Ted Lasso fic: Baseline
Story Title: Baseline
Fandom(s): Ted Lasso
Rating: PG
Word Count: 5,113
Summary: Problems are like mushrooms, she’d told Phoebe. The longer you leave them in the dark, the bigger they get. Perhaps she should’ve taken her own advice.
Author’s Notes: Spec fic written before episode 4 aired.
Richmond wins by the skin of its teeth, but it’s a win nonetheless, and they all now can officially call themselves a Premier League team again. The Higginses host a celebratory party at their home, the liquor flowing freely, enough to where Keeley can almost let herself forget that not everything is tied up with a bow the way the game was.
Almost.
It’s awkward, seeing Jamie again, even though rationally she knew he’d be here. How could it not be, after what happened? Worse, it’s made all the more so by the fact that it seems to not be awkward between him and Roy, headbutt aside. They’d hugged and laughed like schoolgirls at playtime, for Christ’s sake. Whatever Jamie had said in his apology, whatever Roy had said to accept it, it’d worked.
Except whatever either of them had said to each other had not been said to her, so when she accidentally catches Jamie’s eye across the living room, the delirious happiness she sees there wavers just a little, his grin falling. Her own stomach ties itself in knots at the prospect of confronting this head-on; the funeral was two weeks ago, and she hasn’t so much as texted him since.
But she’s a big girl, and she can’t just not talk to him ever again. Problems are like mushrooms, she’d told Phoebe, the longer you leave them in the dark, the bigger they get, and this particular mushroom could overtake the entire bloody lawn.
So, shaking off her nerves, she gathers herself up and wanders into the kitchen where she finds Jamie busying himself refilling a glass of water.
“Congratulations,” she says, smiling a smile that isn’t entirely fake. Everything else aside, it’s an amazing feat the team pulled off today, and he was a crucial part of that. “You gave everyone a fright by not taking that shot, though.”
“Right thing to do, innit? I weren’t there for what happened to Earl, but Dani’s been tore up about it all season.”
She hums in agreement.
Evidently deciding of his own accord that they may as well get this over with, Jamie glances over his shoulder into the living room. Spotting Roy embroiled in a chat with Thierry, he turns back to her and clears his throat. “Listen, um. About the funeral -”
“Forget it. It’s fine.”
“No, look, I - I didn’t plan to say it. Not then, I mean. It was just the … you know.”
Roy had felt weird about the funeral, too. So had she. So had everyone. Things were said and done that wouldn’t normally be said or done. Perhaps she shouldn’t hold that against him if she isn’t doing it to anyone else, no matter the gravity of it.
“So, you didn’t actually mean anything by it, then.”
She’s teeing up the answer for him. She’s giving him an out. He could end this tension between them with a single word and they could get back to the party, everything resolved.
Jamie wets his lips. “I didn’t - I mean, I don’t - I won’t - come between you and Roy.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know,” Jamie says. He sounds miserable. “Do you want me to lie?”
Keeley sighs, exhausted and wired all at once. “What are you expecting to happen, Jamie?”
“I’m not expecting anything.”
“Then why did you drop that on me?”
“I told you -”
“I mean, you just - after all this fucking time, that’s when you say it? At a funeral when I’m with someone else, that’s when you decide to say you’re still in love with me?”
“Would it have mattered if I’d said it sooner?”
“Of course not, but that’s not the point.”
Apparently hearing something in her tone that she didn’t, Jamie takes a half-step forward and repeats, “Would it have mattered?”
She stares at him, trying to make her mouth say what her brain wants it to, that no, it would not, how many times does she have to say it? Yet the words stick in her throat, and the way he’s studying her, she feels like a butterfly pinned to a board. It’s the way he used to look at her, back when declarations of love were welcomed. At the time, she’d enjoyed that he could read her so easily; she hadn’t considered that he’d still be able to do it now, when she wishes he couldn’t.
It’s moot, though, in the end - she doesn’t get the chance to say anything anyway.
“Hi, beautiful,” comes Roy’s voice as he walks up and wraps his arm around her waist. He glances between them, clearly sensing the tension. “Something wrong?”
“Nah, mate,” Jamie answers brightly.
“Yeah,” Keeley puts in, “Jamie was just … talking about that dirty tackle the keeper made.”
“Wanker. I’d’ve scored on that breakaway.”
Roy snorts, his mouth twitching a little in mirth. “Would’ve gone wide.”
“Would not.”
Needing to get some air, Keeley announces, “I’m gonna go find Ted, give him my congratulations. I haven’t done that yet.”
“Sure, yeah,” Roy says. “Catch up with you later?”
“Definitely.” Aware that refusing to acknowledge Jamie at all would make Roy just as suspicious as if she acknowledged him too much, she bids neutrally, “Bye, Jamie.”
The glimmer in his eyes is, unmistakably, curiosity. Curiosity and hope. Fucking hell, she should have shut down this whole thing before it even got started. She shouldn’t have asked for clarification, just pretended nothing happened as Rebecca told her to. Gone up to him with some smalltalk, making it absolutely clear that she would not so much as let him get a word in about the funeral. As dead and buried as Paul Welton, that’s what she should have done.
Except she didn’t, and now things are worse than they were before. On top of the uncertainty and awkwardness and inability to figure out where they go from here, she’d managed to give him the idea that he simply had shitty timing, that her heart remains open despite very much belonging to someone else, which was not what she meant. What she meant was that it was ridiculous he waited this long to say something, that it was unfair and inappropriate. That’s it.
And the cherry on top of the catastrophe sundae? Maybe it would have made a difference. Maybe it was just shitty timing. If Jamie had come to her weeks, months even, after they’d broken up, contrite and honest and committed to change, she might’ve -
Well. She might’ve.
Because that’s all she’d ever wanted, wasn’t it? She’d wanted him to grow up and stop shutting her out whenever he got too close to true vulnerability, and now he’s gone and done it. He takes responsibility for his misdeeds, his laughs come easy and often without a trace of cruelty, he makes the extra pass.
I finally think that I’m becoming the best version of myself. The kind of man that you always knew that I could be.
He was right. He has become the best version of himself. The one she’d seen since the very beginning when all she knew about him was his first name and the way his hair felt in her hands as he ducked between her thighs, when he drove her home afterwards with a kiss on the cheek and his number slipped into her purse, for next time. She’d seen through his armor then, and now her faith has been rewarded.
