Matchday 33 #7
“You were just a wee thing,” she murmurs.
“I thought it was too much pressure, all that football right after the funeral. And I knew your dad didn’t want you to.
I was afraid to betray him, his memory.” Oliver feels choked and guilty.
He was afraid of that too. “But the academy offered room and board with your scholarship, and more than anything, more than school, I wanted you to have a stable place.” Oliver sits bolt upright, nearly knocking his water glass over.
He didn’t know that’s why he got to stay, to keep playing football instead of grieving.
“Everything felt like it was falling apart. We had some benefits, but I was terrified of making ends meet. Your grandparents wanted to help us, but they couldn’t.
Then your youth manager, Alec, such a nice man, he came over here in person.
You were upstairs with schoolwork and I wanted to send him away, I was so ashamed of the mess, but he asked for just a minute of my time.
” Oliver can picture it perfectly, Alec in his tracksuit and his graying beard, those horrible nine-year-old days where, alone in his room, he counted the hours between training sessions and heard Nicola pacing all through the night.
“He was so sorry to bother us, he only wanted to tell me it would be worth it. He promised to look after you. He said you had such a bright future with Camden. He said he thought you might be less lonely with a group of friends to play with every day. I felt he really cared for you. My little star…”
“I didn’t know about that,” Oliver murmurs.
“I always thought I was so lucky you let me stay, like I’d gotten away with something.
” The man he became, football star with a big bad secret, all traces back to that year, when he started at the academy, gaining a new life to make up for the ruins of the old one.
Oliver retreated into football because he couldn’t get hurt on the pitch, not even when he was fouled or injured.
Not really hurt, not in the same way he and Mum were, not in the way Dad was by the end.
Looking back at it now, at the small version of himself in Camden green, he wonders if he’s still on the practice pitch, if he ever left at all, or if he’s been running drills alone after dark the whole span of his life.
Maybe Leo was the first one to ever find him there and ask what he was up to. Even now, he’s not sure of the answer.
“Oliver,” Nicola says, taking both of his big hands in hers.
“I am lucky, Mum,” he tells her. “Lucky to have you. And to have had Dad. You both did so well by me.”
She squeezes hard and he squeezes back. In the compressed air between their palms he can feel Dad’s presence, holding them both together through time and space.
He wonders what the other Oliver would think of him now: his hair cut and his house and his pace on the ball.
He wonders what Dad might think of Leonardo Davies-Villanueva.
“He’d be so proud,” Mum whispers, answering his silent question. “He would have been thrilled that he was wrong. You playing for England, the pride of Camden—you could have held it over him forever. He loved you, Ollie, more than anything. He’d have given anything to watch you grow up.”
“I can feel him with me,” he says back, just as quiet. He can see his father on the touchline, watching all the many matches he’s played in. He wants to go to him, even though it’s impossible. “There’s so much I want to tell him.”
Nicola blinks the last of her tears away and nods insistently, shaking their joined hands in tune with it.
“He would have wanted to hear it all. And you know he would want to know every detail about all your love life. That’s why I have to be nosy now, in his memory, you see. So who is it? Tell me everything!”
Her excitement slips over his skin like water, choking and drowning him. The voice in his head, the one who is beginning to sound suspiciously similar to Willem, asks: Why have you never told Nicola?
If she didn’t know, Oliver replies bitterly, then at least no one else has to be as secret-keeping and duplicitous as I feel, yeah?
It’s something for him to deal with alone; he’s not asking anyone to lie but Maggie, sweet Maggie, who’s always been just what he needs her to be even when he can’t be anything for her in return.
And Leo. His Leo, who has stars in his eyes and no temperament for shame.
Nicola observes his silence, his lack of enthusiasm for the change in subject.
“Well,” she says briskly but not unkindly.
“Anyone who caught your eye must be rather striking.” She rises from the table and touches his shoulder on her way to load the dishwasher, leaving him silent but feeling like a liar anyway.
Nicola spoke so carefully, not a gendered pronoun in sight, no use of “pretty” or “beautiful,” though Leo is of course both of those things.
It would be so simple to tell her, even to allude to it.
The opening is right there, a door swinging on its hinges.
He can’t do it. Mum doesn’t press him, just lets him follow with the glasses, wondering why he’s such a coward.
When the kitchen’s clean and he says good night, Oliver reaches for her so he can give her a hug, breathe in the particular washing powder and antiseptic scent, something comforting in his memory and in the here and now.
“I’ll come to the Everton match, shall I?” she asks in the foyer.
“If you wanted, you could come to the derby instead—you’d be an away fan, at Kilburn, but I could get you a nice seat, we have a block in the away stand. No Rovers allowed.”
“The great battle of North London,” she says in a somber voice. “I haven’t been in ages. Oh, there’s nothing quite like it. I’ll be there with bells on.”
Oliver kisses her cheek and gives her one more hug, a nice tight squeeze, just because he can.
Then he pedals away, he takes himself south of Regent’s Park, bumping down the cobblestones all the way to Maggie’s door, whacking the buzzer until he can hear footfalls on the stairs.
