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Everything about the villa was exactly like Roy had been promised: private grounds and an infinity pool; one bedroom that looked up towards the mountains and another that looked out over the sea. The kitchen was fully stocked with the food he'd requested and the staff was the kind of discreetly absent you had to pay good fucking money to achieve. It was irritating. And when Roy unpacked his suitcase and set his toiletries out on the counter in the en suite, and he saw just how empty the wardrobe still was, and how much a gleaming expanse of marble was clear of anyone else's toothbrush or hairclips or fucking incomprehensible little bottles of skin serums, it got to be highly depressing.
It was four o'clock, and if he was back in Richmond on a normal day, right now he'd be overseeing training drills or talking strategy in Ted's office or making dinner for Phoebe because Carla was on-call. But he wasn't in Richmond, he was in fucking Marbella, so he put on his swim trunks and picked up one of the paperbacks he'd stacked on the nightstand next to the bed that was too fucking big and went to sit outside.
Roy sent Carla a picture of the pool and the sea beyond, his feet just poking into view at the bottom of the frame. Ugh hairy toes gross, he got back a few minutes later. Phoebe thinks the pool is great please relax & enjoy yourself xxx. Roy heaved a sigh—the emotional demands of being the cool uncle were fucking endless—dropped his phone on the table next to him, and picked up his book. Two chapters, he thought, and then he'd do a few laps in the pool. It wouldn't do for him to go back to London with a tapas belly, and his physio was keen for him to swim more, keep the pressure off his shit knee.
Within ten minutes, he was asleep.
Roy was woken only when his phone started to buzz and hop across the table. Groggy and disoriented by how low the sun had sunk in the sky, it took him a moment to understand the messages he was scrolling through.
Little Prick (4:37): Landed in mallaga late which fucking figures
Little Prick (4:39): Did u know British airways don't give them little bags of peanuts anymore even in first class
Little Prick (4:39): Wankers
Little Prick (5:05): K I'm in the car now on the way only Fernando here wants to know what number ur gaff is Keeley only knew the name of the street
Little Prick (5:17): Are u back to giving me the cold shoulder again because mate u head butted me
Little Prick (5:18): So everything's sorted now
Little Prick (5:41): Ok Fernando says this is the right street but all the houses are behind these big walls so I can't tell which one has a grumpy old fuck in it
Little Prick (5:44): I'm going to tell Keeley on u
Little Prick (5:50): Fernando just left me on the side of the street so u better come find me because I don't know any Spanish and I have me bags and all
Little Prick (5:52): ROY
Little Prick (5:52): ROY
Little Prick (5:52): ROY
"Are you fucking kidding me?" Roy demanded of his phone screen and marched back into the house. Sure enough, the villa's security cameras showed a figure standing in the street outside who looked suspiciously like Jamie Tartt: baseball cap on at a stupid angle and wearing a jacket that had to be way too heavy in the warmth of a Spanish evening.
Roy hit the button for the intercom. "What the fuck are you doing here?"
Jamie jumped, looking wildly around him, then visibly relaxed. "Keeley sent me, didn't she?" he said, looking in the general direction of the camera. "You gonna let me in or what?"
Roy let go of the intercom button and swore what even by his standards qualified as a blue streak. He'd come here for a proper fucking holiday, not to deal with an overgrown man-child who could kick a penalty beautiful enough to make Roy have strange dreams about it but who dressed like the sucker that every salesperson in an overpriced shop saw coming a mile off.
But one thing you could say about Jamie Tartt was that he wasn't a liar. If he said that Keeley had sent him, then Keeley had sent him, so if Roy told Jamie to fuck all the way off back to England, then Keeley wouldn't be very happy about it.
And one thing you could say about Roy Kent was that he was very invested in keeping Keeley Jones happy.
"Fuck," Roy yelled, and hit the button to make the villa's main gates swing open.
"Finally," Jamie said, trundling an oversized and incredibly ugly suitcase up the drive as Roy opened the front door. "I was sweating me balls off out there."
"Why did Keeley send you?" Roy ground out as he stood back to let Jamie pass. "I thought you were supposed to be filming that stupid thing in Manchester."
"So did I, but now I'm not," was all Jamie said. He rummaged in his carry-on bag and produced a smaller plastic one which he thrust at Roy. "Here, I got you a Toblerone."
