Ted Lasso fic: Borrowed Splendour
Story Title: Borrowed Splendour
Fandom(s): Ted Lasso
Rating: PG
Word Count: 6,042
Summary: Loving her comes in stages. Too small to notice at first, when it counts, and then all at once, later, when it doesn’t.
Loving her comes in stages. Too small to notice at first, when it counts, and then all at once, later, when it doesn’t.
No - when it matters most but he can’t do anything about it because she’s with Roy and she’s happy - happier than she ever was with him - and what, he’s supposed to throw a spanner in that?
Sure, he’s imagined it. He’s only human. But all it takes is, afterwards, imagining the look on her face, and that’s enough for the twisted, jealous creature inside him to crawl back into its hole with a whimper.
(Until the next time it emerges, anyway, and it always does, and it burns more each time, like the creature has gnawed off its own leg to escape the cage Jamie put it in.)
It’s his fault, really, of course it is, that he missed the signs. After all, there’s nothing as soft as love, and softness is weakness, something he’s tried to bury his whole life. He shouldn’t have let things get as far as they did in the first place. Keeley should have been a string of hookups at best, conversation no deeper than asking her which hair gel he should choose. Yet somehow, months had passed, and a string of hookups became What do you want for supper? and Maybe we can go to one of those plays you talked about and I love you, Keeley.
It became comfortable.
Comfortable and warm and light and soft.
And, well, that was just too much, wasn’t it? It was a different monster inside his chest, back then. A monster of doubt, of cruelty, of pain, and that monster Jamie had not been strong enough or committed enough to keep at bay.
It was inevitable she’d cut ties, really. Maybe part of him had been goading her into it, even, trying to prove the pattern of everyone leaving him and hating him.
So, she had. Dressed to the nines with Bex mingling somewhere across the room, paid to look but not touch, there in the ballroom did half a year end. No fuss or objection, just Keeley’s quiet, direct We’re done, and that was that.
The silence in his house had been deafening. Faced with having only his guilt and the well-fed monster inside him for company, he’d opened his phone, downloaded the first dating app he could find, and within a quarter of an hour he had a girl hook, line, and sinker.
Which are you looking for? she’d messaged him. Hookup or girlfriend? ’Cause I’m not looking for a boyfriend, and I’m only in town for a conference anyway.
He’d taken a minute to consider, sorting through a variety of responses, before settling on the truth:
I don’t want to be alone.
She’s a good lay, and somehow manages to make financial audits sound almost interesting. Good enough that he doesn’t mind when she passes out next to him without asking if she can stay over.
Maggie, he remembers later. Her name was Maggie, and in the dark, he could almost pretend she was someone else.
Ted Lasso is a fucking wanker. Jamie hadn’t paid him any mind at first, confident that he’d be gone within the month.
But Ted Lasso is not gone within the month. On the contrary, he gets buy-in. From everyone. The players start to like him, start to listen to him, despite his abysmal CV giving them no reason to. Even the press warm to him, a little.
Not Jamie, though. He’d be lying if he said part of him didn’t want to submit to the man’s hokey Midwestern charm - a small part, mind, one Dad could stamp out with the lit end of a cigarette, but a part nonetheless. The rest of him, however, knows better than to dole out any trust and rails against it. In his experience, the kind of man Ted purports to be doesn’t exist. Sooner or later, that hokey Midwestern charm would turn to cutting remarks, training not ending till they puke, and thinly veiled threats. Ted Lasso doesn’t actually practice what he preaches, not for good. He would turn eventually.
Turn he does, and Jamie’s reminded once again of why he’s right to be skeptical of men like Ted. In the dressing room, Ted looming over him, voice hitting a bass Jamie’s never heard from him before, it takes every last shred of willpower to hold himself together. His jaw throbs from the clench of it, his muscles scream with the tightness of a marathon run, his veins buzz with energy that makes him want to either run or hide, he’s not sure which.
And it only gets worse, seeing someone new take over his position, blending in with the team in the sort of seamless way Jamie never had.
It all combines to rub him raw, a knee skidded along the road, little pebbles of asphalt wedged beneath preventing it from healing. The asphalt is Ted fucking Lasso and every accented word that comes out of his mouth grinds him deeper beneath Jamie’s skin. Pretty soon, Jamie thinks he’ll have to find a scalpel to properly scourge the man.
He takes to sulking inside his house after training, when his mobile trills with a text from Goodman.
You coming? We’re at Crown & Anchor, Coach wants to talk to us about something.
Jamie ignores him.
Not that that helps, for Goodman can be a persistent bastard when he wants to.
We’re breaking the treatment room curse tonight. Coach says we’ve got to bring something special to the club at midnight.
Come on, man. It won’t work unless you’re there, too.
Please?
Jamie rolls his eyes and types back:
Curses ain’t real, mate. I got better shit to do.
It eats at him, though, the idea that he’s the only one who won’t be participating. He’ll be left out, left behind. It’s stupid, Lasso’s plan, if it can even be called that. Yet he find himself distracted enough to get smoked by the sim on FIFA, which by itself is enough to make him pull out his mobile. Not to text Goodman, though. He needs a third party, someone who’s never steered him wrong before.
Fifteen minutes later, he’s watching Keeley walk up to him, a handful of words from her making him feel like a petulant jackass.
“Maybe someday you should stop battling the people that just want to help you,” she says, and it rattles around in his brain all throughout the drive home. He wants to rebel against that, call her up and tell her she’s wrong, that people don’t want to help him, certainly Ted fucking Lasso doesn’t want to help him. Even if he did want to, it would only be for Jamie Number Nine, football prodigy, it would only be to help the team win. It wouldn’t be for Jamie Just Jamie, the council estate kid with a chip on his shoulder.
I can honestly say you are the best athlete I have ever coached.
That was a heck of a goal out there, by the way.
Jamie grits his teeth. Ted had seemed sincere, then. Even as high as Jamie’s walls were - are - he hadn’t sensed falsehood in what Ted had said. That despite decades of coaching, Ted thought Jamie was the best, Jamie who doesn’t even play Ted’s sport. That despite Jamie’s goal making no difference on the scoresheet and his left-foot cross being rubbish, Jamie was worth complimenting anyway.
He didn’t have to. He could have berated him like Dad did for not scoring more goals, or ignored him like George Cartrick would have, but he didn’t. Because that’s just Ted’s way, loath as Jamie is to believe it. He threw Sam a bloody birthday party, for Christ’s sake. He’d censored the photos of Keeley’s tits in Jamie’s cubby. He’d put up a handmade, saccharine sign that no one asked for. He’d gone out and bought everyone a book tailored specifically to them.
(Not that Jamie had read his book - it’s hard enough parsing out the letters of a text message on a good day; parsing out an entire book, probably full of metaphors and other fancy literary shit, was too daunting to undertake when he didn’t care about Ted to begin with - but in the days following, he’d heard the lads discuss them, sometimes sounding actually excited by what their respective books contained, and once or twice Jamie had had a fleeting regret that he didn’t remember so much as the title of his.)
Still, in spite of the evidence Keeley’s urged him to consider, it’s fucking terrifying, the prospect of coming crawling back, tail between his legs, soft, offering up a piece of himself to the entire team for Ted’s curse-breaking charade. Sure, he could bring with him something pointless, something he doesn’t care about, but that’s hardly a sacrifice, is it? He wanders aimlessly through his barren house, finding nothing that likely would qualify. May as well not even go then.
