January 2006.
The team goes out the last day of the year. December 31st and the air is chilly and crisp, hinting at a certain sort of newness and carrying with it the promise that comes with each new year.
Andriy stopped buying into that a while ago. Time is time, and a new year is nothing but the progression of it like any other day in any other month. He remembers being a kid and making resolutions each year. Day dreaming. Thinking that, yeah, this year, his father would stop being a soldier, that someone would see him playing and whisk him away from Ukraine, that his mother wouldn't look so worried all the time, that she would stop taking him to the doctor every few months. Some of it worked out, some didn't, but Andriy isn't enough of an optimist to believe that it had to do with anything other than blind luck. Still. It's the last day of December and they're sitting in some ridiculous club where the music is too loud and the alcohol too fancy. Kaká's scarf tickles the edge of his hand and it's red, too red.
He wants to get out.
*
So they do; they flee the scene like guilty teenagers, giddy with their own success, two bottles of champagne and plastic beer cups thrown into the back seat at the last minute, the buttons of their coats undone, sleeves rumpled. Andriy drives, and they end up at a park by the water. The trees are rich and secretive drenched in nighttime. Kaká gets grass stains on his elbows, his new pants. He doesn't mind.
It's quiet where they are.
Andriy pops the cork, pours out champagne into two bright yellow cups and proposes a toast, already a little intoxicated by the potency of spontaneity, enough so that he forgets to be cynical, enough so that his smile is younger, so that his hand slides up Kaká's leg as he says, To the goddamned future, and drinks.
It's almost midnight and Kaká looks at him, at once hesitant and dangerous; almost says, she's waiting for me. He almost says, I should go. What he does say is, "Are you going to kiss me or not?", soft, petulant if not for that smile, small and curving in the darkness. Andriy does, exactly on the stroke of midnight like a scene from an American film, perfect and precise like the way his foot curves around a football; but Kaká doesn't see green when he closes his eyes, doesn't taste it.
They pretend that things are good and, in that moment, Andriy's mouth on Kaká's, warm and whole for the time being, his hands kind on Kaká's neck, jaw fireworks exploding on the other side of the harbor and the sky bright and beautiful - in that moment, it's close enough to the truth that they don't feel bad about it. Their faces are centimeters apart and Kaká looks at him, says, "I've never been kissed on the stroke of midnight before." He laughs, a flash of white teeth and rich sound in the darkness. "Should I be waiting for a transformation? Where are the glass slippers?" Andriy grins, knocks back the last of the champagne in his cup, nudges Kaká to the ground. "Shut up, Cinderella." Kisses him again and he does.
(Will anything or anybody change? Andriy remembers a lot of things when it comes to Kaká, but the one of the clearest was two months after he had first joined Milan. An abandoned locker room, a loss, dirt in his mouth, and Kaká had asked,
"Who are you?"
His breath in the darkness was quiet, controlled and controlling.
"You know who I am."
"Just answer the question."
A skip, scratch on the record.
"Andriy. Andriy Shevchenko."
"That's nothing but a name."
"What more is there?"
What more is there, and Andriy, Andriy doesn't know. He doesn't know, but sometimes, like when's he sitting with his palms buried in the grass and the sky massive and unrelentingly endless above him, a warm mouth on his skin - sometimes, in these moments which sharpen at the corners and distill themselves into the perfection of memory, he can feel it. It, and maybe this it is what Kaká would call God.
He wants to believe. Lying in that park on their backs, watching explosives light up the sky, Andriy could say, I want you to forget me, please and This is the only kindness I can give you, telling you to let me go. He could get up, briskly brush the torn grass off his pants, and drive away. But Andriy doesn't - he stays and he is quiet and some traitorous part of him can't help but hope.
Andriy hoped as a child, at the age of nine. He hopes now, hopes that it doesn't turn out the same way. The clouds look like they're on fire, Kaká says, and Andriy wills his hands not to shake, his arms not to push him off the ground, his feet not to start running. He stays, and perhaps this is the most he can do for anyone, the only love he can give - staying, just staying, staying even when all he wants to do is run and never, ever stop, his feet suddenly small and young, the ankles breakable and shoes dirty. In a way, Andriy runs for a living; football as escapism, he thinks in that moment, football as childhood, football as fear, fear of love, fear as love, and what, what --)