Chapter Text
Sat on a bench ten minutes walking distance from the clubhouse, Trent Crimm realized that there were only a few things he actually regretted about his life. Starting off in university as a biology major was one; it’d been a last-ditch effort to impress his father that backfired spectacularly, leading him to switch majors a year in and throwing his entire schedule off. Braking too late while driving his first car and subsequently rear-ending the Porsche in front of him also ranked somewhere in his top five, followed closely by the brief period in his late twenties where he shaved his chest.
Despite what others might assume, he’d never regret Angela. She was a beautiful, brilliant woman who’d given him a daughter that he loved more than anything else in the world. It’d been awkward for only a moment after he’d come out to her a second time (and in her defense, his first admission had been met with a “well, everyone fancies the same sex at some point, yeah?” that had shocked him enough to go back into the closet) before she’d drawn him into a hug, holding him tight and telling him that it was, that they were, going to be okay.
Hovering somewhere in his top three, though, was what he’d told Colin on the walk back to the hotel that night in Amsterdam, if only for the fact that it forced him to confront something he'd much rather have kept to himself.
They walked in silence for the first few minutes, ears ringing from the near-deafening level whatever passed for music blasted at through PRIK’s numerous speakers. Even when nearing three in the morning, Amsterdam, like another famous city that Trent couldn’t find the name at that exact moment, didn’t sleep. People milled about the roads in varying states of undress, ranging from the man in a full suit and tie, slumped against a streetlight, to the women in the middle of a hen do on their way to yet another club, stiletto heels in hands.
He’d taken his blazer off ages ago, joining the rest of those lacking a proper outfit, laying it folded over his arm like a butler’s white towel. The slight heel on each of his cheetah-print shoes clicked against the brick, echoing into the night.
All things considered, Trent felt pretty at-peace with himself. He was pleasantly buzzed, the night wasn't too cold, and he'd found a way to tell the young man on Richmond's roster that he wasn't the only card-carrying gay man at Nelson Road. There were few ways the night could've gone better, but he didn't bother to think of them, not when it would be tempting the universe to take away the progress he had made with Colin throughout the night.
“Hey Trent,” Colin said, flipping himself around to face the older man. He walked backward, somehow managing to not trip as he navigated the street. “I told you all about Michael, right?”
Trent’s eyes narrowed, unsure of what, exactly, Colin meant, but hoping it didn't mean he would have to hear any more about their sex life. “Yes, you did.”
“So,” Colin said, drawing out the word for a full four seconds, “you’ve gotta ‘fess up, too. It’s only fair.”
He scoffed, looking over to the side. “Sorry to disappoint, Colin, but there isn’t anyone like Michael in my life.”
Colin reached out, lightly pushing Trent on the shoulder. “Come off it.”
Trent shrugged.
“Seriously? Trent,” Colin said, a mix of vodka and indignation slurring his words, “you’re fit as fuck for a forty-five year old.”
“Forty-six,” Trent corrected. He made no attempt to hide his age, though he personally believed any attempts would be ill-fated in the first place. There was nothing about his gray streaks, nor the depth of the lines on his face, that painted him any younger than he was.
Colin waved him off. “Whatever. Doesn’t matter when you’ve got the whole ‘six-foot, -
“Five-ten.”
“-serious, stern professor’ vibe going for you.” He shivered. “I’m not really into it, personally, but that’s just ‘cause I don’t date outside of a two-year bumper. Trying to be responsible, y’know?”
Trent, honestly, didn’t know what to say to any of that. He tried to think back to when he’d been Colin’s age, fresh out of college. It might’ve been due to the times, his personality (twenty-something Trent never would’ve had the courage to speak to a professor in anything less than a strictly academic context), or maybe his university’s faculty just hadn’t sparked his interest. “‘Stern professor’?”
“It’s the jackets,” Colin said, looking him over. “Coats, blazers, whatever they’re called. Don’t really know the difference. Those and the accent are a deadly combo.” He went silent, then jumped in the way where, if Trent squinted, he was sure he’d see the outline of a lightbulb turn on above his head. “Oh, and the hair!”
He’d been growing it out since leaving the Independent last May, had half a mind to go to the barber’s to get it chopped before the weather turned warm, but now, he wasn’t so sure. “I’ll keep it in mind,” Trent replied.
Colin blew out a breath, impatience turning him into a walking nightmare for Trent. “Are you trying to date, though? Or is it, like, celibacy ‘til your girl’s old enough to know not every guy you bring home’s her new daddy?”
God help me, Trent thought. “I’ve been,” he paused, “lightly dating, so to speak. A few dates here and there, but nothing’s stuck.”
Colin stumbled over a loose brick, but quickly regained his footing. “Why’s that?”
His fingers twitched under his blazer, wishing, not for the first time, that he hadn’t given up smoking after Catherine was born. “None of them were the right kind of man,” he answered.
“Why?”
“Christ,” he muttered. “Colin, if I wanted to play the ‘why?’ game, I would’ve stayed home with my daughter.”
Colin smirked at him. “But’cha didn’t,” he said, singsong and smug.
“Besides,” he continued, thankfully in his normal voice, “we’ve gotta look out for each other, right? You’re like my gay Lil Wayne, mentoring me and shit. Lil Wayne looks out for Drake, signed him to a record and all, and Drake looks out for Lil Wayne. Can’t do that if I don’t know what kind of guys Lil Wayne’s into.”
Trent stared at him.
“So spill it, Trent,” Colin finished, crossing his arms. “What kind of men get your motor running?”
“I don’t really think ‘my kind of men’,” he said, miming the quote marks with his free hand, “would be crossing your path all that often.”
“You don’t know what I do in my free time,” Colin said, crossing his arms. “I’m very mysterious.”
