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“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
This is insane, Cristiano thinks, following Kaká down the hallway.
Well, obviously not because he is sneaking away from a party with his old teammate and some deeply inconvenient sexual tension. That part, unfortunately, has become the sort of ordinary Cristiano has known for years.
The insane part is that there are fifty people on the other side of the wall drinking to Cristiano’s future, and he is sneaking away from his own bachelor party with the one man who has spent the past twenty years making this future sound like a joke.
He hears loud music shaking faintly through the floor and someone’s laugh carrying through the walls. As they slip away, one of his friends calls Cristiano’s name from somewhere behind them, drunk and cheerful and already halfway to forgetting why he wanted Cristiano in the first place.
Kaká opens the door to a small sitting room near the end of the hallway, and Cristiano follows him inside. Well, that’s also something he’s done so many times. He has followed him into many more rooms. Hotel rooms. Bathrooms. Terraces. Good rooms to have sex in, let’s put it this way.
The door shuts behind them.
The room is dim, lit only by a lamp near the sofa and the spill of city light through the curtains. There is a table with flowers on it, a bottle of champagne no one has opened, two glasses no one has used. The whole room looks like it was made for a secret.
Kaká turns toward him.
Cristiano expects it. The usual thing. The stupid, terrible relief of it.
And maybe Kaká expects it too, because he steps closer. His hand lifts, not quite touching Cristiano’s face, waiting for permission –
Cristiano catches his wrist.
Kaká goes still beneath his hand.
“Don’t,” Cristiano says. “I really don’t want to get messy tonight.”
Kaká’s face changes immediately, horribly.
“Oh – Oh - yeah, of course,” he says. “I – I’m sorry, I just thought –”
“Shut up,” Cristiano orders.
Kaká shuts his mouth obediently.
Cristiano realizes he is still holding Kaká’s wrist, so he lets go.
He suddenly thinks this is funny, because what the. Actual. Fuck.
Kaká organized this party. Kaká, with his polite emails and his thoughtful phone calls and his extensive memory, somehow managed to put together a room full of everything Cristiano likes. Music. Champagne. People Cristiano actually wants to see. Oh, and good, high protein catering, forgot about that (look, Cristiano is as disciplined as he can be). Basically, Kaká has set up a whole perfect and expensive celebration of Cristiano becoming someone’s husband.
And he also sets this secret room up like they’re going to have sex tonight.
Of course Kaká thought they were going to have sex.
Cristiano had thought they were going to have sex.
That had been the whole point, maybe. One last stupid, tragic, beautiful, disgusting thing before Cristiano walked back out there and let everyone toast him into the rest of his life.
Except now Kaká is standing in front of him looking wounded and obedient and sorry, like Cristiano has slapped him instead of only stopped him, and Cristiano cannot fucking stand it. He has never been able to stand his old teammate looking like that. Not now, not then, probably not from the first year he knew him, twenty-ish years ago, when Kaká had already started being strangely impossible in ways Cristiano did not yet have the language to name.
“Hey,” Cristiano says, almost annoyed at himself now. “Don’t look at me like that, dude.”
Kaká looks at him with those wet, saintly, impossible eyes.
“Like what?”
Cristiano gives up immediately.
“God, Ricky, I’m going to get married in seven days,” he sighs. “There are people out there right now drinking champagne because they think I’m happy. Because they think this is normal. Because they think I am normal. And I- I want to be normal. For the new life. You know what I mean?”
His friend looks down at the floor. “Oh, of course, I’m really sorry –”
“No,” Cristiano interrupts.
Kaká stops.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Apologize like you are ruining me.”
Kaká’s face tightens.
Cristiano rubs a hand over his face.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” he says.
Kaká goes very still.
“No, it’s true.” Cristiano gestures between them. “That is what we agreed on, isn’t it? Or did I misunderstand? Because you got married first. You showed me how this works. You marry someone good, become a husband, and then- ”
Outside, someone cheers. A bright, drunken sound, ridiculous enough that Cristiano almost wants to finish the attack just to hear how ugly it can get. But he is suddenly too tired for this.
