SCANDINAVIAN ROMANCE
Part Thirteen: Purgatory with Good Lighting
Day five, eleven-forty-three pm.
Jesper had been lying on his couch staring at the ceiling for two hours. He'd tried a television programme—something procedural, comforting in its predictability—and had watched approximately eight minutes before realising he hadn't absorbed any of it. He'd tried his phone and scrolled without reading. He'd tried the ceiling, which at least was honest about not offering anything.
His thumbs moved.
Did you get home.
He sent it before the part of him that managed these things could intervene. Then he lay there and looked at what he'd done—not a question, no question mark, which was the tell, which meant it wasn't asking for information but doing something else, something that was not safely categorised as logistical.
He put the phone on his chest.
His heartbeat was not calm.
The phone buzzed.
Yeah.
He closed his eyes.
Good. He typed it and sent it and then held the phone at his side and thought about the fact that five days of complete silence had just ended because he'd been lying awake and dignity had clocked out.
The thread sat there. good. in blue, the last thing said.
He should have left it.
He was looking at his door before he'd consciously processed why.
The knock, when it came, was not loud. Not three AM crisis energy—just two quiet sounds, considered. Like someone who had driven across the city in November rain and arrived at a door and had enough residual uncertainty to knock softly.
Jesper was already there.
He opened the door.
Jens. Hoodie. Hair damp, not drenched—he had parked close. His face doing nothing in particular, which with Jens meant it was doing everything in particular, just contained. He looked at Jesper and didn't say anything. The unspoken explanation of his presence being too large to compress into any available sentence.
Jesper didn't ask why he was there. Didn't tell him to leave.
He stepped back.
Jens came in.
They stood in Jesper's hallway with the city noise outside and the specific silence of five days of restraint having rotted into something that couldn't hold its shape anymore.
Jesper said, quiet—looking at somewhere adjacent to Jens's face because looking directly was still too much: "We can't pretend that didn't happen."
Jens didn't answer with words.
He stepped closer. Not reaching for anything—just closing the distance. Gravitational, unhurried, the movement of something that had been decided somewhere below conscious thought.
Jesper looked at him.
Jens kissed him.
It was nothing like the first one.
The first had been a question—is this real, am I doing this, does this exist. Brief and shocked and immediately regretted in both directions.
This was a different category. Slow. Careful. The kind of careful that came from someone who was very aware of what they were doing and was choosing every millimetre of it. Jens's hands came up—one at Jesper's jaw, thumb resting against his cheekbone, the other at the side of his neck—and the quality of it, the way Jens held him like something that could break, did something catastrophic to Jesper's chest.
Are you still here. That was the language of the kiss. Are you real. Did I break you. Don't disappear.
Jesper's hand found Jens's sleeve and gripped it.
When it ended—slow, no hard stop, just a gradual parting—they were both breathing differently and neither of them said anything immediately.
Jesper's forehead dropped to Jens's shoulder. Not gracefully, not as a gesture—just falling there, because it was the nearest available place and his neck had apparently stopped holding opinions about dignity.
Jens's hand moved to the back of his head. Stayed there.
They moved to the couch. Not because they'd decided to—because the hallway stopped making sense and the couch was there.
Side by side. Knees touching. The specific configuration of two people who were not not-touching but were also not making a statement about touching.
Jens said, after a while—voice careful, the kind of careful that meant he'd thought about this before arriving: "If we do this—I don't want it to be because we're spiraling."
Jesper looked at the middle distance.
He hated how much sense that sentence made. He hated the specific maturity of it, the restraint, the fact that Jens had shown up in the rain and kissed him and was now being the one to pump the brakes with both hands, which was—so much worse than if he'd just been reckless. Reckless would have been easier to resist.
He nodded. Once.
"Yeah," he said.
He leaned his head on Jens's shoulder.
Fully. No joke about it. No sarcasm, no verbal footnote qualifying the gesture. Just—placed it there, settled his weight, and let it be what it was.
Jens didn't move.
They talked.
Not about the kiss or the five days or the first kiss in the car. About other things—smaller, adjacent, the particular conversation of two people who were together in a room and needed the room to be navigable.
Jesper asked about Jens's shoulder. The right one, which had been giving him trouble in training—not structural, the physio had said, just accumulation. Jens answered. Actually answered, not deflected. Said it was better with heat and that he'd been sleeping on the wrong side.
