Pros fic: Mixed Doubles by JoJo - Pros Bingo 2016 - individual card
“Winners buy the drinks,” Bodie said as they rounded the net. “Them’s always been the rules.” He smirked at Pam and Doyle, slung a towel round his neck.
“Eh?”
Doyle, still high on victory, wasn’t so much sceptical as outraged. He’d never tried so hard to win a game of anything in his life. And he hated tennis. Probably even more than he hated cricket.
“I’m not buying any bloody drinks for giving you a good thumping,” he declared.
The girls exchanged the same quick, fizzy look they’d been giving each other over the net. Pam, glowing from the exercise, banged the face of her racket against her heel. She switched her focus to Bodie, swatted him with an accusatory glare.
“You never said that about the drinks before we started!”
“Well, it was close, Pammy.” Jane was always loyal to a fault, even when it involved a whopping great injustice. Even, it had to be said, when Bodie treated her like a doormat. “That last tiebreak could have gone either way.”
“Yes but it didn’t!” Pam squeaked. “Ray and me bloody well won!”
“Now, girls.” Bodie was pacifying and aggravating in equal measure. “Let’s not come to blows.”
Both of them turned to him, furious. Doyle grabbed the edge of Bodie’s towel where it was slung around his neck and began mopping his own face with it.
“I’m just winding you up.” Bodie’s eyes crinkled. Enough to make Jane simper. “There’s a tab behind the bar in my name. And they do sandwiches on Sunday afternoons. If you get a move on there’ll still be some left. I’ll have a tequila sunrise, heavy on the sunrise.” He jerked his head towards Doyle. “Evonne Goolagong here will have a pint of best, and we’ll see you lovely ladies on the terrace in ten minutes. All right?”
“All right.” Pam lowered her hackles, evidently quite charmed by the idea of the sandwiches. “Where are you off to?”
“To make myself look beautiful for work,” he responded, tugging his towel off Doyle’s face.
They all watched him saunter off, and then Doyle grinned. “Make mine lager,” he said, getting ready to follow. “I’m as parched as only a champion can be.”
“So lucky, Ray,” Jane said to him, almost admiring. “You really had no idea where that last lob was going to land, did you?”
Doyle’s grin seemed to have had the same effect on them as the crinkles. They laughed, relinquished their rage and headed off toward the bar, already whispering to each other in that perplexing way that double dates always did.
In the male changing room, Bodie’s kit was discarded on the floor and the shower was running.
Doyle dropped his racket on a bench with a clatter. He toed off his trainers and socks, peeled off the borrowed white Lacoste, and wriggled with difficulty out of the tight, sweaty, regulation white shorts. His ratty tracksuit bottoms had not been considered appropriate attire. He looked down at the discarded kit, rueful. Everything was smeared in rusty red marks from the clay.
It was a mystery to him why Bodie was so keen on sports that insisted you could only play wearing blindingly clean whites from head to toe.
“You know,” he said, wandering into the shower area. “It’s a mystery to me why -“ The rest of the sentence was cut off as something rectangular headed towards him at speed.
“Look lively, Detective-Constable,” Bodie said, voice half obscured by the plash of the water. “I like you nice and soapy.”
“Give over,” Doyle said at once, the soap pinging out of his clumsy catch and clonking against the tiles. “Don’t mess about, you moron, it’s a public shower.”
Bodie didn’t move from his spot under the far shower head. The water was cascading over his shoulders and down his chest, belly and dark, dark hair, mixing with suds. Dragging his eyes upwards through the cascade Doyle could definitely make out a crinkle. Expressing something he knew all too well.
Not the time. Not the place.
He tutted, flipped on the opposite shower, snagged the soap from the drain before it became soggy. It was good to feel the salt and sweat pouring off him under the hot water, the tingle of the heat against his scalp. He was facing the wall when he heard the other shower stop running. If he didn’t hurry up, Bodie was going to be on the terrace blagging both girls at once, eating all the grub, and acting as if he was at the All-England Club. Or whatever it was.
There was the sound of wet footsteps slapping across the changing room floor. Then silence.
Doyle waved his hand around trying to locate the shampoo. After a while his hair was full of it and great blobs of the stuff were running down his face. He scrubbed at his head until it felt squeaky clean.
“I find,” Bodie said as Doyle turned around again, “that playing sport makes me want sex. How about you?” He was half-dressed already, his hair spiky, holding out a dry towel and looking admiringly below Doyle’s waist.
Doyle turned off the shower. He put out a hand and grabbed at the towel as he stepped carefully across the slippery tiles.
“Yes it bloody does,” he said, winding the towel around him.
“Luckily,” Bodie continued, now looking admiringly at his chest, “It also makes me want sandwiches.”
“Yeah well, they have a lot in common for you, mate. Lots of chewing and swallowing.”
“Funny.” Bodie made a face then. “Now get a move on, sunshine, we’re due on shift in less than an hour.”
Out in the bar the girls had eaten most of the egg and cress, which pissed Doyle off because he wouldn’t touch the ham and mustard. Cheese and pickle it would have to be then. And sharpish.
“So, rematch then?” Pam asked when the plates were empty and she’d noticed Doyle looking at his watch. “Same time next week?”
“We could swap partners,” Doyle suggested on a cackle, pushing aside his pint glass.
“We’re not into that.”
Bodie made a rude noise into the remains of his tequila sunrise.
“You know, the civil service really are buggers - making you poor lads work nights.” She was caustic but not unfriendly.
“Yeah, paperwork,” Doyle countered with a long-suffering shake of his head. Pam and Jane didn’t know, but they’d been in the Home Office admin bubble long enough to know they weren’t enjoying occasional tennis and sex with a pair of Foreign Office clerks. It didn’t even really matter to them, but they did like to point out that they weren’t idiots.
They all exchanged a look.
“Let’s go then,” Doyle chivvied. “Duty calls.” They bent to peck cheeks.
“Don’t call us,” Jane said, one plucked eyebrow arched in cynicism.
As they headed off the terrace towards the car park Bodie and Doyle could hear the sound of faint laughter behind them. They’d often had the suspicion that those two enjoyed their own company more than their spurious ‘boyfriends’.
“Another couple of weeks,” Doyle muttered, “and it’s all going to go horribly wrong.”
“Maybe.” Bodie was slipping into work mode, his voice sounding more clipped.
“They know it, too.” Doyle slung both their bags into the boots of Bodie’s car.
“Lucky they’re troupers then.”
“Well let’s face it, they’d have to be to put up with us for no great reward.”
There was quiet for a while as the Capri turned left on to Holland Park Avenue heading east for the centre of town.
“Good game,” Doyle eventually said, a smug smile curving his lips. Bodie glanced over, quick.
“Best thing about it was you in those shorts.” His voice was still clipped, but he managed to inject just enough indecency into his tone that Doyle’s stomach fluttered. And then his imagination locked into Bodie standing in the shower.
“So,” he said, going for casual, flicking open the glovebox to check all the kit was there. “Rematch then, this weekend, you and me?”
Bodie kept his eyes on the road. Spoke in that military operations voice of his that actually turned Doyle on quite a bit. “Roger that.”
Doyle allowed himself one more quip before he got his head around an all-nighter.
“I do hope so,” he said, and picked up the radio handset to say they were on their way.
-ends-
Title: Mixed Doubles
Author: JoJo
Slash/Gen: Slash
Archive at ProsLib/Circuit: Yes please
Disclaimer: no money made, no infringement intended
Summary: Tennis, sandwiches and bantz
A/n: for the second square top line of my Pros Bingo card - Mixed Doubles :) Also fits the just-finished Discovered in Summer Shorts Challenge (just about!)