carp

haymaker

2026-03-03T04:20:02Z

Haymaker

Summary:

They ask: George, have you spoken to Toto yet?

“No,” she says, and stops speaking to the media.

GeorgeToto with girl!George. Set after Imola 2021. Nastiness ahead.

Word count: 2953

Rated: E

Part 1 of my f1 rule 63!verse

The media latches onto George after the race, eager to catch her with her foot in her mouth as many times as she’s willing to put it there.

They ask: George, are you alright? And: what happened? And: what went through your mind during the crash?

She says, “Ridiculous, a Mercedes driver defending like that for P9… perhaps if it was another driver, he wouldn’t have.”

They ask: George, do you believe Valtteri would have let you pass safely, were you not in line for his seat next season? And: For clarification: are you suggesting there was more to the incident?

She falls into the trap swiftly and without protest. She says, “Well, you’d have to ask him that. But in my experience, the male ego can be a fragile thing.”

They ask: George, have you spoken to Toto yet?

“No,” she says, and stops speaking to the media.

Two long processions of motorhomes line the pavement, one led by Mercedes, the other by Red Bull, intimidation and sophistication and excellence. Each subsequent team drifts farther and farther away from the standards they set.

Then, at the sorry end: Williams Racing, more distant from the front than any team George doesn’t drive for.

Charles is standing in a window on the second floor of Ferrari hospitality when George passes by. She’s talking to a member of her team, both in full rosso corsa, her eyes flickering down to meet George’s for a split second. Charles doesn’t hold her gaze, though George doesn’t expect her to. There isn’t much camaraderie between the two of them, nor with Max. They’re civil in public, friendly when they’re pushed into doing media together, but that’s it. Nothing binds the three of them together beyond a gender that has never done any of them any favours in their line of work, no matter what the rags report or Instagram comments say.

Charles and Max resent her, George thinks, because she knows how to make men respect her. Especially older men. Men her father’s age—men Toto’s age—are easy. Younger men are a bit harder. Girls her age are the hardest of all, but they don’t decide if she has a seat next year, do they.

But. Well. Is anyone really easy?

After the final team debrief, George sits in her driver room and waits.

The commotion of a team breaking down their motorhome leaks through the thin walls. Heavy footsteps. Boxes dropped on top of one another with a dull thud. Phones ringing, pagers beeping, voices calling for lifting assistance on a heavy parcel. All cogs in a well-oiled machine, because they have to be. There’s much to do and no one in Formula One waits for anything.

No one bothers George.

The last moments of her race play on repeat in her mind. Right in front of her, Lewis slides into the gravel trap. The engine hums at her back, its drone rising as she gains on Valtteri. James’ voice, tinny in her ear, tells her she’s faster.

She’d been thinking about overtaking Valtteri since qualifying yesterday. People would talk about her afterwards – the future of Mercedes, the woman who pushed a Williams past the driver whose seat she deserved. Toto would find her, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth as he congratulated her on the points. Added something about the faith he always had in her. And George would let him do whatever he wanted to her.

But it doesn’t go like that. Tyre strikes grass and Williams strikes Mercedes, and George strikes a wall and then another wall. Her race ends with two cars smashed to bits and smoking in the wet grass. No points, again. George Russell 0, for the third year in a row. Then it starts again: Lewis, the gravel trap, Valterri, James, the crash.

They’re flying home together, her and Toto. Weeks ago he’d invited her onto his chartered flight. Assuming the offer still stands, he’ll have things to say to her tonight. Many things. The whole world knows she’s in for a reaming.

Alone in her driver room, George digs her front teeth into the soft skin of her thumb and presses her legs together. She’s still wet, and has been since the crash.

Toto is right next to her, from the paddock to the helicopter to the tarmac, close enough for their shoulders to touch, and the entire time he doesn’t acknowledge her at all.

She feels his indifference keen as any blow. It drains her of any anger that might have lingered from the crash and leaves her tired and sad and dreading what’s to come, like a small child picking herself off the ground after a tantrum. She doesn’t like it when he’s cold to her. He’s unpredictable, like this. She prefers his anger hot and explosive, quick to come but quick to end.

“The aft cabin, George,” Toto says to her, finally, after they board. He nods at the small, enclosed room at the back of the plane.

George’s heart leaps into her throat. “Yes, fine,” she says as though she has any choice but to follow him back there and sit on the divan obediently, her ankles crossed and face calm and neutral as he slides the door shut.

He turns to her and, this close and in the quiet for the first time all day, she can see he’s barely keeping himself at bay.

All at once she feels the need to get the first word in.

“I know what I did,” she says. “You don’t have to tell me.”

It’s wasted words. They both know he’s going to tell her anyway.

“What were you thinking, George,” Toto says, a statement. “Tell me, really. Without all of the bullshit this time, please.”

She avoids his eyes. “I was thinking that I was in a Williams, going faster than your Mercedes. And I had the right to overtake. And….”

George shrugs.

“Yes, that would have been very nice for you if you did overtake,” Toto says.

Toto’s still on his feet, towering over her. The plane will start taxiing soon. Usually the flight attendant would knock on the door and ask them to take their seats for liftoff. No interruptions have come as of yet. George wouldn’t want to intrude on this, either.

“But you failed. You crashed, and cost two drivers their weekend.”

“If Valtteri had left me the room—” George starts, but Toto flashes his hand, and she clamps her mouth shut.

“No bullshit, George!” Toto says, exasperated.

George slumps back against the divan, arms crossed tightly against her chest. “What would you have me do? Stay behind him for thirty more laps? Hand over two sodding points to Valtteri, who doesn’t need them and isn’t my bloody teammate— because I might drive for Mercedes next year, if you’ve decided that three years in shit cars is enough?”

“No one is asking you to do this, no one is asking you to give up anything, or to—”

Toto’s words stop abruptly at the sound of a knock on the door. He gives George a stern look like she herself caused the disturbance and slides it open.

It’s the flight attendant, who undoubtedly feels the tension between George and Toto when she pokes her head inside the cabin. She looks like she’s considering asking them to relocate to the main cabin where the chairs have seatbelts—George has taken enough flights to know this is undoubtedly what she’s been sent back here to do—but instead she just requests that they at least sit while the plane takes off.

Toto crosses his arms and sits down on the divan next to George. The flight attendant nods gratefully and shuts the door behind her.

George would feel bad for her, if she weren’t feeling so bad for herself.

All is silent as the plane pulls onto the runway and starts to ascend.

Once they’re comfortably in the air, the climbing altitude pressing in on George’s ears, Toto picks up right where he left off. “All we ask is that you think” —Toto jabs a finger into his temple, angling his body towards her— “before taking risks when a Mercedes is involved.”

“I know that,” George says softly, digging her fingernails into her arms.

“Do you know?” Toto asks. “Because you sounded like you knew nothing at all when you were talking to the media today. You sounded like a spoiled child, completely unwilling to take responsibility when you made a mistake. Do you care at all—”

“Of course I care, what kind of—”

“—how what you said made everyone else look?”

How it made him look, George hears below his words, but she keeps that to herself.

“Everyone complains to the media about everything, Toto, I hardly think that makes me— I mean, listen to bloody Lewis or Max or—”

Toto scoffs loudly. “Lewis would not turn an accident he caused into a crusade, George, so don’t start thinking you compare to him. Do you ever see Max Verstappen whining to the media like a stupid little girl? Do you really think you are more hated than her?”

Toto’s eyes are fixed on her now, boring into her from mere inches away, claustrophobic. There’s none of the coldness he’d shown her on their way here. The fire in his gaze is a painful comfort, the broken-glass stab of holding frozen palms over a fire.

It feels good, to stoke the flames of his anger. Perhaps that’s why she’s fighting so hard. Since the crash she’s felt so alone, boxed in on all sides and then abandoned. A part of her craves the final blow, the intimacy of it, and needs Toto to be the one to deliver the punch. She wants him to knock her down to the floor, because then he’ll be the one to pick her up.

“Well, I apologise that my struggles are so embarrassing for you,” George says, her voice becoming shrill, her eyes stinging. “Next time, I’ll shut up and play nice like a good girl.”

When Toto speaks again, he’s quiet and cuts with a knife. “You are only embarrassing yourself, George.”

George starts to cry.

Her emotions often spill over like this. She can’t help it and hates that it happens. Max and Charles are certainly not so pathetic. Sometimes she wishes she could be distant and uncaring like Max, who probably never cries. Or as beautiful and tragic as Charles, who George imagines cries only at the most noble moments, and looks regal with tears in her eyes.

George cannot picture either of them like this: eyes cloudy and red-rimmed, snot dripping from her nose into her mouth and onto her shirt, her face twisted and hideous.

Toto doesn’t like when she gets emotional. He’d rather talk over her tears, or pretend to be busy until they stop. Or he leaves. George doesn’t judge him for his discomfort; she knows what his childhood was like, understands that his life held little room to accommodate such grotesque expressions of emotion, not with his dead father and working mother, the little sister he had to watch out for.

George’s father has always been the same. These men know what George is capable of. They know she doesn’t need to be coddled.

Toto takes out his phone and goes through his email. He opens WhatsApp once or twice and responds to a few messages as George attempts to calm herself.

“Sometimes,” George says when she finally stops crying enough to speak, though her words still waver in her throat, “it’s like they want me to fail. They’re excited by it.”

Toto barely looks up. “Who?”

George sniffs, runs a finger under her nose. “Everyone.”

“Of course they do.”

Toto pockets his phone. He gets up and ducks into the small toilet next to them, returning with a handful of tissue. He hands it to George, and she takes it, gratefully, and wipes her eyes and nose clean.

“Then don’t fail,” says Toto.

When he sits down, he’s closer to her than he was before. Their thighs touch. She leans into his side, relaxing into the warmth from his abdomen, the smell of his cologne. Toto puts a hand on her back.

“I’ll apologise tomorrow,” George tells him. “Publicly, and to Valtteri.”

This is what he’s wanted her to say since they stepped onto the plane, and she’s known it the entire time. It means more now, though. He’ll feel like he earned her cooperation, now.

George continues, “Whatever you think I need to do to be better, I’ll do it. You know that I will.”

“Of course you will,” Toto says. “If I didn’t think you were capable of meeting my expectations, I would not bother with you at all.”

The approval in his voice cuts relief straight into George’s veins, running down her spine to the tips of her toes.

George leans her head onto his shoulder and then slowly nuzzles her nose into his neck. She stays there for a minute, feeling him breathe. Breathing him in herself. She likes that her body folds into his so easily. Not many men could make her feel like he does; delicate, her angles softened, their roles clearly defined.

“Toto,” she whispers into his neck, dropping her hand to rest on his groin. “Can I…?”

She runs her thumb over the lump of his cock through the knit fabric of his chinos.

Toto sighs. “George, we have more to discuss.”

George keeps drawing circles. His cock twitches under her thumb.

“Please,” she says, and when his legs nudge open, she knows that means yes.

George gets on the floor between his thighs. She pulls his cock out of his trousers swiftly. At this she’s practised. It sits in her palm, flaccid, until her mouth brings him to life.

His hand settles around the back of her neck and his eyes steady on the plane’s ceiling as she takes him in, sucking around the pink head of his cock. He’s mostly quiet. There’s people not so far on the other side of the door. But she knows this is what he likes. Because she knows what he likes, he will let her take from him what she needs.

“Good, George,” says Toto, tightening his grip on her neck as he grows closer, his fingers catching on her hair and pulling that, too. Her cunt throbs. “Good girl.”

He comes in her mouth after a pretty long while, and then pulls her onto his lap.

“Relax,” he says, unbuttoning her trousers.

His cock is still out, a limp thing between his thighs. She can feel it underneath her and wishes for only a second she had waited to make him come until she had the chance to feel it inside her. It’s been weeks since he’s fucked her properly, and she’s been gagging for it since the last time.

Toto slips a hand down into her pants, sliding his fingers through her labia and into her. She sighs in relief. He told her once, on one of his more affectionate days, that he liked how tiny her cunt was, barely there between her legs, all of her able to fit into his mouth at once. She loved hearing that, loved thinking about herself as something that he could easily hold in the palm of his hand.

“Been so wet for you all day,” George pants into Toto’s clavicle, grinding down on his hand, doing most of the work herself. “I wanted— after, I thought you wouldn’t— ah!— you—”

“Sh,” Toto says. “Quiet, or we will need to stop.”

She nods and digs her teeth into the shoulder of his shirt, an unbranded white dress shirt, his team shirt stripped off soon before he’d left the paddock. It doesn’t take long for her to come, much quicker than it took him. Her body trembles through the orgasm, his fingers still firmly pressed up inside her where her cunt stutters around them.

The second he pulls his hand free, while she’s still catching her breath and trying to regain coherence, he tells her, “I think you should come to the factory soon. You will learn a lot from the mechanics and engineers there.”

He wants her to witness the fallout of her crash with Valtteri, to put names and faces to the people whose hard work she washed away with one tiny error in judgement.

George pulls her back straight. “Yes,” she says. “Whatever you need me to do.”

“It will be good. You will need a positive relationship with them when you work together.”

“You still plan to promote me,” George says, and then jokes weakly, “I thought I was only here because I’m an easy shag.”

Toto rolls his eyes. “There is nothing easy about you,” he says, and she finds it in herself to let out a small laugh.

Then his mouth presses into a thin line. After the smallest hesitation, he puts both hands on either side of her face and brings her close. They’re close enough that she can feel his breath on her lips, though he doesn’t close the distance and kiss her.

“You know that I’m hardest on the ones I care about most,” he says.

For the smallest of moments, George loves him and is sure he loves her, too. The moment fades, but she’ll remember it existed, and maybe that’s enough.

“I know,” she says, feeling as close to him as she ever has.

comments

this is the gift

2026-03-03T04:16:38Z

this is the gift

summary:

“Ok, sure. So you, like, tripped and snuck into my motorhome to run your grubby little hands all over my G-strings on accident. Yeah?”

“Please don’t tell my dad,” Max says.

tags: forced feminization ; under-negotiated kink ; chastity devices; humiliation kink ; crossdressing ; transmisogyny ; unhealthy relationships ; female daniel ricciardo ; rule 63

word count: 12,603

rated: e

author note: as i said on tumblr, i wrote this fic with one hand on my dick and one hand on Andrea Long Chu’s Females, which you should read. title inspiration from Torrey Peters’s “The Masker,” a short story about sissies which you should definitely read.

much love to ezra for being my #1 cheerleader for this wip. i also cannot believe how far down the maxiel forcefem rabbit hole i fell. and infinite thanks to nic and raph for aussiepicking daniel, encouraging stoinis’s minor appearance in this fic LOL. luv u guys forever and ever 💕💕💕💕

please heed the tags, in particular re: under-negotiated kink, unhealthy relationships, and transmisogyny. these characters are not good, informed people engaging in healthy kink and gender play and should not be read as such.

“Why can’t I just let my crossdressing be a fetish? What if I was just unashamed of it, and let it be a small, contained, but important part of my life? What if I just owned it? If I told my friends—hey, this is something I like and do alone—same as anything they’re into. Why does my particular fetish have to take such precedence that I change my whole life, my whole body, just to accord with it? Why can’t it be a gift just as it is?”

Torrey Peters, “The Masker”

The first sign is so bloody obvious, Daniel will kick herself later on for not catching it right away.

It’s Wednesday at Spa. By way of a cancelled interview, Daniel has been granted the luxury of returning to her motorhome early. One man’s hospitalisation-worthy food poisoning is another woman’s extra hour of free time to spend with her vibe held to her clit, or however the saying goes.

