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3one3 · 6 years

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The Sequel - 875

Sid Lowe

André Schürrle, Juan Mata, other Chelsea/BVB players, and random awesome OC’s (okay they’re less random now but they’re still pretty awesome)

original epic tale

all chapters of The Sequel

Why did they send me here with Marcus and a bunch of noobs? Daniel and Christian and Markus and Meredith and Marco are probably all available. He and I can’t win a team competition on our own, obviously. Fourth is so unsatisfying. I could have stayed home. I didn’t need to be here. Why did we just surrender a fourth title in like 5 years? Is €1.25 million split 5 ways really so disappointing to the others that they couldn’t bother to come? It’s not like they’re somewhere else competing for more cash this weekend. Bah humbug. I should have skipped it too. But then I wouldn’t be with him, Christina realized, in reference to the Spaniard sleeping beside her in Spain. Juan caught a ride on Cesc’s charter to Barcelona following an exhausting and demoralizing defeat to Manchester City at Stamford bridge, and just caught Christina’s exhausting and demoralizing clean ride in the second round of the Nations Cup Final, which was only good enough to keep Germany in fourth place. She stayed awake to ruminate on her Nations Cup experience while he slept peacefully snuggled up to her, with arm around her waist and two pillows to keep his face above her hair. Neither of them had any clothes on, and the rider kind of wished they did because she thought all the skin to skin contact was making her extra hot and thus making it harder to fall asleep. The footballer barely stayed awake long enough to enjoy the oral sex services offered to him out of sympathy, boredom, and the quest for distraction.

He was there to watch and support her, and to hang out in the Catalonian capital with her for two extra days. Once again the Spain manager couldn’t find a place for him in the squad for the coming qualifying matches, so once again he had the international break to himself. André wasn’t fit enough for Löw either, but he wanted to stay in Germany and work with the coaches at Brackel. Christina actually hoped she could get him to go away with her and Lukas for a few days- perhaps to a European city neither of them had been to yet, or maybe just back to London to do things they used to enjoy there. He wanted to train. She didn’t argue. Despite many visits for many Nations Cups, she’d still never experienced Barcelona as a tourist. Juan had big plans to rectify that. First, she had one more class to jump on Sunday, with Socks. There were two on the time schedule, actually, but she intended to use her second horse for the feature- a 1.55m grand prix- and spare her main mount, Nick, the extra jumps. Nearly everyone else would jump their second in the smaller class in the morning and use their Nations Cup horse for the grand prix. Christina didn’t see the point.

Her Nations Cup week was beginning to feel like something she didn’t see the point in, and one of the reasons she was lying awake in her friend’s arm was that she couldn’t help but wonder if that was going to be a theme in everything for a while. She didn’t know if the event just felt like a waste of time because Heiner and Holger selected three B team riders to accompany her and Marcus, or if she just didn’t care that much about the outcome. Nick did his part. He jumped clear in both rounds and collected a share of the €100,000 bonus. Christina was pleased with him, and with herself, and especially with the fact that she walked both courses with her mentor and her coach and thought, “it’s big, but not that hard”. A Nations Cup Final is no small thing. The course designer works on it for months, and it’s meant to challenge the world’s top riders and horses. It asked as many difficult questions as some of the Olympic courses. But it was still just two rounds, with a day off in between. The primary challenge at the Olympics is being consistent and surviving the war of attrition through day after day of elite level competition. The football wife thought of it as squeezing your biggest derby, an away clash with the team at the top of the table, and both legs of a Champions League semi-final into one week, and being prohibited from making changes to the team. The Nations Cup was a home match against Everton by comparison, after a week without a Tuesday or Wednesday fixture. Still, Christina didn’t know if she was bored with it all or if the less than ideal result just left her convincing herself she didn’t care about it anyway. She knew part of the problem was the social element. It was just her and Tom in Spain, and just Marcus and the H’s. Team dinners weren’t as fun as with the usual gang. There was less banter around the barn. The others needed more of Heiner’s attention.

