He gave a slight laugh. “Coffee would be good.”
It was three in the morning. Coffee might not be good. But hey, it wasn’t exactly like I had Horlicks in the house. We weren’t ready for our seniors’ cards yet. Declan sat down on the couch, his long legs stretched straight out in front of him, which I realised was in order to take pressure off his knee. However, I was also concerned by the fact that his hands remained jammed deep into his pockets in a defensive position.
“That must have been a long meeting,” I said amiably as I prepared our coffees.
“Yeah, they wanted to go over every possible scenario,” he replied glumly. I handed him his coffee. “Do you want a cushion or something to elevate your knee?”
He shook his head and took a grateful gulp from the mug. “I’m wearing a compression bandage, thanks.”
“Is it uncomfortable?” I sat beside him.
“No, you get used to it pretty quickly. Feels weirder when it’s off, once you’re used to it.”
“Bet you won’t be saying that once you get it off.”
He gave me a small, tired smile. “Probably not.”
“So what did they talk to you about for so long?” I wasn’t sure if I should be prying, but I hoped he felt like he could tell me to shut up if he wanted me to.
102 | SEAN KENNEDY
Declan wrapped both hands around his mug, using it for warmth. “Just plans. Plan A, Plan B, all the way through to Plan Z, Part Four. All the possible ways to fix me and all the possible contingencies should they fail.”
“Sounds fucking clinical,” I couldn’t help but say.
“You got that right,” he sighed. “It is. They were sitting there talking to each other, rather than me. As if I didn’t have a say in it.”
“I bet you didn’t put up with that.”
He bit his lip and looked even more defeated. “To tell you the truth, I did. I was so fucking miserable by that point I didn’t care one way or another.”
That did it. I put down my mug and swung myself over to his side of the couch.
“Scoot.” He leaned forward and I squeezed in behind him, my legs uncomfortably splayed on either side of him. He leaned back into me, and I wrapped my arms around him.
“So, what’s Plan A, then?” I murmured into his ear.
Declan’s hands rested over mine. “Intensive physio. I’ll probably be off for another couple of weeks before they decide to try me out again.”
I kissed the back of his neck. “Don’t let this get you down too much. I know it’s easy for me to say that, but getting depressed will make it worse.”
“It
is
easy to say,” he agreed, but he didn’t sound mad. He leaned his cheek against mine, using the crook of my neck as a pillow.
“I wish there was something I could do for you,” I said, feeling as helpful as a calculator in an English exam.
“You are,” he murmured.
It was a big concession to make, and I didn’t ruin the moment by trying to get further clarification. Even though my legs were aching, I closed my eyes, and found sleep wanting to take me as Declan’s body warmth seeped through into my own. I was vaguely aware of hearing a slight snore come from him before I probably added to it.
I JERKED awake with a massive leg cramp that made me practically shove Declan off me. He mumbled something incomprehensible as I shot over him and jumped around in the middle of the lounge room, hissing a litany of
fuckfuckfucketyfuckfuck
. Declan shakily got to his feet and approached me. “Left or right?”
“
Fuckfuckfuckrightfuckfuckfuck
!”
He couldn’t help grinning as he grabbed my hip with one hand to keep me in one spot and then ran his other down my calf. I leaned on his shoulder, trying to resist the urge to start jumping around again as pain shot up and down my leg. He began rubbing my calf gently, and I think it was probably the psychological effect of his ministrations more than anything else that made me calm down as I started to feel my muscles relax.
TIGERS AND DEVILS | 103
“You trying to beat me in the bad leg stakes?” Declan laughed, his second hand now travelling down my leg to begin working in unison with the other.
“Yes, my night cramp is jealous of your million dollar injury,” I said, embarrassed that I had made such a spectacle of myself. Way to go to rise to the drama queen level, Simon.
“Feeling better?” he asked, looking up at me.
I nodded. “Thanks.” I helped him back to his feet.
“I just realised,” he said slowly. “I haven’t done this tonight yet.”
We kissed, long and deep and hungry. But there was no denying we were too tired to take it any further.
“Better late than never,” I murmured.
And I realised I really needed to pee. I ran to the bathroom without another word. When I finished and came back out, Declan was in my bedroom and undressing. I hung back for a moment and couldn’t help but perve as his clothes fell away until he stood there in only his boxers and began turning down the bed. I walked around to jump in beside him.
“You have too many clothes on,” he complained.
I let him pull my T-shirt over my head, and he kissed my shoulder. His hands tugged at my trakkies until they were caught around my feet, and I gracelessly kicked them out the side of the bed.
“That’s better,” he said with a smile.
The tent in my boxers suggested I was ready for action, as did his, but sleep was more insistent, and I don’t even remember how the bedside light got turned off.
THE morning sun was warm upon my face, but that wasn’t all. Declan was kissing me; and even though I was half-asleep my body was already doing fine working of its own accord as it pressed into and moulded along the lines of his own. Declan’s hand crept beneath the cloth of my boxers and cupped my arse. I moved slightly, and my hardness connected with his. His moan was cut off by my invading tongue. My hand tugged at the hem of his boxers and yanked them down. He let go of my cheek and did the same with my shorts. They were unceremoniously kicked free, and we were now naked against each other, the only alien object being the rough material of his compression bandage scratching against my knee. I gently positioned his bad leg over mine, and we were now fitted into each other even more tightly. I took us both in hand, and his hand closed over mine as we sought release against each other. It was quick, frenzied, and what we wanted. Slow could come later, we needed to come now. We lay in silence, panting. His leg felt heavy over mine, and he winced as he moved it back down.
“How are you?” I asked, still out of breath.
