Archive of Our Own

webster’s dictionary defines love as…

n. strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties; attraction based on sexual desires: affection and tenderness felt by lovers; affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests.

n. a score of zero (as in tennis)

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ROUND ONE
Kent (unseeded) v. De Maat (wild card)

Rising with the sun is just another shit stipulation of his career, but rising with the sun, accompanied by an a cappella rendition of “Octopus Garden,” Ringo Starr’s record scratch against the ears of the world? That is an abomination Roy Kent will not let stand.

Except standing might be a bitch this morning. 

He stretches beneath the duvet and his left knee pops as if firing off a warning shot. “Fuck you, too,” he growls at his traitorous body and defiantly swings his legs out of bed, off to chase the early songbird out of the house with a racket.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ted Lasso is not the only person singing in his kitchen. Phoebe is sitting at the table with a coloring book open, but she’s too distracted watching Ted shuffle around the kitchen to focus on her magenta ocean scene. An exceedingly unhelpful note is tacked to the fridge: “Surgery. Good luck today.” The Kent family is deathly allergic to exclamation points, but his sister claims she always adds a smiley face; it’s just interactive.

The smiley face arrives by way of Phoebe, who beams upon spying him scowling at Ted from the kitchen archway. “Uncle Roy, Coach Lasso made waffles!”

Waffles explain why the kitchen smells like real human food and not the chalky, artificial stink of protein powders. Phoebe has half a waffle on her plate, missing one whipped cream eye and the left side of its strawberry smile. At the place across from her, Ted has served up a glass of gloopy green shit right next to a second glass of gloopy white shit, no strawberries smiles to be seen.

Why can’t he have a fucking waffle then? It’s not like one measly waffle, hold the whipped cream, is what will cost him Wimbledon.

Roy doesn’t say as much, obviously. He narrows his eyes at Ted and the waffle maker of nebulous origin (though he wouldn’t put it past the bastard to have flown it across the pond) and asks the all important question, “How the fuck did you get in my house?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Phoebe rummaging through her knapsack in search of the little pink notebook where she records the swear tally. Ted doesn’t tut him for his language—fuck, how that ship has sailed and Roy paid the on-court fines to prove it—but he does shrug with infuriating nonchalance.

“Your sister gave me a key.”

His eyebrows rise. “My sister gave you her key?”

“Nah, I think she had a copy made,” Ted says, confirming Roy’s worst nightmare. For a woman who earns her living excavating the most intimate parts of a person, his sister has shockingly little respect for privacy, his specifically. She and Ted have that in common. “Now, go drink your goo,” he calls over his shoulder while happily raiding Roy’s fridge. “Coach has got you hitting at ten with this great kid from Mexico. Dani Rojas—sounds kinda like a superhero’s alter ego, huh? Dani Rojas, Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne…”

Roy halts halfway to the table. “What the fuck happened to McAdoo?”

“He had to pull out of the tournament.” Ted sighs, his regret genuine. 

And that right there is another thing Roy has yet to get used to: how his coach unironically roots for every player on the tour—better known as the sworn enemies of the man who pays him—to do their darnedest. He’s like a walking participation trophy.

Ted will never coach him into cheering for the likes of the peacocking Frenchman, Richard Montlaur, or the Dutch war machine, Jan Maas, but Roy would have been sorry to hear about McAdoo even before teaming up with Coach Sesame Street. He and Isaac have been hitting partners since Isaac came up from the juniors and Roy has watched him rise in the rankings on both the national and world stages. His shoulder had been giving him trouble throughout his run at the French Open and it ultimately cost him the semi-final, which he lost in a tight four-setter to Jamie fucking Tartt. Of course, Tartt trumpeted how he had demolished Isaac to anyone who waved a microphone in his face, so Roy had been counting on him to arrive in London out for blood.

If Roy cannot crush Jamie Tartt, another Brit must.

“Is Hughes still in?” Roy asks as he takes his seat across from Phoebe and prepares to brave the two glasses in front of him. White shit first, then green for a chaser.

Ted hums another few faint notes of Ringo while he racks his brain. “I think so.”

“Alright, Phoebe”—Roy levels her a serious look—“you are going to use all your wishes and I mean every shooting star, every four-leaf clover, every lucky penny, on Colin Hughes winning.”

“Don’t want to save any of those wishes for yourself there, Roy?” Ted slides into the seat between him and Phoebe and sets down a mountainous stack of waffles, topped with a hefty whipped cream peak. Roy hates him. Just not nearly as much as he hates Jamie Tartt.

If hating Jamie Tartt were a professional sport, Roy Kent would be the greatest ever to play the game. The little prima donna is a world-class showboat, cocky enough to crow, a poor sportsman, and just about everything else Roy despises in a competitor. Needless to say, the British public loves him.

Rather than answering Ted’s question and inviting a meandering anecdote concerning barbeque sauce or the Kansas City Chiefs, Roy tunes the TV to BBC Sport, where the Wimbledon coverage is well underway.

“ …but the big question on everyone’s minds here in London: will this be the year the curse of Centre Court finally ends? Will a British man bring home the trophy for the first time since 1936? Even with the unfortunate withdrawal of Isaac McAdoo late last night, we still have two players seeded in the top twenty and let’s not forget—”

In high-definition, three-time Wimbledon loser George Cartrick sneers. “Don’t say Roy Kent.”

“Fucking hypocrite,” Roy murmurs. Phoebe duly notes another tally.

“You’re counting him out already, George?” Murray baits.

“Of course I am. Roy Kent is a geriatric dinosaur and a danger to every person on The Grounds,” Cartrick decries. Roy clenches his jaw and debates chucking the glass of green shit at the screen. “You can forget about Hughes, too. Tartt is our only hope. Tartt and—can’t believe I’m about to say this—Keeley Jones.”

On that point, the commentators find common ground. Murray assents, “Yes, on the women’s side of the tournament, Jones has become a favorite after her absolutely dominating performance in the Eastbourne International last month.”

The coverage transitions to video highlights of Keeley’s finals match in East Sussex, which she won on a godly backhand taken on the run, undoubtedly the work of Rebecca Welton’s intensive training. Keeley’s career renaissance has really been a thing to behold. Even as his interest in the tennis world has waned, Roy finds himself again and again glued to his couch whenever Keeley Jones has a racket in her hand. It’s purely professional. Not every day you see a woman everyone counted out by twenty-three hitting her stride as she approaches thirty, proving the prickish critics wrong with one wicked forehand slice after another.

“She seems nice,” Ted remarks, watching the on-screen Keeley accept a silver trophy bowl with a golden smile. “You two friends?”

“No,” Roy grunts. In fact, he hasn’t spoken to Keeley in six years. He imagines it will stay that way.

“Standing in the way of the UK’s dreams of a championship sweep is, of course, the man who needs no first name nor an introduction—”

Roy shuts off the TV and slugs back a quarter of the white goop, wincing as it slithers down his throat. Over the rim of the glass, he catches Ted eying him attentively. Lasso may act the part of a simple small-town man, but he’s shrewder than Roy gave him credit for in the beginning and he’s only gotten better at reading Roy’s moods the longer he has spent training him. He knows Roy is bloody terrified of what tomorrow will bring. It’s the beginning of the end.

And it very well may be the end of the end, too.

Roy would love to say his career’s downhill slide began at this year’s first major, the 2020 Australian Open, where he entered the tournament as a wild card and down a coach.

The Rod Laver Arena had become something of a second home to him. To the roar of ten thousand people bellowing his name, Roy lifted his first Grand Slam trophy as an eighteen-year-old lightning rod who went on to prove lightning did strike the same place—or, in this case, person—twice, and then a third time, and then a fourth time after that. He appeared in eight Australian Open finals in ten years, winning four. The mayor of Melbourne awarded him a key to the fucking city.

Things took a dip—a few hellish five-set exits in the quarters, followed by a handful of frustrating oustings in third and fourth rounds, and then the two years missed because of a knee surgery—but Roy came into the 2020 tournament prepared. This would be his comeback story. This would be the year he—

Got killed by Jamie Tartt in the second round.

Killed is euphemistic. He had been annihilated. The crowd would have heard the word “love” less had they been there to see a Beatles tribute band. Yet somehow, the worst of it hadn’t been the score. It had been Tartt, acting as if he was doing the sport of tennis a favor by putting down their once beloved, now decrepit dog.

Every winner he hit, he preened. Each ace he served, he threw his arms up towards the crowds—were they not entertained? And after Roy double-faulted a serve, the little shit fucking applauded.

Then, the last straw. Late in the third set, Jamie was up five games to love and readying to serve out the match. As they passed each other at the net, he smirked at Roy, winked, and whispered, for their ears only, “Don’t forget to invite me to your retirement party, grandad.”

Roy swears he had never blacked out from anger before that moment, but one minute he had his hand clenched around his racket and in the next he had a fistful of Jamie’s sweaty shirt. The crowd fucking lost it. The umpire had to climb down from his chair, threatening a default, and all the while, Jamie was grinning at him like he had gotten exactly what he wanted.

The fallout was swift and brutal. Lost the match, lost his Adidas sponsorship, lost his last shred of goodwill with the tennis punditry. The demands he retire in disgrace poured in from all corners of the globe, but the loudest cries came from inside of the house. The Sun ran a headline declaring him an embarrassment to British tennis and, within the folds, mused if Roy Kent were actually one of the all-time greats, why had he never won Wimbledon?

Here’s the truth of it then: his career had been in decline long before that disastrous Australian Open. Shocking, he fucking knows.

It might have been the hard fall he took at the 2017 US Open that shot his left knee to hell and kept him out of the 2018 season entirely. He could have come back in 2019, so the BBC Sport commentators argued with blue faces, but Roy had been plagued by nightmares of his knee giving out for good. The anxiety crippled him and his refusal to play cost him his coaching team.

Sure, it might have been the knee, but he had been slowing down long before the fall. It had been years since he watched back tapes of his performances on the court and saw the player crowds once serenaded with, “He’s here, he’s there, he’s every-fucking-where.” He looks across the court now, at versions of his younger self but taller, leaner, stronger, and doesn’t feel the fiery need to dominate. Roy only feels a bone-deep exhaustion.

Jamie Tartt is not the tip of the iceberg; he’s the giant that scraped a hole in the Titanic and Roy’s the fool who thought himself unsinkable.

He had told himself he had more time. In 2008, when he lost the gold medal at the Beijing Olympics and the Wimbledon final in the span of a single month. In 2012, when he won the gold in London, but again lost the final to Zava in straight sets. He hasn’t reached the final since, yet he held out hope like a fucking idiot and now the clock has run down.

“No one wants you,” said his agent, stating the bloody obvious, once he returned from Melbourne. 

No one, it would seem, except a coach in America named Ted Lasso. Once upon a time, Lasso had been a promising young junior who went as far as the final in the US Open boys’ tournament before mysteriously calling it quits at the starting line of his professional career. He ended up coaching in his home state, some depressing place called Kansas, and transformed a local university’s tennis program to one of national-caliber in three years. It appeared he was craving a new challenge.

“No,” Roy had said. The last thing he had left to lose was his dignity.

A few days later, his PR representative sent him the rough draft of a farewell speech.

He read the first two words, slammed the laptop shut, tossed it from a third-story window, and took his niece out for ice cream. Over cones of chocolate-vanilla swirl, he asked Phoebe, “What would you think if I stopped playing tennis?”

“I think you could play more football with me,” she answered without hesitation. Then and now, all Phoebe cares about is AFC Richmond, their shit local club with a shittier record. He should know; he holds season tickets, at the request of her puppy-dog eyes. Even with the tantalizing prospect of more time spent on headers and less on backhands, she insisted, “But you can’t stop yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because you told me I get to go to all your Wimbledon matches this year, remember?”

He had promised her so, back when he believed the home crowd would welcome him home on Centre Court with a standing ovation. How would Phoebe feel having to listen to her uncle booed through a single three-set match he lost?

“You really want to go to every match?” Roy asked.

Phoebe gave him a look she had picked up from her mother, wordlessly asking why she was forced to suffer idiots. “Duh.”

After dropping Phoebe off, he called his agent on the drive home and asked him to see if Coach Ted Lasso still wanted to make an ass out of them both. Dignity was for pricks anyway. He could withstand working with a mustachioed goober from America for a few months, on behalf of Phoebe. On behalf of his sister, once dragged to every match, tournament, and press event during his junior seasons. On behalf of his grandad. On behalf of the kids in Liverpool, or Manchester, or South London, the ones who walk by rundown courts every day and just see another world they’ve been locked out of. Those kids have been kept waiting a long time, but this is finally the year.

This will be the year Roy Kent retires.

But he’ll damned if he doesn’t give Wimbledon one last fucking try.

Rojas is already warming up on the practice court when Roy and Ted arrive at The Grounds. Though Roy has never faced him in a tournament, he has seen Dani play. He is not the battle ax Isaac McAdoo is, but rather a blisteringly-fast, exhaustively-energetic offensive player who has given Tartt a run for his money on several memorable occasions. An injury sent him out early from the US Open in 2019 and has kept him off the tour until now. To watch him dash around the court today, basking in the burning July sun and killing every volley popped his way, you’d never know it.

No one is watching him, but a sizable crowd has flocked to the practice court next door. Outdoor hitting practices are open to ticket holders (to his own immense displeasure) and the public takes full advantage. Roy would assume it’s Tartt on the other court, soaking in the crowd’s blind adoration, but he’s scheduled to play his first match within the hour.

He chances a peek through a sparse patch in the crowd and glimpses Rebecca Welton standing by the net, her expression inscrutable behind a pair of large, opaque sunglasses. Her head is following balls spearing past the net via a machine and then observing those same balls slam back over, hitting down the left alley line every time. A Welton classic, the greatest gift a protege could ask for.

A blur of blonde hair, done up in a whip of a high ponytail, flashes before his eyes, but Roy turns away. He’s wasted enough time.

Ted and Beard—first name redacted, the trainer who came packaged with Lasso as a two-for-one deal, Roy’s third favorite person ranked only behind Phoebe and his sister—are chatting with Rojas as Roy finally makes his way onto the court. Rojas spots him immediately and bounds over, his smile exuberant. “Roy Kent!” Rojas infuses his name with an awe Roy has not heard in a long time. “It is an honor to train with you today!”

Fucking hell, the kid actually means it. Rojas clasps Roy’s reluctant hand between both of his and shakes reverently. “Alright,” Roy says, extracting his hand, discomfort roiling beneath his skin. “Let’s get this fucking over with.”

“Yes, let us get all the bad shots out now, so we do not make them in the tournament!” Rojas raises his racket in the air, skimming the cloudless blue sky. Jogging backwards to his side of the court, he declares in a joyous cry, “Tennis is life!”

“Jesus Christ,” Roy exhales. His knee twinges in envy at how Rojas stretches with ease behind the baseline. What the fuck am I even doing here, he asks himself while taking his own baseline position, racket slippery in his sweating hands.

The serve is—

A crack.

—gone. 

Roy blinks and the ball has whizzed past him, colliding with the back fence. He hears both Ted and Beard whistling through their teeth. No wonder they call Rojas an ace: his first serves are no fucking joke.

“Again?” Dani calls cheerfully.

Roy groans, the noise pulled from deep within his chest, but grits his teeth and nods. Yes, again. It speaks to a question he has never been able to answer: do sports breed masochists or did masochists invent sports?

They settle into something of a rhythm over the next hour and Roy begins to see the logic in Ted arranging for Rojas as a replacement partner over a player like Hughes or Bumbercatch. Rojas pushes his upper limits, but, much like Roy, he favors the leg that did not almost cost him his career. They’re both playing at seventy-five percent rather than a hundred. 

Roy isn’t so sure he has the full hundred left in him.

