for: gullwatch
Pairing: Steven Gerrard/Xabi Alonso
Rating: R
Prompt: how Xabi realised, how Stevie realised, and how they went about trying to tell each other.
Preferences: since it's christmas, humour is preferred to angst! (for example, thwarted seductions! embarrassingly bad pick-up lines! first attempt at sex!) or just general crack, you know. just -- something lovely that makes you smile and feel all warm on the inside, etc.
Away With Words.
*
He can’t believe the man is twenty-two. His eyes alone look forty-one.
Later, he would tell him, “Not strange you like Matthaus.”
“Why is that so?”
“You both like to look as if you were carrying the weight of the universe.”
Xabi says nothing. He is twenty-two, but he has read about Atlas.
*
“I can’t believe he is twenty-two,” he says the day Xabi puts his foot on Anfield for the first time.
Xabi can’t believe Stevie’s age, either, when he meets him -but for the opposite reasons. This kid, he thinks, the big brother role he’s had to play all his life finally catching up, heart on the sleeve, raw on the outside.
Xabi was never that young.
*
Steve Gerrard falls in love one anodyne afternoon -it’s cold and they are playing Norwich, he is injured and hating being on the outside looking in, and Xabi, well, he is the most beautiful thing Steve has ever seen. That day. Football is.
Simply beautiful.
Stevie thinks he should never use that word again. Only for this.
*
He thinks he will always hate how slowly Xabi speaks.
One day, much later, he would tell him, You might want to try saying what you mean to say, instead of what you think you should.
Of course Stevie messes up all the nouns and adjectives and scratches the grammar and fractures the syntax. But that’s what you are supposed to do with your language.
Xabi is so good with words that he is actually bad.
*
It’s the day after New Year's but the world is old and scarred all of a sudden.
Stevie smiles the smile of a nervous fifteen year-old.
“And you wanted to keep playing, you lost your marbles or what?”
“I didn’t know it was broken,” Xabi smiles back. His foot feels a stranger to him now, heavy, insensitive, artificial.
Stevie thinks, if we keep like this, there’s no way we are ever going to play together.
Stevie thinks, I’m sorry, you were doing great.
Stevie thinks, I’m sorry. But instead of saying it he presses two fingertips against Xabi’s shoulder, not caressing, not pushing, it’s something odd. Stevie doesn’t know what it means. He can feel muscles and cartilages and pulse.
If football doesn’t break your bones, love might.
*
Stevie loves talking exaggerated slang to him, because he knows it makes Xabi mad, not knowing the meaning of things.
“Let’s go down for a bevvy,” he says and the frown on Xabi’s forehead is delicious.
He loves talking slang to him because Xabi will never admit when he doesn’t know the meaning of a word; he will keep it all inside and then go home and look it up, restlessly. Proud boy.
He puts his arm around Xabi’s shoulders on the way to the pub and he is not even drunk yet but.
Are we friends now? Xabi asks and doesn’t remove the arm. He asks and “now” really sounds like “already” and Stevie has to remember you have to deserve it, with Xabi, his not open hands. No, rather Xabi is all hands in his pockets, silence.
Why do you have this compulsion to define everything? Dictionary boy.
Xabi doesn’t get mad because he knows it’s true -he needs to know what everything means the same way Stevie needs everybody to tell him that they love him. Dictionary boy. It’s the same disease.
*
One day Ian St. John says that Xabi is more crucial to Liverpool’s game than Steve is -it’s a cold morning and football is ugly that day; the city is uglier that day, its grey no longer familiar, comfortable. Stevie breathes into his hands when he leaves the flat, but nothing can warm him up, and he thinks “fuck, what about London?”, he bets it’s not so ugly all the time.
He is jealous.
He is a kid.
Months later he understands Xabi will never forgive him for that moment of weakness- Rafa never will. The Kop won’t, again.
*
Istanbul, it ruins everything.
*
“I’m staying,” he says, into the phone, and there’s traffic on the other side of the line.
“I know. I read it.”
Xabi’s punctuation is like everybody else’s silence.
“Guessed you might. But I wanted to tell you.”
