Archive of Our Own

By late afternoon the pool had stopped being a pool.

Not officially. The water was still blue, still stung with chlorine when a kid cannonballed and got shouted at in three languages. The tiles still burned the soles of feet. The inflatable flamingo still drifted like it owned the place. But the air had tightened—like the whole resort had been cinched at the waist and pulled into one shared posture.

A large screen had been erected at the far end where the sun fell hardest, two metal trusses braced against the breeze, speakers lashed on like boxing gloves. Somebody had dragged planters aside and taped down cables with the fussy care of people who knew exactly what happened when crowds forgot where they were stepping. The poolside bar—usually the realm of lazy daiquiris and hollow laughter—had become a kind of concourse, cups stacked and ready like ammunition.

In the shade, the girls were already settled in. Not early, not late—just with the kind of certainty that meant they’d been doing this together long enough to have a “spot” without ever announcing it.

Six loungers. A little crooked, because somebody always insisted on angling theirs for a better view and it always ruined the symmetry. Towels draped like banners. A cheap straw hat wedged over the corner of a bag to stop it sliding. Bottles of water already half gone, condensation making dark rings on the side table. Sunscreen slick on knees and collarbones. The faint tang of aftersun—cucumber and something medicinal—hung around them like a second skin.

Toni-Marie had her sunglasses pushed up into her hair, face tipped toward the screen like she was measuring it for flaws. She squinted. “If this goes off mid-anthem, I’m scrappin’ some fella, la.” Joking, but said like it mattered enough to scare fate.

Olivia made a soft sound—half laugh, half warning. “Behave, Tone. Yer meant to be on ’oliday, not startin’ a gang war.”

Kourtnee, legs folded under her on the lounger, had commandeered the only patch of breeze like she’d negotiated it. She flicked her wrist at the growing mass of people drifting in. “Look at this, though. Honest t’God, it’s like Anfield’s spawned a cousin in Spain.”

“More like Goodison,” Marnie-Jay corrected automatically, because she couldn’t help herself. Hair scraped back off her neck, she had the attentive stillness of someone who’d been pretending she wasn’t excited for hours. She leaned forward, elbows on knees, watching the way bodies found places without asking. “Everyone’s just… slotting in.”

Lucinda tilted her head, watching the crowd form like it was weather. “It’s mad, isn’t it? One telly. One game. An’ suddenly everyone’s got the same face on.”

Shazney Devlin, quiet in that way she got when something felt bigger than it should, let out a breath through her nose. “It’s proper, this.” She glanced down the line of loungers at her mates, as if checking they were all still there. “Like… didn’t think it’d feel like this, not here.”

They weren’t the only ones who’d clocked it.

At first it was the obvious ones: Irish tourists already sun-browned into a new shade of determination, drifting in with football tops clinging damply to their backs, green stripes and shamrocks and numbers that meant something to them and nothing to anyone else. They came in pairs, trios, whole noisy knots of them, scanning for screen-angle like birds checking wind. Some had flags folded tight under their arms, not waved yet, held the way something got held when it wasn’t for show until the right second.

Then families arrived. A couple with two small kids slid into a spot low to the ground, the kids perched on knees, legs swinging. One of the kids had a pool noodle like it was a sword, smacking it gently against the tiles until their mam caught it mid-swing and gave them a look that could curdle sangria. The kid’s mouth puckered, offended, then softened as the crowd noise rose. They leaned into her, little palm pressed to her forearm.

A group of Irish lads in their twenties appeared with that half-joking bravado that was really nerves wearing a grin. They came like the whole thing might be a laugh until it wasn’t. Two of them were already sweating through their tops, not from heat but from whatever it did to a body to care too much in front of strangers. One had an Irish tricolour tied around his shoulders like a cape and kept adjusting it, fingers fidgeting at the knot.

“Go on, lads,” one of them said too loudly, though nobody had done anything yet. He thumped his mate on the chest like he could knock the fear right out of him. “It’s only a game, innit?”

“Only a game,” the mate echoed, tasting the lie even as he tried to smile it into truth.

Near the bar, a couple of sunburnt Brits who insisted they were “neutral” hovered with pints that sweated as much as they did. Lobster-red shine from underestimating Spanish sun and overestimating resilience.

“We’re neutral,” one of them announced to nobody in particular, leaning in as if neutrality required proximity. Voice full of lazy confidence, the kind that found volume whichever way things went.

His mate—hair fried almost white at the temples—took a sip and winced because the beer was colder than his scorched lips. “Neutral, yeah,” he repeated, eyes locked on the screen. Another half-step closer, like the tiles themselves were tugging.

At the very back, a German couple took positions with careful politeness, as if they were at an art exhibit and didn’t want to block anyone’s view. The woman—Anke, if the stitched name on her beach bag was to be believed—held her hands clasped in front of her stomach, curious and contained. The man, Jürgen, had a tiny camcorder and looked vaguely guilty about it, like he wasn’t sure if filming a crowd like this counted as stealing.

They weren’t cheering. Not yet. But their eyes kept darting to faces: the way mouths shaped future shouts, the way shoulders lifted in anticipation, the way hands hovered near flags or cups as if any second might demand both.

Even the Spanish staff began drifting in, pulled by the simple truth that finals were theatre. The sport didn’t need to belong to them for the moment to make sense. A whole group of strangers holding their breath together always meant something.

The bar staff came first—aprons on, hands wiping themselves dry out of habit even when there was nothing to wipe. One of them, Paco, carried a tray of plastic cups like he’d carried trays his whole life, but his head kept turning toward the screen with the hunger of someone who wanted to know the ending.

His colleague, Marisol, had her hair pinned up tight, not a strand allowed to rebel. She paused mid-restock, a bottle angled in her hand, and didn’t pour. She watched the crowd’s shape, the way it thickened, the way it didn’t spill into chaos but organised itself with invisible rules.

A lifeguard leaned on his pole with one forearm, whistle resting against his chest. He looked like a referee who’d wandered into the wrong sport and decided not to leave. Every now and then a child splashed too close and he lifted his chin, but his eyes kept sliding back to the screen like it had gravity.

Housekeeping staff in uniform appeared in twos and threes, hair pinned, faces still damp from work. One woman—older, stern-looking, lipstick too bright for her tired eyes—stood with her hands folded at her waist as if she was attending mass. A younger one nudged her and whispered something. The older woman’s mouth twitched like she was trying not to smile at being caught.

It wasn’t allegiance, not really. It was appetite.

It showed up in little choices. In the way Paco set down an extra stack of cups in reach of the Irish lads, as if preparing for a flood. In the way Marisol glanced at a green shirt and then at a yellow one and smirked, choosing not a country but a story. In the way the lifeguard shifted his feet until he had the best angle, like he’d decided this was his watchtower now.

Under the shade, the girls watched it all congeal around them.

Lucinda leaned back and tipped her face toward the breeze, eyes half-lidded. “I love when everyone pretends they’re dead chill an’ then—bang—you can tell they’re about to combust.”

“Yer mean like you?” Olivia asked, voice light, but her fingers were already worrying the edge of her towel, rolling and unrolling it.

Lucinda clicked her tongue, offended on principle. “I’m calm as anything, me.”

Kourtnee snorted. “Yeh, an’ I’m the Queen.”

Toni-Marie pointed with her chin at the Irish lads as they jostled themselves into a better view, all elbows and nerves. “Look at ’em. They’re tryna laugh it off, aren’t they? But it’s in their eyes.”

Shazney’s gaze followed. One of the lads—dark hair, freckles, a grin too wide—caught her looking and gave a quick nod like something was shared just by being here. Shazney nodded back, small and solemn, as if she’d been handed a responsibility.

Marnie-Jay shifted forward again, unable to sit back when there was a screen in front and a crowd behind and the whole place vibrating like a drumskin. “It’s mad, though,” she murmured. “The pool’s like… the pitch edge. Like there’s a line an’ everyone can feel it.”

And it did feel like that. Loungers and towels and prams and coolers made terraces. Umbrellas turned into the roof of a stand. The bar became a tunnel everyone passed through, emerging with drinks and nerves. Even the tiles seemed to hum underfoot with the stamp of people finding their place.

Somebody—nobody clocked who—tested the speakers.

A crackle snapped across the pool like a static slap. A ripple of boos rose immediately, instinctive, as if the crowd had rehearsed it. The boos weren’t cruel; they were a kind of communal reflex, a way of saying: don’t you dare.

Then laughter chased it, bright and relieved, because the booing itself meant it had already become a thing.

“Hey! Fix it!” one of the Irish lads shouted, grinning as he did, making it a joke so it wouldn’t sound like prayer.

Paco lifted both hands in surrender, palms out, as if he personally had offended them with electricity. “¡Un momento, un momento!” he called back, smiling too.

Toni-Marie leaned forward, voice sharp with mock menace. “Paco, la—don’t be doin’ us like that.”

Olivia laughed, but it was tight around the edges. “Tone, he’s not the broadcast engineer.”

“Don’t care,” Toni-Marie said, eyes still fixed on the screen. “He’s nearest.”

Another crackle, softer this time, like someone clearing their throat. The image on the screen flickered. A chorus of “Ohhh!” rolled through the crowd, then quieted fast, as if everyone had suddenly remembered they might scare it away.

Jürgen lifted his camcorder, hesitated, then lowered it again, as if deciding that this wasn’t something to film; it was something to sit inside.

A little boy in the family at the front wriggled, restless, twisting sideways until his mam’s arm became a seatbelt. He huffed, bored already. His sister tried to clap along with someone chanting nonsense near the bar, but it petered out when she realised nobody else was clapping yet.

A breeze cut through, carrying the smell of sunscreen, beer, wet towels, fried food from somewhere beyond the pool fence. The air was heavy with late heat, but there was something else in it now: that metallic taste of a shout waiting to be born.

Then the broadcast settled.

The crackle disappeared. The picture steadied. A clean swell of sound came through the speakers—music, murmurs, a distant stadium roar transported into this pocket of Spanish afternoon. For a heartbeat, nobody moved.

The crowd exhaled like one body.

It sounded soft, but it was everywhere: breath letting go, a plastic chair squeaking as someone shifted into stillness, the clink of a pint set down carefully like a vow. A child’s fidgeting stopped mid-knee-bounce. The Irish lads’ grins fell into something more honest. The “neutral” Brits went quiet without noticing. Marisol’s bottle finally tilted and poured, but she didn’t look away from the screen as she did it.

Under the shade, the girls didn’t speak for a second either.

Shazney’s eyes were bright, not teary—just caught by the screen’s glow and held there. Marnie-Jay’s foot tapped once, then stilled. Olivia’s hand found Lucinda’s wrist on the table between them, a casual touch that wasn’t casual at all.

Toni-Marie leaned in, voice low, reverent in its own rough way. “Go ’ed then.”

And the resort—sun-dazed and salt-sticky and full of strangers—held itself the way a stadium did, like the next sound mattered.

The match hadn’t started yet, but something shifted anyway—quietly at first, like a change in pressure before weather, then all at once when it was noticed.

The screen showed the wide bowl of the stadium in Sydney, the grass too perfect, the lines too clean. Cameras panned across faces painted and tense and shining under floodlights. The broadcast kept cutting to little details: boots lined up, a hand tugging at a collar, a goalkeeper rolling his shoulders like a man waking himself up for a fight. Poolside, the Spanish sun stayed bright and lazy, but the resort had gone tight around the edges. It held itself.

Somewhere near the bar, the Irish lads stopped bouncing their jokes off each other. One of them took a sip and forgot to swallow for a second, eyes fixed, throat working. The “neutral” Brits didn’t say neutral anymore. They just stood there, cups sweating in their hands, their sunburnt faces turned toward the screen like it was a fire.

In the shade, the girls felt it land.

Marnie-Jay—normally composed, the one who could smooth over a sharp word with a softer one, who could read a room like sheet music and keep it from going sour—found herself holding her breath without meaning to. It wasn’t drama. It wasn’t for show. Her chest simply stopped moving, like her body had decided there was no spare air for anything that wasn’t this moment.

