exercise a little caution - xavi fic
exercise a little caution
xavi/villa
disclaimer: fuck all the canon
~12400
15 word fic: By the time Xavi had got used to the idea, it was already too late.
This was a big personal project for me. When I came into the fandom I wanted to read something that explored the problems for a gay footballer coping with keeping his private life private, but this is just not that fic, because David Villa happened. Anyway, I find Xavi fascinating and I am horrible invested in his character here. This is the point to say: I have used a lot of artistic licence with the canon here.
I could never have finished this or made it someway decent without the_wild_son who read it over and over despite everything and who is more intelligent about it than me. Thanks also to heartequals for being absolutely brutal about it early on and for calling it 'maudlin' ♥
It feels like the end of something, but Xavi wants it to be a beginning. It’s a long time coming and in the end the arguments get too tired, too dead-ended. He and Elsa have been together for coming on six years. Xavi doesn’t remember what it’s like not to have her around, and he doesn’t really want to.
It’s mutual; Xavi doesn’t even remember who starts the conversation, or who says the final words a week later. There’s a dismal inevitability about break-ups that reminds Xavi of managers sacked and teammates sold: no one likes it, but no one is moving forward without it.
Except Xavi doesn’t really move forward. He spends more time at his parents’, because it’s easy. He avoids his friends for a little while through laziness mostly. He can’t summon the energy to tell all these people who care about him that yes, his relationship has ended, but, no, he isn’t distraught, just tired, a little sad, and maybe unsure of what comes next. He doesn’t want to see the uncertainty of their reactions and to talk through his feelings or their feelings or anything really. So he stays with his parents sometimes, and when he feels like he needs to talk about it, he talks to Elsa, because you can’t just forget the one person with whom you’ve shared every important moment of the last five years.
It’s going to be okay, he thinks, but he isn’t interested in figuring out the details of how.
“What will you do with the house?” they ask, and Xavi doesn’t know, so he fends them off and goes to training. “You can move back here, if you need to,” they say, and Xavi doesn’t know but he doesn’t want to move out. “Maybe you need some space,” they say, and Xavi doesn’t need some space, he needs his space. So he goes home, and three months later that’s where he is, still. There is South Africa, and there are holidays, and then there is the start of a new season. There is the intention to move, but not the inclination.
When he and Elsa finish, Andrés is there and he, despite everything, supports Xavi. “I’m fine,” Xavi tells him, almost laughing, because Andrés has gone through so much, too much, and now he asks Xavi if he is okay.
“Andrés,” he says, looking directly at him. “It’s fine. We’re fine.”
But Andrés smiles and grips Xavi’s arm, he keeps asking anyway and Xavi appreciates it more than he is aware at the time.
David arrives at the club and it’s strange because it’s not strange. It’s a little bit like national training, and a little bit like David has always been there. Xavi likes David. He’s fun and intelligent and even-keeled. Maybe he won’t ever love Barcelona the way some of them do, but he loves football in the same way so Xavi is happy, more than happy, with the signing.
David being there every day makes him realise too how well they get on. They have the same sense of humour, and David makes Xavi laugh in a way that the others don’t. He bends over laughing in training, his cheeks hurting, and no one else is finding it as funny but Xavi doesn’t care. David kind of laughs at him and with him at the same time and Xavi likes it.
Then of course David is like a dream on the pitch and so everyone else likes it too.
The season has barely started; they’ve only played one game and they come out of it with flying colours. In the dressing room a few days later, the mood is buoyant. They’re getting dressed and the place is a mess, boots and discarded clothing strewn across benches. At least three people are laughing loudly and the rest are raising their voices to compete.
Victor is hanging around Andrés, distracting him as only Victor can, and in the gaps where Andrés is busy with buttons and laces and re-packing his bag, Victor turns to David.
“What are you doing this afternoon?” he says, “Want to come for lunch with us?”
David declines. “It’s dedicated father time,” he says. “Patricia has an appointment, so I get to spend some time just me and the girls.”
“That’s a fair excuse,” Victor says. “We’ll let you off. It’s nice to have more family men in the squad, boosting the numbers.
“Since some people,” he says, stressing the second word and in no subtle way leaning across David to Xavi, “Are intent on letting the side down.”
He puts a hand to the back of Xavi’s head and pushes forward gently. It’s fond and friendly and Victor can get away with it through the years of familiarity. Xavi pays him little attention, only smiles and says, “Yeah, I’m sorry I let you down, Victor.”
Victor moves over and wraps both arms around him. “That’s okay,” he says, cheek pressed to Xavi’s. “You’re cool enough on your own.”
He lets go and gravitates back to Andrés. “Plus,” he says, “We need all your concentration on the pitch. Don’t want any girls distracting you. Look how Andrés has been ever since he got engaged. Shocking. Only one world cup winning goal. It’s pathetic.”
Andrés elbows him in the ribs. Trapped in the middle, David is grinning at his kitbag throughout the exchange. He looks up and catches Xavi’s eye, and they share a smile because the memory of that goal is still fresh. David’s smile makes his eyes crease up at the corners.
“Where are you taking them?” Xavi says, when Victor is distracted again by Andrés, fussing over who will drive.
“I don’t know,” David says. “Any suggestions?”
They spend more time together than they have before. On the plane and on long bus journeys they sit together and share ipods and food, and they don’t always talk a lot. They go for lunch a couple of times a week too and that’s when David talks. He asks Xavi about his family and his life and they talk about the times they have played together, stories they remember from national training camps. Xavi feels funnier around David; David laughs at him, a lot, almost as much as he makes Xavi laugh, and Xavi doesn’t even get self-conscious about it. David looks funny when he laughs.
David’s in his room one morning. They’re getting ready to leave the team hotel and Xavi has left packing till the last minute as usual. He’s glad that he doesn’t sprawl out over hotel rooms like some of them do, possessions scattered everywhere. He may only start to pack with five minutes to go, but he’s neat about it.
David’s ready, suitcase propping the door open and a satchel slung across his chest. He’s yawning obnoxiously and Xavi is laughing at him until it starts him yawning too.
David is fiddling with everything that Xavi dumped on the dresser: playing with keys, opening Xavi’s wallet and laughing at his driver’s licence. Xavi doesn’t even bother. He knows he looks like a dork in it. It’s eight years old.
Xavi has photographs in his wallet, a collection of varying size. It’s sentimental, but it makes Xavi feel good when he’s travelling all the time.
“Can I?” says David, holding them up and raising his eyebrows at Xavi. Xavi shrugs, sure.
“This your sister?”
Xavi looks up and nods. David smiles and carries on.
A minute later he remarks, “It’s nice that you and your girlfriend - I mean, your ex - it’s nice you still get on.”
“Yeah, well. It’s not like it ended terribly, you know. We just wanted different things.”
“Yeah?”
Xavi shrugs again, focused on packing. He’s not really minded to go into detail. Eventually David just lets a breath out slowly, taps the photos a couple of times on the surface to line them up and replaces them in the wallet.
David asks him about Elsa, where others let it lie. Where Xavi’s friends stop at asking how he is, David will lean in, will ask if it’s okay at home - when does Xavi think Elsa will start seeing someone again - when does Xavi think he might start seeing someone again?
Xavi doesn’t know. He doesn’t tell David that maybe it’s more complicated than that. With only a little awkwardness, he tells David what he tells the media: that he has football to focus on, that he never gave his relationship the attention it deserved before so what would be different this time? He will wait, for sure, until he retires.
David laughs at him, of course. “When will you retire?” he says. “You’ll be our Pep, you’ll be Barcelona for as long as you’re still breathing.”
And when Xavi looks at him, David just smiles. “You’re not serious,” he says. “You think you’ll retire, don’t you.”
Xavi doesn’t - he thinks he will - he just keeps looking at David because he doesn’t know what he thinks.
“Maybe I don’t want to do this forever,” he says.
David softens a little. “Okay,” he says. “‘Forever’ - maybe forever is too big a word anyway. Maybe you want to do it for a while longer. Maybe you’ll coach or manage ‘for a while’.”
Xavi feels dismay. David is right - what would Xavi do, if not football?
“Maybe I don’t want to be - known, forever.”
David looks at him and Xavi amends himself: “For a while,” he says, and David smiles, appreciates the joke.
“I know,” he says. “I know. I’m - I don’t like the children being in that.”
“I’m sure,” Xavi says, and they are quiet for a moment.