“You told me.”
“Yeah.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
“No.”
*
After Istanbul, everything is performance anxiety.
After that night of celebration, that night of champagne and brief endless friendship, after Stevie threw his arm around Xabi’s neck and declared, slurping, drunk on cheap and expensive alcohol, and high on their own legend, “man, we couldn’t have done it without you. Am not kidding,” and it pretty much sounded like “man, I couldn’t have done it without you,” and Xabi just smiled, saying “you are drunk.”
Not drunk, Stevie roared with laughter, slapping Xabi’s arm gently. You don’t say that, you silly foreigner. ‘Alf pissed, not drunk.
After that, and Xabi knew it then, everything was meant to be downhill.
*
Stevie falls into certain patterns in his life.
He realizes his (non)relationship with Xabi off the pitch copycats his relationship with Rafa on it.
Houllier was never shy of telling anyone who would listen how important Stevie was to this team, how he was the keystone, the great bright hope. It’s not that Stevie craved that kind of attention, or grew accustomed to it. It’s that he needed it.
And when Rafa arrives at Anfield what does he do? Sign another midfielder.
Stevie’s resentment towards the newcomer, this twenty-two year old kid, well, it lasted until he saw Xabi’s first pass wearing red. His resentment passes, but his fear lingers on.
Rafa, like Xabi, never says anything.
Silence makes Stevie scared, and fear makes him think of all the other lives he might be living, words like money, Premiership, star, London.
Stevie wants to think it’s not his fault, not really.
*
Steve Gerrard falls in love in a match against Norwich. But it’s just football.
Steve Gerrard falls in love with the way Xabi picks his words so carefully, and delivers them so slowly -he thought he would always hate that.
Steve Gerrard begins catching his breath whenever Xabi sits by him during a flight.
Steve Gerrard is thirteen years old, all of a sudden.
*
“We could, mmm, go up for a moment, to your room. I mean. Could we? Or mine. Room, I mean. Just a moment.”
“Steve, half of the time I have no idea what you’re talking about. Now you’ve just lost me.”
“Up. Room. To speak. For a moment. I need to talk to you. Not need. It’s nothing important. Just.”
“Okay,” Xabi doesn’t quite know what he is agreeing to. He grabs his cup of coffee and goes to sit on one of the hotel restaurant’s pastel-coloured chairs.
Stevie goes after him.
“Hey, your English is really incredible. Not one mistake these days. Study much, eh?”
“I have to say that my English seems better than yours right now, yes.”
“Ha ha, very funny.”
“Stevie, are you okay?”
Stevie, not Steve. Sometimes even Xabi steps on the wrong foot.
*
Everybody says Xabi is too smart for his own good.
He is. That’s why when he started celebrating the goals (his, Stevie’s, then, shamelessly, everybody else’s) by hugging and clinging to Stevie just a bit longer than the others- oh, he realizes immediately what that means.
He is too fucking smart to even kid himself about it, to think, like anyone else would, that it’s just football, and Stevie is just that good, and together they shine and all those things the headlines say about their partnership and that are, mostly and surprisingly, true.
Stevie smells like freshly cut grass on a Third Division field -the kind of pitch where you play out of love, without the bullshit professional sport involves. Stevie smells like Xabi remembers how to love this game. But that’s not it.
It’s not Captain Fantastic he loves.
Underneath that green and bright scent, underneath the armband and the goals and the high, high hopes, there’s Stevie.
Oddly, it’s not like Xabi even likes the guy that much. He is alright enough, funny and quick and a good person, but not the kind of guy Xabi would pick as a friend.
This has nothing to do with friendship.
This has to do with the way Stevie makes him feel like the days when he met Nagore and for the first time in his life Xabi skipped classes, just to go to the beach with her. He doesn’t exactly like Stevie but he loves how his face looks like an old man’s when he is too worried or too happy, those wrinkles, he loves the contrast between his tiny voice and his heavy accent. Xabi loves. Loves.
Smart kids can’t say “I love you.”
Xabi isn’t planning on doing such a thing, either.
