He can’t argue with that; Oliver suspects Leo might have had the right idea once they get to the Crossing and his nerves compound with his empty stomach, leaving him feeling faint. They’re early, the locker room is barren, but that’s almost worse, standing in the front of the room in business casual, waiting for the beginning of the end. It’s a small consolation that Leo looks so dashing next to him, as if he’s planning on coming out as a high-fashion model rather than a bisexual. Everyone arrives in one jumbled flood only moments later. Charles is missing, Gavin arriving last and all alone.
Oliver can sense his teammates searching his face for answers,but he keeps his head down, making the barest of small talk with Sebastian, who won’t stop touching Oliver’s elbow like a comforting nag. Eventually, Willem clears his throat and everyone stands at attention like this is a normal training session.
“I appreciate you making time for this, right at the start of vacation,” Willem says in that going-on-posh way of his, the one that means he’s going to assimilate in England just fine. “I’m going to give Oliver the floor, but I want to say my piece first: Your presence is noticed and we are thankful for it. I expect this same show of commitment and solidarity, publicly, going forward.”
He steps back, leaving Oliver center stage. Oliver is not quite sure when it was agreed he would be the mouthpiece instead of charming, charismatic Leo.
“Well, now that the stakes are nice and high,” he says uncomfortably, as Willem raises his hands in apology; the room laughs tensely. “Gaffer said it best: it means a lot to me that you’re all here. I know you’ve probably seen the stuff on the telly, online, about me, about Leo, and I know you have a lot of questions.”
“What exactly is going on, Ollie?” Trevor asks. “Are you all right, man?”
“I am, Trev, I swear. We all are. The thing is, the media speculation is right. Leo and I are—well, we…” Oliver trails off uselessly, wishing everyone could fill in the blanks for themselves, then steels his nerves, reminding himself what the point of all this is, of the life in front of him where he never has to avert his eyes or tell a lie again. “We’re…involved, romantically, like. We’re together. I’m gay. Leo’s bisexual, which is different, but for our purposes right now, kind of the same.”
The oxygen sucks right out of the room, but no masks drop from the ceiling. Next to him, Leo has gone tense and combative, like he does when he wants to give a defender the excuse to foul him.
“You’re…together?” Carda asks, pointing between the two of them and looking flabbergasted.
“This isn’t something I really wanted to talk about at work,” Oliver goes on, ignoring the question and meeting Joe’s eyes, trying in vain to look nowhere else. “But since the issue was forced, since those photos caused all these questions—I don’t want to lie. I don’t think I’ve done anything that needs to be covered up. This isn’t a piece of myself I planned on sharing, it’s something I consider private, but the truth is that I’d rather give the Rovers some more material about me than pretend I’m something I’m not. And what I am is in love with Leo. As much as I’m a Rose, a midfielder, a vice captain. We’re going to say much the same thing in the press conference later, and I wanted you to know first, because you’re my teammates, and you’re important to me. I hope that we are important to you too, enough to have your support in this. So, ah, thanks for listening, I guess. That’s all I’ve got to say.”
The room erupts, a din of questions and frowns and a handful of smiles, some forced and others huge. Oliver retreats from it, stepping backward and sitting down at his locker lamely, feeling spent. Anthony immediately appears at his side, crouching down and putting a hand on Oliver’s knee, holding on tight.
“Did I not literally just tell you I’m fucking Davito?” Oliver mutters out of the corner of his mouth. “Ease up.”
Anthony only holds on harder, looking up at Oliver with something between pride and flint on his sun-freckled face. The room is funneling the noise in their direction, looking at the two captains sitting together, demanding answers.
“Shutup!” Anthony roars at the pack of them, looking away from Oliver for the first time. “One at a time, you animals, I swear on my mum.”
“And if you put one toe out of line, just know, I’m going to actually, literally kill you,” Joe adds, a good head taller thaneveryone else and looking entirely threatening. “So, Finn, why don’t you go first.”
“I just want to say: you still have to pass to the rest of us,” Finn announces to the room matter-of-factly, undeterred by Joe’s simmering violence, as Dutch as a windmill, almost like the two of them planned this in advance. Oliver suspects they might have. “You can’t play favorites now.”
