The alarm goes off at six-fifteen and YN Reyes does what they do every morning, which is ignore it for four minutes while conducting a silent internal argument about the nature of time and whether it is, in fact, a social construct designed specifically to ruin their life.
At six-nineteen, they get up.
The penthouse is quiet at this hour. Barcelona light comes in sideways through the terrace doors, pale and unhurried, falling across the kitchen in long strips. It is the kind of morning that looks like a photograph of itself. YN moves through it in an oversized grey knit and yesterday’s joggers, hair doing something architecturally questionable on one side, and finds the coffee already done because they set the timer last night, which is the most organized they ever get.
They pour a cup. Stand at the kitchen counter. Drink it in the particular silence of a home before a seven-year-old wakes up.
This lasts approximately three minutes.
“Mami.”
YN doesn’t turn around. “Morning, Bells.”
Feet on tiles. The specific sound of Bella navigating the kitchen in her dinosaur socks, which have been her preferred footwear for six months and show no signs of retirement. A small body appears beside YN and leans against the counter with the bearing of someone who has recently made a decision.
“I need a packed lunch today,” Bella announces.
“You have a packed lunch every day.”
“A specific packed lunch.”
YN looks down at her. “How specific?”
“No cucumber.”
“You like cucumber.”
“I did like cucumber.” A pause. “I have evolved.”
YN stares at her for a moment. Bella stares back with complete patience. She has perfected YN’s stare, which means this is essentially YN arguing with themselves, and YN has never once won an argument with themselves in their entire life.
“Fine,” YN says. “No cucumber.”
Bella nods, satisfied, and opens the fridge with the authority of someone who owns it.
By seven-fifteen the kitchen has survived something. There is a lunchbox on the counter. There is a spilled glass of orange juice that has been mostly addressed. Bella is at the table in her school uniform eating toast with focused efficiency and YN is standing in the living room turning in a slow circle.
“Mami,” says Bella, without looking up.
“I’m looking for my keys.”
“They’re in your coat pocket.”
“I checked my coat pocket.”
“The other coat.”
YN stops turning. “I was wearing the other coat?”
“Yesterday.”
A pause. YN goes to the hallway. Returns with keys. They hold them up in Bella’s direction as though this proves something.
Bella has already gone back to her toast.
The penthouse is a good home. YN knows this the way they know most things about their life, practically and without sentimentality, but it is true. Four rooms plus the gym and the library and the terrace that wraps around the outside like an afterthought that became essential. Bella’s room is at the end of the hall and is, by any objective measure, a disaster zone. YN has never once commented on this.
The walls in the living room are hung with Bella’s drawings, framed properly, the way you frame something that matters. A skyline done at five with too much purple sky. A horse that is possibly a dog. A portrait of YN that captures something true about them, the expression slightly narrowed, the mouth not quite a smile, which is Bella’s honest record of what their Mami looks like at rest.
YN passes it every morning. Has never taken it down.
There are photographs along the hallway wall and on the shelves. YN and Bella at the beach, Bella eating something enormous, YN holding approximately seven bags. Bella and Rosa in Rosa’s kitchen, Bella on the counter despite this being repeatedly forbidden. All three of them at Christmas, Rosa in the middle looking insufferably pleased with herself.
You would not notice, unless you were looking, that YN does not appear in any of them alone.
You would have to be paying attention.
“We’re going to be late,” says YN.
“We’re not,” says Bella.
“We’re going to be late because you’re still eating toast.”
“I eat at a consistent pace.”
“Bella.”
“I can’t be rushed. It affects my digestion.”
YN looks at her. Seven years old. Sitting at the kitchen table telling YN about her digestion. This child came into YN’s life as the most important thing in it and has somehow become an entirely separate and extremely opinionated person.
“Where,” says YN, “did you learn the word digestion?”
“Abuela Rosa.”
Of course.
“Eat the toast,” says YN. “Quickly.”
“Mami, stress affects”
“Bella.”
She eats the toast.
Eleven minutes from the penthouse to school. One of the reasons YN had refused to move after the divorce, although they would never have admitted that was part of it. Bella’s school was close. Rosa was close. Bella loved her room. The terrace still caught the evening light exactly right. Joanna leaving did not mean everything else had to leave with her.
YN pulls up at the school. Bella is already unbuckled, lunchbox in hand, backpack on, ready to deploy.
“Okay,” says YN. “Have a good day.”
“I will.”
Bella opens the door. Pauses. Turns back.
“Mami.”
“What.”
“You look nice today.”
YN glances down at themselves. The good blazer. The dark trousers. The shoes Bella once described as very serious, which she had meant as a compliment. “Thank you, Bells.”
“You always look nicer when you’re not frowning.”
“I’m not frowning.”
Bella gives them the look. The one that means: you are frowning but I have decided not to fight you on this today.
Then she leans across and kisses YN’s cheek and is gone, backpack bouncing, disappearing into the stream of small people and harassed parents without looking back.
YN watches until they can’t see her anymore.
The school gates are ordinary. The street is ordinary. Other parents are getting back into their cars, already on their phones, already elsewhere.
YN sits for a moment with the engine running.
It is a very good life. They know this. They remind themselves of it on mornings like this one, when the quiet in the car is the kind that used to feel like company and now just feels like quiet.
Then they put the car in gear and go to be a surgeon.
Not as an announcement. Not as something she had rehearsed. She said it the way you said things that had been true for a while before you were ready to hear them out loud.
"I think it's time."
They were at her mother's house. A Sunday, the kind that had always happened in this family, food on the table and too many voices and the television on in the background that nobody was watching. Alba had been telling a story about something at training and Alexia had listened and laughed at the right moments and then the story had ended and the room had gone briefly quiet and the words had come out.
"Time for what?" Alba said.
Alexia looked at the table.
"To leave Barcelona."
The room changed.
Not dramatically. There was no sound, no sudden movement. Alba went very still, the way she went still when something required her full attention. Eli, who had been carrying something from the kitchen, stopped. Set it down. Did not say anything immediately.
Alexia kept looking at the table.
"Not because I want to leave," she said. "Because I think it is what is next. Because I think I have been waiting for someone to ask me what comes next and nobody has, and so I am asking myself."
Alba opened her mouth.
Eli moved first.
She came around the table and sat beside Alexia and put her hand on her shoulder, the way she had always done, the gesture that had meant I am here since Alexia was small enough to fit entirely under it.
"Have you spoken to YN?" she said.
Alexia looked at her.
"Yes," she said.
"And?" Alba said.
Alexia was quiet for a moment.
"They said we would figure it out."
Something passed between Eli and Alba across the table. Not alarm. Something more like recognition. Like two people seeing something they had suspected for a long time finally confirmed.
"Where are you thinking?" Alba asked. Her voice was careful. Measured. She was doing the thing she did when she was feeling more than she was showing.
"I do not know yet," Alexia said. "I have not decided where. Only that I am ready to leave."
"Those are two different decisions," Eli said.
"Yes," Alexia said. "They are."
Her mother looked at her for a long moment. The look of someone who had watched a person become themselves over thirty years and was watching it happen again.
"Then it is time," Eli said simply.
Alba made a sound that was not quite a word.
"Alba," Eli said.
"I am fine," Alba said. She was not crying. She was doing the thing she did instead of crying, which was to press her lips together and look at a fixed point and breathe carefully. "I am completely fine. It is just fourteen years."
"Fourteen years," Alexia agreed.
"And it is not going anywhere," Alba said. "The fourteen years. Those already happened. You cannot un-win the things you won."
She looked at Alexia then, properly, the look of a younger sister who had always understood her better than most.
"Go," she said. "Wherever it is. Go."
She had told YN a few days before.
Not the club. There was still no club. Only the decision underneath the club, the one that had been harder to reach and was harder to say: I am ready to leave. I do not know where I am going yet.
They had been on the sofa. Something was playing in the background that neither of them was watching. Alexia's arm was threaded through YN's, her hand resting near their wrist, holding on in the way she had started to hold on without making a thing of it.
"I am ready to leave," she had said.
YN had turned toward her. Had not said anything yet.
"I do not know where I am going yet," Alexia said. "I only know I am ready to go."
"We will figure it out," YN said.
She had looked at them.
"What if there is nothing to figure out?"
YN had been quiet for a moment.
"Then we wait," they said, "until there is."
She had stayed where she was, her arm through theirs, and the television had continued behind them and the apartment had been quiet and warm and she had thought: this is what it is to have somewhere to land. Not a destination. A person. You can leave when you do not know where you are going if you know who is going with you.
She had not cried then either.
She was waiting, without knowing it, for somewhere smaller to fall apart.
The filming day was strange in the way that official things were strange.
The stadium was empty. Her voice echoed slightly when she spoke. There were people she did not know adjusting lights around her and someone checking the angle of the crest behind her head and someone else asking her to look slightly to the left and then slightly less to the left. Fourteen years at this club and the last official thing she would do here was sit in a chair while a stranger adjusted the light on her face.
