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lvrclerc · 20 days ago

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MEANT TO BE YOURS

summary: you didn't expect to realize you didn't want to marry your fiancé at the altar, and you sure as hell didn't expect your formula one driver best friend to be your getaway car. still, you and oscar piastri are facing the neverending coast, and the true reason why you bailed out of your wedding. ✷ IVY'S POETRY DEPARTMENT EVENT: « i have never loved before as i love you─ with tenderness, to the point of tears. »

F1 MASTERLIST | OP81 MASTERLIST

pairing: oscar piastri x best friend!f!reader wordcount: 10.3K content: best friends to lovers, road trip, bittersweet, fluff, toxic/controlling relationship, age gap (not with oscar), happy ending note: requested here! i told myself i'd only write semi-short fics for this event but i have a severe case of overwriting. can you tell i enjoy writing op81 friends to lovers?

♫ paul - big thief, from eden - hozier, anchor - novo amor

SOMEONE RANG THE church bells by accident, a shrill clang which startled the officiant in the middle of his question. Most of the assembly had laughed, albeit awkwardly, to the obnoxious melody coming from the metallic giants, and the man behind the lectern had sputtered out a weak joke to ease the discomfort creeping up your spine at the interruption. Your fiancé, whose callouses still scraped your fingers he held in an iron grip, rolled his eyes and urged him to carry on.

It was the moment you knew.

“Y/N,” the officiant starts again. Your name felt pasty and foreign in his mouth, and reverberated back at you as a distorted echo of yourself you no longer recognized. “Do you take Elijah to be your husband, your best friend, and love for life?”

The look your fiancé laid upon you was nothing short of expectant. His wedding band is cold on your burning skin, branding you with its white hot ore, and you realize you hadn’t had a say in how your own looked like. The venue hadn’t been your choice either: it had been carefully curated by a wedding planner Elijah had paid, draped in strings of pearls and pristine white roses— the thorns on your bouquet hadn’t been removed and poked at your fingers through the gloves.

Your gaze drifted through the assembly. Your side blinked away tears, blotting them with monogrammed napkins bearing the last name you were meant to take, whispering their admiration about how well you were marrying for a girl of your background. His side wore rigid Venetian masks of neutrality, keeping their head high and eyes narrowed in funeral silence, all except for one.

Oscar had his eyes locked upon you. Rust-gold hair fell across his brow, hands tucked on his lap, ever the picture of calmness. Yet, you knew your best friend like no other, and the confusion swirling in his pupils told you he noticed the sweat beading on your forehead, the shuffle of your heels. He knew you just as much—if not more.

Seconds ticked by like hours, your silence was arousing raised eyebrows and disapproving stares. It took you a longer moment to notice the tightening grip Elijah had on your hands. His eyes were harsh and urgent, nothing like the soft questions in Oscar’s. He hadn’t seen it. He didn’t know.

But you did, now.

You took a step back, and the shift was almost imperceptible, still, your heel seemed to strike against the marble floor like a gunshot, rippling through the entire crowd. Gasps turned the air thick with incomprehension, building up the pressure in your lungs. Your vision frayed at the edges. Elijah’s mouth moved in a whisper, “What are you doing?”. Oscar worryingly stirred in his seat.

It took everything in you, every ounce of will and bodily strength, to tear off your hands from your fiancé’s grasp. You didn’t look back at the people seated in front of you. You didn’t even glance back at Elijah, the man you were supposed to marry today.

Desperate, breathless, you looked at Oscar. Mouth agape in search of any intakes of air, tears pearling at your lower lashes. His confusion melted, replaced by a soft understanding, because he knew— he always did. In that moment, your shoulders unknotted. He nodded. Got up from the wooden bench, along with many outraged others.

And you ran.

Your feet pounded against the floor, echoing louder than the gasps behind you. The half-opened side-exit loomed ahead, beckoning you closer, and you hurried toward it without looking back. Cold air wrapped around you, bracing after the weight of the ceremony hall. Behind you, the commotion dulled into a muffled roar: voices tangled together in an indecipherable mess, heels clicking in panic, Elijah’s voice yelling your name. You gathered the heavy layers of your dress, bunching the white satin and lace with trembling fingers, and sprinted through the maze of narrow corridors and clerestory windows, past wooden doors creaking in protests mixing with the rush of blood in your ears.

The last door slammed open beneath your palm, leaving you stumbling to a parking lot, and the bright morning sun seared its shape into your irises. You shielded your face with one hand, lungs dragging in the sharp air. For a moment, light, color and sound blurred together.

Then there was the low purr of an engine, the hasty screeching of tires against the tarmac. A car swerved into view, and the pacific blue of it glinting under the sunlight so familiar it took your heart with the last move of its steering wheel. It came into a clean, urgent stop in front of you.

Oscar threw the passenger door open, already leaning over to push it wide enough. Your breath caught in a sob. He didn’t say anything. You didn’t either.

Wordlessly, you rushed toward him. The train of your dress snagged on the doorframe of the church, and you let out a small, strangled laugh, somewhere between hysteria and relief, as you fought to stuff the endless fabric into the cramped footwell. Oscar helped as much as he could, waiting, always a careful eye set on you.

Once you were in, he met your eyes, hands firmly on the wheel. “Where to?” he asked.

You swallowed and turned your head to the window.

“Anywhere.”

Oscar didn’t hesitate once. The tires squealed as he floored it, the engine growling beneath you like a beast let off leash. Speed took the wheels, and the church disappeared in the rearview mirrors until it was but a grain of sand in the endless ticking of an hourglass. The guests, the whispers, the life you almost disappeared into, and somewhere, amongst it all, Elijah stood at the threshold, watching you vanish.

The bells were still ringing when you passed by the exit sign.

You met Oscar Piastri three years ago. It was the first time Elijah had invited you to a Formula One race. In the two years you’d been dating, it had always come first: he was gone more often than not, attending meetings, galas, and testing weekends.

Elijah wasn’t just anyone in the motorsports world. Not that he was of any importance in the intricacies of engineering, steering the heavy cars across the narrow corners or knew how to navigate overtakes from behind a helmet— he didn’t do any of that. What Elijah did was pay for the parts and repairs, and the logo from the company he had inherited from his father graced the pristine pink and blue of the Alpine racing suit. When you first learned about it, your eyes went wide in childlike excitement. You were only in your second year of university, only nineteen, and the most expensive thing you owned was an Ipad you’d saved for one summer. So when a man, ten years older, confident and polished, told you he had his last name stitched into one of the most elitist sports in the world, it had stunned you into admirative silence.

You’d looked at him like he had been touched by Midas himself. You thought it meant something about him.

Looking back on it now, you could only describe it as garish, and note that he shouldn’t have been talking to you in the first place.

But here you were, twenty-one, dressed like you belonged, stepping into the paddock.

You had always imagined it to be somewhat organized and polished. Instead, you were met with the blur of motions and noises: staff members pushing past, PR agents shouting into headsets, camera shutters clicking in quick succession. Conversations overlapped in different languages, and bodies moved like currents, in which you were just another thing to dodge. However, you had no time to get accustomed to it: Elijah had to leave—“Important meeting, you see,” he said with a formal kiss to your forehead, “you’ll be fine, Alpine’s hospitality’s nearby”—and left you to your own devices in the den of lions.

The Miami heat had a devastating effect, sticking to you like molten plastic. Sweat clung to the back of your neck, and your dress, carefully picked by Elijah, dug uncomfortably into your ribs. Every time you tried to step aside, someone shoved past, never long enough to help.

Vision tunneling, you pressed a hand to your forehead, but even that felt wrong. You didn’t belong there, and Elijah was right not to invite you for so long. The humidity stuck to you like a second layer of skin, your breath shallow.

“Hey.”

A voice, calm and low, cut through the static.

You blinked up, sight clearing, only to find a pair of soft brown eyes studying you, brows furrowed beneath sun-drenched hair. It was Oscar—well, you didn’t know his name yet, but at that moment he already looked familiar, a barrier between you and the world.

“You okay?” he asked, hands tucked in the pocket of his shorts as if not to startle you.

You nodded too fast, then winced at the sudden movement when the world around you started spinning again. “I’m just… I’m supposed to find Alpine’s hospitality? I can’t figure out where that is.”

His gaze flickers past you to the swarm of people. “Yeah… it’s chaos today.” Pulling a hand out one of his pocket, he handed you a water bottle—or what you assumed was a water bottle, warranting your vision could only make out blotches of pale blue. “You should sit for a minute. Shade’s better over there.”

Hesitation overcame you, visible on your face, but he didn’t urge you. He waited.

You took the water.

He led you toward a quiet stretch of wall just beyond the media scrum. It was hardly private, but the sun wasn’t blistering your skin anymore, and fewer people were circulating. You sank to the curb, grateful for the cool concrete against the back of your legs. He sat beside you, elbows on his knees, a polite distance away. You silently thanked him for it.

“I’m Oscar,” he said after a moment, glancing over at you with the same grounded calm. “Oscar Piastri.”

You managed to muster a smile. Shaky, yes, but a smile nonetheless. “Y/N.”

Your hands were trembling slightly when you reached for the cap of the bottle. Observant, as he always was, you’d come to discover down the line, his fingers brushed against yours in a question. You let him take the bottle, which he unscrewed open without much of a word about it. “First race?” he asked.

Nodding, you took back the plastic container. “First time… all of this.”

“Yeah, it can be a lot,” Oscar smiled. It was a tiny stretch of the lips, it could be mistaken for a frown, but it didn’t escape you. “You’ll get around it though, if you stick around.”

“Is that your way of asking if I come here often?” you probed after a gulp of water, arching a brow.

That got a flustered chuckle out of him, the first out of many that you’d elicit in the years to come, and your heart whipped in a somersault. “Not really, but now I’m curious.”

Elijah would later find the two of you engulfed in the small corner, deep in conversation, your laughter a thread of relief amid the chaos of the paddock. His anger, visible in the tight line of his jaw, melted almost immediately when Oscar’s gaze landed on him, unassuming. That day, you’d learn that Oscar was McLaren’s rookie on his first season, just a year older than you, and that he and Elijah had been friends since karting days. For Elijah, it had always been a hobby to brag about at dinners. For Oscar, racing was simply etched in his bones, similar to all nineteen of his colleagues who fought to get there.

You’d smiled and nodded as Elijah threw a possessive arm around your waist, pestering you to the Alpine hospitality. Oscar gave you a small wave as you were pulled away.

