"Mr. Gerard. Mr. Gerard."
The voice arrived from somewhere above him, patient and persistent, the particular tone of someone who had been given a task and was going to complete it regardless of the resistance they encountered.
Piqué stirred.
The resistance was considerable.
He surfaced slowly — through layers of sleep that had been genuinely deep, the kind that comes when the body has finally had enough and has simply taken what it needed without asking permission. His cheek had been pressed against something that was now leaving its impression on his face. His neck had an opinion about the angle it had been held at for the last several hours. His eyes, when they opened, opened onto the familiar surroundings of his home office and found them briefly unrecognisable in the way familiar things become unrecognisable when you wake up in them unexpectedly.
He blinked. Once. Twice.
"Sorry to disturb you, sir." The man standing beside the desk was older — late sixties, precise in the way that people who have been doing a job properly for a long time become precise, his expression carrying the particular composure of someone who had woken his employer up before and had learned to do it without embarrassment. "You insisted I wake you at ten. For the—"
"Yeah." Piqué's voice was still mostly asleep. "Yeah, thanks. Thank you."
"Of course, sir." The home manager nodded once, the nod of a task completed. "If you'll excuse me."
He left the office with the quiet efficiency of someone who understood that his continued presence was not required.
Piqué sat with the silence for a moment.
Then he picked up his phone from the desk.
10:03.
He made a sound — low, deeply personal, the sound of a man registering information he already knew he was not going to enjoy — and put the phone down. He leaned back in the chair, or attempted to, and his neck immediately filed a formal complaint about the last several hours of its treatment. He ignored this and stretched — both arms up, spine arching, jaw falling open in a yawn that was vast and unhurried and took its time completing itself.
"Let's do this," he muttered, to the room, to himself, to the general situation.
The office was a disaster.
Not in a chaotic way — in the way of a space that had been used with genuine intensity over a sustained period of time, every surface having been recruited into the service of something. Papers everywhere. Documents in stacks that had started as organised and had evolved into something more honest. Printouts. Spreadsheets — actual printed spreadsheets, the kind that got produced when digital wasn't enough and you needed to see everything at once. Folders with tabs. A whiteboard on one wall that had been written on so many times the original markings were only partially legible beneath the accumulated layers.
Projected earnings. Building schematics. Investor listings. Broadcast models. Partnership frameworks. Sponsorship structures.
It was all for the league.
Piqué had told his teammates this morning and they had received it as the idea of an interesting, slightly eccentric senior player with too much energy and too many opinions — which was understandable, because that was how it must have looked from the outside. The slightly chaotic enthusiasm of someone who had not quite figured out that he was still a footballer and probably had enough on his plate.
But this was not a hobby. This was not a side project. This was the thing he went to bed thinking about and woke up — evidently, on this occasion, at his desk — thinking about. The Kings League — no name yet, not publicly, the name itself still in the process of being tested against the concept — had been living in his mind for years before it started living on paper, and it had been on paper for months now, and in those months it had moved from something he was considering to something he was building.
Football as entertainment. Not football as sport with entertainment as a by-product. Entertainment as the first principle, with football as the vehicle. The idea had a shape now. A real one, with real investors circling it and real broadcast conversations beginning and real decisions being made about format and structure and how you built something that the traditional game had never quite attempted.
He gathered the documents from the desk — efficiently, without deliberation, the practiced movement of someone who had been managing this material long enough to know what needed protecting. The stack went into the lower drawer of the desk, the good stack, the one with the real numbers and the real projections. He closed it. Reached for the lock — a number combination, four digits — and engaged it with the familiarity of something done many times.
He stood.
Stretched again — the full version this time, upright, both arms above his head, the entirety of a body that had spent the night in a desk chair making its feelings known. He rolled his shoulders. His neck made a sound. He accepted this without comment.
Then he left the office.
The house received him.
It was large in the specific way of houses belonging to people for whom the primary limiting factor on space had simply not been space — large without being excessive, the scale of it sitting comfortably alongside the life lived inside it rather than dwarfing it. There was warmth in the way it was built and furnished, the sense of somewhere that had been made into a home rather than simply a property, the accumulated evidence of a family having lived here for long enough to leave their particular shape on the rooms.