Roy looked at the bag, then at Jamie, then back at the bag. "Why the fuck did you get me a Toblerone?"
"You can't go through Duty Free and not buy a Toblerone," Jamie said. "It's like a rule or something."
"I literally flew out about four hours before you," Roy said, "from the same fucking airport, and I didn't buy a fucking Toblerone."
"Well then you're lucky I brought you one, aren't you?" Jamie said, waving the bag right under Roy's nose until he was forced to take it. "Not on your holliers unless you've bought a Toblerone."
Keeley didn't pick up when he rang, but a few minutes later he got a text saying Conference call with New York babe talk to you tomorrow yeah? Xxx.
Roy had the distinct feeling he was being managed, but there wasn't much he could do about it just then and all the evening flights back to London had already left. He settled for pointing at the door of the second bedroom. "You, there," he told Jamie, "and no bullshit, yeah?"
"Sound," Jamie said as he headed toward the bedroom door, hauling his suitcase behind him. Roy had no clue where he'd got a spike-studded suitcase from—he looked like he'd made a pet out of one of the characters from that fucking cartoon that Phoebe had mercifully grown out of.
By the time Jamie reemerged, Roy had pulled a t-shirt on and set about making a paella for dinner, because what the fuck was the point of being in Spain and eating something you could get from the caff at home.
"You'd better eat shrimp," Roy told Jamie as he stirred the rice, "because I'm not making anything else."
"Yeah, course I do," Jamie said, taking a seat at one of the bar stools which were lined up on the other side of the kitchen island. "I've eaten snails and all. Thierry Henry dared me once at this posh restaurant in Paris and I didn't puke or nothing even though I'd just necked this whole thing of champagne."
"What the fuck does a shrimp have to do with a snail?" Roy snapped.
"Don't know, mate, I failed GCSE Biology," Jamie said. He sounded laidback, but when Roy looked over at him, he could see lines of tiredness around Jamie's mouth. Roy had expected Jamie to get changed into some skin-tight outfit right away, ready to go out and drop ten grand on a bottle of champagne at one of the overpriced clubs down on the beach—the same kind of ridiculous shit Roy himself would have done when he was in his early 20s and convinced no one could teach him anything. Instead, Jamie was dressed in a pair of grey sweatpants and a faded Richmond t-shirt, an outfit which five minutes ago Roy would have bet good money did not exist in the wardrobe of Jamie Tartt.
When the food was ready they took their plates and some beers out to eat on the terrace. The evening was still warm despite the breeze coming in off the sea, and everything was quiet except for the faint chatter of birds that Roy couldn't name. It was so pleasant that for a moment Roy found himself remembering with shit-awful clarity what it had been like growing up in that fucking council flat, with rising damp in the walls and the smell of piss in the stairwells.
Roy closed his eyes, opened them, and took a swig of his beer. "You never told me why Keeley sent you."
Jamie shrugged one-shouldered. He was already halfway through his plate of food, eating with all the steady enjoyment of a man on temporary release from a nutritionist-vetted diet. "She said you needed a break and I needed a break so it made sense for us to take a break together. And that you'd left a spare ticket with her and she could change it into my name."
"And?"
Jamie shrugged again.
"She's up to something," Roy said, though he was fucked if he could think what.
"That's our Keeley," Jamie said, stuffing the last of the shrimp into his mouth.
Despite his afternoon nap and the too-empty bed and the complete absence of any familiar London noises outside, Roy slept a good ten hours that night. The room was quiet and dark thanks to thick walls and heavy blackout curtains and when Roy finally woke up he thought for a moment he was in one of those sensory deprivation tanks. He blinked up at the ceiling and then hauled himself out of bed, grimacing as he put weight on his bad knee. Even though he'd paid extra for a seat with maximum leg room, spending that much time on a plane meant that each individual part of the joint was filing an individual fucking protest.
Roy made it into the kitchen without limping too much, but from bitter experience he knew he was going to need to do his physio-ordered exercises and his regular yoga routine that morning—if he didn't stretch things out properly, he'd end up back on the exam table of some knob of a consultant who'd make tutting noises and drop hints about knee replacements. Roy'd be fucked if he let that happen before he was even 40, so yoga it was, even if Jamie was bound to give him shit about it.
Jamie was already up and in the kitchen, buttering a small tower of toast while scrolling through something on a tablet. Roy grunted a good morning at him and then started rummaging through one of the wall of cabinets that divided the kitchen from the living room until he found what he was looking for: the yoga mat and resistance bands that the travel agent had promised would be stocked for him.