Which doesn’t make a blind bit of difference, not in the way he wants it to. It’s too late for that. He had his chance. She’s moved on.
The matter of his confession remains unsorted out, no two ways about it. She’ll have to deal with it eventually (mushroom, it’s a giant fucking mushroom).
But not now. Not today. Not when the only thing any of them should be focused on is Richmond getting promoted.
Jamie’s stupid speech and his stupid apology and his stupid eyes shaded with hope won’t be on the agenda at all, she’ll make sure of that.
At least, she intended to deal with it. Really, she did.
But she’s too busy with the unexpectedly complicated logistics of KJPR to go down to the training facility with any regularity, then Roy’s breaking up with her on a dime without any satisfactory explanation, then she spends what little free time she has crying at her desk and trying to get her colleagues to untwist their knickers. Then, then, then. Jamie falls further and further down her priority list until he’s squarely under the Out of Sight, Out of Mind category.
So when she does run into him, two and a half months after their abortive conversation, she’s not prepared in the least.
He looks good. Somehow, that silly boy-band-meets-Beckham hair works for him when it has no right to, and the new training gear whose procurement she facilitated through a fresh licensing deal fits him as advertised. She adopts an overlarge smile, desperately hoping she can will things back to how they were before the funeral, before there was this cavern of uncertainty between them.
It doesn’t work.
“How you doing? You good, yeah?” Jamie greets as Colin and Moe pass. His smile is tentative, and he anxiously twists the top of his water bottle within an inch of its life.
“Yeah, I’m all right,” she says. “You?”
He rambles. He says three words for every one needed, none of them with much substance. He went to the gym is what he comes up with. Maybe she should help him, but nothing comes to her mind either.
Smalltalk is her bread and butter, she excels at it. Thrust into an interaction with Jamie without warning, however, all she can do is keep that smile plastered to her face and nod along with whatever he says. She can’t decide whether it’s vindicating or upsetting that he clearly feels as uncomfortable as she does. If there were no awkwardness on his side, she could determine it was a her problem, something she had to figure out by herself. But it’s a them problem, it would seem, and not one that can be solved with time alone.
And because when it rains it pours, the movement to her left that catches her eye is Roy. Roy standing stiffly in the hallway, putting on a poor show of pretending he doesn’t see her conversing cordially with Jamie. Christ, she could not have asked for a worse confluence of events. On that, at least, she and Jamie seem to be of agreement; he pulls the ripcord first, bailing as soon as he, too, spots Roy. His goodbye is hasty, his departure hastier. She can’t blame him. For as much as Roy had said he forgave him, there’s a lot of history there to move past, even without the confession. Being a little skittish is probably a good idea.
She stares after him for a moment, a million thoughts and none running through her head. It’s just as well, she supposes. The hallway in the training center is not exactly her ideal environment for having that sort of conversation.
Roy is a much more well-known quantity. While it’s awkward with him, too, it’s the sort of awkwardness that she can navigate. It’s painful and she agrees no more with Roy’s reasoning now than she did weeks ago, but ultimately, the rigamarole of breakups is the same; it’s only the details that are different from one to the next.
“Hey, Keeley,” he says, quiet even for him. “Here.”
She takes the proffered leopard-print bag filled with what little she’d left at his house, and wishes she could give it right back to him. She doesn’t want it, she wants her stuff scattered around his house exactly how it was.
“Thanks for bringing this,” she says. “Saves me a trip.”
Roy grunts, staring somewhere at a point on the wall.
“Shouldn’t take long to get your stuff together,” she says. “I’ll text you.”
Roy grunts again.
“All right, well, good luck on Saturday.”
The team goes on a tear with Zava, all of a sudden no longer the butt of everyone’s jokes. The 4-4-2 formation that had been employed at Chelsea switches to a 4-5-1 for Wolverhampton, and sees not a hint of deviance afterwards. It works just as it should, Zava trouncing teams almost by himself, only a goal here or there scored by someone else. There’s a buzz about the team that Keeley’s never seen before, increasing with each passing game.
She should be thrilled. And she is, partially. She’s glad they’re doing well, and that merch and ticket sales are raking in cash. But as the Richmond faithful’s excitement rises, so does Keeley’s unease.
She hadn’t noticed it at first, Jamie’s lagging, and when she did, she’d chalked it up to growing pains from being dropped down to midfield. While he’d played that position as a child, she knows - how not, when he idolized the great Roy Kent? - he’d never done so professionally, so it would only be natural for him to chafe against it at first.
Except it doesn’t get better. In fact, it gets worse. His passes get intercepted, he veers out of position, and instead of keeping his nose to the grindstone and letting his talent speak for itself, he lets his frustration ooze out onto the pitch. He’s never been that kind of player, the one to get angry and aggressive, yet there he is down below in two straight matches having a yellow card shoved in his face by the referee. And there Zava is without a care in the world, reveling in the masses' appreciation, because he doesn’t pass the ball anyway, so it makes no never mind to him whether Jamie gets carded or not.
It churns her stomach.
At half, Keeley turns to Rebecca next to her. “How is Zava … fitting in? Everything okay?”
“I’d say so,” Rebecca replies as she gestures to the scoreboard. She grins then, a common sight since Richmond began its win streak. “Rupert must be shitting himself. Zava’s been a godsend. He’s in love with himself, but he’s moving us up the table.”
Well, she can’t argue with that. Zava gets results, as promised.
The team topples Brentford, as it did Wolverhampton and Burnley and Crystal Palace and Leeds and even the mighty Manchester United. Keeley has never seen Rebecca so happy and buoyant. Ted has the media eating out of his hand as usual, and the players all seem thrilled during their interviews.
And she might believe the rest of them, but she watches Jamie on the pitch and she watches him in post-game pressers, and he’s just … off. He’s a good actor, always has been; probably most people wouldn’t see past the marble mask he hides behind. She does, though. She’s had far too much experience chipping away at that particular block of marble, and even from the other side of the telly she can see the hairline cracks in it that herald imminent collapse.
It’s Shandy, in the end, who finally forces her hand. Keeley’s attention is elsewhere most of the night when they all meet up at Sam’s restaurant after Brentford, and while she clocks Jamie sitting in the corner table by himself, she doesn’t get the chance to talk to him most of the evening.
But as the event winds down, oh, she notices him then. Rather, she notices Shandy zero in on him and begin chatting him up, her charm and Jamie’s intrigue visible from across the room. For all that Keeley instigates a toast with Rebecca, a celebration of the things ahead, she can’t get the sight out of her mind. Not even so much the interaction itself as the way Jamie’s face had lit up.
