safe in the wrong arms

Two Uniforms, One Girl

# Isabella's POV

The alarm tore through the dark, a thin metal shriek that found every nerve in my skull.

I didn't need a genius's math to know it: less than five hours again.

I kicked the blanket off. Cold air hit my skin first, then the shiver came a half-second behind it, crawling up my arms. My body didn't want to move. It never did. I dragged myself upright anyway, eyes barely slitted open, and shuffled toward the kitchen where the real alarm was waiting — the one I couldn't just slap into silence from bed.

Two years of doing this had taught me the trick: keep the phone far enough away that shutting it off means standing up. The kitchen counter, right beside the kettle, was the only place cruel enough to work.

I switched it off. Filled the kettle with bathing water. Set it to heat.

Then I put my head down on the counter — just for a second, I told myself — and the next alarm woke me fifteen minutes later, exactly where I'd left myself.

*Someday I'm going to crush this phone.*

But then I'd remember why I hadn't yet.

*For a better future.

To get out of these debts.

To get out of this apartment.*

The bathwater was warm. but the room temperature was cold enough to raise goosebumps the second it touched me, and I didn't linger — in and out, fast, like ripping off a plaster. I toweled off and pulled on my Barcelona FC training gear, then caught myself in the cracked mirror by the door.

I stopped.

Neat ponytail. Crisp kit. For one second I didn't look like a twenty-two-year-old working nights to stay ahead of debt collectors — I looked like the girl who belonged in that medical compound, like the physios who trailed after players worth more than my whole apartment block.

I didn't eat breakfast. There wasn't any to eat. Not that it mattered — I hadn't eaten breakfast at home in longer than I could remember. Every spare peso had gone into my mother's last months, and by the time that was over, I'd simply stopped being a person who ate in the morning. The staff buffet at work did that job for me now. One more small humiliation I'd folded into the shape of my life until it stopped feeling like one.

I locked the door out of habit more than logic — there was nothing inside worth stealing, not even bus fare — and took the stairs, because the elevator had been dead since the day I moved in six months ago.

Mrs. Alvarez was already out front, broom scraping rhythmically against the concrete, humming something under her breath. The hallway smelled like damp walls and someone's dinner from the night before.

"Buenos días, Isabella."

"Morning, Mrs. Alvarez." I gave her the smile — the easy, closed-lip one that came before I even decided to make it — and slipped past her toward the stairwell.

My scooter was where I'd left it, rusted and patient. I rode past buildings still waking up, past people walking with their heads down toward whatever jobs were waiting for them, and parked two hours later at my usual pit stop. From there, a cab covered the rest. Two hours, door to door, every single day.

By the time I stepped out at the medical compound, the lot was already lined with cars that cost more than I'd make in three lifetimes — a BMW here, a Ferrari there, sunlight sliding off hoods like they'd been polished specifically to remind people like me what we weren't. My scooter, parked blocks away, would've looked like scrap metal next to any one of them.

Inside, the medical department was already humming with its particular chaos. Doctors crossed paths between exam rooms. Physios flipped through reports without looking up. A knot of players laughed too loud near the water station, still in yesterday's confidence.

I found my way to the testing room before Dr. King arrived, and instead of standing around, I straightened what needed straightening — instruments back in their trays, charts stacked, the counter wiped down. Small things. But when he walked in and his eyes swept the room and landed, briefly, approvingly, on me, that was enough. That was the whole morning made worth it.

---

Priya and Sidney were already at our usual table when I got to the cafeteria, trays half-eaten.

"I am so happy for you," Priya said around a mouthful of pancakes. "No one deserves this more than you."

"Yes, friend, congratulations," Sidney added, not quite looking up.

"Thank you, guys. I really appreciate it." I dropped into my seat, spoon already halfway to my mouth. "This is like a dream about to come true."

"Wow. Disgusting. How are you eating like that." Sidney wrinkled her nose. "You can lead a donkey to water, but you can't make it drink daintily, apparently. You work in an elite club like this and still haven't learned basic table manners."

"Sidney." Priya's voice dropped into a warning hiss.

"What? I'm joking."

"It's fine, Priya." I laughed it off, because that was easier than not laughing it off. "Anyway, I'm full, and I need to get back to Dr. King."

I waved and left them there, Sidney's laugh trailing after me down the hall.

---

The rest of the morning blurred into checkups — player after player stepping onto the table, Dr. King calling out numbers, two names already marked with a red *no pass* by lunch. We'd finish the rest tomorrow.

It was, for the most part, exactly the kind of day I'd dreamed about.

Except for the ten minutes when one of the players leaned a little too close while I was logging his results and asked, with a grin clearly rehearsed on someone else first, if I wanted to give him my number. I was still working out how to say no in a way that wouldn't cost me anything when Dr. King walked back in, and the player straightened up like nothing had happened. Ten minutes later I watched him try the exact same line on the front desk receptionist.

*Football players.* There had to be something in the water at this club. Even Enric — in a relationship, apparently in love, apparently faithful — played the same game everyone else did, just with better PR.

I didn't have room in my life for a man, let alone a playboy with a locker full of them. If anything, Dr. King had just saved me a headache I didn't have time for.

Lunch was quieter. Priya and Sidney had both left early, and I ate alone, which felt less like loneliness and more like the tax that came with taking on more responsibility than everyone else.

---

By the time my shift ended, the sun was already low. I took a cab back to the pit stop, swapped the scooter's key from my bag, and peeled off the training kit for my delivery uniform in the cramped bathroom there. When I caught my reflection this time, a different girl looked back — the one nobody at the club ever saw. The orphan. The one drowning quietly in debt. The one running on four hours of sleep and caffeine and stubbornness.

I turned on the app and started riding.

*Please, please don't let one of these addresses belong to someone from the club.*

Delivery work at night meant learning people in fast, ugly snapshots — the creepy ones, the kind ones, the ones who wouldn't even look up from their phones to say thank you, the ones who complained about a five-minute delay like it was a personal betrayal. I'd stopped being afraid of the dark a long time ago. When you've had a knife or a fist waved at you more nights than not, fear stops being useful.

Around 8:30, I pulled up outside a narrow house for a pizza order, and a girl — maybe fifteen — came bounding down the steps to meet me, counting out loose change into my palm like every coin mattered, because it probably did.

Something in my chest pulled tight.

I used to save change like that too, all month, just for pizza — except sometimes my mother needed it before it ever added up, for something more urgent than dinner. I never minded. Somehow that made the pizza taste better on the nights we actually got it.

I handed over the box, forced a smile, and rode off into the next order.

---

By the time I'd hit my quota, it was past eleven, and I still had to be at the compound by eight to finish the second half of checkups — the captain last, according to the schedule. I raced the last stretch home on muscle memory alone.

The power was out when I opened my door. Of course it was.

I used my phone's flashlight to navigate the familiar obstacle course of secondhand furniture, dropped my training kit in the laundry basket, and stripped off the delivery uniform to sink into a tub of cold water — because that was the only kind of water I had tonight.

My room was barely big enough for the bed and the wardrobe that leaned permanently to the left, like it, too, was too tired to stand up straight. I collapsed onto the mattress without bothering to check the state of anything around me. Most nights, I didn't let myself see it — just a roof, just a bed, just enough.

*I'll deal with the rest tomorrow,* I thought, and then I wasn't thinking anything at all.