Work Text:
When did it start?
In summer, even the sun would sweat. Kylian loved lounging on a hammock, sunglasses firmly pushed up the sticky bridge of his nose, watching with the drowsy avidity of a devotee before a holy statue as hot waxy tears oozed, bled, and dripped from the sun.
Summer days went on forever.
“Summer is the best,” he said.
Michael’s syrupy voice floated from somewhere along Kylian’s damp jaw. “Debatable.”
“It’s the best,” insisted Kylian. “It slows things down. That running out of time feeling, there’s less of that during the summer.”
“Nah, winter.”
“There’s even more of that during winters, no? Those late twenties existential crises. Especially in football.”
A dissenting noise again, soft as a kitten’s fur, and full of teeth and tongue.
Kylian huffed. “You can’t possibly prefer winter over summer? Ah, Michael. Mikey, Mikey, Mikey.”
The skin low on Michael’s hip was so warm against Kylian’s palm. He gave it a slow knead. Carefully loosened and opened up during game days, these young hips supported precious legs, precious feet. Kylian wouldn’t want it strained too much during, well, this other type of game day.
“Winters,” Michael was saying, “scarves, hats, coats. Hoodies. Gloves. Nobody bothering you.”
Ah, his little recluse. Of course. Kylian could only huff in amusement again.
“Winter also has better styling options,” finished Michael.
“But everything feels so alive in summer,” said Kylian. “So open. Jump on a plane on a whim and head over to, oh I don’t know, Martinique or Comoros, why not. Country roads are not flooded or snowed, you can run or walk or bike for hours, why not. You remember you’re actually still young, you know what I mean? And it’s like, football is pure game again, and you have so much time, so rich in so many ways.” Kylian sighed wistfully. “Ah, you get to my age, my dear, and you’ll understand what I mean.”
“I already went through what you mean.”
“Hm? What?”
“You’re well cute,” hummed Michael, briefly slipping into English.
“I know, thanks.” Another sleepy squeeze of Michael’s buttery-soft hip. “French now.”
“Know that tat near my right calf?”
“The Japanese one?”
“Kaizen.”
“Yeah, that. And? What does it mean?”
“It means,” said Michael, lips curling wetly from his hiding place deep in the shadows of Kylian’s neck, “I’m already older than you are.”
*
The Barajas Airport was steeped in staleness. There was a cruel absence of breeze that trapped the warmth of a late spring evening, flattened it like orange juice left out for a day on the pitch, made the fruity floral perfumes blend with the stuffy powdery colognes blend with the claustrophobic plane air freshener that clung to your clothes blend with the staticky smell of sunbaked asphalt, a nauseous roil, until everything was a massive wad of damp, filthy cotton balls, distracting Kylian.
He tried to focus on the mic in his face.
He smiled. One side of his lips stretching further than the other. Dry. Maybe he ought to keep a small jar of cocoa butter in his bag, after all, whatever the season. Just like Michael had told him once.
Focus.
He apologised and asked for the question to be repeated. Smiled again, this time showing teeth. Quipped in Spanish to the Spanish reporter that when a season’s on, he usually went about life partially deaf. He actually used the English phrase hard of hearing because he had been put on the spot and he was familiar with the term, had read it here and there online. Hard of hearing. Mostly, he was concerned about having his words scooped out of context, crumpled in the process of translation, or twisted by a sly wordsmith to then live out some abject reflection of him in the minds of others.
I’m usually hard of hearing from August to May.
He refrained from adding, Can you blame me, though?
The din of a stadium during matches, the roars of a crowd, the cheering and clamouring spilling onto the streets wherever he went even in his personal time, little clusters of explosions. He couldn’t hear properly half the time, he went on, chuckling a little at the mic, so, nope, blithely popping the p, he certainly hadn’t heard anything about him being labelled as the dressing room’s black hole.
The black hole of Monaco, Paris, and now Madrid.
That’s funny.
How did that saying go?
Haters gon’ hate.
Eh, he was used to it. And this fevered single-minded hatred that shadowed the applause, twins, inseparable masks, comic and tragic, wasn’t that a kind of adoration, too? After all, you would have to know him and care enough about how he moved through football and life to hate him. Full stop.
The reporter tried to rally, but Kylian only tossed a smile over his shoulder and sauntered off.
Later, after looking up the difference between partially deaf and hard of hearing, his thumb would slow down on the feed of his Reddit burner. The pap pics would come out okay. His photograph-self looked relaxed, still coated with the honey glow of the Sardinian sun. He’d grown out his hair in short cropped coils, thick and healthy, with the sides and back in a sunburst buzz fade. Dior shirt but nothing flashy; like the whole ensemble, it was deceptively plain. Deep blue sleeves rolled up his well-tanned arms. A small splash of white embroidery over the left breast, wild garlic flower. The cotton poplin collar, languidly yawning down to two unbuttoned buttons, still redolent, he would remember, with the thick herby spicy scent of Mirto. He would remember how the sweet aftertaste of the bitter corbezzolo honey lingered under his tongue, behind his lower teeth, and at the back of his throat. That must explain the vague curve at the corner of his unsmiling lips in the photos. His toes, peeking out from his green Loewe sandals, still bore the faint crust of sea salt.
That day he looked anything but a vampiric creature. Anything but a malicious life-sucking force.
He didn’t even look like an aging man, in football years, on the first step of decline.
He looked just like himself. Just Kylian. The banlieusard who’d made good on his childhood dreams and in the process made the crossing to Paris from its hinterlands. Still the Kylian who adored playing football. Who looked, okay, yes, a bit older, who’d lost the boyish roundness of his face, but that just meant that he was still alive, right? Who had checked off some life goals but not others, a fact that had started to show on his pale, dry lips, but life was not always a straightforward and easy ride, right? Life and football both. That was the first lesson in adulthood.
He was not a bad guy. He was not perfect, obviously, but who was?
Kylian was not a bad guy.
He’d thought as much anyway as he strolled past the pack of cameras and mics and phones on his way to his mother’s waiting car. Kylian serenely ignored the crystal-clear shouted questions about the tensions in the club, about his Hala Madrid El Clásico Instagram story, about his injury, about yet another lackluster trophyless season. He had just faked his injury, hadn’t he? Only a World Cup stat-padder, wasn’t he, and that was turning pretty stale, too. Falling short of the greats, wasn’t he, in terms of making a proper record for himself. What was he looking forward to? A Ballon d’Or win? Was he prioritising the World Cup and disregarding the club?
In a way, he’d asked for it. This was a price of the dream. So many eyes. So many questions. They all wanted a piece of him.
Yeah, he had heard it all.
He always heard about everything. Always had his ear pressed against the wall, his fingers feeling up the pulse of popular preoccupations or whatever people wanted to call it: sentiment, neuroses, cultural miscellany. If you wanted to be a step ahead of media vultures and paperwork for endorsement deals and investment portfolios, you had better spend some time in the walls. The little boy in Bondy who had rehearsed presiding over press conferences with his Pikachu toothbrush for a mic, dimpling and chortling at the small foggy mirror in a cramped bathroom, trotted beside him to this day.
Kylian didn’t say another word on that stale, dry pavement in the Barajas. Not another soundbite that would sell.
But this would be captured by the cameras for his later perusal on his Twitter and Reddit burners:
He raised his hand. All five fingers casually splayed. His knuckle hairs glinting a glossy black. Pavé diamonds twinkling around his wrist. A slight nudge on the nose bridge—he adjusted his sunglasses with just the very tip of his middle finger.
From behind the dark amber lenses, the blaze of cameras looked like delicate yellow petals, gamboling in the ghost of a spring breeze.
He was still on top of the world.
Haters gon’ fucking hate.
*
Does it ever get old? Michael had asked him once. Both of them lay sprawled on rumpled burgundy sheets, the only light in the hotel room coming from the flickering TV screen. Kylian was still trying to catch his breath; beads of sweat were crawling sideways from his heaving chest to his pits; his knees felt weak in the best way; the lightning he’d felt all over his hips, that molten wave of sparks, was slow to fade. He was drained and soupy and sleepy. Couldn’t form a word. Even playing a full 90 minutes with extra time had never left him this winded.
