Ted Lasso fic: shadows, sweet shadows (won’t you come for me)
Story Title: shadows, sweet shadows (won’t you come for me)
Fandom(s): Ted Lasso
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,196
Summary: No matter how fast light travels, it finds that darkness has always gotten there first.
She’s too late, far too late, to fix him. He doubts anyone can, really. By his reckoning, there’s not enough to fix, the pieces of him that once were unblemished long since rent apart. They’d been put back together before, many times, until it just wasn’t worth it anymore to do so again (and again, and again). A bone broken once, twice, can be reset and good as new in a few weeks, but break it enough times and it’s never the same no matter how sound the cast and rehab.
Perhaps he’s lost the metaphor.
Anyway, she came too late. Which is the worst bit of all of it - and there are a lot of bad bits - because she’s the sort of light he thinks could have fixed him, back when there was enough material to work with and he weren’t so used to the him he’s become. She listens, she remembers, even the most offhand of statements divulged carelessly through a mouthful of toast at breakfast take root in her brain. It’d been unnerving - forgetting is usually best, in his experience - but he’d learned eventually she did it to help, not to harm.
He knows she’s too late, too, is the thing, it’s not like he only figured it out after they’d imploded. Which exacerbates it all, because the longer he’s with her, the more he lets her into the very marrow of his bones, the more it’s going to hurt. Not him alone, he’s used to that, whatever, he can deal with it. But this - he - will hurt her to one degree or another, it’s inevitable. She ought to get out while she can, while she’ll be able to years from now think of him with a shrug - if she thinks of him at all - just some guy who occupied her bed for a few months while she waited for someone worthwhile to come along.
The honorable thing to do would be to break it off clean. Actually, the honorable thing to do would be to have shut this down to begin with. Keep on the way he’d been going. He could live on scraps of affection, or things he pretends are affection, that’s fine, he’d been doing it since he learned the difference between a parent like Mum (praise, hugs, and bedtime stories) and a parent like Dad (… other things).
Yet days, weeks, months pass and he can’t do it. He’s neither kind enough nor strong enough to let her go the way she deserves. She’s wasting her time with him, and it’s unfair to let her do it.
But frankly, whether it’s fair doesn’t cross his mind. He hasn’t the energy to care or to consider how the outcome could be more favorable. She’d chosen him of her own volition, he’s going to see it through to its inescapable end.
Which it will, because nice things rarely stick around in his life. (Sometimes that’s his fault, if he’s honest with himself, but that’s beside the point.) He’d driven Mum away, he says things that earn him purple bracelets around his wrists from beer-soaked hands, he gets laughed at and yelled at for his brain being unable to put letters in the right places.
(It was better to act like he had no interest in that, being literate, he’d learned that long ago. Better for teachers and classmates and Dad to think football’s all he cares about, if it means not being called stupid, looked at like he’s stupid, scolded for messing up or not reading fast enough. They’re probably right, none of them take an hour to read a single page because the letters won’t stop swimming and when they do they don’t make sense, so it has to be him that’s the problem, right, so yeah, better to leave books to those who can read them properly and he can kick a ball around a pitch instead. Not much reading to be had there.)
It isn’t that he doesn’t realize she’s pecking away at his layers bit by bit, he’s not an idiot and being sneaky is not her strong suit. He notices when she starts to invade his closet space. He notices when he goes to the shops and buys her favorite shampoo because the bottle she has is nearly empty. He notices when some nights the bed is used solely for sleeping, when some nights one of them stays over.
He does it more than her, he notices that, too, and he finds ways to rationalize it to himself - her mattress is more comfortable; he forgot to buy coffee and needs to use hers; his neighbors are remodeling and the noise is irritating; the cleaners are coming in the morning and he doesn’t want to get in their way; any number of things, each more pathetic than the last, not all of which are even true - because otherwise, that means he does it because he wants to, because she’s familiar, because she’s one of the few people who actually likes him these days, and he craves it.
It’s soft is what it is, and he’s spent half his life striving to be anything but that.
He fails at it, not being soft, he can feel its throbbing persistence, but if he can’t kill it outright he will bury it alive and hope that one day it finally croaks. He can’t let it come to the surface, he won’t. Dad’s voice is a steady drip of poison in his ear that eats him from the inside out until the only way he can stop it is to submit, so he does.
(There is no stopping it, of course. What he means is, he can slow it. Even if he could stop it, it wouldn’t matter, the poison’s corroded any parts of him that once were saveable. If there were any such parts at all, anyway, which he doesn’t entirely think there were. It’s hard to remember what it was like to breathe free and clear. The morning of his fourteenth birthday, he thinks is the moment - which he doesn’t do often - think of it, that is - for he runs headlong into a wall of confusing blankness before he can get very far. That’s the last time he reckons he was his own person and not the host to a parasite that burrows its head deeper and deeper any time he drums up the courage to dig it out. Try to dig it out. Never works.)
