Lucky

by Garrett Leigh

  Or what seemed a more likely possibility the longer he stared at me like I’d grown horns, and then something seemed to visibly give way inside him and he staggered across the room.

  He didn’t say anything as we slid under the covers, just pulled me close, and hid his face in my hair. After a while, I wondered if he’d fallen asleep, but there was a jagged edge to his breathing that said otherwise.

  I disentangled myself from him and leaned back so I could see him. His gaze was fixed somewhere behind me. I touched his face, cupped his strong jaw, and scratched the five-o’clock shadow peeking through his skin. He met my eyes and smiled slightly. I returned it and kissed his cheek, rubbing my face against his, nuzzling. “There you go,” I whispered. “Relax, baby. I’ve got you.”

  He made a sound low in his throat, but didn’t protest as I drew him into my arms and reversed our positions. I took advantage and ran my hands through his silky hair and over his corded shoulders. Damn, he was so fucking fine. How did my life lurch from ludicrous to glorious with such totality? I couldn’t make this shit up.

  Bit by bit, Dom relaxed against me, though the thrum of tension in him didn’t entirely fade. I stroked his skin and rubbed his muscle, and chattered nonsense at him until my words found more purpose, and he finally looked at me with something more than sex-addled despair.

  “What?” he said.

  I repeated myself, but his incredulity remained.

  “You played football?”

  I chuckled and pulled the duvet higher; tucking it around him, like I could shield him with cotton and feathers from whatever was frightening him so much. “Playing is a bit strong, but I was on a local team for years. My dad was the manager.” Dom’s eyes flashed, but I ploughed on, even though talking about this shit was my idea of hell. “My brother played too, but he was a different son—a better one—I already told you what kind of man my dad is, right?”

  “You mentioned him.”

  “Yeah, well. Let’s just say me trying to play football pretty much tipped him over the edge, which was fucking ironic, ’cause he was the arsehole who forced me into it.”

  “What happened?”

  “You mean the final straw that ruined our father–son bond?”

  Dom shrugged. “I’m listening to whatever you want to tell me.”

  I’m listening too. Talk to me. “It was a friendly match with our sister team in Hove—which was the only reason I was playing, to be honest. He always benched me for games that mattered, and I was glad of it. Skinny and pale, I was a bit of a target, you know?”

  “I can imagine.”

  Of course he could, but true to form, Dom gave nothing away. Just rubbed his cheek on my chest before looking up again, waiting for me to go on.

  So I did. “My dad had a real thing about me embarrassing him, and I knew it, which seemed to make things worse. The harder I tried, the more I messed up, and I really messed up this game. Fell over, cried, even scored an own goal. He went ballistic at half-time, threw a boot at me—his boot, I think.” Reflex had me running a finger along the scar splitting my eyebrow. “It hit me in the face.”

  “Bastard,” Dom growled darkly. He batted my hand away and replaced it with his own. “How old were you?”

  “Nine or ten, maybe? I can’t remember.” Lies. I remembered it all, down to what I’d had for dinner that night, alone in my room, blood dripping from my face and into the soup my mum had left outside my door. “Anyway, it was actually the last time he ever hit me, but he didn’t need to after that. I was terrified of him, until—”

  “Until what?”

  I shrugged. “Until I wasn’t. It was weird…I knew he could still really hurt me if he wanted to, but I just didn’t care. I felt indestructible for a while.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I guess I went off the rails a bit. I came home off my nut one night when I was about fifteen and flipped. He wound me up, so I hit him. It was pretty dramatic, if you like soap operas—Old Bill everywhere, neighbours out on the street, and my brother trying to kill me. I ran away in the end.”

  “Did you ever go back?”

  “No.”

  Dom nodded slowly, clearly absorbing the extended version of a story I’d halfway told him before. I bit my lip and waited, hoping, perhaps even expecting he would reciprocate.

  But he didn’t. He sat up and reached for his jeans. “I have to go.”