In the dark, Michael shifted closer to him. Kylian vaguely felt him stretch, a languid slippery undulation of long inked limbs and a taut inked torso, before curling up against Kylian.
Then: even, soundless breathing against his neck. A purple loc tickling his nose. Long fingers idly tracing sweaty patterns around his nipple. They were still gummy with the dregs of Kylian’s cum, Michael’s fingers, from a couple of rounds ago.
First round was torture. Kylian had been teased to death, so much so that he thought his dick would fall off until Michael’s hot breaths turned to mercy and Kylian watched with something close to delirium as his dick disappeared bit by polite bit past those plush lips, until he reached the back of Michael’s tightly fluttering throat and he could only groan helplessly, fighting to keep his eyes open, to keep watching Michael watching him.
Second round was torture, too. But in the best way. His hand pressing down Michael into the sheets by the nape, his other hand anchoring himself against the headboard, and there was no other way to say it, anchoring, because what else were you supposed to do when Michael’s whines and sighs, wave upon wave upon molasses-y wave, had wrapped around your head like a foamy cocoon and you were gripped with a biting desperation to reach the deepest part of him, this insatiable boy, this rookie of the season, to gorge him to the point of catatonia to make him shut up for a minute before you lost your goddamned mind.
But that was the thing about Michael. He could be so quiet that you often forgot that lithe body of his was still taut with energy, immodestly fucking young, still raring to go for another round. Whatever were they feeding him in Munich?
Well?
Soft wet lips moving against his jaw, against the side of his throat.
And Kylian remembered that there was a question.
Does it ever get old?
It?
An affair? Sleeping with a teammate?
The herculean routine and grinding rhythm of club season?
But it turned out Michael had meant something else.
In the TV was another Kylian. He was probably the fifth other Kylian that night. The camera roved all over his broad solid back, pale gold because the ad had been shot last winter, no tan lines, no tattoos, almost unidentifiable, completely raw and ripe for projection, before the luxurious silk shirt of a French fashion house rippled into view and covered him up.
France’s emissary to the world, announced the tagline.
He didn’t even remember shooting that ad.
Earlier, there had been other Kylians. In the display windows of high-end French and Swiss shops, showing off his feet. Looming over the steps to the train station, showing off his wrist. On a pavement, his eyes peering over dark amber lenses. In fragmented clips and quotes and soundbites scattered all over the internet, dissected and desiccated.
Yeah. Sometimes, he did feel like he didn’t belong to himself.
Like some part of himself or some aspect of life that he should have lived or should have been living was slipping from him.
But it was up to him to fix his perspective, right? Cope. Adapt. This was a price of the dream.
And Kylian, he wasn’t bad, okay?
So, like a good mentor, a good senior, he told Michael: No, it doesn’t.
*
When he was nineteen, Kylian did an interview where he was asked two things:
How did you celebrate the win with your friends?
How do you stay grounded?
It was the dizzying height of the summer France won the World Cup for the second time. Kylian had also scored in the final, the first teenager to do so since Pelé. The last time France had won was the summer of the advent of Kylian’s birth. Written in the stars. Everything was drenched in gold and honey and amber. Even his skin felt tight, buzzing against his bones and sparking with stars. The boy with the world at his feet.
He paused. Thought about his answer carefully.
For several days and nights, all of France had been out on the streets celebrating. The truth was that Kylian’s best friend was his younger brother, and both of them had already been treated by their parents in celebration of the World Cup win. This meant that he and Ethan had been living it up, getting to do whatever they wanted for the rest of the summer, spoiled like never before. Staying in all day in their new family home in the 16th arrondissement, getting out of bed whenever they wanted, tiramisu and ginger tea for their 2:00PM breakfast, gaming and TV show binging until supper, grocery hauls-cum-sightseeing trips at La Grande Épicerie, and occasionally going out to see a film’s 10:00PM screening.
Kylian realised right then and there that his only other friends were the lads he knew at Monaco and PSG. He lived football. He breathed football. He loved talking about football with people who knew what he was talking about. They were his only social life even if most of them were older than he was, some even married already, with kids and yachts and holiday trips to glamourous places abroad.
Out of nowhere, Kylian was overcome with a strange shyness to admit anything concrete about friends and celebrations to the interviewer.
He twiddled his thumbs. He rubbed his buzzed head. He settled with something vague about a beach trip to Nice before club season started again. A family thing.
I’ve never been to a beach before, you see, he told the interviewer with a laugh. Which was true.
There was a worn newspaper on the seat beside him. Splashed across the front page was himself. Held aloft by Les Bleus, his left arm raised, his right arm cradling the gold trophy like the precious bones of a saint, a deliriously happy grin on his face, MBAPPÉ 10 clearly visible. All around them was a swirling storm of golden confetti that the cold Russian rain had plastered to their kits and skin. The arms supporting him were dark brown, brown, dun, honey, ivory.
France’s 2018 rainbow team of Black and white and Arab, trumpeted the headlines, a callback to the dream team of 1998, where skill with the ball is the only thing that matters. In football, all of us are French and all Frenchmen are equal.
It was a good fantasy, Michael would tell him one day.
Kylian would rebut that fantasy was just another word for dream or goal, wasn’t it, and he, Kylian, was proof of that, wasn’t he, but Michael would only shake his head and drop the conversation.
Dizzying heights.
So very easy to slip and come tumbling down from the peak.
A freezing fingertip pressed against Kylian’s nape.
“We can be the best and the world champions as we are now,” he answered the interviewer’s second question with a light shrug, going for down-to-earth, circumspect, mature for his age. But deep inside, he was sageing himself already. “But in four years, you are forgotten, because there is someone else who has arrived and done better than you.”
He was twenty-five when he met Michael. Two World Cup finals into his career, his name brighter than ever, and no other teenage boy wonders had been bathed in gold on the world stage since, so maybe that was why that interview was the furthest thing from his mind.
Or maybe it was just the prefrontal cortex thing. Mind catching up to your grown body. His girlfriend would tell him that it was pseudoscience babble, but to Kylian it was as real as sageing, as the evil eye, as his own sincere belief that he was the best player on any pitch he stepped on.
Or maybe it was simply that he’d already settled into his skin. Why would he need to have been the youngest best player, anyway? Wasn’t it enough to be the best? Maybe he’d simply grown older and wiser, overcome the so-called child star syndrome. At least, he would like to think so.
Just before he was unveiled as Real Madrid’s newest transfer, he’d written in his unnamed moleskin journal:
Midsummer 2024. I know I’m the best. This is not me bragging. Everyone knows I’m the best, and they know that I know that they know it. Simply being the best is easy, though; the hard part is being the best consistently. That’s where the work comes in. I want to be the consistent best player in the best club in the world.
*
Pretty boy. Kylian’s first thought at first sight upon meeting Michael. That had been in 2024, too, when Michael was called up to France’s senior squad for the first time. August was almost over. The cooled sun hung somewhere between summer splendour and brisk autumn.
“Hello. Nice to finally meet you,” were Michael’s first words to Kylian, in accented French.
He had a soft voice. Quite like a purr but only truly in softness; almost kittenish; otherwise, Kylian judged, the purr was free of artifice, free of the sort of grubby worldliness that Kylian had come to recognise in the halls of professional football business and been trying very hard not to hate and to love too much.
No, that was just Michael’s natural indoor voice. He was noticeably shy. Which was cute. Kylian adored that shyness. And Kylian thought the accent charming. He couldn’t place it, though. It didn’t sound like the typical schoolroom French of a Brit.
