(no subject)
Recipient:
hiro_chan
Title: False Starts
Pairing: Ole Gunnar Solskjaer/Paul Scholes
Rating: PG-13/R
Author's Note: AU. Hopefully this meets the requirements, but I honestly couldn't think of any way to do it that wasn't AU!
***
"Don't you, like... regret it?" Paul asks. "Sometimes?"
Ole shrugs, then he sighs. He thinks it over. "Sometimes," he says, and he's telling the truth.
***
They met when Paul was 25 years old, a couple of weeks after his birthday and while he was still getting used to 30 being just that much closer each day. He was out in the muddy middle of Wales, supposedly driving some crappy Citroën a couple of days before the World Rally Championship proper came to town, but in reality it actually involved a lot more general standing about in the rain under a dodgy borrowed team golf umbrella, trying not to freeze to death while everyone else concentrated on getting things prepped for a forest stage. He couldn't complain, though, not really - he got to see a lot more of the countryside than he'd used to playing football. And with a lot less sycophantic directorial rubbish for the most part, albeit in conditions that varied from absolutely fucking freezing to hot enough to make him pine sweatily for shorts and a football shirt instead of the fireproof racing getup that resembled nothing so much as an oven as soon as the weather got above about 15 degrees. He liked it. It kept him busy, if not exactly warm during the winter months or ideally hydrated during the summer.
He was leaning against the team van when it happened, huddled up in his padded team jacket that made him look sort of like an odd black and white Michelin Man and wondering what he'd done with his matching gloves. He looked up; he's fairly sure would've known him anywhere. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer wasn't just some random passing spectator - he'd just elbowed his way up into third place in his first year in the WRC Drivers' Championship, was coming to the British rally off the back of two clear wins and the worst he could do for the season now was fourth. Paul had just finished reading an article about him in the latest Autosport, the one he'd left sitting on the dresser in his hotel room back in Cardiff with a copy of Four Four Two surreptitiously stashed inside it. He was still vaguely incredulous that he was lined up to drive against him the following season and couldn't think of a single thing to say that made anything approaching sense. The World Rally Championship beckoned for Paul Scholes in just a month or so, in his little Citroën Saxo's four wheel drive big brother, which meant going up against the Big Names. And that included a certain Norwegian who'd appeared quite suddenly out there in the rainy, muddy woods and almost as if from nowhere, brandishing a Škoda umbrella and a bright, boyish smile.
The conversation wasn't long, basically only covered hello and good luck before Ole was whisked away by his surly team entourage and Paul was left more or less alone again, standing in the rain with increasingly wet, muddy boots and stone cold feet, wondering what the bloody hell had just happened. He'd never exactly been given to hero-worship - playing a couple of matches with Eric Cantona & Co had sorted that right out - but it was strange meeting Ole Solskjaer. He'd been tongue-tied and virtually mute, hadn't had a clue what to say to him, not that he was terribly garrulous at the best of times but he usually had a bit more to spit out than the few seconds of mumbling he'd just about managed when faced with making conversation on this particular occasion. It was annoying and maybe a bit confusing. He was still thinking about it when he won the stage. He was still thinking about it when he got back to the hotel. He set the Four Four Two aside and read that damn article again.
They met again. It was inevitable, really, considering the fact that they were both involved in the same championship the following season, kicking off three or four weeks after Christmas. They didn't pal around like some of the other drivers did, at least not for a start - Paul was maybe a bit too reserved to be out drinking and making friends or whatever with the other guys while they were out in China and Italy, Greece and New Zealand, gearing up for gallivanting around the countryside in high-powered motor vehicles. Paul's co-driver was French, brought in by Citroën from Peugeot because his own co-driver was hanging up his pace-notes and turning hotelier or something insane - the effects of marriage, apparently. And said Frenchman spoke remarkably little English - he spent most of his time going over his pace-notes and practicing pronouncing everything clearly in the worst mock-British accent Paul had ever had the misfortune to hear while Paul was calling friends in England to break the monotony - Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville were still talking to him after he'd left United, at least, and torturous though it might have been, they kept him occupied with team and Premiership gossip, the odd report of a match he'd missed while off in Kenya or something like that.
And then, in two years' time, they met again.
