Chapter 16 Vincent
VINCENT
A week after the Zenith dinner, I left for our next match in Manchester. It was a four-hour drive from London, but the energy in the stadium was noticeably different. Restless, almost explosive.
The sea of red and white filling the stands was a visual reminder that we weren’t on our own turf anymore.
It was always hard to give up home advantage, but this match had been an especially massive shit show so far.
Gallagher and Dormund were on the bench due to injuries in the first half, and we were one down with a minute left to play.
My lungs burned. My shirt was soaked with sweat, and my muscles were shot, but we were so close to making this a draw.
Come on, Donovan.
The crowd roared as Asher gained possession of the ball. He broke toward the goal, his—
A shrill whistle pierced the air.
Confused shouts rang out from the stands as the match stumbled to a halt. The referee jogged toward where Manchester’s striker lay on the ground, clutching his knee.
My heart thundered as I ran toward the commotion. It was such an obvious dive. There was no fucking way the ref would give Manchester a free kick for that.
“Come on, ref!” I heard Asher yell when I got within earshot. “I barely touched him!”
The other striker groaned dramatically as if he’d been shot. Motherfucker.
“I saw the whole thing. He fell by himself,” I argued, backing Asher up. “Look at him! There’s no way he’s really hurt.”
The official was unmoved. He awarded the other team a free kick, and I watched, my pulse hammering, as the Manchester player took his shot.
The ball sailed toward the net. Noah knocked it back out to a chorus of jeers, but his save wasn’t enough.
The “foul” cost us our momentum, and when the final whistle blew less than a minute later, my chest had already caved in with disappointment. The stadium’s celebratory cheers dulled into a roar as I stared at the final scoreboard.
Three-two.
We’d lost.
To cheer us up, Adil insisted we attend a “consolation celebration” later that night, which was how the entire team ended up packed into his hotel room after dinner.
We weren’t returning to London until the morning, and normally, we’d have a night out after an away game, but the mood had been glum all evening. Although today’s match had been a regular Premier League match that didn’t count toward the UCL, it never felt good to lose.
Adil’s solution to that? Dinosaur erotica. The craziest part was, it seemed to be working.
“I now call this meeting of the Blackcastle Book Club to order.” Adil banged his mini gavel against the table. “I hope you all had a chance to look over the discussion questions I emailed—”
“Oy, Chakir, get on with it already,” Gallagher called out. His injury was minor, but he was still grumpy about getting subbed out. “We’ve suffered enough today, yeah? Don’t need a whole song and dance when we already know how this goes.”
Adil glowered at him. “Obviously you don’t because the book club rules clearly state that whoever holds the gavel has the floor. For that, I use the power vested in me as the president of this club to strip you of your book-choosing privileges next month.”
“What? That’s not fair!” Gallagher spluttered. “It was my turn to choose!”
“You should’ve thought of that before you broke the rules. Now, as I was saying…”
I tuned out the rest of Adil’s introduction. I wasn’t surprised that he’d consider a book club meeting a consolation prize or that he’d hunted down copies of our monthly pick at a local bookshop. Our meeting was originally scheduled for Friday, so we’d left our books at home.
I was more surprised by how comforting this felt.
We’d started the Blackcastle Book Club in the spring at Adil’s insistence, but it’d turned into a general team bonding experience.
Every month, we gathered at one of our houses to discuss our latest pick.
We usually only spent ten or fifteen minutes on the actual book discussion.
The rest of the hour was spent chatting or, if a guy was on the outs with his girl, providing unlicensed therapy.
This month, our pick was Fucking My Theropod Therapist by Wilma Pebbles. If you guessed the book was about a human woman who falls in lust with her dinosaur therapist, you’d be right.
I didn’t want to know how Adil was able to get that many copies on such short notice.
“Let’s start with question number one.” He read from his phone. “Do you think it’s ethical for a therapist to sleep with their patient, even if they’re fictional?”
“It’s interspecies fucking, which is technically bestiality. We’ve passed the boundaries of ethics,” Samson said.
“That doesn’t count,” Stevens argued. “Interspecies fucking is the entire premise of the genre. We have to overlook it the way we have to overlook how everyone has, like, ten orgasms at a time in these books even though that’s physically impossible.”
“Impossible for you, maybe,” Samson said. “Don’t project your inadequacies on the rest of us.”