“I love your accent.” The words had spilled from of Kylian’s mouth before he could think to phrase it better. Had he really just said that? He sounded like a clumsy child, loud and overly eager. He hadn’t felt like this in years. Michael was still holding his gaze. Pretty eyes on a pretty boy. Belatedly, Kylian realised how widely he’d been smiling at this pretty boy for a good few wordless seconds now. Just smiling and smiling and smiling like a complete idiot. He cleared his throat. “Did you go to school here in France at some point?”
“My mother speaks to me in French,” explained Michael with another shy smile. He bit on his soft-looking lip; a short pause. “I used to answer her in English all the time, but. Yeah, I’ve been trying to change that.”
At Kylian’s friendly prodding to know more about him, Michael blinked once, twice, thrice, butterfly-quick flutters of his ridiculously long lashes, finally breaking eye contact.
And then Kylian’s lungs felt like collapsing.
His calves had turned into springs, coiled tight, thrumming with anticipation. The sides of his neck were hot as fuck. He found himself wishing he’d used a different aftershave. Did his wristwatch and bracelet really go well with his henley? And his sneakers? Should he dye his hair again?
Then he realised that he’d been clutching his cup of mint tea a little too tightly. Goddamn. What even was happening?
FOCUS.
He relaxed his knuckles. And he was still smiling widely, all on his own.
Michael had ducked his head, trying to hide what could have been a bitten-off smile. The tiny diamond on his earlobe glinted over the collar of his black silk long coat. He’d come to Clairefontaine dressed all in black. It suited him. Willowy and sleek. Tall. Slightly taller than Kylian. Michael mostly stuck to the shadow of a pillar, nibbling on pieces of dried mango but otherwise standing quite still as he silently people-watched and listened in from the fringes of conversations; or else he’d be found to the left of a mullioned window, where a slice of frail sunlight grazed just the ankle of his black shoe. That was where they had been enthusiastically introduced by Didi. Promising new talent, had been Didi’s exact words just before they came within Michael’s earshot. Michael Olise. Twenty-two. Always better than his last game. Driven, hardworking. A marvellous sponge. A gem, truly magnificently a gem in our hands, Kylian, I am not saying this lightly. Even Titi said so, did you know? Kylian had stepped into that scrap of pale-yellow light, dressed in a cream henley and mint green quilt patchwork trousers, expecting to feel geriatric as fuck and bracing himself to squash any stirrings of immature insecurity on his part.
Michael’s shapely lips quivered. He was ready to talk again. He began to release a few more bits about himself, and Kylian, inexplicably entranced, hung on to every one of Michael’s spare words. Michael’s mother had grown up in Paris, in Barbès. As an adult she had lived for a while in Annecy whilst she drove back and forth across the border with Switzerland for her job. He regularly visited family in France and in Algeria with her. Maybe that might explain his accent?
A shy smile, very few words in either French or English, a firm handshake, and the smoothest fucking skin that Kylian had ever felt on a man.
That first impression remained true, but Michael was quicker to open up when Les Bleus played these days, quicker to warm up again and pick up where their acquaintance had left off, like a family compound cat that had decided that, yeah, Kylian was cool to hang out with.
Michael’s gaze during that first meeting, though? How could Kylian forget that?
It still made the back of his neck prickle, remembering it.
*
When did it start?
People loved to poke at the genesis of an affair, excavate and date the navel of passion.
If anybody ever asked, Kylian would say that it all started in the 2026 World Cup. He’d been having a long and difficult teething in Madrid, and Michael was a breath of fresh air at the right place and at the right time. Virgin air. Newly born from fat dewy leaves. The kind of air you would greedily gulp in after holding your breath a tad longer than was healthy.
Should his mother press him, he would tell her that, okay, technically it started during Michael’s debut season at the Nations League. First time they had sex. And it had been safe; they’d had their recent medicals; Michael had only taken Kylian in his mouth and even refused to let Kylian return the favour. He would add that Michael was a nice young man, that Michael wasn’t interested in being a celebrity himself and didn’t even have a footwear endorsement deal, and wasn’t that refreshing, wasn’t that so attractive of him? Plus, Michael’s mother was French, too.
But really, if Kylian were absolutely honest with himself, the truth was that it had started that time in 2024. That first time he looked into Michael’s eyes.
The thrill and the terror of it.
Kylian had tried to sort out his thoughts about it. He did a bit of his go-to anonymous journalling. Like a very secure, very private therapy session.
He’d opened the word vomit with: Bear with me.
The thing was, Michael’s shyness didn’t reach his eyes.
He’d never had trouble holding Kylian’s gaze even during that first meeting. Michael’s gaze was direct, but it was puzzlingly softened somehow that you would forget that he hadn’t broken off eye contact with you for the past 30 minutes. But it didn’t come off as braggadocio or peacocking. It wasn’t an abrasive challenge. Nor did it come off as vulturey.
It was, in a way, strangely hypnotic.
Kylian still couldn’t figure out how Michael did it.
It must be the eye shape. Slanting and stately most of the time, like how Kylian used to imagine a mermaid’s eyes as a little kid who had never been to the beach. Mermaids, to him, were remote creatures, unknowable and nigh impenetrable, eldritch and ethereal. But then other times, Michael’s eyes would turn round and kittenish, babyish, especially when Michael was gliding like a figure-skater with the ball, his slim-legged balletic moves almost teasing teammates and opponents alike, or when he was actually teasing in bed, almost going cross-eyed as those rounded eyes obsessively traced the slow progress of Kylian’s precum from the tip like it was the first time ever that Michael had had a dick right up in his pretty face that he just had to stare and softly exhale warm little puffs in wonder, tick tock tick fucking tock, until Kylian almost felt like weeping.
Or it must be Michael’s long lashes. They emphasised his boyishly gentle blinking. Cushioning the direct gaze, as it were. At least, that was what Kylian had thought at first.
He’d been wondering lately if the lashes were actually a mask. Masking the way that even if it seemed like Michael had lowered his eyes, he was in fact still latched onto you, betrayed by the shifting of his gossamer lids, by the liquid blackness of his eyes glinting right at you through his satiny lashes, making you feel like, like, those bottomless eyes, like.
Liquid black eyes that had lives of their own. Pretty eyes on a pretty boy.
Wait.
Was there a question? He couldn’t remember.
What had Kylian been getting at again?
*
When did it start?
A shrill whistle. Training grounded to a halt. From the corner of his sweaty eyes, Kylian glimpsed the assistant coach muttering something to Didi and Didi was nodding, frowning. Another assistant coach gestured at the staff desk and in short order bottles of mineral water were being passed around to the squad.
The grass on Bentley University’s pitch was shuddering under the soggy Boston sun.
Humid day today. The heat clung heavily to their legs. Kylian was still doing okay, but sure, he could do with some water.
“Michael,” he heard Didi say, “drink up. Did you eat properly at breakfast?”
Michael was wiping his face with his orange bib. There was something rather frail about him this morning. He’d been getting knocked about by the defenders put against him. But like a true professional, he still listened intently to Didi’s review. He shifted from one foot to the other. He pressed his cheek against the cool bottle. He’d rolled his socks down, down, down to the flutes of his ankles, the palest part of his lower limbs, so that his brown legs were visible in their full glory, the Japanese characters on the side of his right calf and the furled surgery scar on the back of his sweaty left thigh.
And then it was Kylian’s turn.
“Kylian,” said Didi with a tight smile. “You seem distracted, hm? Focus. I’m sure you know this already, basics etcetera, but pass when it’s needed to pass and not a second too late. Okay? Focus.”
That afternoon after the recovery session, Kylian kept trying to focus on video review in his room. But.
It was just that he couldn’t get it out of his mind, Michael being somehow off a day before their first World Cup match.
He stared at his phone for a minute, then thought, what the hell, and got out of bed. He stepped out of his room in a robe and fluffy slippers. He knocked on the door next to his.
Michael answered on the third knock.
Hair in a scarf. A loose sleeveless top that almost hid the tiny shorts he was wearing. Purple socks.
“Can I come in?” asked Kylian.
Michael fidgeted with the hem of his top. But he nodded. He let Kylian in, and Kylian locked the door.
