Taking Care of House and Home
Title: Taking Care of House and Home
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Zlatan Ibrahimović / Helena Seger
Word Count: 7,050
Summary: “Come on,” Helena says. Zlatan turns his head just far enough to see that she’s dressed and all made up, just putting in her earrings; she looks sexy as fuck but he buries his face back into the pillow anyways. “Get up. I have to get to work and someone needs to take the boys to school.”
A/N: For meretricula, who wanted post-retirement Zlatan, househusband extraordinaire.
He wakes up with a slap to his ass.
“Come on,” Helena says. Zlatan turns his head just far enough to see that she’s dressed and all made up, just putting in her earrings; she looks sexy as fuck but he buries his face back into the pillow anyways. “Get up. I have to get to work and someone needs to take the boys to school.”
“No,” he says, and the only way he can tell that she hears it is by her laugh.
“Yes,” she says, and he can tell by her voice that she is still smiling. “You’re a kept man now, Ibrahimović. Do as you’re told.”
He tries not to, but he can’t help but smile at that; he hopes she can’t tell by the set of his shoulders or the curve of his spine, but he knows that she probably can. She’s fucking smart as hell like that, and knows him better than anyone else on the planet.
“Five minutes,” he says.
“Two minutes,” she tells him, and then she leans forward, kisses his shoulder blade before leaving for work.
Zlatan gets out of bed twelve minutes later. He’s only wearing black boxer briefs, so he throws on an old pair of Milan training shorts and heads down the hall, scratching at the skin just below his belly button while he walks. He stops to bang on Maximilian’s door.
“Let’s go, Maxi!” he yells. “Time to get up.”
“No!” Maxi yells back, and Zlatan feels oddly proud of that. Maxi’s going to school-there’s no fucking doubt about that-but Zlatan likes that Maximilian takes after him, that he’s loud and opinionated even at ten years old.
“Come up with a better argument and get back to me,” he says through the door, and then he keeps walking down the hall to wake Vincent.
Vincent’s different from him and Maxi; he’s not loud, but he’s smart as a whip when he does talk, and better at football than either of them were when they were eight. He thinks Vincent’s going to be really fucking impressive when he grows up, and that all of Europe better take note of that now or be forever trying to catch up.
“Yo, V,” Zlatan says. He knocks on the door twice before popping his head in and flipping on the lights. “Time to get up.”
“Okay,” Vincent says, and he kicks off his sheets, lies starfish on the bed as Zlatan keeps going, heads to the kitchen.
Trustor and Hoffa are lying at the foot of the stairs, both of them looking up at him with their tongues lolling out of their mouths like they know he’s going to feed them eventually and so he might as well get it out of the way and do it now. He pauses to roughly pet Hoffa with his foot-lazy, he thinks, so fucking lazy-and when he steps over them, they follow him to the kitchen. Their dog bowls are still empty and on the kitchen counter, and Zlatan thinks for a second that Helena could’ve fed them on her way out, and then he feels like an asshole for it.
“Yeah, good morning to you, too,” he says to them, but they don’t really react, just keep staring, watching him as he goes to grab the newspaper and pour himself a cup of coffee. When he does finally give in and feed them, it’s mostly to get them to go away and leave him alone.
By the time the boys finally stumble downstairs, Vincent running his fingers over Trustor’s back as he walks by, it’s ten minutes later than usual. Maximilian’s shirt is on backwards, and Zlatan figures that they probably spent half the night up playing the new FIFA; for a second he thinks of not calling them out on it, but then he figures that he has to make sure they know that there’s no way they’ll ever be able to pull one on him.
“At least tell me you were playing with one of my teams,” he says.
Maxi just looks at him like he’s an idiot and says, “Dad,” but Vincent smiles because he’s knows he’s been caught and, sliding into his chair, says, “AC Milan.”
Zlatan laughs and says, “Good choice,” and then folds up his newspaper. “Scrambled eggs?” he asks. “Or cereal?” but he already knows the answer and is reaching into the cabinets for bowls before they even answer.
Zlatan pours two glasses of orange juice while they pour themselves their own cereal, and then he sits down with them at the table. He watches the way they both shovel the cereal into their mouths, hunched over their bowls like little animals, and while Helena would straighten them out if she was there, Zlatan can’t help but feel a strange sense of pride over the whole situation; they’re the best thing he’s ever done with his life, and yet they can’t eat cereal unless their faces are 10 centimeters away from the bowl. It’s all strangely funny, and makes Zlatan’s heart hurt with happiness.
“Did you pack your homework?” he asks because he refuses a repeat of last week, when he had to drop their homework off at Young Ajax five minutes after he just dropped them off at Young Ajax.
“Well, I did,” Vincent says. His face is propped up on the heel of his palm and so it comes out slightly muffled, but Zlatan still hears the way Vincent stresses the I, and notices how Maxi kicks him under the table.
Zlatan turns to look at Maxi and raises one eyebrow. He says, “Maximilian, did you do your homework?” Zlatan can see it written all over Maxi’s face, how he’s weighing the pros and cons of lying, and so he adds, “Lie to me and I will end you.”
Maximilian pulls a face and finally says, “Everything but the math.”
“Okay,” Zlatan says, and he keeps his voice level, even, because he knows how his boys think and that’s scarier to them than shouting ever could be. “And why did you do everything but the math?”
Maxi doesn’t look at him, just brushes his long blond hair out of his face and says, “Footballers don’t need to know how to do any of that stuff.”
“You do if you want to count all the money you’re making,” Zlatan tells him.
Vincent pops into the conversation at that and says, “But he can already count to zero,” and that startles such a loud laugh out of Zlatan that Vincent starts laughing at his own joke, too, uncontrollable giggles that just make Maxi mad.
They get dressed after breakfast. Zlatan throws a shirt and some trainers on, and is ready to go in five minutes; the boys take a little bit longer, getting distracted by the things in their rooms and fighting over the toothpaste in the bathroom, but eventually they’re piling into the car, each of them with a school bag and a football bag and a pair of boots tied together at the laces. It makes Zlatan feel slightly nostalgic for his own playing days, even though he knows that going out on top was, for him, the only way to go.
“Got everything?” Zlatan asks, craning his head to look at them both in the back seat. “Seatbelts buckled?”
“Yeah,” Maxi says.
“Vincent?”
“Yeah,” Vincent says, and Zlatan nods to himself, puts the car into reverse and pulls out of the driveway.
“First day back to practice since your last match,” he says. “You guys excited?”
“Yeah, it’s gonna be so cool,” Maxi says. “Coach said he had someone filming the match and so we’re gonna watch part of it today and talk about what we did and everything.”
“Very cool,” Zlatan agrees.
“Super cool,” Vincent tells him.
“That’s what I meant,” Zlatan says, but judging by their faces, neither of them believes it.
A few minutes and one discovery of a hidden, half-eaten sandwich later, Zlatan pulls the car into the parking lot of Young Ajax. He thinks that it’s perfect how everything’s worked out, being able to move to the Netherlands for the kids, having the chance to give them an opportunity that Zlatan never had when he was growing up. He’s lucky Helena’s so fucking smart; she can work anywhere, and when the boys said football and Zlatan said Ajax, all she had to do was make a couple of calls. Zlatan doesn’t quite know what he did to deserve her, but he knows that he’s the only one who does, and that’s all that really matters, anyways.
He pulls the car over to the curb by the door and says, “Alright, everybody out!” Maxi and Vincent don’t hesitate, just grab their things and walk away, but before they can get very far, Zlatan has to holler out the window that Maxi forgot his boots in the back seat. After that, though, they walk towards the academy doors, to where all their friends are waiting. They don’t look back, and on one hand, Zlatan loves that, loves how independent they both are already, but on the other hand, they’re growing up, and it makes him feel old.
“Train hard, study hard, and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t be the best!” he yells out the window, mostly because that’s the kind of thing that fathers are supposed to do. The boys don’t seem to hear him.
He thinks, for a second, that this must be how Helena feels all the time, but he cuts his laugh short; Helena would have his balls if she knew he even joking thought of her as old.
Once the kids are off his hands, Zlatan goes to work out. It’s still early, although late enough that most people are at work, and so the gym is pretty empty. Helena had said that she thought it was pointless, setting up an in-home gym and then just paying for membership at some place fifteen minutes away, but there’s a difference between working out alone and working out by yourself, and after years of playing on a football team, Zlatan more than understands the difference. Helena doesn’t, not really, but she understands that there is one, even if she doesn’t really know what it is; she stops saying anything and sets up an automatic payment system for the membership, and Zlatan thanks her with his palms on the curves of her body.
