De Boer doesn’t respond, only looks at him seriously and waits for further outbursts, except Oliver is all out of words. He sinks, shaking, onto the nearest bench and rests his forehead in the heel of his hands, taking deep, unsteady breaths. A moment later, he feels Willem settle beside him, then one warm palm is resting between his shoulder blades.
“I’m not going to punish him. Or you. You haven’t done anything wrong.” Oliver thinks he knew that, except hearing Willem say it feels like a tremendous relief. “Does Leo know you’re here?”
“He might,” Oliver hedges. “He doesn’t know why. He’d try to stop me.”
“Someone ought to,” Willem tells him matter-of-factly. “I’m out of my depth, Oliver, but I swear to you I’m trying. You got us far better than fourth place, you did what was asked of you. I will not allow you to be shipped off for it.”
“You don’t have to,” Oliver whispers miserably. “You don’t owe it to me.”
“Maybe not. Maybe a manager doesn’t owe his players anything outside of that pitch. But I feel that I owe you something. I owe you this.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve looked after Camden since you were tooyoung to know how much was being asked of you. Now someone needs to look after you. I’d like to be the one to do it.”
“How?” Oliver can’t stop asking one-word questions. His brain is only supplying him single syllables at a time. He thought he’d have to argue more. He thought he was giving everything up so that Leo would never have to, only now Willem is saying Oliver doesn’t need to either.
“It’s not my place to say. That’s for you and Leo to decide,” Willem is now rubbing careful circles onto his back.
“But what do you think we should do?”
“Do you know what I would have done, this winter, to get you to come to me for advice? My God, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.” Oliver groans and Willem chuckles wryly. “It’s easy for me to say, so you might tell me to fuck off, but in life there’s no way out but through. If I were you, I would tell the world they saw what they saw, you aren’t sorry for it, nor is Leo, and neither is the club.”
“Come out with it? Are you having a laugh?” Oliver says, suddenly serious again. “Willem, they’d fucking crucify me. We’d never play again in the fifth division, forget the Champions League.”
“Not if we tell the team first and they stand with you. What could they do, relegate all of us?”
“Since when do you fancy yourself a mind reader?” Oliver asks slowly, like he’s talking to someone concussed. “You’re sure they’ll just all conveniently be okay with it? You think everyone will be chuffed for us? Have you heard the way footballers talk in the locker room? About gay people?”
“You’re Oliver Harris,” Willem says. “They’d stand with you over anything. I told you: where you go, the team will follow.”
This takes his head off completely. Oliver bursts into ugly, racking sobs, intermixed with the hysterical laughter of someone whose world is being unmade and reshaped in real time.He’s cried more this year than in the whole of his life put together, even counting the months after they buried his dad. If Willem is wrong, the club is doomed, the whole miracle season wasted. If he is right, Oliver has spent his whole adult life suffering in silence when maybe he didn’t have to. He turns to his left and collapses into Willem’s steady, waiting arms—already held out for an embrace—and lets it all seep out of him, boneless and held aloft by the strength in the manager’s body. They stay that way for a good long while.
Eventually Oliver’s voice returns to him and he asks the last nagging question, the one that makes this plan seem foolhardy, even when explained in Willem’s authoritative Dutch rumble.
“What good would it do, anyway? Say we keep playing, what changes? Or we get run off and everything is just as homophobic as ever, another nice fat warning for anyone else who ever thinks about coming out?”
The accusation joins them on the bench, wedging itself between Oliver staring at the floor and Willem lighting an illegal cigarette, dutifully smoking it in the opposite direction when Oliver glares at him.
“Would it be terribly cliché for me to talk about Cruyff?” Willem asks.
“Yes,” Oliver answers immediately. “Do it anyway.”
“He told me a story once, before I signed for Atlético. I wish I could call him now, you know? He would tell you exactly what to do and you would believe him immediately. You’d have no use for me at all.” Oliver rolls his eyes and gives Willem his full attention, turning toward his smoky mouth and sitting cross-legged, listening with his whole body. “The way he explained it, when his son was born, he decided to call him Jordi, after the patron saint of Catalonia. Fitting, you know; it was while he played for Barcelona. But in those days, Franco was in power in Spain, and it was illegal to use the local language. At thehospital, they told him, it has to be Jorge, you need to use the Spanish name, that is the law. And Johan insisted, ‘My son is from Holland, not Spain, so I’ll name him what I like, and his name is Jordi.’ And so he was: officially registered as Jordi Cruyff on his Dutch passport.”
“So you think we should adopt a kid?” Oliver asks, deadpan, and Willem smacks his knee almost affectionately.
“Ithink,” Willem goes on, pointing the cigarette at Oliver like one of his whiteboard markers during a halftime lecture, “Johan would tell you that it’s not your job to fix it all, but it is your gift and your great challenge to keep hold of the spot you’ve earned, for football, for yourself, for the man you love. He would say there’s worth in any attempt to stand in truth, in righteousness. The first Catalan name registered in Barcelona in years, can you imagine? That certainly didn’t depose Franco, but no one else could have done what Cruyff did and gotten away with it. Only he had that power. No one else can do this now but the two of you. And that means something. It might mean everything. To me, I think it does.”
Oliver thinks it over for another quiet spell, imagining what it would be like to take this secret out of the locked compartment of his heart and wear it on his sleeve, written as plainly as number 6 is on his back. What would it be like to be all the things he already is, at once, none of them swapped in and out?
“If Leo will have me, if he wants to do it, then we should. I don’t want to leave, mind you. I was just trying to be noble,” he says meekly.
Willem hoots a big laugh, slapping Oliver companionably on the shoulder.
“Oh, he’s smart. He’ll do what he needs to to keep you. Sometimes I’ve had half a mind to remind Leonardo that there are nine other players on the pitch, not just you and him.”
That makes Oliver blush, roses on his cheeks, because he’shad to remind himself of that too. Maybe if Willem had yelled at them about it, they might never have been photographed looking like they were in love and this conversation would never have happened. Oliver can’t bring himself to wish that was the case anymore.