Her trip to Rome the week before was slightly less devoid of fulfillment. Global Champions Tour events were always full of parties and better shopping. The hotels were better. The food was usually really good. Christina had her son, his grandparents, his cousin, and her brother and sister-in-law around to do things with when she wasn’t riding. Daniel was there. Nick and Rio were rusty, so they required her to actually pay attention and try in the saddle. Stefanie was competing in the big classes and needed a lot of handholding. There was exceptional pasta. She got to wear pretty dresses a couple of times. One of her old friends from New York was there grooming for a young American rider. Lukas did his first TV interview and told everyone his brother, Kimi, was his favorite horse. When the Tour interviewer questioned the brother-brother relationship, Lukas side-eyed him so hard that his mom burst into laughter and told the guy he should apologize for offending him. Once she got her horses sorted- which only took one class a piece- the actual riding wasn’t that interesting though, and she truly couldn’t have cared less if she won or not. Her prime purpose there was to knock off the dust and get two of her best three mounts back into competition shape so they’d be ready for the Nations Cup and Global Champions Tour Finals and maybe even retain that fitness through their next horse show drought between them and the World Cup qualifier in London in December or whatever she chose after that. So it was hard to draw any conclusions about motivation in the days between her events, and she really just wished she could stop feeling like she was supposed to be doing that- that she was supposed to be gathering evidence to help her figure out what to do next with her life. Riding was what she did, and it was hard to imagine that some boring horse shows would make her choose something else. André said they might just mean she needed to do something different with riding, like different shows, or different venues, or even different horses. He kept telling her to stop pushing it too, and to just let things come as they may.

It’s not like being at home was that much more satisfying, the Olympian reflected. Her eyes were closed and she really was trying to get to sleep, not least because she could barely move anyway. At least there’s a Ferrari at home though. I love my Ferrari. I need to find a way to do a photoshoot with my Ferrari and my Dirk and have it not be ridiculous. I’m gonna take him to London, I think. He’ll be good in that tiny ring, and he’s gonna be so bored by then if I don’t. I might try Calvin in the Puissance. He’s big and clunky but he really is the most powerful jumper in the barn, literally speaking. Them hocks, though. I hate that show, actually, but I love that it’s in London because everyone gets to come. Juanin can probably come like 4 out of the 5 nights. Can’t wait to go out with him tomorrow night. I’m sure wherever we’re going is awesome, and I missed sitting next to him at a dinner table. And we’re going to the Boqueria on Monday! I’m gonna eat all day long, Christina resolved. She eventually fell asleep thinking about all the wonderful things in Barcelona’s famous market- particularly the sweet confections. And she slept well, because jumping late into the night took a lot out of her, even if the riding wasn’t so difficult. Her days all necessarily started early up to that point. Sunday was different, since she wasn’t doing the morning class. Her internal clock woke her at 8 anyway. Juan wasn’t interested in getting out of bed at 8.

“Playing against Guardiola’s team when you don’t have anyone to hold the ball up is like running the London Marathon,” he complained when she leaned on her right elbow and attempted to talk him into getting up- not through persuasiveness, but by annoying him with her constant chatter. The Chelsea man arrived to her with a completely flat battery. Fellow Spaniard and critical cog in Conte’s plan, Alvaro Morata, had to be substituted in the first half due to injury, and it left the Blues with no out ball to evade the constant onslaught of City’s press. Christina watched the match during dinner at the horse show. She kept counting the players on the field to make sure they actually put someone on in Morata’s place, because it looked like they played a man down from then on. “You said you don’t have to be next door until noon.”

“I don’t, but I need to go to the gym, and I want breakfast, and you know, company.” She tried to appear charming and cute and undeniable, and Juan was having none of it. He just rolled his eyes and yawned. “Don’t you need to go to the gym too? Shouldn’t you do some kind of recovery for your precious marathon legs?”

“Yes, but first I should sleep two more hours.”

“I think you’re incapable of waking up at a decent hour in Spain. Seriously. Like as soon as you hit Spanish airspace, you need to sleep all day and want to eat at midnight, and your face glows like a pregnant lady.”

“You look tired. Go back to sleep. Sleep with me, cariña,” he yawned, paying no attention to her complaints. He rolled onto his side and leaned over to pull her closer- close enough that her face ended up almost in the side of his pillow pile, from which he bent down to smooch her cheek. His legs mingled with hers too, and he rubbed her back to try to make her sleepy, or at least in the mood to snuggle and probably fall asleep. “Close your eyes and think about the competition later. Visualize the ride.”

