10. 10
10
S ean didn’t order the Indian and the beers and work on making Jack relax so he could get him to suck his dick again. Instead, he’d said he needed to get to bed before nine the night before and hopped to his room with Jack’s surprised, “Oh, okay, goodnight,” called out behind him as he moved as fast as he could with crutches, Jack adding, “Do you need anything?”
“I’m fine, ‘m good,” he’d said and waited for Lola to dart in behind him before resolutely shutting the door.
He’d lain awake for a long time wondering what his problem was. He’d been aching for it and now he had the green light and he was hiding in his bedroom.
Jack was driving them to the club the following morning when the reason Sean was hesitant hit him. Preseason training had officially begun and Sean was attending to do aquatic therapy—“pool-based hydrotherapy”—which Jorge was excited about, had already organised the waterproof cover specific to Sean’s measurements, but Sean was yet to be convinced since he couldn’t stop imagining his leg drowning him. After that, endless video reviews and a team meeting, while Jack trained back with the main group.
Sean was sitting in the passenger seat, watching the convict brick and heritage houses give way to new townhouses as they cruised out of Fremantle and headed for the training facility in Cockburn, his heart beating with nerves as he realised he didn’t know how to make a move. How had he managed it the first time? And when was their first time? How did it happen? He couldn’t quite believe he was only thinking about this now, but he was, and he was so caught up in it, anxious about it, it felt a lot like when he’d been in the hospital, when the agitation was at its worst, when everything was confusing and he had questions that could never be answered because while people might be able to tell him about his life, there were ways he interpreted his life no one else could ever explain.
“Hey,” Jack said, his deep voice breaking into Sean’s panic as swiftly as the hand he reached over and grabbed Sean’s bare knee with. “It’s gonna be alright. Everyone on the team knows what’s happened and the new guys, the ones we’ve got since, they all know the drill, Harris has spoken to everyone. It’s gonna be fine.”
He squeezed Sean’s knee reassuringly before putting his hand back on the steering wheel like it was a normal gesture between them.
And Sean remembered there was another thing to be anxious about. He took a deep breath, ready to ask Jack to pull over so he could get out and hop away, when what came out was, “Did we fuck for the first time after we lost that prelim?”
Jack startled so much he jerked the car into the other lane and got a vicious horn from the stunned driver on their left.
“Shit, sorry, sorry,” Jack said even though the person couldn’t hear him.
Sean looked at the man and saw him do a double take when he realised who he was looking at, his face transforming from anger to surprise. Sean felt a hysterical laugh bubbling up; he waved.
“Can we talk about this later?” Jack asked.
“It’s a yes or no question,” Sean replied, his heart ticking up again.
“No,” Jack retorted firmly. “Happy?” he shot him a complicated look—put out, but hurt. When Jack looked at him like this, Sean got the feeling Jack was talking to past him—Sean now—and importing all his disappointment that this present Sean was not living up to the future him he’d become. It pissed Sean right off, but underneath that, it made him feel woefully inadequate, a feeling he was more than used to from school as a kid, a feeling he fucking hated, and so, when Jack reminded him of it, he charged in with his anger in order to avoid the inadequacy.
“Why would that make me happy?”
They stopped at a red light, the heritage houses and charm of Fremantle firmly behind them, old-school industrial sheds and buildings stretching down the highway to their right, the dilapidated service station that still hadn’t been torn down sitting like a mirage in the emerging heat on their left.
Jack inhaled audibly. “I don’t know.” It was as if they were always having multiple conversations, layers Sean couldn’t track because there was so much he didn’t know.
“Look, I just wanna know how we started,” Sean said as the light turned green and Jack accelerated right, cruising down the wide lanes of the highway.
“And you thought this was the best time to ask?” Jack focused on the road, voice tight.
“No, I dunno. I’m sorry, alright? But you don’t get it,” he turned his body to face him. He liked this, he realised, Jack trapped in the car with him—he couldn’t get up and pretend he had other stuff to do when Sean asked questions he didn’t want to answer. “I’m trapped back there and it’s like my whole life has changed and you’re only givin’ me half answers. So when I think of somethin’ then yeah, I’m gonna ask it.”
