Page 20 of After the Siren

Then Jake splashed him, and he stopped thinking about Jake’s smile.

They spent a few minutes making spirited attempts to drown each other, then, a truce reached, swam along the shoreline for a while.

Jake looked absolutely at home in the water, occasionally flipping onto his back to do backstroke or diving to cut through the water like a seal.

They got out when Theo realised he’d lost feeling in his toes, then jogged back to their towels. Jake had packed extra towels, two Falcons hoodies, beer and two thermoses of coffee. Theo suspected Xen’s intervention.

They lay in silence for a while, Jake sprawled on his back and Theo on his stomach with his head resting on one elbow.

‘Why the beach?’ Theo asked eventually. He’d dried enough to sit up and pull on a hoodie. The breeze was nippy.

Jake was still looking at the ocean. ‘The beach always makes me feel better.’

‘I ... thanks.’ Theo hoped Jake wasn’t going to look at him. He was sure his face was doing something stupid.

‘You wanna talk about it?’ Jake asked. He’d pushed his hair back off his face and it was drying in tangles. His eyes were the same colour as the sky.

Theo thought about the last time he’d been at the beach, barefoot in the shallows with Priya walking beside him.

‘Not really.’ He realised it wasn’t true as he said it. ‘Maybe.’

Xen would probably have been the better pick for this conversation.

He was a good listener, and he always knew the right questions to ask.

Jake was not always a good listener, and he had no idea what questions he might have to ask.

But Stavs looked like he needed to talk, and maybe he’d do it here with his hair drying in windblown curls and sand clinging to his bare calves.

Jake had always found it easier to talk when he could smell the salt.

When he could look at the ocean instead of whoever he was talking to.

When he was thirteen he’d come out to Keeley on the beach, drinking stolen strawberry Cruisers, staring at the seagulls.

He’d thought about bringing Xen and Paddy as well.

But he was more likely to get Stavs to the beach if he rocked up alone and made it harder for him to just say no.

The three of them had had a post-game conference in Jake’s car about how to cheer up Stavs.

Raze had called him as well, because apparently Jake was suddenly the resident Stavs expert. He’d told them all he’d talk to him.

Stavs didn’t look at Jake. He’d rolled onto his back as well and was staring up at the sky, one hand resting on his stomach and the other above his heart, like he was in yoga or something.

Jake gave him a moment, digging a bottle of beer out of the backpack and putting a kombucha next to Stavs’ towel.

Jake looked out at the waves, waiting, nursing his beer.

‘Things weren’t good,’ Stavs said, after a few minutes. ‘Last year, I mean. After that game. Or before it as well, I guess.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’d moved back in with my parents after Sarah and I broke up, because I didn’t know what I was going to do. The apartment we’d been living in was hers. My parents were away, and I was ... I was pretty low. After all of that.’

Jake realised where the story was going with the skidding sensation of losing control of a car on a dirt road: you knew what was happening, but there was no way to stop it. And you couldn’t slam the brakes, no matter how much you wanted to.

Stavs couldn’t seem to look at Jake. He’d turned his head, but his eyes skirted over Jake’s face and away.

‘I—’ He stopped. ‘It doesn’t—’ He stopped again, and Jake stayed quiet.

‘Well,’ Stavs said, his voice soft, ‘things were ... things got a bit messed up.’ He swallowed.

‘I took a lot of paracetamol and chased it with a lot of vodka. I still don’t know .

.. I didn’t really want to die. I just needed to .

.. I don’t know. I needed to do something .

To turn the way I was feeling into something other people could see.

But I called my friend Priya, and she came and got me to the ER. ’

Jake wanted to reach for him. He didn’t, but he shifted so their wrists were touching. ‘I’m sorry you were feeling that way.’

‘Thanks ... I just ... I want this to work out. It has to work out.’

‘Why?’ Jake asked.

Theo met his eyes, then. ‘What do you mean?’

Jake tried to find the right words. ‘I get why you want to play footy, obviously. But, like, you’re smart.

You do Law and you speak different languages and shit.

You could do lots of things that aren’t footy.

If I didn’t play footy, I’d probably be stacking shelves at Woolies.

You’d be a big-shot lawyer or a diplomat or something.

If footy doesn’t work out you’ve got options. ’

‘That’s . . . so do you.’

Jake snorted. ‘I mean, not really. I’m not bitching about it. This is what I’ve always wanted to do. But you could do heaps of things. Why does it have to work out?’

‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘I’ve got nowhere better to be,’ Jake told him, taking another sip of beer and gesturing at the beach around them.

‘I didn’t pick up a footy until I was fifteen,’ Stavs said, staring up at the sky.

There were a few patchy clouds racing across the sun above them.

‘I did athletics, and one day the footy coach came up to me after training and asked if I’d ever thought about playing footy.

I was a bit bored, so I said I’d try it. ’

Jake could imagine a footy coach spotting a teenaged Stavs doing the high jump or whatever and being unable to believe his luck.

