Chapter Text
Roy doesn’t realize what’s happening at first. When Tartt flips the script and shows up at his door at—fucking hell, half three in the goddamn morning, he sees, squinting over his shoulder at the clock on the microwave—Roy’s mostly just pissed off.
“What the fuck do you want?” Roy asks.
It comes out probably a bit harsher than necessary, but Jamie’s incessant knocking had startled him out of a sweet snooze doze, a floaty, happy dream that smelled, vaguely, of walnuts. Roy’d been fully planning to sleep out his snooze time like God intended. Then, he was going to rally, piss, drink his tea, get dressed, slog down half a protein shake—he’d never liked them—, piss again, brush his teeth, and then, only then, feel even remotely prepared enough to deal with Jamie Tartt’s endlessly chipper energy at four o’clock in the goddamn morning. Roy has a routine, and he doesn’t fucking deviate.
Only, once Roy’s eyes have adjusted well enough in the glare coming off Jamie’s headlamp across the pitch fucking dark that already gives him a fucking time, he realizes that Jamie doesn’t look anywhere near his usual level of eager-to-give-Roy-shit. He’s grimacing, sweat streaked across his brow, left leg hoisted up in a way that might be casual but that Roy knows is not.
Immediately, Roy’s mind flashes to the worst. A mugger. James Tartt, Sr.. His own bum knee.
“What happened?” Roy asks, and there’s a different kind of darkness in his voice, now. A vicious, mauling protectiveness over Jamie he’ll later deny having felt.
Then, Jamie whines. Hikes up the bottom of his trackies and twists his calf out towards Roy.
“Caught a cramp, haven’t I?” Jamie says, pouting.
The crushing relief surging through Roy only barely manages to outpace the intense wave of irritation.
“Right, then,” Roy says.
He turns on his heel and leaves Jamie standing there in the open door.
“Where ya going, coach?” Jamie calls after him.
Roy doesn’t need to turn to know that Jamie’s already making his way inside, and he doesn’t feel that his question warrants anything more than his grumbliest grunt.
When Roy’s done with the first few steps of his pre-Jamie routine, he finds the man on the sofa, rubbing his thumbs over and over into his left calf. He hisses between his teeth, then glances up at Roy and goes quiet, like being in pain is something to be ashamed of.
Roy passes Jamie a fresh mug of tea and sits beside him.
“Let’s see it, then,” Roy says, glaring.
He’s not sure the glare is all that effective, given how entirely unfazed Jamie seems to be while staring directly at it, but that’s fine. It’s mostly for show these days, and given how entirely unfazed Jamie is, Roy figures he knows it, too. Jamie calling his bluff doesn’t piss him off as much as he thinks it should.
Roy doesn’t know what he’d been expecting when he asked to see the cramp. Maybe for Jamie to motion vaguely back to the limb he’d just been massaging. Maybe even for him to brazenly fling his leg into Roy’s lap. He doesn’t expect Jamie to set his tea aside, stand, and strip down to his pants straight away.
Of course, he’s Jamie. So, that’s on Roy for having missed the obvious answer. Still, the sight of Jamie standing there, something akin to Discobolus in the lean of his hips, the flex of his legs, or maybe more like that one Vermeer painting with the hang of his lips, the earnestness of his eyes. Fuck—Roy wishes he’d thought to flick on a lamp while grunting his way through the house.
Then, Roy’s eyes adjust, again, and he’s able to make out the finer details in the thick cords of muscle roping across Jamie’s body. He sits back immediately.
“Christ, Tartt,” he breathes, staring at his calf. “That is a proper fucking charley horse you’ve got there.”
Jamie Tartt is standing in Roy’s living room, in his pants, looking over his shoulder at Roy like he’s some coy fucking vintage pin-up, and Roy can’t even appreciate it properly because Jamie’s calf is a fucking mess. The normally taut cusp of muscle has gnarled up on itself, twitching and flexing like a fist beneath the skin.
“I know!” Jamie says, bouncing agitated on his right leg.
He knots his hands in the front of his jumper, and shit, Roy can’t even appreciate the way the motion hikes the back of the jumper tight over his arse because he knows, he knows Jamie only pulls that particular bout of restless movement when he’s self-soothing. Jamie’s properly stressed about this, not just in physical pain over this.
“Oi,” Roy says, scooting closer to perch on the edge of the couch.
He leans over to take hold of the soft inside of Jamie’s knee, and Jamie doesn’t flinch away from him, even when Roy starts kneading gently at the edges of the cramp. He goes on, tries to keep his voice a soft anchor to the touch of his hands.
“It’s just a cramp, Tartt. It’ll pass, yeah?”
“Dunno, coach,” Jamie says, wincing and shaking his head. He’s still wearing the headlamp, and the movement makes the light bobble around the room. Roy goes on pressing his thumbs into his leg. “Maybe I went too hard yesterday. I was at the club late, you know, running through that goal fucking Crystal Palace sneaked past me, trying to land me bicycle kick and—ow, dickhead!”