So he weighs the scale.
On one side: Her.
He still doesn’t understand why she gives him the time of day when she could have anyone else. He’s not a nice person, he’s a mess, he hasn’t spoken to his mum in years, he’d rather stuff his own organs in jars than expose her to his dad despite exposing himself to his dad every damn day.
Which is exactly what’s on the other side: Dad.
He wishes it were a competition. That would make him less of a selfish coward. But it’s not, he’s not, there’s no doubt in his mind.
She’d burrowed her way inside him, too, god help him, but the consequences of ending things with her versus the consequences of resisting Dad? No contest. The worst he’s ever gotten from her is icy silences or expressions of frustration. Cutting - but verbal, her hands kept to herself.
She doesn’t give him scars and bruises for reasons she doesn’t explain in addition to the ones she does explain. In her company, it never happens that one minute he’s standing there behaving (thinks he’s behaving), the next he’s on his arse with his cheek aching or in hospital with a fracture spiraled through his arm that causes the doctor to ask him a whole bunch of questions he answers with lies.
(Dad, though. Dad.)
She wants him to bare himself to her, show her his vulnerable underbelly, as if he hasn’t already done that more so with her than anyone except Mum. Doing anything further would risk not being able to flip back over for Dad, who already pierces his feeble armor as it is.
So the idea of choosing her, choosing anyone, over Dad makes his heart pound and his breath hitch, makes his hands grow clammy with sweat.
It’s paralyzing, and he can’t do it.
This ain’t my fault, he says after a day of baiting her finally brings things to a head. I never wanted any of this, you were the one who said we should be more.
Stop it. Stop pushing me away. I’m sick of it.
Then stop making me into something I’m not.
They’ve done this dance before, spinning in careful circles like ballerinas avoiding a loose floorboard. Not that they’re very good at avoiding it. They dance right over it constantly, sometimes without noticing, and it weakens with every hop, skip, or jump. It’s always been when it’ll collapse that’s the question, not if, and right now the screws holding it in place are unwinding fast.
I’m not making you into anything. There’s more to you, I know it. I’ve seen it.
There must be, is the thing, because she’s not a liar and she wouldn’t have tolerated him for this long otherwise. She values her time too much to be wasting it all on him. He can’t see it, why she even bothers with him, but if she says so then there ought to be something.
Which is fucking terrifying. Terrifying and unacceptable.
I love you, she says.
I didn’t ask you to.
The sneer he can feel on his face is an old friend, plastic melted to his skin, too bonded to separate even if he wanted to.
(He does want to, sometimes, even though he knows it’ll peel his skin off right with it, because he hates seeing that look on her face and he hates that he’s the one who puts it there.)
I didn’t ask you to love me either, but you do. You said it.
I only said it so I could keep fucking you.
No, you didn’t, and you bloody well know that. You’re just too goddamn scared to admit it.
She storms to the door, opens it. A storm is behind her, too, rain lashing the windows and slickening the floor. She’s got a sneer of her own as she leaves him, ugly and sad and vicious in a way he’s not seen before.
Or maybe that’s not how it went.
Maybe it’s the way he replayed it in his head later.
Which must be the case, because he doesn’t think she’s sneered a day in her life. He might be that cruel, however, tell her she means nothing to him. Act like it hadn’t taken him weeks to work up the courage to confess to her and weeks before that to realize it himself. He’s not sure what he is or isn’t, what he’ll do or not do, what he wants or what he doesn’t. Who he loves or who he doesn’t. He’s fumbling around blindly with no frame of reference.
He tries, though, usually. Fumbling around blindly is better than doing nothing, isn’t it? Whether it works is another question entirely, but his whole life he’s tried to do things.
Is pushing her away trying? It doesn’t feel like it, now that she’s abandoned him for doing exactly that.
He hastens to the door she’d slammed behind her and runs out into the rain. She’s already in her car but has barely begun to reverse, so he raps on the window. She stares at him as rain sluices down his face and soaked top. He wonders if she’s considering releasing the brake, letting the car roll over his foot. It’d end his career, that, and he’s not entirely sure he’d blame her.
She doesn’t, she’s too kind for that. Instead, she puts the car in park - not off, he doesn’t get that courtesy - the wipers racing back and forth along the windscreen, and steps out. She regards him stiffly over the roof. He’s allowed no closer, the action says.
“What?” she shouts over the downpour.
Words fail him. Not just the right words, which is usually the case, but any words at all. She resembles a drowned mouse more than a woman, with her hair falling in ropes, her mascara running down her cheeks into foundation that’s hanging on for dear life. Her top has been rendered transparent, clinging to the skin and bra beneath. Bizarrely, it’s the latter that makes him pause. It’s an unremarkable garment - beige, two or three years old, the clasp at the back bent out of shape. Perhaps that’s why, the unremarkability.
