Chapter Sixteen
Sebastian – “We Don’t Really Know Each Other”
EARLY APRIL
The shower with Marcos sat behind Sebastian’s eyelids every time he closed them.
Marcos’ mouth on his, Marcos’ hands sliding over his body with that careful, unfinished pressure, water running between them, steam on the tiles, and Marcos going still whenever he grew unsure.
Sebastian tried not to think about it, which worked about as well as expected.
By Monday morning, his head was full of it again before he had even made it through the club doors. He had told himself the weekend would give him some distance. Enough space for his body to stop remembering the exact weight of Marcos’ hand across his stomach.
It didn’t help that during the review on Monday, Marcos sat next to him.
The room wasn’t full. There were plenty of seats left when Marcos walked in.
Parker had taken a chair near the front with Lachie and Corey.
Phetmany was two rows ahead, headphones still around his neck, watching the screen in anticipation.
Sebastian had chosen a seat against the wall because he wanted somewhere solid at his back and a straight line to the door, which had felt sensible until Marcos appeared in the doorway and looked directly at him.
For a second, Sebastian thought Marcos might look away, but Marcos crossed the room with his bag over one shoulder, his expression unreadable. His eyes stayed on Sebastian until he reached the seat beside him.
“Hello,” he said, and lowered himself next to him.
Sebastian had to make himself nod. Like Marcos sitting beside him after weeks of putting space between them did not rearrange every thought in his head. Marcos settled with his back against the wall, hands clasped in his lap, one leg resting against Sebastian’s.
Neither of them moved.
At first, Sebastian assumed Marcos would shift once other people came in.
He didn’t. The room filled around them with staff, players, assistants, the low noise of post-match bodies still carrying soreness and satisfaction.
Jacob came in with his tablet, spoke briefly with one of the analysts, then faced the room.
When the review started, Sebastian kept his focus on the screen.
He had to. Jacob was not the kind of coach who tolerated players drifting because they had won one close game.
If anything, the win made him sharper. He walked them through the match quarter by quarter, stopping the footage to show what had worked, what had held only because the Wolves had missed chances, and why the game should not have come down to Sebastian’s final kick to secure it.
The footage jumped between centre bounces, defensive exits, missed leads, late pressure, their forward structure collapsing and rebuilding under fatigue.
Jacob paused on one of Marcos’ tap-outs from the third quarter and made the midfielders talk through the positioning.
Marcos answered when he was asked, voice even, hands still clasped in his lap. His leg stayed against Sebastian’s.
For the better part of the review, Sebastian managed to think about football.
It should not have been impressive. He was a professional player in a professional review.
Thinking about football was the absolute minimum requirement.
Still, he counted it as a minor win because Marcos was warm beside him, their knees aligned, and Sebastian’s mind had a stupid habit of returning to the shower whenever he had half a second of quiet.
So, he thought about Jacob’s voice instead. About the plan for the week before their Friday-night game. About clearances. About the fact that their first win had come too late to let them relax and too narrowly to let them pretend they were playing great.
Then the final kick came up, and the room quietened in a different way.
The footage was from behind the goals first, then from the broadcast angle, then the close camera on Sebastian’s face.
He was already bloodstained in the shot, jaw set, eyes fixed on nothing but the posts ahead of him.
He remembered the exact feeling of that moment too clearly: the crowd stretched thin, his breath measured into something that felt borrowed, the ball in his hands with the whole match waiting for him to become either reliable or useless.
Beside him, Marcos shifted.
One of his hands shifted from his lap and came to rest near Sebastian, hidden by the angle of their bodies and the line of the seats.
His thumb traced a line down the side of Sebastian’s thigh, small enough that no one else could have noticed it, deliberate enough that Sebastian nearly forgot how to sit still.
The touch made his back straighten.
A grin slipped onto his face as the screen showed him kicking the winning goal.
He kept his eyes forward, because staring at Marcos would have been obvious.
Staring at Marcos would have done something to his face he didn’t trust in a room full of teammates and staff.
