and looks at me with wide, blinking eyes. She’s even more beautiful when she’s shocked. I think I want to keep shocking her.
“You don’t lack for confidence, do you?” she says when she composes herself, her voice incredulous.
I shrug one shoulder. “I don’t lack for a lot of things. Though it does seem quite unfair to me that you’re off-limits.”
She shakes her head in disbelief. At least the sadness in her eyes is gone. “Alejo,” she begins, rubbing her lips together. “You’re a sweet boy, but you’re going to have to stop talking to me like that.”
I feel a flash of annoyance at her choice of words. She chooses to see me as a boy. Not Alejo Albarado, number twenty-eight of Real Madrid. A boy, and a sweet boy at that.
I am anything but.
“You think of me as a boy, not a man. Would you call a soldier who has gone off to war a boy? Because there’s a war every single time I go out on that pitch. A war I aim to win.”
She raises a brow. “That’s a bit, what, sacrilegious, don’t you think? To compare a soldier and a war to a football game?”
“You don’t know Spain very well then, because it’s sacrilegious to compare football to anything less than holy. This sport is our religion. We go to church on Sunday to pray for the game next week.”
“Be that as it may,” she says slowly, “I meant what I said. You can’t talk to me like that. Luciano or Mateo would not approve.”
“They never approve of anything I do.”
“Maybe there’s a reason for that.”
I stare at her, trying to see if there is room to play. But there isn’t. She’s serious, and I like her enough as a person to not fuck things up going forward.
“I’m sorry then,” I say to her, hoping she reads me as sincere. I display my palms as a show of surrender. “I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. I just tell the truth when I probably shouldn’t, and it gets me in trouble. Forgive me. Please.”
“Forget about it. It’s nothing,” she says dismissively, giving me a quick, tight smile. Then her gaze sharpens on me. “You do know how old I am, right?”
“Well. No. What does it matter?”
She brushes her hair off her face, rolling her eyes. “It matters. I mean, what really matters is that I’m your therapist. I’m also seventeen years older than you.”
I stare at her for a moment, thinking my English comprehension has gone downhill suddenly. Then I try to count. “I’m sorry, I told you I was bad at math. That makes you what…forty?”
She gives me a pointed look. “Yeah. I’m forty, Alejo. And you’re twenty-three.”
I knew she was older. I thought maybe she was in her early thirties.
“See,” she says after I don’t say anything. “Now you know.”
“Sorry I took so long,” Luciano says, his voice breaking the thin silence that had fallen between us. “I ran into Adriano.” He hands Thalia her glass of Cava which she takes with a big smile.
“Thank you. Who is Adriano?” She’s staring up at Luciano in such a way that makes me realize she wants nothing more than to put our little conversation behind us.
Luciano glances at me, back at Thalia, and then at the seat I had been occupying earlier. He cocks a brow at me and sits down where I was before.
“Adriano Afonso plays for Barcelona,” he says eventually.
“Oh, of course,” she says. Then she cranes her neck to look behind her. “He’s here?”
“Yes, he’s with his lady in the corner over there.”
“Things don’t get weird when you see your opposition out and about and you’re all drinking?”
“What, you think we would brawl?” Luciano says with a laugh. “We are a passionate bunch, yes, but not like that. I play with Adriano when we’re on the national team for Portugal. He’s a good guy. But when he’s on the field playing against me, we are no longer friends.” He points his glass at me. “If I had to play against Alejo one day, it would be the same. No longer brothers.”
“You’re not on the national team for Spain?” Thalia asks me.
“No, but I should be,” I tell her.
“He’s right. He should be. I hope they decide soon,” Luciano says. “Maybe you’ll step up your game a little.”
“Capullo,” I swear at him.
The rest of the night doesn’t go on for that long. After some more chatting about the teams in La Liga, we all decide