Then there’s aclick.
“What’s gotten into them, you think?” Leo asks. Oliver shrugs, too nervous to speak, flinging pants at Leo and taking the stairs two at a time, hopping to avoid his still-sore left leg.
He mashes at remote buttons until it turns on Sky Sports News, standing arms akimbo directly in front of the television, heart racing as the images make sense of themselves, nausea roiling when he starts listening. A charcoal-suited pundit he vaguely recognizes is sitting lazily in a high-backed chair, giving a righteous lecture. Floating next to his head is a picture of Oliver himself, on the ground in his away kit, forehead to forehead with Leo.
“Listen, this isjustoutrageous. Anyone who knows a thing about football knows that Camden FC and Oliver Harris are one and the same,” the man is saying. “He’s just gotten them to their best finish in his lifetime, after a campaign many people counted them out of last year. This is the biggest moment of his career! His return to form! He’s the captain with Anthony Moss out, but he can’t take the penalty. So what he needs to do here is prepare a teammate for the biggest moment ofhiscareer. Harris is bucking him up. He’s being a leader. And now what? Both of these men are going to have to taint this moment, this season, by issuing some kind of…statement about their sexuality! It takes away from the results, for me. It’s disrespectful.”
“But you have to admit, it does look a bit strange,” another man across the panel is saying, pointing to the photo assertively. “And there were photos late last night, I don’t know if you saw—”
“Disrespectful, if you ask me,” the first one repeats, belligerent. “Off the mark entirely. Nothing gay about it. Wrong to suggest there is. I won’t comment on any of the other rumors.”
The image in question blows out, filling the whole screen. The picture looks so private, so out of place, Oliver would almost be shocked, if he hadn’t experienced it for himself yesterday. The way they’re looking at each other—it’s too much, it’s sounbearably intimate. Oliver is holding Leo’s face in his hands while Leo clutches at him, then the image shifts and Oliver’s mouth is on Leo’s face, he’s kissing him, they’re almost kissing each other. It’s markedly different than even those loose boundaries of affection the pitch will permit. Somehow, everything they feel is captured in the pixels, real and visible.
Oliver slams the off button and hurls the remote, venomously, out the nearest open window and into the garden, satisfied by the plastic crunching noises of something shattering and breaking beyond repair. For good measure, he goes to have a kick at the couch as well, but when he turns around, Leo is teetering at the bottom of the stairwell, deadly pale and completely silent. All the violence in Oliver’s body drains out, puddling on the rug.
“Hey, hey,” Oliver says, stepping toward him and opening his arms. “I’m sorry, that was childish of me. Are you all right?”
Leo only shakes his head tightly, biting his lip and squashing his eyes closed. Oliver tentatively holds Leo by the hip bone, suddenly unsure what’s allowed, what can be seen, even here in this room where they’ve been so easily, happily intimate. He wonders, distantly, frightened, if anyone can see them now. Then his own phone buzzesagain,making him wish he’d thrown it instead.
“What?” Oliver answers through gritted teeth, uncaring who’s on the other end.
“Oliver,” Nina says, “I’m sorry. I know this must be difficult for you.”
It is difficult, but not in the way she thinks. Oliver is so outraged he could spit at everyone’s reaction to this, especially his own.
“What can I do for you all?” he replies.
“It’s just me,” she says tiredly. “I told the others you both might be more comfortable if you weren’t facing the half–Spanish Inquisition. Leo’s here too.” Oliver looks at Leo, who isindeed holding his phone an arm’s length from his head like it might bite, and thinks,You have no idea.“If you’ll let me put on my comms hat,” Nina is saying, “I think what might make the most sense here is if the team issues a statement swiftly. We want to keep the two of you out of it as best we can, let the club protect you both from the brunt of it. Basically, my thinking is in line with what a lot of the media are already saying: it’s inappropriate speculation and it’s off the mark. Footballers are allowed to be close on the pitch without anyone asking if there’s an underlying sexual nature behind it. Does that resonate with you?”
Oliver is nauseous again, phantom alcohol from the celebrations he missed turning to bile and threatening to make a reappearance. Nina is right, it is inappropriate, only because it’s no one’s business, not because it’s insulting to wonder if someone might be gay. He and Leo can play together and celebrate together without it being vulgar, without it being sexual, but there’s nothing vulgar about their sexuality. The statement makes it sound like they’re denying the remotest possibility of queerness, like the idea of it is offensive, like it never even occurred to anyone at Camden FC that it might actually be true. Oliver has no idea how to express any of this without coming out over speakerphone, and he feels guilty and wrong-footed that still, even now, he’s not sure if he wants to, if it would be possible to survive the experience. He chances a second glance at Leo, who is edging away from him, further into the living room, his lower lip quivering like he wants to argue or cry, or both.