Jack glanced at him, a quick searching look, before he gave a firm nod. “Okay, I’m sorry,” he said decisively. “I’m doing my best but it’s difficult for me too. I’m not not telling you shit to be difficult; I’m trying to protect you. Also—”
“Don’t do that—”
“Also,” Jack repeated, “can we maybe agree not to do this just before we get to training?”
Sean scoffed. “Like training ever stopped us getting into it.”
Jack winced, but kept his eyes resolutely on the road. He drove into the carpark and headed for the players lot, winding the window down to flash a pass at a boom gate before they drove in.
“Will you tell me after?” Sean asked as they parked.
Jack didn’t meet his eyes, but he agreed with a, “Yeah, alright.”
Sean nodded. And then the rush of panic at being at training with a bunch of players who knew two years’ worth of stuff he couldn’t remember flooded in. It wasn’t like the brief visits at the hospital—he was expected to be somebody here.
“We’re early,” Jack said, “so you can get ready and head to the gym. The guys are gonna come in and say hi in pairs before you hit the pool, me or Ben will be with them.”
“Sounds good,” Sean said, trying to believe it.
“Hey,” Jack reached for him, aborted the movement and rested his hand on the console. Sean wished he’d just touch him again, but he’d fucked that up by bringing up that fight. Because that’s what it must’ve been in the end. Just another fight.
“It’s gonna be alright,” Jack said. “You’re still you, Sean Hiller, one of our best players. That hasn’t changed.”
Sean didn’t want to acknowledge how much better that made him feel, but it did.
The guys did come and meet him in pairs, always a face he knew with a face he didn’t, and it was easier with the brothers—the other Indigenous players—even the new ones. He felt his shoulders drop each time one came in and they did a blackfella handshake—a handshake only the way mob do—and smiled knowingly at each other in a way that transcended whether or not they’d met before. Fremantle had always had one of the strongest contingents of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players in the league, and now they were nine, two more on the seven Sean remembered, with two of his old teammates traded out and so four new brothers in total.
Ben grinned at him when he came in with the Kelly brothers—Minang Noongars from down south Albany way, Bobby and Jimmy—and Sean cracked a laugh in surprise. How in the shit did Freo score them?
Bobby gave him a good handshake, “Kaya, cuz,” he winked, his voice soft yet brazen, much like his brother who clapped Sean’s elbow as he shook his hand, repeated the greeting, “Kaya,” and asked him how his head was doing. But Sean wanted to know how they’d ended up here—no way Essendon was making that trade. Bobby and Jimmy were two of the most dangerous forwards in the league with an uncanny ability to find each other from anywhere on the ground.
“Bobby ‘ere wanted to come home, eh,” Jimmy said and Sean knew wherever Bobby went, Jimmy went, and what a get for Fremantle.
Harry Bleaker came in next—Wongi Mob out near Leonora, desert Country—he was one of Freo’s senior players and Sean’s mentor when he was a rookie. He turned their handshake into a hug and told Sean it was bloody good to see him, voice gruff, backslaps punctuating his speech like he’d been really worried for a second there. Sean stayed in the hug for as long as the big fella let him.
The others filed in—James Cooper, Yorta Yorta Mob from the Murray and Goulburn Rivers; Jordie Davey from the Kokatha Mob on the west coast of South Australia; and Andy Long from up north, Wardama Mob near Katherine on his dad’s side and Wargamayagan Mob from the Torres Strait on his mum’s.
When Matty Tampu came in Sean’s eyebrows flew up in surprise. Tampu was a superstar Tiwi Islander and not a player Carlton would’ve traded. He was black as night, his hair a riotous mass of curls and his white teeth shone as he grinned big and bright at Sean and gave him a handshake.
“What’re ya doin’ over ‘ere?” Sean asked.
Tampu’s smile turned smug. “Nobody gonna get that one outta me.”
“Matty Tampu?” Sean said to Ben after he’d left.
