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It started that summer, in the off-season. A couple of weeks remained before they were supposed to go their separate ways for the holidays — Pedri to the Canaries, Gavi to Andalusia. They were sprawled at Gavi's place on a summer evening; the air conditioning helped, but the feeling of sticky heat hung in the air regardless. Gavi was flipping through channels until he landed on an early-2000s film with recognizable American actors.
Pedri was half-asleep, sprawled across the cushions with his bare feet — cold from the AC — tucked under the warm weight of Gavi's thighs. He snapped back to consciousness when he heard Gavi's bright, cascading laugh: a reaction to something on screen.
“Pedri, look, this is funny,” Gavi said, patting his bare ankle to get his attention. He didn’t pull his hands away — wrapped them instead around Pedri’s bent knees.
Pedri didn’t quite follow the plot, but he found himself grinning every time a particular actor showed up on screen — the one who kept opening arguments with his friend with “You know how I know you’re gay?” and proceeded to invent the most absurd possible evidence. Pedri noticed that these scenes made Gavi laugh hardest; his whole body shook whenever those characters appeared.
When the end credits rolled, Pedri decided that American comedies with questionable humor were not, as a rule, his genre — but this one had been good. Gavi’s hand was still resting around his knees when he cleared his throat and said:
“Pedri,” Gavi announced, with the gravity of a man delivering a verdict. “You know how I know you’re gay?”
Pedri raised an eyebrow with studied indifference, though he could feel the smile pulling at his lips. Gavi grinned wide — dimples appearing — as though he’d gotten exactly the reaction he’d been fishing for.
The characters in the film had traded in absurdities, but Gavi chose to go somewhere more specific, more personal:
“You deliberately don’t wear socks so you can shove your cold feet under my ass,” he said, conspiratorial light dancing in his eyes. Pedri immediately moved to pull his feet back — but Gavi’s hand held him in place.
“Gavi, that is an impressive level of observation on your part,” Pedri said, buying time. A few minutes later, once Gavi had drifted back to his phone, Pedri whispered:
“Gavi, you know.”
Gavi looked up — the same conspiratorial light back in his dark eyes. He was delighted as Pedri had accepted the invitation to a game in which he had no chance of winning.
“Gavi. You know how I know you’re gay?” Pedri let each word out slowly. Gavi nodded, set his phone aside, ran a hand through his hair, licked his lips — signaling, with his whole body, that he was all ears. “You always sit this close so you can touch my ankles all evening.” Pedri registered that this wasn’t strong enough, and added, almost without thinking: “Because you’re obsessed with my ankles.”
Gavi’s eyebrows shot up; his smirk deepened. He made a loose gesture with his free hand — mas o menos.
“Pedri, you know how I know you’re gay?” Gavi let his gaze travel over him, head to toe. “You always sit at the other end of the couch so I can’t see that you’ve been hard for me all evening.”
Color flooded Pedri’s face. He didn’t understand why he’d gotten into this at all — in any game that required wit and nerve, Gavi had the advantage from the start.
Gavi registered the effect and, apparently satisfied, sank back into his phone. But Pedri wasn’t finished — he was a competitive player when the stakes were high. The media didn’t call him a young genius of football for nothing.
When Pedri felt that particular rush, it was difficult to stop. He pulled his feet free, tucked them underneath himself, repositioning beside Gavi and using the newly gained height advantage. He didn’t know yet what he’d say — and was desperately searching for a foothold.
“Gavi, you know how I know you’re gay?” Gavi made a noncommittal sound without looking up, performing disinterest. Out of the corner of his eye, Pedri caught the feed on his phone — photos of girls in swimwear.
“You’d give up your new car for a chance at my nudes.”
He wasn’t being inventive — he was remembering a fan who had tagged his account on a photo of a new car with the caption: “I’m not as happy about my new car as I am about Pedri’s play today.” It had made Pedri smile at the time, though he hadn’t quite understood how you could compare the two things.
That last line made Gavi exhale sharply and toss his phone onto the cushion.
“So you want to play big, little Pedro?” His face was luminous with anticipation.
Gavi pressed his lips together, narrowed his eyes, looked somewhere into the middle distance.
“Pedri. You know how I know you’re gay?” He brought his gaze back to Pedri’s face as though seeing it for the first time, then let it settle on his mouth. “Your lips are that full on purpose — the better to suck with.”
That was Gavi, in everything. Provocateur, generator of chaos. The one who says what he thinks and acts on what he feels. Pedri had always envied him for it — because all he himself could do was control what already existed, and clean up whatever chaos Gavi left behind. But never, never provoke a crossing of lines. Perhaps that was why they were so young and already a legendary duo.
A wave of heat broke across Pedri’s body and settled in his face. He dropped his eyes — studied the pattern on his green shorts. Gavi’s hand patted his knee: surrender accepted, no hard feelings. Pedri didn’t lift his gaze before he said:
“Gavi, you know how I know you’re gay? You couldn’t even get yourself off in a room with another guy — you’d be too ashamed of the sounds you make.”
