#kostas

The rain in Liverpool had a different weight to it than the rain of his childhood. In Piraeus, a storm was a dramatic, passionate affair. Thunder would crack over the Saronic Gulf like a god’s whip, and warm sheets of water would pour down, cleansing the dusty streets and stirring up the rich scent of wet earth and salt. Afterwards, a steam rising heat would emerge, making everything feel new and vibrant. Here, the rain was a persistent, grey melancholy. It did not storm, it seeped. It soaked into the bones of the city’s red brick buildings and into the soul, a constant, damp whisper that spoke of industrial history and personal heartache.

For Kostas Tsimikas, standing under the deep green awning of a small, independent bookshop called "The Reader’s Rest," it was just the backdrop to a familiar post match haze. The adrenaline from the 2 0 win against Everton was still a pleasant hum in his veins, a physical memory of perfectly weighted crosses, a crucial last minute tackle, and the deafening, unifying roar of the Kop. He craved silence now, the kind only found in the quiet, solemn company of words. A new sports biography, maybe. Something to quiet the flightiness of victory, to ground the high of collective achievement into something solitary and calm.

He pushed the heavy oak door open, a small brass bell above it chiming a single, soft note to announce his arrival. The air inside was warm and still, smelling of old paper, fresh ink, and the faint, citrusy scent of bergamot from a diffuser hidden somewhere among the shelves. It was a comforting, academic smell, a world away from the sharp liniment, sweat, and freshly cut grass of the locker room he had left less than an hour before.

He nodded politely to the shop clerk, a young man with round glasses who was meticulously arranging a display of poetry collections, and made his way to the "New Releases" table. His eyes glazed over brightly coloured thrillers and glossy cookbooks, his mind still half on the pitch, replaying moments of the game. And then, a small, elegantly designed placard, standing upright between a stack of novels, caught his eye.

Its script was a tasteful, looping font.

The name did not just ring a bell, it was a clapper striking the very core of his being, a seismic shock that left him utterly still. His breath hitched in his throat. Y/N. It could not be. It was a common enough name, was it not? A coincidence, a trick of the mind. His reeling brain, desperate for logic, latched onto the title of her book. The Amber of the Aegean. His throat tightened. That was no coincidence. That was a direct, brutal echo from a past he had tried, and failed, to bury.

An Evening with Y/N L/N

Celebrating the release of her critically acclaimed novel,'The Amber of the Aegean’ Signing 6-8 PM

He forced his eyes, heavy with sudden dread and a terrifying flicker of hope, to travel from the sign to the small table set up near the back of the shop. It was nestled between towering shelves of literary fiction, a little island of quiet activity.

And then, the world did not just tilt on its axis, it shattered and reassembled itself into a painful, beautiful mosaic of past and present.

There she was.

Y/N.

Her head was bent, a curtain of hair obscuring her face as she signed the title page of a book for a beaming, older woman. She murmured something he could not hear, and the woman laughed, a sound that seemed to come from another dimension, another life. Kostas was trapped in a vacuum. All he could see was her. The way she held her pen, not with a grip but with a grace. The slight, familiar frown of concentration between her brows. The elegant slope of her neck as she leaned forward.

She looked, older. The last soft vestiges of girlhood had been refined into a poised, almost severe beauty. She was dressed not for a Greek summer, but for an English autumn, in a simple, cashmere black sweater, a delicate silver pendant resting in the hollow of her collarbone. She was a ghost from a sun bleached, salt stained past, rendered in the stark, beautiful monochrome of a Liverpool evening.

He could not move. He could not breathe. The familiar, powerful weight of his own body, the strength that powered him down a pitch past the world’s best defenders, meant nothing. He was anchored to the spot, water dripping from his dark hair onto the worn, wooden floorboards. Each drop sounded like a ticking clock, counting back the years.

Two years. It had been two years since he had seen her. Two years since the heartbreak on the pier.

The memory hit him not as a thought, but as a full sensory assault, pulling him under.

--

Flashback

The heat was a physical weight, a thick blanket of air heavy with the scent of grilling octopus, wild jasmine that tumbled over whitewashed walls, and the undeniable, pervasive salt of the sea. The sun, a furious orange orb, was melting into the water, setting the sky on fire with streaks of violet and gold. Kostas was stretched out on the warm, sun bleached wood of the old pier, his head a comfortable weight in Y/N’s lap. Her fingers, clever and gentle, were tracing idle, soothing patterns through his hair, a touch that sent shivers of deep contentment through him despite the clinging, oppressive heat.

