i NEED jealous Max. Please 🥺🥺🥺 I love jealous/possessive guys haha the feminism just leaves my body
Me too! GOD. Me, too.
It took me ages to decide how to go about this because I had soooo many ideas but I hope you like it!
✨set during the Miami GP weekend 2022✨
Everybody wants you, but I don’t like a gold rush
Max glances down at his watch. 17 minutes. 17 minutes you’ve been standing in the gallery area of the garage, fanning yourself with a magazine - with Max’s face on the front of it, no less - in the Miami heat, talking to some freakishly tall guy in a Louis Vuitton denim jacket and aviator sunglasses. He’s so painfully American that Max wonders what you even have to talk about for…eighteen minutes.
You tighten your high ponytail while Paul Bunyon talks, his mouth wide with every word. Max studies your face for any sign that you’re bored. He’s bored of watching this, but he knows from experience that not looking isn’t a real option. You haven’t looked over at him once in those eighteen minutes, in fact you haven’t even been distracted by the mechanics moving around or the noise of drilling and clattering tools.
This guy must be really fucking interesting.
You smile at something Captain America says and Max feels his jaw clenched so hard he thinks a tooth is going to crack.
It’s like he’s thirteen again, watching you stand in the middle of the makeshift paddock at the karting track, swarmed by every one of his competitors, their parents packing up their stuff as they vie for your attention. He was the only one who stayed away, following his dad’s instructions on how to properly dismantle and store things while sneaking glimpses at the show you were running. He would win every race and still go home feeling like a loser.
It’s different now, of course. He doesn’t take your gregarious nature so personally now, and he can admit he understands what men see in you now, even if he doesn’t feel it. But he’d be lying if he said it doesn’t trigger something in him to see the way men react to you. It might irritate him less if you enjoyed it, but you’ve long since grown out of that. Now, you expect it so much that you ignore it, and Max has no choice to but to notice it, the same way you’d notice a rusty knife embedded in your side.
“You’re not listening to me, are you?” GP says, which snaps Max out of his calculations.
“I’m listening,” Max says, fiddling with the brim of his cap. “Drive fast, win race, I got it,”
GP frowns at his dismissive tone, and Max makes a point of looking at his water bottle, lest GP realise what actually had his attention. “Max, you need to focus. What are you even-“ It’s the sound of your laugh - high pitched over the deep bass of the music - that makes GP look across the garage. His features twist in disapproval as he turns back to Max. “You’ve got to be kidding me,”
Max looks down at his shoes, moving his foot as he inspects them. “What?”
Above him, GP groans. “I’m not going to say anything about the situation as a whole, because it’s waste of my time. But specifically now, she’s right there, she’s not going anywhere. Can we please just go through this once and then you can carry on staring?”
Max rolls his eyes, steeling his face as a cameraman enters the garage. He’s wearing a Red Bull shirt so Max doesn’t mind too much, but he can’t be captured looking as morose as he feels. The cameraman pans past him and onto you and the guest. Max watches you cringe as the guy throws up some hand sign to the camera, clearly at home with the media attention.
“Who even is that?” Max asks, unable to hide his rancour. He’s probably going to be forced to take a picture with Popeye later.
“I don’t know, some American football player?” GP says with a shrug, giving Max a helpless look. GP couldn’t give less of a shit about the celebrity guests touted around the gargae, and normally Max is his ally. “Are we done?”
Max nods, but not even a second later he’s looking again. It gets worse the more you talk, he can see this guy becoming more enchanted by the second. He wonders what kind of steroids they take in American sports leagues because the meathead is acting like a dog in heat. He leans towards you at an angle that is wholly unnecessary, his eyes fixated on your mouth, nodding too emphatically at everything you say.
“My God, why doesn’t he just lick her face,” Max says incredulously, more to himself than anything.
“Max,” GP sighs.
“Come on,” Max implores with a scoff, stopping himself from outright gesturing in your direction. “Look at him. That’s embarrassing,”
GP fixes Max with a deadpan expression. “Right, but you being sulky and jealous is the height of cool?”
“I’m not jealous.”
And he isn’t. Because Joe DiMaggio over there doesn’t have anything he wants. He’s not going to waste time being jealous of a guy getting half an hour with you when he has cats, and a home, and a life with you.
Finally, you look in his direction, but only because GP calls your name. “Can you come here?”
You give GP a thumbs up and excuse yourself, trotting over to Max without a second thought. Wannabe Tom Brady brazenly enjoys the view, and Max swears he hasn’t been that close to punching someone since Monza last year.
“What’s up?” You ask, slotting yourself between the two men as you lean back against the shelf.
GP hands you his phone. “Beat this Candy Crush level for me, would you? Been stuck for days,”
You look at him skeptically, but years of being filmed up close by cameras on the pit wall have given GP a hell of a poker face; he just stares back at you, and you give up with a huff.
“Men are hopeless,” you say with a roll of your eyes.
“Couldn’t agree more,” GP says, his eyes pointedly on Max, who can’t even defend himself.
Desperate to avoid GP’s scrutiny, he glances over at the gallery, only to find the Yank looking at him. Well, not him, you. He’s got that curious expression as he assesses you fiddling with GP’s phone, one that says he’s trying to understand if he has something to be worried about. He doesn’t. You’re not his to worry about.
“Here,” Max says, pulling off his cap. You barely look up at him before he puts his cap firmly on your head, holding it steady with one hand while pulling your ponytail through the hole at the back with the other.
The brim of the hat obscures half your face, and Max turns so that half your body is shielded by his, which he tells himself is in case a camera comes by.
“It’s sunny,” Max shrugs in his own defence, when he notices you looking at him with a raised eyebrow.
You adjust the cap on your head but don’t take it off. “Why don’t you just give me your letterman jacket?”
“My what?”
“Never mind,” you chuckle, shaking your head at him as you pat his chest with an indulgent smile.
He takes the opportunity at the sound of a large wheel gun to glance over at the gallery, only to meet the eyes of the guy you were talking to. Now that you’re no longer next to him, Max does sort of recognise him. He plays for some team named after an animal. Max just looks at him - he’ll do this all day if he has to - until the guy shoves his hands in his pockets and pulls out his phone, starting to tap away. Yeah, go back to Raya.
Good riddance, Max thinks to himself as he turns back to you, only to find that you already looking at him. He wonders for how long.
He can tell by your smirk that he’s been caught. If he’s honest with himself you caught him five years ago, this was just one of the few moments he let you know it. And you know it. How could you not know?
He thinks for a second that you’re going to tease him, but you don’t. You shift on your feet so that some of your weight rests against his arm, and go back to playing on GP’s phone.
“Go on, GP,” he says, fighting a smile at the large number 1 on the brim of what is now your hat.
He knows from the way GP is looking at him that he’ll get an earful about this later, but right now, he just clears his throat.
“Right, so,”
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