“Relax, Michael, I just want to check in with you.”
“Sure,” mumbled Michael. “Big day tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
On the table, there was an empty cup and two phones.
“Sorry, were you on call with someone?”
A small smile flickered across Michael’s face. “Just finished talking with a friend. It’s okay.”
A greedy curiosity kicked up in the pit of Kylian’s belly. Right under our noses, had been Didi’s words. Kylian had always wanted to know more about Michael, but he’d also grasped by now that you had to ease in when it came to these things with the lad. Michael was adorably shy and withdrawn like that.
So instead of asking who the friend was, Kylian smiled easily and remarked, “You never told me what your Japanese tattoo meant.”
Michael’s brows went up. He gestured for Kylian to sit. “Kaizen, yeah. Want some tea? Juice?”
“I’ll have juice, thank you.”
There was really nothing Kylian could glean from Michael’s pretty face. And the lad’s gait seemed fine as he walked into the kitchenette, so his recovery session appeared to have gone without a hitch.
“Room temp’s fine,” Kylian called out, right as one of Michael’s phones lit up with a notification.
Someone named Jam had just sent a photo with a heart exclamation emoji and a glittering heart emoji. Then another message swiftly followed: You’ll do great :)
Soft rustling on the cream carpet. Kylian leaned away from the phone just as Michael’s purple socks rounded the corner.
He set a glass of some kind of red juice in front of Kylian whilst holding a steaming cup of some kind of fragrant tea for himself.
“Thanks.” Sweet like raspberry, but with a slightly bitter aftertaste. Cherry, maybe? He took another gulp, then another, and one more. “So, kaizen?”
“Oh, yeah. It means ‘a little more each day.’ One of the coaches at Palace used to talk about it. I like it. Improving little by little, every day, until you reach a certain level.”
Kylian nodded with a sympathetic noise. “That sounds great, actually. Consistency. Discipline.”
He could only imagine what it must have been like for Michael. To bloom quietly away from the spotlight. In France’s eyes it was like he’d just emerged fully-formed, but there he was, developing in his own time, not saddled with the title of wonderkid or teenage boy wonder or anything like that. Young Michael who had gone through many restarts. Kylian could only imagine the grit, the tenacity.
Green and growing things.
Not that Kylian wanted that for himself.
He didn’t. He did not. He would not wish to re-do his entire trajectory so far. No.
He took another gulp of the red juice.
“Nervous about tomorrow?”
Michael’s shoulders loosened a little at the question. “Yeah. But. I always am before a new competition.”
“Ah, I get that. I was nervous my first time, too.”
“You were so young, though.” Michael’s lashes flickered. “More understandable.”
“Hey, it doesn’t really go away, you know? That’s the thing to keep in mind. Everyone on that pitch is nervous, some less so than others. It’s a big deal, the World Cup. It’s natural to be nervous.” Kylian shrugged. “I’m nervous, to be honest. First time captaining and all. Still a lot to prove. Come to think of it, it’s trickier now at my age, so I have more reasons to be nervous about than when I was nineteen or twenty-three. Back then, there was always a next time.”
A feathery pause settled over the table, over the wood and beige and blue room.
Then Michael said, “You always know what to say.”
He was regarding Kylian with a new glint in his liquid dark eyes.
“You’re in a lot of interviews,” Michael went on. “So well-spoken.”
Kylian was tickled at the notion that Michael had been watching his interviews. “You think so? I’m glad to hear it. I try to be.”
“I’m not like that,” said Michael. He gripped his steaming cup with both hands. “I mean, sometimes I can be. But it depends on the situation. The people. I’ve never liked post-match interviews.”
“Ah, those.” Kylian chuckled. “Yeah.”
“The internet never dies. The clips keep going around.”
A small whine of complaint had slipped into Michael’s voice. Kylian laughed, encouraging him.
“Is that why I can barely find any interview of you?”
This startled Michael a little. He broke off eye contact for the first time, lashes fluttering, eyes skittering past Kylian’s face and down the neck of his open bathrobe, the 10 embroidered at the hem courtesy of the hotel, to his bare chest and summer-blue shorts.
“No secret that I’m interested in you,” Kylian said easily, smiling as he picked up his glass again. He made no move to cover himself up. “I mean, who wouldn’t be?”
Another small smile from the lad. He didn’t look flustered.
“I don’t say things that I don’t mean,” Michael said quietly. “I don’t like saying things that I don’t mean. In interviews. And everywhere else. So, it’s not the easiest for me to be in front of a camera and mic.”
“Okay. That’s good. And I’m still interested in you.”
“I know.”
Beyond the window, the sun had dipped past the tree line of the Public Garden. Shadows licked into the room.
“Did you,” said Michael, “want to do something about it when you knocked on my door?”
Kylian shrugged. “Is that a rhetorical question?”
“Still here, aren’t you.”
“I’m also here as a friend.”
That made Michael smile properly, a slow unfurling of his full lips, half in shadow, devastatingly lovely, that it made Kylian’s breath stutter just a tiny bit.
“Sweet,” remarked Michael. His thumbnail was scratching his cup’s handle, a thin grating sound. The cup was still full, haloed with wisps of steam.
“This morning,” began Kylian. His scalp felt warm. He cleared his throat. “I’m just making sure you’re okay. Anything you want to talk about?”
“Nah, I just didn’t get to eat properly. Was late for breakfast.”
“Okay.”
Okay? No, there was something else that Kylian had been meaning to ask.
“Right, then. Kylian? I’m making a move now.”
The thing about this thing with Michael was that it had never once felt sordid to Kylian. He would sink into those dark pools and everything else afterwards was nothing but a countdown to the inevitable. Running out of time, but at the same time suspended in an almost disorienting timelessness. The frisson and headiness of a first date was always there, too. He didn’t understand it, this first time feeling, because Michael’s fingers were matter-of-fact, quick even, as he pulled down Kylian’s shorts. Michael knew what he was doing. On his knees, there was nothing young about him, but there was something new, something just a little bit weird, about the way he was nosing the side of Kylian’s thigh. He started from the crease behind Kylian’s knee. Kylian spread his thighs wider as Michael made his sojourn, his lovely mouth now trailing spit as he nibbled his way up the corded muscles and marbled green veins of Kylian’s thigh. Tiny little bites. Tiny little licks. Tiny little teases. Dimly, Kylian realised that Michael was slightly trembling. That was the weird part. More like Michael was teasing himself instead of Kylian, and Kylian just happened to be there. And then Michael’s lashes were fluttering as he stared at Kylian from the underside of Kylian’s aching dick. How had he missed the lad getting there? Michael was still trembling, bristling. Spit had bloomed at the corners of Michael’s lips; a string of it dripped down the side of his chin. Before Kylian could straighten in his seat and ask what was wrong, Michael’s mouth was opening wide, so wide, starving, perfect teeth and a dark ridged roof. That was Kylian’s last proper thought because he started choking out moans. He was choking. Michael was not choking. He had swallowed Kylian whole. The inside of his mouth was blistering, a thousand little teeth gnawing on Kylian. Kylian’s hands scrabbled weakly at the side of Michael’s head, slipped at the satin scarf, fell to his sides. Little bites sank into the meat of Kylian’s thighs. Must be Michael’s nails. Hot shadows engulfed the room. A thin keening sound was grating against Kylian’s ears. Time slipped from him. Kylian could only see the liquid black glint of Michael’s eyes, tiding him over to release. It started low on his belly, low on his hips. Crackled down his spine. Heart punching up his throat, the back of his throat bittersweet, sweetly bitter like corbezzolo honey, bitterly sweet like that red juice Michael had served him, raspberry-maybe and cherry-maybe, and then Kylian was curling on the chair, upwards, downwards, it didn’t seem to matter because Michael was holding him down.