She walks to her personal quarters in a daze, still half out of it from the truly debaucherous summer break she’s just spent in LA, already mentally queuing up what video she’s going to search for the moment she gets to her bed when she finally gets in sight of her bedroom, only to find the door ajar.

Her first thought is that one of her sneaky little friends is there to prank her. Put rotten fish in her shoes, or sand in her sheets, or something equally nasty and inconvenient. Her second thought is that the grid girl she fucked and then ghosted in May has finally made good on her promise to surprise Daniel naked in bed. The third thought, this one much more urgent than the others, is that someone has snuck into her room to axe murder her.

Keen to avoid any untimely murder when she hasn’t even won her first WDC yet, Daniel whacks her door so its hinges fly open and it slams against the wall.

That’s when she finds the fucking kid with his hands in her underwear drawer.

Max yanks back his hand like a child touching a hot stove, his face flushing bright red in an instant, and freezes. A few pairs of underwear go flying, one landing on her bed, another hitting Max in the face before dropping to his feet.

Daniel presses a hand to her chest to calm her pounding heart. “What the fuck, Max. Warn a cunt next time, Jesus. I thought I was about to get serial killed.”

“It is not— I am only—“ Max swallows and looks like he’s going to get sick. “It was an accident.”

Heart attack avoided (for now), Daniel closes her bedroom door (you never know who’s listening), snorting. “Ok, sure. So you, like, tripped and snuck into my motorhome to run your grubby little hands all over my G-strings on accident. Yeah?”

“Please don’t tell my dad,” Max says, sounding like he’s actually going to start crying, Jesus Christ, and effectively ruining any fun to be had for playing with him.

Daniel feels a pang of pity for the sad little teenager in front of her. Not like he’s the first little perv to try and get a sneak peak at her intimates. Honestly, Daniel’s flattered. She’s been starting to wonder about Max, if there was something weird about him. Beyond the obvious savant shit of course.

But turns out even Max Verstappen is capable of regular teenage depravity after all. If Daniel gets Max’s prepubescent little dick hard, she’ll take it as a compliment.

“Fuck it. Take the undies, I don’t care,” Daniel tells him with a broad grin that Max pointedly does not return. “Usually go without them most days anyway.”

She grabs the pair from her bed and shoves them into his hands. He lets them drop to the floor with the other pair and shakes his head, backing away from her towards the door.

“Go on, take them,” says Daniel, laughing in a way she hopes conveys how much she doesn’t give a shit about this, about anything. “Probably look better on you than me, right?"

The look Max fixes on her is one of pure stunned terror. It’s an emotion Max has never worn in front of Daniel, and one Daniel suspects few people who didn’t give Max their Y chromosome are privy to. Taken aback and uncomfortable, Daniel stops trying to wrestle the underwear into his hands.

Max takes the chance to dart out of her bedroom, slamming the door behind him in his wake.

Max avoids Daniel’s eyes for a few weeks, but other than that Daniel doesn’t read into it. Really she doesn’t think about it at all.

She doesn’t think about it until she’s given a really, really good reason.

In Austin, the model Daniel ghosted in May makes an eleventh hour appearance in the season and materialises naked in her hotel room. Qualifying is less than twelve hours away but Daniel fucks her all night long. It’s probably just what she needs, she figures as the model buries her face in Daniel’s cunt. What fucking use is sleep when you can come six times in two hours?

There’s some downtime between Daniel’s fifth and sixth orgasm of the night. Covered in a thin sheen of sweat and out of breath, Daniel flops back against her mattress and asks the model if she has any juicy paddock gossip.

The grid girls are the fucking best for that shit. Literally tapped into the grapevine.

When the model bites her lip and really reconsiders spilling, Daniel knows it’s going to be fucking good.

“You didn’t hear this from me,” she says to start. “It’s about your teammate.”

Daniel perks right the fuck up. Suddenly full of energy, she sits straight up, eyes blown wide, and brow near her hairline. “Holy shit. Max? Tell me now, oh my god.”

And the model does. One of her friends had slept with Max, she says, a few months before— around the time Daniel had found him in her bedroom. He’d been pretty nice when she was first trying to get him to take her home from the club, like a little nervous maybe but he wasn’t even nineteen then so who could blame him? But then when he did take her home things got really weird. Weird enough that the model’s friend left before either of them came.

“Weird how?” Daniel says urgently. Good gossip is like crack: the euphoria and the immediate need for a more complete high. And right now Daniel’s tweaking.

“Well…,” the model says.

Well, Max wasn’t hard and he couldn’t get hard. Which was a problem, obviously, because sex. He was nice: the model’s friend kept saying that, how nice he was being to her. He ate her pussy for a long time and didn’t mention the little problem down below. So the model’s friend didn’t say anything either.

Then when they were both properly in the nuddy, Max got really quiet and said that if she wanted him to fuck her, he could try on her bra and underwear. He said it like that, like it wouldn’t happen otherwise.

So the model’s friend left.

“Kind of harsh, you reckon?” Daniel tells the model, her high all at once dimmed. That same pang of pity for Max rears its head. Poor little fucker should have known better than getting kinky right out the gate with a grid girl. At least secure an NDA first.

The model shrugs and says something about the friend not being interested in guys who can’t own their shit, and about how if Daniel thinks it’s hot maybe she could teach her teammate how to fuck.

Daniel isn’t listening. The thought of Max with his secret little panty obsession is doing it for her. She swings her thighs on either side of the model’s face and fucks her mouth like that, all the while envisioning Max under her, her clit riding his broad nose, his shameful little cock trapped in a tight-fitting silk g-string. Daniel’s g-string even.

Orgasm number six runs through her like a bullet train.

So, yeah. Daniel thinks about it after that. She thinks about it a lot, actually.

Daniel doesn’t tell Max, though. Where’s the fun in that?

The idea comes to her three days before Christmas and four beers in.

The scene might as well have been stolen from the summer treks home to Australia she made as a pimplier, more sexually repressed teenage version of herself. She’s in a field with the Perth boys, crushed tinnies of Emu scattered at her feet, Stoin taking the piss out of all the cringey media Red Bull forces her to do.

Tonight it’s the Christmas video the team’s YouTube page spit out a few days ago. On the dim screen of Stoin’s phone, Daniel, dressed in low-effort Santa Claus drag, throws styrofoam snowballs at her little elven lackey Max.

“Shocked they didn’t sit him on your lap,” he says.

Daniel snorts through a mouthful of deliciously foul beer. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, hey?”

The year Daniel grew tits they messed around a bit, her and Stoinis. Actually he was her first, like, everything. Not that he knows that; Daniel has a bad habit of posturing as more experienced than she actually is. That wasn’t any less true at fifteen than it is at twenty-seven.

Their thing lasted until he gave her head so bad that afterwards she told him she was a lesbian, just so he’d stop asking to hook up. He believed the lie for three years and has never truly forgiven her for it.

“Yeah, mate, I’m dying to see that one.” Stoin affects an accented falsetto that sounds a lot more like his yiayia than Max. “Mrs. Claus, for Christmas I would like to see your nipples, please.”

“I was fucking Santa, ya gronk, not Mrs. Claus,” Daniel tells Stoin. She pushes him over and he topples off the log onto the dirt. His beer stays safely upright in his hand, though.

She’s pretty sure the Santa outfit was actually meant for Max, though, because the elf outfit had a bit of a skirt and candy-striped tights. The thought of Max in that stupid green costume was too delicious to not make reality. Then she thought a bit about the whole g-string incident, about how maybe Max might get off on it a bit.

Also, she looked hot in a beard. Daniel made them switch.

Max was surprisingly compliant about it, though he complained the whole shoot. That’s Max in a nutshell. Obedient and eager as a puppy, and he looks you in the eye as he’s pissing on the carpet, too.

It surprises Daniel, how much she likes working with him.

Anyway the whole conversation has her thinking again about the undies, and about how she didn’t buy Max a Christmas gift even though he gave her something really thoughtful, an entire crate of this Dutch beer she’s pretty sure she only mentioned loving in front of him once, offhand.

Later that night when she stumbles into her bedroom, still basically pissed, she uses that boundless sloppy energy to dig through her laundry to find a properly crusty pair of old lacy undies. She finds an old shoebox in the back of her wardrobe and throws the pair in there, tapes it up, and somehow finds Max’s home address to scribble it on the side of the box in marker.

In the morning, Daniel’s pretty impressed with her work. She drops the parcel off at the post and forgets about it.

Max calls her in the middle of the night two weeks later.

He sounds breathless and panicked, his voice only a hair above a whisper as he says, “Why did you send me this?”

Daniel rubs her eyes. It takes her a minute before she puts together what the kid is even talking about, then — Oh. She sits straight up in bed, suddenly wide awake.

“You got it!” she says, smiling wide. “Merry Christmas ya filthy animal. Broke them in for you and everything.”

“You should not have sent these here. Anyone could have opened them. My sister, or my…. Anyone.”

“So?” Seems like Max has bigger problems than thoughtful gifts of his teammate’s pre-worn knickers, if everyone in his house is rooting through his mail. “They’re lucky, hey? Wore them when I won in Malaysia. Try them on this season, see if you get lucky too.”

The story is a total lie, but she likes how it sounds.

“I don’t need your fucking luck,” Max says and hangs up.

Something in his voice—a tightness, a heaviness—convinces Daniel she’s got Max hooked. Poor little bugger’s probably already wearing the g-string, fisting his cock raw.

She finds Max most pliant when he’s had a bad race.

Bad qualifying session in China; Daniel starts calling Max Princess to his face and by the next morning, he no longer scowls when she does it.

Brake failure in Bahrain; Daniel wonders aloud why Max hasn’t started shaving his legs and arms, if he’s so committed to every tenth. In Russia his skin is smooth and bare.

First-lap collision and suspension damage in Spain; she tells his stylist at a photoshoot later that week, in front of Max, that something needs to be done about his disgusting manly nails. His hands arrive at the shoot neatly manicured and covered in a top coat.

Electrical failure retirement from second in Canada. Engine issue in Baku, where Max watches Daniel win from the garage. Collision in the first corner in Austria. Three DNFs in a row.

Max is livid after the third. “I don’t understand,” he keeps saying, “why I’m so fucking—“

“Unlucky, hey?” Daniel says knowingly.

Max’s face twists and heats up and he storms off. She wonders if he’s genuinely tried wearing her underwear. If he’s there yet.

If Daniel could bet on it, she would.

So, like, Daniel probably should feel ashamed of how long she lets this shit drag on. Months, really, even as she and Max become close enough that it should be awkward. But it gets her going, giving him all these subtle reminders that she knows his secret little kink. She just doesn’t give a fuck.

Then there’s Malaysia.

The kid turns twenty and the next day overtakes both Mercs to win. Daniel starts fourth and finishes third, which is not as good as starting third and finishing first, but a podium is a podium and nothing beats first anyways.

The after reminds Daniel of the birthday parties thrown by her unfortunate childhood friend born on Christmas, which Daniel reckons isn’t that far from reality. Except that winning a race blows Christmas out of the water completely, every time, always.

Max has more fun than she knew he was capable of, the dedicated little fart. Drinks so many goddamn G&Ts that she worries about the bar’s gin supply. Sings obnoxiously to songs that don’t have proper words and dances badly like the fetus he is. Comes back from the restroom bouncing with his pupils blown.

He’s the most normal she’s ever seen him, like he can only truly let loose after a win.

It’s enough to make her forget about everything else. The bizarre, kinky little dance between the two of them, still basically unspoken. Unacknowledged.

Until.

It’s Max who finds Daniel, actually. He pulls her into a dark corner of the nightclub, soaked to the skin with sweat and breathing out boozy fumes through his mouth. Clumsily he yanks her ear to his mouth and whispers, “Daniel… I did what you said.”

Daniel laughs, clutching his shoulder for balance. Even though Max is the one who brought her over here, her body is the one crowding his into the corner. “What’d I say? Must’ve been good advice.”

“I wore them… what you said,” says Max. His eyes are wide and so focused on her face that it sends a shiver down her spine.

Her booze-logged brain lags. For a moment, she doesn’t get it. And then she does. “Max,” is all she says.

“You said I had to,” says Max, “for luck.”

No, she hadn’t, she’s pretty sure. She never said Max had to do anything. It’s been a game, hasn’t it? A game of kinky chicken, her pushing his buttons to see how far he'll let her go. Pulling pigtails, a friendly antagonism she has with almost every bloke on the grid.

Had she actually believed he would take it further? Not really. The idea had been wanking fodder from time to time, and she'd known the same was definitely true for him. That was really all she'd wanted. All she'd expected.

“Oh, Max,” she says, her heart beating so fast in her ears she's scared she might pass out. “During the race? Really?”

“For luck,” Max says. “You said you wore them here last year.”

“Hm. I did say that, didn't I.”

His coked-up gaze searches her face. His expression droops, just a bit but she sees it happen. Confusion laces his voice when he says, “You made me wear them.” He says, “You made me shave my legs and arms and... everywhere else.” He says, “You wanted me to do it. You made me.”

It occurs to Daniel, with a momentary intrusion of sobriety, that Max wants her to have coerced him into it. That he's been playing a game, too, not one so different than Daniel's. Maybe he likes her murky boundaries, how far she'll go to remind him of the humiliating moment when she found him in her bedroom last year.

Maybe a part of Max had wanted to be found.

“Oh, Max,” Daniel says again.

She puts one hand to his face, grasping gently, the other falling to the soft curve of his hip, stroking there for only a moment before she dips her fingers right inside the waistband of his jeans. There her fingertips press against his bare skin until they reach what she'd been hoping they would: the sweat-soaked twisted lacy string of the underwear she'd sent him in the post months ago.

“You did good," she tells him.

Max's whole body sags, trapped between Daniel and the wall and deflating like a balloon, as her fingers roll the band of the g-string back and forth against his hot, sticky skin. His hands scramble up to grasp at her waist. Daniel leans her forehead against his, their mouths for a moment barely separated, breathing into each other.

As Daniel finally moves her mouth on top of his, she lets the band snap against his hip, and he groans so loudly the vibration travels from her mouth down to her toes.

“Daniel, I need—” he pants, pulling back, “I need—”

“Yeah, honey, I know what you need,” she says, a little patronizing, his heavy cock poking into her thigh, hot and needy even through the thick material of his jeans. She pushes her hand against it. “Got all I need to know from this little thing, yeah?”

Max shudders desperately against her shoulder.

“I'm gonna get you out of here,” she tells Max, “and I'm gonna fuck you.”

Daniel takes Max back to his hotel room. She strips him of all his clothes except the underwear. She rides his cock raw and plays with his nipples and soft little pecs. Then after he comes, she tucks his cock back into the lace, sits on his face, and makes him lick his own spunk out of her cunt. She rides his tongue and his nose until she’s gasping and he’s sobbing, tear tracks running down his wet, ruddy cheeks.

As she finally dismounts his face and flops on the mattress next to him, already starting to fall asleep, she thinks: no way is this a one-time thing. She thinks: he’ll need more than just one singular pre-owned g-string — she’ll have to buy him his own. Other shit, too. She thinks: how far is he willing to let this thing go?

She thinks: how far is she willing to go?

Daniel buys Max new underwear. Silk, bright pink, a whole set of them. Delivers them herself to his hotel room in Texas.

Max sits on the bed and stares down into the box. He looks a bit scared shitless, but there's a wonder there too. This is what he's always wanted, Daniel thinks, but never truly let himself have.

“Do I have to...?” he asks, not meeting Daniel's gaze.

It's Thursday morning. The weekend has barely begun.

Plenty of time, then.

Daniel snorts. “What do you think?”

It's the right thing to say. A flush blooms on his cheeks. “During the practice sessions too?”

