Chapter 6
Rafe
The gym at five-thirty.
Thirty minutes earlier than usual, which I noted and did not examine. The treadmill. The same incline, the same pace, the same deliberate rhythm that I could have maintained in my sleep.
I was not going to regret the terrace. That had been the first thought when I woke at five, the first fully formed sentence my mind produced before anything else — I am not going to regret this — as though some part of me had spent the sleeping hours arguing the case and arrived at the verdict before I was conscious.
The problem was that I didn't regret it.
Not regretting the terrace would have been manageable if it came with the ordinary clarity of an impulse acknowledged and set aside.
You notice something, you act on it, you understand it for what it was in the context it happened, you return to the work.
That was a sequence I'd navigated before with the clean precision I tried to bring to everything.
Instead I lay on the treadmill timer's count and felt the specific weight of not regretting it, which was heavier than regret would have been, and this was new information that I didn't know what to do with.
She'd been the one to close the distance. I'd been standing there with the city below us and the full understanding that what was about to happen was something I should redirect, and then she'd moved, and everything I'd been about to say had become irrelevant in an instant.
Her hand against my chest. The way she'd said nothing, which was its own kind of language.
I increased the treadmill incline by two degrees and ran harder.
After the gym, the mobility work. After the mobility work, the cold water. After the cold water, the morning quiet of a hotel that wasn't yet awake.
I sat with coffee and tried to watch the tactical footage from the Brazil–Argentina match, which we'd likely face in the knockout rounds if the group tables held, and which deserved sixty minutes of serious attention.
I watched fourteen minutes and retained approximately nothing.
Brazil's left-sided press was a legitimate problem that required a specific structural response that I had opinions about and was currently unable to form because my mind kept returning to the terrace, which was not a professional use of my time or cognitive capacity.
I put the footage on hold. I opened my training notes.
I was not going to text her.
I was not going to text her because I didn't have her number, which was an obvious observation, but more importantly because reaching out the morning after a thing that had no established framework would make it a thing with a framework, and I was not prepared to decide what that framework was.
This was the honest analysis of the situation: I had kissed a journalist at a tournament gala and I hadn't decided what I thought about it, and until I had, doing nothing was the correct position.
Doing nothing felt terrible.
This was also information.
I went to the team breakfast at seven-thirty and ate the aggressive eggs and said the appropriate morning things to the players at my table and listened to Danny's account of the latter portion of the gala with the precise attentiveness of a man demonstrating that he has no particular interest in the gala's earlier events.
Danny, for once, didn't probe.
This concerned me slightly.
The press availability was at two o'clock in one of the media hotel's function rooms — a mid-week session, pool access, the usual fifteen journalists cycling through while the FA managed the flow.
I'd agreed to attend because I always attended when the schedule allowed and because absence would have been noticed as deviation, and deviation generated conversation, and conversation generated attention, and attention was something I managed carefully.
I sat at the table with the press officer beside me and answered questions about our next fixture, which was in four days, against Japan — a technically disciplined side who were going to require a specific kind of patience from the squad.
Japan's defensive shape. England's adaptation in the second half of tournament play. The physical demands of the heat, the importance of squad rotation.
I was eleven minutes in. Competent. Completely present in the professional sense of the word.
Then I looked up from the journalist I'd been answering and she was at the back of the room.
She wasn't in the press line. She wasn't waiting to ask a question.
She was standing to the side of the back wall with a coffee and a notebook and she was looking — not at me, at the room, the practiced lateral attention of a journalist constructing context.
She had her hair differently than last night, back instead of down, and she was wearing what journalists wore in the day, completely different from the green dress, and none of this was relevant information.
She didn't look at me directly.
Across the room, two seats left of where she was standing, was a man I recognised as Bruno Alvarez — Portugal's left winger, twenty-eight, technically exceptional, the kind of player whose press interactions were uniformly excellent because he understood how to use them.
He was waiting to do his own session in the adjacent room. He was looking at Sienna.
The journalist to my right asked me a question about squad fitness.
I answered it, and the answer took four minutes, which was the length of time required to give it properly, and during those four minutes I used my peripheral vision with a precision I normally reserved for tracking runners on the far side of the pitch.
She finished the coffee. She moved across to where Alvarez was standing.
She said something that made him turn toward her with immediate attention, which was the natural response of any person when she directed her full focus at them, I had now gathered.
