The buzzer in Luc’s apartment rang at exactly eight in the morning.
Luc pressed the intercom button on the wall. “Yeah?”
“It is Hugo,” the voice crackled through the small, static-filled speaker.
Luc frowned, hitting the unlock button to grant access to the lobby. He walked back into the living room, grabbing a roll of packing tape from the counter. The space was mostly bare. The towering stacks of cardboard boxes he and Juliette had assembled yesterday were lined up neatly against the far wall. The infamous black sofa was already gone. The building manager had shown up with two maintenance guys at seven in the morning, thrilled to drag the expensive piece of furniture down the hall for his own use.
Hugo Blanc stood in the hallway. He was not wearing his standard club-issued tracksuit. He wore a plain gray hoodie, dark denim jeans, and white sneakers. He held a coffee cup in his hand and carried a highly annoyed expression on his face.
“What are you doing here?” Luc asked, stepping aside to let the teenager in. “I thought you were packing your own stuff today. The truck is supposed to swing by Valérie’s place, then here, then Juliette’s.”
Hugo walked into the empty living room, looking around at the bare walls.
“I was prepared to pack my belongings,” Hugo explained, taking a sip of his coffee. “I woke up at six. I had an approach outlined for my clothing, my monitors, and my personal items. However, Valérie intervened.”
Luc laughed, standing near the kitchen counter. “What did she do?”
“She hired people to do it,” Hugo said, the annoyance bleeding clearly into his tone. “Five people arrived at the house at six-thirty. Valérie informed me that my packing was inefficient and that I was not allowed to interfere with the professionals. She removed me from my own bedroom and told me to go get breakfast. I had nothing to do. So, I came here.”
“She bought you a house, Hugo. You can let her hire some movers.”
“I appreciate the financial investment,” Hugo clarified. “I do not appreciate being treated like a child who cannot place a folded shirt into a cardboard box.”
Luc smiled, shaking his head. It was easy to forget the dynamic Hugo navigated daily. On the pitch, he was the cold maestro of a title-contending midfield, dictating the tempo against men sometimes way older than he was. Off the pitch, he was a seventeen-year-old kid living under the roof of SC Valois’ ruthless billionaire owner, who clearly viewed him as something between a prized asset and a son.
Valérie Laurent was fiercely protective of him, and that protection often manifested as suffocating control.
“Well, since you’re unemployed for the morning, you can help me,” Luc said, tossing a roll of packing tape at the teenager. Hugo caught it effortlessly. “The movers are downstairs. We need to run these smaller boxes down to the loading dock.”
Hugo looked at the tape in his hand, then at the massive wall of boxes. “I am a central midfielder, Luc. My contract does not stipulate manual labor.”
“Consider it training,” Luc fired back. “Grab a box.”
For the next hour, they fell into a steady rhythm. The professional movers handled the heavy lifting. Things like the bed frame, the dining table, the television, while Luc and Hugo managed the personal items. They walked back and forth down the long, carpeted hallway of the apartment building, carrying boxes.
The fatigue was mild compared to a training session, but it kept their muscles active on a designated recovery day.
“Your legs feeling okay?” Luc asked as they waited for the elevator doors to open. He held a box containing his boots and training gear.
“I am experiencing standard fatigue buildup,” Hugo replied, holding a box of kitchenware. “Pushing the training session to Wednesday was the correct decision, though.”
“Henri wasn’t thrilled about it.”
“Henri operates on the assumption that suffering breeds discipline,” Hugo noted dryly. “But running Gabriel into a soft-tissue injury just to prove a point before we play Stade Phocéen would be a critical managerial failure. Henri is pragmatic enough to realize that.”
“He’s not still angry at Gab. C’mon, don’t say he meant to overwork him on purpose.”
The elevator dinged and the doors slid open. They stepped inside, hitting the button for the ground floor.
“How is Gabriel?” Hugo asked, watching the floor numbers descend. “He was silent on the bus ride home.”
“He’s exhausted, and his ego is bruised maybe because of the yellow card for diving,” Luc explained. “He sacrificed his entire game to cover for Pinto, and he got mocked by the opposing crowd for it. But he did his job. If he doesn’t make that slide tackle in the first half, we lose.”
“I am aware,” Hugo said quietly. “My pass was underweighted. I miscalculated the friction of the turf and the starting position of the C?te d’Azur midfielder. If Gabriel had not tracked back, my error would have resulted in an immediate goal.”
Luc looked at the teenager. Hugo rarely made mistakes on the pitch, and he rarely admitted to them out loud when he did.
“It happens, Hugo. You can’t calculate every single thing most of the time. That’s why we have eleven guys on the pitch. You cover for them, they cover for you. You hit a free-kick into the top corner later in the game. I think you made up for the short pass.”
The elevator doors opened to the ground floor. The massive moving truck was backed up. Two men in uniform were busy strapping furniture to the interior walls of the truck.
Luc and Hugo handed their boxes over, watching them get stacked neatly into the designated section for Luc’s apartment.
By ten o’clock, the apartment was completely empty.
Luc stood in the center of the living room. The echo in the space was loud now.
The windows offered the same sweeping view of the city skyline. It was a beautiful apartment.