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An object in motion will stay in motion. A football, once kicked, will continue moving until it hits a body, or a net, or succumbs to the slowing fate of friction. Trent’s brain, once started down a train of thought, will continue chugging along that track until a more compelling train comes along to intercept it. For as long as Trent could remember, that train had been football. Then he met Ted Lasso.
Trent’s first interaction with Ted Lasso does not go as expected. Trent has been a sports reporter for years, and he knows the rules. You talk, then they talk. You push, and they pull back. You snipe, and they grumble, curse, muddy the waters. You write, and they crumple the words and throw them back at you. It is a game of clear and unshakeable boundaries built on a mutual lack of respect for the opposing team. Trent is a career player. But then Ted Lasso opens his sweet, lilting, mustachioed mouth and all the rules go out the window.
Pressers become Trent’s favorite part of the day. He sits in the second row in his usual seat and waits for Ted Lasso to arrive at the podium, open the room for questions, and point to Trent with that earnest sort of smile Trent thought was only possible on children’s faces. Trent identifies himself, because that’s the rule and rules are there for a reason. Ted answers his question with some kind of endearing obfuscation, and Trent, for reasons he cannot quite grasp, allows it. It is the same dance every time, and yet from the moment Trent enters the press room, his heart leaps, stands up on its toes, ready for that first step into the addicting tempo that is Ted Lasso.
It will take Trent an embarrassing number of months to parse these dance steps for what they actually are. Brains, particularly Trent’s, are funny that way. Trent has never really cared for poetry, but suddenly here is his brain, thinking in metaphor, his heart beating in a new and indecipherable rhythm. He wonders if falling in love feels this way for everyone.
Trent was five years old the first time he saw someone kick a truly beautiful goal, and something in his brain clicked firmly into place. This, he thought. This is what bodies are for.
Unfortunately for Trent, it didn’t seem to be what his body was for. His body was awkward and gangly and didn’t like the sensation of being too close to other children. Or grass. Or the way his feet felt stuffed into football boots. Trent’s sister Margot, on the other hand, was a natural. She’d walk over to the park every day after school to play with the neighborhood kids, and Trent would follow behind her like an ugly duckling. He’d sit on a bench with his feet pulled up underneath him, hands stuffed under his armpits and eyes tracking every movement of the ball as it spun across the grass. A bounce, a pass, a firm connection to a foot and then whizzing away in another direction, rolling past a defender, hitting Margot’s boot just right and pivoting into the goal, net shaking in its wake. Margot’s cheeks would be red and her arms would be in the air in celebration and her teammates would be mobbing her, hands on shoulders on backs on hands. Trent was obsessed, high on the joy and the movement and the celebration and the sudden feeling like his insides were too big for his outsides, like his heart would grow right out of his chest if it could. Trent would never be able to get enough of that feeling.
He loved everything about it, wanted to know everything about it. He memorized the rules, learned the language, studied the game for hours and hours until he was sure the knowledge wouldn’t fall out of his brain overnight. As he got older, his love only grew wider, big enough to hold the rules and the game and the language, but also the feeling of a cold beer in his hands, the sound of a raucous hometown crowd, and the sight of professional athletes in very short shorts.
But at the beginning Trent was five years old and in love the way five year olds are, innocent and earnest and obsessive, and so he went to the library. The librarian looked up as he came in, to ask him what he was looking for.
“A book on football,” Trent replied, not yet tall enough to see over the counter.
The librarian smiled. “Oh lovely, we have lots of those. Would you like one about the players? Or perhaps this one,” she said, pulling a book out of the returns. “It’s a lovely picture book about a boy your age.”
“Yes,” Trent said, and checked out both. He would eventually read through every book related to football that his local library had on its shelves. He started in fiction, but quickly outpaced the collection and moved to non-fiction. He finished the entire children’s section in a matter of months, and got special permission from the librarian to check books out from the adult section. He read team histories and player memoirs and official league rule books. He learned how matches were meant to go and the vocabulary to talk about them after they happened. And he would go to games with Margot and watch from his bench and think about the rules, and how nice it was to know how a thing was supposed to happen.
Grown-up Trent would give anything for the kind of surety he had at five years old. But since Ted Lasso had arrived, Trent’s meticulous rule book is proving less and less useful. And Ted is everywhere. There is Ted at games, and Ted at pressers, and Ted at Indian restaurants where his undivided attention makes Trent’s stomach somersault in increasingly acrobatic ways. At which point the actual food kicks in and the feeling coalesces into one more akin to his stomach eating its way out of his body.
