SCANDINAVIAN ROMANCE
Part Nine: Daily
It started with the weather.
physio said rain makes it worse. take it easy.
Jesper read it standing in his kitchen at eight in the morning, coffee in hand, brain not fully operational. He stared at it for a moment with the particular expression of someone receiving information they didn't request.
didn't ask for medical advice.
He sent it, put his phone down, drank his coffee.
His phone buzzed.
noted.
That was it. That was the entire exchange. He stood in his kitchen and looked at the word noted for approximately fifteen seconds before putting his phone in his pocket and doing something else entirely.
That evening: ice the shoulder before bed. not optional.
you're not my physio.
correct.
He iced the shoulder. He wasn't going to not ice the shoulder.
The next morning: weather's fine today. you can do the outdoor exercises.
He didn't reply to that one. But he did the outdoor exercises.
This was, he told himself, purely practical. Information exchange between two people who occupied the same professional ecosystem. Nothing about it was anything except logistical. The fact that it was daily was simply because the information requiring exchange happened to be daily. The fact that he noticed when a morning text was late was simply because the schedule it referenced was time-sensitive.
These were lies he was comfortable with for now and intended to revisit never.
The gym encounter happened on a Wednesday.
Separate corners—this was established, unspoken, reliable. Jesper had claimed the rehabilitation equipment along the far wall, the resistance bands and the balance boards and the specific humiliating apparatuses designed to remind him that his body was still a work in progress. Jens was on the other side with the weights, doing something methodical and heavy.
They had been in the same room for forty minutes without acknowledging each other, which was a practiced skill at this point.
Jesper was on the balance board. Single-leg work, shoulder held careful, the goal being to stand still and make it look easy. He had been managing this. He was managing it now—until a slight overcorrection sent his weight wrong and he lurched sideways, grabbed the wall, saved it with about half a second to spare.
He looked up automatically, the way you looked up when you'd nearly done something embarrassing to check whether anyone had seen.
Jens was looking at him.
Their eyes met.
Jesper said, preemptively: "Don't."
Jens looked away.
Jesper reset on the board. Steadied. Focused. Good. Back to functional. He was not thinking about the nearly-fall. He was not thinking about the expression on Jens's face in the half-second before he looked away, which had contained something that might have been a suppressed reaction to the nearly-fall.
Five seconds. Ten.
He heard it.
A brief, involuntary, barely-there sound. Breath pushed out through a controlled exhale that had not quite succeeded at being controlled. The sound of a laugh that had been mostly caught and had escaped through a very small gap.
Jesper kept his eyes on the wall in front of him.
He could feel the smile arriving on his face before he'd agreed to it. He pressed his lips together.
That worked for approximately three seconds before his mouth did something anyway.
He wiped it off immediately. Looked at the wall. Got on with the balance drill.
Across the room, Jens had resumed his weights with the careful focus of a man who had not made a sound.
That night, Jesper picked up his phone with the energy of someone about to do something they were calling justified.
saw you laugh today. disgusting.
He sent it before he could reconsider what it implied, which was that he'd been listening for it specifically.
The reply came faster than he'd expected:
occupational hazard.
He looked at that for a while. Occupational hazard. The phrasing of it—not a denial, not an excuse, just a deadpan acknowledgment that nearly-laughing at Jesper had apparently become a recurring professional hazard in Jens's life.
He put his phone down.
Picked it up.
Put it down again.
Did not reply.
Did not sleep immediately.
Phase two arrived like most things arrived between them—without announcement, having apparently already been happening for some time before either of them noticed.
The texts changed.
Not dramatically. The surface of them was the same: short, practical, minimal. But underneath the logistics, something else was being communicated in the negative space. Did you ice it. Coach said rain tomorrow. Don't overdo it. The formal deniability of information exchange—but underneath, steadily, a different frequency. The frequency of: I'm checking that you're okay. I'm not going to say that. But I'm checking.
Neither of them named it.
Neither of them needed to.
The evening Jesper forgot to reply was a Thursday.
He'd been in physio late, then called his mother—the call that had been pending for weeks, which had been every bit as long and emotionally demanding as predicted—and by the time he'd surfaced from that, his brain was too empty to do much except go horizontal.
He fell asleep with his phone on the nightstand.
Jens, across the city, noticed the absence.
Not with alarm. Not immediately. Just—checked the clock at nine-thirty. Looked at the thread. Nothing since afternoon. Checked at ten. Checked at ten-twenty.
