Chapter Text
Everything But a Lover
Chapter 2: Dry Lines
…
The Italian sun is not merciful. It turns the tarmac to a low hum and the air above it to a visible thought. The circuit is the kind that lives in calendars and childhoods: olive trees banked beyond the fencing, a tower with an analog clock that is always two minutes wrong, a paddock that smells like rubber dust and latte foam from the café that survives on mechanics and hope. Helmets glint on the workbenches like trophies or promises, depending on who you ask. The loudest language here is ambition; all the others have to commute.
They have made it to Europe exactly the way you would expect: a long list of small decisions disguised as fate. The mothers signed apartment leases in cities whose streets they’d only ever walked on Google Maps. They learned the names of mechanics and the names of cheeses in the same month. They stopped translating their jokes. They learned to love unfamiliar grocery stores and the cold tile echo of flats built a hundred years before karting invented a reason to move your child across an ocean.
All of it brings the boys to this: a junior grid under a noon that erases shadows, two karts nosed toward the line, marshals wearing fluorescent vests like plumage. There are twenty-seven kids who could be champions one day and two who will keep seeing each other at the front whether they plan to or not.
Mark has grown into his quiet. He wears Ardent Academy navy the way some boys wear uniforms they think will excuse them. He doesn’t need excuses. He has brought his neatness across continents: the way he tape-labels tires, the way he calculates chain wear by feel, the way he counts breaths in threes before a start. Korean sits comfortably in his mouth now; his English is still careful, as if it’s a violin he doesn’t want to tune in public. If you want to catch him off guard, say his surname properly. His eyes will go soft for half a second; then the edges return.
Hyuck has not grown into anything so much as sprinted ahead of it and dared it to catch up. Helios orange looks carnivorous on him, all clean lines and bright marketing. His English is better than it should be for a boy who likes to pretend he doesn’t need anything from anyone. When he says okay to a mechanic, the word sounds like an agreement he intends to amend later. When he switches to Korean at Mark, it’s weapon and shelter both. He believes corners will forgive him if he asks quickly and with conviction.
It is media day for juniors, which is to say a hot rectangle of shade behind the podium where a volunteer in a polo shirt insists pre-professionals talk like professionals. The friend group that will one day headline press conferences as adults exists here in its larval form: Jeno and Jaemin in red so flattering it borders on advertising fraud, Jaemin wearing sunglasses he pretends are medically necessary; Renjun and Chenle in papaya with matching smiles that imply conspiracy; Jisung and Sungchan in black, one boy careful and analytical, the other grinning like he hasn’t learned yet that cameras expect containment from their favorites. They are rivals in public, teammates in the group chat, future co-conspirators. They are also teenagers with sweaty hairlines and half-finished homework hidden under their flight cases.
“Say your name, academy, and your favorite corner,” the volunteer says, and the kids comply as if reciting a hymn.
“Jaemin—Ferrari Driver Academy, Turn 9. It’s rude and I respect that.” Jaemin smiles like a cat that knows where all the warm spots are.
“Jeno—also Ferrari. I like the first chicane because it’s a good way to make bad choices look brave.” Jeno’s grin is domestic; it looks like he forgot to bring a scowl and refuses to borrow one.
“Renjun—McLaren. The double-apex.” R’s voice is soft; the words have edges you could balance a setup sheet on.
“Chenle—also McLaren. I like the pit exit because Ji is always there to chase.” Chenle’s eyes cut to Ji, who flushes even on tanned summer skin.
“Jisung—Mercedes. The last corner. If I get it wrong I think about it all night.” He says it as a joke; it isn’t.
“Sungchan—also Mercedes. I like any corner Hyuck takes.” The table ruptures into laughter. Sungchan means it, which is why it works.
The volunteer turns to the two the cameras would have chosen anyway.
“Donghyuck—Helios,” Hyuck says, chin up just enough to register on broadcast if broadcast bothered with children. “Turn 7. It lets you lie and then punishes you for lying.”
“Mark Lee—Ardent,” Mark says, steady. “Turn 7. It’s not a lie if you can do it twice.”
There is a sound that isn’t quite a laugh from the assembled. The volunteer blinks between them like he has entered a conversation that began before he was born. Someone takes notes they won’t read later.