The mat was pastel pink and had an inspirational quote on it. Keeley would have loved it; Roy heaved out a sigh.
Jamie didn't seem to notice it though, settling for crunching his way loudly through a piece of toast and saying, "That bed's well nice. Do you think I could get a mattress like that at home? Only my waterbed keeps leaking so maybe I need to like, be more traditional or whatever."
Roy stared at him.
"Oh, you want some toast?" Jamie said, pushing the plate across the acre of marble kitchen island. "Bread's good, only there's no Marmite. What kind of place doesn't have Marmite?"
"A place where people like to eat things that don't taste like shit," Roy pointed out.
"Yeah, okay, except for how Marmite's fucking delicious," Jamie said, with a look on his face like he thought he'd just made an argument-winning point.
"Toast," Roy said, gesturing at Jamie with the yoga mat for emphasis, "is made out of bread, and yeast's what you use to make bread, and Marmite's just a lot of yeast jammed into a jar so why the fuck would you want to smear a bit of the raw fucking ingredient of the thing on the thing?"
"Because it tastes good?" Jamie said, brows furrowed.
"Jesus Christ," Roy said, and went outside to get into Down Dog. This, at least, his body could remember how to do: feel the warmth of the terracotta tiles soaking into the mat, taste the salt in the air, breathe in and out as he moved. By the time he was done, his leg felt better—not perfect, but the kind of ache that was closer to healing than it was to damage. His mind was a bit quieter, too, which was why Roy didn't quite know what to make of it when he got up and saw on the patio table a mug of tea with just enough milk in it to be the perfect shade of brown, and a plate with some toast (buttered only) and scrambled eggs.
Roy stared at it suspiciously for a long moment before he sat down and ate a tentative mouthful. He was expecting nothing more than rubbery cafeteria eggs at best, but somehow these were actually fucking good: creamy, buttery, perfectly seasoned with black pepper, the kind of food that made you feel hungrier as soon as you took the first mouthful.
"Who the fuck taught the little shit how to cook?" Roy said aloud, mind no longer even the least little bit quiet, but he'd never been one to look a gift meal in the mouth, so he finished the whole plate.
After a shower, Roy called Keeley and this time she picked up. "Hey babe!" she said, and Roy wasn't sure he'd ever get used to how it felt to hear her voice and remember her smile and know that she was in love with him. "You having fun?"
"Jamie Tartt's out in the garden," Roy said evenly, lying back on the bed. Jamie had started talking about how he needed somewhere with good light to take some pictures for Instagram, just to maintain the brand, yeah?, and Roy had tuned out long before Jamie produced one of those stupid fucking selfie sticks. "Why is Jamie Tartt in the garden of the villa I rented for my first proper holiday in for-fucking-ever?"
"Well, that ticket was just sitting there," Keeley said. "No point in letting it go to waste, was there? And Jamie seemed like he was at a bit of a loose end, and as a PR professional I can say that nothing good comes out of Jamie Tartt being at a loose end in London during the off-season."
"Yeah, but so what? You don't work for Richmond anymore, you're not obligated to give a single fuck," Roy pointed out. "Plus getting up to stupid shit is just what footballers do, and I don't see you sending fucking Colin over here just to stop him reversing that stupid Lamborghini into another fucking postbox."
"I don't need to with Colin, do I?" Keeley said primly. "Will finally worked up the courage to ask him out the other week. Isaac says they've been going at it like rabbits ever since."
Roy blinked. "What?"
"Yeah, Isaac had to go to Nelson Road for a photo shoot and he found the two of them shagging in the locker room, apparently they were arguing the pros and cons of Plaid Cymru at the same time they were—"
"Not that," Roy cut in as he sat up. This was the kind of conversation you needed your feet planted on the fucking floor for. "Did you send Jamie over here because you think he's what, sexually fucking frustrated?"
Keeley sighed. "Not quite like that, no."
"You want me to bring him to a strip club?" Roy said. "Be his fucking wingman? Because I am at least fifteen years too old for—" There was a sudden absence of sound on the other end of the line. Roy looked at his phone screen, and had just enough time to think She hung up on me before his phone rang: this time with an incoming video call from Keeley.