By ten-forty he was aware that he was counting the minutes since the last message in a way that had nothing to do with logistics or schedule-monitoring or any of the structures he'd been using.
He sat with that.
The specific horror of realising that someone else's silence had weight. That quiet where Jesper usually was had a different texture than ordinary quiet. That he was measuring it.
He put his phone face-down.
Lay back.
Occupational hazard, he thought, grimly, at the ceiling.
Jesper's moment came on a bad Friday.
The kind of session where the progress that had been feeling real decided not to feel real—the shoulder protesting, the exercises regressing, the physiotherapist adjusting the plan in a way that was medically correct and emotionally crushing. He sat in the changing room afterward, still in his kit, sweat-damp and hollowed out.
He picked up his phone and typed, without the part of his brain that managed optics being involved:
today was shit.
Sent it.
Immediately looked at what he'd done.
He could not explain why he'd sent it to that thread. He had other threads. He had Sam, who would have received this information with warmth and a follow-up question and probably a voice note. He had Tijjani, who would have been characteristically direct and oddly comforting. He had options.
He'd sent it there.
He waited, with the specific tightness of someone who has done something they can't undo and is now awaiting consequences.
Forty-three seconds.
i know.
That was it. Nothing else. No advice, no practical suggestions, no pivot to solutions. Just i know—simple and flat and somehow exactly right, the acknowledgment of something without trying to fix it, which was not a thing Jesper had expected from Jens, which made it worse.
He turned his phone face-down on the bench.
Sat there.
Teammates didn't know like that. That was the fact he was pressing on. Teammates who were estranged, who had said something unforgivable in a locker room, who communicated primarily in logistics and mutual avoidance—they didn't know like that. They didn't reply in forty-three seconds with the exact right two words.
i know implied a specificity. Implied that Jens had been aware enough, paying attention closely enough, to know what kind of day it had been. Implied a kind of monitoring that wasn't logistical at all.
Jesper picked his phone up. Put it in his bag. Went home.
Did not reply.
Could not figure out what to reply.
The second parking lot encounter had less rain and more inevitability.
Jesper was on the kerb waiting for an Uber that was apparently on the far side of a city that had apparently decided to have traffic. Jens came out of the building, car keys in hand, and saw him.
He didn't ask.
Jesper didn't wait to be asked.
He just—looked at the phone, looked at the progress of the Uber icon, looked at Jens's car, made a decision that he didn't narrate.
He got in.
They drove through the city with the radio doing the work the conversation wasn't doing, something in Dutch that neither of them was listening to. Jens drove the way he always drove—unhurried, both hands easy on the wheel, like he had time for the road. The city lights through the window.
When they arrived, Jesper undid his seatbelt. Opened the door.
"Text me when you're home," he said.
He was out of the car before he'd finished saying it, because if he was already moving then it was just something that happened, not something he'd decided. He heard the door close behind him. Went inside.
Forty minutes later, his phone lit up.
home.
This time he replied in four minutes. Not ten.
ok.
He was asleep before he could analyse the reduction in delay. His phone on the nightstand, the thread open, ok. glowing briefly and then going dark.
Jens scored on a Saturday.
Not dramatically—a composed finish, inside the post, the kind of goal that showed up beautifully in statistics and had no story attached to it. He turned and jogged back to position. The crowd did what it did.
The broadcast cut to a wide shot of the bench.
Jesper was there—not playing yet, still in the early stages of return-to-training protocols, observing. The camera caught him for two seconds. Not looking away. Not performing the careful neutrality that he'd been deploying in public since the hospital. Just—watching Jens jog back to position.
His face did something small and unambiguous.
He looked proud.
Not envious. Not complicated. Just—the clean, uncomplicated pride of someone watching something good happen to a person they were invested in.
He seemed to realise the camera was on him approximately one second later and reassembled his expression. But the camera had already been there.
The clip went into the match broadcast archive. Nobody pulled it specifically. It just existed, two seconds in the forty-third minute of a Tuesday fixture, Jesper's face doing something that didn't fit the existing narrative.
In his car after the match, Jesper sat with the memory of watching that goal and what had moved through him.
Not: I should have scored that.
Not: that should have been my starting spot.
Just—good. Clean and involuntary. Good, I'm glad.
