ohhhh...life counseling :/

It’s so beautiful it almost takes your breath away. You’ve never been up this high in Orange County, and you suppose a lot of people don’t ever get to be. 

It’s under relatively odd circumstances you find yourself up here, too. Also in yellow rectangles are your previously-sent messages, in which you played not too interested and yet not too detached, the way you do with every other guy on that godforsaken app—in your defense, you didn’t set out expecting to woo an international football star. It was just that his abs looked really good, and anything other than a blank profile insistently hitting you up with hey. pics? ass pic? hi. pic4pic? is a grail of its own kind. You don’t waste time tapping. Besides, his bio spelled it out—DL visiting looking for right now—and you also don’t like to waste time negotiating your pleasure. You could practically hear your friends chiding you for even entertaining those two letters—DL. Have some self-respect, they’d say, not quite half joking, but you’re not in the business of telling people how to live their lives. What went on in so-called straight dudes’ consciences after you fucked them wasn’t really your concern. Something was pleasing about such candidness, anyway, however incomplete and rooted in convenience—here’s my shame, have me anyway, even just for a second, if you can stomach it. Anyway, you weren’t looking for a life story, or even a love story—just an evening. 

It obviously wasn’t the first time he’s done this, either. You appreciated that he also didn’t seem like a time waster. The guidelines were clear from the first message after the one where he told you you’re cute: he doesn’t kiss, he doesn’t bottom, and—get this—he’s a high-profile athlete with a reputation to uphold. 

You had shaken your head a little, eyes narrow, smirking despite yourself. It was like that, huh? You’re not stupid; it’s Newport Beach during the World Cup. 

You tapped the link to a PDF: an NDA, which came immediately in the wake of a picture of a heavy bulge through athletic shorts. His hands were sexy, a little veiny, and the dark, wet dime-sized bead of precum against the gray material he held himself through made it evident he was touching himself already. 

But the twinge of excitement you felt, suspended in the momentary mystery of who he could be and which team he played for, was lightly subdued by such a procedural interruption. You’re maybe the last person on earth impersonality scares—it tends to pique your curiosity, if anything, you think—but filing intimacy into a digital cabinet before it could be enacted? That’s new. New to you; probably very ordinary to him. You had tilted your head at your phone a little as you considered the degree of piteousness you could feel for a man in a situation such as this.

Nonetheless, you scanned the document for what you could divulge to your friends later. The answer was, predictably, not much. But it was a short thorough read, and it didn’t look terribly suspicious, so you scribbled on it and sent it back over. 

After all, if it wasn’t going to be you, it’d certainly be someone else.

The reward for this was the stunning, angular face of Sae Itoshi, looking a bit up at you through his phone camera—shirtless, from an angle where you could see his shorts slung low on his thin waist. 

Not that you’re particularly well-versed in the world of soccer, but you’d have to live under a rock, especially in the SoCal area in the summer of 2026, not to have seen his face along with many others on more than a few promotional materials. He stood out, with his rosedust-colored hair and general aversion to smiling politely as his colleagues tended to. But even before all that ramped up, you’d scrolled past a few of his interviews on socials before; strange, that it would be him, you think. In the limelight, he seemed like he didn’t care about much. Funny how easily indifference passes for mystery when someone’s attractive enough. The internet had spent Sae Itoshi’s late teenage-into-early adulthood years sanding him down into archetypes; stoic prodigy, too cool for interviews, too talented to bother performing gratitude. What you sense is that no one ever seems to imagine that a person can look detached because they’re exhausted from keeping whole facets of their being hidden. And he’s not close to the first professional athlete your radar would ping, much less would strike you as one to go out of his way to keep it so strictly on the low. All just goes to show how dumb all that parasocial shit is. But it’s also not terribly shocking, either, you guess. Men’s sports are like that. Either way, it deflated you a little the longer you stared at him on your screen—his prominent collarbones, his toned abdomen, his biceps, the tent in the same gray shorts from the first photo. Anyway, how bummed could you really be if you were about to hook up with Real Madrid’s star midfielder? 

