“My knee,” he says, easing into the passenger seat as I open my door and join him in the car. “It’s still fucked. I can’t put enough pressure on it to use the gas and brake pedals to drive.”
Sympathy rushes through me, the impulse to offer him comfort and reassurance, but I tamp it down. That’s not what’s going on with us. He’s made sure of it, with that gruff, I don’t want to know nonsense when I tried to explain last night and clear the air like a rational adult.
Focusing instead on turning on the car and adjusting my mirrors, I ask, “And you plan on practicing today how, then?”
“I don’t,” he says, backing up his seat and extending his leg as much as possible. “I plan on getting sorted out by Dan and Maria, then standing on the sidelines and giving you hell while you run around all day.”
“Sounds delightful.” I pull out onto the road and make the turn for Deja Brew instead of the direct route to the sports complex.
Gavin notices. “Oh fuck, no. Not this again. I cannot endure another coffee-for-the-cast-of-thousands run.”
I flash him a smile, a real one. “Don’t worry, sötis. This run is just for us.”
18
GAVIN
Playlist: “Wait for It,” Usher
“What did you just call me?” I stare at Oliver as he hums to himself, changing lanes in preparation for his right turn into Deja Brew.
He’s either ignoring me or he can’t hear me past his infuriating humming of “One Last Time.”
“Bergman,” I snap.
He glances my way. “What?”
“What did you just call me?”
Slowing, he makes the turn for the coffee drive-through. “I’m not sure I understand.”
Jesus Christ. I’m going to wring his gorgeous neck. “Have you lost your command of the English language? What isn’t there to understand?”
He grins, and fuck, I can’t look. It’s a real grin, soft and crooked, not that megawatt shit he shows the world. It feels intimate and personal and so impossibly lovely I want to wrap my hands around that smile and slip it inside my pocket, and fucking hell, I really, really need to stop reading poetry.
Oliver hits a pothole in the road. I grab the oh-shit bar and suck in a breath as a bolt of white-hot pain wracks my lower back. My stomach knots. I’m being hit on every front, this nightmare of a paved road, today’s excruciating level of pain, once again being stuck in Oliver’s car, bathed in his scent, the sight of him, flooded with memories of last night, touching him, wanting him, being words away from humiliating myself, confessing what I’d give for him, do for him—
Anything. Everything.
Shifting in my seat, I grunt out of the sheer agony that is moving. Today is a day colored by pain, stamped by pain, cut out by pain; there isn’t a motion or movement or thought that isn’t imprinted, shaded, or shaped by it. Blinking, breathing, turning, shifting—all of it hurts. It’s consuming. And I wish for just a moment I could shut my eyes and escape it, float out of my body and into a space devoid of sensation, where I could exist without knowing where every fucking nerve ending is in my back and hips and knees and neck, where breathing didn’t feel like knives in my spine and shifting didn’t make my back send a dagger of pain through my leg until my molars clacked and bile crawled up my throat.
Mercifully oblivious to my misery, Oliver finally says, “I’ll clarify. I understand the question. I just don’t understand why you expect me to answer it, seeing as you went all grunting Neanderthal back there and shut me down when I was trying to communicate with you.” He glances my way, a flash of genuine annoyance evident, even with those sharp pale eyes hidden by his sunglasses. “What if my explanation made you feel better about what happened last night?”
That’s exactly my concern. I don’t want to feel better about last night. I want to bury it and never revisit how raw and real and imperfect and hungry it was. How much I wanted not only to peel off his clothes and unwrap him like a fucking present, but to lay Oliver on my bed and learn every part of him—his pleasure, his pain, his wants, his fears.
Which is absurd. It’s my years of abstinence to blame, confusing longing and love, desperation and deep intimacy. I was no more prepared for a one-time hookup last night than I was to walk onto the field today and kick a soccer ball. And I refuse to make an irrevocable mistake, on either of those fronts.
So I tell Oliver, with as little feeling and as much indifference as I can muster, “Bergman, I don’t care about your explanation. It’s over. Done. We agreed we’d move on.”
His hands clutch the steering wheel so tight his knuckles whiten. “We also agreed to honesty and respect,” he says.
“Ah,” I tell him as he pulls up one car closer to the ordering window, “but only as it pertained to co-captaining and the team. This topic most certainly has nothing to do with that. Because we would never let anything personal jeopardize our professional lives—our captaincies or the team.”
Oliver glances over at me, his expression hidden behind his sunglasses. I never realized how much he says with his eyes until I couldn’t see them. I’m sorely tempted to rip off those aggravating polarized lenses right now and demand the truth.
Which would be the height of hypocrisy, of course.
“No,” he says evenly, his voice calm and serious as he stares at me. “No, we wouldn’t.”
The car behind us honks, ending our stare-off. Oliver drives forward, relentlessly polite and cheerful as ever while he places our order, then pulls up to the payment window. It’s a different person from last time who’s so busy making drinks in between making change they don’t have time to bullshit with Oliver, thank God.
Oliver puts on Hamilton while we wait, seemingly incapable of existing in quiet—granted, extremely tense quiet—and I don’t even have the willpower to tell him to turn it off. He’s chosen “Wait for It,” and that song has had me in all three minutes and thirteen seconds of its clutches since I first heard it.
“You know,” Oliver begins, sounding dangerously philosophical. “This song’s themes and subtext raise serious questions of—”
I groan. “Must you pontificate? Can’t we just let Leslie Odom Jr. sing the shit out of this song and sound like sex in a voice box?”
His mouth quirks, but he quickly schools his expression into something frustratingly neutral. Is this what Oliver feels when looking at me, when everything I’m feeling and thinking is hidden behind the cool, inscrutable expression I’ve perfected—frustrated, shut out, infuriated?
If he does, then I have no idea how he hasn’t burst a blood vessel. I’m about to rupture something when this is the first time I’ve ever been on the receiving end and it’s been all of five seconds.
Oliver thanks the person at the window as they hand him our drinks. A small cup is set in my hand, again with GG written on top. I frown down at the lid, then up at the menu I just noticed inside the window, where I see The Double G is a custom drink advertised.
“What the hell.” I point past him, toward the menu.
Oliver wrinkles his nose and leans closer. “Well, would you look at that.”
“I’m looking. I noticed it, you menace. What is this about?”
I remember what he said when I asked him last time what GG stood for and he said it was between him, God, and Deja Brew’s owner, Bhavna. There’s some significance to this, and I’m frankly too pissed about too many things to be rational about it. “Goddammit, Bergman, stop being cryptic and tell me. If this has anything to do with me, I deserve to know.”
Taking a long sip of what looks to be an iced matcha green tea latte, Oliver pulls out of Deja Brew and says, “Apparently, the drink I specially ordered for you was a big hit when Bhavna did a tasting of new specialty drinks. Now it’s on the menu.”
“What,” I say between gritted teeth, “does ‘The Double G’ stand for?”
“Bhavna follows the team,” he says, focused on merging into traffic, ignoring me. “The first time I made a whole-team coffee run, I asked her to make you a little something special.” He keeps his eyes on the road. “I was hoping she’d pick up on my sinister vibes toward you and throw in something rough like pickle juice or Worcestershire sauce, but alas, she did not. Not that you acted like what was in that drink made a lick of difference anyway.”
I remember his wide smile, the drink thrust in my face as he passed around coffees. How raw and empty I felt those first few weeks. Back in a country that I’d literally run away from, home only to sad or, at best, bittersweet memories. Here simply because my body was not capable of the caliber of play required in England, because here I could still be somebody, lead a team, keep playing the game.