The space inside Pedri’s shorts was getting tight. Gavi’s hand on his knee faltered — fingers curling.
“Pedri, you know—” At which point Pedri braced himself for the most appalling thing the human mind had ever produced – Gavi never veers from the path he’s chosen. “If you enjoy thinking about me getting off, you can just ask to see it.” A chill moved through Pedri’s body — a strange contradiction to the warmth further down. “And that’s how I know you’re gay,” Gavi finished, triumphant.
Gavi was, objectively, one of the most attractive men Pedri knew. A professional athlete — objectively a beautiful body, one Pedri hadn’t seen in a while now: they hadn’t trained or played together since the season ended. Gavi was his best friend, the one with whom he’d played shoulder to shoulder through dozens of matches in the center of the pitch, for one of the most legendary clubs in the history of football.
“You know what, Gavi,” Pedri said, nodding toward his shorts — which looked tighter. Or maybe that was just him. “Go ahead. I genuinely want to see.”
Pedri might not have been the strongest player at verbal games — but he was definitively the most experienced player at games with Gavi. He knew how to catch him off guard: how to win a tackle for the ball, when exactly you could beat him with his own weapon.
The truth was that everyone was afraid to press Gavi — afraid of the backlash, the aggression. But Pedri knew: that was exactly what he was waiting for, and almost no one gave it to him. He knew that Gavi couldn’t stand ambiguity and always moved to make situations clear — on his own terms. So Pedri was calm. Gavi would never agree to conditions imposed on him.
A nervous smirk flickered across Gavi’s face — and then, a second later, his eyebrows shot upward.
“Whatever you want, Pedrito. On one condition: you sit in my lap — front-row seat — and stop pretending that’s not what you’ve wanted all evening.”
Pedri exhaled.
He shrugged — as though this were the most ordinary request imaginable. As though this was the logical solution to the problem of his cramped legs. As though swinging a leg over Gavi’s thighs and settling into his lap were the most organic outcome of this perfectly ordinary evening at Gavi’s place.
“All conditions met, Gavi,” Pedri said, pressing his lips together, dropping his gaze to his friend’s shorts. When he clumsily straddled his legs, his mouth had gone dry — he swallowed a few times. He felt the tension in Gavi’s body, felt his eyes on Pedri, on the oversized t-shirt that covered nearly everything — almost to the middle of his shorts.
“Fine, if that’s what you want,” Gavi said — one hand settling on Pedri’s thigh to lift him slightly while the other pulled his shorts down from the waist. Pedri felt a small, sharp stab of disappointment when the shorts didn’t come down far enough to expose anything at all.
One of his friend’s hands remained on Pedri’s thigh; the other disappeared inside his own shorts. Pedri didn’t dare raise his eyes to Gavi’s face, so he just watched — the slow movement of Gavi’s hand beneath the fabric.
Something was wrong: everything was simultaneously too much and not enough. As though they had waded into water once and now stood in the wind, every wet inch of skin registering the cold, with no way to go fully under.
Pedri licked his lips, searching for a position that would let him see everything he needed to see without meeting Gavi’s eyes. He placed his hands on Gavi’s shoulders, adjusting himself slightly. He leaned forward and their foreheads came to rest against each other. He lifted himself a little to give more room, and Gavi’s hand began moving faster inside his shorts. Through his skin, Pedri felt sweat beginning to gather at Gavi’s brow, felt his breathing grow louder and more ragged.
Gavi’s other hand — resting on the side of Pedri’s shorts — moved slowly upward, reaching his waist. Pedri’s own breathing had grown heavy; he felt how fast his heart was beating, felt the tension below his stomach pull tighter and tighter.
Gavi’s hand crept higher, lifting Pedri’s t-shirt, which had until now conveniently concealed just how hard he was. Pedri watched the white fabric rise. Then a moan broke from Gavi’s mouth — and at that moment Pedri’s body lurched forward, pressing against Gavi’s thighs and the moving hand inside his shorts, desperate for friction. His fingers found Gavi’s neck and held them both in place.
“You know,” Gavi whispered, when there was no space left between their bodies. “I want to touch you.” The next moment Gavi’s body shuddered, and the fingers resting on Pedri’s skin just above the waistband dug into the soft flesh of his hip.
Before Pedri could speak — could ask his friend to please, as soon as possible, do what he’d said he wanted — Gavi went slack beneath him. He dropped his head back, eyes closed, moving under the lids. “You know, I don’t know which of us this makes more gay.”
Pedri felt his body straining toward Gavi, felt how much he needed more, further — as though Gavi had invited him to a party that turned out to be the best party of Pedri’s life, and now he was being asked to leave.
Pedri’s gaze dropped to the space between their bodies; Gavi’s hand was still inside his shorts. He carefully took him by the wrist and drew it out. Gavi’s chest was still heaving in the aftermath, his head apparently not yet fully reconnected to the rest of him.
