Work Text:
Roy and Jamie’s thing lasts for exactly three weeks before Phoebe figures them out.
Roy can’t even be angry with her. She’s fucking smart. She notices shit.
It happens when she’s over at Roy’s house, curled up on the couch exhausted after having a kickabout with Jamie in the back garden, drawing something in her sketchbook that’s hopefully age appropriate. Roy’s in the chair across from her, reading his book, while Jamie makes them tea. The whole thing is so sweetly domestic that the Roy of five or ten years ago would be baffled - but then, the Roy of five or ten years ago was a miserable piece of shit who hadn’t been able to conceive of any sort of life at all after retirement, so what the fuck did that dickhead know?
Jamie comes in from the kitchen with a mug in each hand. He leans over Phoebe first and squints at whatever she’s drawing with a critical eye. After a moment he nods and solemnly pronounces, “Good lines,” like he knows what the fuck he’s talking about, and Phoebe giggles.
She and Jamie both adore each other. It’s fucking sweet.
Then Jamie comes over to hand one of the mugs to Roy, and he does - something, Roy doesn’t even know what it ends up being, whether he touches Roy’s shoulder for too long or leans his head in too close when he takes a peek at Roy’s book, or what - but something makes Phoebe narrow her eyes at them both thoughtfully.
“Uncle Roy, are you and Jamie boyfriends?” she asks abruptly.
“Uh,” Roy says.
“Yeah, Uncle Roy, are we boyfriends?” Jamie asks lightly, turning to him with a cheeky smile, a question in his eyes.
Their thing is so brand new that they’ve never had a conversation about telling anyone, and he’s tempted, for a moment, to laugh Phoebe’s question off. The idea of widening his and Jamie’s little bubble any further scares the shit out of him. Once the circle opens, the real world is going to start seeping in. The fucking shit real world.
But just thinking about lying to Phoebe - of pretending that Jamie is anything less to him than what he actually is, to the little girl who’s possibly the most important person in his entire life -
“Yeah, Phoebe,” Roy says, roughly clearing his throat. “We are.”
Jamie’s smile turns delighted, surprised, and almost smug. As if he didn’t already fucking know.
“Oh, okay,” Phoebe says. “Jamie, do you want to come to my Perchtenlaufen party? It’s not until December but the costumes take a while to make.”
“Phoebe, I would love to come to your Perch-laughing thingie,” Jamie says with a blinding grin, and Roy would fucking die for the stupid little prick. “Gonna keep my schedule clear, yeah?”
Roy reads the next few chapters of his book feeling lightheaded, barely seeing the words on the page. When he gets up to start making dinner he looks down and realizes his hands are shaking.
She’s his fucking ten year old niece. He’s not scared of his fucking ten year old niece.
Except ten years old is more than old enough for kids to be nasty little shits. When he was that age, it was more than old enough for your mates to call you gay slurs just because they found out about your blankie, nevermind anyone actually suspecting you of being gay.
So maybe he's at least managed to avoid infecting her with the worst parts of his upbringing. At least there’s that.
Once Phoebe knows, telling Ruth is inevitable. When she picks up Phoebe, after she’s safely in Ruth’s car with headphones on - and Jamie already gone home at Roy’s request, because Roy knew he wouldn’t be able to do this with an audience - Roy asks if he can talk to her for a minute outside.
They hadn’t actually been close at all, growing up. She’d been young enough when he left for Sunderland that the first time he’d come home on break she hadn’t even recognized him. They hadn’t seen each other much when they were both adults, either, what with Roy playing for Chelsea and Ruth in medical school. He’d been fucking proud of her, of course, his baby sister who was ten times smarter than he’d ever been, but they weren’t exactly best mates. Their family didn’t really go in for all that bonding shit.
Then one night she’d shown up on his doorstep near midnight, eight months pregnant and on the verge of tears because her worthless shit of a husband decided he didn’t much like the idea of being a dad after all and had up and left her without a minute’s notice. Roy had taken one look at her and that had been that.
He’d been there when Phoebe was born, had been the second person to ever hold her, a tiny scarily fragile perfect little human with ten tiny perfectly formed little fingers and ten even tinier perfectly formed little toes. She’d opened her sleepy little eyes and looked at him with a slow, careful blink and he’d started fucking crying right there in the delivery room. He’d missed an entire month of matches that season because he hadn’t left Ruth’s side afterwards, and by the time she’d convinced him that her friends were perfectly capable of helping out when he wasn’t there he’d become closer to her than anyone else in his life.
He knows, objectively, that she's almost certainly going to be fine with what he has to say. He's had to listen to one too many rants about the state of the NHS to think she's a closet Tory. But she was raised with the same shit he was, and it's different when it's your own fucking brother, innit?
“So…” Ruth says, and he realizes he’s just been standing in front of her in silence.
“Didn’t want you to hear this from Phoebe instead of me,” he says abruptly. He tries to stick his hands into his jacket pockets before realizing he’s not wearing a jacket. “Jamie and I - we’re dating.”
“Whoa,” Ruth says, eyebrows raised in shock.
“Yeah,” Roy says.
She starts nodding repeatedly.
“Whoa,” she says again. “Okay.”
He breathes evenly and waits her out. Ruth’s dirty little secret is that even though on the surface she’s a happier and more functional human being than Roy she still inherited the Kent family inability to deal with serious emotions. She'd been a fucking natural at every part of her job except the bedside manner bit.
"You're gay?" she asks finally, slightly disbelieving.
"Bisexual," he says stiffly. He hates the idea that she might think he was only dating Keeley because he was in denial, or some shit like that. But fucking Christ does he not want to have to talk about this with his fucking sister.
“Okay, right, yeah, that’s-” Ruth stops nodding and Roy watches as she visibly remembers her remedial bedside manner training. “Right. Thank you for telling me.”
“Yeah, well,” Roy says, shrugging. “Can’t keep shit a secret from Phoebe, if she hadn’t figured it out today when he was here it would’ve been sometime else soon.”
“He’s over a lot, then?”
“Yeah, so?” Roy asks, bristling.
“Jesus, Roy, relax,” she says. “I like Jamie. I’m just asking if it’s serious.”
“Right. Yeah. Sorry,” he says. “It’s. Yeah. It’s serious.”
Even if it’s only been a few weeks. He doesn’t know how to do not-serious anymore. Especially not with Jamie.
She doesn't say anything for a moment, just looking at him, searching his face like she's trying to find something she hadn't seen before, and it - just a little bit - makes his skin crawl.
