Page 20 of One Last Try (Try for Love #1)

Mathias

Owen is the type of guy to have a whimsical, musical knock. I know this instinctively, so it comes as little surprise when he plays out the tune to what I’d hazard a guess is “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” on my front door Sunday morning.

My cheeks involuntarily pull into a smile.

He’s wearing jean shorts, a Superdry hoodie, a Bath Centurions baseball cap, and black New Balance trainers. Dad shoes. My smile stretches wider.

The sky beyond him is a cloudless blue, and it’s chilly out, but the kind of chilly you know will only last an hour or until the sun has had a chance to wake up and get to work.

“Morning, Wild Card,” he booms. He’s not dropping his holdall on the ground, which means he’s expecting me to come right away.

“Let me grab my stuff a sec.” I pop back inside the house to collect my bag, and my boots, which I keep in a separate bag so I don’t get mud on everything else. Not that I’ll leave without mud on everything, but I’d rather not start the session that way.

“Have you got a towel?” he calls through the door.

“Or you could always come here to shower. Most of the other guys do, to be fair. Well, to their homes. We all live just round the corner, and the shower block at the club is . . . a bit minging, in all honesty. But I’ve got shampoo you could borrow. ”

I’m back at the porch.

Owen see-saws his hand. “Actually, it’s not shampoo, it’s like five-in-one hair and body wash, but . . . I don’t really have a lot of hair . . . not up there, anyway. Everywhere else is like a yeti took a bath in regrowth serum.”

He’s babbling, and it shouldn’t be as cute as it is.

“I’ve got shampoo,” I tell him. “And a towel. We don’t have to share anything. So, where’s the grounds?” I close the cottage door, lock up, and chuck the key in my bag.

“Literally behind the pub,” he says, already marching down the path and looking either way at the roadside for oncoming traffic.

Around the back of The Little Thatch is a beer garden I had no idea existed.

It has about eight wooden picnic tables with adjoining benches and branded pub umbrellas slotted into holes in the centre.

Difficult to tell what brand because they’re all collapsed.

At the end of the beer garden is a kids’ climbing frame, with a slide, a fireman’s pole, and a set of monkey bars.

Beyond the boundaries is farmer’s field after farmer’s field, flocks of fluffy sheep, and what appears to be an ocean of oilseed rape. It’s just beginning to flower. In a couple of weeks it’ll be a stunning carpet of sunshine yellow, but right now it’s mostly lime greens with dappled yellows .

“There’s the pitch,” Owen says, pointing to a patch of brilliant green about five or six fields away. I can make out the goal posts and a little concrete hut. There also seems to be a small car park where a few cars wait. There’s no form of spectating area, not that I expected there to be.

We cut through the fields, climbing over styles, dodging sheep shit and stinging nettles until we get to the rugby grounds.

Over a dozen people loiter outside the shack, including Tom and Bryn from the pub quiz, and Orlando, the drunken teenager who broke into my house.

Thankfully, there’s no Roger, but there are a few other faces I recognise from quiz night.

Daisy’s here too. She spots her dad and runs over for a hug.

She’s not the only woman either. There are two others about Daisy’s age or perhaps a tad older.

Everyone else stops their conversations, glances over at us, and cheers. I know in my gut they’re cheering for Owen, but for one heart-faltering second, I let myself get swept away with the idea they’re excited to see me too.

“Let me show you around the place,” Owen says.

His smile is so wide it can probably be seen from the space station.

“Here’s the pitch.” He holds out a hand.

“That’s the locker room and shower block.

” He holds out his other hand, pointing to the somewhat ramshackle building on our right.

It bears a peeling vinyl sign with gold lettering, which reads: MUDFORD-UPON-HOOKE RFC . “And that’s the storage shed.”

Most of the guys are already in their kits, so when Owen and I head into the locker room, it’s empty save for two men tying the laces on their boots.

“We thought—well, the lads thought that since it’s not often we have a professional player amongst our ranks, you might be able to do a bit of coaching?

And then afterwards we can play a little match,” Owen says.

He finds a clear spot on the wraparound bench, dumps his bag on the tiles, and takes a seat.

The bench is littered with other people’s clothes—jackets and hoodies hung up on the pegs, and trousers and shorts on the wooden slats. Sometimes they’re folded, but mostly it’s just a mini mountainscape of different coloured denim. I look around the space for actual lockers, but don’t find any .

