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In the hushed alleyways of Richmond, two people kiss.
Her blonde hair brushes against his jaw while a lone strand of brown curls across his forehead. She tastes whiskey on his lips, and he chases the vodka on her tongue. One sip had blurred into drinks three and four, now concocting and pouring from each other’s mouths.
He pulls away first. “Wow.”
And she’s more brazen. “I’m not drunk.”
He wobbles. “I think you are. Or I am. Or I was and you are and we—am I even talking out loud?”
“You are,” she giggles and leans in. Smells his woodsy aftershave under the lust of alcohol. “No, I meant…”
He places two fingers under her chin and brings her eyes to his. “Wanted you to stop spinning before me.”
Her next breath fails to come. “You really are stupid drunk.”
“I am.” He pauses, frowning. “I’m not.”
“Ted, it’s okay. Me too.”
“No, no, no, I’m not stupid.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Because this—” he jabs his finger to his chest, then points to her—“this was smart.”
Her cheeks turn red. It’s not cold out. “It was?”
“Brilliant. Like, uh, Einstein-worthy and 1600 on the SATs.”
“What are the SATs?”
“Boring American stuff.”
“Which you aren’t,” she says.
He smiles, a little too wide, like his mouth can’t contain his words. “I’m not?”
Her hand curls around his jaw. “You’re the most fascinating man I know, Ted Lasso.”
Ted stills. She’s seen his hands shake and his worries betray him, leaving her wondering where he was, what she should do. But now, before her, he stops and looks. Takes her in. Sees her in truthful entirety, perhaps, for the first time a man ever has.
“Rebecca?”
“Yeah?”
“I’d like to kiss you again. If that’s okay.”
“Ted?”
“Yeah?”
“You don’t need to ask.”
He leans in, and she meets him there.
They don’t hear the cacophony of Greyhound cheers.
In three weeks, it becomes breaking news: the gaffer and the owner of AFC Richmond have found love somewhere between the press room and the dog track. Fans pour into their seats, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Premier League’s royal couple. #GoodJobWanker goes viral.
Ted catches Rebecca’s eye when reporters vie for his words regarding West Ham’s newest coach, finding solace in its greenery. She wears his name across her shoulders after the newest batch of jerseys arrives at the club. He runs up the stadium stairs at halftime, huffing and puffing when he reaches the owner’s box, and leans over for a good luck kiss. She throws her arms around his neck when they win forty-five minutes later.
Rupert tries to start something, demanding public outcry for workplace ethics and an immediate firing of Theodore Lasso. Gossip rags run photos of Ted walking out of Rebecca’s home, carrying no shame but a rather giddy grin. Keeley wields her own response with the help of Trent Crimm, just independent, listing out the age of every woman Rupert has been with since Rebecca.
Rupert goes quiet. Rebecca posts a selfie of her and Ted on her Instagram.
Keeley plans weekly double dates, and Roy pretends it doesn’t bring him joy. He does, after five beers, admit that they are a good-looking couple. “Rebecca does most of the heavy lifting in that sentiment,” he adds gruffly.
Ted agrees with no taste of bitterness. She laces her fingers between his.
The team calls them Mum and Dad for the sake of a joke (minus Sam. It will always be too soon, even as Rebecca and him share a final nod and parting glance). On the days of away games, they leave a seat on the bus empty for her. Sometimes, Rebecca accepts and falls asleep with her head against Ted’s shoulder. Other times, she takes her car and tries to convince Ted to come along too with her lips teasingly close to his.
He steels his jaw, mutters something about setting a good example of leadership for the team. She demurely smiles, waiting for the day he finally breaks.
“I must maintain some secrets,” he says, shoving his biscuit recipe into his back pocket.
She curls her fingers through his belt loops, pulling him closer. “Not a whole chamber's worth.”
“Touché, Hermione Granger.” He smiles. “Just this, I swear. I gotta keep you around somehow.”
“Ted, I’m never leaving,” she answers, sudden and bare. It gets quiet then, a needle poking its way through the stiff air. She waits for it to drop.
“So this,” he says and not much else, hoping an answer will appear in her irises.
“This is it.” She quiets, thinks. It’s his own agony. “If you’ll have me… if you’ll let me.”
