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“Did you leave me for Ted Lasso?”
Trent’s ex-wife sideswipes him with this question before he’s even had a sip of coffee. She’s sitting across from him at the little garden table they’d found in a garage sale a few years ago, her elbows propped on the morning paper, croissant crumbs at the corners of her mouth.
There’s a pile of stuff between them, for Ted - laid down with the flu, probably bouncing off the walls with boredom. There’s a criminally expensive collection of shortbread from Rebecca, a book from Beard, cards from the team, and he was going to be in the area, anyway, he’d said, and he could drop it past Ted - no trouble, or whatever.
Joanna hasn’t changed.
She’s changed a little. Her hair is blonde, now, her ring finger is bare, and she’s wearing another man’s pyjamas. Trent’s been watching her watch the kitchen window that faces out onto the garden like she might catch a glimpse of the man making bacon and eggs, like she’s a teenager all over again. Trent knows she’s going to marry the guy burning his hand on the hot plate.
She is brighter than she has been in five years, and doesn’t hate Trent half as much, but she’s otherwise the same - caustic, beautiful, and whip smart, and good, and sees right through his bullshit.
“I left you because I’m gay, Jo.”
“Ha ha,” she deadpans. “But like, gay for Ted Lasso?”
“Like gay for not women.”
“You know what I mean, Trent,” she says, and she knows she’s prodding, and he knows she’s persistent. “Did you fall in love with him, and he, like gay-awoke you?”
“You’d never guess that you’re a writer,” he huffs, and she bats his hand across the table. It occurs to him to feel a little upset at her for what she’d just said, and he doesn’t want that, so he peers away for a moment, squinting into the sun as he watches Molly bash around the garden.
It’s grounding, he thinks, to watch the heedless adventures of a child high on orange juice. Their child - all ferocity and fizz, Trent’s eyes and her mother’s stubbornness - doing pirouettes until she’s too dizzy to stand. He had watched Molly blossom in the wake of her parents’ divorce, had only realised then how unhappy his own unhappiness had made her, how much more herself she is now she’s not watching her dad play pretend.
He doesn’t want to be annoyed at Jo, because his pretend hurt her too, but she’s prodding him about being gay-awoken by Ted Lasso, when she’d been privy to his gay awakening. Twice.
The first time had been so rife with cliches and tequila that she found it almost as easy to deny his feelings as he did. It was his best man, his best friend since school, the best political journalist at the paper. It was his buck’s night for fuck’s sake. They’d had a quiet moment outside the men’s room of a nice bar, teary and taciturn as they’d finally acknowledged what couldn’t happen anymore, what could have started at fifteen years old. When John had kissed Trent, it had tasted like tequila, had made his chest ache with longing, and grief, and guilt.
It had been easy enough for Jo to write it off as cold feet, face pinched beneath her practice wedding makeup. It had been easy enough for him to find a new best man, to go through the paces, to marry her - because Trent did love her, and she loved him, and he didn’t know why he dreamt about John, sometimes; so what did it matter? He still dreams about him sometimes, his brain inventing a future for them he’d long since let go.
He dreams about Ted sometimes.
The second time had been different. Jo didn’t cry - she never cries - but her face had crumpled, her shoulders had heaved beneath the weight of their wasted time, and her brows had furrowed in anger. And then she’d wiped herself clean - reached across the table and ran her finger down his nose, across his lips, around his jaw, like she was trying to memorise him, like he was a new man. She had told him he seemed different, and he was.
And that’s the rub, the real crux of his annoyance at Jo - he did leave her because of Ted. She has seen right through him again, and it’s mortifying to be understood, and it’s also hard to make her really understand.
Ted saw something in him that she had never seen, and how do you say that to your ex-wife?
Ted saw some part of him that had been buried - by his job, by their marriage, by his father’s unending lessons in the art of repression. Ted had waded through the quagmire of Trent’s self-hatred, gently prised open his armour and poked at the soft, lovely parts of him until Trent was forced to acknowledge them. He saw that Trent was pretending.
It had been like a four year olds game of pretend, simple if a little bonkers, utterly consuming until the crashing reality of bedtime. He was a heartless journalist, he thought, he was a good husband, he was honest to his daughter, he was happy, he had thought, until he unravelled his whole life and realised that was happiness. The man he’d wanted to be all along was a little aimless, messy and kind, and gay and free, and all it took to see that was Ted’s intermittent company, his full attention, his wide brown eyes, and mid western charm. His particular brand of conviction in the goodness of others, in the goodness of Trent
God. Was he in love with Ted?
Anyway.