*
It happens abroad, Champions League, a draw, somewhere colder than Liverpool, or warmer, it doesn’t matter. Somewhere that is not Liverpool.
It couldn’t have happened there.
It happens elsewhere, in a hotel room, and they both believe that a severe policy about sex before matches is a good thing, but they are young, and love has a way of bending the rules without breaking them.
*
When they kiss Xabi is wearing his long blue pullover and Stevie grabs the neck as he pushes Xabi against the wall.
Xabi is still holding the door key; he remembers after a match (Reading? Sheffield? Boro?) he spent on the bench and it was raining a thick, heavy curtain of water and Stevie was soaking wet, shaking like a small animal and grinning, a victorious child. Xabi put his coat (this very same coat, now, and maybe there are no coincidences -but Xabi has always believed that what we call coincidences are just things we are too lazy to explain) over Stevie’s shoulders. Like to a girlfriend. Xabi didn’t think of it like that, but maybe just because he had never given his coat to a girl.
He doesn’t let the key drop, like a lover would; he twists it in his hand, white marks on his palm, like it burns, and puts it in his pocket, with eyes closed and his free hand pressed against Stevie’s shoulder blade.
*
“Ever done it with a bloke?” the question sound like a cheap line in a softcore gay movie, or rather how Xabi imagines that would sound.
“No. You?”
“Nah. I’ve fooled around when I was drunk,” he kisses the line of Xabi’s jaw and he is heavy, heavy, and his kisses are too wet, too sloppy, marking down the territory like a dumb dog. “You ever liked a bloke before?”
There’s something brilliant and fragile in the softness of his eyes, in his voice, in the way he untucks Xabi’s shirt while trying to kiss him and speak at the same time. Xabi has to breathe and remember Stevie is easily bruised, easily crushed by words. Everything Stevie does (even this, especially this, Xabi knows, clever boy, too clever boy, it hurts) is so that people would love him.
No, everything he does is so that people would tell him that they love him.
Xabi doesn’t know how to say it.
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“It’s complicated,” Xabi stands still, his chest aching from Stevie’s weight and Stevie’s fucking need to know, Stevie’s need for words. “People are just people.”
He could say more -he could say people are people, and I like them, regardless of matters of sex, and I was always a strange one like that, but he could also add: girls are smarter and softer and I like their smell, and the line of their necks, it’s not sexual orientation, it’s aesthetics. But god, I love the line of your neck, your back, too. But he doesn’t say it -he doesn’t have the words, the courage, the heart. He doesn’t have the words and Stevie always needs words, he always needs more, more, and closer, closer. Xabi lifts his head a bit and instead of words there’s Stevie’s lips and Stevie’s tongue, and Stevie’s nose against his cheek.
It’s messy and absolute, and ridiculously teenage-like, in the sense that when you were fifteen every kiss was the end of the world, the end of your life, you wanted to never taste oxygen again, air never again, food never again, life never again, just this. Stevie reminds him of being fifteen and sitting on wet sand in the summer with a girl by your side, holding hands over sandcastles, and brushing knees when the sun is low and your parents are calling you to dinner.
Stevie (and his hurried, uneven kisses; that hand just above Xabi’s hip) reminds him of a time when Xabi used to think he was too tall or too small or his limbs were growing all in inappropriate speed and he had an ugly face -Stevie reminds him how he still feels everything he is outside the football field is inadequate.
Stevie always reminds him of a time when football was all about love and not a bit about cameras and checks and morning edition headlines. And that’s why Xabi kisses him and kisses back.
*
“Slow down,” Xabi sighs.
Stevie bites back his own hysterical laughter.
“If slow down, I might stop. And no. No.”
Xabi shrugs and puts his arms around Stevie’s neck, burying his face into his neck, so that he doesn’t see his face when he comes in his hand. He pulls Stevie’s hair a bit, but not painfully, only just so Stevie’s mouth comes down to his, and his lips and his teeth. Suddenly Xabi is all teeth and Stevie is hard just thinking about the bruises.
He had hoped Xabi would let out something in Spanish, in the heat of the moment, or some other romantic notion Stevie has about the whole thing -it shouldn’t surprise him that Xabi doesn’t.
