Archive of Our Own ^beta

Once upon a time, on a beautiful August evening, Stefanos came to Nether Wallop.

It had been that lovely time of the evening, right before twilight, when the sun painted everything red and gold, as if sensing the expiration of its allotted time and making the best use of its final moments. Sitting by the window, Dania saw him coming down the slope to his little cottage through the field of grass, and went outside.

The light that time of evening was magical. Stefanos’ hair was painted gold, his shirt likewise; the line of his throat shone gold. Gold glowed all around him. When he was at last at the gate, Dania needed a moment to realise that the guy was not a vision his mind had made up, a side effect of his life of wild depravity.

“What are you doing here?” He asked Stefanos. He probably should have asked how Stefanos had even managed to find him — his cottage in Nether Wallop had been a carefully protected secret — but that seemed pointless now. Stefanos had found out and was now here, and Dania couldn’t extract the knowledge from him, anyway.

“Have you retired?” Stefanos said, ignoring his question. His expression was pinched, as if he was suffering through a toothache, and even that didn’t make him any less beautiful. “Are you done with your career?”

Dania didn’t know how to answer that. He felt like he’d lost what little skill at natural conversation he’d had before, and now after months of isolated life, it was as though he’d forgotten how to speak.

“Why are you here?” He said again, feeling exposed.

“Why are you?” Stefanos said.

Dania let out a breath and closed his eyes. The back of his eyelids was all reddish and orange, the courtesy of the setting sun. The tight feeling spiralling up from his gut to his throat was beginning to claw, and soon he would not be able to keep it down and control himself.

That was one of two things that his father ever asked of him, that he control himself.

Stefanos was not supposed to be here, had no business coming here and disturbing his righteous, self-imposed suffering. Whatever misplaced pity he had for Dania, he better take it and shove it down his own throat. And leave him the fuck alone. It was bad enough that Dania was a miserable piece of shit without having Stefanos here to witness the disastrous state of him.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he told him.

“No,” Stefanos said.

They stared at each other over the fence, like characters in a Mexican stand-off.

“When did you last shave?” Stefanos said after a while, squinting at his overgrown beard, and Dania ran a hand through it unconsciously, embarrassed.

“Before I came here,” Dania admitted.

“Okay, Rip van Winkle,” Stefanos said with a barest hint of a smile, as if he was amused despite his own attempts at remaining somber to match Dania’s mood. Dania suddenly felt stupid and childish for being here, looking like this, making Stefanos pity him so much he had to come all the way to Nether Wallop, when nothing tragic — or even terribly unusual — had happened, not really. Just Dania fucking things up, the way he always had. Hiding himself here, as if he was some tragic widower or a even a person with real, earned pain, was just arrogant and egocentric of him.

“You want to come inside?” He said quietly, gesturing at the little old cottage behind him, that looked like a magic house straight out of a fairytale — made even more so in the glare of the setting red sun.

“I’ve come this far,” Stefanos said. His hair swayed in the breeze, strands of golden curls flying over his eyes. Dania wanted to catch them and push them behind Stefanos’ ear.

The charm seemed to break the moment they stepped inside the cold little house and away from the soft pastel gold of the setting sun. It was sobering, and Stefanos’ face lost its serenity at once.

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” he drawled, looking around, “All these unpacked boxes, piled all the way to ceiling, the dirty dishes. Really gives the place that authentic… junkyard feel.”

Dania didn’t say anything.

“They say your external life reflects your internal life,” Stefanos said. The last sunbeam peeking through the window was painting the side of Stefanos’ face bright crimson. “Yeah, filth and garbage would surely reflect your inner state,” He leaned against the wall, folding his arms across his chest. “I can see now why you’ve always been such an insufferable asshole.”

This was better, Dania thought, this haughty, narrow-eyed Stefanos much more familiar, than the serene, smiling Stefanos of five minutes ago.

“Did you come here to insult me?” Dania said, wishing he’d hear some more.

“I came to see just how deep of a hole you’ve dug for yourself to wallow in your self-pity,” Stefanos said, looking him directly in the eye. Dania turned away. His stomach was twisting painfully, grumbling low — it’s been a week. “Insulting you is just a side bonus.”

“Well now that you’ve seen it,” he said, sitting on his hands so they would stop shaking. “You can kindly fuck off.”

Stefanos glared, then pointedly turned away to shuffle nosily through the cupboards in a way that was no doubt meant to indicate how very little time he had for Dania’s nonsense. He was flushing, from either embarrassment or irritation, or possibly from a lifetime’s worth of pent-up disappointment with Dania.

“Your ban ran out weeks ago, and Khachanov’s good as new,” Stefanos said as if he hadn’t heard him. “When are you coming back on tour?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Dania licked his dry lips.

Stefanos looked at him for a long time, as if trying to read his mind. Then he sighed. “Your father is sick.”

Dania shivered. “What?”

“Your father is sick,” Stefanos repeated, frowning. “You would have known that if you bothered to turn on your phone once in a while.”

“I didn’t want to talk to anyone,” he muttered, his voice almost drowned by a strange ringing in his ears.

“And trust me — everyone wanted to talk to you even less,” Stefanos said harshly, and Dania closed his eyes. “But your mother and sisters have been trying to reach you, while you’ve been hiding here like a coward.”

Dania didn’t argue. There was no point in trying to twist the truth. He was a coward. He knew that. Stefanos knew that, too. He’d bought this place as soon as he was legally allowed to, which happened to be right after he had the fight with his father. ‘The fight’ sounded wrong, though — as if he was trying to cheat himself. A fight would have required him to have pushed back, defended himself somehow instead of just taking it like a pathetic coward he had been, before fleeing all the way to a middle-of-nowhere English countryside with his tail between his legs. He was driving around Nether Wallop when he passed an old, crooked for sale sign one day, thought about it for a total of two seconds before calling the estate agent. A couple days later, he was an owner — a spontaneous local reaction to an unprecedented amount of pent-up sadness in his life. He stayed here in between tournaments sometimes, when it got too much — the gnawing sensation of not belonging anywhere, his inadequacy getting too apparent to be surrounded by normal functional humans.

“No witty comeback?” Stefanos said after Dania kept silent. He looked uncomfortable and wrong in the little filthy kitchen, like a beautiful painting that had no place on a wall of a druggie warehouse. “That’s new. I call you a coward and all I get is broody silence. Khachanov got way more than that for much less, I hear.”

Dania’s eyes snapped back to him, guilt and shame and fear mingling inside in a whirlwind. His leg jolted and spasmed underneath the table.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” he mumbled, breathing suddenly uneven. “I lost control and snapped. I know it was unacceptable.”

“Yes, it was,” Stefanos pushed. “Whatever he said to you, you had no right no do that, you fucking psycho.”

Psycho. Dania probably was a psycho. He’d never thought of that word before, never applied it to himself, and it sounded accurate and appropriate now.

In the silence that stretched between them, Stefanos’ breathing went uneven and eyes wide and a little wild. He straightened out, arms flying in the air.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” He demanded, and Dania startled. Stefanos suddenly looked mad, his expression of smug superiority falling apart. His eyes gleamed as he stared at him. “Why are just sitting there silently like a moron? Didn’t you hear me?”

“What do you want me to say?” Dania asked him, confused. There was little of knowledge in his Book of Stefanos on the wild, slightly panicked expression the guy was wearing. “You are right.”

Stefanos kept breathing loudly, his chest rising and falling unevenly, fingers flexing. He looked like he was considering punching Dania in the face.

“What about your father, then?” He demanded in the same unhinged tone of voice. “You’re not even gonna see him? Your own father?!”

Dania closed his eyes, a familiar hollowness in his chest. He looked out the window, where the sky was now grayish-blue and the field of grass seemed cold and dead. “He’s not my real father.”

He heard Stefanos let out a breath sharply. “What?”

“I don’t know who my biological father is, but it’s not him.”

His mouth felt dry and awkward as he said the words. He’d never said them to anyone else before.

“So?” Stefanos snapped after a beat, and Dania tore his gaze from the window and looked back at him. “He still raised you! Even if you’re not his biological son, he still loves you!”

Dania laughed, except it sounded screechy and raspy, like the sound the old rusty pipes made back in his Moscow flat. Stefanos was staring at him with wide eyes, so he shook his head and said, “Why do even care?”

“Because I want you to come back to tour so everyone would fucking stop wondering about you in hushed whispers, as if you’re special! I want you to stop your ridiculous pity-party, as if it wasn’t your own fault what happened!” Stefanos all but yelled. “I want you to be an adult you’re supposed to be and go deal with your family, so they would leave me alone already! Deal with your shit!”

“Okay,” Dania told him.

Stefanos seemed lost for a moment, as though he was just getting started and had expected more of a fight. But Dania didn’t fight — never had, not when it actually mattered — a fucking coward that he was.

“So, um, you’ll go?”

“Yes,” Dania said.

“Why?” Stefanos said suspiciously.

“Because you’re right,” Dania said again. Because I’d do whatever you want me to, he didn’t say.

Stefanos stared at him as if he’d never seen him before. Dania used the temporary hiatus to study him, the curly hair that had grown out, the sparse hairs on his chin signifying his first proper beard, the way his Adam apple bobbed when he swallowed.

Slowly, Stefanos unclenched. “Good,” he muttered, still frowning. He crossed the little kitchen in one long stride and dropped himself on a raggedy chair across the table. “Good,” he said again.

“Do you want tea?” Dania said, blinking slowly. His eyelids felt like they were made of lead, and his whole body was getting heavy and loose, now that they’d finished fighting — or rather, now that Dania had finished listening.

Stefanos’ eyes surveyed the mess around them, stopping for a second on a pile of weeks-old, unwashed dishes in the sink.

“No way I’m drinking anything out of those mugs,” he said with disgust, his expression eerily similar to that of Dania’s father whenever he had looked at him.

“Suit yourself,” he shrugged.

“And by the way,” Stefanos said, looking him over again, “you stink.”

That might have been true, too — he hadn’t showered in days. Hadn’t even looked at the mirror, unwilling to see his own unrecognisable face staring back at him. In fact, he’d steadily avoided all reflective surfaced so far.

Stefanos looked calmer then, as if finishing his tirade with that last jab had put him finally at ease, an air of a job well done.

“Okay,” he said again, and they sat together quietly.

Stefanos was avoiding looking at him, and so Dania stared at him unabashedly. The silence felt deep and right, as if there was nothing either of them could say that could possibly be important enough to break it.

It was dark by the time Dania showered and shaved his beard off. Stefanos didn’t comment on it, his face a mask of polite disinterest. They went outside, and Dania locked the place up, even though there had never been anything of value inside.  They stood in front of the little house silently for a few moments, before walking through the fence and away.

It isn’t until the morning after the Roland Garros final that he learns the news. Taking a sip of his coffee, he opens up his Instagram app and is immediately accosted by screaming headlines with Stefanos’ photos all over, the capslock words all but yelling: TSITSIPAS’ SHOCKING ANNOUNCEMENT OF EARLY RETIREMENT!

The coffee gets stuck in his throat and he coughs violently, choking. His phone has slipped from his hand unto the table, so he grabs it again, sure of a mistake, a cosmic misunderstanding — something — because this just can’t be true, has no business being a real thing that is happening.

But scrolling through numerous tennis-themed and fellow players’ accounts, a clot of dread and despair is rapidly rising in his throat. He sets his coffee aside, the mug still full to the brim.

This is wrong. This can’t be true. Stefanos couldn’t have just… quit. He must have meant something else, like a retirement from the clay season or the next tournament. He must have.

He calls Gilles.

“Have you heard about Stefanos?” he says in lieu of a greeting, his voice a raspy croaky thing.

“Of course I did,” Gilles tells him. “He announced it right during the ceremony. Did you not watch it?”

Dania didn’t. Instead, he turned the telly off the moment Stefanos won his third Match point and his first ever Grand Slam — defeating no other than Rafael Nadal at that. Choking on his bitterness and jealousy and all-too-familiar self-deprecation, he pushed the off button on the remote and chucked it all the way across the room, as if it had personally offended him. He didn’t stick around to watch the awarding ceremony.

Now it’s a bothersome itch, an all consuming need to abandon everything else and see it with his own eyes. He tries to imagine Stefanos saying those words, I retire from tennis, and his brain cannot even provide an image of such an outrageous preposterous event. But then, he’s never had any imagination.

“He couldn’t have meant he’d be retiring from tennis altogether,” he tries to say firmly to Gilles, but it still comes out like a question.

“Well, that’s pretty much what he said,” Gilles states, leaving no space for arguments.

Later, after he’s spent hours going obsessively through social media, he wanders around his flat, head buzzing. Everything is wrong. He keeps going around his bedroom and then living room in circles, restless and unable to stay still for a moment, and he opens and closes the cupboards, peers into his fridge, glances at the balcony, as if that would help him find the answer to how this could possibly have happened. His hands shaking and internal organs trembling, he feels as though he is terribly hungover.

When his legs finally give up, he stumbles to the balcony and collapses on a patio chair, breathing in the warm summer air. Through the hazy fog in his head, only one question keeps circling around and rising to the surface of this strange, incomprehensible reality — what will happen to him now?

In the days that follow, Stefanos’ announcement is the only thing everyone is talking about. It reminds him of being in high school again, except this time he both dreads and yearns to be around for the gossip. As he arrives at Stuttgart, the guesses and various conspiracy theories immediately engulf him, and he wonders how on Earth people can just talk about it so trivially, so conversationally, as if elite athletes on top of their game just quit retire every other day. As if nothing earth-shattering had happened. As if the universe hasn’t spun all over and then stopped, completely tilted off its axis.

But maybe, it’s only his universe that’s done that.

I bet it was his father, he hears in the locker room from Berrettini, whatever happened, I bet it was Apostolos’ idea

I think he must have gotten injured, he hears from Felix in the gym, and wouldn’t have been able to play anyway

I’ve heard he got a silent ban for six months, says Shapovalov on the practice court, and he just decided to fuck it and quit while he was ahead

Dania listens to all these conspiracy theories with rapt attention and laser focus, collecting them all for future dissection. He keeps catching himself at constantly glancing around the courts and the gym, as he always does, trying to spot Stefanos somewhere in the distance, and forces himself to stop. It was pathetic when Stefanos had been around to look for, and is even more so now when he is not.

“Do you know anything?” He asks Sascha the next day, because the man is usually up to date with all the latest gossip. He tries to sound vaguely curious, but comes off desperate instead, and Sascha looks at him strangely.

“No,” he says, looking at Dania with a mixture of bemusement and pity. “I haven’t spoken to Stef since the semis last week.”

He wants to drop it, then, before he embarrasses himself any further, but his mouth keeps talking without his permission. “So he hasn’t said anything to you?”

He’s gone too far, he realises, because Sascha raises a curious eyebrow at him. “Why do you care so much?” He says in a tone that implies he knows exactly why. “Aren’t you supposed to be glad your arch nemesis has surrendered?”

Dania swallows past the dry cotton in his throat and looks away. Sascha’s teasing smirk is suddenly unbearable to look at.

If you don’t know your own boundaries, Stefanos had once said to him, you’re going to get lost.

“Yeah,” he mutters absent-mindedly, even though Sascha doesn’t look like he believes him. “Yes. I am.”

“You gotta do way better if you plan on having any shot at Wimbledon at all,” Gilles tells him with a frown that Dania reads immediately as seriously dissatisfied. He doesn’t typically get this confrontational unless he is seriously disappointed. “What’s going on with you? You’ve been all over the place!”

Dania grits his teeth and says nothing. He has no idea how to explain to Gilles something he cannot even fully comprehend himself.

Gilles glares at him for a while, then claps his hands. “Fine, backhand cross, go.”

And so Dania does. He hits the backhand cross-court and then backhand down the line, until his hands are numb and his legs can barely support him and his head is empty and silent.

If you don’t push your boundaries, you don’t get to the top.

He’d choose grass over clay on any given day, and yet it still feels distinctly foreign to him, like he was an alien stepping on Earth for the first time, marvelling at its gravity and physics. The bounce is all wrong, and the speed is lightning fast, and his movement resembles someone recovering from a stroke. It’s not a surprise to anyone but Gilles that he’s kicked out of the tournament on his second round.

“I thought you were going to try,” he says with such quiet, devastating chagrin, Dania suddenly wants to cry, and he hasn’t cried in many years. He’s been fine with losing up until now, but having Gilles so openly unhappy with him makes him immediately degrade to the little boy he used to be, swallowing his tears and trying to stand tall under the crushing weight of his father’s disappointment.

If you’re not gonna try, don’t bother doing anything at all, rings in his ears, and he shakes his head and focuses back on Gilles.

“I did try, I really did,” he says, and winces at how pathetic he sounds — so full of fucking excuses, and flaccid ones at that. “It just didn’t work out today.”

Gilles doesn’t say anything, just keeps walking silently by his side, radiating almost palpable fumes of harsh judgment. Dania hates how it’s making his hands twitch along his sides, how the inside of his mouth is getting dry and bitter.

“I’ll do better next time, I fucking swear,” he says, and Gilles gives him a side glance, as if to see if he means it. Well, he fucking means it. He will make Gilles happy with him, he won’t let Gilles down.

“Okay,” Gilles says simply, and keeps walking ahead, Dania a few steps behind. “I’ve booked us a flight to Queen’s, so pack up. We’ve got a lot of work to do before Wimbledon.”

Heartbeat finally slowing down, Dania follows.

If you don’t tread your boundaries, tread them precisely, no wavering, no lingering doubt about who you are and what you can do, what you can’t, what you won’t, what you will; if you don’t know how to let your mind go then you can’t push your body, reassemble the way you were made and put yourself together better, stronger, invincible; you don’t create greatness.

He’d spent a long time being jealous of Stefanos. The moment they met, it sparked inside him — vile and blooming jealousy, heavy like a stone on his stomach. He’d been jealous of everything that made Stefanos who he was — his picture perfect family, smiling and happy and glued together as if they were on a set of filming a cereal commercial, constantly joking around and teasing each other, but not in a way his own father did, which more often than not ended in fists slamming into walls and quiet insults whispered into his face. He’s been jealous of his tennis — graceful and beautiful and so unlike his own, ugly and awkward, making everyone gasp and huff with every ball he landed in, as if perpetually surprised a lanky, stooping creature like Dania could ever manage to even strike a ball over the net in the first place. He’d been jealous of Stefanos’ looks, so attractive and gorgeous — he could easily quit the sport and pick up a job in modelling five minutes later. He’d even been jealous of Stefanos hair. Dania hated his own hair. It had always been so dry and lifeless and already showing signs of receding early and nothing like Stefanos’, which was golden and curly and radiant and never looked bad, not even when he’d just rolled out of bed in the morning.

All of that jealousy turned into bitterness, which turned into resentment, which eventually grew into reluctant admiration, which then crossed over the line into obsession.

At this point he wasn’t sure anymore if he liked Stefanos or simply wanted to be Stefanos.

They spent years growing up in each other’s pockets, stuck together tournament to tournament and country to country, even though they rarely ever socialised or exchanged even a couple of sentences that weren’t bitter and snarky on Dania’s side or dismissive and smug on Stefanos’. Years went by, and Dania was turning out to be surprisingly fragile, quick to tears and violent bouts of self-loathing. Stefanos was better at hiding his sadness, but Dania soon found a way of coaxing it out of him, getting him to open up about things he hadn’t discussed with anyone else — his bitterness toward his father, his trouble communicating with the other players on tour, the feeling that he’d been cheated, that the world he’d been raised to live sometimes felt like it wasn’t his own.

He listened to Stefanos with reverent attention, collecting his expressions and committing them to memory in greatest detail: the smallest twist of Stefanos’ lips, the slightest raise of his eyebrow, the little crinkles around his eyes when he smiled. All of that knowledge, continuously expanding, eventually mounted to something Dania had ironically called the Book of Stefanos in the privacy of his own mind. At nighttime, when he couldn’t sleep, he’d glide through the mental pages of the book, adding new details or rewriting the passages.

Sometimes, Stefanos tried to retaliate, provoking him into letting something slip about his own life and his own family, but Dania cut those attempts at their roots. His life wasn’t nearly as exciting and interesting as Stefanos’, so there really wasn’t much of anything to say.

Besides, he still had his tennis, the only thing in his life he’d ever felt proud of. The only thing he was better at than Stefanos, and the only thing he knew Stefanos was the one being jealous of.

How do you even manage those backhands, Stefanos would grumble with a shocked, reluctantly impressed look in his eye, and Dania would smirk and gloat at him silently. For once, there’d be no need to say anything or prove anything — he could let his tennis speak for itself, and he could allow himself to enjoy those moments of pride, rare as they came.

It was only fair there could be this one thing he was better at. Stefanos already had everything else.

He loses the Queen’s final to Novak, which is upsetting, but not enough to really hurt. It was a good match, and he did his best. Novak was just better.

In the evening, back in his hotel room, he watches Novak’s press conference and listens to him wax poetics about Dania’s solid game and exceptional personality, and feels like a fraud. He wishes he could be the person Novak is describing — probably believing the words he’s saying, even — but that person doesn’t exist.

Dania can be edgy and snarky. He can be funny and even charming. He can be confident and clever. It’s a lot of roles he’s learned how to play, all comfortable and familiar, and sometimes slipping into them is like putting on an old, well-worn pair of slippers.

Try being someone you’d like, his therapist had told him. See if you can actually be that person.

The problem is, he can play pretend all he wants, hoping for his personality to slip away and dissolve, disintegrate into all the roles he’s playing day in and out, but there’s no escaping his own treacherous mind come nighttime and there’s no one around to perform for.

Wherever he goes, there he is.

I can’t imagine how anyone could stand you, Stefanos had told him once, and Dania sympathises. He can’t imagine that himself. And at least, unlike him, Stefanos has always had a great imagination.

He checks the time, and it’s only nine. He suddenly can’t stand it, being here in the empty hotel room with nothing but his own mind to focus on, the toxicity of his thoughts poisoning his own body. He gets up and grabs his phone and his hoodie.

An hour later he’s sitting at a booth of one if the ugliest, filthiest pubs all of London has to offer. He’s put a lot of effort into finding such a place — a dirty God forsaken hole in a basement of an old crumbling building. It matches nicely with the contents of his mind, and it’s even better that no one should recognise him here.

He considers picking up a girl, but then he’s out of energy to go through the necessary wooing and flirting and talking, and that particular role doesn’t feel right tonight. So instead he keeps eying the men that keep walking past him, hoping the sight of him would be enough to telegraph the message, even though he’s placed himself at the furthest, most inconspicuous corner of the room.

He only has to wait for a couple of hours, and by the time a bloke approaches him, he’s had about five whiskey and cokes, and he is pleasantly tipsy.

“Hey,” the bloke says, looking him up and down. He is shorter than Dania, but then — almost everyone is. He is sturdy and broad though, and has a lumberjack sort of beard, bright red and bushy. The pub’s lights are reflecting on his bald head. He looks nothing like Stefanos. He will do. “You want a drink?” he says, even though Dania is sipping one as he speaks, and the empty glasses on the table in front of them provide a very obvious, if sad, conclusion.

“Sure,” he says, struggling to decide which version of Dania he should be for this guy. In the end, it probably won’t even matter, because the bloke has a clear intention written all over his place. Dania doubts he’s approached him to learn all about his hopes, dreams and aspirations. This guy wants to fuck.

“You really remind me of someone,” the guy says, after he’s come back from the bar with a couple of new drinks. He sets them on the table and plops down into the seat across from him, looking Dania over pensively, and Dania winces. It’s all over if this guy recognises him, and he’s out of gas to go through the whole waiting thing for the second time. It’s already close to midnight.

But the guy doesn’t elaborate, and maybe he can salvage this, still.

“Kevin,” the man says, offering his hand, and they shake over the table.

“Dania,” he replies with a smile that feels plastic on his face.

“What is that, Polish?”

“Yeah,” he says smoothly, glad to confirm that Kevin has no idea who he is. “Came here to study economics a few years ago.”

He doesn’t know why he says it, except it feels easy and familiar to be someone else, a version of himself that could maybe have existed in some other life. It’s just good to not feel like himself.

“You have lovely dimples, Dania,” Kevin says, and his grin turns sharp and predatory, and Dania sighs with relief. He hopes this won’t take much more time now.

An hour later Dania takes him to a classless, cheap hotel just shy of Paddington station, which is convenient, because it’s only a short walk from the pub, and he’s not going to take Kevin to his fancy luxurious room in Savoy and have him gape and ask too many questions. He pays a hundred quid to the reception manager and asks for any room with a queen-sized bed available, while Kevin stands close to him, his breath hot at the back of Dania’s neck.

The room they get is dark and bland and smells pungently of piss and vomit. He doesn’t dwell on it, because Kevin is pressing him against the door as soon as they shut it behind them, and there are chapped lips on his. Kevin has to stand on his tiptoes to reach him, which is a bit awkward, but he is still a solid, comforting weight against his body, broad and muscular and strong. His tongue pushes into Dania’s mouth, and he can taste the cheap whiskey from the pub.

“I’m gonna fuck you,” Kevin whispers harshly against his neck, and Dania shivers, heat building low in his belly. He desperately wishes Stefanos could see him now — being kissed, being wanted by somebody, a red-blooded human being.

“Yeah, yeah,” he mutters, and Kevin roughly grabs his cock through his jeans, effectively making him lose his train of thought, leaving only one pulsating desire to feel someone want him, to have someone’s hands running up and down his back, consumed by a child-like hunger for human contact and the comfort that came with it.

Kevin drags him by the arm and pushes him onto the flimsy bed. He turns the bedside lamp on, exposing the numerous dubious stains on the mattress for both of them to see.

“Fuck, you’re skinny,” Kevin mutters, stripping off his t-shirt, and okay, whatever floats the guy’s boat. Dania knows he isn’t the most muscular guy, but he is still an elite athlete, even though it doesn’t feel like it next to a guy of Kevin’s built. “I’m gonna fuck you so hard.”

He hums, shutting his eyes and falling back against the shitty stained sheets, lifting his hips to help Kevin strip him of his jeans and underwear. He is mostly hard now and his body is loose and heavy and hot with anticipation.

“Come on, come on,” he says, looking back at Kevin, and there must be something on his face or in his eyes, because Kevin freezes, staring at him, unblinking. His hand stops where it’s been squeezing Dania’s cock, and the atmosphere in the room suddenly changes, filling with bitterness and stale regret.

“Fuck,” Kevin mutters with a note of finality, tearing his gaze away. “Sorry, mate, I just can’t do it.”

Dania swallows past the excess of saliva in his mouth, his stomach dropping. Blood rushes through his head, a roaring confusion in his ears. He is aware he is not exactly attractive by any means, with his small chin and thin lips and receding hairline and gangly bony constitution, but it’s never been bad enough for someone to reject him at the stage of already having spread his legs, a hand moving on his cock.

He stares at Kevin silently, not sure if there are words that exist that could fix this disaster, that could make Kevin forgive him for whatever it is he’s said or done wrong and just fuck him anyway.

“You remind me too much of my ex,” Kevin adds tonelessly, leaning back on the mattress. “I just realised that now.”

“I’m sorry,” Dania says, the only thing he can come up with. He’s always been good at apologies.

“Yeah,” Kevin drawls and drops next to him on the bed.

They lay there awkwardly in suffocating silence, and Dania contemplates the path that’s led him here to this point — a cluttered saga of bad decisions and emotional melodrama. His hands are shaking and he stuffs them under his thighs. His right leg spasms. Kevin’s breathing is loud next to him, sound like sandpaper against his eardrums.

“Hey, um…” Kevin’s says after a while, a guilty note in his tone — he must have forgotten Dania’s name.

“Yeah?”

“You mind if I wank off?” Kevin says.

“No,” he tells him, looking at the rusty spot at the corner of his ceiling, humiliated and hollow and still a little hard. “Go right ahead.”

If you don’t know your boundaries, you won’t know what you have.

Dania had been standing in front of the house for a long time, listening to the sounds of heavy teenage partying coming from within. He’d found a spot by the huge dumpster garage, and the irony didn’t escape him. He clasped the small rectangle wrapped sloppily in blue wrapping paper with a golden bow on top, his fingers gone numb with how hard he was squeezing it. The air was hot and swollen and wet, and he still shivered.

This had been idiotic, a desperate Hail-Mary on his part, coming here. Stefanos might have invited him as a token gesture of goodwill, but that only meant Dania would suffer hours of pointless, empty small talk inside before Stefanos even remembered him being there, if he even would. They hadn’t talked, not really, not about anything important, for too long. And now Stefanos was somewhere, not here, not anywhere close.

