Work Text:
AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
Firstly, I must say that researching and writing this book has been one of the great joys of my life. AFC Richmond have been my family’s team since my father’s parents immigrated in the late 1930s, and some of my earliest memories are of attending their games. The Independent gave me the wonderful opportunity to cover them for nearly a decade, through two owners and four managers, the last of which is, of course, the subject of this volume.
This is to say that I cannot claim any sort of neutrality where Richmond is concerned, but then no reporter in England can, when it comes to football—we each of us have our teams, whether we are avid or casual fans; the sport of football is something which every English citizen inherits, by simple nature of their birth. Thus, the reader may trust that the harshest critic of any team is a lifelong fan, and that Richmond shall receive no favors from me.
However, for the sake of full disclosure, and to avoid any accusation of bias, I must also confess something which I have scarcely been able to confess to myself.
Unfortunately and irrevocably—I am in love with Ted Lasso.
It is regrettable but undeniable that this fact may have influenced my reporting; however, I have worked diligently with my editors and publishers to assure that no overt favoritism has endured. Lastly, I have every reason to believe that this affection is mine and mine alone—I would request that the press and the general public leave Mr. Lasso alone on this front.
If you must very well hound someone, hound me.
My details have been provided below, for your badgering convenience:
Trent Crimm
14F Dwyer Street
Richmond
Greater London
TW10 6SE
UK
[email protected]
020 8484 972113
##
Trent sends the final draft of his manuscript to his agent a few minutes after eleven PM, then puts The Trials of Van Occupanther on the wall-mounted record player and pours himself three liberal fingers of scotch. It’s a school night, so there’s a chance that Emily has gone to bed early in anticipation of her daughter needing to be ferried to Year 7 in about eight hours, but they’re both equally egregious night owls so the chance is very slim indeed.
Nevertheless, a man can hope, and when his phone starts buzzing across the kitchen counter with Emily’s name on the screen, a man can hope some more that if he doesn’t answer the first time, his agent won’t bother calling again; unfortunately, it’s not to be.
“I can’t send this to the publisher,” Emily announces, before Trent can even say hello. “Are you serious, Trent? If this is some sort of joke, I don’t get it—”
“It’s not a joke,” he says levelly, pouring himself a second scotch. “I’m being professional, that’s all. If I wrote a book about my mother I’d have to disclose she was my mother.”
“Interestingly, the identity of your mother would not fetch quite so many headlines as you being in hopeless gay love with a Premier League manager—”
“No need for the ‘gay’ part,” Trent tells her. “Just ‘hopeless love’ will do, thanks.”
“Trent.” Emily’s given up sounding irritated and just sounds tired, and worried. He can picture her as she probably is—sitting in her home office, uncorrected proofs piled on the shelf behind her, daughter asleep down the hall, rubbing her eyes. “I can’t send this.”
Trent sinks onto his couch. He wonders if this is how heads of state feel when they decide to go to war—the calm, cloistered night before, when everything is dim, and as doomed as tomorrow may be, it still seems very far away. “I don’t think you have a choice, ethically.”
“Trent,” Emily says again, then doesn’t say anything but, “fuck.”
“Indeed,” Trent murmurs, drinking.
“This could tank your career. It is going to ruin your credibility—almost defnitely. Can’t you just—it’s not like anything’s ever going to happen, is it? Can’t you just keep this to yourself?”
That is, Trent suspects, the million-dollar question, and a question that would be better posed to his therapist, if he had a therapist. Why, when he sat down at his computer this morning to assemble his front matter, hair still wild because he hadn’t showered, just shoved it back with a headband, eating yoghurt and granola out of a coffee mug because all his bowls were in his sink and he didn’t feel like tackling a week’s worth of dishes—why did he sit down to write a swift and bloodless introduction to his magnum opus and decide, suddenly, that he couldn’t stand to send it along without acknowledging, even obliquely, that the entire book had turned out to be a love letter. Ted, he’d wanted to begin the foreword, as if all 570 pages were a letter to a single man, Ted, Ted, Ted—and on the dedication page he’d had to force himself to type, For AFC Richmond—for better and for worse, til death do us part—which in hindsight was probably not quite as cool and removed as he’d thought at the time.
It's not that he’s under any illusion that Ted will ever return his feelings; he’s not entertaining visions of weddings and rings and Ted humming country music while he bakes biscuits in Trent’s kitchen—that would be ridiculous, and not only because Ted’s flat is probably at least five times the size of the postage stamp Trent’s lived in for the past decade, so if they were going to move in anywhere it would make more sense to move in there.
No—Trent isn’t about to publicly humiliate himself on a national stage because he thinks Ted could ever love him back; nevertheless—shamefully, nauseously—he suspects he may be doing it because he can’t bring himself to relinquish the possibility.
“I’ll teach j-school if I have to,” he says at last. “Or—sixth formers, God forbid.”
Emily’s quiet for a minute, fighting it, then lets out a long breath through her nose. “Fine,” she says. “If it’s what you want—then it’s what you want. You’re the author. But I’m not publishing your home address. Or your mobile number. That’s asking for trouble.”
Trent, who’s mellowed quite a bit since he started drinking and anyways wised up on that front almost immediately after he pressed send, just says, “Yeah. Alright.”
##
Trent wakes at ten the next morning to a splitting headache and approximately eight thousand emails from his publisher; he makes himself a strong cup of coffee and takes it to stand beneath the scalding spray in the shower until he starts to feel less dead and vaguely human.