“Duh,” Daniel says. She takes the box from him and sets it next to him on the mattress, standing in between his legs in its place. Her hands cradle his chin, tilt his face up to look at hers. “You're, like, my little bitch now, right? Can't have you forgetting that.”

“Daniel,” Max breathes out.

They have an hour before they have to leave for the track walk, and Daniel spends it with Max in between her legs, his hard cock straining against pink silk.

Over the course of the weekend, they break in every single pair.

Max seems content to spend, like, as much time as possible between her legs. Which is basically awesome, but also not really what Daniel is used to with guys. At first she thinks he's just waiting to fuck her, that at any moment he'll break and make a desperate leap for her cunt. But he doesn't actually, just gives kitten licks to her clit, his hands clenched at her waist, the only sign that he's trying to get off at all a subtle gyration of his hips into the mattress. That's how he comes— untouched, splooging into the lacy knickers, an embarrassing stain of dark red on the otherwise pink silk— unless Daniel pushes him onto his back and climbs onto his cock herself, which she rarely feels the need to do.

Between the third and fourth pair, Daniel lies against the cushioned headboard and pulls Max onto her, her tits pillowing his head, her fingers stroking down the fabric stretched over his crack.

“You got porn on your phone?” she asks him.

“What?” he says, his voice even more hoarse than usual, completely wrecked. He's the one doing most of the work and receiving relatively little of the reward, yet he's the one looking spaced out and fucked raw.

“C'mon, I know you do, ya little pervert,” she says, digging a nail into the softness of his ass. “Your porn. Show it to me. I want to see it.”

He blinks sluggishly and his movement away from her tits to stand up lacks any urgency whatsoever, like his limbs have been encased in fog. He unplugs his phone from his charger and rejoins her on bed, where he types and scrolls for a minute. His eyes dart to her, nervously. He hands her the phone. Averts his gaze.

On the screen, a video waits, ready for her to hit play.

It's not from a standard porn site, not one of the malware-riddled black-and-orange or black-and-red eyesores Daniel seeks out blindly when she's feeling a little out of her head and needs the extra push of visual stimulation to get her over the edge. Designed to get her off as quickly as possible so she can close the tab. A blog or some kind of forum hosts this video instead, the sort of thing you basically have to seek out yourself, intentionally.

She plays the video.

On screen are two women, one in a ridiculous pink frilly dress and thigh-high stockings, the other giving her the strap from behind. No, not two women: one woman wearing only a strap, and a guy, a crossdresser, his cock small and flaccid and locked inside a pink plastic cage.

Sissy porn, she'll think later, when she has the mental clarity to put words to what she's seen.

In Malaysia, fucking him had felt like losing grip on her tether, stupid yet gratifying, getting thrown into the deep end without knowing how to swim. In Texas, it still feels like that, but as the video plays on, there's another feeling too: that Daniel hasn't yet scratched the surface at all.

“This is what you like?” she says, unable to strip the incredulity from her voice. It's more intense than she thought it would be by a fucking lot. There's no question of which of the two figures on screen Max sees himself as. Which he wants to be.

Max's face burns bright red. He presses it into the pillow, and she thinks for a moment that he's about to cry.

Trapped inside pink silk and lace, his cock comes to life.

In Japan, Daniel buys a lot more than just new underwear.

Bras to match the set she’d bought him in Texas; thigh highs and high heels, two tandem purchases presented to Max at the same time; a new harness for her strap-on, because the old one got lost once Daniel started getting lazy about bringing it to hook-ups; new makeup, which she makes him lay perfectly still as she applies, rubbing her ass on his cock and pinching him whenever he moves; and the crown jewel of this degenerate little collection: a pink, sparkly chastity cage, which she orders online while laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of the thing.

She enjoys surprising him with the sissy shit. It never fails to catch him off guard. The shock and embarrassment on his face when she presents him with each new, progressively depraved addition to his collection... it just does it for her.

Truthfully, she's into this shit, the degradation and the feminisation and the rest, and she's been into it. She wouldn't have let him get away with it that first time when he tried to steal her underwear, wouldn't have sent him the parcel, wouldn't have pressed him into shaving or the manicure or the pet names if she wasn't.

She likes that he lets her do all that. She likes the power she has over him.

The strap makes its full debut the same night as the cage.

The weekend in Austin goes off with a whimper. After starting sixteenth, Max finishes third but is penalized down to fourth, a comedown from the top step of Malaysia and the second step in Japan. Daniel starts fourth and doesn’t finish at all, puttering to a halt in lap fucking fourteen with another bloody engine failure. It’s the first weekend neither of them have podiumed since Monza, almost two months before.

Funny, how quick you can get used to being on top. Daniel’s restless and she knows Max is too.

Daniel waits until they’re back in Milton Keynes. Max sits across from her at the Monday debrief and squirms the whole time the strategists chastise him for exceeding track limits at the last minute.

Who are these bozos to tell him off like that, she thinks. It should be her making him squirm. It should be her he’s squirming for.

Her thoughts turn to the cock cage she’d purchased online during her kinky sexy shopping spree in Japan. She had it overnighted to her house and then gave it to Max the next time they saw each other. It’s stayed with Max since then but to her knowledge he hasn’t used it. Not around her, at least.

“Is your cage here?” She asks him once the debrief ends several hours later and they’re finally able to be alone, Daniel crowding Max into a vacated conference room.

She has him pressed up against one of the walls. He’d tried to rest his hands on her hips but she shoved them off and told him that little fucking sissy boys weren’t allowed to hold her there. That he either had to drape his hands over her shoulders or keep them to himself. He chose to wrap his arms around his own waist, a bit sheepish, a bit dainty.

“Here? Of course not,” he says. “Why would I wear it to the fucking—”

She pinches him hard on the soft tummy and makes a sound like a buzzer going off. “Not what I was asking, Maxy. Is it here, as in England? As in Milton Keynes?” She presses him harder against the wall and lowers her voice to say directly into his ear, “As in, can I lock you up tonight before I fuck you?”

He nods against her neck.

“Fucking pervert,” she says with a broad grin, and then leaves him there. Michael’s waiting for her somewhere else. The more Max can stew on the possibility of what she’s going to do to him tonight, the better.

He shows up to her place with the box in hand, though the tape latching it shut has been torn and the components inside slide around noisily.

“Did it fit?” is the first question she asks.

Next to her on the sofa, Max shrugs. “I don’t know what these things are supposed to feel like.”

She snatches the box from him, leaving him with only the opaque cloth bag he’d covered it with on the way over in hand. “Come on, princess, you’re not a total bimbo yet. Could you lock it up? Did the ring feel like it was going to sever your dick from your balls?”

“No,” he says.

“Ace,” says Daniel. “What are you waiting for, then? Go on, put it on. Show me how you do it.”

“Right now?”

“No, next Tuesday. Yes right bloody now, obviously.”

Max squirms on the sofa. His hands are gathered in his lap and his back presses deeper and deeper into the cushion like he wants to melt into it. “I can’t right now, Daniel. I have to be, when… I can’t put it on, like this.”

Daniel narrows her eyes. “Like what?”

“Like…” Max shrugs. He swallows.

“Hands off, Max.”

He shakes his head.

She does it for him, grabbing his wrists and yanking them away. His jeans are tented, after ten bloody minutes of being here, Jesus Christ.

“The fuck is that?” she says, genuinely pissed off. “Are you trying to ruin our plans?”

“No, Daniel,” says Max. “I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to get hard. I wanted to stay soft, so you could lock me up and then fuck me, like you said.”

“Fat load of good that does us now.” Daniel stands, heads for the kitchen.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m getting ice, Max. One of us has to do something about your complete lack of self-control. Christ.”

He doesn’t respond to that.

When she gets back, tea towel wrapped around an ice pack in hand, she makes him take off all his clothes. She makes him spread his legs and prop his feet up on the couch, displaying himself like a cheap fucking whore, asshole to cock, right there in her face. She makes him tuck his hand behind his back and slaps his arms whenever he makes a move to pull them out.

Then Daniel kneels between his legs and presses the ice pack to his taint until his cock flags and then, finally, after a few excruciating minutes, goes flaccid.

“At fucking last,” Daniel says. “You promise to stay soft until we get this thing on you?”

Above her, breathing deeply, his face twisted in concentration and eyes squeezed shut, Max nods.

“Verbal response, Maxy.”

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I promise.”

Daniel pats his thigh. “Good,” she says, throwing aside the bag of ice and grabbing the box Max had brought with him, the one the chastity cage had come in. “Cos if you don’t, you’re not coming for the rest of your bloody life, comprende?”

“Yes, Daniel,” Max says.

He already sounds wrecked.

She doesn’t have to tell him to keep his hands behind his back as she maneuvers him into the cage. God, the thing is bloody ridiculous, she thinks as she gets a closer look at all its components, lubing them up, sliding them into place around him. Pink and sparkling like unicorn jizz. He looks tiny as fuck tucked inside that flashy silicone. Like he barely has a cock at all.

“We’re gonna need to do something about your impulse control issues, Max,” she tells him as she finally locks him into place. “You’re not a real fucking man anymore, ok? If you’re going to be my bitch, you gotta act like it.”

“Yes, Daniel. I will.”

“Yes sir,” she says, watching a flush grow on his pale chest and cheeks. His little asshole puckers in the air. “If there’s a little girl here, it’s not fucking me.”

“Yes, sir,” he amends.

“Great,” says Daniel. “Listen, I’m gonna get my own cock and fuck you with it, ok? When I’m back, I want you on your hands and knees. And I don’t want to see your face. Or your cock.” She glances a finger right over his hole, barely a touch. “Just wanna see your loose cunt, got it, honey?”

“Yes, sir.” Max scrambles for his hands and knees. He shoves his ass into the air and his face into the sofa cushion and says, as Daniel retreats to her bedroom to find the harness and strap, a gasp of a word into fabric: “Please.”

It’s nice to see him obedient, she thinks later, when she’s lubed up his virgin hole and inches silicone into him for the first time. It’s nice to see his need for shame laid totally bare on her sofa, in her own bloody living room. The disappointing weekend dissipates where it hardened inside her.

They work, the two of them. When Daniel needs out of her head, she needs something to sink her teeth into. Max is her inverse; he needs to be sunk into. And he needs her to do it.

“Daniel, I haven’t come in a long time,” Max tells her a few weeks later after Brazil (fifth for him; sixth for her), sitting at her feet in her hotel room the morning after the race.

She hadn’t fucked him, not today; bringing the strap with her on overseas journeys like this makes her kinda nervous, which is why she’d stopped taking it to hookups in the first place. But she had let him lap at her cunt until she no longer felt the bitterness of her ten-place displacement at the start of the race or of seeing his name higher than hers on the leaderboard, again, even if she still has him beat in the championship standings.

“You said you would let me come again, if I didn’t get hard,” Max says. “I didn’t get hard, but you haven’t let me come again.”

It’s true. She’s been keeping him locked up as often as she can. First it was on the plane to Mexico. She got wet just seeing him shifting in his seat as the plane took off. After that, she didn’t see any reason to ask him to take it off. Whenever he can get away with it — and even some situations when it’s more dangerous, like one near-disastrous gym session with his trainer — she makes him stay locked.

Fucking awesome, to look at him at a debrief or during an interview and to be the only one who knows what’s going on under his fireproofs.

“Yeah, about that,” Daniel says. “First, let’s get one thing straight: I didn’t say when you could come again. I just said I would let you, period, at some undefined point in the future.”

She cradles his chin in her hands, tilts his face to look up at hers. “Don’t think you’ve earned the right to just come, yeah? You know why?”

Max nods against her palm. His gaze is so blue and direct that it’s hard to look at him sometimes, God. “Because that’s for real men,” he says, “and I am not a real man.”

Daniel wonders if she kissed him now if he’d still taste like her.

“Too fucking right. C’mere,” she says, and then pulls him on to the bed next to her.

They lay back, Max a burning warmth at her side, his cage a cool silicone intrusion digging into her thigh.

“I think I’m done letting you come the old-fashioned way,” she tells him. “Like, you’re definitely not coming inside me anytime soon. Or ever. And wanking ain’t on, either.” She pulls back to look down at him. He meets her eyes. “You haven’t been wanking, have you?”

He shakes his head. “No. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Really? Not even once?"

He pauses before he shakes his head again.

“Max. Don’t fucking lie to me.”

“It was only once, I promise,” he says. “It was when I slept without my cage on before you told me I had to wear it to bed. I woke up and my hand was already….” His fist makes a lazy jerkoff motion. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Did you come?”

“I didn’t mean to,” he says again.

“You’ll need to make it up to me for that, somehow,” she says. “Is that really the only time?”

“Yes,” he says. “I promise.”

Daniel hums. Her fucked-up rolodex of kinky punishments spins. Maybe she’ll smear lipstick on his lips and force him to drive to the factory like that, only letting him wipe it off once he’s walked past security. Maybe she’ll force him to go commando for a week. Maybe she’ll make him wear one of the bralettes to the last race of the season, in Abu fucking Dhabi no less, the lacy straps close to visible underneath the thin fabric of his fireproofs, one tug of his neckline away from revealing itself.

So many great options. She makes a note to choose the exact right one later.

“Fine,” she says. “Anyway, I’ve been doing some reading online, on the forums and shit, and I know what we’re going to do with your self-control problem. You’re way deeper in that crap than me so maybe it’s nothing new, but— ”

The blogs call it a sissygasm, which is just a different, sissy-themed word for prostate orgasm. Though it seems that for a lot of people there’s more to the ritual than just taking it up the ass. Some sissies train themselves out of popping a chub ever, period. They rub the heads of their cocks through the fabric of their undies, barely enough to stimulate, stopping before they get hard. Over and over, each day until they can come like that, not hard, leaking out the tip like a girl when she squirts.

A lot of them stay locked up in their chastity devices the whole time. Without the stretch of a regular-hard on, the muscles around their cocks atrophy over time, shrinking it until it’s a dainty, shameful little clit between their legs, unable to please a woman anyway.

Daniel drags a light finger across Max’s locked-up, pantied-up cock as she explains all this. She knows he’s familiar with everything she’s saying. But still, pressed up against her, his breath deepens. He’s getting aroused just at the fucking thought.

“I should keep you locked up until the end of time,” she says, laughing mockingly. “You’d love that shit, wouldn’t you, you nasty little perv? Your tiny cock would shrivel up even more until it’s smaller than my clit. Just a little, like, fucking nub.” She holds out her pinky and curls it to demonstrate size and uselessness. “Couldn’t fuck anyone with a microscopic little clitty, hey?”

Max moans into her chest. He doesn’t say anything.

“Say it out loud, Max,” says Daniel. “Tell me you want me to lock you up forever and throw away the fucking key. Tell me you’re going to be my bitch until the end of time.”

“I’m your bitch,” Max gasps out. “Throw away the key, Daniel, please.”

“Good girl,” Daniel says, and Max’s whole body seizes. If Max would have been able to get hard, he probably would have come that fucking instant.

In Abu Dhabi, Daniel doesn’t finish. Max gets fifth place. 2017 Red Bull Driver Rankings, overall: Daniel fifth, Max sixth. 2027 Red Bull DNF Ranking: first.

La di fucking da.

Daniel fucks Max in a toilet before they catch their charter flight the hell out of the Emirates.

It’s his punishment for jizzing without permission, she tells him. He accepts this, even though a week she already made him wear lingerie beneath his clothes to a gym session with his trainer.

What actually has her dragging him into the toilet is simple: Daniel is pissed off, and Max is there, and when she’s fucking him hard with her silicone cock, he looks back at her over his shoulder with those massive blue eyes, red cheeks and red mouth drooping open, lips slick with spit.

