"Let me get that."
Pedri said it easily, already moving toward the door before Aina had finished processing that they had arrived — his hand reaching for the bell with the natural, unhurried manner of someone for whom small gestures of this kind required no calculation.
Aina looked at him.
She smiled — small, genuine, directed mostly at the door rather than at him. "Thanks," she said. Quietly, the word carrying just enough to reach him.
Pedri glanced back at her and returned the smile without making anything of it. Then he pressed the bell.
Meanwhile—
"You are an actual clown."
Olivia said it through laughter — the helpless kind, the kind that keeps restarting every time it thinks it has finished, her hand coming up briefly to cover her mouth before dropping back down. She was looking at Mateo across the dining table, where the two of them were in the process of setting things out — plates, glasses, the bowls of food coming through from the kitchen in stages.
Mateo was smiling back at her with the particular expression of someone who had just delivered a joke and was pleased with its reception. Not smug — just satisfied, in the easy, comfortable way of a person who had made someone laugh without trying too hard and knew it.
He was about to say something — a follow-up forming, the kind you save for when the first landing has been confirmed — when his head came up.
The bell.
The smile shifted. He tilted his head toward the door, the thought behind his eyes doing a quick, quiet calculation.
"Sounds like someone's at the door," he said.
Olivia's laughter wound down, her attention following his. "Yeah."
Mateo was already moving — setting down the bowl he had been carrying, dusting his hands against each other once, turning toward the hallway with the efficient redirect of someone switching from one task to another without breaking pace.
"Don't worry — I've got it," he said over his shoulder. "It's probably my friend."
"Okay." Olivia reached for the nearest bowl, continuing where he had left off. Then: "It could also be Aina — she messaged me she was nearly here."
Mateo made a sound of acknowledgment, his back already to her, almost at the hallway. The expression that crossed his face at the information — a small, private oh of mild surprise — was not visible to anyone.
He reached the door and leaned in toward the peephole.
Through the small circular lens: Pedri's profile, three-quarters turned, looking to the side the way people look when they are waiting and have not yet arranged their face into anything particular.
Mateo turned back toward the dining room. "It's Pedri," he said, with a smile that carried the particular warmth of someone expecting a friend.
He opened the door.
"Hey, man—"
His hand was already out for the shake, his weight already shifting into the easy greeting of someone whose next five seconds were fully planned — and then he saw her.
Standing just to the side of Pedri, slightly behind his shoulder, was Aina.
Mateo's hand completed the shake on automatic while the rest of him caught up.
"Aina?"
He looked between them — his friend, his cousin — with the expression of someone whose evening had just developed in a direction he had not fully accounted for.
"You two came together?"
Pedri completed the handshake, his grip easy and familiar. "Met her on the stairs. We walked up together."
"Okay." Mateo stepped back from the door, making room. "Come in, come in."
Aina came through first, moving into the apartment with the comfortable ease of someone returning to a space they had already spent a day in, the unfamiliarity of yesterday replaced by something closer to familiarity. She came through the hallway and into the living area and her eyes found Olivia immediately — still at the table, still arranging, looking up at the sound of movement.
"Aina — you're back." Olivia's face opened into a genuine smile, warm and relieved in the quiet way that comes when someone you have been waiting for finally arrives.
Aina smiled back. Then her eyes moved to the table — properly looking at it now, taking in the bowls, the plates, the clear evidence of a meal that had been prepared and was waiting to be eaten.
"Did you guys cook?"
She looked between the table and the kitchen doorway, the smell of it reaching her properly for the first time.
"I'm so hungry," she said, with the complete sincerity of someone for whom this was not a conversational detail but a genuine and pressing reality.
She went to change first — disappearing into the bedroom briefly, re-emerging a few minutes later in something looser and more comfortable, the particular relief of a person who has swapped their outside clothes for their inside ones visible in the way she moved as she came back through the hallway and settled into one of the chairs around the dining table.
"I'm back," she announced, to the table, to the room, to no one specifically.
"Welcome back," Pedri said, from across the table.
"Thank you." She pulled her chair in and looked around at the spread — the rice, the chicken, the side dishes arranged between them with the practical neatness of people who had assembled a meal with actual care.
Her eyes moved to Olivia and Mateo.
They were talking. Not loudly, not about anything she had walked in on the beginning of — just talking, the easy, mid-conversation talking of two people who had been in each other's company long enough that the initial stiffness of it had entirely dissolved. Olivia was reaching across for the bowl of chicken, and Mateo said something — she caught the tail end of it, a request, a can you pass me that — and Olivia handed it to him without breaking the thread of whatever they were saying, and he took it and said thank you with a smile, and she said you're welcome and smiled back.
Aina looked at this.
She looked at it for a moment longer than she had intended to.
