, so much so that Chris’ mom banned them from talking about racing inside the house for three straight years. The who of them are better now, now that Bill’s been able to let Chase find his own way and go through his own racing journey. 

“Your sister is doing a Hot Lap today,” Bill says, and Chris can hear Chase’s laughter from the muffled speaker. 

Bill and Chris are driven to the track on Saturday because traffic is so bad. It’s hot and windy and Chris has her window rolled down the entire drive, her fingers dancing through the dry air. She’s always loved the heat, the sun shining down on her skin, kissing her in a million different places all at the same time. She loves the heat, and the heat loves her. 

The morning flies by. They start the day with a tour of the Ferrari garage, where they’re introduced, or re-introduced, to their drivers. They end up with a couple other very important people hunched over Charles’ car while he explains how much pressure needs to be applied to the brake pedal for the car to actually brake. Bill eats the semantics up, cars and their mechanics run thick in his blood, braided deeply into his DNA. Chris, however, has always enjoyed the more delicate things in life; the pink hair bows and the dollar store makeup kits and spinning herself dizzy in a flowy summer dress. She never spent exorbitant amounts of time at Dad’s engine shop or Grandpa’s Ford Dealership, it just wasn’t in her lane of interests. She sips another coffee–her fifth of the day–and listens attentively to Charles talk, bites her smile at his wild gesticulations. He’d make a good kindergarten teacher, she thinks, with his huge personality. 

When the whole tour group is being shuffled out of the garage to be replaced by a new set of prying eyes, Charles makes a passing comment. See you later for the world’s slowest hot lap, he remarked, put his hand on her shoulder and gave it a soft squeeze as he moved past her. 

She doesn’t know why, but she’d convinced herself that it wouldn’t actually be him she would be doing the lap with. It was qualifying day, after all. Surely, he had about a million and one better things to be doing than driving a random girl around a track a few times. She figured it would be a driver, but not one of the drivers. 

After lunch, she makes her way back to Ferrari hospitality, to where she was told to be waiting at 1:10. She’s the only person who looks like they’re here on instruction. Nobody else is nervously picking at their cuticles or vibrating in place as a reaction to their seven coffees that morning.

She spent the night before grilling her dad about his experience, forcing him to give her a moment-by-moment breakdown of everything he remembered happening, from the safety briefing to the conversation afterwards. But, when it came time for Chris to actually do hers, there was no safety briefing warning her about the million different ways she could die. Instead, the same man who’d tracked her down the day before escorted her from the top floor of hospitality to the bottom, out the back into what she can best compare to an alleyway, and then to a red supercharged Ferrari. 

Charles is there, talking to what appears to be a personal photographer and another man dressed in Ferrari garb. She re-introduces herself for a third time in twenty four hours. “I know your name, Chris,” Charles says, smiles and shakes her hand anyway. She doesn’t like the way her brain reacts to him saying her name like it belongs on his lips. 

“Duh,” she laughs, “sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“Right,” she nods. “Yeah, sorry.” Charles laughs out a sigh, cocks his head and smiles. Chris bites her tongue not to apologize again. It’s a reflex. She puffs out her laugh and shrugs. 

If she manages to make it out of these couple laps with her life and the contents of her stomach still intact, she’s sure to still look like a clown–a fact she realizes as she pulls the tight helmet over her head. She’s worn racing helmets a handful of times, but it’s not muscle memory to her in the way it is to him. It takes her a minute to tighten the chin strap just right and despite his genuine offer to help her, Chris turns him down and blindly works her fingers under her neck until it’s just right. 

“Why don’t you get a fun Hot Laps helmet?” She asks while she fights with the strap. 

Charles knocks on the side of his helmet with his knuckle. “Custom fit. Safety reasons.”

Chris knows, she was just messing with him. She nods like she never could’ve guessed that was the reason. “My safety doesn’t matter?” She comments, pulls the strap tight for the final time. 

“You think I’m going to crash?”

She shrugs. “Maybe.”

“I would never crash with Chris Elliott in the car.” There he goes again, saying her name all annoyingly French and nice and easy. 

“Whatever,” she says, turns away so he can’t see her squished cheeks flush pink against the polyester. He opens the passenger side door for her, knocks his knuckle on her helmet this time, and horribly mocks both her words and accent before shutting the door behind her. 

Chris has her seatbelt buckled before he can get around the front of the car and into his seat. Her leg bounces anxiously against the floor mat. Charles starts the car and moves to shift into drive, but stops short. “Are you scared?” he asks, and in a moment of vulnerable honesty, she nods. She’s more than scared. She’s terrified, and despite his brief attempt to reassure her that it’s going to be fun, her leg is still bouncing when they peel off from the group already awaiting his return. 

A hot lap, she’d come to learn in the last day or so, would be more accurately referred to as hot laps–plural, multiple, several. Three, to be exact. One out lap, one push lap, and one cool down lap. Three laps. Hot laps. They should really start referring to it as a plural. 

The best thing she can compare it to is a roller coaster. The turns share the feeling you get at the tipping point, right before your body thinks you’re free falling. Her stomach is left behind three turns back and it never really catches up to the car once they start. The straights are like that first hill, fast and crazy in a way that pulls from her lips screams she hears before she consciously chooses to release. It’s like a roller coaster, if the person sitting next to you is completely unaffected by the ride and spends the entire time trying to carry out a conversation with you between your screams and their giggles. It’s like a roller coaster, if the cart never leaves the ground. 

On the cool down lap, when they’re going at a speed that allows Chris to pick up her soul when they drive through turn four, he asks her if she’s single. It comes at her from left field. 

“Are you flirting with me?”

He laughs, takes a hand off the wheel and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Yes!”

“Oh,” she says softly. If he notices the surprise in her tone, he doesn’t mention it. “I am.” 

“Can I get your number?” She swears that his fingers are shakier than before as they hover over the paddle shift. They were sure-footed just minutes earlier, she’s sure of it. She’s sure of it, but there’s no way it’s a genuine observation. There’s no way she’s making him nervous. 

She laughs, because what on God’s green Earth is a European Formula One driver going to do with a small town American girl’s phone number? 

“I’m not abandoning my dad for a hookup,” she says, and he rolls his eyes, repeats the question. “Why do you want it?”

“Because, Chris Elliott,” she wants to scrape the way he says her name out of his voice box and pin it in a scrapbook. It’s like a tick, the way it burrows into her skin. Nobody should be allowed to make her name sound like that. “You are a very beautiful girl, and when a guy sees a beautiful girl, they act like an idiot and ask for her number.” 

“Oh, my God,” she giggles, shakes her head and looks out the window like it might ground her, or like it might reveal that she really is in some fever dream state and none of this is real. She’s not even in Texas, maybe. That’s how insane this whole conversation is to her. 

“Too cheesy?” He asks, grimaces. She shakes her head, holds her hand out for his phone. 

“Just cheesy enough.”

When they get back to where they started, someone asks Chris if she’d had a good time. She nods, flattens down the static-electricity charged flyaways on her head and tells them yes, even if she’ll be just a little bit nauseous for the rest of the day. It’s not a lie, either, she did have fun. She was scared out of her mind, but in a way that makes her happy she did it. 

They pose for a photo together in front of the car, the picture snapped by the only guy with a camera around his neck, the only one besides Chris not covered head to toe in Ferrari branding. When they pose, Charles’ arm wraps around her lower back and, almost like he remembers himself in the middle of the action, his hand doesn’t close around her side. Instead, it hovers just beyond her body, open and stiff and flat. How gentlemanly. “Good luck tomorrow,” she says.