You tried not to think about it too hard all the way up until you slid quickly through the door into the line of his pressing, empty gaze and to the chair upon which you now sit as he saunters about, still shirtless, incredibly delicious but slow, like he’s trying to give some invisible audience the impression that he’s not overly eager about anything, especially not for what’s supposed to happen. And, again, you really do try not to stare at him—not because he’s difficult to look at or you don’t want to make him feel weird but because fame tends to trick you into thinking you’ve already seen someone. But sitting here, watching him, you get the feeling that the public version of Sae had never occupied three dimensions. Also, you’re a little bothered from his photos, a little impatient to get your hands on him, a little unsure of what to say—or if you should say anything at all—to a really handsome, really closeted athlete whose room you’re in solely and only to fuck him in a way that will probably never leave the cover of night and non-disclosure. You pretty much clarified everything over text. People had informed him before that his demeanor comes off rather cold, he told you. You got that, you had poked jokingly. Very funny, he’d replied. A brief moment of humorous gratitude passed between you when you said you didn’t mind; if anything, it made him sexier. But as you sit, it’s like you used up all the banter over the phone and now there wasn’t any left. That’s okay, though. The message where he said he’s into you, that it’d be a good time even if it didn’t necessarily show on his face, sticks to your ribs. You know asking him to show it might be asking for too much, but you don’t mind, really. 

“Do you care if I smoke?” 

But before you can nod no, that you don’t care (which you were going to, anyway), he’s already twisting the dropper off a sage-green vial with a label that proudly reads Product of California, USA and sticking it under his tongue to deposit a couple drops of what looks like olive oil. Of course, Sae Itoshi would never actually, literally smoke his marijuana, the same way he wouldn’t let you more than three steps past the door without requiring the removal of your shoes, or wouldn’t permit you entrance to his penthouse suite if there was anyone else in the hallway. Walk directly past my door if anyone else is around. Don’t even look at it and don’t turn back until you’re alone, one of the many blue chat bubbles you’d rescrolled through on your way here read. He doesn’t offer you any of the tincture. 

You shift a little as he throws something in a duffel bag here, checks something on his phone there, draws the blackout curtain forward a bit. Finally, he plops onto the foot of the big plush bed, kicking off a pair of expensive-looking house slippers as he does. A drawn-out sigh leaves him. He doesn’t look over at you, opting instead to lean back on his hands, and you quietly admire the slope of his torso as he breathes. Shoulders tense. His composure is very obviously manufactured, and you’re unsure if he lets you see this because he possesses a legally binding document ensuring you can’t expose such a thing to the public, or if he just doesn’t care. Maybe he thinks you’re too dumb to realize, or too much of a starfucker to care yourself.

Either way, the draw against Cape Verde in the first round was rough. You do not have to ask him personally about this or even be observing him right now in order to know that. You’ve seen the headlines, all the way up until this afternoon—Spain’s listless performance won't cut it against better teams at World Cup—after the win against Uruguay on an error. It gnaws at you a bit, that two shaky parts of his life are colliding in this room, and you’re here to watch. No, not watch—participate. 

He runs a hand through the fringe he keeps pushed back when he plays; right now, it sweeps across his forehead. You know enough to know that no one ever really sees him like that. He’s obviously somewhere between pissed and defeated, and putting forth an artifice of indifference. There are too many things lingering in the room to appear indifferent about, in your opinion, but it’s another thing you’ll just have to not to think about too deeply. He’ll be fine. If he wanted you to therapize him, he’d have said that, but he didn’t, and he doesn’t. He just wants to fuck. However this goes, you remind yourself, he’s making a fat wad of cash either way. 

People would kill for this life. It seems almost insulting to imagine someone could be lonely in a suite this expensive. You’re reading too far into the ephemerality, surely; after all, everything in a hotel room counts on guests leaving before there is a chance for an impression to be made. The mattress won’t remember the shape of one body before the next inhabits it, and the stocked minibar will never run empty. You wonder if he’s a drinker. It doesn’t look like it, but he’s only been here for less than a day. You make a mental note to help yourself later. A liminal space has never made you itch so terribly. 

And the least you can do is treat him like a human being. 

“You waiting for something?” he murmurs over his shoulder at you, cutting through your thoughts. It’s not bitey, but it is impatient. He doesn’t cast his sidelong glance at you as much as he does the wall. 

You rise and make your way to him—one, two, three, four, five, six intentional steps until you’re turning to stand before him, one hand playing at the hem of your shirt, the other dangling limply. 

Sae looks through you in your pause, sultry, unamused green eyes tired as they lift up to yours. They flit down once, toward the floor, and then back up to you. You understand this as your cue to drop to your knees. 

