Chapter Text
Allie drops into the empty chair, her purse still swinging over the back of it as she feels an arm snake around her waist, possessively tugging her into his side.
“Where’ve you been?” Her boyfriend, Tom, asks her, studying her slightly flushed cheeks as he leans in towards her, carefully keeping his hand wrapped around a bottle of beer.
The smell on his breath causes Allie to flinch away from it but the small smile at the corner of her mouth remains as she squeezes his arm.
Lifting her hand, Allie brushes her fingers through his hair, the warmth of the lights in the banquet room bouncing off his styled hair and she smiles to herself feeling his thumb brush up and down her side, the cedar scent of his cologne warm and familiar as she kisses his cheek, wiping away the lipgloss smudge with the pad of her thumb, his stubble tickling her slightly.
“I went to the bathroom,” Allie answers, twisting her grandma’s ring around her finger, looking across the table and noticing Lexi draped over Kobi, his attention on the chairman but hers on tracing the sharp curve of his jaw. “I told you that’s where I was going.”
“Yeah but,” Tom starts, abandoning the bottle to scrape his hand over the stubble on his jaw. “You’ve been ages.”
Allie rolls her eyes and threads their fingers together.
“You can just tell me you missed me.” She coos.
Tom’s mouth pulls up in something close to a smile, a smirk almost as he leaves a kiss against the back of her hand.
The chairman’s speech draws to a close to applause from everybody and a chant, Allie is sure comes from the defenders, always the rowdiest (even without Kobi sitting with them) and feels the tension in her neck start to wear away. She appreciates his love and passion for the club, a football man through and through who would go through war for his team but man, can he talk.
“Babe, go and get me a drink?”
Allie looks over at Lexi and how she’s stroking her hand down Kobi’s arm, pouting her lips at him and batting her fake eyelashes. He grins and kisses her forehead before taking her empty glass and leaving the table, Tom offering to go with him.
“Isn’t he the best?” Lexi asks across the table, eyeing Allie, expecting some kind of reaction from her. “Speaking of—” and Allie doubts that whatever she’s going to say next is going to be relevant. “Have you seen the new signing? He’s fit, but the rugged type, you know boy-next-door, not really my type…”
Allie raises her eyebrows slightly but doesn’t say anything but in the couple of seasons since Kobi arrived, she’s gotten used to Lexi’s… quirks. Yeah, quirks.
“I thought Kobi had met your parents?” Chelsea interrupts, dropping into Kobi’s vacated seat with another glass of champagne fizzing in the flute she’s holding, tucking her hair behind her ears.
Lexi huffs and draws her finger along the silver bracelet that sits delicately on her wrist. Chelsea looks at her for a moment before across the table to Allie.
“She’s not talking about Kobi,” Allie offers helpfully, taking pity on the confusion that creases at her forehead and leans forward on folded arms. “She’s talking about the new number six.”
Chelsea opens her mouth before closing it and nodding.
“He seems nice, cute too, him and Allie were talking in the corridor,” Chelsea says, winking at her friend out of the corner of her eye.
Allie braces herself.
“Spill!” Lexi immediately shouts, hitting her hands on the table, her eyes widening with a familiar sparkly intrigue. Once a gossip monger always a gossip monger comes to mind but Allie keeps that thought to herself.
“Bloody hell, Lex,” Allie laughs and lets her hair fall over her shoulders, framing her face as she looks up at Lexi and the impatience that glares back at her, her cheeks red like she might burst and jump the table any second now. “All we did was chat while I was waiting for Chels. I just asked him how he’s settling in.”
“Does he know you’re dating Tom?” She asks, emphasising his name as she sits up like a meerkat to scan the ever-lengthening line at the bar, trying to seek out both him and Kobi and making sure they’re not in earshot so she can continue gossiping. “Oh, I would love to see the look on his face—” She continues, bouncing in her seat like a child hopped up on sugar but her eyes betray her, like she can sniff out an impending scandal.
Too much television and crappy Netflix dramas warping her view on real life relationships.
“Lexi,” Allie says and stares pointedly at her, twisting the ring on her finger again. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I really don’t think he cares about who I’m dating.” She tries, waving her hand in front of Lexi’s face to try and snap her out of her latest stupor.
“Yet,” Lexi sings, winking exaggeratedly at her across the table. “Isn’t Tom the jealous type?”
Allie looks away, ignoring the question and letting her gaze fall on guests milling about in the empty spaces between the tables, easy-going conversations becoming lighter and more personal now that alcohol has started to settle in their systems, normal formalities and over-politeness dipping to a low buzz of familiarity.
She hears Lexi’s interest change to retailing her summer adventures— which is something that Allie’s already heard in great detail through the group chat. The same group chat that Lexi readds her to every time she tries to leave it because she’s incapable of sending just one message, no, it’s like a full-throttle attack of her phone vibrating every second.
Allie turns to try and get a better look at her boyfriend but instead her eyes catch on the table of midfielders and how Ciaran’s Irish accent cuts through the noise coming from it before falling on the circle of empty shot glasses.