Jens asked about physio. How the programme was running. Jesper told him. Mentioned the milestone from last Tuesday that he'd told nobody yet because it had felt too small to mention and too personal to broadcast.
Jens said: "That's a big milestone."
Jesper said: "Yeah." And felt the warmth of it, the specific warmth of being the recipient of someone's genuine attentiveness, the thing that was different from sympathy or courtesy. I know your physio schedule and what this milestone means in context was what Jens had actually said. Compressed into four words.
At some point Jesper's eyes stopped staying open.
He didn't try to fight it—the days of disrupted sleep and the couch warmth and the shoulder he was using as a pillow, which was structurally excellent for this purpose. He went under fast, the way you went under when your body finally decided it was safe.
Jens stayed awake.
He looked at the ceiling. Felt the weight of Jesper against his shoulder—light, actually, even lighter than he looked, the particular lightness of someone whose bones were fine-built—and did not move. Did not adjust. Did not do anything that would disturb the sleeping.
He looked at the ceiling for an hour and thought about the following, in no particular order:
The way Jesper had opened the door without asking why. The way the grip on his sleeve had said something that the rest of the evening had been carefully not saying. The way Jesper had said that's a big milestone with genuine pleased attention before catching himself.
The way he'd said we can't pretend that didn't happen as though it was a problem and then immediately let Jens kiss him again, which was its own answer.
This isn't shallow, Jens thought. The thought arrived fully formed, not as a conclusion he was working toward but as a fact he'd arrived at. This isn't situational. This isn't guilt or rivalry or circumstances. This is—
He looked at the ceiling.
Terrifying was the only word available.
He was terrified in a way he had never been on a pitch or in a duel or in any of the high-stakes moments that were supposed to be the difficult ones. This was different. This was the terror of having something real that you could lose.
At some point—two, maybe two-thirty—Jesper shifted in his sleep, the unconscious adjustment of a body getting comfortable, and his weight settled differently. Jens looked at him.
He looked—
God, Jens thought, and then stopped that sentence because it was too large.
He was beautiful. That was the plain fact. Not in the press-conference way, not in the way that photographs and clips captured—but in the unguarded way of someone who had stopped performing the moment consciousness left. Jesper asleep looked like none of the versions of Jesper that the world had been offered. Soft. Very young, somehow. The defender-face, the competitor-face, the PR-face, all of them gone.
Jens watched him breathe.
After a while he carefully, slowly, levered himself out from under Jesper without waking him. Found a blanket from the armchair. Tucked it—properly, completely, the way you did for someone you were paying attention to—around his shoulders.
He found a notepad in Jesper's kitchen. A pen.
Wrote: text me when you wake up.
Placed it on the cushion near Jesper's head where he would see it.
Then he stood in Jesper's kitchen in the three-thirty am dark and looked at the hallway and thought: I need to leave before this becomes something he wakes up to having to address.
He left.
Jesper woke up at seven-nineteen with a blanket over him and a note by his face.
He looked at the note.
Looked at the blanket.
Lay there for a moment.
Picked up his phone.
up.
The reply came in thirty seconds. Jens had been awake.
how's the shoulder.
Jesper stared at that. The specific priority of it—not good morning or how did you sleep, just straight to the shoulder, which was so purely Jens that something in Jesper's chest did the thing it kept doing.
Fine. How's yours.
better.
A pause.
good. Jesper typed. And then, before he could stop himself: you tucked me in.
An even longer pause.
your couch is cold.
you tucked me in, jens.
..yeah.
Jesper looked at yeah for a while.
thank you, he typed.
Nothing for a moment. Then:
eat something before training.
He smiled at his phone in his empty flat. Pressed his face briefly into the cushion. Composed himself.
you're insufferable.
eat.
fine.
He got up. Made food. Ate it.
The training ground.
They arrived separately by sixteen minutes. Used different entrances. Did not acknowledge each other in the first hour.
In the afternoon session—a rondo, team mixed—Jens made a comment about positioning in the press. Jesper disagreed, sharply, in the way that read as their old register. Jens responded with an eye-roll calibrated for public consumption.
The team breathed.
Good, the rivalry's back, normal service, nothing to see here.
Sam, arms crossed at the side, watching: "Why does this feel rehearsed."
