"Ehn — what's this?"
Xavi muttered it quietly, already tapping the notification, his thumb moving with the automatic reflex of someone who had checked his phone so many times in a day that the motion had long since stopped requiring a conscious decision.
He was in his office — or what passed for his office in the current arrangement of his life, which was a room in a building attached to a training facility that smelled faintly of liniment and had a whiteboard on one wall covered in tactical diagrams he had drawn and redrawn over the course of the last week. His coffee was on the desk, still warm. His laptop was open. He had been in the middle of something.
He was no longer in the middle of something.
The notification had come from one of his group chats — he had several, as anyone who had played football at the level he had played it for as long as he had played it inevitably accumulated, a sprawling network of threads and conversations that had formed over the years like geological layers. Most of them he checked with varying degrees of regularity. Some had gone months without a message.
This one was different.
Eleven people. Him, Iniesta, Fàbregas, Piqué, Valdés, Dani Alves, Messi, Alba, Busquets, Puyol, and David Villa. Created years ago — the exact origin of it was something none of them could probably reconstruct with full accuracy anymore — but still active in the way that the best group chats stayed active, which was not constantly but reliably, the thread a place where things of interest got shared and responded to without ceremony, news articles and match clips and the occasional photograph and the kind of commentary that only made sense between people who had spent years sharing the same dressing room.
What had caught Xavi's attention — and caught it immediately, which was itself unusual — was not just the content of the notification but who had sent it.
Messi had posted a video.
This was notable. Messi was active in the chat in the same way he was active in most things — present, engaged, but measured. He responded. He commented. He reacted to what others posted with the brevity of someone who had plenty to say and chose carefully when to say it. But posting himself — initiating, sharing something unprompted — was rare enough that its occurrence alone was enough to make Xavi stop what he was doing and look properly.
He clicked the video.
His first thought, arriving in the opening seconds as the image loaded and the sound came through: Where is this?
The space was warm and decorated — balloons, a banner he couldn't fully read yet, tables pushed to the edges of a large room, people filling the centre of it. Young people, mostly. Staff members. The kind of institutional gathering that had a specific texture to it, a quality of occasion that didn't quite look like any professional setting he could immediately place.
He watched for another few seconds.
La Masia?
The thought arrived with the particular certainty of someone who had spent years inside that building and knew its bones — the way the light fell through certain windows, the proportions of the main hall, the specific character of a space that had formed the backdrop of a significant portion of his own life.
He leaned forward slightly.
The camera was moving through the party now — whoever was filming it panning slowly across the room, catching faces and decorations and the general texture of an evening in full swing. Then it found a group of boys near the left edge of the hall, seated and mid-conversation, laughing at something one of them had just said.
Xavi did not need more than a second.
The boy in the centre of the group — the one whose laugh was the loudest and whose presence seemed to be the point around which the rest of them naturally arranged — he knew him immediately. Not because he knew him personally. Because there was, at this point in the season, essentially no serious follower of Barcelona football who did not know his face. Xavi had made a point of watching every match he could when the schedule allowed it — especially now, with the club in genuine contention for both the league and the Champions League, the kind of double pursuit that happened rarely enough that you watched closely when it did.
He had heard from his contacts in Spain for months. The messages had been consistent and came from people whose opinions he trusted — this kid, Xavi, you have to see this kid. He had seen. He had formed his own view.
Mateo King.
Seventeen years old and already doing things on a football pitch that made experienced professionals stop and look twice. Xavi had been a generational talent himself — he knew what that looked like from the inside, knew the texture of it, knew how it felt to have an understanding of the game that exceeded your years. He had grown up alongside other generational talents, had trained and played and competed with them at the highest level for over a decade. He was not a man easily impressed by youth.
He was impressed.
More than impressed. There was a quality to the boy that Xavi kept returning to in his mind — something that went beyond the technical, beyond the numbers, something in the decision-making, the spatial awareness, the way he read a situation before it fully developed and was already moving into the solution while everyone else was still understanding the problem.
The comparison his mind kept making was one he had resisted for a while, because it felt like the kind of statement that should not be made carelessly.
But honestly — the only player he could find to compare it to was the man who had sent this video.
And even then — and this was the part that genuinely startled him when he sat with it — at seventeen, Messi had not been this. The Messi that Xavi had known at seventeen had been extraordinary, clearly something special, already unmistakably different from the people around him. But the version of Messi who had become the thing Messi became — that had taken time, had required the full flowering of everything, had arrived gradually through the years in a way that felt, looking back, almost inevitable but had not been visible in its full form from the very beginning.
Mateo, at seventeen, was already showing you the full form.
