My Ultimate Gacha System-Chapter 339 - 13: Three weeks II

Balenciaga was on Boulevard des Moulins and the casual wear came easier because he had more opinions about it — trainers he understood, track trousers he understood, but she redirected him twice away from things that were too close to training gear and toward things that looked like someone who was nineteen and had good taste rather than someone who’d been issued kit and worked outward from there.

They were leaving the Hermès store — she had looked at a bag, he had stood near the entrance feeling slightly out of context — when the photographer appeared on the pavement across the street, and neither of them registered it immediately until the second shot when the shutter sound carried over the pavement noise.

Sophia noticed first and she didn’t stop walking, just said "don’t react" in a tone that meant she’d navigated this before, and he matched her pace and kept his eyes forward and they turned the corner onto a quieter street and the photographer didn’t follow.

"How long until that’s on a website?" he asked.

"Probably already uploaded," she said, and she pulled out her phone and checked and there it was on Gossip Italiano — Demien Walter e Sophia Bianchi: insieme a Monaco? with the photo from outside Hermès below it, both of them in the same frame, her hand not quite touching his arm but close enough that the caption wrote itself.

"Does it bother you?" he asked.

She looked at the photo and then put her phone away. "It used to," she said. "I’ve been in this long enough now that it doesn’t." She looked at him. "Does it bother you?"

"No," he said, and he meant it.

She nodded once and they kept walking toward the port in the midday sun.

Saturday, June 10, 2023 Yacht Deck — Port Hercule

They’d returned to Monaco the previous evening and the yacht was back in its berth, and Saturday afternoon they were on the aft deck with the sun at the angle that made everything warm without being uncomfortable, and Sophia had a glass of rosé and he had a beer and the port moved around them with the activity of a Saturday in early June — other boats coming and going, people on the pontoons, the constant low hum of a place that was never quite still.

She’d posted the deck photo at sunset the previous evening — his arm around her shoulder, glasses raised, the Rock of Monaco visible in the background — and the comments had run through the night and were still running, and somewhere in England the football accounts had picked it up and the Italian gossip sites were running it as confirmation of something that hadn’t technically been confirmed yet.

He’d reposted it to his own story without adding anything, which was its own form of confirmation, and she’d seen him do it and said nothing and looked at him and the expression on her face was the kind that didn’t require words.

"So," she said, looking at the port.

"So," he said.

She turned her glass in her hands. "Are we doing this properly again or are we doing something else?"

"I want to do it properly," he said.

She looked at him. "Even with everything that’s happening. The transfer, England, potentially moving countries."

"Especially with all of that," he said. "I don’t want to be trying to figure all of that out and also trying to figure out whether we’re together. I’d rather know."

She was quiet for a moment. "If you go to England—"

"Then we figure it out," he said. "Milan to London is two hours. It’s not impossible."

She looked at the port for a moment and then back at him. "I’m transitioning into my father’s company in January," she said. "I’ll be based in Milan. That’s not changing."

"I know that’s not changing," he said. "I’m not asking you to change it."

She looked at him for a long moment with the directness she’d always had when something mattered to her, and then she set her glass down and reached across and put her hand against his jaw briefly before pulling back.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay," he said.

She picked up her glass again and looked at the port and the conversation moved to other things, and Monaco went about its Saturday afternoon while the sun moved across the deck and the crew prepared the yacht for whatever came next.

Thursday, June 8, 2023 Demien’s Apartment, Bergamo 11:20 AM

The BMW was in the parking garage when he got back from Monaco on Wednesday evening, and he’d seen it from the street level before he went inside — the white of it visible under the fluorescent strip light at the far end of the bay, sitting where his driver usually parked.

He took it out Thursday morning with no destination because the car needed to be driven before it could be understood, and he spent an hour on the roads above Bergamo where the route climbed through stone walls and hairpin bends and the M4 did what it had told him it would do during the test drive, which was everything it was built to do without requiring explanation.

He came back along the lower road into the city and parked in the garage and sat in it for a moment after the engine went off, and the garage was quiet around him and the morning had been good in the specific way that came from an hour of not thinking about anything at all.