He almost does exactly that - until he remembers the box stashed away in the understair storage, the box not even Keeley has seen, the one with the few items from his childhood that still contain positive memories.
God, he hasn’t seen these boots in months. Hasn’t even thought about them. They’re like-new, despite being given to him the better part of a decade ago, just a few scraps of grass and caked-on dirt marring the spikes. By the time Mum had given them to him, he’d been too far along in his career to be able to use boots like those. They would’ve cost a lot for Mum, but were unacceptable on a real pitch. But they mean something, enough to where there’s a brief, sharp pang in his heart at acknowledging they would be thrown away or burnt to a crisp or whatever it is Ted Lasso has planned, and surely that qualifies.
He checks the wall clock; he’s late. A blessing in disguise, for it gives him a reason to not show up at all. They’ve probably already finished the whole thing. Showing up now would just make things weird and awkward for everyone, and it’s not like they’re expecting him to come anyway.
Shoving his every thought down, he grabs his keys and speeds out of the driveway, fingers drumming against the wheel as he edges closer and closer to Nelson Road, Mum’s boots resting beside him on the passenger seat.
It goes fine. It goes great, actually. Every cell in his body seizes up at the prospect of baring himself to everyone, but he does it. He talks about the boots, about Mum, about Dad, about how ever since Keeley had given him that figurative thump on the head he’s had to look inward at what he’d let himself twist into. He’s had to imagine the look on Mum’s face if she knew how selfish and mean he’d become, and it’s a look that he never wants to imagine her having again.
They don’t laugh once he’s done like he’d feared. They welcome him, seem to want to let everything be water under the bridge even though he knows he doesn’t deserve it. His heart lifts with the grace of forgiveness; for the first time in ages, he feels almost buoyant.
Of course, it doesn’t last. Good things never do for him, and he shouldn’t have allowed himself to get so complacent. Uri awakens him with a phone call at five a.m. to gleefully inform him that Man City wants him back.
Jamie numbly takes it in, the realization only fully dawning on him after he hangs up. He’s going back to Manchester. To Dad. After everything he’d said last night, all the laughter and happiness, it’s come to this. Lasso had used him.
Jamie pulls up the text Lasso had sent him last night.
Thanks for sharing that story with us, Jamie. Your mom sounds like a real nice lady. See you at practice tomorrow. Gotta make sure you’re in game shape!
Screen swimming as angry tears build, Jamie summarily deletes the text chain and blocks Lasso’s number. He won’t fucking need it where he’s going.
Keeley is a creature of habit. Always has been. It was one of the things that made it easy to be with her - she was a lighthouse flame burning constant, her habits meaning he usually had a good idea of where she would be. The thoughts in his head could be threatening to swallow him whole, his world could be on the brink of collapsing, yet still he knew, he knew, that every day at a quarter past noon, she would be getting coffee at the café five minutes from the club.
It’d be simple to catch her right as she’s leaving work. And he plans to, really. But as soon as he sees her, a content expression on her face as she pulls her fuzzy blue jacket closer around her, he freezes. He hasn’t seen her in ages, not since he’d relegated Richmond. She’d been wearing Roy’s jersey that night the way she used to wear his, which had added fuel to his resentment, but god was she striking even from his vantage all the way down on the pitch.
She’s out of sight for several minutes by the time Jamie gets the wherewithal to move again. Tamping down his anxiety, he jogs to close the distance, waits for her to step inside the coffeeshop, then walks in himself. Just as he’s about to lose his mettle once again, she turns around, her eyes meeting his.
“Jamie?”
Music to his ears, her voice is.
“I’m not stalking you,” he begins, even though it’s only arguably true.
After that, he loses the plot entirely, words coming out in a fast scramble. Keeley’s expression doesn’t change as she hears him out, nor does she seek to throw him a life preserver by cutting him off.
“I’ve just been trying to build up the courage to say hi, so …” He swallows, takes a breath, and finishes lamely, “Hi. Is that okay?”
It feels like for-fucking-ever before she replies. Then, “You deleted my number?”
“Yeah.”
She waits for him to order a coffee of his own, black, then nods in the direction of the least-desirable seats, those without any sort of view and the sound of toilets flushing - but also the seats that are the least visible. “How are things?” she asks, blowing on her coffee before gingerly taking a sip.
“Do I need to answer that?” He’s checked Twitter. Those who hadn’t seen the interview itself have seen the internet in the aftermath, and Keeley’s entire job is to know what’s going on on social media.
“No,” she says with a small, sympathetic smile. “You said you wanted to talk?”
He scratches at the table where the lacquer has started to peel away, in an effort to get rid of some of his nervous energy. It’s been a fucking shit day. “I wanted … I mean, I was thinking …”
God, it would sound stupid to say aloud. It sounds stupid in his head. Heat creeps up his neck at the shame at being in this situation in the first place and embarrassment that he can’t so much as finish a sentence, apparently.
But Keeley just gazes at him in that same patient, unassuming way she used to when he was dragging his feet on something important. In the end, he doesn’t need to say a thing. She knows him too well. “You want to come back to Richmond.”
“D’you think they’ll let me?”
“By ‘they,’ you mean Ted?”
“Yeah. Didn’t exactly leave on good terms, did I? Weren’t great before that either.” Jamie picks at the lacquer some more. “What if he doesn’t … want me?”
Keeley snorts. “Ted thinks the world of you, Jamie. Don’t you know that?”
No.
Yes.
I don’t know. Not after -
“Oi!” Keeley interjects. “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop getting all up in your head.”
He takes a swig of his coffee to avoid responding. Of course, that doesn’t stop her.
“Why did you leave City?” she plows ahead. “Thought Roy was taking the piss when he told me he saw you on that stupid dating show.”
Imbuing every drop of indifference into his voice as he can, he replies, “What, doesn’t sound like something I’d do?”
“No, Jamie, it doesn’t.”
“Well, I did.”
Keeley studies him, tapping her finger against her cup. Then, finally: “If I ask you something, will you tell me the truth?”
He should say no. Knowing him well means being able to hurt him in ways most people can’t, use things he’s told her against him. But he’s never been able to resist her, and he’s bloody tired of putting on a front.
“Go on then.”
Her eyes are soft, her voice softer. “Is your dad the reason you left?”
Jamie sucks in a breath. “What? Why would you -”
“Because I’m not an idiot,” Keeley says. “We were together for six months, you think I couldn’t figure out that your dad’s an arsehole?”
“But you - you never said anything.”
“I guess I wanted you to tell me on your own.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, better late than never.” Keeley checks her watch and curses. “Shit, I’ve gotta get back. I have a call with Dubai Air in ten minutes. Promo stuff.”
Jamie feels a surge of panic rise in his chest. “No, Keeley, don’t -”
“Talk to Ted,” Keeley says. She squeezes his shoulder. “I’m here if you really need me, you know that, but I’m the wrong person for this.”
With a swish of her ponytail she’s gone, leaving him bereft but for cooling coffee and a knot in his stomach.
“Got time?”