"Babe, look," Keeley said as soon as he accepted the call, "I meant to say it to you upfront but then there was that last minute conference call and then… well, honestly, I sort of lost my nerve a little bit, because I figured you'd just do that thing you do with your eyebrows."
"What thing?" Roy said, as his eyebrows did exactly that. "I'm trying to like, use my words and shit, but that's a bit tricky when all your words are just 'what' and 'fuck'."
"It's not important," Keeley said with a wave of her hand. "What I'm trying to say is I saw an opportunity and I said well, why not try? I mean, you're going to be there for weeks, you've got loads of free time, it's quiet, it's private"—she made a show of trying to look over Roy's shoulder—"the tile in the en suite is bloody gorgeous, god, it's huge—"
"Keeley," Roy said.
"I just thought it would be a good place for you to seduce Jamie," Keeley said in a rush.
Roy dropped his phone.
The third phone call established that no, Keeley wasn't taking the piss; that no, she wasn't breaking up with him; that no, she didn't want to be with Jamie but that yes, she was interested in the idea of Jamie being with her and Roy.
"You've seen how he looks at you, haven't you?" she said.
"Like he wants to tell me to fuck off?" Roy was pacing the bedroom; the villa was perfectly temperature controlled but he still felt too hot in his own skin. "Like I'm some sort of… fucking stupid has-been? Like—"
"Like he admires you so much he can't even tell where that ends and the wanting begins," Keeley said gently. "Look, if you don't want to, that's fine. You're enough for me. I'm not saying it'd be better with the three of us, just… different, yeah? Just have a think about it."
And of course, something like that was all Roy could fucking think about. He thought about it during lunch, he thought about it while he responded to his sister's texts and absolutely none of Ted's little motivational picture things, he thought about it when he took a book outside to read on one of the sun loungers. He stared unseeing at the words on the page and thought about it, because there was so fucking much to think about.
There was the fact that his girlfriend wanted him to kiss—to fuck—someone else. Another man. That she thought he could, or that he could want to, or that Jamie would. That she thought Roy was capable of a seduction, which was a stupid fucking word that made him think about those Mills and Boon books his mum had always been reading: ones with cheesy covers promising Greek billionaires and Italian princes and American cowboys. That Keeley wanted to fuck Jamie, and have Roy watch them, and the fact that just thinking about that made Roy think confused things about Jamie's mouth and Keeley's tits and feel a strange twist of arousal in his gut.
It was fucking infuriating, was what it was—and that was even before Jamie appeared in a pair of Speedoes so tiny and so neon that it was like he was channelling the ghost of a German tourist from the '80s.
"Take a picture, yeah?" Jamie asked, tossing Roy his phone, before striking a pose on the edge of the pool: facing away from the camera so that he was silhouetted by the bright Mediterranean sky, the afternoon sunlight gilding the strong lines of his back and the solid muscles of his thighs. "Jan-Maat just got 30,000 likes for a video of him holding a load of little puppies, I bet I can top that."
"In your fucking dreams," Roy said, but the infuriating thing was that even with Roy trying to deliberately take a shitty photo, Jamie got a load of likes—and that when Jamie finally jumped into the pool and swam a few dozen laps, arms and legs moving smoothly through the water, Roy watched him the whole time. Fuck.
Roy picked up his phone.
Roy (4:18): How would I even know if I was attracted to another man?
Keeley (4:21): Babe it's not that complicated
Keeley (4:22): And it's not really about if it's another man
Keeley (4:22): It's about whether you want to snog Jamie
Keeley (4:24): I mean him being another man isn't nothing it's something but the key thing here is just focusing on the Jamie part
Keeley (4:25): Put the cock part lower down on your list of priorities
Keeley (4:25): xxx
Which was, of course, why Jamie picked that exact moment to climb out of the pool, water droplets beading his shoulders and his Speedos clinging to a part of his anatomy that Roy was now definitely, definitely thinking about.
Fuck.
Dinner that evening was eaten on the enormous sectional in the living room, in front of the fuck-off enormous flatscreen TV. The sound system was fancy enough that Roy could feel the bass from it rumbling through his ribcage although that wasn't exactly a hardship when you were watching John McClane working his way through Nakatomi Plaza and a fucking truckload of ammo.
"I cannot believe you have never seen this before," Roy said to Jamie. "It's a fucking classic of modern cinema."