His phone was in his jacket pocket and it buzzed once while he was sitting there.

Marco.

He answered.

"Transfer update," Marco said. "Manchester United have increased their bid to sixty-two million euros. Liverpool have matched it — sixty-two million pounds. Bayern are at fifty-eight. Arsenal have dropped out." A pause. "Atalanta have communicated informally that they’ll accept any of these offers provided you indicate a preference. They’re not going to force a sale but they won’t stand in the way either."

Demien sat in the car with the engine off and the garage lights reflecting in the windscreen.

"June twenty-first," he said.

Marco exhaled. Not frustrated exactly — more the exhale of someone who had accepted a position they would have preferred to argue with but had run out of the energy for it. "June twenty-first," he said. "But Demien — these clubs are not going to hold their positions indefinitely. Liverpool are already looking at alternatives. United have a timeline for announcement before pre-season. Sixty-two million doesn’t sit in an offer forever."

"I understand that," Demien said.

"Good," Marco said. "Read the briefing document."

"I’ll read it before England," he said.

"Before England," Marco said. "Not on the bus to the airport."

"I’ll read it properly," he said.

"Good," Marco said again, and the call ended.

He sat in the car for another minute and then got out and took the lift up to his apartment, and the briefing document was still sitting unread in his email, and St George’s Park was two days away.

Saturday, June 10, 2023 Florence 10:30 AM

He drove down to Florence in the M4 Saturday morning because the motorway gave the car room to settle into its proper rhythm and because Isabella had asked him to come for the weekend before England camp, and the Settignano apartment had formally accepted the offer and the purchase was proceeding and she wanted to walk him through the neighbourhood properly.

They walked through Settignano for two hours in the late morning — she showed him the alimentari on the corner that she already knew by name, the pharmacy that the woman across the hall from her current flat had recommended, the small piazza with the bar where the older men sat outside with their espressos on Saturday mornings, and the road that went up through the olive trees toward the panoramic point above the city where Florence spread out below in its entirety.

They stood at the panoramic point for a while without saying much.

"You’ll be gone ten days," she said.

"Twelve," he said. "Camp starts Monday, back the twenty-first."

"And then?" she said. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

"And then Marco and I sit down and we work out what comes next," he said. "Properly this time."

She looked at him. "You still don’t know what you want."

"I have a better idea than I did three weeks ago," he said.

She accepted that and they walked back down through the olive trees toward the neighbourhood below, and he stayed for lunch and left in the early afternoon while the light on the motorway north was the flat afternoon gold of a Tuscan June, and by the time he reached Bergamo the evening was settling in and the briefing document was still in his email and England was the day after tomorrow.

He made dinner, read the briefing document from start to finish at the kitchen table, and went to bed at ten.

Sunday, June 11, 2023 A Local Training Ground, Florence

The pitch was a small club facility outside the city centre that Isabella had found through a contact — proper grass, proper goals, empty on a Sunday morning because the youth teams that used it didn’t train until the afternoon, and the groundsman had let him in without fuss and locked the gate behind him.

He worked for ninety minutes alone — possession touches to start, then passing sequences against the rebounder, then longer runs with the ball across the diagonal of the pitch and back, and finishing drills in the second half of the session because his shooting had been the thing Gasperini had most wanted to sharpen before the Genoa match and a week of Monaco had taken the edge off the contact.

The session had no structure other than what felt right, and by the end his boots were dirty and his shirt was through and the ball was scuffed from the rebounder sessions and it felt like football rather than preparation for football, which was what it needed to feel like.

He posted a short clip of a passing sequence to Instagram from the changing room while he cooled down — fifteen seconds, no caption beyond a football emoji — and the comments were exactly what they always were.

@United_Transfer_News: Training in secret before camp 👀 #MUFC @LFCDemien: Red or Red Demien??? 🔴 @Atalanta_Forever: Stay home 🖤💙

He locked the phone and put it in his bag and walked back out to where Isabella’s neighbour had agreed to drive him to the station, and the train to Bergamo left at three and England camp was the day after tomorrow and the briefing document was read and the decision was twelve days away.