Alexia Era

A furious Jay was obvious. A furious Jay paced, swore creatively, opened apps she had been legally and emotionally banned from, and spoke in a way that made lawyers develop new facial tics. A furious Jay could be intercepted. Fed. Kissed. Redirected towards a gym or Alexia or, in extreme cases, a cold shower and a sternly worded Clara voice note.

But this Jay was calm.

This Jay had showered, changed into a clean black Barcelona training top, pulled her damp hair back into a tidy low bun, and was now walking through the corridor beneath Lyon's stadium with the slow, loose confidence of a woman who had scored a first half hat trick in thirty minutes and decided that was not quite enough public education for one evening.

She had a protein shake in one hand.

That made it worse too.

There was something deeply threatening about Jay Jones with nutrition and eye contact. She looked almost serene, her shoulders relaxed beneath the tracksuit jacket, the red of the amor tattoo at her throat just visible above the collar, her face clean of match sweat but still carrying the afterglow of violence done legally with a football.

She was not bouncing. She was not grinning. She was not asking whether anyone knew if UEFA technically governed sarcasm. She sipped from the shake as they approached the press room and listened while Julia, walking beside her, spoke in the clipped, careful tone of a woman trying to keep history from happening twice in one week.

"You will not insult him personally."

Jay swallowed, nodded, and said, "Define personally."

Julia stopped walking.

Jay stopped too, obediently, which somehow made Julia more afraid.

"Jay."

"I'm asking for clarity."

"You know what personally means."

"I know what it means in everyday language. I'm asking what it means in post match context."

Julia looked at her for a long moment. "You are not to call him a prick."

"Fine."

"Or imply that he is a prick."

Jay considered this with sincere difficulty. "Can I create space for the audience to arrive at that conclusion independently?"

"No."

"What if he created the space first?"

Julia inhaled through her nose.

Behind them, Alexia made a small sound that could have been a cough, except Jay knew exactly what Alexia trying not to laugh sounded like. Jay turned her head and saw her leaning against the wall outside the press room, still in her match jacket, hair damp from the shower, cheeks faintly pink from the heat of the changing rooms and the cold corridor air. She looked composed to anyone who did not know her, captain clean and media ready, but her eyes were soft with exhausted amusement and the corner of her mouth was betraying her one millimetre at a time.

Jay pointed at her with the shake. "She laughed."

"I did not," Alexia said immediately.

"You did internally."

"You cannot prove this."

"I felt it in the relationship."

Alexia folded her arms, but her smile gave up and arrived properly. "Do not be stupid in there."

Jay's expression changed when Alexia said it. Not dramatically. Not enough for anyone else to call it softness. But Julia saw it, because Julia had spent years watching Jay become many versions of herself and had learned to recognise the few people who could reach the truest one without knocking. Jay's eyes warmed. Her grip shifted on the bottle. Her whole body leaned, almost imperceptibly, towards Alexia.

"I won't," Jay said, quieter now.

Alexia studied her. "You are calm."

"Yeah."

"This is suspicious."

"I'm wounded by the lack of trust."

"You threw your shirt at a camera less than one hour ago."

"For charity."

"It was not charity."

"It helped a man with hydration issues."

Julia shut her eyes. "Please do not say that in the press conference."

Jay smiled, just once, quick and sharp. "I won't. Unless asked directly."

"Jay."

Alexia stepped closer and took the front of Jay's jacket between two fingers, not pulling her in, exactly, but holding her in place with the simple authority of touch. "Listen to me," she said softly. "Say what you need to say. But do not let him make you lose yourself again."

Jay looked down at her hand on her jacket, then back at her face. The press room buzzed behind the closed door. Voices. Cameras. Reporters waiting with sharpened questions and prepared angles. Somewhere in the building, Lyon were surely conducting their own autopsy. Somewhere online, Jay's shush and fake tears and shrug and shirt toss were multiplying into legend, stitched together with bass drops and captions and an alarming amount of flame emojis. The night could still become too much. It wanted to. Jay could feel the hook of it in her chest, bright and tempting.

But Alexia was there.

Alexia, who had stood in front of the treadmill and said mírame. Alexia, who had told her to punish him with football. Alexia, who had kept her hand on Jay's chest in the middle of a stadium because she trusted Jay enough to call her back, but loved her enough not to pretend she did not need calling.

Jay bent her head and kissed Alexia's forehead, slow enough that Julia looked away for privacy even though three staff members and one UEFA official had just witnessed it near a vending machine. "I'm good, baby."

Alexia's fingers tightened once in her jacket. "Promise?"

Jay smiled, smaller now. "Promise."

Julia gave her exactly two seconds of tenderness before clapping her hands once. "Right. We are going in. Jay, you will sit. You will drink your shake. You will answer the question that is asked, not the secret question your brain invents underneath it."

Jay nodded solemnly. "Terrible system, but okay."

"You will not mention in any form of who the manager might or might not be sleeping with."

Jay paused.

Julia saw the pause and pointed at her. "No."

Jay lifted both hands, one still holding the shake. "I didn't even know that was on the banned list."

"It is now.”

Alexia looked at Jay's face and, because she knew the shape of that restraint, said, "Bebé."

Jay exhaled. "Fine."

The press room fell into a strange, hungry silence when she entered.

It was not a large room, but it felt crowded with attention. Rows of journalists sat beneath harsh white lights, laptops open, phones recording, eyes tracking Jay from the door to the table as though she might explode en route and save them the effort of writing. Behind the cameras, media staff lined the walls with the wary stillness of people standing near a beautiful animal that had recently learned how doors worked. Jonatan was already seated at the table, looking like a man who had survived the match and was now bracing for the aftershock. A bottle of water sat in front of him. Another sat in front of the empty chair beside him.

Jay ignored the water and placed her protein shake on the table.

Several cameras subtly zoomed in.

She sat down, adjusted the microphone, took one slow sip, and looked out at the room with the calm of a woman who knew everyone wanted blood and had decided to serve them analysis first.

The moderator cleared his throat. "We will begin with questions for Jay Jones and Jonatan Giráldez. Please raise your hand and wait for the microphone."

Jay leaned back slightly in her chair, one ankle hooked behind the other, shoulders loose. She did not look at Julia, who stood at the side of the room with her arms folded and her face set in the kind of polite neutrality that suggested she had already imagined four exits and one burial site.

The first question came from a French journalist in the second row, his tone careful but not careful enough. "Jay, you scored three goals in thirty minutes after a week of comments from the Lyon manager. Did his words motivate you?"

Jay lifted the shake, took another sip, and gave herself half a second before answering.

"Yeah," she said, her voice even. "Obviously."

There was a flicker through the room. Pens moved. Fingers touched keyboards. Jay watched them all decide what kind of quote they wanted before she had finished the sentence.

"I think it would be dishonest to sit here and pretend I didn't hear it," she continued, calmer than most of them expected, and somehow that made the room lean in further. "Everyone heard it. My teammates heard it. My girlfriend heard it. My club heard it. I heard it. He wanted it heard. That was the point. So, yes, it motivated me, but not in the way I think he hoped."

Jonatan glanced sideways at her.

Jay did not glance back. She was looking straight ahead now, voice low, measured, carrying that unusual authority she had when she chose not to outrun her own thoughts.

"He wanted me emotional in the wrong way. He wanted me chasing him, chasing headlines, chasing tackles I didn't need to make. He wanted chaos without control, because that's the version of me that would help his team. Instead, I scored three goals and came off after thirty minutes. So I'd say if his plan was to wind me up, he succeeded. If his plan was to help Lyon win a football match, his team might want a word with him."

A few reporters made the involuntary sound of people trying not to react professionally.

Jay sipped her shake.

It was infuriatingly effective.

In the players' lounge down the corridor, the Barcelona squad watched on the large screen with the kind of collective attention usually reserved for penalty shootouts and team bus gossip.

Mapi sat forward on the edge of the sofa, elbows on her knees, eyes bright with delight. "Oh, she is good."

Lucy stood behind the sofa with her arms folded. "That was actually a very good answer."

Keira nodded slowly, impressed despite herself. "Too good. I don't trust it."

Pina, sitting cross legged on the floor with Cata beside her, whispered, "She looks calm."

Cata shook her head. "That is not calm. That is when cats pretend they are not about to push glass off a table."

Alexia stood near the back of the room, one shoulder resting against the wall, arms folded, her face unreadable except to anyone who knew where to look. She watched Jay on the screen, watched the way she kept her body still, the way she paused before speaking, the way she kept taking slow, deliberate sips from that ridiculous protein shake as if it were a legal defence strategy.

Her chest felt tight with pride and dread in equal measure.

Mapi looked back at her. "You trained this?"

Alexia did not look away from the screen. "No."

Lucy snorted. "You absolutely trained this."

"I taught her not to get sent off," Alexia said. "This is different."

On the screen, another journalist raised a hand.

"Jay," the woman began, "you said Lyon might want to speak to their manager. Do you think his comments cost them tonight?"

Jay gave a small shrug, not dismissive, more like she was laying out something obvious and regrettable. "I think his comments helped Barcelona. That is not my problem."

Jonatan pressed his lips together.

Jay continued, "If you are a manager before a Champions League knockout game and you spend your press conference talking about another player's relationship instead of your own team's structure, then you have made a choice. He made it personal. He put attention on me. He put attention on Alexia. He gave us emotional energy and tactical clarity, because suddenly everyone knew exactly what this match meant beyond football. His players then had to play inside the noise he created. That's not clever. That's ego."

This time, the reaction in the room was impossible to hide. A few heads lowered towards laptops. Someone muttered under their breath. The moderator shifted slightly, already sensing the clip forming.

Jay leaned towards the microphone, not angry yet, but closer to it now. "And look, people can call me chaos. I'm not precious about that. Sometimes I am chaos. I have ADHD, I play on instinct, I press like my boots owe me money, and yes, occasionally my impulse control and my thumbs need legal supervision."

A ripple of laughter moved through the room, and even Julia's mouth twitched before she forced it flat again. "Fine. Say that. But at least I do my talking on the pitch. At least my chaos scored three tonight. His chaos gave a team talk to the opposition."

In the lounge, Mapi stood up so fast Pina had to grab her sleeve. "This is art."

"Sit down," Lucy said.

"I need to salute."

"You do not."

Cata, eyes fixed on the screen, whispered, "His chaos gave a team talk to the opposition. That is going on a shirt."

Alexia said, without moving, "No shirts."

"Not for Jay," Cata said quickly. "For private use."

“No."

Mapi pointed at the screen. "She is drinking protein while ending him. This is cinema."

Alexia could not argue with that, which annoyed her.

Back in the press room, the next question came sharper.

“Jay, after the first comments from the Lyon manager, you posted on Twitter. Looking back, do you think it was right to respond that way?"

Julia's entire body went still.

Jonatan turned his eyes down to the table as though suddenly fascinated by the grain.

Jay placed the protein shake carefully on the table. Not slammed. Not snapped. Carefully. That was the first sign that something in her had shifted.

She looked at the journalist.

"Did you ask him if it was right to make the comments in the first place?"

The room quieted.

The journalist blinked. "I'm asking about your response."

"I know," Jay said. "And I'm asking why the response is always more interesting than what caused it."

Julia, at the side wall, inhaled once through her nose and then, to her own great surprise, did not intervene.

Jay sat forward a little, forearms resting lightly on the table. Her voice remained controlled, but the warmth had gone from it now. This was not the grin in front of the dugout. This was not the fake crying, not the shirt throw, not the theatre. This was the part underneath. The part that had heard laughter in a press room when a man reduced Alexia Putellas to pillow talk and had stored it somewhere much deeper than humour.

"I shouldn't have tweeted the way I tweeted," Jay said. "I can say that. I'm not twelve. I know I gave people a headline. My agent has reminded me with love, violence and several capital letters."

There was another small laugh, but Jay did not smile.

"But what I'm not going to do is sit here and let the whole conversation become about whether I was too emotional in defending myself and Alexia, while everyone steps around what he actually said. Because what has my relationship got to do with this sport? Seriously. What has who I love got to do with whether I should start for Barcelona? What has Alexia's private life got to do with her captaincy? Why was that allowed to sit in a press conference like it was a normal bit of mind games?"

The room had gone very still.

Jay's eyes moved across the journalists, not wildly, not searching for an enemy, but making sure the question landed everywhere it needed to land.

"I don't say he's only got a job because he's sleeping with someone on the board," she said, and Julia's eyes closed in immediate, silent pain. "I don't say that, because that would be inappropriate, disrespectful and completely irrelevant to football. And if I did say it, I guarantee you I'd be fined before I got back to the hotel."

Jonatan coughed into his hand. It might have been a warning. It might have been a laugh. History would never know.

Jay lifted one palm slightly. "But he gets to imply that I'm only on the pitch because I'm sleeping with my captain, and suddenly everyone wants to ask whether my tone was right. That's the bit I have a problem with."

In the lounge, nobody made a sound.

Alexia had not moved.

Her eyes were fixed on Jay's face on the screen, and something deep inside her had gone painfully soft. She had heard Jay defend her in anger. She had felt it in the bedroom, in the gym, in the tunnel. But this was different. This was Jay choosing her words with the same precision she had chosen her runs, turning all that fire into something clear enough that nobody could dismiss it as impulse. You can say what you want about me, Jay had told her earlier without saying it aloud. But do not touch her. Do not make her smaller. Do not use her love as a weapon and expect me to treat it like football.

Mapi looked at Alexia and, for once, did not make a joke.

On the screen, Jay took another sip of her shake, though everyone who knew her could see she did it to slow herself down.

"Stop letting men in the women's game belittle us and then acting shocked when women answer back," she said. "Call it out when it happens, not only when one of us reacts loudly enough to make it uncomfortable. Because if the question is whether my tweet was perfect, no, it wasn't. If the question is whether his comments were worse, yes. And if the question is whether I regret being angry that someone dragged my girlfriend into it, absolutely not."

A reporter near the front lifted his hand halfway. "When you say girlfriend, are you referring to the personal nature of the first comments?"

Jay's gaze snapped to him with enough force that the hand lowered by itself.

"Yes," she said. "Obviously."

The word hit harder than if she had raised her voice.

Then the anger came, not explosive, not uncontrolled, but visible now in the set of her mouth and the hard brightness of her eyes.

"You can say what you want about me. I mean that. Say I'm chaos, say I'm too emotional, say I'm overrated, say I should be benched, say whatever gets your little column moving. I don't give a shit."

The room seemed to inhale. "But don't talk about my girlfriend that way. Don't reduce her. Don't question her professionalism because she loves me. Don't imply she'd compromise this club, this team, or that armband because of who she goes home to. You pissed me off when you spoke about her. Say what you want about me. Don't ever talk about her."

For half a second, Jay looked as though she might say more.

Then she stopped herself.

She reached for the shake, took one long drink, and leaned back in her chair.

Julia stared at her with the expression of a woman who had just watched someone throw a knife and somehow hit the exact centre of the target without breaking the furniture.

In the lounge, Pina whispered, "I think I just became more gay."

Cata nodded solemnly. "Me too, and I was already very busy with it."

Lucy put one hand over her mouth, trying not to smile too openly because Alexia was still standing there and this was, technically, serious. Keira looked down at her coffee as though coffee might explain why her eyes had gone slightly shiny. Mapi, who had never been good at restraint but was making an honest attempt, pressed both hands to her heart and whispered, "Do not ever talk about her. Madre mía."

Alexia said nothing.

She could not.

Because Jay was Jay, ridiculous and impossible and frequently in need of phone confiscation, but Jay also loved like that. Completely. Publicly if necessary. Not performative, not polished into marketable softness, not afraid of being seen caring too much when the world had already decided too much was the charge. She loved like a body putting itself in front of a door.

Alexia lowered her gaze for a second, breathing through the swell of feeling before anyone could see too much of it on her face.

Mapi, quietly for once, said, "She did well."

Alexia looked back at the screen.

“Sí," she said. "She did."

The questions moved, because journalists were nothing if not creatures with survival instincts when a room changed temperature.

A Spanish reporter asked about the hat trick itself, and Jay answered with surprising tactical clarity, breaking down the first goal by praising Alexia's timing between the lines, the second by explaining Graham's delivery and Lyon's full back overcommitting, the third by describing the defender's body shape with such calm precision that Jonatan looked openly pleased despite everything.

She spoke about Barcelona's press, the need to stay compact after the restart, Salma's fourth goal, and the way the team had managed the crowd after Lyon scored. For five full minutes, she was not a headline or a firework or the woman who had told a camera to deliver her shirt to a crying manager. She was simply a brilliant footballer explaining a brilliant performance.

That, too, was part of the answer.

Then, inevitably, someone asked about the shirt.

A journalist at the back raised his hand, already smiling in the way people smiled when they thought they had found the clip question. "Jay, after you were substituted, you threw your shirt towards a camera and said the Lyon manager could wipe his tears with it. Do you regret that?"

Jonatan turned his whole face slowly towards Jay with the weary dread of a man watching a toddler approach an electrical socket.

Jay looked at the reporter.

Then at her protein shake.

Then back at the reporter.

"No," she said.

Julia mouthed something at the ceiling.

Jay continued, beautifully calm. "He's been crying all week about me. I was just trying to help."

The press room broke.

Not completely. They were professionals, or at least dressed as them. But the laugh that went through the room was immediate and helpless, startled out of people before they could decide whether laughing was allowed. Even the moderator's mouth twitched. Jonatan put his fingers against his brow and looked down at the table, shoulders moving once in what might, from a legal distance, have been despair.

Jay took another sip.

In the lounge, the team exploded.

Mapi actually fell sideways onto Lucy. Cata screamed into a cushion. Pina rolled onto her back on the floor. Keira said, "Oh my God, Jay," in the tone of someone horrified to be delighted. Even Alexia laughed, one hand covering her mouth, eyes closing briefly because she wanted to be stern, she truly did, but the line had landed with such calm, vicious elegance that love and discipline had collided inside her and discipline had lost by several goals.

Lucy pointed at the screen. "That is going everywhere."

"It was already everywhere," Mapi said breathlessly. "Now it has subtitles."

Alexia lowered her hand, still smiling despite herself. "Julia is going to kill her."

"Julia is going to frame the transcript," Keira said. "Then kill her."

Back in the press room, the shirt question had opened the final gate.

"Why make it personal?" another reporter asked. "Some would say your celebration and your comments afterwards escalated the situation."

Jay's smile faded at once.

There it was again, the shape of the question she had known would come. Why did you make it personal? As though she had woken up one morning and dragged their private life into a tactical preview. As though Alexia's name had left her mouth first. As though Jay, for all her faults, had ever needed help making a football match emotional when a goal and a badge usually did the job.

She leaned towards the microphone slowly.

"Because he did," she said.

No shake this time. No joke in the first breath. Just the answer, clean and direct.

"He made it personal. He wanted a reaction and he got one, at the expense of his team. That's on him. If you stand in front of cameras and try to wind up a player before a Champions League match, you don't get to cry because she turns up motivated. If you drag her relationship into it, you don't get to act surprised when she responds like a human being."

Her eyes did not leave the reporter.

"And let's be honest, maybe if he focused on his own tactics instead of worrying about who I'm sleeping with, he might get somewhere. But clearly his own ego couldn't control him."

Julia made a small, strangled sound.

Jay heard it and, without looking over, added, "Respectfully."

Jonatan whispered, "That does not help."

"It helps me," Jay murmured back.

The microphones caught it.

The room laughed again.

Jay let it pass, then returned to the question with that same calculated steadiness. "Look, I know who I am. I know what people say. Chaos, temper, instinct, whatever. Some of it is fair. Some of it is lazy. But tonight was not me losing control. Tonight was me using what he gave me. If you give a striker anger, don't complain when she turns it into movement. If you make it about respect, don't complain when she plays like respect is on the scoreboard."

She sat back.

For a moment, nobody asked anything.

The silence had changed from hungry to stunned.

Jonatan, sensing either an opportunity or a narrow escape, leaned towards his microphone. "I think what Jay is saying is that the team responded with football. We played with intensity, but also control. The first thirty minutes were excellent. Jay's performance was excellent, but so was the collective work behind it. Alexia, Patri, Aitana, Graham, the defensive structure, the counter press. This was a team win."

Jay nodded. "Absolutely."

Jonatan looked faintly relieved.

Then Jay added, "A team win that started because their manager gave me homework."

Jonatan closed his eyes.

The moderator cleared his throat quickly. "One final question."

A Catalan journalist near the front raised her hand. "Jay, you spoke very strongly about Alexia. She also captained the team tonight through a difficult game. How important was she in keeping the team controlled, especially after you came off?"

Jay's face changed.

Everyone who had been waiting for another punchline saw it and lowered their expectations accordingly. The edge softened from her mouth. The adrenaline left her eyes for something warmer, almost private, though there was nothing private about the room. She looked down at the table for a moment, thumb moving along the side of the protein bottle, and when she spoke again her voice had gone quieter.

"Massive," she said. "But that's Alexia, isn't it?"

The room held still for a different reason now.

"She controls games in ways people don't always clip. Everyone sees the pass before the first goal, because it's obvious. It's beautiful. But she controls the ten minutes after Lyon score too. She slows us down when the crowd gets loud. She talks constantly. She knows when to press, when to pause, when to let the game breathe. She's the best captain I've ever had."

Jay paused, a smile touching her mouth.

"And I'm not saying that because I'm sleeping with her, before anyone gets confused."

The room reacted again, but this time the laugh came with something warmer underneath it.

Jay's eyes lifted.

"I'm saying it because it's true."

In the lounge, Alexia looked away from the screen too late.

Mapi saw.

Mapi always saw.

For once, she did not announce it to the room. She only smiled into her drink and let Alexia have the moment.

The press conference ended three minutes later, though not before Jay answered one more tactical question with enough detail that several journalists seemed reluctantly reminded that behind all the noise was a player who understood the game better than most people paid to discuss her. When the moderator finally called time, Jay leaned back from the microphone, picked up her shake, and stood with the peaceful expression of a woman who had said exactly what she meant and somehow only partially endangered everyone's evening.

Julia was waiting by the door.

Her face was unreadable.

Jay approached carefully. "I feel like that went well."

Julia stared.

Jay sipped the shake.

Julia continued staring.

Jay lowered the bottle. "Medium well?"

"You compared a manager's professionalism to an imaginary affair with a board member."

"I said I don't say that."

"You said it while not saying it."

"That feels legally nuanced."

"You implied he was crying all week."

"He did keep talking."

"You said his ego couldn't control him."

Jay lifted one finger. "That was analysis."

Julia looked as though she wanted to argue and found, to her horror, that she could not fully disagree. "You also made several intelligent points about sexism, media accountability and tactical responsibility."

Jay's face brightened. "Thank you."

"I am furious that you made them while also committing three separate quote crimes."

"Balance."

Julia took the protein shake out of Jay's hand, drank a mouthful out of pure stress, grimaced because it was disgusting, and handed it back. "That is vile."

"Chocolate peanut butter."

"That is not what either of those things taste like."

Jay took it back, unbothered. "Recovery is a journey."

Julia pointed down the corridor. "Go to the lounge before someone asks you another question and you accidentally start a parliamentary inquiry."

Jay grinned. "Could be good for the sport."

"Jay."

"Going."

She found the team still in the players' lounge, though the moment she opened the door, the silence told her they had absolutely not been casually waiting. Every face turned towards her with varying degrees of admiration, amusement and concern. Mapi stood in the centre of the room like she had been preparing a speech. Lucy leaned against the back of the sofa, already smiling. Pina and Cata sat on the floor, looking up at Jay as though she had returned from battle carrying both a sword and a media fine.

Jay stopped in the doorway. "What?"

For half a second, nobody spoke.

Then Mapi placed one hand over her heart and said, with grave emotion, "His chaos gave a team talk to the opposition."

The room burst.

Jay laughed as Mapi crossed the lounge and wrapped her in a hug so dramatic it nearly knocked the protein shake from her hand. Lucy joined only to steal the bottle and inspect the label with disgust. Keira shook her head and muttered something about media training being dead. Cata asked whether "quote crimes" counted as assists. Pina wanted to know if Jay had planned the "respectfully" or if it had arrived from divine intervention. Jay answered everything with the loose, relieved humour of someone finally out of the room where every word had consequences and back among people who had seen her at breakfast with toothpaste on her sleeve.

Alexia waited until the first wave passed.

She was still by the wall, arms folded, eyes on Jay with an expression that made Jay's grin soften before she had taken a single step towards her. The room faded a little around them, as it always did when Alexia looked at her like that. Jay handed the protein shake blindly to Lucy, who recoiled but accepted it, and crossed to Alexia.

"Hi," Jay said.

Alexia studied her face. "You behaved."

Jay's eyebrows rose. "Did I?"

"Mostly."

"I'll take mostly."

"You were competent."

Jay placed one hand against her own chest. "That sounded romantic."

"It was."

"Say it again."

"No."

Jay smiled, stepping closer. "You loved the protein shake."

"I hated the protein shake."

"You loved me sipping it like a composed athlete."

“I loved you not throwing it."

"That is growth."

Alexia's mouth twitched, but her eyes were softer than her voice. "You did well, bebé."

Jay's smile faltered slightly under the sincerity. Praise from strangers slid off her most of the time; praise from Alexia went straight beneath the ribs and sat there glowing. "Yeah?"

