Chapter Text
They played the first quarter-final fixture against Paris at home, but they lost it in the twelfth minute. Arjen was red-carded for losing his temper with the referee, and they never recovered after that. With only ten men on the pitch, Paris spun them like sugar and beat them 2-1 in 94 gruelling minutes. Lewy had struck the goal for Bayern in the 87th minute, but even though it put them on the scoresheet and saved them a bit of face, it consoled no one.
When, a few weeks later, they stepped onto the manicured grass at the Parc des Princes, they faced a task that seemed surmountable, but only just. Pep told them and they told themselves that they had no option but to win, but after 75 minutes, the score remained locked at 1-1, and every Bayern shirt on the pitch was beginning to lost its temper. By chance rather than by precision, an 83rd minute header from Basti won them back their confidence. An 89th minute goal from Lewy won them the game.
The team was uncontainable after the final whistle, their joy only a thin veneer for their relief, and Pep asked the hotel to close its bar to the public and other patrons so they could celebrate under his supervision. In a distinctly uncharacteristic move – one that maybe indicated how close things had been during the game – Pep said that he’d turn a blind eye to one glass of beer each after they had eaten dinner.
At the bar, Basti half-heartedly complained to anyone who would listen that they’d need five glasses each to get drunk off French beer. Philipp threatened to demote Basti from the vice-captaincy. Dante took control of the music, and for the first time in a long time, every single one of them relaxed. They settled in for a contained celebration and a good night.
Exhaustion got the better of Pep before it did the others and he went to bed early, leaving Philipp and Basti in charge. The festivities became a little more rambunctious in his absence, at Basti’s behest and despite Philipp’s half-hearted efforts at control. Pep would probably have them all skinned the next morning when he saw the state of some of them, but the general consensus was that they had won, that they didn’t care, that the media wouldn’t find out anyway, and that they’d deal with Pep in the morning.
Thomas was particularly drunk. He had finished his drink, weaselled half of Juan Bernat’s, sweet-talked the barman into pouring him a second, and then a third. Lewy watched his antics from one of the bar’s window seats. The curtains were shut behind him, and he was happy enough to get his kicks out of watching everyone else celebrate. He had only taken a few sips of his beer, and it wasn’t particularly good, but his mind was still on his goal and he was buzzing.
Like the day before, Jerome turned up next to him unannounced and sat down, an unopened bottle of Saint-Omer still in his hand. He clapped Lewy on the shoulder, presumably by way of congratulations for his strike. Lewy gave him a small smile in response before turning back to the crowd.
“Will he be okay?” Lewy asked, nodding in the direction of Thomas, who presently had an arm around Holger’s shoulder and was shouting a conversation into his unfortunate ear. The music was loud, but it wasn’t that loud – although Thomas was very, very drunk.
“He’ll turn up to breakfast tomorrow like he never had a drop, just watch. Don’t worry about him.”
Lewy looked from Thomas to Jerome. “How? He has zero body fat.”
“The first rule of Bayern Munich is that you do not try to make sense of Thomas Muller. At all. For your sanity. The second rule of Bayern Munich is the same.”
Lewy shook his head in amusement and leaned back against the curtains. The two of them fell quiet and observed the scenes unfolding around them. Basti was dancing, or at least moving his body around in a way presumably intended to be in time with the music. David was dancing next to him, and Lewy couldn’t work out whether David was really good or whether Basti was just that bad. Mario was curled up on one of the couches, arms around a thick cushion and three winks away from sleep, and Arjen and Xabi were across the room in a spirited conversation.
Eventually Jerome leaned closer to Lewy, and spoke directly into his ear, even though it was unlikely anyone else would hear them from this distance, and even though nobody paid them any mind.
It was a peculiar act, oddly intimate when there were two dozen other people in the room. Lewy figured that whatever Jerome wanted to say, it was meant for his ears only, and if it was for his ears only, then it was likely to be about only one thing. His pulse quickened.
“I’ve always wondered,” Jerome said carefully, “what goes on in that mind of his.”
“Do you.”
“I do.”
“So much for the first two rules of Bayern Munich.” Lewy replied drily. “And besides. I thought mind-reading was beneath you.”
“It is. Doesn’t stop me from thinking about it from time to time, though.”
“Is this your underhand way of asking me whether I’ve read his mind?”
Jerome half-smiled and raised his unopened bottle to Lewy in a mocking toast. “That’s exactly what I’m asking.”
“Then yes, I have read his mind.” Lewy answered, before taking a long drag of his drink. “But you knew that already.”
Jerome didn’t respond immediately, A peculiar kind of silence passed between them – not comfortable by any means, but not unpleasant by any means either, and certainly without any of the previous heaviness that used to define the quiet between them. Mostly, Lewy was still getting used to the fact that Jerome wanted to talk to him.
“What does he think about?” Jerome eventually asked.
“You mean you want to know?” Lewy asked, and god, he knew he should probably keep the smug accusation out of his voice, but it was almost impossible after all the shit that Jerome had given him. “I see. So the sanctity of a person’s mind is negotiable when someone else is doing the reading. Fascinating.”