When Kylian could see again, it was the sight of Michael still between his thighs that greeted him. Michael’s cheek against Kylian’s knee. Michael licking the tips of his fingers. Shy little licks on the valley between thumb and forefinger. There was a vague curve at the corner of Michael’s lush, unsmiling lips. He looked sated. He wasn’t trembling anymore. Kylian huffed out a weak laugh. He felt like the husk of an old man. He felt as frail as a baby. He didn’t know how long he stayed slumped like that, heartbeat in his ears and thick in his throat, as Michael cleaned up every last drop of him.
*
Out on the blazing summer pitch, Michael moved like a siren, like something out of a dream. Kylian had never seen anything like it. A blur of bouncing ponytail and rich brown skin one moment, slowing down the next, pulling the immediate space around him into a different tempo than the rest like a misplaced time pocket, waving, flowing, then changing gears again, sluicing and cutting in between defenders, yet somehow never losing pace nor possession through it all. Dancing on the ball, almost gliding with his feet, only a sliver of the back of his sweaty thighs visible, small knees knocking together, his wrists delicately arched for balance, teasing with his feet, lulling you before ripping open space for chances and possibilities. Kylian would never tire of watching him.
Even better was the way that Michael seemed to find him and zero in on him with startling precision at all times. To be in the right spot at the right moment to pass the ball to Kylian. The captivating way that Michael seemed to be in sync with him, oozing out the same sweat, pumping the same blood, seeing the game with the same eyes.
And with Michael, the game was truly a game again.
Kylian was reminded that football was a game. Flashes of feelings, memories. The sun-drenched skies of the pitch back at AS Bondy; concrete courtyards where balls sprouted and little kids learned how to dance and hunt in tight spaces, singing songs, pausing the game and darting in and out of the block of flats to run errands for Maman; the sweet burst of orange slices; Brets chips and chewy dates passed around at half-time; playing all day during weekends with nothing but instinct and pleasure.
Kylian saw all of it in Michael’s face on the pitch in their World Cup opener against Senegal. It was like watching the opening of a gift.
It was no surprise to him when Michael was named Player of the Match. It was a great World Cup debut. France had won, and Kylian, the hopeful captain, squeezed his way past their jubilant teammates and wrapped his arms around Michael’s sweaty kit, OLISE 11, squeezing his little waist, and pressed a loud kiss on Michael’s damp forehead. The salt stung Kylian’s dry lips, and he could taste pennies, but it didn’t matter, they had won and he could feel that it was the first of many wins, summer splendour was making his ears buzz and his eyes swim, and Michael smelled so good. How had he managed to smell so good after a game? Kylian went in for another exuberant kiss, this time on Michael’s cheek, then on his other cheek, and hugging him again to kiss his ear, the side of his warm neck. Distantly, Kylian could hear Désiré chortling, asking Kylian not to forget that it wasn’t with Michael he was supposed to swap kits.
Michael squirmed happily, laughing, part-gasping, part-panting, crystal-clear in Kylian’s ear. His long fingers cupped Kylian’s nape. He was happily melting in the sun.
*
In summer, even the sun would sweat. Kylian pushed his sunglasses up the sticky bridge of his nose and watched with the drowsy avidity of a devotee before a holy statue as hot waxy tears oozed, bled, and dripped from the sun down, down, down to him on his hammock.
Lounging with Michael.
Oh, to lounge on a hammock, the best invention in human history and the ultimate icon of summer. Gently floating. Suspended. Pulled on either side and anchored to trees. Whorls of infinity within the trunks of trees.
The dusty green foliage buzzed. Leaves crisped and curled in the heat. Branches stayed ominously still and thirsty roots creeped ever deeper, deeper, umbilical cords into the unknown. The trees were all hugging one another so closely, chestnuts bleeding into cashews bleeding into figs bleeding into pomegranates.
Summer days went on forever.
It made Michael shift unhappily, turning his head this way and that, wet lips unsticking from Kylian’s sweetly aching shoulder, smearing a fussy pout across Kylian’s collarbones and up the length of Kylian’s damp throat, before hiding behind Kylian’s ear, and Kylian would squeeze and caress whatever part of Michael he could reach.
If all-day summer sunbathing were swimming, Michael would be drowning. He would be barely staying afloat. He wouldn’t know how. Deep down, Kylian loved that. He would be there for Michael to hold on to.
It’s okay, Kylian cooed, it’s all good. The sun is lucky. It used to be a god, right? Summer is the best season.
And Michael, skin baby-soft and moist and glowing as butter, as always, disagreed.
*
A camera was one huge eye, a bottomless eye, and that eye had teeth. An unforgiving maw. With huge chompers that would grind you, grind, grind, grind until you lost your mind.
Dissected and desiccated.
The trick was to give it only a version of you. Not a false you, of course, but just a small truth about yourself. Maybe even a glimpse of future you, an older you, an ideal self that you had been aiming for, sort of like a fake it til you make it situation.
*
When did it start?
Michael’s shyness didn’t reach his eyes. Had never reached his eyes. Kylian watched on the screen as, on the pitch playing for Crystal Palace and Bayern Munich, the rest of Michael caught up to Michael’s eyes.
Sharp eyes that saw what was happening all over the pitch at all times.
There were earlier years when Kylian thought he glimpsed himself in Michael, a flick of his heel, his own plays, his own runs, and some bits of others like Neymar’s and Leo Messi’s and Arjen Robben’s and Franck Ribéry’s and surely some more that Kylian couldn’t recognise in Michael’s clearances and recoveries, like pieces of all these men flowing all over Michael’s limbs, but as the years passed, they got properly chewed, masticated, until there was only Michael, growing healthier, more vibrant, ever more skilled.
Feet dancing, gliding, lulling and captivating you before ripping open spaces for chances and possibilities. An impressive work rate. An even more impressive synchrony with his teammates.
And he was relentless. Uncompromising when push came to shove. Glowing with a ravenous hunger.
It was like watching Michael step out of the shadows.
Michael would jerk away his arms during duels and send the ones marking him skidding to the ground, he would be visibly cross when fouled, he gesticulated with his hands, irritation all over his face. He squared up against fouling opponents. He complained to the refs.
In one match, now in Bayern colours, he came tumbling down to the grass before quickly throwing out an arm and grabbing the opposing defender’s thighs and calves, and Kylian guffawed and leaned forward avidly as lithe little Michael then tried to clamber up the much larger defender’s kit, his glistening face scowling and spitting and snarling, ponytail bouncing, and then he was yanking down the whole neck of the defender’s jersey. His eyes were blazing. If I’m down, you’re going down with me.
There you are, thought Kylian, with a hot jolt of recognition.
You are how you eat.
Kylian had grown up playing with the best because that was how you become the best, how you stayed consistently being the best.
I want him, thought Kylian.
That night after first meeting Michael, he’d started the habit of researching the lad. He’d even set up a Google Alert.
Michael’s online trail remained sparse. You could count on one hand the proper profile interviews he’d given and you’d still be left with spare fingers. In one of them, he was asked about his nationality. ‘Nationality says where you come from,’ was Michael’s answer. ‘And I actually come from four countries: France, Algeria, Nigeria, and Great Britain. It’s not something I think about every day; it’s perfectly normal for me. I carry little things from each country within me. It has broadened my horizons because these cultures are quite different from one another. At home, I had three cultures thanks to my parents. And outside, it was England, where I grew up. I didn’t have to force this mix; it was just there. When I was growing up in London, we regularly visited Algeria, Nigeria, and France…’
Kylian scrolled with something very close to impatience. Him, he had Cameroonian and Algerian roots, but he was also simply French. He had parked himself on his seat at the table as every Black French person or French person of colour should, as far as he was concerned. He was French, full stop.
Michael’s twitter, @MichaelOlise10, was even more barren.
And then there were the pictures.
It seemed like Michael regularly scrubbed his Instagram. It struck Kylian as charmingly carefree and youthful—his own Instagram, after all, was mostly a business portfolio.