“When he came over for Uncle’s Day,” she says, slowly, “I could see it immediately, how in love with you he was.”
Fucking what.
“You didn’t say anything?”
“Wasn’t for me to tell. And I had no idea how you’d react.”
That’s fair. He fucking hates that that’s fair.
"So, wait," Ruth says abruptly, frowning like she's thinking hard. "That friend of yours from Sunderland. Whatshisface. The one you wouldn't shut up about when you were like fifteen. Brought him home to visit that one time."
"Craig? Yeah? What about him?" Roy hasn't thought about Craig Chapman in decades. They'd been best mates for a few years, but he'd washed out of Sunderland’s Academy when Roy was sixteen. Roy had tried to still be friends, making time for him after training, but Craig had gotten a girlfriend and suddenly didn't have time for Roy anymore, and they'd inevitably lost touch, and at the time Roy had just been so fucking angry at him-
"You had a crush on him," Ruth says, like it’s obvious.
Roy scoffs.
"No, fuck off."
Ruth just looks at him.
He stops.
He thinks about it.
He thinks about it a bit more.
"Fuuuuuck," he says, and Ruth laughs, and just like that everything between them is normal again. She steps forward and gives him a quick hug.
“I mean it, Roy, thank you for telling me,” she says. And then, mischievously: “I’ll have to invite you and Jamie over again soon.”
“Fuck no, I’m not putting you two in the same room again,” Roy says.
“Well, Phoebe’s definitely going to have him over for Perchtenlaufen.”
“That is not a real holiday.”
“And yet he’s still coming just because your niece invited him,” Ruth says with her eyebrows raised, like she’s somehow scoring a point on him, like Roy doesn’t already know that Jamie is great with kids and fucking loves Phoebe.
“Right, can we stop talking about our fucking feelings now?” Roy asks.
“Oh, thank god,” Ruth says. “Yes please.”
As she leaves, he looks at her car driving away and thinks well, at least that’s fucking over with.
Except it's not fucking over with, because if Roy's family knows then Jamie obviously gets to tell Georgie and Simon.
(The human shitstain going around calling himself Jamie’s father doesn’t get to know fucking shit about them. Roy and Jamie agree on that.
Jamie’s visited him in rehab two or three times, because deep down below all his flippant prickish-ness he still wants that worthless piece of trash to love him. Every time he comes back to Roy’s afterwards he’s withdrawn and quiet and all Roy can do is make him something nice to eat and put something on that he likes to watch and let Jamie curl up against him until the tension starts to slowly seep out of his body, because Roy knows - from bitter fucking experience - that anything that could possibly come out of his mouth on the topic of James Tartt Sr. would only make Jamie more upset. Then when Jamie’s asleep he goes into another room and takes deep breaths and digs his nails into his palms until he breaks the skin because it’s better than putting a fucking hole in the wall about it.)
There’s nothing wrong with telling Georgie and Simon. Roy likes them, and they should know. Roy hears Jamie's breathlessly excited conversation with them from across the fucking house and is impressed he managed to keep a lid on it for as long as he has.
And Jamie’d already told Georgie he was bisexual years ago, apparently, so for some reason all that fucking excitement is just for Roy.
After fifteen or twenty minutes Jamie finds Roy where he’s hiding in one of the guest bedrooms and shoves his phone in his face. Georgie beams at him from the phone screen and immediately demands they both come up to visit as soon as they can and tells Roy she can’t wait to hug him again in person.
It’s so fucking easy to get swept up by them both. By the end of the call Roy’s reduced to nodding repeatedly as he somehow agrees to come visit the next time the team is up in the area, and to get the recipe for Jamie’s favorite chocolate cake from Simon, and to give Jamie an extra cheat day to actually eat the fucking cake. The whole thing makes Roy feel strange and off balance, something in his chest going weirdly tight.
“Oh, Jamie, my sexy little baby, I’m so happy for you,” Georgie says as they hang up, making grabbing motions at him like she wants to pinch Jamie’s cheeks through the screen, and Roy can’t help but stare. Jamie is smiling even after they end the call, so wide it looks like it hurts, and it’s- it’s-
Jamie stops smiling and squints at Roy suspiciously.
“Are you into me mum?” he demands.
“The fuck?” Roy says. “No.”
“Cause I know Mummy’s only three years older than you-”
“No,” Roy says flatly, because he had very much not done the math on that one and now feels like a fucking cradle robber.
“-but it’s still fucking weird, babe.”
“I’m not into your mum, Jamie, fucking hell,” Roy says.
“Why’re you acting so fucking weird, then? Staring like that?”
“You just. Seem like you have a nice relationship, is all,” Roy says, the back of his neck prickling. “Supportive and shit. It’s nice.”
“Oh,” Jamie says, a little surprised looking. He fiddles with the strings of his hoodie. “Yeah, it’s - she’s great. Best mum I’ve ever had, you know.”
“Generally how that works, yeah.”
"Fuck off. You know her and Simon really like you," Jamie says.
"The fuck for?" Roy demands. "I only met them the once."
"Cause I’ve been telling them all about you, you stupid old twat," Jamie says, like Roy's being dense on purpose. “Even when we were just friends.”
"Yeah? Which bit do they like about me, the bit where I used to headbutt you on the pitch or the bit where I'm your boss now?"
Jamie just rolls his eyes, like all the good things about Roy that Jamie would be telling his mum about are so self evident that he doesn't even need to explain what they are.
And the whole thing is good. It’s nice. He’s glad Jamie has people like that in his life.
It shouldn’t have made him feel so fucking exhausted and fucking- exposed.
But now it's done, and Jamie's only got the one mum, so at least he won't ever have to do that again.
(Roy doesn’t tell his parents.
He doesn’t complain about them, ever. They’d fucking tried their best with what they had. But their best had been sending him to fucking Sunderland when he was nine, and now thirty-one years later he and they just- don’t really have a relationship where they- talk to each other about stupid emotional shit.)
“Fuck.”
“Whhzzat?” Jamie mumbles, jostled awake from being dislodged from his favorite sleeping position (face down on Roy’s chest, suffocating Roy with his entire body).
“I need to tell Rebecca. About us.”
“What?” Jamie says, sounding significantly more awake. “Right now?”
“Not right now, you muppet. Just. At some point. Soon.”
Jamie rolls off of him. There’s a pause and then the sounds of fumbling, before the bedside lamp switches on and Roy can see Jamie blinking at him and rubbing his eyes with one finger, bleary and tired and hair falling into his face. It’s fucking adorable.
“Okay,” Jamie says. “Why?”