It wouldn’t be the last time you’d meet him. You’d run into him on multiple occasions: galas, race weekends. Sometimes he’d find you alone, and you’d share coffee on a bench, no matter how stifling the heat. Among those many instances, you’d exchange numbers. From there, the rest felt inevitable: Oscar would start calling you after races to ask how your day was, participate in movie marathons during which you’d eat room service on the ground and fall asleep leaning on his shoulder, keep the other company in quiet corners when black-tie occasions rose and Elijah left you unsupervised as he networked. Oscar would listen, hold your deepest secrets, and you would hold his, cradling them between your intertwined fingers.

It felt like fate written in the margins. But at that moment in time, you didn’t know. Not yet.

You couldn’t have known he’d be the same guy, three years later, driving well over the speed limit to get you as far away as possible from your own wedding either.

The landscape would be suffocating if it didn’t steal your breath away: the tall pine trees loomed over you like ancient sentinels, their dark bark and deep green needles wrapping around the world in quiet reverence. They stood close, tangled together to form a living fortress stifling any clear view of the coast? In the fleeting glimpses between trunks, you could see the ocean foam itself into a fury against the cliffs, hear its wild applause in the distance.

The air was cooler than it had been at the altar. A bracing wind tore at your carefully pinned curls until they unraveled into ribbons, leaving strands dancing across your face. The car windows were rolled down all the way; you leaned your head back, letting the rush of air thread through your fingers. The radio played low, echoing the chords of a half-forgotten melody you barely listened to.

The tear tracks on your cheeks had dried in delicate salt lines, reminiscent of the sea. You couldn’t remember the last time either of you had spoken.

Oscar’s driving had settled from frantic to steady, but his knuckles remained white on the steering wheel. The sun shifted overhead, sliding across his profile—sharp, yet gentle, a hint of shadow pooling in the curve of his jaw.

You wanted to ask where you were going. He wanted to ask what you were running from. Both questions simmered on your tongues, both knowing, yet neither of you voiced it out. That’s what often happens when you know someone from the inside out—things were left unsaid under the impression the other already understood.

Except sometimes, only sometimes, it didn’t work like that. It had been what Oscar and you struggled with for a while, now.

The car began to slow, easing out of the rapid pace of the highway. Caught up in your own thoughts, you felt the shift before you could see it: Oscar’s foot lightened on the pedal and the hum of the road softened beneath the tires. Through the pines, you noticed the glint of an old, flickering neon sign, weathered by time but still clinging to its pink glow, even in the middle of the day. Rosie’s Diner.

The small building was a 1950s-style chrome beacon, half-buried in the woods, clashing with the darkness by its bright colors. The parking lot was cracked asphalt, wild grass sprouting through the grass in a fragile attempt of a rebellion against time. Oscar pulled into the lot and cut the engine. For a moment, only the soft ticking of the cooling car filled the silence.

You opened your mouth to form a question, but the Australian spoke up first. “It’s almost lunch.” He turned to face you. His gaze flickered to the tear lines on your cheeks, then back to your eyes. “And I know you didn’t eat this morning because of… everything.”

A blush rose to your cheeks, embarrassed by how transparent you could be to him. You looked down at the disheveled wedding dress gathered in your lap, filling the passenger seat with white satin gone grey at the hem and torn lace. “Oscar,” you whispered, voice hoarse. “I can’t go in there like this.”

A gentle smile ghosted across his lips. “Y/N, we’re in the middle of nowhere. There’s probably two people in that place. Nobody’s going to look twice at you.” His smile grew a fraction warmer, like it often did with you. “Even if they do, it’s not like we’re going to see them again, are we?”

“You’re a celebrity, Oscar,” you noted, acerbity laced in your trembling tone.

He shrugged. “I don’t see how that factors in anything.”

You let out a shaky laugh, the sound breaking free as would a breath held for too long. There had been no hesitation in his words, only a factual reassurance. Oscar believed what he was saying, he didn’t see the issue because there wasn’t one. Elijah would have rather died than got out of this car with you in such a state.

Oscar’s hand found yours on the center console, and he gave it a reassuring squeeze. The gesture sent a shiver down your spine, no matter how familiar. “Come on,” he said, a quiet invitation to something new.

So you took his hand, letting him anchor you in the moment, and together, you stepped out of the car.

Saying the diner was empty would have been an understatement. Apart from two tired-looking waitresses with roller skates leaning on the counter and a couple of line cooks half-heartedly flipping burgers in the back kitchen, even the rats seemed to have deserted this place.

The years had left their marks: chipped vinyl booths, gritty floor tiles that hadn’t been swept in god knows how long, and walls that might have been white but now leaned closer to a yellow shade of old nicotine. You slid into a corner booth near the window, the cracked red leather sighing under your weight. The menus, laminated and curling at the corners, looked like relics coming straight from the nineties—Comic Sans titles and cartoonish doodles framing a faded list of cheeseburgers, milkshakes, and fries.

Oscar sat next to you. It was an unspoken rule in your friendship, because sitting across from each other always felt too impersonal. He was still in his tuxedo that had started to crease in the humidity of the coast, and his tie was coming undone at his throat. Your gaze lingered on that detail for a split second before you caught sight of yourself in the window: a disheveled bride in a wedding dress, smudged in dust and tears.

What a pair you made.

A waitress ambled over, pencil tucked behind her ear. She glanced between the two of you, curious eyes remaining a beat too long on your wedding dress. You tensed up, and Oscar’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly at the movement. “Well, don’t you two look like something out of a movie,” she drawled. “What can I get for you today?”

Oscar lifted a brow at you. “Bacon cheeseburger?”

You laughed softly, the sound a little bit broken. “Bacon cheeseburger. As usual.”

She scribbled it down. “Two of those, coming right up. Oh—” she leaned in conspiratorially, a wicked grin on her lips. “And since it looks like you’re getting married and all, that’s half price for y’all today. Congratulations, by the way!”

The comment struck something in your chest, although you couldn’t pinpoint what, exactly. You know it should have stung, tug on what you had left behind, and it looked like Oscar expected as much: he flinched, eyes darting to you, his lips parted as if to protest. You knew what he was thinking about it—your tears, the cadence of your feet as you fled the altar—and he was ready to explain, to protect you from the memory.

You stopped him with a gentle touch on his hand. “Thanks,” you said to the waitress. You offered her a small smile, “Half-price is too good to pass up, right?”

Oscar’s eyes widened in understanding. He quickly went with it, and the waitress winked and bustled off. For a second, the silence between you and Oscar threatened to swallow the air, but then you locked eyes. You both burst out laughing, the sound bright and unexpected, so needed it nearly broke your heart all over again.

“We didn’t need the discount, you know,” he managed to say between laughs.

“I know,” you sighed, “but it doesn’t hurt. Besides, these burgers are so overpriced.” You turned the menu around again, squinting at the faded prices.

Oscar leaned over, close enough that you caught a faint whiff of his cologne, clean and citrusy, washing over you. His cheek brushed your shoulder and you didn’t miss the pink flush at the tip of his ear either. “Maybe the quality’s good?” he teased.

You snorted. “Do you actually believe what you just said?”

“Not at all.”

The waitress came back with your orders in record time, balancing two plates stacked high with cheeseburgers and fries, looking way more delicious than you’d expected. The smell, greasy and comforting, sent your stomach into a frenzy of need. Oscar was right: you were starving.

You grabbed a fry and popped it into your mouth. You groaned in pleasure at the taste, and Oscar raised an eyebrow at you in a way that looked suspiciously like a non-verbal I told you so. You swatted his arm with a napkin.

Between bites, the conversation flowed like seawater, laughter bubbling up to the surface and dissolving into other topics as you made your way through your meal. The remnants of the morning’s panic were at the back of your mind, which was a cruel thing to notice, but the pang in your heart disappeared as Oscar threw another offhand comment at you. At one point, as you set your burger down and wiped a red smear of ketchup from your cheek, you sighed and leaned back against the cracked booth.

“This,” you started lightheartedly, halfway through a burger bite, “reminds me of that time I fake-proposed to you in that little restaurant in Italy.”

Oscar’s groan was immediate and full-bodied, and the sound only widened your grin. “Please, don’t remind me,” he mumbled, pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead. “I had to have the weirdest conversation with my media team afterwards— ‘Yes, she’s my best friend. No, I’m not hiding a wedding. Leave me alone.’ Absolute nightmare.”

You cackled at the memory, so dear to you, and the sound echoed bright and sharp, like something cracked open in your chest. “But hey! We got the meal for free! And you got the prettiest ring made out of a napkin.”

He couldn’t help but laugh too, and the inflections of it were so utterly soft, the eyes he set on you captivated as you threw your head back in a chuckle. There was something worshipful in the way his gaze never left you even as he took a slow sip of his soda, and it made you feel blasphemous to sit under it inside a diner booth.

“You know,” Oscar murmured, his voice dropping just enough, “this is nice.”

His tone softened your grin into a smile. “What is?”

“Being with you, like this. You haven’t laughed like that in…,” he sets his drink on the table, “I don’t know. A long time. You kinda—” Oscar paused, searching your face. “You kinda lost your spark. Your thing, you know? So it’s nice. You and I, like this.”

Like old times.

You opened your mouth to say something, but nothing came out. The words dissolved on your tongue, instead taking the shape of the sudden sting of tears pricking at the corner of your eyes. The words didn’t hurt, but the reality behind them hit you like bullets: you couldn’t recall the last time you let your tongue run free of any overthinking, your laugh coming from the deepest cracks of yourself, your shoulders released of any tension.

You come to the realization you forgot what it was like to be you, and hamburger grease drips down on the white of your wedding dress.

“Shit!” you gasped, dazed, staring at the growing yellow splotch on your bustier.

Frantically, you grabbed a napkin and dabbed at it, but it only smeared. Tears pricked at your lashes, as you bit back a sob as you muttered, “Sorry— god, I’m such a mess.”

Oscar reached across the table and gently took hold of your wrist, fingers marching the warmth of your skin. “It’s okay,” he murmured, and it felt like a balm. “Who cares?”

You let out a breathless, disbelieving laugh. The sticky table, the harsh overhead light in the middle of the day, the chatter of the waitresses, all of it faded, and your world narrowed down to the feel of Oscar’s hand on yours, the salty beads pearling at your eyes, and that stupid stain on your stupid dress. “Yeah,” you breathed out, your voice breaking into a chuckle. “Who cares?”

Oscar’s answering smile lit up his entire face, and you couldn’t help but revel in it. It felt like a sunrise, one you hadn’t seen in a really, really long time.

Because you had forgotten what it was like to be you, and Oscar offered you fragments of it. A reminder you were still there, somewhere in the deepest parts of yourself and the most evident parts of him.

