Self-Awareness (3)
"Sir Ryu! Another incredible goal today!"
I took Alvaria's hand—she'd been the closest—and hauled myself up, only for her to gush with praise and pull me into a crushing hug. Not that her reaction was anything unusual. I'd met Bruna's cross and connected it straight into a bicycle kick, a strike beautiful enough to contend for a top-three spot in La Liga's Goal of the Year.
But what made me happier than scoring a goal that gorgeous was this: Alvaria was hugging me so tightly I could feel every inch of her sweat-soaked body through nothing but a thin jersey, and my body wasn't reacting at all.
I'd already confirmed I didn't react in the locker room, but unfortunately I hadn't scored in the next match—the Copa del Rey tie against Granada—so I'd never gotten the chance to verify it on the pitch.
Now, though, even with Alvaria pressed this close, it wasn't a problem. I'd proven beyond any doubt that I wasn't some degenerate who got turned on looking at his teammates mid-match.
And the risk of a camera catching me with an erection during a game was gone, too. Even I would have been mortified if footage like that leaked onto the internet. At least that wasn't happening.
…If someone asked me which of the two made me happier, I'd say the latter—by a slim margin. No. By a landslide.
"Heh, Ha-neul. Thanks. That's an assist in the bag thanks to you."
The hug with Alvaria ended, and this time Bruna came over and wrapped her arms around me. I patted her on the back. Still no reaction.
Bruna's not a problem either, huh…
It had been about a week since I'd started wondering whether I liked my friends as more than friends. I'd been noticing it the whole time: this kind of light physical contact with Bruna wasn't an issue at all.
Truth be told, Bruna was a pretty decent-looking friend, appearance-wise. Not on Valentina's level, but she had the fair skin you'd call white, large and well-defined features, and the kind of full, athletic figure you'd expect from a Latino who trained relentlessly.
But maybe it was because I knew she was a football-obsessed maniac—there just wasn't any sexual appeal there.
Sure, some guys might find a woman who was good at football attractive. That particular charm didn't work on me.
"Ha-neul!"
And while I was thinking about Bruna, the real problem came walking over.
"Ugh, don't. You're all sweaty."
"What's that supposed to mean? You hugged Alvaria and Bruna just fine."
I shoved her head away with my hand, and Camila huffed. But judging by the signal trying to fire off down below, having Camila cling to me here was dangerous.
"Tch. Feels like you've been avoiding me lately."
…Was I that obvious? If even Camila—the least perceptive of us—had noticed, then Valentina and Yuri had probably already figured out I was dodging them.
Yeah. Lately I'd been avoiding the girls who were throwing me into confusion.
In the time I'd spent since that bewildering day, one thing I'd confirmed for myself was this: unlike with other women, looking at Camila, Valentina, or Yuri sent dirty thoughts surging up. I just didn't know why.
The only thing they had in common was that I'd known them since I was a kid. Camila and Valentina from the start of elementary school, and Yuri from even before that.
And one other common thread: I did a lot of physical play with them.
Poking at Camila's stomach, putting Yuri in a headlock—I'd been pulling that kind of stuff almost once a day. I horsed around with Valentina plenty, too, in all sorts of ways.
But that didn't seem like the root cause.
If it were just about knowing them since childhood, something would have happened already—at school, in the dorms, somewhere—before any of us hit adulthood. And if it were about all the physical contact, that play-fighting had been going on for far too long to suddenly matter now.
Which left only one possibility: that I actually liked them.
But that was a fact I still couldn't confirm.
It wasn't like this was my first life. I'd dated plenty of girlfriends since the La Masia dorm days—actresses, models, singers, influencers, ordinary girls. Some for as little as a month, others for a year or two, so I had no shortage of data.
I couldn't say I'd loved every girlfriend. But the one I'd dated at La Masia, back when I had nothing, had been a passionate, burning kind of love—and it hadn't felt like this.
I knew how I acted when I was in love.
I was the type to throw myself into a blazing romance without looking back.
But I'd changed a lot. Had the way I loved changed too? I still didn't know. I just needed to keep checking.
"Ha-neul! Hurry up!"
Of course, confirming anything right now was impossible. The match had paused for the goal celebration, but we were still in the thick of it.
I wiped the stray thoughts from my head and focused on the game.
I ran myself ragged concentrating, and before I knew it the clock had ticked around to the seventieth minute of the second half. The manager signaled me off.
"Good work."
"Yes."
"That goal today was something else, and your play was solid. I take it you just weren't in form against Betis?"
"Seems that way. Though I did score more in that match."
"Haha. Goals are goals. What matters in the end is playing our football."
Angela had come out to the touchline to meet me, and she clapped me on the shoulder. After that brief exchange, I did what I always did—grabbed a water bottle rolling around on the ground, took a swig, dumped the rest over my head to cool off, and looked for an open seat on the bench.
Tch…
The only empty seat was the one next to Valentina. Everything else had bibs or jerseys or various other things piled on it. I could have cleared something off and sat there, but with Valentina's seat open, deliberately avoiding it would have looked even weirder. So I walked over and sat down beside her.
"Hey. It's still cold out."
And just like always, Valentina draped a long towel over my shoulders. I couldn't remember exactly when it had started, but whenever I came back with water dumped over me, Valentina would wrap a towel around my shoulders.
When was it? Somewhere between elementary and middle school, I think…
I was still turning that over when our eyes met. Valentina's large, double-lidded eyes looked deeper than they usually did. And filling those dark pupils, completely, was me.
