“Aren’t you?” she asks, eyes now searching him curiously. “I don’t think you’re lying, for the record. But I do think you’re keeping a secret. Something that keeps you from everyone else.”
“It’s worth it,” Oliver replies. He’s thought about it a million times since he was eighteen. It’s always worth it, when he does the math. “For now, it’s a fair trade. When I’m old and retired, then I can do whatever I want.”
“That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.” She leans back and takes a long pull straight from the bottle, then offers it to him. He follows suit, paws tiredly at his eyes, and rests his forehead in his palms.
“It’s honestly not usually that bad.” He forces a rueful laugh. “I’m still one of the lads, even if I’m gay. I fit in just fine. It’s just,like…teammates are especially off-limits.” Camden is for football, not for grafting. These are the rules he’s got to live by, the ones that got him where he is. It’s the only way he can play. And he’s only ever wanted to play.
“I doubt Leo thinks so.” Maggie hiccups, a playful note creeping back in her voice. “He’s obsessed with you.”
Oliver scrunches his nose, involuntarily pleased at the idea. Monday night was a lifetime ago, a whole new era of his life devoted to the strange feeling he gets when he looks across the room and clocks the outline of Leo’s collarbone, or sees his peach-fuzz earlobes, or smells his clean, grassy sweat. He shakes his head like he’s trying to get water out of his ears, snapping himself out of it.
“Come off it. He’s—he’s who he is,” Oliver says, as much to himself as to Maggie. “And I’m a football star. That doesn’t mean he’s into me.”
Maggie smiles dangerously, propping her chin in her hands.
“He’s on his way to being a football star too. Take it from someone who used to fancy you,” she tells him. “It seems like he might.”
She doesn’t get it—obviously, a group of often-shirtless men who spend all their time with each other and exchange glorious, sticky hugs in front of thousands of peopleseemsgay. But that way lies madness. It’s different for the rest of them than it is for Oliver, and if he allows himself to think, even for a second, that it isn’t, he won’t be able to go back to his normal life again. Oliver would rather snog Prince Harry on the roof of Buckingham Palace than get caught looking at Leo. He’s perfected the art of the fully anonymous, pitch-black hookup, but never in his life (not even in the academy, when more than one teammate allowed the other lads to jerk them off because it was the only available orgasm option) has Oliver ever strayed from that. He’s supposed to be the beating heart of the team, Willem said—he fuckingwouldn’t be if everyone knew he was gay and couldn’t look him in the eyes anymore. He considers trying to explain this, before deciding he just wants to go to bed instead.
“You can get the last round,” he tells her. “As payment for my agony.”
Maggie makes a considering expression, then seems to remember she hasn’t paid for so much as a winegumsince they were twelve years old, and nods in agreement.
Oliver severely regrets that last guzzle of wine by morning, when the fluorescent rectangles of office lights above the exam table are blinding him, head pounding like a nightclub beat. Being injured provides so much more time for midseason drinking than he’s used to.
“I have precisely no sympathy for you at all,” Anna says after he expresses this, perching on a wheeled stool and brandishing an ultrasound wand at him. “You can stop moaning at any time. Getting drunk on a Wednesday, for God’s sake.”
“I wouldn’t be able to drink on weeknights if you’d fix up my leg, Doc.”
“IfI’dfix it?” she asks, words rising worryingly in pitch. “What if you were to stop running on it, against direct instructions, hm? Don’t think I don’t know what you were up to.” Sebastian is such a fucking rat. Everyone knows he thinks Anna is beautiful—she is!—but it’s no excuse to be a tattler.
“The running didn’t hurt it,” Oliver tries. “It was the tackling.”
Mistake, mistake, mayday.Anna shoves his left leg upright and jabs at it with the wand, pressing into the tender tissue of his upper thigh with none of her usual deftness.
“I’m not a miracle worker and I don’t like when my advice and my time aren’t taken seriously, Oliver.” Her tone is clipped, harsher than he’s hardly ever heard it. “If you want to spend the rest of the year limping and drinking, be my guest. But I expectthis kind of idiocy from Georgie and Henri, not from you. I thought you would take things seriously, after the last year you’ve had.”
Being mentioned alongside two people who have both been invited to appear onLove Islandis about the same as if Anna had cursed at him or called him a dickhead. He is appropriately chagrined by the comparison.
“You’re right,” Oliver murmurs, contrition in his voice. “I’ve been at sea. I’m working on it.” There’s been a lot swirling around his life and his head since that first week of the year, when he was panicked about his leg and nothing else. The ache that came solely from his hamstring feels far away from the here and now. Anna’s still miffed, but she brings her shoulders down from where they were tensely coiled up by her earlobes.
“Then drop an anchor, Oliver. Give me a chance to report some good news to Willem and get your act together,” she says, pulling off her rubber gloves and dropping them in the bin with finality. “Leg is moving along fine, in spite of you. Eight weeks maximum, probably less.”
Oliver can see the calendar for the rest of the season stretched out in front of him in his mind, everything he’s going to have to miss, the international break for England as well. But not the whole campaign. He could be back in time for matches, important ones too—Kilburn, United, maybe Arsenal.
“Would it help if I said I was sorry?” Oliver asks. There’s been a lot of that going around recently.
“You know what? I think it would,” Anna replies, and she even looks like she doesn’t want to kill him.
• • •
When they dive into the pool for their post-training swim, it becomes immediately clear that Leo’s experience is much more of the sunbathing and sandcastle-building variety, not swimminglaps. He has just about the least efficient stroke Oliver’s ever seen, spinning his arms like a windmill but still mostly staying in one place.
“Quit laughing,” Leo says, forlorn, while he’s catching his breath at the wall. “I’m getting better!”
Oliver is still in stitches—he can’t help it. For all of Leo’s long, elegant strides on the pitch, right now he resembles nothing so much as a cat in the bath.
“Mate, it’s a low bar to clear,” Oliver says, trying to keep his voice from wavering with mirth. “How have you made it this far in life without drowning?”