The practice sessions tell a predictable story in the sense that meteorology is predictable: everyone has a plan until a gust arrives. The circuit is sunny, the track is green, the kids are brave. Hyuck is purple in sector two straight away—his personal specialty is carrying speed into a place a coach would underline in red and say do not. Mark’s specialty is subtraction, again: shaving off inputs until the lap time is a proof and not an expression of intent. They end P1 and P2 in practice like a mirror held up to a future where motorsport will insist they invent personalities that fit in headlines.
Between sessions, language becomes another tool. The helmets come off; the accents shift to wherever they are most useful.
“Your line into seven is illegal,” Hyuck says in English, standing too close like he’s certain personal space can be negotiated by speed.
“Everything you do is illegal,” Mark replies.
Hyuck switches to Korean to make a point Mark will pretend not to feel: Then catch me properly.
Mark’s eyes flicker, translation a half step behind his understanding. “I will.” It comes out in English. It is a statement of policy, or desire, or both.
Jeno and Jaemin drift by, sharing a bottle of water like it’s a microphone. “This is going to be a thing, isn’t it,” Jaemin says to Jeno under his breath.
“It already is,” Jeno says, not looking away.
The second practice is tire work and a lesson in who respects track limits and who respects momentum. Renjun and Chenle take turns ghosting each other through the chicanes, identical helmets bobbing in unison, a drone shot waiting to happen. Jisung finds a tenth in a cleaner exit that he attributes to “changing my mind about myself,” which is something only a Mercedes rookie would think to say. Sungchan tries Hyuck’s Turn 7 line and slides so far wide he ends up on the astroturf and returns grinning, heart in his throat, thrilled to have lived.
Qualifying is when the adults begin paying attention. There are more polo shirts, more sunglasses, more quiet men with hands on hips and clipboards that mean nothing until the signatures they want arrive. There is a whisper that a Formula One driver’s junior coach might be in the paddock checking “pipeline health.” There is a whisper that one of the top academies will make a cut in the autumn. There are a dozen whispered futures with only a few seats in them.
Mark sits in the tent listening to his engine idle, eyes closed. He hums under his breath to time the revs, the way his father taught him before his father had to return to a job that didn’t have time zones on the wall. His mother ties his hair back with practiced, domestic precision. “Drink,” she says, and he does. She does not tell him to be careful because she knows careful only works if you’ve already earned it.
Hyuck sits on a tire stack between his engineer and his future. The engineer tells him the delta relative to his best, the tire pressures, the wind direction. The future sits under his skin, ready to argue with the present if it doesn’t move fast enough. His mother squeezes his shoulder once, then lets go like bravery is transferable by touch.
They go out in the same quali group, an inevitability disguised as logistics. The track is hotter now; the air feels like hard candy. Mark’s banker lap is neat, unsurprising, three green sectors and a time that will safely put him on the first two rows. Hyuck abandons his first lap with a hand-flip that suggests boredom; he is building heat in the tires like a baker preheats an oven. The second lap snaps purple at the first split, purple again at the second, and then bites him in the third when the rear asks for respect and he answers with charisma. He saves it, loses a tenth, still puts it on provisional pole.
On their in laps, Hyuck pulls alongside Mark and pulls the rev limiter for half a second—an audio version of sticking out his tongue. Mark shakes his head. He is smiling, and you would only know it if you recognized the way his eyes flatten when his mouth moves of its own accord.
Final runs. The track is grippy in the way that makes teenagers do math they can’t explain out loud. Mark goes early to find clean air, nails a sector two that reads like respect for geometry, and comes across the line two tenths up on Hyuck’s earlier time. Hyuck waits, because patience is showmanship when you decide it is, and launches with two minutes to spare. He threads traffic like an argument, takes Turn 7 in the way he described—let the corner lie to you and then tell the truth anyway—and finds a tenth Mark didn’t want to leave on the table.
They end split by 0.064 seconds, Hyuck first, Mark second, the rest of the grid learning the virtue of modesty. Cameras catch their karts parked nose to nose in the parc fermé bay like two animals deciding whether to be friends. The volunteer from media day looks like he wants to schedule an intervention into fate.
“Pole by a breath,” Hyuck says lightly as they climb out. He’s not panting; he’s incandescent.
“I’ll take the slip,” Mark replies, cool as a shadow.
“Try,” Hyuck says, smile hitting a lower, older gear. He leans in half an inch. “Catch me next time.”