Jamie gives no preamble as he walks into Dr. Sharon’s office, clicking the door shut behind him. He’s been avoiding this for two weeks, but can’t anymore. It’s gotten under his skin, this therapy shit, the unpleasantness only ameliorated by voicing the troubles in his head, by having Sharon guide him through what it all means and what he can do to make sense of it.
If she’s taken aback by his abrupt entrance, she doesn’t let on. She silences her mobile and sets it face-down on her desk, the better to ignore it. “Good to see you, Jamie. It’s been a while.”
Jamie drops into the chair opposite her as he had every week since he returned to Richmond. Like clockwork it’s been; until Wembley, that is. Jamie follows her movements as she pulls out her notebook. Even after the dozens of sessions he’s had with her, even knowing they ultimately make him feel better, it still gives him anxiety when she does that.
She’d shown him once what was inside, which helped. It cut down on the mystery, seeing his name written in neat cursive on the cover page, the contents within dedicated to him and him alone and stored in a locked cabinet. Knowing there’s a record out there of his darkest fears and deepest insecurities makes him nearly break out in hives, but nothing and no one, she’d promised, could compel her to show it to anyone.
He begins, “I’ve been …”
You want to go, Jamie? Don’t you forget where you came from!
“… busy.”
Sharon nods in that inscrutable way she does, like she already knows what happened at Wembley. Maybe she does. Some of the other lads see her, they could’ve said something.
The thought of that makes his stomach twist.
“I’m glad you’re here now,” Sharon says. “How are you?”
“Fine.”
Sharon says nothing, the question implied.
He clears his throat past the lump that’s formed there and bounces his knee, trying to get the nervous energy out. “The, um. The nightmares came back.”
Look where you are now, twaddling about with a bunch of amateurs.
“Why do you think they came back?” Sharon asks.
“Same reason as before.”
Don’t turn your back on me, you pussy.
“Your father?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he call you again?”
“No, he … he came to Wembley.”
Sharon nods again, but there’s visible sympathy in it this time. He doesn’t know whether that makes him feel better or worse. “I see. And what happened?”
Jamie doesn’t want to tell her, doesn’t want to relive it yet again, doesn’t want another person to know how weak he’d been and that Dad had reduced him to a husk, the way he used to.
But Sharon’s different, he knows that much, and he knows he wouldn’t have been able to push back even the small way he did if it weren’t for her.
He draws in an uneven breath, and speaks.
He skips the session Sharon had scheduled for him later in the week, ducking his head when he sees her in the hallway. The specter of Wembley still hangs over him, and their last session had featured more tissues than Jamie would have liked. But he drags himself there for the next, nearly three weeks after Man City’s massacre. Sharon greets him not with her usual impassivity, but with an unimpressed raised eyebrow.
“You missed your appointment,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Would you like to talk?” she asks, even now giving him an out should he want it. “We can pick up where we left off.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t - not about my dad.” His hand is fully healed, the loss is behind them, and Dad hasn’t texted in days, but whenever he closes his eyes, he still sees the sharp fluorescents of the dressing room, feels Dad’s flesh shift beneath his fist. Diving back into that isn’t an option, not yet.
“All right,” Sharon agrees.
Dark eyes probing but patient, she waits, and waits some more, waits so that eventually the silence will be so oppressive that Jamie has to speak. Has to put voice to the things he’s been thinking about for longer than he cares to admit.
Finally, he submits. “What do you do when …”
“When what, Jamie?”
“When you fuck things up.” His skin feels itchy, stretched too tight over the bones beneath. He hasn’t felt like this in a while, since those very first sessions. “Like … badly, but it’s too late to fix it.”
“What did you fuck up?”
He says the name on an exhale: “Keeley.”
Sharon’s expression doesn’t change, but there’s a flicker in her eyes that he’s long since learned means he’s said something she can pounce on. It’d unnerved him initially, but he’s come to almost appreciate it, for it means she has an idea of how to help.
“Keep going.”
“She was the best thing in my life and I threw that away,” Jamie says. “Didn’t think I’d ever lose her, and then I did.”
“What happened?”
“More what didn’t happen.”
We’re done. See you around.
You’ve really helped me to feel good about this decision, just by … being you.
Have a good night, Jamie Tartt.
Jamie can’t force the truth out, so he clenches his jaw and tugs at his sleeves instead.
Sharon waits several more minutes for him to elaborate, but once it’s clear he won’t, she prods, “Have you talked to her about this?”
“No,” Jamie says. “We haven’t talked much at all since I came back.”
“Why not?”
“Dunno. Feels too hard now.”
“How come? You said she was a good friend to you.”
“She was. She is. It’s just - it’s different.”
“Different how?”
“Dunno.”
“Jamie.”
He glances up at her before looking away again. In little more than a mumble, he answers, “’Cause I love her.”
He can feel Sharon’s confused frown even though he can’t see it. “I thought you knew that already. We’ve spoken before of your relationship.”
“I didn’t know it was real.”
“And now you know?”
“Yeah, I - yeah.” He swallows. “It … hurts.”
“Unrequited love tends to do that.”
Sharon doesn’t say it unkindly, but the word lances through him and festers like a rusted nail.
Unrequited.
Keeley had loved him once, but no longer, and he has only himself to blame for that. She has Roy now, anyway. Jamie probably crosses her mind only when he’s right in front of her. As well he should - she’d spent enough time on him, she oughtn’t spend any more of it than she has to.
“What do I do?” he asks. “Tell me what to do.”
Sharon sighs. “You know it doesn’t work that way. I can’t tell you -”
“Just once. Please. I need help.”
“What is your goal?” Sharon asks instead. “With Keeley. What are you trying to achieve?”
“Dunno,” he lies. And it is a lie, a great big one, because he knows exactly what it is he wants to achieve.
While Sharon’s voice is free of judgment, there’s clear warning in it. “Sabotaging her relationship is not a very noble goal, Jamie.”
“I’m not - I don’t want to sabotage anything,” Jamie objects. He takes a tissue from the box on the desk and begins to worry it between his fingers for something to do, fine scraps of paper becoming a small pile on his lap. Squirming under Sharon’s expectant gaze, he offers, “I just - I want her to know that she meant something to me, I guess. That I wasn’t playing her or … or faking it or something. I don’t think she knows that. Shitty thing to do, though, innit? I don’t have any right.”
“Of course you’re entitled to your feelings.”
“But I shouldn’t say them, not to her. It’s not fair.”
“Maybe not. But you would only be expressing yourself - respectfully - right? No sabotaging?”
“Right,” Jamie says. He wants to mean it.
Well, no, he does mean it. He can’t bear the thought of hurting Keeley or damaging their friendship, and he can’t hurt Roy either, not after he saved him from spinning clear off his axis in the dressing room.
All the same, the idea of never getting a second chance with her, never being able to convey just how much he regrets not treating her the way she deserved … that’s unbearable, too. Even if he doesn’t merit that second chance, that to even think of it is selfish, he wants it. He aches for it - to hold her again, kiss her again, prove to her that her faith in him was not misplaced.
“Right,” he tells Sharon again.
Sharon’s voice is gentler than usual as she replies, “This is a good thing, Jamie. There’s a difference between expressing what you’re feeling, and acting upon those feelings. The fact that you know there’s a difference is a mark of how much progress you’ve made.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. A year ago, would you have hesitated to go after something you wanted? Whether or not it was wise or hurt someone else in the process?”
