6. 6

6

J ack’s version of ‘being more present’, Sean thought wryly a week after he’d been back in Jack’s home, was sitting wherever Sean was and trying to act chill while they did whatever half-assed activity Sean could do. Watch television. Do the physio exercises. Do a puzzle Jack bought. Jack reckoned the puzzle would be a soothing activity and something, “We can do together.” Sean did his best not to roll his eyes, which wasn’t too difficult since no matter how hard he tried, he was still weirded out by Jack meeting his eyes, Jack talking to him like a friend, Jack jumping to his feet to get Sean a drink, something to eat, medication, anything Sean wanted if Sean so much as moved and made a discomfited noise.

His understanding of his life had been challenged, he’d admit, not only by Jack’s new familiarity, but also when he’d first looked at himself in the mirror. He’d startled at the man looking back at him—of course it was still him and he hadn’t aged that much, probably not noticeable to anyone but himself, but he was definitely thinner or more angular; his cheekbones sharper, his stubbled jawline more pronounced, the sockets around his brown eyes—which had always been big in his face, bigger than Jayden’s, so big his aunties and his mum said he looked like Bambi after his mum got shot and laughed at him—were even more pronounced now. He’d shed all the boyish fat and was, indisputably, a man. His dark skin was clear, no longer pebbled with the breakouts he’d get, and there were the faintest traces of laugh lines starting around his eyes. The stripe of shaved hair—about two inches wide and stretching from his forehead to the top of his skull, the gnarly scar that was forming where the stitches had already come out, the glaring evidence of the ventriculostomy they’d done to relieve the swelling on his brain—was growing back in a black fuzz, the rest of his hair longer than he remembered keeping it, curling around his ears, wisping at his nape. But this was him, this was the him Jack was best friends with.

But in the understanding he had of his life, from the last point he remembered, he interacted with Jack strictly as needed. After that first re-introduction in the locker room, when Sean wandered off and disengaged, he and Jack kicked to each other in drills in training, but never spoke beyond the occasional snippy conversation when Jack fucked something up, and if Sean had no other option—literally nothing else was open—he’d kick or handball off to Jack in a game. Jack kicked to him down in the pocket a lot and if he fucked it up, Sean would give him a real spray, to which Jack had looked insufferably hurt at first before doing his best to look blank, which didn’t really work, but they didn’t interact beyond that. There’d been a few games where Sean had let himself forget about their past and just play, and in those games, they’d been on fire. But the sight of Jack’s joy at the end pissed him off, so he’d revert back to hanging him out to dry the following week, hating himself for it because it was an irrefutably shitty thing to do in a team sport but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. It wasn’t conscious, it just was.

And so, as Jack sat across from him on the armchair he’d dragged in front of the couch and insisted the puzzle piece Sean was trying to fit into the monstrosity Jack had chosen for them to work on—a Swiss ski chalet in summer, mountains in the background, trees, too many fucking trees in the foreground and on the edges—didn’t go there, Sean swung back violently to wondering why Jack was talking to him at all.

“It fuckin’ fits,” he snapped.

“It doesn’t,” Jack responded calmly, but Sean could hear the frustration he was holding at bay.

“Why’d you get a puzzle with this many different trees?” Sean shoved the piece into the gap where it wasn’t going to fit.

“I guess Switzerland has a lot of different trees,” Jack replied evenly, but as soon as Sean took his hand back, he swooped in and took the piece out.

“What the fuck, put it back.”

“No,” Jack said, “it doesn’t fit.”

“It fucking does.” It didn’t, but Sean was mad, madder than he’d been since he got stuck in the stairwell and thrown his crutches, madder than when he’d woken up and seen Jack beside him.

“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 point because 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 other than 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’t explain 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.”

“Well, what do you normally do in the offseason? You always stay in the city?” Sean knew the guys from other states went home and a lot of the West Australian boys, like himself, went away, took their training plans with them.

“Uh, yeah, we usually, you know,” Jack flashed him a quick smile and went into the kitchen.

“We usually what?” Sean asked. And then it dawned on him—they must’ve made plans. He’d rented a house with Ben once. After he’d been home for a couple of weeks they’d gone down south to Margaret River, stayed in a huge house that’d seen Jayden and some of the cousins, some other players, rotating in and out over the summer before they’d had to pack it up and head to preseason camp on the Gold Coast.

“Just head out on a trip, you know,” Jack smiled over at him.

“Did we have somethin’ booked?”

Jack nodded, but he wouldn’t look at him, busying himself at the fridge, getting things out to make lunch.

“Where?”

“Just a chalet in Bali,” Jack said, eyes on the lettuce and tomatoes in his hands. “No big.”

“And you didn’t go?” Sean asked.

Jack looked up, surprised. “Of course not.”

“Why?” Sean asked.

Jack’s surprise morphed to stunned, but he quickly schooled his features—he was getting better at that—and replied evenly. “Because you had an accident. Of course I didn’t go.”

“Yeah, but,” Sean tried to put into words what he was thinking. “But like, you had a holiday booked and now you’re wastin’ your whole offseason stuck with me like this.”

Lola jumped up on the couch next to him, panting and pleased—she played with a rope toy while Sean did his exercises and gleefully joined him once he was done, like she was doing her exercises while he did his. When Sean made this observation, Jack told him she did that before too—if Sean worked out at home in the gym room, Sean had trained her from a puppy to play with her toy while he did his thing. That’d hit him with a real pang—he’d have liked to see that, see her as a pup.

Jack came over with a sandwich and thrust it at him. “I’m not wasting anything, eat your lunch.”

Sean raised both eyebrows.

“No need to be a dick, I’m just tryin’ to figure out my life.”

Jack sat in the armchair with his own. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s not exactly easy for me either—”

“I’m sorry I’m such a—”

“Not like that,” Jack said. “Let me finish. It’s not easy ‘cos Harris said, and then Doctor Cohen took me aside and said it again: I’m not supposed to overwhelm you with shit. It can make you agitated. So, like, I’m flying blind here, okay? I want to tell you all about our life, or like, what we do,” he said hurriedly. “But also, I’m not permitted to, or I don’t want to like, upset you.”

Sean mulled that over. “You reckon it’d upset me if you went to Bali without me if we booked a trip together?”

“No, I think it’d upset you to know we’re the kind of friends that’d never do that. Book something together and if one us couldn’t go, the other one would never go either.”

Sean tilted his head to the side and watched Jack eat. He was quiet about it, contained.

“It’s definitely weird,” he allowed.

Jack jerked his chin in acknowledgement, but didn’t make eye contact.

“But some guys are mates like that,” Sean leaned back, looked at the ceiling. “I mean, Ben would’ve gone.”

Jack laughed and Sean slanted his eyes down to look at him.

“Ben definitely would’ve gone,” Jack agreed with a grin.

Sean huffed a laugh, but the conversation left him with more questions than answers. Ben was his best mate and if he and Sean had booked a trip and Sean got injured, Ben still would’ve gone once it was clear Sean was going to live. Sean would’ve insisted. Ben would’ve acquiesced. So what kind of friends were he and Jack?