"Maaahn—"
The groan came out long and genuine, the sound of a man processing a loss that had nothing to do with football.
"Now I have to cancel my date tomorrow."
Dest dropped his head back against his locker, addressing the ceiling with the specific suffering of someone whose evening plans had just been restructured by a Dutch coach with a point to make.
Back in the locker room — entirely unaware of the mental gymnastics their coach was currently working through in the office down the corridor — the players were still reeling from the cancellation of their imagined day off. The result had been celebrated, the speech had been received, and now the business of changing and unwinding had resumed, overlaid with the collective low-grade mourning of a squad that had briefly held the concept of rest in their hands and watched it be taken away.
Mateo, beside Dest, heard the date comment and laughed — the immediate, uncomplicated laugh of someone who found this genuinely funny and had no interest in pretending otherwise.
"Well," he said. "Lucky her, I guess."
Dest picked up the nearest thing — his jersey, still damp — and threw it at him.
Mateo caught it, or didn't, it didn't matter, he was already laughing harder, and the players nearest to both of them had caught the exchange and were laughing too, the moment spreading in the easy way moments spread in locker rooms when the energy is right and everyone is looking for a reason to let something out.
"Ha ha," Dest said, flatly. "So funny."
"It kind of is," someone nearby offered helpfully.
Dest looked at them. They did not stop laughing.
Mateo shook his head, grinning, and reached back into his locker for the rest of his change of clothes. The noise of the room continued around him — music still going somewhere, a conversation about something completely unrelated to football happening at full volume near the door, the general comfortable chaos of a group of people who had done what they came to do and were now in the process of becoming regular human beings again.
He had one shoulder through his shirt when a voice came from across the room.
"Yo — check this out."
Araujo.
Standing near the far wall, phone in hand, already looking at the screen with the expression of someone who had found something and needed an audience for it. He had pitched his voice just right — not a shout, but enough to carry, the particular tone that makes people look up without being told to.
People looked up.
Mateo looked up, shirt still half on, one arm in, one arm not.
Araujo felt the attention land and then immediately — with the timing of someone who had not entirely thought this through — held up one finger.
"Wait, wait — I'm coming, let me connect this."
He crossed to the nearest television mounted on the locker room wall, phone already out in front of him, beginning the process of connecting it with the focused concentration of a man doing a technical task in front of an audience that was now waiting.
"Man City had a match today," he said, while his thumbs worked. "Same as us."
"Yeah — Newcastle, right?" Alba, from somewhere behind Mateo, not looking up from whatever he was doing.
"Yeah, Newcastle." Araujo kept his eyes on the phone. "Seems they won. Then after the match they went for the media interview." A pause. The kind that comes when something is almost connected. "And then—" He looked at the screen. Looked at the TV. Back at the screen.
"Got it."
He stepped back.
The screen flickered and then resolved — his phone's display appearing on the mounted television, larger now, the image clear enough for everyone in the room to read.
"Pep said this," Araujo said simply, and sat down.
The locker room reorganised itself slightly — not dramatically, nobody knocked anyone over to get a better view, but bodies shifted and faces turned and the general orientation of the room moved toward the screen with the natural, unhurried momentum of people who were curious about something and had nowhere else to be.
The documentary camera operator, who had been working a quiet angle near the equipment bags, registered the shift in the room and moved — smoothly, without disrupting anything — to a position that could hold both the screen and the players watching it in the same frame. The lens settled.
Mateo, shirt now on but one shoulder still slightly twisted where he hadn't finished pulling it through, looked at the screen and waited to see what exactly they were about to watch.
The interface was Twitter — a video post, the thumbnail showing a familiar figure standing in front of a press backdrop, the blue and white of Manchester City's branding visible in the background. The play button sat in the centre of the frame.
Araujo pressed play.
The video was a standard post-match media setup — the kind that happened in rooms like this all over Europe on matchdays, a manager standing before a bank of microphones and cameras, the questions coming from just off-screen, the whole thing lit with the particular flatness of press conference lighting.