He thinks about the fights with Roy he instigated, the look on Sam’s face every time he insulted him, Nate’s palpable misery that Jamie encouraged. Keeley’s frustration when he shut her out.
“No,” he allows, “probably not.”
A year ago, if Keeley had shown the slightest interest, he’d have tried to worm his way back into her life. In fact, he almost had done just that, with only inconvenient geography keeping him from going further. At least, further than one night.
And what a night that had been. He’d knocked on her door genuinely only to thank her for her efforts to help him, then she’d propositioned him, and that was that. The barrage of feelings he’d felt in the afterglow, the depth of those feelings, had done him in.
He hadn’t slept at all, caught up in the rightness of her curled into his side, her cold feet warming against his leg, her arm slung lazily over his chest, fitting against him as snugly as if she were meant to be there. He hadn’t appreciated that enough when they were together, not nearly enough. He’d taken it for granted like he did everything else in his life.
Having it again even if just for a few hours, his arm beginning to tingle from where she was lying on it, the darkness in the room slowly giving way to morning’s pale blue, well. Something shifted inside him, though he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge what it was because while she showed enough interest to fuck him, she hadn’t shown enough to take him back.
Not that he’d asked. He’d rationalized it as not caring, but really it was knowing she’d reject him. He couldn’t have handled that. Not then, and maybe not now either. So he’d panicked, extricated himself from her embrace, dressed, and left without so much as a note. Drove back to Manchester right then and there, blinking the fatigue out of his eyes and pretending he didn’t still have the scent of her burnt-sugar lotion rubbed into his skin, the feeling of her hips, her thighs, her breasts inked on his fingertips, the sound of his name gasped from her lips seared into his very bones.
Sex is all it was, he told himself, fun and familiar but ultimately meaningless, and it was just the endorphins that made him think he felt all those things.
(It wasn’t. And it was, because it had to be.)
“Jamie?” Sharon prompts.
“Sorry.” Sharon looks at him pointedly - he shouldn’t apologize so much for thinking and reflecting, she says - so he amends wearily, “Just … you know.”
He rubs absently at his chest. Mostly he’s gotten used to the constant ache beneath his ribs, but sometimes it bothers him, like an old injury that complains when the weather changes.
“Will it stop?” he asks.
“Will what stop?”
“The … hurt.”
Sharon studies him a moment, considering. “Do you want it to?”
Jamie grabs another tissue and begins mauling it as with the first. The obvious answer would be yes, because who would want to feel this way?
It’d be a fucking blessing to be able to interact with Keeley without feeling his heart skip, to see her holding hands with Roy and not have to white-knuckle his way through keeping his face unaffected. To not get a whiff of her perfume as she walked past and be bombarded with the memory of his bathroom strewn about with her cosmetics, of her running late and asking him to plait her hair while she put on her eyeliner because he was better at it than she was.
Yet when he opens his mouth to answer, no sound comes out and he just stares at Sharon, answer-less.
“You don’t have to decide now,” she says. “But you will have to decide, Jamie. You have to keep moving forward, however you choose to do it.”
He doubts this is what Sharon meant. She probably meant he should take some time to think it through, to come up with a proper plan of action. Ask Keeley if she wants to grab a cup of coffee after work to discuss press stuff, perhaps. Tell her he found a pair of her earrings that had dropped behind his chest of drawers, maybe, and would she come back to his place to get them? Or simply say he wants to speak with her, and they could go for a walk around Richmond, find a bench on the green.
Something decent, normal, somewhere she could tell him to fuck off if she wanted to. Then he could bring up the real stuff.
Rebecca’s father’s funeral is, he reckons, not what Sharon had in mind.
It’s entirely his fault, he knows that, but it hasn’t helped his resolve that all day Keeley has been sending him … looks. Giving him a once-over, complimenting his suit, glancing at him during the eulogy, beckoning him over to talk. He knows better, he does, honest. And yet.
And yet, here he is standing in front of her futilely pouring his heart out like a chump, watching the realization slowly dawn on her the longer he speaks. She always knows what to say; now, she’s silent.
He almost kisses her. It’s a near thing, his stomach swooping like the split-second pause of anticipation on a roller coaster before the cars plunge downward. Her mouth is parted, her eyes wide and searching. She hasn’t recoiled from him, hasn’t shied away, hasn’t moved at all. Roy and decency be damned, his ego thinks she might even let him kiss her, if only for the briefest of moments, if only because she’s so floored by what he said that she doesn’t have her head together enough to stop him.
A shameful part of him even hopes she would, just to feel her again and know there’s a part of her that still stirs for him. She’d looked at him this way the last-first time he told her he loved her, too. Of course, that time had yielded a positive reaction. Not this time.
He stutters forward a centimeter, his body thrumming. God does he want this. He’s dreamt of it for months, how it would happen, what it would feel like, where it would lead. He wants to cup her face in his hands, take in every bit of her, feel her lips on his. Make her feel the way he should have done all along.
But he doesn’t because everything about this is wrong. It’s the wrong place, it’s the wrong time, she’s not his to kiss, and he’s not the guy who steamrolls over others anymore.
No, what he does is leave her standing there. You did it, the not-quite-Sharon in his head says. You ruined your friendship, she’ll never speak to you again, but she knows now. You achieved your goal. Aren’t you glad?
No, he’s not.
He’s never wanted to achieve something less, now that it’s over and done with. It doesn’t feel like the right thing. It feels like shit, like he’s been put in that fancy blender he bought himself years ago because it seemed like the thing to do once he had money to burn, even though he can’t cook worth a damn.
It feels like trying to stretch a rubber band past its limits, every step away from her harder and harder. Only he can’t let it snap him back because he’s not sure he could properly stop himself. Not to force himself on her, god no, but begging - begging, he would do. Right here right now in Rebecca’s childhood home, holding Keeley’s hands in his and begging her to take him back, swearing beyond all doubt that things would be different.
(They would be different. He knows they would, and he knows she knows they would. Doesn’t matter. Too little, too late.)
He needs some air.
Vaguely he hears someone ask him if he’s all right, but he can’t be arsed to turn around and check who it is, let alone reply. It’s just as well: The answer would either be a lie or get him chastised, neither of which he wants.
He strides outside, no clue where he’s going, and eventually finds himself in the Weltons’ backyard. It’s quiet here, the voices of all the guests barely audible. Jamie sits down against the brick exterior next to a rosebush, not giving a shit about the damp soil staining his absurdly expensive trousers.
He breathes in for four seconds, holds for four, breathes out for four.
In four, hold four, out four.
In four, hold four, out four.
In four, hold four, out four.
It doesn’t work the way it did when Sharon was walking him through it in her office, but it gives him something to do, at least. Something other than relive Keeley’s stricken silence, the gravity of what he’d just done.
It’s out there now. Short of fleeing to the ends of the earth, never to be heard from again, he can’t put this jack back in its box. He’d told his ex-girlfriend he’s still in love with her, never mind that she’s dating his coach and hadn’t thought he still cared about her in this way.
He says the wrong thing, he does the wrong thing, he pushes people away, always and without fail. Sometimes he means to, sometimes he doesn’t, but it all ends the same.