He doesn’t even say Stevie’s name, at all, that time.
“Your hands are cold,” Stevie says, when Xabi is counting his ribs aimlessly, and that’s what being lovers must feel like.
“Yours are not.”
“Ha ha, I know.”
They seem unable to get off their clothes and kiss at the same time -but they won’t give up either.
*
“I don’t know why anybody seeks new lovers,” Xabi blurts out, abruptly, looking at the ceiling; his voice is bright like sunlight, like his passes, like football. “First times with a person are always this horrible.”
“Hey.”
“No. I meant.”
“I know,” Stevie smiles; I had you. Fingers over Xabi’s collarbone. Oh, yes, yes, you had me. The humour is false, the tone is severe, everything is so fucking complicated with Xabi Alonso.
“Is that why you are still with your childhood girlfriend?”
Xabi wants to care, to say something epic and gentlemanly, something out of a movie, like, You don’t talk about Nagore here.
But he doesn’t, because Stevie is a mate first, and a friend second, and “this” goes after those two.
“I guess. She makes things easy.”
“Alex and I are fighting all the bloody time. It’s so fucked up, man.”
“Nagore and I have never fought.”
“Now that’s fucked up.”
Yes, Xabi thinks and because yes, it is, he grabs a handful of Stevie’s short hair and pulls him against his mouth, which is Xabi’s translation for “I don’t want to talk,” when words are sharp blades. Kissing is better than admitting, I don’t know what this means. Proud boy, Stevie smiles but his smile chokes on Xabi’s kiss and he rubs his ankle against Xabi’s shin, under the covers.
*
There was a moment in the middle of it when Stevie started laughing.
Later, Xabi admits: “I was worried. For a moment- I was-”
“Oh, no,” Stevie covers his eyes with his hands, then thinks better of it and lifts one elbow, taking a mouthful of Xabi and his skin and his jaw and his lips with him. “It’s just that it was so messy, the whole thing.”
He starts laughing again, remembering, Mental, he babbles, just crazy.
Xabi pulls the cover up to his neck.
“I’m so naked, too naked,” he is twenty-four and this is probably the first big mistake he’s made in his life.
Stevie can’t stop laughing, “that’s the point of this, mate,” and throws the covers away, they are touching everywhere now; it feels nicer, now, not just odd and embarrassing and imperative. “That’s the point of this,” he kisses him with eyes open and a thumb on his hip and Xabi’s curves remind Stevie of modern art, unexpectedly soft but ultimately indecipherable.
*
Xabi likes playing in foul weather, cold winter afternoons, because they remind him of himself, fourteen years old, waking up at dawn to jog and practice long shots, his mother’s hot cup of cocoa when he comes home, his father’s approving glance as he reads the newspaper, Mikel stealing his clothes again, Jon yawning.
Xabi likes playing in foul weather, frozen mornings, when he can’t feel his feet on the field but the ball and him find each other as always, anyway; winter football and afterwards he still can’t feel his skin, his cheeks, and it’s almost like Stevie is kissing somebody else, not him.
*
It’s Monday and he hasn’t drunk that much, but he puts his arm around Xabi as they walk out of the pub because Xabi’s hands might be cold, but he feels altogether warm to Stevie. Like a coat thrown at you on a rainy day when you are shaking.
“I’m drunk,” he says, anyway. He will always feel like he needs an excuse, with Xabi. So just in case, let’s pretend he is drunk.
“Not drunk, you silly,” Xabi smiles a smile that could shut off the city lights, there’s sudden clarity to the world and to Stevie when he smiles that way, and he feels ashamed of all the times he has complained this is too much trouble. “‘Alf pissed.”
It’s Monday and there are no mid-week matches. A small blessing. They are not drunk but they could be. Stevie’s voice sings with beer and the closest thing to happiness. People passing by see them and they are “just two mates, walking each other’s home,” and nothing in them betrays that they are lovers.
Well, maybe the way Stevie curls his fingers around Xabi’s hair, thinking, too short, too short, I love it when it’s longer. I love it. I love.
