Chapter Text
Prologue
Two days before the Vuelta started, Mads Pedersen announced, in a group chat that hadn’t seen activity since Roubaix, that he was “gathering the boyz” for dinner.
No one really knew what that meant, but about two dozen drivers showed up anyway.
They crowded into a restaurant tucked into the edge of an old town square, where the floor tiles were uneven, the light flickered above the bar, and the owner’s dog kept wandering through the tables like he owned the place. The air smelled like grilled meat, garlic, and sunburnt skin. Plates clinked. Chairs scraped. Bottles of water were passed from hand to hand while some brave souls went for beer. It wasn’t official, not a team thing, not a sponsor event - just a room full of cyclists who would be racing each other in less than forty-eight hours, trying to pretend they weren’t.
Someone turned the football on in the background. Someone else turned it off. Arguments about climbing stages started at one end of the table and turned into inside jokes by the time they reached the other. Wout sat across from Sepp and refused to speak English for the full first hour. Almeida threatened to do the same in Portuguese until no one could stop laughing. A waiter tried to bring out menus and gave up after the third rider asked for “whatever pasta you have. sauce? no, no sauce please.”
Jonas came early. Not because he wanted to, but because Mads had texted “don’t be lame” in all caps and then called him twice to make sure he was coming. He found a seat against the wall, not too close to the center but still within reach of the group, and sat quietly for a while, running his thumb over the corner of a napkin as the table filled in.
Tadej came late. Not rudely late - just the kind of late that made people notice. He walked in with his usual lopsided grin, hoodie sleeves pushed up to his elbows, a backwards cap that didn’t match the rest of him. He said hi to everyone. He always did. He had that way of making a room feel like it belonged to him without trying to. But he didn’t sit near Jonas. That might’ve been coincidence. Probably wasn’t.
“Look who finally showed up,” Mads shouted, throwing a piece of bread across the table at him.
Tadej caught it, dramatic like a goalkeeper, and grinned. “Had to make an entrance.”
“You’re two minutes late,” someone said.
“That’s exactly when the entrance window opens,” he replied, and slid into a chair between Gino and Roglič, greeting them both with that casual kind of affection that comes with having spent far too many hours on bikes and buses together.
By the time the bread baskets were nearly empty, everyone was talking over each other. The kind of noise that bounces off warm walls and starts to sound like music. Someone at the far end was doing impressions of team staff - slightly mean, definitely accurate. Someone else was trying to start a debate about whether descents were more about instinct or stupidity.
“I’ll take instinct,” Sepp said. “Because I have no excuse otherwise.”
“You have neither,” Wout muttered.
Mads was halfway through a story about crashing into a goat during a training ride in Girona when he slammed a palm on the table and shouted, “No but seriously, you all suck, I’m gonna win this Vuelta and none of you can stop me.”
Tadej laughed first - bright and easy, the kind of laugh that tips his head back just slightly - and then tried to cover it with a sip of water. Jonas smiled before he could stop himself, eyes flicking over just for a second.
Just a second.
They didn’t talk. Not really. But they weren’t strangers either.
At some point, Tadej leaned across to snag a bottle of sparkling water and asked, without looking, “Still hate the lemon kind?”
Jonas, four seats away, didn’t miss a beat. “More than I hate descents in the rain.”
“Noted,” Tadej said, and passed the plain one down without another word.
Later, Jonas offered him a fork when his was taken with someone else’s plate. Tadej bumped their knees under the table in thanks. Normal things. Easy. But not nothing.
They weren’t close. Not the way teammates are. Not the way best friends are. But they had shared podiums and post-race hugs. Shared silence in anti-doping trailers, awkward eye contact in press conferences, one stupid moment in Monaco no one ever brought up again. They weren’t close - but they weren’t strangers.
By dessert, the table had split into two factions: those who were fully committed to getting gelato afterward, and those who claimed they had early training and would “probably just head back.” No one moved. No one meant it.