A little to the left and her eyes trail up another arm until they land on said new signing’s face, scrunched up slightly as he hides the burn of whatever he’s just thrown back with a futile attempt at remaining impassive. He’s rolling the empty shot glass between his fingers, his cheeks slightly flushed but enough that Allie can notice it across the room.
It’s endearing, stupidly so and she doesn’t know why she gets up to make her way across the room, cutting Lexi’s anecdote about a club in Ibiza off with a harrumph and the feel of her eyes in Allie’s back as she crosses the hall, sidestepping a conversation about the club’s financial situation.
“Allie!” Ciaran’s voice is delightfully loud, his accent thicker with the alcohol steadily making its way through his body. “Had enough of gossiping?” He asks and nods towards her table where Lexi has recovered from her interruption and reverted back to telling whatever story she was in the middle of.
“There’s only so much Lexi I can handle in one night,” Allie smiles thinly in lieu of greeting, surveying the expensive bottle of vodka sitting in the middle of the table before letting her eyes drop to her side, a small smile touching her lips when she looks down at number six, who is doing an incredibly bad job at masking his surprise at seeing her.
“You know the rules, Allie. You hit the table, you take the shot,” Bill suddenly gleams, his arm swaying as he holds out an overfilled shot glass towards her somehow managing not to spill it over her or himself.
She rolls her eyes but takes the glass from him and knocks it back in one go, it burns a little but she’s had more than her fair share of punishment drinks from various nights out in her university days, so she’s almost smug at how little it shows on her face as she places the glass down, wiping a drop away from her lip.
She might not be able to keep up with any of them on the pitch but she sure as hell can drink them under the table off it.
“D’you know Lewie?” Jack’s voice draws Allie back to reality. “Allie, Lewie, Lewie, Allie…” A pause, just long enough for her to look across the table at him with a gently arched eyebrow. “Tom’s girlfriend.”
It’s comical, the way the recognition flares in Lewie’s eyes at the mention of her boyfriend’s name, so much that Allie almost cracks a small smile at the confusion that he’s failing to blink away.
Tom’s girlfriend. Allie flicks her gaze up the ceiling where a chandelier hangs from the tall ceiling to avoid rolling her eyes. When she looks back to him, extending her hand towards him, she barely resists the urge to say that Tom.
She doesn’t have to look at him to know the questions, the thoughts, the mismatched puzzle pieces somehow slotting into place behind his eyes, she knows they shouldn’t work, they’re two completely different people— chalk and cheese. Fire and ice. Total opposites in every way that should matter, but it works. For the most part.
Lewie shakes her hand though, for a second his thumb brushes across the back of hers but he lets it go just as quickly. Allie lets her arm fall back to her side, loosely gripping the satin material of her dress at her waist, scrunching it between her fingers.
“Hey,” Lewie calls out to her, gently touching the back of her hand to draw her attention towards him, the rest of the table having fallen into overlapping conversations of what? Allie couldn’t even grasp the tailend of one to even begin to figure it out. “I didn’t know you were dating Tom.”
And the worst part? He seems genuinely apologetic, sorry so earnestly staring back at her like they’d just got off with each other in the corridor. She tries really, desperately not to laugh but she can’t help it and her shoulders are shaking silently, the words stuck on her tongue as she looks at him, her eyes softening slightly at the tension that radiates off him.
“You should be,” she finally replies, her voice gradually getting lost between her own laughter and the cacophony of noise from the table, finding herself still surprised at the absurd amount of noise six men can make just by chatting. “How dare you talk to me in the corridor when you know nothing about me.”
Lewie’s eyebrows raise of his own accord but when he looks back at her, the corners of her mouth are twitching as she tries to fight back a smile. Suddenly, his eyes look less like those of a deer in headlights and start twinkling with the same laughter that’s mirrored in Allie’s.
“You’re joking,” he says to her.
“I can’t believe you thought I was serious,” Allie giggles, pressing her palms to her warm cheeks to hide the blush that’s threatening to creep across her skin.
Lewie drops back in his seat, slouching slightly, the rim of his finger circling the edge of a shot glass as he turns to look at her, his head tilting to the side and letting the warm streak of light slide across his face. Allie straightens.
“So. Exeter, right?” Allie asks him, sometimes it pays to have a Lexi in your life, for better or for worse, she’s an encyclopedia of knowledge on everybody at the club, a spy in another life or at least a private investigator. “I bet this feels so different.”
“It does. Further from home, that’s for sure,” Lewie sighs, shrugging a half-shrug. Allie waits. “Guess I’m just a bit of a homebody, I hate being away from Cardiff for too long. And my family. Some choice of career I made here.” He smiles ruefully, grasping hold of the glass as if it will ground him somehow.
“You’re close to your family?” Allie asks, her heart warming slightly at the small smile that dips at the corner of his mouth, a ghost of a dimple appearing in his cheek.
