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When she wakes, the first thing she registers is the cold of the sheet beside her.
She does not open her eyes immediately. She lets her hand drift across the cotton, palm flat, the way she might check the depth of a puddle. Cool. Not warm-recently-vacated cool. A while.
Alexia tells herself nothing yet.
She tells herself bathroom.
She listens for a long second with her eyes still closed. The shower would be running. The tap would be running. The small hotel-room sounds of another body still in the room with her.
Nothing. Her mouth feels dry and empty.
She opens her eyes and sits up slowly. Scratches at her eyes, delays what she already knows.
The sheet falls to her waist. She is bare under it. Her right shoulder twinges when she shifts her weight — match shoulder, she thinks distantly, the captain's instinct — and she registers the bruise on the inside of her thigh and the small ache between her hips and a faint mark she can feel low on her throat. The body is fine. The body is more than fine.
The bed beside her is empty.
She lets herself look at it for one long second. There is a single dark hair on the white cotton. The duvet on that side has been pulled up neatly, folded at the edge — the way someone does when they are trying not to disturb the person sleeping next to them.
She presses her fingers against her own forehead. Closes her eyes briefly.
Tonta.
She gets up. She is not someone who lies in bed just because it costs her to leave it.
The blaugrana is on the floor near the foot of the bed. Half-twisted, one sleeve turned wrong. Real Sociedad’s blue and white is beside it, draped over the corner of the duvet where it must have fallen.
The two shirts are touching at the hem.
They have been touching all night.
Alexia stands there and looks at them.
It hurts her, that part. More than the empty bed, maybe. The ridiculous intimacy of fabric. The soft, stupid evidence of a night that had been allowed to exist only in the dark.
She picks up her own shirt first.
Folds it.
Sets it on the chair.
Then she picks up yours.
The blue and white is cold in her hands. It smells faintly of grass, hotel soap, and, underneath both, something she cannot name except as you.
She should fold it too.
She lifts it over her head and pulls it on instead.
It is too tight in the chest. Too short at the hem. The number across her back is someone else’s number. Your number. The fabric catches at her shoulders in a way that makes her feel, suddenly and foolishly, borrowed.
She catches herself in the mirror by the wardrobe.
Bare legs. Sleep-flat hair. Someone else’s shirt.
She turns away before she can properly see her own face.
The room is very quiet.
She makes coffee because there is nothing else to do with her hands.
The little hotel machine on the counter takes pods, and there is one already loaded, housekeeping’s small ghost from yesterday. She brews it.
She thinks, faintly, that she would not have minded making coffee for two.
The thought lands badly.
She picks up her phone.
No message.
Of course there is no message.
She looks at the screen anyway, thumb hovering above your chat. She thinks about what she would have written if the sides were reversed.
Hey. You sleep okay? I made coffee.
Light. Easy. Civilized. The kind of morning two adults can have after touching each other like they are trying to learn a language by mouth.
But she is not on the other side.
She is herself.
Left behind in a hotel room, wearing your shirt.
She opens Instagram.
The chat is still there from last night. The hotel name. The address. Your answer.
i know it
Alexia stares at it until the letters start to look strange.
Then she types before pride can organize itself.
Buenos días.
She looks at the words.
Too simple. Too soft.
She adds:
You didn’t have to leave. We could have had coffee.
She sends it.
Then she puts the phone face down on the desk like that will make her less pathetic.
She drinks the coffee standing at the window.
The harbor is grey in the early light. The water moves without conviction, small lap and return, something sheltered pretending to be sea. The city has not fully woken. A gull cuts across the sky and disappears behind the glass edge of another hotel.
The shirt smells like you.
That is what gets through in the end. Not the bed. Not the silent phone.
Your shirt against her skin.
Alexia closes her eyes.
She decides she needs to take it off.
She decides she needs to shower.
She decides a lot of things in the space of three seconds and believes none of them.
The phone is buzzing when she gets out. She crosses the room with the towel still around her hair, leaving drips on the carpet, and picks it up
One notification.
sorry — i thought this was casual? felt like that's what you wanted
She reads it twice before she sits down on the edge of the bed.
The bed where, six hours ago, you had been wearing her shirt. Where you had taken her face in both hands and made her look. I'm not asking. I'm telling you I know. Where you had pressed your mouth to the date on Alexia's ribs without asking what it meant, and Alexia had heard herself make a sound she had not given permission to exist.
The captain's instinct kicks in before the rest of her does. The captain reads the play. The captain reads what the line is doing, what shape it is, where the actual ball is.
Casual. The word sits there, neat and bloodless.
This is not a confession.
It is a clearance.
You are giving her an exit. Worse, you are pretending the exit was hers all along.
Felt like that’s what you wanted.
You think you are being kind.
You are wrong about who wants what.
Alexia lets out a long breath.
She is not angry, exactly.
She is tired.
The specific kind of tired that comes from being misunderstood by the one person she had hoped might have been looking closely.
Cabezona, she thinks. Argentina cabezona.
She types: Got it. Sorry — I didn't mean to make it weird.
She reads it back. Light. Easy.
She sends it.
She does not feel good about it. She does not feel bad about it either.
The reply comes almost instantly.
ok cool 😊 maybe next time?
The smiley face is what does it.
She stares at the small yellow mouth, the little blush dots, the tonal overcorrection of someone who is — on the other side of this exchange — very relieved to have been let off a hook she was bracing against.
Alexia exhales through her nose. Almost a laugh, not quite.
She sets the phone down very carefully. She does not throw it.
She picks up your Real Sociedad shirt instead, from where she had set it on the desk. She runs her thumb over the stitching of the number 8.
She folds it. Properly this time, puts it in her bag.
She is, she notices, going to keep it.
The phone buzzes once more.
She picks it up expecting nothing and that is not what she gets.
keep my blaugrana for me, for next time
She blinks down at it.
Alexia feels something move in her chest that has nothing to do with the rest of the morning.
It is not relief. It is not hope. It is not even tenderness. It is — she has to look for the word — recognition. The recognition of having heard, just now, the precise sound of someone trying to keep a door open while pretending to close it.
You have spent the entire previous exchange handing her a script. Casual. Easy. Next time.
You have now, sixty seconds later, found a reason to keep texting.
The shirt is the reason.
The shirt is always the reason.
She thinks about the words next time.
She types.
La próxima.
She sends it. Looks at it on her own screen. The phrase the whole season has been carrying. The phrase that had, in her own mouth, meant something.
She will be patient. She knows patience intimately. And she knows what she wants.