“They are out there celebrating me becoming someone’s husband,” Cristiano says. “And I am in here with you, explaining why I don’t want to fuck you at my own bachelor party. Very mature of me.”
Kaká’s mouth moves, but no sound comes out.
Cristiano looks at him.
“What?” he says. “Say it.”
Kaká shakes his head once.
“No, say it. You always look like you know something. So say it.” Cristiano mocks, “Got any advice for me for a happy marriage? You probably have a lot of it, dude.”
Kaká looks at him for a long moment, like he is deciding whether to let it pass or to answer honestly for once. His jaw tightens, and something flickers across his face—hurt, maybe, or frustration, or both.
Then Kaká says quietly, “Don’t get married if you are doing it to punish yourself, Cris.”
Cristiano lets out a short, humorless laugh.
“Cristiano-”
“No, that was good advice.” He nods. “Very wise.”
“I didn’t mean-”
“Yes, you did.”
Kaká does not deny it.
Cristiano turns away. He walks to the table and picks up a glass and puts it down again because he does not actually want it, just his hands feel restless. Then he leaves the room without looking back at his best friend.
**
They do not talk to each other for the rest of the night.
Or, no. That is not exactly true. Kaká texts him once. Something useless and careful about whether Cristiano got home safely after the party, but Cristiano does not answer. He feels great because he thinks he’s become a new man.
This lasts only about two hours, because Cristiano remembers, with real and personal hatred, that Kaká is his best man.
And Kaká is, objectively, a very good best man.
He is very good at schedules and answering emails. He is very good at taking calls from the planner, and very good at forwarding Cristiano updated PDFs. He is also very good at remembering things, which Cristiano’s never got the patience for.
He has made Cristiano’s wedding prep incredibly easy.
All of this makes Cristiano want to thank him, or kill him, at the same time.
As the wedding gets closer, none of the horrible feeling disappears. This makes Cristiano sick. He wants to scream. He wants to ask why Kaká is doing this, why he is standing there with a folded schedule in one hand and his wedding ring on the other, helping Cristiano walk toward a life neither of them can look at directly.
Instead, during one of the final fitting sessions, Cristiano looks at Kaká standing off to the side with the seating chart in his hand and says, with unnecessary sharpness, “You are taking this very seriously.”
Kaká looks up at him. “It is your wedding.”
“Yeah,” Cristiano says. “I heard.”
Kaká’s mouth tightens, but he does not take the bait. That is another good thing about him. He learns very fast.
**
The closer it gets to his wedding, the less Cristiano feels like a person and the more he feels like a problem someone forgot to solve.
He is filled with too many things. Rage, mostly. Fear, maybe. Some very stupid, very humiliating amount of hope. Also the strong physical urge to leave the country, change his name, and pretend he has never heard the word wedding in his entire life.
His tells this to his friend Pepe, who in turn tells him this is normal.
Apparently, before Pepe’s own wedding, he had felt the same sort of panic. He had thought about disappearing too, Pepe tells him, and that is just what everyone feels. Everyone gets scared before they get married. Everyone thinks about running away for one second. It just means you understand the size of the promise.
Cristiano nods very seriously when Pepe says this, because Pepe is married and therefore technically a professional.
He still does not get this, he thinks. Probably not as clearly as Pepe hopes he has understood it.
Not the promise part. He understands promises. He has made promises his whole life, to clubs, to countries, to sponsors, to his family, to himself in mirrors at six in the morning when no one else is awake to witness how badly he wants to become something impossible.
He understands wanting to run away, too.
That is not the confusing part.
The confusing part is that when Pepe says everyone thinks about running away, Cristiano knows, with sudden and terrible clarity, that he is not thinking about running away. Or, he cannot imagine where he is supposed to run to.
There is no clean other life waiting somewhere with lights on. No door he can open and walk through and become a different man on the other side. He could leave. Of course he could leave. He has money, passports, houses, private jets, and people who would answer the phone at any hour and make the arrangements he want without asking questions. He could be gone by morning.
And then what?
He would still be Cristiano. Still famous. Still watched. Still himself. Still the same man carrying the same impossible thing in his chest, only now in another country, another bed, another room.