He moved through it quietly — the hour and the purpose both calling for quiet — passing through the wide hallway, past the kitchen that still held the particular organised complexity of a space used seriously, the living room beyond it where the evidence of children was present in the specific and ineradicable way it always was, regardless of how recently things had been tidied.
He stopped at a door partway down the corridor.
Opened it.
The room inside was large — generously large, with the slightly organised chaos of a space that had been arranged for children and had been subsequently modified by the children's own vision of how it should work. Two beds, proper ones, not small. Between them and around them: things. Toy cars in clusters that suggested specific narratives had been in progress. A construction of some kind that had been ambitious and had partially succeeded. Books that had been consulted and not returned to their shelf. A model of something on the desk by the window — football-related, predictably.
The only light was the soft glow of the small lamp beside the nearer bed. Both beds were occupied. Both occupants had achieved the particular degrees of displacement that children achieve during sleep — blankets partially off, limbs arranged at angles that seemed uncomfortable from the outside and apparently were not, the whole picture suggesting that some amount of activity had preceded sleep and had not entirely resolved before sleep arrived anyway.
Piqué looked at them.
Something moved through his face — quiet and unhurried, the expression of a man who had arrived somewhere that reorganised his priorities without requiring any deliberate effort.
He moved to the nearer bed first. Lifted the blanket that had migrated toward the floor and brought it back where it was supposed to be, settling it carefully. Moved to the second bed. The same operation, slightly more complex due to the geometry involved. He stood back and looked at both of them — properly asleep now, properly covered, faces doing the uncomplicated thing faces do when the people wearing them are completely elsewhere.
He stood there for a moment longer than the task required.
Then he stepped back out into the corridor, pulling the door to its almost-closed position, and kept moving.
The main bedroom was at the end of the hallway — the double doors giving it a presence that the other rooms in the house did not have, substantial without being imposing. He opened them carefully.
The room was large, simply furnished in the particular way of people who had the resources to make something complicated and had chosen not to. High ceilings. The bed itself enormous — king-sized in the literal sense, the kind that occupied the centre of a room with the calm confidence of something that had been measured and placed and had no doubts about its right to be there. Draped across it, one side of it, was a shape — blankets, form, the particular stillness of someone genuinely asleep.
He did not move toward the bed.
He moved to the wardrobe instead — which was not a wardrobe in the conventional sense but a room, a proper room, with a door and internal lighting that activated when you entered it. He stepped inside.
The space was divided — the geometry of it reflecting the two people whose lives it organised. One side was predominantly hers, and it announced itself accordingly. The clothes took up the larger portion — arranged by category, by colour within category, the precision of someone who had a system and maintained it. Between garments, accessories. Jewellery arranged on dedicated structures, the pieces significant enough that the organisation of them was itself a small art. Shoes below, many, each with the particular care of things whose replacement would require thought.
He moved past all of it to his section. Found the bag he had come for — already packed, already sitting on the floor where he had put it the previous evening before falling asleep at his desk — and picked it up. He checked it briefly, confirmed the contents were what they were supposed to be, and moved back out of the wardrobe.
He went to the bathroom. Set the bag down. Ran cold water and bent over the sink, pressing it against his face with both hands — the wake-up shock of it, the cold water doing the work that sleep had not quite finished. He dried his face with the towel hanging beside the sink. Looked at himself in the mirror briefly, with the impersonal assessment of someone checking a report rather than seeking reassurance.
He reached for the bag.
Behind him, in the bedroom, the blankets shifted.
A pair of eyes opened — green, slow with sleep, adjusting to the faint light coming from the bathroom doorway.
"Where are you going?"
Her voice at this hour had a different quality than her voice in the day — lower, softer, the edges of it rounded by sleep, the particular beauty of a voice heard in the small hours when performance has gone to bed and only the real thing remains.
Piqué, towel still in his hand, did not turn around immediately.
