Coach’s hand was already up. Already coming down. A friendly slap between teammates. A harmless pat a coach gives his top guy to sayyou’ve got this, kid. The kind of thing I’d taken a thousand times.
Except this time it landed square on my bad shoulder.
The sound wasn’t loud. Not compared to cameras adjusting or reporters rustling their notes. But the pain…
I couldn’t swallow it. Couldn’t mask it. Couldn’t do a single thing fast enough.
The noise tore out of me before I had a chance to bite it back. A sharp, guttural cry that ricocheted off the walls and snapped the entire room into stillness.
A beat of silence.
Then the entire place erupted.
Voices swelled, reporters rushed forward. Cameras angled toward me with predatory precision. Reese froze, horror draining all the color from her face.
And me?
I stood there, chest heaving, shoulder screaming, every lens in the room capturing the exact thing we’d spent months keeping quiet.
My pain.
On camera.
In real time.
And there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it.
12
Reese
“I’m gonna need you to say something. Anything. Give me a sign of life, please.”
I bit my tongue and kept pacing, my sneakers squeaking on the linoleum every three paces when I would turn around to go back the way I’d come. Holly’s eyes tracked me, her hands steepled at her chin. She seemed oddly calm after what just happened but then again, that was her job.
Her most urgent concern was management’s reaction to that monumental fuck-up in the press room. For me, it was the look on Theo’s face when he hauled ass out of there. I’d never seen him that… scared, was the word that floated up. Although it didn’t quite fit.
“I can’t do anything until I know what I’m dealing with, Reese.”
I didn’t even know what I was dealing with. I wanted to talk to Theo. But also, I didn’t think I could bear to see him.
“This was a bad idea.” I said it more to myself than her. “All those cameras…”
“That’s what a presser is,” she replied. “You knew that going in.”
My feet stopped, and I looked at her. “They were all over him. Talking at the same time, thrusting their stupid mics and phones in his face. How is that okay?”
“It’s not,” she conceded, and dropped her gaze. “Which is why I called security as soon as things went sideways.”
“Yeah, well, it should’ve been called off,” I snapped, anger pushing up through all the other emotions vying for attention. “You shouldn’t have forced McAvoy and me to go through with it. To put on a show after Theo stormed out.”
She let out a long, controlled sigh. “That would’ve looked a lot worse.”
“Worse than what I said in there?” I flailed my arms in defeat, shoulders sagging. “I don’t even know what I said. I went blank.”
“You said the right thing. Mostly,” she replied, and leaned back in her chair. I hated how relaxed she seemed. Even if it was fake. I hated how she could fake it so easily. “But the presser’s over, and what we need to talk about now is management.”
“Fuck management.” I started pacing again. “No, seriously, fuck ‘em.”
