Work Text:
After all these years, after everything, it's a shame that some part of her, deep down, always expects to be disappointed.
When she was a little girl, her parents made an annual tradition of falling out right around her birthday. For her tenth, they gifted her tickets to see The Wiz in the West End. Rebecca doesn't remember the production really at all, but she remembers her father on her left and the empty seat where her mother was supposed to be on her right. It was always like that — her stuck in the middle even if one of them was gone. A wedding ring could be removed, but their daughter couldn't. She was a chain shackling them together.
She blamed herself because she was a child and that's what children do. Kept hoping anyway that maybe, maybe just this once, things would be different, until the person she became the most disappointed in was herself for holding onto that hope as long as she did.
"Keep your expectations low and nobody can ever let you down," Sassy said to her once, justifying her recent string of terrible boyfriends with a throw away comment, but it landed somewhere deep inside Rebecca. Assuming disappointment inured her against feeling it as deeply as she otherwise might've when her mother refused to speak to her for nine months.
The distance between her and her feelings was honestly a relief. She got addicted to it in a way, kept up the habit for years and years. The change happened slowly, as change often does, unobserved and unremarked upon, until one day she emerged a diamond, rare and sharp and hard. Finally worth something to somebody.
And it still wasn't enough. For twelve years, disappointment after disappointment, she kept hoping that maybe, maybe next time, things will be different. Hope made her naive. Hope was a chain raising her up high enough to be let down again and again. Hope was something she never wanted to feel again.
And then. Well. Things changed.
Rebecca inspects herself in her foyer mirror. Her arbitrary choice of green made under pressure had been a good one, she thinks, smoothing her palms over the olive chiffon of her gown to flatten a wrinkle. She feels a little nervous about tonight, like she's standing on the precipice of something, though she's not sure why. Wearing something that makes her feel pretty always helps her feel like less of a mess on the inside.
The doorbell rings. She doesn't want it to appear she'd been anxiously, pathetically waiting right by the door for him to arrive, which she absolutely had been, so she takes her time getting to the door and lets out a slow exhale before she opens it.
"Wow. You look gorgeous," Ted says.
The earnestness of his words takes them both by surprise. His ears go a little red and Rebecca feels her cheeks doing the same. It's obvious he hadn't intended to greet her like this.
"Thank you, Ted," she says before he can take it back because she realizes she really doesn't want him to. "Please, come in." She waves him inside and closes the door behind him.
"I, uh, brought you these." Ted, still a little off-kilter, holds up a brown paper-wrapped bouquet. "The sunflowers caught my eye. Made me think of—" He cuts himself off, the red deepening. "Lemons."
"Lemons?"
"Yeah. You used to have that really big bowl of lemons in your kitchen, remember?"
She laughs softly, feeling overwhelmed by the gesture and the reminder of all the history they share. "Your eye for detail is quite admirable, as always.”
“Detail? They took up half the island.”
“Hush. And, thank you. That's…very thoughtful. Especially when you were in such a hurry."
"My tailor is the fastest and the best in the biz, I told you."
Rebecca scrutinizes his tuxedo with an arched brow. She'd been dubious about his claims, but she can appreciate fine tailoring when she sees it. She gives him a small nod of approval.
"They say a tuxedo is only as good as the man inside of it, which means this is the loveliest tuxedo I've ever seen," she says.
Ted preens, looks at his feet, his blush deepening even further. "Who's 'they'?"
She shrugs. "Me, I suppose. Let me put these in some water and then we can go, alright?"
Ted trails her into the kitchen. She sets to work unwrapping the bouquet and trimming the stems while she tells Ted where to find a vase in her cupboard.
"You look like you know what you're doing," Ted remarks, watching her carefully — though not as carefully as would if they weren't somewhat in a hurry — arrange the flowers.
"We did a flower arranging class for one of our corporate retreats a couple years ago. I've gone back a few times by myself. I find it rather soothing. I sometimes wish I had time to grow my own flowers so I could make them myself. Maybe I was a florist in a different life."
"Why not this life?"
She laughs, thinking at first that he's making a joke because he knows just how busy she is, but she sees on his face that he's asking sincerely. "Seriously?"
Ted shrugs. "It's never too late to change."
She wants to roll her eyes, but she can't. She can't because the second she starts to seriously consider what he's saying, her chest clenches and she feels an impulse to flee. It's how she knows she really wants something — because it scares her.
She'd forgotten, somehow.
Lately, in a rare, quiet moment, she's found herself wondering what comes next for her, not that she's voiced it out loud. After the women's team's future is secure, after the men's team has won the League, after her mother has died. It's not imminent, she doubts it's even soon, but it's there, ahead of her, looming in the distance.
In that future, is she with Matthijs? With Jelka? In Amsterdam? Matthijs has been dropping no small number of hints that he's interested in taking the next step, whatever that means, and she's been ignoring them, for the most part. Pretending she's content with their arrangement, with distance and Zoom sex, the independence it grants her, because she had been content with it, for three years.
