Chapter 37
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
MADDY
The incessant dinging of a phone yanks me out of the deepest sleep of my life.
Disoriented, I blink into the semi-darkness of dawn, trying to figure out if the phone is real or if it was just a dream. I’ve barely had the thought before the dinging starts again, this time in stereo.
“Someone better be dead,” I grumble, rolling over and burying my face in Cam’s chest, pulling the covers up over my head and growling when the phones keep going.
Cam’s body stiffens against me, his breath a short gasp as he rockets up in bed and fumbles for the switch on the bedside lamp, turning it on and grabbing his phone. I understand immediately, and dread curls in my stomach as I go from half asleep to entirely awake in less than a second.
Riley.
Ethan.
I don’t say anything, just lay a hand on the back of his neck as he unlocks his phone with trembling hands. He leans back into my touch, opening his messages and scanning the screen before letting out a long, slow exhale, his entire body deflating in relief.
“It’s okay.” He turns and drops a kiss on my head, lingering there and inhaling deeply, like he’s breathing me in.
His entire body relaxes, and everything inside me warms at the way he’s taking his comfort from me.
I wonder whether that will ever stop being the best thing ever. I doubt it. “Everything is okay.”
But then Cam’s phone buzzes again in his hand, and when my phone starts up again, I remember what woke us up in the first place.
“What the fuck is happening?” I mutter, reaching over to grab my phone.
I click on my own messages, seeing thirty-seven new ones in the Smart Bitches chat, a bunch in my family chat with my parents and siblings, some from Tyler, and a few from Brian and Liv.
All of that would be normal but for the fact that it’s four o’clock in the morning and the messages keep rolling in.
Smart Bitches
Maya
Holy fuck, Maddy, are you okay?
Sarah
I’m about to burst into flames. I’m going to CUT A BITCH.
Sophie
Someone talk me out of putting my mad hacking skills to use and making this bitch’s life hell.
Maya
Don’t look at me. I’m talking you out of nothing. Revenge must be paid.
Emmy
Me either. I’ll defend you if you end up in jail.
Caitlin
No one is hatching a revenge plot, and no one is going to jail today.
Maddy, I just booked you a flight from Denver to Pittsburgh that leaves in two hours, and I emailed you the details. Don’t take the team plane. We’ll be at the airport to pick you up. All of us. We’re going to figure this out, I swear to fucking god.
Emmy
That article is SO MUCH TRASH. My computer is out. I’m going full vengeful lawyer on her ass the second the courts open.
Article.
Fuck.
Closing out of the group chat and ignoring the rest of my messages, I hit the browser icon and type my name into the search bar.
It’s the first result, the headline from a local sports blog screaming the news I’ve been keeping mostly a secret for months.
“Renegades Most Eligible Bachelor Off the Market: All the Details on Cam Lowry’s Secret Relationship with Team Psychologist Maddy Wright. ”
Anxiety grips my spine as I click on the link, my eyes scanning the screen.
It’s short, mostly speculation and nothing solid, but it names me as team psychologist, the daughter of a former NHL legend, and the sister of a current one.
It names my mom and her firm. And it gleefully congratulates me on locking down the hottest single dad professional sports has ever seen all while questioning the ethics of a team medical professional engaging in a hot and heavy relationship with a player.
Before my brain can even take in all the words, my eyes land on the pictures.
Holy fuck.
Cam and me in the VIP section at Cavo, my hand to his lips.
Him kissing the corner of my mouth, my body flush against his.
Locked together on the dance floor, his body curled over mine and his hand high on my thigh.
Picture after picture of us on the sidelines of games.
Standing just a little too close. Bodies always turned towards each other.
One from after his touchdown, exactly like the picture Sophie took of the jumbotron.
One from just yesterday, my hand grazing the outside of his leg as we stood on the sidelines with Drew and Tyler.
They’re all a little blurry, like they were taken on a phone or grabbed off someone’s social media, but it doesn’t matter.
No one who sees these pictures all together would doubt that Cam and I are exactly what we are to each other.
