Faking it || Lando Norris LN

26

Lando Norris

Friday. Week-off.

I shuffled under the bedsheets before I finally woke up.

The past two nights had been awful. I hadn't been able to fall asleep for hours. The last time I checked my phone for the time it had been 5 AM and it had still taken me another while to fall asleep.

This mess kept getting more and more complicated.

I dragged a hand through my face before checking the time. 2:30 PM. My trainer would kill me for waking up this late, but at least I hadn't missed any appointments or whatever. The only thing scheduled for today was the nightclub Gianna and Davies had told us to go to.

I should've been happy that I was finally being allowed to go out. I should've been texting people to meet us there and calling up the club to make sure they gave me my usual table.

But I didn't. There was another thought invading the most amount of space inside my mind.

I need this stunt to be over, and I need it over now.

Shit hadn't stopped getting complicated ever since it had begun.

The whole thing had started as a pain in the ass. Other than the obvious mental storm that implied having my seat at risk, my ego was bruised by sponsors threatening to pull out. The fact that suddenly the solution to it had been giving up partying and sleeping around, obviously didn't help my mood at all. The magic solution to keep me from losing my seat had been presented as the one bound to make me lose my mind instead.

Faking a relationship with the obsessive, calculated, insufferable, Olivia Reyes.

God, her presence just... angered me. She was utterly annoying, and a textbook people pleaser. Obsessive and calculated, yet managed to be mediocre at best with a race-winning car. She was a constant reminder of everything going wrong. My seat was at risk, my sponsors weren't happy, I wasn't allowed to go out, and Davies had the password to all of my social media accounts to make sure I wasn't texting any girls that could put the stunt at risk: which meant, all of them.

I barely even recall her from last year, her first season in Formula 1. I couldn't give less of a shit about Olivia then. I was busy winning the Championship as to care about who she was and, in complete honesty, I hadn't even considered her attractive in the slightest before. Everyone in the grid considered her either very attractive or the sheer definition of beauty. I just considered her okay.

But then again, that was another complication that decided to add itself to the endless list of them along the way.

Olivia Reyes was a little more than okay.

I shook the thoughts away as I grabbed my phone and logged on to Twitter. This had become part of my routine, checking my social media every bloody hour. I had never been a fan of using it loads, but now that my career depended on what people said of a girl I barely even tolerated and me, I could never spend more than 30 minutes without refreshing every news outlet.

I needed the stunt to be over.

I needed to not be near her. It pissed me off.

It angered me. It made my skin crawl and my jaw clench. I hated looking at her, a constant reminder of everything going wrong in my life.

And at the same time, a constant reminder of the way she looked under the pouring rain in Italy, of the way her hair stuck to her face and her white shirt to her body —a clear display of a hundred moles sprinkled on her skin—, and of the white lace she wore under it.