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“Oh, you have got to be fucking with me,” Thierry says loudly, apropos of absolutely nothing.
Richard and Sam immediately shush him. “Dude!” Sam says, casting the other side of the room a furtive glance. “Don’t be so obvious!”
Across the locker room, Isaac’s talking to Colin with a smile brightening his eyes, leaned in all close up in his personal space - despite the fact that they’re both sweaty as shit from practice. They can’t see Colin’s expression, since he’s turned away from them, but by the looks of his body language, he’s pretty happy to be in the position as well.
Oh, and - just to add insult to injury - Isaac’s got his arm pressed to the wall right above Colin’s head, casual and most definitely flirtatious.
Moe snorts. It’s all very high school, really.
He grabs his notebook from off the shelf in his cubby. “Right, you want to make an edit, Zoreaux?” he asks, clicking his pen. “They’re looking pretty chummy over there.”
Thierry rolls his eyes. “Put the book away, Bumbercatch, they’re always doing shit like that.” He glances back over at the pair, and shakes his head with disdain and thinly-veiled awe. “It’s absolutely absurd. It never ceases to amaze me.”
Moe shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says. “Still got you down for around the holidays then, yeah?”
Thierry nods. “Mistletoe and spiked eggnog literally have to work. If they don’t, then I don’t know what fucking will.”
“Riiiiiiiiiiiiight,” Jamie says slowly, all drawn out and long. “What the fuck are you all on about?”
“The betting pool,” Richard says, as if it should be obvious, which - well. “On when Colin and Isaac are finally going to profess their undying love for each other.”
Jamie’s eyebrows raise. For as long as Moe spent hating him before, it’s a bit of a funny look on him now. “Their what?”
“Jamie doesn’t know,” Dani says quietly, leaning closer into the group’s circle conspiratorially. “Bumbercatch only started the pool once Manchester City called you back.”
“Well, that’s fucking bullshit,” Jamie says hotly. “Because I’ve been suspectin’ shit about them since I started here, and I used to hang out with them the most out of anyone in the club.”
Sam shrugs. “He has a point.”
So Moe says, “All right,” flips open the notebook again, and says, “When are you thinkin’, Tartt?”
“I want to know upfront what the current standin’ is,” Jamie says.
“Currently?” Moe scans the list, lands on the running total at the bottom. “About five hundred pounds.”
Jamie swears loudly. “Mother of - Right, I’m wagerin’ another seventy that it’ll be the next time we play Everton.”
“Jan Maas is already on for that one,” Moe tells him.
“Fine, then right after that match,” Jamie says, forking over the money. “Win, lose, or tie, Everton drives everyone mad. They’ll snog, I swear it.”
Moe makes a note, tucks the cash into the pouch he’s got reserved for this shit. “Ok.” He looks up at Dani, taps the page with his pen. “Care to put anything down?” he asks. “There’s still time yet, no one’s been right.”
Dani bites at his lower lip and shakes his head. “I’m…still not sure. I haven’t landed on an answer that I feel makes sense.”
“Well, you’d better do it fast, muchacho,” Jamie says, indicating Colin and Isaac with a nod of his head. “Because I’m pretty damn sure they’re each other’s soulmates.”
— — —
It doesn’t happen over the holidays, and Thierry - who’d hovered around the Higgins home all night waiting for Colin and Isaac to walk underneath a mistletoe-bedecked doorway together - takes to cursing in French every time one of them walks by. This finally stops when Isaac takes offense and there’s almost a brawl on the pitch, but in the end, Coach Lasso works it out.
Moe doesn’t mind. His date won’t come for a while, and he feels pretty confident in his guessing abilities.
Also, he’d kind of like to buy a new car, and the money pot wouldn’t hurt his chances of that.
— — —
“Right, so I’ve been trying to get my cousin into Bantr,” Moe overhears Colin telling Keeley one day when she’s visiting the office. “But she’s a visual learner, and I can’t remember dick about how the app works to show her.”
“I’ll text you some pointers,” Keeley says. “And if you want to put your cousin in touch with me, that’s fine, too.” She grins, and waggles her eyebrows. “Haven’t used Bantr in a while, eh, Colin? Found somebody special?”
Moe does his best to pretend that he’s not eavesdropping, which is difficult, as the hallway is deserted apart from the three of them.
Colin seems to hesitate for a moment, and then laughs. “Well - “
“Clearly he’s not still on there, Keeley,” Moe butts in, forgoing subtlety entirely. “You know, with Isaac and all.”
It’s a direct approach, but it’s worth a shot.
Colin turns pink, shrugs his shoulders good-naturedly. “Well, yeah, pretty much.”
Keeley coos. “Aww, I understand, babes.” She walks off with a click of her boots, raises her hand, and shouts behind her, “I’ll text you!”
“Thanks!” Colin shouts back, and turns to Moe, chuckling. “Love is weird, mate.”
“Yeah,” Moe says, feeling close to smacking himself in the forehead, hard. When are these two idiots going to get together? “No kidding.”
— — —
“No,” Alisha says, popping another Skittle into her mouth. “No, I still don’t get it, Moe. How do you know they’re even gay?”
Hairspray continues to drone on in the background, something about Michelle Pfeiffer and crabs, but Moe ignores it. “You have to see it, babe,” he tells her, shrugging. “I really don’t know how else to describe it. I know you’ve never officially met them, but haven’t you noticed it during games? Even their body language on the pitch is fucking homoerotic as shit.”
Alisha snorts. “I want to believe you, but football clubs are so goddamn weird that I don’t even know what to think. I mean, your coach still knows next to nothing about the sport, you had a cursed treatment room from World War One, one of your best scorers kicked a dog in the face, and you learned the choreography to an entire *NSYNC song.” She shakes her head. “I’m not saying it’s not legitimate, I’m just saying it’s strange.”