"I came to get my away bag," he said. His voice was low too, the accommodation of a room where someone had been sleeping. "I told you already — the coach wants us in Manchester tonight. The whole of tomorrow to prepare before Tuesday."
Silence from the bed.
He finished with the towel. Set it down. Straightened. Turned.
She was sitting up slightly — not fully, propped on one elbow, looking at him. Her hair was tied up, the loose kind of up that happened at night rather than the arranged kind for the day. On her face, the green skincare mask that she applied with the dedicated regularity of someone who had decided this was a non-negotiable part of the evening and had not wavered from that decision. In the low light it gave her face a slightly surreal quality — the eyes vivid against the green, the rest of her familiar in the way only the person you go to sleep beside can be familiar.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
"Okay," she said.
A pause.
"Do you want me to come?"
He shook his head. "No need. Don't stress yourself." He picked up the bag, settled the strap on his shoulder, checked that he had everything with the quick internal audit of someone who had done this before many times. "I have to go — already wasting time."
He moved toward the door.
"Okay," she said again. "Bye."
"Bye," he said, already at the threshold. "Bye."
And he left.
She stayed where she was.
On the bed, one elbow still beneath her, listening to the sounds of him moving through the house — the corridor, the direction of the garage, the familiar sequence of a departure she had witnessed many times. Her hand was raised slightly, in the automatic gesture that had preceded some other automatic gesture — the kind of physical reflex that begins before the brain has confirmed whether it's needed.
He had not kissed her goodbye.
He always kissed her goodbye when he left for an away game. Always — not sometimes, not usually. Always, for as long as she could remember this version of their life. And at the end of it, before the door closed, always the same words.
She lay there for a moment with the raised hand and the absence of what should have been there.
Then she lowered her hand.
He was probably tired, she told herself. It was the middle of the night. He had been in his office half of it — she had known he was in there, had heard him moving around, had said nothing because that was their understanding when the league was on his mind, which was most of the time now.
He was tired and it was late and he had an away game and that was all.
She settled back into the pillow. Pulled the blanket up. Closed her eyes.
That's weird, said a quiet part of her, before sleep came back.
She let it go and didn't answer it.
The garage held eight cars.
Not because either of them had sought out eight cars specifically — it had accumulated, the way things accumulate around lives lived at a certain scale, each acquisition making sense at the time and the total only becoming apparent when you counted. Four were his. Four were hers. The division was visible without labels: his side tended toward the angular, the practical, the understated performance of vehicles that worked without announcing themselves — the Audi Q7, solid and unhurried; the RS models, the same brand pushed further; the Porsche Panamera for the occasions that called for it; the Mercedes SUV for everything else. Her side had its own character — the SLK, the A7, the BMW X6, the Range Rover, each one carrying a different kind of personality, the collection of someone who appreciated the thing itself rather than just its function.
Neither of them was, at heart, particularly a car person.
He took the Q7.
The away bag went on the passenger seat. The garage door opened ahead of him, folding upward, and the Barcelona night was on the other side of it — cool and dark, the city's ambient glow sitting on the low sky, the streets not empty but quieter than they would be in six hours.
He reversed out. The garage door closed behind him.
The drive gave him what late drives always gave — the particular freedom of a mind released from the social obligations of being in a room with other people, able to go wherever it wanted without commentary.
It went to the league.
He thought about the format again — the wildcard goals, the president penalty, the progressive player entries, the way each piece had been designed not as a rule but as a mechanism for generating a specific kind of drama. He thought about the investor conversations, the broadcast conversations, the question of streaming partners and how that particular relationship worked and what it required from both sides. He thought about the name — still unresolved, still somewhere in the process of being decided, the right word for a thing still finding its way to the thing.
And underneath all of that, moving through it like a current through water, the thought that had been becoming more frequent and more unavoidable:
Retire.
He was thirty-four years old.
He knew what that meant in a way that was different from knowing it at thirty, different from knowing it at thirty-two. The knowledge at thirty-four had a texture that the other versions hadn't — it was physical, specific, located in the knees that required more management than they once had, in the recovery that took longer, in the consistency that was no longer automatic but something he had to actively pursue. He could still perform. He could still be excellent — he had been excellent this season, in the matches that required it, at the level the club needed. But the difference between can be excellent and is reliably excellent was a gap that had not existed five years ago and was not getting smaller.
