Nina looks simply delighted.
“That settles it. I’ll get both of your agents in the loop tonight.” Sheclick-clacks back off, leaving them alone.
“Right,” Oliver says. “Good charitable lads we are. Have fun at wine night.” He makes another attempt at the door.
Leo takes a step closer, near enough for their knees to knock.
“I really do want to help. And to, like, learn. I’m not trying to be a bother,” Leo murmurs. This is precisely the kind of collaboration Willem would be dead keen on. Oliver just can’t shake the nagging suspicion that if Leo sees him doing this, all his careful silence during trust ball will be for nothing and he’ll never be able to keep a secret again.
“I’m glad to have you. But Nina will never let you go now,” Oliver says, trying to balance whatever heavy thing is trapped between them.
Leo’s nervous expression softens, just as Carda dances up to them with mischief radiating out of every pore.
“El vino más fino y Leo tan feo,” he croons, horribly. “Fiesta, fiesta, que nada molesta!”
“One of your worst songs ever,” Oliver says without hesitation.
“And he doesn’t even know what it means,” Leo adds. Their reviews don’t dampen Carda’s mood in the slightest; he simply winks and squires Leo away under his arm, leading him out the door. Oliver wonders absently if he would benefit from learning some actual Spanish.
• • •
His hamstring is hollering at him, a pulsing ache all down his upper thigh. The increased mobility from stretching and treatment and cross-training is coming at a price, along with a reminder that Oliver’s recovery is still very much in progress. As soon as he gets home from the Crossing, he hauls several bags of emergency ice from downstairs into the tub and turns the faucet on full blast.
An email dings when he’s lowering himself in. The icy water is sluicing over his hip bones and his forearms are shivering with cold and exertion as he grips the marble edge of the tub and carefully, carefully inches downward. Once he’s submerged and has caught his breath, he snags his phone from the floor to read.
Nina and their agents have been trading notes for the last few days, and now they’ve agreed that Leo will come with Oliver to the hospital next month for one of his public visits. They’ll shoot a set of photographs to make it all nice and official.
Oliver’s had a lot of time to mull it over all week since that strange car ride, and he’s decided, begrudgingly, that Willem is right. Leo is neither a beautiful daydream sent to tempt him, nor a fuckheaded upstart intent on ruining his life. He’s just a footballer, one who is excellent on the long ball. He’s going to be his teammate and, apparently, his friend. That’ll have to be that.
Besides, the hospital work is important, possibly the most important thing to him besides football. He always dreads going, seeing himself in the tired kids’ faces and the sad-eyed parents, until he gets there, when he loves it—once he can stop posing and shaking hands and sit quietly with one of the children, reading them a book, talking to them seriously, like he wished someone would have when he was there with his dad. If Davies-Villanueva is going to come with Oliver and be part of it, he’s got to trust him and be trusted in return. There’s no room for rivalries or anger there.
His leg goes blissfully numb as the bathwater turns from frigid to tepid, then to boiling when he tops it off. Between the wisps of steam, he slides down the back of the tub and dunks his head under, letting out a bubbly exhale. Oliver surfaces, wipes his fringe out of his eyes, and, living dangerously, goes for his phone with a dripping hand.
Busy weekend for us, hey?he texts, opening a new chat thread in WhatsApp.
A reply chimes approximately twenty-four minutes later (but who’s counting?) while he’s sprawled across his bed on his belly, readingFever Pitchfor the hundredth time.
How so? No debut 4 me :(Leo’s written.
Still got a match to watch tomorrow. Injured guys meeting @ Castlehaven Arms for pints and banter. See you in the morning?Oliver replies.
I’ll be the one with green face paint x
We’ll be sure to get you a separate table.Oliver spends an inordinate number of minutes debating whether or not to include a kissy-face emoji, if that kind of joking affection is allowable. He sends them to Joe all the time. Eventually, he uses a rose and hits send before he can change his mind.
Saturday, January 14, 2017: Camden FC at Swansea City
Matchday 21
It’s an injury-approved walk to Castlehaven Arms, only five minutes up Camden Road into the center of the neighborhood, the cluster of the city where he’s always felt most at home. Camden might look different now, more and more so every passing month, but the bones are the same. It’s been a long time since people recognized him as Oliver from Camden instead of Oliver from Camden FC, but when he looks closely, Oliver can still find his home in the bricks, among all the familiar sounds and streets. Sometimes he suspects everything in his life is eons away from where things started, no matter what the map says, and that makes him wonder if everything is eons away from where they should be, but then he takes the same route through the same park he’s always known, and his feet meet the road as solidly as if they were rooted to the earth.
Camden is playing in the first match of the day, so Oliver lets himself into Conor Bishop’s pub before noon, exchanging the cold city air for the smell of beer-damp wood and hot oil. Conor is the dreamiest restaurateur north of the Thames and openly gay to boot, and he never misses an opportunity to flirt with him. Conor seems to think it’s a fun game of chicken with afamous footballer, but for Oliver, it’s the most reliable action he’ll get all season.
Inside it’s a fantasy of twenty-first-century England, posh and homey at once, brimming with tartan and black-and-white photos of Conor’s extended family at home in Nigeria. Conor is behind the bar like he pulls pints for a living instead of collecting Michelin stars, the sleeves of his waffly shirt pushed back and a tea towel draped over his shoulder to great effect. Oliver feels somewhat the knob wearing double denim and stark-white trainers.
“Don’t think you can always just show up before we open, Oliver,” Conor says, but he’s eyeing him up and down and kicking open the door to the private back room.
“I’ll never learn if you never turn me away,” Oliver tells him. “You spoil me.”
