Revenge~ Charles Leclerc

"Home sweet home"

My leg bounced up and down to the beat of the music playing excruciatingly loudly in Daniels headphones as he sat next to me, his eyes struggling to stay open. The 2 weeks spent in Perth was everything I could have dreamed it would be, spending everyday with the most amazing group of people on the planet, quad biking, horse riding, boat racing, you name it we did it. The night time strolls I took with the girls as we laughed and posed for pictures on the beach, the endless supply of alcohol locked away in Dans wine cellar that myself and Max managed to get our hands on, Learning the rules of games Lando would play back home so I could obliterate Pierre as payback, it all came to an end, something I'd been dreading since the day I stepped through Dan's front door. But the thing I was dreading the most, it was leaving him, uncertain of the next time we'd be in each other's presence. Since that drunken night we'd not spent more than an hour apart everyday, with the exception of throughout the night where we contained ourselves in our designated bedrooms, even offering to go grocery shopping together, in which our now labelled adopted son Pierre tagged along as he claimed it was mine and his thing and Charles was intruding. I had seen a different side to Charles while in Perth, a more relaxed, laid back version, the version I saw the first day we met where all he seemed to care about was what he was going to order from the menu. It's as though being away in a foreign country, 8,565 miles away from Monaco put his mind at ease. Every now and then he'd fall into a eerie silence for several hours at a time, staring into space playing with the rings on his fingers relentlessly, a million thoughts racing behind his eyes as they formed a glossy layer over them from the lack of blinking, this was until Carlos would sit next to him, his arm draping loosely around the back of Charles' chair as they entered a deep discussion. I didn't pry as to what the interventions they would hold now and then were about, instead I observed attentively, examining their facial expressions, body movements and gestures as they spoke to get some kind of incline as to what their discussions encountered, a trick i had learned in court and found myself to be quite good at. From what I had picked up, Charles was nervous, on edge some would say, the fiddling of the ring that slipped perfectly on and off his finger, the subtle jaw twitching, the lack of blinking, it all added up to mental anguish, he was hiding something that I'm certain only Carlos was aware of.

Sitting on the chair in the airport waiting for the thumbs up to board Dan's jet, my ring clinked against the metal arm rest next to me to the rhythm of the song now playing in Daniels ears. He was now out for the count, soft snores escaping his lips and as his chest fluctuated up and down in sync with his snores. It was my time to go home, back to Madrid, back to college, back to my so called family. Daniel agreed to fly with me as he was meeting a few of his friends there for a quick catch up before the race that weekend, everyone else already leaving Perth and heading straight for Azerbaijan. Before leaving Perth, Carlos informed me I was welcome to any race and just to give him a call if I fancied it, in which he continued to talk about how much he loved having me there and how he would miss me when I was gone, Charles standing mere inches from him as his head bounced up and down in an agreeing manner, resulting in Carlos to look at him with furrowed brows and a smirk on his face. Charles simply explained that having a different face around was refreshing, and that I had better chat than the rest of the group.

One thing I was excited to go home to was a new environment, one of the nights in Perth I'd had one too many to drink, as usual, allowing myself to spill all my feelings and anxieties about going home to mama, papa and Laia to Carlos while I cried hysterically buried in his arms. Luckily it was just me and him still up in the early hours of the morning so no one else heard my drunken moment of weakness. It was two days later that Carlos informed me he'd bought an apartment by the beach in Madrid and he wanted me to live there, even when he wasn't travelling, it took me several minutes to come to terms with his words, Lewis and Charles staring at me in suspense as words failed me, Carlos just sat with an amused, smug look on his face. I cried for 2 hours straight that night, not letting Carlos break free from my embrace for 15 minutes of it, letting my tears pool onto his T-shirt as they soaked through to his bare skin.