"How can it be modern?" Jamie said, eyes glued to the screen. "It's from the '80s, I weren't even born in the—oh shit, wicked, now he has a machine gun, ho ho ho! Ha, I bet that'll piss off Snape."
"This might just shock you," Roy said as he set his cleared plate down on the coffee table, "but the world didn't actually start with your birth."
"Course not," Jamie said. "Otherwise there wouldn't be Jurassic Park."
There were a number of reasons Roy wasn't going to touch that one, not least how fucking old it made him feel.
If you'd come to Roy a few months ago and told him that there was any kind of a chance that he'd be sitting on an obscenely comfortable couch in the south of Spain, eating half a Toblerone for dessert and watching Alan Rickman pretend to be a German pretending to be an American with Jamie fucking Tartt sat next to him, he wouldn't have disagreed with you—if only because he'd have thought you were a nutter and walked away, end of conversation.
If you'd come to Roy a couple of weeks ago and said it, well, it might not have seemed quite so fucking crazy. Jamie hadn't been as much of a little bitch this season, and there were even times when he'd managed to get most of his head out of his arse. The stupid stunt he'd pulled at Rebecca's dad's funeral aside, Jamie was maybe starting to actually grow the fuck up.
Only now Roy had that phone call with Keeley bouncing around in his head and everything was fucking weird.
At least that face Alan Rickman made when he was falling off the Nakatomi Tower was still fucking hilarious.
"You know you're not fucking glued to my hip, right?" Roy said the next morning. "You can go do whatever you want while you're here. I'm not your fucking minder."
"No, I know that," Jamie said, putting on his sunglasses. They were red and oversized and made him look like an extra from Miami Vice, but at least the rest of his outfit looked a bit more Primark than ponce. "I just want to see some of the town, don't I? Like a proper local."
Roy grunted. It wasn't as if there were a lot of locals in this part of Marbella, which was mostly streets lined by walled villa compounds like the one they'd just left, narrow enough that there wasn't even a path for them to walk on. Almost all the houses here were either incredibly posh tourist rentals like where they were staying, or places for Russian oligarchs to launder their cash, so actually it wasn't that much different from the part of London where Roy lived: an air of being half lived-in, just with more white-painted houses and fewer bellends who worked in the City.
At least the sun was shining here, though.
It took them about twenty minutes to reach a busier road, and another ten minutes again to reach Roy's goal: a newsstand on one corner of a small, tree-lined square with racks of magazines and newspapers out front, and next to it a coffee shop that sold coffee strong enough to make a Starbucks drinker weep. Beautiful.
"I don't get it," Jamie said as they took a seat at an outside table. "The house has got wifi, you've got your phone, why do you need a fucking day-old newspaper?"
Roy glared at him over the top of the sports section. The English papers were always a day or two old by the time they got down here, but it was the principle of the thing. "Because I want to. You got a problem, you can piss right off."
"Yeah, yeah, okay, all right."
Jamie went quiet after that, quiet enough that halfway through reading a story about Spurs' latest fuckery, Roy got worried enough to look up. Jamie was just sitting there, though, one hand wrapped around his coffee cup while he watched people passing by. Roy didn't know that he'd ever seen Jamie look like that before: just existing, with no knobby clothes on and no posture like he was trying to prove something, like one of them sea creatures that puffed themselves up to scare away predators. For the first time, Roy found himself wondering what Jamie would be like if he wasn't a footballer—what kind of Roy he'd be if he hadn't been one either. Would they ever have met? Could they have still been friends?
But it was fucking baffling enough to consider this world right now, where he was Roy Kent, has-been—it was impossible to imagine a world where he was Roy Kent, never-was.
Maybe best not to think about it.
One coffee turned into two turned into getting lunch at a tapas place across the square, and then they ambled back along the seafront in the direction of the villa. It would have been a weirdly peaceful morning, if not for the fact that they spent most of it in a rolling argument about the Ballon d'Or and whether it was utter bullshit or useful bullshit, and who they'd put on their Ballon d'Or dream team.
"Okay," Jamie was saying, hands waving, "yeah, okay, fair enough, but the thing about Mo Salah, yeah—"
Roy didn't know if he'd ever seen Jamie let himself be so clearly enthusiastic about a topic that wasn't his stupid fucking hair, or his stupider fucking clothes—just talking about the game for its own sake, not because he was trying to make himself seem like the cock of the walk. And not just enthusiastic, but actually fucking knowledgeable and thoughtful, like Jamie really had been listening to the advice he'd been getting and paying more attention to other players and trying to learn from them.