He said it very quietly. To Tijjani. Who was also watching.
"Because it is," Tijjani said. Just as quiet.
They looked at each other.
Milos appeared at Sam's left shoulder, inexplicably, having materialised from somewhere. "They're overdoing it. People who actually hate each other don't—" he gestured at the pitch, at the very deliberate quality of the eye-roll, the very calibrated sharpness of the disagreement. "—perform it."
"They're compensating," Tijjani said.
"For what," Sven said, from Sam's right, also inexplicably present, completing the formation.
The three of them looked at Sven.
Sven looked back.
"I don't know," Sam said, carefully. "But something changed."
Yuki was twenty feet away doing something with a resistance band. He looked up, at the pitch, at Jens and Jesper performing enemies with the subtlety of two people who had spent the previous night on the same couch, and then looked back at the resistance band.
He said nothing.
He knew.
Eight days later.
Jens's flat. A Thursday.
A film—something on the television, Jens's choice, something action-adjacent that Jesper had been pretending to follow. They were on the couch. The arrangement had evolved without discussion from its first iteration—they were closer now, the spatial negotiation having quietly resolved toward less space.
Jesper's legs were across Jens's lap. This had happened approximately thirty minutes into the film when the shoulder wanted a different angle and the couch geometry made Jens's lap the most sensible option, and Jens had received this without comment and put one hand on Jesper's ankle and that was that.
The film was doing something with a car chase.
Jesper was not watching the car chase.
He was watching Jens watch the car chase—the specific quality of Jens's focus, genuine, apparently interested in cars going fast, and the line of his jaw, and the way the television light moved across his face.
He'd been doing this for eleven minutes and was not going to stop.
"You're not watching," Jens said, without looking away from the screen.
"I'm watching."
"You're watching me."
Jesper looked at the screen immediately. "I'm watching the film."
Jens's thumb moved on his ankle. One small movement, absentminded, and Jesper felt it in his whole body in a way that was wildly disproportionate to what had happened.
He looked at the ceiling.
I will not survive this, he thought. I am already not surviving this.
Later—later, when the film had ended and the screen had gone dark and neither of them had moved to do anything about that—Jens looked at him.
Really looked. The direct uncovered way that still cost something every time.
"You okay?" he said.
And the thing was—the catastrophic thing, the thing Jesper lay awake thinking about afterward—was that Jens meant it. It wasn't filler. It was a genuine inquiry from someone who had been paying close enough attention to have a real question about the answer.
"Yeah," Jesper said.
And then, because Jens was still looking: "Getting there."
Jens nodded. Like this was the most important sentence he'd heard all week.
Maybe it was.
The night Jesper slept over—properly, unplanned, the third week—had started with a film and three makeouts and then Jesper on the couch with his head at the armrest, barely awake, physio and two training sessions having finally outrun his stubbornness.
Jens tried once. Said his name. Jesper made a sound that was not language and turned toward the couch cushion.
Jens stood there for a moment.
Looked at Jesper.
Asleep, completely asleep, with his hair falling wrong and his mouth slightly open and the particular innocence of unconsciousness making him look younger than he was—so much younger, so much less defended. The face he never showed anyone. The Jesper that existed when all the architecture came down.
Jens stood there for a while.
Then he did the thing that he didn't examine before doing because examining it would have meant something was decided: he gathered Jesper up, one arm under his knees and one supporting his back, careful of the shoulder, careful of the ribs that were still sometimes tender. Jesper was warm and small against his chest and stirred slightly—made a small sound, brow furrowing—and then subsided back into sleep completely.
Jens carried him to the bedroom.
Laid him down. Careful. Tucked the duvet. Stepped back.
Jesper breathed in the dark, completely unaware, hand curling into the pillow.
Jens stood in the door of his own bedroom looking at him.
His heart was doing something he didn't have a word for. Something that had the dimensions of terror and the temperature of warmth.
I will rearrange everything, he thought. Without drama. Without performance. Just the quiet arrival of a fact. I will rearrange everything and call it normal.
He slept on his own couch.
Did not sleep for a long time.
Morning. Jesper woke up in Jens's bedroom with the specific disorientation of being in the wrong ceiling.
He lay there. Processed.
Looked at the bedroom. At the spare duvet tucked around him. At the bedroom door, which was open, and beyond it—visible from the bed—the couch, where a pair of feet in socks was protruding over the armrest.