He nods his thanks, “I hope I see you around this weekend,” he adds, and then they go their separate ways. Good thing, too, because she’s still blushing over it when she gets back to her dad in the Champion’s club. Bill is too distracted by the live feed on Chase’s qualifying laps on his tiny phone screen to notice Chris’ presence, much less the coloring of her cheeks. He qualifies third and they celebrate quietly with drinks from the bar and FP3 on the big screens. 

They stumble into more NASCAR old-timers while in the Champion’s Club and Chris spends the time fifth-wheeling their conversations about Chase and watching the second half of qualifying on one of the TVs. 

She doesn’t really understand the format of the weekend. In theory, she understands the basics, didn’t have to read Formula One for Dummies on the plane ride over, but the intricacies of it are beyond her. In NASCAR, drivers are split into two groups and then are only given, at max, two laps to set their qualifying times. It varies depending on the track that weekend, but it always hits some of the same points. From what she can gather from the low-volume televisions mounted on every surface around her, F1 is definitely different. 

They head back to the hotel directly after qualifying to ‘beat the traffic’ which is code for Chris is still nauseous and they’re both feeling a little too heat exhausted. They stop for dinner on the way back, at a barbeque place right by their hotel. Bill orders the chopped brisket with potato salad and Chris gets the pulled pork sandwich with a tomato zucchini salad. 

Chris has been really busy with work, with settling into the new routine with her new group of students, and Bill wants to hear all about it. She always struggles in September and October, feels inadequate every time the other teachers find their footing with their new class weeks before she does. It’s the first time alotta ‘em have been in a school, Bill reminds her and she shrugs it off, tries to find something more upbeat to talk about. 

Chris and Bill have really gotten close over the past couple years. Growing up, she and her sister Chandler were massive daddy’s girls, had him wrapped around their little fingers from the moment they came into the world. But, when Chase started to really take racing seriously, the girls lost a lot of their dad to their brother and spent the majority, if not all, of their time with their Mom. As a teenager, Chris did what all sixteen year old girls do and rebelled against any and every rule in the book. While Chandler was touring colleges and getting 1550s on her SAT and singing in the church choir, Chris had other plans. Whether it was stubbornly refusing to clean her half of the shared room with her big sister, ratting Chase out for coming home at 2am drunk, or sneaking out of the second-story window to go out with her all-too-old boyfriend, she tested all of the waters. It wasn’t until college, until she moved away to Athens and was out of the house for the first time in her life that she realized just how important family was to her. She’s been attempting to make up for lost time since. 

That night when she plugs her phone into the charger and shuts it off for the night, she realizes she’d been half expecting a late night text from Charles. It didn’t come, and disappointed isn’t the right word for the tiny little pit in her stomach because she wasn’t really expecting anything to come from typing her number into his contacts.  It’s not disappointment, it’s something closer to acceptance or rejection, maybe. It’s not like he would’ve been searching out anything but a hookup, anyways, and Chris made it perfectly clear that she wasn’t into that idea. 

She would never hear from him again, and that’s how it should be. The whole interaction turning into anything but a story she can tell in a couple months when she’s drunk would be entirely too complicated of an outcome. 

She doesn’t let herself think about it any longer, leaves her phone face down on the side table and tucks herself into bed. 

– – –

Traffic on race day is true-crime inducing. They’re driven, again, escorted and still spend an hour and a half in the backseat of an SUV. Bill and Chris watch from the VIP stands and Chris has never seen anything like this, especially not at COTA. Even Talladega and Daytona barely hold a candle to this spectacle. 

If she has one critique, it’s that F1 should really hire some B-List at best celebrity to scream drivers, start your engines! At the start of the race like they do in NASCAR. It would really add some flare, she thinks. 

She and Bill share Chris’ airpods, one in each of their ears listening to the NASCAR broadcast. Charles starts twelfth, for whatever reason. She can’t be bothered to look into it, knows it’ll probably be a penalty she doesn’t understand and she’ll be tumbling down a rabbit hole before she knows what’s happened to her. 

While it’s not Chase’s best race–he finishes fourteenth with a single sigh from Bill–Charles puts on a show, fights his tires all the way up into third. 

They watch the podium celebrations on the TV screens and nobody looks happy to be up there. They look miserable, almost, and she understands it to an extent. It’s hard to have energy after a race, she’s witnessed it first hand more times than she can count. It’s hard, especially at the end of the season. Burn-out is real, but still. They look bored. She didn’t know spraying champagne could look so tired. 

Bill grumpily flies them home to Georgia late Sunday night. He’d wanted to wait until Monday morning, after all the billionaires and their super-jets take off right after the race, but Chris refused to miss another day of work this early in the school year, not when she was already going to be missing time in December for her brother’s wedding. 

Bill’s been flying planes since before any of his kids were born. His most recent purchase is a Cessna Conquest II that he uses to fly the family around for short distances. In another gene that skipped the females in the family, Chandler, Chris, and their mom all prefer to be passengers. Chase, however, followed in Dad’s footsteps once more in becoming an avid aviation fan. 

By the time they take off, any thought Chris had of getting a text from Charles has faded far into obscurity. He’d probably gotten dozens of numbers from girls this weekend. He was probably at a club somewhere right now still pulling women. Women more his type, probably. He seems like he’d be more into the refined type, the girls without the ‘cheap’ accents who were all worldly and spoke seventeen languages fluently and had long legs that carried them down runways across Europe every other weekend. 

Little southern girls get texts from little southern boys, that’s how it goes. That's how it’s always gone, and Chris is beyond naive to think anything different for even a moment. 

She grades papers on the flight home. Purple pen, because she thinks that color is fun and red is too cruel to grade with. Puffy stickers for everyone, even the kids who aren’t anywhere near the right track because she doesn’t want anyone to feel less than just because they struggle a bit more. Chris has always been a firm believer that the student is never the problem. If someone isn’t learning what she’s teaching, she needs to adjust the way she teaches it to cater to their learning style. 

It’s her job to teach them, not their job to learn. 

Joris has been laughing at Charles from the hotel room armchair for fifteen minutes now, beyond entertained by his best friend’s restless pacing, providing absolutely zero aid to his current predicament. This act has been going on for some time now. Charles, pacing for five minutes before pulling out his phone and typing up an opening message to Chris. Each time, he starts to read it out to Joris and then stops himself short, deletes it, and paces for five more minutes. 

Hey, Chris. This is Ch–no, that’s stupid. 

Sorry it took me a minute to text–absolutely not. 

What’s up? It’s Charles, how–someone should just stop him from speaking to women all together. 

There’s half a dozen renditions before Joris breaks. “Mate? What is your problem?” He finally asks. “It’s just a girl.”

“I know,” Charles sighs, “I know.”

“Then why can’t you send her a text?”

“Because.” He doesn’t really know why he can’t land on a message, why everything he types sounds entirely too casual or formal or nothing at all like what he would say to another human being. This isn’t a problem that he’s used to having. It’s the in-person flirting that fucks him up, not the texts and DMs and comments. She was just… he doesn’t know what she was. She was just. End of sentence. 

It’s no help that he doesn’t know American texting culture, unfamiliar with how long he’s supposed to wait to send a message or what he’s supposed to say in the opening text. 

“Here,” Joris says, holds his hand out for the phone. “I’ve got the perfect text.”

“Don’t send it,” Charles warns, but passes the phone to his friend. 