“You know, Gavi, how I know you’re gay?” Gavi seemed to register all at once that his wet hand was in someone else’s possession; he lifted his head sharply from the back of the couch, eyes moving between his own fingers — streaked white — and Pedri’s face. Pedri didn’t know what Gavi saw there, but it was clearly producing strong feelings. “When you let your friend lick your cum off your fingers.”
In Pedri’s head it had sounded more like a question — but Gavi nodded anyway, his face a mixture of disbelief and something else.
Pedri closed his eyes and licked Gavi’s palm, his tongue coming away coated. He hesitated for a second, tasting it. His heart was hammering, waiting for Gavi to tell him to stop. Nothing like that happened. Pedri swallowed and went back in. He took each finger deep into his mouth, licking them clean one by one, sucking gently, making sure not to miss a drop.
“Dios, Pedri,” — Gavi pulled his hand away. Pedri’s eyes snapped open in sudden dread that he’d made something wrong. But Gavi drew him in by the cheek — the same wet hand — and their foreheads touched again.
Gavi didn’t close his eyes, Pedri didn't look away this time. He seemed to be searching for something in Pedri’s face, moving from one eye to the other. As though he had only now understood that he’d lost something a long time ago and got a chance to find it.
Pedri swallowed, the taste of Gavi still on his tongue — and it was better than any restaurant fancy meal, better than any cheat meal after weeks of a sports diet, better than anything he had ever tasted.
In the first days of July, Gavi was supposed to come over to Pedri’s for the Real Madrid versus Borussia Dortmund match. It was, unambiguously, a hate-watch — one neither of them bothered to dress up as anything nobler, like studying the archnemesis’s tactics.
This was one of dozens of football viewings at Pedri’s place, and yet it was somehow different from every previous one. For some reason it mattered to him, urgently, that the apartment be clean and make a good impression. He ran the handheld vacuum over every corner again, despite the fact that the cleaner had been through two days ago. He checked twice that the fridge contained various sugar-free sodas, like four different types. Or they could always order delivery if something was missing. An infinite number of unpredictable circumstances pressed against the inside of Pedri’s skull. What if the ice ran out and Gavi got too hot and decided to leave early?..
Fifteen minutes past the agreed time, Gavi still hadn’t appeared, and Pedri already hated himself and the entire idea of watching football together — the most ordinary idea in his life, until it stopped being that.
Until that stupid comedy came on with its stupid jokes, until Gavi started that stupid game, until Pedri accepted his best friend’s invitation to sit in his lap while he got himself off — accepted it as swiftly and without argument as though it were a Ballón d’Or nomination. Until Pedri took his best friend’s hand and… Several days had passed since that evening, and every time the memory reached that point, his fingers would close painfully around his own forearm or thigh, hard enough to leave marks.
Half an hour past the agreed time, Pedri’s phone buzzed: a message from Gavi, in the imperative — “Open the garage.” Pedri lurched toward the button by the door; his breathing went uneven, his pulse erratic. While Gavi parked the car, Pedri moved through a sequence of small deaths, each without beginning or end, name or discernible cause.
When Gavi appeared in the lift doorway, Pedri went still. He knew, in the abstract, that his best friend was very attractive — conventionally handsome, even — but the dark glasses, which somehow sharpened the line of his jaw in a particular way, made him simply the most beautiful man alive. Pedri exhaled heavily.
“I genuinely hope the whole squad de Blancos is jet-lagged and we get to watch the legendary collapse of Real Madrid at the Club World Cup tonight,” — this familiar register of Gavi’s, somewhere between spite, fury, and barely contained excitement, was among the small number of predictable circumstances this day had to offer. Pedri exhaled. He knew how to work with Gavi in this mood.
“Borussia flew from Europe too — they’re in the same position,” Pedri said, following his friend toward the kitchen.
Gavi spun around sharply, produced his Mercedes button-key, unfolded the metal key, and brought it to Pedri’s throat. The metal didn’t touch his skin — but the gesture sent a pleasant shiver through him regardless.
“That’s not what we’re here for,” Gavi said, in a lower register, dropping the key and falling onto the nearest sofa. In the space of a second, Pedri’s mind produced several vivid illustrations of what exactly those words might mean.
“Right, only clubs from the capital of Spain are prone to jet lag,” — this was the maximum cognitive contribution to pre-match hate speech that Pedri could currently manage. Gavi clocked it but smiled anyway, tossing his sunglasses onto the coffee table and rubbing his eyes — so thoroughly his gesture that Pedri felt, for a moment, like he’d spotted an old friend in a crowd of strangers.
The next half hour before kick-off moved through the usual subjects of their years-long conversation — football, news from family, football, summer plans, football.
