don't look back in anger (i heard you say)

The Sporza studio has not changed much over the years. The same stark walls. The same giant windows. The same giant, reflective interview table that must only look good on camera, because it’s really distracting to be around it in person. Mathieu hates it.

The gold medal feels heavy around Mathieu’s neck. The rainbow jersey itches at the cuffs. The studio lights are too bright and too hot. One of the interviewers smiles at him and asks how it feels to win his sixth men’s elite cyclocross World Championship.

Mathieu can’t tell the truth, can’t say that he doesn’t feel like much of anything right now. All he has is a dull sensation, a void that has opened up in the center of him, pulling in all traces of emotion, good or bad. In some ways, it’s not so different from how he felt last year, sitting in this same studio and hating every moment of it, and in some ways, it’s not the same at all. Mathieu is a professional, though, so he tries to smile and says, “It’s really special. It was a hard race, but I am glad to know I managed to pull it off again. You can take nothing for granted in this sport, and I gave it my all.” It’s all polite platitudes, things he knows how to say by rote by now.

The interview shifts towards Pidcock next, which is a relief. He gets asked a similar question to Mathieu, about how he felt about today’s race, about winning silver. Pidcock replies in his halting, careful Dutch that he is proud of how he did, that it was a difficult race, that he’s still impressed by how Mathieu was so much better than the rest of the field today.

Mathieu can admit that Pidcock did well. He was relentless and strong, and he had managed to hang onto Mathieu’s wheel for two whole laps, but Mathieu hadn’t felt threatened at any point. Pidcock finished the race nearly a minute down.

Once everyone is satisfied with Pidcock’s answers, there’s a brief pause, and Mathieu knows, from some deep instinct he’s developed from spending a large portion of his life in the public eye, exactly what they’re going to ask next. He can feel his gut turning over, a churning nausea starting to rise up.

“One of the biggest stories in cycling this winter has been the sudden, early retirement of Wout van Aert. What was it like to compete in this World Championship without him?”

Much to Mathieu’s relief, Pidcock answers first. In English this time, where he’s able to be blunter and more articulate. “It sucks. He’s annoying as hell to race against, and in some ways, it was nice not to have to worry about him, but he’s one of the best, and no one deserves to go out that way, you know? He should be with us here today.”

Then all the eyes in the room turn towards Mathieu, and somehow, the void seems to get bigger and emptier with each passing second. He has already answered five different variations of this same question today. He has already answered another twenty of them this year. He has an answer prepared and ready, locked and loaded. But his throat still tightens up, and his chest feels like it’s caving in. “It’s always– I’ve always looked forward to our battles,” Mathieu says, “and I’m– it’s a shame we won’t have any more of them.” He promised himself years ago that he wouldn’t let himself cry in this fucking studio again, and right now, it’s really fucking difficult to keep that promise. He imagines what it would be like if he just stood up and walked out right now. The press would write mean stories. He’d get nasty comments on social media. He’d get chewed out by his father and the team’s press officer. There would be nearly as many questions about this moment as there would be about Wout’s absence in so many future interviews. But most importantly, he wouldn’t have to be trapped here, in this studio, forced to think and talk about Wout on live television.

The next questions are about the upcoming road season, and somehow, that makes it worse. Sure, there will be Mads and Tadej, even Christophe Laporte stepping into Wout’s shoes for his team, but Mathieu knows he will always be keeping one eye out for a familiar, deadly shape in the peloton that won’t be there anymore, that won’t be there ever again.

Mathieu lets Pidcock do most of the talking, and he keeps his own answers short and clipped. Pidcock knows that something is off — he keeps shooting Mathieu awkward looks out of the corner of his eye — but he doesn’t bring attention to it. He’s not as polished as Wout was, especially when he’s trying out his Dutch. He can’t quite field and deflect attention the way Wout could. But he is more than decent at it. Mathieu is grateful.