Her shoulders went square. Not stiff, not tense, just… set. She stood up without quite realising she’d done it, rising from her lounger the way people rose for a hymn. The plastic frame creaked under the sudden absence of her weight.

Olivia glanced at her, a little startled, then didn’t say anything—like speaking might break whatever had just snapped into place.

Marnie-Jay’s hands hung loose at her sides for a second, then one of them curled, fingers closing on nothing. Her jaw locked, then eased, then locked again. She stood like she’d been asked to represent a whole kitchen-table lineage—those unseen faces in memory, tea mugs and Sunday roasts, old stories told with a finger tapping a table for emphasis. It made no rational sense in Spain by a pool, but it didn’t need to. Her stance did the thinking for her.

“Mar…” Kourtnee started, like she was about to tease, then stopped.

Kourtnee had a bag of crisps open on her lap, the shiny packet crackling softly each time her hand went in. Normally she’d fill silence with something—some quip, some exaggerated eye-roll, some bit that made everyone laugh and loosen their shoulders. She tried now, mouth already full, and it came out wrong, smaller than she expected, like her own voice had pulled its punch.

“Eh—look at ’em,” she mumbled around the crisps, attempting breezy, attempting bored. “All serious, aren’t they. Like they’re goin’ the dentist or summat.”

Her laugh didn’t travel. It barely made it past her lips before it fell straight down into her chest.

She swallowed. The sound of it was loud to her—too loud—and she blinked at the screen as if daring it to be normal again. Then she smiled, too wide, all teeth and cheer, and it looked like a mask that didn’t fit right. She rubbed her thumb along the edge of the crisp bag like she was smoothing fabric.

Toni-Marie gave her a quick sideways look, the kind that clocked the wobble without naming it. “Quit actin’ like it’s not gettin’ t’yer,” she muttered, low enough that it didn’t turn into a performance. Her own knee was bouncing, a hard little rhythm against the lounger, and she’d stopped trying to hide it.

Kourtnee huffed through her nose, still smiling too much. “S’not gettin’ t’me.”

“Aye,” Shazney said softly, and there was no bite in it at all. Just agreement in the way friends agreed with lies that were meant as comfort. “Course it’s not.”

Lucinda-Rae sat forward with her elbows on her thighs, the shade line cutting across her shoulders. Her gaze didn’t blink much. The screen had her the way confession booths had people—not with threat, but with the quiet insistence that something inside needed saying, even if it came out as a whisper.

In her hand was a cheap camera, plastic-bodied, the sort that felt too light to hold meaning. She’d bought it at the resort shop without thinking, alongside sun lotion and a packet of tissues, and now her thumb hovered over the button as if the whole world might vanish if it wasn’t trapped inside a rectangle of film.

It wasn’t even that she expected the photos to be brilliant. She wasn’t aiming for art. It was proof she wanted—proof that this happened, that this crowd existed, that strangers became a single thing for reasons nobody could properly explain later.

She raised it, lowered it, raised it again.

“Lucy…” Olivia breathed, and the way she said it had a warning softness, like the word might stop her doing something silly.

Lucinda-Rae didn’t look away from the screen. “Gotta,” she whispered back, barely moving her lips. “Just—gotta get it.”

“What, the match?” Toni-Marie asked, and she tried to make it sound like a joke, but her eyes didn’t leave the broadcast either.

Lucinda-Rae’s thumb hovered, trembling faintly. “Nah.” A swallow. “All this.”

She shifted the camera’s aim, not at the screen but at the crowd—at the Irish lads in their twenties who’d stopped laughing and were now standing shoulder to shoulder like they’d been drilled into place; at the family with the two small kids whose fidgeting had softened into stillness, the kids’ eyes wide and newly serious like they’d sensed the adults’ silence and stepped into it; at the German couple at the back, hands folded, faces curious and intent as if watching something sacred but unfamiliar; at the Spanish staff who’d gathered with aprons and uniforms and damp hair, drawn not by flags but by the shape of anticipation itself.

Paco at the bar had stopped wiping his hands. They hung at his sides, his apron smudged with the day’s work. Marisol leaned her hip against the counter, arms crossed now, and her expression wasn’t neutral at all—she looked entertained and invested, like drama was a currency and she was rich in it.

The lifeguard’s pole rested against his shoulder. He stared at the screen with the same face he wore when a child went under for half a second too long—alert, ready, breath held.

Lucinda-Rae pressed the button.

The click was small. It felt huge.

A few heads turned at the sound, then turned back. No one was offended. If anything, it made the moment more real, like the crowd approved of being witnessed.

Marnie-Jay didn’t sit down. She stayed standing, weight balanced on both feet, chin slightly lifted, eyes fixed. Her throat worked once, a swallow that didn’t ease anything. She exhaled finally—slowly, carefully—as if letting air out too fast might jinx something.

“Mad,” she murmured, almost to herself.

Olivia’s voice came quiet beside her. “What’s mad?”

Marnie-Jay’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “How it’s…,” she started, then stopped. There weren’t proper words that didn’t sound like she was making a speech. She gestured instead, a small sweep of her hand that took in the screen, the crowd, the pool that had become a terrace. “All this. Like… it’s heavy.”

Kourtnee let out a shaky laugh that tried again to be big. “It’s footy, Mar.”

Marnie-Jay’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. “Aye. I know.” Her voice was steady, which was almost the strangest part. “Still.”

On the broadcast, the camera found the tunnel. Figures moved at the edge of the frame—shadows becoming bodies, bodies becoming names. The commentary rose a notch, the cadence tightening, the words taking on that polished seriousness commentators always wore for finals.

Around the pool, a hush gathered—not total silence, not reverent quiet, but a collective lowering of volume, like the resort had turned its own dial down.

A child’s whisper carried from the front. “Mam… are they comin’ out now?”

The mother didn’t shush. She just wrapped her arm tighter around the child’s middle, her eyes on the screen. “In a minute, love.”

The Irish lads’ shoulders rose as one, then dropped, like they were trying to shake off the tension and couldn’t. One of them muttered something that sounded like a prayer but ended in a swear. His mate laughed once, short and sharp, then went still again.

Toni-Marie’s hands were clasped together now, fingers interlaced tight enough to blanch at the knuckles. She stared at her own hands for half a second as if surprised to find them doing that, then looked back up, jaw set.

Shazney leaned forward, forearms on knees, eyes bright and unblinking. Lucinda-Rae kept the camera in her hand, thumb hovering again, ready to trap another fragment of proof.

Kourtnee took another crisp, chewed it slowly this time, as if speed might betray her. When she swallowed, her smile finally faded into something more honest. She wiped her palm on her thigh, then said, very softly, like it was a confession she didn’t want anyone outside the shade to hear:

“Go on.”

And when the stadium roar swelled through the speakers—clean and distant and enormous—the resort didn’t erupt yet. It didn’t celebrate, didn’t chant, didn’t spill into noise. It only leaned in, together, holding itself right at the edge of starting.

It started showing in bodies before it showed in voices.

The crowd didn’t need telling to lean. It happened on its own, a slow collective inch forward as the broadcast cut to the centre circle, as the referee checked his watch, as the players moved with that strange mix of looseness and strain that always came before the first whistle. By the pool, feet that had been lazily crossed straightened. Ankles uncrossed. Knees drew in. People who’d been lounging sat up like there’d been a sudden announcement.

Weight shifted from one hip to the other in tiny, nervous adjustments—micro-movements that said the same thing in every language: not yet, not yet, but it’s coming.

Hands went to mouths without meaning to. A woman in a green top covered her lips with her knuckles, eyes wide above them, as if she might accidentally shout too soon. One of the Irish lads dragged a palm down his face and left it there, fingers spread across his cheekbone like a brace. A “neutral” Brit pressed his pint to his forehead for a second, not even drinking, just cooling himself like he could cool whatever was happening inside his chest.

Sunglasses got pushed up and forgotten. So many of them. A man in an Ireland shirt shoved his shades up into his hair and they stuck there crooked; he never noticed. Marisol did the same, quick and absent, and then stood with her eyes narrowed at the screen, bare-faced now, expression too readable to hide behind lenses. Even Lucinda-Rae, who’d been hiding behind her cheap camera, pushed hers up with the back of her wrist and forgot they existed, thumb still hovering over the button, the camera now resting in her lap like a held breath.

Somewhere near the back, Anke adjusted her strap and said something soft to Jürgen; he nodded without looking away, his camcorder lowered. Their posture wasn’t loud, but it was precise—shoulders angled, feet planted as if this was a lecture worth standing for.

The whistle went, and the resort—sun-dazed a minute ago—clicked into one shared tempo.

It was the simplest sound, that sharp little peep through the speakers, but it cut clean. The poolside became a mouth that didn’t quite close, a throat that didn’t quite swallow. The roar from Sydney came flooding through, and for a moment it felt like the air itself had been replaced by noise.

Under the shade, the girls’ little cluster held its own centre of gravity.

Toni-Marie kept her commentary short now—less chatter, more clipped verdicts. Her voice was low, pitched to her mates, but it carried a blade of authority. She didn’t narrate every touch; she judged. She watched the way Ireland moved when they pressed, the way lines tightened and opened, and her words came like stamps on paper.

“Keep shape.”

“Go on.”

“Sound.”

Her knee still bounced, but controlled, like she’d given it a job instead of letting it panic.

Olivia sat with her forearms crossed over her stomach, not defensive—anchoring. Her fingers kept tightening and releasing against her own sleeve. Every so often she’d inhale like she was about to speak, then decide against it, as if words were too big to waste.

Marnie-Jay remained standing. She didn’t sway. She didn’t fidget. That composure had hardened into something else—focus that felt almost ceremonial. Her eyes tracked patterns, not just players. When someone in the crowd behind them shifted too abruptly, she didn’t turn; she simply adjusted her stance, absorbing the jostle without losing her line of sight.

Kourtnee, who’d been trying to laugh it off minutes ago, had stopped eating altogether. The crisps lay open and forgotten on the table, the bag sagging. Her mouth stayed slightly open, just enough to breathe quietly through it, like she couldn’t trust her lungs not to make noise. Every time the ball changed direction she blinked hard, quick and sharp, like she was resetting her gaze.

Lucinda-Rae kept the camera in hand, but it wasn’t an obsession now. It was a talisman. When the crowd noise swelled she lifted it and caught a frame—hands flying up, mouths forming “oh,” a child’s eyes widening—then lowered it again, because watching mattered more than proof.

Shazney—Shazney Devlin—had her jaw set. Not clenched in anger, but tight in concentration. She wasn’t shouting. She wasn’t performing excitement. She was monitoring.

Her eyes didn’t stay on the screen the whole time. They moved. Screen, crowd, screen, crowd. She checked everyone’s faces like she was counting heads after a nightclub rush—the kind of glance that tallied who was okay, who was about to bolt, who was about to get pulled under by adrenaline.

She scanned Toni-Marie’s sharp stillness, Olivia’s tight forearms, Kourtnee’s too-wide focus, Marnie-Jay’s upright stance, Lucinda-Rae’s camera-hand. Then she scanned beyond: the Irish lads’ shoulders bunched together; the family at the front, children now eerily still; the “neutral” Brits with their pints abandoned half-raised; Paco at the bar with his hands gripping the counter edge, knuckles whitening; the lifeguard leaning forward, whistle forgotten, pole angled like a spear.

It was a crowd, but it behaved like one organism. Every few seconds it shifted, a rippling adjustment, as if the whole place was trying to find the best angle to survive what it cared about.

Ireland pressed high.

The line stepped up, bodies compressing space, forcing Australia back a half-step, then another. It wasn’t even a chance yet, not a shot, not a moment for the highlight reels. It was pressure—pure, purposeful. A promise of hunger.

Toni-Marie pointed once, sharp, her finger slicing the air as if she could direct it with force alone.

“That’s it,” she said, clipped, satisfied. “Don’t let ’em breathe.”

Her finger dropped. Her hands returned to their clasp, and her eyes stayed fierce and steady like a bouncer’s stare.

