Archive of Our Own

1.

England won the match.

It won the kind of match people still talked about long after the final whistle had blown, the kind that demanded survival before football. Norway struck first, but Jude Bellingham found the equaliser just as England were beginning to surrender to fear. Then, with the match drawing its final breath, he appeared once more to bundle a loose rebound over the line. That was enough. The Three Lions were through to the World Cup semi-finals.

So when he opened his eyes the following morning, he wasn't surprised to find his body in exactly that state. His thighs ached as though someone had spent the night packing them with sand, and his shoulders still complained from countless embraces. Footballers celebrated the same way they played: without ever measuring their strength or their passion.

There was the familiar dryness at the back of his throat too, the kind that always followed too much talking and far too little sleep. He ran his tongue across the roof of his mouth. It tasted of champagn, or only the memory of champagne, which was probably worse.

The ceiling fan turned lazily overhead, so slowly it looked as though it paused to think before completing each rotation. A faint patch of damp marked one corner of the ceiling. He couldn't remember noticing it over the past few days, though he couldn't remember not noticing it either. He supposed some things simply revealed themselves after you'd spent too many nights sleeping in the same room.

Outside, the morning sun had begun to slip through the curtains of the Pink Palace. Its light stretched across the wooden floor in long, warm bands, tinted with such a soft shade of pink that it hardly seemed possible it belonged to the same Miami where, only a few hours earlier, more than eighty thousand people had screamed themselves hoarse.

Jude liked the hotel at that hour. From somewhere in the distance came the sharp clack of heavy football boots against the tiled floor, and every now and then the lift announced its journey with a muted thud as it came to a stop on another floor.

He lay still, listening to the hotel creak awake around him. He wasn't sure why. Perhaps because he still couldn't quite summon the strength to get up. Or perhaps because, after a match like that, silence always felt a little unfamiliar.

What time was it? Seven, maybe eight?

Despite celebrating until almost dawn, Jude's body clock had long since learned to wake him at the same hour every morning. It was instinct now, as deeply ingrained as breathing.

The display of this phone lit up.

6:14 a.m.

Saturday, 11 July 2026.

Jude frowned.

That was odd. He could have sworn yesterday had been the eleventh too.

Social media was overflowing with predictions and articles about the performances Håland, Harry and Jude himself were expected to deliver in that evening's match. He'd expected to find photographs of the celebrations, or at the very least people talking about his two goals.

Instead, there was nothing. Nothing at all. Everyone seemed caught up in an excitement Jude had already lived through. It hadn't been a dream... had it?

The sting beneath his skin was still there. His feet still ached from dancing. He could picture every detail of his first goal with startling clarity, and he could still feel the warmth of every pair of hands that had reached for him after England won.

That had been real, hadn't it?

The thought lasted only as long as it took him to stretch. He'd had absurdly vivid dreams before. Once he'd sworn he'd argued with his mum over the phone, then spent half the day feeling guilty before realising he'd never called her at all. The brain was a peculiar place to live when you didn't get enough sleep.

According to the Declan of his dream, someone had insisted on raising a toast every five minutes because you didn't knock Norway out of the World Cup every day. And after everything 10 July had been filled with—training sessions, team talks and relentless pressure—it was perfectly possible that his mind had simply tangled reality together with what he'd wanted most.

He set the phone back down on the bed.

There'd be plenty of time to think about it after breakfast.

In the corridor, doors were already opening, suitcases were rolling across the carpet, and a physiotherapist was chasing one of the players with a bottle of isotonic drink in his hand. Jude reached the lift just before the doors closed and stepped inside beside two members of England's coaching staff, who were arguing, with almost scientific seriousness, over whether sleeping eight hours was actually better than sleeping seven and a half. It was slightly irritating and, at the same time, strangely fascinating, how someone could talk about something so serious at six in the morning without yawning between sentences.

Jude had noticed that at night, the lobby of the Pink Palace filled with the scent of polished wood, plastic flowers, and the expensive perfume worn by FIFA executives. But at that hour of the day, everything smelled of coffee, warm bread, and sun cream. The entire hotel stopped feeling like an elegant Victorian building, and became something closer to a railway station where, instead of travellers, there were hundreds of representatives from two national teams.

The strange thing was that the hotel staff moved without any sense of urgency. The journalists still rushed past with their translucent camera bags, businessmen still spoke into their phones with deep frowns etched across their faces, and volunteers still groaned under the weight of boxes that looked heavier than they were. Only the hotel employees carried on with an almost irritating calm, as though they knew something everyone else didn't. Perhaps old hotels simply worked that way, they had watched so many people come and go that nothing managed to hurry them anymore.

"Good morning, Mr. Bellingham."

The doorman held open the door leading into the second lobby with the smile of someone who seemed to have been born already knowing everyone's name, even though Jude still couldn't remember his. That embarrassed him a little.

"Did you sleep well?"

Jude pulled a face.

"Very well, thank you."

He was lying. Of course he was lying. Some dreams disappeared before you even had the chance to sit up in bed, others clung to your body like the smell of smoke after a barbecue. And Jude couldn't stop thinking about everything he had dreamed, but if the world insisted that today was only the eleventh of July, then it was the eleventh of July.

And all it took was a cup of coffee for the silence to dissolve, and for everyone to have opinions about absolutely everything again. At one table in the dining room, people were debating whether Kane would finish as the tournament's top scorer, at another, someone was insisting that penalty shoot-outs should never decide a World Cup, and further down, one of the kit men was trying to convince two volunteers that freshly washed shirts smelled better than brand-new ones, although nobody seemed particularly convinced.

Jude smiled to himself. Football had that peculiar habit of turning even the most ridiculous thing into a matter of great importance.

He picked up a tray and started making his way along the breakfast queue. There was a mountain of bread rolls, still warm, steam escaping every time one of the chefs lifted the cloth covering them, and for a moment the entire room looked like a dream made of butter. Further along waited the scrambled eggs, several platters of sliced fruit, and an enormous bowl of yoghurt that some nutritionist, sitting in some forgotten FIFA office, probably considered essential to winning a World Cup.

Then someone behind him said,

"Tonight."

Just one word.

They were enough to make something tighten inside him.

Tonight... Tonight they were finally playing Norway. He stood still for a moment, the bread tongs suspended in mid-air.

His stomach tightened as quickly as a hand plunging into water that was far too cold. The feeling was brief, almost embarrassing. He clicked his tongue without realising it.

What a persistent dream.

And he kept walking.

A waiter appeared on his right carrying a silver coffee pot that looked far too large to hold with one hand. Jude stepped backwards, instinctively, just a movement, he didn't even think about it, his body simply reacted.

"Careful!"

The warning came a second too late. A few drops of coffee splashed onto the marble after the waiter stumbled over his own feet.

"My deepest apologies, sir. Luckily, you've got excellent reflexes," he murmured, adjusting the coffee pot between his hands before continuing on his way, the back of his neck completely flushed.

Jude lowered his gaze to his trainers. He had stepped back before hearing the warning, before seeing the waiter lose his balance, before even thinking about it. Perhaps sleeping badly simply made people more alert. Or perhaps he'd caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and his body had reacted before his mind did. As footballers, their job was to anticipate things half a second early.

Yes. That made perfect sense.

He reached the end of the queue, and the cook greeted him with a warm smile as she served the eggs.

"The usual, sir?"

Jude nodded, and each item was placed carefully onto his porcelain plate. Scrambled eggs, two slices of wholemeal toast, Greek yoghurt, a glass of orange juice, and a small bowl of strawberries that looked almost impossibly juicy.

And once again, he felt that tiny pull beneath his ribs. It wasn't even pain. It was more like the absurd discomfort of finding an old photograph tucked into the pocket of a jacket you could have sworn you hadn't worn in months.

He looked down at his plate for a few seconds, almost exhausted. The same breakfast from his dream, or at least the one he thought he'd been served. He remembered those same colours arranged in exactly the same way, the orange reflection shimmering through the glass, the crumbs spilling from the crust of the toast. Everything was so...

But he accepted it anyway. After all, he'd been eating almost the same breakfast for weeks. If you repeated the same routine for long enough, your dreams eventually began to resemble reality rather suspiciously. That had to be it, yes, that was all.

A conversation with his teammates would make him forget all of this, and stop him from dwelling on a string of rather tiresome coincidences.

Footballers, when they were nervous, needed noise to convince themselves their bodies were still responding. More often than not, they let a dumbbell hit the floor harder than necessary. The fitness coaches always pretended to be annoyed, although Jude suspected they had long since grown used to it.

The cold metal of the machine at the Hard Rock Stadium tugged at his forearms as he began his first set. His muscles protested almost immediately, with that sluggish resistance that always came the day after asking too much of your body.

His legs still remembered yesterday's effort, or the dream's. He clicked his tongue again. His mind really wouldn't let it go.

"Listen up for a moment."

The manager's voice carried across the gym without needing to rise above the noise. One by one, the conversations faded until only the steady hum of a few machines, still running out of inertia, remained.

"Norway have come a long way. Forty years ago, this fixture would have seemed impossible. Not today. Today they're a side capable of beating anyone. They've earned their place here."

Jude lowered his gaze to his palms, reddened slightly by the grip.

"I want intensity from the first minute. No switching off. No giving them space."

The rest of the squad nodded, and before he could return to his set, Jude felt Tuchel step dangerously close, until he was only a few inches from his ear.

"And one more thing, Jude." His voice dropped, just enough for only him to hear. "Don't go easy on Håland because of the past."

The warning didn't strike him as exaggerated, only amusing. It was rather difficult to feel sorry for someone who was nearly two metres tall and perfectly capable of dragging three defenders with him without so much as messing up his hair. So he simply answered Thomas with a, "Yes, gaffer," hoping to put his mind at ease.

He had stopped thinking of Erling as the inexperienced boy he'd first met in Dortmund a long time ago.

But sometimes he closed his eyes and still saw him wearing Borussia yellow, his hair tied back badly, his socks always slipping down, and that unmistakable way he celebrated goals, as though he'd only just discovered football was the greatest idea humanity had ever come up with.

Those had been good years. They had been young, or younger, at least, and somehow that alone had been enough to make everything feel a little simpler. Then, for the first time all day, he didn't think about the match as a mistake, or as some strange trick of time.

He didn't feel nervous. Only a kind of absurd calm. The sort you felt when you watched a film you loved for the second or third time, already knowing how it ended. He didn't remember the result with the excitement of a fantasy. He remembered it with the quiet certainty of someone recalling a holiday, or an old conversation. He even knew, or thought he knew, what it would feel like to embrace Erling after the final whistle.