And then, following that like a second wave: I want him to be happy. Not successful. Not vindicated. Not winning the internal competition between them. Happy. He wanted Jens to feel something when the ball went in, the way Jens used to before he'd turned himself into a machine living inside its own punishment.
He sat in the car park for a while.
This was, he recognised, a significant problem.
The bubbly boys were not stupid.
They were, in the order of their awareness: Tijjani first, then Sam almost simultaneously, then Yuki in his particular way that suggested he'd known for some time and had simply been waiting for the others to catch up, then Milos in a sudden flash of insight during a training session that caused him to stop mid-drill and say oh to nobody.
"Something changed," Tijjani said, on a Thursday in Sam's kitchen. He was looking at his coffee.
"Something changed a while ago," Sam said.
"But it's different now."
"Yeah."
"They don't fight."
"They haven't fought since the hospital."
"No, but before that it was still—there was still something. They were still engaged with each other. Even when it was bad. Now it's like—" Tijjani paused. Made a shape with his hands. "Someone turned the sound off."
Sam leaned against the counter. "Which is somehow worse."
"Significantly worse. At least the fighting made sense. This—" He gestured again. "This I don't have a category for."
Milos appeared in the kitchen doorway with the expression of someone who had been listening from the corridor. "Jens knows Jesper's physio schedule."
Sam and Tijjani looked at him.
"Like. Down to the time. He mentioned it once. I didn't give him that information. None of us did."
Silence.
"Also," Milos continued, "he leaves training at the same time Jesper finishes rehab. Every time. I checked. I kept track for a week because something felt weird and I was right."
"You kept a log," Sam said.
"I'm not proud of it."
"You absolutely are."
"I'm a little proud of it." Milos came into the kitchen properly. "My point is he knows her schedule and times his exits around it. Which is—"
"Weird," Tijjani said.
"Extremely weird. For someone who supposedly wants nothing to do with him."
Sam was quiet for a moment. Looking at his coffee. "Jesper doesn't react anymore."
They both looked at him.
"When someone mentions Jens. Or when there's a clip, or a result, or anything. He used to react—even controlled, even careful, there was still something. Now it's just a pause. This half-second thing. And then nothing."
"Like he's—" Milos started.
"Like he's doing the math," Sam said. "And not letting you see the working."
Yuki was in the living room. He had not been part of the conversation, but he spoke from the doorway: "They lie to self."
They all turned.
Yuki considered his words. "Me think—they already know. Since long time." He paused. "But knowing—" he searched for it, "—is different from saying."
Sven appeared behind him, having apparently arrived without announcement. "I think Jens is sad," he offered. "I've thought that for a while. He looks like someone who has something he can't say to the person he wants to say it to."
Sam looked at him. "That's very specific."
"I pay attention," Sven said, mildly.
The kitchen held all of them for a moment.
"So," Milos said, "what do we do."
"Nothing," Sam and Tijjani said simultaneously.
"We do nothing," Sam continued. "Because if we do something, Jesper will know we've been watching and he'll close down completely. And Jens will—" He stopped. "Whatever is happening between them, it's moving. Slowly. But it's moving."
"How do you know," Milos said.
Sam looked at his phone. The thread from two nights ago—Jesper, unprompted, at eleven pm: the gym's quieter without someone watching me fall off the balance board—and Sam had stared at that for a full minute before responding, because it had not been sent to him, and Jesper had corrected it immediately with wrong thread ignore that but it had been there long enough to read.
Wrong thread.
Sam had filed it without comment and was still filing it now.
"I just know," he said.
Jens's phone, that same Thursday.
wrong thread ignore that
He read it for the third time. Set the phone down. Picked it up. Read it again.
gym's quieter without someone watching me fall off the balance board.
The original message. Sent to him, then recalled—but he'd already seen it, already had the specific warm ridiculous thing move through his chest at the image of Jesper on the balance board nearly falling and the idea that Jesper had—apparently—thought of him in the context of that.
Had almost sent it to him before catching it.
Had caught it too late.
Jens looked at the ceiling.
He typed: don't fall without witnesses.
Deleted it.
Typed: noted.
Deleted that too.
Typed nothing.
Did not sleep for a while.
In the dark he thought about wrong thread and what thread would have been right, and what that meant about what he was becoming in Jesper's phone—the person you sent things to without thinking, the default, the first draft before the edit.
He thought about i know and the two-second camera shot he'd seen clipped online, Jesper's face doing the thing it had done when the goal went in.
