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formulaforza · 1 year

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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.

#ma&thbp #boo!#charles leclerc #charles leclerc fluff #charles leclerc imagine #charles leclerc blurb #charles leclerc x reader #f1 blurb #f1 imagine #f1 fic #f1 fanfic #f1 #cl16 #from the queue

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