“When I am a writer,” she said, her voice soft but laced with a steel conviction that he adored, “this is what I am going to capture. Not just the picture of it. The feeling. The way the wood feels warm and rough under your back. The sound of the water slapping lazily against the mossy pylons. The taste of the ouzo on your dad’s breath when he tells the same story about his father for the third time.”

He opened one eye, squinting up at her. The dying sun turned her into a silhouette, a goddess crowned in fire. “You will not need to write it down to remember,” he said, his voice rough with sleepiness and affection. “We will come here every summer. We will bring our kids. They will roll their eyes at their sentimental parents, just like we did.”

Her smile was small and sad, a flicker he almost missed. “Maybe,” she said, the word barely a whisper.

She was quiet for a long moment, her gaze fixed on the horizon where the day was bleeding out into the sea. “It is more than remembering, Kostas. It is about, making sense of it. Taking all of this, this feeling, and trapping it in words so someone else can feel it too. So that a person sitting on a crowded train in the pouring rain in London can open a book and for a moment, feel the Greek sun on their face. That is the magic of it.”

He had sat up then, concerned by the deep melancholy in her tone. He cupped her face, his thumb stroking the apple of her cheek. “Hey. You will do it. I know you will. You are the most brilliant person I know.”

Her eyes, shining with unshed tears that caught the last of the light, met his. “And you will be a famous footballer. The whole world will know your name. They will sing it in stadiums.”

“They will know yours too,” he had vowed, fierce and certain, and he leaned in to kiss her, pouring every ounce of his belief, his love, his entire imagined future, into it. The taste of her was of summer and promise and a forever he had never once doubted.

--

Flashback

It was their last night. The same pier. The same two people. But the air was charged with a different, terrible electricity, one of impending, inevitable loss. She had received the email that afternoon. A full scholarship to a prestigious creative writing program. In London. It was everything she had ever worked for, everything she had dreamed of and whispered about under these same stars.

And it was a continent away from him.

“I have to go, Kostas,” she said, her voice hollow, as if all the life and music had been scooped out of her. “It starts next month. It is, it is everything.”

The bottom had dropped out of his world. His stomach lurched. “Next month? But, the season, I cannot just,” he had stammered, panic rising like a tide. He had been on the verge of a breakthrough with Olympiacos. Training was intensifying. He could not leave. Not now.

“I know,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around herself as if against a sudden, vicious chill that had nothing to do with the evening air. “We, we always knew this summer had an end.”

*The words were a knife, sharp and cold, twisted directly into his heart. “We did not know that,” he argued, his voice rising, sharp with a pain that was already crippling him. “I did not. Y/N, this is, this is us. We can do long distance. It is 2023, for God’s sake. I will come every break. I will call you every day. It is two years, not a lifetime!”*

She shook her head, a single tear finally escaping and tracing a glistening path through the twilight. “It will be a lifetime of goodbyes at train stations and airports. Of missed calls because of time zones and your matches. Of lonely nights wondering what you are doing, who you are with. It will stretch us so thin we will just snap. I cannot, I cannot let us become that. I cannot let us grow to resent each other.”

“So you are just giving up? On us?” The anger was a welcome, burning shield against the crushing, suffocating grief. “Was any of it real?”

“It was the most real thing I have ever known!” she cried, her own composure breaking, her voice cracking with the force of her emotion. “That is why I have to do this! If I stay, if I let myself choose you over this, a part of me will always wonder, and that wonder will turn to poison. It will infect everything. I will not do that to you. I will not do that to me.”

He felt desperate, unmoored, like a boat cut loose in a storm. “Y/N, please,” he begged, the word tearing from him. It was not a sound he recognized from his own throat.

She stepped forward then, her own tears flowing freely, and kissed his cheek. It was not a kiss of love, but of finality. A seal. It felt like a brand of ownership that was actually a release. “You will be a famous footballer,” she whispered, her lips trembling against his stubbled skin. “You will have this, all of it. You will not even remember me.”

Before he could respond, before he could find the words, any words, to chain her to him, to beg her to change her mind, she turned and walked away. He stood, utterly paralyzed, watching the love of his life, his best friend, his future, disappear into the gathering darkness of the village, her figure getting smaller and smaller until she was swallowed whole.

“Y/N!” he screamed, the raw, guttural sound tearing from his throat, only to be swallowed by the indifferent, crashing waves.

She never looked back.

The clatter of a book falling from the edge of the signing table snapped him back into the harsh, electric light of the present. The shop was empty now, save for the clerk who was pointedly not looking in their direction, feigning intense interest in the spines of the classics section. Y/N was carefully, methodically placing her expensive pens into a leather case, her movements efficient, weary. This was a routine for her. This signing, this conversation, this polite distance. This was her life now.

