#murcia!!!

After, the sun is too inviting to ignore. They drift outside as if pulled, plates left for later.

Jannik is dragged along by Luca to the court, the one Carlos built when the kids were smaller and he still needed the sound of a ball striking strings to make sense of a day. It’s tucked behind the house, where the light is slanted and forgiving and the cicadas are loud in the trees. The surface is worn but loved in the places you’d expect, baseline scuffed, net a little saggy in the middle, lines repainted with care.

He strips off his shirt without thinking and immediately feels the heat on his skin, the air slick with the smell of dust and green things. He catches Carlos staring and then, almost comically, trying not to, turning his head too fast, busying himself with the net. The sight of it—his alpha undone by restraint—hits Jannik low and deep, unhelpful and unkind.

He wants to laugh and cry and be cruel just to see what happens.

They hit because Luca insists, because Jannik recognizes the want of someone who has watched greatness up close and learned the shapes by heart. The kid bounces on his toes like a spring wound too tight, eyes shining. Carlos tosses Jannik a racket that fits his hand like it’s been waiting for him, and for a moment tennis saves him, the one thing that can hold all of this without collapsing.

The body remembers what to do. He feels the weight settle into his palm like an extension of his arm.

The sound of the ball off the strings is clean and familiar, a language that doesn’t require translation. Luca watches every move with ferocious attention, mimicking Jannik’s footwork when he thinks no one is looking, grin splitting his face when Jannik praises him.

Carlos feeds balls, patient, precise, the coach bleeding through even here, even now. His voice slips into that old cadence, the one that still does something electric to Jannik’s spine. “Feet,” he calls, habit, ritual.

Jannik moves automatically, body snapping into its familiar grammar. Meets him there, generous and precise, because of course. The ball feels heavier here, slower, like it wants to stay close to the ground. Luca beams every time he makes clean contact. He laughs when he misses.

When Jannik paints a line so clean it feels like sacrilege, the boy stands frozen at the net, awe written plain on his face. “Do it again,” he breathes.

He is thirteen and limitless and so like Carlos, and that makes something in Jannik ache so sharply he almost has to sit down. Instead, he hits a little harder, matching Luca’s grin for grin, letting the boy feel fast and clever and unstoppable.

Carlos leans against the fence, watching them with something like pride and grief braided together. There’s a split second where his scent betrays him: deep, hungry, careful not to touch. Sweat runs down Jannik’s spine, his body loose and responsive in a way it hasn’t been for weeks. He thinks, briefly and sharply, of bodies and inheritance—of what passes from hand to hand without permission—and it startles him. He pushes it down hard.

The sun turns everything gold, unreal. For a moment, he lets himself pretend this is all there is: the thud of the ball, the boy’s laughter, Carlos’ voice calling out corrections and encouragement in Spanish that wraps around Jannik’s name like a blessing.

They swim when the heat becomes unbearable, the chlorine stinging sweetly against skin still warm from exertion. The pool is cool and impossibly blue—the kind that looks fake even when you're submerged in it. Emma says something about sunscreen and hands Jannik a towel. Elena appears, sits with a book and a knowing look that makes Jannik's stomach flip. She studies him the way people do when they're trying to understand a reflection that doesn't quite match.

Luca splashes, laughs, demands races, and Jannik obliges gratefully. He dives, cutting clean through the water, and comes up laughing, his curls slicked back, his skin bright. Carlos stands at the edge for a moment, tan and solid and devastating, arms crossed, eyes dark, before pretending to be interested in adjusting a pool chair.

“You're going to get wrinkles,” Jannik calls, teasing, his heart hammering because he can't help it—it feels wicked and alive to be wanted here. This is what this place does to him; it makes everything visible.

Carlos snorts. “You wish.”

(For a second, it's almost funny, the way the rules feel both absolute and laughably thin. Then it isn't.)

Jannik lets himself float on his back, eyes closed, the world muffled and distant, the sky blinding above him. He dreams, drifting and languorous, of the lotus flowers rising clean, the men who ate and forgot and wandered until home became a story someone else told them. It would be so easy to stay suspended like this, he thinks—numb and fed and held by something that asks nothing of him except presence.

Later, he sits in the shade, towel around his shoulders, ice melting in a glass. Elena corners him by the lemon tree while Luca is inside changing. “You’re good with him,” she says casually, like she’s talking about the weather.

Jannik smiles, startled, because he thinks she means her brother. “I like kids,” he says. It’s true; it costs him nothing to say it.

Her smile shifts, a small, knowing thing, and she tilts her head, that mirror-sharp look again. “I meant, with Papá.”

The words land like a dropped plate, shattering without sound. Jannik doesn’t know what to do with them. Elena’s gaze softens, just a little, as if she’s glimpsed something without deciding what to do with it yet, and the moment passes—but it leaves a bruise.

By late afternoon, the light goes honeyed and dangerous. It feels like an iteration of summer, like those weeks they stole along the Mediterranean when everything was new and reckless and bright. There’s a pressure behind his eyes, a buzz under his skin. Emma feeds him again. The house keeps giving. Jannik keeps taking. He moves from room to room feeling like a thief who has been handed the keys.

Eventually, Jannik ends up in the garden. He walks the perimeter slowly, shoes sinking into soft earth.

(Emma had shown it to him before lunch, orderly and riotous at once: orange trees, a lemon bush, a small patch of wildflowers that seem to be thriving entirely out of spite. She’d pointed to a locked glasshouse at the back and said, “That’s Carlos’ sanctuary. He only lets the children in. And you, now, I suppose.” She smiled, and it wasn’t a threat, wasn’t a surrender. It simply exists.)

The plants are orderly but cherished, tomatoes heavy on the vine, herbs clipped back with care. If he tilts his head just so, he can see his mother’s terrace, the neat rectangles of basil and mint, the rows of beans so straight you could measure them with a ruler. He thinks of home in April, the mountains white at the top, pale green at the bottom, the clouds like a line drawn by a careful hand. He wonders if she would recognize him like this, sun-warmed and hollowed out, wearing someone else’s life like borrowed clothes. He wonders if she’d forgive him for the love that has become a second heartbeat, if forgiveness itself is a muscle you have to keep using.

The garden hums softly. Bees work. The world continues.

Carlos finds him there, barefoot, holding a tennis ball Luca left in the grass. He comes up behind Jannik and stands so close that the air between them feels unsafe. For a moment, they don’t speak. Jannik turns the ball in his hands, feeling the roughness of the felt, the familiar curve. He feels a hand on his shoulder, calloused and grounding and right, and then it falls.

“You’re beautiful here, you know,” Carlos says, his voice roughened by something like fear.

Jannik almost drops the ball. He wants to say, That’s the problem. Instead, he says: “The garden is nice,” and Carlos laughs, a sound too real, too exposed.

He hates him for this one precise, incandescent second. Hates him for bringing him here. For letting him see this. For making him want something so domestic, so omega, that it feels like a moral failure. He thinks, horrified, of the way his body aches sometimes with a phantom want, a future it knows how to imagine even if his mind refuses it, something that would anchor him here in a way that could not be undone.

The idea of carrying something of Carlos inside him, of building a life that way, hits him like a punch to the gut, instinct flaring hot and visceral and shameful. A kitchen like this, a calendar with shared dates, a smaller body with his curls and the prettiest dark eyes chasing balls across a court.

He imagines it for a heartbeat and hates himself for how vivid it comes, how natural it feels, how something deep in him keens in recognition. He hates that Carlos already has this, already lives inside it, and still looks at Jannik like he’s starving.