The book, tentatively titled RICHMOND TIL WE DIE (there’s been a lot of vicious back and forth over whether “til” ought to have one or two Ls, and blood was actually shed over the issue of the apostrophe) is getting rushed to print, scheduled to be published at the end of the month, to coincide with the end of the Premier League season and a theoretical surge in interest if Richmond wins the trophy—or loses the trophy, honestly. As such they’re barely going to have time for one round of editing before the draft is finalized; Trent feels feverish and shivery if he thinks about it too hard, but years of filing seconds before his deadline have immunized him to the exhilarating terror of not having anyone check his work.
By the time he gets out of the shower, clean and caffeinated if nothing else, the emails have turned into phone calls and Emily’s sent him a text in all caps, with the emergency function on because she knows him well enough to know he’ll turn on Do Not Disturb—ANSWER BERNARD YOU CAN IGNORE THE REST. Bernard is Trent’s editor, who is worse than his Year 3 grammar teacher when it comes to split infinitves and dangling prepositions; Trent fortifies his second cup of coffee with his leftover scotch from last night before he feels girded enough to contend with that particular brand of sticklerism. He appreciates Bernard, he really does—the man can spot a misspelling from a kilometer away in heavy fog—but he would probably be better suited editing minute and incredibly specific updates to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, instead of something people are actually meant to read.
Bernard has suggested:
My details have been provided below,For yourbadgering* convenience:Trent Crimm
14F Dwyer Street
Richmond
Greater London
TW10 6SE
[email protected]
020 8484 972113*Bernard Pill: “Hounding” and “badgering” may be too similar. I would suggest “harassment” or perhaps “accosting,” though I’m not a fan of the gerund in this particular instance. You are of course the writer and I remain open to your suggestions.
Which means, of course, that he’ll be rejecting anything Trent suggests out of hand—Trent supposes “harassment” is just as apt a term for the thousands of vitriolic and bigoted emails he’s opening himself up to receive, so he agrees, then makes similar short work of the rest of Bernard’s markups. His phone eventually stops buzzing; his email app crashes on his laptop and he neglects to re-launch it. Emily will text him if there’s anything important, and if he doesn’t respond she’ll show up and ring his buzzer obnoxiously until he either answers or implores his upstairs neighbor to let him throw himself from her balcony.
Emily instructs him to take a Zoom call from his publisher’s legal team, which is seven kinds of excruciating and lasts three hours; they do everything short of polygraphing him to make sure he’s not making the whole thing up to sell copies, and the only reason they don’t send someone over to polygraph him is because Emily threatens to fillet them. Trent mutes himself and turns off his camera while she’s busy with that so he can open the window and light a cigarette—he’s quit smoking, nominally, but this morning’s circumstances are extraordinarily stressful and the burn makes him feel like he’s closing down a café after a long day in the Spanish sun reporting on the running of the bulls, or something. In nada as it is in nada indeed.
“We’re going to have security at the launch party,” is the decision, at the end of the day; Emily tells him once the lawyers have all signed off. She does, in fact, look as tired as she sounds, and she’s forgotten to put eye makeup on, which is alarming. “Also at your book signings. And they want to keep someone on retainer for your flat; I think you should agree.”
“Christ, really?” Trent says.
“It’s just in case,” Emily repeats, “but yes, really,” so Trent agrees. They hang up.
Afterwards his flat is too quiet, like the ringing silence after a storm, or a victorious locker room after the players have all gone carousing out to celebrate on the town. For a moment, burning his fingers on the butt of his cigarette, Trent can’t think of anything but Colin Hughes—that this is only a fraction of what Colin would face if he ever decided to come out publicly, that it hasn’t even started yet and Trent’s nerves are already frayed.
He wonders—abruptly and shockingly, like walking into a glass door—if it’s selfish of him, to publish a statement like this. Even though he’s the one stripping himself bare, he could end up taking Ted down with him. The Sun is going to publish tabloid edits of them with hearts around their faces, because Trent might not be famous but Ted Lasso certainly is. What he really needs is that damned therapist—he needs someone to tell him whether he’s doing this to force an answer out of Ted, to force him to acknowledge this guilty, private knot of longing that Trent’s been tending like a needy bramble in his own chest; Trent can’t discern, anymore, whether he’s really worried about journalistic integrity, or if he’s just been carrying this secret around for so long that the only way it can come out is in the splashiest, most inconvenient way possible.
Either way, the bell has been rung; as the saying goes, it cannot be un-rung. Trent turns off his phone, turns off his laptop, and heads out to find something less apocalyptic to occupy his mind.
##
Of course, staring at Ted’s arse in khakis is its own sort of hell—mostly because Trent knows, objectively, that an arse that flat in trousers that awful shouldn’t do anything for him, and he’s certain it must speak to some sort of fundamental failing on his part that it does, but also because he’s not sure how much longer he’ll be welcome in the stands during training, even now that it’s open to the public. When the book comes out—or maybe sooner, when Ted and Rebecca and Keeley and whoever serves as in-house counsel get their advance proofs, if Trent can’t convince the publisher to hold back the front matter—Trent may very well be unable to ever set foot in Nelson Road again.
Not, of course, that Ted would ever ban him—not for something like this. But there might be legitimate security concerns; the fans might turn him into public enemy number one, which would at least give Isaac a break but would ruin Trent; the peace that he feels here and now, watching the squad scrimmage and shout and get mud all over, this sense that he’s exactly where he’s meant to be in this moment—it could all disappear. This could be the last time.
“Trent Crimm, independent of The Independent,” Ted smiles, coming over when he spots him. “Couldn’t stay away, could you? The book versions of us ain't got nothing on the real thing.”
“Yes, well,” Trent says. He has some idea of witty repartee involving the written word being a pale imitation, but he’s had a nightmarish morning, his brain is fried, and he can’t quiet string the sentence together. “I heard tell that some mad genius opened Richmond’s training sessions to the public.”
