Chapter Text
“Dad, who’s my mom?” Junior asks him and the phrase comes out of his lips naively, while he is petting his puppy on the couch or when he lies down on the floor to play with all his cars. He doesn’t look at him, but Cristiano knows he is waiting for an answer, even though his little head covered with dark curls does not rise, and when he lets out a tired, short sigh from his lips. Cristiano tells him his name and then he always looks him in the eye and it’s there, the sweet confrontation, his brown-almost-hazel eyes against Cristiano Ronaldo Junior’s brown eyes, that were always deeper, thicker. Then he always responds with the same sentence, which from saying it seems to have already been spent: “It doesn’t matter who is your mom, your mom is travelling. The only important thing is that Dad cares for you and loves you”. And Cristianinho lowers his gaze and runs his fingers and his chubby hands over the colored fur of his dog or takes his cars and pretends he is on a road. “Do I have another dad, then?” sometimes Junior insists. “Because Paula does” Cristiano never responds something else, he watches him only few seconds, enough to remember everything.
He knew it was a question he would inevitably have to answer, because Cris Junior realized how things were for the other preschool children. And he had invented that excuse in the hope that his son would believe him. When Junior was littler, everything was easier, because he believed anything that came out of his lips, but over time, Cristiano wondered how long it would last this trip of the person who gave birth to Junior. He was going to tell him, surely, he was going to. When his son is a little older, maybe at ten or at eleven or at an age when he was able to understand him and not reproach him, not criticize him at all. Cristiano knew that deep down he was going to understand and believe that what he did was right.
Cristiano paid a lot of money to avoid it. He paid for each closed mouth that could be a riot in the life he intended to form next to the boy who had suddenly appeared without him wanting it, without him being able to do anything. He paid his friends to bite their tongue when the reporters asked them and he paid him, to forget that he had given birth to a boy for the rest of eternity. Cristiano was not sure if Junior would ever know that he paid for him, so that he would own only to him, but he was sure that everything had been worth it and every day he believed it a little more, when Cristianinho ran around the house or hit a ball and then laughed, with that contagious laughter and Cristiano adored him more than anything, because he was his live portrait.
Except for Dolores, nobody knows the secret. The world gives its proposals and talks about that could be this but also that but Cristiano is never in charge of checking it, to say "yes, this is what happened". Some rumors are running here and there, some closer to reality, others more distant, but Cristiano had made sure that any gossip remained as that, a gossip. A pair of frivolous babblings that never reached his son’s ears. A pair of frivolous babblings that beat him, but Junior, never.
Cristiano remembers it, now more than ever. These years with Cris Junior by his side have served to, little by little, recreate everything in his memory, creating landscapes and scenarios. The year is insubstantial, Cristiano just gets into the head that Junior was born in 2010 and that's all he needs to know, remember, always. So, without calculations, he is sure that he met the omega who gave birth to his son there in 2009. Because it was going to start the World Cup in nine months and he had gone to play a friendly match there in Medellin and had gone with his teammates to have a drink, to celebrate the victory.
Jorge Mendes had recently given him some good news: at any moment it would become official that Real Madrid would pay the highest sum that any other club had given for him, only to have him among their ranks. It was pretty possible that he will be part of his national team for the World Cup and things were going well, life seemed suddenly really kind, truly worth living. And there, sitting closer, was a young boy, all freckles and thin and Cristiano recognized him. He had seen him walking around in the place where they trained for the match. Surely he was a player part of the omega football club there in Medellin, but Cristiano never confirmed that. He was Colombian, probably, although Cristiano had never been interested in knowing that. He did not talk much and seemed shy, giving him sporadic looks. He was not the kind of omega that Cristiano had become used to, he was not cloying. He seemed indifferent. From the way he looked at him sometimes, he did not even seem to know who he was.
Cristiano's career had begun to soar, so many sudden jumps and so many twists, that he also had difficulty in sizing who he really was, what he was now that he had become a skilled footballer, the kind of footballer who calls the attention of the big clubs. But with it, all came, the Omegas and Betas (and even the Alphas) and parties and silver and everything, everything that makes a footballer, which constitutes an elite footballer. Between so many flirts with no scruples, Cristiano had lost the habit of practicing some ritual of conquest when suddenly someone caught his eye. He was direct, frank and always sincere.
So he said that Omega with brown hair, eyes that were lighter by the lights of the room and blue jeans, with that body that Cristiano scanned with his eyesight, to sleep with him. It was as if the king had chosen the courtier and that poor boy had no choice but to accept him because he was Cristiano Ronaldo and was becoming, faster than he could handle, a world football star.
But he refused. He shook his head and went back to his seat, and Cristiano watched as the rest of his friends were filled him with question, stung him by any hint of what was going on there. One of the teammates of Cristiano said hello to one girl who was sitting next to the boy and Cristiano found his chance, again. The only thing Cristiano heard coming from the Colombian’s lips was his name when he asked. James. And in fact, it was not a name he would remember for the next few days. When James finally gave him a shy smile, Cristiano had no choice but to dust off his forgotten tenderness. He smiled at the boy, approached him and whispered very slowly, so that no one else could hear: quiero besarte.