That was the strangest part. Because whatever happened that night, whether he scored those same two goals, whether the scoreline changed, whether everything unfolded differently, Jude had the strange certainty that Erling would still be Erling.

Win or lose, leave the World Cup or stay one match longer, there were people who changed with the result. Erling had never been one of them. And Jude couldn't entirely understand why that thought filled him with such relief.

The tunnel always smelled of damp grass, liniment, and that scent that was so difficult to describe, the one freshly pressed shirts carried while they still held on to a trace of steam. Jude had never found two stadiums that looked alike, but every tunnel ended up smelling exactly the same. He liked to think it was football's way of reminding players that, in the end, every match began in the same place.

The murmur of the stadium drifted through from the other side, softened by the concrete walls. Eighty thousand people sounded different when you couldn't see them yet. It was like lying on a beach, without England's kit on his back, listening only to the waves. The supporters were a sea, a rather impatient one.

England began to line up. Norway appeared a few seconds later. Jude barely had to lift his head to find Erling, not because he was the tallest, although that certainly helped, but because he occupied space with an absurd sort of ease. Even standing still, he looked as though he were on his way somewhere.

His hair was tied back, and two blond strands had escaped the ponytail, falling beside his ears exactly as they used to during training in Dortmund. Jude was about to point it out, but then he remembered he'd been pointing it out for five years, and Erling had never once done anything about it.

As he walked past, he gave him a light kick on the backside.

Erling turned almost immediately, a crooked smile already tugging at his lips.

"What are you doing, mate?"

"Nothing."

Years ago, that little kick had stopped meaning any one thing. Sometimes it was a greeting. Other times, congratulations. Once or twice, it had even been an apology. It had started as a joke during some ordinary training session at Borussia Dortmund, and somehow it had outlived the club, the managers, and even the countries between them.

Erling let out a quiet laugh through his nose before slipping an arm around Jude's shoulders for a second. It was a brief, awkward hug, the sort footballers pretended to give without much enthusiasm so nobody could accuse them of being sentimental.

"Good luck, big guy."

"More than you?"

"Impossible."

The answer was light, silly, almost schoolboyish. And once again, Jude felt that same relief. Erling was still Erling, and he allowed himself to enjoy the comfort of that thought until the embrace slipped away.

Jude sang the national anthem with his gaze fixed somewhere high in the stands. He had never understood why people insisted on looking at the flag while those sacred notes were playing. He preferred looking at people. The children standing beside the players looked as though they were trying terribly hard not to blink, afraid they might miss something important.

Then came the whistle.

For a while...

Everything else ceased to exist.

Two touches of the ball were enough to forget the noise, the cameras, and every worry that had existed before the warm-up. His body began thinking for itself, and Jude trusted it almost out of necessity.

The match unfolded exactly as he'd expected a match against Norway to unfold, physical, patient, uncomfortable, with precious little space and far too many legs. Erling brought down a ball that should have been impossible to control, and Jude couldn't help smiling. He still did things that seemed to defy the size of his own body.

During a free-kick, Jude wandered over until he was standing directly behind him. He gave him another quick tap on the backside with the back of his hand. Erling glanced over his shoulder and shook his head with a smile. Jude had to bite the inside of his lip to stop himself from laughing too soon. A few minutes later, while play was stopped, he tossed the ball back to him with a little more force than necessary. Erling caught it without even looking. He didn't even bother returning the favour. He simply raised an eyebrow, as if to say, finished now?

Jude thought they would probably never stop behaving like two idiots whenever they happened to share the same pitch.

And honestly, he thought that was wonderful. Some things simply weren't meant to change. Then came the ringing.

Faint, like the lingering hum left behind after a concert. It lasted no more than a second. Jude blinked. The colourful ball was still rolling, the stadium was still roaring, Erling was still running, nothing had happened, and he carried on playing.

Even so, the feeling returned another couple of times before the match was over, small, persistent, like a forgotten word refusing to leave the tip of your tongue.

It drew nothing more from him than a brief shake of the head. After all, it was an important night. The body did strange things when adrenaline mixed with exhaustion, and the first half slowly began closing in on itself.

Norway found the breakthrough while the clock still had a little patience left, and from that moment on, England began playing with the kind of anxiety that belonged to teams accustomed to winning. Nobody was doing anything particularly wrong. Everything was simply arriving half a second too late.

Jude began asking for the ball more often. Standing still had always seemed like the worst possible way to lose a football match. The stadium answered with that peculiar murmur thousands of people made when they still hadn't decided whether to rise from their seats or wait a little longer.

The ball found him again. Then everything happened in the space of a heartbeat. The strike. The rebound. Two white shirts. A player collapsing inside the box. The ball breaking loose, as though it no longer knew who it belonged to. Jude got there first. The finish wasn't particularly beautiful, or particularly powerful.

It was simply enough.

When eighty thousand people screamed at exactly the same moment, the air did something remarkably close to stopping.

Someone threw their arms around him before he even realised he was smiling. There were arms everywhere, hands thumping the back of his head, voices shouting words the noise transformed into an entirely different language.

They had equalised. He became aware of the pressure against his diaphragm and drew in a deep breath. Perhaps all he had needed was to breathe again.

As he made his way back towards his own half, he looked for Erling almost out of habit. He found him standing with his hands on his hips, his eyes lowered to the grass. When their gazes finally met, Erling lifted his thumb ever so slightly.

Good goal.

The bodies had been running for far too long to keep obeying with any real precision, and yet everyone pretended they still had fuel left. Every sprint began to feel like the last one, until another came, and another, and another.

The ball found its way back into the box through a mess of rebounds, shins, and chaos that would have driven any manager mad. For a moment, nobody seemed to know where it was.

Jude did.

Or at least his body did.

His foot arrived before the thought. Then came the strike, a clean, hard finish with not a trace of hesitation in it. There was a tiny silence, not on the pitch or in the stadium, but inside Jude. That ridiculous instant when the brain hadn't quite understood that something had already happened.

Then Miami exploded, and so did Jude.

He felt his throat tear open before he even heard his own voice. He ran without knowing exactly where he was going while half the team tried to catch him. The grass seemed too small to contain that much euphoria. Someone climbed onto his back, someone else pulled his hair, and Declan shouted something into his ear that he would never remember.

That was why he loved football.

Happiness was never abundant on earth, but when it arrived, it arrived pure, violent, overflowing inside the heart of one poor English footballer, his entire team, and everyone who had come to scream for them.

And in the middle of that burst of light, when a teammate grabbed his shirt and dragged him to the ground, the bubble of joy cracked with the faintest trace of regret. While the whole stadium sang his name, a thought slid through his mind as delicately as a splinter.

This has happened before. It was only a thought. So brief he almost managed to ignore it. He looked back up at the scoreboard. England 2. Norway 1.

The ringing filled his ears, then came another, sharper, rawer one. It was as if someone were trying to tune a radio station inside his head, but couldn't find the right frequency. He blinked, and the noise vanished as quickly as it had arrived. Everything was perfectly normal, and yet for a fraction of a second he had the absurd impression that he wasn't living that goal.

He was remembering it.

Then the final whistle came, and the stands stopped being stands and became a single white mass waving flags, scarves, and arms. From below, it was impossible to tell one face from another. There was only this enormous, happy noise that seemed to push the air itself down towards the pitch.

Celebrating a World Cup victory was like surviving a sudden storm. You stopped recognising directions and simply waited for it to pass over you. England had won. Norway were out.

Jude found himself laughing without knowing exactly why. Maybe at everything, maybe at nothing. This was one of those moments when the body discovered too many reasons to be happy all at once. He looked up at the stands, where thousands of people were still singing. He couldn't make out individual voices, only that deep vibration rising through the concrete, travelling through his boots, and settling in his chest. He had never understood how a stadium could make a heart beat differently. Maybe it couldn't. Maybe it was the person who changed.

In that moment, everything seemed to occupy its proper place, the scoreboard, his teammates, the lights, the grass, even the exhaustion. The ache in his body was the same one he remembered from childhood, when he fell asleep in the car after a long journey, every limb cramped and heavy, and his father carried him to bed without fully waking him.

The interviews started before he had even caught his breath. Microphones appeared, then cameras, then photographers walking towards him with the kind of confidence that only came from spending years photographing happy footballers. They asked him about the goals, the semi-finals, Harry, England, and he answered most of it laughing, because afterwards he wouldn't remember a word he'd said anyway.

Inside his chest lived a clear, radiant certainty that he had just lived one of those nights people still talked about twenty years later, the kind that justified an entire childhood, dawn training sessions, defeats, swollen ankles, hotels, endless flights, all of it.

When he finally escaped the circle of journalists, he started walking towards the tunnel. The noise of the stadium already sounded farther away, like rain still falling behind a closed window.

Someone caught his forearm gently, and he didn't need to turn around. He would have recognised that hand, that grip, that pressure anywhere. Erling was still wearing his shirt, his hair more dishevelled now, his cheeks flushed from the effort, and that strange expression that only appeared when he lost, not anger, not sadness, just disappointment.

He had just lost a World Cup quarter-final and still looked like the same boy who used to arrive at training with his backpack half open and his keys rattling inside it as if they could never find a place to stay still. And somehow he had always seemed more certain of himself than of the rest of the world.

They didn't say a single word. They just hugged more slowly. No introductions from their managers, no referees waiting, no anthems, just two men breathing after spending one hundred and twenty minutes trying to eliminate each other.

"Good match," Jude murmured, feeling Erling's ragged breathing against his neck.

Erling let out a tired laugh.

"You too."

They stayed like that for a few seconds longer, long enough for Jude to think, for reasons he couldn't quite explain, that he wished every full-time scene could end this way. Then Erling turned his head until his lips brushed Jude's ear, close enough that nobody else could hear him. His voice reached him warm and rough, mixed with the distant noise of music, shouting, and chanting.

"See you later."

Jude nodded almost automatically. Of course. Later. There was always a later.

When they finally pulled apart, neither of them took that backward step people usually took when a conversation was over. They stayed there, still too close, as if neither could find an urgent reason to leave.

Jude noticed a small streak of grass on Erling's sleeve. He reached out on reflex and brushed it away with his fingers.

"You always end up getting dirty."

Erling looked down at the fabric.

"Your fault."

"Mine?"

"Yeah. You make me run too much."

Jude laughed, loud and unrestrained.

"That's not true. Well, maybe a little."