He looked at those feet for a moment.
His chest did the thing.
He picked up his phone. Typed: you carried me to bed.
Across the flat, he heard a phone buzz. A pause.
your neck would've hurt on the couch.
Jesper looked at that.
jens.
yeah.
you slept on your own couch.
A longer pause.
yeah.
Jesper put his phone down. Looked at the ceiling of Jens's bedroom. Thought about a man who had driven across the city in the rain and kissed him slowly and tucked a blanket around him and carried him to a bed and slept on his own couch.
He thought: I will not survive this.
He thought: I don't want to.
He got up. Found Jens on the couch—actually asleep, finally, somehow, in the configuration of a very large person on a not-very-large couch, feet hanging off the end.
He looked at him.
Went to the kitchen. Made coffee. Brought two cups back.
Set one on the table near the couch.
Sat in the armchair.
Waited.
When Jens woke up, he found Jesper already there—coffee made, feet tucked under himself in the armchair, looking at his phone. He looked up. Said nothing. Gestured at the coffee on the table.
Jens sat up. Looked at the coffee. Looked at Jesper.
They didn't say anything for a while.
It wasn't uncomfortable.
That was the thing—the thing neither of them said, the thing they were both sitting inside of—it wasn't uncomfortable. Two people in a flat in the morning with coffee, saying nothing, and the silence being the most relaxed either of them had been in longer than they could remember.
"Physio at ten," Jesper said, eventually.
"I know," Jens said.
"You'll need to drive."
"I know."
A pause.
"Okay," Jesper said.
"Okay," Jens said.
They drank their coffee.
Outside, the city was doing its morning thing, indifferent and loud and completely unaware that something irreversible was sitting on a couch and in an armchair being quiet about it.
Sam found out on a Tuesday.
Not all of it. Not the details. But enough.
He found out because Jesper, getting his kit from his locker, was wearing a hoodie that was not Jesper's. This was provable because Jesper's hoodies were specific—he had opinions about his clothes, always had—and this one was too large across the shoulders by a margin that ruled out any shared-size possibility and was the exact dark blue of the one Jens had been wearing last Thursday.
Sam looked at the hoodie.
Looked at Jesper.
Opened his mouth.
Jesper met his eyes. His expression was perfectly neutral, with the specific quality of perfect neutrality that meant I know you've seen it and I'm watching what you do with this.
Sam closed his mouth.
Went to his own locker.
Said nothing.
Later, in the car park, he sat in his car and sent a single message to the bubbly boys group chat—no text, just a gif. A gif of someone looking directly into a camera with raised eyebrows.
Tijjani replied: tell me.
Sam replied: i have no information.
Milos: LIAR.
Sven: What happened?
Yuki: a single period. Just. .
Sam looked at Yuki's period for a while.
Then typed: they're fine. I think they're fine.
He sat with that.
Put his phone away.
Watched Jens's car leave the car park sixteen minutes before Jesper walked out of the building, and Jesper's car leave two minutes after that, in the same direction, and thought:
Yeah. They're going to be fine.
End of Part Thirteen.
SCANDINAVIAN ROMANCE
Part Fourteen: The Last Duel
Jesper came back to full training on a Wednesday.
The physio signed off on Tuesday afternoon—cleared for contact, full intensity, return to competitive drills—and Jesper had sat in the physio room with the paperwork and felt something settle in him that had been unsettled for months. His body was his again. The shoulder moved. The ribs had stopped commentating. He was himself, physically, in the way that only became vivid when you'd spent a long time not being.
He texted Jens from the car park. Just: cleared.
The reply came in under a minute. good. And then, after a pause: don't be stupid on the first day back.
Jesper had smiled at his phone and put it away and driven home.
Wednesday. Full squad session. The coach ran the standard return-to-contact protocol for the first hour, kept Jesper in the lower-intensity groups, watched him move with the assessing eye of someone making sure the clearance matched the reality.
It matched.
By the second hour, Jesper was in the main group. Sharp, immediate, the particular brightness of someone who had been away from this and had missed it in their bones. The team felt it—the energy shifting, something slotting back into place. People found themselves passing to him differently, with more trust, the way you passed to someone you knew would do something interesting with it.
At the end of the session, the coach looked at Jens and at Jesper and said: "Duel. Let's see where we are."