104 | SEAN KENNEDY
“Great.” He laughed.
We kissed, kissing turned into exploration, and after a suitable amount of time we took it more slowly. The morning was spent in bed, sometimes with coffee, a lot of playing around, and some necessary napping in between. At one point while Declan was asleep I ran out onto my front lawn, knowing that the paper would have been delivered. I kicked the offending object until it was concealed underneath a bush, where its articles on Declan’s short return to the field would not be seen by him. The day stretched before us beautifully, and the night promised even more. I stretched blissfully when I woke again around midday and watched Declan as he slept. The lines of stress on his face from only hours before seemed to disappear during sleep. I ran my thumb gently over his lower lip, and his eyes opened.
“Sorry,” I said, not having meant to wake him.
“’s okay,” he said. He looked over my shoulder at the alarm clock. “Shit.”
“We’ve still got the whole afternoon.”
He grabbed me quickly before I could defend myself and rolled over onto me, grinding me down into the mattress. “As much as I would love to keep you in here all day, I think I have to prove I like you for more than sex.”
I shook my head and laughed. “I’m not a girl.”
“Come on, let’s go and grab some lunch, and then I’ll watch the Richmond game with you.”
I wondered if that was such a good idea, as undoubtedly his injury would be brought up yet again to be dissected by the commentators during lulls in today’s game. “Wow, you
must
like me.”
He looked down at me seriously. “I do.”
I kissed him. “Just so you know, the feeling’s mutual.”
He moaned as I continued kissing him. “Don’t start again or else we’ll never leave.”
More kisses. “Would that be so bad?”
He pushed me against the pillow. “What would Richmond say?”
I pushed him back. “You’re right. Get off me.”
Declan now seemed to be practicing passive resistance as he sagged against me and became dead weight. “Nah, I’ve changed my mind now.”
“Bastard.” I struggled against him, but he was too heavy for me to budge him. Which you know, it’s not
that
bad a thing to have Declan Tyler naked and on top of you, but it does start to make breathing slightly difficult after a while. He took pity on me and rolled off. “Shower, then lunch. And then watch Richmond get slaughtered again.”
You never know, it could be Richmond’s day. After all, it seemed to be mine.
TIGERS AND DEVILS | 105
WE had just showered and were getting ready to go out when both of our mobiles rang within seconds of each other.
“Scott,” Declan said unhappily. He had been hoping to get through the day without a call from his coach.
“Roger,” I said, almost as unhappily. I was not ready for the talk that we needed to have. Especially now.
I left Declan in the bedroom to have privacy while I took mine into the study and closed the door so we wouldn’t be heard in the background of each other’s calls.
“You picked up,” Roger said, sounding surprised.
“Yeah, I meant to call you before this.”
“Oh.”
Silence. Apparently now that we were talking, we had nothing to say.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Roger said, finally.
“It’s okay,” I mumbled.
“Not really, it’s not,” he replied. “Just, as your friend, I get to be concerned for you, okay?”
I made some kind of noise of agreement.
“How about if I come over, bring some beer, and watch the game with you?”
Oh fuck. There was no way this situation would end well. He could sense the hesitation in me.
“What the fuck, Simon? Are you still really that mad at me?”
“No,” I said quickly. “It’s just… Declan’s here.”
“Oh.”
Funny how that one little word, one syllable, two letters, could mean a thousand different things.
“Look, he’s just really upset because of what went down yesterday, so today probably isn’t a good day to do the meet-the-friend thing.”
“Uh huh.”
Fuck,
he
was pissed now. The tables had turned. “I’m sure you saw what happened at the game last night, Rog. He’s… not in a great state.”
Maybe I was exaggerating a little. But with things still unsorted between me and Roger, and with him being free and easy about his opinion on my new relationship, I couldn’t guarantee a thermonuclear-free day if the three of us got together.
“Roger?”
“Yeah, fine. That’s cool, if that’s what you want.”
And just like that, my needle swung back into the red zone. “Hey, it’s not like when you and Fran first got together you didn’t disappear for the first month or so, and I never gave you any shit for it.”
106 | SEAN KENNEDY
I had him there, and he knew it. But he wasn’t going to let it go.
“Like I said, Simon, fine.”
“Fine. Speak to you soon.”
And I hung up on him.
Not a good thing to do. But by the way things were heading with that conversation, one of us was going to do it in the end. Might as well be me. I childishly turned my mobile off so that if Roger tried calling back, which I doubted he would, he wouldn’t be able to get me. And if he rang the landline, there was always the answering machine. I opened the door to the study and listened to ascertain whether Declan was still on his call. It was dead quiet in the house, so I walked back towards the bedroom. Declan was sitting on the bed, all vestiges of the carefree aura he had had all morning wiped away. He was back in his defensive position, staring at the floor.
“Hey, what is it?” I asked, sitting beside him.
He sighed heavily. “You’re going to kill me.”
“I doubt that. Why, what have you done?”
“I have to leave for Hobart. This afternoon.”
Okay. Not a killable offence, but one which would make my day a whole lot less pleasant. “You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was. I’d try to wrestle my way out of it, but they’ve hired a special private jet that flies at a low altitude so there won’t be any further pressure on my knee.”
That’s when it finally hit me that I was dealing with a totally different world. A world where no expense was spared to protect a million-dollar investment, which is what my boyfriend was. I had joked before with Declan, calling him the million dollar baby, but the truth was he was
more
. He earned about one and a half million annually just in salary from the club. I had no idea how much his endorsements and sponsorships would be worth, but they would be even more than that. He was important enough that special planes were now being hired to ferry him home with as little inconvenience as possible.