Ben shrugged. “Dunno, just requested the trade, everyone’s been wonderin’. Ya feelin’ alright?”
Sean nodded and meant it. And Ben smiled at him like he knew it too. Ben was a Wudjari Noongar from Gnowangerup—Ngowanjerindj in their language, land of the malleefowl—and they’d played together on the Great Southern Twenty team when they were teenagers, had been drafted together, and up until Sean’s last memory, had lived together with an open-door policy for the other brothers on the team, and anyone from their mobs coming up to the city.
It was one of the weirder things about living with Jack. Just him and Jack. Ben had visited, and Jayden, but no one else. He’d felt isolated in a way he never had. He’d had moments of loneliness living with Ben, seeing him with Lara and knowing he’d never have that, but he’d never been alone.
“Hey,” he asked Ben as they left the locker room later to go to the team meeting. “How come no one’s comin’ round? Does Jack not like it?”
Ben looked surprised. “Not at all, we all just decided to give you a bit of space. Harris said it’d be too much with your head all,” he made a hand gesture at Sean’s temple, fingers waggling. “But you normally have everyone over every couple of weeks for a meal, drinks. All the brothers, the rest of the mob in town. Your mob stays with you when they’re in the city. Jack loves it.”
“Oh,” Sean replied. He could not imagine Jack there, loving it.
“His sisters and all their kids always come too,” Ben went on.
Sean hadn’t even met Jack’s sisters. Did this mean Jack had been keeping everyone away?
They were in the meeting room before he could ask. He’d met everyone by this point and the players he knew—who all looked the same but different, which freaked him out, but he was dealing with it—all smiled over at him, the new fellas grinning reassuringly. Sean had a newfound appreciation for dementia patients. It was nice, everyone trying to make him feel okay, but it was disconcerting too.
He went to follow Ben to the back of the room, but Jack stood, the chair next to him free, his smile not the smile he gave Sean at home. This was friendly enough, but it was professional too, cordial.
As he took a seat and Jack took his crutches and propped them against the wall, Sean saw with fresh eyes how intimate Jack was with him at home. He sat back down, gave him another quick smile—professional, reassuring—and turned his eyes to Hayes, their captain, kicked his long legs out, crossed them at the ankles, rested his hands over his stomach and listened. He was the guy Sean knew from two years ago but more settled in himself. But he wasn’t the guy Sean had been getting to know at home.
Hayes welcomed him back—“Nice to see you not slackin’ on the couch and decided to come join us, Hiller”—and everyone laughed, Ben jostled his shoulder from behind and Jack gave him another friendly yet distant smile.
The meeting was mainly about the semi-final they’d lost the year before, which Sean didn’t remember, and how they needed to move on. They watched the video review and Sean marvelled at a version of himself—one he had no recollection of—playing an incredible game of footy. He was good, just as quick, skills more honed, but then he saw himself miss a mark off a kick from Jack, the fumble creating a turnover then a handball to bloody Finnegan Flynn who exploded down the centre of the ground, dodging their players like he was made of Teflon and kicking a beauty from fifty metres out on the run. If it wasn’t against his own team, he’d admire the hell out of it. He didn’t remember screwing up the play, but the amount he hated himself in that moment, it was as if he did. He was such a fuck-up.
Campbell, their coach, was another guy Sean had never met but at least knew of with Campbell being an ex-league player from West Coast, a three-time premiership winner there and at Melbourne. By the sounds of his speech on moving on, learning from their mistakes, don’t hold onto it, he was about the same as most coaches. He needed to ask Jack what happened to Hurley, but the thought of it, another question on his ever-growing list, exhausted him.
Jack had barely shut the door back in the car when Sean said, “Man, I am such a fuck-up.”
Jack chuckled, got his seatbelt on. “Nah, we all lost that one. Plus, you were under a lot of pressure and we were givin’ you nothin’.”
“Yeah,” Sean nodded. “I noticed, what the fuck, where were you?”
Jack glanced at him to gauge how serious he was. He was serious.