Lewy turned to look at Jerome in time to catch the half-annoyed, half-I-can’t-be-bothered-with-you look that he was being given – but there was still a hint of a smile in Jerome's expression. Maybe he was still buoyed by the game. A victory did strange things to a person, and a close victory even more so.
“Just answer the question.” Jerome said, busying himself with opening his bottle.
Lewy contemplated his answer for a few moments. He had spent less time in Thomas’ mind than the rest of them, but ‘less time’ by his measure still amounted to a lot. He thought about what he had seen – the idle thoughts, the daydreams, the fears (and Thomas had them, as much as he kept them to himself) – and he wondered which ones he should share.
“The nice thing about Thomas,” he began slowly, choosing his words carefully, “is that for the most part, there aren’t any surprises. He’s like he is on the outside – loud and all over he place, but more clever than anyone gives him credit for. Plus horses.”
“Huh. Really.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I expected something more interesting than that.”
Lewy gave a curt, humourless ha. “That is interesting.”
“Is it?”
“Of course it is.”
“You sound jaded.”
“I am. When you – “
“BOATENG. LEWANDOWSKI.” Basti howled across the room, slicing into the middle of their conversation – and everyone else’s – like a hot knife through butter. He wiggled a finger in their direction. ”Come. Dance. I’m summoning you.”
“No.” Jerome called back. “You’re tipsy.”
“Captain’s orders.” He boomed.
“Vice-captain.” Philipp observed, and loudly. “And not for much longer if you keep this up.”
Lewy and Jerome exchanged a look but left the conversation there. Lewy figured that they weren’t done just yet.
Lewy went down to breakfast early the next day, as soon as the breakfast buffet opened, and he wasn’t surprised to find that he was the first one there. He didn’t feel great, exhausted as he was from the match rather than the celebrations that followed it, but he was ready to bet that he’d be feeling better than most of the team.
He cobbled together a small tower of eggs and bacon, grabbed two newspapers, and sat down at one of the small tables by the window with a view of the hotel’s green. He began to eat and settled into his favourite post-victory routine – reading glowing match reports.
He was interrupted a few minutes later, when a set of keys and a cell-phone clanged unceremoniously down on the seat opposite his. When he looked up, he found himself looking at Jerome. He smelled like mint and extra-fragrant shower gel, but his eyes suggested that he still had some waking up to do.
“Mind if I join you?” Jerome asked.
“Go ahead.”
Jerome nodded and went to get his breakfast, stretching out to crick his shoulders as he did so. Lewy watched him go and thought back to the months he had spent trying to get Jerome to even look at him without murderous intent. Maybe Jerome was less difficult to break than he had expected.
Jerome eventually returned with a cup of light, milky coffee and a plate piled with toast, but he put the food down in front of him and didn’t get to it immediately.
“What were you going to say last night?”
“Sorry?”
“Before Basti cut you off.”
Reflexively, Lewy surveyed the room to make sure no one was within earshot. Although wait-staff were scattered around the large, brightly-lit room, none of them was close enough to overhear anything.
He turned back to Jerome, who took the first sip of his coffee and eyed Lewy curiously over the top of his mug.
“You always do that, you know? Even when no one’s around.” Jerome observed. “Anyway. Tell me why you’re jaded.”
Lewy stirred his own coffee idly and wondered how to put it. The fact that Jerome was asking was a testament to how little he used his ability. The fact that Lewy had an answer for him was a testament to how frequently he used his own.
“If you read at all, you’d know.” He told Jerome. “But you clearly don’t.”
Jerome peeled the foil off his single serving of butter and dipped a knife into it.
“Well, seeing as you’ve already done the dirty work, you might as well go ahead and tell me what you know.”
Lewy almost smiled. “Your sense of morality is a lot more negotiable than I thought it would be.”
Jerome shook his head as he buttered his toast and took a bite. Between mouthfuls, he said, “Oh no. I’m not taking lectures on morality from you. Answer the question.”
Lewy thought for a few moments before responding. There was a short answer and a slightly long answer. They had time to kill before everyone else arrived, so he opted for the latter.
“I had a friend at high school. A good guy, kept his head down, wasn’t top of the class, wasn’t the fastest runner or anything – middle of the table in every respect, but you couldn’t meet a nicer guy, y’know? Always happy, always kind, and I always thought we were really close. Anyway, long story short, I decided to read his mind one day – don’t look at me like that, I was fourteen – and you asked – and inside he was just … miserable.”
“How?”
“When I was younger, I used to catch the train to school and back and I used to read people’s minds so that I wouldn’t get bored. Most of the time it was just all these miserable adults, worrying about their lives. He had that same kind of sadness in him, but talking to him face to face – and I did, every day – you would never have known it. And up to that point, I had always known that people kept things to themselves – but I was close to this guy. We talked and I told him things and I had no idea. I guess it just shook me. So when I meet people like Thomas, who don’t hide things, who just are what they are – it’s nice.”