“Rebecca,” he murmurs, and it’s so soft and gentle, she half-believes she made it up: “I want you to.”
Her lips press to his; a second, then gone. “I—”
Her next words fall flat on her tongue.
“You what?” he asks, tempering his insistence.
Her thumb smudges the corner of his mouth. “If I say it, I can’t take it back.”
“I like to think you say what you mean, you mean what you say.”
“They’re big words, Ted.”
“I think I can shoulder ‘em, baby. Look at me.” He opens up his arms, showing off his broad reach.
It makes her giggle, cracks her open and lets her feelings fall. “I love you,” she says suddenly, grinning through it, unable to keep the wall up. “There, I said it.”
He starts to smile. “No take-backsies.”
“You’re making it sound like primary school.”
“No, no,” the words rush out of him. “Never about this. Not when I love you back.”
“You do?” She doesn’t sound surprised, just—settled.
“I thought I was obvious. Keeley told me I had to calm down with the heart eyes. She said I was starting to look like the emoji.”
“I like that look.”
He leans in to kiss her, pressing her into the kitchen counter, the smell of sugar in the air.
Her hands slip over his shoulder, his sides, finding his lower back. Then—
“Ha! Got it.” She pulls out the tattered index card, grinning, reveling.
“Was this all just a long con, Oceans Eight?”
“Perhaps,” Rebecca says, sly around the edges.
She flips over the card. Her smile drops into a frown.
“Ted, all this says is love.”
He nods: “It’s the secret ingredient.”
She goes quiet. “So all this time…”
“I knew.”
The number of games left in the season begins to dwindle. Rebecca had thought they had so much time—her and Ted, to figure each other out, to see the start blur into an endless sight. Now, she leans over his shoulder as they read the latest standings on his phone, configuring how close they are to winning the whole fucking thing.
His unsigned contract sits in her desk drawer, and an unspoken worry starts to cloud the air, matching the storm brewing over the field. Rebecca presses her hand to the glass, stopping her reach as she watches him run training, wondering if he ever wishes he could take back what they started.
It’s ridiculous, she thinks. He loves her. He tells in the morning, pouring milk into her tea. And during the day, when she wants to discuss strategy and he plans dinner. And at night, between a gasp and a moan, his face pressed into her neck.
And yet it’s not. There’s Kansas, and there’s Henry, and there’s everything she hand-plucked him from in selfish duplicity.
“He’s not going to leave,” Keeley says one evening, swirling red wine around her glass.
“Richmond is not his home,” Rebecca replies, untying her fear.
“Maybe it’s not,” Keeley says. “But you are.”
Still, she waits and paces around her office: like the world is punishing her, or maybe she wants to punish herself. She had pushed him to be here, to win, to beat Rupert. Now she watches him drop off Henry at the airport, catching an errant tear on his cheek with the swipe of her thumb.
“Woah, woah, woah,” Ted says, opening the door without a knock. “You could make a diamond with that much pressure.”
He charms her; she half-smiles and half-contemplates. His arms wind around her easily, pulling her into a kiss. He’ll never let her go unless she tells him to. It scares her, faintly, like the ghost of a haunted past. She had stayed before, stayed until her ex-husband didn’t even care about the Daily Mail's front page.
She’s not Rupert, and neither is Ted. Yet, the burden carries and aches.
She pulls him in closer.
He notices. “What’s wrong, big fry?"
“Big?” she asks, finding the lithe tease.
“You’re no small fry.” He laughs brightly. Rebecca wonders when his southern accent and isms became so lovely to her.
“But really,” Ted then says, because he knows. He always does. “Are you okay?”
She can’t hide anything from him, not anymore. “I have your contract.”
A grin captures his face. “Well, give it here then! I’ll scribble out the old Hancock himself.”
She grabs onto his hand. Close, tangible. “Ted.”
“I know, I know. You’re going to say I should get a lawyer to give it a Elle Woods’ look over. But listen darlin’, I trust you.”
“Are you sure?”
“That I trust you? Rebecca, I’ve told ya. You’re my number one.”
“But what about Henry?”
“I guess I should’a put an asterisk there then. He’s at the tippity top too, but y’know, in a different type of way.”
“Exactly what I mean.”