He responds well to positive reinforcement, she’d told Ted once, and it’s as true now as it was then. Some positive words from Shandy, and Jamie’s all ears.
“Give me a sec,” Keeley tells Rebecca once Shandy steps away with a lingering hand on Jamie’s shoulder.
Rebecca raises a judgmental eyebrow, even as she dutifully takes Keeley’s champagne glass. “What was it you said about leaving things behind?”
Keeley doesn’t dignify that with a response.
Instead, she makes her way to Jamie’s table, where he’s finishing up the remnants of supper. “Can I sit?” she asks.
Looking rather like a deer in the headlights, he swallows his mouthful of food and nods. “Are you - is something wrong?”
“Maybe this isn’t the best time to bring this up,” she says, “but I think we need to talk. Finally.”
Jamie averts his eyes, instantly growing uncomfortable. “Oh. Yeah.”
“I know you have West Ham coming up, so just … whenever.”
“You haven’t - I mean, is your number the same?”
“Don’t tell me you deleted it again.”
Jamie gives her a sheepish smile. “No. I’ve got it.”
She knows she’s different. She knows she’s not the same person she was three years ago. Which she takes plenty of pride in - though Rebecca had been instrumental in helping her move onwards and upwards, Keeley knows her own gumption and ambition did the rest. If she hadn’t scaled Rebecca’s walls as Ted encouraged her to, if she hadn’t reached out to Rebecca at the gala, if she hadn’t set up Jamie’s promo shoot, Rebecca probably would’ve continued to look right past her.
Now here she is, the owner of her own PR firm, miles away from who she used to be.
And here Shandy is, reminding her of how far she’s come. Which is a good thing, mostly. But there’s a certain kind of yearning there, too, that she hadn’t realized she had until Shandy reentered her life.
They’d been thick as thieves, the two of them, traded trashy gossip from shoots like it was the morning paper. Helped each other through breakups, shared stories good and bad about previous partners, playfully slagged the other off.
Now, it feels like putting a shoe on the wrong foot. Had Shandy always been so … not shy? She seems so much bolder and wilder than Keeley remembers. Or had she always been that way, and Keeley, too?
It’s taken some getting used to. But if Rebecca could bring Keeley to where she is now, then Keeley hopes she can do the same for Shandy. Boldness aside, she knows the woman has a lot of ideas - some more viable than others, perhaps - and a lot to contribute.
It helps a little that for the most part, Keeley’s old life and her new haven’t otherwise intersected very much. Most of the gigs the VC firm has her going after aren’t the types of gigs she would do as a sort-of-famous-for-being-almost-famous pinup.
With Richmond, there’s even more of a gap. Sure, Keeley hadn’t always had a professional relationship with them. For six months she’d been nothing more than Jamie Tartt’s Hot Girlfriend. But she’s moved past that, they’ve moved past that, and sometimes she wonders if they consciously remember she was Jamie Tartt’s Hot Girlfriend at all.
Shandy has even less of that. She knows the team now, but only professionally, and for half of them she still has trouble putting a face to a name. So it’s easy to separate past from present where Shandy’s concerned.
At least, she’d thought so.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” Shandy asks a few days after Brentford. They’ve still got most of the team to get through regarding interview requests, and it’s going slower than Keeley would like; she’s more than happy to break for lunch. It’s not like the work is going anywhere.
“Of course you can. What’s up?”
“You and J … you’re like over over, right?”
Keeley raises an eyebrow. Of all the questions she thought Shandy might ask, that was not one of them. “Do you not remember the hour you spent on the phone talking to me after I broke up with him? Twice?”
“No, yeah, but I mean like you don’t want to get back with him, do you?”
“Why?”
“Okay, look, you know what I thought of him when you were dating. Fit as fuck but a wanker, like all of ’em.”
Keeley rolls her eyes. “Don’t think you have room to talk, Shandy. Your boyfriends -”
“I see it now, is all,” Shandy says quickly. “All that time you went on about how he ‘wasn’t like that with me’ and ‘there’s more to him,’ and all that shit, I thought you were mental. But you weren’t. Night and bloody day he is, from back then. And you knew it the whole time.”
“What exactly are you asking?”
“I just want to know if I can bang him, babe,” Shandy says with a snap of her gum.
Keeley stares at her. “I - really? Jamie?”
Shandy shrugs. “Can I?”
“Um. I mean, yeah, I guess,” Keeley says. “If you want.”
Shandy grins the sort of grin Keeley’s seen a million times before, the one that rarely fails to get her what she wants. “Good. It’s been ages since I’ve been properly railed and you always said -”
“I know what I said.”
Normally, Jamie preferred for her to take the lead. They both did. But sometimes a change of pace is nice. It’s that which flashes into her brain now, the feeling of him pressing her against her bedroom wall, his fingers bruising her hips, his teeth leaving a mark on her neck that makeup struggled to cover. It was novel, it was fervent, and it was fucking hot.
Keeley clears her throat, ridding herself of the memory with some difficulty. Unperturbed, Shandy flicks open the top button of her blouse, leaving a bit less to the imagination. “Wait, now?” Keeley objects. “Shandy, we’re at work.”
“So I’ll cut my lunch hour short,” Shandy says dismissively. “Wish me luck, yeah?”
Keeley reels as she watches Shandy head Jamie’s way. Work impropriety notwithstanding, she has no reason to dissuade Shandy from her mission, and moreover it’s a courtesy Shandy hadn’t needed to give her at all.
So she can’t quite explain why her stomach ties itself in knots, nor why she has the urge to point Shandy in the direction of one of the other footballers. There’s no shortage to choose from, after all, and none of them are ones Keeley has dated.
Yet it’s there all the same, the discomfort, and it only worsens when she sees Jamie laugh at something Shandy says, giving her his full attention as he had at the restaurant.
Keeley quickly, decisively, packs up her things, scrawling a quick note to Shandy and sticking it to the chair. She knows Rebecca’s in meetings all day, which means her office is free for Keeley’s taking.
She could use the peace and quiet anyway.
Can I come round?
Jamie’s text catches her by surprise, even though it probably shouldn’t, considering she’d been the one who told him to pick a time, any time, to come by. But between being swamped with work and her assumption that after the walloping the team suffered at the hands (or feet) of West Ham his mind would be elsewhere, she’d forgotten all about it.