Jerome nodded thoughtfully, drizzling honey over his second piece of toast.
“You don’t need to read minds to know that people aren’t who they make themselves out to be.”
“Yeah, I know that. But when you read their minds, and you understand what that means in real terms – it’s different. You see the kinds of things that people hide to put on a brave face in the morning. It stays with you.”
“Not enough to put you off reading, though.” Jerome observed.
“No. If anything, it made me want to read more.”
“So that’s why you read everyone?”
“Yeah. Curiosity.”
“Sounds like trust issues, if you ask me.”
Lewy stared at him blankly and didn’t respond, and for once, Jerome was the one that had to look away sheepishly.
“I didn’t ask you.” Lewy bristled. He didn’t tell Jerome that maybe he was right.
They started talking regularly after that, each little sliver of information pulling out another from each of them. It was difficult not to share, to compare notes and experiences, to bask in the strange novelty of having someone to talk to. After months of heavy silence, they suddenly had a lot to say to each other.
Jerome was initially slow to share, but Lewy was happy enough to tell him things first.
Lewy told him about how his mother explained things away by thinking he was just a hyper-perceptive child. She presumed he was just sensitive to the sadness or anger of others, even when their body language didn’t give them away. He told Jerome how his teachers marvelled at his ability to sit down and play or colour in while in complete silence, not knowing that he was peering into the minds of everyone around him. Lewy was around eight when he appreciated that maybe he could do something that other people couldn’t.
He told Jerome how in his early teens, his grades began to suffer because all he could do was read, how his tendency for silence became mistaken for a bad habit of zoning out. He told him about a memorable Sunday afternoon when he was thirteen, where his mother and his grandmother sat him down and told him that enough was enough, that he had to pull himself together, the message alternately conveyed by reasoning and shouting. That afternoon, he realized that he couldn’t spend the rest of his life listening to the lives of other people instead of living his own.
Lewy spoke about learning to control when to use his ability, about forcing himself to sit in the large park near his house, daring himself not to read the minds of the people around him and failing for months before finally succeeding once. He never quite managed to unlearn the reflex, but he could put a stop to it for a while when he needed to concentrate on something else.
He told Jerome about how learning to control it in that small way didn’t stop him from doing it anyway, and how he listened to people on trains and planes and in school. He became used to knowing everything about people without having to give forth a single part of himself. He told Jerome about the batshit daydreams that he had encountered, and how they always seemed to come from the most unassuming people.
Jerome eventually began sharing things with him too, in small drips.
Slowly, Jerome told him that his ability was a little different. He didn’t have to read because he just heard anyway, without asking to. He figured out as a child that there was something that other people called “quiet” that he didn’t quite seem to understand. The thoughts of other people around him resonated like quiet voices murmuring in the air, like the background noise in a café, and if he focused on one, he could hear it like a voice in his ear.
As a child, he sometimes heard things that he liked, and sometimes he heard things that scared him, but mostly he heard a lot of things he didn’t understand. Jerome felt that he had grown up too quickly. It made him an insular, serious child, avoidant of company because he didn’t know how to switch it off, so he avoided people instead. The only thing that he enjoyed enough to distract him was football. He rarely left the house for anything other than that and school.
He had tried telling his older brother, who didn’t believe him, and his parents, who tried to understand but dismissed his complaint as an overactive imagination, because if people didn’t want to believe something, they simply wouldn’t. Like Lewy, Jerome eventually decided that he had to learn to control his ability himself. He started off by spending time in quiet places like the library, where there were enough thoughts in the air for him to practice, but not enough to overwhelm him.
He would sit and try to focus and shut out everything. He threw everything into the work in front of him and achieved incredible grades as an unintended consequence, and eventually he learned how to shut everything out. He told Lewy that rarely and to this day, around some people, it was still difficult to control. The thoughts of certain people were so loud, so raging, that they ended up in his ears anyway.
Jerome told Lewy that he hated what he could do, that he woke up every day wishing for nothing about silence. He didn’t like knowing everything. If someone was happy, he couldn’t celebrate with them and if they were sad, he couldn’t let them know that he knew. The knowledge was a burden, and curiosity barely factored in the equation.
They more they talked, the more they realized that they had taken to their abilities in diametrically opposing ways. For Lewy, it was a tool, and he had nurtured it like a flower. For Jerome, it was a weed, and he had contained it and let it fester within him. Lewy wanted to know every conceivable thing about every person that he met, and Jerome would have been happy not knowing anything about anyone, ever again.
But despite their differences, they talked and they couldn’t stop because finally, there was someone around who offered more than a sympathetic ear. Finally, there was someone around who understood.
They talked about it again one Sunday night. It had been a chilly day and the sky seemed to darken far too early, and David and Mario and Lewy had ended up at Jerome’s place playing FIFA. After five hours, David and Mario had left, the first citing tiredness and the second citing Lewy’s questionable FIFA tactics. Lewy contemplated leaving after they did, but Jerome had picked up the controller and challenged him to another game, so he stayed. He figured that if Jerome wanted him to leave, he would make it clear enough.