Because that’s just who he is, isn’t it?
Fandom(s): Ted Lasso
Rating: PG
Word Count: 6,042
Summary: Loving her comes in stages. Too small to notice at first, when it counts, and then all at once, later, when it doesn’t.
Loving her comes in stages. Too small to notice at first, when it counts, and then all at once, later, when it doesn’t.
No - when it matters most but he can’t do anything about it because she’s with Roy and she’s happy - happier than she ever was with him - and what, he’s supposed to throw a spanner in that?
Sure, he’s imagined it. He’s only human. But all it takes is, afterwards, imagining the look on her face, and that’s enough for the twisted, jealous creature inside him to crawl back into its hole with a whimper.
(Until the next time it emerges, anyway, and it always does, and it burns more each time, like the creature has gnawed off its own leg to escape the cage Jamie put it in.)
It’s his fault, really, of course it is, that he missed the signs. After all, there’s nothing as soft as love, and softness is weakness, something he’s tried to bury his whole life. He shouldn’t have let things get as far as they did in the first place. Keeley should have been a string of hookups at best, conversation no deeper than asking her which hair gel he should choose. Yet somehow, months had passed, and a string of hookups became What do you want for supper? and Maybe we can go to one of those plays you talked about and I love you, Keeley.
It became comfortable.
Comfortable and warm and light and soft.
And, well, that was just too much, wasn’t it? It was a different monster inside his chest, back then. A monster of doubt, of cruelty, of pain, and that monster Jamie had not been strong enough or committed enough to keep at bay.
It was inevitable she’d cut ties, really. Maybe part of him had been goading her into it, even, trying to prove the pattern of everyone leaving him and hating him.
So, she had. Dressed to the nines with Bex mingling somewhere across the room, paid to look but not touch, there in the ballroom did half a year end. No fuss or objection, just Keeley’s quiet, direct We’re done, and that was that.
The silence in his house had been deafening. Faced with having only his guilt and the well-fed monster inside him for company, he’d opened his phone, downloaded the first dating app he could find, and within a quarter of an hour he had a girl hook, line, and sinker.
Which are you looking for? she’d messaged him. Hookup or girlfriend? ’Cause I’m not looking for a boyfriend, and I’m only in town for a conference anyway.
He’d taken a minute to consider, sorting through a variety of responses, before settling on the truth:
I don’t want to be alone.
She’s a good lay, and somehow manages to make financial audits sound almost interesting. Good enough that he doesn’t mind when she passes out next to him without asking if she can stay over.
Maggie, he remembers later. Her name was Maggie, and in the dark, he could almost pretend she was someone else.
Ted Lasso is a fucking wanker. Jamie hadn’t paid him any mind at first, confident that he’d be gone within the month.
But Ted Lasso is not gone within the month. On the contrary, he gets buy-in. From everyone. The players start to like him, start to listen to him, despite his abysmal CV giving them no reason to. Even the press warm to him, a little.
Not Jamie, though. He’d be lying if he said part of him didn’t want to submit to the man’s hokey Midwestern charm - a small part, mind, one Dad could stamp out with the lit end of a cigarette, but a part nonetheless. The rest of him, however, knows better than to dole out any trust and rails against it. In his experience, the kind of man Ted purports to be doesn’t exist. Sooner or later, that hokey Midwestern charm would turn to cutting remarks, training not ending till they puke, and thinly veiled threats. Ted Lasso doesn’t actually practice what he preaches, not for good. He would turn eventually.
Turn he does, and Jamie’s reminded once again of why he’s right to be skeptical of men like Ted. In the dressing room, Ted looming over him, voice hitting a bass Jamie’s never heard from him before, it takes every last shred of willpower to hold himself together. His jaw throbs from the clench of it, his muscles scream with the tightness of a marathon run, his veins buzz with energy that makes him want to either run or hide, he’s not sure which.
And it only gets worse, seeing someone new take over his position, blending in with the team in the sort of seamless way Jamie never had.
It all combines to rub him raw, a knee skidded along the road, little pebbles of asphalt wedged beneath preventing it from healing. The asphalt is Ted fucking Lasso and every accented word that comes out of his mouth grinds him deeper beneath Jamie’s skin. Pretty soon, Jamie thinks he’ll have to find a scalpel to properly scourge the man.
He takes to sulking inside his house after training, when his mobile trills with a text from Goodman.
You coming? We’re at Crown & Anchor, Coach wants to talk to us about something.
Jamie ignores him.
Not that that helps, for Goodman can be a persistent bastard when he wants to.
We’re breaking the treatment room curse tonight. Coach says we’ve got to bring something special to the club at midnight.
Come on, man. It won’t work unless you’re there, too.
Please?
Jamie rolls his eyes and types back:
Curses ain’t real, mate. I got better shit to do.
It eats at him, though, the idea that he’s the only one who won’t be participating. He’ll be left out, left behind. It’s stupid, Lasso’s plan, if it can even be called that. Yet he find himself distracted enough to get smoked by the sim on FIFA, which by itself is enough to make him pull out his mobile. Not to text Goodman, though. He needs a third party, someone who’s never steered him wrong before.
Fifteen minutes later, he’s watching Keeley walk up to him, a handful of words from her making him feel like a petulant jackass.
“Maybe someday you should stop battling the people that just want to help you,” she says, and it rattles around in his brain all throughout the drive home. He wants to rebel against that, call her up and tell her she’s wrong, that people don’t want to help him, certainly Ted fucking Lasso doesn’t want to help him. Even if he did want to, it would only be for Jamie Number Nine, football prodigy, it would only be to help the team win. It wouldn’t be for Jamie Just Jamie, the council estate kid with a chip on his shoulder.
I can honestly say you are the best athlete I have ever coached.
That was a heck of a goal out there, by the way.
Jamie grits his teeth. Ted had seemed sincere, then. Even as high as Jamie’s walls were - are - he hadn’t sensed falsehood in what Ted had said. That despite decades of coaching, Ted thought Jamie was the best, Jamie who doesn’t even play Ted’s sport. That despite Jamie’s goal making no difference on the scoresheet and his left-foot cross being rubbish, Jamie was worth complimenting anyway.
He didn’t have to. He could have berated him like Dad did for not scoring more goals, or ignored him like George Cartrick would have, but he didn’t. Because that’s just Ted’s way, loath as Jamie is to believe it. He threw Sam a bloody birthday party, for Christ’s sake. He’d censored the photos of Keeley’s tits in Jamie’s cubby. He’d put up a handmade, saccharine sign that no one asked for. He’d gone out and bought everyone a book tailored specifically to them.
(Not that Jamie had read his book - it’s hard enough parsing out the letters of a text message on a good day; parsing out an entire book, probably full of metaphors and other fancy literary shit, was too daunting to undertake when he didn’t care about Ted to begin with - but in the days following, he’d heard the lads discuss them, sometimes sounding actually excited by what their respective books contained, and once or twice Jamie had had a fleeting regret that he didn’t remember so much as the title of his.)
Still, in spite of the evidence Keeley’s urged him to consider, it’s fucking terrifying, the prospect of coming crawling back, tail between his legs, soft, offering up a piece of himself to the entire team for Ted’s curse-breaking charade. Sure, he could bring with him something pointless, something he doesn’t care about, but that’s hardly a sacrifice, is it? He wanders aimlessly through his barren house, finding nothing that likely would qualify. May as well not even go then.
