Page 14 of Spring Awakening

Mali smiles as brightly as Frankie does. She has a friend. “Yes.”

She watches as Frankie walks away with a skip to her step, and she realises she desperately needs to see the grounds. For reasons. Like Zach in rugby uniform reasons. “Wait, can I come see some practice?” Mali is running to catch up with her either way, and by the time Frankie says yes, Mali has already opened the doors.

“How much do you know about rugby?” Frankie asks.

“I know Toby should have scored in last season’s final. I know Kai is too young to be as good as he is. I know Ezra was the best fullback the Titans had before you became coach.”

“True!” Frankie shouts. “God, I love that you’re a fan!”

“I had no choice. My parents went to every game. I could hate it, but I’d be there either way.”

“Do they still come?” Frankie asks, shoving the last set of doors open. The air is chilly, but at least it’s not raining. Mali should have put her coat back on though. She watches as her shoes leave imprints in the grass. The actual pitch is a muddy mess. She makes a mental note to figure out how to fix it.

“Not as much,” Mali says, wondering if she should say the next part out loud. “The season tickets took a bit of a hike.”

“Eurgh,” Frankie says. “I know. We don’t control the pricing, but our last sponsor whacked them up the moment we got promoted. I don’t know what we can do about it.”

“I’ll look into it,” Mali says. “Are sales still good?”

“Yeah, better than ever. I just know there’s a whole bunch of people who can’t come anymore, and I feel like a prick.”

“It’s fixable,” Mali says. She means to say something else, but she’s watching practice instead. There’s something thrilling about massive men throwing each other about like they weigh nothing more than a bag of sugar. Ezra knocks into Kai, and Mali swears she feels the impact vibrate through her body from the sidelines.

“Ezra is so fucking large.”

Frankie laughs. “I was bigger than him until he hit fourteen, then that little wanker just kept growing.” Mali attempts to watch all the players, seeing their footwork and their spins away from their teammates. Rugby is basically ballet with a significant increase of trying to knock someone out.

But her eyes always land on Zach. He’s so fucking good. He’s a hooker, but she knows he could defend if he had to. Shewatches the way his thighs tense with every stride he takes, his shoulders taking the brunt of the bag he’s barrelled into. Ezra hits the floor like a sack of potatoes, but Zach helps him back up. Somehow, he’s managing to make a mouthguard look hot as fuck. Everything he does seems to be effortless. Unthought about. Second nature.

“Is Azan your favourite player?” Frankie asks, and Mali wonders if the blush on her cheeks is visible. It would be reasonable, she thinks, for her to say yes. Zach is a lot of people’s favourite player. There’s a small chance that if she says yes, Frankie will know there’s something else behind it. He can play rugby better than most people, professional or not, but there’s something else—something she can’t quite identify. Something like the press thinks he’s a charming pretty boy, yet he has to google things to figure out if they’re rude.

“I have a different favourite player depending on what day it is, but yeah, he’s always close to the top.”

Frankie hums, then blows her whistle. Zach finally looks over, though he doesn’t look surprised to see her. She doesn’t think his chest is twisting just because their eyes locked over a frozen rugby field. She doesn’t think he’s wondering if she can fuck him into next week. There’s a real chance he had no idea what her name was until Frankie introduced her, which is embarrassing, because she said about three different versions of his name hundreds of times.

She doesn’t think he’s thinking about her at all.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Zach has never trainedas well as he has in the past ten minutes. He hit harder, ran faster, dodged quicker, and he’s fucking knackered. Why did Frankie bring Mali out here? He spotted her the moment the doors opened, and his heart started racing like he’d been doing anything other than getting the bags ready. She’s the only one who has ever defended him, and quickly, for no reason other than to defend him. Sometimes, Ezra tells people to shut up, but it’s usually so Frankie can talk. It’s weird, feeling like he might have someone on his side.

Not for long, because now, he has to sit opposite her and answer questions about his life when he can barely breathe, and it’s all her fault. He blinks the sweat out of his eyes as he walks towards her. He needs to walk straight past, because there’s no way he can take his mouthguard out without her seeing, and he wants her to have one random fantasy about him, at least. He wonders if it’s obvious on his face how he thought about her for the entirety of his drive home last night. He wonders if she can tell how her pretty fucking face was the only thing he thought ofwhen he jerked off in the shower this morning. He wonders if she knows how badly he wants her to be impressed by him.

“Hey,” she says, turning to walk with him when he tries to stride past her. Then she spins back around. “Later, Frank.”

Zach pulls his mouthguard out while she’s spun to wave at Frankie. How is she already on a nickname basis with the coach? That means he has no chance of ever being friends with her. Not that he wants that—he doesn’t make friends well, and it’s even harder to keep them. Especially when the team will be head over heels for her in minutes, and they’ll trash-talk him even faster.

Mali walks backwards for a few moments, and it’s the most stressful time of his life. He faces teams of the biggest men he’s ever seen every week in front of thousands of angry, desperate to be racist towards him fans, and he’s not as stressed then as he is now, over the fact a woman he barely knows might trip over her own ankles.

“Frankie said you wanted to see me.” He’s not sure why he told her that when she was right there when Frankie said Mali wanted to see him.

“Yeah,” she replies, sounding chipper. Does she know it’s ten a.m. and, reasonably, people aren’t allowed to be happy until at least midday? “Do you like the orange?” she asks, twirling a lock of hair around her finger.

Yes. He does like it. He takes her question as an excuse to look at her again. Her side profile is something he’s sure people would study at university, if that’s a thing people do when they try and draw. She’d be the perfect model.

“Sure.”

Mali laughs, but it’s not as fond as when she did it with Frankie. “Okay, smooth talker.”

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