“I really enjoyed getting to spend this time with you, Trent,” Ted says.
And Trent has to check, because his brain cannot process what is happening. “You actually mean that, don’t you?”
There is nothing in the rulebook for the way Ted nods, shoveling another bite of hot hell into his mouth. Trent leaves. He goes home and throws up and feels worse. He tells himself the sour taste in his mouth is just from bile, and not from the spiraling suspicion that every rule he knows to be true is suddenly inadequate. He tries not to think about Ted’s face, earnest and open, telling him that wins and losses, the very fabric of football as Trent has come to understand it, are irrelevant. In fact, over the course of the next several weeks Trent spends a considerable amount of time trying not to think about Ted’s face. He hasn’t failed so miserably at a task since he’d first tried to kick a football. His brain and his body feel like they had then, wrong-footed and fumbling.
“There are three laws of motion,” Margot told him, football tucked under her arm. “Rule number one: an object at rest will stay at rest until a force is enacted upon it.” She placed the football down in front of Trent. “You are the force.”
Margot was fifteen. Her love of football had begun to be tempered by her increasing passion for science. Trent’s love of football was tempered only by his inability to play it. At eleven years old Trent had yet to grow into himself. Most days his body felt relatively out of his control. That lack of control was frustrating. Which is what had brought them to the park, Margot with a plan and Trent with an air of general hopelessness.
“I don’t think this is going to work,” Trent said glumly, staring down at the football.
“Shut up,” Margot said. “The second law is that an object’s force is equal to its mass times its acceleration.”
“I don’t think I know what that means,” Trent said.
“It means that the harder you kick it the faster it will go,” Margot said, and she manhandled him over to a better position.
“What’s the third law?”
“That every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”
Trent considered this. “I think that means that the harder I kick the ball the harder I will fall down.”
“That’s not what it means.”
“You just learned this today, you probably don’t know what it means.”
“Just kick the ball, Trent.”
Trent rolled his eyes. But then he straightened his shoulders, squared up to the ball, and kicked it with all the pent up frustration of an eleven year old who just wanted the world to make sense in a way it never, ever would. He felt the ball connect with his boot and saw it fly across the pitch, a beautiful arc carrying it through the air and towards the goal. And Trent was still standing, both feet on the ground, body buzzing with the feeling.
“See?” Margot said, already jogging over to collect the ball so Trent could try again. “Science.”
Trent spends two years learning how Ted Lasso works. Relatively early into this project, Trent throws out the old rulebook in favor of simply starting a new one, a brand new file in his head for Ted Lasso. Every new interaction, every follow up press conference, and Trent knows a little more, has a few more pages filled. Meanwhile, the book becomes ever thicker with the empty pages Trent has yet to write. He has spent decades learning football, a vast and complex culture and sport encompassing diverse and global populations and opinions. Trent thinks he could spend at least as long studying Ted Lasso.
When Richmond is relegated, though, Trent is unsure where they stand. He had, after all, splashed quite a bit of the Ted Lasso story into the press. The aftermath of that decision is a sticky one, and Trent finds himself wading through the bog of unemployment and unidentifiable sentiment that he himself is only just beginning to parse out. What he is sure of - and with so few sureties left Trent is clinging to this one with a white-knuckled grip - is that there are chapters of the book he has yet to write. There are blank pages of Ted that Trent desperately wants to fill. Which, of course, is when the rest of that train of thought chugs into the station.
Years ago, in the winters of Trent’s childhoods, the boughs of the pine trees would get so laden with snow that they’d bend to nearly eye level. Trent, nose fixed permanently into the pages of that week’s book, would occasionally walk directly into them, smearing pine sap across his glasses and shaking snow in his hair and disrupting what was otherwise a well-oiled routine of walking up his own front lane. The Trent of now is reminded suddenly of the Trent of then, smacked in the face with the cold and sticky truth of mislaid attentions. He has spent so long studying Ted that he has neglected to attend to his own heart. And now here he is, sappy and sticky and heartsick with the alarming realization that he will not feature in the continuing pages of Ted’s story. He has written himself out.
He calls Margot.
“So you’re in love with him,” she says, immediately after Trent explains the situation.
“What?” Trent says, aghast. “Of course not.”
“Okay, but you are describing being in love with someone.”
“I can’t be in love with him,” Trent says.