“Because I’m technically your boss. We’re supposed to tell our workplace. Make sure there isn’t abuse of power or some shit.”
“...Eh, okay, but like, you were definitely already abusing your power before we were dating,” Jamie says, squinting at him.
“I was not,” Roy says.
“Were too,” Jamie says, like a child.
“Was not,” Roy says, like a perfectly mature adult. “That’s not the point. The point is I want to- fucking- do this right, and make sure it’s all aboveboard, even if I have to talk to HR or whatever.”
“Louise ain’t that bad once you get to know her,” Jamie says. Then he fully registers what Roy is saying and his eyes get big and soft and surprised. “You’d do that? Actually talk to people about it? On purpose?”
“Course,” Roy says gruffly. “Not the whole fucking club, but Rebecca and whoever needs to know. I’m. I’m fucking serious about this. About us.”
Suddenly he has a lapful of Jamie kissing him, on his cheeks and nose and forehead.
“Alright, keep your shirt on,” Roy says, not even trying to contain his smile.
Jamie pulls back and sits up straight, exaggeratedly stretching his arms over his head.
“Don’t know about you, but I’m wide awake now,” he says.
“Yeah, sorry,” Roy says. He looks at the clock. 3:57 am. “Want to go for a run?”
“Not exactly what I had in mind,” Jamie says, with an attempt at a seductive look.
“I know,” Roy says, to make Jamie sputter. He nods his head at the door. “Go on. If you start now I won’t add any push ups to the end.”
“Abuse of power, Coach,” Jamie whines, but as he rolls out of bed he grins and blows Roy a cheeky little kiss.
Roy’s got no idea how to open the subject with Rebecca, so before he can lose his nerve the next morning - or later that same morning, more like - he barges into her office and announces, “Rebecca, I’m fucking one of my players.”
“Hello, Roy,” Rebecca says, faintly, teacup frozen halfway to her lips. “Good morning. How are you? Would you mind repeating that, because I believe I must have heard you wrong.”
“I’m fucking one of my players,” Roy repeats. He belatedly closes the door behind him.
“Yes, I was afraid you were going to say that.” Then she just looks at him, apparently lost for words.
“Here,” he says, quickly striding across the room and dropping her box of biscuits on her desk. Like hell he’s going to come up short against Ted fucking Lasso.
She carefully puts her teacup down, not even acknowledging the fucking delicious homemade biscuits in front of her.
“Coach Kent,” she says, evenly, “is this a fucking joke?”
“No,” Roy says. “What the fuck? Why would I joke about that?”
“Who-”
“Jamie,” Roy says. Then he clarifies: “Tartt.”
“Right,” Rebecca says faintly. “Obviously. Of course it is. Of course it’s Jamie Tartt. Of course you’re sleeping with Jamie Tartt, our star player, who we absolutely cannot afford to lose-”
“There’s no rule against it,” he blurts.
Rebecca actually, physically puts her head in her hands. Roy acknowledges he could probably be presenting this to her better. He sits down in the chair across from her desk and tries to start over.
“I just meant- I want to make sure we do it properly, and shit. If there are like… forms we have to fill out or whatever?”
“Three years ago you were physically attacking each other in the middle of matches,” she says, seemingly not hearing him. “When you were playing for the same team. What’s going to happen if you break up?”
“That was one time, and we’re not going to break up,” Roy says immediately. He pauses. “Unless Jamie wants to break up. If Jamie breaks up with me I’ll respect his decision and I’ll be completely normal about it.”
She looks up at him with more than a little skepticism, and that’s when he suddenly remembers that his boss is also his ex-girlfriend’s best friend.
God, they’re an incestuous lot, aren’t they.
“Roy. There’s so much at stake here. What on Earth are you thinking?”
She looks, a little bit, like she’s questioning her faith in him. The faith that got him this job in the first place.
“I’m not going to put the club in jeopardy for this. We’re not,” he says, leaning forward, dead serious. “I love Richmond. Jamie loves Richmond. This team - it saved both of us.” She softens a little, at that. He takes a breath. “But I’m. I. Also care. About Jamie. And we’re- going to be together. Hopefully for-” Forever. Fucking forever. “A while. And I want to fucking do it right. I want to do whatever I need to do to get it sorted so that the club doesn’t have to worry about our personal lives.”
She studies him for a long moment, eyes narrowed, before sighing heavily and opening the box of biscuits.
“You could’ve led like that, you know,” she says, holding up a biscuit to examine it with a critical eye. Ted had given Roy his recipe, but Roy’s convinced the man had left out a secret ingredient because Rebecca keeps insisting there’s something ever-so-slightly different about his.
“I had to work up to it,” he says.
“You’re really willing to work hard for this, aren’t you,” she says. “You really want it.”
“I really fucking do,” Roy says.
“Is he your bolt of lightning, then? Is that it?”
Jamie’s less like getting struck by lightning and more like getting hit by a bus driven by the most obnoxious little prick he’s ever met. And then having that prick get out of the bus and start gloating.
And then getting struck by lightning.
“Guess so,” Roy just says, tipping his head up to look at the ceiling to try and hide the smile suddenly threatening to break out.
“Well,” Rebecca says, after a short silence. “Okay. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I trust you to work with HR to handle this professionally. God help us all.”
“Cheers,” Roy says.
There’s a silence as she thoughtfully chews the biscuit.
“Closer,” she says. “So. You and… Jamie Tartt. Jamie Tartt.” God, has he fucking broken her?
There’s a new look in her eyes, like the shock of the unexpected HR crisis has faded enough that she’s just now processing that Roy just indirectly revealed something else to her. Which he’d also been trying not to think about much.
Fucking hell, he hopes she’s not going to ask more questions. He’s not fucking ashamed of it, and Rebecca’s a good sort despite being disgustingly posh, but he also really doesn’t want to spend the morning baring his fucking soul to his boss any further when he should be dealing with the fact that the season’s well underway and they play Liverpool in three days and the Champions League group stage starts in two fucking weeks and meanwhile Jan Maas just fractured his ankle and-
"Roy,” she starts, sitting up straight and placing her hands on the desk in front of her, and here they go. “Thank you for telling me.” Thank you for telling me again, Christ, is it in the fucking manual everyone’s getting?
It's going to be like this for-fucking-ever, isn’t it. Every time he wants to tell someone that he and Jamie are dating (because that's what he and Rebecca have become, somehow, people who tell each other things like that even when they’re not disclosing workplace conflicts of fucking interest) it's going to be an entire fucking production about his identity. Fucking kill him.