In the crowd, the Irish lads responded without meaning to. One of them nodded hard, like he’d been personally addressed. Another muttered, “Yes, yes,” under his breath, and his mate elbowed him gently—not teasing, anchoring. A man in a green cap began to clap twice, stopped, then clapped again, hesitant at first, then with growing certainty as a few others picked it up. The claps were short, staccato, not celebratory—encouragement thrown like coins at a street performer.

A kid near the front copied the clapping, tiny palms making a softer sound. Their dad glanced down, smiled without looking away from the screen, and let it happen.

Marisol, arms still crossed, gave a small approving noise—almost a hum—and leaned in a fraction. She didn’t know the tactics, not really, but she understood momentum. Everybody did. Everybody understood when one side started to look like it belonged.

The resort had heat, sweat, sunburn, beer—everything sticky. But the stickiest thing was the tension. It clung to skin. It clung to breath.

Then, early, a near-miss.

It didn’t come with a long build. It came like those moments always came: a sudden opening, a movement that sliced through the expected pattern. A quick pass. A touch that was just too clean. The ball rolling into a pocket of space that felt illegal. The kind of moment that made everyone’s body do the same involuntary calculation—if this goes in, everything changes.

The shot came off a boot with a snap that carried even through the speakers. It flew, fast and true and just a touch wrong. It skimmed wide.

It didn’t even hit the net. It didn’t make the satisfying rattle that would have exploded the poolside into chaos. It just missed, brushing the world by inches.

And the entire poolside made the same wounded sound.

Half gasp, half groan.

A sound with teeth in it. A sound like someone had been poked in a bruise.

It rose as one and fell as one, and for a heartbeat there was nothing but that collective hurt.

Marnie-Jay’s shoulders jumped—only slightly, but enough to betray her—and her breath came out as a sharp hiss between her teeth. Her hand went up, palm hovering near her mouth like she could catch the disappointment before it escaped.

Kourtnee’s eyes went huge. Her hands flew up—both of them—covering her mouth, crisps forgotten, fingers pressing hard into her own cheeks. The too-wide smile was gone. In its place was a raw, open-mouthed “ahh” she didn’t let out because her hands stopped it.

Olivia’s head tipped back for a second, eyes closed, like she was offering the miss up to the sun as a complaint. When she brought her gaze back down, her lips were pressed into a thin line, and her nostrils flared with the kind of controlled frustration she usually saved for people who chewed with their mouths open.

Lucinda-Rae’s camera clicked purely by reflex—thumb pressing down before her brain caught up—capturing a frame of hands over mouths and squinted eyes and shoulders hunched like a punch had landed. She immediately lowered it again, like she felt guilty for taking evidence of pain.

Shazney’s jaw tightened another fraction, and she didn’t move her hands. She watched the crowd’s reaction instead, eyes quick, counting faces the way she always did when a room surged.

The Irish lads staggered, not physically but emotionally, like the miss had grabbed them by the collar. One of them bent forward, hands on knees, laughing in shock like he couldn’t process not scoring. Another slapped the side of his head with his palm, a sharp smack, then held his hand there, elbow out, frozen in disbelief.

“Awh, for f—” someone started, stopped, swallowed the rest because children were close, then muttered it again under their breath with less restraint.

The family at the front had both kids suddenly looking up at the adults, startled by the noise. The little boy’s eyes were round as coins.

“Did we—” he began.

His mam hugged him tighter, still staring at the screen. “Nearly, love. Nearly.”

The “neutral” Brits reacted like they’d forgotten to be neutral. One of them let out a strangled noise and then laughed at himself, half embarrassed, half delighted at being caught caring.

“Christ,” he muttered, then added quickly, too late, “—I mean, blimey.”

His mate clapped him on the shoulder without taking his eyes off the screen. “Neutral, yeah?” he said, and it was the faintest tease, the kind that meant they both knew they’d been lying.

Paco at the bar sucked in a breath through his teeth, hands still gripping the counter. The lifeguard straightened unconsciously, as if he’d watched someone slip. Marisol’s arms uncrossed and her hands fluttered up—one to her mouth, one hovering at her chest—then she dropped them again, lips parted, eyes bright with the thrill of it.

At the back, Anke’s hands flew to her face, fingers laced at her lips. Jürgen’s camcorder lifted, caught himself, lowered again, his eyes widening like he’d just discovered football could do this to people.

Under the shade, Toni-Marie didn’t shout. She didn’t throw her arms up. She just let out a single, sharp exhale through her nose—more knife than sigh—and nodded once.

“Unlucky,” she said, clipped. Verdict delivered. Then, immediately, as the players reset and the game kept moving like it didn’t care about anyone’s nerves: “Again. Again.”

Shazney’s eyes moved down the line of her mates, checking, tallying, making sure the near-miss hadn’t knocked anyone sideways. She caught Kourtnee’s hands still over her mouth and gave her a tiny nod, like: breathe. She caught Olivia’s tight jaw and didn’t comment. She caught Marnie-Jay’s hand hovering and watched it lower slowly back to her side as the composure reassembled itself piece by piece.

The crowd settled in the way crowds did after almost-joy: a slight shiver, a resetting of posture, a collective swallow.

Sunglasses stayed forgotten on heads. Hands stayed near mouths. People found their footing again, shifting weight, edging forward, ready.

The match had started, but it still felt like the real beginning was always one heartbeat away.

It didn’t arrive like a neat little moment with polite applause. It arrived like something tearing.

One second the resort was a held breath and the next it was sound splitting open—raw, ugly, ecstatic—too big for the speakers, too big for language. The noise that came out of the crowd wasn’t a cheer so much as a rupture, a scream that cracked into laughter that cracked again into people grabbing whatever was nearest because bodies didn’t know where else to put the joy.

On the screen, Ireland’s move unfolded fast enough to feel unreal: a press that turned into a nicked ball, a burst of green shirts surging like they’d been released from a leash, a pass threaded through where there shouldn’t have been a pass, a touch that set it up—clean, almost casual—then the strike.

The ball hit the net and for a beat the resort couldn’t catch up. The image of it happening was ahead of the feeling by a fraction, and then the feeling arrived all at once, slamming into everyone’s ribcages.

A high, wounded sound burst out of the Irish lads—except it wasn’t wounded now, it was reborn. One of them screamed so hard his voice cracked immediately and he didn’t care; he laughed at the crack even as the scream kept going. His mate jumped up and wrapped him in a bear hug, nearly tipping them both backwards. A third lad lunged for the nearest person without aiming and ended up grabbing a “neutral” Brit by the shoulders like they were long-lost family.

“We’re neutral—” the Brit started, purely out of habit, and then he was laughing, helpless, as the Irish lad shook him in sheer delirium.

“Y’are not, y’soft arse!” someone barked, and it was met with a howl of agreement that turned the insult into a blessing.

The family at the front jolted as if the noise had physically pushed them. The little boy’s eyes went huge, then he started laughing because everyone else was laughing and that was the only rule kids needed. His sister shrieked, half-scared, half-thrilled, clapping wildly at nothing in particular. Their mam’s hands flew to her mouth for one split second, eyes shining, and then she was up, still holding one child while her other hand flailed in the air, fingers spread like she could catch the goal again and keep it safe.

Even the pool reacted—water sloshing as people who’d been sitting on the edge kicked their legs without thinking, splashes leaping up to glitter in the sun.

Under the shade, the girls detonated into motion like the goal had lit a fuse under their loungers.

Kourtnee jumped so hard her drink sloshed, cold and sticky down her wrist, soaking her hand and dripping off her fingers. She didn’t even look at it. She didn’t even flinch. She was already on her feet, body making a noise somewhere between a scream and a laugh, and the next thing she knew she’d thrown her arms around Lucinda-Rae like she’d been shot out of a cannon.

“OH MY GOD—” Kourtnee yelped, voice breaking up with joy, and then it dissolved into pure sound.

Lucinda-Rae had been holding her cheap camera a second ago. It got trapped between their bodies, plastic pressing into Lucinda’s ribs, and she still didn’t care. She laughed like she was shocked by her own happiness—like it had come from somewhere deep and startled her on the way out.

“Stopppp—” Lucinda gasped, not meaning stop at all, only meaning: it’s too much, it’s too good, it can’t fit. Her laughter turned into a squeal and then back into laughter again, wet-eyed and brilliant. “Ahhh, Kurrrrrt—!”

Kourtnee’s wet wrist smeared cold across Lucinda’s shoulder as she hugged tighter, and Lucinda made another helpless laugh, half wince, half delight, like even the spill felt like part of the celebration.

Toni-Marie was up too, fast, her whole body snapping forward. She threw both fists down by her sides like she’d just landed something herself. Her face had gone fierce with triumph, teeth bared, eyes wide. She screamed once—one clean, feral sound—then laughed hard enough it shoved tears into the corners of her eyes.

“YESS!” she shouted, and it came out more like “YESSs—!” because her throat didn’t know how to contain it. She slapped the air, the back of her hand against her palm, again and again, like she was trying to drum the goal into reality.

Olivia made a sound that was almost a sob at first—caught, involuntary—and then it flipped into laughter. Her hands flew up, not sure where to go, and she ended up gripping the edge of her own sunglasses on top of her head like she could anchor herself that way.

“FUCKIN’—” Olivia started, then she choked on her own laugh. “NAH— NAH—!”

Her eyes were bright, her cheeks already hurting from smiling, and she looked half offended by how happy she was, like joy had snuck up behind her and grabbed her by the throat.

Marnie-Jay’s reaction was the purest betrayal of her usual control. Her hands flew to her face—palms flat over mouth and nose, fingers splayed up toward her eyes—as if she could physically hold the moment in. She stood there for a heartbeat like that, shoulders shaking, and then she dropped her hands because she refused to hide the smile.

It was huge. It took over her whole face. It wasn’t polished or careful. It was a grin with teeth, eyes crinkled, chin lifted like she was daring the universe to argue with it.

“Aye!” Marnie-Jay breathed out, and the single word held everything—relief, shock, pride, all tangled together. She shook her head once, still smiling, like she couldn’t believe her own body had done that. Like she couldn’t believe it had happened and also could never doubt it again.

Shazney Devlin cracked.

For one second—just one—her composure fell off her like a dropped coat. Her mouth opened in a raw, honest scream. Her eyes flashed with something unfiltered and ferocious—joy so sharp it almost looked like rage. She grabbed the back of Toni-Marie’s arm, not gentle, just needing contact, needing proof.

Then she snapped back into control like a switch had been thrown.

Her scream became command. Her joy became strategy. She pointed at the screen with a chopping motion, voice hoarse already, yelling like she could hold the team together through the speakers.

“BACK IN! BACK IN! DON’ SWITCH OFF!” Shazney bellowed, the words coming out thick and Scouse and urgent, like she was barking orders at a doorway during a crush. “BACK IN, LAD— BACK IN!”

The crowd around them was still exploding, still grabbing and shaking and shouting, but Shazney was already trying to contain the aftermath, already trying to stop the joy from turning into slackness.

“HEADS!” she shouted again, and she didn’t even realise she’d started counting with her eyes, scanning faces, checking that her mates were upright and okay in the surge.

Behind them, the Spanish staff were losing it in their own ways.

Paco leapt up from behind the bar, both hands in the air, tray forgotten. “¡GOL!” he yelled, and he was laughing so hard his apron flapped against his thighs. He didn’t care who had scored; he cared that the world had just cracked open and spilled colour everywhere.

Marisol—arms crossed a second ago, cool as stone—had both hands to her mouth now, then she flung them up and grabbed the nearest person in an impulsive hug that turned out to be one of the housekeeping women. The older woman startled, then broke into laughter, red lipstick flashing, and hugged her back like they’d been mates for years.

“¡Madre mía!” someone cried, and it got swallowed by the roar.

The lifeguard, still gripping his pole, shouted a single “¡Vamos!” and then clamped his mouth shut like he’d caught himself being human on the clock. His eyes were bright anyway. He leaned forward, half laughing, half shaking his head as if the goal had personally insulted his ability to stay neutral.