Zlatan stays at the gym for about two hours, give or take, long enough for him to lift weights and run a couple of miles, and long enough for him to be covered in a layer of sweat that shows through his grey shirt. He misses football, though, and while running on the treadmill keeps him fit, doesn’t do anything to help that. For a second, he thinks about joining some sort of amateur league, just so that he can play again. He dismisses the thought, though, because even retired, Zlatan’s better than most of the professional players out there; playing with amateurs would be like playing with children, and Zlatan’s got two of his own for that.
His phone rings when he’s back in the car and halfway home, and Maxwell pops up on the screen. Zlatan answers it, and without even saying hello, says, “It’s been over a week, Maxwell, I thought you were breaking up with me.”
Maxwell laughs and says, “As if you’d let me.”
“As if you’d want to,” Zlatan shoots back, and the light he was waiting at turns green. “You’d never find someone better than me, anyways.”
“Not so sure,” Maxwell says. “You’re old now. Retired.” He whispers that last bit, like it’s a secret.
“Fuck off,” Zlatan says. “The fact that you’re so far away makes you cocky, but I can still kick your ass.”
Maxwell takes a deep breath like he’s going to defend himself, but then he just says, “I know,” and that makes Zlatan laugh. Out of all the people he’s ever met, he’s never met anyone else like Maxwell.
“So how’s it going?” Zlatan asks.
“Good,” Maxwell says. “Really good, actually. But I’ve just, um. I decided that this is going to be my last season. I mean, I haven’t told anyone yet, but my knee is still pretty messed up, and I’m like twenty years older than everyone else on the squad-”
“Twenty-three, actually,” Zlatan interrupts.
“Hey, you better watch it,” Maxwell says. “I get mad at you and then you have no friends.”
“Oh, ouch,” Zlatan says, and he turns the car onto his street.
“Anyways,” Maxwell continues, “the wife is pregnant, so.”
“What?” Zlatan says, and he pulls into his driveway, throws the car into park. “That’s awesome; congrats, man.”
“Thanks,” Maxwell says, and Zlatan suddenly wishes he was there with him.
“Shit,” he says. “Another little baby Maxwell.”
“I know,” Maxwell says, and he sounds so happy, so genuinely happy, that it’s hard for Zlatan not to feel the same.
“Well, you better name him after me this time,” Zlatan says. “Fair’s fair.” Neither of them bothers to mention that Maximilian’s name has nothing to do with Maxwell, because they both know that all Zlatan ever does is talk shit and mess around.
“So sure it’ll be a boy,” Maxwell jokes, and Zlatan’s ready for it, saw it coming a mile away.
“Well, men make men, Maxwell,” Zlatan says, “so you tell me. I will accept Zlatina, though.”
Maxwell laughs and Zlatan doesn’t bother telling him that he was serious because he’s not entirely sure if he was or not. They talk for another forty minutes and it doesn’t occur to Zlatan to get out of the car until after he’s hung up.
When he’s inside, Zlatan heads to the laundry room and takes off his gym clothes. He stands there naked and throws on a load of laundry, sorting through Maxi and Vincent’s dirty practice clothes and avoiding Helena’s delicates because she will kill him if he shrinks them or accidentally runs them through the wash with a chapstick or a piece of gum. Afterwards, he hops through a shower and thinks about everything he still has to do before he picks up the boys; it’s not too long a list, considering.
Zlatan towel-dries his hair once he’s out and throws on another pair of training shorts; he doesn’t bother with a shirt. It’s almost lunchtime, so he heads downstairs and pads barefoot through the kitchen to the fridge. Tiny bits of dry cereal stick to the bottom of his feet as he passes the kitchen table.
“You have got to be shitting me,” he says to himself, and upon closer inspection notices that there is about half a bowl’s worth of cereal on Vincent’s chair and on the floor around where he sits. “Trustor!” he calls. “Hoffa! Come on, cereal’s on the floor!”
He uses his toes to point out the cereal, but his dogs are useless; they sniff around but don’t eat anything, and decide instead to go back to sleep by the foot of the stairs.
So Zlatan does the only thing that he can do and goes to grab the broom, stopping to turn on the tv as he goes; there’s an old match on, an Ajax Classic, and Zlatan turns the volume up so he can hear it from the kitchen as he sweeps. It’s astounding, he thinks, how much of a mess an eight-year-old can make without anyone noticing.
For lunch, Zlatan makes himself a sandwich out of leftover chicken from the night before, and he eats it standing over the sink as Kluivert scores for Ajax in the eighty-fifth and Milan realizes that 1995 is not their year. He thinks, vaguely, that if he gets crumbs on the floor he just swept that he’ll lose it.
He texts Helena as something to do, and asks, Thoughts about dinner? He figures maybe he should go to the grocery store. He should take a cooking class; Helena’s wicked in the kitchen, but with her working, Zlatan’s usually the one who makes dinner, and that’s usually just the basics.
Helena writes back five minutes later. Late night for me here. These people are incompetent. Zlatan laughs even though it sucks that she won’t be home until after the boys are in bed.
He’s in the middle of texting her back, Well maybe when you come home we can- when his phone rings, and the screen says, Mino Raiola.
“Mino,” Zlatan says. “What’s going on?”
“Not much, just got off the phone with NIKE,” Mino says, and as he’s talking, Zlatan slides open the back door and lets the dogs out into the yard. “Apparently even though you’re retired, your brand of shirts and boots are still selling like crazy. They’re going to send you some mock-ups of some new stuff sometime next week, and we’ll talk about it.”
“Alright,” Zlatan says. “That sounds awesome.”
“Okay, great,” Mino says. “Listen, I gotta go, I need to go earn you some more money.”
Zlatan laughs, says, “That’s what I like to hear,” and Mino hangs up, just like that. Zlatan thinks that maybe getting Mino as his agent was the best professional decision he’s ever made; Mino gets stuff done.
It’s only later, when he’s eating an apple and watching Ajax beat Juventus four minutes into the 1973 European Cup Final, that Zlatan realizes he forgot all about the laundry and gets up to go switch loads. He holds the apple between his teeth, which he realizes a minute later is a bad idea, and goes through what’s left of Maxi’s juice-stained shirts and Vincent’s mysteriously ripped socks; he doesn’t quite understand how they manage to destroy clothing as quickly as they do, but they’re inventive about it, which keeps it interesting, at least. Honestly though, Zlatan’s just glad they’re still young, because he hasn’t figured out what the fuck to do once they start needing their sheets watched every other day.
Zlatan finishes doing the laundry and watching Ajax celebrate their third consecutive European Cup, and then suddenly it’s four o’clock and the boys need to be picked up. He grabs his keys and heads out, and drives with the windows open, his hair whipping his eyes as he speeds up. It’s only when the seatbelt starts rubbing uncomfortably that he realizes he forgot a shirt.
When he gets there, Maxi and Vincent are outside with a couple of friends, all of whom live in the Young Ajax housing system. Zlatan wonders, however briefly, if Maxi and Vincent would rather live there too, given the choice. He watches them laugh for a minute before leaning out the window and getting their attention by saying, “Car for Mister and Mister Ibrahimović.”
Zlatan gets out and helps with their bags, grabbing three of them with one hand and tossing them into the trunk; Maxi helps him with the fourth bag while Vincent tries to untangle his arm from the laces of both pairs of boots.
Once they’re all in the car and buckled up, Maxi tells him how great practice was and how lame class was and how he doesn’t have any math homework tonight so Zlatan might as well not even ask. Vincent speaks up every once in a while, laughing and talking about how Coach wouldn’t let them leave practice until they all managed to hit the crossbar with a football from just inside the box-a team-building exercise that Zlatan remembers from when he was a kid, too.
“Let me guess,” Zlatan teases, “you finished dead last?”
“No,” Vincent says, “I finished dead first,” and then he and Maximilian start bickering, arguing over whether or not he actually did hit the crossbar first.
“Well, what about scrimmaging?” Zlatan asks, figuring it’s better to interrupt the fight than wait until he’s at a red light and has to throw himself back there to break it up. “Did you guys get to scrimmage at all?”
“A little,” Maxi says. “You should have seen it, though-”
“No visitors allowed,” Vincent says, and he knows he’s being a smartass. Maxi hits him on the arm and Vincent hits him back, saying, “Stop it.”
“Hey,” Zlatan says. “Next person to throw a punch gets extra chores and I’m telling your mother.” They pull away from each other at that, and Zlatan thinks that he must have made a wrong turn somewhere if they’re more terrified of Helena than they are of him.