A few minutes before kick-off, Pedri carefully moved to the other end of Gavi’s sofa — the one best angled toward the screen. He was trying to position himself in a way that wouldn’t provoke Gavi into the kind of jokes that had, last time, led them where they’d gone. At the same time, his body was attempting to arrange itself on the small sofa to maximize the potential for accidental contact.
At the referee’s whistle they both sat up straight and leaned forward simultaneously. By the fifth minute Gavi was already fidgeting restlessly, and this brought their thighs into contact — the July heat, blunted by the air conditioning, laying a film of sweat between the two patches of skin. Pedri leaned back against the sofa cushions. This turned out to be the correct decision, because when Real scored the first goal in the tenth minute and Gavi roared in outrage, pounding a cushion with his fist, Pedri had an excellent angle on his favorite spectacle in the world: Gavi furious.
He didn’t let himself think about the fact that this had recently stopped being entirely true.
After the outburst, Gavi dropped back against the sofa — against the arm Pedri had draped along the back of it. Pedri considered whether he should move it now, which was a strange thing to consider, given that they’d sat exactly like this hundreds of times and he’d never thought about it once. He missed, slightly, the way their thighs had been touching.
Possession was roughly even between the sides. In the twentieth minute Real Madrid scored a second, and beating the cushion was no longer sufficient — Gavi turned on Pedri with a sound like something prehistoric and grabbed him by the shoulders.
“This is completely unbearable,” Gavi shouted through a laugh that was mostly nerves. Pedri felt, for no reason, like the happiest person alive.
Ten minutes later, Gavi evidently exhausted every possible sitting position and, deflated, shifted away from Pedri only to lie on his side and rest his head in Pedri’s lap, breathing out heavily. “This is a very difficult match.”
“You’re not even playing,” Pedri said, smiling. When Gavi’s head settled against his legs, something inside him switched on like a light, and he felt how much room there was in his lungs.
“It takes real effort to want a team to lose this badly,” Gavi said, turning his face up toward Pedri and giving him the full-force, all-teeth smile.
Pedri let himself relax entirely and lowered his right hand from the sofa back onto Gavi’s side. His attention caught on the strip of skin visible between his shirt and shorts — a few centimeters, one shade lighter than his own. He let his thumb slide across it; a tremor moved through Gavi’s body, but he said nothing. Then Pedri set the rest of his fingers down on that same strip of skin. It was soft and cool everywhere except where his fingers were.
Gavi made a vague sound and stretched slightly — the way cats do when they want to free up their paws. The movement gave Pedri more room.
Pedri began drawing slow circles on Gavi’s bare lower back, whose face was turned toward the screen as the first half drew toward its end. Were it not for the timer in the corner of the screen, Pedri would have bet that at least half an hour had passed since he’d started tracing different patterns across Gavi’s skin. The timer insisted it had been five minutes.
After another Real foul stopped play, Gavi made a sound close to a purr and rolled onto his back. Pedri’s hand lifted away and resettled — first on Gavi’s hip bones, then on the flat of his stomach.
Gavi looked at him through half-closed lids and dark lashes. Pedri found himself seriously wondering why he’d chosen such a beautiful person as his best friend. Then Gavi’s brows drew together in that particular way — the expression that looked, briefly, like he might cry. Before Pedri could pull his hand back, Gavi said, in an indeterminate tone:
“Pedri, you should either move your hand or move it lower.” Heat flooded Pedri’s face and he was already pulling away when the actual meaning of his friend’s words reached him. He looked at Gavi’s shorts — loose enough, with his legs bent, to conceal whatever shouldn’t be visible. For the first time in his life, Pedri wanted to use whatever media capital he had to make this type of shorts unfashionable.
Gavi closed his eyes. Pedri’s hand slid carefully downward until his fingers met the waistband. He eased it aside, and on the way down his fingers found the reason for the ultimatum Gavi had issued a moment before.
Pedri exhaled audibly and felt a corresponding weight settle in his own shorts. Something washed over him — an unexpected rush of satisfaction at the knowledge that his touch could produce this in his best friend. It was the first time he’d felt this kind of control in an interaction with another person — the same control he had over the game on the pitch. Nothing gave him more confidence than the feeling of control.
Pedri leaned over Gavi’s face. “Gavi, you know, it’s pretty gay — getting hard because your friend is touching you,” he whispered.
Gavi made a sound of agreement without opening his eyes, shifting his hips toward Pedri’s hand. Through his fingers Pedri felt the slightly damp fabric pulled tight.
Pedri rarely drank and had never been satisfied with the experience — he kept expecting and not getting the euphoria people described. But he was getting it now: in daylight, on his own living room sofa, with his hand in his best friend’s shorts.
He wanted the soft fabric his fingers were resting against to stop being barely damp and become indecently, irreversibly wet — wet enough that removing it would be the only sensible option. He began moving his hand — barely any pressure at first — along the length of Gavi, running his fingers up and down, tracing the shape of veins that seemed to pulse against his touch.