Xavi had been thinking about this — or rather, a particular extension of it — more than he had admitted to anyone. He was a coach now. That was the direction his life had taken after playing, and he had thrown himself into it with the same totality he had brought to everything else. And the coach's part of his brain, which had been developing its own distinct set of preoccupations that were different from the player's part, kept circling back to the same place.
What could you do with someone like that?
Not as an idle question. As a tactical one. He had been sketching it out — not literally, not yet, but in the part of the mind where ideas form before they are written down. Mateo's natural position, his strengths, the way he moved with and without the ball. But there was something in him — the pace, the directness, the ability to go past people in tight spaces — that made Xavi think about the wings. Not as a fixed position necessarily, but as a starting point. If you gave him width and let him come inside — used that speed to stretch a defensive shape, created the overload through the centre that the interior movement would produce—
He stopped himself.
He was doing it again. Getting lost in the construction of something that had no concrete application yet. He pulled himself back, smiled slightly at his own preoccupation, and returned to the video.
The camera had moved on, sweeping across the rest of the hall. And now — properly looking at it, reading the decorations, understanding the scale of what he was seeing — Xavi felt something that took him a moment to name.
A going away party?
His brow lifted. Since when do they do that?
He tried to remember. He had left La Masia — had left Barcelona entirely, moved on to new clubs, new countries, new chapters — and there had been no gathering of this scale to mark it especially one for the youth level. There had been goodbyes. There had been the particular warmth that the people in that building had always carried and always offered. But this — the decorations, the full hall, the institutional weight of an event that had clearly been planned and sanctioned and invested in — this was something else.
The video ended.
He looked at the messages that had come in below it, the thread already running.
Cesc: when did they start doing this lol
David Villa: that's the Mateo boy yeah?
Messi: yeah. went there yesterday. It was his going away party
Dani Alves: these kids are living differently man 😂
Dani Alves: this new gen are ENJOYING bro 😂😂
Busquets: fair enough honestly
Puyol: Francisco would have shut this down before anyone even hung a balloon
Iniesta: truly that man ran that place like a military operation
Puyol: if this was old man Francisco's time he would rather die before allowing this
Valdés: got caught eating outside the cafeteria once. the look he gave me I still think about it
Iniesta: I was there Víctor. I was standing right next to you.
Valdés: then you know what that look was like
Iniesta: I had nightmares
Valdés: i spent a week on extra fitness drills
Iniesta: WE spent a week 😂😂
Dani Alves: the man never missed anything. ever. how
Puyol: because he didn't sleep. I genuinely believe he did not sleep.
Alba: caught me coming in late once. didn't say a word. just looked at me. I ran to my room.
Cesc: same. 11pm I'm trying to get back in quietly and he's just there. standing in the corridor. lights off. waiting.
Dani Alves: 💀
Busquets: he knew before you even did it. that was his thing.
Puyol: old school. different era.
Iniesta: different planet
David Villa: anyway — the kid. you lot been watching this season or not
Xavi typed something into the thread — a memory, one of his own, something about Francisco and a particular corridor incident he had never fully told the complete version of — and sent it before he had time to second-guess the wording.
The response was immediate.
Within seconds the thread was moving again, faster now, the earlier energy finding a new gear as the memories started arriving from multiple directions at once. Puyol with something about pre-season. Iniesta adding a detail to a story that someone else had started. Dani Alves contributing something that made Xavi laugh out loud in his office, genuinely, the sound surprising him slightly. They were scattered across numerous countries at this particular moment — different clubs, different time zones, different stages of careers and post-careers and whatever came after — and none of that mattered in the slightest when the thread was alive like this.
It had that quality, this group, that the best ones always had. The ability to collapse distance instantly. To make eleven men feel like they were in the same room.
Xavi typed again, smiling, and settled back in his chair.
The video of Mateo's going away party had not stayed contained to one group chat of legendary players.
It had never really had a chance to. There were too many people in that hall, too many phones, too many different angles captured by too many different hands over the course of the evening — and once a few of those clips found their way out into the world, the rest followed with the inevitability of water finding a downward slope. By the time any of it could have theoretically been stopped, it was already far too late for stopping.
It was especially prominent on the Spanish side of the internet, where it had been trending since the night before — appearing and reappearing in different corners of football Twitter in various forms, the original clips being shared and quoted and embedded into threads, each new wave of attention bringing a new wave of people who had not seen it yet and were now seeing it for the first time and responding accordingly.
@Taz_Cule · 2h right so my aunt works at la masia and she sent me this video from last night and i've been staring at it since. she said the whole day was something else. said the love everyone had for this kid was unreal. apparently messi came. MESSI. some other first team players too. for a kid leaving the academy.
this is why i will die a cule man. i genuinely mean that. this just made me love this club even more than i already did and i didn't think that was possible. this is beautiful.
