The whistle cuts through the stadium like a lightning strike — shrill, final, everything in it stretched to breaking. The crowd erupts. A sea of white shirts spills across the pitch, arms raised, lungs emptied in celebration. Confetti hasn’t even started to fall yet, but the feeling is already everywhere: joy, disbelief, relief.
You’re on the sidelines, just outside the tangle of players. The noise is massive — chants, shouts, laughter — but you feel a strange stillness inside you. Not cold. Just… still. Like the world narrowed in the last two minutes and forgot to widen again.
You scan the pitch, eyes skipping over bodies hugging, collapsing to their knees, shouting at the sky. And then you see him. Sergio.
He’s not celebrating wildly like some of the others. He’s moving slowly, looking around, not dazed—more deliberate. You know him well enough by now to see it for what it is: he’s taking stock. Of the win. Of his teammates. Of the weight he carried and the silence he’s about to let himself sink into.
And then, almost like he feels your eyes, he spots you.
There’s no hesitation. He starts walking toward you — cutting through the chaos, a towel half-draped over his shoulder, sweat glinting off his neck in the stadium lights. His expression is unreadable at first, caught somewhere between exhaustion and something quieter. Something that looks like relief, maybe. Recognition.
You don’t know what to do, not right away. You blink at him, heart still stuck in your throat from the match. Maybe you think he’s just walking past. But he doesn’t.
He stops right in front of you.
For a second, neither of you speaks.
Then, low enough that only you can hear, he murmurs, “You didn’t breathe that whole second half, did you?”
You laugh—sharp and sudden, surprised by your own voice. “Barely.”
He smiles. Not the big media grin, but the close one. The kind that makes a small crease beside his mouth and lingers a little longer than it should.
“Same.”
The rest of the world blurs behind him—teammates screaming with joy, lights flickering, silver trophy glinting somewhere off to the right. And yet here he is, eyes on you, stillness in his body that doesn’t match the moment around him.
“You always find me after a final,” you say softly, unsure why you said it.
He tilts his head slightly, one corner of his mouth twitching like he’s trying to play it cool but isn’t really trying that hard. “You’re easier to spot than a trophy.”
You roll your eyes, but something in you folds a little. The tension slips — not all of it, but enough.
A cheer goes up behind him, louder than before. He glances over his shoulder, then looks back at you. “Come with me?” he asks—not commanding, not dramatic. Just asking. Like you being near him still makes sense, even now.
You hesitate. He notices. His hand hovers near yours, not touching, just… there. Steady. Waiting.
You nod.
And he doesn’t say anything else — he just turns slightly, shoulder brushing yours, not moving away too fast. You fall into step beside him, moving back onto the pitch, into the noise, into the night that has cracked open with celebration.
There’s no public gesture. No arm around you. But his pace matches yours, and the angle of his body leans just enough that you feel covered somehow, shielded.
He says something to a teammate who runs past, laughs when someone throws water at him, but he doesn’t drift too far from you.
He never really does.
And even in this fever-pitch of victory, his attention—quiet and constant—feels like the only part of the night that isn’t temporary.
Netwrck