At first, when Max jolts awake, sitting bolt upright in his bed, he can't figure out why he such an overwhelming sense that he's forgotten something, but he's certain that whatever that something is, it's very important, if the state of overt panic burning a hole in his chest is anything to go by.
Sluggishly, pressing a hand to his head in an effort to ease the riot of thoughts shouting in chorus with one another, the volume inside his mind so deafening he can't even hear himself think, Max is glancing down at his phone, the blurry lines of the clock slowly coming into focus when it clicks.
The clock reads 10:30 am, which is a good three hours after your flight had landed and five hours after he'd supposed to have gotten up. He must have turned his alarm off in his sleep he thinks dazedly, swearing as he tears back his sheets, so consumed by the task of getting up, dressed and out the door as fast as is humanly possible, he doesn't even realize he's not alone until he's got both feet on the floor, and he hears a sharp intake of breath from the doorway to his bedroom.
Kaia had stayed at Daniel's last night, since it hadn't particularly been feasible to try and wrangle a toddler along with him this morning, and honestly, Max had desperately needed the night on his own, so he'd known who it would be standing there before he'd even looked up.
"Uh, good morning?" Max offers you a sheepish smile, trying not to wince when he finally forces himself to hold his head up high and meet your gaze.
"I- You-" you bluster wordlessly at him.
It's not until then that it even registers with Max that since he'd been home alone last night, he'd gone back to his old ways, which meant at present, he didn't have a lick of clothing on.
"Well... I guess Daniel will finally get his answer about which way it curves then, won't he?" Max doesn't know why he says it but he does.
"I-" you clap a hand over your eyes then, the motion so sudden it snaps him out of the same shock induced stupor you'd been experiencing, "it- um- curves to your left... right?"
"Yeah, yep, definitely, my left, yep."
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Thursday, September 13th, 2018- Singapore
Singapore Grand Prix, the Marina Bay Street Circuit- FIA Press Conference
The thing was, you had expected for the atmosphere in the apartment to be awkward, hell, you had quite entirely consigned yourself to the next few weeks to be stilted and uncomfortable, but you hadn't expected for the dynamic between Max and yourself to be- for lack of a better term- tense.
Kaia didn't give you any reason to think she'd picked up on the change that had struck, and while you hadn't really expected that she would, it still caught you a bit by surprise that the significant shift could escape anyone's notice, be they a two-year-old or not.
But perhaps you were just biased, perhaps your view of the situation, from a vantage point inside the eye of the hurricane, where the world around has gone still, the air thick enough to cut with a knife, the sky choked out, lost behind an ominous, opaque haze, perhaps, just perhaps, your perception of reality had become distorted.
It was absolutely inconceivable to accept, let alone believe it was all just in your head, not when, for the rest of Monday and well into the early hours of Tuesday, that same inescapable feeling remained, at such a level of excess that it was primed to hold out clean through Wednesday, all but guaranteed to continue through the remainder of the week, to spill over into Thursday with no end in sight.
