Te Liberé
a/n: smutty fwb/secret relationship vibes. this so technically part 4. you can read the first part here and my alexia masterlist with the other parts is here
word count: 3.8k
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There is a strange kind of violence in the sound of packing tape being ripped from a cardboard box. It’s a dry, shrieking noise that cuts through the hum of the fridge and the steady, depressing drum of London rain against the windows. You slide the box cutter through another seam of brown tape, the blade gliding with a clean, clinical snick.
This is her new reality. A sixteenth-floor flat in Nine Elms, overlooking a grey, swollen Thames that looks less like a river and more like an industrial drainage ditch. It smells of fresh emulsion paint, industrial floor cleaner, and the expensive timber of unboxed furniture that you dare not try to guess the cost of.
Alexia is sitting on a stack of unopened boxes, her long legs stretched out in front of her, ankles crossed. She’s wearing an oversized grey tracksuit—the neutral uniform of a woman between identities. The London City Lionesses logo hasn’t quite stuck to her skin yet; it still feels like a corporate stunt, a billionaire’s fever dream played out in the top flight of English women’s football. The papers called it the transfer of the century. You call it a logistical nightmare that has brought the center of your universe eleven hundred miles too close to your own front door.
“The kitchen is small,” she says, her voice devoid of any real complaint. She’s tracking the movement of your hands as you lift a stack of charcoal ceramic plates from a nest of bubble wrap. Her English is soft, the edges rounded off by years of international press conferences, but there is still that slight hesitation before certain sounds, the subtle pause where her brain negotiates between Catalan syntax and British monosyllables. “In Barcelona, the kitchen has the island. Here, it is just a corridor.”
“Welcome to London,” you say, not looking at her. You stack the plates on the marble counter with a deliberate clack. “You pay three grand a month for the privilege of cooking your eggs in a hallway. It’s character-building. It stops you from getting ideas above your station.”
She lets out a dry, breathy laugh that ends in a sniff. She’s tired. The medical took longer than expected because the British press wouldn’t stop hovering outside Cobdown Park like a flock of damp, bloated crows. They wanted pictures of her; they wanted a statement about the multi-club ownership model; they wanted to know if she’d spoken to her new teammates. Instead, she’d given them the standard, blank-eyed smile that she uses when she’s hiding a tactical tweak or a lingering hamstring tweak.
“I don’t have ideas,” she murmurs, her fingers tracing the edge of a cardboard box. “Michele says this is the project. The project needs a house.”
“Michele Kang has a team in Washington and a team in Lyon, and she’s currently using you as a very expensive billboard on the side of the A20,” you reply, your tone deadpan, devoid of any real malice but sharp enough to keep the air thin. You reach into the box and pull out a framed photograph. It’s her and her sister, standing on a beach in Ibiza, their skin dark from the Mediterranean sun, teeth flashing against the camera glare. It looks like a relic from a different geological era compared to the slate-grey sky bleeding into the river outside. “Where do you want the family portraits? Next to the toaster or over the radiator?”
Alexia looks at the frame in your hand. Her expression doesn’t change. She has this terrifying capacity for emotional neutrality when she wants it—a shutter that comes down behind her eyes, leaving nothing but a blank, beautiful surface. “Put it on the shelf. The one near the lamp.”
You move across the room, your socks swishing against the pristine herringbone floor. The apartment is too quiet. In Surrey, you have the rustle of the trees and the distant roar of the A3 to keep you company. Here, the silence is synthetic, insulated by layers of reinforced glass and the architectural arrogance of a luxury high-rise. You can see the lights of the station below—the tiny, red-and-white beetles of commuters crawling through the downpour, completely unaware that the two-time Ballon d’Or winner is currently watching them while deciding where to store her protein shakers.
It’s an absurd setup. The hierarchy of London football has been completely inverted by a massive injection of American capital and a three-year contract that makes your first salary look like pocket money. You think about the training ground at Billericay, the cold Tuesday mornings you spent tracking back on pitches that look like plowed fields, while she was living in a high-tech fortress in Sant Joan Despí. Now, she’s here. In your city. Sharing your weather. Eating your bad bread.
“You are thinking too much,” she says. She hasn’t moved from the stack of boxes, but her gaze has shifted from the window to the back of your neck. You can feel it—that unnerving, localised heat that usually precedes a bad tackle or a sudden shift in possession. “Your face goes… tight.”
“I’m always thinking. It’s a defense mechanism. It keeps me from realising that I’m spending my Friday night acting as an unpaid removal man for a woman who could hire a removal team to move her stuff a lot faster.”