So, he watched himself on the screen instead, watched the ball go through, watched the stadium erupt all over again while Marcos’ thumb rested against him for one more second before pulling away.
| | | |
The rest of the week held the same feeling as that moment in the review, as if everything between them had shifted without becoming simple.
Marcos didn’t suddenly become talkative.
He didn’t start standing beside Sebastian in every room or reaching for him in ways anyone else would notice.
One day it was only a greeting at the start of a session, soft enough that it was almost swallowed by the noise around them.
One day it was a quiet word of encouragement in the gym when Sebastian finished a set, sitting under Sebastian’s skin longer than it should have.
The touches were worse, not because they were unwanted, but because they were almost nothing and not nothing at all.
A lingering hand on Sebastian’s chest after Marcos spotted him through an incline press, there for half a moment too long before it lifted away.
Fingers gliding down his side as Sebastian stepped out from a squat rack, light enough to pass as balance or correction if anyone happened to be looking.
A guided touch near his foot during a leg extension, even though Sebastian didn’t need help finishing the rep, and Marcos knew it.
All of it was innocent enough from the outside. Teammates helping each other. Spotting, correcting, moving around shared equipment in a gym that never had enough space when everyone was using it at once.
Sebastian knew better.
He felt it in every glance that lasted too long before Marcos turned away. In the way Marcos’ hand would settle confidently, then leave too fast, like he’d suddenly become aware of himself. In the guarded look behind his eyes whenever the moment came too close to being something else.
Sebastian couldn’t lie; every moment between them had him half-waiting for Marcos to pull away again.
He remembered enough about figuring himself out to recognise it, even if Marcos’ version belonged to Marcos.
The pit in the stomach. The ugly, sudden drop after wanting something too much.
The way each pulse of the heart could feel wrong if it carried a truth the rest of you didn’t know how to hold.
But Marcos didn’t pull away.
They continued their training program together, and somewhere through the week, it stopped feeling like punishment.
The drills ran smoother now, not perfectly, but cleaner than before.
Sebastian was on the ball quicker. Marcos tapped it into spaces Sebastian was already heading toward.
Phetmany adjusted around them instead of having to cover for their hesitation, and Lachie started getting better scraps because the ball was coming out as if it had a purpose.
Their teammates read the improvement quickly.
They had to. Football punished anyone who didn’t notice what was changing around them.
Parker started opening wider when Marcos shaped his body toward the tap.
Corey pushed harder into the outside lane because Sebastian was clearing bodies earlier.
Callum, further up the ground, timed a lead off a movement that hadn’t existed properly two weeks earlier.
For the past few weeks, Sebastian had felt like he’d been playing with a handicap.
His mind had been limiting what he could see in front of him, cutting the field into pieces every time Marcos entered the edge of his awareness.
It hadn’t completely lifted, but something had loosened.
His body seemed to be moving before his mind gave it direction.
Jacob noticed on Wednesday, after they ran a centre drill perfectly four times in a row and he walked onto the field with a smile on his face.
Sebastian couldn’t think of any time he had seen Jacob smile properly, not even after the win on the weekend. It was not a big smile. It barely held for more than a second. But it was there, and it made Parker whistle low under his breath from the wing.
Jacob made them run the drill again anyway.
By Thursday afternoon, Sebastian had started to wonder if Marcos had forgotten about asking to come to his apartment. Neither of them had mentioned it, and Sebastian didn’t want to seem like he had been waiting for confirmation all week.
It wasn’t until after training, when Sebastian had showered and was getting changed, one foot still bare, and hair damp, when Marcos came to sit on the bench beside him. He did not sit close enough to touch this time. Marcos pulled on his socks and tied his shoes.
Sebastian’s gaze ran over him. “You ready for tomorrow?”
Marcos gave a tight nod, leaning back against the lockers, then, “Does tonight work?”
Sebastian paused, his shirt halfway over his head. “Uh.” He pulled the shirt down and ran a hand through his hair. “Tonight?”
“Yeah,” Marcos said slowly, his eyes locked onto a locker on the other side of the room, and his hands picking at each other in his lap. “To come around?”