Roy eases his grip, but he glares at Jamie. This time, Jamie has the decency to look fazed, even if it means rolling his eyes and fisting his shirt tighter around his hands.
“I know, alright?” Jamie huffs. “You’ve told me only a million fucking times that acrobatics are best left to circuses and bellends who don’t give a shit about the sustainability of their bodies.”
Roy goes back to Jamie’s calf, but he’s gentle again.
“And yet,” Roy mutters.
Jamie sighs, goes quiet. Faces forward again. Roy doesn’t check out his arse. The top of the knot begins to loosen under Roy’s fingers, and Jamie trembles.
“I put the crash mat down,” he says after a while. “Tried to be careful, didn’t I?”
“Still a stupid fucking risk,” Roy grunts.
And while he knows he’s right, he also knows that he’s maybe not the most clinically detached coach when it comes to watching young footballers take stupid chances on their bodies. He’d take back every bicycle kick he ever tried—even the beautiful few that actually made a difference—if it meant he could play a single match more, hell, even a single proper fuckabout in the garden with Phoebe more, without feeling his knee lance like a lightning strike. Youth is wasted on the young, and all that.
Then, Ted’s fucking voice in his head, but don’t let the wisdom of age be wasted on you. Roy sighs, stops his ministrations on Jamie’s calf.
“We won the Crystal Palace match, Jamie,” Roy says gently. Jamie doesn’t turn, and Roy thinks it’s almost easier talking to the back of his head. “You don’t have to run yourself ragged over one goal Maradona himself wouldn’t have been able to kick away.”
Jamie says nothing. Roy catches the soft inside of his knee again, but he doesn’t knead into the cramp. He presses gently against the tendons lining the joint instead, the ones he’d ripped apart in his own knee tackling this smarmy bastard before him.
“That Palace striker had one shining moment,” Roy says softly. Thumbs across Jamie’s knee, feels the blood thrumming there. “You’ve got a lifetime of them ahead of you.”
This, finally, makes Jamie peek back over his shoulder at Roy, tentative. There’s something in his eyes that feels too big, too shaky, when it sinks into Roy’s chest. He presses against the top of the cramp again, and Jamie winces.
“If,” Roy insists, staring up at Jamie with that big, waving thing in his chest. “If you take care of yourself.”
Jamie keeps looking at him. Then, he nods.
“Yeah, coach,” he murmurs.
Roy nods and lets go of Jamie again.
“Good. Now, lay down,” he says and pushes himself up off the couch. Lightning through his knee.
He’s nearly out of the room before Jamie calls to him.
“Not even Maradona himself, huh?” he asks, the lilt of mischief back in his voice.
Roy rolls his eyes and grins where Jamie can’t see him.
He goes to the guest bath first, where he keeps a stash of baby lotion for Phoebe’s elbows during the cold months. Then, he goes to his own bathroom, where he’s pretty sure Keeley left a half-full bottle of fancy massage oils Roy had never let himself ask be used on him. (It wasn’t fucking sad. He’d loved getting to massage Keeley, to make her feel good, ‘cause she fucking deserved it. He’d have just felt like a right wanker to turn it into a quid-pro-fucking-quo. You did things like that for your partner because you wanted to, didn’t you? Because you loved them. Not because you expected shit back. And besides, he’d felt like enough of a burden on her at the end. Couldn’t well ask for a rub on top of that.)
Jamie’s lying down on the sofa when Roy returns, sprawled out on his back across it like he owns the joint. He’s abandoned his headlamp to the coffee table, and his tongue is out, and he’s snapping photos of himself in the front-facing camera of his phone. Roy flicks on the lamp, because he’s weak, and also because he really is shit in the dark.
“On your stomach, you fucking muppet,” Roy snaps.
Jamie doesn’t even flinch at the volume, just drops his phone to the ground and flops over onto his front. He hugs a green throw pillow under his chin and looks over his shoulder at Roy.
And because Jamie is Jamie, and because he knows exactly how he looks perched on Roy’s couch like that, fucking good enough to eat, he has the audacity to smirk at Roy.
“Like what you see, old man?” he quips, grinning and shaking his arse a bit.
Now, Roy can’t entirely say when appreciating Jamie’s body for its power and athleticism had flipped into feeling like he might need to gnaw his own arm off to stop from touching him—Jamie throwing him double birds moments before the lads mobbed him at last season’s Tottenham match, maybe? Jamie flicking his headlamp on and sprinting past Roy on that second training day, maybe? Fuck, Jamie sneezing too loud in the weight room and startling Isaac into a full overhead press with 50 kilos instead of the lateral raise Roy knew was in his workout plan, maybe? It’s impossible to say when, really, only that the switch had been irreconcilably made, and Roy’s going fucking mental with it.
He doesn’t miss the days when giving Jamie a well-deserved nutter would have appeased the vitriolic urge running through him; he likes their joyful antagonism much better. But fuck, if those days weren’t blissfully uncomplicated.
Roy rolls his eyes, holds out a bottle in each hand.
“Pick one, yeah?”
