How hard can it be to fall in love with a football player when you're afraid of footballs...?
---
Helping out her best friend by playing the lead in that music video project for university had seemed like an easy enough feat for art student Lorelai...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The Christmas break party was a big deal for uni students in Barcelona. Several faculties and attached schools all around the city ganged up to plan what was to be the biggest, weirdest, most fantastic and crazy party of the university year, continuously outdoing rival events of other faculties and schools. The University of Barcelona was the biggest university in Spain and counted to the biggest and best ones in the world — there was just no place on heaven and earth to make one party for each and everyone of the more than 90,000 students.
As per usual, Lorelai's faculty was to be partly responsible for decorations, along with other faculties that had their main focus on creative work. For the last few weeks, that had meant additional work for her and her colleagues, making the already busy schedule even tighter and Lorelai regret ever joining the party committee (yes, there really was such a thing!) that fateful first semester a few years back in the first place.
Usually, the parties Lorelai's faculty was regularly a part of had a freaky theme going on — if you were looking for something like a boring »Christmas« theme, then you definitely were at the wrong address. Thankfully, this year's theme wasn't going to be football-related, because last year's party had been setting the mood for the upcoming World Cup in Brazil: which had meant lots and lots of people showing up in national team jerseys from all around the world (thank the universe for Barcelona being such a multicultural city). Naturally, flags, national colours as well as all kinds of stuff related to the sport, like footballs, goals, fake grass and whatnot, had dominated the decorations.
Thinking back to it now, Lorelai remembered quite a few people wearing Brazilian jerseys, the yellow and green coloured clothing with the number ten on the back having been one of the most popular ones with the party animals. She herself, of course, had chosen a Spain jersey for her short appearance — if nothing else, at least she'd wanted to show some national pride. If memory served correct, it had been Andrés Iniesta's. And if her memory was complete, she remembered drinking way too much to help ignore the fact that there were lots and lots of footballs flying around that night. Not that she had stayed long enough for it to matter anyways — as soon as the first balls had went flying like crazy, Lorelai had gotten the hell out of there, screw the fact that she was missing out on what had turned out to be one hell of a party.
This year, the people from the uni party committee had taken inspiration from one particular music video that had been growing ever the more popular in Barcelona (and the rest of the world, it seemed) these last few months. Yes, the beach music video with the one and only FC Barcelona. The one with Lorelai. And Neymar. And the »tints&shades«.
The latter were going to perform as a special guest this year.
The former, as it turned out, was going to appear as well — as the unplanned surprise guest, it would seem, the one even the committee wouldn't know about (and hell would need to freeze over before Lorelai would tell them that).
The committee had asked her, of course, about a possible appearance of Neymar or some other player from the video; seeing as she now had the connections to the club via art assignment. But Lorelai had blatantly refused their enquiry; especially not with all the history she and Neymar had already shared in their short time of knowing each other.