Jerome had a nice place, too. Lewy had been in Munich for several months but the team had spent so much time away that his home still felt impersonal, like a hotel room. It was new, and clean, and that was precisely the problem with it – he hadn’t spent enough time there to make it his own. Jerome’s home, on the other hand, bore all the imprints of his personality. It was all dark wooden furniture and a surprising amount of art – none of which matched, a mess of colours and styles, but which inexplicably seemed to work as a collection. Whatever wall space remained was adorned with photos in bold frames – of his games, his teams, but mostly his family. The space was cluttered, in a tidy sort of way, but it was cosy.
And if Lewy was being entirely truthful with himself, he didn’t mind the company so much either.
For a while, they played in comfortable silence, the quiet occasionally punctured by an exclamation or profanity. After their third game while alone, Jerome asked him a question.
“So. You never feel guilty?”
It took Lewy a few moments to realize that Jerome wasn’t talking about the game. When he clicked, he answered truthfully but didn’t take his eyes off the screen.
“No, I don’t feel guilty.”
A few moments after he answered, Lewy slotted in a goal past Jerome from a corner kick. Jerome crinkled his nose in displeasure.
“Seriously?” He asked. “Never?”
“Well.” Lewy said, restarting play. ”Sometimes. Only since you’ve been around.”
“I don’t understand that.” Jerome observed. “Or you.”
“It’s not like I’m not taking anything.”
“That’s beside the point.”
“Enlighten me, then.”
The conversation felt peculiar somehow, a little more stilted and tense than the lengthy ones that they had been having recently.
Lewy figured that they would need to have this conversation – the Big Ethical Debate – at some point, but he hadn’t expected it to happen over a FIFA marathon, with shitty electronic music pounding on an aimless loop in the background. It seemed inappropriate somehow, but maybe it was best that they couldn’t look directly at each other.
“It’s not about what you take.” Jerome said. “The problem is you being there in the first place. It’s like - say you break into someone’s house, and all you do is sit on their couch and stare at the photos on their fireplace. You haven’t taken anything but you’re still breaking and entering. It’s still wrong.”
“That’s completely different.” Lewy replied, shaking his head.
“It’s exactly the same thing. If they found out what you were doing, you wouldn’t last five minutes.”
“Except they’ll never know. So your point is moot.” Lewy said, slipping past Jerome’s goalie again. Jerome was playing with Bayern, and Lewy was playing with Dortmund, and Manuel Neuer was having the worst night of his career. “Anyway, enough of me fielding your questions. You explain something to me. You never get curious?”
“Of course I do. Sometimes. But it’s none of my business. Or yours.”
“What if reading comes in handy? Say someone needs help but they can’t ask for it.”
“And in 26 years, how many people have you helped?” Jerome asked. Lewy shifted uncomfortably in his seat instead of answering, and Jerome let the silence drag on for an uncomfortable period of time before saying, “I thought not. If people want help, they ask for it.”
“They don’t. That the problem.”
“Then that’s their choice too. It’s not your role to override it.”
Lewy kept quiet. He saw the logic in Jerome’s arguments, but he wasn’t used to living by them, and more importantly, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to either. He felt like there was still something to be said for his own approach, but he couldn’t articulate it in a way that would make sense to Jerome. He decided to keep his mouth shut for now, and resolved to think about it later.
After a seventh straight loss at Lewy’s hands, Jerome tossed his controller loosely on the cushion next to him. He sighed and leaned back into his seat. Lewy took that as a sign that they were taking a small break, and left his own controller on the coffee table in front of him. He spoke after a few moments.
“I get a twinge of guilt sometimes.” Lewy admitted. “Not often, but it happens. I try not to think about it when it does.”
Jerome regarded him earnestly, his brows creased in a frown of inquiry rather than disappointment. “I just don’t understand how you can distract yourself from something like that.”
“Usually? I find a new mind to read.”
Jerome scoffed and shook his head, looking up at the ceiling like it would give him patience. “I can’t say much for you, Lewy, but at least you’re honest.”
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that was a compliment.”
“It is. Don’t get used to it though.” Jerome said, pausing for a few moments before adding. “But this isn’t bad. For the record.”
“You’re on a seven match losing streak. This is pretty bad.”
“Not the game. I meant this.” Jerome said distractedly, making vague gestures in the air with his hand that did nothing to clarify his point. He didn’t look Lewy in the eye, his gaze elsewhere. “Talking about it, I mean. It’s not bad.”
“Oh. Sure.” Lewy replied, even though a suspicious warmth spread across his chest. “I guess it isn’t bad.”
And even though Jerome had only just complimented him on his honesty, Lewy didn’t feel right admitting how much he was enjoying these conversations too.
At first, Lewy told himself that they talked because there was no one else to talk to. After a while, he acknowledged that maybe they were enjoying each other’s company as well.