“They won’t know where the plates go,” she says simply. She stands up, the movement fluid and unhurried, the natural grace of someone whose body is worth millions of euros on the open market. She walks over to you, her bare feet making no sound on the wood. When she stops, she’s close enough that you can smell the dampness on her hair—she’d run from the car to the lobby without an umbrella, a stubborn Catalan refusal to acknowledge the British climate. She smells of the high-end shampoo they stock in the luxury hotels near Mayfair, mixed with the faint, metallic tang of wet cardboard.
She reaches past you to adjust the photo frame you’ve just set down. Her forearm brushes yours—a brief, cool slide of skin that makes the hairs on your wrist stand up. “Better like this,” she decides, turning the frame three degrees to the left. “More straight.”
“You’re a psycho,” you mutter, stepping back to give yourself room to breathe. The flat feels smaller now that she’s on her feet. “Everything has to be a perfect with you. Even the domestic stuff.”
“It is not perfect. It is correct.” She turns her head, her hazel eyes fixing on you with that heavy, unblinking intensity that makes most people reconsider their life choices. There’s a faint smudge of dark purple under her right eye from the standard exhaustion of a forty-eight-hour transition across continents. “You are in a bad mood today. Why? Because the training was bad?”
“Training was fine. Sonia had us doing transition drills for two hours in the cold. My quads feel like they’ve been punched repeatedly, and I have five hundred unread messages from my agent about a boot contract I don’t want.” You lean against the kitchen counter, crossing your arms over your chest. “And now I’m here. In a glass box, watching you pretend that you’re going to enjoy playing away at St Helens in January.”
Alexia’s mouth twitches at the corner—a tiny, micro-expression of amusement that she quickly swallows. “St Helens is cold?”
“St Helens is St Helens. They don’t have Sant Antoni or the beach. They have a north wind that will take the skin right off your face. You’ll be wearing three pairs of skins and wondering why you didn’t just stay in Spain and play for Madrid CFF.”
“I like the challenge,” she says, her language dropping into that familiar, rehearsed groove she uses for interviews. But then she stops, her voice losing that professional veneer, dropping an octave into something more intimate, more jagged. “And I like that you are thirty minutes away by car. Not three hours on the plane.”
The honesty of it lands like a low blow. You don’t have a response for that. For three seasons, your relationship has been a series of high-stakes logistical maneuvers—stealing forty-eight hours in hotels, booking flights under names that didn’t match your social media profiles, pretending you were just “good friends from the European circuit” whenever some eagle-eyed fan spotted you in the background of a story. It was exhausting, but it had a certain cinematic quality to it. It felt like an affair. It felt dangerous.
This—this feels like real life, and real life is far more terrifying. If she’s half and hour away, it means she can see the mess. She can see the days when you don’t wash your hair, the days when you lose 2-0 to City and spend six hours staring at the wall eating cold takeaway noodles. The distance was a shield; now, you’re completely exposed.
“That’s a terrible reason to move to a different country,” you say, your voice dropping into that deadpan register to cover the sudden, frantic thumping behind your ribs. “The LCL fans think you’re here to help them win the league. They don’t know you’re just trying to cut down on your roaming charges.”
“They don’t need to know,” she says. She steps closer, invading your personal space with the practiced ease of a woman who is used to owning whatever ground she stands on. She reaches out, her hand finding the hem of your jumper. Her fingers are cool against your bare skin as she hitches the fabric up an inch, her thumb tracing the line of your hip bone with a slow, heavy pressure. “Let them think about the football. The football is easy.”
“Easy for you,” you mutter, though you don’t pull away. You can’t. The friction of her thumb is the only warm thing in the room. “You have a world cup and plans for a statue to be built outside the Camp Nou. I’m one ACL tear away from a career in local radio commentary.”
“You will not tear your ACL,” she says, her voice suddenly pointed, almost superstitious. In the world of women’s football, those three letters are a curse, a ghost that hovers over every training session, every uneven patch of grass. She knows the cost of that injury better than anyone; she’s carried the scars of it through two seasons of grueling recovery, the long, lonely hours in the gym while the world moved on without her. Her hand tightens on your hip, her fingers digging into the muscle until it hurts—a brief, bruising reminder of her ownership. “Don’t say this word.”
“Sorry,” you say, though you aren’t. You like the way her face darkens when she’s protective. It’s the only time she looks human, rather than an icon minted in gold by the Catalan press. “Forgot about the trauma.”
“It is not trauma,” she says, her eyes narrowing slightly as she drops her hand. “It is just… stupid to say it.”
She turns away, walking back toward the large floor-to-ceiling window that dominates the living space. The rain has intensified, turning the London skyline into a smear of yellow and white lights. The London Eye looks like a ghost ship floating in the mist, its neon rim bleeding into the wet dark. Thunder rolls over the river—a low, heavy vibration that shakes the glass panels of the high-rise just enough to make the water in your glass ripple.