🔁 847 · ❤️ 6.2K
@BoyishVoid · 1h okay i was already in a bad mood because i just spent 20 minutes arguing with some guy who was telling me "mi casa es tu casa" is FRENCH. french. the heel does that even sound like french to you. the heel.
ANYWAY. saw the la masia graduation videos for mateo king and my heart is genuinely warm right now. this is what separates us. VISCA BARCA. madrid wonders why we say we're a family. look at this. look at what this club does for its own. their soulless club could never.
🔁 1.2K · ❤️ 9.4K
↳ @Vincent_notthesaint · 58m replying to @BoyishVoid
there is a genuinely touching moment happening at your club. a real one. people are emotional about it. and somehow you still found a way to bring madrid into it within the same tweet. mourinho said barca fans are obsessed with real madrid and i used to think that was just him being bitter but man. he was just reporting facts.
🔁 312 · ❤️ 4.1K
...
"Dude, I am so tired."
Mateo said it to the open air of the car park, not particularly to anyone, the words arriving with the particular flatness of someone whose body had been making the same point for the last hour and had finally decided to start saying it out loud.
Beside him, Pedri responded not with words but with a groan — a long, low, deeply sincere groan — and stretched both arms above his head with the slow, effortful deliberateness of a man trying to locate parts of himself that had temporarily stopped reporting in. His back cracked once. He accepted this without comment.
"Tell me about it," Mateo said.
He looked around the car park, blinking in the late afternoon light.
"Where's the ride?"
Pedri was already looking at his phone, thumb moving. "My brother should be here." He scanned the car park once, didn't find what he was looking for, and looked back at the screen. A few seconds passed. "He texted me."
He read it.
He sighed — the specific sigh of someone reading news they had not asked for and did not need at this particular moment.
"Tyre burst," he said. "He's running late."
Mateo groaned — a genuine one, carrying the full weight of a person who had been running on fumes for the last ninety minutes of training and had been sustaining themselves primarily on the promise of getting into a car and being taken somewhere horizontal. He found the nearest low ledge along the side of the car park and sat down on it with the careful, deliberate descent of someone whose legs had earned a rest.
"So are we just going to wait, or—"
"Booking a ride already," Pedri said, still standing, thumbs moving.
"Nice."
Pedri came and sat beside him on the ledge. "Told my brother not to bother coming." He settled in. "Ride's three minutes out."
Mateo shifted along the ledge without being asked, making room. They sat there in companionable silence for a moment — two people at the end of a long day, watching other teammates filter through the car park, some stopping briefly when they saw them.
"Waiting for a ride," Mateo said, to the third person who asked. And then the fourth.
The car appeared in just under three minutes, pulling into the public area of the car park with the slightly tentative approach of someone who had been told to look for two people and was now locating them.
They stood, crossed to the car, and got in.
The driver — a young man, mid-twenties, who had been having what appeared to have been a fairly ordinary Tuesday afternoon right up until approximately three minutes ago — looked in the rearview mirror and found two FC Barcelona first team players settling into his back seat, and underwent a visible internal experience that he managed, to his credit, to keep mostly internal.
Mostly.
It took a few minutes — Mateo and Pedri trading off, warm and patient, answering the questions that came with the practised ease of people who understood that this was part of it and had long since decided to be decent about it. Yes, it was them. Yes, the season had been incredible. Yes, the Champions League semi-final was — yes, they were feeling good about it. The driver's voice went up half an octave at some point during this exchange and never fully came back down, but by the time they were properly underway the conversation had settled into something approaching normality, the initial electricity of the moment wearing smooth with a few minutes of ordinary human interaction.
The air conditioning was running properly by the time they hit the main road, and Mateo had located it with his face and had no intention of moving.
He was manspreading comprehensively across the back seat — legs extended, head tilted back slightly, the cool air working its way across his skin with the specific, targeted pleasure of something a tired body needed without knowing how much it needed it. His eyes were half closed. He had no immediate plans to use them fully.
Pedri, to his left, was in a broadly similar configuration — also spread out, also making the most of the space, also operating at a significantly reduced level of vertical ambition compared to his usual state.
"I could kill for a home cooked meal right now," Pedri said, to the ceiling of the car.
Mateo groaned in agreement. "Dude, same."
A few seconds of silence passed in which both of them apparently contemplated the specific injustice of being hungry and tired simultaneously.
"The food the kitchen staff cooked for me," Mateo said, his voice slightly muffled by the fact that he hadn't moved his head, "finished yesterday."