She answers in her dressing gown, peeved and wreathed with cigarette smoke.
He waves it away from them irritably, but when it clears, the hardness in her jaw makes him almost miss the stench.
“If you’ve shown up with bad news, please go home. I was in the bath.”
“I meant to stop for flowers,” Oliver says dumbly. “To bring you a bouquet, like.”
“Ollie,” she replies, sighing so heavily it shakes her shoulders, her beautiful features wan in the single flickering entryway light. “That’s not your job. You’re going to give my other suitors the wrong idea.”
He probably deserves that.
“It’s my privilege,” he tells her, meaning it truly. “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry for being such a dickhead, and I wanted to do it in person, so you could slap me if you wanted.”
“Ollie,” she says again, but it’s nicer this time. “You’re always playing the martyr. It’s fine! You’re in the thick of it in a way I could never understand. I just wish you wouldn’t shut everyone out over it. You make everything seem so lonely.”
“I’m not lonely. Truly, Maggie, I swear to God.”
Her face changes in an instant, exhaustion swirling into a rich tapestry of gossip and glee.
With Leo? she mouths. He nods assent and she squeals, throwing her arms around his neck and continuing to let out a high-pitch frequency. “You told him?”
“He…guessed,” Oliver admits. “And it took a beat to, ah, sort things between us. But now it’s good. I think it is, anyway. Complicated. I don’t really know what I’m doing, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt like this before.”
“Gee, thanks,” she says. He grips her elbows, beseeching, and she forgives him with a returning squeeze.
“I don’t know how to get anything done,” he admits, finally, for the first time. “I think about him all the time.”
“You’re supposed to, babes,” Maggie assures him.
“When you’re with someone who makes you happy.
He does, doesn’t he?” He nods again, feeling the smile turn up at the corners of his mouth.
He’s never been happy before, not if this is what it feels like.
“Oh, Oliver! You’re growing up. I need to know everything. Do you want to come in, then?”
She takes his arm and tugs conspiratorially, the same way she’s done since they wore primary school uniforms and gaps in their teeth.
“Honestly, I’m knackered. I need to sleep hard. I don’t think I could talk about it even if I was awake. It’s so much. I keep waiting for it to all fall apart.”
“You’re pessimistic when you’re tired. It won’t fall apart if you don’t keep expecting it to,” she scolds, but then rises on her tiptoes to kiss him gently on the cheek, one hand gripping his shoulder for balance so she can whisper in his ear.
“You’ve always been the most important man in my life.
It’s about time you found the most important man in yours. ”
· · ·
In the yellow hallway light of the hotel in Stoke-on-Trent, the most important man in Oliver’s life is standing furtively outside his door, five rooms down from his own. Oliver leans against the doorframe, poking his head out to meet him. Leo’s pajamas almost match the horrible hotel carpeting.
“Yes?” Oliver asks, casual as anything.
“Do you have an extra phone charger? I forgot mine,” Leo replies loudly, standing at attention and beaming with pride at his ruse. Oliver rolls his eyes as he lets him in.
“Look at you go, James Bond. Cover story of the century, very sneaky.” He kisses Leo lightly, just to say hello.
Leo keeps hold of Oliver’s waistband when he steps back.
“I’m not going to let you fuck me,” Oliver says definitively.
“They call it isolation for a reason. With only goals to ponder, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that.”
That’s why Alec used to tell them they weren’t allowed to text girls after midnight. It feels very grown-up to lecture someone else with it now, particularly a someone who he’s very much attracted to.
“Wow, pervert,” Leo replies. “Who said anything about sex? I just wanted to have a cuddle.”
Oliver doesn’t believe that for a second.
He knows what it’s been like, between them, recently: physically, the chemistry is a ceaseless revelation.
Matching their steps stride for stride during training is as good as foreplay.
When they’re alone together, all bets are off.
Since that blessed evening of the United match, Oliver has seen his bedroom from a hundred different angles he didn’t even know existed before.
Case in point, Leo is currently palming him on each flank, pawing, ravenous, at his hip bones.
“Jesuuuuus Christ.” Oliver lets out a low whistle.
Leo is a Renaissance painting, more intricate than the triptych of earthly delights Maggie once spent a whole month yammering on about.
He wants him desperately, but he can’t have him right now, not in a hotel before an away game, when the season still has its claws in them.
Oliver can’t bring himself to send him away, though.
There’s so little time left, just a handful of matches—he’s not sure how many more moments like this they’ll have together before Finch discards them or they inevitably discard each other.
Leo doesn’t understand just how likely it is they’ll look back on this as the end of something, but maybe he deserves to.
So when they’ve clambered into bed and Oliver has tucked the comforter up to their chins, sliding down the mattress enough to make them equal in height, he broaches the silence.
“Can I tell you something?”
Leo breaks the parentheses of their embrace, craning his neck backward so their gazes connect in the semidarkness.
“Shit, that’s ominous,” Leo whispers back.