“Tagged,” he said but like he knew Sean wasn’t going to allow that as an excuse.
“And your mate Flynn,” Sean shook his head in disgust. He could respect the hell out of the play, he just didn’t like that play being made against him and because of his mistake. And he knew Jack and Flynn were mates, had seen the pictures on their social media pages, like some advertisement for a white boy surfing magazine—the pair of them with arms around the other’s shoulders, tanned bare chests and low slung boardshorts, white teeth smiling as blue eyes crinkled against the sun.
But Jack just laughed, shrugged. “What’re you gonna do? It’s Finn.”
Sean muttered a few insults, mainly at himself. He had no recollection of playing and yet the anger and shame was the same as if he had. Jack wasn’t completely unaffected either; Sean saw the flinch when he brought up Jack’s own errors, how well he’d been shut down, how he needed to learn to shake a tag.
By the time they were having dinner, Jack’s shoulders were so tense Sean regretted going on about it. He wasn’t the Jack from around the team, the locker room Jack, he was the Jack Sean saw at home—more open, more vulnerable—and Sean had to pause, fork in hand, and take in the dejection radiating off him. It was as alarming as it was surprising. Sean had been giving Jack hell for a year—as far as he remembered it—but Jack never let on how much it bothered him aside from the odd flinch Sean caught, the flash of hurt in his eyes, carefully buried before he lifted his gaze.
“Hey,” Sean said, “I’m not tryin’ to be an asshole. I’m not like, attacking you personally.” It felt weird to be explaining himself, even after all these months.
Jack met his eyes and Sean would give his annual salary to be able to read the expression on his face. “Yeah, I know, I guess it’s just,” his gaze turned distant, “weird.”
“I don’t break down your game and give you pointers anymore?” Sean asked.
“Oh no, you do,” Jack chuckled and met Sean’s eyes from under his eyelashes. Men should not be allowed to have eyes that blue that could do that, he thought as he felt desire rush through him. “But ah, you’re both less and more about it, I dunno. It’s hard to explain.”
He started eating and Sean was left staring at him with that piece of non-information.
“Well, maybe ya could try,” he said and tucked into his nutritionist-approved salmon, brown rice and salad.
Jack made a considering noise around his mouthful. “After,” he said once he’d swallowed, pointing his knife at Sean’s plate.
Sean knew he was playing for time, getting all his ducks in a row in his head, but he was hungry, so he’d let him have it.
He knew it was serious when Jack sat down next to him on the couch instead of taking his usual spot in the armchair, gently herding Lola to her bed so he could sit there.
“Ah, hello?” Sean said.
Jack laughed nervously, but he settled back, kicked his legs out like he had at training, clasped his fingers over his stomach, the white shirt pulling taut over his abs and chest. It did not look as relaxed as it had at training, but it was a posture Jack preferred, Sean knew that much. He had a beer on the coffee table, had offered Sean one before he sat down, which Sean declined. He loved a drink as much as the next bloke, but he had to be careful with it since some in his mob had a problem with it; well, most Australians were alcoholics, but the Aboriginal mobs copped more shit for it, which made him self-conscious about it, so he generally made a rule of not drinking during the week and very rarely during the season, rarely outside his house. Jack nodded like he’d expected Sean to say no, and Sean got the feeling Jack usually abstained as well.
“Hi,” Jack replied sarcastically, but reached for his beer, took a swig, sat back in the same posture and turned to look at Sean, nothing sardonic in his face. “You wanted to know about our first time and about how you are with me about the game, right?”
Sean was amazed, but he really did, so, “Yeah,” he replied immediately, shifting his posture side on and as open to Jack as he could be with the cast.
Jack nodded, tapped his fingers on his stomach and dropped his head so his hair was falling in his face. “Right, well, the first time was after a fight—”
“After the prelim?” Sean knew it.
“No,” Jack shook his head. “No, that was just a fight.” He said, tone tight. Sean got the feeling there was more to it, but he’d ask later.
“This was, the next year, start of the season—”
“We’ve been fucking for two years?”
