ME
Absolutely not. Just don’t need to know you met a girl.
Shouldn’t you be focusing on literally anything else.
CHASE
She was at the community center. Think she was 12.
Damn him. I fell right into his trap. Letting out a laugh, I slow my breathing and try to turn this conversation around.
ME
So you met a child. Great!
CHASE
Said she wanted to be a lawyer when she grew up.
Told her she can do anything she sets her mind to.
Perfect, now he’s being nice to little girls and making me smile without even being in the room. Annoying.
ME
That was sweet
CHASE
And that I knew a pretty badass lawyer who works in sports.
Told her all about you.
ME
Chase…
CHASE
Have a great day, Princess.
I choose not to respond, unsure what I’d even say. Somehow Chase sees me for who I am beneath all my complicated layers, and I let him in by sharing my complications at work. I don’t willingly share my feelings with people. Not even my closest friends. Ivory and Taylor are still in the dark about my health scare last year. It’s a personality flaw. Letting Chase see beyond the surface was an olive branch that epically backfired. It’s the only explanation for how utterly disappointed I was when he gotarrested. It was more than having to do my job to keep him out of trouble. He let me down. Proved he was no better than before.
I was also mad at myself for entertaining any ideas about us, even after telling him we needed to stick to being friends. The back and forth was giving me a headache.
Pick a lane, Gabrielle. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell him to move on and keep things professional then be mad when he does it.
Still, he could’ve chosen literally any other method than getting wasted and arrested.
“Knock, knock.” Taylor walks into my office and plops down in the chair by the window overlooking the field.
“Oh, look you’re back again and didn’t tell your friends you were coming. How original.”
“Thought we could go over some notes for the press conference,” she says. We decided to wait to hold the press conference about Chase’s restitution until the team was back in town to coincide with his first game back in the lineup.
“You do know you don’t actually work here, right?”
“And some community service options.” She ignores me like always when I question why she’s in the office so much.