Trent raised an eyebrow, letting the unspoken reminder of what happened in front of Sam Obisanya’s restaurant in full streetlight lay between them.
Colin jut his chin out, defiant.
“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with a child,” Trent said, ignoring Colin’s indignant squawk. If it had been any other night, he would’ve cut the conversation short, bid Colin goodbye, and gone back to his own room the second they reached the hotel, but the full weight of three beers and two dirty Shirleys (which cemented that he would never, ever allow Colin to order for him again) had hit him about two blocks ago.
“I guess, if I had to pick a man’s attributes, I’d want someone,” he chose his words carefully, “kind. Good with children, obviously. Someone that could make me laugh.”
Embracing the “child” comment, Colin blew a raspberry. “Boring!”
Trent groaned. “That’s what’s important to me, Colin. I’m not looking for someone based on physicality.”
“But if you had to,” Colin asked, “what would he look like?”
He thought to himself for a moment. “A nice arse. Solid thighs.”
Colin laughed. “That’s what I’m talking about!”
He let the words fall out of his mouth. Sometime after his second boyfriend dumped him, Angela told him that, unless he wanted her to start vetting her coworkers, she didn’t want to hear him whine about the lack of acceptable, single, non-straight men in London. “Same age, roughly,” he continued. “I’m not trying to have a May-December romance. Brown or black hair; I can’t do blonds.”
“What’re your thoughts on facial hair?” Colin interrupted. “Michael’s thinking of growing some sort of scruff thing, but I don’t really think I’m into it.”
Trent’s mouth clicked shut.
They were veering far too close to the big, red, glaring button on his heart and Trent didn’t trust himself to keep things cool after the night he’d had. He was too old to have a crush, had given up doodling names and hearts in glitter gel pen years ago, but there was something about a certain coach that made him seriously consider an unnecessary trip to his local Hobbycraft.
It wasn’t fair, really; he hadn’t thought facial hair was a turn-on for him at all until he watched Ted Lasso wipe blood from his moustache after a clearly well-aimed football cracked him on the nose, all while trying his best to assure the little girl that’d kicked said ball that it wasn’t her fault.
It was Roy Kent’s niece, Trent had thought to himself, years ago. It was definitely her fault.
For the better part of almost two years, that particular moustache and the man it was attached to had featured in more than a few dreams, memories, and private thoughts he refused to let come to the surface of his mind if he was in view of the clubhouse. The way it looked when Ted smiled, how it would look like while Ted shaved the surrounding stubble away from it in the morning. The way it would curve, stretching with Ted’s mouth as he -
“It depends on the man’s face,” Trent said, voice tight. His wrist dropped ever-so-slightly, blazer draped as to conceal the front of his crotch. “On the right man, it works wonders.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Colin replied.
They turned the corner, finding themselves back at the entrance of the Van Der Horst Hotel, shining like a beacon against the night sky. Tagging along with AFC Richmond on their away games gave Trent time to think, gave him different settings to include in his novel and the ability to explore other cultures’ feelings towards football, but most importantly, it gave him an all-expenses-paid room in a disturbingly fancy hotel with at least two more stars in its rating than anything Trent Crimm, the Independent could’ve afforded on a meager journalist's salary, even with how high up on the Independent's totem pole he'd climbed by the end of his tenure in the Sports section.
Tonight, Trent Crimm, sort-of-independent, had a luxurious shower and a king bed in a room that cost more than his first car were just minutes away.
Rebecca Welton had bought out the entire eighth floor for the team, coaches, personal guests, and other miscellaneous employees, going so far as to pay for the spare rooms to avoid a random fan finding out and booking it before anyone was the wiser. More and more often, Trent found himself in awe of her, even, on some occasions, thinking they might be inching towards friendship. That being said, he couldn’t ever seem to shake the uneasiness he felt knowing that, should he take one wrong step, he would find himself kicked to the metaphorical (and possibly literal) curb faster than he could say “greyhounds.”
He followed Colin to the elevators, trying to avoid any hotel workers that might take note of the two men sneaking in at such a late hour and make certain assumptions. They got through the lounge, only two steps from the buttons, before a nearby movement caught Trent’s eye.
Sat in a chair wedged in the corner of the lounge, away from all the white feathers and stuffing that two young women in hotel uniforms were shoving into opaque garbage bags, was Ted Lasso. He sat in a tailor's fashion, his legs tucked underneath him, and was hunched over a notebook he had pressed against his thigh. He scribbled on the pages with the kind of intense ferocity one usually reserved for writing out a note to an upstairs neighbor after a deafeningly loud stomp, and when Trent craned his neck, he couldn’t seem to make out a single coherent word.
Feeling much more sober than he had any right to, Trent approached him, wary. “Ted?”
It was as if Ted didn’t hear him at all. He turned the page he’d been writing on with enough force to nearly wrench the paper from its spine and kept writing nonsense onto the page.
Reaching a hand out, Trent touched the other man’s shoulder, not harsh enough to be considered shaking, but just enough to get his attention. “Ted, what are you doing down here?”
“Yankee Doodle kicked me out,” Ted mumbled, moving to the next page. His accent was thicker than usual, the twang of it making the words hard to decipher.
He paused, letting his hand rest on Ted’s shoulder as he looked back towards Colin. “What does that mean?” Trent mouthed.
Colin shrugged, confused.
“Ted,” Trent said, voice soft, “where’s Coach Beard?” He figured if anyone would know what to do with Ted, it’d be his best friend who, if Trent was being honest with himself, could get frighteningly protective, bordering on territorial, over Ted. Trent didn’t want to invoke that if he could avoid it, had barely managed to miss it after his last article had hit the papers. While Ted was content to put the article he’d written behind them, Trent wasn’t confident that the rest of the club could say the same, especially when it came to the other coaches.
“Dunno,” he answered, still mumbling. “Went out a few hours ago.”