Pep Guardiola stood with the easy posture of a man who had done this thousands of times — hands loosely in front of him, weight balanced, the slight forward lean of someone who was listening to a question before he answered it. He was smiling as the clip began, which immediately told everyone watching that something had already been said that he found either amusing or interesting.
The interviewer's voice came through — off-camera, professional, the particular cadence of a sports journalist who knew their subject well enough not to waste either of their time.
"Another three points secured, and with the league looking increasingly like it's in wraps — we wanted to ask you about something else today."
Pep tilted his head slightly. "Something else?"
"Yes." A brief pause, the interviewer gathering the thread. "The white whale."
Pep's expression shifted — a small, knowing sound, the ooh of someone who had been expecting this question to arrive at some point and had now watched it arrive. He nodded once, settling.
"In a few days' time," the interviewer continued, "you have Barcelona coming to the Etihad. Second leg of the Champions League semi-final. You have the advantage from the first leg, but this Barcelona team — and I think everyone watching over the last few months would agree — is not the same team it was at the start of this campaign. They have also come back from worse this campaign. So the question has to be asked — what's the next move? What are you thinking tactically? What's the plan to secure the win and advance to the final?"
The question finished.
Pep looked at the camera.
Then he laughed — a short, genuine laugh, not performed, the laugh of a man who had a specific thought and the laugh was the first part of it coming out.
"You want to know what the next step is?"
"We do."
He looked at the microphone for a moment. Then back up.
"Nothing," he said.
The interviewer went quiet.
Not the polite quiet of someone preparing a follow-up. The genuinely caught-off-guard quiet of someone who had expected a tactical breakdown and had received the opposite of one.
"Nothing?"
"Nothing." Pep said it again, completely unbothered. "Not a plan. Not a session. Today — today I told the players to go out. Have dinner. Have drinks. Enjoy the evening."
"You can't be serious."
"I am completely serious." He spread his hands slightly. "You watched the game today. You watched us — we were fine, we were good, Newcastle made it difficult and we came through it. But you know what I was thinking on the touchline?" He paused. "Barcelona."
The interviewer made a sound.
"I'm telling you," Pep continued, and the lightness in his voice had not left but something underneath it had become more careful, more deliberate, the way his voice got when he was being genuinely honest rather than performing honesty. "I have a feeling. And my feelings on these things — I don't ignore them. I have a feeling we are not going to win this game."
"Now you have to be—"
"I'm not joking." Not sharp — just clear. "Barcelona are the favourites. In this tie, at this moment, with what they have — they are the favourites. I believe that. We cant compete."
In the locker room, nobody said anything.
"You saw the last game," Pep said. "You saw what happened. And that kid — ehm—" He stopped. The particular stop of someone reaching for a name they know they know. "Ehm—"
"Mateo?" The interviewer offered it quietly.
"Yes." Pep pointed once — the small, decisive point of someone confirming the right answer. "Yes. Mateo King." He said the full name with the weight of someone who had been thinking about it. "What do we do with that? Tell me — because I have been asking myself this question and I don't have a comfortable answer." He shook his head slowly. "The pace. The finishing. The way he moves before the ball arrives — you don't coach that. You don't set up a training session and produce that. That is something that exists or it doesn't." A pause."It exists."
The interviewer let it sit for a second before the next question.
"So the psychological pressure — putting it on Barcelona, saying they're the favourites — that's intentional?"
Pep smiled. A small, patient smile.
"Everything I say is intentional," he said. "But that doesn't mean it isn't also true. Both things can be true at the same time." He tilted his head. "If Barcelona read this and feel the pressure of being called the favourites — good. That is their problem to manage, not mine. And if they read it and feel confident — also good. Confident teams make mistakes. Comfortable teams make mistakes." He let that breathe. "Either way, I am comfortable with what I said."