They laughed again, completely out of place in a stadium that was still celebrating a World Cup qualification. And yet it was the same laugh from Dortmund, the one that appeared when one of them hid the other's shin pads, when they argued over music on the team bus, when Erling butchered an English word on purpose just to make everyone else laugh.

For one impossibly brief moment, Jude felt as though the entire city had moved very far away. Erling still had that strange ability to make places that were too large feel small, and there, between photographers, kit men, referees, and cameras, they were still finding a completely absurd way to be alone together.

He gave him two last pats, not one, not three, always two, on the back before letting go, and Erling disappeared into the crowd of players, coaches, and cameras. Jude followed him with his eyes for only a second.

Then someone called him back for more photographs.

And he smiled again, with his whole mouth, his whole face, with that naïve happiness that only exists when you still believe time always keeps its promise to keep moving forward.

The forecourt outside the Pink Palace had never seemed so empty.

Jude thought it was strange because, although it was almost midnight, the hotel was still alive. Through the glass walls he could hear the blaring music, the raised voices, the bursts of laughter echoing through the corridors, doors opening and closing as his teammates wandered from room to room with no intention whatsoever of going to sleep. England had won, and nobody was willing to let the night come to an end.

He hadn't meant to escape the celebrations either. He had spent nearly an hour accepting hugs, friendly thumps on the back, glasses he didn't really want to take, and congratulations that still felt slightly unreal. Everyone spoke too quickly, as though lowering their voices might allow reality to catch up with them.

But at some point, he'd stepped outside for a bit of fresh air, and somehow ended up in the dark car park, where there were only the silhouettes of palm trees, the glow of streetlamps reflected across luxury cars, and a security guard dozing inside his booth.

He found Erling before he had even decided where to look.

He was leaning against the railing, away from the main entrance, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder and his headphones resting around his neck. He was wearing trousers far too loose for someone who had spent the last few hours chasing a football, and a plain T-shirt beneath an unzipped jacket.

He looked weighed down by an exhaustion that had nothing to do with the match. A different kind. The kind carried by someone who had been awake for far too long.

Jude knew it. 

"Well, well, weel, would you look at that," Jude said as he walked over. "I thought a Norwegian giant would need a bit longer to escape his own supporters."

Erling looked up. For a second, the tiredness disappeared from his face, and he was the bright, easygoing lad Jude remembered from Dortmund again.

"I thought the English needed a six-hour celebration before accepting they'd actually won."

"Seven, actually."

"Oh. Sorry. That changes everything."

Jude smiled. Talking to Erling had always been ridiculously easy.

It didn't matter how many years had passed. It didn't matter that one played for England and the other for Norway. It didn't matter that they had just spent two hours trying to knock each other out of the World Cup.

There was always something between them that survived everything else. The way they wound each other up. The way months could pass without seeing one another, and they would still know exactly where to pick the conversation back up.

Jude leaned against the railing, the cold metal raising goosebumps along his arms, leaving a few steps of space between them. For several seconds, neither of them said anything. Each was lost in his own thoughts, and in the tiny dots of light scattered across a city that, World Cup or not, never seemed to sleep.

It wasn't complete silence. There was the constant buzz of the neon sign above them, the distant sound of cars passing by, and the warm Miami air clinging to their skin after a day that had gone on for far too long. Inside the hotel, the celebrations carried on. Out there, it felt as though they were somewhere else entirely.

Jude looked at Erling with a small smile.

"You alright?"

The question came out more gently than he'd expected.

Erling looked up.

"What?"

"I don't know. You're... different."

"Different?"

"Yeah. Quite different. And not the sort of different I usually like."

Erling let out a short laugh, but it didn't last long. There it was again. That little expression Jude recognised.

The way Erling pressed his lips together whenever he was thinking too much. The way he avoided looking directly at people when he was trying to find the right words.

Jude tilted his head slightly.

"You know you can tell me anything, Erli'."

The nickname slipped out as though the years between Dortmund and this moment had never existed.

Erling lowered his eyes for a moment. He looked almost uncomfortable. And that, on its own, was a strange sight. Erling Håland, uncomfortable. Jude almost wanted to laugh.

"Er..."

The Norwegian shook his head, although a faint smile appeared on his face.

" Well, no.I'm not really alright."

Jude's smile slowly faded.

Curiosity arrived first. Concern followed right behind it. Before he could ask anything else, Erling drew in a slow breath and said, very quietly,

"There's something I need to tell you..."

Then something strange happened. Nothing happened, nobody interrupted them, nobody came looking for Erling, nobody walked out of the hotel calling their names. There was no real reason for the moment to stop. They simply stood there looking at one another, and it felt like a minute or several hours.

Jude had no idea how much time passed.

He only knew that Erling seemed to be trying to decide something, and for some reason, Jude didn't want to rush him. After all... They had time. They always had time.

At last, Erling looked away and let out a quiet, humourless laugh.

"You know what? I'll tell you another day."

Jude blinked.

"What?"

Erling adjusted the bag on his shoulder.

"I've got to go."

Jude looked at him for a second. Then he let out the small, disbelieving laugh that always escaped whenever Erling did something that was so unmistakably Erling.

"Seriously?"

"Yeah, mate. Sorry. I really am."

"You've just told me you had something important to say, and then decided not to say it."

"Exactly."

Erling didn't seem regretful. Maybe a little sad. But not regretful. Jude shook his head, amused.

"You're unbelievably annoying."

"I know."

"You don't even deny it."

"I've never denied who I am."

Seeing the conversation wasn't going anywhere, Erling took a step backwards.

"See you, Jude."

Jude lifted a hand in farewell.

"Alright, mate. We'll talk later."

Erling smiled.

And Jude turned away.

He didn't think about how that smile looked more tired than it had a few minutes earlier. He didn't think about the conversation they hadn't had. He didn't think that perhaps something important was hiding behind that silence. Because tomorrow existed. Later existed. It always had.

He walked back towards the hotel doors as the sound of the celebrations slowly grew louder again.

Then the clock struck midnight. For one brief instant, everything stood still. The sound of the cars, the voices, the buzz of the neon sign, all of it disappeared, as though the entire world had held its breath. Jude barely had time to register what had happened.

And then the seams of time split apart.

2. 

When Jude woke up and saw the same date on his phone screen, he didn't spend several minutes staring at it the way he had... Yesterday? Today? Tomorrow?

When you were facing a losing battle, leaping out of bed or desperately searching for an explanation wasn't always the best course of action. He simply closed his eyes again. Maybe he was still asleep. Maybe his mind was still trying to put an extraordinary night of celebration into order, all those emotions piled on top of one another, too many hours awake, thousands of images his brain hadn't quite finished processing.

You didn't win a match like that every day. Perhaps his mind simply didn't know how to let it go.

But when he opened his eyes again a few minutes later, the room was still the same. The fan was still turning. The light was still slipping through the same corner of the curtain, at exactly the same angle.

And his phone was still showing the same time.

6:14 a.m.

11th July 2026.

Jude remained sitting on the edge of the bed. He didn't like the feeling that detail left behind. It was beginning to feel far too specific. He seem the same posts, the same comments, his boots, perfectly clean, without a single blade of grass on them, sitting in exactly the same place by the door.

Was he losing his mind? Was he dreaming Or had this all been some sort of joke? Had he taken something that had pulled him completely out of reality?

Whatever it was, sitting motionless on the bed wasn't going to give him any answers.

So Jude decided to cling to that small voice in the back of his mind reminding him that he was awake, that he wasn't drunk, that he wasn't high.

That maybe... He was simply confused.

At breakfast, he tried to behave as though there wasn't a strange knot sitting in the pit of his stomach. They served him the same food. The same waiter walked past. People moved in exactly the same way, and his sudden attention to detail felt like a whirlpool dragging him under.

Still, he decided to rise above it. To remember that he was a world-class footballer, not someone trapped inside a dream. He listened to his teammates talking, smiled when he was supposed to, drank his coffee, answered questions.

Everything seemed the same. And perhaps that was the problem. Nothing was different, strange, nobody was running for their life or walked up to him saying, "Jude, is it just me, or are the days repeating themselves?"

The Pink Palace was still buzzing with movement. The staff moved through the corridors with the quiet efficiency of people who had repeated the same routine for years. Journalists waited near the entrance with their cameras at the ready. Yesterday he'd thought the hotel was impressive. Today he thought it was strange. Not in a bad way, simply... Too familiar. It felt like walking into a room you knew you'd never been in before, yet somehow you knew exactly where everything was.

Jude wasn't someone who believed in magic, or anything supernatural. He had never been the sort to look for signs in ordinary events, or believe there was a hidden reason behind every coincidence. Fate was a lovely word when somebody used it in a post-match interview, but he'd never really known what it meant.

He believed in work, decisions, hours spent training, in things you could touch, you could prove. The time didn't break, the ays didn't repeat themselves and people didn't wake up twice on the same morning. So, of course, there had to be another explanation.

Then Harry and Anthony Gordon had exactly the same conversation, without a single variation. At last, Jude tried asking.

Naturally, he wasn't about to announce that time itself had broken.

"Don't you feel like this has already happened?" he asked, as though it were simply something odd he'd just noticed.

His teammate looked at him for a few seconds before laughing. "What did they put in your tea this morning, Jude?"

The conversation carried on, everyone laughed and instead of reassuring him, it only made him feel a little more alone. Because if everyone else could laugh at the idea, if everyone else could carry on so easily, then perhaps the problem wasn't the day. Perhaps it was Jude.

Even though his thoughts had begun to wander, the world pulled him back to where he belonged. He managed to ignore everything when he stepped into the stadium. When he heard thousands of people shouting for England. When he felt the grass beneath his boots, and that familiar electricity that always appeared before the biggest matches.

Everything felt real again.

Was he really letting an absurd feeling, a coincidence, ruin a moment any footballer would dream of living? His strange dreams and ridiculous theories didn't change the fact that he was at a World Cup. It was still a quarter-final. History still depended on what he did with his feet.

He scored the equaliser again. Jude felt that same joy he'd felt the first time, the same rush of adrenaline, the same shout tearing itself from his throat, the same certainty that he was exactly where he wanted to be.

Then came the second half, extra time, the ball crossed the line. His teammates ran towards him, the whole stadium seemed ready to collapse and somewhere beneath the happiness, Jude felt a tiny discomfort, almost impossible to notice.

The match ended the same way, tje ctory arrived the same way, but it didn't taste the same. His eyes swept across the stadium until he found Erling's silhouette in the distance. He already knew where he'd be. Waiting in the tunnel, for the embrace, to promise they'd see each other afterwards.

And at the end of the night, beneath the lights of the Pink Palace, he found Erling again, the duffel bag over his shoulder, the headphones resting around his neck.