Mark doesn’t flinch. “I intend to.” He doesn’t need to be fluent to understand the part that matters.
If you’re keeping a story, you could end the chapter here. But circuits, like feelings, demand a race.
Lights. A beat that they have learned to stretch like candy in their chests. Off. Hyuck launches just enough; Mark launches perfectly. The first chicane is patience squared; they survive it at the front because the boys behind them want to live. Jisung tucks into P3 and looks like he would happily write letters to his future self about the ethics of defending. The McLaren twins bother Ferrari through the middle sector, one papaya flashing to the other like turn signals.
Hyuck leads with the entitlement of a good start and a hotter banked tire. Mark sits in the slot with the entitlement of a boy who has mastered subtraction. They are not playing defense; they are composing. Hyuck’s lines are declarative. Mark’s are interrogative: is there more here? is there less?
Lap four: Mark is close enough to read the stitching in Hyuck’s glove through the shadow of the seat. The slipstream knits between them; the air makes deals with itself. He feints to the inside at the end of the straight to see if Hyuck will blink. Hyuck does not blink. He swings late to cover, clean, daring Mark to pick a different problem to solve.
Lap six: the first backmarker in a kart that looks like it wears hand-me-down parts and a dream. Hyuck clears him on the outside of the double-apex with a trust in strangers that would worry a mother. Mark waits one more beat and clears between corners, lifting for a breath to frontload the exit. He is not only chasing Hyuck; he is auditing him.
“He’s learning you,” Hyuck’s engineer says into the radio without urgency.
“He should,” Hyuck replies. “I’m interesting.” It’s bravado. It’s also true.
Lap eight: Mark’s front bumper kisses the air bubble off Hyuck’s rear just enough to loosen it. Hyuck lets the kart move under him and brings it back with a correction that would be invisible if you weren’t trained to see it. He tips his head in acknowledgment, a nod Mark feels more than sees.
Behind them, the race is chaos arranged in tiers. Jeno and Jaemin have made peace with papaya for the moment, running P5 and P6 and swapping so often a steward makes a note to check if team orders exist at this level. Chenle attempts a pass on Jisung that is equal parts math and flirtation; Jisung defends with the mortified competence of a boy who knows he will be teased in the chat later and refuses to supply additional material.
Lap ten: the tires complain. Not loudly, not yet, but enough for both boys to make the kind of compromises they will later call “driving within the window.” Hyuck adjusts his steering inputs as if he is playing for the camera that isn’t there; Mark adjusts his brake bias because he keeps a small notebook in his head for such things. The gap is three tenths. Then two.
Last lap. The olive trees stop moving because the wind wants a better angle. Hyuck goes deep into the first hairpin and gets away with it. Mark takes a cleaner exit and inherits physics. Down the back straight, he’s in the draft, close enough to taste rubber. The final complex is a question written in concrete: two corners that hate each other.
Hyuck covers the inside into the penultimate turn with the calm of a boy who has made his choice. Mark takes the outside—less distance, more trust—and tries to square for the final corner. Hyuck slows the kart in the middle to ruin Mark’s momentum and succeeds in everything except discouraging him. Their lines cross like signatures on a document neither of them has read carefully enough.
Out of the last turn, the exit is a drag race to the flag. The finish line is not as far away as it looks; that is true of many fatal mistakes and several good choices. Hyuck plants the rear, counts to one, and opens the wheel. Mark opens it a breath earlier and suffers no penalty. They thunder under the grandstand banner separated by a margin that will be measured in syllables by moms who’ve learned to stare at timing screens.
Hyuck wins by less than two kart lengths. Mark is second by an amount that hurts enough to make him walk taller to the scales. The friend group collapses around them in a circle of congratulation and gloating that has very little to do with finishing positions and everything to do with future dinners. Chenle declares the last sector “romantic.” Jaemin says, “Save it for the podium,” loudly enough that the volunteer smiles into his clipboard.
Parc fermé is ritual now. Hyuck knocks his knuckles once against Mark’s fairing. Mark raises an eyebrow—permission, invitation, acknowledgment. Hyuck steps in, closing the last inch of a distance that is educational and infuriating and addictive. “Caught me properly?” he asks, pure trouble in Korean.
“Almost.” Mark keeps his voice even. The word is its own plan.