But when Rojas tips a ball over the net, the kind of drop shot most players have no hope in heaven or hell of returning, Roy lets instinct jump in the driver’s seat and dives for it. He gets his racket under the ball just as it’s coming down for the second bounce, ignoring how his knees—plural—are screaming, and clips it over the net, sending it skidding past Dani’s reach. He falls back on his ass, breathing ragged. Well then.

A lone wolf whistle sings through the air. 

Roy cranes his neck toward the source of the sound. In the no man’s land between the two practice courts, Keeley Jones is appraising him with keen eyes. “Looking good!” she shouts to him, and Roy is made painfully aware he is covered in grass stains and drenched in three layers of sweat.

Keeley is a sweaty mess, too. Her ponytail is sticking to the back of her neck and there are noticeable dark patches around the collar and pits of her hot pink tennis dress. She’ll have to change into the mandatory tennis whites for her match on Centre Court tonight, but in this moment, she looks wholly herself, which obviously means bloody fucking gorgeous.

Rebecca whispers something in her ear, sending them both into a fit of giggles. Five years overlapping on the tour together, Roy never saw Rebecca Welton laugh once, let alone giggle like girls did over a schoolyard crush. They start off before Roy manages to peel himself off the grass, but he watches them go long enough to see Keeley turn around to get one last look at him. 

“Well then,” Roy says aloud, almost amazed. He snatches up his racket, adjusts his grip, and signals with a nod to Rojas. “Again.”

What he remembers of his first time playing on Centre Court: nearly shitting his pants in the locker room. Then, the vacuous silence of the tunnel before he made his entrance. The crunch of the grass beneath his trainers. Chalk dust. Blood pounding in his ears. A missed forehand. A bad slice. Second serve. Shaking the hand of a man ten years his senior, about to throw up, or cry, or both. Discovering the only thing more exhausting than losing is winning.

It had been his first time in the main draw of a major and Roy ended up going out in the Round of Sixteen, but his performance cemented his reputation for the decade to come.

The world hadn’t seen a pimply teenage prick, awkward and itchy in a white polo he despised, biting his inner cheek hard enough to break the skin. They saw a brazen competitor who defended shots fired at him like a brick wall and ran down every ball with the relentless determination of a hunting dog. He growled at the shots he missed. He didn’t smile for any point he won. He was going to save British tennis.

No one thinks that of the Roy Kent entering Centre Court today.

The applause he receives is polite but unenthusiastic, though only someone who has heard every flavor of support in this stadium would be able to tell. Roy finds he preferred the impassioned frustration he received in Wimbledons past to this cool indifference. The home crowd is happy to be here eating strawberries and creme and getting day drunk on Pimm’s, but unhappy they’ve paid so much to see a fossil who should have retired himself to a museum by now. Would they feel better or worse knowing the championship board only scheduled his first match on Centre Court because it would have been poor form not to?

This may very well be the last time we see Kent on Centre Court, a voice—dead-ringer for three-time Wimbledon champion Chris Evert—whispers in his inner-ear.

Or any court, fellow three-time champion John McEnroe chimes in. He’s never gone out in the first round before, but there’s a first time for everything. De Maat’s not gonna just let him have this because it might be his last tournament.

De Maat has the jittery hands of someone who shat themself fifteen minutes ago and might shit themself again in the next ten. Rite of passage. This may be the sole Centre Court appearance of his career, but Roy is severely lacking in magic words that might allow him to enjoy it. He’s certainly not having a ball.

It’s embarrassing how sick he feels at the thought of losing here. He glances at his player’s box, where Phoebe is bouncing in her seat, eager for the match to start already, and his stomach flips. This is not Phoebe’s first Wimbledon, but it will be the first she remembers with any sort of clarity and her memory can’t be of him bowing out in the first round.

The coin toss lands in De Maat’s favor, the first serve his. A hush falls over the stadium, the held breath before the match truly begins. The score, broadcasted on a dozen big screens around the court, is 0-0 on all counts.

Exactly as Roy likes it.

Love-all is the beauty of tennis. A game is won, but then the score resets back to zero and the fight begins again. Four points to win a game, six games to win a set, three sets to win the match in a best of five. You’re not beating a clock, or running it down, or attempting to stop it keeping time. You’re building points, games, sets, from nothing, everything always up for grabs, doesn’t matter whether you’re up or down two sets to none. It’s a sport of infinite chances, if you’re willing to put up a fight for them.

Does he still have it in him, Chris? —We’re about to find out.

Love-fucking-all.

For most players, a poor showing at the post-match press conference is cause for embarrassment. Roy considers it a reason to pop champagne.

Eight journalists have elected to slum it, but most are having hushed side conversations amongst themselves. The names Tartt and Jones float above the murmur. Roy presses his lips together hard and scopes the room for anyone interested in asking him a stupid question. Just his luck, the only person paying him any attention is Trent Crimm. He has his pen raised like a primary school arse and Roy stares at him, unblinking, for a full minute before indicating he can have his turn.

“Thank you.” Trent smiles, sarcastic yet subtle, a prick to the last. “Congratulations on your win today.”

If Trent wants some token of appreciation for not sounding surprised Roy won, he is shit out of luck. Roy leans back in his chair, stifling a yawn.

“Many people weren’t expecting to see you here at Wimbledon,” Trent continues unfazed, “and there are rumors you’re planning on retiring after the tournament.”

Roy tilts his head. “Is there a fucking question here?”

Trent raises a single curious eyebrow. “Well, are you retiring?”

At the back, Ted is wedged between two photographers, his encouraging smile at home amongst the bright camera flashes. The other conversations peter off. Everyone is now waiting to hear how Roy Kent addresses the hairy elephant in the room, as if they haven’t been attempting to craft the answer for him over the last six months.

Leaning into the microphone, his glare fixed on Crimm, Roy answers, “Ask me after the final.”

A handful of the other fucks try grabbing his attention, but Roy has cleared the bare minimum’s low bar and is done with the circus for today. He leaves the room to a stunning burst of camera flashes and shouted follow-ups, already predicting the digital headlines: Kent Refuses to Say “Retire.”

Delusional Kent thinks something short of a miracle will get him into the final.

Speaking of delusional, Ted is keeping pace with him through the back halls of Centre Court, yammering on about something to do with Ms. Welton and a cocktail reception.

“The fuck are you on about?”

“The Rebecca Welton invited us to her first round reception,” Ted says, a thrill in his voice. “So, I was thinking you pick me up around 8—”

“No.”

“Well, I haven’t gotten that quick rejection since Mallory Munch told me she didn’t want to go to the Evel Knievel Museum with me in seventh grade.” Ted frowns thoughtfully, scratching his chin. “Evel Knievel was—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Roy shakes his head in exasperation and ups his pace to triple time. All he wants to do is go home, sleep off the match, and prepare to be run into the ground by Dani Rojas tomorrow morning. He is not forgoing his night of solitude to attend a Welton reception, sure to be teeming with rich assholes who believe they’re owed free booze, Nike swag, and his precious time.

No fucking way.

Roy has to hand it to Rebecca Welton: she knows how to pick a venue. 

The riverfront bar is a sophisticated box of shimmering glass atop one of the city’s tallest towers, affording a stunning panorama of the London skyline at twilight. Roy would better appreciate the view with a scotch in hand, but the waiter has fucked off and he refuses to wade through the throngs of tipsy people chomping at the bit to discuss his imminent retirement, all for a go at an open but packed bar.

Among her many other talents, Rebecca is a superlative collector of favors, Roy owing her several, and, for reasons that elude him, she chose to cash in one tonight to guarantee his attendance. His small act of revenge is letting Lasso loose on the room, though he suspects Ted would have shown up with or without him, what with it being a free audience for his arsenal of tennis-based puns.

Ted is parked at the bar, entertaining the young Nigerian up-and-comer, Sam Obisanya, and bewildering Jan Maas; count that as another reason Roy will not go order his own drink. His eyes track Rebecca as she accepts a top off to her champagne and resumes her hostess circuit. On her way to charm billionaire Edwin Akufo, she says a brief hello to Colin Hughes, relieved to be celebrating a victory after a five-set fight yesterday, and Richard Montlaur, the recent French Open champion who Roy may be facing in the bracket sooner rather than later. The place is brimming with viers and challengers, some members of the old guard, on the tour as long as Roy has been, but many more new and hungry, nervous and afraid of letting those raw nerves show.

Watching them as they pretend to enjoy gin and the hot air of billionaires, Roy realizes this is likely the last time he’ll brush elbows with most of these players. He’ll be spending the next week—two, if the forecast calls for a miracle—racking up lasts. Last first round at Wimbledon. Last pointless reception. Last champagne toast with someone he hopes to beat tomorrow. He catches Thierry Zoreaux’s eye across the room and nods at him, wishing he had a glass to raise. Two days from now, one of them will be leaving Centre Court cursing the other’s name.

The bar’s private elevator dings, announcing a late arrival. The doors slide open and in steps the man of the hour, even though the man in question does not believe in time. A last Roy will not miss: having to watch everyone falling over their asses because Zava has graced them with his presence.

Zava, entourage flanking him, opens his arms wide, as if inviting the whole party to bring it in for a group hug. A sprinkling of applause ripples across the room—nothing from their fellow players, who have some fucking self-respect—but Zava presses a gratified hand to his heart like he’s received a stand ovation.

Missing scotch aside, there is not enough alcohol in the city of London for Roy to put up with this shit. He ducks out to the rooftop deck, blessedly empty, and settles at the balcony’s edge, breathing out through his nose. The Thames churns far below, dark under the deepening blue sky, golden hour come and gone. Fuck, he just wants to be shut up at home.

“Oi, party pooper!” Her voice carries, loud enough to echo, and sets his stomach churning as fast as the river. Keeley is kind enough to have brought out two glasses of champagne, handing one off to him as she joins him at the ledge. First indulging in a strong sip, she waves her glass back in the direction of the party they’ve both left and says, “You fucked off just when the guest of honor showed up.”

“What, that prick?” Roy shoots Zava, a towering giraffe amongst gazelles, a bristling side eye through the glass wall.

“Oh, you didn’t get the memo this is actually a surprise party for him?” Keeley asks. A small, mischievous smirk tugs at her lips.

Roy works his jaw, staving off a smile. “Must have missed it when I was being forced to show up.”

“Yeah, I heard you need to be threatened with a good time.” Keeley angles her body into his, her eyes searching his face, and Roy has to fight against two diametrically-opposed urges: back away or fall in closer. He stays still, trapped, like her gaze has pinned him in place. “Can I ask you something?”

“Can’t stop you,” Roy says, forcing nonchalance. So much to do with Keeley is out of his control.

“Why don’t you like me?”

“What—” His hold on his glass slips and a sip of champagne crests over the lip, splashing onto his jacket cuff. “What do you mean why don’t I like you?”

“It’s a pretty easy question, man.” Keeley shrugs and one of her dress’s silk straps falls an inch down her bare shoulder.

Swallowing around a dry mouth, Roy attempts to deflect. “It’s ridiculous, is what it is.”

Keeley scoffs. “Ridiculous is how we’re at all the same tournaments, attend all the same boring events, and you never talk to me. Not a, hey, Keeley, heard you fucking smashed your match, or hey, Keeley, nice hair clip.”

“It’s a butterfly,” he observes, the delicate golden wings reflecting the glow off the strands of lights tangled in the potted trees’ branches.

“You know, I once flicked a cherry tomato at you on purpose during one of Kate Middleton’s charity dinner and you didn’t even say, ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’” Keeley says, in a good imitation of him to be fair. She edges another inch closer, her arm brushing his on the ledge, demanding his undivided attention. As if she had anything less. “So, why don’t you like me?”

Roy drains his champagne in one go, his mind forcibly replaying the cherry tomato incident. Hard to forget, given how it hit him square between the eyes and bounced into his salad. He knew the projectile launch had been Keeley’s doing, but beside her, Jamie Tartt was snickering like a schoolboy and Roy made the very mature decision to eat the tomato as if it had always been on his plate. Rather that than give Tartt the satisfaction of his frustration.

“Does everyone have to like you?” he asks, allowing himself a bit of frustration now.

“‘Course they do. I’m lovable as shit,” she declares. Coming from anyone else, he’d find such bravado unbearable, but coming from her, Roy only hears it for what it is: the truth. She is lovable as shit and right to know it. Bloody persistent, too, as she repeats for the third time, “Why don’t you like me?”

They stare openly at each other, barely a breath of space between them. Slips of soft conversation drift from the bar and the sounds of traffic float up from the street below, but it has all muted to a static hum in his ears, not unlike the stadium noise when he is in the middle of a match, where nothing matters but the person on the other side of the net and who has the ball in their court.

“I don’t…” Roy considers her butterfly clip, a piece of hair falling free of it, and the overloaded charm bracelet on her wrist, jingling lightly as she twists her flute’s stem between two fingers, and the way she has her bottom lip folded between her teeth, and the soft, curious way she’s looking at him, like she genuinely cares what she may have done to earn Roy Kent’s bad opinion. “…not like you.”

“Ringing endorsement,” she says quietly. Her knuckles skim the back of his hand.

“Hey, Keeley, you totally abandoned me with—”

Roy briefly entertains leaping off the balcony and praying for a dumpster to break his fall. Even a long, painful death seems preferable to facing Jamie fucking Tartt and his read on the moment he has so thoroughly thrashed.

Jamie is blinking rapidly, standing gobsmacked with his back to the party. Roy can still see Zava through the glass, over Jamie’s right shoulder, and how he dwarfs him even from such a warped vantage point is an unwelcome reminder of how young Jamie is. Twenty-three, and an unimpeachable idiot, and looking a bit heartbroken at having found his ex-girlfriend seemingly about to kiss Roy Kent.

Only now, Roy is not as sure Keeley is Jamie’s ex-girlfriend, emphasis on the past tense. They’ve come to this reception together, if Jamie’s accusation Keeley abandoned him holds any weight. The tabloids reported on their break-up over a year ago, but what has The Sun ever known?

A cackling laugh escapes through the door Jamie left open and snaps him out of his stunned state. “Didn’t expect to see you here, Roy,” he says, his cockishness recovered in record time. “The old folk’s home let you out this late?”

“And isn’t it past your bedtime?” Roy shoots back.

“Boys,” Keeley sighs, “can’t you play nice?”

“He started it,” Jamie contends with an obnoxious pout.

Roy squints, for once more mystified than aggravated at something spewed from Tartt’s mouth. “When?”

Before Jamie has the chance to cobble together a lie, a piercing crash sounds from inside. Their heads snap towards the noise simultaneously. A tray once loaded with drinks has shattered on the floor, now a muddle of jigsawed glass and expensive liquor. The mortified waiter is attempting to steer everyone clear of the wreckage, but one man would rather not heed the warnings. Instead, he’s working the crowd, apologizing for the mess, though not like he means it.

“Fuck’s sake,” Jamie mutters, shamefaced like the man inside should be. The connection crystalizes. James Tartt, father and notoriously profane coach, has moved on from offering insincere apologies and is now making excuses to Rebecca, her mask of politeness transparent. Even Zava, incapable of reading a room, is keeping his distance.

“C’mon, babe”—Keeley pushes off the ledge and loops her arm through Jamie’s—“I’ve got you.”

Roy glances away, lifting his drink to his lips to find it empty.

“We’ll talk again, yeah?” Keeley, one high heel inside and one still planted on the deck, is looking at him expectantly and, because Roy is not a fucking child, he nods in answer. She smiles, but it’s distracted. Her back turns, the butterfly clip catching the light a final time, a golden wink of a goodbye. Blink and you’ll miss it. The door to the deck sinks shut behind her, leaving Roy alone again.