A life he knew nothing about. A life that had been built in his absence, a sculpture from which he had been carved out.

A violent, tidal surge of emotions warred within him. Staggering, disbelieving joy at the mere sight of her, alive and here. White hot, familiar anger at her abandonment, at the silence that had followed. And beneath it all, a crushing, profound sadness for the two years they had lost, for the empty space where he had once held her hand. The combination was combustible, overwhelming. He felt his feet moving, carrying him toward her table as if pulled by a magnet, before his mind could formulate a single, coherent plan or thought.

He stopped a few feet away, close enough to see the faint dusting of freckles across her nose that she had always hated. The copies of her book, ‘The Amber of the Aegean,’ were stacked in a neat pyramid. The cover was a beautiful, abstract wash of gold and deep blue, like sunlight filtering down through seawater.

“Y/N?”

Her name felt foreign and familiar on his tongue, a sacred relic he had never allowed himself to speak aloud to anyone else, a name he had only screamed into empty rooms and silent pillows.

Her head snapped up as if yanked by a string. The shock that registered on her face was absolute, total. Her eyes, the exact colour he had spent two years trying to bleach from his memory with training and matches and noise, widened to an impossible degree. All the colour drained from her cheeks, leaving her pale as the pages of the books surrounding her. Her lips parted, but no sound came out for a long, suspended second. She looked like she had seen a ghost. Perhaps she had.

“Kostas?”

Hearing her say his name was another physical blow, knocking the remaining air from his lungs. It was her voice, but deeper, more measured, more sure. It was the voice of the celebrated author, the woman who gave interviews and spoke at events, not the girl who had whispered secrets to him on a pier. Yet, it undid him completely, pulling him back through time.

“I, I saw the sign,” he managed to stammer, his own voice hoarse, unfamiliar. He gestured weakly toward the window display. “I was just, walking. I needed, after the match. I did not, I could not believe it was you.”

She just stared, her hand trembling slightly as she set down the silver pen she had been holding. He noticed everything, his athlete’s mind cataloguing details with frantic speed. The simple silver ring on her index finger. The faint, tired shadows under her eyes that spoke of late nights. The way she bit the inside of her lip, a nervous habit he remembered. She was real. She was here. In his city. The improbability of it was staggering.

“What are you doing here?” she finally breathed out, the question hanging between them in the quiet shop, loaded with the weight of a history he knew she was remembering just as vividly, just as painfully, as he was.

“I play here.” The statement felt absurdly inadequate, childish. He tapped the Liverbird crest on his chest, a symbol that meant so much to so many, but felt like nothing in this moment. “For Liverpool.”

Recognition dawned in her eyes, followed swiftly by a flicker of something that looked like shame, or perhaps regret. “Oh. Oh, God. Of course you do. I, I heard that. I saw the news when you signed. I just, I did not let myself,” she trailed off, swallowing hard, her eyes darting around the shop as if looking for an escape route, a place to hide from the overwhelming reality of him.

The awkwardness was a chasm between them, wide and deep. The silence stretched, taut and painful enough to snap. The anger, his old, familiar friend, began to uncoil in his gut, hot and protective. He needed to shatter this polite, terrible distance. He needed her to feel even a fraction of the pain he had carried for her, because of her.

He reached out and picked up a copy of her book. The weight of it in his hand felt significant, heavy with meaning. He ran his thumb over the embossed title, his voice dropping to a low, accusatory timbre that seemed too loud in the hushed space.

“You did it,” he said, not looking at her, staring at the golden cover as if it held all the answers. “You are a celebrated writer. Just like you said you would be.” He finally lifted his gaze to meet hers, and let the bitterness he had nursed for two years, the poison he had kept locked away, seep into his words. “Congratulations.”

She flinched visibly, as if he had struck her across the face. “Kostas,” His name was a plea on her lips, a request for mercy.

It was all the invitation the dam needed. The words, sharp and broken, poured out of him, a flood he could no longer contain. “You left,” he said, taking a step closer, his presence suddenly overwhelming the small space between the bookshelves. “You left and you never looked back. You never called. You never wrote. You never answered any of mine. You just, vanished. Like we were nothing. Was it that easy? To just forget me? Forget everything?” The image of her walking away, her back straight and unwavering, flashed behind his eyes, a perpetual torture. “You told me I would forget you. Was that a hope or an order?”

Tears welled in her eyes, magnifying their colour, but she stubbornly, defiantly refused to let them fall. Her own pain seemed to ignite then, cutting through her initial shock and meeting his anger with her own fire.