He almost does exactly that - until he remembers the box stashed away in the understair storage, the box not even Keeley has seen, the one with the few items from his childhood that still contain positive memories.
God, he hasn’t seen these boots in months. Hasn’t even thought about them. They’re like-new, despite being given to him the better part of a decade ago, just a few scraps of grass and caked-on dirt marring the spikes. By the time Mum had given them to him, he’d been too far along in his career to be able to use boots like those. They would’ve cost a lot for Mum, but were unacceptable on a real pitch. But they mean something, enough to where there’s a brief, sharp pang in his heart at acknowledging they would be thrown away or burnt to a crisp or whatever it is Ted Lasso has planned, and surely that qualifies.
He checks the wall clock; he’s late. A blessing in disguise, for it gives him a reason to not show up at all. They’ve probably already finished the whole thing. Showing up now would just make things weird and awkward for everyone, and it’s not like they’re expecting him to come anyway.
Shoving his every thought down, he grabs his keys and speeds out of the driveway, fingers drumming against the wheel as he edges closer and closer to Nelson Road, Mum’s boots resting beside him on the passenger seat.
It goes fine. It goes great, actually. Every cell in his body seizes up at the prospect of baring himself to everyone, but he does it. He talks about the boots, about Mum, about Dad, about how ever since Keeley had given him that figurative thump on the head he’s had to look inward at what he’d let himself twist into. He’s had to imagine the look on Mum’s face if she knew how selfish and mean he’d become, and it’s a look that he never wants to imagine her having again.
They don’t laugh once he’s done like he’d feared. They welcome him, seem to want to let everything be water under the bridge even though he knows he doesn’t deserve it. His heart lifts with the grace of forgiveness; for the first time in ages, he feels almost buoyant.
Of course, it doesn’t last. Good things never do for him, and he shouldn’t have allowed himself to get so complacent. Uri awakens him with a phone call at five a.m. to gleefully inform him that Man City wants him back.
Jamie numbly takes it in, the realization only fully dawning on him after he hangs up. He’s going back to Manchester. To Dad. After everything he’d said last night, all the laughter and happiness, it’s come to this. Lasso had used him.
Jamie pulls up the text Lasso had sent him last night.
Thanks for sharing that story with us, Jamie. Your mom sounds like a real nice lady. See you at practice tomorrow. Gotta make sure you’re in game shape!
Screen swimming as angry tears build, Jamie summarily deletes the text chain and blocks Lasso’s number. He won’t fucking need it where he’s going.
Keeley is a creature of habit. Always has been. It was one of the things that made it easy to be with her - she was a lighthouse flame burning constant, her habits meaning he usually had a good idea of where she would be. The thoughts in his head could be threatening to swallow him whole, his world could be on the brink of collapsing, yet still he knew, he knew, that every day at a quarter past noon, she would be getting coffee at the café five minutes from the club.
It’d be simple to catch her right as she’s leaving work. And he plans to, really. But as soon as he sees her, a content expression on her face as she pulls her fuzzy blue jacket closer around her, he freezes. He hasn’t seen her in ages, not since he’d relegated Richmond. She’d been wearing Roy’s jersey that night the way she used to wear his, which had added fuel to his resentment, but god was she striking even from his vantage all the way down on the pitch.
She’s out of sight for several minutes by the time Jamie gets the wherewithal to move again. Tamping down his anxiety, he jogs to close the distance, waits for her to step inside the coffeeshop, then walks in himself. Just as he’s about to lose his mettle once again, she turns around, her eyes meeting his.
“Jamie?”
Music to his ears, her voice is.
“I’m not stalking you,” he begins, even though it’s only arguably true.
After that, he loses the plot entirely, words coming out in a fast scramble. Keeley’s expression doesn’t change as she hears him out, nor does she seek to throw him a life preserver by cutting him off.
“I’ve just been trying to build up the courage to say hi, so …” He swallows, takes a breath, and finishes lamely, “Hi. Is that okay?”
It feels like for-fucking-ever before she replies. Then, “You deleted my number?”
“Yeah.”
She waits for him to order a coffee of his own, black, then nods in the direction of the least-desirable seats, those without any sort of view and the sound of toilets flushing - but also the seats that are the least visible. “How are things?” she asks, blowing on her coffee before gingerly taking a sip.
“Do I need to answer that?” He’s checked Twitter. Those who hadn’t seen the interview itself have seen the internet in the aftermath, and Keeley’s entire job is to know what’s going on on social media.
“No,” she says with a small, sympathetic smile. “You said you wanted to talk?”
He scratches at the table where the lacquer has started to peel away, in an effort to get rid of some of his nervous energy. It’s been a fucking shit day. “I wanted … I mean, I was thinking …”
God, it would sound stupid to say aloud. It sounds stupid in his head. Heat creeps up his neck at the shame at being in this situation in the first place and embarrassment that he can’t so much as finish a sentence, apparently.
But Keeley just gazes at him in that same patient, unassuming way she used to when he was dragging his feet on something important. In the end, he doesn’t need to say a thing. She knows him too well. “You want to come back to Richmond.”
“D’you think they’ll let me?”
“By ‘they,’ you mean Ted?”
“Yeah. Didn’t exactly leave on good terms, did I? Weren’t great before that either.” Jamie picks at the lacquer some more. “What if he doesn’t … want me?”
Keeley snorts. “Ted thinks the world of you, Jamie. Don’t you know that?”
No.
Yes.
I don’t know. Not after -
“Oi!” Keeley interjects. “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop getting all up in your head.”
He takes a swig of his coffee to avoid responding. Of course, that doesn’t stop her.
“Why did you leave City?” she plows ahead. “Thought Roy was taking the piss when he told me he saw you on that stupid dating show.”
Imbuing every drop of indifference into his voice as he can, he replies, “What, doesn’t sound like something I’d do?”
“No, Jamie, it doesn’t.”
“Well, I did.”
Keeley studies him, tapping her finger against her cup. Then, finally: “If I ask you something, will you tell me the truth?”
He should say no. Knowing him well means being able to hurt him in ways most people can’t, use things he’s told her against him. But he’s never been able to resist her, and he’s bloody tired of putting on a front.
“Go on then.”
Her eyes are soft, her voice softer. “Is your dad the reason you left?”
Jamie sucks in a breath. “What? Why would you -”
“Because I’m not an idiot,” Keeley says. “We were together for six months, you think I couldn’t figure out that your dad’s an arsehole?”
“But you - you never said anything.”
“I guess I wanted you to tell me on your own.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, better late than never.” Keeley checks her watch and curses. “Shit, I’ve gotta get back. I have a call with Dubai Air in ten minutes. Promo stuff.”
Jamie feels a surge of panic rise in his chest. “No, Keeley, don’t -”
“Talk to Ted,” Keeley says. She squeezes his shoulder. “I’m here if you really need me, you know that, but I’m the wrong person for this.”
With a swish of her ponytail she’s gone, leaving him bereft but for cooling coffee and a knot in his stomach.
“Got time?”