There’s something tender and sweet in that gaze. Something grateful. It curdles her stomach. She doesn’t even have it in her to look at him for more than a few seconds.

After the season ends, Max goes on holiday with his family. He's not really looking forward to it, though she knows he'd rather die than admit that to her.

She laughs when he calls and asks her if she wants to come. “You know I can’t, baby,” she says.

“Why?”

“I’ve got plans. Meetings and shit. You know that.”

And he does know, at least about some of them. Others he’s unaware of and it will remain that way until something changes.

“Bullshit. You can do contract negotiations on the phone,” Max tells her. “Daniel, please, I need you here.”

The urgency and demand in his voice makes her recoil.

“The fuck do you know about what you need?” says Daniel, all at once angry. “Christ, Max. Don’t fucking talk to me that way. Are you locked up right now?”

The silence on the other end of the call stretches on for a long time before he finally tells her, voice thick and hard to read, that he is.

“Good,” she says. “Don’t fucking take it off, yeah? Fucking pathetic, Max, Jesus.”

Daniel shakes hands with Helmut and Dietrich. The contract is pretty good, even if Helmut spent most of the meeting talking down to her, like after ten years driving for his team she should still count herself lucky that he lets a pair of tits behind the wheel.

As for the car, well, who’s to fucking say.

Afterwards, once she’s finally back in Monaco after weeks away busy with negotiations and the holidays and her own family in Perth, she bangs on Max’s front door.

He texted her a few times when he was with his family. With the time zone differences and constant cocktail of hangovers and jet lag casting a weird haze over the winter break, Daniel got a bit lazy about texting him back. Besides, the thought of leaving him alone with his thoughts for a while— to have him desperate and gagging for it when she finally returned the attention— excited her.

Only when she finally messaged him again yesterday, checking in with him, making sure that he was still doing everything they’d established he needed to do, he hadn’t responded.

So she’s here. Seems like someone needs his shit sorted.

A flash of guilt crosses Max’s face when he opens the door and sees her. “Daniel,” he says, so neutrally it can’t be anything but a facade. “Hello."

“Hello yourself, mate,” she says, pushing forward letting herself in. When the door has been shut behind her, she turns to him and says, hands on her hips, the split image, she’s horrified to note, of her mum. “Why didn’t you respond to my text?”

Max shrugs. He avoids her gaze by turning his back to her, leading them both to his sofa, where he’d been playing FIFA before she arrived. “I am really busy this week, Daniel, same as you.”

She takes in the expanse of his apartment, the mess of the place, takeaway containers and crisp packets and all sorts of shit his trainer would be pissed to see, this close to pre-season training. She snorts. “Yeah, sure you have,” she says. “You’re a really bad liar, you know that?”

He shrugs. “I’m not lying.”

Daniel narrows her eyes at him. “Max,” she says. “Are you locked up right now?”

Max freezes. He presses his lips together and blanks his face. In turn, Daniel wrestles him onto his back on the couch. The second her hands reach the fly of his jeans, he goes limp. Lets her do what she’s going to do.

Her hands reach inside his underwear— regular fucking boxer briefs— and pull out his bare cock.

“Daniel,” he says, a frantic note in his voice, “Please—”

Before she can fully comprehend what she’s about to do, Daniel pulls her hand back and slaps him in the face.

Max lets out a small yelp, like he’s a dog whose tail she’s just stepped on. He doesn’t say anything. Perhaps he doesn’t know how. He stares up at her, eyes wide, mouth agape, frozen.

“Max,” she says quietly, horrified at herself. She feels like the past few days of cross-continental flights and contract negotiations, the uncertainty brewing into a storm inside her— an uncertainty of which Max lies right at the center—have been nothing but a dream, a waking dream she’s startled herself out of with one single slap. She feels like she’s been slapped herself. “I…”

She doesn’t know how to speak, either.

In between them, his cock springs to life.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

They stare at each other like that for a long, heavy moment, the soccer pitch on the massive TV screen beside them casting an artificial green glow over them both.

“Where’s your cage, honey?” she says firmly, keeping her tone more casual than she feels.

Max sits up and she crawls off of him. Sniffing, he leads her to his bedroom. To the walk-in wardrobe where presumably Max keeps all of his identical white cotton t-shirts and skinny jeans. To the back of the wardrobe, hidden behind a layer of junk, to the cardboard box Daniel had pulled from her own wardrobe, a year before, to send him a pair of old knickers in the post.

“Everything is in here,” he tells her, offering the box to her.

She takes it and opens it. Everything is in there: the pairs of lace undies; the bralettes; the makeup; even the thigh-highs and heels, which they’ve barely used; and yes, the chastity cage too, tossed in there in several pieces. Fucking harsh.

“I almost sent it all to the bin,” Max says.

“Why would you do that?” she says, forgetting amidst the astonishment— at herself, at him for actually copping to what he’d almost done—that she should be angry.

That he would consider it at all concerns her, actually. Leaving him to his own devices to the extent that she has was a mistake. She can see that now.

Max shrugs. “I did what we discussed for a long time. I wore the cage all the time and I touched myself the way you wanted me to, with one finger, and I barely ever got hard. Then I don’t know. One night all of a sudden I didn’t think I liked it anymore.”

“So you wanted to bin it?”

“No,” he says. “Well, yes I did. But I didn’t, because I knew you would be pissed with me if I did that.”

“Too right, I would’ve been pissed,” Daniel says. “Do you know how much I spent buying this shit for you? Time and money, Max. Christ.”

“I didn’t do it, Daniel,” Max reiterates. “Only you were refusing to talk to me. So I didn’t know. I thought maybe….”

“What?”

Max shrugs again. He toys with the hem of one of his hanging white t-shirts. “I texted you a lot and mostly you didn’t answer me. And then I called you and you ignored it. So I thought maybe you didn’t want to do this anymore. With me.”

She doesn’t remember the call. She was probably drunk at the time, probably too busy causing mayhem across the streets of Perth with her boys to pay attention to her phone.

“Jesus, Max,” she says softly. “I wouldn’t fucking do that. Just fucking abandon you with no warning. Jeez. Who do you think I am?”

“Sorry,” he says again.

Daniel stares down at the box and its contents. Everything has been shoved inside in haste, like Max truly couldn’t stand to look at any of it for a moment longer.

She clears her throat. “Right, well,” she says, a bit louder, “we’ve got some bloody work to do, don’t we, princess? The sooner we scrub this fucking dude-stench off of you, the better.”

Max nods eagerly. He looks genuinely relieved, and Daniel feels the same. This kinky little ritual has become comfortable to her. She realises she’s missed it.

Daniel lays him down on his bed— made, so either he’s been selective about what he keeps tidy, or he hasn’t slept in here since the last time his maid came around— and makes him get completely naked.

“Think I might burn these,” she says, holding up his normal grey underwear in disgust. The fabric is rank and crusty. She doesn’t want to think about how long he’d been sitting in disgusting boxer briefs. Very male of him.

She puts everything back on him when he’s finally nude. Everything, until the box is empty, except for the extra sets of lingerie. Max himself applies his own makeup. She shoves the handheld mirror she keeps in her purse in his hand and watches him paint himself into something less male— or perhaps it would be more apt to say: something more female— with an unsteady hand and look of absolute concentration.

“Did I do it the right way?” he asks her when he’s done.

He’s put in a better effort than she thought he’d pull off, actually. There are things she thought she’d have to tell him that he seemed to already know. Like to keep his lips relaxed when applying lipstick, to start in the center and then move to the corner of his mouth. When she handed him bright pink eyeshadow, he wasn’t as exact or as even as she would have been, but he tried to be, and tried to blend out the hard line of pigment lining the hood of his eye.

“Perfect,” Daniel says. “See, Max? It’s like you were born to be a girl.”

His face blooms red.

With the garters pressing indents into the pale skin of his thighs and his cock lock-up and pressing into pink silk where it belongs, Daniel suddenly remembers that she had a gift for him.

“Stay right here and don’t fucking move,” she says.

Daniel practically runs down the stairs to her own apartment. She’s energised, the sort of adrenaline rush she gets on track after a near-miss. The package is sitting on her entryway table, where she’d thrown it earlier today when she arrived home. She hadn’t given it much thought since she ordered it, perhaps because she’d bought it on a whim entirely similar to the impulse that had her shipping her g-string to him last year: a night of drinking in Perth.

She rips it open and tosses the packaging to the side before she runs back upstairs to Max’s apartment.

“I bought something for you,” she says once she’s back in his room, holding out the red fabric in her hand. “Not sure if it’ll fit since sizing is probably weird. Try it on, though.”

He takes it from her gingerly, unfurling the fabric in his hands onto the mattress to reveal a slutty little red dress. He stares at it hungrily. “This is for me?” he says.

“Well, it’s not for me,” she says. “Go on, try it.”

He gets to his feet, his legs shaky on the high heels. The dress is tight on him — it’s made for women so it stretches awkwardly around his shoulders and torso — so she has to help him pull it down his body.

But it does fit.

“Do you like that?” she says, laying back on the bed, watching him run his large hands down his body, something akin to awe in the careful, reverent motion. “You like looking like a slut?”

The dress — skin-tight, bright red, ending right below his waist — seems to alter Max like his car alters Max during a race: no longer just Max, he becomes Max-in-the-car; Max-in-the-dress.

“Daniel, yes,” he says, looking the closest to complete she’s ever seen him look. “I love it.”

Later, after everything, Daniel will come to resent the dress.

But she doesn’t feel pushed out at first. At first she doesn’t see it as any more important than the high heels, or the g-string, or the chastity cage. It becomes a regular addition to the roster of goodies she forces Max into and then humiliates him for loving.

Daniel adds dresses to the collection: all equally skimpy and demeaning, in a variety of slutty colours. To celebrate the start of the new season, she goes all out and buys him a proper sissy dress: all ruffles and frills and gigantic, garish bows, an exaggerated, anime-ridiculous maid dress.

She gives it to him in Monaco. She feels a sick pleasure in forcing the monstrosity over Max’s head and making him spin. Lightheaded with how much she loves seeing him demean himself with it, she fucks him under its massive, unwieldy skirt, his legs thrown over her shoulders, her tongue down his throat.

He comes on her cock. She coaxes him through it with a gentle hand on his chin. Tears stream down his face.

P1 for her. P9 for him.

It’s not hard for her to love seeing him like this. Moments when she has him right where she wants him, and she knows he can feel the power she has over him.

Sometimes it’s harder. P4 for Daniel; P2 for Max, watching him cover himself in champagne on the podium from the pit wall— harder.

He wears the red dress that night; she hadn’t known he’d brought it with him to France. She lets him eat her cunt, and watches him circle the slit of his cock with his pinky, applying the barest amount of pressure through the pink silk of the g-string.

“Do you think I’m smaller than last time?” he asks her afterward.

“For sure,” she says, exhausted from the entire weekend but plastering on a smile for him anyway. “You were already halfway to a clit. Now, you’re practically almost there.”

That’s what people expect of Daniel Ricciardo: Unwavering enthusiasm, boundless energy. That’s what Max needs from her.

Sometimes it feels like just one more thing she’s giving him.

Sometimes nothing happens between them at all.

The strangeness of the arrangement comes rushing back to her in her most serious moments, the times in between: when dresses and high heels and cock cages and everything else start to collect dust in the back of Max’s wardrobe, when seeing him across the garage becomes more difficult to bear, when the media storm around first and second drivers rears its head, no longer a question of who but a statement of fact.

What Daniel keeps coming back to is this: it isn’t normal, what they do. Not just what they do but that sometimes it’s all they do.

More and more Daniel finds Max wearing lingerie beneath his regular clothes when the two of them haven’t touched each other in days. He sends her photos of himself on holiday with high heels in the background she knows belong to no woman. There’s never any lead-up any more, either, no casual games of FIFA, no easy drinks at the local pub, just the two of them. When she and Max spend time alone, his flaccid cock is locked and face is smeared in a grotesque layer of makeup and his softening body is drowning in pink. Always.

Or else they don’t spend time together, which hurts more than it should. It isn’t normal, and it isn’t a fucking relationship.

Is Max capable of a normal relationship? Is that even what Daniel wants for herself? She never used to, before Max, never cared if people thought she was a pervert. It’s different now. No one is shocked by anything Daniel does anymore.

Thinking about it too long puts a sinking feeling in her stomach, a sour taste in her mouth.

So Daniel doesn’t think about it.

She doesn’t think about it until she’s given a really, really good reason.

The fact that she sees Max at all is a complete coincidence — a total improbability that will haunt her for months.

Summer shutdown 2018 and she’s back in Monaco only for a day before her flight out to LA, there to exchange a suitcase of dirty clothes from her wardrobe with a cleaner, less rank batch.

She doesn’t plan to visit Max. She doesn’t think she has the time.

On the drive from the airport in Nice to her apartment in Monaco, she stops for a bite at a small cafe on the outskirts of the principality. Still exhausted from the flight from Perth, Daniel drinks espresso in a tucked-away corner of the place where she can hide her face and caffeinate herself to death in peace.

As the last drops of espresso drip from the cup down her throat, the cafe’s door slides open and someone walks in. She can’t see them from her table, but she can hear them: the clicking of their heels across the tile, the friendly greeting from the girl working behind the counter.

The customer orders, and even with her shit understanding of French, Daniel would recognise that raspy, accented voice anywhere.

“Merci,” Max tells the worker, who gives him what he ordered, and calls him Madame.

Daniel shrinks into her seat until the clicking starts again across the tile, heading back towards the door. Only then does she peek her head around the corner to catch the last sight of him.

Her eyes feel like they’re playing tricks on her. Her stomach twists. For a moment she’s sure she got it wrong, that it wasn’t Max after all. The person wears a modest dress, simple and blue in a cut that’s a bit outdated, the shape of their shoulders obscured by a thick yet feminine jacket. Blonde hair brushes the collar of the jacket, but there’s something in the way that light reflects, strands glinting green and blue under the sun, stiffer than real hair. For sure a goddamn wig. Christ.

The door falls shut behind them and turns on the street so Daniel can finally see their face and —

Well, maybe the cafe worker has never seen Max Verstappen in bright red lipstick. Maybe she wouldn’t recognise him like this.

But Daniel has.

She stalks out of the cafe almost immediately. Not to follow Max, just to — think.

There was a smile on his face when he turned and walked away. God. He’s out in public, wearing fucking girl clothes Daniel never gave him, fucking tasteful, modest dresses like he’s a real woman. He’s out in public, wearing a dress to do normal, boring shit like get coffee and he’s getting called Madame by random cafe workers who don’t know him and will never see him again. And he’s fucking smiling about it. Like it’s a secret little pleasure.

Nausea builds in Daniel’s gut. She feels disgusted. She’s confused. She becomes convinced that this is the fault of the red dress, the dress that has taken on a life of its own, taking up more and more space in the bedroom every time it appears.

The dress she bought him. That she gave to him. That she made him wear.

Maybe it’s her fault. Maybe the disgust that coils in her stomach is half-guilt.

Daniel retreats to her apartment. Takes an ill-advised nap, and wakes up at eight in the bloody evening disoriented from a restless sleep filled with dreams of seeing Max in that fucking cafe. Of him seeing her there. Of Max showing up to the factory wearing that blue dress. Of sitting down with Helmut and Christian and telling them every single sordid detail of whatever the fuck it is she and Max have together.

She pulls herself off the couch and goes through her emails over a glass of wine — also ill-advised.

There’s one from the commercial airline she’s booked to fly her out to LA, reminding her to check in for her flight tomorrow. A few spam emails down, there’s one from her agent, with the contract extension they’ve been negotiating for months attached.

We need to make a concrete decision soon, her agent says. The offers won’t wait for your decision forever, Daniel.