"Sí." Alexia reached up and touched the side of Jay's face, thumb brushing the faint mark left by the microphone headset. "You were angry, but you used it."

Jay swallowed. "I meant what I said."

"I know."

"About you."

"I know."

"I don't want them talking about you like that."

Alexia's hand slid to the back of Jay's neck, fingers warm and firm. "You made this very clear."

"I could make it clearer."

"No."

"Just one more sentence."

"No sentences."

Jay leaned in, smiling now. "Kiss instead?"

Alexia pretended to consider this as if she had not already decided. "That is acceptable."

Jay's grin went soft right before Alexia kissed her.

It was not long, because the lounge was full of their teammates and Julia was probably still somewhere in the corridor developing a migraine in three languages, but it did not need to be long. Alexia's fingers tightened at Jay's neck. Jay's hand settled at her waist. It was a small, warm, deeply familiar thing, but it steadied Jay more than the hat trick had, more than the press conference, more than every viral clip already tearing across the internet. It was the answer beneath all the other answers.

When Alexia pulled back, Mapi immediately sighed from behind them. "The press conference was less intimate than this."

Jay did not turn around. "You watched the whole thing and that's your takeaway?"

"My takeaway is that you are terrifyingly articulate when hydrated."

Lucy held up the protein shake. "This cannot be hydration. This is paste."

Jay turned at once. "Don't disrespect my recovery paste."

"It has lumps."

"Those are ambition."

Keira looked at the bottle. "Those are definitely not ambition."

Alexia took the shake from Lucy, handed it back to Jay, and said, "Drink your ambition, then we go."

Jay accepted it with wounded dignity. "Thank you, baby."

Mapi lifted her phone. "Also, your crying line is already everywhere."

Alexia closed her eyes. "Of course it is."

Jay peered over. "Good angle?"

"Excellent angle," Mapi said. "Very calm. Very lethal. Protein visible."

Jay nodded, satisfied. "Branding."

Alexia looked at her.

Jay quickly added, "Responsible branding."

Julia appeared in the doorway at that exact moment, expression flat. "No one is branding anything."

Jay lowered the shake slowly. "How long have you been there?"

"Long enough."

"Legally?"

Julia pointed towards the exit. "Bus. Now."

Mapi whispered, "She scares me."

Jay whispered back, "That's because she can read contracts and disappointment."

Julia's eyes cut to her.

Jay smiled beautifully. "Bus sounds lovely."

As they filed out of the lounge, laughing and tired and still buzzing with the strange electricity of a night that would be talked about for weeks, Alexia slid her hand into Jay's. It was not hidden. It was not shown off either. It was simply there, fingers threading together in the corridor beneath a French stadium while staff carried bags, players shouted for missing boots, and somewhere outside the press were already carving Jay's words into headlines.

Jay looked down at their hands, then sideways at Alexia.

Alexia squeezed once. "Slow morning tomorrow," she reminded her.

Jay's face softened into something so openly pleased that Alexia nearly laughed. "Yeah?"

"Sí."

"With breakfast first?"

"With breakfast first."

"And then kisses?"

"And then kisses."

"Touching?"

"Jay."

"I'm confirming the schedule."

"You are testing your luck."

Jay lifted their joined hands and kissed Alexia's knuckles as they walked. "My luck's excellent. I'm sleeping with the captain."

Alexia stopped dead.

The corridor went silent around them.

Jay looked at her, eyes wide with the immediate regret of a woman whose mouth had sprinted ahead of survival. "In a respectful, professionally irrelevant, deeply loving way."

Lucy made a strangled noise.

Mapi turned into the wall.

Julia whispered, "I am retiring."

Alexia stared at Jay for one long second, then shook her head, muttering, "Dios mío, you are impossible," but her hand stayed firmly locked in Jay's.

Jay smiled because she knew exactly what that meant.

Still annoyed.

Still loved.

Alexia sat beside her, shoulder touching Jay's, one hand resting loosely over Jay's thigh while she pretended to read match notes on her tablet and, in reality, spent half the flight watching Jay bounce silently through every stage of pre match fixation. Jay had headphones on but no music playing, which Alexia knew because the wire had never connected properly and because Jay kept answering people who had not spoken loudly enough to be heard through actual sound cancellation.

She tapped two fingers against her knee, then stopped when Alexia covered them with her palm. She drank half a bottle of water, forgot it existed, found it again, took another sip, and frowned at the clouds as though Lyon might be hiding tactical weaknesses somewhere inside them.

By the time the squad reached the hotel, the second clip had already begun to spread.

This one was not as explosive as the first, mostly because the Lyon manager had discovered that public misogyny produced consequences and had attempted, with the subtlety of a man hiding fireworks under a napkin, to rephrase himself as a tactical philosopher. He did not say sleeping with the captain again. Even he, apparently, possessed some faint animal instinct for danger. Instead, standing before the press in a navy tracksuit with the satisfied smile of someone who mistook provocation for intelligence, he said Barcelona had become "emotional" around Jay Jones, that they allowed her "temperament" to shape the team, that great sides could not rely on "moments of chaos" when facing disciplined football. Then, with a little shrug that made half the Barcelona squad want to commit multilingual crimes, he added, "Maybe she likes attention more than control. We will see tomorrow."

They saw it in the hotel lobby because Mapi, who had promised not to monitor social media and had therefore immediately monitored it under the legal distinction of "not posting," made a strangled noise near the lifts and turned her phone away too slowly.

Jay noticed, of course. Jay noticed everything she was not supposed to notice, especially when people tried to hide it with the facial subtlety of a school nativity shepherd who had forgotten his line. She was standing beside Alexia with her hood up, one hand hooked lazily around the strap of her backpack, looking loose and unreadable in the way that made strangers assume she was calm. Alexia knew she was not calm because Jay's jaw shifted once, very slightly, and because the hand not holding her bag had curled into a fist inside the pocket of her hoodie.

"Mapi," Jay said, without lifting her voice.

Mapi froze with the phone still half hidden against her chest, looking at once guilty and offended by the inconvenience of being observed. “Nothing."

Jay tilted her head. "You said that like someone currently holding evidence."

"It is not evidence," Mapi replied, which was the worst possible answer because it immediately made half the group look over.

Lucy, who was walking behind them with Keira, leaned around Mapi's shoulder and glanced at the screen. Her eyebrows went up. "Oh, he's brave."

Alexia did not ask. She simply held out her hand.

Mapi surrendered the phone with the look of a woman giving a sword to someone who knew exactly how to use it. Alexia watched the clip once. Only once. Her expression did not change much, but Jay felt the shift beside her; felt it in the air, in the way Alexia's warmth went tight, in the way her thumb brushed once across the edge of the phone as though she were imagining pressing it into the manager's forehead with controlled, elegant force.

Jay said nothing.

That was what worried everyone.

A loud Jay was trouble in the obvious sense, something to be diverted, mocked, cuddled, fed, or physically removed from Twitter by Alexia Putellas. A quiet Jay was different. A quiet Jay meant the chaos had stopped scattering outward and started organising itself into one sharp thing. Even Salma, who usually approached tension with the bright curiosity of someone opening a cupboard to see what fell out, looked at Jay's face and decided to become fascinated by the carpet.

Alexia handed the phone back to Mapi and slid her fingers into Jay's pocket, finding Jay's closed fist and gently working her hand open. "Bebé," she murmured, low enough that only Jay heard.

Jay's mouth twitched, but not with humour. "I'm good."

Alexia looked at her.

Jay nodded once, eyes still fixed somewhere beyond the lobby doors. "I'm good, Ale."

She was not good. Alexia knew she was not good, and Jay knew Alexia knew, and because they both knew that, neither of them insulted the moment by pretending otherwise. Alexia only leaned into her side, a small public touch that would have looked casual to anyone else and meant everything between them. Jay's fingers, now loosened, threaded automatically through hers. For a few seconds, they stood like that in the centre of the hotel lobby while staff moved around them, teammates pretended not to watch, and the clip gained another hundred thousand views online.

Then Jonatan appeared at the front of the group with the strained expression of a man who had aged three months since Jay had discovered the internet existed in the morning. "Everyone upstairs," he said, clapping once with entirely false cheer. "Dinner in forty minutes. Phones away."

Jay lifted her chin. "My phone is away."

Alexia looked at her.

Jay corrected, "My phone is in my possession but spiritually away."

Jonatan closed his eyes very briefly, perhaps speaking to God, perhaps to his contract, perhaps to whatever cruel administrative chain had placed him in charge of Jay Jones during a media incident. "No posts."

"I haven't posted."

"It has been four hours."

"Growth," Jay said.

Alexia squeezed her hand hard enough to make the point travel directly into bone.

Jay smiled for the first time since the lobby doors opened, but it did not reach her eyes.

That night, after dinner, after the tactical meeting, after treatment tables and hydration checks and the familiar pre match rituals that usually softened the edges of travel, Alexia woke from a half doze in their hotel bed to find the space beside her empty.

The room was dark except for the thin wash of city light through the curtains and the small red dot of the television on standby. For one disorienting second, Alexia reached across the sheets expecting skin and found only warmth fading beneath her palm. Her eyes opened properly. Jay's hoodie was gone from the chair. Her trainers were gone from the door. Her phone was still on the bedside table, which should have comforted Alexia and instead did the opposite, because Jay without her phone meant Jay was not spiralling outward into noise. She was somewhere alone with her own body, trying to outrun what her mind had become.

Alexia sat up, hair falling loose around her shoulders, and exhaled through her nose. "Joder," she whispered into the room, not angry exactly, only tired with worry and affection and the familiar ache of loving someone whose fire could warm a whole life and burn her own hands bloody if no one stood close enough to notice.

She found Jay in the hotel gym ten minutes later.

The gym was on the lower floor, glass walled on one side, bright in that ugly artificial way hotel gyms often were, every machine arranged with sterile confidence as if the room had been designed by someone who understood exercise only as a brochure concept. It smelled faintly of rubber, disinfectant and metal. The lights were too white. The air conditioning hummed. Outside the glass, the corridor was empty.

Jay was on the treadmill.

Not running for fitness. Not even running for the clean, steady rhythm that usually helped her settle. She was driving herself forward like punishment. Her shirt was dark with sweat between her shoulder blades, blonde hair tied high and messy, tattoos shifting along her arms with every powerful pump. The treadmill belt whispered viciously beneath her feet. The numbers on the screen were too high for this time of night, too sustained for the day before a game, too Jay for Alexia to feel anything except the immediate, fierce urge to step between her and the thing she was using to hurt herself quietly.

"Jay," Alexia said.

Jay did not hear her or pretended not to. Her eyes stayed forward, fixed on the blank wall beyond the mirrors, face set and distant. She had that look Alexia hated, the one where she had gone somewhere inside herself that could not be reached by ordinary language.

Alexia crossed the gym slowly at first, giving Jay the chance to come back on her own. "Bebé."

Nothing.

The treadmill kept going.

Alexia stopped beside it and looked at the speed. Her mouth tightened. "Enough."

Jay's jaw flexed, breath harsh and controlled. "I'm nearly done."

"No, you are not."

"Ten minutes."

"You said that to yourself ten minutes ago, I think."

Jay did not answer, which was answer enough.

Alexia reached for the emergency stop.

Jay's hand shot out, not touching her but blocking the movement. "Don't."

The word came rougher than she meant it to. It landed in the white room and changed the air. Alexia's eyes lifted to Jay's face. Jay was still running, still breathing hard, still trying to appear held together by force of will and quad strength. Her expression flickered almost immediately with regret, but she did not stop. Could not stop, maybe. That hurt Alexia more.

Very quietly, Alexia stepped onto the side rail of the treadmill in front of her.

Jay's eyes sharpened at once. "Ale, move."

Alexia did not move. She stood facing Jay, hands on either side of the treadmill frame, wearing soft black shorts and one of Jay's old sweatshirts, hair loose, face calm in a way that had nothing to do with passivity. Jay shortened her stride instinctively, panic flashing beneath irritation because the one thing she would not do, even furious, even locked inside herself, was risk hurting Alexia.

"Move," Jay repeated, but the command had already lost power.

Alexia reached out and hit the stop button herself.

The belt slowed. Jay stumbled half a step, caught herself, and gripped the rails with both hands, breathing hard, sweat running down her temple. The machine whined down beneath them until silence spread through the gym.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Jay stared past her.

Alexia stepped closer, close enough that Jay had no choice but to feel the warmth of her, the steady presence of her body in the space Jay had been trying to fill with speed. She lifted both hands and cupped Jay's face, thumbs pressing gently beneath the sharp line of her cheekbones. Jay's skin was hot under her palms. Her breathing was too fast. Her eyes were bright, not with tears exactly, but with the furious pressure of too much feeling denied an exit.

"Bebé," Alexia said, and her voice had dropped into that soft Spanish register Jay could never defend against. "Mírame."

Jay's eyes flicked to hers and away.

Alexia held her there. Not forcing. Not pleading. Simply present, immovable in a way only love could be. "Mírame, Jay."

This time Jay looked.

The fight went out of her so suddenly it was almost frightening. Her shoulders sagged. Her hands loosened on the treadmill rails. Her breath broke once, rough and quiet, and Alexia stroked her thumbs along her cheeks as if smoothing the edges of something jagged.

"He gets in your head when you let him make you run like this," Alexia said.

Jay swallowed, throat working beneath the red of her tattoo. "He's not in my head."

"Amor."

Jay gave a small, humourless laugh because Alexia saying amor like that was less a pet name and more a witness statement. "Fine. He's renting space. Short term. Terrible tenant. No references."

Alexia's mouth softened, but she did not let go of Jay's face. "You do not need to prove everything tonight."

"I do."

"No."

"I do, Ale." Jay's voice cracked at the edge, not weak, just scraped raw by how badly she wanted to turn everything said about them into something undeniable. "Because if I don't, they'll say it again. Him, or someone else, or some bloke online who thinks pressing is a brand of trouser. They'll say I'm only here because of you. They'll say you're compromised. They'll say we're emotional, or distracted, or unprofessional, or whatever word they use when they mean women who don't apologise for wanting each other."

Alexia's hands slid from Jay's face to the back of her neck, fingers threading into the damp hair there. "They may say it anyway."

"That's supposed to help?"

"No," Alexia said, and leaned in until their foreheads touched. "It is supposed to be true."

Jay closed her eyes.

Alexia breathed with her until Jay's breathing began, stubbornly and unevenly, to follow. "You can score tomorrow," she murmured. "You can press. You can make them suffer. I want this. Very much, actually." Her voice warmed slightly, a little dry now, because Alexia was still Alexia and even tenderness carried a blade when necessary. "But you cannot arrive empty because a stupid man with a microphone made you forget you are already enough."

Jay opened her eyes slowly. "That was another annoyingly poetic one."

"I have range."

"You do."

"And you smell terrible."

A laugh escaped Jay before she could stop it, surprised and breathless. Alexia smiled because she had wanted exactly that, then rose onto her toes and kissed Jay once, soft and firm and salt warm from sweat. Jay tried to chase it when she pulled away, because even at her most exhausted she remained fundamentally Jay, and Alexia's hand tightened at the back of her neck.

"No," Alexia said. "Shower. Food. Bed."

Jay looked at her through the last of the anger, trying to find room for obedience without feeling defeated. "Bossy."

"Sí."

"Hot."

"Still sí."

Jay's smile tugged wider, weary and adoring. "You know I love you, right?"

Alexia's expression softened so completely that the gym, with its ugly lights and humming machines, seemed briefly less hostile. "I know."

"I'm not trying to make it harder."

"I know that too guapa.”

Jay leaned forward then, not in flirtation, not in apology exactly, but in need, letting her forehead rest against Alexia's shoulder. Alexia's arms went around her at once, holding her despite the sweat, despite the late hour, despite the fact that she would absolutely complain about both later. Jay's hands settled at Alexia's waist, careful at first, then tighter when Alexia pressed a kiss to her temple.

They stayed like that until the treadmill screen went dark.

Later, in bed, Jay did everything Alexia told her to do with the suspicious compliance of a woman who was either genuinely exhausted or planning something. She showered. She ate the protein yoghurt Alexia placed in front of her. She drank water. She let Alexia dry the ends of her hair with a towel while pretending this was normal and not one of the quiet intimacies that made her chest ache. She even allowed her phone to remain on Alexia's side of the bed, confiscated again, though she did stare at it once with the longing of a banned prophet denied access to her people.

"No," Alexia said without looking up from her book.

Jay, already under the covers, turned her head. "I didn't say anything."

"You sighed at Twitter."

"I sighed generally."

"You sighed in blue verified."

Jay rolled onto her side and slid closer, pressing her face into Alexia's hip. "You're mean when you're right."

"I am often right, so this is difficult for you."

Jay smiled into the fabric of Alexia's sleep shirt, and for a while, almost, the night became one of their usual nights before a big match. Alexia's hand found Jay's hair. Jay's arm wrapped over Alexia's thighs. The city moved beyond the window, rain whispering faintly against the glass, and the hotel settled around them with the thick, hushed energy of teams pretending to sleep while the game waited in everyone's blood.

Usually, Jay loved mornings before matches when she woke beside Alexia. She loved the lazy gravity of them, the half lit softness, the way Alexia would complain about the alarm and then burrow closer as if Jay were personally responsible for the cruelty of time. She loved kissing Alexia before either of them had spoken properly, loved the warm press of her body, the slow drift of Alexia's hand beneath her shirt, the little Spanish grumble against her mouth when Jay got too playful too early and then the inevitable way Alexia kissed her back anyway.

She loved pretending they had five more minutes when they never did, loved stealing seven, loved Alexia muttering, "You are making us late," while making no serious effort to move.

But when Alexia woke the next morning, Jay was already gone.

The shower was running.

Alexia opened her eyes to the empty pillow, the dent still fresh, the sheets pushed back with uncharacteristic care. For a few seconds she stayed still, listening to the water behind the bathroom door. No humming. No terrible off key chorus from whatever song had lodged itself inside Jay's ADHD brain at two in the morning. No shower monologue about tactical injustice, pigeons, breakfast, or whether ghosts would respect offside. Just water.

Alexia turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

This, more than the tweets, more than the glare in the lobby, more than the gym, told her what kind of day it was going to be.

Jay came out ten minutes later with wet hair, towel around her shoulders, already dressed in travel kit from the waist down. She stopped when she saw Alexia awake, and something guilty softened her face. "Morning, baby."

Alexia watched her from the bed, hair spread across the pillow, one arm tucked beneath her head. "You left."

Jay looked down at herself as if hoping an explanation might be printed on her training top. "Shower."

"You always wake me."

"I know."

Alexia did not say anything else. She did not need to. The space between them filled with all the usual things that had not happened.

Jay crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. For a moment, the focus cracked enough for tenderness to show through. She leaned down and kissed Alexia slowly, one hand braced beside her shoulder, mouth soft with apology. Alexia's fingers rose to her jaw, holding her there, and Jay made a faint sound under her breath as if the kiss had reminded her of something she had nearly let the match steal.

When Jay pulled back, Alexia kept hold of her chin. "Do not disappear inside the game before it starts."

Jay's eyes flicked across her face. "I'm here."

"Not all of you."

The honesty of it landed. Jay covered Alexia's hand with her own and kissed her palm. "After," she murmured. "I'll come back after."

Alexia did not like that answer, but she understood it. There were days when Jay's mind narrowed into a tunnel because the only way through the noise was forward. Alexia would rather have had the slow morning, the kisses, the teasing, the warmth of Jay's body refusing to let her leave the bed. She would rather have had her ridiculous girlfriend making them late with charm and wandering hands. But love, she had learned, was not only enjoying someone's softness when it came easily. Sometimes love was standing beside the edge of their focus and trusting they knew the way back.

At breakfast, the team noticed immediately.

Jay was not rude. She was never rude to staff, never careless with people who had done nothing to deserve the blast radius of her moods. She thanked the woman at the coffee station in surprisingly careful French, which made Keira blink because nobody had known Jay possessed careful French, least of all Jay. She ate everything on her plate because Alexia put the plate in front of her and watched until the food vanished. She nodded when Jonatan spoke. She listened to Lucy's comment about Lyon's full back shape. She even responded when Pina asked whether her boots were the new pair or the lucky pair, although her answer, "Yes," did not technically help anyone.

But she was quiet.

Not sleepy quiet. Not moody quiet. Not even angry quiet in the usual Jay sense, where the anger sparked outward through jokes and restless movement. This was match quiet. Weapon quiet. Her eyes kept fixing on nothing, then sharpening as if she were watching a centre back step half a yard too high in a game that had not started yet. Her fingers moved occasionally against the table, not tapping this time but marking invisible runs.

Mapi leaned towards Alexia at the coffee machine and whispered, "She looks like she is mentally hunting."

Alexia stirred sugar into her cup even though she did not take sugar, because her attention was elsewhere. "She is."

"Should we be worried?"

"For Lyon, sí."

Mapi considered this, then nodded with solemn satisfaction. "Good. I enjoy French suffering when tactically deserved."

Across the room, Jay looked up suddenly. "I heard that."

Mapi pressed a hand to her chest. "I said you look beautiful."

Jay stared at her.

Mapi held the stare for three seconds, then surrendered. "And dangerous."

Jay nodded once and returned to her eggs.

Pina whispered, "That was scary."

Lucy, who had been drinking coffee with the calm of a woman who had seen too much football nonsense to be easily shaken, said, "She's going to either score three or get booked inside six minutes."

Alexia looked over at Jay just as Jay lifted her gaze, finding her automatically across the room. The focus softened for the smallest second. Jay's mouth curved, not quite a smile but close enough to belong only to Alexia. Alexia held her eyes and gave one slow, warning tilt of her head.

Jay's smile became sheepish.

Lucy watched the exchange and shook her head. "Actually, no, Alexia's got the lead on. Three goals, no red."

"From your mouth to God," Keira muttered.

By the time they reached the stadium, the whole day had sharpened.

The ground hummed with the restless hostility of a crowd that knew exactly what story it had been sold. Lyon supporters were already loud when the bus pulled in, pressed behind barriers, flags snapping in the cold, voices rising as the Barcelona players stepped down one by one. Cameras turned greedily towards Jay, waiting for a reaction, a grin, a quote, anything that could be carved into another clip and thrown online before she had even tied her boots.

Jay gave them nothing.

She stepped off the bus with headphones over her ears and hood up, face calm, eyes forward. Alexia came behind her, and for once Jay did not turn back automatically, did not reach for her bag strap, did not drift into her space with that unconscious need to touch. She walked straight inside, boots bag in hand, body carrying a stillness that made even the photographers lower their voices for half a second before remembering they were vultures with accreditation.

Inside, the stadium corridors were bright and narrow, the walls too clean, the air smelling of polish, grass and old concrete. Somewhere beyond the tunnel, the crowd rolled and swelled. Jay moved through it all like sound had become irrelevant.

Then, near the edge of the pitch during warm ups, she saw him.

The Lyon manager stood outside his technical area, arms folded, speaking with one of his assistants. He looked towards the Barcelona players as they came out and smiled.

Not broadly. Not theatrically. Just enough.

Jay stopped.

Only for a fraction of a second, but Alexia saw it. Jonatan saw it. Lucy saw it from ten metres away and immediately muttered, "Oh, don't smile at her, you absolute idiot."

The manager's eyes met Jay's.

Jay stared back.

There were glares and then there was what Jay did then, which was less an expression and more a formal notice delivered without paperwork. It contained no visible threat, no childish show, no exaggerated sneer. It was simply the look of a striker who had remembered every word, every laugh in the press room, every implication about her place, her relationship, her captain, and had decided language was no longer the most efficient reply.

The manager's smile twitched.

Jay's did not.

Alexia moved past her just close enough for the backs of their hands to brush. "Warm up," she murmured.

Jay obeyed.

That, more than anything, made the staff nervous.

Before kick off, in the tunnel, the noise of the stadium pressed against the walls like weather. Studs scraped the floor. Players shifted, stretched, rolled shoulders, bounced on their toes. The Lyon players stood opposite with that fixed, bright pre match focus that always looked a little like collective denial. Jay stood near the front, eyes down, hands flexing once at her sides. Alexia watched her from half a step away, seeing the storm contained in all that quiet.

She stepped closer.

Jay looked at her immediately. Always. No matter how far inside the match she had gone, Alexia could still call some part of her back just by entering her space.

Alexia lifted a hand to Jay's chest, fingers spreading briefly over the badge. The gesture was small enough to pass as captaincy, intimate enough that Jay's breath changed. "Do what you have to do," Alexia said, voice low and steady beneath the roar outside, "but do not get sent off. Punish him with your football, sí?"

Jay's eyes searched hers, anger and love moving too close together. "Yeah, babe."

"Promise."

Jay swallowed. "Yeah. Promise."

Alexia's thumb brushed once over the front of Jay's shirt, exactly where her heart was beating too fast. "I love you."

Jay's face shifted. There she was, Alexia thought, beneath all the sharpened edges. Her Jay. Chaos and fire and feeling, trying so hard to be untouchable when love had made her anything but. "I love you too," Jay murmured, and because there were cameras in the tunnel and a match waiting and a whole world desperate to misunderstand them, she did not kiss Alexia. She only leaned in enough for their shoulders to touch.

It was more than enough.

The whistle blew, and within three minutes it became obvious Lyon had made a terrible strategic error.