Somewhere down the line, she’d stopped making her appearance performative. Sure, lace and red and leather are littered throughout her drawers, but for special occasions now. Because she’s grown comfortable around him, comfortable enough to wear the things that have had one too many washes, or sometimes nothing at all; she can’t be bothered, and she doesn’t care if he sees her when she’s not magazine-ready.
It’s such a ridiculous thing to get caught up on, the color and condition of her bra, yet he does.
Might be she thinks he looks pitiful, might be he looks like he’s about to have a breakdown, he can’t quite tell through the water and the way his porchlight shifts the shadows on her face.
What he does know is she lets him walk around the car, her eyes narrowed. She glances down at his bare feet, of all things. “You’re not wearing shoes. Why aren’t you wearing shoes?”
“Didn’t have time.”
“Okay.” Not a shout this time, for he’s close enough to hear. “What do you want?”
It plays out in his head the way it would for someone better, someone deserving. He’d give some grandiose, eloquent speech - or maybe not so eloquent, maybe stumbling and bumbling would do the trick, that could prove more endearing - then there would be silence cut through by the fat, heavy raindrops bouncing off the ground, a roll of thunder off in the distance for effect. Or not, the thunder may be too much.
Then right when he would think there’s an equal chance of being yelled at or her driving off, she’d fist her hands in his hair hard enough to hurt and draw him down into an indelicate kiss. They might fuck on top of her car, or in it, or possibly they’d make it into the house first, he doesn’t care which. They’d get pneumonia regardless, no doubt, it’s really fucking cold and wet out here.
It doesn’t happen like that, though, why would it?
Because “I dunno” is the response he gives her instead of an eloquent-or-stumbling-and-bumbling speech. Not even a “you, kid, I want you,” said in the way old Hollywood stars said it, Humphrey Bogart or Burt Lancaster, all suave and sophisticated. No, he’s more of a Brando - charming, yeah, but a right bastard.
More of one but not one, not any of them. All he says is, “I dunno.”
It’s the worst thing he could say, worse than nothing at all. But he says it anyway, and he watches as her face hardens. She shoves him out of her way. He lets her, then he lets her drive off, squinting into the car’s highbeams as if blinding himself will burn her out of him.
(It won’t. She’s been carved into his ribs since she told him her name under strobing clublights and there’s no spackle or sandpaper in the world that can fill them in again.)
She doesn’t return to him, as well she shouldn’t. She’d told him ages ago that she was done with that sort of thing. That she’d dated too many arseholes she came crawling back to and that she wouldn’t do it with him.
Who says you’ll need to? he’d asked, hiking his jeans up past his thighs. He hadn’t meant it any type of way, but she’d looked at him some type of way.
What’s the alternative? Be together forever?
God no.
It’d been obvious, at the time, that all there was between them was sex. At the time, she’d been little more than a convenience, as he was to her. Reliable and warm but temporary, intended only to last until she found someone who could do the boyfriend thing proper or Man City finally reeled in his line.
What I mean is, he’d continued, now pulling his top over his head, if you get bored or whatever, then you can leave. I don’t give a shit.
She’d laughed, nose scrunching up in that way it does. You’re a lot of things, but boring isn’t one of them.
All right, if I piss you off, which I probably will.
Thanks for the heads-up. See you tomorrow?
They hadn’t normally scheduled their encounters, but match days, those were a given. Whether he was riding a high - if the match went well - or needed to blow off steam - if the match went poorly - they were at their best afterwards.
Count on it.
He’d given her a wink, copped a quick feel, and nowt was said again about it. She’d taken it to heart, too, he finds, as days pass without so much as a text. He’d told her he’s not a bloke she ought to crawl back to, and so she hasn’t.
He shouldn’t be glad for the lack of matches Richmond’s got at the moment, he should be upset that the team tripped and fell over itself in its first Carabao Cup outing earlier this year, stalled now as they are for a week. He should be upset over that because without a Carabao Cup there’s one fewer chance to make Man City see they should recall him, one fewer opportunity for Dad to find fault in him. But he’s not upset about it, which does upset him and leads him to pacing around his room, too much energy trapped inside him. It writhes up his legs, down his arms, beneath his tattoos, ready to leak out of the swirling, inked-black pores.
Dad has gotten on him about this, too, the moving (a fucking joke that is; if there’s anything Dad isn’t, it’s still), and usually he can stop it if he tries - it isn’t that he can’t stop, it’s that he doesn’t realize he’s started - but he can’t now, he feels like something bad will happen if he does. He gives it a try anyway, forces himself to stop pacing, sit down, and just be - and immediately feels like he’s going to explode into a burst of blood and distrust.
Pink mist, that’s what he’d overheard from the dibbles when they came round once years ago asking about a man down the street who got himself a suspicious bullet through the skull.
