Page 54 of We Were Never Lovers
I know you’re reading these. I know you’re awake. Talk to me. Please.
Sean threw his phone across his bed, yanked it back and stuffed it under his pillow. Of course Jack knew, Sean had been leaving him on read for a year. It must be three, four in the morning in Melbourne. Either Jack hadn’t slept yet or he got up really fucking early. Maybe he was drunk. It didn’t take much.
He scrambled for his phone again. He knew how to put this to bed and get Jack to stop texting him. He opened his messages, went to Tony’s and typed a reply.
Ur a fuckin dick, but whateva, it’s in the past. Don’t wanna talk about this again. Tell Jack to stop bugging me on it. And if youse neva message again that’d be too soon.
He hit send and held his phone. An hour must’ve passed, his phone silent. Sean didn’t understand why that made him feel shittier than the messages. He lay in the dark, the exhilarationfrom the game completely gone and replaced by this awful feeling that Jack might never text again, that Jack still didn’t think he needed to apologise properly for that fucking hit. Never mind what happened between them the night before.
Jack never had texted him again. Sean missed his texts like he’d lost something precious. He never deleted them, still opened the thread and read over them every few days, his eyes tripping over thatYOUagain and again.
They had the next day off after catching the red-eye back from Melbourne. They’d lost, Jack as quiet and withdrawn as he’d been since Sean’s birthday, but somehow worse. There was quiet and then there was the black hole Jack was circling the bottom of. It felt a lot like depression and Sean knew he’d never get his form back if he kept this shit up.
It still took him another week to do something about it.
“‘Kay,” he said to Jack after barrelling into his hotel room in Brisbane. They had a game the next day and if he had to sit there and watch Jack play like a zombie one more time, he was going to march onto the field and punch him in the face.
“Hey,” Jack said, surprised but tired. “What’s up?” He closed the door and came into the room.
Sean looked around the generic hotel room—Queen sized bed, TV on the cabinet, a mirror behind it, Jack’s suitcase open on the floor, suit hanging up in the closet, shoes lined up neatly beneath it, his phone screen lit up on the bed.
“Who you texting?” he asked.
“Was just checking on Lola,” Jack replied and sat down on his bed, started texting again, his hair falling over his face, the shellof his ears peeking out. He’d already changed into trackies and an old Billabong singlet to sleep.
“Yeah? She all good?” Sean asked.
“Yeah,” Jack smiled down at his phone. “Getting used to it again, maybe.”
Sean nodded, a lump forming in his throat because the next words were hard.
“Look,” he began, squared his shoulders, stood tall above Jack on the bed, cleared his throat. “You’re playin’ like shit.” Well, maybe not so hard.
Jack huffed a laugh and winced at the same time. “Thanks.”
“Like you don’t know it,” Sean willed Jack to look away from his phone and up at him.
“Glad we got that cleared up, thanks for coming by to state the obvious,” Jack tapped away at his phone.
Sean grabbed it out of his hand.
“Sean, what the fuck,” Jack finally looked at him.
“That wasn’t what I came in here to say,” he took a deep breath and Jack looked away.
Sean had watched all their games now, the ones from the two years he’d missed. He’d been surprised he’d copped a one game suspension and even more surprised when he watched the incident—he’d elbowed Jay Cully, a West Coast defender, hard in the chest when they were off the ball. It was an aggressive move and not like him at all—he’d been done for ‘intentional conduct, low impact, high contact’ and been handed the suspension and fine on the Monday by the tribunal. He watched the game closely, trying to see what’d set him off, expecting to see Jack somewhere before realising he wasn’t playing. A quick search told him Jack was out—reinjured, he’d undergone surgery, and from what Sean could put together, this would’ve been the week Jack got sick. He then went to Jack’s games since he’d come back after he recovered, ostensibly to see if it’daffected his game, but noticed a new pattern. In the year prior, before the injury, Jack was good, then he wasn’t, and Sean hung him out to dry sometimes, not giving him the pass when he was wide open, even if it meant he missed the shot himself. It’d been like that the year Sean could remember too, though with less open fighting. His eyebrows had raised when he watched them have a screaming match on the field—they were fucking teammates and while he’d give his left nut to know what they said, especially the time Jack snapped back at him and Sean smirked like he was pleased, he was more concerned by the commentators focusing on it so much. He didn’t need that kind of attention. But in the last year, there was something else going on, a pattern—Jack could be off his game one week, but then he’d be in top form the next, carefree, totally out of his head. And they lived together, so Sean must’ve known what they did to get Jack there, Sean knew he must’ve helped somehow, but he didn’t know how.
“You never play this consistently shit,” Sean said.
Jack winced, looked up and tilted his head. “Is that supposed to be better than what you just said?”
“I’m not sayin’ this right,” Sean rallied. “Last year,” he started slowly and watched Jack tense. “You’d be bad but then good again. What … helped? Or is it like, me, am I the problem now?”
It occurred to him he’d been thinking about this all wrong and felt himself gathering momentum. “That’s it, isn’t it? I’m a distraction, like when a guy gets with a chick who’s no good. Bad comparison, but—”
“No,” Jack shook his head. “It’s not—”
“It is,” Sean went on. He’d come here thinking he could help. And actually, he could. “I should move out.”