As you sink onto the shag carpet you momentarily imagine yourself from a third perspective. And from this perspective, you speculate further about what Sae’s type in women might be; you imagine your own hair, but long and in a cute, athletic ponytail. While you shuffle closer to him, trailing semi-confident fingertips up his thighs to his waistband, you envision a set of understated French-tipped nails doing so instead. It’d be easier all around—tidier for the tabloids if anyone ever found out; star footballer spotted with mystery girl. His PR team would grit their teeth, a couple new sponsors would pop out, fans would speculate for a week or two, and then the world would move on. Sae is the kind of man who could build a life out of things like that, if he wanted; he has the face for it, the money, the path paved before him. But he hasn’t, and you’re here, tugging his shorts off his hips, down his muscular thighs, down his calves, looking up at him with want. 

He kicks his shorts aside and places a firm hand on your jaw, peering down at you from behind the prettiest lashes you think you’ve ever seen on someone as you wet your lips and wrap your fingers around the base of his cock. The third perspective is gone—was never there to begin with. Just you and him in this room, like so many rooms he keeps returning to, where everything must disappear by the light of day. 

The thought should flatter you, really, that in all the possibilities available to him, he chose you. But the longer you spend in his orbit—and it’s not even been two hours—that thing that’s been sticking to your ribs drifts down toward your stomach, where you know it will settle like a rock. It’s not really you he's choosing, anyway; rather, a version of desire that isn't real enough to him to threaten the rest of his life. 

You push this unsavory line of thinking back out to sea again as you loll your tongue out. 

Sae’s fingers skirt from your face into your hair. It’s hardly perceptible how he pushes you toward him, especially with you leaning into the motion so you can hold him to your mouth and lave the flat of your tongue over his frenulum. The closed-mouth sigh he breathes makes his chest flutter. You wonder if he’d let you touch it. And then you hold still and swipe him against you, slowly, arching closer to put better pressure on him, looking up into his striking face to watch his brows stitch together. When you ball up a mouthful of spit onto his tip so you can stroke him fully, once, then twice as you feel his warm, neutral precum mix with it on your tongue, his pretty lips fall open as he draws in a deep, controlled breath and lets it out just so. Laser-focused on you. You, laser-focused on him. If he’s going to battle with this internally, you at least want to make it good. Yes, there is conflict in his gorgeous ocean-colored eyes, and it fills you with the unmistakable urge to be good for him. 

When you wrap your lips around his tip and swirl your tongue in honeyed circles, a deep rumble rises from his chest; it makes your stomach and your eyelids flutter in tandem, and you nod against him, suctioning and releasing to make more circles and draw more precum out of him, switching back and forth until his fingers in your hair tighten up. The longer you bob your head, the quicker he wants you, and the fuller his groans come. 

And then he pushes. You figured he’d want it rough—a lot of DL guys seem to; it’s a dominance thing—so you move your hand off him and brace yourself against his inner thighs, which flex and twitch lightly as you take more of him in your mouth. Fuck, he breathes headily when you’re halfway down him, I wanna use this mouth; he’s not asking for permission, but you moan around him eagerly, nodding still, to mean yes anyway, just as much as you mean to make him feel good. 

So his other hand knots up in your hair, too; you suck in air through your nose, ready—ready for him to guide you down until he’s prodding the back of your throat. You dig your nails into his thighs before slipping a hand down and beneath your own waistband; when you touch yourself, you’re unsurprised to feel yourself leaking and throbbing as he works into you. 

Sae’s fingers interlock at the back of your skull, and you know this is where you resign yourself for a bit—you stop nodding, stop bobbing as he thrusts you down once, twice, and three times until you’re buried in the sparse patch of hair at his pelvis. He smells so good, you think, tastes so good, fills you up so good—and he holds you there as you gag around him, shoulders beginning to tremble; if you were looking at him, you could see him throw his soft head of rosy hair back before he lifts you so far up just to slam you back down. 

And he makes good on his word. What he does is definitely use you, with no regard for how your scalp burns as he manipulates you up and down his length, uncaring for the pathetic gurgling sounds his cockhead forces out of the corners of your mouth each time he strikes your windpipe. You screw your eyes shut when the tears come—they blur everything anyway—and you falter as you rub yourself, no less content to listen to him grunt and sigh than if he was fucking you in a hole that felt good for you, too. 

But his hips are restless even as you let him maneuver you. Sae returns the thrusts to himself double, going from passive to actively fucking into you, and you grasp onto him, squirming backward; you feel his form overtake yours—but Sae holds you, doesn’t let you falter from him as he stands to leverage his hips against your head until he’s standing, knees bent, unwilling to leave your mouth. 

