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After an hour and another coffee, he moved into the lobby, because he was falling asleep where he sat, so he needed to be where Luke couldn’t miss him.
He stayed awake until one, scrolling mindlessly on his phone, his heart beating hard every time a group came through the doors. It was a Marriott, and a big one, so there were heaps of groups. At one-thirty, he got another coffee. Fortunately, Italians seemed never to go to bed.
He started wondering, though. He couldn’t help it. Luke had said, sometime in there, that he’d found his partners overseas, times when the team was playing in some country where soccer was everything. Places where he could be anonymous.
He’s out with the team. He’s gay as can be, and he’s straight as a die. He can’t lie if he tries. That’s why you fell in love with him.
I’m strong as oak, Luke had said, that first night in the car, and I’m steady as hell. And I don’t cheat. I don’t hurt, I don’t lie, and I don’t cheat.
It’s one-thirty in the morning, and you’ve seen English rugby players come in for a couple of hours now. It was hard to mistake them, and none of them was Luke.
And Luke had been distant on the phone lately. Face it. Hayden was hopeful, but he wasn’t that stupid, was he? Luke wouldn’t have to be cheating. He could just be …
Done.
His eyelids were like sandpaper now, his limbs heavy and aching. He shifted in the chair, then shifted again. The last thing he remembered thinking was, If you don’t matter to him enough after all, if he can stand to lose you, if we’re looking at goodbye here … you need to know. Not in July. Now.
How did you anesthetize your heart?
They’d won the game, which was no surprise, but it hadn’t been easy. It never was, whatever the scoreboard said or what the public thought. Luke had gone out with the boys afterward, had watched some of them get stupid and some of them hook up, and was working now on getting the worst of them back to the hotel. Business as usual, but for some reason, his body was dragging.
He was fit. He’d prepared well, same as always. He knew how to lift to meet the moment, no matter what was happening in his life, so why did his entire body feel pummeled tonight?
Get over it, he told himself. He’d be on the plane in the morning and headed straight to Scotland, and it would all start again. That was his job, and that was his life. He’d signed up for it with his eyes open almost fifteen years ago, and he still loved it. He’d get some sleep here and some on the plane, and he’d be fit to go again.
So he was lonely and felt like nobody knew the man he was. He ought to be used to that.
George Conley, the blazingly fast young winger who’d earned his first cap on this tour and had scored his first international try tonight, stumbled getting out of the taxi, and Luke caught him by the arm and hauled him upright.
“Check out the talent,” George said, the moment they went through the hotel’s revolving door. Luke looked. Four or five young women with shiny hair, short skirts, and high heels, heading into the bar. “Another beer,” George decided, attempting to veer off that way. A few of the other boys were in the bar, Luke noticed. Well, he couldn’t round up everybody. He wasn’t actually a sheepdog.
“You’re legless, mate,” Freddie Pritzker, the centre, told George. “You try to talk to them, you’re likely to piss yourself. They’ll laugh, is what they’ll do.”
“I’m no worse than you,” George slurred, which was very nearly true. “A bloke gets to celebrate.”
“We’re on the bus at seven,” Luke said, “and it’s past two already. You miss that bus, and there’ll be no next game for you.” New caps were all the same. “There’ll be girls in Edinburgh,” he decided to add.
“Faw,” George said. “Scottish girls. They don’t have hair like that. Don’t have—”
“Nah, mate,” Freddie said. “You listen to the Skip. Boring, but he’s right. You can’t miss the bus. I’ve had one or two too many myself.”
More like five or six too many, but Luke wasn’t saying it. He’d get them to their rooms, and if they went out again after that and made arses of themselves, well, he’d have done his—
He stopped. George kept going, tripped over his size 14 feet, tried to turn around with middling success, and asked, “What?”
Luke hadn’t had a drink tonight. Nothing but fizzy water with lime. But he felt legless himself, like his head and body weren’t working together.
Hayden was asleep in one of the big chairs in the lobby. Not looking perfect for once. His shirt was rumpled, and so was his hair.
Luke couldn’t process it. He couldn’t work it out. He’d texted with him … when? Thirty-six hours ago? He told Freddie, “Get George up to his room.”
“Not sure I can, mate,” Freddie said. “Not sure I remember which is my room.”
“Five twenty-four,” Luke said. “George is 513. Here.” He grabbed a pen from his jacket pocket and wrote the numbers on the back of Freddie’s hand.
Freddie blinked at them. “I don’t— You can’t—”
Freddie was twenty-three, George wasn’t even that old, and Luke was the skipper. This was his responsibility.