“Why not?”
“Because you have to know someone to be in love with them!”
“Trent, darling, you’ve been writing a book about him in your head for two years. I think you know him.”
“I-” Trent isn’t sure how to explain why it doesn’t feel the same. “I know him professionally,” he equivocates.
“So,” Margot says, patient, but also with a tone of voice reserved for older sisters that impresses on you that you’re a little bit stupid. “Get to know him personally, then.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t! What would I do? Just call him up and ask him out to dinner?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t think that’s how this works.”
“One, that’s exactly how this works. Two, how would you know? When’s the last time you asked someone out?”
Trent has no response that is not embarrassing, and so he keeps his mouth shut.
“Exactly. Call him. The worst he can do is say no. You don’t even work together anymore, so it’s not like you’re going to awkwardly bump into him in the hallway or anything.”
Trent always hates when Margot makes sense.
“Call him right now,” Margot says, “and then call me right back and tell me what happened. If he says no, I’ll buy you a drink.”
“Two drinks,” Trent says.
“Deal.”
Trent calls Ted, and then he calls Margot.
“Well?” Margot says.
Trent is supremely glad that Margot can’t see the absolutely mortifying grin currently plastered on his face. “Would you be available to babysit Eliora this Friday?”
Margot laughs, and it bubbles up through the phone and fills Trent’s chest. “Darling, it would be my absolute pleasure.”
On Sunday afternoons after Hebrew School, Trent’s father would take him and Margot out for lunch. Trent would sit in a booth and compete with Margot to build the tallest sugar packet pyramid while their father sipped too-strong tea and worked on the Sunday crossword.
“What’s the capital of Nigeria?” Leonard asked. “Five letters. Lagos?”
“No, it’s Abuja,” Trent said, delicately placing another sugar packet. “But Lagos is bigger.”
Margot elbowed him in the side. “Nerd.”
Trent elbowed her back. “You’re gonna knock down my tower.”
“Would we call that a tower?” Margot asked, eyeing Trent’s construction. “Doesn’t look very tall.”
“Five letter word for perspective?” Leonard asked.
“Angle,” Trent said, crowning his heap with a final Sweet’n Low. He looked up at Margot. “Tall depends on your point of view.”
Margot rolled her eyes, and Trent carefully slid his towering pile to the side, making room for the waitress to lay his plate.
Trent liked the cafe. It was always the same. He would sit against the wall of the booth, squished in next to Margot, and he would order the same lunch he ordered every Sunday. He liked the routine of it, the ritual. It felt good to know what was coming. Religion felt like that, too, for Trent. The same prayers, the same rituals, the same people, the same pews. Judaism had rules, and Trent was grateful for them. Rules were clear, and they were precise, and they were easy to follow. Trent believed in rules, thrived on the specificity and the precision and the routine of them. Trent was good at rules.
Ted Lasso is not good at rules. Trent knows this in a sort of abstract way. He has, after all, been watching Ted Lasso break rules for the last two years. What Trent has failed to consider, however, is how that rule-breaking behavior might present itself outside of work, when Ted isn’t pushing the envelope of British football, but is just a person in the world, interacting with other people.
Trent, on the other hand, has spent a lifetime of careful study compiling rules for being in the world. Among these are the laws of general behavior while out to dinner, including, but not limited to: the correct way to speak to strangers, the correct way to order food, and the correct topics of conversation on a first date. Ted seems to have no concern for these rules whatsoever, and this is mystifying and infuriating for Trent in equal measure.
For instance, Trent likes this particular restaurant in part because the wait staff generally leaves him be. He can eat his dinner in peace and not be required to chit chat. But here is Ted Lasso, making small talk with Tony the server, coaxing stories and smiles out of him that Trent has never seen or heard in the six years he has been eating here. Tony finally takes their order and heads for the kitchen, and Ted turns to beam at Trent instead.
“Nice guy, that Tony. He’s got a lotta great ideas about food. Did you know about all that mushroom foraging he’s been doing?”
“I had no idea,” Trent says.
“Well, see? Now we both learned something cool tonight, then.”
And it would be so easy to say something snarky, to reach for irritation rather than appreciation. If it were anyone else, Trent is sure he would. But it’s Ted. He finds himself horrifyingly charmed instead. “Yes, I suppose we did.”