“’Bout time Janice did him in,” Mum had said after they left, lighting a fag. (“Oh, no, me boy and I, we got no idea on that awful business, swear down. Sure you don’t fancy a brew, loves?” is what she’d said to them a moment before, voice pitching up all sweet-like.) “I’d have done it years ago, if I was her.”
(Would you have, Mum? he’s nearly asked a dozen times since, bloodied his tongue to stop himself. What gives him license to cast stones? What’s he done over the past nine years? Roll over and take it, that’s what he’s done. Yes, Dad, no, Dad, I’m sorry, Dad, I won’t do it again, Dad, I promise please I swear, Dad. You’re hurting me, Dad. Who’s he kidding, Janice Jenkins has more balls than he ever will.)
So he gives up on the sitting thing and permits his feet to take him where they will. As it happens, that’s out his front door, through his neighborhood, and into the heart of Richmond. Takes longer than he anticipated; he hadn’t ever considered the logistics of walking from his place to hers.
His heels are raw by the time he gets there, which is going to make training tomorrow a pain in the ass. He hadn’t thought about the shoes he’d slipped on, and these aren’t made for walking any real distance. Come to think of it, he hadn’t put on socks. That part’s probably more the culprit, the not-wearing of socks. Either way, blisters.
His finger stops over the doorbell, unable to press it as the idiocy of this plan - too generous a word, that, there was fuck-all planning involved in this - washes over him. Dad would laugh himself into a fit if he could see him, perched on her doorstep like he’s got any reason or right to be here. So he retracts his finger, turns around to go back the way he came, maybe spray himself in the face with the garden hose when he gets home, see if it’s enough to make him forget his stupidity.
Doesn’t work, of course it doesn’t work, he hasn’t banked enough goodwill with the universe for that (has he banked any?) and he’d forgotten about the motion-detector app she has on her phone. She greets him with an expression blanker than the slab of white marble on the island in his kitchen. If the marble were like to murder him, anyway, because there’s a lot more hostility emanating from her than there is from his kitchen island. The blankness and silence continue, a game of chicken that he’s pretty sure he’s going to lose.
“You stayed,” he says, losing. “With me. It weren’t supposed to - I never had that before.”
She stares at him like he’s gone mad. “What?”
“No one stays.”
“No one - I didn’t stay, I left you a week ago.”
“I mean that you did longer than anyone else.”
“You came all the way here to say that?”
“I - yeah - no, I just …”
He can’t say it. He’d like to think it’s because he simply has too much to say that he can’t get it all out, that all he needs is a few minutes to get everything straight and intelligible.
Which isn’t the truth. Well, it is, he has a lot he wants to say. But pride and ego and stubbornness and fear, all the things she’d accused him of, keep it buried. Saying it and meaning it, actually meaning it, is several bridges too far, no matter how much she’s made him realize that perhaps he does, in fact, mean it and it’s not, in fact, her cunt that he misses. Well, it is, he does miss that, but they’re part and parcel. One comes with the other.
Her voice is quiet. “You just what, Jamie?”
He’s always been a man of action - moving, always moving, stuttering, always stuttering - and so he is now, too. Aware he’ll probably get a slap for it, he grabs her round the waist and kisses her, trying to convey what he can’t say.
She pushes him off her immediately, as expected - but she doesn’t slap him, she doesn’t even put any more distance between them. She looks up at him with wide green doe eyes that have only a quarter the amount of affront he thinks they should.
Bolstered by her response, or lack thereof, he presses his luck. He does it slower this time; she could back away, if she wanted, shut the door in his face or smash over his head the bowl that holds her keys, and he’d allow it.
“Why won’t you tell me?” she sighs against his lips. He kisses her again without an answer, the one thing he can do; or, the thing he can attempt to do. She pulls back before he can and scoffs, “You think I’m gonna be that easy?”
He had, kind of, but putting in the effort is no hardship. He’s never minded. He enjoys it, really, and he doesn’t understand blokes who don’t. Who could possibly not enjoy getting someone off, watching them keen beneath your fingers or tongue, edging them with a finesse that brings them near to tears?
Well, their loss. He enjoys it.
With her more than anyone before, as by now he knows precisely the balance of getting her off quicker or longer, he knows what she wants when she wants by the way she responds, he knows whether the way she’ll pause and look at him means she wants it slow and gentle on silk sheets or hard and fast bent over a table.
The rest he’s rubbish at - speaking, feeling, thinking, existing - but this? Whipping her into a froth until she’s wet and begging for him? Oh, this he can do. It’s the reason she’d gotten with him in the first place, innit.
In the aftermath as he toys with her mass of curls and she sleeps contentedly in his embrace, so relaxed and trusting despite the wrongs he’s done her, things seem clearer than ever.
This’ll last, he decides, believing it with the arrogance and naivety that has doomed him before and will again. We’ll make it work this time. I can change, for her.
