Page 4 of One Last Try (Try for Love #1)
Owen
“Mathias Jones.” I stand in the middle of the pub, the word—his name—no louder than a breath on my lips. Or perhaps I’d never even said it out loud. Perhaps it had been an echo in my thoughts.
Mathias Jones.
Everyone stares at either me or the open pub door where Mathias Jones just ran through, disappearing into the dark March evening.
His smashed pint of Guinness still lies on the flagstone floor.
The overhead fairy lights twinkle, reflecting on each shard of broken glass and each rivulet of black as it races outwards along the lines of grout.
Mathias Jones.
Mathias fucking Jones.
“Told you so,” Daisy says, turning to me, her smile not quite its usual thousand-watt grin, a falter in her usually unwavering smugness.
I blink at her, lost for words.
She did. She did tell me. A few weeks ago when I signed the rental agreement. The property management company had informed us they couldn’t disclose the full details of who’d be moving into Fernbank Cottage because of privacy reasons, but that all the relevant checks had been performed.
All we were privy to was a single initial . . . M , a surname . . . Jones, a date of birth . . . 13/11/1995, a gender . . . M, and that there would be no other people occupying the house. No spouse, no dependents, not even any pets.
As a first- and hopefully last-time landlord, I’d thought nothing of it. Assumed it was normal protocol. Maybe it still is. Who the fuck knows?
But Daisy had taken one look at the signature, at the Mr M. Jones in the “Print Name Here” box, and said with resolute conviction, “Oh my god, it’s Mathias Jones.”
At the time, I’d rolled my eyes in response.
Of course it wouldn’t be him. There must be hundreds of thousands of people named M.
Jones in the world. Odds were National Lottery level high it wouldn’t be the one guy, who in his debut Union match, tackled me so succinctly in the seventy-eighth minute that it not only ended the game and any chance of Bath taking home the win, but also my career.
Simply a coincidence. Not even a weird one. Not even a Matrix glitch coincidence, just a very, very common name.
Then a week ago, when I’d all but forgotten about the Mr M. Jones on my cottage’s new lease, the signing of the Cardiff Bengals’ kicker to the Centurions was officially and publicly announced.
“Fucking knew it,” Daisy had said, as she stood in front of the pub’s TV. “M. Jones. Mathias Jones. That’s who’s moving into our old house. ”
“Watch your bloody language, young woman,” I’d replied. Not that I’m one of those dads who stops their kids from cussing, but there’s a time and a place for swearing. That time and place is during a match.
And sex.
Though the less I know about my eighteen-year-old and twenty-one-year-old daughters’ sex lives, the better.
But I’d still put the M. Jones moving into my cottage and the M.
Jones moving to the Bath Centurions down to coincidence.
Again, too many people with that name. And besides, everybody—and I mean everybody—knows I grew up in Mudford-upon-Hooke.
A quick Google search of me or my pub and Mathias would have my location.
Now, I don’t know much about Mathias Jones off the pitch, but I rather got the impression he’s spent his entire rugby career avoiding me.
There was that one time about two months after the incident when the pair of us were scheduled to appear on some morning news programme to discuss what happened and the progress of my healing.
Mathias was a no-show. They had to change up the segment at the last minute, keeping my interview but filling Mathias’s void with a piece about kids’ World Book Day costumes you could buy from Asda for a tenner or something.
And then there was the time somebody thought it would be hilarious to schedule us both on A Question of Sport —on opposite teams of course—but Mathias had arrived at the studio, taken one look at me, and hopped straight back in his car.
The producers had a mad scramble to fill his spot.
It was eventually occupied by an Olympic bronze-medal-winning gymnast.
And another time we were supposed to do a piece on BBC radio. My agent pitched it to me as this “air the laundry slash big reconciliation” thing, but again Mathias just never showed up.
Not that there was anything to reconcile.
Sure, his tackle broke my fibula, but it was a legal tackle.
I’d landed awkwardly. The fracture had been neat, the recovery pretty swift—once you took into consideration my age at the time.
Having almost unlimited access to physio had definitely been a bonus .
And such was—is the nature of the sport.
I’ve suffered many an injury during my career as a player.