Gavi pulled in a breath. Pedri kept moving, going lower and lower as far as the angle allowed. Gavi made a sound — impatient, frustrated — and Pedri brought his hand back up, to the waistband of his boxers. He eased it aside. He stopped for a moment, looking at Gavi’s closed eyes, and then slowly put his fingers inside.
Pedri had never touched anyone like this before. The way he’d always imagined it — it had seemed like a kind of favor, something you did for someone else. But this he was doing for himself. He desperately wanted to do it. And something about understanding that made it almost impossible to breathe.
“Gavi,” Pedri murmured, unable to say anything else, watching Gavi’s face as dozens of things moved across it at once. He started slowly, eyes fixed on his face — reading it, learning where to touch to get the most from him. He gathered the wetness from the tip and spread it carefully, making his fingers slick. It smoothed the movement, and as he kept going he kept returning to the same place.
Gavi’s body grew restless — he was trying every possible angle under Pedri’s hand, as though he no longer fit inside his own skin. He turned his head sideways and pressed his face into Pedri’s lower stomach. Pedri understood that at this point Gavi could feel exactly how hard he himself was — the evidence of it pressing through the fabric directly against his face.
Gavi began making small, plaintive sounds and took a piece of Pedri’s white t-shirt between his teeth to muffle them. Pedri’s hand kept moving, finding the rhythm where the sounds Gavi made grew more and more desperate. He wanted his entire body, his entire life, caught between Gavi’s teeth — wanted those sounds to travel straight through him.
Pedri’s breathing was quickening, his free hand moving into Gavi’s hair, drawing him closer — a strange kind of embrace. He wanted, at the same time, to pull Gavi into himself until there was nothing left between them, and at the same time to give him the space of the largest stadium in the world, so those sounds could fill every inch of it.
But the intercom rang.
Their bodies went still. Gavi’s eyes opened slowly; he released the fabric from his mouth. It was chaotically damp where his lips had been. They looked at each other — the way they did on the pitch when a decision needed to be made without words. The unspoken decision now was to wait this intrusion out without moving.
Pedri’s phone buzzed on the coffee table. A message from Ferran: “Pedri hi, open up, I can see your car in the garage.”
Pedri swore rarely, but right now he had no other words — just an exhausted: “De puta madre.” He tipped his head back and tried to think of the fastest way to resolve this without taking his hand out of Gavi’s pants. He just wanted to keep going. He didn’t want to resolve anything.
As though sensing this, Gavi began carefully extracting Pedri’s hand from his shorts. This was the worst possible solution, and Pedri looked at him in undisguised horror as he sat up. When Gavi saw his face he laughed — a loud, genuine laugh — and ruffled his hair. He always did that after a good pass at training, or simply when he wanted to let Pedri know he was alright.
Pedri dragged his eyes away from Gavi and typed a reply to Ferran without looking at his phone. He lazily walked to the hallway, there was a mirror by the front door, and the figure in it looked like Pedri — but also, in some way, not at all. His hair was slightly disheveled; his t-shirt was creased where Gavi’s face had been, still damp where his mouth had been. Pedri tried to tuck the damp patch into his shorts, which immediately revealed the bulge he hadn’t entirely lost.
Everything about this moment irritated him. He didn’t want to be in a creased t-shirt — he wanted to be out of it, wanted Gavi’s lips on skin rather than fabric. He wanted to get back to the feeling that no disorder mattered, because he was himself a total mess, because when Gavi made those sounds — the ones from a moment ago — nothing seemed important at all.
He heard Ferran step into the lift. Gavi appeared in his line of sight, smirking — perfectly composed. Pedri made a loud, depleted sound and spread his arms out to either side: the gesture of a man surrendering. “I want to keep going.” He was close to crying. And if not for the sound of the lift opening, he would have bet that Gavi was reaching out to steady him — his face carrying the particular expression of someone prepared to give a person whatever they need.
“Hey, Fer!” Gavi said, easy as anything, shifting his gaze to the figure appearing in the lift doorway. “What brings you here?”
Pedri couldn’t follow the sequence of questions and answers in their exchange, so when Ferran extended a hand in greeting, Pedri automatically extended his right hand and shook it, leaning into the hug Ferran pulled him into.
Behind him he heard a stifled laugh from Gavi, and Pedri knew instinctively what it was about. When he extracted himself from the embrace — slightly tighter than he was prepared for right now — he looked at his own palm. It looked, to all appearances, like an ordinary palm. But two people in this room knew it had only just dried from Gavi’s precum. And one of those people found this hilarious.
Pedri raised a reproachful eyebrow at Gavi as the three of them moved toward the kitchen. He hadn’t caught the reason for Ferran’s visit, and asking now would have been weird. Besides, over the past year they’d been spending more time together — particularly during Gavi’s rehabilitation after the injury, or the additional training sessions for his recovery.