  “Go?”

  “Yeah.”

  He stood and began dressing in jerky movements. I scrambled to the edge of the bed and reached for him, but he evaded. “Dom, look at me.”

  “No, I can’t, Lucky. I can’t—”

  “Can’t what?”

  Dom bent to retrieve his damn fucking hat from the floor and jammed it on his head before he met my gaze with the dead eyes I’d long forgotten. “I can’t be here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said.”

  Dom stamped into his shoes and started for the door.

  I lurched after him, tripping over the bed sheets, and caught his arm. “Dom, stop. Talk to me, please? Or don’t—we can just fuck if you want…we don’t have to talk—”

  “It’s not about that!” Dom shouted, wrenching his arm free. He glared at me for a heated moment, but then his expression shattered, and he shook his head. “Please. Let me go, okay? I can’t explain, I just—”

  “Just what?”

  “Lucky, I…I can’t see you anymore.”

  Twenty

  Dom

  I’d broken bones, cracked my kneecap, and torn every ligament in my legs that I could spell, but nothing had ever hurt like leaving Lucky in that Edgeware Road hotel room.

  The confusion clouding his lovely eyes haunted me—awake, asleep, always. I couldn’t take a breath without thinking about him. I told myself over and over that I’d had no choice—that his life would be as fucked up as mine if the press got hold of his name—but the devil on my shoulder called me a coward. It was Lucky who’d had no choice.

  The morning after I left him, I drove to Manchester. Isha came with me under the pretence of meeting with Micah, but I knew he wanted to talk to me—wanted me to talk to him. And lacking any better ideas, I did. We had no secrets anymore.

  “How’d he take it?” he asked when I was done with my nausea-inducing recap.

  I changed lanes on the motorway to avoid looking at Isha. “Dunno. I kinda left him hanging.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think? It wasn’t like I could give him a proper explanation, was it? If I could explain this shit to anyone I wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “How did you meet him, anyway?”

  I shot Isha a dark look. “I’m not telling you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s none of your damn business.”

  He shut up for a while. I focussed on the road, but the silence left me space to think—too much space—and my mind moved from the present to the past. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.” Isha sat up a little and put his hand on the car door, like he was worried I was about to pull over and kick him out.

  “How did you figure out I was queer? It can’t have just been the bachelor thing. I don’t tell you everything, so I could’ve had a bird for all you knew.”

  Isha snorted, but sobered when he looked at me. “Honestly?”

  “You think I can handle more bullshit?”

  “Okay, okay. If you must know, I found a porn mag in one of your academy bedrooms years ago. You weren’t the type to play pranks on the other lads, so I knew it must be yours.”

  “What the fuck were you doing in my room?”

  “Checking for drugs. It’s not something I’d do now, but you were seventeen when I signed you, and ridiculously strong for how lanky you were. I kept a special eye on you for a while.”

  “You creepy fucking bastard.”

  “If you say so.” Isha turned his gaze to the window. “At the time, like
now, I was just trying to look after you. Most lads come up through the clubs with their dads, or uncles…you didn’t have that.”

  “I didn’t want it.”

  “Doesn’t mean you didn’t need it. Damn it, Dom, you shut everyone out.”

  Not everyone. But I didn’t say it. What was the point? How I felt about Lucky was irrelevant now…right?

  “You missed the exit.”

  I scowled at Isha. “You fucking drive then.”

  Hitting the training ground was a relief. For hours, I slammed balls back and forth, tackled players with far more prestige than me to the ground, and then I hit the gym, running inclines on the treadmill in a vain attempt to keep my mind occupied.