As he had wanted.

|||

ROUND TWO
Kent (unseeded) v. Zoreaux (26)

“Theirry Zoreaux, the Canadian Savior—now there’s a name,” Ted marvels while they wait on Dani to arrive for another morning practice session. In the distance, a burst of applause erupts from Centre Court where the second round match-up between Jamie Tartt and Moe Bumbercatch is in full swing. Each cheer is a fresh stab at Roy’s foul mood. Ted is, naturally, unaffected. “Why’s he called that again?”

Beard removes his sunglasses, the better to pinch the bridge of his nose, and exchanges a look of mild irritation with Roy. Uni rots as many brains as it enriches, a truth universally acknowledged, but Roy figured a tennis coach, once exclusively collegiate or not, would at least know the career highlights of the top thirty players in the world.

Evidently, Ted does not know this: “He’s called that because he’d save more set points than Jesus Christ.”

“Hmm, so he knows how to dig deep,” Ted translates. Roy and Beard nod in tandem. “Kinda sounds like you, Roy.”

“Yeah, and that’s the fucking problem.”

Playing a wild card entry like De Maat had been tough but predictable. Younger players tend to get sloppy when up against Slam winners, even those past their prime. They overrate their own agility and underrate the older player’s experience, so the unforced errors—netted backhands, under-cooked drop shots, giveaway lobs—start stacking up. Against De Maat, Roy won in straight sets but not because of anything spectacular he did to earn it.

Facing a seeded player is a different beast. Roy has beaten Zoreaux before, sometimes handily but more often in fights to near-death. Because their playing styles skew so similar—defense, defense, defense—they’ve contested matches in Grand Slam tournaments that have passed the four-hour mark. He knows exactly what he’d be saying to Zoreaux right now if he were his coach: just outlast the old fuck.

“Huh,” Ted says, massaging his chin. Roy already hates what he’s about to say without having to hear it. “Well then, how about we try playing unlike Roy Kent?”

“And how the fuck am I supposed to do that?” he asks, as last time he checked, he hadn’t received a body or brain transplant.

Beard raises his hand. “You could try going to the net.”

“I don’t go to the net,” Roy growls.

“Now, I’m sure Jason Kidd felt the same way, but then look how well it turned out for him and everyone in Jersey,” Ted says, a pleased smile peeping from beneath his mustache. At Roy’s responding glare, he immediately recalibrates. “That is an early aughts New Jersey Nets joke that I am realizing by your face, you were not the audience for, but the point still stands: sometimes you’ve got to say sayonara to your comfort zone. Who knows what will happen once you’re out of there.”

“I know what will happen: I lose,” Roy says, “badly.”

“As opposed to playing the exact same way you always do and losing anyway,” Beard fires back, wholly unimpressed, “also badly.”

“Roy,” Ted follows up, his smile lines especially warm, “we are just two boys, standing in front of another boy, asking him to trust us.”

Roy glowers at the pair of them. The time for overhauling his playing strategy ended at the turn of the new millennium. He’s saved from having to argue it in circles by the arrival of Dani, chipper as an animated anthropomorphic animal. They spend the next two hours rallying back and forth and unleashing their serves on one another, Roy desperately trying to jam himself into the zone. Banishing thoughts of switching things up, and Trent Crimm breathing down his neck about retirement, and Jamie Tartt currently sailing into the third round, and who he left the party with last night.

On a water break, he spares a glance at the court next door. The players are no one he recognizes.

Later, he watches her dispatch her opponent 6-1, 6-0 from the cold depths of an ice bath and decides their conversation was nothing more than a fluke. They all have their own careers to worry about and their own shit to deal, none of which is Roy’s fucking business. Best to forget it.

His subconscious seems to disagree. He wakes from a dream of Keeley cheering for him from his player’s box and her illusory cheer loops in his head all morning, right up until he’s stretching in the locker room, ten minutes out from his next match.

Sitting a few benches over, Zoreaux has a supersized pair of headphones hugging his ears, his face so zen-like anyone might have thought he’s listening to crashing ocean waves or rain forest sounds. Roy knows the truth. Zoreaux picks a musical per tournament and plays the soundtrack on repeat until he could walk-on for any part if asked. Secret superstitions, ill-advised habits, petty rituals—every player has them, because every player will wring the universe dry for one measly drop of good luck. Doesn’t matter if good luck exists only in the mind. Isn’t that where everything, real or imagined, lives anyway?

His personal pre-match ritual—staring at one of the many flat screens in the locker room and testing if he can explode it with his mind—is interrupted by Ted, coming to join him on the bench. “This place is like a country club,” he observes of the room, its walls of wooden lockers and cream-colored carpeting, meant to soothe.

Roy grunts noncommittally; he’s made it a rule to turn down every tennis, golf, or country club invitation he receives. They sit in pointed silence for five minutes, a disconcerting amount of time for Ted, until Roy is forced to ask, “Was there a reason you came in here? Did you have some folksy pep talk you wanted to give me?”

“Huh.” Ted frowns, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him. Another slow, silent minute passes. Zoreaux is off the bench and bounding out of the locker room, giving them about thirty seconds before an attendant comes to fetch Roy. Just as he has given up on a few words of Kansas-fried wisdom, Ted brightens, a light bulb shining behind his eyes. “Yeah, I’ve got it: love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”

Roy squints. “Did you just quote Shakespeare at me?”

“Yup, I did. Beard and I took Henry to see All’s Well That Ends Well last night at The Globe,” Ted explains. “Can you believe we were standing right in the place where old Billy once did?”

Often, it’s impossible to tell what is a joke with Ted and what is serious, so Roy never bothers asking. He has a different question anyway: “Well, did it end well?”

Ted takes a moment to ponder it before landing on, “Everyone on stage seemed to think it did.”

For some reason, Roy is disappointed. He isn’t sure what answer he’d have wanted instead.

The attendant signals it’s time for Ted to leave for the stands and for Roy to enter the tunnel. On what is always one of the longest walks of his life, a camera following his every step, Roy turns over Ted’s advice, by way of a centuries-old dead man. Love all. Trust a few. Do wrong to none. What, is do wrong to none supposed to represent some sort of good sportsmanship? Bloody useless is what it is.

All’s well that ends well. Easy for Shakespeare to say, when it was all up to him how the ending went.

A bead of sweat rolls down his forehead, following the slope of his nose and landing on his upper lip. He tastes salt on his tongue and something metallic at the back of his throat. His left knee twinges as he readies himself behind the baseline. Across the net, Zoreaux looks like he can do this all day.

Strong serve down the line. Backhand return. To the forehand, setting him up to hit—

Straight into the fucking net.

“2-5”

“Fuck,” Roy curses, hitting his fist against his thigh.

Been awhile since we’ve had a good Kent racket bashing, hasn’t it, Chris, comes the hypocrite McEnroe.

Well, if it’s going to keep him alive, Evert laments. Three points down in the first set tie break. If he loses this set, I can’t see him getting the momentum back.

His imaginary commentators are right. He needs to close the three-point deficit or risk losing more than the set. But fuck, is he tired dragging himself again into position. He breathes in, his lungs on fire. Sprinting around the back court might wind up being the death of him and what a shit way to go.

Zoreaux misses his first serve. There is muted applause, most of it coming from his player’s box in a rallying cry to him. Phoebe is leaning so far over the box’s edge that Beard has a hand hovering close to her back, ready to snag her by the ducktail. Henry is hanging off the railing beside her, his fingers crossed on both hands. Ted looks untroubled, his expression one of utter calm, like he trusts the fucking breeze whispering through Centre Court, or the universe, or Roy. Trusts in him to know what he’s doing.

He sends Zoreaux’s second serve flying at his backhand and charges forward. His left knee whines, but he hardly hears it. Not over the sound of Zoreaux’s ill-prepared lob slamming back down on his side of the court, out of the Canadian Savior’s reach.

“Point Kent.”

3-5.

Zoreaux spins to face his box, mouthing to his coach, “What the fuck just happened?”

He is not the only person in the stadium asking that; astonishment has brought the crowd to life. Phoebe and Henry are stomping their feet, cheering through cupped hands. Beard, though expression impassive, flashes him a thumbs up. Ted is smiling close-lipped, still calm. Roy rolls his eyes skyward, refusing to return the smile, and gets ready to do it over again, and again, and again.

To his horror, the number of reporters in his post-match press conference has doubled. The casual, bored atmosphere from the last conference is gone, too, usurped by a buzzy, thrilled state of shock. It’s irritating and condescending, but Roy already asked his agent if he’d be allowed to skip this head-patting exercise and, while her words did not mention castration, her tone certainly threatened it.

Against better judgment, he again calls on Trent Crimm first. Crimm will always be a prick, but at least he’s a prick who doesn’t transfigure a person’s answer into whatever he would have rather heard.

“It’s safe to say we’ve all gotten used to a kind of consistency from your playing style over the last two decades,” Crimm says, and Roy bites his inner cheek to stop himself from correcting him. Nineteen years, thanks. “You shocked more than just Thierry Zoreaux today with your more offensive, volley-driven strategy. Do you think that surprise sealed your victory in today’s match?”

“You take advantage of and find momentum where you can,” Roy answers, a diplomatic way of putting, fucking obviously. “It was a well-fought match. Zoreaux is a talented player.”

A number of other journos begin fighting for his attention, but Crimm rises above the rumble with, “And will this be your strategy moving forward in the tournament? Shorter points, charging the net?”

Grudgingly, Roy will admit Trent Crimm is very good at his job. You can hardly hear his real question, woven in the gaps: the longer you go in the tournament, the worse it will be on your knee, so are you trying to end points as quickly as possible to stave off the inevitable?

The problem for Trent Crimm is Roy is also very good at his secondary job: never giving journalists any satisfaction.

“It wouldn’t be a very good strategy if I went around parading it, would it?”

The shadow of a smile plays on Crimm’s lips. Further in the back, once again camped by the photographers, Ted has a much broader, prouder smile on his face. He should consider consulting a doctor. Hauling around such a big heart seems medically reckless.

Roy suffers through the rest of the journos’ uninspired questions about his change in tactics and how he feels about the likelihood he’ll face the number four seed, Richard Montlaur, in his next match. Like fucking shit, is what he thinks. Delighted, is what he says with unconcealed sarcasm.

By the time he escapes the press room, the sun is setting over The Grounds, the evening session winding down. He and Ted walk out together, parting ways at the back gates. “Gloat tomorrow please,” Roy requests.

“What do I have to gloat about?” Ted strolls backwards in the direction of the closest bus stop, stupid proud smile unwavering, and shoots Roy a pair of finger guns. “I didn’t just win a match.”

Not for the first time and definitely not for the last, Roy wonders where the hell this man came from. The answer cannot be as simple as the bloody United States of America. A reverse of Dorothy, he’d wager, where an earthquake tore through the Emerald City and resident Ted Lasso slipped through a crack, wound up in Kansas, and decided to call it home. Home is where Roy would like to be right about now, so he picks up his pace, weaving through the car park and minding any cracks in the asphalt.

“Oi, you Roy Kent?” comes a startling voice, thick with a fake Cockney accent.

Roy jumps, as anyone in his shoes fucking would, so he does not appreciate how the jump-scarer giggles maniacally at his expense. He had been expecting some security personnel after a quick autograph, not Keeley perched on the rear bumper of his car.

“What are you doing here?” He slows his approach, newly aware of how empty the lot is. “And how do you know what my car looks like?”

“Oh, Rebecca’s PI is very good,” she answers, which might have been concerning if she hadn’t followed it up with a shit-eating grin. “But actually, saw you drive out the other day, and you're the only tennis guy I know who doesn’t drive a Lamborghini.”

Roy grimaces, thinking of Colin Hughes and his lime green deathtrap. “Right.”

“Wanna walk?” Keeley inclines her head toward the gate, yawning open to Church Road and Wimbledon Park beyond it.

“Did you come all the way over here to walk?” Roy clarifies, “With me?”

“I did, yeah.” Keeley smiles, a bit awkwardly, and pushes off his car bumper. “So, do you want to?”

He hesitates. Something holds him back, an insecurity he can’t quite quash. It’s pressing him to ask, why now? They’ve spoken more in the past four days than they have in six years, but not for any reason Roy knows or understands. Has he grown so pathetic Keeley is offering overtures of friendship as—what? An act of charity?

If Keeley does pity him, she’s a good enough actress not to let it show. Her eyes are bright, hopeful even, and he notices her hair is down and curlier than it normally is, like she hadn’t thought to do anything before jumping in her car as soon as his match finished. The sun glows behind her, enough left of it in the sky for an evening stroll through the park. His body will certainly feel the four long sets he just played tomorrow, but hell, he has some leftover adrenaline to spare. She did drive all this way.

“Sure, why not?”

Rather than leading them along the street winding the Wimbledon Park golf course, Keeley turns them in the direction of Putney Commons. They fall in with a steady stream of spectators, couples and families sleepily drifting home for the evening. A boy about Phoebe’s age, waddling with the weight of an oversized tennis ball attached to his middle, glances over his shoulder, droopy eyes passing over Keeley and Roy, and then does a double take. Roy presses a finger to his lips and the boy, dazed and over-tired, nods in awed obedience, keeping their secret.

While the current flows toward the bus, Roy and Keeley fork off into the Commons. The ground is still soft from a brief morning rain shower, but the trees are a summer green, the evening air cool for July. A step ahead of him, Keeley hums a brief snatch of something to herself. It almost sounds like his old chant.
 
“Congratulations, by the way,” Keeley says after a while. “You smashed it.”

“Didn’t think I would,” Roy confesses, trusting her to understand the dichotomy of feelings he experiences after every match. Relief at having another sliver of proof he may be as good as he hopes he is and the gnawing fear it’s all been a massive fluke. “But then…”

“But then?” she presses, nudging her shoulder against his. Intimacy seems to come so naturally to her, a second language she speaks fluently but one he only understands in half-gestures and mistranslations. He struggles to keep up.

“It’s going to sound fucking stupid,” he warns. “My coach quoted Shakespeare before the match.”

“Oh, that’s fancy.” Keeley waggles her eyebrows, just shy of suggestiveness. “Was it the sex one?”

“I thought they were all sex ones.” Roy is perhaps more pleased than he should be to drawn a laugh from her. They walk a ways further in silence before he realizes she’s waiting for him to tell her the quote. “It was from the All’s Well That Ends Well one—love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”

“Should you really be loving people you don’t trust?” Keeley muses. “I thought love and trust were supposed to be, like, really sexy lovers who do things like hold hands at the Tate and tongue kiss on the Tube.”

Roy huffs, though he finds himself distracted by her hand, skimming along the hem of her fluffy pink jacket, the sleeves dragging past her knuckles. It’s been ages since he stepped foot in a museum, but now he’s imagining what it would be like to take her to the Tate, to be two anonymous people wandering amongst some of the world’s greatest works of art, taking the piss out on paintings they don’t understand, and hiding the cracks in their voices at the paintings choking them up for reasons they can’t put their finger on. He’d slip his hand into hers, buy them both overpriced coffees and a print at the gift shop, and they’d kiss like lovesick teenagers on the train ride home.

It’s a fantasy he’s at risk of losing himself in, same as how people get lost in how an artist captures a twilight sky in deep oily blues and pale yellows. The sky how everyone wants it to be, not how it is.

If it’s as Keeley says and love should be tangled up in bed with trust, no wonder his relationships have all fizzled out within a month. “You’ve trusted everyone you’ve ever loved?” he asks, trying not to sound incredulous.

“I have, yeah.” She glances off, nose wrinkling. “Does bite you in the ass sometimes though, doesn’t it?”

“When did you get back together with Tartt?” Roy asks, like a bloody moron. Leave it to Jamie to intrude on another moment without having to be present, the absence of him walking in step beside them. “Sorry, never fucking mind—”

“I didn’t,” Keeley cuts in, nonplussed. “Shit segue though.”