At the back, Anke clapped both hands to her cheeks and let out a delighted yelp—small, surprised—then began clapping properly, rapid and neat. Jürgen’s camcorder shot up at last. He filmed two seconds of chaos—people hugging, plastic cups flying up, sunlight glinting off spilled beer—and then he lowered it again because his own laugh broke out, and he didn’t want the camera to be between him and the moment.

The “neutral” Brits were fully compromised. One of them jumped with his pint, beer slopping over the rim and down his knuckles. He stared at his wet hand like it belonged to someone else, then barked out a laugh and wiped it on his shorts without shame.

“Neutral, me arse!” he shouted, and his mate roared, pointing at him like he’d just scored the goal himself.

People grabbed strangers because there was nowhere else to put their arms. A man in green hugged a woman in a yellow top by accident, realised, paused in a split-second of awkwardness—and then they both laughed and hugged harder because awkwardness was too small a thing to survive in a moment like this.

A kid got hoisted up onto someone’s shoulders and squealed, hands flapping like wings. An Irish flag unfurled somewhere, snapping open in the sunlight, and it made the whole poolside roar again like the cloth itself was magic.

Under the shade, Kourtnee finally let go of Lucinda just enough to look at her face, both of them laughing, eyes shining.

“Lucy, I can’—I can’ feel me hands!” Kourtnee shrieked, and then laughed at herself, breathless, because she very much could feel her hands—she could feel everything—she just didn’t know how to hold it.

Lucinda-Rae’s laughter went high again, then softened into something almost tender, her cheeks flushed. “I’m dead,” she gasped, and the words were nonsense in the face of her grin. She squeezed Kourtnee’s shoulders, then suddenly hugged her again, tighter, as if hugging was the only language left that made sense.

Marnie-Jay took one step forward, still smiling wide, and then stopped, grounding herself. Her hands hovered in the air for a second like she might clap, might pray, might shake something invisible. She chose clapping—sharp, deliberate claps that matched her expression: controlled joy, joy she refused to apologise for.

“Aye,” she said again, quieter now, her voice thick. “Aye.”

Olivia wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand like she was annoyed at them for watering. Her laugh had gone softer, warmer, and she shook her head, looking at the crowd as if trying to memorise it all.

“Listen t’that,” Olivia said, voice half amazed, half laughing. “Listen. It’s like—” She didn’t finish because her own grin got in the way.

Shazney, still shouting at the screen, jabbed a finger forward again. “SETTLE! SETTLE!” she yelled, like the players could hear her through continents. Her voice rasped at the edges now. She didn’t care. “BACK IN, LADS! DON’ GET GIDDY!”

Toni-Marie turned then, turning away from the screen for the first time since it went in, and her face was incandescent with triumph. She looked at her little cluster—at Kourtnee and Lucinda locked together, at Marnie-Jay glowing, at Olivia bright-eyed, at Shazney barking orders like a general—and something in her expression hardened into pride.

She pointed at them, arm straight, finger like an accusation aimed at the universe itself.

“Tha’s us,” Toni-Marie declared, voice ringing out over the leftover roar. “Tha’s our lot.”

The words landed like a claim. Not a label, not a title—just a fierce little staking of ground inside the chaos: this pocket of shade, these six bodies, this laughter and screaming and breathless disbelief. The resort might’ve been an accidental stadium, full of strangers and sweat and flags and spilled beer—but that moment, right there in their crooked line of loungers and towels, belonged to them.

The replay ran, and the crowd’s roar turned strange—less blast, more shimmer—because everyone already knew the ending and still couldn’t stop their bodies from reacting as if it might change.

On the screen the goal unspooled again: the press, the nick, the pass, the strike, the net rippling like it had been punched by joy. The camera angle was cleaner the second time, crueler in its clarity. It made the whole thing look inevitable, like it had always been waiting there.

By the pool, the noise softened into pockets: laughter that kept bubbling up, people talking over one another, hands still on shoulders, strangers still holding on as if letting go might make it untrue. Plastic cups got retrieved from wherever they’d flown. Someone stepped on a crushed crisp and didn’t notice. Beer dripped off a forearm and dried in the sun, leaving that sweet, yeasty stick that clung like proof.

In the shade, the girls did the private stuff.

Not for show. Not loud. The kind of small gestures that would’ve looked like nothing to a camera at the wrong angle, but meant everything to the person doing them.

Olivia brought two fingers to her lips and kissed them, quick and fierce, then flicked them out toward the screen like she was sending the luck back in. Her eyes stayed wet-bright, her smile still too big for her face.

“Keep doin’ that,” she muttered, half laughing at herself, half dead serious. “Go on, keep doin’ it.”

Toni-Marie didn’t answer with words. Her hand went to her ring—plain enough to look ordinary, worn enough to look loved—and she tapped it twice with her thumb, sharp little knocks like punctuation. Tap, tap. She didn’t even glance down; she did it by feel, eyes locked on the replay, jaw set like she was guarding the score with her teeth.

“Sound,” she breathed, not to anyone in particular. “Sound.”

Marnie-Jay’s fingers found the pendant at her throat, hidden by the shadow line of her collarbone. She pinched it lightly, then held it there, grounding herself. Her smile had eased into something steadier now, still bright but less startled—like she’d decided to let herself have it without flinching. When the replay showed the ball hitting the net again, her grip tightened, then softened, a quiet squeeze that looked almost like gratitude.

Shazney, already half turned back into a drill sergeant even as her grin refused to leave, touched her own wrist where her watch sat—an unconscious check, as if time itself needed keeping in line. Her other hand brushed her necklace once, not lingering, just a quick press of fingertips to skin, then back down. Her eyes kept sliding across the crowd too, still counting, still scanning, even while the replay tried to lure everyone into reliving the moment instead of surviving the next one.

Lucinda-Rae—camera still in hand, strap looped around her fingers—made a tiny, silent “oh my God” face at the slow-motion angle, like she was seeing the goal for the first time properly. Then she fumbled in her bag with one hand, not taking her eyes off the screen, and pulled out a thin green ribbon she must’ve nicked from somewhere: a gift wrap scrap, a resort wrist-tie, something cheap and cheerful.

Kourtnee spotted it and made a breathless little sound of approval. “Yesss, la.”

Lucinda-Rae didn’t explain. She just tied it around her wrist, clumsy at first because her hands were still buzzing. She looped it once, twice, then tugged it snug. The ribbon sat bright against her skin, ridiculous and perfect. She stared at it for a beat, then looked back up at the screen like it had always been part of the plan.

“D’you reckon tha’ works?” Kourtnee asked, half teasing, half hopeful.

Lucinda-Rae’s laugh came out soft and shocked all over again. “It better,” she said, voice breathy, eyes shining. “I’m not takin’ it off. Not even t’get in the pool.”

Kourtnee—still damp down her wrist from her earlier drink-slosh, still not caring—reached out and touched the ribbon with one fingertip like it was holy. “Go on, then,” she whispered, and it sounded like a blessing.

Behind them, the Spanish staff had relaxed into grins, the way people did when the immediate explosion passed and all that was left was the glow.

Paco had his hands back on the counter now, but he wasn’t wiping anything. He was just smiling, teeth showing, eyes crinkled. Marisol leaned near him, laughing with her head tipped back, the kind of laugh that made her look younger for a second.

A lad behind the bar—newer, younger, all limbs and mischief—decided the moment needed encore. While the replay showed the Irish player wheeling away in celebration, the lad mimicked it with an exaggerated leap, knees coming up too high, arms flung wide like a cartoon hero. He landed with a dramatic stomp, turned, and did a ridiculous little spin that nearly took him into the beer taps.

The crowd caught it and rewarded it instantly.

Applause cracked out, delighted and rowdy. Someone wolf-whistled. A woman in green laughed so hard she had to bend forward, hands on her thighs. The Irish lads cheered him like he’d scored himself, slapping the bar top, chanting incoherent encouragement in a mix of English and holiday-brain.

“Go onnn!” one shouted, voice hoarse. “That’s it, lad!”

The bar lad bowed, hand to heart, milking it. He did one more big, theatrical leap, smaller this time because he’d learned the space, then threw both fists up and froze like a statue.

More applause. More laughter. The resort loved him for it—not because it was clever, but because it was pure. A performance offered up the way people offered up jokes at wakes: not to distract from emotion, but to carry it.

Somewhere near the front, someone shouted, “¡Irlanda!”

It came out messy—rolled wrong, accent slipping, vowel stretched in a way that wasn’t Spanish or Irish, just sincere. The word lifted over the pool like a tossed scarf.

A few Spanish staff echoed it, laughing as they tried. “¡Irlanda!” Marisol called, and then immediately laughed at herself, shaking her head. Paco attempted it with exaggerated seriousness, as if pronunciation was a sacred duty. “¡Irlanda!” he declared, and the crowd roared approval anyway, because effort mattered more than accuracy.

Even the “neutral” Brits clapped, caught in the glow, faces split open in grins they hadn’t planned to wear. One of them tried the word too, mangling it in a way that made his mate shove him with a laugh.

The replay finished. The broadcast cut back to the pitch, players regrouping, the stadium noise steadying, the match continuing like the goal was both everything and only the beginning.

In the shade, Toni-Marie tapped her ring one more time. Marnie-Jay’s fingers left her pendant. Olivia kissed her fingertips again, quick as a flicker. Shazney’s voice lifted, sharp and urgent, cutting through the last of the laughter.

“BACK IN!” she barked, pointing at the screen. “BACK IN, LADS—DON’ GET GIDDY!”

Lucinda-Rae looked down at the green ribbon and gave it a tiny, determined tug, as if tightening it could tighten Ireland too. Then her eyes went back to the match, bright and fierce, joy still thrumming under her skin like a second heartbeat.

Half-time didn’t arrive like a lull. It arrived like the world letting go of a clenched jaw.

The whistle on the broadcast cut through, sharp and final, and the crowd by the pool made a single long sound of release—part exhale, part groan, part laugh at themselves for forgetting how to breathe. For a few seconds, nobody quite knew what to do with their hands. Then the resort remembered it was a resort.

The sun had shifted while everyone had been locked to the screen. It slid along the tiles like a slow tide, dragging the line of shade with it. What had been cool a moment ago now warmed ankles and shins; what had been blinding glare had softened, angled. People noticed all at once—foreheads slick, shoulders pinking, throats dry.

Menus became fans. Hats became fans. A folded newspaper flapped briskly in one man’s hand like he was trying to summon wind out of sheer annoyance. Someone snapped a beach towel twice and used it to waft their face, the air smelling faintly of salt and detergent. The Irish lads who’d been statues in the first half suddenly started moving like marionettes whose strings had been cut and retied: stretching calves, rolling shoulders, rubbing the backs of necks.

A woman in a green top tipped her head back and drank half a bottle of water in one go, then looked startled by how thirsty she was.

The bar woke up in earnest. Orders got called out over each other, voices bouncing in Spanish and English and the musical mash that happened when adrenaline met holiday heat.

“¡Dos cervezas, aquí!” Paco barked, already sliding cups along the counter like a man at a busy pub on match day.

“Ice! More ice, por favor—” a sunburnt Brit pleaded, holding his empty cup out like an offering.

The ice machine clattered, then the unmistakable clink—ice dropped into plastic, poured over, the cold cracking the moment into something physical. Cans hissed open. A bottle cap pinged off tile and skittered under a lounger. The smell of fried food drifted in stronger now that people were breathing through their noses again.

Even the pool tried to resume its usual business: a child took the chance to splash, was shushed, then splashed again anyway because half-time made adults softer around the edges.

Under the patchy shade—because the shade was never loyal for long—the girls gathered closer, drawn together by habit and heat and the fact that nobody wanted to lose the thread of the moment by drifting too far from each other.

Kourtnee wiped her wrist with the edge of her towel, finally noticing the sticky trail dried there from the goal. It left a faint sheen on her skin. She laughed under her breath, shaking her head as if she’d only just clocked she’d been soaked by her own drink and hadn’t cared for a second.