"So you won't compete?"
Pep looked at the interviewer with the expression of a man who had just heard something that required correction.
"What? What — who said that?" He straightened slightly, the smile returning but different now — sharper, the particular version that came when something had been misread. "Of course we compete. We always compete. We are City — that is what we do, that is all we do." He shook his head. "I said I have a feeling. I said Barcelona are the favourites. I said I told my players to rest tonight." He counted them off. "None of those things mean we don't compete. We will compete completely. We will go onto that pitch and we will give absolutely everything — every tactical preparation, every physical output, everything."
He paused.
"And after all of that — after all the preparing and the competing and the striving—" He shrugged. One shoulder, unhurried, the shrug of a man making his peace with something in real time. "You can still lose."
A beat.
"That's football."
The video ended.
The locker room stayed where it was.
Not because anyone had decided to be still — it just happened, the natural consequence of twenty-something people processing something at the same time and none of them arriving at a conclusion fast enough to say it out loud first. Araujo nodded once — a slow, private nod, the nod of a man who had delivered something and was now sitting with the delivery — and reached over to disconnect his phone. The television went dark.
Ter Stegen, who had been standing with his arms folded for the last three minutes, looked at the blank screen for a moment.
"Well," he said. "That's something."
And that was apparently the unlock, because the room came back to life — not all at once, in pieces, conversations starting in clusters, voices finding each other, the noise of the locker room returning at a lower frequency than before, coloured with something that had not been there ten minutes ago.
Confusion, mostly.
They were used to being talked about before big matches. That was not a new experience — at this level, in this competition, with this club badge on the training bag, you encountered every variety of pre-match rhetoric. You got the ones who came out swinging, talking about how they were going to take Barcelona apart, how the occasion meant nothing to them, how they had faced bigger challenges and come through. You got the ones who were clinical about it — tactical, specific, detailed breakdowns of what they intended to exploit and how. You got the ones who said nothing, who went completely quiet and let the silence make its own point.
You did not, typically, get the manager of the team that beat you at home, that held the aggregate advantage, that was ninety minutes away from a Champions League final, standing in front of a camera and telling the press that Barcelona were the favourites and he expected to lose.
Who did that?
Who does that?
The question was moving around the room in different forms, different voices, the same essential bewilderment underneath all of it.
"I mean — they beat us 2-1. At home." Roberto, from the other side of the room, not accusatory, just genuinely confused. "They have the home advantage for the second leg. That's — I mean, by any metric—"
"I know—"
"—they're the favourites—"
"That's what I'm saying—"
"It doesn't make sense—"
Mateo stood with his arms folded and looked at the blank television screen with the specific expression of a person whose brain had received information and was still running it through every possible framework and finding none of them producing a satisfying result. He had watched the whole thing. He had heard every word. And he was still, genuinely, confused.
The room got louder — not argumentative, just the noise of a group of people collectively failing to make sense of something, talking at each other and around each other, the confusion producing energy that had nowhere specific to go.
Then a sound cut through it.
Laughter.
Not the big, performative locker room variety. Something quieter — a specific, knowing laugh, coming from one place in the room.
Everyone stopped.
Turned.
Messi had his hand over his mouth, his shoulders doing the small, rhythmic movement of someone who had started laughing and was trying to contain it out of basic respect for the room. Beside him, Alba had already given up on containment entirely. Busquets was smiling in the careful, restrained way of a man who had seen this particular play before and found it funny in a different, more informed way than the people around him.
Piqué was shaking his head slowly.
"Sorry, sorry—" Messi lowered his hand, composed himself with the effort of someone who genuinely meant the apology. "Sorry."
He looked at the room.
"You don't need to take him seriously," he said. He gestured at the blank television — clearly, obviously meaning Pep. "Any of that. Don't take it seriously."
"He always does this," Alba said, from beside him. The delivery was flat and certain, the tone of someone stating a known fact. "Always. Before big matches. Every time."