It’s a bog standard school-style locker room.

There are speckled beige tiles on the floor and wall, worn dark-wood benches pockmarked with occasional graffiti, and eighties utilitarian clothes pegs on the wall.

In places, the grout has blackened, and some of the tiles are cracked.

The place has a well-used but slightly uncared for air to it.

Owen must see me searching amongst the chaos. “There are lockers on the other side of that wall, but none of them have keys, so there’s no point in using them.”

It wasn’t what I was looking for, but I nod and make a space opposite him by pushing someone’s jeans along the bench. “What did you mean, do some coaching?”

“It’s been a really long time since I’ve been involved in pro rugby, and we . . . they . . . mostly Daisy to be fair, thought you could show us some of the training techniques you do at Cents. Or Bengals, even.” He kicks off his trainers, tucks his socks inside them, and stands to undo his shorts.

I look at the floor. “Um . . .”

I’m going to say no. I already know I’m going to say no, but part of me wants to agree. I had so much fun the other night with Owen and his regulars, and I’d never have given myself the opportunity without his gentle shoving.

“Will there be potatoes included?” I ask him.

“Mate, it’s Sunday!” he says, with a don’t ask dumb questions edge to his voice. “We’ve got roasties, we’ve got mash, we’ve got sweet potato mash.” He pulls off his shirt, and now he’s standing across the locker room from me in only his pants.

“Okay, keep going. What other sides do you have?” I whip off my own tee.

Owen falters, his eyes lingering on my chest before he drags them back up to my face, his cheeks a little pinker than they were a second ago.

He then concentrates very hard on pulling on his shirt and shorts, and therefore cannot spare me a look while he lists off the side dishes.

“Cauliflower cheese, honey roasted carrots and parsnips, pigs in blankets, Yorkshires . . . Oh, and the gravy. Holy fuck, you need to try the gravy.”

“Pigs in blankets in April? ”

“Come on, Wild Card, a pig in a blanket is for life, not just for Christmas. What is this, amateur hour?”

“Fair play. You don’t have to twist my arm on that one.” I drop my shorts next. “What meat?”

Owen’s mouth opens and hangs there. No words come out for at least five seconds. “Beef.” His voice is squeaky. He clears his throat. “Always beef, chicken, and nut as standard, and pork and lamb on alternate Sundays. I think it’s pork this week.”

I tug on my own shorts and jersey, an old Bengals’ away kit.

It’s black with orange stripes. Owen is wearing standard shorts anyone can pick up at JD Sports and a newer style Cents shirt in green and gold.

It’s not the same as my new kit, but it’s definitely more recent than his rugby days.

I’ve not seen him in it before, and I don’t let myself dwell on what that means.

If it means anything.

Which it doesn’t.

I’m an observant guy. I notice things. The fact that I have a mental catalogue of everything Owen Bosley has ever worn in public and in my presence is simply a product of me paying attention. That’s all.

“Okay, deal. I’ll do it for the potatoes and the pork. But you should know I want potatoes three ways again.”

“You drive a hard bargain. I accept,” he says, pulling his boots out of his bag and wiggling his feet into them. “So, what’s on the agenda today? What drills are we doing? Ooh, I have a whistle you could borrow.”

I put my boots on. “I have no idea. I mean, a heads-up would have been nice. That way I could have planned some things out.”

“Wait, for real?” His studs rap against the cream tiles as he crosses the locker room. The whistle he offers me is bright yellow. “It was Daisy’s idea. She told me not to tell you this morning because you would have said no.”

“Well, she’s right. I would have. But . . . I can’t let you all down, I guess.”

Sunlight jabs me in the eyes as we leave the little hut, and Owen gives the rest of the folk a not-so-subtle thumbs up .

“Fine, I’ll do some of the drills our coaches do,” I say, shielding my face so I can observe the hordes of people waiting for me. Okay, the fourteen people. I need to make some quick assumptions about their capabilities.

Honestly, I have no fucking clue. I don’t know what these guys know, whether they’ve done anything at this level before or whether this is their first time on the pitch.

Ages range from eighteen to probably mid-sixties and there are all shapes and sizes. I decide to go easy on them. Easy-ish.