The league was not a consolation prize. He wanted to be clear with himself about this, in the way he was clear with himself about things he did not want to deceive himself about. He was not building it because he needed something to do when football ended. He was building it because he believed in it — because the idea had been genuine and original when it first arrived in his mind and had become more so the more he had examined it, and because the specific combination of football and entertainment and emerging technology and the new ways that young people consumed sport had opened a window that someone with his specific knowledge and his specific position and his specific relationships was uniquely placed to climb through.
But it was true that the timeline was converging.
He thought about 2010.
The World Cup final. The night in Johannesburg, the noise of eighty-five thousand people, the weight of a winner's medal that he had not yet fully believed was real. The particular physics of that night — the way everything had felt possible in it, the way the body had felt capable of anything, the way the future had stretched ahead without visible limit. He had been twenty-three years old and had just won the World Cup and the world had confirmed everything he had privately believed about himself.
And later that night, still running on the adrenaline of it and possibly — possibly — the minor assistance of one or two celebratory drinks, he had walked up to one of the biggest artists in the world and simply spoken to her. Because that night, the question of whether things were possible had been temporarily suspended, and the answer had simply been yes, and so he had acted accordingly.
A small laugh came out of him, quiet and private, directed at the windscreen and the empty road ahead.
He had felt, that night, like he would play forever.
The thought settled.
He let it go.
The game.
His mind found its way there the way it always found its way there eventually. City. The second leg. The Etihad in thirty-six hours or so, the match that the whole of this impossible, improbable, infuriating and extraordinary season had been building toward along one of its two great tracks.
The guilt arrived with the thought of it, the way it always did.
He had missed the first leg. Had watched it from the stands at the Camp Nou — the stands, not the bench, not the pitch — in the specific purgatory of a professional athlete watching a match they should be part of and being unable to affect anything about it. The red card against Bayern had taken him out of that game before it happened. His absence had changed things — the tactics rebuilt around the gap, the lineup restructured, the whole approach adjusted to account for the fact that one of the primary defenders was not going to be on the pitch.
He had sat in those stands and watched the game unfold and thought, with the particular torment of the self-critical, about every possible version of events in which his presence would have changed something. The two goals conceded. Whether he would have been in the right position. Whether he would have read the second one differently. Whether even one — just one — might have been prevented.
He could not know. That was the specific cruelty of it. You could not run the counterfactual, you could only sit with the question.
And then the second half had happened, and Mateo had happened, and the goal had happened, and the match had shifted into something it had not been before.
He had been watching from the stands when it occurred to him that without that goal — without that specific, individual, seventeen-year-old's goal — they might have come away from the first leg with nothing. No away goal. No foothold. No reason to believe the tie was still alive.
He had looked at Mateo in the aftermath of that goal and felt something that reorganised his opinion without his having requested a reorganisation. He had already liked the boy — it had been impossible not to like him, the talent was obvious and the personality was genuine and the combination of those two things in a seventeen-year-old was rarer than people understood. But gratitude was different from liking. Gratitude was specific and located. It came from a particular place.
They had become closer after that game. Naturally, without effort, the proximity of people who had been through something together and had come out on the same side.
And now the second leg was coming.
His hands shifted on the steering wheel — not a dramatic movement, just the unconscious tightening of a grip that reflected the resolution underneath it. The two goals from the first leg sat in his memory like a debt. He understood that football did not work on the logic of debts, that what happened in a previous match was not something you could simply decide to reverse through will, that the game did not accommodate those kinds of accounts.
He understood all of that and he still felt it.
He was going to be on that pitch this time. He was going to be in every challenge, every header, every moment where a decision could go one way or another and he was going to make it go the right way because that was all he knew how to do when it mattered.
And Mateo was going to do what Mateo did.
That he was now completely certain of.