Then David leans back in his chair and kicks his legs out to the side. “So,” he says, and counts off on his fingers. “You want to retire, to leave the public eye.” He raises his eyebrows at Xavi, and Xavi nods, shrugs.
“You want to - I don’t know, maybe start a relationship, ‘find a wife’.”
Xavi barely pauses, then nods again. He fiddles with his glass, wiping the condensation down the sides. David counts off another finger.
“Then, let’s say, you’ve been out of the industry seven, eight years. You have two or three young kids, who are great, but in all honesty Xavi -” he pauses and waits for Xavi to look up at him again. “- Not very interesting at that age. There’s only so many times you can play princesses before you go crazy.”
Xavi smiles and David continues, “So your wife, she gets tired of you being in a bad mood, watching football all hours of the day because - “ he leans forward and points at Xavi. “You will still be watching football at all hours. If I know you at all...”
Xavi smiles properly this time, and shakes his head a little. David grins at him. “So she tells you to go do something with your life. You say one word to the board, they will pay you anything to come back. Coach the kids, coach the B team, coach the first team.
“You’ll be the second coming,” he says. “If Pep is our saviour - ”
He sits back in his chair again and Xavi laughs a little but has nothing to say. He doesn’t know if David’s right, not at all. David laughs, anyway. He seems not to expect a response. He taps his sunglasses against the table and looks at Xavi. “We’ll see,” he says, and calls the waiter.
Xavi and Carles make time these days. They are like two veterans, two curmudgeons who should by rights be on a bench somewhere - on the sea wall, smoking and talking about the good old days. They laugh about it, and the rest of the team laugh at them. So they make time, to sit and talk.
Carles comes over on a Tuesday. Xavi makes dinner and they eat it outside; it’s dark already, a late meal even for them and the rapidly falling darkness of late September. Elsa strung lights around their yard a few years ago and miraculously they still work.
They talk of the team and then the others, Xavi tells Carles what Iker told him last time they spoke, and they talk about captaincies.
Carles is mild-mannered and he never pushes any conversation. Xavi likes this about him. He relaxes around Carles.
“I have something to ask you,” he says, cautiously off-hand.
“Sure,” Carles says, and shakes more pepper onto his food.
“Do you - and the others, do you ever - are you offended, that I don’t really talk about myself much?”
It’s not exactly what he wanted to say, but he thinks it will do.
Carles takes a moment. Then, “I wouldn’t speak for others usually,” he says, “But Xavi - in this instance I can say with some surety that no one, no one is offended.”
Xavi makes a noncommittal noise and turns over his food.
“We’re friends,” Carles says. “I would never ask you for more than you give me.”
“Thank you,” Xavi says, and means it. Carles smiles at him.
“What brought that on?”
Xavi shrugs and lets out a sigh. “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess just with new people joining the team, you know.”
He hears it back and knows it’s too apparent who he is talking about. He is sure that Carles will tell him not to worry, but Carles doesn’t, and when Xavi looks up, Carles is staring thoughtfully at his food. He takes a deep breath.
“Can I be honest?”
“Yes.”
“If you want your privacy, that’s your decision.”
It’s another overnight and Xavi is late packing again.
David is standing in Xavi’s room, hovering by the dresser. He is intently casual. “The dinner on Thursday,” he says, like they’ve been chatting about it. “Aren’t you bringing anyone?”
“No.” Xavi is repacking, taking clothes out of his suitcase, folding them and putting them back in place.
“Why not?”
Xavi shrugs. “I don’t know, because I usually bring Elsa, and she’s busy.”
David is frustrated. “But isn’t there-“
Xavi straightens up. David is scowling at him and Xavi is lost.
“Isn’t there what?”
“Why don’t you bring someone?”
And David is almost angry as he says it, angry at Xavi, and Xavi doesn’t get it.
“I just told you-“
David looks at him and then Xavi sees something else in his expression, something a little defiant and a little ashamed, like he knows he’s overstepping a line.
Xavi breaks off. There’s a long pause, and then he very deliberately turns away and continues to take clothes out, shake them and fold them and replace them in the case.
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
Xavi shakes out a towel. “Doesn’t what bother me?”
Behind him, David gives a loud, frustrated sigh. Xavi shakes his head a little, and carries on.
“Why won’t you talk about this?”
He turns around. David lifts his chin a little.
“David,” Xavi says. “I don’t know why you’re attacking me about this.”
“I’m-“ David laughs disbelievingly. “I’m not attacking you, I-
“Sorry,” he tries. “I didn’t- I didn’t mean it like that.”
Xavi frowns, and sits down on the bed.
“But seriously, it doesn’t bother you?”
There’s a long, long pause. Xavi sits on the bed and looks at David, and thinks about why David is there, and what he’s asking, what Xavi can give him. He rubs a hand across his mouth and just looks. Then, “No,” he says. He gets up, turns to his suitcase and closes the lid but doesn’t zip it up.
David is still looking at him. Xavi gives him a questioning look, and David opens his mouth.
“That’s all,” Xavi cuts across him, and David shuts it again. After a while, he shakes his head, shrugs, and leaves.
“Sorry,” he says when he reaches the door. Xavi makes a face like, never mind, and David closes the door behind him.
Xavi figured out his sexuality a long time ago. He questioned it, dealt with it, and put it behind him a long time ago. Perhaps in time it shifted, and perhaps by the end of his relationship he wanted something different, but the essentials - he knew the essentials.
To keep it separate from work was a conscious decision and Xavi was happy with it. His mother asked, once, soon after he and Elsa had finished everything, but Xavi had his mind made up.
“Was that the reason?” she had said. But it wasn’t. It was just part of a whole. Xavi wanted something different.
“It’s going to be hard,” she had said. “I’m afraid, it’s going to be hard on you.”
But of course he knew that. Xavi was old enough and had lived in the professional world long enough to know that secrets didn’t work like they did when you were little. Secrets were pieces of information you shared with people you trusted, who would share them with people they trusted, and so the information would go until it ended up somewhere it shouldn’t. The whole process was something to be measured and contained. He didn’t have secrets from anyone, he just restricted the flow of information.
Xavi avoids David for a week or so, is short with him in training and deliberately doesn’t meet his eye or give him an opening. He’s wary; he can’t predict David. He doesn’t know if David will push it and he feels unprepared for that.
Maybe everyone notices, Xavi isn’t sure, but Andrés is the one to approach him about it. They’re seated outside a restaurant. Xavi has his shades on and Andrés is squinting into the bright light.
“We’re fine,” Xavi tells him. “I’m not -”
And then he thinks, it’s Andrés, and if there’s anyone he can talk to without judgement, it’s Andrés. Maybe he’s young and maybe he doesn’t have any experience of what Xavi is experiencing, but Xavi doesn’t need advice.
“He said some things that I didn’t like,” he amends, “And I don’t know how to act like he didn’t.”
Andrés waits a while and then he says, “I’m sure he didn’t mean to offend you.”
Xavi frowns. “I don’t know actually.” It occurs to him that David may not have meant to offend, but perhaps meant to provoke.
Andrés bites his lip. “Well,” he says, cautiously, “I know I don’t know what it was about, but that’s not the David we know.”
But I’m not the Xavi David knows, Xavi thinks, and stares at his water glass, turning it in circles.
There’s a long silence and it feels uncomfortable. Xavi can feel Andrés wanting to speak. He wants to change the subject instead but he knows it will be obvious, and he hates it, hates avoiding the subject and deliberately pushing people away from conversations.
Xavi doesn’t like being private with his close friends on the squad. It feels like he is throwing their open friendship back in their faces. He only wants to keep his own life away from Barca: his own friends, his family, separate to his profession, ready for an inevitable life after football.
He rubs his hands across his face, tries to ease the muscles in his forehead. His mother tells him off about that. She tells him he is getting worry lines far before his time. Xavi feels like he’s an old man some days.
Andrés looks worried when Xavi looks up at him, and it makes Xavi feel bad. He smiles at Andrés and leans back in his chair. “It’s fine,” he says. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, I shouldn’t have,” Andrés says, and he smiles anyway.
For another few days Xavi debates how to handle it. He doesn’t want to bend, he wants to maintain his privacy, but the further he gets from the conversation the less it seems to matter. He misses David. He wants their easy friendship back. Xavi realises that he had got so used to David’s company that he feels a little cheated without it.
So three days after he talks to Andrés, Xavi texts David in the evening as he is preparing a meal. ’Would you like to go for lunch tomorrow?’
