Matchday 23 #2
“I was trying to bring you a coffee,” Leo replies archly, holding up one of the offending cups like he’s presenting forensic evidence. “I’m being the bigger person.” Oliver flicks his eyes up and down Leo’s comparatively short frame and wisely decides to keep his mouth shut on that one.
“To be fair, I tried that last night and you ignored me,” he points out instead.
“I was still angry last night. But I won’t be anymore,” Leo says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “Are you still mad at me?”
“No,” Oliver says immediately. “I just have a great capacity for taking things personally.”
Leo’s face makes a delicate frown, the bottom turn of his lips reaching one of the freckles on the top of his chin.
“Lucky for you, I don’t,” Leo mutters. “I don’t get you, Harris. Why do you make everything so much harder than you have to?”
Oh, mate, Oliver thinks. This is not nearly as hard as it could be. He doesn’t say that—he just sticks his hand out the window. The space between Leo’s eyebrows condenses in confusion.
“One of those was for me, wasn’t it?” Oliver asks. “Hand it over and get in.”
“Just like that?” Leo snaps, but his eyes aren’t flashing the way they do when he’s really, truly upset. “I bring coffee, you give me a ride, and we’re buddies again? Aren’t you going to apologize too?”
“I can drive away if you’d rather,” Oliver challenges.
Leo thrusts the cup at him and huffs his way around the car to the passenger side.
He takes an excessive amount of time to settle himself, adjusting the seat and fussing with his belt.
Oliver ignores him and takes a slurp of the drink—it’s a perfect latte, crowned with foam.
There’s a little football scrawled on the rim of the cardboard sleeve. Leo ahems meaningfully.
“Are you all set? May I move?” Oliver asks, lifting his accent into a posh mockery of itself and trying to make it clear he’s only teasing now, not being mean anymore.
Leo leans across the space between them and headbutts Oliver, an intentional smack of forehead to shoulder.
He points at the road ahead of them, and Oliver listens, putting the car in gear, putting himself back on track.
The ride was silent, so he’s still nervous as he changes for physio, sneaking glances at Leo’s locker, trying to gauge from his peripheral vision if things are fixed, if the glue will hold and everything will stick.
Oliver’s only taken one sock off when a terrible, foreboding noise floats its way down the hallway.
“Hide and seek, hide and seek,” someone who could only be Anthony is chanting, punctuating each word with the booming noise of something hitting a tiled floor.
“What’s that?” Leo asks, suddenly cropping up at his shoulder. It would be a good sign he’s come to Oliver with such a question, if only the answer wasn’t so terrible.
“Oh fuck,” Oliver replies. “This is not on.”
Pandemonium ensues around them, every one of their teammates sprinting for the door, each of them partially undressed in a different way.
Ji-Hoon has on a beanie but no shirt. Lukas is pulling Finn by the snood.
Emmanuel reaches one hand for the fire alarm, then seems to think better of it and keeps moving.
“Fucking run!” Joe shouts as he and Nick pass Oliver’s locker. “Hop on your good leg if you have to!”
“Oliver?” Leo asks again, looking increasingly panicked when the overhead lights flick off.
Anthony materializes in the doorway, wearing only a four-sizes-too-large parka like a cape over his shorts. He’s holding an upturned broom in one hand, the source of the noise, and blocking the exit, the very picture of menace.
“Hide and seek,” Anthony says again, raising one eyebrow at the stragglers.
“Today?” Oliver asks indignantly. “Are you mental?”
“Some matches we lose, but attitude you choose,” the captain retorts mysteriously.
“So quit feeling shitty, lickety-splitty.” Everyone remaining groans, but Anthony bangs the broom several more times and they force their ways around him and out the door as well.
Leo is unmoving next at his side until Oliver grabs his elbow and tows him along while he hobbles on his tender left leg.
“Hide and seek! Hide and seek!” Anthony shouts after them, malice and glee in his voice.
“Pints if you’re strong and sprints if you’re weak! ”
“Don’t quit your day job,” Oliver yells back forcefully. “Leo, I swear to God, keep up. Do you have two healthy legs or don’t you?”
“Tell me what’s happening!” Leo demands, overtaking him but looking back with wide eyes. “We never did this in the academy.”
“What it bloody sounds like,” Oliver replies, skirting around a suit-wearing, befuddled PR intern and ducking down a side hallway. “Hide-and-seek day, innit?”
“This doesn’t answer any of my questions,” Leo says.