Which puts her immediately on edge, because she’s very much not prepared.
She hasn’t been properly alone with Jamie since the promotion celebration, and she doesn’t have a clue as to how to broach the actual football of it all. He’d always been prickly when he didn’t play up to his own standards, and this is far beyond that. He hasn’t just been playing below his standards, he’s been playing below everyone’s standards.
She puts on her best and brightest smile when the doorbell rings, greeting him with a hug inversely enthusiastic to the conversation she needs but dreads. He loosely hugs her back with a quiet, “Hey, Keeley.”
He looks awful. The fact that he bears it so openly to her makes it all the worse. “Here, come inside,” she says. “Do you want some tea? Kettle should be ready soon.”
“Yeah, sure.”
She pours them both a cup and takes a seat on the couch. Dully, Jamie asks, “So, you wanted to talk?”
“In a minute.”
It is what she wants, and it’s what she asked him here for. But the look on his face is sheer devastation, nowhere near the kind of look she would expect for a discussion about what happened at the funeral.
“Okay, what, then?”
She leans over and gently prods his ribs where she knows he’d taken a hard fall, then the scrape on his cheekbone from the scuffle. “This. I’m worried, Jamie.”
Jamie hunches in on himself. “I know my game’s been shit.”
“No, I’m worried about you. You’re fighting, you’re losing the ball, sometimes I barely recognize you on the pitch.” She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “I know things are weird between us, but you can still talk to me.”
His eyes search hers, gray meeting green. Slowly, the guardedness fades away, leaving only pain. “They’re gonna transfer me. Soon as the window’s here, I’m gone.”
Keeley nearly chokes on her tea. “What? Why would you say that?”
“Heard Ms. Welton talking with Higgins about money, how the club is strapped.”
“They said they’re going to transfer you?”
“Not specifically,” Jamie allows. “But it’s what’s best, everyone knows that. There ain’t a place for me at striker anymore, I’m fucking terrible at midfield, and the chances on goal I do get are stolen anyway. I’m a liability, and so’s my salary.”
“That is not going to happen. Even if Rebecca wanted to, Ted wouldn’t stand for it.”
Jamie scoffs. “Ted transferred me once, why wouldn’t he do it again?”
“That - this is different. It’s not like it was with Man City.”
“Close enough. Point is, they’ll put the club above me. Which they should.”
“So that’s why you’ve been playing badly? Because you think they’ll transfer you?” she asks. Jamie’s hands are clenched so tightly around his cup that she’s afraid it’ll shatter. Carefully she wrests the cup from him and squeezes his hand in its place. “It’s not like you to roll over. Come on, there’s something else.”
Jamie’s voice is small. “It’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair?”
“Zava.” Jamie spits the name, and then the words come fast and bitter. “I know I was a selfish prick when I first came to Richmond, yeah, but he’s worse and everyone loves him anyway. Ted gives him whatever he wants. I got sent away, but not Zava. He gets more and more, and then there’s fucking Dad, he -”
“He came to see you?” she asks, horrified.
“No, just … just texts and some calls.”
There’s no “just” about it, as far as she’s concerned. She flashes back to the night of the game at Wembley, how utterly destroyed Jamie had been. She’d hoped he had blocked James’s number after that. Then again, who knows what James would do if he couldn’t reach his son on the phone.
Jamie rakes a hand through his hair. “It’s stupid, I’m being stupid. Be a team player, right, that’s what I’m supposed to do? What happens to me don’t matter, ’s long as the team does good.”
“Of course it matters, Jamie. I’ll talk to Rebecca. You are not going anywhere, I promise.”
He stares at her, eyes wide and shiny with unshed tears. “Yeah?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“’Cause of … what happened.”
Oh. That.
I love you, Keeley. Sorry.
“Guess we never finished that talk.”
“Weren’t much else to say, was there?” he asks.
“No,” she says, working past the sudden hollow feeling in her gut, “there wasn’t.”
“Look, can we just … forget it happened? I miss you. As a friend, I mean. Nothing else.”
It’s not “nothing else,” really, if he feels the same as he did four months ago. Which she has to presume he does, or else he’d say otherwise. But she’s bloody tired of walking on eggshells and suffering this gulf between them.
Because she misses him, too. She misses rolling her eyes at his arrogance and she misses the way he can make her laugh and she misses how he says her name and she misses the depths of him that so often he only lets be seen by her.
Besides, in the grand scheme of things, so what if he’s in love with her? He’d said himself that he doesn’t expect anything, that his offer of friendship isn’t predicated on it leading to something more. If he can sidestep his feelings, well, so can she.
There isn’t Roy to consider anymore either, at least not as much as there was then, the realization of which - somewhat guiltily - lifts a weight off her shoulders. She has only herself to consider now; there’s no fretting that Jamie’s head will be shoved through a wall or her being looked at like she’d done something.
“Yeah, forget it,” she says, surprised at how much she means it. She squeezes his hand again and affixes him with a glare. “Now, what are you going to do about your game?”
“Roy’s training me, he thinks that’ll help.”
That’s news she wouldn’t have thought she’d hear in a million years. “He’s training you?”
“Started after Brentford. Mostly he yells and sends me on runs. Says it’s ‘foundational’ and we’ll get to the football later.”
“Don’t get caught up in all that,” she says. “Anger worked for Roy, he used it to ground himself. Still does. But that’s not you, Jamie. You can succeed without it.”
“At striker, maybe. Not at midfield. I’m rubbish back there. You’ve seen it.”
“No, I’ve seen you half-ass it. You’ve let Zava get in your head and it’s distracted you. You’re using your new position as an excuse.”
He lets out an indignant squawk. “An excuse -?”
“Fuck Zava,” she continues. “Fuck your dad and everything else. It’s all just noise. Play your way, the way I know you can. The rest will follow.”
“Yeah,” Jamie says. “Yeah, okay.”
“Good.”
He lingers to drain the remainder of his tea, then gets to his feet and pulls her to hers. He takes her in for a moment. Perhaps she should feel discomfited or that it’s stepping over a line, but she just feels … well, she doesn’t quite know what, but discomfited isn’t it.
This time without hesitation, he leans down and draws her into a hug, arms tight around her. In her ear, he murmurs, “Thanks, Keeley.”
She smiles against his chest, inhaling the scent of his expensive detergent and cheap body spray. It’s pungent and atrocious, but so achingly familiar that she can’t bring herself to pull away.