"Hasn't changed," Busquets confirmed, in the same register. The two of them had the particular ease of people sharing a private joke with a much larger audience, the shorthand of former teammates who had watched this specific behaviour from much closer range than anyone else in the room.
"He plays the game before the game," Messi continued, more directly now. "Everything he says in those rooms — it's all deliberate. All of it. Don't give it space in your head. That's what he wants."
The room absorbed this. Not all at once — but the confusion was finding somewhere to go, the framework Messi was offering making more sense than the alternative, which was that the manager of Manchester City had genuinely lost his mind four days before a Champions League semi-final second leg.
The tension in the room dropped a register.
Gradually, something approaching sense was being made.
It was just Pep. That's just what Pep does. The man has been doing this for twenty years.
I mean — who praises the opposition days before a knockout match? A madman, or someone very, very calculated.
Either way, don't let it in.
The room was almost back to itself when Piqué opened his mouth.
"Well," he said.
He paused — the pause of a man choosing his moment.
"He wasn't wrong about the kid, though."
The sentence landed.
Mateo turned around slowly.
"Ehn?"
He said it with the particular blankness of someone who had heard correctly and was hoping he hadn't.
It took approximately one second.
Then Roberto was off — "Yes, yes—" — and Araujo right behind him, and Umtiti from across the room with the wide, delighted grin of someone who had been waiting for an opening and had just watched one appear, and suddenly the entire locker room had opinions about the segment of Pep's interview concerning Mateo King and none of them were being kept private.
"Pep Guardiola himself—"
"He said it on camera—"
"What do we do with that?" — someone doing a full Pep impression, accent and everything, which was not accurate but was committed.
"Who can stop our little bunny—"
"Little bunny—"
"Don't call him that—"
Piqué crossed the room with the unhurried ease of a very large man who had decided something was going to happen and was simply going to go and make it happen. He arrived at Mateo's side and positioned himself between him and the rest of the room, arms slightly out, the body language of someone stepping in to protect.
"Okay, okay—" He held a hand up at the group, the gesture of a man restoring order. "Leave him alone."
The teasing died down slightly. Mateo straightened, exhaling.
Piqué looked at him.
Then, with the complete calm of someone who had been planning this from the moment he left his seat, the large hand came down on top of Mateo's head and rubbed — thoroughly, thoroughly — the full, unhurried rub of a man who had decided this was happening and had the physical advantages to ensure it did.
"You're going to make the little bunny angry," he said, with great tenderness.
"GET—" Mateo grabbed the hand with both of his and flung it sideways with the desperate energy of someone fighting for their dignity. "Get OUT—"
The room exploded.
The laughter that came from the room was enormous and completely unhelpful.
He was still straightening his fade — running a hand over the top of his head with the wounded expression of someone conducting damage assessment — when Pedri's voice arrived through the noise.
"Mateo." He was looking at his phone, already moving toward his bag. "We need to start going. It's getting late."
Mateo processed this. Looked at his locker. Looked at the room — at Piqué, who was still smiling, at Roberto and Araujo who showed no signs of being done with any of this.
"Oh shit—" He was already moving. "I'm coming, I'm coming—"
He went to his locker at speed, pulling things out, checking things, shoving things into his bag with the focused, slightly chaotic energy of someone who is running late and has just remembered it. He found a spray, deployed it in the general direction of his neck and chest with the quick, practiced motion of someone who had been doing this since he was fifteen, and grabbed his bag.
"Aye — where are you two going?" Umtiti, curious, watching him rush.
"Nonya," Mateo said, without looking up.
The room waited.
Piqué tilted his head. "Nonya what?"
Araujo, who had seen exactly where this was going, took a step forward, one hand already up. "Wait—wai—"
"Non ya business."
The room.
The room went.