The reply is almost instant, ’Of course’, and Xavi is in a good mood for the rest of the night.
At lunch on a slow Thursday, waiting for the weekend to come sooner, David puts down his fork and looks across the table at Xavi.
“We always just go to lunch,” he says. “Let’s do something else.”
Xavi fights a smile. “Yeah? Like what?”
“Let’s drive somewhere. Into the country. We’ll take a picnic.”
Xavi grins this time. “I can’t imagine you having a picnic,” he says, and David acts shocked. “You in your designer trainers. They’ll get all dirty.”
“Shows how little you know,” David says, and they laugh.
Xavi’s sister comes to pick him up from training one day. His car is in the garage and they’re going to a cousin’s wedding. There’s a few of them in the car park when she shows up, so she gets out of the car and he introduces her. She’s met Carles before but David is new.
“How are they treating you?” she says, and David grins, nudges Xavi with his shoulder.
“Oh I don’t know,” he says. “I mean they think they’re fucking superior culé bastards but apart from that...”
Xavi rolls his eyes, pushing back against David. “Well with that attitude,” he says, and leaves the threat hanging. It’s Carles who grabs David into a headlock and messes up his hair. David yells, scrabbling against Carles.
“We’ll beat it out of him,” Carles says. “It’s cool.”
He releases David and they’re all laughing.
Carles takes his leave after that, kissing Xavi and his sister on the cheek and giving David’s hair a final swipe. There’s a pause while they watch him leave and then readjust their stances, filling the empty space he leaves in the conversation.
David turns to them. “Going somewhere nice?”
She smiles. “Yes,” she says. “Our cousin’s wedding.” And David smiles back.
“You’re going like that?” he says, turning his attention to Xavi. He reaches out and fingers the t-shirt that Xavi came in.
“His suit’s in the car,” she says, and David smiles at Xavi, then back at her.
“Well have a good time,” he says. “It was nice to meet you.”
“David was nice,” she says later, much later, when all the wine has been drunk but the dancing is still going.
Xavi puts an arm around her shoulders. “Yes,” he says, “- and married. Also, stay away from footballers, I know them well enough to know you’re too good for them.”
She gives him a funny look, and they get pulled onto the dancefloor.
At the end of September Xavi’s brother turns 27 and he asks Xavi if it’s okay to invite a couple of their friends from the team. Xavi understands; they’ve been a part of his life since they were children and his brother is close to them too. So he says yes, and it’s fine, except when he’s with David a few days later he feels a little guilty, like he’s keeping it from him.
Maybe it’s because of this, that, sometime after that when they are talking about their plans for the evening, Xavi says that his family are having their usual Monday night get together, and why doesn’t David come?
Even as the invitation leaves his mouth he feels taken aback. He has never invited someone like that. Even David looks surprised.
His family don’t question it either, and Xavi gets the uncomfortable feeling that they are deliberately treating it like nothing out of the ordinary. He wants someone to point out the strangeness of it. He wants his sister to sit up and say, why David? You never invite your teammates here. Every week we have friends with us, but never your team. Why now, why David?
He only wants them to question it so that they can move on and accept it as an oddity, something that won’t happen again. He doesn’t have the answers, he would only shrug and tell them he doesn’t know.
But no one asks, and so Xavi just shrugs away his mother’s questions about David’s preferences instead until she gets tired of him and tells him to be a little more helpful. Then she sends him away from the kitchen and he retreats to the front porch, suitably chastised.
There’s a moment that evening: David is sitting across from Xavi, outside on the long wooden table that extends outwards in both directions to catch up errant cousins and uncles and friends who just happen to be passing. Xavi looks up from his plate and David is laughing, talking to his mother. He says something, a postscript to her story, and she puts a hand on his arm and laughs and laughs.
Something in Xavi reacts to that. It kicks out and suddenly he feels very far away from everything happening, like he is the only one not at the party. He’s sitting there in the middle of everyone, but he doesn’t feel like it.
Xavi doesn’t think his expression changes. He looks away. He puts his elbows on the table and rests his chin on his hands, and he turns away. More than anything he wants to be sitting on the other side, next to David, sharing that moment. It shakes him. He’s never felt isolated in his family before.
David finds him later, sitting slightly apart from his cousins as they argue it out as to who has the cushiest job. There’s no point in Xavi joining in, it will too obviously be him.
David sits down on his other side and puts an arm around his shoulders.
“Hey,” he says, “Life of the party.”
Xavi just rolls his eyes good-naturedly, and leans into David slightly.
After a minute he thinks he should say something, although it’s nice just to sit here with this new feeling of being closer to David than anyone else is. It’s a strange, childish emotion. Like he’s saying: look, here is my best friend, and none of you are allowed to be best friends with him.
“Are you having a nice time?”
David smiles. “I am,” he says. “I love your mother.”
Xavi laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “I could tell.”
He looks at David. “I think she likes you too.”
David’s smile gets wider, and he looks back at Xavi. “Yeah?”
Xavi lets his gaze slip away from David, but David keeps looking at him. There’s a pause, that stretches out to a gap, and Xavi feels a bit adrift again.
And then David says, “Hey, show me your room.”
Xavi walks him through the house, out towards the back where the bedrooms are. His is small, a single bed with the same red covers he had when he was young. “Here,” he says, gesturing like there’s a lot to take in. It’s not very interesting, but David edges past him and into the room.
He pulls the blinds back, looks out into the courtyard. It’s getting dark outside and there’s not much to see. Xavi watches him, not sure what to say about his room. He watches him place the blinds back into position, holding them so they don’t swing. David looks up, looks all around the room. He focuses on the teddy on Xavi’s pillow, smiles but doesn’t say anything. He focuses on the cupboard, where a few photos are still stuck, and old blue-tack marks where others used to be.
He gravitates back towards Xavi, still standing by the door, and crouches next to him to examine Xavi’s bookshelves.
Xavi leans against the door frame.
“There’s not-”
David looks up at him and laughs. “You still have videos,” he says, cutting Xavi off. “Do you also have cassette tapes?”
Xavi nods, resigned to the joke. “I know,” he says, “I’m stuck in the nineties.”
“You’re stuck in the eighties,” David says, “Never mind the nineties.” But he pulls a video out and reads the back.
“I had this!” he says. He turns it over in his hands, grins at it. He opens the case, closes it again, and then looks up, holds it out to Xavi. Xavi raises his eyebrows.
“Nineteen ninety-two?”
He hands it back to David and smiles. “You have blaugrana in your history,” he says, teasing, and David snorts. He doesn’t refute it though, and Xavi doesn’t expect him to. Some players, some teams, if you were a footballer - they transcended loyalties.
David runs his fingers lightly along the backs of the tapes, stopping occasionally to read a title. Once he pulls one out halfway and laughs to himself.
“What?” Xavi says, and David shakes his head, puts it back. Xavi can’t see what it was.
David stands up, takes a moment to rub his thumb across the brass plate on a small trophy and smile again. He looks at Xavi and his expression is fond and amused.
“Nice room,” he says, and Xavi shrugs. He thinks David is satisfied but David doesn’t leave, he sits on the edge of the bed instead and looks around again, then back at Xavi.
“I’m trying to imagine you in here,” he says, and it is oddly intrusive. Xavi doesn’t feel he can leave though, and instead he comes into the room, letting the door fall half-closed behind him. He pulls the chair out from his desk and sits opposite David, their feet brushing together when the chair turns of its own accord.
He takes his cue from David, and looks around the room. It does seem small.
David picks up the teddy and looks at it, smoothing out its woolly coat. He grins at Xavi. “What’s he called?”
Xavi makes a face.
“Pep,” he says, and predictably, David laughs.
“I don’t know why I asked.”
“I didn’t name him,” Xavi says truthfully, trying to regain some dignity, but David looks at him like he doesn’t believe him.
“Sure,” he says, and replaces the toy.
Xavi walks him to his car. It is dark outside but the light from the porch is enough to see by. David holds his keys in his hand and looks at Xavi. He feels almost uncomfortable, like David is expecting something of him.
“Thank you,” David says. “I’ve had a really good evening.”
“I know,” Xavi says, although that wasn’t what he meant to say. He feels off balance. “I mean,” he amends, “My family are nice, it’s hard not to have fun around them.”
David pauses for a second and then laughs and turns away. Xavi takes that moment to look properly at David and when David turns back to him, Xavi is caught out. David holds his gaze.