“The storm is big,” she observes, her forehead almost touching the cold pane. “Like in Galicia.”
“It’s just a normal Friday in South London. Don’t get romantic about it.” You follow her, your movements slower now, the domestic pretense of unpacking completely abandoned. The room is half-empty, boxes strewn around like the ruins of an ancient civilisation, but the focus has shifted. The space between you and her has gone tight, the way it always does right before the narrative changes.
You stand behind her, looking over her shoulder at the reflection of the two of you in the glass. It looks like a composite image—the two-time player of the year and the cynical English defender, framed by the wet brick of Vauxhall and the distant, corporate monolith of the MI6 building. You look smaller next to her, not because of height, but because she carries herself with the weight of someone who has already historicalised herself.
“How does it feel not being a tourist,” you say softly, your chin almost resting on the meat of her shoulder.
“Strange,” she says, her eyes meeting yours in the reflection. She doesn’t turn around, but her back settles against your chest, her weight shifting into you with a lazy, confident trust. “I have the National Insurance number. I have a new bank account at Barclays. I am very British now.”
“Have you had a Greggs yet?”
“What is Greggs?”
“Exactly. Call me when you’ve had a vegan sausage roll in the rain at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning. Until then, you’re just an expat with an expensive contract.”
She laughs, the vibration of her ribcage running through your own chest like a small, pleasant electric shock. She turns around in your embrace, her movements fluid, her hands coming up to rest on your shoulders. Her fingers tangle in the collar of your jumper, pulling you upwards just enough to align her mouth with yours.
“You talk too much,” she whispers, her breath smelling of the mint tea she’d made an hour ago. “Always the talking.”
“It’s my only marketable skill.”
She closes the distance before you can carry on. The kiss is slow, deliberate, a patient dismantling of the defensive lines you’ve spent the last three hours building. She doesn’t approach you with the frantic energy of the hotel rooms or the drunken desperation of that birthday in Barcelona; this is different. This is the pace of a woman who knows she doesn’t have a flight to catch in the morning. She has all night. She has three whole seasons.
Her tongue slides into your mouth with a heavy, relaxed rhythm that makes your knees go loose. You reach out, your hands finding the hard angles of her waist, your fingers digging in to keep yourself upright. She tastes of the cold air from the lobby and the sweetness that is just her—no perfume, just the natural scent of her skin after a long day of hard work.
The city lights blink behind her, a thousand tiny, indifferent eyes watching through the rain, but the flat has narrowed down to the heat of her mouth and the steady sound of her breathing. She pulls away just far enough to look at you, her thumbs tracing the dark circles under your eyes with a gentle, bruising pressure.
“The bed is not made,” she says, her voice a low register that vibrates against your lips.
“It’s not,” you reply, your internal monologue short-circuiting into something primal, something that doesn’t care about the herringbone wood or the dust from the cardboard boxes. “but that’s never stopped us before.”
A slow, knowing smile touches her lips—the look she gives an opposition when she knows she’s about to put the ball through their legs. She doesn’t say anything. She just turns you around, her hands on your hips, pressing your back against the cold glass of the window.
The contrast is a shock even through your clothes—the freezing pane of glass against your shoulder blades and the fever-heat of her body pressing into your front. Outside, the rain is washing over the glass in thick, undulating sheets, distorting the lights of London into long, jagged streaks of gold and red. It feels like you’re suspended over the city, ready to be naked and exposed to the sixteen floors of empty air below you.
Alexia doesn’t give you time to adjust. Her hands are under your jumper, her palms dry from ice throughout the day, sliding up your ribs with a frantic, sudden urgency that contradicts her relaxed tone from moments before. She drags the heavy cotton over your head and tosses it into the dark behind her. It hits a cardboard box with a dull, soft thud.
“Ale,” you gasp, caught off guard.
“Shh,” she murmurs, her mouth finding the sensitive skin right below your ear. She bites—not a tease, but a hard, territorial nip that will leave a small, yellow bruise by Sunday. You can feel her teeth snag on your skin, the sharp pinch of pain immediately followed by the soothing, wet slide of her tongue. “No more talking.”
“Bossy,” you choke out, your fingers clawing at the glass behind you for balance as she drops to her knees.
The shift in gravity is sudden and total. She doesn’t hesitate; her fingers find the waistband of your shorts and drag them down your legs with a swift, efficient motion that leaves you standing in nothing but your underwear against the cold pane. The high-rise air conditioning is hummed at a steady twenty degrees, but you are shaking, your thighs trembling as the cold from the window bleeds into your spine while the heat of her breath blossoms against your stomach.
