“It is when the person you’re catering to is an asshole to you, yeah.”
“How much money were you going to get if you got the touchdown?”
“Fifty thousand. And I was about ten rushing yards from one-hundred thousand on top of that. It would have settled up the blackmailers’ demand and covered Andy for the rest of the month. Would have left us with five thousand.” I was so damn close.
Tilly smacks my gut, but it’s the back of her hand, and it’s a fairly floppy smack. “You fucked up, Blaise.”
I grin, glad that she’s being sassy with me if not actually irritated, and twist myself to kiss her again, more softly this time.
“I love you, Tilly.”
She pouts — she actually pouts — and says, “I don’t know how much I love you right now, Blaise, but I was warming up to you until all this.”
I laugh loudly and attempt to tip myself over her and take advantage of this linebacker-sized bed.
The second my ankle starts to shift, an alarm goes off.
The medical team rushes back in.
Doc Tremaine yells, “I told you no sex in here!”
Newly promoted Emily Hess, Director of Public Relations, stares me down across the long table they’vebrought me to at the Wilmington Juggernaut’s corporate headquarters. There are about a dozen suits here, from Team Owner Tamara Godwell all the way down to an intern scribbling notes furiously on a tablet while another intern calmly types them — I think this is for dramatic effect — but Emily Hess is the one who’s stressing me the most.
Also, there are representatives from four different departments, but no one from legal. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Legal’s usually around for the bad stuff and definitely when there’s an actual law that’s been broken — which, hi, blackmail — but they’re conspicuously absent for me. There’s a private detective here.
Not a real police detective. This is a guy who used to be a cop and is now into what looks like shady shit, if I’m taking a guess.
But it’s Emily Hess, sitting between Godwell and the team manager, who’s stressing me out.
“So then, after the Texans game last season, I’m out partying, having a good time, and I get this email. It’s got the name of the girl, and I’d been thinking about her, you know? Wondering if she was okay and shit. Usually, I don’t open emails if I don’t already know the address, but it’s that same name. I go for it.”
Everyone listens but with varying degrees of focus. Coach Keenan is rubbing his eyes. The HR Director went ashen the moment I said I thought Tilly had come down enough from the acid to give for-real consent. The team shrink has this glazed look, like he’s heard this sort of nonsense from players so many times that it just rolls right off him.
Okay, he’s heard this sort of nonsense from me personally dozens of times. The first year, they had me seeing him weekly.
“There’s a video in the email. A, uhh, a porn, I think. And listen, I get unsolicited shit all the time, whatever, we’ve all seen ladies jamming twelve-inch—never mind. Anyway, this is different, right? It looks like one of those leaked celebrity sex tapes, where it’s all dark and grainy and the angles are off, and I’m just confused, I figure I should watch it. Just, like, I don’t know, maybe it’ll be good or . . . or I don’t know.”
Emily Hess breathes in and out at the most even pace I’ve ever seen. She doesn’t move otherwise. She doesn’t react at all. She’s probably a beast at poker. But I swear I see wheels turning.
“But it’s me. There were cameras in that hotel room. Everywhere. They got audio, too. And remember how I said Tilly’s into a . . . uh . . .” I blank trying to remember the words I just used because I don’t want to make my girl sound like a freak or anything, but it’s hard to explain the situation without making her look terrible, and she doesn’t deserve that. “She’s into games? Just fun, haha, not at all serious games? The video shows me paying her before we do anything.”
“Fucking hell,” Keenan groans.
Godwell, who’s a fair, reasonable owner who’s always been super cool and patient with me, whispers, “Why are you like this?”
I shrug. “It was just a game, I swear. We were having fun.We . . .” I slump, tip my head forward. My hair flops forward with it. Last night, when we finally got home, Tilly undid my twists and washed my hair, using the little spray attachment we have to bathe Donovan. I don’t have a cast, just a brace that comes right off, but they wanted me off my feet last night, and Tilly threatened me with war crimes if I took it off. So she sat my ass in the tub, my ankle propped up on the edge, while I scrubbed up and she washed my hair.
And then instead of prepping it for twists, she towel-dried and conditioned and teased it out. My off-season hair. She’s not going to twist it again until Doc Keltner gives me the green light to get back on the field, and even if I had all the money in the world right now, I wouldn’t go behind her back to get it done professionally.
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” I say firmly. We didn’t. We were two consenting adults, and yes, I gave her almost $10,000 afterward, but I was not paying her for sex. I was playing a game, and then I was giving a gift to someone I thought really needed that gift, and I was right.
It just made everything look really bad.
“After the video was a message about how the whole night was caught on tape, and they were prepared to leak this to the media if I didn’t pay them. So I paid them.”
Maurice Bradley looks at Andy, who took a red eye from California to be here for this meeting. “Did you know about this?”
Andy grimaces.