“Yeah, we’re watching the Real versus Borussia match, second half’s about to start,” Gavi answered something Ferran had asked. Pedri decided not to force himself into the conversation and instead offered snacks, to make this look slightly more like a normal football viewing with teammates.
The only things in Pedri’s fridge were healthy snacks, because he was essentially indifferent to food and ate roughly the same things every day. Junk food had never been a way of rewarding himself. He stood behind the kitchen island and began arranging celery sticks and baby carrots on a plate.
“Pedri, were you actually watching the match in here?” Ferran threw out suddenly, bursting out laughing in the middle of his conversation with Gavi.
Color flooded Pedri’s face and he popped a baby carrot into his mouth, afraid to look up and discover whatever the evidence they’d failed to get rid off in time.
“He always eats vegetables and always drinks cola zero,” Gavi said, clapping Ferran on the back with a smile. “Even during a Real hate-watch. Sorry, Ferran — no beer and crisps today.”
Part of the anxiety dissolved when Pedri heard Gavi defending his eating habits, and something inside him opened up and filled with warmth.
The three of them moved to the seats facing the television, where the players of both teams were slowly returning to the pitch. Gavi and Ferran took the sofa; Pedri chose the armchair, so as not to provoke any unnecessary physical tension.
Gavi launched into a vivid account of the first half for Ferran’s benefit. It turned out that Ferran was no less committed a critic of Real than Gavi, which was enough to make Gavi himself stand down and drift back to his phone, while Ferran kept turning to Pedri to ask what he thought of this or that mistake by the Real midfielders, and proposing his own solutions to the forwards’ problems with the air of a man interviewing for the position of the head coach.
In the middle of the second half, Pedri’s phone buzzed; he took the carrot between his teeth and shifted to pull the phone from his back pocket.
It was a few messages from Gavi. With an attachment.
When he opened it, his teeth actually snapped shut, sending part of the carrot onto his lap. It struck him as such a conspicuous, ungainly movement that Ferran must have noticed. But his attention was entirely fixed on the match.
Three short messages.
The first was a screenshot from some football outlet: a cover photo of Pedri with his tongue out — one of his signature goal celebrations.
The second was a text: "Will you do that for me?”
The third was: “On your knees.”
Pedri was aware that his face had gone crimson. He felt the space inside his shorts getting tight again, his body beginning to shift restlessly in the armchair, his hands pulled as if by magnet toward the places already marked with bruises from previous clutches of nerves.
“You can kill me for this, but I love Luka Modrić, even though he plays for Real,” said Ferran, from what seemed like an entirely different universe. Pedri looked up at the screen and understood it was a comment on the substitution — Vinícius coming off for Modrić.
From the corner of his eye he caught Gavi’s triumphant smirk as he readily agreed with Ferran.
The rest of the match passed comparatively peacefully, and when Borussia began scoring after full time, Pedri finally got interested and watched the rest with genuine attention.
After the match ended, Ferran made to leave and looked at Pedri questioningly first — Pedri who still didn’t quite understand what the original purpose of his visit had been. As though registering his host’s confusion, Ferran looked over at Gavi, who was still sitting in the corner of the sofa, brow furrowed over his phone. Gavi glanced at Pedri for a moment — an unreadable look — and nodded.
The goodbye happened much faster than the hello. When Pedri was left in the silence of the vast white apartment, he exhaled loudly. He had the feeling of a dangerous moment that should have been checked by VAR — a potential red card — that no one had noticed. But it could have changed everything.
For the first time in years — since he’d found his place at the club — he wanted to be somewhere other than Barcelona. He missed his parents and wanted to be back in the noise and coziness of home. Or on his favorite beach on Tenerife, where the sound of the sea would drown out the hum of the anxiety that hadn’t yet formed into words, or into questions exactly.
Pedri walked slowly to the nearest guest bedroom and dropped onto the bare pale sheets. He rolled onto his back and laid his forearm across his eyes to block out the remaining daylight.
Pedri understood that Gavi was his friend — his best friend — and that this was what mattered most. The most important thing was to preserve this, because it had always mattered to Pedri.
There had always been one close friend, from childhood onward, the friend changing as the circumstances of his life changed — when he played football as a child on the beaches, when he enrolled in the football academy, when he was trying out at different clubs across Spain. There had always been a closest friend, ready to listen, capable of making the unbearable weight of uncertainty lighter.
He didn’t know how long he lay like that, his thoughts spiraling. At some point he heard the click of the lift and the sound of its ascent. No one was supposed to disturb him on a Sunday. Pedri found he didn’t want to do anything about it — as though the intrusion into his apartment had nothing to do with him.
“Sorry — I forgot something,” came a quiet voice from the bedroom doorway.
Pedri lifted his arm from his eyes and focused on Gavi, who was leaning against the doorframe with the drawstring of his zip-up hoodie between his lips. Pedri had many questions about how Gavi came to be here. But the main question was why the off-white color of the hoodie suited him so well, and why he had never noticed this before.