They moved at the same time, Scholes and Solskjaer of Citroën and Škoda respectively, over to Subaru. Paul liked the Impreza they were driving, mostly because he'd got the production model as his road car back home in Greater Manchester but also because it turned out to be fairly reliable and he scored his first Championship points in it, though that came later. The following season he won his first race and Ole took the championship by a hair's breadth.
And somewhere along the line, he discovered at some team meeting or other that Ole spoke significantly better English than his still Anglo-challenged co-driver did. From that point on they were nigh on inseparable, intra-team rivalry be damned.
***
It was a strange attraction, not the normal kind at all and not just because it happened to be homosexual in nature. Ole couldn't say he found him attractive in the traditional sense because he wasn't exactly Brad Pitt, though he'd never had any real opinion on Brad Pitt one way or the other so that wasn't a brilliant comparison. Paul was pale and ginger and sort of short, not exactly classically good looking by anyone's definition of the term, but still, there it was. There was something between them, undeniably, though it was hard to say exactly what it was.
He didn't have a name for it for the best part of two years, mostly because he wasn't aware that it needed a name. They'd been teammates since they'd both joined Subaru in 2001and they'd got to know each other fairly well in a ridiculously short space of time. So much so that Ole was almost convinced that he knew him better than he knew his own co-driver, someone he'd been driving with for almost five years by that point though to be brutally honest, it had been almost five years and he still wasn't used to not being the only one in the car when he drove. Rally driving wasn't where he'd seen himself when he was younger. His ambitions had been in a somewhat different direction.
They were in Kenya the first time anything actually happened between them, which wasn't the most likely of settings. It was July and ridiculously hot out there, not that Ole ever had any other experience of Africa - it was always hot and either sticky or so dry it almost hurt to breathe the air outside and there they were, 9:30 the night before the third and final day of the Safari Rally round, sitting in the exquisitely air-conditioned bar of their expensive hotel. They were having their collective ass kicked by Tommi Mäkinen and the Mitsubishi team but were all apparently taking it bemusingly well; Paul kept getting phone calls from someone called Gary who was apparently instructing him to go back to Manchester when they were done for a wedding or a christening or something of the like, and Ole's co-driver was telling absolutely appalling jokes that just resulted in an oft-repeated chorus of groans. But Ole just kept glancing over at Paul in the irritatingly low light that made him squint like he'd lost his non-existent glasses, wondering if it was a bad thing that he wanted to know who Gary was. And Ryan. And Nicky and all the others that sometimes called him while they were away.
As usual, it wasn't a particularly late night. Neither of them were in the habit of drinking all that much or all that often, probably as much to do with the fact that they'd be driving in the morning as anything moral, and it was only another half an hour or so before Ole was making his exit, taking the short walk out into the cool, spacious lobby and over to the elevators. He could hear footsteps close behind on the ridiculously shiny, slippery parquet floor. It was Paul, still on the phone but heading for the elevators anyway. He ended the call just as they stepped into the car; Ole watched him tuck his mobile into the hip pocket of his well-worn jeans, under the hem of his t-shirt.
"You fancy a drink or something?" Paul asked, leaning back against the wall of the car with his hands tucked into his pockets, somehow managing to look even shorter at that angle and even more ginger under the bright fluorescent strip light overhead.
Ole shrugged, then rubbed at his neck, unimpressed but unsurprised by the way it ached after the day's fun and games out on the track. "Okay, but just a quick one," he said, and nodded though by that point the nod was sort of redundant. It was a struggle not to roll his eyes at himself for the strange way he was reacting.
The elevator stopped at the floor where their rooms were located and Paul pushed himself away from the side of the car, gave him a quick glance then led on. There was a moment of oh-God-don't-tell-me-I-lost-my-bloody-key as Paul searched through every pocket in his jeans and jacket at the door, finally locating it before he let them both into the dark room; the curtains were open and fortunately so because Paul, as Ole had often suspected, had a knack for failing utterly with most forms of technology, hotel lights requiring key cards inserted into them to work being far from an exception. Sometimes it was almost more than Ole could fathom that Paul even managed to start the new Impreza, let alone drive it.
They took a seat at the table by the unshaded window, once Ole had taken charge of turning on the lights and safely closed the door behind them. There was a convenient mini-bar and Paul poured them both a nice, conservative orange juice from a couple of dinky little glass bottles he produced from it; Ole sipped from his glass while they flicked through a few TV channels and found approximately nothing in any language that either of them could speak. Not surprising when between them all they had was English, German, Norwegian and Paul's smattering of positively filthy French cursing and driving directions, and Ole's German was rusty already from its current years of disuse. He'd barely spoken it since he'd moved to Monaco, away from the country where he'd spent so much of his early career.
