The night before the United match, he stays late after his massage and shoots free kicks alone, drilling a whole pile of balls toward the top right corner until they’re sailing into the netting on repeat, goal after goal after goal. Oliver thinks he’ll stop after ten in a row, but then it’s twenty, then thirty. He’s gearing up for the twenty-fourth when someone whistles sharply, and when he turns it feels only natural that it should be Leo waiting for him, barefoot and drowning in a hoodie.
“I didn’t even know we had this many,” Leo says, kicking a loose ball over to Oliver.
“Brought ’em from home,” he jokes, kicking it back.
It also feels natural for them to start orbiting each other, two planets around the same little rubber sun, passing it between them.
“You’re kind of intense,” Leo says after a spell, bouncing the ball off his knees on repeat. “Anyone ever told you that? Makes the lot of us look like slackers.”
“Well, not the whole lot of you,” Oliver says fairly, accepting the return pass and indulging in a few keepie-uppies, luxuriating in moving his body and the ball in perfect synchronicity. “You’re here too, hey?”
Leo drifts in close and bodychecks him lightly, just enough to throw Oliver off-balance and claim the ball back for himself.
“I like playing with you,” Leo says quietly, passing back to Oliver once more. “I’ve always wanted to. Nothing else has quite come close to that first time, the day of the Burnley match.”
Oliver wants to tell him to not be silly, that a kickabout with no audience and no opponents can’t compare to the real thing. But he remembers it too, as intimate as anything he’s ever felt in his life. If he were Willem, he’d be seething at them as well, for squandering it.
Leo no longer fits a neat classification of feeling in Oliver’s head, hasn’t for weeks or maybe even months. If there’s a word for the mixture of lust and curiosity and occasional antagonism that Leo elicits in him, it’s probably in German, and Oliver doesn’t know it. All he knows is that he has a primal awareness of him, feels his presence in every room, during any match. Sometimes it drives him mad, but right now, when he knows he could blindfold himself and still play exactly the same, finding the passes with his heart rather than his eyes, he wouldn’t trade it for anything. Every tiny move they make balances each other out, creating a perfect equilibrium in the midfield, and it twists around them both, all through the grass, like a thread of fate, leaving them tangled up and better than they started. The way they play together is preternatural, the way they see each other too. Camden could win a championship off this. Oliver could lose himself in it. And the longer it goes on, the more he suspects that the sensation he gets on the pitch when they’re together is inextricably linked to the one in his gut when he thinks about kissing Leo, that he can’t feel one without the other.
Oliver scoops the ball off Leo with an obvious, gentle foul, holding him in place by the hip so he can get after it, careful not to step on his bare toes, and whips the ball into the goal from twenty yards out.
“Oh, so we’re done, then?” Leo laughs. Oliver responds by going to ground, flopping happily to the soft earth and looking up at the pinkening sky.
Leo follows him, gingerly taking a seat beside him. He’s still for a moment, then with a furtive look on his face he scoots a tad closer to Oliver, putting them into each other’s personal space. They’re quiet for a stretch; Oliver knows how much there is to be said between the two of them, but he can’t bring himself to break the peaceful spell.
“It’s been kind of shite, hasn’t it?” Leo says eventually. He’s craning his neck up toward the sky, his whole body arcing with it.
“It’s been getting better,” Oliver says, feeling guilty for his part in it. Leo shrugs, noncommittal.
“Maybe, yeah,” Leo hedges. “I miss you, still.”
“I’m right here,” Oliver says softly, meaning it and still knowing he’s not telling the whole truth.
Leo shakes his head.
“You’re not, though. Not really. I get it, Ollie, I swear I don’t blame you. It’s just…After Willem first called, while I was packing my bags, my mum told me that she sometimes wishes I was worse at football, because she thinks that would make me happier. She said if I were any worse, I’d give it up, accept the bad luck, and move on. I’m afraid she might be right.” Leo has his mouth crooked into a rueful half-smile. Oliver isn’t sure what to say, because he could never be happy without football; he learned how to be happy without his dad and without ever telling the truth about himself, but he’s never managed to imagine feeling it without football. And now he’s afraid, too, that he’ll never be happy—even with football—if he isn’t playing it withLeo. “I thought I’d never be happy unless I was great at this. And finally, I’m great. I can prove it was all worth it. After all this time. I know I’m not as good as you are, but I’m better than I ever dreamed I could be. I love playing for Camden, and getting to put on an England shirt, but it’s still so fucking hollow. It’s not what I want, or at least not enough of it. I could be better, I know I could, I could even be happy, I think…but we can’t. Or we won’t, you don’t want to—”
This time Oliver is the one to cut Leo off, stemming the flow of stumbling words by sitting up and grabbing Leo by the face, kissing him like he’s just discovered the act of it. Theycan. All Oliver has ever done in his whole life is run laps around what he really wants. In this moment, he can’t bring himself to sentence Leo to the same. Leo deserves so much more than this, on the pitch tomorrow and on the practice pitch right now, from Oliver. The kiss goes on for one glorious, perfect minute—the warm feel of it driving him near mad with desire, mad enough to forget where he is and how foolish it is to be doing this, until Leo’s hands move from the nape of his neck to his collarbone, pushing him away.
“What are you doing, Harris?” Leo asks, breathless, doing a scrambly little crabwalk to put a body length between them.
“I want to,” Oliver admits, reaching across the space between them so he can palm the slight span of Leo’s hip bone, bunching it up into his hand. He wants to touch more of him, all of him. “You have to know that I do. I think about it all the time. I thought it would kill me, the wanting, how much I want you.”
“Yeah,” Leo protests. “I want you too, Harris, if you hadn’t noticed. But you said we had to be normal. And we’re at theCrossing.”
“No one’s here,” Oliver says, willing it to be true while he still has the nerve to say what he needs to. He always asks whoever’s on duty at security to turn off the field cameras when he stayslate, anyway, so he can practice by himself without anyone watching, even from far away. The one time he didn’t, there was a crowd of people around the monitor when he was on his way out, and he felt like a caged lion at the zoo. Oliver’s not keen to find out what they’d think of this particular highlight reel. “It’s just you and me, and we can—it’s okay. You were right. I was wrong. Don’t you like the sound of that?”
“Say it again,” Leo breathes, like he’s just daring to believe it.
“Don’t test your luck,” Oliver warns him, tipping Leo’s chin up so he can brush their mouths together again, a sip of a kiss that deepens the longer it goes on, neither one pulling away this time, until they’re clutching at each other, alone in the great green expanse of Camden Crossing.
Sunday, April 30, 2017: Manchester United at Camden
Matchday 33
Gun to his head, Oliver couldn’t tell you how he got home last night or what he did once he got there. He can only remember what it was like to kiss Leo, the force of it bowling them over until they were sprawled across the practice pitch like it was a picnic on Hampstead Heath. They kept laughing, at God knows what, giggling just from laying eyes on each other, lost in the wonderful lunacy of feeling truly, unchangeably happy. At one point Oliver rolled onto his back and took Leo with him until he was posed above him on his elbows, quite literally joined at the hips. They’d kissed that way forever, luxuriously unhurried, getting the lay of the land, then suddenly it did feel hurried, it felturgent.
“Ah,” Oliver gasped, newly and acutely aware of his earlobes—more tenderly sensitive than any muscle he’s ever strained in training—and Leo had one of them between his teeth, sucking and stinging. He could feel the hard line of an erection bumping against Leo’s thigh and he chased the friction, the sweet drag and rasp of it.