They greeted each other, laughed, had the same conversation, one that seemed suspended somewhere Jude couldn't quite reach.

When Erling hesitated before saying something.... When he looked away again and said they could talk another day... For the first time, Jude felt those words carried a weight he couldn't explain. But not enough to stop him.

Because he still wasn't afraid. Because there was still hope that all of this was only a dream, and tomorrow he would wake up to the right date, at the right time. He still didn't understand it.

"Alright. We'll talk later."

Because later still existed. It had to. It simply had to.

7.

Jude stopped looking for an explanation. After so many aches in his body and so many mental labyrinths with no way out, he couldn't see the point in continuing to search for logical reasons behind something more complicated than reality itself, more complicated than days, more complicated than time.

During those first few days, he'd done what any sane person would do when something impossible, or magical, started happening to them. Explain it away. By now, Jude had exhausted every possibility he could think of. Exhaustion, the endless celebrations, too much alcohol, a wave of stress, the pressure of a World Cup, and the strange mixture of memories and dreams after a night that had gone on far too long.

He had even started wondering whether he wasn't remembering the previous day at all, but imagining it so vividly that his brain had decided to turn it into a memory. It was a dreadful theory, but a theory nonetheless. The trouble was that Jude preferred dreadful theories to accepting something he couldn't explain.

Jude kept telling himself that things like this didn't happen in real life. He knew nothing about quantum physics beyond the little he'd picked up from documentaries he never actually finished watching, and he certainly didn't have any particularly strong opinions about alternate dimensions, parallel universes, or any of those things that seemed to exist solely to make life more difficult for characters in films.

He only played football and lived a fairly simple routine; train, sleep, eat and win matches. As a child, he'd been taught that every situation had causes as well as consequences, and that the world had always worked that way, until one day, for reasons he still couldn't begin to understand, without so much as a written note or an apologetic email landing in his manager's inbox, it simply stopped.

Once again, he woke at 6:14 in the morning. Before he even opened his eyes, he already knew exactly what he was going to find. The fan turning above him with that faint uneven rattle he'd ignored the first few times, the light filtering through the curtain, the glass of water on the bedside table, and the same headline: Can England's golden boy overcome the strength of the Norwegian Viking?

This time, he waited, perfectly still, trying to steady the waves of anxiety with slow breathing exercises. His phone vibrated at exactly the same moment, with the same notification and the same date. Jude stared at it for a long time.

He wasn't frightened anymore. That would have been the normal reaction, the expected one, the ordinary one. No... what he felt today was exhaustion. A strange sort of exhaustion, because his body had only been awake for a few minutes, yet part of him felt as though it had already lived through that morning far too many times.

He got up, showered, got dressed, and when he stepped out of his room, he knew exactly what he would find on the other side of the corridor. The same member of staff pushing the cleaning trolley, the same door closing two rooms farther down, the same lift arriving before anyone pressed the button, the same conversation between the two coaches about sleep schedules.

The Pink Palace was still just as beautiful. The corridors still held that pink-toned wood that reflected the warm glow of the lamps, the old paintings still hung crooked in exactly the same way, and the air still smelled of freshly brewed coffee and expensive cleaning products.

On the first morning, he'd thought the place looked as though it belonged in a magazine. Now he knew that one of the decorative mouldings near the lift took exactly forty-three seconds to disappear from sight, he knew the lobby clock ran almost two seconds fast, he knew the morning receptionist always straightened the same stack of papers three times before looking up. They were useless things, meaningless details, but they were the only things that remained constant, and Jude needed something to hold on to.

Because nobody else seemed to notice. He had interrupted conversations before they happened, answered questions people hadn't quite finished asking, guessed exactly what Thomas was about to serve himself for breakfast. But the result was always the same. Confused looks, jokes, and someone asking whether he'd slept well. Nobody remembered, nobody knew, nobody was trapped. Only Jude.

And that was the first thing that truly began to frighten him. The fact that he was the only one affected. He had tried leaving the hotel, finding a taxi, going to the news, even asking his social media manager to post about it everywhere. But once again, time folded back in on itself, and once again, he ended up back at the Pink Palace, as though nothing he did could alter it.

He looked at the white cup in front of him, the tiny crack in the fruit plate, the waitress setting down the cutlery. He could remember exactly when every single thing was about to happen, but he couldn't understand why. And that was the problem.

He no longer needed proof that something strange and completely impossible was happening. By now, that much was obvious. Now his body, his anxiety, his mind, his fear, his worn-out heart, every part of Jude was begging for an answer, for comfort, for something that could prove he wasn't trapped inside a cage.

24.

Jude cried.

The tears came slowly, warm against his skin, born from exhaustion that had been held back for far too long, from sheer weariness. When he woke up and realised it was still the eleventh of July, he buried his face in the pillow and shouted, "I don't want this anymore." Whatever higher power had thrown him into this punishment was probably laughing itself senseless, watching him slowly fall apart, watching him stand at the very edge of madness.

But if all those defeats, all those difficult moments, all those even harder ones had taught him anything, it was that the soul had to remain unbreakable. Everything could be solved, and sooner or later, he would find his way out of this. So after an hour, Jude wiped away his tears and decided it was time to change things. If he couldn't escape the hotel, and he couldn't ask anyone outside for help, then the breaking point had to be somewhere inside him.

That morning, he found a notepad in one of the drawers of the desk in his room. It was the sort hotels left beside the telephone so guests could jot down a number or an address they'd probably forget before checking out. Embossed in gold ink across the top corner was the name Pink Palace, accompanied by a tiny sketch of the building.

Jude tore off the first page because one corner had a faint water stain and wrote down the date without really thinking. Then he crossed it out. There was no point writing 11 July if every page was going to begin exactly the same way. Instead, he wrote across the top: Things That Never Change. He left a generous space beneath it before starting a second list, much shorter this time: Things That Do.

He had never been particularly tidy when it came to taking notes. At school, his margins were always crooked, and whenever lessons dragged on too long, he ended up doodling footballs in the corners of his exercise books. Even so, those pages began filling themselves with a neatness he barely recognised in himself.

He discovered that one of the waiters was left-handed because he always carried the coffee pot in his left hand and arranged the cups into a perfect half-moon before pouring. He wrote that one of the lamps in the third-floor corridor always took a fraction longer to switch on than the others, such a tiny delay that nobody would ever have noticed it if they hadn't walked past it more than twenty times in a row.

He started writing down those sorts of things because he needed to convince himself he was still capable of learning something new, even if it was something utterly pointless.

His latest theory was that if he could figure out what was causing the repetition, perhaps he could stop it. If the problem lay in one particular detail, one specific action, one decision he made during the day, then surely doing something different would be enough.

It was a very simple idea.

And after several failed attempts, he realised it was also a completely useless one.

Because he had changed countless things, and the day still ended exactly the same way.

The first time he decided not to go down for breakfast, he did it with the sort of childish satisfaction that came from believing you'd found a loophole nobody else knew about. He stayed in bed, listening to the familiar sounds of the hotel slowly waking around him, and for a few minutes he felt strangely peaceful.

He wasn't following the path anymore. He wasn't doing what everyone expected him to do. He wasn't stepping into the same morning as though he had no idea he'd already lived every second of it. He simply lay there until almost training time, staring at the ceiling and waiting for something to happen.

Nothing did. Nobody came looking for him. Nobody knocked on his door. Nobody rushed upstairs to find out where he was. The world simply carried on without him, and somehow that was even stranger than he'd expected.

Because part of Jude, whether he wanted to admit it or not, had imagined that breaking one small piece of the routine would make everything else crack apart as well. A change inside the hotel. A conversation that had never happened before. Some unexplored variable that would force the day to stop following the same path.

But when he finally left his room, his hair still a mess and without having had a single cup of coffee, the Pink Palace was exactly the same.

The same member of staff pushing the cleaning trolley, the same soft music drifting through the lobby, the same sunlight pouring through the tall windows, and even the old clock beside reception was still running two minutes fast.

Jude stared at it for several seconds. Not because there was anything particularly remarkable about its antique design or the golden gleam of its hands, but because it was beginning to feel more familiar than some people.

The receptionist, a lovely little elderly woman, looked up after noticing him staring at the clock for so long and offered him one of those gentle smiles he'd always answered with an absent-minded nod before carrying on with his day.

"Good morning, Jude."

"Morning," he replied, a little surprised, because this conversation hadn't happened before. Yes. A different response.

While she searched beneath the desk for a few documents, he watched her organising folders with the quiet patience of someone who had been doing the same job for so many years that every movement had become second nature. The woman looked up again and smiled once more.

"I hope you find whatever it is you've been looking for."

The words sent a shiver crawling down his spine. Jude raised an eyebrow, his eyes widening as though they no longer belonged in their sockets, and before he could ask what she meant by that strangely gentle mystery, the woman disappeared into the adjoining lobby, her full hips swaying as she walked away.

What was that supposed to mean? Was it a sign? So he really was supposed to be looking for something... or finding something... but what? Jude rubbed both hands over his face, utterly exhausted.

And when that day ended exactly the same as every other, he started trying different things. Still clinging to the theory that one meaningful change would shine a bright white light on the answer he so desperately needed, the one that would finally let him escape that suffocating prison of time.

The next morning, he changed the trainers he'd been wearing for weeks and chose a pair he almost never used, ones he'd packed more out of habit than intention. Throughout breakfast, he felt an absurd sense of discomfort over something so insignificant, as though changing his shoes alone might somehow alter something much bigger.

It didn't change anything. Training happened. The same drills, the same instructions, the same comments from the coaching staff, even the same water bottle forgotten beside one of the benches.

On another occasion, he decided to answer the journalists waiting outside the Pink Palace differently.

The first time, he'd been polite, tired but focused. The second, he'd tried being more serious. The third, he'd answered with the sort of jokes he normally saved for his teammates. The journalists reacted differently, a little surprised by how unlike the neat, courteous Jude the change in attitude seemed.

And for a moment, his face lit up. Perhaps he'd finally found something, a tiny crack in the pattern. But when afternoon arrived, when the stadium began to fill and the floodlights came back to life above the pitch, none of it mattered.

The match was still there, along with the same night, the same noise, and the same victory.

It was as though the day possessed a shape of its own, and everything else was nothing more than small detours it could absorb without effort. Jude tried to stop thinking about it, but it didn't work.

He even tried something simpler. Doing nothing. Not signing autographs, not stopping when children called his name outside the stadium, not looking at the cameras. For an hour, he walked around as though he were somebody else. As though Jude Bellingham, the Real Madrid footballer, the lad who had spent years learning how to smile for photographs and answer questions after every match, could disappear for a day.