For a while, they talked. Ole understood that Paul wasn't exactly the most willing or adept of conversationalists in the world, but they always seemed to manage quite well anyway; that night Paul actually talked for a while about how he'd got into the sport, how he'd never imagined back in his old Catholic school that he'd be sitting out there in Kenya when he got to be pushing thirty. He'd thought he'd be playing football forever, he said, maybe a bit of coaching after that but he didn't put in for all that player-coach, former-player coach malarkey that seemed to go on so much in the modern game. Ole had known for a while that Paul had had a few seasons with Manchester United. He'd known that injury had ended his career. He hadn't known how low Paul had been after that, how many apparent friends he'd lost when he'd lost his fitness and had that failed surgery, how much it had taken for him to build up something like a new life and all thanks to some distant relative with an odd passing interest in driving who'd got him to do a bit of navigating in amateur-level production car rally while he was too irked at the world to do much else.
Ole poured them another orange juice each and sat back down. His own start had been quite different.
When they kissed, he could almost have believed it was an accident. He was heading out the door and Paul jogged up behind him with the intention of handing him the jacket he'd left tossed over the back of his chair - he actually barrelled into him when Ole turned, remembering the pesky jacket himself. A second later, he had his lips pressed to Paul's. A second after that, Paul was blushing an unsightly shade of tomato red and Ole, for once, was absolutely speechless. He left without another word, but somehow knew they were fine anyway.
That night was the first time he tried to put a name to it. It was three more months before he could.
***
The first time they met, Paul wasn't 25 years old. The first time they met, he was nineteen. The first time they met, it was only for the length of a handshake.
Paul was still playing football then, young and looking forward to a career in England's top flight because he'd been with Manchester United almost as long as he could remember. He'd had a couple of first team starts, made some friends and some money and turned professional just before the season had started. He'd got a bigger house and moved out on his own. And for some bizarre reason that he couldn't quite understand, he'd ended up being dragged along to some random motorsport event even though he hadn't been terribly sure what it was at the time. Apparently, he had a mate who knew someone who knew someone who worked for one of the teams, and the next thing he knew he was half deaf from over-loud screechy single-seater motors and being introduced to a couple of blokes in rather colourful fireproof racing suits like he'd only ever seen on the F1 coverage.
His friend's friend's friend told him the driver's name was Ole Solskjaer. He couldn't pronounce it to save his life and he had the strange impression that the smiling guy in the suit that made him look thin as a rake was Danish. He found out six years later that he came from Norway. He'd seen him in his first championship-winning year of British Formula 3, after several seasons of the German version, before he'd moved on up for his one and only season of F3000.
He was meant to graduate to Formula 1. The article Paul read said there'd been interest from Jordan and McLaren, maybe Benetton too, but Ole had turned them all down then made the thoroughly perplexing, mysterious decision to drop out for almost a whole season with the exception of a 24-hour seat in a third-finishing Porsche for Le Mans. No one got it, especially when his future had looked so bright. And then, he resurfaced in a couple of rally races back in Norway. A season later he was in the Škoda WRC team. He made it look easy. Paul wasn't sure how many former single-seater guys could do that on a regular basis, maybe because not many tried.
The second time anything happened between them, they weren't away at a rally. They were sitting in Ole's lounge in his place in Norway, a couple of days after that year's Rally Finland, watching the Hungarian Grand Prix on TV with Norwegian commentary that made Paul's head hurt. Ole turned it off at something like the thirtieth lap. Paul couldn't say he really cared for F1 all that much, ironically probably something to do with some deep-seated resentment of people who were paid that much to do something so utterly pointless and besides which they were all living out there in Monte Carlo anyway. Something to do with tax breaks that Paul's solicitor had tried to explain to him though he really didn't care about all that, he was happy in Manchester. That afternoon was the only time Ole really talked about his life before WRC. He didn't sound terribly happy about it. Paul didn't get why
They kissed, and this time it wasn't remotely accidental. Paul was nervous, so damn nervous that his hands were almost shaking and his mouth wouldn't do what he wanted it to but that wasn't as much of a problem as he thought it would be. It was awkward, yes, but that was to be expected since Paul wasn't quite sure why he was doing what he was doing and was trying quite hard not to think about it as he put one unsteady hand on Ole's thigh. Ole, on the other hand, seemed to know exactly what they were doing. That helped. He might have run for cover otherwise.