“What about Ms. Welton? Roy?”
Ted huffed. “Not answerin’ their phones.” He seemed oddly petulant for someone who, for all intents and purposes, had never shown the presence of a single negative bone in his body. “Rude.”
Trent took his hand back, crouching down in front of Ted and his notebook, trying to get a good look at his face. He noticed that, underneath furrowed brows, Ted’s pupils were completely blown out, much too dark to justify when the lounge had more lamps than the light section of an IKEA. They spanned almost to the edge of each iris, leaving only a thin ring of hazel in their wake. The fringe of his hair, usually swept back in his all-American hairstyle, fell into his face, and the tips of it were wet with sweat. “Are you high?”
If Colin’s eyebrows went any higher, they’d disappear into his hairline. “Holy shit,” he whispered. “Is he?”
Ted clicked the pen, changing its ink color, and began to draw what looked like flowers.
He couldn’t just leave the head coach of a Premier League football team, couldn’t leave Ted, higher than Kilimanjaro, in the lounge of a hotel, no matter how fancy it was. “Alright,” Trent said, standing up. “What room are you in, Ted?”
“Eight-, eight-something,” Ted said. “Don’t remember. Doesn’t matter. Don't wanna go.”
It took all of Trent’s self-control to keep himself from sighing. “Where’s your keycard?”
“Lost it.”
“What?”
Ted hummed, completely oblivious to Trent's mounting concern. “Left it in the Windy City.”
Colin looked between the two men. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“You think I know?” Trent asked, incredulous. He hesitated for a moment, unsure of what to do. He couldn’t exactly bring someone who was clearly impaired up to the front desk in the middle of the night and demand their keycard. Besides, if a single hotel employee was looking to make a small fortune and word got out that he got a copy of Ted’s keycard, the implications alone could give certain people a very good reason to cut off his access to the team, novel be damned.
Peering over the pages again, he saw the words “Triangles,” “Tri-angles,” “TRY-angles,” and “TRY-ANGELS” in increasingly illegible handwriting, with each word a different color as well.
This time, he didn’t hold back his sigh. “Ted, can you stand up for me?”
Ted stopped writing, dropping the pen to the paper as he looked up towards Trent. “Yeah,” he said, “’m not drunk.”
“That’s good,” he replied. He reached down, slowly, and took the pen and notebook off of Ted’s lap. “I need you to stand up.”
“Why?” Ted asked, standing up without hearing the answer. He swayed, but kept his ground, and cocked his head to the side.
Trent turned to Ted, reaching out to curl a hand around his bicep. Underneath the smooth, orange crewneck was a thick, surprisingly solid (at least for a gaffer) arm that Trent knew he’d hate letting go of. “I’m taking you to bed.”
Ted snorted. “Buy me a drink first.”
Trent chose to ignore Colin’s cackle. “Not like that,” he said, face flushing a deep, unflattering maroon. “You’re going to bed, Ted, and since your keycard is God knows where, I’m taking you to mine.” He began to walk, tugging Ted along with him, to the elevator as quickly as he could without raising the alarm of the nearby employees.
“M’kay,” Ted mumbled, giving up on enunciating his words properly.
The ease at which he let Trent manhandle him into the elevator would’ve worried him in any other scenario, but as the clock got closer and closer to four, Trent was more relieved than anything that Ted wasn’t putting up a fight. He kept the pen and notebook clutched in his other hand, blazer wedged in his elbow, glad that Colin had had the foresight to click the call button already.
Colin brought up the rear, following them into the elevator and hitting the button for their floor. They stood in silence for a minute, with Ted running a hand over the braille on each button and Trent praying to any god out there that he wouldn’t start clicking them, when Colin’s head whipped to the side.
He looked at Trent, then at Ted, then back at Trent, focusing on the way his hand cradled Ted’s arm. “Oh my God.”
“What?” Trent asked, staring back at him.
Colin looked between the two again, eyes wide. “Oh my God.”
“No,” Trent hissed, catching on. The flush reared its head once more, doing him no favors. “No, it’s not -”
“Oh my God.”
“Colin -”
“Colin’s here?” Ted looked over at the young man. “Colin, when’d you get here?”
He cleared his throat. “Been here the whole time, Coach,” Colin said.
"Oh, good," he said. “That’s good." Ted wasted no time in going back to the panel, flattening his palm against the star next to the ground floor’s button.
Trent stared up at the indicator, watching it move from six to seven to eight, refusing to look over at either man beside him. The second the elevator car’s doors opened, he rushed out, forgetting that he hadn’t let go of Ted.
Ted stumbled out alongside him, nearly falling to the floor with the sudden pull.
Trent glanced down the hall, taking note of the white feathers that seemed to permeate the hotel and cursed the method of room assignments that Ted and the rest of the coaches utilized. It made sense; coaches clustered near the elevators, then players, assigned two to a room, with other employees and guests bringing up the rear end of the hallway. With a premade plan, everyone knew where to find the coaches while the players themselves had buffers between either exit (elevator or stairwell) to discourage any sneak-outs.
He’d heard through the grapevine known as Ms. Keeley Jones that, towards the beginning of Ted’s first full year as head coach, he’d actually taped the players’ doors after having to go out in the middle of the night to find a wayward Tommy Winchester. Winchester, of course, had bribed his roommate, Bumbercatch, into silence before sneaking out to a local independent theater that had advertised a day-long marathon of Guy Ritchie movies to celebrate the filmmaker’s birthday. He’d come out of the theater between Sherlock Holmes movies, intending to do a snack run, only to find both Coach Beard and Ted waiting for him outside. If rumor was to be believed, the team had watched, gathered at the windows, as Winchester was marched back into the hotel by two upset forty-something men, one of whom wore a bathrobe and slippers.