Finally, finally, the interview ends, and Mathieu can get up out of his chair and head for the exit. Pidcock grabs him by the shoulder as soon as they’re back outside, the brightness of the sunshine almost rivaling the studio lights. They’re away from the cameras now, not quite in private, but the closest they’re going to get for the rest of the day. “Look,” Pidcock says, “I know you and him had a whole– a whole thing, but you’re acting like he fucking died out there, and it’s really fucking uncomfortable to be around.”

“Oh,” Mathieu says from a lack of anything better to say.

“Just thought you’d want to know.” And with that, Pidcock claps him on the back, and he leaves.

Mathieu found out about Wout’s situation after a race. It had been cloudy, he remembers. The ground hadn’t been quite frozen, but the dirt had some of that same stiffness underneath his cleats and the treads of his tires.

He’d won that day, almost a foregone conclusion when Wout was off at his team’s altitude training camp for a few weeks. It would be Mathieu and Alpecin’s turn to disappear into the mountains a few weeks after that. Mathieu had been enjoying it at the time, not having Wout there, almost a vacation, even if it wouldn’t be polite to say so out loud.

After he had pulled across the finish line thirty seconds ahead of the second place finisher and before the media could get to him for questions about the race, Mathieu’s DS had pulled him aside and said to him, “There’s something you should know.”

Wout had had a cardiac arrest during the training camp a week ago, which the team had kept under wraps so he could undergo medical evaluation. After consultation with the team and his doctors, Wout would be retiring from professional cycling immediately. Visma had made the announcement while Mathieu was on lap six. This was big, earth-shaking news in the sport of cyclocross, and Mathieu had to be ready and prepared to answer questions about it.

He’d stumbled through his first few interviews by showing his genuine shock and surprise. None of it had sunk in yet. There hadn’t been enough time. He went through the podium ceremony, his usual post-race routines on auto-pilot, letting habit and instinct take over because his brain sure as hell wasn’t in it. He felt numb, all of the feeling gone out of his arms, his legs, his chest, his head. He didn’t know how anyone was supposed to react to news like this, so he couldn’t tell if he was under- or over-reacting.

It wasn’t until later, when he started thinking ahead towards Worlds, that the full magnitude of what had happened hit him. He and Wout had never been close, had never been friends, but when he was sitting by himself in his room, thinking about racing around the World Championship circuit without Wout right ahead or right behind him, Mathieu had felt suddenly, painfully alone.

Pidcock is right. Mathieu has been acting weirdly about this whole thing, because on some level, it feels like Wout is gone. Wout was there, ever-present, for so long. And even during long stretches when he wasn’t, there was always the threat that he would be back. For Mathieu, Wout hadn’t existed outside the world of cycling, and his abrupt departure from it had felt like a sort of passing away.

But Wout isn’t dead. Wout is still very much alive. He’s doing whatever the fuck he has decided to do with his post-racing life. Raising goats. Watching every show on Netflix. Teaching adorable moppets how to patch and replace inner tubes. Something. Various media sources have tried to get a post-retirement interview with him, but from what Mathieu can tell, Wout has told all of them to fuck off. Not that Mathieu blames him for that.

Still, it leaves this strange, blank space where Mathieu’s understanding and awareness of Wout used to be, and he feels like he needs to fill it with something or he might go a little crazy and start believing Wout is actually dead. That would definitely get him more than a few lectures.

It’s probably not the most reasonable explanation for why he ends up on Wout’s doorstep on a Friday morning a month after Worlds, but it’s the only one he has, so it will have to do. He probably should have called or texted like a responsible adult to let Wout know he was coming by. But he didn’t, so he just rings Wout’s doorbell and waits.

He waits for long enough that he wonders if this is even the right house, but he’d wheedled the address out of one of their many mutual acquaintances who has no reason to lie about it. Then he wonders if Wout is even home right now, but there’s a blandly practical car in front, and there’s a light visible through one of the windows.

When Wout does finally open the door, a good two minutes later, he raises his eyebrows at Mathieu’s presence and says, dry and amused, “You know, I don’t usually let people in when they show up unannounced, but I figured if I left you out here much longer, it would end up on some gossip blog somewhere.” He pushes the door open further. Mathieu steps inside.