When the waitress dropped the bill, you both paid with cash from the bottoms of your pockets—who brought their credit card to a wedding?—and practically rushed through the door, a newfound lightheartedness in the way your hand rested on his bicep. Oscar took a moment to help you gather the layers of tulle and satin that had tangled around your ankles, his fingers brushing yours as he lifted the skirt with exaggerated care.

“Honestly,” you groaned, tilting your head back, “this dress is the most impractical thing I’ve ever worn.”

Oscar’s eyes crinkled with a grin. “You do look like a giant cupcake.”

The fact that he was bent over and helping you gather the fabric gave you better access to smack his shoulder—playfully, always. “You just know how to reassure a woman, don’t you, Osc’?” That made him laugh.

“Seriously, though,” you sighed, glancing down at the ruffled mess of your skirt, “I need to change. I’m sweating my ass off in this thing.”

Even though your tone was as light as you could make it, your best friend seemed to get the undertones the moment they left your tongue.. “Well, Maps did show a thrift shop about forty minutes from here,” he said, cutting your thoughts short. “Not exactly designer, but…”

A quiet, reckless joy bloomed in your chest. “Screw that, like I care about price tags anyway.”

And just like that, the two of you were rushing back to the car. Oscar hurried ahead and opened the door for you with playful flourish. You tumbled inside, not stopping the string of half-formed sentences and childish giggles that spilled from your lips.

Oscar’s grin widened as he closed the door shut and jogged to the driver’s side. The engine roared back to life with a satisfying growl and with one last glance at you, eyes bright and wild like he had missed, he pulled away.

The hefty silence had been left in Rosie’s Diner’s parking lot. The car had come alive under jokes thrown to the wind funneling in through half-opened windows, and the radio blared loud enough to tempt your lips into finally humming the melody. Sometimes, Oscar's gaze wandered from the road, catching yours, and you’d meet it, beaming. Other times, you’d stare at him as he maneuvered the tight curves of the mountainous coast, seeking any sign of exhaustion in the way the early afternoon light carved shadows in the dark of his irises. There was none, there never was— just unbridled warmth.

Forty minutes slipped by like five and, before you knew it, you were pulling into the dirt lot of a questionable wooden building. The weathered facade had been battered by sea salt and wind until the paint cracked, the structure groaning in rhythm with the coastal gusts. The sign had long given up its name, now only legible by its function: Thrift and Pawn Shop.

“What a fine establishment,” you quipped, eyeing the warped planks.

Oscar killed the engine. “But you don’t care about price tags, right?”

You rolled your eyes, but the smirk on your lips was nothing if affectionate. “You know, maybe I should’ve let myself die of thirst the day I met you.” You don’t mean it.

“Maybe I should’ve let you,” he fired back, and his traits only carried the same knowing softness. He didn’t mean it either. That was the whole point.

You entered the shop side by side.

The inside was a considerable improvement from the outside, to say the least. It was an Aladdin’s cave of mismatched treasures: clothes and antiquities climbed each wall like ivy, so much the ceiling was brimming with another rack to choose from. Shoes and hats littered the floor to form a winding makeshift pathway to the front counter, a glass table at the back cluttered with multiple trinkets varying in quality, all overseen by a middle-aged woman. When her eyes set upon you, her eyebrows shot up in surprise at the wedding dress trailing behind you and the tuxedo at your side. You offered her an awkward smile, to which she answered with an indifferent shrug.

You and Oscar shared a look—that could be translated by Let’s get this over with—before diving into the efficiently organized chaos.

The options felt endless and overwhelming. You didn’t even know where to start, Oscar either, and the oppressive gaze of the woman at the counter didn’t help your hesitation: racks sagging under the weight of too-small shirts, dresses with questionable patterns, and pants that looked like they’d fit a twelve-year-old or a linebacker, no in-between.

You decided to divide and conquer. Oscar took the left side of the store while you made your way to the right, burying yourself in a twisted maze of dusty shelves.

As per thrift shop customs, everything seemed to miss the mark: too tight, too loose, too… everything. You huffed in frustration, and the creeping feeling of spending the entire day in that wedding dress, like you were originally supposed to, came crashing upon you. Just as the thought swallowed away your renewed optimism, a beacon of hope reached your eyesight.

A pair of worn jean shorts peeked out from underneath a dizzyingly high pile of knitted sweaters. Hoping for a miracle, which would take the form of a size that could actually fit you, you grabbed them. That was when the shelf next to it caught your attention with a slightly askew hanger.

You couldn’t help but laugh out loud when you took it. “Oscar!” you called, giddy and wheezing. He appeared from between racks of 80s windbreakers, eyebrows raised.

“What’d you find?”

With all the pride you could gather, you held up the brand-new, bright orange McLaren shirt you had found, with the number 81 in bold lettering on the front pocket.

His eyes, both reflecting so much and so little, went back between your smile and the shirt a few times.. “I’m… mildly offended to find that in a thrift shop,” he finally said, deadpan.

You chuckled again, and the sound of it stole a fond grin out of Oscar. “It’s half-priced too, $40,” you read off the tag attached to the hanger.

“That’s a bargain.”

“Yeah… might be because of that.” You turned the shirt around.

The number 81 was bigger on the back, but it wasn’t the star of the show. The real showstopper was Oscar’s last name, written similarly, right below it, spelled out in bold—PAISTRY.

There was a moment of silence during which Oscar stared at the letters, entirely too dumbfounded to manage one of his usual dry remarks. You snorted, and that broke the dam: you were both bursting out in messy laughter, doubled over with shaky shoulders and tears prickling at your eyes. The sound ricocheted off the cluttered walls, drawing a loud, pointed cough from the woman at the counter. Reminded of the time and place, you straightened abruptly, slapping a hand over your mouth in a failed attempt to stifle the giggles. Oscar mirrored your motions, clearing his throat, his lips still twitching.

“I’m sorry,” you managed to wheeze out, wiping at your cheeks, “but I have to have this. I can’t just leave it here.”

Oscar laughed. “You could’ve just told me if you wanted one, I’d have stolen you a dozen from the HQ.”

“That’s not the same!” You flipped the shirt back around so you could see the misspelled name. “I can’t pass up the chance to be Mrs. Paistry, can I?”

The words tumbled out before you could stop them, and the significance hit you like a rogue wave, leaving you too dizzy to take them back before the momentum passed. Oscar’s eyes widened just a fraction, a bright, telltale pink dusting his ears and cheeks. You could feel the heat rising in your own and the tip of your fingers tingling as you clutched the shirt tighter. Eye contact felt suddenly unbearable, so you busied yourself looking at every worn vest and secondhand jacket, shifting from one foot to the other like you reverted back to being an awkward sixteen years old, and not at the wise age of twenty-four.

Maybe the truth was that becoming Mrs. Piastri—or Paistry—wasn’t such a terrifying thought after all. Somehow, it sounded better than Mrs. Elijah Hart.

Oscar cleared his throat, cutting your train of thoughts short. ”Do you even have forty bucks?” he asked, voice a touch too casual as if he was trying to keep things light save for his obvious fluster. “I’d get it for you, but I barely have gas money after the burgers.”

“Oh.” You deflated a little. You didn’t have forty dollars. Hell, you probably didn’t have ten. Brides didn’t usually carry money on their wedding days, after all—the rest of your cash and your card were safely tucked at home, which seemed like a whole other world right now.

You ran your thumb absentmindedly over the wedding ring on your finger, something you found yourself doing whenever you were thinking. The smooth gold caught your eye, glinting artificially under the store’s dim light. The idea hit you right here and there.

A spark of defiance bloomed in your chest. Trembling breath and limbs, you took a hold of the layers of your dress and turned toward the counter, where the middle-aged woman still watched you with detached disinterest. “This is a pawn shop, right?” Your voice carried strength, even if you couldn’t feel it in your muscles.

Next to you, Oscar frowned, but kept quiet.

The woman raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, it is,” she answered, her tone slow and a little suspicious. “Why?”

You paused for a second, letting your skin absorb the coolness of the metal one last time, and before you could hesitate, you slipped the wedding ring off. It fell onto the glass counter with a small clink, which seemed to reverberate inside the entire shop, bouncing off the walls until it was inside your bones. Yet, it was more satisfying than it should have been. “How much for this?”

Oscar let out a stunned exhale, a silent panic flickering in his eyes. The movement was subtle, but there nonetheless: he reached out, the pad of his fingers scraping against your sleeve as he gently held your elbow. “Hey— are you sure about this?” he asked softly, barely above a whisper. “I can get you a better shirt, or a hundred of them. You don’t have to—” He faltered, took a deep breath to regain his usual composure. “If you really want to do this, you have to be sure. It’s big.”

You looked down at the spot where your ring had sat, and spotted the faint tan line that marked the absence of something that had once meant everything, or so you thought. Now, it just looked like a parcel of skin bruised and branded white, a part of yourself that didn’t belong to you anymore but rather to the ghost of something past. You thought of all the sun you’d soak up, the laughter and scratches that would paint over that line, a testimony of the spark you’d welcomed back in the past hours.

You weren’t attached to the ring. Or the marriage. Or any of it, truly.

You took a deep breath and met Oscar’s gaze, smiling. “I’m sure,” and you meant it.

Oscar’s expression melted into a thing of warmth, pride, and maybe a bit of relief. He gave your arm a reassuring squeeze, his eyes shining. “Alright, let’s do it then.”

The woman eyed the two of you before her eyes set back on the ring. Minutes passed while she scrutinized under the glare of a magnifying glass and poked it with a few tools. Pursing her lips, she finally lifted her gaze back to you. “This is expensive stuff. You sure you want to sell that here?”

“Never been more sure of anything.”

She raised her brows and gave you a slow once-over. “Not a happy… almost-marriage, I’m guessing.”

“Let’s say I tend to gravitate more toward silver,” you said in a sigh. The woman looked back at the golden band with an empathetic hum. Oscar, who’s been hovering right behind you, let out a snort.

“That’s a nice way of saying he was a dick,” your best friend interjected dryly, and you turned to him in surprise. Elijah and him had been friends, or so you thought. You wouldn’t have expected Oscar to openly berate him, but then again, today had been a day of surprises—and he had been front row for your entire disaster union.

After a bit of back-and-forth and some haggling, the woman finally relented. She handed you a surprisingly heavy wad of nine hundred dollars in cash—minus the cost of your jean shorts, the McLaren shirt, the surprisingly pristine white sneakers Oscar had found for you, and a new outfit he’d picked out himself. You’d insisted on paying for his clothes, too. Reparations, you’d called it, and he had rolled his eyes at you.