Stop it, Xavi wants to say. Like when he was younger and his sister would hover over his shoulder while he was working. Go away, stop bothering me.
David steps closer to him. “Okay,” he says, “I have to go.”
“Goodnight,” David says, and he reaches out to hug Xavi but before he does he kisses him, brief but sure, on his cheek. Xavi puts a hand on David’s back and tries to ignore every part of him that knows what this is.
Lunches turn into suppers, and David is at his house a couple of nights a week at least. They spend the evenings watching TV, eating in, talking. Sometimes Elsa is around, but after the first few times she doesn’t join them. Xavi understands, and thinks he would do the same. They have to leave each other space.
He can tell though, that she isn’t keen on David. She has met him before and is polite and friendly, amenable but not familiar. She makes non-committal noises when Xavi mentions him and enquires instead after other friends of Xavi’s.
Xavi doesn’t say anything, but he does feel a vague and childish urge to stand up to her, to go against her preferences. The same feeling he had as a teenager, wanting to show his parents that he wouldn’t always agree so easily with what they thought he should do.
It didn’t work, of course. As far as he was concerned they were pretty sensible; to rebel against them would have been to do something he didn’t even want to.
He feels a similar sense of foolishness when Elsa comes in from work and he and David are in the sitting room, David’s legs slung over his own, and they are both laughing about something stupid, laughing at the expense of one of the coaches. Elsa passes through with barely a nod and Xavi quietens. When David looks at him he shrugs in response.
Xavi is, and has always been, happy living in Terrassa. The first time David suggests that this is odd, Xavi bristles at the implicit criticism and refuses to discuss it simply by pretending David hadn’t said anything of the sort. “I don’t know what I think of this wine,” he says, and David lets it go.
Another time, at the end of an evening, David raises his arms above his head and stretches theatrically.
“Back in the car,” he says. “Back on the road.”
Xavi rolls his eyes and tries to cuff David round the back of his head. David ducks away laughing.
“Seriously,” he says, “Can’t you move just a little bit closer? Live in the suburbs or something?”
“It’s twenty kilometres,” Xavi says. “Seriously. Shut up.”
He almost says: ‘You don’t always have to be the one to come here,’ but then he remembers, and doesn’t.
“Put up or shut up,” he says, meaninglessly, and David snorts. He crowds into Xavi’s space, hands at his waist, and everything gets heated for a moment before he says, “Touchy,” and Xavi pushes him away.
Still, David keeps it at it.
Xavi lets his guard down one evening when they are sitting out on the back porch, the faint sounds of traffic and the crickets a background hum. Xavi is in a bad mood all day, then David comes over late, with wine, and Xavi throws caution to the wind. They duck out of the way, Xavi feeling a little like he’s hiding, and they stay up in defiance of training the next day.
He’s bored and frustrated and maybe a little bit drunk when he says it, staring out into the dark garden.
“Do you think I’m-”
Something flies across his face and he swats a hand at it.
“- I don’t know. Do you think I’m too old to be living here still?”
There’s a long pause and eventually Xavi looks at David, watches him think out an answer.
“No,” David says. “Not that - there’s no time one should leave their hometown.”
He takes a breath in and sits up slightly. “But,” he says, and looks directly at Xavi. Xavi sits up straight in mirror image and can feel the wine making his head move slower as he does so. “But - do I think that you could try somewhere else? Yeah.”
Xavi breaks into a smile and then a laugh.
“Very diplomatic,” he says, and David laughs too. “Hey,” he says, and puts his hand on Xavi’s knee. “Far be it from me to play the wild party guy. I’m as homely as you.”
Xavi grins a wry grin. “Yeah? You mean you aren’t going to take me clubbing if I move?”
“You got the wrong guy,” David says, his hand still on Xavi. “Try Barca B.”
Xavi puts in his face in his hands. “Don’t,” he says, “I’m still trying to pretend I never saw Thiago’s photos. There are some things you don’t want to know.”
David laughs again. “Old man,” he says, fondly. He squeezes Xavi’s thigh, once, and pats it twice before withdrawing his hand.
They sit in silence for a minute, and Xavi takes another sip before he decides he’s had enough.
“I think it would be good for you to move,” David says, and Xavi doesn’t feel as picked on as he thought he would.
He keeps it a secret for as long as he can, but when it comes down to it there is only one person whose opinion he really wants.
His mother and father come to three places with him and at each one Xavi feels out of his comfort zone. The estate agent smiles at him, professionally knowing, and Xavi smiles back but he just wants to say: why would I want to live here? Do you know me?
His parents know him but they don’t know who he thinks he might want to be, and they don’t understand, still, his abrupt decision.
So he corners David after practice. “I need your help,” he says, and David smiles up at him. He shuts his locker, picks up his washbag and bumps their arms together. “Yeah?” he says, “What can I do for you?”
They go back to the third house together, and David sits on the wide leather couch and looks around. He rubs a hand across the surface and stares at the cushions and Xavi just stands back, arms folded. The estate agent hovers discretely.
David looks at him. Xavi shrugs.
“What do you think?” he says. “Is it for me?”
It’s an effort even saying that. He knows it’s not for him. He just wants to see what David’s going to say, and whether David’s going to contradict him. He’s not sure how he’ll feel if he does.
David looks at the estate agent, and she smiles.
“Are these apartments popular?”
“Very,” she says, “Particularly with young professionals. It’s a very fashionable area.”
David smiles back at her. “What do you have that’s unfashionable?”
Xavi is disarmed.
He finds it on his own in the end, and it’s terrifying, and a betrayal, but he falls in love. It is almost hard to leave it, the first time. He goes back to Terrassa and it feels small.
“Do you think I’m making a mistake?” he says, and his mother tells him that it’s not a final decision, that he can always come back. It’s not what he wants to hear.
A long time goes by, anyway, drawn out as is the way of things, and slowed down, too, by his reluctance.
He walks around his town and it’s so comforting, and it’s a wrench to leave even to go to training, even when he knows he’s coming back, like every second spent out of the town is a waste. He goes back to the apartment and almost throws the whole thing until he stands before the windows again.
He thinks maybe he’s just buying the view, because he can’t imagine ever feeling at home in those big, empty rooms where everything is new and no one is around.
David is his first guest of course. Xavi has been moved in for a week and the furniture is there but the walls and surfaces are empty and Xavi doesn’t know where to begin. He’s never decorated on his own, never had only his own life to put on display. He opens a bottle of wine in his new kitchen and then he gives David the tour.
“It’s nice,” David says, looking around. “It’s- yeah.”
Xavi takes his time, wends his way between the settees and coffee table, and over to the corner of the room. “Turn the lights off,” he says. Then he pulls the blinds back.
David is visibly taken aback. He walks towards the windows, stopping when he is level with Xavi, and then he laughs, disbelievingly. Xavi keeps quiet. He feels like some of David’s amazement is transposed to him. He feels anticipation, and something like vertigo.
“Trust you,” David says. “Of course you only moved to Barcelona for this view huh?”
He grins at Xavi, making fun. Xavi laughs a little.
“Am I that transparent,” he says, and David steps a little closer. “Maybe,” he says. He puts a hand, warm and comfortable, at Xavi’s hip.
“Yes,” Xavi says, feeling off balance. It’s the wine, and the view, and David. “Yeah. I didn’t consider it, you know, that I might be able to-” he pauses, tries to collect his thoughts.
“Because you don’t see it enough, every day.”
“No,” Xavi says, even though David is teasing, and beside him David laughs softly and puts a careful hand to Xavi’s cheek. Xavi follows the press of his hand and turns to face him.
“I could never see it enough,” Xavi says, and David kisses him.
They stand before the Barcelona skyline with the city stretching out to the glow of the coastline and David kisses him in the middle of their conversation like it is nothing out of the ordinary.
Xavi breathes in, and feels his heart hammering in his chest, and carries on talking. He doesn’t know what he is saying; only that David is so close still.
He looks out at the lights and stops talking. He has what happens next laid out in his mind like a set piece. He will put his glass down, and turn to David, and say--
--but David kisses him again when Xavi turns to him and Xavi doesn’t want to tell David that they can’t. He wants to kiss David back, and step closer to him. To take David’s shirt off and close the blinds because the Barcelona skyline is right there, Camp Nou is right there.
“Stop thinking,” David says, and Xavi can’t, because that is who he is, but he gets a hold of David’s shirt in one hand and takes David’s glass in the other and they don’t close the blinds.
