Page 24 of One Last Try (Try for Love #1)

Owen

“Why do you have it on Blu-ray if you hate it?” I ask, as Mathias crouches over his PlayStation or whatever console he’s using to play the movie through. I nestle down on the big sofa, kick my trainers off, and prop my feet up on the coffee table.

It doesn’t surprise me that the man who buys digital copies of all his music is also the guy who still owns DVDs and Blu-rays.

“I don’t hate it. I love it. In fact, it’s a comfort movie.

Well . . .” He clears his throat. “You know, one of those movies you put on in the background. Though . . . if anyone asks, it’s not my copy, it’s my sister’s.

” Then he sits back on the other end of the larger sofa, in the same place I used to favour, and presses play on the console controller.

Immediately, I recognise the opening sequence. The deer being chased through the mossy ancient forest by a faceless person. The cheesy voice-over track. The dramatic music. The fever-dream blue filter.

“ Twilight ? Twilight is your comfort movie?” I say before Kristen Stewart’s character even appears on the screen.

“How did you guess it from those ten seconds?!”

“Mate, I have a twenty-one-year-old and an eighteen-year-old daughter. This isn’t my first rodeo. We’ve been having Twilight marathons every September since, like, twenty twelve, or I dunno, ages ago.” I take a sip of my lager.

“Oh, god. Do you hate it? Should I put something else on?”

“Ehh . . . I don’t hate it.” I don’t know if Mathias hears the subtext in my statement, but I don’t want him to change the movie.

I like the way his brain works. That he didn’t think to question if I, a forty-five-year-old man, wanted to watch a movie about teenage vampires.

And I also like the fact that he’s comfortable enough with me to reveal this “guilty pleasure” information.

“The real question, though,” I say. “Is are you team Jacob or team Edward?”

Mathias covers his smile with the neck of his beer bottle. “Edward,” he says after a while, giving it some thought, which for someone who claims this movie as a comfort watch seems at odds. Surely he should be able to answer that one instinctively. “You?”

“Jacob,” I say without hesitation. “So long as we forgo the non-consensual kiss and the whole Renaissance baby imprinting stuff.”

Mathias laughs so loud and suddenly he sloshes beer over himself.

“Oh my god.” He’s getting to his feet. “Renaissance.” He leaves the room and comes back a few moments later wearing a clean shirt.

This one is plain white, and the way the stretchy cotton brushes over his chest and abdominals feels like a personal attack to my integrity. I have to look away.

He sits down and is silent for a few moments.

“You coming to sevens tomorrow?” I ask.

“Do I have to coach this time?” He picks up his beer and takes a swig .

“No, I can coach. Or we can just play a game for an hour and a half.”

“Sure, call for me again, yeah?” he says. “Though I can’t do next Sunday the twentieth.”

“Shit, yeah, it’s Easter Sunday. Are you going back to Wales?”

Mathias nods, sips from his bottle. “Is the pub open?”

“Full Sunday roast, the works. One of only three days we take bookings for—Easter Sunday, Mother’s Day, and Christmas Day.”

“Mam would kill me if I wasn’t at theirs for Christmas dinner.”

Something about his words pulls uneasily at my chest and I refocus my gaze to Mathias’s multiplex-sized screen.

More than a dozen times, that’s how often I’ve seen this movie, and yet I’ve still never watched it.

Never really paid attention. On the TV, Bella’s dad is gifting her a beat-up red truck.

I try not to think about how, come Christmas, Mathias won’t be here.

Even if he stays in Fernbank Cottage until the end of the rugby season, he’ll only be here until midsummer at most.

“They booed me,” Mathias says, puncturing the silence.

I jolt in my seat. “What?”

“You asked me how the match was, and I never answered. They booed me. And Harry Ellis is pissed because if Eksteen hadn’t played him for the first fifteen minutes, we’d have probably won. So he hates me. Obviously.”

Wow, okay. My mind races with a million thoughts.

They heckled him because of me, because of what happened eight years ago.

They’re still not fucking over it. And Mathias is worried about Harry Ellis blaming him for being better than he is.

I couldn’t give less of a fuck what Harry Ellis thinks, but I don’t know how much that would help Mathias right now.

And on top of all that, I feel Mathias opening up and telling me these thoughts is a big fucking deal and I need to tread carefully. He’s not a chatty guy. He has that whole silent, moody, brooding type thing going on.

I won’t scare him off, but I’m at a complete loss about how to proceed. My mouth hangs open like a dying fish.

“I knew they’d boo me,” he adds .

I want so badly to pull him into a hug, squeeze the sadness out like I would with the girls.

I want to tell him that I heard the boos, sure, but they weren’t loud or long lasting by any means.

It was probably just some playful panto style booing, and I expect it sounded a lot worse to him, but I’m not going to be the prick who tells him it’s all in his head.

“Well, we listened to the radio, and you were great,” I say instead.

“On fire, as the kids would say. Okay, you guys lost, but from what the commentator said, your personal performance was exceptional. It’ll be a win next time for sure, and once people start seeing those scores tick over in our favour, they’ll change their minds.

They’ll stop booing. They’re all for the win. Doesn’t matter how we get it.”

Mathias turns towards me and brings his knee up to the back of the couch. I don’t let my eyes wander south to the expanse of bare thigh that’s just been exposed. “What else did the commentators say about me? Did they mention I broke your leg eight years ago?”

I cannot hide the truth in my expression. They did. In fact, it was one of the first things they spoke about.