Sex was a weird thing with them, right from the start. Paul wouldn't have identified as gay if he'd had to choose a label and even if he had, he couldn't have said that Ole was exactly his type. He was a skinny, somewhat funny-haired Norwegian who never seemed to look any less like he was twelve years old despite an ever-increasing proliferation of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Paul was fairly sure he wasn't going to be called into many photoshoots himself, either, and maybe that was one reason why it was all so strange - he couldn't for the life of him see why Ole was interested and honestly, he wasn't sure why he was interested himself. But shirts came off and that seemed okay, and somewhere along the way his nerves subsided.
It was summer, the room was full of light, quiet except for the sound of their breath. Ole's body from the neck down seemed to be all angles, intriguing, enough to make him pause to trace at least a few of them.
They didn't go all the way that first time, that was a couple of months later when the weather wasn't hot enough to make Paul feel like he was being slow-roasted for some bizarre Norwegian festival of which he was as yet unaware. It was later when it came to them who was going to fit inside whom, when Ole wrapped his fingers around Paul's cock and Paul felt like he could die of embarrassment, only for the feeling to give way seconds later. But that time, that first time, they stayed in the bedroom and turned on the TV in there. They caught the last few laps and the Barrichello win, the Italian anthem for Ferrari that never fails to make both of them smile, champagne showers they've both felt before. Then Ole told him why he hadn't gone into Formula 1.
***
British TV is uniformly awful and predictable each and every Christmas. This is something Paul's apparently known all his life - you don't get to be British and unaware of this fact, so Ole's reliably informed - and Ole's learned that fact the hard way over the past few years. There are only so many times you can sit through repeats of the Christmas episodes of the Vicar of Dibley and Father Ted and That One Episode of Only Fools And Horses Where Del Boy and Rodney Dress Up As Batman And Robin. They've both got right up to that limit but keep on watching anyway, even through the Bond films and the Sound of Music, and hell, Paul has the Great Escape on DVD like he hasn't seen it fifty times already by some unhappy festive accident. But here they are. Again.
"Don't you, like... regret it?" Paul asks. "Sometimes?"
Ole lived in Monte Carlo for a six and a half years; he has a tuxedo hidden away somewhere in a wardrobe about the size of Venezuela that somehow made him look more James Bond than penguin that Paul's English version could ever manage. He gambled sometimes in the huge casinos that Paul's only been to once, despite the fact that he's driven in so damn many Monte Carlo rallies. Maybe it wasn't quite the F1 lifestyle but it wasn't far off; apparently, he was thinking of buying a yacht before he caught Paul's down-to-earth bug. He moved to Cheshire about six months later.
It's a choice he's glad he made, just like leaving racing when his mum got ill; she'd sacrificed so much for him that it was easy to do it in return. Just like switching disciplines when she swore to God she thought he'd die if he raced F1. Maybe it was paranoid, maybe it was just part of the illness, but he didn't care. He wanted it, but not that much.
Ole shrugs, then he sighs. He thinks it over. It takes some time to think through the layers of turkey and Christmas pudding that Paul's mum brought over and the brandy his own parents insisted they all try because damnit, if there's one time of year when alcohol's called for, it's Christmas Day. He turns off the day's second godforsaken episode of EastEnders, thanking his lucky stars for Paul's sudden turn for the inquisitive in one way at least. And he looks at him.
"Sometimes," he says in the end, and he's telling the truth. Sometimes he wishes it could have been different. But then he smiles, and tosses the remote at him because he knows exactly what Paul's asking and he knows his answer. He's known it for years. He knew it even before things changed between them, before going home meant going home together, before he traced the scars on Paul's knee and had the funny thought that he'd do anything for that not to hurt the way he knew it did sometimes, in the cold.
Paul's steady performances beat Ole's frenetic wins and losses to the season's championship; it went down to the wire, the last rally, back there in Wales where in a way it all began. Competitive as Ole is, as he's always been, it didn't occur to him to be hurt that he'd been beaten. Moments like that just made the answer more clear.