The dinner goes on this way, with Ted committing dinner fouls right and left, and Trent wrestling with the referee in his own brain who is standing in the middle of the pitch, whistle shrieking, red card waving above his head. It shouldn’t be pleasant. Everything about it should be excruciating. But somehow, perhaps just through the sheer magic that is Ted Lasso, Trent is enjoying himself. He realizes this, with no small degree of wonder, as Ted builds a precarious structure of silverware on top of his dessert plate.
“It’s all about center of gravity,” Ted says, balancing a knife atop a fork. “Or at least that’s what my momma always told me.”
Trent watches, rapt, as Ted adds a spoon. There is a moment of perfect suspension, everything balanced against everything else, before it all comes crashing down to the plate. Eyes turn towards them, waiters and patrons, and Trent has one quick second of embarrassment before he catches sight of Ted, cheeks red, smile a little crooked, with eyes for no one in the restaurant but Trent. Embarrassment gives way to a surge of affection. He wants people to look, he realizes. He wants to be seen with this small-talking, rule-breaking marvel of a man.
Once a week Margot called from university and they did the Sunday crossword together.
“Forty-nine across. Six letters. Walking,” Margot asked. Trent can hear her tapping her pencil against her desk.
“On foot,” Trent replied.
“Oh, excellent.”
“Sixty across. Long lasting lip makeup.”
“Stain,” Margot said.
It continued like this for a peaceful twenty minutes or so, each filling in sections of the puzzle, passing clues back and forth like gossip, but Trent knew it wouldn’t last.
“So,” Margot said eventually, long enough into the call that she could pretend this wasn’t the real reason for the call all along. “How are things?”
“Fine,” Trent said. He added three more letters to the puzzle.
“You make any friends this week?”
Trent thought about his peers at the school paper, who he generally regarded with a cool sort of professionalism tinged with contempt. “Not really.”
“Okay,” Margot said. “Twenty-one across is ‘siren song’, by the way.”
“I knew that,” Trent said, and hoped Margot couldn’t hear his pen filling in the letters.
“I’m sure you did,” Margot said. “Are you actually trying to make friends? Or are you still treating everyone like you’re smarter than them?”
“I am smarter than them,” Trent said. “Flinched. One thirty two across.”
Margot sighed. “If you were nicer to people you might make more friends, though.”
“I’m not mean,” Trent protested. “They’re just wrong.”
“But you don’t always have to correct them,” Margot pointed out.
“Isn’t it nicer to correct them?” Trent asked. “I’d rather know when I’m wrong.”
“It’s complicated,” Margot said. “Not everyone is like you.”
Trent didn’t respond. He knew that he was not like other people. He was across, and they were down, interrupting him right in the middle, letters intersecting but never spelling the same word. People were hard to understand, but he knew Margot wanted him to try. He wanted to try, too, to be better at puzzling people out.
Ted Lasso is standing in Trent’s living room, and Trent is not entirely sure how he’d gotten there. They’d had dinner, that he could remember. He even remembered what he’d eaten. It had been a relatively nondescript bowl of pasta from the Italian place on the corner. They knew Trent by name there. None of them watched football. Trent had ordered a bottle of wine, and he and Ted had passed the bottle back and forth. Trent had felt the warm buzz of red in his brain as Ted walked him home. Then, Trent supposes, he must have invited Ted in, because here he is standing amidst the detritus of Trent’s internal life, socked feet pressing real and solid into Trent’s living room carpet.
“It’s a nice place you got here,” Ted says.
“Thank you,” Trent replies, more out of habit, he feels, than any real handle of the situation.
There is a beat of silence where Ted surveys the living room and Trent surveys Ted, and then Ted raises an eyebrow. “So you gonna give me the ten-cent tour, or what?”
Trent raises an eyebrow in response. “Is that how these things normally go?”
Ted chuckles, abrupt, like it’s been shaken out of him. “Ya know, that’s a great question.” He smiles over at Trent. “You’ve always got great questions.”
Trent’s heart does a complicated samba step in his chest. “Do you want to see the kitchen?”
“Another great question, to which the answer is yes. I love kitchens.”
Elated to have a direction, Trent wheels around and beckons Ted after him. When he arrives at the threshold to the kitchen, though, Ted is not behind him. Instead, Ted is adrift in the corridor, staring at the hodgepodge of family photos littering the walls.
“These your folks?” Ted says, pointing to a frame.
“Yes,” Trent says.
“You look just like your mom.”
The rapid rhythm of Trent’s heart stutters out. “I know,” Trent replies.