“I was just saying,” Maxi says, “that I scored I goal from outside the box.”
“Alright, my man!” Zlatan says, and he reaches into the backseat with one hand to give Maxi a low five. “And what about you, Vince? Anything exciting happen?”
“Oh yeah,” Maxi jumps in. “He scored this really good one off of a short corner.”
“Yeah?” Zlatan says, and he looks at Vincent in the rear-view; Vincent is looking out the window and so Zlatan reaches back again and tugs on Vincent’s leg. “Yeah?” he prompts again.
“Yeah,” Vincent says, and he laughs when Zlatan starts squeezing his calf.
“I knew it,” Zlatan says. “You can’t be an Ibrahimović and not be one hundred percent amazing.”
“Unless you’re Uncle Sapko,” Maxi says, and Zlatan says back, “Well, I mean-” but he doesn’t know how to finish the thought, and Vincent and Maxi just laugh at the crazy way he gestures with his free hand.
When they fall into a lull of silence as they reach the house, Zlatan figures that even though he and Helena agreed that the boys would live at home, he still kind of wants to know what they would rather. And so he says, “Hey, are you guys okay with living at home? I mean, you don’t miss out on too much every night, do you?”
“No, living at home is better,” Maxi says. “Otherwise we’d never see you and Mom.”
“Yeah?” Zlatan asks. “V?”
“Home is better,” Vincent agrees.
“Alright,” Zlatan says, and his heart flops at that. “Not that I was going to let you out of my evil clutches, anyways, but that’s good to know.” And it is good to know, because if they’re not happy then there’s no point to any of this.
He parks the car and watches Maxi and Vincent as they race to the front door, and he only feels a little bit bad when he has to remind them to come back and get their bags out of the trunk.
Inside, Maxi and Vincent throw their bags on the floor next to the door and then divebomb the couch.
“There are so many things wrong with this scenario,” Zlatan says from the doorway, and they both turn to look at him, a general expression of What? on their faces. “For starters, you’re covered in dirt and sweat and are laying all over my three thousand euro couch. So go shower. And while you’re at it, please be so kind as to remove your junk from my floor, and bring it to your room.” Maxi just groans at that, and so Zlatan says, “Maxi, how tall are you?”
“1.3 meters,” Maxi says; Zlatan knows that he only knows because they just had team physicals the other day.
“Great; I’m 1.95 meters,” Zlatan says, “and so if you don’t do exactly as I say, I’m going to squash you like a bug.”
“Okay,” Maxi says, and even though he’s trying to act miserable, Zlatan can see him fighting a smile.
Helena calls when Zlatan’s boiling water for spaghetti.
“Sorry,” she says, “I was going to call earlier, but things are really crazy today.”
“No worries,” Zlatan says, because really, after all the travelling and moving and him not calling that she had to put up with, Zlatan has no room to complain. “You gotta keep them in line, I get that. Maybe if you bring the flogger from our bedroom they’d be better behaved.”
Helena seems unimpressed at that and says, “But what use is it to me here when I’m at home and want to use it on you?”
The water starts to boil and so Zlatan wedges the phone between his shoulder and his ear, and as he dumps the box of pasta into the pot, he says, “I’m sure you’d find something else.”
“I’m very creative when I need to be,” Helena says, and Zlatan thinks, Fuck, and wishes she was there with him.
Vincent comes down the stairs then, his pajama shirt stretched out at the neck and his hair soaking wet. He says, “Is that Mom? Can I talk to her?”
Zlatan pauses and then says into the phone, “There’s someone here named Vincent who wants to talk to you. You don’t know any Vincents? I don’t know, blue eyes, blond hair, red pajama shirt?”
Vincent laughs and just says, “Da-ad,” drawn out into two syllables like that, and Zlatan hands the phone over before going back to heating up the sauce and popping some garlic bread into the oven. He’s not paying much attention, but after a while he notices that Vincent is speaking really quietly, saying things like, They let me do it again, and Yeah, and I’m way better than him. Zlatan has no clue what he’s talking about.
When Vincent hands him back the phone, Zlatan tells him, “Let your brother know that dinner’s in five minutes, okay?” and then to Helena, he says, “What’s up?” She knows what he means.
“Just don’t get mad,” she says.
“Mad? I’m not going to get mad,” Zlatan says, although almost every time he’s ever said that, it’s been a lie.
“Okay, well,” Helena says, “Vincent’s decided that he likes being a keeper more than he likes being a striker, and he’s too nervous to tell you.”
And Zlatan’s so confused at that, because Vincent is so good at being a striker, has great control and speed and aim. Vincent’s dynamite at being a striker.
“How does he even know he likes it? I mean, is he even any good?”
“Apparently they let him goal keep at practice, I don’t know,” Helena says. “Listen, I have to go, but we’ll talk about it tonight, okay? Don’t bring it up.”
“Okay,” Zlatan says. He doesn’t get it. Keeper? Vincent has a future at playing striker, and Zlatan doesn’t understand why he’d want to risk that for something that an even smaller amount of people get to do, and for something that Zlatan doesn’t know anything about and can’t help him with at all.
Maxi and Vincent come sprinting down the stairs and Zlatan doesn’t have any more time to think about it. Instead, he drains the spaghetti pot and tells Maxi to get them water and Vincent to take the bread to the table.
“Can we slurp the noodles?” Vincent asks when they’re sitting down. “Mom’s not here.”
Zlatan’s answer is to take his fork and knife, one in each fist, and bang them on the tabletop. In the deepest voice he can muster, he says, “This is a man house! We feast like kings and eat like men!” He thinks on it and then adds, in the same deep voice, “But first, we tuck napkins into our shirts!”
And they do, they listen to him in that respect, tucking napkins into their shirt collars in a sad attempt to prevent sauce stains. It probably won’t be very effective, but Zlatan will take all the help he can get.
They eat like that, slurping the spaghetti and laughing, the sauce getting everywhere, and it’s fun, just Zlatan and his boys and no rules except for the one about the napkin. He can’t imagine doing this every day, living every day without Helena at all, but for just one night it’s perfect, man time to be disgusting and laugh at fart jokes with his kids.
That’s why he doesn’t stand a chance when, as they’re cleaning up the dishes, Maxi says, “We want mohawks.”
And Vincent says, “Yeah, Dad, please.”
Zlatan just freezes, two dirty plates in his hands, and says, “What, now?” And that’s a horrible, terrible idea because Helena loves their long hair.
“Yeah,” Maxi says. “You have scissors, right? Please?”
And Zlatan stands there, looking back and forth between his two boys and their long, blond hair, and the way they’re looking at him like this is something that they really want, and he says, “Okay. But only if you clean up after,” because he is Zlatan Ibrahimović and he does what he wants, and what he wants is to give his boys mohawks.
He finishes cleaning and then grabs the things he needs, sitting Maxi on a kitchen chair, holding an electric razor in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other.
“I want it like this long on top,” Maxi says, and he shows Zlatan with his fingers, “and then like this short on the sides.”
“Alright, then, here we go,” Zlatan says. He turns on the razor and moves it towards Maxi’s head, saying, “Last chance to back out.”
“Do it,” Maxi says, with all the intensity of someone going to war, and Vincent just watches with wide eyes as Zlatan drags the razor from the front of Maxi’s head and around his ear, to the hairline at the back of his neck.
Huge clumps of hair fall away and Vincent just says, “This is so cool.”
Zlatan shaves the sides down short and then takes the scissors, works on shortening the mohwak until it’s only a few centimeters long, and then he takes his hands, rubs them back and forth over Maxi’s head, knocking away all the loose hairs. When Maxi finally looks in the mirror, he feels the sides of his head and says, “Oh, wow. I look so tough.”
Zlatan wants to laugh; his fucking angelic little baby does not look tough at all, but Zlatan is willing to humor him and agrees, saying, “Very tough.”
Vincent hops onto the chair that Maxi vacated and says, “Me next. I want it just like his,” and really, Zlatan can’t back down now that he’s come this far.
So he just says, “Coming right up,” and delivers, shaves Vincent’s sides down to the quick and trims the top until it’s perfect mohawk height. “You guys will be the baddest footballers Young Ajax has ever seen.”
“We already are, Dad,” Maxi says.
“Yeah,” Vincent agrees, and he smiles. “We’re Ibrahimovićs.”
Zlatan thinks that fucking truer words have never been spoken, but he still says, “Well, I don’t care how tough you are, sweep up your hair; a deal’s a deal.”