The team bus was visible from the car park — lit inside, the shapes of people moving within it, the particular organised preparation of a squad heading somewhere.
Koeman stood beside it with two of his assistants, talking about something in the focused, low-energy way of men running final checks. He looked up when Piqué's car pulled in.
"Piqué." He said the name with the warmth of someone who had been expecting him and was glad to confirm the expectation. "Good. Come, come."
Piqué shook the hands that were extended, the easy greeting of people who knew each other well and were not required to perform anything.
"Good to have you," one of the assistants said.
"Where else would I be," Piqué said.
Koeman turned briefly to the other assistant. "Okay. Now it's just Alba and we can leave."
Inside the bus, the squad was arranged in the various configurations of people who had been told to be somewhere at a specific time and had each resolved that instruction according to their own particular approach to the available hours.
Some were asleep — properly, head back or against the window, the clean unconsciousness of people who had learned to sleep whenever the opportunity existed because the schedule did not always provide the opportunity with advance notice. Some were on headphones, screens in front of them, present in the bus and somewhere else entirely. A conversation happening in the middle rows — quiet enough not to carry, animated enough that the hands were involved. Someone near the front reading something. Someone else doing nothing in particular with the specific composure of a man at peace with doing nothing.
Piqué moved down the aisle, exchanging greetings as he went — the nodded acknowledgment, the brief word, the fist touched to another fist in passing. The particular warmth of a group of people who were not friends the way civilians are friends but who had been through enough together that something durable had formed anyway.
He reached a pair of seats a few rows in and stopped.
"He's sleeping," he said.
Not to anyone specifically. Just an observation, offered to the general vicinity.
Pedri, in the window seat, looked up. He had the alert quality of someone who had been half-asleep and had surfaced cleanly — one of those people whose transition between sleep and consciousness was frustratingly efficient.
"Yeah," Pedri said. He glanced at the seat beside him.
Mateo was asleep against the window — the full, dedicated sleep of someone who had a significant deficit to address and was addressing it without apology. His head was at the angle that bus windows create, the glass doing what glass does, his breathing slow and audible in the particular way that indicated genuine depth. The face that, on a training pitch or in a tactical room or on a football pitch, carried a quality of focused, directed energy was now simply a seventeen-year-old's face at rest — younger than it looked during the day, more uncomplicated, the specific blankness of someone who was, for these hours, not doing anything at all.
Piqué looked at him for a moment.
He thought about the first leg. About the stands. About the goal.
Then he shook his head slightly — a private movement, directed inward — and smiled.
He kept moving toward the back of the bus, where Griezmann had taken a window seat and was looking out at the night with the contained, self-sufficient energy of a man who had learned to be comfortable with his own company.
"Grizi."
Griezmann looked over. His face arranged itself into the easy greeting of someone glad of company. They shook hands — the proper version, grip and hold — and Piqué settled into the seat beside him, storing the away bag in the overhead space, moving through the small rituals of making himself comfortable in a space he would be in for several hours.
From the front of the bus, the sound of new arrivals — Alba's voice, Koeman's response, the final piece of the departure falling into place.
Koeman's voice carried back through the bus.
"Okay, boys. We're off."
...
yeah we just reached
checking into the hotel room now
Her reply came quickly — the read receipt appearing almost immediately, then the three dots, then the message.
single room?
nah rooming with pedri
okay
yeah
A pause. The kind that happens when neither person has the next thing yet but neither has closed the conversation either.
you should head to bed
He typed it and sent it before he'd fully decided to, then added:
its late. i need to head to bed too
im just about to round up here
okay then
goodnight mateo
goodnight
He looked at the exchange for a moment — at the small, plain architecture of it, the two columns of text that had been, for the last few minutes, the only conversation happening in this time zone that he was interested in. Then he locked the screen and put the phone in his pocket.
"Mateo — over here."
Pedri's voice came from further into the hotel corridor, ahead of him, already at the door. Mateo looked up and followed.
The room was the standard configuration of team hotel rooms — two beds, adequately spaced, the functional décor of somewhere designed to be slept in rather than lived in. Clean, prepared, impersonal in the way that all hotel rooms were impersonal regardless of the quality of the hotel.