You both made your way to the single changing area at the far end of the thrift shop. Giddy to escape the heat of your dress, you ducked into one stall, while Oscar took the one beside you.

But as you kicked off your heels with relief, cold realization trickled upon you: the tight, back-laced corset. You cursed under your breath. It had taken the combined effort of your mother, your sister, and a few Hail Marys to get it on in the first place. You were a fool to think you could manage it alone. Still, you tried.

You twisted and contorted your body, which definitely earned you a type of scoliosis, and the knots only seemed to get tighter the more you moved. In another effort, your elbow slammed against the thin wall separating you from Oscar’s stall with a loud thud.

“Is everything alright?” Oscar’s voice floated through the cheap wood paneling.

A frustrated laugh, tinged with desperation, escaped you. “No I— I think I might need help. With the dress. This goddamn corset—”

There was a pause. After what felt like forever, you heard the hesitant creak of Oscar’s door and a few footsteps before your own cabin door eased open. He stood there, a little unsure, his shirt half-opened and his jacket forgotten somewhere. He was probably in the middle of changing, you thought, and a flush crept up your neck.

“Can you—?” you gestured awkwardly toward your back.

His brown eyes softened. “Yeah. Of course.”

Oscar carefully stepped inside. The space became more cramped than it already was with the addition of his presence, so when you turned so your back faced him, you were almost leaning entirely against his chest. His breath was a warm wave on the nape of your neck, catching at the sudden closeness, and the mirror in front of you showed the clear tension in your cheeks, your chest heaving.

His fingers, steady, found the first knot and began to loosen it. Oscar was methodical in his movements, making his way slowly through each row with brushes so gentle you wondered if he was even touching you at all. The imperceptible sweep of his knuckles against your spine had been featherlight, maybe accidental, but echoed through your entire body as if he had dug his fingers in your hips. Your breath hitched, and your eyes flew to the mirror.

His had too.

Oscar’s expression was nothing if focused, save for the tenderness of his eyes gliding upon you. His hands untied the last row of ties, achingly measured, each loosened lace a small liberation. The corset eased off, and the cold air hitting your bare back was a relief that almost brought tears to your eyes. Yet, what reduced you to pieces was the subtle ghost of Oscar’s fingertips, his eyes transfixed, tracing down your spine in sheer reverence. You don’t think someone had ever touched you so.

A soft gasp slipped past your lips. “Oscar—” you whispered. Your voice was trembling, carrying gratitude and something else, something you couldn’t quite name, or were too scared to.

His eyes snapped back up to yours, and his cheeks flamed red. His name seemed to have brought him back to whatever trance he had been plunged in. Oscar stumbled back, his hands dropping to his side. “Uh— I’m going to— I’ll go get changed,” he stammered, looking everywhere but at you. “I’ll meet you outside, okay?”

You watched him retreat, a thunderstorm waging in your ribcage, the mirror reflecting your dazed expression. The wedding dress pooled at your feet as you released the iron grip you had on the bustier.

Reaching out for the McLaren shirt hanging on the side with shaky hands, you caught a glimpse of your back in the mirror: hard pressure scars were left where the lace had clung too tightly, where Oscar had let the pad of his fingers drift for mere seconds.

You thought about the pressure of the basque waist. The overwhelming smoothness of the satin against your legs, trapping sweat in every crease. The beading heat between your breasts. Your ribs had cracked, and you had bent yourself into someone whose spine had to fracture in order to breathe.

Slipping on the orange shirt with Oscar’s name on the back, no matter how misspelled and large on your fragile stature, felt like mending bones. Little by little, one vertebra at a time.

Oscar was indeed waiting for you by his car, half-perched on the hood with his arms folded across his chest. He’d traded his tux for a short-sleeved grey shirt that clung to his arms, some well-worn cargo shorts, and a pair of sneakers that matched the ones he picked for you. The outfit was so unapologetically Oscar that you couldn’t help but let out a quiet chuckle.

He caught the sound immediately and grinned, before pushing himself off the hood. With practiced ease, he opened the backseat door and gestured at the sad remains of your wedding dress you held in your arms, now crumpled like a white flag.

“Figured you’d want to put that behind you,” he said.

“God, yes,” you muttered, dropping it in the backseat. It hung there like a ghost.

You slipped into the passenger seat, stretching your legs. You relished in the space you had, your feet finding a home on the dashboard without a hint of shame. Oscar’s lips twitched in amusement as he buckled up. “So, where to?” he asked

You heard the question beneath the question. Want me to take you home? Get you someplace safe, so you can finally think?

Except you didn’t want safe. You wanted the rest of the world, the horizon you could squeeze in the rest of the day and what Oscar made you see you missed. You wanted everything, or as much of it as you could have right now.

You grinned at him. “Anywhere.” It sounded like a dare, and his smile widened.

He took you there.

You drove down the winding coastal roads with the radio turned all the way up, sea wind tangling in your air as you leaned out the window and belted out every song, no matter how wrong the lyrics. Oscar threw his head back in a laugh, and though he made fun of your singing, he couldn’t resist when you demanded he join in. His voice was lower, just a hum, but it occupied the car entirely.

At a run-down gas station, Oscar filled the car up while you wandered inside and returned with a cheap keychain—a gaudy plastic seahorse with a chipped tail. You looped it around the rearview mirror. Some other charms you had already gotten him were already dangling there, untouched.

An hour down the road, you parked on the shoulder to share sandwiches he had gotten at the gas station behind your back. You sat on a nearby bench, up in each other’s personal spaces as if there wasn’t enough space on the wooden seats for both of you, crossed legs and crumb-covered. Between bites, you caught up on everything that had slipped through the cracks of the preceding year: you both had grown and stumbled, drifted and returned. The reality that you spent a year with Oscar at arm length grew more irrational by the minute, especially when being with him felt so natural.

Eventually, the road leveled out, giving way to a flat stretch of cracked asphalt. On the near horizon, a glimmer of white sand and the loud sound of rolling waves called to you like a siren’s song. You bolted upright in your seat. “We really got to the beach?”

You didn’t have to voice your request. Oscar squinted, frowning at the sky. The clouds had begun to gather in thick gray bunches, and shadows had already started stealing the sunlight. “I don’t know�� looks like it might rain.”

“Come on!” You threw your arms in the air dramatically. “It’s just sight-seeing, it’s not going to take long.”

Oscar shook his head, yet a fond expression tugged at his facial traits despite himself. “You’re impossible.”

He parked right here and there.

The beach was a place of wilderness. The rocky cliffs you’d been riding on blurred into the misty edges of the pale sand, littered with dark driftwood and the bleached skeletons of forgotten trees, left to rot amongst the seascape. You could have found poetry in it, about endings and new beginnings, but your mind was too tender to poke at metaphors, bringing you back to your own issues and the meaning behind them. You settled on the simple, superficial beauty of it all.

You and Oscar strolled along the shoreline, careful to keep your semi-new shoes away from the forty reach of the waves; neither of you wanted to risk soggy socks and the humiliation of having to resort to the abandoned loafers and heels. Bits of conversations floated between you, punctuated by the kind of comfortable silence only best-friends shared.

A blush-pink seashell, perfectly intact and glistening in the sand, caught your eye just before you would’ve stepped on it. You bent to pick it up, already imagining nestled in the little collection on your shelf back home, until—

A cold splash of water hit the thin cotton of your shirt. You gasped as more droplets splattered across your arms. You could have sworn it was the rain Oscar had warned about, at least if the latter wasn’t standing there, grinning, with dripping wet hands.

“You little—”

Before you could finish, he flicked another handful of water at you, his laughter joining the rising wind. You lunged, scooping up water with both hands and launching it at him. It hit him square in the chest, and he let out a high-pitched yelp you’d never heard from him before.

Water flew back and forth, each splash accompanied with screeches and half-formed curses. By the time the first real raindrops fell from the darkening sky, your hair was already clinging to your forehead and your clothes were sticking to your skin. Oscar caught your eyes, a tad breathless, and you both turned your faces upward just as the sky opened.

The drizzle turned into a downpour.

“Shit, let’s run!” he shouted, grabbing your hand as you bolted toward the nearest cover: a massive pine tree at the edge of the forest line. You both stumbled underneath, breathing hard and dripping wet on the mix of sand and grass. The rain roared around you like a thousand tiny drums.

Oscar was laughing, really laughing. The kind of laugh he never let out in public, the one with the wide open mouth and the hand on his knees that shook his whole body and took his voice with it. It stole yours away too, reducing you to a look of wonder, taking him in between huffy intakes of air, a parody of the sound that was supposed to come out of your lips.

The reality of what this day had come to was a comic realization, and it struck you right in the chest when you and Oscar locked eyes. His smile was broad when he spoke up, loud enough to be heard above the pounding of the rain. “God, started with a wedding and ended drenched in thrifted clothes on some random beach. That’s wild.”

The giggle bubbled in your throat and escaped your lips, trembling in disbelief at the scene around you. The rain poured down harder now, piercing through the pine canopy and spattering your arm like cold bullets. The air was thick and heavy with fog, choking your lungs and turning the beach sweltering in a shroud of gray. The salt bit at your eyes. The waves roared in a relentless crash. The cold of the settling evening. The breathless laughter splintered into a sob—one miserable gargle at the back of your throat.

Everything came out at once.

You pressed your palms to your eyes in a final, useless attempt to dam the flood, but the tears wouldn’t be stopped. They streamed down your face, and your shoulders convulsed with the strength of them, the effort to hold yourself together failing with every ragged breath.

Oscar’s smile faltered. He stepped forward without hesitation, without a word, and wrapped his arms around you, strong and warm despite the chill. He held you against his chest, a shield against the wind and the rest of the world. You tried to anchor yourself to the steady rise and fall of his breath.

“It’s okay,” he murmured in your ear, one hair smoothing over your hair. “I got you, it’s okay.”

Beneath the shelter of the pine tree, with the storm raging and the ocean crashing in wild, beautiful chaos, you finally let yourself break. You fell apart for good, in ugly, keening sobs and pained wails clawing for blood at your throat, trembling but safe, held fast in the arms of the person who had carried you through everything.

Eventually, the rain relented, leaving a misty calm in its wake. The silence stretched, and stretched, until you felt brave enough to talk again.

“I just— Oh my god. I left him at the altar,” you choked out, your voice hoarse from crying. “I ran away like a coward. And you know the worst of it, Osc’?” You pulled back just enough to see his face, but your hands still rested on his chest. “I’m not even feeling guilty about it. I ran away from my wedding, I sold my ring in a sketchy pawn shop, I got hamburger on my dress and it just felt… freeing. Like— Like I could breathe again. Does that make me a bad person?” You sobbed. “It does, doesn’t it?”