Silence stretched between them. “Then you should come get it,” Pedri said, a nervous laugh escaping him, and he pushed himself up onto his elbows.
Gavi took a few steps forward and dropped down beside Pedri on the bed with an audible exhale, the mattress giving under him. He shifted his gaze to Pedri’s body, scanning him from feet to shoulders — searching, as though looking for something he’d noted once and was looking for again.
“Where did this bruise come from?” Gavi pressed a finger firmly into the forearm above the elbow, enough that the tender place ached. “I noticed it when you were lying there just now.” Gavi’s eyes moved down Pedri’s body and he pressed just as firmly into the bruise above his knee. “And this one.”
Strike, Pedri thought. All the pins down in one. Every bruise he’d left on himself — from the formless feeling that came over him every time the memories surfaced. He’d been planning to give himself several more in the coming days, in honor of what had happened on the sofa today.
“I noticed you started — touching yourself harshly, when I sent you that message,” Gavi exhaled heavily, still playing with the drawstring. “I thought it had upset you, pues mierda, that’s why I left, but then I realized I needed to say something.” Gavi was talking fast now, eyes on the drawstring. “Because I don’t want there to be any kind of tension between us, because you’re my best friend and everything else, and I sat in the car trying to figure out what to say, I thought about writing, but that message is literally the last one in our thread, and it would be incredibly stupid to follow up sexting with an apology for it. To my best friend. Joder.”
Pedri had always been struck by Gavi’s sincerity, which was why his inability to contain what he felt had never been a problem — only a moving reminder that Gavi always said what he thought, and never held anything back.
“You were sitting in the dark in my garage this whole time?” Pedri felt his lips pulling into something tender.
“Cars have an interior light option, great and all-knowing Pedri — they weren’t designed exclusively for getting from point A to point B.” A second and Gavi’s eyes were already moving over his face with a smile.
Gavi’s breathing was settling; he released the drawstring from his teeth and let his head drop, exhausted, a few centimeters from Pedri’s face. They weren’t level now — Pedri looked down at him from where his head rested on his bent arm.
Pedri closed his eyes so the contact between them wasn’t quite so intense, but he didn’t move away. “None of this comes easily to me, and every time I think about all of it — about you, with me — I have a lot of feelings, and I’m afraid of getting lost in them, so I press into myself to stay grounded, to not let the anxiety get so loud.”
He had learned this from Gavi — to speak openly about what he felt — and even though the act of it felt, every time, like a small violence against himself, the result always brought relief.
“Pedri, you know,” Gavi’s quiet voice seemed closer still, and Pedri didn’t have the nerve to open his eyes and confirm this. “Touching yourself while thinking about me — that’s rather gay.”
Pedri’s eyes flew open of their own accord; Gavi’s face was a few centimeters from his. There was so much energy inside Pedri with nowhere to go that in one second he threw his whole body weight onto Gavi, pressing him into the mattress. The bruised forearm landed under Gavi’s chin; Gavi’s body shook with laughter.
Pedri’s other hand moved down and began lifting Gavi’s shirt, uncovering the muscled torso and chest. He had seen this torso at least a hundred times, but this time was worth all of those — because it was Pedri who had decided it would be bare right now. He looked at his own decision, studying each muscle, each bone that pressed against the surface. The laughter gradually faded from Gavi’s body, but his stomach stayed taut under Pedri’s gaze.
He lifted his forearm from Gavi’s throat and moved his hand to his wrist, closing around it — as though afraid Gavi might disappear, evaporate. Pedri shifted himself down his body.
And his lips found the left side of Gavi’s ribs.
Pedri felt the hair rise on Gavi’s arm, a faint tremor moving through his skin.
Pedri moved downward in kisses, counting each bone and each muscle with his lips. He wanted to look inside Gavi and see every tendon — inspect it, make absolutely certain it would never tear, never thin.
Pedri could feel Gavi’s racing pulse both through his lips and through the hand holding his wrist. When Pedri’s lips reached the area of his navel, Gavi let out a long, muffled moan. Pedri released his wrist and ran his fingers along the waistband of his shorts.
“Say it,” Pedri whispered, looking up at Gavi’s face where it lay turned to the side. When Gavi opened his eyes slightly, his pupils were almost invisible — dark and carnivorous.
Pedri understood that Gavi understood. Their work was to make shared decisions in fractions of a second, without words. Of course he understood.
“I want you on your knees with your tongue out,” Gavi said in a low voice.
This answer wasn’t enough — Pedri already knew it. He began slowly pulling Gavi’s shorts down, leaving kisses on every centimeter of skin as it appeared. “Why do you want that?”
“Because I want to see your tongue below me,” Gavi said, his voice worn through, twisting under Pedri’s touch.
“Why?” Pedri could feel Gavi’s erection pressing against his chin. He kept kissing skin, running his nose along the trail of hair disappearing into the waistband.