Fandom(s): Ted Lasso
Rating: PG
Word Count: 5,113
Summary: Problems are like mushrooms, she’d told Phoebe. The longer you leave them in the dark, the bigger they get. Perhaps she should’ve taken her own advice.
Author’s Notes: Spec fic written before episode 4 aired.
Richmond wins by the skin of its teeth, but it’s a win nonetheless, and they all now can officially call themselves a Premier League team again. The Higginses host a celebratory party at their home, the liquor flowing freely, enough to where Keeley can almost let herself forget that not everything is tied up with a bow the way the game was.
Almost.
It’s awkward, seeing Jamie again, even though rationally she knew he’d be here. How could it not be, after what happened? Worse, it’s made all the more so by the fact that it seems to not be awkward between him and Roy, headbutt aside. They’d hugged and laughed like schoolgirls at playtime, for Christ’s sake. Whatever Jamie had said in his apology, whatever Roy had said to accept it, it’d worked.
Except whatever either of them had said to each other had not been said to her, so when she accidentally catches Jamie’s eye across the living room, the delirious happiness she sees there wavers just a little, his grin falling. Her own stomach ties itself in knots at the prospect of confronting this head-on; the funeral was two weeks ago, and she hasn’t so much as texted him since.
But she’s a big girl, and she can’t just not talk to him ever again. Problems are like mushrooms, she’d told Phoebe, the longer you leave them in the dark, the bigger they get, and this particular mushroom could overtake the entire bloody lawn.
So, shaking off her nerves, she gathers herself up and wanders into the kitchen where she finds Jamie busying himself refilling a glass of water.
“Congratulations,” she says, smiling a smile that isn’t entirely fake. Everything else aside, it’s an amazing feat the team pulled off today, and he was a crucial part of that. “You gave everyone a fright by not taking that shot, though.”
“Right thing to do, innit? I weren’t there for what happened to Earl, but Dani’s been tore up about it all season.”
She hums in agreement.
Evidently deciding of his own accord that they may as well get this over with, Jamie glances over his shoulder into the living room. Spotting Roy embroiled in a chat with Thierry, he turns back to her and clears his throat. “Listen, um. About the funeral -”
“Forget it. It’s fine.”
“No, look, I - I didn’t plan to say it. Not then, I mean. It was just the … you know.”
Roy had felt weird about the funeral, too. So had she. So had everyone. Things were said and done that wouldn’t normally be said or done. Perhaps she shouldn’t hold that against him if she isn’t doing it to anyone else, no matter the gravity of it.
“So, you didn’t actually mean anything by it, then.”
She’s teeing up the answer for him. She’s giving him an out. He could end this tension between them with a single word and they could get back to the party, everything resolved.
Jamie wets his lips. “I didn’t - I mean, I don’t - I won’t - come between you and Roy.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know,” Jamie says. He sounds miserable. “Do you want me to lie?”
Keeley sighs, exhausted and wired all at once. “What are you expecting to happen, Jamie?”
“I’m not expecting anything.”
“Then why did you drop that on me?”
“I told you -”
“I mean, you just - after all this fucking time, that’s when you say it? At a funeral when I’m with someone else, that’s when you decide to say you’re still in love with me?”
“Would it have mattered if I’d said it sooner?”
“Of course not, but that’s not the point.”
Apparently hearing something in her tone that she didn’t, Jamie takes a half-step forward and repeats, “Would it have mattered?”
She stares at him, trying to make her mouth say what her brain wants it to, that no, it would not, how many times does she have to say it? Yet the words stick in her throat, and the way he’s studying her, she feels like a butterfly pinned to a board. It’s the way he used to look at her, back when declarations of love were welcomed. At the time, she’d enjoyed that he could read her so easily; she hadn’t considered that he’d still be able to do it now, when she wishes he couldn’t.
It’s moot, though, in the end - she doesn’t get the chance to say anything anyway.
“Hi, beautiful,” comes Roy’s voice as he walks up and wraps his arm around her waist. He glances between them, clearly sensing the tension. “Something wrong?”
“Nah, mate,” Jamie answers brightly.
“Yeah,” Keeley puts in, “Jamie was just … talking about that dirty tackle the keeper made.”
“Wanker. I’d’ve scored on that breakaway.”
Roy snorts, his mouth twitching a little in mirth. “Would’ve gone wide.”
“Would not.”
Needing to get some air, Keeley announces, “I’m gonna go find Ted, give him my congratulations. I haven’t done that yet.”
“Sure, yeah,” Roy says. “Catch up with you later?”
“Definitely.” Aware that refusing to acknowledge Jamie at all would make Roy just as suspicious as if she acknowledged him too much, she bids neutrally, “Bye, Jamie.”
The glimmer in his eyes is, unmistakably, curiosity. Curiosity and hope. Fucking hell, she should have shut down this whole thing before it even got started. She shouldn’t have asked for clarification, just pretended nothing happened as Rebecca told her to. Gone up to him with some smalltalk, making it absolutely clear that she would not so much as let him get a word in about the funeral. As dead and buried as Paul Welton, that’s what she should have done.
Except she didn’t, and now things are worse than they were before. On top of the uncertainty and awkwardness and inability to figure out where they go from here, she’d managed to give him the idea that he simply had shitty timing, that her heart remains open despite very much belonging to someone else, which was not what she meant. What she meant was that it was ridiculous he waited this long to say something, that it was unfair and inappropriate. That’s it.
And the cherry on top of the catastrophe sundae? Maybe it would have made a difference. Maybe it was just shitty timing. If Jamie had come to her weeks, months even, after they’d broken up, contrite and honest and committed to change, she might’ve -
Well. She might’ve.
Because that’s all she’d ever wanted, wasn’t it? She’d wanted him to grow up and stop shutting her out whenever he got too close to true vulnerability, and now he’s gone and done it. He takes responsibility for his misdeeds, his laughs come easy and often without a trace of cruelty, he makes the extra pass.
I finally think that I’m becoming the best version of myself. The kind of man that you always knew that I could be.
He was right. He has become the best version of himself. The one she’d seen since the very beginning when all she knew about him was his first name and the way his hair felt in her hands as he ducked between her thighs, when he drove her home afterwards with a kiss on the cheek and his number slipped into her purse, for next time. She’d seen through his armor then, and now her faith has been rewarded.
Which doesn’t make a blind bit of difference, not in the way he wants it to. It’s too late for that. He had his chance. She’s moved on.
