He loops a curl around his finger. “That’s a hard bargain, because I’m nearly finished with my life-size sculpture of you, and I’d rather not have to cut it off your head while you sleep.” Then he bursts out laughing. “You know what, I’m going to go ahead and ring the alarm on myself for that one.”
“I mean, honestly, mate. All the beeps in the world.”
“I agree to your terms, though. Reluctantly, because I want you to move back in right now. But you’re right, we’ve got to do it proper if we’re going to do it forever.”
My heart flutters at this thing, this moment between us, this understanding we have. Hard-won, battle-tested, built to last. I tug his earlobe, like I did in his dream. He kisses me, softly, sweetly, and it’s the most perfect moment…until my stomach rumbles. He rubs his hand over the curve of my belly, with a look in his eyes like he can’t believe he gets to touch me there. “Let’s get you carbo-loaded so we can go again.”
“True or false: Dating you is going to require the physical stamina of an Olympic athlete.”
“True, I’m afraid. From a lifetime of trying to impress Bashie.”
“Oh shit,” I say through my giggles. “That reminds me: If I don’t text Sadie soon, she’s going to break in here and demand a play-by-play, or maybe a live reenactment.”
Lachlan raises an eyebrow. “That can be arranged.”
I smack his ass. “Go be useful and make me a sandwich.”
He smiles and crawls out of bed, and though I already miss him next to me, I can’t help but feel so grateful, so lucky that we got to this place. And then I rummage in my bag for my phone and see I have seventeen texts from Sadie, and I feel so grateful and lucky for a thousand more reasons, for this little life I’ve built.
Chapter Forty-Four
There are no last-minute upsets:Mersey F.C. wins the Premier League. On a blindingly sunny day, we romp to a decisive victory at Knowsley in the last match of the season. A lovely breeze blows in off the river, a wind that carries the swell of fifty thousand voices as the referee blows the final whistle. We’re jubilant in the Comms box, but I also have the most wonderful, serene sense of calm, of centeredness. I haven’t stopped smiling for days, and I’m filled with a lightness I would find annoying in anyone else but have decided to tolerate in myself.
The Mersey staff make our way down onto the pitch for the trophy presentation, buffeted by the songs pouring out from the fans, all of whom are staying to watch. It’s my first time being on the pitch when people are in the stadium, and I am again struck at how the lads can do this week in, week out, when I feel like I might shit myself with all these eyes on me.
As the officials set up the temporary stage, I make my way to the mob of players thronged by their families, friends, and the entire British media establishment. The place is crawling with kids, all wearing shirts with their dads’ numbers and “DADDY” or “PAPA” on the back. Tiny little girls with their hair in pigtails chasing their brothers in full kit—shin guards, boots, everything.Raf Koopman’s daughter is in the goal with him, throwing her precious little body over the balls he gently rolls toward her. Bashie runs by and grabs me by the waist, spinning me around in a wild circle before dropping me back to the ground to tear after Marco Riva’s kid. Vogler is there with his family, his wife with dignified streaks of gray in her hair, his three teenage sons looking awkward and gangly. My heart is full to bursting, watching it. This family of people,myfamily. These boys and their clever feet and powerful thighs and enormous hearts. These men who have lifted me up and buoyed me along what could have been the worst year of my life…wasthe worst year, in some ways, until it wasn’t. And it’s all down to them.
To one of them in particular, whose arms encircle me from behind, whose gingery stubble scratches at the side of my neck as he bends down to kiss my cheek. That familiar Scottish burr in my ear: “Hello, Stripes.”
I turn in his arms and look up at him, the expression on his face squeezing my heart until I’m not sure I’m still breathing. I kiss him again and again as the chaos whirls around us, and I don’t care who sees.
Charlotte and I tactfully avoided each other for the first few days after my dressing room make-out sesh, but I knew she was aware of it, so I decided to be a grown-up and talk to her face-to-face. She started off as skeptical as ever at my attempts to convince her that I hadn’t been lying about my WAG ambitions all those months ago. And even though she can’t actually fire me for being with Lachlan, I felt it was important for there not to be any animosity between us. I want her to want to keep me around. So I told her there was so much more I wanted to do at Mersey, to thank these beautiful boys—allof them—for their love and support, to scream from the mountaintops that everyone on earthshould know this club for what it is and what it stands for and the beating heart at the center of it, and that I wanted to do it as a member of her team. She listened to my impassioned speech, and her mouth curled into a smile. “Well, that’s a pitch.”