Oscar studied you with that careful focus you’d seen a hundred times, like the night before a race, analyzing data while you dozed next to him on the couch, or after a weekend where the car let him down and he reviewed every lap. Only this time, his eyes were gentler. This time, he didn’t assume he knew the answer.

This time, Oscar asked.

“What pushed you to do it?” There was no judgement in his question. Only curiosity, along with an unbridled desire to understand you.

When you opened your mouth, you knew it was already too late.

“I don’t know, I— He was being rude to the officiant, when the bells rang. And I—” Your voice wavered. “I dropped out of the most prestigious marine biology programs in the country because he asked me to. I sat in his house alone for days while he called me from god-knows-where to ask me to buy a dress and show up at galas I couldn’t even speak at. He asked me to stop being so close to you because it could make him look bad with Alpine. He picked my wardrobe and told me how to stand and what to say, and I let him. I let him. All that— so he could treat the officiant like garbage on our wedding day?”

A sob tore at your throat. “And it’s such a small thing, so insignificant. There were probably a thousand telltale signs before that, but I just— I realized that I couldn’t live my whole life like that. I’m only twenty-four. I met him when I was nineteen, and I— I feel like I wasted such a big part of my life on… nothing. A whole lot of nothing. Delusions. I deserve more. I know I do, but… what am I supposed to do now? With all the things I wasted?”

Your question was met with silence. Truth be told, you hadn’t been expecting an answer—the question had been more directed at yourself than at Oscar. Yet, his hand rose to your cheek, and his thumb swiftly brushed away a tear that had clung stubbornly to your skin. His eyes were so full of tenderness, no matter what you just confessed, it made you shudder. More tears welled up as he smiled at you.

“I’m not… amazing at comforting people, you know it,” he started, “but it doesn’t take an empath to know you didn’t waste anything. Like you said, you’re twenty-four. That’s nothing in the grand scheme of things,” he shook you a little bit when he said that, and a strangled laugh fell from your lips. “You’re not a bad person for knowing what you want, you just had bad timing. You’ve got a whole lifetime ahead of you to decide what you actually want and to take it, instead of wallowing on what you’ve ‘wasted’.”

His thumb traced your cheek again, so gentle it felt like a balm on an old wound. “You’ve always deserved more than what he gave you.”

You blinked through the tears. Oscar’s words wrapped around your heart, swirled in between your ribs, chasing away all guilt and shame. Something in the way he looked at you, so open and certain unlike you’d ever been, hit you in a way you hadn’t quite prepared yourself for. A tremor of realization that cracked open a door you’d been too afraid to look behind.

Maybe the reason you’d run, the reason you’d found your strength, hadn't been just because of what you lost and left behind. Maybe, deep down, it had been because of what you’d always wanted, and who you wanted by your side. Among the corpses of feelings you’d been forced to bury, hopes, dreams, and softest truths, something had survived. Someone had survived. And maybe that someone had been standing right in front of you all along.

Your heart raced at the possibility. It felt as if Oscar could sense the sudden shift in the air between you, the weight of what you’d never dared to name.

You never had the time to figure out what love really was. You didn't know at nineteen any more than you had at sixteen, cradled by storybook fantasies. In reality, every chance you’d had to understand love had been smothered under the suffocating weight of a man’s expectations, with delusions of grandeur packaged as tenderness, objectifying greed dressed as devotion. Your definition of love had been shaped by cold beds and lonely nights, by a hand that hovered at your lower back only when cameras were near, by an iron-tight grip on your wrist and the wrong flowers arriving a day late. Love, to you, had been a cage—a brand name on a leash.

In the span of a single day, between thrift shop and laughter in the rain, you’d learned more about love than you had in the last five years.

Love didn’t need to be grandiloquent in order to be real. It didn’t have to be bought and paraded to matter. Love could be gentle, and match the rhythm of the heart it belonged to, quiet and careful. It could be found in the smallest gestures—wiping away tears, helping someone out of a corset, listening, asking.

You didn’t need grand gestures to know that you loved Oscar Piastri, and maybe you had for a long time now.

“Oscar?” you called, shaky.

Decide what you want and take it.

You could do that.

“Yeah?”

You wanted Oscar, so you took him by the mouth and made him yours.

The gesture was as clumsy as it was true, as hesitant as it was pure. Your lips had moved on their own, seeking the only warmth that ever felt like home. For one suspended second, Oscar froze and you could feel the tension in his body, the startled catch of his breath. In that heartbeat, every doubt you’d harbored came flooding back. Maybe it had been all in your head, that you’d mistaken friendship for something more and lost your best friend for good.

But that’s when Oscar kissed you back.

It wasn’t rushed or desperate, not the kind of kiss you’d expect after a day like this. It was soft, as though he was afraid of breaking something precious if he ever moved too abruptly. His hands found your waist, tentative at first, then firmer, drawing you closer until there was no air left between your bodies but the one you shared. Oscar kissed you the way you’d find peace in the eye of a storm: slow and patient, with a quiet devotion that made your knees go weak. He tasted like the sea.

No urgency, no hunger, just the relief of being known and being wanted exactly as you were.

When you pulled back for breath, your eyes fluttered open to find him staring at you, memorizing your face as if you’d vanish in the next second. A small, incredulous smile curved at Oscar’s lips, and his eyes shined with unshed tears of his own. He dipped his forehead to touch yours.

“You have no idea,” he murmured, breaking with emotion, “how long I’ve been waiting for you to do that.”

Your heart lost its rhythm, and something between a sob and a laugh escaped you as relief and wonder alike washed over you. Oscar’s arms tightened around your frame and for the first time in a long time, you felt like you were exactly where you were supposed to be.

“Me too,” you admitted. God, did it feel good to finally say it out loud.

But even in the midst of that newfound honesty, a quiet hesitation tugged at the hem of your being. You loved Oscar—oh, you did—and you wanted him. There wasn’t a single doubt in your heart about that, not anymore, at least. But you’d left your wedding just this morning. You’d left an entire life, five years of your life, and there were wounds you hadn’t even begun to understand, let alone heal.

You drew in a shaky inhale, eyes darting between his, searching for understanding. “I think…” Your voice cracked. “I think I need a little more time before we… you know. Before we start… us.”

Oscar’s gaze softened with a characteristic, unwavering kindness. He pulled back just enough to meet your eyes fully, and in them, you saw the steady promise of every whisper, every late-night talk, every wordless understanding you'd share. “Don’t worry,” he murmured. “We’ll figure it all out. Everything you want, everything you deserve—I’ll be there. I’m not going anywhere.”

The tears streaming down your cheeks were ones of relief. You exhaled a trembling chuckle. “I know you will.”

The rain had softened back to a drizzle by the time you both made it back to the car, the world around you washed clean. As you settled into the passenger seat, damp, messy, and more at peace than you’d felt in years, Oscar turned the keys and the engine hummed to life.

He glanced over at you, his smile easy and open, like it had always been just for you. “Where to, now?”

You didn’t have to think about it. Your head tipped back in a laugh, the sound unburdened. Free.

“Anywhere.”

And this time, anywhere meant home. Home in his apartment that already had a space carved out for you on the bed, and a toothbrush with your name on it. Anywhere, as long as it was with the man who saw every piece of you and never once tried to turn away, who was letting you reassemble the puzzle yourself. As long as it was with Oscar and no one else.

There wasn’t anywhere else you’d rather be, anyway.

©LVRCLERC 2025 ━ do not copy, steal, post somewhere else or translate my work without my permission.

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lvrclerc · 3 days ago

Text

EVERY SUMMER'S END

summary: loving a writer is a dangerous game, and carlos sainz is reminded of it when the dedication of your new book throws him back to every summer you ever shared, and the bitter end of them all. ✷ IVY'S POETRY DEPARTMENT EVENT: « although i may not be yours, i could never be another's. »

F1 MASTERLIST | CS55 MASTERLIST

pairing: carlos sainz x romance writer!reader wordcount: 7.2K content: summer romance, breakup, takes place from 2016 to 2021, implied smut, loosely inspired by beach read by emily henry, bittersweet, ambiguous relationship status, inacurrate timeline/events, open ending, not proofread. note: requested here! i wasn't kidding when i said i love writing summer romances. carlos sainz you are the epitome of a book mmc. i finished this out of spite and i hate it, which is why it took so long to get out, but thanks @sunsetcupid for sticking with me for the highs and lows of the writing process and reading through it. ‹𝟹

♫ us. - gracie abrams ft taylor swift

THE INTERVIEWER ASKS about what Carlos enjoys doing outside of motorsports, and the answer is rehearsed.

Carlos Sainz is a man of many hobbies. Racing, of course, dominates his life—he had been born in a legacy of burnt asphalt, it only made sense for him to bleed checkered. He’s a man who enjoys sports: padel with friends on week-ends when their hectic calendars allowed it, he could appreciate a boxing match here and there as a spectator, liked surfing when the weather was right and the waves were kind, and, later in life, he would take up golf. Outside of all movements, Carlos found comfort in good music, the kind with low, rumbling rhythm and gravelly guitar chords he would hum under his breath as a kid. He liked old movies too, the ones with seductive charm and grainy black-and-white frames that felt like diving into a memory.

Yet, amidst all the various things he enjoyed, Carlos Sainz had never been much of a reader.

It’s not that he didn’t like reading—he could get around it—but he just never had the time. As a child, karting consumed him too much to think about anything else. There were a few stray books, Percy Jackson maybe, when all of his classmates were raving about them. But he never learned to let himself get lost in pages. He never had the stillness for it—not with the life he grew up in. The erratic rhythm of racing didn’t leave space for leisurely afternoons, thin paper slipping between fingers, and other worlds unfolding in quiet.

Except once a year.

There was a place, tucked away like a whispered secret in the south of Spain, where time didn’t tick the same. There, the sun kissed his skin with soft acknowledgment. The air smelled faintly of vanilla and light florals. And there, he read.

But he doesn’t like to think about it. So when the interviewer asks about books, Carlos only shrugs and says he’s not much of a reader.

Then he moves on.

—

LA HERRADURA, PROVINCE OF GRANADA, ANDALUSIA, SPAIN. SUMMER BREAK OF 2016.

La Herradura is a small town, as per Carlos’ standards, tucked along Spain’s Costa Tropical. His orange-tiled home set in Madrid, with its silent halls, had started to feel like a weight pressed against his lungs since February of last year. A place too close to memories, but too far from the heart, or something like that—metaphors weren’t really his strong suit. Returning for his second Formula One summer break would’ve swallowed him whole, which is why he chose this town, where nobody would think to look.