“If you ever-”
“No,” Roy says sharply, not knowing how the sentence was going to end and not caring.
Rebecca stops, her eyes widening, and he feels like an absolute knob.
“Sorry,” he says, clearing his throat. “No. Thank you.”
“It’s okay,” she says, with a tight smile. “But-” she raises her hand to stop him from interrupting again. “No, sorry, I do need to say this bit as your boss. I want you to know that here at Richmond we accept everyone's diverse personal identities, and you have our full support with, er, however you decide to handle that going forward. You and Jamie both.”
Roy can physically feel the fuck off building in his throat. It’s all empty bullshit anyway, isn’t it, but he supposes she does have to say it.
"Thank you," he grits out, like a normal person who doesn’t swear at his boss. Much. Anymore. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
(“D’you talk to Ms. Welton today already?”
“Yeah, why, she say something to you?”
“Yeah, mate, she’s fucking terrifying. Pretty sure I could get her to fire you in a heartbeat if you ever break me heart.”
“Huh.” Good. That’s good. Even if he's uncomfortably reminded of walking into the boot room and stumbling on all his coworkers analyzing his shortcomings as a boyfriend.
“So you better be nice to me, yeah? Better treat me right. Be a good boyfriend."
“Yeah? I’ll show you fucking nice, Tartt-”)
Dr. Sharon is the first person - or first full grown adult, at least - who doesn't act remotely surprised when Roy tells them. Which he supposes is better than Louise in HR spilling her coffee all over her keyboard in shock when he’d told her why he was in her office, but it’s- still kind of fucking awful, actually, because now he's wondering how the fuck she could have figured it out, or at least suspected, before he did himself. If there’s something about him that let her know.
(“Thank you for telling me,” she says, and Roy can feel his entire body twitch.)
That lack of surprise isn’t the real problem, though. He's used to it, with her. It feels like every fucking session with Dr. Sharon is just Roy slowly working his way around to figuring out something about himself that was fucking obvious to her from the moment they met. Fucking therapy.
The problem is the other thing, the thing he mentioned in the same breath as the sexuality thing and that Dr. Sharon hasn't even touched yet.
“Don’t suppose you’re normally very supportive of coaches sleeping with their players,” Roy says, three sessions after he first brings it up.
“I can’t say it’s something I generally recommend people do, no,” Dr. Sharon says, blandly. She writes something down on her notepad. Roy always hates when she writes something down because he never has any fucking idea what it could be.
“Yeah. I know it’s a fucking stupid horrible idea but I’m doing it anyway so I don’t want you to try and talk me out of it,” Roy says.
“Why?” Dr. Sharon asks.
“I just said-”
“I’m not asking you so I can start an argument about it,” Dr. Sharon says. He looks at her face and has absolutely no idea what she’s thinking. “As your therapist, I’m interested in what you’re feeling that makes you want to pursue this relationship so strongly.”
Because he's Jamie fucking Tartt, Roy thinks, instinctive and immediate. Because he thinks maybe all of their jagged pieces fit together in a way he's never experienced before, not even with Keeley, and he thinks maybe he's already wound himself so tightly through and around and in Jamie that if he tries to extricate himself he's going to fucking die.
He doesn't say any of that. The words all pile up over each other in his throat and he can’t get a single one out, and he just sits there and looks at her like a dumb twat. Which she fucking knew was going to happen, because it’s what happens every time she asks him to talk about what he’s fucking feeling.
“Well, let’s start there, then,” Dr. Sharon says.
They spend a few months going on what are honestly barely plausibly deniable dates. They go to Roy's kebab place and Jamie's kebab place (which can't hold a fucking candle to Roy's) and expensive restaurants filled with the type of posh cunts who'd look at the both of them like they're something scraped off the bottom of a shoe if they weren't so good at kicking a fucking ball around. They take Phoebe to the zoo and the park and her football matches and her school play, where she absolutely fucking kills it as Witch #3 - she’s got a promising career in the West End ahead of her if she ever loses interest in football, even if her teacher didn’t seem to properly appreciate her improvised lines. They stay an extra day in Manchester after playing United away to visit Georgie and Simon, and Georgie wastes no time in pulling out the pictures of a gap toothed eight year old Jamie unwrapping his brand new Roy Kent poster and looking like he's about to start crying from happiness.
(It makes adult Jamie grin and duck his head, murmuring about how he used to be “proper obsessed with you, babe, you knew that.”)
Sometimes they’ll spend their off day just walking around the city, going to a park or a tourist trap Roy wouldn’t normally be caught dead at or a random little shop Jamie wants to visit that inevitably sells the ugliest fucking clothes Roy’s ever seen - fuck, it doesn’t even matter where they go, does it? As long as they’re together he’s happier than he can ever fucking remember.
Roy can't touch or even really look at Jamie like he wants to when they’re out like that, can’t hold his fucking hand walking down the street, every casual display of affection he gave Keeley without a second thought suddenly feeling as dangerous as a loaded gun - but he can still feel Jamie's presence like a low, sweet burn all up and down his side, keeping him warm.
It’s… all proper fucking lovely, actually.
The only problem is that Richmond’s good this year. Richmond’s good this year, and Jamie’s fucking great, his star rising every day he’s out on the pitch, and everyone’s talking about how Roy Kent’s stepping up in a way he hasn’t really done since his days at Chelsea - and it all adds up, in some circles, to even more interest in what the both of them are doing off the fucking clock.
It’s fucking exhausting, and there’s only so many discreet private clubs for famous arseholes who will pretend not to recognize them that they can go to. Roy gets so fucking angry, sometimes, whenever he realizes he’s checking himself, changing his behavior in fear that someone might see. And then he gets angry that he's angry, because when the fuck has he ever wanted to put the real bits of himself on display in the spotlight? Fucking never. He once wore the same outfit for six straight months so photographers couldn't use any new pictures they took of him. If anything he should be fucking chuffed that he's in a relationship with a built in excuse to hide-
Not that anyone thinks they’re fucking, of course. Not that it's even crossed anyone's fucking mind. He’s Roy fucking Kent. They used to keep tallies of how many women he’d been photographed with in a single month. Roy fucking Kent isn’t gay.
All that time they spend together and the vapid pop culture outlets mainly just start talking about their ‘bromance’ whenever they're seen in public together. The sports journos not overly inclined to like Richmond make snide comments about Roy’s favoritism. And the rags become fucking obsessed with which one of them is fucking Keeley again. She invites Jamie to go with her to some bullshit fashion thing he’s interested in and suddenly they must be back together. She and Roy both have to go to some bullshit charity thing for the club and suddenly they must be back together even though they fucking showed up to the thing separately.