Zlatan sends the boys to bed when they look like they’re getting tired, and the mohawks must have gotten him a lot of brownie points because he doesn’t get any complaints, not even from Maxi. Instead, they both go brush their teeth and then shove their heads under the faucet, using the water to sculpt their hair before telling him, “We’ll have to buy gel tomorrow after practice.”
Zlatan just rolls his eyes and says, “Bedtime. Move it.”
Once they’re tucked in and Zlatan’s back downstairs, he turns on whatever late night talk show is on, keeps the volume low, and opens up his laptop. He still doesn’t understand, and it’s been nagging at the back of his mind, why Vincent would choose keeper, what on Earth would make him want to switch. Zlatan never wanted to be anything else but a striker, never felt called to do anything else. It makes him feel like shit to think that, maybe, Vincent’s been wanting to be a keeper this whole time, had been called to it, but kept turning it down to be a striker because of his dad.
It doesn’t take Zlatan long to go online and order the best pair of youth keeper gloves he can find and pay extra for next day delivery.
Helena gets home a little after that-half past ten, the boys already long since asleep-and Zlatan’s still downstairs, waiting on the couch in the living room for her.
“Hey,” he says when he sees her. “How was your day?”
“Long,” she says. “The people I work with are idiots.” She heads through the room to go drop her bags near the stairs, and then goes to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Zlatan knows her routine and follows her with his eyes.
“So are most people,” Zlatan tells her, because compared to the two of them, everyone else is useless.
Helena walks back into the living room; she asks, “Why is there a pile of hair hidden underneath a napkin on the kitchen floor?” Zlatan opens his mouth to answer, but she must change her mind, because she says, “You know what? I don’t want to know. Go upstairs and take off your pants.”
“Yeah?” Zlatan asks. He likes this side of Helena. “You’re not tired?”
“If I was tired, would I have told you to go upstairs and take off your pants? No,” she says, and Zlatan can take a hint. He heads to their bedroom and then takes off his shirt, his shorts, but leaves on his boxer briefs because she didn’t say anything about that and Zlatan’s a little shit.
He sits down on the edge of the bed, and that’s how she finds him when she comes upstairs. She makes him sit there, keeping his hands to himself, as she unbuttons her shirt and slips out of her skirt. She’s wearing a black bra and a black thong, and Zlatan loves how that looks, black against her pale skin. She stands between his spread legs and leans down to kiss him, and Zlatan can’t help but reach up, trace one hand over her bare shoulder, pushing back her shirt as he does. He eases it off her shoulders and down her arms, until it’s on the floor.
“Fuck, you’re beautiful,” he says when she pulls away, and he feels like he says it all the time, but he means each one.
“I know,” she says, and Zlatan laughs a little, quietly, a laugh that’s mostly just air, and he kisses his way across her stomach and up to her chest. He kisses her breasts, just above the cups of her bra, his hands spread wide around her ribcage, and then he drags his tongue over her collarbone, bites down gently because he knows that’s teasing.
She threads her fingers through his hair and tugs impatiently; Zlatan just smiles against her skin when she does and then sucks a hickey just above her left breast, just because he can.
Zlatan takes off her bra, and when he does, he take one of her nipples into his mouth and flicks his tongue back and forth over it. Her back arches into the touch, and he uses one hand to press into the small of her back and pull her closer.
He kisses his way across to her other nipple and runs his tongue over her skin, bites down just a little until it hardens and Helena’s fingers are even tighter in his hair. She pulls away.
“Lie down,” she says, but Zlatan knows better.
“I don’t think that’s what you want,” he says. He reaches forward, brackets his hands around her hips; it’s strange, her being taller than he is when he’s sitting down like this. Helena raises an eyebrow as he lets his thumb slip beneath the waistband of her thong.
“It’s not?” she asks, but there’s an edge to her voice that sounds like a warning; he ignores it.
“No,” he says. “You lie on the bed,” and he can feel the grin stretching across his face. Helena looks like she wonders what he could be thinking, and the fact that she doesn’t know, just this once, is so fucking hot.
Zlatan keeps his hands on her hips and moves her to the side, switching their positions so she’s sitting on the bed and he’s standing, and once he’s got her there, he pushes her shoulders back so that she’s lying down, her knees bent over the edge. He leans forward and props himself up on the bed beside her head, and then he kisses her, not at all sweetly. He kisses her jaw and her neck, and then down her chest and her stomach, and then he gets onto his knees on the floor at the foot of the bed, and he uses his hands to spread her legs wide so that he can get close. He kisses up the inside of each thigh and then licks slowly, just once, with the flat of his tongue at her cloth-covered cunt. She doesn’t say anything but her breath hitches, and so Zlatan takes that as the okay to keep going; he curls his fingers around the waistband of her thong and pulls it down over her hips and her legs, until it’s completely off.
He spreads her thighs wide again, wider than they were before, and licks up her slit slowly, one time, and then again, and then a third time, and then he uses his fingers, spreads her folds so that he can place short, quick licks to her clit. She threads her fingers back through his hair when he does, and Zlatan feels such a sense of accomplishment at that, feels proud that he can make her breathless in a way that no one else can or even gets the chance to.
When she’s nice and wet, Zlatan slips his middle finger into her pussy and rubs at her clit with his thumb, sitting back on his heels so he can look up the line of her body to her face. Her cheeks are flushed and she’s watching him, biting her lip, and Zlatan grins up at her, adds another finger and watches how her eyes close for just a second.
Using his free hand, Zlatan palms his cock through his briefs and he’s so fucking hard that he almost can’t even think straight. He leans forward and sucks on her clit again, for longer this time, his fingers still up inside her as her hips rock slightly on the bed.
When he pulls away, he asks, “Is this what you want? My fingers and my mouth?” His voice is rough and that’s not what he wants at all, doesn’t want to make her come with his fingers and his mouth because he wants to fuck her, but he’ll do what she wants because whatever she wants is what he wants to give her.
“No,” she says. “Oh, god. Zlatan.” It sounds so dirty, his name from her lips when she’s like this, and Zlatan absolutely loves it.
“What do you want, Helena?” he asks, and he bites down on the inside of her thigh. He has no clue how his voice doesn’t sound completely wrecked already.
“Fuck me,” she says, but it’s not her telling him what she wants; it’s a command, her telling him to do it, and Zlatan’s not one to disobey, not when it’s something he wants, too. He stands up and pulls down the last of his clothing, and when he does, Helena wraps her legs around his waist.
Zlatan doesn’t waste any time; he takes his cock in hand and smears the pre-come at the tip with his thumb as he lines up with her pussy, and then he sinks in, his hips twitching just a little when Helena lets out a quiet, breathy noise. She’s so wet-so wet, just for him-and tight, and Zlatan could never get tired of this, of her, not in a million years. It’s for her that he does everything; does anything.
“Come on,” she says, and she digs her heels into the small of his back, urging him to move.
Zlatan wraps his hands around her hips, and she’s so small, compared to him, compared to his fingers spread on her skin, and he pulls her to him, in time with each thrust. The noises she makes are quiet because they have to be, but he knows that she’s working to keep them that way, to keep the loudest thing in the room the snap of his hips against hers.
Zlatan’s legs start to shake and heat coils in his lower belly, and so he moves his hips faster, the noise of skin-on-skin coming faster and faster. He doesn’t know how much longer he’ll last, not with Helena looking as wrecked as she does, flushed and messy and just absolutely stunning, and so he reaches between them, keeps his hips snapping forward as he thumbs roughly at her clit.
“Oh, fu-uck,” she says, her voice catching on fuck, and Zlatan looks at her looking at him, and then she comes, biting down hard on her lip as her hips stutter and she clenches around him, tight and wet.
Zlatan thrusts into her a few more times and then he’s coming too, his fingers still tight around her hipbones.
When he pulls out, Zlatan collapses on the bed next to her and kisses her lazily. His fingers stroke gently at the skin of her hips where fingertip bruises will be blooming in the morning and she brushes his long hair back from his face.
“That was amazing,” Helena says, and then as if it’s an afterthought, “But it’s always amazing.”
“Of course it’s always amazing,” Zlatan says back. “Look at us.”
Helena laughs softly and the smile that spreads across her face is unguarded and gorgeous and just for him, always for him, and Zlatan smiles back.
He kisses the back of her neck as they settle in to sleep, and he thinks, it’s not just them, not just him and Helena; they’re amazing and their children are amazing, and fuck, even their dogs are amazing, and the rest of the world is trying, he will give them that much, but they’ll never catch up, not in a million years, and if anyone doesn’t see that-well. They can go fuck themselves and send their wives and sisters to his house.
Although, on second thought, Zlatan doesn't really care too much about that last bit.