Sepp asked Jonas if he thought the queen stage was actually as bad as everyone said. Jonas shrugged, thoughtful.
“Bad how?” he asked.
“Like nightmare bad,” Sepp said. “Like… visions of God.”
“It’s not that steep,” Jonas said. “But it’s relentless. You crack once and you’re done.”
“Sounds like love,” Mads said, unhelpfully.
Tadej snorted into his water.
Jonas didn’t look at him. But the corner of his mouth turned up.
Jonas stood eventually, slow and quiet, like someone easing himself out of a familiar ache. Tadej glanced up at the same time, like they were connected by something invisible and slightly inconvenient. Their eyes met. It didn’t last.
It didn’t need to.
— · — · — · — · — · — · — · — · — · — · — · — · — · — · — · — · — · — · · — · —
The hotel room was cold. Or maybe that was just his skin.
Jonas laid in bed, one arm behind his head, staring at the ceiling like it might rearrange itself into answers if he looked long enough. The room was dark except for the pale strip of streetlight bleeding in through the curtain. A car passed every few minutes. Someone laughed outside - loud, careless, distant.
His teammates were next door, probably still talking. He could hear muffled voices through the wall, Wout’s familiar cadence, someone else opening a drawer. It was comforting, in a way. Normal.
But he couldn’t sleep.
He almost never slept well before a race, even now. Even after everything. The nerves weren’t what they used to be - less fire, more background noise - but tonight, something else was making his thoughts feel heavy. Floaty. Like he was both inside his body and a few centimeters to the left of it.
He thought about the dinner. The noise. The jokes. The way Marc had spent five minutes trying to convince the table that gelato was objectively better than ice cream while Almeida threatened to defect to Soudal just to make a point. He liked those moments. Liked the looseness of it, the way everyone was pretending to forget what came next.
But mostly, he kept circling back to that second. That look.
Not even a real moment, really. Just… something.
Jonas closed his eyes.
He remembered the way Tadej had walked in, late and unbothered, sunglasses pushed up in his hair and a leather bracelet on his wrist like he hadn’t just spent the last month racing in the heat. The way his laugh had cracked a little when Mads brought up the goat story again. The way he’d passed him the water without needing to ask, like he just knew.
He remembered the way their knees had touched. Just for a second. Accidental, probably. But Tadej hadn’t moved. Neither had he.
It wasn’t a confession. It wasn’t anything.
But it wasn’t nothing either.
Jonas exhaled through his nose, slow. Turned onto his side. Then back again.
He wondered, briefly, what Tadej was doing right now. Whether he was still out, or back at his own hotel, curled under hotel blankets, hair still damp from the shower. Whether he was also lying awake, staring at nothing. Whether he remembered the same second.
He wouldn’t ask. He couldn’t. They didn’t talk like that. Not really.
They talked like teammates who weren’t teammates. Like friends who never called it that. Like rivals who knew each other too well.
He thought about the stage profiles. The climbs. The weather. Thought about the heat and the wind and the way his legs had felt in training that morning. Thought about strategy.
But underneath all of it - threaded through every stray thought like a breath he couldn’t let out - was him.
He wasn’t in love. That would be ridiculous.
He was just-
Thinking.
About how close Tadej had been tonight. About how easy it was to talk to him. About the way his voice softened when he said Jonas’ name.
Jonas opened his eyes again.
The ceiling hadn’t changed.
He rolled onto his stomach and pulled the blanket up to his chin like it would protect him from the weight in his chest. It didn’t.
Tomorrow they'd do recon. The next day, they'd race. And everything would shift back into motion.
But for now - for this one strange, quiet, restless night - there was still room for softness. For what-ifs. For a second that hung in the air like smoke, refusing to disappear.
He didn’t fall asleep for a long time.
And when he finally did, he dreamed about nothing in particular.
Except maybe a flicker of light.
And a laugh that didn’t quite fade.