Jamie gives no preamble as he walks into Dr. Sharon’s office, clicking the door shut behind him. He’s been avoiding this for two weeks, but can’t anymore. It’s gotten under his skin, this therapy shit, the unpleasantness only ameliorated by voicing the troubles in his head, by having Sharon guide him through what it all means and what he can do to make sense of it.
If she’s taken aback by his abrupt entrance, she doesn’t let on. She silences her mobile and sets it face-down on her desk, the better to ignore it. “Good to see you, Jamie. It’s been a while.”
Jamie drops into the chair opposite her as he had every week since he returned to Richmond. Like clockwork it’s been; until Wembley, that is. Jamie follows her movements as she pulls out her notebook. Even after the dozens of sessions he’s had with her, even knowing they ultimately make him feel better, it still gives him anxiety when she does that.
She’d shown him once what was inside, which helped. It cut down on the mystery, seeing his name written in neat cursive on the cover page, the contents within dedicated to him and him alone and stored in a locked cabinet. Knowing there’s a record out there of his darkest fears and deepest insecurities makes him nearly break out in hives, but nothing and no one, she’d promised, could compel her to show it to anyone.
He begins, “I’ve been …”
You want to go, Jamie? Don’t you forget where you came from!
“… busy.”
Sharon nods in that inscrutable way she does, like she already knows what happened at Wembley. Maybe she does. Some of the other lads see her, they could’ve said something.
The thought of that makes his stomach twist.
“I’m glad you’re here now,” Sharon says. “How are you?”
“Fine.”
Sharon says nothing, the question implied.
He clears his throat past the lump that’s formed there and bounces his knee, trying to get the nervous energy out. “The, um. The nightmares came back.”
Look where you are now, twaddling about with a bunch of amateurs.
“Why do you think they came back?” Sharon asks.
“Same reason as before.”
Don’t turn your back on me, you pussy.
“Your father?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he call you again?”
“No, he … he came to Wembley.”
Sharon nods again, but there’s visible sympathy in it this time. He doesn’t know whether that makes him feel better or worse. “I see. And what happened?”
Jamie doesn’t want to tell her, doesn’t want to relive it yet again, doesn’t want another person to know how weak he’d been and that Dad had reduced him to a husk, the way he used to.
But Sharon’s different, he knows that much, and he knows he wouldn’t have been able to push back even the small way he did if it weren’t for her.
He draws in an uneven breath, and speaks.
He skips the session Sharon had scheduled for him later in the week, ducking his head when he sees her in the hallway. The specter of Wembley still hangs over him, and their last session had featured more tissues than Jamie would have liked. But he drags himself there for the next, nearly three weeks after Man City’s massacre. Sharon greets him not with her usual impassivity, but with an unimpressed raised eyebrow.
“You missed your appointment,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Would you like to talk?” she asks, even now giving him an out should he want it. “We can pick up where we left off.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t - not about my dad.” His hand is fully healed, the loss is behind them, and Dad hasn’t texted in days, but whenever he closes his eyes, he still sees the sharp fluorescents of the dressing room, feels Dad’s flesh shift beneath his fist. Diving back into that isn’t an option, not yet.
“All right,” Sharon agrees.
Dark eyes probing but patient, she waits, and waits some more, waits so that eventually the silence will be so oppressive that Jamie has to speak. Has to put voice to the things he’s been thinking about for longer than he cares to admit.
Finally, he submits. “What do you do when …”
“When what, Jamie?”
“When you fuck things up.” His skin feels itchy, stretched too tight over the bones beneath. He hasn’t felt like this in a while, since those very first sessions. “Like … badly, but it’s too late to fix it.”
“What did you fuck up?”
He says the name on an exhale: “Keeley.”
Sharon’s expression doesn’t change, but there’s a flicker in her eyes that he’s long since learned means he’s said something she can pounce on. It’d unnerved him initially, but he’s come to almost appreciate it, for it means she has an idea of how to help.
“Keep going.”
“She was the best thing in my life and I threw that away,” Jamie says. “Didn’t think I’d ever lose her, and then I did.”
“What happened?”
“More what didn’t happen.”
We’re done. See you around.
You’ve really helped me to feel good about this decision, just by … being you.
Have a good night, Jamie Tartt.
Jamie can’t force the truth out, so he clenches his jaw and tugs at his sleeves instead.
Sharon waits several more minutes for him to elaborate, but once it’s clear he won’t, she prods, “Have you talked to her about this?”
“No,” Jamie says. “We haven’t talked much at all since I came back.”
“Why not?”
“Dunno. Feels too hard now.”
“How come? You said she was a good friend to you.”
“She was. She is. It’s just - it’s different.”
“Different how?”
“Dunno.”
“Jamie.”
He glances up at her before looking away again. In little more than a mumble, he answers, “’Cause I love her.”
He can feel Sharon’s confused frown even though he can’t see it. “I thought you knew that already. We’ve spoken before of your relationship.”
“I didn’t know it was real.”
“And now you know?”
“Yeah, I - yeah.” He swallows. “It … hurts.”
“Unrequited love tends to do that.”
Sharon doesn’t say it unkindly, but the word lances through him and festers like a rusted nail.
Unrequited.
Keeley had loved him once, but no longer, and he has only himself to blame for that. She has Roy now, anyway. Jamie probably crosses her mind only when he’s right in front of her. As well he should - she’d spent enough time on him, she oughtn’t spend any more of it than she has to.
“What do I do?” he asks. “Tell me what to do.”
Sharon sighs. “You know it doesn’t work that way. I can’t tell you -”
“Just once. Please. I need help.”
“What is your goal?” Sharon asks instead. “With Keeley. What are you trying to achieve?”
“Dunno,” he lies. And it is a lie, a great big one, because he knows exactly what it is he wants to achieve.
While Sharon’s voice is free of judgment, there’s clear warning in it. “Sabotaging her relationship is not a very noble goal, Jamie.”
“I’m not - I don’t want to sabotage anything,” Jamie objects. He takes a tissue from the box on the desk and begins to worry it between his fingers for something to do, fine scraps of paper becoming a small pile on his lap. Squirming under Sharon’s expectant gaze, he offers, “I just - I want her to know that she meant something to me, I guess. That I wasn’t playing her or … or faking it or something. I don’t think she knows that. Shitty thing to do, though, innit? I don’t have any right.”
“Of course you’re entitled to your feelings.”
“But I shouldn’t say them, not to her. It’s not fair.”
“Maybe not. But you would only be expressing yourself - respectfully - right? No sabotaging?”
“Right,” Jamie says. He wants to mean it.
Well, no, he does mean it. He can’t bear the thought of hurting Keeley or damaging their friendship, and he can’t hurt Roy either, not after he saved him from spinning clear off his axis in the dressing room.
All the same, the idea of never getting a second chance with her, never being able to convey just how much he regrets not treating her the way she deserved … that’s unbearable, too. Even if he doesn’t merit that second chance, that to even think of it is selfish, he wants it. He aches for it - to hold her again, kiss her again, prove to her that her faith in him was not misplaced.
“Right,” he tells Sharon again.
Sharon’s voice is gentler than usual as she replies, “This is a good thing, Jamie. There’s a difference between expressing what you’re feeling, and acting upon those feelings. The fact that you know there’s a difference is a mark of how much progress you’ve made.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. A year ago, would you have hesitated to go after something you wanted? Whether or not it was wise or hurt someone else in the process?”