She looks up at you from the floor, her hair falling around her face in dark, messy curtains. Her eyes are wide, the pupils completely dilated in the dim light of the city. There is no icon here; there is just a woman who has spent three years waiting for the right to touch you without checking the time.
“You are cold,” she says, her broken English dropping into a register that sounds almost clinical.
“Because you’ve got me pinned to a window, you idiot.”
She doesn’t argue. She just kisses up your body, thighs, stomach, collarbones, before her hands cup your cheeks, her thumbs forcing your mouth open as she rises back up to meet you. The kiss is messy now, the slow tempo forgotten as the thunder rolls again, louder this time, a deep, concussive boom that rattles the entire frame of the building. The glass against your back vibrates, a strange, industrial hum that runs through your shoulder blades and straight down into your pelvis.
The rhythm changes. The storm outside seems to dictate the pace now, the rain hitting the glass in violent, erratic bursts that mirror the sudden, jagged pressure of her hands. She shoves her knee between yours, forcing your legs apart with a muscular authority that leaves no room for negotiation. You are open to her, your hips trapped between her thighs and the unyielding glass.
She reaches down, her hand sliding between your skin and the thin silk of your underwear. Her fingers are warm now, slick with the heat of her own excitement, and when she touches you, the sound that comes out of your throat is broken and completely unedited. It’s the sound you never make in the hotel rooms when you’re worried about the teammates next door. Here, sixteen floors above the traffic, there is no one to hear you but the rain.
“Alexia,” you say, your knuckles turning white as you grip her shoulders, your nails digging into the soft cotton of her tracksuit top.
“Look at me,” she commands, her voice dropping that laid-back cadence completely. This is the tone from the huddles at the Camp Nou—the low, furious demand for absolute focus before the whistle blows. “Keep your eyes on me.”
You look up. Her face is inches from yours, her jaw locked, a fine sheen of sweat breaking out along her temples despite the chill of the room. She is tracking every micro-expression on your face with a terrifying, obsessive intensity, her fingers moving inside you with a heavy, driving rhythm that matches the frantic beat of your heart.
It’s not gentle. It’s the kind of intimacy that feels like an interrogation, a clinical extraction of every secret you’ve kept since she signed that contract. Every slide of her hand is a reminder that she didn’t come to London for the project; she came for this. She came to have you under her hands in a room that belongs to her, where the rules of the WSL and the PR teams don’t exist.
The pleasure is pure, localised, a heavy pressure that builds behind your hips until your vision starts to blur at the edges. The lights of London are spinning, turning into long, nauseating tracks of gold, and the only solid thing left in the universe is the weight of her shoulder against your chest and the relentless, mechanical pace she is setting with her hand.
“Please,” you mutter, though you don’t even know what you’re asking for.
She doesn’t answer with words. She just speeds up, her movements becoming more erratic, more desperate as the storm outside reaches its peak. A flash of lightning illuminates the flat for a fraction of a second—a cold, blue-white glare that catches the white of her teeth and the messy, unraveled line of her hair before the darkness swallows the room again.
The thunder follows immediately, a deafening crack that seems to split the sky right over the river. At the same moment, the tension in your body snaps. You arch your back, your head thumping against the reinforced glass with a dull, hollow bang as the release hits you—a dense wave that leaves you completely empty, your breath coming in ragged, uncoordinated gasps against her neck.
She doesn’t stop. She holds you there, her fingers curling deep inside you, riding out the tremors of your muscles until you go completely limp, your forehead sinking onto her shoulder as you try to remember how to fill your lungs with air.
The silence returns, but it’s a different kind of quiet now. The synthetic insulation of the space has re-established itself, the hum of the fridge and the distant whistle of the wind the only sounds left in the room. Alexia doesn’t move for a long time. She stays pinned against you, her chest rising and falling in sync with yours, her body and warm where it meets your torso.
Slowly, with an unhurried, lazy grace, she pulls her hand back and reaches for the hem of her own gray top and pulls it over her head, discarding it onto the pile of boxes next to yours. Her torso is lean, the functional muscle of her abdomen rippling slightly as she breathes, the pale light from the window catching the faded scar above her left eyebrow.
“Now,” she says, her voice thick and wet, her Spanish accent returning in full force now that the professional veneer has been completely destroyed. “We make the bed.”
You let out a weak, hysterical laugh, your fingers still trembling as you let go of her shoulders. “You’re a monster, Putellas. A literal monster.”
“No,” she says, a slow, relaxed smirk spreading across her face as she shoves her hands into the pockets of her own joggers. “I am just your new neighbour. You have to be nice to me.”
She walks away into the dark toward the bedroom, her bare feet making that soft, familiar slap against the wood, leaving you standing by the window alone. Outside, the rain is still falling, but the lights of London don’t look quite as cold anymore.