Continue reading
xavi/villa
disclaimer: fuck all the canon
~12400
15 word fic: By the time Xavi had got used to the idea, it was already too late.
This was a big personal project for me. When I came into the fandom I wanted to read something that explored the problems for a gay footballer coping with keeping his private life private, but this is just not that fic, because David Villa happened. Anyway, I find Xavi fascinating and I am horrible invested in his character here. This is the point to say: I have used a lot of artistic licence with the canon here.
I could never have finished this or made it someway decent without the_wild_son who read it over and over despite everything and who is more intelligent about it than me. Thanks also to heartequals for being absolutely brutal about it early on and for calling it 'maudlin' ♥
It feels like the end of something, but Xavi wants it to be a beginning. It’s a long time coming and in the end the arguments get too tired, too dead-ended. He and Elsa have been together for coming on six years. Xavi doesn’t remember what it’s like not to have her around, and he doesn’t really want to.
It’s mutual; Xavi doesn’t even remember who starts the conversation, or who says the final words a week later. There’s a dismal inevitability about break-ups that reminds Xavi of managers sacked and teammates sold: no one likes it, but no one is moving forward without it.
Except Xavi doesn’t really move forward. He spends more time at his parents’, because it’s easy. He avoids his friends for a little while through laziness mostly. He can’t summon the energy to tell all these people who care about him that yes, his relationship has ended, but, no, he isn’t distraught, just tired, a little sad, and maybe unsure of what comes next. He doesn’t want to see the uncertainty of their reactions and to talk through his feelings or their feelings or anything really. So he stays with his parents sometimes, and when he feels like he needs to talk about it, he talks to Elsa, because you can’t just forget the one person with whom you’ve shared every important moment of the last five years.
It’s going to be okay, he thinks, but he isn’t interested in figuring out the details of how.
“What will you do with the house?” they ask, and Xavi doesn’t know, so he fends them off and goes to training. “You can move back here, if you need to,” they say, and Xavi doesn’t know but he doesn’t want to move out. “Maybe you need some space,” they say, and Xavi doesn’t need some space, he needs his space. So he goes home, and three months later that’s where he is, still. There is South Africa, and there are holidays, and then there is the start of a new season. There is the intention to move, but not the inclination.
When he and Elsa finish, Andrés is there and he, despite everything, supports Xavi. “I’m fine,” Xavi tells him, almost laughing, because Andrés has gone through so much, too much, and now he asks Xavi if he is okay.
“Andrés,” he says, looking directly at him. “It’s fine. We’re fine.”
But Andrés smiles and grips Xavi’s arm, he keeps asking anyway and Xavi appreciates it more than he is aware at the time.
David arrives at the club and it’s strange because it’s not strange. It’s a little bit like national training, and a little bit like David has always been there. Xavi likes David. He’s fun and intelligent and even-keeled. Maybe he won’t ever love Barcelona the way some of them do, but he loves football in the same way so Xavi is happy, more than happy, with the signing.
David being there every day makes him realise too how well they get on. They have the same sense of humour, and David makes Xavi laugh in a way that the others don’t. He bends over laughing in training, his cheeks hurting, and no one else is finding it as funny but Xavi doesn’t care. David kind of laughs at him and with him at the same time and Xavi likes it.
Then of course David is like a dream on the pitch and so everyone else likes it too.
The season has barely started; they’ve only played one game and they come out of it with flying colours. In the dressing room a few days later, the mood is buoyant. They’re getting dressed and the place is a mess, boots and discarded clothing strewn across benches. At least three people are laughing loudly and the rest are raising their voices to compete.
Victor is hanging around Andrés, distracting him as only Victor can, and in the gaps where Andrés is busy with buttons and laces and re-packing his bag, Victor turns to David.
“What are you doing this afternoon?” he says, “Want to come for lunch with us?”
David declines. “It’s dedicated father time,” he says. “Patricia has an appointment, so I get to spend some time just me and the girls.”
“That’s a fair excuse,” Victor says. “We’ll let you off. It’s nice to have more family men in the squad, boosting the numbers.
“Since some people,” he says, stressing the second word and in no subtle way leaning across David to Xavi, “Are intent on letting the side down.”
He puts a hand to the back of Xavi’s head and pushes forward gently. It’s fond and friendly and Victor can get away with it through the years of familiarity. Xavi pays him little attention, only smiles and says, “Yeah, I’m sorry I let you down, Victor.”
Victor moves over and wraps both arms around him. “That’s okay,” he says, cheek pressed to Xavi’s. “You’re cool enough on your own.”
He lets go and gravitates back to Andrés. “Plus,” he says, “We need all your concentration on the pitch. Don’t want any girls distracting you. Look how Andrés has been ever since he got engaged. Shocking. Only one world cup winning goal. It’s pathetic.”
Andrés elbows him in the ribs. Trapped in the middle, David is grinning at his kitbag throughout the exchange. He looks up and catches Xavi’s eye, and they share a smile because the memory of that goal is still fresh. David’s smile makes his eyes crease up at the corners.
“Where are you taking them?” Xavi says, when Victor is distracted again by Andrés, fussing over who will drive.
“I don’t know,” David says. “Any suggestions?”
They spend more time together than they have before. On the plane and on long bus journeys they sit together and share ipods and food, and they don’t always talk a lot. They go for lunch a couple of times a week too and that’s when David talks. He asks Xavi about his family and his life and they talk about the times they have played together, stories they remember from national training camps. Xavi feels funnier around David; David laughs at him, a lot, almost as much as he makes Xavi laugh, and Xavi doesn’t even get self-conscious about it. David looks funny when he laughs.
David’s in his room one morning. They’re getting ready to leave the team hotel and Xavi has left packing till the last minute as usual. He’s glad that he doesn’t sprawl out over hotel rooms like some of them do, possessions scattered everywhere. He may only start to pack with five minutes to go, but he’s neat about it.
David’s ready, suitcase propping the door open and a satchel slung across his chest. He’s yawning obnoxiously and Xavi is laughing at him until it starts him yawning too.
David is fiddling with everything that Xavi dumped on the dresser: playing with keys, opening Xavi’s wallet and laughing at his driver’s licence. Xavi doesn’t even bother. He knows he looks like a dork in it. It’s eight years old.
Xavi has photographs in his wallet, a collection of varying size. It’s sentimental, but it makes Xavi feel good when he’s travelling all the time.
“Can I?” says David, holding them up and raising his eyebrows at Xavi. Xavi shrugs, sure.
“This your sister?”
Xavi looks up and nods. David smiles and carries on.
A minute later he remarks, “It’s nice that you and your girlfriend - I mean, your ex - it’s nice you still get on.”
“Yeah, well. It’s not like it ended terribly, you know. We just wanted different things.”
“Yeah?”
Xavi shrugs again, focused on packing. He’s not really minded to go into detail. Eventually David just lets a breath out slowly, taps the photos a couple of times on the surface to line them up and replaces them in the wallet.
David asks him about Elsa, where others let it lie. Where Xavi’s friends stop at asking how he is, David will lean in, will ask if it’s okay at home - when does Xavi think Elsa will start seeing someone again - when does Xavi think he might start seeing someone again?
Xavi doesn’t know. He doesn’t tell David that maybe it’s more complicated than that. With only a little awkwardness, he tells David what he tells the media: that he has football to focus on, that he never gave his relationship the attention it deserved before so what would be different this time? He will wait, for sure, until he retires.
David laughs at him, of course. “When will you retire?” he says. “You’ll be our Pep, you’ll be Barcelona for as long as you’re still breathing.”
And when Xavi looks at him, David just smiles. “You’re not serious,” he says. “You think you’ll retire, don’t you.”
Xavi doesn’t - he thinks he will - he just keeps looking at David because he doesn’t know what he thinks.
“Maybe I don’t want to do this forever,” he says.
David softens a little. “Okay,” he says. “‘Forever’ - maybe forever is too big a word anyway. Maybe you want to do it for a while longer. Maybe you’ll coach or manage ‘for a while’.”
Xavi feels dismay. David is right - what would Xavi do, if not football?
“Maybe I don’t want to be - known, forever.”
David looks at him and Xavi amends himself: “For a while,” he says, and David smiles, appreciates the joke.
“I know,” he says. “I know. I’m - I don’t like the children being in that.”
“I’m sure,” Xavi says, and they are quiet for a moment.
