“I don’t need minding,” Leo shouts at Oliver’s back, sounding knackered and miserable. “I’m allowed to be upset.”
Oliver turns to face him but keeps walking backward, the High Street lights twinkling into blurriness.
“You can be upset without being hungover in the morning, mate,” he says, with wisdom he doesn’t yet possess. Leo is red-faced in the frosty night, so Oliver relents and walks back toward him so he can rub warmth into his shoulders, looking down at his sullen mouth, finding him handsome even under these circumstances. “Let me walk you down to the end of the park, then I’ll put you in a cab. Get some fresh air.”
“I get plenty of fresh air,” Leo snaps. “We work outside.” He says it with the conviction of someone ready to pick a fight, but the follow-through evaporates in the air between them and he suddenly half-collapses, going boneless into Oliver’s grasp and tipping his head forward into his chest. They stand there—intertwined in an empty alley, the night sky threatening a flurry of midwinter cold—until time seems to stand still and they’re two figurines in a snow globe. Oliver isn’t sure if he can have this, if he’s breaking any rules, but the feeling rattles through him regardless, tingling and much hotter than the February air. He hopes Leo can’t feel how his heart is pounding, pushing at the space in between them. “I feel like shit,” Leo says eventually, muffled. “I just want to win one. It’s so fuckinghard. And cold.”
Anthony would tell him not to whine, Joe would say it takesten men and a keeper to win, Willem would say the manager’s tactics are at the root of every loss. Oliver’s not sure what his line should be.
“I wanted you lot to win too. Maybe it’s my fault for being injured, maybe it’s Chelsea’s fault. Who knows? But I don’t think anyone would say it’s yours.”
Leo lifts his head up from the cocoon of Oliver’s jacket lining and frowns at him.
“I don’t need a minder, I told you.”
“It’s the truth,” Oliver insists. “You think it’s fun to tell you how good you are when I can’t play? Don’t argue with me.”
“I’m not arguing,” Leo says tiredly. “I’m moping.”
“Oh, Christ. Sorry, mate, don’t know how I got those mixed up. Come on.”
“You weren’t serious? It’s bloody freezing.”
“Talk to me, then, it’ll keep you warm. Step lightly,” he adds, when Leo’s first attempts at walking are tipsy, diagonal stumbles.
“What do you want to hear?” Leo asks, steadying himself on Oliver’s elbow.
“Tell me about your parents,” Oliver decides. “The ones who cheered when I got injured.”
“It wasn’t like that!” Leo says. Oliver hums disbelievingly and Leo pulls insistently on his sleeve, slowing them to another stop and tugging them all the way into the side of the building on the corner, smushed and laughing against the crumbling facade. “A ver,let me think.” Leo reaches forward to brush the first clinging bits of frost out of Oliver’s fringe casually, easily. Oliver is rooted to the spot for one frozen moment, feeling his pulse bleat helplessly out of the veins in his forehead, before he pulls them both upright and several paces down the road.
“I’m listening,” Oliver says, but he’s not making eye contact anymore.
“My mum is from Medellín, in Colombia. She and her sistermoved to Valencia, looking for work in Spain, like. And my dad was there too, he’s capital-BBritish, but he works for HSBC and he was on an international rotation. They met at a bar. Well, she was the bartender. She was studying English under the counter between mixing drinks, and he offered to tutor her.”
“Very magnanimous of him,” Oliver says, grinning.
“Exactly, like, obviously they fell in love immediately and got married right away. Also, because Mum got pregnant with Rafa, my older brother, anyway,” Leo goes on, picking up speed. “I came along too and eventually Dad got promoted, which was super exciting for him, but kind of rough for the rest of us because it meant moving to London, which was, you know, movingbackfor him, movingawayfor us. And there was still a language barrier for Mum, and it’s, like, she’d already uprooted her whole life once, she hadn’t quite bargained on doing it again, with two children, in English, without her sister.”
“How old were you?” Oliver asks.
“I was nine,” Leo explains. “I actually think I got off easiest, because I was still little, and I went right into the academy. All Dad had to do was say the Prem is better than La Liga and I packed right up.” Oliver can see it perfectly, superimposing a coltish Leonardo onto his own memories of being nine and running pell-mell for the gates of the training grounds, the one place where he could put everything to rights even when the rest of his life swirled between chaos and grief on the hour. “It was worse for Mum and for Rafa, way worse. He took off for college when I was twelve and pretty much the minute his bags were packed, Mum said, ‘Me too.’ ”
“She left?”
“No way. She convinced Dad to go too, didn’t she? Hard to argue with ‘your beautiful wife, sunny skies, and the sandy shores of the Mediterranean.’ Even he doesn’t like banking that much. They went back to Valencia together.”
“But you stayed?” Oliver likes the feeling of these questions and answers, like he’s fitting the corners of a jigsaw puzzle together.
“After much petitioning. I was good enough, then, that they knew I might make it professionally, that I was good in the Premier League way and not in the proud parental way, you know?”
“Ah, so youaregood in the Premier League way?” Oliver can’t resist querying in a singsong.
“You knowpreciselywhat I mean, sire,” Leo parrots back, matching him syllable for syllable. “I remember you, you knew even earlier. You were miles ahead of all of us all through the academy.”
“Sometimes I think it’s the only thing I’ve ever known,” Oliver admits, emboldened by the distraction of crossing the street and slipping through a loose vehicle gate to enter Regent’s Park, the cover of darkness and the emptiness of the park opening up some base honesty in him. Leo follows slowly, darting his eyes for anyone spotting them entering after hours. “They’re not going to arrest a Camden player for going into Regent’s, mate,” Oliver yells at him over his shoulder, blowing their cover entirely. “Hurry it up.”
It’s properly snowing now, the first and probably only time all season: thick fistfuls of powdered sugar descending in flourishes onto the greenery and feathering the top of Leo’s head. They pause, gazes trained upward, arms extending automatically, opening up their bodies for the cold, wet satisfaction of a snowy coat. After a moment, they start to match the statues.