When did those two get so comfortable with each other?
The thought arrived with genuine mild surprise — not alarm, not concern, just the particular noticing of someone who pays attention to the texture of rooms and had not expected this particular texture. Yesterday they had been strangers standing in a hallway exchanging first names. Tonight they were passing bowls across a table and finishing sentences near each other and the whole thing had the ease of something that had been happening for much longer than a single day.
She blinked. Considered it for another second.
Then, privately, with the internal nod of someone filing something useful:
Well. That saves me some trouble.
She reached for the rice bowl. Stopped just before it. Looked left.
"Can you pass me the rice?" she said to Pedri.
Fifteen minutes in, the table had found its rhythm.
It happened the way it always happens when the right people are in the right room with good food between them — gradually, then completely, the initial politeness of strangers giving way to something warmer and less careful. Laughs came easier. Sentences got left unfinished because the other person already knew where they were going. The four of them had settled into the particular groove of a dinner that had stopped being about eating and had become about something else entirely, the food simply the excuse that had gathered everyone here.
"No way you lost your hair in a bet."
Aina said it and then immediately started laughing — not the polite kind, the real kind, the kind that bends you forward slightly and makes it difficult to finish the sentence you were in the middle of.
Mateo's expression moved through several stages in quick succession.
"It's not like that," he said, with the specific energy of someone defending a position they know is not entirely defensible. "I mean — it is, but it's more complicated than how he said it—"
The laughter grew. He faltered. Started again. Faltered again.
He looked across the table at Pedri.
Pedri, to his credit, was at least laughing along with everyone else rather than maintaining a straight face — but he was laughing, which was essentially the same as not having a straight face, and the look Mateo directed at him carried the very specific message of a person being publicly sacrificed by someone they had extended the hospitality of their dinner table to.
Really. Throwing me under the bus for the Huzz. he didnt think.
Pedri laughed harder.
Then — from his left, quiet at first, building quickly — a different sound. He turned.
Olivia had both lips pressed together in the specific configuration of someone whose structural integrity was failing in real time, her shoulders doing the small, rhythmic movement of suppressed laughter, her eyes bright with the effort of containing something that had already won.
Mateo looked at her.
He put his hand dramtically to his chest.
"Not you too," he said. The betrayal in it was completely fake.
That was the end of her containment. The laugh broke through fully — warm and unguarded, filling her side of the table — and watching it arrive so completely, so entirely without self-consciousness, pulled something out of Mateo too, and he was laughing before he had decided to, shaking his head at the table, at all of them, at the whole situation.
The dinner continued like that. One thing following another, laughter making space for more laughter, the four of them covering ground the way people do when the conversation is easy and nobody is watching the clock.
Olivia and Aina talked about their Disney days — the performances, the rehearsals, the specific absurdity of certain moments that only made sense in the context of that particular world. Aina's father came up, and his relationship with football, which turned out to be a story that warranted its own extended telling and received it, with interruptions and additions and Mateo contributing a detail that Aina had apparently never heard before and needed a moment to process.
The boys talked about Gavi, about Balde, about Casado and Fermín — small moments from the academy, specific incidents that had no business being as funny as they were once the context was provided. The girls asked questions that made the boys realise how much context had been assumed, and the explanations that followed produced their own separate laughter.
The snack situation from the last match came up — Aina and Olivia's side of it — and Mateo heard a version of events that differed from his in ways he found both illuminating and slightly incriminating.
The minutes moved without anyone noticing them move.
Pedri sat back in his chair and exhaled — a long, satisfied release, the sound of a person whose body had just received something it had needed.
"Phew." He looked at the table, at the empty bowls, at the general evidence of a meal that had been handled seriously. "I needed that."
"The food was really lovely," Olivia said, from his side of the table. She meant it — the particular tone of a compliment that wasn't being offered to fill space.
Aina looked across at Mateo. "It was really good." She paused, the expression of someone constructing something. "Uncle David doesn't have to worry about finding a successor after all."
"Ha. Ha." Mateo said each syllable separately, with the measured delivery of a person acknowledging a joke they are not going to dignify with an actual laugh.
Aina snickered.
He stood, reaching for the nearest plate, beginning to stack. "I'm glad everyone enjoyed it." He glanced toward Olivia. "Though I should say — I didn't make it alone. Olivia helped."
Olivia smiled, reaching for the bowl nearest her.
"She assisted," Mateo continued, his expression entirely pleasant. "You can direct—" He considered the number. "Twenty percent of the praise her way."
Olivia looked at him.
"Twenty," she said.
"I was the head chef."
"You gave me the onion and the rice."
"Critical components worth 20%."
She stared at him. He held the expression, completely unbothered. She looked away first, shaking her head, and the smile she was trying not to show showed anyway.