And he wrote all of it down, because the notepad had become the only proof that time was still moving for someone. Even though every morning the pages returned blank, he remembered every observation perfectly, added a new one, crossed out another that no longer seemed important, then folded the sheets in half and slipped them into the pocket of his training bottoms.

Sometimes he reread them over breakfast while everyone else talked about the match as though it were still an uncertainty. He almost found it funny listening to television pundits argue over the key to beating Norway with nearly offensive confidence. One insisted England needed to close the central spaces more effectively; another talked about the pace of the wingers; a third repeated, for what had to be the fifth time that morning, that knockout matches weren't won with talent, but with patience.

Jude already knew who was going to score first. He also knew who would qualify for the semi-finals. The only thing he still didn't know was why he was the only one condemned to hear those conversations over and over again.

As the days passed, he stopped searching for big answers and started asking himself smaller questions, perhaps because the big ones never answered back. Which things always happened, even when he did everything he could to stop them? Which moments always seemed to find him, no matter how deliberately late he arrived? Sitting on the edge of his bed, he filled page after page with rough timetables, arrows, names of people he crossed paths with, and places inside the hotel he wandered through almost without noticing.

He discovered he could alter a conversation, delay training, or avoid an entire corridor, but sooner or later the day always found a way to guide him back onto the same path. Not by exactly the same roads; sometimes he arrived through the main entrance, other times he crossed the gardens to avoid the supporters waiting behind the barriers, and once he stayed beside the swimming pool for so long that he reached the stadium later than the rest of the squad. None of those variations lasted for very long. The day had a quiet way of putting every piece back into place without anyone seeming to notice.

Because the two goals still happened.

And what unsettled him most was that even when he changed, even when he stopped behaving like Jude Bellingham, the day still seemed to know exactly how to reach the ending. The same tense match, the same result celebrated by thousands and mourned by thousands more.

And after yet another celebration Jude no longer knew how to process, he found himself walking towards the same place, at the same time.

The forecourt outside the Pink Palace. And as the soft pink neon sign reading COME BACK SOON flickered once, Jude understood something.

He could change his schedule, avoid his teammates, lock himself inside his room, give completely different answers to the journalists, behave differently during the match, do anything he could possibly think of. 

But by the end of the night, he was always there, with the hotel celebrating behind its walls, carrying the exhaustion of days lived over and over again, the palm leaves swaying gently in the Miami air, and Erling leaning against the railing exactly as always, the grey trousers, the oversized jacket, the gleam of his headphones.

Jude didn't know what it meant, because if the day was trying to lead him somewhere, if there truly was a reason behind all of this, he expected at least one clear clue. An answer. Anything. Please. But there was nothing.

Only Erling. Only that moment. Only that conversation that always ended exactly the same way, untouched.

The bag hanging from his shoulder, ready to leave with the rest of his team, and the expression of someone who always looked as though he was about to say something, yet never quite did.

"We'll talk another day."

Jude had heard those words so many times that they no longer sounded the same, and yet, when he answered, his reply never changed.

"Yeah. We'll talk later."

Later.

The word was still simple, still ordinary, the sort of thing anyone would say, the sort of thing that had always existed.

Jude went back inside the hotel without understanding why he felt so exhausted and leafed through the notes he'd made that day. He had written the same list so many times that he no longer needed to read it to remember it, but he still ran his thumb across the pages, the way someone checks that an object is still where they left it.

For a few seconds, he thought that was all there was to it, until his eyes caught on one name repeated with a persistence that, until then, had seemed almost accidental. It appeared on different pages, written with different pens, the handwriting growing messier each time, as though the name had quietly found its own way onto the paper without asking permission.

Erling.

Jude sat there for a while, staring at the name, not because it felt strange to find it there, but because all at once he couldn't remember a single day that hadn't ended with seeing him. He had changed the order of everything else, arriving late, avoiding certain corridors, dragging out interviews he normally escaped within five minutes, cutting others short out of sheer boredom. But Erling was always there.

Jude closed the notepad slowly and slipped it back into his pocket. He didn't arrive at any extraordinary conclusion. He wasn't even sure he'd discovered anything important.

He simply thought that if he'd spent all this time searching for a way out, and the only place time kept insisting on leading him back to was that forecourt, then perhaps tomorrow he would stop wasting time looking at the rest of the map and, at last, start paying attention to the only place that never changed.

34.

That morning, Jude opened the notebook fully expecting to add another observation about the hotel or the match. He picked up the little black notebook with the same ease as a student continuing yesterday's notes and, when he finished writing, realised he'd spent several minutes staring at a sentence that was completely useless.

"Erling pushes his hair back with his left hand before the anthem."

He read it twice. Then he smiled to himself, tore the page out with every intention of throwing it away and, instead, carefully folded it before slipping it back between the others. It was a ridiculous note, because it answered no questions, explained nothing about the loop, changed nothing about the result of the match, and wasn't even a variable; it was simply a habit.

Even so, hours later he checked it again as the players emerged from the tunnel and lined up in front of the flags. Erling lifted his left hand, ran his fingers through his hair with a quick, absent-minded gesture, then let his arm fall again as though he'd never given it a second thought.

When they returned to the hotel, Jude put a small tick beside the sentence and closed the notebook. He couldn't explain why it filled him with such a strange sense of satisfaction.

From then on, the pages began filling with new observations, under the excuse that any detail might prove important and that answers usually hid where nobody had the patience to look. But as the days repeated themselves, the notes stopped resembling a record and started looking more like an extraordinarily careful portrait of a person.

Erling always drank water with his right hand, even when he held the bottle with both. Before kick-off, he rolled his neck twice to the left and once to the right, never the other way round. Whenever Ødegaard came over to say something to him, no matter how serious the moment seemed, he always answered with the faintest crooked smile, one that never quite decided whether it was a smirk or an apology.

The tape around his wrist changed depending on which physio wrapped it and, whenever he grew bored during press conferences, he tapped the toe of his trainer against the floor in a rhythm Jude never managed to work out, no matter how many times he tried counting it.

None of it stopped being insignificant. Jude had never pretended otherwise. These weren't the sort of things a person remembered about someone they only saw a few times a year. They were the sort of details that surfaced on their own after enough training sessions, enough journeys and enough shared silences.

Jude began to wonder how many of those habits he genuinely remembered from Dortmund and how many had been born inside the loop. It was becoming difficult to tell because old memories and new ones were beginning to blur together with unsettling ease.

Some afternoons he was convinced Erling had always drummed his fingers against his thigh while waiting in the players' tunnel. Other times he would've sworn it was something he'd only noticed after playing the same match fifty times. Time, which at first had merely repeated itself, had now started rearranging his memories too.

The match stopped being the place where Jude expected to score and gradually became the only moment in the day when he could watch Erling without seeming strange. Nobody questioned a player for watching the opposition's striker for ninety minutes; everyone did. Defenders studied his runs, the coaching staff analysed his movement, and the cameras seemed incapable of losing sight of him for more than a few seconds. Jude took advantage of that borrowed normality to keep collecting small discoveries. He realised Erling hardly ever threw his arms up when protesting a referee's decision and preferred looking down at the grass instead of arguing for too long.

He discovered that, after a long sprint, Erling always rested his hands on his knees a heartbeat before everyone else, as though he needed to bargain with the air for one extra second. He also began recognising the way he searched for Julian Ryerson before every set piece, not to receive instructions, but simply to make sure they were both thinking about the same play.

There were moments when the match forced them closer than either intended, and Jude began noticing things no tactical analysis would've ever considered relevant. The warmth still lingering in Erling's body after a long run whenever their shoulders collided chasing a loose ball. The roughness of his shirt brushing against Jude's forearm during a corner. The way his hands settled automatically against another player's back whenever someone ended up on the ground and needed help getting back to their feet.

They were fleeting touches, completely ordinary between two footballers who'd spent more than an hour trying to take the ball off each other, yet Jude realised he could remember every one of them with ridiculous precision. Sometimes, while walking back into position after a foul, he could still feel the weight of a hand between his shoulder blades even though Erling had moved away several seconds earlier.

The strangest part happened after the match. Once the celebrations settled and the cameras slowly began switching off, Erling seemed to peel away the version of himself the rest of the world knew. Jude had lived through so many elevenths of July that he'd learned to recognise the exact moment Erling stopped being Norway's centre-forward and simply became Erling again.

It was almost imperceptible. His shoulders relaxed by barely a few centimetres. The tension left his jaw. Smiles came more easily, and jokes slipped out before he'd properly thought of them.

Jude suspected nobody else ever noticed the change because it was far too subtle to catch the attention of someone who only saw him once. He, on the other hand, had witnessed the same scene far too many times not to recognise it.

One evening they spent several minutes leaning against the platform railing without saying very much. They weren't even talking to each other. Both simply watched the traffic drift by while, behind them, beyond the glass doors, the England squad carried on celebrating their place in the semi-finals.

Erling lifted the headphones from around his neck to untangle the cable caught in the zip of his hoodie, and Jude noticed a pale strip of skin around his wrist where his watch usually sat during training.

He'd never wondered what shade Erling's tan actually was. He'd never noticed how the gold in his hair shifted slightly once the hotel's lights replaced the afternoon sun, or how much lighter his eyes looked when he laughed properly than when he smiled for a photograph.

They were completely useless observations. He knew that before he even wrote them down.

Even so, that night, before falling asleep only to wake again at 6:14 in the morning, he opened the notebook to a blank page and wrote down two or three of them with the very same seriousness he'd once devoted to the difference between two journalists.

It wasn't until several days later, while rereading those pages over breakfast, that he realised he hadn't written a single line about the Pink Palace, the match or the loop's variations in quite some time.

Without meaning to, the pages had filled with the same name over and over again and, surrounding that name, an endless collection of gestures, habits and tiny routines that explained absolutely nothing.

Jude closed the notebook slowly, set it beside his cup of coffee, and looked up just in time to see Erling crossing the lobby on his way to Norway's coach.

He followed him with his eyes for only a few seconds, just long enough to notice he was carrying his bag over the same shoulder again, and felt that indefinable pressure somewhere between his chest and his stomach, a faint ache that had begun appearing more and more often, one he still insisted on blaming on exhaustion, as though exhaustion had a habit of showing up only when Erling was nearby.

55.

Jude had stopped carrying the notebook everywhere.