Michael’s IG was full of the things he’d seen. A chocolate birthday cake. A tin of tea. A chocolate-slathered burnt-brown croissant with a small bite. A screenshot of an online chess game. The Doha Corniche’s glittering waterfront, colourful boats bobbing in the distance. A terrace view, according to the speculative comments, of the streets of Ikoyi with a faintly dusty haze swirling in the shot, harmattan it seemed like. A fire tree. A plate of okpa and akara. A pair of purple boots. A red purse. A green scrunchie. An open book, face-down beside a purple and green teapot, the blurb saying it was an unofficial novelisation of MCU’s Karli Morgenthau’s time in Madripoor and a reimagined new ending, with an artist’s rendition of Erin Kellyman in costume—mane of red coils, red fist punching a shield of red and white and blue, scuffed black boots braced on the rich green ground—a refugee girl cultivating communities and building new nations, burning rotten seats at rotten tables. A leaf-strewn street, glossy from a recent rain. A pavement view of the Allianz Arena in Munich. A glazed pretzel, bitten into. NYC’s winter skyline. A basketball game from the point of view of prime seats, with someone else’s thigh pressed up against Michael’s.
What pictures of Michael himself that remained up were clearly casually taken. Half of them were tagged by others.
Michael was often half-hiding behind his locs or his hood, busy with his phone or with his tea.
In one photo, he was huddled under the sprawling shade of a tree, holding a football and wearing all black. His locs were gathered with a green scrunchie. The sunlight soaking the garden never reached his black boots.
In another shot in profile, he was hunched over a mobile chess game whilst cutely biting into a croissant, lashes ridiculously long and pronounced, his locs in a twist out. Kylian wondered who had taken the photo. If it was him.
Because there was a consistent someone with Michael in these pictures.
Never in full, of course, no, that would have made Kylian’s research too easy. It was just bits and pieces of the guy. A wavy reflection here, an arm there. Dark hair, coily, cropped short. A broad shoulder peeking past Michael’s slim frame. A stray dimple. A slice of a wide grin. Summer-browned skin in some pictures, honey gold in some more, light beige in others, but Kylian was sure it was the same guy. Lightskinned like Kylian, possibly mixed like Kylian. Kylian had an inexplicable hunch that the guy was younger, though.
His reflection was there in another photo of Michael. Michael was looking right at him, mid-conversation, laughing with a new kind of softness and playfulness when the camera had snapped. The flash glowed red in Michael’s eyes. He was standing in front of a fresco of an angel. Blue ribbons and gold cords secured the angel’s sandals round his handsome ankles, and his strong calves were in full display, and one of his pretty feet was digging into the skull of another creature, someone with rippling shoulders and large hands, trying to claw free from the angel’s chain. The angel was also pointing a sword at the wretch. Saint Michael the Archangel Defeats Satan, the plaque read, and in that golden plaque, Kylian glimpsed the guy.
He widened his eyes.
Short coily hair, toned pale-gold arms, broad solid shoulders, 10, M—
He jerked back from the screen.
Throat closing up, ears pounding.
A caught-red-handed feeling. Kylian glanced over his shoulder but he was entirely alone, the only light in the room coming from the small screen.
*
He found Michael in Four Season’s library lounge, nose in a slim book.
“That about chess?” asked Kylian.
Michael glanced up, smiled, and shook his head. Then he went right back to his book.
Later, Kylian would see that it was about Bin Jelmood House in Doha. The Black Gulf. Tides of histories. Poetry. Diasporas. Fragmentations and multi-hyphenations. And a pre-Islamic warrior-poet whose father was an Arab of the Banu Abs and whose mother was a captive Ethiopian princess. The volume was Michael’s own, not this Boston hotel’s.
Michael was always reading about stuff like that. About stuff that he’d read, watched, and listened to. And about chess.
The library lounge was all emerald-green wood panelling, green shelves and sofas and ottomans, and floor tiles of alternating dark cream and moss green. Ivy carvings cradled the large central lighting fixture and the smaller lamps. Here and there were little pots of trembling bamboo shoots twinned with sprays of beady-eyed little yellow flowers. The entire room was breathing gently. Coolly. Shaded from the summer heat outside. Like the fluttering, scalloped insides of the mouth of a tree.
Michael didn’t seem to notice this. His breathing was in sync with the room’s. He turned a page and tucked a loc behind his ear.
Kylian shrugged. He should’ve brought down his Kindle. He settled on the green armchair across from Michael’s and tapped his passcode into his phone.
He hearted and replied to the dinner plate pic that his brother had sent. His girlfriend was asking him which bangle would go well with her outfit tomorrow so he gave his opinion and wished her luck for her table read.
Then, the treat of anon hallways where he could freely graze as simply himself. Just Kylian. He downvoted some comments on his Reddit burner’s post analysing Madrid’s quarter-final match against Bayern in the UCL. He told someone on r/realmadrid to stop being fucking obtuse and to hop off his dick. He politely disagreed with some comments, enthusiastically agreed with others, called one a delusional fuck, kept it moving. He scrolled through his twitter burner, bookmarked another Google Drive link full of free books from this academic he’d been following for like eight years now, retweeted a mutual’s fanfic link to a Thunderbolts orgy, wished another a happy birthday, rolled his eyes at yet another’s eating disorder post and almost commented “food is fuel and passion and power, what you need is not the small body of a malnourished little girl or the emaciated body of a poor person stuck in a warzone, but a healthy strong body, an active body,” but he figured that this starving person wasn’t cognitively functioning so he left them be, but wasn’t that just preciously self-centered, to starve yourself even though you had the money and the means to eat? Nobody abided by this nonsense back in Bondy. Keep it moving. He thanked the ones who wished him luck on his last tweet about how he would be taking a hiatus for a month because “work is about to kick my ass or i’m about to kick its ass who can say.” He really should get some coffee.
All around him, the room dilated and contracted in a slow, lulling rhythm. Little sips. Small gradual sips.
His eyelids felt heavy. Should he take his allotted one cup of coffee a year? Or take a nap? Summer lethargy or simple jet lag?
Kylian pulled up his camera and snapped a photo of the little pot of bamboo shoots nearest to him. And of the spray of tiny yellow flowers.
He paused. With this thumb and forefinger, he boxed the flowers into Google Lens.
Black-eyed Susans.
Yellow daisy-like wildflowers.
They thrived in full sunshine and were extremely attractive to pollinators. Hardy perennials, these. Apparently. Google results were shit these days.
Kylian bit back a yawn.
The scrunchie holding up the top half of Michael’s dreads was a nice shade of dark red. Crushed cherries. Spilled wine. His maroon shorts had ridden up his lean, little thighs. He was sat sideways, long legs dangling over an arm of the chair, the Japanese characters tatted on the side of his right leg pronounced through gleaming hair. His skin glowed. He looked utterly absorbed. He didn’t look to be as jet lagged as Kylian felt. Then again, Michael had spent most of the flight from France sleeping. And look at his ankles. The most attractive ankles Kylian had ever—
“You’re staring,” murmured Michael.
Mermaid eyes over the book.
Kylian shrugged again.
“Ah. Yeah. No, don’t mind me.”
Michael blinked at him. Considered him for a moment. “Wait, did you come here to talk?”
“What? No, no. No. But I mean.”
“Thought we had the rest of the day off. New plans?”
Oh, what the hell. Out with it. He was not a teenager anymore, was he.
“Actually,” said Kylian, leaning forward on his seat, “I came here to ask you out for coffee. Or snacks. Do you want snacks? Some of the guys and the staff have just gone out for doughnuts, so, you know. And you could bring your book.”
Michael pursed his lips. “Are we gonna talk about footy the whole time?”
“We can talk about anything you want.”
Michael smiled another one of his soft smiles, pretty eyes crinkling at the corners. He closed his book on one long finger. “Okay.”
*
But Michael did not bring his book. Instead, he had a red Goyard pouch with him.
“What’s in the bag?” asked Kylian, who only had the pockets of his summer blue trousers, the same pair he’d worn on his flight from Sardinia to Madrid. “Hey, you ever did those what’s in my bag posts?”