The method that the coaching staff used for rooming was perfect in almost every way, with one glaringly obvious exception—it meant that Trent had to wrestle a high Ted Lasso all the way to the end of the hall while praying that no one would come out of their rooms for any reason.
“Ted,” Trent said, voice low. “I need you to be quiet, alright?”
He mimed zipping his lips shut, locking it, and threw the imaginary key over his shoulder. “Whatever you say, Marvin Gaye,” Ted said, then shut his mouth, lips pressed tight against each other.
“Thank you,” Trent said, trying to ignore Ted's choice in musicians. “Walk with me.”
The hallway was blissfully silent for all of two seconds before -
“Ain’t no mountain high, ain’t no valley low,” Ted sang in a low, rumbling voice. He shut his eyes, letting Trent guide him down the hall. “Ain’t no river wide enough, baby!”
Trent nearly asked him what had happened to zipping his mouth shut, only stopping himself with the knowledge that Ted would most likely come up with some surprisingly logistical reason as to why he could talk without a working mouth that would only turn his concern to annoyance.
“He’s got a nice voice,” Colin said, interrupting his thoughts. “You should’ve heard him at Ms. Welton’s dad’s funeral.”
Trent looked back at the younger man. “Why did Ted sing at her father’s funeral?”
“She sang first,” Colin said, unfazed. “Thought it was just a weird Rickroll ‘til he joined in, if I’m being honest. Two seconds later and the whole congregation was singing ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ like something straight out of an eighties movie. Even Richard, and he hates English music.”
He’d been a part of AFC Richmond for more than a few weeks now, but it seemed as though every time he thought he’d seen the most bizarre, oddly wholesome aspects of the team and their dynamics, he’d find something even more baffling just around the corner. “Did the whole team attend her father’s funeral?”
“Yep,” Colin said, popping the 'p.' “Isaac instituted a formal dress code, too. Ties, shirts, no trainers. Got us all looking like we were straight out of Mourners Monthly.”
Trent didn’t even want to begin to think about the nightmare that coordinating that must have been. Wrangling Catherine into her pajamas was enough of a battle, and she was just a particularly headstrong four-year-old. Getting a group of young men to put on suits?
He’d rather tell his daughter that he’d replaced all her grass-stained jeans with knee-length linen skirts.
“You know what was weird, though?”
“What?” Trent asked, wary.
“He,” Colin pointed at the back of Ted’s head, “showed up, like, right at the end of the service. Missed everything but Ms. Welton’s eulogy. Probably tried to sneak in, but you know how loud those church doors are. Swear to God, they’re made that way just to shame people who show up late, and -, shit,” he said, reading the numbers off the doors as they passed by, “missed my room.”
He backtracked, jogging three doors down to the room labeled eight-eleven. He slipped a keycard out from his front pocket, sliding it through the reader and unlocking the door with a chirp. “G’night, Trent.”
Trent smiled at him. Despite the badgering about his love life, he’d had an incredibly nice night with the younger man, and if he wanted to get poetic about it, he enjoyed being the mentor he’d desperately needed when he was Colin’s age. “Good night, Colin.”
The door clicked shut behind him, and with that, it was just Ted and Trent, alone in the hallway.
Abruptly, Trent felt his throat grow dry, and he became aware of every cell that was in contact with the other man.
Ted, on the other hand, hadn’t appeared to notice that anything had changed in the first place. “Don’t'cha know that there ain’t no mountain high enough,” he sang, nearing the end of the song. “Ain't no valley low enough, ain't no river wide enough.”
As casually as he could, Trent steered him towards the second to last door in the hallway. Once outside room eight-nineteen, he let go of Ted and fished his keycard out of his blazer pocket. He swiped it, relieved it went through on the first try, and shoved it back into the pocket.
With a hand on the center of his back, Trent guided Ted through the open door. The second they were both inside, Trent set the pen, notebook, and blazer on one of the armchairs and all but slammed the door shut, locking it and sliding the deadbolt in, just for good measure. He turned on the overhead light and checked his phone for the time, feeling the late hour hit him as he realized that, after a shower, he was looking at a maximum of five hours of sleep, assuming he wanted to wake up at nine.
“Ted?”
“Yeah?” Ted replied, running a hand over one of the art pieces scattered amongst the walls. It showed a scene straight out of a tourism ad, a quaint windmill against a bright blue sky.
“I’m going to take a shower, so just make yourself comfortable, alright?”
“Alright,” he echoed. He didn’t move from his spot, moving his fingers back and forth over the paint strokes.
Trent nodded to himself. He sent a thanks to Past-Trent who, in a brilliant measure of foresight, had already set his sleepwear atop the counters in the attached bathroom. He hadn’t exactly planned on following Colin out to a club, had mainly just decided to stay in the lounge until the team figured out a place to go and then choose somewhere on the opposite side of Amsterdam to spend his evening. There’d been a vague idea of getting drunk, but aside from that, he really hadn’t known what to expect. Unlike some of the players, Trent had no intention of bringing someone back to his room, and the irony of the situation at hand didn’t escape him.
Preparing for anything, Past-Trent had set out his toiletries across the countertop and laid out a pair of black joggers, briefs, and one of the t-shirts, a deep navy color, from the most recent six-pack he’d bought. Part of him hated that he bought shirts in multi-packs, even if it was just for sleepwear, but after the fourth incident where Catherine had woken up at some ungodly hour and decided to surprise him with breakfast, he’d decided that function over fashion was the way to go. Once she was old enough, or had the proper motor skills to handle carrying cereal bowls filled with unknown concoctions, he could go back to his old, uppity ways. Until then, multi-pack shirts he wouldn't mourn the loss of were what made the most sense.
