Matchday 20 #7
Monday rolls around in a liminal space—the week is fresh but there’s still five more days without a match.
If Oliver were healthy, he’d be restless and itching for competition; while he’s injured, he just feels marginally achy and listless.
Everyone else seems to be enjoying the break, though.
It’s actually quite discomfiting to have your doctor smile while they make you stretch your torn hamstring until it throbs in pain.
Inevitably, the wanton destruction of the relative peace in his life and routine comes from Willem, delivered via Sebastian.
It’s downright balmy for London in January; Oliver’s vantage on the sidelines could almost be sunbathing.
He’s tipping his head up to the sky and hearing the city rumble just beyond the fence line, drinking in the cloudless blue, when someone calls his name.
When he comes back down to earth, Sebastian is standing above him with an air of impatience.
“Join us, Ollie. No legs required.”
He’s of the mind that nothing with no legs required is quite worth doing, but it wasn’t phrased as a question, so he clambers to his feet over the protestations of his hamstring.
“Trust ball,” Sebastian announces to the larger gathering. Everyone is appropriately confused by that nonsense, but he continues on regardless. “Stand across from your partner, put a meter between you. Pass the ball back and forth, heads only. I want to see you maintain a rhythm.”
“There’s a twist,” Willem shouts from the edge of the pitch.
Of course there fucking is. There’s a groan, in unison, from every man over the age of twenty-six.
Oliver bites back his own dissent. “By the end of the exercise, I want you to be able to tell the squad something about your partner we don’t already know.
” Everyone mutters apprehensively, the musty scent of mutiny lingering in the air.
The manager is unperturbed and continues what must be a prepared monologue.
“The game,” Willem says, undeterred, “is to hear each other over all the noise. You each could make these passes asleep and blindfolded. But for this, you have to listen. Strive to allow your partner’s words in.
Shut out other noise. Be someone they can count on.
Put all of your energy into this moment, on being part of this team.
Talk to each other, not to yourselves. Let’s begin. ”
It’s some business-degree nonsense, Oliver can tell, better fit for primary school than the Prem. Team-building. It’s extremely undignified but intuitive enough; the squad starts to assemble themselves and Oliver tests his weight on each leg, feeling out his range of movement.
“Going to tell me all your secrets, Harris?” Finn asks, moving to stand across from Oliver and raising one eyebrow suggestively.
“You couldn’t handle them, Finny,” Oliver warns, but he throws him the ball regardless.
The drill is less exciting than Willem tried to make it—there’s not much the team doesn’t know about each other, and the only things left to tell are the pieces Oliver guards close to his heart. Every other pass, when Oliver tries to share a fun fact, Finn replies, “Duh.”
Finally, Sebastian calls them off, neither satisfied nor upset with their performance.
Oliver fears they’re about to be quizzed on what they’ve learned, but he only tells them to switch the lines up and go again.
When Oliver looks up from tying his shoelace, Leo is hesitant at his side, clearly having been directed there by Willem and probably also by Joe.
“You need a new partner?” Oliver asks, feeling irresistibly like he’s back in primary school.
Leo nods, biting one corner of his lips anxiously.
“Then you go first,” Oliver mutters, lobbing the ball over to Leo, who bops it neatly into the air with his forehead.
While it hovers above him, he shouts back to Oliver in the panicked tone of someone confessing to a crime.
“I have three passports,” Leo says. Before Oliver can process or react, the ball is flying back to him. He nudges it skyward and immediately becomes aware this game is more difficult than it looks.
“Try again, we could’ve guessed that.”
“I’m allergic to shellfish,” Leo offers, somewhat feebly.
“Not good enough.”
“Why don’t you give it a go, if it’s so easy?”
“Oh no, you keep at it.”
At last, Leo’s pass strays off target and when Oliver turns to go and fetch, he sees the rest of the squad in awkward silence, futilely resetting after each quiet pass.
Gavin has given up completely and is instead watching everything with a glimmer of mirth in his eyes—Oliver flashes him a deeply sarcastic thumbs-up as he passes by.
“I like to draw,” Leo offers, as they start again, which explains the doodle on his shoe. Oliver has a sudden vision of Leo as an artist, instead of an artistic midfielder—he can see him in a beret, holding a painter’s palette, cigarette behind his ear.
“Draw fouls, maybe,” Oliver replies, laughing at the image in his head, which for some reason makes him kind of shivery.
They continue like this until he knows that Leo once shoplifted a Kinder Bueno and his dad made him go back and return it, the only time he ever snuck out of the academy was to go cumbia dancing, and that he broke Oliver’s own record for passes completed in a season for Camden’s under-18 squad.
Oliver keeps his own mouth shut, but the more he listens, he has to admit, Willem maybe had a point about staying present in the moment—it would be useful, in a match, to be able to hear the calls of his teammates so clearly.
· · ·
Oliver hasn’t driven Leo home since that first day—he’s been preferring to call a cab or catch a ride with Garcia, but Oliver extends the offer anyway as they’re walking out of the changing room. Leo hesitates.
“I was going for a glass of wine with some of the others—catching up, you know, with some of the guys from my year,” Leo says.
Oliver huffs a laugh, picturing Leo’s induction into Ahmed and Carda’s very exclusive social club.
“Oh, mate,” he tells him. “You are in for a fucking treat. Try not to let them take you to a second location or you’ll be shite tomorrow.”
Leo smiles, the tentative but pleased kind of someone newly included. They’re nearly to the car park when they’re intercepted, Nina Clarke racing over in her pinchy-looking stilettos that still leave her a good two heads shorter than either of them.
“Oliver! You are a hard man to track down,” she says breathlessly.