The room went immediately — laughter arriving from every direction at once, no delay, no build-up, just straight there. Someone at the back repeated it to himself still laughing. Piqué stood with his mouth slightly open, then closed it, then shook his head slowly with the expression of a man who had just been beaten at his own game.
"That's actually good," he said. He sounded genuinely impressed.
Pedri, still laughing, looked at his phone and then at Mateo. "We have some friends waiting outside."
The room caught that immediately.
"Friends—"
"Wait wait wait — is it a girl—"
"Is she the girlfriend—"
"When are you introducing her—"
Piqué's smile spread slow and wide. "Hold on — is it a girl?"
"No way it's a girl," Araujo said, pointing, his voice carrying the energy of someone who had just found a second wind. "Which girl? Which girl is waiting for him?" He looked around the room, genuinely appealing to the group. "This guy trains, goes home, sleeps, and comes back. That's it. That's his whole personality. What girl is sitting somewhere thinking — yes, that one, the one who smells like a training ground and goes to bed at nine—" He shook his head, almost admiringly. "No girl is waiting for Mateo King. I refuse to believe it."
Mateo finished zipping his bag. He looked at none of them. He looked at Pedri.
"I'm done. Let's go."
Then he turned — unhurried, pleasant, the expression of a man who had already prepared something — and looked directly at Araujo.
"Don't project, dude." He let it sit for exactly one second. "It's not good. Not everyone is like you."
The room.
The room.
It went completely — Umtiti, Roberto, someone near the back whose laugh was more of a wheeze, Piqué's hand going straight to his face. Even the documentary camera operator, who had been working quietly against the far wall the entire time, was smiling behind the lens — not performing neutrality, just smiling, because he was a human being and it was funny.
Araujo stood in the middle of it all.
He opened his mouth.
"Well — you — you—"
He stopped.
"You—"
The words simply were not there. Every direction he tried, the sentence didn't follow. He pointed once — at Mateo, at the door, at something — and nothing came out that helped his case.
Piqué materialised beside him.
The large hand came down on his shoulder. Piqué looked at him — not unkindly, not mockingly, with the steady, patient expression of a man who had seen this exact situation before and knew exactly how it ended.
He said nothing.
He simply shook his head. Slowly. Once. Left to right.
Let it go.
Araujo looked at the hand on his shoulder. Looked at the room, still going. Looked at Mateo, who was already at the door, laughing at his own joke with the completely unashamed delight of someone who felt no obligation to pretend he wasn't.
He closed his mouth.
"Bye, boys," Mateo said, hand raised at the room broadly.
"Safe—"
"Take care—"
A hand waved somewhere. Someone said something that got swallowed by the noise. Piqué called something after him that Mateo chose not to dignify with a response.
And then he and Pedri were through the door, the sound of the locker room carrying behind them down the corridor — the laughter and the voices and the music, the sound of twenty-something men in a room with no audience and no agenda, just themselves.
The door swung shut.
...
"Seems they're on the way."
Aina said it to the windscreen more than to Olivia, phone in her lap, and then leaned her head back against the headrest with the full, boneless relief of someone whose body had decided the match was over and it was time to stop pretending otherwise.
"Finally."
Olivia looked at her and smiled.
The stadium was still alive behind them.
That was the thing about Camp Nou after a win — it didn't just empty. It exhaled, slowly, unwillingly, the way a party resists ending even after everyone has agreed to go home. From where they were sitting, parked a little distance from the main entrance in the car Pedri's brother had lent them before disappearing with a wave and some excuse about somewhere to be, they could still hear it — the singing, the voices, the occasional eruption of something that might have been a chant starting up or just a group of people near the exit who had decided the night wasn't finished yet. There was something happening near the main plaza that had the energy of a small festival, clusters of people in red and blue still moving, still singing, the match having released something in them that was not ready to go home.
Which was why they weren't parked closer. Which was why they were here, in this car, windows slightly fogged, the city making its noise around them at a comfortable distance.
