Page 27 of We Were Never Lovers
Jack retreated into himself again. It was like talking to a hermit crab—Jack would come out, fully retreat, come back out a little bit, retreat a little bit.
“Well, no, it’s kinda separate,” Jack replied, eyes looking past Sean and voice off. So, that was a lie, but Sean was going to let it go for now.
“We live together, we’re never gonna get married, we just, you know, shoot the shit a lot and part of that is what we’re gonna do when we retire. We’d have a few beers and talk about it and we’d decided we’d stay together in the city. I want to get into youth league stuff, use the degree to do a postgrad in education and maybe run like, an advocate program with footy in schoolsor something. And you wanted to see about doing uni, fine arts, writing kids’ books.”
Sean stared at him. It wasn’t the art part—he liked art, did some painting with the men’s group in his mob when he was back home—it was the audacity of him thinking he could do art as a living.
“I know,” Jack chuckled. “You took a long time to get there, but yeah, that’s what you wanna do.”
“Ain’t any money in art,” he finally said.
“Maybe not, but there is in kids’ books written by an ex-league player,” Jack replied, his smile warm and sure.
Sean shook his head. He could see why Jack didn’t want to tell him this. He’d never want Jack to know something so personal—he thought he could do a fine arts degree and write kids’ books? He certainly believed he’d had to have had a few beers to tell Jack that. And he knew there must’ve been a lot of conversations, hang outs, just time together for him to disclose something like that. Maybe they really were friends. Sean wouldn’t be that vulnerable if they weren’t.
“Okay,” he said. “I can see I’d wanna do somethin’ like that. I dunno if it’s all that realistic, but I’ll think about it.”
“You’ll stay in the city then?” Jack asked, guarded yet hopeful.
“Well, I gotta stay all year either way, don’t I?” He wasn’t out of the hunt yet, it was all speculation, and in the meantime, he’d be rehabbing, eventually re-joining the team for training, doing his own thing alongside the main group. If anything was to be decided, it wouldn’t be until he was ready to play again.
“A year,” Jack said decisively and exhaled. “Yeah, we can cross that bridge if we come to it, and I don’t reckon we will, but for now let’s focus on the year ahead and get you better.”
Sean rolled his eyes. “Yeah, boss. But what about the other part?”
“What other part?” Jack asked.
“Well, I reckon I believe you that we shot the shit about doin’ somethin’ in the future, about me stayin’ in the city at least. But what I don’t get is why we have to stop the other thing.” He said the last part carefully, hoping he was choosing the right words.
Jack looked surprised. “Didn’t we cover that already? We do it a specific way. You now, you don’t want that.”
Sean’s eyebrows went up. “I don’t?”
“No,” Jack said firmly. “You from two years ago? You’re not gonna like the way we do things.”
“I reckon that’s for me to decide,” Sean replied because he didn’t get what the problem was. He liked what happened in the kitchen. And he could see what Jack meant by ‘take care of him’ in that context—take him to bed after, make sure he didn’t feel used. Sean knew all about feeling used, so he could see how if he just hit it and quit it Jack would feel the same, used and discarded.
“No,” Jack said again even though Sean didn’t miss the surprised look the conversation was going this far. He’d assumed Sean would be out once he mentioned the way they did it, maybe squirm away at the ‘take care of me’ idea. He could see how Sean from two years ago would’ve given him that impression, but what Jack—even two years later—didn’t seem to get was that Sean hadn’t always hated him, and those original feelings hadn’t simply gone away because of everything that happened.
“You don’t get it,” Jack said like the conversation pained him, “you’re like, in charge of me when we do that and I don’t think I could bear it if you said or did something…”
Sean understood. “No, yeah, I get it.”
“You do?” Jack asked, disbelieving.
“Yeah, like, you let me do what I want but like, I’m also all respectful and shit, right?” Now he was blushing. It wouldn’t be obvious, but he could feel it.
“Right,” Jack breathed out like that was settled.
“Do we ever fuck normally?” Sean asked.
Jack considered this, eyes distant. “I know what you’re asking. What we do feels normal to us now. Even when we started we, uh, we were kinda playin’ in that realm. So, no, I guess even before we talked about it, you were kinda in charge and I, you know,” he shrugged and refocused on Sean before dropping his gaze, “liked it.”
Sean didn’t want to freak Jack out, but even this conversation had him thickening up in his shorts so the thought of not getting to do it felt impossible.
“So even from the start I was all,” he waved a hand between them, “respectful and shit.” His mind tripped back to his last memory—the locker room, shoving Jack against his locker, a fight that got confused when he looked at Jack’s lips. He didn’t know if they’d kissed. The memory cut out at that point, but he knew if they’d done anything, it would not have been respectful.
“Well, no,” Jack allowed, smiling wryly. “You were a bit of an asshole, but I wasn’t totally submitting to you back then either. It progressed.”