She had written the statement herself. Twelve versions across three days. In the end she had written something clean and grateful and true enough, and she had let it be.
YN was there. Not on camera. Not in the frame. At the edge of the room, beside Eli and Alba, in the part where the lights did not reach. She had not asked them to come. They had simply been there when she arrived, standing with her family the way they always stood with her family now.
Before filming started, she looked over at them.
YN saw the slight shake in her hand. She watched them see it. They just held her gaze for a moment, steady, and she thought: all right. All right.
She looked back at the camera.
"Whenever you're ready," someone said.
She opened her mouth.
Nothing came out.
Not stage fright. Not nerves. Something else. Something she had not accounted for, some particular weight of the moment pressing down on whatever she had prepared to say and dissolving it. She sat there in the lights with fourteen years behind her and a camera pointed at her face and she could not find a single word.
"Take your time," someone said.
"I'm sorry," she said. Her voice came out wrong. Too small. "I'm sorry, give me a moment."
She looked down at her hands.
From the edge of the room she heard nothing. No one moved. No one said anything. But she felt YN there, at the periphery, the same way she always felt them, steady and present and not needing to do anything except exist in the same room.
She breathed.
She looked back up.
"Okay," she said. "I am ready."
She was not entirely ready.
She said it anyway.
The video went out that afternoon. Her phone began vibrating within seconds and did not stop. Former teammates. People she had not heard from in years. Her name everywhere it always went, which was everywhere.
She turned the phone face down.
She reached for YN instead.
The next morning she went to the training ground one last time.
She had asked to go early, before anyone else arrived, and they had arranged it without asking why. She walked through the building in the particular quiet of an institution before it had woken up, through the corridors she had walked a thousand times, past the photographs on the walls she had stopped seeing years ago the way you stopped seeing things you passed every day.
She pushed open the door of the changing room.
It was exactly as it always was.
The same smell. The same light. The same order of everything, the numbered pegs, the hooks, the benches worn smooth from years of people sitting on them before and after the most important hours of their days.
She walked to her peg.
The captain's peg.
There was nothing on it. The room had been cleared, her kit already packed and sent, everything official already handled by people whose job it was to handle things. But the peg was still there, the small brass number above it, the hook that had held her shirt before every match for years.
She touched it.
Just the hook. Just her fingers against the cool metal of something utterly ordinary.
And that was the thing that broke her.
Not the speeches. Not the cameras. Not the full stadium she was about to walk into. This. A hook on a wall in an empty room. A piece of metal that had been here longer than she had and would be here after she was gone, and her name would come off the peg above it and someone else's name would go on, and the room would continue exactly as it was, and that was how it was supposed to be, and she knew that, and it still broke her.
She stood there.
She looked around the room properly, the way she had not looked at it in years, the way you stopped looking at things you passed every day until the last day, when suddenly you could not stop.
The bench across from her had a long scuff mark on the edge of it, dark and deep, the kind that came from years of boots being pulled on and off. She did not know whose boots. She did not know when it had happened. It had simply always been there.
There was tape on the floor near the door. Athletic tape, the pale kind, a strip of it half-peeled and left, the way it was always left, the way she had left it herself a hundred times and never thought anything of it.
On the bench two pegs down, a water bottle. Someone had forgotten it. Someone would come back for it, or not come back for it, and eventually it would be thrown away, and it meant nothing, and she looked at it for longer than made any sense.
She thought: all of this will still be here tomorrow.
She thought: none of it will know I am gone.
The room was empty except for her.
She let herself cry, properly, the way she had not cried since her father, the way she had not let herself cry in front of anyone because there was always something to be composed for. She cried for the fourteen years and for the girl who had arrived here not knowing yet what she would become, and for the woman leaving who would never be the same version of herself again, and for the hook on the wall that did not care about any of it, that was just a hook on a wall.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand.
She stood up straight.
She walked out.
Before Camp Nou, she sat in the tunnel.
She had been there before many times, hundreds of times, in the particular noise and heat of a tunnel full of players waiting to go out. But this time the tunnel was quiet, the ceremony not yet begun, and she was early, and she had found a place to sit on the bench that ran along one side, and she had sat down, and then she had not been able to get up.
Not a physical thing. Her legs were fine. She was fine. She simply could not make herself move because she had just understood, sitting here in the tunnel with the sound of the crowd building above her, that this was the last time.
Not the last time she would play. She had matches ahead of her, wherever she went.
The last time she would wait here. In this tunnel. With that particular noise above her and that particular smell of grass and something electric, the smell that had meant game day since she was a girl. That was ending right now, in this moment, and she was sitting on a bench in the tunnel and she could not get up.
She heard footsteps.
YN came and sat beside her.
They did not ask if she was all right. They did not put an arm around her or tell her anything. They simply sat down, on the same bench, close enough that their shoulders touched, and looked at the rectangle of light at the end of the tunnel where the pitch waited.
Alexia looked at it too.
They sat like that for a while. The crowd noise built. Someone somewhere checked something on a clipboard. The light at the end of the tunnel was very bright.
"I know," YN said, eventually. Quietly. Not in response to anything she had said out loud.
Alexia looked at them.
Then she looked back at the light.
She stood up.
YN stood beside her.
"Go," they said.
She went.
Camp Nou was full.
She had known it would be and had not known what it would feel like. The noise was not noise so much as something physical, something that entered the body and stayed there. Banners with her name and her number. Shirts. Flags. A choir of people who had watched her become what she became and had come to say goodbye.
She stood at the edge of the pitch.
For a moment she could not move again.
Then she walked out.
She walked the perimeter slowly and she looked at the stands and the stands looked back, and she thought about every match and every person who had been in those seats and what it meant to have a place in the world where people gathered because of you. She thought about her father and she thought: you would have said it was the lights. And she smiled and did not try to stop it.
There were speeches. Presentations. A small girl from the academy who gave her flowers and looked at her with an expression of pure awe, and Alexia crouched to her level and said something that made her laugh, and it was the realest moment of the afternoon.
YN stayed at the edge.
Not on the pitch. Not beside her for the official moments. They gave her room to be what she was here, what she had always been here, without hovering at the edge of the frame. But whenever the ceremony paused and there was a moment that belonged to her rather than to the occasion, she moved toward them without thinking about it.
And they took her hand.
Every time.
Not for the cameras. The cameras were pointed elsewhere.
Not as a statement.
Just because that was what they did.
The jersey had changed.
The hand had not.
They stayed after.
Eli and Alba had gone ahead, understanding without being told. The stadium was emptying, the banners coming down, the crew dismantling the stage near the centre circle. Alexia and YN stood at the edge of the pitch in the long shadows of a late afternoon.
Alexia looked at the seats.
At the empty stands. At the crest on the far wall. At the pitch that had received so much of what she had to give, that would continue to be exactly what it was long after she was no longer the one playing on it.
She did not cry.
She had already cried, in the changing room, alone, where it was hers and nobody else's. This was different. This was just looking.
"I thought leaving would feel like losing it," she said.
YN waited.
Alexia looked at their joined hands.
"Not all of it," she said.
YN looked at her.
"I am still here," Alexia said. Not to the stadium. To them.
"I know," YN said.
The crew moved in the background. The last of the light was doing something golden with the upper seats. Somewhere in the stadium, someone was whistling.
Been seeing quite a few comments and messages lately that haven’t been very pleasant.
Folks, let’s try to be a little kinder to each other. It doesn’t matter if someone uses AI, makes spelling mistakes, or if English isn’t their first language. We’re all here to share something we’re passionate about.
If you don’t have anything constructive to say about someone’s work, it’s okay to say nothing at all.
That was all she said. A meeting. YN looked up from their laptop, nodded, and said okay. No questions. No follow-up. Just okay, the way they received most things she offered without enough context, with the quiet trust that she would tell them what mattered when she was ready.
The meeting happened in a hotel in the Eixample, the kind that had a private room on the first floor with good light and no windows onto the street. The kind of place you chose when you did not want to be seen choosing.
Two people from London City Lionesses. A director of football and someone whose title Alexia did not catch but whose manner said she ran things. They had flown in the day before. They had not made a fuss about being in Barcelona. They had simply come, which told her something about how serious they were.
She had expected a pitch. She had attended enough of those in her career to know the shape of them, the performance of certainty, the flattery dressed as vision. She had prepared herself for it and had decided she would listen politely and then go home.
It was not a pitch.
The director of football opened a folder and put it on the table and then looked at her and said: before we show you anything, we would like to know what you think is missing from women's football in England right now.
Alexia had not expected the question.
She answered it. Honestly, because she did not know how else to answer things, because the question had been asked as though it genuinely mattered what she thought rather than as a preamble to telling her what they had already decided. She talked about infrastructure. About the gap between elite development and grassroots access. About what it meant for young players to train in facilities that communicated, through their very condition, how much they were valued.