Dread unfurls in her stomach. She ignores the contract and her agent’s message.

Instead, she calls the airline and pushes back her flight to LA by a day.

When Max opens his front door the next afternoon, he’s back to normal. Not a single hint that he’d looked very different only twenty-four hours earlier, except perhaps the faintest ghost of deeper red over his pink lips.

“Daniel!” he says pleasantly, his happiness at seeing her genuine. “I didn’t know you were in Monaco.”

She smiles at him broadly. The smile stretches her lip falsely and has no chance of reaching her eyes. “Just passing through, Maxy. You know me. Can’t pin this one down.”

“Do you want to come in? When will you go?”

“Got a flight to LA in the morning,” she says, and closes the door behind her. “But I’m all yours tonight, if you’ll have me.”

“Yes, I will,” Max says. His face is bright and unbothered. “Do you want to eat burgers with me? I plan to get fat and lazy this break before my trainer comes back from holiday.”

She sort of hates how glad he is just that she decided to show up.

Can he sense that it’s the last time? Surely not. Max is a bad liar, a horrible actor. Surely his face would betray him if he knew.

They eat burgers and drink wine together at a restaurant down the street from their building. It’s nice. Weirdly normal for the two of them. Some of the tension in her shoulders dissolves and she remembers why she loves being around Max, with or without the bizarre sex. He makes her laugh. When she tells a stupid joke he cackles so hard the entire restaurant stops and stares at them. They egg each other on. Take turns speaking in a different horrid and unintelligible accent each time their waiter arrives at their table.

When they get back to his place, she presses him against his bedroom wall and kisses him.

As always, he follows her lead. He waits for her to indicate what will happen next, to which humiliating end she’ll take them. But for a long time she doesn’t do anything but kiss him gently.

After a while, he gets antsy. His body stiffens a bit below her. He’s locked up; she can feel the silicone trapped between their bodies.

He wants her to emasculate him. To treat him like she’s the one making him this feminised version of himself; like it’s not his call at all. But tonight, when she thinks about falling back into the typical roles of their arrangement, the same sick feeling she’d felt at the cafe emerges inside her. It feels remarkably close to the shame she’d felt in negotiations with Helmut and Christian. Like everything Daniel knows about herself, about her place in the world, is really about Max, if you strip back one single layer.

She feels tricked.

Looking back on the past two years, Daniel feels every ounce of shame she’s given Max not as an avenue towards empowering herself, but as a gift she hadn’t known she was giving away. All she’s done is give him what he’s always wanted, over and over again. Acting like he’s wanted her to act.

But Daniel is not his fucking bitch. She’s not doomed to be subservient to him.

“Daniel,” Max says finally, squirming. “Can you please—?”

“Please, what?”

She wants to expose him to himself. Make it obvious that she didn’t do shit for him. That everything that they’ve turned him into, he did to himself.

“I don’t know,” he pants. “You can put me in the slutty clothes, or something.”

Daniel snorts. “Asking for it outright, hey? Knew you wanted it.”

Maybe her tone is meaner and more serious than it’s been in the past, because he says, “No, please, it’s only what you want. It’s what you always want, for me to be your slut.”

“Nah,” says Daniel.

“Yes,” says Max. “You made me your bitch. You made me. You did.”

She thinks he might be realising he has something to be scared of.

Daniel pulls back. She leaves him out there and instead heads into his walk-in wardrobe, where she begins to root around.

Max follows her there. “What are you doing?” he says. “Daniel, what?”

She finds what she’s been looking for where she’d thought it would be too obvious to look: in the same corner he’d hidden the shoebox of sissy shit over the winter break. She pulls out a plastic bag filled with blue, silky fabric and immediately knows what she’s looking at.

“That’s not—” Max starts, frantically, trying to take the bag from her hands. “Daniel. Please put it back. Please.”

“Come on, honey, you know I’m not gonna do that,” she says, pushing him away and ripping the blue dress out of the bag.

He stands frozen in front of her as she holds out the dress between them. Like this, his back hunched in shame, face red, gaze tilted towards the floor, he’s nothing more than the kid she’d found rooting through her panty drawer two years ago.

“It’s nice. Kind of mum-ish, but nice,” she says. “Don’t think I bought you this.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“You don’t want to try it on for me?”

“No,” he says.

She lets the dress fall onto the floor. Steps on it to get to him. Tilts his head down to look her in the eyes.

“Don’t fucking kid yourself, Max, Jesus,” she tells him. “I never did anything to you that you didn’t want first.”

“Daniel,” he murmurs.

“Be honest with me,” she says, close to a whisper, right up against his lips. “Do you want me to call you a pretty girl, baby? Parade you around in public? Tell everyone you’re my little girlfriend?”

Max squeezes his eyes shut. “That’s what you want.”

“Well, you are a pretty girl,” Daniel tells him. “And I would have, if you wanted me to.”

She strips him of all of his clothes until he’s completely naked. She takes off his cage, throws it onto the floor without a second thought.

She strips herself bare, too. Then she pulls him on top of her and asks him to fuck her.

“Is this a test?” he asks.

“No, Max.”

“Then why are you doing this?”

She laughs gently. The sound has an edge to it that even Daniel’s ears pick up on. “I just want you to fuck me. Nothing more than that, pretty girl.”

This is not what he wants. This is not a gift. He knows it’s not. He can sense that she’s seen something of him, something he never wanted anyone to recognise, and this is his punishment. It’s soul-scorching for Daniel to witness. Distressing. Exposing.

But his cock is hard, hard enough that he looks like he might weep from it, and he slides into her, and fucks her. He comes inside her. He makes her come.

Afterwards, when they’re lying in his bed, drifting towards sleep, Daniel quietly asks him a question, because she thinks she needs the answer and isn’t sure if she’ll ever get the chance again.

“Would you have wanted me,” she says, “without all of the kink shit?”

“Of course,” Max says, barely awake. “Daniel, for you….”

He doesn’t say anymore. He’s asleep.

She can still feel his cum inside her, sticky between her legs.

The next morning, she leaves for the airport before he wakes.

In the car, she calls Christian. “Think I’ve made my decision,” she tells him, and thinks about the bed she left, and the soft, pale body she’d abandoned inside it.

comments

end to end

2026-03-03T04:12:03Z

Summary: As the sun sets on the last day of Heungmin’s career, the sky over Tottenham Hotspur Stadium turns a deep shade of navy blue. Kaneson, post-career, speculative future!fic written in 2024 for my dear friend Max :D

2029

They all file into the dressing room, one at a time as flights roll into Heathrow and private cars carry them to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Heungmin’s teammates, a patchwork dressing room of different eras: Eric and Dele next to Madders; Tripps next to Brennan; Rodrigo next to Gareth; Ben and Hugo in the middle of them all, faithfully there, as those two always were.

Music plays from a speaker. Heungmin hasn’t shared a dressing room with Dele in over seven years but he recognises Dele’s taste when he hears it. The heavy beat and flowing rhythm of American hip hop, many of the tracks the same ones he played over and over those handful of seasons with Mauricio.

Heungmin wonders if Dele chose these tracks for that reason: to yank him back in time to when victory was a hair’s breadth away and anything could happen. Now, everything that was going to happen has. All that’s left to do is remember it.

And celebrate it, of course.

Heungmin hadn’t wanted a testimonial. Or rather he hadn’t felt the need for one. He gave fourteen years of his life to the club and its supporters; they gave equal parts to him. He’d done his mourning in November when he’d stopped pretending like he could string more than fifty minutes of playing time together and told the club he was hanging up his boots. Besides, who had testimonials anymore? They were for the Gary Nevilles and Steven Gerrards and Vincent Kompanys of the world, players who led their clubs to greatness. Not Son Heungmin, whose great achievement was to watch his team win the League Cup from the stands two years ago, his ankle broken two weeks before.

None of that stopped Harry from asking, when they spoke on the phone a few months later, “So when’s the big send off?”

“Never,” Heungmin had told him. “Didn’t you hear I retired?”

“Do they not want to give it to you?”

Harry used to talk about his own, back when it was still a possibility.

“I don’t need it,” Heungmin insisted.

Three weeks later the club announced the testimonial match. It would be played shortly after the end of the season. Six years gone from the club and Harry Kane still holds more sway over the boardroom than Heungmin ever will.

Still, the prospect of playing again, even just for charity, has given him something to work towards. Instead of spending the initial months of retirement languishing in his uselessness, Heungmin has kept his fitness routine. Regular stints at the gym; a healthy diet; practising drills on grass when he could find someone to train with him. He hasn’t stopped hanging around Hotspur Way, either. He does occasional PR for the club. Signs kits for auction and takes pictures with sick kids and the like. The testimonial has allowed him to cling onto the last dregs of purpose in his footballing life, for which he is grateful.

After tonight, Heungmin will hang up his boots. He will have to find purpose somewhere else. It was always going to be like this.

As Heungmin emerges from the treatment room and sits down along the gradual curve of the home dressing room, Dele lowers the volume of his music.

“Want me to play something else, Skip?” Dele grins on the last word, his first time calling Heungmin it.

Heungmin bends down to adjust his socks, acting out the same pre-match rituals he’s had for nearly twenty years. Incredible, how easy the mentality slips onto him. “Why?” he says. “I love your music.”

“Liar,” Dele says.

He doesn’t change the song but he keeps the volume down. Truthfully it makes little difference in the noise level of the room. Too much excited chatter crowds the air, the sound of former teammates who haven’t shared a bench in nearly ten years, some of them.

This eclectic team call themselves Tottenham Hotspur Legends and wear something close to the club’s current kit with a few retro details. Only a few of them really qualify as legends. Gareth certainly does; Ben and Hugo, who Heungmin couldn’t rate higher and who are legends if just for their sheer longevity at the club. With that criteria, Heungmin counts too, but humility prevents him from ever considering himself anything like legendary.

Then there’s Harry. Not just a Spurs legend, not just a legend of the game. But a legend who came from here, from this club.

A legend who is also late.

“Sorry, plane got held on the tarmac at Heathrow,” Harry says when he finally sweeps into the dressing room, completely unaware of the electric charge he brings to the air when he walks in. “All good, yeah?”

He spends some time making the rounds, talking to everyone in the room. A few of them don’t know him well at all.

Brennan, for example, only met him a handful of times, having been signed to do the impossible and fill the H-shaped hole in their squad. To Brennan, Harry is more myth than man, someone everyone else compared him to. He’s barely twenty-eight and on the verge of the brightest years of his career at Milan, and he shakes Harry’s hand with the big eyes of a twelve year-old meeting their idol.

Most of the others, though, know Harry. Knew Harry. Have known Harry. All of the above. They’ve seen him at his best, his worst, his strangest. The chances he’s wasted. The temper tantrums he’s thrown. The bright shade of red his face turns when he’s laughing too hard to catch his breath. To them, Harry Kane is H, their friend and teammate. He isn’t mysterious at all.

More than any of them, Heungmin knows Harry’s rough edges. There used to be nothing left of Harry to discover. Then Harry went to Germany. Six years later, Heungmin feels a bit like Brennan, wide-eyed and amazed, not sure what to expect.

“Hi Sonny,” says Harry when he finally reaches Heungmin, stretching his arms out to give him a firm, friendly embrace.

His grin is shy and a little tired. He’s coming from New York, where he lives now. It’s been a few years since they’ve seen each other in person. There’s a new flash of grey in his hair and wrinkles at the corners of his eyes but he looks happy. Like he has more colour in his cheeks.

“Thanks for coming,” Heungmin says.

Harry shrugs like it was no big deal and it probably wasn’t. Undoubtedly NYCFC give him a long rein but the season for him is far from over and his teammates are preparing for the matchweek right now.

“Wouldn’t miss this for the world, mate,” says Harry, clapping him on the back. “I spoke to Mauricio about tactics. Us two up front. Just like old times, innit?”

“Just like old times,” Heungmin says.

“... and for the last time, your captain, Number Seven, Heungmin Son. Come on you Spurs!”

Heungmin holds his hands in a heart shape out to the crowd. He looks to the technical area, where Mauricio catches his eye. Enjoy it, he’d told Heungmin in the tunnel. They nod at one another as the crowd chants Heungmin’s name.

The whistle blows. The game begins.

The dressing room celebrates with the same teary-eyed ferocity as the Champions League semi-final in 2019, when Mauricio couldn’t stop crying and Harry couldn’t stop hugging Heungmin. Today is all for Heungmin, though. The attention makes him slightly uncomfortable, as do all of the tears. He feels like a bride at a wedding, endlessly greeting people and shaking hands and making the rounds, unable to find a spare second to enjoy the moment.

The match ended in a draw. Two-two. The score doesn’t matter. Nor does it make a difference that Heungmin hadn’t ended up on the score sheet.

Harry had sunk one in, top bins, at the twenty-first minute, his talent undeniable even if in football years he’s elderly. The other was scored by Eric on a set piece in the second half.

There had been a moment, a minute before halftime when the stars aligned and Heungmin sent a cross flying right into where he knew Harry would be. Harry’s strike was beautiful—or would have been beautiful, had it not been saved.

Harry still ran to Heungmin anyway. “We’ll get one before the end of this, won’t we,” he’s said, and Heungmin laughed and nodded.

His knee throbbed like someone had taken to it with a baseball bat. Mauricio subbed him off ten minutes into the second half. His career is not a sports drama; he isn’t entitled to a satisfying conclusion. He doesn’t even want one, really.

“We’re heading to the pub now, I think,” Eric says once everyone showers and dons their civilian gear. “Did you drive yourself here?”

Heungmin nods, but he tells Eric and the others to go over without him, that he’ll catch up. “I think I will….” He trails off, unsure how to express what he needs to do.

Maybe it’s that the weight of the day has finally caught up to him. A weight sits on his chest—nostalgia and regret and something else he can’t name. To be back on the pitch with these people—it was overwhelming. He liked it too much. It felt too natural.

More than anything, his testimonial has put into clear relief how much his life has changed. How long ten years really is. How he can’t go back. How he has to forge ahead and become a brand-new person, when—and this is the part that really scares him—all he wants is to be here right now.

He needs a moment.

“I want to see the stadium one last time,” Heungmin says.

Eric nods and claps Heungmin on the shoulder. “Course. See you there, mate.”

As the others file out of the dressing room, Heungmin notices Harry hanging back. He says quietly, once everyone is gone, “I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to go, too.”

His hands are clasped around his back and a carefulness in his voice that Heungmin hasn’t heard from Harry in a long time.

“No, stay,” Heungmin says. “Come see the grounds with me.”

2019

When the whistle blows and Tottenham progress to the final—the Champions League final, them, Tottenham Hotspur—the disappointments of the last few years melt away. They’d been so close to glory so many times. In the unadulterated joy of the moment, it all feels necessary, inevitable. The path leading them to the final, to Madrid.

Lucas collapses to his knees. Mauricio sobs openly on live television. Harry leaps down from the bench onto the pitch like his ankle is in full health and sweeps Heungmin into his arms.

I’ll be fit by the final, Harry promises, holding onto Heungmin’s face with clenched hands, and Heungmin knows there’s nothing anyone could do to stop him from playing. I’ll be fucking fit, and we’ll take it fucking home. Me and you, yeah?

Of all the clubs in the world, Tottenham is uniquely susceptible to the forces of luck. No denying that. But these last few years it seems like the winds of fortune have shifted. Like for once Tottenham will be lucky, and that will be what finally pushes them over the finish line.

As for where the luck has come from, and why it has come now, they all have their theories. Heungmin thinks it’s the new stadium. Harry points out that their home performances haven’t become flawless all of a sudden, and the impossibility of their advancement through the Champions League quarter and semi finals to Madrid was accomplished by sole virtue of away goal, which seems to contradict the staying power of their brand new stadium.