Mateo came through the door and did what he always did in hotel rooms — moved directly to the nearest bed, dropped his bag on the floor beside it without particular care, and fell onto the mattress with the full, committed momentum of someone returning a debt.
"Aghhh." The sound came out against the pillow. He turned his face sideways. "I hate late night travel."
"Not my favourite either," Pedri said, from somewhere behind him, the sound of his own bag being set down with more care.
Mateo lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. Then he reached for his phone.
His mother had messaged. His father too — separate messages, both of them variations on the same theme, wishing him safe travels and a good rest and the specific combination of love and practical instruction that parents of professional athletes learned to blend. He read them with the warmth of someone who had been receiving this particular kind of message for long enough that it had become one of the reliable textures of being away.
The team group chat had a new message. Koeman — terse, clear, the voice of a man who had said what he needed to say and was not going to say more. Breakfast at the hotel café. Seven thirty. Everyone up before seven. Get some sleep.
The message ended with goodnight.
Mateo found a saluting sticker — the one he used for this specific kind of message, the shorthand of someone who had received instructions and confirmed receipt — and sent it. He smiled at the screen for a moment at nothing in particular.
Then he closed his eyes.
"I'm off," he said.
"Okay." Pedri's voice came from across the room. "I want to shower first."
Mateo raised one hand from the bed — not quite a wave, more the gesture of someone indicating continued consciousness without committing to it — and let it drop back.
Pedri moved toward the bathroom. The door opened. The sound of water running arrived a moment later, muffled through the wall.
Mateo lay still.
His eyes, behind their closed lids, did not immediately produce sleep.
Manchester, he thought. When was the last time I came here?
The question drifted without arriving anywhere useful. He couldn't place it. He had been here — he was certain of that in the vague way of someone who had been to many places in the last several years — but the specific memory refused to surface with any detail.
He let it go.
The last few days had been — he didn't know how to put it.
That was the honest assessment. He turned it over and found that he couldn't land on a single word or a clear description, which was itself information about the kind of days they had been. Full, certainly. Layered. The kind of days where multiple things were happening simultaneously and each of them was real and none of them wanted to wait for the others to finish.
The match sat at the centre of it. It had been sitting at the centre of everything for a while now, the fixed point that everything else arranged itself around. City. The second leg. The Etihad in less than forty-eight hours.
He knew the numbers. He did not need to work them out — they were simply there, available, the way important facts become available when you have lived with them long enough. One goal down on aggregate. Two away goals conceded. To advance, Barcelona needed to score at least twice without reply, or three times against one. Clean sheet and two goals minimum. No margin. No room for a slow start or a bad twenty minutes or the kind of half where nothing goes right but you trust the second half to fix it.
He knew all of this. He had known it since the final whistle of the first leg. It had been sitting in him since then, a piece of information that the weeks of training and league matches and everything else had been arranged around.
And here was the thing he could not quite account for, lying on a hotel bed in Manchester at whatever hour this was:
He was not anxious.
He thought he should be. He made himself check — the way you check whether you've locked a door even when you're fairly sure you have — and found the same answer. Not anxious. Not the loose, unfocused dread of something approaching that you can't prepare for. Not even the sharp, specific tension of a person who knew the stakes and was registering them properly.
Just — here. Present. The match ahead of him not as a source of fear but as a fact of the coming day.
Was that normal? He had barely played half a season. Was this what happened — you stopped feeling it? Was that good, or was it the sign of something else, some calibration going wrong somewhere?
His mind started doing what minds do when they begin raising questions at midnight in hotel rooms: it kept raising them.
Manchester City.
He thought about the first leg. About the specific quality of them — the way they played, the texture of it. PSG had been different. Loose in the way that teams built around individual brilliance could be loose — the go-and-come of it, a back-and-forth that had its own kind of energy but also its own gaps. Bayern had been more rigid, more organised, but you could feel the flow within the rigidity, the places where the structure bent. Predictable in its own way.
City had been neither of those things.