They had expected Jay to be emotional in the messy sense. Distracted. Reckless. A striker chasing personal revenge at the expense of structure. They had clearly prepared for a version of chaos they could draw out of shape, one that would bite at centre backs, foul too hard, sprint too early, waste energy proving a point that had already been fed to the cameras.

They had not prepared for disciplined fury.

Jay pressed like a door slamming in a storm. She did not charge aimlessly. She angled her runs with surgical spite, cutting passing lanes with such precision that Lyon's centre back, after receiving the ball for the second time, visibly looked up and discovered Jay already arriving from the wrong side of comfort. She forced the first rushed clearance. Then the second. On the third, she let the pass roll across the defender's body, timed her movement perfectly, stole half a yard, and suddenly the entire match tilted.

In the seventh minute, Alexia received between the lines and looked up to find Jay already moving.

It was not a run so much as a decision the pitch had failed to prevent. Jay curved behind the right centre back, held herself onside by the width of a breath, then accelerated the moment Alexia's left foot opened. The pass slid through like it had been placed along a private wire between them. Jay took it once with the outside of her boot, not breaking stride, and the goalkeeper came out fast enough to make the angle narrow.

Jay chipped her.

Not a desperate chip. Not a hopeful lift. A filthy, delicate, humiliating thing, soft as a kiss and cruel as a headline. The ball rose over the keeper's shoulder, hung for one suspended second beneath the floodlights, then dropped under the bar.

The away end erupted.

Jay did not sprint to the corner. She did not roar. She did not do the badge, the fists, the dramatic knee slide. She turned slowly, found the Lyon dugout, lifted one finger to her lips, and shushed the manager with the calm of a librarian correcting a man who had spoken out of turn in a sacred building.

The stadium went feral.

Alexia, running towards her, half laughed despite herself because of course Jay had found the most elegant possible form of disrespect. Lucy grabbed Jay by the shoulders and shouted something in her face that was probably tactical but sounded mostly like delighted violence. Mapi, arriving late because defenders were rarely invited to striker theatre on time, slapped Jay on the back hard enough to shift her balance. Jay only kept her eyes on the manager for one extra beat, finger still at her mouth, before turning into Alexia's arms.

Alexia caught her by the waist, close and brief, her mouth near Jay's ear. "One," she said.

Jay's grin flashed. "Respectfully."

"Liar."

“Emotionally, yes."

Lyon restarted with the brittle energy of a team that had just discovered the match had become personal in a way the scoreboard recognised.

By the sixteenth minute, it was worse.

Barcelona had begun to move the ball with that patient cruelty that made opponents chase shadows until gaps opened where confidence used to be. Patri found Aitana, Aitana found Graham Hansen, Graham drove wide and dragged Lyon's full back into a private crisis. Jay drifted at the edge of the box, apparently marked, apparently contained, until Alexia made one tiny movement towards the penalty spot and both centre backs glanced at her because Alexia Putellas demanded attention the way gravity demanded obedience.

That was all Jay needed.

She peeled away, not backwards but sideways, sliding into the pocket behind the nearest defender. Graham's cross came low, fast, behind the line of obvious danger. Jay met it with her left foot and guided it first time into the bottom corner before the goalkeeper had completed the emotional paperwork necessary to dive.

Two nil.

Sixteen minutes.

For half a second, Jay looked almost serene.

Then she turned towards the Lyon bench, jogged past the manager, pressed both fists near her eyes, and pretended to cry.

Not big. Not cartoonish. Somehow worse because it was small, theatrical and perfectly timed, the gesture of a woman offering sympathy to a man drowning in the puddle he had personally created. The away bench exploded in laughter. The Barcelona substitutes lost all structure. Cata nearly fell off her seat. Mapi, from the halfway line, shouted, "Jay, no!" with the exact tone of someone who absolutely meant "Jay, yes, but legally no."

The referee gave Jay a long warning look.

Jay lifted both hands in innocence, which fooled no one, least of all God.

Alexia jogged over as Lyon players surrounded the referee complaining about emotional damages. She grabbed the back of Jay's shirt and pulled her close enough to speak through a smile. "You promised."

"I didn't get booked."

"You pretended to cry at him."

"Without contact."

"Jay."

Jay's eyes were bright now, the fury transmuting into something dangerously close to joy. "Punishing with skills, baby."

Alexia wanted to be furious. She really did. She could feel the captain in her preparing a statement about discipline, professionalism and unnecessary provocation. Unfortunately, the girlfriend in her had just watched Jay score twice in sixteen minutes after being insulted by a mediocre man with microphone confidence, and the girlfriend was having a tremendous time.

So Alexia only said, "No yellow."

Jay leaned in just enough that their shoulders brushed. "No yellow."

The third goal arrived in the twenty eighth minute, and by then Lyon looked haunted.

There are moments in football when a player stops appearing merely involved in a match and begins to feel inevitable. Jay had crossed into that territory somewhere between the shush and the fake tears, carrying the ball, pressing without mercy, appearing in spaces as though Lyon's defensive line had personally invited her there and forgotten to cancel the booking. Every time Barcelona recovered possession, the stadium seemed to inhale. Every time Alexia looked up, Jay moved. Every time Jay moved, Lyon lost another small portion of peace.

The third started with a tackle from Alexia.

Not a glamorous tackle, not one that would make highlight reels unless people understood the beauty of timing and spite, but a clean, sharp interception just inside Lyon's half. She stepped in front of the pass as if she had read it before the midfielder knew she would play it, took one touch, and saw Jay already spinning off the shoulder of the last defender.

The pass was immediate.

Jay received with her back to goal thirty yards out, a defender tight enough behind her to count the stitching on her shirt. Instead of laying it off, she rolled him. Full body, hip, shoulder, strength, timing. One moment the defender was there, the next she was behind her, discovering regret. Another came across. Jay nudged the ball away from her with the outside of her boot. A third tried to close the shooting lane.

Jay did not shoot.

She dragged the ball back, sat the defender down so completely that the crowd made a collective sound of disbelief, then opened her body and bent the finish into the far top corner from the edge of the box.

It was ridiculous.

It was unnecessary.

It was, in every meaningful sense, a crime.

For one second after the ball hit the net, nobody moved. Even Jay seemed to watch it as if a slightly more sensible version of herself had expected the laws of physics to intervene.

Then the away end detonated.

Hat trick in twenty eight minutes.

Jay turned and walked, not ran, walked to the edge of the Lyon technical area. The stadium noise rose with every step. The manager was already shouting, red faced, one arm flung towards the referee as though the official might retroactively outlaw humiliation. Jay stopped several feet away, close enough for every camera to find her, far enough to preserve the paper thin defence of innocence.

She spread both hands and shrugged.

Then she grinned.

It was the kind of grin that should have been registered as a controlled substance. Wicked, brilliant, too charming to be pure arrogance and too arrogant to be dismissed as charm. It said, very clearly and in every available language, you asked to see.

The manager lost his mind.

In fairness, he had been misplacing pieces of it since the first goal, but this was the moment the final screw rolled beneath the sofa. He grabbed a water bottle from beside the dugout and threw it down in fury. Unfortunately for him, fury had terrible aim and television had excellent cameras. The bottle bounced, sprayed, skidded towards the touchline and clipped Jay's boot with a pathetic little splash.

Pandemonium arrived at once.

The Barcelona bench surged up. Lyon staff grabbed their manager. The fourth official stepped in with the exhausted expression of a man who had hoped to supervise substitutions and instead found himself mediating between masculine fragility and Jay Jones at full voltage. Jay looked down at the bottle, then back at the manager, then lifted one eyebrow so elegantly that Alexia, fifty metres away, almost put her face in her hands.

Lucy reached Jay first, grabbing her around the waist from behind with veteran practicality. "Do not," she said directly into Jay's ear.

Jay, still grinning, said, "I'm not doing anything."

"You're thinking in red card."

"I promised Ale."

"Then think in wedding vows or something because your face is criminal."

Alexia arrived next, calmer on the outside and absolutely murderous underneath. She placed herself between Jay and the dugout with such smooth authority that even the referee seemed relieved. Her hand found Jay's chest, pressing lightly, not pushing exactly, but reminding. Jay looked at her. The grin softened at the edges.

"Bebé," Alexia said, voice low enough to cut through the noise for Jay alone. "Enough."

Jay nodded. Still smiling. Still shaking with adrenaline. But she nodded.

The referee booked the Lyon manager.

Jay pointed at herself with exaggerated surprise, then at the yellow card, as if touched by the thoughtfulness of the occasion. Alexia closed her eyes for half a second. Mapi, from somewhere behind them, was laughing so hard Ingrid had to physically turn her away from the officials.

Jonatan watched all of this with the look of a man doing complex emotional mathematics.

By the thirtieth minute, he had solved it.

The board went up.

Jay's number.

For a heartbeat, Jay stared at it in disbelief, sweat on her face, chest still rising from the sprinting, the scoring, the chaos of having personally converted one man's press conference into a tactical self harm event. Then she looked towards Jonatan.

Jonatan pointed to the bench.

Jay pointed to herself again, this time genuinely.

Jonatan's expression said, with great clarity, I have enjoyed the goals and would like to continue my employment without watching you start a diplomatic incident before half time.

Alexia came close, breathless and flushed from the game, eyes bright with the effort of not laughing. "Go," she said.

"He's subbing me at thirty."

"You have a hat trick."

"At thirty."

"You also nearly caused a staff riot."

"The bottle hit me."

“Your grin hit him first."

Jay opened her mouth, then closed it because that was difficult to deny with witnesses.

Alexia touched her wrist, quick and tender in the middle of the noise. "Good game, guapa. Now behave."

Jay looked at her, still vibrating with adrenaline, then leaned close enough to murmur, "I love you."

Alexia's face softened despite the stadium, the cameras, the absurdity, all of it. "I love you too. Leave before I change my mind and tackle you myself."

Jay jogged towards the touchline to an ovation from the away end and a chorus of boos from the home crowd that seemed, frankly, confused about whether it was furious or impressed. She clapped the travelling fans. She shook Jonatan's hand with exaggerated politeness. Jonatan said something into her ear that made her grin and him immediately regret speaking.

Then Jay noticed the camera.

Of course she did.

It was there beside the tunnel, lens trained on her as she walked off, capturing the sweat, the bright grin, the wild satisfaction of a player dragged from the pitch after thirty minutes because she had scored three goals and turned a manager into a cautionary tale.

Jay leaned towards it.

"Hattrick in thirty minutes," she said, voice loud enough to carry, breath still rough from the match, eyes glittering. "And subbed off."

Behind her, one of the communications staff made a noise like a soul leaving the body.

Jay pulled her shirt over her head.

The camera caught the flash of tattoos, the red mark at her throat, the powerful line of her shoulders, the black sports bra beneath, the complete absence of shame or sensible media training. She balled the shirt once, tossed it directly towards the camera operator with a grin that would be replayed on every platform before the half time whistle.

"Tell your manager to wipe his tears on that," she said, already turning towards the tunnel. "It's worth a fair bit now."

Then she disappeared inside.

The clip went viral before she reached the dressing room.

At half time, Barcelona led three nil and the dressing room was an impossible place.

Not chaotic exactly, because the team was too experienced to lose itself entirely before the match was won, but alive with a charge that made the walls seem too close. Players came in laughing, shouting, breathing hard, some still shaking their heads at the third goal, others replaying the water bottle incident with the moral outrage of people who had not, in fact, been discouraging Jay very strongly beforehand. Staff tried to restore order. Analysts queued clips. Jonatan stood near the board and looked as though he was deciding whether to praise Jay, fine Jay, or have Jay sealed inside a media proof container until the bus left France.

Jay sat in her cubby wearing a fresh training top someone had thrown at her, hair damp with sweat, towel around her neck, bare knees bouncing with leftover electricity. She had not even pretended to be sorry yet, which Alexia thought was wise because Jay's face, in that moment, was incapable of producing believable regret.

Alexia crossed the room before anyone else could reach her.

Jay looked up.

For all the noise, all the laughter, all the wildness of what had just happened, the moment narrowed at once. Alexia stood in front of her, boots planted, hands on her hips, captain's armband stark against her sleeve, face composed except for the tiny twitch at the corner of her mouth that gave her away.

Jay's expression softened. "Hi."

Alexia stared down at her. "Good game, bebé."

Jay's grin grew carefully. "Thank you."

Alexia leaned closer, one hand coming down to cup Jay's jaw, gentle enough to make the entire dressing room pretend not to stare. "But no more, sí?"

Jay looked up at her through her lashes, all mischief and obedience battling for space. "Yeah, babe."

Alexia's thumb moved once along her cheek. "No more."

"No more."

"No tunnel interviews."

"Wasn't an interview. More of a cultural exchange."

"Jay."

"Yeah. No more."

"No gestures."

"None."

"No cameras."

Jay hesitated.

Alexia's eyes narrowed.

Jay corrected quickly, "No cameras."

"No comments about tears."

"That one feels restrictive, but okay."

Alexia bent closer, voice dropping, warm and dangerous. "Do you want to finish this match alive?"

Jay smiled helplessly because even surrounded by teammates, tactics and the ghost of UEFA discipline, Alexia threatening her softly in Spanish adjacent English was still one of her favourite things on earth. "With you? Always."

Alexia tried not to smile. Failed slightly. Then she kissed Jay's forehead, quick but unmistakably tender, and stepped back before the room could fully combust.

Mapi immediately made a strangled sound. "I cannot believe we are all expected to do tactics after that."

Jonatan pointed at her without turning from the board. "You especially are expected to do tactics."

Mapi sat up straighter. "I love tactics."

"No, you love chaos."

"I can multitask."

Jay lifted a hand. "For the record, I also love tactics."

Alexia looked at her.

Jay lowered the hand. "Quietly."

The second half was calmer because Alexia made it calm.

Not by removing the edge, because Barcelona did not survive knockout football by becoming soft, but by putting the match back under her hands. She slowed the rhythm when Lyon tried to turn emotion into momentum. She drew fouls, switched play, spoke constantly, guided the team through the first ten minutes after the restart when Lyon came out wounded and frantic. Without Jay on the pitch, the game lost some of its thunder, but not its control. Barcelona did what Barcelona did best. They kept the ball until the crowd became irritated by the shape of their own helplessness.

Lyon scored in the sixty second minute, a scrappy finish from a corner that sent the home crowd roaring back to life and made the manager briefly behave as though he had personally resurrected civilisation. The camera cut to Jay on the bench at exactly the wrong moment, because Jay, wrapped in a coat now, water bottle in hand, looked towards the celebrating dugout and smiled with saintly patience.

Alexia saw it on the stadium screen and pointed at her from the pitch.

Jay lifted both hands.

The bench laughed.

Barcelona's fourth came twelve minutes later, because football, like comedy, enjoyed timing. Alexia started it, of course. A turn away from pressure, a pass slipped into Patri, a third player run from Aitana, and suddenly Graham was in behind. The cross came high this time, curling towards the back post, where Salma rose and headed it down with enough force to make the net snap.

Four one.

The away end sang until the final whistle.

When it came, the match ended not with relief but with satisfaction. Barcelona players embraced in the centre circle, damp with rain and sweat beneath the lights. Lyon players moved with the hollow look of a team that had spent too long inside someone else's answer. The manager disappeared down the tunnel faster than his post match principles could follow him.

Jay waited near the sideline, hood up again, trying to look calm and failing because her whole face lit when Alexia approached.

Alexia walked straight to her.

No hesitation. No distance for cameras. No careful little space left for the internet to misinterpret. She came off the pitch and into Jay's arms with the tired force of a woman who had held a match together for an hour and deserved, at the very least, the warm, ridiculous body of the person who had set it on fire.

Jay caught her immediately, arms around her waist, face pressing into Alexia's damp hair. "Four one," she murmured.

Alexia's hand slid to the back of Jay's neck. "You scored three."

"In thirty."

“Do not start."

Jay smiled against her temple. "I'm just saying it's efficient."

"You were impossible."

"But loved?"

Alexia pulled back enough to look at her, eyes tired and bright and full of that exasperated tenderness that always undid Jay more than praise. "Sí," she said softly. "Loved."

Jay's grin faded into something gentler. For a second, with the stadium moving around them, the cameras circling, teammates laughing, the noise of victory swelling from the away end, all the morning's focus loosened. Jay looked almost dazed by it, not the hat trick, not the viral clip, not the satisfaction of punishing a man who had mistaken disrespect for strategy. This. Alexia's hand on her neck. Alexia's body against hers. Alexia looking at her like even the worst parts of Jay's fire were worth learning how to hold.

"I came back," Jay said quietly, so quietly the cameras would never catch it.

Alexia understood. Her face softened at once. "I know, bebé."

Jay swallowed. "Told you I would."

Alexia rose onto her toes and kissed her, not for the crowd, not for the narrative, not for anyone desperate to decide whether they were too emotional or too distracted or too in love to be professional. It was a kiss of return, brief and warm and grounding, Alexia's fingers tightening at the nape of Jay's neck while Jay's hands settled carefully at her waist. Around them, the away fans screamed louder because privacy was dead and romance had apparently become a group activity, but neither of them pulled away too quickly.

When they finally did, Lucy was standing three feet away with her hands on her hips. "Beautiful. Lovely. Hate to interrupt the reunion, but Jay, communications are looking for you like you owe them blood."

Jay grimaced. "Do I?"

"Possibly."

Mapi appeared behind Lucy, eyes gleaming. "Your shirt throw is already everywhere."

Alexia turned slowly towards Jay.

Jay looked at the sky as though divine intervention might arrive from the stadium roof. "It was a moment."

"It was evidence," Alexia said.

"It was branding."

"It was a fine."

“It was worth a fair bit now," Mapi added helpfully.

Alexia pointed at her. "No."

Mapi closed her mouth.

Jay leaned into Alexia's side, shamelessly using affection as partial legal defence. "I did stop after half time."

Alexia slid an arm around her waist because she was annoyed, yes, but not immune to Jay warm and victorious and tucked against her. "Only because you were not on the pitch."

"Still counts."

"No."

"Counts spiritually?"

"Do not use Mapi law."

Lucy snorted. "Mapi law has no jurisdiction."

Mapi looked wounded. "Mapi law is emotionally valid."

"It is why we have problems," Alexia said.

Jay laughed then, properly, the sound bright and loose enough that Alexia felt the last tight place inside her chest ease. There she was. Back from the tunnel of focus, back from the treadmill, back from the glare and the anger and the need to turn hurt into proof. Still ridiculous. Still dangerous. Still hers.

Across the pitch, cameras flashed. Online, clips multiplied. The shush. The fake tears. The shrug. The water bottle. The substitution. The shirt thrown at the camera. Jay's "wipe his tears on that" was already being subtitled in languages she did not speak. By midnight, it would be an edit. By morning, a disciplinary discussion. By next week, probably a T shirt Mapi would try to buy before Alexia banned it from the apartment.

But for now, Barcelona had won four one in France, Jay had scored a first half hat trick in thirty minutes, Alexia had kept her promise not to tackle her own girlfriend in front of UEFA, and the Lyon manager had learned, with considerable public assistance, that badmouthing Jay Jones before a game was less mind game and more assisted self destruction.

As they walked towards the tunnel, Alexia kept Jay close with one hand at her lower back.

Jay glanced sideways at her, smile softer now. "Slow morning tomorrow?"

Alexia looked at her, rain caught in her lashes, cheeks flushed from the match, mouth curving despite herself. "Very slow."

"Kissing?"

"Sí."

"Touching?"

"Jay."

"What? I'm clarifying recovery protocol."

Alexia rolled her eyes, but her hand slipped beneath the back of Jay's coat, warm against the damp fabric of her shirt. "Breakfast first."

Jay gasped with theatrical offence. "Cold."

"You need food."

"I need affection."

“You need both."

Jay leaned closer as they disappeared from the pitch, the roar of the stadium fading behind them. "Best captain in the world."

Alexia's fingers pressed lightly into her back. "I know."

"Best girlfriend."

"I know this too."

"Bossy, though."

Alexia turned her head, smiled with that dry Spanish warmth that made Jay's pulse trip even after ninety minutes and three goals. "And still you listen."

Jay opened her mouth, undoubtedly to say something charming, dangerous, or professionally inconvenient.

Alexia looked at her.

Jay closed it again.

Behind them, Mapi whispered to Lucy, "Powerful."

Lucy nodded. "Terrifying."

Jay, without turning around, lifted one hand and said, "I heard that."

With Jay, though, the patterns were not simple. Jay could be the sharpest person in a room and still lose her phone while holding it. She could dissect defensive shapes in one breath and forget, genuinely forget, that she had put toast under the grill until the smoke alarm became involved in the conversation. She could play ninety minutes with violent focus, pressing like an animal, timing runs with a striker’s cold intelligence, then come home and stand in the kitchen for six minutes because she had opened the fridge and the contents had somehow become too many decisions.

Alexia had never thought Jay was lazy. Not once. She had never thought Jay was careless in the cruel way other people had meant it when they said the word. But there were still things she did not understand properly, and Alexia hated not understanding things that mattered to the woman she loved.

She had read articles, then books, then sent Clara voice notes at eleven at night with questions that were too specific to be casual. Why could Jay sit for hours rebuilding a bike part with Pedro but become furious with herself over renewing a parking permit? Why did one unexpected phone call sometimes leave her vibrating for the rest of the day? Why did noise seem fine until it was suddenly unbearable? Why did Jay make jokes about sitting still as if it was a personal tragedy, only for Alexia to find her later in bed with the duvet over her head, exhausted by a meeting everyone else had considered easy?

Clara had answered with patience, and then, after the fifth voice note, with a kind of warm professional amusement.

“Alexia,” she had said, “you are not looking for an article anymore.”

Alexia, alone in the car after training, had stared through the windscreen at the fading evening and felt caught. “No.”

“You want to feel it.”

“I want to understand it.”

“You can understand more,” Clara had said carefully. “But you cannot become Jay for an hour. Even Jay cannot explain what it is to be Jay in a way that transfers the full experience into someone else’s nervous system. What I can do is give you an exercise. It will not simulate ADHD exactly. Nothing can. But it can give you a controlled experience of executive function load, sensory interference, working memory disruption and emotional fatigue.”

Alexia had repeated the words silently, translating them into the shape of Jay sitting at the dining table with both hands buried in her hair, whispering, “I know what I need to do, Ale, that’s the problem,” while staring at a form she had been trying to complete for forty minutes.

“I want to do it,” Alexia had said.

Clara had paused long enough for Alexia to hear that she was thinking not only as a therapist, but as someone who loved Jay too. “Then we do it when Jay is occupied. Not because we are hiding something dangerous from her, but because if she knows, she will either perform, deflect or worry that you are only doing it because she is difficult.”

Alexia had hated how quickly that made sense.

So Clara chose a Thursday evening when Julia had already booked Jay for a long sponsor call, a grim administrative meeting involving contract deliverables, campaign language, image approvals, scheduling conflicts and at least three people named Tomás, which even Alexia considered excessive. Jay had been complaining about it since breakfast with the theatrical grief of a woman being led towards public execution.

“I’m going to perish,” Jay had said that morning, sat on the kitchen island while Alexia stood between her knees and tried to get her to eat a second piece of toast. “And they’ll say, how did she die? And you’ll have to say, brand synergy.”

Alexia had rubbed the back of her neck. “You will not die.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that amor.”

“You’re not a doctor.”

“No, but I have watched you survive Mapi explaining cryptocurrency for twenty eight minutes.”

Jay had lifted her head with haunted eyes. “Don’t joke about trauma.”

By seven that evening, Jay was pacing barefoot around the apartment in black joggers and a sleeveless white vest, hair twisted into a messy knot, tattoos vivid against her skin, while Julia sat at the dining table with her laptop open, files spread around her in careful piles and the resigned expression of an agent who had shepherded Jay through enough sponsorship obligations to know that the first twenty minutes would be spent convincing Jay that the meeting was real and not a social experiment designed to destroy her.

Alexia was in the kitchen arranging glasses of water when the doorbell rang.

Jay spun at once. “If that’s someone saving me, I’m kissing them.”

Alexia turned her head, amused. “It is Clara.”

“Still counts.”

“Bebé.”

“What? Clara’s beautiful and emotionally stable. That’s a premium rescue service.”

Julia did not look up from her laptop. “You are not kissing my wife as an escape route from a sponsor meeting.”

Jay leaned across the dining table and kissed the air in Julia’s direction. “Jealousy is ugly on you, Jules.”

“Sit down.”

Jay sat for exactly four seconds, then stood again when Alexia walked to the door because apparently the simple act of Alexia leaving the room was now personally offensive. By the time Alexia opened it, Clara was already smiling as though she had heard half of the conversation through the wood.

“Hola,” Clara said, stepping inside with a canvas bag over one shoulder and a calmness that made even the hallway feel organised. “Am I interrupting?”

“Yes,” Jay said immediately, appearing behind Alexia and sliding one arm around her waist from behind. “Thank God.”

Alexia, caught neatly against Jay’s body, gave Clara an apologetic look that was not apologetic enough to make her move away. Jay kissed the side of Alexia’s neck, then the corner of her jaw, then rested her chin on Alexia’s shoulder with great tragic weight.

Clara’s eyes dropped to the arm around Alexia’s waist, then rose to Jay’s face. “You have a meeting.”

“I have been told that,” Jay said. “Cruelly. Repeatedly.”

Julia called from the dining room, “Because you keep forgetting on purpose.”

“That is a serious accusation from a woman who once lost her own glasses in her hair.”