“I… won’t,” Joris says slowly, struggling to multi-task. He doesn’t type for more than a few seconds and then hands the phone back to Charles, with the message already sent. Charles’ look of sheer panic is met with a smile and a chef’s kiss from Joris. 

She turns her phone off while Bill is shutting the plane engine down in the hangar. Because of his love of aviation, Bill had bought some land out in the woods a couple decades ago and turned it into the family’s private airstrip for their planes.  Elliott Field, they coined it, stored all their extra vehicles out on the property. She slips it into her back pocket as her and Bill disembark and lock up the place, and the entire time she can feel it vibrating, the notifications from the hour and a half flight catching up now that she’s on the ground again. 

It’s not until she’s in her car that she checks them, pulls her phone out to plug it into the aux and play some music for the drive back to her house. Right at the top of the dozens of notifications is a message from an unknown number with an unfamiliar area code. 

[one unread message] the notification reads. She unlocks her phone to check the message. 

She closes the messages app on her phone and opens up Spotify, shuffles her favorite playlist. She doesn’t reply to his text, doesn’t know if she wants to or even what she might say back. She’s sleepy, more than ready for bed after a long weekend in the sun, excited to be back with her students bright and early tomorrow morning. 

The text from the cute race car driver can wait for another day. An issue for tomorrow, maybe. 

masterlist next chapter>

[thetomorrowshow]

learning curve

empires superpowers au masterlist (not up to date)

this story takes place during chapters 10 & 11 of ‘poisoned rats’.

cw: anxiety, blood and injury

~

Scott calls out that he’s home as soon as he arrives, careful to close the door softly.

It’s been nearly a month, but it’s still weird to have another person living in his house. Particularly since that person is Solidarity.

He doesn’t get a response, but he doesn’t expect one. Solidarity is just as quiet as the day he’d arrived. Scott tries not to think about that too much.

Scott’s ashamed to admit that he doesn’t notice for a while. He goes about his afternoon, doing laundry and his post-work stretches and watching TV.

It’s not until he’s getting ready to prepare dinner that he actually approaches the closed door of the guest bedroom, knocking lightly on the door.

“Jimmy?” he calls quietly. “Would you like to help with dinner?”

No response.

Scott chews on his lip. “Okay, um. If you don’t want me to open the door, say something. I’m just coming in to make sure you’re all right.”

After another moment’s pause with no response, he eases the door open, sidles in.

Jimmy’s not there.

It isn’t hard for him to tell—there’s barely anything in the room, all the clothes put away neatly and the bed made. The spot between the bed and the wall that Jimmy likes to wedge himself into is empty as well.

Okay, no need to panic yet. Jimmy’s fairly new to using the home gym, so maybe he’s just checking out the equipment.

A glance in the gym tells him all he needs to know.

Still, it doesn’t mean he’s—he hasn’t been kidnapped. He hasn’t been kidnapped. He’s safe.

Scott heads into the kitchen, checking around for evidence that Jimmy’s been there. And once he’s looking, it isn’t hard to find.

The lunchmeat is out on the counter. The dishes cabinet is open, but there’s nothing new in the sink or the dishwasher. Scott looks around, checks the fridge, the other cabinets, the trash—

There’s something in the trash.

There’s shards of china in the trash, some of them dark with something red and wet.

The pieces fall into place.

Jimmy had broken a plate, panicked, and ran. Scott knows it with a certainty that surprises him, so he checks the shoes by the door just to make sure and immediately notices that Jimmy’s are missing.

His phone is plugged in at his bedside. His shoes are gone. There’s blood on the china in the trash and Jimmy is missing.

Scott’s tearing out the front door practically before his mask is firmly on his face.

It’s luck, more than anything, that at the end of the street he picks the right direction and within minutes can pull up to the side of the road, where a familiar figure in a grey hoodie is curled up against a lamppost.

“Jimmy!” Scott calls out the open window, trading out his mask for a beanie without even checking to see if anyone’s watching. Traffic’s bad at this time of the day, and already there are people angry about having to go around his car, but he hops out anyway and jogs around to the sidewalk.

“Jimmy,” he says again, and he doesn’t grab him by the arms but almost does— “Jimmy, are you all right?”

Jimmy flinches away, his hands curled loosely in front of him—and they’re absolutely covered in blood—

“Get in the car, okay?” Scott says, glancing around. Nobody’s paying much attention to them, they’re still in the wealthy part of the city with less folks out on the streets, but he’s pulled over on a major road so he needs to get Jimmy out. “We can disinfect this and wrap your hands up, all right? You’re not in trouble, I promise. Can you get in the car?”

Jimmy nods after a moment, allowing Scott to lead him back to the car. Scott buckles him in and shuts the passenger door, taking only a moment to rub his face. It’s okay. He found Jimmy. Everything’s going to turn out fine.

He keeps telling himself that on the silent drive home.

“Sorry,” whispers Jimmy when Scott sits him down in the bathroom, snapping open the first aid kit.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, it’s all right,” Scott says absentmindedly, unscrewing the cap of the rubbing alcohol and dousing a cotton ball with it. Jimmy sniffs, eyeing him carefully, his face streaked with tears and his hands still held gingerly in front of him.

“I’m going to clean your hands, then wrap them in gauze. Is there anywhere else you’re hurt?”

Jimmy shakes his head. Slowly, he uncurls his fingers, splaying his hands out for Scott to see.

It’s not as bad as he’d feared when he’d first seen blood streaming down his knuckles. There’s one large gash in the center of Jimmy’s right palm, and a couple of smaller ones with little slivers of china stuck in them, but all the other cuts littering his fingers and palms are tiny and shallow.

Scott disinfects first, telling Jimmy everything before he does it. He’s going to be patting it with this cotton ball first, and it might sting a bit, but it’s going to help, okay? Now that that’s done, he’s going to press a little harder to wipe away the blood. Is everything still all right? Does he need to slow down?

Forcefully, Scott’s reminded of a night from so long ago, when a heavily bleeding and injured Solidarity had collapsed on his doorstep. He’d been less gentle in his administrations, then.

It keeps Scott up at night more often than he’d like to admit. If he’d let Jimmy stay longer, would he have learned more about Xornoth’s abuse? Would he have felt motivated to track down the villain and take them out before more damage could be done? Could he have saved Jimmy so much unnecessary pain, just by being a kinder person?

“I’m going to use tweezers now, okay? There’s some splinters I think I can get out.”

Jimmy nods, and as Scott watches, his face . . . settles, in some strange way. The tears brimming at his eyes vanish, his mouth sets into a determined line.

It’s unsettling, and Scott’s not quite sure what it means, but if it helps Jimmy brave the treatment, he’s fine with it.

Jimmy’s hands flinch back a couple of times as Scott digs into the cuts with the tweezers, plucking out slivers of porcelain until he has a small, bloodstained pile of them on the corner of the sink. Once the wounds look totally de-splintered, he wipes them down again with rubbing alcohol then wraps them in gauze.

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy says again when he’s almost done. Instead of his automatic response of earlier, Scott pauses to consider that.

“What are you apologizing for?” he asks eventually, because while he’s pretty sure he knows what it is—breaking the plate—he’s not sure Jimmy understands that it’s something forgivable.

But Jimmy, surprisingly, doesn’t mention the plate. “Lying,” he says, and his face doesn’t break. His eyes don’t water. But something changes in the quality of his voice, some terrified edge to it. “I lied to you. I’m sorry.”

“What did you lie about?”