Wout’s house is clean and modern, tastefully decorated in a way that screams that someone did it professionally. It doesn’t have any of the bachelor pad vibes of Mathieu’s own place, but that’s never been Wout’s style. Wout looks the same as he always does, though his hair has not been combed and gelled up into its usual shape. It’s only been a few months since Mathieu saw him last, but in that time, there’s been a life-altering turn of events, and it feels like it should be more visible on Wout somehow, but it isn’t. Some of that might be that Wout’s still dressed in some morning sweats that hang loose off his lean frame. Mathieu’s used to seeing him kitted out in skintight lycra, and the contrast is jarring. This version of Wout is softer, more approachable somehow. This version of Wout seems like someone Mathieu could touch.

“I can’t say I expected to see you here,” Wout says as he leads Mathieu down a hallway into his kitchen. There’s a question in his statement, even if it isn’t phrased as such.

Mathieu doesn’t have a good answer, so the best he can do is, “It just felt like something I should do.”

The skeptical look doesn’t leave Wout’s face, but he just gestures towards the island in the center of his kitchen where there are stools lined up for guests to sit in. Wout asks, “Can I get you something to drink?” A polite and gracious host, Mathieu’s mother would say. His parents raised him right.

Mathieu pulls out a stool and sits down on it and says, “Uh, I’ll just have water,” because he might as well. He watches as Wout rattles around his kitchen with a well-practiced ease, fetching a glass from the cabinets and filling it up from the refrigerator tap. It’s such a normal thing, like they visit each other all the time.

“You can ask, you know,” Wout says as he settles the glass down in front of Mathieu.

Mathieu blinks at him. “Ask what?”

“About the heart thing. About retirement. About whatever it is that freaked you out enough to show up here.” Wout pulls out the stool next to Mathieu’s and sits down on it. He’s so much closer now, very real and very alive. Mathieu had known that, of course, but his physical presence feels concrete and tangible in a way the abstract understanding of it does not.

“I don’t know,” Mathieu says.

Wout picks up a mug that was sitting on the island when Mathieu got here and takes a sip from it. “I’m not going to pretend like it’s been fun. It hasn’t. There are things– there are things I wanted that I didn’t get. But I’ve had the surgery, and that means I’ve had a lot of recovery time to think about all of this.”

Mathieu nods, mute, unable to find anything to say.

“If it happens to you — this, or something like it — you’ll be fine. You’ve already accomplished what you wanted to in your career, haven’t you?” Wout’s words are threaded through with a hint of bitterness, but not as much as they would have been coming from Mathieu’s mouth if their roles had been reversed.

“I’m sorry,” Mathieu says, because he’s still stuck here, confused and helpless, and he doesn’t know what else to say.

Wout’s lips twist into a dark, wry grin. It’s not exactly a pleasant expression. “Yeah,” he says. “Everybody’s really fucking sorry.”

Mathieu almost wants to apologize again, but that feels like it would make things worse. So he just sits there, hands wrapped around his glass of water. He thinks back to all those times when he’s been with his brother or Jasper or another teammate after a disappointing result, filled with a palpable desire to make things better and knowing that he couldn’t.

Wout’s expression softens. “No one really believes me, but I really am doing okay with it now.” He shakes his head. “There’s so many things that I had to do or couldn’t do, so many things that I had to care about. And now I don’t have to deal with most of that anymore. It’s– I’m letting myself enjoy it.”

In some ways, Mathieu knows Wout better than anyone else in the entire world, and in all the other ways, he doesn’t know Wout at all. He can’t tell if Wout’s lying right now, to Mathieu or to himself. But Mathieu finds himself wanting it to be true, that Wout has found some measure of peace in all of this.

Mathieu asks, “Do you miss it?” It’s not until the words are out of his mouth that he realizes that he really means, Do you miss me?

“Yes,” Wout says without hesitation. He looks down into his mug, seemingly lost in thought.