“It happened one time.”

“It happened at a legal appointment.”

Clara stepped inside and kissed Julia’s cheek on her way through, receiving the fond, brief touch of Julia’s hand at her waist in return. Alexia felt Jay soften against her at the sight. Jay always did that when she saw Julia and Clara together. It was tiny, almost private, a looseness around the mouth, a quietening beneath the humour. Family still surprised her when it arrived gently.

Then Jay tightened her arm around Alexia again. “Where are you going?”

Alexia turned in the circle of Jay’s arms. “With Clara for a little while.”

Jay’s brow furrowed, not suspicious exactly, but immediately interested in the way a border collie became interested in movement. “Where?”

“The spare room.”

“Why?”

“Because Clara is here to see me.”

Jay blinked. “You? Without me?”

“Si bebe.”

Jay looked between Clara and Alexia with exaggerated betrayal. “I don’t want to sound possessive, but that feels like treason.”

Julia finally looked up. “Jay.”

“What? I’m being emotionally honest.”

“You are being needy because you have to sit down.”

Jay pointed at her. “That is ableist and accurate.”

Alexia laughed softly despite herself, and Jay’s attention returned to her instantly, as though the sound had hooked something inside her chest. She stepped closer, backing Alexia gently into the kitchen doorway, hands settling at her hips. “How long?”

“Maybe an hour.”

“An hour?” Jay repeated, as if Alexia had announced a pilgrimage through dangerous mountains. “An hour without you while I sit in a sponsor meeting?”

“You see me every day.”

“That’s not the same as seeing you now.”

Clara’s mouth twitched. Julia made a noise into her coffee that might have been a laugh and might have been despair.

Alexia lifted both hands to Jay’s chest, fingers resting against the cotton of her vest. She could feel Jay’s heartbeat beneath her palms, quick and warm and familiar. “You will survive.”

Jay dipped her head, eyes bright, voice lowering enough to become dangerous. “My morale is already damaged.”

“Your morale?”

“Badly.”

“How bad?”

Jay looked briefly towards Julia. “Close your eyes, Jules.”

“Absolutely not.”

Jay kissed Alexia anyway.

It began as one of Jay’s dramatic, public, deliberately inconvenient kisses, the kind meant to make Alexia smile and everyone else groan, but Alexia made the mistake of touching the back of Jay’s neck and then it changed. Jay’s mouth softened, then deepened, her hand spreading warm at Alexia’s lower back, pulling her closer with the natural confidence of someone who knew exactly how Alexia liked to be held.

Alexia forgot, for several seconds, that Clara was standing by the hallway with a canvas bag full of carefully prepared psychoeducational materials, and Julia was at the dining table pretending to check an email while definitely watching over the top of her screen. She forgot because Jay kissed her like she was the only fixed point in the room, like an hour apart was unreasonable not because Jay was ridiculous, though she was, but because Alexia had become home in a way Jay still found both miraculous and offensive.

When Alexia finally pulled back, her face was warm and her mouth felt unsteady.

Jay smiled slowly. “Morale improved.”

Clara cleared her throat. “Beautiful. Deeply inconvenient. But beautiful.”

Julia pointed at the chair opposite her. “Meeting. Now.”

Jay, still looking at Alexia, sighed with the theatrical heaviness of a condemned woman. “If I die, tell the Ducati I loved her.”

Alexia kissed her once more, quick and fond. “Sit down, bebé.”

Jay obeyed, but only after catching Alexia’s hand and pressing a kiss into her palm, then another to her wrist, then letting go so reluctantly that Julia rolled her eyes with genuine affection.

Clara waited until Alexia followed her into the spare room and closed the door before speaking.

The room had been prepared lightly, enough to make sense but not enough to look like a clinic. Clara had moved the small desk away from the wall and placed a chair before it. On the desk were a notebook, a pen, a printed weekly schedule, a simple expenses sheet, a recipe card, a half written email draft, coloured sticky notes, a phone with preloaded notifications, a small lamp with adjustable brightness, a laptop, two baskets of random objects and a pair of over ear headphones.

There was nothing frightening about any individual item. That was the point. Everything looked manageable in isolation, ordinary even. It was the combination that made Alexia’s stomach tighten before Clara had even begun.

Clara set her bag down. “Before we start, I want to be clear. This is not a game, and it is not a perfect recreation. It is not even close. Jay’s ADHD is not only distraction. It is attention regulation, emotional regulation, sensory processing, motivation, time perception, task initiation, working memory, impulse control and the constant background labour of trying to appear normal in environments not built for her. Medication helps, routines help, you help, but none of it makes her brain become yours.”

Alexia nodded, arms folded, already serious.

Clara’s expression softened. “And this exercise is not designed to make you suffer for the sake of it. It is designed to show friction. The invisible friction Jay is often pushing against while everyone else thinks she is just sitting at the table.”

“That is what I want to understand,” Alexia said.

“I know.” Clara gestured to the chair. “You will have a simple set of tasks. Nothing complex. You will create a short plan for tomorrow morning, fill in a few numbers from a receipt sheet, write a three sentence reply to an email, and follow the first steps of this recipe card by sorting ingredients from the basket. You are capable of all of it. Easily.”

Alexia looked at the desk. “But?”

“But I will interfere with the systems you normally rely on. Working memory, sensory filtering, sequence, time awareness and emotional regulation. Through the headphones, you will hear overlapping noise: a café, distant football commentary, message alerts, a voice occasionally giving instructions, sometimes irrelevant, sometimes important. The lamp will change brightness. The phone will send notifications. I will interrupt you with questions, changes and small requests. Some will matter. Some will not. You will not know which at first.”

Alexia looked at the headphones with increasing distrust. “And I try to finish?”

“You try to continue. That is different. The goal is not achievement. The goal is noticing what it costs.”

“And Jay does this every day?”

Clara sat on the edge of the bed, hands resting loosely in her lap. “Jay lives with versions of this, yes, though hers is internal as much as external. Her brain generates interruptions without needing a speaker. A sound, a thought, a memory, a sensation in her body, a message she forgot to answer, a fear that someone is angry, the sudden urgency of an unrelated task. Imagine trying to carry water in your hands while people keep opening doors around you.”

Alexia swallowed. “Okay.”

“One more thing,” Clara said. “You stop when I tell you, or when you need to. Not when you think you have earned stopping.”

That struck close enough that Alexia’s eyes narrowed. “You think I will do that?”

“I think you are Alexia Putellas.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you are wonderful, disciplined, competitive and sometimes emotionally unreasonable about quitting.”

Alexia looked offended for half a second before conceding with a small tilt of her head. “Vale.”

Clara handed her the headphones. “Sit down.”

Alexia sat.

At first, she was fine.

That was what she thought, anyway. The headphones settled over her ears with a padded pressure that made the room feel distant, but not unbearable. Clara tapped something on the laptop, and a layered audio track began: low café noise, cups clinking, chairs scraping, a baby crying somewhere far away, a football commentator speaking too quickly in Spanish beneath a faint electronic hum. Alexia straightened, took the pen and looked at the printed instruction sheet.

Task one: Write a morning plan from 08:00 to 11:00 using the appointments provided. Include travel time. Remember to drink water.

Easy.

She wrote 08:00 breakfast, then paused when a notification pinged from the phone beside her.

Message: Can you send the image approval before 09:00?

She frowned. That was not on the paper. Was she meant to answer it? Clara had said some things mattered, some did not. The audio shifted; another voice entered through the headphones, calm but intrusive. Don’t forget the red folder. The meeting moved to ten. Where are your keys?

Alexia looked for a red folder despite knowing, intellectually, that there was no red folder in the task. Her eyes flicked across the desk. Notebook, schedule, recipe, sticky notes, phone, basket. No red folder. She looked back at the plan.

08:00 breakfast.

08:30 travel?

Travel to where?

She checked the appointments again. Physio at 09:15. Call at 10:30. Grocery delivery between 08:00 and 10:00. Something about coffee with Alba. She reached for the pen again.

Clara spoke from beside her, voice cutting through one side of the headphones. “Alexia, what did Julia ask you to remember?”

Alexia turned. “What?”

“What did Julia ask you to remember?”

“Julia is not here.”

“Are you sure?”

Alexia stared at her. “Yes.”

Clara nodded pleasantly. “Okay, continue.”

Alexia looked back at the paper, irritated by the tiny disruption. It had been nothing. A simple question. Still, she had lost the thread. Where had she been? Breakfast. Travel. Physio. She wrote 08:45 leave for physio, then immediately realised the grocery delivery window made that impossible unless someone else was home. She crossed it out. The commentator in the headphones got louder, shouting about a missed chance. A notification pinged again.

Message: Did you take medication?

Alexia’s hand stopped.

It was fake. She knew it was fake. Clara had programmed it. It still made something uncomfortable move in her chest because she had sent messages like that to Jay. Gentle ones, loving ones, never meaning to sound like a reminder from a system Jay had failed. She breathed out and forced herself back to the schedule.

Clara reached over and turned the lamp brighter.

Alexia blinked. The white page glared under the sudden light. The audio switched; now there was a ticking clock under the café noise. She tried to ignore it and move to the expenses sheet.

Task two: Add the amounts marked with a star. Do not include the crossed out items.

There were ten lines. Simple amounts. €12.40. €7.80. €31.15. One crossed out. Two starred. Another notification pinged.

Message: You forgot to reply to Lucy.

Alexia’s jaw tightened. She ignored it.

The voice in the headphones said, gently, What was task one? Did you finish task one? You need water. Don’t forget the red folder. The meeting moved to ten. Why are you behind?

Alexia pressed the pen harder into the paper. She added €12.40 and €31.15. €43.55. Then saw another starred amount at the bottom, half hidden beneath a sticky note. She lifted the sticky note and found a handwritten instruction: Before continuing, write down the name of the person you should call after lunch.

She looked at Clara. Clara looked back with kind neutrality.

Alexia did not know. There was no person. Or maybe there was, somewhere in the first sheet. Alba? Josep? Lucy? Jay? The ticking grew louder. The café noise shifted into cutlery clattering. The commentator shouted again. The lamp dimmed, then brightened. The phone pinged.

Message: Urgent, but not really.

Alexia muttered, “Joder,” under her breath.

Clara made a note.

“What are you writing?” Alexia asked, too quickly.

“Your reaction.”

“This is annoying.”

“Yes.”

Alexia returned to the expenses sheet with more force than necessary. “I can do annoying.”

“I know.”

The problem was that annoying did not stay annoying. It multiplied. Every time Alexia caught one thread, another tugged loose. She knew how to work under pressure, but pressure in football had direction. The ball was there. The pitch was marked. The noise of a stadium was enormous, but it moved as one living thing around a single purpose. This was different. This had no centre. It was all edges. Every sound asked for attention and punished her for giving it. Every task seemed simple until it touched another task and became sticky. Her normal clarity, the clean inner line that allowed her to organise, prioritise, decide, had not vanished, exactly, but it was being interrupted so often she could not keep her hands around it.

Clara placed one of the baskets beside her. “Sort the ingredients for the recipe while continuing the expenses. Put anything not on the recipe card to the left.”

Alexia looked at her. “At the same time?”

“Yes.”

“That is not efficient.”

“No.”

Alexia almost laughed, but the headphones pinged again before the laugh arrived. The voice said, You are taking too long. Why can everyone else do this? Check the schedule. Did you drink water? You forgot the red folder.

She grabbed the recipe card. Pasta. Tomatoes. Basil. Garlic. Olive oil. Salt. From the basket she removed a tin of tomatoes, a lemon, batteries, a packet of pasta, a small toy dinosaur, a garlic bulb, a sock, a bottle of olive oil and three loose receipts. She stared at the dinosaur.

“Why is there a dinosaur?”

Clara said, “Not on the recipe.”

“I know that.”

“Then put it to the left.”

Alexia put it to the left. The phone pinged. The commentator shouted. Someone in the audio track laughed loudly right in her ear. She flinched despite herself.

Clara asked, “What time is physio?”

Alexia looked at the schedule. “Nine fifteen.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you write it?”

Alexia looked at her morning plan and found she had written 09:15 twice, once beside physio and once beside grocery delivery, because at some point the lines had merged in her head. Heat climbed into her face.

“That was a mistake,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I know it was a mistake.”

“Yes.”

“I do not usually make that kind of mistake.”

Clara’s voice stayed gentle. “Notice that feeling.”

Alexia hated that feeling. It arrived fast and disproportionate, not because the mistake mattered, but because it should not have happened. Because she was good at this. Because she was organised. Because she was used to trusting her mind to hold sequence and context and instruction, and now the paper in front of her looked stupidly crowded, her handwriting too heavy, the crossed out line accusing her of losing control over something simple.

The audio voice said, Why are you upset? It is easy.

Alexia’s breath caught.

For the first time, she understood that the voice was not only noise. It was shame made audible.

She thought of Jay at the kitchen table last month, trying to fill in a renewal form, laughing too loudly when she wrote the wrong postcode, then becoming quiet after Alexia had said, very gently, “It is just your address, bebé.” She had not meant anything by it. She had meant, do not be hard on yourself. She had meant, this is small enough that you are safe. But maybe Jay had heard something else underneath it, not because Alexia had put it there, but because a thousand other people had.

It is easy.

Why can everyone else do this?

You are taking too long.

Alexia blinked hard and forced herself to continue.

At six minutes, Clara added the second interruption layer.

The laptop screen began flashing between the email draft and a moving visual timer. Not fast enough to be dangerous, but enough that light shifted across the desk in uneven pulses. The phone notifications now appeared with fake names. Lucy: Can you answer now? Mapi: important question. Alba: mamá says call her. Unknown: Your delivery failed. Josep: Reminder. Jay: babe where are my black jeans.

Alexia’s eyes went straight to Jay’s name before she could stop them.

The message was fake. Still, her body reacted. Jay needed something. Jay was asking. Jay was somewhere beyond the door, probably fidgeting in her chair while Julia forced her through contract clauses, entirely unaware that Alexia was sitting in the spare room beginning to sweat over a recipe card and a toy dinosaur. Alexia reached towards the phone, then stopped herself.

Clara said, “Do you answer Jay or continue the task?”

“It is fake.”

“That is not what I asked.”

Alexia closed her eyes for one second. The headphones filled the darkness with noise. Café, ticking, commentary, pings, the calm voice asking whether she had forgotten something important. She opened her eyes and saw the email draft.

Task three: Write a three sentence reply confirming availability and asking one follow up question.

She began to write.

Hello, thank you for the information. I can attend on Tuesday. Can you please confirm the time?

The phone pinged before she finished confirm. Clara interrupted. “Actually, do not use the word please.”

Alexia froze. “What?”

“Continue, but do not use please.”

“It is already written.”

“You can change it.”

Alexia crossed it out. The sentence now looked ugly. She started again. The voice in the headphones said, You did the expenses wrong. Check the starred items. You forgot water. Red folder. Why are you behind? The ticking grew louder. Her shoulder began to ache because she had been holding herself too rigidly.

Clara placed a glass of water beside her, deliberately too close to the paper.

Alexia moved it away too sharply and water sloshed over the edge.

“Hostia,” she snapped, pulling the paper back.

Clara handed her a cloth without comment.

Alexia wiped the desk. The headphones kept going. The lamp flickered. The phone pinged. The email waited unfinished. The expenses were wrong. The recipe items were half sorted. The schedule had two physio appointments. The dinosaur sat to the left, cheerful and useless. Her chest felt tight, and beneath the tightness was anger, not at Clara, not really, but at the impossible stupidity of being able to understand every task separately and still feeling them slide out of reach when stacked together.

“This is impossible,” Alexia said, voice low.

Clara glanced at the timer. “It has been eight minutes.”

Alexia looked up sharply. “Only eight?”

“Yes.”

That was the moment something broke open.

Only eight minutes.

Eight minutes of artificial interruption, safe and controlled, with Clara beside her and no real consequences, no one judging her, no childhood behind it, no years of being told she was careless, no teachers sighing, no coaches calling her difficult, no foster carers deciding she was too loud or too much or not grateful enough, no reporters waiting to misunderstand, no sponsors expecting charm, no internal motor that never fully powered down. Eight minutes, and Alexia wanted to tear the headphones off, throw the phone into a drawer, walk out, cry, apologise, finish everything perfectly and never touch paper again.

Jay lived inside a version of this.

Jay lived inside it and still made breakfast. Still loved loudly. Still trained brutally. Still remembered when Alexia was tired. Still noticed the tiny things, the emotional things, the things everyone else missed. Still kissed Alexia in doorways and sent ridiculous voice notes and held herself together through meetings that left her so drained she would go silent afterwards and pretend she only needed a shower.

Alexia’s vision blurred.

Clara’s hand moved towards the laptop. “Alexia.”

“No,” Alexia said, because reflex was stronger than sense. “I can finish.”

Clara’s voice softened. “That is enough.”

“I can finish.”

“I know you can. That is not the question.”

The voice in the headphones said, Why are you upset? Everyone else finished already.

Alexia ripped them off.

The sudden quiet hit her so hard she gasped. Not true quiet, because the room still existed: the hum of the air-conditioning, distant traffic, Jay’s laugh from the dining room muffled through the wall, Julia’s lower voice saying something patient and pointed. But compared with the track, the room felt vast. Alexia sat frozen in the chair, headphones clenched in both hands, the pen still trapped between her fingers, her heartbeat loud in her ears.

Clara stopped the timer.

Nine minutes and twelve seconds.

For a second, Alexia did not move. Then her face crumpled with such immediate, furious grief that she looked almost offended by her own tears.

“Oh,” she said, and then covered her mouth.

Clara was beside her at once, not crowding, only close enough to offer the kind of presence that asked for nothing. “Breathe.”

Alexia shook her head, tears slipping down her cheeks before she could stop them. “Clara.”

“I know.”

“No, I…” She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, angry at herself, overwhelmed by the speed of it. “I lasted nine minutes.”

“Yes.”

“Nine minutes.”

“Yes.”

“And she…” Alexia’s voice broke. “She does this all day?”

Clara took the headphones from her hands and set them on the desk. “Not exactly like this. But yes, she deals with constant friction most people do not see.”

Alexia looked at the papers, the mess of crossed out lines, the wet corner of the schedule, the dinosaur to the left, the phone still glowing with fake demands. Shame and tenderness moved through her together so fiercely she could barely separate them. “I have told her things are simple.”

“Sometimes things are simple,” Clara said. “That does not mean they are easy.”

“I know that now.”

“You knew before in theory.”

Alexia gave a tearful, humourless laugh. “Theory is useless.”

“No. Theory matters. But experience changes where the knowledge lives.”

Alexia wiped her cheeks roughly and hated that more tears followed. She was not embarrassed by crying generally; she had cried in dressing rooms, on pitches, in her mother’s arms, in the dark after injuries, in Alexia sized griefs that had carved her open and taught her how much strength tenderness required. But this felt different. This was not about her. It was about Jay, and the sudden, devastating awareness of how often Jay had been fighting an invisible match with no whistle, no half-time, no one applauding when she simply managed not to fall apart.

“She jokes,” Alexia said, almost accusingly, because Jay’s humour suddenly felt like another kind of bruise. “All the time.”

“She jokes because it gives her control. She jokes because people forgive funny chaos more easily than exhausted dysfunction. She jokes because if she says, ‘This is hurting me,’ some part of her still expects someone to say, ‘It should not.’”

Alexia’s mouth trembled.

Clara waited.

From beyond the door, Jay laughed again, louder this time, and then they heard Julia say, “No, Jay, you cannot describe a luxury watch campaign as ‘time prison but make it shiny.’”

Jay’s voice came through, muffled but indignant. “That is literally what watches are.”

Even through tears, Alexia laughed.

Clara smiled. “There she is.”

Alexia wiped her face again, softer this time. “Does medication make it quiet?”

“Quieter,” Clara said. “More space between the thought and the action. More ability to choose where attention goes. Less emotional whiplash for some people, better task initiation, better filtering. But it is not a personality transplant. Jay is still Jay. Her brain still seeks interest, novelty, movement, connection. She still burns energy managing things you and I do automatically.”

Alexia looked down at the ruined morning plan. “She must be so tired.”

“She is. More often than she says.”

“I should have known.”

“You did know some of it. Do not turn understanding into a weapon against yourself.”

Alexia gave her a look through wet lashes. “You sound like Jay when she says I cannot guilt myself into being useful.”

“Jay occasionally listens.”

“She pretends not to.”

“She has a brand.”

Alexia laughed again, shakier but real. Then she leaned back in the chair, staring at the ceiling, letting the tears run into her hairline because wiping them away had become pointless. “How do I love her better?”

Clara’s expression warmed. “You already love her well.”

“I want to know.”

“Then remember that support is not the same as control. Jay does not need a mother. She needs a partner who understands that reminders can be loving when they are not loaded with judgement, that structure helps when it is shared rather than imposed, that transitions are harder than they look, that rest after social or administrative demands is not laziness, and that sometimes she needs body doubling more than advice.”

Alexia nodded slowly, absorbing each piece with the seriousness she brought to tactical instruction.

“Body doubling,” she repeated.

“Sitting with her while she starts. Not doing it for her. Not hovering like a supervisor. Just being nearby, making the room feel less hostile. You already do it sometimes without naming it.”

“When I sit at the table with coffee while she answers emails?”

“Yes.”

“She says I improve the vibes.”

“Jay language, but yes.”

Alexia pressed the back of her hand under her nose and breathed out. “And when she says sitting still is damaging her morale?”

Clara’s mouth curved. “Sometimes she is flirting. Sometimes she is telling you, in the only way she can tolerate, that the effort of staying regulated in a boring task is costing her.”

Alexia closed her eyes.

In the other room, Jay said, “I’m not saying I won’t attend the sponsor dinner. I’m saying if they make me wear beige, I will become unavailable spiritually.”

Julia replied, “You will wear the suit Alexia chooses and say thank you.”

Jay’s answer was immediate. “Well, if Alexia chooses it, I’ll wear a bin bag.”

Alexia opened her eyes, tears still on her cheeks, and smiled before she could stop herself.

Clara saw it and softened. “There is also this. Do not let understanding turn Jay into a problem to solve. Her ADHD is disabling in real ways, but it is also tangled with parts of her you love. The speed, the humour, the leaps, the way she notices emotional shifts before other people have words for them, the intensity, the charm, the creativity, the way she can walk into a room and change its weather. The aim is not to make Jay easier to love. She is already easy for you to love. The aim is to make the world less exhausting where you can.”

Alexia nodded, and this time the tears came quietly.

They might have stayed there longer if Jay had not appeared at the door seven minutes later with the sixth sense of a woman whose nervous system was apparently connected to Alexia by invisible wire.

She did not knock. She opened the door halfway with a protein bar in her mouth, a contract page in one hand and a pen tucked behind her ear. “I’ve come to report that Julia is violating my human rights and also to ask if anyone has seen my…” Her voice trailed off the instant she saw Alexia’s face.

The protein bar slowly lowered.

Everything playful dropped out of Jay so fast it was almost frightening. Her eyes moved from Alexia’s wet cheeks to Clara beside her, then to the desk, the headphones, the papers, the phone, the lamp, the chaos arranged with too much intention to be random. Understanding did not arrive immediately, but alarm did.

“What happened?” Jay asked, already inside the room.

Alexia stood too quickly. “Nothing bad.”

Jay looked at Clara. “Why is she crying?”

Clara rose calmly. “Because she asked me to help her understand something, and it affected her.”

Jay’s face changed again, confusion folding into something more guarded. Her eyes returned to the desk. She saw the crossed out schedule, the expenses, the recipe card, the headphones. The fake notification on the phone still read: Did you take medication?

Jay went very still.

“Oh,” she said.

Alexia stepped towards her at once. “Bebé.”

Jay’s gaze flicked up. There was something exposed in it, something careful. “You did an ADHD thing.”

“I asked Clara.”

“Without telling me.”

“Yes.”

Jay nodded too many times, the contract page crinkling in her hand. “Right.”

Alexia recognised the movement. It was not anger, not exactly. It was Jay trying to work out whether she was about to be pitied, studied, managed or loved, and the fact that she could not tell immediately made Alexia ache.

“I did not want to make you feel like…” Alexia stopped, frustrated by English, by emotion, by the fact that the right words mattered so much. “Like you had to explain yourself for me. Or make jokes. Or tell me it was fine.”

Jay’s mouth twitched faintly, but it did not become a smile. “I would have made jokes.”

“I know.”

“Good ones.”

“Probably.”

“Mean to Clara.”

Clara inclined her head. “Certainly.”

Jay looked at the desk again. “How long did you last?”

Alexia swallowed.

Clara answered gently. “Nine minutes.”

Jay’s expression shifted before she could hide it.

Nine minutes was nothing. Nine minutes was forever. Nine minutes was the time it took Jay to lose a task completely, rebuild it, hate herself for losing it, make a joke, get distracted by a sound, remember the task, realise she had forgotten something more urgent, want to move, force herself not to move, and then have someone say her name with the edge of impatience that made her want to crawl out of her skin.

She looked at Alexia’s tear streaked face and her own defensiveness faltered.

“You cried?” Jay asked, voice softer.

Alexia’s lips parted, and for one awful second she looked like she might apologise for that too. Then she stepped forward and wrapped both arms around Jay’s waist, pressing her face into Jay’s neck with a need so unguarded that Jay dropped the contract page immediately and caught her.