If you don’t know your boundaries, you won’t know when to stop.

Dania knew his boundaries. He’d learned when to stop.

Happy Birthday, he had mouthed to the house and to Stefanos inside it, who couldn’t hear him of course. He wasn’t anywhere close.

He chucked the gift into the trash can behind him and walked away before it was too late. The rest of the night would just be a footnote to his failure.

If you don’t know your boundaries, you will push yourself over the edge.

Two days before Wimbledon’s main draw starts, Sascha rents an AirBnB apartment and throws a party, unbothered by the continuous complaints and criticisms he keeps getting from the other guys.

“The fuck is he doing, getting us all pissed before a Grand Slam?” Andrey says incredulously, and then still goes. They all still go, as if having collectively acknowledged the idiocy of the idea has somehow nullified the reasons of it being idiotic in the first place.

Dania goes too, because it beats staying alone in his hotel room by a long shot. There’s a lot of them here — most of the Italians and Frenchmen of the tour, a few Germans and, naturally, all of the Russians. Dania slides around the spacious rooms with a plastic cup of vodka-sprite in his hand and exchanges jokes with the guys, feeling like he’s back at Uni, attending the freshmen initiation party.

“Do you think the music’s alright?” Sascha asks him, catching him by the arm in the huge living room, and Dania barely hears him over the volume of the beat, reverberating unpleasantly in his chest.

He pointedly looks around the room. “Honestly, who gives a fuck? Look at these guys, they’re so pissed they’d probably dance to the Alphabet song.”

Sascha clicks his tongue. “Yeah, you might be right. But I just didn’t like the DJ last year, so I took it up myself this time.”

“I see,” Dania smirks. “You have yet again managed to put yourself there.”

“Oh shut up,” Sascha grins and smacks him on the shoulder. “I’m only asking because you’re such a music snob.”

“I’m not,” Dania says with an eye roll, because it’s a tired old argument now. “It’s not my fault you’re so tasteless and simple.”

“We can’t be all blessed like you,” Sascha smirks and takes a sip of murky liquid from his red plastic cup. “And have the talent to write music reviews for school papers.”

Dania frowns. “How do you know that?”

“Stef told me, I think,” Sascha shrugs, and a shiver runs through him at the name. He swallows past the dryness in his throat.

“That was a long time ago,” he says vaguely, and changes the topic. “Anyway, I didn’t know you had a party last year, too.”

“That’s because you weren’t invited last year,” Sascha smirks nastily, and this time Dania smacks him back. “What?” He laughs, white teeth flashing. “I thought you were an insufferable arsehole back then!”

“Past tense?” Dania says with a smile. “Have you grown soft on me?”

“I just don’t necessarily think you’re such a smug, arrogant bastard anymore,” Sascha lists with a raised eyebrow.

“Am I blushing yet?”

Sascha grins and downs the rest of his drink. “Speaking of Stef,” he says suddenly, and Dania has to think of when the hell they were speaking of him. His stomach twists, as Sascha shoots him a loaded look. “I wonder if he shows up.”

“Why?” He says, a wave of unspeakable dread and excitement rushing through him at the same time. “You think he’d want to get drunk with you so much he’d hop on a plane and fly here all the way from Monaco?”

“He’s in London,” Sascha says slowly. “When did you last talk to him?”

“Let me think,” he says with exceptional sarcasm. “Hmm, when did he beat me last?”

“You can’t have been surprised — a crippled child would have beaten you on clay,” Sascha comments, and Dania should get the fuck out of this conversation now, before he says something stupid. But his eyes are already glued to the front door, scanning everyone that walks through for a sign of a familiar head of curly hair. “You should talk to him.”

“Well I considered being a horrendous, nosy pain in the arse,” Dania says, hands twitching in his pockets. “But I didn’t want to step on your toes.”

“Ha ha bloody ha,” Sascha says, unimpressed. His gaze follows Dania’s pointedly to where he’s eying the door. “At least I’ve actually talked to him. Instead of brooding and tragically pining.”

Dania’s heart skips a beat before wildly going off.

“Mind your own fucking business,” Dania hisses with maybe too much venom in his voice, because Sascha steps back, eyes wide and shocked. Dania clenches his hands into fists inside his jean pockets, and tries to calm down his terrified heart. He turns around, a feeling just short of total panic engulfing him at the thought of anyone finding him out, seeing through his carefully constructed roles and masks and looking directly into the sick and twisted core of him.

“Hey, man, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—“ Sascha calls behind his back, but Dania is already out of earshot by the time he finishes his sentence. He walks over to the balcony where Andrey is laughing at something with Casper, and stays near them, without hearing any words they’re saying. The new location makes it harder for him to spy on the front door, and he has to step closer to Andrey to keep it in his clear line of sight.

“Hey,” he hears after a while, and when he looks up Andrey is leaning over to him and Casper is nowhere in sight. “Are you okay?”

He likes Andrey — the kind of an easy extravert who is friends with everyone and no one at once. They’ve known each other since they were children, and yet Dania would struggle to name five things Andrey is interested in.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he says, stretching his lips in a smile, and Andrey claps him on the back.

“Good, good,” he smiles absentmindedly. “Have you seen Stef?”

“No,” he lets out through gritted teeth, even as his eyes immediately shoot to the front door. There’s no one there. “Have you seen a Unicorn?”

“Alright, alright, none of my business, I get it,” Andrey sassy placatingly and looks around the room with an awkward smile. “I’m gonna go find Karen, I fear he’s had about a couple hundred shots by now.”

“Okay,” Dania says, a familiar twist of guilt in his gut at the name, but Andrey has already moved on.

He heads downstairs, surprised to find the kitchen empty, eerie and unfamiliar-looking in the light of the muted TV. He’s expected at least a few guys here, drinking and having a deep, meaningful conversation about the unbearableness of existence, but maybe it’s just his Russian experience speaking. His eyes catch on the telly, where that commercial for children’s GPS watch is playing, the one where a happy family go camping and the little kid gets lost in the woods. The camera pans on the kid’s frightened face, just as he presses a button on his disproportionally huge smart watch — seeming even bigger on the boy’s tiny wrist — and sends his family his GPS coordinates. Immediately, his face breaks into a relieved wide grin as his parents and sister emerge from the trees, clutching their smartphones, and rush to embrace him. Order now! You’ll thank God you did!

Dania would die before he admits it, but the cheesy commercial always gets him choked up, the joy of the reunited family, the parents’ unadulterated happiness at finding their kid, all that sentimental crap. He watches the commercial from start to finish, his throat closing up, but his eyes stay dry. He hasn’t cried in years.

The kitchen looks like a frat party has taken place here, empty beer bottles scattered around and empty plastic plates with half-eaten pizza on the windowsill. Dania carries a bunch of empty beer glasses into the sink and rinses them under the faucet. Then he wraps up the cold pizza, puts it in the fridge, and crams the box into the trash can. He knows it’s not his job to do this, but it’s something to do with himself, and he might as well try and be useful. He’s already ashamed of the way he spoke to Sascha earlier, and he hopes to make it a little easier for him to tidy the place up come morning — but then, Sascha would probably hire a cleaner to do that, anyway.

He’s just finished loading the dishwasher when the sound of explosive laughter from upstairs seeps through the ceiling. Wiping his hands dry, he walks back to the party.

“Dania!” Andrey yells the moment he steps into the room, and he startles to suddenly have all the eyes in the room staring at him. There are still about thirty people left, even though it’s way past midnight and most of them have practice the following morning — the Italians grouped together by the balcony, the Frenchmen sprawled over the couch. A few guys keep wandering around the room, mingling and babbling drunkenly. Dania spots Karen stretched out in an armchair, looking ready to pass out, a red plastic cup almost slipping out of his loose fingers. “We were just talking about you!”

“Only the good stuff, I hope,” he says lightly, his mouth going desert-dry.

“We’re building the perfect player,” Sascha explains from where he’s sitting on the armrest of the sofa. “Your backhand came up.”

“Of course it did,” he says, aiming for lighthearted confidence but missing by a mile and coming off superior and smug instead.

Diego Schwartzman huffs from his spot on the sofa, his tiny frame jammed in between Thiem and Delbonis. He looks severely drunk. “It’s not that good,” he grumbles, and Dania thinks, simply, yes, it is. He is perfectly aware of just how good his game is, just as clearly as he is of how much the rest of his life isn’t. Schwartzman can talk all he wants, but no one will take his hard-earned game confidence from him.

“It’s better than most,” Dania says, which is technically true. Most of the guys hum in reluctant agreement, but Diego sniffs, as if personally offended.

“Wouldn’t ever pick your personality, though,” he says, shaking his head, and Dominic clicks his tongue and kicks him in the shin. The mood in the room immediately shifts, everyone going quiet and somber, eyes fleeting between the three of them as if watching a match.

Don’t ever let yourself be anyone’s doormat, the familiar voice rings in his head, as disproportionate amount of anger and hurt bloom in his chest, and he feels suddenly on the verge of lunging forward and punching the guy.

“Right back at you,” he sneers, heart thundering in his throat. “Too bad your personality isn’t the only thing about you I wouldn’t pick.”

“Dania,” Sascha hisses with huge panicked eyes, but it’s too late and Schwartzman has already jumped up and is staring up at Dania with a distinct look of someone itching for a fight. He sways on his feet, pointing an unsteady finger at him.

“You arrogant asshole!” Schwartzman snaps, his accent thicker than ever now that he’s drunk and furious. “You wanna fight me? Let’s fucking fight!”

“Diego!” Dominic says sharply, grabbing Schwartzman by the arm, but Schwartzman shakes him off.

“I don’t fight women and children,” Dania says slowly. He is great at many roles, but the asshole one comes the most naturally to him. “Or children-sized men, in your case.”

Schwartzman lunges forward, but his foot catches against the coffee table and he stumbles, crashing into Sinner. Sascha jumps out and puts himself between them, hands in the air. “Guys, guys,” he says in a gentle but urgent tone, “let’s just drop this, alright?”

“Why did you even come?” Schwartzman yells, as if Sascha hasn’t spoken. “No one wanted you here!”

“Fuck, Diego,” Dominic snaps, looking murderous. “Go outside and get some fucking air!”

Dania opens his mouth to say something he’s not even properly thought of yet, humiliation and hurt flaring up unbearably in his chest. He shouldn’t have come here, he thinks, regret slicing through him like a knife, the eyes of everyone in the room prickling his skin like pins and needles.

Sascha grabs his forearm in a vice grip, “Just drop it. Please.”

Dania closes his mouth with a snap. With a corner of his eye he sees Dominic and Delbonis escorting Schwartzman to the balcony.

The room is quiet and tense, the sound of paper cups creaking thunderous in his ears. Now that Schwartzman is out, everyone is looking at him.

Serves him fucking right for causing a scene. And Schwartzman only went and voiced what everyone was thinking anyway.

“Glad I haven’t missed all the fun,” a painfully familiar voice says from behind him, and Dania whips around. Stefanos stands there, tall and beautiful and glowing, hands in his pockets, a crooked smile on his face.

“Stef!” Sascha yells with palpable relief, letting go of Dania’s arm and rushing to greet Stefanos. The room is lively and buzzing with energy again, everyone moving around to shake hands and say their hellos. No one spares Dania another glance.

He’s been craving to see Stefanos for weeks, almost like a physical compulsion — an itch he couldn’t scratch — and now that he is actually here, Dania needs to get the fuck away from him. Having Stefanos look at him with narrowed brown eyes feels like actual torture, as though he could see directly through Dania’s shitty façade to the even shittier, toxic layers underneath.

He needs to leave, now.

But then Stefanos steps into his personal space. “Congratulations on Queen’s. Great match.”

“I lost,” he snaps, fighting the urge to take a step back.

“Still a great match,” Stefanos says with a quirk of his lips. “I think you have a really good shot at Wimbledon title.”

“So do I,” Dania says quickly, and they fall silent. Stefanos’ hand comes up to run through his hair, and a few curls bounce against his cheekbone. He is so beautiful, it steals his breath away.

“Yeah, um, I have to go,” he says after a long beat of uncomfortable silence, holding up his hoodie, and Stefanos frowns.

“But I only just got here,” he says in surprise, and Dania bristles.

“If only I had other things to do besides sitting around and waiting for you to show up at a party,” he drawls, and Stefanos frowns even harder. “As if the entire world revolved around you. Imagine that.”

“I didn’t mean—“ he lets out a long-suffering breath, as if collecting himself in front of Dania’s exceptional stupidity. “I meant: weren’t you looking for me?”

“What?” Dania croaks, and there must be something wrong with acoustics, so he clears his throat and tries again. “What? No I wasn’t.”

“Sascha said you were,” Stefanos says with raised eyebrows, and a feeling of betrayal washes over him. He will never mention Stefanos’ name to Zverev, not ever again.

“Sascha has had a little too much to drink.”

“He looks sober enough to me,” Stefanos shrugs.

The tension in Dania’s chest snaps and explodes. “What do you want from me? I already said I’m leaving!”

“I just want to have a normal conversation with you for two seconds!” Stefanos raises his voice, hands in the air. “And I wanted to apologise! For what I said to you at the Laver Cup gala.”

“Fine, you’re sorry, I get it. We both had some drinks and shouldn’t have crossed paths,” he says, pulling his hoodie over his head.

“That’s not what I—“ Stefanos shakes his head and looks at the ceiling. “It was mean and uncalled for. I shouldn’t have said it. And I just don’t want to leave things… festering between us.”

“There’s nothing festering between anybody,” Dania says, and swallows the bile in his throat. “And you didn’t say anything I hadn’t heard a million times before, so…” he shrugs. “Here, that was at least ten seconds. See you.”

Stefanos narrows his eyes, looking at him with intense focus, as if trying to solve a maths problem. “I’m curious,” he says harshly and folds his arms over his chest. “How come you are all smiles and jokes when somebody insults your tennis, but then you completely fucking lose it whenever somebody insults you?”

It’s an idiotic question. Dania shoves his hands into the hoodie pocket and hopes Stefanos won’t notice just how badly his leg is spasming.

“I know my tennis is great,” he says evenly.

“What, as opposed to your personality?” Stefanos says shrewdly, and another spasm jolts through his hands, all the way up to his shoulders. “You know what I think? I think you’re actually insecure, so much so that you get into fights with people to avoid letting them see just how much you don’t like yourself.”

“Wow, thanks,” Dania snaps, with a kind of elation and dread intertwined. “This will spare me years of psychoanalysis.”

Stefanos doesn’t say anything, just stares at him with silent judgement.

“Now I hate to break this therapy session, but I’m gonna go,” Dania says, and then hesitates, waiting for something he cannot even name.

Stefanos sighs and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, they are soft and sad and a little glassy, as if Stefanos was letting go.

“I wish you all the best,” he says with a note of unbearable finality in his voice.

Dania freezes at the words, only for a moment, his heart hammering in his chest, loud and clear, as if it wants out and to give up on him. But then Stefanos walks away, like a door shutting in his face. He allows himself to look at his retreating figure, a new sort of violent panic surging up in his chest.

And then he forces himself to turn and make the long walk of shame across the room to the exit doors. He keeps his shoulders back and his chin up the whole way there, compensating with good posture for the fact that he is no longer welcome here. He thinks the other guys’ eyes follow him as he goes, like coyotes that blink slyly at him, their smiles saying that even one so tall must sleep sometime.

It went like this:

In a land far, far away, there was a grim old castle on a hill behind a mountain. No one lived there except for a little boy, who kept wandering around the many empty rooms, the silence torturing his soul. This little boy was so unlucky as to have blue hair, which made him so frightfully ugly that all the people and children ran away from him with disgust and fear in their eyes. And so the little boy wandered through the empty dark castle, sad and lonely, because he knew he was fated to die there among the cold stone walls and the ringing silence.

Or it went like this:

There once was a tower deep into a magic forest, where no one went, for it was dark and scary. The tower stood tall among the old twisted trees and it had no doors and no windows. Inside lived a little boy, who had been cast out, frightened and alone, into the wilderness by an evil witch. It was very dark inside the tower, and the little boy never saw any light, so he had to pick and poke the wall of the tower with his bare little fingers until he made a hole. Once it was big enough, he shouted for help, because he hoped someone would save him, but if anyone passed his tower and tried to climb it, they fell down and were blinded by the thorny brambles below. The little boy cried and pleaded, but no more people tried to save him, and so he died alone, forever trapped inside the dark tower.

Or maybe —

Stop it. None of that is true.

He thinks sometimes how much easier it would have been if he could tell a perfect story that would explain and excuse the way he were. A clear and easy plot like in many, many fairytales he used to read as a child.

But there’s no excuse and no explanation for why he is the way he is. There were never any towers or castles or even old houses in the woods.

He grew up in a an old Stalinka flat, east of the centre of Moscow, the sort of apartment that was built for the intelligentsia back in the 30-s and passed down through generations, history and design preserved. He remembers going to sleep and staring at the high ceilings, squinting at the stucco moulding on the walls. The flat had never seen any renovation and smelled of old people and old history, and Dania sometimes felt consumed by it, like he wasliving a fairy tale, trapped in a castle of forgotten books and an untouched piano and black-and-white photographs of sullen, unsmiling people on the walls. The floors creaked when he walked and the doors screeched.

It would have been easy to say, no, it wasn’t like that, because I suffered, but the truth is — he’s never suffered anything. Never went through a trauma, wasn’t starved or abused or beaten by his father. There was no reason for him to turn into the person he did, no justifiable excuse for people to point at and usher in soft, tragic voices, that’s why he became like his!

In a public kindergarten his mother signed him up for, his parents were immediately told he hadn’t passed the necessary tests. Arrested psychological development on top of delayed speech development. He hadn’t known how to read and hadn’t even learned the letters of the alphabet. He hadn’t known how to count. At age five, he was horrifically behind all the other children in the class, who knew how to do all those things before they stepped into the building. He was refused to be taken in, and Dania would hear for many years afterwards the reminders of just how unbelievably huge a disappointment he turned out to be.

I was reading novels when I was your age, his father kept telling him with a look of distaste. I was already multiplying by hundreds. Fucked up genetics you got, I see.

But none of his parents seemed to be interested in teaching him, so in the end, his father pulled a favour and Dania was put into a private kindergarten reserved for children of former KGB officials, because I don’t want to see your empty face, devoid of any thought, wandering around the flat all day, doing nothing, just like your daddy did.

He didn’t know who his real ‘daddy’ was, only that he’d been a stupid, lazy, undisciplined waste of space — just like Dania was turning out to be — who’d somehow managed to seduce Dania’s dissolute mother while her honest, proper Soviet husband was away in service to his country. His father never ceased to remind him of that, whenever Dania did something stupid, like failing to count properly or read the words correctly.

Later, after the teachers had finally taught him to read, Dania discovered the marvel that was the old family library in the sitting room — shelves upon shelves of old, previously unseen books, some of them in foreign languages. It was the sort of escapism he immediately took to, since the telly was strictly forbidden to him, and he didn’t have friends to play with on the playground outside. Even his father’s face grew less constricted and shut off when he saw his son reading another book.

A man must be well-read, he would say.

That was one of two things that his father asked of him, that he be a man.

At times it felt like he was living a fairy tale, a little boy stuck in a patchwork old home, cobbled together from misery and indifference. Only no one came to rescue him in the end.

By the time he turned nine, he’d read through most of his parents library. Majority of the books he’d swallowed dealt with love in one form or another, but then, he started to realise, most things in life did. For the first time, then, he wondered, if there was something wrong with him.

Did he actually love anyone?

They used to have an old family dog, Dimka — a large fluffy mixed breed, too old to do anything but lie around all day and lick Dania’s face whenever he petted it. Dania was the one who was in charge of taking care of Dimka, which included taking him out for walks. Once, when an eight-year-old Dania was walking him in the park on a short leash, Dimka looked at him with his old sad eyes, and Dania sympathised. He let the dog of the leash to run around for a bit, and Dimka wandered into the woods, never to be seen again.

It crushed him then, to lose the only living creature who had ever shown him affection within the walls of the dusty old flat, and Dania cried for months after it happened, guilty and ashamed for letting the dog down. But had he loved Dimka?

Probably not. Love was supposed to be a grand and invigorating feeling, and this felt more like pity, guilt and regret.

Did he love his grandmother? He sure liked her, but he only ever saw her on the New Year and Christmas Days, and sometimes on Easter, and she never called him in the time in between. He doubted he loved her, either.

Did he love his sisters? He respected them. He admired them. But they had been like a different species from him, undamaged and whole, before they moved out soon after he turned six and he barely saw them after. They hadn’t been too interested in his fragile, whining and crying self even before they moved though, no matter how much their mother tried to dump him on them for babysitting. No, he probably didn’t love them, after all.

Did he love his parents? He kept thinking about the other kids in his school and even the children back in his kindergarten, who waited with baited breath for their moms or dads to come pick them up, reverent in their love. He had never felt like that. He was pretty sure his father didn’t love him, let alone like him, and he barely knew his mother, the perpetually dazed woman, most of the time drowsy and a little sleepy, as if she wanted nothing more than to spend her entire days curled up in bed. He barely spent any time with either of his parents, and they had made sure he was hardly ever home until late in the evenings. His mother signed him up first for swimming lessons and then for tennis lessons in the same building. A year later he was also in a chess club. By the time he finished the fourth grade, he was also in a physics and maths group, which his school teachers had insisted upon.

Whenever his mother asked him tonelessly about his day, he suspected she hardly listened to his answers, dozing off and looking out the windows, nodding and humming at all the wrong places. He was never quite sure if she was tired or just didn’t care. Dania got the same distracted vibe from a lot of the adults in his life — teachers, counsellors, his friends’ parents, Anna Ivanovna at the chess club, even his coach at the tennis centre. They all seemed to be asking him questions they didn’t really need or want the answers to. His father never even asked.

Did he love his parents? It didn’t feel like love, or at least like anything described in all those books he’d read. At times, out of clinical, detached curiosity, he’d imagine them dying somehow. He’d run this experiment in his own mind, the way he’d get the news that would inform him his family were found dead at a burned down Moscow flat, or killed in a car accident. He tasted those words, seeing what kind of emotion such hypothetical news would provoke.

He felt nothing. Maybe a little sad at about that fact, only proving to himself how deeply fucked up he was.

Maybe he was supposed to be loved first, in order to know how to love. Maybe only the people who were loved could ever have a capacity for loving someone back. Or maybe there was just, indeed, something horribly wrong with him.

And that was just infinitely worse than any fairytale that didn’t happen.

The first week of Wimbledon passes in a whirlwind of training, work-out and long strategy sessions with Gilles, that are getting harder and harder to follow, his focus jumping from one thing to another, voices screaming in his head, memories, unbidden, resurfacing and swimming before his eyes.

Stefanos was right. Now it’s festering. Dania is festering. Like an untreated decaying wound.

He obsesses over his last conversation with Stefanos until he’s learned every word of it by heart.

Fuck. He’s a stupid fucking cunt. He didn’t even ask Stefanos about his retirement, the only thing that had been on his mind for weeks. He didn’t ask Stefanos anything. He just opened his stupid mouth and poured oceans of shit onto him, like he always fucking does.

Thinking about it is unbearable, and yet it is the only thing he keeps thinking about. He obsesses over what he should’ve said instead, fantasising about softer, much more honest words he would have preferred to say to Stefanos instead, and his inability — or rather, incapacity — to do anything now is eating at him like a creature scratching at his insides, like worms chewing at his brain.

Everything is made worse by the unspeakable dread of the realisation that he might not see Stefanos ever again.

It’s a nasty habit he’s had for as long as they’ve knows each other — looking over his shoulder, continuously scanning his surroundings for a sight of Stefanos, until he’d spot him and feel his stomach drop like it does when you walk and suddenly miss a step. And then his eyes would stay glued to Stefanos, wouldn’t wander for more than a few seconds at a time. It’s a habit as deeply ingrained into him as washing his hands before meals or looking sideways before crossing a road, and he does it without thinking. Now that Stefanos will not be showing up, though, it makes him jittery and wrong-footed, as if there was suddenly something wrong with the world.

At the end of the first week, he contemplates calling Stefanos. He grabs his phone and tries to imagine Stefanos picking up, surprised and probably busy — he must have a lot of things to do now that he doesn’t have to practice and work out around the clock. He imagines hearing Stefanos voice through the little speaker and the way his own would sound breathy and hitching or, even worse, snarky and cruel.

He types a message, instead, because he has to do something.

Are you still in London?

He sends it before he can change his mind — a quick press of the button, like ripping a band-aid off. If Stefanos is in London, he will go and talk to him and ask him questions and have a human conversation and beg for his forgiveness.

Hey, comes a few seconds later, and then: No, back in Monaco

He stares at the words, the letters swimming before his eyes. He’s been too late. Stefanos has already left. He is gone, and now the festering wound in Dania’s chest will only continue to grow and decompose, until it’s infected his whole being.

There is no one to blame but himself.

It’s the same as always, this tragic roundabout of him doing stupid shit and then crushing himself under the weight of guilt and regret. He thinks about the Laver Cup, those five days of relaxing and chatting and enjoying the tennis. Now those days are forever tainted with the fucking truth that Daniil Medvedev has done it again, has found yet another way to fuck up everything he has, everything he has ever tried to get.

He looks back at his phone, reads Stefanos’ message again, and tries to find an excuse to say something else, but coming up short. Stefanos is in another country, doing the things he likes with the people he loves. He has no business being disrupted by a parasite like himself, trying to latch onto him like a leech. Stefanos has gone and left Dania behind, good riddance.

His phone chimes. Great match vs. Felix!

Dania lets out a breath he hasn’t realised he’s been holding. Another message comes, I thought no one could stop him now, the way he’s been playing recently, but you never cease to surprise me :)

Too bad I couldn’t surprise you in our RG semifinal, he sends before he overthinks.

You surprised me well enough by getting into the semis on clay in the first place, Stefanos texts and, somehow, now it’s a conversation.

Hey, I’m not too bad these days! he sends and winces — he should have specified he meant tennis.

No, Stefanos texts after a considerable amount of time that feels like an eternity, you are not.

And then: :)

In the dream, Kevin is pressing him down to the filthy mattress, and Dania is so horny. He keeps rutting up, and arching his spine, his entire body on fire and cold at once.

Yeah, just like that, Kevin says, and then his already blurry features melt and distort, and Stefanos is pressing down on him instead. You have lovely dimples, Stefanos says.

Dania is burning. There’s something horrible and wrong inside his chest, something that wasn’t supposed to be there. It’s twisting and trying to claw its way out through his rib cage and muscle, and he needs to keep it inside, because Stefanos mustn’t see.

He is too aroused. He arches into Stefanos’ body, but Stefanos presses a palm to his chest, keeping him down. No, I wanna see, he says, and Dania knows he means the thing inside his chest.

No, no, don’t, he says, but Stefanos reaches down and pulls his chest apart. His rib cage opens like a cardboard box, and Dania feels himself falling apart like an old rickety house. Stefanos peers insight, a strange expression on his face that Dania can’t understand, but his features are distorted and wrong, as if someone melted his face and moulded it back together without a reference.

These shouldn’t be here, Stefanos says, pulling things out of his chest, and Dania knows there were supposed to be organs inside of him, but Stefanos keeps taking out dusty children’s books, faded old tennis balls and empty pill bottles from his chest cavity. He takes out half a rotten apple, then a mirror shard, then a yellow sticky note. This is all wrong, Dania thinks, desperately, Stefanos shouldn’t see. It’s only a matter of time now before he sees the horrible, ugly thing inside him, too.

You are sick, Stefanos says, his voice booming in his ears, as he pulls out the Book of Stefanos next. It’s a huge volume that couldn’t have possibly fit inside him, but it’s there, still, and Stefanos looks at it with disgust, creeped out. Dania’s eyes burn, but he hasn’t cried in years, he remembers, he mustn’t cry now. The creature inside him thrashes and wails.

His heart is next, and Stefanos pulls it out, holding it with two fingers, wincing. How have you been living with this thing? He wonders and shows Dania his pathetic, shrivelled little organ, black and decaying around the edges. It’s a sad little thing, pumping weakly, dusty and rotten and covered with mould, and Dania gasps at the undignified sight of it. Stefanos throws it sideways, and it lands on the floor somewhere with a hollow smack.

