Chapter Text
Throughout his whole life, Pedri had to make many decisions. Some were good, some were bad.
This one was definitely a bad one. He knew that right after making it.
“I have a really weird request,” he said, looking at his friend Ferran sitting across the table and observing how his brows furrowed with confusion.
It all actually started with a family dinner.
He wasn’t a big fan of them, though he didn’t mind if they happened once in a while. A great occasion to eat or to chat with family members he didn’t have a chance to talk to in a very long time. But it also meant meeting up with those he, well , tolerated at best.
One of those people was his cousin, his mom’s sister’s son. Three years younger than him, a bit of a brat , as he and Fer liked to call him. He was loud, overconfident and somehow always trying to find a thing in which he was better than Pedri. Whether it would be naming basketball teams (which, Pedri was pretty sure, his cousin had specially learnt by heart beforehand) or checking whose step is the biggest (Pedri was about 15 centimeters shorter than him).
Most times he didn’t care much about his cousin’s weird questions, until he asked him about his love life.
It was one of the topics Pedri didn’t like talking about and didn’t feel the need to do that. He had never been in a serious relationship. When he was younger, girls from his class didn’t interest him. When he got a little bit older, he found out he was gay and having just started on playing in one of the biggest clubs in the world, he knew he would have probably never got the chance to be in a public relationship with someone he actually felt attracted to. So he focused on football and abandoned the idea of having a romantic partner.
Or that was a plan until he met Ferran Torres.
They became friends in no time, especially after Ferran joined FC Barcelona. They have been inseparable ever since then, always practicing together, sitting next to each other on the bus rides and plane flights. Pedri quickly started enjoying talking to another man and spending his time with him, even though in some matters they were each other's complete polar opposites. Ferran was always there for him and he was always there for Ferran, whether it was a hard time Pedri had after getting an injury or a hard time Ferran had after his split up with Sira. Pedri felt at ease when his friend was around and even better than when he was alone.
So maybe it wasn’t a surprise that at some point Pedri caught feelings. He didn’t know when it exactly happened, because for such a long time he interpreted his feelings towards Ferran as ‘platonic’, until one day, a few months ago, he, with a small indirect help by his brother, realised how wrong he was.
To say he panicked would be an understatement. In the span of three long hours he analysed their whole friendship from the moment they met for the commercial, when Pedri was still playing for Las Palmas and Ferran for Valencia to the last few days. Then he analysed his own behavior around his friend, thinking about all of the gestures he did and all of his reactions. Was he the last person to figure that out? Did Ferran see through him, but hadn’t said anything because he didn’t want to hurt his feelings?
The questions kept him awake at night for some time, but after a few weeks, he learnt how to live with those feelings without actually revealing them to his friend. He tried acting as usual around Ferran, with a quiet voice in his head sometimes turning their friendly interactions into something potentially romantic. He knew Ferran didn’t feel the same, so the best he could do was to keep dreaming.
Those dreams were probably the reason why his mouth moved before he could even think about his cousin’s question. “ Actually, I have a boyfriend.” A blatant lie, so far from the truth as it could ever get. The situation wouldn’t be so bad, if it wasn’t for his cousin’s response…
“He invited me to his birthday party and told me to bring my boyfriend, ” Pedri informed him, after explaining the whole situation (minus the part about WHY he lied about his love life) to his friend. “I can make an excuse on why ‘he couldn’t come’, but then he would know I was lying and I would not hear the end of his teasing.”
Ferran took a long sip of his almost finished coffee, before speaking up. “Okay, I’m in.”
“What?” Pedri uttered, suddenly feeling lost as to what Ferran was referring to. His own coffee was long forgotten, barely touched, ever since he started talking. After the training, he was drained of energy, but the tiredness somehow disappeared when he began stressing about talking his friend through the whole ‘birthday party-boyfriend’ situation.
“I can be your fake boyfriend for your cousin’s party” he responded, smirking, leaning back into his chair. He was wearing a black hoodie, the one he lent Pedri last time he was sleeping over at Ferran’s apartment. The sleeves of the hoodie were rolled up, revealing a cross tattoo on his wrist. In some of his dreams Pedri traced that one and the rest of Ferran’s tattoos with his finger. “I mean it was quite obvious you were about to ask that.”
Was he that predictable? Pedri sighed a bit worried, but also relieved. He would probably die of embarrassment if he were to say that question out loud. And good thing Ferran agreed to do it. Not that he had any other solution prepared in case he didn’t.
He told his brother about it right after he came back to their home. Fer knew about his feelings towards his friend, it wasn’t easy to keep a secret from him when they were living in the same household. Personally, he advised Pedri not to go to their cousin’s party at all, with an excuse of fake fever. He liked their cousin even less than Pedri did and he wouldn't go to that party, no matter that in this case it meant he would become his cousin's target to constant teasing.
However, Pedri wasn't like his brother and when he got the chance to shut his cousin's mouth for once, he was going to take it, even if he needed to fake a relationship to achieve that.
A few days before the party, he and Ferran met up at Pedri's house to plan out the whole strategy. They spent almost three hours going through all the aspects of their relationship, trying to make their ‘get together’ story as reliable as they could.