The worst tabloids are fucking awful about it, barely a half step above straight out calling her a slag on the front cover. Keeley doesn’t even seem much bothered by it, says it’s nothing new, but it makes Roy so angry he sees red if he thinks too much about it. She doesn’t fucking deserve this shit.
Unfortunately, after Phoebe had been born Ruth had made him promise he wouldn’t get arrested for assault again, so he can’t do shit about any of it.
(‘Again’. It had been one fucking time. All he’d done was smashed the bloke’s camera and thrown him into the hotel pool - which served him right for hiding in the bushes on private property like that - but everyone had reacted like he’d fucking murdered the leering cunt.
It’s not like Roy knew he couldn’t swim. Christ.)
Once, they go on a double date with Keeley and her friend Sophie, an insanely fit model who’s just divorced her shit footballer ex-husband (shit at both the husband part and the footballer part) and is up for a shag - with Keeley, not with Roy or Jamie, but no one else needs to know that. Jamie spends the entire evening flirting outrageously with them both.
“You know, I honestly never would have guessed about you two,” Sophie says halfway through dinner. “Especially not you, Roy.”
“Thanks,” Roy says as he knocks back his whisky, because now he’s talking about this with a complete fucking stranger, apparently. Though she mainly just looks impressed. “It’s fucking exhausting.”
“I can imagine,” she says.
“You’re… out?” The words feel awkwardly shaped in Roy’s mouth, like he’s mimicking lines that he’s only seen in films, lines that shouldn’t belong to him.
“Yeah,” she says. “Well. I mean. I am, yeah, but you stay married to a footballer for long enough and it doesn’t matter how many times you got caught shoving your tongue down a girl’s throat in your early twenties, it’s all just a bit of fun, innit?”
She says it with a wry smile and a roll of her eyes, and Roy can see why Keeley likes her.
“That’s shit,” Jamie says.
“It fucking is,” Sophie agrees. She raises her glass. “To everyone else being shit.”
Now that’s something Roy can fucking drink to.
The restaurant they’re at is one of those horrible posh places, the kind where they send the manager over at the end of the meal to quietly let them know that there’s paparazzi outside.
Jamie grins and pulls out his phone to check his hair in the camera, like anything he does will make it look less stupid.
“Showtime, yeah?”
They deliberately walk out the main entrance where the handful of paps are camped out instead of leaving through the back. It’s the whole reason they’re out to dinner here in the first place, because the other three thought it would be a laugh. As they get close, Jamie smiles charmingly at the cameras and grabs Sophie to give her a kiss straight on her mouth as the shutters click. Roy feels a shooting pain through his jaw and realizes he’s grinding his teeth together.
After he releases her, Jamie stares Roy straight in the face and winks. Cheeky prick.
They go home and Roy spends the rest of the night fucking him through the mattress, rough and demanding, bites at his shoulders and thighs and arse, deep, mean bites that he knows will bloom into purple-black bruises by tomorrow.
“Should flirt with people in front of you more often if this is the reaction it gets me, yeah?” Jamie says after, ragged, and laughs with delight when Roy growls at him. Then he studies Roy’s face for a moment and his smile turns lopsided as he says “Babe, you’re not actually jealous, are you? I don’t even know her.”
“No, course not,” Roy says. And he’s not. It’s not jealousy. They’d planned out the whole thing. He doubts Jamie’s ever going to think about that girl again.
He doesn’t fucking know what it is.
The press is distracted for a fucking month, speculating who at their table that night was dating who, and Keeley and Jamie both think the whole thing’s fucking hilarious.
Roy-
Doesn’t.
They’re in Roy’s office, long after everyone else was supposed to have left, and Jamie’s on his knees blowing him. It’s fucking stupid and dangerous, but Jamie had cornered him against his desk and batted his eyelashes and said he really needed more minutes in the next match, please, Coach, I’ll do anything, the perverted little shit, and what was Roy supposed to do with that?
“Coach, are you still here, I was wond- oh! Oh, no, I am so sorry-”
By the time they’ve broken apart and put their clothes back in order Sam’s already gone.
“Fuck, I’ll go talk to him,” Jamie says, bouncing up to his feet in a single smooth motion.
“Fuuuuuck,” Roy says, putting his face in his hands. He stays like that, unmoving, until he hears footsteps coming back his way.
"Thought you locked the door, Coach," Jamie says lightly.
"Sorry. Fuck." Roy says.
"'S fine. Lad was mostly just embarrassed. You know he won't tell anyone." There's a pause. "You okay, babe?"
"Fine," Roy grits out. He finally looks up. "Let's just go home."
The panic of someone knowing in a way that Roy can’t control - one of his players - stays with him all night, though, and the second Sam walks through the doors at Nelson Road the next day Roy corners him, bundling him off to a dusty, disused office.
As soon as Roy closes the door, before he can even get a word out, Sam says "Roy, Jamie already talked to me. I won't tell anyone, I swear."
Roy immediately feels like a giant fucking dickhead. Sam’s the nicest lad on the planet, of course he wouldn’t go around outing people, especially not one of his best friends like Jamie.
"I. Yeah. I know. Sorry, Sam."
There’s a moment where they just stand there awkwardly and Roy realizes that if Sam starts trying to talk about how he’s supportive of Roy’s sexuality or fucking thanking him Roy’s just going to have to fucking kill himself.
Instead, Sam smiles.
“So all of those news articles about you playing favorites were true, I see.”
“Uh,” Roy says guiltily. “Right, yeah, if you have any- fucking- concerns about-”
Sam actually rolls his eyes. But he’s Sam, so it’s a nice eye roll.
“Coach, no offense, but no one else wants to be your favorite,” he says mildly.
“What? Why the fuck not?” Roy demands.
Sam gives him a politely incredulous look.
"You had him training three times a day last season, Coach. He told us all about how you tied him to your bicycle-" He pauses and his face does something funny. "Oh. Oh, wait, unless that was just a sex thing-"
"It wasn’t a sex thing, it was cardio," Roy says. Fucking unbelievable. “But. Yeah. Okay. Fair play, then."
Sam laughs and shakes his head.
"I am happy for both of you. And you know the team wouldn’t have a problem with it," he ventures. “If you did want to-”
“Not fucking likely,” Roy growls, automatic, because absolutely fucking not. Then he takes a deep breath and flexes his hands, before nodding and clapping Sam on the back in apology. “Right then. You're late for training, Obisanya,” he says.