“How about I just visualize you being awake and talking to me?” she laughed.

“Whatever. Just shut up and let me sleep.”

Christina did go back to sleep. She didn’t bother with the visualization. Instead, she traced every contour of Juan’s torso- every muscle and skin fold- over and over until her eyes shut on their own again. He didn’t even notice. His sort-of-girlfriend often wondered if all men sleep like the dead or if it was a trait unique to footballers, who all seemed prone to passing out whenever left unattended in a sitting or lying down position for more than 90 seconds. The particular footballer sharing her bed actually had to work hard to rouse her from slumber two hours later. They did hit the gym together, and then the brunch buffet in the riders’ restaurant, and then the barn. The rider wanted to hang out there, safe from the public and the press, and relax with her friends until it was time to start preparing for the City of Barcelona Cup. Holger had other ideas.

“Please just do the interview,” he groaned at her after a tepid back and forth about an interview request from a local journalist. The assistant trainer’s interest in helping to secure the sit-down wasn’t clear, and Christina didn’t really care what it was. She just didn’t want to do it. “He only wants a few minutes. He only has a few minutes. He’s going to the football stadium to cover the match.”

“It’s a football journalist?” Juan questioned with renewed curiosity. He was involved because the request was to interview him and Christina together, about their friendship and how they supported one another in their respective sports.

“Yes,” Holger nodded, his expression turning hopeful. Juan’s curiosity was more promising than the rider’s snorted and snide “no”.

“Which one?” she asked, with no curiosity whatsoever. It’s definitely some hack who wants to do a story about me cheating on Schü. Without a doubt.

“Sid Lowe.”

No. Wha-

“He could have just called me,” the Chelsea man smiled, glancing at the phone in his hand. They were sitting in canvas chairs in the stable aisle near Nick and Socks’ stalls. “I know him well.”

“How’d he even know you’re here?” Christina questioned.

“Social media, probably. I posted the video of you falling down last night while we were having breakfast,” the Spaniard sniggered. He was lucky enough to capture her totally missing the landing on her signature back flip dismount off Nick’s big butt, primarily because she slipped off said butt before she could even launch herself in the air. The entire Germany contingency was watching, and laughed uproariously both at her and then at Nick when he turned his head all the way around to look at her on the ground as if to ask what on Earth she was doing.

“Is that why you keep telling me to try to go a whole day without looking at Instagram? You jerk.”

“Can we focus on the interview, please? His profile is tremendous compared to yours. It would be nice for us to borrow some from him...”

“I’ll talk to Sid,” Juan told Holger, against Christina’s obvious objections. “What?” he asked her when she made that “how could you betray me?” face at him and put her boot on the front of his chair between his legs. “He’s a good guy. You love him! You asked me to introduce you!”

“I hate you.” Schü is gonna hate this, she sighed inside as he tapped on his phone to message the London-born, Madrid-based Guardian writer, radio commentator, podcaster, and- by a country mile- Christina’s favorite football author. His second book had pride of placement on her shelf of treasured reads, next to I Am Zlatan, Bergdorf Blondes, and a first edition copy of National Velvet. I’m sure Sid has zero interest in asking us shady questions about our relationship, but he’s still going to be mad. There will be this wonderful article in the Guardian tomorrow about how Juanin and I help each other stay motivated, pick each other up, inspire one another, yadda yadda yadda, and Schü is going to read it while I’m frolicking around Barcelona without him.

“Can someone go to the security checkpoint and let him in?” the player asked. “He doesn’t have press credentials.” Holger eagerly volunteered and walked off purposely toward the front of the aisle to go fetch the writer, leaving his rider to return to wondering why he even cared about the interview or wanted her to do it. “I’m doing this because he did that nice feature for me on the launch of Common Goal, and because I trust him.”

“You trust someone who just turns up on a whim and tries to back-door an interview?”

“He messaged on my business phone a few hours ago. I just didn’t see. I try not to be on it when I’m with you.”

Oh, sure, make me feel bad by reminding me that you try to give me your undivided attention. Suuuuuure. Suuuuure. I hate- Does Tom Tom have French fries? Because much of Christina’s incredulity was an act, it was easy for her groom to distract her when he walked up to their chairs with a cardboard tray of food.

