Chapter 59: Supermodel

Saint didn’t take his own car that night. Everyone at the club knew the Fiesta by now, and lately he’d been fielding actual sponsorship enquiries off the back of that same battered old thing. Jasper had turned every single one down without asking.

Not that Jasper looked down on the manufacturers reaching out, Saint’s car had genuinely become a minor talking point in its own right, oddly enough. Jasper simply couldn’t stomach the idea of his best friend endorsing anything so thoroughly unglamorous, and honestly, Saint himself couldn’t be bothered to care either way.

Driving something as unremarkable as a Fiesta had, at this point, become almost a point of pride, proof he hadn’t let any of this change him. Though it was also, quite plainly, a car entirely unbefitting of someone whose face had started appearing in national coverage on a semi-regular basis. Saint had simply never gotten around to fixing that particular contradiction.

The club they arrived at that evening was one of Birmingham’s more exclusive venues; invitation and reservation only, and even then, capacity strictly limited. Jasper, unsurprisingly, was practically family there; the doorman greeted him by first name before either of them had said a word.

This wasn’t entirely new territory for Saint, a couple of nights out during his university years, both times dragged along by Jasper, who’d apparently decided early on that Saint needed regular intervention on this front.

"Proper old money in this decor," Saint said, taking in the interior; heavy wood panelling, portraits, the general sense of a place built to intimidate.

"Family that owns it goes back generations, landed gentry, the whole thing," Jasper explained, clearly proud of the connection.

"Bit quiet for a nightclub, isn’t it?" Saint had been to enough of these places to know what a proper night out usually sounded like.

"Ha! Themed evening tonight, wine tasting upstairs, proper civilised crowd. Gets considerably louder later, trust me." Right on cue, a wave of guests arrived in suits and evening wear, filling the space with exactly the kind of quiet, moneyed murmur Jasper had described. ℴ

Saint’s attention, admittedly, wasn’t lingering much on the men in the room. When it drifted toward the women instead, the atmosphere shifted considerably in his estimation.

Jasper and Saint’s arrival didn’t go unnoticed either. Jasper’s greetings rippled through the room as they walked; clearly a regular, and well liked.

Saint drew his own share of attention too, even as a first-timer; his profile in the Midlands, and increasingly beyond it, meant more than a few faces in that room recognised him on sight.

Football’s cultural weight in England was, frankly, hard to overstate. Not following it at all, in most social circles, was practically a conversational handicap.

They made their way up to a private room on the second floor, where a mixed group of eight or so were already settled in, three men, five women.

"Ha! Lee... finally decided to show your face." One of the men clearly knew Saint already.

Toby Ashworth-Grey, cut from the same cloth as Jasper; old money, easy charm, the kind of friendship with Jasper that suggested real history. Anyone in Jasper’s orbit who already knew Saint had almost certainly earned that connection through Jasper directly.

Before Saint’s arrival on the scene, Toby had been Jasper’s closest friend; the two had known each other since childhood, inseparable right through school.

University had eventually pulled them apart geographically, Toby had gone straight into the family business, while Jasper had ended up at Birmingham, where he’d found Saint instead.

Saint and Toby’s friendship, such as it was, had always run through Jasper rather than existing independently, the two got on well enough whenever their paths crossed, without ever quite becoming close on their own terms.

"Right... everyone, this is my good mate, youngest manager in the country’s history, currently running the show at Aston Villa. Saint Maddox." Jasper made the introduction to the room generally before turning specifically to Saint. "And this is Toby."

"Saint... lovely to finally meet you." The first to greet him properly was a woman dressed boldly enough to turn heads on her own; though her attention, notably, wasn’t actually on Saint at all.

She’d gone straight to Jasper the moment they’d walked in, which told its own story. The "true love" Jasper had been going on about all evening, apparently; and Saint did, in fact, recognise the face.

Sofia Delacroix. Something close to a local celebrity in her own right, model, socialite, a regular fixture in the kind of glossy regional coverage that treated the Midlands’ wealthy set like minor royalty.

"Christ... Jasper’s never going to hear the end of this walking around town now," Saint said, and the line landed exactly as intended, both a genuine compliment to Sofia and a shameless stroke to Jasper’s ego.

"Now I finally understand how you manage to infuriate the entire national press and somehow still keep them coming back for more," Toby said, laughing.

"Careful, you’re making it sound like a compliment," Saint said dryly.

"It genuinely is one. You’ve done things this season no other manager in this country would dream of trying." Villa’s own club channel had approached Saint for an exclusive sit-down more than once by now, each request politely declined.

After Sofia, Saint worked his way through the rest of the room, shaking hands with the four other women present. He didn’t recognise most of them by name, but that hardly mattered, every one of them carried themselves like they belonged exactly where they were standing.

"Grace Fairweather." One name did register properly; a rising face in modelling, still building her name but already turning heads on the right runways.

The moment introductions finished, Jasper leaned in with an unsubtle nudge, the implication clear enough without a word needing to be said.

Grace’s career was still very much in its early stages, genuinely promising but not yet a household name across the industry, she’d actually come out to Birmingham this particular week chasing a major campaign booking, only for it to fall through at the last stage. Tonight, by her own account, was simply about blowing off some steam.

Saint clocked all of that without letting any of it show on his face. Whatever else people said about him, he’d become genuinely skilled at reading a room and giving nothing away; a skill that, if he was honest, owed a great deal to the past month and a half of press conferences.

’Good decision, coming out tonight,’ Saint thought to himself, once the round of introductions had wrapped up.

The conversation with the women in the room flowed easily enough. The men proved trickier going; not everyone in Jasper and Toby’s circle carried the same easy warmth, particularly the ones who came with real standing of their own.

One face in particular stood out to Saint; someone he recognised immediately, though the recognition clearly wasn’t mutual.

Julian Hartwell-Stone. Heir apparent to one of the more significant family fortunes in English business, with real stakes quietly threaded through more than one Premier League club’s ownership structure; and, if the football press was to be believed, being groomed for a serious role in the game himself somewhere down the line.