Chapter Text
The grass is still damp when he walks off court, slick at the edges with dew and churned soil, the blades bent under the violence of movement. It clings to his socks, his laces, the bruised curve of his calves. The late-morning light is soft, almost forgiving, and the air holds that faint sweetness that only Wimbledon seems to keep for itself. His body hums with the clean satisfaction of straight sets — not the wild high of an upset, but a steady, grounded kind of win.
Inside, the corridors of the All England Club smell faintly of polish and fresh-cut flowers, quiet except for the murmur of stewards in green blazers. The interview room is cool, the light pale and even, the kind that makes everything feel sharper at the edges. Jannik slides into his seat behind the microphone, water bottle in front of him, posture easy in the way it gets after hundreds of these.
"Yes, I felt good out there."
"No, I wasn’t thinking about last year."
"Every match is a new match."
A neat volley of answers, nothing that might catch or bruise.
And then—something different.
“Jannik,” says a woman in the front row, her press badge gleaming under the lights, “there’s been a lot of buzz online this week about your… closeness with Carlos Alcaraz. Especially after that little moment on court two days ago. Do you want to comment?”
Buzz. Like a fly trapped under glass. Closeness. Moment. Each word drops into him with the precision of a slice serve.
He blinks once, then again. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“There’s a clip,” she says, her mouth curving in a way that already feels like a headline, “from the practice courts. He grabbed your wrist, and you said something that made him blush. Fans are calling it the sincaraz wrist grab. It’s trending.”
A ripple of soft laughter moves through the room. A camera clicks too close. Someone murmurs couple energy like it’s harmless.
He breathes out evenly. “Carlos and I are friends.”
True — depending on which side the coin lands today.
The questions shift back to safer ground — serve percentages, court conditions — but the moment lingers, lodged like a seed that refuses to wash away.
Later, in the players’ wing, the hush is almost complete. Just the faint echo of a ball being struck on an outside court, the rustle of kit bags, the low hum of the air-conditioning. Jannik sits on the bench in front of his locker, scrolling until the screen fills with it.
The clip. Slow motion. Carlos walking past, the briefest graze of fingertips across his own. A nothing touch, unless you were looking for it to be more.
The caption:
just tell me when to stop, cariño 😏 #sincaraz
From Carlos’s own account.
His thumb hovers above the glass. This is Carlos being Carlos — a joke, a little bait for the crowd.
And yet, there’s a slow tightening in him, low and warm and impossibly steady, that feels nothing like a joke.
He locks the phone. His pulse doesn’t slow.
Carlos is outside when Jannik steps into the soft gold of evening. The light has that London heaviness to it, the kind that makes everything seem briefly suspended—dust motes slow in the air, shadows stretching long and deliberate. Wimbledon village hums in the background: the faint chime of cutlery in distant restaurants, the low clatter of buses beyond hedgerows, a few muffled voices from fans pressed to the iron fence.
But here, at the lip of the hotel driveway, Carlos is alone. Leaning against the low garden wall like it’s the most natural place in the world, one ankle crossed over the other, scrolling through his phone as though the day’s match never happened. No tension in his shoulders. No lingering adrenaline. He looks… untouched.
He doesn’t look up when he says, unprompted, “So, sincaraz, huh?”
Jannik slows, mid-step. The word lands oddly, like a drop of ink in clear water.
Carlos glances over then, and his mouth tilts into a grin that doesn’t quite reach smugness. “You’ve seen it, yes?”
Jannik shrugs, aiming for something careless. “It popped up.”
Carlos turns his phone toward him. The screen glows with a video—low-res, looped, set to some syrupy pop ballad. It’s barely half a second of footage: Carlos’s fingers catching at Jannik’s wrist during a break while they were practicing together, the contact stretched into eternity by editing software. Someone has slowed it down so much the air between them almost hums. A scatter of pink heart emojis float lazily in the corner.
Carlos swipes, and another clip appears: the two of them at a changeover, Jannik drinking water, Carlos smiling in his direction. Over the footage, in glittering cursive: husbands.
Jannik feels something pinch low in his chest, part laughter, part something else. “It’s ridiculous,” he says, but the words snag, almost tripping over a smile he doesn’t want to give away.
Carlos doesn’t defend it. Doesn’t dismiss it. He laughs—open, easy, untroubled—and the sound lands heavier on Jannik than he expects. “They have good taste.”
“They’re insane,” Jannik counters.
“Maybe.” Carlos’s grin deepens. “But I kind of like it.”
That stops Jannik. “You like people making up fake stories about us?”
Carlos shrugs like the question’s made of air. “They could make up worse things.”
It’s the lightness in his tone that unsettles Jannik. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s so Carlos. The refusal to take anything too seriously, the instinct to lean into a storm instead of sidestepping it. Like the whole thing isn’t touching him at all. Like he can bend the narrative with a joke.
Jannik shifts his weight against the stone wall, folding his arms, careful to leave a sliver of space between them. “You don’t think it’s weird? The edits. The… ship name.”