"Sometimes," he says. "But that doesn't mean I'd change a thing."
hiro_chan
Title: False Starts
Pairing: Ole Gunnar Solskjaer/Paul Scholes
Rating: PG-13/R
Author's Note: AU. Hopefully this meets the requirements, but I honestly couldn't think of any way to do it that wasn't AU!
***
"Don't you, like... regret it?" Paul asks. "Sometimes?"
Ole shrugs, then he sighs. He thinks it over. "Sometimes," he says, and he's telling the truth.
***
They met when Paul was 25 years old, a couple of weeks after his birthday and while he was still getting used to 30 being just that much closer each day. He was out in the muddy middle of Wales, supposedly driving some crappy Citroën a couple of days before the World Rally Championship proper came to town, but in reality it actually involved a lot more general standing about in the rain under a dodgy borrowed team golf umbrella, trying not to freeze to death while everyone else concentrated on getting things prepped for a forest stage. He couldn't complain, though, not really - he got to see a lot more of the countryside than he'd used to playing football. And with a lot less sycophantic directorial rubbish for the most part, albeit in conditions that varied from absolutely fucking freezing to hot enough to make him pine sweatily for shorts and a football shirt instead of the fireproof racing getup that resembled nothing so much as an oven as soon as the weather got above about 15 degrees. He liked it. It kept him busy, if not exactly warm during the winter months or ideally hydrated during the summer.
He was leaning against the team van when it happened, huddled up in his padded team jacket that made him look sort of like an odd black and white Michelin Man and wondering what he'd done with his matching gloves. He looked up; he's fairly sure would've known him anywhere. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer wasn't just some random passing spectator - he'd just elbowed his way up into third place in his first year in the WRC Drivers' Championship, was coming to the British rally off the back of two clear wins and the worst he could do for the season now was fourth. Paul had just finished reading an article about him in the latest Autosport, the one he'd left sitting on the dresser in his hotel room back in Cardiff with a copy of Four Four Two surreptitiously stashed inside it. He was still vaguely incredulous that he was lined up to drive against him the following season and couldn't think of a single thing to say that made anything approaching sense. The World Rally Championship beckoned for Paul Scholes in just a month or so, in his little Citroën Saxo's four wheel drive big brother, which meant going up against the Big Names. And that included a certain Norwegian who'd appeared quite suddenly out there in the rainy, muddy woods and almost as if from nowhere, brandishing a Škoda umbrella and a bright, boyish smile.
The conversation wasn't long, basically only covered hello and good luck before Ole was whisked away by his surly team entourage and Paul was left more or less alone again, standing in the rain with increasingly wet, muddy boots and stone cold feet, wondering what the bloody hell had just happened. He'd never exactly been given to hero-worship - playing a couple of matches with Eric Cantona & Co had sorted that right out - but it was strange meeting Ole Solskjaer. He'd been tongue-tied and virtually mute, hadn't had a clue what to say to him, not that he was terribly garrulous at the best of times but he usually had a bit more to spit out than the few seconds of mumbling he'd just about managed when faced with making conversation on this particular occasion. It was annoying and maybe a bit confusing. He was still thinking about it when he won the stage. He was still thinking about it when he got back to the hotel. He set the Four Four Two aside and read that damn article again.
They met again. It was inevitable, really, considering the fact that they were both involved in the same championship the following season, kicking off three or four weeks after Christmas. They didn't pal around like some of the other drivers did, at least not for a start - Paul was maybe a bit too reserved to be out drinking and making friends or whatever with the other guys while they were out in China and Italy, Greece and New Zealand, gearing up for gallivanting around the countryside in high-powered motor vehicles. Paul's co-driver was French, brought in by Citroën from Peugeot because his own co-driver was hanging up his pace-notes and turning hotelier or something insane - the effects of marriage, apparently. And said Frenchman spoke remarkably little English - he spent most of his time going over his pace-notes and practicing pronouncing everything clearly in the worst mock-British accent Paul had ever had the misfortune to hear while Paul was calling friends in England to break the monotony - Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville were still talking to him after he'd left United, at least, and torturous though it might have been, they kept him occupied with team and Premiership gossip, the odd report of a match he'd missed while off in Kenya or something like that.
And then, in two years' time, they met again.