He stripped, climbing into the shower with all the grace of a slightly drunk middle-aged man and got to work. It’s not that he didn’t trust Ted, but there was something a bit worrying about leaving someone who was high in the same room as his overnight bag. Not to mention that he didn’t know what, exactly, Ted was high on.
In all honesty, he’d never really pegged Ted as someone who got high; he wasn’t passing any sort of judgment for his vices, but he’d always assumed Ted was a “pint and call it a night” kind of man. It might just be due to the clean-cut American sports coach archetype he embodied, but it was interesting, to say the least. It made Trent wonder what kind of night he must’ve had that ended with him writing all by himself, coming off of what Trent could only assume to be psychedelics, if the lack of smell was anything to go by.
He scrubbed himself clean, taking a shorter shower than he’d usually go for, and dried off with a towel that he was sure had a higher thread count than his bedsheets at home. In the back of his mind, he knew that going to bed with wet hair was a recipe for disaster, but he was too tired to care. He slipped into his pajamas, brushed his teeth, and left the bathroom with a wet neck he hoped would be quick to dry.
The overhead light was still on, casting the room in a warm glow, and Trent realized he’d worried over his bag for nothing. Ted couldn’t have rummaged through any bags while the shower ran because, rather than snooping, it seemed as though he’d stripped off his crewneck and shoes and left them in a pile underneath the windmill painting before disappearing from sight. For a minute, Trent couldn’t see where he’d gone off to, but a lump underneath the left side of the duvet gave him the answer to that particular question.
Trent stood in the doorway between the two rooms. On the one hand, he had told Ted to make himself comfortable. If he was uncomfortable at the idea of sharing the bed, there was a perfectly acceptable loveseat on the other side of the room, close to the television, and a small basket of blankets in the corner that were sure to keep him warm.
On the other hand, he was too damn old to sleep on a couch where there was a bed in the room. He’d already forgotten his wrist braces back in Richmond, and the less aches in his joints he woke with, the better off he'd be on the nearly seven hour coach ride home.
Trent scrubbed a hand over his face, holding back a groan. He walked, quiet as he could, over to the switch, turning off the overhead light. Using the light from his phone, he made his way to the right side of the bed and peeled back the duvet.
Ted was dead to the world, laying on his stomach with his face pressed into the pillow. He’d kept a white undershirt on, as well as his khakis, and Trent winced. Even though khakis weren’t exactly the dressiest of slacks, they weren’t anywhere close to comfortable to sleep in.
He slid between the sheets, keeping half a foot from the other man, and shut his eyes.
As cliché as it was, the chirps of birds outside his windows woke him up before his alarm could. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but it was different—he never seemed to get birds that loud at his home back in Richmond. The last time he’d woken up to birdsong was last summer, and even then, it could hardly be called “song” when it was just one bird tweeting its heart out at six in the morning.
It had to be much later than six, though. Light shone through the windows at a brightness much more reminiscent of eight or nine, but it couldn’t be nine just yet if his alarm hadn’t gone off. He felt surprisingly well-rested for only having slept a few hours, and for one brief, blissful minute, he considered turning over, slipping further into the heavy sheets and savoring it.
That was, of course, until he realized that the pressure against his chest couldn’t be the weighted blanket Angela had bought him last Christmas because Trent was not in his own bed at home.
No, Trent was in a hotel bed, and if memory served him right, he hadn’t gone to bed alone.
With that, Trent opened his eyes, and realized three things in quick succession.
First, he realized that the pressure he felt wasn’t a blanket at all, but Ted Lasso asleep atop his chest. At some point during the night, he must’ve shifted, going from the side of the bed that Trent had oh-so-carefully stayed away from and pulled himself over Trent, lying halfway on top of the other man. Ted had abandoned the pillows provided by the hotel and utilized Trent’s chest instead. He’d flung an arm out as well, catching Trent around the waist, and held on tight.
Second, he realized that Ted Lasso ran “hot” in the same way one might describe the surface of the sun as “mildly warm.” The man was a fucking furnace, plain and simple, and it made Trent wish that he’d forgone any clothes at all, damn the consequences, to get a break from the heat.
The third, and most unpleasant, of the realizations came as Trent took stock of every point where his body touched Ted’s. The top of his hair grazed the bottom of Trent’s chin, and while Trent did, unfortunately, have a shirt on, he could still feel each exhale that came out of Ted’s slack mouth against the cotton. One hand remained fisted in the bedsheets, but Ted’s other hand wrapped around him right at the intersection between the hem of his shirt and his bare waist, splayed against the expanse of skin, and if he focused, Trent thought that, given photos of Ted’s fingerprints, he could match the whorl of each print to its respective finger.
Mentally, he moved further down his body, and that was where the unpleasantness began. In virtually any other circumstance, the solid, warm press of Ted Lasso’s thick thigh between his legs would be welcomed like a soldier returning from war, but right here, right now, he needed that thigh as far away from his half-hard cock as physically possible.
He shifted, biting back a hiss when it did nothing but press him further into the (soft, his mind crooned, but sturdy, and -) other man’s thigh. The movement jostled Ted, and for a fleeting, terrifying second, Trent watched as he snuffled, eyebrows drawn together in displeasure.
Trent stopped moving, stopped breathing, and waited with wide eyes. Don’t wake up, he thought. Don’t wake up, please don’t wake up.
To his relief, or his detriment, Ted remained asleep. With a huff, he nestled back down, hands flexing out to grab back on to his human pillow and hitching his leg up further.
Trent gave up, dropping his head back to the pillow. Any further movement would wake Ted up, causing him to lose out on sleep that he desperately needed. He wasn’t blind; Trent saw the way that each week seemed to dig its nails into the coach, with losses and draws dragging him down somewhere horrible. He worried, in the private way he did when he wasn’t sure if, or when, his input would be well-received, if Ted was getting help for it, or if he was trying, like so many men their age did, to brave it out on his own.