‘My parents liked us – my siblings and me – doing sport as an extracurricular, but they didn’t think about it as a serious thing.

They’re both academics in medical fields, and they wanted us all to work towards getting good jobs, being financially stable, all that.

So sport was only part of being well-rounded, something for job interviews.

’ Stavs sounded almost defensive. ‘They’re good parents. But they can be set in their ways.’

Stavs shifted and sat up, crossing his legs.

He cast a longing look at Jake’s beer and Jake offered it to him.

To his surprise, Stavs took it, and Jake tried not to notice the way his lips wrapped around the mouth of the bottle, the line of his throat as he swallowed.

He handed the beer back and Jake took a sip as well.

‘I loved footy from my very first training session,’ Stavs said, his smile a little sad.

‘It was ... it’s such a weird game when you haven’t grown up watching it, but it was fun .

It didn’t make any sense, but I loved it.

And I was good at it, too. I didn’t really think about the AFL until I was in the under-18s and suddenly people were asking me about nominating myself for the draft.

’ Theo swiped the beer from Jake and took another sip.

‘You can have that one,’ Jake told him, and got himself another.

Sharing was going to give him ideas.

‘My parents talked me out of it. So I went to uni and did an Arts degree and played in the VFL. But I kept thinking about putting my name in for the rookie draft, seeing if I could make it work. So I did, finally, and then instead of starting my JD full time, I got drafted.’ He laughed, but not as though anything was funny.

‘My parents were ... well, they didn’t shout or anything, they’re not like that, but they made it clear they thought I was making a big mistake.

They just don’t take footy seriously, you know. ’

Jake didn’t know, because his mum took footy more seriously than almost anything else, but he could get it on an abstract level.

‘And then last year it was like they were proven right. That it was a stupid idea. I fought with them for so long to try to convince them that this was worthwhile, and Sarah and I broke up because I wouldn’t leave Australia, and I just .

.. I want to prove to them that I can do this. That I haven’t failed .’

His voice wavered on the last word and Jake hesitated, then shifted so they were sitting closer together, their shoulders touching as well as their wrists. Stavs leaned back into him, just a little.

‘Would ... I mean, even if you were voted All-Australian or whatever, would that convince them?’ Jake asked.

Stavs looked, briefly, absolutely miserable. Jake cursed himself for not sending Xen in his place.

‘I’m not saying it wouldn’t,’ he said quickly.

‘I just mean ...’ What the fuck did he mean?

‘You thought footy was a worthwhile thing to do, and I think you’re right, and heaps of other people think you’re right.

So maybe they’re just wrong, and you can’t really do anything to stop them being wrong, so you’ve gotta do this for yourself and fuck what anyone else thinks. ’

Stavs gave him a look. ‘You say that like it’s easy.’

‘I know it’s not, but ...’ He wished he was better with words. He wished he could say something to fix this, to get Stavs untangled from all this bullshit. Wished Stavs could read his mind, for a few moments, so he’d just get what Jake wanted to say.

Although he didn’t want Stavs reading too much of his mind.

‘Look,’ he said finally, conscious that he sounded like his mum.

‘You had the balls to give this a shot, even when people told you not to. You got drafted, and you’ve played at the highest level – that’s not failing.

You’ve kinda already made it. And if you decide you don’t like it after all, or if it doesn’t work out, you can go off and make bank doing something else.

But you’re here now, and you tried real fucking hard to get here, so maybe you’ve just gotta let yourself have some fun.

Because not many people get to do this, and it doesn’t matter what your parents think, or what I think, it matters what you think.

And I think you want to play this game because you love it, and you’re fucking good at it, and you’ve just got to get out of your own fucking way. ’

Stavs blinked at him, and Jake’s cheeks felt a bit hot.

Was he blushing ? He’d never blushed in his life, but he also wasn’t sure he’d said that many words in a row before.

Stavs was looking at him intensely, like he’d never really seen Jake properly before.

Which wasn’t helping the whole blushing situation.

‘Sorry,’ Jake said, fiddling with his fidget ring. ‘Pep talks aren’t really my thing.’

‘It was actually pretty good.’ Stavs was smiling properly now.

‘Really?’

‘Really,’ Stavs said, putting his beer aside. ‘Sorry, that was a lot to unload on you.’

‘All good,’ Jake said. ‘Thanks for talking.’ That didn’t feel like enough. ‘I get that it was hard to talk about. I’m glad you ... trusted me.’

Stavs blew out a breath. ‘You want to share a deeply personal secret to make me feel better?’

‘Kinda did that already.’

They both laughed, and Jake unearthed a tube of Pringles from the backpack. They deserved a snack. They’d worked hard.

They didn’t say much else, just lay on the beach until it was time to get in the water again, chased one another through the waves like they were kids, piled back into Jake’s ute, sandy and exhausted, and drove home.

And if Jake thought a bit about Stavs’ lips wrapped around the mouth of a beer bottle, about his wet board shorts clinging to his strong thighs . ..

Well. Nobody had to know.