Roy winces. “I know.”

They carry on, the sun sliding further into the pocket of the horizon. Shadows darken the path ahead. He doesn’t blame her for wanting to let the conversation lie, but the tension lingers and she eventually breaks it with a muted sigh. “We were pretty shit as a couple,” she says with an unapologetic shrug, “but turns out we’re pretty brilliant as friends.”

“You don’t have to explain it to me,” Roy insists. “Shouldn’t have asked, none of my fucking business.”

“I know he must be pretty annoying to play.” At Roy’s reflexive snort, Keeley swats his arm. There it is again, her easy intimacy. “Yeah, alright, ‘pretty annoying’ might be an understatement, but if you knew the team he’s got…”

As she peters off, before unpacking too much of Jamie’s baggage to someone he hasn’t offered to show it to himself, Roy thinks back to Rebecca’s reception, the infamous James Tartt. “His dad seems like a proper fucking bellend.”

“Oi, you can say that again.” She fidgets with the charms on her bracelet, pinching a miniature tennis racket between two fingers. “Did your parents want all this for you?”

Her directness momentarily renders him speechless. It’s not how the question usually goes. The press room phrases it as a given—mum and dad watching back home must be proud, eh? Easier to lie that way, mess around with the truth, which is, “I think my dad would have preferred I’d been a footballer.”

Keeley gives him the most thoughtful once-over he has ever received fully-dressed. “I can see it.”

Ignoring the spike in his body temperature, Roy goes on, “My grandad was the one who was tennis mad. Took me to my first Wimbledon.” First and only, until he was competing there himself, he leaves off adding. “I was probably one of the only kids in my neighborhood playing on the shit courts instead of the shit pitches. My niece is obsessed with football though, so maybe her grandad will get his wish.”

“So that’s who’s cheering so loud in your box,” Keeley says, her smile fond and for a girl she has never met. It hits him in a tender spot below his ribs.

“What about you?” Roy asks, recovering quickly and righting the conversation before he said or did something else monumentally idiotic. “Did they have any idea they were raising Keeley fucking Jones?”

Keeley snorts. “Are you kidding? They thought I was mental. Still do. My mum actually suggested I quit a few years back when I wasn’t doing so hot. Said now I’ve got some exposure, I could fall back on modeling.” She shakes her head, any fondness gone, then glances up at him with a tricky smirk. “Would you still not not like me if I were a model?”

She amazes him, what with how smoothly and effectively she throws him off center. It has to be the competitor in her, but what is the game and what are they competing for?

“Dunno,” he says evasively, because he’s no good when he doesn’t understand the rules. “The last model I knew stole my fucking Rolex.”

It’s not the answer she had been hoping for, but he would have felt too exposed if he said his first thought, which was he cannot imagine a version of Keeley Jones he wouldn’t like.

His phone buzzes in his pocket, for once a welcoming distraction. It’s a message from Beard, who only ever sends him article links, sans commentary. This headline doesn’t need editorializing. “Shit,” Roy mutters, as if there was a chance of it going any other way.

“What?” Keeley stretches onto her tiptoes, attempting to peer over his shoulder.

“Montlaur just won his watch.”

“Oh. That’s too bad,” she says without a great deal of sympathy, so he can forget fucking tenderness, and resumes her stroll. Roy stares after her, at a loss for words. Rightly sensing he is frozen where he stands, Keeley turns her head and raises her eyebrows. “What? I really like Richard. I’ll be sorry to see him lose.”

|||

ROUND THREE
Kent (unseeded) v. Montlaur (4)

It’s everywhere—defeat.

The mailman delivers the day’s mail with slumped shoulders. Roy glances at his phone and the news is bad. Turns on the television and the news is worse. Over on BBC Sport, they’re forecasting losses in between announcing losses. Even the sun, after a morning spent struggling to break through the cloudscape, has given up on shining. A light mist of rain spits in his face on the walk over to the practice courts. He’s dragging his feet the same as everyone else. City of feet-draggers, London is.

“Who pissed in your Captain Crunch?” Beard asks, a stupid question unbefitting him. He knows Roy isn’t allowed cereal.

Despite the rain and his hitting partner’s dire mood, Dani is as chipper as always. Roy hardly understands it. The kid treats every court he steps onto less like a proving ground and more like a sandbox, running around the lines with the energy of a kid three ice lollies deep.

“How do you do it?” Roy asks after a brutal point which leaves him panting on the ground, watching Dani jog in place. He waves his racket toward his bouncing heels. “How do you…”

“Tennis is—”

“Life, yeah,” Roy finishes, feeling closer to death. “But don’t you want to win?”

Dani stops running in place. “Of course I want to win,” he says with a great deal of gravity. His face then breaks into a beaming smile, a ray of sun not peeking out from behind the clouds but bursting through them. “That is what makes it so exciting.”

Exciting rather than soul-crushing, what a concept. It may be Dani is too young to have had the switch flip yet, where wanting to win becomes wanting not to lose. He’d tell him to hang onto his excitement for as long as he possibly can, but that’s hardly practical advice and it’s hypocritical, too, since Roy himself has never known how to keep hold of intangible things.

“You’ve got to be more careful not telegraphing your shots,” Roy advises instead. “Getting your opponent where you want them isn’t going to mean shit if you’ve already given away the ending.”

Dani absorbs the critique, processes it, and accepts the truth in it, all within the span of ten seconds. So, not only good at the sport, but good at listening to where his game needs work without morphing into a whiny little bitch—this kid’s coach must have the easiest job in tennis. “Thank you, Roy Kent!” Dani bounds back towards his baseline, pausing halfway across the court to wave at the sideline. “Hola, Keeley!”

“Hey, Dani!”

Roy closes his eyes and counts down from five.

She’s been everywhere, too. Advertising Lacoste on billboards he passes while driving to The Grounds. Her name over the airwaves of BBC radio, spoken fifty times a minute. On television, on the sports page of The Sun, in his dreams again. Now, here she is back in person, crouching beside his niece and helping her with the glitter to glue ratio on a Roy Kent poster.

“That’s…” Having made his way over, Roy sees most of the glitter missed the poster. Phoebe’s hands and jeans are coated in the stuff. “…a lot of glitter.”

“No way,” Keeley objects. She straightens up and claps her hands together, showering the grass with shiny pink flecks. “No such thing as too much glitter in the world.”

A bit of glitter has stuck to Keeley’s jaw. “Well, you’ve got—” Roy scratches his chin. Keeley attempts to mirror him, but scrubs the wrong spot. “No, it’s just…”

“You don’t mind, yeah?” Keeley leans over the short fence, tilting her head. Carefully, Roy steps forward and cups her chin, brushing the pad of his thumb along her jawline. Her skin is slick from the rain, but warm where he runs his fingers again. He feels her shift slightly as she swallows and his eyes dart to her lips.

“I—” Roy clears his throat and retreats backwards. “I don’t think I got it.”

“That’s alright,” Keeley says, unbothered. “It’ll be like good luck, I bet.”

Seeming to remember they have an audience, Keeley looks down at Phoebe, who is glancing between them with huge eyes. Ted and Beard are not much subtler.

Keeley, brandishing her racket bag, says quickly, “I better go.”

“Right.” Before she has gotten too far away, Roy calls after her, “Good luck today.”

She turns and taps her chin, where Roy swears he does see a glint of glitter. “Don’t need it, remember?”

With Keeley still within earshot, Beard stifles a laugh and tells Roy, “She might not need luck, but you sure do.”

Roy heaves a deep sigh. What are the chances Beard is just talking about tennis?

Kukoč down to Hughes. Babatunde defeated by Zava. Bhargava bested by the blistering backhand of Jamie Tartt.

“There have been no great upsets in the tournament thus far,” Murray opines from behind his desk. “Of course, that could all change tomorrow when Roy Kent, once a fixture in Wimbledon final and semi-final matches, faces off with French Open winner and seed number four, Richard Montlaur.”

“I will eat my own right foot,” Catrick vows, “if Roy Kent pulls an upset tomorrow.”

“You’ll be eating my right foot by how far I stick it up your ass,” Roy mutters to his empty living room.

His phone dings, a message from an unknown number: can’t WAIT to watch george cartrick eat his foot tomorrow night xx

Another ding: you should send him a bottle of ketchup

Followed immediately by: this is keeley btw

He had known already, somehow. It seems par for the course with the way the week has been going. He debates asking how she got his new number—they have six years and three privacy leaks between them—but Keeley preemptively answers with a fourth text: phoebe gave me your number.

Like mother, like daughter. Roy rolls his eyes through typing, She also gave it to the guy at our favorite kebab place.

Keeley’s reply is quick: in case of kebab-related emergencies

The message is punctuated with an emoji sticking out its tongue. He smiles down at his screen, picturing her tapping out each text with her legs kicked up, her tongue poking through her lips.

Congratulations on your match, he sends. Once again, she had beaten her opponent in a landslide.

She writes back, thank you xx

A pause, where Roy sees three dots. Another message arrives: we can celebrate together tomorrow. george catrick eats his foot party!

He stares at her two x’s for longer than he should. When he turns in for the night, he falls asleep with relative ease, dreaming of x’s, and exes, and bloody George Cartrick pouring ketchup on his toes. He hadn’t thought of Montlaur or their match for so much as a second. Maybe that had been her whole idea.

Of course, the reprieve doesn’t last.

Back in the purgatory of the Centre Court locker room, Roy tries, for perhaps the one thousandth time in his career, to shatter a flat screen with his mind. It seems more likely he’ll uncover latent telekinetic powers than it is he’ll be able to stop his hands from shaking.

In another corner of the room, Montlaur is whispering prayers in French, clogging up God’s telephone line. Hardly matters. Roy assumes he’d be sent straight to voicemail if he tried ringing the almighty this late in life.

He does wish he believed sometimes. Not in any god necessarily, but in something other than the assured chaos of the universe.

“Do you believe in God?” Roy asks Ted as soon as he has sat down beside him.

“I mean, I grew up in Kansas, right up next to the Bible Belt, so She was always knocking on my door whether I was asking her to or not,” Ted says, skirting around a straight answer. Another one of his Lasso specials. “Why’d you ask?”

“People used to always go around saying shit like God wanted them to win a war or God meant for them to be king. It’s fucking bullshit, but it also must have felt…” Roy flexes his fingers, popping the joints. Still, his hands shake. “…nice, I guess, to be that sure of something.”

“Nice, sure, but stressful, too,” Ted argues. “Like what if God had meant for me to win the Shawnee County Fair Under 16 hot dog eating contest? I probably would have spent a week puking up mustard and relish, instead of what actually happened, which is I finished two hot dogs and decided to call that lunch.”

“Christ.” Roy doesn’t need a stomach full of fair food to feel like he’s going to be sick. “I can’t do this.”

“Now, I didn’t know I came all the way over here to coach the world famous ‘Roy Can’t,’” Ted says gently. It speaks to the shape he’s in that Roy huffs out a shaky laugh. Roy Can’t—Ted should consider pitching the name to Trent Crimm for his evening headline. If not, he can save it for himself and turn it into a children’s book, a depressing antidote to The Little Engine That Could.

“Roy Can’t sounds like a fucking nob,” Roy admits, slumping onto his elbows, “but I don’t know if you’ve coached Roy Kent either.”

The Roy of ten years ago would smash a racket over his head to see him like this, but that lithe asshole doesn’t understand what it means to get older, to learn of bones in your body you never knew you had and feel how violently those bones despise you for what you’ve done to them. These sore bones and their friends—every pulled muscle, every strained tendon, his head, shoulders, knees, and fucking toes—will make damn sure the sprints hurt. No dive goes unpunished. He has watched, like an unwilling participant in his own medical study, as the canyon between what he wants his body to do and what it can do widen, inch by inch, year by year.

He’d say he signed up for this, as a fucking human being who is going to die and shit, but something about becoming a professional athlete fucks with a person’s brain chemistry. If a celebrity’s brain development freezes at the age they first become famous, then it’s even more deluded for an athlete. They think their bodies will freeze at the age someone first hands them a trophy.

“Do you know why they call zero ‘love’ in this sport?”

Roy startles; he had forgotten Ted was there. “No,” he answers, groaning internally, “except I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“Well, no one actually knows why they call it ‘love.’”

“That’s it?” Roy raises his eyebrows a fraction. “We don’t know?”

“Nope,” Ted says brightly, this little linguistic mystery a delight to him. “One of the theories is it comes from the idea everyone out there on the court is playing for the love of the game. Kind of like how the word amateur comes from the Latin word for ‘to love.’”

Roy blinks, unsure if he’s understanding Ted correctly. Typical. “So you’re saying if I go out there and play like an amateur, I can beat the twenty-five year-old who just won the French Open?”

Ted shrugs. “I think you can go out there and do anything.”

For a moment, Roy imagines their positions swapped, him in the role of coach and Ted as the player. If he were being paid the money Ted was, would he be spitting out nonsense he thought the man forking over the cash would want most to hear? The problem with this thought exercise is he already knows Ted believes his own nonsense. He does think Roy can do anything, even with that grand canyon between what Roy wishes his body could do and reality. Still imagining himself in Ted’s shoes, Roy thinks he would say, build a bridge.

Incredible how Ted has tricked him into coming up with his own fortune cookie wisdom. “I hate these fucking pep talks you know,” Roy informs him, rising to his feet.

Ted gazes up at him, his eyes shining. “I know.”

His grandad wouldn’t have made a myth out of the first time he took his grandson to a tennis court, but to this day, Roy wonders how he would have told the story. Roy has had to tell it alone.

The public courts in their neck of South London had been crap. Two hard courts surrounded by a rusted chain link fence and overgrown weeds, one split down the middle with a crack like a fault line and the other with the net down, the mesh unraveling. They tried to arrive early to stake their claim on the netted court, but it never made much of a difference in the end. His grandad taught him the exact height of the net and told him every time his shots were too low, or landed outside the faded white lines, or were just plain not good enough.

He took for granted his grandad was good, just as he took for granted his grandad was making him better. All Roy had been in it for was his company. 

For a long time, the greatest night of Roy’s life had been when his grandad invited him to tag along to his standing doubles night. On the same court where he and Roy drilled forehands, his grandad played with three other old-timers who talked shit better than they served, but still managed to make it through three sets every Monday night.

As his glorious first night on the big boy’s court wound down, Roy was asked to sub in for a point. Being all of eight, it never occurred to him he’d need to take it easy on the chaps. He finishes the story for flashy profiles with how he nearly gave his grandad’s dear friend Art King a heart attack smashing the ball straight at his wobbly feet. Always earns a laugh.

What he keeps for himself is what Art said to his granddad the moment after his life had flashed before his eyes.

“Christ, that kid…”

Had that been his ordination? Because Roy heard it: the astonishment. Within himself, too, he felt the potential for greatness all four men saw. That kid could go professional. Hell, one day Kent’s scrawny grandkid could win Wimbledon.

Art never finished the thought. The men moved on, back to bickering amongst themselves over whose foot faulted on their serve in a match played five years earlier and who had the better slice, never acknowledging the ground had been broken on a young boy’s future.

What of it—they had a match to play.

He smashes the ball at the Frenchman’s skidding feet and Montlaur staggers backwards, his free hand flying to his chest. For a brief second, Art King is on Centre Court, risen from the dead just to have another minor heart attack at the hands of his old friend’s grandkid.

His mouth does something funny without his permission. It smiles.

I can’t believe it. Is that a — he has rendered the McEnroe in his head speechless.

A ball boy widens his eyes like he too has seen the ghost of Art King. Seeing how scared the kid is at the sight of his smile, Roy does something else utterly insane: he laughs. It’s low, more a gust of air escaping his lungs than anything, but the cameras are sure to catch it. Two career firsts in a row.

“Advantage Kent.”

