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“Yeah, here,” Simo flicked to the black and white security footage.
Joq glanced back at the game screen. Finn’s team mates were around him, the trainer, and then the team doctor. The footage cut to the coaches’ box and Joq expected to see the concerned look in George’s eyes as he waited with the rest of them to see if Finn got up.
The box was empty save for the two assistants. The shot cut to George jogging across the field. Which meant he got up right after the hit. Which meant he was already running to Finn as soon as it happened. Coaches didn’t do that. George’s face was a thunder cloud.
“Here,” Simo said and Joq turned and watched the replay.
It was from behind, but it was pretty clear what happened—the nudge, the hip and shoulder, Finn not reacting, then the opponent clocking him right across the jaw with a fist. Finn toppled to the ground. Out cold.
Joq looked back to the game screen. George was next to Finn now, his hands careful as he tilted his face up. Joq watched as Finn’s eyes blinked open and locked on George. Finn winced, but his lips curved up and he mumbled something. The trainer was trying to get to him, but it was George who slid his arms around his back and lifted him, helped him off the field.
“Damn,” Simo said. “Creed really protecting his asset isn’t he?”
Joq grunted. He felt Alison looking at him and very deliberately ignored it.
“Yeah, that was weird as fuck,” Cameron replied and sipped on his coffee like he was watching a movie.
Joq was beginning to feel like he was watching a movie as well. But all the usual scripts for what was expected in a football game were tossed out the window. He saw George reluctantly hand Finn over to two trainers at the top of the tunnel. He said something close to Finn’s ear. Finn nodded, eyes on his boots. Then George was jogging out and back up the stairs, taking them two at a time as he went back to his box.
Joq chewed on his thumb nail as he watched the rest of the game, kept an eye on the monitors. Finn was laid out in the trainer’s room, but he wasn’t there for long. They were moving him to meet the ambulance officers before the game had even ended.
They lost by seven points in the end, and Joq did his best to focus on the monitors as the crowds filed out, as the team filed into the locker room, as George came in to speak to them. Only George spoke to them for less than a minute, hands waving, mouth moving rapid fire, and then he was handing his clipboard to his assistant and marching out.
Joq saw him appear on the monitor outside the locker room door, watched him walk briskly down the corridor and exit the building. He didn’t need to guess where he was going, but he couldn’t quite believe it.
Joq waited up, an anxious feeling swirling around in his gut, and thought about what to say. Ask how Finn was, obviously. Ask why George went to him on the field. Maybe suggest George think about how that might fucking look to the whole world.
Then again, he knew George would shrug that off with the same argument Joq had been giving him for years—no one’s gonna think that ’cos no one wants to believe something like that is going on in this sport.
True enough.
But by the time it was two in the morning, Joq conceded George probably wasn’t going to come home. He was spending the night with Finn in the hospital. And that made him want to ask the question he really wanted to ask: did George think about how all of this made him feel?
But he’d shot himself in the foot with that one years ago when he got George to concede to an open relationship. George was a one man kinda guy. And that was something Joq really tried not to think about anymore. It used to make him feel good, really good. Now it terrified him.
His thumb nail was bitten to the skin and bleeding by the time he went to bed. He couldn’t sleep, all he could do was listen to these thoughts as they travelled across his brain on repeat as he waited for George to come home.
Joq was making his takeaway coffee and slapping his lanyard out of the way when he heard George come in the next morning. He hadn’t slept, and he’d gone from fearful about what this all meant to furious.
“Hey,” George breathed out as he came into the kitchen.
“Hey,” Joq replied and looked over at him. George gave him a wan smile, his eyes bloodshot and flanked with shadows, his expression apologetic.
“I gotta go to work,” Joq said instead of anything and everything else.
“He’s gonna be alright,” George said.
Joq went past him and did his best to bite his tongue, but a bitter, mumbled thought managed to come out: “Yeah, I don’t give a shit.”
“What?” George asked. He sounded genuinely surprised. The asshole.
“Seriously?” Joq spun back to him. “Since when does a coach sit at a player’s bedside all night? How do you think that looks?”
“I don’t give a shit how it looks,” George said.
“Well maybe you should,” Joq spat. “Oh and by the way, the phone is a thing.”
“You knew where I was,” George said and had the audacity to sound incredulous. “I don’t get why you’re so mad.”