I think about this conversation now and it fills me with joy. It makes me proud to know that I’ll get to stay on at Mersey. Because despite all the uncertainties of this last year, all the confusion and the hesitation and the angst, all the attacks of the Anxiety Death Star, there’s one thing I know for certain: I will always love this club and this game. They changed me. They made me a better person, a more confident person, a person who knows her own mind and isn’t afraid to say so.
“What are you thinking about?” Lachlan asks over the chorus of “Get This Party Started” blaring through the stadium’s loudspeakers. Over Lachlan’s shoulder, I see Matty Fletcher dancing with his kids and Evie. He catches my eye and gives me a terse nod and a smile, which is unexpected, but nice.
“Just how much can change in a year.”
“So much, and yet neither of us has managed to get a tan.” Lachlan presses his arm against mine, as if to check that we’re both indeed still pale. Though our bodies have been in almost constant contact for the last week, it still gives me goosebumps; I’m not sure that will ever stop, and I don’t want it to.
“Almost a year ago, I was in my interview with Charlotte, telling her I didn’t care about soccer.”
He drops his forehead against mine. “Jesus Christ, McIntyre, we came so close to never meeting each other.”
I have to laugh, even as I’m shot through with a fleeting sense of panic at the idea of our near miss. “Well, it was true at the time!”
“And now, you’ve finally mastered the offside rule.”
“Offside-no-S,absolutely. And the other sixteen rules to boot. I mean,God,I can’t imagine my life without football. Without this team, this city, these players.”
“And which player in particular?”
“Billy Ashburn, of course. Never want to live in a world without him again.”
Lachlan throws back his head and laughs and my heart squeezes again. I lace my fingers through the hair at the back of his neck and give it a tug, bringing him back down to me. I need to say something to him, something that seemed inconceivable a few months ago but was true even when I didn’t want to admit it. “Hey. Thank you. For all of it. The good parts and the bad. For being my friend, above all. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
The expression in Lachlan’s eyes is all love, bathing me in warmth. The lightness within me swells as he tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “Like I explained countless times, you stupid Yank, you were my only option.”
I shove him away as he laughs, then throws an arm around my shoulder. I catch his hand and lace my fingers through it, slinging my other arm around his waist, drawing him close to me. He leans over and plants a kiss on my forehead. “Come on, Moira brought lobsters.”
There’s a box on Erica’s List for “Fall in love.” It taunted me for months, that small, white, empty square; it felt like a cruel joke. When all the other things on the list were about self-improvement, it was like an annoying outlier, some sort of pro forma thing that needed to be there because it’s what people expect of you when you’re thirty and single. And sure, I did ultimately find that conventional type of love. But I’ve realized that’s not why they included it. It was never about finding the next guyafter Steven, because life—and love—is more than that. The box was there to remind me that despite the hurt, I’d be capable of loving again, in so many forms. I could have crossed it off the first time a British cabbie wearing a flat cap asked me, “Where to, luv?” Or the first time I returned to Liverpool after a long bus journey and it felt like coming home. When I mastered the lyrics to the club anthem and belted it along with the Mersey fans at Knowsley. When I stopped obsessively checking the forecast and accepted that rain is always a possibility and there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. When I truly understood Kieran’s and Bashie’s accents. When I turned the camera on Phil and watched him squirm out of sight of the lens as fast as humanly possible. When Sadie and I got drunk and watchedGladiator. When I looked on as Amina sang a frustrated, tuneless lullaby to try to put Hamza to sleep.
Life is messy. It’s imperfect and it’s hard and you can make plans but they’re going to be derailed. You can carve out space for yourself and see it filled in by forces outside your control. You can check boxes off a list, but you might be surprised by what you’re not tracking. With nearly a whole year of being a football fanatic under my belt, I’ve finally found the right metaphor: You can set a starting lineup, devise a formation, and make a game plan, but you can’t ever truly predict what happens on the pitch—or off it. From the first whistle to the last, you do the best you can, and if you surround yourself with the right teammates, that best can be pretty extraordinary. Life is a game, and it is beautiful.