The squad arranged itself.
Not formally—nobody was instructed to watch. But the gravitational pull of it was immediate, people drifting to the edge of the relevant space in the particular way that meant: this is the thing, this is the thing we've been waiting for.
Jens was on one side. Rolling his shoulders. Face doing nothing.
Jesper was on the other. Kit still perfectly arranged, shoulders back, the returned ease of his posture.
They looked at each other.
Neither of them performed anything.
The drill: simple, direct. 1v1 from the wing, defender to beat, finish. The coach had run this specific drill in October and the memory of it was in everyone who'd been there—the nutmeg, the shoulder check, the moment they'd been chest to chest on the turf and the rivalry had signed its own name.
Jens attacked first.
He came at Jesper the way he came at everything—committed, forward, no hesitation. Jesper held his ground. Read him. They went for it.
The contact was clean. Competitive. Real.
Reset.
Jesper attacked.
He went early, quick feet, the feint—then a cut inside that was sharper than October, the shoulder stronger, the recovery faster. He beat Jens by half a step and the finish was clean.
The squad made the sound that meant something had landed.
Jens reset.
They went again.
The fourth run.
Jens came wide, changed his angle mid-run—the adjustment that had become his signature, that impossible slight change of direction that shed defenders—and Jesper tracked it, perfect position, ready.
And then—
He didn't go for it.
It wasn't a mistake. It wasn't a mistiming or a misjudgement or a physical failure. Jesper made the space, had the angle, and something in him chose differently.
Jens went past. Finished. Clean.
The pitch went quiet.
Not crowd-quiet. Training-ground-quiet—the specific silence of a small group of people who have just seen something that doesn't make sense and are trying to categorise it.
Jens felt it immediately. The cold drop, the wrongness of it. Not the winning—the way it had happened. The way Jesper hadn't come for him. Jesper always came for him. That was the nature of them—two forces that could not exist in proximity without impact. Jesper not going for it was like a law of physics being quietly suspended.
He stood at the far end with the ball at his feet and looked back.
Jesper was not looking mad. Not embarrassed. Not the furious dignity of someone who'd made an error and was managing the fallout.
He looked resolved.
Sam had stopped moving. Milos was mid-sentence about something and had simply stopped, mouth still slightly open. Yuki tilted his head—one degree, no more—the motion of someone receiving confirmation of something they'd suspected.
Jesper walked off the pitch without looking at anyone.
The locker room emptied slowly, the way it did at the end of a long day—people moving at different rhythms, conversations trailing out, the usual noise winding down into the particular quiet of a space that had held a lot of people and was now holding fewer.
Jens was the last. Or almost the last.
He was re-taping his left wrist—methodical, something to do with his hands—when he heard the door.
"I lost to you."
He didn't turn around. Kept his eyes on the tape.
Not accusatory. Not the language of competition. Just—stated. A fact being named.
"You didn't," he said.
"I did." A pause. The sound of Jesper moving, stopping. "You should teach me your moves."
Jens turned.
Jesper was a few metres away. He'd been undoing his jersey—slowly, deliberately, the kind of deliberate that wasn't absent-minded, that was something being decided while the hands did something else. He wasn't looking at Jens in the press-conference way or the rival way or any of the ways that had a function.
He was just—looking at him.
Something in the room changed.
"Stop," Jens said immediately. Voice rough in a way he hadn't prepared for. "Stop."
Jesper's hands went still.
His breath—Jens could see it, could hear the slight catch of it, the way his chest didn't quite move the way it had a second ago.
"…Am I that bad?"
The question arrived like something physical. The specific quiet uncertainty of it—not performing vulnerability, not a tactic. Asking.
Jens felt it in his chest like something breaking.
He took a step forward. Then stopped. His hands at his sides.
"No," he said.
The word came out too small for what it was carrying. He looked at Jesper—at his face, at the question still in it, at everything that had accumulated in the months since a duel in October and a locker room and a hospital and a car in the rain and a couch and a note that said text me when you wake up.
"No," he said again. And then, quieter—dragged up from somewhere that didn't have a door: "I'm bad."
The room held it.
Jesper looked at him.
The specific way Jesper looked at him—no performance, no defence, no of the protective architecture—and Jens watched comprehension move across his face. Not surprise. Not revelation. More like: yes. there it is. that's the thing.