What is this now? Stefanos says, and Dania has to look away, because he doesn’t want to see, can’t watch Stefanos pull out the creature that lives inside him. He twists away, but Stefanos forces him to look, anyway. There’s something small and dark and bloody in his hands, thrashing and crying — the broken, mutilated thing inside him is crying. It should be dead, the state it’s in, but somehow it’s still fighting for life, wailing and whimpering and disgusting, and Dania can’t bear to look at it, the nasty obscenity of it.

This is sick, Stefanos says, holding the mutilated creature in his hands. Kill it, before it contaminates everyone around you.

No, no, Dania pleads, and he is falling to pieces. He can’t kill the little creature, because he feels sorry for it. It’s not its fault that it is so ugly and broken and dying. It didn’t deserve all the horrible things that happened to it. His eyes feel wet, and his father slaps him across the cheek.

Control yourself, he orders. They are standing by the tall old bookcase in their sitting room. Dania is crying. He hasn’t cried in years. His mouth feels weird and he reaches out and takes a mouthful of bloodied teeth out.

You’re disintegrating, his father says, eyes empty and hollow. He has blue hair and a terrifying blue beard. Your mind faster than your body. Kill it.

No, he tries to say but he has no teeth and no mouth to scream with. His father is looming over him, even though Dania is much taller, and he is in pain. It hurts everywhere at once – his legs, his fingers, his head, tearing him apart. The pain is so overwhelming in its intensity, he thinks, with some relief, that he might die, finally, at last. He screams, limbs twitching uselessly, as the horrible heart-wrenching sound escapes his lungs. He screams and screams, thinking I’m not gonna survive this, and he wishes it to stop and to go on, because at this moment, here and now, he feels alive —

—He wakes up.

The hotel room is quiet and dark and empty around him. His heart is pounding in his chest. His right leg is cramping badly.

He reaches up and runs his fingers over his eyes — they are dry. He hasn’t cried in years.

The time Dania most consistently misses Stefanos is first thing in the morning, when he is still half-asleep, unreconciled to the new day. He checks his social media accounts, reads fan messages, and as the days go by, there’re less and less mentions of Stefanos amount the tennis media. It’s like he’s gradually fading into obscurity, the world getting bored as soon as the novelty started to wear off, and Dania only misses him sharper.

He barely tastes his breakfast, thinking feverishly of something he could text Stefanos that wouldn’t sound needy or desperate or like he’s barely holding himself together. The idea of Stefanos reading his pathetic message and deciding he’d rather ignore it, makes him nauseous and jittery. There’s no real reason for him to keep trying to contact the man — they are not friends, and it’s not like they’ve had any sort of relationship for years. Thinking otherwise is deluding himself.

I’m playing Zverev today, he ends up texting, fingers shaky over the keyboard, any tips?

You know how to manage him better than I do, comes a reply barely a minute later. Dania feels conflicted at the compliment, as he usually does — even the matches he’d thought he played well at the time start to look unbearably bad when he rewatches them later, each of his errors sending a jolt of shame through him, until he’s too embarrassed to watch himself at all.

Good luck! :) Another text says, and Dania thinks about replying with you gonna be rooting for me? ;) but then quickly dismisses it lest he sound like he’s fishing for another compliment.

Thanks, he sends instead, short and simple. He takes a big gulp of black coffee. It is better that way, muddy and harsh, more of a shock to the system. His thigh is throbbing, and he rubs at it absent-mindedly, wondering if there’s any other way to keep the interaction with Stefanos going, anything else to say that wouldn’t sound empty and pointless.

His phone vibrates again. I’ll be rooting for you! Stefanos has texted him. He stares at the words, not sure if he’s read them right. His heart is suddenly hammering away in his chest.

Can we talk? He messages on a whim, because it’s now or fucking never. Not right now, but maybe after Wimbledon? He adds hastily.

Stefanos doesn’t take long to reply. Sure, reads the message. And then, you know where to find me.

He finishes his breakfast and five minutes later cannot remember what he even ate. He gets his gear and heads to the practice court. He’s got another semifinal to play, and he can’t afford to be jittery and distracted.

He thinks of Nether Wallop. He thinks of Stefanos walking down the slope, his white shirt open at the throat, the light shining gold.

On Friday he wins the semifinal. Not easily and not playing his best, but he does it, anyway. It was a five setter, and by the time he gets back to his hotel room, he’s utterly exhausted. He’s asleep before his head hits the pillow and he doesn’t dream.

On Sunday he loses the final to Novak.

He plays his best, he commits almost no unforced errors. He wins the first set, even, and is up a break in the second. That’s when the crowd start booing him.

And he knows he should ignore it, has worked with his therapist after the AO final specifically on dealing with it. And yet, the panic and hurt and wild raw anger are all back, making home in his chest. It’s nothing personal, Francesca said the last time, you have to remember they don’t hate you. They just want the other guy to win, as is their right. He tries to focus on the words, but they keep sounding further and further away in his mind, drowned by all the other voices screaming and whispering in his head. I can’t imagine how anyone could stand you, rings Stefanos voice, and he thinks, yes, me neither. Nor the people in the audience as well. They all see him for what he really is, the miserable piece of trash trying to take Novak’s shot at the 21^st Slam again, as if he deserved to.

He knows what he is. And yet he has chosen to ignore this knowledge, to banish it to some murky recess of his mind — the basement storage area for things you couldn’t bear to think about — the same place you hid the knowledge that you were going to die, so you could live your life without being depressed every minute of every day. He’s chosen to ignore it, but the crowd hasn’t.

It gets ugly in the third set. He’s losing and down a break, and the crowd cheers his double faults. He screams at himself, then at Gilles in his box and then at the Umpire. The crowd boos him more. At the start of the fourth set, his leg is cramping so badly he can barely hold himself straight.

At the ceremony Novak leans in to whisper in his ear, It’ll get better, you’ll see. They will all love you one day.

But Novak doesn’t get it. No one has loved Dania, not in the way it matters. And if they haven’t for twenty-six years of his life, he doubts they ever will. He holds the runner-up plate and smiles for the photographs, his eyes burning and hot. He keeps blinking, and even though it’s been many years, even though there’s no liquid left in his body, he still fears he might cry, fail to control himself, fail to be a man.

He digs out the memory, as the photographers around him flash their cameras and the crowd cheer, of Stefanos walking down the slope, his hair shining gold.

He thinks he’ll be fine at first, the next morning after Wimbledon. He manages to get out of bed with relative ease, brush his teeth without glancing at the mirror, and makes it all the way to the kitchen, before it drowns him, like a tsunami wave of incomprehensible guilt and shame and regret.

He can’t do it, he can’t handle it. He needs to get the fuck out of here and disappear. Maybe if he hides deep enough, he won’t be able to hear his own thought and bear with his own existence. He’s been a fucking idiot. He’s been shit. He needs to do something.

He eyeballs the kitchen knife for a second, but then dismisses it like he has been doing for the last few years. It was okay to cut himself when no one would see the extent of it, back when he was a nobody at the outskirts of the ATP rankings, unable to afford a coach or physio. He’d broken a mirror once in yet another fit of uncontrollable rage, and the mirror shard felt right in his hand when he slashed it across his thigh for the first time to penalise himself. He had to stop as soon as his team grew and expanded, though, because it was one thing to cut himself in the safety of anonymity and a completely different one to know he’d be immediately found out at the next massage therapy or physio session. And even if his team might have missed it, Dasha definitely wouldn’t have.

He had to find another way, something that no one would ever see. He glances at the fridge, but it’ll be empty anyway.

By afternoon, he’s called Gilles and given him a week off — just a week for now, even though he knows he’ll miss Hamburg as he speaks. But Gilles would frown and ask questions, and all Dania wants is to please him and keep him happy. He’ll tell Gilles later.

He packs his things and drives to the countryside. On his way, he stops at a local Tesco to get a few bottles of whiskey. He doesn’t buy any groceries.

It was difficult at first to keep himself hungry, harder and much more excruciating than cutting himself. The first few days he kept going to the fridge, opening and closing the door, before talking himself out of snatching a piece of cheese or even getting a sip of milk. The whole point of it was to feel uncomfortable and pained, it wasn’t supposed to be a walk in the park. It was supposed to hurt. Because he was a fuck-up who deserved it.

He had to stop during the tournaments, of course, if he ever wanted to win anything, and Dania only needed to win every tournament on earth. So starving himself wasn’t an option in between matches, but it was good for an off-season or when he needed to take a break. No one would see and no one would know. It was perfect, except for the guilt and shame he felt doing it. Here he was — a rich elite athlete, spoilt with his life of luxury and opportunity, starving himself out of boredom and emotional melodrama while two thirds of the world population would trade places with him in a heartbeat, people who actually had no food because they couldn’t afford it. And Dania was a sad perverted fuck who fancied pretending he was one of them, one of the common people, going hungry for the thrills of it. What the fuck was he doing, inventing troubles and problems for himself, like he was some sick drama maniac, when he had no right to feel this way. He should have been fucking grateful for everything he had, and yet here he was again.

Thinking this inevitably led to new bouts of guilt and shame, which in turn led to more punishment. It was a tragic loop of cause and effect that was hard to break and that sometimes spiralled a bit out of control.

He had to be hospitalised a couple years ago after his strike went on for longer than his body could apparently handle. He had woken up one day, hooked up to an IV and force fed the food through the NG tube, and he has zero desire for a repeat of that. It was a miracle he managed to keep it quiet at the time, and he’s learnt to be more careful now.

He drinks the necessary amount of water. He eats half an apple once ever couple of days. This way, he can go on doing it for weeks and will only need a few days to recover afterwards, if he wishes.

He catches a glimpse of his own face reflected back at this in the car window and recoils. The problem is, he isn’t quite so sure he does wish to.

The little cottage is cold and silent and filthy as ever. The dishes from the last time are still in the sink, gone mouldy and black. Cockroaches are climbing all over the kitchenette as if they own the place. Dania considers smacking them with his shoe, but in the end he doesn’t care enough. He feels like he’s one of them, anyway.

He turns his phone off, as he always does when he comes to here. Nether Wallop was the place Dania went to in his mind, when everything was too much and he felt that he would explode with all the force of it, the way he had felt just before hitting Karen. Nether Wallop was safe, because it was secret; no one would ever find him there and Dania would never hurt them there. Nether Wallop was the place where he could be alone.

But Stefanos had found him there. He could have ruined everything, but instead, Stefanos had become a part of it. When Dania thought of the field, there was green grass, and a hill rolled gently down. There was no road. Stefanos walked down the slope, his white shirt open at the throat. The light was always gold.

In the cottage, Stefanos wasn’t good and he wasn’t bad. He just was there, like the crickets, and the smell of woodsmoke.

But it’s been years since Stefanos set foot here last.

For a long time after their fallout, Dania found himself overwhelmed by a childlike hunger for the guy who’d made himself a part of his recluse. He missed everything about the Stefanos, even the stuff that used to drive him crazy — his off-key singing, his pseudo philosophical ramblings, his inability to follow the plotline of even the simplest TV series — Wait a second, is that the same guy as before, or someone else? — when they’d watch telly in the little cottage of Nether Wallop. Spasms of wild longing would strike him out of nowhere, leaving him dazed and weepy, prone to sullen fits of anger and hysterics that inevitably got turned against the Umpires or even Gilles, which was completely unfair, since he wasn’t the one who’d abandoned him.

Dania is a miserable sad fuck. He had no business expecting Stefanos to forget that and let him off the hook. I can’t imagine how anyone could stand you, Stefanos had said, and the words are truer and louder than ever in his head now.

The only thing that’s made him worth anything at all has been his tennis, and he’s allowed himself to take pride at that. It has been the only thing he had to offer the world, the only thing he had to show for himself, that has somehow balanced out and excused the fact of his otherwise pointless existence in the first place. But he hasn’t won anything since the US Open, and even that had been a fluke, an unfortunate case of Novak imploding at the wrong moment. Dania could’ve won another tournament since, but he hasn’t. He had almost managed to convince himself that it was not a case of his tennis being bad but rather Rafa turning unstoppable, but then Stefanos went and took that excuse from him, too.

He is all out of excuses now.

Taking a huge gulp of whiskey, he wonders why he keeps doing this. There are no meaningful relationships in his life and the only purpose he’d set for himself now feels hazy and so distant it might as well have been light years away. His entire life, Dania has believed that his damage had to serve a purpose, that it wasn’t just a sick joke of the universe, wasn’t for nothing — that it was a good damage. It had made him into who he was for better or worse, made him into a greater player, better professional. It's the hurt he hid that fuelled the fire inside him.

But maybe there wasn’t such a thing as good damage. Only damage.

He thinks about Dasha, the early days of their relationship, the way she’d laugh and click her tongue at him, the way her kisses felt before they turned dry and passive. It was a good relationship, he thinks, up until it wasn’t, but then it’s not like he has much reference. He remembers the way she had looked at him, sad and a little pitiful, her words soft but distant, this is not working; and his own panicked attempts to keep her, excuses and shameless pleading, until she told him firmer and a little harsher, I just don’t love you anymore.

He doesn’t understand that still, the capacity of humans to cease their love as if flipping a switch. But maybe it was slow and gradual, and he just hadn’t noticed until it was too late. Maybe he just fails to comprehend it because he’s never experienced it himself. Did he love Dasha? It felt like it at the time, but now in hindsight he recognises his own neediness and loneliness of those time, the way Dasha satisfied those craving like finally scratching an itch he hadn’t been able reach his entire life. It had been comfortable and easy, and the role he played with her hadn’t felt like too much of a strain. Dasha took Dania under her wing, bringing him to parties after school, introducing him to what he’d been missing. Dania was intimidated at first—everybody he met seemed older and cooler than he was, even though most of them were his own age — but he quickly learned to adjust, each new mask he wore coming easier with practice.

But then it was over, and he was alone again, just as he always had been. Dasha was gone, and those good times, the parties and the laughter and the kisses and her tight embraces, surprisingly strong for her tiny frame, gone along with her.

He takes another long sip of the whiskey. He should have poured it into a cup, but there are no clean ones left and he doesn’t feel like scrubbing the mould of the ones in the sink, so he keeps gulping it down directly from the bottle. He tries to imagine his father’s face if he could see Dania now, but his imagination runs short. He bets it’d do something with disgust and disappointment, anyway.

It shouldn’t take long for him to get pissed and pass out, drinking so much on an empty stomach. He’d probably be out by twilight. The rain is pounding on the windows and the roof of the house, hollow never-ending drumming of water, as if the sky itself is mourning the waste of his life.  

He thinks of Stefanos. Stefanos walks down the slope, his white shirt open unbuttoned. Or was his shirt blue? Was the grass green or brown and dead? There was something about the light. He can’t remember now, details slipping through his mind, bothered by the drops of water breaking the woollen silence.

He closes his eyes, floating away through the fog, a strange coldness hiding in his chest. He should have talked to Stefanos. Should have said something before it was too late, should have asked for forgiveness. But it’s been years and years limping  by, snow after rain after thunder, loss after devastating loss, and now it’s only the summer crying in his window and time itself looking down at him with contempt.  

Stefanos walks down the slope, grass all around him. His hair glows gold.

There was a beautiful day once, somewhere down the line of him skipping the entire Asian swing to hide out at Nether Wallop and Stefanos showing up there unannounced. It was the perfect moment in time, he’d often think later, after they had broken the perpetual awkward animosity between them and before they drifted apart again.

Dania got up from the bed, drowsy and uncomprehending as he usually was this time of the early morning, and Stefanos was still in the cottage. He looked up at Dania when he entered the room, smiling crookedly.

“Well, well,” Stefanos said. “Look who’s here. I was wondering when you were gonna put in an appearance.”

“Hey,” he muttered, uncomfortably aware of himself as the object of close scrutiny. Stefanos was eyeballing him as though trying to figure out what Dania had been up all night. “It’s too early.”

“It’s almost noon,” Stefanos said, bemused, and raised the arm that had his watch on to prove his point. Dania startled. He never slept so late.

Stefanos opened the refrigerator and peered into it for a long time, tilting his head as if something fascinating was going on in there. Then he pulled out a carton of eggs and turned toward the table, his face soft and open, his hair a glorious mess.

“Any chance you could whip up one of those yummy omelettes?” He said. Dania shrugged — he’d made them the night before, because there was nothing else in the fridge and Stefanos got hungry. There was a warm feeling low in his belly at the thought of pleasing Stefanos with even such a tiny insignificant thing.

He made the omelette and Stefanos inhaled it like a starving person.

“Come on, eat your own, it’s amazing,” He said, without stopping to swallow first.

Dania shrugged. He was content to just sit there, watching Stefanos glow and eat his breakfast, and it was a rare thing for him those days — being content.

“It’s just eggs,” he said, smiling, and his face didn’t contort and didn’t crumble. For once smiling felt like something natural he didn’t have to strain himself to achieve. He suddenly wanted to touch Stefanos, the desire coloured with strange reverence, like touching a beautiful sculpture in Louvre. He was afraid his fingers would burn if he did.

“The only thing that would make it even better,” Stefanos said with a raised eyebrow, “is if you had clean plates like normal people to do to eat off. The state of this whole place…” He looked around pointedly, “Is just a stupid, childish act of pointless petulance.”

“Clean is a relative term,” Dania bit back. “And it’s never pointless to resist the social constructs society keeps pushing on us.”

Stefanos didn’t looked impressed.

“Viva la resistance!” Dania added with a smirk.

“I hate to break it to you, Che,” Stefanos said, biting his quivering lip. Dania recognised that gesture as him trying to keep himself from grinning. “But there’s mould on your forks. I don’t think it was socially constructed.”

And so Dania had to get up and wash the dishes so Stefanos would stop wrinkling his nose and complaining. It wasn’t that he minded doing it, just that he felt like he’d be better off without actual proper dishes, seeing as that he didn’t deserve living like a normal human at the moment. But he couldn’t tell Stefanos that, and he would do whatever Stefanos wanted, anyway. This, he couldn’t tell Stefanos, either.

“Your door is barely holding on the hinges,” Stefanos said after breakfast, swinging the door to the bedroom back and forth and wincing at the screeching sound it made. “You gotta fix it, it’s annoying.”

“I don’t have any tools,” Dania admitted with another wave of shame and inadequacy washing over him. It had been one of only two thing his father ever asked of him, that he be a man. And he had failed to do that in more ways than he could count.

“How come you don’t have any tools?” Stefanos drawled with a haughty expression. “Didn’t your Dad teach you to always keep the toolbox around the house?”

“Didn’t your Dad teach you manners?” He bit back, feeling the heat of embarrassment spreading across her face. He pondered on whether or not he was going to throw up, whether from his upset grumbling stomach or from Stefanos’ nosiness, he wasn’t sure. “For a guest, you’re very rude.”

“I am a great guest!” Stefanos exclaimed, as if Dania was the unreasonable one. “Come on, we’re gonna fix that door hinge.”

So they had to do go to the village hardware store, where Stefanos insisted on getting a brand new toolbox, along with some nails and dowels just in case — It’s a must-have in any household, Stefanos told him with an air of wisdom, and Dania smiled and didn’t argue. He felt like he was high when they got to a little bakery in the town centre for lunch, but not in the heavy, sad and hopeless way he’d typically get. This time, it was a giggly way that made that afternoon with Stefanos feel like a goofy adventure, the two of them having easy, lighthearted banter or cracking up at things that weren’t even funny, which somehow made them laugh even harder. They sat outside, and Stefanos placed the toolbox on his lap, his arms hugging it protectively as if it was an invaluable treasure. As they sipped tea and bit into their muffins, Dania squinted at Stefanos’ figure blotting out the glare of noon, haloed in sunlight. His hair glowed golden. He looked absolutely Godlike.

The village was busy and lively in the late afternoon, and long after finishing their lunch, they just sat at the bakery patio like retired old men, observing the young strivers with an air of benevolent amusement. It was as though they sensed an expiration date on the fun and wanted to drink every drop while they still could.

Back in the cottage Dania tried his best to help, but soon found himself completely useless at actually fixing something for once — he’d only ever been good at ruining things, after all. Stefanos kept huffing and criticising him, until he ran out of patience and told Dania to just stay by his side and watch him work — You might actually learn something, and Dania said, Sure, to humour him, but then he did end up learning something. At one point, Stefanos put down the screwdriver and said, I need something sharp, and Dania bit the inside of his cheek and said, definitely not your wit, then, because he suddenly felt light and dreamy and a little cheeky, and he wasn’t sure when he last felt like that. Stefanos rolled his eyes, and kept working on the door with solemn enthusiasm he sometimes brought to the most inconsequential tasks.

It was dark and chilly outside by the time Stefanos was done with the door. It didn’t creak anymore, and he looked proud and accomplished.

“Can we get something delivered here?” he asked Dania, plopping down on a loveseat in front of an old boxlike telly set from the nineties. “I’m hungry after all that physical labour.”

“Yes, the strain you’ve put on your fingers alone,” Dania smirked and Stefanos huffed and rolled his eyes again — You can pay me back with food, you ungrateful bastard. But Dania had never ordered any food to the cottage, so Stefanos had to look it up on his own phone, because Dania’s was dead and lying in a corner somewhere, far from sight. Afterwards, they sat on the couch with little distance between them and watched reruns of Father Ted, until the room grew dark around them, and Stefanos’ face was only illuminated by the soft white glow of the telly.

Stefanos stayed on the couch that night, and before closing his own freshly fixed bedroom door that didn’t screech anymore, Dania turned back and looked at him.

Stefanos was still staring at the TV screen stubbornly, even though his eyes kept sliding closed and his head drooping. He wasn’t smiling, but his face glowed with joyful purpose and content, as if all was right with the world. Dania thought fleetingly about grabbing his phone and filming him back then, but in the end was relieved that he hadn’t. If he had, he’d have only watched that video of Stefanos all the time, day in and day out, wasting away in front of it, rewinding it over and over.

Lying in bed and staring at the ceiling that night, Dania thought, clearly, that it had been one of the best days of his life. And he even got to fix something for change.

In the morning Stefanos was gone.

On the dinner table, Dania found a square yellow sticky note that said in Stefanos’ handwriting, Had to go back home. Until next time!

Hope bloomed in his chest, its roots spreading all the way to the tips of his fingers. He wasn’t a hopeful person, but even despite the anxiety that had dogged him all morning, he still felt a smile tugging at his lips, which was odd and surprising, considering there was no one in the room with him to pretend for.

He should have known right then and there that it would be the last time Stefanos came to his little cottage in Nether Wallop.

On the fourth day of his stay he drives to town and buys some more alcohol. This times we also gets half a dozen apples and a carton of eggs — he doesn’t want to end up in a hospital again.

On the seventh day in Nether Wallop, it starts raining again and doesn’t stop for so many days, Dania loses count. After a while, he can’t tell if it’s really raining or just white noise in his ears. He thinks he can hear the water flowing, the droplets thundering against the roof, if he stops and really listens. The sky is permanently murky and dark, and soon he can’t tell whether he wakes up in the mornings or after dinner. He keeps falling asleep with at odd hours of the day, his schedule all messed up, but he struggles to care.

He hasn’t left the house in days, he thinks. The water is pounding on the windows, as he looks onto the field outside, the grass tall and brown in the murky light of the weeping sky. There’s an old rusty Beetle sitting in his back garden, that sinks into the ground, collecting rain. He should have moved it or thrown it out when he bought the place, but it feels a part of it now on these cold damp grey mornings.

The rain tapping on the windowsill, he contemplates the pros and cons of going on.

He is a tech guy, he got into one of the top Moscow universities by winning an all-Russian maths competition, and scoring ninety-two percent on the physics one. He is used to looking at things from a direct, technical point of view, weighing carefully the pros and cons that usually seem more obvious to him than anyone else. He breaks things down methodically and coldly, detached and unfeeling, because numbers and measures have no use for pointless feelings.

His stomach twists excruciatingly. His right thigh is cramping. He should eat an apple, before it get so bad he can’t hold himself upright.

Maybe he should have stayed at university and gotten a degree. He’d have been of more use by now than a fraud of a world no. 1 that couldn’t secure a single title for almost a year, an impostor that had no business being ranked how he was and paid the money he was.

But it’s over and done now. He remembers going to class one last time, a side trip before shipping off to France for good — the last final goodbye to the old beautiful building and the people that shared classrooms with him. On his way to the principal’s office, he took a detour past the economics room and peered inside. He only stood there for a minute or two, but even so, you might have expected someone to look up and see him, maybe smile or throw a quick wave. That’s what usually happened when somebody peered into a classroom during a lecture. But everybody just kept working or sleeping or spacing out. It was as if Dania no longer existed in this environment, as if all that remained of him was an empty desk in the second row, a memorial to the guy who used to sit there.

It’s just a couple of lectures, Dasha used to tell him, trying to convince him to skip class and go on a fun trip to St. Petersburg instead. Who cares? She’d say. I do, Dania had wanted to say but he wasn’t sure he’d even meant it. He used to care — used to care a lot — and hadn’t quite gotten used to the feeling of not caring, though he was doing his best.

Dasha kept telling him for months that his sadness was temporary, and even kind of healthy. But it hadn’t been temporary, only she hadn’t realised it yet. He felt the same way after he’d quit on higher education and went full in with the tour, that sometimes felt like he’d never left college — the same kind of partying and gossiping and emotional melodrama all around. It bothered him when he met other players who spoke about their hometowns, and sometimes even their families, with casual disdain, as if they’d spent the first eighteen years of their lives in prison and had finally busted out. He wasn’t sure why it bothered him, only that he felt more inadequate than ever.

On what might be day twenty or thirty or what-the-fuck-ever, he turns his laptop on. He ignores the piles of notifications he’s got, and goes directly to YouTube, closes the rest of tabs and windows. He types in Stefanos Tsitsipas and mindlessly watches whatever results he’s got for hours and hours, until it feels a little less like an itch that he can’t scratch. He goes through the interviews first, then watches the highlight reels of his matches, watches the two on them shake hands coldly at the net. He leaves those fun ATP videos for last — a cherry on top — like a treat for himself, Stefanos smiley and warm and a bit awkward in them, looking directly at the camera, as if sensing Dania watching him on the other side of the screen from the future.

The idea of getting back to his life, back into tennis, now feels like it belongs to someone else that no longer exists. Before, there was Stefanos — however distant and out of reach, Dania could observe him and drink him in and convince himself the tiny shred of connection they’d once shared was still there. Even though he understood that, in some irrevocable way, Stefanos had drifted out of his orbit and would do what he wanted when he wanted, regardless of his wishes. He was still there, still around for Dania to get his fix of him and pretend things could go back to the way they were, because sometimes when Stefanos smiled, he got the feeling that his essential self was still in there, still mysteriously forgiving towards Dania in spite of everything.

He catches his reflection on the screen of the laptop when it goes dark and stares at it, transfixed. His face has gone slack and pouchy in the past couple of weeks, as if he were aging on an accelerated schedule, and it is now more pronounced than ever — his face tired and pale, almost unrecognisable, almost inhuman. Papier-mâché, Dania thinks, like a mask. He half expects the skin to flake off when he touches it.

Simple maths: he’s done more shit in his life than he ever has anything good. His value is in the negative. He has continuously made everyone around him disappointed, hurt and ashamed. He has let everyone down: his dog by letting him go, his father by failing to become a proper man capable of controlling himself; his fans by somehow winging his way to the top of the ranking and then failing to meet even the most basic of expectations; the sport by failing to keep his hysterics and outbursts intact; Stefanos by—

Well. There’s just so much he’s done to fail Stefanos, he’d need ages to list all the things in his head.

That’s why he’s here. He was supposed to be alone in this little house in Nether Wallop. He’ll never let anyone down here.

He should have won Wimbledon and Australian Open. He should have tried harder, fought harder. He should have learned how to fight with his tennis and words, not with his fists and with the wrong people. He should have never assaulted Karen and landed him in a hospital. He recalls the way Andrey had looked at him, wide-eyed and terrified, Dania’s hands shaking and crimson with Karen’s blood.

You sound like you’re in love with Tsitsipas, Karen had chuckled and Dania had felt his stomach sinking and his blood freezing. I didn’t know you were gay.

I’m not, I’m not, Dania had said, again and again, panic rising to his throat, a violent burst of anger in his chest. Karen needed to shut the fuck up, before someone could hear them, could find out, and if he didn’t shut up, Dania would do it for him, Andrey and his panicked face be damned.

Hey, nothing wrong with some guy-on-guy action, Karen had smirked, unperturbed, and Andrey — ever the shrewd one — had said, Karen, stop it.