Aina watched this exchange with the quiet attention of someone watching something that had nothing to do with the food.
"Well," she said, standing and reaching across to take the plates from Mateo's hands before he could react, "whoever cooked it — thank you. Now sit down."
"I've got it—"
"You made dinner." She removed the plates from his grip with the calm, final efficiency of someone who has already decided how this is going to go. "Sit."
Mateo opened his mouth.
"Sit," she said again.
He sat.
Pedri was already on his feet, collecting the bowls from the far end of the table. "Same — both of you, sit. This was genuinely the best home-cooked food I've had in a long time." He looked at Mateo with complete sincerity. "My brother and I can't cook. Like, at all. This was much needed."
He stacked the bowls with surprising efficiency for someone who had just claimed domestic incompetence, and looked at Aina. "I'll help you."
Aina glanced at him. "You don't have to—"
"I know." He picked up the bowls and moved toward the kitchen. "I want to."
Aina watched him go for a half second, then followed with the plates, and the sound of the kitchen beginning to be tidied drifted back into the dining area.
Mateo and Olivia moved to the living room.
They picked up more or less where the kitchen had left them — the conversation finding its footing again quickly, the way conversations do between people who have spent an evening calibrating to each other and no longer need to recalibrate from scratch every time the setting changes. It was easy in the way the kitchen had been easy, which was the best kind.
Pedri and Aina joined them not long after, the sound of washing up giving way to the sound of footsteps, and the four of them settled into the living room with the natural, unhurried rearrangement of a group finding their positions for the next part of the evening.
Then Mateo reached for the remote.
"Press triangle — no, not that, triangle — yes, now hold it—"
"I am holding it—"
"You're not holding it, you're tapping it, there's a difference—"
"They feel the same!"
Injustice 2 had been running for approximately eight minutes and things were already complicated.
Aina had Superman. Pedri had The Flash. This had seemed, at the moment of selection, like a reasonable enough arrangement — but the reasonable arrangement had not survived contact with the actual match, which was currently going badly for Superman in several different ways simultaneously.
Mateo was beside Aina on the sofa, watching the screen with the focused expression of a man watching something go wrong in slow motion, his own pad resting on his knee while he dedicated a significant portion of his attention to coaching.
"Okay — okay, he's coming from the left, move right—"
"I'm moving!"
"That was left."
"That's right from where I'm standing—"
"Aina."
On screen, The Flash was building. Pedri was quiet — the particular quiet of someone who knew what they were doing and was being patient about it — his eyes on the screen, thumbs moving with the calm efficiency of someone who had done this before. The ultimate move indicator in the corner of his screen was climbing, bar by bar.
Mateo saw it.
"Move back, move back—"
"What??"
"MOVE BACK—"
Too late.
Pedri pressed L2 and R2 simultaneously.
The screen exploded into the cinematic spectacle of The Flash's super move — the character seizing Superman, the screen pulling wide, the sequence beginning its tour of global landmarks as The Flash dragged his opponent through them with the cheerful indifference of someone who had pressed the correct buttons at the correct moment.
Mateo dropped his head.
On screen, Superman was being delivered through the Eiffel Tower.
Then Big Ben.
"She's still pressing buttons," Mateo said, to no one. His voice had the quality of a man in a particular kind of resigned suffering. "Aina. It's over. Stop pressing the buttons."
"Maybe it'll help—"
"It won't help. The animation is locked. You're going to break the pad."
"The pad is fine—"
"Give it to me."
The match concluded. The winner screen gave The Flash his moment. Aina held the pad out toward Mateo without looking at him, her expression carrying the flat, compressed energy of someone who had Things To Say about all of this but had chosen, temporarily, not to say them.
"Take your stupid game," she said.
Mateo took it. He looked at the pad, checked it was undamaged, and set it on his knee. Then he looked at her.
Then he laughed — properly, from somewhere genuine, the kind that comes when something is funny in a way that overrides any attempt at composure.
Aina turned away.
He was still laughing when he turned to his other side, where Olivia was watching all of this with the quiet, entertained expression of someone who had been a spectator to the entire sequence and had enjoyed every part of it.
He held the pad out toward her.
"Do you want to play?"
She looked at the pad. Looked at the screen. Looked at Aina.
"I'd rather not," she said pleasantly.
Mateo shrugged, entirely unaffected. He looked at Pedri. "Rematch."
Pedri nodded, already scrolling through the character select.
"Since you came for the last match—" Pedri said, not looking away from the screen, his thumbs moving — "are you both coming to the next one?"
Olivia looked up from the cushion she had been rearranging. "Next one?"
Aina tilted her head. "I'm not sure yet. But I know my dad is going."