I blow the whistle, because I’ve always wanted to do that. One guy snaps his heels together and salutes me.

“I guess we’ll do a couple of warm-up laps, and then some dynamic stretches to start?” I say it like a question because again, I don’t fucking know.

“Sounds rad,” Owen says, flashing me a grin. Oh my god, rad. “Right, you heard the man. Two laps.” And then he takes off towards the edge of the field, everybody following him like little lambs. I take up my position as the guardian at the back.

“Good game yesterday?” Bryn asks, filing in beside me, though I get the feeling he’s just making conversation, that he already knows how the game went.

“Cents lost twenty-six to nineteen. Gloucester were pretty on it, their defence was next level,” I reply, and the way Bryn nods along to my answer lets me know I was right with my first assumption.

He already knew the outcome. Perhaps he was even there.

Gloucester’s not very far away from Mudford-upon-Hooke.

It only took us about an hour to get there on the coach.

Bryn hums. “It’s not really about the defence, though.

The defence was fine, but in my opinion, you guys lost yet another game on conversions.

They need to put you in. No point in having Wales’s best kicker if they’re not gonna fucking use you.

Harry Ellis is a good ball carrier and all, but he can’t convert shit.

He gets too in his head. That kid could try pissing into a swimming pool and he’d still miss. ”

Now it’s my turn to nod. I can’t argue with anything he’s telling me.

Poor Harry. He’s good when he’s on form, but he’s young and inexperienced, and his nerves get the better of him.

But none of that matters to the spectators.

People are going to apply the same expectations, hold your performance to the same standards whether it’s your first game or your five hundredth.

“Anyway, what part of Wales are you from?” Bryn says. He’s a little out of breath now.

“Caerphilly. What about you?”

“Ah, no way. We used to go there all the time when I was a kid. Famous for the castle and the cheese. I’m originally from Ystrad Mynach, just round the corner basically. Moved to Bristol for uni, god, twenty-two years ago, and then I met Tom and we moved out Hookborough way to open our shop.”

Bryn has lost a lot of his Welsh accent.

He retains enough to still sound Welsh to the English, but to someone like me who’s grown up and lived there their entire life, it sounds kinda like he’s putting the accent on.

Like he’s making fun of me. I can hear some Bristolian mixed in there too, with his elongated Rs and dropped Hs.

“No point in ’avin,” he said, and “Kickerrrr.”

There’s also a bit of a Hispanic lilt, which he no doubt picked up from his husband. It’s a gorgeous cocktail of accents. A product of his past and present. Uniquely his.

I search my brain for some interesting fact to share about the place he grew up. Come up almost empty-handed. “I once shagged a girl from Ystrad Mynach.” I roll my eyes. Wish I’d kept my mouth shut.

Bryn tilts his head to the side and observes me steadily for a few seconds. No mean feat when you’re jogging around the perimeter of a rugby pitch. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you and Owen like . . . a thing?”

“Oh. No, we’re not a thing,” I reply.

“Shit, sorry, mate. I thought . . .” He shakes his head, steels himself. “Well, it’s nice having you here anyway. Mudford’s a fantastic little place to live. You’re gonna love it.”

After our laps, we stretch. I’m hyperaware of Daisy and Orlando gossiping about me.

Every time I look over at them, one of them bursts into laughter and they both avert their eyes like I’m about to turn them to stone.

I hate it. I want to tell them to stop, but Daisy’s Owen’s daughter and I don’t want him to think I’m disciplining her.

He doesn’t seem to notice. He’s too busy chatting to an older guy about a holiday he and his wife have planned to Lanzarote.

By the end of the stretches I figure out this guy’s name is Neil, his wife’s name is Linda, they plan to stay in the Playa del Carmin area, they got an excellent deal through the travel agents in Hookborough, and they’ve found a kennel for their dog Colin, but their cat Whisky is a nasty piece of shit and nowhere will take him any more.

“Fucking nightmare,” Neil says, shaking his head. He gets to his feet from his hip flexor stretches and turns to me.

Everyone is staring at me, I realise. We’ve finished stretching and now I’m supposed to lead an entire training session.

I stick my finger in my ear to buy myself more thinking time. Wiggle it about a little. “Right, so how do we all feel about maybe trying some long distance passing drills, and after that we can do some four man pods . . .”