Faking it || Lando Norris LN

58

"Spiraling" wasn't enough of a strong word to describe what Lando was doing. His hands were always wrapped around the neck of a bottle or holding some girl's hips as he took her. It had never been this bad.

Lando had always been indulgent in his vices, but now he was free falling into them. He'd gotten used to the feeling of Olivia's hand inside his, so now, most hours of the day he would hold the neck of a bottle to keep his hands from fidgeting. Anxious hands taking a swig each time he remembered engulfing the warmth of her hand instead of the cold glass of alcohol. His hotel bedsheets always smelled of someone different, and his mood was always stormy when he woke up and found out the girl hadn't left.

He had also begun covering all the mirrors at his place.

At the start of the summer break, he would only avoid looking at his reflection, scared of what he would see. Lando had learned to avoid them after a poor result on track. Each time he looked in one of them, he'd catch glimpses of him after his worst losses. The first junior karting pole position he'd fumbled. The first race he hadn't finished. His first crash in Formula 1. The first time he'd gotten close to winning a race and fucking up.

Staring at himself after a loss automatically made him rewind each time he'd lost before, reminding him of all the heavy burdens on his shoulders that he'd never gotten close to letting go of. Moments where the floor had refused to hold him and brace his fall. Moments where the scorching feeling on Lando's skin threatened to incinerate him from the ground up.

And so, he had been avoiding mirrors for a while until he accidentally caught sight of himself in his bathroom.

But the dreadful tape with all his mistakes hadn't played before his eyes. It was him, just him, at this very moment. Anyone would've thought that he had finally healed, that the monsters in his brain had decided to stop haunting him. Lando knew it wasn't the case.

They were laughing at him, showing and reminding him what he already knew.

Olivia Reyes had been his biggest loss.

There was no need to torture him with anything else.

A chaotic frenzy ensued and took over him until, in a blink, he was at Adam's office, and... well, he still had to sort that out later.

If he was ever back to being sober enough to do it.

Now, even though he'd only been home for two days, the mirrors in his place were covered by bedsheets or messily taped pieces of newspaper.

The always-clean, always-white house didn't have a single mirror in plain sight. It was eerily contrasting, like fingernails scratching a chalkboard. The immense amount of daylight that came through the windows and bounced against the walls and furniture didn't stop the house from looking like someone had died inside. It gave Max goosebumps. As if he and Lando were roommates of his ghost, only he lived inside Lando.

The shadows on his face, usually only seen when he lost a race or when his dad made spontaneous appearances, now hung over his expression at all times. The loss was written all over his face but spelled in a dead tongue only a few people could read off Lando's skin.

Like a broken record, the same thoughts kept looping inside his mind, dark and twisted as they gathered around the only bit of light: the certainty that he could never hurt Olivia again. Lando knew he had been terrible for her and to her. Whatever kindness he'd gotten from her had been entirely undeserved. He was sure of it.

He also wasn't sure anyone could ever deserve Olivia, even though he'd tricked himself for a couple of months into thinking that maybe, just maybe, he could turn himself into the kind of man she deserved.