Then David leans back in his chair and kicks his legs out to the side. “So,” he says, and counts off on his fingers. “You want to retire, to leave the public eye.” He raises his eyebrows at Xavi, and Xavi nods, shrugs.
“You want to - I don’t know, maybe start a relationship, ‘find a wife’.”
Xavi barely pauses, then nods again. He fiddles with his glass, wiping the condensation down the sides. David counts off another finger.
“Then, let’s say, you’ve been out of the industry seven, eight years. You have two or three young kids, who are great, but in all honesty Xavi -” he pauses and waits for Xavi to look up at him again. “- Not very interesting at that age. There’s only so many times you can play princesses before you go crazy.”
Xavi smiles and David continues, “So your wife, she gets tired of you being in a bad mood, watching football all hours of the day because - “ he leans forward and points at Xavi. “You will still be watching football at all hours. If I know you at all...”
Xavi smiles properly this time, and shakes his head a little. David grins at him. “So she tells you to go do something with your life. You say one word to the board, they will pay you anything to come back. Coach the kids, coach the B team, coach the first team.
“You’ll be the second coming,” he says. “If Pep is our saviour - ”
He sits back in his chair again and Xavi laughs a little but has nothing to say. He doesn’t know if David’s right, not at all. David laughs, anyway. He seems not to expect a response. He taps his sunglasses against the table and looks at Xavi. “We’ll see,” he says, and calls the waiter.
Xavi and Carles make time these days. They are like two veterans, two curmudgeons who should by rights be on a bench somewhere - on the sea wall, smoking and talking about the good old days. They laugh about it, and the rest of the team laugh at them. So they make time, to sit and talk.
Carles comes over on a Tuesday. Xavi makes dinner and they eat it outside; it’s dark already, a late meal even for them and the rapidly falling darkness of late September. Elsa strung lights around their yard a few years ago and miraculously they still work.
They talk of the team and then the others, Xavi tells Carles what Iker told him last time they spoke, and they talk about captaincies.
Carles is mild-mannered and he never pushes any conversation. Xavi likes this about him. He relaxes around Carles.
“I have something to ask you,” he says, cautiously off-hand.
“Sure,” Carles says, and shakes more pepper onto his food.
“Do you - and the others, do you ever - are you offended, that I don’t really talk about myself much?”
It’s not exactly what he wanted to say, but he thinks it will do.
Carles takes a moment. Then, “I wouldn’t speak for others usually,” he says, “But Xavi - in this instance I can say with some surety that no one, no one is offended.”
Xavi makes a noncommittal noise and turns over his food.
“We’re friends,” Carles says. “I would never ask you for more than you give me.”
“Thank you,” Xavi says, and means it. Carles smiles at him.
“What brought that on?”
Xavi shrugs and lets out a sigh. “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess just with new people joining the team, you know.”
He hears it back and knows it’s too apparent who he is talking about. He is sure that Carles will tell him not to worry, but Carles doesn’t, and when Xavi looks up, Carles is staring thoughtfully at his food. He takes a deep breath.
“Can I be honest?”
“Yes.”
“If you want your privacy, that’s your decision.”
It’s another overnight and Xavi is late packing again.
David is standing in Xavi’s room, hovering by the dresser. He is intently casual. “The dinner on Thursday,” he says, like they’ve been chatting about it. “Aren’t you bringing anyone?”
“No.” Xavi is repacking, taking clothes out of his suitcase, folding them and putting them back in place.
“Why not?”
Xavi shrugs. “I don’t know, because I usually bring Elsa, and she’s busy.”
David is frustrated. “But isn’t there-“
Xavi straightens up. David is scowling at him and Xavi is lost.
“Isn’t there what?”
“Why don’t you bring someone?”
And David is almost angry as he says it, angry at Xavi, and Xavi doesn’t get it.
“I just told you-“
David looks at him and then Xavi sees something else in his expression, something a little defiant and a little ashamed, like he knows he’s overstepping a line.
Xavi breaks off. There’s a long pause, and then he very deliberately turns away and continues to take clothes out, shake them and fold them and replace them in the case.
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
Xavi shakes out a towel. “Doesn’t what bother me?”
Behind him, David gives a loud, frustrated sigh. Xavi shakes his head a little, and carries on.
“Why won’t you talk about this?”
He turns around. David lifts his chin a little.
“David,” Xavi says. “I don’t know why you’re attacking me about this.”
“I’m-“ David laughs disbelievingly. “I’m not attacking you, I-
“Sorry,” he tries. “I didn’t- I didn’t mean it like that.”
Xavi frowns, and sits down on the bed.
“But seriously, it doesn’t bother you?”
There’s a long, long pause. Xavi sits on the bed and looks at David, and thinks about why David is there, and what he’s asking, what Xavi can give him. He rubs a hand across his mouth and just looks. Then, “No,” he says. He gets up, turns to his suitcase and closes the lid but doesn’t zip it up.
David is still looking at him. Xavi gives him a questioning look, and David opens his mouth.
“That’s all,” Xavi cuts across him, and David shuts it again. After a while, he shakes his head, shrugs, and leaves.
“Sorry,” he says when he reaches the door. Xavi makes a face like, never mind, and David closes the door behind him.
Xavi figured out his sexuality a long time ago. He questioned it, dealt with it, and put it behind him a long time ago. Perhaps in time it shifted, and perhaps by the end of his relationship he wanted something different, but the essentials - he knew the essentials.
To keep it separate from work was a conscious decision and Xavi was happy with it. His mother asked, once, soon after he and Elsa had finished everything, but Xavi had his mind made up.
“Was that the reason?” she had said. But it wasn’t. It was just part of a whole. Xavi wanted something different.
“It’s going to be hard,” she had said. “I’m afraid, it’s going to be hard on you.”
But of course he knew that. Xavi was old enough and had lived in the professional world long enough to know that secrets didn’t work like they did when you were little. Secrets were pieces of information you shared with people you trusted, who would share them with people they trusted, and so the information would go until it ended up somewhere it shouldn’t. The whole process was something to be measured and contained. He didn’t have secrets from anyone, he just restricted the flow of information.
Xavi avoids David for a week or so, is short with him in training and deliberately doesn’t meet his eye or give him an opening. He’s wary; he can’t predict David. He doesn’t know if David will push it and he feels unprepared for that.
Maybe everyone notices, Xavi isn’t sure, but Andrés is the one to approach him about it. They’re seated outside a restaurant. Xavi has his shades on and Andrés is squinting into the bright light.
“We’re fine,” Xavi tells him. “I’m not -”
And then he thinks, it’s Andrés, and if there’s anyone he can talk to without judgement, it’s Andrés. Maybe he’s young and maybe he doesn’t have any experience of what Xavi is experiencing, but Xavi doesn’t need advice.
“He said some things that I didn’t like,” he amends, “And I don’t know how to act like he didn’t.”
Andrés waits a while and then he says, “I’m sure he didn’t mean to offend you.”
Xavi frowns. “I don’t know actually.” It occurs to him that David may not have meant to offend, but perhaps meant to provoke.
Andrés bites his lip. “Well,” he says, cautiously, “I know I don’t know what it was about, but that’s not the David we know.”
But I’m not the Xavi David knows, Xavi thinks, and stares at his water glass, turning it in circles.
There’s a long silence and it feels uncomfortable. Xavi can feel Andrés wanting to speak. He wants to change the subject instead but he knows it will be obvious, and he hates it, hates avoiding the subject and deliberately pushing people away from conversations.
Xavi doesn’t like being private with his close friends on the squad. It feels like he is throwing their open friendship back in their faces. He only wants to keep his own life away from Barca: his own friends, his family, separate to his profession, ready for an inevitable life after football.
He rubs his hands across his face, tries to ease the muscles in his forehead. His mother tells him off about that. She tells him he is getting worry lines far before his time. Xavi feels like he’s an old man some days.
Andrés looks worried when Xavi looks up at him, and it makes Xavi feel bad. He smiles at Andrés and leans back in his chair. “It’s fine,” he says. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, I shouldn’t have,” Andrés says, and he smiles anyway.
For another few days Xavi debates how to handle it. He doesn’t want to bend, he wants to maintain his privacy, but the further he gets from the conversation the less it seems to matter. He misses David. He wants their easy friendship back. Xavi realises that he had got so used to David’s company that he feels a little cheated without it.
So three days after he talks to Andrés, Xavi texts David in the evening as he is preparing a meal. ’Would you like to go for lunch tomorrow?’
