Epilogue
EPILOGUE
LATER, July
Give me a second,” I blurted into the phone, trying to cut off the voice on the other end. “I’m almost—can we talk about this when I’m home? I can’t take notes— No , I can’t take notes. I’m in the elevator—”
I slid through the doors as soon as they opened on the twentieth floor, trying to wrestle the keys out of my tote, phone clutched between my ear and shoulder. “Marty!” I shushed. “Please wait five seconds until I can sit at my desk and write this down, will you?”
Somehow, I managed to get into the apartment with one hand, let my bag slide to the ground and threw the keys on top of it when I closed the door with my foot. “Yes,” I exhaled, crossing the entrance into the living room. The plan had been to get into the study—to my laptop and pens and paper—as fast as possible. If only to get Marty, Henry’s manager and my boss, to stop throwing ideas at me I couldn’t write down somewhere. It was stressing me out.
But I stopped in my tracks when my eyes were drawn to the white sofa in the middle of Henry’s living room. As the centerpiece of the open floorplan, it faced the flatscreen on the wall. It probably cost a fortune, designed by someone whose name people ooh -ed and ahh -ed at.
Henry Parker Pressley did not sit on it. He sat on the floor, leaning against the back with his long legs extended and a packet of cat treats that must’ve fallen out of his hand. His eyes were closed, neck craning in ways that looked more than uncomfortable and would probably leave him with aches for days.
He wore one of his new jerseys. Blue Eagles’ signature color and his name and number on the back. The same as his dad’s.
Number seven, Pressley.
To his side, Pip had curled up with a single treat still hanging out of her mouth. She, too, was fast asleep. I was surprised my tumultuous arrival hadn’t startled them both awake.
“Paula?” I straightened at the reminder of Marty on the line. “You still there?”
“Yes.” I lowered my voice and threw the two a last glance before I tiptoed into the office regardless. “Repeat what you need me to know for Lee’s profile please?” I grabbed my notebook, threw myself into the chair and rolled the few missing inches to the desk. Which had a perfect view of the Upper East Side. “I can write now.”
“Oh,” Marty huffed. “No, don’t worry about it. My assistant has all of that. She’ll email it ASAP.”
I suppressed a groan. He couldn’t have said that before I’d sprinted an entire block to get here?
“How’s the profile coming along, though?” He continued casually, as if he hadn’t bombarded my phone and email with the same question.
Josh Lee was my third Blue Eagles profile, and as the team’s star player—as the one with the longest contract, the highest pay and the most media attention—it was understandable that Marty was… interested. Involved. More involved than with the others.
“Good.” I shrugged unhelpfully. “As the one before was. And the one before that .”
“A fluff piece, then?”
“As fluffy as can be.” The occasional trauma sprinkled across the pages, of course. If only to make it more relatable. As for trauma, Josh Lee had a truckload. He’d said I could have my pick of three before we’d started, and… boy had he given me a selection.
Marty’s hum came through the line, tone rough and agreeable. “We’ve been thinking.” He began. “Well—no. Let me paraphrase. Henry has been thinking. Then asked for my opinion, which got me thinking.”
I remembered the boy currently passed out against the couch, and it made me uneasy.
When Henry thought, and then brought the outcome of his thinking to others, it almost always meant something big. Like when he’d thought it would be a good idea for me to write a profile about him and forced my editor to make it happen.
“There’ll be quite a few away games in the coming months,” Marty said, like it wasn’t a constant on my mind. They’d be hopping from city to city, from opponent to opponent until they’d maybe, if they were good enough, play for the MLS cup in December and win it.
By then, five months would’ve passed with me back in New York, watching and watering Henry’s plants. One glance to my right, and there were two of them in his bookshelf now.
We didn’t officially live together. I had my own place courtesy of the generous Blue Eagles’ advance for the three profiles I’d write for them. It was small, lousy, and I think I saw a cockroach scurry across the floor one morning. But it was mine.
Independently and wholly mine.
So, when Henry had offered his much grander penthouse for the time he was away, I’d declined. Because he’d already taken care of my student loans (who’d say no to that?) and he’d groveled enough in the past few months.
Which hadn’t sat very well with him.
He’d begged and pleaded and schemed until one day, I’d walked into his apartment, and an entire jungle (only a slight exaggeration), stared back at me. From living room to kitchen to bedroom and office, every area in the apartment had gotten a lot greener.
“Can you take care of my plants, Charm?” he’d asked. “They’re on a very meticulous schedule, so someone would need to water them Monday to Sunday, and—wait, in that case… you could just stay here, I guess?”
So, plant duty it was.
“And with all these away games.” Marty’s words snapped me out of my thoughts, and I nodded dutifully, even if he couldn’t see me. “We concluded it would be great to have an in-house journalist. Who can really get to know the guys, write about them. Their wins and losses and strengths—maybe not their weaknesses,” he thought out loud. “We can sell some of those articles to bigger magazines. Keep our men in the spotlight. You know what I mean.”
My entire body buzzed at the prospect. I’d gotten up halfway through his words, paced the office until he was done talking.
It sounded perfect. Too good to be true. Anything Henry touched felt that way, a little bit.
I did not think before I accepted. Before I thanked Marty over and over again, and we’d decided to meet next week to go over the position again. Talk shop and salary and all the things you wouldn’t necessarily want to discuss on a Friday evening.
When I got back to the living room, Henry was no longer on the floor. And I felt him behind me a second before he slung his arms around me. “When did you get home?”
Home.
“Just now.” I turned in his grip, smiled up at him. “How did the bonding go?” My head nodded to where Pip still slept on the floor. The scattered cat treats cleaned up and put away.
Henry grimaced. “Not great,” he admitted. “Apparently better after I fell asleep. Maybe she thought I was dead?”
I snorted at the imagery, though I couldn’t disagree. She probably did think she’d finally won.
“I just spoke to Marty,” I remembered out loud. Immediately, Henry couldn’t keep his smile at bay, but he still acted like he couldn’t possibly know what the phone call had been about.
He gushed and gasped when I’d told him, like the idea didn’t have his name written all over it. Sometimes, he was not as sly as he thought himself to be.
“But what about the plants?” I asked, irony lacing my voice when I looked back up at him.
He shook his head, absentmindedly lost his fingers between my curls. “They’ll be gone by the end of the week.” He didn’t even blink. “I only rented them until you’d agree to get out of that hellhole you call an apartment. At least for a little while. At least while mine was empty anyway.”
And while I wished I could say I couldn’t believe it, I absolutely could.
“You always get what you want, don’t you?”
He considered me for a long moment, and said, as if he wasn’t talking about his contract or the big apartment, the money and the fame, “Yes.”