(It doesn’t
and they don’t
and he can’t.)
Fandom(s): Ted Lasso
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,196
Summary: No matter how fast light travels, it finds that darkness has always gotten there first.
She’s too late, far too late, to fix him. He doubts anyone can, really. By his reckoning, there’s not enough to fix, the pieces of him that once were unblemished long since rent apart. They’d been put back together before, many times, until it just wasn’t worth it anymore to do so again (and again, and again). A bone broken once, twice, can be reset and good as new in a few weeks, but break it enough times and it’s never the same no matter how sound the cast and rehab.
Perhaps he’s lost the metaphor.
Anyway, she came too late. Which is the worst bit of all of it - and there are a lot of bad bits - because she’s the sort of light he thinks could have fixed him, back when there was enough material to work with and he weren’t so used to the him he’s become. She listens, she remembers, even the most offhand of statements divulged carelessly through a mouthful of toast at breakfast take root in her brain. It’d been unnerving - forgetting is usually best, in his experience - but he’d learned eventually she did it to help, not to harm.
He knows she’s too late, too, is the thing, it’s not like he only figured it out after they’d imploded. Which exacerbates it all, because the longer he’s with her, the more he lets her into the very marrow of his bones, the more it’s going to hurt. Not him alone, he’s used to that, whatever, he can deal with it. But this - he - will hurt her to one degree or another, it’s inevitable. She ought to get out while she can, while she’ll be able to years from now think of him with a shrug - if she thinks of him at all - just some guy who occupied her bed for a few months while she waited for someone worthwhile to come along.
The honorable thing to do would be to break it off clean. Actually, the honorable thing to do would be to have shut this down to begin with. Keep on the way he’d been going. He could live on scraps of affection, or things he pretends are affection, that’s fine, he’d been doing it since he learned the difference between a parent like Mum (praise, hugs, and bedtime stories) and a parent like Dad (… other things).
Yet days, weeks, months pass and he can’t do it. He’s neither kind enough nor strong enough to let her go the way she deserves. She’s wasting her time with him, and it’s unfair to let her do it.
But frankly, whether it’s fair doesn’t cross his mind. He hasn’t the energy to care or to consider how the outcome could be more favorable. She’d chosen him of her own volition, he’s going to see it through to its inescapable end.
Which it will, because nice things rarely stick around in his life. (Sometimes that’s his fault, if he’s honest with himself, but that’s beside the point.) He’d driven Mum away, he says things that earn him purple bracelets around his wrists from beer-soaked hands, he gets laughed at and yelled at for his brain being unable to put letters in the right places.
(It was better to act like he had no interest in that, being literate, he’d learned that long ago. Better for teachers and classmates and Dad to think football’s all he cares about, if it means not being called stupid, looked at like he’s stupid, scolded for messing up or not reading fast enough. They’re probably right, none of them take an hour to read a single page because the letters won’t stop swimming and when they do they don’t make sense, so it has to be him that’s the problem, right, so yeah, better to leave books to those who can read them properly and he can kick a ball around a pitch instead. Not much reading to be had there.)
It isn’t that he doesn’t realize she’s pecking away at his layers bit by bit, he’s not an idiot and being sneaky is not her strong suit. He notices when she starts to invade his closet space. He notices when he goes to the shops and buys her favorite shampoo because the bottle she has is nearly empty. He notices when some nights the bed is used solely for sleeping, when some nights one of them stays over.
He does it more than her, he notices that, too, and he finds ways to rationalize it to himself - her mattress is more comfortable; he forgot to buy coffee and needs to use hers; his neighbors are remodeling and the noise is irritating; the cleaners are coming in the morning and he doesn’t want to get in their way; any number of things, each more pathetic than the last, not all of which are even true - because otherwise, that means he does it because he wants to, because she’s familiar, because she’s one of the few people who actually likes him these days, and he craves it.
It’s soft is what it is, and he’s spent half his life striving to be anything but that.
He fails at it, not being soft, he can feel its throbbing persistence, but if he can’t kill it outright he will bury it alive and hope that one day it finally croaks. He can’t let it come to the surface, he won’t. Dad’s voice is a steady drip of poison in his ear that eats him from the inside out until the only way he can stop it is to submit, so he does.
(There is no stopping it, of course. What he means is, he can slow it. Even if he could stop it, it wouldn’t matter, the poison’s corroded any parts of him that once were saveable. If there were any such parts at all, anyway, which he doesn’t entirely think there were. It’s hard to remember what it was like to breathe free and clear. The morning of his fourteenth birthday, he thinks is the moment - which he doesn’t do often - think of it, that is - for he runs headlong into a wall of confusing blankness before he can get very far. That’s the last time he reckons he was his own person and not the host to a parasite that burrows its head deeper and deeper any time he drums up the courage to dig it out. Try to dig it out. Never works.)