He wanted to reach out, to ask Ted if he was doing alright without letting him wiggle his way out of answering, and he wanted to be someone Ted would turn to of his own accord. He wanted to know his coffee order for the days he stopped by a local café on the way to the clubhouse, and wanted to know what kinds of clothes he wore when he didn’t have on his self-assigned uniform of khakis and pullovers. He wanted to go out to dinner again, to not skip out before the bill like an arsehole; hell, he wanted to pay for it himself. Most of all, he wanted to hold him.
Christ, he wanted to hold him.
The worst thing about it was that it would be easy. Trent could wrap an arm around him as he slept, might even drift back off into a dream, and it would be the best damn sleep he’d ever have.
It would be less awkward if we were both participating, he thought. Nothing weird if we both reached out. Just two healthy adult men with completely normal responses to stimuli.
He looked back down. Ted’s face had smoothed back into unconsciousness.
Trent’s right hand, barely an inch from the other man, twitched.
Fuck it.
Slowly, carefully, he moved his right arm, bringing it to rest across Ted’s back. He laid his palm on Ted’s shoulder, hovering before letting the weight of his arm fall against the white t-shirt. His left hand moved to meet Ted’s right, cupping the one that clasped his waist.
It was intimate, bordering on domestic. He’d rarely held Angela like this throughout their several years together, and even rarer were the days where he’d held someone like this since their separation. He’d been on dates, gone to clubs, woken up in another man’s bed more than a few times, but this?
This was dangerous territory. This—sleeping in the same bed, waking up wrapped in each other’s arms—was something that couples did. It was reserved for partners that had been married for years but were still, somehow, sickeningly in love, and that would never be something he had, much less with a man like Ted.
Ted Lasso is straight, he reminded himself. Ted Lasso is only two years out of his marriage. Ted Lasso -
moved up, tucking his face into the crook of Trent’s neck. He stuck his nose directly into a mane of unbrushed salt-and-pepper hair, and, once settled, gave a contented sigh.
With that, Trent Crimm’s mind went blank, wiped clean of any thoughts other than a simple, unyielding fact, the answer to the question he’d tried desperately to ignore since it was asked two years ago.
He held on tighter, bringing Ted closer to him like a scared child with a treasured stuffed animal. He didn’t want to forget this, no matter how much of a hopeless romantic that made him sound like. This moment of contentment, holding onto a man like they were more than temporary, like this was something he could wake up to day after day after day until it became part of the mundane.
His eyes slipped shut, and without sight, he could pretend that they were anywhere else, that they were in a place in time where they'd chosen to be together, that their embrace wasn't the result of his pathetic need for this specific man to want his company.
“You,” Trent murmured. “I love you.”
He didn’t know when he’d fallen back asleep, nor how long he’d slept, but the steady beeping of the default iPhone alarm brought him back to the world of the living. Neither man had moved since Trent had fallen asleep, but now, after an alarm and the bright, nine-in-the-morning sun streaming directly into their faces, he roused. Knowing it was futile to ignore the noise, Trent opened his eyes, reaching his right hand out to turn the alarm off. He laid it, loosely, back to where it had been on Ted.
Trent could pinpoint the second Ted woke up. It was in the way he shifted, giving in to the instinct every human had upon waking that made them burrow back into the blankets, chasing an extra minute or two before greeting the world. He watched Ted nuzzle his nose into Trent's hair, then raise his head from the crook of Trent’s neck and blink, eyes bleary but with appropriately-sized pupils, as he took stock of his surroundings.
It was stupid, but he couldn’t help himself. “Good morning,” Trent said, voice rough with sleep.
In an instant, Ted froze.
He’d anticipated a few different scenarios for what, exactly, would happen when Ted woke up. In one, they both laughed it off, striking it up as an awkward, but ultimately forgettable, experience. For another, he had to consider the possibility that Ted, a straight man, might not take waking up in another man’s arms well, and if that had been the case, he’d expected something akin to locker room-style remarks but nothing worse. Ted was a good man, after all; if there was one certainty Trent could rely on, it was that.
In an incredible moment of self-indulgence, he considered a scenario where Ted wouldn’t move at all, even after realizing who he laid on top of. That he’d stay in bed with him for a few minutes more before they’d hear Will’s wake-up knock at the door, a warning that, should he not get an answer, he’d get a spare keycard and snap a photo of the poor bastards on the other side of the door that didn’t get up in time. Trent wasn’t exactly sure what the consequence of having their photo taken was, but he knew Will kept track of it for a reason.
What he hadn’t anticipated in any scenario was the way that all of the color drained from Ted’s face the second he heard Trent’s voice.
He jerked upwards, an abrupt, ugly movement. Trent’s arms fell to his sides as Ted flung himself out of the bed, scrambling to his feet. His hair was a wreck, his shirt untucked, and his breath started to stutter, jarringly different from the slow, deep breathing of sleep. The clumsy yet put-together Ted Lasso he knew had been replaced by someone he’d only ever written about, someone he’d never actually seen.
He’s panicking, Trent realized. He sat up, sheets pooling around his lap. It wasn’t a panic attack, not yet, but he could see the other man teetering on the edge of a cliff that Trent didn’t want to see the bottom of. “Ted -”
“I’m sorry,” Ted blurted out. He looked around the room, gaze bouncing off of every surface like a ping pong ball. “I didn’t mean to -,” he stumbled over the words. “I’m sorry.” He bent down, taking his crewneck and shoes from their pile on the floor. “I’m sorry.”
“What?”
Ted didn’t respond. With every article of clothing he grabbed, Trent could see him slip further and further into himself. He had to do something, anything, to bring him back down.
“Ted,” Trent asked, slowly, “what are you apologizing for?”
