Chapter 2
Finn
“We need to meet up and sort this co-captaincy shit out,” I say to Pi in the locker room post training. I keep my voice quiet, neutral.
Most of the other guys are in the ice baths or showers, but there are still a few lurkers .
. . lurking nearby. One such loiterer, who takes the moody, ginger form of Pi’s best mate, Harry Ellis, is stripping his dirt-smeared kit from his freckly body at a sloth’s pace.
It’s an ill-veiled attempt to eavesdrop, but I really don’t want him listening in.
Abs has just come back from his HIA—head injury assessment.
All was fine, yet he still seems magnificently pissed off, even for Abs.
I’m convinced, however, that his sour mood was triggered by a certain black-haired rich boy whose house we visited on the weekend.
But Pi knows the kid better than I do. Abs doesn’t confide in me the same way he does with Pi, and I don’t have the same sufferance for his constant bitching and grumbling.
There are much fatter and juicier fish for me to fry right now. Like how the hell are we gonna pull this joint-skip gig out of the bag?
The Cents have media day tomorrow, so no real training.
It’ll be photos and interviews and marketing bollocks all day.
We’re not allowed to tell people outside of the club about the captaincy appointments until it’s officially official, but it’s going to be difficult not to.
The topic of Pi and me sharing the helm seems to be all anyone can talk about.
Mostly because, as it turns out, we’re fucking shit at it. Training today was a full-blown disaster.
I have no idea what Dan and Eksteen were playing at giving it to the pair of us.
I’m too spontaneous and too erratic to see eye to eye with Pi’s methodical practicality, and Pi is too .
. . god, I feel like an asshole for even thinking it, but he’s too rigid, too set in his ideas of right and wrong.
He’s not flexible enough to be captain, and he certainly isn’t flexible enough to deal with my shit regularly, or Abs’s shit, or anyone else’s for that matter.
Eksteen sees it this way too, I just know it. He’s spent today skirting the sidelines of the pitch, shaking his head, muttering, and jotting things down in his super-secret coach’s journal.
The crux of the matter is, I hadn’t realised quite how much I wanted to take the wheel until it had been dangled right in front of my face, and I’d bet the entirety of next week’s scran that Pi feels the same.
“Yeah, we need to sort this out,” Pi says, throwing Abs a covert glance then crowding up to me, swallowing the last two feet of space between us. “Tonight?”
“My house. Bring beer,” I say.
Pi arches one blonde eyebrow and tips his head towards me as though I’ve made a diabolical suggestion. “I’m never drinking again.”
“Fair.” I think back to Saturday night and the vomit I had to scrub from my passenger-side seat belt on Sunday morning. “By the way, you owe me thirty-seven pounds for new car mats.”
Pi facepalms.
“How’s things with George?” I ask.
He shrugs, pulls a face. “She won’t answer my calls.”
“She’ll come around, eventually. I’ll get Megan to chat to her.”
My girlfriend, Megan, is best friends with Pi’s girlfriend, Georgia. Ex-girlfriend. Ex. I need to remember that they broke up on Saturday. Apparently, for real this time. I keep forgetting. I also have to keep pretending that every time I remember it doesn’t send a little thrill up my spine.
Pi stares at me, his cheeks puffed out and his lips spread so thinly that they’ve disappeared behind his sandy moustache. “Maybe I don’t . . .” He trails off, changes course. “I don’t know what I want to happen with George. I don’t even know if I . . .”
A now naked Harry Ellis saunters over and grabs his towel from the bench beside Pi and me. He’s as stony as he’s been all day, and he’s obviously been listening to our conversation.
“How’s your head?” Pi asks.
Abs doesn’t smile. He also doesn’t bother to answer his best friend’s question. “You wanna hang out tonight?”
He’s talking to Pi, not me, so I keep my mouth shut whilst I airdrop my thoughts directly into Pi’s brain.
Pi glances at me, his eyes widening before he looks back at his buddy. “Thanks, but I should sort stuff out with Eggs if we have any hopes of actually becoming co-captains. You were there earlier, you understand?”
I let out a tiny breath of relief.
“It’s fine,” Abs mutters. He nods slowly, unblinkingly, and without another word, turns towards the showers.
“He’s such a drama queen,” I whisper as soon as his retreating footsteps die down.
Pi gives me that look he always gives me, the one that says, “Don’t talk shit about my best mate,” but he doesn’t bother to scold me any more.
“Fine, okay. I’ll see you later, yeah? Don’t you dare go to Georgia’s, just come straight to mine.”