Oriol had left immediately after the final whistle — the particular urgency of a father who had someone waiting at home. Grandmother Nuria had wanted to come, had talked about nothing else for days apparently, but her health made the constant movement of a matchday impossible, and she couldn't be left alone, so Nora had stayed behind with her and let her husband go — the compromise of a family that understood its own logistics. He had gone straight from his seat to his car, already on his phone, the excited post-match energy of a man who had three hours of thoughts to share with his wife who had missed the whole thing.
Isabella had stayed longer. She had sat with the girls in the stands after the final whistle, the three of them talking while the stadium thinned around them — comfortable, unhurried, the easy warmth of a woman who genuinely liked the people her son had around him. Then, at some point, she had drawn Aina aside for a few minutes — a small, private conversation that Olivia had not been part of and had not tried to overhear — and then she had hugged them both and left, her heels clicking across the concourse, already pulling out her phone.
And then it had been just the two of them.
Aina and Olivia. Best friends. A borrowed car. Barcelona still singing somewhere behind them.
A small giggle broke the quiet.
Olivia looked sideways.
Aina was already looking at her.
The expression on Aina's face was the specific expression she wore when she was holding something and had decided it was time to stop holding it, the expression that Olivia had seventeen years of experience recognising and exactly zero successful strategies for deflecting.
"What," Olivia said. Dragging the word out, loading it with the weight of someone who already knew the answer and was asking anyway.
Aina's smile spread slowly, the way smiles do when they have been waiting.
"Well — nothing," she said. She looked away, toward the windscreen, toward the stadium lights still glowing in the distance. Casual. Unbothered. The performance of a woman who was about to be neither.
A pause.
"So — Mateo."
"I knew it—" Olivia turned in her seat, pointing. "I knew that's what you were going to say, I literally knew—"
"But can you blame me?" Aina was already laughing, her shoulders doing the small, helpless movement of someone who had committed to something and was not going back. "Can you honestly blame me?"
Olivia turned back to face the front. She was laughing too, which was annoying. "Yeah, yeah."
"Hmm." Aina tilted her head slightly.
Olivia waited.
"You didn't answer," Aina said.
"That's because there's nothing to say."
Aina looked at her. The particular look. The one that required no words and communicated an entire paragraph.
"I'm serious," Olivia said, still smiling, the smile doing the thing smiles do when they are trying to be neutral and not managing it.
Aina said nothing. Just looked.
"I'm serious—"
Still nothing. Just the look, patient and knowing and absolutely devastating in its simplicity.
"Okay—" Olivia made a sound that was half laugh and half something else, her hands coming up briefly before dropping back to her lap, and then it came out — not all at once, in pieces, the way things come out when you've been not-saying them for long enough that the effort of not-saying them becomes its own kind of exhausting.
"He's cute. Fine. He's cute — I admit that." A pause. "And he's nice. Like, genuinely nice, not the kind of nice that's actually just performing niceness, actually nice." Another pause. "And he's funny." She laughed a little at something she was remembering. "Really funny. Like, annoying funny — the kind where you want to be more annoyed than you are and you can't quite get there."
She stopped.
Shifted in her seat.
"I don't know," she said, and the easy momentum of the words slowed into something more careful. "I don't — I don't know what I'm saying." She fidgeted — fingers on the hem of her jacket, a small, restless movement. "We're friends. We just met. We're friends."
The word landed with slightly less certainty the first time than she had intended.
She said it again.
"We're friends."
More certain this time. Decided. She nodded once, confirming it to herself.
Aina made a small sound. A hmm — low, uninflected, carrying nothing specific and everything implied.
Olivia looked at her.
And the smile was gone from her own face before she had noticed it leaving, replaced by something quieter and more honest, and she looked at Aina and took a breath and said it.
"I won't lie." Her voice was different now — the performance of the last few minutes set aside, what was underneath it coming through plainly. "I think I'm getting a crush on him."