They roomed together for the first time during an away game at Hamburg. On the morning of the game, the team ate breakfast and then Pep had made them take a very light training afterwards. The game wouldn’t be till late that night, so they were each allowed to kill time in their respective rooms. Lewy read the newspaper and Jerome listened to music on his bed, his head swallowed by a gigantic pair of headphones. His hands were folded behind his head and his eyes were closed, and if it weren’t for the barely perceptible rise and fall of his chest, Lewy would have thought to check his pulse.
After a while, Lewy noticed Jerome taking off his headphones and putting them on his nightstand. He sat up and rubbed his eyes like he had woken up from sleep. Lewy could tell from his peripheral vision that Jerome was looking at him.
“Let me ask you something.” Jerome began. “Let’s say you had the chance to read the mind of anyone at all.”
Lewy didn’t look up from his paper and flipped the page instead, looking for the crossword. “For someone who prides himself on not reading minds, you’re more obsessed with it than I am, you know that?”
“Dead or alive,” Jerome continued, ignoring him, “human or not, real or fictional.”
“I don’t know. Obama.”
“Obama.” Jerome said, frowning in confusion. “The safest of safe answers. Really.”
“You don’t want to hear the honest answer.”
“I do now.”
“You’re not going to like it.” Lewy warned, locating the crossword on the second to last page. He pulled out the whole page and folded it so that it was the size of the crossword.
“I’m listening anyway.” Jerome said.
Lewy tapped his pen over the chequered squares. He wondered whether his act of pretending to read the clues was convincing at all.
“If I could read anyone’s mind, I’d read yours. I’m not going to,” he added quickly, “but given the chance, and if you weren’t going to find out, I would. Not that I’m going to.” He repeated, for good effect.
It was perhaps a testament to how far things had come between them that Jerome almost smiled at him, instead of scowling.
“I don’t understand what you find so fascinating about my mind.”
“Literally nothing.” Lewy said, uncapping his pen. “It’s more that you won’t let me near it.”
“And here I was, thinking that you developed a moral backbone.”
“I developed self-control. That’s enough personal development for one year.” Lewy pointed out, filling in 4-down [4. Music style, … roll (4,3): r-o-c-k-a-n-d]. “Give me credit for that, at least.”
“You don’t get credit for arriving at minimum standards of human decency.”
“Fine, Saint Boateng.” Lewy said, turning to the other clues. “Who would you read?”
“No one in particular.” Jerome answered, with a promptness that indicated the answer had been ready, like he had thought about this before. “Maybe I’d go work for the police or something. Read people’s minds, see whether they committed crimes or not. Something like that.”
That was enough for Lewy to look up from his paper. He grimaced at Jerome and rooted around for an insult to fire his way, but something even better presented itself to him – an ideological inconsistency.
“So what you’re saying,” he said slowly, “is that reading someone’s mind is fine any time a person is so much as suspected of committing a crime.”
“Well, yeah. It’s justice.”
“No, that’s a police state.”
“Not if a person committed a crime.”
“But you’re not yet sure that they have.” Lewy pointed out, and there was no keeping the smugness out of his expression now. “You only suspect that they have. It’s a lower threshold. And a weak one. But you’re saying that’s okay.”
“Well – yeah. But - “ Jerome said, hesitating as he grappled with the concept, and as Lewy’s point began to make an annoying amount of sense, he raised his hands. “Wait. Stop. Hold on. You’re not allowed to be right on any of this. I won’t allow it.”
Lewy filled in three answers in a row, and smiled down at the paper as he scribbled each one down. He could get used to proving Jerome wrong.
“So I was wondering.” Lewy declared over breakfast one morning. They were both up earlier than everyone else, and had arrived at the buffet as soon as it had opened for service. Jerome had opted for porridge, but Lewy watched as he stole a second piece of bacon off Lewy’s plate without asking. In light of what Lewy was about to suggest, he let it slide.
Jerome didn’t bother looking up as he carved into the rasher. “Wonder away.”
“I was wondering what would happen if we tried to read each other’s minds at the same time.”
At that, Jerome looked up, his expression neutral except for his eyes, which had suddenly taken on something of a hawkish look. He didn’t say anything at first.
“I thought we established,” Jerome said slowly, tone measured, “that it’s like getting kicked in the head.”
Lewy watched him cautiously, well aware that he was re-approaching boundaries that he had learned to avoid over the last few months.
“Only if you’re trying to keep me out. Say we do it again, but you don’t.”
Jerome looked at him with slightly narrowed eyes, the kind of look that he hadn’t given Lewy in months. Maybe months ago, it would have been enough to shut Lewy down, or make him think about changing the subject -- but that was months ago, and a lot had changed since then. And Lewy wasn’t sure how strong their nascent friendship was – how far he could push it, how much tension he could introduce before the string snapped – but enough had changed to make him feel willing to take the risk.
The look suggested that if Lewy knew what was best for him, he would shut the fuck up. But Jerome hadn’t said anything to stop him either, and Lewy was happy to read a little bit of curiosity into his silence.