When Roy gets to the coach offices, Beard’s already there, legs propped up on the desk and face buried in a book about fucking rugby, of all things. Roy grunts out a hello, sets his bag down and starts to take out his things.
“You know there’s cameras in here, right?”
Roy freezes. He turns to look at Beard. Beard casually flips a page and doesn’t even look up.
“I’m not fucking talking about it,” Roy snaps.
“Didn’t ask you to,” Beard says, mild.
“Should probably just come out to the lads,” Jamie says that night as they’re laying in bed, Roy leaning against the headboard and Jamie already on his stomach with his face buried in his pillow, outright saying what he’s been poorly hinting around for a month. Longer. “Maybe this time it was just Sam and Beard, but next time it’ll be someone else, yeah?”
Roy has a fucking headache. He sighs, grumbly and frustrated, rubbing his eyes and closing his book, not thinking about how his doctor says he needs reading glasses because he’s not a fucking old man.
“You don’t want to?” Jamie asks. Roy grunts like he hasn’t been avoiding thinking about it all fucking day, ever since Sam had mentioned it. “You know they’d be decent about it.”
The team are all good lads. They are. But he's their coach, and he can’t fucking shake the voice in his head telling him that it's fucking different when it's your coach. Someone you're supposed to- look up to. Respect.
It's objectively fucking stupid, but he still can't get it to shut up, so what the fuck does that make him?
Not that telling the team would even solve the problem. Maybe next time it won’t be Sam or Beard or anyone on the fucking team at all, it’ll be the fucking janitor.
…Not that Abid wouldn’t be lovely about it. Roy’s pretty sure one of his sons is gay. Or a nephew? Either way he’d probably want to fucking talk about it-
“Fuck,” Roy says, and Jamie peeks one eye at him in a question. “It just never fucking ends, does it?”
Jamie lifts his head up.
“Dunno, think after we tell them we’ve got it pretty much covered, ain’t we?”
“Them and Nate, and fucking Ted, and Trent fucking Crimm,” Roy says, because he’s going to have to tell the rest of the Diamond Dogs at some point. He really already should have, or at least the other coaches. Higgins - who had gotten the news from Rebecca and thus thankfully has never tried to actually talk to Roy about it - has already been giving him extremely unsubtle looks every time they call a meeting, but excuse the fuck out of Roy if he’s had to work up to it.
“Fucking knew you were old man friends with Trent,” Jamie says. Roy ignores him.
“And then every new player, every single fucking year-” Because the lads are all horrible actors and couldn’t manage to pretend Colin was straight for more than a week when they’d picked up a few new players during the summer transfer window, and maybe none of the new lads this year reacted poorly but he knows for a fact they’ve been lucky so far in who they’ve brought into Ted Lasso’s Nicest Dressing Room In Fucking Football, and he’s perfectly capable of whipping ignorant little pricks into shape but that’s not the fucking point, is it-
“Oh, eh, and your yoga mums,” Jamie adds helpfully.
“And my fucking yoga mums,” Roy echoes in horror. They might not know shit about football, but Jamie was their favorite Lust Conquers All contestant, and Jesus shitting Christ at that point he’d have to tell them who he really is, too- “And, fuck, it’ll just keep going forever, if Ruth ever gets remarried, and whenever Phoebe starts dating- and- and-”
“You don’t have to be giving some sort of individual speech to everyone every time, mate, you do know that, right-”
“That’s not the point!” Roy yells. “This whole- telling people thing is such fucking bullshit. I’ve already done it like five fucking times but apparently I need to keep doing it for my entire life every time I meet a new fucking person fucking forever? I just want to fucking do it once and then tell everyone to shut the fuck up about it.”
“Eh, Roy?” Jamie says slowly, looking at him like he’s worried that Roy’s been replaced by a pod person, or maybe having a stroke. “Babe? You saying you want to come out? Like. Come out come out?”
What in the absolute shitting fuck?
“Fuck no, I’d rather die,” Roy says. He stares at Jamie. Jamie stares back at him with big, alarmed eyes. He turns over and sits up fully.
“Because that would be fucking insane,” Roy adds, prodding, when Jamie still doesn’t say anything.
“Yeah, it would,” Jamie says. “Yeah. Let’s fucking do it.”
“No,” Roy says. “You’re supposed to agree that it’s a terrible idea and we shouldn’t do it.”
“Babe, you can’t make me be the mature one,” Jamie says. “That’s not fair.”
"You actually want to- fucking-" Roy can’t even bring himself to say it.
"Nah. Dunno. Maybe," Jamie says. He fidgets with the hem of his shirt. "A little bit. Yeah. Just. I'm not good at lying. Not talking about who I'm hooking up with, whatever, who cares, but I never- never had to think about what I’d do if it was something. You know. Real. Important.” Roy’s entire fucking chest hurts. “Don’t think I ever thought that would happen, honestly. And turns out hiding it from the team is shit. And it's funny to mess with journos sometimes, yeah, but it's fucking shit that I have to be constantly thinking about it when I just want to take you somewhere, yeah?" He shrugs, trying and failing to look casual. "Feels like it'd just be easier to come out with it sometimes, do you know what I mean? Might be nice, being able to talk about you. Half the country'd hate me, but they hate me anyway for being better than their shit clubs, so what do I care?"
“We can’t,” Roy says, a little desperate, because clearly Jamie just doesn’t fucking get it.
“Why not?” Jamie says. He grins suddenly, chin jerking up. It’s a little manic, a little prickish. A little terrified. “I’m Jamie fucking Tartt and you’re Roy fucking Kent. What the fuck is anyone going to do to us?”
“I’m your coach,” Roy says.
Jamie dramatically rolls his eyes.
“You know that-”
"There's no rule saying I can’t fuck one of my players, I fucking know," Roy says. "Not yet. They'll add it after this. The Roy Kent rule. That's what I'll end up being known for."
“Fuck off, Roy, you obviously won’t be known for that, you’ll be known for making Jamie Tartt such a great player,” Jamie says.
“Oh, that’s what you want? You want to spend your entire career listening to people say you’re only where you’re at because I’m fucking you?”
“Fucking- come on, you grumpy old bastard.” Roy glares at him and Jamie rolls his eyes again. As if Roy isn’t fucking right.
Jamie ignores the glare and slaps him on the chest, thrumming with nervy energy. "If anyone says that it’ll be obvious how fucking stupid they’re being. Seriously, what is anyone going to do to us? You're a great coach and a bloody fucking legend. And I'm me. Rebecca already knows and would never get rid of either of us for this, and if we did ever leave there'd be a dozen clubs too desperate to get their hands on us to be bigoted about it. So, what? Stupid jealous twats write nasty articles and yell shit at us on the pitch? How's that any different than it is now? Why can’t we?"