The matter of his confession remains unsorted out, no two ways about it. She’ll have to deal with it eventually (mushroom, it’s a giant fucking mushroom).
But not now. Not today. Not when the only thing any of them should be focused on is Richmond getting promoted.
Jamie’s stupid speech and his stupid apology and his stupid eyes shaded with hope won’t be on the agenda at all, she’ll make sure of that.
At least, she intended to deal with it. Really, she did.
But she’s too busy with the unexpectedly complicated logistics of KJPR to go down to the training facility with any regularity, then Roy’s breaking up with her on a dime without any satisfactory explanation, then she spends what little free time she has crying at her desk and trying to get her colleagues to untwist their knickers. Then, then, then. Jamie falls further and further down her priority list until he’s squarely under the Out of Sight, Out of Mind category.
So when she does run into him, two and a half months after their abortive conversation, she’s not prepared in the least.
He looks good. Somehow, that silly boy-band-meets-Beckham hair works for him when it has no right to, and the new training gear whose procurement she facilitated through a fresh licensing deal fits him as advertised. She adopts an overlarge smile, desperately hoping she can will things back to how they were before the funeral, before there was this cavern of uncertainty between them.
It doesn’t work.
“How you doing? You good, yeah?” Jamie greets as Colin and Moe pass. His smile is tentative, and he anxiously twists the top of his water bottle within an inch of its life.
“Yeah, I’m all right,” she says. “You?”
He rambles. He says three words for every one needed, none of them with much substance. He went to the gym is what he comes up with. Maybe she should help him, but nothing comes to her mind either.
Smalltalk is her bread and butter, she excels at it. Thrust into an interaction with Jamie without warning, however, all she can do is keep that smile plastered to her face and nod along with whatever he says. She can’t decide whether it’s vindicating or upsetting that he clearly feels as uncomfortable as she does. If there were no awkwardness on his side, she could determine it was a her problem, something she had to figure out by herself. But it’s a them problem, it would seem, and not one that can be solved with time alone.
And because when it rains it pours, the movement to her left that catches her eye is Roy. Roy standing stiffly in the hallway, putting on a poor show of pretending he doesn’t see her conversing cordially with Jamie. Christ, she could not have asked for a worse confluence of events. On that, at least, she and Jamie seem to be of agreement; he pulls the ripcord first, bailing as soon as he, too, spots Roy. His goodbye is hasty, his departure hastier. She can’t blame him. For as much as Roy had said he forgave him, there’s a lot of history there to move past, even without the confession. Being a little skittish is probably a good idea.
She stares after him for a moment, a million thoughts and none running through her head. It’s just as well, she supposes. The hallway in the training center is not exactly her ideal environment for having that sort of conversation.
Roy is a much more well-known quantity. While it’s awkward with him, too, it’s the sort of awkwardness that she can navigate. It’s painful and she agrees no more with Roy’s reasoning now than she did weeks ago, but ultimately, the rigamarole of breakups is the same; it’s only the details that are different from one to the next.
“Hey, Keeley,” he says, quiet even for him. “Here.”
She takes the proffered leopard-print bag filled with what little she’d left at his house, and wishes she could give it right back to him. She doesn’t want it, she wants her stuff scattered around his house exactly how it was.
“Thanks for bringing this,” she says. “Saves me a trip.”
Roy grunts, staring somewhere at a point on the wall.
“Shouldn’t take long to get your stuff together,” she says. “I’ll text you.”
Roy grunts again.
“All right, well, good luck on Saturday.”
The team goes on a tear with Zava, all of a sudden no longer the butt of everyone’s jokes. The 4-4-2 formation that had been employed at Chelsea switches to a 4-5-1 for Wolverhampton, and sees not a hint of deviance afterwards. It works just as it should, Zava trouncing teams almost by himself, only a goal here or there scored by someone else. There’s a buzz about the team that Keeley’s never seen before, increasing with each passing game.
She should be thrilled. And she is, partially. She’s glad they’re doing well, and that merch and ticket sales are raking in cash. But as the Richmond faithful’s excitement rises, so does Keeley’s unease.
She hadn’t noticed it at first, Jamie’s lagging, and when she did, she’d chalked it up to growing pains from being dropped down to midfield. While he’d played that position as a child, she knows - how not, when he idolized the great Roy Kent? - he’d never done so professionally, so it would only be natural for him to chafe against it at first.
Except it doesn’t get better. In fact, it gets worse. His passes get intercepted, he veers out of position, and instead of keeping his nose to the grindstone and letting his talent speak for itself, he lets his frustration ooze out onto the pitch. He’s never been that kind of player, the one to get angry and aggressive, yet there he is down below in two straight matches having a yellow card shoved in his face by the referee. And there Zava is without a care in the world, reveling in the masses' appreciation, because he doesn’t pass the ball anyway, so it makes no never mind to him whether Jamie gets carded or not.
It churns her stomach.
At half, Keeley turns to Rebecca next to her. “How is Zava … fitting in? Everything okay?”
“I’d say so,” Rebecca replies as she gestures to the scoreboard. She grins then, a common sight since Richmond began its win streak. “Rupert must be shitting himself. Zava’s been a godsend. He’s in love with himself, but he’s moving us up the table.”
Well, she can’t argue with that. Zava gets results, as promised.
The team topples Brentford, as it did Wolverhampton and Burnley and Crystal Palace and Leeds and even the mighty Manchester United. Keeley has never seen Rebecca so happy and buoyant. Ted has the media eating out of his hand as usual, and the players all seem thrilled during their interviews.
And she might believe the rest of them, but she watches Jamie on the pitch and she watches him in post-game pressers, and he’s just … off. He’s a good actor, always has been; probably most people wouldn’t see past the marble mask he hides behind. She does, though. She’s had far too much experience chipping away at that particular block of marble, and even from the other side of the telly she can see the hairline cracks in it that herald imminent collapse.
It’s Shandy, in the end, who finally forces her hand. Keeley’s attention is elsewhere most of the night when they all meet up at Sam’s restaurant after Brentford, and while she clocks Jamie sitting in the corner table by himself, she doesn’t get the chance to talk to him most of the evening.
But as the event winds down, oh, she notices him then. Rather, she notices Shandy zero in on him and begin chatting him up, her charm and Jamie’s intrigue visible from across the room. For all that Keeley instigates a toast with Rebecca, a celebration of the things ahead, she can’t get the sight out of her mind. Not even so much the interaction itself as the way Jamie’s face had lit up.
