Boxing is fine. Fine, even though Lucy is onto us. Fine, even if Alexia chooses not to wear her top and I get a right-hook to the jaw from Lucy, my guard let down while I watch her take it off. The day continues to be fine when we walk the demon at the local park, and stays fine when Alexia extends the dinner invitation to Esmee after the twenty-year-old complains she'll have no one to cook her food if I am not there.

Even when Esmee leaves, claiming we are making 'bedroom eyes' at each other, everything is fine.

Alexia sighs for the fifth time, hardly paying attention to the TV. I card my fingers through her loose hair, comfortable under the weight of her back pressing against my front, her body between my legs.

She sighs again.

"What's wrong?" I ask gently, well-aware of her hostility towards her own emotions.

"I'm fine."

"You're tense."

"Maybe I am turned on."

I stop moving my hands. Alexia whines at this, pushing back into me. "You're not," I tell her, having become well-acquainted with her body over the past month. "So what's wrong?"

The protruding silence makes me exhale with slowly building frustration. "Alexia, we have to talk to each other if we are going to be together."

She sits up at that. Maybe it translated into Spanish badly, or sounded better in my head. I can preach communication for all its worth, but, of course, with Alexia there is always going to be a language barrier. We can only wear it thin, not destroy it.

"What was Scarlett like?" She doesn't look at me as she speaks, her question said softly and accompanied by the rustling of the sofa cushions as she shifts off my body and into the space beside me.

I forget that I did not have an ex to talk about when I was with Scarlett. I was a lot younger, a lot more inexperienced, and without an excessive amount of baggage.

I don't ask her why she would like to know because the answer to that is obvious.

"Do you want to know about her or us?" I construct the conversation carefully, wanting Alexia to find the information she seeks. Unnecessary detail will swamp us in the past, especially when talking about someone who is not coming back to apologise for any open wounds they left behind.

Alexia's gaze fixes on some point in the distance as if the air holds the answers she is searching for. I watch her for a moment, trying to understand the thoughts swirling in her mind.

"I want to know about both," she finally says, her voice just above a whisper.

I nod.

Monday.

Scarlett hates Mondays with a passion. She refuses to get out of bed and she refuses to make breakfast.

I take on the tasks without a second thought. I unload the washing machine from our Sunday load, and clean up the dishes we had forgotten about last night.

I tell her she looks beautiful when she plods into the kitchen in her training kit, just to make her smile. Her hair is a mess, and she does not seem convinced, but I know it has made her morning seem less grey, even if the sky agrees with her foul mood and unleashes a storm on our city.

"She liked having a routine, and was very passionate about her dislikes. It could have bordered on being judgemental and stubborn, but it never did. She was too kind for it to come off that way."

Tuesdays are better; her favourite day of the week because it means she is the furthest from another Monday.

On Tuesdays, our training sessions end earlier. We get back from Cobham at two o'clock. Scarlett uses the time to visit the children's hospital, refusing the media team's company every single time. I don't like seeing the children and so I never go with her, but I make sure to hold her when she cries upon returning.

She cries if a bed is empty. Sometimes with happiness, sometimes with grief.

Scarlett's brother nearly died when he was a baby. She says she is thankful to the doctors who saved his life.

"Her habitual nature was actually very convenient for me. It's easier to be isolated in London, seeing as England is not built for sociable lifestyles like in Spain. It meant I could predict where she was and be secure in the knowledge that she was safe while I went North to visit Viv."

Wednesdays to Fridays are the same every week.

On matchdays, we eat pasta she cooks. It's her favourite, copied from memories of her one holiday to Rome when she was a child. She likes to be sentimental, but she isn't a sentimental person.

Her memories come and go.

Her parents call her a hoarder. She has convinced me that she is filling our apartment with love, not useless shit. I believe her because she lets me make out with her in every room she organises, and I even buy her gifts from home whenever I go back to Amsterdam.