They looked like Yuri's eyes—from a few years back, when she'd given me that confession that wasn't quite a confession.
…No way. …Right?
I was still reeling from how different Valentina seemed when her gaze shifted toward the pitch. I wiped the water from my hair and skin with the towel she'd given me, already regretting the thought.
Come on. No way. I've just gotten too sensitive lately.
The idea that Valentina liked me was absurd. The kind of horsing around we did was punching each other in the arm, kicking each other in the ass. It didn't hurt—it was just messing around—but would you do that to a guy you liked?
We weren't elementary school kids picking on our crush. No chance.
I really must be losing it, thinking stuff like this.
Yuri, who'd made that almost-confession when we were kids, was one thing. But Camila and Valentina were actual friends. Yuri still let it show, in little ways, that she liked me. These two were different. The way they treated me hadn't changed once, from childhood to now.
Then a thought flashed through my head.
Why did my body only react to the girls I'd known since I was little? The important part was that I'd known them since childhood. I'd watched them grow up, the whole way.
And lusting after girls like that was as good as taboo.
But from the moment I'd seen that part of Camila growing steadily firmer, my body had gone strange. The price of breaking a taboo, maybe?
Was I lusting after that taboo itself?
…Fuck. I'm a degenerate either way.
Of course, this wasn't confirmed yet either. I'd need to check further. But I decided to stop hunting for reasons my body was acting this way. It was more comfortable to think I just had some weird fetish nobody knew about. Everyone's got one of those.
And it was better than the alternative—that I actually liked my friends.
I didn't want to dig any deeper.
Yeah. I was scared.
What if I confessed to someone? What if we started dating? I was terrified that the first people I could truly call friends—across this life and the last—would disappear.
If I dated one of them and we broke up, the rest of our relationships would be hard to hold onto. The times we all got together would slowly vanish. Being in the same room as someone I'd dated wouldn't be fun anymore.
I remembered, all over again, why I'd turned down Yuri's confession that wasn't quite a confession. I'd rejected her then for the same reason I was afraid now.
I didn't want to lose all of them.
And scarier still: even if I did like my friends, I had no idea who I liked the most.
The more I thought about it, the more I felt like I was on the verge of realizing something. The instant that feeling hit, I stopped thinking and watched the match unfolding on the pitch.
Just leave it. I'm a guy with a weird fetish. Keep living the way I have been.
Even after I'd come off, we were still dominating Getafe. The referee's whistle blew. Final score: 3–0.
What's the schedule look like now? Champions League against Napoli at the end of February, then a match against Real Madrid in early March. So Eibar, Napoli, Real Madrid? Five days until Eibar, then three-day gaps after that. Plus the international fixtures in March. Brutal calendar.
Gathering my things and running through the schedule, my cluttered head cleared. I didn't have time to waste on useless feelings. I had a Quadruple to win. I had to become the best in the world. And I had to keep training, all the way to a World Cup title.
For the dream I hadn't achieved in my previous life, I didn't have time to rest.
And so I deliberately ignored the feelings sitting in my subconscious.
"Ha-neul's been weird lately, right?"
"Yeah. Feels like he's been avoiding us a bit."
The evening after the Getafe match. Back at the dorms, Camila, Valentina, and Yuri had gathered in one place to talk. The subject, of course, was the one person all three of them liked: Ha-neul.
The reason three girls who were essentially romantic rivals would sit down together like this was simple.
Ha-neul's walls were too solid. There was no gap to slip through. And they had a fairly good idea why. The reason the three of them had landed on was his passion for football. They'd concluded that Ha-neul's hunger for the game was what was blocking any kind of romantic relationship.
And that guess was, to a certain extent, true. There was another reason they didn't know about.
At any rate, because those walls of his were so solid, the three of them had been holding these little information-sharing sessions ever since that drinking party.
"He suddenly goes red in the face sometimes, and… lately it feels like he doesn't even touch my body as much?"
"That's a good thing."
"Hey!"
Bits of information passed back and forth between Camila and Yuri. Things Valentina already knew. And the more they talked, the clearer it became that Ha-neul had been acting strange lately.
So he started acting weird from when only we went on that away trip… Tch. If Cami would just say what happened that day, we'd know exactly why…
Valentina listened to the two of them and turned it over rapidly in her head. In the end, every answer traced back to that day, so she opened the mouth she'd been keeping tightly shut.
"Hey, Cami."
"Yeah?"
"Be honest. You didn't just eat that time, did you?"
Camila tried to hold out to the bitter end, but under the two pairs of eyes that had gone distinctly menacing, she finally surrendered.
"……This stays between us."
And then, from Camila's mouth, came the story of what had happened that day.
"…That happened? Tch… No wonder he's been avoiding us. Knowing Ha-neul's personality, that was probably the first time he'd seen something like that?"
Had watching that movie made Ha-neul interested in the opposite sex? She didn't bother saying that part out loud. They were helping each other for now, but at the end of the day they were still competitors.
…Maybe I can afford to be more aggressive now?
If she subtly ramped up the physical contact, or casually flashed a little more skin, she had a feeling she could shake those solid walls of his.
"Okay. Meeting adjourned for today."
Having finished thinking it through, Valentina left quickly—before the others could catch on to what was in her head.
But Valentina didn't know.
Camila and Yuri had been thinking the exact same thing.