“Hey,” Jay murmured, one hand spreading across Alexia’s back, the other sliding into her hair. “Hey, baby, come here. I’ve got you.”

Alexia held her tighter.

Jay looked over Alexia’s shoulder at Clara, eyes wide with the silent panic of someone who could soothe Alexia through anything except pain caused by herself. Clara shook her head slightly, reassuring. Not your fault.

Jay breathed out and lowered her mouth to Alexia’s hair. “Ale.”

Alexia’s voice came muffled against her throat. “I am sorry.”

“For what?”

“For every time I did not understand how tired you were.”

Jay closed her eyes.

There it was. The thing she had been dodging before it had even been said. Pity would have made her step back. Guilt made her want to argue. But Alexia’s arms were tight around her, and her apology did not feel like an accusation. It felt like grief arriving late to a place love had already been trying to reach.

Jay kissed the top of her head. “You do understand me.”

“Not enough.”

“You understand me more than anyone.”

Alexia shook her head against Jay’s neck. “I lasted nine minutes and wanted to throw the phone through a window.”

Jay’s mouth curved before she could stop it. “To be fair, that’s healthy. Phones deserve fear.”

“Jay.”

“What? I’m supporting your emotional truth.”

Alexia pulled back enough to look at her, eyes wet, lashes clumped, face open in a way that still made Jay’s chest go tight no matter how many times she saw it. “It kept saying things.”

Jay glanced at Clara. “The headphones?”

Clara nodded. “Part of the exercise.”

“What things?”

Alexia’s face crumpled slightly again, and she hated it, Jay could tell. Alexia hated losing control when she wanted to be clear. Jay lifted both hands and cupped her face, thumbs soft beneath her eyes.

“Tell me,” Jay said.

Alexia swallowed. “Why are you behind? Everyone else finished. It is easy. You forgot. You are taking too long.”

Jay’s expression went unreadable for half a second.

Then she kissed Alexia.

Not to shut her up, not to escape the words, but because Alexia was crying with the weight of Jay’s invisible noise and Jay could not bear to leave her alone in it. The kiss was slow, grounding, full of the kind of tenderness Jay often hid beneath heat. She kissed Alexia’s mouth, then her cheek, then the damp place below her eye, then rested their foreheads together.

“Those are classic hits,” Jay whispered.

Alexia gave a broken laugh. “Do not make me laugh. I am trying to be devastated.”

“You can multitask.”

“I cannot, apparently.”

Jay grinned, and because it was Jay, because humour and pain had always lived too close together inside her, the grin arrived wet around the edges. “Welcome to the brand.”

Alexia’s hands tightened in Jay’s vest. “I never think those things about you.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Jay took a breath.

Clara, sensing the shift, quietly moved to the desk and began gathering the papers, giving them privacy without leaving, because this was still her exercise and because someone needed to make sure neither of them turned love into self punishment.

Jay rubbed her thumb along Alexia’s cheek. “Most of the time, yeah. I know. But sometimes if someone says something near the shape of it, my brain fills in the rest. Like if you say, ‘It’s just an email,’ I know you mean, ‘Don’t panic, babe, it’s safe.’ But there’s a part of me that hears every teacher, every coach, every person who looked at me like I was choosing to be difficult.”

Alexia’s eyes filled again. “Mierda.”

Jay kissed her quickly. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Look like you want to go back in time and fight a school.”

“I do.”

“That’s hot, but logistically difficult.”

“I would win.”

“You would absolutely win.” Jay smiled and pulled Alexia closer by the waist. “Tiny terrifying Spanish woman storms England, defeats entire education system with cheekbones and fury.”

Alexia sniffed, trying not to laugh. “I am not tiny.”

“No, you’re my perfect average height authoritarian.”

Clara made a small coughing sound that was definitely laughter disguised as professionalism.

Alexia slid one hand around the back of Jay’s neck, fingers resting beneath the loose knot of blonde hair. “I want to help better.”

“You help loads.”

“I want to help without making you feel managed.”

Jay’s face softened at that, truly softened, all the performance leaving it for a moment. “You don’t make me feel managed. Not usually.”

“Not usually?”

Jay gave her a sheepish look. “When you stand over me with the pill bottle and the water like a sexy prison guard, there’s a vibe.”

Alexia’s brows lifted. “You like the vibe.”

“I do like the vibe. That’s the problem. It’s confusing for my medical compliance.”

Despite the tears, Alexia laughed properly then, and Jay looked so relieved by the sound that Clara felt her own chest tighten. Jay was always trying to bring people back to laughing. Not because she could not stand seriousness, though sometimes that was true, but because laughter told her the person she loved had not been lost in the difficult thing.

Alexia leaned up and kissed Jay again, this time with both hands holding her face, and Jay melted into it with embarrassing speed for someone who had been attempting emotional dignity. Her shoulders lowered, her hands settled at Alexia’s hips, and for several long seconds the spare room, the exercise, the papers, the headphones, even the sponsor meeting waiting beyond the door seemed to fall away around them.

Julia’s voice came from the hallway. “I am thrilled everyone is bonding, but Jay has drawn a skull beside the appearance clause.”

Jay broke the kiss just enough to call back, “It’s a visual negotiation strategy.”

“You wrote ‘beige equals death.’”

“It does.”

Alexia rested her forehead against Jay’s chest, laughing helplessly now. Jay wrapped both arms around her and looked towards the hallway. “Jules, can I have five minutes?”

Julia appeared in the doorway, took one look at Alexia’s face, and all humour softened into understanding. “Yes.”

Jay narrowed her eyes. “That was too easy.”

“Do not ruin it.”

“Fair.”

Julia’s gaze moved briefly to Clara, and there was an entire conversation between them in the quiet exchange. Clara nodded once. Julia nodded back, then disappeared towards the dining room with the kind of grace that suggested she would now go and terrorise the sponsors alone for exactly five minutes and somehow leave them grateful for it.

Jay turned back to Alexia. “Come sit with me.”

Alexia let herself be guided to the bed. Jay sat first, then pulled Alexia between her legs without asking because after years together their bodies often solved emotional logistics before words became involved. Alexia settled back against Jay’s chest, and Jay wrapped her arms around her from behind, chin on her shoulder, hands linked over her stomach. Clara sat in the desk chair opposite them, not as therapist now, exactly, but as family with training.

Alexia picked up one of Jay’s hands and began playing with her fingers. “Clara said you need body doubling.”

Jay glanced at Clara over Alexia’s shoulder. “You’ve been telling my girlfriend I need a stunt double?”

Clara smiled. “Body doubling. Someone being present while you do a task, to support initiation and regulation.”

Jay considered this. “That sounds less exciting than a stunt double.”

“You already use Alexia that way.”

Jay looked down at Alexia. “That sounds filthy.”

Alexia pinched her hand. “Behave.”

“I’m vulnerable. You can’t pinch vulnerable people.”

“You are always vulnerable when you are avoiding a serious topic.”

Jay sighed dramatically against her shoulder, but her arms tightened with affection. “Fine. Yeah. It helps when you sit with me. Like when I do emails and you read next to me. Or when I’m packing and you don’t even say anything, you just sit on the bed looking beautiful and vaguely judgemental.”

“I am not judgemental.”

“You fold your clothes like they owe you money.”

“They do not end up on the floor.”

“My clothes enjoy freedom.”

“Your clothes enjoy chaos.”

“My clothes are neurodivergent.”

Alexia laughed softly, then kissed Jay’s knuckles. The smile faded slowly, not disappearing but deepening into something more serious. “I did not realise how much energy it takes before the task even starts.”

Jay nodded, eyes on their hands. “Yeah. Starting is sometimes the whole battle. People think doing the thing is the thing, but sometimes the thing is getting your brain to let you begin without setting fire to the rest of the room.”

Clara nodded. “That is a good description.”

Jay looked pleased despite herself. “Can you put that in a science journal?”

“No.”

“Coward.”

Alexia turned slightly in Jay’s arms to see her better. “When you say you are tired after meetings, is it because of this?”

“Sometimes. Sponsor meetings are a lot because I have to look like I’m listening while listening, remember what I can joke about, not interrupt too much, not agree to things because I’m bored, not offend anyone who says something stupid, not touch every pen on the table, not check whether you’ve texted, not think about training, not think about food, remember if I’ve eaten, remember not to make my face do the thing when someone says ‘authentic brand journey.’” Jay paused. “Also I hate beige.”

“Yes,” Alexia said solemnly. “The beige trauma is clear.”

Jay kissed her cheek. “Thank you.”

Clara leaned forward slightly. “And when it is finished, the adrenaline drops. That is why she can look perfectly fine during the meeting and then disappear afterwards.”

Alexia turned back against Jay’s chest, absorbing it. “I thought sometimes you were just relieved it was over.”

“I am. But relief is tiring too. My brain runs the whole meeting like I’m trying to win a duel with a PowerPoint.”

“A duel with a PowerPoint,” Alexia repeated, almost fondly.

“PowerPoints are hostile. Too many transitions.”

Clara raised a hand. “That one is just taste.”

Jay pointed at her. “You don’t know that.”

Alexia brought Jay’s hand to her mouth and kissed the red rose tattooed there. “I am sorry for the times I made it heavier.”

Jay’s arms tightened around her. “Baby, you haven’t.”

“I have.”

“Maybe sometimes. A little. But not because you were cruel.” Jay rested her mouth against Alexia’s shoulder for a moment, gathering honesty in the dark warm place where her face met Alexia’s skin. “You’ve made my life easier in ways I still don’t know how to say without making it sound like a dramatic airport confession.”

“I like dramatic airport confessions.”

“You would. You’re romantic and Spanish.”

“I am romantic because I love you.”

Jay smiled against her. “See? Devastating. How am I meant to compete with that?”

Alexia turned in her arms, kneeling now between Jay’s thighs, hands sliding over Jay’s shoulders. Her eyes were still red, but her expression had steadied. “You do not compete. You let me love you.”

Jay looked at her for a long moment. “I’m trying.”

“I know.” Alexia touched Jay’s cheek, then kissed her with a tenderness that made Clara suddenly very interested in organising the fake notification cards by size. “And I will try not to make the simple things feel like tests.”

“That would be nice.” Jay’s smile tilted. “Although, to be clear, I will still fail some simple things spectacularly.”

“Sí.”

“And I will still leave cupboards open.”

“Yes.”

“And I will still put my phone in the fridge eventually. It’s coming. I can feel it.”

Alexia’s mouth twitched. “I will check the fridge.”

“That’s love.”

“No, amor, that is pattern recognition.”

Jay grinned, then glanced at the desk. “So what did Clara make you do?”

Alexia looked over her shoulder at the wreckage of the exercise and shuddered faintly. “A schedule, expenses, an email and a recipe.”

Jay stared. “At the same time?”

“With noise.”

“What noise?”

Clara held up the headphones.

Jay’s eyes narrowed with immediate personal offence. “You tortured my girlfriend with admin jazz?”

“It was carefully designed sensory interference.”

“Admin jazz.”

Alexia laughed into Jay’s shoulder.

Clara, dignified, said, “It included layered audio, unpredictable notifications, visual interference and interruption based task switching.”

Jay looked genuinely impressed despite herself. “That sounds horrible.”

“It was,” Alexia said.

Jay kissed her hair. “Proud of you.”

“I did not finish.”

“You lasted nine minutes doing paperwork with Clara playing psychological dubstep in your ears. I would’ve eaten the recipe card.”

Clara folded her arms. “You have eaten paper before.”

Jay froze.

Alexia slowly lifted her head. “What?”

“I haven’t eaten paper.”

Clara’s expression remained calm. “You tore the corner off an intake form in my office in 2019 because you were trying not to interrupt Julia.”

Jay looked betrayed. “That was confidential.”

“It was also laminated.”

Alexia stared at Jay, horrified and delighted. “You ate laminated paper?”

“I didn’t eat it. I bit it. There’s a difference.”

“You are a goat.”

“I was under pressure.”

“You were in a waiting room.”

“A high pressure waiting room.”

Alexia collapsed laughing against her, and Jay’s face went soft with triumph, as if making Alexia laugh after tears was the only task that had mattered all evening. She held her through it, pressing kisses into her hair, her temple, the bridge of her nose when Alexia lifted her head again.

Clara began packing the exercise materials away, but Alexia stopped her with a hand on the desk.

“Can we keep some of this?” she asked.

Jay stiffened slightly. “Why?”

“Not the noise,” Alexia said quickly, turning back to her. “Not like that. But the explanation. The task sheets. Clara’s notes. I want to remember.”

Jay looked at Clara.

Clara nodded. “I can make you both a practical version. Not as an exercise. A support plan. What helps during admin, transitions, travel days, sponsor obligations, emotional overload. Not rules. Options.”

Jay tried for a joke and did not find one quickly enough. That, more than anything, told Alexia she was touched.

“Yeah,” Jay said at last. “Okay.”

Alexia kissed her again, smiling into it when Jay followed her mouth as she pulled back. “We can do it together.”

Jay’s eyes warmed. “Together sounds good.”

Julia appeared again, leaning one shoulder against the doorway, laptop tucked under her arm. “I am very sorry to interrupt the therapeutic lesbian nest, but Jay is required for the final ten minutes.”

Jay groaned and tightened both arms around Alexia. “No.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve suffered enough.”

Julia’s eyebrows lifted. “You have been kissing Alexia while I explained contractual usage rights to three men in Madrid.”

“Exactly. Emotionally complex.”

“You signed the wrong page before you left.”

Jay frowned. “No, I didn’t.”

Julia held up the paper.

At the bottom, where Jay’s signature should have gone, she had written, in large confident letters: beige equals death.

Alexia stared at it, then slowly covered her mouth.

Jay looked from the paper to Julia, then to Clara, then to Alexia, and for one beautiful second seemed to consider pretending this had been intentional. “That,” she said carefully, “is legally binding feedback.”

Julia closed her eyes.

Clara laughed.

Alexia turned fully into Jay’s lap, cupped her face and kissed her once, hard and joyful, because her heart was still aching from the exercise and yet here Jay was, impossible and brilliant and hers, turning shame into warmth without even meaning to. Jay made a pleased sound against her mouth and held her closer, the sponsor meeting apparently forgotten again until Julia made a sharp noise of warning from the doorway.

When Alexia pulled back, she rested her forehead against Jay’s. “Go finish, bebé.”

Jay sighed. “Will you come sit with me?”

Alexia’s answer was immediate. “Sí.”

“Body double me?”

“Yes.”

“Sounds illegal.”

“It is not.”

“Could be if we do it right.”

“Jay.”

Julia pointed towards the dining room. “Now.”

Jay stood, taking Alexia with her by the hand, then paused beside Clara and kissed her cheek too, quick but sincere. “Thank you.”

Clara touched her arm. “You are welcome.”

Jay hesitated, then added, much quieter, “For helping her understand without making me feel like a project.”

Clara’s face softened. “You are not a project, Jay.”

Jay glanced at Alexia, who was watching her with wet, loving eyes and a smile that looked like it had survived something. Jay squeezed her hand.

“No,” Jay said, almost to herself. “I’m starting to get that.”

They returned to the dining room together. Julia resumed her position at the laptop with the grim satisfaction of a woman reclaiming order from emotional chaos. Jay sat beside Alexia this time instead of opposite her, because Alexia had already pulled the chair close enough for their thighs to touch. Under the table, Alexia slipped one foot around Jay’s ankle. Jay leaned into her shoulder. Alexia picked up a pen and placed it gently in Jay’s hand, then opened the correct page of the contract and tapped the signature line without a word.

Jay looked at the line, then at Alexia. “No beige?”Alexia’s mouth curved. “No beige.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

Jay signed properly.

Julia exhaled as though a minor miracle had occurred. “Excellent. We are all very proud.”

Jay gave her a lazy grin. “See? Easy.”

Alexia, still holding Jay’s free hand under the table, squeezed once.

Jay squeezed back.

Neither of them said anything else for a while. They did not need to. The apartment had settled into evening around them, warm with lamplight and the faint clink of Clara making tea in the kitchen, Julia’s voice moving steadily through the final details, the city alive beyond the windows. Jay’s attention still wandered, of course it did. Her knee bounced. Her fingers worried the edge of the paper. Twice she opened her mouth too early and Alexia touched her thigh, grounding rather than stopping her. Once she lost the thread entirely and Alexia slid the document closer, murmuring, “Here, bebé,” as naturally as a kiss.

And for the first time, Alexia understood the shape of what she was offering.

Not correction. Not rescue. Not management.

A hand on the table. A body beside hers. A little less noise in the room. A reason to stay.

Jay glanced sideways at her halfway through Julia’s final explanation, eyes warm and wicked again, and whispered, “My morale is incredible now, by the way.”

Alexia bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself smiling.

Julia did not look up. “I heard that.”

Jay leaned back in her chair, entirely unrepentant, one hand still tangled with Alexia’s beneath the table. “Good. Put it in the minutes.”

Alexia laughed then, helplessly, softly, with the remains of tears still inside her and Jay’s thumb moving over her knuckles like a promise. Jay turned towards the sound as she always did, drawn by it, brightened by it, and Alexia realised with a quiet ache that she would spend the rest of her life learning the weather of this woman’s mind, not because Jay needed to become simpler, but because loving her made every complicated thing worth understanding.

Under the table, Alexia lifted Jay’s hand and kissed it.

Jay’s grin softened into something private.

“Love you,” Jay murmured.

Alexia leaned close, her mouth brushing Jay’s ear. “Te amo, guapa.”

Jay shivered so visibly that Julia, without looking up, said, “Please do not make me pause this meeting again.”

Within minutes, lifelong teammates become suspicious strangers. Alliances are formed, evidence begins disappearing, secret passages are uncovered and every clue seems to create three more questions instead of answers. No one can trust anyone, every guest has something to hide and every conversation could be part of a carefully constructed lie.

At the centre of the chaos are Jay Jones and Alexia Putellas.

Determined to solve the mystery together, they quickly discover that investigating a murder is considerably more difficult when your teammates are stealing clues, accusing each other over lunch and treating every innocent glance as evidence of conspiracy. As the weekend spirals into hilarious paranoia, long buried family secrets, mysterious letters, hidden maps and impossible motives transform a simple game into an obsession that grips the entire squad.

With every new discovery, the mystery grows deeper, the suspects multiply and the line between performance and reality becomes increasingly blurred.

Because at Blackthorne Manor, everyone has been given a role.

Beside her, Alexia was still half asleep, curled into Jay's side with the possessive confidence of someone who claimed she did not cuddle aggressively and then spent every night colonising Jay's ribs, one leg hooked over Jay's thigh, face tucked into the hollow of Jay's shoulder, breathing soft and warm against her skin.

The phone buzzed again, hard enough that it rattled against the wood.

Alexia made a small irritated noise without opening her eyes, her arm tightening across Jay's stomach as though she could physically pin the morning down and stop it from happening.

"Turn it off," she mumbled, voice thick with sleep and Spanish around the edges, the words pressed more into Jay's skin than into the air.

Jay reached blindly towards the bedside table, knocking first into a half empty glass of water, then a lip balm, then the corner of a book Alexia had been pretending to read for three weeks. "Could be important," she murmured, fingers finally finding the phone as it vibrated again in her grip.

"It is not important," Alexia said, with the absolute moral certainty of a woman who had not yet seen what time it was and therefore considered all obligations criminal.

"You don't know that."

"If someone died, they can wait five minutes."

Jay turned her head and kissed Alexia's hair because, even half asleep and vaguely threatening the concept of human responsibility, Alexia was impossible not to love. "Brutal morning energy, baby."

"Sleepy morning energy," Alexia corrected, nuzzling further into her shoulder. "There is a difference."

The phone buzzed again, this time with a call, and Jay's smile faded when she saw Julia's name lighting up the screen. Julia did not call this early unless something had happened, and Julia especially did not call this early after sending six messages in a row unless she had already mentally prepared three statements, two legal strategies and one controlled murder.

Jay's stomach dropped. "Okay," she said quietly, already more awake than she wanted to be. "That's probably important."

Alexia lifted her head just enough to squint at the screen, hair everywhere, cheek creased from Jay's shoulder, eyes narrowed in the direction of the phone as though she intended to intimidate it into silence. Even annoyed and barely conscious, she was so beautiful Jay's brain briefly forgot there was a crisis, which was inconvenient because the crisis appeared to be ringing her personally.

Alexia saw Jay looking at her and narrowed her eyes further. "Do not."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking."

"I think many respectful thoughts."

"No," Alexia said immediately, with the weary precision of someone who knew exactly what lived inside Jay's head before seven in the morning. "Not respectful."

Jay smiled despite the call still buzzing in her hand, then answered and put the phone on speaker because Alexia had already propped herself up on one elbow, awake now in the way only Alexia could become awake, all softness still visible but the captain rising beneath it. "Good morning, Jules. Before you start, if this is about the sponsor post, I scheduled it, and if it posted twice, that's honestly Instagram's toxic little journey, not mine."

Julia Esteve did not say good morning, which was the first and clearest sign that something was very wrong. There was only a pause, a controlled breath, and then her voice came through flat and clipped enough to make Jay sit up by instinct. "Have you seen the clip?"

Jay's hand tightened around the phone. "What clip?"

Alexia shifted beside her, the sheet sliding down to her waist as she came fully upright, face sharpening with that quiet, contained attention that made people in boardrooms suddenly sit straighter without knowing why. "Julia," she said, voice lower now. "What happened?"

Julia exhaled in the particular way she did when she had already watched something unfold, hated every second of it, and was now trying not to climb through technology and strangle someone administratively. "The Lyon press conference. Their manager was asked about facing Barcelona and decided to make it personal."

Jay went still.

Alexia's eyes flicked to her.

Julia continued carefully, too carefully, which Jay hated more than if she had simply thrown the grenade straight into the room. "He called Barcelona's front line chaotic. Then he specifically mentioned you, Jay. He called you chaos. And then he said the only reason you start is because you're sleeping with the captain."

The bedroom emptied of sound.

Not literally. Outside, somewhere below their apartment, a scooter passed along the street with its usual impatient whine. A bird called from the edge of the balcony. The old building gave a tiny creak as it warmed into morning. But inside the room, everything living seemed to stop and hold its breath.

Jay looked at Alexia.

Alexia was completely still, which was how Jay knew the anger had gone deep. People who did not know Alexia thought she became blank when she was furious, mistaking restraint for emptiness, but Jay knew better. Alexia never emptied. She contained. Her jaw tightened by a fraction. Her hand curled into the sheet. Her eyes went hard in that almost silent way that meant the storm had already arrived, only she had chosen not to let anyone see the rain yet.

Jay's first feeling was not anger for herself.

That came second.

The first was rage so clean and bright that for one terrifying moment it felt almost calm, because the insult had not merely landed on Jay. Jay could handle chaos. She had been called worse by people with better hair, worse defensive structures and a depressing misunderstanding of pressing triggers.

But he had insulted Alexia. He had implied that Alexia Putellas, of all people, would compromise her team, her armband, her standards, her club, her entire life's work because she loved Jay and shared a bed with her. He had reduced Alexia's authority to sex, Jay's place in the squad to favouritism, and their relationship to some stupid man's fantasy of what women became when they were in love.

Jay heard the plastic of her phone case creak beneath her fingers.

Julia said, "Jay."

Jay's voice, when it came, was much quieter than she felt. "I'm going to kill him."

"No, you're not."

"Verbally."

"Also no."

"Legally?"

"Still no, and I'm concerned how quickly you moved through categories."

Alexia reached for the phone without looking away from Jay. "Julia."

Jay handed it over because Alexia's voice had gone low and precise in the way that meant the temperature of the room was about to drop below safe living conditions.

"Yes?" Julia said.

"Send me the clip."

"I already did."

Alexia looked down at Jay's phone, where three notifications sat at the top of the screen, one from Julia, one from Lucy, and one from Mapi that simply read: DO NOT OPEN TWITTER WITHOUT ADULT SUPERVISION. Beneath it, a second Mapi message had arrived thirty seconds later: I AM NOT THE ADULT.

Jay reached for the phone again.

Alexia caught her wrist before she could take it. "Wait."

Jay looked at her, anger already moving too fast beneath her skin. "Baby."

Alexia's thumb pressed gently to the pulse in Jay's wrist, as though she could feel the speed of her rage there and slow it by touch alone. "Wait."

Normally, that would have been enough. Alexia saying wait in that voice could stop Jay mid sentence, mid stride, mid terrible idea involving scooters, fireworks or emotional speeches in inappropriate locations. But this was different. Jay could feel her brain sprinting ahead of sense, dragging every softer part of her behind it. She watched Alexia open the clip, watched the phone light flicker across her face, watched the exact second Alexia heard the manager's voice and something almost imperceptible closed behind her eyes.

The clip was short.

That made it worse.

A clean little blade of a quote, sharp enough for headlines, short enough for social media, ugly enough for people to pretend they were only sharing it because it was newsworthy.

"Jay Jones is chaos," the Lyon manager said, smiling faintly as cameras clicked in front of him. "That can work sometimes, maybe. But at this level, I think we all know why she starts. When you sleep with the captain, maybe your role is more secure."

There was laughter in the room.

Press laughter.

Not loud. Not kind. Enough.

The video ended.

Alexia lowered the phone slowly.

Jay heard her own breathing. She heard Julia's voice faintly through the speaker, already saying, "Do not post anything. I am saying this now, calmly, while I still believe in the possibility of prevention."

