Chapter 60: Column Inches Overflowing

"Bloody hell... what on earth is this rubbish." The next morning, Saint stared at the papers spread across his kitchen table, genuinely close to tearing one clean in half.

Sky Sports Digital: "Villa’s Wonderboy Manager — And His Mystery ’Companion.’"

Underneath the headline sat a photo of Saint and Jasper, snapped the night before as they’d arrived at the club, Jasper’s sports car unmistakable in the background.

That wasn’t the only image, either. A gallery of smaller shots followed: Jasper leaving Saint’s house on various occasions, the two of them out together more than once, all presented with exactly the framing you’d expect.

The piece leaned hard on the fact that nobody had ever seen Saint with a girlfriend; not this season, not during his time with the academy, not, as far as anyone could establish, ever.

Jasper’s own reputation got dragged into it too, a man who, by all public accounts, never went more than a few months without a new woman on his arm, and yet somehow always found his way back to spending time with Saint specifically.

The tabloid instincts on display were genuinely impressive, if nothing else, the imagination on show wouldn’t have looked out of place in the entertainment pages. And Sky’s piece, as it turned out, was one of the more restrained versions circulating that morning.

One outlet had gone so far as to theorise that Jasper’s endless string of girlfriends was itself a smokescreen, deployed specifically to obscure his real relationship; because, naturally, a family with Jasper’s standing simply wouldn’t tolerate the truth being public.

Another had invented an entire backstory involving a supposed family intervention, a year of enforced separation, and a dramatic reunion the moment Jasper was finally free again.

Reading through it all, whatever good mood had survived the previous night evaporated completely. And the previous night, if Saint was honest, hadn’t exactly ended cleanly either.

Julian had spent most of the evening looking at Saint like something faintly beneath his notice, a Championship manager barely worth acknowledging, as far as a man with real stakes in the Premier League’s upper reaches was concerned.

Saint wasn’t the type to let that sit unanswered, either. Give him a reasonable conversation, and he’d engage warmly enough. Give him condescension, and he’d give it right back, with interest.

And Saint, better than most people in that room, understood exactly what direction certain corners of the English game were actually heading, how quickly short-term thinking from ownership groups with more money than patience could do real, lasting damage to a club’s identity. He hadn’t held back saying so.

The exchange had soured fairly quickly after that, and by the time voices had properly risen, the whole tone of the evening had shifted. Jasper, as host, had looked genuinely uncomfortable watching it unfold.

Not that Jasper held any of it against Saint, family connections aside, the two of them were partners in every sense that actually mattered to Jasper, and he wasn’t about to let one tense conversation with Julian change that.

The evening hadn’t been a total loss, though. Even with most of his energy consumed sparring with Julian, Saint had made sure not to let Grace slip away entirely.

However undignified the whole spat with Julian had looked in hindsight, the conversation with Grace had gone considerably better, by the end of the night, he’d seen her safely to her hotel, exchanged numbers, and even locked in plans to see her again.

"Lee... I want to sue every single one of them. Genuinely, this is defamation, plain and simple." Jasper’s own night had ended rather well, which made waking up to this particular headline sting all the more.

"Already on it... I’ve reached out to a couple of the papers who actually cover us properly." Saint, in fact, had started making calls before Jasper had even rung him.

"Hang on... you and Mike aren’t actually—" Saint cut the call with Jasper short once the practical matters were settled, then dialled a different number entirely.

"Grace... quick question. You don’t actually believe any of what’s in the papers this morning, do you?" The call connected to Grace almost immediately.

"Does it matter whether I believe it?" she asked, amused, deflecting the question right back at him.

"Obviously it does," Saint said, without missing a beat.

Saint had, admittedly, been thinking along these lines for a while now; someone worth actually pursuing, rather than the endless parade Jasper kept trying to arrange. Grace, in their brief conversation the night before, had struck him as genuinely different from the rest of that room.

Whatever cultural instincts Saint had carried over from another life, years living in England had taught him plenty about how relationships actually moved here; direct, straightforward, no elaborate courtship required before someone simply said what they meant.

If he was honest, this wasn’t quite the pace he’d planned on, he’d assumed there’d be more time to get to know her properly first. But this morning’s headlines had, in their own absurd way, handed him an opening he hadn’t expected, and he wasn’t inclined to waste it.

"I think the papers are almost certainly making this up," Grace said, after a pause.

"Completely fabricated, yeah," Saint confirmed immediately.

"Makes sense, really... can’t imagine someone with your... reputation... has genuinely gone this long without a girlfriend," Grace said, something teasing creeping into her voice.

"Funny thing... that part’s actually true," Saint admitted, entirely unbothered by how that sounded.

Shameless, maybe, but also just accurate, between two lives and however many years combined, there simply hadn’t been a girlfriend in the picture, full stop.

The call with Grace did more for Saint’s mood than anything else that morning, and by the time it wrapped up, something had genuinely shifted between them, closer than they’d been the night before, and both of them seemed to know it.

By the time Saint arrived at the training ground, though, that good mood didn’t last. Word had clearly spread ahead of him.

Because the moment he walked in, half the building seemed to be looking at him differently, not hostile exactly, just curious in a way that made his skin crawl slightly. England’s football culture had come a long way on this front generally, but that didn’t make being the subject of it any more comfortable.

"Boss... about the papers this morning—" Cadman, closer to Saint than almost anyone else on staff, was the first to actually say something out loud.

"It’s fake. Jasper and I are just mates. And for the record, I’ve actually got someone now," Saint said, cutting him off before he could finish the sentence.

"...Really?" Cadman didn’t sound remotely convinced.

Cadman knew Saint’s schedule better than almost anyone at the club, knew exactly how little room there’d been in his life for anything resembling a relationship these past two years. If anything, Cadman found the idea of a sudden, brand-new girlfriend considerably harder to believe than the tabloid story itself.

"You don’t believe me." Saint could read it plainly enough on Cadman’s face, no confirmation needed.

It wasn’t just Cadman, either, the rest of the coaching staff had clearly clocked the exchange, and every one of them was now watching Saint with the same skeptical curiosity.

"Right. All of you. I’ll deal with this later." Saint muttered it under his breath, already regretting getting out of bed.

It wasn’t confined to the coaching staff, either; plenty of players gave him the same look throughout the day, three in particular unable to hide their curiosity entirely.

Rocher, Lavelle, and Rami had all lived under Saint’s own roof during their first months at the club; not long, but long enough to have a fairly clear picture of exactly how unremarkable his day-to-day life actually was.

By the end of it, even Sallow had found an excuse to wander over and check in personally.