Even in the fantasy, nothing changes. Nothing saves him from the ever-growing anxiety. Nothing takes the wedding away. Nothing takes Kaká away. Nothing takes Cristiano out of his own body and replaces him with someone else.
So, maybe everyone thinks about running away. Cristiano thinks, he just does not understand why people talk about it like running is the solution, when all he can see is the same locked room from farther away.
**
Three days. Two days. One day. The countdown on his phone makes him feel like he is being hunted by the stupid app. Which is even more stupid, obviously because he is the one who put it there.
The last day before his wedding, he finally feels miserable enough that he starts getting mad at Kaká – or maybe he has been mad at Kaká the whole time, just he is trying not to see it.
He wants to put his hands around Kaká’s neck and ask him why.
Not to hurt him, probably not.
Just to hold him still long enough to make him answer. Why is he still here? Why is he still being kind? Why is he still walking around with his wedding ring on one hand and Cristiano’s schedule in the other, making calls, fixing problems, forwarding PDFs, helping Cristiano walk calmly toward the edge of his own life like this is a normal thing to do for someone?
Why does he get to stand there looking sad and useful and just fucking beautiful?
Why does he get to take this easier?
Why does he get to make this worse?
He also wants to fuck him into the bed. Take him apart. Break him down. Every ugly, destructive thought he has spent years pretending is not love comes roaring up inside him at once. He wants to ruin Kaká and make him cry, wants him underneath him, breathless and shaken, so Cristiano can finally, finally say to him: Love me, goddamn it.
Meet me at ten.
The text bubble with three dots appears and disappears and reappears.
Yeah.
**
Cristiano leaves his house at nine-thirty and drives to the airport. He finds it funny already, because he never even told Kaká where to meet him, and Kaká had not asked either. Cristiano keeps thinking about as he drives, how the three dots had appeared, disappeared, and appeared again.
yeah.
Not Where? Not Cristiano, what are you talking about? Not I can’t. Not this is a bad idea. Just yeah, like Kaká had already known there was one place Cristiano could mean, even though Cristiano himself had not known until he was halfway there.
Or maybe Kaká does not know.
Probably Kaká does not know.
Probably Kaká is not coming at all, because Cristiano has given him no information and it is the night before Cristiano’s wedding and there are, in fact, limits to what even Kaká can be expected to understand through emotional telepathy and twenty years of being insane about each other.
That is fine too.
Cristiano tells himself this as the city thins around him, lights spreading farther apart, the road opening into that strange airport emptiness where everything looks too wide and too temporary. He tells himself it is fine if Kaká does not come. He needed the drive anyway. He needed somewhere to put his hands. Somewhere to put the panic. Somewhere to go that is not back into the house, not back into tomorrow, not back into the stupid app counting down the hours.
The airport is good for that, cus they are nothing but leaving.
He gets there at ten exactly.
Of course he does. His whole life is collapsing, apparently, but he is still punctual. He parks near the private terminal and sits in the car for a minute with both hands on the wheel.
This is the place.
Or close enough to the place that his body remembers it before his brain does. Years ago, he had stood here and watched Kaká go back to Milan, watched him disappear through a door with a bag over his shoulder and that soft, tired look on his face.
Cristiano had hugged him then – actually, they’ve even kissed right in front of the gates.
Which, looking back, is actually insane. Like, what the fuck. They kissed in an airport and then somehow decided this meant nothing.
Then Kaká left, and then five years passed. Five years of not really talking. Five years of pretending this was fine. Five years of Cristiano thinking about him at the most inconvenient times and then doing absolutely nothing about it, because apparently that was his big plan. Five years until they finally found each other again and everything went crazy, which was maybe another way of saying everything finally started making sense.
Cristiano had watched Kaká walk away that day and thought, take me with you, fuck.
At the time, he had thought that meant he wanted Kaká to stay. But now, sitting here years later with tomorrow waiting for him like a sentence, Cristiano thinks maybe it was never that complicated. He had only meant: I love you so fucking much.
Cristiano laughs once, alone in the car.
“Idiot,” he says out loud, to no one. Then he goes inside.
