Chapter 26
Robert
“Wow, for a man with one leg you sure do move fast, McAllister.” My childhood best friend and biggest thorn in my side Niall “Sully” O’Sullivan lobs a cushion at my face from my sofa. “When’s the wedding?”
I roll my eyes and return the volley. “Fuck off.”
We’ve been friends since day one of primary school. He plays hockey for the Belfast Blizzard, and he’s one of the very few people in the world who didn’t treat me differently after my accident. In fact, he might be the only one.
He catches the cushion with ease and tucks it behind him before he takes a pull from his bottle of beer.
“You can’t blame me, man. I go away for a few weeks, come back, and you’re all lovey dovey with the daughter of the man who wanted to kill you.
” He chuckles, leaning forward to grab a slice of tuna, pepperoni, and mushroom pizza from the coffee table.
“You sure know how to pick them, Rob. Even if it’s all for show. ”
He took one look at me as soon as he arrived, two-for-Tuesday pizzas in hand, and knew I was faking it with Rhiannon. Or that I was struggling with the fact I’m not getting any with a woman I’m supposed to be getting some with. Either way.
I couldn’t deny it, but I haven’t exactly admitted it to him either. As he chews, he studies my face with an intensity he usually saves for his opponents on the ice. “Oh no.” He grins, shaking his head, which makes his ’90s boy-band curtains swing back and forth across his forehead.
He lost a bet and has to keep his hair long over the summer. I think he looks ridiculous, but he’s digging the shaggy, surfer dude look, and won’t hear a bad word against his golden locks.
I open my mouth to distract him from whatever he’s about to say with a dig about his hairdo, but he cuts me off.
“You’ve caught feelings for the fly-half, boyo.
” He chuckles. “It may have started off as some kind of falsity, but I know you.” He wags his finger at my face.
“I. Know. You. Rob. And this…” The finger keeps wagging as he takes another bite of his slice.
“This isn’t entirely for show anymore, is it? ”
At my silence, he simply says, “Told you, you move fast. Does she feel the same?”
I glare at him like he’s just told me the earth is flat.
“No, you dumb fucker. Every time she looks at me, she wants to gouge my eyeballs out of my head with the studs of her rugby boots.” That might have been true when she first found out who I am, but we’ve spent real time together, across two different countries.
And she’s stopped yelling at me, too. Under my friend’s scrutinous gaze, there’s a voice at the back of my brain telling me she might not be quite as venomous toward me as she once was.
It’s a beacon of hope I grab with both hands.
“That’s… quite the graphic image.” He shakes his head before folding his slice and taking another bite. “So, you caught feelings for an un-get-able woman on the rebound who wants to kill you? That’s on brand as fuck, Rob. How do you get yourself into these kinds of situations?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “It’s a skill.”
“Are you going to tell her?”
“Fuck no.” I drain the rest of my bottle of beer, but there’s not enough alcohol in the world to handle this line of questioning. Technically, it’s breaking one of her beloved rules, but I don’t care. I’m not dumping this on her.
“Why not?”
Because developing real feelings is against the fucking rules, so they need to be banished whence they came. That’s why, Sully. “There’s nothing to tell.”
He grunts. “Liar. How’s work?”
As if he summoned my boss from the depths of hell, my phone chimes. “It was quiet until you opened your damn mouth.” Before I open the email, I know what it’s going to say. He wants a story, not a fluff piece, but a real piece of sports journalism or he’s going to demote me to the gossip column.
It’s not the first time he’ll have threatened my job, but he seems to think that, since I started dating Rhiannon, I have a mainline to the entire sport of rugby’s news.
I was supposed to have it ready by now, but I’ve been pushing it back, holding both Pete and my boss off by telling them I’m working on something big, something good, something unputdownable.
I haven’t even met her teammates, for fuck’s sake. Plus, I can’t remember which rule it is, but there’s definitely a rule against using her connections for my career advancement. And rightly so.
The email starts as expected; they don’t want a romantic fluff piece. They want an explosive behind-the-scenes feature on women’s rugby’s rising star, all-around badass, and newly media-loved heroine.
I don’t fight my eye roll. Sure, I’ll get right on that.
Except the email doesn’t stop there. If I don’t write the piece, they’ll take it from being a team project, to being a piece written entirely by Pete.
My dick of a boss knows that I don’t want that untrustworthy asshole going anywhere near a solo story about my girlfriend.
Even if it’s fake. I called Laura from Ruck Off a shark yesterday, but Pete would kill his own mother and climb over her still warm corpse to get himself a story.
He’s the kind of journo who doesn’t care about ethics, just engagement.
He twists quotes, sensationalizes stories, and justifies it with, “If it gets clicks, it’s truth-adjacent.
” I learned through the grapevine that his dad’s golfing buddies own part of the paper.
