But today, he was looking forward to going to the café with her today, then she came up to him before training started and told him that she had work to do after training. And I think you know what he decided to do after he was done with training and all.
"Hanne, I have a question," he says, and right off the bat she could tell it's a question she's normally uncomfortable for her to answer.
"Go on."
"What is the Netherlands like? I really want to know because I've never been there and it seems pretty damn cool there."
Oh, nevermind. Definitely a question she could answer.
She cleared her throat, eyes still focused on her task on the computer screen. "Well, the Netherlands is right above us, next to Belgium. The capital is Amsterdam, really nice place. My brother and I were born in Maastricht, but we were raised in Nijmegen and —"
"Is your whole family from Maastricht?"
"No, we're adopted."
Erik can't tell whether she's joking or not.
You see, he came across his question when he saw a newspaper article about Hanne as BVB's new photographer. There was a sentence that confused the hell out of him and he didn't know what it actually meant or if it was real or if the author was being somewhat poetic.
The sentence was:
Hanne and her brother, Willem, are very close to their parents though they do not share the same blood as them.
"Long story short, Willem and I are born, our biological parents can't care for us and then we're adopted," she continued, "if that's what you wanted to know."
Somehow, just somehow, Erik thought of a way to ask her in a different way rather than directly. The thing is that he doesn't know if she's lost faith in him now because she isn't making any effort to talk to him.
Either that or Erik is a a dumb boy that doesn't know that she has work to do.
"That's a really nice photo of myself," he told her as she clicked on a photo of him from training the other day, trying to break the barrier of silence in between them. He was running—well, not really running but jogging—around the pitch with everyone else as a warm up lap before they started actual training.
"I figured you would say that." She clicked out of the photo and dragged it to a file titled Erik. "And before you say anything, no, I'm not worshipping you. Fucking Rosa gave me the job of managing all the pictures, so I have to have files with the team's names on them. Not to mention that she gave me everyone else's job to do."
She wasn't kidding because she had files with everyone's name on them all over the screen. No wonder she also had the job of going out on the pitch and taking pictures of them while camera equipment more expensive than the total amount Marco spends on hair products each year.
"You seem like you really hate your co-workers, and there aren't a lot of people working here," he said, keeping his voice quiet so that none of the other people in the room hear.
But instead of a normal response like he had expected, she stopped her work on the computer and looked at him like she had just stated the obvious. "Is it really that noticable?"