Stevie smiles to himself; Xabi is not the only one bad at words.
Rating: R
Prompt: how Xabi realised, how Stevie realised, and how they went about trying to tell each other.
Preferences: since it's christmas, humour is preferred to angst! (for example, thwarted seductions! embarrassingly bad pick-up lines! first attempt at sex!) or just general crack, you know. just -- something lovely that makes you smile and feel all warm on the inside, etc.
Away With Words.
*
He can’t believe the man is twenty-two. His eyes alone look forty-one.
Later, he would tell him, “Not strange you like Matthaus.”
“Why is that so?”
“You both like to look as if you were carrying the weight of the universe.”
Xabi says nothing. He is twenty-two, but he has read about Atlas.
*
“I can’t believe he is twenty-two,” he says the day Xabi puts his foot on Anfield for the first time.
Xabi can’t believe Stevie’s age, either, when he meets him -but for the opposite reasons. This kid, he thinks, the big brother role he’s had to play all his life finally catching up, heart on the sleeve, raw on the outside.
Xabi was never that young.
*
Steve Gerrard falls in love one anodyne afternoon -it’s cold and they are playing Norwich, he is injured and hating being on the outside looking in, and Xabi, well, he is the most beautiful thing Steve has ever seen. That day. Football is.
Simply beautiful.
Stevie thinks he should never use that word again. Only for this.
*
He thinks he will always hate how slowly Xabi speaks.
One day, much later, he would tell him, You might want to try saying what you mean to say, instead of what you think you should.
Of course Stevie messes up all the nouns and adjectives and scratches the grammar and fractures the syntax. But that’s what you are supposed to do with your language.
Xabi is so good with words that he is actually bad.
*
It’s the day after New Year's but the world is old and scarred all of a sudden.
Stevie smiles the smile of a nervous fifteen year-old.
“And you wanted to keep playing, you lost your marbles or what?”
“I didn’t know it was broken,” Xabi smiles back. His foot feels a stranger to him now, heavy, insensitive, artificial.
Stevie thinks, if we keep like this, there’s no way we are ever going to play together.
Stevie thinks, I’m sorry, you were doing great.
Stevie thinks, I’m sorry. But instead of saying it he presses two fingertips against Xabi’s shoulder, not caressing, not pushing, it’s something odd. Stevie doesn’t know what it means. He can feel muscles and cartilages and pulse.
If football doesn’t break your bones, love might.
*
Stevie loves talking exaggerated slang to him, because he knows it makes Xabi mad, not knowing the meaning of things.
“Let’s go down for a bevvy,” he says and the frown on Xabi’s forehead is delicious.
He loves talking slang to him because Xabi will never admit when he doesn’t know the meaning of a word; he will keep it all inside and then go home and look it up, restlessly. Proud boy.
He puts his arm around Xabi’s shoulders on the way to the pub and he is not even drunk yet but.
Are we friends now? Xabi asks and doesn’t remove the arm. He asks and “now” really sounds like “already” and Stevie has to remember you have to deserve it, with Xabi, his not open hands. No, rather Xabi is all hands in his pockets, silence.
Why do you have this compulsion to define everything? Dictionary boy.
Xabi doesn’t get mad because he knows it’s true -he needs to know what everything means the same way Stevie needs everybody to tell him that they love him. Dictionary boy. It’s the same disease.
*
One day Ian St. John says that Xabi is more crucial to Liverpool’s game than Steve is -it’s a cold morning and football is ugly that day; the city is uglier that day, its grey no longer familiar, comfortable. Stevie breathes into his hands when he leaves the flat, but nothing can warm him up, and he thinks “fuck, what about London?”, he bets it’s not so ugly all the time.
He is jealous.
He is a kid.
Months later he understands Xabi will never forgive him for that moment of weakness- Rafa never will. The Kop won’t, again.
*
Istanbul, it ruins everything.
*
“I’m staying,” he says, into the phone, and there’s traffic on the other side of the line.
“I know. I read it.”
Xabi’s punctuation is like everybody else’s silence.
“Guessed you might. But I wanted to tell you.”
“You told me.”
“Yeah.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
“No.”
