The Younger Man: A Novel

by Halle, Karina

  “Mierda,” he swears, and I glance up at him. He’s staring at his knee in horror. “It doesn’t feel as bad as it looks.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I tell him. “This massage will help drain it, move that inflammation out of there where it’s gathered. That’s all we’ll do for today. Start you off slow. You’ve been through a lot.”

  I get a bit of coconut oil out of the jar and start to gently massage his upper thigh so that it will relax the muscles around the patella. “Does this feel okay?” I ask.

  “Sí, sí, sí,” he says quickly, his eyes closed as he rests his head on the table.

  A silence comes over us as I concentrate on his leg and eventually make my way to the knee, massaging up in a J-like motion.

  Alejo hisses, his features contorted.

  “Sorry,” I say, letting my hands fall away. “Too rough?”

  “Normally I like it rough,” he says through gritted teeth. He opens his eyes to look at me and gives me a strained smile. “But right now, perhaps a gentle touch.”

  I skirt over the innuendo, even though I’m secretly glad to hear it. Means that he’s feeling well enough to joke.

  I mean, these are just jokes, right?

  “Tell me if the pressure is too much.”

  I continue to work at it, my touch light.

  “Did you see me score?” he asks after a few minutes go by.

  “Of course. It was a beautiful goal.”

  He laughs. “It was an ugly goal. A scrappy goal.”

  “But a scrappy goal is still a goal.”

  “Sí, sí,” he says. “And I know if I don’t make the scrappy goals, I won’t make any. You take the shots at all costs.”

  “Kind of sounds like a life motto.”

  “Sí. Absolutely. We’ve both taken all the shots at all the costs.”

  I pause for a moment before I begin again. “You say that about me like you know it.”

  “Claro,” he says, glancing at me briefly. “Of course you have. You are here. You don’t end up here without a lot of risk.”

  I shrug lightly. “I guess so.”

  “Then again, I don’t know anything about you. Perhaps you’d care to enlighten me.”

  I give him a quick smile. “You want to know about the skeletons in my closet?”

  He frowns and gives me a funny look. “You have skeletons in your closet? Are you serious?”

  I let out a small laugh. “Not literally, silly.”

  “Bobo.”

  “What?”

  “Bobo is Spanish for silly. It’s a silly word, no? So now you know more Spanish. You might even know a sentence.”

  I’m already smiling because I can answer him back. “Claro, bobo.”

  He grins at me, and the pain and fatigue on his tanned face seems to melt away.

  It’s a smile that has that same effect on me.

  I’m melting inside.

  Just a little.

  Just enough.

  “You’ve got it,” he says. “So back to these ghosts. No ghosts. Just a saying?”

  “It’s skeletons,” I tell him. My voice sounds tiny, maybe because my heart is going fast and my stomach is doing backflips. I need to get my body back under control ASAP. I clear my throat, focus on the massage. “It means that you have something to hide in your past.”

  “And do you? Have something to hide?”

  Nothing that he would understand.

  “No,” I tell him. “That doesn’t mean life has been easy.”

  “Sí, but that’s the same for everyone. No one has it easy, even those that pretend or seem like they do.” He tilts his head as he studies me. I can feel his intense gaze on my face, scrutinizing me.

  “You have something, though,” he says. “I would like to know more about it.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Something you keep close to your chest. Something that makes you sad.”

  I can feel my throat getting thick. “Well,” I say, exhaling slowly. “I did just go through a painful divorce.”

  “And a public one,” he says.

  I look at him sharply. “When we met, you didn’t know I was divorced.”

  “No, but I do now, and I’ve been reading about you.”

  Oh god. For some reason I don’t want Alejo knowing anything about that. It’s so embarrassing.

  “Uh yeah?” I say uneasily. “What about?”

  “What a cabrón your ex-husband was.”

  I can’t stick up for Stew. At one point I would have tried to, just because that’s what marriage does to you. It makes you become a part of someone until you can’t recognize yourself anymore, until all you see is the other person. In good marriages, that’s a godsend. In bad marriages…it makes you realize you’ve lost yourself and you have no idea how to get your soul back.

  For the longest time, I stood up for Stew, even with all his awful, awful wrongdoings, because he was still a part of me. He was a man I loved, and love doesn’t just disappear because someone decides not to love you back. It still survives and exists until you stop feeding it. But that can take time. For me, I don’t think it truly stopped until I signed those divorce papers.

  That’s when I stopped feeding it.

  “He is a cabrón,” I admit.

  “I would never do that to you,” Alejo says, his voice impassioned. He’s gazing at me in such a way that I actually believe him.

  “I think all men say that,” I say.

  He looks a little ticked off. “I should be happy you’re referring to me as a man, not a boy.”

  “Sorry,” I tell him. “I guess I’m still bitter.”

  His brow relaxes. “I don’t blame you. When did you know?”

  “That he was cheating on me?”

  “Sí.”

  “Which time?” I ask with a sour laugh.

  “I don’t know.”

  I can see Alejo is just curious, and I’m sure he already read all about it, so there’s no use pretending it didn’t happen.

