Chapter 7 #2
Half an hour later, they were herded onto the bus—tinted windows and air-conditioning to keep the heat at bay, and it reminded Alex of Lee’s spaceship comment, a few minutes before things had gone to hell.
And fine, maybe he shouldn’t have grabbed Lee quite like that.
But it wasn’t like Lee hadn’t been looking, and he certainly hadn’t been complaining either, what with how he’d wasted no time sticking his tongue down Alex’s throat.
Whatever, though.
Except, oh! How fucking dare he judge Alex for not disclosing his sexuality sooner? It was Alex’s choice whom he told, and when. Just because Lee had shared some private things didn’t mean Alex owed him—volunteering truth wasn’t a tit-for-tat business negotiation, for fuck’s sake.
Alex put his headphones on, closed his eyes, and willed himself to catch up on sleep.
He dozed off at some point, mind lulled into a tranquil state of lethargy by the steady hum of wheels slapping the road, by the familiar buzz of conversations.
Jeff woke him up when they arrived, and Alex trailed him out of the bus and into the familiar lobby of their team hotel, its modern wing bumping up against the older part reminiscent of a castle.
And… Christ. Alex was still sharing a room with Lee. Of course he was—he’d just forgotten, for a moment there. Any lingering cobwebs of sleep dissipated.
“How about a dip in the pool?” he asked Jeff.
“Think Kieran wants us in the conference room in forty minutes,” Jeff told him. “So, just enough time for a wank in the shower.”
Alex cut him a look. “Images I didn’t need.”
“Prude.”
Since innuendo was Jeff’s forte and Alex wasn’t at his brightest anyway, he left it at a shrug. A covert check revealed that Lee was already gone, had probably headed straight to the room to drop off his stuff. Well, they couldn’t avoid each other forever, so best get it over with.
For once, Alex took the stairs instead of the lift, sports bag bumping against his thigh on every second step.
In front of the room, he fought the ridiculous impulse to knock—he had just as much of a right to be here as Lee.
So he tapped his card against the electronic lock, waited for the green light, and pushed the door open.
Lee looked up from where he was sitting in one of the armchairs by the window, phone in hand and frown firmly fixed in place.
Alex carefully closed the door, and then it was just them and the abyss of silence that gaped between. He turned away to set his bag down next to his bed. When he glanced over his shoulder, Lee had gone back to his phone.
All right, then. So that was how they were going to play it.
Since the match analysis would be followed by a training session, Alex grabbed his soccer jersey and went into the bathroom to change. He thought he heard Lee give a derisive snort at that, but when Alex pointedly turned to look at him, Lee’s attention was fixed on something on the screen. Ass.
Lee didn’t react at all when Alex came back into the room, and Alex should ignore him. Really, he should. “You’re going to act like I don’t exist?” he asked instead. “Very mature.”
It earned him a masterfully executed eyebrow raise before Lee slowly, deliberately, refocused on his phone. The hazy sunlight that filtered through the half-open curtains cast him in bronze.
“Do you have a problem with me being, you know…” Alex cleared his throat. “Bi?”
“A problem with you being bi?” Lee said it smoothly, his attention veering towards Alex. “No. Less than you, maybe, given that I can say it without hesitation.”
“Give me a fucking break. Just because I don’t prance around shouting my sexuality from every rooftop—”
“Neither do I.”
“—doesn’t mean I’m struggling to accept myself.”
“You didn’t even tell Jeff.” Lee leaned forward, a cobra ready to strike. “Someone you seem to consider a friend, even a good friend, and you know he’d be in your corner, but you couldn’t be bothered to trust him with that?”
Alex shifted his weight and fought the impulse to avert his gaze. “Jeff? Or do you mean yourself?”
Lee’s chin tipped up. “It’s not much of a friendship if only one person is honest.”
Okay, that hurt. Alex swallowed around the tightness in his chest. “I don’t tell just anyone about how things are with my parents, you know?”
“Thank you for your highly selective trust.” Lee’s voice dripped with sarcasm, his eyes bitter. “So generous of you to bestow that kind of courtesy on this lowly peasant, my Lord.”
Alex cut him a sharp look. “That’s hardly fair.”