“Personally, I’m more interested in the demographics of this world.” Gallagher frowned. “Were there no human therapists? Why did she go to a dinosaur? I feel like a human therapist would’ve been much better equipped to help her deal with her problems.”
“Yeah, but would a human be able to rail her like Big T? No. That’s what makes this book absolutely bonkers!” Stevens slapped his paperback against his thigh. “This is dino erotica, people! You can’t have dino erotica without the dino!”
The book discussion devolved into a mess of shouting, arguments, and futile attempts by Adil to restore order.
I stayed out of it. I had enough on my mind without trying to wrangle a bunch of footballers who were arguing about dinosaur sex.
Zenith had gone radio silent since the dinner. Lloyd warned me that might happen, but I couldn’t help wondering if he was right, and I’d fucked up by telling them Brooklyn wasn’t my girlfriend.
My gut twisted. I didn’t regret what I’d done. I didn’t want to start off our relationship with a lie, but their assumption had caused—just for a millisecond—a slight stutter in my heart. A moment where I allowed myself to imagine a world where Brooklyn was my girlfriend, not just my plus-one.
In that world, I could kiss her whenever I wanted. We’d wake up in the same bed and fall asleep in each other’s arms. I’d take her to my favorite restaurants, and we’d walk along the river after, hand in hand. She’d wear my shirt number to matches, but that wouldn’t be all.
In that world, I would’ve pulled the car off to the side of the road the other night and shown her exactly who she belonged to.
Not fucking Mason, who had the balls to ask her out like he deserved her.
Not any of the guys on the team who secretly had a crush on her.
Me. Because I was the one who wanted her so much that I couldn’t breathe when she was near.
One glimpse of her skin, one graze of her fingers, and I’d almost crashed the damn car.
It’d taken all my willpower not to react when I’d been silently dying inside.
Except I didn’t live in that hypothetical world. I lived in this one, where I was surrounded by a bunch of footballers arguing about dinosaur sex and Brooklyn was two hundred miles away in London.
I wish she were here. The thought struck me with a sudden swiftness. Jones traveled with the team for all our away matches, but his interns alternated turns. Henry had tagged along for today’s match while Brooklyn remained at home.
What I wouldn’t give to see her right now.
I swallowed, an ache sliding behind my ribcage.
“Consolation celebration, my ass,” Asher said, yanking me back to the present with jarring clarity. “This is like watching a group of ten-year-olds fight.”
I blinked away an image of Brooklyn’s smile and forced myself to refocus.
“Nah.” I tried to sound like I’d been paying attention and not pining after the coach’s daughter this entire time.
“Wilson’s daughter is ten, and she’s better behaved than this.
Right?” I nudged Noah, who sat on my other side.
“Definitely.” He grimaced when Stevens grabbed a pillow from the bed and whacked Samson on the stomach with it. “I can’t believe this is what I left Michigan for.”
Noah was the only American in the Premier League at the moment, which made him a novelty for fans.
He was almost as famous as Asher and me, but he kept an incredibly low profile and was never in the tabloids.
It was hard to dig up dirt on someone who didn’t date, didn’t party, and rarely left his house except for work.
“Hey, we need you here. Your last save was nothing short of poetry,” I said.
“It wasn’t good enough.”
“Don’t start with that bullshit.” Asher wasn’t having it. “You did your job. The ref was the one who fucked us over.”
Noah shrugged, but I could tell he was beating himself up over the goals he didn’t save. He might not hang out with the team much off the pitch, but he took the game as seriously as anyone else.
Asher checked his phone. “It’s Scarlett. I’ll be right back.”
“Do you think he’s really coming back?” Noah asked when Asher disappeared into the hall.
“Nah. We won’t see him again until the morning.”
I lived with Asher and Scarlett for one traumatizing week. Those two could talk for hours about the most mundane topics.
Then again, Brooklyn and I had spent an afternoon at an arcade talking about our grade-school years and underwear-buying habits, so who was I to judge?
“Everything okay?” I asked when Noah frowned at his phone.
“Yeah. Evie’s with her new nanny, and I’m checking in.”
“How’s that working out?” I asked. “This is what, her third nanny in the past year?”
Noah sighed. “Fourth. I fired the third one last week.”
“What happened?”
“I came home and found her on my bed. In lingerie.”