“A genius now, am I?” Ted beams.
“Don’t forget the mad part,” Trent reminds him.
“BEAUTIFUL WORK DICKHEADS,” someone bellows from the stands right above them—one of the three stooges from Mae’s, Trent thinks. The skinny one.
Dani Rojas gives him a smile and a thumbs up while the team decamps to the locker room. Trent had asked the rest of the lads, once, if there was anything that ever made that man sad, and had gotten a harrowing story about the time Dani accidentally drilled their mascot Earl in the head with a penalty kick—Trent remembered, obviously, because he’d been a sports reporter and on top of that it had been a meme on the internet for bloody weeks; PETA had been rabid. Praying in the shower, the squad reported, the pub fallen into a sudden grim hush—He started saying “Fútbol is death”—Rebecca let him pick out the new puppy and he didn’t even smile, just burst into tears covered in the adorable little blokes—I hired him three strippers and he turned them away at the door (this last from Richard Montlaur). Normally he asks them their favorite song and they all dance together. C’etait déchirant. Vraiment.—“How’d he get over it?” Trent wanted to know.
“Therapy,” Jamie Tartt told him.
Trent, who’d been expecting some brilliant act of kindhearted subterfuge on Ted’s part—much like when the team had quote-unquote broken the curse upon Dani’s initial arrival—had been a bit gobsmacked with a mouth full of shite beer. Here was another thing, he thought, that set both Ted Lasso and by extension Richmond apart—that they acknowledged teams did not just need specialists for their joints and muscles but also for their minds, that mental health was as large a factor as physical—except when he asked Ted about it, Ted just laughed and said, “Hell, I had to be forced into it. I’m a football man from Kansas, don’t you forget.”
Which, in Trent’s opinion, is all the more astonishing—that Ted was raised on the tenets of hot-blooded American masculinity and chose to become the man he is today.
A man who, pathetically, Trent cannot stop ogling even when he’s three feet away.
Ted at least doesn’t seem to notice, but Trent spies Coach Beard—who he has always suspected of mild clairvoyance—watching him knowingly from the other side of the water cooler.
“Why don’t you stay a spell?” Ted says. “The boys have been missing you.”
“Just the boys?” Trent teases, before he can stop himself.
He knows Ted’s going to say Naw, not just the boys, and he expects to hear it in a joking tone—but instead, Ted looks at him in a way Trent’s never been looked at before, soft and smiling and sort of private, and when he says it—“No. Not just the boys.”—he’s serious. At least, he sounds serious. Trent swallows hard.
“I’ve missed them as well,” he says. What he means is, of course, I’ve missed you. It’s not as if he’s never at the Dog Track—he’s going to have to write the final chapter of the book faster than the speed of light once Richmond’s played their final match (the publisher has allotted him a generous twelve hours), so there’s still a certain amount of research to be done—but most of his time has been swallowed up in the mammoth task of writing.
He still doesn’t feel like he’s finished—and not just because of the literally unfinished chapter that remains to be written. The manuscript is all well and good, but he has the sense when he reads back through it that he’s set out to write a total biography of the planet and written instead a focused history of the flower box in his neighbor’s window; not as a purposeful microcosm but as oversight, like mistaking the surface of the ocean for its entirety. Trent suspects he could write, conservatively, six thousand pages about Ted Lasso; he thinks if he started writing he might never stop, the same way when he looks at Ted he has the disconcerting sense he could spend the rest of his life doing it, watching his hair turn grey and the lines on his face deepen and the bulk of his shoulders slim. The book would only end when Ted died, and even then—Trent has learned, since the loss of his father—love has a way of enduring and evolving even when its subject is gone, so that the book would never truly end until Trent himself was dead—which presents a whole new issue, since he’s so scatterbrained when he gets so much as the sniffles that he wouldn’t trust himself to write a proper ending on his deathbed.
The fundamental problem with the book, in Trent’s estimation, is that it’s about Richmond, and not Richmond’s manager. But there’s nothing he can do about that—so instead he ignores how Beard is staring at him, puts his hands in his pockets, and follows Ted into the locker room.
##
Keeley Jones listens in patient silence while Trent explains the situation—stilted, awkward, tripping over his words in a way he hasn’t since he was a teenager and realized that everyone was going to make fun of him whether or not he was well-spoken, so there was really no reason to be afraid of failure. She listens so patiently and silently, in fact, that it’s a little unnerving, and it’s not until he’s trying to figure out how to segue into the next part of the meeting, saying, “Er, and, I suppose—” that Trent realizes she’s partially in shock but trying not to let it show, likely to be professional. This is, after all, a professional meeting. They’re in her office and everything.
Trent falls silent for a minute, then offers haltingly, “I realize there may be a conflict of interest. What with you representing the team, and all.”
“Oh God, no,” Keeley blurts, snapping out of whatever state of frozen animation she was in. “It’s totally fine. Officially I just represent the players, not the team. Tricky bit of legalese. And anyway even if I did represent the team, I’m pretty sure all the boys would want me to rep you too. You’re like an honorary team member.”
Trent blinks. “I—sorry?”
“No, I’m sorry. That was totally unprofessional of me, staring at you like that. I just never would have guessed, you know?”
“That I was gay?” Trent wonders. “I’d have thought it was fairly obvious.”
“Oh, it was,” Keeley assures him quickly. “It’s the Ted thing. I would’ve guessed you’d prefer someone who wore a lot of tweed and could quote Shakespeare or something. Although now that I say it out loud I wouldn’t put the Shakespeare past Ted.”