But Karen had snorted and said, it’s just funny, I thought you were a normal guy, and Dania trembled with rage and shame and guilt that were threatening to shake and tear him apart. His teeth were gnashing into dust.

And then Karen added, ah, come on, I’m just messing, are you gonna cry now? And Dania lunched forward and punched him hard in the face. And then kept punching and punching until the noise in his head died down and his fingers could unclench again. He had been dragged back from Karen by someone, holding him from behind. Andrey was kneeling by Karen sprawled on the floor, face an unrecognisable bloody mess.

He will never forget the way Andrey looked at him back then, shocked and disturbed, as if he had never seen Dania before.

A sharp feeling of regret takes hold of him as he stares at the reflection of the lights over the whiskey bottle. He was never supposed to do that, be that person. Was never supposed to be that vile and pathetic and psychotic and lashing out on people for not taking his shit, as if they owed it to him, as if his suffering gave him authority.

He thinks of the way Stefanos had looked holding that guy’s hand gently, when Dania saw them alone in the locker room and had to hide himself from view like a creep, because it felt like he was spying on something deeply private and intimate that had no place for him. He should have realised right then and there, that whatever connection he had thought he had with Stefanos was another lie he’d told himself, another fairytale he had come up with to reinvent reality.

The reality that had been: Stefanos hadn’t wanted Dania, he’d wanted some guy in the locker room he’d been holding hands with. It shouldn’t have come as a shock, it wasn’t supposed to feel like the ground spinning and falling underneath his feet. Stefanos had been drifting away from him for a long time.

He wasn’t mean about it. He never lied to Dania, never mocked him behind his back. It was like he just drifted slowly away, into a different, more exclusive orbit. He had been making a token effort to include Dania in his new circle, inviting him (most likely on instructions from his mother) on a day trip to Sascha Zverev’s beach house, but all that really did was make the gulf between them more obvious than it had been before. Dania felt like a foreigner the whole afternoon, a pale and mousy interloper, skinny and ridiculous in his trunks, watching in silent bewilderment as the pretty girls admired one another’s bikinis, while the guys sipped beer and flirted with them. The thing that had amazed him most was how comfortable Stefanos had looked in that strange context, how seamlessly he’d merged with the others.

Guess what I saw? Dania said to Sascha after he’d left the locker room and Stefanos and the guy holding his hand behind. Tsitsipas making out with some ballboy! And felt vile and shattered and self-righteous and petty and worthless.

Sascha had gasped. Then he proceeded to tell everyone on tour. He’d always been great with gossip.

Years later, Dania spent a long time convincing himself Stefanos was not perfect: he was too immature, too petty, too obsessed with trivial things to see the bigger picture. He never learned to count his blessings and chose instead to dwell on his disasters. But, most importantly, just like him — Stefanos wasn’t happy. Dania was not the only one stumbling awkwardly through the mess of his life, giving up on the hope that it could ever become okay. Stefanos was right along there with him, just as contrived, just as miserable.

If Dania managed to successfully convince himself of that indisputable truth, he could have felt like he’d lost a little less than he thought he had, which was almost like getting something back.

But then, in that moment at the locker room, hiding behind the corner as he watched Stefanos hold hands with another man, the truth was clear as ever: Stefanos was alright. He’ll get there eventually. He’ll figure it out out, because he’s at peace with himself.

That moment in the locker room, Dania felt, suddenly, more alone than ever.

And that’s the way it should be, he thinks, chugging down the rest of the whiskey. He’s so drunk for so long he can’t even tell how long he’s been here, locked inside the little cottage in Nether Wallop, watching the dreary countryside field outside the window, the heavy grey clouds hanging oppressively over it, the rain relentlessly tapping on the roof.

His body is falling apart. His abdomen explodes with searing pain, and he can almost feel the digestive acid burn the inside of his empty, shrivelled stomach. His skin feels so thin it might break if he stretches it even a little. His leg is killing him, the muscles trembling and contracting.

He looks at the apple half lying, half rotten, on the coffee table. He thinks of being dead. He tries to imagine his own funeral, his father giving his eulogy.

He seemed satisfied with his life, his father would say, And why wouldn’t he be? We gave him everything he wanted. He had everything he needed. So why had he become so detached and miserable and mean? Even when reaching all his fame and wealth and success? There must have been something terribly wrong with him. I hope it doesn’t reflect on us. We were good parents even when he had every right to not be, even though wasn’t even my own son. But still he repaid me for all I’ve done for him by thoughtlessly killing himself. Stupid selfish child.

He doesn’t eat the apple. He hurts. He festers.

He can almost feel himself slipping away and then there they are: grief, fear, humiliation, loss. He hopes they don’t follow him wherever he’s going.

It shouldn’t be much longer now.

On the day that Dania becomes aware that he's eating a raw egg and desperately in need of a shower, three birds come down from the sky and perch on the edge of the rain-soaked windowsill, eying him. Dania eyes them right back. He doesn't like the look of them.

The first and smallest, a stripy titmouse just like in the old Russian ballad, clears its throat with a delicate hem-hem.

"My, aren't you doing great," it says. Its neighbour nudges it sharply with a wing. "Oh, fine, all business. Daniil, if a time comes when all is well and you are happy, you can send me flying off to your father. I'll tell him and he'll rest easy."

Dania shakes his head at it. It’s silly, because his father doesn’t care if he is well or happy, never did.

The middle bird, a crow, raps its talons against the window-glass, adjusting its stance. "As for me, Daniil, if there comes a time when you have a sneaking suspicion that your life is passing you by, when you're complacent and disappointed and filled with discontent, then you are normal. I'll fly to your father and tell him, and he'll sigh wearily."

The final bird, the largest of the three, is a vulture. Its beady eyes never leave Dania’s wasted frame. "I'm going to eat you bit by bit," it says. "You're nearly ready for me, breaking into pieces, easier to digest." The titmouse clears its throat again, and the vulture huffs. "Fine. If a time comes when you're in terrible danger and you despair, send me to Stefanos. I'll tell him, and he will come for you."

And that’s even sillier. Stefanos hasn’t been here in years. And he doubts that Stefanos would want his day disturbed by one of these annoying nosy birds.

But if anything, he was raised to be polite, so he thanks the birds. In a flutter of wings they're gone, and Dania is alone in house.

“I have three lessons I could teach you,” the titmouse tells him from the windowsill, tilting its head at him.

“I know them,” Dania tells her, blinking slowly at her from where he’s decaying on the couch. “I remember the tale.”

“Then you’re twice the fool than the hunter was,” says the bird disapprovingly. “All three lessons, and you’ve never applied them!”

“I tried,” Dania explains, but the bird wouldn’t listen.

“You keep regretting the past, you waste away wishing to change things that can’t be changed!”

“Leave him alone,” the vulture says and nudges her with its wing. “Look at him, he’s almost finished.”

“And finally,” the titmouse says, ignoring the vulture, “you keep believing in fairy tales and wishing for miracles! You are a foolish one, aren’t you.”

“Yeah,” Dania says, or maybe he just thinks it. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Who are you talking to?” Says Stefanos at the door entrance. Dania twists around to glance at him, and Stefanos looks shattered and terrified, just like Andrey had once.

“Did that stupid bird call you?” Dania asks him, because it’s not fair. He never asked the vulture to bring Stefanos here. In fact, he hasn’t talked to the vulture at all, the eerie sight of it scaring him.

Stefanos keeps staring at him, frozen and wide-eyed. His mouth is slightly parted, and he is barely breathing. His hair doesn’t glow gold, which is unusual because it always does when Dania imagines him here.

“Fuck,” sharp, like a bullet chambered. Stefanos lets out a breath. “Fuck,” he says again. “Christ. What the fuck have you done to yourself?”

“I haven’t done anything,” Dania says defensively, because it’s true. He hasn’t done fuck-all. “I’ve mostly been sleeping. It’s funny.”

“What?” Stefanos says, his voice strange and choked, like the sight of Dania is something he can’t swallow, something lodged in his throat. He looks like he is afraid to move. “What’s funny?”

“It’s funny how some people sleep so much before they die.”

Stefanos inhales sharply and closes his eyes tight. Christ, he keeps whispering, and he looks like he will fall apart any seconds, which is new, because Dania doesn’t have that expression in his Book of Stefanos. He must have imagined it, but that’s also strange, because he’s never had imagination.

“Dania, fuck,” Stefanos breathes, almost a whimper, and Stefanos has never called him that before, Dania. Only a dismissive Medvedev or a formal Daniil or sometimes just careless you. It sounds nice coming from his lips, almost like a caress, and it’s a bit too much now — these tricks his mind keeps playing on him, so he curls back into the couch, shoves his face into the dusty armrest.

He’s slipping into sleep again, quickly and relentlessly, and before he passes out completely he lets himself foolishly hope the Stefanos hallucination would still be there if he wakes up.

He is not on the couch when he becomes aware next. He’s curled under a blanket, his head resting on soft pillows. He is in his bed.

His body hurts, everything hurts. Moving feels like torture. His stomach is killing him. His internal organs seem to be quivering inside his body, as if they’ve been pulled out and put back into his body without regards to anatomy. The inside of his mouth tastes like dried vomit.

The sky outside is clear and bright blue, the sunlight shining through the window as if mocking him, letting him know that despite all his suffering the world still goes on, the sun still shines.

He gets up, pushing through the pain. He needs some water.

“Look who’s up,” Stefanos says from the couch as soon as he enters the sitting room. Dania halts, faltering, and blinks at him. He surveys the room carefully, but the birds are nowhere to be seen. “How do you feel?”

“Like shit,” Dania says honestly.

“Colour me surprised,” Stefanos says in a ringing voice.

Dania stares at him. Time passes and he keeps blinking, but Stefanos doesn’t disappear.

“Are you really here?” He wonders, and Stefanos’ face breaks as if he is in terrible pain.

“Of course I’m here!” He says in that weird ringing voice and rubs his hand over his eyes. “You called me and I came.”

“I called you?” Dania says suspiciously, because he did no such thing.

“You don’t remember?” Stefanos shakes his head. “Of course you don’t. You weren’t exactly… lucid.”

Dania doesn’t say anything. He waits for Stefanos to elaborate and explain why he thought coming here was a good idea.

“I had no idea how bad it was,” Stefanos mutters, and Dania feels a familiar pang of hurt-shame-guilt, his face heating. He bristles.

“I could write a book about things you have no idea about,” he hisses, and even these many words leave him exhausted and shaky. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine!” Stefanos yells, arms flying. He jumps up from the couch. “And sit down before you fall over, for fuck’s sake!”

Stubbornly, Dania refuses to move, even as his body sways. He feels like he will crumble apart in seconds. Stefanos crosses the distance between them in two long strides and grabs him by the arm, steadying him, his fingers warm and firm.

“Don’t touch me,” Dania snaps, but it comes out quiet and uncertain. Stefanos’ hand doesn’t move.

“Go sit down or I’ll carry you over there myself,” he threatens, and Dania feels conflicted with humiliation and shameful desire. He swallows and takes a few tentative steps to the couch, Stefanos’ hand steadying him as he does. He drops to the cushions, absolutely exhausted.

Stefanos sits down next to him. His fingers squeeze the pulse point on Dania’s wrist, and his face screws in concentration as he stares at his Rolex for few moments.

“Your heartbeat is below sixty,” he informs Dania in a strained voice. “And so is your IQ.”

Dania is surprised into chuckling, the sound escaping his mouth before he stops it. Stefanos looks up at him. The sunlight coming through the window paints his outline gold.

“And yet, between the two of us — I’m the one who went to college,” he says, just to see if he can make Stefanos do Stefanos-y things like huff or roll his eyes or wrinkle his nose.

“Please, you haven’t even finished the freshman year,” Stefanos says with a certain skeptical amusement, but his eyes are sad and expression strained, as if he’s on the verge of tears. Dania is a shit for having called him here, getting him involved in this.

“Stefanos,” he says quietly, and Stefanos blinks at him. “You don’t need to be here. I’ll be fine, I promise.”

Stefanos looks at him like he used to from across the court — all stubbornness and fierce determination.

“I’m not going anywhere, you idiot.”

His tone is harsh and leaves no place for argument. Dania leans back against the cushions, eyes sliding closed. He feels drowsy already, mind slow and murky. It’s like with everything he does: he spends too much time indoors, craving to go out, but as soon as he’s outside, he needs to go back in; he yearns to be on court and the moment he is, he wants to be anywhere but. He’s hoped against all hope that Stefanos would come to him, and now that he has, Dania wants him to immediately leave. Or maybe, even leave himself. He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to be anywhere.

Wherever he goes, there he is.

Stefanos lets go of his wrist, the skin immediately cold where his fingers had been, and gets up.

“Don’t fall asleep yet,” he says on his way to the kitchen. “You need to eat something.”

Dania opens his mouth to protest and argue and maybe provoke Stefanos into a fight, but one look at him is enough to make him swallow it. Stefanos glares at him as if Dania’s diet has personally offended him, and he looks mad and hurt, even. Dania thinks it’s not worth it for now.

Stefanos sets a glass of water and plate of scrambled eggs on the coffee table in front of him. The plate is clean and shiny and so are the fork and the glass.

“It’s not your signature omelette, but it’ll do for now,” he says, dropping back onto the couch, his knee brushing against Dania’s. “And I don’t want to upset your stomach, anyway.”

Dania forces himself to eat and then focuses all his energy on keeping the food down as his stomach rebels. Stefanos is watching him like a hawk, and he isn’t sure if the nausea rising to his throat is from the food or Stefanos’ unbearable scrutiny. He chews slowly before swallowing, the food like sandpaper against his throat.

Stefanos keeps sighing next to him. Dania feels ridiculous and slightly weak, like all that sudden tension had no other choice but to snap like a wire and leave him limp and disoriented.

“Why are you here?” Stefanos asks him when his plate is finally empty.

“Why are you?” Dania says and experiences a powerful sense of deja-vu.

“Because you called me and asked me to come,” Stefanos says evenly. His fingers flex where they rest against his knees.

“And I was obviously not thinking straight if I decided that was a good idea,” Dania says.

“You know what I think?” Stefanos says quietly and narrows his eyes the way he does when he gets self-righteous and stubborn, the way he does when he argues with his father. “I believe that was the only time in a while when you actually did think straight. You asked me for help.”

“I don’t need help!” Dania bristles, shame burning the insides of his stomach, and he fears he’s going to be sick.

“That’s not what you said on the phone.”

“I don’t know what I might have said on the phone but I was obviously drunk and stupid and didn’t know what I was saying and the birds —“

Fuck. He shuts his mouth with a snap. Stefanos stares at him in an annoyingly righteous way as if Dania’s rambling were only proving his point.

“Yeah, you did mention the birds,” Stefanos says lightly and doesn’t elaborate.

Dania’s leg is cramping again. He digs his fingers into the muscle, feeling it contract and twitch. Stefanos sighs again.

“You know you’re actually the only one who never asked me why I retired,” he says pensively. “Why is that?”

Because I don’t care, Dania wants to say, or The world doesn’t revolve around you or even I’ve been busy with my own life, but he can’t quite force the words out, and his eyes start to burn. He wipes a hand over his eyes, and they are thankfully dry.

“You are gonna tell me anyway, aren’t you?” Is what he says instead.

“Only if you want to know,” Stefanos shrugs.

They sit in silence for a while, the birds tweeting outside the only sound between them. Dania tries to keep himself upright, but his body gives up on him, his head droops. He is exhausted.

“Can you walk back to bed?” He thinks he hears Stefanos say, but his voice sounds muffled and distant, as if coming from underwater. Dania hums, but isn’t sure his lips even move.

The next moment the world spins and tilts, and Dania is suspended in the air, everything around him going upside down — or maybe he’s the one upside down. There are arms around him, and a warm body pressed to his, and, belatedly, he realises Stefanos has lifted him up.

Wait, no, he tries to protest, humiliated and terrified of Stefanos seeing him like this, so weak and undignified, but even his shame feels muted somehow. He lets his head roll onto Stefanos’ shoulder, and for a short moment allows himself to enjoy the terrifying yet wonderful sensation of being cared for.

He passes out before he even touches the bed.

It is nighttime when he wakes up next, quiet darkness all around him. He feels dizzy and disoriented, his head heavy, dull throbbing in his stomach. He is hungry.

He walks into the sitting room and looks around. There’s no Stefanos. He isn’t sure he hasn’t imagined him, but then, he has no imagination, especially enough to make Stefanos up in all his complexity, and layers and imperfections. It makes him wonder if that summer day had even happened, if the glorious day they’d spent fixing Dania’s door wasn’t just a figment of his imagination, a bad case of wishful thinking. But the door doesn’t creak, the only evidence he’s got.

Still, Stefanos is nowhere to be seen, and Dania begins to doubt the soundness of his mind again.

The room is tidy. There are no bottles of whiskey he’d had piling on the floor. There are no dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. The entire place looks like it’s seen a professional cleaner recently. He glances at the window and finally sees Stefanos’ lone figure amidst the tall grass outside.

Dania sighs, his heart throbbing painfully in his chest, and goes outside.

The air is fresh and still damp after weeks of non-stop raining, and the wet soil squishes and slurps underneath his feet. It’s a chilly night, but Stefanos’ coat is more fashion than function. He’s standing still like a marble statue, head upturned and gazing at the starry sky.

Dania walks up to him and stands by, unsure if there is anything to say. He’d thought Stefanos would look relaxed and at peace, but up close he looks focused, his face pinched like it was during his service motion. Dania follows his gaze up, and it’s really beautiful — the millions and trillions of stars scattered across the night sky, like the herring fish from on old song. It’s funny how he’s spent many months here over the past years, and has never thought to look up at the starry sky even once.

He feels odd and surreal, almost dream-like, as though he can do anything or say anything and it’ll stay here in this frail peaceful bubble between them. It feels as if they are the only ones left, in the world that has shrunk down to the field of grass around his tiny cottage in Nether Wallop.

“‘All night long their nets they threw to the stars in the twinkling foam,’” Dania whispers absent-mindedly, overwhelmed by the strange magic of the moment, as if he was in a fairytale.

Stefanos closes his eyes, and his lips curl in the corners.

“‘Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe, bringing the fishermen home,’” he sings quietly and then turns his face to Dania, eyes gleaming in the darkness.

A shiver runs through him. More than anything he loves it when Stefanos gets his references. It’s silly sometimes, but Dania has spent the entirety of his childhood and most of teenage years with his nose buried in a book, whenever he wasn’t holding a racquet. And sometimes, when Stefanos quotes those silly lines back at him, it feels like, despite anything, Stefanos gets him, the incomprehensible sum of his longing and his sadness.

Stefanos’ hair sways with the breeze, and the ethereal feeling intensifies.

“Am I dreaming?” Dania whispers, and the breeze chills him, makes him shiver again. He feels like it’s going to blow him away and he’ll scatter like dust over the fields of tall grass.

Stefanos smiles. “'Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed as if it could not be, and some folks thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed of sailing that beautiful sea.”

Dania’s mouth stretches into a reluctant smile. “You’re not helping.”

“My beautiful voice is too dreamlike?” Stefanos grins, and the sensation of surreality passes.

“More nightmare-like,” Dania snorts, regaining some of his senses. He looks back up at the sky to avoid looking at Stefanos’ shrewd face. “A nightmare I’d like to wake up from.”

“Beauty like this could never be a nightmare,” Stefanos says profoundly, gesturing at the sky above.

“That’s very deep. You should put that in a tweet,” Dania drawls, and Stefanos smirks:

“I already did — you’d know that if you started following me.”

They don’t say anything else for a while, just looking at the sky together in silence.

“You know how Mayans had dozens of words for sky?” Stefanos suddenly says. Dania looks at him, studies his profile in feeble moonlight. Stefanos is biting his lip in a way he does when he gets melancholic. “They spent so long studying it, they saw it so clearly, what it was, all its parts. But no matter how many words they had for it, they couldn’t control it. They just kept looking up at it, giving it new names and waiting for it to come down.”

Dania thinks of all his words for Stefanos, all the things he understands: how Stefanos likes his tea and doesn’t take coffee until his eyes are gluing together, how he doesn’t like wearing sunglasses because they feel like filters for the world around him, how he rolls up his shirtsleeves to show off his forearms he feels oddly proud of, how he gestures, how he smells, how he speaks. Dania has words for how Stefanos shakes apart and screams and cries himself to sleep, but he has no words for Stefanos first thing in the morning. Dania has words for all this and he still doesn’t know how long it takes Stefanos to wake up after he opens his eyes, if he likes to sleep curled up next to someone or if he prefers his own space, if he dreams.

Another shiver runs through him, the hair on his arms standing with goosebumps, and hugs himself against the cold. Stefanos turns to him.

“Are you cold?”

“No, it’s a new dance move,” Dania snaps and immediately regrets it. Stefanos doesn’t look offended at his snark, at least.

“Let’s go back inside,” he says, and places his hand on Dania’s shoulder blade, guiding him gently. Another jolt runs through body at the casual touch.

They walk back to the house, Stefanos’ hand resting on his shoulder all the way. Stefanos leads him to the couch and presses down until Dania’s legs fold and he plops down.

“Are you gonna eat now,” Stefanos says, and it should have been a question, but somehow isn’t. He disappears in the kitchen, and Dania sits there like a useless moron, waiting for God knows what.

When Stefanos comes back, there are various food items he seems to have got from a local gas station — candy and fast food and noodles.

Afterwards Dania leans back against the cushions, enjoying the long-forgotten sluggishness that comes with a full belly. The meal hasn’t been fancy — there was no real cooked food made of groceries — but it was delicious nonetheless. Stefanos sat with him, and they’ve devoured everything Stefanos put in front of them — baby carrots, bowls of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup sprinkled with crackers, salami and American cheese sandwiches on white bread — and then topped it off with a bag of Hershey’s Kisses and a couple bars of Curly Wurlies that Stefanos always consumed in large quantities whenever he spent any time in the UK.

“I hate Curly Wurly,” Dania says, chewing on it anyway. “I don’t know how you enjoy this ropy shit, always sticking to the teeth!”

“Well maybe it wouldn’t stick to your teeth so much if you tried brushing them once in a while,” Stefanos says with a pointed look at the entirety of him.

Which, yes, Dania supposes, makes sense. He desperately needs a shower, too.

“Don’t snoop around while I’m showering,” he tells Stefanos, which sounds foolish, because Stefanos has had lots of time to snoop by now if he’d wanted to. And it’s not like Dania has anything personal in this place anyway. Still, he says: “I’ll know if you did.”

Stefanos shoots him a lopsided smile. “Is there a forbidden room I’m not allowed to open with a magical key?”

Again, something warm blooms in his chest. It’s almost like they have an inside joke, all these reference Stefanos keeps understanding and making, as if he’s making a deliberate effort to connect with him.

“Has my beard turned blue?” Dania smiles just to prolong this moment of feeble connection he rarely feels towards another human being. “But let’s pretend there is a secret place here. I’d have to murder you, just like in the old tale.”

“You love me too much to murder me,” Stefanos says with easy conviction, just like he says my backhand is graceful and putting milk in tea is a perversion. Dania’s half-smile slips off his face, and he turns away to not let Stefanos see.

In the bathroom, he finally takes a good long look at himself. His beard is longer than it’s ever been, his eyes are red and dry, his hair is a muffled overgrown mess. He looks pale and ill and tired. He looks like absolute shit.

Still, he doesn’t look like he’s just been dug out of a grave like he did the last time he saw himself.

You love me too much, Stefanos said, and the words ring in his mind, making his palms sweat.

Does he love Stefanos? No, of course not. This isn’t love. This is a sick, twisted obsession.

He showers. He shaves his beard off, exposing his hollowed out cheeks and making the dark circles around his eyes even more pronounced.

“Aww,” Stefanos coos, when Dania makes his way back to the couch. “I’ve forgotten you turn twelve when you shave.”

“I might look twelve, but you are twelve,” Dania says, dropping down next to him. “The level of maturity you possess would barely classify you a teenager.”

“I can’t believe you’re the one who’s lecturing anybody on maturity,” Stefanos says with a pissy expression.

“You’re the one who wouldn’t even shake my hand at the net properly,” Dania says, but the lightheartedness is gone from his voice, and it comes out sounding petulant and hurt instead. Fuck, he needs to learn to shut up. He needs to learn to kick Stefanos out.

“It wasn’t because I have a problem with you,” Stefanos says somberly, immediately sensing the shift in his mood. “It was because I was a sore loser and I wanted to get off court the second I knew I’d lost.”

Dania’s ears catch onto the past tense. He feels a sharp pang of panic and regret, as if learning about Stefanos’ retirement all over again. His thigh twitches, half-way to cramping.

Stefanos sighs. “Just ask.”

“Why?” And the single word manages to convey the feeling of unreality that came over him whenever he thought about Stefanos leaving, a sudden awareness of being trapped in a bad dream, that panicky sense of helplessness, as if he possessed no will of his own.

“I wanted a change of scenery,” Stefanos says pensively.

“Buy a new plant!” Dania snaps, and Stefanos startles. “Just don’t be an idiot and leave the sport you’ve devoted your entire life to!”

“Wow, you sound just like my father,” Stefanos says grimly and shakes his head.

“He is a wise man, then!”

“You’d be surprised,” Stefanos mutters. “It’s not just that. I wanted to see what else is out there. I wanted to experience other things. I wanted a life that would be my own. And I knew I’d regret it forever if I didn’t try.”

“So you decided to just up and leave—“ me, he wants to say, “—everybody behind and do what?” He is suddenly very angry, can feel the clot of his fury stuck across his throat, his heart pounding violently. “Join a knitting club? Farm alpacas? Just because you are a hot young millionaire doesn’t put you anywhere above those minimum wage sad teenagers working at McDonald’s in terms of education or use for society! You want to see what’s out there?” He’s got up from the couch, he realises, and he’s looming over Stefanos, yelling like a madman, like he’s about to lose control — “Nothing is out there! Nothing! Just more of the same shit, Stefanos! Grow the fuck up!”

Stefanos remains sitting calmly, eyebrows raised. “Wow, I don’t know what to do with all that support, thank you.”

And it’s a testament to how toxic Dania is, how vile, because the sight of this content, happy Stefanos is making his blood boil. He wasn’t supposed to be this way, like he’s somehow got all the answers to life’s impossible questions, wasn’t supposed to have it all figured out, to be calm and at peace with himself. He was supposed to be miserable and lost like Dania, the two of them the outcasts-in-arms, together against the rest of the well-adjusted world, stumbling through the mess and shit and leaning on each other. Stefanos wasn’t supposed to move on and leave Dania behind, alone in his filth, wishing he could drag Stefanos back down to his level.

It suddenly feels like Stefanos is the sun, shining too bright, spreading his invigorating light everywhere around him, and there’s no place under that light for a dark, shadowy creature like Dania.

“So what are going to do?” Dania asks through gritted teeth. “You’ve already decided, I see.”

“How do you know?” Stefanos says, surprised.

“Because I just insulted your social value as a person, and all I got was a little sarcasm,” Dania hisses. “Which means you didn’t feel it necessary to defend yourself, which means you feel confident about your decision, which means you have already made it and therefore know what you are going to do.”

“Yeah,” Stefanos agrees simply, though a little surprised at Dania’s accurate assessment. “I’m going to college.”

Dania draws in a sharp breath. It feels even worse now — knowing, than it had before he learned the reason of Stefanos’ departure. It only makes the entire thing more real, the indisputable proof of Stefanos having actually made a decision, of Stefanos having decided to actually leave tennis, leave him.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna do it on campus or online yet,” Stefanos goes on, a strange soft look on his face that Dania can’t decipher. It suddenly feels like his Book of Stefanos isn’t applicable anymore, irrelevant and outdated, like a map of a city that has been burned down and built anew. “But I really want to try it.”

Dania’s knees feel weak and soft, and his leg cramps badly. Stefanos grabs him by the wrist and forcefully pulls him back down to the couch.

“Have you quit on your therapist?” Stefanos says, and Dania can barely process the sudden change of topic.

“What?” He says, lamely.

Stefanos’ hand wraps around his thigh, where the muscle is visibly contracting below his shorts. The touch sends him jolting, as if Stefanos’ fingers burned him.

“Your leg always cramps when you get stressed,” Stefanos elaborates, and his fingers massage the muscle gently. Dania feels like shattering into dust.

“I’m not stressed,” he snaps, and turns his head away, so Stefanos doesn’t see.