But there’s something to it. An omen of things to come, at least.

When Heungmin came to Tottenham the new grounds were nothing but an abstract promise, loose dirt and construction vehicles and scaffolding. Months often went by with little to no visible progress. Many times Heungmin wondered if Tottenham Hotspur Stadium would ever be more than a half-constructed pile of steel beams and rubble. Yet despite everything, in front of them shines this glittering, otherworldly stadium that Harry and Heungmin get to call home before anyone else. The gradual transformation makes Heungmin believe that what they’re building, he and Harry and all the other lads on the team, will grow to become what it was always meant to be.

It’s not the grounds, Harry insists. It’s them. Heungmin doesn’t see the difference.

2029

Harry lets Heungmin take the lead, going where Heungmin deems fit to go, following where Heungmin takes the conversation.

They poke their head into the drab away dressing room. How is Harry enjoying America? His neighbourhood is nice, but he misses German food. They walk across the pitch. Does Harry still think he’ll join the NFL? No, not unless Harry decides to train every day for a year straight, or the league’s standards drop sufficiently. They stand next to each other in the South Stand and yell across the empty stadium. Has Harry been seeing anyone? Harry gives a noncommittal answer. Nothing serious, and not for a while.

A caution rests beneath every step Harry takes and every word he says. Heungmin isn’t sure what to make of it. He doesn’t recognise apprehension on Harry, isn’t sure what it makes that it should rear its head only now that they’re alone.

“Did they ever put in the cheese room?” Harry asks Heungmin as they make their way through the East Atrium.

“No, no,” says Heungmin, wrinkling his nose. He’s never understood the obsession with cheese so many of his teammates seem to share. “I don’t know how anyone could believe that was real. Think of the smell!”

Harry laughs. “Believe me, Sonny, it would’ve made money.”

By now the fans have emptied out onto the streets and into the surrounding pubs. A steady crew of service workers remain, mopping up sticky stains of spilt beer and funnelling debris into rubbish bins. They pay Harry and Heungmin little attention, too focused on their work.

Heungmin leads Harry to a lift in the middle of the Atrium, the private lift that leads to Stratus East, a corporate suite high in the rafters of the stadium. “Have you been up here before?” he asks as the lift opens and they step inside.

“Didn’t have much chance to explore, did I. Have you?”

Heungmin shrugs. “Sometimes, when I’m not playing.”

The lift arrives at their floor. The doors glide open and the lights flicker on as they step into the suite.

Meant to host events for corporate sponsors, Stratus East oozes sanitised luxury, with its marble floors and white glass countertops. At least it did ten years ago when it first opened. Today, the countertops aren’t as white as they used to be, its out-of-date furnishings could do with a remodel, and the carpeting used to be a lighter shade of blue.

Heungmin hasn’t brought Harry here for any of that, but rather because the suite offers the highest vantage point in the grounds. The entire stadium stretches out before them, the pitch and the rafters and all four stands, even the East Stand the suite sits atop, all backlit by the last few rays of sunlight and the onset of dusk.

As the sun sets on the last day of Heungmin’s career, the sky over Tottenham Hotspur Stadium turns a deep shade of navy blue.

“Wow,” Harry says, his shoulder almost brushing Heungmin’s own, close enough that Heungmin can feel the warmth of his body but without making contact.

“The pitch looks quite small from up here, no?” Heungmin says.

They stand there, taking in the view in silence for a while. Then, like a held breath, the moment ends with a release. Heungmin sighs and turns away from the window.

“What will you do now?” Harry asks.

“I don’t know,” Heungmin answers honestly. “Spend some time with my brother, maybe. I might travel some. Try to find myself out there, you know. Very cliche, but I don’t know much about myself outside of football.”

“It’s not cliche, really, mate,” says Harry with a gentle smile. “If you find yourself in America, would you come stay with me? Don’t have to be for long, just until…. You’d like it, I think. New York is quiet, in a way.”

“New York, quiet?” Heungmin laughs. “That’s not its reputation. Or my experience, for that matter.”

“Well, it can be. Depending on where you, you know, live and that….”

Harry gives up on trying to explain himself and shrugs.

Heungmin imagines it, a few days in New York with Harry. A week or two, if Harry let him stay that long. He imagines early morning walks in Central Park among the autumn foliage, drinking beers together at a bar where no one recognises either of them, clinging onto each other’s shoulders as they stumble home late at night.

The fantasy morphs into something much more self-indulgent and domestic. Heungmin leaning against a giant bay window to read a book while he waits for Harry to return home from training. The two of them bickering over which takeaway to order on a quiet Sunday night. Harry flicking white paint onto Heungmin’s face when they attempt to repaint the dining room without professional help. Vignettes from a life that simply could not exist, but that Heungmin occasionally finds comfort in.

“That would be nice, I think,” Heungmin says, putting a hand to Harry’s wrist and squeezing gently. “If you will have me, I’ll come.”

Harry nods, bites his lip. There’s a heat to his face. He glances down at Heungmin’s hand and then back up at Heungmin’s face. “Sonny,” he says and then stops.

Heungmin keeps his eyes trained on Harry’s face, waiting for him to continue. He holds his breath for whatever has been on Harry’s mind all day to reveal itself. A secret, maybe. A girlfriend he didn’t have the heart to mention earlier. Something that will rip Heungmin open but that he will weather regardless.

Harry kisses him instead.

Frozen in place, Heungmin stays still until the kiss reaches its natural conclusion. Harry pulls away, confusion written across his face.

“Sonny,” he says.

Heungmin takes a breath. He’s not so cruel as to wipe the kiss away but he doesn’t acknowledge it at all. “Our friends are waiting for us,” he says, turning away to walk towards the exit.

His voice trembles slightly. It’s subtle, but if Heungmin can hear it, Harry certainly can.

The doors of the lift are opening by the time Harry catches up to him.

“Sonny, hold—hold on,” Harry says, joining Heungmin on the lift. It starts to descend. “I—I thought—”

His mouth opens and shuts a few times. He runs a hand over his red face.

Heungmin averts his eyes. Stares at the floor. The lift chimes, opens. The two of them file out into the empty Atrium.

“I thought this was what you… that that was what you wanted. Where we was headed,” Harry says finally, his words echoing down the long corridor. “I thought after retirement we’d— again.”

Heungmn’s own face burns in shame. “When did I say that?” he blurts out, not remotely sure what Harry is trying to convey. He’s overwhelmed and feeling ambushed, like he’s been given no time at all to calculate the way he should react, the way he wants to react.

“Never. Never mind. I got it wrong,” Harry says, his voice thick.

A terrible, weighty silence hangs between the two of them. Heungmin closes his eyes and tries to breathe. He half-expects Harry to run—if the situation was reversed, that’s likely what he’d do—but he’s grateful when Harry stays next to him.

Gently, Heungmin places a hand on Harry’s forearm. He sighs. Tries to move his mind beyond the feeling of warm lips pressed against his, the taste of Harry lingering on his mouth.

Heungmin says, “Oh, H. You know it’s too late.”

2023

Harry goes. Joins a team that deserves him, a team that can do what Tottenham could never accomplish and give their favourite son a trophy. It’s a long time coming.

Knowing that does nothing to dim the blow.

There are a lot of reasons to hate Harry for leaving. Heungmin can’t choose just one. His club no longer employs the world’s greatest striker, for one. There’s the new manager, another so-called transition period in a long line of transition periods, and every time the squad changes, their future becomes more clouded. And the club: thankfully Harry refuses to join another English club, but if Ange is right and he’s the man to guide them back to the Champions League, it’s entirely possible that Tottenham could play Bayern. Heungmin doesn’t want to know how it would feel to share a pitch with Harry but wear a different kit.

More than anything, though, Heungmin hates Harry for giving up on Tottenham. On Heungmin. Because before Harry left, Heungmin could still pretend that their story hadn’t stalled years ago. If Harry stayed, that meant they could still move forward one day.

But Harry leaves, and it’s too late. Heungmin stops hoping.

Heungmin also stops calling.

Things between them don’t get back to the way they were until a few years later. Spurs are in the Champions League again. They don’t make it past the Round of 16 but they do play Bayern.

It’s the same scenario Heungmin used to lay awake in bed at night and imagine, the summer Harry finally got his transfer. But then when it happens, when he and Harry are finally sharing a pitch as rivals instead of teammates, it’s not scary anymore. They both give it their best, hoping for the other to lose. The same as they would for any other competitor for whom they carry respect.

After the second leg when Tottenham lose in Munich, Heungmin sneaks out of the team hotel and drinks German beer with Harry. They talk. Things between them aren’t the same as they used to be, but things are alright just the same.

Taking Harry seriously as a competitor adds a touch of normalcy to their relationship that Son hasn’t felt for a long time. Their friendship is not a sacred, delicate flame to hold close to his chest. It does not need protection from the wind.

2029

One near-silent car ride later, Heungmin and Harry arrive to find most of the Legends already several pints deep.

Their entire table erupts into raucous applause when they walk in. Soon the entire place starts chanting SON-NY! SON-NY! Heungmin waves it off, his face warm and smile impossible to fight off, and sits in the spare seat between Eric and Madders, across and one over from Harry.

“How did she take it?” Madders yells over the noise into Heungmin’s ear.

It takes Heungmin a minute to understand that by she Madders means the stadium and by it he means the goodbye. “She wouldn’t stop crying,” he says. “So annoying, you know?”

“Don’t I.” Madders rolls his eyes dramatically, then forces a pint into Heungmin’s hand. “Drink up, mate, you got a lot to catch up on!”

Heungmin tips back the glass until the rest of the table whoops in satisfaction. He paces himself after that, though, only sips at the beer, pretends he’s on his second or third when he’s on his first. No one else seems to notice, too deep into their own tabs and engrossed in recounting every little embarrassing detail of Heungmin’s career.

He’s unable to stop himself from glancing at Harry. When Heungmin looks up, he often finds Harry looking right back. Every time their eyes meet, a jolt of electricity runs down his spine.

“I remember a two week period where Sonny and H showed up to training literally looking like zombies,” Ben says when the table starts to share stories from Heungmin’s first season with Tottenham, bugging out his eyes and gesturing vaguely around his face with a hand. “It’s true, Sonny, you looked bad. Like you both hadn’t slept in a week, and you were training like it too.”

“It was kind of nice, actually,” Dele says. “Made the rest of us look better for once. I swear, bro, I nutmegged you at least eight times that day.”

“It was a good reminder that you’re both human after all,” says Eric.

Brennan turns to Heungmin, his eyes wide and delighted. “What was your problem?”

“Nothing, I have no memory of this,” Heungmin says.

“They were staying up late every night, playing fucking video games. Mauricio caught wind that you were having sleep difficulties and made the entire squad go without coffee for a month,” Eric tells Brennan. To Heungmin, he says, “You really don’t remember?”

“No,” says Heungmin, laughing and making a face. “Did we really do that? When?”

“Spring, I think,” Harry says. “Was when we got Bloodborne, innit?”

Harry drains the last bit of beer in his glass and stands up, tells them all he’s going to get another drink. He’s been a bit quieter all night. If the others have noticed, they haven’t said anything. It’s possible they haven’t. Perhaps Heungmin can tell only because he knows the reason why.

“Really? All that for fucking Bloodborne?” says Brennan, looking at Heungmin, as Harry walks off.

Heungmin laughs. “Don’t look at me! I still don’t remember. I don’t think I would stay up late for two weeks.”

“Maybe not anymore,” Ben says. “Reckon you wouldn’t have lasted as long, otherwise.”

As the conversation shifts to Brennan’s first season with Milan, the vague impression of a memory resurfaces, but nothing concrete. His first season with Tottenham blurs together in his mind. It feels impossibly long ago. He’d been so young; he hadn’t known then what he’d want to remember later.

Heungmin feels a sudden rush of affection for his friends. Everyone around this table has changed so much since they first entered his life. Heungmin himself is certainly no exception. Neither is Harry. Nearly fifteen years of friendship with these people, and here they are. Still sharing beers and taking the piss.

Heungmin is reminded that in 2016 he was, by all accounts, a disaster. A work in progress on the pitch, sure, and Heungmin never doubted his place in the starting eleven. But he had barely scratched the surface when it came to sorting out his private life. He didn’t have many friends. Went to his brother of all people for advice with women. Didn’t react very well to criticism. Stayed up late playing video games the nights before training, if his former teammates are to be believed. If he could go back in time to the brightest years of his career, he’d hardly make anything better of them. He’d been talented but young and immature. His younger self might not have known what he had, but young people never do. He certainly doesn’t wish for the brain of a twenty-four year old again.

It’s not 2016 anymore. Nor is it 2017, or 2019, or 2023, or any time but right now. And yet these people are still here, and they still make Heungmin laugh, and even if he’s tried to outrun the feeling for years, Heungmin still loves Harry. He might not be the same person he was when he first came to know them. He’s certainly not the same man he was when he started to love Harry.

Yet here they all are. Together. And there Harry was, only a few hours ago, kissing him like he loved Heungmin, too.

Suddenly that kiss feels like an open question. Something he can’t—and shouldn’t—ignore.

“I’m going to find H,” Heungmin announces when Harry doesn’t return from the bar.

Spread across the table, his friends nod, like they weren’t expecting him to do anything less.

2016

Heungmin doesn’t expect to grow particularly close to anyone his first season. He’s always been quiet, a little boring. His English leaves a lot to be desired and he’s not like most of the other foreign lads who might struggle to order something complex at a restaurant but who always have someone at training to talk to in Spanish or French.

But from the start, things with Harry are so easy. They have the same interests outside of football. The same priorities within the game. Harry understands him implicitly, even in moments when Heungmin struggles to find the words to express himself in his third language.

By the winter of his first season in London, Heungmin and Harry are inseparable. Their friendship naturally deepens into something closer before Heungmin understands what is happening, before he can rein it in.

They stand next to each other in the showers. One freezing night in Newcastle, they share a hotel room and, from their respective beds and without saying a word about it, start wanking at the same time.

And, the night after they beat City 2-1 away, Heungmin finds himself pressed against the rough brick wall outside a pub in Central London, Harry draped over him, lips wet and breath hot against Heungmin’s chin as he moves towards Heungmin’s mouth. They kiss, sloppy and drunk, intoxicated on the enormity of the future as much as alcohol.

When their cab pulls up in front of Heungmin’s flat, their heads aren’t as clouded. They stumble out of the cab and land at Heungmin’s door without saying a word.

Heungmin fumbles with the key. He steps into his flat once the door opens, turning and waiting for Harry to join him so they can do whatever comes next.

Instead of stepping forward, Harry breaks the silence. He clears his throat awkwardly. Says they should wait, maybe, instead of rushing into things. Too much to prove. Can’t afford to lose focus.

Heungmin nods. It’s not something they need to discuss anymore. He understands. He always understands Harry. First they’ll win glory for Tottenham. If anyone can do it, it’s them. After that, well—when the day comes, they’ll see what comes next.

At first waiting doesn’t feel like sacrifice. What more could he ask from Harry, anyway, when what they have is already so much? They spend almost every waking hour together, or at least the hours that count. They train together, they eat together, they win together, they lose together. Could he ask for more without being greedy, asking for Harry to give up parts of himself?

By the time he figures out that that’s the point, it’s several years later; Harry’s gone, and it’s too late.

2029

Heungmin finds Harry outside, slumped back against the brick facade of the building.

It’s May but the night has turned cold, so Harry has his hands tucked deep into his pockets. He drags his foot in the damp much on the pavement beneath his feet, drawing circles. He doesn’t appear to be doing much else.