Ted’s eyes cut over to Trent, and Trent steadies himself for the questions that will come next. They’re the questions he would ask, the ‘where are they now’s and the ‘oh how sad - how did it happen’s. Trent hates the answers he’ll have to give.
Ted just smiles at him. “How’d they meet?” he asks.
Air returns to Trent’s lungs, and his heart finds itself back in time. He has this answer, too, and much prefers it to the alternatives. “They met in a community sewing class.”
“You’re joshing me,” Ted says, eyebrows high.
Trent scrunches his face up in confusion. “Is that a real saying?”
Ted shrugs. “It is, if you can believe it.”
“Who is Josh?”
“You know, that is another great question. Really lettin’ em fly tonight. Should have expected. But to be honest I have no idea. Bet we can google it later. But right now I gotta know more about your parents finding love over linen.”
Trent wheezes out a laugh. “I can’t promise it was linen,” he says, because that feels important to clarify. “But the way they tell it is that they were both enrolled in an adult education course on garment sewing. My father, unsurprisingly, was absolutely hopeless, and managed to sew one of his pant legs backwards.”
“Feels like an easy mistake to make,” Ted says.
“I can only imagine,” Trent agrees. “But my mother, apparently charmed by this act of incompetence, offered to help rip out the seams. He started at one end of the leg, and she at the other. They met in the middle, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
Ted whistles, long and low. “That is genuinely the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard in my whole gosh darn life.”
“Isn’t it just?”
“I feel I oughta be steppin’ up my game somehow.”
“And I feel I ought to inform you that I will absolutely not be signing up for a sewing class.” Trent does not know the first thing about sewing, but he knows that it does not interest him in the slightest. On the other hand, he also knows - or at least has a niggling suspicion - that he’d be willing to follow Ted just about anywhere. This is more than a little frightening.
In the hallway, Ted is still sizing him up. “What about cross stitch?”
Trent swallows a laugh. “You’re not as funny as you think you are, Ted Lasso.”
“Macrame?” Ted offers.
Trent doesn’t even grace that with a reply, instead reaching out to grab Ted’s hand and pull him the rest of the way into the kitchen so that he can push him up against a counter and kiss him. Ted’s fingers squeeze tighter where they are tangled with Trent’s, and Ted’s other hand comes up to the back of Trent’s neck, cradling it in a way that makes Trent feel a little crazy, like he might be having a heart attack. Maybe, he thinks, feeling the way his skin burns against Ted’s, I’m allergic to this. He leans back from Ted and heaves in a shaky breath.
“This is the kitchen,” Trent says.
“I’m a fan,” Ted replies, eyes never leaving Trent.
“Would you like to see the living room?”
“I think I already have,” Ted points out.
“The couch is very nice,” Trent argues.
Ted’s chuckle is soft, and Trent wants to put it in a jar and keep it forever. “Show me the couch, then.”
“Did you know,” Margot said at dinner one night, “that if you smash particles together hard enough and fast enough it can actually tell us stuff about the universe millions of years ago?”
Trent was thirteen, and Margot was leaving. She was headed to university in the fall, and Trent was not entirely sure he knew how his world worked without her. He moved some food around on his plate and wondered if he smashed two peas together hard enough and fast enough they would reveal their secrets.
“Really?” Trent’s mother said. “That’s interesting.”
“It’s so interesting! Because the universe started with a bang, right? So by recreating it we can see what the early universe might have looked like.”
Trent’s universe had always looked like Margot.
“What does one do with a degree in physics, exactly?” Trent’s father asked.
Margot grinned. “I’m gonna smash particles together hard enough and fast enough to see the whole universe.”
An object in motion will stay in motion. A football will keep moving until it hits a body, or a net. Trent has never been able to hit a net, but he thinks maybe he could be a proton, hurtling at high speed until he meets an opposing force, a welcoming force, a universe of possibility. So he keeps moving. He lets his particles collide with Ted’s. The force of gravity pulls them down to the sofa, and Trent feels like the universe is beginning again.
As it turns out, the science of the universe, and as such, the science of intimacy, is not as simple as Margot had always made it out to be.
Trent is not sure how long he spends kissing Ted Lasso, but it is considerable. A respectable amount, he thinks. Now they are tangled up on the sofa, Trent leaning back against Ted, Ted’s steady breath against the back of Trent’s head. It should be comfortable, exciting even, but Trent feels the wrongness in his body like a whiffed football kick.