“No, neither would I,” Trent agrees. “But the, ah—the PR angle…”
“Right!” Keeley picks up a pen with a big pink pom pom on the end. It’s not a writing implement that inspires much confidence, on first glance, but Trent powers bravely through. “What sort of response were you thinking, when the book comes out?”
“Isn’t that, er—I mean, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”
“Totally,” Keeley allows. “Just, typically my clients tell me what they want to happen, and then I figure out how to make it happen. Do you want to be left alone? Become an icon for gay men in sports? Parlay all the media attention into a second book deal?”
“Left alone, I should think,” Trent says—though he does feel a bit guilty saying it. Is he even in a position to help gay men in sports? Is it his responsibility, as a gay man, to do so?
“No matter what happens, we’re going to need a statement,” Keeley tells him. “The book itself isn’t enough. The media’s going to have questions, and the only way to get them to stop asking is to make them feel like you’ve answered them.” She must see the nauseous look on his face, because she adds, “It doesn’t have to actually say anything. We can go boilerplate, if you want. But you’re a writer, so I thought you might want to, you know—”
“Write,” Trent supplies, with a wry little smile.
“Write,” Keeley agrees, gently.
Alone in his flat, Trent puts Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me on the turntable before he can think of the pathetic, miserable symbolism, and doesn’t bother pouring himself any whiskey because he’s only got half a bottle left and he knows he’s going to drink it all—there’s no sense in dirtying a glass. He sits down in front of his laptop in the middle of the afternoon and comes to sometime around four in the morning, a siren on the street outside and someone’s car alarm going; the ticker in his word processor is blinking at the end of several thousand words he has no memory whatsoever of writing.
Trent knows better than to trust anything he writes drunk, so he deletes it, deletes the now-blank document just for the sake of thoroughness, washes down twice the recommended dose of paracetamol—his stomach lining has been a lost cause since j-school—and goes to collapse face-first into his empty bed.
##
Bernard Pill Inbox – Work Today at 6:32
Re: POTENTIAL NEW CHAPTER
To: [email protected]
Reply-To: [email protected]Attached with my edits.
Though you are, of course, the author, I am afraid in this instance your artistic vision may clash with the commercial potential of the book. Should you truly wish to pursue adding this chapter to the manuscript, I would caution you to reconsider, and ultimately suggest a meeting with the full publishing team.
Best,
Bernard Pill
020 8741 7070 x97713
[email protected]
HarperCollins Nonfiction
The News Building
1 London Bridge Street
London
SE1 9GF
UK
With nauseous horror, huddled over a cup of coffee the aroma of which is turning his stomach over and over like a riverboat propeller churning the Mississippi, Trent clicks the attachment, which is entitled, alarmingly, LASSO ’TILL I DIE.docx.
The piece of writing contained therein is an unholy hybrid of erotic love letter and hagiography. Trent has to decamp to the bathroom twice to vomit, and it’s only partially because of the toxic amount of alcohol he ingested yesterday; mostly it’s the atrocious prose.
In strong and awful fashion, the piece begins:
To use a word which has been so abused by the international copywriting community over the past few years that any barrister would advise it to sue, the things which I want to do to Ted Lasso are unprecedented.
MAY HAVE TO ORDER A HIT ON BERNARD, he texts his agent. His eyes are too blurry to text in lowercase and his glasses are somewhere lost in the bedroom—he has the computer zoomed in to about 1,000%. CAN MY NEW SECURITY TEAM DO THAT?
Emily leaves him on read.
Trent scrolls some more. Bernard has left a comment which reads:
Recently I had the good—
or bad, depending on how jealous I’m feeling—fortune to meet an old friend of Rebecca Welton’s in the hotel bar at an away match.She, apparently, has taken Ted to bed on more than one occasion* and reports“riding that sexy mustache like a growling motorcycle,” to use her words,** as well asa cock the size of a rolling pin.****Bernard Pill: I suggest we avoid discussing Mr. Lasso’s sex life, for legal reasons. Though he is a public figure, privacy law is not settled on this issue.
**Bernard Pill: As you may recall from previous discussions, HarperCollins would prefer a family audience for this book; as such, profanity and sexual innuendo may not be appropriate. I would suggest a paraphrase instead of a direct quote. Perhaps “reports Ted is quite gentlemanly,” or a phrase of a similar nature.
***Bernard Pill: See above. Suggest removing this statement entirely. If you feel, as the author, that it must remain, perhaps we might find a size comparison which will be less alarming to the general public than a rolling pin. Try “banana” or maybe “small sopresata salami.”
“Oh my God,” Trent mutters, and goes to puke again.
The worst part isn’t that he’s embarrassed himself in front of his editor. Bernard was never going to respect him; he has long suspected Bernard doesn’t really respect anyone. (Perhaps the sworn and sacred protectors of the OED, to be fair, but not his authors.) No—the worst part is that Trent would send that to anyone at all, that he could ever put something so personal as Ted Lasso on paper for the world to see. Which is what he’s doing, with this book—he's baring his soul, inviting the whole of England to take a good long look at the mortifying depths of his desire, unrequited and unwelcome as it is.
At any given moment, Trent’s strongest and most violent urges are to kidnap Ted back to his flat, to get him alone, so he can hide Ted from the world and keep him all to himself. He wants to know everything there is to know about Ted, and he wants to be the only one in the world to know it, and the fact that Sassy and Ted’s ex-wife Michelle have parts of him that Trent never will, parts of him Trent will never even get to observe—he understands, suddenly, how people write poetry. Sometimes there’s no other way for something like this to come out. Maybe if he had a therapist they would tell him that’s why he did all this—writing about Ted is the only way he's ever going to get to have him.
Not that he’s any good at it, evidently. The wanting, or the writing.