“Has Dr. Todd come back yet?” he inquired, taking a seat on the tack trunk in front of Socks’ stall. The vet was keeping an eye on Nick’s puffy left front leg. He had some swelling around the tendon down the back, just above the fetlock, when Tom took his wraps off in the morning. He jogged sound on it, and it went down some after a 30-minute walk around the show venue. Dr. Todd was supposed to re-check it, though there was nothing they could really do for it besides poultice and re-wrap, and nobody was particularly worried about it. Puffy legs would be conspicuous by their absence in most jumping horses his age.

“No. Did you get fries?” Tom’s charge sat up tall in her director’s chair to try to see in his tray.

“Yeah, and you can’t have them.”

“He’s making me do an interview I don’t want to do. I think that deserves at least one fry.”

“What interview?” He narrowed his eyes at the pair of friends mirroring one another’s crossed arms posture. Holger and the person Christina listened to for about 40 minutes each week on two different podcasts strolled into the barn before either of them could explain. Juan got up to greet his acquaintance, and introduce him to his admirer.

“She’s a big fan,” he chuckled after the formal pleasantries and handshakes. Sid Lowe was slightly taller than she expected, rounder in the middle than he appeared on TV, and every bit as friendly as she imagined. He made it very difficult for her to keep acting so put out about the interview. She was actually quite happy to meet him. He was her favorite kind of nerd, and the person she’d want to hang with at a crowded party.

“Of my puff pieces about you?” Sid questioned. He’d been pumping out Juan-admiring content for years, in great deal because he too was a big Real Oviedo shareholder and really appreciated the way the player helped to save the club.

“Of your crap Spanish jokes, your Real Oviedo fanboying, and extreme ADD,” the rider smiled. “I never miss a pod- but the free ones! I refuse to become a patron for your extra content. I’m not here to subsidize a new Podmobile,” she joked, fitting in as many references to regular parts of The Spanish Football Podcast as possible. Sid was the expert and main contributor, and his friend Phil, a Real Madrid TV employee, was the host who guided him through the week’s Spanish football themes and tried desperately to keep him on track. Christina liked it best when he got off track and shared anecdotes about people. Their podcast was one of the only football things she could still enjoy, because it was all about Spanish football and not about anything to do with her husband or most of her player friends and their families. They didn’t have reason to discuss Juan much. His exclusion from national team call ups wasn’t newsworthy anymore. “Oh! And your appreciation for Fernando Torres. I love Fernando Torres.”

“I must admit this is a bit strange. I’ve never interviewed a fan of...me.”

“We have a condition for the interview,” Juan interjected, very stern and serious.

“We do?” the rider questioned.

“You have to start answering her tweets. She tweets you regularly and you only ever replied to her once, a long time ago.”

“What do you tweet me about?”

“David Villa. And Marcos Alonso, mostly. When is he going to get a Spain call up?”

“Ah. Well. I answer that question all the time on the patron-only pods,” Sid teased, deadpan.

“Figures.”

“Chris, are you watching the time?” Tom asked. His rider apologized and introduced him too, and his question served as a nice segue to the actual interview. Holger fetched another chair for Sid, and Sid explained his interest in talking with them. He said no one writes about athlete friendships like theirs, in which the two people compete in different sports, go to events to support each other, and publically lift each other up in all their endeavors, not just sport- particularly male/female friendships. They brought up Bastian Schweinsteiger and his tennis player wife, as an example of what Juan and Christina were not. Sid wanted to talk Olympics, the Premier League, World Cups, charity projects, music videos, and what it’s like to go through professional and personal ups and downs alongside another athlete doing the same. He was really easy to talk to, and every bit as sharp and intelligent as Christina thought he’d be. Both she and Juan had to be very careful about not just what they said, but how they interacted during the fairly lengthy chat. Sid wasn’t going to miss anything. They didn’t want to accidentally give him an interview about how much they loved one another. He prefaced the whole thing by telling them that he didn’t have a specific angle for piece in mind, that it could be something for his regular Guardian column or a feature for magazine FourFourTwo, and that he might not end up writing anything at all. It would have been easy to accidentally invite him to write about obvious love suppressed between two best friends, though they were both sure that story wouldn’t interest him in the slightest. He was a real journalist, with a PhD, and he wrote a book called Catholicism, War and the Foundation of Francoism: The Juventud de Accion Popular in Spain. No one who wrote anything with a title like that could possibly relish the chance to pen a love story.

