“What is there to say? Have you toldyourmum how much you like my cock?”
“Jesus, easy,” Oliver says.
“You don’t have to keep testing me, Ollie. I told you I didn’t mean it.” Leo gives him a dark look under the stained-glass transom window.
“I wasn’t trying to—I was just asking,” Oliver sputters.
“You weren’t,” Leo says. “I get it, okay? I’ve got a lot to lose too, Ollie. Maybe more than you do. I’m not established, I’m not in demand. But it’s hard for me to accept that the only way to have a football career is to lie. I told you I didn’t want to pretend anything.” He pauses, looking at Oliver like he’s hoping for some kind of guidance or reassurance that he can go on. Oliver touches Leo’s wrist softly, with the pads of his fingers, feeling for a pulse, and waits for more. “I mean…did you not ever think about just going for it? Telling a reporter and making it your thing?”
Leo said “your” but Oliver knows he meant “our.” This is the question at the crux of everything, the one that will still need answering if next season ever arrives. Oliver considers it for a lingering, tiring moment. He can’t stop thinking about the Southampton player calling him a faggot.
“Sometimes, yes. When I was young and foolish, when I thought I was more talented than anyone could ever afford to lose. But I’m nobody’s boy-wonder anymore. I’ve tried to be and there’s a losing record. I guess I’ve just never felt like it would help anyone more than it would hurt,” he admits. He still feels this way, maybe more than before. It wouldn’t just be him gettinghurt, not anymore. It would be Leo, and Leo’s right: he’s got more to lose. Even in the worst-case scenario, Oliver can imagine the third-rate American club that pretends not to care about his sexuality because they just want tofinallybeat the other team from Ohio. He can’t picture anyone making that kind of call for someone with half a season under his belt. Leo has so much potential, he’s finally playing at the level he deserves to—Oliver can’t be the one who takes it from him. He couldn’t live with himself.
“I never even got to be a boy-wonder,” Leo murmurs. “I’m just a boy-wasn’t. But it has to besomeone,sometime.” Oliver shrugs uselessly, withdrawing from their connected hands and looking down at his own as if he could read his palms, before giving Leo a plaintive look.Please don’t,he thinks, sending it telepathically.Please let’s not do this now.
“It would kill me, if this defines your career, or fucks your chance to play in the Prem. I’m the older teammate, I seduced you, I’m gay.Youcould meet a girl someday. I don’t want to condemn you to my fate. It would be a lonely fucking locker room, Leo. If we were in one at all. What would we even say?”
Leo shakes his head, brows furrowed.
“We’d say what it is! Or what it could be, I suppose. You make it sound like we’ve done something wrong. It’s not acondemnation,Oliver. It’s who we are. I’ve known I was, I don’t know, queer, for a long time, so don’t lecture me.” Leo falters, voice shaking, then steps backward slightly, scrubbing at his eyelids angrily. “Ollie, I’d still be this way even if you pied me off right now. I don’t want to meet a girl. I want you. Don’t you want me?”
“I’ve told you,” Oliver starts, intending to mollify, but Leo moves toward him like he didn’t hear at all.
He kisses Oliver just like he did last night: wholly and wildly. It’s so good, every time. If Oliver was strong enough, he’d pushhim away and keep on arguing; he’s done it before. He can’t now. He wants Leo too, he wants him too much. Oliver thought they’d solved this, or maybe that they’d decided there was nothing to solve, but he misread the play entirely, the attacking forward unmarked in the penalty box and him several paces behind, desperate and useless. He doesn’t know what to do, but he knows he needs to do it tenderly, with the greatest of care. One last kiss, then he pulls back, but he keeps Leo’s face between his palms, looking down at him so their foreheads bump, so they can only see each other.
“I want you,” he insists, totally superfluously. Of course he wants him. “I don’t know how not to. You make me feel—Leo, you make me crazy. It’s everything else I don’t know about that makes me unsure. Can you be patient with me? For now? Until we know…until the football is figured out.”
Leo looks like maybe he’d like to forget football entirely and figure it all out right now, possibly with his fists. Oliver has the horrible sensation of disappointing him spreading like pinpricks down his limbs, the forgotten feeling he thought he’d cast off months ago.