The director of football wrote things down.
Nobody had written things down in a meeting with her for a long time.
They showed her the facilities plans. Not finished, not promised, actually in progress, architects' drawings with budget numbers beside them, a timeline with specific milestones. They talked about the academy they were building from the ground up, about the culture they wanted to establish, about what it meant to bring someone in at this stage rather than when the thing was already done.
We do not want a trophy signing, the director said. We want someone who wants to build.
We want your ideas, the other woman said. About leadership. About how you develop young players. About what an environment that produces consistent excellence actually looks like from the inside.
Alexia thought about the last few seasons at Barcelona. About the conversations she had tried to have about certain things and the walls she had met. About the particular exhaustion of loving an institution that sometimes loved its own history more than its future.
She thought: these people are building a future.
She thought: they are asking me to help decide what it looks like.
Something in her that had been very carefully held in place for weeks shifted slightly, like a key turning.
The meeting ran forty minutes longer than it was scheduled to.
In the car on the way home she looked out at Barcelona going past the window.
The streets she had driven down ten thousand times. The city that had made her, that she had given everything to and that had given everything back. She knew every corner of it. Every café near the training ground, every shortcut, every place where the light was good in the evening.
She thought: I could do this.
I could do this and it would be the hardest thing I have done in years and I want to do it.
Then she thought about the apartment. About YN. About what came next.
The key stopped turning.
She came home tense.
She knew it, and she knew YN would know it, and there was nothing to be done about either of those things. She was not someone who could perform ease when she was not feeling it, not at home, not anymore, not with YN.
YN was in the kitchen.
They looked up when she came in, took her in, and said nothing. They did not ask how the meeting went. They did not ask what kind of meeting it had been or what had been decided or what was sitting behind her eyes making them look the way they looked. They just said:
"Dinner in twenty minutes."
Alexia put her bag down.
"Okay," she said.
She went to change and she stood in the bedroom for a moment with her hands at her sides and breathed, and then she changed, and she went back out.
YN cooked something simple. The kind of meal that did not ask to be noticed, that just arrived and was good and warm and did not make a fuss about itself.
They ate at the table.
Alexia was not quiet exactly. She talked. They both talked, about ordinary things, the way they always did, and it was fine, it was good, it was exactly what dinner usually was. Except that underneath all of it she was somewhere else, turning something over and over, and she was aware of YN being aware of this and choosing, again, not to push.
She helped clear the table.
YN washed, she dried, the arrangement they had always had, and the kitchen was quiet between them in the way of two people who had learned each other's silences well enough to know which ones to leave alone.
Afterwards, YN settled into their chair.
The armchair by the window, the one that got the best of the evening light and that YN had claimed without discussion sometime in the early months of them living together. They picked up their book. They found their page. They settled.
Alexia stood in the middle of the room.
She looked at them. At the book. At the window behind them where the evening had gone dark and the city lights were beginning to show. She thought about going to sit on the couch. She thought about going to bed early and trying to sleep. She thought about a hundred things that were not this.
Then she moved toward them.
She stopped a few feet away. Not close enough to sit. Just present. Standing in the space between the couch and the chair with everything she needed to say still stuck somewhere she had not yet found the opening for.
YN turned a page.
Then, without looking up:
"What happened, Alexia. Is something bothering you?"
She let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
"How do you always know," she said. "When something is in my mind."
YN's mouth curved. They still did not look up.
"Because I know," they said. "What happened?"
Alexia looked at them for a moment.
Then she sat down on the arm of the couch, close enough now, but not right beside them. There was still a little space between them. She needed it.
She took a breath.
"The meeting today," she said. "It was with London City Lionesses."
YN lowered the book. Slowly. They looked at her.
She kept going.
She told them about the offer. About the room and the people in it and the plans they had laid on the table like something they had actually built rather than promised. She told them about the question they had opened with, what did she think was missing, and how nobody had asked her that in a very long time. She told them about the facilities, the academy, the role, what they were asking her to come and do.
"Fourteen years," she said. "I have been in a Barcelona kit for fourteen years. It is the only professional identity I have ever had. And I think I have been waiting, without knowing I was waiting, for someone to ask me what comes next rather than assuming I would just keep being this until I stopped."
She looked at her hands.
"What frightens me," she said slowly, "is not the challenge. It is not leaving. It is the question of what I am when the crest is different. Barcelona made me, in the eyes of the world. People love what Barcelona made. I do not know yet who I am without it, and I am not sure I would know how to find out from the inside."
YN said nothing.
"What is stopping you," they said.
Alexia looked at them.
"You," she said. And then, when YN's expression shifted: "Not you. Not like that. It is. I cannot ask you to come. I cannot ask you to leave your work, your life here, everything you have built, because I want to try something in another country. And I cannot ask you to stay here while I go. Both of those things feel impossible and I do not know how to say any of this without it sounding like I am choosing football over—"
"Alexia."
She stopped.
YN put the book down on the table beside the chair.
They stood up.
They crossed the room to her.
Not quickly. Not as though there was urgency. Just steadily, the way YN moved toward most things that mattered, without drama and without hesitation.
They stood in front of her. They took her hand.
Alexia looked up at them.
YN was quiet for a moment. Not searching for the words. She understood, watching them, that the words were already there. That they had probably been there for longer than tonight. That YN was simply deciding where to begin.
"I do not love the jersey," YN said.
Alexia was very still.
"I love the person wearing it," YN said. "I have always loved the person wearing it. Whatever jersey that happens to be. Wherever that jersey happens to be worn."
Alexia's throat was tight.
"So whenever you decide to go," YN said, "without a question, I will come. I promised to always be by your side, Alexia. That was not a promise with conditions. It was not I will be by your side unless it gets complicated. It was not I will be by your side unless it asks something of me." A pause. "It is just I will be by your side."
"Your work," Alexia said. "You cannot just—"
"Marcus and I have talked about London before," YN said. "Nothing is decided. But if this becomes your next chapter." A pause. "I know we will find ours."
She was very still.
"And you do not have to decide tonight," YN said. "You have the summer. You have time. Whatever you decide, whether it is London or Barcelona or somewhere else entirely, I will be beside you. That is not a sacrifice. That is just where I want to be."
Their thumb moved over her hand.
"I am your partner, remember?" they said. Quietly. "That is what that means."
Alexia did not say anything for a long time.
She had prepared herself, without knowing she was preparing herself, for hesitation. For the conversation to be harder than this. For YN to love her and also to need a moment, to say yes with a question mark folded inside it.
There was no question mark.
There was just YN, standing in front of her in their apartment in Barcelona on an ordinary evening, holding her hand, telling her the same thing they had been telling her in every small way for the entire time she had known them.
She thought about the floor, all those months ago, when she had asked how they had never given up on her.
She thought about the beach. The playground. The Sunday morning with the football match murmuring in the background and her father's name in her mouth for the first time in years.
Every version of staying that YN had ever shown her.
And she thought: of course. Of course this is who you are. I have been watching you be exactly this person for the entire length of our story and I still did not fully believe it until right now, in this room, with my hand in yours.
"Okay," she said.
Her voice came out smaller than she intended.
"Okay," she said again, more steadily. "I will think about it. Properly. And we will talk, when I know what I want to do."
"Whenever you are ready," YN said.
She looked at them.
Then she leaned forward and rested her forehead against their shoulder, and YN's arms came around her, and she stayed there for a long time, in the quiet of the apartment, with the decision still unmade and the future still uncertain and the person holding her not going anywhere.
The email had been sitting in her inbox for four days.
She had read it six times. Maybe seven. She had stopped counting after the third, when she realised that reading it again was not going to change what it said or what it meant or the weight it had lodged somewhere behind her sternum and had not moved from since.
London City Lionesses.
A formal expression of interest. A meeting requested. Numbers she had not expected. And underneath the numbers, the thing that had stopped her cold: they did not want her as a trophy. They wanted her to be the player who defined what the club became. The one who shaped the culture from the inside, who brought the younger players with her, who helped build something from the ground up rather than arrive at something already built. They wanted her not for what she had won but for what she still had left to do.
She had not told anyone.
Not Mapi, who would have had seventeen opinions before Alexia had finished the sentence. Not Alba, who would have immediately called their mother. Not her agent, not yet, not until she had sorted out what she actually thought, which she had not managed to do in four days of trying.
Not YN.
She did not know how to tell YN.
That was the part that kept stopping her. Not the decision itself, which was large and complicated and not yet made. The telling. The moment of putting it into the room between them and watching what happened to the air.
At training she was fine.
She was always fine at training. The pitch was the one place where her mind organised itself into something useful, where the noise inside her became irrelevant because the only thing that mattered was the ball and the space and the next second. She ran the session hard, stayed late, worked through a set piece with the younger players until it was correct.
In the car on the way home she thought about London.