“I think it’s really important to be around people who you can admire and learn from but aren’t the same as you,” Juan said during his turn to speak at length about the importance of Christina’s friendship. There wasn’t a lot of straight question and answer going on. It was more like a casual conversation in which one participant just happened to be recording and taking notes. “You have more experienced players in the dressing room to learn from, and young guys who remind you what it’s like to play without pressure, things like this, but you’re all football players. You’re all a similar breed. I like to read books by athletes in different sports, music artists, politicians, writers. You learn different things from them. Christina is in a really different position. She competes for herself sometimes, and sometimes for a team. The psychology of that is tough. In some ways, players have to think that way, because you play for the team and you want the team to win, but you also want to play. You want to be ahead of the other guy in your position. She helps me with that. I don’t know who else could.”

“And he helps me with love/hate relationships with national team coaches,” the gold medalist chirped pointedly just to mess with Holger, who was sitting in Tom’s place on the tack trunk to listen in. “André loves Joachim Löw, and Löw loves André. He’s useless.”

“When I had the admittedly spur of the moment idea to come here to talk to you, I reached out to the horse beat guy at the radio station to get a primer on you so that I wouldn’t turn up and sound like an utter pillock,” Sid remarked, turning his focus on Christina. “She said the only thing to know about you, in terms relatable for me, is that you’re Leo Messi. I want to ask,” he went on, pivoting back to the Chelsea man. “Is that true, and is it as maddening as I suspect to be in a relationship so...so involving of comparisons, and problem sharing? Does her success grate on you, I guess is the simplistic way to put it.”

“I am not Messi.”

“She’s better than Messi. She wins big titles for her country,” the Spaniard commented without a hint of sarcasm. “And I don’t begrudge her success because I see how hard she works for it. It doesn’t make it hard for us to relate. As I said, I don’t know anyone who works like her. The unyielding commitment to doing things the correct way is much more maddening. I think of her whenever I’m tempted by a shortcut.”

“That’s his polite way of saying I have to get my own way and I’m overly dependent on routines.”

“You’ve both highlighted all the ways you’re different, and how you counter-balance one another on a lot of things. Was there a commonality that brought you together in the first place?” Sid switched which leg he crossed over which knee to support his tablet, and Christina tried to gauge how many questions were left on the screen. We’ve talked about all the interesting things, including how we came to be friends. I hope we don’t get into a thing where we’re just talking glowingly about all the things we love about one another, she thought. That wouldn’t be a very Sid Lowe-like piece.

“Just our interests, I think,” Juan shrugged. “Nothing to do with our careers. We like to talk about the same things. We both like nice cars, and art, and learning new things. She loves to cook; I love to eat. She knows all the best old movies. I love old movies.”

“We’re similar as athletes,” the rider piped up, sort of rejecting his rejection of commonality. “He’s not good at what he does on a football pitch because he trains skills all day, and I’m not good at what I do in the saddle because I have lessons every day. We train for fitness and condition and sharpness, and rely on natural talent and instinct for our skills. I think the best part of his game is between his ears, and the best thing I do is in my hands and my butt. You can’t learn those things. You can’t learn vision, or reading the game. Yeah, he needs skills to execute when he sees an opportunity- like you could practice making really quick, perfectly targeted crosses, I guess, but you can’t practice knowing when to make them. That’s what he’s so good at. He’s almost singularly good at it. I can’t name another player exactly like him. I wish for him when I watch other teams. I think all the best people at the top of the different sports are like that, you know? It was something different for me to meet another person in the same boat as me, actually. I had this weird riding upbringing where I was given the chance to ride a lot but didn’t actually get that much instruction. I used to think I just learned by observation, because I learn other things that way. Only when I came over here did I realize that my trainers have only worked to condition me, and professionalize me, and get experience, because my feel is natural, and the best asset I have. Now I know a lot of football players like that, but Juan is the only one I talk training and preparation with. André is kind of different. His natural talent is finishing, and his speed. He doesn’t practice that. He has to practice everything else. I wish he could practice the speed part because it’s gone missing on him for a long time and he could really use it back. It doesn’t work that way. Anyway, the point is, Juan is my only friend who I relate to that way. And my Olympic horse. He’s exactly the same.”

