Chapter Twenty
Saturday
Ruby:
The Saturday of the following week, Emma finds me by the fence about ten minutes before the match.
She’s wearing an enormous khaki parka and carrying two paper cups of tea, her blonde hair sticking out beneath a white bobble hat and her Cindy-Lou nose pink from the cold as she makes her way across the grass towards me.
“He said you’d be out here freezing and pretending not to be,” she says, holding one of the cups towards me with a smile. “Apparently you’ve never missed one of his matches?”
A pang of guilt smacks into me as I take it.
When we were kids, Mum used to drag me to Oscar’s matches whether I wanted to go or not, bundling me into coats and wellies while I complained the entire journey and then making me stand on some freezing touchline watching a game I didn’t care about.
Eventually I stopped fighting it and football became part of having Oscar as a twin.
Except nobody made me come today.
I’m mostly here for Josh.
And that makes me feel like a disloyal bag of shit.
Helped only by the fact Josh looks so good out there.
He moves like he knows exactly what he’s doing, all sharp turns and planted feet and sudden bursts of speed, the muscles in his thighs pulling hard beneath his shorts when he changes direction, his calves tightening when he pushes off the ground, his whole body working with this physical certainty I don’t normally get from him.
Off the pitch, Josh thinks about everything.
I can pretty much watch him doing it sometimes, weighing up whether he should speak, whether he should touch me, whether whatever he wants to say is worth saying at all, but there’s none of that out there.
He calls for the ball without hesitation, shoves another player away from it with his shoulder, turns and tears off in the opposite direction before the defender has recovered, and watching the same boy who turns bright red when I say anything remotely sexual use his body like he trusts it completely is doing filthy things to my concentration.
I can’t stop watching him at all.
“How’s everything?” Emma asks, watching Oscar with the same sort of focus I’m watching Josh.
“Busy,” I say, dragging my attention back towards her. “But good. What about you?”
“Yeah. Better. You know.” She gives me a knowing look and takes a sip of her tea. “Getting there.”
I don’t know everything that happened to Emma last year, only the tiny bits I got to see.
I know that on Christmas Eve Oscar thought she was literally dead and completely lost his mind, then disappeared the next morning and came back after collecting her from the airport.
I know her family had moved to Ireland, that she’d flown back to England alone, and that for months afterwards she barely seemed like herself.
She never told me what happened and I never asked.
On New Year’s Eve she saw the scars on my wrist when my sleeve rode up.
There was no shock, or horror, or anything on her face that made me feel scared or defensive.
She only moved her head to get a good look and then asked if I felt any better now.
When I said yes, she nodded and carried on getting ready.
She never mentioned them again and maybe that’s why I’ve never asked her either.
“I’m sorry I haven’t popped around yet,” she brushes her shoulder with mine.
“That’s okay. I haven’t come over to yours once, and I probably should.”
“I know it was a bit of a sore point for Oscar, but I get why you didn’t move in with us.” We both wince when a De Montfort player almost scores. “How’s the new room?”
“Boring and beige.”
Emma laughs. “They’re all boring and beige.”
“Mine’s really, really awful. It makes me feel like I’m in prison.”
“Welcome to Lincoln, I guess.”
We fall quiet for a while after that, both of us watching the match settle into itself.
Oscar spends most of his time shouting at everyone whether they need shouting at or not, Cam loses the ball trying to get around the same player twice and then looks wholeheartedly offended that the guy has had the audacity to take it from him, and Josh keeps popping up in different bits of the pitch with more grace than any of the other players.
“I really don’t know much about football,” Emma quietly admits, making sure the people around us can’t hear.
“You don’t have to know loads.” I nod towards Oscar. “Just watch him. He’ll tell you what’s happening because he doesn’t know how to shut up.”
As if summoned by the insult, Oscar throws both arms out and starts shouting at Cam, who responds by shouting something back and pointing furiously towards the referee.
Emma laughs into her tea. “I guess you’re right. Though it’s kind of boring when I don’t have a clue what’s going on.” She nods towards the team. “I suppose we should feel lucky that we’ve got something nice to look at.”
I turn towards her. “What?”
She waves one gloved hand towards the pitch. “Take your pick.”
“Of what?”
“The boys. They’re a good-looking bunch, aren’t they?”
“Emma, you’ve got a boyfriend out there.”
“I know. He’s the one I’m mainly looking at.”
“Mainly?”