“Dania,” Stefanos says softly, the just stop it implied in his tone. “Can you not be a bullshit Russian for a second, please?”

The implication of the words strikes him hard, like a spike piercing his spine — the way Stefanos had threw them offhandedly back in Miami, probably without meaning them, and Dania latching onto them, working himself up over them, trying to provoke Stefanos into a reaction, getting Stefanos to at least verbally abuse him, something, anything, to maybe get Stefanos to punish him for being such a sick stupid fuck, and Stefanos just walking away from him, leaving him behind again—

“I don’t need,” he chokes on the words, his breath stuck in his throat, “your help.”

Stefanos stares at him inscrutably for a long moment. Then his eyes narrow dangerously, as they do when he is about to say something controversial.

“Yeah,” Stefanos says in a different tone, low and harsh and straight. “Because you’ve been doing great so far. How long have you been harming yourself? Or did you just do it to get my attention?”

Dania chokes on his hurt and his anger and his shame. Maybe if it hurts enough, maybe if it’s raw enough, he doesn’t have to come to terms with himself that it’s something he wants, that it’s something he fucking craves — Stefanos’ attention, Stefanos’ presence, Stefanos, Stefanos. Maybe if Stefanos never moves to touch him like he’s something to cherish and protect, Dania will stop wanting him to.

“Right,” he bites back, barely getting the words out, “because everything is about you.”

“You want to hang out with me when are kids, then you immediately don’t, you want to play doubles together, then you insult me,” Stefanos lists with eyes narrowed down slits, “you ask me to talk to you — then disappear completely, you call me for help then try to get rid of me when I do!”

Stefanos rises up from the couch, and now he’s the one looming over Dania, tall and broad and radiating masculine authority.

“You are scared and stubborn, and you don’t like people sympathising with you — why not?”

“I don’t need anyone’s pity, I’m not—“

“Oh no,” Stefanos says gruffly, pointing a finger, “you need people to see how invulnerable you are, how independent, how well you’re coping! So they won’t see the miserable, lost, hurt little boy.”

The invisible spike that’s lodged in his spine moves further up and seems to impale his throat. He can’t breathe suddenly, and he’s falling apart, a chunk of flesh here, a bit of marrow there, and he’s running out of parts, out of parts of himself to lose.

“So what do you want?” Stefanos thunders, looking down at him, Godlike. “What the fuck do you want?”

“Cry,” Dania thinks or says or telepathically sends to Stefanos, and this part of him that crumbles apart is going to be the last of him. “I just want to cry,” he shuts his eyes, hiccuping on the words. “All the time.”

For a time, Dania is nothing but a blur of sensation. Heart, stuttering over panic. Breath, hitching faster and shorter. Arms so numb he doesn’t think he could ever move a single digit. The skin on his thighs and stomach blossoms in goose bumps as his blood grows unbearably hot. Water, running down his cheeks, his chin and down to his neck. A blur of motion around him, sharp and slow at the same time. Scent — sun-hot skin and ocean and basil, so familiar.

He is shaking and sobbing, his entire body jolting and spasming, as if his soul was leaving his flesh behind, as if demons were exorcised from him. He’s not sure how long it lasts, only that it hurts everywhere at once and at the same time it’s like a a deadweight he’s been dragging around for years and years has finally been lifted.

He becomes aware at some point in time that he’s squished against Stefanos, his legs over Stefanos’ lap, his face pressed to the junction of Stefanos’ neck and shoulder. It’s undignified, this position he’s in, as if he was a small helpless child. He moves feebly to get away, but Stefanos’ arms hold him closer still, and he gives up without further protests. His eyes hurt and his head throbs with dull ache.

“I hate it,” Stefanos says with inflection, “that I have to insult you and hurt you to get you to be honest with me.”

Dania notices, in a way that he hasn't before, that Stefanos looks pained, as if this, whatever this is, might be hurting him more than that it should hurt Dania.

“Distance doesn’t work, patience doesn’t and nor does kindness,” Stefanos sighs, letting his head drop, and Dania feels Stefanos’ nose press into the top of his head, his breaths hot against his hair. “Just tell me, what do I do? I’m stumbling through the dark here.”

“Just don’t go,” Dania mutters into the skin of his neck, but these are empty words. Stefanos will go. Stefanos will leave. Maybe not right this moment, maybe not tonight, but he will tomorrow, or the day after that.

A week, a month, a college term. What-the-fuck-ever.

His dog left him, his sisters left him and so did his mother, and Dasha and Ben, the guy he’d been having sex with for eight months, before he deemed Dania unbearably negative to be around. Kevin left him that night in London after Queen’s. Even Gilles has been considering leaving him, as he should. Everybody leaves in the end.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Stefanos lies, and hugs him even tighter still, the intimacy and tenderness of it almost unbearable and making his already swollen eyes water again.

“It’s okay to cry, you know. My dad always says it’s better to cry and let it all out, than have things pent up inside,” Stefanos whispers into his hair, and Dania chuckles against his will, a short choked sound. “We all sometimes need a good cry, the kind that makes you stronger.”

“Your Dad wouldn’t have liked mine,” Dania lets out with a long sigh against Stefanos’ skin. It smells like ocean and warm summer air, and he wants to inhale until he loses himself in it.

“How is he?” Stefanos wonders quietly.

“Alive,” Dania tells him, and they fall silent.

Dania has had more than enough sleepless nights in which to take the measure of all that he’d fucked up and what he’d lost, and sleep never came easily or naturally to him. Now he feels like he’s just woken up from a sleep that had lasted way too long, and could no longer remember the dream that had detained him.

Stefanos begins to hum after a while — an annoying habit that used to piss Dania off, the constant off-key singing that Stefanos was much more confident about than his vocal capabilities had warranted.

‘"Where are you going, and what do you wish?" the old moon asked the three,” he sings quietly, and Dania groans halfheartedly.

“Stop it,” but he likes the reverberations of Stefanos’ voice against the top of his head.

“It’s your fault, you brought it up first,” Stefanos chirps, “Now it’s stuck in my head.”

We have come to fish for the herring fish that live in this beautiful sea, sings Stefanos, and Dania closes his eyes again, lets his voice wrap around him, the deep timbre of it caressing his ears.

“Nets of silver and gold have we!" said Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, sings the voice above his head, and he is slipping right back into sleep, a body wrapped around him like an affectionate straight jacket.

They learn to coexisting in the small cottage. Stefanos drives off sometimes, but never for long enough for Dania to start panicking. He never brings any boxes back with him. His stuff just appears, as if by magic. Stacks of paper-bound books fill the empty shelves a little more each day. A new toothbrush makes its way into the cup on the bathroom sink one day. Adidas shirts and hoodies pile up neatly at the cupboard, never mingling with Dania’s rumpled up, unfolded clothes, scattered around the shelves in messy rolled up balls. The cockroaches gradually retreat. The house gets a little cleaner, a little lighter.

Stefanos shimmers with it all. He delights in lighting a fire in the grate he’d cleaned out, on wet nights, sitting next to it with a book in his lap and his stylish reading glasses perched on his nose, lips blowing across the surface of steaming cocoa he’d got in the village, apparently. He sits on a raggedy rusty chair outside in the mornings and watches the sun stream in, taking pictures with a camera that’s suddenly appeared in the house. He sits at the table in the kitchen and pages carefully through books of recipes, complicated lists of ingredients spread out before him, his mouth shaping their names as he talks to himself.

He sits everywhere, engrossed and focused, until he jumps up suddenly and demands they go for a walk in a whiny petulant tone, as if someone has been making him do all this sitting by force. They go for long walks across the field, the grass tall and brown around them, and Stefanos coos over the cows they meet and pets the little fluffy lambs by the riverside and takes endless photos of all of them.

I want a picture with this one, he demands when they encounter a perfect live version of Shaun the Sheep — according to Stefanos, anyway — and Dania ends up playing the photographer and snapping a trillion pictures of Stefanos with a cute little animal, and then a trillion more when Stefanos criticises and refuses to accept the ones he’s taken: can’t you see the composition is all wrong?

Dania observes him. Observes and waits.

You need a smart TV here, Stefanos says one night over them bickering about the channel they should leave on, because the old telly in the sitting room came with the house and, according to Stefanos, only enables Dania’s masochistic tendencies.

Some days he leaves for longer. Before he gets into his rental Prius, he leaves a full home-cooked meal on the table and says, lightly, but also ridiculously authoritatively: I want your fingerprints on the cutlery, I want videotape, I want photographs of you with the food in your mouth and today’s newspaper.

Dania sleeps more regularly than he has in the past. Before it was just a lark, curling up in a bed and having a snooze for an hour or two or passing out on a couch or sometimes even the floor. Now he's getting in the habit of sleeping through the night, almost every night. Like a person.

He waits.

They bicker about whose turn it is to do the dishes, and Dania suggests Stefanos should keep on with it because, it’s only fair since you like doing them so much, and Stefanos says, you wanna keep eating Spanokopita — you’ll do the bloody dishes, and Dania swallows the words that he doesn’t even like feta cheese, he just likes the fact that Stefanos cooks for him.

Dania cries a lot now. It’s like a dam has been broken and the water keeps flowing out of him, unstoppable and relentless. He’d thought his body had long since dried out and stopped producing any liquid. But now even little things make him cry, and his crying over little things irritates him, though, surprisingly, not Stefanos, who keeps hugging him close every time his eyes water stupidly. If your heart should dry, may your eyes still cry, Stefanos says profoundly, running his hands up and down Dania’s back in soothing motions, another one of his pretentious tweets, probably.

He observes. He keeps waiting.

One warm clear night Dania goes outside and catches Stefanos’ voice as he talks on the phone.

I will, thanks, Stefanos says, and Dania holds back a bit, waiting till he finishes his conversation.

“Sascha and Andrey send their love,” Stefanos says uncannily, like he’s somehow sensed Dania creeping behind his back.

“You talked to them?”

“Yeah, we’ve been talking much more since I left the tour,” Stefanos snorts. “Ironically enough.”

“They know you are… here with me?” Dania says, fear and shame cold and sticky in his gut.

“They know you’ve disappeared somewhere,” Stefanos sighs, his expression more somber. “No one has been able to reach you. So I told them you were well,” he shakes his head in a way he does when he has to lie someone and hates it. “They worry about you.”

“No, they don’t,” Dania says lightly, because this is almost funny. “We barely know each other.”

“We’ve all known you since we were kids,” Stefanos reminds him impatiently. “Ever since your mother started dumping you on my family and then Zverev’s. We almost lived out each other’s pocket, all those airports and joint hotel rooms, I can’t believe you’d think they don’t care!”

“Well I’m sorry I was such a burden to all of your families!” Dania snaps, pretending it didn’t hurt.

Stefanos winces, “That’s not what I —“

“Andrey hasn’t said more than a couple sentences to me after, after…” he swallows the bile in his mouth, eyes traitorously tearing up again, “after what I did to Karen, and Zverev had hated me all this time until just recently, and you said, you said—“ his voice cracks.

“Dania—“

“You said you couldn’t imagine how anyone could stand me!”

Fuck, he’s crying again. His lips tremble, hot tears welling up and spilling down his cheeks, and he wipes at them furiously. He meets Stefanos’ eyes. They are wide and frightened, full of a desperation Dania has no trouble recognising, since he sees it all the time in the bathroom mirror.

“I’ve said plenty of nice things to you, too,” Stefanos exclaims, jerking his head. “Why would you choose to believe the only insult I’ve said to you in years?!”

“Because you meant it!” Dania yells, pointing an accusing finger at him, “I know it when you mean shit you say!”

“Sure I meant it,” Stefanos matches the volume of Dania’s voice. “Just not about you, I meant it because I was talking about myself!”

“What?”

Stefanos sighs, shoulders sagging. He looks older now, tired and shabby. “People are always talking about themselves, if you only learn to listen closely,” he says in a pained voice. He chuckles, a sad hopeless sound. “Remember the first time I came here? All the shit I said to you, well — that was the stuff I kept thinking about myself, what I needed to do, what I had to deal with… And then I said it to you instead, because it was simpler and easier to take it out on you and I didn’t know how to talk to you, anyway.”

Dania doesn’t say anything. Some selfish part of him is tempted to let Stefanos talk more — he wants to hear how sorry Stefanos is, how he might care about Dania after all, that Dania might not be a hopeless lost case just yet — but the more reasonable part of him understands that this is a terrible idea. It would just be cruel, getting his own hopes up one last time before crushing them forever. Stefanos is a good man, and he’d already hurt him enough.

“You don’t owe me anything,” he tells Stefanos.

Stefanos is a kind man who is good at fixing things. His net play is awful — oh, well, Stefanos is going to fix it until none of Dania’s cross-court passes work. His sister is struggling with her English essay? Stefanos to the rescue, skipping a party or another important social event to diligently explain to his sister the structure and composition of a proper essay, until it’s perfect. Zverev has an existential crisis? Stefanos is there, helping him regain focus on his life, until he doesn’t feel so lost all the time.

But Dania doesn’t want to be another example in a string of Stefanos’ charity cases, because he isn’t a bedroom door Stefanos could fix with screwdriver or a pile of dirty dishes he could scrub until he’s all clean and shiny, good as new.

“Why are you still here?” Stefanos asks him with desperate note in his voice.

“I live here,” Dania says, stupidly.

“No, you don’t,” Stefanos says slowly, as if talking to a moron. “You live in Monaco, you have an apartment there.”

For a moment, Dania feels confused and lost, before he realises that, right, he does have an actual flat — a fancy condo in a fancy town. He just can’t imagine himself there anymore, the same way he can’t imagine his life after he turns too old to play tennis anymore.

“Right,” he says absent-mindedly. “Right.”

When he tries to project himself into the future, to envision the life that would await him after his career will be over — the big flat in Monaco, the retirement parties and endless interviews, the late-night drinking sessions with guys who would go on to play and compete while he would stay behind and watch from the sidelines, obsessing over a guy who’d drifted out of his life years ago —it all seems hazy and unreal to him, images from a movie he’d seen a long time ago and whose plot he can no longer remember.

“You can go back there!” Stefanos says and sounds like he’s pleading. “Go back to your life!”

“No, no,” Dania shakes his head. He is tired again, even though he hasn’t done nothing much besides argue and disappoint Stefanos today.

“Goddamnit,” Stefanos says, “why would you choose this, why do you want to keep yourself here in this house, hidden from the entire world?”

“Because in this house,” Dania says, “you stay with me.”

Stefanos’ expression opens sharply, spills; it’s like Dania has stabbed him.

Their walk back to the house is quiet; neither of them mentions the conversation they’ve just had, and then later in the night, as the rain starts pouring from the sky again, Stefanos climbs into the bed with him.

Arms wrapped around him tight, knees pressing into the back of his legs, Dania sleeps.

One morning Dania stands in the kitchen, buttering a piece of toast and minding his own business when Stefanos shuffles into the kitchen and as always makes a beeline for the kettle, black tea, no milk, eww. It’s a choreographed dance by now, Dania leaning away from the kettle to give him space, Stefanos reaching for it, impatiently, yawning.

“Morning,” Stefanos says.

“Hmmhm,” says Dania. He sleeps a lot more these days, yet in the mornings he still walks around like he’s not entirely awake yet, uncoordinated and mostly silent, save the occasional disgruntled noise. Watching Stefanos’ shimmering delightful persona this early in the morning is like looking directly at the sun, and he wants to wince and put a hand over his eyes.

Stefanos interrupts his intense staring at the kettle to give him a side glance.

“You’re wearing my pants,” he snorts.

Dania looks down at himself. He is wearing old faded sweatpants that he’s fished absently out of the cupboard, and Stefanos is right. Firstly, Dania doesn’t own any Adidas pants and secondly, despite the fact that he’s tied the drawstring as tight as it would go, they seem about two seconds away from sliding down his hips.

Stefanos seems to have forgotten about the kettle altogether. He is staring at Dania with an expression he hasn’t seen before, has no paragraphs on in the Book of Stefanos. His eyes are narrowed and face focused, as if he is trying hard to hear something far in the distance. He reaches his hands up and ties his hair in a loose bun like he does before starting a particularly difficult task, the one that would require his utmost concentration. The air in the room grows suddenly tense around them.

Dania fidgets. “Um. You want the toast?” he says, offering Stefanos his half-buttered piece, and Stefanos leans closer in one graceful fluid motion and snatches it from his hand.

“Help yourself,” Dania says, distinctly trying to sound sarcastic, but missing it by a mile and coming off very sincere instead.

Stefanos just stands there, in his colourful t-shirt and jeans, Dania’s toast in hand, and blinks at him, that same intense pensive expression on his face, and then suddenly he leans closer forward. And Dania is confused for a moment, because he honestly assumes that Stefanos is trying to reach for something that might be behind him in a cupboard, like sugar or cinnamon — no, Stefanos doesn’t take cinnamon — except Stefanos leans all the way into his personal space, easy as anything, and kisses him, a quick, dry press of their mouths together.

Dania thinks he makes a noise then, he’s not entirely sure about that. There is a hand touching his hip, fingers twisting into the fabric of his T-shirt, and he realises that he must’ve closed his eyes at some point, because he can feel the touch, but everything is dark and feels like it’s floating away, like there’s nothing keeping him tethered to the ground anymore.

Then Stefanos pulls back, his hands leaving patches of skin that grow immediately cold where they’ve been touching him, and when Dania finally manages to unglue his eyes, Stefanos is staring at him with a small smile. Dania’s brain is still stuck on the kiss, a strange static in his ears. He can feel his heartbeat hammering in the back of his throat.

Stefanos takes a bites of the toast he’d confiscated from him and chews on it slowly, as if that’s the first piece of food he’s had in ages and he is savouring every bite.

“I wish you could see yourself right now,” Stefanos says, oddly melancholic. The early morning sun coming through the window paints his face bright whitish-yellow, and Dania can see the tiny specks of dust flying in the air around him against the glare of the sun. “I’ve always barely managed to keep my hands off you in the mornings.”

Dania feels a sudden powerful urge to flee, to run to a gym and spend the afternoon lifting weights or running the treadmill — anything solitary and mindless would do—but it passes quickly, like a hiccup or a shameful sexual fantasy.

He still hasn’t moved, as if Stefanos was the Medusa from the old myth and turned him into stone by kissing him. His mind is a mess and he struggles to scrape together some combination of words to say anything at all, but the words are distant and unreachable in his head.

“You want tea?” Stefanos asks him after a while with a long-suffering sigh, and Dania manages a jerky nod of his head.

Stefanos lets out another heavy sigh, as if to say what am I gonna do with you, and pours him a cup. They sit at the table, Stefanos sliding into the chair across from him, his hands hugging his own mug. He looks sad.

“Why—“ it comes out as a croak, so he clears his throat and tries to find his voice, “Why did you do that?”

Stefanos raises his eyes up to the heavens. “Hmm, let me think. Because I despise you? Because I can’t stand you? Oh wait, hold on, that’s not why people kiss each other!” his voice is dripping with a heavy sarcasm that Dania hasn’t heard from him in years. “Frankly, for someone who got to go to college you can be incredibly dumb!”

“Having gone to college doesn’t necessarily prove a higher level of intelligence,” Dania says automatically. His mind is in shambles.

“Yes, this may be especially true in your case,” Stefanos says.

Dania gathers the words that feel foreign in his mouth.

“So, you…” he might be hyperventilating, “you want me,” and he even manages to make it sound like a statement.

“Yes.” Stefanos tells him empathically with an exaggerated nod.

“Oh,” Dania says, feeling like he’s dreaming again. “Okay.”

He takes a sip of his tea if only for something to do with himself. It’s burning hot and scalds his tongue, but he still swallows it. His head is weirdly empty.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Stefanos says with inflection, something raw and sad in his eyes.

“I can’t say I do, particularly,” Dania replies. Stefanos’ face falls, and he adds, feeling like absolute shit, “Um, I do, but, just, well, not right now?” He swallows, the words awkward and wrong on his tongue. “I just need to think about this, okay? Please.”

“Okay,” Stefanos says, and rubs a hand over his eyes. He reaches up to untie his hair, and it falls back around his face, curls bouncing in the golden sunlight. Stefanos downs the rest of his tea. “I have to go somewhere today, but should be back by dinner.”

Stefanos is flippant whenever he’s upset and uncertain as to whether or not to hide it. There is nothing at all flippant in Stefanos’ eyes. The brown there is tired, funnelled and worn.

“Okay,” Dania says, feeling like a moron. Stefanos needn’t ask his permission or inform him of his daily errands. He doesn’t owe Dania anything.

“Okay,” Stefanos echoes quietly.

With another long look at Dania, he grabs his car keys from the little bowl at the kitchen stand and walks out. Dania hears the car engine start outside and doesn’t move.

He sits frozen, staring at where Stefanos sat across the table from him, long after the car is gone from the driveway.

In the hours of Stefanos’ absence, Dania wanders around the little house aimlessly. For a while, he is almost angry at Stefanos at having cleaned and tidied the whole place, because now there’s nothing to do with his hands, no mind-numbing task he could distract himself with.

Okay, so Stefanos wants to fuck him. It shouldn’t be a huge shock, after all, Dania had known for a long time Stefanos was into men, too, had even kept a close eye on his Facebook status, tracking the ups and downs of his budding romance with Colin Schneider, one of the cutest guys on tour. The shocking bit is, this time, is that it’s Dania Stefanos wants to fuck now.

And yes, the thought makes him excited and shivery and somehow proud. It’s Stefanos who wants him — the gorgeous, beautiful, brilliant Stefanos who kept leaving him, that Stefanos.

Is this why he’s come to Nether Wallop?

The thing with being in the elite sport, Stefanos had once said, is that it calls for an utter understanding of self.

If you don’t know your boundaries, you want know what you want.

And well, Stefanos seems to know all about what he wants now.

He should have said so sooner. He needn’t have spent all this time in the cottage with Dania, if he wanted to fuck him — Dania would have let him right from the start.

He paces around the sitting room restlessly, his leg starting to cramp again. Maybe Stefanos was right, it does tend to cramp whenever Dania is working himself up again. He drops down in the couch, tries to stay there, but jumps after a few seconds, his body a coiled ball of nervous energy. He starts on pacing again.

Maybe if Stefanos had fucked him sooner, Dania would be over this toxic obsession of his, over wanting Stefanos in ways he never had the right to want him. He’d imagined it of course, in his darkest, most shameful fantasies, Stefanos pressing him down, holding him still with his body, fucking the ugliness out of him, until there’s nothing left.

His thigh burst with pain, and he nearly collapses, grabbing onto the shelf to keep himself upright.

He is all up for it, if Stefanos wants him. Dania would make it good for him, , would let him do anything he wanted to him, he’d let Stefanos have him however he wanted, on his back, on his stomach, on his knees. He’d give Stefanos amazing blowjobs — he is good at them, after all.  

During the eight month he and Ben had been seeing each other, Dania had given him a lot of blowjobs, and Ben had seemed happy enough about them at the time. Maybe even a little too happy, he’d come to think, and a little too entitled. Dania had let him know on a couple of occasions about how he didn’t particularly appreciate the way Ben used to just shove his head down toward his crotch — no words, no warning, just a silent command—and Ben had made a show of listening carefully, promising to be more considerate in the future. And he always was, for a little while, until he wasn’t anymore. But then it’s what Dania did best, after all.

Dania doesn’t particularly enjoy thinking about Ben and the blowjobs, but he’d learned a lot, and he’d make it amazing for Stefanos if he’d let him.

He only has so much time left before Stefanos leaves, anyway. He’s got to make it count.

His thigh jolts violently again, and he might have grabbed onto the flimsy shelf too hard, because it flies off the wall and Stefanos’ books scatter around on the floor. Cursing, Dania bends down to pick them up and put them in a neat pile, at least. Stefanos isn’t here to fix the shelf, but Dania still has that toolbox they’d gotten on that magical sunny day years ago.

He starts to get up, but then a small leather-bound book draws his gaze. Disbelieving, he picks it up, the weight of it solid and heavy, despite its small size. He traces a finger along the old yellowed pages, reads the Russian title on the front, European Folk & Fairytales. It’s an old book, printed before the Revolution, more than a hundred years old now. His father would’ve killed him if he knew Dania had taken such an expensive antique book from his library to gift to some boy, and then didn’t even manage to do that, just threw it in the trash.

How the fuck does Stefanos have this? Dania distinctly remembers throwing it out, the wrapped book flying into the rubbish. Could it be another edition?

He opens the book, tentatively, and there it is, the paragraphs on the inside of the cover, Dania’s messy Russian handwriting:

‘Once upon a time, on a farm in a strange land, far away, there lived a little pig who was different from all the other pigs around, because he was bright golden. The little pig liked being golden — not that he didn’t like the colour of normal pigs, he thought pink was nice, too, but he liked being what he was — a little different, a little peculiar. But the other pigs around him didn’t like him being golden, they were jealous and they laughed at him and tried to make his life a misery. It got on the nerves of the farmers, and they decided to do something about it. So one night, when all the pigs were sleeping, they crept in and snatched the golden little pig, and opened up a pot of magic pink paint, and they dunked him in it until he was covered in pink from head to toe and not not a patch of golden was left. What was magic about that paint was it could never be washed off and it could never be painted over. The little pig cried, because he liked being golden and he liked being a little bit peculiar, but even all the thousand tears he cried couldn’t wash off the magic pink paint because it could never be washed off and it could never be painted over. All the other pigs laughed at him, but then the next night, as all the pigs lay sleeping, these strange storm clouds began to gather overhead and it started to rain, slowly at first but getting heavier and heavier. But it was no ordinary rain, it was a magic golden rain, almost as thick as paint, and what was magic about it was it could never be washed off and it could never be painted over. And when the morning came and all the pigs awoke, they found that every single one of them had been turned bright golden. Every single one of them, except, of course, the old little golden pink, who was now the little pink pig, upon whom the magic rain had washed off because of the magic paint the farmers had dunked him in earlier. And as he looked at the strange sea of golden pigs crying around him, he smiled to himself, because he knew that he was still, and would always be, just a little bit peculiar.’

Be yourself. Happy Birthday!

• Dania Medvedev

He didn’t think he’d ever see this again, remembers sitting at his desk in Moscow, writing it carefully, thinking of Stefanos, making an effort to make his messy handwriting somewhat legible, then spending half an hour overthinking how he should sign this.

“I see you’ve finally found it,” Stefanos says from the door, and Dania whips around. “Your attention to detail is great, as always. Only took you a few weeks to notice it there,” Stefanos says sarcastically.

“Why didn’t you leave on the table, if you wanted me to find it?” Dania says unevenly. Stefanos gets sarcastic when he is angry or annoyed, but he doesn’t look either. Dania can’t read him.

“With your levels of obliviousness, I doubt you’d have noticed it even if it flew in the air and smacked you on the forehead.”

There’s a beat of silence. Stefanos stares at him with raised eyebrows. Then he reaches up and tries his hair in a bun. Dania braces himself.

“I loved it, by the way,” Stefanos says with a sigh. “After I’d cleaned it from all the rubbish, of course.”

“How did you get it?” Dania says, voice as uneven as the rest of him. His leg is hurting.

“Khachanov was smoking a joint outside and saw you chuck a present in the bin and leave,” Stefanos shrugs. “Got too curious, so he went and dug it out. And then gave it to me.”

“Karen, huh,” Dania mutters, head swimming. “Makes much more sense now…”

“What, that he accused you of being in love with me?” Stefanos says casually, and Dania freezes. His heart is violently hammering in his chest, each beat reverberating through his body. He is vibrating with it.

“I’m not—“ He swallows and clears his throat. “He did accuse me, yeah. And got punched in the face for it.”

“I heard he got more than just punched in the face,” Stefanos says, putting his hands on his hips. “A punch in the face doesn’t usually land one in a hospital for a week.”

Shame and guilt rise powerfully to his throat, drowning him. He closes his eyes. “I’m not excusing what I did—“

“And I’m not judging you for that,” Stefanos says with inflection. “I’m just saying — it was a bit overkill of a reaction to something that supposedly wasn’t true.”

“I’m not in love with you,” Dania says immediately, and it’s true. He doesn’t love Stefanos. He doesn’t love anybody.

If you don’t know your boundaries, you will never know your limitations.

“That’s too bad,” Stefanos says flippantly. “Because I love you.”

The words hang in the air between them for a while, and they just don’t make sense to Dania. His brain refuses to process them.

“No, you don’t,” he says slowly, unsure how to deal with Stefanos’ sudden and exceptional stupidity.