Five thousand people at most, strolling in the narrow streets folded between whitewashed buildings, with a beach that always seemed to hum in the distance. Here, he thought, he might be able to breathe again.

And yet, it’s only his second day, and someone spilt coffee all over his shirt.

You hadn’t meant to. You were just reaching for a packet of sugar near the café counter, as your waiter had forgotten to bring any. In no way had you expected the man beside you to whip around, so when he did, it became a mess of startled movement, clumsy apologies, and dark espresso blooming across his white cotton shirt like the birth of a bruise over his heart. You both spoke at once, tripping over sentences. Your voice tangled in the air until, mid-flurry, his hand caught your wrist gently.

“You’re alright, I promise,” the stranger had laughed. It rumbled through his chest and for a second, even the waves lapping outside the beachside café seemed to roar in jealousy.

He was beautiful in the way people rarely are, terribly so, all in sharp edges and sunburnt youth, sculpted by speed itself, with cheekbones etched by the wind, and jaw clenched from habit. Then, as anyone might have thought he could come off as severe, there were his eyes: soft in their curves, chestnut brown, flickering with curiosity and warmth. It was the kind of moment that would’ve made you roll your eyes if you were ever to write it—too convenient. Still, your heart lifted when he smiled, washing over you like carbonation fizzing to the top of a soda bottle you would have turned upside down.

“I’m still really sorry,” you apologized. “I wasn’t paying attention and—”

“Neither was I,” he cuts you off, and the exasperated smile that escaped you made his smile grow. Carlos found it charming.

“Let me at least buy you another one,” you offered. “It’ll make me feel less like a disaster.”

By principle, he should’ve declined. He had more than enough money to buy his own coffee, and his parents hadn’t raised him to let a pretty woman cover the bill. But there was something in the teasing in your voice he couldn’t place, a color twinkling in your eyes he craved to name, a story he didn’t want to end yet. So he said yes.

He ends up back at your table, settling into a wildly uncomfortable straw chair on the terrace, and you talk, voices clashing pleasantly over the aroma of salt and espresso. Carlos comes to the realization you don’t seem to know of him—or his last name, or his face—outside of the little world you built out of spilled coffee when you ask, casually, what he does for a living. He panics. Says he works as a chauffeur, because he likes the way your hand rests naturally on his forearm, unbothered, and he’s not ready to see the awkward change his upbringing might lead to.

To steer the conversation away from the sudden heat blooming under his collar, he nods toward your open laptop and the notebook darkened by messy scrawling next to it. “And… you write?” he asks.

Your cheeks go warm, and Carlos—absurdly—wants to bottle the shade and carry it around with him. “I attempt to,” you mumble, hastily flipping the notebook closed. “Haven’t written anything good in a hot minute.”

A year, two months, and thirty-two days, if we’re being precise. Your debut novel had made quiet waves, gotten a litany of praise. Critics called it raw, authentic, the kind of story that lingers between ribs. One reviewer went as far as to say it felt like the words spilled right from your lips onto theirs. There was irony in it, because you didn’t feel like anything spilled anymore. You had been staring at your blank document and blinking cursor, crafting slowly wilting outlines for months now. All ideas withered the second you touched them.

People called you a romance writer now. But how were you supposed to write about love when your last relationship left you with scars so soft they rotted sweet, like overripe fruit? What good was a writer who couldn’t write?

“Writer’s block?” the beautiful stranger asks, bringing you back from your own mind.

You nod. “Exactly. My agent’s on my ass about getting something new on paper, and I just… can’t. I thought coming here might help. Change of scenery, all that.”

He leans in, half-grin across his lips, almost conspiratorial. His hair brushes your cheek right where the shadow kisses your cheek. There is some poetry to that, and it’s so precise and cinematic that you want to laugh, that you want to lean further in and grasp its intricacies. “What do you write?” he inquires, and his voice is similar to dusk: low and warm. “Maybe I could help.”

That makes you smile, and a chuckle tumbles out of you. “Romance,” you say. “Technically, it’s women’s fiction, but they always shelve it under romance.”

“So you make a living out of people… falling in love?” His eyebrows lift as he says it. You nod, though the motion is braced. You know what people think of the genre, especially men: the subtle scoff and the condescension disguised as charm. You’re already preparing to pull the plug on the conversation, right with the slow building fantasy of it all, before it goes sour. But instead, he says, “I thought it would be easy, writing about love.”

The laugh that bursts out of you is entirely involuntary. You throw your head back from it, startled by the naivety of it, and the sheer audacity that he might really mean it.

“Love is far from being easy, tesoro.”

Sunlight catches your hair as you say it, and Carlos is possessed by the sound of the waves crashing onto shore as he asks, boldly and oddly earnest, if you can visit the town together. “As inspiration for your book, and another payback for the coffee,” he justifies.

Truth be told, he disagreed with you. For Carlos, there was nothing as easy as love: he fell in love with karting before he could spell the word ambition, let the scent of gas and gravel tarnish and scorch his lungs black, until the motion of getting into his seat became automatic. He loved the cockpit, the spare parts, the silence behind the helmet. He loved his country, with its sun-warmed streets, the music folded into each inflection of the language. Tradition etched into gestures that he carries with him when he drives. He had loved multiple women until his heart gave out under the effort.

Carlos loved with a ferocity you could only hold in the wild, boundless beginnings of adulthood, when the world still seemed so wide and endless, beckoning you to seek for its borders, and fell with just as much force.

Love wasn’t something complicated, or a puzzle to figure out. Cars were, so were strategies. But love? Love came as naturally as breathing, so easy to give yourself in.

And when you say yes, a knowing smile tugging at the corner of your lips, just this side of daring, Carlos thinks he might be falling for you just as easily.

You walk through the streets slowly, without a plan or destination, just the rhythm of two people perfectly content to orbit one another. La Herradura doesn’t offer much unless you’ve planned ahead: no grand museum or crowded monuments, instead overflowing in small alleys, bougainvillea spilling down balconies, salt-sticky air curling around your wrists like ribbons.

Neither of you minds. Carlos is more than happy stopping by overpriced ice cream stalls, pointing out absurd flavor just to see you wrinkle your nose. He tells you the worst one-liners he’s ever heard, mostly from his mother’s soap operas she used to watch while folding laundry, and bask in the teenage feeling burgeoning in his chest at the mere idea of them making you laugh.

He pays for dinner without a second thought. It’s the tourist spot next to the café where you first met, and the food is nothing special, but your snarky comment as the waiter brings the wine makes him feel like he’s won something. The sun’s set by the time you finish, but the last of its glow still lingers on the skin of the sea, similar to yours, and Carlos is surprised by how easily the parallel draws in his mind. A bonfire crackles by the beach, a testimony of late June and the traditions he loves, flames and music and voices all blending into a single glowing memory.

Like all good romantics, you’re drawn to it like a moth. Carlos slips your shoes off your feet before you can protest and holds them in one hand, his other brushing lightly against your back to guide you toward the shore. You sink into the sand, slow and aimless.

“Tell me about your first book,” he says. And you tell him how the story came to you all at once, like it had been simmering into a carafe and poured out in the cold glass of a single summer, with no real plans or outline. You say you didn’t think anyone would care for it. Carlos disagrees, this time openly, saying he would’ve read it even if no one else had.

You laugh, because you believe him, and that is such a ridiculous notion to hold for someone you just met.

You stroll along the shore for what could be like hours or mere minutes—time often loses its shape when the moment is right. Somewhere between the fifth song from the beach guitar and the taste of the wine still on your tongue, Carlos brushes a loose strand of hair behind your ear. The look you give him, like the sky is collapsing on itself, you’re sure you could have written about it this time around.

And maybe the sky really is collapsing. Maybe this night doesn’t exist in the real world at all, maybe it’s just a dream stitched together by the help of seafoam. Because when he says, “Come back with me,” as if he’s asking for a secret and not demanding, you don’t even think about it.

You go. Hand in hand, shoes forgotten, sand clinging to your ankles. The streets are in deep slumber, and his rental smells like sea and freshly washed cotton, and the moment the door closes behind you, it’s as if the world exhales and fades out of reality.

Carlos kisses you like he’s known you across lifetimes, like he’s loved you before and lost you, and this is his only chance to get it right. He touches you like he’s never going to see you again, because deep down he’s not sure he will. His hands are rough, his mouth devout. The pads of his fingers leave heat wherever they pass—marks not visible but undeniably there. You welcome them with parted lips, quiet sighs, nails digging crescents into his shoulder blades.

He doesn’t let you breathe for too long. Every exhale is an invitation he answers with his lips, his hips, his hands. It’s all consuming and fierce, because Carlos doesn’t know how to be anything else but hungry. Burning at the edges but still asking for more, dangerously close to spinning out but never losing control. He gives you everything because he doesn’t know how to love halfway. Because that’s Carlos: he only knows how to take, and take, and take, but only in exchange of all of himself.

You lie tangled in the sheets afterwards, skin kissed warm and hearts pounding in synchrony. A breeze floats through the open window, carrying with it the fresh air of a summer night. In the mellow silence, he studies you.

The flush of your cheeks could be called rose, but that’s too cliché. It’s something deeper, warmer—carnelian, maybe? He wasn’t the best with words. Or was it the color of joy? Or the exact hue of summer slipping beneath the ocean, the kind that never really leaves the sky? He commits it all to memory as sleep takes you both, you pressed to his chest no matter the heat.

And when he wakes up, you’re gone. In your place is a note, scribbled in your messy handwriting. “I have a plane to catch, didn’t want to wake you so early in the morning. Thank you for everything.” And beneath that, almost like an afterthought, a softer, neater line: “You’re nothing like I expected.”

He traces the paper with his hand for too long, heart thrumming somewhere in his throat. Yet, Carlos still gets up. He showers, and dresses, and for the first time in years, he walks into a bookstore.

The woman at the register smiles when she sees the title he picked. “It’s a good one,” she says, and Carlos nods with pride as if the compliment was directed to him.

He reads it in pieces over the rest of the summer break, trying not to read it too fast in order to ration memories. To let your ghost linger a little while longer.

And somewhere in the sky, a few hours before your layover, you finally open your laptop. For the first time in forever, your fingers don’t stall on the keyboard. The words come gently, naturally, and you type them out with the same carefulness.

They’re not about him, not yet, but Carlos lingers in every line, like the unmistakable smell of sun once it has set.

—

“You don’t read?” his new girlfriend asks, somewhere over the Mediterranean.

