Chapter Text
The last few weeks have been weird. Gemma’s knee was good, just a sprain, she’ll be on the pitch in no time, but Alice can’t shake the ache in her chest. The same ache she had the other day at practice after visiting Gemma. She hopes she doesn’t start crying again. Yeah, Ted said there was crying in football, but she’s not totally certain she buys it. At least not for her. Not yet.
Alice has been killing as much time as she can with Gemma, going with her to all her doctor appointments, trying not to think about all the times she’s gone alone. She sits with her during her physical therapy, trying to ignore the ache in her own knees.
But the worst part of it all, Gemma has been looking at her with pity for weeks now. It doesn’t make any sense, Gemma is the hurt one, but she’s looking at Alice like she’s a sick puppy. It’s driving her crazy. If she didn’t need it for closure, she’d probably be running the other way and trying to avoid Gemma the best she could, but she knows she can’t do that, she can’t do that at all.
Actually, maybe that isn’t the worst part. The worst part is that Alice is willingly missing football practice for the first time in her life. She’s doing it frequently. Sometimes, Gemma doesn’t even have appointments, and Alice is just sitting in her super fancy rich house with her. Most of the time it’s in silence, but sometimes Gemma reads her chapters out of her Law text book and Alice has to try and stop herself from falling asleep. She’d complain, but she knows it’s distracting Gemma, so she lets it slide.
If you told Alice when she was 21 that one day she’d be willingly skipping practices to hang out with Gemma, she probably would have thought you were having a mental break and called someone to take you away. But she’s doing it anyway, and she almost can’t believe it.
Camile has been worried recently, Alice knows this. Despite the fact they live together, they’ve barely seen each other since Gemma got hurt. Camile understands, though. They weren’t dating when Alice got hurt, any of the times, but she deals with Alice’s bad knees enough that she gets the gist. She’s refrained from bringing it up to Alice though, something that Alice appreciates.
But regrettably, Alice isn’t at Gemma’s today, she’s at the stadium, in her office, sitting with Ted. Beard is apparently busy today, which is why she’s here all day, no chance of sneaking out, because she doesn't want Ted to have to wrangle the team alone.
They sit in silence as they wait for the team to arrive, Ted going through plays and Alice pretending to as her mind wander to other things. Alice has no idea how long they’ve been sitting there quietly for before Ted clears her throat and draws Alice’s eyes to him
“I had my first panic attack when I was 16,” he says gently, making Alice focus even more than she was before. “It was a week after I lost my father. Until then I hadn’t been anything but angry. At him, at my mother, at me, I was just mad. And then in history class, I had a pop quiz. Out of twenty true or false questions, I didn’t get a single one right. I didn’t even know that was statistically possible. But one second, I was looking at the big red zero on my paper, and the next, I couldn’t breathe and I booked it from that classroom as fast as I could.”
Ted pauses meaningfully before he turns her hands palm up with a shrug. “But I was a white kid in Kansas who played football, American. There was no place for me to talk about stuff like that. So I didn’t. I didn’t talk about it when I had off and on panic attacks for the next couple of years. I didn’t talk about it when I moved here and they started happening more frequently.”
Ted pauses again, frowning, seemingly disliking how foolish he had been back then. “Hell, it took the worst timed panic attack ever and a therapist literally chasing me down before I could admit I needed help. I was so ashamed of needing it. I was so used to being the person that people went to for help, not the one that needed it. But after I got help, it was so much better, Alice, so much better.”
Ted’s words just sit in the air for a moment before Ted leans on the desk, looking at Alice closely. “I just- I know you have a lot of big feelings. I was wondering if you had someone to talk to about this stuff.”
Alice really doesn’t know what to say about this. She doesn’t want help, not at all, so she clears her throat and shakes her head “I have-”
Ted points at her and cuts her off “Don’t you dare say Gemma.”
Alice honestly wasn’t going to, and feels her jaw drop. “I wasn’t-”
“Or that pretty young lady in the photo on your desk.” he steamrolls on, which Alice supposes she wasn’t really hiding, but it shocks her all the same, especially because that was going to be her answer, not Gemma. “Or me, or Beard, or anyone on the team, although I do think Lizzie would be pretty good at it. I mean real, professional help.”
Alice has had experience with "professional help.” She thinks it’s a load of bullshit, if she’s being honest. She saw team mandated doctors or whatever you call them after she got hurt, but she never really talked to them. She can barely talk about her feelings with Camile half the time.
She thinks that maybe the only times she ever was able to completely open up with people recently was when she didn’t yell at Gemma the other day, and when she talked with Rebecca. She doesn’t really know what to think about that, if she’s being honest.
“I don’t need help,” Alice says instead, and Ted frowns, looking at her with those stupid, concerned, American eyes of his.
“You sound like me,” he says, and Alice shrugs.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she says, and Ted screws his face up.
“Flattery won’t get you out of this one Alice,” he says. “But I do appreciate it. Seriously. I can-”
“I’m fine, Ted," Alice cuts him off, shaking her head and standing up. “It was just a one off. I’m good. Gemma is good, so I’m good.”
She didn’t really mean to say this last part, but Ted softens at the words. “Okay. But just in case, I’ll leave you a number on your desk, how does that sound?”
Terrible, but she doesn’t say it, just pushing her sticky notes towards him and letting him write it down. She takes it and puts it on her wall, right beside the most recent one, let it out. She thinks maybe she’ll call it eventually, but not right now. Right now she has bigger things to focus on. Like how she can hear some of the players getting here, and how it appears that Siobhan and Niamh are in a bad mood today. It also sounds like Mady and Margy have broken up again.
Never a dull moment, Alice thinks, but it’s a good distraction. She doesn’t want to think about anything other than football right now. And she definitely doesn't want to think about Gemma, but that’s easier said than done.
But as she enters the locker room and has to break up a fight between the twins, she can’t help but think there’s no place she’d rather be. She can’t believe she was thinking about quitting.
But the ache in her chest still doesn’t go away, and at this point, Alice isn’t sure there’s anything that can be done about it, so she just ignores it. That’s what she does best, pushing it down and hoping it won’t come back up. She won’t be able to handle it when it does.