The reply is almost instant, ’Of course’, and Xavi is in a good mood for the rest of the night.
At lunch on a slow Thursday, waiting for the weekend to come sooner, David puts down his fork and looks across the table at Xavi.
“We always just go to lunch,” he says. “Let’s do something else.”
Xavi fights a smile. “Yeah? Like what?”
“Let’s drive somewhere. Into the country. We’ll take a picnic.”
Xavi grins this time. “I can’t imagine you having a picnic,” he says, and David acts shocked. “You in your designer trainers. They’ll get all dirty.”
“Shows how little you know,” David says, and they laugh.
Xavi’s sister comes to pick him up from training one day. His car is in the garage and they’re going to a cousin’s wedding. There’s a few of them in the car park when she shows up, so she gets out of the car and he introduces her. She’s met Carles before but David is new.
“How are they treating you?” she says, and David grins, nudges Xavi with his shoulder.
“Oh I don’t know,” he says. “I mean they think they’re fucking superior culé bastards but apart from that...”
Xavi rolls his eyes, pushing back against David. “Well with that attitude,” he says, and leaves the threat hanging. It’s Carles who grabs David into a headlock and messes up his hair. David yells, scrabbling against Carles.
“We’ll beat it out of him,” Carles says. “It’s cool.”
He releases David and they’re all laughing.
Carles takes his leave after that, kissing Xavi and his sister on the cheek and giving David’s hair a final swipe. There’s a pause while they watch him leave and then readjust their stances, filling the empty space he leaves in the conversation.
David turns to them. “Going somewhere nice?”
She smiles. “Yes,” she says. “Our cousin’s wedding.” And David smiles back.
“You’re going like that?” he says, turning his attention to Xavi. He reaches out and fingers the t-shirt that Xavi came in.
“His suit’s in the car,” she says, and David smiles at Xavi, then back at her.
“Well have a good time,” he says. “It was nice to meet you.”
“David was nice,” she says later, much later, when all the wine has been drunk but the dancing is still going.
Xavi puts an arm around her shoulders. “Yes,” he says, “- and married. Also, stay away from footballers, I know them well enough to know you’re too good for them.”
She gives him a funny look, and they get pulled onto the dancefloor.
At the end of September Xavi’s brother turns 27 and he asks Xavi if it’s okay to invite a couple of their friends from the team. Xavi understands; they’ve been a part of his life since they were children and his brother is close to them too. So he says yes, and it’s fine, except when he’s with David a few days later he feels a little guilty, like he’s keeping it from him.
Maybe it’s because of this, that, sometime after that when they are talking about their plans for the evening, Xavi says that his family are having their usual Monday night get together, and why doesn’t David come?
Even as the invitation leaves his mouth he feels taken aback. He has never invited someone like that. Even David looks surprised.
His family don’t question it either, and Xavi gets the uncomfortable feeling that they are deliberately treating it like nothing out of the ordinary. He wants someone to point out the strangeness of it. He wants his sister to sit up and say, why David? You never invite your teammates here. Every week we have friends with us, but never your team. Why now, why David?
He only wants them to question it so that they can move on and accept it as an oddity, something that won’t happen again. He doesn’t have the answers, he would only shrug and tell them he doesn’t know.
But no one asks, and so Xavi just shrugs away his mother’s questions about David’s preferences instead until she gets tired of him and tells him to be a little more helpful. Then she sends him away from the kitchen and he retreats to the front porch, suitably chastised.
There’s a moment that evening: David is sitting across from Xavi, outside on the long wooden table that extends outwards in both directions to catch up errant cousins and uncles and friends who just happen to be passing. Xavi looks up from his plate and David is laughing, talking to his mother. He says something, a postscript to her story, and she puts a hand on his arm and laughs and laughs.
Something in Xavi reacts to that. It kicks out and suddenly he feels very far away from everything happening, like he is the only one not at the party. He’s sitting there in the middle of everyone, but he doesn’t feel like it.
Xavi doesn’t think his expression changes. He looks away. He puts his elbows on the table and rests his chin on his hands, and he turns away. More than anything he wants to be sitting on the other side, next to David, sharing that moment. It shakes him. He’s never felt isolated in his family before.
David finds him later, sitting slightly apart from his cousins as they argue it out as to who has the cushiest job. There’s no point in Xavi joining in, it will too obviously be him.
David sits down on his other side and puts an arm around his shoulders.
“Hey,” he says, “Life of the party.”
Xavi just rolls his eyes good-naturedly, and leans into David slightly.
After a minute he thinks he should say something, although it’s nice just to sit here with this new feeling of being closer to David than anyone else is. It’s a strange, childish emotion. Like he’s saying: look, here is my best friend, and none of you are allowed to be best friends with him.
“Are you having a nice time?”
David smiles. “I am,” he says. “I love your mother.”
Xavi laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “I could tell.”
He looks at David. “I think she likes you too.”
David’s smile gets wider, and he looks back at Xavi. “Yeah?”
Xavi lets his gaze slip away from David, but David keeps looking at him. There’s a pause, that stretches out to a gap, and Xavi feels a bit adrift again.
And then David says, “Hey, show me your room.”
Xavi walks him through the house, out towards the back where the bedrooms are. His is small, a single bed with the same red covers he had when he was young. “Here,” he says, gesturing like there’s a lot to take in. It’s not very interesting, but David edges past him and into the room.
He pulls the blinds back, looks out into the courtyard. It’s getting dark outside and there’s not much to see. Xavi watches him, not sure what to say about his room. He watches him place the blinds back into position, holding them so they don’t swing. David looks up, looks all around the room. He focuses on the teddy on Xavi’s pillow, smiles but doesn’t say anything. He focuses on the cupboard, where a few photos are still stuck, and old blue-tack marks where others used to be.
He gravitates back towards Xavi, still standing by the door, and crouches next to him to examine Xavi’s bookshelves.
Xavi leans against the door frame.
“There’s not-”
David looks up at him and laughs. “You still have videos,” he says, cutting Xavi off. “Do you also have cassette tapes?”
Xavi nods, resigned to the joke. “I know,” he says, “I’m stuck in the nineties.”
“You’re stuck in the eighties,” David says, “Never mind the nineties.” But he pulls a video out and reads the back.
“I had this!” he says. He turns it over in his hands, grins at it. He opens the case, closes it again, and then looks up, holds it out to Xavi. Xavi raises his eyebrows.
“Nineteen ninety-two?”
He hands it back to David and smiles. “You have blaugrana in your history,” he says, teasing, and David snorts. He doesn’t refute it though, and Xavi doesn’t expect him to. Some players, some teams, if you were a footballer - they transcended loyalties.
David runs his fingers lightly along the backs of the tapes, stopping occasionally to read a title. Once he pulls one out halfway and laughs to himself.
“What?” Xavi says, and David shakes his head, puts it back. Xavi can’t see what it was.
David stands up, takes a moment to rub his thumb across the brass plate on a small trophy and smile again. He looks at Xavi and his expression is fond and amused.
“Nice room,” he says, and Xavi shrugs. He thinks David is satisfied but David doesn’t leave, he sits on the edge of the bed instead and looks around again, then back at Xavi.
“I’m trying to imagine you in here,” he says, and it is oddly intrusive. Xavi doesn’t feel he can leave though, and instead he comes into the room, letting the door fall half-closed behind him. He pulls the chair out from his desk and sits opposite David, their feet brushing together when the chair turns of its own accord.
He takes his cue from David, and looks around the room. It does seem small.
David picks up the teddy and looks at it, smoothing out its woolly coat. He grins at Xavi. “What’s he called?”
Xavi makes a face.
“Pep,” he says, and predictably, David laughs.
“I don’t know why I asked.”
“I didn’t name him,” Xavi says truthfully, trying to regain some dignity, but David looks at him like he doesn’t believe him.
“Sure,” he says, and replaces the toy.
Xavi walks him to his car. It is dark outside but the light from the porch is enough to see by. David holds his keys in his hand and looks at Xavi. He feels almost uncomfortable, like David is expecting something of him.
“Thank you,” David says. “I’ve had a really good evening.”
“I know,” Xavi says, although that wasn’t what he meant to say. He feels off balance. “I mean,” he amends, “My family are nice, it’s hard not to have fun around them.”
David pauses for a second and then laughs and turns away. Xavi takes that moment to look properly at David and when David turns back to him, Xavi is caught out. David holds his gaze.