It's not that simple. And Roy knows Jamie knows it's not that simple, because he looks almost wild as he says it, like it scares the piss out of him too. Every bad story ever run about either of them combined wouldn’t match the viciousness the tabloids could and would unleash on them over this. And even the ones who wouldn't be outright hostile would descend on them like a flock of vultures; Roy's not modest, he's not going to pretend it wouldn't be the biggest sports news of the entire fucking decade if Roy Kent came out. He'd have to put a fucking sniper on his roof to keep the reporters away, and even then it'd get brought up in every presser he ever did from now til he's fucking dead.
And the fans. Dear fucking Christ, the football fans. He thinks about the sort of reaction they might get next time they're at Stamford Bridge and gets a sick twist in his stomach.
“It would be fucking different,” Roy snaps, sharper than he means to. Jamie tenses, jaw clenching, his body a rigid line against Roy’s, and for a second Roy wonders if this is about to turn into an actual fight. But then Jamie slumps, pulling away, manic energy dissolved into nothing.
“...No, yeah,” Jamie says, staring down at the bedsheets, waving his hand aimlessly. “You’re right. Yeah. It’s stupid, innit.”
When he lays back down he curls on his side away from Roy, and Roy stares at his back for a long minute, thinking about how instinctively and easily Jamie had said we and us when talking about the future, thinking about the guilty, vicious thrill that had run through him at the idea of their careers being so irrevocably intertwined that no one would ever mention one without the other, thinking and feeling so many fucking things and unable to put a single one of them into words.
Eventually Jamie sighs and turns his head to look at Roy again, shaking his head when he sees that Roy is still frozen in the same position.
“Well?” he asks, motioning at himself with a demanding little gesture. Roy forces himself to move, to lean over, putting a hand on his hip and a tentative kiss on his cheek. Jamie’s hand shoots out, grabbing Roy’s arm and tugging at him until Roy’s forced to fully curl around him, arm holding him tight and spooning him from behind. He makes a satisfied noise as his head flops back down on the pillow, and Roy knows he’s been forgiven.
Clingy little prick, Roy thinks as he presses a soft, apologetic kiss to Jamie’s shoulder and buries his face in the crook of his neck, with such tenderness he scares himself.
He lays there and tries to go to sleep and not think of anything at all except the warm, solid press of Jamie’s body against his, but now that the thought of blowing it all up - of coming out so publicly that not a single person on the fucking planet will hear his name and not know that he’s dating Jamie fucking Tartt - is in his head it won't leave. It's like a sheer cliff that he's standing at the side of, paralyzed, knowing if he takes one step forward his life as he knows it will be over.
But he can't stop looking.
He hasn’t told his grandad about him and Jamie, because his grandad’s fucking dead. Fucking obviously.
“But you think about it a lot? Telling him?”
“I. Yeah. I do.”
“How do you think he would have responded?” Dr. Sharon asks.
“No fucking idea,” Roy says. “Couldn’t tell you what his opinions were on it. Or on much of anything, really. Wasn’t much of a talker.”
“He showed his love through actions, not words,” Dr. Sharon says, reciting something they’ve talked about before.
“Yeah,” Roy says. “It’s fucking stupid, he’s been dead since I was nine. And the man was born in nineteen-fucking-twelve, for fuck’s sake. Pretty sure they didn’t have diversity training back in the old country. ”
“But it does matter to you. What he would have thought.”
“Yeah, it fucking does,” Roy says, quiet. He can’t look at her.
“What would you have wanted him to say?”
He looks down at his hands and doesn’t answer her. He presses his thumb against each finger, slowly, in order, watching it from a distance. They don’t feel like his own; large, rough man’s hands, when every time he’s in this room he ends up feeling like a fucking scared little boy.
“I’d-” he finally says, throat filled with gravel. “I’d want him to say that he’s proud of me.”
But he’ll never fucking know, will he?
A week later, just hours before Richmond’s match against Aston Villa, Colin's luck runs out.
The entire team had been surprised when Colin and Michael’s kiss on the pitch at the end of the previous season had somehow managed to go completely undetected - no one more so than Colin, but he hadn’t complained.
“It was the heat of the moment,” he had said, a little sheepish. “But if no one noticed I’m not going to be the one to point it out.”
It had been crowded and hectic and everyone’s cameras had been too focused on Isaac, Sam, Jamie, Ted, Roy-
Or so they had thought, anyway.
Keeley texts him the link as he’s pulling up at Nelson Road (alone, because he’s far too paranoid to show up at the club on a match day in the same car as Jamie). A fan online going through their old photos from the match had managed to catch Colin and Michael in the background of one of the pictures. Roy sits in his car for a long minute just staring at the picture, at the shocked and curious and nasty replies rapidly, exponentially multiplying underneath it, and feels something he’s completely unable to put into words.
It’s still too early for anyone to be in the dressing room, but when he flicks the lights on in his office Colin’s already there, slumped over in the chair across from Roy’s desk, head in his hands.
“It’s been months,” he says, barely audible, as Roy silently sits down next to him. “I wasn’t even thinking when I did it, but afterwards I thought I was prepared - but then there was nothing-”
“You let your guard down,” Roy says, and Colin nods.
“You know we’re not even together anymore? Me and Michael.” Of course Roy does. It was impossible to miss. Isaac has been begging to be Colin’s post-breakup wingman for a month. “Fuck, they’re going to figure out who he is- where he works- he’s going to kill me-”
“Colin,” Roy says. He puts a hand on Colin’s back. “Breathe.”
Colin takes in a gasping breath, and then another. He’s grown into a good lad. A good player. A shame he spent his first two seasons at Richmond with no guidance because he had a mean, broken down old fuck of a captain too busy feeling sorry for himself to give his players the time of day.
“Sorry, Coach. It’s just - at the time I thought at least we’d be doing it together, you know? But now I’m alone.”
Except he’s not, is he?
“You’re not alone,” Roy says. And then, like a fucking coward: “The entire fucking club is with you, Colin. Anyone tries to start shit with you and we’ll kick their faces in.”
Colin laughs, a sad little sound.
“I appreciate it, but it’s not- it’s just not the same thing, you know?” He closes his eyes. “Sorry. I know you don’t- I know the whole thing’s a little outside your experience, Coach. But really, thank you.”
Roy sits next to him, frozen, words stuck in his throat, and doesn’t say a single fucking thing. Why can’t he just fucking say it?