They moved at the same time, Scholes and Solskjaer of Citroën and Škoda respectively, over to Subaru. Paul liked the Impreza they were driving, mostly because he'd got the production model as his road car back home in Greater Manchester but also because it turned out to be fairly reliable and he scored his first Championship points in it, though that came later. The following season he won his first race and Ole took the championship by a hair's breadth.
And somewhere along the line, he discovered at some team meeting or other that Ole spoke significantly better English than his still Anglo-challenged co-driver did. From that point on they were nigh on inseparable, intra-team rivalry be damned.
***
It was a strange attraction, not the normal kind at all and not just because it happened to be homosexual in nature. Ole couldn't say he found him attractive in the traditional sense because he wasn't exactly Brad Pitt, though he'd never had any real opinion on Brad Pitt one way or the other so that wasn't a brilliant comparison. Paul was pale and ginger and sort of short, not exactly classically good looking by anyone's definition of the term, but still, there it was. There was something between them, undeniably, though it was hard to say exactly what it was.
He didn't have a name for it for the best part of two years, mostly because he wasn't aware that it needed a name. They'd been teammates since they'd both joined Subaru in 2001and they'd got to know each other fairly well in a ridiculously short space of time. So much so that Ole was almost convinced that he knew him better than he knew his own co-driver, someone he'd been driving with for almost five years by that point though to be brutally honest, it had been almost five years and he still wasn't used to not being the only one in the car when he drove. Rally driving wasn't where he'd seen himself when he was younger. His ambitions had been in a somewhat different direction.
They were in Kenya the first time anything actually happened between them, which wasn't the most likely of settings. It was July and ridiculously hot out there, not that Ole ever had any other experience of Africa - it was always hot and either sticky or so dry it almost hurt to breathe the air outside and there they were, 9:30 the night before the third and final day of the Safari Rally round, sitting in the exquisitely air-conditioned bar of their expensive hotel. They were having their collective ass kicked by Tommi Mäkinen and the Mitsubishi team but were all apparently taking it bemusingly well; Paul kept getting phone calls from someone called Gary who was apparently instructing him to go back to Manchester when they were done for a wedding or a christening or something of the like, and Ole's co-driver was telling absolutely appalling jokes that just resulted in an oft-repeated chorus of groans. But Ole just kept glancing over at Paul in the irritatingly low light that made him squint like he'd lost his non-existent glasses, wondering if it was a bad thing that he wanted to know who Gary was. And Ryan. And Nicky and all the others that sometimes called him while they were away.
As usual, it wasn't a particularly late night. Neither of them were in the habit of drinking all that much or all that often, probably as much to do with the fact that they'd be driving in the morning as anything moral, and it was only another half an hour or so before Ole was making his exit, taking the short walk out into the cool, spacious lobby and over to the elevators. He could hear footsteps close behind on the ridiculously shiny, slippery parquet floor. It was Paul, still on the phone but heading for the elevators anyway. He ended the call just as they stepped into the car; Ole watched him tuck his mobile into the hip pocket of his well-worn jeans, under the hem of his t-shirt.
"You fancy a drink or something?" Paul asked, leaning back against the wall of the car with his hands tucked into his pockets, somehow managing to look even shorter at that angle and even more ginger under the bright fluorescent strip light overhead.
Ole shrugged, then rubbed at his neck, unimpressed but unsurprised by the way it ached after the day's fun and games out on the track. "Okay, but just a quick one," he said, and nodded though by that point the nod was sort of redundant. It was a struggle not to roll his eyes at himself for the strange way he was reacting.
The elevator stopped at the floor where their rooms were located and Paul pushed himself away from the side of the car, gave him a quick glance then led on. There was a moment of oh-God-don't-tell-me-I-lost-my-bloody-key as Paul searched through every pocket in his jeans and jacket at the door, finally locating it before he let them both into the dark room; the curtains were open and fortunately so because Paul, as Ole had often suspected, had a knack for failing utterly with most forms of technology, hotel lights requiring key cards inserted into them to work being far from an exception. Sometimes it was almost more than Ole could fathom that Paul even managed to start the new Impreza, let alone drive it.
They took a seat at the table by the unshaded window, once Ole had taken charge of turning on the lights and safely closed the door behind them. There was a convenient mini-bar and Paul poured them both a nice, conservative orange juice from a couple of dinky little glass bottles he produced from it; Ole sipped from his glass while they flicked through a few TV channels and found approximately nothing in any language that either of them could speak. Not surprising when between them all they had was English, German, Norwegian and Paul's smattering of positively filthy French cursing and driving directions, and Ole's German was rusty already from its current years of disuse. He'd barely spoken it since he'd moved to Monaco, away from the country where he'd spent so much of his early career.