“Just hear me out.” He said, with a lot more confidence than he felt. “You don’t like reading minds because the person whose mind you’re in doesn’t know you’re there, right? So it’s a consent thing for you.”
“Get to the point.”
“That problem doesn’t exist with me. I’m giving you permission to read my mind.”
“I’m not worried about your permission.”
“So what’s the problem, then?”
Jerome regarded him frankly.
“I don’t know if I trust you enough not to rifle around.” He explained flatly. “Sorry. I trust you more than I used to, but I don’t know whether trusting you that much yet is a good idea.” And then, at the end, perhaps as a formality rather than as something he sincerely meant, Jerome tacked on a “No offence.”
And of course Lewy took offence. He took a whole lot of offence. The accusation reminded him that even though they were friends now, a long period of conflict had preceded their friendship. It also reminded him of the inconvenient fact that Jerome’s suspicions had their foundations in truth – in his own behaviour – and he knew better than to deny it even to himself.
“What if I promise to stick to your surface thoughts?”
“I don’t know whether I trust you to do that either.”
“You honestly think I’m dumb enough to risk it?”
Jerome finished off the rest of his rasher, and then stole a third one off Jerome’s plate. It was the last one. Lewy didn’t protest, or even notice.
“If you read anything deeper, I’ll block you out like last time. And then I’ll break your nose. At least.”
“Fair.”
“I’m not fucking around, Lewy. I’m serious.” Jerome said, fixing him with a stern look, the likes of which he hadn’t given Lewy for some months. “I’ll do it. But don’t pry.”
It struck Lewy that he could have told Jerome a few things that might have put him at ease.
He could have told Jerome that he was enjoying his company far too much to do anything that might jeopardize it; that he actually liked coming into work now that they weren’t in a state of conflict; that he was stupid but not stupid enough to jeopardize his friendship with literally the only other person in the world who not only knew his secret but understood it. Lewy could have told him that he was getting used to Monday night FIFA battles at Jerome’s, and arguing with him on the bus, and that he wouldn’t trade Philipp’s constant befuddlement about their friendship for anything.
Lewy could have told him all these things but he didn’t. Instead, he nodded and said firmly, “I know. I won’t. I swear.”
They eventually agreed to do it at Jerome’s one Monday night instead of FIFA. They sat at opposite ends on one of the settees, facing each other. Jerome tried to seem nonchalant, but there was a rigidity in his muscles and posture that gave him away.
“Surface thoughts only.” Jerome reminded him.
“I know. Surface thoughts only.” Lewy repeated. “On my count after three, okay?”
Jerome nodded and cracked the bones in his left hand. He met Lewy’s eye squarely.
“One. Two. Three.”
Lewy breathed, focused – and immediately, pain seared through him again, like his skull was in a compressor and being crushed from all three hundred and sixty degrees. He immediately clutched his head in his hands and reached for a nearby cushion, pressing his face into it. In the end, it didn’t help in the slightest, and the pain only receded when Jerome must have given up.
It took a few moments for the pain to recede enough for Lewy to think, and a few moments longer for his breath and his heart-rate to slow down.
“Sorry. Sorry.” Jerome apologised, rubbing at his temple.
Lewy fought back the nausea, took a few breaths. “It’s fine. Don’t worry.”
“I couldn’t help it.”
“You sure you’re okay to do this?”
“Yeah.” Jerome said. “But let’s do it differently.”
“How?”
“I’ll read your mind first, and then you read mine. Maybe I won’t react that way.”
“Okay.” Lewy said, figuring that it couldn’t hurt. That had been enough stabbing pain in his skull for one night.
Lewy watched Jerome closely as he closed his eyes and centred. Lewy mused on how, unlike most people, Jerome’s face relaxed when he focused. His default expression was something a little hard – a state of mild discontent – but when he focused, the creases in his brow relaxed, his lips eased from their frown, and he looked peaceful.
And then, because it was the first time that Jerome had tried to read in his company, Lewy felt the waves for the first time.
He froze at first because oh, god, they’re obvious. They filled the air between him and Jerome with a static that mildly disorientated him for a little while, and he was grateful to be sitting down. It struck him then that this was what Jerome had felt from him all those months, and given how often he used to do it – well. Lewy caught himself and stopped thinking, because Jerome was probably already in there.
But his eyes were closed and he wasn’t reacting, even though he must have known what Lewy was thinking.
In that moment, and maybe for the first time in his life, Lewy appreciated the intrusive nature of what he did. Knowing that someone else was in his head, and that there was nothing he could do to veil his thoughts, was a moment of quiet and sobering revelation. It was perhaps appropriate that Jerome, of all people, was opening his eyes.
Jerome eventually looked at him and gave a slight nod. Lewy focussed and tried to read his mind – and this time, when he did so, he felt nothing. Nothing doubled him over, there was no momentary blindness, and there was no searing pain. There was only a complete and perfect silence. Jerome hadn’t tried to resist.
Can you read this? Lewy thought.
