The Younger Man: A Novel

by Halle, Karina

  He doesn’t look impressed as he eyes me. “Thalia? Don’t let her catch you calling her a girl. She won’t take it lightly. And I think she’ll do just fine, once she adapts to us and how we are.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  He shrugs. “Sure, why not?”

  “Why did you hire her?”

  Mateo blinks at me. “You have a problem with her?”

  “Not at all. I’m just curious. It was a bold move. Pissed off the good doctor, that much is for sure.”

  “Perhaps I wanted to piss off the good doctor,” Mateo says with a smirk as he takes a sip of his whisky. “And Vera talked me into it. You know we needed someone after Pablo left. Vera said we could make history by hiring her, and she was more than qualified. So I did it.” He tilts his head, studying me. “I don’t have to tell you to leave her alone, do I?”

  “Leave her alone? I’ve barely spoken to her. In fact, I was planning on rectifying that tonight.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t.”

  I do.

  “I know you think you have no control over your charms, but you do. Try not to use them on her. Do not try and rectify anything. She needs to focus on her job, not some young hotshot player who keeps giving her the eyes.”

  “I have not given her the eyes.”

  I have.

  So what?

  “Besides,” I go on, “why aren’t you warning Rene about her? Or Luciano? She seems pretty captivated by him right now, he’s the captain, they’re around the same age…it makes sense.”

  “I have warned Rene about her already,” he says. “And I don’t need to talk to Luciano. He’s nearly as old as I am, and he knows to make the right choices. Don’t mistake his friendliness for something more. And don’t mistake her doing her job for something more either.”

  “Mateo, I’m appalled you’d even think of me that way,” I say before sucking the juice out of the lime and finishing the rest of my drink.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says as he walks back to the group.

  I follow.

  “Thought you guys left,” Luciano says as I sit back down.

  “No, but we’re leaving now,” Mateo says, hovering above Vera. He holds his hand out for her. “Sorry, Estrella, party is over.”

  She’s not going to like this.

  “What?!” Vera cries, mouth wide. “It’s only…it’s only…” She pulls out her phone and looks at it. “It’s only one a.m. We haven’t killed the night yet.”

  “No, because the night will kill us first. Come now.”

  Vera grumbles. “This is outrageous, I tell ya,” she says as she gets to her feet. She looks right at Thalia. “I’m so sorry we weren’t able to kill the night together.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll take your place,” I tell Vera.

  To which Mateo frowns at me, taps his finger beneath his eye, and says, “Ojo, Alejo. Ojo.”

  He’s watching me.

  Well, not if he’s going to bed like the old man that he is.

  “You’re in good hands, Thalia,” Luciano tells her. “We’ll show you the real Madrid. Vera is Canadian. She would lead you astray.”

  “Hey,” Vera scowls at him, though her annoyance quickly dissipates with a yawn. “You’re not Spanish either.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m Portuguese. It’s much better.”

  “Que te folle un pez,” I tell him.

  Luciano turns to Thalia. “But I speak perfect Spanish. I’ll translate. He says he hopes I get fucked by a fish.”

  “Goodnight, you guys,” Vera says loudly as they walk away. “I don’t have to tell you to behave, do I?”

  “No, Mama,” I tell her sarcastically. She sticks her tongue out at me in response. I’ve always liked Vera. She keeps Mateo young.

  I watch as the two of them disappear and then turn my focus back to Thalia. “Please don’t feel the need to leave just because they did.”

  She gives me a quick smile, her lips shining like a piece of candy. “Usually when the boss goes home, it’s a sign for you to go home.”

  “That’s not the way it works in Spain,” I tell her. “You follow your heart, your passion, not orders.”

  Her brows raise. “I see. The passion for staying out late.”

  “Passion for anything,” I say, my voice growing husky. “What you feel from your heart, what you feel from your soul, it always comes first.”

  “Listen to yourself, Alejo,” Luciano chides me with a roll of his eyes. “You’re acting like a Spaniard straight out of a mail order catalogue.”

