Because of the order of entrance, everyone ended up sitting next to his or her sibling: Cesare on the right with Lucrezia on his left, and since Alfonso had entered the box before his sister – possibly on purpose – he sat next to his fiancé, with Sancía closing the row on his other side. Neither Cesare nor Sancía seemed completely happy with this arrangement, and soon began to feel neglected: Alfonso kept bending over to tell Lucrezia something or to touch her cheek or point something out, leaving the other two no one to talk to. It wasn't really about the talking, of course, but one must not be too forthright about such things.

This situation persisted for some time. Meanwhile, the game below was ruthless, with players on both sides showing little restraint or little loss of energy, and with the commentators practically screaming into their microphones. It might have been true that the people in the box caught some of the game's intensity and that that was the reason things escalated – the game certainly had something to do with it – and yet none of the people in the box were seriously watching it. Everyone got up at the right moments, of course, but it's harder to not do that than to do it, even in a closed-off box.

It was Sancía who first tried to improve the situation, at least for herself. Cesare, for his part, was trying to win Lucrezia's attention and shooting Alfonso hateful glances whenever he didn't succeed. He hadn't suggested a reseating because the seating wasn't the problem to him: the amount of people was. Since he'd already passed up his chance of doing something about that, there was nothing he could do. But Sancía had no such barriers, and so she stood up, went to the end of the line of seats and haughtily told everyone to move over so that now the order was Alfonso, Lucrezia, Cesare and herself.

'Sorry,' she said, to Cesare in particular. 'The sibling bonding thing wasn't working out for me.'

She smiled beguilingly and flicked back her ponytail which had fallen past her shoulders. She probably had the smoothest curtain of hair out of anyone present in the stadium, and she liked to show it even if it was bundled together and obscured partly by a baseball cap. Unlike Lucrezia, she'd committed to the sports outfit, but for entirely vain reasons since she thought she could pull it off better than anyone. She wasn't completely wrong about that, to be fair.

Cesare returned Sancía's smile and watched her flick her raven hair with due admiration. 'I hope the bonding thing is still on, though?' He said coyly.

Sancía glanced past him at Lucrezia and Alfonso. Alfonso was holding a strand of Lucrezia's hair, which looked a little odd because Lucrezia didn't seem to be paying him much attention. 'Yeah, definitely,' Sancía said. Then she got out a pack of cigarettes and lit one for herself.

'You want one?' She asked Cesare, speaking with the cigarette clenched between her lips.

'Oh, I'm not much of a smoker,' Cesare said, and he reached out to take her cigarette and take a draw from it. Sancía didn't mind this – far from it, she thought it was sexy – but Lucrezia gave her brother a disgusted look that went completely ignored. He took another draw and then he returned the cigarette by tucking it back between Sancía's lips.

'You know, I really enjoy games. They bring out the child in me,' Sancía said, as she pretended to be enraptured by the football game. She even thought to let the cigarette hang casually from her hand, without bringing it to her mouth or tapping the ashes off.

Cesare ignored the game and looked at her profile. It was hard to imagine that anything brought out the child in Sancía. She had a darker complexion like him, with her eyes, eyelashes and eyebrows all as raven black as her silken hair. She also had one of those regal-looking faces, with a proud, curved nose and sculpted cheekbones – so if she ever asked you to do something, most people would do it even when she didn't look directly at them. She was a little frightening, actually, or so most people would say; but she used her looks to her advantage, as she did now.

'It's the opposite for me,' Cesare said to her. 'Somehow games turn me into this insufferable adult.'

'I think they call those kinds of adults teenagers, or maybe young adults. The ones that are too old for Twilight and too young for Fifty Shades,' Sancía replied, and she shortly turned away from the game she wasn't really watching to give Cesare a meaningful smile.

'Oh, I don't know about that. Depends on the game, maybe,' Cesare said.

Sancía dropped her burned up cigarette and turned her full attention to him. 'And what's your favourite game, Cesare?'