Trent Crimm Sent – Work Today at 15:10
Re: Re: POTENTIAL NEW CHAPTER
To: [email protected]Firstly—my apologies. This process has been stressful and I was slightly inebriated last night. Under normal circumstances I am not in the habit of sending professional associates soft core pornography.
Secondly, I completely agree—this chapter has no business being within a hundred kilometers of the book.
I would consider it a personal favor if we could never speak of this again.
Trent Crimm
020 8484 972113
[email protected]
##
When his hangover’s mellowed enough that he doesn’t slosh around just breathing, Trent phones Leslie Higgins to get Ted’s home address. Higgins is happy to furnish him with it and doesn’t even ask why, which is alarming but convenient.
Trent tells himself that he’s going over there because Ted deserves to hear the truth from him, but he fears it’s simply that he can’t stand to wait for the publisher to mail out advance copies; whatever the truth, eight PM finds him in a cab riding across town, and eight thirty finds him on the street in front of Ted’s flat.
He rings the buzzer, says, “Ah, it’s Trent—Trent Crimm,” awkwardly when Ted answers, all of a sudden not sure how familiar he should be, then gets buzzed in to a cheerful, “Trent Crimm, the Independent!” which makes him feel silly for all the philosophizing he did about Ted’s cock in an email to his editor last night.
Ted’s waiting in the open door when Trent makes it up the stairs, his arms crossed, looking very soft and comfortable in a pair of checkered pajama trousers. “Howdy, Trent,” he says. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
The word pleasure out of Ted’s mouth is, concurrently, something straight out of the cowboy pornos Trent used to watch at uni, back when the only way to do that sort of thing was to rent a VHS and hope your flatmate didn’t come home while you were jacking off in the living room, and also completely ridiculous. Trent stands in the hallway clutching the strap of his messenger bag, suddenly convinced that this is the worst idea he’s ever had, including everything that happened last night. He should go home and enjoy the time he has left, like a man whose doctor has told him he only has a few days to live. If Ted reads the foreword while Trent’s clear across Richmond in his own flat, then at least he can pretend it’s not happening. Trent’s been rejected a lot in his life—there aren’t a lot of writers who haven’t been. Silence, he finds, is kinder than an outright No. At least when you never talk about it you can pretend it didn’t happen.
“Trent?” Ted asks, concerned. “You alright? Did something happen?”
“Yes,” Trent says. “I mean—no, nothing happened. I’m alright. Do you mind if I come in?”
Of course Ted doesn’t. A reporter who’s only recently become a friend—who penned one of the most revealing and damaging articles of Ted’s career—shows up on his doorstep with no warning and no explanation, and Ted doesn’t bat an eye.
Trent was right, he discovers—Ted’s flat is considerably bigger than his own, courtesy, no doubt, of Richmond and Rebecca Welton. There are biscuits baking in the oven, the smell wafting through the entire place, warm and buttery and welcoming, and Trent stands in Ted’s living room looking at the mess of bowls and flour and a fucking rolling pin—at the Lego version of Richmond’s pitch on Ted’s coffee table, the Kansas City Chiefs jersey hanging on the wall (problematic, but Ted’s hardly responsible for the team name), framed crayon drawings that Ted’s son is too old to have done any time recently, which means he’s been holding on to them for a while, and they are truly not very good at all—he stands there in Ted’s home, and he feels like an intruder.
Ted’s watching him expectantly. When Trent doesn’t talk, he says, “Can I get you a drink? Beer, wine? Tea? I hate tea but I’ve got a lot of house guests who love the stuff, so I’ve got variety.”
“Tea would be lovely,” Trent says—though he’s not sure why, since Ted’s going to throw him out on his ear as soon as they get to the reason Trent came—and trails him into the kitchen.
Ted puts the kettle on. Trent’s heart is beating like that time he almost got hit by a car. He pulls the manuscript out of his bag and sets it on the table.
“What’s that?” Ted asks, glancing at it.
“My book,” Trent tells him. “All but the final chapter, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Ted picks it up and flips past the title page—RICHMOND TIL WE DIE, by Trent Crimm. “I didn’t know I was gonna get an advance copy. I’m honored, Trent, really. Personally delivered by the author and everything.”
“The, ah—the rest haven’t gone out yet,” Trent tells him. “They’re meant to go out on Monday, I think. But I thought you should be the first to read it. Aside from my publisher, my editor, and my agent, of course.”
“Uh oh.” Ted looks up at him. “Something bad?”
Trent starts to say No, nothing bad, then stops. He’s not quite sure how to answer. Finally he settles on, “I don’t think so, no. But something that—the press may find interesting, I suppose you could say. Speaking charitably.”
The kettle goes. Ted seems preoccupied with the manuscript—he’s reading something in the middle for now, which is mostly Trent waxing poetic about Total Football and the inherent trust necessary for truly solid teamwork, so Trent steps away to pour himself a cup of tea. Ted wasn’t lying—he does have an impressive variety of tea bags on offer. Trent chooses silver tip green tea, which is impossible to find bloody anywhere, and tries not to think that it’s here because Ted remembers it was always in his thermos at the club.
“Not that I don’t plan to read the whole thing, because I do,” Ted says, “but it seems like maybe you came over here to show me something specific.”
Trent stares at his tea. “The foreword,” he says. “I thought you might like to see the foreword.”
Ted stares at him for another moment, with those big concerned brown eyes, then flips to the foreword. Trent watches him while he reads. He can’t look away.
Then he watches him close the manuscript. “Well,” Ted says, and falls silent.