  “Want me to tell you to go fuck a fish again?”

  “No, but I am going to get something other than champagne,” he says, picking up an empty bottle and wincing at it. “What can I get you, Thalia?”

  “I still have some left,” she says, waving her glass that’s half full. “And I should probably call it a night.”

  I can tell she wants to stay though.

  “What can I get you, Thalia?” Luciano repeats.

  She stares up at him, and I can see the war in her head over wanting to do the fun thing or the right thing, not realizing they are both the same thing. “Another glass of champagne, if you’re offering.”

  “Champagne or Cava? You’re in Spain. You want to do things properly?”

  She laughs. “Okay. Cava, por favor.”

  “Ah, she knows Spanish,” Luciano cries out merrily, doing a little jig. “Watch her, Alejo, she’ll be fluent in no time. Maybe she’ll be telling you to go fuck the fish, huh?”

  I watch as he leaves. “Again, I must apologize for his language. A captain should know better.” Then I get up and sit down right beside her on the couch, closer than Luciano was.

  She stiffens at my approach, her hands on her thighs, ballet-pink nails digging slightly into her jeans. Nervous, perhaps.

  “Is this too much?” I ask her, studying her face closely. “I figure we’ll be working so much more intimately than this.” I pause, licking my lips. “I can hear you better this way.”

  I don’t think I’ve been this close to her yet. I can count the faint freckles across her nose, the glitter in her dark eyeshadow. Her eyes — brown with slashes of faint green, like buds trying to break their way through spring soil — are wary of me and afraid to meet mine, especially at this distance. But I don’t back off. I want to see how far I can push it with her.

  Finally she tilts her head to meet my gaze, and I catch a whiff of her perfume. Something soft that brings to mind fresh sheets and morning sunshine. In my head I get a vision of tangled limbs, and my balls tighten in response.

  “Would you sit this close to your other therapists?” she asks, dead-on. Determination flits on her brow, her chin raised slightly in defiance like she’s daring me to challenge her.

  I smile. “If you haven’t noticed, we Spaniards are very, how do you say, touchy feely. It’s something you’ll have to get used to.”

  She blinks at me and then nods, breaking our gaze. “Duly noted.”

  She sips her champagne.

  “May I ask you something?” I say, leaning in an inch, my voice dropping low.

  Her delicate throat bobs as she swallows. “What?”

  “Are you happy to be here?”

  Surprise washes across her brow. “In Madrid? Of course.”

  “Claro,” I repeat. “But I mean with the team.”

  She clears her throat. “Yes, of course. Why do you ask? Do I look like I don’t want to be here?”

  “Well, you do look like you don’t want to be here right now. But I’ll give you a pass on that. I can be intimidating.”

  A gorgeous, full laugh escapes her and she looks at me, trying not to smile by pressing her lips together. I feel like I should be insulted. “You’re not intimidating,” she says. “You’re just a football player.”

  “I’m one of the best football players in the world,” I tell her.

  “Maybe on your team, and you’re one of them.” />
  I stare at her, surprised she doesn’t agree with me. “You’ve never watched me in a game, have you?”

  “I have. You don’t think I watched a million Real Madrid matches before I came here? Besides, I’ve seen you train all week.”

  “So you’ve been watching me, then.”

  “It’s my job to watch you,” she says. “My job.”

  “Sí, it’s your job. But do you like your job here? Or was it better in Manchester?”

  Something dark and troubled comes over her eyes, not quite sadness, but something more complicated. It only makes me want to dig deeper. She has to watch me, then I want to know her.

  “It’s too early to decide,” she says, taking another sip of her drink.

  “But you’ve been making the comparisons in your head all week.”

  “Well, how can I not? You’d feel the same if you were playing for a team and got transferred over here.”

  “I suppose,” I muse. “But you know I’ve been with Real Madrid since I was eighteen. I joined the academy at fifteen. This team, this place, it’s all I’ve known. All I want to know, to be honest with you.”