It was, Roy realised with dawning horror, just a little bit attractive.
Fuck.
"Keeley thinks I should seduce you," Roy said.
Jamie blinked at him across the villa's living room, which was fair enough: all he'd done was ask Roy if he knew where the remote control for the TV was. "You what?" he said eventually.
"Me, you," Roy said, trying his best not to shift his weight from foot to foot; it wasn't as if he was nervous or anything. "You know… seduction."
"In a sex way," Jamie said, still with the same stunned look on his face. "That kind of seduction?"
"What the fuck other kind of seduction is there?" Roy snapped.
"I don't know, do I?" Jamie said. "Maybe you want me to be a spy or something."
"Jesus Christ, what?" Roy said, then scrubbed a hand over his face. This whole thing was like walking around in one of those magic eye puzzles Phoebe had, the ones where you tried to see two pictures at once: Jamie Tartt as a self-involved brat; Jamie Tartt as someone whose cock Roy maybe wanted to touch. So much for a relaxing fucking holiday. "No. She thinks we should… you know. Because she thinks you have a thing for me, which is—"
Which is ridiculous, is what Roy was about to say, but Jamie's gaze was fixed firmly on the ceiling and his cheeks were flushing a dull red. It was ridiculous, because Keeley had put these fucking ideas in Roy's head and Jamie didn't give two shits about Roy and absolutely nothing would or could happen, but now here Jamie was looking awkward. Jamie Tartt, who as best as Roy could tell had had his ability to feel embarrassment surgically removed years ago, long before he'd set a record for the most body parts blurred out in a single season of Love Conquers All.
It was like watching a slow-motion replay of something that had gone down in the penalty box and realising you'd been completely wrong about where one of the players had been standing. Jamie had a thing for Roy. All the fucking confusing, half-formed things that Roy had been thinking about him the past couple of days, Jamie had been thinking about him—just apparently for longer and with much more clarity. The realisation rolled through Roy, as physical as a tackle.
"Hold the fuck on," Roy said, planting his hands on his hips. "She was right? But you're straight." Jamie's straightness was a regular aspect of the headlines of several of the shittier tabloids.
"Uh, excuse you," Jamie said, still staring at the ceiling although sounding more like his usual self. "It's the 2020s, it's possible to be straight and metrosexual, you know."
Roy stared at him for a long moment, shock warring with absolute exasperation, before snapping, "That's not even a fucking thing!"
Jamie looked over and shot him a withering glare. "Colin says everyone's entitled to decide who they are for themselves and no one else can set the boundaries on my own self-descriptions."
"Colin needs to stop reading weird fucking New Age self-help books he found in the discount bin at Oxfam," Roy said. "I'm calling Keeley."
Keeley, thankfully, answered right away. "Hi babe, you all right?"
"What's the next part?" Roy said.
"Next part of what, babe?" Keeley asked.
"Well, you told me I should seduce Jamie, and I just told Jamie that you want me to seduce him, and now we're just standing here staring at one another, aren't we? So—" Roy said.
"We're also having an important conversation about labelling people," Jamie said with a significant look at Roy, raising his voice so that Keeley could hear him, too. "Hi, Keeley."
"Jesus Christ," Roy said.
"You two, I swear," Keeley said, and ended the call. Almost immediately Roy's phone lit up again with an incoming video call from her. She was sitting on her living room sofa, in a pink gingham hoodie and with her hair piled up in one of those messy bun-things, and fuck, Roy really missed her.
"So he's not straight, apparently," Roy said, jerking a thumb in Jamie's general direction, "and I'm… I don't fucking know, and—"
"You are absolutely overthinking this," Keeley said. "I mean, yeah, it's great to be mindful about what you're doing and set some boundaries, but this doesn't have to be complicated."
"You're proposing we try out a threesome thing, yeah, where it's me with another man who I'm also coaching, plus my girlfriend who is his ex," Roy pointed out. "How is that not complicated?"
Keeley sighed. "Jamie?"
"Yeah?" Somehow Jamie had crossed the room without Roy noticing and now he was peering around Roy's shoulder so that Keeley could see him.
"Would you be okay with trying out the three of us together?" Keeley asked, as confident and professional as if she was delivering a practiced line during a press conference. "Sexually and romantically."