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Zlatan Ibrahimović / Helena Seger
Word Count: 7,050
Summary: “Come on,” Helena says. Zlatan turns his head just far enough to see that she’s dressed and all made up, just putting in her earrings; she looks sexy as fuck but he buries his face back into the pillow anyways. “Get up. I have to get to work and someone needs to take the boys to school.”
A/N: For meretricula, who wanted post-retirement Zlatan, househusband extraordinaire.
He wakes up with a slap to his ass.
“Come on,” Helena says. Zlatan turns his head just far enough to see that she’s dressed and all made up, just putting in her earrings; she looks sexy as fuck but he buries his face back into the pillow anyways. “Get up. I have to get to work and someone needs to take the boys to school.”
“No,” he says, and the only way he can tell that she hears it is by her laugh.
“Yes,” she says, and he can tell by her voice that she is still smiling. “You’re a kept man now, Ibrahimović. Do as you’re told.”
He tries not to, but he can’t help but smile at that; he hopes she can’t tell by the set of his shoulders or the curve of his spine, but he knows that she probably can. She’s fucking smart as hell like that, and knows him better than anyone else on the planet.
“Five minutes,” he says.
“Two minutes,” she tells him, and then she leans forward, kisses his shoulder blade before leaving for work.
Zlatan gets out of bed twelve minutes later. He’s only wearing black boxer briefs, so he throws on an old pair of Milan training shorts and heads down the hall, scratching at the skin just below his belly button while he walks. He stops to bang on Maximilian’s door.
“Let’s go, Maxi!” he yells. “Time to get up.”
“No!” Maxi yells back, and Zlatan feels oddly proud of that. Maxi’s going to school-there’s no fucking doubt about that-but Zlatan likes that Maximilian takes after him, that he’s loud and opinionated even at ten years old.
“Come up with a better argument and get back to me,” he says through the door, and then he keeps walking down the hall to wake Vincent.
Vincent’s different from him and Maxi; he’s not loud, but he’s smart as a whip when he does talk, and better at football than either of them were when they were eight. He thinks Vincent’s going to be really fucking impressive when he grows up, and that all of Europe better take note of that now or be forever trying to catch up.
“Yo, V,” Zlatan says. He knocks on the door twice before popping his head in and flipping on the lights. “Time to get up.”
“Okay,” Vincent says, and he kicks off his sheets, lies starfish on the bed as Zlatan keeps going, heads to the kitchen.
Trustor and Hoffa are lying at the foot of the stairs, both of them looking up at him with their tongues lolling out of their mouths like they know he’s going to feed them eventually and so he might as well get it out of the way and do it now. He pauses to roughly pet Hoffa with his foot-lazy, he thinks, so fucking lazy-and when he steps over them, they follow him to the kitchen. Their dog bowls are still empty and on the kitchen counter, and Zlatan thinks for a second that Helena could’ve fed them on her way out, and then he feels like an asshole for it.
“Yeah, good morning to you, too,” he says to them, but they don’t really react, just keep staring, watching him as he goes to grab the newspaper and pour himself a cup of coffee. When he does finally give in and feed them, it’s mostly to get them to go away and leave him alone.
By the time the boys finally stumble downstairs, Vincent running his fingers over Trustor’s back as he walks by, it’s ten minutes later than usual. Maximilian’s shirt is on backwards, and Zlatan figures that they probably spent half the night up playing the new FIFA; for a second he thinks of not calling them out on it, but then he figures that he has to make sure they know that there’s no way they’ll ever be able to pull one on him.
“At least tell me you were playing with one of my teams,” he says.
Maxi just looks at him like he’s an idiot and says, “Dad,” but Vincent smiles because he’s knows he’s been caught and, sliding into his chair, says, “AC Milan.”
Zlatan laughs and says, “Good choice,” and then folds up his newspaper. “Scrambled eggs?” he asks. “Or cereal?” but he already knows the answer and is reaching into the cabinets for bowls before they even answer.
Zlatan pours two glasses of orange juice while they pour themselves their own cereal, and then he sits down with them at the table. He watches the way they both shovel the cereal into their mouths, hunched over their bowls like little animals, and while Helena would straighten them out if she was there, Zlatan can’t help but feel a strange sense of pride over the whole situation; they’re the best thing he’s ever done with his life, and yet they can’t eat cereal unless their faces are 10 centimeters away from the bowl. It’s all strangely funny, and makes Zlatan’s heart hurt with happiness.
“Did you pack your homework?” he asks because he refuses a repeat of last week, when he had to drop their homework off at Young Ajax five minutes after he just dropped them off at Young Ajax.
“Well, I did,” Vincent says. His face is propped up on the heel of his palm and so it comes out slightly muffled, but Zlatan still hears the way Vincent stresses the I, and notices how Maxi kicks him under the table.
Zlatan turns to look at Maxi and raises one eyebrow. He says, “Maximilian, did you do your homework?” Zlatan can see it written all over Maxi’s face, how he’s weighing the pros and cons of lying, and so he adds, “Lie to me and I will end you.”
Maximilian pulls a face and finally says, “Everything but the math.”
“Okay,” Zlatan says, and he keeps his voice level, even, because he knows how his boys think and that’s scarier to them than shouting ever could be. “And why did you do everything but the math?”
Maxi doesn’t look at him, just brushes his long blond hair out of his face and says, “Footballers don’t need to know how to do any of that stuff.”
“You do if you want to count all the money you’re making,” Zlatan tells him.
Vincent pops into the conversation at that and says, “But he can already count to zero,” and that startles such a loud laugh out of Zlatan that Vincent starts laughing at his own joke, too, uncontrollable giggles that just make Maxi mad.
They get dressed after breakfast. Zlatan throws a shirt and some trainers on, and is ready to go in five minutes; the boys take a little bit longer, getting distracted by the things in their rooms and fighting over the toothpaste in the bathroom, but eventually they’re piling into the car, each of them with a school bag and a football bag and a pair of boots tied together at the laces. It makes Zlatan feel slightly nostalgic for his own playing days, even though he knows that going out on top was, for him, the only way to go.
“Got everything?” Zlatan asks, craning his head to look at them both in the back seat. “Seatbelts buckled?”
“Yeah,” Maxi says.
“Vincent?”
“Yeah,” Vincent says, and Zlatan nods to himself, puts the car into reverse and pulls out of the driveway.
“First day back to practice since your last match,” he says. “You guys excited?”
“Yeah, it’s gonna be so cool,” Maxi says. “Coach said he had someone filming the match and so we’re gonna watch part of it today and talk about what we did and everything.”
“Very cool,” Zlatan agrees.
“Super cool,” Vincent tells him.
“That’s what I meant,” Zlatan says, but judging by their faces, neither of them believes it.
A few minutes and one discovery of a hidden, half-eaten sandwich later, Zlatan pulls the car into the parking lot of Young Ajax. He thinks that it’s perfect how everything’s worked out, being able to move to the Netherlands for the kids, having the chance to give them an opportunity that Zlatan never had when he was growing up. He’s lucky Helena’s so fucking smart; she can work anywhere, and when the boys said football and Zlatan said Ajax, all she had to do was make a couple of calls. Zlatan doesn’t quite know what he did to deserve her, but he knows that he’s the only one who does, and that’s all that really matters, anyways.
He pulls the car over to the curb by the door and says, “Alright, everybody out!” Maxi and Vincent don’t hesitate, just grab their things and walk away, but before they can get very far, Zlatan has to holler out the window that Maxi forgot his boots in the back seat. After that, though, they walk towards the academy doors, to where all their friends are waiting. They don’t look back, and on one hand, Zlatan loves that, loves how independent they both are already, but on the other hand, they’re growing up, and it makes him feel old.
“Train hard, study hard, and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t be the best!” he yells out the window, mostly because that’s the kind of thing that fathers are supposed to do. The boys don’t seem to hear him.
He thinks, for a second, that this must be how Helena feels all the time, but he cuts his laugh short; Helena would have his balls if she knew he even joking thought of her as old.
Once the kids are off his hands, Zlatan goes to work out. It’s still early, although late enough that most people are at work, and so the gym is pretty empty. Helena had said that she thought it was pointless, setting up an in-home gym and then just paying for membership at some place fifteen minutes away, but there’s a difference between working out alone and working out by yourself, and after years of playing on a football team, Zlatan more than understands the difference. Helena doesn’t, not really, but she understands that there is one, even if she doesn’t really know what it is; she stops saying anything and sets up an automatic payment system for the membership, and Zlatan thanks her with his palms on the curves of her body.
