Page 8 of Spring Awakening

“Bye, bro.”

CHAPTER SIX

The grass pricks atthe back of Zach’s neck, but he has no energy to lift his hand to push it away. Training wasn’t harder than usual today, but he is knackered, and he can feel the burn in every one of his muscles. Training usually wipes him out, but today, he’s mentally tired, which isn’t something he’s felt since school. There appears to be no cure for it. When he googles it, it comes up with medications, therapy, blah blah blah… but he’s not sure what medications he’d even need. He can’t take sleeping pills because he can’t miss training or the five alarms he has for his mum. He can’t see a therapist because he tried that already and his mum almost had a heart attack. He can’t talk to friends because he has none, and talking to himself might take a dangerous turn.

Zach sighs. It hasn’t helped that he couldn’t sleep last night. The new PR girl was running around his mind. She thinks he’s rude, which might be true, but then she laughed a couple times, and he’d thought everything he said was in the same tone. She’s confusing. He doesn’t want to be rude to her; he doesn’t like it when she frowns at him. He tried to flirt with her, joked aboutburning bridges, but she didn’t seem to like that. And then she figured out he googled the word sweetheart, and he’s still wondering why she would call him out on it. That’s what it said! He wasn’t lying.

Her laugh plays in his mind, that and the ringing in his ears from being next to Ezra in scrum training for an hour. He might look in the mirror and see his ears no longer attached to his body.

“Azan!” Coach shouts, and what now?! He heaves himself off the floor, the burning in the back of his throat inching closer to nausea than he’s comfortable with. Still, he jogs over to where Frankie stands on the sidelines, wrapped in a thousand layers. Even with the puffer jacket on, she’s shivering. Pussy.

“Coach?”

“Why have I got five missed calls from you?” she asks, her brows rising with the question. He wonders if she realises she’d be warmer if she wore a beanie. Ever since she shaved her head a few weeks ago, she seems to have forgotten she no longer has hair. He’s not going to tell her that though.

“That was yesterday. I assume Ezra fixed it.”

Her eyebrows rise more. “What, I have a brother who has to fix things for me? Is it because he’s a man?”

Zach barely resists the urge to roll his eyes. He didn’t mean it like that. God, she’s so infuriating. Frankie is only like this with him. With everyone else, she’s at least sometimes nice, but ever since Zach’s interview mishap, it’s like no one in the team can take anything he says the way it’s meant. They always assume there’s some ulterior motive.

“I texted the both of you,” Zach clarifies. “She only said Adebayo, so I didn’t know which one of you she was chatting about.”

“Well, Ezra’s on the field today, and we had a family thing yesterday, so I guess I’ll have to fix it,” she replies, batting hereyelashes, and Zach smiles wide. Her entire face is going to drop when he tells her.

“Sure, Coach.” He smiles, and her jaw tightens. She’s going to make him run hundreds of laps. “There was a new bird in the office yesterday.” Her jaw hangs slightly. “Said she’s doing PR, but no one was in the office all day, and the heating wasn’t on. That’s why I called you five times. That’s why I called Ezra.”

“Fuck. Did she come back?” she asks, spinning in her place and blowing her whistle as she runs away, as if anyone knows what that means.

“Dunno,” Zach calls, following after her.

“Why did you leave her?!” she throws over her shoulder.

“I’ll do laps, Coach, but I’m not taking the blame for this.”

“Dammit,” she mutters, and he smiles until she disappears into the office. He does hope someone was there for her, if only so she wasn’t cold. Zach spent the better part of the last twenty-four hours trying not to think about her. The way she so blatantly checked him out mid-conversation. The way her eyes narrowed when he told her he didn’t talk to anyone. It’s true, which is why he said it. It wasn’t until he thought about it later that it sounded like he didn’t want to talk to her because she was staff, which is untrue. She could be the one calling the shots on the pitch, and he’d still avoid talking to her. Whether that’s because he doesn’t like to be friendly or because she’s so enticing he can’t speak, he’s not sure. Either way, Lisa is the only one at work that says good morning to him, and he always replies to her, so he supposes his statement wasn’t entirely correct.