The podium is local but enthusiastic: a wooden box painted red and white and green, a bottle of sparkling apple cider pretending to be champagne, a track official who practiced pronunciations in his car. Sungchan hollers from the fence, Jisung hides a smile, Jeno and Jaemin do their best to look unimpressed and fail.
Media scrum, such as it is, arrives with three microphones and a camera that might belong to a parent. “Are you rivals?” someone asks, fishing for the word that will sell the segment on Sunday TV. Hyuck says, “We’re fast,” in English. Mark says, “We’re still learning,” and looks at Hyuck while he does.
“Do you push each other?” another asks. Mark could answer with a list of adjustments; Hyuck could answer with a dare. The answers they give are cleaner than the ones they think.
“He’s annoying,” Hyuck says, voice dry. “It helps.”
“He’s loud,” Mark says, almost smiling. “It also helps.”
The volunteer corrals them for photos. The group ends up arranged by color because humans love patterns: red, papaya, silver, navy, black. The sun glances off the visors hung from their elbows. The photographer tries to coax teenage boys into sincerity and nearly succeeds.
“A little closer,” he says. He means the group. Hyuck interprets it personally. He leans into Mark’s space the way he does into air at 120 kph—so natural it looks like choreography. Mark doesn’t move away. The camera clicks.
“One smile, please,” the photographer begs in the global language of people trying to wring softness from youth on deadline.
Hyuck bumps Mark’s elbow with his own like a secret. “Don’t be a statue.”
Mark turns to look at him, not the lens, and the thing that has been clenched since they left Korea—rain, plastic barriers, the hiss of water on metal—loosens by a millimeter. He smiles by accident, not the polite version he brings to sponsor tents, but the unguarded one that makes the corners of his eyes try on boyhood again. The camera catches it because that’s what cameras are for.
Later, people will scroll past that photo and think it looks like a team-building exercise. They won’t see the tiny lean at Hyuck’s shoulder, the way Mark’s shoe is turned toward him, the millimeters that foretell miles. The narrator, who has learned not to argue with people scrolling too fast to find their own lives, will simply tell you this: they are practicing being seen together. They are very good at practice.
Evening falls like a concession. The paddock empties on a gradient: first the families with long drives, then the teams with tidy checklists, then the friend group, who forget to leave until someone in a polo shirt flicks a light switch pointedly. The mothers trade leftovers in Tupperware that will circulate the continent for the next five years. The boys linger within eyesight of one another, gravitating as if compelled by tires cut for wet the day doesn’t require anymore.
On the way out, Jaemin lifts his chin at Hyuck and Mark without stopping. “Dinner. All of us. If you don’t come, we’ll tell the internet you hate joy.”
“I do hate joy,” Mark says mildly.
“You love it,” Hyuck says, too soft for anyone else. Then, louder: “We’ll come.”
They do. There is pasta and a waiter who insists they’re famous and a collective decision not to correct him. There is Chenle stealing bites from Ji’s plate until Jisung arranges his silverware defensively and blushes at being noticed. There is Jeno ripping a paper napkin into a track map while Jaemin analyzes it like he’s on television. There is Sungchan attempting to toast in three languages and succeeding in one, which is enough.
Under the table, Mark’s phone buzzes with a message he won’t answer until later: a calendar invite from a scout for a different kind of future. Across from him, Hyuck taps his fork against his glass once, gently. Mark looks up. Hyuck tips his head toward the door, a motion that says fresh air without admitting anything else.
Outside, the night smells like basil and hot stone. The piazza drains slowly of teenagers and scooters and day. They stand side by side without touching because touching is a language they haven’t learned yet in public. They say nothing for a while, which is its own conversation.
“You smiled,” Hyuck says finally, low enough to avoid the need for translation.
“You made me.”
Hyuck huffs, pleased. “Good. Don’t wait for rain to be interesting.”
Mark looks at him like he is a corner that will forgive him if he asks quickly and with conviction. “I don’t.”
Back inside, the group leans in for a photo the waiter insists on taking. It looks like a tourism poster for a city that never needed one. Tomorrow there will be another session, another margin measured in syllables, another chance to practice being seen. Tonight there is cold water, warm food, and the kind of laughter that sounds like a starting light clicking down.
The narrator will let the camera drift up: the square, the table, the two boys at its center who are already orbiting each other on purpose, even if they will deny it for years. Dry lines. Clear air. The long season ahead.