Lucinda-Rae’s cheap camera sat on her thigh, strap twisted around her fingers. She’d taken a few more snaps in the minutes after the goal—faces bright, arms thrown up, that wild communal looseness—then stopped when half-time made the whole scene feel less like lightning and more like a warm room. Now she just held it, thumb smoothing the strap like it was a rosary.

Marnie-Jay finally sat, but only on the edge of the lounger, posture still forward, as if her body hadn’t fully accepted the break. She rolled her shoulders once, slow and controlled, then leaned in toward the table where the drinks and crisp packet lived.

Shazney Devlin’s eyes did their sweep again—screen, crowd, mates, exits—automatic as blinking. Half-time didn’t switch that off; it just changed the texture of it. Her jaw unclenched enough to speak properly, and she let out a low breath like she’d been holding tension in her teeth.

Toni-Marie snatched up the handheld device before anyone could even pretend they weren’t waiting for it. A small tablet warm from sitting in the sun too long, screen smudged with fingerprints. She held it out in the middle, and the group instinctively huddled around it, shoulders almost touching, heads bowed like a conspiratorial circle.

“Right,” Toni-Marie said, brisk, as if writing a text was another tactical decision. “Who’s gettin’ it?”

“Me ma,” Kourtnee said immediately, then, without shame, “an’ me auntie, an’ me cousin, an’—”

“Christ,” Lucinda-Rae giggled, leaning in so close her hair brushed Toni-Marie’s forearm. “Send it to the whole city, why don’t yeh.”

“Shurrup,” Kourtnee said, but she was smiling, cheeks still sore from the first-half explosion. “Everyone’s watchin’. Everyone’s gonna be losin’ their heads.”

Olivia’s face was glossy with heat and emotion held in check—steady, not wobbly, just… bright at the surface, like a polished stone. She didn’t grab for the tablet. She watched the screen, then watched the tablet, then looked up at the big screen again, like she was afraid blinking too long would erase the scoreline.

Marnie-Jay leaned in. “Just send one t’ the group chat—”

“There’s no group chat,” Lucinda-Rae said at once, scandalised by the idea, then laughed at herself. “It’s texts, innit. Proper texts.”

“Shut up, yeh know what I mean,” Marnie-Jay shot back, and it came out affectionate even with the snap. She nodded at the tablet. “Just… one message. Quick. Before it all kicks off again.”

Shazney dipped her head closer, voice low. “Put loads of exclamation marks. Make ’em feel it.”

Kourtnee already had her finger hovering. “I’m doin’ it. Move, Tone.”

Toni-Marie held the tablet like a microphone she wasn’t handing over without a fight. “Aye, but yeh can’t spell.”

“Can spell,” Kourtnee protested, indignant, and then immediately proved Toni-Marie right by poking the keypad too fast, letters coming out wrong, the predictive text turning sincerity into absolute nonsense.

Lucinda-Rae’s laughter burst out, quick and bright. “Look at that! It’s sayin’ ‘WERE UOP’!”

“Shurrup!” Kourtnee hissed, cheeks flushing, thumb stabbing backspace like it had personally insulted her. “It’s the tablet, it’s dead old.”

Shazney leaned in, squinting. “Put ‘IRELAND 1-0’ first. Straight in. No faffin’.”

Marnie-Jay guided with a small, precise finger-point like she was directing a surgeon. “There. There. Put that. Then—then—”

The text grew, badly typed and too excited for neatness. Words missed letters. Spaces got forgotten. Someone insisted on adding an extra line. Someone else insisted the extra line needed more exclamation marks. A tiny debate broke out—heated, urgent—as if punctuation could influence the second half.

“Add more!” Lucinda-Rae urged, laughing, hand over her mouth.

“Stop addin’ more,” Marnie-Jay replied, laughing too, but trying to keep it clean. “It’s lookin’ like a ransom note.”

Kourtnee’s tongue stuck out in concentration. “It’s fine! It’s just—listen—”

Olivia finally spoke, soft but firm. “Just send it. Before it changes.”

That did it. The laughter tightened into focus.

Toni-Marie watched the chaos of the message build and then, with the calm of someone making a final decision, she took the tablet back with a gentle but absolute tug.

“Gimme,” she said.

Kourtnee made a noise of protest. “Ehh!”

Toni-Marie ignored her, thumb moving with quick certainty. She didn’t delete everything—she wasn’t cruel—but she carved out a small, clean space in the middle, like making room on a table for something important.

She typed very little. Just a blunt, triumphant line, all caps, no softness around it.

WE’RE UP.

She didn’t add anything else. No hearts. No smiley faces. No explanation.

“Tone,” Lucinda-Rae breathed, delighted, like she’d just witnessed an act of art. “That’s boss.”

“Straight t’ the point,” Shazney murmured, approving.

Kourtnee leaned in so hard her shoulder pressed into Lucinda’s. “Send it, send it, send it.”

Toni-Marie’s thumb hovered over the button for half a beat, and in that half beat the crowd noise swelled again—people talking, laughing, the bar clinking, the distant stadium roar from the broadcast undercutting it all like a heartbeat.

Then Toni-Marie hit send.

The tablet made its tiny, antic little whoosh of success. A message shot across the world in a badly typed burst of adrenaline and too many exclamation marks, the kind of thing that would make everyone cringe tomorrow and grin today.

Kourtnee lifted both hands in a little victory flourish, like sending the text was a goal in itself. “There. Done. Liverpool’s been informed.”

Lucinda-Rae giggled, tucking her hair behind her ear, then took the tablet for a second to squint at it like she could see the message travelling. “Imagine all their faces,” she said, half laughing, half in awe.

Marnie-Jay exhaled slowly through her nose, shoulders dropping a fraction, like she’d completed a task she hadn’t known she was holding.

Shazney did another scan of the crowd, quick and practiced, then nodded once, satisfied the group was still intact.

Olivia didn’t laugh straight away. She stared up at the big screen for a second too long, eyes fixed on the scoreline sitting there like a promise. The sun flashed against the glass of someone’s sunglasses and threw a brief shard of light across her cheek; she didn’t flinch.

Then, quietly—almost to herself—she said, “Me nan’s gonna cry.”

No wobble. No performance. She said it like fact, like weather. Like it was simply true that somewhere in Liverpool, an older woman would be sat up straighter than usual, hands clasped around a mug, throat tight, eyes shining, and it wouldn’t be dramatic. It would just be what happened when hope turned real for a moment.

Toni-Marie didn’t soften. She didn’t tease. She just nodded once, clipped as ever, as if acknowledging a forecast.

“Aye,” she said. “Course she is.”

And around them the resort kept moving—menus fanning, ice clinking, orders called out—because half-time gave permission to remember bodies, but nobody forgot the match. The hush of the first half had loosened, turned into chatter and heat and nervous laughter, yet under it all the crowd still held the same thread, taut and waiting, ready to snap back into one shape the moment the whistle went again.

The second half didn’t come back in gently.

The whistle sounded and the resort snapped taut again, like a rope pulled tight after being allowed to slacken. The lazy half-time chatter fell away in patches, replaced by a different kind of noise—shorter, sharper, thrown out like stones.

“Ref!”

“Man on!”

“Clear it, clear it!”

The words didn’t belong to any one voice. They belonged to the crowd. They came from mouths that hadn’t been open five seconds earlier, from men with pints, from women fanning themselves with menus, from lads who’d insisted they were neutral, from Spanish staff who didn’t even try to pretend they weren’t invested anymore. The sound carried across the pool in little stabs, each one making the air feel tighter.

Even the children seemed to understand something had changed. The fidgeting that had returned at half-time disappeared again. A little girl sat cross-legged on a towel and stared up at the screen with the seriousness of someone watching a magic trick she couldn’t interrupt. Her brother, who’d been splashing during the break, clutched a damp pool noodle like a lifeline and didn’t lift it once.

Under the shade—shifted now, thinner, making warm stripes across knees and forearms—the girls were pulled back into the same collective posture, bodies angled toward the screen, shoulders lifted as if bracing.

Marnie-Jay didn’t mean to start counting minutes. It happened the way habits happened under pressure: the mind grabbing a rung to hold on.

She watched the clock on the broadcast like it was personal. Every time the graphic flickered into view—time ticking, small numbers changing—something in her face tightened and eased in rhythm with it. Her lips moved without sound.

“Sixty-two,” she murmured at one point, barely audible.

Olivia turned her head slightly, just enough to clock it. “Eh?”

Marnie-Jay didn’t look away from the screen. “Nothin’,” she said, but then a moment later, quieter, honest: “Just… countin’.”

Her shoulders stayed square. She didn’t wring her hands. She didn’t pace. But her fingers kept flexing at her sides, opening and closing as if she was trying to release tension through her fingertips.

“Stop that,” Lucinda-Rae whispered, half laughing, half pleading, because she could feel herself getting pulled into it too.

Marnie-Jay’s mouth twitched. “Can’t,” she admitted. “Can’t help it.”

Kourtnee’s leg bounced so hard the lounger frame made a faint, repetitive creak. She tried to stop it—pressed her palm down on her thigh, forced it still—and it lasted maybe ten seconds before the bounce returned like a reflex.

She turned her head over her shoulder, searching for some distraction, any distraction.

Two rows back, a boy—sun-browned, maybe Irish, maybe just wearing a green shirt because it looked good against a tan—had been watching the match with his hands clasped behind his head, elbows wide, the posture of someone pretending calm. He caught Kourtnee looking and lifted his eyebrows in a quick, cheeky little acknowledgement.

Kourtnee’s mouth did that thing it did when she decided to flirt: a half-smile, eyes narrowing slightly, confidence summoned like a costume. She hooked a finger under the strap of her bikini top and adjusted it with theatrical nonchalance, as if she hadn’t been vibrating with nerves a second ago.

“Alright, yeh?” she called back, voice pitched casual.

The boy grinned. “Aye,” he said, then added, amused, “Yeh survivin’?”

Kourtnee laughed—too loud, too quick—trying to turn the nerves into banter. “Course I am,” she said. “Dead calm, me.”

“Are yeh, though?” he teased, nodding at her bouncing knee like it was a flashing sign.

Kourtnee opened her mouth to come back with something sharp and funny—something that would make him laugh, something that would pull her out of the tight coil in her chest—and then the ball moved on the screen, sudden and dangerous, and her eyes snapped back to the pitch so fast it was like the boy hadn’t even existed.

Her flirt line died unspoken.

The boy waited a second, still smiling, then looked back to the screen too, his grin fading into the same tense attention as everyone else.

“Sorry,” Kourtnee muttered automatically, though she wasn’t really apologising to him. She was apologising to her own body for trying to be anything other than what it was: hooked, helpless.

Lucinda-Rae nudged her with her elbow, quick and gentle. “Yeh just abandoned that fella mid-sentence,” she whispered, laughter bubbling up despite herself.

Kourtnee didn’t look away from the screen. “Can’t,” she whispered back, and her voice had no humour in it now. Just fact. “Can’t do it.”

Toni-Marie didn’t comment on the flirting. She didn’t comment on the counting. She didn’t comment on any of it. She had gone into her second-half mode: clipped verdicts, sharp eyes, a kind of grim practicality that felt like armour.

“Hold,” she said when Ireland dropped deeper.

“Don’t dive in,” she snapped when a challenge looked reckless.

“Get rid!” she barked once, harsh enough to make the “neutral” Brits flinch like they’d been shouted at personally.

Every so often she stabbed the air with a finger, not triumphant now—commanding. The way her hand moved made it feel like she believed she could physically push Ireland’s line forward.

Shazney Devlin, meanwhile, started doing damage control before there was damage.

Not on the pitch—she didn’t have that kind of illusion. In the crowd. In their little shaded cluster. In the tiny universe they could actually touch.

She noticed Kourtnee’s leg bounce and put a hand on her ankle for a second, grounding pressure, then lifted it away before it could become a fuss. She noticed Lucinda-Rae’s breathing go shallow and made a little motion with her own hand—down, slow—like a conductor lowering tempo.