The thing they'd been circling for months.
Jens moved first. Or Jesper did. Later, neither of them could have said—it was the kind of movement that happened when two things that have been held apart let go simultaneously, where the question of who moved toward whom collapses into the fact of arrival.
Jens's hands found Jesper's face. Both of them. Careful. The specific care of someone holding something they'd been afraid of losing before they'd let themselves know they had it.
Jesper's hands went to Jens's chest. Not pushing. Gripping. The grip of someone who had been holding their breath for a very long time and had finally decided to stop.
Their foreheads touched.
Both of them breathing.
Jens's thumbs moved along Jesper's cheekbones—learning, not claiming. The small specific tenderness of someone paying attention.
Jesper exhaled. A shaky, genuine sound. Something being released.
"Jens," he said. Very quietly.
And Jens kissed him.
Not the first kiss—not the shocked, brief contact in the fogged car. Not the slow reverent one in the hallway. This was something else. This was after everything—after months of duels and hatred and hospital corridors and home. in a text thread and sleeping on his own couch, after the injury and the locker room and every version of both of them that had been offered and withdrawn and offered again.
This was chosen. Fully. Completely.
Jesper kissed back.
His hands learned the width of Jens's shoulders—had known it abstractly, tactically, as a physical fact of a competitor, but not like this, not as information about something that was his to know. Jens's hands in his hair, against his jaw, like he was being paid close attention to. Like he was specific. Like Jens had been thinking about exactly this.
No rush. No hunger-first chaos. They'd waited too long and knew too much about each other for anything quick—they moved the way people moved when they understood that the moment was sufficient and there was no need to get past it.
I've been afraid you'd disappear, was what Jens's hands said.
I'm not going anywhere, was what Jesper said back.
When they finally stopped—not pulled apart, just slowed, rested—they were breathing the same air. Jens's forehead back against Jesper's. Jesper's hands still in their grip.
"We're in the locker room," Jesper said, very quietly.
"Yeah," Jens said.
A pause.
"Jens."
"Yeah."
"We need to—" Jesper started, and then didn't finish, because finishing required naming a direction and the only direction available was not here and that was less about the location than about what happened next, which was: something that could not be undone.
"My place," Jens said. Not a question.
Jesper looked at him. The full-contact look, nothing between them.
"Yeah," he said.
Later.
The specific quality of later—real later, the other side of something.
Jens's bedroom. The ceiling that Jesper had looked at from Jens's bed on the night he'd been carried here, now looked at from a different position, with different weight, in different company.
They were both on their backs. Not touching, for the moment—just side by side in the dark, the way the human body sometimes needed space after intensity, not because the intensity was wrong but because it needed room to be processed.
The city outside. The heating ticking. Both of them breathing.
The silence had a specific quality. Not the loaded, careful silence of people who hadn't said things yet. More like—aftermath. The quiet of something that had finally arrived at where it was going.
Jesper broke it.
His voice was wrecked in the specific way of someone whose throat had been through something, and also in the other way, the emotional way that can't always be separated. Low. Certain. With something in it that was almost a laugh and wasn't quite.
"We're so fucked."
Jens was quiet for a moment.
He turned his head. Looked at the side of Jesper's face—the profile he'd been cataloguing for a year, in training and matches and press conferences and locker rooms, in the dark of a car and across a hospital corridor window. The face that had been his rival and his problem and his obsession and his home. in a text thread.
He reached out.
Found Jesper's hand. Laced their fingers together—slowly, deliberate, the way you did something you'd decided on. Not hiding it. Not performing it.
Just doing it.
Jesper looked down at their hands.
Looked at the ceiling.
His fingers tightened.
Jens didn't say anything.
He didn't need to.
The rivalry had not survived this room.
They had.
And that was—more than either of them had let themselves want for a very long time.
The ceiling held no more answers than it ever had. The city kept going. The heating ticked.
And Jesper, who had spent a year defining himself against the person currently holding his hand, lay in the dark and felt the specific quality of a thing that had been decided. Not worked out—that would take longer, would take conversation and daylight and the eventual, inevitable moment when the bubbly boys found out and the world realigned.
But decided.
He was here. Jens was here. Their hands were together in the dark.
There's no undoing this.
He didn't want to.
End of Part Fourteen.