Mathieu tries to consider it for himself, a life outside of cycling. Sure, he would still have some things to love: his cars, his dogs, video games and parties and beautiful beaches. But his whole life has been dedicated towards racing, the power, the speed, the pain. He loves and hates it in equal measure. He can’t imagine being without it. Even when he hits his own retirement, when he can’t keep up with the peloton or the younger cyclocross riders anymore, he can’t imagine giving up on any of it entirely. He’ll still be in whatever amateur races will have him until he’s seventy, powered by that constant low-simmering drive to be the best, to dominate the competition.

Suddenly, Wout’s bright, airy kitchen feels too stifling. “Uh, can I use the restroom?” Mathieu asks, even though his water glass is still mostly full.

Wout gives him directions through the hallways with an expression that clearly says that Mathieu hasn’t fooled him for a second. Mathieu doesn’t exactly flee from the kitchen, but he does make a hasty exit deeper into the house.

He must make a wrong turn somewhere, because instead of the bathroom, he ends up in a workroom of some kind. When Mathieu flicks on the light, he can see that it’s a little dustier, grimier than the clean and polished shine of the other rooms. Tools hang from the walls. A workbench is covered in spare parts. Wout’s cyclocross bike is propped up in a bike stand in the middle of the room, its front wheel removed.

It’s one of the bikes Wout rode this past season, and something about seeing it here, in this darkened room waiting for someone to repair it, is achingly sad. This place feels like somewhere personal, sacred, even if that does sound more than a little dramatic, but Mathieu can’t bring himself to turn around and walk away.

“Oh, you did get lost,” Wout says from behind him, approaching on silent, socked feet.

“Sorry,” Mathieu mumbles, embarrassed. He feels like he’s violated Wout’s privacy, like he’s walked into and gawked at a mausoleum for Wout’s career.

But Wout just laughs. “I got a puncture last week, and I keep procrastinating on fixing it up. I really need to get that done today.”

Mathieu squints at him, sure he’s misheard. “Last week?” Wout’s retirement was months ago.

“There’s a local cyclocross field I go to at least once a week, just to ride around for a bit,” Wout explains. His smile is wide enough that his eyes crinkle at the corners.

“Is that safe?” Mathieu asks, though he knows he wouldn’t care about the answer to that either if he was in Wout’s shoes.

“Yeah, it’s fine as long as I don’t push myself too hard. I’m not exactly going at World Championship speeds anymore.” Wout approaches the bicycle, eyes focused on some mud that has caked on the down tube. “Congratulations on that, by the way.”

“Thanks,” Mathieu says automatically. “Did you watch it?” He wishes he could say that every lap had been a dedication, a tribute, to Wout and their rivalry, but Mathieu had only wanted to mash his body to a pulp so that he didn’t have to deal with the confusing riot of feelings that came up when he looked across the starting line and Wout wasn’t there.

“No,” Wout says. “It would have hurt too much.” There’s a blunt simplicity to his words, an honesty that Mathieu envies. Mathieu wishes he were half as good at untangling how he felt. He still doesn’t even know why he decided to visit Wout in the first place.

“I would have– it would have been better if you were there,” Mathieu says, and that, at the very least, is also the truth.

“I wanted to be there,” Wout says. He goes over to the workbench next and picks up the wheel that was sitting on it. He inspects it, turning it over in his large, careful hands. Watching Wout’s long fingers delicately tracing over the rim makes Mathieu’s skin prickle, though he can’t explain why. Wout continues, “I need to get better at doing my own repairs. I was talking to my friends about going to the US over the summer, riding some of the gravel races over there.” That makes sense, since the big US gravel races don’t require qualifications or a world tour license, and for so many of the amateurs, finishing is a bigger goal than winning. Wout won’t have the professional support of a team or a team car, but he’ll have his friends right with him, keeping him in check, making sure he’s all right, as they ride over the plains of Kansas or California or wherever they end up. The thought of it, though, the idea of Wout going across the ocean for a summer, ending up so much further out of reach, makes Mathieu’s chest feel tight and uncomfortable.

That’s probably why he says, “Can I join you next week?”