Not the club specifically. The idea of it. The texture of starting something new, somewhere unfamiliar, with everything to prove and nothing assumed. She had been at Barcelona her entire career. She knew every corner of it, every expectation, every ceiling. She loved it the way you loved a thing that had made you, which was completely and also sometimes like a room you had outgrown.
She had not let herself think that last part until now.
She parked the car. Sat in it for a moment.
I'm home, she would say when she went inside. And YN would answer. And the apartment would be warm and ordinary and exactly what it always was.
She got out of the car.
YN was in the kitchen when she came in.
She stood in the hallway for a moment before she announced herself, the way she had started to sometimes, just to have a second of watching the apartment before it knew she was there. YN at the counter, something on the stove, their back to her, humming something low and tuneless the way they did when they were absorbed and comfortable.
The sight of it did something to her chest.
Not in a painful way. In the way of something you suddenly understood the value of at the precise moment you were considering how much it might cost to lose it. Not lose it. Change it. Complicate it.
"I'm home," she said.
YN looked over their shoulder. "Hey. How was training?"
"Good," she said. "Hard. Good."
She went to kiss their cheek on the way past, the way she always did, and stayed a second longer than usual, her hand on their arm. YN did not comment on this. They just let her, and went back to what they were doing.
She sat at the table and watched them cook and thought about London and said nothing at all.
She almost said it the next morning.
They were having coffee, the slow kind, the kind where neither of them was going anywhere immediately, and YN was reading something on their phone and the apartment was quiet and the moment felt right in the way moments sometimes felt right for things that needed to be said.
She opened her mouth.
YN looked up, as though they had felt it.
"You okay?"
"Yes," she said. "I was just going to ask if you wanted more coffee."
YN looked at her for a moment. The particular look they had, the one that said they were not entirely convinced but were not going to push.
"Sure," they said, and held out their cup.
She got up and made more coffee and the moment closed and she told herself she would say it tonight. Tonight for certain.
She did not say it that night.
The thing about carrying something alone was that it changed the texture of everything around it.
She became aware of the apartment differently. The life they had built in it, which had felt so settled and certain for months, now looked slightly different from the inside of a secret. The same coffee cups. The same side of the bed. The same morning kiss to her forehead. All of it exactly as it was, and underneath all of it, this thing she was not saying.
She thought about her contract. About Barcelona, which had been her entire professional life. It had made her, and she loved it. None of that changed the quiet truth that she might be ready for something it could no longer give her.
And she thought about the offer. It was not running away from something. It was, if she was honest with herself in the way she had been learning to be honest, the most alive she had felt about a footballing challenge in years. The fear of it and the pull of it were exactly the same size, which in her experience meant the thing was worth doing.
She thought about YN.
This was the part that circled back every time.
Not doubt about the relationship. Not that. But the logistics of it, the life of it, what it would mean to ask someone to move. Even someone who loved you. Even someone who had stayed through everything. There was a difference between staying through hard things in a place you both already lived and being asked to uproot, to rebuild, to follow someone else's career to another country.
She had watched other people navigate this. It did not always go well.
She did not know what YN would say. That was the honest truth of it. She thought she knew. But thinking you knew someone and asking them to move to London were different categories of knowledge.
She lay awake on the third night and stared at the ceiling and YN slept beside her and the email sat on her phone on the bedside table and none of it resolved into anything simple.
YN did not ask.
This was a relief, and somehow another kind of pressure.
She knew they had noticed. She had lived with them long enough to understand the difference between YN not seeing something and YN choosing to wait. They were doing the latter. She could feel it in the small adjustments, the way they stayed a little closer without crowding, the way they checked in with a look rather than a question, the way they did not fill the silences she had gone quiet in but simply stayed inside them with her.
Once, on the fourth day, she caught YN watching her from across the room.
YN did not look away.
Neither did she.
"I'm fine," she said.
"I know," YN said.
A pause.
"I'm just thinking about something."
"Okay," YN said. Simply. No follow-up. No demand. Just the acknowledgement of it, and then they went back to what they were doing, and left the space open for her to use whenever she was ready.
She thought: this is who you are.
This is who you have always been.
She thought: how do I tell you something that might change everything when you have spent every day making me believe that nothing between us is fragile.
On the fifth evening she asked about the London expansion.
They were on the couch, the television on low, the kind of evening that had no agenda. Alexia was not entirely sure how she got there, the question forming itself somewhat before she had made a conscious decision to ask it.
"How is the London work going?" she said. "The expansion. You mentioned it a few weeks ago."
YN looked at her with mild interest.
"It is moving," they said. "Marcus and I had a call last week. The client base there is building faster than we expected. We have been talking about whether it makes sense to have a more formal presence."
"A London office?"
"Something like that. A proper base rather than flying in every few weeks." YN tilted their head. "Why?"
"Just curious," Alexia said.
YN looked at her.
The look was not suspicious. Not pressing. It was the look of someone who had heard the word curious and understood that it was doing a lot of work in that sentence, who had clocked the question underneath the question, and who was choosing, again, to wait.
"It would be a good move for us," YN said, carefully. "The business. There is a lot of opportunity there."
"Yes," Alexia said. "I imagine there is."
She looked at the television.
YN looked at her a moment longer, and then they looked at the television too, and neither of them said anything else, and the evening continued the way it had been continuing, quietly and warmly and with this thing sitting between them that only one of them could name.
That night she lay awake again.
YN was asleep. Their breathing slow and even, one hand loose near hers the way it always was, the apartment dark and quiet and entirely ordinary.
She thought about the email.
She thought about London City Lionesses and what they were building and what it would ask of her and what it would give her and what it would mean to say yes.
She thought about YN's answer.
There is a lot of opportunity there.
Said carefully. Said as though they already suspected the shape of what was coming and were quietly making room for it.
She turned her head and looked at them in the dark.
Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow she would say it.
Not because she had figured out what the right answer was. Not because the fear had gone anywhere. But because she had been carrying it alone for five days and the weight of it was not something she wanted to carry alone anymore, and the person beside her had spent their entire life being the one who listened, and for once, for just this once, she wanted to be the one who said:
Some love stories end at the airport. This one begins there.
Masterlist
Season 2: Chapter 10 : In My Veins (Last Chapter)
The boxes multiplied faster than either of them expected.
It had been some days since the harbour, the decision sitting between them now not as a question but as a fact they were slowly building a shape around, and the apartment on 51st and Ninth had begun, piece by piece, to show it. Bookshelves half emptied. The desk cleared of everything except the manuscript itself, which YN had not yet decided how to pack, as though putting it in a box would mean admitting the study was really closing.
Alexia folded clothes into a case with the same efficiency she brought to most things, methodical, unsentimental, and looked up every so often to check on YN, who was not moving quite so efficiently through the bookshelves.
"You've been holding that one for ten minutes," she said.
YN looked down. A paperback, spine cracked from use, the kind of book that had clearly been read many times.
"My father gave me this," they said. "Before I left for London. First real trip alone." They turned it over in their hands. "I forgot I still had it."
Alexia did not say anything. She came and sat on the arm of the chair beside them, close, present, and let them hold the book for as long as they needed to.
"I'm keeping it," YN said, finally, and set it carefully into the box marked KEEP in their own handwriting, separate from the boxes headed for storage, separate from the ones headed for donation.
"Good," Alexia said.
They worked like that for hours, in stretches, some silent and some full of the easy back and forth they had gotten used to, YN narrating the history of things Alexia had never asked about, a chipped mug from a reading in London, a photograph of a much younger YN standing awkwardly beside their father outside a café with a striped awning, the same café, Alexia realised, they had promised to take her to.
"That's the one," YN said, following her look. "Barcelona."
"He looks like you," Alexia said. Gently.
"Everyone says that." YN's mouth curved, something soft and a little sad in it, but not heavy the way it once had been. "I used to hate hearing it. I think I like it now."
Alexia took the photograph from their hands. Looked at it properly, the striped awning, the two of them squinting against the sun, YN small and gap-toothed beside a man who did, unmistakably, share their jaw, their exact way of standing.
"Will you take me there first?" she said. Quiet. "Before anywhere else. Before your mother's, even. I want to see it before I see anything."
YN looked at her.
"Why first?"
"Because I think you need somewhere to start that isn't a decision," Alexia said. "Somewhere that's just yours. And I want to be standing there with you when you walk back into it."
YN took the photograph back gently. Set it, carefully, on top of the KEEP box, where it would not be buried beneath anything else.
"First," they said. "I promise."
They packed until the light went gold through the west windows and neither of them had the energy left to lift another box.
YN stood in the middle of the half-emptied study for a moment, looking at the bare shelves, the desk cleared down to its wood grain, the shape of a room that had held six years of their life now visibly disappearing.
"I don't know if I can do this," they said. Quiet. Not to Alexia specifically, more to the room itself.
Alexia looked up from the case she was closing.
"Do what," she said. Careful, not alarmed, giving them room to mean whatever they meant.