Zach thinks about the way PR girl’s hips shook when she pretended she wasn’t cold. The way her entire face scrunched up when she called him bro. He wonders what else he’d need to do for her to smile at him. He sighs and grabs his phone from his bag.

Thankfully, there’s three notifications for houses for him to look at. The first one is tonight. Keen. Excellent, because he’s moments away from living in his car. The other two are rejections. Nasty. Rude. Uncool. If Frankie is done with training now, attempting to fix the mess they’ve made in the office instead, he could go back to his mum’s, make her dinner, and go see the house all in one evening.

He waits three minutes for her to come back out, then legs it. Frankie would find a way to fine him even if he was the only one left on the pitch. Zach wonders if it would be better to tell the team, or at least Frankie, what’s going on at home. Maybe then they’d be more lenient. He knows Lightman gets off early every Thursday because he picks his daughter up from her mum’s. Kai missed practice because he had the dentist. (Ezra knocked his tooth out during practice, but in his defence, Kai wasn’t paying attention.) But the last time he told anyone on his team something, he was practically chased out of the village. There’s a chance the Titans aren’t like that, but Zach’s beyond telling people things about himself now.

Not when he has no way to retaliate.

Mali dusts the mantel on her fireplace, wondering if taking the time to put the fire on might be a bit much. She’s not even sure the person who turns up is going to want to rent the room, fire or not. She’s not even sure she wants them to. But it hit three in the afternoon yesterday, and Mali had to admit that the job wasn’thappening. It’s humiliating, but the only person apart from her parents that even know she was there is Zach, and he’s probably forgotten her already.

So, she left, and spent the rest of the afternoon eating ice-cream on the couch with Buffy. Late last night she got a notification for a viewing, so she spent all day tidying. No, they might not want to look in the tumble dryer, but what if they notice the lint tray is full? What if it means Riah (a guy, sob) doesn’t want the room? What if it’s all linked to her having to work at Marks & Spencer for another year? Mali had hoped a woman might want the room. In fact, she was supposed to rent to women only, but she forgot to tick the box when she hastily put the ad up in the middle of the night. She wasn’t expecting to have someone want to come and see it so soon. It reeks of desperation, but she can’t complain, not when she’s apparently jobless.

Now, she stands in the kitchen at seven minutes past six and frowns at the fact Riah was supposed to be here at five fifty-five. A weird time, but she wasn’t going to tell them no, even if she wanted to. Her dad was supposed to come round and chill in the back garden in case Riah turned out to be a murderer, but then he got called into work, and Mali is ninety-percent sure a murderer wouldn’t take the time out to make a profile with references just to turn up to a cul-de-sac on a Monday evening with a carving knife. Or this is how she ends up on a Netflix documentary, and people will sit at home binge-watching the six episodes and victim-blaming her. But there’s no time to worry about that now, because the doorbell rings.

Mali loves her front door. It’s green (on the outside) and has a large stained-glass window on the upper half. Right now, it means she can see the person in the front garden is huge, with wide, blurry shoulders, and is at least a head taller than her. Fuck. Buffy saunters out of his bed, but he makes no move to runto the front door. Mali wishes she trained him to a be a killer cat, like a lion or something, but he’s so soft and lazy. He doesn’t like men, though, so Mali might get lucky.

She could pretend she’s not in. Even though the hallway light is on. She could tell Riah they have the wrong house and she’s sorry, but she has no idea what he’s talking about. She could stand right here, where they can probably see her through the slightly translucent door, and let them think she’s rude. The listing won’t be up tomorrow anyway. She already regrets this.

Alas, Mali takes a deep breath and opens the door to the porch, the cold air biting at her ankles, and then she opens the outside door, ready to let the murderer in because she’s nothing if not polite. And then she sees him.

She frowns. “Zach?”

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