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In the aftermath, Jimmy can’t quite believe that so much panic could grow out of something so small.
(The bit of grit in Ali’s eye, that is, not the part with Kev. Nothing’s ever small, with KP.)
He sorts through the details, obsessively, looking for the thread of when and how in his memories of the past month.
It all started, fairly obviously, when he was pacing the corridors of Headingley, restless in the face of yet another rain delay. Bowling over after fruitless over in the unending quest to dislodge Hashim Amla during the first Test had taken it out of all of them; to be thwarted again and again by the weather during the second, when they were all so desperate to salvage team and personal pride, was about as frustrating as cricket got. And cricket could raise frustration to an art form, so.
Sick of seeing his own tension mirrored in the faces of his team mates – it was only a matter of time until one of Swanny’s jokes got him yelled at, or Belly played a prank on the wrong person – Jimmy had headed out in search of, at the very least, a different view than the dressing room walls.
So when he bumped into Ali, he was twitchy and distracted and (most important) off his guard. He’d been so careful for so long, avoiding being alone with Ali and everything, and somewhere along the line he’d managed to convince himself that he was over it all. That he no longer had a thing for Ali.
(Okay, the ‘somewhere’ in that last bit is a dodge, because he knows exactly where and when he decided to go cold turkey. Nothing says get over it, you dick, there’s a gaping black hole where your morals should be like watching one of your best friends look blissfully happy on his wedding day.)
(Even if the blissful happiness did involve driving a tractor from the church to the reception because Ali is adorably strange stop it)
Anyway, so he bumped into Ali. Who was standing with one hand braced against a wall and the other rubbing at his eye. At the time, it seemed like a perfectly harmless idea to stop and check he was okay.
“Yeah,” said Ali with a half-smile, then: “No. Not really. It’s stupid, but… I’ve got something in my eye and it’s driving me crazy.”
Jimmy offered to take a look. (It beat wearing troughs into the corridors of Headingley, right?)
Ali obligingly tilted his face. The skin around his eye was puffy, and the eyelashes were wet, clumped together, making him look startled. Jimmy kept his touch light as he drew back the eyelid, and at length he spotted a speck of black at the top of the bloodshot white. “Ah – yeah, I can see it.”
Ali reached for his eye, stopped himself with a visible effort. “Can you get it out?”
Jimmy hesitated. “You’re probably better off with the doc and some tweezers than my clumsy great big fingers.”
“Believe me,” said Ali, “when it comes to eyes, I’m happier with blunt instruments.”
So Jimmy led him to the bathroom, for the sake of better light and so he could wash his hands before he started poking about. Once they got there, he was so focused on the task in hand that he didn’t really think about the fact that he had Ali bent backwards over a sink, that he was leaning into the full length of the other man as he cradled his face.
But it’s also true that when he was finally able to display, in triumph, the offending bit of grit on his fingertip – “Evicted!” – he didn’t exactly rush to step back and give Ali some space.
No, actually, he more or less just stayed in exactly the same position. “Better?”
Ali blinked a few times, experimentally. “Yeah,” he nodded, beaming. “Feels better. Thanks so much.”
(He knows, looking back, that this was where he went wrong. That should have been it. But it wasn’t.)
“Last check?” Jimmy cupped Ali’s chin with one hand, and made a show of examining his eye one more time, turning Ali’s face this way and that to get different angles on it. Red and swollen and watering, the eye looked painful, but there was no sign of anything else that shouldn’t be there.
A tear leaked free, which he brushed away with his thumb. For a brief moment – just long enough – he was lost. Those eyes, that jaw, those lips.
(He remembers what he was thinking: It’d be so easy to kiss him. Bloody idiot.)
At which point the bathroom door swung open so hard it slammed against the wall.
Jimmy and Ali sprang apart like it was an electric shock, a gunshot.
Replaying this in his head, now, he wonders why Ali reacted with such alarm, if the whole thing was as innocent, on his end, as it appeared. Was it not? He tries to wind the image back, examine it again from another angle like he did to Ali’s eye, but the memory yields no further insight. Mostly because, at the time, he wasn’t watching Ali – he was staring in horror at who had come through the door.
KP stopped just inside the room, eyebrows raised. “Am I interrupting something?”
Jimmy opened his mouth before he realised he hadn’t a clue what to say. He shut it again, leaned against the sink for support.