“Forget you?” The laugh that escaped her was brittle, hollow, utterly devoid of humour. “Do you think for a single second that a day has gone by that I have not thought of you? That I have not remembered the exact feel of your hand in mine, or the sound of your laugh when you are truly happy? Do you think this,” she gestured wildly, desperately, at the book in his hand, at the table, at the placard with her name on it, at her entire life’s work, “came from a place of forgetting? This came from a place of remembering so fiercely it was like a disease. I had to pour it all out onto pages just to survive it!”

“Then why?” he demanded, his voice cracking under the immense strain of his emotion. He leaned forward, his hands flat on the table, caging her in. The space between them crackled with a painful, intimate electricity. “Why did you walk away like that? Why did you shut me out completely? You broke me, Y/N. You fucking broke me. For what? For this?” He gestured at the book.

His raw, unfiltered vulnerability seemed to be the key that finally unlocked her completely. Her own composure shattered into a million pieces. A tear finally broke free, betraying her steely control, and traced a slow, glistening path down her cheek.

“Because it was the only way I could do it!” she cried, her voice rising, filled with an anguish that mirrored his own so perfectly it was terrifying. The clerk glanced over, startled, and quickly buried his nose in a copy of Ulysses. Y/N did not seem to notice or care. “If I had looked back at you, Kostas, if I had seen your face in that moment, I would have turned around. I would have run back to you and thrown that entire future away. And I would have done it gladly. I wanted to. God, I wanted to more than I have ever wanted anything.”

She took a shaky, ragged breath, her chest rising and falling rapidly. “And then what? I follow you to your training sessions? I wait at home in some empty apartment while you travel the world? My dream, the one thing I knew I was meant to do, slowly shrivels and dies because I was too weak to hold onto it? And eventually, I would have started to resent you for it. And you, you would have resented me for my resentment, for my sadness. It would have poisoned everything we had until there was nothing beautiful left. I thought,” she sobbed, the sound wrenching itself from her chest, “God, I was so stupid and young, I thought it was a clean break. The kindest cut. For both of us.”

The fight drained out of him then, leaving him feeling hollow, empty, scoured out. Her words painted a picture he had never allowed himself to see, a perspective he had been too blinded by his own pain to consider. He had only seen her coldness, her rejection. He had never seen the sacrifice, the brutal self preservation, the desperate, flawed, heartbreaking attempt to save what was so precious by, ending it before it could corrupt.

He looked at her, truly looked. Past the successful, critically acclaimed author, the poised, elegant woman. He saw the girl on the pier. The girl who loved him so desperately, so completely, that she was willing to break both their hearts to keep their love perfect, preserved in the golden amber of that one endless summer, safe from the slow, inevitable decay of regret and what if.

His anger dissolved, leaving only a profound, aching sadness that was somehow more painful than the rage had been.

“There was nothing clean about it, agápi mou,” he whispered, the old endearment, my love, slipping from his lips unbidden, a ghost from a time when he had had every right to say it.

Hearing it, she seemed to crumple, the last of her defences falling away. Another tear fell, and then another, a silent admission of defeat. “It broke me, too,” she confessed, her voice a broken whisper, a secret held for two years finally set free. “Every single day. I wore the grief like a coat.”

He reached out, his fingers, calloused from years of gripping footballs, tackling opponents, building the life and career she had insisted he have and keep, gently, so gently, brushed the tears from her cheek. The contact was a jolt. A spark of pure, undiluted feeling that leapt across the two year gap and ignited the embers of a fire that had never, ever gone out, only banked, waiting for oxygen.

Her eyes fluttered closed at his touch, a soft, choked sob escaping her. She leaned into his hand, her own coming up to cover his, holding it against her cheek as if he were a lifeline, as if he were the only real thing in the world.

The silence now was different. It was no longer empty or awkward. It was full. Overflowing. Full of shared pain, of dawning, terrifying understanding, of a love that had been dormant, buried alive, but never, ever dead.

“Your book,” he murmured, his thumb stroking her skin, relearning its texture, its familiar softness. “Is it about the sun? The sea?”

She gave a watery, shaky smile, her eyes still closed, as if afraid to break the spell. “It is about a boy on a pier,” she whispered, her voice thick with a love she could no longer hide. “And the heartbreak I had to live through to finally find the words for him.”

In the quiet, warm intimacy of the bookshop, with the relentless Liverpool rain painting grey streaks down the windows like tears down a face, Kostas Tsimikas felt something he had not felt in two years, the warmth of a Greek sun on his skin. The summer was not over. It had just been waiting, patient and eternal, for him to find his way back to its shore.