The point is, he doesn’t want to be angry again, doesn’t want to reapportion blame when he knows he broke his ex-wife’s heart. And Jo is teasing him, he knows, she is his best friend, she is so thoroughly integral in the existence of the magnificent and silly Molly Crimm, currently singing to herself as she picks flowers from the cracks between pavement stones.
“Earth to Trent?”
Jo taps the metal lid of the biscuit box. Trent meets her gaze, which settles from a pique of worry back to curiosity. “He has the flu right?”
“What’s your angle?”
“Trent,” Jo says, fixes him with a stare, somewhere between pity and steel, and doesn't break it as she lifts her mug to her mouth.
When they were first dating, Jo was laid up in bed for a week with the flu. She was feverish and gross and grumpy, and Trent would ride the tube each night with a lap full of chicken noodle soup, would watch the news with her, and she would fall asleep in his arms and he would wear the same crinkled suit and tie to work the next day - change in the cramped bathroom outside the Richmond press room, and yawn through every conference. She did the same for him the next week, and through the haze of a fever he told her he loved her. And that’s what love is, he’s learned, by way of marriage, by becoming a father. Love is accepting you’re going to get the flu.
That’s what she’s implying with that stare, he knows, with the earned silence of shared history - about Ted. He gives her an inch, before she runs a mile.
“I mean, I guess I fancy him.”
“I knew that, ” she drawls, looking victorious but unsurprised. “You’re not getting away that easy.”
“Would we call this easy?”
He’s known for a while that he fancies Ted.
He’d let himself look when he saw him at press conferences, at the pub, once or twice in the park with Molly running circles around him and asking four-year old questions Ted always seemed to have an answer to. He’d let himself imagine, revelled in the feeling of feeling this way about a man, all those soppy, romantic, sexy, dirty thoughts he’d never let himself think about before. He liked flirting with Ted, liked when Ted flirted back.
His crush had been thrown into sharp relief once he’d started working on his book, spending every day at the club. It had become a little more real than an absent daydream, more of an adolescent ordeal - he’d take a little longer on his hair in the mornings, hang around late to walk Ted to his car, spend the days untangling his feelings of admiration and desire, authorial interest and desperation for friendship and want . But that was different to love .
He can still go and see Ted today, risk getting the flu, without it meaning love. He can bring him biscuits from Rebecca, a book from Beard, well-wishes from the team. He can bring him coffee the horrible way he likes it, because it would be cruel to bring him tea, and it can just mean friends . He can bring him curry from the place they went to for dinner a few years ago, because he still gets a good deal on the menu for some reason, and not because the place means anything, because it was just dinner. He can give him a kiss from Keeley - well - no that might be a stretch.
“Dadddd!”
Molly tears towards him, little hand gripping a collection of flowers. It seems like she had moved on from the weedy, pavement daisies and added a few delicately grown, ferociously plucked tea roses to the bouquet.
Trent peers over to the garden he used to tend, sees the gaps in the low, thorny bushes, sees the scrapes on Molly’s knees she seems to have forgotten about mid-landscaping.
They’re both gearing up for a gentle admonishment when Molly explains carefully that she had picked them for her best friend in class - Annie S. who has been poorly but is coming back next week, which is tomorrow - and Ms Brown said when someone is sick it’s nice to give them flowers and sometimes grapes to show them that you love them and hope they feel better. And because Mr Coach Lasso is poorly, and because dad loves him, he can give him these flowers. And she can go with mummy to get flowers from the store. only because she loves Annie very much because she’s her best friend, and Mr Lasso is her less good friend because she’s only met him two or three times. And they won’t get grapes because Annie doesn’t like them.
It’s an exercise in remembering how much kids listen, and in ignoring the laughter his ex-wife is barely holding in, as he bends to kiss the top of Molly’s head. He drains his tea, fishes in his pocket for a stray hair elastic to wrap around the bouquet.
He can feel Jo’s smirk against his skin when he leans over to kiss her cheek, can see it grow bright and wide as pyjama man crosses the garden, laden with sausages and pudding, eggs and coffee.
“Give Ted our love,” Jo yells, as he leaves, and Molly waves absently with a mouth full of bacon, and Trent is beet red and full-hearted.
*
“You’ve got mail,” Ted sniffles, when he opens the door to Trent.
“I do?”
He coughs out a laugh as he steps back to let Trent into the apartment. He keeps coughing as he helps Trent deposit the coffee, curry, biscuits, book, daisies onto the breakfast table, and coughs while Trent finds a glass in the dishrack, fills it with water, thrusts it at him to drink.
He looks horrid.
He looks snotty, and tired, and lovely - his t-shirt damp with sweat, his feet socked, his arms bare, his fringe falling in front of his eyes as he drains the glass.