“Just, you know... had something in my eye,” said Ali. “Jimmy was helping—”
“Yeah, whatever.” Kev dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “Get a room, guys.” He kicked open one of the cubicles, slammed it behind him.
Jimmy couldn’t even look at Ali, who turned and more or less ran out of the room. Jimmy slammed his hands into the sink unit. He tasted a sharp urge to hit KP, knew (okay: knows now, in retrospect) that it was stupid. Any frustration he was feeling was entirely of his own making.
He glared at his pale, drawn face in the mirror, silently cursed himself for having no fucking self-control, and stalked out of the bathroom.
He didn’t stop to think about why KP had come storming into the bathroom like that. If he thought about Kev at all – and he didn’t, really, except for being angry with him for the completely unfair fact of wrong place, wrong time – he just assumed it was the same restlessness that was getting to all of them. Even when KP did the “it’s tough being me” press conference, Jimmy never imagined things were so close to blowing up.
Swanny’s glee was immense when he heard about the press conference. Jimmy had to practically lock him in his hotel room until he calmed down, which didn’t completely avert the inevitable mockery, but did diffuse it a bit. Swanny and KP had never really got on, but Swanny was a champion needler, and a stand-up row between them was the last thing anyone needed just then.
Of course, as it turned out, Swanny probably couldn’t have made things much worse than they already were. Still, at the time, Jimmy didn’t realise how short Kev’s patience had worn. He never saw the text messages coming.
Nor did he ever see the actual messages, which was why he spent the rest of the month in a state of constant low-level terror about what may or may not have been said in them.
Actually, no, that’s not quite true. Not the whole rest of the month. For the first few days after the rumours about the messages started spreading, and even when the press got hold of it and Kev was dropped for the third Test, things were fine. (For Jimmy. Relatively. Compared to what came later.) It was the drive to Lord’s with Swanny, for training, that left him sweating.
Swanny was blurting the news before they were even out of the hotel car park. “This is brilliant, Jimmy, you won’t believe it,” he said. “Apparently Kev gave the South Africans another tip for how to wind us up. He said that two members of the team are secretly” (he paused for effect) “sleeping together!”
Jimmy froze. There was a roaring in his ears. Graeme was laughing so hard he presumably didn’t see his expression. Which was lucky, because all Jimmy could think about just then was KP walking in on him and Ali.
The bang of the door. Get a room, guys. Ali legging it.
(Shit, Jimmy thought, kept thinking. Shit shit shit shit.)
Swanny was wiping his eyes. “I always suspected he’s got no sense of humour, but that confirms it. I mean, it has to be us, right? I guess you and me are going to get some chat at the crease in the next Test. For the record, when they ask, I’m twelve inches— Watch out!”
That last bit was prompted by Jimmy slamming on the brakes; he’d rolled past a red light and almost ended up in oncoming traffic.
“I know, I know,” Swanny went on, barely pausing for breath. “It is impressive. And normally I don’t like to boast.” (Jimmy stared at his hands, white-knuckled against the steering wheel.) “But however spectacularly endowed I am, there’s no need to crash the car over it.”
The lights changed; Jimmy swallowed, put the car into gear, and pulled forward.
At which point Swanny appeared to finally notice his silence. And misinterpreted it, thankfully.
“Wait… what do you know? Have you got some gossip you haven’t shared? Tell me!”
Jimmy cleared his throat, kept his eyes on the road. “Not that I’ve been able to get a word in edgeways since you sat down, but no. No gossip.” Maybe it wasn’t about him and Ali, after all. He swallowed again, tried to sound casual as he pressed for more information, for some reassurance. “Are you sure it’s us two he meant?”
“I didn’t hear any names, just that it was two England players. But who else could it be?”
Jimmy gave an awkward shrug. His heart was slowing, a bit. “True, none of the others have declared their undying love for each other in public. Repeatedly.”
Swanny snorted. “Prick. He’s probably just jealous.”
And there it rested, at least for Swanny. Jimmy tried out relief and unconcern, but they never quite fit; all through training (where he never once looked Ali in the eye), the defeat in the Test that followed (ditto, virtually), and the ODI abandoned after half a day’s waiting and less than six overs’ play, he couldn’t silence the disquiet in the back of his mind.
