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Need ur help bro. J 🥧, Isaac’s phone flashes. SOS. Got ketchup on my white balmain. Date night fit is FUCKED.
Wear the yellow Gucci he sends back, and then goes back to watching an ancient episode of Cake Boss.
Can’t. U no yellow washes me out. A beat. Come over and help me out?
Isaac knows it’s a pity invite; he’s been shopping with Jamie enough to know that Tartt has never needed advice about fashion. Jamie’s taste leaves much to be desired, but, like in the rest of his life, his confidence is off the charts—he doesn’t need Isaac to hold his hand and reassure him he looks pretty.
But, Isaac supposes as he watches Buddy Valastro drop a cake, he doesn’t have anything better to do.
Fine, he sends back, and gets a ridiculous number of emojis in response.
When he gets to Jamie’s house, though, there’s a car already in the driveway, and Isaac wonders if Jamie has invited him over in the middle of his damn date. He still knocks on the door, though, because he’s two weeks into his suspension and so bored that Jamie Tartt’s love life seems interesting.
Sam opens the door, though, and maybe this will be interesting after all. “Uh, hey,” Isaac says, unsure.
Sam smiles his usual broad smile. “Jamie, he’s here!” he shouts over his shoulder, and pulls Isaac into the house.
“Welcome,” Jamie says, emerging from the kitchen and handing Isaac a can of seltzer, “to the ‘guys who had very loud meltdowns in the dressing room’ club.”
“Huh,” Isaac says eloquently as Sam pushes him towards the couch. There’s a movie playing on the TV—fucking Inside Out . Ted had made them watch it before the Villa game, and Isaac had still been misty eyed at kickoff. Isaac is pushed towards the middle, and Sam and Jamie settle on either side of him, a grounding presence. “What is this again?” he asks, because he’s still not sure.
“After the restaurant was destroyed, Jamie invited me over. We watched Jerry Maguire and talked about how everyone telling us we had nothing to be embarrassed about just made us more embarrassed.”
“And we thought you might maybe be able to relate,” Jamie says.
Sam shrugs. “To be honest, we did not expect to have another member so quickly. But we are glad you’re here. Well,” he winces, “not glad, but—”
“Yeah, I got it, bruv.” He knocks his elbow into Sam’s shoulder to let him know he doesn’t mean anything by it. “But do we have to watch this movie?”
“Ugly crying is part of the recovery process,” Jamie says. “Hair of the dog, and all that.”
“Yeah? What did you watch, after?”
Jamie shrugs, unembarrassed. “Titanic, obviously.”
They settle down into a comfortable silence; Sam keeps forcing a plate of biscuits at Isaac, and he has a box of tissues ready when Bing Bong dies. But it’s Jamie that is the first to break the silence.
“I know I’m supposed to say that violence is wrong and all that shit,” he comments nonchalantly. “But—and I speak from experience—sometimes punching the dick feels really good.”
“What happened to letting the shit flow?” Isaac asks.
“Eh. l’m sure Ted has a unclogging the pipe metaphor too somewhere. Guy had it coming. Colin should have had a chance to get a swing in too.”
Sam hums his displeasure, because he’s the most good person Isaac has ever known, but the thing is—is that Isaac, in his heart of hearts, really doesn’t regret it. He regrets embarrassing the Club, and icing out Colin, and making Roy of all people have to comfort him, but he doesn’t regret going into the stands. Because Isaac isn’t good like Sam; he can’t take all the shit the world throws at him and turn it into a Nobel fucking Peace Prize. He’s not smart or eloquent like Sam; no one’s going to pick Isaac as the face of a movement. All he has is the double-edged sword of fighting back, literally. Jamie wasn’t wrong; it had felt ridiculously good that, even just for a second, the bastard in the stands had felt even a fraction of the abuse he’d hurled at Isaac and Colin, or the violence of the cretins who had destroyed Ola’s, or the simple cruelty of Jamie’s Dad wagging his finger and calling Jamie a pussy.
Still. “I mean it’s a little different for you,” Isaac says. “Don’t get me wrong, what your dad did was proper fucked, but you don’t have to worry about people randomly calling you a poof or making monkey grunts at you, even without causing a scene. You and Roy got into it so many times, as teammates, and no one called either of you a psychopath.”
“Well, Roy did,” Jamie says, laughing, and then continues on, very carefully. “Yeah, you’re right; I don’t gotta worry about racism.”
There’s a beat of awkward silence, and then Sam groans. “God, I owe Richard two hundred pounds.”
Jamie’s arms shoot up, pinwheeling. “There’s a reason I watched Titanic, mate! Kate Winslet? Can get it. DiCaprio? Also can get it.” He frowns, excitement flooding out of him in a breath. “Don’t tell anybody else at the Club, though.”
Isaac feels like someone has kicked him in the stomach. “Are you worried?” He thought everything had been going well, based on what Colin had said, but—
Jamie shakes his head. “No, because they’ll all be fucking insufferable. Apparently I was the last one to know.”
“The night we got promoted,” Sam says, “you talked about Dani’s arms for ten minutes straight. Jan Maas timed it and everything.”
Jamie winces. “I legitimately do not remember that. But I don’t need to be drunk for that,” he continues, completely unashamed. “A blind man would notice how built he is. You’ve really never checked out his biceps before?”
“Sure,” because, well, Dani is built. “But I’ve never openly fantasized about him picking me up with them.”
“Eh, tomato, tomahto.”
Sam laughs, holding out his own bottle of water. “To humiliating ourselves at work.” Jamie meets him almost immediately, and after a minute, Isaac tilts his own can in. He feels warm and sleepy and a little drunk, even though all he’s had is Jamie’s disgusting Key Lime La Croix and Sam’s homemade snickerdoodles.
Sitting here, laughing with the two of them—it doesn’t fix everything.
But it helps.