“Dios, you are unbearable,” Gavi covered his eyes with his free hand. “I was sitting in the car down there in the fucking garage looking at that message, at your photo from the match, and I felt terrible, and I wanted to come so badly. I thought that was freaky to jerk off to your photo in your garage,” Gavi was almost whimpering. “But I wanted so badly for you to suck me off so I could come on your tongue.”
The moment Gavi said the last word, Pedri pulled his shorts and boxers off in one motion. For a second Pedri didn’t feel quite as certain as he had a moment ago. But any doubt had always been resolved in his mind by his usual mantra — the only way out is through.
And he took him into his mouth.
Gavi’s whole body lurched forward — a broken sound stumbled from him. Pedri took his time, open and unhurried, no pretense of neatness — just his mouth moving slowly and then less slowly, his hand at the base of him, his tongue working in a way that drew Gavi’s hand into Pedri’s hair.
Pedri kept going, deeper and deeper, pulling back to run his tongue the full length before taking him back in, spit slicking everything, his eyes moving up once to find Gavi’s face above him — head dropped back, completely undone — mouth open in soundless moaning.
“Pedri, joder, Pedri” — the only two words leaving Gavi’s lips, one by one, weaving together and pulling apart, letting moans through between them.
Pedri couldn’t hold back the sounds coming from his own throat. He felt the trembling moving through Gavi’s thighs against his shoulders, felt his grip tighten and tighten in his hair, felt the specific desperation of what was about to happen.
Pedri patted Gavi’s bare thigh, guiding him down from the bed onto the white carpet. He let go of him to settle on the floor. He looked up and saw the horror on Gavi’s face — the horror of someone who has had everything taken from them at once. So dramatic, Pedri thought, settling on his knees.
Gavi stepped down from the bed in one movement, and the next moment guided himself back into Pedri’s mouth. Pedri took him in fully and moaned around him.
Pedri felt how each of his own sounds sent charges of electricity through Gavi, who was as hard as possible and agonizingly close. Gavi brought his hand back to Pedri’s hair — Pedri could feel the hand holding Gavi himself back from doing something too sudden. He understood what Gavi’s body wanted to do, and that his mind was stopping him.
Gavi moved his hand to himself and stepped back. It was such a labored movement that when Pedri’s mouth was left empty — suddenly, treacherously — he made a small, plaintive sound that he might later be ashamed of.
Gavi looked at him. “Open your mouth,” Gavi said quickly, in a voice performing gentleness. “Please.”
Pedri couldn’t hold back the smile before he opened his mouth and extended his tongue flat, tilting his head back slightly and closing his eyes. The way he’d done it dozens of times in front of hundreds of thousands of football fans. Now it was done for one person, and this victory was worth every win in El Clásico still left in Pedri’s career.
Gavi stroked himself only a few times before Pedri felt the warm pulse of something salt and thick on his lips and tongue. He heard the surrendering cry Gavi made.
Pedri opened his eyes, keeping his mouth open, and saw Gavi’s face — carrying something indescribable, but something with great weight, as though Pedri were the rarest and most precious creature alive, and the sight of him was worth every year of hopeless searching and exhausting effort.
Gavi dropped to his knees beside Pedri, and when they were level, Pedri closed his mouth and swallowed, trying to catch the taste to put it into words he could come back to its description later.
Gavi moved toward him on his knees and took Pedri’s face in his hands. He was searching for something in his eyes again — the way he had a few days ago on his sofa. Perhaps this is simply how Gavi responds to orgasm, Pedri thought.
But then Gavi pressed a kiss to the corner of Pedri’s mouth. Then the other corner. Then to his lips themselves. Then Pedri felt Gavi’s tongue moving between his lips — tasting what was in Pedri’s mouth.
How Gavi tasted on Pedri’s tongue, how Pedri tasted Gavi on his own. Though hundreds of thousands of eyes were always on them — this belonged only to two of them: the point at which they fused, merged into a union that had no entrance and no access from outside.
Even though Pedri's face was a total mess of different liquids — Gavi's spit, his own spit, Gavi's cum – the next moment he felt his cheeks going wet. Tears. Gavi's tears.
Pedri cowardly opened his eyes and slowly broke the kiss. Gavi's eyes held fear and vulnerability. The exact thing Pedri felt inside — and had been trying to drive into the furthest corner.
They were teammates, they were best friends — they had been in each other's orbit for most of the time, and that system had been stable, predictable, legible. But now a new force had appeared between the two bodies — not a third body arriving from outside, but something that had grown from within the system itself — and it pulled each of them in two directions at once, making every calculation impossible and every orbit unpredictable. Physics was Pedri’s favourite subject at school.
What Pedri wanted most was to collapse this new uncertainty between them, so he reached forward and pulled Gavi against his chest, the way he had done it hundreds of times. He needed this hug right now — to hold onto what kept threatening to come apart. At least, that was how it seemed to him.