Wout stares at him, blinking in his confusion. “At the cyclocross field? Aren’t you preparing for the road season now?”

Mathieu shrugs. He might need to shuffle his training around, reschedule some team or agent or sponsor meetings, but this feels more important for reasons he still can’t quite articulate. “Yeah,” he says. “But it sounds like fun.” That’s the best explanation he has that doesn’t sound pathetic. Wout is moving on, and the distance between them is growing, and Mathieu has always hated being left behind.

Wout studies his face for a long moment before shrugging himself. “Okay, sure,” he says. “Why not?”

Mathieu doesn’t remember when he first met Wout. Not because Wout’s always been there (he hasn’t), but because for the longest time, Wout had blended in with that crowd of boys Mathieu’s age who were good but never quite good enough, the ones who were always duking it out for second place in Mathieu’s wake. Wout had been capable and talented back then, dogged and tough and skilled, but Mathieu had been better. Obviously better.

At some point, there was a shift. All of sudden, Wout was there all the time. On Mathieu’s wheel, at the front of the pack, fighting and clawing for every position against everyone, including Mathieu. It had been annoying at first, then enraging, when Wout started winning against him, but Mathieu couldn’t deny that when he was racing against Wout, Wout had his attention, commanded it even.

When Wout was there, it was a shock to the system, like all of Mathieu’s nerve endings were lit up all at once. It was never like that anytime, anywhere else. If Mathieu was anything less than his best, anything less than the best, then Wout would make him pay for it. He had to be aware of Wout at all times, had to be at the top of his mental and physical game, and the exhilaration of that was more intoxicating and heady than any alcohol that Mathieu had ever tasted. And taking the win after one of their battles was better than sex. Mathieu knew exactly how good he had to be to earn it.

Wout had been vibrant and dangerous and thrilling, and the two of them had pushed each other to new and dizzying heights for years and years. And then he vanished, a sudden disappearance that left Mathieu reeling, that left everything dull and colorless and gray.

Wout apparently goes to his cyclocross field in the mid-morning on Wednesdays. “It’s quietest when there aren’t any kids or office workers around,” he explains. Wout is right about how crowded the course is. There’s only one other rider running laps. Mathieu did have to reschedule a couple of meetings to be here, but he isn’t going to tell Wout that.

Wout is dressed in an old yellow-and-black Jumbo Visma kit, and he’s still wearing his Red Bull helmet. Mathieu left the rainbows at home, only in his usual blue Alpecin jersey. It’s an attempt to be more anonymous. It hasn’t entirely worked. He got stopped in the parking lot for autographs and a selfie, but no one seems to bother Wout. Maybe they’ve seen him too much, and they’ve gotten it out of their system. Someone did ask Mathieu why he was here while he was here alone before Wout arrived, and he just shrugged and said that he was meeting a friend. He’s not sure how Wout would react to being called his friend, but Mathieu supposes that’s the closest description they have.

It’s a sunny day, and the air is crisp and cold in a way that carries with it the promises of spring. They walk their bikes out onto the field together, but Mathieu lets Wout have a head start, watching as Wout pushes off and clips in. He can see how Wout is holding back, how careful he is to keep his speed down, but there’s a lightness to his movements, an ease and playfulness that only comes when you’re not pushing your body to the absolute limit. Wout isn’t riding to race. Wout is riding for the simple pleasure of riding his bike on a cyclocross course. Mathieu follows him, catching up without difficulty. He hangs back, following at Wout’s speed, even though every muscle in his body is itching to launch an attack. He could overtake Wout. He has the legs, even without a proper warm up. But that’s not what they’re here for, and as Wout goes, Mathieu lets himself follow.

Being on a bike has always been cathartic for Mathieu, a way for him to bleed all of his feelings into his body and then let them go. He only makes it two laps before he has to stop, not because of the tears that are streaming down his face, but because of the wracking sobs that are rattling through his chest. He has been trying to avoid this feeling, to ignore it, to make it go away through sheer force of will. He feels like he’s choking on it now, the grief. Grief for Wout, whose career was cut way too short, but also grief for their rivalry, an intimacy they’d shared that had brought them closer than lovers. Mathieu has been in a fugue state for months because this isn’t how he’s supposed to feel about this final victory, against Wout and time and nature. It should feel like climbing onto the top step, like sliding a gold medal around his neck, like raising a trophy over his head. It shouldn’t feel like a part of himself has been ripped away, leaving nothing but tatters behind.

