Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"My article is ready," Cassie smiled during her daily lunch with Mélissa, and the latter almost screamed.
"Oh my God, finally! I feel like you really struggled with it,"
"I did," Cassie nodded. I really did. And it was awful. I don't want to live that again, like, having nothing to write about."
"We always have something to write about," Mélissa smiled. "It's just that sometimes, we don't want people to read it."
"Can we stop talking about my neighbor for several hours in a row or is it completely impossible?"
"Completely impossible. I mean, something exciting is happening in your li--"
"Don't finish that sentence that clearly implies that my life is boring."
"Never said that. You did," Mélissa winked, and Cassie groaned.
"I'll let you and Romain know when I hear from him, I told you this morning. Now, let's forget about it."
"You should knock on his door. Just saying. When is his family coming?"
"On Wednesday."
"Wednesday? Girl, it's Friday today! Do you know what it means?"
"Yep, it's finally the weekend, thank God for that, I'm hella tired."
"It also means that they are coming in five days. Five. And you barely know the guy."
Cassie sighed. She hated to hear that, but her best friend was right. They had five days left before the arrival. And it was not enough.
"I will. I will knock on his door."
_
Once in front of the door, she was a little too nervous.
She didn't know why, though.
Neymar was a normal person. Well, a normal person that lies to his family about dating his neighbor. But besides that, he was a normal person to her. Okay, he was a lot richer than her, but money has nothing to do with her knocking on a door.
She took a deep breath before knocking, and once she did, she instantly regretted it. Why did I just--
"Oh, hey Cassie! Come in!" Neymar smiled before opening the door to her, and she stepped in. When she decided to knock on his door, she didn't think she would actually come in. She expected him to be gone, or just to decide to come at her place. But nope.
It was basically the same apartment, but bigger. And more colorful--she was more a black and white person, but he had very colorful paintings on the wall. And Christmas decorations absolutely everywhere—a Christmas tree, Christmas lights, some socks everywhere, and even a little reindeer on the drawer.
She smiled when she saw that the drawer had tons of pictures on it: she didn't think of the fact that she may be supposed to kind of know how they looked like, but it seemed like a pretty good idea now.
"This is Davi," she said, pointing the little boy with her forefinger, because he was the only person she could recognize.
"Yep," Neymar smiled. "This is Rafaella, Jo, Gil and Rafaella's boyfriend."
"Is he coming for Christmas? The boyfriend?" She asked, because Neymar never mentioned him before.
"I don't think so. He's a football player as well, so I think he's gonna spend the holiday with his family."
"Oh, wow, I didn't know he was a football player. It's running in the family," she said before looking closely at the picture. "She's really pretty."
"I know," Neymar grinned, and Cassie smiled because she could see the pride in his eyes. "Oh, here are my mom and my dad," he showed her another picture of his parents with him giving a hug to his mom. The three of them were smiling, and Cassie knew even before meeting them that they were a very happy family.
"You look a lot like them," she mused, and Neymar laughed.
"Do I? I feel like I look more like my dad. Which is quite ironical because Davi looks like his mom."
"You're just saying that because he's blond. He actually has some of your features. Well, according to the pic I saw."
"Did you Google me?" he raised an eyebrow, and she nodded as if it was totally normal. "I did too."
"What?" she frowned, taken aback. She didn't expect him to do so. She should have, though. She was kind of a public face as well, even though he was lot more famous than her.
"What did you expect? Of course I did. I found your Twitter and Instagram, and I also read some of your articles for Girl Boss."
"Wow, okay," she said, half-impressed, half-surprised. Googling her was a thing, reading her articles was another thing. Most of her articles--if not all of them--were probably boring to him.
"It was interesting," he smiled as if he read through her mind. "I looked up for articles about football and I ended up reading about your opinion on gender stereotypes. You briefly mentioned football in it."
Cassie nodded, knowing what article he was talking about. She wrote an article to denounce gender stereotypes, and she indeed talked about the fact that football is presumably aimed for boys.
"Yes, I did," he nodded. "You release an article every week, right?"
She nodded her head.
"Yeah. New article today."
"I'll read it," he smiled, and she laughed.
"You don't have to. This one is...more personal than the one where I mentioned football."
"You don't want me to read it?" he asked seriously.
"That's not what I said."
"If you don't want me to read it, I won't. I just thought it would be interesting to know more about you. I read a lot of articles in general, because it's easy to understand and I like to think that it's helping me to improve my French."
"My article is online, who am I to forbid someone to read it?" she smiled. "I just don't want you to feel obligated to read all my articles from now. And i do believe that it helps. But your French is pretty good. This is not the easier language in the world."
"Yeah, I noticed," he laughed. "But thanks. So, I've been thinking. We can't really invent inside jokes or that kind of things because I can't lie to save my life."
Cassie frowned.
"Yeah, but..." she stopped mid-sentence, trying to understand what he meant.
"We have to spend as much time as possible together before Wednesday."