He still wrote in it, of course, but he no longer felt the need to check every observation two or three times before allowing himself to believe it. The hotel had stopped offering him answers a long time ago. So had the stadium, the match, the journalists, the coach ride, and the clock in the lobby, which still insisted on running two seconds fast.

For several days he kept adding the occasional note out of habit, like someone who continues watering a plant despite knowing perfectly well it will never grow again, until one morning he realised the last few pages were almost entirely about Erling.

It hadn't been intentional. In fact, he wouldn't have been able to say exactly when the lists had stopped organising themselves around time, probabilities and results, and had quietly begun revolving around a person.

It had simply happened.

Jude remembered perfectly well sharing a dressing room with Erling in Dortmund, training beside him for months, celebrating goals with embraces so instinctive neither of them ever seemed aware of how hard they collided. Yet those memories had grown strangely blurred, like photographs buried so deep in a phone that you only stumble across them by accident. The loop, on the other hand, had forced them into a different kind of closeness.

It wasn't physical proximity. There was still a football pitch between them, two different national teams and ninety minutes spent trying to make life as difficult as possible for one another. But repetition had transformed insignificant gestures into landmarks, and now Jude realised he could anticipate them with the same ease a striker recognises a teammate's stronger foot before the pass is even played.

The funniest part was that he'd stopped writing some of those observations down because they now lived somewhere quiet inside his mind, alongside his phone passcode or the route home. He no longer watched for those habits with the concentration of someone hunting for answers; he simply expected them, almost without noticing, and only became aware of his own expectation when they unfolded exactly as they had the day before.

Something else had started happening during the matches.

He no longer watched Erling only when the ball found its way to him. There were pauses, throw-ins, corners, those brief stretches when play drifted elsewhere and the entire stadium seemed to hold its breath.

In those tiny pockets of stillness, when anyone else would've been trying to catch theirs, Jude found himself looking for him almost automatically.

Not because he expected to discover anything new. Simply because time had taught him that Erling was never completely still.

Sometimes he tugged his socks into place with almost exaggerated patience. Sometimes he rested his hands on his hips and slowly scanned the stadium, as though reminding himself where he was. Every now and then Ødegaard would lean over to say something, and the two of them would share a smile so brief the cameras almost always missed it.

Jude had learned the difference between that smile and the one Erling wore during interviews. One afternoon it occurred to him, almost absently, that perhaps nobody else in the world had any reason to tell them apart.

The contact between them hadn't changed either. The kick in the tunnel, the quick embrace, shhoulders colliding over a loose ball, the shove for position, the hand that reached down to pull the other back to his feet after a foul.

Ordinary things.

The sort of things that happened dozens of times in any football match. Maybe that was exactly why Jude had never paid them much attention before. What felt strange now was how long they lingered afterwards.

He never thought about them while he was playing; football left room for almost nothing else. It happened later, walking back through the hotel or waiting for the lift at the Pink Palace, when he'd suddenly remember the brief tug of Erling's shirt caught between his fingers just before they let go and returned to opposite sides of the pitch.

Or the warmth of his shoulder that somehow outlasted the collision itself. Or the weight of a hand between his shoulder blades, gone almost before he'd registered it, yet stubborn enough to stay with him for the rest of the evening.

He let out a slow breath, almost cautiously, as though someone might overhear the thoughts gathering inside his head, and for a long moment he simply watched the coffee grow cold in front of him.

He still believed the answer lay with Erling.

Otherwise, time wouldn't have insisted so stubbornly on bringing them back together at the end of every single day.

What he still couldn't understand was why, the closer he felt to solving the mystery, the less he found himself thinking about escape. And the more unsettled he became by the possibility that one morning there might no longer be an Erling waiting for him on the other side of the match.

74.

It didn't happen all at once. The important things in a person's life never do. That morning, Jude's heart felt unbearably heavy, tight enough to ache beneath his ribs, as though a sob had lodged itself somewhere inside him and simply refused to come out. He wanted to cry. God, he wanted to cry. But he couldn't.

The stuffing burst from the pillow and drifted helplessly onto the floor after he slammed it against the mattress again and again. He had never been a violent man. He'd never needed to empty his anger into something he could hit.

But... He couldn't bear it anymore.

Watching Erling, noticing him, learning him piece by piece had once felt refreshing, almost comforting. But every evening still ended the same way. He still had to answer the same questions, walk into the same match and endure the restless excitement of teammates who genuinely didn't know what was waiting for them, while he... felt nothing.

When he scored, he still threw an arm into the air out of instinct. The next day he still smiled as his teammates surrounded him, even though he already knew the exact order in which the embraces would arrive. Later, he stopped remembering to move away after scoring altogether. Not because England mattered any less or the World Cup had lost its meaning, but because it became impossible to feel the same joy when your body remembered happiness before it had even finished happening.

Celebration stopped feeling like the consequence of a goal. It became just another stop along the route. Like the anthem, the tunnel, the coach back to the Pink Palace. 

Jude scored, his teammates ran towards him, someone ruffled his hair, someone else shouted something into his ear that the roar of the stadium always swallowed whole, and while everyone around him lived that night as though it would never happen again, he couldn't shake the unbearable feeling that he was performing a scene whose ending he'd rehearsed far too many times.

That was when the thought arrived. For several days he tried pushing it away with the same stubbornness people use to avoid touching a tooth that has only just begun to ache. At first it came disguised as something harmless.

What if the result no longer depended on me?

But the question kept growing. Until it occupied so much space inside him that there was hardly room left for anything else.

Jude had already tried changing his movement, arriving with heavier legs, making different decisions during the match, even deliberately letting his concentration drift in moments when he'd once been completely focused.

Because there was one possibility he had never truly tested. What if England simply didn't qualify? But none of it seemed enough to alter the ending. 

Norway still scored first, the equaliser still arrived before half-time, the second goal still appeared once exhaustion weighed equally on every body on the pitch. There were nights when he remembered choosing something completely different inside the penalty area, convinced the ball would finally drift wide, yet somehow the play always found another route. A deflection. An assist. A loose rebound.

The same goal. Again.

He began wondering how much of that victory truly belonged to him anymore, if it no longer required his best football to happen. The suspicion hollowed something out inside him. Something he didn't even know how to name.

For years Jude had believed football was, above everything else, a conversation between talent and hard work. You trained so that, when the right moment finally arrived, you would be ready for it. The loop had begun whispering something far crueller.

What if the right moment had always existed before I did? What if every extra sprint, every better decision, every stubborn attempt to improve had only ever been a comforting illusion inside a story whose ending had already been written long before I arrived?

He had never been particularly superstitious, he didn't step onto the pitch with one specific foot, he didn't cling to lucky rituals before kick-off, he didn't kiss charms or wear lucky tape to calm himself. That was precisely why the thought exhausted him so completely.

He wasn't afraid of time. He was afraid of no longer belonging to his own choices. Over the following days he played with a quiet kind of indifference that nobody else seemed to notice.

He ran because running was expected. He pressed because the play demanded it. He even scored with the same precision as always, though each time it became harder to recognise the exact moment when the achievement stopped belonging to him and became nothing more than another habit the day insisted upon.

After the second goal he no longer searched the stands for the supporters' reaction. He stopped raising his fists to the sky and throwing himself onto the grass the way he had after so many important victories before. Instead, Jude simply accepted his teammates' embraces while something strange travelled through his chest, something that felt almost like the relief of finishing an exam whose answers he'd known before he'd even entered the room.

It was a victory without surprise. And Jude discovered that victories without surprise could become heartbreakingly sad.

That night, the stadium roared with the same overwhelming force as always when the referee blew the final whistle.

England were through to the semi-finals.

Photographers rushed from one side of the pitch to the other in search of the perfect shot, while journalists drifted toward the mixed zone with that peculiar, organized impatience that only ever existed after matches like this.

Jude walked slowly toward the center of the field.

He wasn't looking for anyone in particular.

Or at least, that's what he wanted to believe until Norway's red shirt emerged from the crowd of players, moving with that unmistakable calm that had always belonged to Erling, as though the result had never quite managed to change the way he occupied a space.

They had repeated that embrace so many times that Jude no longer needed to think to know exactly where to place his hands.

He knew how far he had to lean to make up for the difference in height between them. He knew how long the familiar bump of their shoulders would last before one of them inevitably cracked a joke. He even knew that, a few hours later, Erling's duffel bag would gently knock against his back when they met again outside the Pink Palace.

He had learned all of it by heart. What he never expected was that, after all those repetitions, there could still be something about that embrace he hadn't learned yet.

For a fleeting second, Erling rested his chin against Jude's shoulder, just as he had done countless times before.

Then Jude felt it. The warmest brush of lips, barely there, disappearing into the curve where his neck gave way to his shoulder. It was such a tiny gesture that anyone else could have mistaken it for an accident—one of those inevitable collisions that happen when two footballers embrace after ninety exhausting minutes.

But Jude had spent far too long learning the difference between an accident... and a habit. He stayed perfectly still for one heartbeat longer than usual.

Before he could even allow himself to wonder whether he had imagined it, something inside him quietly collapsed beneath the weight of a weariness that no longer fit inside any reasonable explanation.

It wasn't a dramatic breakdown. At first, all he noticed was that breathing no longer came as easily as it had a few seconds before. Then his eyes began to sting.

He buried his face against Erling's neck before anyone in the stadium could catch the expression he was struggling so desperately to hide. His hands clung to him with a strength he couldn't remember ever using before, as though, for more than sixty days, he had been holding himself together for the sole reason that this embrace would still be waiting for him at the end of the match.

As though letting go had suddenly become the hardest thing he had ever been asked to do.

The photographers no longer mattered. Neither did the cameras. Nor the questions they would ask him again about the brace, the semi-finals, or England's extraordinary tournament.

All of it still existed somewhere around them, but it sounded impossibly far away, muffled by the fabric of Erling's shirt and by the endless murmur of a stadium slowly beginning to empty itself.

That was when he heard it.

A quiet hum.

So quiet that, for a heartbeat, he thought he had imagined it. A simple melody. Just a handful of wordless notes, breathed so close to his ear that they seemed to ask for no explanation at all.

Na, na, na... na-na-na-na...

It took him a moment to recognize it.

Jude had known that melody since he was a child. He had heard it after victories before, sung by more than fifty thousand voices chanting Hey Jude with the kind of pride that made an entire stadium feel alive.

Maybe that was why it startled him so much to discover that he had never heard it sound this gentle. He remained motionless, still hidden inside the embrace, while Erling kept humming without any hurry to reach the end. As though he wasn't trying to comfort him. As though he wasn't trying to save him. Only keeping him company until breathing became possible again.

