Our initial meeting unexpectedly took place on a British Airways flight to Nice – unluckily for me, the one and only upgrade to Business I was likely to blag in my entire life was somewhat hijacked by the fact that Marcus Taylor had been seated next to me. What are the odds?! It quickly became clear that he’s not a fan of journalism. He also appears to detest his fans, refusing to engage, sign autographs, take photos or show appreciation to people who have potentially travelled thousands of miles – and spent their hard-earned money – to see him play. Ignorant doesn’t cover it. Arrogant is an understatement. And utterly obnoxious pretty much sums it up. And perhaps it’s actually an industry-wide problem, because from my limited contact with male tennis players so far, I’ve never witnessed a group of men with such fragile egos in my entire life – one missed serve and their tightly coiled little world comes crashing down around them. In the case of Marcus Taylor, toddler tantrums are likely to ensue, involving racquet smashing, bag throwing, generalised stomping and red-faced tirades aimed at anyone from a teenage ball boy to a spectator whose only crime is to have quaffed a few too many glasses of Pimm’s. The tennis scene is shockingly toxic and unsurprisingly privileged and my opinion of Marcus Taylor in particular can, quite frankly, only improve from here.
Pleased to have at least made a start, I put away my notebook and picked up my phone. I’d not looked at it once since we’d arrived on court because it would hardly look professional, and also I was finding the training session slightly more engaging than I thought I would. But as we neared the two-hour mark, I didn’t think a subtle scroll would hurt, even if Marcus would no doubt take it personally if he caught me looking at anything other than him and his tennis prowess. I flickedthrough Gmail, Insta and TikTok, reassured that I wasn’t missing out on anything whatsoever, finally scanning through WhatsApp where there was a message from Amanda’s assistant, Ruby, presumably with some last-minute info about the tickets I needed to collect from the press office for tomorrow’s match. I scanned through it, surprised to see she’d sent me a link to an article entitled:Marcus Taylor’s Secret New Girlfriend!Ruby had added a few words underneath:This just popped up on an obscure digital celeb gossip column I follow. Could be useful to know for your piece?
This was surprising. As far as I’d worked out from my research so far, he’d never even been in a relationship lasting more than about five minutes. Glancing at Marcus, who was now practising volleys at the net, I sighed, clicking on the link – I supposed I was going to have his achingly beautiful girlfriend hanging around now when I was supposed to be spending time alone with Marcus and getting to know him intimately (in a professional capacity, of course) for my piece. Which was why it took me several beats to acknowledge the full horror of the blog-style column, culminating in my phone dropping out of my hand, landing face down on the clay and sending my own cloud of dust fluttering into the air.
With a few people – Marcus included – looking over, no doubt wondering why this strange woman had just launched her phone into mid-air, I bent down to sweep it up, cleaning the screen with my sleeve and immediately regretting it because now my white jumper was smeared with orange clay too. With a slightly shaking hand and a head that was literally spinning (this wasnotjust a turn of phrase), I made myself look at the photos and headline again.Concentrate, Ava, I told myself. This could not be what I thought it was. Could it? Because from where I was sitting, the insinuation seemed to be that Marcus’s secret new girlfriend was ... well, me!! For reasons I didn’t have time to unravel, I felt the tiniest sense of relief that at least this meant he didn’t have anactualgirlfriend to put a spanner in theworks, an emotion that was swiftly followed by sheer, unadulterated panic. What if somebody I knew also subscribed to this column?! I immediately thought of Charlie, and while there was no way he’d be interested in celebrity gossip, any number of the other teachers at his school might be. And my parents and sister would think I’d lost the plot entirely – I’d only met Marcus five minutes ago and now I was supposed to be embroiled in some sort of passionate love affair with him? It made absolutely no sense! I swiped manically through the handful of pictures accompanying the story – the first was of me and Marcus sitting on the plane, which I presumed had been taken by that sly French woman. I bet she’d been snapping away before she’d even approached us! In the grainy shot, I was being all expressive with my hands and Marcus was looking at me with disdain (there had been a lot of those moments, it could have been any of them). The ‘source’ had quoted that we’d had a ‘heated argument’ but soon made up, ‘cosying up over a glass of champagne’.
Cue a second picture of me holding a glass of bubbly. In this shot, we were looking at each other in a way that could easily have been mistaken for romantic longing, if you didn’t also know what was going through my head at the time – i.e., wondering how I was going to get this egotistical man on side so that I could write the damn article I was being paid to write. In a split second, my entire obsession with celebrity gossip was shot to pieces – if they’d got this so wrong, wasanyof it true? And then I spotted the killer photo – the proof, if you like, that ‘Racquet Man’ and his ‘exotic brunette lover’, a description I’d never in a million years have come up with for myself, were in fact going public. Because there, in technicolour, my face as clear as day, were the paparazzi shots of Marcus and me entering the arrivals hall together. And the short exchange we’d had about whether or not I was stalking him had somehow given the impression we were engaged in an actual conversation, like any couple might be. A sort of:let’s go and find our taxi, darling!Or:shall we stop off at a romanticcliffside restaurant for lunch before we head to our delightfully luxurious hotel?There was absolutely no indication that he’d accused me of following him on purpose, or that I was desperately trying to make him not hate me enough to agree to being interviewed for my story. The paparazzi – nay, the entire media industry – was an absolute joke! And why hadn’t Ruby warned me, instead of casually sending me a link to photos of my just-off-a-flight face splashed across the web? It took me a few moments to remember that Ruby and I had never met – I’d never even been into theLuxeoffice, so in reality she had absolutely no idea what I looked like, and, of course, the writer of the column hadn’t known my name. Ruby hadn’t connected the dots at all and how could I blame her?
