Friday, November 16th, 2018- Milton Keynes, England, United Kingdom
Red Bull Racing Factory
"Grow a pair and fucking tell me, Verstappen," Max winces slightly at the escalating stress in your voice as you make your second demand for answer in as many seconds, in as many breaths. He avoids looking you in the eye, uncertain of whether or not he'd be able to handle the look he'd undoubtedly find on your face if he did.
"They want us to date- fake date," he'd never admit as much if anyone were ever to ask but Max had never actually intended for the explanation to come an end there, he'd had a whole host of things he'd meant to say but he'd lost his nerve and pussied out before he'd gotten far enough along in the process to do more than offer you a rudimentary, fragmented excuse of a sentence.
"Come again?"
"Well, it's just that I- we think it might be in everyone's best interest if the two of you-"
"Shut up. Stop talking. Right now," you give the order and it's obeyed, without hesitation or protest by Horner before Max even has the opportunity to process what you'd said and who you'd said it to, let alone to begin to try to fully comprehend the not unsubstantial shift in power dynamic that's just happened before his very eyes, "I'm sorry but I'm going to need you to stop there and say all of that again but this time, do it slower. Much, much slower
On any other day, in any other situation and under any other circumstance, even he would be hard pressed to get away with speaking to Christian Horner like you just have but, merely feeling grateful that he's not the sole focus of your anger any longer, Max elects not to further aggravate the already precarious scene by doing something so idiotic as to point this fact out to you.
Plus, it hardly feels like his place to when the man in question has quite clearly taken no offense to your insubordinate tone, nor to your venom lace words, as Max had half thought the team manager would, and has instead remained impervious as he sits placidly before you, both hands crossed neatly on the desk in front of him, his face betraying nothing, his features arranged into an impassive, inscrutable mask.
Horner looks entirely unfazed by your reaction, as if he'd been expecting this, like he'd called this meeting knowing full well what his hail Mary of a scheme would bring to his door, and that was not something that you seemed to particularly care for, even in the slightest, as far as Max could tell, if what little he could glean from your expression was anything to go by.
So, it didn't take much for Max to consider evidence available and take the next most logical step forward in your train of thought, which told him two things: Firstly, it was blatantly obvious to all parties present that Christian was painfully aware that what he'd asked of the two of you was not only a farfetched, borderline unfathomable request but it was a dangerously shortsighted, perilously flawed plan.
Secondly, and perhaps more predictably, the elder man hadn't let any of that hold him back, let alone to stop him altogether, because he cared about the particulars of what he was requesting about as much as he did about all the potential real-world repercussions this arrangement stood to have on your life, on Kaia's life, on Max's own life in the long term– which was fucking not at all.
Not that he had any right to judge here, since he'd readily sacrificed what little moral high ground he still laid claim to the very same moment that he'd been offered small stakes in this unscrupulous little game that Horner and Marko had created out of necessity, and which they now proposed playing in their delusion.
But, the ethics of this whole charade aside, at present Max was of the genuine opinion that this whole thing could actually work in practice as it did in theory, convinced as he was that people would buy into the lies that Red bull was trying to sell them since many of the same individuals had already come to similar conclusions when no one, save perhaps himself, had had any such goal in mind.