*
After Istanbul, everything is performance anxiety.
After that night of celebration, that night of champagne and brief endless friendship, after Stevie threw his arm around Xabi’s neck and declared, slurping, drunk on cheap and expensive alcohol, and high on their own legend, “man, we couldn’t have done it without you. Am not kidding,” and it pretty much sounded like “man, I couldn’t have done it without you,” and Xabi just smiled, saying “you are drunk.”
Not drunk, Stevie roared with laughter, slapping Xabi’s arm gently. You don’t say that, you silly foreigner. ‘Alf pissed, not drunk.
After that, and Xabi knew it then, everything was meant to be downhill.
*
Stevie falls into certain patterns in his life.
He realizes his (non)relationship with Xabi off the pitch copycats his relationship with Rafa on it.
Houllier was never shy of telling anyone who would listen how important Stevie was to this team, how he was the keystone, the great bright hope. It’s not that Stevie craved that kind of attention, or grew accustomed to it. It’s that he needed it.
And when Rafa arrives at Anfield what does he do? Sign another midfielder.
Stevie’s resentment towards the newcomer, this twenty-two year old kid, well, it lasted until he saw Xabi’s first pass wearing red. His resentment passes, but his fear lingers on.
Rafa, like Xabi, never says anything.
Silence makes Stevie scared, and fear makes him think of all the other lives he might be living, words like money, Premiership, star, London.
Stevie wants to think it’s not his fault, not really.
*
Steve Gerrard falls in love in a match against Norwich. But it’s just football.
Steve Gerrard falls in love with the way Xabi picks his words so carefully, and delivers them so slowly -he thought he would always hate that.
Steve Gerrard begins catching his breath whenever Xabi sits by him during a flight.
Steve Gerrard is thirteen years old, all of a sudden.
*
“We could, mmm, go up for a moment, to your room. I mean. Could we? Or mine. Room, I mean. Just a moment.”
“Steve, half of the time I have no idea what you’re talking about. Now you’ve just lost me.”
“Up. Room. To speak. For a moment. I need to talk to you. Not need. It’s nothing important. Just.”
“Okay,” Xabi doesn’t quite know what he is agreeing to. He grabs his cup of coffee and goes to sit on one of the hotel restaurant’s pastel-coloured chairs.
Stevie goes after him.
“Hey, your English is really incredible. Not one mistake these days. Study much, eh?”
“I have to say that my English seems better than yours right now, yes.”
“Ha ha, very funny.”
“Stevie, are you okay?”
Stevie, not Steve. Sometimes even Xabi steps on the wrong foot.
*
Everybody says Xabi is too smart for his own good.
He is. That’s why when he started celebrating the goals (his, Stevie’s, then, shamelessly, everybody else’s) by hugging and clinging to Stevie just a bit longer than the others- oh, he realizes immediately what that means.
He is too fucking smart to even kid himself about it, to think, like anyone else would, that it’s just football, and Stevie is just that good, and together they shine and all those things the headlines say about their partnership and that are, mostly and surprisingly, true.
Stevie smells like freshly cut grass on a Third Division field -the kind of pitch where you play out of love, without the bullshit professional sport involves. Stevie smells like Xabi remembers how to love this game. But that’s not it.
It’s not Captain Fantastic he loves.
Underneath that green and bright scent, underneath the armband and the goals and the high, high hopes, there’s Stevie.
Oddly, it’s not like Xabi even likes the guy that much. He is alright enough, funny and quick and a good person, but not the kind of guy Xabi would pick as a friend.
This has nothing to do with friendship.
This has to do with the way Stevie makes him feel like the days when he met Nagore and for the first time in his life Xabi skipped classes, just to go to the beach with her. He doesn’t exactly like Stevie but he loves how his face looks like an old man’s when he is too worried or too happy, those wrinkles, he loves the contrast between his tiny voice and his heavy accent. Xabi loves. Loves.
Smart kids can’t say “I love you.”
Xabi isn’t planning on doing such a thing, either.
*
It happens abroad, Champions League, a draw, somewhere colder than Liverpool, or warmer, it doesn’t matter. Somewhere that is not Liverpool.