It was a loaded question; indeed, a loaded conversation, because they'd played one particular "young adult" game just the week before – that is, Lucrezia and Sancía had had a girl's night, and Cesare had interrupted it, sipping a bottle of whiskey and sending his dark looks all over the room. Cesare had sat around, the whiskey had vanished from the bottle and the bottle had ended up in the slender hands of wicked Sancía, who'd spun it around on the ground with the air of an excited schoolgirl.

To give a short account of the drama that inevitably ensued: the bottle first pointed to Lucrezia, who objected but still took Sancía's kiss in stride. Sancía tried to make Lucrezia spin it next, but Lucrezia refused long enough for Sancía to hand the bottle over to Cesare. The bottle again pointed to Lucrezia, as if it sensed her reluctance and enjoyed the discomfort it caused her. Cesare came down from the bed he'd been occupying to kiss his sister's cheek, or the corner of her mouth should the whiskey make him unsteady. His lips had only grazed her mouth when Lucrezia jumped up and took Cesare's position on the bed. Sancía laughed and spun the bottle again. They never knew where it landed on this time, because she put her hand on it and turned it back to Cesare. Cesare sniggered, and like his sister, he took Sancía's kiss in stride. After that, he took it sitting and lying down, too, to Lucrezia's sizeable wrath.

On the day of the football game, Sancía was the third person to refer to this event, though she was the first to do so in a light-hearted way. Possibly because she and Cesare had gotten the most enjoyment out of the game.

'Well…' Cesare mused, thinking back to the bottle spinning. He sensed Lucrezia watching him from the corners of her eye, and he had little doubt that Alfonso was listening too. If he replied what Sancía was trying to get him to reply, things might get uncomfortable for him. He was pondering how much he cared if it did.

In the end, he preferred not to offend his sister within the same hour that he'd apologized to her, and he said: 'Risk. Or maybe Twister. You know what they say, if you've got the flexibility…' He thought that was edgy enough, and Sancía squeezed his leg to show that it was.

'Well, maybe we can play Twister next time,' she said. Sancía did not know the extent of Lucrezia's ire about the events of the previous week, since Lucrezia had pointed most of her darts at Cesare, but Sancía was aware of some discontentment at the very least. Still she leaned forward to look at Lucrezia and involve her in the conversation. She had a slight inclination towards sadism, and she didn't hide it well.

'That would be fun, wouldn't it, Lu? Twister, just the three of us,' she cooed. This wasn't rude towards Alfonso, who was being excluded; or at least the principal goal of Sancía's words was not to spite her brother. She had a penchant for sadism perhaps, but this was meant to come exclusively at the expense of others – as sadism does, obviously. Inviting her brother to a night of "Twister" would likely be very uncomfortable for her, if the night of "Spin the Bottle" was any indication.

'Yes, sis, wouldn't that be fun?' Cesare echoed Sancía's words. He meant it as a joke and grinned at Lucrezia, but she didn't appreciate it.

'I don't think you will need me for that game of Twister, brother,' she said nastily.

His expression dulled and he turned back to Sancía, who was just whipping back her ponytail again. He said something about it to her, something that involved him touching her hair.

Lucrezia watched it with obvious disgust, though no one noticed because Cesare and Sancía weren't looking at her and Alfonso wasn't in a position to look at her. She finally averted her eyes and tried to follow the game. She was surprised to find that it had come to a stop, since it couldn't possibly be halftime yet. She watched the referee speaking to a couple of players, and realized what it must be.

'Oh look, a time-out! Great,' she exclaimed, emphasizing her words with care. She glared at Cesare momentarily, but he didn't turn to look at her.

'It's rude,' she fumed, and turned to her fiancé at last. She made a gesture to her right.

Alfonso appeared unsettled. 'Lu,' he said. He sounded taken aback, and not in a good way.

Lucrezia started apologizing to him, assuming that he was shocked by her outburst, but she soon transitioned back into critiquing the behaviour of Sancía and Cesare.

'Lu…' Alfonso tried again. She missed the urgency in his voice.