“Touchin’ you,” he answered, too quickly. “Smotherin' you.” He looked around at everything but the other man in the room, searching for something. “I should -, I should go.”
“Don’t.”
Ted finally looked at him, confusion and panic twisting his face into something awful. A flush had begun to spread its way down his cheeks and onto his throat.
Trent left the bed, walking over to the armchair. He picked up the pen and notebook, glancing over the sunflowers that graced its cover, and went to Ted. “If you truly want to leave,” he said, “then leave, but please don’t run away on account of misplaced guilt.”
Ted reached out, cautious, and took his belongings from Trent's outstretched hands. “You’re not mad?”
“Why would I be mad?” Trent asked, looking him in the eyes.
He broke eye contact, looking down at the notebook. “I kinda octopus-ed onto you without askin’,” Ted said. “Got all up in your hair in the most literal sense.” His knuckles were white against the orange and yellow he grasped at. “It wasn’t right of me to do that.”
“It,” Trent said, moving closer, “was a completely natural response to another warm body sharing your bed, and it,” he continued, placing his hand on top of Ted’s, “is absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about, okay?”
Ted met his gaze and swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “Okay.”
Trent smiled at him. “Okay.”
They stood together, Trent watching Ted’s breath start to slow as color creeped back into his face. He didn’t want to say anything, didn’t want to ruin this -, well, whatever this was.
Three loud knocks rapped against the other side of the door. “Wake-up call for Mr. Trent Crimm,” Will’s voice called out. “Wake-up call for Trent!”
“I should probably get that,” Trent said, wary. The last thing either of them needed was someone barging in.
Unwillingly, Trent took his hand back and stepped around Ted, running a hand through his hair before unlocking the door and opening it as little as he could without drawing suspicion. “Wide awake, Will, but thank you.”
Will nodded, clicking something on his phone. “Glad to help,” he said. He looked up from the screen, and a small, strangled noise came out in place of whatever he’d intended to say. “Good morning, Coach Lasso.”
Trent’s head whipped around to see that, yes, Ted was visible from the doorway.
Ted blushed. “G’morning, Will.”
The three men stood in silence as Trent fought the growing urge to slam the door in Will’s face.
“Wild night?” Will asked, aiming for a joke. He couldn’t seem to stop staring at Ted, and with every second, Trent could feel the tension in the room rise to the point of suffocation.
“Coach Lasso lost his keycard,” Trent explained. “I -"
Dragged him into my bed, he thought. Cuddled him like I'd put on a ring on his finger, then comforted him when he worried he, of all people, had done something to offend me.
"- invited him in. Didn’t want a Premier League coach sleeping on the streets of Amsterdam. Anything could’ve happened.”
“Yeah,” Will said, unconvinced. He took a step back, looking between the two. “I’ll grab Coach Lasso’s spare card from my room. Be back in a sec.”
Trent watched as he turned on his heel, then sprinted down the hall, throwing open his own door and coming out a second later. He ran back to Trent’s room, keycard in hand. “Here you are,” he said, thrusting it at Trent. “Bus leaves at ten.”
“Thank you, Will,” Ted said. “We’ll be there soon.”
“I -, yeah,” Will said, eyes wide. “Yeah.” He disappeared, and a moment later, Trent heard him knocking on the door next to his. “Wake-up call for Mr. Leslie Higgins!”
Ted cleared his throat behind him. “I think I should take that as my cue to leave?”
“Of course,” Trent said. He stepped aside, leaving the doorway wide open.
He took a step out into the hallway, then stopped. “Hey, Trent?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks for not kickin’ my butt to the curb.” Ted said, a small smile on his face. “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you did.”
Trent put a hand to his chest, playing up the dramatics in the way he’d found himself doing more and more often since coming to AFC Richmond. “I’d never dream of it.”
Ted chuckled as he turned away, leaving Trent to lurk in the doorway.
In the back of his mind, he knew it was a bit weird to watch the other man walk the length of the hallway—it wasn’t as if he could get lost—but he did so anyway.
Will had made his way to the player’s rooms, knocking much louder than he had on any of the staff’s doors. “Wake-up call for Colin Hughes and Isaac McAdoo! Wake-up call -”
Trent heard the door creak open. “We’re awake, boyo,” a groggy voice said.
“Just checking,” Will replied, checking their names off of the list on his phone. “You know how it is.” He stepped away, going across the hall to room eight-ten. “Wake-up call for Jamie Tartt and Dani Rojas!”
In the same way one would realize with mounting horror that no, the car stuck on the railroad tracks was not going to make it off before the train collided with it, Trent realized that Ted would be passing Will and, by extension, Colin, within the next ten seconds, if not less.
Shut the door, Trent pleaded, McAdoo, Will, anyone. Someone make that young man shut his door .
“Coach Lasso?”
Goddamnit.
“Mornin’,” Ted said, giving him a little wave. Blessedly, he didn’t stop for conversation, but Trent knew, either way, he’d be paying for it. He continued on to his room, ducking inside and away from view.
Sure enough, Colin stuck his head out, looking at his ruffled, shoeless coach’s retreating back, then whipped around.
Trent wasn’t fast enough to duck back inside before Colin’s manic gaze locked onto his.
“Did you two -?” Colin mouthed, baffled.
He shook his head, violent with how fast his hair whipped from side-to-side.
Colin gave a short, quick nod. “Good.”
“Colin, bruv,” Isaac said, loud enough that Trent could hear his voice all the way down the hall, “shut the fuckin’ door. Don’t want Coach to see me with my dick out.”
“‘Course,” Colin replied. He shot one last look down Trent’s way that made it clear their conversation was far from over before shutting the door. Trent did the same, locking it behind himself before someone else could come and complicate the situation further.
The empty bed, sheets askew, beckoned him. He didn’t have time to sleep, and frankly, he wasn’t tired enough to need it, but still, Trent found himself between the sheets once more.