He thought about a parking lot in the rain and text me when you're home.
He thought: this is already irreversible.
He didn't send anything.
But he kept the thread open on his phone all night, the last message sitting there—ok.—glowing briefly every time the screen woke up and then going dark.
ok.
As if it was something they'd agreed on.
End of Part Nine.
SCANDINAVIAN ROMANCE
Part Ten: The Denial Olympics (They Medal in Everything)
The first event was guilt. It was the cleanest one, the most structurally sound, the one that held up best under casual examination.
Jens told himself: I feel responsible. The injury, the locker room, the thing said in panic that had landed like a verdict. The weeks of standing in a hospital corridor. The protein bars left at a desk like an apology that couldn't say its own name. All of it reducible, if you needed to reduce it, to guilt. Guilt explained the texting. Guilt explained the drives home. Guilt explained the way he timed his exits from training and told himself he wasn't timing his exits from training.
I feel responsible was clean. It had a cause and an effect and a logical terminus—eventually the guilt would resolve, or be forgiven, or simply run its course, and then this would stop feeling like whatever it felt like and return to something recognisable.
Across the city, Jesper was running the exact same event with the exact same medal.
He feels responsible. That was why the texts kept coming. That was why the protein bars, the rides, the home. in the thread. Guilt was a powerful motivator and Jens had something to feel guilty about and therefore his behaviour had a perfectly non-threatening explanation that required no further examination.
They both ran this event daily. They both medalled.
Neither of them examined why guilt, which typically diminished over time, seemed to be intensifying.
Event two was situational.
The injury. The pressure of the season. Two people thrown into proximity by circumstances—hospital visits and physio schedules and a club too small to avoid each other in—who had formed a temporary functional dependency that would dissolve naturally once the circumstances resolved.
Shared trauma did things to people. Made them reach for the nearest available human connection. This was documented, this was known, this was not meaningful beyond the situation that produced it.
Jesper deployed this one at approximately two in the morning when the texts had started feeling like something he looked forward to, which was a sentence he wasn't going to finish. Situational, he thought. Circumstantial. Not representative of anything durable.
Jens used the same framework more quietly, more privately, in the way he did everything that mattered—by not examining it directly, by keeping it in peripheral vision where it couldn't quite resolve into a clear image.
They both medalled in this one too. Neither stood on the podium.
Event three: I just respect him now.
This was Jesper's primary discipline and he had the form of someone who had been training for it.
Jens on the pitch was—disciplined. Focused. He was watching a teammate, a professional, someone whose work ethic he had a clear-eyed appreciation for. The fact that the no-celebration thing did something complicated in Jesper's chest was explicable through the lens of respect for a particular approach to the game. The fact that he found himself watching the sixty-third minute of a match clip specifically to see the sequence where Jens made a diagonal run that was technically flawless—that was tactical interest.
Not magnetic, Jesper told himself, watching the clip.
His phone was on the bed beside him.
Not that.
He watched the diagonal run three more times.
Event four was the most structurally precarious: I'd act like this with anyone.
This one required the most active maintenance because it was the most transparently false. Jesper could not, if pressed, identify another person with whom he had established a pattern of nightly texts that contained nothing and somehow said everything. Jens could not identify another person whose absence from a training pitch would cause him to scan the field with the specific alert quality of someone who had noticed the wrong thing was missing.
The event was scored on confidence of delivery, not accuracy of content.
They both medalled.
The medals were embarrassing.
Event five had no category in the programme. It simply happened.
It was a Thursday. Double session, first half done, brief break before the afternoon block. Jens was in a rondo with four others—comfortable, sharp, the kind of training that didn't require full investment and left half his brain available for ambient awareness.
He'd been peripherally tracking Jesper for the past forty minutes. This was automatic now, a background process that ran without requiring conscious allocation—he knew where Jesper was on the pitch the way you knew where the sun was on a given afternoon. Not looked-at, just known.
And then, in the break, he wasn't.
Jens scanned left. Right. The cluster of the bubbly boys—Sam, Tijjani, Sven, Milos—but the configuration was wrong, someone missing. Yuki was on the far side talking to the conditioning coach. Jens did a circuit of the visible pitch.
No Jesper.
Milos was standing near the touchline, doing something on his phone. He said, apparently to the air but angled with the precision of someone addressing a specific person: "Jesper had a nosebleed. He's in the medical room."
Jens was already moving.