When Jude finally managed to pull away, he did so slowly, wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand before looking up. For a moment, they remained exactly as they were, their hands still resting on each other's shoulders. Too close to pass for rivals. Too exhausted to pretend this was just another post-match embrace.

Jude found his own reflection in Erling's blue eyes. What struck him wasn't sadness. It was the unmistakable look of someone who had been waiting for something.for far longer than anyone should have to.

"I'll see you later." Erling smiled Just like he always did.

The heat still clung to the asphalt, even this close to midnight. The Pink Palace's neon sign went on humming with that quiet electric persistence Jude had learned to recognize even with his eyes closed, and beyond the glass doors, England's celebration kept spilling through the corridors without ever quite reaching the street.

Leaning against the railing, Erling fell silent again just as he seemed ready to say the thing he had been carrying inside him for so many days. Jude realized that, today, he no longer had the strength to save the conversation from ending. Instead, he simply looked at him for a while, as though trying to memorize one more thing before time carried it away from him again.

"Thank you."

The words slipped out before he knew what they were meant to thank.

He wasn't even sure what he was grateful for. Thank you for the embrace. Thank you for staying with me. Thank you for being you. Thank you for staying. Thank you for understanding. Thank you for not asking. Thank you for never doubting. Thank you for...

Erling tipped his head ever so slightly and let out one of those quiet laughs that always seemed to escape before he had decided whether anything was actually funny.

For the briefest instant, something inside Jude tightened. He had the strange, fleeting impression that the world had breathed differently. The change was so impossibly small that it would have been useless trying to write it down in the notebook. He kept watching him for another second, convinced that if he waited just a little longer, perhaps this time something would happen differently.

But the clock struck midnight.

And before he could reach for him, he opened his eyes to the ceiling of his hotel room.

6:14 a.m.

Again.

81. 

Jude stopped waking up with the feeling that the day was his enemy.

He opened his eyes at the same time as always, watched the faint stain on the ceiling beside the slowly turning fan, and knew—with a certainty that had long since settled into his bones—everything that would happen over the next eighteen hours.

The situation hadn't changed. He had.

Before, he had lived through every repetition like someone trying to escape a locked room by throwing his weight against the same door over and over again.

Now, for the first time since it had all begun, he realized that perhaps he could simply stop pushing. The thought didn't arrive with any grand revelation.

It felt more like the exhaustion that follows a long cry, when the body no longer has the strength to keep resisting and, for that very reason, finally remembers how to breathe.

That morning he went downstairs for breakfast without looking at the clock in the lobby. He had known about those two missing minutes for weeks now, just as well as he knew the crack on the third floor or the elevator's barely audible squeak. But he realized he no longer needed to check any of them.

The Pink Palace was still the same elegant hotel where footballers crossed paths with businessmen, journalists shared elevators with families on holiday, and employees moved through the corridors with the quiet confidence of people who had spent a lifetime walking them.

Jude had stopped moving through it as though he were investigating a crime scene.

The receptionist looked up when she saw him approaching and offered him the same gentle smile he remembered seeing several days ago.

"Good morning, Jude."

"Morning."

"I hope you find what you've been looking for all this time," she said, straightening the last of the papers on her desk.

It took him a second to answer.

"So do I."

That was the end of it. He didn't ask any questions. He didn't try to pull meaning from her words.

The receptionist simply returned to her paperwork, and Jude continued toward the dining room with the strange feeling that those words had been waiting for him all along.

He arrived at training a little earlier than usual. A small group of children were already waiting outside the entrance, wearing England shirts several sizes too big and clutching markers they had uncapped long before the team bus arrived.

During the first few loops, he had signed a couple of autographs out of politeness. Later, he had stopped altogether, convinced that none of it could possibly change the course of the day. This time, before he quite realized how it had happened, he found himself sitting on the curb while one of the kids excitedly showed him a sticker album that was still missing three England players.

Another was determined to explain why Palmer was definitely going to score in the semi-finals once they got past Norway, of course. Jude listened to wonderfully ridiculous theories about penalties, lucky boots, and imaginary rituals invented by children who still believed football obeyed magical rules.

Then one of them looked up at him and asked, "Are you nervous?"

Jude smiled before he even thought about it.

"A little."

"That's a good thing," the boy replied with complete certainty. "My dad says if someone stops getting nervous, it's because they stopped caring."

Jude was still smiling long after he'd said goodbye. He had no idea who that boy's father was. But he sounded like a remarkably wise man.

The rest of the day unfolded with a calm he had never known before. The stadium still roared, England still made things far more difficult than necessary. He still scored the same goals and Erling still appeared before him at all the familiar moments, wearing the same red shirt, the same hair somehow too fair for the Miami sun, and that unmistakable habit of smiling just a little more with one corner of his mouth whenever Jude said something stupid..The difference was that Jude no longer needed to wonder whether their meeting concealed a clue.

He had stopped looking for answers in Erling. Now he simply enjoyed the fact that Erling existed.

And it was precisely that quiet acceptance that ended up turning everything upside down.

During the match, they pushed each other again, teased one another, and exchanged comments that none of the microphones managed to capture. During a play near the sideline, Erling passed close enough to him to give his hip a gentle tug, exactly the same way it had happened dozens of times before. Jude smiled out of instinct. Then he kept running.

It was only several seconds later, while waiting for a corner kick, that he realized he could still feel it.

That brief contact remained with him, a quiet presence, like the warmth that lingers in a cup after the coffee has already been taken away.

That night, when they hugged again after the final whistle, Jude stopped thinking about the loop entirely. He allowed himself to rest his forehead against Erling’s shoulder for a moment without calculating how long the gesture would last or wondering if time would break apart again at midnight.

He simply breathed.

The familiar scent of Erling’s cologne clinging to his shirt, the fresh sweat left behind after the effort of the match, the deep sound of Erling’s laughter vibrating too close against his chest. Everything became unbearably simple when he stopped trying to analyze it. And maybe that was exactly why the question appeared without warning.

It had not been born that night. It had been walking behind him for years. He remembered Dortmund with an unexpected clarity. He remembered how easily Erling invaded any personal space without asking for permission, throwing himself against him after a goal as if Jude had been the most logical place in the world to land. He remembered the times Erling had carried him over his shoulders while they laughed, the playful shoves during training, the photographs where they inevitably ended up standing beside each other without either of them seeming to have planned it.

He even remembered that one time, lost among so many others, when Jude had pretended he was going to kiss him during a celebration just to make him laugh.

And Erling, instead of playing along, had gone completely still for a fraction of a second before leaning back with a confused smile that Jude had never fully understood.

Until then, all those memories had belonged to the same box where people keep the ridiculous little things shared with a friend.

But the way his body had reacted before his mind could even give a name to what he was feeling...

That had always existed somewhere else. The more he tried to return it to the place of simple coincidences, the less it fit.

As he walked toward the Pink Palace’s platform, Jude felt a ridiculous tingling settle somewhere between his stomach and his throat, exactly the same sensation he had spent days trying to ignore every time Erling appeared in front of him.

He thought about all the people he had dated. He thought about the girls he had liked, about the occasional boy who had managed to catch his attention, about kisses that had started with far more logic than that almost imperceptible touch against his neck.

None of them had managed to stay this long. None of them kept returning every time he closed his eyes. He stopped for a moment before crossing the street.

The buzzing of the old neon sign filled the silence again while the rest of the hotel celebrated behind the glass doors.

What if...?

The question appeared with an almost embarrassing softness.

He pushed it away immediately. No. No, no, no. That was impossible. He took another step.

What if...?

He shook his head slightly, as if someone could hear the thing he still was not brave enough to even think.

Definitely not.

And then, almost with the same naturalness as remembering where you left a pair of lost keys after searching for them for hours, he felt all those little things —the hug he waited for after every match, the peace he only found when he was beside Erling, the unbearable weight of a kiss he had never managed to forget, the ridiculous need to see him again even when he already knew exactly what would happen afterward— stop looking like scattered pieces.

Jude lifted his gaze toward the bright facade of the Pink Palace.

Ah.

Oh.

Jude remained completely still while the buzzing of the sign continued filling the street. He had spent so much time trying to understand why the universe insisted on returning him to the same day that he had never stopped to ask himself why he always looked forward to the same moment of the night with such desperation.

It had never been about the victory. Not about the World Cup. Not even about the possibility of breaking the loop. It had always been about Jude... and Erling.

A small, disbelieving laugh escaped somewhere between his nose and his mouth, the kind of laugh people let out when a truth that was far too obvious finally appears after months of searching for it in the wrong place.

It was ridiculous.

He had needed to live the same day more than eighty times to understand something that had probably been following him for years. He thought about the glory days at Borussia Dortmund, the hugs after goals, the small acts of care from Erling, the connection that had always appeared between them without effort, and the trips they had shared.

Every single one of those little moments when Erling had occupied a place in his life with the naturalness of someone who never needed to ask permission.

And the relief he had felt simply because, even though the day repeated itself, even though some things moved and others stayed exactly the same...

Erling was still there. And then he stopped searching for another explanation for that volcano that had been waiting so long to erupt. It was not gratitude. It was not habit. It was not nostalgia. It was not friendship.

The word appeared slowly, without any grand revelation, settling inside him with a strange kind of calm, as if it had been waiting for years for the exact moment when he would finally be ready to say it.

Jude closed his eyes.

“I’m in love with Erling.”

He said it so quietly that he was not even sure he had heard himself. And yet, he had never said anything that felt so much like the truth.

An immense peace settled inside his mind, as if for the first time since he had opened his eyes at 6:14 in the morning, he had stopped arguing with the only answer that had been beside him from the beginning.

Maybe time had never wanted him to learn how to leave, it had only been waiting for him to stop telling himself later.

95. 

Jude had imagined many times that understanding the reason behind the loop would bring some kind of grand revelation, an immediate feeling of freedom or, at the very least, the peace of someone who had finally found the exit of a maze.

But none of that happened.

6:14 arrived with the same unbearable punctuality. The Pink Palace woke up before the sun, and the lobby clock continued running two minutes ahead, something that apparently nobody noticed except him.

And yet, there was a difference that was difficult to explain.

During the first loops, Jude had walked through the hotel searching for answers. Now he moved through it like someone walking through a familiar home. He greeted the receptionist before she even looked up, exchanged ridiculous comments with the cook who always hummed while preparing scrambled eggs, and eventually learned the name of the employee who placed fresh flowers in the enormous vase at the entrance every morning.

The Pink Palace had never changed. He was the one who had stopped behaving like a temporary guest.