Zlatan stays at the gym for about two hours, give or take, long enough for him to lift weights and run a couple of miles, and long enough for him to be covered in a layer of sweat that shows through his grey shirt. He misses football, though, and while running on the treadmill keeps him fit, doesn’t do anything to help that. For a second, he thinks about joining some sort of amateur league, just so that he can play again. He dismisses the thought, though, because even retired, Zlatan’s better than most of the professional players out there; playing with amateurs would be like playing with children, and Zlatan’s got two of his own for that.
His phone rings when he’s back in the car and halfway home, and Maxwell pops up on the screen. Zlatan answers it, and without even saying hello, says, “It’s been over a week, Maxwell, I thought you were breaking up with me.”
Maxwell laughs and says, “As if you’d let me.”
“As if you’d want to,” Zlatan shoots back, and the light he was waiting at turns green. “You’d never find someone better than me, anyways.”
“Not so sure,” Maxwell says. “You’re old now. Retired.” He whispers that last bit, like it’s a secret.
“Fuck off,” Zlatan says. “The fact that you’re so far away makes you cocky, but I can still kick your ass.”
Maxwell takes a deep breath like he’s going to defend himself, but then he just says, “I know,” and that makes Zlatan laugh. Out of all the people he’s ever met, he’s never met anyone else like Maxwell.
“So how’s it going?” Zlatan asks.
“Good,” Maxwell says. “Really good, actually. But I’ve just, um. I decided that this is going to be my last season. I mean, I haven’t told anyone yet, but my knee is still pretty messed up, and I’m like twenty years older than everyone else on the squad-”
“Twenty-three, actually,” Zlatan interrupts.
“Hey, you better watch it,” Maxwell says. “I get mad at you and then you have no friends.”
“Oh, ouch,” Zlatan says, and he turns the car onto his street.
“Anyways,” Maxwell continues, “the wife is pregnant, so.”
“What?” Zlatan says, and he pulls into his driveway, throws the car into park. “That’s awesome; congrats, man.”
“Thanks,” Maxwell says, and Zlatan suddenly wishes he was there with him.
“Shit,” he says. “Another little baby Maxwell.”
“I know,” Maxwell says, and he sounds so happy, so genuinely happy, that it’s hard for Zlatan not to feel the same.
“Well, you better name him after me this time,” Zlatan says. “Fair’s fair.” Neither of them bothers to mention that Maximilian’s name has nothing to do with Maxwell, because they both know that all Zlatan ever does is talk shit and mess around.
“So sure it’ll be a boy,” Maxwell jokes, and Zlatan’s ready for it, saw it coming a mile away.
“Well, men make men, Maxwell,” Zlatan says, “so you tell me. I will accept Zlatina, though.”
Maxwell laughs and Zlatan doesn’t bother telling him that he was serious because he’s not entirely sure if he was or not. They talk for another forty minutes and it doesn’t occur to Zlatan to get out of the car until after he’s hung up.
When he’s inside, Zlatan heads to the laundry room and takes off his gym clothes. He stands there naked and throws on a load of laundry, sorting through Maxi and Vincent’s dirty practice clothes and avoiding Helena’s delicates because she will kill him if he shrinks them or accidentally runs them through the wash with a chapstick or a piece of gum. Afterwards, he hops through a shower and thinks about everything he still has to do before he picks up the boys; it’s not too long a list, considering.
Zlatan towel-dries his hair once he’s out and throws on another pair of training shorts; he doesn’t bother with a shirt. It’s almost lunchtime, so he heads downstairs and pads barefoot through the kitchen to the fridge. Tiny bits of dry cereal stick to the bottom of his feet as he passes the kitchen table.
“You have got to be shitting me,” he says to himself, and upon closer inspection notices that there is about half a bowl’s worth of cereal on Vincent’s chair and on the floor around where he sits. “Trustor!” he calls. “Hoffa! Come on, cereal’s on the floor!”
He uses his toes to point out the cereal, but his dogs are useless; they sniff around but don’t eat anything, and decide instead to go back to sleep by the foot of the stairs.
So Zlatan does the only thing that he can do and goes to grab the broom, stopping to turn on the tv as he goes; there’s an old match on, an Ajax Classic, and Zlatan turns the volume up so he can hear it from the kitchen as he sweeps. It’s astounding, he thinks, how much of a mess an eight-year-old can make without anyone noticing.
For lunch, Zlatan makes himself a sandwich out of leftover chicken from the night before, and he eats it standing over the sink as Kluivert scores for Ajax in the eighty-fifth and Milan realizes that 1995 is not their year. He thinks, vaguely, that if he gets crumbs on the floor he just swept that he’ll lose it.
He texts Helena as something to do, and asks, Thoughts about dinner? He figures maybe he should go to the grocery store. He should take a cooking class; Helena’s wicked in the kitchen, but with her working, Zlatan’s usually the one who makes dinner, and that’s usually just the basics.
Helena writes back five minutes later. Late night for me here. These people are incompetent. Zlatan laughs even though it sucks that she won’t be home until after the boys are in bed.
He’s in the middle of texting her back, Well maybe when you come home we can- when his phone rings, and the screen says, Mino Raiola.
“Mino,” Zlatan says. “What’s going on?”
“Not much, just got off the phone with NIKE,” Mino says, and as he’s talking, Zlatan slides open the back door and lets the dogs out into the yard. “Apparently even though you’re retired, your brand of shirts and boots are still selling like crazy. They’re going to send you some mock-ups of some new stuff sometime next week, and we’ll talk about it.”
“Alright,” Zlatan says. “That sounds awesome.”
“Okay, great,” Mino says. “Listen, I gotta go, I need to go earn you some more money.”
Zlatan laughs, says, “That’s what I like to hear,” and Mino hangs up, just like that. Zlatan thinks that maybe getting Mino as his agent was the best professional decision he’s ever made; Mino gets stuff done.
It’s only later, when he’s eating an apple and watching Ajax beat Juventus four minutes into the 1973 European Cup Final, that Zlatan realizes he forgot all about the laundry and gets up to go switch loads. He holds the apple between his teeth, which he realizes a minute later is a bad idea, and goes through what’s left of Maxi’s juice-stained shirts and Vincent’s mysteriously ripped socks; he doesn’t quite understand how they manage to destroy clothing as quickly as they do, but they’re inventive about it, which keeps it interesting, at least. Honestly though, Zlatan’s just glad they’re still young, because he hasn’t figured out what the fuck to do once they start needing their sheets watched every other day.
Zlatan finishes doing the laundry and watching Ajax celebrate their third consecutive European Cup, and then suddenly it’s four o’clock and the boys need to be picked up. He grabs his keys and heads out, and drives with the windows open, his hair whipping his eyes as he speeds up. It’s only when the seatbelt starts rubbing uncomfortably that he realizes he forgot a shirt.
When he gets there, Maxi and Vincent are outside with a couple of friends, all of whom live in the Young Ajax housing system. Zlatan wonders, however briefly, if Maxi and Vincent would rather live there too, given the choice. He watches them laugh for a minute before leaning out the window and getting their attention by saying, “Car for Mister and Mister Ibrahimović.”
Zlatan gets out and helps with their bags, grabbing three of them with one hand and tossing them into the trunk; Maxi helps him with the fourth bag while Vincent tries to untangle his arm from the laces of both pairs of boots.
Once they’re all in the car and buckled up, Maxi tells him how great practice was and how lame class was and how he doesn’t have any math homework tonight so Zlatan might as well not even ask. Vincent speaks up every once in a while, laughing and talking about how Coach wouldn’t let them leave practice until they all managed to hit the crossbar with a football from just inside the box-a team-building exercise that Zlatan remembers from when he was a kid, too.
“Let me guess,” Zlatan teases, “you finished dead last?”
“No,” Vincent says, “I finished dead first,” and then he and Maximilian start bickering, arguing over whether or not he actually did hit the crossbar first.
“Well, what about scrimmaging?” Zlatan asks, figuring it’s better to interrupt the fight than wait until he’s at a red light and has to throw himself back there to break it up. “Did you guys get to scrimmage at all?”
“A little,” Maxi says. “You should have seen it, though-”
“No visitors allowed,” Vincent says, and he knows he’s being a smartass. Maxi hits him on the arm and Vincent hits him back, saying, “Stop it.”
“Hey,” Zlatan says. “Next person to throw a punch gets extra chores and I’m telling your mother.” They pull away from each other at that, and Zlatan thinks that he must have made a wrong turn somewhere if they’re more terrified of Helena than they are of him.