He paused.
"My dad also prepared something and sent it with the girls."
Pedri's head moved — a small, interested shift in his direction, the first real movement he had made since getting in the car.
"But," Mateo continued, with the tone of someone delivering news they have already made their peace with, "the girls ate it yesterday. Not sure how much is left."
Pedri's head dropped back against the seat.
The groan that came out of him was not short. It was the groan of a man who had briefly seen a meal on the horizon and watched it recede.
Mateo laughed — a quiet one, mostly to himself.
"When I get home," he said, drawing the thought out slowly, with the considered reverence of someone describing something they were genuinely looking forward to, "and have a long hot bath—" He stretched the word long out further than it needed to go, giving it the full space of the car. "Then I can go into the kitchen and cook something."
Pedri's head came up again. Faster this time.
"Really?"
Mateo had his eyes closed now, fully resting. "Yeah."
Pedri looked at him for a moment. "That's right — your dad runs a restaurant, doesn't he?"
"Yep," Mateo said, without opening his eyes.
Pedri settled back, and the car went quiet again — the comfortable quiet of two tired people sitting with a thought that had made the remainder of the journey feel more manageable than it had a few minutes ago.
The complex appeared at the end of the road with the particular welcome of somewhere that had beds in it.
They got out, thanked the driver — who had composed himself considerably over the course of the journey and was now back to something approaching equilibrium — and went their separate ways in the lobby with the economical goodbye of two people who were both very focused on the same priority.
"Long bath," Pedri said, heading for the second floor stairs.
"Long bath," Mateo confirmed, heading for the third.
"Dinner's on your mind though," Pedri said, over his shoulder.
"Always."
He heard Pedri laugh as the stairwell divided them.
Mateo reached his floor, moved down the corridor, and stopped at his door.
He pulled out the key card — the one he had pocketed that morning in what felt like a different chapter of his life — and held it to the panel. The lock released with a soft, clean click. He pushed the door open and stepped inside, pulling it shut behind him.
The apartment received him with the familiar quiet of somewhere that had been occupied in his absence — the small signs of a space that had been lived in through the day, the particular warmth of rooms that had had people in them.
He was already pulling at the laces of his trainers when he heard it.
He stopped.
A sound — soft, coming from somewhere further into the apartment. Not the television. Not the ambient noise of the building settling. Something more deliberate than that, more human. A voice, low and unhurried, moving through a melody that he couldn't fully make out from here but could recognise as intentional, as someone singing — not performing, not projecting, but the private, unconscious kind of singing that people do when they believe they are alone and have forgotten to be self-conscious about it.
Mateo straightened up slowly.
He stood in the entrance hallway and listened, his head tilting slightly toward the sound.
She was sitting on the floor.
That was the first thing he registered — not the papers, not the pen, just the fact of her position, cross-legged on the living room floor with her back against the base of the sofa, settled into it with the complete comfort of someone who had decided the floor was the right place to be and had not given it a second thought since.
The papers were everywhere. Spread across the surface of the central table, layered on top of each other at angles that suggested a working system even if it didn't immediately look like one, and spilling down onto the floor around her in a loose, organic perimeter. In the middle of all of it, she had one sheet held up in front of her — close, both hands on it — and she was looking at it with the particular intensity of someone reading something they had written and were not yet satisfied with.
A large blue pen was at her lips, the flat end of it resting against the corner of her mouth, her teeth just barely touching it — the unconscious prop of someone deep in thought.
And she was singing.
Quietly. Under her breath, almost. More mouthing it than producing sound, but the melody was there — soft and unhurried, moving through whatever she was revising on the page in front of her, her lips barely parted, the sound coming and going as she read and reconsidered and tried a phrase again.
Her hair was parted to one side and pulled forward over one shoulder, which left the other side clear — the line of her neck visible, slender and unhurried, catching the late afternoon light from the window with the clean simplicity of an image that had not been arranged for anyone.
Mateo stood in the entrance of the living room and looked at her.
He had thought she was good looking since she appeared in his doorway the evening before — that had been an obvious and immediate observation, the kind the eyes make before the brain has finished booting up. That was just a fact he had registered and set aside without giving it any particular weight.
This was slightly different.
There was something about the scene that had nothing to do with any single thing — not the neck, not the papers, not the pen — and everything to do with all of it together. The unselfconsciousness of it. The completeness of a person fully inside their own world, not performing anything, not managing any impression, just entirely present in whatever she was working on. He wasn't sure how long he had been standing there when the door moved behind him.
The soft thud of the latch catching.
Olivia's head came up immediately — quick and alert, the way people move when a sound interrupts a private moment. She turned toward the entrance.