'No, I know,' she said. 'But I'm just saying that it's not appropriate at all, and-'

'Lucrezia!'

She frowned at him, but he was looking at something ahead of them, something in the air. Her lips started forming the word "what", but then she turned her head and it caught in her throat. The mirror of her own face stared back at her from one of the large screens that had depicted the football game. For a moment she couldn't fathom why they should want to zoom in on her, but then Sancía pointed out to Cesare that he ought to look up and she understood.

'Oh, no,' Lucrezia said to no one in particular, and she started shaking her head and waving her hands around in the air. Cesare was transfixed at first by the huge, ugly heart that captured the both of them on screen, and then he glanced around him laughing sheepishly as the crowds roared and the game's commentators cracked jokes. The kiss cam riled the blood of people in ways that young, muscled men carrying balls around couldn't.

Just when it seemed that nothing was going to happen – oh, but boredom is a thing the crowds simply will not stand for: it's not as if the Romans used to feed the lions before unleashing them on their gladiators – Alfonso reached out and put his hand on Lucrezia's wrist. He figured that when plan A couldn't go through, Cesare and Lucrezia being siblings and all that, then plan B was warranted.

Lucrezia turned to look at her hand as if she'd forgotten that Alfonso was sitting on her left. Cesare noticed the movement from the corner of his eye, and he promptly, quite thoughtlessly in fact, put his hand around Lucrezia's upper arm.

Now, what happened might have been avoided if Cesare had nottaken note of Alfonso's hand. It might also have been avoided had Alfonso not provoked Cesare earlier, or if Cesare had not provoked Lucrezia. But this is speculation – the only thing that one could say with some conviction, is that what happened could not be avoided any more when Lucrezia turned her head towards her brother instead of her fiancé. To ask him what to do, perhaps, since they were in that embarrassing situation together; or to tell him to let go of her. In any event, it sealed her fate, and his.

Cesare leaned into Lucrezia as soon as her head turned and touched his lips down on hers. His right hand went to the side of her neck to remove any chance of it being accidental or, God forbid, innocent, and then Lucrezia put her hand on top of his to remove any chance of it being one-sided.

The arena watched in fascination, for they had seen the initial refusal, the hesitation and maybe also the movement of Alfonso's – poor Alfonso's! – hand. It witnessed how Cesare wove his fingers in Lucrezia's glorious golden hair, the most glorious hair out of anyone in the stadium, surely; it roared wildly when he opened his mouth and slid his tongue between her lips, which she accepted eagerly; and it went entirely mad when Alfonso jumped off his seat looking like he'd been stung by a thousand bees. Sancía, on the other end, sat on the edge of her seat like most other people in the stadium, decidedly more fascinated than abhorred.

No one was sure how long it took, but Lucrezia broke it off before the kiss cam moved away. She jumped up like she had during the spin the bottle game, and stared down at her brother.

Cesare avoided her eyes at first and held his knuckles against his lips as if he were thinking. Then he lowered his hand, looked up at Lucrezia and laughed like they'd just fooled the entire stadium, which in a way they had. He payed little attention to poor Alfonso, who stood looking at Cesare with a terrible look of hatred on his face.

If Lucrezia hadn't been there, he might have tried to throw Cesare out of the box. But he was by far the kindest of the four of them, and so when Lucrezia said that she'd had enough of the game, he put his arms around her shoulders as if she were sick and escorted her down the stairs. He told himself that he'd beat Cesare to a pulp later, but that's the sort of thing people think and never do, especially when going down stairs. The French call it l'esprit d'escalier, or staircase wit, and it was a reliable philosopher who coined the term so we can be fairly sure that Cesare was in no danger from Alfonso d'Aragona.

As for the blonde dead cat going down the stairs alongside her docile fiancé – now that is something the French philosopher surely wouldn't make any promises about: because between her emergence from the box and the first step onto the muddy grass of the stadium, Lucrezia didn't have a single thought that was inspired by hatred of her brother. Nostalgia, more like.