His cousin obviously knew Ferran, since he was a Barça fan himself. It also meant he must have been aware of their close friendship, so at least they didn't have to come up with the whole ‘ how we met ’ story. It, however, didn't mean it was a walk in a park, because there were still tons of other details they had to discuss in case Pedri’s cousin would get too curious.
“So, who confessed first?” Pedri asked, a pencil in his hand and a sheet of papers in the middle of the table they were both sitting at.
Before they got to the real reason for their meeting, they ate a dish prepared earlier by his brother. A simple, light dish “ so you don't have to brainstorm on an empty stomach ” as he said.
“Me, without a doubt,” Ferran responded, with a big grin on his face, tapping on the table with his own pencil. This time he was wearing a white hoodie that he got from their management, with a big SHARK written on the back. Pedri kind of wondered how it would look on him. “In the hotel room, after an away match, which we obviously won. By mistake, we were the only ones to get a room with one big, double bed. They offered us a different room, but we didn’t care, ‘cause after all it was just for one night. And so with a wave of excitement, ‘cause I scored a goal that evening, I confessed my feelings, you said you felt the same, we kissed and then… we started dating.”
“Did you borrow another romance book from your sister?” Pedri snorted, shaking his head slowly with disbelief. He planned on noting what his friend was saying, but abandoned this thought after it became clear how unrealistic Ferran’s story was going to be. “And for the record, we can’t tell him that the confession happened in a hotel room or any bedroom. He will definitely assume we had sex afterwards if you put it like that.”
Hearing Pedri’s words, Ferran smirked and quickly raised his brows twice. “ For the record, you said it, not me. Besides, most couples have sex, so what if he assumes that? You better pray he doesn’t ask us about our sex life.”
What he actually prayed for was for Ferran not to notice how much he was blushing. The first time in his life he was actually thankful for such a low light intensity of his dining room’s lamps.
“Let’s just… skip to the next part.”
They discussed every detail that they could come up with. Their first date, their pet names, how they revealed themselves to their families, their friends. On which side of the bed each of them slept (they argued about it for ten minutes straight, before tossing a coin), the things they liked the most about the other one, and, most importantly, their answers for some trivial questions like ‘ which of the seasons is Pedri’s favorite?” or ‘ What’s the name of Ferran’s first pet?’. It seemed unnecessary, but he didn’t know what kind of questions his cousin would ask, so they wanted to be safe, just in case.
Pedri wrote down everything, as it was crucial for both of them to remember the same version of their made up relationship.
At last, the only thing they had to talk over was their behavior. If they wanted people, especially Pedri’s cousin, to believe they were a couple, they had to act like a couple. Ferran had some experience, he was in a long relationship, but Pedri felt lost. Of course, he somehow knew how people in love behaved, but he was afraid that in their case it would turn out too unnatural if he just started copying them.
“We could hold hands,” Ferran suggested, playing with the pencil, spinning it and passing from hand to hand. “Or look at each other when the other one is talking.”
“I could also kiss you on the cheek once in a while. If that’s okay with you.”
Pedri hummed in response, his eyes focused on the last thing he wrote on the paper in front of him. He was definitely okay with what Ferran was offering and matter of fact, he wouldn’t mind if it wasn’t necessarily on the cheek, but he couldn’t just say it out loud and play it as a joke.
“You already act like you’re dating, no need to pretend anything.” his brother said, leaving the kitchen.
He spent the last two hours in his bedroom, playing games and talking to his girlfriend, but just when they started talking about their couple-y behavior, he showed up with an excuse of wanting to grab a quick snack. However, in his dictionary quick actually meant fifteen minutes, which he used to eat a banana, make himself coffee, and eavesdrop on his younger brother and his friend.
Pedri huffed, irritated, and dropped the pencil he was holding in his hand, only to flip Fer off until he disappeared from his view.
Though he didn’t like what his brother’s opinion suggested, it wasn’t the first time someone joked about them acting like a couple. Some of their teammates, mostly Lamine, Balde or Fermin, were teasing them about it every time he or Ferran hugged each other or looked at each other after scoring a goal in training, which they both contributed to. ‘ Lovebirds’ was a common way they called them and other teammates eventually picked that up too. Pedri learnt to ignore them, his friend also didn’t look as if he took their words seriously.
“Yeah, I’m okay with that” he finally replied, agreeing to Ferran’s suggestion. Before he was to forget, he scribbled a short note about physical touch and eye contact under a big ‘ Interactions ’ he wrote in the middle of a piece of paper.
They once again went through all the aspects they discussed and after almost three hours of brainstorming, they finally called it a day. They both had to get enough sleep for the next morning training and even though they would prefer to talk more about other topics, they had to part ways.
Pedri let out a long sigh as he locked the door and put his head against them. Halfway through the meeting he realised how pathetic his situation was: he was fake dating his crush, who probably thought they were both treating that as a joke on his cousin, but in reality Pedri may or may not have started to treat it as his only chance of seeing what it’s like to date Ferran Torres. And he felt terrible about it, because his mind was telling him that he was literally using his friend for his own pleasure.
At first, he assumed the whole fake dating wouldn’t affect him, but what if he was wrong? What if he was no longer able to pretend he didn’t feel more?
He was fucked, really fucked.
At this point he only wished for the party to come and go as soon as possible.