She found him standing there.
For a fraction of a second, neither of them said anything — Mateo because he had been caught somewhere between entering and announcing himself and hadn't quite sorted out what to do with that, Olivia because she was still in the mild, blinking process of returning from wherever her concentration had taken her.
Mateo looked at a point somewhere just past her left shoulder.
"Sorry—" A short, slightly awkward laugh. "Did I disturb you?"
Olivia sat up straighter, instinctively, one hand gathering the nearest papers toward her in a small, reflexive tidying motion. "Oh — no, it's fine." She settled, the surprise resolving itself into something more ordinary. A small smile. "Welcome back."
"Thanks." He stepped further into the room. "Good evening."
"Good evening."
She looked at the papers around her — at the table, at the floor, at the general radius of her working spread — and something in her expression shifted into a mild, apologetic awareness of what the living room currently looked like.
"Sorry about all of this." She gestured at it. "I'll tidy it up, just give me a—"
"No—" He waved both hands, the gesture easy and genuine. "Don't worry about it at all. It's fine, honestly."
She smiled at that — a real one, small and unhurried — and Mateo looked at the smile for just a moment longer than he looked at most things before he cleared his throat lightly and shifted his weight.
"I've had a long day. I just want to get a quick shower and—" He gestured toward the hallway. "Head inside."
"Oh — okay then." She tucked one leg underneath her, adjusting. Then, a brief pause, the kind that comes when someone is reaching for the socially appropriate thing to say and finds themselves choosing between several options of varying accuracy.
"Have a nice—" She stopped. "Bath." Another small pause. "I suppose."
Mateo laughed — a genuine one, breaking through before he could do anything about it. "Thanks."
He was already half-turned toward the hallway when he remembered.
"Is my cousin—?"
"Aina went to visit a childhood friend." Olivia had picked up her pen again, rotating it between her fingers. "She said she'd be back soon."
"Ah." He nodded.
"I was meant to go with her but—" She started to gesture at the papers around her, the motion completing the sentence more clearly than any words would have. "I was a little busy."
"Right." He nodded again, looking at the spread of work on the table with the brief, respectful acknowledgment of someone recognising that a thing is happening without needing to understand the specifics of it. "Okay then."
He headed for the hallway.
Fifteen minutes later, Mateo was himself again.
Or close enough to it that the difference didn't matter. The hot water had done the thing hot water does after a day of stamina training — not fixing anything exactly, but softening the edges of it, making the ache in his bones feel less like a complaint and more like information. Evidence. His body had worked today and this was what working felt like, and somewhere underneath the tiredness was something that was almost satisfaction if he held it at the right angle.
He found his towel on the bed where he had left it that morning — still in the scattered, entirely unfolded state in which it had been deposited — dried himself properly, and hung it on the rack in the bathroom with the small, quiet efficiency of someone who had just decided to be slightly more organised than they had been twelve hours ago.
He opened the wardrobe. Boxers, shorts, a t-shirt — comfortable, clean, nothing that required any thought. He dressed, ran a hand through his damp hair once, and opened the bedroom door.
The living room, when he reached it, was empty.
Not just of Olivia — of everything. The papers were gone. The spread across the table, the layered sheets on the floor, the blue pen — all of it cleared away, the surface of the central table clean and the floor around it unobstructed, the room returned to the state it had been in before he came home. He looked at it for a moment, noting it without making much of it, and turned toward the kitchen.
"They really stocked this place."
He said it quietly, to nobody, as he opened the fridge and took in the interior. It had been full when Adrian showed it to him yesterday and it was still full — the shelves organised, the produce fresh, the kind of restocking that happened quietly and without announcement, the way things did when a club was taking care of someone it had decided to take care of properly.
He pulled the fridge door wider and stood there, one hand on the handle, looking at what he had to work with.
"What should I make," he muttered.
He wasn't hungry enough for something heavy. He was tired enough that anything requiring sustained, complicated attention was already at a disadvantage. He wanted something real — proper food, not something assembled — but he needed to eat and then sleep, in that order, without too much gap between the two.
He thought about it for a moment.
Then — the La Masia schedule surfacing in his memory with the reliability of something that had been repeated enough times to become instinct — he had his answer.
Pollo a la Plancha. Grilled chicken, rice on the side. Simple, clean, the kind of meal that had fuelled training sessions for years. He knew it well enough to make it without thinking too hard, which was exactly what this evening required.
He started pulling things out.
Chicken breasts first, two of them, set on the counter. Olive oil. Garlic — three cloves, which he set beside the oil. Lemon, one, for the juice. Dried oregano, paprika, salt, black pepper — the spice jars lined up in a short row. For the rice: long grain, a small white onion, chicken stock from the shelf, a bay leaf.