Cristiano never knew the reason why James slept with him, but he supposed that it was the same reason the rest of the boys and girls did, because an Alpha like him was difficult to find and at least they would have a story to tell one day, even if no one believed them: "I got laid with Cristiano Ronaldo”. And things happened. And Cristiano never saw this James again; he left when he was asleep, in that miserable room of any Medellin motel.
The months passed and it was hours for Real Madrid to play a match against Barcelona when he received a call from Jorge. Cristiano remembers that Jorge sounded pissed, fed up, as if he were a father (the father he had not) who had discovered an evil of his boy. The first thing Jorge asked was, “do you remember James?” And he answered no, because who the fuck was James? “James, the omega you slept with in Colombia, in the friendly match”. Cristiano opened his mouth. “Ah, James!” But immediately his smile faded because how did that boy get his rep number? Why? Jorge tells him that James, desperate and troubled, has told him that he is expecting a child and that the father cannot be anyone else but him. Cristiano laughed nervously. "I saw him naked once" he tries to apologize, but it's no good.
Biting his lip, Cristiano asks Jorge what to do. Jorge sounds hoarse but he answers that he must done the paternity exam when the child is born and if it turns out that James is one of these omegas who are looking for their fifteen minutes of fame, of the demand nobody will save him. Cristiano nods, although nobody sees him, alone in the bathroom of the enclosure in which they are concentrated.
That day, on the field Cristiano looks erratic, without power or joy. His head is elsewhere. Real Madrid that year has no place in the podium but Cristiano, counseled by his mother, whom he has told everything as soon as he has returned home, sends James, through Jorge, the money to carry his pregnancy to term and even pays for a cesarean in a good clinic. Jorge calls him one day while he is training for the World Cup and tells him that James has given birth to a boy. Cristiano feels that his heart is going to leave his chest.
A day later Dolores goes to Medellin and meets the baby, whole corm color, little dark fuzzes on his head. She sends him a photo of the baby and Cristiano receives it in the middle of the comings and goings of his teammates in the dressing room.
Then it happens.
He never believed in love at first sight, but at that moment it happened.
He fell in love with the boy he saw on the screen of his cell phone.
From that moment, Cristiano had a unique whim: to get rid of the one who gave birth to his son. He offers James ten million dollars to give up the creature forever. No visits, no greetings, nothing. As if he had never been inside you, as if nothing had ever been taken from your belly. Dolores and Jorge repeat exactly the words of Cristiano for James and James, young, alone, confused and eaten by the powerful reality that means to have a son, to keep a son, signs the contract that will take him away forever from the boy whom he has not seen a second since they took him off the belly. He signs the contract that is clear and decisive: he will never see the fruit of his entrails again.
Cristiano had suffered a lot when he was a child, seeing his father drunk after work and at night and he was sure that a family made up of both parents had never been a guarantee of good raising. Then there was his girlfriend, Irina, the obsessive Irina, the always jealous Irina, who went to tell the magazines that she felt bad when Cristiano brought the boy to the house but that after all had become accustomed and that was "Impossible not to love that baby." Irina was good while she was there, but she would never be as much as Dolores and Cristiano ran to his mother one night with the baby in his arms, from his mouth came the words that told him that all this that was happening was serious: I want you to help me educate him, to give him love as you did with me and my siblings. No one will ever know who gave birth to Cristiano Ronaldo Junior. From there, Cristiano almost did not know what it was to give milk at midnight or change diapers because Dolores was always at his side, taking care of everything.
The press began to speculate. Who was the boy’s mom. They said that he had paid for a renting belly, and then all the mockery came over him, questioning Cristiano’s Alpha ability. His press chief was quick to issue a statement that they posted directly on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and that journalists reproduced everywhere: "With great joy and emotion, I affirm that I have recently been the father of a baby boy and I have agreed, since the mother prefers that their identity be kept confidential, that my son is left under my exclusive guardianship. There will be no more information on this subject and I ask everyone to fully respect my right to privacy (And that of the boy), at least in such personal matters as these”.
James never appeared again, nor tried to contact him, nor to know how Junior was, or anything.
When Cristiano looks at him, there is something that spreads throughout his body. And when he hears him laugh or hears him say any word or sees his drawings, or listens carefully as Junior tells you’re the best in the world!, he knows he did the right thing. That no one could ever love him as much as he loved him and that someday, when Cristianinho finds out the truth, there would be nothing to be afraid of, because who does nothing, fears nothing.
And Cristiano tries every day to please him in everything: toys, trips, parties with his fellow preschoolers. The only thing he cannot give him for the moment is to reveal his mother's name, even when every day Junior gets up and asks: Dad, who is my mom? Because that does not matter. Because his father is him, Cristiano Ronaldo, triumphant and flattered and the gods do not share the love.