For a while, they talked. Ole understood that Paul wasn't exactly the most willing or adept of conversationalists in the world, but they always seemed to manage quite well anyway; that night Paul actually talked for a while about how he'd got into the sport, how he'd never imagined back in his old Catholic school that he'd be sitting out there in Kenya when he got to be pushing thirty. He'd thought he'd be playing football forever, he said, maybe a bit of coaching after that but he didn't put in for all that player-coach, former-player coach malarkey that seemed to go on so much in the modern game. Ole had known for a while that Paul had had a few seasons with Manchester United. He'd known that injury had ended his career. He hadn't known how low Paul had been after that, how many apparent friends he'd lost when he'd lost his fitness and had that failed surgery, how much it had taken for him to build up something like a new life and all thanks to some distant relative with an odd passing interest in driving who'd got him to do a bit of navigating in amateur-level production car rally while he was too irked at the world to do much else.
Ole poured them another orange juice each and sat back down. His own start had been quite different.
When they kissed, he could almost have believed it was an accident. He was heading out the door and Paul jogged up behind him with the intention of handing him the jacket he'd left tossed over the back of his chair - he actually barrelled into him when Ole turned, remembering the pesky jacket himself. A second later, he had his lips pressed to Paul's. A second after that, Paul was blushing an unsightly shade of tomato red and Ole, for once, was absolutely speechless. He left without another word, but somehow knew they were fine anyway.
That night was the first time he tried to put a name to it. It was three more months before he could.
***
The first time they met, Paul wasn't 25 years old. The first time they met, he was nineteen. The first time they met, it was only for the length of a handshake.
Paul was still playing football then, young and looking forward to a career in England's top flight because he'd been with Manchester United almost as long as he could remember. He'd had a couple of first team starts, made some friends and some money and turned professional just before the season had started. He'd got a bigger house and moved out on his own. And for some bizarre reason that he couldn't quite understand, he'd ended up being dragged along to some random motorsport event even though he hadn't been terribly sure what it was at the time. Apparently, he had a mate who knew someone who knew someone who worked for one of the teams, and the next thing he knew he was half deaf from over-loud screechy single-seater motors and being introduced to a couple of blokes in rather colourful fireproof racing suits like he'd only ever seen on the F1 coverage.
His friend's friend's friend told him the driver's name was Ole Solskjaer. He couldn't pronounce it to save his life and he had the strange impression that the smiling guy in the suit that made him look thin as a rake was Danish. He found out six years later that he came from Norway. He'd seen him in his first championship-winning year of British Formula 3, after several seasons of the German version, before he'd moved on up for his one and only season of F3000.
He was meant to graduate to Formula 1. The article Paul read said there'd been interest from Jordan and McLaren, maybe Benetton too, but Ole had turned them all down then made the thoroughly perplexing, mysterious decision to drop out for almost a whole season with the exception of a 24-hour seat in a third-finishing Porsche for Le Mans. No one got it, especially when his future had looked so bright. And then, he resurfaced in a couple of rally races back in Norway. A season later he was in the Škoda WRC team. He made it look easy. Paul wasn't sure how many former single-seater guys could do that on a regular basis, maybe because not many tried.
The second time anything happened between them, they weren't away at a rally. They were sitting in Ole's lounge in his place in Norway, a couple of days after that year's Rally Finland, watching the Hungarian Grand Prix on TV with Norwegian commentary that made Paul's head hurt. Ole turned it off at something like the thirtieth lap. Paul couldn't say he really cared for F1 all that much, ironically probably something to do with some deep-seated resentment of people who were paid that much to do something so utterly pointless and besides which they were all living out there in Monte Carlo anyway. Something to do with tax breaks that Paul's solicitor had tried to explain to him though he really didn't care about all that, he was happy in Manchester. That afternoon was the only time Ole really talked about his life before WRC. He didn't sound terribly happy about it. Paul didn't get why
They kissed, and this time it wasn't remotely accidental. Paul was nervous, so damn nervous that his hands were almost shaking and his mouth wouldn't do what he wanted it to but that wasn't as much of a problem as he thought it would be. It was awkward, yes, but that was to be expected since Paul wasn't quite sure why he was doing what he was doing and was trying quite hard not to think about it as he put one unsteady hand on Ole's thigh. Ole, on the other hand, seemed to know exactly what they were doing. That helped. He might have run for cover otherwise.
