“No, it was you the whole time, I swear. It was always you.”
Matty unclips his microphone and jumps up out of his chair. I suck in a sharp breath—if he really pitches a fit, we won’t be able to use the footage. But just when it looks like he’s about to throw his water bottle on the ground and stomp back to the dressing room, he turns to the camera again and winks. “Only joking. Let’s just say that Lockie’s going to regret that answer next time we face off in training.”
Phil and the players watching the show laugh, but I find my scalp prickling in annoyance. Honestly, I don’t know what it is about this guy, but he just rubs me the wrong way. I shuffle my cards and move away from the football-related questions.
“What is Lachlan’s favorite Scottish band?” I ask.
Matty clicks his tongue. “Fuck if I know; man’s got dire taste in music. The Proclaimers?”
I laugh, then throw my hand over my mouth to stifle it, hoping Phil can edit that out, but Matty ruins the take anyway by looking straight at me. “Why is that funny?”
Phil zooms out and pans to capture me in the shot. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just that he hates the Proclaimers. I think.”
Lachlan smiles at me. “And who’s my actual favorite?”
I blush and attempt to demur, but Lachlan gives me an encouraging nod, so I answer. “Um, Barfy Clifford or whatever they’re called.”
Matty narrows his eyes. “Biffy Clyro?”
Lachlan winks at me and flips the board around. “Bang-on.”
“Like I said, terrible taste in music.” Matty shifts in his chair and moves his head to the left and right, cracking his neck.
“We can’t all be the world’s biggest Pink megafan.” Lachlan sings a few bars of “Get This Party Started” and his teammates laugh. It’s a bone of contention among the team that when Matty’s in charge of the music during training, they are inundated with the Pink back catalog.
“For the sake of team morale, I will not engage on this matter.” Matty smiles and wags his finger at all his snickering teammates, then turns to me and claps his hands a few times to pump himself up. “Come on, give us another one.”
“What is Lachlan’s biggest pet peeve?”
“Undeserved yellow cards.”
I shake my head.
“Okay, what is it?” Matty asks me.
“Um, I think it’s people who use their phones while they’re walking and slow everything down,” I say.
Lachlan beams as he flips the board around: “Walking phone wankers.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’m not so eloquent as him, clearly.”
“Yeah, but you have the answers,” Matty says.
“I don’t, actually, I’ve just heard him complain about it every time we’re on the sidewalk.”
Matty is quick to aggression; it’s what makes him such a tenacious player but can also get him into trouble with refs. But sincethere’s no one here to give him a yellow card—deserved or not—his latent rage is allowed to simmer freely. “I think this is rigged.”
Someone slings an arm around my shoulders but I don’t have to turn to see who it is because the unmistakable smell of Axe Body Spray hits my nose right as the unmistakable accent of local boy Kieran Campbell hits my ears. “Come on, Skip, let’s let our girl off the hook. Lockie talks about himself so much it’s no wonder she’s picked up on some of it.”
There’s a round of laughter from the players, and Lachlan laughs along with them, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes, which seem to be fixated on Kieran’s arm on my shoulder. I’m not sure what to call the expression I see there—curiosity, maybe, but there’s something sharper hiding behind it. Something that sends a shiver up my spine.
Kieran cranes his neck down to look at the cards, drawing my attention away from Lachlan. “May I?”
I nod and hand him the stack. Not moving his arm from my shoulder, he looks at Matty. “Okay, Skip, you ready for your comeback to begin?”
“Here, let me get out of the shot.” I gently disengage from Kieran. A brief look of disappointment crosses his boyish face, but then he dives into his new role as question master.
The rest of the shoot proceeds without drama. Lachlan gets all of his questions about Matty right, as it turns out, and when I pass by the training center’s pool later that afternoon, I hear Biffy Clyro blasting from the speakers. Phil is in there capturing some footage of the players doing hydrotherapy workouts, and he waves me over to see what he’s got.