  “He, uh, I guess started up an affair two years ago. She’s a social media star. You know, one of those influencer types. Much younger than me.”

  “But not as beautiful,” he interjects.

  I try not to feel flattered. “I suspected something, but I wasn’t sure what. It didn’t feel like he was away or sneaking around, but we were both so busy and you forget to check in with each other. Maybe it was my own fault too, you know? I was lazy about our marriage and we had been dealing with a lot of problems already that I had been trying so hard to bury…maybe I neglected him.”

  “Don’t blame yourself.”

  “I do. But it depends on the day of the week. I keep circulating the blame. Anyway, I should have caught on and I didn’t.”

  “But the media did, yes?”

  “Si,” I tell him. “The media did. A bit later. And then two of his affairs came out and that was…” I trail off, closing my eyes momentarily.

  It was something I didn’t think I would survive.

  Not just the fact that my beloved had cheated on me.

  That made me feel small and insignificant.

  Made me disposable and weak.

  It broke my fucking heart.

  No, it wasn’t just all of that.

  It’s that the media, those wonderful tabloids that had left me alone for most of my career, suddenly decided I was to blame. They couldn’t blame Stew, they loved Stew. They couldn’t attack the man in charge of their beloved team, so they attacked me.

  I was dragged through the fucking mud.

  I exhale loudly. Taking my time to calm my heart. Then I glance at Alejo shyly.

  “I guess the silver lining is he’s back with the woman from the first affair. So I suppose it wasn’t for nothing. He broke my heart but…”

  Alejo purses his lips and thinks for a moment. “Fixed your vision.”

  I consider that and nod at the awfully poetic phrase. “Yes. He broke my heart and fixed my vision.”


  “And yet,” Alejo says thoughtfully, “that’s not where all your sadness comes from.”

  “Maybe the sadness is from realizing I never really got the life I wanted,” I tell him. The words surprise me, and I wish I could take them back, but it’s the truth. The cold, hard truth I’ve never wanted to admit to anyone, not even myself.

  I start wrapping his knee back up in the brace and shrug. “Anyway, fun time is over. We’ll continue another, better conversation next time.” I finish it up and step back, hands on my hips. “Need assistance going to your room?” I jerk my head to the crutches stacked in the corner.

  He slowly sits up and carefully swings his legs over the side, frowning at me.

  “This has upset you. For that, I am sorry.”

  “It hasn’t upset me,” I tell him. “I’m just tired. I’m sure you are too. Did Dr. Costa give you your orders for the rest of the evening?”

  He’s still watching me. His gaze is alive and probing, and I want nothing more than for him to drop this and let me go, to be free. Let me breathe. I never meant to confess so much to him and I feel like our relationship is now lopsided.

  Then he nods. “Sí. He did.”

  He cautiously gets off the table and then walks slowly across the room.

  “You sure you don’t want support?” I ask him.

  “Are you offering yourself or is it a crutch?” he asks, stopping by the door.

  Offer yourself.

  Offer yourself!

  “A crutch,” I say meekly.

  “Then I can manage by myself.” He pauses. “Que tengas una buena noche, Thalia.”

  Chapter 8

  Alejo

  “Eat the flan, Alejo,” my mother says to me, her face stern but I know it’s two seconds from crumbling if I don’t in fact eat the flan.

  “Mama,” I tell her. “You know I have to watch what I eat.”

  “Well, you don’t have to watch now. You’re a cripple!”

  This is how dinner has been every night this week.

  Even though I spend a lot of time at Valdebebas, since the injury happened I’ve been at home more often than not.

  To be honest, I missed my family. They are everything to me. And when you’re feeling not your best and you’re hurt and injured, you need to be around the ones you love and the ones that love you.

  So I’ve been at home, having homecooked meals every night, meals I’m sure Mateo would be appalled at, full of meat and sugar and fat. My house is huge and sprawling and worth millions, located not too far from Valdebebas, so naturally I invited my mother and brother to live with me when I bought it a few years ago. They had been living in Valencia still, though I had gotten them a nice house as soon as I was able to.

  But I needed them here.

  When you lose a father, you realize how important the rest of your family is.

  How you have to keep them near you, always in your sight.

  Although you can’t be that close.

  My mother lives in a guest suite with her own entrance, and my brother lives in the guest house, which is separated between the main house by a pool and a small football pitch, so we all have as much privacy as we need, which is good when I’ve brought women by in the past, or had Luciano or Rene over for the odd drink.

  My mother slides the flan toward me. “Eat it.”

  Armando giggles. “Yeah, eat it.”

  I roll my eyes at him. “You stay out of this. You’re supposed to be on my side.”

  Armando shrugs and spoons his own flan into his mouth. He’s a good kid, though he does have some troubled tendencies. He’s not been doing well at school, and my mother is trying to figure that out, which results in a lot of fighting. I think perhaps he needs to be on some sort of regulating medication for his mind but my mother is old-fashioned and doesn’t believe that men need that sort of help.

  Not that she would go for that for herself either.