"She had lots of stuff. She left it to me, you know, which was a joke. I had to sort through boxes and boxes of things, but I managed to finish it off when I went to London in summer."

Alexia gulps. "And the ring?"

"Oh, I gave it to her parents."

Saturdays and Sundays come and go too soon for Scarlett's liking.

Weekends are for friends; familiar faces in the stands at our matches, lunches, brunches, dinners. Parties, sometimes.

We always host those.

On New Year's Eve, every footballer in England seems to turn up at our apartment. She hosts with the perfect mix of authority and wildness, and I sometimes tell her to pass off her duties to the most responsible person in the vicinity so that I can steal her away from everyone else.

Her eyes shine when she is with people. Her skin glows – she calls it 'nervous sweat', but it does not stop her from looking heavenly.

"You are weirdly attracted to this," she tells me once, the day of her birthday party. It is the first in our shared apartment. Her hands trace down her hips, her stomach, the apron tied around her waist as she bakes the last batch of brownies to be laid out on the table spread.

"And?" I reply with a grin.

"I wish people knew Fleur de Voss was a whore for housewives."

She laughs at her own joke.

"Her jokes never used to make me laugh. Either I wouldn't get them, or they'd be so bad that the whole world would be cringing. But everyone used to say that Scarlett was funny. I'm not sure what I was missing. Maybe it was an English thing."

"You have a strange sense of humour," she says with a scrunched up nose.

I blink back the tears in my eyes; surprised that they are there. "At least I have a sense of humour, Capi."

"Why didn't you keep the ring?"

It catches me slightly off-guard that she hasn't moved on from that yet.

"Because I'm not engaged to her," I answer, treating it as the most obvious thing in the world.

Alexia is silent for a moment, but I do not throw myself back into my memories, sensing another question.

"Lucy said she was a boxer?"

Scarlett has rekindled an old hobby.

I am glad for my abs, otherwise my stomach would be in a lot more pain from the punches it has been receiving.

"I get it!" I beg as she giggles, telling me to stop being a baby. "You can punch. I get it, please stop."

"You're ticklish here." Her fist dissolves, fingers splaying out across the ridges of my stomach. She begins to move her hand lightly. I squirm. "You're like a little dog."

I curl up into a ball so that she can no longer attack me.

She coaxes me out of my defences with a kiss, luring me into a false sense of security before tickling me until I cannot breathe.

She only stops when I agree to come to the boxing gym with her on Mondays. She says the day's existence infuriates her. I think she goes on Mondays because we get the place to ourselves that way, and, for as much as Scarlett loves boxing, she also loves to be inappropriate in places we absolutely should not have sex in.

"Her father used to do it," I explain. "She was very close to him."

I must speak with remorse, because Alexia asks something unexpected. "He is dead?" She must pick up on the grief. She must relate to it.

"No. It's the other way around."

"Fleur, you are being very blunt. Didn't you love her?"

"I did. Would you like me to cry?" She opens her mouth but refuses to endorse the coldness of my words. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine. It's a... sensitive topic."

"I don't want you to think that I am not over her," I confess quietly. "Because I am, Alexia. Her, yes. Our relationship, yes. It's done; it was done before... well, before she died."

"I know." It's quite comforting to hear. I told her when we played at Stamford Bridge, and I remember the way she had looked at me. Then, it was a sight never to be seen: Alexia had wanted to kiss me. "I did not ask because I needed you to prove that to me. She is a part of you, those memories are a part of you."

"Feeling a little curious?" I tease.

Alexia groans in resignation, looking repulsed by what is next going to come out of her mouth, but she says it anyway. "I want to know everything about you."

I giggle.

"You're blushing, you know."

She slaps my hands away when I begin to pinch her cheeks.

This side of Alexia does not disappear, even as the week progresses. A day I am sort of dreading approaches but Alexia is very, very calm.

