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On Wednesday, Benni walks into the locker room with a smile – which is not too unusual – and something that can best be described as swagger – which is pretty unusual. Benni tosses his gym bag onto the bench and superficially smiles at Julian who is left slightly confused.
“You’re in a good mood today, huh?” Julian comments as Benni casually stretches and yawns.
“Yeah, I guess. Slept well last night.”
Benni smiles to himself as he ties his shoe laces like there’s something he isn’t telling. Julian doesn’t catch on and opens his mouth to ask a question before Prince shouts from across the room: “Looks like Benni got laaaaid!” in a sing-song voice.
Instantly, Prince starts wolf-whistling and a couple of other guys join in but Julian watches for Benni’s reaction because if there’s gossip he wants to be the first to know about it.
“No, guys, come one. Don’t,” Benni says, shakes his head and tries to stop the noise with a wave of his hand but he keeps smiling, partly amused, partly just satisfied.
“Dude, I’m happy you finally got over yourself. You seemed, like, severly under-fucked in the last month or so,” Julian pipes up because that’s totally true. Benni had been more strung up than usual and constantly yelling during training, once even because Kevin had pulled up his underpants higher than his sports pants. So yeah, slightly aggressive.
Benni raises an eyebrow and relaxedly leans against the wall, arms crossed. “Under-fucked? Is that even a word?”
Nice comeback, sure, but Julian is prepared for that, of course, so he whips out his phone, types and shows Benni a website.
“It’s on urban dictionary, so, whatever, old man. Congrats on the sex.”
Benni sighs but he’s still smiling like he fell into a pot of self-confident feel-good coconut shampoo yesterday.
“Thanks, Jule. It was the best I’ve had in a while.”
And Benni strides away while Julian contemplates taking a picture and posting it as the definition of swag on urban dictionary.
“Who was it? Do I know them?” Julian calls after Benni but he doesn’t get an answer. What a dick.
--
Julian would probably have forgotten about the whole thing but on Friday, Benni walks in wearing his washed-out grey shirt with a tiger printed across the chest.
That, in itself, is not worth mentioning, however, it’s the same shirt Benni had been wearing on Thursday and it’s the same shirt that he spilled lemonade over on Thursday. Julian can actually still see the outline of the stain on the hemline and that’s a little nasty.
Julian jabs Benni in the side with his elbow. “Are you wearing the same shirt as yesterday? Is your washing machine broken or something?”
Benni is obviously suppressing a self-satisfied grin when he answers. “Yes. And no. And I still look better than you do.”
He throws his clothes into the locker and jogs out of the room, not without winking at Julian and this shit is just getting weirder and weirder.
As the team is running their laps, Julian lets Leon in on his suspicions.
“So Benni told us that he got laid, right? And today he came in wearing the same shirt as yesterday. It must be something more serious but he isn’t telling who he’s having sex with.”
Leon stares on ahead and jogs faster. But Julian speeds up, too, because he couldn’t give a fuck about whether he annoys Leon or not. This is important business after all.
“I need to find out who he’s scoring with.”
“Schalke, hopefully." Leon deadpans and it’s the first time he actually participates in the conversation.
“Dickhead. You know what I mean. I want to know who got Benni into bed after he was basically sexually frustrated for a month. I need to find out.” Julian says gleefully.
Leon rolls his eyes. “No. No, you really don’t need to find out.”
Julian sticks out his tongue and races to catch up with Benni to question him about his secret bedmate but all Benni does is laugh it off. Julian decides he needs to dig deeper.
--
Any and all stalking Benni on social networks (and via calling his mother) by Julian turns out unsuccessful.
Benni never posts any photos with potential girl- or – let’s be real here – boyfriends. For every photo that he doesn’t post of the mysterious lover, however, there are two of him with Dortmund players. Aha, Julian thinks, keep your friends close and your enemies in selfies on your secret instagram account.
Julian is close to giving up on his mission when Benni is his normal captain-y self for like five days but then Benni has the audacity to reveal not only one, but two hickeys.
They shower after training and it’s not like Julian specifically looks but he has eyes, okay, and he has the shower next to Benni’s so of course he sees the bruises, one below the ear, one closer to the collar bone.
Julian tries to estimate the sizes of the hickeys and wonders whether he can match them to the size of a mouth but that goes about as well as one could expect.
Benni catches him staring and laughs. “What are you looking at, Jule?”
“You’ve got hickeys,” Julian replies and adds “Benni’s got hickeys!” louder for the whole team to hear. Two or three heads turn to look but barely anyone really cares anymore. Self-absorbed suckers.
Benni mindlessly lets his fingers play across the bruises. “Yeah,” he says, drawing out the syllable. “You should have seen the other guy.”
Julian opens his mouth to ask who that other guy was but Benni turns on the shower again in the exact moment so Julian has to wait until the whooshing is done. He asks afterwards but Benni only taps his forehead at Julian like it was the most stupid question in the world.
When Benni is gone, Julian stands in the middle of the locker room.
“Is anybody here banging Benni?” he shouts but nobody blushes or raises his hand so he takes that as a no.
At least he can strike the Schalke guys off the list of potential suspects now. Which only leaves half the population of Germany, basically.
--
After a while Julian can add extraordinarily frequent texting and snapchatting to the list of couple-y things Benni does but he can’t really remember whether Benni had always texted that much or whether that was a new thing. He certainly hadn’t hung onto his phone as much during the World Cup but now Benni barely ever lets it get out of sight.