Mathieu finds himself sitting hunched over just off the course, where the ground is half soft mud, half sickly grass. His body can’t stop crying, a torrent of feeling that’s too much to be contained by simple skin and flesh and bone. Mathieu wants– he wants to turn back the clock, wants to reach inside Wout’s chest and fix what was broken, wants to keep whatever fragile thing they have together still alive — even if it’s still on life support — wants all sorts of things he can’t have.

Wout circles back when he notices Mathieu isn’t following any longer, a concerned look on his face. He lays his bike down on the grass next to Mathieu’s and sits close enough that their shoulders brush. They’ve done this so many times before, forced to witness each other at their worst, their most hurting, their most vulnerable. It’s ridiculous that even after Wout’s retired, they still find themselves back here, doing the same old shit. Wout doesn’t say anything this time either, just as quiet and steady and present as ever.

Eventually, the tears stop flowing, and the sobs are replaced by hiccuping breaths. “Fuck,” Mathieu says as he tries to wipe his face clean with the back of his hand.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Wout asks. There’s nothing but a calm patience to his voice, no hint of judgment at all.

“We don’t do that,” Mathieu says with a watery laugh. They don’t talk about it. They sit there while the other deals with his messy, human emotions, and they pretend it isn’t happening, and they don’t ever talk about it.

Wout shrugs. “We could.” He says it simply, matter-of-fact, like it is that easy, and Mathieu realizes he’s right. They can do it differently this time. They can rewrite the script that has defined their relationship for most of their lives. Somehow, this is the most disorienting thing that’s happened to Mathieu all year. For whatever reason, accepting Wout’s absence then was easier than accepting his friendship now.

Mathieu has considered it before. He’s seen what Wout is like with the people he considers his friends: open, generous, fiercely loyal. But even with the few flashes of kindness over the years, Wout has always kept Mathieu at arm’s length, and Mathieu has always respected that distance, has never attempted to bridge that gap.

And yet Wout is here, changing all the rules he laid out years ago. It’s terrifying, like skydiving without a parachute, free-falling into the unknown with nothing to slow down or stop the descent, to prevent the bone-breaking impact at the end of it. But it’s also threaded through with hope. Maybe they can salvage something new out of the wreckage.

“I hated you sometimes,” Mathieu says, “but I think I– I was always a little bit in love with you, too.” The words come out before he can fully think them through, but even as they spill from his lips, he can feel the truth in them. He turns his head to look at Wout. He feels settled now, at ease. It’s okay if Wout doesn’t return his feelings. Mathieu’s heart has already been shattered to pieces.

Wout gives him a searching, probing look, like he’s trying to unlock all of Mathieu’s secrets with just his dark, steady gaze. “Just a little?” he asks with a wry, teasing undertone to his voice.

Mathieu gives his shoulder a shove, and Wout laughs. It’s like they’re really friends now. Wout is letting them be friends.

Wout’s expression turns a little more serious, and he says, “I don’t know if I would call it love or hate. That’s not how it felt for me. It was always bigger and scarier than that. I think– I think everyone else could see that, which is why we got asked about it all the time.”

A laugh bubbles out of Mathieu’s chest. “We were always boring as fuck. We had to keep repeating the same lines over and over again.” All of those reporters, all of those questions, all of the attempts to put a shape around something that they themselves had trouble defining.

Wout grins at him, sharp and impish. “Want to make it interesting?” His voice has gone lower, and he leans in a little closer. It’s nothing inappropriate. If a picture of them like this ended up on social media, it wouldn’t look like anything but a normal chat between the two of them. Mathieu feels his blood heat all the same. It was never safe to want Wout before, but maybe now, in their newly reconfigured landscape, it’s a possibility that Mathieu can entertain.