Me? Not so much. Because the day comes and soon we are showering and changing. I enforce our separation because of the nature of the event that is going to take place in her apartment in no less than two hours. If she cares about the state of her home before her mother and sister visit, she doesn't make it apparent; a mix of our sweaty training kit piles onto the bedroom floor (not that they'd be going inside there) and she leaves out her dirty plates with no second thought.

In this way, Alexia Putellas is relaxed.

I like it, although her slight disregard for our first meeting is not as comforting as she thinks it is. No number of 'it'll be fine's will reduce my panic over being formally introduced to Eli and Alba.

Alexia's organisation has been kind.

We are going to watch Talia's Champions League qualifier against PSG at Alexia's place, because there will be guaranteed conversation, no unexpected relatives, and an easy escape route for moi if need be. Eli and Alba were disappointed by the declined invite to dinner, but Alexia benevolently explained to them that I am still getting used to Spanish culture.

"Do I look okay?" I ask for the hundredth time, watching the clock next to the front door with a heart beating much faster than the ticking of the seconds hand.

Alexia rakes her eyes up and down my body, very comfortable on the sofa while I hurriedly pour out more food into little bowls, waving a knife around instead of slicing the bread I am trying to prepare until I am shouted at to chill out and put the weapon down. "And you look very beautiful," adds Alexia with a shrug, dismissive and really not understanding my stress. I promise her that she will be worse when she is taken to Amsterdam because she does not understand a lick of Dutch. "They are going to love you, and, if they don't, they'll be focused on the match."

The buzzer sounds and Alexia reaches out a lazy hand as a signal for me to let them up. I wipe my palms on my jeans, scared they are growing clammy, and press the button. "Should I speak in Catalan?"

"You don't speak Catalan," Alexia reminds me with a laugh. "Stop being ridiculous. They're the two most important people in my life, and they will love you."

It does not help, and, before I know it, Eli and Alba are walking through the door.

I let them have their hugs and a rapid, incomprehensible exchange, standing awkwardly behind a newly energised Alexia. They seem so at ease with each other, no hesitation to stand there talking, laughing, greeting each other.

It would have been impossible to start dating Alexia and not know about how close she is with her family. She doesn't bring it up a lot – the reason for it, the gaping hole left by her father – but it's not something she needs to explain, and nor is it something one needs to witness to understand. They call her almost everyday. She spends a lot of time with them, something I know has decreased a little bit since we got together because she has started having to distribute between more people.

They have a family dinner every fucking week.

While they talk, I wonder, trying hard not to laugh, how that would look in my family. Dinners with my sister and both my parents, all of us living in the same country. We can barely stay in the same hemisphere.

We're not as dysfunctional as we could be, but watching the three women in front of me is definitely a stinging slap in the face.

My lack of fluency in Catalan is painfully obvious, so there is a seamless switch to Spanish, the pace of their conversation slowing down, allowing me to catch myself up. Alexia, having positioned herself protectively in front of me before, moves to the side, and I force myself to walk forwards and address them.

"Hola, soy Fleur."

"We know who you are," says Eli, but with no malice behind her words at all. "Fleur, we have heard almost too much about you. I am so glad to see you here."

She opens her arms to hug me, and I hear Alexia's suppressed chuckle when I let her hug me. I regret ever telling my girlfriend about my dislike for this kind of physical affection, though she blamed it very heavily on the childhood I received. She called my parents distant, though I laughed in her face at that.

Someone clears her throat as Eli squeezes me tightly. "Can we all thank me for flirting with Fleur so that you'd get over yourself and kiss her? It will never not be funny, especially considering I had a girlfriend. She watched the whole thing!"

It might be a little rude, but I rip myself from Eli to stare gormlessly at the youngest Putellas. "Sorry, what?" 

notes: 

sorry i was super busy and i honestly just couldn't be bothered 

this may or may not be a sneaky filler but allow it x

anyway, thanks a bunch for reading!!!!