“Nah,” said Michael, “they’re usually performative. I mean, lemons and limes? And oranges? Raw. Right next to a paperback.” He made a face, nose cutely scrunched. “Pissed me off.”
Kylian laughed. “Yeah, that’s annoying.”
“You? Ever did it?”
“Ah, no. No.”
“Really?” Michael raised his brows. “You have never done it? Of all people. And those ten essential items interviews?”
Kylian narrowed his eyes playfully. He liked that Michael was picking up where they had left off, again. “You sure you never looked it up?” he said.
“Modest,” grinned Michael, teeth distractingly perfect.
“And with the way things are,” added Kylian, “it’s good to keep some things to myself.”
They had chosen this bakery because Kylian wanted something French and Michael was craving something sweet. Basbousa, Michael had decided. This French place in downtown Boston had the basbousa, thankfully, along with bánh mì, bourek annabi, baklava which was spelt baqlāwa in their charming menu, knafeh, gibassier, and an assortment of sandwiches. A home away from home, promised their menu. Their table was tucked in a quiet corner away from the sunny windows. No paps in sight. No crowds of onlookers. No buzzing whispers.
It all seemed rather normal. Like Kylian had walked into a fantasy within a fantasy.
It was quite nice.
With Michael, it always felt like a first date.
“You should do one.” And at Michael’s raised brow, Kylian added, “A what’s in your bag. While we wait for the food.”
“Nosy.”
“Interested.”
Michael propped his newly-shaved chin on his hand. “And what do I get?”
He said it simply, curiously, impossibly devoid of flirtatious intonation.
Something hot spiked in the pit of Kylian’s belly. He felt adolescent yet aged. Full of cuteness aggression for this man but at the same time gripped with a staggeringly urgent desire to ruin—
“My enduring interest, of course,” Kylian replied gallantly. “And my entire afternoon and evening today. And my hands.”
Michael looked pleased. “Your hands are needed to hold your phone and wallet, mate. Just lemme take your word about something.”
“For a second there, I thought you’d ask for my feet.”
Or Kylian’s dick, but really, it was always on offer. He was practically half hard right now.
Michael rolled his pretty eyes. “Let’s just agree on one thing, yeah? Just for today, mind.”
“Okay. Shoot.”
“No pictures.”
“Aw, but I love taking pictures.” Kylian pouted. “They are so much better than videos. I take pictures of my food, for example.”
“Millennial.”
“Ah, I forgot we were born in different centuries. And I’m a Zillennial, I think. I still remember taking computer classes in school, with the diskettes and stranger danger online and everything.”
“Whatever.” Michael tapped his fingers on his cheek, his palm still cradling his chin. There was a gauzy, almost dreamy quality in the way he was watching Kylian. “You enjoy being older, don’t you?”
Just like that.
Kylian would burst out of his pants if Michael wasn’t careful enough.
“It’s not much, three years between us,” Michael was going on, “but you sure make the most of it.”
“Three years is a lot in this game,” said Kylian. Which was true. They got showered with millions because retirement was mid-30s, and this was a price of the dream, the injuries, the wear and tear that your body would carry into old age. A footballer’s body was both younger and much older than his non-footballing peers’. “It’s like dog years. We’re living in footballer years, my dear.”
“Mmmm.”
“I’m basically middle aged.”
“You sound too pleased about that.”
This brought Kylian up short. “Do I?”
All this time he had been thinking quite the opposite. Teenage boy wonders. Skin bathed in gold. Bones preserved in amber.
Michael hummed again. He really had a nice voice.
Their drinks arrived. For Kylian, freshly grounded coffee, no sugar, no milk, no added anything. Tea for Michael.
“But please no pictures of me?” said Michael, sipping from his mug. “You can photograph your sandwich, though.”
Kylian shrugged. “Noted. No pictures of you.”
“Cheers,” Michael said, briefly slipping into English. “Just for today, yeah? I look ugly today. Off, like.”
The most ridiculous, outlandish, preposterous thing Kylian had ever heard.
“You’re all glowing,” protested Kylian. “Me, I do look jet lagged as fuck.”
“Sometimes I’m just not in the mood.” Michael bumped their knees under the table. “But I can take your picture if you want. You’re well photogenic.”
There was the stark, virgin sincerity again. And that liquid black gaze.
Kylian clicked his tongue. “Okay, okay, but don’t think I forgot about your spread. What’s in the bag.”
*
You are how you eat.
That was what Kylian believed.
He ate his chèvre and tomato sandwich with huge eager bites. He took hearty gulps of his brewed coffee.
Michael had ordered an assortment of pastries. He said he tended to avoid sweets, sticking to dried and fresh fruits instead, but this was his World Cup debut so he’d thought to mark it. He nibbled on the scrumptious basbousa. Took several teaspoonfuls to finish portions of buttery tamina and cheesy knafeh. Gloried in the bite-sized perfection of the assorted honey-gold baklava. Took little sips of his black tea, Éros by Mariage Frères. He said he had grown up drinking this brand and it was one of his pre-match teas.
Michael took his time but he left no crumbs, not even the smallest trace of syrup. A flash of tongue, a curl of plush lips, dainty laps at the tips of his thumbs, at the valley between his fingers.
He savoured every bite with the obsessive air of a perfectionist head pastry chef.
Or with the gloating smugness of a pampered cat.
It was like watching a slow, incremental, adoring kill.
*
The Goyard’s red mouth gaped wide open: two phones, a power bank, a case of wireless earbuds, a digital camera, a wallet, a purple iPod Shuffle, wired earbuds, a small jar of cocoa butter with rose and lemon essential oils, and a travel spray of Montale Aoud Lagoon.
Kylian pretended to be an interviewer. “Would you say these are the Michael Olise essentials?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Two phones?”
“One’s got my bank apps and cloud storage, that sort. The other’s for faffing about. There’s like ten spare email accounts in that one.”
“Smart. I should do that, too.”
“I play chess there.”
“You do play it a lot. Who do you play with?”
“Some of my friends. Club teammates. Former ones too. Those I’ve kept in touch with, I mean. My cousins.” Michael finished counting with his syrupy fingers. “And the ones I’ve met through the games. Oh, and my hairdressers. We’ve become mates.”
Kylian was quite charmed. “Who knew you could be quite the social butterfly.”
“I guess.” Michael smiled. “Chess, it’s like. I just gotta have something outside football, yeah?”
Kylian had nothing to say to that, so he only nodded. He pointed at the digital camera. “Ah, vintage. You like photography?”
And, wait, there was something else at the bottom of the pouch. A keychain or bracelet or something. With a pendant. Picked out in tiny gemstones? M 1 0—
Michael popped another basbousa in his mouth and licked the tips of his fingers, and just like that Kylian was distracted again. That red glimpse of tongue. Moist smear of saliva on Michael’s thumb.
Little laps and sips of the stray drops of Kylian’s cum that had escaped Michael’s wet, greedy mouth.
Dick-hungry. There was simply no other word for the lad.
Speaking of, Kylian had not gone down on Michael yet.
So that was something.
Kylian ought to offer.
He made a mental note to himself to bring it up some time. He ought to write it down in his journal. It was so easy to get distracted when Michael was so close, so easy to lose track of—
*
“Do you remember,” asked Kylian, “where you were and what you were doing when France won in 2018?”
“Mmmm. We were visiting family in France. I was eating savoury cookies with my cousins.”
Kylian grinned excitedly. “Yeah?”
When Michael didn’t say anything else, Kylian opened his eyes and turned his head. The stem of his sunglasses dug into his temple. He gently brushed aside stray locs from Michael’s face, his thumb caressing then slightly digging into Michael’s smooth cheek.
Michael was peering at him through those long thick lashes.
“I was there,” Michael relented, “when the team’s bus paraded down the Champs-Élysées. I mean, loads and loads of people were there, so. We were squeezed beside some kids from Grigny and, like, Fougères. Their parents really wanted them to see the team.”
