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Trent beelines it out of the Indian restaurant. A few steps down the pavement, he wishes he'd grabbed a handful of those fennel candies to tame the fire in his throat. His eyes are still watering from that one bite, and there's a bit of a burning sensation in his stomach.
But that's not why he left.
His head won't stop spinning, won't stop replaying his day with Ted. He feels like he’s been in overdrive all day trying to piece together a coherent portrait of Ted Lasso. Complete buffoon? Craven, two-faced egotistical American? Neither seemed to fit, and now it’s over, but those puzzle pieces are still swirling in his mind.
Trent has done profiles before; he knows what it looks like when The Boss wants to show you a certain persona. He’s shadowed dozens of bigwigs white-knuckling it through eight hours with a reporter on their shoulder. They'll pawn him off on the assistant for an hour so they can go do the real work, or they'll step behind a closed door to take a call and he'll hear the shouting they wanted him to miss.
Eight hours and Ted didn't do that. He never tried to shake Trent off. That’s not to say Ted seemed relaxed, either, but Trent has a hunch that’s because that’s just how Ted is, always: switched on, perfectly caffeinated, like he's on stage. Ted Lasso is always putting on a show, but that's different from faking it.
Trent knew coming in that he wasn’t going to be writing his boilerplate profile column, the one he can type up in about seven minutes flat. This Richmond story, this Ted Lasso debacle - it was already weird enough that he knew he’d find something interesting today.
But he didn’t expect this.
Trent scrubs a hand over his face and exhales. This is what fucking cigarettes are for, but he doesn't do that anymore. Truth be told, he doesn't know what to think. He just knows he can't stop thinking. The day's moments just keep popping back in, one thing after another that he'd already half forgotten. Ted called him a Roomba, for chrissakes. And then invited him to dinner. Not in the same breath, but still.
And back there in the restaurant, after Trent had already decided to leave, after ‘you both just meet a really cool person’ had already taken his breath away - because yes, Ted Lasso is honestly, truly delighted to interact with just about any human being you put in front of him - after that, when Trent was practically falling over himself to leave because the existence of Ted Lasso was exploding his understanding of humanity, and Ted just had to go one further and thank him, thank Trent for getting (getting!) to spend the day with him, that's when Trent finally broke. When his suspicion about who Ted Lasso really was - the suspicion he couldn’t quite believe, but also couldn’t deny after a whole day spent with the man - finally snuck past his lips.
You actually mean that, don't you?
And with that, the puzzle pieces fall into place. Trent is convinced that Ted Lasso is for real, which also means Ted Lasso must be an alien, a legit, little green googly-eyed dude from a billion light years away, or maybe just from Kansas. The thing is, Trent doesn’t believe in aliens. Didn’t.
Trent grips the cold railing hard and takes a deep breath, wills that tobacco-deprived gasp to calm him down just as well as if it were full of nicotine and death. Trent is reeling. He feels like both ends of a magnet at once, like when you hold it up to another one sideways and it can't decide whether to be attracted or repelled. He wants to run back in that restaurant and let the magnificent otherness of Ted Lasso wash over him. He wants to run away and forget the whole day and maybe then his brain will work again.
He takes another breath. Behind him, a woman on a mobile is having an animated conversation with someone named Clementine. Across the river, a black Mercedes honks. And Trent knows he's not going to run away, he’s not going to forget, and he's terrified.
This is what Trent believes: Ted Lasso is not cynical, come to cash in on his success in America by carelessly running Richmond into the ground. Neither is Ted Lasso a complete dolt, a wilfully ignorant buffoon of the highest order. Ted knows, despite his goofy grin and endless supply of bad puns, that the world is not a primary-colored cartoon dreamscape. But somehow, Ted is able to exist in this world, the real world, the same fucked-up world that Trent does, and he’s able to approach this world in an explosively different way than anyone Trent has ever met.
It's fascinating. Mesmerising. Astonishing. Trent wants to understand everything about this man called Ted Lasso who moves through the world in this unearthly way. He wants to walk up to Ted and shake his shoulders and look him in the eyes and ask ‘how do you work?’ He wants to be a fly on the wall. He wants to see Ted alone. He wants to see how Ted eats his toast. He wants to know what part of the paper Ted reads first. He wants to see how Ted looks when he dances. He wants to see how Ted looks at someone when he's in love. He wants to know what Ted looks like when he comes.
Oh.
It's a gear clicking into place or maybe a wall of water crashing over him. It's a hell of a thing, is what it is. Trent laughs, a gasp of a sound. Right, then.
It occurs to Trent that the next logical question is, ‘Well, Trent, what are you going to do about that ?’ But for now, the burning in Trent's tongue has subsided. He’s figured out the puzzle that is Ted Lasso, and the frenzy in his head has been replaced by a crystalline awe. He has a profile to write. The rest will wait for tomorrow.