Olivia turned to her. "Mr. Oriol is going?"
"Yeah." Aina shifted on the sofa. "He said he's not missing any home match now that he can come. Wants to fully experience it — properly, with the fans and everything."
Pedri frowned lightly at the screen. "What does that mean?"
On screen, the match had started — Mateo with Superman this time, Pedri back with The Flash, the opening exchange already running. Mateo moved his character into position, reading Pedri's opener, letting the first combination come before countering — a short, precise punish that took a clean chunk of health off The Flash's bar.
"Didn't he come to the last game as well?" Mateo said, not looking away from the screen.
"He did," Aina said. "But he watched from the VIP area. He said it's not the same. He wants to be down in the stands with everyone else."
Pedri's expression shifted — the light of recognition arriving. "Ah." He understood that instinctively. The stands and the executive suite were the same match in the way that two different cities were the same country.
Olivia was looking between them. "Isn't it the same thing though?"
Mateo's Superman connected with a full combination on screen, the sequence landing clean, pushing The Flash back into the corner of the stage.
"It is absolutely not the same thing," Pedri said, redirecting The Flash's position, recovering the corner. "Watching from up there—" He tilted his head slightly. "It's comfortable. It's good. But you're behind glass. You're away from the sound, from the movement, from the people around you reacting in real time, it takes away like half the entire experience." He paused. "Being in the stands is different. It gets into you differently."
Silence for a moment.
Then, in the natural way of someone following a thought to its next step: "You know what — you should both come to the next match. See for yourself. Feel the difference."
The girls looked at each other. The particular look of two people consulting without words.
Aina turned to Olivia, her voice carrying the cautious energy of someone who was interested but not yet certain. "Should we?"
Before Olivia could answer—
"GOT HIM—"
The shout came from Mateo's side of the sofa, explosive and immediate, his controller arm pumping once. On screen, Superman had caught The Flash in a full punish sequence — the character arcing upward, the screen pulling wide, the combination carrying through with the accumulated momentum of someone who had been waiting for exactly that opening.
Mateo was grinning at the screen, completely absorbed, entirely unbothered by the conversation that had been happening around him.
Pedri turned back to the screen with the expression of a man who had been caught mid-speech.
The match ran on.
The night wound down the way good evenings do — slowly, without anyone deciding to end it, the energy simply finding its natural level and settling there.
Pedri was first. He stood with the comfortable ease of someone who had spent the evening well and had no complaints, said his goodnights to the table, shook Mateo's hand once at the door, smiled at the girls, and disappeared down the stairs toward the second floor.
Then Olivia — gathering herself from the sofa, reaching for her notes with the expression of someone who had been putting off returning to them and had now run out of reasons. "I really should get back to this," she said. She said goodnight to the room, to Mateo, and to Aina with a look that carried something between we'll talk later and I saw you with him, and then she was gone down the hall.
That left two.
Mateo and Aina stayed in the living room a while longer — just the two of them, the way cousins are when the performance of being around other people has come off and the shorthand returns. They talked about nothing important. About family things. About small things. About the day, about the building, about whatever surfaced and felt worth saying.
Eventually the toll of his body, which had been making its case patiently for the past two hours, finally made it convincingly. Mateo stood, stretched, and declared himself finished.
"Going," he said.
"Go," she said.
He went.
The apartment settled into quiet. Aina sat for another few minutes in the stillness of the living room, thinking the comfortable, unstructured thoughts of someone at the end of a day that had introduced several new things into the landscape of her life and was still deciding what to make of them.
Then she turned off the light and headed to the room.
Olivia was already in bed, notes stacked on the nightstand, the lamp on her side still going. She looked up when Aina came in.
Aina got into bed without saying anything.
A moment passed.
"Goodnight," Olivia said.
"Goodnight," Aina said.
And that was the end of the night for all four of them — the bonds between them quieter now than they had been a few hours ago, more familiar, more settled, the kind of comfortable that takes an evening to build and stays longer than that.
A/N
I just noticed that what I posted earlier wasn't actually the extra chapter—it was the scheduled one. So yeah, enjoy that one.
Also, sorry again for the "fillers." I'm really trying to flesh things out properly and build the story in a better way. The game is coming soon (the Man City match), and I promise you won't be disappointed.
Thanks for sticking with me.
If you want to read chapters ahead with uploads and to support me subscribe to my Patreon below There is also a picture of how mateo looks like posted and later there would be votes and all on the site some you wont need to pay to vote but you can if you want to support me thanks
patreon.com/David_Adetola
Thank You your support is greatly appreciated thank you all
I've also created a Discord channel to make communication easier, where I'll post updates, cover/character pictures for all my books, and more. Here's the link:
https://discord.gg/J4p83eGG(New discord link )