But something changed.
"Boss?"
Ted's voice reaches her as though from a great distance. When she looks at him, her chest tightens, so she looks away. There are lovely pale pink roses in the bouquet. She picks out the most perfect, symmetrical, saturated one and cuts the bloom from the stem.
"Sheesh. Did Maximilien Rose-pierre there do somethin' to offend you?" Ted says.
Rebecca only smiles in response. She takes Ted's arm and turns him to face her, tucking the rose in his pocket square. "On the contrary, his color reminded me of your biscuit boxes," she says, smoothing her palms over his lapels for no reason she can really explain. "A worthy sacrifice, I think."
She realizes her hands are lingering on his chest so she drops them and takes a step backwards.
"Thank you for doing this, Ted. I seriously owe you."
Ted waves a dismissive hand. "You know you got me for life, boss. I'm happy to sub in anytime."
She nearly laughs. It's funny that he would think of himself that way. Sometimes Matthijs reminded her of Ted — she'd nearly said as much when she opened a FaceTime call to discover he had a mustache all of a sudden — but not the other way around. Hm. She's never realized that before.
"Oh, please. You are always on my starting lineup."
She means it. When he'd been far away in the States, despite thinking about him all the time, they hadn't spoken much. Obviously he'd been her top choice for manager, for all the reasons she'd told him, but it was more than that. She missed him. Everything was fine after he left, the center held without him in it, but it became very clear that life was just better when he was in it. But when he dodged her calls, she started to worry he'd moved on with his life in a way she hadn't. Or he was hiding from her because he was unhappy, and keeping people at a distance was her area of expertise, so she recognized the signs. He'd been wobbly about leaving so she felt so sure he'd want to come back, but she couldn't know without talking to him in person, face to face. They'd always worked better that way.
"Aw, shucks. Still, I'm sorry Matt couldn't make it. A lot of this will be wasted on me since the closest I've had to a night at the opera is watchin' A Night at the Opera."
"Yes, he's very disappointed to have missed it, but the weather will be weather. It's sort of fitting, in a way, that the Dutch man who lives on a boat and flies planes for a living isn't able to come to shore for the opening night Gala performance of Der Fliegende Holländer."
It's hardly the first time something like this had happened in the three years they've been together. Sometimes it's Rebecca's schedule that gets in the way, but more often than not, between Jelka and the weather and the mercuriality of air travel, it's his. She's tired of hoping that next time, maybe, things will be different, feeling disappointed when it doesn't work out. And, perhaps, a little disappointed even when it does.
"Why's that?" Ted asks.
"You don't know the story?"
"Uh, no. Can't say I do. I did try to read up about it a little, Der Fliegende Holländer."
"Der Fliegende Holländer," Rebecca corrects.
"That's what I said."
"Okay." It wasn't.
" Apparently it was inspired by a real voyage Wagner—"
"Wagner."
"What did I say?"
"Wagner," she says in the most offensively American way she can.
He considers this for a beat. "I don't hear a difference. Anyhoo, it was inspired by a real voyage he was on. With his Newfoundland dog named Robber. And that's as far as I got because I started to feel a little motion sick in the taxi. But no spoilers. Let's circle back to this later. We should probably get goin'."
"Can I be honest?" Rebecca says.
"Is my name Ted Lasso?"
"I don't really want to go to the opera."
"Oh, thank god," Ted exhales, slumping slightly. She makes a face at him, surprised and amused at his relief. "Now don't get me wrong, I'm no Timothee Chalamet or anything, I respect and support all the arts, but…" Ted prattles on for awhile and she listens fondly, grateful there's no longer a rush to leave. He cuts himself off, catching her eyes on him and blushing. "Sorry," he says, his lips tugging into a crooked smile.
Rebecca starts to follow suit, only to realize she's already smiling too.
"No, I'm sorry. Now you're all dressed up with nowhere to go."
"That makes two of us," he says, looking her up and down, "but who says we got nowhere to go? It'd be a real shame to deprive the world of gettin' to see you in this dress."
Rebecca feels a flutter in her belly.
"Did you have somewhere in mind?"
Ted shrugs. "We could hit up a fast food joint, pretend we're movie stars after the Oscars."
Imagining herself and Ted dressed to the nines in some chain food establishment does tickle her, she'll admit. Reminds her a little of how she'd been ridiculously overdressed for lunch at Gates all those months ago. Thinking of Gates makes her stomach rumble. "I am hungry."
Ted rubs his hands together excitedly. "Sounds like a good place to start, then. Let's see where the night takes us, shall we?"
"After a fast food cheeseburger, it might take us right back here." She gives him a knowing look and he snorts a laugh.
"That's okay. Anywhere you are is right where I wanna be," Ted says with a grin, offering his arm.
She takes it.