And no one who reads the article will think anything else but that I am the whorey female doctor with a sort-of-famous family who bagged a player my first month on the job.
Congratu-fucking-lations to me.
My family.
Thoughts of them reading this article have my heart slamming against my ribs, and my palms growing sweaty, my hands shaking as my brain races with the implications of this. This is the worst-case scenario.
When Cam gently takes the phone out of my hands and sets it on the bed, laying a big hand over both of mine, I jolt, my head snapping up to look at him. “Baby, I am so, so sorry this happened.”
I’m devastated. Furious. Incandescent with rage.
Irritated as shit. All. Everything. I can’t grab onto a single emotion as I spiral into the abyss.
Cam’s eyes are steady, calm and determined as he radiates a kind of we can fix this energy that for some unknown reason makes my anger burn hotter. My devastation dig deeper.
“My career,” I say as quietly as I can manage, my voice shaking with the force of my emotions.
“Everything I worked for. They made it sound so…trivial. Like the entire reason I came to work for an NFL team was so I could find a player to fuck. My fa—” My voice catches and I swallow hard, trying again.
“My family is going to read that. Be asked about it.”
Cam shakes his head, his hands squeezing mine.
“It’s unfair. It’s so fucking unfair. You’re brilliant, Maddy.
You’re amazing at your job, and you were born to do this.
You have done an incredible thing with the team this year.
We’re playing in the AFC Championship next week for the first time in almost a decade, and so much of that is because of you.
Everyone who matters knows it. People who think otherwise don’t matter. ”
“Don’t they?” I say slowly. “Sports fans and half the men who work for this league already think women don’t belong anywhere near the NFL.
They’ll read this article and it’ll be one big bro-fest of I told you so.
If we had been able to tell people on our own terms, during the offseason, maybe we would have been able to avoid the fallout, but we live in this world now. ”
I pick up my phone and click back into the browser to refresh the screen.
Just as I suspected, ten more articles from different local news outlets and sports blogs pop up, all breathlessly reporting on the initial blog post. “And in this world, I’m the slutty team medical professional who seduced the squeaky-clean single dad, obliterating professional ethics rules and probably team rules and definitely the rules of all the asshole men who think they get to tell women where we belong. ”
“You belong right here,” he says, laying a hand on my cheek, holding my face steady when I try to look away from his kind, understanding eyes. “In this league. With this team. With me.”
I let out a laugh that sounds brittle even to my own ears.
“That might be true, but it won’t matter.
Because it doesn’t matter what’s true. It matters what people believe.
And since some wanna-be sports reporter cheerfully tossed a bomb straight into the middle of my career and my personal life, people are going to believe that. ”
Cam shakes his head. “You did everything right, Maddy. Absolutely everything. We tried to stay away from each other. We couldn’t.
And when it was clear we couldn’t, you didn’t treat me.
I’ve never sat on that couch in your office as a player or a patient or anything other than the man who lo—” Cam cuts himself off, and my heart gives one painful throb because I know exactly what he was about to say.
The man who loves me.
Five hours ago, I would have been overjoyed to hear those words from him.
But right now is absolutely the wrong time, and I think he knows it because he shakes his head and tries again.
“You did everything right,” he says again.
“You didn’t break any rules. We didn’t break any rules.
Everyone who matters will understand that. ”
He’s right. I know he’s right. He’s saying all the right things.
Somewhere inside my brain is the voice telling me to put my smart-girl hat on.
To talk to Cam and figure out a way forward.
That this really isn’t as bad as it seems. That everything is going to be okay.
But that voice is buried too deep because my brain also pummels me with a thousand worst case scenarios in rapid succession.
The commissioner of the league deciding that, actually, he doesn’t want the psychologist sleeping with a player to be the example for other team mental health professionals to follow in terms of how to do this job well.
My own players losing confidence in my ability to help them.
Brian being stuck in between the fallout from my choices and the fact that he’s my family.
My brother being asked about my relationship instead of his own game performance.
My mom’s clients reading about it, and her having to answer for me.
Riley and Ethan reading the articles. Hearing about it at school.
Shit.