“Controversial appointment here by Bath Head Coach, Johan Eksteen, as we see Mathias Jones join the Cents for his first match. He’ll be playing in the number twenty-two shirt. Many of us remember that fateful game in twenty seventeen—”

“How could we forget?” a second commentator had said, and laughed, as though the pain didn’t matter because it wasn’t theirs. “A day we now refer to as ‘Owen Bosley’s last game.’”

“I can’t imagine anyone forgetting that in a hurry. But perhaps Jones has come along at the right time.”

“Ellis hasn’t quite had the career-opening season he’d been hoping for. Three missed conversions last week against Gloucester . . .”

Yada yada yada.

“They did,” I admit. No point lying. Mathias could find the catch-up recording on the BBC Sport website if he wanted to. Not that he would. Mathias has become somewhat of an expert at shutting out the shit. “Can I ask you something? A personal question.”

He sizes me up for a moment. “Only if we swap. Personal question for personal question.”

“Oh.” I’m so startled by his offer I half forget what I was going to say. “Um, sure that seems like a grown-up trade off.”

He smiles, but it drops instantly.

“Why did you sign to the Centurions if you knew they would . . . that their reception of you would be like this?” I ask.

I can’t quite bring myself to say the word “boo.” It feels so wrong.

If everybody knew the real Mathias, this shy giant who watches Twilight and smells incredible and loves potatoes, they wouldn’t be booing him at all, even if it is all theatrics.

They’d be doing everything they could to spend one minute longer in his presence.

He doesn’t answer for a while. Doesn’t even hold up a finger or scratch his chin so that I know he’s thinking. He’s just silent.

“I don’t want to become irrelevant.” He stares at me for another thirty seconds.

It’s not uncomfortable, but I resist the urge to reach out and comfort him.

“I had a shit year last year. Was off the pitch more than on it, didn’t heal from a fractured rib in time for drafting.

My stats were terrible, and I guess the Bengals didn’t want to take the risk on a shitty injured player.

Thought I might get an offer as a free agent, but nothing came through.

The only signings I heard about were for forwards.

My agent called with an offer from Bath after Winter’s injury retirement, and I panicked.

I couldn’t go an entire season without playing, or even training, because we all know what happens to players then.

They don’t come back. I’m only twenty-nine; I’ve still got a lot of career left in me. I’m not ready to quit just yet.

“I need things to be the same as they always are. People have already started asking me, ‘So, what are you gonna do once you’re too old to play rugby?’ and I know it’s coming soon . . . but I got scared. I figured, better to play for the Cents than do nothing at all. ”

I nod along because I get the sense he hasn’t finished, like he has more to say and it’s been building up for a while.

He does continue, and I’m relieved. I love hearing him talk—the smooth timbre of his voice, his soft Welsh accent—it’s like he’s caressing me, touching me without touching me.

“I figured that because I already knew they’d heckle me it’d be easier to deal with, and I dunno .

. . I guess it is, in a way. Still hits hard, though.

I . . . I don’t like it when I can’t control what people think of me. ”

It’s like a lightbulb has been switched on in my brain. Control.

“I don’t like it when I can’t control what people think of me.”

It explains so much. The reservedness, the super-put-together outfits, the editorial Instagram page run by marketing experts, the hideout here in the sticks instead of living it up in central Bath where all the cool kids hang.

“Okay, you have two options,” I say. Mathias brings his other leg up onto the sofa, tucks it underneath his bum.

I have his full attention. “You can either accept that you can’t control what other people think about you, that no matter what you do or say there’s always going to be some dickhead who hates your guts, so you might as well just be yourself and enjoy the moment.

It’s not those people who matter anyway.

It only matters what the folk you’re close to think.

The folk who love you. If some stranger can’t forgive an accident that happened eight years ago, even when the person who got his leg broken doesn’t give a shit, well that’s on them for being a total wazzock. ”

He smiles softly. Again it falls away. “Wazzocks, the lot of them.”

“I spent so long trying not to swear in front of the girls, I had to get inventive. Some habits die hard, I guess.”

Mathias puffs out a breath and drags a hand down his face. “What’s the other option?”

I pull my leg up onto the sofa too. My knee brushes his socked foot.

“You change it. Change their perceptions. You call a press conference and get your agents and media team to write a nice speech about how, since you’re part of their team and you plan on bringing in the wins for them, you’d appreciate a little more respect.

But obviously written by a pro, so you don’t sound like a knob. ”

“I can’t do that.” He’s shaking his head.

“Then someone else could on your behalf. Eksteen or Chelford?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Or . . . I could. I bet they’d listen to—”

“No!” It’s not a shout, but it might as well be. My heart smashes itself against my windpipe.

On the TV, Edward is doing the fart-stink hand-over-mouth pose.

“Okay, secret third option?” I say.

Mathias raises his eyebrows, says nothing.

“You go to the games, understand that not everyone will be cheering for you, play your little fucking heart out, come away feeling okay because you know you gave it your all, but if you’re still feeling shitty about it, you could .

. . always find someone who you can come back to.

” My organs are about to jump out of my mouth .

. . plop onto the couch cushion between us.

Mathias holds my gaze, and I realise with him I either get all the eye contact or none at all.

I need him to understand that not all the fans feel this way. That maybe there’s a person who feels the very opposite of that. “Someone who you can share your feelings with. Someone who might . . . comfort you . . .”

He stares at me for another few minutes. It’s like before, when he was quiet, but this time he doesn’t fill the silence, and he doesn’t look away. He knows I was referring to myself.

“What personal question did you want to ask me?” I say, breaking the tension before I vomit my nervous system all over his legs.

There’s no hesitation. “What happened with you and Kirsty?”