Instead of moving you along his cock, he clutches you still in his hold and fucks your face with fervor—balls slapping your chin while you sit like a good boy and take him, clawing at him like you want him to stop but you’re certain you both know you mean the opposite. He mutters something you can’t quite make out over the feeling of him wrenching your jaw open wider and wider to accommodate his relentless thrusts; you feel spools of drool collecting, sticking to your chin. You’re lightheaded. You’re letting up on his thighs as he growls above you; you catch good fucking hole as he batters into you and your eyes are rolling back and he’s trapping you between his knees. Fucking your face, holding you close like he needs you. You want to see him from that third perspective again, becoming a pretty, sweaty mess above you. 

Just when you wonder if he’ll cum down your throat, he pulls out of you, punching the air back into your lungs. 

And before you can breathe in fully, he’s slapping you hard. 

You like the way your ears start to ring when your gasp gets caught in the shock of it; you like the way he doesn’t let go, just to shove himself back down your throat to the hilt again, deliver a few more bruising thrusts to the back of your throat, before he does it all over again. 

He pulls out. He slaps you hard. He readjusts your head in front of him to choke you a few more times on his cock, and he repeats this a few times—again, again, again—until you can’t hear anything but your own ragged breathing wearing into rough gags and sobs. 

Your senses come back to you after he drops you, and he really does drop you; your palms hit the shag rug as you heave, willing oxygen back to your brain with everything in you. You’re vaguely aware of him settling himself back down on the edge of the bed, but you can’t yet move to see what he wants next. You know what he wants next. You’re hard and leaking all over the carpet, too, and as soon as you can stand to get yourself on the bed next to him, you’ll gladly give it to him. 

You’ve done enough psychoanalyzing him, anyway. How about how flushed and needy your cock is after being used so brutally? Why do you crave things like this from men like Sae—men who conflate distance and strength? 

Through wet eyes you look up at Sae from the floor, his stone-carved chest and shoulders rising and falling, his cock slick and twitching, and you understand there are some distances no amount of reaching can close. Distance between two people is survivable, navigable—but the distance between a man and himself is an unscalable mountain. And you, you know, are unequipped to give a man like Sae the tools to begin. 

Besides, you know why you do this, and it’s much simpler than why he does. You like sex. You’re young and hot and live in LA. You’re a huge sadomasochist—yes, that’s it. Maybe, you think innocuously, as if you have never thought this before (you have): you just like seeing something in men like Sae break. And you also like it when broken men break you a little bit. 

And that doesn’t make you better or worse than him. You don’t even need that line of thinking. If anything, all that does is make you hurt more for him. The big difference between you and Sae is you’re into something, and he’s into something he can’t admit. 

It’s really, truly whatever, you think as you push yourself up off the floor. You cough and it aches and you wipe drool and tears from your face with the back of your hand and stand on feet that tingle badly, and he looks bored with a barely-there twinge of dark satisfaction at watching you pull yourself together, and you like it. You bite back a watery grin as you stumble toward him and his open legs; he catches you by the hem of your shirt and slips it up until you raise your arms and let him tear it away. 

Brow still furrowed, bangs sweaty, he suddenly tucks his arms back at his sides—like he’s caught himself doing something he wasn’t supposed to do. 

But he looks at you. Drinks you in, even if he wants to act like he doesn’t, and the rock drops into your stomach so you let your grin break out fully now, growing like a flame before you wrangle it back. 

Still breathless, Sae flicks his sea-colored eyes up to bore into you. “Pants off.” 

You oblige, and he continues to gaze at you as you do. You don’t look away from him either, following his eyes as you step out of your boxers; he tucks his bottom lip between his teeth as your cock bobs, and you stand, bare, waiting for him to move.

But he doesn’t, you do. He doesn’t touch you and you don’t expect him to. You slink to him again, reaching for him somewhere in the space between his throat and his pecs, just to see what he’ll do, and he doesn’t disappoint; before you can sling yourself across his lap, his scowl deepens—he grabs your forearms, swinging you to the side of him onto the bed. You hit it and it feels like a cloud, the crazy threadcount sheets and pillowy mattress; one of his thighs wedges between yours as he wrestles you onto your back. 