He's such a stupid fucking piece of shit.
"I'm not going to lie about it," Colin says. He looks both determined and faintly nauseated. "It’s out there, I can’t do anything about it, and I’m not ashamed of it. I just. Fuck, I wish I wasn't the only one."
What is wrong with him? He's done this before, and he's going to do it again another hundred fucking times, and maybe this is one of his players but it’s also just fucking Colin, so stressed he's on the verge of tears, and at the end of the day Roy has one goddamn job as a coach and it's stepping up for his fucking players so he needs to just fucking say it.
Roy opens his mouth-
Keeley pokes her head in, looking frantic.
“Oi, Colin, thank fucking Christ you’re here already. We need to talk, like, right now.”
Roy closes his mouth. Colin stands up, face drawn.
“Right,” he says, letting out a breath. “Lead the way.”
Roy sits there in his office, alone, and tries not to think.
They win the match, 1-0 on an assist from Jamie. Fucking obviously. It's a completely uneventful win, and the frenetic buzzing in the stands has nothing to do with what's happening on the pitch.
Afterwards, there’s the fucking post-match press conference. The club has already put out their hastily written official statements on Colin (who’d also put out an official coming out statement on his socials and categorically refused to do any sort of additional press about it - smart lad) and the press conference is supposed to be about the actual fucking match, but Roy - and everyone else at the club - knows they’re going to try to make the whole thing about Colin anyway. On the way over Keeley rapidly trots next to him in her sky-high heels and gives him the bullet points of what he’s supposed to say when asked: all this shit about how Colin’s a great player and a great man and he has Richmond’s full support and none of this will impact his place on the team and they’re all great fucking allies, on and on and fucking on.
She doesn’t even mention the fact that the whole thing might hit a little close to home for Roy.
But why would she? She knows him. What’s any of this got to do with him? Obviously Roy’s not going to come out. Obviously Roy would never kiss a man where anyone could see, always waits until they’re behind closed fucking doors to do anything even slightly fucking gay.
Obviously Roy’s going to go up there and pretend none of this makes him feel anything at all.
Jamie meets them at the doors, still in his kit and sweaty from the match, strands of hair sticking to his forehead. He’d already been scheduled to be at the press conference after winning Player of the Month again, and Keeley and Rebecca had kept him there in the vain fucking hope that maybe the press would like to ask some questions about actual fucking football instead of who Colin Hughes likes to fuck.
They can already hear the chaos coming from inside.
“Poor lad,” Jamie murmurs. “You know Colin didn’t want to deal with this.”
“It’s complete shit,” Keeley agrees. “But a gay Premier League first teamer? He’s going to be front page news for weeks at least, unless they get something big to distract them. Like the Queen crawling out of her grave hungry for brains sort of big.”
It’s just such fucking bullshit. Because Colin’s not the only one, is he? And everyone fucking knows he’s not the only one, but since he’s the only one stupid enough to get fucking caught he’s going to have to deal with the entire brunt of it.
Roy's fucking furious, suddenly, nearly shaking with it, angry at the stupid fuck who took that picture and everyone who commented on it and every vulture waiting in the press room right now and every single fucking person who thinks they're entitled to Colin spilling his guts out for them.
And, like always, like every single fucking day of his life, he’s angry at himself.
“Roy,” Jamie says after Keeley leaves them, something strange in his voice. “You alright, mate?”
That’s when Roy realizes he hasn’t said a single word the entire time.
“Fine,” Roy says, voice hoarse. “Just.”
Jamie licks his lips, looking almost hesitant. His eyes flicker to each side - checking, they’re always fucking checking - before he grabs Roy’s wrist and stares at him with a piercing, nearly pleading sort of look. He opens his mouth.
“Yeah,” Roy says, cutting him off, because he doesn’t need to hear it to know what Jamie’s going to say. “I know. I fucking know.”
He pushes open the door and walks in a half-daze to the front of the room. All eyes turn to him at once, laser focused, the crowd thrumming with barely restrained energy.
“Okay,” he says as he sits down, and he thinks he sounds more or less normal. “Let’s get this over with. You with the ears, in the front.”
“Coach Kent, where’s Colin Hughes? Do you have any comment on his pre-match statement where he publicly came out as gay?”
Roy opens his mouth to give the prepared bullshit.
And then he stops.
He looks at the crowd in front of him, staring at him with a single unified hungry look, desperate for any scrap of headline worthy content he can give them. He looks at them and wonders when the fuck he started caring what they say about him - when the fuck he started caring about what anyone at all says about him - and why the fuck he’s letting it dictate what he does with his own fucking life.
He knows, even as he thinks it, that it’s not that simple. It never is. But-
He looks at Jamie.
He sees Jamie looking back at him with a leashed sort of energy, eyebrows raised in a question.
Like he’s looking over at Roy standing on the sidelines, waiting for the signal.
Yeah, you know what.
Fuck it.
Roy gives him a nod so imperceptible he knows no one but Jamie will be able to see it.
Jamie grins.
“Eh, yeah, excuse me, I have something to say about that, actually,” he says, leaning forward over the microphone, and it’s like the journos notice for the first time that there’s a second person at the table. Roy can see Keeley in the back of the room suddenly stand up straight, eyes wide. He raises his eyebrows at her, very slightly, and can see her mouth oh, fucking hell to herself.
“Roy and I are together,” Jamie says.
The press room is silent. Roy can see the ones in the front row look vaguely confused, can almost hear them trying to parse what Jamie means. Because obviously he can’t mean what he fucking sounds like he means.
“I mean sexually,” Jamie helpfully adds, waving a hand between the two of them in case someone wasn’t clear which ‘Roy’ he was referring to.
“We’re fucking,” Roy says, loud and deliberate, leaning forward too. It feels like stepping back onto the pitch at Nelson Road, still in his black suit, knee fucking killing him, sweat pooling in the small of his back, half convinced he was making the stupidest fucking decision of his life until he had looked up and seen the crowd staring back at him and heard them start to chant and realized it was the only decision he ever could have made.
Jamie turns to him with a tiny smirk playing on his lips, eyes sparkling, the smuggest Roy’s ever fucking seen him.
A camera flash goes off, deafening in the stunned silence.
And then there’s another, and another, and another, and then the dam breaks and every single fucking person in the room starts shouting at once.
And Roy-
He can’t fucking help it.
He looks back at Jamie, and smiles.
There’s no questions about actual fucking football after that.
And Colin’s news gets pushed all the way to the second page, the lucky little prick.