“Uh, yeah, could say that,” Cal said nervously.
“I think you should both really take a seat,” Tate said as he rubbed his hand on the back of his neck.
He picked up the laptop that was resting on his desk and opened it.
Fuck. This wasn’t happening. There’s no way we fucked up this bad.
“So, last night, I got a phone call from the fire department that our alarm was going off,” Tate said.
“Shit, man, I’m sorry, we didn’t mean—” I started.
Tate raised a hand. “It was nothing. The damn alarm has been doing it for months, likely because it’s so old and Presley’s cheap fucking ass is refusing to fork over the money to upgrade it right now.”
We continued to listen to the story, praying for a better outcome than we were expecting.
“When the alarm goes off, I have to go to the center, so I did. But whenever it goes off, just as a precaution, I check the security footage, just in case on the off chance someone is attempting to break into the facility.”
This was my nightmare. Fuck, it happened.
“I was skimming the footage. I knew you guys had been there until late, so I didn’t really feel the need to look through it all. I really assumed it was just you two setting it off and not realizing it on the way out,” he said, his tension clearly building.
Tate didn’t want to say it, I could tell. Whatever he had to say, he didn’t want to, but it was clear he had to. There was no way around it, and Cal and I knew that too.
“First I went through our lot footage, and I saw you guys leave, and then nothing after,” Tate said. “But, recently, Presley insisted that the inside of the PC needed cameras now in case of anyone breaking in. Honestly, I’d forgotten about them at first, and remembered as I was walking out of my office that I needed to check them.”
Yep, this was my literal nightmare. And honestly, I didn’t give a fuck if Tate called in the Chairman or the rest of the heads in the UWF. They could fire me, humiliate me, I didn’t give a damn what punishment they chose for me. But I didn’t want them going after Cal. But how would I even begin to protect him in this? A Champion that was sleeping not just with a man, but with a man they’d been building as enemy number one? There was no fucking way to spin that, or to even attempt to ease the blow of it to those old fucks who still scoffed at the idea of a champion that wasn’t the ideal.
Cal’s face dropped, his head falling into his hands.
I sat frozen, unable to speak, or to know what to say.
Tate turned the laptop screen around. There it was. A grainy, horribly lit video of me and Cal kissing in the middle of the ring last night, like nobody around us was looking. But there was. We just didn’t know it.
“Oh god,” I choked out, my color draining from my body.
Before we could say anything else, Tate clickedDELETE. And shut the laptop.
Cal and I looked to one another, dumbfounded, and utterly confused.
“Technically,” Tate said, rubbing his temples, “security is supposed to log and archive all footage for liability purposes. I intercepted this before it hit the main server.”
He closed the laptop.
Tate looked between us. He looked like a man who needed a drink.
“I need to know what I’m dealing with here,” Tate said, leaning back. “How long has this been going on?”
Cal shrugged, leaning back in his chair with infuriating ease. “The first time or the second time?”
Tate blinked. “Excuse me? What do youmean, the first or second time?”
“It’s complicated,” Cal said.
“It’s not that complicated,” I interrupted, feeling the need to ground this in reality before Cal gave him a migraine. “The easiest way to explain it is… I’ve been in love with him for almost a decade.”
Tate stared at me. He looked at Cal. He looked back at me.
“Oh god,” Tate exhaled, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Okay. So this isn’t a hookup. This is a big thing. Not a little one.”
