Chapter Text
“And next up, exciting news about a very special choice for the next manager at Tottenham…”
“Yes, a man we all know and remember very well despite his absence these past two seasons—a man who two years ago led his team in perhaps the ultimate underdog story—”
“Certainly, and himself a quintessential fish out of water—”
“Who is it—well, we’ll be right back, so don’t go anywhere!”
Rebecca starts when someone gently taps the table in front of her. She looks up from the glass of wine she’s been nursing to find Beard giving her a meaningful look, the meaning of which she struggles to interpret. She frowns at him, cocking her head. What? He jerks his chin to the television over the bar, and she reluctantly drags her eyes over. It’s on an ad break. She can’t fathom why Beard wants her to learn about car insurance right now.
“What?” Roy growls, clearly equally confused by Beard’s insistence. Keeley, meanwhile, is looking between Beard, the television, and Rebecca with an expression of slowly growing alarm.
“Yes, what?” Rebecca echoes.
“Listen,” is all Beard says. The four of them focus on the television then. The programme returns—sports coverage in the studio. Something about Tottenham, based on the cockerel logo on the screen. A man’s face with a question mark superimposed over his features appears beside the logo. The line of text beneath the commentator reads: Who is Tottenham’s surprise new hire?
“As we were saying, he’s a man who left the Premier League almost as abruptly as he arrived, but not before leading his team to a historical, well-earned almost-victory—yes, that’s right! The new manager at Tottenham is none other than the American we all grew to love—former Richmond gaffer Ted Lasso.”
Keeley screams.
Roy says, “Holy shit.”
Rebecca remains frozen to her spot, staring, transfixed by the television screen on which an image of Ted Lasso, newly minted Tottenham manager, has just appeared. To see that familiar grin, that familiar face, beside the blue cockerel rather than a greyhound feels—all wrong. And to see that face at all again—is a thrill. Perhaps even a dangerous one.
“It’s Ted?!” Keeley is demanding. “Our Ted?!”
“Total betrayal,” Roy is grousing at the same time.
“You okay?” Beard’s eyes are on Rebecca.
“Er—yes,” she stumbles to say. “What—unbelievable news.”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it,” Beard deadpans, eyes flickering over her shoulder.
“Yes…”
“You gotta see it to believe it,” intones a warm, deep, rich and familiar voice from behind her ear, and, oh—
It’s—it’s him.
Rebecca, thunderstruck, twists around at once in her seat to behold the very real, very close Ted standing before her. Ted Lasso, her former head coach, her friend, her former confidante and her former perhaps-something-more-there. Her Ted. No, not her Ted. Tottenham’s Ted.
“Surprise!” Ted cheers, once everyone at the table has noticed him, Rebecca still gaping, Keeley’s eyes round as saucers, Roy’s teeth baring in a welcome-back scowl. “Boy, it’s good to see all your beautiful faces again.”
“Oh my god, Ted!” Keeley squeals, the first to leap up and fling her arms around him. “What were you thinking, going to Tottenham! But, oh, my god, congratulations, and welcome back, we’ve missed you so badly—”
“Good to see you, mate—” Roy joins in, standing as well to clap a gruff hand onto Ted’s shoulder.
Rebecca remains sitting, wine glass clutched in her hand, transfixed by Ted’s material realness and the reunion happening before her eyes. Beard, eventually, gets up as well, moving over to engage Ted in a silent, heartfelt clasp and thump on the back.
So that leaves only her.
Keeley and Roy and Beard have parted for them and so she finds herself slowly rising from the table, knowing she’s meant to. Ted is smiling at her. She smiles back, tentative, disbelieving, processing still. When she goes to him, Ted envelops her in a warm, solid embrace. She lets him do it, but she doesn’t pull him close; instead, her palms slowly relearn what is real, the fabric of his sweater beneath her fingers, all her senses equally puzzled by his return.
“Welcome back,” she stammers, after a long moment, remembering she’s supposed to. She draws back. His hands are still on her arms.
“Thanks, Boss,” he grins, and it almost breaks her heart again right there, that one syllable and this beloved face yanking her back through the vortex of grieving she’d finally emerged through only in the past year. She can tell he’s eager for her, for more, but finds she can’t do it. Can’t give him any other words, or anything other than this weak smile she’s managing to sustain upon her lips. He’s here. He has come back. Without prelude, and when she had finally rested her hope on the highest shelf.
“Not your boss anymore!” Keeley puts in.
Ted finally lets her go then, hands dropping, his grin becoming somewhat, likely jokingly, rueful. “Ah, that’s right—Ouch!”
He ducks belatedly. Something small and round and flat goes bouncing off the back of his head in a blur. A coaster, Rebecca recognises, numbly.