“I’ve been in love with you for years,” Stefanos says, an unhappy twist to his mouth, “Why the hell do you think I couldn’t leave you alone all these years? Why do you think I kept coming back here?”

“You didn’t keep coming back here,” Dania says, wondering if he’s suddenly lost his mind, because Stefanos’s words just don’t make sense. He can’t understand them. “You kept leaving.”

Stefanos’ expression shatters and crumbles.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” He says and it sounds like pleading. “I tried staying away from you, God knows my father wanted me to, but I just can’t. I love you.”

“No, you don’t,” Dania repeats, louder this time. “You don’t love me. You just think you do.”

“That’s the same fucking thing!” Stefanos explodes, hands in the air. His breathing is ragged and uneven now, and he runs a hand through his hair, messing up his bun.

“You don’t love me,” Dania says with a chuckle, because this is getting silly now. “You can’t love me.”

Stefanos narrows his eyes at him, dangerous and mad. “Why? Because you’re someone who doesn’t deserve to be loved? Who deserves to suffer? Someone who doesn’t deserve to live?”

Dania suffocates. His eyes burn and water, and his body tries to gulp air that’s been sucked out of the room. He is dissolving into nothing. He closes his eyes in pain, shut so tight his head actually starts hurting. His hand goes over his mouth to stop himself from crying out loud, from screaming and demanding that Stefanos shut up, the he leave, that he kiss him again.

“Why would you want—“ he tries saying, words lodged in his throat.

“You know what you problem is, Dania?” Stefanos cuts him off, stepping closer, eyes flashing. “You fight so hard for all the things that don’t matter, and not at all for any of the things that do.”

“What, you’re saying tennis doesn’t matter to you?” Dania rasps. Of course it doesn’t, not anymore, Stefanos quit.

“Is tennis the only thing that matters to you?”

Dania steps back, looks away.

“Gilles matters to me. He’s put so much time and work into me. He deserves to see me come to the top.”

Stefanos bares his teeth. “What about you? What do you deserve?”

Dania opens his mouth at that but nothing manages to make its way out.

“That’s what I thought,” Stefanos says flippantly, shoulders sagging.

“What about you, then?” Dania hisses. “Do you deserve to get stuck with a sick, suicidal person?”

“I don’t mind,” Stefanos says slowly and harshly. “I was, too, once.”

“What?”

Stefanos is still, looking at him.

“Do you not remember the way I was back in 2015 and 2016? I was severely depressed, my father was—“ he cuts himself off. “I was in a very bad way. And I had no one to talk to, but you.”

“I didn’t—“

“You did, you fucking helped me back then!” Stefanos yells. “Don’t you see? You were always there for me, coaxing it out of me, just listening — you were always so good at just listening. You got it, you understood that fucking ocean of pain I was drowning in. You helped.”

Dania lets out a breath he’s been holding. He feels transparent, like sunlight would accelerate through him.

“Now you’re here to return the favour?” He says, and is proud it comes out a little steadier.

“I’m here because I love you,” Stefanos says again, and Dania flinches at the words. “Because I want to help.”

“I’m afraid it’s a little too late for that now,” Dania says. There’s static in his ears.

“Why?” Stefanos yells and he looks like he wants to punch Dania. “Because, what you’re done with the world? Going to stay in this house until you fade away?”

Dania opens his mouth, works his throat but nothing comes out. Stefanos is very close now, and Dania thinks that if Stefanos touched the parchment thin skin over Dania’s chest he could feel the malleable texture of his organs, the slow expand and contract in the tissue of his lungs.

“Dying is easy,” Stefanos hisses, his own eyes red and wet, “living is hard! It’s hard fucking work, every day, it takes perseverance and courage!” Stefanos’ eyes are huge and wild and wet. “Anybody can be detached and estranged and give the fuck up. It takes guts to care and to love!”

“I don’t love,” Dania whispers, his ugly mutilation finally coming to the light of day. “I’m not capable of loving.”

“Is that some nonsense your father’s been drilling into you since you were a kid?” Stefanos demands.

“No,” Dania chuckles. “It’s something I realised very early on by myself. I know my boundaries.”

Stefanos’s face shatters, he closes his eyes.

“I was the one who told everyone about you kissing that guy in the locker room,” Dania says, the ugliness now spilling freely from his opened chest. “I was the one who caused all that scandal, who dragged you through all that filth. You had to suffer through that because of me.”

“I know,” Stefanos tells him.

Dania’s heart is about to give up on him. “You knew?”

“I figured it was you,” Stefanos says, running a hand through his hair. His bun almost falls apart, loose strands falling back around his face. “I was angry with you for a while, before I spent years obsessively analysing your every word and action.”

“And you still want me?” Dania demands, “Why?”

Stefanos just raises his eyebrows at him, as if to say, You know why.

“You know what my father called me? When he heard what Karen had said,” Dania says, and Stefanos doesn’t answer. “Trash.” He turns away, looks at the fireplace Stefanos had cleaned up and fixed. “He called me trash, Stefanos.”

Stefanos lets out a choked sound, guilt flashing across his face.

“But you though so too, didn’t you?” Dania says, turning back to him. “You too thought I was trash.”

“No, no,” Stefanos denies vehemently, shaking his head. “I never thought that. I just… I was a jealous idiot. I had once thought you were an ungrateful bastard to your father who hadn’t been making your life hell unlike mine.” He chuckles in a self-deprecating way. “I’d obviously been blind and idiotic.”

Dania doesn’t say anything, couldn’t even if there was anything to say.

“My parents weren’t thrilled,” Stefanos goes on, “they were thinking — that I’d been led astray by you — the bad boy had corrupted the good one — and kept telling them that they were wrong. I was no victim. All you had done was help me find a new way of being myself, a way that made as much sense then as the old way had before.”

“You can’t fix me, Stefanos,” Dania says, a choked raspy sound. There’s water running down his face and he realises he’s crying again. He hurts everywhere at once, and isn’t even sure if it’s his body that’s in pain or the ugly dying creature inside him. “I’m a piece of shit.”

“You’re not!” Stefanos says desperately, feverishly, as if this is hurting him just as much. “Don’t you fucking call yourself that just because your old man fancies himself Father of the Year,” he hisses, voice dripping with sarcasm. He takes a deep breath. “You are a wonderful person, my favourite person in the world.” Dania sways and trembles and shakes apart. “You have just been alone for too long and hurt too many times.”

He steps closer into Dania’s personal space, the scent of ocean and basil and summer invading Dania’s senses, and gently pries the little book of fairytales from Dania’s clasped fingers.

“I loved what you’d written here,” he says softly, running his fingers over the book as if caressing it. “Wasn’t sure if it applied to me more than you. Did you come up with it?

“No,” Dania says, mind swimming, words hazy through the fog. “I don’t have enough imagination.”

“See, you keep saying that,” Stefanos says, and his hand comes up to hold Dania’s jaw, thumb tracing over his cheekbone. “But that’s just not true. Every time we played, I was a fool and you — a creative genius,” he chuckles wetly. “It was like a card game, and no matter who was dealing, even if I was lucky and got handed an Ace, you’d still have a Joker. I had no answer for you and your game. That’s imagination at its purest.”

His arms come up and wrap around Dania’s frame, natural and easy as anything.

Dania breathes him in, into him, body going slack, as Stefanos keeps whispering I love you in his ear, and thinks, Stefanos doesn’t know, doesn’t get how damaged he is, because if he did, he wouldn’t be here.

Even Stefanos can’t be that forgiving.

Absorbed in the (no doubt extremely tedious) local newspaper article, Stefanos sips distractedly at his tea (two sugars and no milk, you pervert) and pulls a face. It’s there and gone, a fleeting grimace of distaste – the kind of look normally inspired by some of Dania’s more unorthodox forehand moves.

“For fuck’s sake,” he says with a frown, “I can’t believe it!”

“What?” Dania says from across the table, buttering his toast. “The fact that you are actually reading a newspaper in 2022? Including Mr Harris from the butchery, the two of you probably make up the entirety of their readership.” Dania takes a bite of his toast. “And Mr Harris is half blind, so you might just be the only one.”

Stefanos rolls his eyes. “Agnes Barth is leaving the bakery!” He says in a ridiculously tragic tone of voice.

Dania blinks. “Who?”

Stefanos glares. “The old lady who used to bake the bread! I bought the ciabatta from her every morning!”

“Is that what I’m eating now?” Dania wonders, giving his half-eaten toast another look-over.

“Yes,” Stefanos wrinkles his nose. “And if you bothered to ask me, you’d know better then to toast a fresh ciabatta.”

“Sorry,” Dania says and is glad he sounds as sarcastic as he planned. Stefanos is being ridiculous. But what’s even more ridiculous is Stefanos not realising he’s being so.

“I can’t believe she’s quitting!” Stefanos exclaims again. “It’s her last day today. Can you believe it?”

“What I can’t believe is the ridiculous stuff they report in these kinds of papers,” Dania says and walks over to slice himself another piece of bread — ciabatta, apparently — and try it fresh this time.

“That woman has worked in that bakery for fifty-seven years!” Stefanos admonishes him. “This is serious news!”

“You’re right,” Dania says around a mouthful of ciabatta — Stefanos was right, it tastes much better untoasted, “notify the New York Times and I’ll start the social media campaign.”

“Asshole,” Stefanos says, but it comes out somehow fondly. Dania’s heart swells a bit.

“How come you’re in shambles over a hundred-year-old lady from the village?” Dania wonders.

“I’ve talked to her a lot, she’s a very sweet old lady,” Stefanos says, absolutely sincere, and Dania is yet again struck by sudden awe at the man. “She’s told me all about her family here, and how they all worked in that bakery for generations. She even showed me how to make bread once.”

And then his face lights up, like a lightbulb turned on. His face grows pensive and excited at the same time, and he reaches up and ties his hair up in bun.

“Uh oh,” Dania mutters. “What now?”

“I will make the bread now!” Stefanos announces in a tone he usually reserved for big proclamations like I’m gonna be the next Grand Slam winner! Dania stares.

He’s always known Stefanos was a weird guy, especially in the early years when none of them had much going on in terms of a social life and Stefanos was broadly considered to be a weirdo with overbearing parents and strange hobbies that most guys on tour had wrinkled their noses at, despite Apostolos going around, loudly praising Stefanos’ “uncommon social skills,” his “inexhaustibly curious mind,” and his “fearless sense of adventure.” Before he learned to adjust and blend in at all the huge parties and poolside barbecues and fancy photo shoots, Stefanos had been a weird kid.

Dania has forgotten all about that Stefanos. Now, staring at him gushing about all the kinds of ciabatta and focaccia he is going to bake, Dania marvels at this new level of his weirdness and the fact that Stefanos isn’t hiding it from him, but letting him see it, completely unashamed before Dania.

Stefanos’ face is so open these days, utterly unguarded, every emotion spelled out with such undisguised intensity that Dania sometimes wants to throw a towel over him, or perhaps a sheet. It’s intoxicating.

“Is there even an oven in this place?” Dania says, and is surprised to find himself smiling, his lips stretched so wide his eyes might be crinkling.

“The fact that you even have to ask that,” Stefanos shakes his head dramatically and then explains, slowly, the way he might speak to a small and fairly dim child, “Of course there is. You might find it just behind me and slightly to the left. This piece of household appliance is generally called an oven among us, common folk.”

Dania can’t help a short laugh escaping him.

“How the fuck did you think I’ve been making all these fancy meals without an oven?” Stefanos demands, pursing his lips in a way he did when Dania’s backhand down the line would swoosh past him.

“I don’t know,” he says cheekily. “Maybe you have a magic porridge pot.”

“Maybe you’re a spoiled brat,” Stefanos whines. “All those fancy recipes I’ve tried for you and you obviously don’t appreciate my hard work,” but there’s a slight curl to his lip as he says it. “You’d do good with nothing but actual porridge from now on. Let it fill this entire house and then the whole village for all I care.”

“Ah, I’m sorry,” Dania grins, leaning his cheek against his hand, “You’re a proper Gordon Ramsay, you’re amazing and incredible and the best cook in the world!” Stefanos bites on his lip to hold off a smile, and Dania adds. “Well, the best in this village, maybe. In this house, definitely.”

Stefanos laughs — a raspy deep sound, as if he’s forgotten how to do it. His shoulders shake as he does, hair coming loose from his bun. He radiates warm ethereal energy, coming off him like sunbeams, and for a moment Dania is convinced he’d burn himself if he touched him.

It’s a good day, Dania thinks after they’ve finished breakfast and Stefanos has gone back to googling the best types of bread for home baking. The sky is clear and strikingly blue, the air warm and dry, the sun painting the grass golden. It’s a good day. He feels almost normal, like an actual real person, like he can smile and tease and taste his food and enjoy the weather without having to play someone else. He can’t recall the last time he’d felt like this, if ever.

Maybe that one day with the door, years ago, that feels like a dream now.

He suddenly wants to go for a walk and see if he can enjoy other things, too, like seeing the river and passing the ancient little houses in the village, overgrown with ivy, and buying a pint at the only village pub and making Stefanos laugh and coaxing more weirdness out of him.

“Let’s go,” he says, jumping up sharply, and it sounds almost like an order.

“Where?” Stefanos says suspiciously.

“Out.”

Stefanos stares at him long, as if checking that all his parts are functioning. Dania has never initiated an activity for them before, and he feels lame and awkward suddenly.

But Stefanos is already getting up and grabbing his keys.

“No, leave them,” Dania tells him. “I want to walk.”

“Okay,” Stefanos says slowly. He looks absolutely delighted. “Any particular place in mind?”

“Yeah,” Dania says with a smile that feels authentic on his face. “Let’s go pay Missis Barth a visit, today is her last day.”

It had merely been an unfortunate night at the Laver Cup Gala, Dania thinks, laying in bed, his mind going over that night again and again, brain refusing to shut off and sleep. Nothing tragic had happened. His hurt is an overkill.

He had thought, falsely, that the easy, relaxed atmosphere of the event would disguise his glaring inadequacy and bridge the gap between him and the rest of the men he’d spent most of his life trying to connect with. It was just a fun night out, no obligations and no animosity, he thought, and besides, Stefanos was going to be there, and Dania might have a chance to hang out with him and pretend things were like they had been once.

There’s going to be an afterparty, Andrey had told him gleefully, it’s our chance to get properly drunk without the having to feel guilty about it, how’s that? And Dania had smiled and agreed.

At the Gala he’d felt jittery and out of focus, too much effort put into smiling and joking and posing for the cameras, and by midnight he’d left the table at gone over to the loo. He’s stayed there a long time, splashing cold water across his face and trying to control himself and stop being so fucking pathetic. It had just been a party, he’d been to dozens of those before and he knew how to slip into that role perfectly. Stop being so fucking pathetic.

By the time he’d come back, everyone was gone — Andrey and Sascha and Casper and all the rest of the guys, the tables empty, only the tournament people left, still enjoying their free champagne and canapés.

Dania had rung Andrey but he hadn’t picked up. He’d rung Sascha but the call went straight to voicemail. He’d considered ringing Stefanos, but his finger froze over the call button, and he ended up locking the screen. He hadn’t had any of the other guys’ numbers.

He’d spent the next hour overthinking Andrey’s words and trying to decide whether they were an invitation or a mere statement of fact: We will have a party tonight. Okay, bye. They’d left without him, and he had no idea where the actual party was, so he supposed it had to be the latter. After a while, he’s stopped trying to reach either of them — he was starting to seem desperate on top of pathetic. He’d gone back to the hotel, controlling himself, pretending it hadn’t hurt, hadn’t been a big deal.

It wasn’t, Dania thinks, staring up at the ceiling through the darkness of the night. It wasn’t a big deal. He didn’t get to feel hurt about that, the needy piece of shit.

Back in the hotel room, still in his fancy suit, he’d run into Andrey by the elevators. Andrey’s eyes had grown wide and he swayed a little on his feet, “Dania!” He’d exclaimed as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. “I thought you were at the party!”

“Um, I don’t really know where it is,” Dania had said, bursting with humiliation, and Andrey hiccuped, eyes sliding half closed.

“Nick’s room, where else?” He laughed drunkenly, “Didn’t you come with us?”

“I fell behind,” Dania said vaguely. “Is it still going?”

Andrey’s face did a strange twist, and he suddenly looked a little more sober.

“Listen,” he said seriously, and Dania tensed. “Karen came over, so…”

“Karen is in Boston?” Dania said through the crushing, hollow ache in his chest.

“Yeah,” Andrey licked his lips. “Flew in to hang out.”

“Oh,” Dania said, lamely. He knew about their ‘hangouts’ the same way he knew why Andrey had been keeping Dania at arm’s length ever since the Karen incident. Dania and Karen hadn’t exactly exchanged much word beyond the initial horrified apologising on Dania’s behalf and grudging acknowledgement on Karen’s. He’d learned to accept it was the way things were going to be now, but situations like this still threw him when they happened.

“Um, I’ll see you, Dania,” Andrey said with an apologetic smile, and Dania smiled back tightly. Andrey jumped into the elevator, and the doors closed in Dania’s face, a clear sign of the universe at how unwelcome he was.

He’d headed straight to his room afterwards, but then in an odd twist of irony, Stefanos was there on his floor. He’d heard the elevator jingle and turned to look, leaving Dania no way to escape unnoticed.

Head held high, he stepped out and walked along the hallway to his room, but Stefanos intercepted him mid-way.

“Are you alright?” Stefanos said, staring at him. He was wearing worn Adidas pants and a hoodie and didn’t seem drunk at all. He had a bag of ice in his hands.

“Any better and I couldn’t stand it,” he said, and the smile on his face was instinctive, involuntary, and completely insincere.

“You didn’t go to the party?” Stefanos says politely, and Dania burnt with humiliation at Stefanos apparently having taken no notice if he had been there or not.

“No,” he said and lifted an eyebrow. “Some of us have to play tomorrow.”

“You don’t,” Stefanos pointed out.

“Well, why aren’t you there?” Dania sneered, sweating profusely though his fancy tailored suit, leg starting to throb. “With your love for pseudo-intellectual bullshit and attention from anyone you can get, I don’t see a reason for why you’d leave.”

Stefanos’ face pinched, eyes narrowed.

“I actually do have a match tomorrow,” he said coldly. “But thanks, nice to know what you think. I see why why you weren’t invited.”

“I was invited,” Dania snapped, a knot of shame of guilt and hurt building in his sternum. His voice shook, and Stefanos standing there calmly, above it all, was making him all the more undone. “I might not be the social butterfly you are, but I just don’t see how you can stand all those hypocritical gatherings, pretending to be friendly for a day or two, when in reality no one gives a fuck about the other!”

“Maybe you would see, if you weren’t such a grim miserable asshole, unable to maintain a single relationship with anyone besides your couch, who is paid to listen to your bullshit!” Stefanos says with venom. “Honestly, I can’t imagine how anyone could stand you without being paid to.”

Dania had said, fuck you at that and stormed off to his hotel room without another word. The next few days, he hadn’t talked to Stefanos at all. He hadn’t talked to pretty much anyone other than the necessary exchanges, and was on the first plane out of Boston when it was over, heading to London then Stockbridge then Nether Wallop. Before leaving for Indian Wells he had spent thirteen quiet days there, out of which he hadn’t eaten for twelve.

He is just making up his own problems, Dania thinks, turning on his side, so he can lay on his side. It’s like he feeds off his own sadness, causing his own pain like an actual masochist, plucking out his out eyes and then feeling righteous about it.

He is a non-person. He doesn’t really exist, only the collective sum of his pain. People can see him but he is not really there. He is not anywhere.

They may see him, but he is hollow.

It doesn’t last long, his surprisingly good mood, turning out to be fleeting and sadly temporary by the next afternoon. Dania can feel it slipping out of him like air from al old shrunk ballon, leaving behind heavy limbs and dull throbbing ache in his chest.

He’d been a fool. He’d been a stupid selfish child, deluding himself into thinking Stefanos would stay with him like in some fairytale. He needs to grow up. He needs to let go of the fairytales and face the fucking reality.

If you don’t know your boundaries, you’re going to be lost.

Stefanos will leave. Dania has known that forever. He can’t believe the thought is chilling now, as if he’s just learned it all over again. He can’t believe it feels like betrayal.

Stefanos doesn’t owe him shit. Stefanos has his own life. Taking care of Dania’s fragile state is not Stefanos responsibility, and nor should it be.

“When are you getting back on tour?” Stefanos asks him from where he’s sprawled over the couch, only managing to sour his mood even further.

It’s a nice reminder that Stefanos obviously can’t wait to wash him off his hands and get the fuck out of here, be somewhere else, not here, not even close.

“I don’t know,” he snaps, and Stefanos shoots him a look at the tone, but says nothing. Dania won’t have it. “Why? Want to get rid of me?”

“Just curious,” Stefanos shrugs, stubbornly unprovoked. “But it’s nearing the end of August and I was wondering if you were going to play US Open.”

The words startle him. He has not been keeping up with the calendar at all, only messaged Gilles weeks ago telling him to withdraw Dania from the upcoming tournaments until further notice. But it’s been months.

The idea of going back to the tour is terrifying, filling him with a sense of urgency just short of total panic. The muscles in his thigh jolt and contract.

“You want me,” he says to Stefanos, and Stefanos startles and frowns. “You said you wanted me,” Dania repeats, his voice hoarse. “Why haven’t you done anything?”

“Very subtle deflection,” Stefanos murmurs. “What do you mean, haven’t done anything?”

Dania flushes, can feel his cheeks and neck and even his chest flame with the heat of embarrassment.

“You haven’t touched me even once since that… you know,” he mumbles incoherently.

Stefanos ties his hair up. Dania’s heart pounds in his throat.

“Do you want me to touch you?” Stefanos says evenly, and, fuck, Dania is trapped. What the fuck is he supposed to say to that? He’s dug a hole and thrown himself in it.

“I, um,” he swallows audibly. “Do you want to?” He says lamely.

“Yes,” Stefanos says bluntly. “I believe I’ve already made it clear,” he adds flippantly. “My turn. Do you want me to touch you?”

Dania opens his mouth, but nothing manages to make its way out.

“No-one ever gets what they deserve,” Stefanos says pensively. “Not unless they know what they’re working towards. And you don’t have a clue what you want.”

And it’s not true, Dania wants a lot of things — too many to ever name them all. He wants a great many things like being the best tennis player, being a normal person, having Stefanos touch him and kiss him and love him; being happy. It’s a great mess of the things he has no right to want, and yet he does, because he is a stupid child lost in a sea of fairytales.

“I do,” he croaks out.

“New rule,” Stefanos says. “If you want me to do anything you have to say it.”

“Why?” Dania rasps, irritated and humiliated and hurting. “You already know—“

“I don’t,” Stefanos says firmly. “I’m not a mind reader. I want you to want things, not just subject yourself to them. I want you to voice things you actually want,” he takes a deep breath, shoves his hands inside his jeans pockets. “At least, that’s what my therapist used to tell me.”

“You have a therapist?” Dania says disbelievingly.

“Yeah, we can’t all be as well-adjusted as you,” Stefanos drawls.

They look at each other. Dania focuses his attention on the idle tap-tap-tap of Stefanos’ middle finger against the armrest as. Stefanos has never been one to display many nervous habits before, and it’s fascinating now and a little endearing. Another layer he’s stripped off himself to let Dania in.

“I know you say a huge number of things you don’t actually mean, and swallow back many more that you do,” Stefanos says with a heavy sigh, “I know you’ll eat burnt toast you hate every day of your life before it ever occurs to you to ask for what you really want. This can’t work like that.”

“Fine,” Dania says, swallowing past the clot in his throat. “Yes. I want you to touch me. I want to touch you.”

Stefanos gives him a lopsided smile with an air of accomplishment, a job well done.

“It’d be my pleasure,” he says cheekily. “We can start on massaging that muscle.”

“What muscle?” Dania says, and it comes out like a whine. “It hurts all over.”

“Then I’ll massage all over,” Stefanos says and taps the empty couch cushion beside him in invitation. “Sit.”

“‘Sit?’ What am I, a beagle?” Dania grumbles, but obediently drops next to Stefanos on the couch, his chest tight with nervous anticipation.

“You have the intelligence of one,” Stefanos provides, but then his fingers are on Dania’s thigh, gentle and warm and tender. Dania sighs against the pain, closes his eyes and lets his head drop against the back of the couch.

Stefanos is silent as he works, threading the muscle carefully, fingers digging in just enough to be painful but not unbearably so. It’s the most anyone’s touched him in months. It’s the most Stefanos ever touched him, fingers on his bear skin, and the hairs on Dania’s arms and the back of his neck stand with goosebumps.

“Alright?” Stefanos says quietly, and Dania forces himself to nod affirmatively. He feels like liquid, like Stefanos’ hands on him are the only barrier preventing him from flowing over and spilling into a river.

“I’m sorry,” he mutters, and Stefanos looks up at him in surprise. “I felt different yesterday, better, I thought,” he tries to explain, but the right words keep slipping away from him. “I thought I’d be okay, and I’m still not, um, not like I felt —“

He cuts himself off, embarrassed and irritated.

“You will be okay,” Stefanos says with unwavering certainty, like it’s the indisputable truth. “It just won’t happen overnight. You gotta live little by little every day.”

It won’t happen overnight, Dania thinks, words tasting vaguely like hope. It won’t happen overnight.

He studies Stefanos’ face. His brow is furrowed and the tip of his tongue is between his teeth — the perfect image of concentration and focus, the expression he used to wear during changeovers and his father’s instructions during practice. The loose curl bounces across his cheekbone as he moves, and, on a whim, Dania reaches, catching it in his fingers, and pushes it behind his ear.

Stefanos looks up. “Anything else?” He says so quietly, it’s barely a whisper, and Dania feels a burst of want deep in the pit of his stomach, instinctive and irrational.

“Yeah,” Dania whispers back, heart in his throat, and kisses him.

The first go they’d had in the kitchen was quick and dry and over before he could even process what was happening, so Dania takes his time on the second round, deliberate and thorough. He memorises the precise shape of Stefanos’ mouth under his, learning the taste and supple give of it, lingering over its curves and corners. He drags their lips together, a sweet velvety glide, and there’s something raw-painful-desperate clawing its was out of his chest.

Stefanos sighs against lips, a hot rush of air, and smiles that rare little smile he seems to reserve specifically for Dania.

“See,” Stefanos beams at him like the sun, “it pays off, wanting things.”

“Do you ever think it was a mistake?” Dania asks him as they walk across the field of brown grass, the setting sun painting the tips of Stefanos’ hair crimson. “Retiring?”

Stefanos shrugs with one shoulder. “Only every single day.” His voice is even, his breathing steady, but there’s an unmistakable tremor running down his arm. “But the thing is — my entire life, even the mistakes I made weren’t my own.”

Dania doesn’t say anything, just listens. He’s always been good at listening.

“I might regret it later, I might not,” Stefanos with a note of desperation to his words. “I might not like it and go back to tennis next season, I don’t know. I’ll never know if I don’t try. The key is to try.”

Dania watches him, waits.

“I need to know my boundaries,” Stefanos. “If you don’t tread your boundaries, you won’t be able to dream.”

They argue, of course. Soft kisses or not, Stefanos is a man of very strong opinions, many of which happen to be completely wrong, and so they fight it out over everything from past matches to Sascha Zverev’s mental state to the ethics of paying resident taxes on price money – and once, heatedly, the merits of college education over straight-out field experience from an entry-level job.

They argue about music and literature, too. By default, in Stefanos’ eyes, Dania is never right. Stefanos invariably takes issue with some aspect of Dania’s contributions to any discussion, whether they’re strategising for a doubles match or brainstorming ideas for where to go for lunch. If Dania recommends a PR agent, Stefanos has worked with her before and she’s utterly incompetent; if Dania thinks it looks like rain, Stefanos just happens to have a detailed weather report on hand that suggests scorching sun for the day. If Dania were to propose that the earth revolves round the sun, he has no doubt that Stefanos would personally discover a fatal flaw in the heliocentric model in order to prove him wrong.

This is why they made such a compelling match-up to watch, the two opposing forces on a tennis court that would attract such huge audiences. Dania misses it now more than ever, the all-consuming anticipation of facing Stefanos across the net and proving him wrong, the delightful sense of accomplishment and pure fun that came along with it.

