Page 19 of We Were Never Lovers
“I know you know it doesn’t,” Jack said, his tone still calm but he was gripping the piece in his palm, carefully looking at the board, clenching his jaw.
Sean had always suspected Jack had a temper as bad as his own if he ever deigned to act like a normal human and not a ‘perfect footballer.’ He’d seen it in the set of his jaw when he’d been hauled off the ground and reprimanded by his coach when they’d played against each other as teenagers. Sean hadn’t known at the time what it was about—had assumed Jack was acting like a stone-cold asshole in the game up until that pointbecause of what’d happened between them the night before. It wasn’t until a year later he’d found out it was for a racist remark Jack’s teammate had made and Jack had taken the blame for; the private boys’ school they attended deciding to keep it in-house and not share this information with the umpires. Jack hadn’t looked at Sean, had looked past him, past everyone, his eyes stony and fixed on the road beyond the suburban footy ground. He’d seen in that look how Jack shoved it down, but it simmered under the surface. When he’d received Jack’s texts explaining and apologising for a situation Sean knew nothing about, but Jack had assumed that’s why he hated him, Sean wished he’d never told him and hated him anew. And he’d never forgiven him for making it about that, making it something Sean had to deal with, answer to, when all he wanted to do was play footy.
And he looked like that now—eyes distant, cool—except the part of himself he was trying to control was there in that clenched palm, in the bounce of his knee.
Jack flicked his eyes up. “What?”
“Put it back,” Sean said steadily.
Jack took a deep breath and then put it back, made a real show of jamming it into the space where it didn’t fit. “Happy?” he asked when he sat back, running an agitated hand through his hair.
“Yeah,” Sean refocused on the board, the smashed piece sticking up and out of place. He picked up another green piece, irritated again because there was no way he was going to be able to figure out where this fit in the kaleidoscope of options—every leaf, frond and branch was included in tiny detail.
“This puzzle fuckin’ sucks,” he said.
Jack cracked up laughing.
Sean looked up.
“Sorry,” Jack replied through his laughter. “It does. I’ll get a better one.”
Sean shook his head, dropped his gaze back to the board to hide his smile as he thought about where to jam this stupid piece. He wanted to flip the board, but less out of anger at Jack and more out of frustration at the stupid puzzle. He didn’t know if he’d felt like that before—directing all his frustration at Jack when it wasn’t always about him. It was about him enough of the time, the fact of his existence was enough, but this was probably true too.
Jack started sweeping the pieces into the box, told Sean he’d forgotten how puzzles could be quite aggravating—when he went on sailing trips with his family as a kid they’d had to play cards, puzzles, read books, all non-technology activities, and Sarah completely lost it one night, throwing the box at Helen’s head when Helen told her she couldn’t do the puzzle anymore because she was too immature.
“Sarah never had much of a sense of humour,” he smiled and got up. “You wanna do your exercises?” he asked as he went for the plan Jorge had left.
Sean tried to remember which one Sarah was—he thought it was the doctor. Then he wondered where all these sisters were, why they weren’t dropping by with their scented candles and mocking Jack’s housekeeping skills.
“Don’t you have anythin’ better to do?” Sean didn’t mean for that to come out as cruelly as it did.
Jack focused on the paper in his hands, shrugged. “I’m lookin’ after you at the minute, so…”
Sean tried to ask in a more diplomatic way. “I mean, don’t you have like, friends?” And that probably wasn’t better. Jack wasn’t always there—he had his offseason training and he went in and used the club’s gym to do it every day, used the pool, timed it with Sean’s afternoon sleep—but he wasn’t doing anything otherthan that as far as Sean could tell. It’d been over a month and he’d not seen a single visitor that wasn’t Sean-adjacent.
Jack laughed, another hysterical number, and flashed Sean a grin. “Yeah, I got friends. And a big family. But everyone knows I’m busy, so…”
“So?” Sean waved his hand around.
“So, what? So nothing,” Jack moved the coffee table with the puzzle out of the way. “Lemme get the hand weights.”
Sean took the papers from him, but kept his eyes focused on Jack getting his weights, testing the two kilos before coming back over, setting them down.
“Can you sit forward from there?”
“Yeah.”
Sean went through the motions, Jack’s hands professional on him as he adjusted his form, counted, huffed a laugh when Sean said he’d had enough and told him he wasn’t done yet.
Sean had to hide his face from the familiarity shining down at him. Ben acted familiar with him, Jayden, his cousins and his aunties who’d called—but there was an unbroken line in that familiarity, a trust. They were his people, his mob. Even discomfited with his head all fucked, he could trust them. But he’d never trusted Jack.
Even if what Jack said was true—he’d fucked up bringing up that racist remark his school friend had made when they played in high school, had thought Sean knew and hated him for it since on top of his numerous text messages explaining this himself, which Sean ignored, he’d asked Jayden to relay the message to him with his apologies. Jayden had told him Jack approached him after a game in Melbourne and asked him to tell Sean he was sorry and it wasn’t him, but Jayden thought he meant the hit and knew to leave that well enough alone, “You was mad enough.”
And even if he had been oblivious to the damage the hit had caused and thought Sean knew he’d been pushed, that didn’texplain why Sean wasn’t at the TAC Cup; how did Jack explain that one away? And why had he been going to make the hit in the first place? Had he apologised for that too? Even if they’d managed to square all that away, including acknowledging why he’d been an asshole that night they snuck out (still not touching that one)—none of that could fix a broken line of trust. It was as if he’d wandered out of the shadows and was supposed to pick up that line and believe it’d never been broken, just lost.
“I don’t wanna keep you from like, seein’ your mates,” Sean said once they were finished. He was slumped back in the couch, catching his breath as Jack put everything away with a pleased smile on his face that disappeared when Sean spoke.
“You’re not.”