The lounge is nearly empty this late. It’s really quiet, in the way expensive places should be quiet, all soft lighting and leather chairs and staffs who obviously recognize him but are paid very well not to look like they do. Cristiano chooses a seat by the window, facing the runway.
A plane takes off while he is sitting there. Then another. He watches the lights lift into the dark, one after another, and for the first time all week, something in his chest loosens.
At ten-thirty, Kaká is still not there.
At ten-forty, Cristiano checks his million-dollar watch.
At ten-fifty, he stops checking.
By eleven, he feels more peaceful than ever.
That is the embarrassing part. Not good. Not okay. But peaceful in the bleak way a man can be peaceful after finally admitting that no one is coming. Like maybe this was the answer. Like maybe the whole point was not for Kaká to appear, but for Cristiano to sit here and understand that there is no door. No miracle. No one running after him in the way he expects them to.
He stands and puts his phone in his pocket, takes one last look at the runway, and thinks, fine.
Then he turns toward the exit, and he sees Kaká running into the terminal.
He is actually running, which is so unlike him that for a second Cristiano does not understand what he is seeing. But it’s also weird, because Kaká is known for his speed on the pitch. Kaká is fast and everyone knows that. But he’s never seen him running like this - flushed and breathless, hair slightly messed, jacket open, looking around with the wild, miserable focus of someone who has been searching for too long and has started to believe the thing he is looking for is already gone.
Then he sees Cristiano and stops.
Cristiano stops too.
For one second, neither of them moves.
Then Kaká crosses the room in three long strides and pulls him into his arms. He drags Cristiano against him and holds on so tightly Cristiano feels it in his ribs.
“I’ve been looking for you since I got the message,” Kaká says into his shoulder. His voice is rough. Almost angry. Almost broken. “I went everywhere.”
Cristiano’s hands hover uselessly for half a second before they find Kaká’s back.
“…What?”
“I went to your house. Then the venue. Then the hotel we stayed at. I called you.”
Cristiano blinks.
He pulls back just enough to look at him. “You called?”
Kaká stares at him.
Cristiano takes out his phone.
Six missed calls, nine messages. His phone has been on silent.
Of course it has. Of course. Of course his whole life has become a tragedy written by someone with a very stupid sense of humor.
Kaká looks at him like he might either laugh or kill him.
“You told me to meet you at ten,” Kaká says.
Cristiano looks at the messages.
He had sent it at nine. God forbid he was stressed enough to not notice that.
Cristiano feels something in his chest crack open so fast he almost cannot breathe.
“Oh,” he says.
Kaká’s face changes.
Cristiano has seen that expression before. On the pitch, in hotel rooms, across tables, in all the terrible years between them. Hurt and relief and fury and love, all of it held very still because Kaká is Kaká and even now he is trying to be decent about it.
“I am just happy I caught you,” Kaká says.
Cristiano laughs.
“You caught me?”
Kaká does not smile.
“Yes,” he says. “I did.”
For one second, Cristiano sees it.
Not like a fantasy this time. Not clean and cinematic and easy. Real enough that all the blood seems to rush into his head at once, real enough that the room blurs at the edges and he cannot see Kaká properly anymore, only the pale shape of him standing there, only the impossible fact of him – or the fact of them.
Somewhere inside Cristiano, something starts screaming.
What the fuck have we been doing?
Why did I not notice sooner?
How was this even possible?
Twenty years of turning away from the same door, and then acting surprised every time they found themselves standing in front of it again.
For one deranged second, his brain even offers up that stupid meme with the three Spider-Men pointing at each other. Except it is not three Spider-Men. It is just him and Kaká, two grown men in the same costume, pointing at each other like either of them can still pretend he was the only one being noble, the only one stepping aside, the only one breaking his own heart so the other one could keep living their happy life.
Then another voice comes through, lower and calmer and much worse.
Yeah, it says. That’s it. Burn your life. Burn your fucking life. For once, let it be yours.
Cristiano looks at Kaká.
“Let’s run away, Ricky,” he says.
Kaká’s hand slips slightly on Cristiano’s back.
For one second, neither of them moves.
Then Cristiano laughs.
“I’m serious,” he says.
