The training had worked. His fist banged against the door so hard that he thought that at some point either it would break or someone living in a neighbouring apartment would have to come and check on the situation. The vibrations echoed back through the door to his hand as his head now connected lightly with the door too.
"June, if you're in there, I just want to talk." Though what he was saying was true, his words held no emotion, his expression no less than casual -- nowhere near as pleading or defeated as it had been when he was met with the indifference of emptiness behind the door every day for a week.
Nico's face emerged from the opposite side of the hall. "Again, kid? She's not here," he told Alex, just like he had the past 6 days. Nico had been nicer on the first day he saw Alex at Juniper's, and to him, this was important to note. "Give her a week."
"Maybe you're right."
"You listen to my advice on the 6th day?"
"Apparently so." Alex let out as he walked down the corridor he had gotten too familiar with for all the wrong reasons.
He didn't usually dwell on the 'What If's?' because his 2020 season had proved to him that there was no point, it didn't happen so it didn't need the extra thought. But Juniper wasn't a track, or a car, or a team, or another driver, so whilst there was a lot of questions he could ask of her and overthink about, there shouldn't have been much use for it. She wasn't a strategy, not the racing kind at least, and the thoughts never provided a logical answer.
Yet, Alex knew he would've shown up to try and find her again if he didn't have George's birthday present to figure out. It was almost surreal when he thought about it, as it meant February had already arrived -- he had met Juniper in January. There she was again, the person he could somehow link to everything.
Ceilings, the mutual friend who introduced the two of them, or architectural artistry, their initial conversation piece. His list continued even still; Monaco, hills, wonder, nicknames, sunsets, depletion in and of itself.
Her absence shouldn't have felt as foreign as it did, he hadn't even known her name the previous year though he found he had seen her face in multiple posts from Charles and Charlotte. But, he wanted their communication back all the same.
Still, George's present. Priority. Words he'd repeat as many times as it took to convince himself that what he was saying was true.
+
Four days of torture. All for George. All for Lando's retrospectively stupid plan. (It was dumb from the beginning, Carlos had told Alex eventually, I just didn't have the heart to tell him.) The four of them had travelled through Europe, picking up different drivers along the way -- Charles from Monaco, Max from the Redbull Ring in Austria, Mick from Germany, Pierre from France, both of them from places that Lando had no chance of pronouncing.
Eventually, they had ended up in Italy, the final destination of their trip. Everybody knew why too, and if George knew, he was playing along very convincingly as his face twisted into shock as they pilled out of the cars they'd driven cross-country. Alex wasn't sure if his reaction was to the place or the people, though this was George, and he knew George.
It was the people.
Many other drivers, current and past, people who George knew from home, his family and his friends, anybody who George had ever deemed important had shown up. He hadn't celebrated his birthday much for as long as Alex had known him, that just wasn't who he was.
They spared him the embarrassment of forcing him around a table to sing happy birthday and blow out his candles, instead, leaving him with his girlfriend who Lando later swore had said George was in serious need of a shower. It was probably true of all of them, and he knew it was true of Charles as Charlotte pulled a face at him whilst an attempted hug went her way.
Her expression eased slightly as she glanced over to Alex now, but he reeled in the awkwardness of his question the last time he had seen her. It wasn't necessarily that he had asked anything wrong of her -- he hadn't, but the way he acted wasn't how he carried himself usually. So whilst he tried to reaffirm that it didn't really matter what Charlotte thought anyway, her presence reentered his mind. She's Charlotte's best friend, of course, it matters what Charlotte thinks, in such a condescending tone that Alex thought the last time he heard it was probably from his mother as a child.
He needed a shower, and a change of clothes, and quite possibly a drink.
The place was incredible, the bedroom he had been shown to by one of George's relatives was nothing less than what was presented from the outside. The view too; Monaco was undoubtedly otherworldly but in its own right, the coast of Italy where the villa lie was as well. The scenery and the paintings hung on the bathroom walls encapsulated his mind until his entry out of the shower had been less tranquil as he might've liked. The clothes he had laid out on the chair remained untouched but a bag had been hastily pushed into the gap underneath the bed.
His face twisted harshly, he could almost hear his sister's teasing of how this act alone would cause wrinkles. It was obvious the room was occupied by him, his suitcase on the bed and the consistent sound of the shower running as the person had thrown their bag away would've been impossibly hard to miss.
Apparently, Alex had chosen that very moment to be a good time to get over the awkwardness he exuded no less than 30 minutes ago when his glance had momentarily met Charlotte's. Even as he made his way over to her, his second thoughts never occurred - it wasn't that she made him like that, though she probably made him like that.
It was probably for his own good that Charlotte noticed his entrance, saving him from any embarrassment a question in front of the group she was previously conversing with could cause.
"What question of mystery can I answer this time?" She reacted before he did.
"This thing a room share?"
She laughed, though Alex couldn't figure out what she had found so funny, it was a question -- a good one at that. "Yes, this thing a room share." She repeated back to him, the mirror of his words now emulating why she'd laughed.
"How did you even find it? Someone said you had a big hand in all of this."
Charlotte shook her head now, but Charles had always said she was modest, so even as he pushed her to tell him how she'd found it without being so humble, she shook her head firmly. "I didn't find it, Alex. She did."
The moment replayed in his mind, his palms growing in heat as his cheeks did the same, that's how he reacted when he saw her in Monaco with Charlotte, stood in the same way he and Charlotte were now -- a cruel rendition of role reversal.
"June." He mumbled, but his words crumbled as they left his lips, breaking away into nothingness as the sound barely reached his own ears. She hadn't tapped on his shoulder like he had that day in Monaco, she didn't need to. The look in Charlotte's eyes was recognisable enough, he'd seen it himself -- he'd noticed her give that look to Juniper before, and there it was again being aimed behind him.
In a moment of sentient cruelty, whereby she was there but he couldn't yet tell to what extent, he turned around to face her now. His lips turning into a shape he didn't recognise the shape of, unable to tell whether he'd never smiled so wide or frowned so deeply.
"Surprise," She said, as if this was her plan all along, "Where does your wonder fall on the scale tonight?"
And as much as he wanted to shout that his wonder didn't matter and that all he wanted to know was where she had been and why she ignored so many of his texts and how she had gotten here, and still, how she even found this place, his shoulders shrugged and he was as laid back as ever.
"Where were you aiming for it to be?"
YOU ARE READING
CAPACITY FOR WONDER. | alex albon
Fanfiction"every time you try to fill the other with wonder, you give a piece of yourself to them, with how you attempt to do so." (IN WHICH!) june maddox decides to teach alex albon there is more wonder in life than ju...