"Leave here," YN said. "I built this. All of it. The whole life I have now, I built it in this apartment, after." They did not finish the sentence, but Alexia understood the shape of the word missing from it. "I don't know what it means to leave the place where I put myself back together."
Alexia crossed the room. Did not touch them yet, just stood close, giving the fear its space the way she had learned to.
"You're not leaving it behind," she said. "You're bringing it with you. The person you built here comes with you. That doesn't stay in a lease."
YN looked at her for a long moment. Something in their shoulders, tight since they'd started packing this room, eased by a fraction.
"Okay," they said.
"Okay?"
"Okay," YN said again, and reached for the next box.
Alexia watched them a moment longer before returning to her own packing, and she understood, watching the careful way YN folded the last of the manuscript pages into a box, that this was not the last time that particular fear would surface. It would come again, in smaller waves, probably all the way to the airport and beyond. She filed that away, quietly, the way she had learned to file away the things that mattered.
"We need a night off," Alexia said, surveying the wreckage of half-packed boxes with the particular exhaustion of someone who had spent the day dismantling a life. "An actual night. Not more of this."
"There's a carnival," YN said. "Down by the river. I saw a flyer for it weeks ago and forgot completely."
"Perfect," Alexia said. "Get your coat."
The carnival was loud and bright and entirely alive, strings of coloured lights criss-crossing over the crowd, the smell of caramel and frying dough thick in the evening air, a small stage set up near the water with a band already playing something upbeat, people dancing in loose clusters in front of it without much concern for whether they were any good at it.
Alexia was delighted by all of it.
She pulled YN toward a game with rigged rings and impossible odds, planted her feet, and threw with the total focus of someone who had spent her whole career refusing to accept a ball wasn't going where she aimed it. Three rings. Three misses.
"This is criminal," she announced, to the teenager running the stall, who looked entirely unbothered by the accusation. "The peg is bent. Look at it. That's not a fair peg."
"Ma'am, it's the same peg for everyone."
"It's criminal," Alexia said again, with the absolute conviction of someone who did not lose gracefully, and handed over money for three more rings, and missed all three of those too, and glared at the stall as though it had personally wronged her.
YN was laughing too hard to be helpful.
"Don't," Alexia said, not looking at them, lining up a final throw with fierce concentration. "Don't you dare laugh at me."
"I would never," YN said, laughing.
The ring missed by a wide margin. Alexia threw her hands up, betrayed, and YN pulled her away from the stall still laughing, and she let herself be pulled, muttering something about rigged carnival games all the way to the next stall, where she insisted, entirely without irony, that they try the exact same kind of game and this time YN had to watch her win.
She did not win that one either. She declared it a moral victory regardless.
Then toward a stall selling something fried and sugared that she insisted YN try, and then toward the edge of the crowd near the stage, where she stood swaying slightly to the music, entirely unselfconscious, entirely herself.
YN watched her for a while.
Then they stepped back, just a few feet, into the shadow at the edge of the lights, and pulled out their phone.
Their mother answered quickly, the way she always did lately, as though she had started keeping the phone closer since the last call by the river.
"YN?"
"Mama," they said. Watching Alexia across the crowd, the coloured lights catching in her hair, her laugh carrying even over the music. "I'm coming home."
A pause on the line. Then a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and something else entirely.
"When?" her mother said. Her voice had gone thick.
"Soon," YN said. "We're packing. It's really happening, Mama."
"Both of you."
"Both of us."
Their mother was quiet for a moment, and YN could hear her breathing change, could picture her exactly, standing in the kitchen of the house YN had not entered in six years, one hand pressed briefly to her mouth.
"I'll see you soon, cariño," she said. Finally. Simply.
"Soon," YN said again.
They hung up.
For a while, YN did not move.
They stayed there in the shadow at the edge of the lights, phone still warm in their hand, watching Alexia sway to the music as though the world had not just shifted beneath their feet.
She was laughing at something a child had done near the stage, head tilted back, hair catching the carnival lights in brief flashes of gold, and YN smiled before they could stop themselves.
Not because leaving had become easy.
Not because Barcelona was suddenly simple.
Not because the fear had gone.
Because Alexia was there. Across the crowd. Unaware. Alive with light.
And for the first time, home did not feel like a place YN had to return to alone.
Then Alexia turned.
Found them across the crowd.
Her face opened immediately, bright and certain, and she lifted one hand, beckoning them back without asking where they had gone.
Come here.
YN went.
The band shifted into something slower.
A woman had stepped up to the microphone, a guitar player beside her, and the first chords of it drifted out over the crowd, unhurried, and Alexia's face changed as she recognised it, something soft moving across her expression.
You're in my veins, the singer began. Even when you're gone, you're in my veins.
YN crossed the distance to her.
Alexia's arms went around their neck before they had fully arrived, easy and certain, and YN's hands found her waist, and they began to move, properly this time, none of the careful managed distance of a wedding months ago, nothing performed about it, just the two of them swaying together under the string lights with a stranger singing about exactly the thing sitting between them.
I flew across an ocean, found you at a gate. Every door I nearly missed led me home too late. Every door I nearly missed led me straight to you.
Alexia rested her forehead against YN's.
"You looked happy," she said, quiet enough that the music almost swallowed it.
YN's hands tightened slightly at her waist.
"I was."
"Because of the song?"
YN looked at her, at the lights caught in her hair, at the softness in her face, at the impossible fact of her standing here.
"Because of you," they said.
Alexia's smile faltered into something tender, something almost too much, and she pressed closer, her arms tightening around their neck, and they kept moving, slow, unhurried, the lights and the crowd and the music all falling away until there was only this, her waist under their hands, her breath against their cheek, the whole enormous decision they had made together finally, finally something they could hold onto instead of just talk about.
You're in my veins, the song went. Barcelona or nowhere, you're in my veins.
They danced until the song ended, and then a little longer, into the next one, neither of them in any hurry to let go.
Later, much later, when the carnival lights had become only colour behind YN's eyes and the apartment had gone quiet around them, Alexia found them in the dark without asking.
She shifted closer beneath the sheets, slow with sleep, and settled her head against YN's chest as though it was the most natural place in the world to land.
YN went still for a moment.
Not because they did not want her there.
Because they did. Too much.
Alexia's cheek rested over their heart. Her hand followed a second later, palm flat against the steady beat beneath their ribs, and YN felt something inside them soften so completely it almost hurt.
They had spent so long thinking home was something they had lost. A city. A house. A father's voice. A kitchen they had not entered in six years.
But Alexia breathed against them, warm and heavy with trust, and YN understood, suddenly, that home could also be this.
Someone resting where the heart had once only known how to ache.
Someone trusting it enough to sleep there.
YN wrapped both arms around her and held her carefully, as though the whole enormous decision of their lives had narrowed down to this one quiet weight against their chest.
"YN," Alexia murmured.
"Mm?"
But Alexia did not finish. Her breathing evened out instead, slow and deep, her mouth softening against YN's shirt.
YN lowered their face to her hair and closed their eyes.
"I love you," they whispered.
Not to make her answer.
Not to wake her.
Only because the words had nowhere else to go.
Alexia smiled in her sleep, small and certain, and YN held her closer.
Some love stories end at the airport. This one begins there.
Masterlist
Season 2: Chapter: 9 : Your Co-Passenger
They stayed like that for a long time.
Alexia’s head rested just beneath YN’s chin, her hand still resting over their heart, feeling it slow, gradually, into something steadier than it had been all morning. YN’s arms were wrapped around her shoulders, tight, unwilling to loosen, their chin settled on top of her head.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
The city outside had begun its ordinary morning work, distant and indifferent, and the room held its own quiet, warm and unhurried, the kind of silence that did not need filling.
“Alexia,” YN said, finally.
“Mm.”
“I’m scared.”
She went still. Did not pull back yet, just listened, her hand pressing slightly harder over their heart.
“I don’t know how it’s going to work,” they said. “The logistics. My work. Your club. Two cities, or one, or neither, I don’t know yet. But I know I don’t want to spend a single moment of my life without you. I’ve never known anything that clearly before.”
Alexia adjusted herself slowly, shifting until she could see their face properly, eye level, her hand still resting where it had been.
“I want to build a future,” YN said, looking at her now, steady despite the tremor still sitting somewhere underneath their voice. “Wherever you are. As your co-passenger. In life, not just on a plane.” They paused. “I cannot imagine myself without you anymore. I’ve tried. I stood by a river this morning and tried to imagine a version of my life that doesn’t have you in it, and I couldn’t do it.”
There’s nothing there.
A beat.
“Just you,” YN said.
Alexia reached up. Ran her thumb slowly along their cheek, feeling the faint dampness still there from earlier.
She did not speak right away. She let the words settle, let them mean everything they were meant to mean, before she trusted her voice to hold steady.
Her eyes filled.
She looked at YN with something that had no other name but love, plain and enormous, and when she finally spoke her voice was quiet, certain, threaded through with the tears she was not trying to hide.
