Page 18 of We Were Never Lovers
“Well, tell me how you really feel,” Jack huffed, a smile in it. “And I’m only like that around you, dumbass, because you’re always looking at me like you want to kill me. Well, you were, you don’t anymore.”
Sean had been wheezing a laugh but that right there brought him up short. “I can’t be the guy you want me to be.”
“You are the guy I want you to be, you’reyou.”
“You know what I mean, I’m not the guy you’re friends with.”
Jack didn’t reply. Sean watched him recross his ankles. He had nice feet, toenails like shells—Sean wondered if he got pedicures. He could almost picture it, but then he doubted it. Those were the feet of someone who swam a lot and Jack might be a lot of things, but a beauty parlour customer he was not.
“Yeah, but, you’re still you. That part will come. Please come home,” Jack said.
Sean sighed. “I dunno if I can stop… being angry around you.”
Jack took his hand and squeezed it. “When we first started hanging out, just the two of us?”
Sean looked up and nodded, weirded out by their hands clasped together but also not; it was another one of those weird sensations, familiar but foreign at the same time.
“You were still angry around me for ages,” Jack smiled. “I didn’t get the reason out of you right away. So, you can be angry around me. I’m pretty used to it.”
Sean squeezed his hand and Jack gripped him back so tightly, Sean was embarrassed for him, which made him smile. “Why’d you put up with it?”
“‘Cos I liked you,” Jack said simply. “I always have.”
“Then why were you such a dick when we met?” Sean asked for the first time. He blamed the pain meds, the trauma of the afternoon. It still cut him up, which was still humiliating. The hit had been the reason he kept in the forefront of his mind for his resentment, but a part of him knew what happened on the cricket pitch the night they snuck out at the juniors’ carnival and camp burned in a way that was so shameful he couldn’t even look at it in his memories.
Jack’s expression shifted to one of true sorrow. “‘Cos I was fuckin’ stupid.”
“You’re still stupid,” Sean retorted.
Jack laughed, which Sean had hoped for. “But you’ll let me take you home anyway?”
“Yeah,” Sean breathed out. Where else was he going to go?
Jack tightened his grip. “Thank you.”
6
Jack’s version of ‘beingmore present’, Sean thought wryly a week after he’d been back in Jack’s home, was sitting wherever Sean was and trying to act chill while they did whatever half-assed activity Sean could do. Watch television. Do the physio exercises. Do a puzzle Jack bought. Jack reckoned the puzzle would be a soothing activity and something, “We can do together.” Sean did his best not to roll his eyes, which wasn’t too difficult since no matter how hard he tried, he was still weirded out by Jack meeting his eyes, Jack talking to him like a friend, Jack jumping to his feet to get Sean a drink, something to eat, medication, anything Sean wanted if Sean so much as moved and made a discomfited noise.
His understanding of his life had been challenged, he’d admit, not only by Jack’s new familiarity, but also when he’d first looked at himself in the mirror. He’d startled at the man looking back at him—of course it was still him and he hadn’t aged that much, probably not noticeable to anyone but himself, but hewas definitely thinner or more angular; his cheekbones sharper, his stubbled jawline more pronounced, the sockets around his brown eyes—which had always been big in his face, bigger than Jayden’s, so big his aunties and his mum said he looked like Bambi after his mum got shot and laughed at him—were even more pronounced now. He’d shed all the boyish fat and was, indisputably, a man. His dark skin was clear, no longer pebbled with the breakouts he’d get, and there were the faintest traces of laugh lines starting around his eyes. The stripe of shaved hair—about two inches wide and stretching from his forehead to the top of his skull, the gnarly scar that was forming where the stitches had already come out, the glaring evidence of the ventriculostomy they’d done to relieve the swelling on his brain—was growing back in a black fuzz, the rest of his hair longer than he remembered keeping it, curling around his ears, wisping at his nape. But this was him, this was the him Jack was best friends with.
But in the understanding he had of his life, from the last point he remembered, he interacted with Jack strictly as needed. After that first re-introduction in the locker room, when Sean wandered off and disengaged, he and Jack kicked to each other in drills in training, but never spoke beyond the occasional snippy conversation when Jack fucked something up, and if Sean had no other option—literally nothing else was open—he’d kick or handball off to Jack in a game. Jack kicked to him down in the pocket a lot and if he fucked it up, Sean would give him a real spray, to which Jack had looked insufferably hurt at first before doing his best to look blank, which didn’t really work, but they didn’t interact beyond that. There’d been a few games where Sean had let himself forget about their past and just play, and in those games, they’d been on fire. But the sight of Jack’s joy at the end pissed him off, so he’d revert back to hanging him out to dry the following week, hating himself for it because it wasan irrefutably shitty thing to do in a team sport but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. It wasn’t conscious, it just was.
And so, as Jack sat across from him on the armchair he’d dragged in front of the couch and insisted the puzzle piece Sean was trying to fit into the monstrosity Jack had chosen for them to work on—a Swiss ski chalet in summer, mountains in the background, trees, too many fucking trees in the foreground and on the edges—didn’t go there, Sean swung back violently to wondering why Jack was talking to him at all.
“It fuckin’ fits,” he snapped.
“It doesn’t,” Jack responded calmly, but Sean could hear the frustration he was holding at bay.
“Why’d you get a puzzle with this many different trees?” Sean shoved the piece into the gap where it wasn’t going to fit.
“I guess Switzerland has a lot of different trees,” Jack replied evenly, but as soon as Sean took his hand back, he swooped in and took the piece out.
“What the fuck, put it back.”
“No,” Jack said, “it doesn’t fit.”
“It fucking does.” It didn’t, but Sean was mad, madder than he’d been since he got stuck in the stairwell and thrown his crutches, madder than when he’d woken up and seen Jack beside him.
