Page 101 of Contested

Instead, he placed his phone on charge beside his bed and walked back to the living room. The heater had started to work by then, warmth pushing through the room, softening the air around the couch and the windows. Sebastian stood near it briefly, shoulders loosening.

His mind returned to the pub. To what he had said in Marcos’ ear.

Massage.

The lie was that he was good at them.

He had received enough through recovery and injury management to have an idea of what he was doing. That was hopefully enough.

And with how he had treated Marcos recently, he needed to make it up to him.

The thought made his jaw tighten.

He had not been easy. He knew that. The worst part was that he had seen himself doing it and still hadn’t always been able to stop. Pulling back at training when Marcos looked too comfortable. Getting sharp when Marcos asked questions that were reasonable. Letting fear sit in his mouth until it turned into something cruel and spilled out as anger.

The comments had been worse lately, or maybe Sebastian had stopped being able to push them aside. A shout from the boundary. A reply under a match clip. A teammate laughing over a harmless line until harmless stopped sounding harmless.

That was the other reason he didn’t want to call his father.

The online stuff would mean nothing to him, probably. Or it would mean something in the wrong direction. He would see the comments, the stupid edits, the weird half-joking posts about Marcos and Sebastian being too obsessed with each other, and say something careless enough to prove Sebastian had been right not to call.

Comments thrown his way when he was a kid had wedged themselves under his ribs and refused to let go. His father had probably never meant anything by them. Just words thrown in anger when Sebastian didn’t act the way he wanted.

Still, the possibility of facing it again made Sebastian’s skin feel too tight.

He looked down and realised he had started picking at the edge of his thumbnail. He stopped.

His eyes wandered to the window, out over the cityscape. The lights filled the night, stretching outward in lines and clusters. Roads, buildings, little squares of other people’s lives stacked high above the streets.

Sebastian forced the thoughts of his family out of his head, the world outside moving below him, indifferent to how he felt.

He turned his focus to Marcos, and a grin spread across his face before he could stop it.

He had just the idea.

When Sebastian had been signed with the Geelong Rams, he had taken a bad hit after a hard collision during training, going up for a mark and landing badly enough that his back had complained for weeks. It hadn’t been anything serious enough to stop him playing, but it was still annoying.

For a while, someone had come to his old apartment to work through the tightness when he couldn’t get enough time with the club staff. Sebastian had bought his own massage table because he had felt bad they had to carry theirs through the building.

His smirk grew as he went to the hallway cupboard and pulled it out.

The table was wedged behind a vacuum cleaner and a box of things he had brought with him from Geelong and never properly unpacked. Sebastian dragged it free, then carried it into the living room. Eventually, it stood in the middle of the space.

Sebastian stood back with his hands on his hips to take it in.

It was a little strange. A massage table in the middle of the living room did not exactly say casual late-night visit between teammates, but that ship had already sunk long ago when Sebastian’s face had been planted between Marcos’ thighs.

Sebastian went back to the cupboard and found a folded white towel, then another. He set one over the end of the table and placed the other on the coffee table beside the oil he found tucked behind a heating pack. The bottle was only half-full, but it would do.

He looked at the setup again. His stomach fluttered, expanding with a nervous, pleased sort of heat that made him bite his lower lip.

A knock came at his door.

His pulse hit hard enough that his whole body seemed to notice.

Sebastian spun on his heel, feeling each rush of blood through his chest as he headed down the hall and opened the door.

Marcos leaned against the doorframe, hair curling slightly messier from the wind outside, jacket zipped halfway, expression softer than it had been in the bar.