Page 65 of We Were Never Lovers
Jack lifted his arm, looked down. “Yeah?”
Sean shoved him and then yanked him back in. Jack curled around him.
“Yeah,” Sean breathed out. He tangled their legs together, wrapped his arms around Jack’s torso and kissed the top of his head. “Fuck yeah.”
Jack squeezed him, fingers digging into his spine. “Your leg alright?”
“Didn’t even notice it,” Sean said honestly, his eyes slipping shut.
“Tell Jorge you don’t need him anymore then,” Jack mumbled against Sean’s armpit.
Sean laughed, sleepy. “Tell him your ass is the new physio.”
He felt Jack’s laughter against his skin. “It’s not a team thing.”
Sean cracked up. “It better fuckin’ not be.”
Jack tightened his arms. “That’s like…”
Sean waited, but Jack wasn’t going on.
“It’s not,” Jack finally said, his lips pressing into Sean’s skin.
“Good,” Sean replied, absently. He felt like there was something else there, but he was too tired and blissed out to push.
He pressed another kiss to Jack’s head, rested back on the pillow and drifted.
22
Jack rolled over andfound Sean sitting up in bed, the white sheet and doona pooled around his waist, chest bare, eyes intent on his phone.
“What time is it?” he asked.
Sean twitched, glanced down at him. “Early,” he replied and went back to his phone, face pinched.
It was harder when Jack was barely awake to remember this Sean wasn’t his Sean, and he rolled closer, slung his arm over Sean’s hips and rested his head on his stomach. Sean tensed under him, then relaxed deliberately, a hand going into Jack’s hair tentatively before Jack could roll away.
He made himself relax as he remembered. His Sean would ditch the phone, would slide down and kiss him, grab his dick, push him onto his back and tell him they had plenty of time, tell him all the filthy things he was going to do to him in that time. Sean could still be a prickly bastard—closed off and snappish—but he made that wall come down for Jack with increasing frequency.
“What’re you looking at?” he mumbled even though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“Hanny, new kid in Sydney, got medically retired,” Sean said, his hand scratching Jack’s scalp.
Jack frowned. Hanny was in his first season, third overall draft pick and he was living up to it.
“What happened?” Jack asked.
“Concussion,” Sean replied, “scans came back, small bleeds.”
Jack knew what that meant. He was a high risk for permanent brain injury.
“He got hit in that first game,” Sean went on and narrated the story he was reading. Jack didn’t follow the footy news like Sean did, so he didn’t know anything about it, and he was more interested in the tightness in Sean’s tone, the grip in Jack’s hair tightening with it.
It was silent for a while after Sean finished, just their breathing and Lola snoring softly at the end of the bed.
“It’s not the same,” Jack finally said because it wasn’t. Sean’s brain was perfectly healthy.
Sean grunted but didn’t say anything. Jack sat up. Sean let him go but his eyes followed him. It was there in his expression—he either already knew they were going to medically retire him or he was waiting for it with a certainty he hadn’t shared with Jack.