“…and coming up, we’ll have three-time Wimbledon finalist, George Cartrick, eating his words and perhaps something else…”

A hiccup of half-hysterical laughter bursts out of him. Roy revels in the sweet vindication for a few seconds longer before switching the station and rolling all the windows down. The opening strings of “Livin’ Thing” spin out and into the night air, his neighborhood of Richmond pulsing around him. He glides by a pub where the patrons are spilling out the door, whooping and cheering themselves mad. Kids are kicking about in the grass across the street, wringing the last of the dusk for all its worth. Saturday night, alive.

To be honest, Roy hates Electric Light Orchestra. He hates rowdy pubs and Saturday, the whole damn day. Just for tonight though, he is willing to put it all aside. Everywhere he looks, he sees glitter and gold.

Ernie Lounds of The Sun pops into his head, uninvited. At the press conference, he had said, “Watching you play just now, it was like witnessing a miracle in real-time.”

He had told Ernie, to his face, he’s a piece of shit full of shit, but the joke may be on Roy because he turns into his driveway and witnesses a true miracle: Keeley waiting on his front stoop with a bottle of champagne.

“I’m starting to think you’re actually using Rebecca Welton’s PI.”

“Swear I’m not,” Keeley says, but slips a pair of crossed fingers behind her back. Joke or not, Roy opts out of interrogating it. “C’mon then, you promised me a celebration.”

He hadn’t promised anything, but the things he has said without really meaning them haven’t stopped Keeley yet and the things he hasn’t been able to say she somehow hears in his silences. Roy brushes past her on the stoop, pretends not to notice the buzz beneath the skin at the place where they touched, and unlocks his front door. “After you.”

The door shuts, leaving them well and truly alone in his foyer. He looks at her—glitter on her eyes and in the scrunchie holding up her hair—and breathes out,  “I won.” 

Saying the words aloud does not make the reality of them any less surreal.

Keeley shakes the bottle of champagne they shouldn’t drink and smiles. “Knew you would.”

“You really did, didn’t you?”

He’d ask what he has done to deserve her confidence, but it’s another thing he chooses not to interrogate. Not yet. He drops his keys and his racket bag onto the floor, crosses the foyer in two bounds, and—fully sober but for the high of triumph—kisses Keeley Jones.

|||

ROUND OF SIXTEEN
Kent (unseeded) v. Rojas (14)

The dawning sun burns hot against his face. He blinks into the harsh glare of it, blaring through the unshaded window. Not only had he slept on the wrong side of the bed last night, he had forgotten to shut the blinds.

A warm body, pressed up against his, is using him as a shield against the light. Her forehead nuzzles between his shoulder blades, her arms snaked around his middle snugly. He covers her hands where they rest on his chest with his and closes his eyes again, happy to ignore the morning. If an alarm hadn’t woken them yet, they had time.

Then, Roy remembers—Middle Sunday.

“Fuck.” The analog clock on his bedside table reads a quarter past seven. “Fuck.”

His sister will have Phoebe dropped off within fifteen minutes, as has been tradition since his niece entered the world. Wimbledon never schedules matches on Middle Sunday, so Roy spends the full day with Phoebe, doing anything her heart desires. On Sundays past, they’ve gone to the British Girl’s Shop, taken high tea, and toured the grounds of Nelson Road, but this Sunday is the first Phoebe has requested additional participants. They’ll be meeting Ted and Henry for a musical on the West End. Though he will never say it, because he is a good fucking uncle, Roy would rather face Richard Montlaur in a cage match than sit through Matilda.

He drags himself out of bed anyway, as quietly as he can.

“Running away again?”

Not quietly enough. Halfway into a pair of sweats, Roy finishes making himself decent before turning to face Keeley. She’s stretching languidly in the center of the bed, her expression mild, betraying nothing of how she feels having struck to the bone of their ancient history.

“You remember it then,” Roy asks roughly, a side effect of the three rounds they went the night before. He clears his throat. “That night.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Keeley sits up with a start at his head shaking, the sheets falling in a mess at her hips. “No, seriously, you’re joking. You thought I didn’t remember? C’mon, we were barely tipsy and you weren’t that bad a shag.”

Roy grimaces. “Neither of us ever said anything after.”

“You never said anything after,” Keeley contends, calling his bluff. She leans over the left side of the bed and comes back with a shirt to yank over her head. It’s his. Her nose scrunches at the smell of day-old sweat, but she stubbornly keeps it on. If this is what he missed walking out six years ago, he really is a proper fucking idiot. 

And a loser. His run-in with Keeley had been precipitated by what had been, at the time, the most disastrous year of his career. At the Australian Open, he had lost in the fourth round to a still-green Colin Hughes. He didn’t even make it to the fourth round of the French. Things had been seemingly on the rise again at Wimbledon, only for him to fall in the semi-final to Zava. Straight sets, no mercy. Some commentators were predicting Roy Kent would never win a major tournament again.

He sighs at how each loss carries a sting, six years on. “I was in a pretty bad place then.”

“And you think I wasn’t?” Keeley chucks a pillow at him and Roy lets it hit his chest, a well-deserved shot. “I was twenty-three and getting called washed-up by every sports page in the country. Drake name-dropped me in a song about peaking in your twenties. Piers Morgan tried to ask me out on Twitter.”

“I can arrange a hit on him if you want,” Roy proposes.

Keeley purses her lips, her eyes narrowing shrewdly. “You wouldn’t do it yourself?”

“Probably couldn’t get the fucking job done.”

“Self-pity really is so sexy.”

Roy crosses his arm, a poorly-timed reminder he is not wearing a shirt. Too much of himself is bared, both outside and in. “And you’re one to talk?” he asks, hitting low.

“Yeah, I am,” Keeley fires back, unflinching. “I had to claw myself back from nothing. I completely rebuilt my game because I didn’t want to be the girl who’s just remembered for modeling the rackets and skirts. Famous for being almost good enough to win a major.” She climbs out of the bed and comes to the stand at the baseboard, regarding him soberly. “I’m not the same person I was six years ago. Are you?”

The door opening downstairs saves him from having to answer. Good thing, given he has none.

“Uncle Roy!” Phoebe yells up to him. “Mum brought more waffle mix!”

Roy exhales through his nose. “I have to…”

“Yeah, ‘course.” Keeley nods with more understanding than he deserves and begins hunting for her clothes, notably sticking with his shirt. More than anything, he wants something more to give her than that, something that made this more than another one night stand rushed out the door.

“Do you want a waffle?” Roy asks, a rather pitiful suggestion.

Keeley glances at him, her eyes crinkled at the corners. Realizing it’s a serious offer, she smiles. “Wish I could, but I promised Rebecca I’d meet her for breakfast.”

“You think Phoebe’s waffles can’t beat the ones at the Savoy?”

“Tell Phoebe”—Keeley walks over to him and lays a hand on his wrist, squeezing gently—“I’ll be back to compare.”

She goes. Downstairs, he hears the muffled voices of her and his sister talking in the foyer, meaning the whole hospital emergency floor will know the details by mid-morning. Best find a shirt, brace himself for the day ahead. The front door closes with a soft slam, tying off the thread of an unfinished conversation. For now.

The locker room is an utter shit show, owing to another Manic Monday.

Every fourth round match in the single’s tournament is played today, which means every competitor left standing is milling about the locker room, waiting for their turn on the chopping block. Zava is in child’s pose by the corner of lockers he commandeered. Dani has tied, taken down, and retied his hair ten times and counting, while Sam Obisanya has been napping upright for the last half hour. Sam had approached Roy when he first arrived to gush quietly over his performance against Montlaur. He’s a good kid, almost too good.

Most of the other biding players are clustered around the largest flat screen, among them an uncharacteristically subdued Tartt. His match is next on Centre Court, but Roy bets it’s the expected outcome of the match everyone is glued to giving him grief. Colin Hughes, the five-set heartbreaker, has yet again battled back from a two-set deficit and is cleaning up in the fifth. He and Jamie will face each other in the quarter-final if they both seal the deal and it’ll be a nightmare for Tartt. His coach hasn’t built him to survive to five-setters. Pity.

Hughes clinches his fifth game and something twists in Roy’s stomach at Tartt’s brittle smile. The waffles yesterday had been a bad idea. He returns his focus to a different television screen, trying to find his zone. Unlike Tartt, he is not waiting for the Hughes match to finish. This will be the first match of the tournament he plays off Centre Court. Within the next hour, he will be walking onto No. 1 Court to face Dani Rojas.

He has a—

Feeling. Not a bad one. Not a good one either. Roy has a singular feeling whatever will happen, will happen. Each time Roy has attempted to poke it one way or another, the feeling stays stubbornly still.

A smattering of respectful applause goes up around the room, nothing compared to the upsurge of cheers to be heard from the heart of the stadium. Colin Hughes has done it. The commotion does not awaken the dragon—Zava, now posing in downward dog—but Sam and Dani join the gang welcoming a euphoric Hughes back into the locker room. Roy stands, too, getting a last good stretch in, and offers his hand to Colin.

“Great match, son.”

Colin beams and grasps his outstretched hand. “Thanks, Roy-o.”

“You’ve got to be jokin’ me,” Jamie mutters, but loud enough to carry.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Roy rounds on him and the atmosphere in the room shifts with a snap, the jubilance evaporating.

“Like you’re not just doing this to rub it in my face.” Jamie nods at his hand, clasped in both of Colin’s.

A sardonic chuckle punches out of him. “Sorry, but why would anything I do be about you?”

“Because you’re obsessed with me!” Jamie snaps. “You’re obsessed with making me look bad.”

“I’m obsessed with you?” Roy echoes incredulously. As if he has done anything in his life to make Jamie Tartt look bad. Who would need to devote their time to something Jamie does well enough on his own?

Eyes bouncing between the two of them, Jamie indignant and Roy seething, Colin slowly drops his hand and inches backwards to escape the line of fire, but Roy seizes on the opportunity he has given him. “Hughes,” he barks, startling the kid. “You’re leaning too far back on your serves and it’s the reason your first serve stats are so shit. Don’t be so fucking afraid of the ball and you can ace him tomorrow no fucking problem.”

“Uh—” Colin shifts awkwardly. He’d clearly rather be anywhere but here, anything but a pawn on Kent and Tartt’s chessboard. “Thanks, Roy?”

Roy swallows around an unnerving lump in his throat and turns back to Tartt, to see how he took to reaping what he sowed, but finds Jamie is not simmering in outrage. If anything, he looks disappointed. “You said I was a joke,” he says quietly. “First Australian Open I played, you said no one would take a pretty boy like me seriously.”

“I—” Roy clenches his jaw, toggling between an excuse he could make sound like the truth or the truth which would only sound like an excuse. “I don’t remember saying that.”

“Well, I do, mate,” Jamie says, the sarcastic endearment barbed. “I had never even talked to you.”

“I’m…”

Jamie scoffs, seeded with bitterness. “Forget it.”

Though he has a rabid crowd waiting to watch him play, Jamie storms out of the locker room and heads in the wrong direction. Colin, who should be celebrating his win in the press room, follows after him. Roy is sure if Isaac McAdoo were here, he’d do the same, a line in the sands of British tennis drawn.

Everyone else drifts back to their respective lockers, no one speaking. In his corner, Zava has opened his eyes at last and is staring intently at Roy, his expression serene. The scream at the very core of his being, the one he never lets leash, claws at his throat.

Ted appears in his peripheral vision, hands stuffed in his khakis. The edgy gait tells Roy everything he needs to know. “Not my finest hour.”

“No,” Ted agrees. “But the nice thing about hours is there are twenty-four of them in a day.”

And at midnight, the hours reset. Twenty-four more.

Keeley slips back into the forefront of his mind, asking him, are you? Is he the same person who, seemingly apropos to nothing, called Jamie Tartt a joke? Flippant comments he doesn’t remember making. Hasty exits in the middle of the night. Losing. Love-all, which means nothing. Well, is he.

The crowd vaults to their feet. Roy falls to his knees, waters the grass with his sweat and one loose tear, then picks himself back up again. 

Did anyone see that coming? McEnroe asks in amazement. I mean, c’mon, Dani Rojas falling to Roy Kent in straight sets! Were we put in a time machine and taken back to 2008?

Both players have to limp their way to the net, so the answer to McEnroe’s question is a resounding no. Roy had planned for a handshake, but Dani collapses into him, his strong arm wrapping around his back.

“Amigo,” he whispers in Roy’s ear. “It has been an honor to play you.”

Roy nods into Dani’s shoulder. In a year or two, Dani will finish a Round of Sixteen match to different results and Roy will be cheering him on from his couch, but today, Roy is happy for his loss.

Dani goes to pack up his stuff while Roy takes a moment to listen to the crowd. A scattered few are chanting his battle song. This is what it took for them to love him again—becoming the underdog so late in his career.

He bows his head in appreciation. When he lifts it, he sees Phoebe flashing her handmade sign and the gaps in her smile. Six years ago, she hadn’t been here. She had hardly been alive. Yet, now he isn’t sure how he did any of this without her.

In his post-match press conference, to a packed house, he does something he never has before: he dedicates the match, to his sister and niece. If only the sentiment saved him from having to take questions.

“At this point, we’re all counting on seeing you in the final,” Sarah of The Guardian informs him. “Do you think we can expect the much-anticipated rematch between you and Jamie Tartt?”

“I hope not.” Roy finds Ted in the back, tapping his watch face. “He’ll destroy me.”

She has made a return appearance to his stoop, glistening in sweat and not out of her tennis whites, a grass stain streaked across the pleats of her skirts. Winner meets winner on the second step. The sun is going down.

Her smile is a touch apologetic. “I might have been a bit”—Keeley holds up her fingers in a pinch—“harsh this morning.”

He shrugs one sore shoulder. “You didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”

“Yeah, I know. Obviously.” Her smile widens, sunny and easy.

Roy rolls his eyes as he opens the door, itself an invitation, but to be safe, “Coming inside?”

“‘Course.” Keeley skates past him and tosses over her shoulder, “I was promised a continental breakfast.”

He is courting something dangerous, he knows. A different kind of destruction. Playing in a Grand Slam has a way of suspending time, erasing what existed before and clouding what may come after. He’ll not know the extent of the damage until after the tournament ends, when this bubble they’ve found themselves in pops. A bubble already too good to be true.

|||

QUARTER-FINAL
Kent (unseeded) v. Maas (17)

With Dani out of the tournament and heading back to Mexico, Roy presumed he’d now be continuing without a hitting partner. Sam Obisanya clocks his surprise at seeing his cheery smile on the practice court bright and early Tuesday morning and quickly launches into an apology. “I hope this is okay. This man by the name of Beard said you were in need of someone.”

Roy swears Beard winks behind his sunglasses. “It’s alright, Sam,” he assures him. “This is your first major quarter-final, right?”

Sam nods eagerly, but trepidation sneaks into his smile. “Can I ask, is it always this nerve-wracking?”

“Yeah,” Roy says, the shortest answer. The terrible secret is every quarter-final—every match, really—will be a first. Against a particular opponent. In that particular tournament. After you’ve reached number one in the world and everyone is hoping to tear you down. After you’ve recovered from an injury and everyone is holding their breath. What was it Dani said? “But that’s what makes it exciting.”

Sam’s relief is palpable.

“Alrighty!” Ted calls from the side court, where he has been chatting away with Sam’s coach, the 1990 French Open champion Ola Obisanya. Yet another family affair. “How about we play some tennis?”

He and Sam practice into the afternoon, amassing a healthy crowd of spectators thrilled to clap at anything. The longer Sam plays, the deeper into his rhythm he gets and the more shots he pulls from an endless bag of tricks. The kid is bound for greatness and everyone watching knows it, especially his father. His pride is as evident as the blue of the sky.

