“You need a new partner?” Oliver asks, feeling irresistibly like he’s back in primary school. Leo nods, biting one corner of his lips anxiously. “Then you go first,” Oliver mutters, lobbing the ball over to Leo, who bops it neatly into the air with his forehead. While it hovers above him, he shouts back to Oliver in the panicked tone of someone confessing to a crime.
“I have three passports,” Leo says. Before Oliver can process or react, the ball is flying back to him. He nudges it skyward and immediately becomes aware this game is more difficult than it looks.
“Try again, we could’ve guessed that.”
“I’m allergic to shellfish,” Leo offers, somewhat feebly.
“Not good enough.”
“Why don’t you give it a go, if it’s so easy?”
“Oh no, you keep at it.”
At last, Leo’s pass strays off target and when Oliver turns to go and fetch, he sees the rest of the squad in awkward silence, futilely resetting after each quiet pass. Gavin has given up completely and is instead watching everything with a glimmer of mirth in his eyes—Oliver flashes him a deeply sarcastic thumbs-up as he passes by.
“I like to draw,” Leo offers, as they start again, which explains the doodle on his shoe. Oliver has a sudden vision of Leo as an artist, instead of an artistic midfielder—he can see him in a beret, holding a painter’s palette, cigarette behind his ear.
“Draw fouls, maybe,” Oliver replies, laughing at the image in his head, which for some reason makes him kind of shivery.
They continue like this until he knows that Leo once shoplifted a Kinder Bueno and his dad made him go back and return it, the only time he ever snuck out of the academy was to go cumbia dancing, and that he broke Oliver’s own record for passes completed in a season for Camden’s under-18 squad. Oliver keeps his own mouth shut, but the more he listens, he has to admit, Willem maybe had a point about staying present in the moment—it would be useful, in a match, to be able to hear the calls of his teammates so clearly.
• • •
Oliver hasn’t driven Leo home since that first day—he’s been preferring to call a cab or catch a ride with Garcia, but Oliver extends the offer anyway as they’re walking out of the changing room. Leo hesitates.
“I was going for a glass of wine with some of the others—catching up, you know, with some of the guys from my year,” Leo says.
Oliver huffs a laugh, picturing Leo’s induction into Ahmed and Carda’s very exclusive social club.
“Oh, mate,” he tells him. “You are in for a fucking treat. Try not to let them take you to a second location or you’ll be shite tomorrow.”
Leo smiles, the tentative but pleased kind of someone newly included. They’re nearly to the car park when they’re intercepted, Nina Clarke racing over in her pinchy-looking stilettos that still leave her a good two heads shorter than either of them.
“Oliver! You are a hard man to track down,” she says breathlessly.
“Nina, I’m in this building for hours every day,” Oliver reminds her.
“Metaphorically hard,” she replies. “But I’m glad I caught you—Royal Charity wants to get something on the books for this quarter.”
“Yeah, I’m happy to,” he says, all businesslike. “You can have them call my agent. I’m not traveling for any matches right now.”
Leo is looking between them, eyes slightly narrowed. Oliver ignores him and starts to inch toward the door, but Nina, either oblivious or just great at her job, goes right on.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. They’ve got a lot of families in right now, they’d like to see if any other players are available to come with you. Are you open to leading something like that?”
Leo pounces faster than he would for an opponent’s stray pass.
“What’s the charity?” he asks.
Nina takes in the sight of him, young and handsome and earnest, then smiles winningly when she smells blood in the water.
“I should have introduced myself,” she says, extending a manicured hand to shake. “I’m Nina Clarke, executive vice president of public relations and sporting media.” It’s an impressive title, almost certainly with an additional adjective since the last time Oliver saw her. “I work with the team on publicity and charitable opportunities. Mr. Harris partners with the hospital just up in Hampstead. He’s been working with them for years. They have housing for family of patients who are in hospital, and we arrange visits with their children—games and reading, the like. It’s exciting for them to have guests, especially footballers.” She turns her smile on Oliver, then back to Leo with shrewd eyes. “You’re just aboard—it could be a chance to place your name, show good face. How do you do in front of cameras?”
“Nina, it’s fine,” Oliver cuts in. “You know I’m happy to film whatever. One hundred percent at your disposal.”
“I’d like to help,” Leo says, words overlapping with his own.“If Harris will have me. I think I’d do okay in front of a camera.”
All good, thanks,Oliver imagines replying.I’ve got the local family tragedy market covered.