Yeah. Jerome answered, somehow, in his head, without uttering a single word. Shit. I can.
They stared at each other, Jerome incredulous, Lewy bewildered, both of them shaking just a little. They were in each other’s minds, at the same time, and it was a peculiar feeling – like knocking down a wall between two rooms, creating one space but with two distinct halves. Lewy focused on what Jerome wanted him to read but he could feel other thoughts lurking in the background as well, some closer to him than others, but he had made a promise to stay away from them. He intended to keep that promise, and he paid them no mind.
Suddenly, Jerome laughed with all the breathless wonder of a child that had been shown a magic trick. Maybe it was nerves, or the aftershock of surprise at the fact that they were even doing this – but it was infectious. Lewy laughed along with him, equally disbelieving but equally content.
We should have done this a while ago, Jerome thought.
See? Lewy thought. You’re not always right. There are two ways of doing things.
Yeah. Two ways, Jerome replied, and his smile was unrepentant. My way, and the wrong way.
They had been drawn with Chelsea for the semi-finals. The day before the second fixture, Pep gathered them at the hotel for a final motivational speech. They had lost 2-1 at Stamford Bridge, and the tone of his sermon was almost apocalyptic. He spoke about tactics and formations but somehow, without saying as much, he impressed upon them that the world would collapse if they lost the return fixture at home.
Lewy and Jerome sat next to each other, alone and in the fourth and final row of plastic chairs in front of Pep. Lewy’s eyes were on Pep but his mind was elsewhere, on the weekend, on the holiday he was planning for the mid-year break, on the groceries he needed to buy – on anything other than Pep and the match.
He felt Jerome’s foot tap against his own, but dismissed the contact as unintentional. When it happened again, with the tap more of a kick against his shoe, he glanced curiously at Jerome.
Then Lewy felt the waves, and rolled his eyes. When he read Jerome’s mind, he found that Jerome was already in his.
When’s Pep supposed to finish? Jerome asked
Technically, twenty minutes ago.
Jesus. And he gave the same sermon over breakfast.
Did he? I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been paying attention all day.
They became so caught up in their silent conversation that they didn’t notice Pep has stopped talking, and was now looking directly at them.
They only noticed when the heads of every person in the three rows in front of them swivelled in their direction. By that point, it was too late, and they were the unfortunate centre of everybody’s attention.
Lewy and Jerome both looked up at Pep but he was already waiting for them, arms folded. His gaze was piercing and severe, and it shifted restlessly from one to the other. He looked distinctly unimpressed, and they each felt like they had been hauled before their father after misbehaving.
“I don’t know what you two find so amusing about tomorrow’s game.” He said quietly, but the room was so silent that each acidic syllable reached them with perfect clarity. “But if you don’t wipe those smiles off your faces and pay attention like professionals, I’m benching you both for tomorrow. Understood?”
They nodded slowly, and they relaxed only when Pep turned back to the whiteboard in front of him and resumed speaking.
Now we’re in trouble. Jerome thought. Thanks.
You tapped my foot, asshole. Lewy replied. Thank yourself.
Next to him, Jerome placed a hand over his mouth. Mercifully, Pep had become engrossed in the defensive formation he was re-explaining on the whiteboard. He didn’t notice Jerome trying to cover his smile, in flagrant breach of the warning he had given them both only seconds beforehand.
Lewy tried not to smile too, but he was getting good at making Jerome laugh, and he wasn’t sure why that mattered to him but it did. He chose not to dwell on it.
They went into the second game down 2-1. At halfway, they were still 0-0. In the 80th minute, Xabi served a delicious kick to Jerome, who fired it into the goal.
Lewy barely had enough time to register the ball hitting the spidery netting before suddenly, he felt himself being propelled backwards, the unstoppable force of Jerome’s body falling against his own as Jerome jumped on him. Lewy struggled to remain upright, but he pulled it off somehow. Jerome roared with joy into his ear, into the air over his shoulder, and suddenly, Philipp and then Basti and then David landed on them both.
But none of that registered for Lewy, because all he could think about was that Jerome had come to him first.
Jerome jumped off him and went to celebrate in front of the crowd. Lewy watched him go and tried to tell himself that he had probably been the nearest person around.
He shook his head and chalked up his racing heart to the fact that after 80 frustrating minutes, they finally had everything to play for. He didn’t let himself think anything else.
Whatever spell had been holding them back till then seemed to break with Jerome’s goal, and they began laying siege to Chelsea’s goal. Courtois resisted and resisted their efforts until finally, Mario tipped the ball past him in the 93rd minute.
The stadium had been loud since Jerome’s goal, but when Mario’s gentle tap curved the ball into the bottom left corner of the net, sonic booms of relief and elation erupted all around them from all four tribunes. It wasn’t the final but for all the noise, it might as well have been one. Basti fell to his knees with relief, David cradled Juan in disbelief, and Philipp yelled himself hoarse into the stadium air.