They had been compact. That was the word, eventually — compact. Not tight in the suffocating way, not defensive in the way of a team protecting a lead. Compact in the way of a well-fitted mechanism, each piece aware of the others, the shape holding not because individuals were holding it but because the collective understanding of what the shape should be was so deeply embedded that holding it was simply what happened. They were the most teamteam he had faced. He didn't know how else to say it, even just to himself in the dark.
Maybe I was more nervous than I thought, he realised, scanning back through all of this.
The recognition arrived with something like amusement. All of this — the analysis, the comparisons, the vocabulary he was reaching for to describe something that was difficult to describe — none of it was the behaviour of someone who was calm. It was the behaviour of someone whose brain had taken a concern and dressed it in the clothes of intellectual engagement so that it could look at itself without acknowledging what it actually was.
Don't think about that, he told himself.
He turned on the bed — physically, rolling to his side, the action of someone trying to turn away from a thought as well as a direction.
Don't think about it.
He thought about the league instead.
Barcelona were still second. Atlético were still winning — the maddening, grinding, deeply irritating kind of winning that left no room for the gap to close. Two 1-0 wins, another 2-1 on a late goal. Not beautiful, not dominant, just relentless — the wins of a team that had decided it was going to keep winning and was doing exactly that without any apparent concern for how it looked. Three points still. The title race was moving toward its final days and the gap was not closing.
He turned that over for a moment, then let it go too. Nothing to be done about it from a hotel bed in Manchester.
His personal life?.
He held that phrase in his mind and examined it with mild bemusement, because personal life had always been such a thin concept for him. Football was the life. Everything else was either in service of the football or arranged around it. Pedri and the boys at the club. His family. FIFA. Uncle Hugo's truck, apparently, which had moved in the last week from the category of fond memory to active part of my current existence.
And — he did not approach this sideways, he was not built for approaching things sideways — Olivia.
He liked her.
He had concluded this on a beach a few nights ago and had not unconcluded it since, which suggested the conclusion was probably correct. He liked talking to her. He liked making her laugh — there was a specific quality to her laugh, the real one, the one that arrived when she hadn't prepared for it, that he had started cataloguing without deciding to. He liked the way she said thank you and meant it each time, not as a social reflex but as a genuine acknowledgment. He liked the version of her he had seen in the apartment, working on her song, entirely absorbed, the pen at her mouth and the papers everywhere and nobody watching.
The beach. The way the light had caught her face. The song she'd been writing and the voice that had come through the car speakers and the way she had said your only enemy is yourself at the same moment he had, as though the words had arrived in both of them from the same source.
He liked her. He had a crush on her. He was seventeen years old and he had known her for approximately one week and the crush was real.
And.
He had heard the song. He had, after that night on the beach, spent a quiet afternoon looking her up — not extensively, just the natural curiosity of someone who had heard a person describe themselves and wanted to know whether the description matched the evidence. The song was about a breakup. A bad one, by the sound of it. And the timeline, once he had found it, was recent.
Yeah.
He shifted again on the bed — the same movement as before, rolling to the other side, though this time Pedri had come back from the shower and was moving around the room in the quiet way of someone trying not to disturb a person who might already be asleep. He looked over at the movement. Mateo didn't open his eyes. Pedri went back to whatever he was doing.
The current thing — the talking, the cooking, the laughing, the thank you and you're welcome and the way she had looked at him on the beach — he was fine with how it was. More than fine. He did not need it to be something else. He did not need to move it anywhere or accelerate it or turn it into a declaration. It was what it was, and what it was, was good, and she had a recent breakup and an album coming out and a life that was in the middle of becoming something important, and he had a Champions League semi-final in less than forty-eight hours and a title race still very much alive.
He was fine with how it was.
He turned the thought over one more time, checked it for honesty, found it sufficient.
Then he let everything go — the match, the league, the analysis of City, the crush, the beach, all of it — and at some point in the quiet dark of the hotel room, in the particular way that sleep arrives when you have finally stopped negotiating with it, Mateo King went under.
He did not notice when it happened.
He was simply, eventually, somewhere else.
A/N
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