So he weighs the scale.
On one side: Her.
He still doesn’t understand why she gives him the time of day when she could have anyone else. He’s not a nice person, he’s a mess, he hasn’t spoken to his mum in years, he’d rather stuff his own organs in jars than expose her to his dad despite exposing himself to his dad every damn day.
Which is exactly what’s on the other side: Dad.
He wishes it were a competition. That would make him less of a selfish coward. But it’s not, he’s not, there’s no doubt in his mind.
She’d burrowed her way inside him, too, god help him, but the consequences of ending things with her versus the consequences of resisting Dad? No contest. The worst he’s ever gotten from her is icy silences or expressions of frustration. Cutting - but verbal, her hands kept to herself.
She doesn’t give him scars and bruises for reasons she doesn’t explain in addition to the ones she does explain. In her company, it never happens that one minute he’s standing there behaving (thinks he’s behaving), the next he’s on his arse with his cheek aching or in hospital with a fracture spiraled through his arm that causes the doctor to ask him a whole bunch of questions he answers with lies.
(Dad, though. Dad.)
She wants him to bare himself to her, show her his vulnerable underbelly, as if he hasn’t already done that more so with her than anyone except Mum. Doing anything further would risk not being able to flip back over for Dad, who already pierces his feeble armor as it is.
So the idea of choosing her, choosing anyone, over Dad makes his heart pound and his breath hitch, makes his hands grow clammy with sweat.
It’s paralyzing, and he can’t do it.
This ain’t my fault, he says after a day of baiting her finally brings things to a head. I never wanted any of this, you were the one who said we should be more.
Stop it. Stop pushing me away. I’m sick of it.
Then stop making me into something I’m not.
They’ve done this dance before, spinning in careful circles like ballerinas avoiding a loose floorboard. Not that they’re very good at avoiding it. They dance right over it constantly, sometimes without noticing, and it weakens with every hop, skip, or jump. It’s always been when it’ll collapse that’s the question, not if, and right now the screws holding it in place are unwinding fast.
I’m not making you into anything. There’s more to you, I know it. I’ve seen it.
There must be, is the thing, because she’s not a liar and she wouldn’t have tolerated him for this long otherwise. She values her time too much to be wasting it all on him. He can’t see it, why she even bothers with him, but if she says so then there ought to be something.
Which is fucking terrifying. Terrifying and unacceptable.
I love you, she says.
I didn’t ask you to.
The sneer he can feel on his face is an old friend, plastic melted to his skin, too bonded to separate even if he wanted to.
(He does want to, sometimes, even though he knows it’ll peel his skin off right with it, because he hates seeing that look on her face and he hates that he’s the one who puts it there.)
I didn’t ask you to love me either, but you do. You said it.
I only said it so I could keep fucking you.
No, you didn’t, and you bloody well know that. You’re just too goddamn scared to admit it.
She storms to the door, opens it. A storm is behind her, too, rain lashing the windows and slickening the floor. She’s got a sneer of her own as she leaves him, ugly and sad and vicious in a way he’s not seen before.
Or maybe that’s not how it went.
Maybe it’s the way he replayed it in his head later.
Which must be the case, because he doesn’t think she’s sneered a day in her life. He might be that cruel, however, tell her she means nothing to him. Act like it hadn’t taken him weeks to work up the courage to confess to her and weeks before that to realize it himself. He’s not sure what he is or isn’t, what he’ll do or not do, what he wants or what he doesn’t. Who he loves or who he doesn’t. He’s fumbling around blindly with no frame of reference.
He tries, though, usually. Fumbling around blindly is better than doing nothing, isn’t it? Whether it works is another question entirely, but his whole life he’s tried to do things.
Is pushing her away trying? It doesn’t feel like it, now that she’s abandoned him for doing exactly that.
He hastens to the door she’d slammed behind her and runs out into the rain. She’s already in her car but has barely begun to reverse, so he raps on the window. She stares at him as rain sluices down his face and soaked top. He wonders if she’s considering releasing the brake, letting the car roll over his foot. It’d end his career, that, and he’s not entirely sure he’d blame her.
She doesn’t, she’s too kind for that. Instead, she puts the car in park - not off, he doesn’t get that courtesy - the wipers racing back and forth along the windscreen, and steps out. She regards him stiffly over the roof. He’s allowed no closer, the action says.
“What?” she shouts over the downpour.
Words fail him. Not just the right words, which is usually the case, but any words at all. She resembles a drowned mouse more than a woman, with her hair falling in ropes, her mascara running down her cheeks into foundation that’s hanging on for dear life. Her top has been rendered transparent, clinging to the skin and bra beneath. Bizarrely, it’s the latter that makes him pause. It’s an unremarkable garment - beige, two or three years old, the clasp at the back bent out of shape. Perhaps that’s why, the unremarkability.