He would not have been able to explain this if asked—he didn't explain it to himself, there was no internal narrative provided, just the immediate purposeful movement of someone who had received information that required action. He left the rondo. Walked fast across the pitch and then, without having decided to, jogged the last twenty metres.
The medical room smelled like antiseptic and the specific paper-covered examination table smell that was universal across all sports facilities. Jesper was on the table, head tilted slightly, a medic holding a tissue to his nose—white tissue, pink and red at the centre, not alarming in volume but present. Blood on the front of his training jersey. On his hands. A streak of it across his cheekbone from what must have been the first moments.
He was pale in the particular way of someone who'd been standing up when they shouldn't have been.
Their eyes met. Jesper's expression moved through surprise and settled immediately on flat.
"What."
"Are you okay," Jens said.
"What does it look like."
It looked like a nosebleed. It looked like Jesper sitting in a medical room with blood on his face being attended to by a professional who had the situation managed. Jens's brain acknowledged all of this and produced no impulse to leave.
He looked at the medic instead. "Is this related to the head injury? The concussion?"
The medic looked at him with the mild surprise of a professional being asked a clinical question by someone who had no obvious stake in the answer. "We're going to monitor it," she said. "Could be. Or could just be dry air and pressure. Happens."
Jens nodded. Filed this. Looked at Jesper.
Jesper was looking at him with an expression that was trying to be irritated and was mostly confused.
"Go back to training," Jesper said.
Jens went back to training.
He jogged back to the pitch and rejoined the rondo and said nothing to anyone. Milos watched him slot back into position with the expression of a scientist observing a data point.
That night: nosebleed fully stopped. medic said it's not the concussion.
Jens read it. The breath he released was not a small breath.
good.
A pause.
ice your neck before bed. blood pressure regulation.
I know what to do with a nosebleed jens.
i know.
ok.
He stared at ok. for longer than ok. required.
The thing that ended the flirting era arrived without fanfare.
It was not a decision, for either of them. It was more like—an absence of inclination. The specific un-happening of something that had previously happened.
At a club event three weeks after the hospital—the kind of thing where partners and associates and general football adjacents were invited, where there was a bar and low lighting and the vague industry function atmosphere—Jesper had been in the room for ninety minutes before someone pointed out, very quietly, that he hadn't done the thing. The thing where he turned a conversation into something that made the other person feel like the most interesting person in the room. The thing where the warmth was turned on like a light and directed somewhere specific.
Jesper, when this was pointed out, had looked mildly surprised. Thought about it. Found no inclination to begin.
He'd talked to people. Perfectly pleasantly. Left at a reasonable hour.
Sam had watched this happen and had not said anything.
Jens, for his part, had been at a different event the same week—squad thing, a dinner—and someone had made a pointed and well-constructed attempt to engage him in a way that had nothing to do with football, and Jens had been polite and brief and had spent the rest of the evening looking at his phone.
that dinner ran long. He'd sent it at ten-fifteen.
Jesper had been in bed. i know. you didn't text.
A pause from Jens's side that contained something.
yeah.
home though?
home.
ok.
Sam said it to Tijjani on a Wednesday, very quietly, sitting in the stands after training:
"He hasn't flirted with anyone since the hospital."
Tijjani didn't ask who. "Neither has Jens."
"I've been watching."
"So have I."
They sat with that.
"That's—" Sam started.
"Yeah."
"That's not rivalry anymore."
"No," Tijjani said. "That's not rivalry."
They looked at the pitch where Jens was finishing a shooting drill alone, the ball placed with the same cold precision as every other ball he'd placed since October. On the far side, Jesper was walking out of the physio annexe, shoulder moving more freely than last week, something in his gait that had recovered some of its usual ease.
Jens looked up.
Not at Sam. Not at Tijjani. Across the pitch.
Jesper wasn't looking at him.
Jens looked back at his drill.
"Someone has to do something," Tijjani said.
"It's not us," Sam said.
"Then who."
Sam was quiet for a moment. "Them. When they get there."
"When."
"They'll get there." Sam sounded more certain than he felt. "They're already most of the way."
The joke happened on a Friday.
Light atmosphere, post-training, everyone loose—the particular end-of-week energy that made people expansive and unguarded. Someone had said something about the starting lineup and who deserved what, and Jesper—easy, relaxed, his public smile working, the room warm around him—said it without really thinking:
"If Jens pisses me off again I'll just steal his starting spot."
The room laughed.