“I—I told you I could control it,” says Jimmy. “Back at—at the hospital. That my powers—I could control them. But I can’t. I—I wasn’t even touching the plate, it just—I don’t know what happened—”

Scott tapes off the end of the gauze, then sits on the side of the tub, doing his best to look into Jimmy’s eyes without forcing him. Jimmy’s biting his lip, hands shaking, looking for all the world like he’s about to bolt.

“It’s just a plate,” Scott says, trying in some way to convey the fact that he doesn’t care what Jimmy breaks, he’s not going to kick him out.

Jimmy shakes his head, quick and repetitive. “It’s just a plate today. It’s—it’s the doorknob tomorrow, and your car the day after, and then it’s your leg or—or—” he cuts himself off, swallowing thickly. “It’s—it’s nothing. Forget it.”

And before Scott can stop him, Jimmy rises on shaky legs and leaves the room, arms clutched around himself.

-

It’s times like these that Scott really misses Aeor.

He’s never taught anyone this kind of thing. He’s never even seen anyone else be taught—and his lessons in control had been far later than most might receive them.

But he decides to start with Jimmy the same way Aeor had started with him—proving that his mistakes aren’t harmful.

Scott’s hand hovers over the dishes in the cabinet. A stack of nine dinner plates, once ten. Five bowls. Eight dessert plates. Four mugs, four saucers.

He never uses half the stuff, particularly not the mugs and saucers—he’s bought his own, more casual mugs in recent years. And a quick internet search shows him that he could replace the entire set for relatively cheap, though they wouldn’t be identical.

The main issue is that these are dishes that came from Aeor. Dishes that he used.

It only takes a second for Scott to come to the conclusion that Aeor would prefer these dishes be put to use to help someone, rather than gather dust in the cabinet.

So Scott piles all of the dishes in the backyard, just beyond his little flower garden. He’s got a decent-sized backyard with a privacy fence, which he thinks will do quite nicely. If they stand on the patio, the fence isn’t too far away, yet not right in their faces. Still, a bit of protective gear is in order.

He manages to scrounge up two pairs of safety glasses and three pairs of work gloves in the garage, all of which he sets out next to the dishes on the patio. Then he turns the oven on, sets a frozen pizza to cook, and heads upstairs to find Jimmy.

Scott knocks gently on the door. “Jimmy? Can I talk to you?”

What feels like ages passes with no sound. Scott’s poised to knock again, mind racing through various possibilities—did he run again? Is he hurt?—before he hears movement inside.

It’s still another full minute before the door opens, revealing a rather miserable-looking Jimmy.

His hair is all rumpled, like he hasn’t gotten out of bed all day. His t-shirt is half tucked into his jeans, half sticking out under his hoodie. The constant shadows under his eyes have only deepened, ringing the redness that rims them. The tip of his nose is red to match, and he sniffles as he stands there, waiting for Scott to speak.

Scott clears his throat, takes a slight step back (he doesn’t want Jimmy to feel like he has no personal space). “Um, I started on dinner, but I was hoping I could have your help with something? In the backyard?”

It’s an agonizingly long moment that Jimmy takes to think it over, but eventually he bites his lip and nods, rocking back on his heels as he waits for Scott to lead the way.

Scott does so, pausing by the front door so that Jimmy can slip on his shoes, then leads him out the back.

“I don’t want you to ever feel unsafe here, all right?” Scott begins, putting on a pair of safety glasses. Jimmy stares at the glasses, the gloves, and the dishes, before cautiously taking the other pair, eyes flicking up toward Scott every so often.

“I accidentally froze something when I was seventeen, and my parents kicked me out. I always thought that was just the way it was—I had to be perfect with my powers, always, and my lack of control was . . . well, I spent a long time hating myself for those accidents.”

Scott pulls on his work gloves, still stained with dirt from the last time he tended his garden. Jimmy surveys the two remaining pairs before choosing the larger ones, biting his lip as he gingerly pulls them on over his bandaged hands.

“I didn’t figure out until—or, Aeor taught me—” Jimmy flinches at the name, but Scott carries on— “that you’re expected to make mistakes. Nobody knows how to control their powers at first. It’s a . . . it’s a learning curve, see?”

Jimmy shrugs. And that’s fine—Scott’s fairly sure it’s a quiet day. It’s just difficult to work with at the moment. He just barely restrains from pinching the bridge of his nose, remembering at the last second that he’s wearing dirty work gloves. How had Aeor ever managed this with teenage Scott?

“From what I understand,” says Scott, “you couldn’t control your powers until . . . recently. And now, you’re thinking that maybe you can’t, because you used them accidentally?”

Jimmy looks away, throat bobbing. He shrugs again.

“Right. So, first of all, this is normal. It’s sort of like—like you’re going through puberty again, okay? You’re going through the learning-to-control stage for the first time, so you’re going to mess up. It happens. I messed up so many times—I used to freeze over the floor when I was angry. I used to be terrible at control, but I just needed someone to help.”

Hopefully that part of the lesson has gotten through to Jimmy. He’s observed, in the month that Jimmy’s been here, that even on quiet days he’s listening more often than not. Scott sucks in a breath, hoping that some air will loosen the stressed knot in his chest, and picks up a bowl.

“So, mistakes are really common. And, Jimmy, I don’t really . . . understand your power, I guess, but things are going to break while you learn how to control. And I just . . . I want to make sure you know it’s okay. It’s okay to break things, okay?”

And with that, Scott chucks the bowl at the fence at the other end of the yard.

It collides with a smash, shards of porcelain flying apart at the impact. Jimmy takes a startled step back, reminding Scott wildly of a spooked horse.

He acts like he doesn’t notice, though, instead handing Jimmy a dinner plate.

Jimmy glances at him, unsure, as he takes it. Scott smiles in a way that he hopes is encouraging, points to the fence.

“Go for it. Don’t hold back.”

Jimmy’s certainly holding back when he throws the plate, but it breaks anyhow, snapping in half against the fence. Scott hears him gasp, but when he looks back at him, Jimmy’s as stoic as ever.

Scott picks up another dinner plate and tosses it, feeling an odd sort of satisfaction echo through his bones as it breaks against the fence. He hands Jimmy a bowl, and with noticeably less trepidation, Jimmy throws it at the fence.

It’s a weird bonding activity, to be sure. Not the weirdest—Scott can remember some of the bonding stuff the theatre folk he worked with in college got up to—but it definitely ranks up there as something probably socially unacceptable.

He throws the next dish even harder.

“Things are going to break,” Scott reiterates, handing Jimmy one of the mugs. “I broke things. You’ll break things. You’re not going to be in trouble for it—you’re an adult, and I plan to treat you like one, all right? And I plan to help you learn how to control it. You’re not alone in this.”

Jimmy hurls a saucer with all his strength, and Scott thinks he sees a shadow of a smile when it shatters against the fence. He does it again with a dinner plate, then steps back, allowing Scott to throw a few more.

When it comes down to the last dish—a dinner plate—Scott hands it to Jimmy, gestures for him to take a good stance. Jimmy doesn’t hesitate; he sends the plate flying into the fence, and this time he definitely smiles a bit when it breaks.

“Jimmy,” Scott says seriously when the man, panting a little bit, turns back to him. “I want you to know—there is nothing in this house that you can break that will make me stop caring about you. As your conservator—and more importantly, as your friend, I place your health and happiness above anything that I own. I want you to remember that, okay?”

Jimmy nods, and Scott’s struck by the sudden, overwhelming urge to hug him. He doesn’t, of course—Jimmy doesn’t really do well with touch, and that’s fine by Scott. He really, really wants to, though.