Somewhere down the line, she’d stopped making her appearance performative. Sure, lace and red and leather are littered throughout her drawers, but for special occasions now. Because she’s grown comfortable around him, comfortable enough to wear the things that have had one too many washes, or sometimes nothing at all; she can’t be bothered, and she doesn’t care if he sees her when she’s not magazine-ready.
It’s such a ridiculous thing to get caught up on, the color and condition of her bra, yet he does.
Might be she thinks he looks pitiful, might be he looks like he’s about to have a breakdown, he can’t quite tell through the water and the way his porchlight shifts the shadows on her face.
What he does know is she lets him walk around the car, her eyes narrowed. She glances down at his bare feet, of all things. “You’re not wearing shoes. Why aren’t you wearing shoes?”
“Didn’t have time.”
“Okay.” Not a shout this time, for he’s close enough to hear. “What do you want?”
It plays out in his head the way it would for someone better, someone deserving. He’d give some grandiose, eloquent speech - or maybe not so eloquent, maybe stumbling and bumbling would do the trick, that could prove more endearing - then there would be silence cut through by the fat, heavy raindrops bouncing off the ground, a roll of thunder off in the distance for effect. Or not, the thunder may be too much.
Then right when he would think there’s an equal chance of being yelled at or her driving off, she’d fist her hands in his hair hard enough to hurt and draw him down into an indelicate kiss. They might fuck on top of her car, or in it, or possibly they’d make it into the house first, he doesn’t care which. They’d get pneumonia regardless, no doubt, it’s really fucking cold and wet out here.
It doesn’t happen like that, though, why would it?
Because “I dunno” is the response he gives her instead of an eloquent-or-stumbling-and-bumbling speech. Not even a “you, kid, I want you,” said in the way old Hollywood stars said it, Humphrey Bogart or Burt Lancaster, all suave and sophisticated. No, he’s more of a Brando - charming, yeah, but a right bastard.
More of one but not one, not any of them. All he says is, “I dunno.”
It’s the worst thing he could say, worse than nothing at all. But he says it anyway, and he watches as her face hardens. She shoves him out of her way. He lets her, then he lets her drive off, squinting into the car’s highbeams as if blinding himself will burn her out of him.
(It won’t. She’s been carved into his ribs since she told him her name under strobing clublights and there’s no spackle or sandpaper in the world that can fill them in again.)
She doesn’t return to him, as well she shouldn’t. She’d told him ages ago that she was done with that sort of thing. That she’d dated too many arseholes she came crawling back to and that she wouldn’t do it with him.
Who says you’ll need to? he’d asked, hiking his jeans up past his thighs. He hadn’t meant it any type of way, but she’d looked at him some type of way.
What’s the alternative? Be together forever?
God no.
It’d been obvious, at the time, that all there was between them was sex. At the time, she’d been little more than a convenience, as he was to her. Reliable and warm but temporary, intended only to last until she found someone who could do the boyfriend thing proper or Man City finally reeled in his line.
What I mean is, he’d continued, now pulling his top over his head, if you get bored or whatever, then you can leave. I don’t give a shit.
She’d laughed, nose scrunching up in that way it does. You’re a lot of things, but boring isn’t one of them.
All right, if I piss you off, which I probably will.
Thanks for the heads-up. See you tomorrow?
They hadn’t normally scheduled their encounters, but match days, those were a given. Whether he was riding a high - if the match went well - or needed to blow off steam - if the match went poorly - they were at their best afterwards.
Count on it.
He’d given her a wink, copped a quick feel, and nowt was said again about it. She’d taken it to heart, too, he finds, as days pass without so much as a text. He’d told her he’s not a bloke she ought to crawl back to, and so she hasn’t.
He shouldn’t be glad for the lack of matches Richmond’s got at the moment, he should be upset that the team tripped and fell over itself in its first Carabao Cup outing earlier this year, stalled now as they are for a week. He should be upset over that because without a Carabao Cup there’s one fewer chance to make Man City see they should recall him, one fewer opportunity for Dad to find fault in him. But he’s not upset about it, which does upset him and leads him to pacing around his room, too much energy trapped inside him. It writhes up his legs, down his arms, beneath his tattoos, ready to leak out of the swirling, inked-black pores.
Dad has gotten on him about this, too, the moving (a fucking joke that is; if there’s anything Dad isn’t, it’s still), and usually he can stop it if he tries - it isn’t that he can’t stop, it’s that he doesn’t realize he’s started - but he can’t now, he feels like something bad will happen if he does. He gives it a try anyway, forces himself to stop pacing, sit down, and just be - and immediately feels like he’s going to explode into a burst of blood and distrust.
Pink mist, that’s what he’d overheard from the dibbles when they came round once years ago asking about a man down the street who got himself a suspicious bullet through the skull.