Jamie eyes both with careful consideration then waves for the baby lotion.
“Always did like how it smelled,” Jamie says, grinning at him.
Roy nods, sets the massage oil on the coffee table, and lifts Jamie’s feet to settle himself under them. They fall heavy onto his lap, and this time, Jamie flinches away when Roy sets his hands into his calf.
“Christ, that’s cold!” he hisses.
“Don’t be a baby.”
“Well, it’s baby lotion, innit?”
Roy digs his thumbs into the meatiest part of the coiled knot and narrowly avoids a reflexive kick straight to the jaw from the foot kissed by God.
“Oi! Fucker!”
“Settle down,” Roy snaps, trying to hold tighter to Jamie’s flailing limb. Unfortunately for him, however, the lotion has made his grip precarious, and Jamie continues to wriggle like a landed fish.
“It hurts!” Jamie complains.
“It’s for your own good,” Roy fires back.
And when that fails to make Jamie relax under his touch, Roy’s hand moves of its own accord. He feels the sting in his palm before he even registers what he’s done. Honest to God, he’s going to gnaw his arm right off.
The action does, however, immediately make Jamie go still. There’s a beat, two, where Roy is frozen, too. Then, slowly, Jamie cranes back around to stare at Roy, shocked, over his shoulder.
“Did you just slap me arse?” Jamie asks.
Roy can feel his heart pounding in his chest, can feel the hot thrum of want, of shame, of regret, of the urge to fucking do it again, of the urge to fucking apologise and flee from his own house and immediately turn in his letter of resignation because he’d just slapped a player’s arse and not in a friendly go-get-em-lad type of way but a proper, full-on spank.
“Yes,” Roy says. His voice sounds remarkably calmer than he feels.
Jamie stares at him for a moment longer, and Roy can barely breathe. Then, Jamie lets out a bright bark of laughter and turns back around, hugs the green throw pillow tighter to his chest.
“Fucking hell,” Jamie laughs, voice muffled against the fabric. “If little Jamie Tartt could see me now. Roy Kent, slapping me arse.”
Roy’s hands are still shaking, but he doubts Jamie notices when he digs them hard and merciless into the cramp. He’s too busy shouting obscenities. But he doesn’t writhe away again.
It takes nearly an hour and most of Phoebe’s winter lotion to get the last of the cramp worked out of Jamie’s leg. Roy’s spent enough time on the physio table to know exactly where and how to massage out even the nastiest of cramps, but by the time the muscle runs smooth and unknotted under his hands, Jamie’s gone tight at the other end of the couch, and Roy’s hands are cramping—the irony—and he doesn’t think early-morning training would do Jamie any good. (Roy’s also got the sneaking suspicion that Jamie had already been working out this morning, that that’s why he’s got the cramp in the first place. He needs to talk to Jamie about over extending himself.) So, Roy makes an executive decision.
“No extra training today,” Roy tells him, still kneading at Jamie’s calf. He’s worked the knot out, but he’s not sure he’ll ever have another excuse to touch Jamie like this, even if he’s keeping himself confined to the same rubbed-red stretch of skin he’s been touching at all morning.
“Fucking mint,” Jamie breathes, his head lolling forward into the pillow again in obvious relief. “That was brutal, mate.”
“You need to tell the nutritionist to up your magnesium intake,” Roy says.
“Right-o, Roy-o,” Jamie says, still hanging his head down.
Jamie flexes his calf a few times under Roy’s palms, and Roy takes that as his cue to stop fucking touching him. As soon as he moves his hands away, though, Jamie twists his head to look over his shoulder at Roy. The sight of Jamie twisting back to look at him will be permanently, beautifully etched into his brain. Roy can only try to maintain it as a respectful mental image.
“That was brutal, mate,” Jamie says.
“You said that already,” Roy reminds.
Jamie nods. Then, he raises his eyebrows.
“What?” Roy snaps. Jamie’s face doesn’t change at all. He just nods back towards his leg.
“Well?” Jamie prompts, like he’s given any fucking indication of what it actually is he wants from Roy.
“Well, what?” Roy bites, glaring.
Jamie nods backwards again, flicks his eyebrows up and down.
“Ain’t you going to kiss it better?”
Roy’s whole field of vision goes white. Rage. Desire. Fucking incorrigible fondness.
“Fuck off,” Roy bites.
“Come on, then. S’only fair,” Jamie says.
“Fuck you.”
Jamie keeps looking at him, nudges Roy’s thigh with the shin still pressed against it. He raises his eyebrows again, expectant.
Jamie doesn’t even lift his leg up. Expects Roy to lean all the way down to meet it.
Roy does. He rolls his eyes, sighs, and presses his lips against the fine hairs at the back of Jamie’s calf. He tells himself not to close his eyes into it.
When he looks back up, Jamie’s grinning at him, eyes bright and full of mirth. Roy is so fucked.
“Cheers, mate,” Jamie says, rolling over and off the couch in one swift move. He doesn’t put his trousers back on. “Got anything for breakfast? I’m fucking famished.”