Instead, he tugs off his gloves and jerks his head in the direction of the backdoor. “I put a pizza in the oven, it should be done soon. Want to find something on Netflix and just hang out for the rest of the night?”

Of course, Jimmy doesn’t say anything. But he offers a small smile, shakes off his gloves, and places his safety glasses on the patio table. Then he steps around Scott and heads inside.

That night, they eat pizza on paper plates while watching an episode of a new suspense show. When the drama peaks, the light in the living room fizzles and goes out—and while Jimmy flinches hard and hides his face, Scott reassures him that it’s fine until he reemerges, forcing out a raspy apology, but agreeing to finish the episode.

It’s not perfect, but it’s progress. And somehow, Scott feels almost proud—and he thinks, really, Aeor would be as well.

[lxdymaria]

i feel bad for being so inactive on here but p much all i do nowadays in play elden ring and ffxiv so here's an update. 1) pls enjoy a picture of my tarnished and 2) pls enjoy a picture of all the crafting ive been doing in ffxiv

[sadquickchristmassnowman]

community as “make up a guy” tweets

[fucciwilliams]

[lemonsourcrisis]

Hidden Love 偷偷藏不住 (2023) — 1.20 | "I'm going to cut ties with you."

[lionydoorin]

how funny would it be if tara did Not have a license in the scene where sam and her steal bailey's car.

sam trusts her with the wheel and girly almost crashes the car on the way to gale's. gale is fighting for her life against ghostface and sam screaming in the car holding on to whatever she can because tara is going so fast and she's knocking trashcans and mail boxes.

people are running and yelling in the street because there's a wild, uncontrollable police car literally destroying everything they pass through. and tara is having so much fun

[snapiphany]

Happy Mother's Day!

[vonxodd]

♡ 𓏲

[gmanmedias]

I WON’T LEAVE A WITNESS, SO MUCH FOR A MERRY CHRISTMAS

🎄 🎄 🎄

🪓 🪓 🪓

⛸️ ⛸️ ⛸️

silver scream: 11/13

[formulaforza]

miss americana & the heartbreak prince

—02. over the ocean call —word count: 6.1k —warnings: language, sexual innuendos —a/n: don't get used to this update schedule my loves. school starts back up again on monday.

In late October, the sunrise is perfectly timed to be at it’s blandest point during Chris’ morning commute. 7:35am, and the sun painted the sky shades of pink and orange and yellow half an hour ago while Chris was curling her hair. Now, it’s not dark, but it’s definitely not light, either. More of a blue hue covering the entire state, painting the parking lot with the emotions of a sleepy Monday morning. For the first time since she landed back home, Chris is feeling the exhaustion of the weekend. 

She piles the bags onto her shoulder–a Jansport backpack and an Earth Day tote she’d been gifted by a student just before summer break last year. In one hand, she’s got a tangle of lanyards, one with her classroom keys and school ID, another with her car and house keys. In the other hand, an oversized travel coffee mug; one that made the morning commute perched between her legs because it’s too big for the cup holders in her car. 

She scans her badge at the office door, greets the secretaries while rummaging through her mailbox, ducks her head into the principal’s office with a single warning knock. He’s not in yet. Her keys jangle and the heels of her booties echo the entire length of the quiet hallway to her classroom. She unlatches the door with her elbow, opens it with her hip and flicks on the lights. The room still smells like shaving cream from the spelling activity she’d left for the substitute on Friday.

In the time it takes her to boot up her computer and answer some missed emails from the weekend, she finishes what’s left of her coffee and heads to the teacher’s lounge to brew another cup. On her way back, she swings by the cafeteria. 

Forty-percent of the district live below the state poverty line and qualify for free and reduced lunch. The lunch ladies are hard at work getting ready to start serving some hungry kiddos. All of the teachers in the district are allowed to eat breakfast and lunch as provided by the cafeteria, and even though Chris already ate breakfast, she snags a full tray–mini pancakes, syrup, a hashbrown, a clementine, and a carton of strawberry milk–and takes it back to her classroom. 

Chris has one student, Quinn, whose family can’t afford reduced lunch prices but also won’t request for Quinn to qualify for the free lunch. She thinks it’s an ego thing, that Quinn’s mom just isn’t able to accept that the family needs help. It’s a single parent household and the mom works two full-time jobs to try and make ends meet. After a newsletter was sent home in need of parent signatures at the beginning of the year and returned with Mama written in sloppy green crayon, Chris learned that Quinn was living a relatively self-sufficient life. As self-sufficient as a five-year-old can be. 

Chris sets the styrofoam tray down on the table in the front of the room and starts to get the place ready for students; she starts pulling down chairs, cleaning up the classroom library, updating the calendar on the white board and re-organizing the magnetic daily schedule. Normally she’d have a lot of this done before leaving the day before, but since there was a sub, nothing was done before locking the room up for the weekend. 

At eight-twenty, Quinn knocks on the open door and trudges in with a backpack that’s half the size of her. “Hi, Miss Elliott,” she says through a yawn, plopping herself into the chair in front of the breakfast tray and digging in. 

“Hi, Quinnie,” Chris smiles from her computer. Quinn relays that she missed Chris very much, a lot while she was gone on Friday and Chris’ smile grows. “I missed you, too. Did Mrs. Bliss do your hair up all nice?” She asks. 

Quinn nods around her spork, around a mouthful of mini-pancake. “She did a braid,” she mumbles. 

“You love braids!” Chris says, opens the bottom drawer of her desk and starts pulling out hair products. Quinn gives her a thumbs up as a confirmation of the braid love. 

She spends the next fifteen minutes brushing through Quinn’s tangled hair. Mondays are always the worst because Quinn has all weekend to get it knotted up. She settles for a ponytail, braids the strands after it’s all smoothed out and puts a pink bow at the base of the pony. After they’re both finished–Chris with the hair and Quinn with the breakfast–the kindergartener heads back to the gymnasium to wait with the rest of her classmates. 

She puts some final morning touches on the classroom before she goes to collect the kids and start the day, and like most Monday mornings around Robinson, time seems to move backwards. By the time she drops her kids off for their morning special–music on Mondays–she feels like she’s worked three ten hour days. She keeps busy during the downtime, making copies and grading word searches and putting newsletters into student mailboxes. It’s not until lunch, until her daily phone call with Hannah, that she remembers all about the unanswered text from the unknown number sitting in her phone just begging to be overthought. 

“Can I, uh, can I tell you something?” Chris asks Hannah. “You can’t tell Chase.”

“Did you kill somebody?” Hannah laughs, Chris doesn’t. Might as well have, she thinks, because flirting with a racing driver is just as bad, if not worse, when it comes to Chase. He and Bill forbid Chandler and Chris from ever getting with a driver, even just for a night, when Chris was barely old enough to conceptualize what exactly a one-night stand was. She was thirteen, at most, and was still under the impression she was supposed to stay pure until marriage or else she’d go to Hell. 

“Can I tell you, or not?”

“You can always tell me, c’mon,” Hannah says, and Chris suddenly feels guilty for suggesting Hannah was anything but trustworthy. They’ve been best friends for decades, a relationship that predates Chase and Hannah, predates Reid, predates puberty and elementary school and potty-training. They’ve always told each other everything, but, in the past couple years–since Chris’ best friend got engaged to her brother–she’s always a little hesitant with the stuff she doesn’t want to get back to Chase. 