Pi doesn’t bother with my doorbell. It’s out of batteries anyway. He just bangs on the wood like it’s pissing down outside and needs shelter from the storm.
“Good evening, princess,” I say, answering the door.
“Is Megan here?” He steps into my hallway.
“Of course not. Why would I invite you over if Megan was here? She’s gone to her mum’s.” I don’t need to add the air quotes around the word “mum.” Pi knows exactly what I mean.
“What about Sven?” he asks, in reference to my lodger.
“Switzerland. For some gaming convention. It doesn’t even start until next week, so the house’ll be empty for ages.
” Not that it’d make a vast difference if Sven was home.
He mainly sticks to his room—my spare room—and emerges only for sustenance-related purposes and toileting.
We don’t need to worry about raising our voices even when he is here.
Sven soundproofed his bedroom last year, and he’s never without his headphones.
However heated our discussions get tonight, there’ll be nobody around to listen in.
Pi smiles. It stretches to only one corner of his lips and lasts less than a second. He holds up an orange Sainsbury’s carrier. “I brought pizza. And drinks. I got zero beer for me and regular beer for you.”
“How very considerate of you.” I grab the bag from him and his backpack, and set both down on the herringbone floor next to my shoes. “Now, take off all my clothes and fuck me until I forget what century it is.”
And then I push him against the wall, slamming my lips down onto his.
Pi returns my kisses with the desperation of a diver returning to the surface for air.
His tongue instantly plunders my mouth. His fingers grip the back of my hair like a life buoy.
It’s been just over a month since we were last together, but it feels like a lot longer. A lifetime without his touch.
He pulls away to tug his T-shirt over his head. “You’re topping,” he says, frantically yanking the leather end of his belt.
“Nope. Not a snowball’s chance, princess. You’re topping.” I take my shirt off, toss it onto his.
“I topped last time,” he whines.
I pause to help him unfasten his belt. His shorts drop to the ground and he kicks them aside. “Yeah, and it’s my house. I make up the rules here, and you’re topping. Plus, I douched. Did you douche?”
“No, I didn’t douche yet.” He sighs the world’s most petulant sigh. “Fine, I’ll top, but please try to maintain an ounce of self-control so you can flip fuck me.”
“Of course,” I promise solemnly. “Cross my heart.”
Pi sighs again and rolls his eyes. We both know the only thing crossing that part of my chest will be my cum in about ten minutes’ time, though he doesn’t dwell on it for too long before he’s pulling my mouth down to his.
The way we push and shove each other, bumping down the hallway and up the stairs, ricocheting off the walls, leaving items of clothing in our wake, is so cliché.
It’s like an overused movie trope, but it’s like this every time, frantic and desperate, as though the world is gonna end any second so we might as well cram in one last shag.
We make it to my bed and I lie in the middle on my back because I want to watch his face when he falls apart.
Aiden Campbell is a stunningly beautiful man.
It’s the Australian surfer-blonde waves, those pert, kissable as fuck lips, and those yellow eyes of his.
I mean, technically they’re not yellow, they’re more golden-brown or amber or perhaps the colour of very unhealthy pee, but I’ve never met anybody in real life with that shade of iris before.
They’re exactly as you’d imagine “yellow” eyes to be—at once ethereal, mesmerising, and disorienting.
Even his eighties TV crime-detective moustache and trad-rugby mullet do nothing to diminish his haunting good looks.
Sometimes I find myself simply staring at him during training, or during meet and greets, or press conferences, and at post-game slap-up dinners. Jesus fuck, he looks magnificent in a suit and tie. Majestic.
I always try to hide my leering, disguise it behind another teammate, or filter it through the mirror or over the top of a menu, but right now, with him towering naked above me, I get my fill.
I let my eyes rake down over his tanned flesh, his muscles, the curves of his pecs, the ridges of his abdominals, that pelvic V that homes my vision straight to his hard cock.
He pulls on a condom, lubes up, and cages me with his body.
We stare at each other for a few seconds.
It feels like both an eternity passes and that it’s over in a lightning blink, and I wonder if Pi ever thinks what I’m thinking.
That maybe once, just one time, it might be nice to .
. . make love instead of simply knocking the Mario coins out of each other.
But I don’t voice that thought for several reasons.
One, Pi’s very recently been dumped by his girlfriend.
Two, I still have a girlfriend. That one’s a doozy.
Three, he’s already kissing me again, and tugging the plug out of my ass.
And four, well . . . it just feels too . . . raw.