Free Web NovelChapter 41: [41] "Rose Part 5"
The door had been locked from inside.
So Rose knocked twice.
There was movement behind the door. Some quick footsteps, the scrape of something that sounded like a table shift and a low curse in what sounded like Spanish.
"Sorry. I think she’s home." Rose said to Luc.
"Who?"
The door opened.
Zara Goza stood in the frame with a towel hanging across from the back of her neck to the front that covered her bare breast and not much else. She was only in her underwear, obviously not expecting Rose to come home with a male. Her short white hair was pressed flat on one side. Her dark eyes noted Rose, then she looked at Luc standing beside Rose, she now completely understood the entire situation.
Her expression did not change though. Maybe that was somehow worse than if it had.
"Zara," Rose said. "I’m sorry, I didn’t know you’d be here. You should have texted."
Zara looked at Luc once more. It was closer to a hostile look than a warm look.
She stepped back and disappeared into the bathroom without a word. The bathroom door closing behind her.
Rose turned to Luc. "She’s not angry, she just has this face."
"I believe you," Luc said.
---
The apartment was exactly what he expected from a woman who had walked across a car park at midnight wearing her heart on her sleeve. Functional and slightly chaotic. A foil-wrapped energy bar on top of the microwave. Boots with dried mud still on them by the front door. A birthday card pinned to the wall that was two months past its date.
A life being lived too fast to be tidied. He suspected that whatever was infact tidy, wasn’t her but the girl that was almost naked in front of them some seconds ago.
Rose went to the kitchen and filled the kettle.
"You want tea," she said, not really asking a question.
"Sure."
She put two mugs down and looked at him over the counter, she had spent days constructing a speech and had now used it and had no idea what came after.
"I have a room," she said. "Uhm--If you want somewhere to sit that isn’t this counter."
---
Her room had a low lamp on, a large window that faced the street and a bed that was currently serving as a shelf for a hoodie, two water bottles and a book about winger positioning in the modern game.
She cleared it immediately they entered without being told, threw the hoodie on the floor and put the book on the bedside table. She sat against the headboard with her knees up and her mug on her knee.
Luc sat at the foot of the bed with his back straight, facing the window.
---
The first few minutes were quiet. Not entirely awkward, just quiet.
Rose was the one who broke it.
"I grew up in Lyon," she said. "My dad is French. My mum is from Manchester, which is where I adopted the pink hair from apparently, her whole side of the family are like this, very big personalities."
"Your mum has pink hair."
"She has red hair naturally. She dyes it blue now because she says red is too obvious." Rose smiled. "She’s a lot."
"And your dad."
"Very quiet. Folds newspapers into perfect rectangles before he throws them away. Has never raised his voice in my entire life." She turned her mug in her hands. "I got her heart and his face. Which is a very specific combination to grow up with."
Luc looked at her.
"You give everything immediately," he said. It was an observation he had made.
"I know," Rose said. "I’ve been trying to stop for about six years. It doesn’t take much according to Zara, but it’s extremely hard for me."
Rose asked him about America.
Not the football. The actual place.
He told her about growing up in Maryland. A suburb that was clean and forgettable and exactly the right size to make you want to leave it. His parents had divorced when he was eleven and both of them had handled it so civilly and so thoroughly that it was more unsettling than if they had been screaming or fighting each other.
"They were better at being divorced than being married," he said. "Which sounds depressing but it was actually fine. They just ran out of something."
"Ran out of what?"
Luc didn’t answer right away. He looked at the window. The street lamp outside was orange and slightly too bright for the hour.
"Friction maybe, or love," he said finally. "They were too easy with each other. Nothing to push against."
Rose was looking at him. "You like friction."
"It helps. Not everything needs to be easy."
She didn’t say anything to that. She had just heard a sentence that explained three things about him all at once.
---
She told him about her first season at Paris Royal.
The first team manager had been replaced two months in and the new one hadn’t scouted the women’s squad at all. He had a list of names from his predecessor and Rose’s name was not on it because the predecessor hadn’t yet updated the numbers on the list.
She had trained for six weeks without a single piece of coaching feedback. Not negative feedback. Not positive feedback. Nothing.
"I asked one of the assistants if I was in his plans, he said he’d find out. He came back two days later and said ’probably.’"
"What did you do?" ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
"I scored four goals in the next three training sessions and waited. He started me the following match. Never mentioned the six weeks."
Luc almost smiled. "You play like that too."
"I play the only way I know how. Full commitment to every run. I know it leaves me exposed sometimes but the other way doesn’t feel like football to me, it feels like surviving."
"Most players settle for surviving."
"I know, but I’ve never been able to."
