CAPACITY FOR WONDER. | alex albon

xxvi. i want you to find me

                                               The party had been as gentle as she had imagined, with nobody around her consuming anywhere near the amount of alcohol that they had at Lewis' party, namely Charlotte. But Juniper was glad that one thing remained similar between the two events.

That as she sat down at her name place, she found a word etched in calligraphy, Alex's calligraphy, on the other side of the paper. The name he had gifted her that changed so much lay there again, with a very happy Alex sitting proudly beside it.

"June? What an odd nickname." She mused gently with him, though he had no time to respond to her words as the chiming of cutlery against a raised glass rendered the audience silent, their eyes and their ears now instead trained on Seb.

He spoke as well as he always did, with as much positivity as people would've expected. Juniper remembered a time when Lilia had complained about the amount of negativity surrounding one of her favourite drivers. But Juniper could barely remember the previous year, let alone the response to a Formula One driver in 2010. Still, Juniper could not imagine a world that didn't appreciate the kindness of the man who stood in front of them now -- especially not as he made a comment about how happy he was to see so many smiling faces, where new faces seemed to make older ones smile wider. Juniper wouldn't have imagined this applied to her and Alex, but then he winked at them, Sebastian Vettel winked at them, and she knew exactly who he was talking about.

She even had to shift in her seat so she could face Alex properly now, a gentle whisper into his ear, "Did a four-time world champion just wink at us?"

"I do believe so." Alex mused, and he couldn't ignore his want to wrap his arm around her back and pull her to rest against his body. So he didn't, and her head gently rested against his chest now.

He hoped to any kind of God that she couldn't hear how fast his heart was beating.

"I need to show you something." He whispered now as their closer proximity made it easier, but he heard the same words echo out from her mouth too. If Seb wasn't still talking, his laugh would've been louder than the muffled sound that let itself out.

Alex felt like Seb had been speaking for hours, which he usually had no issue with, he usually quite enjoyed how much effort Seb put into these kinds of speeches. He always represented good causes too, there wasn't anything not to like about him -- except for the fact now he was talking for too long when Alex was itching to know what June had to show him too.

This meant that as soon as he deemed it socially acceptable he took June's hand and lead her outside, his ears spiking up at their names being mentioned in a conversation between Lando, George and Pierre.

"Alex has no idea." Pierre had said to them, catching Juniper's eye contact as he did.

She wasn't supposed to find out, obviously, that Alex had intended to give her a gift that day but Pierre had seen him buy it. Whilst their friendship wasn't presented as much, Alex and Pierre had talked at the party where Alex was waiting for her reply. Pierre recognised her name from the nickname in his phone, and if Alex wasn't buying that bracelet for Juniper -- he thought she deserved to know.

That's how she knew what he was going to give her that night, because she found the same brand box as the store Pierre had saw him in with her name attached to it.

Juniper didn't know this, but Alex had gotten help of his own from George and that was the part of the conversation he'd heard as they passed the trio to make their way outside.

"I've been wanting to give something to you for so long, but now felt like the best time. Now that there's no more secrets and now that a gift like this makes sense." He told her, situating themselves with one shoulder each against the wall. He was glad he was facing her as she opened it now, revealing a black leather bracelet that had a small pendant of etched wings attached.

"You, my June, have managed to do what Red Bull should've done. Even through everything, you've continued to try to give me my wings back without knowing they were missing."

"Wings might've been useful for the cliff jump." She mused, but he shook his head at her.

"I would take the plunge over and over again for you." He whispered to her now, holding up his wrist against hers to show her the same bracelet he had given her, but the pendant showing an angel without wings.

She smiled down at their wrists, "I knew you'd gotten me a piece of jewellery to give to me today, Alex, I have to admit it." She told him, but the frown on his face almost made her wish she hadn't.

"I promise, I didn't know what it was, and I think it's gorgeous." She recovered quickly as Pierre ran outside and handed her a box now, Alex turning around to see Lando and George also stood at the window looking out at them with no shame. "I need to borrow your phone."

He handed her it even though his confusion levels were higher than usual, going with the flow of what she needed to give him. She opened the box and attached a small circle to the back of the pendant, handing him his phone back after she tapped it against the new addition to her bracelet.

"I'm never gonna take this off, ever, and it does something else too." She told him before she allowed herself to take a deep breath, his hand finding its way into hers in that moment. "I'll make it more secure later, but for now, for all those times I disappear and don't want to be found - I do now, by you, and it'll send you where I am when I tap it, even when my phones dead or broken. because I want you to be the one to find me Alex, you have been the one to find me."

Alex had always been a sentimental person who thought he was relatively good with gift giving, but he had never thought about someone so much. He'd never had anyone think about him so much either.

He wasn't sure if Charlotte had told June about his breakdown months ago at the party, or if their month apart did as much for her as it did for him. But still, she had thought of him so deeply. It was like she had handed him a piece of herself -- having confided in him so many times that being off the grid made her feel safe and welcomed, that being where nobody could find her brought her a kind of peace she didn't recognise from anywhere else.

Juniper Maddox wasn't ready for her peace to be disrupted, which is why she shared what she did with Alex. He would never disrupt her, he calmed her to the core where so many people had commented on how she seemed to mellow when she was with him. He levelled her in so many ways that she couldn't even thank him for, even now as he stood their looking down at her, it really wasn't down.

June had been looked down on, by her mother, by her peers, yet even with the height difference, she had never been looked down on in a malicious way by Alex.

Their wrists formed to one and just as the pendants were supposed to fit together, she wondered if their hands were the same. She might've hated the cliché nature of her thought more if she had looked back up at Alex and he didn't have the look on his face that he did, the look that said he was thinking the exact same thing.

To Lando and to George and to Pierre, this gesture was sweet and heartwarming and every other adjective under the sun, but it wasn't to them what it was to Lex and June. Because "I want you to find me" was her way of saying for me, it's you -- and when he said he always would find her, he was uttering those words right back to her.