“I’m not blind, Ruby. I can appreciate pretty things.”
I slap the back of my hand against her arm. “You’re disgusting.”
“I’m only looking. It’s not like I’m planning on shagging any. Well, except one.”
“Oh.” I wrinkle my nose. “That’s beyond gross. Never talk about shagging Oscar ever again.”
Her smile widens as she takes another drink. “Speaking of your brother, he won’t stop talking about the new boy.”
My stomach gives this pathetic little dip. There mere mention of Josh is affecting me now. Great. “Oh?”
“Yeah. Thinks he’s going to make a real difference for the team. Do you know which one he is?”
My eyes find Josh instantly.
He’s high on the left, almost level with the full-back marking him, mud smeared down one side of his blue and white shirt and one sock sitting lower around his calf than the other. He watches Oscar bring the ball through midfield, and then he starts moving, anticipating where he needs to be.
“Yeah. He’s number eight,” I breathe out, and my voice comes out strangled enough that Emma shoots me an extremely knowing look.
“Right, right. And he’s the tall one?”
“Mmhm. Yeah.” Why can I not be normal about him?
Emma presses her lips together really hard, and I can practically see her deciding how she wants to say whatever has just popped into her head, which is odd for Emma because I’ve always known her to just sort of burst out whatever is on her mind.
There is no filter. No pretence. She is who she is and she speaks her mind without ever being cruel about it. It’s something I really admire.
Until she bows her head and looks all conspiratorial, blinking through her eyelashes at me. “He asked your brother if you were single, you know?”
I gape at her. “He what?”
“He asked Oscar if you were single.”
“You’re joking?”
“I’m really not. Oscar came back from the pub in a right tizz about it.”
“But Josh already knew I was single.” My attention flies back towards the pitch, where he’s just received the ball from Oscar and knocked it on towards one of the forwards. “I told him. Ages ago. Wait. What? What exactly did he say to Oscar? Actually, what the hell did Oscar say to him?”
Emma lifts one shoulder, but there’s a mischievous glint in her eye that makes me want to rip my own hair out. “Oscar just said that he asked if you were single and then he did what he does best and warned him not to mess you around.”
My heart ricochets in my chest. “Oh, shit.”
“That was pretty much my response.”
Inwardly, I groan and outwardly I fight to breathe right. My brother would threaten the first boy I’ve been interested in for years, and I don’t even need Emma to tell me the exact words to know he probably made the whole thing sound far more serious and embarrassing than it needed to be.
“Did he tell Josh to stay away from me?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“What did Josh say to him? When he told him to back off?”
Emma looks back towards the pitch. “That he wasn’t planning on fucking around with you.”
Right.
Am I stupid for thinking that might mean he would take me seriously if he were to take me at all?
Josh has given me very little indication that he sees me as anything more than a friend.
We spend loads of time together, pretty much all the time we can, but that doesn’t mean anything. Maybe he just likes having someone to hang around with. Maybe I do too. Maybe we bonded over Bernardo trying to eat his toe and I’ve somehow turned that into a love story because I’m an idiot—No.
Come on, Ruby.
He asked your brother if you’re single.
The same Josh who only fully laughs with me. Who relaxes around me. He is eager to see me. The same Josh who looked like I’d fried every useful part of his brain when I climbed between his legs and put my hands around his neck.
I look across the pitch again feeling every part of me come alive.
He asked Oscar if I was single.
“Why didn’t Oscar tell me?” I demand.
Emma lifts her shoulder. “You know why. He didn’t want to meddle.”
I bark out a laugh. “Oh, piss off. He’s always meddling. He just didn’t want me getting notions.”
“Well, yeah.” Emma turns enough that she can see my face. “There’s that too.” She looks over the rim of her cup. “Is it giving you notions?”
“No.” Yes.
“Liar,” She scoffs.
I elbow her for the smug look on her face, and we’re both giggling when Josh receives the ball near the touchline. A De Montfort player launches into the tackle, sliding in hard and catching him around the ankle before Josh has a chance to get the ball away.
His leg folds underneath him, twisting the rest of his body sideways so his shoulder hits the grass first and the side of his head smacks against the ground with a horrible thwack that carries all the way over to the fence.
“Oh my God!” I yell, reaching out to grip Emma’s arm. There’s a silence as the crowd watches him lying there, one arm trapped underneath his body and his face turned towards the grass.
He doesn’t get up.