There’s a relief in knowing her real name. Tilly. A dumb fucking name for an evil fucking woman. Knowing her name makes her more real in a way I needed. She was always real, of course. I didn’t stick my dick into a fantasy. I stuck it into a real woman with a real cunt who really came harder and harder with every increasingly depraved act we did that night. But there was that catfishing vibe to it because I had no idea what was real and what was fake about her story.
Well, I know at least one thing that was fake about her story. Obviously, she could get pregnant.
And fuck me, she’s beautiful pregnant. She was captivating before. I could never have called her beautiful. That’s not what held my attention at Ani-Con. But now, she’s got that pregnant woman glow to her skin and a light in her eyes that wasn’t there before. Gone is the looseness, her body now filling out to what it’s meant to be, and so much more.
And so fucking ripe with my baby —my baby— that I had this flicker in me of something I’ve never been before, this drive to knock Briggs and Allore and Foster away and drag her out of the hot tub and to my room, caveman-style. What’s even crazier is I was actually able to keep myself from doing it.
I should have. I should have just held her prisoner there until she confessed to blackmailing me and gave all my money back, every fucking penny she’s collected from me in the past seven months, so I could build a giant house for my family with a cage around it to keep her there because that’s what she deserves. What I deserve.
Gabe and Joss are on a babymoon this weekend. The rest of the guys are in a cabin in the Rockies. Merrick wanted to go skiing and everyone else wanted to chop wood or some shit. Man stuff. It wasn’t my thing anyway, and then with the latest round of extortionfrom Tilly, I didn’t have the money to chip in without stressing. Seventeen thousand seemed like an okay amount of money until I worked out how long that was going to last. I don’t get a weekly paycheck. Andy went through my expenses, crunched some numbers. I’m not going to make it four months with what’s coming in, even if Tilly doesn’t try for yet another money grab.
She’s about to have a baby. She’s going to.
I’ve been waiting for it all week.
I grab a steak and a bagged salad, figuring neither of them will make it another three days so I’m doing their rightful owners a favor, and slam the door shut.
“But you gotta get to Tokyo.”
“Sounds good.” Not really. As much as I love the stuff that comes out of Japan, I’m not a fan of big flights. I’ve only ever flown across the ocean twice, to Europe for games. That’s the Atlantic. The Pacific is a lot more. But if it’ll get me money, I’ll do it.
“It’s for—”
“How much will they pay?” I’ve already told him I’ll do a tampon ad if they pay me well. Hell, I don’t even think I put that caveat on it. I will do a tampon ad, full stop.
“It’s going to be a total of one-point-two.”
“Million?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, great.”
“But there’s a problem.”
I pause in the middle of reaching for one of the frying pans hanging above the island. Not even because I’m stunned by his words. His words just have me wondering if I’m going to want to fire up a grill or fucking skewer this steak and cook it over the firepit. Throw a bunch of kerosene on it, burn it to a char. Sacrifice to the gods. Destruction.
“One of them is a live event. A ribbon cutting. It’s on June 27th.”
That doesn’t mean anything to me. June. Cool. Three months out, so hopefully Andy negotiated for a decent deposit because that’s cutting it close, but Andy’s usually good about this stuff. He likes me, and even if he didn’t, I’m his meal ticket. If I get kicked off the team and my deals dry up, he’ll lose half his income. He’s going through a divorce, so now’s a really bad time for shit like that to happen.
“You’ve got a mandatory training camp that week.”
“Fuck.” Mandatory isn’t a word casually tossed around. They take almost no excuses. This is probably the one Gabe’s already notified them that Joss’s due date falls in the middle of, and even with that, he’s expected to be at camp until Joss is in active labor and will need to return two days after she has that baby. But ribbon-cutting is definitely not an excuse.
“What’s the company?” I ask.
“It’s a stadium. One of their baseball teams is getting a new stadium, but they’re designing it to be mixed-use in the hopes they can attract the NFL to have some international games there, like in Germany and the UK.”
“Fuck,” I groan again, this time lower and dragged out. I don’t know how my reaction would have been different if it had been a tampon factory, I just know this sounds like a big deal. This would make me a representative of the NFL. And yeah, anyone could theoretically build a stadium with these hopes, but if they’re at the point where it’s for baseball, Japan’s most popular sport, but they want a football player at the ribbon cutting, that tells me they’re pushing hard for this. They’ve already got a foot in somewhere.
I’d fucking love this opportunity. I’d love to see Tokyo, honestly, but I don’t think I’d do the flight without the encouragement. And this would make me look good. Professional. Serious. These are the kind of ads that make you the face of a brand, and the face of the NFL in Japan?
“Shit.”
“I’m going to reach out to your GM,” Andy promises. “I can’t make any guarantees, but I’m going to do everything I can.”
“I want this,” I tell him. “I don’t even care what the other thing is, I want—”