“Let me think about it. Can you set up a meeting in person? This afternoon? Same group from earlier?” Oliver speaks quickly, not even bothering to wonder if it’s okay to speak for both of them, if that’s how it sounds to Nina or to Leo.
“Of course, Oliver, look out for an email from me. And, genuinely, I’m so—”
He never learns what she’s so; he hangs up so he can take a deep, shuddering breath, letting out the tiniest of cries. Anger and terror fistfight in his diaphragm, leaving worse bruises than anything Kilburn caused yesterday. The twin urges of self-protection and discontent are at war within him. His instinct saysDeny, deny, deny,but he hates the idea of propping up the homophobia simmering in that statement, of agreeing with those stupid, has-been bellends on his television. All Oliver wants is to know what Leo feels, where his head is at, but when he looks at Leo he can’t get a read, the back of his neck is inscrutable, the rest of his body nearly catatonic with worry.
“I feel so naive,” Leo whispers, pulling Oliver out of his head back into the room with him. “When I asked if you ever wanted to go for it…Ollie, I had no idea it would feel like this.” It does feel like that. Oliver can hear the chants now, every away stadium yelling:Men go down in Camden Town. “I’ll do whatever you think is right,” Leo goes on. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand before what you were afraid of. What people would say. You were right.”
But Oliver knows he was wrong, or at least he isn’t right any longer. He can’t tell this lie, the explicit one, said aloud through a mouthpiece.
“I have to go,” Oliver says, glancing down at his phone again and texting furiously. “Nina is going to send a time for the meeting. I’ll see you there, okay?”
“Wait, Ollie, please—can we talk about this?” Leo reapproaches him, beseeching, reaching futilely for Oliver’s arm, but he’s already halfway out the door, reaching for shoes he’ll have to put on in the street. “Please don’t go.”
“It’s going to be okay. See you shortly. Don’t worry. And don’t look at Twitter again,” Oliver says, without looking back.
Anna said to take his vacation, to be careful, but he can’t wait. Oliver needs to speak with Willem and he needs to do it now. Hedoes the ride in under six minutes, biking through London faster than he ever has, standing upright on the pedals and practically running his way to Camden Crossing, past the Lock and the Pirate Castle and over the canal.
On the threshold, Oliver freezes. He doesn’t want to run headfirst into incident command; he certainly doesn’t want to talk to Nina and Finch. His feet carry him to the locker room, for a chance to catch his breath, but when he pushes through the door, he finds what he’s looking for.
Willem is standing in the center of the room, surveying the empty metal shelves worriedly. When de Boer turns to him, eyes full of concern and affection, Oliver is gripped by the urge to go to him and ask for a hug. Instead, he starts talking.
“Willem, it’s true.” His manager starts toward him, reaching out as if to take his hand, but Oliver shakes him off. He has to say it before he loses his nerve, because when he shuts out all the noise in his head, all the reactions to this, one thing crystallizes into a cogent thought: all he wants, still, is to become the man he’s meant to be—as a player, as his father’s son, and as the person Leo chose. Maybe he’ll only be that if he steps forward as the man he already is, the one who knows the only thing he loves enough to not risk giving it up isn’t Camden Football Club anymore; it’s Leonardo Davies-Villanueva. “It’s all true and it’s all my fault, it’s on me. I came to put in a transfer request. Can you help me? Will you protect him?”
“Oliver, why don’t we talk about this,” Willem says slowly, like he’s negotiating a hostage situation, but not necessarily as if he’s been given a great shock.
“I am talking, I am,” he spits, shaking with it. “I did it—I did what you and Finch asked of me, didn’t I? The last time we finished in third place was the same year I was born. Did you know that? More than a quarter fucking century. You said he would sell me if we didn’t get to fourth. So here we are. We’rethird. It’sactually everything I dreamed it would be, being this good again, playing like I have this spring. If it’s the last thing I ever do as a Rose, it will have been worth it, to play with him, to play for you. I love him, Willem, and you were right—we’re a match made in heaven, everywhere, not just out there. And I want him to have the world, I want him to be the face of this club. It’s his turn now. I don’t need any of it, I just need him. So if we can’t play here together, I’ll go if I have to. You can sell me like you were supposed to. But please,please,Willem, don’t punish Leo for what I dragged him into.”