Trent resists the urge to apologize. It would be excessive, he thinks, since his presence here is already a sort of apology, in and of itself. Ted still hasn’t said anything other than Well. Trent’s tea has started to brew enough that the steam is fragrant, earthy and verdant. He thinks that it would be appropriate if it were raining—absolutely dumping buckets—because the rain always seems to make the outside world blurry and far away, and right now the only thing in the entire world to him is Ted, with a bit of flour in his mustache, sitting at his kitchen table with Trent’s love letter in front of him. There’s a tiny crease between his eyebrows that Trent wants to put his thumb against. He always wants to touch Ted, always; he wants to walk in close behind him and rest his hands on Ted’s shoulders, bend and press a kiss to the top of his head; he wants to be close enough to smell him, for Ted to reach back and grab a handful of his hair; instead, he’s across the kitchen holding a mug that says SORRY YOU GOT RELEGATED. He wonders what the hell novelty shop it came from, or if an angry Richmond fan got it made special, wonders why Ted kept it even now that they’re back in the Premier League, wonders what it says about him. Says he doesn’t pick at his failures like an old scab the way Trent does, probably.
Ted still hasn’t spoken.
“I thought I should bring it over myself,” Trent says abruptly. He can’t stand the silence any longer. “You deserve the opportunity to yell at me in person.”
“Why would I yell at you?” Ted asks.
Of course he won’t yell, Trent thinks, with no small amount of irritation. It would be easier if he would—if he could react so snottily and horribly that Trent could get over him in the course of a single drunken weekend. But he is, after all, Ted.
“Fine,” Trent amends, short, “you deserve the right to—let me down with excruciating kindness in person, then.”
“Hell.” Ted sits back. “I’m not gonna do that either, Trent.”
“Well, what are you going to do, then?” Trent demands. It comes out bitingly—since childhood Trent’s had a bad habit of getting mean when he’s afraid. He deflates a little. "Just rip the Band-Aid off. Please."
Ted gets up from the table, comes across the kitchen, and kisses him.
He kisses, Trent thinks distantly, like the lead in a rom com. Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral, shoulders around his ears, Trent’s face cupped in his hands, heartbreakingly earnest.
“Ted,” Trent gasps against his lips—and Ted starts to press forward for a moment, like he’s going to use the opening to lick into his mouth, but then he pulls away. His whole body is flush with Trent’s. Trent can feel Ted’s heart beating against his chest.
“Now, I ain’t a writer, so you should take this advice with a grain of salt,” Ted says, still holding Trent’s face, eyes heavy on Trent’s mouth, “but I have a suggestion about your foreword.”
“Oh?” Trent asks. He’s fairly certain his brain has evacuated his skull.
“Yeah.” Ted skims his nose against Trent’s cheek. “That part about this affection being yours and yours alone. I’m thinking maybe that could use an edit.”
“Really?” Trent’s hands hover at Ted’s sides. He wants to touch, but despite all this evidence kissing him on the face he’s still not sure whether he’s allowed.
“Yeah,” Ted murmurs again, “really,” and presses him back against the counter, devouring his mouth. Trent grabs him around the waist, hands fisted in his t-shirt, and holds on for dear life; he can feel the bulk of Ted’s body under his clothes and remembers suddenly that he used to play American football, that his presence might be unassuming but his physicality is not; It’s like you’re in a kissing competition, he remembers Sassy telling him in a hotel bar, smiling wistfully while Trent’s stomach burned with jealousy, and he really, really knows how to win—and now Trent can acknowledge that as clunky as the similie had been, she hadn’t been far off. Ted gets a hand in Trent’s hair and a thigh between his legs, kissing him and kissing him like he’s got nowhere to be, and Trent thinks he might melt to a boneless puddle if Ted weren’t holding him up. Ted grinds forward, mouth open wetly; Trent says, “Oh good Christ,” mostly against his chin and gets a hand on his arse to make him do it again.
“Wait,” he says, a second later, “wait, Ted, hold on.” His glasses are all fogged up. He takes the respite to set them on the counter behind him, next to the silver tip tea that he’s never going to get around to drinking, now that something much more enticing is on offer. “I’m about to ruin both our lives—maybe we should talk about this.”
“You’re right,” Ted decides, after a minute. It sounds like it takes a lot of effort. His face is flushed, his mustache in even more disarray than before, breathing like he’s run a marathon. “Sorry. Never done this before.”
Trent blinks at him. Ted has a child, so he knows he doesn’t mean sex, but that still leaves—“Have you never been with a man?” Nowhere in his calculations did he even allow himself to consider that Ted might reciprocate his feelings, so he hasn’t been able to decide how he feels about being a sexual experiment.
But—“Course I have,” Ted promises. “I know what I’m doing, sweetheart. I just never been with someone who makes me feel like I’m on fire, that's all.”
And Trent had every intention of making them sit down and talk things through—really, he did. But there’s not much he can do in the face of Ted’s open desire; after all, he’s only a man, and not one particularly stuck in any principles beyond journalistic integrity, at that. So he hauls Ted back in and kisses him again.
“Yeah,” Ted breathes, “yeah, honey, c’mere,” after which things escalate quickly.
Ted ends up on his knees giving Trent the most transcendent head of his life—ignoring protests that he doesn’t have to—while Trent bites the back of his hand and tries very very hard not to make a single sound, since Ted’s upstairs neighbor apparently has ears like a hawk. The biscuits are still baking, and Trent can feel the warmth of the oven through the countertop. His muscles clench, trying desperately not to fuck Ted’s mouth, and somehow the exertion of having to hold still makes it that much more devastating. “Ted, I can’t,” he blurts brokenly, after a few minutes of the most thorough and attentive treatment he’s ever received, “I can’t, fuck—” and comes in Ted’s mouth, that mustache tickling the bristle he keeps meaning to get waxed, folding forward and cradling Ted’s head.