“Uh-uh,” he scolds you before you can link your legs around his waist, shoving you off him before he grabs you hard by the middle and, in a moment of feeling weightless, flips you onto your stomach. You splay out like a bug on impact, wriggling to right yourself, but you’re nowhere near quick enough; Sae and his strong grasp push and pull you around once more, taking you by the hips and yanking your ass up into the air. You yelp while he tells you, “Gonna let me do it like this.” 

And you do, folding your arms up by your chest to brace yourself as he arches you down with one forceful hand. Cheek pressed to the bed, you gasp when you feel his cock heavy against your thigh. His other hand palms your ass, spreading you apart for him, and his thumb, coated with what must be his spit, circles your hole. 

You flinch as he presses in. He smacks your ass for this. 

“Sae,” you whimper. 

He drops a glob of spit from above; you flinch at this, too, not because you’re a slow learner but because you know the sting will contrast the chill nicely, and you’re right—he lands another hard smack to your ass, and your breath gets caught between a sigh and a groan and then cut off when he sinks his thumb further into you. 

You push back into him just for him to take his thumb out, smack your ass again, mutter slut underneath his breath. “So fuckin’ desperate for it.” 

“I want it,” you tell him, truthfully—he pulls your ass apart again, with both anxious hands this time, and watches it recoil before he lands a few more smacks to it, and you whine into each one. “P—please, Sae.”

He leaves one palm firmly on your asscheek, fingertips digging indents into the fat of it as he gives you his index finger. You can’t help the moan that falls from your mouth, and you don’t fall back because you want his cock and now would be a moment to display the fact that you are a quick learner, but regardless, you’re confident he won’t tease you all that much more. You both have things you can’t think about too long. You can’t speak for him, but you just want him in you. 

“I can take more,” you tell him, and his middle finger inches into you just like you anticipated because this is surely one of the parts he wouldn’t want to prolong if he wasn’t enjoying it, right? If you weren’t just a hole? You find this undulating obsession with having him admit it troubling. You don’t need that from him like he needs it from himself. It’s certainly not your responsibility to draw it out. Stop thinking like that, you tell yourself. 

But he spends another minute or so stretching you out good, scissoring his fingers a bit in your ass to work you open. “Stay still,” he instructs you when you hump into nothing, and you bite the sheet and dig your nails in while your cock twitches with each upward curl of his fingers. 

And you whine petulantly when he pulls them out. 

“Greedy fuckin’ whore,” he calls you as he aligns his tip with your hole. Another smack, another glob of spit, another smudging of it across you. You have yeses spilling from you as he thrusts himself in in a way that would’ve undoubtedly hurt badly if he didn’t spend that extra bit of time opening you up. 

And a full-bodied moan leaves your chest when he bottoms out. You cut it short so you can hear his before you start babbling things to get him moving—fuck, you’re so big, I’m so full, feels so good—but he smacks your ass again and tells you to shut up. 

So you do. You clamp your mouth shut and hum moans as he works up a steady pace until you can’t keep it closed anymore and your jaw falls slack against the sheet. 

You want to look at him. You have to see him. 

So you twist the best you can, trying to glimpse him over your shoulder. In your peripheral, he looks wrecked—hypnotized as he watches himself disappear into you. His hips clap off yours in an obscene notation of rhythm and you feel his blunt nails in your asscheeks, keeping you open for him to ogle with his tongue pressed to the side of the inside of his mouth and pretty, breathy grunts and hisses leaving his lips. God, the sounds he makes are so hot. His abs flex when he hits deep inside you, his biceps, taut and sculpted, keep you in place, and his hair sways dazzlingly; he’s gorgeous behind you, and your moans get louder at the sight. 

But he catches you watching him and one coveted hand flies down to shove your face into the bed. He props a leg up and in one vicious swoop, thrusts into you hard and stays there, knocking a shriek out of you that gets muffled hotly against your face; after this, not only does he pick up the speed, but the depth at which he pounds your insides. Suddenly every moan is a scream, every thrust is a punishment, and his hand is wound tight in your hair again, pushing you down and away from him this time instead of towards him and you want to just go limp and feel used. He’s using you. And you’re using him, and the word used echoes around your brain, making your cock jump erratically as Sae begins to grunt. It’s such a pretty sound. 

