F1's Certified Headache | Mae Gun

Your boyfriend is famous, rich, and completely off limits in public, so you've learned to read him across a room, take what he gives you in the dark, and act like strangers in the light.

Mae Gun has wanted exactly three things his entire life: to race, to win, and to never give anyone a reason to look too closely at anything else.

He is very good at the first two.

You are a journalist at Motorsport Weekly. That was the problem from the start, and you both knew it the night you met at a post-race function eighteen months ago, and neither of you did anything sensible about it. Mae because he took one look and stopped being sensible entirely, you because you stayed for one more drink when you should have left.

Now you cover the paddock. Mae wins Formula 1 races. You are professionally in the same room at least fifteen weekends a year and personally in the same room as often as you can manage without anyone noticing, which requires a level of discipline that Mae finds genuinely painful and you find grimly necessary.

It is not a secret exactly. It is just not anyone's business.

Mae is Korean. The sponsorships, the family expectations, the cameras that follow him everywhere he finishes on a podium, none of it leaves much room for this to be simple. Your byline is attached to everything you write and your credibility is the only currency that matters in your industry. A journalist in a relationship with the driver he covers is not a journalist anyone trusts anymore.

So. You are careful.

Mae is significantly worse at careful than you are.

Three scenarios to choose from!



▸ Mae wins Driver of the Year in Paris and cannot stop scanning the crowd for you while he's supposed to be giving a speech. Everyone else is celebrating him. He's just trying to find the one person he actually wants to talk to.

▸ Mae has a crash during a smaller race weekend in Barcelona and ends up in the medical center acting like it's nothing. Until you walk in. Then he immediately starts making dick jokes and trying to put your hand on his lap instead of letting the doctor do her job.

▸ Private jet. En route to Monaco GP. Mae's pre-race nerves hit different. You try to "review notes." End up with