Lewy stood in the middle of the pitch, overwhelmed, and when the whistle finally blew, exhaustion sunk onto his shoulders like a heavy blanket. But it was a satisfying kind of exhaustion, the kind that came after hard work and achieved goals, the kind that had been for something instead of nothing.
And all around him, the stadium continued to explode, the noise refusing to slope off even as the minutes since the goal passed. He could hear intermittent chanting from here and there, but mostly there was a wall of indistinguishable, overjoyed sound.
The temptation became too much, and he was weak. Lewy opened his mind and began to read the jubilation of everyone around him.
Jerome picked up on the waves and looked at him.
Buoyed by joy, Lewy went to him and put his lips to Jerome’s ear, because there was no way he’d hear him otherwise. No one paid them any attention.
“Read.”
“What? No – “
“Just do it.” Lewy interrupted him, with the kind of boldness that would have been inconceivable months ago. “Stop being a saint for one second and just do it, just this once. You’ve never felt anything like this before, Jerome. I swear. Just trust me.”
Jerome stayed silent, regarding Lewy probingly, but Lewy took his lack of a response as a good thing. If Jerome was completely against the idea, he would have said so. Silence meant he was tossing it up.
“Just once. And only once.” Jerome eventually replied, the words coming out slowly, the repetition more for the benefit of his own conscience than Lewy’s. “Who do I --”
“Doesn’t matter. Start with Philipp. Move to Basti. Pick a face in the crowd. Open up your mind. Do whatever the hell you want. Just do it.” And then, because he had taken an inch, Lewy figured that he might as well take a whole arm. “Mind if I read you while you do it?”
“Whatever. Okay.”
Jerome didn’t look entirely convinced, but he went ahead with it anyway. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a few moments. The ecstatic roar of the crowd around them continued, as loud as it had been after the final whistle. Lewy waited for Jerome’s nod, and let himself into Jerome’s mind just as Jerome let himself into those of others.
Jerome opened up indiscriminately, plucking joyous thoughts from the crowd around them like he was pulling feathers from the open air. Then he looked to Philipp, and then Basti, and then Thomas, and then Pep, and Lewy sensed him shuffle through the joy of everyone around them like he was shuffling through a deck of cards. Jerome stood motionless and speechless as he read, like he was too overwhelmed to move or speak.
Only Lewy could sense the elation coursing through him, as potently as though it was coursing through his own veins. They stood near each other, overpowered by the magnitude of the joy they were leeching off everyone around them. It was the joy of an entire stadium, of tens of thousands of people, magnified upon itself like thousands of mirror images reflecting each other. It seemed immeasurable, infinite, and it was all either of them could do to remain standing as it surged through them.
They remained like that for a long time till eventually, Jerome shut it off. He looked to Lewy and burst out laughing, the breathless laughter of someone trying to remember what it was to breathe, to stand upright, to feel feelings on a normal scale. Lewy smiled back at him.
Jerome walked over, held Lewy’s head in his hands, pressed their foreheads together and didn’t say anything. They didn’t need to speak or read each other. They simply stayed close, reflecting on what they had felt, on what they had done, on this improbable thing they had shared.
Lewy reflected on something else too. Jerome had come to him first, and he thought about what that meant, and what he wanted it to mean. They were two different things.
Jerome put his lips to Lewy’s ear and Lewy willed his heart not to jump. It did anyway.
“Holy shit.” Jerome said breathlessly.
Lewy smiled, even though he could tell that an unfortunate realization was hovering nearby, waiting for him to arrive at it.
“All I’m saying,” he told Jerome, “is that you should listen to me more often.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Jerome said, pushing a playful fist into Lewy’s ribs and fighting back a smile. “I’m never listening to you ever again.”
But he pulled Lewy in to him and they held each other, and Lewy arrived at the realization that had been waiting for him.
Shit.
He fell for Jerome and at first, it was like an illness. The first few symptoms – attention, time, seeking out his company – were all there, but he could easily dismiss them as something benign. He told himself that they were friends, and that this was what friends did. His quickening heartbeat was a little more difficult to dismiss. And then one day, Lewy saw Jerome talking to Thomas and laughing in a way that Lewy had never made him laugh, and there was no denying it anymore. Jealousy detonated in the pit of his stomach. He kept watching and it seeped into his bloodstream, till it had spread to the four corners of his body and stayed there.
After a while, it felt more like a fire that Lewy couldn’t control.
It had started with a small spark, the glow of which was kind of warm and pleasant at first, and it seemed small enough, manageable, easy for him to control. But it grew – and it grew because Lewy didn’t realize how easy it was to feed this thing, how it would feed off the briefest conversation, the slightest gesture, the most inoccuous look.
It grew and Lewy though to himself this is okay, this is fine, I can still manage this. He believed it at first but he continued to tell it to himself even when he didn’t, even when the fire was bigger than he was, when it threatened to burn down the tentative friendship he had built between them. After a while, he acknowledged its size, he stopped trying to control it because he knew that he couldn’t anymore, and he focussed on trying to keep it hidden from everyone else, and in particular, from Jerome.