CAPACITY FOR WONDER. | alex albon

vi. time flies when you're having fun

Thinking back on it, he wouldn't have needed to answer to Max's irritated tone if he had just answered Christian's first phone call.

At this point, Christian Horner was like an ex-partner to Alex. The kind all of his friends urged him to block because the chances of a phone call after the end were never bound to be good. It wasn't like Christian was the reason for his certain downfall, Alex could take his defeats and his mistakes in his stride, especially when in comparison, these mistakes meant nothing.

"Why have a phone if you're not going to answer it?" Max's voice choked out through the phone.

"Mate, you sound like shit," Alex responded, biting his tongue as soon as he had - he never was sure if, in this instance, he did this out of fear or bottled laughter. "Also, I answered you the first time."

"I've got the flu or something, it's not important, I need you to cover the tests I'm supposed to do."

The pair had gone back and forth, to the point where Alex wasn't even sure how they'd managed as teammates for so long. He wasn't even sure why he was arguing when weeks ago, he would've killed for an opportunity to get back in an F1 car - might even have coughed in Max's direction. Alex supposed his impending plans with June plagued his will to agree, and yet the way Max phrased things, he couldn't help but throw his phone back down on his bed and prepare to head to Austria. He'd been in such a rush for a mad couple of hours that the faint buzzing of his phone never registered to his ears, the sound going unheard.

Naturally, if Alex didn't reply she'd assume he was at work or with some other friends, maybe even with Charles, but it didn't go unregistered that they had intended to meet up - by her calculations - 48 minutes ago. She tried one more time but was met with the same droning ringtone that he had obviously set to the default response, another outgoing call leaving her phone with a different destination.

"No, Juniper, I still don't have the shoes you wanted this morning."

"You think I'm still on that?"

A shuffle came from the other side of the phone and Juniper couldn't help but assume Charlotte was checking something on her phone whilst hopefully clambering out of her bed, despite midday having well passed.

"I thought you were with Alex? Why are you calling me?"

"I'm supposed to be, apparently he's a no-show." The nondescript noise met Charlotte's ears now as Juniper shifted to be seated, an uncomfortable huff breezing through her lips. "Do you know where he is?"

Charlotte scoffed slightly, and Juniper knew it meant exactly two things with no question about it. The noise conveyed the general disparity in Juniper believing that Charlotte would've been keeping track of Alex for her friend, but it also told Juniper that she had been keeping track -- and even if she hadn't, it wouldn't have been hard to start.

She wasn't even sure if mere moments had passed before Charlotte met her with a response. "You're being serious? He hasn't told you where he is because this is kind of big for him, not even just him, this is big for Re-"

"I swear, if you're about to say something about his job, I don't want to know." She cut off hastily before Charlotte ended the entire call. A frown ran its way across her face, tugging at lines next to her eyes, followed by a grateful smile as Charlotte's FaceTime request appeared.

The look on her face couldn't have been described as anything less than utter confusion, the lines near her eyes running deeper than Junipers had.

"You've spent this much time with him and you don't know what he does?"

"You make it sound like his career is bad like he's a criminal or something."

"You're so oblivious," Charlotte stated followed by a repeat of the sound she had heard too much in the space of a minute, the end of her call.