They were warm.
After a trip to the bathroom to freshen up, pulling on a t-shirt and jeans, he made quick work of packing. He slung his overnight bag over his shoulder and, after checking twice to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, left the hotel room.
Despite being on the eighth floor, he decided to take the stairs down to the ground floor, hoping that the solo walk would clear his head. The stairwell was well-lit and empty, and so, Trent began his descent.
He passed by the sign for the seventh floor, then the sixth, fifth, and fourth. By the time he got to the third floor, he gave up all hope of getting thoughts of the morning out of his head.
The logical part of Trent’s mind knew that it very well could be exactly what he said to Ted—their early-morning embrace was just the product of two single, lonely men reacting, consciously or not, to each other’s warmth and presence in bed. The emotional, irrational, part of him that spent more than a few nights tipsy and unwillingly watching shitty rom-coms with Angela before they’d finalized the divorce was sitting out in a field of wildflowers, picking off petals while playing “he loves me, he loves me not” and trying to keep himself from counting the petals so he’d be prepared for whatever happened once the stem was bare.
Second floor, first floor, ground.
Trent left the stairwell and met the rest of the team in the hotel lobby. Though his standards for the team weren’t exactly low, he was impressed to see that, even with ten minutes before the coach was slated to leave, almost all of the players were dressed, packed, and ready to go. The room was a sea of navy jackets broken up by islands of bags slung over shoulders or dropped onto the ground. Hotel staff milled about, testing the waters of just how close they could get to the footballers before their boss materialized, reminding them of agreements they made when Richmond booked their stay, promising to treat the team with the same level of respect they would any other guest. Most of the players kept a healthy distance, as advised by the club’s Human Resources manager, Jessica, but some had decided to take the risks associated with speaking to members of the public sans coaches. Isaac McAdoo in particular seemed to be having a grand time as he chatted with two young women Trent recognized from the night before.
Will came in to collect them, directing all players, Richmond staff, and others to the coach outside. Like a well-trained group of primary schoolchildren, they formed a single-file line, passing their bags to the kit man as they boarded the bus. Trent was near the front of the line, and gave Will his bag, noticing that the young man didn’t meet his eyes like he had for the others. Part of him wanted to take Will aside, assure him that nothing was going on between him and Ted, but he knew that, other than attracting the attention of two-thirds of the team, it would do nothing but dig his hole deeper into the ground.
Trent sighed.
Nearly all of the seats aboard the coach were open, and for a split second, Trent entertained the idea of going all the way to the back, sliding into the booth where Ted sat. He still wore the same orange crewneck he’d had on the night before, contrasting against the blue of the seats, but had pulled his staple puffer overtop to combat the chill of the early morning. There was plenty of room in the booth, enough so that he wouldn’t be pushing his luck, so to speak, after how close they’d been that morning. He could use the book as an excuse, maybe get a quote or two from Ted about the benefits of letting the team run loose for a night.
That train of thought stopped abruptly as he saw Coach Beard board the coach, clad in what he could only assume to be a David Bowie costume with a pig snout, of all things, strapped to his face. Ted spoke to him as he sat down, words indiscernible to those at the front of the bus, while the other coach thumbed through Ted’s notebook. He wondered if the inane scribbles made sense in the morning light, or if they were working together to decipher what they meant. All Trent had understood was a triangle motif, but without any context, he couldn't begin to think of a conclusion to jump to.
A tap on his shoulder brought him back to the front of the bus.
“Not trying to be rude, Mr. Crimm,” Coach Armada said, “but are you going to choose a seat soon, or are you planning on standing the whole ride back to Richmond?”
Sheepish, Trent apologized, dropping into the closest empty seat. It was in the first row, next to a young man named Kas that he’d spoken to a few times since the beginning of the season. He’d come to AFC Richmond right around the same time Trent had, hired as an additional physiotherapist for the team. Gail had held the fort down after Trevor left, but they wanted all hands on deck for their return to the Premier League, and that included having at least two physios at all times, just in case of emergency.
From what he’d heard about him, Trent knew Kas to be quiet, which would come in handy considering the hours ahead.
He took out his notebook, knowing damn well that he wouldn’t be writing anything with how the ache in his left wrist had slowly but surely come back to life over the past hour. Though he was right-hand dominant, his left wrist was always the first to go, and his right wouldn’t be far behind. He’d have to digitize the notes he’d written the day before once he was home with his laptop, meaning he didn’t want to run the risk of rendering his hands inoperable for the next twenty-four hours.
Trent flipped through his notes, reading the shorthand he’d scrawled during yesterday’s match. The Amsterdam friendly wasn’t going to play a large part in his upcoming novel, but the night afterwards surely would. Almost any other coach in the league would’ve kept his players inside all night as punishment, but not Ted, and that supportive, caring, near-paternal relationship he cultivated with his players was something Trent had never seen before. He’d never even seen the man angry, nevermind yell, at any of the young men he coached, and, privately, Trent couldn’t wait to see the day he finally snapped. It was a bit sadistic, but Trent wanted to see Ted Lasso properly pissed off, if only to see what the final straw upon the camel’s back would be.
There was a side to him that Trent hadn’t seen before last night, the side that called his friends rude and meant it. He wasn’t a journalist anymore, couldn’t freely push and push and push until he got his subject to crack, and it irked him to no end for something to be so close yet so out of reach.
There was a side to Ted Lasso that got angry, that yelled, that cried, that cursed, and it was behind so many walls that Trent would need to invest in a quality sledgehammer to even begin to see the man that Ted became when he broke open.
The worst of it was that Trent didn’t just want to see Ted with his outer pieces strayed about; no, he wanted to be there to gather them up as well.
Christ, he thought, hearing the roar of the engine come to life. I’m a goner.