He responds well to positive reinforcement, she’d told Ted once, and it’s as true now as it was then. Some positive words from Shandy, and Jamie’s all ears.
“Give me a sec,” Keeley tells Rebecca once Shandy steps away with a lingering hand on Jamie’s shoulder.
Rebecca raises a judgmental eyebrow, even as she dutifully takes Keeley’s champagne glass. “What was it you said about leaving things behind?”
Keeley doesn’t dignify that with a response.
Instead, she makes her way to Jamie’s table, where he’s finishing up the remnants of supper. “Can I sit?” she asks.
Looking rather like a deer in the headlights, he swallows his mouthful of food and nods. “Are you - is something wrong?”
“Maybe this isn’t the best time to bring this up,” she says, “but I think we need to talk. Finally.”
Jamie averts his eyes, instantly growing uncomfortable. “Oh. Yeah.”
“I know you have West Ham coming up, so just … whenever.”
“You haven’t - I mean, is your number the same?”
“Don’t tell me you deleted it again.”
Jamie gives her a sheepish smile. “No. I’ve got it.”
She knows she’s different. She knows she’s not the same person she was three years ago. Which she takes plenty of pride in - though Rebecca had been instrumental in helping her move onwards and upwards, Keeley knows her own gumption and ambition did the rest. If she hadn’t scaled Rebecca’s walls as Ted encouraged her to, if she hadn’t reached out to Rebecca at the gala, if she hadn’t set up Jamie’s promo shoot, Rebecca probably would’ve continued to look right past her.
Now here she is, the owner of her own PR firm, miles away from who she used to be.
And here Shandy is, reminding her of how far she’s come. Which is a good thing, mostly. But there’s a certain kind of yearning there, too, that she hadn’t realized she had until Shandy reentered her life.
They’d been thick as thieves, the two of them, traded trashy gossip from shoots like it was the morning paper. Helped each other through breakups, shared stories good and bad about previous partners, playfully slagged the other off.
Now, it feels like putting a shoe on the wrong foot. Had Shandy always been so … not shy? She seems so much bolder and wilder than Keeley remembers. Or had she always been that way, and Keeley, too?
It’s taken some getting used to. But if Rebecca could bring Keeley to where she is now, then Keeley hopes she can do the same for Shandy. Boldness aside, she knows the woman has a lot of ideas - some more viable than others, perhaps - and a lot to contribute.
It helps a little that for the most part, Keeley’s old life and her new haven’t otherwise intersected very much. Most of the gigs the VC firm has her going after aren’t the types of gigs she would do as a sort-of-famous-for-being-almost-famous pinup.
With Richmond, there’s even more of a gap. Sure, Keeley hadn’t always had a professional relationship with them. For six months she’d been nothing more than Jamie Tartt’s Hot Girlfriend. But she’s moved past that, they’ve moved past that, and sometimes she wonders if they consciously remember she was Jamie Tartt’s Hot Girlfriend at all.
Shandy has even less of that. She knows the team now, but only professionally, and for half of them she still has trouble putting a face to a name. So it’s easy to separate past from present where Shandy’s concerned.
At least, she’d thought so.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” Shandy asks a few days after Brentford. They’ve still got most of the team to get through regarding interview requests, and it’s going slower than Keeley would like; she’s more than happy to break for lunch. It’s not like the work is going anywhere.
“Of course you can. What’s up?”
“You and J … you’re like over over, right?”
Keeley raises an eyebrow. Of all the questions she thought Shandy might ask, that was not one of them. “Do you not remember the hour you spent on the phone talking to me after I broke up with him? Twice?”
“No, yeah, but I mean like you don’t want to get back with him, do you?”
“Why?”
“Okay, look, you know what I thought of him when you were dating. Fit as fuck but a wanker, like all of ’em.”
Keeley rolls her eyes. “Don’t think you have room to talk, Shandy. Your boyfriends -”
“I see it now, is all,” Shandy says quickly. “All that time you went on about how he ‘wasn’t like that with me’ and ‘there’s more to him,’ and all that shit, I thought you were mental. But you weren’t. Night and bloody day he is, from back then. And you knew it the whole time.”
“What exactly are you asking?”
“I just want to know if I can bang him, babe,” Shandy says with a snap of her gum.
Keeley stares at her. “I - really? Jamie?”
Shandy shrugs. “Can I?”
“Um. I mean, yeah, I guess,” Keeley says. “If you want.”
Shandy grins the sort of grin Keeley’s seen a million times before, the one that rarely fails to get her what she wants. “Good. It’s been ages since I’ve been properly railed and you always said -”
“I know what I said.”
Normally, Jamie preferred for her to take the lead. They both did. But sometimes a change of pace is nice. It’s that which flashes into her brain now, the feeling of him pressing her against her bedroom wall, his fingers bruising her hips, his teeth leaving a mark on her neck that makeup struggled to cover. It was novel, it was fervent, and it was fucking hot.
Keeley clears her throat, ridding herself of the memory with some difficulty. Unperturbed, Shandy flicks open the top button of her blouse, leaving a bit less to the imagination. “Wait, now?” Keeley objects. “Shandy, we’re at work.”
“So I’ll cut my lunch hour short,” Shandy says dismissively. “Wish me luck, yeah?”
Keeley reels as she watches Shandy head Jamie’s way. Work impropriety notwithstanding, she has no reason to dissuade Shandy from her mission, and moreover it’s a courtesy Shandy hadn’t needed to give her at all.
So she can’t quite explain why her stomach ties itself in knots, nor why she has the urge to point Shandy in the direction of one of the other footballers. There’s no shortage to choose from, after all, and none of them are ones Keeley has dated.
Yet it’s there all the same, the discomfort, and it only worsens when she sees Jamie laugh at something Shandy says, giving her his full attention as he had at the restaurant.
Keeley quickly, decisively, packs up her things, scrawling a quick note to Shandy and sticking it to the chair. She knows Rebecca’s in meetings all day, which means her office is free for Keeley’s taking.
She could use the peace and quiet anyway.
Can I come round?
Jamie’s text catches her by surprise, even though it probably shouldn’t, considering she’d been the one who told him to pick a time, any time, to come by. But between being swamped with work and her assumption that after the walloping the team suffered at the hands (or feet) of West Ham his mind would be elsewhere, she’d forgotten all about it.
