My Ultimate Gacha System-Chapter 319 - 306: The Morning After I

Thursday, May 15, 2023 Demien’s Apartment, Bergamo 9:17 AM

The light came through the curtains in a thin strip that fell across the foot of the bed and moved gradually up toward the wall as the morning advanced, and when Demien opened his eyes the ceiling was the pale off-white it always was and the apartment was quiet except for movement in the kitchen — the low click of the gas igniting, the soft scrape of a pan being placed on the hob.

He lay still for a moment while his body registered what the day after a hundred-and-twenty minutes of football felt like, which was specifically that his hips were stiff, his calves had tightened overnight, and both ankles ached with the dull persistence that required movement to clear rather than rest. He swung his legs off the bed slowly and sat on the edge while his feet found the floor, and the medal was still on the nightstand beside his phone and the trophy was still on the kitchen table where he’d set it at four in the morning.

His phone screen was dark and he left it that way.

He pulled on a t-shirt from the chair beside the wardrobe before walking toward the kitchen doorway, and Sophia was at the hob with her back to him in his grey Atalanta hoodie that reached the middle of her thighs while her hair was pulled back in a loose knot and a pan of eggs was cooking quietly on the front burner.

She heard him come in and turned her head without stopping what she was doing. "Morning."

"Morning," he said, and he moved to the kettle while she adjusted the heat under the pan.

The coffee was made before the eggs were ready and he poured two cups while she set plates on the table beside the trophy, and when she pushed the trophy slightly to one side to make room she glanced at it briefly before pulling her chair out and sitting down.

They ate without making it a conversation — the eggs, toast from the second batch she’d done while he was in the bathroom — and the kitchen was quiet enough that the sounds from the street outside carried up through the window, people walking and a motorcycle engine idling at the lights below.

After a while Sophia cupped both hands around her coffee and leaned back slightly in her chair and looked at him across the table.

"How are you feeling?" she asked, and her tone was straightforward rather than careful, the way it was when she wanted an actual answer rather than a fine.

Demien set his cup down and took a moment with it because the question deserved more than a one-word response. "I don’t fully know yet," he said. "I keep waiting for it to land properly and it hasn’t yet."

"What does it feel like when you think about it?"

He looked at the trophy for a second and then back at her. "Like it happened to someone else," he said. "Which is strange because I was there for all of it. But the third goal — when I think about that moment I can remember the turn and the contact and watching it go in, and it still doesn’t feel real."

"That might just be what it is," she said. "Some things take longer to feel real than others."

"Maybe." He picked up his cup again. "I was thinking about it at about two this morning, lying in the dark trying to sleep, and I realised I’d never actually allowed myself to believe we could come back from three-nil. Not in the first half. Even when I scored the first one I still thought we were going to lose."

"But you kept going anyway," Sophia said.

"You have to," he said, and he said it simply because that was what it was, not a performance of professionalism but just the reality of the job. "Stopping isn’t an option in that moment. You deal with it afterward."

Sophia was quiet for a moment while she turned her cup in her hands. "You scored three goals in a cup final at nineteen," she said. "I think you’re allowed to take a minute with that."

"I know." He smiled slightly, which was the most he’d managed since waking up. "I just need it to feel like mine first."

She reached across the table and covered his hand with hers for a second before pulling back, and the gesture was brief and easy the way things between them had become after enough time, and then she picked up a piece of toast and changed the subject with the naturalness of someone who understood when to leave something alone.

"What time is training on Friday?" she asked.

"Ten," he said. "Gasperini texted the group last night. Day off today, back to it tomorrow."

"Good." She pulled her knee up onto the chair. "Because I need to fly back to Milan today. I have a shoot tomorrow morning at seven."

"What’s the shoot?" he asked.

"The Miu Miu campaign. The one that kept getting pushed." She broke off a piece of toast. "It was supposed to be last month but they kept moving it because of the art director’s schedule. Now they’ve confirmed Friday morning which means I have to do hair and makeup at five-thirty, which I’m not looking forward to."

"Is it a full day?"

"Probably until three or four," she said. "Then I’m supposed to have dinner with my father Friday evening, which I’ve rescheduled twice already so I can’t move it again."

He looked at her. "How is he?"

The slight pause before she answered was small enough that it could have been nothing, but he’d been around her long enough to read it. "He’s fine," she said. "He just—" She stopped, and then started again in a different direction. "He’s been asking me more seriously recently about the company. Not casually, like he used to. He wants me to come in properly."

Demien was quiet for a moment. "How seriously?"

"Seriously enough that last month he had our legal team send me a formal document outlining a proposed position," she said, and her tone was measured, the way it got when she was thinking through something she hadn’t finished deciding about. "Head of Brand and Creative Strategy. His timeline is me transitioning in by the end of next year."

"And the modelling?"

"He says I can keep existing contracts through the end of this year," she said. "After that — wind it down."

He watched her face while she said it and the expression there was complicated in the way that complicated things usually are, which was that more than one feeling was true at the same time. "Is that what you want?" he asked.

Sophia considered this with the kind of honesty she brought to most things. "I think I’ve known for a while that modelling was always going to be temporary," she said. "It was never what I actually wanted to do — it was just what made sense when I was eighteen and people were asking. The company is real work. It’s what my father built." She paused. "I just didn’t expect the timeline to feel so close."

"It doesn’t have to be exactly his timeline," Demien said.

"I know that." She smiled slightly. "But he’s not wrong that this year makes sense. I’m twenty-two. If I’m going to learn the business properly, earlier is better than later." She looked at the trophy sitting between them on the table. "You know how it is with things that matter. You don’t really get anywhere by waiting."

He didn’t say anything to that because she wasn’t wrong, and she wasn’t really looking for agreement, just the space to say it out loud to someone who would listen without turning it into advice.

"Does it feel like the right thing?" he asked.

"Most of the time," she said, and the honesty in that was something he appreciated. "Some days less than others. But most of the time, yes."

He nodded once, and they sat with that for a moment while the coffee cooled between them and outside the kitchen window Bergamo moved through a Thursday morning that had no particular interest in what had happened inside the Stadio Olimpico the night before.

"I’ll miss you here," he said finally, and it came out simply because that was all he meant by it.

She looked at him with that particular expression that was warmth without sentimentality. "I’m not disappearing," she said. "Just going back to Milan."

"I know."

"And you have two league matches left and Champions League to confirm," she said, "so you’ll be busy enough not to notice."

"I’ll notice," he said.

She didn’t answer that, but the corner of her mouth moved and she picked up her coffee, and they sat together in the quiet kitchen with the trophy between them and the morning light moving slowly across the floor.