Page 54 of Contested

The room carried on around them. Marcos held Sebastian’s gaze for as long as he would let him before Sebastian looked down.

Marcos’ fingers curled around the edge of the bench beneath him. The loss still sat in his chest. His legs still ached, his ribs hurt, and the Storm song hadn’t fully left his head. But beneath all of that, something else settled into place with the same uncomfortable certainty the game had given him.

Playing with Sebastian made sense.

Everything else was the part he still didn’t know how to read. Especially in himself.

|| Chapter Thirteen ||

Sebastian – “This will be easy”

The loss against Sydney followed them home.

Not in a way that made the club feel broken or the season feel over before it had properly started. It was only Round One, and everyone knew better than to start drawing conclusions from a seven-point loss away from home against the Storm. There were too many games left, too many variables, too many ways a season could bend back into shape if a team was disciplined enough to make it.

That didn’t stop the review from hurting.

Monday morning came with footage, numbers, and Jacob standing at the front of the room with his arms crossed while the first quarter played on the screen. Every mistake was sharpened by the pause button. A fumbled handball inside fifty. A kick to the wrong side of a lead. Giving the Storm enough room to run the ball through the middle.

Then the centre clearances came up. The work they had done had been good. He and Marcos had been good. That was starting to become a problem.

Training kept them together after that, even though Jacob didn’t call it punishment anymore.

No one did.

The schedule stayed aligned because it was working. Gym blocks, drills, centre-bounce craft, running patterns, recovery.

If Sebastian had looked for a reason to be irritated by it, he could have found several. He didn’t need to share every second of his working week with Marcos Reyes. He didn’t need Marcos standing behind him in the gym, hands hovering near the bar. He didn’t need Marcos beside him in meetings, one knee shifting too close under the table before pulling away again. He didn’t need to know exactly how Marcos breathed when he was trying not to say something.

But the club wasn’t interested in what Sebastian needed privately. The club cared about what worked.

And it worked.

By Round Two, the commentators had noticed.

Not the private part. Not the part that mattered and couldn’t matter. But the version of them that could be put in a highlight reel with a caption and shared by the club’s media team.

Reyes to Nguyen. Former rivals finding chemistry. Mustangs’ new centre pairing showing promise.

The second round had them against the Newcastle Raiders, and the Raiders made the game ugly from the first bounce. Rain had left the ground heavy, the ball slick, and every clean passage turned into contact. Marcos spent the first half fighting for space against a ruck who seemed less interested in jumping than leaning, blocking, and killing anything clean before it started.

Sebastian worked off him where he could, but the ball came out wrong most of the time. By halftime, the Mustangs were down by eight and covered in too much mud.

Marcos adjusted after the break. He stopped trying to free himself from every block and started using the weight against him, dragging the ball down into contests the Mustangs could actually reach. Sebastian took two clearances in the third quarter, but it wasn’t enough.

The siren sounded with the Mustangs three points down.

In the rooms after, Marcos sat beside him because the away benches were too crowded and no one moved to make space elsewhere. Their knees touched once as players shifted around them. Sebastian waited for Marcos to pull away.

He didn’t.

Round Three took them to Brisbane, where the heat made the whole game feel too fast and too heavy at once. The Brisbane Bears moved the ball wide, then back through the middle once the Mustangs overcommitted to the boundary. Twice, Sebastian saw the danger before the kick came and couldn’t get there in time. Twice, the Bears turned defence into attack in a handful of possessions.

The Mustangs started well enough. Marcos won the first centre bounce clean, and for a while, it looked as if the work they had done might hold under pressure.

For a little bit, the Mustangs were in front.

Sebastian remembered that clearly. The roar from the small maroon-and-gold pocket. Marcos turning back to the centre, chest heaving. The look he gave Sebastian as they crossed paths.