“Honestly,” Moe says. “You should join the team, then you’ll get it. God knows you can score better than me.”
“Damn right,” Alisha says, and then, “Shut up now, Queen Latifah’s on-screen.”
Moe (wisely) shuts up.
Alisha comes to pick him up from training for the first time ever about a week later; she gets this awful little smirk on her face when he introduces her to Colin and Isaac, and doesn’t really stop wearing it all throughout meeting the rest of the boys. She’s uncharacteristically quiet on the way out the door, until she says -
“All right. I want in on it.”
- and, well. It would be really funny if his girlfriend won the pot against the entirety of AFC Richmond. That’s all Moe’s saying.
— — —
“Jamie, you all right?” Coach Lasso asks after their draw against Everton, and Jamie, looking hollow in the eyes and pained in the skull, shakes his head and says,
“I just lost seventy pounds.”
Coach Lasso hums in sympathy. “Oh. Bettin’ pool get you too?”
Jamie nods somberly.
“I lost as well. But I did not wager quite as much money.”
“Shut the fuck up, Jan Maas.”
— — —
Dani finally places his bet somewhere dangerously close to Moe’s, but Moe lets it slide because he’s honestly just glad that Dani finally put in. He’d evidently “needed time” to “figure out” the best choice for him, and if it’s that near to Moe’s, then maybe that means Moe’s not far off in his guesswork, which is a heartening thought.
They’re all beginning to get a little bit antsy. Colin and Isaac continue to dance with each other at clubs and bunk over at each other’s respective flats, and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about any of it. At all. More dates come and go with no avail, and there’s only so many wagers left before the betting pool will probably have to start anew entirely.
It’s genuinely mind-boggling that Dani and Jamie - who no one had even considered, in all their preoccupation with Colin and Isaac - get together first. Colin comes up to wish them congratulations, and then actually goes and holds Isaac’s hand, if you can believe it. Richard’s date is closest, and he tries to convince everyone that he’s won, but none of them are having any of it.
Apparently - and Moe had literally no clue this was happening until he found out - Alisha’s been messaging Keeley non-stop in desperate attempts to shove Colin and Isaac together before she loses her wager. This surprises Moe for a number of reasons, not least of which being that he hadn’t even known Alisha and Keeley knew each other.
Moe’s going crazy. He’s going fucking crazy, and he knows he’s not the only one, either. It’s been ages since the pool was first started up, and all it’s done is lose everyone involved an absolute metric shit-ton of money.
And then Richmond absolutely steamrolls Manchester City in the semis, and in the locker room, amidst all the screaming and cheering and Richmond ’til we die, Colin flings his arms around Isaac’s neck, pulls him in close, and kisses him soundly on the mouth.
— — —
The room quite literally goes silent.
“The fuck are you all staring at?” Isaac says, raising his eyebrows, and remarkably, the first person to find their voice is -
“What the fuck,” Sam says, both sounding and looking gobsmacked, and then he turns to Moe and says, again, “What the fuck.”
Moe’s one step ahead of him, already flipping through the book. “Holy shit,” he’s muttering under his breath, trying to remember what day it is and who’s closest in their guess. “Holy fucking shit, what the shit.”
“Sorry,” Colin says. “Are we missing something?”
“We’ve all been betting on this,” Thierry offers, sounding both impressed and offended. “You really couldn’t have done this over the holidays, huh.”
It’s Isaac’s turn to say, “What the fuck, bruv?” He shakes his head. “It’s totally unprofessional to be gambling on the status of your teammates’ relationship, innit?”
“Yeah,” Colin says. “And also, we’ve been dating for almost two years.”
Moe nearly drops the book. “You what,” he says, deathly quiet.
“Fuck this,” Jamie proclaims loudly, and then the entire locker room bursts into a cacophony of confusion.
“We thought you already knew!” Colin says. “We weren’t exactly trying to hide it.”
“This is the first time you’ve kissed in front of any of us, you know that, right?” Moe demands. “How the fuck were we supposed to know you were together if you’ve never even kissed?”
“Actually, bruv, we’ve kissed a lot at clubs and shit,” Isaac says. “And at karaoke in Liverpool. Multiple times then, actually.”
“How did you all miss that?” Jan Maas asks. “It would have been obvious to me, and I wasn’t here then.”
Richard snaps something at him in irritated French. Thierry shushes him, gently laying a hand on his shoulder.
“We just didn’t want to bother you with constant PDA,” Colin explains, and then he eyes Jamie and Dani. “No offense, you two.”
“None taken,” Dani chirps, beaming. "I'm very happy for you two!"
Jamie looks like he might think otherwise.
“Wait,” Sam says. “Wait, so if they’ve been together this entire time…who wins?”
Everyone - even Colin and Isaac - looks to Moe.
“Er,” he says, then coughs. He glances down at the book. “Well, I guess we could just say whoever’s date is closest to today, yeah? Which would be - “
He breaks off.
Winchester whoops. “It’s me, isn’t it? Fuck, I’m a genius.”
“Hang on,” Moe says. “Hang on, someone’s listed as wagering that Colin and Isaac have been together this entire time.”
Silence.
“Well?” Isaac demands. “Who is it, then?”
— — —
Coach Nathan Shelley of West Ham United is surprised - to say the least - when he finds a gift basket from his old club sitting on his desk, along with an envelope full of a hefty sum of cash. We’re not any happier about this than you are, an attached note says. Good luck in the match Saturday. We’d tell you to Believe, but you’d probably just tear this paper in two.
Regards,
The Greyhounds
Nate grins, in spite of it all. He always knew Colin and Isaac were too close to not already be in love with each other.