He opens his mouth, ready to flirt back, but then Wout leaps to his feet, grabbing his bike, and takes off. Wout mounts with all the speed and skill of the elite cyclocross rider he was, and he rides away. Mathieu scrambles to follow, just a few seconds behind him. It doesn’t take long for him to catch up, as slow as Wout is these days, and when he does, he finds Wout cackling with a childlike glee that he hasn’t seen since they both were actual children.

Mathieu had known on some level that Wout could be like this, as silly as anyone, but he almost never got to see it. The sight of it now makes his chest feel tender and soft. Wout pulls over when Mathieu catches him, half-laughing, half-panting, and fuck, Mathieu loves him like this, so filled with uncomplicated joy. Mathieu pulls over next to him. He unclips from his pedals, but he’s still straddling his bike when he hooks a finger into the strap of Wout’s helmet and tugs him into a kiss.

The angle is awkward, so it’s little more than a mash of lips against lips. It’s still good, still great. Mathieu can’t bring himself to give a shit if this moment does end up plastered all over Twitter or Instagram, because he’s kissing Wout, and Wout is kissing him back. It isn’t anything like racing Wout, but it’s still electric. It still makes Mathieu’s body sing.

“You fucking cheater,” Mathieu says against Wout’s mouth.

“Takes one to know one,” Wout says back.

Their last real race against each other was in January, but Mathieu doesn’t remember much about it. The details are blurry, smeared into so many of the other races they’ve had against each other. Wout had won it, in part because Mathieu’s had started twinging halfway through. As much as Mathieu hated losing, especially to Wout, it didn’t seem worth it to aggravate the old injury for a mostly meaningless mid-season race when there was still Worlds coming up.

Mathieu couldn’t tell you much more about it. There had maybe been a crash near him at one point, but he hadn’t been caught up in it. He may have had flatted near the pits, but it didn’t lose him any positions. He could go back and rewatch the whole race or even just the highlights to jog his memory, but doesnt really see the point in doing so.

He does remember the post-race handshake between him and Wout afterwards, though. “I hope your back feels better next time,” Wout had said, as polite as ever, even though Mathieu hadn’t mentioned anything about the twinges, to him or the reporters.

Mathieu hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. It was a matter of course that Wout could tell when Mathieu’s back was acting up. Mathieu could always tell when Wout’s old injuries were bothering him, too. That was how it was between them — they barely spoke, but they understood each other in a way that went deeper than any words could capture or convey.

Now, the moment is tinged with nostalgia but without a hint of regret. They can’t be who they were back then again. Mathieu will still miss it. He’ll always miss it. But now he and Wout will have new ways of communicating, of knowing each other, of pushing each other to be the best versions of themselves. There are new challenges waiting for them. Mathieu’s looking forward to it.

Mathieu wakes up when the morning sun peeks over the horizon, spills in through the bedroom windows and onto his face. He always sleeps lighter away from home, more sensitive to light and sound.

Wout makes a snuffling noise next to him that almost sounds like a snore. Mathieu is going to give him so much shit about this later. He’d insisted that he wasn’t a snorer when he invited Mathieu to stay over.

There are going to be tough conversations to be had when Wout wakes up. What the coming road season and Wout’s gravel adventures mean for this shift in their relationship, what they are okay revealing to the press, what their futures, together or apart, will look like, what they want it to look like.

But that’s something Mathieu can worry about later. He has learned that he needs to appreciate what he has while he has it, because it’s impossible to know when it will be taken away from you. He rolls over so that he can wrap an arm around Wout’s side, so that he can trace his fingers over the scar left behind by the pacemaker surgery, so that he can run his palms over the softer, fuller planes of Wout’s body now that he’s not on a strict diet and training schedule anymore.

There’s still a lingering chill from winter in the air, but Mathieu feels warm, suffused with a delicate sort of hope. He presses a kiss to the back of Wout’s neck, and he closes his eyes, and he breathes in the moment before he falls back asleep.

FIN.