“It has been a joy watching you play in person, Mr. Kent,” Mr. Obisanya says on their way to the player’s lounge, practice through for the day. He claps Roy between the shoulder blades. “I hope it will not be the last.”

“Well, if your son and I both win…”

Roy trails off, noticing a distinct lack of noise running through the back halls of Centre Court. The tension walking into the lounge is stifling. Even Sam’s smile falls. Roy spots Jan Maas, who he’ll be facing tomorrow, sitting stiffly on a sofa, not quite able to tear his eyes from the television.

“Despite another surging comeback from the Welshman, the Tartt v. Hughes match ended as most predicted, with a win for the number three seed.” Murray pauses, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “Yet perhaps the most shocking moment of the match came not on the court but off it, when Tartt’s father, also his coach, had to be removed from Centre Court for disorderly conduct.”

The coverage cuts to a video of the incident; it happened in the middle of the fourth set, after Hughes had broken Tartt’s serve and put himself up 5 games to 4. Serving with that advantage, he’d likely win the set and everyone watching knew it, especially James Tartt, Sr.

By his violent flush and how his neck strained, James Tartt and his vitriol must have been picked up by the microphones, but whatever he said is evidently too vile to air in playback, leaving audiences with the silent portrait of a man imploding with rage. It’s still loud enough.

His phone buzzes against his thigh.

please please please go check on him. rose & crown hotel. colin says they’re at the bar.

Keeley would do it herself if she didn’t have her own match to play.

Wordlessly, Roy tilts the screen towards Ted, who nods without meeting his eyes. Sans goodbyes, Roy steps quietly and purposefully out of the room. The distance from the Grounds to the Rose & Crown Hotel is fifteen minutes, ten if you fucking book it.

The hotel’s pub has been calculated for maximum quaintness. None of the chairs match because they had been bought from antique fairs with a color scheme in mind and the booths are all upholstered with fabrics chosen for how worn and kitschy they look. Jamie and Colin are sheltered in a corner booth, Colin with luggage at his feet and Jamie with his hood drawn past his ears. It’s a nothing of a disguise. Everyone in the pub, previously enjoying an uneventful late lunch, is openly staring.

Keeley must have texted Colin to expect him because as soon as he spies Roy by the bar, he whispers something to Jamie, hand tentatively patting his shoulder, and then gathers his stuff. “Go easy on him, boyo,” Colin says when they meet in the middle.

The television above Colin’s head is tuned to Wimbledon coverage, playing the incident again like a nightmare feedback loop. The past Jamie on court has shut down completely, a perfect mirror to the Jamie now slumped in the booth. “He still fucking won,” Roy says in wonder.

“Yeah, he did.”

Roy considers Colin, not seeming overtly disappointed in the result. “You could have asked for a penalty.”

According to Grand Slam rules, off-court coaching during matches is prohibited. Once a player steps on court, they’re in it alone. Three strikes and the player with the offending coach is penalized a full game. If the chair umpire had judged what James Tartt was doing as coaching—big fucking if—Jamie could have lost the set without Colin having to do anything more for it. Players rarely regain momentum after rulings like that.

Colin frowns, offended at the suggestion. “I wouldn’t have done that. What he was doing wasn’t coaching. It was…” He shakes his head, looking off. “It wasn’t coaching.”

“Good lad,” Roy says, squeezing his shoulder. Despite what happened on Centre Court today, tennis may still be the sport of gentlemen.

Nodding, Colin hefts his bag, wishes him luck tomorrow, and leaves Roy to it.

Jamie is more morose in close-up, but balks seeing him approach the table. “The fuck do you want,” he says weakly. His hands, folded in the sleeves of his hoodie, are cupped around a glass of something brown and depressing. “Come to kick me while I’m down? Want me to go out and buy myself a cute dog, so you can kick ‘im, too?”

Not a man calibrated to comfort, Roy has no idea what he’s supposed to say. The best he comes up with is a piece of practical advice: “You shouldn’t be drinking,”

“You’re not the boss of me,” Jamie sneers and, to prove what a contrarian prick he can be, he lifts the glass and swirls it. Never letting it touch his lips. Because, Roy realizes, Jamie doesn’t like to drink. He just thinks he has to. Alcohol is the adhesive he has seen men in his life use to close the wounds inside them, but he knows, somewhere deep within him, the glue never holds.

Roy snatches the drink and dumps into the nearest potted plant.

“The fuck? I bought that, didn’t I—”

“Stop fucking talking and listen to me very carefully,” Roy snaps, shutting Tartt up. He requisitions a nearby chair and sinks into it, his busted left knee thanking him. Now eye to eye with Jamie, he plans to serve him with what a right-minded coach would: a match plan. “You’re not going to be able to bait Zava into fucking up. You’ve got to dig deeper than you ever have and do what you did with Hughes: chip away at his weaknesses.”

Jamie’s face turns solemn and he says in a low voice, “Zava doesn’t have any weaknesses.”

“Everyone has weaknesses. He attacks the net just like you do and tries to end every point early because his baseline game isn’t as good as he wants people to think it is,” Roy says, dispensing with the advice he had been saving for himself. “So, play some fucking defense for once. Your game is ugly. Very ugly. So ugly that the ugly fucking duckling would laugh it, but it doesn’t have to be.”

“Couldn’t have just left it at the first part?” Jamie asks, scowling, but Roy sees a brain kicking back into gear within his thick skull. He’s heard what Roy told him.

“Get some sleep,” he advises, thoroughly-spent himself. “And then win.”

“Just means I’m gonna beat you in the final,” Jamie says, the suggestion of his smug smirk returning.

Roy takes the reappearance as his cue to vacate the premises. “We’ll see,” he murmurs as he leaves, not sure if Jamie could still hear him.

The hotel lobby is bustling with Wimbledon attendees back for the evening, but the front desk is free of guests when Roy walks up. “Can you tell me if a James Tartt is staying here?” he asks. The employee behind the desk is reticent, so he produces his wallet. “Doesn’t matter. I already know he fucking is. Just tell me how much I have to pay to buy him out of his room and ban him from this place for life.”

His pockets are lighter on his walk back to The Grounds. One less weight to worry about.

Under moonlight, everything is blue, the shadows on the walls rippling. She props her chin on his chest, the hair he runs his fingers through blue, too. “First kiss: go.”

“Samantha Jones, Year 7. She had braces and all that”—he waves a hand in a circle by his mouth—“cotton candy lip crap.”

Keeley gasps. “Samantha Jones, like Sex and the City?”

“Christ, I wish.” Roy nudges his thumb against her temple. “Your turn.”

“Swear you won’t say anything to anyone?” He rolls his eyes, distracted by how long her eyelashes are. She swings a leg over his hips, pressing him into the mattress, and demands, “Swear it.” Her finger crosses an X over his heart.

“Alright, alright, I swear.”

“It was Tom O’Brien.”

“Number 999th in the world, Tom O’Brien?” Roy bites back a laugh. “Tom O’Brien who tore his butt twice, that Tom O’Brien?”

“We trained at the same academy when we were kids,” Keeley protests, also struggling to hold it together. “He was right fit for eleven and he didn’t have braces and he used just the right amount of cotton candy lip crap.”

His sides ache. It hardly seems right he should be given a second chance at this, but with an attached expiration date. He’ll go out tomorrow or in the semi-final, if he’s lucky, but she’ll take it all. Wimbledon, then the US Open in a few months time. Her star will only continue to rise and he’ll be left in this blue room alone, underwater but never drowning, remembering how hard he laughed and how much he wanted it to last.

As any major tournament winds down, the locker room transforms from a hub of activity to an eerie crypt. It’s often empty, save for two players and the impressions every other player has left behind. De Maat, pacing in fitful bursts by the toilet stalls. Zoreaux, on a bench listening to Xanadu. Montlaur, reciting prayers. Dani, massaging his tricky hamstring.

At the beginning of the tournament, there were one hundred and twenty-eight. By the second week, only sixteen. Tomorrow, it will be four. Zava. Tartt. Obisanya.

Him or Maas.

“Here we are again,” Ted sings, stealing the melody from Dolly Parton. A soft echo underlays him. “Lookin’ better than—”

“No.”

Ted exaggerates a sigh and bounces back with, “So, for today’s pep talk, I thought I’d quote from the great, if oft-temperamental, John McEnroe—”

“When this is over,” Roy interrupts, “you should offer to coach Jamie.”

Nothing has seemed so obvious. Jamie needs someone who will support him, not berate his every fault, real or imagined. Who better than the man who will be reincarnated as an emotional-support dog in his next life?

“Seems like a good idea,” Ted says agreeably, “except I am already happily employed.”

“We both know this”—Roy gestures between them, then drops his hand to his knee, thumbnail tracing along the raised edge of his surgery scar—“has an expiration date.”

“Well, you know, expiration dates are more like suggestions. I was watching this piece by John Oliver on produce and dairy products in grocery stores and—”

Roy gags, both at the mention of that comedic turncoat and the implication Ted chugs expired milk. There is a reason he picked his own end date; it’s so he doesn’t have to watch himself sour and spoil over another year. So he, and not anyone else, is the one to chuck his career in the bin.

“Mr. Kent?” The young attendant peeks his head around the corner, definitely after a lengthy period of eavesdropping. “They’re ready for you.”

The attendant hands him a water bottle, Ted a towel, and Roy slings his racket bag over his shoulder. He starts out of the room, but something is missing. Fucking hell. “What’s the McEnroe quote?”

Ted has kept it locked and loaded: “It was ‘I’ve never seen a good tennis movie. They were all terrible.’”

Roy pitches his head back and groans. “Jesus Christ.”

“See, I was planning on talking about how the realities of a sport are often impossible to capture in what is a relatively short-form medium and…” Ted sees the attendant spinning his hand to wrap it up. “…and we are out of time. Sorry, I’ll retool it for the semi-final.”

They follow the attendant out of the locker room, preparing to part at the door. “You know what else McEnroe said?” Roy asks rather suddenly, the quote resurfacing. “‘The older I get, the better I used to be.’”

Ted nods in appreciation. “He’d sure know, huh?”

Seven Grand Slams, a total of 170 weeks at number one, and never reaching top form again after a 1986 sabbatical. John McEnroe would know how athletic talent wanes the same as Atlas would know the exact weight of the world.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to say when you win the whole damn thing?” Ted asks. Before giving Roy a chance to answer, he waves him off. “You know what, never mind, best not to jinx it.”

The jinx has been cast already then, because Roy has thought about it. Too much, actually. But just in case, while still away from the prying eyes of the cameras, Roy finds an old piece of paneling and knocks on wood.

“Please, ladies and gentlemen”—no one pays the umpire any mind, the roar deafening—“Ladies and gentlemen, quiet please.” The rowdiness subsides, the cheers tapering off. If they want to see him pull it off, they have to shut the fuck up.

The stadium stills. Thousands of people, now scared to shift, whisper, breathe. Jinx it.

Has there ever been another crowd who wanted a man to win so badly? Evert asks, hushed. She’s all in his head, but she wants it for him, too.

Match point, Kent.

|||

SEMI-FINAL
Kent (unseeded) v. Obisanya (24)

Phoebe pokes at her meatball, rolling it in a circuit around her plate of spaghetti. Roy should chide her to eat, but he’s not thrilled to dig into his meager chicken cutlet and undressed side salad either. A secondary plate of spaghetti has been wrapped and stored in the fridge for when his sister returns from the hospital. All in all, it’s a quiet Thursday dinner. That is until Keeley crashes through the front door screaming, “I’m a fucking Wimbledon finalist!”

Keeley hits him at full speed, leaping into his unready arms and latching her legs around his waist. “I did it! I fucking did it!”

“Of course you did,” Roy says softly into her sweaty mess of post-match hair. He had watched every minute of the match alongside Phoebe, neither of them doubting for a tenth of a second she’d pull it off. “You’re Keeley fucking Jones.”

Phoebe, though beaming, holds her hand out to Keeley as soon as her feet touch back on the ground. “You said two bad words,” she informs her. “Well, one bad word twice. That will be two pounds.”

“Right, obviously,” Keeley says without missing a beat and races back down the hall, coming back with a hefty handful of coins. She deposits two in Phoebe’s waiting hand. “And it’s a pound per swear, yeah?”

Phoebe nods and looks to Roy, eyebrows raised expectantly.

“Put mine on my tab.”

“Alright…” Keeley spreads the rest of the small fortune on the table, mouthing the count to herself. She grins at Phoebe. “Ready?”

Wimbledon finalist Keeley Jones almost brings the fucking roof down.

“…and thus ends his dream of becoming a 2020 Wimbledon finalist. Despite a stunning run of form during this tournament, the number three seed simply had no answers for Zava’s unassailable play here on Centre Court. One can’t help but wonder if the chance of a British man finally again winning Wimbledon goes with Jamie Tartt.”

“A good thing James Tartt wasn’t around to witness that performance. We’d have seen the poor guy carried out on a stretcher. Christ alive, 6-2, 6-1, 6-0, and in a semi-final. Leaving us with Kent. Kent!”

“Careful now, George. You still have another foot you could eat.”

Zava is on his way out of the locker room, toweling his hands like he has to wipe the blood of his victory from them. His sunglasses are already on, but at the sight of Roy, he slides them off and into his hair, still done up in a ridiculous miniature man bun. With no way of evading him, Roy stands his ground as Zava brings them toe-to-toe.

Both hands coming down on Roy’s shoulders, he breathes in deeply. Exhales. “I have hope it will be you that I face on Sunday,” he says with the same serene smile Roy has called bullshit on since the day they met. 

Zava had been nineteen and meditating during breaks in their Monte Carlo Masters second round match, but being one with the earth and sky didn’t keep him from losing in three lopsided sets. He bowed his head in gratitude toward the spectators and the umpire, but pretended not to notice Roy waiting to shake his hand at the net. Losing gets to him, same as it does everyone else; the prick just wants the world to think it doesn't.

In a remarkable feat of self-restraint, Roy waits until Zava and his team are out of earshot to mutter, “The feeling is not fucking mutual.”

A shower is running, the locker room’s lone noise soon joined by the echo of Roy’s trainers against the bathroom tile. The room is freezing. Under a cold spray, Jamie is sitting with his head tipped against the wall, his clothes soaked through. With a muted sigh, Roy shuts off the shower and slides down the wall, enduring the draining water as it plasters his shorts to his ass.

Several minutes pass in silence. The shower drips, as does Jamie’s hair in small beads of water down his wet cheeks.

“Your hair’s looked better,” Roy observes. The laugh that cheap dig draws is pitiful. “It was one match. I promise, you’ll live.”

“I really thought I could do it. I thought I could beat him.” Jamie hangs his head between his knees, wrung out. “But you were right. I just ended up looking like a fucking joke. Couldn’t get any of my first serves. Three double faults in one game! I shoulda faked an injury. Should’ve—” He sucks in a sharp breath and kneads both fists against his eyes. “Just been better.”

Fuck if Roy hasn’t heart those words before, rattling around his brain, driving him half-mad. His longest working relationship has been with self-flagellation, the sponsor who never pays, and he’d save every young player from the lashings if he could. Even Jamie.

“When I was seventeen, I debuted in the main draw of the US Open.” Roy senses Jamie’s head turn, feels the weight of his gaze, but stares firmly at the opposing wall. “And I just went on a fucking tear. Looked like I came out of nowhere. I had people acting like I was King Fucking Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, talking about how I was going to save British tennis. I was just playing the game I had been working so fucking hard at since I first picked up a racket, but…”

“You loved it,” Jamie supplies.

“Yeah, I fucking loved it. Greatest feeling in the world when a thousand people are on your team. I walked out of the tunnel for my first semi-final, just hearing everyone chanting my name like it fucking meant something to them, and…” His breath caught in his throat. Nearly two decades have passed, but he’s still right there under the lights of Arthur Ashe Stadium, on the court of giant slayers and gods ascending, coming to claim his title. “And then I choked.”