“Year and a half, give or take,” Jack said, his tone now carefully indifferent.
Sean whistled. He’d never have thought, not in a million years, they’d be sleeping together at all, never mind for almost two years.
“So, we were at The Clink, most of the team, we’d absolutely destroyed Port Adelaide at home in the first game, you’d played an absolute blinder. Taken a mark that’d win you mark of the year and I’d fed you the kick. It was one of those games, like everything unfolded perfectly, we won by eighty-three points, an absolute pounding, and everyone was high on it, so we went out. Hit The Local first and when that closed, everyone wanted to keep going, go clubbing, so we got cars to The Clink. Everything was good, happy, and we’d all had a few and I was comin’ out of the bathroom when you cornered me, got right up in my face, saying the usual shit.”
Jack threw a hand up and Sean knew what he meant. He watched Jack’s game as closely as his own and never missed an opportunity to tell him everything he’d done wrong. Jack always took it stoically, face pinched, but he never got stuck into Sean in return. Their teammates gave them the side-eye a lot, but no one got involved since Sean never crossed a line—it was always about the game and it toed the line of abusive but never crossed over.
“And I was like, ‘Are you for real?’ Like I say, I’d had a few, and I just let you have it. Said a lot of stuff I’d probably been sitting on from the year before. Like how I didn’t get what your problem was, how we’d just won, how I bloody well set you up over and over again, helped make you the player you are, better since I got back.”
“Yeah, except when you got injured,” Sean retorted.
Jack laughed humourlessly. “Yeah, that’s what you said then, but it was getting kinda out of hand? Like you were yelling over the music, I was yelling back and I was just like, ‘I’m done.’ So I left. I pushed you back and headed out.”
Sean raised his eyebrows, he couldn’t imagine Jack pushing him. Jack clenched and released his hands over his stomach, kept his face in his hair.
“Well, I thought that was the end of it, but as I was jogging up the stairs, I could feel you charging behind me and I was like, I don’t wanna do this, you know? I didn’t wanna keep fighting with you. I never wanted to fight with you. But you followed me and I could feel you behind me, but I was like, nope, I’m getting a taxi, I’m going home. I was gonna go for the taxi stand near the markets, but you came alongside me and gave me a real good hip and shoulder. And I just wanted to get away, so I went down the lane, thought, ‘fuck it, I’ll walk home, let him follow me,’ and I was gonna walk when you pushed me against the wall outside the Sail he could picture it. It would’ve been an angry kiss, he could almost taste it, the fierceness of it.
“Anyway, so like, we were kissing there, like, pressed together?” Jack gave him a pointed look. Sean felt himself blush when he got it, felt his dick stir now at the thought of it. “And ah, you pulled back and said, ‘not here.’ And yanked me back into the lane and we got a taxi, went to my place in East Freo, dunno if you remember my house down the road from my sister?”
Sean shook his head.
Jack nodded like that made sense, but it was wistful too, like that place meant something to him, maybe meant something to them.
“And we, you know, fucked,” Jack finished inadequately.
“How?” Sean asked.
“How did we fuck?” Jack asked like he’d rather step over hot coals than get into the mechanics of it.
“Yeah, like, did I fuck you?” He wanted more details. Did they get in the door and just have to do it in the hallway? Or did they make it to a bed? Did they keep kissing or was it just a brutal fuck?
“Well, yeah, you always, we’ve always done it that way. I like it, you like it,” he shrugged as if this conversation wasn’t turning his cranks as much as it was turning Sean’s—Sean saw him shuffling where he sat, didn’t miss the skittish eyes.
“And? Was it good?” Sean asked.
Jack laughed, his face flushed. “C’mon, man, you know it was.”
“How would I know?” Sean was bewildered and pissed off. He needed more details.
“You reckon we kept doing it for two years ‘cos it was bad?” Jack looked at him and smirked, it was both a boyish and smug expression. It was a look that told Sean why he’d continued to fuck him—he was a good-looking motherfucker, hot too, in that built surfie athlete way. Not as cut as his mate Finn—Jack was more bulk, and that would’ve turned Sean’s cranks, always had, but he would’ve seen that boyish, smug expression and wanted to kiss him and hold him down until all that remained was desperation, his face washed of any humour, only pleas for more.
