Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
HUGO
I crack the caps off two beers and set one down in front of Tom on the high-top table looking out over the pitch.
He picks up the bottle and taps it against mine as I take the seat opposite him. “Cheers. Miller was right when he said this is a great spot.” He nods toward the turf, which is a particularly vibrant green in the early evening sun. “Glad I stopped by.”
“So it was the grass you came for? Not my scintillating company and dazzling repartee?”
“Yup. Thought to myself, I could go see something setting down roots, bursting with life and growing into a bright future, or…I could go see Hugo.”
I rest a forearm either side of my drink and groan. “Guess LA hasn’t made you any funnier.”
He peers at me as he takes a swig. I know with absolute certainty he can tell that I’m still shaken from the surprise encounter with Wilcox—something no one else would ever notice. Well, I’m sure Wilcox would have. If she’d stopped bashing herself on the head with rolled-up papers for long enough, that is. The corners of my mouth start an involuntary journey upward at the memory, so I yank them back into place.
“That was a bit awkward back there, huh?” Tom places the bottle on the table and gazes out toward the pitch as if trying to save my embarrassment by not looking directly at me.
“Nah, it was okay. She’s just fucked off with me. I’m sure it’s temporary. I mean, you know what they say, ‘Once you’ve had Mr. Happy, everything else seems crappy.’”
“Literally no one has ever said that.” He’s looking at me now, with a knowing smirk. “Anyway, why is she pissed off? What did you do?”
“What did I do ?” I straighten and draw a halo over my head with a finger. “Absolutely nothing. Why assume I’m the one in the wrong? Why not assume she’s being unreasonable?”
He slides his beer bottle to the side, rests his elbows on the table, and clasps his hands under his chin like a wise old judge. “Is she?”
“Fuck yes. I helped her out and she got angry.”
“Ah.” He leans back and nods, like I’ve given him the answer to a question he hadn’t asked.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“By helping out do you by any chance mean barging in, shoving her out of the way, and taking over?” He picks his bottle back up and takes what he clearly believes is a victory drink.
“Fuck no. She benched one of the players. Without discussing it with me, by the way. And he got all up in her face yelling at her. I heard it from the hallway, so I told him to show her some respect and not talk to her like that. I helped . I sorted it. I saved her.”
Tom snort-chokes on his beer. He coughs as he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “You saved her?”
“Yup. And I don’t see what’s so funny about that.”
“Well, maybe it wasn’t the shocking display of chivalry you thought it was. Maybe it was exactly what I just guessed it was.”
“Oh, I’m so glad you showed up out of the blue. Good of you to stop by.” I fold my arms and gaze at the orange and sky-blue chairs in the stand opposite. “No, that’s not what I did. I marched into the office, stood between them, and told that kid in no uncertain terms to shut the fu?—”
It’s like that moment when you’ve been staring at one of those pictures where some people see a vase and some people see two women’s profiles. For hours all you’re getting is the vase. But then, all of a sudden, you can see the faces too.
My shoulders sag. All of me sags. I suddenly feel like a hundred-and-seventy-four-pound sack of potatoes. Or probably now more like a hundred-and-seventy-six-pound one, due to the recently discovered joy of the local clam chowder.
“Oooh.” The word falls out of me as part of a long sigh.
Tom points the neck of his bottle at me. “And that, my friend, is the sound of the penny dropping.”
I’m caught. Red-handed. By the man who knows me best.
Am I really that awful, though? “Do I do that? Is that a thing I do?”
“Yup.”
“And it pisses people off?”
He shrugs. “Some more than others. And I imagine the league’s first female head coach being told how to handle an angry player by a brash Englishman with zero coaching experience would likely fall into the some category.”
“I hate you.”
“But you’ve learned this lesson before.” He shakes his head like he’s telling a kid for the hundredth time not to stick his finger in a socket. “Remember the pub trivia night when you upset Asif because you kept taking over all the sports questions and wouldn’t let him talk? And how you showed up to your brother’s house when he was moving and started ordering the movers about and he ended up telling you to go home. And?—”
“Okay, okay.” I hold up my hands to push back the tide of Hugo-barging-in-and-taking-over anecdotes.
And I’m not convinced they’re entirely just. “In my defense, Asif was dithering about, fumbling for the answers. He would have taken ages to get there, and I knew them immediately. So I was saving us time and making sure the answer was right. Plus, we really needed to beat that bunch of arseholes in suits who’d thrashed us the month before.”
My turn to point my bottle at him. “And those movers were idiots. They would have scraped the dining table if I hadn’t virtually thrown myself across it. So I was helping my brother protect his stuff.” I take a slug of beer. “I mean, it was bought with my money, of course, but it was still his table.”
I put my drink back down with a satisfying thunk, like a judge striking a gavel. Case closed.
At the same time, a hissing noise erupts out on the pitch. We turn to see the sprinklers have kicked into action.
“Wellll,” Tom says, with the calmness and patience befitting a man who once had to talk a band around when they refused to go on stage at Madison Square Garden because the candles in the dressing room were vanilla, not vanilla rose.
“Asif might have got the right answer in the end,” he continues, “if he’d had a chance to participate in the quiz and enjoy himself. Which he obviously didn’t because he never came again. And we could have really used his bizarrely specific knowledge of 1950s country music the next month.”
I always thought that guy looked more like a computer nerd who talked about gigabytes and algorithms, not someone who could list every number one bluegrass album since the chart began.