“You have me, YN,” she said. “We will be scared together. I told you that already, and I meant it then, and I mean it more now.”
She pressed her palm flatter against their chest, over their heart, feeling it beat beneath her hand.
“I’m not leaving you,” she said. “Just like you never left me. Not in a doorway. Not in a jewellery store. Not once, not even for a second, when it would have been so much easier.”
YN’s breath caught.
“So I won’t either,” Alexia said. “Wherever this goes. Barcelona, New York, somewhere neither of us has thought of yet. I don’t need to know how it works right now. I just need you to know that I’m staying for all of it.”
She leaned in and pressed her forehead to theirs.
Neither of them moved for a long moment. Just breath, and warmth, and the particular stillness of two people who had finally stopped needing to solve everything today.
“Co-passenger,” YN said, quietly, into the small space between them.
“Always,” Alexia said.
“We’ve been talking about forever for twenty minutes,” YN said, eventually, “and we still haven’t had breakfast.”
Alexia laughed. It broke something open in the room, light and sudden, and the tension that had been sitting there, warm but heavy, finally eased.
“You’re the one who started it,” she said.
“I stand by every word,” YN said. “I would just also like some eggs.”
Their eyes drifted, without meaning to, to the blanket pooled low around her waist, her clothes still scattered near the foot of the bed from the night before.
“You know,” YN said.
“What?”
“I’m kind of liking you like this.”
Alexia looked down. Realised what they meant. Her face went warm immediately, and she laughed, properly, ducking her face into YN’s chest to hide it.
YN laughed too, arms coming around her, and for a while neither of them moved to get up at all, the laughter settling into something soft and easy between them.
Eventually YN did get up.
They swung their legs out of bed, and the moment the warmth of them left her side Alexia’s hand found theirs. She did not decide to do it. It simply happened, automatic, the way a hand finds a railing before the mind has registered the need for balance.
YN looked down at their linked fingers. Then at her.
“I was just getting up,” they said.
“I know,” Alexia said.
She did not let go, and YN did not ask her to, sitting back down on the edge of the bed instead, something quietly pleased settling into their face, the kind of thing neither of them needed to comment on for it to be understood.
“You know,” Alexia said, after a moment, looking at them properly, relaxed now, playful in a way that had not quite surfaced until this morning.
“What?”
“You worry a lot.”
YN rolled their eyes. “I’m aware.”
“Good thing you found someone patient,” Alexia said, and the smile she gave them was warm and a little smug, entirely, comfortably herself.
They made it to breakfast eventually, and somewhere between the eggs and the coffee the conversation turned soft and unplanned, the kind of talking that had no destination and did not need one.
Alexia reached across at some point, without any particular reason, and held YN’s hand while she drank her coffee with the other, and neither of them mentioned it, and neither of them let go.
“I spoke to Mama,” YN said, buttering toast without looking up. “This morning. Before the run turned into an actual conversation.”
Alexia looked up. “What did she say?”
YN smiled, the particular smile that meant they were about to enjoy this. “She said, and I’m quoting her exactly. That girl is completely and madly in love with you.”
Alexia’s face went warm all over again. “No she didn’t.”
“She absolutely did,” YN said. “She’s been saying some version of it for weeks.”
“You never told me that.”
“I didn’t know how to,” YN said. Then, quieter, something a little more unguarded slipping in beneath the teasing. “I think Mama realised before I did, if I’m honest. She usually does.”
Alexia reached across the table and took their hand, and for a moment neither of them said anything, just held on, the toast going cold, the coffee steaming between them.
“What’s the first place you’d take me?” she asked, after a while. “In Barcelona.”
YN considered this properly, the way they considered most things. “There’s a café near where I grew up. Nothing special to anyone else. But my father used to take me there on Sundays before.” They paused, but it was not the old flinching pause. “I’d want you to see it.”
“I’d like that.”
“And you’d have to meet my mother properly,” YN said. “Not on the phone.”
“I already love her,” Alexia said. “Fair warning.”
“She’ll love you more,” YN said. “She already does, honestly. I think she loved you before I let myself.”
Alexia smiled at her plate.
“And you’d have to meet mine,” she said. “My mother has opinions about everyone I’ve ever brought home. She’ll interrogate you.”
“I look forward to it,” YN said, entirely sincere.
“Where would we live?” Alexia asked, quieter now, testing the question the way you test something fragile.
“Wherever you want me,” she said, before YN could answer their own question, “I’ll be there.”
YN looked at her for a long moment.
“Be with me,” they said. Simply.
A pause.
“I’d like to stay in the house I grew up in,” they said. “Eventually. My mother’s alone there now. I think I’d like to be closer. I think I owe her that, and I think I want it too, not just as an obligation.”
Alexia did not hesitate.
“Then that’s where we’ll be,” she said.
“You don’t have to decide that right now.”
“I’m not deciding a location,” Alexia said. “I’m choosing you. The house is just where you happen to be standing.”
YN looked at her, something moving across their face too large for the small kitchen to hold, and reached for her hand again, and for a moment neither of them said anything else, both of them leaning into a future that had a shape now, soft and unhurried, and did not need to be finished today.
They left the apartment sometime around sunset, no real plan, just YN saying “come on” and holding out their hand.
Alexia took it before they’d finished asking.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“No idea,” YN said.
Alexia raised an eyebrow. “That’s not very reassuring.”
“Good thing you’ve got your co-passenger,” YN said, and Alexia laughed, and they walked out into the evening together, no destination, just the city and the last of the light.
On the way they stopped for ice cream, one cone between them, YN holding it with the particular responsible seriousness they brought to most things.
Alexia leaned over. Took a bite.
Then another.
“That’s mine too, you know,” YN said.
Alexia grinned, entirely unrepentant, and took a third bite before YN could react.
Then, without warning, she plucked the cone straight out of their hand.
With the smallest grin, she dabbed a little ice cream onto YN’s cheek.
YN blinked.
“Did you just.”
Alexia looked entirely unapologetic.
She winked.
Then she turned and jogged away, laughing, not trying very hard to actually escape.
YN stood there for a beat. Looked at the melting cone in her hand, retreating down the path. Touched the ice cream on their cheek. Looked at their fingers.
Shook their head, laughing despite themselves.
“Alexia.”
Then they went after her, closed the distance in a few easy strides, caught her hand, and their fingers laced together immediately, neither of them letting go.
“You’re unbelievable,” they said, still laughing, both of them slowing gradually into an easy walk.
Alexia’s hand stayed in theirs, the way it had all day, at breakfast and at the door and now here, an unbroken thread neither of them had ever needed to acknowledge out loud.
By the time they reached the harbour the laughter had faded into something quieter, softer, the particular comfortable silence of two people who had run out of things that needed saying, at least for tonight.
The water was gold and moving, the last of the sun sitting low over it, and the air had gone cool and salt-touched in the way it did at this hour. They stood at the railing together, fingers still linked, watching the light change on the water.
Alexia rested her head on YN’s shoulder.
Neither of them spoke. The gulls called somewhere further along the water. A ferry crossed slowly in the distance, small against the wide gold surface, and the whole evening felt suspended, unhurried, entirely theirs.
“Let’s go home,” YN said, quietly.
Alexia lifted her head. Looked at them.
She did not ask which home they meant.
She already knew.
She simply smiled, and laced her fingers tighter through theirs, and together they turned from the railing and walked into the last of the light.
Some love stories end at the airport. This one begins there.
Masterlist
Season 2: Chapter 8 : Let's Go Home
It was still dark when YN woke.
They lay still for a moment, the way they had gotten into the habit of doing, looking at Alexia beside them, asleep, her breathing slow and even, one arm thrown loosely across the space where they had been. The blanket had slipped, and her shoulder was bare, and even in the near dark she looked like something YN did not entirely trust themselves to have.
They did not wake her.
They got up carefully, found their running clothes in the dark by feel, and left a note on the kitchen counter, just in case, three words, gone for a run, before letting themselves quietly out of the apartment.
The city at this hour belonged to almost no one.
A few other runners. A truck making early deliveries. The particular blue-grey light of a Manhattan morning before the sun had properly committed to rising, the avenues long and mostly empty, and YN ran without much direction, the cold air sharp in their lungs, trying to outrun something that did not have legs and could not, therefore, be outrun.
They stopped near the river. Bent forward, hands on their knees, breathing hard, and pulled out their phone.
It was around four in the morning in Barcelona. They called anyway.
Their mother answered on the second ring, voice thick with sleep but immediately alert, the specific alertness of a parent who has trained themselves to wake fully the instant a certain name appears on a screen.
"YN? Is everything alright?"
"I'm sorry," YN said. "I know it's late there."
"It's fine. Tell me."
YN stood by the river, watching the water move, grey and indifferent in the early light, and did not immediately know how to begin.
"It's nothing," they said. "I shouldn't have called this early."
