This Modern Love
“Do you want to come over and kill some time?”
Chapters of a romance written in hotel rooms all across the
world.
Switzerland, Austria, Spain, and nearly all the rest of Europe, South America, Africa, even the United States.
David jokes that they’ve almost covered all the continents,
but Fernando doesn’t think it’s funny.
It’s almost like prostitution, really.
Or at least a high-class escort service.
They try their best not to go back to the hotels in the same car, or sit together on the bus, to avoid being too obvious.
Not that it’s really a secret anymore, to anyone, but the paparazzi still don’t know, and that’s the way they want to keep it.
When they have enough self-control to stay away from one another after matches, David is always the one waiting in the lobby, checking the sports news on his iPhone, his feet up on one of the glass-topped tables.
Fernando rushes in through the glass sliding doors, falling
over himself, tucking his hair behind his ear with one hand and clutching his
training bag with the other.
David looks up and has to bite back the wide smile. (我特别爱这句话但怎么也翻译不出那么萌的感觉……)
Just a nod is all they need, and it’s up the elevator and down the hall, bursting through the door, clumsy hands and feet moving faster than their brains can process. Kicking off cleats and tearing at buttons and zippers and nothing can happen fast enough.
The conversation with Del Bosque rarely changes, and he must suspect something, but he never calls them on it. What could he possibly say? “Stop sleeping together it makes you score fewer goals!”
Oh wait.
He always puts Fernando with Xabi and David with Pepe, who
both know all the details of the situation anyway, so it wouldn’t really matter if they swapped rooms behind Del Bosque’s back. Unless he knocked on the door looking for Xabi and David answered instead, his hair all mussed, wearing
Fernando’s too-long sweatpants.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a normal relationship?” David
asks one night.
He turns to lie on his side, studying Fernando’s profile as they’re sprawled across a pile of blankets on the floor of their hotel room in Costa Rica. Neither of them really remembers how they ended up on the floor, along with all the bedding, but they don’t really mind.
“What do you mean?” Fernando replies slowly.
He, too, turns over onto his side, their eyes meeting in the dim light of the room.
“You know, live together in a townhouse in Madrid, get a dog, do the grocery shopping together.”
It all seemed so lovely in his head, a life of apartments and interior décor that’s not beige or sky blue or white, quiet days spent in the city, laughing too loudly in cafes and whispering endearments while wandering the streets and long nights in their queen size bed, the city lights winking coyly at them until the wee hours of the morning.
When he says it out loud, though, it just sounds absurd.
“Maybe when we’re both retired, but even then…It wouldn’t be
the same. That isn’t who we are,” Fernando says, biting his lip pensively.
“I’d like that to be us, though,” David breathes.
He leans in to kiss Fernando’s throat, his heart clenching at the soft sigh that falls from Fernando’s lips.
Neither of them wants to say it, but they both know it could never be that way. Even retired, the news would ruin their legacy forever, taint everything they worked so hard to win for their country.
Making heroes of liars and damning, humiliating, and ridiculing honest men for telling the truth.
That’s just how the world is, though, David tells himself bitterly.
So the string of hotel rooms will continue, the frantic breathing and heavy looks in the locker room, the constant fear of being ruined forever.
“This modern love breaks me.”