The plane ride home to Monaco is a long one when you’re flying from Abu Dhabi, and Carlos had barely said a word since the takeoff. It’s December, and even at cruising altitude, Carlos can feel the temperature shift. He hates the cold—it bites instead of kisses. Give him heat, always. Give him sticky skin, the faint hum of the fan overhead and someone's breath mixing with his in the dark.

His mind travels to his personal Eden, where summer seemed to loop for years on end. The sound of cicadas, the coast so washed it looked half-dreamt. It’s only when his girlfriend calls his name again that he blinks, startled back to the present.

Right, reading. She’s referring to the interview.

“I never have the time,” Carlos answers mechanically, punctuated with a tense chuckle.

She hums, unconvinced, and starts rummaging through her bag. “I could lend you one of mine, just to try. This one’s a beach read,” she says, oblivious to how his chest seems to tighten at her words. “My favorite author. I’ve read everything she’s written. Her stories are always kind of… sad, but really beautiful.”

Carlos wants to protest, say that he’s too tired and beach reads aren’t his thing. If he were to read, he’d want something heavier: a brick of historical nonfiction, or a complex murder mystery. He opens his mouth with an excuse at the ready, but the words die in his throat the second he sees the cover.

It’s a painted memory of soft edges and impressionist strokes, displaying a warm-toned terrace café with straw chairs, dappled in afternoon light. Carlos knows this place, not because of the building or how the awning folds over itself, but because of you.

You’re sitting at one of the tables. Well, it’s not exactly you, more someone like you. A woman rendered in delicate brushstrokes, a sundress flowing to her knees, holding a book just high enough to shadow her face. Still, her likeness is uncanny. And where the café’s name should be, in looping white script, is the title: Every Summer’s End. Beneath it, your name.

Carlos forgets how to breathe.

“You said you vacationed there, right?” his girlfriend inquires, unaware of the rupture. She flips the book around to show him the back. “La Herradura? That’s where it’s set. So funny, it made me think about you when I bought it.”

He takes the book when she offers it, thumb grazing the glossy spine. It’s heavy, like truth, and he forces a slow nod of acknowledgement.

Funny.

—

LA HERRADURA, PROVINCE OF GRANADA, ANDALUSIA, SPAIN. SUMMER BREAK OF 2017.

Carlos doesn’t believe in fate. He never has, not in the grand scheme of things. He’s not enough of a romantic, in the historical sense, too much of his father’s son, to do so. What he believed in was repetition, in giving until there’s nothing left and your body breaks before your mind. Fate had never helped him score points, efforts did. And licking open wounds caused by those efforts like an injured dog in hope of miracle recovery is what led him to La Herradura for a second time.

He couldn’t admit out loud that it wasn’t the town he came back for. It was the feeling.

The café hasn’t changed much. The layout is different from last year, the chairs rearranged and the menus reprinted in a more minimalist aesthetic. The cushions are a new shade of sun-bleached coral, he notices, but the air still carries the same warm hum of sea salt and citrus.

Carlos doesn’t look when he turns after ordering. A sharp movement, and his cup tips forward in a graceless arc, splashing a deep brown bloom across your pale beach cover-up. “Joder— shit, I’m so sorry—” he stammers and grabs a napkin with the frantic energy of someone half-present in his own body.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this, tesoro.”

It’s not immediate. It crawls leisurely over his skin, laps at the snowglobe of his memories. Your mouth curves into a smirk he’s sure he’s shaken a few times in his mind. You laugh, his nickname on your tongue, and it clicks all at once. You were the feeling he missed.

You, on the contrary, don’t believe in coincidences. You believe in the invisible threads that tie together with quiet purpose. That everything, no matter how painful or messy, is part of some intricate, meaningful design in a bigger story. You’d be lying if you even thought that some hidden fragments of you hadn’t been hoping, all along, to see him again, wondering if the right set of conditions would pull him back where you left off.

No screams leave your lips, or curses at the temperature of the drink. You were never one for dramatics. You beam at him, damp fabric clinging to your swimsuit. “I think you owe me a clean shirt, this time around,” you say, and Carlos huffs out a disbelieving laugh.

He insists on buying you another coffee, and puts the sugar in it before you can think about telling him to. This time, you sit on the opposite side of the terrace, shaded by a new umbrella but caught in the same orbit.

The rest of the day folds over itself like a well-read book, the ones with the crack in the spine and the wavy pages from hair dripping of pool water. You walk again: down the coast, over the pebbled sidewalk, past shuttered shops and sleepy balconies. When you pass by the same tourist restaurant where you had dinner last year, you both decide to dine somewhere else.

Later, when the sun sinks and the bonfire sparks to life again, a feeling of continuation sneaks upon you both. You walk barefoot in the sand, again, letting your fingers thread through his, again. Unlike last time, Carlos asks about your new book with a carefulness similar to the one of a child. You admit that it’s finished, that people loved it, but you don’t tell him he inspired you. Not yet.

When you get back to his place, again, Carlos kisses you the exact same way, the brush of his mouth against yours too familiar for something that happened just once because he still remembers every second of it. He touches you like he’s still memorizing you, like you’re something he’s still trying to make sense of.

You fall asleep with your limbs tangled in linen and this time, when he wakes up, you don’t disappear. You’re still here when he wakes up, curled into his side with sunlight slipping through your hair. There were no planes to catch this time, you had made sure of it. However, Carlos is a man of habit, a creature of rhythm and ritual. So he gets up. Dresses.

The bookstore is only a short walk from his place. It’s barely open when he arrives, and yet, he finds it immediately: on the middle shelf, front-facing, your name bold and bright against the soft watercolors of the cover.

By the time he returns, the apartment smells of quiet mornings and coffee. You’re sitting on a stool at his kitchen island, legs folded up, his white cotton shirt swallowing your body. The seagulls heard through the windows are alive and singing but your hair is still mussed with sleep and bleary-eyed. Still, Carlos had the sensation to have walked upon something sacred.

Until you froze as your gaze dropped. “Wait,” you say, voice hoarse, “You— You bought it?”

Carlos turns the book around, displaying the familiar name stamped across the bottom with boyish pride. “First thing in the morning,” he grins.

You groan, tucking your face in your hands, even as your cheeks grow blotchy and warm with color. He’d spent half the night thinking of words to name it: he liked carnelian, but coral was as gorgeous. Cardinal stuck. Cardinal, bright, bleeding. It reveled on his tongue like you did.

It looked like the morning sun was in love with you.

Carlos smiles again, slower this time, fondness finger painting his features like a Monet’s. “I really liked your first book. I thought I’d check out the new one after yesterday.”

“You read my debut?” you gaped.

He hums. “Last summer, after you left.”

You just stare at him with wide eyes in wonder, adoration sprinkled like stars in the sky of your pupils. Your heart is louder than your thoughts, skipping similar to a stone over water. You feel seen. In that quiet, piercing way only readers could ever make you feel. And of all people, for it to be him.

Your voice falters as you admit, finally out loud, “Okay, well. In this one, I mean—just a little—some parts might’ve been…” You gesture vaguely, tugging at the hem of the shirt you borrowed. “Inspired by what happened last year.”

Carlos’ smile softens into a molten thing. If your emotions transpired through your eyes, his overcame you in the soft curve of his mouth, seemingly waiting for each one of your words to trigger something in him. He crosses the space to you in the beating of a heart and, as if it was an everyday thing, presses a kiss to your forehead. “I’m honored to be your muse, preciosa.”

You laugh, and it bubbles out of your chest bright and alive. Carlos could compare it to the shaking of a cold soda bottle on a hot day, but he’d be afraid of sounding somewhat ridiculous. You wrap your arms around him without thinking, face tucked in his shoulder. He still smells like the beach, like intimacy.

“Well,” you murmur, “you’ll probably end up inspiring another one this summer.”

He pulls back just enough to look at you, thumb brushing under your skin. “Then I’ll help you through the process again,” Carlos assures, his voice laced with poetry. “I’ll give you a thousand stories worth writing about.”

And it’s such a you and him thing to say that you feel your chest bloom open.

Outside, the world is just beginning to stir. The sunlight is thickening, birds singing as if to beckon the beginnings of July closer and closer. Inside, in this little kitchen scented with espresso and sunscreen, you know in your bones that won’t be the last time you wake up here.

This isn’t fate. This isn’t coincidence. It’s what’s left of the sand after it trickled down the hourglass, somehow, the two of you begin again.

—

The book was shelved under Romance.

Carlos hesitated in front of the section. His gaze trailed over the display of cartoon covers and pastel spines until his eyes settled on it.

Turquoise and dark sienna, a palette so at odds with its neighbors that it looked like it was meant to misfit. The title curled across the spine in delicate letters tangling into one another with the intimacy of intertwined lovers. Carlos felt like he intruded on something that he had no right to look at. Maybe that was the case.

He handed back the copy his girlfriend had so kindly lended him. Her copy, with loopy, highlighter-bright annotations and neatly color-coded tabs with tiny hearts next to her favorite quotes. It didn’t feel like you at all. Not when you were all in cracked spines and sand-stuck pages, yellowed out by the sun. Your notes, when your mind raced slow enough to make them, were scrawled hastily in the corners of receipts and napkins tucked before the backcover, legible only in candlelight, sometimes not even to yourself.

When they landed in Monaco, Carlos didn’t go home. He went to the airport bookstore, the scent of sterile bleach and teary goodbyes clinging to the air. He needed a clean slate: something that didn’t belong to her, but not something that belonged to you either. Just something that let him read the book like it was a book, and not a wound he’s been carrying around like a splinter.

As he takes the novel in his hands, the rough pads of his fingers shake around the paperback. A book could never be a person, Carlos reminds himself. Still, disappointment swelled in his chest like rising tide when the cover didn’t give under his touch the way your skin used to. It held firm, cold.

He glanced around instinctively. The bookstore was mostly empty, and he waited for the clerk to turn her back on him before tucking one, two, three, four under his arm. He was absurdly careful. As if they could bruise, he mocks himself.

With the carefulness of a lover, Carlos placed them at the very front of the shelf titled Women’s Fiction.

—

LA HERRADURA, PROVINCE OF GRANADA, ANDALUSIA, SPAIN. SUMMER BREAK OF 2018-19

You found each other again, summers after summers, until it became another beloved tradition, a ritual engraved in the gravelly skin of La Herradura, like initials in driftwood, softened by sun and salt but never erased.

Every late June, you’d return to your meeting place: the beachfront café that had once been the backdrop to spilled coffee and first laughter. Same time, same order— there was comfort in that, in repetition, the predictability of you and him.

As the sun dipped low below the sea, you’d slip back into his hunchback rental, skin warm with the fingerprints of daylight and your limbs heavy with knowing exactly where the night was going. You wore his shirt like silk and let him read you like scripture under the low hum of the fan.