He stood back and looked at it all laid out in front of him. Every ingredient present, every component accounted for.
He washed his hands — properly, thoroughly, the way his father had always insisted — and then washed the chicken under cold water, patting it dry with paper towel. The garlic went next, pressed and minced on the board, the smell of it immediate and clean in the quiet kitchen. The lemon he rolled against the counter with his palm before cutting it, coaxing the juice.
He mixed the marinade in a small bowl — oil, garlic, lemon juice, oregano, paprika, salt, pepper — and worked it across the chicken with his hands, turning each piece until it was coated properly.
He reached for the pot for the rice, filled it at the tap, and set it on the hob.
He was reaching for the dial when he heard footsteps.
He turned.
Olivia appeared in the kitchen doorway, unhurried, slightly distracted — still in the comfortable, slightly internal state of someone returning from concentration rather than arriving fresh from idleness. She was in a loose oversized top now, her earlier outfit traded for something softer, and her hair was different — gathered loosely, less arranged than before, a few pieces falling where they had decided to fall.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
Then her eyes moved to the counter — the ingredients, the board, the bowl, the pot on the hob — and back to him, with the expression of someone taking in a scene they had not expected.
She pointed past him, toward the far side of the kitchen.
"I just needed water," she said.
"Yeah." He stepped slightly to one side, making the path to the glasses clear. "Go ahead."
She moved past him to the cupboard, reached up for a glass, turned on the tap.
"That's true actually," Mateo said, turning back to the counter. "I'm about to cook — would you want to eat as well?"
She hesitated. The glass of water turned slowly in her hand.
"I'm already adding Aina's portion," he continued, reaching for the chicken. "Because I know that glutton is going to come back hungry. And my friend — the guy you met yesterday — he's coming over too."
"Oh," Olivia said.
"So." He looked at her. "Do you want to?"
She twirled the water in the glass, a small unconscious rotation of her wrist. "I really don't want to impose."
"Come on—"
"I'm already disturbing you in your own space," she said, and she meant it — not performatively, just honestly, the particular conscientiousness of someone who was a guest somewhere and was aware of it. "I don't want to add to it."
Mateo reached for the chicken, already moving. "I'm going to take that as a yes."
She looked at him for a moment.
Then she smiled — the small, resigned smile of someone losing an argument they didn't completely want to win.
"Then I'm helping."
He turned around. "Sorry?"
"I want to help cook." She set the glass down on the counter. "Let me help."
"You don't have to do that—"
"I want to."
"I'm already in the middle of it—"
"I insist."
He looked at her. She looked back, patient and decided.
"Please," she added. Then, after a beat — "It would help with the guilt of staying here completely rent free."
The corner of his mouth moved.
"Okay," he said.
"Nice." The word came out light and satisfied, the single syllable of someone who had gotten exactly what they came for.
He turned back to the counter. "Right — so I'm making Pollo a la Plancha. With rice." He glanced at her sideways. "It's not complicated, but I suppose you can help."
She looked at him evenly. "You suppose."
"There is a condition though."
"A condition?"
He reached to the side — the hook near the far edge of the counter — and lifted something off it. An apron. Navy, simple, hanging there the way kitchen aprons hang in kitchens that have been properly stocked by people who thought of everything. He held it out toward her, his expression entirely pleasant and entirely serious.
"You have to wear this."
Olivia looked at the apron. Looked at him.
"An apron."
"Yep." He held it there. The p at the end had a certain finality to it.
She took it. Turned it over once. Began putting it on, looping it over her head and reaching around to tie the back. "Alright."
She finished tying it and looked up at him.
"You're not wearing one."
"Don't question the head chef."
She giggled — a short, bright sound, arrived and gone quickly — and Mateo turned back to the counter before whatever was on his face had time to be examined by anyone.
He was washing the extra chicken at the sink when he became aware that she had appeared beside him.
Close. Not unreasonably close — the sink was one sink, the kitchen was one kitchen, and they were two people who both needed to use the water. This was all entirely logical.
He looked at her anyway.
She was looking back at him. Completely neutral. The expression of someone waiting.
He realised he was blocking the tap.
He also realised, approximately a half second after he should have, that he was staring.
"What," he said. The word came out slightly strangled, slightly lower than intended, with none of the composure he had been aiming for.
Olivia held up both hands, palms facing him, with the patient expression of someone who had been waiting very politely for a reasonable amount of time.
"I want to wash my hands."