Michael hesitated. His liquid-black gaze roved all over Kylian’s face.
“Go on.”
“My parents, too. They wanted me to see the team. Like, as a way of encouraging me, I guess. Maman said to ignore the president’s political posturing, and I did. I just focused on the team. I was sixteen but,” a quick bite of his lip, little moist teeth marks, “I’ve only just been properly settling into academy life. Been only a couple of years of relatively no problems, that summer. Don’t know if you looked me up, but you probably already know I didn’t have, like, a smooth-sailing pipeline like the one that you had.”
“Of course I looked you up,” Kylian said gently. Michael the different child, the complicated child. “Who wouldn’t after seeing you play superbly.”
Right under Kylian’s nose.
But Kylian had him now. At least for a while.
“Did you know you don’t have a nationality on your Wiki? I had to put it in myself. French-English. Michael Olise is a French-English professional footballer.”
“Yeah, I edited that out.” Michael was frowning. “So it was you. Again.”
“No, what? Again? I only did it once.”
“I edited it one time, then you appeared to edit it after me, after which I edited it again.”
“Why would you do that?” Kylian pouted.
“You really wanna get into that right now?”
Kylian sighed. For this was the appeal of a first date: all the sweetness of a companionship, none of the bitterness. None of the baggage. At least, not yet. “Okay. You’re lucky you’re so pretty. Go on, then.”
Michael stirred fussily again. He blinked, looking quite sun-dazed.
Kylian was still smiling widely. “You saw me.”
He took off his sunglasses, tossed them in the direction of the crushed cherry-red pillows of the hammock. He kissed the tip of Michael’s nose. He looked into Michael’s liquid-black eyes, felt the swoop in the pit in his belly.
He wished he could scoop himself out of these eyes. Bathed in gold. Bones preserved in amber.
“Everyone saw you,” Michael mumbled. His lashes fluttered shut. He batted away Kylian’s pinching fingers. He turned to a pillow, locs fanning out across his face again. “It’s you.”
Kylian wasn’t having any of it. He sat up on the hammock. It was a fairly roomy hammock, almost the size of a single. He lifted Michael, maneuvering the lad until his hips were canted across Kylian’s lap, adjusted his plump ass so that its heft was evenly distributed across Kylian’s thighs, adjusted his precious legs so they were not strained, arranging his arms so they were wrapped around Kylian’s shoulders. Kylian tucked some locs behind Michael’s ear. A diamond winked at him. He rubbed his thumb across Michael’s bottom lip. He gripped Michael’s chin and gave it a squeeze, opening up the lad’s lips, a soft O like a baby bird, but Michael tilted his chin away, scowling, and buried his face into Kylian’s neck again.
So fucking cute. Chuckling, he stroked the small of Michael’s hot back with the pads of his fingers. He traced nonsense shapes. “You know, my bedroom in Bondy used to be full of posters. Pelé, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Zidane, Platini, Messi, the icons, the stars. Was your childhood bedroom like that, too?”
Michael was quiet for a long moment. Then: “Yeah.”
“Who? Me? Did you get a poster of me after the World Cup in Russia?”
“Rhetorical?”
Kylian grinned. “So, me, then?”
Sharp little nails biting into his nape.
“Not just you, idiot. Why are you so obsessed with this, anyway? You’re so weird.”
That brought out a laugh from Kylian. “I guess I just like teasing you.”
“Nah, it’s something else.”
“And what’s that?”
Michael refused to answer. Kylian smiled and lightly ran his knuckles up, down, up Michael’s spine. The sun was beginning to dip below the tree line.
“You did game review?” asked Kylian.
A noise of assent.
“Talk me through that, then? Please. I want to hear your thoughts.”
“Out here picking the rookie’s brain again.”
“Just being a good captain.”
*
“Can I please take pics of you now? Pretty please? I’ll use your digital camera so it’ll be safe, okay? It’ll be safe. You are so made to be photographed, my dear.”
“Flattery. Right. And I’m not.”
“I won’t repeat myself, but I’m right, what I said is true. And this is the season for pictures.”
“It’s not. But say I allow it. What do I get?”
*
Kylian had said, “You get me. Just good ol’ me.”
It was the right answer.
For the first time, Michael had let him in without a wrap, a hot tight slide of bliss that was almost mind-numbing. Had pulled out a guttural groan from Kylian, a roaring rush in his ears, made him greedily grip Michael’s slippery hips, bouncing the lad on his dick as Michael hung onto him limply, sun-dazed, cheek listlessly sliding against Kylian’s shoulder, Michael’s own dick only half-hard between them. Kylian had tried to make it last. Hadn’t wanted to end up feeling winded afterwards. Wet squelches had pierced the quietness of the darkening grove, gaudy sucking noises, because, sure, Kylian might have been trying to make it last but he was doing things exactly the way only he wanted, too hard one moment and too fast the next, grinding and fucking into Michael who had gone limp as a doll, wet tiny whimpers and sighs muffled against Kylian’s shoulder so Kylian was startled, hissing, when teeth quickly and meanly clamped onto the meat of his shoulder, the sudden squeeze of Michael’s ass wringing out his orgasm from him, punching him out of the climb to the peak, pulling the rug from under his feet.
He’d almost shoved Michael off him in a burst of irritation, but he didn’t want any strain on the lad’s legs. They didn’t do missionary because of these precious young legs. Kylian had been so fucking considerate.
Michael was napping now, a vague curve on the corner of his lips and cuddled up against Kylian and stuffed full of his cum. Looking sated as fuck even though Kylian was pretty sure Michael hadn’t come. It was hard not to feel even the tiniest bit of resentment towards him, Kylian thought, still slightly annoyed.
Dusk had fallen. From across the hammock, the sliding door was a dark pool, cold and still. A dull glimpse of the red of crushed cherries. Faint stirrings of many leafy fingers. On the spot of where the hammock’s reflection should be, only Michael’s ankles could be seen, paler than the rest of him. Michael often wore socks even outside training and matches: lounging, sunbathing, sometimes even during fucking. Little weirdo, Kylian thought fondly.
But Kylian was restless. A ruined orgasm had got to be worse than a delayed one. He wished Michael would wake up soon; the lad was usually insatiable, relentless.
His gaze fell on the Goyard pouch on the grass. He could take pictures of Michael now, to pass the time. Maybe to wake him up, too.
The digital camera still had a previous picture.
Michael’s back was pressed against the chest of whoever had taken the picture. The camera peered over Michael’s shoulder, catching some locs. Michael’s long legs, kaizen tattoo and all, were stretched out on the rumpled sheets, bracketed by someone else’s. Kylian knew at once that it was that guy. Calves and thighs thicker than Michael’s and sun-browned in the picture so they were almost the same shade as Michael’s, that guy’s skin taut and not tatted, his leg muscles bristling with youthful vigour. But Michael’s ankles remained paler than the rest, from the whistling flutes to the graceful arches, from the sensual instep to his pear-shaped big toes.
And there, on Michael’s right foot.
An anklet. A row of pearls, gleaming like teeth. The pendant draped against his foot’s bridge was picked out in tiny diamonds. M10.
M?
“You wondering if it’s you?” came Michael’s quiet voice from under Kylian’s chin.
The muscles of Kylian’s arm jumped, shuddered, tightened around Michael.
A freezing fingertip pressed against Kylian’s nape.
He tried to speak. His voice came out hoarse, choked. “M as in Michael, then? You want the 10 jersey?”
“Thought you looked me up.”
“You want the 10 jersey that bad? Obsessed with it still?” He added, only half-lying: “It’s cute.”
“Everyone’s obsessed with it. Starboy number.”
“So is it? M for Michael?”
Michael’s ankles were bare now. Michael shifted his head and a smile slowly unfurled against Kylian’s damp chest, near his thudding heart. When Michael spoke, his teeth coldly grazed Kylian’s pebbled skin. “You could say that.”
fin