“Isn’t it, though?” Lee asked, and Alex crossed his arms, then realized he’d done just that and dropped them back to his side.
“It’s not.”
“Agree to disagree.” Lee’s tone was cool, as though he’d already drawn a line under their friendship. Alex bit the inside of his cheek and waited for the sting to distract him from the leaden pressure in his belly.
“Fine.” He inhaled sharply through his nose. “Guess there’s no point in trying to solve this if you simply don’t care.”
Lee’s eyes flashed with something that Alex couldn’t read. “Guess not.”
God, how had things gone downhill so quickly?
“Okay,” Alex said, quiet now, and for a moment, it looked like Lee was going to respond. Then he shrugged and turned away, and yeah, all right, Alex could take a hint.
And yet he waited for another second, and another. Still nothing.
“I’ll take a walk,” he told the back of Lee’s head. “See you at the strategy session.”
“Can’t wait,” Lee muttered, and screw his passive-aggressive bullshit. Swallowing back any words to that effect, Alex picked up his phone and didn’t spare Lee so much as another glance before he left.
Fuck him.
Trust Kieran to choose today of all days to pair Lee with Alex for every. Single. Drill.
The first two, anyway, and it felt like a throwback to a month ago—working in hostile silence, avoiding each other’s eyes, Lee’s shoulders tight enough that the team masseur might remark upon it later.
The second exercise was an intense one too, jostling for the ball in close quarters, and Lee was too bloody aware of Alex.
Heart beating too fast as he tried to shield the ball, balance a little off as their shoulders and hands and hips bumped, feet knocking together.
So really, when Lee went down, it was only logical.
“The fuck?” Alex hissed.
Logical to Lee. Not to Alex, it seemed.
Lee rolled back to his feet. “What’s your problem, mate?”
“Mate?” Alex’s lips pulled into a hollow smile. “My fucking problem is how much you like to trip over your own two feet. Like you’re just looking for a reason to cry foul.”
Really, he’d gone there—all the way back to that Premier League match some weeks ago? Well, all right. Common courtesy demanded that Lee follow his lead.
“Funny how the ref didn’t see it that way.”
Alex drew a breath, the sun catching glints of gold in his hazel eyes, and fuck, Lee wanted to kiss him. Still, or maybe more than ever.
“Funny how—” Whatever Alex had been about to say, Kieran sliced clean through it.
“Cool off.” Kieran’s tone lacked its usual cheer, a rare frown on his face. “Both of you. Separately, if necessary.”
Fuck.
“Sorry,” Lee mumbled, at the same time as Alex ducked his head and offered a lukewarm apology of his own.
Clearly, they’d be the hot topic at dinner tonight—everyone was staring at them as though they were an entertaining yet mildly off-putting internet meme.
Bloody move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
“We’re all a little on edge after the match last night,” Kieran told them, expression softening by a margin, and right, yeah, the match.
That was what had them sniping at each other.
Obviously. “I get it, yeah? But”—he raised his voice to be heard by the rest of the team—“the best thing you can do is take that anger and turn it into something productive. Use it to focus your mind on the next game. And maybe next time we’re ahead by two goals, don’t think it’s in the bag.
Because the moment you do, that’s when the other team’s gonna kick you in the nuts. End of life lesson.”
It complemented the article he’d handed them today, as part of the usual pre-training routine: The Power of Negative Emotions. Not a lot of discussion on that one as the message had been loud and clear.
Dismissed by Kieran’s nod, Lee moved off the training field to grab a bottle of water. Alex was a few steps behind him, and they would need to talk to each other, probably, because this wasn’t going to work.
It wasn’t Lee who’d started it, though.
And yet. After a half-second of hesitation, he bent down to grab a second bottle of water and offered it to Alex. Hey, never let it be said that he wasn’t mature enough to extend the occasional olive branch.
“Thanks.” Alex’s fingers brushed Lee’s as he accepted the bottle, and Lee withdrew his hand, suddenly unsure what to do with himself. Everyone else had gone back to their training drills—everyone other than Oliver, who was heading straight for them with his captain face firmly fixed in place.