Aina's eyes lit up immediately, the brightness arriving before she had made any decision about it.
"But—" Olivia said.
Aina's face paused. "But?"
"Is a crush really what I need right now?"
She said it quietly. Not rhetorically — actually asking. The question of someone who had genuinely been considering this and had not arrived at a comfortable answer.
"I have an album coming." The words started coming faster, the thoughts arriving in the order they had apparently been queuing in. "Dan still doesn't like the last song — he called me twice this week about it and I didn't pick up either time because I don't know what to say to him yet. I'm about to start the most important chapter of my life professionally, like actually start it, and it's already overwhelming, it's already a lot, and I haven't even begun—" She stopped. Started again. "I'm seventeen. I'm in Barcelona because I needed to get away from everything, and I came here to clear my head, not to — not to add something new to it." She shook her head. "Is this the right time? Am I seriously this — is this who I am right now? Someone who comes to clear her head and immediately—"
"Olivia—" Aina's voice was soft, worried.
Olivia laughed.
But it was not the laugh from before. It was smaller and more private, directed inward, the particular laugh that arrives when someone has caught themselves in something they don't entirely want to be caught in.
"Why am I even lying," she said.
Aina blinked. "What?"
"All of that." She gestured vaguely — at herself, at the reasoning she had just laid out. "The album. The timing. Dan and the song." A pause. "They're not wrong — they're all real — but they're also excuses." She was quiet for a moment. "I know what the real thing is."
She stopped.
And for a moment she didn't say it — her eyes going somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't the car or the window or the stadium lights still faintly visible.
"When Joshua—"
Aina's expression changed the moment the name arrived. Something in her jaw shifted, something in her eyes.
Olivia kept going.
"When Joshua broke my heart—" She said it evenly, carefully, the way you say something you have said to yourself many times but are still careful with in front of other people. "I was devastated. You saw me. You were there — you know what it was like. I was wrecked." A small breath. "It's why this album exists, honestly. I needed somewhere to put all of it. I needed to make something out of it or it was just going to sit in me and stay there." She paused. "It's part of why I needed to leave. To come here. Just — away from the noise, away from everything that had his shape on it."
Aina opened her mouth.
"And now—" Olivia cut across her gently, not unkindly, just not done yet. "Now I'm here. And things are moving again. And I actually feel like myself again — properly, for the first time in a while — and now I'm sitting in a car outside a football stadium developing feelings for a boy I met four days ago?" She shook her head. "What does that say about me? Does that mean everything I felt before wasn't real? Does it mean I'm someone who just — moves on like that?" She snapped her fingers softly. "Like it didn't matter?"
The question sat in the car.
"Or does it mean—" She stopped. Her voice had gone very small. "I just don't know if I'm ready. I don't think I'm ready."
Silence.
Aina moved.
Not dramatically — just across the seat, closing the distance between them, and when she spoke her voice was different from the teasing warmth it had carried for the last ten minutes. It was just her. Just Aina.
"Olivia. I'm sorry." She said it clearly, meaning it from the start of the word to the end of it. "I didn't know you were still carrying all of that. And I was sitting here trying to push you toward someone when you hadn't even — I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked."
Olivia smiled — the small, real smile that comes after something has been said that needed to be said. She reached up and pressed the corner of her eye with one finger, catching the small threat of something before it became something else.
"It's fine," she said.
"It's not—"
"It is." Firmly, but warmly — the it is of someone who had decided. She looked at Aina, and the smile was fuller now, steadier. "It really is. I'm okay. I just—" She laughed softly. "I needed to say it out loud, I think. I haven't said any of that out loud."
Aina held her gaze for a moment. Satisfied herself that the answer was true. Then she nodded, once, and let it settle.
A beat passed.
Olivia tilted her head.
"Besides." The smile shifted into something different — warmer, pointed, with the specific quality of a very deliberate subject change. "I'm much more interested in talking about you."
"Me?"