“That’s interesting. Would you characterize your competitors the same way? Are there a lot of people like...for example, like Frank Lampard. The popular trope that follows him is that he wasn’t very talented but worked harder than everyone to be good. Without throwing your fellow riders under any buses, is that how you see it?” the English writer posed as a thoughtful follow up. Juan was listening pretty keenly too. Christina liked having his ear on something like that.

“Some. There are a lot of different types of riders who can be successful at this. I know some people who win big classes and get great horses just by having the ability to stay on a psychotic but super-talented horse and not crash into the jumps. Someone like that wouldn’t get much out of most of my horses. Others rely on really polished mechanics. Others are more like me. But it’s funny. We don’t talk about feel. You can’t share a feeling, or coach someone into it. If we’re trying to help one another, we talk mechanics- try more leg here, or shift the balance sooner- stuff like that. A lot of having the feel is being open to it. It’s hard to explain. You need to open your body and have your head clear enough to tune into the horse. You need a certain amount of happiness, and content with your life. If you have too much going on inside, you’re too distracted to feel what the horse wants to tell you, or what he doesn’t want to tell you. Juan is one of the only people I talk to about that. He helps me figure out how to stay receptive. Actually, he helps me balance my neurotic need for hard work and routine with taking breaks and doing other things so that I do have that clarity of mind, and openness. We do things like stay a few extra days after a horse show to enjoy the city and leave horses and football to the side. I try to do that with André too, but it’s hard to leave family issues to the side with the horses and the football. We naturally end up talking about our son all the time, and stuff like that.”

“Chris, can you get out of the aisle? We’re going to start getting horses ready in a few minutes,” Tom said after begging pardon to interrupt. Indeed, there were more grooms around, and other riders. He took Socks’ halter off its hook and was about to drop the stall guard to bring him out. The interview was clogging up their path to the grooming area.

“I have enough, I’d say,” Sid declared with the tapping on his phone screen to end his recording. “How much time happens between getting horses ready and the cup competition?”

“For Chris, about 45 minutes,” Holger supplied. He sprang up from his seat. “Would you like to stay as our guest and watch in the hospitality tent? Or you can watch with Juan at the ring.”

“What time is kickoff at Camp Nou?” Juan inquired. His writer friend checked his cheap watch.

“4:15. I can stay for 45 minutes. How long is the whole thing?”

“About the same as a match,” the player chuckled. “Watch Chris and then go. That’s what I do at home.”

“I think I will. I want to see Leo Messi ride a horse,” Sid smiled. Holger’s eyes grew with excitement. They all picked up their canvas chairs and folded them to get them out of the way of the people working. Juan showed Sid to the drinks cooler for a Coke. Christina excused herself to change, and to reflect on the interview. It didn’t feel that revelatory in real time, but the minute it was over and everyone was standing up to move on to the next thing, a big thing hit her.

There are so many reasons he’s good for me that have absolutely nothing to do with sex and romance. I’ve been low key to high key pissed at boyfriend for so long for accepting my relationship with Juanin, and for exalting his approval, and for saying he understands that I need him and he helps make my life better. He’s just right though. The friendship is so important to everything I do. And he and I can’t seem to have the friendship without the intimacy too, to one degree or another, so it’s...it’s actually a really unselfish thing. It’s not that he doesn’t love me enough to be possessive, or isn’t strong enough to say no, or he’s hiding how much it hurts him because he doesn’t want to look wrong about all the promises. Perhaps he really doesn’t feel hurt because nothing that good for me could ever hurt him. I’ve never been able to think about my relationship with Juanin the way I had to do just now. It’s different when someone sits down and essentially says, “Okay, tell me why you have this special friendship”- when you can’t include any of the sex or love stuff, and you have to focus on the actual friendship, and the ways you support and help each other just as people and not as people in love. I haven’t been able to talk about us that way since before I knew he cared about me that way- back when I used to have to defend “we’re just friends” to Schü all the time, because he didn’t like us hanging out. I should apologize to him for using his unselfishness against him all the time, maybe.

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