“I was just saying,” Maxi says, “that I scored I goal from outside the box.”
“Alright, my man!” Zlatan says, and he reaches into the backseat with one hand to give Maxi a low five. “And what about you, Vince? Anything exciting happen?”
“Oh yeah,” Maxi jumps in. “He scored this really good one off of a short corner.”
“Yeah?” Zlatan says, and he looks at Vincent in the rear-view; Vincent is looking out the window and so Zlatan reaches back again and tugs on Vincent’s leg. “Yeah?” he prompts again.
“Yeah,” Vincent says, and he laughs when Zlatan starts squeezing his calf.
“I knew it,” Zlatan says. “You can’t be an Ibrahimović and not be one hundred percent amazing.”
“Unless you’re Uncle Sapko,” Maxi says, and Zlatan says back, “Well, I mean-” but he doesn’t know how to finish the thought, and Vincent and Maxi just laugh at the crazy way he gestures with his free hand.
When they fall into a lull of silence as they reach the house, Zlatan figures that even though he and Helena agreed that the boys would live at home, he still kind of wants to know what they would rather. And so he says, “Hey, are you guys okay with living at home? I mean, you don’t miss out on too much every night, do you?”
“No, living at home is better,” Maxi says. “Otherwise we’d never see you and Mom.”
“Yeah?” Zlatan asks. “V?”
“Home is better,” Vincent agrees.
“Alright,” Zlatan says, and his heart flops at that. “Not that I was going to let you out of my evil clutches, anyways, but that’s good to know.” And it is good to know, because if they’re not happy then there’s no point to any of this.
He parks the car and watches Maxi and Vincent as they race to the front door, and he only feels a little bit bad when he has to remind them to come back and get their bags out of the trunk.
Inside, Maxi and Vincent throw their bags on the floor next to the door and then divebomb the couch.
“There are so many things wrong with this scenario,” Zlatan says from the doorway, and they both turn to look at him, a general expression of What? on their faces. “For starters, you’re covered in dirt and sweat and are laying all over my three thousand euro couch. So go shower. And while you’re at it, please be so kind as to remove your junk from my floor, and bring it to your room.” Maxi just groans at that, and so Zlatan says, “Maxi, how tall are you?”
“1.3 meters,” Maxi says; Zlatan knows that he only knows because they just had team physicals the other day.
“Great; I’m 1.95 meters,” Zlatan says, “and so if you don’t do exactly as I say, I’m going to squash you like a bug.”
“Okay,” Maxi says, and even though he’s trying to act miserable, Zlatan can see him fighting a smile.
Helena calls when Zlatan’s boiling water for spaghetti.
“Sorry,” she says, “I was going to call earlier, but things are really crazy today.”
“No worries,” Zlatan says, because really, after all the travelling and moving and him not calling that she had to put up with, Zlatan has no room to complain. “You gotta keep them in line, I get that. Maybe if you bring the flogger from our bedroom they’d be better behaved.”
Helena seems unimpressed at that and says, “But what use is it to me here when I’m at home and want to use it on you?”
The water starts to boil and so Zlatan wedges the phone between his shoulder and his ear, and as he dumps the box of pasta into the pot, he says, “I’m sure you’d find something else.”
“I’m very creative when I need to be,” Helena says, and Zlatan thinks, Fuck, and wishes she was there with him.
Vincent comes down the stairs then, his pajama shirt stretched out at the neck and his hair soaking wet. He says, “Is that Mom? Can I talk to her?”
Zlatan pauses and then says into the phone, “There’s someone here named Vincent who wants to talk to you. You don’t know any Vincents? I don’t know, blue eyes, blond hair, red pajama shirt?”
Vincent laughs and just says, “Da-ad,” drawn out into two syllables like that, and Zlatan hands the phone over before going back to heating up the sauce and popping some garlic bread into the oven. He’s not paying much attention, but after a while he notices that Vincent is speaking really quietly, saying things like, They let me do it again, and Yeah, and I’m way better than him. Zlatan has no clue what he’s talking about.
When Vincent hands him back the phone, Zlatan tells him, “Let your brother know that dinner’s in five minutes, okay?” and then to Helena, he says, “What’s up?” She knows what he means.
“Just don’t get mad,” she says.
“Mad? I’m not going to get mad,” Zlatan says, although almost every time he’s ever said that, it’s been a lie.
“Okay, well,” Helena says, “Vincent’s decided that he likes being a keeper more than he likes being a striker, and he’s too nervous to tell you.”
And Zlatan’s so confused at that, because Vincent is so good at being a striker, has great control and speed and aim. Vincent’s dynamite at being a striker.
“How does he even know he likes it? I mean, is he even any good?”
“Apparently they let him goal keep at practice, I don’t know,” Helena says. “Listen, I have to go, but we’ll talk about it tonight, okay? Don’t bring it up.”
“Okay,” Zlatan says. He doesn’t get it. Keeper? Vincent has a future at playing striker, and Zlatan doesn’t understand why he’d want to risk that for something that an even smaller amount of people get to do, and for something that Zlatan doesn’t know anything about and can’t help him with at all.
Maxi and Vincent come sprinting down the stairs and Zlatan doesn’t have any more time to think about it. Instead, he drains the spaghetti pot and tells Maxi to get them water and Vincent to take the bread to the table.
“Can we slurp the noodles?” Vincent asks when they’re sitting down. “Mom’s not here.”
Zlatan’s answer is to take his fork and knife, one in each fist, and bang them on the tabletop. In the deepest voice he can muster, he says, “This is a man house! We feast like kings and eat like men!” He thinks on it and then adds, in the same deep voice, “But first, we tuck napkins into our shirts!”
And they do, they listen to him in that respect, tucking napkins into their shirt collars in a sad attempt to prevent sauce stains. It probably won’t be very effective, but Zlatan will take all the help he can get.
They eat like that, slurping the spaghetti and laughing, the sauce getting everywhere, and it’s fun, just Zlatan and his boys and no rules except for the one about the napkin. He can’t imagine doing this every day, living every day without Helena at all, but for just one night it’s perfect, man time to be disgusting and laugh at fart jokes with his kids.
That’s why he doesn’t stand a chance when, as they’re cleaning up the dishes, Maxi says, “We want mohawks.”
And Vincent says, “Yeah, Dad, please.”
Zlatan just freezes, two dirty plates in his hands, and says, “What, now?” And that’s a horrible, terrible idea because Helena loves their long hair.
“Yeah,” Maxi says. “You have scissors, right? Please?”
And Zlatan stands there, looking back and forth between his two boys and their long, blond hair, and the way they’re looking at him like this is something that they really want, and he says, “Okay. But only if you clean up after,” because he is Zlatan Ibrahimović and he does what he wants, and what he wants is to give his boys mohawks.
He finishes cleaning and then grabs the things he needs, sitting Maxi on a kitchen chair, holding an electric razor in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other.
“I want it like this long on top,” Maxi says, and he shows Zlatan with his fingers, “and then like this short on the sides.”
“Alright, then, here we go,” Zlatan says. He turns on the razor and moves it towards Maxi’s head, saying, “Last chance to back out.”
“Do it,” Maxi says, with all the intensity of someone going to war, and Vincent just watches with wide eyes as Zlatan drags the razor from the front of Maxi’s head and around his ear, to the hairline at the back of his neck.
Huge clumps of hair fall away and Vincent just says, “This is so cool.”
Zlatan shaves the sides down short and then takes the scissors, works on shortening the mohwak until it’s only a few centimeters long, and then he takes his hands, rubs them back and forth over Maxi’s head, knocking away all the loose hairs. When Maxi finally looks in the mirror, he feels the sides of his head and says, “Oh, wow. I look so tough.”
Zlatan wants to laugh; his fucking angelic little baby does not look tough at all, but Zlatan is willing to humor him and agrees, saying, “Very tough.”
Vincent hops onto the chair that Maxi vacated and says, “Me next. I want it just like his,” and really, Zlatan can’t back down now that he’s come this far.
So he just says, “Coming right up,” and delivers, shaves Vincent’s sides down to the quick and trims the top until it’s perfect mohawk height. “You guys will be the baddest footballers Young Ajax has ever seen.”
“We already are, Dad,” Maxi says.
“Yeah,” Vincent agrees, and he smiles. “We’re Ibrahimovićs.”
Zlatan thinks that fucking truer words have never been spoken, but he still says, “Well, I don’t care how tough you are, sweep up your hair; a deal’s a deal.”