Holding Eliora was uncomplicated. Children were that way, Trent supposed. Right from the start, Eliora in his arms had felt correct, needed, a growing weight and a promise of care, unconditional and infinite. Holding Ted Lasso is proving to be more complicated than that.
“You’re tense,” Ted says.
“I’m not tense,” Trent lies.
Ted pokes him in the shoulder. Trent flinches. “Uh-huh,” Ted says, knowing.
“It’s just-” Trent stops, gathers himself, forces his fists to unclench from his own trousers. “I have become unaccustomed,” he starts again, eyes darting down to where Ted’s arms are wrapped around his chest, “to this kind of intimacy.”
“And what kinda intimacy is this, would ya say?”
Trent grits his teeth against the dueling waves of fondness and annoyance flooding his system. “The romantic kind,” he says, leaning back into Ted a little. “Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Ted repeats, and Trent doesn’t have to see his face to hear the grin as he says it. “Well, if it makes ya feel any better, I’m rather out of practice myself, these days.”
“It does, actually,” Trent says quietly. But his brain is still stuck on the oddity of Ted’s arms around his chest, Ted’s warm breath behind him, Ted’s fingers on Trent’s skin, and relaxation continues to elude him.
“Do you wanna stop?” Ted asks.
Trent does, in fact, want to stop, and stopping is also the last thing he wants to do. “I think maybe I should,” he says. “Just for a little while.”
“No sweat, Colonel Rhett.” Ted loosens his arms, and Trent rolls away, wishing he had spent less time learning the rules of football and more time learning the rules for this.
Trent’s brain had always been a funny place. Years on, Trent could still remember the smell of his childhood best friend’s home. He could remember the lyrics of songs he hadn’t listened to in decades. He could read a new word once and remember the definition forever. There were just things in Trent’s brain that stuck around. This made him good at tests and good at papers and good with teachers who were delighted that he was good at tests and good at papers. This made him something of an alien among his peers, who couldn’t have cared less about grades or about papers but were instead practicing snogging behind the hedgerows outside of school, or learning how much alcohol their small bodies could ingest without blacking out. Trent had no interest in these things. Instead, he kicked footballs with Margot. He went to every football game and took notes, so he could type them up and send them to the school paper that evening. When the school paper caved to the inevitable and gave Trent a job, he approached writing with the same dogged persistence as a moth throwing itself at a window screen, desperate to get to the light on the other side.
Trent is in the bathroom. He is brushing his teeth and flossing and taking his medications, and Ted Lasso is in his bed. Trent plays that thought again. Ted Lasso is in his bed. Waiting for him.
The prescription bottle in Trent’s hand is nearly empty, and he peels the label off and carries it to bed with him, sliding in next to Ted. He dials the number for the pharmacy and squints down at the label, dutifully typing the prescription number into his phone.
Ted blinks at him. “Are you refilling a prescription right now?”
“Yes,” Trent says. Then, “Shush.”
“Wow. I’m being upstaged by a pharmacist.”
“You’re not being upstaged by anyone,” Trent says, straining to hear the call menu over Ted. “I’ll be with you in just a moment.”
“Gotta say, Trent, I’ve never been put on hold in bed before.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
Ted snorts, then stretches an arm out to lay a hand on Trent’s hip, fingers just beginning to slip beneath his shirt. “Why don’t you just do it tomorrow?”
The suggestion of what they could do tonight is not lost on Trent, and he squirms. In his ear, he hears the satisfying beep of the refill request being confirmed and sets his phone down on the nightstand. “I’ll forget by tomorrow,” he says, rolling into Ted.
Ted’s arms slide around him. They’re face to face, breathing each other’s air, Trent’s particles are touching Ted’s particles, and Trent knows physics isn’t chemistry, but this has to be chemistry, he thinks. It’s some kind of alchemy, the way he fits here.
Ted pushes away the hair that’s falling into Trent’s face, then leaves his hand on Trent’s cheek, warm and solid and heavy. “Are you gonna forget me by tomorrow?” Ted breathes, quiet and careful.
Trent just laughs. He can’t help it. Forgetting Ted Lasso would be like forgetting gravity. Like forgetting how many players are on the pitch, or the shape of a ball in front of a foot, the arc of a kick towards goal.
“I’m not sure how to take that,” Ted says, but he’s smiling.
Trent brings a hand up to cover Ted’s, presses a kiss into the meat of his palm, and shakes his head. “There’s no forgetting you, Ted Lasso.”