Mornings belonged to books and windows cracked open. Carlos always woke before you, force of habit, and he’d pad down to the tiny bookstore with sand still crusted to his ankles and pick up the novel you’d published the summer before. Always one summer behind, and always eager to catch up in the only place he actually could.

He had learned to notice the parallels, to draw the metaphors by himself, no matter how clumsy. A sunset that had once dripped like marmalade over your bare shoulders found itself in Chapter Twelve. The stray kitten that had curled up in his lap one morning during breakfast became a symbol of grief in your prose. He watched your stories unfold and realized he was there: tucked between allegories and half-truths, tucked in the margins.

The days melted into each other with the same syrupy pace as the tide. For someone whose life was clipped in interviews and lap times, Carlos learned what it was like to breathe again, to fill his lungs until they stretched open without ache. His fingers, used to clenching around the wheel or curling into fists from tension, learned to soften. To touch with intention, not urgency.

He slept through the night, and he let silence settle without needing to break it.

In your shared Eden, nothing touched you. Not the headlines, not the passing of time. Even the reality that loomed past the end of those three weeks seemed to be kept at bay. There was only the breeze, the sea, and the soft, looping miracle of finding each other again.

—

LA HERRADURA, PROVINCE OF GRANADA, ANDALUSIA, SPAIN. SUMMER BREAK OF 2020.

Someone had to bite the apple first, and this time the sinner had brown hair.

This time, Carlos landed in La Herradura with red flashing in his mind, tensing the deepest parts of his bone, flashing behind his eyes when he tried to sleep. The familiar rumble of the engine still echoed inside of him as he crossed the beachfront café, the one where it always begins. This time, his body didn’t relax.

The switch hadn’t been sudden, not really. The idea of Ferrari had haunted him long before the contract had been signed. The discussions, the promises, and the restructuring of his future in motorsports; it had consumed him in the months separating one summer from the next, had bent his life in directions he’d sworn to never take for granted.

When he found you again, sitting below the striped awning with your sunglasses pushed up into your hair, your drink sweating under the Andalusian sun, he smiled. Yet, it didn’t fully reach his eyes.

You noticed it. Of course, you did.

Carlos remembers what you said, in a faraway place in which cradled the beginnings of the two of you. You said that love is far from being easy, and back then he’d disagreed without a second thought. There was nothing as easy as love. He was twenty-two then: all heart and bleeding devotion, untouched by the weight of what it meant to choose. But today he was twenty-six: it felt older, he had traded cotton shirts for linen button-ups, and learned to appreciate the taste of stronger alcohol.

And no matter how soft the sand, the hourglass kept running.

This time, Carlos planned things. Planned. The word itself was foreign to your time together. He made reservations at upscale local restaurants with white linens and dizzyingly long wine lists. He drove winding cliffs to bring you to coastal vineyards, places with photo ops and curated beauty. He booked you both scuba diving lessons with a man who introduced himself as Diego and called you lovebirds. He filled the time until it overflowed, as if silence was a sin he couldn’t afford anymore.

This wasn’t how La Herradura worked. You never planned here. You lived here.

Now, he drove too fast, kissed you like the end was always lurking around the corner. The only time he’d breathe and settle down was at night, when he held your body flush against him. His hands tugged you impossibly closer, like he was made of marble and trying to carve you out of him.

Still, you didn’t ask. The problem didn’t reside here, in your sacred, familiar garden. It lived in whatever came before and after, so you didn’t think you had a right to. You didn’t belong there.

Next year, things would have to change. Carlos would have to change. His body, his name, his entire presence all had to be shaped into one thing, focused and sharp. The Carlos you had couldn’t split himself between two places, love and legacy.

Hard-working. Focused. Determined. That’s what Carlos is, down to his core. He’d never been a romantic.

And yet, you curled into him that night, limbs loose from wine and heat, hair spilling over his bare chest like ribbons. The fan circled overhead. Outside, the waves licked the sand in soft intervals, time dissolving once again in white noise. Carlos stared at the ceiling, his hand draped low on your spine, fingers memorizing.

He keeps telling himself that it was always meant to be temporary. Time stopping for anyone or anything was a silly notion enfolded in the delusions of early adulthood. You were a substance he had to get out of his system, and those summer breaks spent in this secluded paradise had him indulging more than he felt the need to.

You were always meant to be temporary, he tries to convince himself as he holds your sleeping figure close to his chest.

For the very first time, and in a desperate attempt to grasp the last seconds you could ever share, he whispers in your ear for the very first time, “I love you, preciosa.”

He would hold on to his name on the back of the vermilion suit, on his ivory number somewhere on the bar of his cerise car. It wasn’t the cardinal flush of your cheeks, but it was as close as he was going to get in a long time— if not forever.

Carlos would hold onto that too. Until he could draw another parallel, find another adjective.

Love is far from being easy, he finally agrees.

—

Nostalgia is a traitorous substance, an opiate of the heart: indulge in it too much and you become addicted. Carlos had learned, early one, to stray away from it. There was no room for looking back when you lived life ten seconds at a time. However, melancholy— melancholy he never quite managed to unlearn. And nostalgia, no matter how hard he tried to keep it at bay, always found a way back in.

Both brewed now, unbearably sweet, in the pages of Every Summer’s End.

Carlos sat crooked on his bed, spine aching and sheet twisted at his hips. The only sound was the rustle of paper and the quiet shift of his breath whenever a sentence carved too deeply.

When his girlfriend told him it was set in La Herradura, Carlos’ heart had dropped straight to the floor. He was scared of what he’d find between the lines. Terrified of you, not in flesh and skin but in ink and metaphors. More precisely, Carlos was afraid of finding out if you had grown to hate the memory of him, if you had walked the same streets, swam under the same starry sky, but the landscape curled into you like spoiled wine, if you had spat on his name while he held yours tenderly behind his teeth. It was a selfish fear, but real nonetheless.

Then he started reading. That’s when he realized the truth: the book wasn’t about him, like it had been so many times before.

This time, the novel was about you.

The lines blend together until they form black-and-white frames in Carlos’ mind. Adriana—your heroine—had lost the love of her life. The how was ambiguous— sometimes, you hint at the cruel but tender hands of death. Sometimes, you allude to another woman, on another coast, somewhere colder. Carlos read and reread each implication like scripture, combed through context like scripture.

But the novel was never about the man. No matter what you may imply, it all comes down to the same thing: the mourning of what was. Grief, in its purest shade, and the rebuilding that came.

He recognized every place Adriana visited, and Carlos felt it like bruising under his skin to the point of nausea. The worst wasn’t even the familiarity, but knowing you had been there too: walked those same steps without him, cried without him, healed without him. And survived.

Because that’s what the story was really about: surviving through the healing process. Life isn’t restricted to loss. It might shape and change what you are, but it doesn’t erase you. It doesn’t vanish, but simply loosens its grips. The places you once loved don’t reject you; they remember you and help you puzzle yourself back together. In the library near your rental, in the San Juan bonfire on the beach. You are still there, somewhere, no matter what happened.

Eventually, you learn to love again.

Adriana meets someone at a beachfront café. A stranger, simple and warm. He doesn’t spill his coffee on her. He tells her he’s a local, works in a bar not far from here. He’s different from her past lover, and that’s good, because he reminds her that love isn’t always followed by silence.

The tear that hung on Carlos’ eyelashes finally fell down. Gravity had decided to be merciful, just this once.

—

LA HERRADURA, PROVINCE OF GRANADA, ANDALUSIA, SPAIN. SUMMER BREAK OF 2021.

Carlos wouldn’t know what happened at that time or place. He wasn’t there.

However, you would. But you didn’t like to recall it, so you wrote about it instead.

Then, you moved on.

—

By the time Carlos had turned the last page, the sun had started its gentle ascent, spilling gold through the half-closed curtains of his bedroom. The warmth of the light filled the emptiness that came after savoring a book, heavy with everything that had been lived on the page.

The sleepless night had passed in an ever present ache. He deciphered your every allegory, holding your tone close to his chest. He had read you in every line with your rhythm, the sentences that curved like the lines of your body. Your prose was yielding, bruised. It felt like another night beside you, your hands toying with his hair, whispering sweet nothings in his ear. When the final word passed under his gaze, it felt like he was leaving you all over again.

But now he was done reading, and you were almost gone.

Almost. Because there it was, not in capitalized letters or bolded words, but on the final page, similar to the unearthing of a secret.

Although I may not be yours this time around, I could never be another’s.

He could recall a conversation you once had on the balcony of his rental. “I hate dedications at the beginning of books,” you’d muttered with a sigh. Carlos was sunbathing next to you, opening an eye to look at your figure hunched over your keyboard. “It doesn’t make sense to me. The person you dedicate it to doesn’t know what you’re giving them yet.” He’d hummed with a laugh, and you had continued. “Maybe it’s ridiculous, but I would much prefer it to be at the end, so that they understand the meaning of all of it.”

“Would you ever dedicate it to me?” Carlos had asked teasingly.

You’d arched a brow at him, rolling your eyes to the sky with nothing but tenderness. “If I did, I wouldn’t say your name, tesoro. Much too obvious.”

He hadn't thought much of it at the time, only amused when he looked for the dedications in your books and found them right before the backcover.

Except that now, the last of your presence hung on the last page and the two lines that made it, and Carlos knew in the deepest, most egoistic parts of himself, that it was meant for him to understand. That was probably the cruelest part: the story had ended, so had the numerous summers, and he wasn’t sure either of you were still the people who loved and burned under the Andalusian sun. Time passed, it was something Carlos had made peace with.

Yet, the dedication said maybe.

The most rational part of him told him to let it go. He should protect what little healing you and him may have found, to not dig up something that already fed the soil. But the thing about Carlos Sainz is that he had never been at letting go of the things that made him feel alive. Because you had a part of him in you, just like every car he had ever stepped foot in possessed a part of his soul, just like every race track could beat to the rhythm of his heart. Because Carlos Sainz doesn’t know how to give halfway.

He doesn’t know what he’s doing until he’s done, but a ticket to La Herradura for the end of the next month of June is blinking at him on his phone screen.

He had no plans, no speeches, and didn't mean to prepare any. The only desire inhabiting him was the one to be there, in that place, basking in the possibility of it.

Maybe Carlos won’t see you, maybe he will. If he does, you’d talk. He’d offer you your usual coffee, if you still took it that way, and he’d tell the entire truth. He’d see where it leads, if he’d take back that part of him you held or he’d let it stay with you.

Some summers, just like love stories, never end.

They just get rewritten, again and again and again.

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