When his legs start working again he tries to steer Ted towards the couch he saw in the other room, but Ted says, “Naw, sweetheart, you deserve a bed,” which is a ridiculous thing to say to a forty-nine year old man and also very endearing. Trent puts Ted on the bed and strips him out of his pajamas—pajamas before nine in the bloody evening, and Trent doesn’t know why that works for him but it does. He has a journalist’s mind, he’s never had to take many notes, so he knows that he will never forget a single detail of Ted Lasso lying naked in bed waiting for him—his thick mat of chest hair, darker than his head, one knee bent like he’s Burt fucking Reynolds, making a joke about it as well—Where’s my bear rug?—for which Trent has to fix him with an unimpressed look even though Sassy was right about the rolling pin too and he’s really, really impressed. Coming so soon means that approximately 99% of the things he wants to do to Ted are off the table, and Ted must see some of the doomed urgency on his face as he stands next to the bed, because he comes up on his knees and takes Trent’s face in his hands again and tells him, “Hey. Stop that big brain of yours from worrying so much. I’m in love with you too, alright? We can do this again tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that…”
Trent gets the picture. He takes a deep breath, hands sliding up Ted’s bare sides, his bare back, and wills himself calm. It’s not difficult, in this setting.
“What do you want?” he asks Ted in a low murmur. “Tell me what you want, love.”
“You,” Ted says, without missing a beat. “Just you, Trent Crimm.”
This man wears visors, Trent reminds himself, just to keep himself from bursting into flames at the enormity of what he’s doing—visors, and khaki pants—and tumbles Ted back into bed.
##
Trent Crimm Drafts – Work Today at 7:47
Edit to Author’s Foreword
To: [email protected]See attached.
Trent Crimm
020 8484 972113
[email protected]AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
…for the sake of full disclosure, and to avoid any accusation of bias, I must also confess something which I have scarcely been able to confess to myself.
Unfortunately and irrevocably—I am in love with Ted Lasso.
It is regrettable but undeniable that this fact may have influenced my reporting; however, I have worked diligently with my editors and publishers to assure that no overt favoritism has endured.
Very recently, I have learned that Ted Lasso loves me back. As our relationship is in its earliest stages and still somewhat fragile, I must implore that the members of the public and the media leave him alone on this front. I can’t have the love of my life second-guessing his decision.
If you must very well hound someone, hound me.
For your harassment convenience:
Trent Crimm
[email protected]
“Well, hold on, I think I’ve got another note,” Ted complains, chin hooked over Trent’s shoulder while he double and triple-checks that he hasn’t included anything graphic about what they’ve been doing for the last twelve hours or so. He’s not sure how it would’ve happened but he is, he thinks understandably, paranoid after what happened last night. Two nights ago, rather. Ted taps the screen where it says second-guessing. “I’m not gonna second-guess you, Trent. I mean, unless—"
He sits back abruptly, away from Trent’s shoulder. Trent blinks at him from behind his glasses, eyes gummy from the blue light. It feels a bit odd to be wearing glasses and nothing else, but he isn’t a young man anymore and it will be a miracle if he can get hard again in the next week, let alone before Ted has to get up to go to work. Bare skin is about all he can manage, but he can’t stand to have anything less.
Except now Ted’s face is closed off, and he just said unless.
“Unless?” Trent prods, holding very still.
Ted’s knees come up so he can rest his elbows on them. He drags a hand over his face. Trent relaxes a fraction, because Ted looks absolutely wrecked, to even be saying what he’s about to say—whatever it is. Usually when someone’s about to kick Trent out of bed they don’t look so miserable about it. “Sassy,” Ted starts—“Rebecca’s friend, you know. We were—we sort of had a friends with benefits thing, I guess. Very 2011. I asked her out. I figured—why not. You’re the only other person I’ve been interested in since Michelle, and I knew you and me were never gonna happen.” He shoots Trent a smile—small, shy, private, Look how wrong I was, look where we are now, then looks away again, shoulders heavy. “She told me I was too much of a mess to date anyone. And, you know—with the season and everything, changing strategies, I haven’t exactly had much time to work on myself. So. I would understand if you didn’t want to go all in with me. You do what’s best for you.”
Trent stares at him for a moment, his heart breaking. Ted’s only a foot away across the ruined mess of bedsheets, and he’s been there for barely a minute, but already Trent misses him. He’s got a sprig of grey hair at his temple; Trent wants to hold his head still and kiss it. It’s a chilling thought, but he thinks there may not be anything Ted could do that would make Trent not want him anymore, or at least nothing that would make him unwilling to try.
“I’m not an expert,” he tells Ted, “but I’m fairly certain that’s what love is for.”
Ted looks up at him. His eyes are wet. Trent has wanted to give Sassy a stern talking-to since he met her, but now the urge is overpowering. He puts his laptop aside and reaches for him; Ted is already coming to him, falling into Trent’s arms at the same time as he pulls Trent into his.
They end up in the pillows. Trent puts his thumb on the crease between Ted’s eyebrows, then kisses the same spot, then the patch of grey hair. “I think love matters most when it’s work, not when it’s easy,” he murmurs. “When it’s easy, anyone can do it. When it’s work—you need someone who’s going to stick it out.”
“Trent.” Ted huffs a little, eyes still red. “You got a real way with words, you know that?”
“Yes, thank you.” Trent kisses the tears away from his eyelashes, and rubs their noses together affectionately, breathing him in. “Let me stick it out with you, Ted. I want to.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” Ted drawls, voice rough. “Yeah. Okay.”