Sex was a weird thing with them, right from the start. Paul wouldn't have identified as gay if he'd had to choose a label and even if he had, he couldn't have said that Ole was exactly his type. He was a skinny, somewhat funny-haired Norwegian who never seemed to look any less like he was twelve years old despite an ever-increasing proliferation of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Paul was fairly sure he wasn't going to be called into many photoshoots himself, either, and maybe that was one reason why it was all so strange - he couldn't for the life of him see why Ole was interested and honestly, he wasn't sure why he was interested himself. But shirts came off and that seemed okay, and somewhere along the way his nerves subsided.
It was summer, the room was full of light, quiet except for the sound of their breath. Ole's body from the neck down seemed to be all angles, intriguing, enough to make him pause to trace at least a few of them.
They didn't go all the way that first time, that was a couple of months later when the weather wasn't hot enough to make Paul feel like he was being slow-roasted for some bizarre Norwegian festival of which he was as yet unaware. It was later when it came to them who was going to fit inside whom, when Ole wrapped his fingers around Paul's cock and Paul felt like he could die of embarrassment, only for the feeling to give way seconds later. But that time, that first time, they stayed in the bedroom and turned on the TV in there. They caught the last few laps and the Barrichello win, the Italian anthem for Ferrari that never fails to make both of them smile, champagne showers they've both felt before. Then Ole told him why he hadn't gone into Formula 1.
***
British TV is uniformly awful and predictable each and every Christmas. This is something Paul's apparently known all his life - you don't get to be British and unaware of this fact, so Ole's reliably informed - and Ole's learned that fact the hard way over the past few years. There are only so many times you can sit through repeats of the Christmas episodes of the Vicar of Dibley and Father Ted and That One Episode of Only Fools And Horses Where Del Boy and Rodney Dress Up As Batman And Robin. They've both got right up to that limit but keep on watching anyway, even through the Bond films and the Sound of Music, and hell, Paul has the Great Escape on DVD like he hasn't seen it fifty times already by some unhappy festive accident. But here they are. Again.
"Don't you, like... regret it?" Paul asks. "Sometimes?"
Ole lived in Monte Carlo for a six and a half years; he has a tuxedo hidden away somewhere in a wardrobe about the size of Venezuela that somehow made him look more James Bond than penguin that Paul's English version could ever manage. He gambled sometimes in the huge casinos that Paul's only been to once, despite the fact that he's driven in so damn many Monte Carlo rallies. Maybe it wasn't quite the F1 lifestyle but it wasn't far off; apparently, he was thinking of buying a yacht before he caught Paul's down-to-earth bug. He moved to Cheshire about six months later.
It's a choice he's glad he made, just like leaving racing when his mum got ill; she'd sacrificed so much for him that it was easy to do it in return. Just like switching disciplines when she swore to God she thought he'd die if he raced F1. Maybe it was paranoid, maybe it was just part of the illness, but he didn't care. He wanted it, but not that much.
Ole shrugs, then he sighs. He thinks it over. It takes some time to think through the layers of turkey and Christmas pudding that Paul's mum brought over and the brandy his own parents insisted they all try because damnit, if there's one time of year when alcohol's called for, it's Christmas Day. He turns off the day's second godforsaken episode of EastEnders, thanking his lucky stars for Paul's sudden turn for the inquisitive in one way at least. And he looks at him.
"Sometimes," he says in the end, and he's telling the truth. Sometimes he wishes it could have been different. But then he smiles, and tosses the remote at him because he knows exactly what Paul's asking and he knows his answer. He's known it for years. He knew it even before things changed between them, before going home meant going home together, before he traced the scars on Paul's knee and had the funny thought that he'd do anything for that not to hurt the way he knew it did sometimes, in the cold.
Paul's steady performances beat Ole's frenetic wins and losses to the season's championship; it went down to the wire, the last rally, back there in Wales where in a way it all began. Competitive as Ole is, as he's always been, it didn't occur to him to be hurt that he'd been beaten. Moments like that just made the answer more clear.
"Sometimes," he says. "But that doesn't mean I'd change a thing."