He thinks about the fights with Roy he instigated, the look on Sam’s face every time he insulted him, Nate’s palpable misery that Jamie encouraged. Keeley’s frustration when he shut her out.
“No,” he allows, “probably not.”
A year ago, if Keeley had shown the slightest interest, he’d have tried to worm his way back into her life. In fact, he almost had done just that, with only inconvenient geography keeping him from going further. At least, further than one night.
And what a night that had been. He’d knocked on her door genuinely only to thank her for her efforts to help him, then she’d propositioned him, and that was that. The barrage of feelings he’d felt in the afterglow, the depth of those feelings, had done him in.
He hadn’t slept at all, caught up in the rightness of her curled into his side, her cold feet warming against his leg, her arm slung lazily over his chest, fitting against him as snugly as if she were meant to be there. He hadn’t appreciated that enough when they were together, not nearly enough. He’d taken it for granted like he did everything else in his life.
Having it again even if just for a few hours, his arm beginning to tingle from where she was lying on it, the darkness in the room slowly giving way to morning’s pale blue, well. Something shifted inside him, though he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge what it was because while she showed enough interest to fuck him, she hadn’t shown enough to take him back.
Not that he’d asked. He’d rationalized it as not caring, but really it was knowing she’d reject him. He couldn’t have handled that. Not then, and maybe not now either. So he’d panicked, extricated himself from her embrace, dressed, and left without so much as a note. Drove back to Manchester right then and there, blinking the fatigue out of his eyes and pretending he didn’t still have the scent of her burnt-sugar lotion rubbed into his skin, the feeling of her hips, her thighs, her breasts inked on his fingertips, the sound of his name gasped from her lips seared into his very bones.
Sex is all it was, he told himself, fun and familiar but ultimately meaningless, and it was just the endorphins that made him think he felt all those things.
(It wasn’t. And it was, because it had to be.)
“Jamie?” Sharon prompts.
“Sorry.” Sharon looks at him pointedly - he shouldn’t apologize so much for thinking and reflecting, she says - so he amends wearily, “Just … you know.”
He rubs absently at his chest. Mostly he’s gotten used to the constant ache beneath his ribs, but sometimes it bothers him, like an old injury that complains when the weather changes.
“Will it stop?” he asks.
“Will what stop?”
“The … hurt.”
Sharon studies him a moment, considering. “Do you want it to?”
Jamie grabs another tissue and begins mauling it as with the first. The obvious answer would be yes, because who would want to feel this way?
It’d be a fucking blessing to be able to interact with Keeley without feeling his heart skip, to see her holding hands with Roy and not have to white-knuckle his way through keeping his face unaffected. To not get a whiff of her perfume as she walked past and be bombarded with the memory of his bathroom strewn about with her cosmetics, of her running late and asking him to plait her hair while she put on her eyeliner because he was better at it than she was.
Yet when he opens his mouth to answer, no sound comes out and he just stares at Sharon, answer-less.
“You don’t have to decide now,” she says. “But you will have to decide, Jamie. You have to keep moving forward, however you choose to do it.”
He doubts this is what Sharon meant. She probably meant he should take some time to think it through, to come up with a proper plan of action. Ask Keeley if she wants to grab a cup of coffee after work to discuss press stuff, perhaps. Tell her he found a pair of her earrings that had dropped behind his chest of drawers, maybe, and would she come back to his place to get them? Or simply say he wants to speak with her, and they could go for a walk around Richmond, find a bench on the green.
Something decent, normal, somewhere she could tell him to fuck off if she wanted to. Then he could bring up the real stuff.
Rebecca’s father’s funeral is, he reckons, not what Sharon had in mind.
It’s entirely his fault, he knows that, but it hasn’t helped his resolve that all day Keeley has been sending him … looks. Giving him a once-over, complimenting his suit, glancing at him during the eulogy, beckoning him over to talk. He knows better, he does, honest. And yet.
And yet, here he is standing in front of her futilely pouring his heart out like a chump, watching the realization slowly dawn on her the longer he speaks. She always knows what to say; now, she’s silent.
He almost kisses her. It’s a near thing, his stomach swooping like the split-second pause of anticipation on a roller coaster before the cars plunge downward. Her mouth is parted, her eyes wide and searching. She hasn’t recoiled from him, hasn’t shied away, hasn’t moved at all. Roy and decency be damned, his ego thinks she might even let him kiss her, if only for the briefest of moments, if only because she’s so floored by what he said that she doesn’t have her head together enough to stop him.
A shameful part of him even hopes she would, just to feel her again and know there’s a part of her that still stirs for him. She’d looked at him this way the last-first time he told her he loved her, too. Of course, that time had yielded a positive reaction. Not this time.
He stutters forward a centimeter, his body thrumming. God does he want this. He’s dreamt of it for months, how it would happen, what it would feel like, where it would lead. He wants to cup her face in his hands, take in every bit of her, feel her lips on his. Make her feel the way he should have done all along.
But he doesn’t because everything about this is wrong. It’s the wrong place, it’s the wrong time, she’s not his to kiss, and he’s not the guy who steamrolls over others anymore.
No, what he does is leave her standing there. You did it, the not-quite-Sharon in his head says. You ruined your friendship, she’ll never speak to you again, but she knows now. You achieved your goal. Aren’t you glad?
No, he’s not.
He’s never wanted to achieve something less, now that it’s over and done with. It doesn’t feel like the right thing. It feels like shit, like he’s been put in that fancy blender he bought himself years ago because it seemed like the thing to do once he had money to burn, even though he can’t cook worth a damn.
It feels like trying to stretch a rubber band past its limits, every step away from her harder and harder. Only he can’t let it snap him back because he’s not sure he could properly stop himself. Not to force himself on her, god no, but begging - begging, he would do. Right here right now in Rebecca’s childhood home, holding Keeley’s hands in his and begging her to take him back, swearing beyond all doubt that things would be different.
(They would be different. He knows they would, and he knows she knows they would. Doesn’t matter. Too little, too late.)
He needs some air.
Vaguely he hears someone ask him if he’s all right, but he can’t be arsed to turn around and check who it is, let alone reply. It’s just as well: The answer would either be a lie or get him chastised, neither of which he wants.
He strides outside, no clue where he’s going, and eventually finds himself in the Weltons’ backyard. It’s quiet here, the voices of all the guests barely audible. Jamie sits down against the brick exterior next to a rosebush, not giving a shit about the damp soil staining his absurdly expensive trousers.
He breathes in for four seconds, holds for four, breathes out for four.
In four, hold four, out four.
In four, hold four, out four.
In four, hold four, out four.
It doesn’t work the way it did when Sharon was walking him through it in her office, but it gives him something to do, at least. Something other than relive Keeley’s stricken silence, the gravity of what he’d just done.
It’s out there now. Short of fleeing to the ends of the earth, never to be heard from again, he can’t put this jack back in its box. He’d told his ex-girlfriend he’s still in love with her, never mind that she’s dating his coach and hadn’t thought he still cared about her in this way.
He says the wrong thing, he does the wrong thing, he pushes people away, always and without fail. Sometimes he means to, sometimes he doesn’t, but it all ends the same.
Because that’s just who he is, isn’t it?