“Incoming,” Lee told Alex with a tiny flick of his chin.
Alex followed the direction Lee had indicated. “We could try to outrun him.”
Lee chuckled, and for just a moment, things clicked back into place. Then Alex raised the bottle for a generous swig, and Lee instantly remembered licking the minty taste of toothpaste off Alex’s lips. He looked away.
His brief distraction cost him the right moment to reply. Just as well, then, that Oliver had closed the distance. Under the pretense of picking up a water bottle for himself, Oliver murmured, “What was that just now?”
“Nothing,” Alex said, and wow—he was a far worse liar than Lee had given him credit for.
Lee considered himself somewhat of an expert on the matter given he’d spent his teenage years telling all sorts of lies about why he was the one picking up his sisters, where his mum was, and why he hadn’t done his homework.
He’d come to appreciate truth as a luxury you could more easily afford once you were an adult with a proper income.
Not the whole truth, of course. Never that.
“Like Oliver will believe that was nothing,” he told Alex. “Didn’t they teach you how to lie at posh school?”
Alex sent him an unimpressed look. “Must have skipped that day.”
Lee knew this was a sensitive subject and he should quit while he was ahead. On the other hand… “All right, fair. Your dad’s a politician, though—shouldn’t he have raised you on a steady diet of political half-truths and flat-out lies?”
“That would have required spending some actual time with me,” Alex said, then seemed to remember that Oliver was listening. He pressed his lips together. “Anyway.”
“Anyway,” Oliver echoed dryly. “Now, come on—what was that? I thought you guys were fine.”
Lee took a sip from his bottle. Alex developed a sudden interest in the hem of his jersey, inspecting it with rapt attention.
“You can talk to me right now”—Oliver inserted a weighted pause—“or you can talk to Kieran at some point tomorrow if you don’t fix whatever’s going on. Your choice.”
“Sounds an awful lot like blackmail to me,” Lee grumbled.
“Sounds an awful lot like a reality check to me,” Oliver returned.
“Um,” Alex said, and Oliver nodded at him.
“Excellent point. Let’s go.”
“Power has changed you, man,” Lee said sadly, but the thing was, Oliver was right.
If Lee and Alex didn’t figure their shit out, Kieran would sit them down in the very near future, and Lee didn’t particularly care to get another taste of Kieran unpacking his disappointed father routine.
Honestly, the speech after yesterday’s match still smarted a little.
“Cry me a river.” Oliver gestured towards the locker room, about to start walking, when Alex stopped him with a quick touch to the upper arm.
“How about a deal?”
“A deal?” Oliver studied Alex with a quick, assessing gaze.
“Yeah.” Alex rubbed the back of his neck, voice low but urgent. “I know that Lee trusts you, okay? And it’s not that I don’t. But it’s just… personal. Give us a chance to sort it out ourselves?”
“Because we’ve done such a brilliant job so far,” Lee put in.
Alex turned imploring eyes on him. “Let’s try harder.”
That wasn’t fair. Alex wasn’t fair because Lee wanted to hold on to his anger, he did, but how was he supposed to do that when Alex was looking at him with a mix of trepidation and hope?
Lee sighed. “Yeah, okay.”
“Thank you.” It was quiet, sincere.
Oliver’s gaze found Lee’s, a question in his eyes that Lee didn’t know how to answer. After a beat, Oliver nodded. “You have until dinner.”
“Thank you,” Alex repeated, the tiny upwards curve to his mouth speaking of blatant relief.
“Work it out, lads.”
Brief silence settled in the wake of Oliver leaving to rejoin the other goalie. With a small sigh, Alex raised the water bottle to his face and rolled it against his forehead, condensation leaving behind a sheen of wetness. When he glanced over and caught Lee watching, neither of them looked away.
It was Alex who broke the moment. “How about a walk?”
“Kieran told us to cool off.” Lee let his lips tilt into a careful smile. “Not sure a walk in this heat is gonna do the trick.”
Alex hesitated. “Pool?”
That was a terrible idea—Alex was distracting even fully dressed, and Lee didn’t see how that would improve if he was near-naked and wet. A bad idea, yes.
So Lee, of course, nodded. “Sounds good.”