"Oh—" He stepped sideways immediately, perhaps slightly faster than was strictly necessary. "Yeah, yeah, go ahead—"
She stepped in, turned the tap on, and began washing her hands with the unhurried ease of someone who had not noticed anything — or, Mateo was beginning to suspect, had noticed everything and had chosen to say nothing, which was somehow worse.
A quiet giggle reached him from the direction of the sink.
He turned back to the chicken and gave it his full attention.
"Can you cook?" he asked, once he had retrieved something resembling his composure.
She finished drying her hands on a spare cloth. "I know my way around. Not a professional, but decent."
"Okay." He nodded, scanning the counter, making a quick calculation. "Alright — I'll take the chicken. You can start the rice base. Dice that onion—" He gestured to the small white onion beside the board. "Not too fine. Then soften it in the pan with a bit of oil before we add the stock."
"Got it."
"You sure?"
She picked up the knife with the comfortable grip of someone who had held one before. "I said decent, not helpless."
He watched her make the first cut — clean, even — and turned back to his side of the counter.
They worked in the easy, slightly careful way of two people who had not shared a kitchen before and were quietly calibrating the distance between them. Not awkward — just new. The particular attentiveness of people who were still learning how much space the other person took up.
"Can you brush the oil over the chicken?" he asked, a few minutes in.
"Yeah." She moved across, took the pastry brush, and began working it over the chicken in long, even strokes while he held it steady. The smell of the garlic and lemon in the marinade came up immediately, warm and sharp.
"Even coat," he said.
"Got it"
He said nothing. She smiled at the chicken.
The onion hit the pan a few minutes later and the kitchen filled with the sound and smell of it — the soft, immediate sizzle, the sweetness coming through quickly. Mateo added the chicken to the grill pan beside it, and the kitchen became properly warm, two things cooking at once, the sounds layering pleasantly.
"About earlier," Mateo said, after a while.
She looked up from stirring the onion. "Earlier?"
"Yeah — when I came in. You looked pretty focused. Hope I didn't disturb you."
"Oh — that." She waved the spoon once, a small dismissal. "No, you didn't disturb anything. I was just working on a song."
He looked at her. "A song?"
"Yeah." She kept her eyes on the onion. "I'm a musician. I was writing."
He was quiet for a moment. "Really?"
"Really."
"That's—" He thought about it. "That's really cool."
She smiled at the pan. "Thank you."
"What's the song about?"
She reached past him for the stock without looking at him. "I think it's time to flip the chicken."
He looked at the chicken. He looked at her. She was already adding the stock to the rice pan with the focused expression of someone who had decided the topic was closed for the moment and the food required their full attention.
He let it go.
"Move over," he said, a few minutes later, as the chicken reached the point where it needed turning. "Let me do that part."
She stepped aside, spatula still in hand, watching him.
He took the handle of the grill pan. Looked at it. Then he looked at her — and something in him decided, for reasons he didn't examine too closely, to be slightly more theatrical than the situation strictly required.
He smiled. The full one, teeth and everything.
"Don't try this at home," he said.
Before she could respond, he lifted the pan — a clean, confident tilt, the chicken and its aromatics rising — and flipped it. Not just turned it. Flipped it, the contents catching air and landing back precisely, the move executed with the casual assurance of someone who had done it a hundred times in a restaurant kitchen and had just chosen this particular moment to demonstrate that.
The sizzle that followed was deeply satisfying.
Olivia stared at the pan.
Then she stared at him.
"Woo—"
The sound came out involuntarily, the laugh already behind it, and then she was clapping — actually clapping, two hands, the genuine applause of someone who had just seen something they did not expect — laughing while she did it, the sound filling the kitchen.
"Okay," she said, when the laughter had settled enough for words. "That was genuinely impressive."
Mateo set the pan back down and turned to face her. He extended one arm out at his side and bent at the waist — a full, deliberate, performative bow, slow and complete.
"Thank you," he said, straightening. "I do everything to impress."
"You—" She pushed him — a light shove at his shoulder, palm flat, the instinctive response of someone whose hands had moved before the thought caught up. "Please."
He laughed. She laughed. The chicken sizzled between them in the warm kitchen, and for a moment neither of them said anything, and it wasn't a silence that needed filling.
...
The staircase was quiet at this hour — the building having settled into the particular stillness of early evening, the day mostly behind it.
Aina was not paying attention to the staircase.
She was paying attention to her phone, specifically to the conversation thread currently open on her screen, specifically to the message her childhood friend had just sent that had made her laugh loudly enough that she had briefly considered whether the sound carried through the stairwell walls. She was typing back — thumb moving fast, the reply already forming, a grin already on her face before the words were finished — her feet finding the steps by memory rather than by sight, the way feet do when the mind is occupied elsewhere.