Then, quickly, “I mean, not that serious. Obviously.”
Kaká says nothing.
“But I do have a jet,” he continues.
“I have a jet, you know I have a jet,” he adds. “This is not impressive. It would be more shocking if I didn’t, right?”
“And Madeira is nice this time of year,” Cristiano says. “You know. With the sea and sun and stuff. It’s beautiful. I just bought a house there, just so you know.”
Kaká closes his eyes.
“And there has always been a house,” Cristiano says, because now he cannot stop, because apparently a man can spend his entire life learning discipline and still be really really fucked up. “In my head, I mean. Not always the same one. Sometimes Madrid. Sometimes somewhere stupid and private where no one can see. Sometimes I think I bought it already and forgot to tell myself why.”
He swallows.
“With you.”
There.
Please don’t let me say it even clearer, Cristiano thinks.
Please understand.
And Kaká should. Of course he should. He is the person who knows him best in this fucked up and surreal world. The person who has always understood too much and still somehow never enough.
Kaká opens his eyes. He takes one step toward him, then stops.
Cristiano almost laughs again, because that might be the whole story of them right there. Kaká taking one step toward him and stopping. Cristiano watching him stop and pretending it does not gut him every time.
“Cristiano,” he says.
“No, don’t fucking Cristiano me.” Cristiano’s heart is beating so hard it feels almost violent. “Don’t say my name like you’re sorry for me. Don’t stand there and make yourself look kind. Just answer me. Just- just fucking answer me.”
Kaká’s face tightens.
Cristiano hears his own voice and cannot stop it.
“I am asking you,” he says. “Will you come with me to Madeira?”
For a second, Kaká looks almost offended by the hope of it.
Then his face breaks, just enough for Cristiano to see, because Cristiano has spent half his life learning every message his old teammate can fit into one expression, on the pitch, in the locker room, across a table, in bed. Basically everywhere.
He thinks he sees a smile on Kaká’s face, and that is definitely not happiness, but something worse. So much worse.
“You know what would happen,” Kaká says.
Cristiano shrugs. “I don’t care.”
“Your family.”
“Yes.”
“Her.”
Cristiano’s jaw tightens.
“Yes.”
“I also have a family.”
“Yes.”
“I have two children.”
“I know.”
“The press will-”
“Fuck the press.”
Kaká looks at him then, and Cristiano understands immediately that this is not the part Kaká is afraid of.
**
Of course it is not.
If it were only the press, they would have done this years ago. If it were only the scandal, only the cameras, only the headlines, only the ugly machinery of people finding out what they had already done to each other in private, then maybe it would not have taken them nearly twenty years from the first kiss to stand here and admit how insane it is to fall in love.
The press would be awful. The scandal would be biblical. There would be photos and headlines and statements written by lawyers and friends who suddenly became sources close to the family. There would be disappointment. Anger. People who loved them feeling made into fools by the truth.
But none of that is the real question.
None of that is what Cristiano is asking.
He does not care, suddenly, about the world. Not in the way he should. Not in the responsible, decent, adult way a man should care when he is standing just a couple of hours away from his own wedding and asking another married man to ruin several lives before tomorrow’s breakfast together.
He only wants one word. A yes, if Kaká is brave. A no, if Kaká is kind. He is not even sure he is hoping for one over the other now. He only wants the shape of an answer. Something solid enough to hold. Something that will finally tell him what kind of ruin this is supposed to be.
“We don’t have to know what comes,” he says.
Kaká looks at him.
“We don’t have to know,” Cristiano says again, softer. “Not now. Not before it happens. We’ll find a way, because that’s how life works, isn’t it? You do something first. Then maybe you understand it eventually.”
He looks down at his own bare hand, and there’s no ring yet. Not until tomorrow. The skin is smooth and waiting, if any of them is brave enough.
“Maybe nobody knows how to live it before they do,” he adds in the end.
The lounge is expensive for a reason, Cristiano thinks. He does not throw away millions of dollars every year for nothing.
Everything is quiet. He can still hear the airport around them, though. Not much. Just the low hum of the lights, the distant roll of luggage somewhere outside the lounge, the soft announcement from another terminal.