  It was futile, though. Pounding treadmills was dull as rocks regardless of how much it burned my calves, and my thoughts returned to my disastrous private life anyway. And fuck if it wasn’t a damn shit show. No one seemed to know about my early encounters with Lucky, but we’d been photographed leaving the same hotel twice—Lucky with wet hair—and in the pub when I’d found him half-asleep on a bench in Tottenham. I hadn’t seen the pictures, but Isha had, and even though they proved nothing, they proved everything, because the stalker tabloid hack’s assumptions were true. I couldn’t explain without lying, and lying meant taking a risk with Lucky’s identity. If the columnist didn’t get what he wanted from me, there was nothing stopping him going after Lucky. Hounding him. Exposing him.

  I couldn’t put him through that. Couldn’t see his face splashed across the red-top paper when it should’ve been mine alone.

  “Covering this up is going to take money—a lot of it,” Isha had said.

  Shamefully, I’d agreed, and for the first time found myself thankful that Isha had spent years planting stories and burying suspicions to cover for me. My worst nightmare was old hat to him.

  “What’s to stop him holding the photos and extorting more and more money from me?”

  “Nothing, in theory,” Isha had said. “But at this stage he’s not even asking for money—we’re offering it to keep him quiet, and if he takes it, he’s as fucked as you.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “You’re fucked anyway.”

  I got off the treadmill with shaky legs that had nothing to do with running on incline twelve for thirty minutes, and staggered to the deserted dressing rooms. Fear had been my constant companion for years, but until Lucky I’d always managed to keep it at a distant simmer. Now, it roiled in my ears every moment I wasn’t on the pitch, and my nerves were frazzled wire, just one short circuit away from total meltdown.

  “Dom?”

  I jumped a fucking mile, and whirled around to find Micah behind me, lips turned up in a hesitant grin. “What?”

  “Um…I was just gonna ask if you wanted to come out.”

  “Piss off, mate. I’m too old for that shit.”

  Micah rolled his eyes. “Not out out. I meant for dinner. I was gonna eat with Isha, but he’s fucked off back to London.”

  “Why?”

  “Dunno. He didn’t say.”

  Paranoia tickled my sanity. Isha had other clients besides me, and a whole life outside the murky world of football, but the notion that something had happened to add to my mess made me dizzy.

  I sat on the bench by my borrowed locker. Fuck. What if the PIs had found Lucky after all? Or if they’d been trailing him all along? What if someone was on Lucky’s doorstep right now?

  “What if he sells you out?” Isha had said. “It’s bullshit right now, but if they got him to corroborate, it’d be huge. Like, globally huge.”

  I hadn’t answered Isha at the time, had pushed the question aside without considering an answer, but I considered it now. It was easy to trust Lucky when we were together—sleeping, fucking, flicking fried food at each other—but away from the spell he cast on me whenever he was near, doubt oozed through my gut and surrounded my heart like creeping black vines. I knew shamefully little about Lucky, but I hadn’t missed the fact that he’d been on his arse financially. That he needed whatever money a stranger might offer him to fuck over a bloke who’d hurt him.

  Because I had hurt Lucky. He had eyes that didn’t lie.

  Micah sat beside me. “Don’t punch me or anything, but are you okay?”

  “What do you care?”

  “Mates, ain’t we?”

  “Are we?”

  Micah frowned. “Thought so. Wouldn’t be asking you out for dinner if we weren’t. Besides, Maldano is my cousin, so we’re basically family.”

  I’d forgotten that. Distant memories of Maldano talking up his precocious young relative filtered back to me, and the fact that they were the only two bozos in football I actually liked suddenly made sense. “Sorry, dude. I’m tired.”

  “What the fuck are you doing rinsing the gym then? Haven’t you got a big derby coming up?”

  I hummed absently. The biggest domestic game of the season was right around the corner, and match days against our closest rival were always huge, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the fixture calendar of late. Hadn’t paid much attention to anything except my own selfish wants and needs.

  Micah nudged me. “You coming for food, or what? There’s a Mexican place round the corner. We could grab some fajitas and take them home.”

  Home. If only. But right now even heading back to London filled me with dread. Manchester was hardly the other side of the world, but with Isha gone, was it far away enough to pretend my life wasn’t slowly falling to bits? That each day didn’t make me hate myself a little bit more?