That sense of peace, however, always disappeared when night fell. Even after moving past the excitement of the match, all it took was remembering the platform, the buzzing of the neon sign, and Erling’s silhouette approaching with his bag hanging across his shoulder for his stomach to tighten again, as if everything he had learned during those months had only served to lead him, once more, toward the same fear.

For days, Jude had rehearsed conversations that never actually happened.

He repeated them while showering, during the ride to the stadium, or while waiting for the anthem to begin. Sometimes they were long speeches where he tried to explain the loop from the very beginning, describing the hotel, the ninety identical breakfasts, the nights that always ended at midnight, and the way he had learned to recognize the exact shade of Erling’s eyes beneath the lights of the Hard Rock Stadium.

Other times, he managed to reduce everything to a single phrase.

Me too.

Afterward, he would realize that answer only made sense if Erling finally managed to finish the sentence he had been trying to say for five days. Because now Jude was certain of one thing, something that did not need proof.

Erling wanted to tell him something. He always had. He did not know how that certainty had taken so long to make its way through all the other questions, but once it appeared, it never left him.

He no longer looked at Erling like someone studying a clue inside a puzzle. He looked at him with the patience of someone who recognized another person’s silent effort to gather enough courage to speak.

He started noticing small hesitations he had previously mistaken for exhaustion. The way Erling pressed his lips together right before falling silent. The way his breathing became slightly deeper whenever the two of them were alone. That almost imperceptible gesture of lowering his gaze for a moment before meeting Jude’s eyes again, as if he had changed his mind at the very last second.

Jude had needed almost a hundred repetitions to memorize the habits of the hotel, the stadium, and the match.

But discovering Erling’s fear became infinitely easier from the moment he recognized his own.

The first attempts were disastrous. One night, he interrupted him too early, unable to endure hearing "there’s something I need to tell you" one more time. The words came out rushed, crashing into one another without any order, and he ended up talking so much that he did not even leave room for Erling to respond.

In the next attempt, he waited too long, convinced that this time the other man would find the courage on his own. But midnight arrived while they were still looking at each other in silence.

In another repetition, Jude decided to grab his arm the moment Erling started turning away, so terrified of losing another opportunity that he completely forgot everything he had rehearsed throughout the day.

Erling turned back with such a confused expression that Jude felt all the carefully prepared sentences disappear before they even reached his throat . He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. And time broke apart again, exactly like always.

After so many days, he could recite his confession perfectly without making a single mistake. It surprised him to realize that the problem had never been the words.

He had said them silently so many times that he already knew exactly where he would breathe, where he would pause, and even the way he would look at Erling when he said his name.

The difficult part was accepting that there was a possibility that, once he said them, the world would remain exactly the same.

Jude had spent more than ninety days believing that his greatest fear was being trapped forever on July 11th. Now he understood there was another one, much older, one that existed long before the Pink Palace, the World Cup, and any loop.

The fear of offering another person the complete truth and discovering that there was no I feel the same waiting on the other side.

That realization changed even the way he watched the match.

The commentators continued describing a legendary performance from the team that Jude no longer felt belonged entirely to him, but between one play and another, when Erling looked up searching for an open teammate or stopped for a few seconds with his hands resting on his knees to catch his breath, Jude stopped seeing the striker admired by all of Europe.

He only saw a man who had spent five nights trying to say one sentence and failing in the exact same place every time.

The thought filled him with an unexpected tenderness. For months, he had believed he was the only one incapable of breaking the circle.

It had never occurred to him that, on the other side, Erling could also be fighting against something he did not know how to name. That night, while walking toward the platform, Jude stopped repeating the speech he had been perfecting for days.

The air was still warm, yhe neon sign still buzzed with its usual persistence, the windows of the Pink Palace continued spilling flashes of a celebration he already knew by heart. Everything was exactly where it was supposed to be, even Erling.

Walking down the sidewalk with his bag hanging from his shoulder and his headphones resting around his neck, he seemed to occupy the same place he had occupied during almost a hundred different lives.

Jude watched him approach and felt a calmness he did not remember ever feeling before. He no longer needed to convince him of anything. He did not need to figure out how to break time or find an explanation for the hotel.

There was only one thing that mattered: This time, he would not let later exist. Because for the first time since everything began, he understood that some words are not spoken when fear disappears.

They are spoken despite it.

100. 

The screen of his phone lit up at 6:14, exactly as it always did.

The warm Miami light filtered through the curtains once again, and the air conditioner continued murmuring with the same steady rhythm that had become part of the hotel just as much as the pink carpets in the hallway or the lobby clock that remained two minutes ahead.

Jude stayed there for a few moments, staring at the ceiling before slowly sitting up. He no longer needed to confirm the date. He knew perfectly well what it was.

He also knew what breakfast would be waiting for him downstairs, which journalist would ask him about the pressure of facing Norway, which child would proudly show him an almost complete sticker album, and even the approximate minute when the waiter would be about to drop the coffee pot.

Everything was still exactly where it belonged. And he found comfort in realizing that it no longer felt like a punishment. He greeted Yule, the flower attendant, while Gabriela, the receptionist, returned his calm smile before he even reached the counter.

During breakfast, he allowed himself to finish his coffee sitting beside the window, watching as some fans began gathering outside the hotel several hours before England’s bus was scheduled to leave.

He thought the sky was unusually clear for July. Then he surprised himself by realizing that, throughout all this time trapped here, he had never truly looked at the sky before.

The rest of the day passed with the serenity of someone who had stopped fighting against something he no longer needed to defeat.

England struggled again. Norway took the lead again. Jude found the equalizer before halftime again. And he scored again in extra time while the stadium collapsed into a roar that would have been unforgettable for anyone else.

He smiled when the final whistle blew, but not because England had reached the semifinals. He smiled because, for the first time since waking up that morning, he realized he had not thought about midnight even once.

The hug with Erling was exactly the same and completely different. Jude felt that same broad hand between his shoulder blades, the familiar comfort of a body leaning against his own, and the distracted brush of lips near his neck.

This time, he did not cry. He only closed his eyes for a moment and breathed with a peace he could not remember ever feeling before. When they pulled away, Erling gave him that small, almost shy smile again, the one Jude had spent so long mistaking for tiredness.

"See you later".

"Yeah. Later".

For the first time, Jude believed in that word.

The English celebration exploded inside the Pink Palace exactly like every other night before. Music playing too loudly, laughter echoing through the hallways, journalists waiting for an improvised statement, and teammates insisting that he stay just a little longer.

Jude promised he would come upstairs afterward. Nobody pushed too much, everyone was too busy living a night that, for them, existed only once.

When he stepped outside, Erling was already there. The bag rested over one of his shoulders, and the white headphones hung around his neck. His hands were placed on the railing of the small platform separating the hotel entrance from the avenue, watching the traffic with that distracted expression Jude had memorized long before understanding why he found it so endearing.

"I thought English people needed a six-hour celebration before accepting they won".

"Seven, actually."

"Ah. My apologies. That changes everything."

Jude let out a laugh. The same conversation. The same jokes.

The same comfortable silence settling between them as they watched cars pass beneath the pink glow of the hotel sign, beneath the "you alright" hat had started everything.

For so long, he had believed that silence was a wall. Now he understood that it had only been a door neither of them knew how to open. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Erling move. That small gesture of pressing his lips together before making a decision. The slightly deeper breath.

"Jude, there’s something I want to tell you.

This time, Jude did not let the silence grow until it became impossible. He simply turned toward him with a calmness that surprised even himself.

"Erling, I need to tell you something too". 

At that exact moment, lightning split the sky.

It was so unexpected that they both looked up almost at the same time. A second later, the rain fell with the violence of a summer storm, heavy, warm, sudden, striking the pavement, the roofs of cars, and the palm trees surrounding the entrance of the Pink Palace as if it had been waiting for that exact moment to begin.

They both burst into laughter because neither of them was going to run or look for shelter. The rain soaked Erling’s blond hair within seconds, and Jude’s shirt began clinging to his skin as droplets slid down his forehead. The headphones, the bag, the shoes, everything stopped mattering with absurd speed.

Jude took a step forward. And Erling did exactly the same. For a moment, they became still again, so close that Jude could see the raindrops slowly sliding down Erling’s pale eyelashes.

He remembered a hundred different nights trying to reach that place. A hundred ways of staying silent. A hundred goodbyes that always ended with a bittersweet taste.

He lifted his hand and gently placed it against Erling’s cheek. Touching someone had never felt so simple.

"Can I kiss you?"

There were no speeches. No long confessions. After thinking about it for so long, Jude had understood that both of them were the kind of people who preferred something quieter, more direct, where actions spoke louder than words. And he knew Erling would understand everything from that simple question.

You are the best person I have ever met. You have this ability to stand out, not only because of your size, your light, your brilliance, or the charisma you carry inside you. It is as if you are the freest golden star in the sky.I cannot believe I have someone as free as you in my life.

And I just want you to know that after a hundred attempts of watching you, memorizing every detail of your skin, your face, your habits, and keeping them all inside my heart, the only thing that has never changed is how much I love you.

The rain fell so heavily that Jude had to raise his voice slightly to be heard.

Erling looked at him for a moment. And then he started laughing, not a nervous laugh, not a disbelieving one. A completely free laugh, the kind that appears before thought has the chance to catch up.

Jude ended up laughing too.

"You’re an idiot". Erling murmured.

Erling slowly shook his head, still smiling, and took the final step separating them. He had to lean down slightly because of their height difference, just as he had done hundreds of times before when hugging him after a goal. Except now there was no stadium around them, no cameras, no match waiting to end. Only them.

When their lips finally met, Jude felt time stop looking like a line and begin to feel more like a breath. It was a kiss that had been waiting for them, hungry for everything they had never managed to say, steady because of all the times they had chosen silence, and surprisingly peaceful, as if both of their bodies had known how to reach that moment long before their words ever did.

Jude brought his other hand to the back of Erling’s neck and felt him smile faintly against his lips before kissing him again, this time with the confidence of someone who finally allowed himself to stop holding back after far too long.

When they pulled away, neither of them moved.

They stayed there with their foreheads pressed together, breathing the same humid air while the rain continued falling around the platform and the Pink Palace kept celebrating, completely unaware of the small miracle that had happened only a few meters away from its entrance.

Jude closed his eyes. And for the first time in a hundred days, he was not afraid of midnight.

He was so absorbed in the feeling of kissing his best friend that he did not notice that, inside the soaked pocket of his pants, his phone was no longer waiting for 6:14 the next morning.

The screen had quietly lit up.

00:00

July 12, 2026.