Page 14 of We Were Never Lovers
Sean jerked but looked at him.
“I promise,” Jack said, “no matter what happens, we’ll figure it out, okay?”
Sean took a deep breath. “But you don’t even trust me enough to tell me why you got a hate on for a fuckin’ physio, so I’m sorry if I’m havin’ a rough time believin’ in that.”
Jack squeezed, his gaze searching. Sean made himself watch him back, unflinching and, as best he could, not angry, not showing his fear either. Just steady, steady like they’d been a few times in games, where the magic had happened like he’d known it would when they were teenagers.
Jack let him go and sat back with a deep sigh. “He’s always hitting on you.”
Sean raised both eyebrows. “Me? He’s hitting on you, dumbass.”
Jack scoffed and resumed eating, a flush creeping up his tan throat, radiating over his cheeks. “As if,” he said and started eating again.
“Hang on,” Sean said, “why do you care? I mean, he’s not, he’s hitting on you, but why do you care if he hits on me?”
Jack swallowed carefully, his eyes over Sean’s shoulder as he replied. “It’s unprofessional.”
“You’re lying,” Sean said.
“I’m not—”
“You are. You got a tell. Well, you got a few, plus you completely suck at it, but you won’t make eye contact when you’re lying.”
“Alright, well, I’m glad you’re keepin’ such a good eye on me.”
“Answer the question,” Sean said.
“Your food’s going cold.”
“I’ll eat once you tell me why it bothers you.”
“‘Cos,” Jack shrugged and met Sean’s eyes; he held the gaze like he was proving he could. “We’re best mates.”
Sean knew that was a non-answer, but Jack had put so much emphasis on it he felt scared to push. Something was telling him not to push on that door because he might not like what was on the other side of it. He wasn’t a fan of Jorge hitting on Jack either, but he knew Jack wasn’t interested and he wouldn’t do anything. He’d seen guys checking Jack out before, seen him be—or act—oblivious. Sean could never be sure which one, and so he knew Jack wasn’t going to start having hot sex anytime soon with the hot physio in his room where Sean could hear. But just thinking it made him feel like shit; it’d been okay as a joke in his head, but the thought of Jack having actual sex with another man? Just, no.
He ate, wallowed in those shitty feelings, listened to Jack eat quietly beside him as he scrolled through something on his phone. And he was thinking it might be worth going back to bed for the day when Lola came under the table and sat near his foot. Jack had told him she usually sat on his foot, but with the chair in the way she’d figured she could still get contact by pressing her body against the foot plate on his good leg. Sean flipped the plate up, dropped the foot down until she rested her head on it, a comforting weight on his toes.
5
“It’s been over amonth,” Dr Harris said, the first note of seriousness creeping into his voice since Sean had woken up in the hospital. They were in his office at the club, another doctor—Dr Cohen, a neurologist—sat beside Sean in front of Harris’ desk, Jack on Sean’s other side.
When Jack had roused him that morning, his look had been different. His gaze in the morning was always searching—he examined Sean as if he expected someone else to be there, a hopefulness on the edge of that look he tried to conceal. Those looks had diminished after the first week, or Jack tried to better hide them. But that morning, Jack had really looked again, as if he were trying to peer inside Sean and will someone else into residing there.
Sean had dropped his eyes, for the first time feeling guilty. Anger surged after the guilt—he didn’t owe Jack anything.
But he remembered what today meant and what he’d decided. If they told him this was permanent, he was moving back to hisapartment. He couldn’t keep playing this charade. Jack had been good to him, but it was too weird.
Adding to the weirdness was an unprecedent level of arousal thrumming under the painkillers. He’d always had a good sexual appetite—he jerked off most days, though he never had sex after the first few disastrous hook-ups he’d had with men. It wasn’t just that the sex had been bad, which it had been, it was the racism, the flash of surprise and dismay when a hook-up arranged on an app saw he wasn’t whatever they thought he was based on the shirtless picture of his torso. He had a white grandad of Irish descent on his dad’s side, and other whitefellas in his bloodline going back over two hundred years and siring kids in ways no one ever talked about, and while he was clearly a man of his race, he wasn’t dark, not even as dark as his brother, more brown than black. But those few hook-ups always failed to conceal their disappointment, their judgement. As far as he remembered, he’d decided to stop hooking up at all. He had no memory of feeling like this—body tingling, braced for something, adrenaline and desire coursing through his busted body when he tried to sleep at night. And to feel like this around Jack—it was too much.
“Trauma induced amnesia, or organic amnesia,” Harris went on now, his eyes apologetic over the business-like tone.
“Amnesia caused by an injury to the brain, a traumatic brain injury or TBI,” Dr Cohen interjected.
“Usually resolves within a few days or presents very differently. Arthur,” Harris inclined his head at Dr Cohen and they all looked at him.
He smiled, his round glasses reflecting the sunlight beaming onto the oval outside the upstairs offices, his thin body swivelling to face Sean, his glance darting between him and Jack.
“Yes, a simple trauma induced amnesia usually presents as an inability to recall the actual traumatic event, which you have, but, in your case, you seem to have lost the last two years as well. Now, we might have thought traumatic brain injury, but,” Cohen got up and all eyes followed him to the CT scans of Sean’s brain glowing on the screen. “Your brain has no signs of injury. Once the swelling came down, we can see here,” he pointed and it meant nothing to Sean, “a healthy brain. If you had a TBI, we’d see something and the presentation would be different. In most cases, you lose everything except abilities.”