“H,” Heungmin calls out.

Harry straightens at Heungmin’s approach, his affect morphing from startled to casual. “Sonny,” he says. “Sorry, you know, had to get some air, like.”

“Of course,” Heungmin says, joining Harry with a shoulder against the wall, only a finger’s width from Harry’s own. “It’s quite hot in there. And loud.”

“Right.”

Harry is silent for a beat. Heungmin watches his face. Harry isn’t hiding as much as he’d probably wish, but it’s still hard to read. Mainly his expression—the tight brow, the rapid blinking, the worry of his teeth on his lower lip—betrays confusion and indecision. Nothing Heungmin didn’t know before coming out here. Nothing Heungmin doesn’t feel himself.

“Sorry,” Harry says again. He’s not looking Heungmin in the eyes. “I need to—Can I ask you a question?”

A knot coils in his stomach. “Certainly.”

“You’re not a footballer anymore.”

“Very good observation,” Heungmin jokes weakly, “but not a great question.”

Harry looks at him. All at once his expression clears, and Heungmin realises that what he read as confusion was really frustration.

“So if I’m basically retired, and you’re not in the game at all anymore,” Harry says, “then why did you say it was too late for us?”

There’s a long silence before Heungmin answers.

“Because it is,” he says. “Because if we were going to be…together, then it would have happened already.”

Heungmin lets his words hang in the air for a minute before continuing, “Because we never deserved it.”

“Is this because we never won anything together?” Harry says. “Is that why?”

“Of course it is!” says Heungmin without having to think. “Just think about it! If we had started something, and then the season went wrong, or we lost another final, we would have just blamed ourselves.”

“Maybe not. You don’t know that.”

“No I do not,” Heungmin says, his eyes stinging. “because you left us, H.”

When Harry speaks again, it’s into a heavy silence and with a quiet voice. “I used to fantasise, you know,” he says, “about me and you lifting a trophy, and then kissing you with the medal around our necks.”

Heungmin sniffs and presses his back into the brick. “Me too,” he says. “It would have been nice for that to happen. But it never did.”

Harry sighs. “I’m tired of thinking about everything I almost did, aren’t you? That’s not how I want to remember the years I spent at that club. I’d rather remember, like, the look on Dele’s face when he’d nutmeg you in training, or how grumpy Mauricio got when he didn’t have his mate in the morning.” Harry pushes his shoulder into Heungmin’s. “How it felt to win a match for the only club I’d ever loved. You know what I mean? Like, why can’t what we did be good enough?”

Heungmin lets the cool night brush his face. The street is quiet except for the soft rumble of the pub behind them. He’s afraid to look at Harry but he forces himself to anyway. Harry’s face has turned soft.

“If it makes a difference,” Heungmin says, with a small, humble smile, “what I remember about back then is mostly you.”

“Yeah,” Harry says, “Me too,” and then Heungmin lets Harry kiss him.

Harry’s lips are soft, and warm, and they taste like beer. Harry pulls away, averts his gaze. The two of them stand with their backs flat against the wall for a moment, listening to the street, to their friends yelling and laughing inside.

Without looking, Heungmin presents Harry with his hand, and Harry takes it.

“I’ll visit you soon in America,” Heungmin says.

“Really?”

“Sure. If you want.”

“God, Sonny, I do, more than anything,” Harry says. “You can stay as long as you like.”

Heungmin shrugs and smiles. He doesn’t have other plans. He might as well, though he wouldn’t want to stay forever. A few weeks, maybe, before heading back to Seoul. He can always visit again, if Harry does want him after all.

Harry squeezes Heungmin’s hand, and Heungmin squeezes back, and the two of them take all the time they need out there in the cool air of the dark night until they return to their friends again.

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backing up fic here

2026-03-03T04:05:04Z

with the recent outage of ao3, i want to do my best to upload fic i've posted elsewhere, as well as longer meta that i want to save should tumblr or ao3 bite the dust, here :D i'm not really sure how to use this site & i'm a bit clueless as to its norms so please bear with me !

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Violent women, unnerving victims, and the cult of the rockstar

2026-01-05T14:38:04Z

Let’s talk about the Manson Girl.

Let’s talk about the textually feminine costumes—by which I mean the costumes that clearly and explicitly invoke femininity—that Gerard Way wore on stage during the first months of My Chemical Romance’s North American tour in 2022.

Let’s talk about how each costume has referenced traditional American archetypes of female cultural and social power.

Often I see dissections of these outfits supporting the point of Gerard’s gender non-conformity without addressing how or why he might have chosen a specific manner of playing with gender. I don’t mean to reach any concrete, definitive conclusions about Gerard’s intent or about gender but just hope to offer one way of reading these outfits.

It’s incredibly obvious how intentional and deliberate these choices are. And I think a failure to recognize these outfits as a specific artistic choice does Gerard a disservice. Exploring the layered motivations for a specific kind of gendered expression does not preclude these costumes from being an important, interesting, and personal manifestation of gender nonconformity. In fact, I’d say it supports that interpretation even more.

*

Gerard walked on stage on September 27 in Houston, Texas wearing a simple denim dress and blue cardigan.

It took fans a moment to pin down that the costume referenced the ensemble worn by followers of the violent cult leader Charles Manson when they appeared in court to answer for their role in a series of murders they committed in Manson’s name. The outfit was a divergence, an overtly dark portrait of femininity, and an incredibly thought-provoking one. And yet we have afforded it very little discussion.

The explanation for our relative silence is obvious. People struggle to talk about cults and the people involved in them. Obviously, this issue is complex and requires nuance. As a cult survivor myself I am acquainted with the complexity of victimhood and culpability for cult members from my own deconstruction. But I think that Gerard intentionally chose to dress up as a female cultural symbol that embodies this uncomfortable gray area.

Actually, I don’t think it’s the only one meant to evoke that frustrating moral ambiguity. The First Lady, The Nurse, The Teacher, The Cheerleader, The Devoted Follower—all of these important American archetypes symbolize feminine power, victimhood, and violence. When Gerard performs these identities on stage, he offers commentary on his own role in American society.

My friend Sophia pointed out that these are not just important figures within general Americana; they hold significance within rock music specifically. Rock relies on the convenient metaphor of these women at their worst. The cheerleader stands in for every girl who never saw successful men for their worth; the female teacher stands in for oppressive authority figures holding men back. The Manson Girls, too, have become a cultural icon for music to evoke. Their violent, mindless devotion to Charles Manson (and more overtly, their beliefs surrounding the Beatles and Helter-Skelter) is an obvious parallel to the crazed devotion of fans to celebrity musicians.

These representations of women are generally pretty misogynistic, as the songs that invoke them create distance between the successful male musician and the women who don’t understand them. But through dress Gerard turns this dynamic on its head.

Gerard, the rockstar, the cult leader, the most powerful person in the room when he’s on stage, takes these figures that are traditionally degraded by people in his position, and takes on their societal role. He’s not the president; he’s the president’s wife. He’s not the cult leader; he’s the cult leader’s devoted follower. He’s not the doctor you respect; he’s the nurse you trust. He’s not the man looking back with scorn at the popular girl who never noticed him in high school; he’s the cheerleader drowning in equal parts admiration and ire.

The female figures of Gerard’s costumes represent the only socially prescribed and socially approved avenues for women to obtain power. These women can’t be the politician, but they can exert influence over him as his wife. They can’t control the adult men in their lives, but they can teach children. They can’t go to medical school, but they can make many of the life-or-death decisions for their patients.

My Chemical Romance occupies a position within American society that allows them to wield substantial economic and social power. But every ounce of power they gain from their position in the industry further constricts them to specific roles, a specific life. And with more power comes the ability to cause real harm.

These positions—the First Lady; the Nurse; the Teacher; the Manson Girl; the rockstar—allow for violence, intentional or otherwise. In a horror context, these figures unsettle because of the blurred lines of culpability and victimhood they convey. This uncomfortable feminine danger is obvious with the Manson Girls, who committed brutal murders in the name of the abusive man who brainwashed them, but these other female archetypes exert power over others as a reaction to more abstract misogyny.

The nurse costume, for example, references in part the Nurse Ratched character: the heartless, sadistic caretaker of the all-male psychiatric care facility in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Even the adored Jackie Onassis, benevolent as her image is, represents a strata of American society akin to an untouchable nobility, an American aristocracy that only occasionally reached out to those below them.

Their violence cannot be separated from their victimhood. Their victimhood cannot be separated from their violence. The condition of their subjugation lends them the very power it limits.

Just as the Black Parade and Conventional Weapons used military service as a metaphor for the predatory music industry, Gerard’s choice to wear these outfits can be read as specific commentary on his own institutional power, on his own ambivalence about his role as cultural nobility.

He arguably occupies one of the highest positions in society one could achieve; yet as much as this empowers him, as much as this is the life he chose for himself, it also constricts him. It is uncontrollable. It can cause harm.

Not so long ago, after all, the media demonized My Chemical Romance, claiming that they created a subculture that glorified self-harm and suicide. Gerard wears the same dress and cardigan as members of a violent cult as someone who has been accused of starting a violent cult himself on multiple occasions and by no small number of people.

I think, too, that it shouldn’t be taken as a coincidence that he has chosen to perform as these specific women, these feminine figures who find power through their compliance in and performance of constrained, gendered roles. There’s something to be said about the stage, by nature a confined space, being a place where gender nonconformity can be expressed safely, where the costume can be put on and taken off, where it is expected to be put on and taken off.

It’s a distinctly feminine demonstration of horror; it’s a horror best expressed through the feminine.

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My Chemical Romance, Hardcore Sexual Repression, and the Lemon Stealing Whore

2022-10-18T03:41:30Z

[Content warning for non-graphic references to pornography, sex, sexual violence, and negative attitudes towards sex work. There is no explicit nudity but you might not want to read this in front of your boss.]

It’s the setup of a joke: Gerard Way, Mikey Way, Frank Iero, Matt Pelissier, and a porn actress huddle around a leather couch in a dingy room as a camera rolls. The actress, a young and bright-eyed Joanna Angel, asks each member of My Chemical Romance in the room, “Do you guys watch porn?”

Most of us have seen the interview. If not, stop and watch it now, because nothing else I say will make sense otherwise. (And here, just for you, I’ve reuploaded the video with at least 10% more pixels. Watch below, or read a transcript here.)

The fact that My Chemical Romance, whose faces have decorated shirts at Hot Topic for over fifteen years, whose songs have saved lives and inspired memes, who all have wives and children, would end up associated with an alt porn website like Burning Angel often baffles fans watching the interview for the first time.

For example, see these comments left on the original video uploaded to YouTube:

These comments, though a few years old, generally represent how a lot of fans understand the interview. Other people think it’s funny and perhaps a little out of left field, but don’t question how four members wound up on a porn site like Burning Angel. Both attitudes are a pretty typical example of the MCR fandom’s ignorance about the New Jersey hardcore scene, as well reflecting general weirdness about sex work.

Since I cannot turn my historian brain off, I wanted to provide some of the extremely interesting historical context behind the video. The post I had originally planned to make very, very briefly outlined how MCR ended up being interviewed by Joanna Angel, founder and longtime CEO of Burning Angel. But the more I looked into it, the more I fell down a rabbit hole. This eventually turned into something of a mammoth manifesto about women and sexuality in the late 90s hardcore scene that gave My Chemical Romance and Joanna Angel careers. I will warn you: this is long. But it’s also important historical background information that rarely gets discussed at all—especially by MCR fans.

(So, with all that said, please feel free to ask any questions about anything I say here! Sources for will be posted on a different post which I will link at the end, and I have been quite thorough, though not as thorough as I could have been.)

Tl;dr: Joanna Angel came up in the exact same scene as My Chemical Romance, Thursday, and Midtown, a scene which stigmatized open sexual expression, at the expense of women and queer people—especially those involved in sex work. When she started her porn site, Burning Angel, she applied the same DIY values that her peers did to their own bands, but faced violence and ostracization from a subculture much too repressed to embrace such blatant expression of female sexuality. In this context, the My Chemical Romance interview with Burning Angel in 2004 was not only a group of guys doing a favor for someone they had probably known for years at that point; it can also be read as a somewhat controversial act that pushed back against this aversion to sexuality, and that helped legitimize and popularize both the site and Joanna Angel’s career.

Burning Angel: the Movie (2005)

Say you’re a diehard My Chemical Romance fan in 2005—if you really want to watch your favorite band discuss their porn-viewing habits, you’ll have to travel to either your local adult entertainment store or go to the hardcore porn site BurningAngel.com and order their first DVD, appropriately titled Burning Angel: The Movie. Once you have the disc, you’ll have to fast forward through several sex scenes and interviews with other bands before you arrive at what you wanted: the actress who you’ve just seen in hardcore sex scenes asking Gerard, Frank, Mikey and Otter questions about their preferences in adult entertainment.

The DVD was Burning Angel’s first attempt at more professional pornography, and Joanna’s first foray into full participation in filmed, live-action sex. Joanna Angel would later go on to be one of the most well-known porn stars of our time—in Virgin Territory (2006), for example, she played a lemon stealing whore; you might have seen the video—and Burning Angel would be credited with the popularization of the “alt” porn genre, which broke from the exploitative mainstream porn model and typically featured models representative of subcultures.

But in 2005 her alt porn empire was still in its infancy, and Joanna was still struggling to rectify her recent full expulsion from the local New Jersey hardcore social scene with her enduring devotion to DIY values—and the fact that members of the sexually repressed subculture that had ostracized Joanna were her site’s target audience.

Joanna Angel on the Scene

Any thoughts of a future career in adult entertainment and the last name Angel were far from her mind when Joanna Mostov enrolled in Rutgers University in 1998.

Though she often pushed back against the wishes of her religious orthodox Jewish family, the extent of her adolescent rebellion had ended at sneaking out to punk shows and getting piercings her mother wouldn’t approve of. At Rutgers, Joanna quickly became enmeshed in the New Brunswick hardcore scene, putting her in the same circles as a host of people whose names you might recognize: Geoff Rickly of Thursday (who ran hundreds of shows out of his basement), Gabe Saporta of Midtown and Cobra Starship, and Alex Saavedra of Eyeball Records.

Geoff Rickly: Well, you know, the funny thing is that, at the time, Joanna, who would later go on to form Burning Angel and become a famous porn star in her own right, was playing in her goth bands with chelsea haircuts and the basement shows. Like, her local goth band would play. And they’d bring out people and stuff, and I’d put touring bands on that show, and so it’s funny to me how, weirdly, DIY punk hardcore scenes and porn had weird associations then. [source: Going Off Track: Geoff Rickly, 2012]

The NJ hardcore scene was close-knit enough that while she only has documented friendships with some of these people, she had to have crossed paths with most of them multiple times (for example, Joanna was at the show on December 31, 1998 where Thursday and Midtown played their first real sets). She went to every show she could and hosted some in her own basement.

While we don’t necessarily have a written record of her friendship with Frank Iero and Mikey Way of My Chemical Romance, the fact that Joanna attended plenty of shows in the North Jersey area and also spent a lot of time at the Eyeball House (Alex was a close friend; and Pencey Prep was on his label) suggests that, at the the very least, Joanna, Frank, and Mikey were aware of each other’s presence in these early years. They were peers in the same scene, just as they were with everyone else who frequented the same venues or played in the same basements.

For years, the hardcore scene mattered to her more than anything else; it was her social life and what she based her values upon.

Those hardcore values and a growing curiosity about her own sexuality lead Joanna to sex-positive feminist activism and a writing internship with Nerve.com, an online magazine which explored topics related to sex and romantic relationships. From there, her interest in expressing her own sexuality continued to develop.