Outside of the fact that she expects Hannah to put her partner before her best-friend, Chris hates the idea of having to put Hannah between the two of them. She hates it, but she needs to tell someone about the text burning a hole in her phone, and who else is she going to tell? “Okay, so,” Chris smiles, realizes she’s smiling, and forces herself to stop. “There’s a guy.”

Hannah audibly gasps on the other end of the line. “There’s a guy? What’s his Instagram? First and last?”

“Do you want his social security number, too?” Chris laughs. Do they even have social security numbers in France? She clicks the spacebar on her keyboard to wake the monitor, types the question into the search bar. Oh, they do. Now she just feels silly. “We met this weekend.”

“Oh?”

“He’s a driver.”

There’s a long pause. Chris chuckles, because she doesn’t know what else to do. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Hannah clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, exhales heavy through her teeth. “Is he hot?”

Chris nods, and with a smile on her lips again, “Very.”

“Did you hook up with him?”

“Hannah!” Chris whispers through gritted teeth, looks around the room for the sudden presence of prying ears, clicks the volume on her phone down a few notches. 

“Chris!”

“No, God. I just need to text him back.”

“You gave him your number?!”

She actually recoils out of surprise with Hannah’s tone. “That’s more absurd than the idea of me hooking up with him?”

“Yes,” Hannah deadpans.

“I don’t like you.”

“Well, little late on that realization, honey.”

“Can you just help me figure out what to say to him?”

“Yeah, but first,” Hannah pauses. Chris can hear the tapping of her freshly done acrylics on the glass phone screen. “I’m looking at a picture of all of them. Which one is he?”

“I’m not telling you that.”

Hannah groans, and Chris can imagine her pout so vividly. “You suck!”

“Okay,” she ignores Hannah’s temper tantrum. If she’s going to ask for help, she’s going to get the help. “So, he texted me and basically just said ‘hey,’ what should I send back?”

“Uh, just say ‘hi’ back?”

Chris pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs, “You literally have negative game.”

“I’m getting married in two months!”

“To my brother.”

“Got me there.”

Chris spends the next fifteen minutes drafting texts with Hannah as her peer-reviewer in the notes app on her phone. She doesn’t like any of them, they all feel forced, feel like they’re too strong or too weak or just all together strange and off-putting. Hannah calls her a chicken and Chris hangs up on her, sends a single kissy-face emoji in a text and calls it a lunch period. 

After lunch and after recess, Chris’ class does more English. They practice writing their names and their letters and working on the way they hold their pencils. Chris is a real stickler when it comes to the way children hold their pencils. She took an ergonomics class her junior year of college for extra credit and some of it still sticks with her years later. 

After that, it’s group reading and snack time. They read Rainbow Fish on the city-themed rug that came with Chris’ classroom when she started. They spend the rest of their afternoon crafting their own Rainbow Fish out of construction paper, glitter, and glue. 

The last task of the day, and arguably the most stressful, is pickup. She drops all of the bus-riders off in the cafeteria, and that’s the easiest part of it all. It’s the back blacktop that’s the horrifying part, the hoard of parents and the four and five year olds anxious to run off to their mommies and daddies without letting Chris know first. Everyday that she survives pickup without any of the kids being abducted is a gold medal day in her book. 

She heads to the Pre-K hall after that day’s episode of Survivor to pick up her nephew–Hannah’s son–Reid, and take him back to her classroom. She prints worksheets for tomorrow in the teacher’s lounge and when she comes back, has to re-tidy up the classroom behind Reid’s wake of destruction.

It’s not until she’s in the car, after she’s loaded up her bags and strapped Reid into his carseat, that Chris finally texts Charles back, and it’s about as creative a response as his original message. 

She regrets the double text before she even pulls out of the school parking lot, but there’s nothing she can do about it now. It’s been months since she updated her phone, and she’s sure she doesn’t have the ‘undo send’ feature in her outdated software. And even then, she’s heard it notifies the person that a message is unsent, and the only thing worse than regretting a double text is letting the other person know that you regretted it. 

It’s a fifteen minute drive back to Chris’ house, Reid in tow. By the time she gets back there’s a new message from Charles.

Okay, okay. The double text didn’t scare him off. He’s deeper than a Georgia frat brother, that’s definitely a check in the win column. 

Per usual, it’ll be another hour before Hannah is back from work to pick Reid up, so like always, he and Chris share an after school snack from her fridge. Reid is a talker. He can droll on and on about the most obscure, irrelevant moments of his day like they’re the greatest thing to ever happen to a human being, and can listen to the sound of his own voice until he’s blue in the face. He tells Chris all about his day, about play time with the kid who picks his nose and wipes his boogers on the rug, about David’s bad day from storytime and all about Chase’s race. If there’s one thing the world’s most talkative kid likes to talk about more than anything else, it’s Chase’s racing. 

Chris sips lemonade from a purple bendy straw and stares at her phone on the counter, open to the messages app.

“Are you texting to my mom?” Reid asks. 

“I have other friends besides your Mom,” Chris quips, slides her plate of animal crackers across the table to him. 

“Nuh, uh,” Reid shakes his head, chomps down on an animal cracker with the grace of a clown slipping on a banana peel, crumbs pouring from his mouth onto his shirt, his lap, the wood tabletop. Chris reaches over and swipes them onto the ground.

Chris laughs out loud, steals Reid’s attention away from playing make-believe zookeeper with the cookies in front of him. She wonders how quick he regrets sending it, or if she just has a one track mind. 

She giggles a kind of hair-twirling, blush-inducing, feet-kicking giggle that makes Reid sigh loudly. “I’m trying to focus!” He says, glares at her with a hippo in one hand and a gorilla in the other. She snatches the gorilla and eats it in two bites. Reid, dumbfounded, is met with a smile from his aunt who promptly and dramatically licks her fingers.

She wishes she could be having an, of course he remembers moment, but she is genuinely shocked by it, moreso by the fact that she doesn’t even remember telling him about it in the first place. It had to have been during the Hot Lap, surely, sandwiched between her screams at two hundred miles an hour and his giddy giggles with each gear change. 

Why would he ever remember that, she wonders. She’s sure that if she told Chase about it, under regular conversation standards on a regular weekend, he’d forget about it before the end of the hour, and he’s her brother. Her own blood. But here’s this guy, in the middle of this insane weekend, remembering a stupid little thing she tells him while he’s trying to focus on driving a car faster than any sane person’s reaction time could ever handle. It’s shocking. 

Reid is gone, picked up by Hannah, and dinner is started when she messages him again. Chris is terrible with crushes, really. She’ll tell you it’s one of her worst traits; how easily she falls into a crush, how quickly her adult exterior melts away into nothing but a teenage girl hoping to be asked to the homecoming dance. She’s simple, easy to attain. Call her beautiful or remember something she thinks is important and you’re in her good graces, racking up points in a pro and con chart in her head. Charles has already done both of those things.

Her phone rings three minutes after she sends it. Facetime call: Maybe: Charles. Crap. 

She checks herself out in the reflection of the microwave window. She’s still got on her morning makeup, and even it’s last leg is better than nothing. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, also from this morning, and falls messily around her face. She’s changed from work clothes into a pair of leggings and an old purple sorority hoodie, the neckline cut into a v and the ends of the sleeves tattered with tears and grease and loose threads from loving the cotton a little too hard. It’s not ratty… it’s just, comfortable. An acquired taste. 

Has her kitchen always been this messy? Did it come like this? Has she ever cleaned it? Why, why, why does she keep a high school picture of her and Hannah on the fridge?

She rolls her sleeves over themselves and tucks as many frizzy hairs behind her ears as she can manage before she sets her phone up on the counter, against the backsplash tile, and answers it. 