“Greyhounds only!" bellows a livid Mae.
Several apologies, grovelling and a few more rounds later, the group disbands outside the pub.
“G’night, Ted—don’t be a stranger!” Keeley calls out as she and Roy head off into the night. Beard has gone by now, responding to an urgent message from his wife. Ted waves merrily to Roy and Keeley and turns back to find Rebecca looking down into her purse, resting it on the bench outside the darkened pub.
“Can I walk you home? We can do some catchin’ up,” Ted offers. He shoulders his backpack, a new one now, burgundy instead of green.
Rebecca looks up at him, something less than a fraction of a second tightening across her lips. She looks unchanged, he thinks, the elegant lines of her the same as when he'd left her last. He feels strange. It doesn't feel as if it should have been years since he'd last seen her. It feels as if it should have been yesterday.
“Certainly,” she says.
Ted isn't sure if he's imagined it—just missed it—a little waver in her voice. It’s gone now, in any case, and the moment of fear that had crossed her face is gone, too, before Ted had had a chance to observe it. Instead there’s a moment of impassive reserve before finally a small, steady smile gathers on her lips.
"Oh, Ted. I can't believe you're really here,” she tells him, picking up her purse and falling in step alongside him for the walk back to her house. She glances at him, then quickly away. “Here in London again. Now, how…why are you going to Tottenham?”
Ted chuckles, hands in his pockets, looking over at her fondly as they stroll along. Their gazes just miss each other. “Well, my favourite team was already spoken for, and I just wanted to come back to London as soon as possible, so…”
Rebecca smiles slightly. “You should’ve just called me. I would happily break Hodgson’s contract for you.”
Ted laughs. “Oh, dang it. Maybe after this year ends.”
“Maybe,” she agrees. “We’ll be watching your progress with the Spurs with great interest.”
He turns to her then in transparent delight. “Star Wars! You finally watched it? When I wasn’t even here?”
“There were a lot of things I finally did after you left,” she answers, but softens it with a look when Ted meets her eyes, stricken.
“I’m sorry I—haven’t been the best at keepin’ in touch,” he begins. Her heart clenches at the reminder of his departure, the melancholy afternoon sun that day in the airport, the silence in her life once he’d left. The old emotions, renewed, fill her chest now as if they had never left. She’d thought she had finally moved past it. But she hadn’t been prepared to see him again—not tonight—perhaps not ever.
Not that she had not wanted to see him again; but to be prepared was another thing.
Perhaps it was better not to have had forewarning, she muses. The suddenness of his appearance perhaps was helping to numb some of the grief swelling within her. It was a pleasant shock still to look to her side and discover him there, real, solid, present.
“I shoulda done better,” Ted is saying. “I hope you’ll let me make up for it now I’m back.”
“I’m sure you had a lot going on,” she tells him. Now she finally allows herself to examine him a little more, in the dark and then in the soft glow from a lamppost as they turn onto her street. He looks almost exactly the same; the same moustache, the same earnest eyes, the same strands of hair falling forward onto his forehead.
Outside Rebecca’s door, Ted shrugs his backpack off one shoulder and swings it round to his front to rummage inside. Her heart drops when she sees what’s in his hand when he pulls it out.
He holds his hand out to her.
“Here you go,” he says. “Last thing I made in the house before I packed it all up.”
She takes it from him—the little pink box. She opens it, looks at them, the biscuits, suddenly fighting back tears. Thankfully her voice is steady when she asks him,
“Why?”
He tilts his head.
“Why what?”
“Why did you—want to come back?”
Ted looks down, carefully zipping up his backpack again. “Because—I—it’s…a lil bit of a long story, I s’pose.” He manages to meet her eyes again. “Perhaps over a cup of tea one day?”
Rebecca raises her eyebrows.
“Not for me,” he hastens to add. “I’ll never change my mind on that stuff. Horrible.”
She forces out a laugh, mind and heart still caught up on his biscuits, his non-answer, his promise of more time with her. Ted is saying goodnight, then. He steps close for a hug. She lets him in, but not completely; she keeps a space between them now where once they would have been flush.
When Ted lets her go he’s looking at her fondly, tracing the contours of her face with his eyes.
"G’night, Boss," he tells her softly.
She gives him one last look, all of him, part of her wondering if he would disappear again once she lost sight of him. For how could it be that one day nearly three years ago he had gone for good, and now here he was, before her, in Richmond?
“Goodnight, Ted.”
At last she tears her eyes from the smile he gives her, the little nod, so painfully familiar. She lets herself into the house, the little pink box clutched in one hand, her keys in the other. Shuts the door. In the silent darkness of her foyer she looks down at the fuzzy grey-blue of the box. Her heart tightens painfully. She drops her keys in the dish and flicks on the hallway light. She opens the box, slowly, carefully, feeling every beat of her heart in her fingertips. Pale yellow biscuits with pale yellow crumbs: years gone by, months without him. Days and days spent desperately missing him.
