“Otto!” Juliette trills my name, rising from her chair with swan-like elegance as the maître d’leads me over to a corner table situated right by the windows.
This is not a restaurant I would have chosen. I might have the money necessary to eat at a place like this, but I’m a boy from Tannfeld beneath it all. I can already tell, walking past some tables that have already received their food, that I’ll have to order room service once I’m back at the hotel. Most of the portions are smaller than my fist.
“Juliette,” I greet, brushing my mouth against each cheek in the expected greeting.
The fragrance she’s wearing fits this setting. Floral and bubbly, like orchids and champagne.
“New perfume?”
She steps away, lips pursing as she reaches for the flute of sparkling wine set next to her plate. “No.”
I force a smile. “It’s nice.”
Juliette never appreciated my abject lack of interest in fashion or beauty when we were together, and that doesn’t appear to have changed since we broke up.
I take the chair across from her, accepting a menu from the maître d’. I make eye contact with a woman seated one table over, and she quickly stops staring. I can still feel other eyes on us.
They likely recognize Juliette, not me. I’m a German goalkeeper who’s not even an active player at the moment. She’s plastered on billboards across the city. I passed two on the drive from the airport to the hotel.
“It’s so wonderful to see you.” She smiles, and it’s poised, like everything else about her.
I thought living with Juliette—planning to marry her—might reveal another side. That escalating the seriousness of ourrelationship would lead to moments between us that were more messy or vulnerable. Real.
But we never moved past the stage of playing parts. Even our breakup was amicable. I went to practice the following morning; she flew to Milan for a fitting.
“You too,” I tell her. “You look beautiful.”
She always does, even if it’s an icy, reserved sort of ethereal. Attraction was never an issue between us, but intimacy sure was.
Juliette preens with pleasure at the compliment.
“You’re in New York for a shoot?” I reiterate what she already told me, trying to spark some neutral conversation.
I’m not sure what I want out of this evening. We’ve barely spoken since we broke up, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a lack of closure.
I’m not sure what Juliette’s expecting. Even after a relationship that lasted a year and a half, I have a hard time reading her intentions.
“Yes,” she confirms, tapping her manicured fingers on the leather-bound menu. “For Chanel.”
“Congratulations,” I say, knowing that’s a collaboration she coveted for a while.
Thecrème de la crème, she always called it.
“Thank you.” Her fingernails tap the side of the champagne flute now. “I was sorry to hear about your season.”
“Were you?” I ask wryly.
Juliette was never a football fan. I appreciated our diverse interests at first, liked that she didn’t give a shit what I did for a living. We met toward the end of a brutal season, when the spotlight was bright and expectations were high. Being around Juliette was an oasis from the attention and speculation and pressure.
But she also didn’t like being isolated at my house outside the city. Didn’t like attending football-related events with me either.
Diverse interests started to feel a lot more like a lack of support. Like disdain of the sport I’d dedicated most of my life to.
“I was sorry you got hurt,” she clarifies, which is sincere.
I nod. “Thanks.”
No matter what she says, Juliette endorsed anything that drew my attention away from football. An injury serious enough to make me sit out the remainder of a season? If that had happened when we were engaged, there might have been a wedding.
