At my silence, he simply says, “Told you, you move fast. Does she feel the same?”
I glare at him like he’s just told me the earth is flat. “No, you dumb fucker. Every time she looks at me, she wants to gouge my eyeballs out of my head with the studs of her rugby boots.” That might have been true when she first found out who I am, but we’ve spent real time together, across two different countries. And she’s stopped yelling at me, too. Under my friend’s scrutinous gaze, there’s a voice at the back of my brain telling me she might not be quite as venomous toward me as she once was. It’s a beacon of hope I grab with both hands.
“That’s… quite the graphic image.” He shakes his head before folding his slice and taking another bite. “So, you caught feelings for an un-get-able woman on the rebound who wants to kill you? That’s on brand as fuck, Rob. How do you get yourself into these kinds of situations?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “It’s a skill.”
“Are you going to tell her?”
“Fuck no.” I drain the rest of my bottle of beer, but there’s not enough alcohol in the world to handle this line of questioning. Technically, it’s breaking one of her beloved rules, but I don’t care. I’m not dumping this on her.
“Why not?”
Because developing real feelings is against the fucking rules, so they need to be banished whence they came. That’s why, Sully. “There’s nothing to tell.”
He grunts. “Liar. How’s work?”
As if he summoned my boss from the depths of hell, my phone chimes. “It was quiet until you opened your damn mouth.” Before I open the email, I know what it’s going to say. He wants a story, not a fluff piece, but a real piece of sports journalism or he’s going to demote me to the gossip column.
It’s not the first time he’ll have threatened my job, but he seems to think that, since I started dating Rhiannon, I have a mainline to the entire sport of rugby’s news.
I was supposed to have it ready by now, but I’ve been pushing it back, holding both Pete and my boss off by telling them I’m working on something big, something good, something unputdownable.
I haven’t even met her teammates, for fuck’s sake. Plus, I can’t remember which rule it is, but there’s definitely a rule against using her connections for my career advancement. And rightly so.
The email starts as expected; they don’t want a romantic fluff piece. They want an explosive behind-the-scenes feature on women’s rugby’s rising star, all-around badass, and newly media-loved heroine.
I don’t fight my eye roll. Sure, I’ll get right on that.
Except the email doesn’t stop there. If I don’t write the piece, they’ll take it from being a team project, to being a piece written entirely by Pete. My dick of a boss knows that I don’t want that untrustworthy asshole going anywhere near a solo story about my girlfriend. Even if it’s fake. I called Laura fromRuck Offa shark yesterday, but Pete would kill his own mother and climb over her still warm corpse to get himself a story.
He’s the kind of journo who doesn’t care about ethics, just engagement. He twists quotes, sensationalizes stories, and justifies it with, “If it gets clicks, it’s truth-adjacent.” I learned through the grapevine that his dad’s golfing buddies own part of the paper. In essence, Pete’s untouchable, smug, and knows it. He’s never had to fight for a single opportunity in his career.
What the fuck?
The dilemma crystallizes into a knot of cold dread. My stomach falls to somewhere under the recliner. I drag my hands through my hair, trying to force slow breaths in and out of my body so I don’t hyperventilate. Pete can’t get the story. He just can’t. I need to protect her from the worst: the underbelly of Northern Irish journalism. But I can’t hurt and betray Rhiannon by writing about her either.
After our Julia Roberts movie marathon, she confessed that her dad’s disapproval fueled her work ethic. She told me she doesn’t talk to him before games if she can avoid it because he gets in her head and makes her doubt everything she knows about rugby.
Talk about being shoved between the devil and the deep blue sea.
My boss politely goes on to tell me that if I turn down this story, I get to write about a scandal involving a local celebrity, B-list at best.
“Shit.”
Sully sits up, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his thighs. “What’s wrong?”
The Morrigan family already thinks I’m a morally bankrupt bastard, but the truth is, that doping story was personal, not business. As much as it’s my job to dig and expose the truth, Idoin fact, have a moral compass.
“My boss wants me to write a story about Rhiannon.” I rub at my neck. “It was supposed to be about women in sport, but he’s leaning heavily into my girlfriend being the headliner.” I’ve started a draft. On the plane home while she was sleeping on my shoulder and I couldn’t settle.
I seeded a whisper—friction in the Morrigan camp—meant to contextualize, not crucify.
Even off the pitch, Morrigan moves like she’s waiting for the next impact. Watching her on the Croatian coast, she’s a woman who doesn’t know how to rest.
I recite the words over in my head, swirling them around as my gut churns harder. I’ll need to rewrite the damn thing. Too many snippets could give Pete a scent of blood, and I don’t want him to pursue her any more than we have to for this piece.
Sully whistles. “Fuck. Can you say no?”