She produced her recorder. He lit up — literally, his posture changed, the easy physicality of a man who liked being seen.
She laughed at something he said. Head back, briefly, the quick genuine version that I'd heard twice in other contexts and that was, I noted with the calm precision of a man who was entirely unbothered, completely different from the polite version she'd used in the press line.
I answered the last question, thanked the room, and left.
My room was quiet when I got back to it.
I lay on the bed, which I never did in the afternoon. I looked at the ceiling.
I had watched her laugh at a joke from Bruno Alvarez and I had left my own press availability early — not dramatically, not noticeably, but earlier than usual — and I was now lying on a hotel bed at three in the afternoon like a person who was absolutely fine.
I was thirty seconds from the tactical footage.
I was approximately thirty years from the version of myself who could watch that footage without any interference from the fact of last night.
Danny knocked at four.
He had the hotel key card, which I'd given him two years ago and which he used to enter without waiting for an answer, which I'd never corrected because I'd never needed to correct it.
He looked at me. He took in the ceiling-staring. He sat on the other bed with the ease of a man who had come specifically to sit there and wasn't going anywhere.
"You look terrible," he said.
"Thank you."
"You left your own press session six minutes early."
"I answered all the questions."
"You answered the last one in one sentence. The last one usually gets four." He stretched out on the other bed, hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling alongside me. "Is this about the journalist?"
A long silence.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You were watching her at the press session."
"I was watching the room."
"Specifically the part of the room that contained her."
I said nothing.
Danny continued examining the ceiling. "I'm not going to say anything useful about it," he said.
"I know you know that my saying anything useful would require you to tell me things you're not going to tell me, so I'll just say this: you look terrible, the tactical footage can wait until tomorrow, and Bruno Alvarez —"
"Danny."
"I was there. For what it's worth." He paused. "He told a joke about airport security. She laughed. Then she did her job, got what she needed, and left. That's all it was."
I was quiet for a moment. "I know."
"Do you?"
I didn't answer that.
Danny rolled off the other bed, which was its own kind of answer — the move of a man who has deposited what he came to deposit and is ready to go. He picked up the room service menu from the desk.
"You could just talk to her," he said. "I know that seems impossible given how you've constructed your entire personality, but there it is. Talk to her like a normal person. Without the press-conference version. You've done it before, I assume — you've been a normal person at some point."
"I appreciate the advice."
"No you don't." He was already moving toward the door. "I'm getting food. Do you want food?"
"No."
"I'll get you something anyway."
He left.
The room was quiet again. Better and worse for the conversation.
I got up and sat at the desk and opened the tactical footage because the alternative was more ceiling time and I'd reached the limit of what that was going to resolve.
Brazil's left-sided press loaded on the screen in front of me.
The movement patterns. The structural gaps.
The things that required thinking about properly.
I watched for twenty minutes. Forty. The footage became the thing it needed to be, which was work, which was something I knew how to do completely.
But underneath the work, at the low frequency where things sit when they haven't been decided yet — there she was. The image of her head tipping back. The way she'd said my last name alone on the terrace, without the title, and how it had landed.
The way she hadn't texted.
Neither had I.
I filed that away with everything else and went back to the footage.
The next morning's training session was the one that made the younger players nervous.
I don't do it on purpose. I don't arrive with the intention of being frightening.
But there are sessions where I'm running the particular kind of focused anger that comes from having spent forty-eight hours not doing the thing I'm best at, and those sessions have a quality that I'm aware of and that younger players pick up on and give a wide berth.
Marcus Deen took one look at me in the warm-up and moved three metres to the left.
I trained for ninety minutes at a standard I hadn't accessed all tournament and knew was unsustainable at this frequency, and it was exactly what was required.
Afterward, walking back to the changing rooms with the clean exhaustion of a body that had been used properly, I made a decision with more honesty than the ones I'd been making.
I was going to stay away from her.
I made this decision, as I had made it before, with the full understanding that it was the right decision and the complete knowledge that I meant it slightly less than the last time I'd made it.
That was the situation.
I walked into the changing rooms and turned the shower on cold.
It helped, the way cold things help — briefly and with diminishing returns.
The tournament had not even reached the knockout rounds yet.
There was a great deal of time left.
I was not sure what I was going to do with it.