  I sighed heavily and recalled how easy Micah’s company had been last time we’d gone out. Fuck it. I nudged him back. “Let’s go.”

  Lucky

  “I can’t believe this shit.” I paced around Jamila’s tiny bedroom, barefoot, and angry, kicking anything that got in my way.

  “Calm down,” she snapped. “If you break my stuff, I’ll break you.”

  I spared her a glare, but wilted under hers. She was far fiercer than me, always had been.

  “Sorry.” I flopped down on the end of her bed. “I’m just pissed off. How does he get to carry on like nothing’s happened when I want to claw my fucking eyes out every time I see his face?”

  “Um…maybe because he can’t see your face? And it’s not his fault you’re cyber-stalking him.”

  “I’m not stalking him.”

  “Right. Because you always read the Daily Fail.” Jamila held up my phone, lit up with the open news app I couldn’t seem to stop reading. “Besides, the article isn’t even about him. He was just there.”

  “Yeah. There, having dinner with some hot black guy.”

  Jamila laughed. “Oh, you think that’s what’s going on, do you? That he’s suddenly out of the closet and dating Micah Roberts? Get real, Lucky. He’s a footballer—he’s going to be seen with other footballers, and the bloke’s gotta eat.”

  She was right, and I knew it, but irrational jealously burned in my gut anyway. I wanted to have dinner with Dom, huddled up in a big white bed, naked, telly on for background noise. Then I wanted him to fuck me, to love me, and the real world to piss right off.

  A week had passed since he’d walked out on me and I thought of him constantly, letting my imagination take me far beyond the clutch of encounters our relationship actually comprised of. I pictured what life would be like if we were a normal couple: him without his closeted superstar status, and me with—well, anything would be a start. Not much changed from the eating and fucking we’d already done, but there was more of it, and it meant something. It meant everything. I’d spent the last few years convincing myself I didn’t need anyone, that I didn’t want anyone except Jamila in my life, because she was the only one who’d never let me down. But my outlook had changed when I’d met Dom. From that very first moment, he’d filled a void my heart had cried out for. And now he was gone that void was raw and open again.

  I missed him so much.

  “Have you heard fr
om him at all?” Jamila asked gently. “Has he texted?”

  “Course he hasn’t. And I knew he wouldn’t. You should’ve seen his face, J. It was so out of the blue, but so final, you know? He walked out of that room and he didn’t look back.”

  I rubbed my chest, like I could cram the hurt back in.

  Jamila shuffled down the bed to lie beside me. “I’m sorry, baby, but maybe it’s for the best. I mean, what future did you have anyway? Even if this hadn’t happened, it’s not like he could ever be with you in the open, and perhaps he didn’t even want to. He’s lived his whole life in the closet…he doesn’t know anything else.”

  “I never said I wanted him to be with me. I wasn’t asking him for fucking marriage.”

  “So what did you ask him for?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jamila took my hand. “And it was still too much for him.”

  I left Jamila’s before she went to bed. She wanted me to stay, like I had done most nights since I’d last seen Dom, but I was done relying on her to patch me up when shit went wrong. Besides, avoiding my place didn’t make it better. I had to go back eventually and too long between visits made the reality harder to bear.

  As ever, Dom was on my mind as I walked home. Jamila had admitted to liking the Dom she’d met when he’d returned my phone, but the more I’d moped around her flat, the more that had faded. By the time I’d left, she seemed to be convinced he was a dickhead rich queer who’d fucked me for kicks.

  I knew different. I had to, or the pain in my chest meant nothing, and I was the fucking fool. And she doesn’t know the full story, remember? But I got the feeling I didn’t either, and turning it over and over in my scattered brain was driving me crazy. Please make it stop.

  Down the road from the halfway house was a bench I often sat on when I couldn’t quite be bothered to go all the way home. I slumped onto it now and swiped at my phone screen until I found Grindr.