"You and Pedri." She said it with great casualness, which was not casual at all.
Aina blinked. "Olivia—"
"No, listen—" Olivia turned in her seat, pulling one knee up, fully reorienting herself. "What is going on there? Because I'm watching, and I'm getting a very specific feeling." She paused for effect. "I think he likes you."
Aina said nothing immediately.
"He's cute too," Olivia continued, her voice lightening by the sentence, the earlier weight of the conversation being set down deliberately, traded for something easier. "Like — a different kind of cute. Not loud about it. Quiet about it. The confused, gentle, doesn't-quite-know-what-to-do-with-himself kind of cute." She giggled. "Which is honestly the most dangerous kind."
Aina's mouth moved.
"Is it that obvious?" she said. Quietly. With the particular expression of someone who had been hoping the answer was no.
Olivia opened her mouth to respond —
BANG.
The sound hit the car like a physical thing — loud, sudden, coming from right outside — and both of them screamed at the same moment, the pure, unfiltered scream of two people whose nervous systems had received information and bypassed all rational processing entirely. Aina grabbed Olivia. Olivia grabbed Aina. They folded toward each other instinctively, eyes squeezed shut, the sound of their own voices filling the car.
Then the laughter started.
From outside. Loud, helpless, the specific laughter of someone who had just done something and was experiencing the full satisfaction of it landing exactly as intended — so consumed by it that they were barely holding themselves upright.
Both of them opened their eyes.
A figure outside the window. A mask — some ridiculous thing — being pulled off to reveal Mateo, doubled over, barely functional, laughing with everything he had.
Pedri stood slightly behind him, laughing too, but with the expression of someone who had been a co-conspirator but was now also slightly concerned about the structural integrity of the plan.
Aina's eyes narrowed.
She reached over and opened the door.
"Mateo."
He was already climbing in, still laughing, still barely recovered, and Aina's hand started on his back — not gently, not the tap of someone making a light point, the repeated, genuine hits of someone who had been genuinely frightened and wanted him to know it.
"What is wrong with you—"
"Were you scared—" He could barely get the words out. "Were you actually scared—"
"YES — obviously — how are you—"
"Your face—" He lost it again completely.
Pedri slid into the driver seat, pulling the door shut, his own laughter considerably more contained than Mateo's but present — his hand over his mouth, his eyes bright, shooting a sideways look at Aina that was part apology and part helplessness.
Aina glared at him.
He covered his mouth more firmly.
"It is not funny," she said, settling back into her seat, pulling her jacket straight with the dignity of someone restoring order after a disaster.
"It was a little funny," Mateo said, from the front.
"Pedri."
"It was a little funny," Pedri agreed quietly, and then immediately looked out the window.
Aina exhaled. A long, controlled, deeply expressive exhale.
Olivia, beside her, had her hand over her own mouth — not successfully hiding the fact that she was laughing, which she absolutely was, silently, her shoulders doing the thing that shoulders do.
"Why did you even tell us to wait?" Aina said, directing it at the back of Mateo's head.
Mateo turned around.
He was still smiling — the wide, easy, white-toothed smile that took up his whole face, the one that showed both rows, the one he had no apparent ability to reduce to a more reasonable size.
"Wasn't it you girls saying you wanted to see Barcelona?" he said. "Go around, enjoy the city, experience it properly?" He tilted his head slightly, the question entirely genuine beneath the smile. "You said that."
He leaned forward slightly, and if the smile had somehow gotten wider it was doing it now, carrying something ahead of the words that made the words almost unnecessary.
"And lucky for you both—" He placed a hand on his chest, the gesture of a man making a solemn declaration. "Your knight in shining armour is here." He gestured between himself and Pedri. "Well. Knight and co-knight. We'll take you around. The whole city. Properly."
Aina opened her mouth.
"Trust me," he said cutting her off before she could talk. "There is nothing like Barcelona at night."
A/N
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