He’s greeting her with a smile, childlike almost, the way his dimples dig into his cheeks. Stupid. She remembered him as cute and she remembered right. She smiles back because even through a screen, even when you barely know him, it’s a contagious smile complimented with soft, warm eyes that manage to make it look like he doesn’t have a care in the world. 

“Hello, Chris Elliott.”

“Hello, Charles Leclerc.”

“Tell me all about this dinner you’re cooking?”

“If you insist.”

“I insist a million times.”

They talk all evening about dinner and rainbow fish and how Chris is not, under any circumstances, going to be one of his girls. His dimples make her worry that she could be convinced to, though. 

“Okay,” Chris says, sets her phone up against the hotel end table and takes a couple steps backwards so her entire figure is in frame. “Good? Bad?” She asks, spins, holds a thumbs up to the camera when she’s finished showing off the outfit. Charles smiles at the sound of her voice pouring from his airpod. “Keep in mind it’s the only thing I brought.”

She’s in a hotel room somewhere in Virginia. He doesn’t know where, exactly. He’s in Mexico, race day, breakfast in his hotel room with Joris and Andrea. The guys are bickering in the bathroom; Joris, attacking Andrea’s red on red ensemble, Andrea, attacking the seven hundred hair products Joris has stacked up on the vanity. They’d already eaten and knocked on Charles’ hotel room door until he woke up forty-five minutes later than he was supposed to. 

“You could wear a rubbish bag,” he answers because he’s almost certain she could, but also because he knows it’ll make her blush. He smiles when it does, when she pretends it doesn’t. “I don’t know that you should be asking me for outfit advice, my fans are not fans.”

“I think you dress well,” she hums, and he watches her catch her reflection in the mirror, analyzing the sundress from every angle. He doesn’t need to analyze it, always has been a fan of sundresses, no matter the color, no matter the fit. You can never go wrong with a sundress, he thinks. Never. “Like right now, you look sharp.”

“‘I’m in pajamas,” he says. 

“Sharp pajamas.”

He laughs, drops his head and shakes it. “You’re cute.”

“What about the outfit?”

“Cute too,” he says around a spoonful of food. “What’s under it?” He quips, bites the inside of his cheek so he doesn’t burst into laughter at her strawberry tinted cheeks. It’s exactly the reaction he’d been looking for, the one he’d found too much amusement in over the last few days. She blushes easier than anyone he’s ever met, and it’s more than just bright cheeks–it’s in her smile, pursed and big and adorable. It’s in her eyes, wide and unable to keep any semblance of direct contact with him. It’s a direct contrast to her normal state of being, to her normal attentive listening. She blushes too easily and he has too much fun making her. 

It’s her words that always seem to take him by surprise, when she moves close to her camera again and almost whispers, “You wanna see?”

He coughs, clears his throat and looks around the room to make sure neither of the guys have appeared over his shoulder. “Very much, I would like seeing.”

She laughs. “You wish.”

“You’re a tease.”

She shrugs, reaches over her phone and out of frame. She grabs her purse and when she does, the phone falls face down onto the wood. “Sorry,” she squeaks, picks it back up. “Good luck today, yeah?” She tells him, a confident smile on her face. He nods, mouth full, and holds up a thumbs-up, waves at her quick goodbye. 

It’s not even a couple minutes before his phone is buzzing against the plastic tabletop. A picture, from her, by her, of her. Her, and white lingerie and a little bit of imagination that has him doing all the blushing. 

Fucking sundresses, man.

She sends him a picture of the whiteboard in her classroom, decorated for the Halloween party that day with fake spiderwebs and ghost stickers and pumpkins and all things Halloween that don’t scare a five year old to death.  She also sends him a picture of two store bought sugar cookies with orange frosting, purple and black star sprinkles on top. 

It doesn’t take long for the time difference to bite them in the ass, for the optimal time for communication to be hindered by sleep and work and meetings and more sleep. An hour too early for him, a few hours too late for her, not that she’d admit it, miss I would be awake and grading these papers whether or not I was talking with you. 

That’s what she’s doing, sitting on her living room floor and grading papers on her coffee table. He’s making breakfast, but really he’s watching her grade papers and talking to her whenever she remembers that they’re having a conversation. 

It’s cute, he thinks. Extremely so, the way she struggles to multitask. The way her voice will trail out into silence in the middle of a sentence because she’s trying to decipher a kindergartener’s little chicken scratch handwriting. It’s cute, the way she carefully flips through her book of stickers to find the perfect one for each and every paper, the way she carefully puts them on and makes sure they’re pressed down firmly so they don’t fall off somewhere between her coffee table and their desk. It’s cute, the purple pen with the sparkly gel gripper. 

“I want to see you,” he blurts out in the middle of it all and it takes her a minute to process it. He watches the gears turn, watches her practically jump out of her skin at the sound of his voice like she really forgot he was there for a moment. 

“You’re looking at me.”

“In person,” he laughs. “I want to see you in person.”

“I’m going to Arizona this weekend,” she says, and he can’t even believe she’s entertaining the idea. He was sure, actually, that he’d be getting another one of her I’m not going to hook up with you, Charles, lectures. It would be the second or third of the week, and no matter how many times he’s told her do you think I’d be up this early for a hookup, she remains unconvinced of his motives. 

“I know.” She’s going with her brother. It’s the finals, or the playoffs, or something like that. He’s listening, trying to remember, he really is. None of it makes any sense, though. Formula One is so much easier to wrap your head around.  “What about next weekend? You could come to Brazil.”

“No,” she yawns. It’s gotta be at least one-thirty there, she should be asleep. He shouldn’t be keeping her up. “I’m too busy with work that week. How about the one after?”

“Abu Dhabi.” He says it like a statement, not a question. Like, if we're going to wait that long, might as well wait until I’m home.

“I could come,” she says, and it surprises him because nobody wants to come to Abu Dhabi. He doesn’t even particularly want to go to Abu Dhabi. It’s felt a lot this season like it just never stops. Like, no matter what he does, he and the car and the team can’t get in sync. He’s ready to reset for next year, really, to challenge Max instead of shaking Checo off his ankles for a few more weeks. 

“You want to come?”

She looks up from the papers at him, confused, clicking the back of her pen against the pages. “Do you want me to come?”

“Do you know how long that plane is?” He asks. “My family will be there,” he adds, and now you’d never guess he’s the one who wanted her to come in the first place. He doesn’t tell her all these things because he doesn’t want her there, he does. He just also wants to make sure she knows what she’s getting herself into, the lion’s den she’s climbing into, the shallow end of the pool and the nose-dive she’s taking. 

It’s crazy enough to meet up somewhere neither of them live. It’s a whole other monster to do it at a race, where his family is also present. 

“Do you,” she pauses, pointing the pen at the screen, “want me,” and then at herself.  “To come?”

He shrugs. “I would not have said I want to see you if I didn’t want you to come.”

Even though he didn’t want to keep her up all night, he kept her up all night with planning. And, despite the incessant need to make it clear she isn’t a hookup, Chris also refuses to come under the guise of any sort of label. He’s not mad about that, flying her in under the implication to anyone that she’s his girlfriend… especially when she’s not? It’s a recipe for disaster, for drama and death threats and cross paddock glares for just existing. It’s something he wants to avoid for himself, but more importantly, something he wants to avoid for Chris, who didn’t sign up for any of this, who doesn’t reap any of the benefits of his life. She’s too good for the drama, he thinks. 