“Breathe,” Shazney murmured, not dramatic, not bossy. Practical. “In through yer nose, la. Slow.”

Lucinda-Rae shot her a look that was half gratitude, half “don’t start,” but she did inhale anyway, shoulders dropping a fraction.

Shazney reached for a bottle of water—warm now, plastic soft from the sun—and shoved it into Toni-Marie’s hand without asking.

“Drink,” she ordered.

Toni-Marie tried to ignore it, eyes glued to the screen.

Shazney didn’t move. She just held the bottle there, unblinking, until Toni-Marie took it out of sheer irritation. Toni-Marie took a swig, still watching the match, then handed it back like she’d been forced to take medicine.

“Boss,” Shazney said, satisfied, as if she’d just prevented a catastrophe.

She did the same to Olivia, who accepted the bottle with that steady seriousness she had, drank three small sips, and passed it on like a ritual.

To Marnie-Jay, Shazney didn’t offer water first. She offered a hand on the shoulder—light, brief—and a quiet warning.

“Don’t do yer head in with that clock,” she said.

Marnie-Jay’s eyes stayed fixed. “I’m not,” she lied.

Shazney huffed a laugh under her breath, not unkind. “Aye, course.”

Then Shazney looked beyond them, at the crowd itself—people packed tight, faces tipped up, bodies turning into a single nervous system.

A man in an Ireland shirt had both hands over his mouth now, fingers pressing into his cheeks, eyes wide above them. The family at the front had the kids tucked in closer, the adults’ arms forming a physical barrier like the noise might knock them over. The “neutral” Brits were no longer hovering; they were planted, feet wide apart, pints forgotten in their hands.

Spanish staff had formed their own little pockets of intensity. Paco leaned forward with his elbows on the bar now, mouth slightly open. Marisol’s arms were crossed again, but it wasn’t coolness—it was containment, her hands gripping her own elbows like she was holding herself together. The lifeguard had shifted his pole from one hand to the other without noticing, the whistle still resting against his chest like an unused threat.

The calls from the crowd kept coming, sharp little bursts.

“Ref!”

“Offside!”

“Get it out!”

Each one made the air vibrate, like the resort itself was shouting.

Shazney’s voice cut through their little group again, different from the crowd’s yelps—lower, steadier, more like someone running a drill.

“Sit down if yeh feel faint,” she said, glancing at Kourtnee, then at Lucinda-Rae. “No heroics. Drink water. Sun’s still batterin’ everyone.”

Lucinda-Rae gave a breathy laugh. “Yeh sound like me ma.”

“Good,” Shazney replied, dead serious. “Yer ma knows.”

Kourtnee finally glanced at her, eyes a little wild. “I’m not faint, I’m just—” She cut herself off as the ball swung again, her attention snapping back, body tightening. Her leg bounced harder.

Shazney’s hand hovered for a second, ready to steady her again, then she pulled it back and instead rested her palm flat on the table, fingers spread—grounding herself like it would somehow ground everyone.

The universe was unstable. The second half made that clear. Every pass felt like a threat. Every whistle felt like an insult. Every second ticked forward with the weight of something that mattered too much.

And so Shazney managed the small things—breath, water, posture, touch—like she could keep the universe stable by tending the parts she could reach.

Marnie-Jay whispered another number without meaning to. “Seventy.”

Toni-Marie’s jaw clenched. “Too long,” she muttered.

Olivia’s gaze stayed on the screen, glossy and steady as ever. When she blinked, it was slow, deliberate, like blinking was a choice.

Kourtnee’s flirt target behind them let out a sharp “Ahh!” at a foul that wasn’t given, and Kourtnee didn’t even turn around—she just made the same sound at the same time, synced without trying, another body in the same tense organism.

And the resort—menus fanning forgotten now, ice clinking fading into the background—held itself in that taut, bright-edged state where anything could happen and everyone knew it, where the only real movement was the tiny shifting of weight, the hands rising toward mouths, the sunglasses pushed up and left there, forgotten, as if seeing clearly mattered more than anything else.

Australia scored, and the sound that followed was brutal.

Not a single groan, not a few disappointed noises. A collective wound. A low, heavy “ohhh” that seemed to flatten the air, like the whole crowd had exhaled at once and there was nothing left to breathe with for a second. It pressed down on shoulders. It made the sun feel hotter. It made the tiles feel harder under feet.

Somebody threw a hat onto the ground. It wasn’t dramatic, not flung like a tantrum—more like a surrendering gesture, a body refusing to keep holding the object it had been clutching. The hat hit the tile and sat there, limp, brim up, as if even it had been stunned.

A man swore in grief—loud, full-bodied, the kind of swear that came out from somewhere underneath language. Then he caught himself, eyes flicking down to the kids in front, and he muttered an apology he didn’t mean.

“Sorry—sorry,” he said, but his face stayed twisted with the same fury, and the apology was just etiquette laid over pain like a napkin on a bruise.

The family at the front went rigid. The little boy looked up, confused by the sudden heaviness, the way adults’ bodies had gone wrong. His sister’s hands hovered mid-clap from a habit of reacting, then dropped slowly to her lap as if she’d been told off by the atmosphere itself.

Paco behind the bar made a sharp noise through his teeth and slapped his palm flat on the counter, not hard enough to hurt, hard enough to vent. Marisol’s arms tightened across her chest like a brace, her mouth tightening into a line as if she was trying to physically hold the goal out of existence. The lifeguard straightened, pole rigid, eyes narrowing. Even the “neutral” Brits went quiet in a way that betrayed them—pints forgotten, shoulders slumped like they’d been personally wronged.

Under the thin shade—shade that had become patchy now, sunlight striping through—the girls went still in different ways. Six bodies, one blow, six reactions, all honest.

Toni-Marie’s face hardened instantly. The joy had made her bright before; now it made her sharp. Her chin lifted like a challenge, jaw set, eyes locked on the screen with a look that dared the match to try it again. There was no flinch in her. No collapse. Just a tightening into steel.

“Right,” she said, low and hard, not to anyone, not to herself—just into the air, like a marker driven into ground.

Olivia went quiet. She didn’t sag, didn’t fold, didn’t make a sound for the crowd to borrow. Her eyes were bright—water held at the edge—but controlled. She blinked once, slow, deliberate, like she was keeping her body from betraying what her chest was doing. Her lips pressed together, then parted slightly, as if words tried to rise and were refused.

Kourtnee looked betrayed, like the world had lied to her.

The expression hit her face before she could manage it—hurt first, then disbelief, then that particular anger that came from feeling foolish for having hoped so hard. Her mouth fell open, then snapped shut. Her eyes stayed wide, glassy with shock. One hand lifted, palm up, as if she was asking the screen a question it had no right not to answer.

“No,” she whispered, tiny and fierce.

Lucinda-Rae laughed once—sharp, humourless. Not joy, not a giggle. A brittle sound that snapped out of her like a reflex, like her body needed to produce something and that was all it could find.

Then she shut her mouth like she’d bitten herself.

Her lips pressed tight. Her hand came up and hovered near her face for a second, then dropped into her lap, fingers curling around the camera strap like she needed to hold onto something that didn’t move. Her eyes stayed glued to the screen, but the light in them had changed—less wonder now, more a stunned kind of watching, as if she was waiting for the universe to fix its own mistake.

Marnie-Jay didn’t speak. She didn’t lecture. She didn’t even look away.

She simply reached out and touched Kourtnee’s shoulder—just a hand, warm and steady, a grounding point that said: still here, still with it, breathe. Her fingers pressed gently once, then stayed. No fuss. No performance. A quiet anchor.

Kourtnee didn’t turn, but her shoulder shifted under the touch, the tiniest acknowledgement, like a body remembering it wasn’t alone.

Shazney Devlin scanned the group again, immediate, practised, eyes moving fast: Toni-Marie’s hard set jaw, Olivia’s controlled brightness, Kourtnee’s shocked hurt, Lucinda’s brittle quiet, Marnie-Jay’s steady hand. Her gaze flicked to their hands too—who was gripping too tight, who was shaking, who was too still.

She didn’t bark orders at the screen this time. She didn’t shout “BACK IN” because the whole crowd was already back in, pulled under by the equaliser. Instead she did what she always did when a room shifted toward risk: she managed the cracks before they became breaks.

“Breathe,” she said, low. Not to one person—into their little huddle, like a blanket laid over shoulders. “Breathe, la. In. Out.”

Toni-Marie’s nostrils flared. She didn’t look at Shazney, but she did take a breath, sharp and controlled, like swallowing a blade.

Olivia’s shoulders dropped a fraction on an exhale, as if she’d been holding something in her ribs.

Kourtnee swallowed hard, throat working. Her eyes stayed furious and hurt, but the hand on her shoulder and Shazney’s quiet command kept her from floating away into panic.

Around them the resort made a new kind of noise: mutters, groans, the occasional sharp swear quickly swallowed when a child’s head turned. A menu that had been used for fanning got slapped down on a table, forgotten. A pint got set down too hard, foam spilling over the rim and running down the side like sweat.

A man in a green shirt dragged his hands down his face, fingers pressing into his eyes as if he could rub the image out. Somewhere behind, one of the Irish lads said, “Ah Jesus,” and it came out like a plea, not a curse.

The hat on the ground stayed there, unmoving, an absurd little casualty.

On the screen, the players reset, already running again, already demanding the crowd move forward with them. The stadium roar in Sydney was a different beast now—less celebratory, more hungry.

By the pool, the air had been flattened by that collective groan, but it didn’t stay flat for long. It began, slowly, to tighten again.

Toni-Marie’s chin stayed lifted. Olivia stayed quiet and bright-eyed. Kourtnee stared like the screen had personally betrayed her. Lucinda kept her mouth shut, jaw tight. Marnie-Jay’s hand remained on Kourtnee’s shoulder, steady and small. Shazney’s eyes kept moving, counting heads, checking for cracks.

The dying minutes had a particular cruelty to them.

By the pool, nobody was pretending anymore. The half-time looseness was gone, scrubbed clean by the equaliser. The resort had tightened into pure watchfulness—faces tipped up, mouths half open, hands hovering near lips like they might need to catch a scream before it escaped. Even the sun felt like it had shifted into a harsher angle, heat pressed down on shoulders and scalp, but nobody moved to find better shade. Nobody gave up their line of sight.

The clock in the corner of the broadcast became its own character: ticking, taunting, refusing to hurry. Every stoppage made the crowd inhale like a single animal startled by a sudden sound. Every restart made them flinch forward again, hungry and afraid of their own hunger.

“Ref!” came the sharp, brittle shout from somewhere near the bar.

“Time-wastin’!” an Irish lad yelled, voice hoarse, as if volume could pry seconds loose.

“Get rid!” someone else cried, and it wasn’t even clear who they were shouting at anymore—the defenders on screen, the universe, their own nerves.

Extra time seemed inevitable in the way bad weather seemed inevitable when the clouds had already decided. It settled in people’s bodies before it settled in their thoughts. There was a resigned, sick readiness to it—shoulders braced, thighs tense, the long knowledge that this wasn’t going to be quick, that it was going to be dragged out and wrung.

Under the thinning stripe of shade, the girls were caught in that same awful patience.

Marnie-Jay had started counting again without even trying to stop herself. Her eyes flicked to the clock, then away, then back, like she was checking a wound. Her lips moved soundlessly: numbers, breath, numbers again. Her hands were clenched at her sides so tight her knuckles showed pale.

Kourtnee’s leg bounced in tiny vicious taps. She’d stopped flirting, stopped joking, stopped trying to bleed off nerves. Her whole face had gone fixed, eyebrows drawn, mouth set like she was holding herself together with grit. The earlier betrayal still sat in her eyes, but now it had sharpened into something else—need.

Lucinda-Rae had her camera half-lifted, then lowered it again, then lifted it again. Her thumb hovered, useless. Her mouth was pressed shut, jaw tight, like she didn’t trust herself not to make a sound that would jinx it.

Olivia sat very still, glossy-eyed and controlled, hands folded together so neatly it looked like she was trying to trick the world into calm. The muscles in her neck kept tightening and releasing in little pulses, betraying her. She swallowed hard once, then again, as if her throat kept filling up with something she refused to name.