Which puts her immediately on edge, because she’s very much not prepared.
She hasn’t been properly alone with Jamie since the promotion celebration, and she doesn’t have a clue as to how to broach the actual football of it all. He’d always been prickly when he didn’t play up to his own standards, and this is far beyond that. He hasn’t just been playing below his standards, he’s been playing below everyone’s standards.
She puts on her best and brightest smile when the doorbell rings, greeting him with a hug inversely enthusiastic to the conversation she needs but dreads. He loosely hugs her back with a quiet, “Hey, Keeley.”
He looks awful. The fact that he bears it so openly to her makes it all the worse. “Here, come inside,” she says. “Do you want some tea? Kettle should be ready soon.”
“Yeah, sure.”
She pours them both a cup and takes a seat on the couch. Dully, Jamie asks, “So, you wanted to talk?”
“In a minute.”
It is what she wants, and it’s what she asked him here for. But the look on his face is sheer devastation, nowhere near the kind of look she would expect for a discussion about what happened at the funeral.
“Okay, what, then?”
She leans over and gently prods his ribs where she knows he’d taken a hard fall, then the scrape on his cheekbone from the scuffle. “This. I’m worried, Jamie.”
Jamie hunches in on himself. “I know my game’s been shit.”
“No, I’m worried about you. You’re fighting, you’re losing the ball, sometimes I barely recognize you on the pitch.” She tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “I know things are weird between us, but you can still talk to me.”
His eyes search hers, gray meeting green. Slowly, the guardedness fades away, leaving only pain. “They’re gonna transfer me. Soon as the window’s here, I’m gone.”
Keeley nearly chokes on her tea. “What? Why would you say that?”
“Heard Ms. Welton talking with Higgins about money, how the club is strapped.”
“They said they’re going to transfer you?”
“Not specifically,” Jamie allows. “But it’s what’s best, everyone knows that. There ain’t a place for me at striker anymore, I’m fucking terrible at midfield, and the chances on goal I do get are stolen anyway. I’m a liability, and so’s my salary.”
“That is not going to happen. Even if Rebecca wanted to, Ted wouldn’t stand for it.”
Jamie scoffs. “Ted transferred me once, why wouldn’t he do it again?”
“That - this is different. It’s not like it was with Man City.”
“Close enough. Point is, they’ll put the club above me. Which they should.”
“So that’s why you’ve been playing badly? Because you think they’ll transfer you?” she asks. Jamie’s hands are clenched so tightly around his cup that she’s afraid it’ll shatter. Carefully she wrests the cup from him and squeezes his hand in its place. “It’s not like you to roll over. Come on, there’s something else.”
Jamie’s voice is small. “It’s not fair.”
“What’s not fair?”
“Zava.” Jamie spits the name, and then the words come fast and bitter. “I know I was a selfish prick when I first came to Richmond, yeah, but he’s worse and everyone loves him anyway. Ted gives him whatever he wants. I got sent away, but not Zava. He gets more and more, and then there’s fucking Dad, he -”
“He came to see you?” she asks, horrified.
“No, just … just texts and some calls.”
There’s no “just” about it, as far as she’s concerned. She flashes back to the night of the game at Wembley, how utterly destroyed Jamie had been. She’d hoped he had blocked James’s number after that. Then again, who knows what James would do if he couldn’t reach his son on the phone.
Jamie rakes a hand through his hair. “It’s stupid, I’m being stupid. Be a team player, right, that’s what I’m supposed to do? What happens to me don’t matter, ’s long as the team does good.”
“Of course it matters, Jamie. I’ll talk to Rebecca. You are not going anywhere, I promise.”
He stares at her, eyes wide and shiny with unshed tears. “Yeah?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“’Cause of … what happened.”
Oh. That.
I love you, Keeley. Sorry.
“Guess we never finished that talk.”
“Weren’t much else to say, was there?” he asks.
“No,” she says, working past the sudden hollow feeling in her gut, “there wasn’t.”
“Look, can we just … forget it happened? I miss you. As a friend, I mean. Nothing else.”
It’s not “nothing else,” really, if he feels the same as he did four months ago. Which she has to presume he does, or else he’d say otherwise. But she’s bloody tired of walking on eggshells and suffering this gulf between them.
Because she misses him, too. She misses rolling her eyes at his arrogance and she misses the way he can make her laugh and she misses how he says her name and she misses the depths of him that so often he only lets be seen by her.
Besides, in the grand scheme of things, so what if he’s in love with her? He’d said himself that he doesn’t expect anything, that his offer of friendship isn’t predicated on it leading to something more. If he can sidestep his feelings, well, so can she.
There isn’t Roy to consider anymore either, at least not as much as there was then, the realization of which - somewhat guiltily - lifts a weight off her shoulders. She has only herself to consider now; there’s no fretting that Jamie’s head will be shoved through a wall or her being looked at like she’d done something.
“Yeah, forget it,” she says, surprised at how much she means it. She squeezes his hand again and affixes him with a glare. “Now, what are you going to do about your game?”
“Roy’s training me, he thinks that’ll help.”
That’s news she wouldn’t have thought she’d hear in a million years. “He’s training you?”
“Started after Brentford. Mostly he yells and sends me on runs. Says it’s ‘foundational’ and we’ll get to the football later.”
“Don’t get caught up in all that,” she says. “Anger worked for Roy, he used it to ground himself. Still does. But that’s not you, Jamie. You can succeed without it.”
“At striker, maybe. Not at midfield. I’m rubbish back there. You’ve seen it.”
“No, I’ve seen you half-ass it. You’ve let Zava get in your head and it’s distracted you. You’re using your new position as an excuse.”
He lets out an indignant squawk. “An excuse -?”
“Fuck Zava,” she continues. “Fuck your dad and everything else. It’s all just noise. Play your way, the way I know you can. The rest will follow.”
“Yeah,” Jamie says. “Yeah, okay.”
“Good.”
He lingers to drain the remainder of his tea, then gets to his feet and pulls her to hers. He takes her in for a moment. Perhaps she should feel discomfited or that it’s stepping over a line, but she just feels … well, she doesn’t quite know what, but discomfited isn’t it.
This time without hesitation, he leans down and draws her into a hug, arms tight around her. In her ear, he murmurs, “Thanks, Keeley.”
She smiles against his chest, inhaling the scent of his expensive detergent and cheap body spray. It’s pungent and atrocious, but so achingly familiar that she can’t bring herself to pull away.