It couldn’t have happened there.
It happens elsewhere, in a hotel room, and they both believe that a severe policy about sex before matches is a good thing, but they are young, and love has a way of bending the rules without breaking them.
*
When they kiss Xabi is wearing his long blue pullover and Stevie grabs the neck as he pushes Xabi against the wall.
Xabi is still holding the door key; he remembers after a match (Reading? Sheffield? Boro?) he spent on the bench and it was raining a thick, heavy curtain of water and Stevie was soaking wet, shaking like a small animal and grinning, a victorious child. Xabi put his coat (this very same coat, now, and maybe there are no coincidences -but Xabi has always believed that what we call coincidences are just things we are too lazy to explain) over Stevie’s shoulders. Like to a girlfriend. Xabi didn’t think of it like that, but maybe just because he had never given his coat to a girl.
He doesn’t let the key drop, like a lover would; he twists it in his hand, white marks on his palm, like it burns, and puts it in his pocket, with eyes closed and his free hand pressed against Stevie’s shoulder blade.
*
“Ever done it with a bloke?” the question sound like a cheap line in a softcore gay movie, or rather how Xabi imagines that would sound.
“No. You?”
“Nah. I’ve fooled around when I was drunk,” he kisses the line of Xabi’s jaw and he is heavy, heavy, and his kisses are too wet, too sloppy, marking down the territory like a dumb dog. “You ever liked a bloke before?”
There’s something brilliant and fragile in the softness of his eyes, in his voice, in the way he untucks Xabi’s shirt while trying to kiss him and speak at the same time. Xabi has to breathe and remember Stevie is easily bruised, easily crushed by words. Everything Stevie does (even this, especially this, Xabi knows, clever boy, too clever boy, it hurts) is so that people would love him.
No, everything he does is so that people would tell him that they love him.
Xabi doesn’t know how to say it.
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“It’s complicated,” Xabi stands still, his chest aching from Stevie’s weight and Stevie’s fucking need to know, Stevie’s need for words. “People are just people.”
He could say more -he could say people are people, and I like them, regardless of matters of sex, and I was always a strange one like that, but he could also add: girls are smarter and softer and I like their smell, and the line of their necks, it’s not sexual orientation, it’s aesthetics. But god, I love the line of your neck, your back, too. But he doesn’t say it -he doesn’t have the words, the courage, the heart. He doesn’t have the words and Stevie always needs words, he always needs more, more, and closer, closer. Xabi lifts his head a bit and instead of words there’s Stevie’s lips and Stevie’s tongue, and Stevie’s nose against his cheek.
It’s messy and absolute, and ridiculously teenage-like, in the sense that when you were fifteen every kiss was the end of the world, the end of your life, you wanted to never taste oxygen again, air never again, food never again, life never again, just this. Stevie reminds him of being fifteen and sitting on wet sand in the summer with a girl by your side, holding hands over sandcastles, and brushing knees when the sun is low and your parents are calling you to dinner.
Stevie (and his hurried, uneven kisses; that hand just above Xabi’s hip) reminds him of a time when Xabi used to think he was too tall or too small or his limbs were growing all in inappropriate speed and he had an ugly face -Stevie reminds him how he still feels everything he is outside the football field is inadequate.
Stevie always reminds him of a time when football was all about love and not a bit about cameras and checks and morning edition headlines. And that’s why Xabi kisses him and kisses back.
*
“Slow down,” Xabi sighs.
Stevie bites back his own hysterical laughter.
“If slow down, I might stop. And no. No.”
Xabi shrugs and puts his arms around Stevie’s neck, burying his face into his neck, so that he doesn’t see his face when he comes in his hand. He pulls Stevie’s hair a bit, but not painfully, only just so Stevie’s mouth comes down to his, and his lips and his teeth. Suddenly Xabi is all teeth and Stevie is hard just thinking about the bruises.
He had hoped Xabi would let out something in Spanish, in the heat of the moment, or some other romantic notion Stevie has about the whole thing -it shouldn’t surprise him that Xabi doesn’t.