Carlos hums, eyes still on his phone. “Not really. They’ve been doing it for years.”
Jannik doesn’t answer. A breeze moves through, cool and damp, carrying the scent of clipped hedges and the faint metallic promise of rain. He’s not sure what he expected. Mockery, maybe. Some flicker of embarrassment. Not this casual enjoyment, this willingness to play along. Not Carlos joining the chorus.
Carlos nudges him with his elbow, light as a heartbeat. “Come on. You don’t think it’s a little funny?”
Jannik exhales through his nose. The sound might be a laugh if you didn’t listen too closely. “Maybe a little.”
Carlos beams like he’s won something. “Gracias. I knew you had a sense of humor in there somewhere.”
They stand like that for a moment—close enough for Jannik to catch the faint rustle of fabric when Carlos shifts, the faint heat radiating from him, but not so close it becomes anything else.
He tells himself it means nothing.
He almost believes it.
That night, stretched flat on the hotel bed with the ceiling fan murmuring above, Jannik unlocks his phone and taps into Twitter. He types #sincaraz on the search bar.
It’s all there. Edits in slow motion. Grainy screenshots ringed in digital hearts. Captions that swing between sweet and absurd. Some posts are old—moments he barely remembers living—but others are fresh, pulled from just hours ago.
He scrolls. Laughs once, quiet. Scoffs twice. Locks the phone without liking a single thing.
Sleep doesn’t come.
He lies on his side for a while, watching the strip of light at the bottom of the curtains quiver each time a car passes outside. The hum of the air conditioner has gone from background comfort to a kind of interrogation—its fans ticking faintly, measuring out every second he’s failing to drift off.
The phone is still on the nightstand, screen black. He thinks about reaching for it. Doesn’t.
He keeps seeing Carlos in the half-light of the hotel drive: the way he leaned against the wall as if nothing in the world could unseat him, the way his grin curled around that one careless sentence—I kind of like it.
It replays in Jannik’s head with a peculiar weight, not sharp enough to be irritation, not soft enough to be harmless. Something in between.
It’s stupid. He knows it’s stupid. This isn’t the first time fans have made up stories, or cut together moments between them until they looked like something else. He’s seen the edits before—the slow pans, the hearts, the romantic music layered over a handshake. Usually, he scrolls past without even a twitch in his pulse.
But this is different.
This time Carlos wasn’t just part of the story. He added to it. Posted straight into the bloodstream of the sincaraz tag like he was feeding a fire on purpose.
And he’d been so light about it. Like it was nothing. Like it didn’t matter what people thought they saw in that half-second wrist brush, or in his smile, or in the way they orbit each other on court.
Jannik rolls onto his back. The ceiling is pale in the dark, just enough to reflect shapes his mind won’t settle on.
He tells himself the tightness in his chest is about professionalism. About how their matches will be picked apart even more now, how every camera shot will be dissected for “hidden meaning.” About how he’s already had enough of people thinking they know him.
But if that’s all it is, why does the thought of Carlos laughing at those edits—liking them—make something knot low in his stomach?
He closes his eyes. Sees it again: Carlos’s thumb still scrolling, mouth tilted into that easy, infuriating grin.
He flips onto his side, then his stomach, then back again.
It’s past two by the time he gives up on sleep entirely.
Morning arrives without ceremony, just the pale grey of a Wimbledon sky leaking through the curtains, soft and heavy, tinting the room with that particular English light that makes everything look slightly faded.
Jannik lies still for a while, cataloguing the stiffness in his body: the ache along his shoulder from tossing all night, the dull weight behind his eyes. The kind of fatigue that feels older than a single bad sleep.
When he finally gets up, the air in the room is too still, as if it’s holding something in. The floor under his bare feet feels cold, even through the carpet. He moves through his routine in silence: pulls on a t-shirt, combs his fingers through his hair instead of bothering with a mirror, ties his shoes by muscle memory.
Downstairs, the breakfast room hums softly — the scrape of knives on toast, the muted shuffle of papers, the low hiss of the coffee machine. Conversations hover in the air without resolving into words.
Jannik fills a plate automatically: porridge, a handful of berries, coffee so black it reflects the overhead lights. He takes a seat by the window, where the view is nothing more than wet pavement and clipped hedges, the glass streaked faintly from last night’s rain.
He should check his phone.
He doesn’t.
But he knows, in that strange half-sure way, that Carlos has already been up for hours. He can almost picture it: Carlos in the gym downstairs, headphones in, laughing with his physio over something Jannik would never hear. Or maybe not laughing at all. Maybe sitting in his own breakfast somewhere else, scrolling through the same sincaraz tag he’d fed last night, seeing what the fans had built out of his joke.
The thought lands unevenly, a pebble dropped into water that refuses to settle.
Someone says his name — softly, in passing — and he looks up too quickly, half expecting to see him.
It’s not Carlos.
He forces a small nod, goes back to his coffee, watching the steam curl up in loose spirals until it disappears.