Page 69 of We Were Never Lovers
He spun around, “You’re? You’re?” he mocked. “You’re fuckin’ what?”
“Fuckin’ sick of it!” Jack bellowed. His face was red, his eyes were wild, but almost as quickly, the heat went out of him as he stared at Sean. “Have you been crying?”
“What the fuck is it to you?” Sean yelled. He stepped closer, the rage taking over. “What the fuck is it to you?!” There was a hysterical note to his voice and for a moment he was scared of himself, of what he might do here. All those years of hating Jack roared to the surface, and he was unmoored with them.
“What the fuck is it to me?” Jack asked incredulously. “Are you fucking serious? We were gonna be best mates and then yeah, I fucked up, but it was fixed. And you still won’t even look at me.”
“I’m lookin’ at ya now,” Sean seethed and walked right up to him. Jack took an involuntary step back until his back was pressed against the locker. “And all I see is a trade that cost us a fuckin’ fortune and nothin’ to fuckin’ show for it.”
“Fuck you,” Jack said weakly, eyes blinking quickly as he looked down.
“Fuck me?” Sean hissed. He shoved his chest against Jack’s pristine white shirt. “You’d like that wouldn’t ya?”
Jack swallowed, eyes darting to the side.
“No,” Sean said slowly, something clicking. “That’s not what ya want, is it? Fuckin’ fag like you, ya wanna bend over, don’t ya?”
Jack recoiled at the word “fag”, but twitched as Sean finished.
“Don’t fucking, don’t fucking call me that,” Jack said breathlessly. He was bigger and Sean was looking up at him, but he felt it then—all the power he had over him,and in the midst of his rage, he felt a stab of tenderness; he remembered being seventeen and wanting to push Jack under him, to do it carefully, to make it good.
The memory made him angrier, the ball of hurt exploding out of his chest and suffusing his limbs.
“At least that’d make ya good for somethin’,” he shoved hard, Jack’s body crushed between his own and the locker. “‘Cos ya sure ain’t good for football.”
Tension snapped back into Jack’s body and he went to straighten up, tried to get away. “Fuck you,” he whispered, but his eyes had dropped to Sean’s lips.
Sean pulled back an inch, surprise and desire whipping through him, upending the anger. He looked to Jack’s lips, plush and parted, heaving with breath. He’d fake him out, he’d pretend to kiss him and then leave him hanging, the way he’d left Sean hanging all those years ago, and then he’d mock him until the end of time—
“You’re not worth it,” Jack had said, voice cracking.
And that was the last thing Sean remembered, no matter how much he tried to push past that point, he couldn’t see it. He’d wondered, almost desperately, if he’d followed through and they’d kissed. When Jack told him about the first time outside the club, he’d figured not. He’d surmised that altercation had either ended with Jack getting free and making a break for it, or Sean stepping back and leaving him to it. He’d wanted to know in the same way he wanted to know everything he’d lost. But he also didn’t want to know because if they had kissed and it hadn’t, as he sometimes let himself hope, turned into a real kiss, the disappointment he felt was like going back all over again, back to being seventeen and Jack pretending everything meant nothing. And if they’d kissed then, most importantly, who’d kissed who? Had he bridged that gap, or had Jack? It mattered in a way he couldn’t explain, but he knew it damn well mattered.
But now he had Jack holding all those answers away from him and a meeting with management to discuss his future. And all he could think was: if they say I’m done, I’m going home because I can’t do this anymore.
24
After Jack’s parents diedwhen he was nineteen, after the numb and shock—that fucking sailing accident, after all those years of his dad planning to finally take that trip now all his kids were out of the house and having it end like that—Jack couldn’t let himself think about the unfairness of it because it cut him up and made it difficult to carry on. But as he tried to process it and got ready for a flight back to Perth for a memorial in absence of their bodies, he’d thought,Sean will text me now. What a guilty and shameful thought to have, he’d berated himself, and yet, he’d had it, he’d even expected it. Only Sean hadn’t texted.
As Jack stood with his sisters in the winter sunshine surrounded by hundred-year-old trees in Karrakatta cemetery, all of them drenched in varying degrees of disbelief and grief, he’d thought again of Sean only a few kilometres away, playing in a Western Derby and thought he’d have gone to the game if it wasn’t for this. And another stab of guilt came and it wasn’tuntil years later, lying in bed with Sean, the room dark and quiet around them as he told him all of this, that Sean had reached over, gripped his shoulder and said he wasn’t a bad person, denial was part of grief, and him wondering about a footy game at a funeral with the way it’d happened, proper grief hadn’t even had time to put its boots on yet, of course he’d be thinking normal things.
“I wrote a text, ya know,” he’d said. “But I didn’t send it.”
“Why?” Jack asked.
“Felt kinda cheap, I dunno,” he stroked his fingers up and down Jack’s neck. “Like I hadn’t talked to ya in years and then I’m like, what? Cashing in on ya grief? I saw you on the news. It already sucked bad enough.”
Jack shook his head. “I really wish you had.”
“Sorry,” Sean replied and Jack knew he meant it, knew his regret in the squeeze of his hand on Jack’s bicep.
“Nah, I know you dealt with worse, and here I am, gettin’ all sad ‘cos something bad finally came and found me,” Jack closed his eyes.
“Don’t do that,” Sean had replied softly. “It ain’t a competition.”
Jack didn’t remember what they’d said after that, he wished he’d paid better attention to all those little moments, recorded them somehow. That conversation had been a month before Sean got hurt. Well over a year since they’d officially gone exclusive. It was another memory that made Jack’s heart clench, and he saw it in his memory like a movie reel.
They’d been sitting next to each other on the floor, stretching after a game. A Saturday afternoon home-game, a win they’d managed by the skin of Sean’s teeth, a beauty of a goal coming off Jack’s boot after Sean handballed it off to him in the dying seconds. It’d done it—a two-point win in an absolute nail-biter.
