The dour quiet is transforming, crystallizing into something sharper and more defined. The magic number is in the room with them now, the truth of unspoken expectations finally put to words, but it’s hardly the point. There’s a rallying cry building up in all of them, awakened by some forgotten instinct. The win streak might as well still be intact. Oliver knows, clearly and all through his limbs, that they’re going to beat Finch’s odds.
• • •
On the plane home, Oliver crouches in the aisle next to Leo’s seat, where he is not quite pouting but in the vicinity of it, pensive bordering on sore loser. Oliver wouldn’t admit it, of course, but even that is attractive on Leo, the refusal to limply accept defeat sitting plain on his face, in the tightness of his jaw and the downward slant of his eyebrows.
“Shite match, good speech, hey?” Oliver offers, when Leo doesn’t deign to greet him. He gives him alook,one that says,Leave. Me. Alone. Oliver ignores this and shuffles forward on his knees, settling his elbows into the hard plastic armrest. “You’re very cute when you’re angry,” he says, as quietly as he possibly can. “You go on and brood, I’m no worse off for it. Just be ready to go again, okay?”
The drive to win, the competitiveness that vibrates in his bones and powers his lengthy strides, lives somewhere in Leo’sbody too. Oliver knows where to look for it and it makes him feel less alone. He always thought that his sexuality and the footballer in him, two core pillars of his being, were diametrically opposed. Now he’s starting to think he can’t have one without the other, that no one except Leo could look at him and see the sum of all the parts.
Leo’s gaze goes from murderous to sheepish, then soft and sweet as custard. He slips his fingers around the zipper of Oliver’s jacket and gives it a tug. Oliver can feel the affection come through the metal zip and layers of fabric. True to his word, he goes back to his seat and lets Leo do his thing, but if he leaves a part of himself holding vigil over seat 5A, that’s between him and the flight attendant.
The coach rolls its way from Heathrow back to Camden Crossing and deposits them, exhausted and wound tightly, on the midnight concrete. Trevor is the one to eventually suggest they go inside to review the match, which leads to a pell-mell cluster of folding chairs and crossed legs around one of the conference room television sets. Finn manages to connect his phone to the screen and Sebastian’s team has kept up the pace of sending footage as fast as the team can produce it on the pitch.
In the green light of the grass on the screen, Leo’s dark curls look especially shiny. Oliver wants to bury his nose in them and let his mind go blissfully blank, but he contents himself with taking advantage of the dark office by reading Leo’s feverish note-taking over his shoulder and toeing at his ankle bone repeatedly without anyone noticing. Leo’s handwriting is rubbish, serial-killer style, but the notes are solid.
With twenty-two minutes left in the replay, Willem passes by the windowed far wall, holding what can only be a pack of cigarettes, which is very interesting indeed. They all look up in unison, the manager guilty, then pleased, when he sees the lot of them. Oliver gives him a toothless smile, just one quirk of themouth. Willem doesn’t interrupt or intervene, just nods smartly and continues on his way, so they can all get back to work.
“You think he’d let us bum a few?” Matty asks in a whisper.
“I’ll tape your mouth shut,” Anthony warns.
Leo looks less petulant when the replay ends, more likely to fall asleep on Oliver’s shoulder. No one bats an eye when Oliver stuffs him through his passenger door.
“Still with us?” Oliver asks gently as they pull out of the Crossing.
“Mmmph. Tired. Are we going to yours?”
“If you like.”
“I like.” Leo sounds barely conscious, but Oliver needs him to listen while he says what he couldn’t put words to on the plane.
“I don’t like losing any more than you, all right?” he says. “But every match since I’ve come back—every match I’ve played with you, Leo—they meant everything to me. I wouldn’t trade them, even the ones that were awful. You’re so, so good. Better than I was at your age. I mean it.” He takes one shuddery gulp of air, eyes prickling, streetlights flickering, letting all the tension out of his body and into the front seat of the Audi, between them.