Ted looks at her, his eyebrows working. “You’re important to me, and Henry’s important to me. Does that… mean something?”
“It means,” she pauses. “Oh fuck, Ted. Do I have to say it?”
“Honey, I think you do because I’m as lost as a cow in a corn maze.”
“Do you really want to keep coaching here?” she asks finally.
“Of course I do. I love coaching.”
Rebecca moves behind her desk, needing the space. “Or are you just staying for me?”
“Well I love you, so… yes?” He rubs his jaw in his hand. “Is that the wrong answer?
“No, it’s entirely right,” she sighs. “I’m just scared that if you stay for me, you’ll resent me.”
“Rebecca, I—why would I resent you?”
“Because Henry’s in Kansas. Your mother is in Kansas. Your whole life, your life before me and what I did, it’s so far from here.”
He lets out a heavy breath. “Rebecca, those few months before you called me to join the team, I barely had a life. I was goin’ through the motions. Michelle became distant. Yes, I had Henry, and I’ll always love the days I’m with him and see him, but it wasn’t perfect. You know it wasn’t. If anything, you gave me a lifeline.”
“Ted—”
“What I have here—you, Beard, Roy, Keeley, the team—that’s a family too.” He moves closer to her, sliding his hand down her elbow to her wrist. “This is the life I want.”
She nods and blinks back tears she didn’t know were there. “Are you sure?”
“It’s us,” Ted says in stand-still truth. “I’ve been sure for years.”
He hasn’t moved in, and she doesn’t think to ask. Sure, he stays at her home for days in a row, but she enjoys how they are, that they can give each other the occasional space needed. Henry had been accepting of his father’s new relationship, throwing his arms around Rebecca’s waist the next time he came to England; still, she wanted Henry to have his own place with Ted, and his flat was the main part of that. She knows Ted appreciates it, letting their relationship grow at its own pace.
It’s easy, the two of them, even when Rebecca expects it to be hard. They talk things out and rarely ever fight. He makes her biscuits and visits her in her office as if he didn’t just see her hours before, stretched out in his bed. He compliments her outfits and smiles against the blush on her cheek. He grabs her hand when Rupert enters the dog track and cuts down Rupert’s glances of ire with an earned grin.
Still, selfishly, she likes it when it’s Sunday, and she finds him in her bathroom, a towel around his waist as he brushes his teeth. She looks at herself in the mirror and sees faint marks left by his impatient lips and mustache from the night before.
He runs his thumb over her wrist when she moves to his side, reaching for her face wash. He watches her, smiling through the toothpaste. It makes her laugh, his morning simplicities.
Standing together, their shoulders are almost the same height.
She feels his chest press into her back.
“So unlike how y’all do your sports here, this one is all about the hands,” he says.
His hands fall over hers as she grips the basketball.
“Well, if it involves your hands, I’m in,” she replies.
“Why, Ms. Welton, are you flirting with me?” She can hear his smile.
“I think I am, Coach Lasso.”
“I dig it.”
She laughs.
“I should have hired you to coach basketball,” she says.
“In another life,” he replies, “I’d be the owner of a basketball team in America, and I’d hire you to coach.”
“So I could capsize the team?”
“Nah,” he says, taking a step back so she can take a shot. “Because you’re tall.”
She shakes her head with a smile, then moves forward to shoot the ball. She misses—of course, she notes in her head—but Ted cheers like she made a buzzer-beater.
They end the season with a 2-1 win over Man City. The team rushes onto the field, laughing and cheering and jumping into each other’s arms. They don't win the league, but no one could ever guess.
They actually came in fifth.
West Ham landed at sixth.
But Rebecca doesn’t really think about it. Instead, she runs down from the owner’s box, Keeley on her heels, yelling, “Oi, be careful!”
Rebecca can’t hear her, though, not when she sees Ted. The whole stadium is cheering his name, but he can only look at her. When she reaches him, he doesn’t say anything, just pulls her into an embrace. He lifts her off the ground, spins her around. It’s over the top, like the ending to one of Ted’s favorite Meg Ryan movies.
“We won,” he says, his hand finding her cheek.
“We did,” she says and leans it.
Their kiss ends up on the front page of The Sun.
Keeley gets it framed.