Rebecca hesitates, then picks up one of the biscuits between finger and thumb. The memory of every sense floods her being: the weight of it, the texture, the smell when she lifts it to her nose and breathes in. The taste when it first touches her tongue and the taste when she bites. And as it first did almost six years ago, it does again—transports her at once to some fiercely treasured place held deep within her heart.
She cries, the salt of her tears spilling hotly over her fingers. Because Ted—why? Why, Ted? Seeing him again has stunned her, filled her with warmth and love, pain and grief. There were so many questions left unanswered. Why had he baked these biscuits for her from day one, and every day since, until he’d left? Why had he left in that way? Why had it all meant nothing in the end, all the late nights and early mornings alone together in her office, all the hope she’d held in her chest toward the end, looking up at her bedroom ceiling at night?
And why, now, was he back—when finally, finally, she had made some kind of peace with the not knowing?
Now she would have to go through it all again, the desperate wondering, the silent bargaining, the final heavy resignation. She can’t bear it. She knows she couldn’t bear it all again.
Another afternoon at the Crown and Anchor finds Ted there again, this time joined by a few more Greyhounds here to see their old boss.
“So you’re really here, mate,” Jamie marvels, clapping Ted on the shoulder and giving him a very firm squeeze, as if to confirm his realness.
“Oh, I’m here to stay,” Ted laughs. “I mean it.”
“Ooh, what about Henry?” enquires Leslie.
“He’s getting here just before the league kicks off, isn’t that right?” says Keeley.
“Yeah,” Ted beams. “So we can settle him in before I get busy and then school starts for him, and work for Michelle.”
“Are you back together then?” Isaac asks, frowning. Jamie and Higgins glance from Isaac to Ted. Keeley looks from Isaac to Ted to Rebecca.
Rebecca looks down at her drink.
“Oh, no,” Ted is saying. “That’s all in the past now.”
All in the past now—was it true for the two of them, too?
“Whereabouts you living now? Now you’re at Tottenham,” Jamie asks with an exaggerated shudder. Rebecca looks up involuntarily—eager despite herself to know Ted again, to know his life and where he’ll be and if their paths might cross. No, she needs to stop; needs to stamp out this hope that rears its tentative little head again in her chest.
“Someplace named Hampstead, once Henry gets here,” Ted answers cheerfully.
“What d’you mean—where are you now?” demands Keeley.
“Well, Richmond,” Ted chuckles. He glances at Rebecca, who looks away. “Thought I’d keep bein’ a Greyhound while I still can. Drink here while Mae can still stand the sight of me.”
As if on cue, Mae walks by their table with a tray of empty glasses, glowering at the returned American.
“I’m not so sure she can,” Higgins muses.
“Well, hey, any day ‘round here without a coaster flyin’ at my head is a personal win for me.” Ted turns to Rebecca with a grin. “Right, Boss?”
Rebecca has been conspicuously quiet all night, she knows. But something holds her back still, tells her not to speak. Not to learn him again. Fair or not, there’s a fear inside her somehow at the thought of him.
So she doesn’t speak, only smiles quietly, and Ted’s face falls, just slightly.
“She’s not your boss anymore,” Jamie comments, and Ted sighs.
“So y’all keep remindin’ me.”
Jamie shrugs. “‘S your fault for betraying us, innit?”
Ted looks to Rebecca again when he answers, even if she still is not looking at him. “And I’m sorry, I am.”
He had hoped to walk Rebecca home again afterward, that they might have time to speak alone, so he could apologise again. Instead, she soon finishes her drink and rises to bid an early goodnight to everyone. Ted rises, too, uncertain, but Keeley announces she’ll join Rebecca and that the boys should stay. He watches them leave, the two of them, Keeley slipping her arm through Rebecca’s as their silhouettes begin to grow smaller against the late summer sunset.
“What’s wrong?” Keeley murmurs, snuggling closer to her friend as they begin to head into the Green. “I thought you’d be happier,” she adds. “I remember how you were when he left.”
Rebecca is silent for a while. “I don’t know,” she starts. “I’m…it feels…I don’t know. I suppose we’re not as close as we used to be...”
“Hey, Boss—sorry to interrupt—”
She turns in surprise to find a somewhat breathless Ted before her.
“Forgot to give you these,” he pants, and holds out another little pink box. She stares at it, feeling Keeley’s eyes on her and then on the box as well.
“Oh, Ted—” she tries. “There’s really no need.”