  “You wouldn’t be traded elsewhere, even for all the money in the world?”

  “Not for all the money in the world.” I am adamant. “Madrid is my home. This team is my home.”

  She adjusts herself on the couch, tucking a leg under the other, her dangerous-looking high heel pointing outward like a weapon. It puts a little more distance between us, but she looks comfortable as she assesses me. “I was going over your records this week.”

  “Oh really? Are my school grades in there, too? I was awful at math.”

  “It says you were born in Valencia.”

  “This is true. But when I left, I left. Madrid is my home.”

  “And your parents? Do they live there still?”

  My expression grows tight. “My father is dead. My mother and my brother live in my house, near Valdebebas. This is home now for them. It’s a…what is the saying…a fresh start.”

  Her face crumples and she lowers her drink. “Oh, I’m so sorry about your father.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Surprised it doesn’t say that in the records. What else did they say?”

  “That you’re prone to injuries due to you doing stupid shit.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “Does it really say that?”

  She shoots me a small grin. “No. But I got the gist of it.”

  I shrug. “What can I say, I like to make risky moves.”

  She stares at me for a moment, her smile faltering into something else, something cautious. “I believe it,” she says as she lifts the glass to her lips.

  My head tilts as I observe her, words dancing on my tongue, propelled by a boldness that never seems to cease. “You know. If you weren’t my therapist, if we didn’t know each other as we do and met each other tonight for the first time, at this bar, you would be going home with me. That’s a guarantee.”

  She coughs, nearly spitting out her drink, 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 to call it a night. I ask Thalia if she needs an escort home and she looks completely terrified at the idea, assuring me she called an Uber for her short ride back to her apartment.

  A million things are going through my head as my private driver picks me up. I’m thinking about Thalia. I’m thinking about the game on Saturday. I’m thinking about Luciano saying I need to step it up in order to make the national team. I know he meant it in jest, but even so it’s enough for me to tell the driver to take me to Valdebebas instead of home.

  I’ll sleep there this week. Time t
o lose myself to the game and become a slave to the season.

  Chapter 5

  Thalia

  “So how are things? I mean, really?” Helen asks me over the phone as Manuel navigates the morning traffic. It’s early, really early, but the air is already thick with smog and humidity, and the day looks to be a scorcher.

  “Good, good,” I tell her absently. I haven’t talked to her on the phone since I got here, so when I saw she was calling this morning and I had the time, I decided to pick up. I owed her that much. I feel like I’ve been a shitty friend, even though I’ve been so busy.

  “Good but not great,” she points out.

  I laugh. “I don’t know, it’s only my second week. There are growing pains. Our first game of the La Liga season is tomorrow so I’m heading to the office really early to get a head start. I’ll stay overnight there too.”

  She sighs with an air of nostalgia. “I remember those days, when you first started at Man U. You put in all the extra hours, always with so much to prove. Did you ever end up proving it?”

  I’m caught off-guard by the question. “What do you mean?”

  “You know. You were always bristling about with a chip on your shoulder about it being a man’s game. I hope you’ve gotten over that notion.”

  That notion?

  My lips flap together for a moment while I gather my words. “It’s not something to get over, Helen. It’s a big deal to hold this position, for any team, whether you’re male or female. But yes, I have to work harder to prove myself. Not to me. I know I’m good and I hold my own. I know how to read the body, and I know what my hands are capable of. Maybe my intuition about people’s bodies is deeper than most, I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean I have to stop proving myself to everyone else. It’s a man’s game and a man’s world, and I’ll be damned if I become someone people dismiss because of my gender.”

  “Okay, okay, calm down. Sheesh, Thalia. You’re going to have a heart attack first thing in the morning, feminista.”

  I am breathing hard and my heart is pounding. I guess I get riled up about these things but it really rankles me when Helen starts pushing those buttons. She loves taking on the debate that women don’t deserve to be paid as much as men because we’re the ones that have children.