“Why don’t you come give me a kiss, Finny,” Oliver replies, drunk with honesty, nonplussed and thankful for an initial response he’s equipped to respond to. “Then we’ll talk.”
Finn plays right along, grinning dangerously and stalking toward Oliver, lips puckered and smacking, and he makes to shove Anthony out of the way. Most of the team boos when Oliver shoves Finn off in turn, but Leo whispers, “Phew,” and then there’s more laughter, sounding real this time, almost like it’s a normal day at training, the spell broken, most everyone converging on the pair of them to offer congratulations, to hug them, even. It does break his heart that Charles isn’t there. He searches the room for him sadly, then slips to the edges of the crowd, where Gavin is waiting for him.
“What’s happened?” Oliver asks.
“I told him not to come,” Gavin replies in a low, tight voice. “Not if he couldn’t be there for you right. And that I wouldn’t play with him until he could be.”
Charles and Gavin have been friends longer than Oliver’s been alive; they’ve stood together at touchlines and marriage altars and christening ceremonies—a deeper relationship than Oliver could claim with Leo, when it comes down to it—and Gavin told him not to come. Then he showed up. Oliver feels unmoored by the depth of that; he doesn’t have the words for describing it, much less repaying it, being worthy of it. He touches Gavin’s shoulder cautiously, then accepts the resulting embrace that the gruff defender yanks him in for, and then,finally, the crush of the rest of the bodies as the team converges on him, holding him down to the floor and keeping him in the room with them.
“Here’s to Leo, right?” Matty asks, ruffling Leo’s head affably. “Here’s to the man who finally bagged Harris! We always thought it wasn’t possible, brother.”
Leo blushes, looking at Oliver with the same face he made once before, right before he kissed him for the first time, when fear gave way to desire. It feels just as good this time.
Eventually, Sebastian reminds them there’s a press conference to give, and they make their way out into the largest conference room, everyone milling about while the stage is set and the reporters line up outside, shoving like they’re trying to get on the barricade at a rock and roll show. Other attendees are being shown in by one of Nina’s assistants, and suddenly Nicola is there, waving to Maggie and looking assured in a blazer and tall in a pair of pumps. When Oliver calls out to her, she makes a beeline for Leo and envelops him in her arms, then pulls back to give Leo a good look, and suddenly she’s crying silently, wiping two little oil-slick spills of mascara off her cheeks. Leo’s lower lip quivers and Nicola reaches up, cupping his face in her palms and standing up on her toes to kiss him on the forehead.
“I have really, really been looking forward to meeting you,” she whispers. “And I thought you might need a mother’s hug.”
“You were right,” Leo says, blinking away the threat of his own tears. Oliver can hear the room still filling in behind them, the clock ticking somewhere above their heads, but he wants to stay here and watch these two people get to know each other, possibly forever. “Nicola, thank you.”
“I know you two have to go—just tell me before you leave, Leo, dear, shall I give your parents a ring? So they can hear the conference?”
“That’s really kind of you, Nicola,” Leo says, tasting thename again like he’s looking for any excuse to use it. “Our friend Ahmed, he’s got them on FaceTime.” True to his word, Ahmed is on hand holding Leo’s phone out to the room—a blurry, good-looking couple occupying the screen—while keeping himself one foot away from Leo at all times like he might need to play bodyguard.
A whole host of other unexpected people have shown up to quite literally stand in support. In the time they’ve been with Nicola, the room has fit itself to bursting. The de Boers are huddled in a cluster, Ilse holding Willem’s hand and Sophie giving Oliver a worldly shrug, like,Well, you can’t win them all. Maggie is holding court with half the squad. Alec, the youth manager who came to Nicola after the funeral and saved Oliver’s whole life, looking wizened but still in his customary tracksuit, is forming a triangle with Sebastian and Anna, stage-whispering,We’ll talk later,when Oliver starts toward them.
“This is bedlam,” Oliver whispers to Leo. “I feel like I’m in a parallel universe.”