“Guess not,” Sean said, his voice breathy, betraying the nonchalance. “Did we make it to the bed?”
Jack chuckled. “Yeah, but we knocked over a lot of shit on the way. Didn’t manage to get our shoes off.”
Sean whistled again. “Hot.”
Jack nodded, but he’d withdrawn again. “It was, bit rough too, like, it wasn’t romantic or anything.”
“Did you want me to be romantic, Jackie?” Sean asked.
Jack laughed again. “Nah, not back then. It was good,” he finished shortly. “So, that was the first time and after we were done you started in again about my game.”
“I didn’t,” Sean breathed out.
“You did,” Jack smiled over at him. “Didn’t even let me put my dick away before you resumed the conversation from the club like we hadn’t just fucked in the middle of it.”
Sean laughed.
“Anyway,” Jack’s smile turned down a notch, that careful part he was hiding reappearing on his face, “that’s kinda how I mean you like, you always break down my game but we’re kinda fucking at the same time? Or, like, it’s hard to explain, but the two go hand in hand and it’s, well, it’s kind of a turn on? Like, you were mean about it and we’d fuck and then it changed and you still did it but like less mean? And more, I dunno, like it was what we did in bed.”
Sean tilted his head to the side and tried to parse what Jack was saying. Did Jack get off on Sean talking shit about his game in bed?
“So that’s why today it was just kinda weird for you to be sayin’ all that shit,” he paused, looked thoughtful for a moment. “Like that,” he finished.
“Like I meant it,” Sean replied quietly.
“Well, I reckon you always mean it, but more, I dunno. There’s more to it now or it’s like, you’re giving me pointers.”
“So, let me get this straight,” Sean said and Jack looked at him, guarded but about as open as Sean reckoned he was going to get. “Our foreplay and pillow talk is me helping you with your game.”
Jack chuckled and it was real, a lightness coming over his face. “Yeah, kind of, I guess. I mean, it’s not like you tell me anything I don’t already know—”
“Bullshit.”
“But it’s the way you say it, and yeah,” Jack leaned back and stretched his legs and torso, “you make the odd good point,” he shot Sean a smile. It was the kind of smile that invited Sean into this thing with him, a bridge. And Sean wanted to cross it, but he felt like he couldn’t quite step onto it yet. Something was missing. He was turned on, he wanted to fuck Jack, still felt horned up from the time in the kitchen, but this was a lot more intimate than he’d bargained for.
Jack must’ve read his mood shift because he sat up, said, “So, hope that fills in the gap a bit,” and with that, he got up.
“Yeah, thanks,” Sean murmured and grabbed his phone, started scrolling through his socials for something to do while Jack puttered around pulling the blinds down and turning off lights and turning on lamps, falling into his normal routine for the night but with a self-consciousness Sean could feel.
And it was Jack who turned in first, which was weird, and of course he asked if Sean needed anything, got him water and pain meds for his room even when Sean said no, and then disappeared down the hall and into his room with a soft click of the door.
It was a quiet night, the heat of the day lingering outside but smothered by the cool insulation of the old bricks of Jack’s house. Sean sat in the silence, Lola snoring softly beside him, and wondered why he felt like Jack had just told him everything and yet he felt like he knew less than before. As if a big part of the story was missing. And also why the story hadn’t led to them jumping straight back into it, but had instead made him feel shy for it, and made Jack, by the looks of it, feel the same way. He cursed his memory loss—this massive gap he was sure had something to do with what this all meant to him, and that was something Jack couldn’t fill. Even though he was sure there was stuff Jack still wasn’t telling him.
“C’mon, girl,” he said to Lola and leveraged himself off the couch and hopped to his room.
He lay in bed, hand running up and down her silky coat, his mind and body preoccupied by the mind and body in the bed on the other side of his wall. And he’d bet money on it that Jack wasn’t sleeping either.