You start to collapse under the force of him until you’re flat against the bed, your sensitive cock jostling against it with each harsh clash of his hips into you. It starts to hurt so good. All the stimulation begins to accumulate in your gut, blanketing that rock from before until it grows so warm and sweet and overwhelming you can’t remember the rock was ever there to begin with. Sae’s fucking your brain out of you, going to leave it leaking out of your spent hole, and you feel the tears again, wet and hot between you and the fabric as he drops to his elbows and cages you in. 

You cum hard and loud, shaking and arching and jolting against him and the mattress and he doesn’t care. He’s relentless, splitting you open as the stickiness of your release soils the sheets. He fucks you at that pace until he can’t contain his voice anymore—tells you to fucking take it through open-mouthed moans until he pulls out fast enough to give you whiplash. You whimper all over again as you feel him cum across your ass in hot spurts. It’s like he cums forever and yet at the same time, it’s over too fast. But either way, as you lay there and wait for him to be done, you clench around nothing and wish, in your cockdrunk daze, that he would’ve cum inside you. 

And he pushes himself off you to stand and disappear from your field of touch. His heat signature, too far from you. Most DL guys don’t cuddle after, and you didn’t expect him to be any different.

He just tosses a towel onto the bed in your line of sight, next to your unfurling fist, putting a fluffy gray splotch over the bit of window you were gazing out of as he used you until he didn’t need you anymore. You hear his footsteps, light and slow, before the bathroom door clicks shut and the shower turns on. 

And you get up quivering all over. After wiping yourself as clean as you can, you retrieve your clothes; you shimmy back into them, feeling uncomfortably damp and dumbly wondering if you can expect to see him before you leave. It’s likely you won’t, you think. Wordless works well for men like Sae, in and out of public life. 

It’s funnily appropriate, you think, the isolation he leaves you in. It’s one he knows well, you assume. Less than twelve hours ago, after all, he was tearing across countless television screens internationally, scoring the only Spanish goal of the tournament so far—the prodigal son of Japanese soccer, dull and burning and stunning like a star beginning to die. A spectacle. You’ve always wondered how athletes, or actors, or people with any sort of celebrity status maintain their humanity among the artificial intimacy that colors their lives. Loved by so many, known by none at all. It’s cruel and sad. 

You like to think, in the quiet of the penthouse, that you do know some things about Sae Itoshi. But it’s no good, really—of no worth, because you can’t tell anybody, and even if you could, you wouldn’t want to because it wouldn’t be their business. Except it’s Sae’s business—but he, too, turns away from it. You know his body, which is a logistic in the eyes of the world, is going back to being just that under a hot stream of shower water as you reluctantly curl yourself up on a corner of the bed. It is with resignation that you understand he sees himself as national property. 

But sadder than that—what makes you shrivel into the corner of the bed you’re going to be expected to abandon very soon—is what he really is, which is, of course, nobody’s at all. Not the public’s, not his country’s or another’s, and most certainly not yours. The loneliness of men like Sae Itoshi doesn’t start or end in stadium tunnels or hotel rooms or on the pitch; it begins somewhere so incredibly private, somewhere he keeps boarded shut with insistence and devotion close to fanatically religious. Sae is the kind of man you could reach for forever and still barely grasp the traces of the self he puts forward as player, competitor, genius, performer. 

And the saddest thing isn’t even that Sae can’t be yours—it’s that he can’t bear to belong even to himself. 

You pat your pockets for your keys, your wallet, your phone. And you remember the minibar. You sit in its call for a moment and listen to the water and look at the mess on the bed and at the tincture bottle and the cologne and the towel and his slippers and you scrunch your nose up a bit before you make your way over to the display of smoked glass bottles and pellucid whiskey cups. One, two, three, four, you count in your brain as you pour out the rest of the Ciroc Ten Year—looks like he does drink, but only the bougie shit. You roll your eyes as you down it, not counting, breath held. It burns and you like it.

Emptily glancing around the room, like something or someone in it is still waiting for you, you leave the glass on the cart before padding over to slip your shoes on and reach for the door handle. Funny, the room is already forgetting you. Another day and housekeeping will strip the bed, bring him fresh towels. In a week or two some other rich man might order a bottle of wine up here, looking out the big window over these same lonely ribbons of freeway and not suspecting Europe’s best midfielder stood there shirtless and silent and trying to look like he wanted nothing at all in this world. It’ll be like you were never even here. That’s the point of all this, anyway.

The next time you will see Sae Itoshi will be on a television screen, versus Austria at SoFi Stadium. And you will not know anything about him, and it will be a gross understatement for the next guy to say it’s a nice hotel room.