##
Once Keeley and Rebecca receive their advance copies of the book, they agree that Ted should stay home on the day of its release—having the fans observe training might be a nice idea in theory, but in practice it’s going to allow anyone who has a bad thing to say about Ted being bisexual to walk right in the front door at Nelson Road and yell at him from the stands. Rebecca wants to hire Ted security, but he tells her he’s already got some since Trent’s camped out in his flat and the publisher insisted; Trent listens to the entire phone conversation sitting on Ted’s couch with Bono’s new autobiography. He’s left his own phone and his laptop at home, so all he’s got is a cheap, prepaid Nokia with Emily’s number in it and it’s making him itchy—Ted says, “Yeah, he’s right here,” to Rebecca, then hands the phone to Trent.
Trent takes it cautiously. Despite recent thawing, diplomatic relations between him and Ted’s boss have historically been comparable to those of North and South Korea. “Hello?” he says.
“If you break his heart,” Rebecca says imperiously, without bothering to return the greeting, “I will roast you like a pig. That man deserves the entire world.”
Trent swallows hard. “I know,” he promises. “I know he does.”
Rebecca hangs up.
The book was sent out—in abridged form, sans front matter—for advance reviews a month ago; the cover bears praise from Chris Powell and Michael Lewis, with a few quotes from his former colleagues in the Richmond press room on the flip side, Sarah Pherson and Lloyd Kratz and Marcus Adebayo.
“A heartwarming tribute to a beloved team,” Adebayo has attested. “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry—I know I did.” And from Michael Lewis—“The greatest book about being a soccer (sorry, football) fan I’ve ever read. Trent Crimm is an fresh new voice in sports writing—a veteran of the press room with a real and infectious love of the game.”
“Fresh and new are redundant,” Trent mutters to Ted, for perhaps the dozenth time since he got his first hard copy. It’s maybe the one thing he and Bernard have ever agreed on, but they got overruled. Apparently it’s sacrosanct to correct Michael Lewis.
“I know, sweetheart,” Ted assures him, not listening, and drops a kiss on his head.
The cover photo is of the team—the pitch overrun with fans and family, as Ted, at the center of it all, carried on the shoulders of his players, lifts the Premier League trophy over his head. It had been, conservatively, the best night of Trent’s life—and he’d barely had time to meet with Ted for a quick shag in the equipment closet before he had to run home clutching his steno pad and blister through the final chapter of the book, twelve hours slipping away like so much sand. Ted had let himself in the front door and shuffled past, dead on his feet, around six in the morning; Trent barely noticed, so that when he finally hit send on the email, scrubbed his hands over his face, and zombie-walked into his bedroom, he’d jumped about a foot in the air to see Ted asleep under his blankets. But—“C’mere, baby,” Ted had muttered, rolling over, and Trent went, sinking into his arms. The moment they were touching they were both suddenly wide awake and breathless with wanting for each other; they fucked slow and sweaty with most of their clothes still on, Ted keeping up a steady stream of praise into Trent’s mouth, not so much aiming to come as to just—stay close.
Trent had come anyways, of course. Ted always made sure he did.
Now—Trent hasn’t been on the internet in more than a day, Keeley’s running all his socials and bonking bigots on the head with a giant cartoon hammer (or so Trent likes to imagine), and he’s so nervous to leave the cocoon of Ted’s flat that his hands are shaking as he tries to tie his tie.
“Hey now.” Ted is suddenly there in the bedroom, warm against Trent’s back, reaching around to pull his hands gently away. “Let me do that. You’re tyin’ the Gordian knot, honey. Sorry—I only know how to do it from back here.”
Trent studies Ted’s face in the mirror. He’s frowning while he undoes the mess Trent’s made of his tie, taking it back to square one. “You don’t have to come,” Trent tells him suddenly. “These things are just—schmoozing. Fluff. I barely want to go myself—you don’t have to.”
“Don’t be silly,” Ted says, all his attention on Trent’s tie. He’s doing a truly abysmal job; Trent’s hands are steadier now, so he bats him away and does it himself. When he’s done, Ted turns him around and smooths his hands down his lapels, straightening him out. “Trent Crimm. You clean up real nice.”
“Ted—” Trent tries again.
“Nuh-uh,” Ted cuts him off. “You wrote a book and they’re throwing a whole-ass party about it. I’m going, and that’s that on that.”
“It’s going to be awful,” Trent tells him. “I’m the one who did this to us, just—you don’t have to take the punishment for it. I can handle it myself.”
Ted’s eyes are determined, the way he gets when the squad are losing a match. He looks nice in his own suit, which is perhaps the worst understatement Trent’s ever committed. If his phone weren’t full of threatening texts from Emily that say things like SHOW UP TONITE OR YOU’LL BE IN BREACH OF CONTRACT, he would toss this whole launch party over and stay in bed with Ted until the media loses interest in a few years or so. He’s been signing books in Ted’s living room all day and on top of being slightly high from all the Sharpie he has a twinge in his wrist; he’ll be expected to shake a lot of hands tonight, so that’s almost a valid medical excuse. He could make it work.
Like he can sense what he's thinking, Ted tugs on Trent’s lapel, making sure they both know he’s got a good grip. “We don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” he says, “but if you’re going, I’m going.” He smiles, teasing. “What was it you said before? Let me work on you?”
“Ah—not exactly.”
“Let me work on you, Trent Crimm,” Ted murmurs, teasing still, drawing him closer. And the words are wrong but the sentiment is right, so—what can Trent do, but kiss him, and kiss him again, and take him to the fucking launch party. And it does help, he can admit, to look across the room and see Ted looking back, to remember him saying, You. Just you, Trent Crimm—to know that even with his name on the front of the book and his heart scrawled all over the pages, he isn’t in this alone.