Stop it, Xavi wants to say. Like when he was younger and his sister would hover over his shoulder while he was working. Go away, stop bothering me.
David steps closer to him. “Okay,” he says, “I have to go.”
“Goodnight,” David says, and he reaches out to hug Xavi but before he does he kisses him, brief but sure, on his cheek. Xavi puts a hand on David’s back and tries to ignore every part of him that knows what this is.
Lunches turn into suppers, and David is at his house a couple of nights a week at least. They spend the evenings watching TV, eating in, talking. Sometimes Elsa is around, but after the first few times she doesn’t join them. Xavi understands, and thinks he would do the same. They have to leave each other space.
He can tell though, that she isn’t keen on David. She has met him before and is polite and friendly, amenable but not familiar. She makes non-committal noises when Xavi mentions him and enquires instead after other friends of Xavi’s.
Xavi doesn’t say anything, but he does feel a vague and childish urge to stand up to her, to go against her preferences. The same feeling he had as a teenager, wanting to show his parents that he wouldn’t always agree so easily with what they thought he should do.
It didn’t work, of course. As far as he was concerned they were pretty sensible; to rebel against them would have been to do something he didn’t even want to.
He feels a similar sense of foolishness when Elsa comes in from work and he and David are in the sitting room, David’s legs slung over his own, and they are both laughing about something stupid, laughing at the expense of one of the coaches. Elsa passes through with barely a nod and Xavi quietens. When David looks at him he shrugs in response.
Xavi is, and has always been, happy living in Terrassa. The first time David suggests that this is odd, Xavi bristles at the implicit criticism and refuses to discuss it simply by pretending David hadn’t said anything of the sort. “I don’t know what I think of this wine,” he says, and David lets it go.
Another time, at the end of an evening, David raises his arms above his head and stretches theatrically.
“Back in the car,” he says. “Back on the road.”
Xavi rolls his eyes and tries to cuff David round the back of his head. David ducks away laughing.
“Seriously,” he says, “Can’t you move just a little bit closer? Live in the suburbs or something?”
“It’s twenty kilometres,” Xavi says. “Seriously. Shut up.”
He almost says: ‘You don’t always have to be the one to come here,’ but then he remembers, and doesn’t.
“Put up or shut up,” he says, meaninglessly, and David snorts. He crowds into Xavi’s space, hands at his waist, and everything gets heated for a moment before he says, “Touchy,” and Xavi pushes him away.
Still, David keeps it at it.
Xavi lets his guard down one evening when they are sitting out on the back porch, the faint sounds of traffic and the crickets a background hum. Xavi is in a bad mood all day, then David comes over late, with wine, and Xavi throws caution to the wind. They duck out of the way, Xavi feeling a little like he’s hiding, and they stay up in defiance of training the next day.
He’s bored and frustrated and maybe a little bit drunk when he says it, staring out into the dark garden.
“Do you think I’m-”
Something flies across his face and he swats a hand at it.
“- I don’t know. Do you think I’m too old to be living here still?”
There’s a long pause and eventually Xavi looks at David, watches him think out an answer.
“No,” David says. “Not that - there’s no time one should leave their hometown.”
He takes a breath in and sits up slightly. “But,” he says, and looks directly at Xavi. Xavi sits up straight in mirror image and can feel the wine making his head move slower as he does so. “But - do I think that you could try somewhere else? Yeah.”
Xavi breaks into a smile and then a laugh.
“Very diplomatic,” he says, and David laughs too. “Hey,” he says, and puts his hand on Xavi’s knee. “Far be it from me to play the wild party guy. I’m as homely as you.”
Xavi grins a wry grin. “Yeah? You mean you aren’t going to take me clubbing if I move?”
“You got the wrong guy,” David says, his hand still on Xavi. “Try Barca B.”
Xavi puts in his face in his hands. “Don’t,” he says, “I’m still trying to pretend I never saw Thiago’s photos. There are some things you don’t want to know.”
David laughs again. “Old man,” he says, fondly. He squeezes Xavi’s thigh, once, and pats it twice before withdrawing his hand.
They sit in silence for a minute, and Xavi takes another sip before he decides he’s had enough.
“I think it would be good for you to move,” David says, and Xavi doesn’t feel as picked on as he thought he would.
He keeps it a secret for as long as he can, but when it comes down to it there is only one person whose opinion he really wants.
His mother and father come to three places with him and at each one Xavi feels out of his comfort zone. The estate agent smiles at him, professionally knowing, and Xavi smiles back but he just wants to say: why would I want to live here? Do you know me?
His parents know him but they don’t know who he thinks he might want to be, and they don’t understand, still, his abrupt decision.
So he corners David after practice. “I need your help,” he says, and David smiles up at him. He shuts his locker, picks up his washbag and bumps their arms together. “Yeah?” he says, “What can I do for you?”
They go back to the third house together, and David sits on the wide leather couch and looks around. He rubs a hand across the surface and stares at the cushions and Xavi just stands back, arms folded. The estate agent hovers discretely.
David looks at him. Xavi shrugs.
“What do you think?” he says. “Is it for me?”
It’s an effort even saying that. He knows it’s not for him. He just wants to see what David’s going to say, and whether David’s going to contradict him. He’s not sure how he’ll feel if he does.
David looks at the estate agent, and she smiles.
“Are these apartments popular?”
“Very,” she says, “Particularly with young professionals. It’s a very fashionable area.”
David smiles back at her. “What do you have that’s unfashionable?”
Xavi is disarmed.
He finds it on his own in the end, and it’s terrifying, and a betrayal, but he falls in love. It is almost hard to leave it, the first time. He goes back to Terrassa and it feels small.
“Do you think I’m making a mistake?” he says, and his mother tells him that it’s not a final decision, that he can always come back. It’s not what he wants to hear.
A long time goes by, anyway, drawn out as is the way of things, and slowed down, too, by his reluctance.
He walks around his town and it’s so comforting, and it’s a wrench to leave even to go to training, even when he knows he’s coming back, like every second spent out of the town is a waste. He goes back to the apartment and almost throws the whole thing until he stands before the windows again.
He thinks maybe he’s just buying the view, because he can’t imagine ever feeling at home in those big, empty rooms where everything is new and no one is around.
David is his first guest of course. Xavi has been moved in for a week and the furniture is there but the walls and surfaces are empty and Xavi doesn’t know where to begin. He’s never decorated on his own, never had only his own life to put on display. He opens a bottle of wine in his new kitchen and then he gives David the tour.
“It’s nice,” David says, looking around. “It’s- yeah.”
Xavi takes his time, wends his way between the settees and coffee table, and over to the corner of the room. “Turn the lights off,” he says. Then he pulls the blinds back.
David is visibly taken aback. He walks towards the windows, stopping when he is level with Xavi, and then he laughs, disbelievingly. Xavi keeps quiet. He feels like some of David’s amazement is transposed to him. He feels anticipation, and something like vertigo.
“Trust you,” David says. “Of course you only moved to Barcelona for this view huh?”
He grins at Xavi, making fun. Xavi laughs a little.
“Am I that transparent,” he says, and David steps a little closer. “Maybe,” he says. He puts a hand, warm and comfortable, at Xavi’s hip.
“Yes,” Xavi says, feeling off balance. It’s the wine, and the view, and David. “Yeah. I didn’t consider it, you know, that I might be able to-” he pauses, tries to collect his thoughts.
“Because you don’t see it enough, every day.”
“No,” Xavi says, even though David is teasing, and beside him David laughs softly and puts a careful hand to Xavi’s cheek. Xavi follows the press of his hand and turns to face him.
“I could never see it enough,” Xavi says, and David kisses him.
They stand before the Barcelona skyline with the city stretching out to the glow of the coastline and David kisses him in the middle of their conversation like it is nothing out of the ordinary.
Xavi breathes in, and feels his heart hammering in his chest, and carries on talking. He doesn’t know what he is saying; only that David is so close still.
He looks out at the lights and stops talking. He has what happens next laid out in his mind like a set piece. He will put his glass down, and turn to David, and say--
--but David kisses him again when Xavi turns to him and Xavi doesn’t want to tell David that they can’t. He wants to kiss David back, and step closer to him. To take David’s shirt off and close the blinds because the Barcelona skyline is right there, Camp Nou is right there.
“Stop thinking,” David says, and Xavi can’t, because that is who he is, but he gets a hold of David’s shirt in one hand and takes David’s glass in the other and they don’t close the blinds.
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