Jay took the phone back from Alexia. "I'm just looking."

Alexia's hand closed over hers. "No."

"I'm just looking, Ale."

"You are not a just looking person."

Jay's thumb was already moving. "That's unfair."

"That is a medical fact."

Julia spoke again, louder this time. "Jay, as your agent, as your friend, and as a woman who has already had to explain three separate Instagram captions to legal this season, I am begging you not to open the app."

Jay opened Twitter.

Alexia closed her eyes and muttered, "Dios mío, dame paciencia."

The clip was everywhere. Quotes, edits, angry Barcelona fans, Lyon fans laughing, neutrals making jokes, journalists pretending to be balanced while practically licking their fingers and holding them up to feel which way the drama was blowing. Jay's name. Alexia's name. Barcelona. Captain. Sleeping with. Chaos. There were already accounts breaking down her minutes this season as if she hadn't been scoring goals since August. There were men with profile pictures of midfielders from 2008 explaining professionalism to women who had won more before breakfast than they had achieved in their entire lives.

Jay's thumb hovered over the compose button.

Alexia sat forward, voice low. "Give me the phone."

Jay moved it away. "No."

"Jay."

"No, because if someone said that about me, fine. Whatever. I've survived being called chaos by better teams and worse stylists. But he said it about you."

"He said it about both of us."

"He said you start me because I'm in your bed."

Alexia's expression flickered at the word bed, which on any other morning Jay would have enjoyed enough to ruin both their schedules. This morning, it only sharpened the anger.

"He made you sound like you don't have standards," Jay said, getting out of bed now because her body could no longer hold still. The floor was cold beneath her bare feet, but she barely felt it.

"Like you'd risk the team for me. Like you're not the most professional person in every room you enter. Like you didn't earn that armband with your whole life. Like you're some stupid man's idea of what women do when they're in love."

Alexia softened despite herself. "Guapa."

"No," Jay said, pacing once towards the end of the bed, phone in hand, hair dishevelled, sleep shorts sitting low on her hips, fury turning every tattooed line of her into something electric. "No, I'm not letting him turn us into that."

Julia's voice became grim. "This is exactly why you do not tweet before carbohydrates."

Jay was already typing.

Alexia stood too, sheet falling away as she reached for her. "Jay."

Jay backed up a step with the intense seriousness of a woman attempting to protect a national treasure, despite the national treasure being an objectively terrible tweet. "I'm being measured."

Julia made a sound of disbelief. "You have never been measured on Twitter in your life. Your pinned tweet for three months was a photo of a pigeon in the Emirates car park with the caption 'assistant coach?'"

Jay ignored her. The first tweet appeared under her thumbs with alarming speed, every word powered by anger, love and the reckless certainty that came over her whenever someone hurt Alexia.

Interesting strategy from Lyon to admit before kick off that their manager doesn't understand football or women. I start because I score goals, press like hell, and make centre backs reconsider their career choices. Alexia Putellas does not hand out minutes in bed. She earns respect by being better than you at literally everything.

Alexia read over Jay's shoulder and inhaled through her nose. "Jay."

"I'm not done."

"That is already the problem."

Jay typed a second tweet, shorter, worse, and therefore, in her mind, unfortunately necessary.

Also, if your tactical plan is "hope the lesbians are distracted," good luck. We'll be there."

Julia shouted through the phone, "Do not press send."

Jay pressed send.

Then pressed send again.

For one suspended second, the room seemed to stare at her.

Alexia stared at her.

Jay stared back, chest rising, thumb still hovering as though a third act remained available if anyone wished to test her.

Julia said, with terrifying calm, "I am going to hang up before I say something that violates several employment laws, several friendship boundaries and possibly one Geneva convention."

The call ended.

The silence after it was worse.

Then Alexia said, very evenly, "You tweeted lesbians."

Jay lifted her chin. "I stand by the community."

"Before a Champions League match."

"The community stands by me."

"You said minutes in bed."

"He implied minutes in bed."

"You repeated it."

"For clarity."

Alexia stared.

Jay stared back.

Then Alexia turned away, picked up her own phone from the bedside table, and muttered, "I need coffee before I become widowed by stupidity."

Jay's anger faltered for the first time because that was not Alexia's playful annoyance. That was real. "Are you mad?"

Alexia looked back at her. "Yes."

The word landed harder than Jay wanted it to, perhaps because Alexia did not fling anger carelessly. She placed it where it belonged. She did not punish with it. She simply let it exist, honest and unavoidable between them.

Alexia saw the hurt flicker across Jay's face and softened instantly, but she did not take the word back. "I am not mad that you are angry," she said, slower now, reaching for Jay's hand because even annoyed she could not leave Jay untethered for long. "I am angry because you let him take your control. He wanted a reaction, and you gave him one with punctuation."

Jay's jaw tightened. "He doesn't get to say that about you."

"I know."

"He doesn't get to reduce what we are to that."

"I know, amor."

"He doesn't get to act like I'm only here because I'm sleeping with you."

Alexia's thumb moved over Jay's knuckles, steady and warm despite everything. "I know. But you cannot answer everything with fire."

Jay laughed once, sharp and humourless. "Have you met me?"

"Yes," Alexia said, and the softness in her eyes hurt more than the anger had. "I love you. This is why I am telling you."

That stopped Jay for half a second.

Then her phone began vibrating again.

And again.

And again.

Alexia looked at it.

Jay looked at it.

The morning had properly begun.

By the time they reached the training facility, the outside world had already turned the whole thing into a meal and was picking its teeth with the bones.

The gates were lined with cameras, phones, journalists pretending they were there for ordinary Champions League build up and not because Jay Jones had tweeted the word lesbians at half past seven in the morning while threatening Lyon with boots. Security had pushed everyone back behind the barriers, but the energy was there, hungry and glittering. A quote had become a story. A story had become a crisis. A crisis had become content, which Jay considered one of the most depressing sentences civilisation had ever produced.

Jay arrived on the Ducati.

Of course she did.

The bike came through first, black and sharp beneath the pale morning sun, engine growling low enough that heads turned before anyone saw her. Jay rolled through the gates with her visor down, body language cool in the way that told anyone who knew her that she was anything but, shoulders squared, spine straight, anger strapped down so tightly it had started to look like control. She parked, cut the engine, swung one leg over and removed her helmet without once looking towards the cameras.

Alexia arrived seconds later by car, which would have been completely normal on any other morning. They did not always travel together. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't, sometimes they left from the same apartment and still took separate vehicles because Jay claimed the bike needed emotional exercise and Alexia claimed the bike needed therapy, restrictions and possibly a priest.

This morning, though, everything looked like evidence.

Jay on the bike.

Alexia in the car.

No smile across the car park.

No quick touch by the entrance.

No kiss stolen near the doors because Alexia had walked too close and Jay considered proximity a legally binding invitation.

No Jay walking backwards because she couldn't leave Alexia's orbit cleanly.

No Alexia rolling her eyes and pulling Jay forward by the strap of her bag with a muttered, "Walk properly, bebé."

They were fine.

Mostly.

Still irritated. Still raw. Still standing on the same side of the war but annoyed by the shape of each other's weapons.

Unfortunately, the internet did not understand mostly. The internet understood slow motion zooms, captions in capital letters and the emotional regulation of a toddler who had discovered espresso.

Jay removed her gloves carefully, aware of every lens. Alexia got out of the car, sunglasses on, face composed in that cool, immaculate way journalists mistook for distance because they had never seen her make toast in one of Jay's hoodies while arguing with a pan. She glanced once at Jay. Jay glanced once back.

It was not hostile.

It was not even cold.

It was controlled, which was worse.

Jay wanted to walk over. She wanted to say, "I'm sorry I tweeted bed minutes," because now that some of the heat had burned off, she could admit the wording had been perhaps less than ideal. She wanted to kiss Alexia's cheek, feel Alexia's hand at her waist, hear her say idiota in that soft, exasperated voice that meant they were okay. She wanted to rest her forehead against Alexia's temple and let her own breathing calm.

But cameras were there.

Staff were there.

The clip was everywhere.

So Jay tucked her helmet under one arm and walked towards the entrance.

Alexia walked separately.

The cameras caught all of it.

By ten o'clock, the break up rumours had begun.

The internet did not merely wonder if Jay and Alexia had argued. It built an entire tragic opera in less than two hours, complete with timestamps, zoomed in screenshots, grief edits and at least one body language expert who appeared to believe human relationships could be diagnosed from a seven second car park clip shot through a fence.

Jay and Alexia arrive separately after Twitter rant.

Trouble in paradise?

Alexia Putellas ignores Jay Jones after Lyon controversy.

Body language expert explains why Barcelona's power couple may be under strain.

A fan account posted a zoomed in clip of Alexia looking at Jay in the car park and captioned it: OH NO THEY FOUGHT.

Another posted Jay walking inside without turning around and wrote: SHE DIDN'T LOOK BACK. I'M SICK.

Someone else replied: They're lesbians before a Champions League game, they'll be engaged by lunch.

Jay would later consider that the only intelligent contribution of the morning.

Training itself was tense, though not because Jay and Alexia were breaking up. The team knew they were not breaking up because when Alexia walked into the changing room, Jay looked at her like a dog abandoned in the rain, and Alexia lasted exactly seventeen seconds before sighing, crossing the room, and fixing the twisted collar of Jay's training top with a muttered,

"You are impossible." Jay had whispered, "But loved?" and Alexia had replied, "Unfortunately," in a voice so soft that Patri turned away with one hand on her chest and Mapi whispered, "I cannot train under these emotional conditions."

So the team knew.

The staff knew there was an external media problem. They knew Jay had tweeted. They knew the Lyon manager had behaved like a man trying to compensate for tactical uncertainty with misogyny and microphone access. They knew Alexia and Jay were together because seven months public had finally beaten reality into even the most clipboard brained member of the performance department. What they did not know was whether to address the personal part, ignore it entirely, or hope Jay did not discover any new apps before lunch.

Jonatan chose the middle path.

He pulled Jay aside after warm up and said, "No more Twitter."

Jay, still bouncing on her toes, said, "Technically it's called X if you have principles."

Jonatan stared at her.

Jay nodded. "No more Twitter."

Twenty metres away, Alexia said nothing.

She did not need to.

Her look crossed the pitch, located Jay's conscience and pressed one elegant Spanish finger directly into it.

Jay avoided looking at her during the next drill because she was trying to be mature and because Alexia's disappointed face did deeply inconvenient things to her internal organs.

The first half of training was ferocious. Jay played like someone had put a match to her bloodstream. Her touch was sharp, her pressing savage, her finishing so clean that after the third ball hit the back of the net, Cata stood with both hands on her hips and shouted, "Do you want me to save anything today or are we just doing public execution?" Jay lifted both palms in apology, then immediately bent another shot into the far corner with the expression of someone making a political statement through ball contact.

Mapi jogged past Alexia during a water break and said, "If she scores like this against Lyon, can we let her tweet before every game?"

Alexia did not look amused. "No."

"Not even one controlled tweet?"

"No."

"What about a tweet supervised by Julia?"

"No."

"What about a tweet written by Jay but translated into something less criminal by you?"

Alexia took a sip of water. "Mapi, if you continue this conversation, I will make you do extra defensive shape."

Mapi immediately veered away. "Love is censorship," she muttered, though not loudly enough to risk accountability.

By the time they reached the players' lounge after training, Jay was tired in the way that had very little to do with running. Her body felt almost too alive, every muscle warm and sharpened from the session, but her brain had not stopped since Julia's call. Clip. Tweet. Replies. Cameras. Alexia's face. Julia's silence, which was always more terrifying than Julia's yelling. Lyon. Match. Headlines. Public relationship. Respect. Sexism. Anger. Alexia. Always Alexia at the centre of it, not as the cause but as the gravity.

Jay dropped onto the sofa in the lounge and let her head fall back.

The room smelled of coffee, protein shakes, clean sweat and the faint rubbery scent of recovery bands. Outside, afternoon light pressed against the windows. Inside, most of the team had drifted towards lunch or physio, leaving the lounge unusually quiet. A few boots sat abandoned near the wall. Someone's hoodie had been thrown over a chair. The TV was on mute, cycling through sports news Jay refused to look at because her own face had already appeared twice, which seemed excessive given that she was still alive and only mildly stupid.

Alexia came in five minutes later.

Jay knew by the way the room changed.

She did not lift her head.

Alexia crossed the lounge and sat beside her. Not too close at first, which hurt more than Jay wanted to admit. Then Alexia looked at her, sighed quietly, and moved until their thighs touched.

Jay's breath eased.

Alexia noticed.

Of course she noticed.

"Are you still angry?" Alexia asked, not accusing, just tired and gentle enough that Jay felt the fight in her shift.

Jay kept staring at the ceiling. "At him, yes. At myself, yes. At the concept of social media, always. At you, no, but you are still terrifying, so my nervous system is leaving that category open for review."

Alexia's mouth twitched despite herself. "Good."

"Good?"

"At least you are angry at yourself also."

Jay turned her head and gave her a wounded look. "Wow. Comforting. Really warm captaincy there."

Alexia reached up and brushed a strand of hair from Jay's forehead, her fingers soft enough to undo something tight beneath Jay's ribs. "I am not trying to be mean, bebé."

"I know."

"You cannot do this before games."

"I know."

"You cannot give them the story they want."

"I know."

"You cannot answer every idiot who talks about us."

Jay closed her eyes, the repeated truth pressing into her harder because it came from Alexia, whose anger never arrived without love holding the edges of it. "I know all of that," she said quietly. "I knew it while I was doing it. That's the stupid part."

Alexia's fingers paused near her temple. "Then why?"

Jay laughed once, without humour. "Because I saw your face when he said it."

Alexia went still.

Jay opened her eyes and looked at her, properly this time, letting Alexia see the part underneath the rage that had been there all morning, raw and protective and frightened in a way Jay hated admitting.

"I can handle chaos. I am chaos, apparently. Fine. Great. Brand alignment. But the way he said captain, Ale. Like you're not you. Like everything you are could be reduced to who you sleep with." Her voice roughened. "It made me want to break something."

Alexia's expression shifted, anger still there but something warmer underneath it now, something vulnerable enough that she reached for Jay's hand before she answered. "You defended me."

"Badly."

"Loudly."

"Same thing, often."

Alexia slid her hand down to Jay's cheek, palm warm, thumb brushing the corner of her mouth. "I do not need you to defend me by hurting yourself."

Jay looked away.

Alexia turned her face back with two fingers beneath her chin, firm and intimate, making Jay meet her eyes because that was how Alexia loved her when Jay wanted to hide. "Mírame."

Jay looked.

Alexia's voice softened into that low, precise register that always made Jay listen, even when she wanted to argue. "You think you were protecting me. I know this. But I am strong enough to stand through a stupid man talking. You are strong enough to not give him your control."

Jay swallowed.

"I do not want you smaller," Alexia continued. "I do not want you quiet when something matters. I love that you are fire. I love this about you even when I want to throw your phone into the sea. But I need you to choose where to burn."

Jay stared at her for a beat, overwhelmed and trying very hard not to let it show.

Then, because vulnerability was crawling up her throat and Jay had never allowed it to arrive without at least one joke holding its hand, she said, "That was annoyingly poetic."

Alexia rolled her eyes, but her thumb stayed gentle on Jay's cheek. "I am very wise."

"You are."

"I know."

"And hot."

Alexia gave her a look. "Do not flirt your way out."

"I'm not flirting my way out. I'm flirting my way through. It's a process."

"Jay."

"Sorry." Jay reached for Alexia's hand and linked their fingers, pressing their palms together. "I'm sorry. Really. I shouldn't have posted. Or I should have at least sent it to Julia first so she could have tackled me through the phone."

"Julia would have arrived in person."

"True. She has range."

Alexia's thumb moved over Jay's knuckles, and for a moment they simply sat there, their hands resting between them, the argument losing shape the way most of their arguments did when neither of them was too proud to touch first. Fingers before words. Knees leaning together before apologies fully settled. Alexia's hand in Jay's hair. Jay's mouth at Alexia's wrist. It was difficult to stay on opposite sides of anything when their bodies kept remembering they belonged in the same place.

"I understand why you did it," Alexia said after a while.

Jay looked at her.

"I do," Alexia said, because she knew Jay needed to hear it twice. "I was angry too."

"You didn't tweet."

"No. I imagined many things in Spanish."

"That's healthier?"

"No. But quieter."

Jay laughed, and Alexia smiled because the sound finally had some life in it.

Jay lifted Alexia's hand and kissed the inside of her wrist, lingering there for half a second longer than necessary because Alexia's pulse was warm beneath her mouth and Jay had always found apology easier when she could put love somewhere physical.

Alexia's eyes softened.

"I'm still annoyed," Jay murmured against her skin.

"I know."

"He's still a prick."

"Sí."

"I still want to score four goals and do his stupid little press conference gesture at the camera."

Alexia paused. "What gesture?"

Jay demonstrated a very restrained version of a man talking too much with one hand.

Alexia stared. "No."

"It would be iconic."

"It would be a yellow card in spirit."

"Worth it."

"Jay."

"Fine. I'll score respectfully."

"You can score angrily."

Jay looked at her. "Yeah?"

Alexia leaned closer, eyes warming in a way that immediately made Jay's attention sharpen. "I prefer when you score angrily."

Jay's eyebrows lifted.

Alexia realised how it sounded.

Colour rose at once in her cheeks. "I meant football."

Jay's smile spread slowly, dangerous and delighted. "Baby."

"No."

"You prefer when I score angrily?"

"I meant football."

"Did you?"

"Yes."

"Because I can work with that feedback in multiple departments."

Alexia put a hand over Jay's mouth. "Stop."

Jay kissed her palm.

Alexia's eyes darkened for half a second before she could stop them.

Jay saw it.

Of course she saw it.

The lounge door opened, because the universe had never once allowed Jay Jones to flirt herself into victory without sending witnesses.

Lucy walked in carrying a bottle of water, phone in hand, expression already far too entertained for someone entering a room where two people were allegedly having a serious conversation. She stopped just inside, took in Alexia's hand over Jay's mouth, Jay's eyes bright with mischief and their linked knees pressed together on the sofa. "Have you two seen online?"

Alexia did not remove her hand from Jay's mouth. "What now?"

Jay mumbled against Alexia's palm.

Alexia lowered her hand.

"The manager?" Jay asked.

"No," Lucy said, with visible pleasure. "The break up."

Jay blinked. "The what?"

Lucy held up the phone. "Fans think you've split."

Alexia closed her eyes. "Dios mío."

Lucy dropped into the chair opposite them like she had brought snacks to a theatre performance. "Apparently because you arrived separately and didn't talk going into training. There are threads."

Jay sat up. "Threads?"

"Many."

"Show me."

"No," Alexia said instantly.

"Baby."

"No."

Lucy, who had never valued peace above entertainment, turned the phone towards Jay anyway.

Jay leaned forward.

Alexia looked at Lucy. "Why?"

Lucy shrugged. "Content."

The thread was dramatic enough to qualify for public funding. There was a still of Jay on the Ducati, visor down, shoulders tense, captioned: Jay arrives alone looking devastated. There was a still of Alexia getting out of the car, sunglasses on, expression unreadable, captioned: Alexia avoids Jay. There was a slow motion clip of them walking separately into the facility with the words no eye contact. I fear it's over.

Someone had zoomed in on Jay's hand and circled the absence of a ring, despite the fact that Jay did not wear a ring, Alexia did not wear a ring, and neither of them had ever announced an engagement unless you counted Jay once referring to Alexia as "my wife emotionally" during a post match interview and causing three hours of chaos.

Someone had written: SEVEN MONTHS AND GONE. I BLAME LYON.

Jay stared.

Then she began to smile.

Alexia saw it and immediately tightened her hand around Jay's wrist. "No."

"I haven't said anything."

"You are going to post."

"Yes."

"No."

"I need to deny this dramatically."

"No."

Jay reached for her own phone. "Just one post."

Alexia snatched it before Jay's fingers could close around it. "No Twitter."

"It's not a rant if it's romantic."

"It will become a rant."

"It will become art."

Alexia held the phone away from her. "No."

Jay looked at Lucy. "Tell her the people need reassurance."

Lucy took a slow, thoughtful sip of water, entirely too pleased with her role in the collapse of order. "I think the people need to suffer a bit. Builds engagement."

"Luce."

"I'm just saying, break up rumours are great numbers. You could ride this until at least dinner."

Alexia stared at her. "You are not helping."

Lucy grinned. "I know."

Jay reached for her phone again, stretching across Alexia's lap with the athleticism of someone who had used fewer core muscles in Champions League finals. Alexia leaned away, arm extended, the phone safely out of reach. Jay followed. Alexia pushed two fingers into Jay's forehead and guided her back into her own seat with insulting ease.

"Sit."

Jay sat.

Immediately.

Lucy's eyes widened. "Wow."

Jay pointed at her. "Do not."

"I said nothing."

"You looked loud."

Alexia slipped Jay's phone into her own pocket. "No posts."

Jay slumped against the sofa like a censored revolutionary. "This is authoritarian."

"This is relationship management."

"This is oppression."

"This is me loving you enough to save your career from your thumbs."

Jay paused, because she was helpless against that phrasing and Alexia absolutely knew it. "Manipulative."

"Effective," Alexia said.

Lucy looked between them and shook her head. "You two are nauseating."

Jay leaned her head onto Alexia's shoulder, all wounded dignity and shameless affection. "We're broken up, apparently. Be respectful."

Alexia huffed a laugh and, without thinking, lifted a hand into Jay's hair.

Jay went still for half a second.

Then she melted.

It was immediate and embarrassing, which was unfortunate because Lucy was still there and therefore legally required to notice. Alexia's fingers slid through the hair at Jay's temple, nails scratching lightly, and Jay's whole body dropped several levels of tension in one visible collapse. Her shoulders loosened. Her breathing changed. Her eyes half closed. It was less like relaxation and more like someone had located the secret off switch installed behind one of her tattoos.

Lucy pointed. "That. That right there. Post that and the rumours die."

"No," Alexia said.

Jay, eyes closed, murmured, "Could post a statement."

"No."

"Joint statement."

"No."

"'We regret to inform the public that we are disgustingly in love and still arguing about tweet governance.'"

Alexia's fingers moved slower through her hair. "Sleep."

"I'm not tired."

"You are exhausted."

"I'm alert."

"You are almost horizontal."

"I'm emotionally horizontal."

Lucy stood, apparently deciding she had reached the limit of intimacy she could witness without filing a complaint. "I'm leaving before this becomes too domestic."

Jay did not open her eyes. "Coward."

"Yes," Lucy said cheerfully, and left them there.

The lounge quieted again.

Alexia kept her hand in Jay's hair.

Jay meant to keep arguing about the statement. Truly, she had several strong options. A Notes app apology that was not an apology but did contain the phrase tactical lesbianism. A photo of their hands. A selfie with Alexia looking unimpressed, which historically did excellent numbers. A carefully worded post that said Lyon manager successfully united us in irritation, lesbians remain undefeated. The possibilities were endless and, in her opinion, extremely healing for the public.

But Alexia's fingers were warm and slow, and Jay's brain had been running at full speed since morning. The anger had eaten through her. Training had burned what was left. The soft aftermath of arguing and making up with Alexia had taken the last of her resistance.

Her head slipped from Alexia's shoulder to her lap.

Alexia looked down. "Jay?"

"Mmm."

"You cannot sleep here."

"Watch me."

"We have media in an hour."

"Wake me in fifty nine minutes and morally support me through hair."

Alexia's mouth curved despite herself. "You are impossible."

"Loved."

"Sí," Alexia said softly, her fingers never leaving Jay's hair. "Loved."

Jay smiled faintly, already halfway gone.

Alexia leaned back into the sofa, still stroking Jay's hair. The muted TV flashed headlines neither of them wanted to read. Outside the lounge windows, players moved in the corridor, voices passing and fading. Somewhere, Mapi laughed too loudly. Someone dropped a bottle. The world remained loud and stupid and hungry for stories.

Here, Jay slept.

Or close enough.

Alexia watched her.

The sharpness had gone from Jay's face now, the public armour loosened, the anger dimmed, the restless need to answer everything finally quieted beneath Alexia's hand. Nearly asleep, Jay looked younger. Not softer exactly, because Jay always carried something bright and dangerous even at rest, but unguarded in a way Alexia loved fiercely and guarded more fiercely still. One of Jay's hands had found the hem of Alexia's training top and rested there, fingers curled lightly in the fabric, as though even unconscious she needed a point of contact.

Alexia should have moved.

She should have woken Jay, got her food, checked the media schedule, spoken to Julia, perhaps apologised to communications on Jay's behalf before communications began looking for a window to climb out of. She should have done several sensible things.

Instead, she slid down the sofa slightly, careful not to jostle Jay, and let Jay shift half onto her.

Jay responded instantly, even asleep. One arm went around Alexia's waist. Her face tucked against Alexia's stomach. Alexia's hand slipped beneath the hem of Jay's shirt without thought, palm settling warm against the bare skin of Jay's stomach because touch was how she loved when words had done enough for one morning.

She meant to close her eyes for one minute.

Just one.

Mapi found them twenty minutes later.

She entered the lounge with Pina behind her, mid sentence, phone in hand, fully prepared to show them the latest break up thread because Mapi believed friendship meant bringing chaos directly to the people least equipped to handle it.