The one time Julian manages to get hold of the phone, he isn’t able to find the password so he quickly has to sneak it back into Benni’s bag before he notices. Julian does take note of the lockscreen background though – it’s a picture of two interlinked hands of presumably two guys on a blue bedsheet.
It’s a small hint but not really of any help to find out who Benni is dating.
And ‘dating’ is definitely the right word, based on Julian’s observation on the next Friday. Benni changes into a clean white shirt and tight pants after training, applies half a bottle perfume and calls someone to say that he’ll “be a little late but you can just get to the table already, I’ll find you at the restaurant.”
Benni grabs his stuff, says bye and leaves to drive away in his car. Julian is about to leave, too, when he spots something on the floor in front of Benni’s locker.
He bends to pick it up and holds a small, yellow BVB pin between his fingers. It has to be Benni’s and if it was someone else Julian would be scared about him transferring or whatever – but this way it’s just another blip on Julian’s radar for Benni’s love life. An advanced version of the gaydar, if you will.
Atsuto spots him looking at the pin and takes it from his hand. “What’s that? You changing clubs all of a sudden, Jule?”
Julian flips him off. ”Uh, no, it’s Benni’s.”
Atsuto just nods like that totally makes sense.
“Must be from... you know who. His ‘friend’." he says and winks like they’re both in on the joke. Julian knits his eyebrows. Is it common knowledge that Benni is dating some Dortmund supporter?
“Nah, Benni’s too blue for that." Julian replies, trying to get Atsuto to tell him more about it.
But he just frowns and asks “What is Benni blue about?”
Julian looks at him blankly. “He’s blue about... our club?”
“Why is he blue? What’s making him sad? I don’t get it. He just saw him laughing a minute ago.”
“God, no,” Julian groans, “Not ‘blue’ as in ‘depressed’. ‘Blue’ as in the colour. Of our club. I’d have thought he’d be too much for Schalke to sleep with a Dortmund fan.”
Atsuto shoots him a weird look that’s probably supposed to mean something.
“Dude, I’d be happy if Benni slept with Cristiano fucking Ronaldo if it meant that he’s as easy-going as he is right now.”
Wow, that’s just about enough for Julian. Joke about anything, but Cristiano Ronaldo is one step to far.
Julian is still thinking about it when he gets home, when he makes dinner and watches tv for three hours and maybe he’s a tiny little bit obsessed with this whole thing but whatever, there’s no one to judge him here.
In fact, nobody else even seems to care (and to want to answer his elaborate texts asking for information) which he really can’t believe. But of course he selflessly volunteers to finally clear this whole thing up and tell Benni to his face (over the phone) that he doesn’t care at all who Benni is dating. Uh-uh.
He calls Benni although it’s late and he might not even be back from his date but Julian gets an answer right away anyway.
It’s not Benni though, it’s Mats.
“Bene Höwedes’ personal good-looking answering machine here. Leave a message after the beep unless you’re Marco Reus because you have absolutely no-“
Mats doesn’t get any further and Julian can hear noises before Benni answers the phone.
“I’m so sorry,” Benni says and sighs but Julian can tell he’s not even a bit angry. “But I do hope this is something important because you’re interrupting my date.”
“Yeah, okay, whatever,” Julian replies with a little rage, “I don’t even care anymore. Like, okay? Fine, don’t tell me who you’re banging even though I’ve asked like a thousand times. Okay. I don’t even care anymore.”
Benni breathes a confused ‘whaaaat.’ into the phone before something clicks and he laughs.
“Oh my god,” Benni chuckles. “Are you for real? Can you not put two and two together?”
“Four.” Julian says sulkily. Why is Benni picking on him now?
“Nice.” There’s a pause and then “It’s Mats.” and – oh. That does make a lot of sense. That was just way too easy for Julian’s incredible detective skills. Wow. Wow.
Julian whistles appreciatively. “Isn’t that hard to coordinate? I mean if my judgement was right, you guys didn’t hook up for a month something.”
“Twenty-seven kilometers is not too far if you love someone.” Benni says dreamily and Julian doesn’t mention that twenty-seven kilometers is also not too far if you don’t love someone, as long as you’ve got, like, a car.
It might be super cute that Benni and Mats are an item or whatever but as soon as Julian can hear kissing noises over the phone, it’s enough. He says goodbye, pretty proud of himself for figuring this whole secret out. Proud enough to share the discovery.
It’s close to midnight or maybe even past it, when Julian calls Leon who actually answers the phone.
“What.” he groans into the phone, as pissed off as the one time when Julian accidentally- whatever, doesn’t matter.
“Mats was the one Benni had been banging.”
Julian can seriously hear Leon face-palm over the phone.
“I know,” Leon says, “Literally everybody knows. Unless you’re calling me to tell me my house is burning, you can fuck off. It’s in the middle of the night.”
Julian kindly ignores that last part. “You knew? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you were jok- how can you not have known? Can you name one other person who Benni could logically have been dating.”
Leon doesn’t even make that last sentence a question because he knows he has a point there and ends the call before Julian can reply.
And, sure, Julian could have been faster with this discovery but he did find out and that’s what’s important.
When Benni wears a ring on a necklace around his neck the next time the team meets up in a bar, Julian winks at him.
Benni has the decency to blush, if just slightly.