Jamie nods, clearly knowing as much. This is another very old story, but no one tells it right.

“Didn’t win a single game in the first set. One of the bloody ball boys mouthed, sorry, to me before I served the sixth game, like he wished someone would take me out back and put me out of my fucking misery,” Roy says and doesn’t blame Jamie for his guffaw. “It was humiliating. Probably should’ve motivated me, but you know how many games I won that match?”

“Three,” Jamie answers without having to pause to think on it. “Just like me.”

“And just like you, I had to listen to a bunch of floppy cocks out there act like they hadn’t put me on a pedestal, claiming they knew all along I didn’t have what it really took to win.” A quote springs to his mind, courtesy of Trent Crimm: perhaps the boy who would be king is merely a kid lucky to have been brought along to the tournament. His mum and dad read that paper and Roy remembers wishing he could burn every copy in England. With his hands clenched, he says, “You’re seventeen, playing guys almost twice your age and triple your fucking experience, but everyone is expecting you to be the first man in the history of tennis to never lose a bloody match.”

Jamie shakes his head wearily. “I’m not seventeen.”

“No, you’re not,” Roy assents, “but that’s not what I’m fucking getting at. You’re going to lose. A lot. You’re going to lose to guys who get lucky, or because you’re having a shitty day, or to some young prick who’s got something to prove…”

Jamie huffs, but says nothing.

“You can then go cry about it or curse God or whatever the fuck helps you sleep at night, but don’t fucking ever beat yourself up bad enough the next guy can’t even get a punch in.”

There it is: everything he wishes someone had told him at twenty-three, everything his grandad hadn’t had time to impart. It might have saved him a great number of self-inflicted bruises to his ego. He stands, wincing at the wet cotton stuck up his crack, and holds a hand out to Jamie, who accepts it with a slight smile.

“You’re the reason I wanted to play tennis, you know,” Jamie says, and the confession probably shouldn’t surprise Roy as much as it does. “All the other kids just wanted to play football, but you made tennis seem…”

Roy appreciates how desperately Jamie struggles not to blurt out cool. “It was the same for me growing up. Had to walk past all my friends playing on the pitch on our block to get to the courts, but my grandad made me want to stick with it.” He glares at the smirk threatening to burst onto Jamie’s face. “Don’t fucking read into that.”

“Well, it’s just you were inspired by your grandad and you’re becoming something of a grandad to me…”

Roy stalks out of the showers, leaving Jamie laughing in his wake. Such a little prick, even at his lowest moments. As distracted as he is cursing the Tartt name to himself, he almost misses Jamie calling after him, “And good luck, grandad! Bet you’ll smash it.”

It would be a wasted effort, fighting off a smile. He passes a mirror, the reflection handing the pride in his smile back to him, and a horrifying realization bowls him over. If hating Jamie Tartt is a professional sport, he has officially lost the championship title.

“This where all the losers hang out?”

Three scotches deep, Keeley Jones looked heaven-sent, sliding into the stool beside his. The bar had reached capacity two hours ago and kept letting people inside anyway—welcome to a Friday night in the stomach of London—but no one had dared touch that empty stool for fear of losing a limb. Only Keeley.

At the time, as drunk and wretched as he was, Roy had chalked up her miraculous appearance to a funny coincidence. Allowed six years of hindsight, he wonders now if Keeley had sniffed him out. Of all the broken-heart bars in the city, she stumbled into his.

She had ordered three shots of tequila before he strung together an eloquent, “What’re you doing ‘ere?”

“Misery loves company, doesn’t it?” she asked and licked a strip across the back of her hand, salted it, and knocked back two of the three shots without pausing for a breath.

“I’m not miserable,” he protested, once he had picked his jaw off the bar. “I’m…” But he scraped the bottom of his barrel for a word and came up dry.

“Well, I’m miserable,” she announced, smacking both palms on the bar top. She finished off her last shot and signaled to the bartender for two more. Rather than hoarding both for herself, she nudged one his way. “And I’d love some company.”

With only a sip of his fourth scotch left, Roy was not about to turn down the free liquor. He lifted the shot glass, only for Keeley to make an affronted noise. “No, no, we’ve got to do this right!” She grabbed his hand and, mind muddled by an excess of scotch, he didn’t realize what she was about to do until she was dragging her tongue from the base of his thumb to his knuckle.

“Jesus.”

One hand coated in salt and a lime shoved in the other, Roy was deemed ready. They did their shots at the same time, his eyes never leaving her face.

They stayed until last call. In the time since, Roy has forgotten what they talked about it, if any of it was important. His memory skips and picks up again in the corridor of her hotel, after she must have accepted his offer to walk her back. For safety, and shit like that. Between the short distance from the elevator to her door, he had stumbled twice, but her hand on his wrist kept steadying him.

“This is me.”

He’ll never be sure if it’s wishful rewriting on his part, remembering her hands had shook slightly as she slipped the key card into the lock, believing she had been as nervous as he was.

“Well…”

“Good night,” he said brusquely. He might have held his hand out for a shake.

“Uh, good night?”

He went another round with himself on the walk back to the elevator. Batted back a flash of hot and angry tears. Cursed God a bit, for the hell of it. He thought he couldn’t withstand fucking up another thing that day.

But somewhere between the tenth floor and the lobby, he realized none of it mattered. The lost semi-final didn’t matter. Zava didn’t matter. At that moment, tennis didn’t fucking matter. What mattered was he had left Keeley Jones hanging upstairs when he should have kissed her until neither of them could breathe.

Keeley took her turn leaving him hanging and let him wait five minutes before she answered his knock. Dressed in a hotel robe a size too big, she folded her arms to hold the robe together and considered the sorry look of him. She lifted her chin. “Want a second chance?”

“Fuck yes.”

In the morning, the hangover hit, with it a renewed despondency over the loss, and he ran out like a coward who’d rather dig a grave to wallow in than try to reconcile both happiness and disappointment together in his heart.

But in those small hours before the morning came, he had been happy to let it all go. He had been fucking ecstatic, to have Keeley in his arms, to kiss her without a fuck given about tomorrow, to be a loser in her wonderful company.

“40-15.”

The mark of a good player is soldiering on no matter the conditions—blistering heat, a strong breeze, a drizzle, or, as is the case today, a dark sky threatening much harder rain. A heavy droplet hits Roy’s thumb, squeezed around his racket grip, as he waits on Sam’s serve.

The serve clocks in at 115 mph, a millimeter beyond the service box. Out.

“Second service.”

The crowd is cheering for a fault like Sam had instead served an ace and it takes the umpire asking for quiet three times in succession to shut them up. If the mark of a good player is persevering through any conditions, the mark of a great one is playing to win while a whole stadium is rooting for you to lose. Sam Obisanya is truly great and he’ll have earned his spot in the final. First set, 6-4; second set, 6-3; about to go up 2-0 in the third.

Looks like the Cinderella story finally ends here, John McEnroe, summing his situation up well. What he’s paid to do, though he’s been berating Roy for free.

Roy is tired. His knee is smarting, like it does in bad weather. He wonders if he should fold. Been a good run, they’ll say, just such a shame he choked in the end. That Roy Kent, with all his medals and his trophies, he must have not wanted Wimbledon badly enough.

What Roy wants is a miracle.

Sam’s second serve arrives at a respectable 99 mph, right down the line. Roy shoots it back to his forehand, anticipates a short ball. Ola Obisanya is sure to have told Sam to run him around like a cat after a laser pointer. He pops the short ball across court. Can’t be the only one running here. Sam dives, but his attempt catches the net.

“40-30.”

To thunderous applause, the sky opens up in a downpour. There’s his miracle.

Roy is losing track of how many beads of water he has dripped on the carpet. The attendant had handed him a towel as soon as he reentered the locker room, but he hasn’t bothered with it. Staving off the inevitable. If he refuses to towel off, perhaps the rain will keep falling, the match will be suspended indefinitely, and he’ll never lose. Never retire. Stay exactly as he is.

And never win either.

Ted comes to join him on the bench, for what may be the last time, and doesn’t say a word. Just the hushed whispers of Sam and his father fill the locker room, indiscernible from where he’s sitting. Roy doubts knowing Sam’s strategy would help him much once the rain does clear. Storms never last forever and neither do winning streaks.

“It’s over, isn’t it?” Roy peers over at Ted, searching for a sign of the future in his face. If it’s hopeless, he wants Ted to tell him so. At least then he can stop caring so bloody much.

Of course, he should know better than to expect resignation from Ted Lasso. The man has never been given odds he’d call hopeless. “I dunno,” he says, and adds, free of any doubt, “We still have two and a half sets to play.”

Roy scoffs and finally unfolds his towel, scrubbing it down his face. “Try subtracting two.”

Ted casts him a sidelong glance. “What are you going to do after this, Roy?”

“Are you about to invite me to fucking Disneyland?” Roy asks, mopping the remaining sweat and rainwater off his brow.

“If you’re paying,” Ted says, shrugging offhandedly, “and only if it’s the one in Paris. I wanna hear Mickey Mouse say, bonjour, monsieur.”

Roy shuts his eyes, hangs his head, and invites the sweet release of death.

“But what I actually meant was, what happens if you lose today? You’re going to retire, right?” After Roy nods without opening his eyes, Ted continues, “Alright, and what happens if you win today? You’re still going to retire, final or no final. So what does it matter if you win or lose?”

His ears—ringing since he came off the court—pop.

“Because I want to fucking win!”

The words explode from him, in a voice he hardly recognizes. The voice shocks the room but him most of all, because of how long it has been since he has heard it. The surety in what he wants, the hunger to fight tooth and nail for it is back, after years muffled under layers and layers of insecure shit.

“And I don’t want to win just to prove George Cartrick wrong, or to beat Zava, or to go down in bloody history, or to make you proud, or make my grandad proud, or even Phoebe. I want to win because…I want it. I fucking want it. It would…” He breaks off. His throat hurts, but a weight in his chest has eased. “It would make me happy.”

“Alright.”

“Alright?” Roy echoes, teeth clenching. After he has bared his bloody, buggered soul to him, Ted has nothing more to say than that?

“Alright, you want to win. This guy right here”—Ted points to his heaving chest, the raging heart beating within it—“can get you there.”

This guy, who reflexively tries to calm his breathing and fails. He releases his balled fists, his hands steady. The rest of the locker rooms comes into sharp focus—the scent of chemical cleaner mixed with a hint of sweat and a freshly-opened can of tennis balls, the hum of muted televisions underlying the low voices of Sam and Mr. Obisanya, the carpeted floor grounding beneath his feet. The television across from him is playing highlights of the semi-final thus far and Roy feels, with absolute confidence, he could shatter the screen simply by narrowing his eyes, shattering the past two hours with it. A wrinkle in time, a do-over, another chance.

Roy turns back to Ted, his eyes brighter than they’ve ever looked before now. “Two and a half more sets, right? Tell me what to do.”

The players are walking back onto Centre Court after an hour and a half delay. Kent probably conferred with his coach, looking for any weak spots in Obisanya’s game, anything that might turn this thing—

“Fuck off, John McEnroe,” he whispers to his phantom commentator. The voice disappears; there’s no longer any room for it.

His head is empty of anything but this: eyes on the ball, whipping off Sam’s racket.

He knows exactly where it's going, clean down the left alley line, and he knows exactly where it's going next, deep in the right corner, forcing Sam back, slowing him down. Giving Roy time to run. Just give him time.

“And look at that: we’re out of fucking time.”

He escapes the press room by the skin of his teeth, but ends up facing down a far scarier adversary: Rebecca Welton, waiting patiently in the back hall for him.

“Congratulations, Wimbledon finalist.”

Rebecca extends her hand. Roy moves to shake it, but notices her hand isn’t empty, in it a security pass allowing him a seat in Keeley’s box for tomorrow’s final. He turns the pass over it, perhaps expecting to find the word “psych” scribbled across the back. It’s blank. The pass is the real deal.

“Do not fuck this up,” Rebecca warns, and Roy knows damn well she isn’t talking about his own final.

She’s talking about the rest of his life.

|||

CHAMPIONSHIP
Kent (unseeded) v. Zava (1)

The sun glares through the blinds, cutting long, blinding stripes across his white duvet, but for once, the early morning light is not what wakes him. Outside his window, the bird songs are being drowned out by raucous yelling and the rhythmic thwacking of balls hitting rackets. Roy peeks around the blinds, blinking the sleep from his eyes, and is positive what he’s seeing can’t possibly be real.

Dani Rojas, who should be in Guadalajara, whoops at the sight of Roy cutting across the lawn and misses a crack at Colin Hughes’s second serve. “30-love!” Phoebe declares, discreetly peering at the umpiring Isaac McAdoo to assure she said the score correctly. Sam Obisanya whispers something to Dani, likely a request for him to get his head back in the match, before returning to his position at the net, diagonal from Jamie fucking Tartt, grinning gamely.

Either five of the world’s top players have snuck over his garden wall to have a go at his hard court or his sister has a cache of key copies she gives out in place of a doctor’s lollies. “What the fuck is going on?” Roy calls out.

Colin jerks, fumbling his serve. The ball smashes into the net, millimeters off Jamie’s shoulder. “You trying to kill me, man?” Jamie asks, appalled. Back to his drama queen self then.

The boys abandon the match in short order and congregate at the net in a messy line, never looking more like a pack of naughty schoolboys, just in more expensive threads. Phoebe scurries to align herself on his side instead, mimicking his crossed-arm stance. “I’ll deal with your betrayal later,” Roy says to her.

“We’re just here to help you, bruv,” McAdoo explains. The bandage wrapped around his left shoulder is just visible at the collar of his sweatsuit. Again, Roy is struck by how strange it is not just that they’re all here, at his house, but that they’re all here together. He would have expected Isaac and Jamie to be at each other’s throats, but they’re standing beside one another without a whiff of tension.

“You”—his eyes lock on Jamie—“are here to help me?”

Jamie shrugs. “It’s what he said, ain’t it?”

“You all hate the idea of Zava winning that much?”

“I could never hate Zava,” Dani says, fervently shaking his head, distressed at the mere suggestion. “To see him hit a backhand is to see a baby smile for the first—”

“It is not that we hate Zava,” Sam thankfully interrupts. “It is that we like you.”

Roy juts his chin towards Jamie. “Even him?”

Jamie opens his mouth, but Colin beats him to the draw. “‘Specially him. It was his idea.”

Within five seconds, Jamie and Colin are coming to fake blows with their hundred-buck rackets, the other boys and Phoebe egging them on. Nothing happening in his back garden would be out of place on a schoolyard, right down to the comradery binding them all together. Every man here has dashed the dreams of the men they’re laughing with and every man here has been the one dashed, but they’ve picked themselves up, they’ve reset back to zero, and they’ll be ready to go again by the time the next tournament rolls around.

He is the sole outlier. They’ve come to play him off.

Jamie manages one last bash at Colin’s shoulder before clearing his throat. “Are we gonna show this granddad some new tricks or what?”

“Such a little bitch,” Roy bemoans under his breath. Phoebe stills hears him and holds up her pointer finger, another tally for the book. “I’ll make it two if you run in and get my racket. Your uncle’s got to pummel a bunch of unschooled little boys into the ground.”

Though he and Sam do pummel Colin and Jamie in a friendly set of doubles, Roy also pays close attention to Dani showing him how he gets so much spin on his first serves. He listens to Isaac explain how he prevents opponents from running him around the court and to Colin talk about how he’s able to dig so deep, coming back from two sets down. (Though, he’ll not be whispering, “I am a strong and capable man” to himself to save a fucking match point.) He even allows, under extreme protest, a few pointers from Jamie on his net game.