Somehow, the conversation about the rooming situation requires more dancing than the refusal to put a label of any sorts on their… acquaintanceship. Where does she stay? With him, he wants to stay–stay with me, please stay with me. Does he see if someone can pull a few strings and get her a room in the same hotel, or would it be better for her to stay somewhere else? Better for who, he doesn’t know. He wants her with him, wants to pretend he doesn’t know half the drivers and half the teams stay at the same hotel, that people are always waiting in the lobby and outside waiting for pictures and signatures with their favorite zoo animals. 

He scratches the back of his neck, “You could stay with me, if you want to.”

“Yeah,” Chris nods. “If you want me to.”

“If you want to.” They both chuckle, horribly nervous and awkward because they’re so terrified of making a wrong move, of coming on too strong or too careless. 

“It’s your job,” she says, still fidgeting with her pen. Actually, now it’s just the glitter gel gripper that she's messing with. “Your life. I’m the intrusion–”

“You’re not an intrusion,” he interrupts, because she isn’t and he needs her to know he doesn’t think she is. 

She smiles, looks up from the pencil grip in her hand to smile at him. “Okay, I’m the… guest. Tell me what you want me to do.”

He wishes he could reach into the phone and grab her hand and still it from bouncing the gel grip against the coffee table. Softly, he replies, “I want you to stay with me.”

She nods, and equally as soft, biting down on a smiley bottom lip, “Then I’ll stay with you.”

She mentions to him in passing that she’s on Thanksgiving break for the week that follows, letting it hang in the air with silent implication. He knows her game, completely aware that she wants him to make the next move–invite me to stay, I'm not going to say no, she’s telling him. I’m not going to say no, you just have to ask.

And so he does ask. Something about it’s only fair that you see my home country after I’ve seen yours. Really, he couldn’t care less about being in Monaco. He just wants to see her. Her and the purple pen and sticker book and nose crinkle when he tells a bad joke and the tug of the corners of her lips when she tries not to blush. He wants to see it all in front of him, right there where he can reach out and touch it. 

He wants to take her on a date. He wants to take her on more than one date. Cook her dinner and show her around and memorize her presence when she’s not with her dad, when she isn’t screaming in a speeding car, when she’s not on the other side of the globe. 

“Well,” he hums. “Now I’m excited.”

“You should be,” she says, smiling at a stack of spelling tests as she tucks them away into a folder. “I’m great fun.” He pauses, watches her with a small smile. She yawns again, stretches her arms above her head with a quiet groan. She’s up entirely too late. He’s kept her up entirely too late. I bet, he thinks. “What?” Chris laughs. 

“You’re adorable when you are sleepy.”

She plays the voice memo and listens to his voice echo off the wall. He’s laughing, and she wonders what it would be like to be the wall his voice bounces from. You look like a commercial puppy, he says, it’s adorable. 

“You’re so annoying,” she says into the phone microphone, “How’s the weekend going?” When she listens to it back after sending, you can still hear the congested sniffle in her voice even though she’s regained her composure. 

Screwed by the weather, he responds. Sprint Race is soon. 

“Good Luck!”

Enjoy your movie day. 

—

He calls on Sunday night, late and unplanned. She’s already in bed, reading her book to wind-down before turning in for the night. His name on her screen makes her smile, even if she doesn't know the reason for the call. They’d been careful, when it came to calls, tried to make sure they planned them out so they didn’t spend all day, every day talking to each other. 

“Hi,” she greets, hesitant. “Everything okay?”

“Uh,” he chuckles, but it’s tired. Tired and upset and far away from the phone. He doesn’t really answer, he just sighs. 

She slides her bookmark between the pages and sets the book on her nightstand. “What’s wrong?” She asks, adjusts in bed so she’s sitting up straighter and pulls her legs close, crosses them under the sheets and puts him on speaker phone.

“I wish I was home,” he finally tells her. “Race today fucking… it’s like this, I don’t know.”

She didn’t watch the race. He knew she wasn’t watching it, that she was practically hibernating this weekend after a crazy week at work with what seemed like a never ending series of state testing. She didn’t watch the race, but now she’s really, really wishing she had. “You don’t have to show face with me,” she tells him. “Tell me what you want to say.”

“My fucking boss isn’t even here,” he starts, and he doesn’t stop. He’s got a lot to say. A lot to say about strategy and the championship and the car and himself and the season. It’s more than this race, it’s a lot of races, a lot of meetings, a lot of things she doesn’t really understand. 

Chris just listens, because it’s about the only thing she can do. She can’t give him answers or solutions or advice, and even if she could, it doesn’t sound like he’s looking for any of those things. 

She gets out of bed because she’s terrified that she’s going to fall asleep on him. She takes her water bottle and a blanket to her screened in porch, sits on the patio furniture and sips water and listens to the hum of the bugs and the sound of his voice on another continent. 

She calls him in the back of her Uber, on her way to Atlanta to catch her flight. She’d debated with herself about telling someone she was going, just out of pure convenience, saving the hour drive to the airport by just… flying there. That would require telling one of the two people in her life that know how to fly a plane–Chase and Bill–that she was going to Abu Dhabi and Monaco to see a racing driver. That would not go over well, even a little bit. So, she doesn’t tell anyone where she’s going and Hannah is the only person who knows that she’s going anywhere at all. Chris is sure her best friend could guess where she’s going, but she can’t prove anything, not when Chris has turned off her location sharing and refuses to confirm or deny what flight she’s on. 

“Are you gonna be weird when you see me?” She asks him, because this whole thing is so incredibly weird. It’s not normal, flying for seventeen hours across the world to hang out with a guy you haven’t even gone on a date with yet, a guy you haven’t spent more than a few minutes with. It feels almost illegal, letting a guy pay over a thousand dollars–he refused to tell her how much her ticket was, but she possesses the ability to use google flights–to come hang out with him. She’s not a sugar baby, right? Right? No, she isn’t a sugar baby. 

“Yeah,” Charles says through a yawn. He’s already in Abu Dhabi and it’s the middle of the night there, half past midnight, at least. He should be sleeping. “So weird.”

“You should go to sleep.”

He smiles. “Sleep is for the weak.”

Chris rolls her eyes with extra gravitas. She knows he sees it because he laughs. “Good night, Charles. I’ll see you in…” she checks her watch, “nineteen hours.”

“I can’t wait to be sooo weird when I see you.”

“I’m going to watch Cars 2 on the plane. As preparation.”

—

She does watch Cars 2 on the plane. She watches Cars 2 and eats a shitty chicken Caesar salad as dinner with a ginger ale, because ginger ale is only good when you’re on a plane or have a stomach ache. After the stale meal in the stale air, she takes two melatonin gummies, shuffles her favorite playlist, and sleeps. 

She wakes up an hour before they land in Paris, where she has a short layover. It takes the majority of said short layover to figure out where the heck she’s supposed to go. Once she’s figured it out, she spends the rest of the layover walking around the gate area, already exhausted with the idea of sitting still. She eats a chocolate croissant and has a coffee and listens to the people around her speak different languages with fluent ease. 

The flight to Abu Dhabi is shorter, but she’s awake for all seven hours of it, so it feels a million times longer than the first one. Also, somewhere between the first and last sip of what might be the best coffee she’s ever drank, nervous little butterflies have begun wreaking havoc in her insides. She’s giddy, the kind of giddy that should be reserved for little kids. Giddy and fighting a stupid little crush with the most insane stakes. 

It’s six o’clock local time on Friday evening when she lands in Abu Dhabi.

<last chapter masterlist next chapter>