“I’ve always been so annoyed at you,” Stefanos tells him, “for being so much more well-read than me,” he chuckles. “Every time I’d see my Mom after she’s spent five seconds with you, it’d be like, darling, have you read Chekhov? Do you know Tolstoy? You have to know the Russian classics, they’re your heritage, too. Dania has read everything!”

He rolls his eyes, imitating his mother in a naggy tone, and it’s a pretty accurate parody of her. “She was so hard on my ass about not reading Dostoevsky’s Idiot—“

“You haven’t read Idiot?” Dania says with an air of superiority. “That’s a shame, considering it’s named after you.”

Stefanos rolls his eyes so hard it must hurt. “Yeah well, I had a late start, I couldn’t keep up with you,” Dania watches his expression shift into something more vulnerable and less comfortable. “I did read the book you gave me. The one that ended up in the trash, but was originally supposed to make its way to me,” he smiles.

“You read the whole thing?” Dania wonders, another unbearable clot of sentiment rising to his throat.

“Of course,” Stefanos grins. “How else did you think I’ve been able to keep up with your endless silly fairytale references?”

Dania sighs, trying to calm his stupid pounding heart.

Stefanos is leaning back in his chair, seemingly as unconcerned as ever with the fact that he’s barely an inch away from toppling over on his arse. He’s perfectly balanced, jeans pulling taut over the lean muscles of his thighs, and Dania wants and wants and wants.

“I’m going to bed,” he announces, getting up. At the door, he gathers the last shreds of his courage and his will, and says, without looking at Stefanos, “Will you come with me?”

Stefanos’ chair snaps back on all four legs with a loud noise. Dania hates it when he sways in the already raggedy chairs, one strong breath away from falling apart. Stefanos grabs his phone from the table and smiles at him.

He follows Dania to his room. He doesn’t argue for once.

“There was this day when I was fourteen,” Stefanos says as they sit in raggedy chairs on the patio, watching the sunset, tea mugs steaming on a flimsy small table between them, “we all got the flu. It was horrible. Lizzie was barely a toddler and she was coughing and crying nonstop, and Pavlos and Petros were down with fever. Mom couldn’t get out of bed even to puke, and Dad kept yelling at everyone to get their shit together.” He chuckles with a far away look in his eyes. Dania listens and watches the way his hair sways in the light summer breeze. “I was the least affected, even though I felt like shit too, so Dad forced me to be the nurse basically. I had to calm Lizzie down, and she just kept wailing and screaming, I thought my head would explode… Petros was thankfully mostly asleep, and Mom was puking so much her hair was crusty with dried vomit, so I had to clean that, too.” He shakes his head and takes a sip of his tea. “And then — I remember it so well — Pavlos stumbled in, crying, greenish snot running down his face, and wailed, “Adonis — that’s our dog — pooped in the kitchen and I stepped in it!” And my Dad yelled, all indisputable authority, Stefanos! Take care of it!” He smiles, but it’s a sad little thing. “And I remember thinking clearly, this is hell and I hate him, I hate my father.”

Dania doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t think Stefanos wants to him to, anyway, and he’s just content listening to whatever tidbit Stefanos is willing to give him.

“It all got better the next day, naturally. We all got better. But from then on I always thought of that day as the low point in my life, the debacle that put everything else in perspective. If the basement flooded, or I played badly, or Dad got too overbearing, I always reminded myself that things could have been worse. Well, I’d think, at least it’s not as bad as that time we all got so sick. That was pure hell.”

Dania watches his profile, the way he licks his lips, the tip of his tongue darting out. Despite the undoubtedly profound story, he feels an undeniable pang of desire for Stefanos, an actual stirring in his groin.

“For years I kept thinking that, and I was so offended at Dad for making me do all that, clean the shit and vomit and what have you. But then Dad got a heart issue and had to get a surgery. It was a very bad one, the kind where they don’t make any promises, and we sat there in the waiting room, numb with worry, and Mom said — probably just to distract us — remember that day we were all down with flu, and Stef took care of us all? Your Dad was so proud, and I said, Mom, it was a horrible day, and she went: That day was lovely, I wouldn’t trade it for a million ordinary days. I learned that we’d raised a son who could take care of others.”

Stefanos pauses to look at him and maybe give him time to process the moral of the story. Dania stays silent.

“I think a lot about it these days, how I kept thinking my father was a proper bastard, doing fuckall that whole day,” Stefanos smiles with a corner of his mouth. “but, really, he was just a very good teacher.”

They sip their tea in a companionable silence, as the sun slowly disappears behind the endless rows of tall grass.

“Do you have any memories like that?” Stefanos asks him after a while, and Dania falters, unsure.

“I, um —“ he says in a choked raspy voice that doesn’t sound like his own. “Not a lot. Next to nothing, really.”

Stefanos looks at him closely, tilting his head.

“I might not be the maths expert between the two of us,” he says softly. “But next to nothing is still higher than nothing, isn’t it?”

The circles under Dania’s eyes have faded slightly as he is surprised to see when he looks in the mirror. A touch of colour has returned to his face, and he looks generally better rested and less like a surly, dying homeless person dressed in fancy Lacoste clothes.

It’s not gonna happen overnight, he thinks, as he brushes his teeth. Little by little every day.

It’s the last week of August and Dania is shaking apart with unbearable apprehension that comes from the knowledge of Stefanos leaving soon, looming over him like a dark cloud.

He is restless and sleepless again, the insomnia messing with him and causing him to vent at Stefanos more often than not, his words laced with fatigue, impatience, resignation, and a hint of petulance.

“Are you alight?” Stefanos asks him through the darkness of the room, lying curled on his side next to Dania.

Dania shrugs, trying to let him know he was okay, but the gesture feels more ambivalent than he’s meant it to. He can feel the sweat breaking out on his forehead, one clammy drop at a time. Stefanos doesn’t push. He never does, anymore, never really takes charge of things, always letting Dania set the pace, never pushing, never urging anything on. It’s annoying and unbearable, and Dania wants to scream and demand Stefanos do something, anything, already.

He fists his hands in the sheets and breathes raggedly, wonders if Stefanos can feel how feverish he feels, how much he wants him, how much he needs him now. His whole body is burning up, waves of heat coming off him that Stefanos must be able to feel, and he is choking up on air and the remains of his pride, and his love—

“Stefanos,” he chokes out, throat closing up, and he wants and needs and craves.

“Yeah,” Stefanos breathes, turning so he can face Dania, keeping a chaste distance.

“Please,” Dania begs, ashamed and bursting with too many things to name, and then closes the final gap between them and kisses him, hard and wet and long. Stefanos makes a choked sound, almost a whimper, and heat immediately builds low in Dania’s stomach. He’s rapidly on his way to getting fully hard, feels like he’s been hard for days, years, ages.

“Dania,” Stefanos moans against his lips, wet and hot, and Dania wants Stefanos to want him, wants Stefanos to cup his cheek and tell him how much he wants him. He wants Stefanos to make him forget where he is, forget his own name, forget everything except the feeling of Stefanos’ lips and the way Stefanos’ name feels in his mouth.

He grabs Stefanos and hails him up until Dania is pressed to the mattress underneath him, Stefanos a hot long line of muscle on top of him, and they are close like this, eliminating the negative space in between, from foreheads leaned together to lips brushing to Stefanos’ heart beating against his chest, to their toes brushing against each other, to Stefanos’ cock digging into his thigh.

“Dania,” Stefanos moans again, but Dania just keeps on kissing him, messy and deep and wet, because he can’t get enough.

He can never get enough of this. And Stefanos will be gone soon.

“Fuck me,” he says with inflection, the words somehow wrong and filthy in his mouth, and he thrusts his hips up, letting Stefanos feel just how hard he is for him, how desperate, how he’ll let Stefanos do anything he wanted to him. “Fuck me hard, come on,” he keeps babbling and Stefanos draws in a sharp breath. Good, Dania knows how some guys get turned on by all the dirty talk, the way they get to feel powerful and strong over his skinny frame, the way they can bend him in half and just use him. He needs Stefanos to fucking do it, now, before he might think about it too hard and change his mind. He can’t help his tone getting a bit theatric, “Come on, Stef, fuck me, I need your big fat cock insi—“

“Stop this, just stop it,” Stefanos says suddenly and draws back.

Dania freezes, words stuck in his throat, throbbing and bitter. For a terrifying moment he is back in the filthy hotel room near Piccadilly, spread over the stained sheets, and Stefanos is going to say sorry, mate, I can’t do it, and leave him here, alone and splayed open.

“Sorry,” he babbles, terrified and panicked and near hyperventilating, “I’m sorry, Stef, please, I won’t, please—“

Stefanos leans down and kisses him, slow and impossibly tender, and Dania moans, loud and broken, right into Stefanos’ open mouth.

“You don’t need to appease me,” Stefanos whispers into his ear, “and I don’t want you to pretend to be something you’re not.” His hands slide underneath Dania’s T-shirt, glaze over his belly and up to rub softly at his nipples. Dania jolts, eyes screwing shut. “I don’t want you to be anyone else but yourself. I love you.”

He wants to tell Stefanos that being himself isn’t a good thing while being someone else is an upgrade, but God, this is too much, Stefanos’ hands and Stefanos’ words, and Dania can’t handle the sensory overload. He chokes out a whimper, and Stefanos kisses him again and squeezes his hands tight, their fingers laced together. “What do you want?”

“Anything,” Dania babbles, “I’ll have anything you give me, please, just—“

“No,” Stefanos says, his hands stopping their ministrations over Dania’s nipples. “What do you want?”

And Dania is going to cry because, what kind of a question is that — fuck, anything Stefanos asks him, anything Stefanos wants, Dania’s answer is yes.

“Do you want me to fuck you raw?” Stefanos whispers harshly, and Dania’s body jolts. “Do you want me to use you, fuck you like a slut? Use your body until it bleeds and I can find a new one? You want me to fuck your mouth like a back-alley whore and leave you here with my come on your face?”

“No,” Dania wails, trembling and burning all over, because, fuck, he had wanted those things before, craved them from random strangers and men he’d picked up in dubious pubs, but he doesn’t want that from Stefanos now, because it’s Stefanos and fuck, Dania wants, he wants—

“Then what do you want?” Stefanos demands, eyes flashing in the dark. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to make love to me,” he sobs out and hiccups and turns his face to the side, so Stefanos won’t see him, won’t see how disgustingly needy he is. He is trembling with helpless little jerks, the last of his rational thoughts flying out the window, succumbing to shame and humiliation of his admission, the most pathetic thing he’s ever said to Stefanos.

“Yes,” Stefanos whispers, his voice rough and hoarse, as if he wanted to cry, too. “Okay.”

And then he is kissing Dania again, urgent and desperate, as if it’s his last ever chance to do so. His hands take off Dania’s t-shirt impatiently before he slides them down Dania’s arms, down his sides and over the swell of his ribcage. He takes his time, noses at Dania’s nipple a couple of times before flicking his tongue over it, and Dania bites on his lip hard enough to draw blood. Every nerve ending he has is on fire, and Stefanos is all hot skin, all over him, and when Dania says Stefanos’ name, his voice is ruined, raspy and hoarse and completely fucked out.

“Stef, Stef, please, Jesus—“

Stefanos’ wandering fingers leave criss-crossing trails of heat all over Dania’s body. Everywhere he touches, Dania feels the hot drag of his fingertips through slick sweat, and it’s too much, he can’t help it, and he bucks his hips, shoving his cock into Stefanos’ hips. Stefanos huffs out a breathless, wondering laugh, his breath damp against Dania’s skin.

“Christ, you’re so beautiful,” Stefanos says, his pupils blown so wide it’s all blackness and heat in his eyes. He looks delirious, like he’s come down with a fever. “I wish you could see yourself, darling”

Dania’s cock jerks at the word, and fuck, he is going to come before Stefanos  even fucking gets his hands on him. There’s a ringing in his ears, everything too hot, too intense, too much, and his fingers ache from gripping the sheets too tight, and his cock fucking aches from holding on too long, and then Stefanos pulls his underwear down in one jerky desperate move and licks a hot stripe up the underside of his cock, closing his mouth around him, and Dania can’t feel anything except that, hot and soft and wet.

Dania comes what would be embarrassingly quickly if he had any shreds of embarrassment left in him. He hasn’t had sex in a very long time and this is Stefanos.

It’s Stefanos, his mind supplies, the only thing that makes sense, his name and the way Stefanos’ mouth feels around him and the way his hands are splayed wide over Dania’s hips, thumbs pressing into the hollows, pushing him down hard into the mattress.

“Okay, love, good, you’re doing great,” Stefanos murmurs into his skin as he is coming down. “You’re okay, darling, I’ve got you.”

He feels electrified, tingly, boneless and liquid, and at the same time shaky and shivery all over. His breaths come out in sharp uneven puffs of air, and his hands still gripping the sheets are trembling and spasming.

Stefanos moves up, leaning on his elbows on either side of Dania’s face, and kisses him again. Dania opens his mouth under Stefanos’, whimpering when he tastes salt and fuck, come, in Stefanos’ mouth. His head is empty, mind narrowed down to Stefanos mouth against his, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist, and it might as well for all Dania cares. He keeps kissing Stefanos, who drapes himself over Dania again, grinding into him a little before he slides his palms along the backs of Dania’s hands, lifting them above his head, and they’re pressed together everywhere, ankles to elbows, and Dania just can’t kiss Stefanos enough, never enough.

Stefanos flips them then, leaning back against the headboard and manhandling Dania until he ends up sitting on Stefanos’ lap. It’s almost unbearably intimate this way, making him feel vulnerable and exposed, and he hides his face in the warm crook of Stefanos’ neck, inhales the scent of ocean and basil. Stefanos hands roam over his sides and his back, before cupping Dania’s jaw and tugging, making him look up.

Stefanos looks wrecked. “Okay?” He breathes into Dania’s ear.

Dania doesn’t miss the cracking edge in his voice, like he’s barely hanging on. Stefanos’ breathing has gone ragged and uneven, like he’s just stepped off court. He leans forward and kisses Dania’s cheek, then his nose, then his lips ghost over his trembling eyelids. Dania wants to hide suddenly, flee this room and fly halfway across the word from Stefanos’ incomprehensible tenderness, and at the same time craves it even more, yearns for it like dying plant that’s never seen the sun.

Stefanos’ cock nudges against his ass, hot and hard, and he shifts back, causing Stefanos to moan.

“Stef,” he mutters against his lips, arms wrapping around Stefanos’ neck. He shoves his nose into the golden curls, soft and silky, and closes his eyes. He’s taken the edge off, having already come, but it’s building up again, this desperate-painful-raw ugly thing inside him, hurting and crying. He needs Stefanos closer, tighter, more, more, more.

Stefanos reaches for the bedside drawer, but there’s no lube inside, which now feels like a major cosmic tragedy, and Dania hurries to say, “get the massage oil, come on,” before Stefanos decides he doesn’t want to do it anymore. But Stefanos seems too out of it now to care about such trivialities, and he mindlessly pours the oil over his shaky fingers.

“Stef, Stef, please,” Dania urges, already half hard again, and Stefanos hasn’t even touched him.

“Yes, yes,” Stefanos replies, feverish. “Christ, Dania, fuck.”

His oiled finger slides down to Dania’s ass and rubs against his hole. Dania jolts, mouth opening.

“Shh, just relax,” Stefanos tells him. Dania wants to tell him he knows, he’s done this before, but Jesus, he hasn’t been fucked in so long, and he hasn’t been made love to ever, and the words stick to his tongue.

“Gonna open you slow,” Stefanos promises. He makes tiny circles with one of the slick fingers pressed up against Dania’s hole, not dipping inside yet but considering it. Allowing Dania to get used it. “Gonna make you feel so good.”

“Stef,” Dania says, more of a gasp really, mindless with unbearable anticipation and raw visceral need. “Please.”

Maybe it’s the edge in his voice, but Stefanos takes pity on him, sliding a finger inside, just a tip. Dania is ready to just buck down and sink on it, pain and patience be damned. He squirms and writhes, and Stefanos sighs Dania, Dania and adds another finger.

Dania is floating away now, as if his consciousness is separating from his body. He has to keep reminding himself it is Stefanos. Stefanos is going to fuck him, and suddenly he knows why Stefanos keeps saying saying his name like that, awestruck, because it is so difficult to believe. It’s difficult to believe that he is here, getting fingered by Stefanos, getting hard again for Stefanos, needy and wrecked and shaking apart for Stefanos.

But it’s also Stefanos touching him very, very gently, making soft promises that are both incredibly filthy and yet also somehow careful, and very kind.

Dania, Stefanos whispers in his ear, wet and hot, you feel so good, darling, and delicately twists his fingers inside him. Dania shudders with his entire body, heart galloping violently in his chest, reverberating down his his limbs. Dania is too tall and angular, but he folds himself down, makes himself fit into the structure of Stefanos’ body, pressing his face against the juncture of Stefanos’ neck and shoulder, his nose stuffed of Stefanos’ curls.

His hips are moving without his permission, rolling forward and up into Stefanos’ belly, cock red and strained and leaking. And the worst thing — the thing that makes Dania want to shy away and hide himself — is the diligent way Stefanos has destroyed the masks and roles that Dania depends on — that he needs — and exposed all of the ugly, vulnerable, yearning places inside him. And Stefanos isn’t running away like he should be — he’s wrapping himself around Dania instead and blanketing him with warmth and a cherishing devotion that’s almost like worship.

Dania has never felt so loved in his life and it’s fucking terrifying.

Stefanos’ fingers hit his prostrate and Dania wails, too far gone to control himself. Stefanos draws in a sharp breath, says Christ, you’re gorgeous, kisses his cheek again, whispers brokenly, those dimples flaring in your cheeks, I could never take my eyes of them, just wanted to make you smile all the time.

Please, Dania begs, his voice so cracked and ruined that he doesn’t recognise it at first, but the relentless movement of Stefanos’ fingers inside of him slows, so Dania licks his lips and tries again. Please fuck me — Stef, come on—please, I need—oh God, please, Stef—”

And Stefanos probably wanted Dania to ride him, but it seems completely impossible now, because he is a shaky unhinged mess, only held together by Stefanos’ fingers inside him. Stefanos swears, and pulls them out, the connection gone, and Dania clings to him even tighter yet. He feels hollowed out, bereft. He aches inside, and sudden panic seeps in through the hazy edges of his arousal.

God, he needs this. Can’t Stefanos see how much he needs it? Sod it all to fucking hell, if Stefanos screws with him any more, then Dania is going to break down crying right here, naked and panting into Stefanos’ hair. Nothing else matters now, nothing else even exits except Stefanos and him in this little house in Nether Wallop, where Stefanos came to him and then left him, the bastard, left him again, and —

Stefanos cock presses against his hole, and Dania exhales a shaky breath of relief. Stefanos holds him by his hips, lifting him up as if he weighed like a papier-mâché, and sinking him gently onto his cock.

It’s okay, love, it’s all going to be okay, Stefanos babbles into his ear, hands moving Dania up and down on his cock. Even now he’s still useless, Dania thinks guiltily, even now Stefanos still has to do all the work, can’t even ride him properly. He wants to wrap his hand around his own cock, but the idea of letting Stefanos go, even for a moment, is unbearable, so he just ruts against Stefanos’ belly, smearing precome everywhere, and getting some friction before he fucking dies.

Dania, sweetheart, Stefanos babbles, and the flood of endearments is making Dania choked up, while somehow soothing the throbbing ache in his chest at the same time. Kiss, kiss, kiss across his cheek, his neck, his shoulders, and then down to his nipples, sending ripples of heat and frantic neednowplease down his body. It’s too much, this reverence, this worship he’s never experienced before, never been touched so carefully, so lovingly, as if he was something to cherish and treasure.

I’ve got you, love, trust me, Stefanos breathes. Trust Stefanos. As if it’s possible for Dania to do anything else. He nods anyway, and Stefanos rewards him with another feverish kiss. Dania, look at me, Stefanos says in a voice that cracks, and Dania unglues his eyes and meets his gaze. Stefanos is staring back at him with such fierce devotion and desire that Dania’s stomach clenches painfully. He isn’t sure that he can ever be whoever Stefanos thinks he’s looking at.

Stefanos thrusts up again, loosing rhythm and finesse, and brings Dania down deeper onto his cock at the same time, and it’s too much, the heat is almost unbearable now, the heavy tug low at his stomach. The room dissolves in tiny little flashes as Stefanos holds him and fucks him. Dania is vaguely aware that he’s mewling, that his legs are trembling where they’re hooked around Stefanos’ hips, that Stefanos is kissing every inch of his skin that he can reach. He’s dripping sweat, skin agonisingly hot and responsive, and Stefanos is a brushfire moving against him. He thinks he cries out, but his ears are ringing, and Stefanos just keeps thrusting, hitting his prostate again and again, and then says in a desperate raspy voice that breaks, I’ve got you, you’re are gonna be okay, we both are, I love you

I’m gonna take take of you, Dania hears, and that’s it, he’s done and over, he is coming again for the second time tonight, back arching.

Солнышко моё, Stefanos whispers, and Dania sobs, a violent burst of pleasure ripping through him, and comes and comes and comes, his breath stuttering out like he’s been punched and his muscles spasming. He’s shaking apart, shattering to pieces, and Stefanos keeps fucking him through it, hand caressing his spent cock.

He must have blacked out for a while — his brain short-circuiting and unable to process such a sensory overload — because when he becomes aware next, he is laying on his back, and Stefanos is melted on top of him, pliant and soft and pleasantly heavy.

“Dania,” Stefanos mumbles somewhere into his neck, and then, with an obvious effort, pulls himself onto his elbows and peers down at him. Stefanos’ cock is still inside him, and Dania doesn’t want him to move.

“Hmm,” he says, because that’s all he can scramble together at the moment.

“I love you,” Stefanos says again with a desperate urgency.

“So you’ve said,” Dania mutters, and god, thinking is hard right now, and speaking even more so. He feels boneless and liquid and like he is going to pour onto the floor the moment Stefanos gets off of him. “But I’d hold off the big declarations for now, at least while your cock is still inside me.”

Stefanos sighs and drops back onto him, his elbows giving out. His face lands in the crook of Dania’s neck, and he mutters, “I’d told you that before we had sex, I don’t need to hold anything off.”

“Yeah, um, I,” Dania says and shuts up. He can’t think of anything remotely appropriate to say now, his eloquence apparently fucked out of him.

“I can’t believe you’ve read so many books and yet coming up with a sentence is such a hardship for you,” Stefanos says flippantly, and Dania sighs. He doesn’t want to upset Stefanos, it’s just that it’s inevitable, isn’t it, because Stefanos has got it into his head that he is in love with someone who doesn’t really exist.

“Yes, well, that was really intense, give me a moment,” he says and hopes that the moment will last for about a year.

“I understand,” Stefanos says, his voice sending little vibrations into Dania’s skin. “Sex with me can shock some people, I get it. Take all the time you need.”

Dania chuckles unwillingly, and Stefanos twists his head to look up at him, grinning. There’s a sheen of sweat on his forehead, his lips are kiss-swollen, and his hair a mess of tangles curls, and if Dania didn’t know any better, he’d call that cosmic overwhelming feeling deep in his very core love.

But he does know better.

“I suppose you’re gonna close yourself off now,” Stefanos mutters, sighing, no trace of a smile. “You’ve let mesee you and now you’re in shambles. Now you’re gonna keep me at arm’s length.”

Stefanos slips out of him and rolls off. The bed dips as Stefanos climbs off. Dania lies there with his legs sprawled wide, too fucked out to think clearly, and lets the white noise of his fatigued body drone in his mind. The sound of water running in the bathroom reaches him but means nothing until Stefanos reappears with a cool washcloth that he trails over Dania’s body.

Dania is half asleep by the time Stefanos touches him, makes a muffles sound of protest —but Stefanos shushes him with a kiss and a let me take care of you, and Dania would tear up again if his body had any liquid left in it. Stefanos’ hands are gentle, and just as good at putting him together as they were at taking him apart in the first place. The cloth goes everywhere: face, chest, stomach, cock. Down between Dania’s legs with deft, thorough swipes that make his breath catch.

“I’m not in shambles,” he protests, even though he fucking is. Stefanos climbs back into bed, and Dania shuffles closer to him, until they are touching again. “See, we can cuddle,” he says, and throws Stefanos’ arm over his own body. Stefanos immediately shifts closer, fitting himself over Dania’s back like second skin. His arms tightens over Dania’s middle, and Dania swallows and laces their fingers together.

Stefanos’ body is warm and solid against him, surprisingly reassuring, like a wall he can lean on. Stefanos noses at the back of his neck, sighs into his skin.

“It’s going to be okay,” he mutters into Dania’s neck, a note of urgency in his voice, as if he was trying to convince himself as much as Dania. “We are going to be okay.”

They have sex again in the morning, the early murky light from the window barely enough to see through the darkness.

This time Stefanos fucks him slowly, sweetly —no rush and choking desperation, like they have all the time in the world. They stay spooned, side by side, as Stefanos hooks his leg up and slides into him from behind, and Dania keens and mewls and floats through it, still half-asleep and maddeningly aroused.

Darling, Stefanos whispers into his ear, and it sound like a plea, solnyshko.

Stef, Dania moans through the haze of sleepiness and arousal, body arching, and Stefanos opens his mouth and just lets the endearments slip out — a constant flow of affectionate words he’d never heard addressed to him before.

He doesn’t even stir when Stefanos slips out of bed, kissing him on the forehead, just drifts back to creep, loose and boneless and relaxed.

It’s afternoon when he wakes again, and Dania puts on the clothes that are neatly folded by the bed — he’ll give Stefanos the credit — and walks, yawning, into the the sitting room on rubbery legs.

Stefanos is busy in the kitchen.

"Wakey-wakey ," Stefanos says with unseemly cheer. He's got his back to Dania, working away at the counter. There's a mug of tea already waiting on the dinner table. Dania sits to take it while Stefanos keeps messing with whatever today's project is. "Focaccia," he answers the unvoiced question. "I’ve had some in Rome — the real thing, not the shit they sell at Tesco, and it was amazing. I’d had no idea bread could be so delicious. Wait till you try it! If I can get it right, that is."

Dania sleepily brings the mug to his mouth and watches Stefanos’ back and shoulders shift beneath his shirt as he kneads the dough. Little by little, details filter through the fog. Stefanos is wearing linen white pants and a baby-blue linen shirt —Dania once saw Berrettini pull off a similar one — like he fancies himself an Italian youth at a Sunday food market south off Piazza Minghetti, his sleeves rolled up, forearms covered in flour.

Stefanos keeps kneading, bare forearms moving in a strange dance. Little huffs of breath come from him as he works. His shirt is untucked and covered in flour and dough and something that looks dark and sticky that Dania doesn’t want to know. Dania knows he's staring but can't think of a reason to stop. The light filtering in from the window paints Stefanos hair gold.

It’s strange how Dania had come here to suffer, and then Stefanos showed up and made him forget his purpose and begin to enjoy himself, sharing juicy tidbits of gossip from the ridiculous local paper, or simply renewing his connection to the harsh but colourful world he was supposed to have renounced.

“We’re out of milk, by the way,” Stefanos says, turning towards him, one big puff of flour eating from his fancy linen shirt. “And we want milk when we eat focaccia, trust me.”

“I wouldn’t dare not to,” Dania says solemnly, amused despite his himself. “You’ve been a bread expert for all of five minutes, after all.”

Stefanos huffs and then claps his flour-covered hands above Dania’s head, and the flour falls down like snow over his hair and shoulders. Stefanos laughs like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever seen.

“Hey,” Dania protests, valiantly wiping the white stuff off his shirt and hair. “I look like I have dandruff now!”

“Yeah, well, go have a shower,” Stefanos grins. “You need one, anyway, after last night.”

“I’ve already bathed this week, don’t want to seem like an elitist,” Dania drawls, and Stefanos throws another puff of flour at him with an unseemly giggle.

“How about I join you there?” Stefanos says with and waggles his eyebrows like a cartoon character. “Save water and all, if you’re worried about elitism.”

“Yes, might be the only solution,” Dania says, getting up. “Although, there’s nothing elitist about having dubious DIY bread for food, so maybe I needn’t worry.”

Stefanos clicks his tongue and then lunges forward, floury hands and all, and kisses him.