“As for your brother,” Tom says, staying on track. “Isn’t your relationship with him fragile enough without you acting like he’s not capable of organizing his own house move?”
A shiny silver blade twists in my guts. “So you’re saying I ruin everything?”
Tom sighs, flops back, and folds his arms. “Sure. Yeah. That’s right. I’ve dropped in out of the blue to see a total asshole who irritates the crap out of me.” He shakes his head. “Of course that’s not what I’m saying, you idiot. I’m saying that sometimes people need to be given a chance to sort out their own shit. The time and space to figure out how to deal with things for themselves.”
“But I only get involved when I know I can improve things. I don’t meddle with stuff I don’t know anything about. Like getting grass stains out of white shorts, I leave that to the laundry crew. Or how to recover after a ruptured Achilles, I don’t interfere with the physiotherapy team. Are you saying I should stay out of everything ? Even if I can help? Even if I can deal with it better?”
“In Drew’s case, maybe especially if you can deal with it better.”
I’m now like a sack of potatoes, but without the sack. I’m basically just potatoes spilling off this chair, bouncing around all over the floor of the owners’ box and rolling to the lowest level they can find.
I slump forward and play with my bottle, tearing a thin strip off the edge of the label where it’s not stuck down properly.
“She’s cool.” The words come out low and quiet. And schoolboyishly reluctant.
It’s hard to admit. Out loud anyway. Inside, I’ve known she was special since that first day when she was unpacking stuff onto her shelves and said I obviously needed the job. She saw through me immediately. She got me.
“You sure seem fond of her,” Tom says. “I’ve not seen you like this before.”
“Like what?”
“This.” He gestures to my slumped, sagging form. “Is it because for the first time in your life a woman’s rejected you?”
“She didn’t reject me. She just said it was all a bit much.”
“And that’s a fair point. There is a lot going on here. A lot at play. And a lot at stake.”
“I know. I know I never should have touched her. But I couldn’t help myself. She got me all…I don’t know.” I press my fingers against my temples and screw up my eyes. “She got all up inside my head, I guess.”
“Wow. So it’s not just your pants department that got involved. It’s your brain department too.” Tom blows out a long whistle. “That’s a first.”
I let my hands fall into my lap and my head drops back on a long groan that vibrates my whole frustrated body.
“So why would you make a move on her when you were already in such a difficult, weird-ass situation and risk ruining your comeback?”
“Because she’s different.”
“Go on.”
I take a long draw on my beer. How do I sum up Wilcox’s total fucking awesomeness?
“Her focus is never on anything to do with herself. Not on how she looks, not on living somewhere flash, not on her own accolades or press coverage. She’s all about the job, and all about other people.”
“You mean you met a good person and actually recognized how good she is. Wow.” He makes a brain exploding gesture.
“Yeah, yeah. Take the piss all you like. Thing is, she works fucking hard to make the players the best they can be and to make them happy.” I rest my forearms on the table and lean forward. “And I’d always thought those two things were mutually exclusive.”
“She sounds pretty awesome.”
“And”—I slap the table—“she can spot a team’s hidden weaknesses on the first watch of a video. The first . It takes me two or three.”
“Impressive,” he says.
“And if I asked her right now, she could give us a two-hour lecture on the offside rule, the nuances of it, and how to avoid it right off the top of her head.”
She’s also the first woman who’s ever made my heart do that new skippety-skip-skip thing every time I see her, but I’ll leave that bit out, lest he thinks I’ve lost it completely.
“The perfect package,” Tom says. “Smart. Loves footy. Knows footy. Doesn’t take your crap. Is attractive. Aaand…?”
“Needs me to not get this job so she can have it.” I finish his sentence for him and gaze up over the top of my beer bottle. “And I need her to not get it, so I can have it.”
“Yup,” says my wise, wise friend. “Now you really have slept with the enemy.”
“The really fucking hot enemy.”
Tom lets out a chuckle as he takes a long, slow draw on his drink and looks out over the pitch, as if it will provide inspiration for a solution to this baffling conundrum. “It’s a tricky one, that’s for sure.”
“Of all the shit I’ve gotten myself in over the years, this has to be the most ridiculous.”
“And you know what?”
“Go on, treat me to another pearl of Dashwood wisdom.”
“You can’t run away from this one.”
“Sure I could. I could get on the plane to LA with you tomorrow and never come back here again if I wanted to.”
“And you’d be very welcome to do that. Dylan’s beating me when we have a kickabout now, so I could do with someone to put him in his place.” Tom’s face lights up when he talks about his soon-to-be-stepson who’s thirteen, or fourteen, or something.
“Really? I thought you were worried he didn’t get outside enough, what with all his guitar playing and music mixing.”
“I was. So I kept dragging him out, and now he’s beating me. The bastard.” He leans forward on the table again. “But my point is, when you’ve gotten yourself tangled up in tricky situations before, you’ve always been able to walk away. But you want this job so fucking badly that you can’t this time. And I assume she wants it really badly too and won’t walk away from it either. So you have to figure out how you’re going to deal with it now you’ve…you know…” He waves his bottle around in a manner I assume is meant to convey “banged her on the bar of an Irish pub.”
“You mean I need to apologize for being an interfering, overbearing dick?”
The sound of water spraying onto the pitch comes to an abrupt end when the sprinklers turn off and their rainbows vanish.
Tom raises his eyebrows as he sips from the bottle, swallowing the amber nectar slowly and deliberately before shrugging. “There’s a first time for everything.”