“You’re right,” Leo concedes, closing his eyes tiredly but, crucially, not pulling away. “Of course you are. I’m sorry. I can wait.”
Oliver blinks furiously to stem the threat of tears. He wishes he knew what Leo was waiting for; he wishes he could give it to him.
“I’m sorry too. I don’t want to disappoint you.”
Leo looks at him again and presses his thumb into Oliver’s chin, tipping it down slightly so he can brush their lips together, more of a reassurance than a kiss. Oliver sags into the embrace; Leo holds him up.
“You’re not. You’re exactly who I want you to be,” Leo laughs, shaking his head. “That’s the fucking problem.”
Oliver comes up for air, mostly so he can look at Leo again, and manages a watery smile.
“God, I’m fucking beat. You’re worse than an away game, you are,” he says. “Can we go back to bed?”
“Sofa,” Leo replies. “Come on, make us another coffee.”
Later, when the coffee’s been drunk and Leo is snoring despite it, face in the sectional and feet in Oliver’s lap, toes blocking half of the book Oliver can’t seem to focus on, he counts Leo’s exhales and thinks about how precious everything feels when it’s balanced on a knife’s edge, one heartbeat away from oblivion. Oliver wishes he could crawl down the sofa and join Leo in dreamland, where the laws of gravity don’t apply, but he stays awake instead, keeping watch over him.
• • •
Camden’s winning streak ends abruptly against Sunderland, only darkness falling at what they call the Stadium of Light. It hardly seems to matter that they’re still in fourth place for how hard it hits Oliver; he’d somehow forgotten the feeling of losing, the helpless, guilty tang of it, all metallic in the back of his teeth. Every visitors’ locker room looks the same, but somehow this one feels especially unwelcoming, gray-tinged and cold-tiled. Willem will give them a speech now, as a matter of course, and they’ll have to unravel his metaphors and try to make something useful of them, translated into Sebastian’s diagrams. Oliver is not sure if he has the stones to sit through it tonight.
Perhaps de Boer doesn’t either, because he enters the room as unobtrusively as Oliver has ever seen him do anything. Willem takes a seat on the bench next to Joe, where he’d usually keep his feet at the front of the room, patting the keeper’s knee sympathetically and telling him something quietly that actually wrings a wry chuckle out of Joe’s sad, silent vigil under locker number1.The break from routine is a spectacle, enough so that the squad is at attention when Willem speaks louder, for all to hear.
“I told my two children, back in November, that I was going to accept a job here in London. My daughter Sophie yelled at me like I’ve never been yelled at before. Do you know what she said?” The room is silent, still dangerously close to sullen. None of them are quite in the mood to discuss Willem’s family. Oliver is straining all the muscles in his face to keep his expression blank and all the muscles in his hands to keep from reaching for Leo, three seats to his left. “She said: I can’t believe you’d rather get your shit rocked by Swansea City in the middle of nowhere in the freezing rain than go to the World Cup with the Oranje. I can’t believe you’d leave us for some piece of rubbish team and not even ask what we think,” he explains, over the rising tide of titters. “It’s the only time in her life she’s ever told me she hated me.”
Everyone is bristling at the accusation. Willem doesn’t seem to register it, like he’s back in Amsterdam relitigating this choice with his family. Oliver has a sudden surge of sadness for Willem, who took this job under Finch’s conditions and received resentment from the team in exchange, from Oliver especially.
“I’ve carried that around with me all season,” Willem says, still monologuing to a difficult audience. “Was it hubris to think I could change our results this season? Am I not the father and husband my family deserves? This game can put a man on a lonely road. We play for our clubs and our countries, but we shoulder this responsibility we feel inside of us alone. It’s that part of us that enabled you to get to this place, to this pinnacle of the sport, in the first place. It brought us here and it holds us apart from each other at once.” The manager takes a rasping breath as if he wasn’t quite expecting to confess all of this until now that it’s flowing out of him against his will. Oliver finds he’sbeen holding his breath without meaning to. “But we have to walk it together now. We have, this year, and we’ve been brilliant. So we go again. I want you to take in this match, what you did right and what you did wrong, and learn from it. We’re in fourth place. That’s where I’ve been told we must be for this project to be considered a success. I won’t get another shot at it if we don’t maintain this position. And I’m telling you now: I want another shot.”