Dania wants this, he suddenly thinks with a knot in his chest, frozen halfway between his chair and the table, mug of tea still in his hand. He wants this painfully, desperately, like he’s never allowed himself to want anything in his life — he wants Stefanos in the little kitchen in the mornings making his stupid bread, he wants Stefanos at the couch with him commenting on a shark documentary, as they watch it snuggled close together, he wants long walks across the field with Stefanos’ fancy camera clicking away at trivial stuff Dania wouldn’t look twice at, he wants Stefanos’ kisses sudden and light and warm, his beard scratching Dania’s cheeks, he wants to keep feeling this way: lighthearted and easy and content, he wants to smile and have Stefanos gush at his dimples, he wants to laugh like he means it, he wants and wants and wants.

“Leave me some hot water,” Stefanos says, but Dania barely hears him.

“Okay,” he mumbles, no idea what he’s agreeing to.

It won’t happen overnight, he thinks with a strange awe. It won’t happen overnight.

They are playing chess when the call comes.

Stefanos has been losing badly, as he typically does — which is by no means surprising since Dania didn’t spend years in the chess club for nothing — and he’s kept moaning and whining and accusing Dania off cheating.

“This is not Durak,” Dania says, smug and amused, “how the hell would I cheat at chess?”

“You’d find a way,” Stefanos says dramatically and forlornly surveys the few of his white pieces left on the board. “This can’t be yet another thing you are better than me at!

“I’m better than you at a great many things,” Dania’s lies, but Stefanos only huffs.

“My backhand is more beautiful,” he points out petulantly.

“Be that as it may, beauty does not equal quality,” Dania smirks, and has to duck for the bishop piece to narrowly miss his right ear.

“Unsportsmanlike conduct, warning, Mr Tsitsipas,” Dania grins, and Stefanos says, “Fuck off.”

“Verbal abuse, point penalty, Mr Tsitsipas,” Dania drawls, snatching Stefanos’ white queen off the board, and Stefanos laughs and opens his mouth for an undoubtedly witty retort, but then his phone starts ringing.

He takes it out of his jean pocket and stares intensely at the caller ID for a long moment, his smile slipping off his face. Dania freezes. There’s a sick, slippery dread slithering around in his gut at once.

“Hello,” Stefanos says in Russian, too formal to address his mother, and too tense to address someone he wouldn’t know. Dania swallows, watching him. “Yes, he’s here. Just a second.”

He offers the phone to Dania, hand outstretched over the forgotten chess board. “It’s your sister,” he says somberly.

Dania takes the phone, hesitating for a beat too long, before bringing it up to his ear.

“Hey, brother,” Yulia’s voice comes through the speaker, tense and overly casual. “Guess it’s time for you to remember your family,” she pauses and Dania can hear her swallow audibly. “Dad died.”

He feels nothing.

There is a giant hole in his chest where he knows grief and sadness and anger should be, a reaction to an unprecedented tragedy in his life. But he feels much a like a Black hole, sucking the molecules and atoms around him and vanishing them into eternal nothingness.

“Dania,” Stefanos says

Dania startles, he has forgotten Stefanos was there with him.

He realises with a sudden clarity how wrong it is that Stefanos is with him. He shouldn’t be here. He’s been wasting his time, stuck in this strange limbo of a house, babysitting Dania, instead of doing whatever it was he wanted to do now that he was free of the burden of his career. It feels inevitable, almost mathematical — Dania had been looking to fill the vacuum in his life, and Stefanos was the only plausible candidate. It had been such a shock to see him that day, walking down the slope, face and throat golden in the light.

He doesn’t know why they bother anymore — the game of play-house has turned into something like a bad habit to both of them, a ritual that had outlived its usefulness.

“I’m sorry,” Stefanos says, his face contorted and expression conflicted. He stands there awkwardly by the couch, limbs hanging uselessly along his body. He keeps twitching, as if wishing to move towards him, but always stops himself short, hesitant and lost.

“I didn’t love him,” Dania says evenly, surprised at the steadiness of his own voice: no cracking, no breaking, no tragic hiccuping. He had cried because Stefanos made him a Russian borsch the previous week, all sentimental gratitude that was enough to make his eyes tear up, and now there’s no trace of wetness in his eyes.

“I understand,” Stefanos says softly, and Dania is suddenly overwhelmed by violent anger, like a nuclear explosion building in his chest. Stefanos understands fuckall, and describing it is beyond Dania’s power.

“You don’t,” he says, and doesn’t recognise his own voice: low, discoloured, estranged. “I never loved him. I never loved anybody.”

“Dania —“ Stefanos starts, but Dania doesn’t let him finish.

“I know my boundaries,” he says and Stefanos flinches. “I know my limits.”

“You’re hurting right now—“

“But see, that’s the problem,” Dania laughs, a strange distorted sound, “I’m really not.”

Stefanos looks at him long and hard. “The problem is that you are always hurting, darling.”

The endearment slices like a knife against his ears, almost a physical pain. I doesn’t surprise him that Stefanos is sad or rebellious or angry. He has every right to be all those things and more. The only thing that surprises him is that Stefanos is still around, still sharing a house with him when he could just as easily have run off back to his family or his own fancy flat in Monaco or anywhere, really, that is not here, not anywhere close. Should have done.

“When are you leaving?” He demands, weeks of pent-up paranoia and apprehension finally spilling out of him.

“What?” Stefanos frowns.

“When are you going back to your life?” Dania presses aggressively, as if nothing could affect him anymore. “Don’t tell me you’re planning on staying here forever baking ciabatta for the local Sunday market!”

Stefanos falters, eyes skirting away. He looks sad and a little lost, and his hands fly up to tie his hair up.

“I’m not— I don’t—“ he utters, then looks annoyed — with Dania or himself, he is not sure. “What about you?” He says instead, eyes narrowing. “Are you done with your career? Your friends? You are just gonna hide yourself forever in this house in the middle of nowhere? Cutting yourself off from the people who love you?”

“You don’t love me, you just—“

“Don’t tell me what I fucking feel!” Stefanos yells, unhinged, eyes gleaming dangerously. “You are a fucking coward! You know why you are so afraid to lose?”

“Let me think,” Dania hisses, “I watched a tennis match once, and I noticed a fascinating thing: the guy who won was the happy one, imagine that! And then I did the math.”

“And yet you are world no. 1 and still not happy!” Stefanos yells, drops of spit flying out of his mouth. He’s shaking with righteous anger, hands flying around. “Because you are a coward! You’re afraid of change, afraid of even trying! You’d rather imagine a fairytale, instead of actually doing something and trying, because if you don’t try — you don’t fail! You don’t try and you don’t risk being a fucking disappointment!”

“Get out,” Dania grits out, his ears ringing. Stefanos glares at him, his breathing ragged and uneven. In contrast, Dania is calm, eerily serene. “Leave! You’re so good at that — leaving!Go back home, go to college, go to the fucking moon, just get the fuck out of here.”

Stefanos stares at him for another long beat. Then he grabs his car keys from the bowl and walks out of the room, out of the house, out of Dania’s life. The door slams loudly behind him, the sound cacophonous against his ears.

Then there’s silence.

Once upon a time, in an overgrown valley far, far away, there stood an ancient house. Darkness reigned over it, and no one ever went inside. There was no one left around to go inside the old shabby house, besides the little boy who lived there, trapped and hungry, locked in the cold dark dungeon. The old man who had put him there, blind and evil, died, and no one knew that the little boy was still locked in the cage. The villagers of the valley didn’t even bury the old man, only boarded up the windows and doors of the raggedy old house, and years later the village was empty and deserted. Only the little boy was still stuck in the cage, crying and alone, and dreaming of food for many, many years, and a rare passerby thought it were ghosts haunting the old crumbling house, and hurried to quickly get away from it. Years later, the house went silent, no one screaming and crying for help anymore.

Moscow is cold and grim this time of the year, but then it is so any time of the year. The air tastes stale and polluted as soon as he steps out of AeroExpress at the Komsomolskaya Station, and the sound of cars honking, ambulances howling and people hurrying around with their luggage dragging behind them immediately accost his ears. It’s a shock to his system and months of the quiet life at Nether Wallop, the scale of the monstrosity of this city. People scurrying around him look miserable and exhausted, and Dania is immediately infected with the mood.

He takes a taxi to Sokolniki, and the driver is silent the entire way. He isn’t sure he doesn’t recognise Dania or simply doesn’t care. There’s no music in the car as they drive.

Lena hugs him when she opens the door, tight but quick, almost perfunctory, as if they saw each other every couple days. Yulia just nods and waves at him from the hallway, a tight smile flashing on her face for only a second.

“It’s nice of you to finally come,” Yulia says with a specific inflection that makes his teeth ache. “How long has it been, eight years?”

“Yulia,” Lena says sharply, a warning.

Yulia sniffs. “Just funny how our dad’s death is what finally makes him step a foot in this place.”

“Yulia!” Lena snaps, harsh. Dania sighs. It’s obviously something they’d spent a lot of time discussing before he came here. He isn’t sure he wants to know.

“Where is mother?” he asks instead, looking around the huge sitting room. It should have seemed smaller to him now as a fully grown man, and yet it looks vaster and bigger than he ever remembered it being, the ceiling higher, the crystal chandelier grander and more majestic.

“You hear that: ‘mother’?” Yulia sniffs again, shaking her head. “We call her Mom in this family, just so you know.”

“Yulia, that’s enough!” Lena barks and sends a tight apologetic smile to Dania, before grabbing their sister by the shoulder and leading her out of the room. “Not today, for god’s sake…”

Her voice cuts off, and Dania is alone in the room. The table is long and set for about twenty people, and Dania is surprised at even that number. He doesn’t remember his father having many social acquaintances, but then, as a former KGB agent he’d have at least some former colleagues who are still alive, willing to pay him the last respect.

He walks into the master bedroom, the door creaking just like he remembers, and his mother is sitting on the neatly made bed, looking tiny and somehow shrivelled. He hasn’t seen her in years. Her hair has lost the last of its colour, hanging lifelessly around her sallow face, and the lines around her eyes and mouth have deepened and are now much more pronounced. She looks lost, sitting there on the empty king-sized bed, almost childlike in her misery.

“Dania,” she says, surprised, when she looks up at him. Even her voice is different now, deeper and raspier. “You came.”

“I came,” he agrees, a coil of inexplicable irritation flaring up inside him. “I didn’t want to.”

His mother’s mouth twists downwards and she looks away, sighing. “I’m glad you came,” she says quietly. “Even though though you didn’t have to.” She folds her hands on her lap, her wrists thin and fragile, the skin almost transparent. “I’m glad you’ve found success. I’m happy for you.”

She looks back at him, a strange, almost pleading expression on her face. “Are you happy?”

The irritation blooms and turns into inexplicable sudden anger. “No,” he says bluntly. “Did you really think I would be? Growing up in this place?” And it feels terrifying and tragic and freeing to acknowledge, for the very first time, that it might not have been normal, the way his life had been here when he was little.

Don’t blame the world for your own inadequacy, his father’s voice thunders in his ears

His mother closes her eyes, and shrinks into herself even more. “No,” she says quietly, “I suppose not.”

Dania burns and festers with his rage. He violently wants to be far away from here, back in the quiet little house in Nether Wallop. He can’t recall why he ever thought he had to come here.

“I fear,” his mother says with a familiar drowsy, faraway look in her eyes, as if she was just awoken from a long nap, “that I’ve used myself up on the girls.” She sighs heavily. “You ever think that we have some finite amount of love given to us at birth? If we do, I must have reached my given limit before you were born. I didn’t have much of anything left of me to give you.”

She focuses on his face, her expression pained. “I’m sorry. You deserved more from me. From both of us, but he is not around to apologise anymore.”

“I don’t need his apologies,” he says, but it’s a lie. He’s always needed them, waiting and hoping like a fool, for his father to acknowledge his pain and his own part in it. And it’s the worst thing about the man dying, Dania thinks, clearly now — he won’t ever get that apology now, won’t ever get the closure. His father is dead and nothing will ever get better between them.

“I did,” his mother says, fiddling with her wedding ring. She lets out a long raspy breath. “You know I only married him because I was so sure no one would ever love me,” she whispers, and Dania’s breath gets stuck in his throat. He can sympathise with that. “And he was safe and stable. And when someone did fall in love with me, it was too late. Please, don’t’ make the same mistakes.”

She takes her wedding ring off and turns it in her hands, before slipping it back onto her finger with a somewhat guilty look on her face.

“I was in love with your father,” she says, looking him in the eye, and she looks dreamy for a second. “The man who was your real father,” she adds, and her lips stretch into a sad little smile. “If anything, know that: you were born out of love.”

Too bad I didn’t get any after I was born, he wants to say, but throat closes up and the words gets stuck. He wonders what it would have been like, if Stefanos of today had found him earlier, much earlier in life — the miserable little boy that was living here, and shone at him with his kindness and his light. Maybe if he had a Stefanos growing up in this place, things would’ve have been different.

“Good to know,” he says, and there’re tears in his mother’s eyes. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her shed one.

The door opens with a screech behind him.

“Oh god, Mom,” Yulia says, rushing to their mother. She sits next to her on the bed and wraps an arm around her shoulder. Her expression is barely concealed anger when she glares at Dania. “Why did you make Mom cry? To feel better about yourself?”

“Yulia, shut the hell up!” their mother suddenly says with a force that comes unexpected from such a frail body. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you silly child!”

His sister startles and recoils, a confused shock look on her face. She looks back and forth between them, but his mother doesn’t elaborate, and Dania doesn’t feel like saying anything either.

He turns and walks back to the sitting room, where a few people have already gathered. Lena is rushing back and forth between the kitchen and the dining table that’s been moved to the sitting room, her hands full of shot glasses.

“Let me help you,” Dania says, and she shoots him a grateful little smile.

“The car should arrive in fifteen minutes, I hope everyone will get here in time,” she tells him worriedly. “Otherwise it’s a pain getting there by public transport.”

“Will he be cremated?” He asks, although he kind of knows the answer.

“Yes,” Lena tells him, getting on her toes to reach the alcohol drawer at the very top of the kitchen cupboard. Dania reaches it for her, takes the vodka out. “Yulia wanted him to be buried, but you know what he was like,” she shrugs. “It sometimes seems like Yulia grew up in a completely different place, like a separate reality from me,” she says pensively, hugging the old soviet shot glasses close to her chest. “Like she’s gone and made up this fairytale father in a fairytale family, and convinced herself that was her life.”

Dania swallows past the bile in his throat. “Yeah, well,” he says evenly, “We all have ways to cope.”

Lena looks at him then, really looks, like she actually sees him.

“Thank you for coming here,” she says softly. “Don’t listen to Yulia. I know you didn’t have to come.”

He only nods to acknowledge her. It’s the most she’s said to him in years.

“Are you staying for long?”

“Just for the funeral,” he says.

Lena nods. “He didn’t want a priest or even a church,” she says sadly. “But then, he’s a former KGB, so that’s to be expected.”

“Yeah,” Dania says, and she gives another nod, looking lost. They walk back to the sitting room, and Lena pours vodka in all the shots.

More people come in, all of them older men in uniforms with medals and honour badges at the lapel, and stand still and silent, never asking for a seat, never saying anything besides the cold my condolences to his mother, who is now greeting them at the door. They all nod at each other somberly, and proceed into the sitting room to stand there like marble statues, hands folded behind their backs, the invisible haze of stale grief and chronic indifference thickening the air.

Dania wanders. He walks into the room that used to be his once and is now a messy dump of papers and old books that didn’t make it to the library. His desk is still there and he absently rummages through the drawers, taking out a few yellowed sheets — the music reviews he used to write for the school paper back when he was a teen. His handwriting looks messy and barely legible on the paper, but it’s surprisingly neater than it is now when he is an adult.

He should leave the papers here where they belong — forgotten in the past, but for some reason, he folds them carefully and slides them into his jacket pocket.

He wants to leave. The dusty old room that he’d spent so much of his childhood, reading and living trough fairytales, now puts him on edge.

In the sitting room, they all raise their shots of vodka in silence, without clinking the glasses. The ethanol burns against his throat and settles heavily in his stomach.

Dania’s eyes take a tour of the room around him — the luxurious crystal chandelier hanging of a crumbling ceiling, paint peeling off in lumps; the old TV set that hasn’t been upgraded since the nineties, the long rows of old dusty books on the shelves that contained stories no one had wanted to know. An odd sense of melancholy takes hold of him — the same feeling he got walking past his old school, or the crumbling tennis courts at Taganskiy Park — as if the world around him were a museum of memories, a collection of places he’d outgrown.

They leave the flat silently. The car is waiting outside.

In the casket, his father doesn’t look anything like himself. Dania startles when he sees him, barely recognising him. He’s read once, that people lose their likeliness after they die, but the man lying in the coffin looks more like a wax figure than a real body. It’s unnerving. At the same time, it’s a little liberating.

“If you were a better father, I might have been a better son,” Dania whispers, leaning over the coffin to look at his face one last time. “And now we’ll never know.”

Then the casket is closed, nails beaten through the lid. It’s not a fancy coffin, but a plain black one. Yulia had wanted to get a beautiful shiny one, made out of Italian pine wood, which Dania thinks is pointless and flashy and matters not. The casket and the body inside only take a few minutes, in the end, to turn to ash, flickering out of existence.

“I’m sorry,” Lena says somberly, once they step outside into the cool foggy air. She looks up to the sky as if it might give her the right words she needs. “I should have made more of an effort. With you,” she swallows audibly. “But I was going mad in that in the house, and all I thought was about how to get the fuck out of there as soon as I could. I didn’t think about you — still so young, left there alone. At least I had Yulia.” She shakes her head and wraps her arms around herself. “It was selfish of me. I’m sorry, Dania.”

It’s been a strange day that’s mostly felt surreal and ethereal, as if he was watching it in a movie or reading about it in a book. His suit feels weird against his skin and the tie around his neck is like a boa at times, choking him. Even his sister’s words feel like they’re someone else’s, strange and foreign, even though he’s yearned to hear them, the hope locked somewhere in the deepest and darkest corners of his mind.

He’d fantasised about his sisters coming back for him to rescue him, back when he was little, but then realised just how young they’d been still when they left. He couldn’t hold it against them, deny them their own right to freedom and normal human connections they obviously yearned for just as much as he had.

But it was Stefanos in the end, who had sat up with him on nights when he was out of his mind with pain and suffocating loneliness, and had cooked him breakfast when he woke up wild-haired and drooling on the sitting room couch, still in yesterday’s clothes. It was Stefanos.

“It’s alright,” he says and tears up again. It’s as if Stefanos had poked a hole in his body and the liquid keeps pouring out of him now. “You had to leave. I understand.”

“It’s not alright,” Lena says in a gravelly voice, her own eyes red and shiny. “It shouldn’t have been like that. You should have had someone.”

Dania sniffs, swallowing the wetness running down his throat.

“Is there anyone?” Lena asks softly, her fingers gentle on his arm. “Do you have someone now?”

There was green grass, and a hill rolled gently down. There was no road. Stefanos walked down the slope, his white shirt open at the throat. The light was shining gold.

“I don’t know,” he says, a flood of horrible sentiment rising to his throat. As the silence grows strained, he wonders if it would be a good idea to ask her about her kids, find out if they’d had some sort of reconciliation, but then decides against it. If people had good news, you didn’t have to drag it out of them.

“You deserve to have someone, Dania,” Lena tells him and squeezes his arm. “You managed to escape, to get of out of this shithole country, build a beautiful life for yourself. You’ve done great. Don’t let him ruin your life, especially when he’s not even around anymore to appreciate it.”

In Domodedovo terminal Dania stands in front of the departure board, still wearing the suit he did for the funeral, he blinks up at the flight schedule.

New York, Toronto, Barcelona, Monte Carlo.

He wants to pick a city but doesn’t know how, here in Moscow eight entire years later, Stefanos somewhere, not here, not anywhere close. The flight numbers rotate, flash a dull shade of orange.

Time passes.

He picks London. It‘ll only take him a few hours to get to Nether Wallop from there.

The little house that looks straight out of a fairytale stands, ungainly, surrounded by miles and miles of burnt brown grass. The old rusted Beetle in the backyard has sunk halfway into the ground, orange and glaring against the sun. Stefanos had wanted to do something with it, fix it or at least dig it out of the garden, but hadn’t gotten to it in time.

Dania walks in.

“I didn’t think you’d be back so soon,” says Stefanos from where he’s sitting at the couch, a big black book in his hands.

Dania freezes. There are molecules and atoms of emotions he can’t name, swirling and taking over one another, building on the one before that and the one before that, a chain reaction, and all that energy is starting to feel dangerously like hope, crackling and swirling and building in Dania’s chest like a nuclear explosion, and Dania can’t contain it, can’t keep it from breaking out of him.

“You’re a here,” he says, and his voice comes out awestruck and reverent.

Stefanos sighs and then smiles a bittersweet smile. “Yep.”

“You’re scared,” Dania says in a sudden state of clarity, and he gets it now, understands everything as if the Oracle has whispered the secrets of the universe into his ear. “You have no idea what to do with your life. You are scared to try,” he says, amazed at the new level of expertise he’s reached at all things Stefanos. “That’s why you’ve been staying here all this time.”

People are always talking about themselves, he thinks, if you only learn to listen.

Stefanos closes his eyes. “I’m utterly lost sometimes. There’s so much to do and try and I don’t know where to start and if I even should,” he sounds pained, like the words are physically hurting him. “And what’s worse, I know I wanted this, and now that I have the freedom, and I’m too fucking scared to go ahead and do something already. I was actuallyrelieved when you called me last time, delirious, can you believe that?” His mouth turns downwards unhappily. “You were out of it, and I was relieved, glad even, that you needed me and I had something to do finally.” He looks at Dania, hard. “Do you know what it’s like to actually need someone?”

“Yes,” Dania tells him. “I do.”

They sit in silence for while, Stefanos’ fingers playing with the leather edge of the album in his hands.

“Why didn’t you go home?” Dania says, and Stefanos gives him a fleetingly annoyed look.

“I told you,” he says slowly. “I love you. I can’t stay away from you, never could. Don’t want to.” He twirls the big leather-bound book in his hands, and then adds flippantly, “And I wanted to help you. Too bad I can’t even help myself.”

“How about we help each other?” Dania says. He has buried his father earlier today, and he is just so, so tired of feeling this way, being this way. Maybe he’s punished himself enough. His father is dead now, but Dania’s conscience is stuck in the past, tethered to a set of conditions that no longer existed — burnt to ash right along with his father’s body.

“I’d like that,” Stefanos says in a voice that cracks. His eyes are wet in the corners.

Dania walks over and sits next to him on the couch — the cushions now feel like they remember the shape of their bodies, they’ve spent so long here, snuggled together. He takes Stefanos’ hand in his, willing to take a portion of Stefanos’ sadness away from him, suck it into himself.

“I don’t know if I could ever love you,” Dania whispers, squeezing his hand, and Stefanos winces. “I’m sorry. It’s just the way I am,” he swallows, the knot in his chest throbbing dully. “But I promise, I’ll be there for you, whatever you need.”

“Darling,” Stefanos breathes out, eyelashes trembling. “Whatever you want to call it, I know what you feel,” he wraps an arm around Dania’s shoulders and pulls him close, until the top of Dania’s head is nestled under his chin. “I know it, because of the way you look at me and because of the way you are around me. I’ve known for a very long time.”

It should have been terrifying and humiliating, hearing this, but Dania is hollow and emptied out by today’s events — two flights and a funeral, never mind the several emotionally draining confessions, years after their due date.

“I’ve always been obsessed with you,” he admits, because it’s easier to say it now into the skin of Stefanos’ neck, and easier to admit to obsession than some all consuming fairytale love.

Stefanos shifts around him, grabbing the big leather-bound album again. “Let me show you something,” he says and nudges Dania make him sit straight. “Remember when I used to have my camera with me all the time?”

“Yeah,” Dania says, because he does — there was a time the thing was glued to Stefanos’ hands, albeit a different camera back then. Stefanos even took it to matches with him, snapping pictures of the audience when he should have been waving at them, basking in his glory.

Stefanos opens the album.

There are dozens and dozens of old photographs, faded prints from the days before Stefanos’ parents gifted him a digital camera, back when Stefanos walked around with a retro old-school Leningrad camera — courtesy of his mother, no doubt — that printed instant square photos that immediately gained an air of age and times long gone.

Dania appears in every picture. There he is at a practice court, caught mid-swing and arms blurry. One at the changeover, expression grim and determined, which now looks ridiculous on his boyish sixteen-year-old face. One of him and Andrey talking by the lockers, Dania half turned to the camera, mouth open mid-sentence, teenage Andrey smiling at him.

He turns and turns the pages, and there he is on all of them, a chronicle of his life on tour, frozen moments he wouldn’t care to remember or think about otherwise. He looks more or less a teenager in most of them — wide-eyed and toothy and desperately innocent. One picture makes a special impression. It’s a close-up, taken at night, when Dania was about nineteen, judging by the pathetic whiffs of facial hair displayed on the photo. It must have been around Wimbledon, because Dania is dressed in a white shirt, and he is looking somewhere beyond the camera lens, smiling widely, dimples deep in his cheeks. He doesn’t remember ever noticing Stefanos taking any of those pictures.

“How’s this for obsession?” Stefanos says with a little self-deprecating smile. He is gazing down at the photos, fondly, as if remembering the particular moments they were taken. “I just wanted to hate you in peace, and you wouldn’t even let me do that.”

“You’re a creep,” Dania says, and something powerful blooms in his chest, threatening to fill the gap around his hear. “Do you have any of me sleeping that you have stuck to the walls of a basement somewhere?”

“Naturally,” Stefanos says without missing a beat, “along with a lock of your hair I keep beneath my pillow.”

“So you’re gonna brutally murder me one of these days for a ritual sacrifice, then.”

“Anything to get back in the news,” Stefanos grins.

“That would get you into the local paper, for sure,” Dania says, “right below Missis Barth retiring from her bakery and a cat that got rescued from the tree.”

Stefanos laughs and closes the album, putting it back onto the coffee table. His laughter dies out, and he looks serious again.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Dania says, the word clumsy in his mouth. “I won’t play US Open. I think, I need some time to… get myself in order.”

Stefanos nods somberly. “I think that’s a right call,” his mouth twitches, “you were hallucinating only a month ago.”

Dania shrugs noncommittally. He wants Stefanos to put his arm around him again, but Stefanos doesn’t, so Dania slides closer, grabs it and wraps it around his shoulders himself. Stefanos presses him even closer at once.

“I was drunk and hungry,” he says casually. He doesn’t want to talk about the birds, not yet, at least. “What about you?”

“I’m not sure,” Stefanos says slowly, as if treading the words. “I think I’m gonna take an online course in photography, I’ve always wanted to do that.”

Dania points at the album, “You already have a portfolio, ready-to-go,” and Stefanos tries to smile, but doesn’t quite get there. “You know you can always come back on tour, right?” He says softly and immediately knows it was the right thing to say, because Stefanos lets out a long breath and his whole body relaxes, losing its tension.

“Yeah, I know,” he says lightly, but Dania sees how just the existence of that option placates him, his breathing steadier and deeper now. “I know.”

“Are you going to go back home?” Dania asks, going for flippant and missing by a mile.

“I don’t know, this place has kind of grown on me,” Stefanos says in a tentative voice. “And I was really hoping to sort out that Beetle in the garden.”

The powerful feeling in Dania’s chest overflows and spills over.

“I suppose I could let you stay here,” he says, lips pulling into a smile on their own accord. “I’ll accept home-made Italian bread as rent payment.”

Stefanos’ arm squeezes him so hard it almost hurts.

They sit on the couch, huddled together, and in the moments before Dania drifts off to sleep, still in the suit from the funeral, he tries to think of an appropriate ending for the story of Stefanos and him. This story is most likely going to finish in  fashionably downbeat mode, with Dania living happily for a month or two before slipping back to his natural twisted ways, with Stefanos looking at him through rose-coloured glasses and missing all the red flags at first, before inevitably getting burned and leaving for good this time. This story is going to finish something along those lines, because happily-ever-afters don’t work in real life, no matter how much Dania wanted them to. But Stefanos kisses the top of his head gently, and Dania thinks, maybe it doesn’t have to end this way. Maybe they all had their problems and their pain, and it doesn’t have to define them. Maybe he’ll work through his pain and issues and try to connect with people. Maybe it will get better, and he won’t feel this way forever. He already doesn’t some days, remembers how to smile without it hurting, eat freshly baked bread without feeling guilty.

Maybe it just won’t happen overnight, the fact which would ruin his fashionably downbeat ending, but is somehow more in keeping with the… fairytale spirit of things.

The end.