Open Play: Ladies, Goals, The Everything System in-between

Chapter 53: [53] "Zara Part 1"

Wednesday. Three days before Paris Royal.

The café on Rue du Bac was the best kind. It had been at the same corner since before anyone thought cafés needed branding.

Luc was at a corner table with his tablet, Phocéen’s full-match footage from the league’s official database. He’d been sitting there for forty minutes with a black coffee that had gone cold beside a second black coffee that was going the same way.

He was somehow still tracking Neji’s press. The timing of his press against central possession. The half-second tell in his shoulder that announced which direction the press was going.

Paris Royal’s midfield wasn’t Neji. But the principles translated the same... more or less.

The café had maybe twelve people in it. A woman in a long coat reading something on a paper at the far window. Two men near the door discussing something that seemed financial, with the low voices like they preferred their arguments to not be overheard.

And then the door opened.

Short white hair. Dark coat and a leather bag over one shoulder.

She ordered at the counter without looking around. Two words, no addition, she already knew what she wanted before she walked in.

She turned with her cup and found the nearest available table to the window and sat.

Luc was already looking back at his tablet.

Two minutes had now passed.

He reached for the cold coffee out of habit and realized again... it was cold, so he put it back.

The woman with the white hair had opened a notebook. Not a phone... an actual notebook with a pen, and had started writing something with the focused of someone who did their thinking without distraction.

Luc set his eyes on his tablet again. He ran the Neji clip back fifteen seconds.

His peripheral vision, the upgraded version, was on the woman’s movement before he consciously noticed it. She had looked up from her notebook and was watching him.

Luc looked over.

But she didn’t look away.

"We’ve met?" he said across the small café.

She put her pen down. "Yes."

He looked at her. The white hair. The dark skin. Her cold expression.

"Paris Royal... The-- the sponsors’ night?"

"Rose’s apartment."

He pointed at her with two fingers. "Oh! The naked lady. You were wearing considerably less then."

"Ha ha. I was also not expecting company."

Luc closed his tablet. "Let me guess, you threw the note away."

"Y-- yes."

"Why?"

She picked up her pen again and rotated it once between her fingers, it dropped off her fingers to the notebook.

"Because Rose is my best friend. And you are a complication I didn’t think she needed. But I was wrong about the second part."

Their were tables between them.

"Wrong how?"

"She thinks you don’t want to speak to her." Zara kept her voice level, the way someone spoke when they were delivering facts they’d already argued with themselves about. "She’s been watching every match. She’s been checking her phone after every result. She hasn’t said any of this to me directly but--"

"But you know anyway."

"I do"

Luc reached forward and picked up the cold coffee and hesistantly drank the rest of it. It wasn’t exactly the worst thing he’d tasted.

"She stopped mentioning you. Rose talks about everything. When she stops talking about something, it’s the thing she’s thinking about most."

"You came here to tell me that?"

"I just came here for coffee." She picked up her cup. "You happened to be here."

"This café isn’t near your training ground."

Zara drank from her cup and her eyes gave Luc the expression that she had no reason to explain her route choices to him.

[System Notification]

[Objective: Earn the affection of Zara Goza]

[She operates on complete information and zero ego. Adjust accordingly.]

"No reward?"

[No reward]

"What reward?" Zara chimed in.

"I was just saying-- Why didn’t you just text her my number yourself?" Luc asked. "You saw it before you threw it away."

"I remembered it. That wasn’t what you said bef--"

"So you have it." Luc interrupted her.

"I have it," Zara confirmed.

"Then why are we doing this?"

She set her cup down very carefully on the saucer with a deliberateness in her motion.

"Because if I give it to her, she’ll know I took it. I don’t want that, isn’t it obvious."

"You must really value your friendship with her," Luc said.

"Since we were sixteen."

"And you threw the note away to protect her."

"Yes."

"And you’re here now because you think you were wrong to do so."

Zara opened her notebook again. "Like I said, I’m just here because I had coffee and you happened to be nearby. I don’t know what else to tell you."

"Right."

Luc pulled out his phone. He opened his contacts, typed his number in, walked the four steps between their tables, and put the phone on the edge of hers.

All this while they had been talking from a distance for some reason.

"Save it," he said. "And give it to her however you want. I don’t care about the framing."

Zara looked at the phone screen. Then she looked at him, properly this time, a look she rationed out carefully.

She copied out his number and saved the contact on her own phone.

He picked the phone back up. "You must have seen me when you came in."

"Yes."

"And you sat at the table closest to my line of sight."

"The other seats were taken." She said, with a bit of bashfulness creeping into her tone now.

Luc sat across from her at the same table.

"What are you doing?"

"My seats been taken. Just now."

She looked over to his seat, she couldn’t say anything.

He opened the Neji clip, which was still paused, at the minute the midfielder’s shoulder angled toward the right press, the tell right there his stance.

Zara wrote in her notebook for another ten minutes. Her pen didn’t stop.

After the awkward silence between them, Zara closed her notebook and stood to leave.

She walked past him towards the door.

"Rose’s birthday is June third... In case."

The door opened.

Cold street air came in for a second.

The door closed.

Luc sat in the quiet of the café with his cold coffee and his highlight paused.

[System Notification]

[Observation: Zara Goza gave you a piece of information she did not need to give you.]

[TES notes: That’s never accidental with her.]

"Does the upgrade come with this much pestering? What the hell."

His phone chimed. "If I’m correct. That’ll be her."

Luc was correct. It was:

Zara.

One word. No last name. No emoji. Nothing decorative.

Exactly what he expected.

He went back to the footage without replying. He had Paris Royal, the biggest match so far this season, against his rival, in three days.

[System Notification]

[Remember Mateo’s birthday is tomorrow]