"YN. You called me at four in the morning my time. It is something."
"It's stupid."
"Try me."
YN was quiet for a moment. A runner passed behind them, footsteps fading.
"I don't really know how to say it," they said.
"You never do," their mother said. Not unkindly. Just true. "You've been like this since you were small. You'd sit on things for days before you said them. Say it badly if you have to. I don't need it to be a good sentence."
YN exhaled. Watched the water.
"It's Alexia," they said, finally.
"The one who missed her flight."
"Yes."
"I know who she is, YN. What about her."
"I know," YN said. "I just." They stopped. Started again. "I don't know how to explain what's happening in my chest right now. It doesn't make sense. She's here. She's safe. Nothing is wrong."
"But," their mother said.
"But I keep waiting for it to go wrong," YN said. "I keep waiting for her to disappear. Yesterday I lost sight of her in a crowd for four seconds and I thought I was going to be sick. My whole body just." They stopped again, frustrated at themselves, at the shape their own feelings refused to take in words. "I don't know how to say it properly."
"You're saying it fine," their mother said. Gently.
YN told her the rest, slower now, the words coming easier once the first ones were out. Not the guilt. Not the house. Just Alexia. All of it, from the beginning, the plane and the apartment and the mall and the wedding and the gate she had walked away from, and the fear that had sat in their chest since a crowd swallowed her for four seconds and their whole body had gone cold.
"I love her, Mama," they said. "I don't want to be away from her. Not for a day. Not for an hour, if I could help it."
Their mother was quiet on the other end for a moment.
"Look at the girl who left a plane for you," she said, finally. "Do you think she will ever leave you? In life. In New York. Anywhere."
YN said nothing.
"That girl is madly in love with you, YN," their mother said. "I know you love her too. I've known since the first time you said her name on the phone and your voice did something I hadn't heard it do in a very long time."
"Mama."
"I know why you're scared," she said. Simply. No preamble, no working up to it. "I know why you haven't come home. I've always known."
YN's throat closed.
She had never said it. Not once, in six years, had she named the thing directly, and YN understood now, standing by the river with the phone pressed hard to their ear, that she had known the entire time and had simply chosen not to make them say it.
"I'm not angry," she said. "I never was. I just wanted you to come home when you were ready. Not because I asked."
YN was crying now, quietly, the tears cold against their face in the morning air.
"I know why you're worried," their mother said. "Why you're scared to come back, cariño."
She did not say the word. She did not need to. YN heard it anyway, sitting underneath everything she had said, and something in their chest that had been clenched for six years loosened, just slightly, just enough to breathe around.
"Go," their mother said, and her voice shifted, the way it always did, warm and teasing even through everything. "Not everyone is lucky enough to have a love like this, YN. Don't waste it standing by a river feeling sorry for yourself."
YN laughed. Wet and helpless.
"I love you, Ma," they said.
"I love you too," she said. "Now go home to your girl."
The apartment was quiet when YN let themselves back in.
Alexia was still asleep, exactly as they had left her, though the blanket had shifted further now, pooled low, her hair a soft chaos across the pillow, one arm curled beneath it. Her clothes from the night before were still where they had landed, scattered near the foot of the bed.
YN stood in the doorway for a moment.
They thought about the plane. The hand over hers at thirty-five thousand feet.
They thought about the first night after the mall, the knife and the glass and the blood, and how Alexia had sat with them on this same couch, in the next room, and turned off the lamp and pulled a blanket over both of them without asking, and how they had fallen asleep with her weight against their chest for the first time, the fear of that day finally quiet enough to let them rest.
They thought about weeks before that. A corner somewhere in the West Village, a cigarette between their lips, and Alexia reaching over without a word and taking it from their mouth and dropping it in a bin. Stop. She had never explained why it mattered to her so much. They had never smoked again after that, not once, not even in the months since.
They thought about the apartment on the first night, the book on the shelf she had not known was theirs. The knife. The glass doors. The wedding, the corridor, the doorbell that had changed everything. The window last night, her hesitating before she touched them, asking permission with every step, choosing them again and again without ever once being asked to.
They crossed the room. Slipped back beneath the blanket beside her.
They did not touch her yet. They simply looked, the way they had looked that first morning after she stayed, quiet and full of a disbelief that had not entirely gone even now.
Alexia stirred.
Her eyes opened slowly, adjusting to the light, and found YN watching her.
"Hi," she said. Her voice thick with sleep.
"Hi," YN said.
She reached out. Brushed her hand along their cheek, still half asleep, the gesture entirely unthinking, entirely familiar now.
YN smiled. Leaned into it.
They pressed a soft kiss to her nose.
Alexia laughed, quiet and warm, and moved closer, tucking her head just beneath their chin, and YN wrapped their arms around her fully, pulling her in, her bare shoulder warm beneath their hand, her hair against their jaw.
"I love you," YN said. Into her hair.
"I know," she said. "I love you too."
YN held her a moment longer, feeling the last of the night's fear finally settle into something quieter, something that no longer had teeth.
They rested their forehead against hers. Just that. No words, no movement, just the quiet weight of it, both of them breathing the same air for a moment.
"Let's go home, Alexia," they said.
She went very still.
Then she pulled back to look at their face, searching it, making sure.
"Barcelona," she said.
A pause. YN held her eyes.
"With you," they said.
Alexia's eyes filled, and she said nothing for a moment, just looked at them, and then she kissed them, slow and certain, and when she pulled back she was smiling through it.
Some love stories end at the airport. This one begins there.
Masterlist
Season 2: Chapter 7 : Don't Let Go
The phone rang while Alexia was still in the shower.
YN picked it up off the counter without thinking, meaning to bring it to her, and saw the name on the screen. Mama. They almost set it back down. Instead they answered it, because Alexia had asked them to once, weeks ago, if her mother ever called and she was not near her phone.
"Alexia?" her mother's voice said, warm and a little rushed.
"She's in the shower," YN said. "I can get her."
"Oh. No, it's fine. Just tell her to call me back. I only wanted to know when she's coming home. The club keeps asking me and I keep telling them I don't know either."
"I'll tell her," YN said.
"Thank you, cariño."
The line went quiet. YN set the phone down on the counter and stood there for a moment, looking at it.
They had known this was coming. They had known it the way you know a train is coming before you hear it, a change in the air. But hearing it stated so plainly, so simply, by someone who loved Alexia and had every right to want her home, made it real in a way it had not quite been before.
Alexia came out a few minutes later, hair wrapped in a towel, and found YN standing very still in the kitchen.
"Everything okay?" she said.
"Your mum called," YN said. "She wants to know when you're coming home."
Alexia's face did something complicated. She crossed the kitchen and picked up her phone, dialled, and YN listened to one side of the conversation, Alexia's voice going soft and reassuring, the specific tone of a daughter managing a mother's worry.
"Soon, Mama," she said. "I'll be back soon. I promise."
She hung up. Looked at YN.
Neither of them said anything about it.
They went out anyway. It had been planned for days, a walk through parts of the city Alexia had not seen properly, and neither of them wanted to let the phone call cancel it.
The Highline first, then down into the Meatpacking District, then further, into the crush of a Saturday afternoon near Union Square, the crowds thick and moving in every direction, tourists and vendors and the general churning mass of a city on a warm weekend.
YN held her hand the whole way. Old habit now, comfortable, unremarkable.
Then a group of people cut between them, a family with a stroller and too many bags, moving fast toward a subway entrance, and for three seconds, maybe four, YN's hand closed on nothing.
"Alexia?"
They turned. She was not there.
"Alexia."
Louder now. People moved past, indifferent, a wall of shoulders and bags and none of them her. YN's chest went tight, fast, the specific cold flood of panic that arrived before the mind had time to reason with it.
They pulled out their phone. Called her.
It rang. And rang. No answer.
"Alexia!"
They were moving now, pushing through the crowd, scanning faces, and every face that was not hers felt like an accusation. The noise of the square seemed to double, the sun too bright, the whole afternoon suddenly unbearable.
Then, over the crowd, a hand.
"YN!"
She was there. Twenty feet away, near a fruit stand, having simply stopped to look at something and lost track of the distance between them. She was smiling when she said it, an ordinary smile, the smile of someone who had not been frightened at all.
YN reached her in seconds.
They did not say anything. They just pulled her in, both arms, tight enough that she made a small surprised sound against their shoulder, and they held on.
"YN," she said. "I'm right here."
"I know," YN said. Their voice was not steady. "I know."
She pulled back to look at their face and stopped.
The fear in their eyes had not gone yet. It sat there, raw and unmanaged, the same look she had seen once before, in a jewellery store, on a different afternoon, over a different kind of loss.
"Hey," she said, softer. "I'm here."
YN nodded. Did not let go of her hand.
They did not let go of it for the rest of the day.
It became something neither of them talked about, but both of them noticed.