“Once a year, Anthony makes everyone play hide and seek. He waits until we’re all in the worst mood and then springs it on us.
You hide in pairs, he looks for us, then everyone has to run sprints based on how early they get found.
Winners get free drinks for the rest of the season, everyone is cheery again. Did you even listen to the song?”
“How will you do sprints?” Leo asks.
“Seeing as I’m injured, you’d have to run mine for me,” Oliver admits.
“Hold your fucking horses,” Leo starts.
“Shush!” Oliver whispers, smushing one finger to Leo’s lip for emphasis.
“He has ears like a bat. No one knows the Crossing better than I do, right? He’s not going to find us.
Now come on.” He keeps up the fastest pace he can manage, winding deeper and further down the labyrinth of cinder block hallways until they reach the basement, where he stuffs the pair of them into the remotest of broom cupboards—where Anthony had filched his props, no doubt, and thus the last place he’d ever think to look.
Oliver locks the door from the inside for good measure.
“Isn’t that cheating?” Leo asks, his cup runneth over with unnecessary questions.
“Only if we get caught,” Oliver replies firmly. “For the last time, could you actually shut up? My leg is killing me—budge over, I want to sit on that bucket.”
Leo arranges himself in the far corner of the tiny room and glowers over the top of Oliver’s head as Oliver eases himself down onto an ancient, upturned paint container and breathes a sigh of relief.
“You know, I didn’t ask to play,” Leo says angrily. “Or make you run for it. Not the other night. Today neither.”
“Ease up. I’m not blaming you,” Oliver replies. “I’m only trying to repay you for the coffee with a lot of free booze.”
“I also didn’t ask you to repay me for anything. I tried to apologize, Oliver. I’m still trying. You’re not listening to me at all.” Leo’s mouth quivers at the first sentence, then sets itself firmly into a line for the second one, like he’s gathering steam.
Oliver ducks his head, chin to chest, chastened.
He’s still running just as hot and cold as Leo accused him of, only now he feels guilty about it, since the hot is running hotter by the second, the longer he looks at Leo and imagines what it might be like to remove the coffee-stained shirt he’s still wearing, remembering that he touched his mouth just a moment ago.
“I accept your apology,” he says very seriously, forcing himself to meet Leo’s dark brown eyes, which are still sparking with annoyance. “And I’m trying, too. I brought you along so you’d win this stupid game, didn’t I? Not any of the others.”
“You’re so sure you’ll win, Harris.” Leo rolls his eyes now, but his whole demeanor is softening while he does it. He slips down into a crouch, leaving them crammed together on the cupboard floor, back at eye level.
“Sure I am. S’my job to win,” Oliver says.
He feels a little woozy, so close to Leo without any anger or jealousy behind it.
He wants to win at something else, something impermissible.
There’s not enough oxygen in the cramped room and it’s running out faster the more his breathing quickens.
Leo is looking at him strangely, like he’s waiting for him to say something or do something.
He’s in Oliver’s face now that he’s crouched, much closer to him than even the close quarters necessitate.
Oliver must be imagining how charged the air feels, because it’s too much like what he’s been dreaming about these last few days.
There’s a sheer drop off a sharp cliff and a wide gulf spanning between whatever it is Leo’s expecting and all the thoughts lining up in Oliver’s head.
I could teach him how to win, he thinks.
I could teach him a whole lot, if only he wanted to learn.
He wants to get it right, whatever it is he’s going to say, but before the words come to him, someone hollers in the distance and Leo claps one hand over Oliver’s mouth, hushing them both.
“Harris! Davito!” Anthony is calling. “Stop gloating, you bastards! You’ve won!”
“See?” Oliver says, vindicated and muffled against Leo’s open palm. “Told you so.”
Leo rises and sticks out his other hand to help Oliver up. He’s still imagining things, he’s sure, because it feels like they stand there for a long moment; Oliver is the one to step away first.
Back at his locker, when the real training is over and he’s been stretched and observed and poked at by the physios with no concern about the new source of pain in his hamstring, Oliver can’t shake the happy idiocy that comes after an adrenaline rush.
“What’s gotten into you?” Joe asks, sidling up to him with a strange look on his face. “Quiet and smiling? Are you having a stroke?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Joseph.
” He sounds drunk. He feels a little drunk, truthfully, experiencing a sense of relief like it came in a shot glass.
“I’m celebrating. I won hide-and-seek day,” Oliver insists.
Leo picks that moment to join them both and ask if Oliver will drive him home.