"Yeah, all right," Jamie said after a moment's pause.
"See?" Keeley said with a shrug of her shoulders. "Not that complicated."
Roy let out a very slow and deliberate breath through gritted teeth. "Well then, if it's not that complicated, what happens next?"
There's a glint in Keeley's eye. "Oh, I've got a few ideas."
The idea Keeley started with was them moving things into the bedroom. "Prop the phone up on the nightstand so I can… yeah, that's it, angle's good. Roy, sit on the edge of the bed, yeah, perfect. Jamie, between his legs." Jamie dropped to his knees in front of Roy with a speed that made Roy's head spin. They'd been as close as this before—closer, even—arguing and head-butting and grappling, but never with this kind of intent to it. It made Roy's breath hitch.
"See, the thing is, Roy," Keeley was saying, sounding warm and conspiratorial. "Jamie's got a mouth on him, yeah? But he also loves it when someone else is telling him how to use that mouth. Give it a try."
Everything about this was properly fucking strange. Roy was sitting on the edge of a bed in a villa whose weekly rent probably cost more than his parents' whole council flat, with his girlfriend watching from hundreds of miles away while his—his what, exactly? While Jamie Tartt, another man and someone who'd made Roy punch a concrete wall more than once, was kneeling between Roy's legs and looking up at him with a kind of willing expectation on his face that made something twist in the pit of Roy's stomach.
"You sure?" he asked Jamie. It wasn't as if Jamie was going to steal Roy's watch in order to buy drugs, or that he thought this was going to turn out to be some major disaster—couldn't be, not if Keeley thought there was some possibility here, some thread pulling tighter between the three of them. But Roy was sure that if they took this one last step then everything would be different, after.
"Uh, yeah?" Jamie said. "But if you're too old or chicken or whatever, I—"
Roy reached out with one hand and rested it on the nape of Jamie's neck, feeling warm skin and the bristle of close-cropped hair beneath his palm. Jamie went instantly, thrillingly quiet, eyes heavy-lidded. Roy risked a glance over at the phone screen. Keeley gave a tiny nod of approval, her expression intent.
"Kiss me," Roy said. "If you really want to do this, kiss me and show me you mean it."
No one had ever denied that Jamie Tartt had talent. The thing people had always debated was whether or not the little shit was capable of getting his head out of his arse enough—realising other people existed enough—to make the most of it. A good striker was one who could make a shot on goal from fucking near anywhere on the pitch, who had an instinctive sense of where he was in relation to the ball at any given moment, but a great striker was one who knew he was part of a team, who never forgot he was part of something bigger.
Right now, right here, Roy was reminded that Jamie was good and that he had the capacity to be great. His mouth was soft and hot beneath Roy's, his kisses full of the kind of lazy assurance that came from knowing you were good in bed—and when Roy squeezed gently at the nape of Jamie's neck, tugging him closer, the whimper he let out went right to Roy's cock. The kiss deepened, stubble scratching against stubble, Jamie opening his mouth to Roy's tongue: everything different now because this wasn't teammate and teammate, or coach and player, or even begrudging friends. This was an offer of something else, something Roy didn't even know if he had the words for.
Finally, Jamie nipped at Roy's lower lip and pulled back slightly. His eyes were dark, dazed. "Like Keeley said, I know how to be good for you if you want me to be good. If you let me."
Roy reached out and ran the pad of his thumb across Jamie's lower lip, wet and swollen. Jamie's eyes fluttered closed and he swayed a little as he knelt there. Roy was most of the way to hard now, and still very aware that Keeley was watching them.
"What do you think, Keeley?" Roy asked, shifting his hand to cup Jamie's jaw, fascinated at how Jamie leaned into his touch. "Is he telling the truth?"
"Oh, I know he is," Keeley said. "I trained him in, didn't I? But I bet there's more for him to learn."
Roy grunted in response. "What did you have in mind, babe?"
"Well, he was always really good at eating me out," Keeley said. Roy glanced over at the phone to see that the view of her had shifted: she was lying down now on the sofa, eyes gone a little dreamy. "And I bet he'd look very pretty with a cock in his mouth."
"Yeah, you think?" Roy was already pretty convinced that she was right—felt a shiver run through him at the thought of Jamie taking him in, swallowing him down; of the two of them putting on a show for Keeley—but teasing Jamie was its own kind of satisfying. "Maybe a kiss is enough for one night, though."