Toni-Marie’s posture was pure forward intent—leaned in, chin up, eyes fierce. Her body looked like it had been carved into one instruction: go.

Shazney Devlin was doing her quiet management even now. She shoved a bottle of water toward Kourtnee, then toward Lucinda, her voice low and practical, like she was talking somebody down from a ledge.

“Drink. Tiny sips, la. Don’ be daft.”

“Can’t,” Kourtnee muttered, not looking, voice thin with tension.

“Do it,” Shazney said, and somehow it wasn’t a nag. It was an anchor.

Kourtnee took the bottle, took a quick swallow, then gripped it like it was something she could hold onto when everything else wanted to float away.

The resort around them had gone almost feral with anticipation. People weren’t chatting now; they were making little sounds—sharp inhales, low groans, half-finished swears. Sunglasses sat forgotten on heads, pushed up and abandoned. Hats were crushed in hands. A menu used as a fan fluttered once, twice, then stopped entirely as its owner forgot their body again.

On the screen, the ball moved upfield, downfield, upfield again—scrappy, desperate, everything coming faster because the end was near and no one wanted to admit what they wanted.

A foul. A whistle. The crowd’s reaction sliced through the warm air.

“GIVE IT!” someone bellowed.

“Awh, ref, yeh mad!” an Irish voice cracked.

The Spanish staff had drifted closer again. Paco leaned over the bar, mouth open, eyes bright with stress. Marisol stood with her hands clasped together in front of her chest, fingers interlaced tight, as if she’d accidentally started praying. A housekeeping woman in uniform had stopped pretending she was only passing through; she was planted now, feet apart, watching like her life was on the line.

Then, in the last breaths of regulation, it happened.

It wasn’t a tidy, cinematic thing at first. It began with pressure—Ireland refusing to accept the draw, refusing to accept the idea of another thirty minutes of this. A ball won where it shouldn’t have been won. A second ball chased down like it was personal. A quick pass, then another, the kind of short, urgent football that looked like panic until it suddenly looked like purpose.

The crowd leaned so hard it felt like gravity changed.

“Go on,” Toni-Marie rasped, voice so low it was almost swallowed by the stadium noise through the speakers. Her hands were clenched together, knuckles white.

“Man on!” someone screamed.

“SHIFT IT!” an Irish lad yelled, voice cracking, laughter already hovering at the edge of hysteria.

The ball went wide. A cross came in—hard, fast, not pretty. Bodies collided in the box like weather. A scramble, a deflection, a moment where it looked like nothing would come of it.

And then—one clean strike. A flash. A thud into net.

For a split second there was stunned silence.

Not because people didn’t care—because reality needed a beat to load in properly. The image on the screen showed the ball in the goal, the keeper twisting too late, arms outstretched into emptiness… and the resort didn’t quite believe what it was seeing. It hung there in the air, unreal, like a word that didn’t make sense until it was said twice.

The silence lasted the length of a heartbeat.

Then the entire poolside erupted so violently it felt like the sky cracked.

A scream went up—one enormous sound that fractured into hundreds of smaller ones. People were screaming. People were sobbing. People were laughing like lunatics, mouths wide, faces contorted in joy so intense it looked like pain. Strangers grabbed each other’s faces, palms on cheeks, foreheads pressed together, eyes wild with disbelief. Someone dropped a drink—plastic cup slipping from numb fingers—and it splashed across feet, cold beer and ice skittering over tiles, and nobody flinched. Nobody even looked down. The spill belonged to the old world, the world before the goal.

A Spanish woman in uniform—hair pinned up, cheeks flushed—clapped above her head and shouted something joyous and rapid, words tumbling out in a bright stream.

“¡SÍÍÍ! ¡VAMOS, VAMOS! ¡MADRE MÍA, QUÉ GOLAZO!” she cried, laughing as she shouted, and even if not a soul understood the sentences, everyone understood the sound. It was pure celebration, pure release, language turned into music.

Paco leapt like he’d been launched, both hands in the air, yelling, “¡Gooool!” with a grin so big it looked impossible on his face. Marisol grabbed the nearest coworker and hugged her hard enough to lift her toes off the ground, both of them shrieking and laughing, aprons flapping, hairpins threatening to surrender.

The Irish lads were gone. Not physically—emotionally. One of them fell into his mate’s chest and sobbed outright, shoulders shaking, face buried, and his mate sobbed too, laughing through it, both of them holding on like they’d been rescued from drowning. Another lad punched the air so hard his arm shook, then grabbed a “neutral” Brit again and kissed him on the forehead in sheer delirium.

The Brit barked out a stunned laugh, eyes wide. “What the—” he started, then gave up and just howled with everyone else, neutrality burned to ash and blown away.

At the front, the kids started screaming too, not fully understanding, only understanding that the world had become loud and bright and safe enough to lose control in. Their mam cried openly, laughing as she cried, one hand pressed to her mouth, the other fist pumping the air like she was nineteen again.

Under the shade, the girls lost all composure.

It wasn’t a gradual cracking. It was complete surrender.

Olivia—steady, glossy, controlled—folded.

She dropped down so fast it looked like her knees simply gave up on holding her. She collapsed onto them on the warm tile, not sad—overwhelmed—hands pressed to her face as if she couldn’t hold the joy inside her skull. Her shoulders shook. A sound came out of her that wasn’t a sob and wasn’t a laugh and then it became both at once, muffled behind her palms.

“Olive!” Marnie-Jay shouted, and her voice broke on the name, not from fear but from sheer shock at happiness taking physical form.

Marnie-Jay dropped with her too—half crouch, half kneel—one hand reaching as if to help her up and then stopping because there was nothing to fix. Olivia wasn’t hurt. Olivia was exploding inward. Marnie-Jay’s fingers hovered, then settled on Olivia’s shoulder, the same grounding touch she’d given Kourtnee earlier, only now it was shaking with her own laughter.

Kourtnee made a noise like a shrieked prayer and turned into pure motion. Her hands flew up to her head, fingers tangling in her hair, then she grabbed Lucinda-Rae by the shoulders and shook her gently, not violent, not scary—just needing a body to confirm it was real.

“TWO!” Kourtnee screamed, voice gone high with disbelief. “TWO! TWO!”

She said it again and again, as if the number had to be spoken out loud to make it true, as if the universe required verbal confirmation before it would commit.

“TWO! TWO!” she shrieked, laughing between the words, eyes shining, face wild.

Lucinda-Rae was laughing like she couldn’t breathe, her cheap camera forgotten entirely—still looped around her wrist, swinging uselessly. Her mouth was open, laughter pouring out, and her eyes were wet, lashes clumped with tears she hadn’t bothered to blink away.

“Oh my God,” Lucinda gasped, then it dissolved into another burst of laughter, helpless. “Oh my—KOURT—!”

Toni-Marie had both arms up, fists clenched, head thrown back as she roared—a sound so fierce and victorious it felt like it belonged in the stadium itself. She turned in a tight circle, looking at the crowd as if she wanted to see every face at once, as if she wanted to tattoo the moment onto her memory.

Her eyes landed on their little cluster—Olivia on her knees, Kourtnee shaking Lucinda, Marnie-Jay crouched and crying-laughing, Shazney—Shazney—finally losing her composure too.

Because Shazney cracked again, longer this time. She grabbed Toni-Marie’s arm and screamed, a raw, joyful yell that tore right out of her chest, then laughed so hard she had to bend at the waist, hand braced on her thigh like her body couldn’t hold it upright.

For one glorious, lawless moment, Shazney wasn’t managing anything.

Then, even in the middle of her laughter, her eyes flicked—automatic—and she checked: Olivia on her knees but safe, Marnie-Jay steadying her, Kourtnee’s shaking gentle not frantic, Lucinda breathing, Toni-Marie upright and roaring. The scan happened in a blink, not because she wanted to control it, but because it was who she was.

And then Shazney laughed again, free, because this time the cracks weren’t dangers. They were openings. They were joy spilling out.

Around them the poolside kept detonating—people grabbing faces, shouting, crying, clapping above heads. The sky stayed intact, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt like the world had split open and let something enormous and bright pour through, and for this one ruptured moment in Spain, under harsh sun and rattling speakers, nobody had anywhere else to put it but into each other.

After the 2–1, it wasn’t pure celebration yet.

It was celebration with teeth clenched.

The goal had ripped the resort open, yes—had turned bodies into noise and noise into touch—but the moment it settled into the scoreline, the second feeling arrived right behind it: the terrible knowledge that there were still seconds left to survive. The joy didn’t evaporate. It tightened. It sharpened. It turned into something that could cut.

People were laughing with their hands still over their mouths. People were hugging and then pulling back immediately to stare at the screen like they’d been caught doing something reckless. Drinks were still spilled across tiles, ice melting into thin rivers at everyone’s feet, but now nobody stepped back; they stepped forward, as if closing the distance could protect the lead.

The crowd started pleading.

Not chanting. Not shouting instructions like before. Actual pleading—voices cracking, palms pressed together, faces tipped up, mouths forming words meant for gods, referees, luck, anything that might be listening.

“Please,” someone said out loud, raw as a prayer.

“Hold on,” an Irish lad begged, voice high with panic dressed in hope. He wasn’t talking to his mate. He was talking to the screen like it was a window. “Hold on, hold on, hold on—”

A woman near the front had both hands clasped under her chin, knuckles white. She rocked slightly on her feet, eyes locked, lips moving in silent repetition. The kids beside her watched her face more than the match now, learning what it looked like when grown-ups asked the universe for mercy.

The “neutral” Brits weren’t neutral at all. One had his hands on his head, fingers laced, elbows wide, staring like the screen might blink out. His mate leaned forward, hands on knees, whispering, “Just… just see it out,” as if the words could build a wall.

Paco behind the bar had stopped smiling. His mouth was open, but nothing came out now. Marisol had her arms crossed so tight it looked like she was holding her ribs together. The housekeeping woman in uniform—lipstick too bright, eyes too bright now—kept clapping in short, clipped bursts, not celebration, more like urging a horse forward. The lifeguard’s pole was forgotten; his hands were in fists by his sides, shoulders tense, gaze pinned.

Under the thin stripe of shade, the girls’ bodies shifted into the same new shape.

Kourtnee had stopped shaking Lucinda. Now she held onto her—one hand fisted in the fabric of her mate’s towel or top, whatever she could grab—like she needed a tether. Her face was split between grin and grimace, joy and fear fighting over the same muscles. Her eyes stayed wide, too bright. Her mouth kept forming “no, no, no” whenever Australia pushed forward, then flipping into “go on” when Ireland cleared.

Lucinda-Rae’s laughter had faded into breathy little bursts she couldn’t control—like hiccups made of joy—and she kept wiping her face with the back of her wrist without looking down. The cheap camera swung from her wrist like an afterthought; she didn’t dare lift it now. She didn’t want proof. She wanted time to move faster.

Marnie-Jay was standing again. She hadn’t chosen to. Her body had just risen, driven up by the need to see, to brace, to endure. Her hands were clasped in front of her mouth like she was trying to keep her own heart from leaping out. She stared at the clock like it was personal, like it had insulted her by continuing to tick.

“Just blow,” she whispered, almost inaudible. “Just—blow.”

Olivia had managed to stand too, wiping at her face once, hard, as if the tears were an inconvenience. Her eyes were bright but controlled again, her mouth set. She wasn’t making it sentimental. She was watching like survival. Her hands were curled into fists at her sides, nails biting into palms.

Toni-Marie looked like a person forged in the last five minutes. Chin lifted, shoulders squared, eyes burning at the screen with a kind of fury that was pure love in disguise.

“Keep it,” she muttered, voice rough. “Keep it. Keep it.”

And Shazney—Shazney Devlin—was pleading without letting herself look like she was pleading. It came out as commands, but the undercurrent was the same raw request.

“Don’t switch off!” she barked, voice hoarse, hands slicing the air as if she could cut danger away. “Don’t be daft! Get it out! Get it out! Take it t’ the corner, la—take it t’ the corner!”