She had already opened with, "Okay, listen, this one has made a timeline," which was the sort of sentence no emotionally stable person wanted to hear.

Then she stopped.

Pina walked into her back. "Ow. Why did you stop?"

Mapi lifted one hand without speaking.

Pina looked around her shoulder.

Both of them went silent.

Jay and Alexia were asleep on the sofa.

Not neatly. Not in a way that could be mistaken for two teammates resting near each other. Not even in a way that could be diplomatically described as casual.

Jay was sprawled half on her side, arms wrapped around Alexia's waist, face pressed against Alexia's chest like she had gone there with intention and deep personal conviction. Alexia was slumped into the corner of the sofa, head tilted against the back cushion, one hand buried in Jay's hair and the other hidden beneath Jay's shirt, palm clearly resting against her stomach. Their legs were tangled. Jay's phone was half visible in Alexia's pocket, confiscated and forgotten. Alexia's thumb, even asleep, moved once over Jay's skin in a tiny unconscious stroke.

It was absurdly intimate.

It was also the least broken up two people had ever looked.

Pina pressed both hands over her mouth. "Oh my God."

Mapi whispered, "The rumours."

Pina looked at her sharply. "No."

Mapi was already lifting her phone with the solemnity of a woman preparing to intervene in public misinformation. "This is evidence."

"They are asleep."

"And in love."

"That is not consent."

Mapi paused, visibly inconvenienced by ethics.

Pina stared at her.

Mapi lowered the phone by two centimetres, then lifted it again from a respectful distance, framing only the general shape of them curled together, no faces clear, no exposed skin beyond Jay's tattooed arm around Alexia's waist, the kind of photo that said everything without stealing too much. It was soft enough to be harmless and vague enough to preserve privacy, which annoyed Mapi slightly because chaos was always more fun when it wore bright colours.

Pina narrowed her eyes. "You're still posting?"

Mapi typed with great care.

Mapi León: Rumours are very stupid today.

She attached the photo.

Pina stared at the post.

Then at Mapi.

"That is actually restrained."

Mapi looked offended. "I can be elegant."

"You once captioned a photo of Cata falling over, 'goalkeeper down, democracy up.'"

"That was also elegant."

"It was a training accident."

"It was political."

The post went live.

The internet detonated again, but this time in the opposite direction. Within five minutes, the break up threads collapsed like badly built furniture. The car park footage became a historical artefact from a less enlightened age. People who had been writing farewell essays half an hour earlier were now declaring that they had always believed in love.

Someone replied OH THANK GOD within twelve seconds. Someone else wrote Mapi said shut up and honestly fair. Another account zoomed in on the curve of Jay's arm around Alexia and captioned it: this is not a breakup, this is a hostage situation conducted by affection. A fourth wrote: Alexia confiscated Jay's phone and then fell asleep on her. Marriage behaviour. The most liked reply simply said: they are literally napping through our divorce proceedings.

Julia saw the post and texted Mapi directly.

Julia: Did you ask before posting this?

Mapi looked at the sleeping couple, then at Pina, then back at her phone.

Mapi: Spiritually.

Julia: That is not a legal category.

Mapi: It fixed the rumours.

Julia: Unfortunately, yes.

Mapi smiled.

Then her phone buzzed again.

Clara: Good distance. No clear faces. Acceptable chaos.

Mapi held it up triumphantly for Pina. "See? Legal approval."

Pina squinted. "That is therapist approval."

"Same household."

"That is also not a legal category."

On the sofa, Jay stirred.

Mapi and Pina froze with the immediate guilt of children found beside a broken vase.

Jay's eyes opened halfway. For a second she looked disoriented, blinking slowly into the lounge light, then she felt Alexia beneath her, Alexia's hand warm against her stomach, Alexia's breathing soft near her hair. Her face changed immediately, all tension gone in an expression so gentle that Mapi almost felt bad for what she had done.

Almost.

Then Jay saw her.

Her eyes narrowed sleepily. "Why are you crouching like a burglar?"

Mapi stood too fast. "No reason."

Pina stared at the wall as though the wall had become fascinating.

Jay's gaze moved from Mapi's face to Mapi's phone. "Mapi."

"It was necessary."

"What was necessary?"

"Love defence."

Jay blinked slowly. "I've just woken up and already hate this conversation."

Alexia stirred beneath her, voice heavy with sleep. "Qué pasa?"

Jay softened instantly, turning her face into Alexia's shoulder for a second before answering. "Nothing, baby. Mapi did something criminal, but in a friendship way."

Alexia did not open her eyes. "Again?"

"Likely."

Mapi held up her phone with the cautious pride of someone presenting a risky tactical decision after it had unexpectedly worked. "I stopped the break up rumours."

Alexia opened one eye.

Jay lifted her head. "How?"

Mapi showed them the tweet.

There was a long silence.

Jay stared at the photo.

Alexia stared at the photo.

Pina looked ready to flee the country.

Jay said, after another beat, "You know what? That's cute."

Mapi exhaled. "Thank you."

Alexia looked at the post again, then slowly looked at Mapi. "My hand is under Jay's shirt."

Mapi nodded seriously. "Yes, but tastefully."

Jay grinned. "Baby, the internet already thinks we broke up. A tasteful stomach hand is basically public service."

Alexia's cheeks went pink. "Dios mío."

Jay leaned up and kissed her cheek, lingering there until Alexia's irritation weakened by visible degrees. "I like it."

"You like everything that makes us look married."

"Yes."

Alexia's eyes softened despite herself. "We are not married."

"Emotionally, I have said otherwise on live television."

"That does not count."

"It counted to Twitter. They made edits."

"Twitter also thought we separated because I got out of a car without you.”

Jay considered that. "Fair."

Pina, who had finally recovered enough to speak, whispered, "For the record, I told her not to post."

Mapi gasped. "Betrayal."

"You posted sleeping people."

"Sleeping love."

"Still people."

Jay settled more comfortably against Alexia, entirely unashamed and still half wrapped around her. "Honestly, I respect the composition. You got my good arm."

Alexia looked down at her. "You have a good arm?"

"All my arms are good arms."

"You have two."

"And both have served this relationship beautifully."

Alexia gave her the look again, but this time the corners of her mouth were fighting not to lift. "You are still not allowed Twitter."

Jay looked wounded. "Even after napping?"

"Especially after napping."

"I was going to post a romantic denial."

"I know."

"It had lesbians in it."

"I know this too."

Mapi gasped, delighted. "Can we still see it?"

"No," Alexia said.

"Yes," Jay said.

Alexia's hand tightened under Jay's shirt.

Jay immediately corrected herself. "No."

Pina whispered, "Powerful."

Mapi nodded. "Very."

Jay looked up at Alexia, soft now in the aftermath of sleep and argument and the strange public stupidity of the day. "We're okay, yeah?"

Alexia's expression changed at once, all teasing quieting because she knew that question came from somewhere real. She slid her hand from Jay's stomach to her back, rubbing slow circles through the thin cotton of her shirt. "Sí, bebé. We are okay."

"Still annoyed?"

"Yes."

"Still in love with me?"

"Very unfortunately."

Jay smiled, eyes lowering. "That's my favourite kind."

Alexia bent and kissed her, soft and brief at first, then another at the corner of her mouth because Jay followed her automatically, always greedy for closeness after fear. It was not performative. It was not a denial for the internet. It was an old habit between them, a small repair, a return to centre. Alexia's hand stayed under Jay's shirt. Jay's fingers curled lightly at Alexia's waist. Mapi and Pina both turned away half a second too late.

Mapi muttered, "We are still in the room."

Jay did not look at her. "That feels like a you problem."

Alexia laughed against Jay's mouth.

For all the jokes, there was something lovely about it, and even Mapi knew it. The world could invent whatever it wanted from a car park clip, a morning argument, a stupid quote from a man trying to stir chaos before a match. It could slow down footage, circle empty fingers, mistake privacy for distance and disagreement for disaster. It could make an opera out of two women arriving in different vehicles because one of them loved her motorbike too much and the other had more common sense.

But here they were.

Jay with her face tucked into Alexia like home.

Alexia with her hand under Jay's shirt because even asleep she wanted skin.

Seven months public, longer in all the ways that mattered, still ridiculous, still intense, still affectionate enough to make their teammates complain and then secretly defend them online.

Mapi took one careful step back. "Okay," she said, solemnly. "I leave you to your break up."

Jay lifted one hand without opening her eyes. "Respect our privacy during this difficult time."

Alexia laughed softly beneath her.

Mapi smiled.

When she and Pina left, Jay and Alexia stayed exactly where they were.

The internet could calm down or not. Lyon could talk. Journalists could write. Fans could analyse car park footage like sacred text. Julia could draft statements with the grim endurance of a woman who had chosen a career in crisis management and then accidentally acquired Jay Jones.

Jay had Alexia's heartbeat under her ear, Alexia's hand warm against her skin, and Alexia's voice murmuring, "Five more minutes, guapa," as if the world had not spent the morning trying to turn them into a headline.

Five more minutes became twenty.

Marta's voice came through the phone, calm and warm and professional in the way Alexia had already begun to trust. She went through the identification again. Donor 0203. Confirmed characteristics. Confirmed availability. Confirmed that the clinic would reserve the sample for them moving forward. Confirmed the next stage. Confirmed the assessment appointment.

Alexia listened, nodding even though Marta could not see her, her eyes fixed on the pale grain of the kitchen counter as the words moved from possibility into decision.

Jay, beside her, was terrifyingly still now.

That was worse than the knee bouncing.

Alexia glanced sideways and found her staring at the phone as though the device contained a tiny priest, a contract lawyer and the future genetic scaffolding of their child all at once. Her hands were folded tightly in front of her, tattoos shifting across the backs of them each time her fingers flexed. She had not said a word since the call began, which was almost always the clearest sign that something enormous was happening inside her. Jay in ordinary nerves asked too many questions. Jay in proper awe went quiet.

"Does that all sound alright?" Marta asked.

Alexia looked at Jay.

Jay looked back.

For a second, neither of them spoke.

It was ridiculous, really, because they had already chosen. They had discussed it for days. They had read the file, walked away from it, returned to it, argued about the difference between instinct and evidence, slept on it, woken up still certain. They had imagined the donor not as a person, exactly, but as a contribution. A doorway. One piece of a future that would belong entirely to them once it began.

Still, the confirmation pressed against Alexia's ribs with a weight she had not anticipated.

She reached for Jay's hand beneath the counter.

Jay gripped it immediately.

"Yes," Alexia said, her voice quieter than she expected. "Yes. It sounds right."

Jay swallowed, then leaned closer to the phone. "Yes. Definitely. Donor 0203. We confirm."

Marta's smile was audible. "Perfect. I'll make a note now."

Jay squeezed Alexia's hand so tightly that Alexia turned her head and murmured, "Bebé, I need circulation."

Jay loosened instantly. "Sorry. I was emotionally notarising."

Marta paused for half a second on the other end of the line.

Alexia closed her eyes.

"Emotionally notarising?" Marta repeated, clearly trying not to laugh.

"It felt legally significant."

"It is administratively significant," Marta said.

Jay nodded solemnly, as though Marta had supported her. "Exactly."

Alexia pressed her lips together and stared at the ceiling.

Marta continued with the next details, the assessment appointment, the timings, what they should expect, what paperwork to bring, what Alexia should avoid beforehand, and by the time they ended the call, Jay had opened the folder despite claiming she would not need to. She wrote one note, underlined it twice, then added a small star beside Donor 0203's number.

Alexia watched her for a moment.

"You have starred him."

Jay looked down at the paper. "Yes."

"Why?"

"Because he's important."

"He does not know he has been starred."

"That's not the point."

"What is the point?"

Jay tapped the page with her pen. "Recognition."

Alexia stared at her.

Jay looked completely serious.

"Jay."

"What?"

"You cannot give the donor a gold star."

"It's not gold."

"That is not the issue."

"He's contributed to the project."

"The project?"

Jay opened her mouth, paused, then winced. "Not the project. The baby. The possible baby. Our baby. I panicked and went corporate."

Alexia's face softened despite herself.

Jay noticed immediately and leaned in with a hopeful expression. "Can the star stay?"

"No."

"It's tiny."

"No."

"It's respectful."

"It is strange."

Jay looked at the starred number, then back at Alexia. "What if it's a symbolic star?"

"Still no."

Jay sighed with visible suffering and crossed it out, badly. The star remained entirely visible beneath the single line.

Alexia reached over, took the pen from her, and drew a thick block over the top of it until it disappeared.

Jay watched the destruction with quiet horror.

"You didn't have to murder it."

"I did."

"That star had emotional value."

"You emotionally notarised enough for one morning."

Jay leaned against her shoulder, dramatic and boneless. "I'm being censored in my own fertility folder."

Alexia kissed the top of her head. "Sí. And yet somehow you survive."

Jay slid an arm around her waist and stayed there for a while, her cheek pressed against Alexia's shoulder, the folder open beneath them, the future written in neat black ink and one badly concealed patch where a star had died. Alexia let her own cheek rest against Jay's hair, breathing in the familiar smell of shampoo and skin, and felt the decision settle.

Donor 0203.

Not a baby yet.

Not even close.

But one step nearer.

A week after that, they returned for the assessment.

It was the same clinic, the same discreet plaque beside the entrance, the same soft lighting inside and the same impossible number of healthy plants arranged around the waiting area as if fertility could be encouraged by botanical confidence. The receptionist recognised them and smiled in that gentle, practised way that managed to be both welcoming and careful, as though she understood that everyone who entered carried a private weather system through the door.

Jay carried the folder.

Of course she did.

This time, however, it was noticeably smaller.

Alexia had watched the downsizing operation the night before with a mixture of tenderness and suspicion. Jay had sat cross legged on the living room floor in front of an arrangement of papers that looked less like preparation for an assessment and more like the evidence board of a detective determined to solve conception. She had removed duplicate printouts, condensed notes, reorganised tabs, and then spent nine minutes deciding whether "Emotional Variables" should be renamed because Alexia had laughed at it too hard.

"What would you call it?" Jay had asked, pen in hand, deadly serious.

"Feelings."

Jay had looked pained. "Too vague."

"Pregnancy feelings."

"That sounds like a leaflet."

"Feelings about possible pregnancy."

"That's just Emotional Variables with less professionalism."

Alexia, stretched out on the sofa with one leg thrown over Jay's thigh because she enjoyed being a physical obstacle to Jay's administrative intensity, had said, "Delete the whole section."

Jay had pressed the folder to her chest. "You take that back."

Now, standing in the clinic waiting area, Alexia saw Marta glance at the slimmed down folder and bite back a smile.

Jay noticed immediately.

"It's smaller," she said.

Marta's face remained admirably neutral. "I didn't say anything."

"You thought it."

"I thought you seemed very prepared."

"It only has essential tabs."

Alexia looked at Marta. "There are nine."

Jay turned to her. "Seven of them are essential."

"What are the other two?"

Jay adjusted the folder under her arm. "Emotionally supportive."

Marta coughed into her hand.

Alexia looked delighted. "You made Marta cough."

"I did not make Marta cough. Marta coughed independently."

"I'm fine," Marta said, though her mouth was definitely twitching.

Jay pointed lightly at Alexia. "This is exactly why emotionally supportive tabs are necessary. Hostility in the room."

"Hostility?"

"From my own future co parent."

"Co parent?" Alexia repeated, her voice softening around the word before she could stop it.

Jay's expression changed instantly.

The humour did not disappear, but it grew quieter, folding itself around the sudden tenderness. "Yes," she said, carefully now. "If we are lucky."

Alexia reached for her hand.

Marta looked away for a moment with the professional grace of someone giving intimacy somewhere to land.

The assessment itself went better than Alexia had allowed herself to hope.

She had not realised how much tension she had carried into the room until Marta began to speak in calm, approving sentences. Everything looked as it should. The timing made sense. The results were good. The plan remained solid. Nothing in the assessment closed a door. Nothing delayed them. Nothing made Marta's voice turn careful in the way Alexia had privately feared.

Hope, she was discovering, was not light.

People spoke about hope as if it floated.

It did not.

Hope had weight. It pressed into the chest and sat behind the eyes. It made every good sentence feel enormous because good did not mean certain, but it did mean possible, and possible was enough to make a person tremble if she wanted something badly enough.

Marta walked them through the next phase.

Dates.

Medication.

Timing.

The day itself, when it came.

Alexia asked questions in the voice she used when she wanted to sound calm and competent rather than like someone whose body had become the site of their shared future. She asked about practicalities, discomfort, timing, what she should expect afterwards, what was normal and what was not. Marta answered with patience. Then Jay asked questions too, because of course she did, but they were good questions, annoying only in the way good questions became annoying when they forced the room to acknowledge that Jay had probably read three clinical papers, two pamphlets and at least one forum she had been specifically told not to visit.

"Jay," Alexia said after question six.

Jay held up one finger without looking away from Marta. "This one is medically relevant."

"The previous five were medically relevant."

"Exactly. Pattern of excellence."

Marta smiled. "It's alright. Ask."

Jay looked triumphant for half a second before remembering that triumph in a fertility clinic was probably inappropriate and rearranging her face into something more humble.

Alexia leaned back in her chair. "Dios mío."

When Jay eventually apologised for, in her own words, "perhaps overdoing it slightly, but in a well intentioned and scientifically curious way," Marta closed the file in front of her and looked at them both with a kindness that settled something in the room.

"You'd be surprised how many people wish they had asked more before the day arrived."

Jay turned to Alexia as if Marta had just placed another Champions League medal around her neck.

Alexia held up a hand. "Do not."

"I said nothing."

"You are glowing amor.”

"I'm allowed to glow. Marta validated my tab culture."

"Marta validated questions."

"Questions live in tabs."

"They do not live anywhere. They are questions."

Jay leaned closer and whispered, "Preparedness is sexy."

Alexia did not look at her. "Not in a clinic."

"Especially in a clinic."

"Jay."

"What? You love competence."

"I love quiet."

Jay pressed her lips together.

Marta's shoulders moved with silent laughter.

When they left the clinic that afternoon, the city looked different again.

Alexia knew, rationally, that nothing outside had changed. Barcelona remained Barcelona, bright and impatient and alive around them, scooters sliding through gaps in traffic, sunlight on shop windows, people moving along the pavements with their own errands and private hopes. Yet something in Alexia had shifted enough that the same streets seemed altered by association. They had entered the clinic carrying possibility, and they left with dates.

A timeline.

A set of steps.

A day circled in their shared calendar that neither of them named too loudly at first, though both of them began looking at it every morning.

The Day.

Jay called it that by accident three evenings later while cutting vegetables so badly that Alexia had taken the knife away twice and been ignored both times.

"When The Day comes," Jay said, trying to slice a carrot into pieces that varied wildly in size, "we should probably leave earlier than we think because traffic near the clinic is unhinged and I refuse to let a bus driver called Jordi interfere with conception."

Alexia looked up from the sofa.

"The Day?"

Jay froze with half a carrot in her hand.

The expression on her face was so earnest, so instantly vulnerable beneath the humour, that Alexia's chest softened. Jay had a tendency to name things before she knew she was naming them. To turn emotional landmarks into titles. The Walk. The England Thing. The Sofa Agreement. The Day.

"Too much?" Jay asked.

Alexia shook her head.

"No."

Jay watched her carefully.

Alexia smiled. "It is The Day."

Jay's shoulders eased.

"Good. Because I already mentally capitalised it."

"Of course you did."

From then on, it was The Day.

The Day arrived on a Tuesday.

Alexia woke before the alarm.

Not a few minutes before, not in that convenient way where the body politely rises ahead of schedule and gives you the pleasant illusion of control. She woke an hour and a half early, eyes opening in the dim bedroom with the immediate, full body knowledge that the day had arrived. The appointment was at eleven. The alarm was set for half seven. The room was still grey and quiet, the curtains admitting only a thin line of morning where they did not quite meet the wall.

Still, she knew.

The day sat in the air.

In the hush around the furniture.

In the shape of Jay beside her.

Alexia lay on her back, one hand resting low on her stomach, which was still flat and familiar and not yet changed by anything they were about to do. That thought moved through her strangely. Her body looked the same as it had yesterday. It would look the same tomorrow. There would be no visible evidence of this morning's significance, no mark on the skin, no immediate sign that something had begun or failed to begin.

And yet, by lunchtime, they would have done something extraordinary.

Something quiet enough to happen in a clinic room and enormous enough to rearrange the rest of their lives.

She was not exactly nervous.

Nerves, Alexia understood. Nerves had accompanied her into finals, surgeries, public speeches, penalty shoot outs, matches where expectation had felt like a whole stadium pressing between her shoulder blades. Nerves could be managed. They could be breathed through, directed, turned into focus.

This was different.

This was anticipation with fear folded carefully into it.

Readiness with a tremor beneath.

The feeling of standing at the edge of a life she wanted so badly that wanting itself had become dangerous.

Beside her, Jay was lying on her back.

Still.

Too still.

Alexia stared at the ceiling for another few seconds, listening.

Real sleep had weight. Jay's real sleep was full bodied and shameless, warm limbs flung across the bed, one foot wedged beneath Alexia's calf, occasional nonsense murmured into the pillow with great conviction. This stillness was not sleep. It had tension inside it. Awareness.

"You are awake," Alexia said into the dark.

For two seconds, nothing happened.

Then Jay exhaled.

"I was being quiet."

Alexia turned her head. "How long?"

Jay continued staring at the ceiling. "Depends what you consider long."

"Jay."

"Since five."

Alexia blinked. "Five?"

Jay's mouth tightened. "Possibly four forty."

"Bebe.”

"I woke up and my brain said congratulations, it's The Day, and then refused to return to unconsciousness."

"You should have woken me."

"You were asleep."

"I am awake now."

"You weren't at four forty."

"How do you know?"

Jay turned her head towards her.

In the soft grey morning, her eyes were open and bright, her hair a mess against the pillow. "Because I was watching you like a totally normal and emotionally well adjusted person."

Alexia's mouth twitched. "That sounds very normal."

"It was from a respectful distance."

"You were beside me."

"Emotionally respectful."

Alexia rolled carefully onto her side so she could face her properly. "I have been awake since six."

Jay's eyebrows lifted. "You have?"

"Sí."

"And you didn't say anything?"

"You did not say anything."

They stared at each other across the small space between their pillows, both caught in the ridiculous tenderness of their mutual silence.

Then Jay laughed softly.

It broke the tension just enough.

"We've both been lying here awake in silence for half an hour trying not to disturb each other."

"Being considerate."

"Being idiots."

"Also that."

Jay turned fully onto her side, facing Alexia. Her hand came up and found Alexia's cheek in the dark with the ease of long practice, thumb brushing slowly over the skin just beneath her eye. The touch was familiar enough to settle Alexia immediately and tender enough to make the fear rise again.

"How are you feeling?" Jay asked.

Alexia gave the automatic answer before she could stop it. "Fine."

Jay's thumb paused.

"Ale."

Alexia breathed out.

She could have insisted. She had done that for most of her life. Fine was a useful word, a captain's word, a word that closed doors and kept other people from crowding the room. But this was not a day for locking Jay outside. Jay was not asking as a spectator. She was in the centre of it too, even if the procedure would happen to Alexia's body.

"I feel..." Alexia searched for the shape of it. "Aware."

Jay waited.

"Ready, but not calm. Strange inside."

"Strange how?"

Alexia looked past Jay towards the faint outline of the wardrobe, the chair, the curtains. "Like today is already a memory and it has not happened yet."

Jay went very still.

Not the anxious stillness this time.

The recognised one.

"That's exactly it," she said quietly.

Alexia shifted closer until their knees touched beneath the duvet. "You?"

Jay made a small sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. "I feel like my body wants to run, cry, make breakfast, reread the folder, call Marta to confirm the confirmed confirmation, and fight God if necessary, all at the same time."

"Normal Tuesday for you."

"Rude." Jay leaned forward and kissed Alexia's forehead. "Accurate, but rude."

Alexia smiled.

Jay's hand slipped from her cheek into her hair, fingers moving gently against her scalp. "I need you to tell me what you need today."

"I will."

"No. Actually tell me." Jay lifted her head enough to look at her properly. "Don't manage me. Don't manage the room. Don't do captain face and decide it's easier if you become a beautiful Spanish statue while quietly having a crisis."

Alexia narrowed her eyes. "Beautiful Spanish statue?"

"Compliment first. Concern second."

"You have made rules."

"Yes."

"For my procedure day."

Jay's expression softened. "Our procedure day."

Alexia felt the correction land gently but firmly between them. It mattered. Not because Jay was trying to claim her body or take something from her, but because she needed to belong inside the process. Needed not to stand politely outside the doorway of something that would make them mothers together.

Alexia nodded. "Our procedure day."

Jay kissed her once, pleased. "Rules still stand."

"Your rules are usually dramatic."

"These are excellent."

"What are they?"

Jay shifted onto one elbow, suddenly very serious. "Rule one, you tell me what you need. Rule two, I can provide anything I notice before you say it, within reason, and without making you feel like you're being assessed by airport security."

Alexia's mouth twitched.

"Rule three," Jay continued, "if you say you're fine in the suspicious tone, I'm allowed to ask once more."

"The suspicious tone?"

"You have one."

“I do not."

"You absolutely do. It's very elegant and extremely false."

Alexia looked unimpressed.