Zlatan sends the boys to bed when they look like they’re getting tired, and the mohawks must have gotten him a lot of brownie points because he doesn’t get any complaints, not even from Maxi. Instead, they both go brush their teeth and then shove their heads under the faucet, using the water to sculpt their hair before telling him, “We’ll have to buy gel tomorrow after practice.”
Zlatan just rolls his eyes and says, “Bedtime. Move it.”
Once they’re tucked in and Zlatan’s back downstairs, he turns on whatever late night talk show is on, keeps the volume low, and opens up his laptop. He still doesn’t understand, and it’s been nagging at the back of his mind, why Vincent would choose keeper, what on Earth would make him want to switch. Zlatan never wanted to be anything else but a striker, never felt called to do anything else. It makes him feel like shit to think that, maybe, Vincent’s been wanting to be a keeper this whole time, had been called to it, but kept turning it down to be a striker because of his dad.
It doesn’t take Zlatan long to go online and order the best pair of youth keeper gloves he can find and pay extra for next day delivery.
Helena gets home a little after that-half past ten, the boys already long since asleep-and Zlatan’s still downstairs, waiting on the couch in the living room for her.
“Hey,” he says when he sees her. “How was your day?”
“Long,” she says. “The people I work with are idiots.” She heads through the room to go drop her bags near the stairs, and then goes to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Zlatan knows her routine and follows her with his eyes.
“So are most people,” Zlatan tells her, because compared to the two of them, everyone else is useless.
Helena walks back into the living room; she asks, “Why is there a pile of hair hidden underneath a napkin on the kitchen floor?” Zlatan opens his mouth to answer, but she must change her mind, because she says, “You know what? I don’t want to know. Go upstairs and take off your pants.”
“Yeah?” Zlatan asks. He likes this side of Helena. “You’re not tired?”
“If I was tired, would I have told you to go upstairs and take off your pants? No,” she says, and Zlatan can take a hint. He heads to their bedroom and then takes off his shirt, his shorts, but leaves on his boxer briefs because she didn’t say anything about that and Zlatan’s a little shit.
He sits down on the edge of the bed, and that’s how she finds him when she comes upstairs. She makes him sit there, keeping his hands to himself, as she unbuttons her shirt and slips out of her skirt. She’s wearing a black bra and a black thong, and Zlatan loves how that looks, black against her pale skin. She stands between his spread legs and leans down to kiss him, and Zlatan can’t help but reach up, trace one hand over her bare shoulder, pushing back her shirt as he does. He eases it off her shoulders and down her arms, until it’s on the floor.
“Fuck, you’re beautiful,” he says when she pulls away, and he feels like he says it all the time, but he means each one.
“I know,” she says, and Zlatan laughs a little, quietly, a laugh that’s mostly just air, and he kisses his way across her stomach and up to her chest. He kisses her breasts, just above the cups of her bra, his hands spread wide around her ribcage, and then he drags his tongue over her collarbone, bites down gently because he knows that’s teasing.
She threads her fingers through his hair and tugs impatiently; Zlatan just smiles against her skin when she does and then sucks a hickey just above her left breast, just because he can.
Zlatan takes off her bra, and when he does, he take one of her nipples into his mouth and flicks his tongue back and forth over it. Her back arches into the touch, and he uses one hand to press into the small of her back and pull her closer.
He kisses his way across to her other nipple and runs his tongue over her skin, bites down just a little until it hardens and Helena’s fingers are even tighter in his hair. She pulls away.
“Lie down,” she says, but Zlatan knows better.
“I don’t think that’s what you want,” he says. He reaches forward, brackets his hands around her hips; it’s strange, her being taller than he is when he’s sitting down like this. Helena raises an eyebrow as he lets his thumb slip beneath the waistband of her thong.
“It’s not?” she asks, but there’s an edge to her voice that sounds like a warning; he ignores it.
“No,” he says. “You lie on the bed,” and he can feel the grin stretching across his face. Helena looks like she wonders what he could be thinking, and the fact that she doesn’t know, just this once, is so fucking hot.
Zlatan keeps his hands on her hips and moves her to the side, switching their positions so she’s sitting on the bed and he’s standing, and once he’s got her there, he pushes her shoulders back so that she’s lying down, her knees bent over the edge. He leans forward and props himself up on the bed beside her head, and then he kisses her, not at all sweetly. He kisses her jaw and her neck, and then down her chest and her stomach, and then he gets onto his knees on the floor at the foot of the bed, and he uses his hands to spread her legs wide so that he can get close. He kisses up the inside of each thigh and then licks slowly, just once, with the flat of his tongue at her cloth-covered cunt. She doesn’t say anything but her breath hitches, and so Zlatan takes that as the okay to keep going; he curls his fingers around the waistband of her thong and pulls it down over her hips and her legs, until it’s completely off.
He spreads her thighs wide again, wider than they were before, and licks up her slit slowly, one time, and then again, and then a third time, and then he uses his fingers, spreads her folds so that he can place short, quick licks to her clit. She threads her fingers back through his hair when he does, and Zlatan feels such a sense of accomplishment at that, feels proud that he can make her breathless in a way that no one else can or even gets the chance to.
When she’s nice and wet, Zlatan slips his middle finger into her pussy and rubs at her clit with his thumb, sitting back on his heels so he can look up the line of her body to her face. Her cheeks are flushed and she’s watching him, biting her lip, and Zlatan grins up at her, adds another finger and watches how her eyes close for just a second.
Using his free hand, Zlatan palms his cock through his briefs and he’s so fucking hard that he almost can’t even think straight. He leans forward and sucks on her clit again, for longer this time, his fingers still up inside her as her hips rock slightly on the bed.
When he pulls away, he asks, “Is this what you want? My fingers and my mouth?” His voice is rough and that’s not what he wants at all, doesn’t want to make her come with his fingers and his mouth because he wants to fuck her, but he’ll do what she wants because whatever she wants is what he wants to give her.
“No,” she says. “Oh, god. Zlatan.” It sounds so dirty, his name from her lips when she’s like this, and Zlatan absolutely loves it.
“What do you want, Helena?” he asks, and he bites down on the inside of her thigh. He has no clue how his voice doesn’t sound completely wrecked already.
“Fuck me,” she says, but it’s not her telling him what she wants; it’s a command, her telling him to do it, and Zlatan’s not one to disobey, not when it’s something he wants, too. He stands up and pulls down the last of his clothing, and when he does, Helena wraps her legs around his waist.
Zlatan doesn’t waste any time; he takes his cock in hand and smears the pre-come at the tip with his thumb as he lines up with her pussy, and then he sinks in, his hips twitching just a little when Helena lets out a quiet, breathy noise. She’s so wet-so wet, just for him-and tight, and Zlatan could never get tired of this, of her, not in a million years. It’s for her that he does everything; does anything.
“Come on,” she says, and she digs her heels into the small of his back, urging him to move.
Zlatan wraps his hands around her hips, and she’s so small, compared to him, compared to his fingers spread on her skin, and he pulls her to him, in time with each thrust. The noises she makes are quiet because they have to be, but he knows that she’s working to keep them that way, to keep the loudest thing in the room the snap of his hips against hers.
Zlatan’s legs start to shake and heat coils in his lower belly, and so he moves his hips faster, the noise of skin-on-skin coming faster and faster. He doesn’t know how much longer he’ll last, not with Helena looking as wrecked as she does, flushed and messy and just absolutely stunning, and so he reaches between them, keeps his hips snapping forward as he thumbs roughly at her clit.
“Oh, fu-uck,” she says, her voice catching on fuck, and Zlatan looks at her looking at him, and then she comes, biting down hard on her lip as her hips stutter and she clenches around him, tight and wet.
Zlatan thrusts into her a few more times and then he’s coming too, his fingers still tight around her hipbones.
When he pulls out, Zlatan collapses on the bed next to her and kisses her lazily. His fingers stroke gently at the skin of her hips where fingertip bruises will be blooming in the morning and she brushes his long hair back from his face.
“That was amazing,” Helena says, and then as if it’s an afterthought, “But it’s always amazing.”
“Of course it’s always amazing,” Zlatan says back. “Look at us.”
Helena laughs softly and the smile that spreads across her face is unguarded and gorgeous and just for him, always for him, and Zlatan smiles back.
He kisses the back of her neck as they settle in to sleep, and he thinks, it’s not just them, not just him and Helena; they’re amazing and their children are amazing, and fuck, even their dogs are amazing, and the rest of the world is trying, he will give them that much, but they’ll never catch up, not in a million years, and if anyone doesn’t see that-well. They can go fuck themselves and send their wives and sisters to his house.
Although, on second thought, Zlatan doesn't really care too much about that last bit.