Trent wants to help, wants to hold him, to rub small, endless circles between Ted’s shoulder blades until the coughing subsides, wants to take him to bed, and stay with him. Trent wants to kiss Trent, sick as he is, and say don’t worry about it with a wave of his hand, when Ted frets over him catching it, and kiss him again. He wants Ted to look after him, too.
Fuck. He is in love with him.
He should go.
Instead, he fiddles with the knot in the bag holding the curry, watches as Ted catches his breath.
“You know that bit in You’ve Got Mail , when Tom Hanks shows up at Meg Ryan’s door, and she’s got the flu?” Ted asks, voice scratchy, catching a train of thought Trent thought he’d lost at the door, picking up the bouquet of flowers. “And he knows she’s Shop Girl, but she doesn’t know he’s NY152, she just knows he put her out of business, so she hates him?”
Ted pauses, picks up the flowers from the kitchen table and works at untangling Trent’s hair tie, while he waits to see if Trent is going to say something.
His brain is playing catch up still, bouncing around the plot of a film he’d seen a decade ago to try and guess where Ted is heading with this. He knows that Ted’s analogies usually end with something kind, but right now, all Trent can think is: does Ted hate me ?
Should he leave?
He had thought they were friends, finally, after all these months at Richmond - all those late nights, early mornings, coffee runs, bus rides, hotel room service dinners, movie nights with a popcorn between them, secrets and advice and useless chatter and careful flirting.
He thought Ted liked him, might have liked him, and wanted him around, and been happy he was here today. But he really never did apologise for that article. He just sort of blustered his way back into his life and the club, took advantage of Ted’s kindness like everyone else. He did exactly what Tom Hanks did in the film, bulldozed over the delicately balanced, brilliant existence of a good person, and realised too late that he was in love the whole fucking time.
But this isn’t a romcom, he can’t walk this back or catfish Ted into forgiveness with anonymous emails, or win him over with a dog. He doesn’t have a dog. Should he get a dog? He should leave.
“Well, she’s supposed to hate him,” Ted continues, just as Trent is about to make his excuses. He shuffles to the sink to refill his empty water glass and arrange the flowers in it.
“But she doesn’t?”
“She doesn’t,” Ted says, looking around at Trent, brow furrowing. He nods to the makeshift vase. “He buys her daisies.”
Oh. Oh .
“Oh, shit. Did I spoil it?” Ted asks, and it seems like a good explanation for Trent’s dumb silence if you weren’t aware of the dull roar in his head of Ted’s words, his ex-wife’s laughter, the tattoo of fresh rain outside, the static from the television in the bedroom, the dull thrill he feels when Ted swears, and oh fuck - oh fuck - he’s in love with him. He feels the way Molly must have felt this morning, spinning around in the garden until her legs came out from under her.
“I saw it in the cinema,” he croaks, just before the silence has stretched too long. He clears his throat then, pulls himself together, gestures to the flowers. “Molly picked them for you.”
Ted brightens at that, gives him a grin that is as fond as it is snotty. His middle-age reveals itself in a smile that big - Trent can see every wrinkle around his eyes, across his forehead, the lifetime of effort he’s put towards happiness. Trent can see how sick he is too, and how tired - his flushed cheeks and low shoulders and the sheen of sweat across his forehead.
“Why don’t you - um - go to”, he gestures to what assumes is Ted’s bedroom. “I’ll heat you up some food.”
It takes very little to prise the flowers from Ted’s hands, to gently push him towards his room. It feels intrusive, and painfully domestic, to be alone in Ted’s kitchen - playing house while he pokes around for bowls and forks, figures out the microwave, sweeps discarded tissues into the bin. It feels like a life he could have, could reach for, could settle down with - could long for. He half-expects Ted to be asleep by the time he comes into the bedroom. He finds him half-awake instead, propped against the pillows, fidgeting with the remote.
“Do you have to get back?”
“Oh - yeah - well,” Trent fumbles for an excuse he doesn’t have, not expecting to be kicked out so politely. He hastens to find room for food on Ted’s bedside table, avoids his gaze as he adds Beard’s book to the tower propped next to his lamp. “You know, the book…”
“No, no, I wasn’t, I wasn’t trying to get you to leave,” Ted coughs, beaming as Trent hands him a coffee, patting the spot on the bed next to him. “We could watch it, if you wanted?”
“You’ve Got Mail ?”
“I do?” Ted teases, frowns, adds, “I’ll make you sick though.”
“It’s okay. I love you,” Trent wants to say. “I just wanna look after you.”