Jay continued before she could argue. "Rule four, no unnecessary Googling by either party, mainly me. Rule five, we eat breakfast."

"You added breakfast as a fertility rule?"

"Blood sugar is infrastructure."

"Dios mío."

"Rule six, if either of us cries, we don't make it weird."

"You always make crying weird."

"Incorrect. I make crying British, which is different."

Alexia laughed despite herself, and Jay smiled immediately, the private triumphant smile she always wore when she managed to make Alexia laugh on a morning that felt too large.

"Accept the rules," Jay said.

Alexia sighed dramatically. "Vale."

Jay looked delighted. "Vale."

Then she kissed her again, slower this time.

It was not hungry or urgent. It was the kind of kiss that gave the morning somewhere to begin, soft and warm and unhurried, Jay's hand still in Alexia's hair, Alexia's palm settling against the steady beat of Jay's heart beneath her T shirt. They stayed there for a long moment, breathing each other in, allowing the fear to exist without letting it take the whole room.

When Jay pulled back, she rested her forehead against Alexia's.

"Breakfast," she whispered.

"You are very committed to infrastructure."

“Sexy, isn't it?"

"No."

"You're lying."

"A little."

Jay grinned and got out of bed.

Alexia remained beneath the duvet and listened to the house wake around her. The coffee machine began first, then the cupboard doors, the faint clink of plates, the fridge opening, the low mutter of Jay talking to herself in the kitchen. Normally Jay's morning routine had the logic of a pinball machine. She moved from task to task according to an internal system visible only to her, starting coffee, forgetting coffee, feeding the cats they did not own in theory because she had once left tuna outside for a stray and now considered herself part of a neighbourhood welfare programme, returning to coffee, opening the wrong drawer, remembering three unrelated things at once.

This morning was different.

There was intention in the sounds.

Quiet efficiency.

The kind that revealed how much Jay cared because she was pouring every restless piece of herself into the act of making the morning gentle.

Alexia stayed in bed because she had accepted the rules, and because there was something unexpectedly tender in allowing herself to be looked after without managing the edges of it.

Jay returned carrying a tray.

An actual tray.

The wooden one they had bought months earlier at a market because Alexia said it was beautiful and Jay, after holding it for half a second, had declared, "This is dangerous. This is how people become tray people." They had bought it anyway, of course, and then almost never used it because Jay preferred carrying too many mugs at once in her hands like a circus act with no insurance.

Now the tray held two coffees, toast from the good bakery, a glass of water, a small bowl of yoghurt, and a mango sliced exactly the way Alexia liked it.

Alexia stared at the mango.

Jay froze.

"Don't."

"I have not said anything."

"You looked emotional."

"It is mango."

"It's a significant mango."

"Fruit cannot be significant."

Jay carried the tray to the bedside table with great care. "That's where you're wrong."

Alexia looked at her.

Jay climbed back onto the bed beside her, suddenly shy beneath the humour. "You've wanted mango all week. I bought it yesterday in case you wanted it this morning. I didn't know if you would, because your body has become a mystery with excellent cheekbones, but I wanted it to be available."

Alexia's eyes stung immediately.

Ridiculous.

Completely ridiculous.

She had stood in front of cameras after devastating losses with dry eyes. She had taken questions after injuries, finals, pressure, public scrutiny, the endless demands of being Alexia Putellas in rooms that wanted strength more than truth. Yet Jay buying a mango the day before just in case she wanted it had pushed something soft and perilous beneath her ribs.

Jay pointed at her. "You're going to cry about mango."

"I am not crying about mango."

"You're very close."

"I am having a normal emotional response to fruit."

"That sentence is not helping your defence."

Alexia looked away because if she continued looking at Jay's face, she absolutely would cry about mango, and she refused to give Jay that kind of material on The Day.

Jay touched her chin gently and turned her face back. "You can cry about anything today, baby. Mango included."

Alexia let out a wet laugh that she immediately resented. "You are annoying."

"I'm deeply supportive."

“You are staring."

"I am checking."

"You can check without staring."

"No, I check visually. It's part of the system."

"The system has too many parts."

"The system loves you."

Alexia took Jay's face between both hands and kissed her.

Jay softened instantly, one hand closing around Alexia's wrist as though she needed somewhere to hold on. The kiss was brief because breakfast existed and because the day was already too full to rush through, but it steadied them both.

They ate in bed.

Jay watched Alexia eat the mango with such profound satisfaction that Alexia eventually paused with a piece halfway to her mouth and said, "You are proud of yourself."

"I selected well."

"It is mango, Jay."

"I assessed ripeness by feel, smell and emotional potential."

"Mangoes do not have emotional potential."

"This one did. Look at you."

"I am going to ban this conversation from the conception story."

Jay leaned back against the pillows, holding her coffee with both hands. "You can try, but if this works, the mango becomes historically relevant."

"Our child will not hear the sentence, 'First, there was a mango.'"

"It has a mythic quality."

"It has a restraining order quality."

Jay grinned into her mug.

They talked about ordinary things because ordinary things made extraordinary days survivable. Jay described a video Lucy had sent of a toddler trying to kick a football and falling over with such dramatic betrayal that Jay had diagnosed "early midfield energy."

After breakfast, Alexia showered.

When she came out wrapped in a towel, hair wet and skin warm from the water, her clothes were laid out neatly on the bed. Soft trousers. Comfortable shirt. The bra that did not annoy her. Socks folded as if Jay had briefly become a hotel employee. Even the underwear was the pair Alexia would have chosen herself, which should not have moved her because it was only underwear, but The Day had apparently made her defenceless against domestic competence.

Jay stood in the doorway, suddenly very interested in the ceiling.

Alexia looked at the clothes, then at her.

"You laid these out."

"I guessed."

"You guessed correctly guapa.”

"Good."

Alexia walked towards her slowly, the towel tucked securely beneath her arms. Jay's gaze remained with unnatural commitment on the wall behind her.

"You are doing rule two," Alexia said.

Jay blinked. "What?"

"Noticing before I say."

"Oh." She rubbed the back of her neck. "Yeah. Is that okay?"

Alexia reached her and touched her fingers to the front of Jay's T shirt. "It is very okay, guapa."

Jay finally looked at her.

Whatever she saw in Alexia's face made her expression soften immediately, all nervous brightness falling away into something quieter. Alexia leaned up and kissed her, slow enough that Jay's hand found her waist beneath the towel by instinct and then immediately froze as if her self control had remembered the importance of context.

Alexia smiled against her mouth. "You can touch me."

"I know." Jay's voice had gone low. "I'm being respectful."

"You look like you are defusing a bomb."

"You came out in a towel on The Day. My nervous system has departments arguing."

Alexia laughed and kissed her again because flustered Jay was one of the great privileges of her life.

They left the house just after ten.

The drive to the clinic was quieter than the first appointment, but not heavy. Jay put music on low, soft enough that it did not compete with the morning, and her hand found Alexia's over the centre console before they reached the end of the street. Alexia watched Barcelona pass in flashes of light and movement, bakeries opening, shutters halfway raised, people stepping around delivery vans, a man carrying flowers under one arm while shouting into his phone as if romance and conflict had made an appointment for the same hour.

"Talk to me," Jay said.

Alexia turned slightly. "About what?"

"Anything. Whatever is in your head. Unless it is terrifying, in which case still tell me but perhaps begin gently."

Alexia looked out through the windscreen.

“I am thinking that if this works, they will never know this drive."

Jay's hand tightened.

"They will know the city," Alexia continued. "They may know this road one day. They may pass the clinic and not know. Not unless we tell them. To them, the morning will be a story, not a memory."

Jay was quiet for a moment.

Then she lifted Alexia's hand and kissed her knuckles. "We'll remember it for them."

Alexia looked at her.

"We'll remember the drive," Jay said. "The mango. The fact I almost took the wrong turning because I was thinking about whether babies can sense vibes from before conception."

Alexia stared.

Jay glanced at her quickly. "Can they?"

"No."

"You say that confidently."

"I say it because they do not exist yet."

"Right. Good point."

Alexia shook her head, but she was smiling.

"We'll tell them," Jay continued, voice softening. "When they're old enough. Not dramatically. Not like, gather round children, your origin story begins with clinical paperwork and your mother emotionally bonded with tropical fruit. Just... this was the morning we went to try for you."

Alexia's throat tightened.

"I cried about mango in this version?"

"You emotionally approached mango."

"Do not make mango central."

"No promises."

At the clinic, Marta was waiting for them.

She greeted them with the same calm warmth, her face lighting with recognition in a way that felt personal without becoming too much. "How are we today?"

"Good," Alexia said.

Jay nodded. "Good."

Marta looked at Jay for one second longer.

"Also nervous?"

Jay opened her mouth.

Alexia squeezed her hand.

Jay closed her mouth again and sighed. "Yes."

Marta smiled. "Very normal."

"I wasn't going to lie," Jay said.

Alexia murmured, "You were absolutely going to lie."

“I was going to emotionally edit."

"That is lying with stationery."

Marta laughed softly. "Come through."

The room was different this time.

More clinical, but still warm. A chair for Jay. A place for Alexia. Soft lighting. Clean surfaces. The same careful effort to make the space gentle without pretending it was not medical. Alexia appreciated that more than she expected. She did not want false softness. She wanted competence with warmth. Marta had both.

Marta explained everything again, step by step.

What would happen.

How long it would take.

What discomfort might feel like.

What they would do afterwards.

When testing would make sense.

What not to over interpret.

Alexia listened, though she had read the information many times. Hearing Marta say it aloud steadied the abstract knowledge into something held by another person's calm.

Jay stood beside her.

Too still.

Alexia could feel the energy in her contained so tightly that it almost vibrated. Jay's hand remained in hers, warm and strong, thumb moving slowly across the back of Alexia's fingers. Her whole body angled towards Alexia, not crowding her, not taking over, simply present with such fierce attention that Alexia could feel herself leaning into it without meaning to.

When Marta finished, she asked, "Any questions before we begin?"

Jay inhaled.

Alexia said, "Tab seven."

Jay froze.

Marta looked between them.

"It is a short tab," Jay said.

"We can ask afterwards."

"There are only two questions."

"Afterwards."

Jay turned her head. Alexia held her gaze, calm and firm.

This was part of the rules too. Not the written ones, but the real ones beneath them. Jay could prepare. Jay could care. Jay could be Jay. But she also had to let the moment happen without turning it into a meeting.

Jay exhaled slowly.

"Afterwards."

Marta nodded with admirable seriousness. "I'll be available afterwards for tab seven."

Jay pointed at her. "Thank you."

Alexia whispered, "You have infected Marta."

"Preparedness is contagious."

The procedure was as Marta promised.

Quick.

Straightforward.

Not nothing.

Alexia realised that very clearly as it happened. Anything involving the body and hope was never nothing. It could be simple without being small. It could be medically routine and emotionally enormous at the same time. She breathed through it, eyes on the ceiling, one hand locked around Jay's.

Jay's hand became the whole room.

The pressure of her fingers.

The warm sweep of her thumb.

The way she leaned down once and kissed Alexia's temple without asking a question.

Alexia focused on that. Not the ceiling. Not the clinical details. Not the possibility of failure. Jay's hand. Jay's breathing. Jay beside her, steady despite whatever storm was taking place behind her eyes.

When it was done, Marta's voice came gently.

"That's it."

Alexia breathed out.

Jay leaned down at once, mouth brushing her temple again. "You okay?"

"Sí."

"Pain?"

"No. Just strange."

"Good strange or bad strange?"

Alexia thought about it.

"Important strange."

Jay kissed her cheek. "You were brilliant."

"It was not a match."

"You were brilliant."

"I lay there."

"Brilliantly."

"Jay."

"I'm recording it officially."

"In the folder?"

"There will be a note."

"No."

"Yes. The Day. Alexia brilliant. Mango successful. Tab seven deferred under protest."

Alexia laughed softly and closed her eyes.

For a moment, she allowed herself simply to exist there, in the quiet after. No certainty. No answer. No change she could feel. Yet something had been attempted. They had walked through a door together, and even if they later had to walk through it again, this first time would remain.

Marta gave the aftercare information again, the waiting period, when testing would make sense, what symptoms did and did not mean, when to call. Jay asked the tab seven questions afterwards, and they were good questions. Alexia let her ask them because today the folder was not a shield or a form of control. It was Jay's love trying to put its hands somewhere useful without crowding the room.

When they stepped outside, Tuesday afternoon met them as if nothing extraordinary had happened.

The sun had risen higher. The city had warmed into itself. Traffic moved through the street. People walked by carrying groceries, handbags, takeaway coffees, phones held to their ears. A cyclist shouted at a taxi. A delivery driver laughed with someone outside a café. Ordinary life continued with almost insulting confidence, completely unaware that Alexia had just stepped back into the world possibly, maybe, impossibly at the very beginning of carrying their child.

Jay stood beside her on the pavement.

For once, she did not speak immediately.

Alexia looked at her. "You are quiet."

Jay nodded.

"That is suspicious."

"I'm full."

Alexia's expression softened. "Full?"

"Too much feeling. No storage."

That almost undid her.

Alexia reached for Jay's face and drew her closer. "How do you feel?"

Jay looked at her for a moment, eyes bright in the sunlight. "Like something happened today that I will remember forever, even if it doesn't work this time. Even if we have to come back. Today happened. We tried."

Alexia's eyes stung again.

The mango had weakened her permanently.

"We do not know yet," she said quietly.

“I know."

"It may not work first time."

"I know."

"We may have to do this again."

"Then we do it again."

"And again."

"As many times as it takes," Jay said. "Or until we decide together that we need to pause, or change direction, or breathe. But I'm here. Every appointment. Every result. Every weird symptom you Google and then pretend you didn't. Every mango. Every tab. I'm here."

Alexia looked at her, this impossible woman who had spent so much of her life believing love was something people left behind, standing on a pavement in Barcelona promising to stay through uncertainty.

Every day, Alexia thought.

Every day Jay made her fall in love with her again.

Sometimes it was dramatic. Sometimes it was Jay outside a clinic with emotion bright in her eyes. Sometimes it was a mango sliced before breakfast. Sometimes it was the way she touched Alexia's hand in a medical room and made the room feel less clinical. Sometimes it was an overfilled folder with too many tabs and a donor number that had once had a star.

Alexia kissed her.

Right there outside the clinic, because Jay was looking at her like that and because some days became too large for privacy. Jay kissed back with both hands settling at Alexia's waist, careful and warm and completely hers. It was not a kiss for anyone watching. It was contact. Gratitude. Fear. Hope. The strange intimacy of having done something no one else could fully understand from the outside.

When Alexia pulled back, Jay kept their foreheads together.

"Lunch," Jay whispered.

Alexia laughed. "You always say lunch when you are emotional."

"Food is grounding."

"You are using lunch to avoid crying."

“I may cry into patatas bravas. That is between me and the potatoes."

Alexia kissed her again, smaller this time. "The place I like?"

"The place you like."

"You know its name."

"I do. But the place you like means I know you like it because I pay attention."

Alexia's chest tightened.

"Every day," she said.

Jay blinked. "What?"

"Every day you make me fall in love with you again."

Jay's face opened, vulnerable and almost startled. "Ale."

"Every day," Alexia repeated. "The mango. The car. The folder. Standing beside me in there. Even tab seven, though it was annoying."

"Tab seven was emotionally relevant."

"It was," Alexia admitted.

Jay looked overwhelmed. "You can't say things like that outside clinics."

"Why?"

"Because I have limited emotional storage."

Alexia placed her hand against Jay's chest. "Put it here."

Jay covered Alexia's hand with hers and held it there.

For a moment, neither moved. The city continued around them, bright and indifferent. Inside Alexia's body there was nothing they could know yet. No certainty. No answer. No promise. Only the beginning of possibility, delicate and terrifying, held between them like something neither dared grip too tightly.

Jay took her hand.

They walked towards lunch with their fingers linked, shoulders brushing, Jay pressing kisses to Alexia's temple at crossings and Alexia muttering, "Dios mío, enough," with absolutely no conviction. The folder was tucked beneath Jay's arm this time, safe against her side, and every few minutes Jay touched it as though checking the future had not fallen out.

Halfway down the street, Jay said, "So we agree we don't test early."

Alexia looked at her. "We agree."

"Because early testing is chaos."

"Sí."

"And we are not chaos."

Alexia stopped walking.

Jay stopped too. "What?"

“We are absolutely chaos."

"We are structured chaos."

"You had a folder called Emotional Variables."

Jay looked wounded. "That section was private."

"It was not a section. It was a cry for help with dividers."

"It had good formatting."

Alexia laughed and pulled Jay close by the front of her jacket. "You are ridiculous, guapa."

Jay's smile softened. "You love it."

"I love you."

"That too."

Alexia kissed her again because she could, because the pavement was warm beneath them and the day had become enormous, because Jay was frightened and brave and funny and hers. Jay kissed back with a small, quiet sound of happiness, one hand sliding to Alexia's lower back while the other kept the folder tucked securely under her arm like sacred paperwork.

When they separated, Alexia glanced down at it. "Do not add a tab for the two week wait."

Jay's silence was damning.

"Jay."

"It might help."

"No."

"A symptom tracker."

“No."

"A mood tracker."

"Absolutely not."

"A mango consumption tracker?"

Alexia stared at her.

Jay grinned. "That one was a joke."

"Was it?"

"Mostly."

Alexia shook her head and started walking again, pulling Jay with her. "No early tests. No symptom tracker. No telling Mapi."

Jay gasped. "I was not going to tell Mapi."

"You were thinking of telling Mapi."

"I was thinking she has strong energy for secrets."

"She has terrible energy for secrets."

"True. She'd stare at your stomach every three seconds and shout, 'I am not looking.'"

"Exactly."

"Lucy?"

"No."

"Keira?"

"No."

"Your mother?"

Alexia hesitated.

Jay noticed, because Jay always noticed.

Alexia sighed. "Not yet."

"Okay," Jay said immediately.

No argument.

No push.

Alexia looked at her. "You don't mind?"

"I mind because I want the entire world to know we did something brave today," Jay said. "But what I want more is whatever feels safe for you."

Alexia had to look away because the tears were back again, threatening over a sentence that did not even contain fruit.

Jay squeezed her hand. "Emotionally approaching again?"

"No."

"You are."

"I am walking."

"You can emotionally approach while walking."

"I hate you."

"No, you don't."

"No." Alexia leaned into her side as they walked. "No, I do not."

They reached the restaurant Jay always called the place you like and sat outside beneath a striped awning. Jay ordered for them in Spanish, concentrating so hard on the words that the waiter looked charmed before Alexia had even finished being proud. She stumbled once, glanced towards Alexia in panic, and Alexia slipped into Spanish smoothly, correcting with a soft apology that made Jay stare at her mouth with open admiration.

When the waiter left, Alexia lifted an eyebrow. "You are staring."

"I like when you do that."

"Correct your Spanish?"

"Rescue me in Spanish." Jay leaned back, eyes warm. "Very attractive."

"You are impossible."

"And yet chosen for reproductive destiny."

Alexia closed her eyes. "I should never have said that drunk."

"You absolutely should have. It was one of your best speeches."

"I had one shoe."

"Exactly. Iconic."

"You are not telling the baby this story."

"I am telling the baby a carefully edited version."

"No."

"Once upon a time, your mum came home with one shoe and a dream."

Alexia laughed into her hand. "Dios mío, Jay."

"And your other mum, brave and medically confused, said, 'That's not how it works, babe.'"

"I hate this already."

"But then there was mango and tabs and Donor 0203, who briefly had a gold star before your mum censored my appreciation."

Alexia pointed at her. "Do not make our child's conception sound like a football transfer."

Jay grinned. "A very loved football transfer."

Alexia looked at her across the table, sunlight catching in Jay's hair, tattoos bright along her arms, folder balanced on the chair beside her because she refused to place it on the floor. Jay was smiling, but beneath the smile Alexia could see the same fear from the car, the same old ache that lived behind so many of Jay's jokes. Only now it was threaded through with hope.

Alexia reached across the table.

Jay took her hand at once.

For a while they sat like that, fingers linked over the table, the city moving around them and lunch arriving in small plates between them. They ate slowly. Jay created a ranking of possible first words, placing "goal" above "mama" until Alexia threatened to leave her at the restaurant. Alexia caught Jay rereading the aftercare leaflet beneath the table and confiscated it without negotiation.

"I was casually reviewing."

"You do nothing casually except flirt with danger and forget laundry."

"That is unfair."

"You forgot laundry yesterday."

"I remembered eventually."

"It was wet for nine hours."

"It was marinating."

"It was suffering."

Jay opened her mouth, then closed it. "Fine. Fair."

After lunch, they walked back to the car slowly, in no rush to leave the day behind. Jay kept touching her. Hand at her back. Fingers around hers. A kiss to her hair while they waited at crossings. Alexia let herself receive all of it. Let herself lean. Let herself be loved without managing the edges.

In the car, before Jay started the engine, Alexia placed one hand over her lower stomach.

It was still flat.

Still the same.

Nothing visible.

Nothing certain.

Jay noticed and went utterly still.

Alexia looked down at her own hand, then at Jay. "Maybe nothing."

Jay covered her hand with hers.

"Maybe something," she whispered.

Alexia nodded.

"Maybe something."

They sat like that in the parked car, palms layered over Alexia's body, the folder on the back seat, Barcelona bright beyond the windscreen. It was too early for anything. Too early for signs, too early for knowing, too early for celebration, too early for grief. But not too early for love. Love had been early from the beginning, arriving before certainty, before plans, before either of them knew what shape their courage would have to take.

Jay leaned across the console and kissed Alexia softly.

"Whatever happens," she said against her mouth.

"Whatever happens," Alexia echoed.

"We do it together."

"Sí, bebé. Together."

Jay kissed her once more, then started the car.

On the drive home, Alexia rested her head against the seat and held Jay's hand over the console. Jay kept the music low. Neither of them spoke much, but every few minutes Jay lifted Alexia's hand to her mouth and kissed it, as if checking she was still there, as if saying the things words could not hold.

When they got home, Jay carried the folder inside and placed it carefully on the kitchen counter.

Alexia watched her.

"You know," she said, "you can put it down like normal paper."

Jay looked offended. "This is not normal paper."

"It is clinic information."

"It is possible baby paperwork."

"Possible baby paperwork," Alexia repeated, smiling.

Jay nodded gravely. "Sacred documents."

Alexia crossed the kitchen, slipped her arms around Jay's waist from behind and pressed her cheek between Jay's shoulder blades. Jay covered Alexia's hands with hers.

"Thank you," Alexia said softly.

Jay's body stilled. "For what?"

"For today. For the mango. For the car. For not asking tab seven until after. For choosing with me. For wanting this enough to learn Spanish lullabies badly."

Jay turned in her arms. "They won't be bad."

"They will be a little bad."

"They'll be heartfelt."

"That, sí."

Jay's eyes softened. "Thank you for letting me be there."

Alexia frowned. "Letting you?"

Jay shrugged one shoulder, old fear passing over her face so quickly it almost disappeared. "You know what I mean."

Alexia did know.

She hated that she knew.

She took Jay's face in both hands. "You are not a guest in this, amor."

Jay's throat moved.

"You are not helping me have a baby," Alexia continued. "We are trying to have our baby. Ours. Every appointment, every paper, every tab, every mango, every ridiculous Spanish lesson. You are in the centre of this with me."

Jay's eyes brightened.

Alexia switched into Spanish because the feeling became too large for English, the words warm and certain on her tongue. "Estás conmigo. Siempre. ¿Me escuchas? No estás fuera. No eres extra. Eres su madre también, desde el principio."

Jay did not understand every word.

Alexia saw the exact moment she caught enough to break.

Jay blinked hard. "From the beginning?"

"From the beginning," Alexia said in English. "Always."

Jay pulled her in.

The kiss that followed was slow and deep and full of everything the day had asked them to carry. It was not softened for a clinic pavement or careful for public eyes. It was home. Alexia melted into it, hands sliding into Jay's hair, body pressed close, her heart a wild thing beneath her ribs. Jay kissed her like she was accepting something. Like she was promising something. Like she was terrified and grateful and fully there.

When they finally separated, Jay rested her forehead against hers.

"I'm going to learn the lullabies."

Alexia smiled. "Sí?"

"Yes."

"And no Mapi."

Jay hesitated.

"Jay."

"No Mapi."

"And no secret early tests."

"Agreed."

"And no two week wait tab."

Jay opened her mouth.

Alexia pointed at her. "No."

Jay shut her mouth.

A moment passed.

"What about a very small note?"

"No."

"A feelings note?"

"No."

“A mango inventory?"

Alexia tried to remain stern.

She really did.

But Jay's face was too pleased with itself, and the day had been too big, and the sacred documents were sitting on the counter with possible baby paperwork inside them, and the whole house seemed full of maybe.

Alexia laughed.

Jay grinned, catching her hand and kissing her palm. "You love my infrastructure."

"I love you."

"Same thing."

"No."

“A little."

Alexia shook her head and pulled Jay back into her arms.

They stood in the kitchen for a long time, wrapped around each other in the golden quiet of late afternoon. Outside, the city carried on. Inside, the folder rested on the counter, the mango knife sat in the sink, and somewhere beyond certainty, beyond timing, beyond everything they could control, a beginning waited.

For now, there was only this.

Jay's arms around her.

Alexia's cheek against Jay's chest.

The silence after a huge day.