I slung my phone into my bag, my chest rising and falling with indignation as adrenaline rushed through every muscle of my body. Even the tips of my fingers were tingling as I tried to open my bottle of water. Was I going to faint, I wondered? I closed my eyes, tempted to put my head between my knees but realising that would attract the kind of attention I currently did not need. Marcus was going to go mad when he saw the pictures. He wasn’t going to do the article now, was he, and my one chance to impress Amanda Eddington atLuxehad been ruined. My career-defining moment was about to be whipped out from under my nose because of a handful of stupid, misleading, incriminating photos, and right now it felt as though there was absolutely nothing I could do. Marcus would not, under any circumstances, want to be romantically linked to someone like me. And now I was going to have to face him. And if, by some miracle, Dean hadn’t already seen the story, I’d have to break the bad news to him, too.
I looked back at Marcus charging around on court, an oblivious Marcus who wanted nothing more than to focus on the tournament and probably dearly wished that he’d never set eyes on me in the first place.
Chapter Seven
After another excruciating fifteen minutes of hitting, grunting and generally getting annoyed with himself, Marcus finally strutted off the court. He stopped right in front of me, a deliciously cool shadow falling across my face.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said, training his piercing brown eyes on me. Sweat was pouring off him now, running down his temples in rivulets and dripping on to the white towel slung around his neck.
‘Nothing,’ I said, struggling to utter even the simplest of words.
Marcus crouched down in front of me and peered at me with a frightening intensity. ‘You look all grey and sweaty, even though the only exercise you’ve done is to lift your pen. Have you got sunstroke, or something? You should have gone inside if you were too hot. Here,’ he said, rummaging in his sports bag and pulling out an ice pack. ‘Hold this against the back of your neck.’
He twisted the plastic pouch to pop it, shook it and handed it to me. Even though I probably didn’t have sunstroke, I did as I was told. If nothing else, I was stalling for time. I’d emailed Dean the link and had asked for an emergency meeting – he’d requested that Marcus and I meet him in the restaurant in the VIP village as soon as they’d finished training. Hopefully, this meant that he was going to be the one to tell Marcus what was happening.
‘What is wrong? Does she need a medic?’ asked Patrick, now standing over me and peering at me too. He looked to Marcus for help. ‘Is she diabetic, or something?’
‘How the hell would I know?’ snapped Marcus, standing up. ‘Ava, do you feel unwell? Should we call for a doctor?’
‘I’m honestly fine,’ I said, keen not to appear completely pathetic. ‘I’m not ill. I’m just a bit ... thrown by something.’
‘Thrown by what?’ asked Marcus.
What had I gone and said that for? Now he’d know something was up and would try to force it out of me while I was feeling vulnerable and didn’t have Dean to back me up. To distract him I got up, keeping the ice pack on my neck because, funnily enough, itwasactually calming me down.
‘Dean wants to meet us,’ I announced. ‘Urgently.’
‘Where?’ asked Marcus, still eyeing me suspiciously.
‘Le Village. Shall we go?’ I said, picking up my bag and trying to act vaguely normal, although it was difficult with an ice pack on the back of my head and Marcus and Patrick staring at me as though I was about to keel over. As I headed for the gate, trying to keep what little dignity I had left intact, I noticed another tennis player and his coach looking furtively in our direction. Had they seen the story?!
While I grappled with the lock on the gate – why wouldn’t it open?! – Marcus grabbed his tracksuit and ran to catch me up.
‘Ava, you’re acting very strangely,’ he said, sliding the lock effortlessly open for me.
‘I know,’ I said, choosing not to elaborate.
It was gone eleven o’clock now, meaning the main gates to the tournament had been opened. As a result, a group of fans had already gathered just outside the court, standing patiently behind a chrome handrail with their cameras held aloft.
‘Morning, Marcus!’ said one male fan chirpily as I followed Marcus down the steps, back towards the VIP village.
‘Morning,’ he grunted reluctantly.
A few people shoved notebooks and scrappy bits of paper in his direction, which he mostly ignored.
‘Marcus! Sign this for me, will you? Please? Please, Marcus?’
I kept my head down, noticing that the only person Marcus stopped for was a little girl who wanted him to sign a giant green tennis ball.