Broken ulna as a kid. Broken collarbone as a teenager.
Broken nose—okay, that one was drink related, but the drinking had been done on a Cents’ night out, so rugby adjacent.
I’ve dislocated pretty much every joint I possess.
I’ve got so many scars on my face I can’t even pinpoint the origin of each one, and my cauliflower ear is so bad on the right side it barely resembles an ear any more.
After the accident, people kept asking me if I’d forgiven Mathias, but there was nothing to forgive. He’d simply been doing his job. And I’d told every reporter, every social media keyboard warrior, and every “just a concerned citizen” as much.
Still, it didn’t change how the Centurions’ supporters felt—feel about him, and that probably had quite a lot to do with the whole avoiding me for eight years deal.
And the running away from my pub just now.
“I should go after him,” I say, looking between Daisy and my dumbstruck patrons.
Daisy glances at the smashed pint glass. “I’ll get the dustpan and brush. Wait, is his pie ready? You should take it over to him. I bet he hasn’t eaten all day.”
“Ooh!” I rush back into the kitchen, pull the oven door open, and get punched in the face by the steam. “’Bout five minutes,” I say to no one.
When the food’s cooked, I plate it up, pop it on a tray with a plastic platter lid, and even though he has chips and not mash, an individual pot of gravy. As an afterthought, Daisy adds the last bowl of rhubarb and apple crumble and a jug of custard.
“Dad?” Daisy croons, her tone the same as the one she usually uses to ask for money.
“What is it, Daze?”
“Did you see his slutty little shorts?”
I roll my eyes. Damn my daughter . . . daughters, because Molly would be doing the exact same thing had she not been a hundred and seventy-five miles away at uni.
“No. Nope. I know what you’re getting at, and the answer is a resounding no.
He’s too young, he hates me, and well . . . those are reason enough.”
“But the shorts, though?” she whines.
Admittedly, the shorts were . . . fucking delicious, but I wonder if anyone else’s daughters put this much effort into manipulating their father’s love life?
“Mum’s remarried. Mum’s moved on,” she says. It’s what she always says.
“Mum doesn’t have a pub to run, or thirty-five thousand pounds to magic out of the air.”
“True, but Mathias is rich. He owns a Range Rover and a Supra.”
“How do you know these things? I doubt he has that kind of wedge just lying around, though. What are we going to do, plan a heist?”
She’s infuriatingly persistent. “But he must save so much in shorts fabric alone. He could be your sugar baby . . .”
I shoot her my most cutting cease and desist look.
Mathias is . . . I quickly do some mental maths.
His year of birth is nineteen ninety-five.
Ninety-five! Fuck me, that was the summer my form tutor Mrs James told me I’d never amount to anything, so I decided there and then to become a professional rugby player.
That makes my new neighbour twenty-nine. There’s a fifteen year age gap between Mathias and me. That’s . . . too much. Isn’t it? He’s closer to the girls’ generation. I shiver.
“Okay, I know what you’re thinking,” Daisy says, as I pick up the food tray. She follows me to the front of the pub and holds the door open for me.
Eyes follow our movement from every corner.
Tom and Bryn from their usual seat next to the window.
Roger and Ange from the table beside the fireplace.
And Viv. Even Will Shakespeare, the laziest Irish setter anyone could ever encounter, lifts his head from his paws and watches us go. Rapt, entertained.
As always.
“What am I thinking?” I half whisper to Daisy as I stare up at my old house.
“I’ve seen Mathias’s personal Instagram. He’s single . . . and Lando and I are almost one hundred per cent confident he likes guys. Later, Lando’s going to see if Matty baby’s on Grindr. I bet he is. ”
I choose to ignore the last few sentences of her statement, even though they make my heart do a weird wet-fish slap against my stomach. “How have you seen his personal Instagram?”
The public one run by his PR people, sure, everyone’s privy to those. But his personal page? Everything I assume about Mathias leads me to believe he’s not casual about the access randomers have over his life.
Daisy ignores me, starts getting her phone out of her back pocket. “Wanna see?”
Dammit, yes. Yes, I do. Instead, I shake my head and leave The Little Thatch.
Viv yells after me, “Go get him, tiger!”