Every morning, he scanned the headlines. He ached with guilt like a chill in his bones, thinking of the agony and attention this would bring on his family, when it came out. Of the damage it would do to Ali, innocent in all this.
(Probably innocent in all this, he reflects now, his thoughts circling back to the key moment. Why was Ali so panicked that day? Hard not to read more into it, the more times you look back. Until you start to wonder if you’re remembering it right, or just making stuff up out of wishful thinking. Maybe Ali was just reacting to his own reaction. Maybe Ali was shocked at the realisation of what Jimmy was about to do, both of them being married and everything. To other people. Women.)
(Fuck, he’s getting nowhere. Where’s the thread? Two weeks later; twitter. Yes.)
Two weeks later, sitting in front of a pair of computers with Finny and a camera crew for a twitter Q&A, getting teased (by Finny of all people) about his A-Level grades (of all things), Jimmy had just about begun to breathe a little easier. Dale Steyn had mostly just looked confused when Jimmy had asked – in a roundabout and no doubt totally subtle way – who else was mentioned in Kev’s messages besides Strauss and Flower. It’s possible Steyn was just a really good actor. But that sort-of confirmation, coupled with all the days that had passed without the tabloids barging down his door, gave Jimmy hope that Swanny’s piece of gossip had just been one more of the seemingly endless bullshit rumours swirling around the whole sorry situation.
None of which explained why – at the far end of August, with two more ODIs to get through and everyone knowing but not officially knowing that Ali was going to take Straussy’s place as captain any day – the end of his own personal Textgate torment left Jimmy feeling so strangely hollow as he sat at that computer next to Finny.
It wasn’t that he’d enjoyed the fear of exposure, the thought of the fallout, the prospect of his marriage ending in the most painful way possible. It wasn’t that at all. He’d rather pull out his own fingernails than go through that again.
And yet.
There was a part of him – a small, ashamed part – that’d got used to thinking about Ali again; about him and Ali. Even if only (mostly) as a source of guilt. Circumstances made it hard not to. And it was habit-forming.
(Scrub that last bit. Admit it: there is a part of him that is used to it, present tense. Current. The same part of him that – the night they lost the second ODI – came, hard, to a furious hand around his cock and an unsubtly altered memory of the fateful scene in the bathroom. Director’s extended cut, minus KP’s interruption and most of their clothes. He woke up the next morning feeling like crap, turned on the TV to see the announcement of Ali’s ascent to the captaincy, felt worse.)
So that was his frame of mind when he sat down to the twitter chat with Finny. Not the bit with the wanking (that hadn’t happened yet). The bit where he was just starting to feel safe in the matter of the text messages, and just starting to wonder if he wanted, really, to be safe.
That was the train of thought that ambushed him when he got to one particular tweeted question:
“Who—” He faltered over the first word, already knowing it was a mistake to read it out. “Who has the biggest bromance on the team?”
His voice trailed off as he got to the end, his smile faded, and he stared fixedly at the computer screen, intensely aware of the camera just off to his right. His mouth felt, suddenly, very dry. He swallowed.
He heard KP’s voice, again, in his mind: Get a room, guys.
The fear returned. Had Kev told anyone else? Was there a trap lurking in the question?
“There’s only one winner there,” Finny was saying. Jimmy couldn’t help but look round at him, at his half-smile and raised eyebrows and matter-of-factness. “You’re involved in it.”
Jimmy made himself laugh, just a bit, just enough: more of a held breath released than real amusement. He felt the panic ebb. He could brazen it out. Everyone knew the bromance was him and Swanny, right?
“Ah,” he said, turning back to the screen, playing coy. (Or playing at playing coy. Layers and layers of deception.) “I can’t say that…”
The smile he couldn’t quite hold back was half-nervous, half a reflex response to the simple thought of Ali. It had been creeping up on him for days, that unfightable smile, but looking back now, he sees that the exchange with Finny was when he finally had to recognise it for what it was.
If there was a trap lurking in the question, it was his own doing, and in his own mind. (And so, a few days later, he let himself fantasize about Ali, about fucking Ali, for the first time in months.)
So much panic, over such a small thing. Leaving him right back at square one.
Except worse, because now the man with whom he dreams of cheating on his wife is his captain, with all the weight of responsibility and public scrutiny that brings.