“’Bout time Janice did him in,” Mum had said after they left, lighting a fag. (“Oh, no, me boy and I, we got no idea on that awful business, swear down. Sure you don’t fancy a brew, loves?” is what she’d said to them a moment before, voice pitching up all sweet-like.) “I’d have done it years ago, if I was her.”
(Would you have, Mum? he’s nearly asked a dozen times since, bloodied his tongue to stop himself. What gives him license to cast stones? What’s he done over the past nine years? Roll over and take it, that’s what he’s done. Yes, Dad, no, Dad, I’m sorry, Dad, I won’t do it again, Dad, I promise please I swear, Dad. You’re hurting me, Dad. Who’s he kidding, Janice Jenkins has more balls than he ever will.)
So he gives up on the sitting thing and permits his feet to take him where they will. As it happens, that’s out his front door, through his neighborhood, and into the heart of Richmond. Takes longer than he anticipated; he hadn’t ever considered the logistics of walking from his place to hers.
His heels are raw by the time he gets there, which is going to make training tomorrow a pain in the ass. He hadn’t thought about the shoes he’d slipped on, and these aren’t made for walking any real distance. Come to think of it, he hadn’t put on socks. That part’s probably more the culprit, the not-wearing of socks. Either way, blisters.
His finger stops over the doorbell, unable to press it as the idiocy of this plan - too generous a word, that, there was fuck-all planning involved in this - washes over him. Dad would laugh himself into a fit if he could see him, perched on her doorstep like he’s got any reason or right to be here. So he retracts his finger, turns around to go back the way he came, maybe spray himself in the face with the garden hose when he gets home, see if it’s enough to make him forget his stupidity.
Doesn’t work, of course it doesn’t work, he hasn’t banked enough goodwill with the universe for that (has he banked any?) and he’d forgotten about the motion-detector app she has on her phone. She greets him with an expression blanker than the slab of white marble on the island in his kitchen. If the marble were like to murder him, anyway, because there’s a lot more hostility emanating from her than there is from his kitchen island. The blankness and silence continue, a game of chicken that he’s pretty sure he’s going to lose.
“You stayed,” he says, losing. “With me. It weren’t supposed to - I never had that before.”
She stares at him like he’s gone mad. “What?”
“No one stays.”
“No one - I didn’t stay, I left you a week ago.”
“I mean that you did longer than anyone else.”
“You came all the way here to say that?”
“I - yeah - no, I just …”
He can’t say it. He’d like to think it’s because he simply has too much to say that he can’t get it all out, that all he needs is a few minutes to get everything straight and intelligible.
Which isn’t the truth. Well, it is, he has a lot he wants to say. But pride and ego and stubbornness and fear, all the things she’d accused him of, keep it buried. Saying it and meaning it, actually meaning it, is several bridges too far, no matter how much she’s made him realize that perhaps he does, in fact, mean it and it’s not, in fact, her cunt that he misses. Well, it is, he does miss that, but they’re part and parcel. One comes with the other.
Her voice is quiet. “You just what, Jamie?”
He’s always been a man of action - moving, always moving, stuttering, always stuttering - and so he is now, too. Aware he’ll probably get a slap for it, he grabs her round the waist and kisses her, trying to convey what he can’t say.
She pushes him off her immediately, as expected - but she doesn’t slap him, she doesn’t even put any more distance between them. She looks up at him with wide green doe eyes that have only a quarter the amount of affront he thinks they should.
Bolstered by her response, or lack thereof, he presses his luck. He does it slower this time; she could back away, if she wanted, shut the door in his face or smash over his head the bowl that holds her keys, and he’d allow it.
“Why won’t you tell me?” she sighs against his lips. He kisses her again without an answer, the one thing he can do; or, the thing he can attempt to do. She pulls back before he can and scoffs, “You think I’m gonna be that easy?”
He had, kind of, but putting in the effort is no hardship. He’s never minded. He enjoys it, really, and he doesn’t understand blokes who don’t. Who could possibly not enjoy getting someone off, watching them keen beneath your fingers or tongue, edging them with a finesse that brings them near to tears?
Well, their loss. He enjoys it.
With her more than anyone before, as by now he knows precisely the balance of getting her off quicker or longer, he knows what she wants when she wants by the way she responds, he knows whether the way she’ll pause and look at him means she wants it slow and gentle on silk sheets or hard and fast bent over a table.
The rest he’s rubbish at - speaking, feeling, thinking, existing - but this? Whipping her into a froth until she’s wet and begging for him? Oh, this he can do. It’s the reason she’d gotten with him in the first place, innit.
In the aftermath as he toys with her mass of curls and she sleeps contentedly in his embrace, so relaxed and trusting despite the wrongs he’s done her, things seem clearer than ever.
This’ll last, he decides, believing it with the arrogance and naivety that has doomed him before and will again. We’ll make it work this time. I can change, for her.
(It doesn’t
and they don’t
and he can’t.)