She was giggling at something that came back when her foot found the edge of a step differently than expected.
The slip was small. Not dramatic, not a full loss of footing — just the sudden, lurching wrongness of a step that wasn't where the body expected it to be, the floor tilting briefly in a direction it had no business tilting, her weight going forward and to the left without permission.
"Yip—"
The sound came out before she could stop it — small and undignified, the involuntary response of a body startled into honesty.
And then hands.
"Whoa — whoa—"
Firm, quick, one at her arm and one at her waist — the contact arriving before she had fully processed what was happening, steadying her, absorbing the momentum, pulling her back to vertical with the unhurried assurance of someone who had reacted before deciding to react.
"I got you. I got you."
She heard the voice before she looked. Low, calm, carrying the particular quality of someone who was more focused on the practical problem of keeping her upright than on anything else. Her heart was doing something unreasonable in her chest — the delayed response of the body catching up with how close that had just been — and she stood very still for a moment inside the steadiness of someone else's grip, breathing.
Then she looked up.
Dark brown eyes. A face she recognised. Damp hair — darker at the ends, the way hair looks when someone has not been out of a shower very long, the warmth of it still sitting in the texture. Cheekbones that caught the stairwell light at an angle that she noted and then made a private decision not to dwell on.
Pedri.
He was looking at her with the expression of someone making sure the situation had fully resolved before he allowed himself anything else. Then, when he was apparently satisfied that she was upright and stable and not going anywhere she had not chosen to go, the expression shifted.
He smiled.
"We really need to stop meeting like this."
Aina blinked.
She straightened — properly, pulling herself to her full height, one hand smoothing the front of her jacket in the automatic way that happens after the body has just done something embarrassing and the hands need something to do. She felt his hands withdraw from her arm and her waist — the absence of them arriving with a clarity that she immediately decided was not something she was going to think about.
She looked down at the steps.
She hadn't climbed far. The distance between where she was standing and where she would have landed was not catastrophic — but it was enough. Enough for a bruised knee at minimum, enough for the kind of impact that announces itself for the next several days every time you bend a joint.
She breathed out.
"Thanks," she said. The word came out slightly smaller than intended, still carrying the remnants of the adrenaline.
"Are you okay?" He was still watching her, the smile still there but the attention behind it genuine and focused.
"Yeah." She pressed her lips together briefly. "Thanks to you."
She stood there for a moment, the stairwell quiet around them, and became aware that the whole thing had a quality to it that she could not quite ignore.
"What kind of cliché is this, though," she muttered. Mostly to herself. The kind of thing you say when the thought arrives faster than the filter.
"Pardon?"
She looked up. He was looking at her with the politely puzzled expression of someone who had caught the tone of something without the content.
"This—" She gestured vaguely at the stairwell, at him, at herself, at the general arrangement of events. "It feels like something out of a K-drama right now. The staircase, the slip, the—" She stopped. Looked at his expression, which had moved from puzzled to something closer to genuinely lost. She shook her head. "Sorry. Sorry, I'm just — saying things. Ignore me."
"Okay," he said. The word came out careful and kind, in the manner of someone who was choosing to accept what they had been told at face value without pressing further, and who found something quietly amusing in doing so.
"I guess," he added, after a beat.
She laughed — a short, real one, the last of the adrenaline finally finding an exit. She looked at him.
"Did you notice me coming or did you just—"
"Coincidence." He shook his head, easy and unbothered. "I was heading upstairs. To Mateo's." He lifted his chin slightly toward the floors above them. "You just happened to be there."
"Ah." She nodded. Considered this. "Okay then." She tucked her phone into her pocket — the conversation with her friend temporarily set aside by a more pressing series of events — and glanced up the remaining stairs. "We can head up together, then."
"Sure."
"And—" She looked at him one more time, the word carrying something more than its syllable, more than the simple exchange it technically was. "Thank you. Again."
Pedri looked at her.
Not long. Just a moment — the kind of moment that arrives without announcement and is gone before you can decide what to do with it. She was still a little distressed around the edges, the slip still sitting in the slight unsteadiness of her breathing and the particular brightness of her eyes that came from a sudden shock not yet fully metabolised. Her blonde hair had been displaced slightly from whatever arrangement it had started the evening in, a few strands having made their own decisions during the excitement. Her hazel eyes, when they met his, were steadier than her breathing suggested she felt.
He took all of this in.
Then he smiled — quietly, without making anything of it.
"You're welcome," he said.
And they started up the stairs.
A/N
Extra chapters because I'm great 😏Smug look, laughter, and full pride—make it come alive 😎😂