Ted arrives later in the morning, Henry and Beard in tow and with more than enough green smoothies to go around. “You knew this was happening,” Roy accuses.

“I may have had some extra keys made.”

Roy does not miss the conspiratorial smile Jamie and Ted share.

During a water break, while Phoebe and Henry are distracted by Sam and Dani attempting to teach Ted how to hit a ball between his legs, Roy decides to play nice and give Jamie a word of warning. “A certain mustachioed man is probably going to ask if you need a new coach sometime soon.”

“Aye, he already did.” Jamie mops a bit of water off his chin. “Turned him down.”

“Well, that was fucking stupid.”

“Was it?” Jamie asks, a cocky twinkle in his eyes. “Got my eye on this other coach, see. Rumor is he’s gonna be out of a job soon.”

Roy woke up thinking he had to get his eyes checked; now, he’s worried his hearing is on the way out. “You can’t be fucking serious,” he scoffs. “We’d kill each other.”

“Ain’t that the fun of it?”

“And what makes you think you can afford me?”

“You wouldn’t be in it for the money.” Jamie shoots him a smug smile. “You’ll do it for the glory. ‘Cause you’re going to coach me to winning a calendar-year Grand Slam and the gold medal.”

Roy’s hearing really must be shot, because what Jamie just said is bloody mental.

A calendar-year Grand Slam—winning the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open within the same year—is the holy grail of tennis, only achieved by one man and two women in the modern era. Roy never came close to achieving it. Neither has Zava. Never mind adding the Olympic gold in Paris—it’s impossible.

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Think about it,” Jamie says, undeterred. He grabs his racket and jogs back onto the court, joining Henry for a new round of doubles against Phoebe and Dani.

Jamie has the hardest time returning Dani’s first serve, so they’d have to work on his return game, but he’s still in a good position to win the upcoming US Open over him and Australia in the near year. Clay is his worst surface, which will be a problem for the French Open and Paris 2024. They’ll have to spend February and March on the clay courts in Spain. Then, at next year’s Wimbledon—

Well, fuck. Roy has finished thinking about it.

“—guess I’ll say what we’re all thinking: of course it went this way. This is who Keeley Jones is and has been since she came on the tour: she shows promise, but never delivers on it. I’m surprised the end results weren’t worse! By the way she played at the end there, you’d have thought Danvers should have beaten her in straight sets. I mean—”

“Okay now, George. If you’re just tuning in with us, we’re discussing this afternoon’s thrilling Wimbledon women’s final between Keeley Jones and Jack Danvers, where Danvers managed to edge out the UK darling Jones in a tight 6-7, 7-6, 6-4 win, unfortunately crushing British hopes of winning both singles titles.”

“It’s the hope that kills you, Murray, but we’re all bloody fools for pinning our hopes on Kent and Jones.”

The corridors bustle with the afterthoughts of a final—clean-up, crowd control, celebrating, if anyone can afford the time—but Keeley has found herself a lonely corner amidst the madness. Roy follows the invisible trail she’s left behind; play in enough tournaments over so many years and you soon add every stadium’s darkest alcove to your personal collection of breakdowns.

Keeley has lost the battle to hers. Her silver runner-up plate has been discarded on the ground beside her and she’s hugging her racket to her chest the way a musician holds their acoustic guitar. When she lifts her head at the sound of his footsteps, Roy glimpses her face, a flushed mess of snot, sweat, and tears, and his heart aches for her. She ducks her head back down quickly, scrubbing her hand beneath her nose to clear away some of the snot.

“Did you at least have fun?” she asks weakly.

Roy settles beside her, minding the consolation prize. Suddenly, he understands the instinct everyone has to say such empty platitudes as, it was so close; you almost had her; it could have gone either way, even though Keeley will never hear the truth in them, same as Roy never has in the past. If it was so close, she'd say, why didn’t I beat her? And Roy will have nothing for her, other than an overwhelming need to do anything—fight the Grand Slam Board single-handedly, invent time travel, kill a god—to save her this heartbreak.

“I’m sorry.” He lays his hand, palm-up, on his knee.

Her fingers slot seamlessly between his. She sniffles. “I really wanted to win.”

“I know.”

She rests her head on his shoulder and they sit quietly, for five minutes or five hours. Neither of them care to keep score.

“This might be bad fucking timing,” Roy concedes, after the worst of her tears have subsided. He draws the small box from his pocket and says, “But I got you something.”

“Oi, a present?” Keeley snatches it, rattling it close to her ear. “It’s perfect timing. I think everyone should get a present right after they’ve gotten the snot kicked out of them.”

She carefully unties the pink ribbon, hands it off to Roy for safekeeping, and pops open the box. Roy tears his eyes away before he can see her initial reaction, but he hears the soft gasp and looks back to see her holding the charm in the palm of her hand: a loopy K, gold and set in shining pink crystals.

“K for…”

“Keeley.”

“Yeah, right,” she says, rolling her eyes fondly. “Though you know I already have a K charm, yeah?”

Roy silently curses the jeweler for not warning him. “I did not.”

“Eh, that K was too pointy anyway.” Keeley returns the charm to the box and smiles, her first since all the ones she had to fake in front of the cameras. “Out with the old and in with the new, right?”

His throat tightens at the cliche. He is the old—hasn’t that been what everyone’s been saying over these last two weeks? Zava’s old rival, the old guard of the sport, the geriatric dinosaur. He’ll never again be the man she bumped into at a bar six years ago, on the way down from his career’s peak but still brushing the top of the world. He’ll not even be the man she remet in this tournament, on a once-in-a-lifetime winning streak. Roy Kent will become past tense, a nostalgic article, an answer on a quiz show, and he’ll be what’s left—just Roy.

Keeley pokes the corner of his unconscious frown. “There’s that sexy look again. What’s the problem? Is your beard on too tight?”

“Why do you like me?” he asks, an inverse of the question she first posed to him. Another six years may as well have passed between their conversation on the balcony and now.

“I guess at first, it was because you were good, like Queen performing at Live Aid good, and you seemed mysterious, which is fucking hot.” Keeley digs her elbow into his side, clearly hoping to get a rise out of him, but her eyes soften the longer she looks at him. “But then I realized you aren’t actually all that mysterious. You’re just good.”

He’d say he’s about to retire from being good, for good, if he thought she meant at tennis. “And that’s enough?”

“Absolutely.” The period she stamps at the end of her one-word sentence implies no room for argument, but, as if to further her point, Keeley tugs his arm and wraps it around her waist. “See, I just had this feeling it’s supposed to be you and me.”

“Seems like a lot of faith to put in the universe,” he hedges.

“Fuck the universe,” Keeley dismisses, startling a laugh out of Roy. “I did this all by myself. I did everything Rebecca taught me: I visualized my goals, I executed my maneuvers…”

“So, I was a match you wanted to win?”

Keeley seems to take the joke more seriously than he meant it. “Yeah,” she answers, pressing her lips against his shoulder. “Which makes me the champion after all.”

“Congratulations,” he whispers against her crown. Then, Roy tilts her chin up, tips his forehead against hers, and kisses her, thrilled to have lost a game he’s been lucky enough to play. And to think, this is only round one.

“Last round,” Ted says, rubbing his hands together. He hasn’t sat down yet, possessed by a jittery energy Roy is having trouble not reading as nervous. “I’ll tell ya, it took me forever to decide what to wear.”

“You look the fucking same.”

Ironed khakis, a tucked-in blue polo, a pair of unscuffed trainers—Ted has the fashion sense of a sitcom stock character.

“I can say the same about you,” Ted points out and, in the same tennis whites he has washed and donned seven times now, Roy must admit he has him there. Ted continues to stand, shifting his weight from one leg to another, until his eyes catch on something above Roy’s head. “Man, that’s one old racket you’ve got there. Hope you didn’t plan on playing with that thing. May I…?”

Roy shrugs, not seeing how it could hurt, especially given the state of the racket. The face of the racket, bent nearly in half, is hanging on by a few fraying strings, the wooden frame completely splintered. Ted is gentle in extracting it from Roy’s locker and holds it reverently, a touch of melancholy in his smile.

A lump, the size of a tennis ball, catches in Roy’s throat. “It was my grandad’s.”

His parents had found it a week after the funeral while in the process of cleaning out his grandad’s flat. It ended up at the top of a junk pile, which is the only reason Roy was able to rescue it from its fate. His family pretended to understand his attachment to the broken racket, one of his last connections to his grandad and the sport they shared, but none of them knew the real story.

“I smashed it,” Roy explains. “I was pissed about a bad call he made in our bloody friendly, so I did that. I was eight.” Ted whistles, reassessing the damage. “My grandad made me do all these chores to pay him back for it, but at the end of it, he gave me the money to buy my first real racket, a proper metal one.”

He had been shocked, boxing and throwing away the home of the greatest friend he’d ever had, to see his grandad held on to the racket. While he can guess at why, Roy will never know for sure. He just has to carry it on.

“My dad had a wooden racket like this,” Ted says, carefully returning the broken relic back to the locker. “I didn’t get to play with him much growing up. He had kind of lost his passion for it. But he came to all my matches, at least the big and important ones.”

“What did he say when you didn’t go pro?”

Ted coughs lightly. “He, uh…he actually passed away when I was sixteen, just after my US Open final.”

“Is that why you…” Roy leaves the last word off.

“I quit?” Ted finishes for him. “It is, yeah. First match I played after he…well, I bombed worse than a stand-up comedian at a funeral. I got it into my head that I couldn't do it without him, so I decided to go to KU instead. Didn’t even play for the school’s team. I met my future wife, had Henry, and I thought that part of my life was over. That I had lost my passion for it, same as he did.”

Roy senses the obvious—“But?”

“I had this itch, the ants in your pants kind. Michelle said I kept mumbling 40-love in my sleep. Turned out the KU campus near us needed a new coach and the rest they say…” Ted sighs. “You know, a lot of folks here have been asking me if I regret it, never turning pro, but honestly? I think I dodged a bullet, Neo in The Matrix style. I would have been miserable under all that pressure. What I do regret is why I quit. It’s not what my dad would have wanted for me.”

Regrets—Roy once carried around a metric shit ton of them. Counting every loss as a regret sure fucking added up. He is seeing now, with clearer vision than he has had in a decade, how it did nothing for him, lugging all that weight around. It never improved his game. Never made him a better person. 

If anything, it embittered him. He took cheap shots at talented kids who didn’t deserve it, left a woman he was scared to love alone in a hotel bed, and put himself down, over and over again, because he didn’t know how to find joy in difficult things. The uphill battles. Relationships with an open end. What’s on the other side of this horizon and the fear it’s nothing.

It is nothing, because he’s the one deciding what happens next. That’s probably what makes starting again so exciting.

At last, Ted sits down beside him, setting their familiar scene for the final time. “How’re you feeling?”

After a beat, he says, “Tired.” After another, he admits, “Fucking terrified. But I think I’m ready. I’m quitting for the right reasons.”

Ted shakes his head adamantly. “Nah, retiring isn’t quitting. It’s…”

“Goodbye.”

“Yeah,” Ted agrees, smiling broadly. He pats Roy’s knee, the good one. “And parting is such sweet sorrow.”

Roy shakes his head, his face scrunching with the effort it takes not to grin. “Fucking hell.”

The moment is over, ending on a discordant yet perfect note. Ted walks him as far as the door, where Roy pauses, his hand hovering above the handle. That terror he admitted to has firmly taken hold of him now. It all becomes undeniably real when he steps outside this locker room. The final, which had seemed like a pipe dream two weeks ago, will be a real match he has to play. His name, above Zava’s on the scoreboard. 

The score, love-all.

What he remembers of his last time playing on Centre Court: Ted having to open the door for him. The silence of the tunnel and the cameraman’s discreet smile. Applause washing over him in a downpour. The grass beneath his feet, never changing. The scoreboard. Kent, no seeded number beside it. Surpassing all expectations. Having to surpass one more.

Think of it this way—and the voice is not Chris Evert or John McEnroe, but his own—it’s only history.

In his box, Ted and Beard are saluting him, Henry following their example. Phoebe is sitting on her mother’s lap, flapping her Roy Kent sign. His sister is confiding something to Keeley, who laughs with her head thrown back. She dabs the corners of her eyes, which then fall on him, gazing at her, still not quite believing his luck. She winks at him and holds up her wrist, fingers catching one of the charms. He can’t see it from so far away, but he knows.

He can fucking do this, because his coaches are here, his family is here, and Keeley is here. And next year, he’ll be in her place, cheering her on, watching as she wins the whole damn thing.

|||

GOING OUT ON TOP
World No. 1 Zava shocked the international tennis community this weekend by announcing his retirement shortly after his upset loss to old rival, Roy Kent, in the Wimbledon final.

“Still can’t believe that fucking prick,” Roy grumbles, tossing the newspaper aside. Phoebe jots down a tally, fourth of the morning. “It was supposed to be my retirement on the front page.”

“Now Roy, I believe you said you didn’t want your retirement to be a big deal,” Ted reminds him on his way back to the table, delivering a heap of waffles for Henry and Phoebe to descend upon. “Can we check the record on that, Phoebe?”

Without checking anything, Phoebe nods firmly, the syrupy traitor.

“Nah, I agree with Roy. It’s unfair.” Jamie accepts the syrup bottle from Phoebe before continuing, “I mean, if he’s retired, how am I supposed to beat him and prove I’m better?” He tries using his fork to spear a waffle for himself, but Roy moves the plate out of his reach. “Seriously?”

“You’re not going to beat anyone if you’re loading up on this junk.” Roy takes the last two waffles for himself and adds, “No offense, Ted.”

“None taken.”

“I think we should all look on the bright side,” Keeley declares. She gives up trying to squeeze one of his dining room chairs between him and Phoebe and drops into Roy’s lap. “He promised to send me an avocado basket from his farm. Think of guacamole!”

“Can I at least have that?” Jamie asks Roy, a note of hope in his voice.

Roy cuts him a sharp look. Jamie mutters something whiny about how unfair his treatment is before jumping into a heated debate with Henry and Phoebe concerning what is the best way to eat an avocado, with Keeley happy to referee. 

Under the cover of their conversation, Roy asks Ted quietly, “When do you leave?”

“Me, Henry, and Beard will be at Heathrow tonight catching Flight 815. One number off the one from Lost, phew,” Ted says, flicking imaginary sweat off his brow.

Roy forces the words out quickly, before anyone else can catch them: “Thank you.”

“I feel like I should be the one thanking you,” Ted says, because he has never made anything easy for Roy, even here at the end. “For the rest of my life, I get to say I coached the 2020 Wimbledon champion.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Roy presses his lips together, refusing to get choked up. “Thank you anyway.”

Ted smiles warmly. “You’re welcome anyway.”

“Aw,” Keeley says, unabashedly eavesdropping. “Feels like I should be getting a picture.”

“No.”

Ted mimes taking a mental snapshot and Keeley follows suit. She then presses a lingering kiss to Roy’s cheek, rightly sensing his determination to keep it together is at a breaking point. He already blubbered through yesterday’s trophy ceremony and his subsequent retirement speech; he will not cry in the presence of Jamie fucking Tartt.

“C’mon, drink up, babe.” Keeley shoves his coffee mug at him. “We’ve got a big day planned. Right, Phoebe?”

The big day: visiting the Tate. Afterwards, a bit of football on the Richmond green. Another training session with Jamie in the evening before they start in earnest tomorrow. A dinner he cooks for two. Keeley Jones, staying the night.

It’s a bit boring, the way life is. He also knows his hand will be sweating the entire time he holds Keeley’s during their museum walk-through. Love tends to do that to a person, so he’s heard. It gets messy. It’s a fight. It begins at a baseline of zero and grows, if you give it a chance.

Roy can’t fucking wait.