"No, please," Jamie said, voice trembling. "Let me, I've wanted it." He had one hand in his lap, palming his cock through his shorts, visibly as hard as Roy was, and maybe there could be something better than teasing.
"Okay then, kit off," Roy said. He unzipped his own jeans and pulled them and his boxers down to mid-thigh while Jamie frantically shucked off his clothes before getting back on his knees. Jamie's hands rested warm against Roy's legs; his face turned up to him, pleading. Roy had seen him in the nip before of course, but everyone knew the unspoken rules of the locker room: no looking, no letting your gaze linger on solid thighs or the lean line of a back. "Is he always this eager for it, Keeley?"
"Mmm, yeah," Keeley said. She'd unzipped her hoodie and underneath she was just wearing a sports bra, her nipples hard beneath the thin fabric. "But that just makes it better to take your time with him. You should see what he's like when I'm fucking him with one of my dildos. He goes all pliant, it's delicious."
"You going to show Keeley just how well you learned your lessons from her?" Jamie hadn't even finished nodding before Roy was curving his fingers around Jamie's jaw, the back of his head, guiding him down onto Roy's cock. The first shock of it—softness, heat—had the air rushing out of Roy's lungs.
"Fucking... fuck," Roy said as Jamie took him deeper with a satisfied moan, and Roy wondered how long Jamie had been thinking about this, fantasising. Jamie's rhythm was hesitant at first, uncertain; Keeley's dildo aside, Roy didn't think Jamie had ever had a cock in his mouth before. But Roy would bet good money that Jamie had wanked to the thought of this, watched videos maybe, sucked on his own fingers and wanted, and Roy's breathing sounded heavy in his own ears. He slid one hand down along Jamie's cheek, letting his thumb brush against the corner of Jamie's mouth where it was stretched around him. It was all so unlike anything Roy had ever experienced before—this man's mouth on his cock, these big hands splayed out against his thighs—that he found himself close to coming so quickly his head was spinning with it.
"Isn't his mouth clever?" Keeley said, and Roy didn't even have to look over at his phone to know that she was touching herself at the sight of them fucking: he knew it from the way her voice had gone breathy, laced with self-satisfaction. "Maybe when you two are back here with me, we'll have him eat me out while you fuck him. Wouldn't that be nice, Roy, Jamie begging for you to fill him up?"
Roy sucked in a breath so deep and hard he almost choked on it, shocked by the vividness of what he was imagining as Keeley spoke—the three of them sprawled out across her bed, Keeley's thigh smooth beneath one hand while he fisted Jamie's cock in the other—right as Jamie swallowed around him. Roy felt himself curling forward, hands roaming over Jamie's hair, his arms, fingers digging into the wide span of his shoulders, as he got closer and closer to coming.
"My good boys," Keeley said, "my—" Her voice broke off, cracking as she came on a familiar moan, and that was enough to push Roy over the edge, too: coming in Jamie's mouth, a release so pleasurable that Roy felt tension leach out of muscles he hadn't even known were being held tight. Jamie swallowed it all down, and when Roy finally pulled his softening cock from Jamie's mouth, he strained forward for it again blindly, like he couldn't bear to stop.
"That's okay," Roy said, his voice as rough as if he'd been the one sucking cock, "time for you to come now. Touch yourself."
Jamie looked up at him, eyes glazed, hand stripping his cock. "Shit, shit, please, I—"
Roy leaned down and, pitching his voice just loud enough to be picked up by the phone speakers, said, "Good boy."
Jamie came instantly, spurting hard through his fingers and sobbing. It was pretty fucking spectacular, and Roy found himself resting one shaking hand on the top of Jamie's head. Jamie closed his eyes and let his head fall against Roy's knee.
"You did so well," Keeley said after a moment. "Thank you."
It took a little bit of fussing to get them sorted: Roy stripped down to just his boxers and then hauled a docile Jamie up so that he was lying properly on the bed instead of half-on, half-off it. Jamie looked mostly asleep already and Roy could feel his own eyelids wanting to close, but his mind was whirling too fast for sleep. He scooped the phone up off the nightstand instead and tugged the covers up over them; no point in Jamie getting cold. "So how's your day been?" he asked, and let himself rest between the strange newness of Jamie's head lolling against Roy's shoulder as he nodded off, and the beloved constant of Keeley's smile.