Her eyes kept scanning even now, checking her mates’ breathing, their stance, who was about to crumple from the intensity, who needed a hand on the shoulder. But the scan was faster, messier. Her own composure was shaking at the edges like glass under strain.

On the screen, the final minutes became their own kind of violence—scrambles, clearances, a referee’s arm pointing, bodies colliding. Every time Australia got the ball near the box the resort made the same strangled sound, like someone being squeezed. Every time Ireland cleared it, the exhale came out ragged, incomplete.

A man somewhere shouted, “I can’t—!” and then laughed, hysterical, because he very much could, because he had no choice but to.

Then the referee brought the whistle to his mouth.

There was a beat—one last tiny suspension where the world seemed to hold its breath and decide whether it was going to be kind.

And the whistle went.

A clean, final note through the speakers.

For a fraction of a second the resort froze, like it didn’t trust it.

Then the joy became clean.

Full.

Unstoppable.

It wasn’t a cheer anymore; it was a tidal wave.

It hit in an instant—roaring, rising, swallowing everything. People screamed as if their bodies had been waiting for permission. People sobbed openly now, the fear finally allowed to turn into relief. People laughed like lunatics, heads thrown back, mouths wide, hands on faces and shoulders and hair and anything they could reach.

Strangers grabbed each other and spun. Someone fell into a chair and bounced back up like they’d been launched. The spilled drink on the tiles got smeared into shining streaks under stamping feet. A flag appeared and unfurled and the crowd roared again as if cloth alone could carry the sound.

The Spanish woman in uniform clapped above her head and shouted again—fast, joyous syllables pouring out—and this time more people echoed her even without understanding, because understanding wasn’t in words now. It was in noise, in breath, in shaking hands, in the way bodies collided and held on.

Under the shade—what was left of it—Kourtnee screamed and laughed and hugged Lucinda so hard Lucinda squeaked, then hugged back harder. Marnie-Jay’s hands flew to her face again and she didn’t even bother to hide the tears this time; she dropped them and let her smile take over. Olivia exhaled a sound that was half laugh, half sob, and her shoulders sagged in relief like she’d been carrying a weight she’d forgotten was there. Toni-Marie punched the air, then pointed at her mates again, wild pride on her face, as if claiming them to the world. Shazney threw both arms up and let herself roar, the control finally allowed to splinter into pure, unfiltered release.
It didn’t get decided. It happened.

The whistle had barely finished echoing through the speakers when the resort’s joy stopped being something that could stay contained in lungs and hands. It needed somewhere else to go. It needed movement. It needed impact. It needed the nearest body of water like the crowd needed air.

People were still shouting, still laughing, still clutching each other’s faces with shaking hands, when the first splash happened at the pool edge—some lad, shirt still on, trainers still on, launching himself like gravity had turned into a joke. The water erupted up his sides in a white burst, droplets catching the light from the big screen and the resort lamps that had clicked on without anyone noticing. The sound of that splash—clean, sudden—was permission.

A second person went in. Then a third. Then it wasn’t “someone jumped in” anymore; it was the inevitable next note of the match-day song.

Under the patch of shade that had gone thin and useless, the girls looked at each other for a fraction of a second, a shared glance that wasn’t a plan so much as an understanding: there was no chance of sitting still after this. There was no chance of staying dry.

Kourtnee’s hands were on Lucinda’s shoulders; Lucinda’s mouth was open in laughter that kept breaking into sobs. Olivia’s eyes were still bright, her cheeks damp, her lips trembling with a smile she couldn’t flatten. Marnie-Jay’s face was flushed, her hands hovering like she didn’t know where to put them. Shazney was shaking—literally shaking—like her body had stored every ounce of tension and was now emptying it out through her bones. Toni-Marie had her chin lifted, still fierce, still lit up, but the fierceness had cracked open to show the girl underneath it.

And then Toni-Marie made a noise—half laugh, half barked command—and pointed at the pool like it was the only sensible place left in the world.

“Get in,” she said, hoarse with joy. “Get the fuck in.”

“Tone!” Olivia tried, and it came out like a laugh, not a scold. “Yer mad—”

“Aye, I am!” Toni-Marie shouted back, already moving, already shedding whatever tiny restraint she had left. “Come ’ed!”

Kourtnee grabbed Marnie-Jay’s hand in a sudden vice grip, eyes wide, still wild with disbelief, as if the joy might evaporate if she didn’t hold onto something solid.

“Marn,” she blurted, breathless. “Marnie-Jay—”

“I’m here,” Marnie-Jay said immediately, like an answer to a fear that hadn’t been spoken. Her voice was thick with laughter. “I’m here, la.”

Lucinda-Rae lifted her cheap camera above her head on instinct, strap wound around her wrist, the plastic body already slick with sweat and sunscreen. The camera looked ridiculous held up like that, a little toy raised like a sacred object. Her eyes were shining as she stared at it, then at the pool, then at the chaos around them.

“I can’t— I can’t get it wet—” she started, and then she laughed, sharp and bright, because even as she said it she knew it didn’t matter.

Shazney made a sound that was almost a sob. “Oh my God,” she breathed, then laughed again, stunned by her own voice, like she couldn’t believe it belonged to her. “Oh my God, we’re… we’re doin’ this, aren’t we.”

Toni-Marie didn’t answer with words. She answered with action.

She sprinted three steps—barefoot, towel slipping off her shoulder—and launched. No graceful dive, no neat entry. Just a girl flinging herself at the pool like it was the only way to make the moment fit inside her body.

The splash hit like a clap of thunder. Water leapt up and rained back down on the tiles, on ankles, on shins, on the crisp bag and the abandoned cups. Someone screamed in delight at the cold shock of it. Someone else laughed so hard they choked.

And that was it. The last thread of restraint snapped.

Kourtnee went next without meaning to. She didn’t even let go of Marnie-Jay’s hand at first—she tugged, hard, dragging her with her like fear and joy had tangled into the same instinct.

“Marn—COME ON!” Kourtnee shrieked, and the words weren’t a suggestion. They were a plea. A command. A way of keeping the joy from floating away.

Marnie-Jay laughed—one big helpless burst—and let herself be pulled. She didn’t have time to think about dignity, about clothes, about anything sensible. Her feet left the tiles and for a split second her stomach lifted like she was on a ride.

They hit the water together. Another explosion of spray. Another chorus of delighted screams.

Olivia stepped forward like she was being drawn by a tide. Her hair clung at the temples, mascara already softening from heat and tears. She hesitated at the edge for a breath—one last glance at the screen where the scoreboard still sat like proof—then she jumped too, a clean, quick plunge, as if she’d decided she was done holding herself together carefully.

Lucinda-Rae followed, camera still held above her head like a torch, one arm stretched up, the other reaching out blindly until her fingers found Shazney’s wrist.

“Shaz!” Lucinda cried, laughing. “Shazney—come ’ed!”

Shazney stared at the pool like it was a dare. Her face was flushed, eyes bright, mouth open in a grin she didn’t quite recognise on herself. She looked… startled. Like she was shocked she was capable of letting go.

Then she did.

She went in with Lucinda, half-laughing, half-screaming, the sound ripping out of her with a freedom that made her own shoulders jerk in surprise. Water closed over her head for a second. Cold swallowed the noise. Then she broke the surface, hair slicked back, eyes wide, laughing like she’d just discovered she was allowed to be a mess.

The pool turned into a tangle of bodies and sound.

Mascara ran in thin black lines under eyes, turning laughter into something even more dramatic. Hair slicked back off foreheads, heavy and dark with water. Hoop earrings flashed whenever someone turned their head—little bright circles catching the resort lights and the harsh glow from the big screen, glittering under the stadium floodlights on the broadcast and the real lamps along the pool rim. The earrings made tiny sparks of movement in the chaos, like jewellery was cheering too.

Toni-Marie came up gasping, water streaming down her face, hair plastered back, eyes blazing. She sucked in a breath like the pool had punched it out of her, then screamed again—triumphant, feral, pure.

“YEEEEESSSS!” she howled, voice cracking, and then she laughed, the laugh breaking her open. For once she looked her age—just a girl, wrecked with happiness, shoulders shaking, mouth stretched wide, eyes shining with the kind of joy that didn’t know how to be cool.

She wiped water off her face with both hands and it only made it worse, smearing mascara and tears and pool water into a mess she didn’t care about. She threw her head back and screamed again, and it sounded like relief taking a physical form.

Kourtnee had both arms around Marnie-Jay now, clinging to her in the water like she was afraid the joy would float away if she loosened her grip. Her cheek pressed against Marnie-Jay’s shoulder, her laugh bubbling up in frantic bursts.

“Don’t let go,” Kourtnee said, breathless, ridiculous, sincere as anything. “Don’t—don’t let go.”

“I’m not,” Marnie-Jay promised, and she meant it. She held Kourtnee steady with one arm and used the other to tread water, her laughter softer but constant, her face glowing. The grounding touch she’d offered earlier on dry land had become something bigger now—an embrace that kept Kourtnee from tipping into overwhelm.

Olivia surfaced near them, hair plastered back, eyes bright and controlled even now, but her mouth was trembling with a grin she couldn’t hide. She wiped her face once, hard, as if still trying to keep herself neat, then gave up and laughed, finally, properly—shoulders loosening as the water held her up.

Shazney shook water from her face like a dog, then stopped and burst into laughter all over again, startled by herself.

“Look at us!” she cried, and the words came out like disbelief. “Look at the state of us!”

“Boss, innit!” Toni-Marie yelled back, and there was no edge to her voice now, just joy and salt and chlorine. “Boss!”

Lucinda-Rae was still holding her camera above her head, arm trembling with the effort, laughter making her wobble. The camera looked absurdly heroic in her grip, like she was carrying a flame through a storm.

“Lucy!” Kourtnee shouted, pointing at it, water dripping off her chin. “What are yeh doin’, la!”

Lucinda’s mouth opened to defend herself—something about memories, something about proof—and then a splash hit her, a wave thrown up by someone nearby, cold water smacking her forearm and spattering the camera casing.

She flinched, instinctive horror flickering across her face.

Then she laughed.

It was a real laugh, not the sharp humourless one from earlier. It burst out of her like a release. Her eyes squeezed shut. Her shoulders shook. She looked at the camera, then at her mates’ soaked faces, mascara streaks, hair slicked back, earrings flashing, mouths open in joy.

And she made a decision that didn’t even feel like a decision.

“Ah, fuck it!” Lucinda-Rae shouted, and the swear came out like a blessing.

She lowered the camera.

Not dropped—she wasn’t reckless—but lowered it into the splash zone, letting it get sprayed, letting the water hit it, letting the moment win. It took a battering of droplets immediately, the lens speckling, the plastic body wet and shining.

Lucinda held it there anyway, laughing like she’d been freed from caring about the wrong things.

“Some things matter more!” she yelled, voice breaking with glee.

“Aye!” Shazney screamed, and she sounded delighted by the thought. “Aye they do!”

Toni-Marie surged through the water toward them, splashing like a kid, not even trying to be sleek. She grabbed Lucinda’s shoulder with a wet hand and shook her once, triumphant.

“That’s it!” Toni-Marie roared. “That’s the one, Lucy! Tha’s it!”

Kourtnee let out another shriek—high, ecstatic—and splashed both hands down into the water, sending a spray up like fireworks. Marnie-Jay laughed and clung tighter, not restraining her, just holding her steady inside it. Olivia’s grin widened until it finally stopped trying to be controlled and just became joy.

Around them the pool filled with fully dressed bodies and wild noise—people splashing, shouting, sobbing, laughing, clapping in the water like clapping could keep the scoreline real. The resort lights gleamed on wet hair and earrings and running mascara. The big screen blared its victory graphics over the chaos, the stadium floodlights on the broadcast turning every droplet into a little bright flash.

And in the centre of it, the girls—soaked, wrecked, alive—lost themselves completely, because the moment demanded it, because there was no other way to hold that much happiness without letting it spill.