  After my father died, things drastically changed for all of us, and we all did our best to bring ourselves out of it. I became the father figure of the house, which made things more difficult when I went off to the Real Madrid Academy. I swore to myself I would make it worth it, that I would become the best so that we could have the best life. I could make things right even without our father.

  And yet, none of us have really talked about our father since his death.

  I know it’s not normal.

  I know it’s not healthy.

  It’s just been swept under the rug, like he never existed and it never happened, and I fear for the day that the dam breaks and it all comes out, as necessary as it is.

  For me, it’s already coming. Not a raging river, but in trickles. I suffer from nightmares from time to time, of seeing his body hanging there, the way his ankles looked so weak, the thin, ratty socks he was wearing.

  If I think about it too long and too hard, I start to die a little inside.

  But I’ve got bigger things to worry about than what happened in the past.

  I sigh and take a spoon to the flan. I have a sweet tooth that I don’t like to let loose, and I know one bite will ruin me.

  Shit. It’s good.

  “Well?” my mother asks as she stands there, leaning on the kitchen table like a cop in the middle of an interrogation, eyeing me suspiciously. “Do you like it?”

  “I love it,” I tell her, and proceed to eat the rest up. I swear the sugar does something to my brain.

  “You’re going to get fat now,” Armando says smugly.

  “You wouldn’t want that,” I tell him. “Who is going to pay for this house if I get fat and can’t run and score goals?”

  “I think you have enough money to last forever,” Armando says.

  He’s not wrong. I’m already worth twenty-five million dollars. Luciano is close to a billion. There’s a lot of money to be made here, while you still have a chance to make it.

  It’s also something I try not to think about.

  “I won’t be injured forever,” I tell him. “Each week I’ll be doing more training, enough so I can eat all of Mama’s food.”

  “Good,” she says, sitting down with her own flan and a cup of coffee. “You sure you don’t want coffee?”

  I wave the offer away. “A good night’s sleep is all I need.”

  For now, I’ve been taking it fairly easy. During siesta, when the players are resting in between the training sessions, I go over to Valdebebas and Thalia works on me.

  I have to admit, it’s the best part of the day.

  Just seeing her face.

  That smile.

  Having her healing hands on me.

  Slowly peeling away her layers and discovering who she really is.

  I still don’t know the source of her sadness. I know the source of her anger and bitterness, that’s no surprise. But I want to know the parts she keeps hidden from me.

  I want her to know that I’m someone she can invest in. Someone she can trust.

  A friend if nothing more.

  But I would be completely lying if I say I don’t want something more.

  She’s made it clear on more than one occasion that she’s not interested in me, and I know for a fact it’s against the rules of the club.

  She’s off-limits.

  The forbidden fruit.

  And I’m terrible at pretending I don’t want a taste.

  “I think I’ll put on a record,” I tell my mother and brother. “Maybe some jazz for the evening.”

  “Ugh,” Armando makes a noise of disgust.

  That’s exactly why I’m putting on the jazz.

  I get up, try to slide my chair back with my leg, and —

  FUCK.

  The pain hits me like a sledgehammer.

  “Shit!” I cry out, immediately clutching my knee. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  “What is it?” my mother asks, getting up so fast she spills coffee on the table. She comes around to me while Armando grabs a cloth and wipes it up.

&n
bsp; “My knee,” I say, breathless. “I must have twisted it wrong or something.”

  “Did you dislocate it again?” my brother asks, coming to my side and putting my arm around his shoulder to help support me.

  “No. I don’t know. Maybe. Is that possible?”

  “I don’t like this, Alejo,” my mother says. “Maybe you will need surgery.”

  “No,” I tell her, jaw clenched. “I’ll be fine.” I take in a deep breath, trying to stifle the pain. Slowly, I stick my leg out and move it from the knee in a kicking motion. “See. I would not be able to do that if it were dislocated.”

  “You need ice. You need to lie down. Armando, take your brother to the couch,” my mother commands.

  Armando leads me over to the couch in the living room, and I lie down. He takes a giant pillow and carefully tries to prop it up. I grit my teeth at the discomfort.

  Eventually my mother comes back out of the kitchen with a bag of frozen peas and hands it to me. I apply it to the top of my brace, not about to undo it. I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to get Thalia to take a look at it. I just hope I haven’t done any major damage.

  “Alejo,” my mother chides me, sitting on the corner of the couch. “You should be more careful.”

  “With getting up from dinner?”

  “Yes. Please. You’re all we have.”

  I swallow hard and glance at her. My mother has never looked young for her age. Taking care of us when we didn’t have much money, dealing with my father, before his death and after, worrying about us boys constantly, it took a toll on her from day one. I’ve only seen color on her face and joy in her eyes in the last year or so, and I would do anything to keep that growing brighter.

  I don’t want her to worry about me.

  “I’m going to be fine,” I assure her. “I promise you. This is just part of the game.”

  She grumbles something and looks away.

  I’m lying there on the couch with the frozen peas on my knee, Armando sifting through the vinyl collection by the record player, when headlights flash outside the door.

  “Who the hell is that?” I ask. We have gates that are operated by code and not that many people know it.