“Oh, yeah, loads.” He grins, flicking his gaze across to meet Allie’s, noticing that she’s leaning on the table closer to him now. “I owe them everything, my mum and Nan especially, they’re the ones who sacrificed their evenings and weekends to drive me up and down the country for games.” He says with an almost wistful smile before chuckling to himself, his eyes dropping to the table.
“What?”
“My nan,” Lewie smiles and turns his head to meet Allie’s eyes, “she knows two footballers, me and Pele, as far as she’s concerned we’re pretty much the same player.”
“And, are you?” Allie asks, reaching out and touching his wrist, her nail scraping across his jacket sleeve. “As good as Pele?”
“Guess you’ll just have to wait and see,” he smirks, squeezing the glass in his hand. “So, what about you?”
“What about me?” Allie asks, sitting up but her arms are still loosely crossed on the edge of the table, her lips pursed but they slip into a humoured smile just as quickly. “As good as Pele? Sorry to disappoint but I prefer watching.”
The dimple appears in Lewie’s cheek again at her words but he shakes his head, laughing softly.
“I mean what do you do? Sorry. I just doubt your job is Tom’s girlfriend.”
For a second, Allie’s teeth sink into her lip and she wants to scoff but instead she finds herself shaking her head, Tom’s girlfriend spins around her head like her brain has turned into a merry-go-round. When she was younger, dating a footballer was the dream of every girl she ever knew and she remembers how the media would pander to it, from Posh and Becks to whenever England made it to a tournament and every gossip rag in the supermarket would have a three page spread on the players’ wives and girlfriends.
The silence grows between them. Allie’s always hated it, how her life became diluted to just dating Tom, that when she’s scrolling through social media she sees the girlfriends of other players in the league and their comments are full of teenage girls desperately commenting how to end up like that. Hell. Lexi has more followers than most Premier League footballers and her feed is full of day in the life— dating a footballer videos with everybody in her comments lapping it up.
Allie hesitates, looking to the table beside her where a couple of the shareholders are gathered sharing an expensive bottle of whiskey dissecting the team’s chances of promotion this season. It would be nice if they did get promoted but she knows that dating a Premier League footballer would come with more attention, more scrutiny, too much of anything that she’s not used to.
Her breath comes out in firm exhales, her cheeks flushing under the flood of feelings that circle each other. It’s a simple question but one that she doesn’t really answer all too often, at least not to Tom’s teammates but Lewie is still looking at her, studying her in a way that has the lights above feeling like they’re scorching her skin.
“I work in PR. It’s pretty boring.” It feels practiced, numb against her tongue, she’s always hated talking about herself especially when she just works a simple nine to five, especially when it all pales in comparison to people finding out she’s dating a footballer, which unsurprisingly becomes the main topic of conversation.
“So… you’re my first call after a night out gone wrong?”
“Hm?” Allie snaps her head towards him but Lewie is just grinning at her, joking, of course he is. She doubts he’d ever be the type to end up in a situation that reflects badly on the club, he’s got that boy-next-door about him that Allie always assumed she’d end up with (and Lexi unsubtly pointed out). “Sure, Lewie,” she breathes out, “I’m your girl.”
He exhales and turns his head away from her, a light pink dust sweeping across his cheeks, his good to know getting lost somewhere between the noise from the bar and the table’s conversation that has swiftly dipped into cars. Or something like that.
Allie almost doesn’t want to leave the table, her chest feeling lighter than it had all evening. She isn’t the type to enjoy the formal side of football but she’d never not accompany Tom to one of them, rolling her eyes with a gentle smile every time he tells her that he needs her there and that she makes him look a thousand times better.
The sound of someone clearing their throat behind her startles Allie, whipping her body around to meet Tom’s eyes and the sharp set of his jaw but not at her, he’s looking at the table before meeting her eyes.
“Why’d you leave?” He asks, unusually steady, his hand curled around another bottle of beer.
“You left too,” Allie pokes, squeezing his suit jacket between her fingers but gets to her feet anyway. “What took you so long?”
Tom drops his eyes to her, having not heard her at first but then he grins, Cheshire cat-esque, sweeping her up in his arms, pulling her possessively into his side and without warning, presses his mouth against hers. Hard.
Allie tenses at it but kisses him back, twisting her arm until she can press her palm against her boyfriend’s chest with just enough force to break the kiss without it seeming like a rejection. Someone else clears their throat, Allie thinks it might be Lewie as Tom steps back, a wolfish grin curling at the corners of his mouth.
“Nothing for you to worry about, babe. Just making connections. Ready to head back?”
She almost turns around to catch a glimpse of him again but forces herself not to, her mouth twisting into a small frown, her cheeks flushed pink as she swallows down whatever reply was on the tip of her tongue.
“Sure. We can go,” Allie smiles and hopes the disappointment doesn’t show as Tom slides his fingers through hers and starts to tug her in the general direction of the club’s higher-ups, her shoulders sagging.
Allie looks back over her shoulder, an apology written across her face but Lewie isn’t looking at her.