“You’re talking like this is the end of something,” Leo says, shell-shocked and missing the point entirely.
“I’m trying to tell you that if it is, you’re the best partner I ever had in the midfield.”
“In the midfield…” Leo trails off. “And what about everywhere else?”
“Maybe everywhere else is less important,” Oliver says firmly. “I want you to have the career you deserve, wherever it takes you. To be able to do it on your own, after this.”
Leo is quiet, suspiciously so, for so long that Oliver finally dares to look at him to make sure he hasn’t actually fallen asleep. When he does, Leo is shaking his head. Oliver wants to push, toask what he’s thinking, but he can’t. All he can do is look down Regent’s Park Road, stretching before him as solidly as ever, like it might take them all the way to the end of the season.
• • •
Everton, they of the stupid elephant mascot, are proving as solid as the pavement on Regent’s Park, lumbering like a parade of their namesakes through Regent Road.
Oliver knows he’s back to full fitness—the statistics and Anna’s hamstring exams don’t lie—but his limbs are leaden. The opposing squad’s got their own version of Leo: a Spanish midfielder with sharp eyes and a stride that turns over lightning quick. He’s faster than Oliver, skipping around him in the center of the pitch. Every time Oliver manages to advance into the attacking half, he’s rewarded with a heavy shove to his midsection from one of the defenders, each one of them shaped like a thick column of bricks. Most of his energy is going into not entering the disciplinary notebook. The scoreline remains deadlocked.
Leo is taking a different tack, to put it tactfully. He’s not necessarily provoking shithousery, but he’s not exactly engaging in gentlemanly sportsmanship either. There’s a glimmer in his eyes inviting mischief, a dare offered up to their opponents. It’s, frankly, not dissimilar to the kinds of looks he’s been giving Oliver the last few days: a challenge to push at the limit, to cross the line between what is and what’s to come. Against Everton what’s to come can only be some kind of violence. It bubbles over just as soon as the thought occurs to Oliver.
Number 25 reaches for the back of Leo’s shirt, yanking him backward and away from the space he needs to receive a pass. Leo reacts instinctively, limbs independent from his brain, throwing an elbow back and making sharp contact with the other player’s rib cage. In the next heartbeat, Leo’s been shoved face-first toward the ground, the ball trickling, forgotten, across thedamp grass as every green and blue shirt from both ends of the pitch converge on the scene. Oliver gets there first, just in time to hear some rapid Spanish being lobbed between the pair of them, Leo whipping himself back onto his feet, covered in dirt and foaming at the mouth with rage. Oliver is still monolingual, but even he knows, or can at least guess at, a rough translation ofqué maricón de mierda,which is what the defender has pronounced that Leo is. Oliver thought having slurs thrown at himself made him crazy—foul-tempered and violent—but this is another level; he could fuck someone up, really hurt someone, for talking that way about Leo. There’s a lot of that going around, apparently; Leo shouts back, something too fast for Oliver to catch, and the instant it’s out of his mouth, his opponent is winding up to land a punch, ready to accept a red card in his haste to knock out Leo’s teeth.
Oliver is there in the nick of time, stepping between them and absorbing the closed fist at his shoulder, staggering backward at the force of it but saving Leo’s cheekbone from the impact. It gives Oliver the excuse he needs to puff up at the chest, holding himself broadly and clenching his fingers into a ball, ready to get in a blow of his own. The referee has other ideas, as do all their teammates, who are arriving en masse, shouting and shoving until there’s a twenty-two-man horde at the edge of the sideline, tempers aflare like a forest fire.
There’s a bright red card in the ref’s hand already, held up to the sky with a flourish, his other hand pointing menacingly at the man from Everton, who throws up his own hands in defeat and exits without ceremony, not even bothering to protest. Oliver shouts when he pulls another card, this one yellow, gesturing at Leo.
“He got fouled!” Oliver hollers, unsure if he’s arguing as a vice captain or for Leo specifically. “You can’t book him for not getting punched.”