“I insist,” he insists. “Biscuits with the Boss. I made a promise, and—”
“Why?” she interrupts. “Ted, you’ll be busy soon—in Hampstead, at Tottenham—we won’t see each other. Every day,” she adds, feeling her first words perhaps a little too harsh.
He looks at her, eyes wide. “I s’pose—I know I’ll see you somehow,” he argues.
“Every day?”
Ted struggles in silence for a long moment. There’s something about the look in his eyes that tugs at her heart. It makes her relent, finally, reaching out to accept his offering.
“Thank you,” she says. “But really, Ted, you…you don’t need to keep doing this.”
You shouldn’t keep doing this.
Ted swallows.
“Right. G’night, Rebecca.”
“Goodnight, Ted.”
“Night, Keeley,” he adds, quickly, before turning to go. The younger woman gives him an understanding smile.
Once Ted has gone far enough, Keeley turns to Rebecca and says: “Okay, what the fuck, babe?”
Rebecca raises her eyebrows, but keeps walking.
“Biscuits? With the Boss? After all this time? What’s going on there?”
Rebecca shrugs. “He’s a man of his word.”
“Babe, are you sure he—”
“—Yes,” Rebecca says. “I’m sure.”
“You didn’t even let me finish my sentence.”
“Don’t say it,” she pleads. “Please.”
“I just think it’s possible that he might—”
“—he doesn’t. He never has. I really think so. It…it was only ever me. And like I said, I—I never told him. Because there was no point. And…it’s been three years now. So—no.”
“But—he’s come back.”
“Yes, but—it’s nothing to do with—He never—we never spoke, Keeley. We spoke the first year and then it was birthday texts, and holiday texts, and…nothing, nothing else. So him coming back had—had nothing to do with me.”
Now Keeley is quiet for a while.
“Okay. Okay. But do you still…do you still—?”
Rebecca swallows hard. She decides to be honest, though it hurts her to admit it out loud, outside the safe confines of her own heart:
“I do.”
Keeley reaches for her hand and squeezes. “Aw, god, babe…”
“So I’m—” Rebecca stops, hating the tremble in her voice. “I’ve been—I know he’s back, but it just feels like when he left. I’m just—wretched and scared he’s here because I’m scared he’ll leave, I—I’m fucking terrified, Keeley, I…” she stops, choking back a sob, furious with herself, ashamed, embarrassed. “I can’t do this all over again—”
Keeley tugs her into a fierce hug, reaching up to pull her down, pressing their cheeks close in the dark summer night. “Fuck,” she breathes. “Fuck, Rebecca…”
She remembers the grieving Rebecca had gone through that year.
When Ted left Richmond Rebecca had lost a best friend, and, she’d confided in Keeley then, someone for whom she had lately grown to have more complicated feelings. She had gone to the airport, but in the end she hadn’t told him. And he’d left, and Rebecca had quietly mourned for months.
Now that he’s back, protecting Rebecca from him—however good his intentions—is at once Keeley’s highest priority.
There’s an ache in his heart as Ted starts back toward the pub. There had been something about what Rebecca had said, her refusal of the biscuits for the first time he could remember. And what she’d been saying to Keeley as he approached: that they, she and Ted, were not as close as they used to be. And they weren’t; and it was his fault. His fault for leaving, his fault for not being better, trying harder, at staying in touch.
All night he thinks about her. She stays in his mind as she so often has over the past years, in the long stretches of Kansas nights when he’d wondered about picking up the phone and calling her. They had grown close. Rebecca had become a dear, dear friend—someone who had saved him more than once from the depths of his darkest thoughts—someone who, for whatever reason, wanted to save him, to care for him. Someone he had come to rely on second only to his oldest friend, Beard. He could only hope he had been there for her in the same way. And yet if he had—he could not shake the deserved guilt of the way he had left her. But he had had no choice…
Ted turns over in bed, restless, thinking now of Henry and moving to Hampstead, and how happy he was to finally have it all: to be here in London, with a job that would challenge him, and his son near every night. To be making a home.
And her words echo again in his head, as it had so many times over the last three years:
I just want you to consider the possibility that this is your home. Henry can come and live here…
She had been right. It had taken some years for him to arrive at the same understanding, but she’d been right. She always was.
He would do better. Now that he was back—now that he was here to stay—he would make things right. Yes, he would not be in Richmond, but he would make the effort to come across the city. The biscuits represented that—his commitment to make things between them back to the way they were. To be close again. He wanted to be there for her like he had been before, if she would let him.
It’s five in the morning when he reaches for his phone—he finds it’s easier to do here than in Kansas—and taps on her name in his messages.
Hey, Boss! Let me know if you have time to grab a coffee today. It would be nice to catch up, just the two of us.
He hesitates; deletes a word.