Somewhere across the city, tomorrow is still sitting exactly where he left it.
“I’ll wait until I have to go.”
Kaká’s voice is quiet. “…For what?”
“The jet,” Cristiano says, like he is talking about a business trip. Like he is still joking. Like this is not the bravest thing he has ever done in his entire life. “You know what? I’m going to book it now.”
He points vaguely toward the office. The lights are still on, because apparently this is what all the money is for. “I’ll book it for tomorrow morning at 6am.”
Kaká stares at him.
Cristiano shrugs.
For one second, Kaká’s face does something Cristiano cannot bear to name. But he huffs out a laugh, barely a sound, like this conversation has hurt him in some strange, bright place. Like there is still something alive in him that knows how to recognize a door when it opens, even if he has not yet decided whether to walk through it.
“Cristiano,” Kaká says.
“What?”
Kaká opens his mouth, and Cristiano waits.
But nothing comes.
No yes.
No no.
Just Kaká looking at him like the answer is still somewhere ahead of them, unwritten and far away.
Cristiano feels his heart drop, hard and heavy, but he manages to nod at the very least.
“I’ll wait anyway,” he says.
Kaká looks at him like he’s holding back words. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” Cristiano pushes away from the table. “But I have to go back after 6, in case the wedding happens like normal, yanno.”
Kaká does not say anything, and he does not move either.
Cristiano starts toward the office.
His hand is already on the handle when Kaká says, “Cris.”
Cristiano turns around. Kaká is standing where he was, with the evening behind him and his ring still on his hand and something open on his face that makes Cristiano feel as if he has spent his whole life standing on the wrong side of a locked room.
“What?” Cristiano asks.
Kaká looks at him for a very long time.
Long enough for Cristiano to think: fuck, this is it. This is the end.
Long enough for him to think: he is going to say no.
Long enough for him to think: he is going to say yes.
Long enough for both answers to exist at once, alive and trembling in the space between them, like that cat-in-the-box thing. Some physics bullshit. Some scientist Cristiano has heard of before and could not spell correctly if someone held a gun to his head.
He has always thought the whole thing sounded stupid: A cat is either alive or dead. A man either comes with you or he does not. A plane either leaves with two people on it or one. What the fuck - two possibilities cannot both be real just because nobody has opened the door yet.
But standing there with Kaká looking at him like that, Cristiano thinks maybe that mad physicist had a point.
Maybe there are some things you do not know until someone opens the door.
Then he sees a smile on his old teammate’s face, small, devastated and almost beautiful.
It is not a happy smile, and not exactly hopeful either. It is something stranger than that. Something old and unfinished. Something from Madrid, before they even knew what to call it; something from all the hotel rooms after, when they finally knew exactly what it was but still could not stay with it.
Something like, fuck you, my dear god.
Fuck whatever had made us believe suffering quietly was better than wanting honestly. Fuck whatever had taught us both to call this impossible and then spend twenty years proving we wanted it anyway.
Fuck the vows. Fuck the rings. Fuck the beautiful lives we have built and could continue to build. Fuck it all, because it fucks everyone up. Because everything hurts and it hurts so fucking bad, and if there is no clean way out of this life, maybe the only thing left is to choose which truth will ruin us.
There is no clean version of this.
There never had fucking been.
Because after all this time, after all these years of doing the correct thing too late and the wrong thing too carefully, Cristiano and Kaká still find themselves stuck right here. Both of them. Standing with one hand on the door of their collectively ruined lives, thinking about opening it.
And maybe that is what Cristiano sees on Kaká’s face. Not certainty. Not forgiveness. Not even permission. Nothing that can be put into one word, or any word, really. Therefore, there’s nothing clean enough to call an answer between them.
Only this.
Only Kaká standing there, looking straight into Cristiano’s eyes like it is twenty years ago and he was reaching for Cristiano’s hand to say hello, all polite smile and Milan red and black. Cristiano had been so young then. Young enough to think losing to him was the most dangerous thing Kaká was ever going to do to him.
Kaká smiles at Cristiano and says, “You know what? I think Madeira is indeed very nice this time of the year.”
(THE END)