When the crowd thickened again outside a market a few blocks later, YN's grip tightened before Alexia had even registered the crowd forming. When a man stepped too close behind her, reaching past for something on a stall, YN's arm was suddenly between them, a shoulder turned, a low word said to the man that Alexia did not catch but that made him step back immediately.
"YN," she said, quietly, after the third time.
"I know," they said. "I know I'm being."
"I didn't say anything was wrong."
"You didn't have to."
She did not push it further. She let them hold her hand too tightly, let them angle their body between her and every stranger who came within a few feet, and she understood, somewhere underneath the mild embarrassment of it, that this was not about her safety in a crowded market.
This was about a phone call. And a countdown neither of them had said out loud yet.
The apartment, when they reached it, felt very still after the noise of the day.
Alexia locked the door behind them. YN hung their coat without a word and walked to the window, and stood there, looking out at nothing in particular, their back to the room.
Alexia went to the kitchen. Filled the kettle. Made two cups of tea neither of them was going to drink, because her hands needed somewhere to be while her mind worked out what to do with the rest of her.
She brought both cups to the living room and set one down near YN. They did not turn.
Five minutes passed. Maybe longer.
It was not an awkward silence. It was heavier than that, the kind that sat in a room like weather, and Alexia found herself watching YN's shoulders rather than the tea cooling in front of her.
She did not know what to do with her hands. She almost reached out twice and stopped herself both times, unsure whether touch would help or whether it would feel like a demand for something YN could not yet give.
"Long day," she said, eventually. Not really a question.
"No," YN said.
Another silence.
She looked at their hands. YN's fingers were laced together in front of them, knuckles pale, gripping so tightly that the skin had gone white in patches.
"You're squeezing your own hands," she said.
YN looked down. Seemed almost surprised to find it true. They unclenched their fingers slowly, one at a time, as though it required effort they had not accounted for.
"I didn't realise," they said.
Alexia stayed where she was. She wanted to move closer and did not know if she was allowed to yet, and that not-knowing sat uncomfortably in her chest, a version of fear she had not expected to feel tonight.
"YN," she said. Quiet. "Talk to me."
"I don't." YN stopped. Started again. "I'm not sure how to explain it."
"Try."
"When I couldn't see you today." They stopped again. Their jaw worked, the words caught somewhere behind it. "It wasn't. I don't think it was about today. Not really."
"What was it about?"
"I don't know how to say it," YN said, and there was frustration in it now, at themselves, at the gap between what they felt and what they could put into words. "I keep trying to find the sentence and it isn't there."
Alexia waited. She did not fill the silence this time, though every instinct told her to.
"My body remembered something," YN said, finally. Slower now, testing each word before releasing it. "Before my mind did. That's the closest I can get to it."
"Remembered what."
"Losing someone," they said. "The day my father died. Nobody had told me anything yet. I just felt it. Here." They pressed a hand flat against their own chest. "Cold. All at once. And today, for four seconds, it was the same feeling. Exactly the same. Before I even had time to think anything."
Alexia felt something in her throat tighten.
She crossed the room now, slowly, still unsure if this was the right thing, and stood beside them at the window rather than in front of them, close enough to be felt but not demanding anything.
"I survived losing my dad," YN said. Their voice had gone very flat, very quiet. "I don't think I'd survive losing you."
It was not dramatic. That was the worst part. It sounded like something they had already decided, calmly, somewhere private, long before tonight.
Alexia reached over. Hesitated for half a second, her hand hovering, and then took one of their hands anyway.
"I can't promise you nothing bad will happen," she said. Slowly, because she was working it out as she said it. "I want to promise you that. I do. But I'd be lying, and I don't think you need another lie right now."
YN turned to look at her.
"What I can promise," she said, "is that I will keep choosing you. Every day. I will keep coming back. If I ever lose you in a crowd again, I will keep finding you."
"You can't guarantee that," YN said. Quiet. Not arguing, just stating the fear plainly.
"No," Alexia said. "I can't. Nobody can guarantee anything. But I can promise you the trying. That's the only thing I actually have to give you."
YN was quiet for a long moment.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said. "Not tonight. Not because I'm promising forever. Because right now, in this room, that's true, and I need you to hear it while it's true."
YN did not answer. Their shoulders stayed tense, their breathing still shallow, the words landing somewhere but not yet reaching the part of them that needed convincing.
"Tea?" Alexia said. Gesturing at the cups, still full, gone cold on the counter behind them.
YN shook their head, small, almost automatic.
"Sofa," Alexia said instead. Not a question this time. She led them there, and they sat, and for a moment there was distance between them, a foot of cushion, both of them unsure how to close it.
Then YN moved.
Slowly, without announcing it, they curled toward her, their head finding her shoulder and then, gradually, her lap, until they were folded into her the way something folds when it has run out of strength to hold its own shape. Alexia's hand found their hair. Began to move through it, slow, careful, not trying to fix anything, just present.
Minutes passed. The tea went cold. Neither of them spoke.
"Can I hold you?" Alexia said, finally. Quiet. It felt like a strange question to ask of someone already in her lap, but she asked it anyway, because she wanted YN to have the choosing of it.
YN nodded against her.
She wrapped both arms around them properly then, and they stayed like that for a long while, the apartment holding its breath around them, the city outside doing its ordinary indifferent work.
"Come with me," she said, eventually. Soft.
She led them to the bedroom, slower than before, no urgency in it, and sat them on the edge of the bed. She stood in front of them, between their knees, and framed their face with both hands, still uncertain, still feeling her way through this rather than commanding it.
"Tell me the rest," she said.
YN's jaw was tight. Their hands found her waist, holding on.
"I lost him and I never got to say the things I should have said," they said. "If I lost you too." They stopped. Tried again. "I don't know what would be left of me. I don't have a good way to say it. I just know that."
They were trembling now, faintly, a tremor she could feel through her hands where they rested on their shoulders.
Alexia kissed their forehead. Their cheek. The corner of their jaw.
"Don't leave me," they said, and finally, properly, they broke, their face pressing into her stomach, the sound muffled against her.
She held them through it. Did not rush it. Let them cry until the shaking eased on its own, her hands moving slow through their hair, saying nothing at all for a long while, because there was nothing that needed saying yet.
When it slowed, she tipped their face back up to hers.
"I'll keep choosing you," she said again. Quiet. "I'll keep coming back. Every time."
She kissed them.
Gently. She waited, watching, and YN kissed her back, and only then did she deepen it, still watching, still checking, the way she had been checking all evening.
"Can I?" she said, against their mouth, her hand at their cheek.
YN leaned into her palm. That was the answer.
She eased them back onto the bed slowly, watching their face the whole way, ready to stop the moment anything in it changed. YN went willingly, but she did not take that as permission for everything at once. She paused above them, one hand braced beside their head, waiting.
YN's hands found her waist first. Pulled, gently, an invitation rather than a demand.
She reached for the hem of their shirt. Stopped.
YN took her hand and guided it the rest of the way themselves, and only then did she lift it over their head, and her own followed a moment later, tossed toward the floor without either of them tracking where it landed.
She kissed down along their jaw. Paused at their throat. Looked up.
"Okay?" she said.
"Yes," YN said. Barely a whisper, but certain.
She continued, slow, feeling the fast pulse beneath her mouth begin to ease, checking their face every few moments the way you check a road before crossing it, never assuming the way was clear just because it had been a moment ago.
"Look at me," she said, when they closed their eyes.
YN opened them.
"I'm here," she said. "Tell me if you want to stop. Any time."
"I don't," YN said.
"I know," she said. "I'm still going to keep asking."
The rest of their clothes came away slowly, each step a small question answered before it was asked, her hands pausing at every new place, waiting for the small nod, the small sound, the small pull closer that told her to continue. She wanted YN to have time to believe it, time to let their body catch up with what their mind already knew, and when they finally came together it was slow and unhurried, both of them finding the rhythm together rather than one of them setting it, Alexia's hands framing their face whenever their eyes tried to close again.
"I'm here," she said, again and again, a quiet refrain matched to the rhythm between them, until the words themselves became a kind of touch. "I'm here. I keep choosing you. I'm here."
YN said her name once, low and wrecked, hands gripping her like an anchor, and she held their gaze through as much of it as either of them could manage, until it built and broke over both of them at once, and for a long moment neither of them could have said anything even if they had wanted to.
Afterward, YN pulled her close, and then, without either of them quite deciding it, shifted until their head was resting against her chest instead, her arm coming around their shoulders, holding them the way she had been holding them all evening.
Their breathing slowed together. YN's trembling, finally, stopped completely.
"You're safe with me," Alexia said, quiet, into their hair.
YN did not answer.
They did not need to.
Their arm was around her waist, holding on even in the stillness, and Alexia reached down and pulled the blanket up over both of them, tucking it in at the shoulder the way she had learned to, the way that had once been done for her.
Outside the window the city carried on, indifferent and constant.
Inside, the room was warm, and quiet, and neither of them let go.