In essence, Pete’s untouchable, smug, and knows it.
He’s never had to fight for a single opportunity in his career.
What the fuck?
The dilemma crystallizes into a knot of cold dread.
My stomach falls to somewhere under the recliner.
I drag my hands through my hair, trying to force slow breaths in and out of my body so I don’t hyperventilate.
Pete can’t get the story. He just can’t.
I need to protect her from the worst: the underbelly of Northern Irish journalism.
But I can’t hurt and betray Rhiannon by writing about her either.
After our Julia Roberts movie marathon, she confessed that her dad’s disapproval fueled her work ethic. She told me she doesn’t talk to him before games if she can avoid it because he gets in her head and makes her doubt everything she knows about rugby.
Talk about being shoved between the devil and the deep blue sea.
My boss politely goes on to tell me that if I turn down this story, I get to write about a scandal involving a local celebrity, B-list at best.
“Shit.”
Sully sits up, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his thighs. “What’s wrong?”
The Morrigan family already thinks I’m a morally bankrupt bastard, but the truth is, that doping story was personal, not business. As much as it’s my job to dig and expose the truth, I do in fact, have a moral compass.
“My boss wants me to write a story about Rhiannon.” I rub at my neck. “It was supposed to be about women in sport, but he’s leaning heavily into my girlfriend being the headliner.” I’ve started a draft. On the plane home while she was sleeping on my shoulder and I couldn’t settle.
I seeded a whisper—friction in the Morrigan camp—meant to contextualize, not crucify.
Even off the pitch, Morrigan moves like she’s waiting for the next impact. Watching her on the Croatian coast, she’s a woman who doesn’t know how to rest.
I recite the words over in my head, swirling them around as my gut churns harder. I’ll need to rewrite the damn thing. Too many snippets could give Pete a scent of blood, and I don’t want him to pursue her any more than we have to for this piece.
Sully whistles. “Fuck. Can you say no?”
“If I do, he’ll set the office Rottweiler on her.”
He leans in, voice low. “You remember the translator, right? You did this before, Rob. Different scale, same shape. Don’t get caught up in that shit again.”
The words are a rope pulling me under. Guilt tastes like grit. I can hear the echo of that other paper, those other consequences.
“It’s a boss business move. He’s backed you into a corner, making you face an impossible choice, and all in the name of a day’s work. It might be unfair, but it’s smart as hell too. You need to be smart now as well.”
I don’t know if my neck is sweaty, or my hand, but I’m clammy, and my chest is tight.
She doesn’t want to be my redemption in the journalistic world, nor should she be.
Our rules are very clear, and if I write the story, I prove her father right about me, that I’m a worthless piece of shit, a predator, only in her company because I want something from her.
Just like her fucking father, using her for my own gain.
My notes for the article contain truths Rhiannon had only whispered when she was too relaxed to keep her guard up, or too drunk on relief to care.
One night in Croatia, staring out from the darkened balcony, when she’d confessed, fighting back tears of sheer exhaustion, that she had seriously considered quitting rugby altogether just before the wedding imploded.
She pressed her palms to the railing and said, small and helpless, “Sometimes I think I could walk away. I realized I play for his approval, not mine. I don’t even know if this—this is what I want.
” She laughed, a bitter, broken sound. “It’s starting to feel like my bones were on stage and my dad was the only critic. ”
She thought it was private. I typed it up because it mattered. Because it was true.
“It’s starting to feel like my bones were on stage and my dad was the only critic.”
The quote is seared into my memory, and my hard drive. I know I’m sitting on gold. The readers would eat it up, but it would drive an even bigger wedge between Rhiannon and her dad, and I don’t want to come between them more than I already have.
That vulnerability—the genuine, heartbreaking shame that her career, her entire worth, was built on seeking Michael Morrigan’s approval and chasing perfection—is sitting right there in my transcribed notes.
I could almost hear the sound of her teeth grinding down, see her fingernails picking anxiously at her cuticles as she spoke in the darkness.
I know exactly how Pete would twist that confession: transforming Rhiannon into the spoiled, reckless fly-half who only played rugby for Daddy and planned to quit.
I open the draft on my phone—header, four paragraphs, one highlighted pull-quote: “Even off the pitch, Morrigan moves like she’s waiting for the next impact.”
Reading back my words tastes like betrayal.
If I published the story, I’d break her trust; I’d become the predator her father accused me of being. If I don’t, Pete would write the piece, and Rhiannon would be skewered anyway, but at least my hands would be clean.
The truth always hurts someone.
Bile rises up into my throat. Sully’s right, it’s an impossible choice. Do I exploit my fake girlfriend? Or let someone else do it without context, or worse, her consent?
My name’s on that move. And even if I meant it as context, names make knives. And guilt tastes the same in any language.