“I think it’s going around,” Trent says instead. It feels like just as much of a confession, earns a different smile from Ted - bright, and earnest, and fond, and shy - like Trent has hung the moon.
It occurs to Trent as rounds the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight as he awkwardly arranges himself against the bedhead, that Ted was nervous. Ted wanted him to stay, was nervous about asking him to stay.
It’s not an emotion he’s used to on Ted, as unfamiliar to him as anger, or indifference, jealousy, or lust.
It’s not that he thinks Ted is incapable of vice, of feeling things that are ugly, or big or uncomfortable. He’s disabused himself of the feeling that Ted is just not letting Trent see him - the necessary, invisible wall of press and subject has long since pulled down between them. He thinks Ted could fill valleys with all the horrid things he could feel, and he just has no interest in feeling them. He thinks Ted’s parents probably did a number on him, too.
If Ted is still nervous, he’s not showing it - nudging Trent’s boots until he takes them off, admiring his odd, colourful socks, pulled last minute from the washing pile before he throws a blanket over two of them.
Trent on the other hand, he’s been nervous the whole goddamn time. It takes him the first twenty minutes of the film just to unwind his jaw, relax his shoulders enough to feel the weight of Ted on his left. It takes him a bit longer to actually pay attention to Meg Ryan’s plight, after he’s adjusted to the way Ted smells - coffee, shampoo, Vicks - and to his warm body, his intermittent sniffling. He’s waiting for the running commentary too, can sometimes hear it on team movie nights, and when it doesn’t come he figures Ted’s fallen asleep. It’s a surprise then, when he feels Ted’s lips land on his shoulder.
“Thank you,” he mumbles, half-asleep, and presses a kiss to the seam of Trent’s t-shirt. He lingers there for a moment, lets them both linger, and then drools on him for the next ninety minutes.
It hits him somewhere between shots of New York City streetscapes that he is going to lose Ted. They all will, Richmond will - one day, soon, maybe. They’ll lose him to his son, as they should, and to the cozy Ephron America that Trent has always imagined him living in.
The weight of that reality, the weight of Ted’s head on his shoulder - his breath warm on Trent’s neck - becomes heavier by the scene and at the end of the film, he’s desperate to leave, now, first.
“Ted,” Trent mumbles into his hair, shifting his shoulder to wake him up for the last scene. Ted’s got sleep creases along his cheek, and his fringe has flattened against his head, and he looks mortified.
“God, Trent. I’m - ” Ted starts, then interrupts himself to imitate Meg Ryan’s happy sobs. God, he hates his ex-wife for telling him he’s in love with Ted.
God, he wants it to be Ted so badly.
“I’ve gotta head,” Trent says, the moment the credits roll, shuffling off the bed and escaping into the kitchen before he can see Ted’s expression. He’s got a few moments to collect his things, collect himself, before Ted clambers after him - pulling a sweater over his head, Trent’s stray hair elastic still around his wrist.
“Back to the grind,” Trent attempts. If Ted is sceptical he doesn’t show it, offers a commiserating smile and walks him to the door.
Ted thanks him for coming as he steps out into the corridor, polite and miserable - his voice heavy with sleep and sickness, and something else. Trent thinks he’s probably offended Ted with his quick exit, and doesn't know how to explain that being around Ted has suddenly become unbearable. He doesn’t want to pine for him, doesn’t want to want something he can’t have - he was thrilled about just being his friend , and now he thinks he’s ruined that too.
He doesn’t know how to say all that, so he settles for reaching over, tugging Ted’s sweater flat from where it has rucked up around his torso.
“Don’t cry, shop girl,” Trent says, and suddenly he’s being kissed.
He’s had years, and no time at all, to think about what it would like to be kissed by Ted. He’s built it up in his head, in an absent, ephemeral way - something to imagine, but never a solid reality. It feels real, now, Ted’s body solid, and warm, and trembling against him, his moustache tickling Trent’s nose.
He’s about to move his hand to Ted’s jaw when Ted pulls away, body racked by coughing, interrupted by bursts of nervous laughter.
He’s bent double, and Trent moves back across the threshold to try and help, his head spinning, his lips kissed pink. He steadies Ted until he’s steady, pressed to his side - one hand at his waist, the other rubbing rough circles in his threadbare shirt.
“Sorry,” Ted huffs, once he catches his breath.
He moves one hand from his knee to shift the hair which has curtained around Trent’s face, tries to read his expression.
“You’re definitely gonna get sick now.”
“Hey,” Trent says, presses his lips to Ted’s temple, slipping his hand beneath the neckline of Ted’s shirt to tuck an erstwhile tag away. “Don’t worry about it.”