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Lauren’s stomach twisted.
She’d been trying not to think about it. Lauren’s been helping out. The under-eighteens captain with her hand still half up, looking across the touchline as if Lauren might fix it, and Lauren standing there with a water bottle and no idea how.
“Their captain messaged me. Asked if it was true. I said nothing’s been decided.” She rubbed her thumb along the edge of the table. “Which is true. I think. Becky?”
“Nothing’s been decided,” Becky said firmly. “He can’t just announce it. This is a decision for our committee, not the joint one. Jax insisted on autonomy over footballing decisions, so they’re meant to leave us alone to run our own teams. It’s none of their business. She’s so angry she’s been speaking exclusively in American swear words for an hour. Some of them I don’t think are real.”
“Good,” Carly said. Then, more quietly, to Lauren: “You’ve done a good job with them.”
“I’ve lost every game.”
“That’s not the same as doing a bad job.”
Carly was looking right at her, steady and direct, and Lauren felt like a keeper facing a penalty with no idea which way to dive.
“Cheers, mate,” she said.
The flicker again. This time, Lauren caught a bit more of it. It looked like something closing.
Carly stood. “I need the toilet. Excuse me.”
She picked her way through the singing crowd and disappeared into the corridor. The second the door swung shut behind her, Paige leaned across the table.
“What are you doing?”
Lauren watched the door, then turned her attention back to Paige. “What do you mean?”
“With Carly. All the alright, mate stuff. Are you joining the cast of EastEnders?”
Becky snorted into her pint.
Lauren frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is how I always talk.”
“It’s not,” Becky said, with an apologetic shrug, as if she’d rather be anywhere else. Unlike Paige.
“You have never used that word before in your life,” Paige said, lifting Sam out of her coat and onto her shoulder to rub his back. “Not once. Not to me, not to Jenna, not to anyone on any team you’ve ever played for. I’ve known you since we were teenagers. I’ve heard you call people babe, dickhead, sunshine, trouble, and on one occasion, at three in the morning outside a kebab shop, Your Majesty. Never mate.”
“That’s not true.”
“Name one person you’ve called mate.”
Lauren opened her mouth.
She closed it again.
“See?” Paige said. “It’s like you’re trying to prove a point that you only see Carly as a mate, but it’s having the opposite effect. You’re so transparent right now. You’ve said it three times in three minutes. I counted.”
“Fuck off!” Lauren protested, then hunched her shoulders immediately, because there were very young ears present. She lowered her voice. “Sorry, Sam.”
Sam burped, unbothered.
“He’s heard worse,” Becky said. “Jax changed his nappy on Thursday.”
Lauren slumped back and stared at the ceiling, where someone had hung a strand of tinsel weeks too early and it was already drooping.
The worst part was that she couldn’t explain it. She hadn’t planned it. The word had turned up somewhere between letting go of Carly’s hand and walking off the pitch.
It wasn’t hers, and she’d known that before Paige started counting. She’d grabbed it like a coat off a stranger’s peg in the rain. It didn’t fit, and everyone could see it didn’t fit, but it was the only thing in reach.