Good-natured. Easy. The sound of a group who remembered the rivalry and could find it funny now that it had apparently resolved into something more coexistable.
Except—
Jesper heard it land and felt, in the same moment, the specific wrongness of it. Not the content. The shape of it. Steal his spot—meaning Jens not having the spot, meaning Jens displaced, meaning Jens—
He looked across the room.
Jens had gone very still.
Not the cold-machine stillness of the pitch. Something else—something internal, a half-second of genuine response before the control came back down. His jaw had done something. His hands, loosely at his sides, had done something too.
And then it was gone. Face neutral. He found something else to look at.
Jesper looked away.
The room was still laughing. Someone followed up with something. The conversation moved.
Jesper stood inside the echo of his own joke and experienced, with the clarity of something that had been approaching for weeks and had now arrived, the following realisation: he did not want to steal Jens's spot.
He hadn't wanted to steal it for a while.
He wanted Jens to have the spot when Jens was the right person to have it, and to not have it when Jesper was the right person to have it, and for both of them to be in this squad, on this team, in this building, proximate and present and—
He didn't want to lose him.
Not the competition. Not the structure. Him. The protein bars and the home. and the nosebleed and the laugh that happened when Jesper nearly fell off a balance board and the two seconds of camera footage where Jesper's face had done something proud and not known it was being filmed.
He did not want to lose that.
He wanted that to keep existing.
He wanted—
The room moved around him, unsuspecting.
Across it, Jens had turned away. Was talking to someone. His shoulders held with the specific uprightness of a person managing something.
Oh, Jesper thought.
Just that. Just oh.
The word that arrived when the thing you'd been refusing to look at directly looked at you first.
Jens drove home with the shape of steal his starting spot still in the air somewhere.
He'd laughed. He'd made the right sound, the social sound, at the right time. He'd looked at something else, talked to someone else, exited the interaction cleanly.
And then on the drive home he'd sat with the half-second in which Jesper had said steal his spot and Jens's body had produced a response before his brain got anywhere near it—something low and sharp and nothing to do with football. The thought of Jesper not being there. Not being on the team. The restructured reality in which Jens had the spot and the pitch and the starts and none of the other things that had accumulated around and between and underneath all of that—
He parked outside his building and didn't go in for a while.
The thing he'd told himself for months—competition, guilt, circumstance, respectable professional acknowledgment—sat in a pile on the passenger seat and looked obviously, embarrassingly insufficient.
He got out of the car.
Went upstairs.
Lay on his bed.
His phone was in his hand. The thread—ok. at the bottom, two days old, the thread that now had more messages than he'd sent his family in three months—and he looked at it.
Jesper had wanted to steal his spot for a year. That had been the thing. That had been the shape of everything. And hearing it said just now—as a joke, lightly, the room laughing—
He hadn't felt threatened.
He'd felt afraid of Jesper not being there.
Oh, he thought.
Just that.
He stared at the ceiling.
Outside, the city made its sounds. His phone screen timed out and went dark.
After a while, it lit up.
wrong thread my ass btw.
Jens looked at it.
what.
that nosebleed text three weeks ago. 'fully stopped, medic said not the concussion.' you think i sent that to the wrong person.
Jens read it. His chest did something he didn't address.
did you.
A pause. Long enough to feel like Jesper was standing on a ledge deciding something.
no.
Jens looked at that for a long time.
Then: i know.
Jesper: stop saying that.
Jens: stop being right.
Another pause. Longer.
Jesper: go to sleep.
Jens: you first.
Jesper: goodnight jens.
Jens stared at his name in Jesper's message. His name, which Jesper had not used in the thread before—always just statements, implications, logistics. His name, which in Jesper's voice—even text, even this, he could hear it—sounded like something.
goodnight jesper.
He put his phone on the nightstand.
Lay in the dark.
Did not sleep for a while.
But it was a different kind of not sleeping.
Sam, the next morning, found a mug in Jesper's cupboard that said GOODNIGHT MUG on it in Dutch, which Jesper had apparently bought for unclear reasons and which Sam did not ask about. He made his coffee and sat at Jesper's kitchen table and looked at his friend, who was on the other side of the table looking at his phone with an expression Sam had not seen before.
Not the PR face. Not the performing-fine face. Not even the genuinely fine face.
Something else. Something that was almost soft.
Sam drank his coffee.
Said nothing.
Waited.
End of Part Ten.