He doesn’t even say Stevie’s name, at all, that time.
“Your hands are cold,” Stevie says, when Xabi is counting his ribs aimlessly, and that’s what being lovers must feel like.
“Yours are not.”
“Ha ha, I know.”
They seem unable to get off their clothes and kiss at the same time -but they won’t give up either.
*
“I don’t know why anybody seeks new lovers,” Xabi blurts out, abruptly, looking at the ceiling; his voice is bright like sunlight, like his passes, like football. “First times with a person are always this horrible.”
“Hey.”
“No. I meant.”
“I know,” Stevie smiles; I had you. Fingers over Xabi’s collarbone. Oh, yes, yes, you had me. The humour is false, the tone is severe, everything is so fucking complicated with Xabi Alonso.
“Is that why you are still with your childhood girlfriend?”
Xabi wants to care, to say something epic and gentlemanly, something out of a movie, like, You don’t talk about Nagore here.
But he doesn’t, because Stevie is a mate first, and a friend second, and “this” goes after those two.
“I guess. She makes things easy.”
“Alex and I are fighting all the bloody time. It’s so fucked up, man.”
“Nagore and I have never fought.”
“Now that’s fucked up.”
Yes, Xabi thinks and because yes, it is, he grabs a handful of Stevie’s short hair and pulls him against his mouth, which is Xabi’s translation for “I don’t want to talk,” when words are sharp blades. Kissing is better than admitting, I don’t know what this means. Proud boy, Stevie smiles but his smile chokes on Xabi’s kiss and he rubs his ankle against Xabi’s shin, under the covers.
*
There was a moment in the middle of it when Stevie started laughing.
Later, Xabi admits: “I was worried. For a moment- I was-”
“Oh, no,” Stevie covers his eyes with his hands, then thinks better of it and lifts one elbow, taking a mouthful of Xabi and his skin and his jaw and his lips with him. “It’s just that it was so messy, the whole thing.”
He starts laughing again, remembering, Mental, he babbles, just crazy.
Xabi pulls the cover up to his neck.
“I’m so naked, too naked,” he is twenty-four and this is probably the first big mistake he’s made in his life.
Stevie can’t stop laughing, “that’s the point of this, mate,” and throws the covers away, they are touching everywhere now; it feels nicer, now, not just odd and embarrassing and imperative. “That’s the point of this,” he kisses him with eyes open and a thumb on his hip and Xabi’s curves remind Stevie of modern art, unexpectedly soft but ultimately indecipherable.
*
Xabi likes playing in foul weather, cold winter afternoons, because they remind him of himself, fourteen years old, waking up at dawn to jog and practice long shots, his mother’s hot cup of cocoa when he comes home, his father’s approving glance as he reads the newspaper, Mikel stealing his clothes again, Jon yawning.
Xabi likes playing in foul weather, frozen mornings, when he can’t feel his feet on the field but the ball and him find each other as always, anyway; winter football and afterwards he still can’t feel his skin, his cheeks, and it’s almost like Stevie is kissing somebody else, not him.
*
It’s Monday and he hasn’t drunk that much, but he puts his arm around Xabi as they walk out of the pub because Xabi’s hands might be cold, but he feels altogether warm to Stevie. Like a coat thrown at you on a rainy day when you are shaking.
“I’m drunk,” he says, anyway. He will always feel like he needs an excuse, with Xabi. So just in case, let’s pretend he is drunk.
“Not drunk, you silly,” Xabi smiles a smile that could shut off the city lights, there’s sudden clarity to the world and to Stevie when he smiles that way, and he feels ashamed of all the times he has complained this is too much trouble. “‘Alf pissed.”
It’s Monday and there are no mid-week matches. A small blessing. They are not drunk but they could be. Stevie’s voice sings with beer and the closest thing to happiness. People passing by see them and they are “just two mates, walking each other’s home,” and nothing in them betrays that they are lovers.
Well, maybe the way Stevie curls his fingers around Xabi’s hair, thinking, too short, too short, I love it when it’s longer. I love it. I love.
Stevie smiles to himself; Xabi is not the only one bad at words.