Suicidegirls in 2001

So, in 2002, when her roommate and friend asked her if she wanted to start a porn site that offered more explicit content than sites like SuicideGirls, which featured punk aesthetics and band interviews but stayed away from anything more than simple nudity, Joanna agreed.

BurningAngel.com went live in April 2002. It wanted to do things differently than other porn sites. While not necessarily pushing the boundaries of beauty standards, the site used models who were beautiful but in a more approachable, average sense. Joanna has said that since she had little experience even watching porn prior to starting the site, she wanted the site to mimic the kind of sex she was having with actors who looked like the people she was having sex with.

Joanna: When we started the website, it was a reflection of ourselves. It still is to this day. There's band interviews on the website, the style of girl that we use is not your average typical porn star and the personality on the website is a little bit different. All the members interact with each other, all of the girls have blogs and profiles, and people become friends with each other. It's more of a community and a reflection of a subculture rather than just being a website with content to jerk-off to and never think about again. [source: Complex: Interview: Joanna Angel Talks Alt Porn, Piracy, And Her Blow-Up Doll, 2011]

[Burning Angel’s homepage in June 2002]

Hardcore Punk Reacts to Hardcore Porn

Her longtime involvement in the scene and her application of DIY ethics to her porn business did not mean that the hardcore culture actively nurtured Joanna Angel’s career in porn. In reality, many parts of the scene were actively hostile towards Joanna and the site once Burning Angel went live.

This backlash isn’t incredibly surprising within the context of late 90s hardcore, a subculture that by and large refused to acknowledge sexuality of any kind.

The sexual repression in hardcore reflected several different aspects of its culture: a negative perception of women active in the scene; a reaction against the violence of tristate hardcore in the early 90s; and, more than anything else, the general privilege of those involved in the underground.

Like Joanna, Geoff Rickly, and Frank Iero, most people involved in New Brunswick hardcore were enrolled at Rutgers, and white, middle-class male college students dominated the scene. For many of them, applying DIY values to their own lives meant distancing themselves from their socioeconomic upper-hand. Consequently, the scene as a whole developed an attitude of asceticism, rejecting anything that served no purpose beyond pleasure or personal enjoyment. (Of course, it was easy for them to reject their social privileges, especially when they could just as easily cast off their aesthetic of poverty and self-denial for an adulthood of relative comfort.)

To do anything just because you enjoyed it, or because it brought you happiness in the moment, was seen to be a betrayal of hardcore’s higher intellectual goals—and that included sex. You can see this trend, for example, in lyrics from NJ hardcore bands, which focused on things like political issues or childhood traumas instead of the common themes of sexual and romantic desire found in mainstream music.

Joanna spoke about finding comfort in the general sexual repression of the scene because of her own adolescent insecurities:

Joanna: Me being very sexually not advanced and insecure, [90s hardcore] was the perfect place for me, because I could ignore [sexuality]. I was getting older, I don’t know, I wanted to explore myself more. So I began to write these graphic sex stories. My roommate, Mitch, knew about it, and I remember him getting a kick out of it. [source: Turned Out A Punk #127: Joanna Angel (Burning Angel)]

For another salient example, Geoff Rickly of Thursday has spoken about his own struggles with the hardcore scene’s repression, especially in regards to the shame he felt about writing sexually explicit stories for pay:

Geoff Rickly: You have to think, this is the 90s punk scene. It's not now. Nobody would openly talk about sex in DIY punk. It was such a repressed PC time, where — I mean, a lot of that stuff is my heart, like the political activism that was still such a part of punk, and actually just giving a shit about things that matter, and modes of how you're doing what you're doing. Those things seemed to matter back then, and I appreciated that side, but it was also so uptight. So repressed. [source: Going Off Track: Geoff Rickly, 2012]

While its general aversion to sexuality might have been born out of an initial desire to reform the violent misogyny of other hardcore cultures, it created the conditions for certain social problems to go completely unaddressed. After all, how can you address the rampant misogyny, homophobia, and sexual violence in your community if any acknowledgement of sexuality is taboo?

(For a brief but interesting perspective on the impact of hardcore sexual repression upon queer people in the scene, check out Episode #4 of Geoff Rickly’s podcast Dark Blue, in which Steve Pedulla and Norman Brannon discuss their experiences as gay musicians in the scene.)

Of course, these issues aren’t confined to the New Jersey hardcore, nor were they unique to the late 1990s. This particular brand of sex-aversed misogyny reflects important threads within the feminism of the time which villainized open female sexuality—especially when it concerned sex work. Left-leaning spaces like music undergrounds adopted this sex-negative, misogynistic attitude as a part of their feminism—not in opposition to it.

In particular, the Riot Grrrl movement of the late 80s/early 90s pushed back against a culture (and a subculture) that shamed women for publicly expressing their sexuality. Following that, early fanzines and performance practices addressed the mistreatment of sex workers in hardcore as one way that female bodily autonomy was limited and women’s bodies were policed. Bikini Kill frontwoman and Riot Grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna has spoken about her past in sex work, the hostility she endured for openly discussing it, and the importance of that experience in shaping the form of Riot Grrrl’s protest.

Kathleen Hanna: “Whenever we were written about in the press, I wanted my sex-work history to be part of the description, because I wanted other women whom I danced at clubs with (and who never knew my real name) to see themselves reflected in some way. A lot of women who are doing music now have been sex-trade workers, prostitutes, dancers; I thought it was really important that I didn’t hide that. But I also didn’t want to glamorize that experience in being a super-cool thing in itself. I just wanted other women who work in the sex industry to remember that we can be sex-trade workers and be philosophers, writers, musicians, artists, or whatever. [Andrea Juno, Angry Women in Rock (1996)]

Riot Grrrl gained significant traction and nation-wide attention. In the decade or so after Kathleen Hanna and her peers catalyzed the movement, bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile remained incredibly popular, and likely contributed a lot to shifting attitudes towards sexuality in music subcultures.

Still, these sex-negative attitudes prevailed among enough people involved in local underground scenes that, when Burning Angel launched in 2002 and Joanna started marketing it in local hardcore spaces, the site received a lot of attention—both good and bad. The positive attention fueled the site and allowed it to expand beyond just photographs, text interviews, and low-budget personal sex tapes that characterized its early content.

However, the negative attention Joanna and her site received was vocal, targeted, and occasionally involved literal physical violence. As Kathleen Hanna had faced moral condemnation for her time in sex work, Joanna Angel faced criticism from fellow members of her subculture who thought sex work to be completely antithetical to their social justice goals. She has spoken about how difficult it was to see a community she had cared about for years turn her back on her completely for engaging in a type of work that she found enjoyable, and that she thought could be done with moral integrity.

Joanna Angel: People were calling me ugly, calling me all sorts of mean shit, how [Burning Angel was] making a profit, [we were] exploiting women, blah blah blah. And I was so bummed. I was like, you know, this isn’t fair! I always support every fucking band in the punk scene. Even if I don’t like the band, I support them—I go to their shows, I would hand out fliers for their shows. I thought it was like a code, in the punk scene, that it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. If this is part of the scene, you accept it, and you help it, and you love it—and I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. I remember being very hurt, you know? I was like, dude, I didn’t violate any punk laws by starting this. My friend from my computer class is the one who put it online. All the other girls on the site—all three of them— were punk chicks and part of the scene. And I felt really bad; people were insulting the other girls, and I really thought I was starting this cool thing where girls could just explore their sexuality. And mind you, at the time, the beginning of Burning Angel was just photos, not even videos. People were getting all up in this upheaval because of a handful of naked photos on the internet. It’s crazy to think about now. [source: Turned Out A Punk #127: Joanna Angel (Burning Angel)]

Amidst the mounting antagonism and after an incident at Hellfest 2004, Joanna officially decided to leave the hardcore scene that she’d been involved with for over five years.

Joanna Angel: I remember going to Hellfest one year. Maybe it was like 2004?…these girls were throwing water balloons at us because we had a booth there. Because we used to get booths at some of these shows and sell tshirts. We didn’t even have any DVDs—we’d literally get in a booth and sell tshirts and hand out fliers and stickers. And these other girls were throwing water balloons at us and calling us sluts. I was like, “Hey, that sucks, can you stop doing that?” And one of my friends—he owned a record label. He owned Eyeball Records, Alex…he saw the girls picking on us, and he went over to the girls, and said, “Hey, can you cool it? They have a booth here—let them do their thing. They’re not gonna get in your way.” And then those girls and their boyfriends beat him up, and he wound up in the hospital. He almost died. It was terrible. And I was like, we have to get out here. Let’s just stay away. If we’re a porn site, let’s just be a porn site. Let’s promote ourselves with other porn companies; let’s step away for a little while. Everyone in the punk scene knows who we are. They’ve made their decision about if they like us or not. I’m still gonna interview bands, still gonna do that thing—but I’m done. [source: Turned Out A Punk #127: Joanna Angel (Burning Angel)]

Joanna and Burning Angel’s separation from the NJ hardcore scene in 2004 finally brings me to Burning Angel: The Movie, My Chemical Romance, and that interview.

So, 2004: after over two years spent largely behind the camera and slowly expanding her porn site, Joanna finally decided to get in front of the camera and produce a more intentionally crafted alt porn video that retained the feel of the website. Thus Burning Angel: the Movie was born.

As Joanna explains in the interview, the general idea of the DVD was that different self-contained pornographic scenes would be interspersed with band interviews. One of the key features of Burning Angel, like Suicide Girls before it, was the band interviews subscribers could access alongside the porn, so it made sense to preserve this aspect of the site on the DVD experience. Joanna interviewed five bands in early 2005: Killswitch Engage, Eighteen Visions, Shadows Fall, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and, of course, My Chemical Romance—all bands that Joanna admired, and who had been involved in the same scene that she had recently left because of very real threats to her emotional and physical well-being.

Within this context, My Chemical Romance’s decision to participate in the Burning Angel interview was a statement, as they put their support behind an enterprise that was highly controversial within the social circle most immediately relevant to them.

Fresh off the 2004 Warped Tour and promoted Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, My Chemical Romance might have appeared to be largely divorced from their scene of origin, but they still acted in response to those politics—politics that impacted American culture at large more than you’d think—in both intentional and incidental ways.

That is not to say that MCR was being overtly political; they’ve made a clear effort to distance themselves from the clear-cut political imagery and goals of some of their peers in hardcore. Still, the band (Gerard especially) very obviously cared a lot about using their music and stage presence to express shades of sexuality that they perceived to be lacking from some forms of music.

Gerard: I also wanted, at the same time, [for] the record to be a testament to self-expression, and putting stuff in there like that, while not being a homosexual myself, but expressing myself in a homosexual way, is either going to push your buttons in a negative way or you’re going to identify with it. [AP: Well, this whole scene wants you to be sensitive, but not too sensitive.] It is extremely homoerotic, especially the whole emo-sensitive thing. Everyone’s wearing women’s pants; everyone’s got women’s haircuts; everyone’s wearing youth-medium shirts. I don’t want to come out and say it. It’s blatantly obvious. Wearing a leather jacket is an extremely masculine thing to do in this scene. Even the hardcore bands, the really hard ones, you see them in makeup and stuff. I like that. I think it keeps it dangerous. It keeps it exciting. In a way, sex has really been missing from rock, especially because of all the sensitivity. That’s what I really wanted to convey on the record, too. I wanted the record to be very dangerous and sexy at the same time. There’s such a lack of sex in music. It’s been more about getting in touch with your feelings and being there for each other, which is great, but it’s definitely lacking this sexual duality. [Source: Alternative Press #193, Aug 2004; emphasis mine]

Additionally, many of their moments of explicit sexuality on stage were designed to be somewhat incendiary and polarizing.

But it’s important to remember that, just as late 90s New Jersey hardcore was not the first subculture with issues of sexual repression, My Chemical Romance does not represent the first attempt to push back at this asexual culture and definitely weren’t leading that particular conversation. Gerard took inspiration from artists already pushing those boundaries and incorporating sexual expression into their art. He has spoken, for example, about the impact of Riot Grrrl acts upon his music and stage presence (Joanna Angel has similarly pointed to bands like Bikini Kill as significant influences). These bands had already incorporated resistance against harmful sexual repression, values which Gerard and his band mates took on when they adopted their styles into My Chemical Romance.

(I also want to mention briefly that other significant people in the hardcore world have spoken out against pornography, such as Ian MacKaye of the formative post-hardcore band Fugazi. MacKaye owned Dischord Records, the definitive underground music label, to which a young Frank Iero unsuccessfully attempted to get his band Sector 12 signed. The matter of pornography and its role within the hardcore world was not one upon which you could maintain a neutral stance after, say, appearing on a porn DVD.)

As shitty as it was that they needed approval from the men in the scene, My Chemical Romance, along with other bands, supported Burning Angel, a new kind of porn, and helped legitimize Joanna Angel’s claim that what she was doing was not backwards or exploitative but had integrity.

Have you had an issue with people you grew up with when they find out you're in the adult industry?

Joanna: At first people had problem[s], but not anymore. Once the cool kids in bands said, "I think what she's doing is cool" all the others turned around. Everyone I ever respected didn't have an issue with it and all the stupid, annoying hardcore kids had a problem. For as much shit as I got, I also got a lot of support. [Source: Hustlerworld Interview: Joanna Angel]

My intentions with this post (which turned out longer than I had ever anticipated, so Jesus, thank you for reading) were to shed light on the historical context of one moment in My Chemical Romance’s history. I’ve found that the average MCR fan, even those with a specific fondness for their early years, doesn’t actually know much at all about it—so I hope this has given some clarity.

I don’t mean to glamorize the porn industry or to depict Joanna Angel as some savior of female sexuality in the early 2000s. But, as Kathleen Hanna points out, sex work is legitimate work, and sex workers deserve to have workplaces that treat them with dignity and communities that recognize their humanity. The reality was that NJ hardcore as a community did not support sex workers. Fundamentally, these were the barriers that caused Joanna and Burning Angel to make an exodus from the local hardcore scene—and they are the attitudes we risk reproducing when we express discomfort that a band we admire has interacted with a sex worker.

I’ll end on this note: Without bands supporting Burning Angel, who knows—we might have never seen the lemon stealing whore. At the very least, the culture surrounding porn would look a lot different. That might not mean it would look better or worse—though you can’t deny the role that Joanna Angel played, nor the role that bands from the New Jersey Hardcore scene like My Chemical Romance played in shaping the American culture of pornography.

[acknowledgements: thank you so much for reading! my forever thanks, as always, to nic @raytorosaurus, sophia @sendmyresignation, vyn @bringmoreknives, and maddy @8thnotes for their continued cheerleading as i spent over a month writing this long, long post. additional thanks to wes @killrockstar for very kindly offering some incredibly helpful guidance about riot grrrl and sending me resources about kathleen hanna. and much gratitude to merlin @void-flesh and @transmascfrankiero for their feedback on the final draft of this essay.]

Sources

The interview:

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzAOmGe1S00

Transcript: https://mcr-transcripts.tumblr.com/post/17317559562/burning-angel-dvd-interview

Joanna Angel

Complex: Interview: Joanna Angel Talks Alt Porn, Piracy, And Her Blow-Up Doll (Tara Aquino; Jul 29, 2011)

Turned Out A Punk #127: Joanna Angel (Burning Angel) (May 2017)

Hustlerworld Interview: Joanna Angel (March 2006)

'Each Time It's More Fun' in Haaretz (Shahar Smooha, Jul 12, 2007).

‘Wearing Nothing but Attitude’ in The New York Times (Robert Lanham, May 1, 2005).

‘A Woman On Top’ in New Jersey Monthly (Eric Levin, Dec 19, 2007)

Hardcore