“Nina, I’m in this building for hours every day,” Oliver reminds her.
“Metaphorically hard,” she replies. “But I’m glad I caught you—Royal Charity wants to get something on the books for this quarter.”
“Yeah, I’m happy to,” he says, all businesslike. “You can have them call my agent. I’m not traveling for any matches right now.”
Leo is looking between them, eyes slightly narrowed. Oliver ignores him and starts to inch toward the door, but Nina, either oblivious or just great at her job, goes right on.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. They’ve got a lot of families in right now, they’d like to see if any other players are available to come with you. Are you open to leading something like that?”
Leo pounces faster than he would for an opponent’s stray pass.
“What’s the charity?” he asks.
Nina takes in the sight of him, young and handsome and earnest, then smiles winningly when she smells blood in the water.
“I should have introduced myself,” she says, extending a manicured hand to shake.
“I’m Nina Clarke, executive vice president of public relations and sporting media.
” It’s an impressive title, almost certainly with an additional adjective since the last time Oliver saw her.
“I work with the team on publicity and charitable opportunities. Mr. Harris partners with the hospital just up in Hampstead. He’s been working with them for years.
They have housing for family of patients who are in hospital, and we arrange visits with their children—games and reading, the like.
It’s exciting for them to have guests, especially footballers.
” She turns her smile on Oliver, then back to Leo with shrewd eyes.
“You’re just aboard—it could be a chance to place your name, show good face. How do you do in front of cameras?”
“Nina, it’s fine,” Oliver cuts in. “You know I’m happy to film whatever. One hundred percent at your disposal.”
“I’d like to help,” Leo says, words overlapping with his own. “If Harris will have me. I think I’d do okay in front of a camera.”
All good, thanks, Oliver imagines replying. I’ve got the local family tragedy market covered.
Nina looks simply delighted.
“That settles it. I’ll get both of your agents in the loop tonight.” She click-clacks back off, leaving them alone.
“Right,” Oliver says. “Good charitable lads we are. Have fun at wine night.” He makes another attempt at the door.
Leo takes a step closer, near enough for their knees to knock.
“I really do want to help. And to, like, learn. I’m not trying to be a bother,” Leo murmurs.
This is precisely the kind of collaboration Willem would be dead keen on.
Oliver just can’t shake the nagging suspicion that if Leo sees him doing this, all his careful silence during trust ball will be for nothing and he’ll never be able to keep a secret again.
“I’m glad to have you. But Nina will never let you go now,” Oliver says, trying to balance whatever heavy thing is trapped between them.
Leo’s nervous expression softens, just as Carda dances up to them with mischief radiating out of every pore.
“El vino más fino y Leo tan feo,” he croons, horribly. “Fiesta, fiesta, que nada molesta!”
“One of your worst songs ever,” Oliver says without hesitation.
“And he doesn’t even know what it means,” Leo adds. Their reviews don’t dampen Carda’s mood in the slightest; he simply winks and squires Leo away under his arm, leading him out the door. Oliver wonders absently if he would benefit from learning some actual Spanish.
· · ·
His hamstring is hollering at him, a pulsing ache all down his upper thigh.
The increased mobility from stretching and treatment and cross-training is coming at a price, along with a reminder that Oliver’s recovery is still very much in progress.
As soon as he gets home from the Crossing, he hauls several bags of emergency ice from downstairs into the tub and turns the faucet on full blast.
An email dings when he’s lowering himself in.
The icy water is sluicing over his hip bones and his forearms are shivering with cold and exertion as he grips the marble edge of the tub and carefully, carefully inches downward.
Once he’s submerged and has caught his breath, he snags his phone from the floor to read.
Nina and their agents have been trading notes for the last few days, and now they’ve agreed that Leo will come with Oliver to the hospital next month for one of his public visits. They’ll shoot a set of photographs to make it all nice and official.
Oliver’s had a lot of time to mull it over all week since that strange car ride, and he’s decided, begrudgingly, that Willem is right.
Leo is neither a beautiful daydream sent to tempt him, nor a fuckheaded upstart intent on ruining his life.
He’s just a footballer, one who is excellent on the long ball.
He’s going to be his teammate and, apparently, his friend. That’ll have to be that.
Besides, the hospital work is important, possibly the most important thing to him besides football.
He always dreads going, seeing himself in the tired kids’ faces and the sad-eyed parents, until he gets there, when he loves it—once he can stop posing and shaking hands and sit quietly with one of the children, reading them a book, talking to them seriously, like he wished someone would have when he was there with his dad.
If Davies-Villanueva is going to come with Oliver and be part of it, he’s got to trust him and be trusted in return.
There’s no room for rivalries or anger there.
His leg goes blissfully numb as the bathwater turns from frigid to tepid, then to boiling when he tops it off.
Between the wisps of steam, he slides down the back of the tub and dunks his head under, letting out a bubbly exhale.
Oliver surfaces, wipes his fringe out of his eyes, and, living dangerously, goes for his phone with a dripping hand.
Busy weekend for us, hey? he texts, opening a new chat thread in WhatsApp.
A reply chimes approximately twenty-four minutes later (but who’s counting?) while he’s sprawled across his bed on his belly, reading Fever Pitch for the hundredth time.
How so? No debut 4 me :( Leo’s written.
Still got a match to watch tomorrow. Injured guys meeting @ Castlehaven Arms for pints and banter. See you in the morning? Oliver replies.
I’ll be the one with green face paint x
We’ll be sure to get you a separate table. Oliver spends an inordinate number of minutes debating whether or not to include a kissy-face emoji, if that kind of joking affection is allowable. He sends them to Joe all the time. Eventually, he uses a rose and hits send before he can change his mind.